TY - JOUR
AU - Melnikova,, Irina
AB - Abstract This essay focuses on the ‘desire trilogy’ by Italian director Luca Guadagnino to reveal how it embodies nostalgic longing in its discursive structure. The essay examines how the films address matters of nostalgia and adaptation, how they trace an ‘absent presence’ and refer to one another, how they configure the hypertextual, intertextual, and architextual dialogue with other texts and media and use multimodal strategies that engage in ‘nostalgic desire’ for the cultural past. The analysis pays special attention to the mediation modes of intertextual references, reconfiguring the concepts of Gérard Genette within the framework of Lars Elleström’s concept of intermediality as intermodality, based on the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. The study proposes an intermodal approach to the issue of intertextuality and intermediality, exposing the ways in which the engagement of modal strategies in a transtextual dialogue is (or can be) related to the construction of (archi)textual ‘self’. Nostalgia, adaptation, intermodality, ‘desire trilogy’, hypertextuality, architextuality I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes. (Vladimir Nabokov) ‘Later!’ The word, the voice, the attitude. (André Aciman) Nostalgia as a ‘liminal, ambiguous phenomenon’ (Niemeyer 6) bears a fundamental affinity to adaptation. Both are grounded in and generated by absence—the absence of past time/space/text. Both are associated with a kind of desire to fill the temporal and/or spatial gap, to transfer the past into the present or to be transferred to the past, to recreate a sense of continuity. Both are fundamentally elusive and ambivalent in marking an absent presence. When proposing the history and theory of nostalgia, Svetlana Boym defines it as a longing for a different place and/or time and argues that nostalgia can be retrospective and prospective, can have dual orientation (can be directed sideways) and overlap the actual setting and the setting of the mind. Obsessed with repetition and the search for identity, nostalgia draws different borderlines and blurs them, and ‘a cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images—of home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life. The moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface’ (Boym xiii–xiv). Adaptation is also a kind of ‘double exposure’, a superimposition of multiple texts which threatens to break the frame when forced to coexist as one. The encounter with adaptation presupposes a ‘return’ to the past, the remembrance of the absent work. The acknowledgement of a film as an adaptation is related to ‘the affection or nostalgia for the adapted text’ (Hutcheon 121), evoking ‘a specific form of enjoyment and understanding’ (Corrigan 23). As Linda Hutcheon describes this specificity of understanding, If we do not know that what we are experiencing actually is an adaptation or if we are not familiar with the particular work that it adapts, we simply experience the adaptation as we would any other work. […] For an adaptation to be successful in its own right, it must be so for both knowing and unknowing audiences. (Hutcheon 120–21) Like nostalgia—which can represent ‘a rendez-vous with oneself’ (Boym 50) that challenges personal identity as a constituted ‘self’ or as a ‘project of a self’ (Benwell 7)—adaptation raises the question of textual identity. Like nostalgia adaptation speaks ‘in riddles and puzzles’ (Boym xvii), thus, to untangle the signs of nostalgia, to conceive a film as referring or trying to resurrect the past, ‘one needs a dual archaeology of memory and place, and a dual history of illusions and actual practices’ (Boym xviii). This duality inscribes adaptation within a wider field of Genettean transtextuality, which, as R. Barton Palmer rightly notes, debunks a myth ‘that works are inherently singular, with perdurably fixed boundaries that separate them ontologically from all other texts. The phenomenon of transtextuality indicates that this singularity is instead conditional’ (Palmer 74–75). The illusiveness of textual singularity with a reference to nostalgia, thus the necessity of ‘a dual archaeology of memory and place’, becomes clearly visible in a group of three films from Italian director Luca Guadagnino: Io sono l’amore (I Am Love, 2009); A Bigger Splash (2015); Call Me by Your Name (2017). All of them appear as hypertexts, works connected to an earlier text (a hypotext), upon which they are ‘grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary’ (Genette, Palimpsests 5). All of them trigger hypertextual relations both ‘massive (an entire work B deriving from an entire work A) and more or less officially stated’ (Genette, Palimpsests 9), and all enter the field of ‘multidimensional dialogism’ (Stam, “Beyond Fidelity” 64) which influences signifying practices and modifies the processes of meaning-making. Finally, all of them require attention to medially specific modes of engagement in the transtextual dialogue. In addition, Guadagnino’s films as multimedial cinematic texts posit the necessity of what could be called a ‘medium-sensitive’ approach to transtextuality. The films urge to consider the material interface of a hypertext, ‘situated in social, historical, communicative and aesthetic circumstances’ (Elleström, “Modalities of Media” 13). This interface initiates and affects signification, and Lars Elleström offers a conceptual lens for its consideration in his discussion of intermediality. Following the Peircean idea of semiosis, Elleström proposes to examine signification as initiated by perception and extended by conceptualization, and elaborates a three-layered definition of medium grounded on the notion of modality (Elleström, “Modalities of Media” and “Adaptation”). He explains modality as a mode of manifestation and experience of cultural phenomena or constructs, distinguishes four modalities (namely, material, sensorial, spatiotemporal, and semiotic) and three ‘kinds’ of media (qualified, basic, and technical) as ‘three complementary, theoretical aspects of what constitutes media and mediality’ (“Modalities of Media” 12). The first two ‘kinds’ are defined as abstract notions, denoting either a complex of different qualities activated by four modalities (basic media) or a virtual cultural construct of variable amplitude (qualified media). When distinct art forms—e.g., painting, cinema, music, opera, printed book, audio book, etc.—are specified as media, they appear as conventional cultural constructs determined by social, cultural, historical practices, and conventions, thus as qualified media. However, the embodiment of a qualified medium by the technical medium, which ‘realizes and manifests the latent properties of media’ (2010: 17), in a particular media product can change the basic media. The three-layered model proposes a flexible notion of media that aims to draw the media borders and to see their transgression in each precise case. For instance, adaptation as a product of the qualified medium of cinema hypothetically has to configure the ‘definite’ shape of its basic medium. It has to activate two modes of sensorial modality (seeing and hearing) as well as several modes of spatiotemporal modality (space as unfolding in virtual and perceptual sphere of marked figurative materiality within virtual and perceptual dynamics of time-duration + cognitive space/time) and, finally, all three kinds of semiotic modality (convention, i.e., symbolic signs; resemblance, i.e., icons; contiguity, i.e., indexical signs). Yet, as a particular product of a qualified medium, a film adaptation can suppress one kind of modes and accentuate the other(s), creating different configurations of basic media and thereby present unexpected strategies of signification that stimulate different variants of reception. This phenomenon becomes obvious in Call Me by Your Name. In turn, a film’s involvement in a hypertextual dialogue with a hypotext of another qualified medium, which predetermines the intersection of distinct basic media, can change the ‘modal shape’ of intermedial dialogue. Such a change becomes perceivable in all three films by Guadagnino. Finally, when ‘caught up in the ongoing whirl of intertextual reference and transformation’ (Stam, “Beyond Fidelity” 66)—that is, when referring to a range of intertexts1—a hypertext can also request modal changes, the (re)configuration of the set of modalities that have to be activated within a ‘multileveled negotiation of intertexts’ (Stam, “Beyond Fidelity” 67). Such a situation also occurs in all three films of the trilogy. Therefore, to examine how adaptation, nostalgia, and identity can intersect with intermodality and transtextual dialogue, I propose a close analysis of the ‘desire trilogy’, focussing on the ways in which the films use particular modes to trace an absent presence, on the discernible marks that trigger hypertextual and intertextual dialogue among themselves and with other texts and