Screenwriting manuals, industry handbooks, and other screenwriting help books often have little in common with the works of academics on theories of adaptation. Also, theoretical works on adaptation seldom engage with the questions about what sells a film adaptation and what approaches to adaptation work for an average audience. However, the seemingly opposing approaches to film adaptations have a lot in common and opposite points of view could benefit from consolidating and reconciling their findings.

The starting point of a successful adaptation, from the point of view of the film industry, is to condense and dramatise the adapted text and transform it into a three-act structure. Screenwriting manuals emphasise the process of elimination by selecting scenes from a novel and then imposing a tight, dramatic structure on the new text. In other words, screenwriters, when adapting a work of prose, are bringing it closer to the genre of drama. It is not surprising that works related to “the business of screenwriting” engage in similar consideration to those of dramaturgs.

Kenneth Portnoy, in Screen Adaptation: A Scriptwriting Handbook (1998), outlines the stages of the adaptation process: “The writer must find key scenes; pick a suitable starting point; add scenes to fill in plot details; and, in general, condense and combine characters and scenes. Whenever possible, dialogue should be condensed and visual elements brought into play” (p. 35).

Among theoreticians, the question of condensation of the novel is problematised. Imelda Whelehan, in her “Introduction” to Adaptations: From Text to Screen from Screen to Text (Cartmell and Whelehan 1999, p. 6), is critical of the scholars who consider film as an inferior art form and who believe the process of condensation impoverishes the psychological complexities of novels’ characters by simplifying them. Whelehan claims that “this position demonstrates both an ignorance of film narrative strategies and […] undermines the possibility of serious study of the verbal, visual and audio registers of the film” (p. 6).

Similarly, the emphasis on the film’s power to translate the novel’s narrative into a visual experience is the key point in screenwriting manuals. Portnoy’s handbook, which is representative of the industry approach, invites screenwriters “to create a more visual filmic experience” in relation to the adopted text. However, Portnoy admits that “the visualization of a character in a film removes part of the mystery that makes the character so likable in the original work.” Rather than maintaining the superiority of the adapted text, the manual urges screenwriters to find filmic tools to compensate for the loss “by creating a three-dimensional representation of the character” (p. 22). This approach goes against the myth that film cannot recreate character depth since film is mainly visual. The conciseness of the new text and its visual economy should not be considered detrimental to the new form. When Portnoy advocates that “the screenwriter must prune the lengthy descriptive passages of a novel or long short story down to a few key words” (p. 28), this could be read as praise of the film’s ability to say more with less.

An adaptation, compared to the adapted prose text, undergoes the process of heightened dramatisation, which brings it closer to the genre of drama. It is no coincidence that handbooks on screenwriting read like textbooks on dramaturgy.

Theories on the genre of drama focus on identifying its distinguishing features. In a broad sense, the essence of dramatic expressions, not necessarily limited to the genre of drama, is tension. What makes drama a unique literary genre is “existential tension, which brings about the protagonist’s profound understanding of the self” (Švacov 2018, p. 66).Footnote 1 Dramatic form demands “density of action,” as opposed to the novel, which offers the reader a complex set of motivations for the characters’ actions. Also, “no single event in a novel has the intensity of the dramatic event, which fundamentally changes the character’s life” (p. 93). No single event in a novel, regardless of how dramatic it could be, can “condense the fullness of an existence in its sudden self-illumination” (pp. 93–94), which happens in drama. Similarly, Portnoy believes that not every situation is suitable for dramatisation: “Successful dramatisation of an issue also depends on picking complex issues that don’t have easy answers” (p. 63).

Portnoy also points out that “the adapter […] walks a tightrope […] to make the original material work within a tight dramatic structure” (p. 5). Similarly, he claims that “the rambling and loose structure of the novel must be tightened into the three-act structure of the screenplay, increasing the protagonist’s problem until the climax is reached in the third act” (p. 35). “The protagonist’s problem” in a screenplay, as in drama, is not merely a problem that causes tension but a fundamental problem that concerns the protagonist’s entire life. This makes the screenplay close to drama. The screenwriters’ buzz phrase “How is today different,” translates into the demand that drama conjures the moment of “the disturbance of the ordinary” (Švacov, p. 93).

The starting point of an adaptation should be the question of what the character’s central problem is and how it could be dramatised in its full intensity. The screenwriter’s imperative that the character’s journey, the character’s arc, leads to a fundamental change mirrors the journey of the dramatic character towards the understanding of the true self, the process in which “the most hidden human of the character steps into the bright light of its concrete manifestation” (Švacov p. 98).

In Abdulah Sidran’s film adaptation of his novella Sjećaš li se Dolly Bell?/Do You Remember Dolly Bell? (Emir Kusturica 1981), the central event is the death of Dino’s father. The protagonist’s journey, his coming of age, and coming to terms with his father’s death are condensed in this tragic event at the end of the film. The strict dramatic format, the opening that introduces Dino and his ambition to become a musician, which ties into the film’s ending, is firmly structured so that everything leads to and reflects the loss of the father. In the process, through Dino’s conversations with his father, the father’s illness, Dino’s practising a technique of hypnosis, his clumsy love affair, the busy household with the unruly bunch of siblings, and the dealings with the neighbourhood’s bully, Dino grows up and “every day in every aspect improves.” His journey “towards understanding the true self” ends in accepting the loss and moving forward. The film ends with the scene in which Dino performs with a local band on the stage of a community centre.

The novel is an excerpt from a character’s life, regardless of how lengthy, while in drama, an entire life is condensed in the central event. Švacov believes that the form of the novel does not require an ending. For example, no one should wonder what happens to Hans Kastorp when Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain ends. However, drama must have a definite ending. When it ends, a character’s life ends as nothing of importance could happen to that character anymore. Nothing could change the “merciless direction […] that connects the two points: the beginning and the ending of drama” (p. 94).

Portnoy emphasises the imperative for the adaptation to be original: “The screenplay writer has to make the structure his own even if that means cutting and eliminating scenes or adding new ones” (p. 48). He finds that film adaptations fail if screenwriters use the adopted text “as a crutch and are afraid to be too ruthless, even when changes are really necessary” (p. 5).

Desmond and Hawkes, on the other hand, warn against “adding the wrong elements” if the added scenes break the tight structure of the new text. In some cases, adding scenes is successful, such as in the case of Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation (2002), in which the added plot line in the ending mocks Hollywood’s clichés and contributes to the ironic tone of the film (2006, p. 236).

Another common problem in film adaptations is “cutting something essential.” In this context, the authors refer to John Huston’s film Moby Dick (1956), in which “the weighty metaphysics were cut in favour of a fishing tale” (p. 236).

Desmond and Hawkes also warn against “going Hollywood,” defining it as “imposing Hollywood formula on the adapted text” (p. 237). This also includes a “Hollywood upbeat ending” (p. 239). On the other hand, Švacov states that a tragic ending is not imperative for drama but is an ending to which everything in the drama has been leading to the inevitable final point.

The often criticised three-act Hollywood formula could be viewed as the requirement in drama to manifest growing tension. However, as mentioned earlier, the tension in drama is not ordinary; it is existential tension stemming from a crucial dramatic situation in which the dramatic character faces a dilemma that defines her whole life and gives it meaning (p. 93). In Švacov’s typology of tensions, historical tension has a high ranking amongst other types of tension (bodily, biological, psychological) as all dramatic characters share a specific time and place with the other members of the collective. For ordinary tension to become dramatic, it requires to be played against the background of history (p. 57). Historical tension “could be manifested as social, moral, religious …” tension. Drama focuses on the individual facing a specific moral, social, religious, or any other type of “historical” order. However, “not every historical tension” qualifies as dramatic. Not every moral dilemma or social injustice is suitable for the dramatic form. The question is “What makes a rebel out of Karl Moor, or a power-hungry criminal out of Richard III?” (p. 57). To become suitable for drama, historical tension must become existential; the character must face a dramatic situation that “defines his whole life.” In most cases, a dramatic situation is not under the character’s control (p. 61).

In Jasmila Žbanić’s film Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020), the protagonist faces the most extreme of life situations: the deaths of her two sons and husband. Early in the film, in the chilling moment of recognition, she understands that the soldiers will kill all the men. The historical order that she is facing, all its political, religious, social, and psychological aspects, is manifested vividly in front of her eyes. In the action that follows, Aida faces the ever-rising obstacles that she cannot overcome. Her existential, dramatic situation, determined by the historical context, has only one ending: her family is taken away and killed. Her life ends there because “nothing of importance could happen to the protagonist” anymore. The film ends with a scene from a few years into the future when Aida tries to return to her apartment, taken by a Serb family. The image of children playing offers hope that there, perhaps, is a future of living in peace for the next generation of Bosnians. However, structurally, this has nothing to do with the protagonist’s final point in her journey, the tragic moment when she lost her family. Her story ended there.

Švacov defines the tragic as the strongest possible dramatic tension, in which the existential crisis is manifested as the ultimate price to be paid. Also, existential tension is inseparable from a specific historical place and time. What gives intensity to the tragic situation of the character is that “the threatened individual existence […] challenges the very historical context from which the existential tension stems” (p. 66).

Similarly, Danis Tanović’s No Man’s Land (2001) has the structure of a classic tragedy: in one setting, a trench, three soldiers face an existential situation that will lead to the characters’ profound self-understanding inseparable from the historical context. The inevitable tragic ending—the Serb and the Bosnian soldiers kill each other, while the third soldier is left to die lying on a spring mine—is a rebuke to the social order in which people are thrown into the chaos of war, are left to die and the so-called civilised world’s half-hearted attempts to save them fail.

Comparing the reader’s associative and imaginative reading of a work of prose to the viewer’s perception of drama, Švacov reveals an “insurmountable limitation” of prose: its inability to present “the totality of action by simultaneously depicting several strands of action, all of which, at the most heightened tension—conflate into one final scene” (p. 129). The author refers to the final scene in Hamlet: “Gertrude drinks the poisoned wine, Laertes wounds Hamlet, the king tries to prevent Gertrude from drinking the poison, the swords are being swapped, the queen falls … Everything is happening on stage at the same time, and no [prose] description can achieve such density of simultaneous action” (p. 129).

Film montage can create a similar effect by juxtaposing, at a fast pace, shots of simultaneous actions. The famous parallel montage in The Godfather, the baptism scene, is an obvious example. Film montage and other cinematic modalities can dramatise non-dramatic elements in the adapted text. The Hollywood demand to make the adapted text more visual and less verbal is a legitimate claim stemming from the dramatic nature of the film script.

The first step in adaptation, according to Švacov, is to “transform the novel’s space and time organization into dramatic space and time and to remodel it into dramatic action” (p. 112). If a fundamental characteristic of a dramatic text is its inherent “performativity” (Anne Ubersfeld 1999) in the sense that it is meant to be performed, not only read, the screenplay is identical to the genre of drama in this respect: it is fundamentally a text that is meant to be presented on screen.

The following is a summary of the stages in film adaptations:

selecting scenes

  • adding new ones

  • imposing a tight dramatic structure on the new text focusing on one existential dramatic situation that fundamentally changes the character’s life and that, in a striking moment of revelation and self-understanding, gives meaning to the character’s entire life

  • setting the central dramatic situation against the background of history

All this is actuated with the use of cinematic devices to their maximum potential.

The stages that are outlined include many other transformations that could completely forego the adapted text. The new text in the last stages of the process could have very little to do with the adapted text. What is relevant is that the new text has a tight structure of drama, with all other aspects that stem from this fundamental requirement.

Švacov, while affirming the “openness of dramatic texts” in its possible interpretations, finds that openness “has its limitations.”

Openness of a dramatic text is thus understood as “mysteriousness” since there is always something new and elusive about dramatic characters to be illuminated in an adaptation (pp. 144–5).

This brings up an important question: What happens to Ahmet Šabo if, in a film adaptation, he is transformed from a character who observes the corrupt world and is disgusted by it but lets others pull the strings into a character who cannot stay silent and who, with every step in the plot development, directs his destiny in the only possible direction that his experience and temperament impose: rebellion.

One important aspect of drama is that the words characters say must be directed towards “creating tension and conflict.” Oedipus directs his destiny when asking Tiresias to name the culprit, and thus Oedipus “inevitably brings destruction upon himself” (Švacov p. 144).

