But they also valued cooperation and advice. Both private diaries and semi-public materials such as discussions inside Soviet film studios make clear that filmmakers often found the process of regulation (in the term then in use, “control” or “filtration” ) annoying and deeply frustrating. 5ĥSuch an interpretation undoubtedly captures part of what making films in the socialist state was about. In analyses of this kind, the editors working in studios and in regulatory bodies such as Goskino (the State Film Committee) are certainly perceived as ‘readers,’ but particularly slow-witted and obstinate ones, committed to imposing their own political, moral, and aesthetic perceptions on long-suffering filmmakers. Woll, R (.)ĤThe most familiar element of all this is the bureaucratic control that is usually referred to in the West as ‘censorship,’ and which tends to be perceived exclusively as an impediment to the creative process. Nowhere was this more true than in the late Soviet film studio, where “film factories” were huge operations, employing staffs of many thousands, and where output was processed by government and Communist Party bureaucracies as well as the administrative hierarchy of the studio itself. Yet film is a collective art, its effects depending on large numbers of ‘readings’ by different artists (from camera operators to costume designers, sound engineers to conductors)-not to speak of editors, producers, and studio management. Particularly, it remains circumscribed by an auteurist view of the cinematic process, according to which important decisions are made by the director alone. But all the same, the understanding has limitations. 4 The importance and specific profile of film studios in socialist countries makes it all the more (.)ģSuch a view of how film directors work as readers is significantly more sophisticated than the idea that they simply pick up a given book and attempt to impose their own interpretation on it.The very terms ‘original’ and ‘adaptation’ engrain such an interpretation, suggesting an inescapable secondariness in the results of the transformative process. Films diminish they distort they simplify. The core assumption, whether among literary professionals or ordinary readers, is often that the process inevitably involves a significant shift not only of sign systems, but also of aesthetic status. Adaptations of such texts reach audiences of millions and, if successful, may challenge or blur impressions of the written sources on which they are based. While the making of (almost) any film requires a relocation from verbal to visual -from initial creative work in the form of treatments, scripts, budgets and other planning documents, as well as correspondence with regulatory and funding bodies, to the film itself as a sequence of images- this process is placed in plain view and becomes particularly controversial when it relates to a literary text that is generally considered to be a masterpiece. But are they good ones? Are these ‘readings’ like any others, or ones with a particular, perhaps seditious, influence and authority? How precisely does the ‘reading’ process work when a text is relocated from the domain of verbal signs to visual signs? In the “long century” since cinema began, these questions have preoccupied authors, cinematographers, critics, viewers, and more recently, dozens of cultural theorists and historians. 1 The research for this chapter was carried out with the support of the Arts and Humanities Researc (.)ġFilmmakers are among the most influential readers of literary texts.
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