"In Cronenberg’s hands, horror is no longer a disreputable bastard genre, but a new avenue of expression, gleaming with possibility."
- critic Stephen Schiff, writing about THE BROOD (Cronenberg, 1979)
One of the most gratifying things about looking back at the career of any filmmaker whose output has traversed multiple decades and stages of life is to chart their growth as artists and the maturation (or not) of their themes.
Throughout his entire career, the dominant thematic conceit that has characterised Canadian auteur David Cronenberg’s body of work has been the human body's relationship with disease, decay, physical destruction, and violence.
Almost without exception, his films have featured some of the most extraordinary and startling images of destruction, infection, and degradation – both physical and emotional – to be found anywhere within the confines of mainstream, Hollywood-friendly North American cinema.
From the penis-shaped rabies host in his second theatrical feature RABID (1977) and the exploding head of his breakthrough fifth feature SCANNERS (1981), to the mental illness of the title character in SPIDER (2002) and the culturally specific tattoos that adorn Nikolai’s body in EASTERN PROMISES (2007), Cronenberg's obsession with the human body and its manifold weaknesses has become one of the singular defining elements of his auteur status.
As he himself has said, “The first fact of human existence is the human body. If you get away from physical reality, you're fudging, in fantasyland, not coming to grips with what violence does."
But like all truly important storytellers, Cronenberg’s evolution as a writer and a director has seen him, in recent years, find greater fascination – and more inherently dramatic fodder for his concerns – in the internal, emotional aspects of decay and destruction.
As a natural evolution of his dominant thematic concerns, Cronenberg has refined his vision from the exploitation sensibilities of his earliest works and into a mindset and an artistic palette that, while it occasionally cherry-picks from the conventions and iconography of horror and science fiction (his earliest stylistic and commercial template), almost always subverts, deepens, and enriches them.
In this characteristic alone, Cronenberg has emerged as a singular voice in the North American cinema, and one its few true - and truly consistent – visionary individuals.
Moreover, it is a voice that easily transcends virtually every expectation laid upon him, even those of his most devoted fans and collaborators. No one is ever quite sure at any given point exactly where or how he will embrace his dominant concerns as an artist.
His most recent films, specifically EASTERN PROMISES, A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (2005), and SPIDER, while they most certainly boast their share of graphic violence and/or highly confronting imagery, nevertheless ultimately find their sine quibus non in personal, internal, deeply character-based obsessions. It is in this thematic evolution that Cronenberg is revealed as an authentic artist of cinema and not merely a “world class provocateur", although he is certainly that as well.
But this journey from exploitation horror schlock – characterised by his earliest films SHIVERS (1975) and RABID - through to mature dramas about violence and the people who engage in it, passed through a curious “middle period” during the 1980s, in which Cronenberg managed to comprehensively blur the lines between horror and science fiction in a way that almost single-handedly created the hybrid.
This transition began in earnest with his 1979 horror film THE BROOD, the first of his films to tackle truly mature themes within a commercial horror framework.
But although the film’s pseudo-science, Psychoplasmics, is one of the purest and most repulsively compelling of science fiction conceits, it remains a MacGuffin, ultimately taking enough of a back seat to the iconography of the horror genre for THE BROOD to remain a pure horror experience. (Pseudo-scientific explanations are also offered in films such as DAWN OF THE DEAD (Romero, 1978) and its ilk, as explanations for zombie plagues, but this doesn’t make them science fiction… it is merely the device that facilitates the ensuing carnage that is typical of the modern horror film.)
But despite its prescient deviation into more mature themes, and its established status as a “thinking man’s scare film". THE BROOD was merely a teaser… a foretaste of Cronenberg’s later films, almost all of which would successfully reject much (but not all) of the visual viscera of his early work and instead bring his cinematic vision into line with a growing and maturing focus on the psychological over the corporeal.
The real breakthrough began with the three films I want to focus on in this essay: the three films Cronenberg wrote and directed between 1981 and 1986 – SCANNERS, VIDEODROME (1983) and THE FLY (1986).
(For the purposes of this essay, we will skip over 1983’s THE DEAD ZONE - a film Cronenberg helmed as a freelance “director-for-hire”, and not one he developed himself.)