When Ahmet Šabo, drunk and angry, accuses the dignitaries of injustice, cruelty, and corruption, he directs his destiny, which leads inevitably to the harsh reaction of the local notables, hurt in their pride, and feeling threatened. Ahmet cannot act differently since all his past actions and the experiences in the war, its cruelty and wasted lives, and the injustice he has seen every day since his return all direct him towards the conflict at hadji-Duhotina’s party. His character traits, in conflict with the constellation of the forces in society, lead him to the sudden and unplanned act of bravery, the moment when the previously hidden aspect of his character becomes manifested. The conflict, dramatised to its utmost expression by the forces in society, leads to the party as the centre of the corrupt universe. Only then does everything become clear to Ahmet. Even though drunk, he blurts out the previously hidden essence of his humanity: a scream against injustice for all his dead comrades, for all useless and senseless deaths on the banks of the Dniester River. Selimović’s novel must be read as a cry against war, and Ahmet’s outburst at the party must be the central situation in the adaptation. The party could be depicted as grotesque, the dignitaries’ scheming, and their unbearable conceit could be fashioned after local references and flavour, the dialogue contemporised, the tension heightened to the highest notes, illuminating Ahmet, squeezed between various fractions in society, and jostled around with a peculiar version of malice. All these forces make him ever angrier as the party progresses and inevitably lead him to fulfil his destiny. The adaptation could have many possible endings; it could end in Šehaga’s death in Venice or in the birth of Ahmet’s child, which, if we follow Selimović’s prophetic and ominous closing narration, symbolises a new generation to be sacrificed in a future war, one more generation in the sad procession of humanity wasted at the banks of another river.

Whatever the organisation of the plotline, dramatic action must be manifested as “inseparable from the dramatic character” “thrown against a historical world,” and the result of this clash is the character’s “profound understanding of the self” (p. 146).

Švacov sees dramatic action as developing in stages, with every new stage “revealing more of the destiny of the character” and “reaching further into illuminating the limitations of human possibilities in a specific historical world” (p. 147). In other words, as Kulenović affirms, in drama everything that happens leads to one event, the moment when “Birnam Wood begins to move” (1990).

Švacov defines a dramatic situation as a “meeting between the character and the immediacy of a historical world” (p. 158). Ahmet Šabo returns to Sarajevo, the only soldier in his unit who survived the war, except Mula Ibrahim, who was wounded—Ahmet carried him across the Dniester River and saved his life. Ahmed roams the city aimlessly, trying to forget the war, but images keep coming. They appear suddenly, uninvited, triggered by the children laughing and playing or by the pigeon’s wings flapping. Each flashback reveals more of Ahmet’s inner world. He starts working for Mula Ibrahim as a scribe. Mula Ibrahim arranges for Ahmet to be invited to the party at hadji-Duhotina’s house to help Ahmet get a better job. The build-up towards the central dramatic situation must be ever revealing and the tension tightened as more and more of the societal forces start playing against Ahmet’s goal. The played-out drama “illuminates the limitations of [his] possibilities in a specific historical world.” The character’s motivation is manifested in dramatic action. Reaching hadji-Duhotina’s house, Ahmet sees a war hero, bayraktar Muharem, now old, crippled, and begging. The tension in this scene is heightened in the novel by the narration that gives the background information. This needs to be translated into concise dramatic dialogue and condensed visual narration. Portnoy writes that “perhaps, the most difficult problem for adapters is to translate the novel’s narration into character action” (p. 29). A possible way to do this could be verbal action, Ahmet and bayraktar Muharem revealing the past in the dialogue, which would provide the build-up to the central situation.

Švacov reaffirms the expectations of the development of dramatic action, which apply to classical drama as well as to the absurd and seemingly actionless plays, such as Ionesco’s and Beckett’s. The necessary stages are “the initial situation, the organised direction of the action, and the appropriate outcome” (p. 148). Even in plays without action, everything that characters do or do not do is limited by their specific dramatic situation.

Švacov also cautions that a sequence of events in drama does not mean following the cliché of exposition, rising action, climax, and resolution. The directed action leads Ahmet to clash with the forces in society that prevent him from achieving his goal: to have a job and to live in peace with his wife. However, his goal clashes with his actual need: he wants a decent life but cannot forget the dead comrades, so he must expose the corrupt world around him. It becomes impossible for him to stay silent. The clash between the forces in society and his own character’s needs cannot be avoided. The stages that add to the intensity of the “clash” will follow the inner logic of the adaptation.

The stream of events in drama “defines, delineates and limits the character’s situational possibilities,” presenting a “range of man’s situational possibilities” and “offering an insight into a specific historical ‘world’” (p. 154). A character could have a limited view of her situation at one moment, but in another, she can unexpectedly expand the horizon of her world. King Lear, Švacov illustrates, believes that “the scope of his insight reaches into the very hearts of his three daughters,” but in the end, he becomes aware of his limited view, by realising that the greatest mystery is the very people closest to us. In the course of the play, Lear’s character, “from the constant focus on his suffering, reaches towards the understanding of suffering in general” and “widens the horizon of his world” (p. 155).

Drama must “intensify” the character’s situation and make it extreme, so the character becomes trapped in his limited perspective of his world, while “exiting the extreme situation enables a sudden widening of the character’s horizon.” For example, dramatic characters face death, and they only see the narrow horizon of their extreme situation, but “after the resolution, after stepping out of suffering by accepting the inevitable, the horizon of the world opens up and with that expands the character’s view of himself in that world” (p. 157). In the course of drama, some characters “reach self-understanding” while some “persist in their blindness” (p. 163).

In The Fortress, Avdaga, a dogmatic police inspector, maniacally defends the order, the order he neither understands nor questions. He cannot exist outside of the “limited view of his situation”: everyone is guilty one way or the other, and he must purge his “world” of criminals who threaten the order. When he stubbornly pursues his blind hunt, he is destroyed by the very forces he wants to protect. The most powerful man, Šehaga, plots his murder because Avdaga, like a dog sniffing prey, has discovered too much. Avdaga’s character traits are in service of his dramatic function. In the novel, Avdaga is killed so that Ahmet can live. If he had not been stopped, the murder conspiracy that involved Ahmet would have been discovered, and Ahmet, being the weakest cog in the wheel of events, would have been punished for the crimes of others. Selimović saves his character and in doing so dulls the blade that cuts to the core of the character’s dramatic situation.

Švacov believes that the demand for the dramatic character to be essentially good or, if not good, then great in his hamartia, in modern drama, is often reduced to the demand that the dramatic character is defined by “his relationship to a specific moral order” (p. 159).

If the metaphor of the fortress stands for the moral order depicted in Selimović’s novel, the fortress could be read as an “edifice of the bureaucratic imagination that spreads its web around everything human” (Radović qtd. in Majić 2017, pp. 76–7).Footnote 2 Ahmet’s response to the moral order of his world is to preserve his humanity. Ahmet does not accept “to be humiliated and to be diminished in his humanity” (p. 76).

Some critics claim that the protagonist of Death and the Dervish, Ahmed Nurudin, “is a more dramatic character as he is modelled after his perspective, the perspective of his own project,” while Šabo is depicted from the “perspective of his social position” (Petrović, qtd. in Majić, p. 80). Nurudin has more agency, while Šabo is tossed by the forces of society.

Nikola Kovač finds two aspects of the moral order in The Fortress: one stems from the character’s “inner motivation,” Šabo’s “cult of purity”; the other stems from the outside world: the character’s sense of justice is manifested as “the imperative of historical revolt to defend a minimum of freedom and the right to existence” (qtd. in Majić, pp. 97–8). The character of Ramiz, a student rebel who, some critics believe, is modelled after Milovan Djilas, a dissident in Tito’s Yugoslavia, is what Ahmet would like to be, but Ahmet is more of a poet than a revolutionary. That is why his dramatic situation is between acting and not acting. As critic Kasim Prohić points out, “all Selimović protagonists are placed in the chasm between contemplation and action” (qtd. in Majić, p. 118). Ahmet’s ambivalence about Ramiz is manifested in the dramatic action: he does not publicly take Ramiz’s side but at the same time implores Šehaga to act to save Ramiz.

The question is how to resolve this ambiguity in the adaptation. Ahmet is on the tightrope between acting and not acting, but his “seemingly” not acting has dramatic consequences: Ramiz is kidnapped from the prison in the fortress and set free. Avdaga finds out and is killed to prevent Šehaga from being exposed as the mastermind behind the plan. In the process, one of the conspirators is also killed by his own family because he has talked too much. Ahmet is weary of Ramiz’s revoltFootnote 3 believing it could lead to violence, but his acting behind the scenes leads to multiple murders. This is the moment when the tight dramatic structure and consistency need to be imposed on the adapted text. We cannot have Ahmet get away with pretence. He needs to face his dramatic situation, to see his face in the mirror. He either becomes Ramiz or dissolves into the drabness of forgetting and merely existing. In his critique of the novel, Nikola Kovač offers one solution: a revolutionary ethos: “Ahmet Šabo views Ramiz as a man who is in danger that his ideal and absolute principles lead him to violence; Ahmet Šabo, a poet and a dreamer, could not perceive that action could have its stellar moments and that its eros could leave intact the ethical integrity of a person” (qtd. in Majić, p. 108).

If we lead Ahmet from the central dramatic situation when he utters a cry against the unjust order and have him face the consequences—he loses his job, he is attacked at night and covered in shit as a warning—he later manipulates Šehaga into freeing Ramiz. Avdaga is conveniently removed; the powerful Šehaga takes Ahmet under his wing; they go to Venice; and Šehaga is killed, poisoned in a Venetian inn by the far-reaching hand of Sarajevo’s čaršija, who punishes those who do not play the game by their rules. If we follow this train of action, we will end up with a character who is not “great in his hamartia.” How can the adaptation be made to adhere to the tight dramatic structure? What happens to Ahmet when he sees himself in the mirror? Like King Lear, he must “widen the horizon of his limited situation.”

Švacov asks a question: Who can be a dramatic character? He offers the answer: one “aware of his position and possibilities” (p. 165). Ahmet must realise that one either lives a cowardly life or takes responsibility for his actions.

Kasim Prohić finds dramatic tension in Selimović novels exactly in the “empty space” between the characters’ thoughts and actions. They are dramatically suspended in that empty place between “acting and existing,” the place of clashing principles: “the individual against society, self-initiative against authority, truth against dogma, conscience against crime” (qtd. in Majić, p. 119).

This empty place is where the adaptation becomes a structure on its own, with its dramatic logic. The character chooses his path.

The adaptation enters the stage of “adding scenes.” Ahmet could act impulsively and be guilty of all kinds of follies, but he must be great in his stubbornness, his pride, or his sacrifice, or in whatever we decide to do with him. One possibility is to eliminate Ramiz’s character and plant his seed in Ahmet’s. Ahmet, after his ordeal, could become Ramiz if the widened horizon of his character’s view reveals that one must firmly voice one’s “J’accuse” even only for the echo it will have beyond the walls of the fortress.

Dramatic character moves the action forward, but his character traits are inseparable from his dramatic action. At the same time, the character reaches above his situation and “from a seemingly distant place, speaks of what we do not understand because it is too close to us” (Švacov, p. 166). The character needs to reach this height and distance by walking the path he must choose at the fork because he can’t take any other.Footnote 4

The elimination of a character who, in the structure of the adapted text, has its specific role will have profound consequences on the adaptation. If Ramiz is gone, Šehaga’s kidnapping with all its consequences must be removed. A solution to the problem could be that Ahmet ends up in prison, and his wife, Tijana, persuades Šehaga to save Ahmet. Ahmet ending in jail would be a logical consequence of his actions at hadji-Duhotina’s party. He can’t be silenced after his humiliation. He becomes aware of his world and his place in that world: they are in permanent conflict as he cannot live according to the twisted moral norms of his world. His scream at the party escalates into further action. It could be fashioned as unplanned because Ahmet is not a scheming revolutionary; he acts on impulse and makes his situation worse. He ends up in jail. The jail in the Ottoman fortress could be replaced by a faceless building of an institution of prison, but the cruelty of punishment that seeks to destroy all that is human in the character makes it everyman’s prison.

Švacov also emphasises that character traits could serve as a “basis for the diversification of the relationships between characters” (p. 164). Ahmet not accepting to be humiliated divides the other characters into the cohort of helpers and enemies, and those who want to help but are too cowardly but could still help in some small ways. Mahmut Neretljak is a representative of the latter and is probably the most filmic character in the novel. He functions as a comic relief but at the same time reveals something of endearing human inconsistency and throws a blanket over attempts to depict any character as inherently good or bad.

If the essence of dramatic structure is action stemming from one essential situation that heightens the conflict between the character and the limits of his historical situation, so all conflicts—with other characters, with the forces in society—must lead to the characters’ profound understanding of the self.

