Literature and Cinema: The Game of Memory and Spaciality in 20.000 Days on Earth and The Sick Bag Song

Abstract

Literature and cinema are arts that dialogue in a fertile way, and the intersectionality between them is undeniable and increasingly fruitful, especially when they are diluted as borders that separate as their pre‑fixed forms. Cinema transposes literary narratives to the screen, just as literary narratives often use cinematographic techniques in their construction, but among them there are countless possible agencies. Here, what is clearly delineated is the intersection between the temporalities and the spatialities of these works. This work aims to analyze this possibility of interrelationship between time and space in the narratives of the film 20,000 Days on Earth, directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, about artist and writer Nick Cave, and his most recent book The Sick Bag Song, a mix of poetic narrative, memories, story and travel diary. Our focus will be to explore how aspects of spatiality or, as Gaston Bachelard conceptualizes in his Poetics of Space, of topoanalysis stand out in these two narratives and how they are correlated when dealing with memory (temporality) and artistic creation.