Highlights and problematics of movies adaptation during American Modernism PDF

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Tesina finale sull'adattamento letterario dei Film nell'America Modernista per l'esame di Cinema e Letteratura del prof. Michele Fadda....

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Literary adaptation Highlights and problematics of movies adaptation during American Modernism by Giulia Paganucci

Since the very start of adaptation's history in America, the relationship between movies and novels has always been filled with oppositions that revolved around the main fight between cinema and literature, each of them leaning towards other shades of meaning that society has learnt to associate with them. So literature would be identified with high culture whereas cinema with a lower kind; literature would be destined to a smaller group of people, mostly intellectuals, while cinema would be open to basically everybody, as the symbol of mass culture that it is. This quite superficial conception of these two entities is based on stereotypes, and a stereotype is by definition a concept that represents only a part of the whole truth. It derives from a series of prejudices that consider literature superior to cinema, like seniority, iconophobia and legophilia, all of these assuming that an older and verbal art cannot be better than a new and visual one. Literature was blamed for “contaminating” the pureness of cinema, without taking into account that cinema is an impure art itself that constantly takes inspiration and elements from other forms of art. Cinema has the capacity to engage various senses, arts and cultures. (Stam, 2000 : 58) Cleared that up, during Modernism these two apparently contrastant poles were brought together by Capitalism. Capitalism infact had the goal to draw the attention of the middle class, which included the most numerous part of the population that until now, had not yet identified itself in one side of the duality. To do that, the studios thought of taking some renowned works of literature and call talented writers and journalists from the middle class, such as Eugene O'Neill, Scott Fitzgerald or William Faulkner, to adapt these stories to the big screen. (Naremore, 2014 : 1-4)

Although the plan might have been well-thought, they did not expect a literary rebellion to come, an explosion of creativity to blow. Infact, modernist literary artists in that period went against the artistic cliché style that capitalists searched to transform into movies, and produced instead anything but mainstream works, that were not only experimental, but most largely progressive and at time offensive, making the ninetheenth century conservative works more appropriate and adaptable than the high-modernism texts. As opposed to many beliefs, Modernism era is not quite connected to the idea of modernization, which is a frequent misconception among people. Briefly, the last one indicates a process of social and economic development, which might concern several fields of society such as industry, technology or urbanization, and it is not originary of the nineteenth century, as modernization's history can be tracked back to the seventeenth century. On the contrary, Modernism is not strictly related to economy or progress, but with culture, since it includes specifc values, beliefs and ideas that had a strong and powerful influence on all forms of art in twentyeth century. Although modernists did admire the inventiveness of technology, and the industrial development inevitably influenced the movement as well, these two concepts must not be treated as synonyms. First and foremost, Modernism was born as a rebellion against Victorian's prudish ideals and firm moral values. Modernism rejects the innocence, pursuing instead the depth and complexity of reality, no matter how painful it might be. (Singal, 1987 : 7-9) This is a necessary preamble to underline how significant the leap towards Modernism's climax had been to a society that was beforehand used to a more conservative, reserved and traditional kind of art. This change in culture was mainly evident in cinema, where both visual art and literature aspired to be represented in order to be seen by a larger audience. In this period we also see how the intensity of aestheticism in cinema influenced the works of some American writers like Hemingway and Faulkner, whose novels were reckoned to have a “cinematic” form. So, at this point, we have at the same time a former discrete society, an innovative, creative cultural movement that wants to affirm its ideology by

