Thousand and One Nights and Ali Baba and Forty Thieves

This article is going to study the adaptation of Thousand and One Nights in the movie Ali Baba and Forty Thieves directed by Arthur Lubin in 1944 through the lens of adaptation theory. The movie departs heavily from the text of Thousand and one Nights to the point that it is a whole different story and owes a great deal to the imagination of Universal Pictures. Since the movie represents the Orient it is a fertile ground for the study of the Orient in the movie. First we study the relationship of the text with the image and second we will study the images of the Orient. Of course the image the movie presents of the Orient is innocent and mild. The movie turns the text on its head in that the movie is the reverse of the text. The plot of the movie is the opposite of the text, whereas in the text it is the forty thieves who are the villains in the movie it is the other way round, the forty thieves befriend Ali Baba and grow him up and they form a resistance against the Mongols.


INTRODUCTION
The theory of adaptation is nowadays a major research in comparative literature discussing the relations of cinema and literature. This theory of adaptation is not merely after proving which one of literature and cinema is more important than the other. It does not consider adaptation as a secondary and derivative term. This theory considers adaptation as important in itself. In this regards I will be discussing Linda Hucheon, and Julie Sanders from whose ideas and thoughts this article benefits a great deal. Linda Hucheon's book A Theory of Adaptation has been very beneficial along with Julie Sanders' Adaptation and Appropriation. Both Sanders and Hucheon in discussing adaptation place emphasis on the term inter-textuality. They believe that it is the nature of adaptation to be intertextual embroiling more than one text. Therefore, the text of Thousand and One Nights is discussed here as an intertext influencing and appearing in many other texts. Likewise adaptation is treated as interdisciplinary which embroil both literature and cinema.
For every adaptation there are a plethora of reasons and motivations. We have to find the motivations of the adaptors when discussing adaptation. Some directors adapt a text because they want to make money out of their adaptation, some do an adaptation to pay tribute to an author. There are social, political, religious, cultural and economic reasons for adapting a text. Since Thousand and One Night is an oriental text travelling to the west, it is ineluctable and inexorable not to discuss its adaptations in the light of orientalism. That is to say because it is entwined with the knowledge of the Orient its adaptations take the form of representation. Therefore we will see to the fact that as an oriental work Thousand and One Nights is a fertile ground for asking new questions. Viewed in this way, the movie adapted from the text of Thousand and One Nights depicts the Orient as an exotic place. They simply represent the orient from the perspective of the adapters. To discuss orientalism or oriental representations in the movie adaptation of Thousand and One Nights, I will focus on the plot and the way the movie depicts the Orient.
Linda Hucheon in her book A Theory of Adaptation believes that everyone who has experienced adaptation has his/her own theory of adaptation. Her book A Theory of Adaptations tries to think through this ongoing status and the continuous critical condemnation of the over-all phenomenon of adaptation-in all its numerous media manifestations. She condemns those who consider adaptation as a minor and subsidiary and undoubtedly never as respectable as the original. Hucheon shows a strong interest in what has come to be called "intertextuality" or the dialogic relations among texts,works in any medium are both created and received by people, and it is this human, experiential context that allows for the study of the politics of intertextuality.
Adapted works are ubiquitous. They are not few and far between. Linda Huncheon believes that adaptations are all over the world nowadays, they are found on the television and movie display, 'on the musical and dramatic stage, on the Internet, in novels and comic books, in theme park and video arcade'. (2004,2) Adaptations are clearly not novel and fresh to our time, though; Shakespeare conveyed his culture's tales from written form to stage and made them obtainable to a whole new spectators. It is common knowledge that not only adaptations, but all art is born from other art, and literary works have been breastfed by other literary works. Numerous film, television, or theatre adaptations of recognized works of literature acquiescently announce themselves as an interpretation or re-reading of a canonical predecessor. Every now and then this will include a director's personal revelation, and it may or may not include cultural rearrangement or updating of some form; sometimes this re-interpretative performance will also encompass the movement into a new standard mode or background. (Sanders, 2006: 2) Literary works 'are built from systems, codes and traditions established by previous works of literature' (Allen 2000: 1). Nevertheless they are also constructed from systems, codes, and backgrounds resulted from companion art forms. As an example the verse drama called Beatrice Chancy has breastfed many other works including dramas, romances, chronicles, screenplays, parodies, sculptures, photographs, and operas. If we take the following list of authors which Linda Hucheon mentions in her article 'In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production' we will see that it has influenced many: Vincenzo  Hollywood adapts from popular novels, as Ellis names the "tried and tested" or "tried and trusted." (1982: 3).
Hucheon defines adaptation doubly as process and product. This definition is closer to the collective practice of the term and is comprehensive enough to consider 'not just films and stage productions, but also musical arrangements and song covers, visual art revisitations of prior works and comic book versions of history, poems put to music and remakes of films, and videogames and interactive art'.(9) she makes distinctions; for instance, references to and transitory reverberations of other works would not succeed as lengthy engagements, nor do most instances of musical sampling, for the reason that they recontextualize only short fragments of music.
Hucheon says 'it is obvious that adapters must have their own personal reasons for deciding first to do an adaptation and then choosing which adapted work and what medium to do it in. They not only interpret that work but in so doing they also take a position on it'.(92) Therefore as far as interpretation is concern, it means that closeness or faithfulness to the adapted text should not be the standard of judgment or the focus of examination. Hucheon argues that for a long time, "fidelity criticism," was the critical convention in adaptation studies, specifically when coping with recognized works. Nowadays that supremacy has been questioned from an assortment of viewpoints and with an assortment of consequences.(7) She quotes George Bluestone pointing out that initially when a film becomes a monetary or critical achievement, the issue of its fidelity is given scarcely any thought (ibid). Hucheon believes it seems to be unimportant to engage openly in the continuous debate over degrees of closeness and fidelity to the "original" that has produced those many typologies of adaptation processes: borrowing as opposed to intersection as opposed to transformation; analogy as opposed to commentary as opposed to transposition; using the original text as raw material as opposed to reinterpretation of only the essential narrative structure as opposed to a literal translation. (ibid)