In critiques of The Fortress, Selimović’s characterisation of Tijana, Ahmet’s wife, is problematised. Her lack of agency and Selimović’s romanticising of Ahmet and Tijana’s marriage is seen as a novel’s weakness. One critic finds that Selimović’s conservative “notion of female character […] idealises the cult of the woman as the pillar of the domestic hearth and marriage love” (Primorac qtd. in Majić, p. 75).

Tijana is idealised on many levels; she is morally pure, she is the rock that keeps Ahmet’s world whole, her temperament is placid, and her actions tempered and wise. This is not necessarily problematic. What is problematic for the adaptation is that Tijana does not function as a dramatic character. Their dialogue lines never produce conflict between dramatic characters, only petty conflicts that are quickly resolved. In other words, nothing that Tijana does is related to the direction of Ahmet’s destiny or her destiny. The only exception is that her Christian faith adds more suspicion to Ahmet’s actions in the eyes of the čaršija and, more importantly, in Avdaga’s eyes, as he acts as an agent directing Ahmet’s fate. The adaptation must transform Tijana into a dramatic character. Perhaps there is no need to radically change her character traits; they only have each other for comfort in a world that offers no comfort; Tijana could be pure and could be the loving centre of Ahmet’s world, but she must be thrown into dramatic action and made to take some control of its direction. Her positive character traits are in service of dramatic tension: Ahmet loses everything dear to him if he confronts the forces in society. The stakes are high. Tijana’s motivation is to keep Ahmet safe and to protect her family and the unborn child; she wants Ahmet to avoid conflict and lie low. However, she can’t so purely love a defeated Ahmet who accepts silence as his fate. She has a morality that sees through pretence.

All these forces that pressure Ahmet make him say more than he should and act braver or more recklessly, but the real force that cannot allow him to stay silent is the impossibility of reconciling his war experience with the unjust and corrupt world to which he returned from Chocim in today’s Ukraine.

The stage of adding scenes becomes the stage of restructuring the adapted text by abandoning its structure. This stage should be thus labelled “restructuring” rather than adding scenes.

I propose the following chain of events: Ahmet is provoked, and he becomes Ramiz; he voices his grievances, orchestrated by Avdaga, and is captured and sent to jail. Tijana goes to Šehaga and implores him to help Ahmet. Šehaga’s motivation for kidnapping Ramiz, except now Ahmet, does not change: He hates the dignitaries for killing his son. He now lives only for revenge. The kidnapping happens, and Ahmet, now free, must leave Bosnia. Šehaga arranges for them to go to Venice, where Ahmet waits for Tijana to join them. The novel ends with Šehaga’s death, killed by the far-reaching poison concocted by his enemies in Sarajevo. The real danger for the regime is not Ahmet; it is the powerful Šegaha, who acts irrationally and threatens the very structures of power. His enormous wealth buys him influence, but by impetuously ditching the rules of the game, he became too unpredictable and too dangerous. Šehaga is a real tragic character: his life ended a long time ago, in the place where his son was shot as a deserter, but he acts as a powerful agent of dramatic action, led by a passion for revenge and unbearable grief.

The adaptation could end with Šehaga’s death, with Ahmet pushing his way through the rowdy carnival crowd in Venice, and reaching the harbour to meet Tijana, who, carrying a baby in her arms, waves from a vaporetto, a symbolic place of exile for those who couldn’t bear to live in silence and indifference.

An adaptation of The Fortress that situates the film in the present Bosnia rather than in the Ottoman period faces one significant obstacle: How to make Ahmet if not dangerous but at least enough of a nuisance for the petty rivalries and despicable scheming of the actors in contemporary politics? In a world where the voices of protestors are so loud that they often cancel each other out in the noise, authorities can blissfully ignore the racket and get away with almost anything. What would make them send Ahmet to prison by, for example, setting him up for the crime of embezzlement that he didn’t do?

One place that Ahmet better not poke at is organised religion, a place of emotional investment. Religion in the society is woven into all aspects of life and power. The authorities would not allow for the religious moral order to be shaken at its foundations. Without having religion and ethnos at its core, the system would lose its blood supply.

Ahmet, in the novel, is not a religious man. Several critics find Selimović’s atheism reflected in Ahmet’s. It would not be unconvincing for Ahmet’s character to be bitter about religious dogma and ethnic divisions that the authorities capitalise on. In the novel, Ahmet witnessed his generation slayed in the name of religion. He must ask the question of why they were sent to a far-away place under the banner of religion to plunder and kill. All this resonates powerfully with the contemporary sentiment beyond the borders of Bosnia.

The dilemma for the adaptation is whether to leave the time and place of the novel intact. In favour of this approach is what critics define as Selimović’s contemporaneity: Selimović did not “need to write novels on contemporary themes as those themes are very much present” in his novels (Smiljanić, qtd. in Majić, p. 93).

If we follow the consequences of the choice to contemporise, then the brunt of Ahmet’s attack on the system must be organised religion.

The novel offers a solid foundation for this approach. As mentioned earlier, Hodel emphasises Selimović’s “prominent antireligious tendency” in The Fortress (p. 148). The author illustrates Ahmet’s “ironical and polemical tone” about all kinds of public manifestations of faith. Hodel finds that the author shares Ahmet’s “atheistic pathos” (p. 149). Also, the Islamic content in the novel must be integrated into Selimović’s general atheism, his view of any religion as “fundamentally a delusion” (p. 150). Ahmet’s criticism of religious and ethnic fortresses is the immanent feature of the novel. It is present in the themes of the novel: Ahmet’s marriage to Tijana, who is a Christian, is met with the disapproval of their friends, families, and the entire carsija (pp. 155–6).

In an interview from 1974, Selimović expressed his view on religion:

I don’t have any need for religion as a personal conviction or as a form of communication because I have been an atheist for a long time. However, I am not against religious feeling if it is not to exclude and divide people and incite violence, even if it is only in thoughts.

About citing verses from the Quran, Selimović explains that for a lack of a solid translation of the Quran, he “liberally stylised the citations, preserving only the spirit of the Quran.”

He adds that

Nothing that is not of man can give meaning to life: no possession of an object or control over people … All these things leave man empty. Only the experience of love, of human relations, or of any relationship that requires full human engagement can offer at least a thought, at least an illusion, at least a pretense that there is meaning in life. (Meša Selimović u intervjuima 2022)

In 2003, The National Theatre of Sarajevo (dir. Sulejman Kupusović, dramaturgs Darko Lukić and Kupusović)Footnote 5 adapted The Fortress for stage and radically condensed the novel into a two-act performance. The novel’s time frame is not altered, but the allusions to contemporary Bosnia are prominent. The main intervention in the adapted text, apart from the radical condensation, is the focus on the problematic mixed marriage and on the war palpably evoked on stage. The contemporaneity of Selimović’s novel confirms the earlier observation that the author does not need to write about the present as the present is already in his novel.

The play opens with a conversation between Ahmet and Mula Ibrahim, who offers Ahmet a job at his scribe’s shop. The dialogue is condensed and interrupted by Ahmet’s war memories, which transition into a crowd gathered to listen to the speech by Student Ramiz. The script reads:

/Reminiscences of the battlefield, of the fogs over Hoćin, of ghosts, of death and pain/

/the link is the silhouettes of warriors transforming into the crowd listening to Ramiz/ (Tvrdjava, script 2002, p. 4).Footnote 6

The image of the “mutineers” transforms into the crowd, attending Tijana and Ahmet’s wedding. “Ahmet carries Tijana in his arms to the river bank” and the “wedding party turns into stones” (p. 4).

The past is vividly evoked solely by visual symbols. Then, the script becomes more verbose with a wordy section in which dignitaries and religious leaders, gathered at a mosque, condemn Ramiz’s actions.

However, the unanimous condemnation is disharmonised by one voice, the voice of hafiz-Abdulah, a respected and old religious scholar, who blames the authorities for having lost touch with the people. He accuses them of fearmongering, cruelty, and oppression. Later, he is killed, and a dangerous outlaw, Bećir Toska, who lurks in the hills above Sarajevo, is blamed for the murder, which had been arranged by the local religious leaders. This serves as a motivation for Šehaga’s revenge because hafiz-Abdulah was his best friend. Like in the book, Ahmet appeals to Šehaga to kidnap and set Ramiz free, as it will hurt the dignitaries most.

Ahmet has so far been an observer, except that he earlier rejected Avdaga’s request to spy on Ramiz. Avdaga is killed, like in the novel, because he has discovered too much. The adaptation follows the major plot threads of the novel but condenses the story to the point that occasionally obscures the motivation for the character’s actions.

The adaptation changed the structure of the novel in one important aspect: Ahmet’s outburst at hadji-Duhotina’s party in the performance takes place almost at the end. After the party Mula Ibrahim fires Ahmet, Ahmet tells Tijana that they will manage somehow, and next, he is in Venice with Šehaga. The ending follows the novel: Šehaga dies asking his right-hand man to recite a litany of Bosnian toponyms. The stage is described as “the wild carnival crowd carrying in its flow the gondola with the doomed Bosnians” (p. 40).

Ahmet, in his feverish dream, sees Ramiz, who talks about “this cursed country, unlike any other” (p. 40). The adaptation changes Ahmet’s first-person narration into a dialogue with Ramiz. The script reads: “I don’t want to think about you, Ramiz! Who are you? What do you want from me? Why is your heart beating so loud that I can hear it as my own ache?” (p. 41). Ahmet has become Ramiz.

This section focused on the relevant similarities between action in drama and film, and consequently, between characters on stage and screen. However, pertinent differences need to be considered in the subsequent stages of the adaptation.

The Transformation of Literary Signs into Film and Theatre Signs

Theatre and film explorations originating in semiotics focus on the nature and the functioning of the heterogeneous sign systems on screen and stage. However, such investigations have often been purely theoretical and of no use for theatre and film practitioners. This is perhaps one of the reasons for the frequently negative attitudes towards semiotics.

Rather than going separate ways, semiotic theories and theatre and film practices should occupy a common ground. As Elaine Aston and George Savona point out, such reconciliation asks for a kind of theatre semiotics that is “not a theoretical position, but a methodology: a way of working, of approaching theatre in order to open up new practices and possibilities of seeing” (Aston and Savona 1991, p. 1).

Finding common ground between the discipline of semiotics and theatrical and cinematic practices is especially relevant for screen and stage adaptations of literary works. Insights into the transformation of the sign system of natural language into multiple sign systems on screen and stage could help practitioners discover what works and what does not work in film and theatre.

In all stages of adaptation, the unique nature of verbal signs in literature compared to predominantly visual signs of film and theatre needs to be addressed, notwithstanding the degree of loyalty to the adapted text. One question is if there are some pertinent similarities despite the different nature of these sign systems. The poetic function of signs is the common denominator of aesthetic texts. Roman Jakobson, member of the Prague Circle, attempted to discover “the empirical linguistic criterion of the poetic function” of language and concluded that “the poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” (Jakobson 1987, p. 71). The poetic function of theatre and film iconic signs is also found in the material characteristics of the signifier when it, with its materiality, conveys some of the meanings of the signified.

Jurij Lotman and the members of the Tartu semiotic school also consider the verbal sign in literature not only arbitrary but also iconic. Lotman opposed verbal and visual arts based on the tendency in verbal art to use “the materials of conventional signs” to make a verbal image that is noticeably iconic while in visual arts, especially in film, an opposite trend could be traced: an effort to achieve narrativity, to tell a story from the material of iconic signs whose nature is not appropriate for narrativity (Jurij Lotman 1976, pp. 7–8).

Literary text is a secondary modelling system, which means that at least two sets of rules operate on the level of the text. One is a set of rules of the verbal code, subjugated to the set of rules that govern the creation of the aesthetic message. The value of the aesthetic message is in the complexity of the information the text conveys, the information that “can neither exist nor be transmitted outside this artistic structure” (Lotman 1977, pp. 10–11). This is related to the lack of entropy in artworks. In transforming literary works to the screen, the concept of informativeness could help in making decisions about how to tell a story most effectively and how to reduce entropy. Film visual signs can transpose long narration from an adapted text into an effective and revealing visual expression.