making their way into the cinematic world, and the heads of capitalism, trying to put a brake to their rebellious spirit for their own sake. Adaptation is the link to all three of these positions. As it often happens nowadays as well, film adaptation is frequently criticized by the audience, making comparisons with the original work and labelling the movie as “unfaithful” or “deformated”. Such a misconception often brings people to devalue the products of adaptation whatsoever. Infact, the best part of complains about adaptation usually revolves around the notion of fidelity, which is the ability of capturing in a film the thematic, narrative and aesthetic features of its original source. This kind of transformation – at least in its totalityis not always possible, since the change of media involves not only a different type of narrative and dialogic language, but also the introduction of several means that do not appear in a book, such as lights, sounds and other detailes. The problem of fidelity and adaptation overall gets even more challenging during Modernism because of the contrast between the studios' goals, who aimed to produce classical Hollywood movies with linear narratives, a stable hierarchy of characters, humanist ideology and a tidy resolution, and the modernists' novels, which went against all these concepts of mere stability that did not allow characters to change or shift throughout the story, but believing instead in a continuous transformation of the human nature. The products of novel and cinema in this historical period, argues Blueston, represent very different aesthetic genres. It is automatic and almost granted to imagine that the whole process of filming, that is editing and composing the shots, will inevitably generate a certain difference between the original source and the cinematic outcome, but that does not give adaptation a negative connotation and it does not for sure put cinema into an inferior position in comparison with literature. It's more proper to identify this relation as a deal between different media. Infact, if a book gives the reader an insight of the characters' thoughts, a movie offers the viewers all those audiovisual aids to picture the scenes and to add details to the words of a story. For example, in a specific passage of The Grapes of Wrath directed by

John Steinbeck, we see Ma Joad open a box and stare at some photographs and letters. In the novel it is not spelled out what kind of letters they are, the content of the box, or who appears in the pictures, but in the cinematic transposition of John Ford, the director has to necessarily make a decision and pick a specific photograph, a specific newspapaer, specific earrings and so on, to represent it. (Stam, 2000 : 54-55) Another important element mentioned before that a book cannot convey is the sound, and more in particular, the music. Even though music had been present in muted films too, it certainly gains a major role when cinema becomes spoken. Thanks to the background music infact, the sequences of frameworks become more fluent and easier to follow, working as a bridge to the editing. In The Grapes of Wrath's passage before mentioned, Ford added to the scene a melancholic background song which match the situation perfectly, trying to set the same atmosphere of the book through a different medium. Just because the novel cannot use different media other than the verbal one, doesn't mean that a director should deprive their film of musical, theatrical, artistic material or other effects if said elements can improve the film and make it a better adaptation. If the power of novels is found in the words' expressivity, the perk of cinema is the conglomerate of arts that it brings together in its products and the possibility to use them all together. That's why in Novels into Films: the Metamorphosis of Novel into Cinema, Bluestone does not blame The Grapes of Wrath – and other movies – for debasing the literary source, but he rather defines it as a “metamorphosis” into another medium with its own formal and narratological possibilities. For this difference of means of expression, cinema has been blamed not to be reflective enough, as in a movie it is not possible to explore the thoughts of a character, assuming with that that cinema lacks of depth, and despite it could be good for representing action, it is not adequate when it comes to representing introspection. On the other hand, as opposed to novels that are usually written by one single person, cinema is an outcome of a teamwork, an ensemble made of a director, screenwriters and a whole crew who collaborate together. In addiction to that, a movie offers a possibility of fragmentation and

