introduction - shodhganga : a reservoir of indian theses...
TRANSCRIPT
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
Virginia Woolf writing on Cinema in her essay "The Cinema" (1926)
had expressed her misgivings about this new art form and called it
'hubble, bubble, swarm and chaos.' She saw Cinema invading the
literary terrains and becoming an art with a new meaning.
All the famous novels of the world, with their well known characters, and their famous scenes, only asked, it seemed, to be put on the films ... But the results are disastrous to both. The alliance is unnatural. Eye and brain are thrown asunder ruthlessly as they try vainly to work in couples. The eye says: 'Here is Anna Karenina'. A voluptuous lady in black velvet wearing pearls comes before us. But the brain says 'That is no more Anna Karenina than it is Queen Victoria? For the brain knows Anna almost entirely by the inside of her mind - her charm, her passion, her despair. All the emphasis is laid by the Cinema upon her teeth, her pearls and her velvet. ("The Cinema", 1926.).
The advantage Cinema had over laboriously written novels troubled
Woolf. It had the capacity to concretise and visualise for the reader
a 'Anna Karenina' in flesh and blood. She continues with her fears
of misrepresentation in cinematic adaptations of literary texts and
says: -
So we lurch and lumber through the most famous novels of the world ... A kiss is love. A broken cup is jealousy. A grin is happiness. Death is hearse ... None of these things has the least connection with the novel that Tolstoy wrote, and it is only when we give up trying to connect pictures with the book that we guess from some accidental scene -like the gardener mowing the lawnwhat the Cinema might do if it were left to its own devices. (The Cinema, 1926).
Virginia Woolf had correctly identified, almost thirty years before
George Bluestone's seminal work, Novels into Film (1957), that the
indexical and iconic characteristics of Cinema was gradually
evolving its own new language and vocabulary. What Virginia Woolf
Introduction
had not foreseen was that the cinematic adaptation of literary text
will not only generate a body of critical theory but will also establish
itself as new genre and an area of study.
The process of adapting novels for film has continued unabated for
ninety years and more and the motivations have ranged from
creatively visualising literary classics to earning pure commercial
profits. Even at the risk of the viewer complaint about having
betrayed the 'original novel', the adaptation of novels to films has
only gained in stature as a serious art form. Christian Metz echoed
Woolfs sentiments when he contested the problem of violation of
the original. He said, "the reader will not always find his film, since
what he has before him in the actual film is now somebody else's
fan tasy" . 1
Interestingly enough Virginia Woolfs novels show an affinity with
cinematic techniques. Keith Cohen in his book, Film and Fiction 2
uses passages from Virginia Woolf to suggest how the modern
novel, uses techniques of Eisenteinian 'montage cinema'.3 Literature
and film have always been related. The debate about the inter
relationship of the verbal and the visual goes back to the nineteenth
century Pre-Raphaelite discussion on poetry and painting. From the
early days of the film, when 'classic' novels were made into movies,
filmmakers have continually been indebted to literature in a variety
of ways. So to, a number of writers from Pirandello to Nathanael
2
Introduction
West, have shown that the influence goes both ways, a cross-
fertilisation in Keith Cohen's terms.
