Case Studies of Film Adaptation
text: Kiss of the Spider Woman (Puig, 1978)
The complexity of Manuel Puig's novel Kiss of the Spider Woman makes it positively impossible to adapt faithfully. Because of the nature of the book, this film is almost entirely inerpretive; Babenco utilizes Puig's words as a departure for his presentation rather than a basis. Puig's text is written largely as a play without stage directions; Molina and Valentine exchange dialogue. Footnotes offer theoretical explanations of homosexuality. Occasional italicized passages are included as stream of consciousness transcriptions of the main characters' thoughts. Since Puig's text is almost entirely dependent on words without contextual description, Babenco's film is necessarily a departure from Kiss of the Spider Woman's original narrative techniques.
The pure difficult of translating so many different, interwoven styles of writing is further complicated by the book's extensive critique of the medium of film. To pass the time in prison, Molina "tells films" using words instead of pictures. Just as presenting Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead in a cinematic setting risks upsetting the intertextual focus of representing a play within a play, enacting the films that Molina describes skews Puig's exploration of the relationship between stories and movies. Instead of depicting Molina telling films, Babenco chooses to show the films that are described in the book. Thus, in a sense, Molina and Puig both abdicate authorial control to Babenco.
SECONDARY SOURCES:
Internet
Movie Database Site
Manuel Puig. "How the Provincial
Argentine Left Literature for the Movies, Thereby Discovering the Immense Potentials of
the Novel," Writing in a Film Age: Essays by Contemporary Novelists, ed. Keith
Cohen (Colorado: UP of Colorado, 1991) 264-276.
The secondary source material accompanying Kiss of the
Spider Woman is an essary written by Puig explaining his realization that he was a
novelist and not a filmmaker. This stance provides a valuable contrast to Nabokov's
ideas about Lolita. Whereas Nabokov was fully cognizant of
his strength working independently, Puig began his career with a primary interest in the
cooperative art of film. This cinematic influence in evident in his book, as both
subject matter and implicit critique.
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This page is copyright © 2000, Bridget Robin Pool.
Last Modified Monday, January 29, 2001