LITERATURE AND FILM: KAZUO ISHIGURO’S “NEVER LET ME GO” AS AN EXAMPLE OF INTERMEDIATE RE-CODING

Abstract

The article provides a comparative study of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel “Never Let Me Go” and its film adaptation directed by Mark Romanek. The analysis is made in the context of the theory of intermediality, which involves the interpenetration of various forms of information transmission. According to modern views on intermediality (I. Rajevsky, L. Elleström) it has been established that screen adaptation belongs to “medial transposition” which are understood as the transformation of one media into another by re-coding. The objective of the article is to study the problem of re-coding of literary works by means of cinematography, since it is the transfer of original author’s plots to the screen that creates a wide interpretive field for intermediality research. Literature and cinematography both benefit from their interaction. For cinema, these are engaging plots and challenges in reproducing the original literary style and genre, while for literature; it is an increase of readers and bigger attention to the literary work. The indisputable advantage of cinematography is visual and audio elements that can create a brighter picture of the changed emotional state of the characters, and therefore the film is able to involve the viewer into the events depicted on the screen. The article examines the issue of film language, which is understood as a means of expressing artistic reality in cinema using a set of technical and metaphysical methods for creating reality. Thanks to editing, the director managed to recreate the time-space structure of the novel, which combined three different time life periods of the characters. Important compositional elements were preserved; in particular, considerable attention was paid to the visual interpretation of the basic symbols of the novel.