The Paradox of Bazinian Adaptation: Translation and Fidelity in Saramago’s <i>The Double</i> and Villeneuve’s <i>Enemy</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Discussing Enemy (2013), his adaptation of Portuguese novelist José Saramago’s The Double (2002), French-Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve remarks: ‘the best way to respect an author is to be very honest about the way you adapted [their work] and to totally destroy the original and make it your own’. Villeneuve’s recreative (translational) use of ‘respect’ reverberates intertextually with André Bazin’s description of respect-based fidelity. For Bazin, utterly faithful yet completely original adaptations could be achieved through ‘a ceaselessly creative respect’ in which faithfulness and unfaithfulness paradoxically converge in translational acts of recreation. I term this paradoxical doubling the paradox of adaptation in Bazin. In part 1 of this article, I explore how Bazin illustrates that paradox in his essays about adaptation with examples of translation, and particularly with examples of Baudelaire’s and Mallarmé’s translations of Edgar Allan Poe (an emblem of intertextual rewriting in French literature). Bazin’s references to translation provide an aperture into a wider understanding of adaptation’s intertextual and heteroglossic nature. Bazinian adaptations are faithful reconstructions and unfaithful transformations. As I discus in part 2 of this essay, Villeneuve capitalizes on this paradox in his recreative translation of The Double. The film reflects and ‘destroys’ (as Villeneuve would say) Saramago’s novel in order to recreate it. Through its re-theorization of Bazin’s fidelity as a translational prism of recreation, this essay contributes to the ‘resurgence of (pro)fidelity criticism’ (Hermansson) as well as to ongoing calls (Krebs, Venuti) for greater attention to the hermeneutic synergy between translation and adaptation studies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".