From Pastoral Drama to Multiple Performance: A Comparative Look at the Adaptations WUTHERING HEIGHTS and WHITE AS SNOW / Deniz Gündoğan İbrişim

New Directions in Turkish Film Studies Conference, 2013.05.04
New Directions in Turkish Film Studies 12, May 2016
Varlık magazine, March 2016

“My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see.” Joseph Conrad

“The eye does not see things, but images of things that carry the meaning of other things.” Italo Calvino

“Every life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, in which everything can be constantly reshuffled and reordered in every conceivable way.” Italo Calvino

Abstract

In the relationship between cinema and literature, literary adaptation often shows itself along a line that is rarely affirmed in the face of the original/source work. In other words, some critics regard adaptations as secondary to the original work. Nevertheless, in the 1950s and 1960s, under the influence of modernism and postmodernism, the French New Wave films considerably changed the language and editing of cinema, and introduced an “estrange(ment)” effect concerning why, where, when and how adaptations are actually produced. So, are adaptations today simply, and largely of necessity, imitations of original works? Or, on the contrary, are they works that hold on to their own counter-narrative in storytelling, challenge a monolithic truth, and create layered reality (or realities) that we might call fragmented, multiple and carnivalesque? Can adaptations, in the process of the aesthetics of production and reception (1), shake the traditional ideological ground of the relationship between cinema and literature to its foundations, and open up, between culture and style/editing, a third space that we might call iconoclastic and that has an “aura” of its own?

Adaptation, as the postmodernist critic Linda Hutcheon also points out, has always been an essential method for innovative imagination in storytelling. In her book A Theory of Adaptation, Hutcheon says that adaptation should be examined more deeply as a brand-new work that fully retains its own rights in the process of production and reception (2006). Such an attitude points to a place we might call a third space, one capable of breaking monophony in the relationship between cinema and literature. At this point, adaptation goes beyond everyday comparisons and, while it can reconstruct the past and history, turns into a powerful metaphor of the present situation.

In the context of the adaptation debate above, this article will take a comparative look at the films Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold, 2011) and White as Snow (Selim Güneş, 2010), and will analyse the cinematic language and the mode of adaptation of both films, which intersect on the axis of macrocosm and microcosm. It will examine how, and to what extent, the literary adaptations of both Arnold and Güneş topple the authority of the main text. Moreover, it will examine the distinctive narration and special atmosphere — the aura — of both directors, and reveal the hybrid nature of these literary adaptations in relation to the original work.

Keywords: Adaptation, textual authority, performance, hybridity, carnivalesque.

Introduction

Today many texts, from novels to story collections and from drama to comics, are being brought to the screen through widely differing cinematic languages. Nevertheless, it would be unfair to expect to grasp the true nature of these transfers of form in depth through the novel, the drama or the film alone. First of all, says the critic Brian McFarlane, at the very root of the debates on bringing or transferring a novel or a story to the screen lies the contrast between perception and conception. In his book Novel To Film, McFarlane sums up this contrast as follows:

The novel, by its nature, seeks to produce a “conception” along a visually lower track and a symbolically more layered one. Film, on the other hand, seeks to construct perception within a symbolic frame that is passive compared with the novel. This contrast lies at the basis of adaptation and essentially brings with it three main methods. In the first, fidelity to the originality of the text is maintained and as few changes as possible are made. In the second, through interpretation, a number of changes, though not many, may be made to the original text. In the last, by way of “analogy”, a U-turn, so to speak, is made away from the original work, and an entirely different work is in fact created (1996:5-10).

