From page to screen: A comparative analysis of Ghassan Kanafani's Men in the Sun and Tawfiq Saleh's The Dupes

Introduction

Adapting literature into films is one of cinema's most enduring and complex artistic practices. This transformative process transcends mere translation between media to sophisticated negotiations between the abstract conceptual world of written narrative and the concrete audiovisual realm of film. In his pioneering work Novels into Film, George Bluestone establishes that novels and films operate through fundamentally different sign systems, namely, literature through conceptual and discursive forms, cinema through perceptual and presentational forms (1957: viii/ix, 20, 23, 47–48, 206, 210).

Bluestone's distinction acquires additional significance when examining adaptations that cross not only medial but also cultural and political boundaries. In the Palestinian cultural production context, particularly works emerging from the traumatic historical rupture of the 1948 Nakba and its ongoing reverberations, adaptation assumes additional layers of complexity. Arkan's contention “[l]iterary adaptations serve as a conduit through which the themes and cultural significance of literature can reach a vast audience” (2023: 51) takes on particular resonance when considering Palestinian narratives. Therein adaptation serves not merely entertainment functions but is, in Bresheeth's words, “part of the anti-colonial resistance movements spanning the 1950s, in which literature, poetry, cinema, theatre, and the arts played their part alongside armed struggle” (2008: 112). Palestinian cinematic productions have historically instrumentalized cinema to challenge misconceptions about their identity, dispossession, and resistance as well as to expose the dire conditions of life under Israeli occupation (Ben Labidi, 2021: 250).

Tawfiq Saleh's The Dupes (1972) represents, therefore, a crucial site for examining how Palestinian narratives circulate across media while maintaining their political urgency. Khetam Shraideh's examination of the intercultural encounters (e.g., translation) in postcolonial contexts that are marked by “asymmetrical power dynamic” (2018: 114) proves particularly relevant when examining the transformation of Ghassan Kanafani's 1963 novella Men in the Sun (‘rijāl fī al-shams’) into Saleh's cinematic adaptation The Dupes (‘al-makhdū'ūn’) since the latter transcends mere aesthetic transformation to a complex negotiation of power, representation, and cultural memory.

Kanafani's novella portrays three Palestinian refugees attempting to cross into Kuwait hidden in a water tank. Being the narrative's central metaphor, the suffocating confinement of the tank that ultimately becomes a death chamber, represents a powerful allegory of the Palestinian condition under Israeli occupation, whereby the final question “Why didn’t you bang on the sides of the water tank?” indexes simultaneously a literal struggle for survival and a metaphorical call for breaking silence in the face of oppression (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2024: 1). Saleh's adaptation came a decade later, following the profound shifts of the 1967 war and Black September. Therefore, it recontextualizes Kanafani's narrative for a changed political landscape. Yet, it expands the narrative's reach to international audiences. Additionally, the temporal gap between Kanafani's literary creation and Saleh's cinematic interpretation validates El-Kurd's analysis of the Palestinian experience that is characterized by a reality where “[t]he Nakba is an organized and ongoing process of colonization and genocide that neither began nor ended in 1948” (El-Kurd, 2024: 1). This understanding of continuous displacement and trauma suggests that adaptations of Palestinian narratives must contend with both historical specificity and ongoing trauma. This temporal dimension becomes crucial when examining how Saleh's film transforms Kanafani's literary techniques (interior monologue, temporal fragmentation, symbolic imagery, etc.,) into cinematic language through mise-en-scène, editing, and performance. The adaptation process thus becomes not merely an aesthetic exercise but a form of resistance in which the act of retelling and reframing Palestinian narratives serves as part of the anti-colonial resistance movements.

This study argues that Saleh's The Dupes does not merely reproduce Kanafani's narrative but transforms its symbolic and political meanings through cinematic techniques, rearticulating its critique within a post-1967 context. This argument is demonstrated through close comparative analysis of specific scenes, narrative structures, and symbolic elements in both the novella and the film. By focusing on detailed textual and visual comparison, this study highlights how adaptation functions as a form of cultural and political resistance.

