Context: When I chose Spanish 310 to teach from our catalogue, it was titled “Signs and Symbols in Latin American Short Story and Poetry.” Engaging, right? I don’t really do poetry, so instead I decided to shift the class to focus on just five authors, picking a short story and a short novel from each. I’m also quite the film buff, and because many of these readings were old, they also had film adaptations. If you have it, use it!
Assignment: After reading the short novel, students watched the film adaptation, and then wrote a two-page response with the following prompt:
–Does the movie add something not in the book?
–What does the movie cut from the book? Does it have a good reason for doing that? Does the movie suffer because of it?
–Do you feel that the film gets to the heart of the book? If it doesn’t, why not?
–If you could change something about the adaptation, what would it be?
–Why do you think the filmmaker made they choices they made?
–Did the adaptation make you want to pull your hair out? Explain!
The key idea here was to explore why the filmmaker made the changes they made. Was something in the book not representable on screen? Was the film better for it? Worse? Some of our selections were vastly different (Aura / La strega in amore), while others were much more faithful (Pedro Páramo).
Reflection: Once students got a better idea of what I was looking for, they picked up on some fascinating differences between the two texts (movie and book). The activity also got them to think about how the various parts of a text work, and how some elements (the narrator role in A hora da estrela, for example), are largely unadaptable to film. In the end, they engaged critically with both, and while reading the text, even began thinking of how they would film it. They did get a chance to do just that, at the end of the semester.