Taken in general terms, it is not very striking when, in bringing or transferring novels or stories to the screen, certain narrative elements are modified and put on display in the film. However, in an adaptation that can subversively go beyond “carrying over” or “transfer” to the screen, literary elements may find quite a different path for themselves at the level of film. This often leads us towards plural and creative voices. At the same time, as the roles of the text’s main elements — narrative, character, time, space and so on — change or are bent, the idea is also put forward that adaptation is positioned as secondary to the original work. What is being debated here is the film’s failure to remain faithful to “the novel” or “the book”. Yet in the twentieth century and today, the question of adaptation, both theoretically and methodologically, has long since shed self-reflection or self-reflexivity and become the refuge of an oppositional stance that refuses to remain faithful to the original text. While this oppositional stance underlines how far “narrative” adaptation on the screen diverges from the traditional, it does not exalt hierarchical definitions of the novel or the film, or the existence of an ongoing complacency. On the contrary, it lets the audience sense the presence of a playful intertextual dialogue. Thus, in this form of relationship, which we might describe as an exchange between telling and showing, that is, in narrative adaptation, we can speak of the presence of many elements: a polyphonic, dialogic perspective that we might call Bakhtinian, intertextuality, the practices of cultural studies, deconstruction, narratology, performance theories, reception theory and so on. Although all of these are elements that have entered narrative adaptation relatively recently, the true “success” of an adaptation depends not on its being one hundred per cent faithful to the original work, but on the strong interaction of these elements with one another. In this sense, the notion of fidelity to the original work in the question of adaptation has already lost its currency and its meaning in aesthetic evaluation as well.

Following the adaptation debate above, we must not fall into the error of a simple generalisation about the novel and the film. We need to distinguish the main elements and characters of the work from their “true” functions in the film, and to recognise an interaction between the original text and the screenplay, if there is one, that is not monolithic but playful, one that we might even call Bakhtinian carnivalesque (2). From this point on, it is important to look at the extent to which the author and/or textual authority is still effective today. For, especially from the 1950s and 1960s onward, with modernist/postmodernist aesthetic and visual ruptures — largely with “French New Wave” (3) cinema — a sharp break from the conservative line takes place in literature, in art and in the visual realm alike. Thus, in the light of a changing cinematic language, there is a very strong fragmentation as to the purpose for which, and the way in which, adaptations that leap beyond carrying over and transfer are actually produced. At this point, a shifting of the centre, play, performance, irony, a hybridity produced by clashing identities, intertextual interaction and, of course, a sharp “estrange(ment)” in the interaction between original work, film and audience are now on the screen. For this reason, rather than positioning adaptations within the question of one hundred per cent fidelity, it will be necessary to think of them together with the modernist/postmodernist problematic of existence. For the endless editing possibilities of adaptations serve the withdrawal of the author or of textual authority — the author is now dead. They allow the characters, in keeping with their inherent metafictional quality, to speak for themselves. In this sense, though it may sound a little radical, adaptations can also be called carnivalesque narratives in which hierarchical structures are turned upside down, a discourse free from domination prevails, and, as monophony is broken in the face of the original work, an unconventional voice, exuberance and desire emerge. Such a liberation from authority also brings with it a stand against a totalising system of truth, and undermines the perception of adaptations as mere copies of original works and as secondary to them.

Linda Hutcheon, one of the strongest names in postmodern criticism, also proceeds in parallel with the subversive function of adaptation mentioned above, and says that adaptation is in fact a creative extension of an ongoing storytelling. In her book Theory of Adaptation, Hutcheon underlines that adaptation is a spatio-temporally “new” imagining. According to Hutcheon, adaptations that go beyond the threshold of transfer are “other” works, which retain their own rights in both the process of creation and that of reception, and which we might call close to metafiction. Indeed, in the first sentence of her book, Hutcheon addresses the reader as follows:

Adaptation is, in a way, also redecorating (2006:10).

While this statement in fact points to the changeability of the original work and of the story in today’s understanding of cinema, it also makes strong references, in terms of reception and consumption, to alternative forms set against the ordinary; it exalts the politics of intertextuality. In this sense, adaptation foregrounds performance itself rather than the hierarchical structuring between source and production. It refers to texts that speak to and contradict one another, pierce through one another and at the same time deconstruct one another.

