kiss of the spider woman: 1985.

One of the main points of contention in the 1985 film adaptation of Kiss of the Spider Woman is the character of Molina. Manuel Puig was displeased with William Hurt’s portrayal, and I have to admit that I agree. While I think Hurt did a fine job, the casting itself was wrong.

The back of Puig’s novel describes Molina as “older”. This works in the text because it gives the character further vulnerability: not only is he gay, he is getting older and his years for fulfilling dreams, living his own life, and finding love are numbered. I believe this vulnerability helps trigger Valentin’s desire to be with Molina, as if to take care of him in some way. Additionally, having Molina be an older character would have his maternal instincts towards his waiter friend and Valentin make sense. He fantasizes about the waiter coming to live with him and his mother so he can take care of him. He nurtures Valentin during his illness. This instinct of Molina’s struck me as being more of a mother-child relationship than friends or lovers.

William Hurt is simply too young in the movie to add this complexity to the character. He is vibrant, seemingly in the best years of his life—walking in his gold jacket with pride.

kiss of the spider woman--inside out.

Going back over Kiss of the Spider Woman, I noticed a commonality in some of the excerpts I underlined, two in particular:

“…she’s all wrapped up in herself, lost in that world she carries inside her, that she’s just beginning to discover,” (4)

In regards to Molina’s mother: “But she’s got the danger inside, she carries the enemy around inside, it’s that weak heart if hers,” (36)

The first refers to the panther woman in the first movie Molina relays to Valentin. In many ways, when he describes the woman in the film, he actually describes himself. Due to his homosexuality, he has felt like an outsider, he has to discover (or cultivate) the person he is internally. The blank cell gives him an opportunity to truly be himself, it is like an extension of self for both the cellmates because there is nothing there but them.

The second quote is in regards to Molina’s mother and her heart condition. While it is meant in a literal sense—that the danger is in her heart condition—there is still the concept of internality to the quote.

I think this can be seen as another theme within the text—or another concept worth exploring, at least. The internal life of the character. The structure of the novel excludes thoughts, however it hints at the insides being important to a person’s self. It will be interesting to see if this is acknowledged in the film version, or even if others agree with me about its presence in the text.

developing underdeveloment.

It would be an understatement to call Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s movie Memories of Underdevelopment complicated—there is so much at play in the film. It makes an issue of intelligence, class, revolution, internal struggles, age, gender, etc. In addition, Alea stretches the boundaries of filmmaking itself through the movie. By this, I am referring to the addition of documentary film footage, which is narrated by the protagonist, Sergio. While Desnoes’s story (on which the film is based) is fiction, the Cuban Revolution is obviously a very real part of history. By using documentary footage, Alea is bringing his viewers’ attention to that fact. The film at hand is not simply one about a man’s midlife crisis; it is the crisis of a culture in turmoil. That being said, Sergio’s narrations of both the fictional and nonfiction portions of the movie serve to blur the lines between fact and fiction in terms of the movie in its entirety. While I never actually questioned what was real and what was not, I was engaged with the movie in a different way than if it had been done entirely in one form or the other.

While Alea used the documentary footage to accentuate the meaning of the movie, he manipulated the film to reinforce smaller details as well. In the Elena section of the movie, there is a few scenes or actions that get repeated several times, one after another. For example, there is a man thrusting himself onto a woman at the beach and a backview of Sergio’s wife stepping into the shower. What is Alea getting at with these? I believe he is stating that the sexual charge of this story is not to be ignored, despite the heavier topics at hand.

memories of underdevelopment: an introduction.

In reading the entirety of Memories of Underdevelopment further, I was happy to see that my question regarding how Desnoes’s first-person narrative would be translated to the screen was almost immediately answered in Michael Chanan’s Introduction (this also grows off of Rachel’s comment on my previous post). First, Chanan words my question much more eloquently. He writes, “How can you translate the first person of the narrator to the screen as more than a conceit? The convention of the voice on soundtrack is logically not the same; in film, there is no true equivalent of the first-person narrator in literature, for the camera as an analogue of the writer’s pen is impersonal: it cannot say ‘I’; it always says ‘there is,’ ‘here is.’”(4).

Well, it seems that, in making the film, Tomas Gutierrez Alea pushes the form of film, as Desnoes seems to be pushing the form of literature. While Desnoes’s protagonist refers to his typewriter and journal as tools to tell his story, Alea uses documentary footage and unscripted scenes. I suppose when I proposed my original question, I was thinking about taking the story to the screen in more of a purely adaptive way. Though Chanan’s explanation of the filmmaking process shows me the consideration for mechanics that Alea had and how he made them fit his medium.

inconsolable memories.

