Literature and Cinema as Transformative Experiences: On The Name of the Rose

Abstract

The Name of the Rose, the novel by Umberto Eco and its film adaptation by Jean-Jacques Annaud, constitutes an inexhaustible laboratory of knowledge that serves as a semiotic guide, insofar as both works follow traces, clues, and symbols to show that cinema and literature are not merely constructions, but experiences of meaning that mobilize emotions, confer meanings, and activate memories.

In this dual value, literature has contributed its expressive sensitivity, while cinema has been able to process the stylistic and rhetorical possibilities of language not only through dialogues, glosses, cadences, rhythms, and tonal inflections, but also—and more powerfully—through the expressive resonance of images.

They are two different works of art, two distinct languages. For this reason, adaptation is not simply a transfer of content; rather, it involves the elaboration of a new semiotic structure. This is effectively achieved through the perspective used by the director to enhance the expressionist treatment of faces that transmit human passions while activating emotionality in the viewer. These aspects motivate the present research, whose objective is to interweave the languages and analyze the emotional depth they generate in spectators. The methodology that supports this approach is metacognitive experience, understood as the set of conscious cognitive and affective experiences linked to the solution of a particular problem (Melot, 2003).

For this reason, cinema and literature are intensity, intimacy, and ubiquity, since the filmic and literary image offers a specific vision of reality. Music and descriptions reinforce the power of penetration and, above all, there is a syntactic and semantic construction that draws us into the plot through faces, objects, setting, and other effects. Finally, all this produces a transport through time and space, not only into the time of the film, but also into the time of the spectator.

In this way, perception becomes affective insofar as cinema and literature provide us with a subjective image, making it possible to construct a passionate experience of reality that is now assumed as individual.