Sergei Eisenstein the famous director of the silent film classic
Battleship Potemkin (1925), tries to document the importance of the
English novelist to the early American filmmaker. He found specific
film techniques in the Victorian novel. In his seminal essay
"Dickens Griffith and the Film Today" in his book Film Fonn (1949)
he argues that the rcots of the American film aesthetic are to be
found in the Victorian novel especially those of Charles Dickens. He
discovers a "close-up" in The Cricket of The Hearth, a (dissolve" in A • Tale of Two Cities (1859) montage in "Oliver Twist'(1838) and
camera technique everywhere. Eisenstein derides the idea that film
is an autonomous, self-contained and independent form. 4 On the
other hand critics like Alan Spiegel, Keith Cohen and Richard
Pearce argue that all the technical novelties introduced in the
novels after 1920 are borrowed from the films.s They emphasize the
modern novel's need to recount specific action by articulating visual
images through word play, metaphor and description. The
disruptive tendencies of post modern literature and the techniques
of the new unframable, distanced novel is also attributed to the
influence of the techniques of film making. While Eisenstein's well
known Film Sense is actually an expanded version of what has been
called the literary imagination, for the modern critics like Richard
Pearce, the modern fictions of Joyce, Faulkner and Beckett are only
the literary versions of the cinematic imagination. 3
Introduction
Film had recognised its influences of and kinship with literature
right since its inception. Some narrative techniques employed in
novels presupposed a cinematic imagination- like Flaubert's
anticipation of cinematic crosscutting in the scene of the
agricultural fair in Madame Bovary (1857) or Conrad's inclusion of
a subliminal flashback in The Heart of Darkness, (1918) when
Marlow prepares for a nocturnal meeting with Kurtz.6 Eisenstein
drew parallels between the narrative methods of Charles Dickens
and those of D.W.Griffith the American filmmaker. His own
montage theories and practice had precedent in James Joyce's
work. The opening Chapter of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man, (1921) with its free movement between time and space,
is one of the finest examples of Eisensteinian montage in fiction. 7
If one considers literature as the art of words, that is to say, if it is
letters or words that give literary activity its peculiar and distinctive
character, then it follows that film is not literature, nor even
literary, certainly not in the silent era and only marginally in the
sound era. If it is the primacy of the word that creates literature,
then one would have to say that the film is at best analogous to
literature, having its own pictorial vocabulary and its montage for
syntax. But if we shift the focus a little and consider literature as a
narrative art that creates images and sounds in the reader's mind,
then a film is 'literary' and we can safely assert that the film is only
an extension of the older narrative arts.
4
Introduction
According to Andre Bazin, Cinema is the furthermost evolution to
date of plastic realism, the beginnings of which were first manifest
in Renaissance and which found its expression in Baroque
paintings.8 In the nineteenth century the Pre-Raphaelite painting
was torn between two ambitions, one primarily aesthetic, namely
the expression of spiritual reality wherein the symbol transcended
its model and the other purely psychological i.e. a duplication of the
world outside. The Pre-Raphaelite's painted directly from natural
objects. They chose subjects from contemporary life and portrayed
subjects borrowed from Shakespeare, Keats, Dante and Malory in a
contemporary light. They attempted to perfectly imitate the world
outside and created an illusion of reality.9
Walter Pater's concern with concreteness of sensations and
impressions was ye~ another expression of the same attempt. The
Pre-Raphaelites had .solved the problem of form, had even suggested
movement yet not quite. Realism was forced to continue the search
for some way of giving dramatic expression to the moment
captured, "a kind of psychic fourth dimension that could suggest
life in the tortured immobility of Pre-Raphaelite paintings" .10 With
the availability of camera, the artist was in a position to create the
illusion of three-dimensional space within which things appeared to
exist as our eyes in reality saw them. The first photographic images
thus captured by Lumiere brothers in 1886 depicted scenes of a
railway station and labourers coming out of a factory- once again
scenes from daily life but this time with all the real movements. The 5
Introduction
satisfaction of achieving an illusion of reality had finally been
achieved.
Robert Scholes, In his essay, "Narration and Narrativity in film"
(1957) has persuasively argued that film is capable of combining
the essential qualities of both narrative literature (verbal narrative)
and visual art (pictorial representation) .11 Scholes' insight can be
further extended: we may say that, insofar as film is an
encyclopedic and synthesizing art form, it combines aspects of not
only literature (that is, fiction, drama, poetry) and painting, but
also photography, mime, dance, architecture and music. The film is
capable of drawing upon most aspects of its artistic heritage to
document, render and interpret experience. Camera position,
camera movement, framing, lighting and sound all may individually
or severally reproduce shape and thus express and evaluate the
significance of a narrative. Andre Bazin, Bela Balazs, George
Bluestone and Sergei Eisenstein talk at length how camera situates
and frames action, what is the iconic and the analytic and
expressive possibilities of spatial, tonal. and cognitive montage.
Their critical writings have thoroughly surveyed the nature and
method of the adaptation as an interelative link between literature
and film.
It is interesting to note that the French word for a filmmaker is
Realisateur - one who "realises" or actualises" a fluid text. When a
literary narrative is transformed into a cinematic narrative, a spatial
6
Introduction
and temporal dimension is added on to it. The resemblance between
literature and Cinema is strictly structural. Both the mediums are
subjugated by the authority of the narrative, structure, like the
necessity to have a defined beginning, middle and end. The essence
of both literature and Cinema is drama. The drama lies in the
method in which the theme unfurls itself. The continuous
movement back and forth of the structure a phenomena known as
flashback and flash-forward in Cinema creates this drama. It is also
created by the sequential exposition of the theme. In literature
sequential continuity is broken by syntax, paragraphs, chapter etc.
