FROM LITERARY ORALITY TO FILM ORALITY IN THREE TEXTUAL DIALOGUE MODELS. LA COLMENA [THE BEEHIVE]: NOVEL; SCRIPT; AND FILM

Abstract

The novel La colmena and the film La colmena are two narrative genres the textualization processes of which are built with different materials, even though they refer back to the same story. In the film, the cinema plot operates narratively and descriptively through the sequencing of images in which dialogues, action, spaces and characters coexist: there is a certain specification given in a multimodal form. In the novel, everything is verbal, discursive: its textualization is a succession of linguistic forms with evocative power. The common bond that they share, apart from the narrated story, are characters’ dialogues. Between the source product and the target product lies the mediating function of the cinema script written by J. L. Dibildos, which consists in adapting C. J. Cela’s work from literature to cinema with transformations in its literary structure and in its dialogues to turn La colmena into a film text. In this work, dialogues of La colmena of the three creative proposals are analyzed and compared, with two objectives: (1) to determine if linguistic modifications are imposed by scenography of the sequences and (2) to verify whether the constructivist technique developed by Cela to make literary dialogues truthful serves as a reference to create new dialogical sequences and interactions between characters invented in the script.