SİNEMADA EDEBİYAT UYARLAMALARI VE GÖSTERGELER: MUHTEŞEM GATSBY (2013) FİLMİ ÖRNEĞİ

• Main Author: Okan ORMANLI
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Istanbul Aydın University 2014-04-01
• Series: The Turkish Online Journal of Design, Art and Communication
• Subjects: Cinema; literature; signs
• Online Access: http://www.tojdac.org/tojdac/VOLUME4-ISSUE2_files/tojdac_v04i206.pdf
• ISSN: 2146-5193; 2146-5193

The cinema and literature are two different branches of the arts that have on occasion collaborated with one another over the past 120 years. The Hollywood film industry, along with many other national cinemas have taken best sellers or important literary sources and turned them into films. Although some novels are fictional, they nonetheless are able to give information regarding the socio-economic and cultural setting in which they take place. The Great Gatsby written by F. Scott Fitzgerald is set in 1920s America and was published in 1925. The novel, which has today become a classic in literature, holds parallels between the life of the main character Jay Gatsby and the life of the writer of the novel, Fitzgerald. The novel was first adapted to the cinema in 1970’s. The second version of the novel was filmed in 2013 and was directed by Baz Luhrmann. Although the film, which will be the subject of this study, stays true to the storyline of the novel, it has visual and auditory elements that signal differences. By taking full advantage of today’s technology, the film is able to successfully reflect the period’s flamboyance and craziness. The film highlights the dance and music of the time, but still makes room for some of today’s songs. Furthermore, the costumes and hair styles also reflect the times in which the events unfold. The green light emphasized in the novel holds its place in the film in the signifiers of the Valley of Ashes and Dr. T.J. Eckleburg’s advertisements boards, and comes to mean dreams, the inability to come together, class difference and society of surveillance. The Great Gatsby is a film that stays true to the original novel; however, even so, it bears a new, updated, postmodern approach that has a stylized and spectacular style in terms of form and content.