Lotman emphasises film’s ability to absorb different types of semiosisFootnote 7 and to organise them into a unified system. This leads to multiple coding, for each system in the complex system of film language has its specific code, which results in an “aesthetic multiplicity of meaning” (Lotman 1976, p. 94). Film and theatre have the power of integrative semiosis, where dialogue, music, sound effects, and visuals combine and surpass the informativeness of each code. In the process, signs transcend their individual meanings. Lotman regards film text as synthetic and polyphonic owing to its capability to absorb different types of semiosis as well as to organise them into a unified system on one level, but, at the same time, it “presents simultaneous movement on various levels” (1976, p. 96). The concept of “aesthetic multiplicity of meaning” is related to Keir Elam’s term transcodification “whereby a given bit of semantic information can be translated from one system to another or supplied simultaneously by different kinds of signal,” which is possible on account of “the transformability of the sign” in theatre (1987, p. 52).

Film and theatre practitioners make aesthetic choices according to the specific nature of the signs on screen and stage. For example, Jan Kott notes that objects in theatre need not be identical with objects from reality, in contrast to film’s convention, which implies a certain degree of similarity between the objects on film and those from reality. In the Noh theatre, “a real landscape can be represented by the twig of a blooming apple tree or a bunch of reeds pulled by Shite” (Kott 1984, p. 114). Kott believes the “icon is richer, more overwhelming than all of its references” (p. 135).Footnote 8 A chair in theatre might connote many additional meanings, not necessarily being closely related to the object itself. Theatre sign is more independent of its referent compared to film sign. An actor can, by a gesture, point to an object to assign new content to the object. Therefore, a bare wall might become a door or, as in Kabuki theatre, “cloth–bound balls represent human heads rolling on stage, thrown by the executioner” (p. 122). Kott concludes that a sign in theatre becomes a sign only when it ceases to stand for itself: “A box of matches … can represent everything which is not a box of matches” (p. 125).

Petr G. Bogatyrev also considers the sign in theatre as “a sign of a sign not a sign of a material,” concrete object. For example, the clothing might be a sign of poverty or wealth (1976, p. 33).

The material concrete object, in Charles Morris’ terminology, is denotatum, different from designatum—what the sign refers to, not necessarily existent in reality. Denotatum is what the sign refers to which actually exists. Each sign has a designatum but not necessarily a denotatum. Signs might represent abstract concepts and objects of the imagination. Moreover, signs referring to the same object—having the same denotatum—might not have the same designatum. For each interpreter, a designatum could be different. Designatum is the class of objects, and denotatum is an element of a class (1971, p. 20).

The source of theatrical sign expressiveness is the material equivalence with its denotatum, not identical with its designatum. Based on such incongruity of form and content, the aesthetic dimension arises. The material equivalence of theatrical signs “with the signs they are meant to signify,” as outlined by Fischer–Lichte (1992, p. 130), is the sign’s quality of being iconic.

Pure icons, which are identical to the object to which the sign refers, are props, thus losing their semantic richness. Instead, it is necessary to emphasise the quality of aesthetic signs to have the signifier, or the sign’s expression plane, that could become independent of its content, thus creating its meanings derived from the mere material qualities of the signifier. In other words, the aesthetic sign systems are capable of semantisation of non-semantic elements, thus creating complex sign systems. Only because the sign in theatre could be “materially identical with the signs they are meant to signify” could a separation of the expression from its content demonstrate singular visual poetry, unique for theatre (p. 130).

Therefore, signs in aesthetic sign systems do not function like conventional signs. Aesthetic signs acquire their designatum from the classes different from those of their denotata. The borders between aesthetic signs are blurred and the signifiers of multiple signs could become one complex signifier whose signified transcends that of a single sign. This is what all aesthetic discourses have in common, and this has important implications for the approaches to adaptation. Rather than “translating” the adapted text from the verbal mode to the visual and acoustic, the poetry of the adapted text that “projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” needs to be transformed into the new and autonomous pattern of complex film and theatre signifiers that create their own poetry.

Aesthetic Codes and Aesthetic Signs

This section explores the possibility of establishing the criteria for the distinction between aesthetic and non-aesthetic functions of signs on stage and screen.

According to Morris, an aesthetic sign is a complex iconic sign representing “a structure of signs” (Morris 1971, pp. 414–432). The aesthetic quality is not achieved by virtue of the sign’s specific structure but rather in the process of “aesthetic perception,” which is a unique mode of perception. Therefore, the pragmatic aspect of the sign is responsible for the aesthetic dimension. In such perception, a sign possesses value, namely the designatum of a sign is value. By virtue of both iconicity and specific aesthetic value, the aesthetic sign is distinctive from other signs. The signifier or “sign vehicle of aesthetic sign,” by being iconic, represents one of its denotata. There is a certain double tension in the aesthetic perception, which, in turn, enables the aesthetic value to be perceptible directly because it is materialised. At the same time, the receiver of the aesthetic message is aware of the character of the sign as an aesthetic object. For that, the aesthetic sign is “an iconic sign whose designatum is a value” (p. 421). Its value is perceptible both indirectly—for being established by signs—and directly—for the sign itself embodies the value which it represents.

A complex aesthetic sign is, by its nature, iconic in the sense that at least some of its constituent signs are iconic, as well as being, to a certain degree, of the same character as the complex icon itself. In other words, the individual elements of the complex sign have to materialise value properties inherent to the aesthetic sign as a whole. Aesthetic perception is a complex and cumulative process where the receiver of the message detects with more or less accuracy the values of the complex icon in the single iconic sign. Individual constituent signs of the complex icon operate as secondary symbolism in the creation of aesthetic signs, as well as focus the attention on particular elements of the aesthetic sign. The value of an aesthetic sign is set up in the paradigmatic aspect of semiosis, namely by the relationships between the sign and its user, thus being related to the role of art in culture Mukařovský in Matejka and Titunik eds., 1976, p. 8). According to Morris, an aesthetic sign represents “in objective form the solution of a conflict of values” (p. 429). Because of its double existence—material, embodied in the work of art, and abstract sign existence—the value of the aesthetic sign is both “consummatory and instrumental.” The art object is, at the same time, the object of consummation and the value existing in the interpreter consciousness, serving as an instrument for solving different value situations (p. 429).

This model of aesthetic sign is readily applicable to film and theatre signs. Film image and the complex theatre sign are iconic signs composed of signs of various natures, predominantly iconic. A single iconic sign embodies part of the meaning of the complex sign. For example, in the performance Apocalypses cum figuris by Grotowski—according to Kott’s description (1984, p. 140–144)—the acting, the gestures, the scenery, the objects on stage, each single sign embodies some of the mysticism and the idea of purification through suffering. Actors who “offer to the audience a physical humiliation of their bodies,” the tortured village idiot, night streets lit by candles where drunkards murmur curses and prayers, the last scene at the bare church’s floor in the full darkness, and the almost unearthly light which illuminates the faces of the prisoners on their way to the crematorium, all are in accordance with the idea that “liberation comes only through death, the torture of the body, and the humiliation of the spirit” (p. 144). Individual icons convey part of the value of the whole performance viewed as a complex icon.

Film is also capable of creating complex signs that participate with each individual’s sign materiality—in the creation of complex meanings. For example, the symbolism of death prevails at the representative level in the film Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch 1996). In Machine Town, there are guns ready to shoot, immobile faces, the frozen-faced woman with the baby in a crib, and the landscape pregnant with the symbolism of death and destruction: bare trees, burned settlers’ carriages, teepees, and dead bodies. Individual film images embody part of the meaning of the whole film: the lost spiritual landscape, the ruins of the old world, and the symbolism of death and destruction that replaced the old world.

In The Semiotics of Theatre, Fischer–Lichte singles out ambiguity as the chief characteristic of the aesthetic text. The sign obtains meaning by virtue of its position (syntactic dimension) and its relationship with the object it represents (semantic dimension). The pragmatic aspect of the sign, its relationship with the sign user in a specific communicative situation, is a constitutive part of creation of aesthetic value. In aesthetic texts, ambiguity stemming from the displacement of the sign’s relation with the object it represents is the text’s fundamental characteristic:

The aesthetic text thus does not intend to objects and realities about which it provides a direct account to be its message. As a consequence, the relation between them and the signs denoting them cannot be considered to form the semantic dimension of the text: the aesthetic text does not exhibit an independent semantic dimension. This specific feature, which distinguishes it fundamentally from all types of non-aesthetic texts is the root cause of its innate ambiguity. (Fischer–Lichte 1992, p. 216)

The receiver of the aesthetic message decodes the semantic aspect of the aesthetic message through the syntactic and pragmatic aspects. The very structure of the aesthetic message and its syntactic relationships are fundamental for the decoding process.Footnote 9

According to Lotman, aesthetic signs are not arbitrary but iconic. In other words, the relationship between the signifier and signified is motivated. Furthermore, unique for art texts is the semantisation of non-semantic elements. The word in the artistic text is not a separate semantic unit but is a “functive of a complex semantic function” (Lotman 1977, p. 166). In an aesthetic text, words appear as signs to signify not-yet established content, which emanates from the relationships between signs. In a non-aesthetic text, the semantic of units dictates the character of relationships, while in an aesthetic text, conversely, the character of relationships dictates the semantic of units (Lotman 1977, p. 205).

Furthermore, Lotman affirms that entropy, typical for natural language in everyday use, disappears in aesthetic text, for every element conveys information. Information is the opposite of automatism, while “the quantity of potential information depends on the presence of alternative possibilities” (Lotman 1976, p. 13). He also emphasises that the aesthetic text abolishes the law from the theory of information by which redundancy or predictability increases, along with the increase in structural regularity of text. Even though the aesthetic message maintains structural regularity, it overcomes redundancy by being subject to at least two structural norms. What is regular about one set of rules might appear as irregular in terms of the second set of rules: “Conflicting redundancies of two differing systems are cancelled out when the system operates simultaneously, and the text retains informativeness over its entire length” (p. 50).

According to Lotman, Charlie Chaplin’s films confirm this assumption. He is playing two characters. When we expect the clown to appear, the gentleman arises and vice versa. Thus, regularity is demolished, and the spectator’s expectations are betrayed. At one point, the change of costume becomes a fact of the plot, losing for the moment the dramatic effect. What is important is “the constant alternation between establishing anticipation and destroying it which forms one of the bases of the undiminishing informativeness of a text” (p. 53).

What matters is the possibility of different choices among the elements of the art language at each point in the creation of the aesthetic message. However, the possibility of choice does not guarantee aesthetic value, for each alternative is the subject of value hierarchy. For example, in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s film La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928), the choice of close-up shots among the other alternatives along the axes of camera distance obtains specific aesthetic value in the context of the whole film: the past is not depicted in a representative manner with regard to the particular historical events. The author has chosen to focus on permanent, not time-conditioned categories: human suffering, guilt and punishment, fear of death, and the desire to live by one’s own principles.

The most appropriate film language element capable of conveying such a message is a close-up of a human face, abstracted of time and historical conditions. The close-up is the choice representative of the overall meaning of the film.

The relationship between entropy and redundancy is unique in artistic texts. An increase in entropy is reciprocal to the probability of the occurrence of the units of a given system. Accordingly, “maximum originality or information is transported by messages in which all […] symbols have equal probabilities” (Abraham Moles 1966, p. 41). It is defined as maximum entropy. If the addresser of an aesthetic text violates the established norms in the given aesthetic system, the addressee’s expectations are betrayed and the entropy increases. On the other hand, redundancy is “a measure of the relative ‘wastage’ of symbols in transmitting a given message” (p. 42). The higher the efficiency of the transmission of a message, the lower the redundancy.

In the complex semiosis of film and theatre, in which the message is transmitted by several channels simultaneously, it is important to ensure that the information has reached the addressee. In the complex semiosis, the addresser deliberately increases redundancy to maintain the efficiency of the communicative process. For instance, the same information might be conveyed by the visual or the acoustic code simultaneously in film or performance. The degree of redundancy depends on the perceptive abilities of the addressee in the particular communicative process. Therefore, entropy in the aesthetic system is related to the specific qualities of the units of the given system while redundancy is a quantitative measure of the efficiency of the communicative process.

Accordingly, Rudolf Arnheim disapproves of the statistical approach in detecting the aesthetic value of the text, deriving from the theory of information. He considers that the criteria of the orderliness of the system—as opposed to chaos—ought not to rely on statistical data but on the property of structure.Footnote 10 According to the theory of information, the structure is reduced to bare predictability, which is futile if applied to the aesthetic text. Arnheim speculates that the photography of Andy Warhol, if analysed by the theory of information, would have been a redundant message due to its identical reproductions. However, argues Arnheim, the insight into the property of its structure—to establish mechanical multiplication as a phenomenon of modern life—would have diminished the quantitative method of the theory of information. On the other hand, the theory of entropy is focused on the very nature of the units, not on the predictability of their appearance in the series of units. What is of importance in aesthetic discourse is “the structural theme of the work,” namely “the skeleton, which holds the key to its basic meaning” (Arnheim 1971, p. 32). The artist “imposes structural theme upon the perceptual organisation” (p. 34). Two opposite tendencies in a system—total orderliness and mechanical chaos—are balanced in aesthetic texts. The author distinguishes between orderliness and order. The former, for the lack of any tension in a system, is but the other side of entire chaos while the latter, by virtue of its dynamic qualities, is the system with articulate structure. According to this theory, an aesthetic text should establish the simplest form of a given structure, in other words, “the simplest, most balanced structure available to a system” (p. 35).

