Spanish filmmaker Albert Serra and Chinese language auteur Bi Gan had solely simply met for the primary time final month in Paris, however on the Shanghai Worldwide Movie & TV Market the 2 administrators sat down collectively as in the event that they’d been arguing about literature for years.
The panel, “Stories Travel Further: Literature & Cinema in Spain-China Dialogue,” opened with brief movies by Carla Simón, Turbo and Nicolas Mendez and a presentation on Spanish literature’s cinematic potential from the Federation of Publishers’ Guilds of Spain.
Serra, whose movies draw on traditional texts with out treating them as blueprints, mentioned the supply materials barely registers by the point he begins working.
“I just used some means or some very basic ideas that everybody knows, and from that point of departure to create something on my own,” he mentioned. “So in fact, to write a script with [literature’s] principle and to write a script based on a new idea, it’s not very different. The development of what you will do in the film, it’s totally new and creative.”
“I don’t care. I just want to do a good film, an original and personal film,” Serra added. “I think more about my own style and how to develop it.”
Bi took a gentler line on the topic, describing his relationship to literature as structural slightly than reverential. “A film’s title is its face. I often use book titles from literature as film titles, giving the audience a perfect gateway into the story. Apart from that, [my films] incorporate many literary and even poetic structures, and that can set it apart from typical genre films, because its narrative threads, storytelling approach, and character development all adapt a poetic structure,” he mentioned.
The 2 administrators expressed admiration for one another’s work. Serra praised the usage of poetry in Bi’s “Resurrection,” saying it might encourage folks to consider photographs and use language in another way. Bi mentioned that watching Serra’s “Afternoons of Solitude” had given him a literature-like expertise, as a result of the narrative logic of the movie was completely sudden.
“His film structured literature in cinematic language, which is completely new and fresh to me,” mentioned Bi. “I saw scenes of clouds, some of them could be a bit long, but actually it doesn’t feel dull.”
“Why did you want to adapt material that’s not your own?” Serra mentioned. “You have to be respectful to the material somehow, because if not, you will create your own story. You will not adapt a story of somebody else just to destroy it, [that would be] like a narcissistic exercise that is stupid. But at the same time, you have to betray the original material in order to create your own story. You have to be brave.”
Serra went additional: “I don’t see the point of doing the adaptation. So it’s for lazy people because they don’t want to figure out an original idea.”
“Literary adaptation has always been a crucial thread in the historical development of cinema,” mentioned Bi. “Some films, like Serra’s ‘Honor of the Knights,’ manage to completely deconstruct the original text, which is an approach that I find very appealing. However, there were also many classic adaptations, including those with novelists joining in the project. During the Film Noir movement in Hollywood, literature became a major aesthetic event and symbol, ultimately pushing the boundaries of cinematic language.”
Each filmmakers additionally converged on a counterintuitive level: that mediocre supply materials usually produces higher movies than nice books do. “People with good books, they are too respectful to the book, so they are not free,” mentioned Serra. “They feel inside a prison. The book is everything, so they want good things in all levels, artistic direction, photography, and script. But then, they don’t match, they don’t glue. With bad books, people is not so respectful, so they do whatever they want. It is not like making an adaptation, because they feel more free.”
Bi put the problem plainly: “Adapting text to screen is a formidable task riddled with obstacles, making truly successful literary films exceedingly rare.”
“Try to forget,” mentioned Serra. “Because if you don’t forget the other output, you have to create your own universe.”
Among the many literary figures who had formed him, Bi named Federico García Lorca, whose poetry he described as “brief and beautiful, as a small, soft outcry.” The affect, he mentioned, was not at all times legible on the web page of a script – however ran deeper, into questions of mortality and worry that had basically formed his sensibility.
Each administrators pushed again on the notion that AI might open up filmmaking to everybody. Bi questioned the premise of human-AI communication itself. “Language is a huge fantasy itself. We thought that AI can make something based on whatever we put into it, but the miscommunication itself is unsolvable. Telling an AI to complete what you want it to complete has a natural contradiction within.”
“The only thing AI will never have is innocence, because AI is based on collecting data, and innocence is based upon deleting data,” mentioned Serra. “Real artistic filmmakers are unpredictable because they destroy what everybody has done before to create something new. If you think about a new form with nothing in common with previous forms, you will always be ahead of AI.”
The Shanghai Worldwide Movie & TV Market runs contiguously with the Shanghai International Film Festival.
