Aleksei Balabanov’s Cargo 200 and William Faulkner’s Sanctuary: An Intermedial Comparison

This work is based on the comparison of the novel “Sanctuary” by William Faulkner and Aleksei Balabanov's film “Cargo 200”, as they share similar storyline. The aims of this work are to explain what caused Balabanov to make an adaptation of the novel, how he transferred Faulkner's story into another sociocultural context and how do the novel and the film influence each other from the perspective of reception. The first chapter of this paper is dedicated to the theory of adaptation. Firstly, it studies which adaptation tools Balabanov used. Secondly, it attempts to explain why the director did not want the audience to know that “Cargo 200” is an adaptation. The second chapter studies the sociocultural contexts of Faulkner's novel and Balabanov's film: in which way they are similar and how they differ. In the third chapter, there is a comparative analysis of the characters of “Sanctuary” and “Cargo 200”. The fourth chapter is focused on the comparison of the narrative methods that Faulkner and Balabanov use. Overall, this work is focused on understanding what knowledge the audience gains from being familiar with both “Sanctuary” and “Cargo 200”.