Cinema is easily the most versatile artistic medium for expressing feelings, conveying sensations, and communicating messages. It also often has certain ideal characteristics that allow it to adapt almost any other form of art to its own language.
When I mention the word “versatility,” I do not mean it lightly. Words and paragraphs that come from the great classics of universal literature can easily become blueprints for sequences that make excellent stories.
No art form is spared from the possibility of turning into a movie script, and that is a very good thing. To complement what I just mentioned earlier, written stories are the ones that are most often adapted to cinema.
And although prose differs in many respects from the seventh art, it is inevitable that whatever was once text will become moving images. That is why Gloria Ruiz Blanco, from the University of Seville, Spain, makes the following statement:
“Cinema and literature are two titans in continual struggle. They are two arts with a different language, but with the same narrative vocation. Two different arts condemned to understand each other and to flow between them. Two arts that share the same codes in the society in which they are developed.”
And if we are going to talk about great stories that have been communicated for centuries thanks to the virtues of literature, we cannot forget the atavistic stories that the Greeks imagined a long time ago. And of course, it is to be hoped that cinema has found a way to adapt those same stories, in one way or another.
Let’s start with the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, directed by the Coen brothers. In it, we are told the story of Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney), a convict who escapes from prison accompanied by two other prisoners.
Set in the rural Mississippi during the Great Depression, we watch the protagonists traverse the countryside as they face a multitude of unpredictable unforeseen events. If the name of the protagonist and the plot are familiar to you, it is because the movie is inspired by a very famous epic: Homer’s Odyssey.
The film functions as a contemporary satire whose plot is entirely translated into a totally different space and time. While the original story is set in the Mediterranean Sea during the Bronze Age, O Brother, Where Art Thou? takes place in North America of the 1930s.
However, despite the fact that the film’s location and temporality are different, the essence of the characters retains consistency in many respects. Ulysses Everett McGill represents Odysseus; his two friends, his crew. In the same way, the protagonists find themselves on their journey with a stout man wearing a patch representing the famous cyclops Polyphemus, and a group of enigmatic women who act as mermaids.
Another fascinating film that explores Greek mythology in a contemporary key is Black Orpheus, by French filmmaker Marcel Camus.
Released in 1959 and set in Rio de Janeiro during carnival times, this film explores the romantic relationship between Orfeo (Breno Mello) ,a tram driver whose hobby is playing the guitar, and Eurídice (Marpessa Dawn), a beautiful woman who has just arrived in the city. Presenting beautiful dance sequences and a great soundtrack composed of bossa-nova pieces, this film takes us into the folklore of Brazil (which is usually very characteristic and idiosyncratic, as is often the case with the other nations of Latin America).
However, as much as it sounds like an optimistic story, in the end it is not. And this is due, again, to its source of inspiration. As the names of the protagonists indicate, this film is based on the ancient Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, whose fate is severely tragic.
In both instances, although Orpheus seems to have enough charisma to “charm people, animals, trees, rivers and stones alike,” ultimately, he cannot save his beloved from death. That being so, although its adaptation is very faithful to the original material, the film is concerned with combining aspects of contemporary culture with ideas of the past.
At last, another film that also recovers stories from Ancient Greece and translates them into the current context is Oedipus Mayor, by Jorge Ali Triana.
This Colombian film, set in the nineties and written by Gabriel García Márquez, tells the story of Edipo (Jorge Perugorría), a mayor who is sent to mediate peace talks between the National Army and the Guerrilla. In the process, he is involved in several violent skirmishes and an affair with an older woman. As time passes, an inevitable fate seems to come upon him.
As in the previous cases, this film is based on the Greek tragedy Oedipus King, by Sophocles –only here, the events do not take place in the ancient city of Thebes, but in the Colombian town of Salamina, Caldas.
Just like in Black Orpheus, things do not end well for the main character. And while it is not a movie that many Colombian people remember or think about that often in terms of national cinema (including myself), it works as a great example that any story is worthy of adaptation, regardless of the spatial and temporal factors at play.
Everything I have mentioned so far helps to underpin the same unambiguous idea: almost any classic narrative has the potential to work anywhere at any time. It does not matter if the story is set in depressed North America, Brazil in the late 1950s, or in the Colombian Andes in the 1990s: good stories are timeless.
