Image from literature to big screen in L’écume des jours: “paraadaptation”

Abstract

Many terms have been used in recent decades to refer to film adaptation, and the definitions of the terms themselves vary considerably. When literary works of a surrealist nature, such as L’écume des jours, by Boris Vian, are produced for the cinema, these terms need to be revisited, and a new one may be required to encompass everything that this transposition refers to. To achieve this aim, this article begins with an analysis of the image and the elements that compose it, both in cinema and in literature, and follows with the different meanings of the act of bringing a literary work to the cinema. This theoretical approach is then applied to the aforementioned work by Boris Vian and to the "adaptations" of Charles Belmont and Michel Gondry.  As a result, the importance of the contexts of production in the creation of each of the works will be presented, and a more appropriate mention will be proposed for the cases studied.