Theatrical Performance in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold, 2011), perhaps the most famous and most lyrical work of English Romantic literature and the one brought to the screen most often to date, brings with it an understanding of adaptation that we might call parallel to the line above. Published by Emily Brontë in 1847 and foremost among the classics of English literature, the novel is, much in the vein of Romeo and Juliet, the story of an ill-fated love, a burning passion, a rising anger and a relentless revenge. On the other hand, we cannot pass over the sharp class problematic in Wuthering Heights, nor the gender-centred critique that comes with it. While the novel tells of the relentless, painful passion and ill-fated love that Heathcliff, the orphan taken in by the Earnshaw family, and Catherine, the family’s own daughter, feel for each other, it shows the reader how these two characters find consolation on the dark and howling moors in a noble savagery almost inherent to Rousseau. That such a twisted novel should this time come from the hands of Andrea Arnold carries it well beyond a mere story of love and revenge and makes the questions of race, class and gender even more visible. For Arnold’s cinematic language sets itself, from the very start, against the “dark-skinned exotic” language of the original text of Wuthering Heights. As the character of Heathcliff is brought to the screen as Black for the first time, he appears before us not so much as a dark-skinned exotic other from Liverpool but as an ordinary Black boy. In the film, Heathcliff, quite unlike the vague allusions in the original work, is at the centre of the problematic of race and class. In Arnold’s film, Hindley’s racist remarks in particular, and Heathcliff’s response to them, go beyond a stand against the Victorian hegemony of the period. What is at stake here is a practice of subjectivation against today’s politics of “othering”. The real issue here lies in the power struggle of two masculine forces in their effort to reach capital and inheritance, and essentially the source of feminine desire — Catherine. Heathcliff’s depiction on the screen as Black refers to the construction of (masculine) identity under cultural and political violence, which is not very sharply evident in the novel. For narrative adaptation here is also a powerful symbol of cultural transmission. If we accept adaptation as a vehicle that carries literary texts or narratives to a particular audience in a particular way, then, when the vehicle does not quite fulfil its function in repetition or reproduction, the story becomes different. In other words, the story adapts to its “environment” by undergoing a series of changes. The real repetition here is subversive narrative adaptation itself; it is the text that undergoes change. Thus, such a repetition, together with an alternative practice of subjectivation that stands against the traditional, creates the phenotype of a Black Heathcliff.

Another challenging and crucial point in Arnold’s adaptation is the decentring of the novel’s main narrator — the visitor called Lockwood, newly arrived at Wuthering Heights. Lockwood records the harrowing story of Wuthering Heights in his diary by listening to Nelly, the housekeeper. Through Nelly and the diaries, the reader witnesses the story as a whole. In the film, however, Nelly interprets the story with the observations she has gathered in the household over the years and with a class-based gaze. In this way, the audience can easily see the two-generation family drama moving between texts — the source novel and the film. Such an interaction goes beyond the question of fidelity or infidelity to the text and lays bare the variable, intertextual attitude that Hutcheon emphasises. The audience’s confrontation with such a process prepares the ground for undermining the notion of “already knowing”. At this point it is possible to see a two-way performance along the line of the pleasure of consumption. For while the narrator on the screen pierces through the original text from a class perspective, she makes social, political and intercultural content more visible in the film’s effect on the audience and in its critique. Therefore, Wuthering Heights does not remain one hundred per cent faithful to the original work. The narrative of a Black Heathcliff, shaped through carefully chosen cultural codes, creates a new discourse and a new performance. Thus the agency involved in disseminating the story reveals this narrative on the screen itself as a subversive instrument.

In Wuthering Heights, apart from the Black Heathcliff, perhaps the most effective stance that stands out and plainly refutes the question of fidelity is the fact that Arnold, throughout the film, sets out from a pastoral eulogy set against the original work. Arnold gives space solely to the noble savage performance of unbridled nature, of the twilit, howling, muddy moors and the dark grey sky. Arnold’s cinematography goes beyond the original work, pushing time and space out of monophony and redecorating them within a dark carnivalesque. In this sense, the function of referring to the original work weakens considerably in almost every frame of the film. We cannot see here the period choreography of traditional literary adaptation. In Arnold’s hands, the Yorkshire moors appear before us with an almost primitive visuality. The distinction between human and animal seems to melt away on these moors. Indeed, Arnold completely erases the flashbacks one would expect in the first frame. Here the audience is first left alone with images of the creaking house, of the windows forever opening and closing with a howl, of the tree branches reaching towards these windows, and of the moor sunk in mist among the green hills. At the very beginning of the scenes in which the characters’ childhoods are played by Solomon Glave and Shannon Beer, the moment when Heathcliff and Catherine take refuge on the hissing moors that have made the mist their roof is especially important in Arnold’s narrative adaptation. Heathcliff and Catherine’s desire to realise themselves outside the claustrophobically tomb-like house, by living the barest wildness of nature to the full, turns into an entirely different depiction in Arnold’s hands. Arnold does not bring Brontë’s novel to the screen once more in a classicised form. Through such a use of nature and an extremely slow pace, she seeks to create a pre-book effect. In other words, she puts forward a raw, half-fictionalised series of affects and actions, as if the book were to take the film as its basis. Moreover, Wuthering Heights was shot not in the usual rectangular perspective but in a square 4:3 perspective. This allows the characters to be shaped within the image in an extremely dynamic way, horizontally, vertically or diagonally. We feel the spell, and at the same time the terror, of the dark grey mist above the green hills more than as it is described in the novel. In this sense, Wuthering Heights cinematographically gives the audience a sense of the Kantian dynamic sublime. In other words, we are both in awe of how powerful and immeasurable a force nature is, and in the face of this force our reason and our imagination succumb to a feeling of terror.