In all three of these important transitional films, we find Cronenberg the auteur moving into territory that lay further outside the conventions and traditions of the horror genre and into an nascent, but already highly developed, analysis of what might be described as “the horror of science”. It would be here that Cronenberg would rest his boat for almost a decade, before veering into the psychological dramas that have characterised almost all of his subsequent/current work.
THE BROOD had successfully retained a pure horror sensibility at the same time as it signalled a deeper meditation on the scientific origin of horror’s iconography, Interestingly, it also managed to successfully integrate an intensely personal component into the narrative… this harrowing tale of familial dysfunction and parental/custodial conflict was born of Cronenberg’s own bitter, real-life divorce and custody battle with his first wife – an event from which he was, when he wrote the film, still extremely raw. It renders the film unquestionably his most personal, and for many it remains his masterpiece.
But it remained most defiantly a horror film, and Cronenberg would not begin swinging away from the temptations of “visceral for visceral’s sake”, and into a more balanced, cerebral approach to the same obsessions, until 1981’s SCANNERS.
In SCANNERS we find ourselves in a world where a Thalidomide-like drug - Ephemerol – has resulted in an entire generation of men and women possessing extraordinary abilities in telekinetic mind-control. The plot depicts the moral struggle by the doctor responsible for this drug, and the consequences of him attempting to exercise dominion over the struggle between two men – ultimately revealed to be his own sons and the prototype subjects of his original experiments with the drug – who war over the potential socio-political application of their psychic aberration.
But it is an ideological, verging on metaphysical, war that is waged between these two siblings, the good brother Cameron (Stephen Lack) and the machiavel Darryl (Michael Ironside). Although their conflict ultimately comes down to a direct psychic confrontation between their extremely – some might say excessively – strong telepathic minds (a literal battle of the wills), the final victory is ambiguous at best, if not downright Pyrrhic – and spectacularly typical of Cronenberg’s creative raisons d'être – Cameron wins, but only by utterly destroying his own body and taking over Darryl’s… telepathically transferring himself into Darryl’s conquered biological shell.
Cronenberg bases his narrative in the repercussions of medical science’s constant and (in the world of film, at least) utterly unrestrained experimentation. In doing so, he creates a film that demonstrably steers more towards science fiction than horror, although the film’s infamous exploding head scene and the graphic, blood-drenched climactic psychic battle are certainly more typical of the iconography of horror.
"Here, the mind actually leaves the body, violently."
It is perhaps the extremely graphic nature of these two isolated scenes of physical horror that have served to confound many serious attempts at identifying the film's true, dominant genre as science fiction. Many still classify it as a horror film. Some prefer to sit on the fence and classify it as a hybrid piece. Few, if any, classify it as pure science fiction.
In VIDEODROME (1983), the first film of Cronenberg’s to be almost exclusively labelled science fiction by marketing campaigns and video store proprietors, we see a man experiencing an increasing (and increasingly intense) number of hallucinations brought on by a tumour caused by “infected” television signals. As a metaphor for the spread of disease, and as a treatise on the shared journey of moral and physical corruption, particularly as it pertains to man’s journey through a world dominated by unchecked scientific and technological advancement, VIDEODROME aligns perfectly with the trajectory of Cronenberg’s dominant thematic concerns as they evolved, during this transitional period, from the physical to the metaphysical.
VIDEODROME is also notable for being the first work of Cronenberg’s to earn its lead actor (in this case, James Woods) widespread acclaim for his work as an actor, an aspect of Cronenberg’s work that had managed to escape attention during his genre-specific early films. It would not be the last time that Cronenberg would guide an actor to critical plaudits.
But again, while the horrors witnessed – the vaginal opening that appears in Max's stomach, the fusion of his hand to a gun on a biological/technological level – are extremely graphic and reek of the horror sensibility, they are sufficiently spaced throughout the narrative – just as the moments in SCANNERS were – and both entirely appropriate to the narrative context, for them to be comparatively transparent. In this, Cronenberg fuses genre in a sufficiently ambiguous manner for their respective acculturated expectations to be confounded.