I’ve found reading Inconsolable Memories by Edmundo Desnoes to be both a frustrating and interesting process. My frustration does not stem from the style of writing or the story itself, more from the narrator as a character. Through his false hatred of others and self-contradiction, it is clear that he is trying to find himself in some way or another (perhaps forget the person he believes himself to have become). However, for most of his writing (more so in the first half of the piece), he is nearly absent from the page. Obviously it is him who is writing, so as a reader I understand how his mind works. But as far as what made him who he was or what he was like outside of writing, I found myself grasping for things I could pin down as facts.

More of a linear narrative comes to the story when the narrator begins tracing the time from school forward, and I really appreciated that. I also found myself liking that this had come later in the story. This brings me to what I found interesting about the story. In going with the theme of our class (adaptation), I often thought about how this piece would translate to film.

I suppose it is obvious that the narrator would be seen by viewers from the very beginning. While this would take away the frustration I felt while reading, something essential to the story might also be lost. In addition, much of the piece is about the act of writing, of keeping a diary, retracing memories, going where the mind leads you, etc. Filmic flashbacks might not capture this in the way Desnoes’s writing has.

a little of this and a little of that.

Although it is only about three pages long, there is quite a bit at work in JL Borges’s “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero”. The narrator of the story is actually an author describing the construction of a separate story. The story he is describing is, I believe, fairly complicated in that it has history repeat history and, in a deliberate way, art.

While I am interested in discussing the mechanics of the story itself, the interview with Bernardi Bertolucci regarding his film The Spider’s Strategem brings up so much about the concept of adaptation that I would rather address that here. While his film was inspired by Borges’s story, he says: “The mechanism is very similar to that used by Borges but I’m not so focused on his very Borgesian reflection of the cyclical nature of things. The theme of the film is this sort of voyage into the realm of the dead,” (52). Bertolucci seems to have taken the plot that Borges set forth and has given it a new focus. He also uses the influences of painters Ligabue and Magritte, as well as American culture (Tera from Gone With the Wind). It could be said that he is adapting all of these art forms (painting, writing, etc) into his own work. It is probably best to use Dudley Andrew’s term “borrowing” for this sort of adaptation. At least, this is how it seems before watching the movie.

In addition, Bertolucci’s interviewer points out that the film DOES contain a cyclical return to things (as the Borges story does). The filmmaker claims this is simply because he was not in a period of neurosis while making the film (60). I wonder about this as well… is it possible to be inspired by “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” without cyclical-ness?

prospective on peavler.

I greatly appreciate Terry J. Peavler’s article “Blow-up: A Reconsideration of Antonioni’s Infidelity to Cortázar” if only for the reason that he nicely summarizes the Antonioni/Crotazar debate until that point. It’s good in that “there’s no sense of reinventing the wheel” sort of way… We can take what he has gathered together and spring off of it.

Peavler also set me at ease as far as my understanding (or lack there of) of Cortázar’s short story. I originally came away from the story wanting to debate whether or not the narrator actually saw a crime take place, more basically what it was the narrator saw at all. After our class discussion, I was worried I might have missed something---that didn’t seem to be a point of interest. Maybe the situation is more cut and dry than I had believed? Peavler reassured me, however, by stating: “As if matters were not already complicated enough, our hypothetical reader-viewer can find no where to turn for help in his comparative analysis, for it is difficult, if not impossible, to find two readers, or two viewers, who concur on what happens either in the story or in the film, much less come to an agreement on what, if anything, it all means. The single best example of ambiguity in each work is the crime that seems so central to the plot.” P888.

With that said, where does this leave us in terms of adaptation and Antonioni’s film? Though I have yet to see the film, Peavler’s explanation of the relationship between the two gives me the impression that their connection is far more fascinating, artistically, than a straight adaptation would present. I like to think about artists being inspired by each other across mediums. It seems as though Antonioni might have wanted to capture some of Cortázar’s essence and was appreciative enough of its existence to state that fact out loud. I don’t think it gets much better than this line in the last paragraph of Peavler’s article: “But Antonioi continues to wink at Cortázar, and Cortázar at Antonioni.” What a great explanation of the whole situation--- and image.