Intership

The well-known problem with “adaptation” is that the word is fraught with normative assumptions. Adaptation implies comparison, and comparison implies standards, grounds of comparison. Instead, a dialogue with a past that once was there but cannot be “restored” is a productive deployment of anachronism as a figure of intertemporal thought. Chapter 10 offers a detailed commentary on an “adaptation” of the author’s own that adopts an attitude of loyalty, rather than fidelity, to the text it engages: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Flaubert wrote his novel in a strong and critical contemporaneity. The historicity of the cinematic images of most Madame Bovary films thus obliterates from the novel its own historicity, substituting for it a theatrical mask that puts everything at a distance. The audiovisual work discussed here seeks both to actualize the novel and to be loyal to it in the manner of its actualizing.