Joseph Roths Novelle "Die Legende vom heiligen Trinker" (1939) und Ermanno Olmis gleichnamige Verfilmung (1988). Eine intermediale Analyse

Abstract: Creative cinematographic reception of literature tries not only to visualize the original texts but also to reinvent them on the basis of visual and cultural interpretive patterns. Literaturverfilmung is an area of research that studies the transcodification of the verbal language of literary works to the film language of cinema. This article first recognize Joseph Roth’s short novel Die Legende vom heiligen Trinker as a balancing act through Christian faith and literary irony, sense of duty and human weakness, then shows those hybridisation visual techniques, especially in relation to literary and film space, by which the Italian Catholic filmmaker Olmi translated Roth’s text into film. The main result of the analysis of the principal transformations occurring in the film is that Olmi’s reception reproduces adequately Roth’s ambivalent representation of the hero, but at the same time emphasizes values such as simplicity, honesty, religious behaviour, that belong to Olmi’s specific convictions about Christianism and morality.