Creative Film Adaptation: Vláčil’s Adelheid Cover Image

Tvůrčí filmový přepis: Adelheid
Creative Film Adaptation: Vláčil’s Adelheid

Author(s): Petr Bubeníček
Subject(s): Cultural history, Novel, Czech Literature, Post-War period (1950 - 1989), Film / Cinema / Cinematography, History of Art
Published by: Masarykova univerzita nakladatelství
Keywords: Adaptation; Avant-garde cinema; Narration; František Vláčil – Adelheid; Vladimír Körner – Adelheid;

Summary/Abstract: This study deals with Adelheid (1969), František Vláčil’s film adaptation based on Vladimír Körner’s novel of the same name. The director does not disrupt the main story line of the original text; nevertheless he simplifies it by omitting some episodes. With his “open adaptation” Vláčil offers greater space for the viewer to reflect on a still traumatic historical topic: the expulsion of the German minority from post-war Czechoslovakia. Such a shift is made possible thanks to the “unorthodox material” of the literary text. This study explores the creative avant-garde methods used in the film, which above all demonstrate Vláčil’s exceptional cinematic poetics. The adaptation itself is then examined as a distinctive process of intermedial transposition. The outcome of such a creative process is a new audiovisual work of art constructing a fictional world that portrays human freedom, the relationship between an individual and external unfortunate events and the topic of misunderstanding. Vláčil’s Adelheid is shown ultimately to provide universal testimony about human existence in a disturbed world.

  • Issue Year: 14/2011
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 29-40
  • Page Count: 12
  • Language: Czech