Resumen de World literature in japanese film (1910-1938)
Since the beginning of cinema, innumerable films have been derived from classic or popular literature. Film adaptation of a literary work can be considered as an interpretative process in which the film director creates a new artistic work through several transformations in the structure, content, aesthetics, and narrative discourse. There are hundreds of films in which the directors have adapted literary works from their own cultural sphere, but there are fewer examples of directors who have made movies based on literary works from a different culture and literary tradition.
That is the case for some Japanese film directors, such as Kurosawa Akira, who adapted foreign literature for the screen. Many scholars in the field of Film Studies have focused their attention on the adaptations made by Kurosawa and other Japanese directors in the 1950s and subsequent decades: a period during which Japanese cinema received acknowledgment worldwide and achieved an international presence in prestigious film festivals. However, there has been little or no attention to the adaptations of Western literature produced in Japan during the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, throughout the so-called Meiji, Taishō, and Shōwa pre-war eras.
The objective of this research is therefore to explore the intertextual relations between those films and the Western works on which they were based, and to describe the cultural transformations in the structure, content, aesthetics, and narrative discourse carried out in the process of adaptation. The methodology employed follows Stam’s intertextual dialogic approach, and takes into account the most recent theoretical frameworks, which suggest adding historical, cultural, and contextual aspects into the analysis of film adaptations. This dissertation goes far beyond the scope of the previous investigations, as it examines Japanese movies based on Western literature produced during the first half of the twentieth century that have never or barely been studied.
