Introduction

Abstract

Bosnian Literary Adaptations on Stage and Screen reconciles theoretical approaches to adaptation with theatrical and cinematic practices. The book is informed by scholarship in film and theatre adaptation theories and is grounded in a comparative approach that focuses on the interplay of sign systems and codes unique to screen and stage.

Bosnian Literary Adaptations on Stage and Screen reconciles theoretical approaches to adaptation with theatrical and cinematic practices. The book is informed by scholarship in film and theatre adaptation theories and is grounded in a comparative approach that focuses on the interplay of sign systems and codes¹ unique to screen and stage.

The comparative approach draws from relevant works in film and theatre semiotics and linguistics but avoids the limitations of those approaches. Investigations in film and theatre semiotics and linguistics will be discussed in the context of selected examples of literary adaptations. Solutions that amplify a unique integration of the cinematic tracks, on the one hand, and theatre codes, on the other, are explored through the process of adapting two literary sources written by Meša Selimović. The book will propose potential approaches to adapting the novels The Fortress and The Island ² for screen and stage, respectively.

The choice to adapt The Fortress and The Island is guided by the principles of relevance and universality. Selimović is a renowned writer from Bosnia and Herzegovina and the two novels are representative of his literary opus. The Fortress and The Island address the universal themes of war and exile, which resonate with contemporary audiences.³ The Fortress’ vivid local characters and setting—eighteenth-century Bosnia—do not preclude a contemporary reading of the adapted text. The novel’s prophetic contemplations on history as a repetition of cycles of violence transcend its specific Bosnian context. The story revolves around Ahmet Šabo, a Sarajevan who had recently returned from the war in Chocim in contemporary Ukraine, where he fought for the Ottoman Empire. The Ahmet of the novel has many facets, while a screen adaptation can focus on Ahmet the ex-soldier, incapable of forgetting the horrors of war; or Ahmet the rebel, who cannot be silent when facing the insidious machinations of the powerful; or Ahmet the poet, who refuses to be implicated in dangerous political games. The novel offers various readings, which are not mutually exclusive. I will explore the approaches to adapting the novel for screen having in mind what Jan Kott points out in the context of staging the complex world of Hamlet: “One can select at will. But one must know what one selects, and why” (1964, p. 150).

The Island stages a closed world of essentially dramatic characters. It is a novel about ageing, its characters, an old couple, trapped on an island of their own making. The seemingly uneventful plotline teems with existential dramatic situations. The dialogue stages and demasks the characters’ strategies of hurting the other to tend to their own existential wounds. Unlike The Fortress, The Island invokes an unspecific time-and-place context: the nameless island,⁴ except for its Mediterranean ambiance, could be interpreted as an everyman’s island of loneliness. On the other hand, The Fortress is firmly situated in a specific cultural context. Although the plot is situated in eighteenth-century Ottoman Bosnia of the Ottoman Empire, the novel has been read as a not-so-veiled critique of the communist regime in Bosnia, which was part of Socialist Yugoslavia when the novel was published. Possible interpretations of the novel are informed by a body of texts that responded to, criticised, or reflected the ideology of the regime. The specific political, psychological, and autobiographical context of the author as well as the political moment when the book was published are essential for the adaptation process. In Robert Stam’s reading of Bakhtin, the notion of chronotope applied to the adaptation of a literary source to screen would require a film to be “a historically situated utterance” (2000, p. 117), in which the textual and the contextual are interwoven.⁵ The adaptation will need to occupy this delicate place and to oscillate between authenticity and universality.

The Fortress poses a challenge for screen adaptation on account of its distant time frame. A range of questions about the cultural context of the adaptation and its transposition and reception are considered. A number of approaches will be contemplated to make the adaptation relevant for the contemporary viewer. The chronotope of the novel, eighteenth-century Venice and Sarajevo, could, in the film’s discourse, be transported to post-war Sarajevo in the early twenty-first century. Audiences are likely familiar with the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s, and a contemporary reading of the novel inevitably conjures the Sarajevo of that war.

In an adaptation, the time frame of The Fortress could be changed, which would in turn necessitate a radical reimaging of the novel’s characters and its narrative structures. The proposed approach rejects the fidelity-criticism stream in adaptation studies. However, in adapting the two novels, I will seek a balance that reflects Mieke Bal’s metaphor of “friendship”:

The difference between loyalty and fidelity, seen through the metaphor of friendship, is the different critical attitudes they foster. Instead of judging one work, usually the adaptation, on the basis of a slavish subjection to its precedent or “source” with a normative posture that obscures its own standards, I consider the two-way intership between the two works a more productive source of insight because a detailed analysis can bring to light aspects of both source and adaptation that can converse with each other. (2017, p. 212)

The proposed approaches to adapting the Selimović novels are situated within the considerations of adaptation as “an endless process of recycling, transformation, and transmutation” (Stam 2000, p. 66) or, to borrow Dennis Cutchins’ metaphor, adaptation is like:

tossing a boll on a windy day. Once the ball leaves the thrower’s hands, it is subject to the winds and likely to end up someplace different than the thrower intends. This is not to say that the thrower does not have intentions; it simply acknowledges that those intentions are not the only factors in the ball’s eventual landing spot. (2017, p. 89)

A stage adaptation of the novel The Island faces the obstacles of its fragmented structure and its noncontinuous time and space organisation. The novel is composed of nineteen novellas, forming a loose causal connection, and needs to be radically changed, with many sections omitted and new ones added. Solutions that situate adaptation theories and practices in the context of what works best for each art form will be considered.

