Dangerous Liaisons: Quo vadis? (1913, dir. Enrico Guazzoni) and the Previous Theatrical Adaptations of Sienkiewicz’s Novel

Abstract

Quo vadis?, directed by Enrico Guazzoni in 1913, is still one of the most faithful film adaptations of the novel by Sienkiewicz. When the silent feature came to cinemas around the world, the story was already familiar to the majority of the audience, due to the popular success of the book and a proliferation of many derivative works, especially theatrical. In various ways, these adaptations developed audiences’ previous knowledge of the plot and the characters. Some of them were set in an openly illustrative relationship; others focused on a single narrative thread of the novel. The most complex examples, especially the 1909 opera by Jean Nouguès, offered a skilled concentration of the plot in a few scenes that were complex both in terms of narrative and staging. The director Guazzoni was quite familiar with the ‘horizons of expectation’ that adaptations of such a popular novel created, but he decided to use them differently. In his film, faithfulness to the original text became the most important trait of a new, ambitious staging strategy: the protection of the plot’s complexity and its spatial fragmentation. Performing a comparative analysis of the narrative spaces in Guazzoni’s film and in a few theatrical adaptations, this chapter delves into two different examples of interaction between the original novel, the adaptation, and viewer expectations: the centripetal model, in which the most important quality is the ability to synthesize, and the centrifugal one, based precisely on fidelity to the original text and to historical accuracy.