Literary adaptations and filmic narration in Turkish cinema

This study undertakes the literary works especially ?adaptation? films that appeared as a result of the use of novels as source texts from the beginning of the cinema. The aim of this study is to put forth the transference process of a narration from one narrative level to another, and to clarify the discussions and views related with the fidelity of adaptations to source texts. The adaptation concept was defined, and generation and development of adaptation on cinema were considered in the first section of study. Moreover, the relation between cinema and literature, especially between film and novel is discussed in this section. On the other hand, this section studies the views on adaptations and theoretical works. And also, fidelity criticism for adaptations is mentioned; the concept of ?fidelity? is explained; and the fidelity of the cinema to literature is discussed carefully. The second section includes an overview on adaptation convention for the aspect of the Turkish Cinema and also makes the formal criticism of two novels in Turkish Literature written in the genres of social realism and magical realism and the adaptations of these novels to the Turkish Cinema. One of the works selected for analysis is Yılanların Öcü, written in Social Realism style by Fakir Baykurt and adapted to cinema by Metin Erksan. The second one is Agır Roman written in Magical Realism genre by Metin Kaçan and adapted to cinema by Mustafa Altıoklar. During theese analyses, formal criticism method, which was applied by David Bordwell in his work, Film Art: An Introduction, for the analysis of cinema productions, was used. As a result of the studies, it is seen that narrative components of adaptations forming the novels are eliminated in respect of some aspects and they are recreated. These eliminations including the components such as story, plot, main events on novel, characters, time, place and dialog formation are harmonized with the creative competence of director; transferred to cinema language under the frame of cinema rules; and translated to the narrative level of cinema. The study proved the irrelevancy of the fidelity discussions of cinema to novel -they both have different narrative languages- by stating the creational and technical differences between film and novel. The study also showed the unjust attitude in evaluating novels -which were created through a very complicated process- only through the criteria of fidelity criticism. Key Words 1 - Cinema 2 - Adaptation 3 - Formal Criticism 4 - Social Realism 5 - Magical Realism