In Cinema it is done at the editing stage by cuts, inter-cuts, fade-
outs fade in etc.
The translation or the transformation of a literary narrative into a
cinematic narrative occurs through a screenplay. A screenplay,
which forms the blueprint for the 'mechanised muse', the Cinema,
often reads like a literary piece. The written word in a screenplay
provides a language within a language. How successfully the verbal
gets translated· into the visual depends entirely upon the
screenplay. Constitution of meaning in Cinema is undertaken
through various devices. In a colour movie, black and white shots
are sometimes used to denote a time in the past. Shyam Benegal's
film Trikaal( 1985) was suffused with a golden light through out, to
evoke the metaphorical golden era of Goa under the Portuguese
rule. Govind Nihalani's Rukmavati Ki Haveli (1992) an adaptation of
Lorca's The House of Bernard Alba (1934) was entirely shot in tight 7
Introduction
frames and close ups to convey a claustrophobic ambience.
Rukmavati Ki Haveli was also displaced in time and space i.e. to a
village in Rajasthan in twentieth century India. Similarly in Orson
Welles' adaptation of Kafka's novel The Trial (1962), the visual
externalisation of the character's state of mind is done through long
shots and shots of lengthening shadows. Sometimes musical
leitmotifs and the soundtrack function as verbal and visual
substitutes for the anguish-ridden ambience of the scene.
The novel, far from being a copy of the source is a transposition or
translation, from one set of conventions for representing the world
to another. This brings us to the objective of the present study. The
present study will be a comparative analysis of these two somewhat
similar and yet distinctly different modes of representation. Kazuo
Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day (1989) and the film The I
Remains of the day (1993) by James Ivory and Ismail Merchant
shall be correlated and evaluated in the light of theoretical issues
discussed. I believe that combining the verbal with the visual and
aural produces a new narrative. When a literary work is translated
into a film, it is metamorphosed not only by the camera, the editing,
the performances, the setting and the music, but also by distinctive
film codes and conventions, culturally signifying elements, and by
the producer and director's interpretation as well. Meanings that
may have been lost when the text of the narrative first became the
screenplay, condensed and bereft of some of its linguistic resources,
may be resurrected and new meanings added subsequently in the 8
Introduction
new medium in a different form and through a different kind of
imaginative process. The present study will attempt to unravel this
craft of constitution of meaning in the mentioned novel and its
cinematic representation.
When a filmed script comes alive on the screen and is experienced
by an audience, the dialectic between the film and viewer is not
exactly the same as that between literary text and reader. Robert
Scholes has observed that film is, for e.g., a more collaborative
process than literature; -
In cinematic narrative, the spectator must supply a more categorical and abstract narrative .... The images presented to us, their arrangement and just positioning are narrational blueprints for a fiction that must be constructed by the viewer's Narrativity.12
The signs and codes and convention depend upon shared cultural
context or geist and the audience experiencing a film supplies the
appropriate feelings perceptions, interpretations, and thus in a
sense, completes the film. Thus the present study will attempt to
also analyse the impact of these two modes of representation on the
reader and the viewer respectively. A brief account of the author of
the novel; under consideration at this juncture is pertinent.
Nagasaki born Ishiguro is a J apanese-English man who came to
England at an early age. Fully educated into the idioms and
assumptions of British life, Ishiguro is distinguished for his
understatements, exquisite precision and subtle humor. Ishiguro's
novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), was awarded the Winfred Holtby
9
Introduction
prize by the Royal Society of literature. His second novel, An Artist
of the Floating World (1986) shortlisted for Booker was the
Whitebread Book of the year. His third novel The Remains of the
Day (1989) won the Booker prize in 1989. Each of his novels has an
unmistakable identity; yet he displays his virtuosity in his use of a
different narrative voice in each. Some critics see in Ishiguro' quite
mannered narratives and delicate understatement, draft and
elegant strokes of Japanese paintings. However the author
vehemently opposes such reading of his novels.
