Читать книгу From Page to Screen / Vom Buch zum Film - Группа авторов - Страница 32

Secondary characters do not abound in books and films targeted at young audiences, and there are cognitive, experiential and pedagogical reasons for this: children find it difficult to distinguish between characters; they have limited experiences (they do not know many people); only one adult suffices to perform the social and pedagogical role of guide or teacher (Nikolajeva, 2004: 172). In addition to this, it is widely acknowledged that women are extensively underrepresented in both children’s books and films (Giaccardi et al., 2019; McCabe et al., 2011; Smith et al., 2018) and, although the trend seems to be shifting (Heldman et al., 2020), there is still a long way to achieve equal representation, both from a quantitative and a qualitative standpoint. If this is so regarding women protagonists (Lauzen, 2019), the issue becomes especially compelling when it comes to secondary characters, whose importance in the shaping of a collective consciousness about women and their role in society has often been overlooked in the criticism.

In books, secondary female characters are often key for the creation of a diverse, feminised background against which the main action develops. This also generally reflects the vast majority of children’s experiences in Western societies, where women are still the primary caregivers. As opposed to this, book-based family films and blockbusters exhibit a conspicuous absence of secondary female characters, and there is no underlying cognitive, experiential, pedagogical or technical reason for it. In a recent review of book-to-film adaptations, Meg Miller (2016) concludes that women characters in books are represented as more complex, nuanced and defiant of social rules than in film; she also states that the advent of blockbusters somehow redefined female roles to make them fit more stereotypical depictions. In the passage from book to blockbuster, those secondary plots and background stories, rich with female characters that help construct a more realistic narrative, are abandoned in favour of a grand (masculine) narrative.

The effect of such dominant narratives on actual audiences has been both attested to (Goulds et al., 2019; Steyer, 2014; Ward & Aubrey, 2017) and contested. In this regard, Christine Gledhill has argued that audiences do not just passively receive, but rather interact with, media products (Gledhill, 2006: 114) and that that interaction necessarily eludes the adoption of pre-established “fixed positions” (Gledhill, 2006: 118). It is true that viewers (even very young ones) bring into the act of watching their own set of references, beliefs, experiences and motivations that may support, thwart, counter or even cancel out filmmakers’ intentions, and that films (even blockbusters) may open up gaps for meaning negotiation. However, in the specific case of young audiences, a combination of semiotic and mimetic approaches must be adopted as children often fail “to acknowledge fictionality as a literary convention, including the fictional status of characters” (Nikolajeva, 2004: 172). This effect might even be increased by the materiality that the screen affords these characters.

In this scenario, intermedial analysis offers the possibility of observing mechanisms to which audiences do not generally have access: these are conscious mechanisms that, through operations of selection, reduction, deletion, addition, adaptation, rewriting and emphasis, are precisely intended to fix meaning. In this way, intermedial analysis reveals the worldviews and intentions behind filmmakers’, screenwriters’ and producers’ decisions when adapting a text. So, even if the experience of the film itself opens up new possibilities for viewers, it certainly, and deliberately, closes others offered in the book. This reduces considerably the possibilities for feminist meaning negotiation.