From Narrative to Images: Interrogating the Interactions of Visual Sentences and Verbal Narrativisation in Biyi Bandele's Half of aYellow Sun

Abstract

Narrative is a general term indicating the construction, development and telling of a story. Film as a narrative genre presents a story. Some scholars hold that we are all storytellers because we tell stories everyday of our lives, and that our lives are stories, unfolding in layers. However, not all of us can tell a good story, hence, the recourse to adaptation: of an epic narrative, drama, prose, or a film narrative created out of an original idea. Adaptation, therefore, presupposes the ability to make something suitable for a new use, situation, etc. In Biyi Bandele's screen adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel of the same title, Half of a Yellow Sun(2013), one can see the manifestations of the verbal narrativisation which makes the fictional work flexible for re-make; re-use or adaption- whichever side of the spectrum one looks at these two forms of communication. Since film as a medium is intensely decision-based, using the narrative theory and relying on the intertextuality/intermediality theory simultaneously, this paper argues that each shot lined up by the filmmaker has resulted from a dozen of choices about the elements and conventions such as camera placement, lighting, focalization (focus),casting and framing. It draws the conclusion that not only do things on the screen (i.e. images) appear at the expense of others not shown, but that the manner in which they appear depends on a selection of one perspective that eliminates,at least temporarily, all others in what this writer sees as subordination of story to style.