Event
Tarkovsky's Hoffmanniana: The Screenplay as 'nicht realisierten' Palimpsest
In academic study of film adaptations, comparisons between literary source texts and their manifestation on the screen abound, yet the screenplay developed between these two extremes is often overlooked, in Jack Boozer's vivid words, as "merely a skeletal blueprint." My talk will address this in-between space through an exploration of Andrei Tarkovsky's nicht realisierten" Hoffmanniana, a screenplay that was reworked over the course of a decade, yet never filmed. Through a close look at Tarkovsky's engagement with his source texts (E. T. A. Hoffmann's writings and biography), and especially the curious way in which he uses large amounts of Hoffmann's own writing, I will examine how this modern form of a palimpsest actually operates as a stabilized locus of change worthy of its own study.