The Remains of the Day (1989) renders with humor and pathos a
memorable character Mr. Stevens who is occupied with a single
question all his life, which is, 'What makes a great butler'? This may
seem an extraordinary question for a young novelist to pose at the
end of the twentieth century; yet Ishiguro uses it in order to be able
to ask the far more important question of how a man's life is
justified. The novel is a stream of memory told by an elderly English
butler on holiday in the West Country, reflecting on his service in a
very grand house the Darlington Hall in the 1930's. His obsessive
and Jeevesian meditations are punctuated with a nagging thought
that something is badly wrong somewhere. He recalls the glittering
house parties, visiting dignitaries, his impassivity at his father's
death and the romantic overtures of a female colleague.
The mask of the perfect servant is gradually cracked by
retrospection during his tour of Wessex. In short the novel tells us a
10
Introduction
melancholy and humorous love story: it is a political meditation on
the democratic responsibilities and failings of an ordinary man, and
an elegiac tale of how best intentions go awry. As in Ishiguro's
second novel, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), this novel also
deals with an old mc:n coming to terms with personal and public
guilt after the Second World War. A remarkable feat of imagination,
since Ishiguro recreates a butler of an era long extinct. This
humorous and enqulrmg novel was made into a film in 1993 by
Ismail Merchant, James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Its
producer, director and scriptwriter as a team have repeatedly
explored the English mind and are known for having perfected the
art of film adaptations of literary classics. The Remains of the Day,
thus both in its verbal and visual representation is a symbolic
outsider's rendition of the British class and culture.
In Chapter 1- Reality and Representation, ,an attempt has been
made to trace the debate on 'reality and its representation' in art
and the literary theory surrounding it from Plato till the present
day. This debate touches on various issues related to mimesis. It
discusses how representation of reality can be made to function as
a controlling mechanism of human imagination and hence its
relation to the power discourse which operates in a society. It also
explains how a visual medium like Cinema can alter, transform,
recreate reality with its unique repertoire of cinematic codes. In this
chapter an attempt has also been made to summarise the literary
theory on mimesis from Plato onwards. The chapter also touches on 11
Introduction
how film theorists like Sergei Eisenstein and Pudovkin drew upon
these theories of mimesis to evolve a theory of film viewing. The
debate extends the frontiers of theories of mimesis by highlighting
the technological apparatus of Cinema, which can generate reality,
which is 'probable' and 'perceptual' and fits the notion of reality in
the minds of viewer with no refferent in the real world.
Chapter 2- Page to Screen traces the journey of the novel to
Cinema and the ensuing critkal theories. This chapter highlights
the similarities and the differences of two different systems of
signification and two different modes of representation and reality.
This chapter also discusses the narrative elements of the novel
those that are transferable on film and those that cannot be. An
attempt is also made to define certain unique features of the film,
which provides the medium with an added advantage for purpose of
narration. The discussion highlights the 'gaps' that occur when
'verbal' is transformed to 'visual'. Various cinematic and film
techniques like flashback'. 'crosscutting' and the soundtrack are
defined in this chapter. A discussion is carried out to explain how
the film apparatus with its repertoire of lighting, sets, soundtrack,
camera angles and editing etc. collectively or individually constitute
meaning in the film text. The discussion also highlights the
differences between theatre and Cinema.
In Chapter 3- Theories of Adaptation, an attempt has been made
to discuss all the film theories pertaining to film adaptation of
12
Introduction
novels. From George Bluestone's seminal, pioneering work Novels
into Films (1957) to Kracauer's views on adaptation of novels from
films in The Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality
(1960) is discussed at length. The various categories or types of
adaptation of literary texts to film is also discussed in this chapter
followed by a sample analyses of five films based on novels. This
analysis is undertaken to highlight how novelistic elements are
transferred to screen and also to study the resultant gaps the
process of constitution of meaning in the film medium and whether
films adhere to any particular category of adaptation.
In Chapter 4, The Remains of the Day- a detailed analysis of the
film is followed a comparative reader-viewer response of the novel
and the film. The film analysis takes into account the additions,
, deletions in the film script vis-a.-vis the novel and provides reasons
, for them. The analysis also traces the process of constitution of ~-
meaning as it takes place in every scene of the film. The analysis
also traces the thematic shifts that takes place in the film due to a
different foregrounding of the story elements of the novel. The
chapter also provides a graphic model of the film apparatus, which
translates a screenplay into a film.