Julie Sanders
Julie Sanders' book Adaptation and Appropriation has been a good source from whose ideas I have benefited a lot. In this book Sanders examines and investigates numerous classifications and practices of adaptation and appropriation, she discusses the cultural and aesthetic politics behind the instinct to adapt. She also talks about varied methods in which current literature and film adapt, look over and re-envisage other works of art, the influence of academic schools, like structuralism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, postmodernism, feminism and gender studies on adaptation. She also explores the adaptation across time and across cultures of particular recognized texts, but also of literary archetypes for example myth or fairy tale.
What is of importance to Sanders is the term intertextuality which she examines in the form of adaptation and appropriation. The discussion of adaptation calls into play the process of intextuality, of how literature creates literature. She believes the idea that the finding of intertextual reference and allusion as a self-confirming implementation is reasonable enough, quoting Robert Weimann's phrase 'reproductive dimension of appropriation'(quoted by Sanders, 1) proposes the various traditions in which texts breastfeed and inform other texts -but, as readers and critics, we also need to recognize that adaptation and appropriation are fundamental to the practice, and, indeed, to the enjoyment, of literature(ibid).
Sanders refers to Roland Barthes professing that 'any text is an intertext' (Sanders,2005:2), proposing that the literature of preceding and former cultures were invariably existing in later literature. Barthes likewise placed emphasis on the techniques in which texts were not merely hooked on their authors for the construction of meaning, suggesting how they profited from readers who shaped their own intertextual organisms.(ibid, 2) Julia Kristeva, a product of systematic and

