As a playwright, Anton &Chachek;exov yields only to Shakespeare in
popularity among film makers. However, only those who succeeded in
cultivating a delicate balance between the cinematic, potentially
already present in &Chachek;exov, and the theatrical, succeeded in
adapting &Chachek;exov to the screen. The purpose of this paper is to
examine the conditions under which cinema has most successfully
approached &Chachek;exov. This inquiry will serve as a first step to a
more extensive study of &Chachek;exov's playwriting through the prism
of cinema. Specifically, I will look at two screen adaptations of
A set of categories derived from the scattered writings of French
film theoretician André Bazin provides a relevant point of
departure for this analysis. What makes it possible to believe
that the cinema exists to discover or create a new set of dramatic
facts,
writes Bazin, is its capacity to transform
theatrical situations that otherwise would never have reached their
maturity.
&Chachek;exov's plays, which demanded a reform of
the entire theatrical system, contain a plethora of potentially
cinematic situations unfit for the stage. This constitutes the
complexity of their texts. Bazin maintains that a play whether
classic or modern is unassailably protected by its text.
Behind Bazin's insistence on loyalty to the text lies his idea of the
theatrical reality as an entity, separate from the dramatic
reality. For Bazin, the written text of a play achieves a synthesis of
both. Bazin's brand of realism requires loyalty to the raw material
and its specific reality. He offers the following model of
reconciliation between cinema and theater: cinema should not pretend
to make us forget the conventions of the theater. Films