disunity that in a novel is not always available. Moreover, while a novel can rely only on the written word to convey emotion and creating scenarios, a movie can use several different means, which makes cinema not superior, but at least more complex in resources. In particular, the conflict between words' descriptions and the film's miseen-scène is relevant for characters' representation: if the novelistic character is a verbal artifact made of words, the cinematic verse is a performer, with body movements, a voice and acting style, that brings with itself the memory and experience of the past roles. However, all these advantages and perks of the filmmaking did not always assure a proper transposition. As stated before, a movie is made by a team of people who equally collaborate, in this case, to transmediate a story, but as each role is fundamental to do so, the moment a piece of the big machine doesn't work, the outcome will change. So a performer can boast a superioriry over a book description only if an actor can act well, is led by a good script and directed properly. (Stam, 2000 : 56-57) (Naremore, 2014 : 6-7) The third adaptation of The Great Gatsby of 1948 , directed by Elliott Nugent and based on the well-known modernist novel of Scott Fitzgerald, received several critics for the flat version on screen of such a dynamic story. The movie has been molded to the lines of classical Hollywood realism, ending up with a distort representation of the characters, in order to let them fit in the stereotypical hierarchy imposed by realism and the studios. Even though writers were getting fond of a revolutionist vision of humanity, the producers remained loyal to the traditionalist victorian ideologies. In modernist writings, characters are depicted out of the formal portrait and lose their rational restraints over feelings and emotions, opening themselves to the world in order to fully experience it, which is what the Victorians had feared the most. The brake Hollywood producers imposed to the writers concerned more than everything the psychological aspect of modernist characters. In the cinematic adaptation of Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury of 1959, directed by Martin Ritt, the producer and screenwriters edited the complexity of

the psychological development for the economy's sake, depriving the characters of some parts, crucial for their literary storyline but censored in the movie, like Quentin Compson's suicide. Another tricky aspect of the novel that made it even more difficult to adapt into a movie, is the use of different narratological perspectives, and this technique gets completely ignored in the adaptation. In the film Benjy's voice, his frustrated attempts to speak, remains entirely muted instead, whereas it could have been represented through visual montage techniques. (Halliwell, 2007 : 91-93) Gérard Genette distinguishes three types of points of view and roles: the narrator (the instance that tells), the character (the instance that experiences and sees) and the filter (the instance that knows), and he also makes a distinction between two more categories regarding the focalization, which can be “variable”, evoking a tag-team approach where the point of view concerns a group of people, whether of major charcaters or minor characters, or otherwise the focalization can be “multiple”, which evokes not only a multiple perspective but also the multiple focalization of a dispersed narrative. In Godard's Contempt for example, while in the novel the story is told as a memory in first person of the characters, the adaptation does not keep this expedient and Godard decides instead to tell the story under no particular point of view, except maybe the one of cinema itself. (Stam, 2000 : 72-73) So the difference of treatment of points of view in both novels and cinema is a key point during the process of adaptation. That's why from 1940 directors start to develop the narrative subjectivity of cinema - meaning the change of point of view from an omniscent narrator to one of a character's through techniques like the voice-over or flashbacks, which increased the complexity of the storytelling. The topic of the points of views is certainly a complex question in adaptation as translation, but we cannot forget the power of visual aids that cinema possesses, through which it can represent every part of a book with the right technical and artistic means. A notable case of well-done cinematic adaptation to mention is The Maltese Falcon movie of 1941, directed by John Huston, known as the third attempt to adapt Hammett's popular novel to the big screen. Huston, infact, was

the only one who gave his work a cinematic distinction and managed to get some elements and dynamics even more intruiguing than the novel's. Even though the movie might not be completely faithful to its original literary source, the transformations that Huston decided to apply turned out to be not only convenient to the industry – or at least acceptable – but also in compliance with the Modernism's style, as none of the characters had been deprived of their psychological sides and the photography is much more artfully stylized than the previous adaptations, even if the photographer (Arthur Edeson) and art director (Robert Hass) had also worked on the past versions. The innovative touch that Huston gave this third adaptation did not focus much on the writing itself, but rather on the overall style of the movie, transforming its source and making it more appealing. The actors chosen for the roles aren't quite physically similar to the characters of the novel, but the combination of their deep acting, their behaviour and attitude, together with the excellent expressivity of the photography and mise-en-scène, changes slightly the style of the story compared to the book's, although for once in a good way. Hammett's decriptions are often flat and his art minimalistic, while Huston's storytelling is more expressive and Edeson's photography more artistic, with new camera techniques used to give more depth and resolution to the scenes, and highlight the characters' emotion and psychology. Huston's changes show how little he cared for the philosophical aspects of the story and wanted to focus on the psychological development of the characters instead and their emotional journey, making this version more passionate and psychologically intense than its predecessors and the novel itself. He was able to humanize the action of the story but still keeping the dynamics powerful and the dialogues witty. This version is truly an excellent example of how an adaptation can, not only measure up with the novel, but also outdo it, when we put together good acting, writing and editing. Because of these series of adaptations and other films, Hemmett was soon established as a “movielike” author, whose novels had a quite cinematic form that could be easily adapted to a movie, despite his modernist style, which still continued to be a problem for the studios throughout the whole decade.

