Anšlava Eglīša darbi uz ekrāna un aiz tā: ekranizācijas un filmu apskati

Anšlavs Eglītis (1906–1993) is a Latvian poet, artist, author of more than 20 novels, dozens of plays, and countless other literary works. Less known is his work in cinema in the second half of his life. Living in exile in California, USA, Eglītis published reviews of the latest Hollywood films in the newspaper Laiks for almost 30 years. The research aims to determine what kind of legacy the reviews by Eglītis have left in the field of cinema and what form the literary works created by Eglītis have taken in Latvian cinema. The first part of the research is dedicated to the analysis of film reviews by Eglītis in the newspaper Laiks in the 1960s and 1970s, paying closer attention to reviews of screen adaptations. The second part analyses two screen adaptations of Eglītis’s literary works – films “Maestro” (1990, directed by Pēteris Krilovs) and “Homo Novus” (2018, directed by Anna Viduleja), and a small insight is devoted to the series “Pansion at the Mansion” (Pansija pilī, 2024). Screen adaptations and film reviews are analysed according to the principles of adaptation theory, in which the adaptation is viewed as an autonomous audiovisual object, with all the specifics of its creation and screening, all perceived in relation to the literary work from which the adaptation has been made. The adaptation theory is based on the ideas of post-structuralists and hermeneutics about the openness of the text as a structure and the vastness of the context, as well as on semiotics and medium specificity theory, analysing the different languages of literature and film and their signs, which become an intertextual phenomenon in the process of adaptation. The biographical method is also used in the research. As a result, two aspects of Eglītis and his works’ relationship with cinema have been analysed. Eglītis’s own film reviews cannot be considered a significant criticism in the context of film theory, but they serve as vivid examples of Eglītis’s personal views and language; moreover, they hold a cultural and historical significance. Adaptations of his literary works follow ideas expressed in the literary source, and changes made are mainly related to the specifics of the film as a medium or requirements of the genre.