Filmed Theater and Novel Adaptations
Canned Theater and Touring Companies
Marcel Pagnol's film adaptation of "Topaze" aimed to make the play accessible to a wider audience, offering a "Paris cast" at an affordable price. Similarly, boulevard plays were filmed after their successful runs to reach those who couldn't see them live. Films offered original casts and magnificent sets, especially in areas where touring companies had second-rate casts.
However, the success of "canned theater" was short-lived. Provincial tours regained popularity as audiences became disillusioned with the glamour and luxury of cinema and sought something closer to live theater. The improvement in touring companies' situation was partly due to the poor quality of filmed theater, which drove audiences back to the theaters.
Photography and Painting
Photography freed painting from the need for likeness and anecdote. The high standard and low cost of photography led to a reevaluation of painting, establishing its unique place. Painters like Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, and Manet understood the photographic and cinematographic phenomenon and enriched pictorial technique by dialectically opposing it. They understood the laws of the new image better than photographers and filmmakers.
Photography continues to serve the plastic arts by multiplying and renewing our knowledge of pictorial images. Color photography has allowed painting to become more individual, independent, and accessible. Similarly, bad "canned theater" has helped true theater become aware of its own laws, and cinema has contributed to a new concept of theatrical production.
Filmed Theater and Shakespeare
Good-filmed theater increases the general public's understanding of theater. Films like "Henry V" make Shakespeare accessible to everyone, illuminating his dramatic poetry and providing effective theater lessons. Adaptations of plays multiply the potential audience and prepare them to enjoy stage plays.
Seeing "Hamlet" on screen can't replace a live performance. However, successful filmed theater deepens the understanding of theater and reveals the gulf between stage and screen. "Canned theater" and mediocre popular theater cause confusion, while well-filmed theater promotes real theater.
From Filmed Theater to Cinematographic Theater
Slapstick comedy in cinema revived dramatic forms like farce and Commedia dell'arte. By making space a protagonist, the screen enhances the metaphysical meaning of farce. Slapstick expresses the tyranny of things, creating a tragedy of the Object, as seen in Keaton's work.
The combination of cinema and comedy-theater happened spontaneously. With the screen now able to accommodate other forms of theater, it can give new life to the stage by employing its techniques. Stage structures are important, and certain dramatic works have suffered from a discord between contemporary taste and staging style. Tragedy, in particular, has been affected by the disappearance of traditional tragedians like Mounet-Sully and Sarah Bernhardt, who are now fossilized in films d'art.
The screen has modified our sense of verisimilitude in interpretation. We are accustomed to inner naturalness, which allows stage actors only a slender margin of stylization. The success of tragedians was due to their talent and the complicity of the public, a phenomenon now almost exclusively found in cinema. The Comédie-Française guarantees Racine a reasonable life, but not a triumphal one.
Thanks to color film, "Henry V" is a triumph. Ancient tragedy owes its revival to the Sorbonne and the archeological enthusiasm of students. If cinema has turned the aesthetic and sociology of the sacred monster to its advantage, it might return them if the theater came looking for them. Film theater awaits a Jean Cocteau to make it a cinematographic theater.
Theater on film is aesthetically founded, and any play can be brought to the screen if stage space is reconverted. The only possible modern theatrical production of certain classics might be on the screen. Some of the best filmmakers are also the best stage directors, seeing cinema as a complementary form of theater.
The Two Ways of Seeing
D.W. Griffith: “The task I’m trying to achieve is above all to make you see.”
Joseph Conrad: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.”
Novelists and directors share the intention to create an affective relationship with the audience. However, visual perception and mental conception represent the fundamental difference between film and novels.
Differences in form and theme are inseparable from differences in media. Structures, symbols, myths, and values comprehensible to Conrad's middle-class readers may be incomprehensible to Griffith's mass audience. Seeming concurrence between Griffith and Conrad splits apart under analysis.
Relationship between Novel and Film
A close relationship has existed from the beginning, with many films based on novels. Griffith adapted works by Jack London, Tolstoy, and Charles Reade. Eisenstein noted that Griffith found hints for his innovations in Dickens.
Novels have appeared conspicuously on story conference tables. Counts range from 17 to almost 50 percent of total studio production. A sampling from RKO, Paramount, and Universal motion picture output for 1934-35 reveals that about one-third of all full-length features were derived from novels. Asheim’s survey indicates that of 5,807 releases by major studios between 1935 and 1945, 976 or 17.2 percent were derived from novels.
