Stanford Humanities Center
The Working Group in Literary and Visual Culture invites you to our first event of this academic year.
This talk examines how Larisa Shepitko’s film The Ascent (1977) adapts Vasil Bykov’s novel The Ordeal(1970). Specifically, it asks how Shepitko adapts Bykov’s free indirect discourse, exploring how the film’s narration merges with, and parts from, the two main characters’ perceptions and subjective distortions. L. Lazarev writes of Bykov’s novel: “In Sotnikov, Bykov constructs the narrative in such a way that we see the story, alternately, now through Sotnikov’s eyes, now through Rybak’s eyes. This principle is consistently maintained throughout the work. There is no neutral voice of the author ...” (94-95). The film medium does not easily lend itself to such crisp, alternating focalization. Photography-based film entails, if not a “neutral voice of the author,” a mechanical “seeing” of the world, which the film’s various strategies (long takes, depth of field, restrained use of nondiegetic music) emphasize. Also, the film’s narration occasionally aligns with other subjective viewpoints such as that of the villainous Portnov (Anatoly Solonitsyn); and the film’s Christological imagery, stylized sound, and nondiegetic music “contaminate” shots framed as characters’ perceptions.
Formal markers of subjectivity and neutrality take on heightened significance with a story that pits moral “gut feeling” (any betrayal is odious) against a consequentialist logic that treats some betrayal as acceptable if it permits one to live to fight another day. Both novel and film privilege Sotnikov’s moral revulsion over Rybak’s rationalizations. But tonally, they are different. Whereas the novel’s final paragraphs are understated and ironic, for instance, the film’s penultimate shots feature melodramatic tears and swelling music. I connect such differences to the way the free indirect involves different qualities and strategies as it passes from one medium to another.
About the Speaker
Karla Oeler teaches in the Film and Media Studies Program. Her research and teaching interests are film history, theory and criticism, with emphases including the theory and practice of Sergei Eisenstein, cinematic representations of violence and thinking, and the relations between film aesthetics, literature, theory and philosophy. She is the author of A Grammar of Murder: Violent Scenes and Film Form (University of Chicago Press, 2009). Her work has appeared in numerous forums including Cinema Journal, The Journal of Visual Culture, and Slavic Review on a range of topics including works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean-Luc Godard, Sergei Parajanov, and Jean Renoir. She is currently writing a book called "The Surface of Things: Cinema and Interiority."
About the Series
Research Workshop in Honor of John Bender
The Working Group in Literary and Visual Culture is sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, and made possible by support from an anonymous donor honoring the work of former SHC Director John Bender, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
When
Room 007, McMurtry Building, and Online
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