Chapter 2 offers an overview of adaptation theories and practices. This book attempts to bridge the theory and practice of adaptation, which guided the selection of research sources. The most valuable for this purpose have been the testimonies of film and theatre practitioners and their contemplations about the creative process. The cited segments from interviews with theatre practitioners and filmmakers illuminate the choices they made, their rationale, and the stages in the process of adaptation. This book offers a glimpse into film and theatre practices in Bosnia and the wider region of ex-Yugoslavia since most examples of adaptations used are the works of local practitioners.

Chapter 3 identifies the stages of film and theatre adaptation. The discussion is guided by the view that screenwriting handbooks and academic studies in adaptation and dramaturgy have a lot in common. They share an emphasis on the tight structure of the plot, starting from the initial situation developing in a certain direction and leading to the inevitable outcome. The plot structure reflects conflict and tension inherent in both film script and drama. However, conflict and tension are conceptualised according to the demands of genres and periods. Conflict and tension are not necessarily manifested on the surface level but are the inherent driving force that imposes its logic on the structure of a film script or a play. Informed by various theories of dramatic conflict and tension, the proposed adaptations centre around dominant conflicts, whether manifested on the surface level or not. The chapter outlines the stages of adaptation: the selection of relevant segments of the adapted text, its condensation, the heightened dramatisation, and the creation of added scenes. This approach argues for the adaptation to abandon the adapted text and create a new structure that has its own logic and coherence. Theorising about the stages of adaptation is continually placed in the context of adapting The Fortress for the screen. The chapter suggests possible directions the adaptation could take, all of which demand a radical change of the novel’s structure and characters. Scholarly works from dramaturgy and literary criticism, primarily works of Selimović’s literary critics who illuminate relevant aspects of the reception of his works, are incorporated into the analysis of The Fortress.

Chapter 4 offers a model for the segmentation of the basic units of film and theatre. The proposed segmentation is informed by Metz’s application of linguistic methodologies in discovering film’s “universal grammar.” In Cognitive Semiotics of Cinema, Warren Buckland (2000) offers a fresh view on Metz’s exploration of the functioning of film language and an illuminating examination of Noam Chomsky’s Transformative Generative Grammar. Informed by these approaches, this chapter explores a possible segmentation of film and theatre language that has its correlatives in the units of segmentation of natural language above the level of the sentence. This book attempts to identify the units of film and theatre language in the segments that correspond to the communicative act in natural conversation. Also, the study relies on the concepts of lexical semantics proposed by Jurii Apresjan, who singled out elementary situations, which could apply to film language, which correspond to Charles Filmore’s notion of grammatical predications. Fillmore’s definitions of predication and argument are of more use than grammatical notions of subject and predicate. The application of these linguistic models has proven helpful in the classification of elementary film predications, which could illuminate the very functioning of film modalities. Again, the usefulness of the theoretical considerations is constantly tested by contemplating possible predicative relations in the adaptations of the two novels.

Chapter 5 attempts to illuminate the functioning of dialogue in film and theatre by incorporating approaches to dialogue from relevant branches of linguistics and the philosophy of language. The position that dialogue in the novel is fundamentally different from that in drama is challenged as the close reading of the dialogue in The Island reveals relevant similarities to dialogue in drama. Terminology stemming from speech-act theories is systematically applied to the dialogue segments of the novel. Oswald Ducrot’s distinction between the elements of the deep and surface structures in communication informs the analysis of the dialogue in The Island. In Dire et ne pas dire, Ducrot elaborates on the speech-act theories of the Oxford School and focuses on the concepts of illocution and perlocution, which are reflected in the distinction between the linguistic component and the rhetorical component of the utterance—présupposée and sous-entendu. The close reading of the dialogue in The Island reveals the functioning of the discursive laws similar to those that govern communication in natural language. The novel’s dialogue and the accompanying narration uncover the characters’ motivations and their discursive positions. This section draws from Bakhtin’s exploration of the concepts of dialogue and monologue in the context of Dostoevsky’s novels. The chapter concludes that the embedded-in-narration dialogue and open dialogue of the novel are not fundamentally different. This offers useful guidance for selecting and rewriting the novel’s dialogue in the adaptation.

Chapter 6 outlines a possible transformation of the segments of The Island into theatre discourse. It is based on the view that both narration and dialogue are incorporated into performance. The proposed arrangement of stage configurations is conceived as a testing ground for the concept of predication, discussed in Chap. 4. In the proposal for the adaptation, two simultaneous stage configurations are juxtaposed to heighten dramatic tension, which exposes the extreme situations of the characters and their utter isolation from each other and the world. Such an approach invokes the theatre of the absurd since the protagonists, through the pointed intervention in the adapted text, could be rendered in the manner of Ionesco’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith. However, the chapter only outlines a possible direction for the adaptation and does not attempt to create a complete script.

Chapters 7 and 8 present a brief overview of cinematic and theatrical practices in Bosnia and Herzegovina, mostly in Sarajevo during and after the war in the 1990s. The focus of the historical overview is the adaptation practices in theatre and film productions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, though some relevant works from other regions of ex-Yugoslavia are included. An overview of the artistic output in this part of Europe exposes the significant shift in the cultural context in the 1990s, reflected in the region’s artistic practices.