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Volume 60 anthropological school influenced by Lévi-Strauss, articulated the term intertextualité in her essay 'The Bounded Text' to designate the process by which any text was a transformation of texts, an intertextuality (ibid,17). Kristeva's emphasis was sprang from semiotics; she was absorbed in how texts were pervaded by the signs, signifiers, and words of the culture to which they contributed, or from which they sprung. Intertextuality as a word has, nevertheless, come to denote a far more textual idea set against utterance-driven notion of how texts include and react to other texts both during the procedure of their formation and configuration and in terms of the individual reader's or spectator's reaction.(ibid). In adaptations the intertextual connection may be less obvious, more entrenched, but what is often unpreventable is the fact that a political or moral pledge generates a writer's, director's, or performer's choice to re-interpret a source text.(ibid) Sanders contends that 'modernist poetry practiced intertextuality in the form of quotation, allusion, collage, bricolage, and fragment'.(ibid, 8) Drawing upon the ideas of Gérard Genette, Sanders uses the term 'hypertext' to equate it with the adaptation and 'hypotext' to the source.(ibid, 6) Sanders discusses Ulysses as a powerful hypotxt of the rich potentials of the adaptive method and of analyses attentive to the politics of appropriation, but it is likewise a good example of the sense of play that numerous thinkers have empathize as fundamental to the adaptive instinct.(ibid, 7). She quotes T. S. Eliot suggesting that meaning comes from the connections between texts, connections which stimulate contrast and comparison. Sanders also contends that 'Canonicity is almost a required feature of the raw material for adaptation and appropriation'. (ibid, 120) Directors and filmmakers do not choose any work from literature they choose the ones which are canonical. Adaptation, argues Sanders, both seems to require and to preserve the presence of a canon, while it may in turn contribute to its continuing reformulation and growth.(ibid, 8) Regarding the canonicity Sanders refers to Derek Attridge contending that the continuation of any canon is reliant in some measure on the allusions made to its former supporters by its later followers or prospective members (ibid, 8-9). The essential 'reading alongside' of original work and adaptation, demands a knowledge on the part of the reader and viewer of the original work when facing the adaptive text. In this regard, adaptation becomes a veritable marker of canonical status; a lot of reference to a canonical, original work infers authority. (ibid, 9) Sanders believes that adaptation could be described as a characteristically conservative genre. Quoting Attridge arguing that through their regularly explicit allusiveness novels present themselves not as assaults to the canon, but as canonic -as already canonized. They seem to place themselves within a recognized literary culture, rather than offering themselves as a challenge to that culture (ibid). Nevertheless, as the idea of antagonistic overthrow present in a term such as 'appropriation' suggests, adaptation can likewise be oppositional, even subversive. There are as numerous chances for departure as devotion, for attack as well as reverence. (ibid) To the benefit of adaptation, Sander refers to Adrienne Rich's 'When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision', first printed in 1971. Making use of Rich's much-cited observation that for women writers it was indispensable to adopt the writing of the past in order to go beyond it into a liberated, imaginative space of their own. She quotes Rich as saying 'Re-vision -the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction … We need to know the writing of the past and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us' (ibid).

DISSCUSSION
In the light of Hucheon's and Sanders's theory of adaptation, it is not practical to think about the faithful relationship of the movie Ali Baba and Forty Thieves and Thousand and One Nights. The question of fidelity is insignificant and wide of the mark here in this analysis. We will discuss the movie in terms of its plot, its main characters and the similarities and differences, Representation of the East which is to be found in the imagery of buying women, passion, harem and veil.

