| Popis: |
This paper studies what chapters become when they are adapted into sequences of films or series. I focus on the widely popular adaptations of Harry Potter and A Song of Ice and Fire. This type of adaptation calls into question the distinction between episode as a part of an unfinished whole, and chapter as a part of a complete opus. Adapting chapters into a film requires eliminating a lot of details, but also expanding on the main events, especially at the end. Adapting a chapter into an episode requires a change in rhythm and composition as well: chapters are condensed into short, two minutes sequences, and combined in a montage which makes characters and storylines alternate much more tightly. Chapters and episodes thus differ in rhythm and content, but this distinction is blurred when we examine their function in the overall structure: both provide an incomplete closure, promising some form of sequel. Thus the adaptation of chapters into episodes reopens the text to narrative potentialities. Even if the adaptation does not modify the “Bible”, as screenwriters call the adapted material, some measure of suspense emerges, in that the public wonders how and how much their expectations are going to be fulfilled. In the context of transmedia narrative, suspense keeps popping up in new ways, and the teleology which turns episodes (of an unfinished work) into chapters (once the work is completed) has to be questioned, as chapters can go back to being episodes. |
