The special relationship between literature and film in the literary archive
Published: Wednesday, Nov 29th 2023, 11:30
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The Swiss Literary Archives (SLA) is exploring the boundary between film and literature - with an exhibition and the new issue of its magazine "Quarto": "Films ... not realized" is the title. Co-editor Magnus Wieland talks about the connection between literature and film and a dissatisfied Friedrich Dürrenmatt.
"Quarto" is the name of the multilingual journal of the Swiss Literary Archives (SLA), which is published once or twice a year and is aimed at an interested public. The 52nd issue will be published at the beginning of December and it is a novelty. Because it is dedicated to film. It was produced as part of this year's SLA research focus on "Literature and Film".
The thematic spectrum of "Quarto" has always been deliberately broad. "As a literary and archive journal, the focus of 'Quarto' is primarily on texts and written documents," explains co-editor and deputy director of the SLA, Magnus Wieland. "In this respect, the thematization of the 'seventh art' is a first." In 2002, there was an issue that had already taken a closer look at the relationship between two different forms of cultural expression; back then, it was about writers and their relationship to music. But "so far there has been nothing specifically about film," says Wieland in an interview with Keystone-SDA.
"Films ... not realized" is now the title of the 52nd edition of "Quarto". "The idea was developed in a workshop," says Wieland. He is editorially responsible for the magazine together with Stéphanie Cudré-Mauroux. He also wants the SLA to be a place for discoveries. It is a place where the unknown, unpublished and unpublished lie dormant. That's why the idea of creating an edition on unrealized literary adaptations seemed obvious. In this case, "unrealized" means that only drafts, treatments, screenplays or storyboard sketches of film projects have survived. "The research has uncovered an astonishing amount of rich and visually appealing material," enthuses Wieland.
Novel as an alternative to the movie
One example of what found its way into the booklet "Films ... not realized" is the text on Friedrich Dürrenmatt. The SLA looks after the estate of the author, who at times tried his hand at writing screenplays. However, much of this failed "because Dürrenmatt was unable to let go of his 'invention'," says Wieland. Although Dürrenmatt wrote the screenplay for the 1958 film "It Happened in Broad Daylight", he was not at all happy with the under-complex realization. Dürrenmatt wrote the novel "The Promise" as a counter-project.
"Another example of the multi-layered interaction between literature and film is the book about Louise Brooks by the writer Roland Jaccard," says Wieland. "Fascinated by the cinema of the early silent film era, he was inspired to write a literary portrait and thus helped the forgotten 'anti-starlet' back into cinematic history."
In addition to these contributions, which are based on archival finds from literature, the conception of this film booklet also emphasized the importance of including original contributions from creative artists, particularly from the film industry. For example, director Gertrud Pinkus reports on her project to make a film version of Mariella Mehr's novel "daskind" and Etienne Delessert talks about the reasons why his animated film "Supersaxo", based on an original by Maurice Chappaz, was not made.
More film in the literary archive
Thanks to the "Literature and Film" research focus, the importance of Swiss film in the literary archive has increased significantly in recent years. "We organized a kind of lunch cinema at regular intervals," says Wieland. Over lunch, exemplary film adaptations of Swiss literature were envisioned and discussed. This year, this resulted in a cooperation with the Rex cinema and the Lichtspiel in Bern.
Wieland finds the question of the relationship between literature and film, of what connects or separates film and literature, difficult to answer: "First of all, it depends on what exactly you mean by film and literature: fiction or documentary, novels or poetry?" In any case, the examples discussed in "Quarto" confirm that there is a creative exchange between literature and film, which can be realized in different ways - or not.
For Wieland and Cudré-Mauroux, working on the booklet "Films ... not realized" was a time of intensive engagement with film. Privately, Wieland says that "auteur cinema and independent film since the late 1980s have certainly influenced me cinematically". Cudré-Mauroux, on the other hand, admires the Chilean-French filmmaker Raoul Ruiz for his "Le temps retrouvé", in which Ruiz attempts to make Marcel Proust's voice audible in a cinematic narrative.
*This text by Raphael Amstutz, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.
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