While Arnold makes the cinematographic spell we have mentioned above ever more effective as the film proceeds, the original story is no longer the director’s main concern. While the film uses the text of Wuthering Heights as a draft and/or a template, it reconstructs its own narrative, and therefore its distance, by bending it within the pair of time and space. The camera moves through the given scenes at the same time as the characters; yet it is also fragmented and interrupted in order to capture the smallest detail. Thus the sense of slowness that we feel deeply throughout the film, and the minimised dialogue, melt into the characters. The audience travels to the full across the wuthering heights together with the characters. As Arnold creates a eulogy of genuine slowness and of minimised dialogue forever wrapped in mist, she adopts a highly original attitude that holds on to her own work. Arnold’s Wuthering Heights is always one step beyond a series of thresholds that continue throughout the film. In other words, the sensory experiences made possible by the exterior, by the interior of the house/household and, along with them, by the characters’ subjective intervals pierce through the holistic perception shaped on the axis of macrocosm and microcosm. At this point it can easily be seen that the performances of Heathcliff and Catherine come to the fore. The performance here refers to existing conditions — in other words, to the original text — only up to a certain point. In Arnold’s hands, reference is not the sign of an existential essence. On the contrary, it is positioned against the traditional — the source or original work — beyond a tradition of pastoral drama. It points not to performative discourse but to a theatrical performance, through the fragmented, circular repetition of body language and minimised dialogue — each repetition signalling the formation of a new subject. Thus the performance here, viewed from a Derridean (4) perspective, refers to a form of communication in which there is no semantic essence established beforehand in sharp outlines. In this way, Heathcliff’s Black identity under cultural and political violence in the film, and Catherine’s noble savage identity, suppressed by social/cultural practices and wishing to realise itself only in the arms of nature, go beyond any previously given reference. The subjectivation achieved here passes through a definition that breaks uniformity, undermines hierarchy and that we might call plural and carnivalesque: the definition of a practice of subjectivation which, through a performance in which hierarchy is broken, retains its own rights and formally perhaps has little need of the original work. In conclusion, in Arnold’s film the characters construct themselves not through the performative discourse of the original work but through performance. Therefore, they also point to the existence of what is probably a third and more ambiguous space concerning cinema, literature and representation.