media. The analysis shows how the films interweave mediality into a complex system of transtextuality and how this involvement influences their meaning-making strategies, particularly how the modal forms and levels of a dialogue between the texts and media affect signification. Thereby, the examination of the trilogy will exemplify the practical reasoning of taking account of the relationship(s) that exist between transtextuality and the material interface of a media product, and thereby demonstrate the necessity of a multimodal approach to transtextuality and adaptation. HYPERTEXTUALITY: SEEING AND HEARING Director Luca Guadagnino has defined three of his sequentially created, although stylistically and structurally distinct movies as his ‘desire trilogy’ (Laffly). This authorial definition has inspired reviewers to consider desire as the main thematic motif (Wheeler) and aesthetic device and to pay attention to the aesthetics of interaction between the diegetic figures. As Joanna Di Mattia argues, Guadagnino develops and refines an erotic language that conveys not only what desire looks like, but more importantly, what it feels like. The interplay of objects and physical space, as well as an emphasis on the space between actor’s bodies, captures the urgency of the erotic experience. Di Mattia discusses desire as sensorial experience in characters’ attempts to surpass the physical distance separating them from the Other. She pays special attention to the sensuality of interaction between the diegetic figures in their attempts to embody desire. However, the trilogy extends the desire nexus to the relationship of senses within and between other arts and media. The filmic discourse configures the trilogy as a peculiar whole within which the movies are intertextually connected as if representing a desire to overcome the distance between each part of the whole. At the same time, the films create a complex net of references to other texts and media, thus marking the desire to overcome the external textual and media distance. The combination of those discursive devices shapes the whole as a variant of an absent presence of specific discursive model or architext (Genette, Palimpsests 1, 4–8). To uncover the form of this absent presence, to identify an architext and reveal its specificity, first, I will focus on the ways in which the films create interconnections, on the formal modes in which the filmic ‘border spaces’—the credit sequences or other peritexts2—mediate the links with absent hypotexts. This formal scrutiny will be followed by the discussion of how those modes expose the significance of (inter)mediality, and how they involve the matters of mediation and modality in the meaning-making. Firstly, through stories of distinct types of love and desire, the trilogy creates a specific field of artistic tension that relates the protagonists as performing artworks from different media. In Io sono l’amore the protagonist Emma (Tilda Swinton) redesigns her own body image according to the model featured in the book Atelier simultané di Sonia Delaunay, thereby recreating an image from avant-garde artist, painter and fashion designer Sonia Delaunay, whose geometrically patterned textiles served ‘as ways of articulating bodies in space’ (Giorcelli 38). The main character of the second film, Marianne (also played by Tilda Swinton), is presented as a rock music singer who attempts to recover her lost voice. The film shows singing as the phenomenon of her past and visually represents it through the album covers for a release titled Dead Revolution and the concert images in the opening credits. The main character of the third, Elio (Timothée Chalamet), performs instrumental classical music. The characters represent a different qualified medium—respectively: design, rock music, and classical music, thus the filmic stories invite to activate certain modes of sensorial modality, respectively: seeing; both hearing and seeing; hearing. Yet the filmic discourse complicates the issue of perception. It emphasizes the visuality of sound and music even in the case of classical music, which is represented through sound and as musical notation, and outlines the distance between the music of (conventional) present (i.e., rock music) and (conventional) past (i.e., classical music). In addition, these artists-performers are presented as estranged characters. All the movies introduce the motif of a stranger in Italy (Russian émigré Emma, British Marianne, Italian (?) Jewish Elio) and show that all of the main characters imply various levels of religious (in)difference compared to what would be expected in Italy: Emma is (perhaps) Orthodox rather than Catholic, Marianne—is (perhaps) Anglican rather than Catholic, and Elio is Jewish. The first two films emphasize ethnic/national affiliation, while the third one displaces ethnicity/nationality as a mark of outsider status and replaces it with ethnic-religious affiliation. Three types of performance and three estranged performers are inscribed in a specific Italian spatial unity, arranged around villas with a swimming pool. The pool becomes a place of death and rupture in the first and second films and rapprochement in the last. It is presented as the spatial centre of the stories that (1) mark the temporal pivot points by religious feasts, connoting ideas of nativity/birth (Christmas), happy death (the feast of St Joseph3) and revival (Hanukkah as the Jewish feast of rededication of the Jerusalem Temple), (2) involve gift-giving motif, and (3) pay special sensual attention to the meal with a focus on fish (Table 1). In referring to one another, the films configure a three-part narrative which performs a surprising sacralization of ostensibly secular stories of artists-strangers. The trilogy’s whole appears to reflect the idea of birth → death → revival in another status, framed by the Last Supper motif, which emphasizes ‘sacralization’. Io sono l’amore shows family dinners as ‘last suppers’ for both Edoardo Sr. and Edoardo Jr.; A Bigger Splash presents the last dinner as the ‘last supper’ for Harry-father; Call Me by Your Name ends with setting the table for Hanukkah—the trilogy’s unshown ‘last supper’; serving the dinner opens the first story and closes the last one. The function of this structural sacralization is not immediately clear, yet the Last Supper images clearly shape three movies as a ‘picture in a frame’, thus emphasizing the importance of conceptual simultaneity and wholeness in seeing ‘moving picture(s)’. Table 1 Repetitive diegetic devices Diegetic device . Io sono l’amore . A Bigger Splash . Call Me by Your Name . Place of action (all Italy) Lombardy Sicilian Island Pantelleria Lombardy Protagonist Russian émigré Emma Recchi British Marianne Lane Italian (?) Jewish Elio Perlman Orthodox (?) Anglican (?) Jewish The wife of Milanese businessman Tancredi Recchi, falling in love with chef Antonio Singer, recovering the lost voice between the two love(r)s (former producer Harry vs filmmaker Paul) The son of a professor of archaeology Mr Perlman in love with American Jewish postgraduate student Oliver Protagonist’s turn/loss Mother loses son and family, finds love Singer loses voice, former love(r) and the ‘father’ (Harry is Penelope’s father and Marianne’s art ‘father’/producer Son loses lover, ‘refinds’ father Spatial centre of action Villa with swimming pool Villa with swimming pool Villa with swimming pool Artworks within the diegetic space Painting, book, architecture, sculpture (fragments of architectural monuments of Milan, cemetery sculpture) Vinyl and CD discs, books, posters, photos, statues of Moorish heads (outdoor flower pots), lighters in ship-like and fish-like form (Photos of) antique sculpture, antique cameos, old maps, books, painting, posters, Russian samovar, bells Temporal ‘centre’ of action (religious feast) Christmas = birthday of Edoardo Sr. La Festa San Giuseppe Hanukkah Festive meal Fish-soup (ucha) Fish in a salt crust (film shows the dead fish and its disembowelling) The close-ups show the live fish caught to cook, but the film does not show it eaten Gift-giving Painted portrait + the name (Emma) (Tancredi’s wedding gifts to Emma) Paul (Hurry’s gift to Marianne) Antique statue from the lake Garda (‘gift from Count Lechi to his lover—contralto Adelaide Malanotte’) Diegetic device . Io sono l’amore . A Bigger Splash . Call Me by Your Name . Place of action (all Italy) Lombardy Sicilian Island Pantelleria Lombardy Protagonist Russian émigré Emma Recchi British Marianne Lane Italian (?) Jewish Elio Perlman Orthodox (?) Anglican (?) Jewish The wife of Milanese businessman Tancredi Recchi, falling in love with chef Antonio Singer, recovering the lost voice between the two love(r)s (former producer Harry vs filmmaker Paul) The son of a professor of archaeology Mr Perlman in love with American Jewish postgraduate student Oliver Protagonist’s turn/loss Mother loses son and family, finds love Singer loses voice, former love(r) and the ‘father’ (Harry is