Time and Description in Sátántangó and The Melancholy of Resistance (Novel into Film)

Abstract The collaboration between László Krasznahorkai and Béla Tarr has resulted in one of the most celebrated recent works of world cinema. The adaptation aspect of films like Sátántangó (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) is sometimes overlooked by adaptation studies. I will argue that the concept of fidelity criticism, disregarded by recent studies of adaptation, is still valuable for analysing the way in which literariness can travel through the transmedial modality of time and duration. These case studies suggest that a transmedial approach to the relation between world literature and world cinema is possible by putting forward a different understanding of the concept of fidelity as circulation, a concept that is common to both world cinema and world literature studies.