The film adaptation as an intersemiotic translation procedure: the "Budapeste" case

Abstract

Based on the semiotic theories of American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, this article analyzes Walter Carvalho and Rita Buzzar’s film adaptation of the novel Budapeste, by Chico Buarque (2003). According to Peirce, a sign is anything that can take the place of something else in any situation — in this sense, in a representation context. If the sign is a representation device, we use it to make translation processes, that is, we put a sign in place of another sign so that we are able to relate to reality through language. An important issue, from this theoretical point of view, is to question how film adaptations, translations of translations, are related to literary texts. For the reading that we propose, from a semiotic perspective, we shall apply the most famous Peircean classes of signs (icon, index and symbol), considering their functionality, but we shall mainly use the icon category, because of its property of representing based on similarity relations between signs and their objects. The hypothesis we are considering initially is that, in both narratives in issue (the literary and the film one), the mirror metaphor, or the duplication metaphor, can be self-referential ones, taking part in a labyrinthine game of digressions and interruptions in the plot, which is an attempt to deconstruct the verisimilitude and so is also an icon of the fictional subject. In order to explore the analytical potential of the Peircean categories, we shall discuss the film adaptation as an intersemiotic process, trying to find out which interpretation of the novel is in the filmmaker’s reading, following the clues of this translation process and considering the implications of Peirce typology to a theoretical-critical appreciation of the film.