Literature review

The scholarly discourse on literary adaptation has evolved significantly since its formal inception in the mid-20th century, developing from prescriptive theories of fidelity to more nuanced understandings of intermedial creativity and cultural translation. Bluestone's groundbreaking Novels into Film established the foundational distinction between literary and cinematic modes of expression, arguing that novels operate through conceptual and discursive forms while cinema functions through perceptual and presentational forms. Bluestone concluded that “what is peculiarly filmic and what is peculiarly novelistic cannot be converted without destroying an integral part of each” (1957: 63). This medium-specific approach, while later challenged, provides theoretical groundwork for understanding adaptation as transformation rather than mere replication.

Contemporary adaptation theory has moved beyond Bluestone's structural distinctions and embraced more fluid understandings of intermedial relationships. Arkan expands on this evolution, noting “[f]ilm amalgamates various senses, encompassing sight and hearing, to culminate in a cohesive structure that assimilates the contributions of preceding art forms” (2023: 51). This multimedia synthesis enables cinema to create experiential dimensions impossible in purely textual form. It simultaneously presents unique challenges for maintaining narrative complexity and symbolic depth, nevertheless. Additionally, the capacity of film to draw from multiple artistic traditions, incorporating elements of painting, music, and theater alongside literary narrative, offers adaptors a rich palette of expressive possibilities that can either complement or complicate the translation of written works.

The shift from fidelity criticism to more nuanced analytical frameworks represents a crucial development in adaptation studies. Where early scholarship, like Bluestone's, often privilege source texts and measure adaptations by their adherence to originals, contemporary approaches recognize “flexibility” that enables adaptations to generate new meanings through their interaction with source texts rather than simply reproducing them. As Pasopati et al. further argue, “adaptation from Literature to film is flexible enough for the world to realize the potency of intertextuality in textual Literature” (2024: 395, uppercase in the original), suggesting that the movement between media creates productive tensions that can illuminate both the source and its cinematic interpretation. This flexibility is particularly relevant when examining politically engaged adaptations like Saleh's The Dupes, where the transformation process itself is a form of cultural commentary.

The postcolonial dimension of adaptation studies introduces additional critical perspectives that prove essential for understanding the Kanafani-Saleh transformation since “[q]uestions of identity, representation, and difference have a distinctive status in postcolonial studies” (Shraideh, 2018: 114). When applied to translation and adaptation, these questions become acute. In postcolonial discourse, “language is not neutral and thus translation can never be impersonal” (Shraideh, 2018: 114). This insight fundamentally challenges traditional adaptation studies’ focus on aesthetic fidelity, suggesting instead that adaptations of postcolonial texts must be understood within broader frameworks of power, resistance, and cultural sovereignty. Recent scholarship on diaspora and identity further strengthens the understanding of displacement as an ongoing condition shaping subjectivity and belonging. Chattoraj and Basu (2025) argue that diasporic identities are formed through continuous negotiation between cultural retention and adaptation, often producing conditions of rootlessness alongside shifting forms of belonging. This perspective is particularly relevant to Kanafani's Men in the Sun, where exile operates as a sustained condition rather than a singular event. In relation to Saleh's The Dupes, such a framework helps to explain how adaptation rearticulates experiences of displacement across media, linking questions of identity, memory, and representation.

Hilary Kilpatrick's English translation of Men in the Sun provides a compelling case study for these theoretical concerns. Shraideh's analysis reveals how Kilpatrick “tends to show apolitical impartiality through transferring the surface meaning not the deep meaning of the text with a tendency of not thickening the translation with annotations, glosses, or footnotes to contextualize the piece” (Shraideh, 2018: 114). This “thin” translation approach contrasts sharply with postcolonial translation theory's emphasis on contextualization. For instance, the cultural connotations of the word “pottery” are overlooked in Kilpatrick's translation, Shraideh outlines:

Arabs are well-known of pottery industry. They used to use the pottery for cooking and water conservation. Most of pottery decorations are symbols of holiness, power, and sovereignty. It is part of the cultural heritage of the Arabs. Thus, by neglecting to mention the cultural connotation of the term, the reader would miss the opportunity to know about Arab culture. (Shraideh, 2018: 116).