Plot of Ali Baba and Forty Thieves
The plot of the movie revolves around Mongolian conquest of Bagdad by Hulagu Khan (Kurt Katch). The caliph Hassan (Moroni Olsen) has run away confinement, accompanied by his young son Ali (Scotty Beckett), and prepares to reorganize the remaining of his soldiers. Although remaining at the castle of Prince Cassim (Frank Puglia), Ali and Cassim's daughter Amara (Yvette Duguay), being afraid that they will not see each other again, make a nuptial agreement through their blood. Everything is oriental: the clothing, the atmosphere, and the names, except for the language.
When the caliph is ready to go away, Cassim ruins caliph's plan by calling him back and makes him be killed at the hands of the Mongols but his son Ali absconds. Unaccompanied and lost in the desert, he falls upon a mountainside where he watches a throng of riders departing a concealed cave. Learning its opening phrase ("Open, Sesame!"), he arrives in the cave and finds it full of gem. When the 40 thieves come back, they discover the boy dead sleep in their hideout. Upon understanding that he is the offspring of the caliph, and enthralled by his bravery and strength of mind, the thieves permit him to be with them and be their leader, Old Baba (Fortunio Bonanova), accepts him as his son, Ali Baba.
A decade later, the group of thieves have become a troupe of Robin Hood-style resistance fighters, prowling the Mongols and giving to the deprived and browbeaten people. At some point, they find out that a convoy bearing the new fiancée for the Khan to Bagdad, which appears to be rich pickings since it is seemingly only insecurely protected. Ali Baba (Jon Hall), now a full-grown man, nevertheless is doubtful and chooses to watch the caravan first, accompanied by his 'nanny' Abdullah (Andy Devine). The bride appears to be Amara (Maria Montez), Cassim's daughter, who is to be married to the Khan so as to strengthen Cassim's rather wobbly standing with the Mongols.
Meanwhile, Amara chooses to bath in the oasis, where Ali meets her (they do not recognize each other, however). Mistaking her for a mere servant and making her believe he is a traveler, he questions her about the caravan, then more about herself. But then it becomes clear that the caravan is indeed seriously protected; Ali is trapped and apprehended, while Abdullah only just flees. When Ali Baba knows that the 'servant girl' is the fiancée of the Khan, he curses her for her supposed betrayal. Offended by his allegations and in mounting approbation for him and his faith, she requests her servant and bodyguard, Jamiel (Turhan Bey), who admires the 40 thieves, to slake Ali's thirst.
In Bagdad, Ali is shown to the Khan, nevertheless he is not identified as the chief of the forty thieves, and tied to a pillory in the palace square for public hanging the next day. Cassim pays a private visits to him and finds out Ali's true identity, but does not disclose it to anyone. Soon afterwards, the thieves organize Ali Baba's release, nevertheless Old Baba is gravely injured; Amara, who was about to visit Ali to clear the misunderstanding between them, is abducted, and Jamiel alone frees Ali Baba. The thieves depart into Mount Sesame.
The next day, the thieves arrest Jamiel, who was following them. Ali distinguishes him as a comrade, and Jamiel, who pledges loyalty to Ali Baba, is given the role of a mole in the palace. His first mission is to hand in a ransom note to the Khan: in exchange for his bride, Hulagu Khan is to submit the conspirator Cassim. The thieves go to Cassim's house to expect the defector's coming. When Amara comes into the garden, Ali distinguishes her as his lost love, and with his aroused moods for her he chooses to free her without wanting her father. This primarily stimulates the irritation of his troupe, nonetheless they still continue to be faithful to him.
When Amara comes back to Bagdad, her father discloses Ali's real identity to her and the Khan. Hulagu Khan chooses to hold the wedding instantaneously; Amara does not abide, but seeing her father being tortured falsely makes her submit. Jamiel informs Ali, who chooses to release his love. In order to get to the palace unobserved, he invents the strategy to pass himself off as a trader from Basra who carries forty enormous jars of oil as a wedding present. Jamiel comes back to the palace to communicate the strategy to Amara, nonetheless they catch one of her servants snooping. The girl then communicates the news to Cassim and the Khan, who choose to greet Ali in an appropriate fashion.