Penelope’s father and Marianne’s art ‘father’/producer Son loses lover, ‘refinds’ father Spatial centre of action Villa with swimming pool Villa with swimming pool Villa with swimming pool Artworks within the diegetic space Painting, book, architecture, sculpture (fragments of architectural monuments of Milan, cemetery sculpture) Vinyl and CD discs, books, posters, photos, statues of Moorish heads (outdoor flower pots), lighters in ship-like and fish-like form (Photos of) antique sculpture, antique cameos, old maps, books, painting, posters, Russian samovar, bells Temporal ‘centre’ of action (religious feast) Christmas = birthday of Edoardo Sr. La Festa San Giuseppe Hanukkah Festive meal Fish-soup (ucha) Fish in a salt crust (film shows the dead fish and its disembowelling) The close-ups show the live fish caught to cook, but the film does not show it eaten Gift-giving Painted portrait + the name (Emma) (Tancredi’s wedding gifts to Emma) Paul (Hurry’s gift to Marianne) Antique statue from the lake Garda (‘gift from Count Lechi to his lover—contralto Adelaide Malanotte’) Open in new tab Table 1 Repetitive diegetic devices Diegetic device . Io sono l’amore . A Bigger Splash . Call Me by Your Name . Place of action (all Italy) Lombardy Sicilian Island Pantelleria Lombardy Protagonist Russian émigré Emma Recchi British Marianne Lane Italian (?) Jewish Elio Perlman Orthodox (?) Anglican (?) Jewish The wife of Milanese businessman Tancredi Recchi, falling in love with chef Antonio Singer, recovering the lost voice between the two love(r)s (former producer Harry vs filmmaker Paul) The son of a professor of archaeology Mr Perlman in love with American Jewish postgraduate student Oliver Protagonist’s turn/loss Mother loses son and family, finds love Singer loses voice, former love(r) and the ‘father’ (Harry is Penelope’s father and Marianne’s art ‘father’/producer Son loses lover, ‘refinds’ father Spatial centre of action Villa with swimming pool Villa with swimming pool Villa with swimming pool Artworks within the diegetic space Painting, book, architecture, sculpture (fragments of architectural monuments of Milan, cemetery sculpture) Vinyl and CD discs, books, posters, photos, statues of Moorish heads (outdoor flower pots), lighters in ship-like and fish-like form (Photos of) antique sculpture, antique cameos, old maps, books, painting, posters, Russian samovar, bells Temporal ‘centre’ of action (religious feast) Christmas = birthday of Edoardo Sr. La Festa San Giuseppe Hanukkah Festive meal Fish-soup (ucha) Fish in a salt crust (film shows the dead fish and its disembowelling) The close-ups show the live fish caught to cook, but the film does not show it eaten Gift-giving Painted portrait + the name (Emma) (Tancredi’s wedding gifts to Emma) Paul (Hurry’s gift to Marianne) Antique statue from the lake Garda (‘gift from Count Lechi to his lover—contralto Adelaide Malanotte’) Diegetic device . Io sono l’amore . A Bigger Splash . Call Me by Your Name . Place of action (all Italy) Lombardy Sicilian Island Pantelleria Lombardy Protagonist Russian émigré Emma Recchi British Marianne Lane Italian (?) Jewish Elio Perlman Orthodox (?) Anglican (?) Jewish The wife of Milanese businessman Tancredi Recchi, falling in love with chef Antonio Singer, recovering the lost voice between the two love(r)s (former producer Harry vs filmmaker Paul) The son of a professor of archaeology Mr Perlman in love with American Jewish postgraduate student Oliver Protagonist’s turn/loss Mother loses son and family, finds love Singer loses voice, former love(r) and the ‘father’ (Harry is Penelope’s father and Marianne’s art ‘father’/producer Son loses lover, ‘refinds’ father Spatial centre of action Villa with swimming pool Villa with swimming pool Villa with swimming pool Artworks within the diegetic space Painting, book, architecture, sculpture (fragments of architectural monuments of Milan, cemetery sculpture) Vinyl and CD discs, books, posters, photos, statues of Moorish heads (outdoor flower pots), lighters in ship-like and fish-like form (Photos of) antique sculpture, antique cameos, old maps, books, painting, posters, Russian samovar, bells Temporal ‘centre’ of action (religious feast) Christmas = birthday of Edoardo Sr. La Festa San Giuseppe Hanukkah Festive meal Fish-soup (ucha) Fish in a salt crust (film shows the dead fish and its disembowelling) The close-ups show the live fish caught to cook, but the film does not show it eaten Gift-giving Painted portrait + the name (Emma) (Tancredi’s wedding gifts to Emma) Paul (Hurry’s gift to Marianne) Antique statue from the lake Garda (‘gift from Count Lechi to his lover—contralto Adelaide Malanotte’) Open in new tab The filmic request for conceptual simultaneity of reception is also marked by the mode in which the film credits (classifiable as Genettean peritexts) configure a hypertextual relationship. The spatial frames of all three movies introduce them as adaptive hypertexts: Io sono l’amore names its source as an unpublished story by Guadagnino himself (thus framing the film as self-adaptation); A Bigger Splash is a remake of a prior adaptation of the novel La Piscine by Alain Page, the eponymous 1969 film directed by Jacques Deray and starring Alain Delon and Romy Schneider; finally, Call Me by Your Name is marked as a more straightforward novel-to-screen adaptation (Table 2). Therefore, the movies configure distinct shapes of hypertextual dialogue. The first, with its invisible hypotext, renders the hypertextual status of the film unreliable4 (see Genette, Palimpsests 36, 51). It simultaneously indicates and dissolves the adaptive identity since ‘the resulting adaptation makes no sense without reference to and foreknowledge of the adapted text’ (Hutcheon 212). The second part of the trilogy redoubles its hypertextual status by its reference to multiple hypotexts: both a novel and its earlier film adaptation. Finally, the last movie of the trilogy represents a classical example of adaptation as autographic hypertext.5 Table 2 Acknowledgement of hypotexts Peritext . Io sono l’amore . A Bigger Splash . Call Me by Your Name . Title A line from the aria ‘La mamma morta’ in Italian opera Andrea Chénier (1896) by Umberto Giordano The title of a painting by David Hockney, A Bigger Splash (1967, Tate Modern, London) The title of the novel by André Aciman (2007) Opening credits Io sono l’amore ‘basato su una storia di Luca Guadagnino’ (‘based on a story by Luca Guadagnino’) A Bigger Splash ‘Based on the novel by André Aciman’ Closing credits ‘Based on the film La piscine directed by Jacques Deray, Based on the original screenplay by Alain Page and on his novel La piscine published by Raoul Solar’ Luca Guadagnino’sA Bigger Splash Call Me by Your Name Peritext . Io sono l’amore . A Bigger Splash . Call Me by Your Name . Title A line from the aria ‘La mamma morta’ in Italian opera Andrea Chénier (1896) by Umberto Giordano The title of a painting by David Hockney, A Bigger Splash (1967, Tate Modern, London) The title of the novel by André Aciman (2007) Opening credits Io sono l’amore ‘basato su una storia di Luca Guadagnino’ (‘based on a story by Luca Guadagnino’) A Bigger Splash ‘Based on the novel by André Aciman’ Closing credits ‘Based on the film La piscine directed by Jacques Deray, Based on the original screenplay by Alain Page and on his novel La piscine published by Raoul Solar’ Luca Guadagnino’sA Bigger Splash Call Me by Your Name Open in new tab Table 2 Acknowledgement of hypotexts Peritext . Io sono l’amore . A Bigger Splash . Call Me by Your Name . Title A line from the aria ‘La mamma morta’ in Italian opera Andrea Chénier (1896) by Umberto Giordano The title of a painting by David Hockney, A Bigger Splash (1967, Tate Modern, London) The title of the novel by André Aciman (2007) Opening credits Io sono l’amore ‘basato su una storia di Luca Guadagnino’ (‘based on a story by Luca Guadagnino’) A Bigger Splash ‘Based on the novel by André Aciman’ Closing credits ‘Based on the film La piscine directed by Jacques Deray, Based on the original screenplay by Alain Page and on his novel La piscine published by Raoul Solar’ Luca Guadagnino’sA Bigger Splash Call Me by Your Name Peritext . Io sono l’amore . A Bigger Splash . Call Me by Your Name . Title A line from the aria ‘La mamma morta’ in Italian opera Andrea Chénier (1896) by Umberto Giordano The title of a painting by David Hockney, A Bigger Splash (1967, Tate Modern, London) The title of the novel by André Aciman (2007) Opening credits Io sono l’amore ‘basato su una storia di Luca Guadagnino’ (‘based on a story by Luca Guadagnino’) A Bigger Splash ‘Based on the novel by André Aciman’ Closing credits ‘Based on the film La piscine directed by Jacques Deray, Based on the original screenplay by Alain Page and on his novel La piscine published by Raoul Solar’ Luca Guadagnino’sA Bigger Splash Call Me by Your Name Open in new tab In one way or another, though, all the films are represented as hypertexts of literary works, and as such, they express