As we talked about the concept of fidelity, it is relevant to connect it also to the concept of translation. Adaptation as translation can be applied both linguistically or figuratively, as it happened for the movie Le Mepris (Contempt, 1963), the cinematic version of Moravia's novel Il Disprezzo, which also includes a contemporary adaptation of Homer's Odyssey. This film is an example of a movie within a movie, as it is based on a book, that also talks about another book. During the shooting they had to transform an ancient society into a modern one, but they also had to hire a mediator to help the American monolingual producer Prokosch to comunicate with his European polyglot interlocutors, since many dialogues of the movie are spoken also in Italian and German. (Naremore, 1998 : 12-18) Another problem of adaptation as translation is the inevitable use of sexually charged images and gendered language, associated with the notion of “fidelity”. Because of the Victorian culture still common among society, which acclaimed prudishness and innocence, the mere act of translating words into photograph drawn the people's attention and made it label it as something nasty and inappropriate to watch, accusing the screenwriters to “violate” their literary sources. Reading a scene about a girl flirting on a swing was not the same as seeing it on a screen: the visual emphasized the words, created images that people could not tolerate, despite being the same scenarios of the novel. (Stam, 2000 : 62-63) However, on that point, by the latter part of the Progressive Era, a cultural revolution aimed to change that mentality, started to spread in America, as many social workers and artists encouraged people to set the Victorian codes aside and embrace “reality” with all its instincts and passions. In particular, renowned writers including John Reed, Margaret Sanger and Eugene O'Neill, gathered in New York to discuss the latest European Modernist authors in order to call for sexual, political and artistic liberation in their own country. (Singal, 1987 : 18) Against fidelity criticism, Brian McFarlane, author of an interesting study about adaptation as translation, wants to demonstrate how faithful an adaptation can be by showing how the “cardinal” feautures of nineteenth novels

can be transposed intact to movies. He distinguishes two kinds of novelistic elements: those that can be transferred, working satisfactorily both on literal and cinematic form, and those that need a proper adaptation, because the change of medium influences their meaning or representaion. However, the definition of adaptation does not focus only on enunciative techniques or “cardinal” features of narrative. For some researchers the definition of adaptation is too much related to the whole process of trasformation of a novel into a movie, while it should be more concerned about the political, economic and cultural issues. Among these, there's the relation between TV and theatrical movies, since regarding the media of support, the type of adaptation changed as well. So while in the theatres adaptations based on old tv shows were more popular, TV became more interested in literary canon, reversing their roles. Cable TV became more and more incline to broadcast literary adaptations as, as opposed to theatres, it was a more available source for the people, which allowed the producers to reach a larger audience. By the end of the twentieth century, cable TV was trasmitting a lot adaptations from “respectable” literature, the same kind of material that fifty years before was spreading in American cinema among modernist artists. A new generation of TV movies based on classics started, seeing well-known titles like Mody Dick or The Count of Montecristo on the screen, soon followed by TNT adaptations of Don Quixote, David Copperfield, Animal Farm and A Chrismas Carol. Because of their narrative predisposition for adaptation, the same one they had in classic Hollywood as well, and the presold audience who was already familiar and fond of the classics before they came on TV, these kind of films were labelled as “prestige” TV movies and remained so until the twenty-first century, since also nowadays we can see many adaptations of nineteenth century...