As intermitências da transposição intersemiótica: um exemplo com Agatha Christie no cinema

Abstract

This research has as its object the novel “O caso dos dez negrinhos” of Agatha Christie (1939) and four films produced between 1945 and 1989, officially inspired by its plot. The objective of the study is to analyze the intermittences of the transpositions from the book to the screen, considering that the film works could insist on keeping as close to the spirit of the literary work or break free of it semantically, so give it new meanings. These two possibilities are justified because in the time frame adopted, flanking studies of the relationship between literature and film, the shoot was also targeted by a vector that stemmed from the literary text towards the film text, supported by the theories of adaptation guided by the notions of fidelity and equivalence. To address the intermittences of the transposition between the book and the films, we reconstructed the "generative course of meaning" of the book following the model of the "semiotic square" suggested by French semiotics from Greimas (1976), in dialogue with Barros (2008) and Fiorin (2005 and 2012), in order to establish a parameter to qualify the meaning of each film. As a result, we find an important change of direction in the outcome proposed by the 1945 film, which was followed by others. Illuminated by the premises of Bluestone (2003), Bordwell (1986 and 1999) and McFarlane (1996), we believe that this change in the first film, was due to the option for accommodating the plot of the book to the classic pattern of Hollywood filmic plot, focusing the ordinary entertainment and subtracting the effects of police catharsis in the cinema. Seeking to better understand the possibilities of intersemiotic transposition process, we analyzed in what the films resulted beyond the pasteurization of the spirit of "O caso dos dez negrinhos". Sharing the views of Aumont (1995, 2004 and 2005), Stam (2000, 2005 and 2008) and Sanders (2006) on questions concerning the nature and complexity of the processes that claim movies and transpositions as a production system, its operating mechanisms and rules of political and ideological composition, we believe that the flashes presented as the ambiences, characters and speeches of the films were constituted upgrade transport and cultural, political and ideological of his time, helping to forge a representation of social relations and historical consciousness. Above all, we believe that, as the meaning of the messages in the four films was produced under the atmosphere of the Cold War, the hegemony of conditions that historical context reverberated in the dominant discourse of culture and Anglo-American geopolitical issues and conveyed by cinema. We conclude that this research partly on the transposition of Christie's work for film entails the expansion potential of the theoretical and methodological studies in Semiotics in understanding how the close relationship between literature and film reveals the functioning mechanisms of social practices, at the time which produces and conducts other social practices.