film’s longing to bridge the distance with literature in/of the past. In other words, these films express a textual nostalgia marked by discontinuity in their hypertextual tensions of different intensity that configure different ways to search for and represent the literary past. These differences recall Svetlana Boym’s distinction between reflexive and restorative nostalgia. In considering both etymological roots—nostos and algia—Boym maintains that restorative nostalgia focuses on nostos, on an attempt to reconstruct a lost home or time, thereby protecting truth and tradition and fixing the past into an unmovable heritage (xix; 41–44). In contrast, reflective nostalgia concentrates on algia, on a potentially ironic longing that reveals ambivalence, calls the truth into doubt, explores ways of simultaneously inhabiting many places, lingers on context and details, presents an ethical and creative challenge, cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalized space, recognizes the gap between identity and resemblance, fixes estrangement, and opens a relationship between past, present and future (Boym xix, 49–51). Within such a dichotomy, the first movie models the search for the past as a textually embodied reflexive type of textual nostalgia, whereas the second and the third seem to implement a restorative one. In turn, while referring to literature all of them rely, first of all, on ‘hearing literature/word’, however, the first two films of the trilogy complicate the matters by the title-word references to the texts of other qualified media. Io sono l’amore, while credited in such a way to underscore the cinema ↔ literature link, takes its title from the line ‘io sono l’amore’ in an aria from the Italian opera Andrea Chénier by Umberto Giordano, based on the life of the French poet. This line is repeated in the second film of the trilogy, pointing out a recurring hypotext in the qualified medium of opera, which spatializes the temporality of music, connects hearing (the word) with seeing ‘the (sound of) singing’, and combines symbolic signs with visual and sound icons.6 A Bigger Splash, while credited with past works in both literature and cinema, takes its title from a painting by American painter David Hockney (A Bigger Splash, 1967, Tate Modern, London). The title not only diverges from the hypotexts (entitled La Piscine). Through its reference to a painting, it invites to consider the materially marked figurative space, to prioritize seeing, to focus on visual icons as guiding signification. The title signals the film’s painterly traits, which are emphasized by the repetition of the title in the opening and in the closing credits, the latter in a slightly modified form (A Bigger Splash ↔ ‘Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash’). The story of a musician—a singer, even—is enframed by the title of a painting, which represents a ‘wordless enigma’ freezing ‘moments of wordless power’ (Jones). The repetition of the title ‘freezes’ and ‘spatializes’ the story as the frame of a painting does. In turn, the mode of repetition of the title in the film indicates, connects and separates the two ‘wordless enigmas’—two ‘bigger splashes’, painted (Hockney’s) and cinematic (Guadagnino’s) splash. The film uses one more device to insist upon seeing the word. Instead of the credited name on the cover of the book La piscine (Solar éditions, 1969) and in the opening credits of Deray’s 1969 adaptation, Jean-Emmanuel Conil, Splash credits his pen name Alain Page (Table 2). This pseudonym appeared on the cover of the novel’s 2014 reprint from another publisher (Éditions Archipoche). The estrangement suggested by the change of name in the credits of A Bigger Splash correlates with the characters’ change of profession in Deray’s adaptation. Instead of the writer Jean-Paul (Alain Delon), A Bigger Splash introduces a photographer-filmmaker, Paul de Smedt (Matthias Schoenaerts), and instead of the journalist-writer Marianne (Romy Schneider) it shows the singer Marianne Lane. Meanwhile, Harry (Maurice Ronet for Deray; Ralph Fiennes for Guadagnino) retains his professional identity of a music producer. In representing the story of a singer who is unable to sing and speak, thus showing the longing for singing and impossibility to sing, the film invites to see singing and music, represented in a variety of modes. Thereby, the film appears as a reflexive type of textual nostalgia, which acknowledges the gap between identity and resemblance and reveals ambivalences of desperate longing. Call Me by Your Name is the only film of the trilogy which clearly focuses on nostos, demonstrating its will to ‘restore’ literary text and activating the sensorial modality of hearing through its protagonist’s performance of music. However, here once again a change in profession signals particular emphasis on the visual: in this case, the target for change is the author of the novel which the film has adapted for the screen. While dismissing all the episodes of Aciman’s novel connected to writers and writing, the movie reconfigures the real writer Aciman as an actor, casting him in the (fictional) role of the Perlmans’ friend Mounir. The second part of Aciman’s novel includes a short passage about the visit of a nameless gay couple from Chicago who resembles the Thomson and Thompson twins from The Adventures of Tintin or Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum from Through the Looking-glass. The plot of the novel refers to the issue of enantiomorphism, that is, presenting an ‘object’ and its ‘mirror image’ as not identical, as the right hand is not identical to the left. It thus notes the difference between identity and resemblance, and associates the issue of enantiomorphism to the remembrance of things past. In casting the author of the source text as a character, the film transfers the enantiomorphism from the characters to the filmic discourse itself. Not only does this casting make the literary past visible, this actor-character is present for Elio’s musical performance, configuring literature and music as ‘enantiomorphic’ doubles from the point of view of their sensorial experience—both ‘have to be’ heard, yet both have a visual dimension. This visuality is exemplified in the film’s intertextual references, which express the desire to overcome textual and medial distance. INTERTEXTUALITY: IMAGE AND SOUND Alongside the references that form the multimodal hypertextual field, all the films form a peculiar field of intertextuality related to sensorial and/or spatiotemporal estrangement and to the matters of nostalgia and (textual) identity. Io sono l’amore presents an intertextual junction of sound and images of an estranged, collective cultural past; A Bigger Splash shows an image of the ‘personal’ cultural past and visually connects it to the collective cultural past; Call Me by Your Name introduces intertextual images of the Italian cultural past, immediately commented by verbal explanation. Io sono l’amore points to nostalgic remembrance through multiple references to Emma’s past in Russia that connect sound to image. Talking with Antonio, Tancredi’s wife says that Emma is not her real name; it is her husband’s ‘wedding gift’, received along with a portrait of a woman that hangs over the writing desk in the guest hall of villa Recchi. ‘At home they all called me Kitezh’, Emma says. Kitezh is the name of a mythical city hidden at the bottom of a lake. The trace of its absent presence can be seen in city’s reflection in the lake (Svetloyar) and heard in the sound of church bells ringing. The ancient legend has been told in many Russian literary sources, but is widely known from Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera (!) The Tale of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya (1907). Sound thus performs a peculiar move: a personal name is equated to the specific toponym, linking the filmic character with a place (a mythical city) and using this intertext to define the character and the place/city as invisible. Russian culture includes the only person to have been named in a similar manner: the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova—‘the woman of Kitezh’ (‘kitezhanka’) as she names herself in her verse. Furthermore, in the Poem Without a Hero it was she, Akhmatova, who associated herself with the figure of the woman in the portrait shown in the film. The portrait represents Russia’s greatest soprano of the eighteenth century, opera singer Praskovia Zhemchugova, known as Praskovia the Pearl. Io sono l’amore inscribes the alien portrait7 of Praskovia into the space of Italian villa-museum, intertextually associates the portrait with Emma’s name (Kitezh) which refers to the poet Achmatova, and visualizes the lines of Achmatova’s poem related to Praskovia. Consequently, the film conjoins the sound-name (Kitezh) and the image (painted portrait) into a multimodal synecdoche that refers to the stories of the opera singer and the writer (for details see Melnikova), and