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Roa LMISRI is a Phd student and holder of a Master in French and Comparative French Literature, Faculty of Humanities and Letters of Tetouan, University Abdelmalek Essaâdi, year 2011.
Qualified Secondary School Teacher
Since its origins, cinema has drawn inspiration from literary works. The great films drawn from great novels are always the meeting of two artists who have each brought two visions of the world, two different perspectives, but which have a common "branch": a diegetic aesthetic world.
In the Arab world, the relationship between cinema and literature suffers from flagrant fragility. Most filmmakers prefer to write scripts for their films themselves or collaborate with other writers to convey their own ideologies. In fact, this is due to the lack of funding, the absence of film production and the mediocrity of the Romanesque heritage in some Arab countries where the novel had prospered only in recent decades.
On the other hand, the situation of the Egyptian cinema differs from that of other Arab countries, since it was, since its appearance, closely related to literature. It is undeniable that the propagation and the glory that he had known, are due to the cinematographic adaptation of great masterpieces of Arabic literature like the novels of the Egyptian writers, Najib Mahfoud, Youssef Sbaï, Ihssan Abdel Koudouss and many others.
However, these reports of interference between Egyptian literature and cinema have been softened during the last two decades. This would be caused by the evolution of the means of the production and reception of cinema and the absence of great writers in favor of a new generation of novelists in perpetual quest for their identity. And in the face of the political and social upheavals experienced by Egypt and the Middle East during this last decade, the general public is no longer fascinated by the great stories and it becomes thirsty for news items.
This prompts us to research the aesthetic relationship between modern Egyptian cinema and a new youth novel that has produced fiction or bestsellers that have exceeded one million copies. By way of example, we can cite Ahmad Mourad's novels, of which we choose the novel Poussière de diamant as an example for our study since it is adapted cinematically in 2018. Note that this film is the result of a third collaboration between novelist and director Marwan Hamed, which leads us to question the limits traced between the film and the novel, between the written narrative and the film narrative.
Why are Ahmad Mourad's works even more successful after being adapted to the cinema, despite critical discourses that challenge its literary value despite its unprecedented distribution? What are the points of convergence and divergence between fictional writing and its cinematographic adaptation?
In addition, establish a kind of logic of the equivalence of meaning between the written words of the novel and the moving images of the film or between two domains; literary written and cinematographic staged, seems a risky and random adventure given that the film remains an ephemeral moment of a literary work. In fact, in Diamond Dust, the story spans more than six decades, a fairly long historical period that requires a director to compress events without the film having narrative holes.
This prompts us to ask ourselves: to what extent did the director Marwan Hamed succeed in weaving the storyline despite his non-respect of the chronological order of events and his adoption of non-linear narrative? Is it, in this case, a primordial necessity for the construction of signifiers or a staged deliberately destructured to refer to the diegetic universe of the film narrative in question?
In order to answer these questions, it would be useful to use academic references that will guide our research. As an example, we can cite Francis Vanoye's Récit écrit-Récit filmique, André Gaudreault's Du littéraire au filmique and Aesthetics of Jacques Aumont's film.
Indeed, these references will allow us to highlight the structural perspective of the written and filmic narrative in Diamond Dust as well as the temporality (the temporal landmarks, the rhythm and the speed of the filmic narrative), which will help us to grasp the historical-political context of the work and to decipher the non-linear character of the narrative.
written by Roa LMISRI