The horrors depicted in VIDEODROME are also noticeably bloodless – unlike the moments in SCANNERS – and are tied thematically to a phenomenon that is more technological than biological. Because it is an electronic force that creates the body's decay (or at least the tumour-induced illusion of such), we are removed from the ubiquitous “disease/infection” iconography of horror’s traditional – if nominal - scientific foundation.
These attributes would carry over into his next major work, THE FLY.
At 43 years of age, with growing emotional and artistic maturity, not to mention by now major commercial success, Cronenberg was deepening his vision of human life as an ongoing process of decay and degradation. His subsequent films, beginning with DEAD RINGERS (1988) – the first Cronenberg film to garner an Oscar nomination - would see him move well past the sheer visceral horror of his early B-movies, and into a more defiantly art-house aesthetic based on emotional and spiritual decay.
But with THE FLY he refined his approach not only to the influence of technological science over medical science as facilitator of decay and degradation, but also to the impact this decay would have on the emotional life of the characters, and their interplay with one another on a human level. It was no longer simply about the disease, but the people most immediately affected by it.
The emotional dynamic between protagonist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), his lover/destroyer Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis), and her boss and ex-lover Stathis Borans (John Getz) is one of the most compelling and sympathetic to be found between characters in any of Cronenberg’s films prior to this, and would lay the template for his further evolution into a creator of exceptional character-based dramas… with DEAD RINGERS and M BUTTERFLY (1993) being the earliest subsequent markers of this trend.
The tragedy of Seth’s destruction is entirely built on the clumsy/sexy relationship that evolves organically between him and Veronica, and the connection that we as an audience are allowed to construct alongside it. Cronenberg cleverly plays on the unlikely symbiosis between these characters, allowing us to find a significant curiosity factor in the unlikely alliance between the awkward, enigmatic manchild Seth (the always quirky Jeff Goldblum being almost too perfectly cast in the role), the ambitious and forthright career journalist Veronica, and the stunningly realised anti-hero Stathis – a criminally underrated performance from journeyman actor John Getz.
That we absolutely believe the turns and transitions in each of these characters – that none of the significant emotional paradigm shifts ever ring untrue, is evidence of Cronenberg’s growing control over his craft and his actors.
In this, Cronenberg is clearly laying the seeds for his next artistic evolution, that of an actor’s director; but what is significant about THE FLY is that he so very clearly understands the nature of the medium he is working in – the purest and most perfectly pitched hybrid of science fiction and horror – that he is already transcending it, evolving it into another area entirely, even before his audience has caught up with him.
He uses just as much of the imagery of horror as the material requires, aligns it perfectly with the conventions of science fiction (just as he had done with VIDEODROME), and before we can say, “Well, which is it?” he has moved on into a different area again.
REFERENCES:
1. Rolling Stone” (February 21, 2003)
2. Ashley Allinson; “Keeping his Body of Work in Mind: A Chronology of David Cronenberg’s
Success as Canadian Auteur and Industry Pillar” (2002)
Saturday, 3 December 2011
Slowing It Down
In determining the mood and impact of a given film, any director is forced to make hard and fast decisions as to what will be the most effective stylistic choice, in so far as pacing is concerned, to address the themes and ideas contained within the narrative structure.
Genre obviously plays a vital role in determining this pace. An action film will generally always have a moderately-to-extremely frantic pace, with rapid fire editing piecing together a stream of set-piece sequences in a way that keeps an audience energised and engaged at all times. In this respect, the action genre stands alone when compared to other genres, all of which – bar the majority of the drama genre – can vary its pace depending on the specific needs of the individual narrative… whether based in the conventions and iconography of sub-genre/hybrid-genre or not.
In Comedy, Horror, Science Fiction, etc., the pacing can swing either way – either frenetic and highly energised, or it can be slowed right down to the slowest crawl… and every variation in between, depending on the project’s narrative and stylistic requirements. Even within a film, the pace can change from scene to scene depending on the needs of the narrative.
In the theatre, I have seen the exact same comedy script tackled by two completely different directors with two completely different approaches. One paced it right up, the other took his time. Both were valid interpretations and each had much to offer.