Filmed novels persistently rate among top quality productions and have made strong bids for Academy Awards. "Birth of a Nation" and "Gone with the Wind" were considered the best silent and sound films, respectively. "Gone with the Wind" stood ahead of all others with earnings of million. Five of the ten most valuable film properties had been adapted from novels.
The success of filmed novels may be due to the cinematic adaptation of Pulitzer Prize winners, from Alice Adams to All the King’s Men. The demand for David Copperfield increased after its film adaptation. The film premiere of The Good Earth boosted sales to 3,000 per week. Sales of Wuthering Heights increased after its film adaptation. After the film’s appearance, the Pocket Book edition of Wuthering Heights sold 700,000 copies. Various editions of Pride and Prejudice reached a third of a million copies, and sales for Lost Horizon reached 1,400,000.
Jean-Paul Sartre suggests that for many readers, the book appears “as a more or less faithful commentary” on the film. Quantitative analyses have very little to do with qualitative changes and do not indicate implications for aesthetics. Statements such as “The film is true to the spirit of the book” are predicated on assumptions that blur the mutational process.
Changes are inevitable when one abandons the linguistic for the visual medium. Film and novel represent different aesthetic genera. It is as fruitless to say that film A is better or worse than novel B as it is to pronounce Wright’s Johnson’s War Building better or worse than Tchaikowsky’s Swan Lake.
Note on Origins
The American film began as a gadget and ended as a billion-dollar investment. Its primary appeals all along have been to our dual American love of innovation and splendor. The origins of the film suggest two fundamental implications:
The sheer delight in the fact that images move.
Films are originally a product of a genuine folk-art.
Even the earliest American films were already making use of their own peculiar properties, adding movement to stationary works of art.
The novel is more complex because its history is longer and its materials more refined. The novel has assimilated essays, letters, memoirs, histories, religious tracts, and manifestoes. Aesthetic apprehension is constantly driven back to epistemology.
The novel’s imprecise boundaries have made critics reluctant to classify it with absolute assurance. Critical constructs distort the novel in much the same way that novels distort life. True comprehensiveness comes only from reading the novel again and again.
Throughout forms of modern fiction, there runs a motif of anxiety, a recurring sense of collapse the moment formal criticism is brought to bear on the novel.
The French roman suggests remote origins in medieval romance. The Italian novella means “news” and suggests a new kind of anecdotal narrative claiming to be both recent and true. The novel touches heroic legend at one extreme and modern journalism at the other.
In the 18th century, Henry Fielding described Joseph Andrews as “a comic romance … a comic epic poem in prose.” In 1840, Balzac distinguished between the literature of imagery and the literature of ideas, considering himself an exponent of literary eclecticism.
Modern definitions force the setting up of new oppositions, with epistemology questioning whether any fixed reality was possible at all. The inability to arrest a reality that is perpetually out of reach becomes a central theme. The novelist begins to doubt reality and doubts his medium as well.
Language has become a character in the novel. André Gide makes this point explicitly, noting the rivalry between the real word and the representation of it. Language is no longer a secondary matter, and technique contains intellectual and moral implications.
Language cannot convey non-verbal experience and cannot express simultaneous experiences. Reality cannot be expressed or conveyed—only the illusion of it. What seems to be new is the intensification of polarity between the constructs of verbal expression and the elusiveness of nonverbal experience.
Not only does the modern novelist doubt his ability to stake out claims, he also doubts the existence of what he is claiming. Reality is never the same from one moment to the next. His very act of writing alters his subject matter.
If the tendency of the modern novel has been to escape the limitations of language, one must meditate on the extraordinary effects which have been revealed in the process. Acceptance permits him to discover new possibilities.
Active imagination and aesthetic apprehension take their place as types of ordinary cognition. Hugh Dalziel Duncan defines great literature as “the conscious exploration through the imagination of the possibilities of human action in society,”. The shaping power of the mass audience leaves its mark on the film, and the reader’s symbolic action leaves its imprint on the novel.
Where the film has not yet begun to question its ability to render certain types of physical and even psychological reality, the novel is no longer so confident. The novel first tries to reflect reality as faithfully as it can, and then, despairing of the attempt, tries to evade the feeling of a new reality of its own.