Eco believes that the violation of norms of conventional code—thus creating a new aesthetic code—is the main source of its aesthetic quality. This process of overcoding creates ambiguity and invites the reader to participate in “an interpretative effort” (Eco 1976, p. 263).

The receiver of the aesthetic message assigns the meaning to aesthetic codes. Conventional codes differ from aesthetic codes in terms of communication of generalised experiences of a community. Such experience, to be formalised into language, ought to be simplified and generalised. The elements of language, symbols representing certain experiences, have to be “associated with whole groups, delimited classes of experience rather than with the single experiences” (Sapir 1921, p. 12).

Conversely, the artist aspires to communicate the individual experience using a common already coded language of art. In this sense, the aesthetic code is innovative and implicit while the conventional code is explicit, aiming not to violate norms to avoid disturbances in communication.

However, by no means are aesthetic codes inclined to disturbance in communication. According to the theory of communication, communicative disturbance is noise, defined as “anything that is added to the signal between its transmission and reception that is not intended by the source” (Fiske 1982, p. 8).Footnote 11 Fiske singled out certain basic common traits of all codes, irrespective of their nature:Verse

Verse They are compounded of a certain number of units liable to selection at the paradigmatic axis and combination at the syntagmatic axis All units possess sign function—stand for something other than themselves Their functioning is predicated upon the convention between code users and given culture Exhibit social and communicative function They might be transmitted by means of medium-communicative channels (p. 81)

On the other hand, aesthetic codes are polysemantic, expressive, not liable to precise determinations, easily changeable and subject to a strong influence of a cultural context. Fiske also emphasises the constant process of conventionalisation of aesthetic codes; namely, their innovations, once accepted, become convention itself.

As was outlined above, deviation is by no means equal to noise, for the former is an intentionally coded message by the sender, thus being an essential structural characteristic of the aesthetic code. Deviation is, therefore, established at all levels of the message. Unexpected combinations of the elements of different paradigms result in a deviant syntagm. Exhibiting deviation is inherent to poetry.

In the film El ángel exterminador (Exterminating Angel Luis Buñuel, 1962), elements not likely to coexist in the film image are present, such as chicken legs in a wallet. Such coding is extremely deviant, demanding the spectators’ heightened participation in the decoding of the meaning. The whole range of associations might be established: cruelty, superstition, sacrifice, corruption, hideousness, fear, and death: all constituents of the complex film metaphor.

Aesthetic codes deliberately violate syntagmatic combinatory rules, bringing into relationship elements of “entirely diverse, sometimes inconceivably linked paradigms” (Fiske 151). The result of such coding might be the annihilation of the values of one paradigm or even the equation of paradigms which are, according to generally accepted cultural values, conceived as opposite. For example, Dušan Makavejev, in the film Misterije organizma (Mysteries of the Organism 1971), combines the paradigms not likely to appear coexistent at a syntagmatic plane: communist hymn and erotic pictures, photos of Stalin, a model of a plastic penis, sequences dedicated to Wilhelm Reich, and electro-shock treatment. Thus, the author established a relationship between values not likely to appear together. Consequently, aesthetic codes fulfil one important function: rather than offering an answer, they raise questions.

The violation of conventional codes and the creation of new types of coding of the existing elements rely on viewers’ competence in decoding.

In Eco’s typology, the sign production based on the principle of inversion poses a challenge to the spectator’s competence in decoding the aesthetic message. The sign function is set up by apportioning of the expression plane with the content plane not yet defined in a given culture, for the lack of a previously set-up model of the correlation between expression and content. The addresser has to establish new content, a new expression, and a new mode of their relationship. Therefore, “cases of invention are not cases of performance of a given code but rather cases of invention of a new code” (Eco 1977, p. 10). The role of the addressee’s decoding abilities is stressed. It is by no means an accidental activity as the understanding of the film image ought to be learned. It is related to the knowledge of the existent codes in a given culture.

Eco notes that “film is playing a risky game between the coded and the uncoded. It supports a daring suggestion by coded connotations. Culture acts as a glue to amalgamate the invention of unheard-of relationships” (p. 13).

In theatre, violation of existing codes and the creation of new ones are also a permanent process. Aston and Savona point out the techniques of defamiliarisation—the Russian formalist’s concept of ostrenanie. According to the authors, Beckett’s Endgame, due to its inconclusive structure, violates the conventions of dramatic plot. The authors observe that “plays which deviate from this traditional shaping of dramatic plot serve to highlight the rules and conventions governing theatrical construction” (Aston and Savona 1991, p. 31). Therefore, violation of established codes in theatre shifts the attention beyond encoding to the decoding process, reinforcing the active role of the spectator. In the same way, Brecht’s alienation techniques or Churchill’s Top Girls, by violating “the convention of a fixed, time bound-plane of action,” or Beckett’s dramatic dialogue, established as a “process of destabilisation” rather than a creation of “the reality of the dramatic universe,” all encourage the spectator to “re-examine the rules of drama” and to engage in “collaboration and active participation in the production of meaning” (pp. 33–4).

Since film and theatre aesthetic messages are unique texts—they represent “multiple messages” (Moles 1966, pp. 170–190)—their aesthetic value is created by different structural principles from those that govern the creation of simple messages.Footnote 12 It is important to determine if certain elements of film and theatre language perform predominantly the aesthetic function or the semantic.Footnote 13 The premise is that aesthetic and semantic information, for example, the narrative one, is transmitted simultaneously by different codes and individual signs. None of the constitutive codes of multiple aesthetic messages of film and theatre are specialised in conveying either aesthetic or semantic information. Theatre and film languages display the polyfunctionality of their units rather than a prescribed model of performance. In the course of a performance or film, a dynamic functional interplay of various codes is perceived. Aesthetic information might be transmitted at one point by the visual or the verbal code, or by music, or it could be reinforced by the simultaneous transmission through more than one code. At one point, aesthetic information might fall to zero on account of narrative information; as well, narrative information might be absent, a segment of film or performance displaying the aesthetic function only. Through the interplay of various constitutive codes of the multiple messages, additional higher-level coding takes place. Both narrative and aesthetic information are not predominantly detected in a single constitutive code but in a combination of codes. This is a unique quality of multiple messages, regardless of the nature of their constitutive codes. For instance, actors, through their body movements and gestures, might convey only one part of narrative information, which is completed through the actors’ verbal action. Each of the codes transmits partial information that is completed by other codes. Furthermore, visual and verbal codes or music and visual codes, for example, might convey contradictory semantic information, and from the complex interplay of codes aesthetic information is inferred. Multiple aesthetic messages are subject to complex coding compared to simple messages, which by no means implies a higher aesthetic value of the message.

Aesthetic Practices of the Integration of Theatre and Film Signs

Inspiring examples of adaptations that represent a complex interplay of codes unique to aesthetic messages are presented in this section.

In the National Theatre adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s novel War Horse, a large horse dominates the stage. Being a puppet, not a real horse, it becomes so much more than a horse. The signifier is not tied to its signified, and, in that space of the theatricalness of the signifier, the sign of the horse conveys the “emotional core of the book to understand the experience of war” (Tom Morris in War Horse: The Final Farewell, 34:20 min).

The enormous mute puppet representing a horse, through its striking physical presence and movements, makes the audience engage with “the horse’s internal world” (Davids in Laera 2014a, p. 23). The puppet, without words, communicates the novel’s voice of the horse. Thus, the icon replaces an entire verbal stratum of the novel by relying on the power of visual and acoustic signs in the theatre. Also, a complex system of “movements and relationships” stemming from animal behaviour is essential in engaging the audience (Jones in Laera 2014a, p. 30).

Vivian Radman, in the essay “Divine transgression,” offers detailed descriptions of Tomaž Pandur’s performances Madrid’s Inferno, Caligula., and One Hundred Minutes, inspired by Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. The theatrical image of the Angel in Madrid’s Inferno conveys meanings with its very form:

Shockingly beautiful Madrid’s Inferno opens with an angel balancing a sphere hanged from the ceiling. Angel’s naked body is covered with white powder, presumably baby talc. As he moves, or, more accurately, as he engages in acrobatics which keep our eyes fixed on his beautiful male form, the scented dust from his body is dispersed throughout the air and the odor molecules find their way to our nostrils. Impulse from the nostrils to the brain … and we are disarmed, we are back to the innocent state of infancy from where we can be led into the world. And the world opens before our very eyes and our very ears. It is such world to which Angel would gladly fall. (Section 2. A gift of jouissance, in Radman n.d.)

Radman’s description of the performance reveals something unique to the theatre: the immediacy of the viewer’s experience, which is lacking in film. Olfactory signs complement the workings of visual and auditory signs, which are unique to theatre. Also, the angel in Inferno represents a class of angels, and its beautiful naked body represents a naked body. In film, it has to be the body or the face. In Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, there are angels, but they have the human faces of Bruno Guntz and Otto Sander. The esoteric wings are in contrast with the angels’ very human faces, so even when they float above the city, their designatum (they represent a class of angels) keeps returning to its single-human denotatum.

Edward Clug’s dance of a suffering individual in Haris Pašović’s stage adaptation of Miroslav Krleža’s essay “Europe Today” (Europa danas 1935) is a “dance ritual,” which creates a vivid image of “a lonely and isolated citizen of today’s Europe” (Predstava: Europa danes 2011).

Clug represents a class as his concrete human presence on the stage transcends the body of its owner and becomes the body of a collective.

Vivian Radman, in her analysis of Pandur’s Caligula, points out that for the spectator watching “Caligula being born naked into this world,” the scene stops being a sign of his birth but becomes the birth itself:

The play opens with Caligula ever so slowly appearing onstage, like a being materialized before our very eyes. First there are only the Roman walls, so grand and bland, and fine a postament, and then, as the walls begin to move and a crack between them opens, a leg begins to appear. We are made watch Caligula being willed into existence inch by inch, until the whole of him is born out of the cold stone. Watching a hero being born naked into the world doesn’t leave much space to analysis of the meaning intended. A primal scene, and yet tuned to please the senses in every way, cannot be transcended. It does not mean, it does not stand for something else. It is what it is, as painful and ecstatic as life itself. (Section 3. 3. The substance of Pandur’s theater, in Radman n.d.)

Pandur’s performance achieves Artaud’s claim for “spatial poetry to take the place of language poetry” in theatre (Artaud 2013, p. 27). Artaud affirms that theatre should question all given relationships between objects and “between meaning and form.” He celebrates the theatre of senses and concrete images and asks for a revival of theatre’s “anarchic spirit,” claiming that poetry is “anarchic to the extent its occurrence is the result of disturbances leading us nearer to chaos” (p. 30). The power of theatre is in unexpectedness, in “the sudden inopportune passing from a mental image to a true image” (p. 30). Its power, therefore, derives from iconicity, but an iconicity which transcends representation. It is “a pure game of forms,” “inversion of forms,” which, free from their conventional content, embody, by their mere material qualities, new, unexpected meanings (p. 30).

Artaud’s urging for a pure game of forms in theatre and for “poetry to take the place of language poetry” is powerfully realised in the National Theatre production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The creators reflect on their creative process in adapting Mark Haddon’s novel (BBC Learning: Design Elements n.d.). Marianne Elliott, the director, explains that “the design had to be a piece of imagination. The more realistic you made it the more domestic and clunky and heavy it felt.” Bunny Christie, a theatre designer, reveals that they “wanted to make it as if we were in Christopher’s head … in his imagination … it had to be clean, orderly, and mathematical,” because it was important for the character, the autistic boy. They describe the process in which every scene was carefully designed from models and drawings and used computer animation: “The painters worked directly from the model box” (BBC Learning: Design Elements n.d.).

The space in this stage adaptation represents a complex sign with its plane of expression detached from its content. Elliott refers to the book’s description of Christopher’s “brain [as] a bit like a laboratory […] and that was how we decided to design the show like a laboratory of his brain.” The stage is “like a graph paper […] and our projections onto it are his diagrams […] inside Christopher’s head we could go anywhere.” The stage “had to be lots of different spaces” to mark shifts in time and space: “[Christopher] jumps time lines, goes back and forth in time. He goes from one scene and jump cuts to the middle of another scene” (Elliott). They wanted to create a space where the “story could be told fluidly and poetically” (Christie).

