Adaptations of Hybrids: Literary Plays with Genres in Contemporary Polish
Cinema (Spoor and Darkness and Dark, Almost Night)
The article discusses the problem of genre hybridity and the play with genres from a comparative perspective on the example of Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk and Dark, Almost Night by Joanna Bator as well as of their fi lm adaptations, directed by Agnieszka Holland and Borys Lankosz, respectively. In both novels, generic and stylistic hybridity does not only fulfi ll a ludic function, but more importantly serves to express a social critique, and their fi lm adaptations refl ect this. Spoor is a creative adaptation which – through the combination of genres and styles – questions ethical norms often regarded as axioms and prompts the viewer to reconsider the relationship between humans and animals. Dark, Almost Night approaches the complex combination of genres in the literary original in a reductive way, which affects its message. The study of adaptations should not focus on the issue of „fi delity”, but rather examine how the change of the medium transforms the original textual structures and their use of social discourses.