On difference and repetition in cinematic adaptation: Bertolucci's Before the Revolution and Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma

Abstract

Abstract Critical reflections on the cinematic adaptation of literary texts are usually structured by the dialectics of fidelity and betrayal, identification and estrangement. Through a theoretical framework constructed by the concepts of Gilles Deleuze, Gérard Genette and André Bazin, my article interrogates the Oedipal model of imitation and rebellion used to understand an act of cinematic adaptation. Analysing the links between Bernardo Bertolucci's Before the Revolution (1964) and Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma (1838), I propose that cinematic adaptation may be understood as an engagement with a differential singularity; as the assemblage of a point of view in relation with another point of view. Adaptation is the creation and production of difference in concert with another difference, rather than the repetition of the same. Bertolucci's encounter with Stendhal expresses a type of historical consciousness; an expression that takes place on the planes of aesthetics and politics.