Lighting designer Paule Constable explains the guiding principles of the lighting design in the performance: “I felt the lighting shouldn’t describe the place because the lighting was just what Christopher saw […] it had to be lots of changes in the lighting all the time” to match the changes in Christopher’s head.

In the conversation, the creators of the play remember the stages in their process of adaptation. Throughout the process, they were trying to find visual, acoustic, and verbal “outlets” for the complex emotional and reflective processes in Christopher’s brain, as described in the novel. The source of theatrical sign expressiveness is that the diagrams on the floor of the stage are not of the same class as their designatum. As Elliott pointed out, the space had to be abstract because only abstract signs could match the abstract operations taking place in the boy’s brain. As stated earlier, on the basis of such incongruity of form and content, a powerful aesthetic effect is created.

Elliott’s view parallels Robert Wilson’s reflections on staging Beckett’s Happy Days: “It’s all dance, it’s all timing, and the makeup is artificial. It is this other world and I’m always surprised that people try to do him in this more naturalistic way. He wrote an image that goes with the text and you can’t have this woman sitting on the street waiting for a bus” (Wilson 2022).

In The Curious Incident, the mirroring of the boy’s brain onto the surface of the stage provides the visual framework for decoding other signs in the performance. The multitudes of signs in the performance are thus related to the key sign, the function of which is to enable the decoding of other signs.Footnote 14

In the National Theatre adaptation of War Horse, an acoustic sign becomes the key sign in the climatic moments of the performance: the rhythm of the horse’s hooves moving across the stage. The creators point out that “only the rhythm was important and did not matter that the sound of the horse’s hooves was not exactly right.” They call it “emotional engineering”: “As soon as you got the rhythm right of the legs hitting the floor in the right order, it didn’t matter that the sound wasn’t exactly like a horse who’s hitting the ground; it was the rhythm that you as a viewer picked up” (War Horse: The Final Farewell 2016 Adrian Kohler 28:20 min).

Horse choreographer Toby Sedgwick remembers, “We didn’t worry about puppets being seen at all … If the horse was moving like a horse, they literally become invisible” (27:37 min.). This demonstrates the capacity of a theatre sign to become a key sign. Key signs punctuate highly emotional moments in the performance. Also, the horse’s breath achieves a high status in the hierarchy of signs. As Basil Jones explains, “Breath is absolutely fundamental to puppet manipulation” (31:36 min). The horse is breathing all the time in the show, which helps the audience imagine the horse alive. However, he warns that the breathing should not be too obvious (Jones 34:00 min). This reminds us again of the difference between props and aesthetic signs: if the sign’s plane of expression is too close to its content, the sign only performs the representative function. Aesthetic signs need to have the plane of content and expression to hover or to dance around each other but should not completely overlap.

Film sign, on the other hand, is closely related to its direct referent, being able only by virtue of film modalities to signify designatum, which is different from denotatum.

In film images, direct sign relation with reality is not enough to convey an author’s expressive intentionality. Film signs ought to be polyvalencyous, open to various interpretations, frequently ambiguous. Polyvalencyousness or transsignification implies the sign competence for various “cognitive integrations”—symbolic and analogic (Michelson 1972, pp. 313–332). Michelson points out that film, besides being capable of reconstructing reality, has almost unlimited possibilities to set up the structural relationships “between lived reality and artistic form.” A necessary precondition is the dynamics of creation and perception. Film exploits the possibilities of the camera to restructure the environment, thus promoting viewing into discovery. Film is privileged among the arts in terms of its ability to generate the alienation effect as an aesthetic principle. Film can entirely reconstruct reality (relocation, special effects) while, at the same time, the spectator’s perception remains physical and direct. Therefore, the film medium itself imposes the spectator’s active cognitive reconstruction and redefinition of the very film content.

Despite its polyvalencyous quality, film image lacks plurisituationality. That is why it is not possible to assign abstract meaning without considering the special context of film image occurrence (Bettetini 1973).Footnote 15 Unlike verbal language, film language does not possess generic signs—for instance, a car or house—but actual images of concrete objects or people only. Generalisations are possible only by virtue of the relationships between various images. Those relations will stimulate the spectator’s intellectual activities, which could lead to abstractions (p. 133). Using Morris’ terminology, the film sign could be categorised as unisituational for “it has signification in only one situation,” unlike a plurisituational sign, which has fixed meaning in various situations (Morris 1971, p. 96).

The question of sign-systems hierarchy is often addressed in semiotic investigations. Kracauer notes that a spoken word in film evokes mental images which combine with visual images. The integration of these two systems ought not to inhibit the visual element but rather to set up the “equilibrium between verbal and pictorial statements” (Kracauer 1960, p. 105). The attempts at equilibrium are frequently unsuccessful; therefore, Kracauer proposes the visual element to “play down dialogue with a view to reinstating the visuals” (p. 106). He claims that the only successful synchronisation is the one where the visual code dominates, irrespective of the type of synchronisation (p. 116).

Barthes selected two functions of verbal signs with regard to the iconic message: anchorage and relay. The former is a denominative function, which fixes the meaning of the objects of an image, for the image is never precise in the same way words are. The latter is a complementary relationship between text and image. The function of the latter might be to render concrete the location, time, or theme. Signs appertaining to various codes in film transcend their meanings to create complex meanings of the higher order. The intensity of their fusion varies; individual signs might “jump out” of the semantic whole (Barthes 1977, pp. 38–42).

In film as in theatre, one single sign could transcend its individual meaning and create complex meanings of the higher order. In Goran Rušinović’s (2008) adaptation of the novella Buick Riviera by Miljenko Jergović,Footnote 16 one sign jumps out: the protagonist’s “Buick Riviera, which comes to symbolise much more than an old gas-guzzling car, serves as a fourth protagonist” (Vidan 2010). It transcends its sign function, its denotatum, and becomes in the protagonist’s words, his home: “The Buick is my America. I have gone through all kinds of things in him and always felt at home.” The reviewer reveals that

the interior of the Buick Riviera is the only space where he feels at home. Much of the world is viewed from behind the wheel, with images of the chilling, white emptiness of the northern American plains alternating with the gray, anxiety-ridden vignettes of the war in Bosnia, themselves often seen through the front window of a car streaked with blood. What exactly happened in this earlier period of Hasan’s life in Bosnia remains unexplained, but one can deduct that his entire family was executed, his house destroyed, and that somehow he managed to escape. (Vidan 2010)

The film adaptation reduces long sections from the novella, which reveal the characters’ past, their psychology, and war experience. Hasan’s sudden flashbacks to the war as he drives down the endless highway in snow-covered North Dakota, which could be any desolate place on earth, are the only references to the war, as both Hasan in the novella and film do not talk much. Against the nature of signs in film, Hasan’s Buick Riviera becomes a polysituational sign despite its very cinematic concertedness: it is a universal place of displacement, of the shelter both from America and from memories.

The filmmaker purposefully emphasises the anonymity of the scenery and the snow-covered fields by creating universal images from the actual landscape.

Aesthetic signs exceed bare denotation, transcending the meanings which derive from representation to create complex meanings. However, signs must sustain the bond with depicted reality,Footnote 17 but by no means be reduced to mere representation (Bettetini 1973, p. 142).

Lotman also warns against mere representation in film and advocates for “the automatism of the laws of technical representation” to be rejected in favour of treating the filmed “reality” according to the laws of artistic creation (Lotman 1976, p. 14). He also points out “the duality of perception of a work of art,” which is the tension between the conception of the fictionality of events and, at the same time, the refusal of their fictionality. Accordingly, Lotman proposes that the greater the similarity between art and life, the more its conventionality ought to be suggested to the spectator (p. 18). Unlike conventional abstract linguistic signs, the iconic sign is concrete. Therefore, “the creation of a second-degree language, a language of abstraction based on photo-signs is possible only as a conflict with what is most essential in the nature of photographs” (p. 44). The concrete nature of the film sign is transcended by virtue of the “strongly expressed modality of the shot” (p. 44).

One recent film adaptation illustrates aesthetic possibilities inherent in the medium of film that allow heightened tension between the concrete and the abstract in film images. Armando Iannucci and co-writer Simon Blackwell’s adaptation The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019) “amplif[ies] the absurdist—and remarkably modernist—elements of the adapted text” and “conjure[s] a surreal cinematic odyssey …” (Kermode 2020).

The reviewer points out the transitions between “a painted backdrop straight into the glowing landscape of East Anglia.” Also, “scenes fall away like tarpaulin backdrops and memories are projected onto walls, interspersed by handwritten chapter-headings.” These images are juxtaposed with those of “the adult Copperfield witness[ing] his own birth, com[ing] face to face with his boyish younger selves … and learn[ing] to weave characters in and out of his life as he pens a ‘written memory wherein loss and love live forever side by side …’”

Such a level of abstraction works only because the filmmaker created concrete, unique, and very cinematic characters, who, with their gestures, facial expression, and costumes that firmly situates them in their unique context, and the picturesque and concrete setting vividly embody Dickens’ characters, however, exaggerated. The characters never cross the line and become like comic book characters. The creators intelligently and wittingly play between sketching and punctuating the characters’ featuresFootnote 18 while making them utterly unisituational. The exaggeration, occasionally to the point of the absurd, works because of the characters’ constant shifting back to the authentic. This film adaptation blends cinematic techniques with theatre techniques but never becomes theatrical. It stays firmly in the world of film but demonstrates the possibilities of creative stretching of aesthetic devices in film.

In discussing adaptations, considerations about the viewer’s perception in film and theatre, as opposed to that of the reader, could be useful for cinematic and theatre practices. How viewers select what to pay attention to on screen and stage and how creators guide spectators’ attention are what semiotic explorations have tried to clarify.

Barthes views theatre as polyphonie informationnelle, characterised by une épaisseur de signes, density of signs (1972, p. 258). Keir Elam notes that spectators interpret the complex theatre message—speech, gesture, scenic continuum—as an integrated text in accordance with the theatrical, dramatic, and cultural codes at their disposal. The density of the information at each moment in the performance is the semiotic thickness of the theatre discourse (Elam 1988, p. 27).

In theatre semiosis, the viewer’s perception is polarised and guided (Honzl 1976, pp. 88–89). On the other hand, Carlos Tindemans emphasises the viewer’s perception as “constructive, rather than receptive” as the spectator selects bits of information “looking for clues, for causal connections between events” (p. 128). The author concludes that frequent misunderstanding of a theatrical message is the result of “misplacing the focus of attention,” deliberately chosen by the addresser. Tindemans names it focus establishment, which implies that not all signs produced in performance have the same informative value. Particular signs could guide the decoding of the performance as a whole (p. 129). Tindemans stresses the importance of the concentration of focal energy, which means “bypassing the less relevant elements and stressing the more distinctive ones” (Tindemans 1984, p. 132).

Spectators, in the course of the performance, focus their attention on certain signs at one point, not being able to focus attention evenly on all signs (Honzl, p. 89). This is defined as the polarisation of perception, as opposed to simultaneous perception. However, the attention-focusing is by no means accidental. Honzl suggests that the mere observation of a spectator’s perceptual behaviour in theatre would confirm that “they all have the same interest in a single actor at one moment or interest in the observation of the scenery at another moment” (p. 89).

An important feature of visual “reading” is a lack of perception of minor, unimportant signs or objects. Spectators focus their attention on certain elements while disregarding others. In theatre, the spectator perceives mostly what the actor’s activity points to.

In Dino Mustafić’s stage adaptation To nikad nigdje nije bilo/It Has Never Happened Anywhere (Sarajevo National Theatre 2021), based on a novel by Tvrtko Kulenović, the emotional peak of the performance is the bloodbath scene. One actor and two actresses bathe in red paint on the white plastic sheet while the crowd encircles them, shouting nationalistic insults and slogans. This climatic scene testifies to the effectiveness of synecdoche in theatre: the three performers represent all war victims, while the yelling of the crowd stands for the insanity of nationalism.Footnote 19 The spectators focus on the bloodbath scene, on the frantic movements of the actors, while absorbing the maddening sounds of the mob. Nothing else is in their focus. At key moments of the performance, the planes of expression of different signs merge and create a complex aesthetic sign, which, for a moment, becomes the dominant sign. The choreography of Mustafić’s staging affirms Artaud’s view of staging as “a language of movement in space” (p. 32).