turns this synecdoche into a medially sensitive sign of filmic nostalgia for literature and opera. The sound-image junction in Io sono l’amore, which refers to the opera about Andrea Chénier by its title, forms a complex intertextual reference that transforms the verbal symbolic sign ‘Kitezh’ into a visual icon that assumes the traits of an indexical sign. Concurrently, the visual icon (Praskovia’s portrait) also has indexical traits and links together several sequences of symbolic signs. The film challenges the semiotic modality of both symbolic and iconic signs by requiring viewers to see the word and hear the image, and relates this challenge to Russian myths represented in literature and music. The word and the past here appear as an uncertain, unreliable, and estranged virtual vision provoked by sound. A Bigger Splash shows the diegetic past as a real vision (visible image) of the sound and relates this vision to the non-fictional cultural past. In a sequence that comes before the opening credits, Marianne’s glorious singing in the past emerges as an image of a rock music concert that refers to the iconic images of outdoor shows of the 1970s and 1980s. Marianne’s stage costume obviously refers to Mick Jagger’s in Memphis during The Rolling Stones’ 1975 ‘Tour of the Americas’. Afterwards, Marianne and Harry appear in a photo next to a photo of John Lennon; the cover of Marianne’s fictional record Dead Revolution appears as juxtaposed with the real cover of the Rolling Stones Emotional Rescue, etc. The film visualizes music in the diegetic figures and enforces this visualization by mixing real and fictional images and faces as well as images of the present and the past. Besides, it creates combinations that enable a symbolic sign (a readable word) to emerge behind a visual icon. These discursive visualizations remodel and reconsider the diegetic acts of gift-giving. They show music as a gift-receiving qualified medium gaining (or able to gain) the traits and qualities of other media, those that can be materially visualized, seen, and touched. The second part of the trilogy shows the music sound as the past, which is embodied in the ‘real pictures’ of the sound in the present, and which connects this film to the first entry in the trilogy. When Penelope explains the source of her knowledge of Italian to Paul, she mentions ‘Io sono l’amore/I am Love’ and explains that the song is a fragment from ‘La mamma morta’, known from her opera lessons in sixth grade. Her verbal explanation indexically refers to the title of the first film Io sono l’amore. Call Me by Your Name refers to the obviously nostalgic, analeptic, and fragmentary literary narrative of the novel, which presents the process of remembrance of what happened twenty years before alongside with the fragments from the nearer past. Yet the film erases the retrospective narration and blurs the visual signs of nostalgia that permeate the literary narrative. It shows the linear love-story as happening in the diegetic present (in 1983) without any references to the characters’ past and to the places of historical past mentioned in the novel: no mention of Monet’s berm; none of the places associated with Shelley or other poets; no visit to Rome; no San Clemente, etc. However, the last film of the trilogy includes a device similar to the first film’s sound/Kitezh + image/portrait device, which connects the diegetic figure (Emma) with the historical figures of opera singer (Praskovia) and writer (Akhmatova). When Professor Perlman visits Grotte di Catullo and sees the antique statue removed from the water of Lake Garda, he notes, ‘this statue was a gift from Count Lechi to his lover, contralto Adelaide Malanotte. There are four known sets after the Praxiteles originals’. The Professor mentions the great Italian opera singer of the early nineteenth century best known for her title role in Gioachino Rossini’s Tancredi (Gossett 150–51). Since the first film takes its name from a line in the opera, includes a portrait of the opera singer, and names Emma’s husband Tancredi, the repetition of a similar device in the last film forges intertextual links between the last and the first parts of the trilogy. In addition, the sculpture, which similarly to the portrait from the first film ‘freezes’ singing and music, represents the past as a material figurative artefact, as an art object which bridges time and space. Nevertheless, as mentioned above, the way in which Call Me by Your Name configures its hypertextual relationship invites the viewer to activate the modality of hearing, to hear how the soundtrack of the film (re)creates the nostalgic (retrospective) mode of narration through non-diegetic music. The soundtrack includes original songs written and performed by Sufjan Stevens. His ‘Mystery of Love’ and ‘Visions of Gideon’ create a tension with diegetic classical music performed by Elio and diegetic pop music of 1980s. In an interview, Guadagnino explained that the lyrics of Stevens’ songs assume the role more typically assigned to the voice-over. The director ‘wanted to work on a contribution from the standpoint of music that could give the film a precise identity that was going to go beyond the philologic aspect of the ’80s and the commentary music of the classical music’ (Caulfield). In Stevens, Guadagnino ‘was seeking a voice to add itself to the voices of the film—played by the actors playing the characters’ (Caulfield). Thus despite the film-adaptation blurs the visual signs of nostalgic narrative of the novel, its diegetic music configures nostalgic dimension associated to the restorative type of nostalgia. In these ways, the entire trilogy associates nostalgia with an unconventional, especially sensorial perception of art, which in turn becomes an instrument of spatializing time. The filmic discourse inscribes the desire to blur the borders between the senses, to overcome the distance between seeing and hearing as well as the distance between spaces, times, and texts. And the technique of the embodiment of that desire is explained in Aciman’s novel Call Me by Your Name, the literary hypotext for Guadagnino’s eponymous film. In the novel, an essential plot twist occurs during the visit of Elio and Oliver to Rome, which is not shown in the film, when they encounter a fictional poet, the author of ‘Se l’amore’ (‘If love…’) and ‘The San Clemente Syndrome’. The latter poem compares life and love to the Basilica San Clemente in Rome, and the poet’s explanation associates the syndrome with a desperate attempt to summarize different ‘faces’ of identity: ‘who I am when every part of me seems miles and centuries apart and each swears it bears my name’ (Aciman 192). The poet and the novel compare this experience with palimpsestuality, involving the change(ability) of name(s). Basilica San Clemente is described as a multi-layered building that superimposes several historical layers and different persons with the same name Clemente (Clemens), creating an entity that has ‘no first anything, no last anything, just layers and secret passageways and interlocking chambers’ (Aciman 192). The effect of such an experience is shown in a Proustian fragment of the novel that reveals the power of sound perception. In Rome, Elio hears a song and realizes that it was the song of his childhood: the strains of the doleful song stirred such powerful nostalgia for lost loves and for things lost over the course of one’s life and for lives, […] that I was suddenly taken back to a poor, disconsolate universe of simple folk […] of an old Naples whose memory I wanted to share word for word with Oliver now, as if he too, like Mafalda and Manfredi and Anchise and me, were a fellow southerner whom I’d met in a foreign port city and who’d instantly understand why the sound of this old song, like an ancient prayer for the dead in the deadest of languages, could bring tears even in those who couldn’t understand a syllable. (Aciman 206) This passage relates nostalgia to palimpsestuality in a manner that uncovers the differences in how signs such as the Proustian petite madeleine and Aciman’s San Clemente produce meaning. The Proustian sign appeals to personal sensorial experience and provokes an involuntary search for the absent ‘object’ in the personal past. To recall the past, to transfer it to the present, to conjunct the two spaces and time sequences in the flow of time, the sign has to activate the sensorial modality of tasting, smelling, hearing, touching, rather than that of seeing. When activated, it will remain a part of non-transferable, personal experience. In contrast to this individuated response, Aciman’s sign (San Clemente) alters how perception begets remembrance. Aciman’s sign includes seeing as a sensorial modality able to activate the mechanism of memory. It has a more complex, layered structure and is connected to collective rather than strictly personal memory. The music and lyrics trigger a vision of the past, and the visual perception related to the sound becomes the