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Volume 60 On the day of marriage, Ali Baba does appear as a trader from Basra and is accepted as a guest. Through an interval, sword dancers appear, who initially perform their routine and then rapidly dive their swords through the jar covers -but the jars have only sand inside. Upon learning of the exposure of the original plan, Ali had decided to make a few modifications: most of the thieves came cloaked in the crowd; some others were concealed in jars which were not brought in front of the Khan.
Hulagu Khan slays Cassim for his disappointment and proclaims Ali's hanging, nonetheless then Jamiel unlocks the revolution by killing Ali's protectors with his throwing blades. While the thieves attack the palace guards, he and Amara open the gates for the mob, which rushes in and suppresses the Mongols. Abdullah kills Hulagu Khan, and Jamiel raises the Arabian flag over the palace's highest tower as a symbol of victory.

A Whole Different Story
The movie, though based on Thousand and one Nights, deviates from the text of Thousand and One Nights to a great extent. It is a novel story in itself. The setting is Baghdad though the story of Ali Baba is supposed to be in Persia. (Burton,369) The setting is at the time of the invasion of Baghdad by the Mongols. The story of Ali Baba in the text of Thousand and One Nights is completely turned on its head. It is totally reversed. In the story of Ali Baba the process is changed from hostility of the forty thieves to their friendship. It is they in the movie who are helping Ali Baba to revenge himself. The forty thieves are forty friends for Ali Baba and they raise him up and hence Ali Baba. 'Baba' in Persian means 'father' and Ali is the most famous name in Persian culture. Even the name 'Ali Baba' is chosen by the Old Baba the leader of the group.
While in the text of Thousand and One Nights the gang is very dangerous and aggressive, the movie they are friends to people and the poor. In the text they are enemy of the people and rob people and wreak havoc in the city and outside of the city. They rob and what they rob is kept inside a magical cave which is opened with the phrase 'open oh sesame' and is closed with the words 'close oh sesame'. In the text of Thousand and One Nights the forty thieves are villain and evil but here in the movie it is the other way round. What they do in the text is to massacre and rob people and what they do in the movie is otherwise helping the poor and the deprived. In the text all the forty thieves are killed by Mariana and here in the movie they are acting benevolently and are loved by Ali Baba.
The movie has another person which is also found in the text, that person is Cassim. In the text Cassim is the brother of Ali Baba and is very greedy and dies because of his ambition. (Burton, 1901: 376) The same parallels can be found in the movie in the character of Cassim who is greedy and dies as a consequence of his ambition. The reference to forty jars by which the forty thieves attacked Ali Baba's house in order to kill him are used in the movie to the benefit of Ali Baba as his plan to overthrow and topple the government of the Mongols. Instead of forty thieves inside the jars, there is sand in them.

Textual Ali Baba and Visual Ali Baba
Textual Ali Baba is chalk and cheese with the visual Ali Baba. The textual Ali Baba is a poor person from the Persian and from working-class (Burton: 1901: 369) while the visual Ali Baba is from gentry's class. Visual Ali Baba is the son of the caliph, who is killed by the Mongols. The textual Ali Baba scrapes a living by collecting woods and by some quirk of fates comes upon a cave wherein the thieves heap up their stolen wealth. He takes some of them and is rich beyond the dream of avarice. The textual Ali Baba becomes a respected merchant on account of the wealth he takes from the cave. In fact, the textual Ali Baba gets from a poor state to a rich state while for visual Ali Baba it is quite the opposite because he is the son of a caliph and is reduced to nothing other than being a vagabond after his father is toppled by the Mongols at a time when Ali is only a child.
The visual Ali Baba is there to befriend the forty thieves and become their leader to steal from the Mongols and give to the downtrodden. The visual Ali Baba is a pest for the Mongols to the extent that the Halagu Khan orders 'Ten Thousand pieces of gold for the body of Ali Baba and the International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences Vol. 60 destruction of the band of thieves'. The visual Ali Baba is a freedom fighter. Along with his friends he resists the cruel ruling of Mongols and at the end defeats the Mongols and resumes the caliphate. The textual Ali Baba is not from royal dynasty but one who rises from rags to riches.