In film, on the other hand, the director has firm control over the viewer’s attention. By virtue of camera movements, lenses, lighting, and other modalities, the film director constantly guides the viewer’s perception.Footnote 20 The close-up is the most common film device to focus the viewer’s attention.

The impact of the psychologically conditioned perception process in decoding film and theatre aesthetic messages was systematically observed, which led to some prominent theoretical approaches that enabled a better understanding of film and theatre art. Rudolf Arnheim (1971) proposed a theory of perception of film image, which is one of the most systematic approaches to film semiosis. James Monaco (1977) and Sol Worth (1981)Footnote 21 elaborated on the idea of a learned process of reading film images, proving that the process is influenced by the spectator’s psychological, cultural, physiological, or other background data. According to Monaco, seeing is founded on saccade patterns, for the attention is fixed “on specific nodes rather than absorbing general information” (Monaco 1977, p. 126). This process is by no means only conscious.

Film art relies on the illusion of similarity. Everything in the film image is fictitious, including the illusion of movement. The movement is subject to various optic distortions. A camera angle distorts movement in regard to the real, not only because the speed of movement depends on distance but also because “perspective foreshortening will diminish the path of movement,” which in turn achieves the visual effect of increased speed (Bettetini 1973, p. 97).

Lotman also points out the difference in perception between film image and reality (1976, p. 28). In reality, when the viewer approaches an object, it gets bigger, but, at the same time, the viewer’s field of vision becomes more limited, while moving away from an object, the viewer’s field of vision becomes broader. Conversely, in film “the field of vision is a constant quality.” Thus, it is possible for the object approached by the camera to “jump out” of the frame. Accordingly, film can replace the whole with one of its parts, in the close-up, for instance.

Barthes emphasises the uniqueness of the film sign in regard to the relationship between sign and object: “From the object to its image there is […] a reduction—in proportion, perspective, colour …” (1977, p. 17).

Eco, similarly, emphasises the capacity of the film image to sustain only the pertinent traits necessary for recognition, disregarding at the same time other elements (third dimension, surface texture, size) (Eco 1977, p. 11). Film image, like photography or drawing, has its referent independent of the sign’s plane of content (signified), which in turn enables film to signify non-existent entities (p. 3).

Insights into the process of decoding aesthetic messages in theatre and film, which is by no means based on intuition, enable theories of aesthetic perception to become more useful for theatre and film productions. The presented approaches to film and theatre semiotics emphasise that theatre sign is materially identical with the object it represents; paradoxically, it transcends its denotatum by its very material characteristics that take on a life of their own. Film sign, on the other hand, transcends its referent—its purely representational function—by virtue of film modalities.

At this point, it is important to consider how theatre and film practitioners in adaptations could benefit from theoretical consideration about the nature of signs in literature, film, and theatre, their typologies, and their integration on screen and stage.

Reflections on Adapting The Fortress to Screen

Before proposing possible approaches to adapting The Fortress for the screen, I will reflect on the 2003 adaptation of The Fortress (The Sarajevo National Theatre) in light of the presented semiotic investigations.

Kupusović’s adaptation takes full advantage of the inherent multimediality of drama. The adaptation looks for the “matrices of ‘performativity’” or “kernels of theatricality” (Ubersfeld 1999 p. 8) in the adapted text and reads the text in such a manner to imagine performance by filling the “gaps” in the literary text (p. 10).

The performance combines the music by Adi Lukovac and the choreography of the Sarajevo National Theatre ballet. There are the voices of “dead souls” and the masked carnival crowd. Also, the scenography by the notable Bosnian painter Safet Zec and the costumes by Amela Vilić contribute to a powerful theatrical spectacle (see Figs. 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3, pp. 59–61).

Fig. 3.1
A sketch depicts the entrance of a two-storey building with a staircase at the front and a side view of the building.

Zec (2003)

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Fig. 3.2
A sketch depicts the entrance of a two-story building with a staircase at the front.

Zec (2003)

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Fig. 3.3
A sketch depicts the entrance of a two-story building with a staircase at the front and a side view of the building.

Zec (2003)

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The critiques of the performance emphasise the power of Zec’s scenography and of Vilić’s costumes to conjure, through the stage metaphors, the “fortress in all of us.”

One critic describes the scenography in detail:

The stage is dominated by Bosnian houses, which superbly represent carsija / mahala.Footnote 22 About ten windows with their lights on and off, through which heads of čaršija’s dead souls show up, wonderfully conjure the painful silence dominated by carsija, which under the slogan of ‘Mind your own business’ shrouds everything that is happening. There is also a mansard that, when needed, represents a mosque but also a platform for political speeches. On the right side is [Ahmet and Tijana’s] white bedroom, a symbol of their poverty and purity. The precise focusing of the lighting aptly transitions to the scribe’s shop on the left of the stage. However, the most impressive is the large iron double gates, which, like a horrible wide-open mouth of the revengeful power, quickly swallow the errant. The falling curtains successfully mark the transition from small Sarajevo to a Venetian ambient […] Amela Vilić‘s costumes delineate the authorities, clad in uniforms, from the costumes of the nobility and the people (Tvrdjava naše stvarnosti 2003).Footnote 23

The performance is framed by the same prologue and epilogue. The opening and closing narration takes on the role of the chorus, “a figure-collective outside the internal dramatic system” (Pfister 1988, p. 74):

There are times when dear Allah closes his eyes, tired of the world. At that time, from under the rocks, from the darkness, from hiding places, slither out all the vermin, the filth, the pests, who fear God’s face … But this does not last long. As soon as Allah opens his eyes again, they scatter away and hide in their hollows. Their time cannot last long. Only for a short time while God’s eyes are closed for the world. (Tvrdjava, Script 2002)Footnote 24

The beginning narration as well as the integration of the novel’s narrative sections into the characters’ dialogue lines work in theatre because the verbal component in theatre is only one of the sign systems to be integrated with the visual and auditory signs of the performance.

In the script of the performance, when Mula Ibrahim fires Ahmet, Ahmet’s dialogue line, quite long, is the “dialogised” narration from the novel.

Good luck, my dear fellow, whom fear makes such an untrusty friend. But may God forgive you, your petty soul was none of your choosing, it was given to you. You were last in the queue when there were no other, better ones left. Fare you well, man like all other men, who do evil without intending. May God preserve both you and me from those others who plan evil and assign it. (Selimović 1999, pp. 89–90)

The dialogue in the novel is much more condensed, as the narration expands on Ahmet’s thoughts and feelings.Verse

Verse “And I? Where shall I sit?” He blinked his little eyes and swallowed, placing his hands on his narrow chest, as if in pain. “You? I’m afraid there won’t be a place for you.” “What do you mean? I don’t understand.” “Well, you see how it is. You were away a long time, and I employed these two. I thought you’d found another job.” “What other job? You knew I was ill.” “How could I know? You didn’t come. You sent no word, and customers crowded in as if they knew I was shorthanded.” (p. 86)

The novel’s original dialogue would work in the film adaptation because close-ups of characters’ faces and the work of the camera as the primary narrator could reveal the unspoken and compensate for the omitted narration. The novel’s description of Mula Ibrahim’s reaction asks to be transformed into a close-up of his face:

His voice was quiet, strangled, sticky. His wrinkled face strove to retain its calm; his glance lost its confidence. His thin lips drooped as if he were about to cry. (p. 87)

An adaptation of the novel to screen would have to create unisituational signs but still convey abstract meanings. How to create Lotman’s second-degree language of abstraction in conflict with what is most essential in the nature of photographs? How to visually conjure the feeling of being in a fortress?

If the adaptation preserves the timeline of the novel, there are suitable filming locations in the region—the medieval fortresses in Počitelj, Bobovac, Srebrenik, Travnik, or Bijela tabija above Sarajevo. The concrete nature of the sign could be emphasised through the texture of the wall and the time-eaten patina of the staircase leading to a tower, but the camera could quickly shift between the realistic representation and a more abstract one and try to conjure the feeling of the fortress in the characters. The conflict between the concrete and the abstract could happen in the space between the shots where the unexpectedness and informativeness of the aesthetic message (Lotman) are maximised. For example, the horse riders taking Ahmet to the fortress could be depicted as the universal sign of the four riders of the apocalypse, but the camera could unexpectedly show a face of a local man watching Ahmet being taken, his face twisted in a mix of malice and fear. The novel is permeated with a sense of fear. The question is how to show fear hovering over the town. It does not have a denotatum. Selimović’s effective and concise dialogue is instrumental in conjuring this chilling fear:Verse

Verse “Are you afraid of the serdar-Avdaga?” “How should I not be afraid!” “Did he beat you for that other business?” “Avdaga doesn’t beat anyone.” “Then what does he do?” “He kills.” (Selimović 1999, p. 117)

As mentioned earlier, in film, a sign often achieves its meaning from the denotata of other signs. They could have a concrete denotatum, which helps a sign without a concrete denotatum to conjure its designatum. The novel’s description of Avdaga’s room and its scarcity renders Avdaga as the timeless executioner:

Everything about the man was usual, an almost empty room with whitewashed walls, a floor grease-spotted from the droppings of candles in cheap candlesticks, uncurtained widows, only the most essential and roughest furniture of heavy wood. And he himself was ordinary, quiet, polite, his look bore no menace, as I’d imagined, nor did he scare me with threatening words. He even seemed unsure of himself, thin as he was, with a worried expression, and fluttering eyes, which most of the time he hid by looking at one side or straight in front of him. And yet, I was uneasy. I felt there was this thing hovering about him, hidden from me, unknown yet ever present. (p. 112)

When Avdaga, persistently pursuing his interrogation, accosts Ahmet, “the rain was dripping down his nose …” (p. 157). Selimović’s image of a fanatic who coldly sends people to their deaths, his face exposed to the element, amplifies the terrifying determination and irrationality of Avdaga better than a thousand words.Footnote 25 The film must conjure this image, as this is the moment when an individual sign “jumps out” of the semantic whole (Barthes).

Before we engage in contemplating specific proposals at this stage of adaptation, it is important to consider the general approach. The adaptation should be about showing the effects of war on people rather than about war itself. Selimović’s The Fortress is not War and Peace; it is an intimate story of remembering and trying to live with the memories.

We could now engage in selecting and punctuating moments that vividly conjure this feeling.

The film can resort to effective shortcuts to punctuate the protagonist’s feelings: a woman dictates to Ahmet a letter to her son, who has been sent to war. Ahmet’s face is a sign pregnant with meanings. All the memories come back. Did his parents dictate a similar letter he never received? His expressions and gestures visually punctuate his experience. As he writes the letter, the sound of his pencil laboriously traces the letters on the white paper. What are the film signs that punctuate the emotional experience of the characters? It could be the woman’s nervous hand gestures, clutching the purse as she pays for the service, or Mula Ibrahim’s nudging, “There, come on, don’t cry, let’s get on with it …” (p. 22). However, we don’t need Mula Ibrahim in this scene. In the novel, he composes the letter because the woman cannot find words. In this scene, we only need Ahmet and the woman and his reactions to her words and gestures. The novel can expand on multiple characters; the film is more economical and punctuates rather than elaborates. In Screen Adaptation, Kenneth Portnoy points out that “the novel deals with internal reality; the screenplay deals with external events” (1998, p. 7).

A couple of the novel’s pages later, Mula Ibrahim is decorating the window of his scribe’s shop with the paper stars, the paper crescent moon, and the image of the sultan. As earlier mentioned, Selimović’s novel—on one level—was read as the author’s criticism of Tito’s personality cult. The novel’s description of Mula Ibrahim’s earnestness as he diligently cuts the paper to make stars is suitable for the film’s visual characterisation:Verse

Verse “Tomorrow’s the sultan’s birthday. Hold on to this!” I looked at him in surprise. What sort of a joke was this. It wasn’t a joke. He was taking an unserious matter seriously, giving himself to it entirely, energetically, almost passionately. With some scissors he cut a crescent moon, stars, and paper chains out of colored paper, and we stuck them on the windowpanes and frames, making a sky beside the public toilets. A mass of multicolored stars and pointed crescent horns adorned the hovel that was our shop, and in the window we stuck a picture of the sultan Abdul Hamid […] We put candles in the window and, since it was already getting dark, we went out into the alleyway to admire them. (p. 26)

This visual expression of servility contrasts Ahmet’s mockery: “What do you think of the moon and the stars?” asks Mula Ibrahim, and Ahmed replies: “Wonderful.” Just one word of Ahmet suffices. The method of punctuating the character’s emotions is the focus at this stage of adaptation. The stars and the moon do not need the anchorage of verbal signs. The verbal sign is less powerful here than the concreteness of the human gesture or facial expression. The sign of Mula Ibrahim’s servility is anchored in its own visual power through the workings of film modalities: close-up, lighting, etc. However, Portnoy warns that

the visualization of a character in a film removes part of the mystery that makes the character so likable in the original work. The difficulty of recreating the mystery and making the character interesting for the viewer is one of the prime aims of the scriptwriter. He accomplishes the task by creating a three-dimensional representation of the character. (p. 22)

We could translate the concept of a three-dimensional representation into the aesthetic criteria of unexpectedness and a lack of entropy. When Selimović describes Mula Ibrahim’s reaction to Ahmet’s speech at hadji-Duhotina’s house, he humorously conjures Mula Ibrahim’s predicament: “Mula Ibrahim wriggling his thin neck as if he’d swallowed a live eel” (p. 64), and a page later “Mula Ibrahim had swallowed his eel and was now hiccupping quite purple in the face” (p. 65).

