Transmutation in John Boorman’s Excalibur: accuracy and intersemiotic translation in the movie adaptation of Le Morte d’Arthur

Resumen

In 1981, the British movie director, producer and scriptwriter John Boorman decided to release his film Excalibur, a cinematographic adaptation from the medieval masterpiece Le Morte d’Arthur by sir Thomas Malory. Critics and audience agree with the fact that Boorman’s work is the most accurate movie adaptation of the Arthurian cycle so far.

The current article aims at analyzing the relationship among Le Morte d’Arthur and Excalibur, which, based on the aforementioned book, has tried to make an updated translation for the contemporary audience. This research studies the effects of the application of different theories—intersemiotics, multimodality and movie adaptation—in order to find out how they reflect characteristics and closely subjective traits of the movie director who decided to take over sir Thomas Malory and how these traits have influenced his task of translation and adaptation.

I have analyzed in a contrastive way a lecture between the convergences and divergences in Malory’s and Boorman’s works with the aim of highlighting all those elements of the intersemiotic translation or transmutation, cinematographic adaptation and resemiotization which show the British author’s incomparable unequivocal style. I have used Iedema’s Multimodality, resemiotization: extending the analysis of discourse as multi-semiotic practice as well as Sánchez Noriega’s De la literatura al cine: teoría y análisis de la adaptación to guide my research.