involuntary stimulus for a desire to (voluntarily) share a revival of this past with others. The effect of such multimodal, nostalgic ‘diving into the waters’ of collective cultural memory is also discussed in the novel: I think that all this clementizing […] is quite charming, though I’ve no idea how your metaphor will help us see who we are, what we want, where we’re headed […]. But if the job of poetry, like that of wine, is to help us see double, then I propose another toast until we’ve drunk enough to see the world with four eyes—and, if we’re not careful, with eight. (197) All the devices of literary narrative—its retrospective mode of narration, the ‘images’ it presents, the explanation of their function—reveal that Aciman’s novel narrates a story about nostalgia for love rather than love itself. The novel describes the nostalgic remembrance of love that one desires to share with the Other and explicitly relates this act of remembrance to the perception of art. The perception of oral performance of poetry and song is equated to the perception of architecture and of places that spatially represent artistic activities (e.g., Monet’s berm). Both these encounters involve seeing the past. The film adaptation transforms the devices of the novel by erasing visual traces of the nostalgic narrative and instead framing nostalgia in diegetic songs. In so doing, it changes the story about nostalgia for love into a story of both love for nostalgia and love as nostalgia. Moreover, while erasing the San Clemente basilica/Syndrome from the plot and inscribing the story in the essentially different spatial context connected to the first and the second films of the trilogy, the film proposes the viewer of the trilogy’s whole to experience the San Clemente Syndrome. It shows the swimming pool, a setting of rupture and rapproachement represented in all three films, as a visual analogue of palimpsestual building of the basilica San Clemente. SEEING THE ARCHITEXT The films of the trilogy show a swimming pool8 as (1) an object that bridges or freezes diegetic time and space; (2) a place of vital plot twists; (3) a word that indicates the hypotexts of the second film, both of which are titled La piscine (French for ‘swimming pool’). The change to A Bigger Splash relates the film more obviously to the painting rather than to the earlier film and novel, and it thus becomes a pre-emptive response to the request of the title of the third film to ‘call someone by Other’s name’. It also iconizes the trilogy’s configuration around the ‘absent presence’ of various hypotexts. Hockney himself explained that ‘[w]ater in the swimming pool is different from, say, water in the river, which is mostly a reflection because the water isn’t clear. A swimming pool has clarity. The water is transparent and drawing transparency is an interesting graphic problem’ (qtd. in Sykes 187). Nevertheless, while depicting the splash Hockney does not show what caused it; the transparency of the water he paints does not imply a plainly visible image with an obvious narrative interpretation. And the title of Hockney’s painted splash finally becomes ‘the trace of what is hidden under the water’ of Guadagnino’s discourse, pointing to the film’s place within the trilogy. Hockney created three swimming-pool pictures: The Splash, A Little Splash and A Bigger Splash. As Jones cunningly notes, ‘the title A Bigger Splash is a jokey reference to its place in a group of works’. The trilogy transfers ‘the splash’ to the centre of the three-part construction, establishing its central position by the traits of discourse, rather than by the chronological sequence of the films. It becomes the hierarchical subordinating centre since: it frames the story with a title that hypertextually refers to the core image of the swimming pool, thus embodying the trilogy’s key trait of absent presence; it absorbs and explicates all the (repetitive) devices that are partially shown in the first and third parts of the trilogy; it focuses on rock music, which unites melody with word and visualizes music, yet shows the singer without a voice, creating maximal tension between image and sound; it doubles the motif of ‘a stranger in Italy’, involving refugees on Italian Island as the pivotal plot twist; it places the action on Pantelleria Island as ‘a sort of border place’ (Pulver), encircled by water and opposed to the lands of Lombardy in the first and the last films, thus making the island the (reversed) conceptual analogue of the swimming pool; it locates the action around dammuso: a traditional house from local lava stone with a barrel-shaped roof used for collecting rainwater for the wells (Valussi 167–82); the opening image of this roof with Marianne Lane on it both opposes the roof to the swimming pool shown in the following shots and doubles the image of the swimming pool, making the roof its duplicate without water; it doubles the image of a fish, showing it as an organism (disemboweled and baking in a salt crust) and as a handmade object (the straw fish-lighter under the roof of the terrace); it associates the temporal centre of the plot with the religious feast, which implies the idea of a happy death. Finally, it creates maximal tensions between the fictional and non-fictional figures and faces, between their filmic present and their filmic and historical past. It repeatedly shows the face of Tilda Swinton, who ‘comes from L’amore’s Milano, a city Deray’s Harry (Maurice Ronet) intended but failed to visit because of his deadly encounter with the writer Jean-Paul (Alain Delon). The repetition of Swinton’s face within the whole of the trilogy, which also makes visible the face of the writer Aciman in the last film, creates peculiar hypertextual tensions. The tensions include the change of the writer Jean-Paul (Delon) to photographer-filmmaker Paul, presented as Harry’s gift to Marianne. Such change and presentation remind the ‘deeper doubling’ of the faces of the former Paul and Harry—of the actors Ronet and Delon. They both ‘come to’ Deray’s Piscine from the Plein soleil (Purple Noon) by René Clément (1960) in which Tom (Delon) steals the identity and the name of the murdered Philippe (Ronet), whose drowned body is found attached to the yacht.9 Framing a living human (Paul) as a gift here refers to the actors’ earlier roles10 and unmasks the central discursive device. When A Bigger Splash refers to the actors’ past and embodies the past of the fictional and real persons in the gift-figure of the photographer-filmmaker, it overturns the device used in Io sono l’amore, where both portrait and name refer to real people, and in Call Me by Your Name, where a sculpture from the water refers to a real person and the sculpture’s part (hand/arm) is visually equated to the part of the fictional ‘person’ Oliver (Armie Hammer). The central position of the second film within the trilogy, its title’s reference to a painting, the striking visualization of music, and finally its inner discursive connections with the other parts of the trilogy (Table 3) reveal the discursive model of this three-part structure, a specific architext ‘adapted’ by the trilogy’s whole. While explicitly and implicitly focussing on music, the trilogy finds its architext in the visual art of painting: specifically, the triptych of Christian altar painting. As other types of discourse, modes of enunciation or genres, church triptych presupposes its own conventions of representation and suggests its own strategies of reception. The trilogy unfolds in the manner of an altar triptych as of a ‘painting with doors’ or wings, which ‘structurally embodies the concepts of epiphany and revelation’ (Jacobs 2) and structures the imagery and reception in a specific way. Table 3 Repetitive discursive devices Discursive devices . Io sono l’amore . A Bigger Splash . Call Me by Your Name . Naming devices Emma ← Kitezh (Emma = Kitezh) Marianne Lane Elio Perlman hiding of the name under the portrait (Praskovia the Pearl) Presentation of the family name (Lane), absent from La piscine, names on music records, passports, etc. Presentation of the family name (Perlman), absent from the novel Visual parallelism life = art Human faces = faces of cemetery sculpturesPerson = city (Kitezh) Human faces = outdoor flower pots’ ‘Moorish heads’ Fish= fish-like lighter Human faces = cameos and sculptural faces human bodies = sculptural bodies Markers of the place of action Non-diegetic captions ‘Milano’, ‘Sanremo’, ‘London’Diegetic sound (Russia) Diegetic captions ‘Pantelleria’ (posters in the airport) Non-diegetic caption ‘Somewhere in Northern Italy’ Spatial devices Family villa Recchi ↓ former historical mansion, real museum Villa Necchi Campiglio in Milano Guest villa on Pantelleria ↓ architectural icon of the island, real traditional house (dammuso di Pantelleria) Unnamed family villa ↓ former castle, real historical mansion known as villa Albergoni The lake Svetloyar (by intertextual reference) ↔ swimming pool The sea ↔ swimming pool The lake