This visual sign has an abstract designatum: it conjures fear, vividly and unexpectedly, but also it designates a man’s liberation through humour. It relates to Ahmet’s—“fear to sit, fear to shit, and when does a bloke get to live?” (p. 56)—his rejection of fear. Not only does the sign reveal so much about Mula Ibrahim, but it also reveals the magnitude of Ahmet’s rebellion. As Portney reminds us, “Often a writer reveals a character by what other characters in the screenplay have to say about him or how other characters react to him” (p. 24).

Characterisation, of course, does not rely on visual signs only. Effective dialogue exchange, such as the first dialogue in the novel between Ahmet and Mula Ibrahim, is condensed and would be effective in film: we learn a lot from little:Verse

Verse “You here every day?” “Every day.” “What do you do?” I shrugged my shoulders. “And for how long?” “Why?” “What do you do for a living?” Again, I shrugged. I didn’t know what I did for a living. Nor did I care. “You’ll go mad on your own like this.” “I won’t.” “Winter will come, illness, you’ll get old. What will you do then?” “I don’t know [….]” “I opened a scribe’s shop You can work for me […]” “You don’t owe me anything, Mula Ibrahim. When I saw your boat, I grabbed it quite unconsciously. Perhaps, I thought it’d help me stay afloat.” “I’m not repaying a debt. I need an assistant […]” (pp. 17–18).

The dialogue could be trimmed even more and, in case the adaptation changes the time frame to the present, the dialogue should sound more contemporary.

Also, at this stage of selection and punctuation, quite a few characters and backstories will be removed. However, one character should have its screen embodiment. It is Mustafa Neretljak, a man of contrasts, whose fear is so great that he has diarrhoea every time Avdaga questions him, and he runs to the toilet in great humiliation. He brings offerings to destitute Tijana and Ahmet, and the next day steals from them, he lies to Ahmet, then unexpectedly blurts out the truth, he fails in every business venture he devises but picks himself up undefeated and comes with another dream about how to strike it rich. In the novel, he is a side character. In the adaptation he could be the leitmotif, even absorbing Mula Ibrahim, so the two characters become one. Mustafa could be a scribe who devotedly decorates the windows of his office. He could “wriggle his thin neck as if he’d swallowed a live eel,” at hadji-Duhotina’s party, without conflicting with his endearing and tragicomic self in the novel. The logic of the script is to reduce redundancy and to increase the unexpected by revealing contrasts in the character.

In the novel, Mahmut Neretljak is introduced on page 39. Ahmet overhears Mahmut lecturing children in Arabic:

I didn’t see him through the window. But I heard voices coming from the little room behind, Mahmut’s deep, hoarse voice, and the high voices of children. He was teaching them. But what? It seemed familiar. God Almighty, it was Arabic, broken and distorted, stuffed with Turkish, Persian, and Greek words, and spiced with our own colourful swearing. What was he doing? […] (pp. 39–40)

The dialogue between Ahmet and Mustafa reveals the full meaning of the lecture scene:Verse

Verse “And what was so funny?” “But you don’t know Arabic.” “Sure. I don’t know. How could I.” “Then why are you doing it?” “[…] I don’t know much, and they don’t pay much, so no one owes anybody anything. What do they lose? Nothing […]” (pp. 39–40)

In the adaptation, Mustafa could be present from the beginning, a sort of foil character to Ahmet. He brings comic relief with his cheerful resilience. He could play a functional role as well. If Ahmet becomes Ramiz, Mahmut could be the character that unwittingly gets Ahmet in trouble. Ahmet is not a willing rebel. The events make him one, and Mahmut is the perfect catalyst for plot twists. Perhaps Mahmut is used by Ahmet’s enemies as bait to push him where he wouldn’t normally go. At this stage of adaptation, new scenes and plot twists will have to be invented.

The key scene at hadji-Duhotina’s party could be visually rendered through “the sublimation of individual meanings” as everything in the script will lead to this scene, the cathartic moment for Ahmet. The rendering of this scene could rely on the concept of transignification, the sign competence for various cognitive integrations (Michelson). The scene could expose the secret scheming, meaningful exchanges of glances, nodding, and guarded reactions. All these individual signs will conjure an atmosphere of utter fear and control, palpable in the room. Ahmet—walking into the trap, unaware, unguarded as he is, with his truly human rejection of fear—must clash with the forces in society and fulfil his destiny, the destiny that he himself is devising with each minute of the film.

The novel offers a lot of material suitable for the cinematic conjuring of the scene. Hadji-Duhotina greets the guests at the door:

At my first step inside this rich house I realized that my aloofness was ridiculous and my armor unnecessary. Our host, hadji-Duhotina, short, with a large stomach, like a stuffed turkey, greeted us with a beaming face, so ingratiatingly polite that I couldn’t believe my eyes. What had Mula Ibrahim told him about me? Or was this splendid man so nobly hospitable that he showed such respect even to insignificant guests? […] But alas, […] That splendid man passed us by as though we were shadows. His beaming host’s face, the wide-opened arms, ready for an embrace, and the obsequious cordiality were not meant for us, but for the kadi who was behind us. (pp. 56–7)

The mobility of film signs could be exploited here: the plane of expression of one sign integrates with the plane of expression of other signs to create complex meanings. However, both film and theatre practitioners are weary of using too obvious metaphors in cinema. If two signs engaged in the metaphoric relationship are too similar, the metaphor is too obvious. Theatre practitioners often reject direct metaphors on stage. Ivo van Hove argues that “a space never becomes a metaphor. That doesn’t interest me. It’s always a real surrounding, a real environment. But it can have different layers you can fantasize about” (in Laera 2014b, p. 57).

If adapting The Fortress, the film overuses the metaphor of hadzi-Duhotina’s house as the centre of corrupt power, the metaphor loses some of its appeal. Metaphor is based on semi-identity—possession of identical semantic marker.Footnote 26 Metaphors in film work when they are not too obvious; when they involve semantic features (sememes) that belong to a periphery of their semantic field.Footnote 27

Film metaphors are established through the relationships between objects that have an “identical semantic marker.” If that marker belongs to the periphery of the objects’ semantic fields, the metaphor is more sophisticated than one based on a too-apparent similarity. Also, the identical markers must carry a pertinent characteristic of the two sememes.Footnote 28

Pasolini believes that film is “a metonymic art” and does not lend itself to metaphor since “it represents reality with reality” (Pasolini 1988, p. 225). According to Pasolini, film compensates for the lack of metaphor by analogy, namely, by means of indirect depiction of real people and setting.

Similarly, James Monaco refers to the inappropriateness of metaphoric relations in film because “the secondary element of metaphor is too equivalent in cinema, too much present. As a result, cinematic metaphors based on the literary model tend to be crude and static and forced.” For that, film might more efficiently resort to indexic sign: “It is here that film discovers its own, unique metaphorical power, which it owes to the flexibility of the frame, its ability to say many things at once” (Monaco 1977, p. 134). Monaco favours metonymy in film: “Associated details can be compressed within the limits of the frame to present a statement of extraordinary richness. Metonymy is a kind of cinematic shorthand” (p. 136). Similarly, Christian Metz refers to the diegetic referent of film image in terms of its ability to depict the partial referent only. Thus, “in film, a ‘house’ would be a shot of a staircase, a shot of one of the walls taken from the outside, a close-up of a window …” (Metz 1974, p. 98).

The power of film metonymy.Footnote 29 lies in its ability to substitute the whole with one of its effective details, for film media is extremely economical. It demands restrictions on the representative material which in turn promotes the metonymic depiction of reality. Moreover, film lacks the broad inventory of epic devices to narrate a story, as the novel does. Film uses efficient shortcuts: instead of representing the entire event, film depicts an impressive detail to evoke the whole. Such evocation is frequently more powerful than full representation, for film is too representative and resorts to metonymy as the ideal artistic device that restructures reality. Metonymy is not merely an aesthetic device but a technical manoeuvre conducted to avoid the too complex representation of reality. However, form in aesthetic discourse ought to be in correlation with content; therefore, the metonymic representation should be justified.

Jasmila Žbanić in Quo Vadis, Aida? uses effective film metonymies. The film tells the story of the murder of more than 7000 Bosnian Muslim men by focusing on the story of one family, through the eyes of the mother. The pointed guns in the factory hangar, where the men are crowded to be executed, stand for the three-day killing spree. The sounds of guns are heard; the killing itself is not shown. We see the reaction of the mother instead of the scene of actual killing. This approach is in accordance with the aesthetic choice not to show the actual killing and its gore and to protect victims in their last moments of agony from the observer’s intrusion.

In Selimović’s novel, the party at hadzi-Duhotina covers about ten pages of the novel. The film will have to resort to metonymy, both as a functional and aesthetic device, to effectively select moments and plot threads and to punctuate the characters’ emotions: the misunderstood greeting at the door and Ahmet’s reaction, the kadi standing for all the dignitaries, and hadzi-Duhotina for the servility to the powerful and cruelty for the powerless. There is the provocateur character as well, and Ahmet and Mahmut (instead of Mula Ibrahim) alone in the “enemy country.” The few characters represent the whole society. However, the scene should not be too reductive as it would be in theatre where “a particular item of clothing … functions as a metonymy, or more precisely as the synecdoche […] of the fifteenth century, or of the French Regency” (Ubersfeld 1999, p. 123).

In film, a sudden and unusual concrete detail would need to be carefully crafted into cinematic shortcuts.

The final sequence of the novel, Šehaga’s death in Venice, during the carnival, offers descriptions that could be integrated into the complex cinematic medley of sounds, images, and words.

Selimović did not show much of the carnival itself; instead, he replaced it with the sounds of the carnival that Ahmet hears through the window of Šehaga’s room. Also, when Ahmet watches the carnival from the window, he perceives it as a total sign, one large signifier for Ahmet of an unpleasant signified:

I looked down onto the street. Hundreds of men and women clad in the most outrageous costumes, crowded in an indescribable chaos. Their voices merged into a mighty noise in which no single voice was audible. The light of torches and lanterns was reflected in the quiet water of the canal. I looked in bewilderment at this multicoloured throng that rocked and twisted, that moved and halted as one, yet each person was doing his own thing, leaping, dancing, singing, as though competing for who should commit the greatest madness. (p. 381)

Later in the night, when he’d fallen asleep, I went out onto the street. It was empty, littered with all the discarded rubbish of the carnival, strangely quiet after the noise that had shaken the stone buildings. (p. 384)

The novel’s ending could be represented with an acoustic cinematic sign, the sound of war trumpets, the sign that, in the final shots of the film, becomes the key sign, signifying, with its plane of expression, a terrifying designatum: one more generation sacrificed in war.

Meanwhile, in my beloved country, the banners of war were once more unfurled […] And, from the square, soldiers were already setting off for war […] Of those who were going, who would be killed? And where? In the Danubian marches? In the forests of Bessarabia? In far foreign fields? […] And would my children tread the same miserable path when they grew up? Would they live as stupidly as their fathers did? […] I refused to believe, but couldn’t free myself from apprehension. (pp. 399–400).

Lotman argues for displacement of visual and auditory images (1976, p. 15), which violates the expectation of synchrony. Such an artistic choice “drive[s] out automatism from the common use of film elements” (p. 16). In the proposal for the closing of the film adaptation, the nondiegetic sound of war trumpets floating above the Venetian lagoon becomes the sign of foreboding, the sign liberated from its narrow Bosnian context, trumpeting with its plane of expression the ominous designatum, its invisible contours conjuring the humanity’s fear of the future as uncharted territory.