In Chapter 5- Encoding and Decoding Meaning: The Reader
Viewer Response, the theoretical underpinnings of the reader-
viewer response debate is discussed at length. In the backdrop of
this theoretical discussion a graphic model is proposed which
13
Introduction
indicates a mUltiple text scenario which emerges from the viewing
experiences of a reader who watches a certain film adaptation of a
novel. This chapter also discusses how the ideological apparatus at
times dominates the constitution of meaning in films and other
visual mediums. Towards the end of the chapter a brief exercise is
undertaken to highlight how the process of encoding and decoding
of meaning takes place in The Remains of the Day- the film.
The issue of adaptation has attracted critical attention for more
th~ sixty years. George Bluestone's work Novels into Films (1957)
is still regarded by many as the last word on the subject of
adaptation. Bluestone was of the view that cinematic adaptations
could alter the novel to suit the needs of the medium without
changing the novelist's intention and meaning. Bela Balazs writing
before Bluestone had credit,ed the screenplay adaptation as a new
art form. According to him literature provides raw material for film
adaptations, and the film creates new visual forms and thematic
contents. However both Bluestone and Balazs felt that only certain
novels could be rendered into films while others resist translation
because of the inherent differences in the media.
Sigfried Kracauer who continued the adaptation debate in his work
Theory of Film: The Physical Redemption of Reality (1960)
approvingly refers to Bluestone's conclusion that the film The
Grapes of Wrath (1940) directed by John Ford based on John
Steinbeck's novel by the same name is a remarkably successful
14
Introduction
adaptation because the novel lends itself so well to "the images of
physical reality. "13 According to Kracauer adaptation of novels fail
because they are 'uncinematic'14 For Kracauer 'redemption of
physical reality' is the sole purpose of Cinema and an examination
of the psychological state of Emma Bovary has no place in this
scheme.
The discussion on adaptation has been bedeviled by the fidelity
issue from the very beginning. Even those who concede the
. -impossibility of an exact translation from page to screen, frequently
argue, that it is possible to be faithful to some amorphous,
indefinable spirit or essence of the novel. Jean Mitry adding to the
fidelity debate says:
... at the level of mise-en-scene - if we define the phase simply as the creation of dramatic space ........ the adapter can compose the world which the novel suggests, its climate, it ambience and record it with the camera. 1S
For Mitry then, adaptation of literary texts or novels are no longer
creation or expression but are only representation or illustration,
which sometimes would even echo the style and manner of the
author, Dickens for e.g.: in David Lean's Great Expectations (1946).
Eisenstein was of the view that different media employs different
methods to convey the same meaning. However Eisenstein
presupposes an 'organic vision' in the mind of the creator who then
finds equivalence for that vision in the mind of the receptor through
the medium of fIlm or novel. What Eisenstein failed to take into
account was the 'organic vision' could never be one but there could
15
Introduction
be multiplicity of visions or interpretations in mind of vanous
creators or filmmakers. He also fails to confront the fact that inspite
of the clinically designed montage technique the intertextuality that
operates in the viewer's perception would effect his response.
Andre Bazin put forward the most convincing theory of equivalence
in his essay "In Defense of Mixed Cinema" .16 He argues that fidelity
to the source text is a virtue and that adaptation should be
regarded as a form of translation from one language into another .
. ' But_ Bazin further complicates the analogy of translation by
prefixing it with a 'fortunate understanding of the text.' Adaptation
involves selective interpretation and perception, which mayor may
not coincide with that of the critic and hence Bazin's fidelity issue
becomes meaningless. Moreover the analogy of translation was
dismissed by Christian Metz .He established that 'film cannot be
considered as a language in any complete sense consequently,
resemblances can never become equivalents'.
However Bazin changes his stance when he writes his famous
essay, "The Stylistics of Robert Bresson." In his book What is
Cinema? (1967), Bazin comments extensively on Bresson's film,
Diary of a Country Priest (1950) based on the Bemanos novel. Bazin
found the voice-over narration in the film as an attribute to 'fidelity'
to the source text. However in order to reconcile his theory with the
numerous ellipses in the Bresson film and its shift from the
Bernanos novel, Bazin went on to say: -
16
Introduction
It is a question of building a secondary work with the novel as foundation. In no sense is the film "comparable" to the novel or "worthy" of it. It is a new aesthetic creation, the novel so to speak multiplied by the Cinema. 17
Bazin was close to discarding the now almost bankrupt concept of
fidelity but somehow never could do it. Adaptation for Bazin merely
raised the whole of Cinema, " to the level of literature". 18 However,
Andre Bazin was futuristic when he observed that adaptation had a
number of important social functions, one of which was
pedagogical.
