The present interdisciplinary project, which brings together specialists from different sectors, departments and faculties, aims to promote theoretical and applied research on the relationship between the nineteenth-century French novel and its adaptations in French or English, with the specific intent (a) to study the relationship between literature and its cinematographic translation in a historical-ideological, semiological and translational perspective, (b) to study the most purely linguistic (phonological, morphosyntactic and semantic) aspects of film adaptations (in relation to French and English (c) to promote the subtitling of French literature-based films not yet available in Italian, (d) to build a large computer database where both research results and some of the materials which are the object of our analyses will be made available (e) to promote cultural activities aimed at spreading this cinematographic heritage which is arguably often unknown to Italian audiences, both through the creation of events and public screenings and through the involvement of specialists in seminars for students and in conferences. The perspective theoretical and applied results of our project can be summarized as follows: (1) a more in-depth scientific knowledge of the relationship between written medium (especially nineteenth-century French literature) and its translation for the screen in an integrated approach that would also blend the results of semantic analysis under a semiological frame of reference and of formal analysis in a linguistic perspective; (2) a contribution to the practice of subtitling also through the involvement of students; (3) sharing results and research materials with the general public.
This type of search introduces aspects of innovations both on a theoretical plan that of the practical implications.
The relationships between cinema and literature have essentially been studied by the filmologis, that has rarely gone over the aesthetical or formal plan. Our project want to fill a gap, relatively to the French literary culture and its declinations (essentially in Italy and in the English-speaking world): which the recurrent phenomena are in the rewriting of a novel or a play in a cinema script? In that way the cinema tells us something on the literature and on the linguistic practice? The filmic text simplifies the texts literary in an optics directed to the fruition of the spectator? And if yes, in which measure? Is cinematographic speech a kind of simplified orality? What role do marked structures play (functionally, geographically or socially)? It is therefore intended to propose a descriptive work that is not only an abstract comparison, well known, between cinema and literature, visual code and written code, as a path historically connoted (the nineteenth century) and culturally (French literature in Italy and in the world English-speaking). Such a perspective, which has so far found no place among specialists, presupposes upstream a work of documentation that is in itself an advancement of knowledge to the extent that less known materials will be made available to the public. We aim to systematize, analyze and contextualise a corpus of films taken from nineteenth-century French novels, working primarily on the materials of the original screenplays; subtitles and linguistic contextualization will be provided. These data will be digitized and made available to scholars in a database dedicated to the relationship between cinema and French literature (and its Italian and Anglo-American developments).
For exemple, we'd like to record in digital format The Magic Skin (1915) by Richard Ridgey, a silent film produced by Edison and considered by historians one of the first major adaptations of Balzac's work (La peau de chagrin), currently preserved in a 16mm copy at the Library of Congress.
The innovativeness of the project also arises at the level of dissemination of research. On the one hand, the students of the Language course for the subtitling of parts of the films will be involved, which implies a work "on" and "with" the language, practical and reflective at the same time. With this action, we intend to try, therefore, to make scientific research dialogue with the teaching of language and literature, this aspect increasingly important in a university world too often closed on itself and not open to new job opportunities that are offered by modern technology. Moreover, in order to combine scientific research and product diffusion to an unskilled public, part of the funding will be devoted to the creation of events that approach non-specialists to this type of film. A retrospective of French literary cinema will therefore be organized, bringing all the Sapienza students closer to this type of filmic text.