Análisis estructural y comparativo de la novela Shutter Island y su adaptación cinematográfica de 2010

Abstract

The term adaptation is frequently associated with an accurate imitation of an original. Film adaptations in particular are often criticized if they fail to achieve such accuracy. Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island is a novel that can be difficult to translate between different semiotic systems because of its narrative structure. Analysing the intersemiotic mechanisms that Martin Scorsese employed to bring Lehane’s novel to the big screen is what inspired the origins of this project. To achieve that it is necessary to compare both versions of the object of study. I do that by describing the settings and motivations that inspired both creators in their work, as well as the structure, the characters and the intersemiotic mechanisms involved in it. What the research and the analysis results confirm is that an adaptation must create new content in order to resemble the original without it becoming plagiarism. To make the adequate creations it is required to identify the structural markers and the purpose of the original work, so that they behave in such a similar fashion that they can be associated with each other. The sum of these parameters is what really define an adaptation’s value. The understanding of the functions that intersemiotic mechanisms perform is a very helpful notion. Specially for film critics that aspire to accurately describe the nuances between two sibling pieces of art, but also for students of translation studies interested in the field of semiotics.