“Un solo túnel, oscuro y solitario”: Ernesto Sábato entre o papel e a tela

Abstract

This work is within the scope of interarts studies and has as its object a comparative study between the works The Tunnel (1948), by the Argentine writer Erneto Sábato and the film of the same name by the Buenos Aires director León Klimovsky (1952). This research aims to comparative analysis the literary and the filmic text, in order to show the strategies used by the director for the construction of the film narrative, and by so doing bring to the spectator an existentialist plot, which in the book presents itself as a narration in first person and in the structure of the film is presented through the external eye of a camera and intermediated by the readings carried out by characters that do not exist in the plot of Sábato. For that, authors who discuss the adaptation of literary texts to the cinema, such as Linda Hutcheon, Robert Stam, André Bazin and Sánchez Noriega, will be brought to the discussion. In order to analyze the existentialist theme content, which explicitly forms part of the influences present in both works, we turn to Jean Paul Sartre's ideas, more specifically to his texts Existentialism is a humanism and Sketch for a theory of emotions. Finally, considering that Ernesto Sábato was, besides an author, a recognized literary critic, we make use of some of his texts, such as El escritor y sus fantasmas and Heterodoxia, which turn to the discussion of his own aesthetic production and to Issues that affect literary production in general.