| Chapter 1: | Literary Appropriation |
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Chapter 1
Literary Appropriation
Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.
—Françoise Sagan
Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
—Paul Valery
The synergy of literature and cinema is a long-standing practice, and this is particularly true of the French, who draw regularly from the well of their own literary tradition: there are no fewer than eight Francophone adaptations of Hugo’s Les Misérables, and the works of Flaubert and Zola have been mined countless times. Yet the relationship is not just one of adaptation, for cinema also borrows from the literary realm in a more roundabout way, adopting its forms and manners of signification. The most readily identifiable examples for many would be among the early works of Alain Resnais, whose Hiroshima mon amour and L’Année