Within the specific context of Arab cinema, the practice of literary adaptation carries distinct cultural and political weight beyond its aesthetic dimensions. The relationship between Arab literary modernism and cinematic development created unique conditions for adaptation that shaped both forms. Mahajar notes that:

from its inception, Arabic cinema resorted to making films of highly appreciated literary texts, to provide films with respectability and relevance. This helped to root cinema in the culture of this region. Early narrative films evolved in parallel to the historical moment at which the Arabic novel was beginning to acquire its autonomy from other narrative forms. (Mahajar, 2009: 4)

 This parallel development meant that cinema and literature in the Arab world developed in dialogue rather than in succession, creating distinctive relationships between the two forms whereby adaptation served legitimizing functions for cinema as an art form in the Arab world, establishing cultural credentials while building audiences familiar with literary sources. The relationship between literary prestige and cinematic development in Arab contexts differs markedly from Western patterns, where cinema often had to struggle against perceptions of cultural inferiority. In the Arab world, the parallel development of modern literature and cinema created symbiotic relationships between both forms/media. Most importantly and most pertinent here, Ben Labidi notes that “[s]ince the late 1960s, Palestinian documentary films have been thematically, stylistically, and ideologically aligned with Third Cinema” (Ben Labidi, 2021: 255), Third Cinema being a genre whose:

definition set up the hegemonic Hollywood model of film or First Film with its commodified function as a spectacle made and circulated often for the purposes of entertainment, consumption, and profit versus the revolutionary and more politically engaged Third Cinema … [Third] cinema is an independent genre that cannot be interpellated or manipulated by the existing ruling system for its own propagandist purposes. (Ben Labidi, 2021: 255).

Hence, the alignment with Third Cinema suggests a convergence between aesthetic innovation and political commitment that shapes Palestinian adaptations.

Therefore, for Palestinian cinema, adaptation takes on additional layers of significance that extend beyond aesthetic or commercial considerations. Even through Egyptian cinema's pioneering role established patterns that influenced regional practices, Palestinian cinema's specific conditions of production in exile, with limited resources, and urgent political imperatives, etc., created distinct adaptive strategies that often prioritizes testimonial and memorial functions over commercial considerations. Bresheeth's (2008: 111–113) analysis rightly positions Palestinian film within the broader context of anti-colonial cultural production, where artistic expression becomes inseparable from political resistance. Closely examining Tawfiq Saleh's The Dupes, Hany Abu-Assad's Rana's Wedding (2002) and Najwa Najjar's Eyes of a Thief (2014), for example, Ben Labidi demonstrates how Palestinian cinema “contests monolithic tropes and representations of Palestinians as either victims or terrorists in Western media and films” (2021: 250). This resistance to stereotypical representation becomes a defining characteristic of Palestinian cinematic adaptation.

The relationship between Kanafani's novella and Saleh's film must thus be understood within this broader framework of resistance aesthetics. Kanafani's writings were characterized by his focus not only on the Palestinian individual but also on the broader human condition. This universality within specificity presents unique challenges for adaptation since filmmakers must balance the particular Palestinian experience with broader humanistic themes. In other words, the adaptation must serve multiple functions: preserving and disseminating narratives of Palestinian experience, reaching international audiences who might not access written texts, and creating visual testimonies of displacement and struggle. Shalhoub-Kevorkian argues that this process of cultural production occurs under conditions of an ongoing Nakba, where “even the rules of analysis – its terminology, its criteria, methods of interaction, thought processes, the public statements – have all failed us” (2024: 1). This failure of conventional analytical frameworks necessitates new theoretical frameworks and approaches to understanding Palestinian cultural production, including cinematic adaptation. These new frameworks must account for the unique challenges posed by the context where “bang[ing] the sides of the tank” becomes both literal narrative content and metaphorical artistic imperative, “[t]hose who do not dare bang on the sides of the water tank die, because banging and shouting imply a hope for life” (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2024: 1). Such a metaphor illuminates how adaptation of resistance literature requires new frameworks and approaches that can account for both its aesthetic dimensions and its function as cultural-political intervention.

