Diacritics

Abstract:

This essay discusses the aesthetic, cultural and political dynamics of Raúl Ruiz's Mysteries of Lisbon (2010), which was produced both as a four-and-a-half-hour feature film and a six-part television series. The masterful adaptation of the 1854 eponymous novel by the Portuguese writer Camilo Castelo Branco, Mysteries of Lisbon allows us to address issues of narrative and historical time in the feuilleton form in literature and television, and of its transition to a unified presentation as a novel of a feature film. Working with theoretical notions such as diastolic and systolic movements, temporal dis-tension and in-tension, the Deleuzian notions of incompossibility and baroque folding, I define the main effect of the movie as a process of reverse adaptation. This process also results in the exposure of cultural and political hegemonies both from an intra-European and a postcolonial perspective, in a lasting upheaval of cultural and political transnational and transmedial hierarchies.