Читать книгу From Page to Screen / Vom Buch zum Film - Группа авторов - Страница 6

The first section in our collection deals with the adaptation of children’s stories. Very often we forget that what we call children’s literature is not written by children but for children, and that the authors are undoubtedly adults who cannot help writing and composing their texts from a certain social, geographical, political, etc., position. That is, a position that is always already predetermined and that we might consider ultimately as inevitably cultural and therefore ideological.

To this we must add the fact that the original children’s story can be manipulated for commercial reasons when we try to turn it into a film that could be enjoyed by not only children but by a larger audience. A case in point is the double reading or viewing that could be made of certain animated cartoons or CGI films based on stories and scripts initially designed to appeal to children but which contain a kind of subtext that is meant for the adults who normally go along with the children to the theatre.

We can clearly see this in the way that at the end of some of these films, when the list of credits is shown, the viewer is also given a sort of “making of” with discarded or alternative scenes which, by their comical effect, seem more intended for the enjoyment of the adult than of the child. The film, as it were, includes an extra layer of meanings which appeals to the adult viewer and satisfies his desire for entertainment as he carries out the noble task of caring parent. In this way, the experience of going to the movies and, most importantly, the film itself, becomes a cultural event to be enjoyed not only by the children but by the whole family.

Lorena Silos uses, as the starting point for her essay, the widely accepted idea that the adaptation of literary texts into films or TV series serves the very important function of reproducing values and ideologies which may be an essential part of the social fabric. This reproduction is not always a mechanical process, since it is often the case that a new version of an old story is used to reassess that story from the perspective of a new social environment and/or a new cultural paradigm. Silos uses as case-study the adaptations of Johanna Spyri’s Heidi, and, after reviewing the long history of adaptations of the literary original, she concentrates on discussing more particularly one of the main characters in the story, Fräulein Rottenmeier. By following the evolution in the way this character has been portrayed in several film adaptations as well as the animated versions, Silos tries to explain the political as well as social implications which account for those changes in the representation of this female figure.

Bruno Echauri also concentrates on the study of a story in which, again, the protagonist is a young girl. The focus is not, however, as in the previous case, an adult that is close to the young protagonist but on the child herself, Mathilda. For Echauri an important element to be considered is the fact that the author frequently, behind what seems to be a literature written simply for entertainment, manages to hide a subtext of profound social criticism of values and circumstances affecting children. The success of the story, as could be expected, caught the attention of Hollywood’s producers which eventually turned the book into a film. Echauri analyzes the changes in characterization in the film version, connecting them with the material aspects of film production, as well as with the commercial component due to the shift in film genre in the Hollywood version of the story, in a move which eliminates the elements of ambivalence in the original text.

Finally, Yiyi López-Gándara begins by acknowledging how an unexpected event such as the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has made us all suddenly but fully aware of the importance of all kinds of learning, which become, as she says a “kind of hybrid education experience”. In this context, more precisely, the relevance of films is highlighted for their educational value. López-Gándara focuses her analysis on the way gender is represented in media texts at large, and how children can be affected by stereotypical approaches to gender issues. By focusing both on film versions of children’s stories and the so-called blockbusters, she describes the reimagining of secondary characters as an index to the strategies used by producers and filmmakers to reproduce patriarchal mechanisms in the construction of gender.