"The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain."
— Roberto Bolaño
2666
In Roberto Bolaño's 2666 the authors research is clearly seen in his practice as the chapter entitled 'The Part About The Crimes' documents a series of femicides that occurred in Ciudad Juarez with a journalistic detachment that makes the reading of the chapter more unsettling. In the novel, the crimes are set in the fictional town of Santa Teresa. The author gives a context to each of the murders to humanize the victims and explore the ongoing corruption that allows the murder of women to continue without being cluttered by the media's focus on Ciudad Juarez as a battleground in Mexico's drug war. These are human casualties.
Jacques Tardi allows dreams and reality to fragment and synthesize in his work, to highlight the mental and physical trauma that is produced by acts of violence. His protagonists have difficulty in separating fact from fiction and the reader cannot anticipate the outcome as the fragmented narrative unfolds, becoming more involved with the work.
"I had a furious row with a studio executive once: he said, "They won't get it, Nic" and I said, "No, they'll get it; it's you who's not getting it, because you're trying to force something that's different into being the same". People usually arrive to see something with an open mind. I want to make them feel something emotionally, but not by planning how to get them there. That would almost be like the communist days when newspapers told people what to think - when there was no competition with Pravda."
"Rius's comics were not for escapist entertainment but were intended as cultural guerilla warfare, attempting to shame the middle-class Mexican into an awareness of his society and its glaring inequalities and hypocrises." (Raat: 39)
Ed. Raat, W.D. and Beezley, W.H. (2007) Twentieth Century Mexico, USA: University of Nebraska Press
above: A page from the Codex Borgia showing Aztec gods of life and death - image taken from The skeleton at the feast: the Day of the Dead in Mexico (by Elizabeth Carmichael and Chloë Sayer) .
"Where the filmic image enters into a spatial relationship only with the off-screen space cut off by the frame, the bande dessinée image will always be perceived simultaneously with other images. Each panel is, then, surrounded by its perifield." (Peters 1991:15)
Miller, A. (2007) Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French Language Comic Strip, UK: Intellect Books
2. Marked by surreal distortion and often a sense of impending danger: "Kafkaesque fantasies of the impassive interrogation, the false trial, the confiscated passport . . . haunt his innocence"(New Yorker).
Towards a thematic adaptation... recontextualizing themes and atmosphere from Kafka's text for a modern audience... themes in Kafka's text fit the aesthetics of film noir, sharing similar traits. The paranoid 'wronged' protagonist, isolation, crime, entrapment, the femme fatale, a subjective point of view.... Psychological metamorphosis
-------------------------------
"You show the protagonist so that the audience can put themselves under the skin of the man. First of all, I use my camera in such a way as to show things, whenever possible, from the viewpoint of the protagonist: in that way the audience identifies itself with the character on the screen and thinks with him."
- Fritz Lang
Bogdanovich, P. (1967) Fritz Lang in America, Studio Vista
The problem that arises from a visual adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis is the lack of empathy that would result from not having a human face to identify with; the audience would immediately be emotionally detached from the transformed protagonist. Seeing the protagonist as an insect, with few human traits to hold on to would quickly become uninteresting as the audience would not be able to relate to a subhuman creature. Previous adaptations have attempted to get around this by giving Samsa a human head with an insect body or as seen in the stage version, he is a man with insect movements, but the existing adaptations detract from the sense of empathy with the character that is required from the reader to make the story work and Kafka's text is distorted. Moving away from a mechanical adaptation towards a thematic treatment of Kafka's text allows for a more successful presentation of the key themes in a visual narrative. A human face is necessary for the audience to engage with the protagonist and a step toward a mental metamorphosis, presenting a protagonist with an altered perception opens the work up to becoming a more successful visual narrative.
[Searching for the sure-fire flop] Max Bialystock: "Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to discover that he had been transformed into a giant cockroach." Nah, it's too good. The Producers (Dir. Mel Brooks, 1968)
An example of a successful thematic adaptation is Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, which deviated from the source material (Philip K. Dick's 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep') in order to produce a successful visual narrative. Alejandro Jodorowsky's unrealised vision for his film adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune started with the director taking ownership over the source material and adding and subtracting concepts without any reverence or obligation to the source material commenting that, "I did not want top respect the novel. I wanted to recreate it. For me Dune did not belong to Herbert as Don Quixote did not belong to Cervantes... the work of art is created from the collective unconsciousness."1.
While the project was taken away from Jodorowsky after 2 years of pre-production and eventually realised and later disowned by David Lynch in his own adaptation, Jodorowsky was able to develop concepts from thousands of pre- production illustrations for his version of the film and find a new audience for the material using the medium of comic books. He continues to collaborate with artist Jean Giraud. Comic art is a valid medium for communicating a visual language and Jodorowsky found a receptive audience to his work in Europe.
