Perspectives of Adaptation

One of the key issues in Michael Chanan’s introduction to Memories of Underdevelopment (film script) & Inconsolable Memories (source novella) is the question of the adaptation of perspective from written work to film.
Desones’ novella is an extremely close first-person work. The aesthetic of the perspective of the novella is inextricably linked to the play with first person language and a metafictional attention to the act of the protagonist writing. These elements are scribal; they require the written word to be effective. Chanan strives to point out how Alea reconciles this problematic in his film adaptation, first by demonstrating the failure of film as a first-person genre, and consequently by showing us Alea’s solution. He writes
“How can you translate the first person of the narrator to the screen as more than a conceit? The convention of a voice on the soundtrack is logically not the same; in film, there is no true equivalent of the first-person narrator in literature, for the camera as an analogue of the writers pen is impersonal: it cannot say “I”; it always says “there is,” “here is”.
Alea’s answer is not to alleviate but to intensify this difference by incorporating documentary footage in which this evidential quality is foregrounded.“ (4)
Chanan sees, in Alea’s solution to the failure of film as a first-person form, an idea worth considering when judging the “success” of any adaptation. When Chanan calls the first person narrator of a film “a conceit” he is establishing the notion that any imitation of technical elements of literature in film are extended metaphorical representations of their sources. They are abstracted representations the of author’s play with complex tropes of a form. In this sense, a bad adaptation, for Chanan and presumably Alea, attempts to represent the tropes of its source material rather than interpret or enter into dialogue with them.
Alea is interpreting this first-person problematic by exploiting the fact that it cannot be achieved. The inclusion of documentary footage is in many ways a polar opposite of the first person journal style of Desones’ novella. It is impossible, however, to believe that Alea is simply ignoring the personal-ness of the original text. The change in title, as Chanan also points out, from novella to film is a distinctly private to public switch respectively. (3) Alea, instead of in vain attempting to re-created the personal, private language and lens of the novella, “intensifies” the breach in the language of the two different forms.
In doing so he is, in essence, mirroring Desones’ highly metafictional style without mimicking it.