Пътуване до Тилзит – в търсене на филмовата медия
THE JOURNEY TO TILSIT: IN PURSUIT OF A FILM MEDIUM

Summary/Abstract: The article deals with the film adaptation of Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, based on Hermann Sudermann’s novel Die Reise nach Tilsit (The Journey to Tilsit, 1917). The study argues that, regardless of the significant changes in the screenplay and shifting a number of problematic focuses, Murnau’s book-to-film adaptation responds with a flair for the novels contained in the book, reorienting towards consolidating the idea of urban space as a complex medium rather than translating the plot strands and the imagery in their entirety. In this context the film project transforms one type of narrative structures to another. Thus Murnau seeks to create an in-between space amid the urban simultaneous presence that would structurally correlate with the film medium, a medium placed between the other media. In the end, yet another adaptation of the same novel is comparatively outlinrd in broad strokes, i.e. Veit Harlan’s Die Reise nach Tilsit (The Journey to Tilsit, 1939). The film seeks to keep its storyline as closer to Sudermann’s novel as possible, but translates instead the commonplaces of the belletristic ambiguity and the implicit phantasmagoric sides to the novel into an apodictic film language, which nonetheless is highly susceptible to ideological suggestion.

• Details
• Contents