Garda ↔ swimming pool Framing devices Framing of the characters by door window and mirrors Framing of the characters by mirrors and the car window Framing of the characters by the three-sided mirror Visual representation of music Music records (CD Love) Real and fictional music records (CD and vinyl disc Dead Revolution, Emotional Rescue, etc.), literal embodiment in Harry’s dance Music records (CC, compact tapes, tape recorder), music notation, piano and guitar music performance Spoken languages Italian English Russian Italian English Italian English French German Discursive devices . Io sono l’amore . A Bigger Splash . Call Me by Your Name . Naming devices Emma ← Kitezh (Emma = Kitezh) Marianne Lane Elio Perlman hiding of the name under the portrait (Praskovia the Pearl) Presentation of the family name (Lane), absent from La piscine, names on music records, passports, etc. Presentation of the family name (Perlman), absent from the novel Visual parallelism life = art Human faces = faces of cemetery sculpturesPerson = city (Kitezh) Human faces = outdoor flower pots’ ‘Moorish heads’ Fish= fish-like lighter Human faces = cameos and sculptural faces human bodies = sculptural bodies Markers of the place of action Non-diegetic captions ‘Milano’, ‘Sanremo’, ‘London’Diegetic sound (Russia) Diegetic captions ‘Pantelleria’ (posters in the airport) Non-diegetic caption ‘Somewhere in Northern Italy’ Spatial devices Family villa Recchi ↓ former historical mansion, real museum Villa Necchi Campiglio in Milano Guest villa on Pantelleria ↓ architectural icon of the island, real traditional house (dammuso di Pantelleria) Unnamed family villa ↓ former castle, real historical mansion known as villa Albergoni The lake Svetloyar (by intertextual reference) ↔ swimming pool The sea ↔ swimming pool The lake Garda ↔ swimming pool Framing devices Framing of the characters by door window and mirrors Framing of the characters by mirrors and the car window Framing of the characters by the three-sided mirror Visual representation of music Music records (CD Love) Real and fictional music records (CD and vinyl disc Dead Revolution, Emotional Rescue, etc.), literal embodiment in Harry’s dance Music records (CC, compact tapes, tape recorder), music notation, piano and guitar music performance Spoken languages Italian English Russian Italian English Italian English French German Open in new tab Table 3 Repetitive discursive devices Discursive devices . Io sono l’amore . A Bigger Splash . Call Me by Your Name . Naming devices Emma ← Kitezh (Emma = Kitezh) Marianne Lane Elio Perlman hiding of the name under the portrait (Praskovia the Pearl) Presentation of the family name (Lane), absent from La piscine, names on music records, passports, etc. Presentation of the family name (Perlman), absent from the novel Visual parallelism life = art Human faces = faces of cemetery sculpturesPerson = city (Kitezh) Human faces = outdoor flower pots’ ‘Moorish heads’ Fish= fish-like lighter Human faces = cameos and sculptural faces human bodies = sculptural bodies Markers of the place of action Non-diegetic captions ‘Milano’, ‘Sanremo’, ‘London’Diegetic sound (Russia) Diegetic captions ‘Pantelleria’ (posters in the airport) Non-diegetic caption ‘Somewhere in Northern Italy’ Spatial devices Family villa Recchi ↓ former historical mansion, real museum Villa Necchi Campiglio in Milano Guest villa on Pantelleria ↓ architectural icon of the island, real traditional house (dammuso di Pantelleria) Unnamed family villa ↓ former castle, real historical mansion known as villa Albergoni The lake Svetloyar (by intertextual reference) ↔ swimming pool The sea ↔ swimming pool The lake Garda ↔ swimming pool Framing devices Framing of the characters by door window and mirrors Framing of the characters by mirrors and the car window Framing of the characters by the three-sided mirror Visual representation of music Music records (CD Love) Real and fictional music records (CD and vinyl disc Dead Revolution, Emotional Rescue, etc.), literal embodiment in Harry’s dance Music records (CC, compact tapes, tape recorder), music notation, piano and guitar music performance Spoken languages Italian English Russian Italian English Italian English French German Discursive devices . Io sono l’amore . A Bigger Splash . Call Me by Your Name . Naming devices Emma ← Kitezh (Emma = Kitezh) Marianne Lane Elio Perlman hiding of the name under the portrait (Praskovia the Pearl) Presentation of the family name (Lane), absent from La piscine, names on music records, passports, etc. Presentation of the family name (Perlman), absent from the novel Visual parallelism life = art Human faces = faces of cemetery sculpturesPerson = city (Kitezh) Human faces = outdoor flower pots’ ‘Moorish heads’ Fish= fish-like lighter Human faces = cameos and sculptural faces human bodies = sculptural bodies Markers of the place of action Non-diegetic captions ‘Milano’, ‘Sanremo’, ‘London’Diegetic sound (Russia) Diegetic captions ‘Pantelleria’ (posters in the airport) Non-diegetic caption ‘Somewhere in Northern Italy’ Spatial devices Family villa Recchi ↓ former historical mansion, real museum Villa Necchi Campiglio in Milano Guest villa on Pantelleria ↓ architectural icon of the island, real traditional house (dammuso di Pantelleria) Unnamed family villa ↓ former castle, real historical mansion known as villa Albergoni The lake Svetloyar (by intertextual reference) ↔ swimming pool The sea ↔ swimming pool The lake Garda ↔ swimming pool Framing devices Framing of the characters by door window and mirrors Framing of the characters by mirrors and the car window Framing of the characters by the three-sided mirror Visual representation of music Music records (CD Love) Real and fictional music records (CD and vinyl disc Dead Revolution, Emotional Rescue, etc.), literal embodiment in Harry’s dance Music records (CC, compact tapes, tape recorder), music notation, piano and guitar music performance Spoken languages Italian English Russian Italian English Italian English French German Open in new tab As Lynn F. Jacobs explains, the wings of the triptych presuppose different degrees of opening and configure the structure that shapes the boundaries between the interconnected but distinct panels, different times and spaces of the action, different status of the figures, and distinct states of being. The triptych invites to consider relations between the parts, when it is opened, and between the outside and inside when it is closed. It makes visible transformations of the whole as the degree of opening ‘the doors’ changes and provides a wide variety of views (Jacobs 4–10). Thus, the triptych shapes thresholds, challenges them, and enables manipulations with another threshold – that between the artwork and the viewer. The triptych offers a kinetic and haptic experience of ‘the very process of shifting from one view to another’ (Jacobs 10). Jacobs argues that ‘the format of a “painting with doors” thereby allow[s] fully pictorial works to take on a characteristic of architecture and sculpture and occupy real space (not just create illusionistic space)’ (10). Such a form constitutes narrative as simultaneously dynamic and static, material and dematerialized, haptic and estranged. It appears as an auto-reflexive pattern that inscribes into the mutable structure the references to the modes in which it creates meaning(s). It requires the spectator to recognize the core element of this structure—the thresholds and their intersections—and configure the conceptual simultaneity and changeable wholeness in seeing ‘moving picture(s)’. Guadagnino’s cinematic triptych specifies A Bigger Splash as its central panel and devotes it to rock music and musicians. This ‘panel’ shows all the possible forms and modes of existence for music in film, and configures its relationship with both word and image. When representing music, as if repeating the spatial arrangement of the three-part whole (the Lombardy lands—the island—the Lombardy lands), this filmic triptych surrounds the presentation of rock music with the plain presentation of painting and architecture on the left wing (Io sono l’amore) and antique sculpture and photography on the right (Call Me by Your Name). Nevertheless, it implicitly inscribes opera and literature in both the left wing (L’amore’s Russian opera singer and the writer Akhmatova) and the right (Name’s Italian opera singer and the writer Aciman). Marianne, the singer representing a multimedial musical phenomenon of the conventional present—rock music (interconnecting melody and word), is ‘surrounded’ by the two (hidden ‘under the water’) other singers representing a musical phenomenon of the (conventional) past—opera, combining melody and word. In turn, the depths of this triptych hide a literary word, which becomes the main object of filmic nostalgia. The architextual dialogue of filmic trilogy with church triptych helps to envisage the motif of the Last Supper, which enframes the whole, and explains the vague sacralization of