A Folk Song Sung for Sabahattin Ali’s Ayran: Poetic Performance – White as Snow

An approach similar to the way Andrea Arnold’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights defeats the language of analogy with the original work, and to the way it breaks from the traditional and turns into the metaphor of an ideological rupture in the relationship between cinema and literature, can be found in the film White as Snow (Selim Güneş, 2010). Selim Güneş’s first film, White as Snow, was turned into a screenplay and adapted for the screen from the story “Ayran” by Sabahattin Ali, who built the strongest bridge between the classical period of Turkish literature and modernism. Güneş’s 2010 film White as Snow holds a distinctive place among the literary adaptations in Turkish cinema today. Güneş’s cinematic language and visuality intersect, in a fairy-tale-like way, with Sabahattin Ali, who stood against every form of domination and injustice and whose literary vision points to what we might call lyrical anarchism. “Ayran”, just like Kürk Mantolu Madonna or Kuyucaklı Yusuf, is a story that pierces the heart like a bullet. Our hero Hasan tries to sell a jug of ayran on a freezing winter day, shouting “fresh ayran”. He is only seven or eight years old, yet he carries the great responsibility of looking after his siblings and his home. That his mother has to work as a carer in another house in the town is also one of Hasan’s burdens. He is separated from his mother, who works in the town four hours away. Hasan, whose life consists of selling ayran at the station and feeding his little siblings, winds back and forth along the village roads with his tiny steps, summer and winter alike. On a bitterly cold winter day, while returning to the village before he has even earned the money for bread, he is torn apart by wolves on the way back. Written in 1938 and published in 1943 in the book Yeni Dünya, “Ayran” is one of the finest examples of Sabahattin Ali’s “sincere realism” and his striking “passion for truth”. The utterly lonely individual represented by little Hasan and the surroundings/townsfolk who represent the system that holds him in its grip are so cut off from one another that it is as if everyone has become an “other”, absorbed in their own world and indifferent to what is happening around them. In the end, the door on which the real drama knocks is that of the weakest of all.

While the story “Ayran”, which can convey the faltering and unruly sides of society along such a genuine, people-centred but never populist line, is being turned into a screenplay, Selim Güneş, just like Sabahattin Ali, never strays from truth and sincerity. At the same time, the traditional bond between the original work and the film, just as in Arnold’s Wuthering Heights, is consciously loosened and, by creating a different discourse or performance, takes on a new cultural paradigm. First of all, we do not see Hasan’s father in the original work. The absence of Hasan’s father is not explained in the story. In White as Snow, however, this story written in 1938 is shifted, as the audience can easily sense, to the period of the coup, 12 September 1980. Moreover, while Sabahattin Ali’s story takes place along the railway, White as Snow is moved to Artvin; new characters are added to the film. White as Snow turns the train station of the original work into a desolate roadside where the minibuses going from the town to the village stop. Such a choice by Güneş in fact opens a third, different space between the original work and the film, and becomes a powerful metaphor of an ideological rupture. The issue here is the political position of Artvin, where many people were killed under all kinds of torture in the events that unfolded before and after 12 September. In the film, unlike the original work, it is possible to see the poverty, deprivation, domination and injustice that sprout from precisely this point and are positioned at the heart of the film. Moreover, the merging of this injustice with idealism and hope — the most crucial moment, when Hasan’s father coincides with the idealist blacksmith — makes White as Snow a very powerful work that holds on to its own narrative. In such a narrative we witness Hasan’s unparalleled struggle beneath the snow, the father’s idealism, the horrifying indifference of the stranger who passes through the town, the mother’s inner resentment, Recep as an incomplete individual stricken with a hopeless love, and the pangs of conscience of the informer Kadir Dede, who betrayed the father. White as Snow, like Wuthering Heights, breaks with mere repetition of the original work. In Güneş’s characters, too, we come face to face with the lament of a performance that intersects with Arnold’s cinematic language.

In White as Snow, the first step of the passage from pastoral drama to the lament of performance lies in the way Selim Güneş brings us face to face with the harshness of nature as much as with its beauty. Nature here, in keeping with the film’s title, opens up before us a snow-white space, more stylised than in the original work. The boundless, wild snowy expanse, where the howling of wolves reaches the ear and which we might perhaps call point zero, takes on a spiritual and, of course, cine-fable state in which being cannot realise itself and is always observed as an incomplete individual — the mother, the father, Hasan, Recep, Kadir Dede. Dialogue minimised as in Wuthering Heights, a cinematographic poeticism, mysticism, an immanent slowness, and a Beckettian reference to being and waiting are the doors Güneş opens for us. All of these doors go beyond the traditional threshold and completely bend the form of the “village film”. Moreover, if the audience does not know the story, they too join in this Beckettian waiting. Through both Kadir Dede and the old man who, like Hasan, comes to the rest stop to sell things, the audience accompanies the characters’ performance by listening to Recep’s story, Hasan’s misfortune, why the mother is far away, and the father’s days in prison. In such an interaction, a third narrator, again with a class-conscious eye, in a sense undermines the original work while transforming the film both thematically and narratively.