Modes of Consciousness
The novel has tended to retreat more and more from external action to internal thought, from plot to character, from social to psychological realities. It is this reduction of the novel to experiences which can be verified in the immediate consciousness of the novelist. Howard Mumford Jones sums up the central problems which have plagued the modern novelists:
the verbal limitations of non-verbal experience
the dilemma of autobiographical fiction
the difficulty of catching the flux of time in static language
The film, being a presentational medium, cannot have direct access to the power of discursive forms. Where the novel discourses, the film must picture. Perceptual knowledge is not necessarily different in strength; it is necessarily different in kind.
The rendition of mental states—memory, dream, imagination—cannot be as adequately represented by film as by language. Conceptual imaging has no existence in space. The film image, being externalized in space, cannot be converted through the conceptual screen.
Because dreams and memories exist nowhere but in the individual consciousness, they cannot be adequately represented in spatial terms. The film can lead us to infer thought but cannot show us thought directly. A film is not thought; it is perceived.
Chronological Time
The novel has three tenses; the film has only one. From this follows almost everything else one can say about time in both media.
Bergson’s distinction between two kinds of time:
chronological time (measured in discrete units)
psychological time (distends or compresses in consciousness)
Language is a medium consisting of consecutive units constituting a forward-moving linear form of expression that is subject to the three characteristics of time—transience, sequence, and irreversibility. Chronological time in the novel exists on three primary levels:
chronological duration of the reading
chronological duration of the narrator’s time
chronological span of the narrative events
The film is spared at least part of this conflict because one of the levels is omitted. Since the camera is always the narrator, we need concern ourselves only with the chronological duration of the viewing and the time-span of the narrative events.
The ranges of chronological time for reader and viewer are rather fluid yet more or less fixed by convention. A fifty-hour novel has the advantage of being able to achieve a certain density. The mode of beholding in the novel allows the reader to control his rate, while the film viewer is bound by the relentless rate of a projector that he cannot control.
Silent versions of Anna Karenina dropped the entire story of Levin and Kitty. Some films contained less than a third of the original content.
Psychological Time: Variability in Rate
Psychological time implies discrete units in a series, and language seems roughly adequate to the task. It assumes the clock as a standard of measurement. Here, language is still appropriate to its task.
Compression and distension of time has its exact equivalent in the film’s use of speed-up and slow-motion. The principles of movement seem to collect around centers of gravity dictated by the film’s persistent self-assertion.
Spatial mobility makes time more flexible. By interfering with natural time, Jean Vigo was able to render the dream-like essence of the pillow fight in Zéro de Conduite. Spatial mobility makes time more flexible.
The film can suggest the dreary routine of job-hunting by intercutting shorts of the man’s feet walking along asphalt streets with close-ups of other men shaking their heads, saying no. Four or five such alternate shots, taking a few seconds of running time, can suggest a process taking months or even years. The film is thus able to suggest the sense of monotonous events that seem “short” in retrospect, even though the duration of those events is “long” by clock time.
The film has an exact parallel in the thoroughly discussed theory of montage. Use of sound (music, dialogue) provides a complex system of counterpoint.
A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema by François Truffaut
The sole aim of the notes that follow is to try to define a certain tendency in the French cinema — a tendency known as that of 'psychological realism' — and to suggest its limitations.
Scriptwriters’ Films
The French cinema’s undeniable progress has been due mainly to a renewal of scriptwriters and themes, to the liberties taken with accepted masterpieces, and, lastly, to confidence that audiences will be receptive to themes generally regarded as difficult.
Aurenche and Bost rehabilitated the art of adaptation by challenging the notion of what was generally meant by it and replaced the old prejudice that required one to be faithful to the letter by the opposite requirement to be faithful to the spirit.
"An honest adaptation is a betrayal" according to Carlo Rim.
The touchstone of adaptation as practised by Aurenche and Bost is the so-called process of equivalence is so appealing in the very formulation of its principle that no one has ever thought of examining in detail how it works. This process takes for granted that in the novel being adapted there are filmable and unfilmable scenes, and that instead of scrapping the latter (as used to be done) you had to think up equivalent scenes; in other words ones that the author of the novel might have written for the screen.
“Inventing without betraying” is the watchword that Aurenche and Bost liked to cite, forgetting that one can also betray by omission.
Faithfulness
Since 1943, Aurenche and Bost have together been responsible for the screen adaptation and dialogue of the following novels:
Michel Davet's Douce
André Gide's La Symphonie pastorale
Raymond Radiguet's Le Diable au corps
Henri Queffélec's Un recteur de I’ile de Sein
Francois Boyer's Les Jeux inconnus
Colette's Le Blé en herbe
Also, they wrote an adaptation of Georges Bernanos's novel, Le Journal d'un curé de campagne, L'Auberge rouge.
