A arte de produzir efeito sem causa

narrative and transposition to the cinema in “Quando eu era vivo”

Abstract

When literary works are adapted for the cinema, it is common to hear questions about the fidelity of the new work in relation to what we could call the “original”. For a long time, there has been, and still is, a culture in which there is a supposed to do that maintains the loyalty between the adaptation and the content that inspired it. Such a tradition would be dooming cinema to failure, if it weren’t for the fact that screenwriters have creative freedom when adapting a work. Based on this conception, the present research will address the cinematographic adaptation of the novel “A arte de produzir efeito sem causa”, by Lourenço Mutarelli, by Marco Dutra, transposed to the cinema in 2014, under the title of “Quando eu era vivo”. The objective here is to analyze the constitutive elements of the narrative of the two works. To this end, a comparative reading will be made between the literary and filmic productions, considering the particularities of the language of each one. Both works present a reading in which it is up to the reader/spectator to fill in the gaps left on purpose, whether through the word or the image. In this way, it is evident that each of the arts exposes, in its own way and independently, multiple interpretations, without exhausting its possibilities.