Selim Güneş’s expanded and wide-ranging world shows that he takes Sabahattin Ali’s “Ayran” only as a sketch or template. Like Arnold’s cinematic language, Güneş rebuilds his own narrative and distance by changing them in both time and space. The cinematic language Güneş constructs, with its use of image and music that verges on surrealism, the poetry quotations scattered through the film, its minimal dialogue, its constant waiting and its lack of communication, lays bare even more sharply the original work’s critique of the system, its poverty and its question of class. In Hasan’s struggle to walk home alone across the snow-covered plain where the howling of wolves reaches his ears, and in the echoes of the mother’s “Hasan”, everyone is in truth to blame; even the mother. Hasan, whose only sin is poverty and deprivation, is forced to construct and realise his own existence according to this system. The performance in the scenes where little Hasan, forced into a noble savagery, stumbles on all alone in the middle of the snowfield reaches its peak in Selim Güneş’s hands. Metaphors such as the white horse as the symbol of freedom and hope, the forest, the knife, the red paint distilled from life and death, Hasan’s red beret and his father’s pocketknife at the end of the film render Hasan’s swaying between life and death with an almost surreal visual quality. The bodily performances created by all these elements reveal a form of communication in which the given meaning of the original work is never present and is therefore not transferred. Such a form of communication recalls the performances of Heathcliff and Catherine in Wuthering Heights, which sit outside performative discourse. In particular, the mythical, mystical and fantastic performance of Hasan and his mother breaks down the nature–human relationship we are used to. It subjectivises spiritual description and foregrounds a sterilised visual quality. With Selim Güneş’s unusual angles and his use of sound, the characters, alienated from themselves and their surroundings in the lap of harsh nature, also follow Tarkovsky’s trail and offer us an entirely different text and reading on the line between death and life.

Thus the original work “Ayran”, in the exchange between telling and showing, becomes another cine-text through the elements of performance. Through gestures, silences, sounds, dialogues, close-ups, the voice-over narration, the use of music and cinemascope elements, it refers to a “process of creation” of its own. As Hutcheon also puts it, this process of creation in adaptation is especially important today. For adaptation is positioned in the creative and interpretive process between the acts of appropriation or salvaging, depending on one’s point of view. In this sense, adaptation by its nature involves rewriting, just like a “palimpsest”. At this point, (re)defining adaptation means attending to an intertextual, polyphonic, even carnivalesque dialogue. While adaptation relies on repetition to a certain degree, it strongly underlines that it refers to change. In this sense, it is both the process and the large-scale recoding of a heterocosmic aesthetic understanding. Such a creation merges magnificently both with the world of imagination and with visual/bodily performances.

Conclusion: Hybrid Narratives, Different Auras

In conclusion, Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights and Selim Güneş’s White as Snow, which intersect subtly and magnificently in terms of cinematic language and cinematographic inferences, undermine the question of “fidelity” to the original work and largely put forward hybrid narratives. Such an approach frees adaptation from the glass bell in which it has long been trapped and, this time through “transformation”, reinforces the continuity of the original/source text. When we consider narrative adaptation as creation, process, product, reception and consumption, we can say that all elements and genres meet in a carnivalesque and anti-hierarchical way. Moreover, as Hutcheon notes, just like biological adaptation, cultural adjustment or adaptation creates its own process and favourable conditions according to its environment. Like hereditary development, stories settle and develop according to a particular environment and culture, and this is by no means unchangeable. At times, just like biological adaptation, cultural adjustment and/or adaptation may advise migrating to more suitable conditions. In his book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins says:

Cultural adaptation resembles biological adaptation to a certain degree; so much so that, although it is basically conservative, it can give rise to a form of evolution, to memes, which are units of cultural transmission (1989:189).

