Damascus-SANA
The presence of the novel in the dramatic and cinematic arts and the relationship between literature, poetry and fine graphic arts are themes addressed in the symposium hosted by Al-Assad National Library within the activities of the Syrian Book Fair.
The symposium titled “Communication between the Novel and the Arts” was attended by a group of writing, criticism and art figures. All arts overlap throughout the history of art, such as the Sumerian and Babylonian myths, the Iliad, the Odyssey and others.
Al-Qasim talked about poet artists who drew a poem with words in geometric shapes or squares. They also wrote a plastic poetic text based on a plastic image, referring to the architect Sinan Hassan, who works in architecture with the poem, giving it a hierarchical form and a creative architectural building.
Scriptwriter Hassan M Youssef spoke in his intervention about his transfer of the novel The End of a Brave Man by the late Hanna Mina into a dramatic work, following a special method he called “free quotation.” His relationship to the text was based on transforming it into ideas, movement and feelings in a way that serves the novel and gives us an opportunity to seriously transform it into a visual language because the novel is an entity Readable and visualized while the script is visual, audible and animated.
Youssef considered that the change in the transfer of the novelistic work to the dramatic is useful when it carries the chromosomes of the novel and is an extension of the body of the novel and is not intrusive to it, pointing out that the script is a new writing for literary work and freedom is left to the script.
Dr. Manya Sweid touched on the relationship of the novel with cinema through two models of the first two films, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, which was turned into a film dozens of times, considering that the most prominent version in this regard was a film produced in 2012 because it carried a special flavor and a kind of rebellion against the one vision of events without relying on the method of imitation and provoking questions.
She also talked about a modern novel bearing the nature of refusal journalism, written by journalist Mark Boal, and turned into a movie The Cabinet of Pain, which revolves around the US forces' occupation of Iraq, noting that director Catherine Figlo worked to show the psychological effects of the scourge of war on the film's characters who turned into killing machines and became murder scenes. For them, bombing and violence are matters of fun and entertainment, and they even reached the point of addiction.
Bilal Ahmad