Adaptation: Russian Text into Film 

9-11 May 2013 / Columbus, Ohio



http://www.uvu.edu/chss/adaptation/



Russian literature has inspired film directors at home and abroad for over a century, and continues to do so today. Lev Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina alone has been filmed more than twenty times for both the big and little screens. On celluloid, Karenina has been played by Greta Garbo (1935), Vivien Leigh (1948), Tatiana Samoilova (1967), Jacqueline Bisset (1985), Sophie Marceau (1997), Tatiana Drubich (2009), and later this year, Keira Knightley. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “White Nights” has spawned such diverse adaptations as Le Notti Bianche (Italy; 1957) with Marcello Mastroianni and Saawariya (India; 2007) with Ranbir Kapoor. In recent years Russian directors have expressed their own admiration for Russian literature: Vladimir Bortko serialized Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita (2005); Sergei Bondarchuk Jr. remade a version of Mikhail Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don (2006); Aleksei Balabanov offered to movie audiences Mikhail Bulgakov’s Morphia (2008); Karen Shakhnazarov directed Ward no. 6 (2009) based on Anton Chekhov’s short story of the same name.



What do these films have to tell us about their source texts, and the various audiences who watch cinematic versions of them? How do we account for the ongoing popularity of Russian texts for a variety of worldwide cultures? How do different directors across the world transform Russian literature, and what do these transformations indicate about the difficulties of turning fictional works into cinema? What allows a film to illuminate its source text in the act of transforming it into a new medium and cultural, historical, and ideological context?



These questions have become crucial in the past two decades, as the proliferation of post-Soviet Russian and worldwide films based on Russian texts coincides with increasing critical attention to the phenomenon of adaptation. Robert Stam suggests that film adaptations of literary texts are involved in a dialogical process in which the hypotext (the source text) generates hypertexts (elaborations of the source). This assertion liberates critics and scholars from a line-by-line comparison of text and film, emphasizing the film as a reading of the hypotext, rather than an un/successful copy.



Adaptation: Russian Text into Film aims to provide scholars with the opportunity to examine collectively the transposition of Russian hypotexts into cinematic hypertexts. The conference will confront many of the issues involved in turning narrative into narration, making the cinematic out of the theatrical, or expanding the short story into a full-length feature. Somewhere between pruning and inventing, the screenwriter and director must convert the semiotics of the word into a compelling cinematic transliteration for viewers. Adaptation: Russian Text into Film explores the question of what makes Russian texts adaptable and marketable for such diverse audiences.



Conference Schedule:





All events and activities will be held in PAGE HALL ( 1810 College Road)





Thursday, May 9



5:00-5:30: Welcome from conference organizers (LEC Room 130)

5:30-7:00: Keynote Address by Thomas Leitch: Hollywood Takes Russia (LEC Room 130)

7:00-8:00: Reception (Friendship-Discovery Space)

8:00-10:30: Film Screening of Casper Wrede's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Room 10)

                     Andrei Rogatchevski will introduce and lead the discussion of the film





All sessions below will be held in PAGE HALL (1810 College Rd.) Room 60



Friday, May 10



9:00-11:00: Panel 1: Chekhov, Nabokov and Aksenov

     Alexander Burry: "Заколдованный круг": Shakhnazarov's Adaptation of Ward no. 6

     Dennis Ioffe: Fassbinder's Nabokov: from text to action

     Otto Boele: The Failure of Film? Vasilii Aksenov's Youth Novels on the Soviet Screen



11:00-11:30: Coffee Break



11:30-1:30: Panel 2: Tolstoy's Anna Karenina on the Silver Screen

     Irina Makoveeva: An Affair to Remember: Remaking Anna

     Yuri Leving: The Eye-deology of Trauma: Killing Anna Karenina Softly

     Nina Bond: Cinematizing the Inner Lives of Anna Karenina and Pozdnyshev



1:30-2:30: Lunch



2:30-4:30: Panel 3: Post-Soviet Adaptations

     Justin Wilmes: Transformation and Dialogism in Avdotya Smirnova's Fathers and Sons

     Joe Andrew: Another Captive in the Caucasus: Aleksei Uchitel's The Captive

     Vlad Strukov: The delirium of change: film and television adaptations of Mikhail Bulgakov's prose in post-Soviet Russia





All sessions below will be held in PAGE HALL (1810 College Rd. ) Room 60



Saturday, May 11



9:00-10:15: Panel 4: Russian Texts in American Movie Theaters

     Frederick H. White: A Slap in the Face of American Cinematic Taste

     Robert Mulcahy: Chasing the Wealth: the 'Americanization' of Il'f and Petrov's Dvenadtsat' stul'ev



10:15-10:30: Coffee Break



10:30-12:30: Panel 5: Dostoevsky and Bresson

     Ceilidh Orr: Stealing the Scene: Crime as Confession in Robert Bresson's Pickpocket

     Olga Hasty: Robert Bresson's Dostoevsky

     Ronald Meyer: Dostoevsky's "White Nights": The Dreamer Goes Abroad



12:30-1:30: Lunch



1:30-3:30: Panel 6: Adapting Dostoevsky

     Helena Goscilo: Dostoevskii's Centripetal Demonism as German Apocalypse in Visconti's La caduta degli dei

     Anthony Anemone: Do we really need another adaptation of Crime and Punishment?

     David McVey: Stepping over International Borders in Crime and Punishment: Transgressing New Divides with Aki

                                Kaurismäki's Rikos ja rangaistus



3:30-3:45: Coffee Break



3:45-5:00: Summation discussion with conference participants