Dudley Andrew in his essay titled 'Adaptation' (1984) years after
Bazin, hi'nted at similar social functions. He said that certain
adaptations at certain period of time cater to the political need of
the time and hence it was imperative that studies on adaptation
should be used to understand "the world from which it comes and
the one towards which it points"19. The study of film adaptations
based on literary texts can then be read as discourse of a particular
age and time.
Two critical areas of debate which the present area of study will also
touch upon are the 'reality and its representation' and the 'process
of viewing that representation'. Debates about 'realism and
representation' in European culture can be traced back to Plato and
Aristotle. That realism cannot be confined to a particular style of
representation and is always in a flux is increasingly being felt in
the present era of digital modes of representation. However in the
late nineteenth century a group of painters made their mark as
17
Introduction
'realists' by painting, truthful objective representation of the real
world based on meticulous observation of life. Photography made
that experience even more concrete. In the arena of literature the
realists cast themselves as careful painters of human life. Emile
Zola's 'Naturalism' became an extreme form of realism where
observation and reproduction of detail became ends in themselves.
When Cinema arrived in 1885-86, realism suddenly found the
domain of dynamic visual realisation. The nineteenth century
audience already exposed to the genre of novel and fiction found a
medium where both the fantastic and the spectacular could be
enacted through a narrative and in a believable setting. Before
Cinema the commercial stage was the arena for such renditions.
Cinema was somehow waiting to happen In this age of
industrialisation and capitalism. The new middle class was as if in
search for a new medium of representation to mirror a new reality
emerging out of a more complex changing socio-political context.
The early film theorists such as Munsterberg, Malraux, Arnhiem,
Balazs and Eisenstein used formalist theories to anlayse the new
medium-Cinema. The formalists believed that form constrained
meaning and new meaning could be achieved only if the shape or
the pattern of the container is changed. The neo-formalists such as
David Bordwell and Kirsten Thompson draw on this assumption to
claim that realism can only be achieved if it breaks with familiar,
conventional patterns - i.e. the process of defamiliarisation. Andre
18
Introduction
Bazin broke away from the formalist school and rejected
Eisenstein's montage technique as a restrictive means of
representing reality where events are ordered to suit rhetorical
needs. Bazin showed preference for yet another kind of montage -
the continuity editing style of mainstream films. He felt a long take
and depth within the image was inherently more realistic. Bazin
also favored a de familiarisation technique that breaks with already
established codes and conventions in the interests of generating
realism and interpretive ambiguity. Bazin advocated a realistic
Cinema that preserved the freedom of spectators to choose their
own interpretations of an object, character or event. However
Dudley Andrew later argued that techniques alone cannot
guarantee reality.
In film studies, Colil1 MacCabe forcefully argues the post-
structuralist position20 . MacCabe argues that a nineteenth century
literary novel has several discourses each proposing a version of
reality. But among them only one discourse is privileged as the
bearer of the truth; this discourse functions as 'metalanguage'
against which the truth or falsity of other discourses can be judged.
The metalanguage corresponds to the narrating source of the fiction
no matter whether the narrating voice is first person or third
person. MacCabe claims that fiction films are similarly structured,
where voice-overs and numerous images present different versions
of reality - with images taking precedence over words. The image
track shows the spectator what really happens, the camera thus 19
Introduction
providing the metalanguage by situating the spectator within the
fictional diegesis of the film. In filmed fictions, the narrating
discourse is rendered transparent through the camera and it resists
questioning. The viewer or the spectator is in possession of the
complete and final knowledge of events and hence the truth.
David Bordwell criticises MacCabe's formulations since it fails to
take into account the various sub-genres of a nineteenth century
novel, lik~ the novel of manners, Gothic romance etc. and it also
doe_s not take into account omniscient and restricted point-of-view.
Moreover according to Bordwell the nineteenth century novel is as
not so much hierarchy of discourses, as it is a Bakhtinian
heteroglossia or dialogue where conflicting visions of the world,
struggle to articulate themselves throughout various discourses.