superficially secular stories. The Last Supper provides the scriptural basis for the Eucharist (Holy Communion), and a fish was an early Christian symbol for the Eucharist (Dillenberger 49). As mentioned, the triptych structurally embodies the concept of the epiphany (‘manifestation’) and revelation; in the film, the desacralization of the Last Supper functions as a sign of memory akin to James Joyce’s concept of epiphany. ‘Joyce uses “epiphany” both to describe his records of moments that blend triviality with significance and to designate the revelatory climax of aesthetic apprehension’ (Mahaffey 177). In Joyce’s text, those moments of insight become ‘a point where hitherto disparate observations, thoughts, and desires rearrange themselves into an unsuspected pattern that shatters often long held ideas about one’s self and one’s surroundings’ (Leonard 91). Joyce performs the epiphanic revelation of the spiritual in the actual within the diegetic world of his literary narratives; Guadagnino transfers it to cinema, but performs it, first, on the discursive level, and the modes of this performance are an invitation to use sensations in the process of signification, to hear with the eyes and to see with the ears. His coherent triptych invites one to feel/see/hear/smell and touch fragments of the cultural past, fragments of media ‘languages’, in order to open the deepest layers of filmic meaning(s). This triptych offers the perception of cinema as a ‘Sacrament of the Holy Communion, Eucharist’ through desacralized transubstantiation. The viewers’ acceptance of this invitation or invocation depends on their ability to perceive the ‘dead languages’ or their wish to remember them, and on their textual and sensual empathy. Boym mentioned that ‘[n]ostalgia is paradoxical in the sense that longing can make us more empathetic toward fellow humans’ (xv). Guadagnino’s triptych shows that textual nostalgia can make us more empathetic towards cinema and media traits of transtextual dialogue. CONCLUDING REMARKS The analysis of Guadagnino’s three-part narrative shows how the filmic discourse provokes diverse sensorial experiences, engages the audience in the process of signification, and relates perceptive and signifying practices to the issue of textual identity. These practices indicate the unsteady outlines of (archi)textual identity. The three-part narrative complicates the identity of the characters, multiplies languages, widens the range of references to different cultures and media, confounds the semiotic identity of a media product and its claim(s) to ‘originality’. It sets up borders and erases them, thus blurring the markers of a single-plan (or one definite) identity. By testing the borders of different identities, it configures a multiple identity—appears as the triptych which turns three love-stories into the three-part story of love-as-nostalgia, establishing love as a metaphor for the performative desire of discourse for a tenuous wholeness and continuity. Like Elio and Oliver, the triptych calls different phenomena by the Other’s name and invites the audience to do the same, to inscribe the Other (human, genre, text, medium, etc.) into the continuity of the (textual) self. The appeal to fill the gaps in space and time makes this three-part narrative inherently nostalgic. Discussion of the trilogy also demonstrates how the concepts of multimodality and architextuality can be used productively in adaptation studies.11 These concepts help untangle the transtextual net in order to understand the hypertextual dialogue of a film with its hypotext(s), to conceive how a film inscribes itself into the cultural field and how, in turn, it inscribes that field into its own fibre/texture. Robert Stam defined architextuality as a ‘suggestive’ category for adaptation studies (“Introduction” 31). However, architextuality becomes useful when we avoid reducing it to the ‘generic taxonomies suggested or refused by the titles or subtitles of a text’ (Stam, “Introduction” 30), when it is not conceived as performing the role of assistant in the process of identifying the hypotext, but is rather considered to be a medially sensitive level of a dialogue between the modes and regimes of filmic expression. Architextuality uncovers how the (film) text in question sets up audience expectations, and how it deceives them; it underscores how different media can play with conventions of reception and modes of expression. Architextuality is closely connected to the intermodal perspective, which looks beyond the signification found in narrative differences and tensions to clarify how an adaptation involves the perceptual and sensorial qualities of media in the process of meaning-making. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I gratefully acknowledge the support and valuable comments of Colleen Kennedy-Karpat on the earlier drafts of the essay and wish to thank anonymous reviewers for their feedback. Footnotes 1 Genette considers intertextuality in a restrictive sense, defining it as ‘a relationship of copresence between two texts or among several texts’ (Palimpsests 1), as the explicit or implicit reference of one text to another, the ‘actual presence of one text within another’ (Palimpsests 2). 2 Within the field of literary studies, Genette proposes a spatial category of paratext and a formula paratext = peritexts + epitexts. Peritexts are defined as liminal framing devices within the book (titles, subtitles, chapter titles, prefaces, epigraphs, dedications, notes, etc.), whereas epitexts as located outside the book (interviews, conversations, etc.) (Paratexts 5). A Genettean taxonomy encourages categorizing film credits as peritexts (Klecker). 3 Saint Joseph is considered to be the patron of fathers, happy deaths, and the universal church, and is the patron saint of Sicily (San Giuseppe). According to legend, he prevented a famine, and therefore Sicilians pray for their patron to bring them rain. 4 We can find other cases, such as Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2017) based on Tarel Alvin McCraney’s unpublished play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue (2003), which had been acknowledged as an ‘original’ and an adaptation at the same time (Demory 89–90). 5 A hypertext which refers to a particular autonomous hypotext falls within the category of autographic hypertexts (Genette, Palimpsests 52). 6 An iconic sign presupposes a resemblance that is not equated to visuality. An acoustic music sign is also an iconic sign based on another (sound) kind of resemblance or likeness. 7 Io sono l’amore places the action in a real museum—the art gallery at the Villa Necchi Campiglio, which becomes the fictitious Recchi mansion. Almost all the paintings shown in the film belong to the permanent collection of the Villa Necchi museum, including two still-life paintings by Giorgio Morandi and a genre painting by Fausto Pirandello, Donne che se pettinano. The portrait used for the film’s posters, marked out by close-ups and introduced as Tancredi’s wedding gift to Emma, appears to be an exception. It was created by the Russian serf painter Nicholai I. Argunov and belongs to the temporary exhibition of the Kuskovo Estate Museum in Russia. 8 Interestingly, the actual historical mansion in Moscazzano has no swimming pool, and, as Lawrence notes, ‘art director Roberta Federico built the trough (a de facto swimming pool […]), sourcing recycled stone from the nearby Bianchessi warehouse and painting it to look 300 years old’ (Lawrence). 9 The decorative models of a yacht and a ship under the ceiling of Penelope’s room attract her attention. The film accentuates them with close-ups. 10 It is worth mentioning that Tancredi’s role in Luchino Visconti’s Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963), to which Io sono l’amore also refers, was also performed by Alain Delon. 11 For the discussion of adaptation within the framework of intermediality as intermodality, see Elleström (“Adaptation and Intermediality”); for the discussion of genre (i.e., architextual) aspects of adaptation, see Leitch. REFERENCES A Bigger Splash . Dir. Luca Guadagnino, Studio Canal, Frenesy Film, Cota Film. Italy, France, 2015 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Aciman , André. Call Me by Your Name . London : Atlantic Books , 2007 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Benwell , Bethan , and Elizabeth Stokoe. Discourse and Identity . Edinburgh : Edinburgh UP , 2006 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Boym , Svetlana. The Future of Nostagia . 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TI - Nostalgia, Adaptation, and (Textual) Identity: Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Desire Trilogy’
JF - Adaptation
DO - 10.1093/adaptation/apaa003
DA - 2020-11-21
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/nostalgia-adaptation-and-textual-identity-luca-guadagnino-s-desire-fWjdDoqY5R
SP - 378
EP - 396
VL - 13
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -