Context in film adaptations

All material supplied via JYX is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, and duplication or sale of all or part of any of the repository collections is not permitted, except that material may be duplicated by you for your research use or educational purposes in electronic or print form. You must obtain permission for any other use. Electronic or print copies may not be offered, whether for sale or otherwise to anyone who is not an authorised user. Context in film adaptations Vallittu, Marjo

put forward by Hutcheon.I also use Brian McFarlane's theory, as it provides a cultural frame of reference.As it seems impossible to provide a universal defi nition of what happens in the process -that is, what factually is adapted -I limit my analysis of contextuality to the perspective of reception.The diff erences in reception reveal a lot about the diff erences in and between both the media and the context.
In what follows, I use the Finnish movie Vodkaa, komisario Palmu ( Vodka, Mr. Palmu ;1969) as a case study to test my hypothesis regarding the context and reception of fi lm adaptations.This movie is the last in a series of four movies, directed by Matti Kassila (1960Kassila ( , 1961Kassila ( , 1962Kassila ( , 1969)), based on the characters and fi ctional world created by Mika Waltari.Vodka, Mr. Palmu is a suitable example for this study, since its reception has changed throughout the decades.Most of all, it has also been received quite diff erently than all the other works in the series, of which it is nonetheless considered to be an essential part.It is also an exceptional fi lm adaptation because, unlike the fi rst three Palmu movies, it is based not on a single novel but on all the earlier works in the series.

Interpreting film adaptations
In order to analyse how context infl uences fi lm adaptation, one has fi rst to accept a defi nition of adaptation.The contemporary defi nition seeks to crystallize the way the story is transformed when it is adapted from one sign system into another.In this process, Hutcheon points out, change is inevitable.For example, in creating a work based on a historical event or a person's life, the authentic events cannot be reproduced.Instead, the audience always receives them in a mediated form.For the audience, fi lm is adaptable material, like a text, and the events are re-enacted both in their memories and in a new medium .
A work is usually shown or told, but audiences can also be parts of it.Observing these three perspectives of narration, we notice phenomena that cannot be recognized just by observing the medium itself.We move from the formal defi nition centred on the medium to observe the whole process of adaptation; for the receivers, the readings are conducted not in a void but within their own personal context (see .This personal context, the director's context and the temporal context form a signifi cant part of the context that exists outside the textual world.
According to Hutcheon, adaptation can be considered in three distinct stages: as a formal entity or product, as the process of creation and as the process of reception.Transcoded works are part of the fi rst category.CONTEXT IN FILM ADAPTATIONS In these works, adaptation is executed by changing the medium, genre, frame and thereby the context.These changes may also be about drawing a line between fi ction and fact, the inside and outside infl uences of the textual world.The process of creation always requires reinterpretation and recreation, whereas the process of reception has to do with intertextuality.Interpreting a work, we compare it to all the works we know and to our own knowledge of the real world .
This idea of the story being connected to the medium is related to the idea of context.The medium forms an intertextual context for the story and this association is often related to a genre.In other words, changing the frame can be understood as changing the medium, changing the genre and, therefore, changing the context.For example, in traditional literature and fi lm, genre infl uences the representation of the story.When the author or the director changes the genre, something is bound to change in the context of reception.The audience expects the narration and the story to be diff erent in, for example, romantic and horror movies.The change can also be seen in the expectations regarding the reception of the work.For example, the Palmu movie is interpreted as a detective story but also as a Palmu work.Each part of a series participates in the creation of interpretational expectations, which the author and director of new instalments can seek to subvert.
Hutcheon proposes that the director of an adaptation is primarily an interpreter who fi lters the text and creates a new piece of work.In this way, the director is part of the audience.If the audience knows the source text, they can consider the adaptation in terms of its intertextual connections to other texts.The audience is able to 'overwrite' a work intertextually because the recognition of connections with other works is part of its formal and hermeneutic identity .This controls the background noise (Hinds 19) -that is, all the intertextual parallels the receivers can connect to the work.The audience is also, unintentionally, under the infl uence of the intertextual context, which forms a significant part of the textual world.The dialogical process between the texts is ongoing (Stam 64).Adaptation is full of these visible and invisible quotations (Hutcheon 21).There are usually more than two texts related to a single adaptation.
The context within which the piece of work is interpreted -that is, the correspondence through which it can be understood -is versatile, allowing the audience and the director to make diff erent interpretations.For the audience to be able to understand the director's interpretation, they need to understand his context and the temporal context of the movie's execution.In other words, multiple concurrent contexts can be, and usually are, present in reception.Contextual research focuses on text relation, co-texts and, in a broader sense, the cultural context: on fi guring out the relationship between form and meaning (Heikkinen 88-9).The co-texts that surround a piece of work form an intertextual context, which relates to the larger cultural context through its temporal and spatial aspects.I argue that contexts are combined in this way and are as such dualistic, since a text is always shaped by the context it simultaneously reforms Heikkinen 89).Segmentation between the textual world and the world around it is not trouble-free either.A dualistic relationship between the context and the text is often interpreted in Bakhtinian terms as dialogic, emphasizing the number of ways the worlds are linked to and interact with each other (Stam 64-5).The analysis of fi lm adaptations brings this aspect of adaptation to the fore in a fruitful way.Adaptations, after all, consist of at least two works that are linked both to each other and to the outside world.

Cultural code and contexts: outside the texts
The spatiality of a movie and the linearity of a novel are divergent, and adaptation has to take this into account.McFarlane has sought to understand this phenomenon by introducing 'codes' to the theory of adaptation.The fi rst code is called linguistic and it includes accents and tones.It can be used to create an image of a character, his social status and temperament.The second code is called the visual code and it is as important an element in adaptation as the non-linguistic sound eff ects such as music.And fi nally, there is the cultural code -that is, the awareness of how life is lived and how it has been lived.The basic assumption is that the receiver will recognize the cultural code included in the adaptation .It can be linked to Hutcheon's (145-9) 'transcultural adaptation' and broadened from covering the temporal context into encompassing the textual world -that is, to including communication.A literary work has often been considered as one-way communication and thereby as missing the precise frame of reference for its reception, which explains the variety of interpretations it allows (Brax 126).Alastair Fowler has stated that redundancy is one of the main elements of reducing distraction in communication produced by ambiguity (20-2).
I interpret McFarlane's codes, especially the cultural code, as showing us how the outside world infl uences the interpretation of the textual world.The audience compares the story to their own cultural code and the cultural 163 CONTEXT IN FILM ADAPTATIONS codes they are familiar with.The cultural code connects the story to the contexts outside the textual world, showing how context infl uences interpretation.Adding Fowler's idea of genre as a reducer of redundancy to this type of understanding of the cultural code creates a framework of reception that takes into account both the historical and textual frameworks (20-2).
This can be seen in the reception of the Palmu movies.The last movie, Vodka, Mr. Palmu (1969) initially received largely negative reviews, but this has changed and it has since been interpreted as an essential part of the series and a fi tting image of its time.For example, the temporal distance renders the political satire in the narration quite easy for us to understand, while in 1960s Finland the situation was clearly much more diffi cult to interpret neutrally.
To put it simply, in a series of fi lm adaptations the cultural code is related to context in multiple ways.Texts are exposed to many infl uences, observes Keskinen , and those infl uences can be called contexts.Meanings are always formed in relation to something and meaning is always fastened to a context.A completely unreferential text would be unintelligible, because it could not utilize a natural language, which always has a reference to the world.Nevertheless, a text is autonomous and, for example, a detective story is partly formed as such by being read as one.Texts always contain references to the outside world but they come across as independent because of the sentiments of the readers and the properties of the language they utilize (Keskinen 97-100).
In a global and modern, shattered world, the cultural code of a text is not always easy to recognize.Emphasis could therefore be laid on the meaning of the cultural space formed inside the text (Pietil ä inen 127-8).'A work of fi ction is produced within a specifi c cultural nexus.Yet once it exists, the novel becomes a discrete context within which subsequent productions in that cultural nexus can be understood.In other words, a literary text projects its culture as forcefully as it refl ects its sources' (Urgo xi).In the case of the Palmu works, this can be seen within the textual context: as the series are formed, they also form their own textual context.The last Palmu movie can be received both independently and as a part of the series.The formation of the series may also change the reception of the earlier works by changing the textual context.

Cultural code and contexts: inside the texts
The context or contexts inside the textual world are particularly important for fi lm adaptations, since adaptations are closely related to intertextuality, and intertextuality is by defi nition a part of the textual world.In this section, I focus on the contexts inside the textual world.Hutcheon thinks that the essence of adaptation boils down to two diff erent sign systems that can be observed in all the elements of a story, such as themes, consequences, context, world, perspective, motivations (10).These elements are mainly part of the inside context of texts, but as objects of infl uence they point outside it.Hutcheon emphasizes that a story does not only conform to the presentation and the rules of structure, but it always includes narrative expectations and a communicative narrative.Time, place, society and culture are important signifi ers in interpreting fi ctional texts, because the contexts of reception and creation are cultural, personal, aesthetic, public, economic and material (26-8).Simply put, it is important to pay attention to contextuality and intertextuality in adaptation theories.McFarlane has also criticized the theories of adaptation that remain oblivious to these issues, since while watching a movie, one has to pay attention to both the cinematic conventions and the text on which the adaptation is based.He prefers the term 'extra-novelistic infl uences' to refer to the connection between a movie and a novel (200-2).
I call this connection the textual context the fi lm adaptation has created around itself.The textual context is a combination of the texts, often a novel and a movie, and the context created by the adaptation process that surrounds the works.This shows why the two texts are connected while remaining independent.The intertextual context, the director's context and the temporal context all have an outside infl uence on the fi lm adaptation.The textual context is the primary context created from the inside.This means that all the other contexts are secondary, merely touching upon the textual context and the works involved in the adaptations.The textual context shows that in a fi lm adaptation there is a connection between the two works.It could be conceived of as an association understood by the audience and is related to the idea of movie series, as was mentioned earlier regarding the Palmu movies.The two works are understood as having a strong connection, although for example the genre, style, plot, medium and narration may have changed.The connection is stronger than a series of intertextual references and it concerns both form and meaning, yet it is impossible to defi ne what precisely is adapted.In this respect, transfers, in which the essential elements remain the same, are less complicated than proper adaptations (McFarlane 23-7).
The textual context is, however, not equivalent to fi delity.It is merely a connection, a consensus, that the fi lm adaptation process 165 CONTEXT IN FILM ADAPTATIONS creates around itself.A movie can be at the same time 'faithful' and 'free', and it deserves the interpretative frameworks that suit its medium (Carroll 34-5).It is not always easy to tell adaptation apart from intertextuality, since adaptations can involve intertextuality and even meta-adaptation, while intertextuality can involve adaptive elements.Researchers may ask how far from the source text the adaptation can be removed before it is better considered in terms of intertextuality.How does the audience understand that they are witnessing an adaptation?Do they need to be conscious of interpreting an adaptation?Since the two pieces of work involved in adaptation are independent, it should be possible to understand them separately.For example, the last Palmu movie (1969) contains several cameo roles, and another was planned for an earlier instalment but never executed.Cameos are therefore part of the Palmu narration for the director but not for the audience.Some members of the audience might recognize the cameos in Vodka, Mr. Palmu and some of them might not.Nevertheless, they can all interpret the movie and enjoy it.To understand the adaptation process as I have described it, however, requires an understanding of the textual context of the movie.
In fi lm adaptation research, the main focus is often on form and meaning .Adaptation theory holds that in fi ctional texts, literature and movies, a story is formed inside the medium, which changes in adaptations.A story is represented by a text, and meaning is understood through the context by decoding the cultural code embedded in the text (see McFarlane 19-29, Hutcheon 33-7).The form, the text, itself is actually creating a context for the story, whether it is a novel or a movie.Therefore, the medium of the story, the focus of fi lm adaptations, can create new meanings by itself and also through its new context.
Adaptation forms its own textual context as the work is created and it refl ects the existing intertextual context.Particularly in a movie series, the earlier works in the series form the textual context together with the work in question.The textual context of a movie also refl ects the temporal and cultural context of its time of production (Hutcheon 28).Meaning is thus generally understood by understanding the context, which enables the understanding of what McFarlane calls cultural codes.Interpreting a movie does not require that one understands the cultural code of the author, the director or the time of its production.An interpretation that reproduces the intentions of the author or the director is in no way superior to one that does not.In fact, the text does not produce the subject but the subject produces the text, and the reader can also choose to ignore any possible interpretative clues included in the work of art.Also, the object of reception is often obscure (Kovala 186-7).In other words, there are no wrong interpretations.In researching the understanding of a context, interpretation is combined with the cultural context around and inside the textual world.Therefore, the textual context cannot be separated from the cultural context outside it.This can be illustrated with a diagram ( Figure 11.1 ).Dudley Andrew has linked the context of movies and fi lm theory to eras, styles, cultures and subjects ( 16).McFarlane takes this idea further as he writes about the intertextual contextuality of adaptations (McFarlane 200-2; see also Cardwell 66).According to McFarlane, all narrative movies are part of certain cinematic traditions, and because adaptations rely on the principles of intertextuality, both cultural autonomy and the adaptation process have to be recognized when researching them.
Umberto Eco states that the concept of story ( fabula ) is complex because the audience can, according to its ability of abstraction, recognize and form the story on diff erent levels.This allows us simultaneously to observe several isotopic stories -that is, stories that equal each other structurally (Eco 28).This brings to the fore the reader and the viewer as well as their contexts.Martin Wallace (29-30) has proposed a communicative model of narration, according to which the narrator and the narration are situated between, on the one hand, the social context and the cultural conventions, and, on the other, formal, analytical frames for disciplines, such as linguistics and literary studies.These can aff ect the author and the director as well as the receiver,  142,[148][149][150].For example, social context obviously indicates gender, age, education and basically all the surroundings that may aff ect the interpretation.
These cultural conventions are related to Roland Barthes's (19-20) fi ve well-known codes.(1) The hermeneutic code refers to an element of the story that is not completely explained.Containing gaps, it appears as a mystery to the reader.(2) The proairetic code forms a tension: it refers to actions or events indicating that something else will happen.This tension makes the reader guess what this something might be.(3) The semantic code refers to the kind of connotations in the story that produce meanings, which complement the basic denotative meanings of words.(4) The symbolic code resembles the semantic code but expands the semantic meanings into broader and deeper sets of meanings, thereby acting on a wider level.The last one, ( 5), the cultural code, refers to anything founded on unchangeable canonical works, which are assumed to be the foundation for truth.Barthes's cultural code therefore equals McFarlane's intertextual contextuality -'extra-novelistic infl uences' .
As was stated earlier, according to McFarlane's cultural code the basic assumption is that the receiver and the sender share an understanding of the world.This is related to what Roman Jakobson (66-71) has called the referential function of language, as it refers to the connections between the audience and all its surroundings.It also alludes to Barthes's cultural code, as it indicates the parsing of the text through other texts in a form of intertextuality.This could broaden McFarlane's cultural code to cover not only the understanding of how life is and was lived but also the idea of intertextuality and the literary canon.The basic idea of adaptation is that the works are distinctive and independent, but they are always exposed to the influence of other works.
Jakobson's idea of poetic function (66-71) confi rms the connection between the cultural code and the intertextual context.The poetic function refers to text itself and therefore the elements of fi ction -elements that senders, the author or the director, know from other texts.They are familiar with the literature and movie canon and expect this from the receiver too.For example, Mika Waltari's Palmu novels have a fi rst-person narrator who is also the fi ctional writer of the novels.This narrator often refers to himself as the author and it is expected that the reader understands this element of narration through other novels and is familiar with the idea of a narrator being present in multiple roles and diff erent timeframes.This kind of a narrator is rarely found in movies and therefore a movie audience will not expect a movie to utilize one.
In what follows, I try out the ideas of multiple contexts and textual context as they have been defi ned above.I use Matti Kassila's last Palmu movie, Vodka, Mr. Palmu , as a case study because it is the last part of the Palmu series and its reception diff ers from that of the other instalments.I claim that the diff erence is mainly an outgrowth of the changes in the textual context.The audience sees the changes in the textual context as it seeks to understand the movie, but their context for interpretation is the one formed in the adaptations of the earlier works in the series.

Case study: Vodka, Mr. Palmu 's contexts
The understanding of certain references in the Palmu works requires knowledge of the cultural context of Finland in the 1930s, 1940s and 1960s.All works in the Palmu series are detective stories and they share many elements, such as the main characters, the milieu and the director.Nevertheless, in the last movie the narration has changed, as the rhythm is more intensive than earlier, and new types of characters are included.