Bordwell concludes by saying that MacCabe reduces, the range of
filmic narration by equating metalanguage with camera. The
camera cannot be privileged ·over filmic techniques such as speech,
gesture written language, music, colour, costumes, sound offscreen
space etc. 21
The other area of debate is in the domain of spectatorship or
viewership of the cinematic representations. A filmmaker mediates
information about characters and situations in reference to the
dominant conceptions of what constitutes reality. These dominant
conceptions could be dependent upon public opinion according to
Barthes.22 This pubic OpInlOn represented through critical
20
~
.0 M t+-O"")
Introduction
discourses, promotional literature and advertising help constitute
the climate of interpretation that surrounds the popular reception
of a film or media text. While a professional viewer draws upon this
referential context to measure realism in films an ordinary viewer
judges his assessment on the basis of plausibility in the filmic
context. The viewer engages himself in a process, which swings
between suspension of disbelief and a willingness to playa game of
make-believe. The viewer considers a fiction film realistic provided
the characters and situation make sense in the world they inhabit.
They draw upon their own experience of what constitutes reality
including their knowledge of other realities.
l David Bordwell provides a useful approach to questions of r t- plausibility and rationality in film texts23 • Bordwell's work engages
with cognitive theories that are interested in exploring how we make
sense of our physical and material world; he argues that we use the
same processes to make sense of films. The cognitive theory defines
the culturally embedded knowledge of characters and events held
by the viewer as the personal schemata. This personal schemata
helps the viewer to identify and comprehend similar representation
lL of characters and events on screen. This process of identification
~ .. leads to constitution of meaning. Bordwell identifies three areas of 01 0' cognitive activity that are brought into play when we watch a film: 0'" '~ a) Our perceptual capacities: the ability to perceive colour and to
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construct a three dimensional-space on a two dimensional plane
through depth cues etc. 21
Introduction
b) Our prior knowledge and experiences.
c) The material and structure of the film itself.
The personal schemata thus enables us to extract meaning from a
vast amount of sensory data. This existing schemata comes in to
play while watching a film and assessing its 'realism'. The process
of recognising an elderly person, for e.g.: as a realistic character in
a fiction lies beyond the mimetic capacity of sound and image
technologies. They merely reproduce a recorded physical and aural
liket::ess or a copy of a real person. The filmmaker and the viewer
draw upon the cultural knowledge of elderly people in the real
world, of an environment at a particular point in time, to encode
and decode the representation.
Murray Smith defines the viewer identification with the character as
'alignment' and argues that, "character structures are perhaps the
major way by which narrative text solicit our assent for particular
natures, practices and ideologies"24 . Murray Smith extends his
definition of 'allegiance' to bring into its ambit a moral dimension
missing in Bordwell's schema. Murray tries to explain the
'satisfaction' aspect of the viewer involved in the process of
identification. He distinguishes between recognition, alignment and
allegiance: 25
Recognition: 'a process by which the spectator recognises the
Cinematic signs as a character in a fiction, through mimetic
reference to human beings in real life'.
22
Introduction
Alignment: 'a process by which spectators are placed in relation to
characters in terms of access to their actions and to what they
know and feel'.
Allegiance: 'a process whereby the spectator evaluates and
responds emotionally to the traits and emotions of characters'.
Murray Smith thus introduces the 'emotional dimensions In
spectatorship'. Smith's category of 'alignment' is however further
expanded into various sub-categories to explain various kinds of
relationship between the actor and the viewer constructed by film
and television discourse 26 • They are:
a) Intellectual Alignment: 'the processes by which information,
reasoning and understanding is received by the spectator from
the text'.
b) Interest alignment: the curiosity element - 'What will happen
next?'
c) Concern Alignment: 'hope and fear invested by the spectator in
the film characters'.
d) Moral Alignment: 'the text's position towards the character
defines the spectators position. The validation, condemnation or
distancing position of the text towards the protagonist
constructs spectators' moral alignment too'.
e) Aesthetic Alignment: 'a sUbjective category, which allows the
spectator to enjoy the physical attributes and the personality
23
Introduction
features of the characters. However all such attributes have to
be in consonance with the prevalent cultural norms of beauty'.
f) Emotional Alignment: 'a process whereby the spectator is
positioned to share the emotional responses of the characters.