Recent scholarship's emphasis on adaptation's dialogic nature and its function as cultural translation is, therefore, relevant for Palestinian narratives that must navigate multiple linguistic and cultural contexts. Pasopati et al. argue that adaptation creates “open meanings on dialogues among realities” (2024: 390), suggesting that the transformation of Kanafani's Arabic prose into Saleh's visual language involves not only aesthetic choices but also decisions about how to maintain cultural specificity while reaching international audiences. This process of cultural translation becomes particularly complex when dealing with works like Men in the Sun, which employ culturally specific symbols and references that may not translate directly across cultural boundaries. For example, Al-Kharabsheh and Yassin (2017) demonstrate the role and particular challenges colloquial language and cultural specificity present in adaptation through analyzing Arabic-English subtitled films, using Saleh's The Dupes as their case study. Their study reveals that a number of colloquialisms “reflecting religious overtones, have been missubtitled” while others “have been totally dropped out from subtitling” resulting in subtitling and cultural aspect “loss” (Al-Kharabsheh and Yassin, 2017: 18, 26). This finding has significant implications for understanding how Saleh's film navigates between maintaining cultural authenticity for Arab audiences while achieving accessibility for international viewers. The challenge becomes not merely one of linguistic translation but of cultural mediation, where the adapter must balance fidelity to cultural specifics with the need for broader comprehension. Al-Kharabsheh and Yassin (2017) recommend “practical and pragmatic translation solutions, techniques and/or strategies” (p. 19) such as “communicative … idiomatic … [and] literal” translation strategies (p. 26, italics in the original). Al-Kharabsheh and Yassin's study, findings and recommendations offer a framework for understanding the choices available to filmmakers adapting culturally-rooted texts.

The concept of resistance literature, as articulated by Palestinian intellectuals and activists, provides another crucial framework for understanding the Kanafani-Saleh adaptation. al-Araj (2014: 2) explains, resistance literature emerges from a context where “the outlaws become figures of agitation in societies that persist in a state of submission, as they are the most capable of existing outside of the system that imposes humiliating conditions on the living.” This understanding positions both Kanafani's novella and Saleh's film within a tradition of cultural resistance that challenges dominant narratives and power structures. Indeed, the political dimensions of Kanafani's work add further complexity to the adaptation process. Though this paper adopts Ben Labidi's (2021: 253, 254, 257, 258) interventionist approach to Palestinian cinema that aligns with Kanafani's own understanding of literature as resistance, it also recognizes its limits. Such an approach requires careful negotiation in the visual medium to avoid didacticism while maintaining political clarity.

Drawing on these scholarly foundations, several theoretical frameworks prove particularly relevant for analyzing the Kanafani-Saleh adaptation. Medium specificity theory which follows Bluestone's distinctions incorporates, in addition, contemporary modifications, examining how each medium's unique properties shape narrative presentation. For Men in the Sun, this includes analyzing how Kanafani's interior monologues transform into Saleh's visual compositions and how literary symbolism translates into cinematic imagery. Cultural translation theory which is informed by postcolonial studies and the insights of scholars like Al-Kharabsheh and Yassin, on the other hand, examines how adaptations navigate cultural contexts and political meanings. The decade between Kanafani's novella and Saleh's film saw profound changes in Palestinian political consciousness, requiring analysis of how the adaptation reflects these shifts while maintaining the original's critical force. Dialogic theory that draws on Bakhtin and elaborated by scholars like Pasopati et al., views adaptation as creating dialogue between texts rather than one-way transmission. This may illuminate how Saleh's film both honors and transforms Kanafani's vision, creating what Pasopati et al. (2024) call “interactions” that generate new meanings through the convergence of different media (pp. 391, 392, 397). Finally, frameworks from trauma and memory studies help analyze how Kanafani's literary techniques for representing collective trauma translate into Saleh's cinematic form.