Vodka, Mr. Palmu has many features typical of spy movies of the cold war era, and the makers themselves considered it to be a spy movie.The movie begins with the discovery of the body of a left-wing news reporter in the grounds of a mansion where discussions between Soviet and Finnish business negotiators are taking place.The dead reporter is clutching the wristband of the kind worn by National Socialist stalwarts.This wristband belongs to his murderer, a character who had a real-life counterpart.Palmu, a retired police inspector, is recruited to solve the crime unoffi cially.The public broadcasting company of Finland, Yleisradio, acting under the Finnish government, provides the milieu for the movie, and the social democrat minister and future president of Finland, Mauno Koivisto, has a small cameo role.In the end, a Soviet agent helps to catch the culprits.
The contemporary reception of Vodka, Mr. Palmu considered the movie to have too much to do with television, particularly Yleisradio (see e.g.Etel ä p ä ä ).It was considered too political and too positive about the Soviet Union.Already in the 1960s, but especially from the 1970s onwards, critics have compared it with the other movies in the series (Kejonen; Malmi; R ö mp ö tti; Uusitalo).This shows that the understanding of the textual context has changed over the course of time.It should CONTEXT IN FILM ADAPTATIONS also be noted that the context of the audience had changed by the time the movie was broadcast on television, and therefore it was embedded in the everyday diff erently than it had been in the 1960s, when the fi rst generation of critics saw it in the cinema.The Palmu works and the connection between them were interpreted diff erently after a while, and they were more consistently seen as a series: the Palmu series formed a consensus that could be interpreted as an ensemble.
The last Palmu movie did not have the same timeless feel to it as the earlier ones: the fi rst movie, Komisario Palmun erehdys ( Inspector Palmu's Error ;1960), was an epoch story, like the novel of the same name in Finnish ( Inspector Palmu's Mistake in English; 1940).The cultural code therefore includes understanding the cultural heritage (Childs 89-100) in a broader way than it needs to be understood in relation to other Palmu movies.In the second movie, Kaasua, komisario Palmu! ( Gas, Inspector Palmu! ;1961), based on the novel Kuka murhasi rouva Skrofi n? ( Who Murdered Mrs. Skrof? ;1939), the time of the events is not specifi ed, but the novel T ä hdet kertovat, komisario Palmu ( It Is Written in the Stars, Inspector Palmu! ;1962), and the movie based on it, of the same name in Finnish ( The Stars Will Tell, Inspector Palmu in English;1962), contain recognizable societal elements, such as youth gangs.Their activity still appeared as innocent and marginal but it refl ected the rise of youth culture in the 1950s and 1960s.This shows that the textual context had started to change, and not least because of the changes in the cultural code and the temporal context, but the later audiences tried nonetheless to utilize the same textual context in interpreting all the Palmu works.One fi lm critic even stated that the second and third movies of the series share the same problem, which is the abrupt change of genre about halfway through the movie (Uusitalo).
Vodka, Mr. Palmu was the fi rst distinctly political instalment in the Palmu series.The evident politics in the movie are related to the genre, the changes of which are caused by the intertextual, temporal, textual and director's contexts.The political atmosphere is shown in the plot, as in the last three Palmu works the identity of the murderer remains secret for a long time.This enables the motive for the murder to be interpreted as political or societal.The fi rst four Palmu works -that is, the fi rst two novels and their movies -are relatively typical locked-room mysteries in which the murderer is familiar to the victim and the motive is personal.At the end of Vodka, Mr. Palmu , the motive of the murder is revealed to have been personal, a love triangle, but the narrative tension is built on prominent political symbols that lead the audience to assume that the murder was political.The director's context, the cultural space, and the temporal and textual contexts should be linked in the interpretation of the last Palmu movie.The series of Palmu works has a variable textual context.The series is obviously a textual context in itself and the movies and novels made at the same time -that is, the intertextual context -aff ect both the textual context and the cultural space.In 1940s Finland, the cinema audiences started to shrink, a development that peaked in the 1960s (Toiviainen 11-2).The advent of the new Finnish movie in the 1960s and the 1970s was a turning-point that saw big changes in the fi nancing system and the emergence of a new generation of directors (12-23).Matti Kassila had directed since 1949, and his experience can be seen in the Palmu movies, which were quite traditional Finnish movies.Despite the undervaluation of detective stories, the movies were diligently made and combined different techniques, humour and crime (Toiviainen 11-23, 122-3).Young directors wanted the movies to represent society and the people instead