This emotional engagement will not be premised primarily on the
character but on the situation'.
Julia Hallam and Margaret Marshment 27 by proposing the above
categories which explains how a spectator gets situated vis-a-vis the
char:.acter have brought the spectatorship debate centrestage. By
suggesting that these categories overlap and slide into one another
and may not merely focus on the character, have shifted the debate
to spectator's relation with situation and event in the filmic text
from the spectator's relation with the character. Thus in the present
era of digital modes of representation the spectatorship will
continue to be an important area of critical enquiry.
The film adaptation of novels has been viewed differently by
different film theorists. The present study will attempt to trace the
issue related to the study of adaptations over the years. The present
study is also relevant in the light of a resurgence of film productions
based on novels. The film studies programme is also being launched
by almost all academic institutions allover the world. The media
studies is increasingly occupying centre stage and finally a
convergence of word and image, the verbal and the visual is taking
place not only in the world of media but also in academic and
24
Introduction
critical circles. In a media saturated environment like ours an
adaptation is naturally dense with intertextuality with borrowings
from books, other movies, music, news headlines, video coverage of
news events and all other arts. Film in itself is a powerful
synthesizing medium rich with connotations and hence with its
genre of adaptation should be an immediate area of query and
analysis.
Introduction
Notes
1. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier (Bloomingdale: Indiana University press, 1977), p.12.
2. Keith Cohen, Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p.5.
3. Montage: A technique in Cinema proposed by Sergei Eisenstein the Russian film Director and Film theorist. Borrowing from the Japanese ideogram, (in which two pictures, items, or symbols combine to produce one emotion), Kabuki Theatre (in which motion and gesture replace words to express internal conflict) and Haiku (in which details and design express brief,
- sharply defined mage); Montage evolved as a technique where several disparate shorts are fused together to form a collage to produce a specific emotional, intellectual or descriptive effect.
4. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form and the Film sense. Trans. Jay Leyda (Cleveland: Meridian, 1957) pp.28-84.
5. Alan, Spiegel, Fiction and the Camera Eye: Visual consciousness in Film and the Modem Novel (Charlottesvile: University Press of Virginia, 1976). Spiegel coined the term 'concretized form' to explain the modem novel's emphasis on concrete experience encouraged by film's dependence on visual image. Keith Cohen in Fflm and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange, emphasised the modern hovel's need to recount specific action by articulating visual images through word play, metaphor and description.
6. Neil Sinyard, Filming Literature (London : Croomhelm, 1986), p. vii -viii.
7. Sergei Eisenstein, "Dickens, Griffith and the film today" in Film Form: Essays in Film theory p.213.
8. Andre Bazin, "What is Cinema?" essays Trans.and Ed. Hugh Gray, (London; University of California press, 1971) pp. 10- 11.
9. Edward Arnold, Victorian Poetry (UK: Butler and Tanner ltd., 1972), pp156-157.
10 . Op. Cit. Bazin, p. 10-11.
26
Introduction
11 . Robert Scholes, 'Narration and Narrativity in Film,' Quarterly Review of film Studies (Aug 1957), in G. Mast and M. Cohen, Film Theory and Criticism. 2nd edition (NY: OUP,1979), pp. 417-33.
12 . Op. Cit. Bluestone, p.5
13. Sigfried Kracauer, Theory of film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, (NY: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 239.
14. Jean Mitry, "Remarks on the Problem of Cinematic Adaptation", Bulletin of the Midwest Modem Language Association, IV, No.1 (1971).
15 . Op. Cit. Bazin, p.67.
16 .- Ibid., p. 66.
17. Ibid., p.142
18. Ibid., p. 140
19. Dudley Andrew's essay on "Adaptation" in James Naremore ed: Film Adaptation (London: The Athlone Press, 2000), p.37.
20. Colin MacCabe (974), "Realism and the Cinema : Notes on some Brechtian Theses", Screen 15.2, 7-27
21. David Bordwell, Narration in Fiction Film (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), p.18-20.
22. Roland Barthes,), "The Realistic Effect" Trans.Gerald Mead in Film Reader 3, p.131-5, 1978.
23. Op. Cit. Bordwell, p. 18-20.
24. Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p.85.
25. Ibid., p.133.
26. Ibid., p.135
27. Julia Hallam, Margaret Marshment, Realism and Popular Cinema (New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), p.134-136.
27