Being able to remain faithful to the spirit of Davet, Gide, Radiguet, Queffelec, Boyer, Colette, and Bernanos would require a most unusual mental agility and a multiple personality, as well as a singular spirit of eclecticism.
Aurenche felt nostalgic about, and rebelled against, his education at a Jesuit school. While he flirted with Surrealism, he seems to have been drawn to anarchist groups in the 1930s.
Father Amédéé Ayffre says that “We find faith reduced to religious psychology in Gide, and religious psychology reduced to mere psychology in the film.”
New characters are added, such as Piette and Casteran, who are supposed to represent certain feelings. Tragedy becomes drama or melodrama.
What Bothers Me
Truffaut is not convinced that a novel can contain unfilmable scenes. Praising Robert Bresson for his faithfulness to Bernanos, André Bazin concluded, “After Le Journal d'un curé de campagne, Aurenche and Bost are no more than the Viollet-le-Ducs of adaptation.” Truffaut remembers in Bernanos’ adaption Chantal’s face that 'began to appear little by little, gradually' was missing.
A constant and deliberate determination to be unfaithful to both the spirit and the letter and a very marked predilection for profanation and blasphemy mars the films.
The same unfaithfulness to the spirit also mars Le Diable au corps, which becomes an anti-militaristic, anti-bourgeois film, and Un Recteur de I’île de Sein, in which the islanders are portrayed like the “cretins” in Luis Bunuel’s Las Hurdes (Land without Bread).
Aurenche and Bost would seem ideally cut out to be authors of out-and-out anti-clerical films. But as movies portraying men in cassocks are in fashion, themes such as profanation and blasphemy, and dialogue full of double entendres, pop up from time to time so they can prove to their chums that they know how 'to pull the wool over the producer's eyes' while at the same time satisfying him, and how to do the same to an equally satisfied general public.
Aurenche and Bost actually water down the books they adapt as equivalence always tends to encourage betrayal or timidity. Such examples are legion and will one day have to be explained.
Summarized Aurenche and Bost boil down film to:
La Symphonic pastorale: Minister loves someone he isn’t allowed to.
Le Diable an corps: They go through the motions of love, but are not allowed to.
Dieu a besoin des hommes: He gives mass, blesses, and administers the last rites, but is not allowed to.
Jeux interdits: They bury someone, but are not allowed to
Le Ble en herbe: They love each other, but are not allowed to.
Those themes lend themselves to the misunderstandings on which the whole system is based. Under the cloak of literature – and of course quality – audiences are served up their usual helping of gloom, non-conformism, and facile audacity.
Writers who took up dialogue for films all followed the same rules, following something of his own universe into some more ambitious films, like Scandinavian mists transposed to Brittany (Pattes blanches/ White Paws).
The scripts oscillate between Aurenche and Bost, Prévert, and Clouzot in a slightly more up-to-date version.
Looking at the uniformity and unrelenting vulgarity of scripts nowadays, we find we miss Prévert. Most characters with all the sins of creation, there was always room for a couple for whom, like some latter-day Adam and Eve, the story would take a turn for the better once the film was over.
Psychological realism, neither real nor psychological
There are only seven or eight scriptwriters who work regularly for the French cinema. Each of them has only one story to tell, and as each of them can dream of nothing but becoming as successful as the 'two greats', it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the French films made each year tell the same story.
That school of film-making, which aims for realism, always destroys it at the very moment when it finally captures it, because it is more interested in imprisoning human beings in a closed world hemmed in by formulas, puns, and maxims than in allowing them to reveal themselves as they are, before our eyes.
We live in strange times, when any old failed actor uses the term 'Kafkaesque’ to describe his marital problems. This type of cinema comes straight out of modern literature, half Kafkaesque and half Flaubertian! The authors of any film shot in France nowadays imagine they are doing a remake of Madame Bovary.
Mise en scène, Director, Texts
Directors are and want to be responsible for the scripts and dialogue they illustrate. Death is always skated over in such films, and everything takes place after death.
When it happens that talented writers, either through a love of money or out of weakness, end up one day allowing themselves to 'write for the cinema', they do so with a feeling that they are somehow lowering themselves. They tend rather to make a curious attempt at mediocrity, careful as they are not to compromise their talent, and convinced that if you write for the cinema, you have to ensure you are understood by the lowest common denominator."