Memes, unlike hereditary transmission, are units such as every kind of tradition, way of thinking and way of life, which enable human beings to reconstruct their social and cultural life and codes. As generations change, cultural and social content is passed on to the next generation through the memes that follow. Thus, in narrative adaptation, stories too point to a working that resembles memes. Ultimately, by being retold and reproduced, stories go beyond surviving in different cultural materials and environments and begin to flourish. The narrative adaptations of Arnold and Güneş, while being magnificently recreated with an original language and with the possibilities of technology, retain a distinctive narration and a special atmosphere. At this point it is important to recall “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” by Walter Benjamin, who analysed the changing world of art and the artist through mass production with industrialisation and who put forward a very powerful critique of mass culture. Benjamin states that in the age in which the work of art can be reproduced, the special atmosphere that represents the work’s here and now, the spiritual veil that envelops the work, its “aura”, loses its power, and he tells us that the sacred and life itself also become reified (2009:55). According to Benjamin, the reproduction of the work of art through technical means causes the work to lose its quality of being here, now and unique. Benjamin says that this situation is not confined to the work of art alone. In a film, too, in a film frame passing before the eyes of the audience, the natural and spiritual “aura” enveloping the film has been lost.

However, it is possible to argue that the spiritual veil and/or aura surrounding Arnold’s Wuthering Heights and Selim Güneş’s White as Snow does not lie in the realm of reification or artificiality. It can be said that the spiritual veil in both films lies in the realm of an “other” truth, one based on the directors’ objective choices, their intuitions, feelings and emotions, and the essentiality of their perceptions. Thus the work of art here signals a break from tradition. Yet it is not in an ambivalent position, split into mere object/body or mere subject/soul. On the contrary, by shedding the binary opposition of subject and object, through transformation and creativity it retains its own different reality and radiance — in other words, the luminous aura of the performance that belongs to Arnold and to Güneş.

*****

Notes

(1) Reception aesthetics was put forward by the German-born Hans Robert Jauß (1921-1997) in 1967, in his trial lecture at the University of Konstanz entitled “Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft” (Literary history as a provocation to literary studies). The pioneers of this theory are Wolfgang Iser, born in Germany, and, in America, Stanley Fish. While reception aesthetics generally puts the question of meaning in art at its centre, it first of all asks the following questions: Where are we to find meaning in a work of art? In the author? In the words? In the reader? According to Wolfgang Iser, the meaning of a work of art is not to be found ready-made in the text, but is formed by the reader in the process of reading. Meaning exists in the text potentially: the text created by the author (the artistic pole) and the text received by the reader (the aesthetic pole). But the work does not come into being until these two poles meet, says Iser, because the reader’s role is to fill the spaces or indeterminacies the author has left blank.

(2) The concepts of “carnival” and “carnivalesque” analysed by Mikhail Bakhtin refer to the creative and transformative power of the world. According to Bakhtin, carnival exalts change and the process of interchangeability: “Carnival is a ceremony that takes place without a stage and without any division into performers and spectators. In carnival everyone is an active participant; everyone takes part in the carnival act. Carnival is not watched; to put it more precisely, it is not even performed; its participants live in carnival, and they live by its laws as long as those laws are in force; that is, they lead a carnivalesque life. And since carnivalesque life is life drawn out of its usual course, it is to some extent ‘life turned inside out’, the reverse side of the world”, Rabelais ve Dünyası, 2001.

(3) A term used by critics for a group of French filmmakers in the late 1950s and in the 1960s who were partly influenced by the Italian Neorealist movement. Along with the political and social changes of the period, the “New Wave” refers above all to the differences in their editing, visual form and cinematographic narration, and to a sharp break with the traditional line of cinema. Among the leading pioneers of this movement we can name François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette.

(4) To understand Jacques Derrida’s concept of “Différance” and “Performance”, which seeks to explain signification in language and the reasons why this meaning is turned inside out, it will be useful to look at the essay “Signature, Event, Context” in Margins of Philosophy, the book Jacques Derrida wrote in 1982.

Bibliography

Bakhtin, Mikhail (2001) Karnavaldan Romana. (Edebiyat Teorisinden Dil Felsefesine Seçme Yazılar) (Trans. Cem Soydemir), Ayrıntı Yayınları, İstanbul.

Benjamin, Walter (2009) Pasajlar (Trans. Ahmet Cemal), Yapı Kredi Yayınları, İstanbul.

Dawkins, Richard (1989) The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press.

Derrida, Jacques (1982) “Signature, Event, Context”, Margins of Philosophy, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Hutcheon, Linda (2006) “Beginning to Theorize Adaptation”: A Theory of Adaptation, Routledge, New York.

McFarlane, Brian (1996) Novel To Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation Clarendon Press, Oxford.