Posts filed under 'movie adaptations'

Asymptote at the Movies: Men in the Sun and The Dupes

. . . the film refuses to downplay their suffering and invites us, the spectators, to partake in their anguish as something fundamentally embodied.

1962 saw the publication of Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, a striking novella that depicts the fates of three Palestinian refugees as they seek to make their way out of an Iraqi camp, hoping to find work in Kuwait. From a committed revolutionary and visionary documentarian of liberatory futures, Men in the Sun was one of Kanafani’s most powerful and symbolic tales—a narrative that at once elucidated the precarious liminal position of the exiled, and criticized passivity and silence in the face of injustice. Ten years later, the story would be adapted and released as The Dupes by Egyptian director Tewfik Saleh, who repudiated Arab cinema at the time as being woefully ignorant, stating: “No one ever proposed a serious political analysis of [the Palestinians’] situation as victims of an imperialist machine.”

That same year, in 1972, Kanafani was assassinated by a car bomb placed by the Israeli Mossad; his seventeen-year-old niece died along with him. He would be remembered as a comrade who had never lost faith in the Palestinian cause, continuing to insist that the future, with all its hardships and destructions, was still a site of hope: “I knew, however, that a distant homeland was being born again: hills, olive groves, dead people, torn banners and folded ones, all cutting their way into a future of flesh and blood and being born in the heart of another child. . .” In this vein, him and Saleh were united in the necessity of persistence, with the latter explicating: “. . . I think, even if this isn’t everyone’s opinion, that a film like The Dupes is extremely mobilizing. Under what conditions can we say a film is mobilizing? When it inspires the overthrow of a situation.”

In this edition of Asymptote at the Movies, we take a look at Men in the Sun and The Dupes, the way these two master storytellers intersect, diverge, and speak together of human dignity—how it has been undermined by the world. When Men in the Sun was published, there were 1.1 million refugees registered with UNRWA; today, there are approximately six million. The persistence to live continues, and the resistance along with it.

Christina Chatzitheodorou (CC): In these two narratives, Tewfik Saleh and Ghassan Kanafani grasp the meaning behind the Nakba as an ongoing event and a transgenerational trauma, focusing on three generations of Palestinians who, after being expelled from their homeland after 1948, find themselves living in temporary shelters. Yet the fact that Kanafani uses three generations of Palestinians to tell the story symbolizes how the temporary experience of exile has been transformed into something permanent, with dispossession being at the heart of the Palestinian experience. The protagonists each have their own flashbacks—living off their memories—and though they are products of different Palestinian experiences, their commonalities are found in betrayal and despair, the material implications related to the loss of the homeland.

Mia Ruf (MR): I was also struck by the frequent use of flashbacks, both in the novel and the film. Each character enters the story with his respective memory burden. I thought that the montage interweaving Abu Quais’s experiences with shots from the broader “historical record” (diplomatic summits, etc.) was particularly impactful—it really gave us a sense of the scope of Abu Quais’ life, in both general and personal terms. Over the course of the narrative, though, as Abu Quais, Abbas, Marwan, and their smuggler Abu Khaizuran make their way toward Kuwait, all these individual memories converge, in a way. There’s a line in the text: “their thoughts seemed to run from one head to the other”—it’s almost like the men have come to share a collective consciousness, the heat melting their minds into one. In Saleh’s film, this is evoked through shots of swirling dust on the barely-perceivable road toward Kuwait—objects in the physical world become less and less individuated.

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Although the men share in one another’s misery, they die in utter isolation, in darkness, baking to death inside a sweltering water tank. Though it’s not included in the book, the film has the men banging on the insides of the tank for help in their final moments, unheard by Abu Khaizuran, who has been held up at the customs desk. This is a broader theme in the film and text: the exiles’ repeated pleas for help, the world’s failure to respond, and the crushing sense of isolation and betrayal that results.

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Asymptote at the Movies: Lolita, Double Feature

This week, we discuss Nabokov's most famed novel, adapted by Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne.

Of Lolita, that startling, monumental novel that—by Vladimir Nabokov’s own words—”completely eclipsed [his] other works,” of a story that continues to enthral, shock, and conjure up long-winding debates since its 1955 publication, of this classic that stunned the world . . . 

Though Lolita was originally written in English, Nabokov himself was, as Alfred Kazin said, “a man who turned statelessness into absolute strength.” In addition to being a well-respected translator of Russian poetry, he was also the one who took on the laborious task of translating Lolita back to his native language (albeit in bootleg copies, as it was banned in the Soviet Union until 1989). Though most authors would be reluctant at the thought of translating their own work, difficulties on Nabokov’s part was perhaps mediated by his translation philosophy, which was centred around the existence of a greater metaphysical language, of which all the various iterations of the same text—including the originalare fragments. 

In consideration of this greater language, of which the spirit of a text surges and infuses its renditions, we must also think of Lolita as study of an immense mind as it navigates the English language anew, amidst a collision of intercultural practices, literary traditions, and theories. In choosing this subject for the latest Asymptote at the Movies, our blog editors consider not only Lolita‘s textuality, but also the “collision of interpretations” that led to its varied existences. The films, directed by Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne, are supreme examples of the intertextuality, as defined by Brian McFarlane, that adopts the original novel as a resource, as opposed to the source. They are celebrations of translation as a wholly original art.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): It’s hard to think of an author less befitting of cinematic adaptation than Vladimir Nabokov—that indisputable master of runaway language, his generous verbosity that creates multifarious, dramatic textures . . . It defies the instantaneous appreciation for images. That is not to say that Nabokov isn’t a distinctly vivid writer (what is more lucid than that single configuration: “four feet ten in one sock”?), but that his work is the embodiment of that singular textual quality of transformation and reference—one word simultaneously impresses on the next while calling back towards the previous, a line denoting memory is startled by its knowledge of the present. The writer, in impeccable craft, moves from the tactile to the figurative to the emotional to the sensual. 

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