Netflix’s recent announcement that it had acquired the rights for the first screen adaptation of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” the classic novel by Gabriel García Márquez, has provoked an international controversy. Is it acceptable to adapt a work that its author, who died in 2014, did not want to take to the big screen?
Other classics, from “The Odyssey” to “Hamlet" to “War and Peace,” have been brought to film and television with varying degrees of success. Like them, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” published in 1967, has a life that extends beyond the printed page. It has inspired songs and ballets, an opera and a play, dozens of paintings, an exclusive Japanese drink, and even the name of an offshore oil platform. Now its time has come for a screen adaptation. The author’s children, Gonzalo, a graphic designer and editor, and Rodrigo, a film and TV director, will be the executive producers of the Netflix series.
The crux of the matter is that the adaptation of the novel can now benefit from changes in the modes of creation, production and circulation of audiovisual materials. Today, directors and writers have more creative freedom to tell stories that do not need to bend to Hollywood standards to be successful. Thanks to the algorithms used to track user activity, content production is driven by data about what the public views and how they view it, and consumers can watch recommended content wherever and whenever they like.
Netflix, with its nearly 140 million subscribers, leads many of these changes. Therefore, the most important debate is not to speculate on the quality of the future “One Hundred Years of Solitude” series or its faithfulness to the novel, but to analyze how the global distribution of the series in more than 190 countries can give new life to the stories of Macondo and the Buendía family. The success of the “Narcos” series and the feature film “Roma” prove that there is a market hungry for stories based in Latin America.
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” never lacked suitors for its adaptation to the cinema screen. The author’s correspondence reveals that he received offers even before winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Contrary to popular belief, he did not reject the offers because of a distrust of cinema, which was in fact one of his professional passions. In 1963, two years before starting to write this novel, he worked as a film screenwriter in Mexico City. He was doing so well that in a letter that year he told his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza that he pictured himself soon working in Hollywood.
It was thanks to cinema that García Márquez learned to unite magic and reality, two fundamental elements of “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” He used many cinematographic tricks and techniques when writing it. And he did so from the first page: The moment when Colonel Aureliano Buendía stands before the firing squad ends in a flashback, to when he first touched ice as a child and Macondo was only a small village.
What did cause the writer some consternation about adapting his novel was determining which audiovisual format was best suited to convey the stories of Macondo. He knew that such a work could not be compressed into a few hours. Therefore, what he actually opposed was any adaptation with a feature film format. García Márquez had more trust in television’s narrative possibilities. In 1989, he told The New York Times that with TV “in one night you can reach 10 million viewers and that’s the idea — to reach that audience with ideas and quality.” He knew that “One Hundred Years of Solitude” had that potential. When the actor Anthony Quinn was interested in adapting it, he told the writer that the novel would be “ideal for a 50-hour television serial.”
All literary classics share an ability to reinvent themselves generation after generation, but each classic has its own challenges for screen adaptation. A respectful adaptation must consider details such as local speech and culture, translated into a more universal dimension for a global audience. Otherwise, the series will fall flat, as did the adaptations of his books “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” and “Love in the Time of Cholera.”
The lack of dialogue in “One Hundred Years of Solitude" is one of the most complex technical obstacles. Dialogue makes up only 5 percent of the book. Characters rarely exchange more than three sentences in a row, buried in pages and pages of narration. In his writing of the novel, the author eliminated many phrases from the final text that could be rescued to resolve some of the difficulties of adaptation. Omissions include characters, paragraphs, images and even dialogue that could be heard onscreen for the first time.
Another key challenge is how to tell the story. In the novel, linear time — from the founding of Macondo until its disappearance — is intermingled with cyclical time: The names of the characters and their tragedies are repeated. In addition to its unmistakable poetic prose and magical realism, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is a very sensory work. Is it possible to bring to the screen dozens of scents, like the fragrance that tormented the men seduced by Remedios the Beauty; flavors, like the taste of the substance that freed the inhabitants of Macondo from the plague of insomnia; and textures, like when Aureliano Buendía touched ice for the first time?
If anything affirms the transformation of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” into a series, it is the unstoppable power of the classics to enter our lives through formats that are entirely different from those established by their creators. As for the catastrophic predictions about its adaptation by Netflix, the reality is that no classic has lost that distinction because of a bad adaptation. On the contrary, the announcement that “One Hundred Years of Solitude” will become a series has reverberated throughout the world, only reinforcing its standing.