of just entertaining their audiences.The acknowledgement of this demand can be seen in the satirization of politics in the last Palmu movie.The director, Matti Kassila, has said that he tried to express this demand through satire but failed to do so (Kassila, Interview), and part of the audience ended up interpreting the movie as distinctively political.The cultural code was therefore somewhat unclear to the audience -the expression of the satire was too subtle and in contradiction of the director's context.The last Palmu movie can thereby be interpreted as taking an ironic stance towards both the era and the director himself, involved as he was in the political discussions of the late 1960s and the early 1970s.Also, the context of the author, Mika Waltari, changed during the series of Palmu novels.Publishing the last Palmu novel in 1962, Waltari possessed the honorary title of an academician, and a number of coeval critics considered it to be of inferior quality to that expected of someone of his stature (e.g.Korjus).Detective stories were not valued in the 1930s or 1940s either, when the two fi rst Palmu novels were published, but they met with less negative reception as the prolifi c author's eminence was not yet offi cially acknowledged and his early works had been considered courageous; he therefore wrote the fi rst Palmu manuscript under a pseudonym.
These aspects are only nominally linked to the change of genre and cultural and temporal context in Vodka, Mr. Palmu .Although the last Palmu movie diff ers from the others, it is considered to be a part of the series.Joel Rinne recreated the role of Inspector Palmu and his nephew had a small part in the movie.This nephew, Teemu Rinne, later wrote a Palmu novel called Kuvat kertovat: Palmu, murharyhm ä (2003), but CONTEXT IN FILM ADAPTATIONS this novel is not usually considered to be a part of the Palmu series.The protagonist of the novel is Palmu's nephew and the events take place in a well-known Palmu milieu, Helsinki.Although the novel has an intertextual connection to the Palmu series, it is considered to be neither an adaptation nor a part of the series.The connection among the diff erent instalments of the Palmu series is formed by the textual context the works themselves create.For example, the aforementioned references to the political situation can be understood just by knowing the textual context of the works and the cultural code of their respective eras.

Conclusion
Finally, the contexts that mainly aff ect fi lm adaptations fall into two diff erent categories: those that aff ect the processes outside the textual world and those that aff ect the processes inside it.
McFarlane's ideas of cultural code have to do with understanding the context of worlds.The context outside the textual world includes the temporal context of the works, the cultural space, or 'cultural nexus' (Urgo xi), and the author's or director's context.The audience ultimately creates the cultural space through the interpretation of the cultural space of the work, the author or the director.To interpret intentions successfully, the audience needs to understand both the cultural code of the work and the context of either the author or the director.Nevertheless, texts can be understood within the cultural space.I extended the cultural code by supplementing it with the idea of intertextual context.
The intertextual context is formed both by other works published at the same time and the series of works the story belongs to.In my view, this context is inside the textual world, which it simultaneously creates through its dualistic nature.The textual context is the core context formed inside the adaption process, which connects the works involved in adaptation.It includes, for example, McFarlane's extra-novelistic infl uences, which connect the novel and the movie despite the changes in the medium, the story and the temporal context.
In my view, all the contexts are connected to the story and the reception, but other contexts only touch upon the textual context.The reader of the novel and the audience of the movie create their own contexts and have a multifarious understanding of other contexts, but the textual context remains the core factual context of fi lm adaptations.The audience does not need to be conscious of the adaptation process to come up with an interpretation, but then again, they are not aware of the textual context either.The case study of the movie Vodka, Mr. Palmu reveals that the textual context may change over the course of time as the initially varied perceptions of the series develop and eventually converge.The changes in narration and the temporal context aff ect the opinions of contemporary critics, and when the last Palmu movie was shown in television, the emphasis was already on the series instead of the individual movie.The movie was interpreted through the same textual context as the earlier Palmu works, although the textual context had changed every time a new novel or movie was produced.The dualistic nature of the textual world is also seen in this disposition of fi lm adaptations: other works infl uence the textual context, which aff ects the reception of other works.

Figure 11 . 1
Figure 11.1 The circle of reception and interpretation.Illustration by the author.