Topic
From the Setting to the Land-/Cityscape: Italy in Highsmith’s Adaptations
The paper discusses the issue of cinematic space in adaptations of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), a crime story of a temporarily stolen identity, showing Americans taken with Europe. It focuses on how the novel and its adaptations, two films and a Netflix series (Plein Soleil, dir. René Clément, 1960; The Talented Mr. Ripley, dir. Anthony Minghella, 1999; Ripley, dir. Steven Zaillian, 2024), present Europe, embodying different aspects of (vague) fascination with Italy. It considers the modes by which the hypertextual intersemiotic transpositions transform the novel’s setting into cinematic settings and various kinds of landscape and cityscape. It analyses how these transformations invert meaning-making and the image of Italy, and how the inversions appear to be related to the main plot opposition – original vs forgery. The discussion is grounded in the significant distinction between setting and landscape, proposed by Martin Lefebvre (in “Between Setting and Landscape in the Cinema”, Landscape and Film, Routledge, 2006), who relates the distinction to the two modes of spectatorship (a narrative mode and a spectacular mode) triggered by the discursive strategies and devices. In the setting that concerns narrative representation and dominates both literary and cinematic stories, the events suppress the spatial spectacle. In the landscape that emerges in the series and concerns aesthetic representation, the events are suppressed by various spatial images that gain autonomy and become symbolic. Ripley’s devices allow the spectator to go beyond what is traditionally presumed to be a landscape. These devices create land-/cityscapes that involve different objects, painting, (urban) sculpture, and architecture, and enable them to act as a stage for shaping a new identity for a character, a painting, a sculpture, and a city that appear as neither original nor forged.
Irina Melnikova (Vilnius University)
Irina Melnikova is a professor at A. J. Greimas Centre for Semiotics and the Theory of Literature (The Institute for Literary, Cultural and Translation Studies, Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University). Her research interests cover the semiotics of Ch. S. Peirce, intertextuality, intermediality, adaptation studies, and the city in literature and film. She is the author of three monographs (Semiotic Models of Reading: Sinking, VU Press, 2024 [coauthored with Katkuvienė and Salupere], The Strophes of Literary (Inter)mediality, VU Press, 2016, Intertextuality: Theory and Practice, VU Press, 2003; all the three books are in Lithuanian) and more than thirty papers in academic journals, Semiotica, Adaptation, Journal of European Studies, Studia Semiotyczne among them. See https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6832-1714; http://www.semiotika.lt/irina-melnikova-en/).