Álvaro Santana-Acuña is a sociology professor at Whitman College and is working on a book about how “One Hundred Years of Solitude” became a classic. This essay was translated from the Spanish by Erin Goodman.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
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Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ in the Time of Netflix
Opinion | ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ in the Time of Netflix
Netflix’s recent announcement that it had acquired the rights for the first screen adaptation of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” the classic novel by Gabriel García Márquez, has provoked an international controversy. Is it acceptable to adapt a work that its author, who died in 2014, did not want to take to the big screen?
Other classics, from “The Odyssey” to “Hamlet" to “War and Peace,” have been brought to film and television with varying degrees of success. Like them, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” published in 1967, has a life that extends beyond the printed page. It has inspired songs and ballets, an opera and a play, dozens of paintings, an exclusive Japanese drink, and even the name of an offshore oil platform. Now its time has come for a screen adaptation. The author’s children, Gonzalo, a graphic designer and editor, and Rodrigo, a film and TV director, will be the executive producers of the Netflix series.
The crux of the matter is that the adaptation of the novel can now benefit from changes in the modes of creation, production and circulation of audiovisual materials. Today, directors and writers have more creative freedom to tell stories that do not need to bend to Hollywood standards to be successful. Thanks to the algorithms used to track user activity, content production is driven by data about what the public views and how they view it, and consumers can watch recommended content wherever and whenever they like.
Netflix, with its nearly 140 million subscribers, leads many of these changes. Therefore, the most important debate is not to speculate on the quality of the future “One Hundred Years of Solitude” series or its faithfulness to the novel, but to analyze how the global distribution of the series in more than 190 countries can give new life to the stories of Macondo and the Buendía family. The success of the “Narcos” series and the feature film “Roma” prove that there is a market hungry for stories based in Latin America.
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” never lacked suitors for its adaptation to the cinema screen. The author’s correspondence reveals that he received offers even before winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Contrary to popular belief, he did not reject the offers because of a distrust of cinema, which was in fact one of his professional passions. In 1963, two years before starting to write this novel, he worked as a film screenwriter in Mexico City. He was doing so well that in a letter that year he told his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza that he pictured himself soon working in Hollywood.
It was thanks to cinema that García Márquez learned to unite magic and reality, two fundamental elements of “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” He used many cinematographic tricks and techniques when writing it. And he did so from the first page: The moment when Colonel Aureliano Buendía stands before the firing squad ends in a flashback, to when he first touched ice as a child and Macondo was only a small village.
What did cause the writer some consternation about adapting his novel was determining which audiovisual format was best suited to convey the stories of Macondo. He knew that such a work could not be compressed into a few hours. Therefore, what he actually opposed was any adaptation with a feature film format. García Márquez had more trust in television’s narrative possibilities. In 1989, he told The New York Times that with TV “in one night you can reach 10 million viewers and that’s the idea — to reach that audience with ideas and quality.” He knew that “One Hundred Years of Solitude” had that potential. When the actor Anthony Quinn was interested in adapting it, he told the writer that the novel would be “ideal for a 50-hour television serial.”
All literary classics share an ability to reinvent themselves generation after generation, but each classic has its own challenges for screen adaptation. A respectful adaptation must consider details such as local speech and culture, translated into a more universal dimension for a global audience. Otherwise, the series will fall flat, as did the adaptations of his books “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” and “Love in the Time of Cholera.”
The lack of dialogue in “One Hundred Years of Solitude" is one of the most complex technical obstacles. Dialogue makes up only 5 percent of the book. Characters rarely exchange more than three sentences in a row, buried in pages and pages of narration. In his writing of the novel, the author eliminated many phrases from the final text that could be rescued to resolve some of the difficulties of adaptation. Omissions include characters, paragraphs, images and even dialogue that could be heard onscreen for the first time.
Another key challenge is how to tell the story. In the novel, linear time — from the founding of Macondo until its disappearance — is intermingled with cyclical time: The names of the characters and their tragedies are repeated. In addition to its unmistakable poetic prose and magical realism, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is a very sensory work. Is it possible to bring to the screen dozens of scents, like the fragrance that tormented the men seduced by Remedios the Beauty; flavors, like the taste of the substance that freed the inhabitants of Macondo from the plague of insomnia; and textures, like when Aureliano Buendía touched ice for the first time?
If anything affirms the transformation of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” into a series, it is the unstoppable power of the classics to enter our lives through formats that are entirely different from those established by their creators. As for the catastrophic predictions about its adaptation by Netflix, the reality is that no classic has lost that distinction because of a bad adaptation. On the contrary, the announcement that “One Hundred Years of Solitude” will become a series has reverberated throughout the world, only reinforcing its standing.
Álvaro Santana-Acuña is a sociology professor at Whitman College and is working on a book about how “One Hundred Years of Solitude” became a classic. This essay was translated from the Spanish by Erin Goodman.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Source: Read Full Article