Filming/Telling of Death: Sándor Kardos’ “Gravedigger” as a “Literary-Related” Film

Rafał Koschany

kwartalnik.filmowy@ispan.pl
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan (Poland)

Abstract

The starting point of this essay is the issue of film adaptations of poetry and poetic prose. They do not happen in the cinema too often, and when they do, it is in the form of animation or experimental work. In this sense, Sandor Kardos’ Gravedigger (A sirasó) - as a full-length feature film - is a unique work. Koschany, in his interpretation, focuses mainly on the director’s storytelling as a film equivalent of Rainer Maria Rilke’s story. Thanks to the slit camera and further deformation of the image, with the emphasis on the auditory layer (Rilke’s text, with directorial amplifications, was here almost entirely read by the actors), and thanks to numerous similarities of film or film tape to the book, Kardos obtained an “archaic” and “literary-related” effect, while at the same time creating a thoroughly modern work. In this manner the eternal theme of love and death, so important for Rilke, has been told again, but in a form that surpasses the limits of what is usually considered to be a film.


Keywords:

Sándor Kardos, adaptation, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hungarian cinema

Helman, Alicja. Sposoby uprawiania teorii filmu. Kino i telewizja w dobie symulacji elektronicznej. In Prędkość i przyjemność, edited by A. Gwóźdź. Kielce: Wydawnictwo Szumacher, 1994
  Google Scholar

Surowska, Barbara L. Młody Rilke. Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo ATEXT, 1994
  Google Scholar

Wysłouch, Seweryn. Poezja na ekranie: nowy gatunek filmowego dokumentu, w: tejże, Literatura i semiotyka. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2001.
  Google Scholar


Published
2017-06-30

Cited by

Koschany, R. (2017) “Filming/Telling of Death: Sándor Kardos’ “Gravedigger” as a ‘Literary-Related’ Film”, Kwartalnik Filmowy, (97-98), pp. 241–249. doi: 10.36744/kf.2097.

Authors

Rafał Koschany 
kwartalnik.filmowy@ispan.pl
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan Poland

Polonista i filmoznawca, doktor nauk humanistycznych w zakresie komunikacji spo­łecznej i nauk o poznaniu, adiunkt w Zakładzie Se­miotyki Kultury Instytutu Kulturoznawstwa Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza. Autor książki Przypadek. Kategoria artystyczna i egzystencjalna w literaturze i filmie (2006) oraz artykułów publiko­wanych w pracach zbiorowych i czasopismach nau­kowych (m.in. „Kwartalnik Filmowy”, „Przegląd Kulturoznawczy”, „Poznańskie Studia Polonis­tyczne”, „Estetyka i Krytyka”), współredaktor kilku prac zbiorowych (m.in. Musical. Poszerzanie pola gatunku /2013/). Jego zainteresowania badawcze do­tyczą teorii interpretacji oraz pogranicza literaturo­znawstwa i filmoznawstwa.



Statistics

Abstract views: 115
PDF downloads: 37


License

Copyright (c) 2017 Rafał Koschany

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The author grants the publisher a royalty-free non-exclusive licence (CC BY 4.0) to use the article in Kwartalnik Filmowy, retains full copyright, and agrees to identify the work as first having been published in Kwartalnik Filmowy should it be published or used again (download licence agreement). The journal is published under the CC BY 4.0 licence. By submitting an article, the author agrees to make it available under this licence.

In issues from 105-106 (2019) to 119 (2022) all articles were published under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. During this period the authors granted a royalty-free non-exclusive licence (CC BY-ND 4.0) to use their article in „Kwartalnik Filmowy”, retained full copyright, and agreed to identify the work as first having been published in our journal should it be published or used again.