Methodology

The selection of Kanafani's Men in the Sun and Saleh's The Dupes as the primary texts reflects several crucial considerations. First, both occupy canonical positions in Palestinian and Arab cultural production, with Kanafani's novella recognized as a foundational text of Palestinian literature and Saleh's film acknowledged as a landmark of Arab cinema. Historically, The Dupes belongs to the “Palestinian cinema of the third period, created in the 1970s in exile . . . [Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon] constructing the Palestinian national narrative as part of an international revolutionary struggle,” Gertz and Khleifi affirm (quoted in Ben Labidi, 2021: 256, ellipsis and bracketed comment in the original). Moreover, “[w]hile preserving a pluralistic and hybrid character, and blending different genres from Third and Second films (experimental, neorealist, and transnational), Palestinian cinema … contests monolithic tropes and representations” (Ben Labidi, 2021: 250). This hybridity reflects not only aesthetic choices but also the complex positioning of Palestinian cultural production within global cinema circuits. The movement between Third Cinema's revolutionary aesthetics and more conventional narrative forms represents a strategic negotiation of political message and audience accessibility. Second, the decade separating their creation allows for analyzing how political contexts change, particularly the aftermath of the 1967 war and the events of Black September, influences adaptive choices. Thirdly, both creators are recognized for formal innovation in their respective media, making their works particularly rich for examining how experimental literary techniques translate into equally innovative cinematic forms. Finally, and most significantly, the works’ engagement with Palestinian displacement provides a crucial case study for understanding how politically committed art navigates aesthetic transformation while maintaining its critical force.

The data collection process involves systematic and detailed engagement with both primary texts. The literary analysis required multiple readings of Men in the Sun in both the Arabic original and English translation, with detailed notation of narrative structure and temporal shifts, character psychology and development, symbolic imagery and metaphorical systems, and the novella's political themes and social critique. Similarly, the film analysis involved multiple viewings with systematic documentation, including scene-by-scene breakdown comparing with novella chapters, technical analysis of shot composition, camera movement, editing rhythm and transitions, sound design and music, and performance and dialogue delivery.

The selection of these analytical elements is guided by their centrality to the transformation of meaning across media. Narrative structure is examined as it constitutes the primary organizational logic through which literary fragmentation is reconfigured into cinematic sequencing. Interior monologue is prioritized due to its significance in Kanafani's text and its transformation into performance, gesture, and visual expression in film. Sound and silence are analyzed as key cinematic tools that articulate psychological and political meaning, particularly in relation to themes of oppression and voicelessness. Similarly, symbolic elements such as the water tank and the desert are foregrounded because they function as core carriers of meaning whose translation from textual metaphor to visual form is essential for understanding the adaptation process.

This study employs contemporary adaptation theory to analyze how The Dupes transforms Kanafani's literary vision while maintaining its critical edge. It examines not only what changes in the translation from page to screen but also why these transformations occur and what they reveal about the distinct capabilities and constraints of each medium. As Pasopati et al. (2024: 391, 398) argue, adaptation exists within complex networks of meaning that transcend simple binary distinctions between original and copy. In the context of the current paper, this suggests that Saleh's film should be understood not as a derivative work but as a creative dialogue with Kanafani's text. This dialogic relationship illuminates how both works function within the Palestinian resistance literature in which artistic expression becomes inseparable from political struggle. Moreover, the present analysis is situated within the broader context of Arabic literary adaptation, recognizing the unique role such adaptations played in “root[ing] cinema in the culture of this [i.e., Arab] region” (Mahajar, 2009: 4).

The simultaneous examination of the aesthetic strategies and cultural-political dimensions of Saleh's adaptation aims to contribute to understanding how Palestinian narratives circulate and evolve across media, maintaining their critical edge while reaching new audiences through the “diverse array of cinematic signifiers” available to film (Arkan, 2023: 52). Through addressing the specific case of Kanafani and Saleh, the study addresses, by extension, broader questions about how politically engaged literature transforms into film, how cultural resistance manifests across different artistic media, and how the Palestinian experience continues to challenge and reshape our understanding of adaptation itself. Therefore, the dialogic relationship between Kanafani's novella and Saleh's film must be understood within the broader context of resistance literature, a genre that emerged in response to both Zionist propaganda fiction and Cold War cultural infiltration. As Elizabeth M. Holt demonstrates, Kanafani's work was profoundly shaped by his awareness of literature's function as a “weapon” in ideological warfare, particularly his critical engagement with Arthur Koestler's 1946 Thieves in the Night (Holt, 2021: 3–4, 6–9). This understanding of literature as both a site of struggle and a tool of resistance fundamentally shapes the paper's approach to the adaptation process, not merely as aesthetic transformation but as a form of cultural commentary that actively participates in anti-colonial resistance.