"One of (David) Lynch's unproduced projects is an adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis."2. David Lynch has so far been reluctant to produce a film as a mechanical adaptation of the text, revealing in an interview with Chris Rodley, "I've got the script of that. It needs a little bit of work but I like it a lot. Unfortunately it's expensive and it won't make a lot of money." 3.
His existing films do frequently feature metamorphosis and can be seen as being Kafkaesque. Of these existing works, Lost Highway has been very influential on my own research in it's use of a subjective narrative and the use of an unreliable narrator. Lynch uses the aesthetics of film noir to present a visual narrative that can be understood by a modern audience literate in the visual language of film. Fred Madison, the protagonist of Lost Highway constructs a fantasy to escape from his prison cell, revealing that he likes to "remember things my own way". His metamorphosis in the film occurs in his prison cell when he transforms into another very different character, becoming younger, more confident and successful with women. The aesthetic of film noir is important as it complements the subject matter; the shadows that envelop Fred hint at his inner darkness and the femme fatale that he desires leads to his destruction as he loses his grip on the fantasy world that he has contstructed.
As part of my research project, my own exercise in creating a beat script and treatment of Kafka's Metamorphosis resulted in the need for an extensive reworking of the original text to make it work visually and the addition of new scenes that distorted the original story to the extent that it made me uncomfortable to produce a straight adaptation that could satisfy myself or an audience familiar with the work. My response to the text and failed attempts at writing a successful adaptation did inspire me to write an alternative, Kafkaesque and subjective narrative that is directed at a modern audience. I have written the first draft and I am developing the short story visually, experimenting with conceptual storyboards to make it work as a visual narrative. The treatment is inspired themes contained in Kafka's work and by a story that continues year after year in the newspapers which can find its audience in the presentation of real human horror in a way that can evoke empathy and create a successful visual narrative.
----
1. Cobb, B. (2007) Anarchy and Alchemy: the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Creation Books
2. Sheen, E. and Davison A. (2004) The Cinema of David Lynch: American dreams, nightmare visions. Great Britain: Wallflower Press
3. Ed. Rodley C. and Lynch D. (1997) Lynch on Lynch, England: Faber and Faber Limited
For the way finding project in Amsterdam, I teamed up with Benz and we started off by getting lost until the Foam gallery found us and we found our bearings. As a starting point, the bicycles and trams that attempted to run us over while we stared at our maps and the welcoming and fractured font of the Foam logo became the trigger for visual experiments depicting our section of the city...
Storyboards for a short animation were fueled by coffee and drawn in cafe's. We made quick test animations by layering pages of the storyboards and making them transparent by using candlelight in a dark cafe'. Motion was a very important aspect of the city; everywhere bicycles zoomed past and as we were on foot we were very aware of the constant flow of people on foot and on two or four wheels. In the storyboard designs, the sliced 'a' of the foam logo is featured in the typography that represented each of the street names of our slice of the city; Vijzelstraat, Kerkstraat, Keizersgracht, Reguliersbreestraat and Rembrandtplein. The curve of the red 'a' detaches from the rest of the letters, slides across the screen and parks in the bottom left corner. The letters stack up in the bottom left corner, the next 'a' in the sequence moves behind the first like the parked bicycles seen in the photo above.
The group meeting to discuss our initial ideas was productive as the feedback that we got in response to our rough designs focused on the sounds of the city; the trams, the clicking traffic lights and the bicycle bells that were another quirk of Amsterdam that needed to be included. A small digital camera was used to record the sounds of the city, more storyboards were sketched out and work started on the digital art needed for the animation. Font was altered using Adobe Illustrator and imported into After Effects to be further manipulated. The sliding 'a' letters were placed onto a new layer to become animated wheels.
The animation developed as Benz reacted to the soundtrack and began to improvise, moving away from the storyboards to produce an animation that complimented the sounds of the busy city streets. The animation was done quickly and instinctively and captured the chaos of the city, becoming more textured and chaotic in response to the soundtrack. Collaborating with Benz was a valuable experience as we complimented one another; he responded to sounds of the city and edited to match the rhythm of the soundtrack and I responded to visuals; incorporating the curves of bicycles wheels and street signs and the horizontal lines of the architecture into the storyboard design. The short deadline allowed us to produce a simple animation that was instinctive and reflected our response to the city.
Below is my own experiment in quickly producing a digital animation as a response to the Amsterdam way finding project animation. This animation also deviates from my initial storyboards as I responded to the flexibility of the digital medium, allowing the animation to develop naturally. Created using Adobe Illustrator and After Effects.
On the book shelves at Lambiek, "Europe's first comics shop, and the finest of Holland", comics and graphic novels are organized not by the writers name, but by the name of the artist. The downstairs gallery holds original and limited edition prints of comic art.
