This is the reason why Oscar Wilde’s famously controversial literary work will be the perfect example for proving that a literary work can truly become immortal due to film adaptations and the “magic” of cinema. The fact that a 19th-century novel is still popular in our days makes the original creation and its adaptations more interesting not just from a literary point of view, but also from a general, cultural point of view. There are plenty of film adaptations, audiobooks, musicals, theatre plays and other novels based on the original, fact that shows that Dorian and his story is still alive, giving him the immortality he was aspiring for, even if it is not manifested in the form Dorian wanted to gain it. The analysis will take as a starting point Oscar Wilde’s only novel, called The Picture of Dorian Gray, a novel that demanded its eternity not only through the plot, through Dorian Gray’s desire to become immortal, but also through the contribution of the cinematic medium. In order to see and understand better this ambiguous and mutual relationship between cinema and literature, this paper will examine concrete examples from both fields. All these colloquial expressions show the fact that both cinema and literature do contribute to each other’s evolution. Similarly, people often say about literary works that they are very “film-like”, which usually refers to the rapid rhythm of the scenes or to the eventful plot. In common language we often hear that a movie was too “literary”, which bears a negative connotation and mainly refers to the slow pace of a film, to the uneventful plot, or to the highly symbolic and abstract contents of a certain cinematic work. In addition, these two fields are constantly developing by sharing and borrowing from each other certain specific features. The field of cinema would not and could not exist without its raw material, its inspiration, namely, written literature (Szíjártó 2006: 677), but on the other hand, owing to the appearance of filmmaking as a new artistic field, literature is being rediscovered over and over again, giving new life, new interpretations to the literary creations, and in this way their message becomes immortal independently from period, mentality or even pop-cultural fashion. “The making of film out of an earlier text is virtually as old as the machinery of cinema itself.” (Andrew 1984: 98) This statement by Dudley Andrew from his volume entitled Concepts in Film Theory supports the claim according to which the relationship between literature and cinema is held to be mutual and indispensable. However, many of them agree on the fact that both fields have their own autonomous and independent ways of expressing complex messages and in spite of this they continuosuly cross each other’s paths, mutually completing and sharing their means of expression. Literature and cinema have always been in a controversial – sometimes even contradictory – relationship and due to this ambiguous correlation they have often stirred many debates among theorists of different fields for nearly one century. The Real Prince Charming – The Hippie Dorian Gray The Picture of Dorian Gray – The Rigid Marble Statue Adapting The Picture of Dorian Gray to the Screen The Concept of Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity SAPIENTIA HUNGARIAN UNIVERSITY OF TRANSYLVANIA
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