This study employs a comparative analytical framework that integrates multiple methodological approaches to examine the transformation of Kanafani's Men in the Sun into Saleh's The Dupes. This methodology combines textual analysis, cinematic analysis, and cultural-contextual investigation to understand how literary narratives transform across media while maintaining their political and symbolic significance. As Pasopati et al. emphasize, understanding adaptation requires recognizing that:

comparisons among others in the adaptation of art indicate audience, makers, and language as sides who speak. The audience gives attention to originality and adaptation. Makers have their own realms to be realized. Language relates, understands, and lives conditions of the aesthetic of human beings. Every aspect has its own meaning that will leave many surpluses to be applied to others. (Pasopati et al., 2024: 398)

This philosophical grounding informs the paper's multidimensional analytical approach that resists simple binary comparisons between source and adaptation, instead examining the dynamic interplay/dialogue between texts, contexts, and cultural meanings.

Consequently, following Bluestone's distinction between conceptual and perceptual media, the study examines how narrative elements transform between literary and cinematic forms via a detailed analysis of plot structure, documenting additions, deletions, reordering, and character development between novella and film. Throughout, transforming the literary symbols (the water tanker, the desert, the border) into visual motifs that carry similar or evolved meanings are tracked. The temporal organization receives particular attention via comparing Kanafani's fragmented chronology with Saleh's cinematic manipulation of time.

Nevertheless, while the paper's multi-layered analytical framework is based on established adaptation methodologies like Bluestone's, it also incorporates specific considerations for Arab and Palestinian cultural production that cannot be separated from its political situation, positioning the adaptation not merely as an aesthetic transformation but as a form of political and intellectual engagement. Therefore, the cultural-contextual analysis forms a crucial component of the paper's methodology, recognizing that each work must be understood within its specific production context.

The comparative analysis, thus, documents direct transpositions where scenes or elements transfer with minimal change, transformations where significant alterations in form occur while maintaining essential content, additions of new elements introduced by Saleh, deletions where Kanafani's elements are excluded from the film, and recontextualizations where familiar elements receive new meaning through cinematic presentation. This methodology follows Pasopati et al.'s observation that “[a]daptation of art enables people to see interactions” (2024: 397), focusing on dynamic relationships rather than static comparisons. It also enables systematic analysis of adaptation strategies while remaining sensitive to the specific cultural and political dimensions of Palestinian narrative. Through this comprehensive approach, the paper endeavors to illuminate not only the specific transformations between Kanafani's novella and Saleh's film but also the broader implications for understanding how resistance literature maintains its political urgency and cultural significance as it moves across media and reaches new audiences in changing historical contexts.

Discussion

Conclusion

This study has demonstrated that the adaptation of Men in the Sun into The Dupes operates not as a process of simple translation but as a structured transformation in which narrative meaning is reconfigured through medium-specific techniques. The comparative analysis has shown that Kanafani's use of fragmentation, interior monologue, and symbolic density is systematically reworked by Saleh into cinematic forms through editing, performance, sound design, and visual composition. In particular, the transformation of interior consciousness into embodied performance and acoustic expression, and the rendering of symbolic elements such as the water tank into sensory experience, reveal how cinema does not replicate literary meaning but reconstructs it in perceptual terms.

The study contributes to adaptation and postcolonial scholarship by demonstrating how cinematic adaptation can function as a form of political reinterpretation, preserving and intensifying the critique of displacement, silence, and oppression within a changed historical context. By grounding the analysis in detailed textual and visual comparison, it clarifies how The Dupes extends Kanafani's narrative into a post-1967 framework, thereby reinforcing the role of adaptation in shaping cultural memory and resistance discourse.

At the same time, this study is limited by its focus on a single literary–film pairing and by the absence of reception analysis. It does not examine how different audiences interpret the film, nor does it consider other adaptations of Palestinian literature that might offer comparative insights. Future research could address these limitations by comparing The Dupes with other cinematic adaptations of Palestinian texts, as well as by examining the film's circulation and reception in regional and international contexts. Such approaches would further illuminate how adaptation participates in the global mediation of Palestinian narratives and the ongoing negotiation of identity, memory, and resistance.