Dealine: 15th September.
Utopia – UK Portuguese Film Festival, Camões Institute & Centre for Portuguese Language and Culture (King´s College) are delighted to invite you to submit proposals to the film and literature conference From Text to Screen and Back to Text. Film and Literature, the Portuguese Context.
The theme of literary adaptation to the screen has always been a great academic catalyst, appealing to various disciplines, from film, to literary, to post-colonial, to translation, and to media and communication studies. Indeed, this broad spectrum of interest has made for very productive and multidisciplinary research.
Letters from War, by film director Ivo Ferreira, a recent adaptation from the homonymous novel by writer António Lobo Antunes, has highlighted how film adaptations of literary works can lead to different theoretical readings. For this discussion, it is important to bring to the forefront two distinct schools of thought: on the one hand, such key authors as André Bazin and Joy Boyoum, who advocate a screen adaptation that is “true” to the work it is inspired by; and, on the other, theoreticians and film critics such as Neil Sinyard, Patrick Cattrysse, Henry Bacon, Jeanne-Marie Clerc and Monique Carcaud-Macaire, who defend the film work as a new object in its own right.
In this context, it is relevant to mention the nuances and variations in artistic meaning created by the film adaptation of international literature. Such as in the work of Portuguese filmmaker João Botelho, who has adapted both Charles Dickens’ Hard Times and Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet. Or Michel Van der Aa, who has also adapted Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet. Or the adaptation of José Saramago’s oeuvre by several international filmmakers. Can we read the impact of nationality in film adaptation.
In this dialogue around film and literature, it is also crucial to investigate the indents film has been making on Portuguese literature. Can we trace how and to what extent the cinema has influenced Portuguese literary works? And can we speak of a film-centric Portuguese literary period or school.
This conference will focus on the challenges, possibilities and multidisciplinary aspects arising from and related to the field of interaction between literature and film in a Portuguese context. We welcome proposals for papers and presentations that explore the following themes from a broad range of viewpoints and approaches, by researchers and practitioners, as well as by practice-based researchers.
Submissions may focus on, but are not limited to, the following topics.
• The relationship between the book, time and film.
• Film influences in Portuguese literature.
• The imagined audience. The reasons for literary adaptation.
• How do book adaptations engage cinema goers and on what levels?
• Literary adaptation to film and the ideology of the moment
• From ‘text’ to film: the aura of the writer
• Portuguese literature’s influence in and translation to the visual arts