At the opposite end of the spectrum from the action genre – where the pace is generally swifter and more energised almost by default – character-driven drama, by contrast, slows the pace down considerably. This, too, is a matter of default, and speaks to almost every film that falls within this genre. Because drama is generally more concerned with the characters, their emotional journey(s), and a much more detailed portrait of the subtleties and dynamics of human interaction, more time needs to be spent letting these nuances settle into an audience's perceptions. Rather than treating them as links to the next set-piece action scene or scare moment, ie: a means unto an end, the characters in a drama are the end.
We live in a gung-ho, music-video-and-TVC-driven world of contemporary filmmaking. The average viewer’s attention span shortens virtually on a daily basis, and this average "consumer”, living and wallowing in our absurd and bloodthirsty culture of instant gratification, expects everything to be laid out in the first thirty seconds and explained in triplicate. Thus, as a film-maker, one is constantly confronted with the average producer or executive producer's defiantly market-driven mantra of “keep the story moving”. Rarely does one hear a producer or executive producer say, “slow it down”, or “can we make this scene longer”, or “less cuts”.
But even within the drama genre, it’s always interesting to compare how even those conventions are subverted and toyed with by independent film-makers.
Per Blom’s 1987 Norwegian film IS-SLOTTET (THE ICE PALACE) is a miraculous work on many levels. But the chief factor that renders it such an important film for makers of cinematic chamber drama is the pace it adopts throughout its entire seventy-eight minute running time.
If filmed in a conventional, mainstream, “Hollywood” style, the film would probably run less than an hour, possibly a mere thirty minutes. Blom’s staging of the story, however, and the pace he adopts, slows the film down considerably, and makes the pacing one of the film’s central defining attributes, speaking directly to the film’s themes and concerns.
At times, the pacing is almost funereal, the camera lingering over extraordinarily protracted - and frequently wordless - exchanges between characters. At other times, the camera lingers on a single character’s face for over a minute as they simply stand there thinking. The acting is so extraordinarily subtle and minimalist that one could be excused for thinking they weren’t acting at all.
The story itself centres on two eleven-year-old girls, Siss (Line Storesund) and Unn (Hilde Nyeggen Martinsen). Unn has recently arrived in a tiny, remote community in the bleak but incredibly beautiful Norwegian countryside. Her mother has recently died, and she has never met her father. She lives with her aunt. Being the new girl in the local school, Unn finds it difficult to make friends.
Siss, by contrast, has many friends and both of her parents. The two girls become increasingly attracted to each other, and quietly, slowly, with every beat played to its fullest potential, begin to express their feelings towards one another. They meet one evening in private, and what begins as a perfectly harmless childhood sexual experimentation suddenly changes course dramatically as Unn becomes frightened, and ends their private moment before anything serious can happen further.
Both are suddenly forced to confront the reality of what their feelings for each other mean, and while Siss is apparently quite happy to follow this strange new path, Unn is unable to deal with what her feelings for Siss may bode. The following day, confused and distraught, she skips school and visits a nearby ice castle that has been created by a waterfall. She climbs into the castle and begins exploring the vast tunnels and caverns, baffled by its beauty. She becomes disoriented and cannot find her way out. She dies of hypothermia. Her last word is ”Siss".
Siss is overwhelmed by loss and loneliness, and makes a promise that she will never forget Unn. She takes upon herself the role that Unn had played – standing alone in the schoolyard, refusing to play or speak. She struggles through a long and harsh winter – literal and symbolic - trying to find her way out of her own emotional ice castle, before she can continue towards adolescence and adulthood.
Blom’s film is based in the seminal novel of the same name by Tarjei Vesaas… a classic of Norwegian literature. Like the novel, the film is not merely a coming-of-age story, but a story of loneliness and alienation. These two young girls, on the threshold of adolescence and adulthood, are forced to confront the reality of consequence, and the costs incurred by their dreams and aspirations, as well as by the dominant cultural expectations of their community.
Blom shoots Vesaas’ novel in a stark, desolate, and yet staggeringly beautiful cinematic language… haunting, wintery landscapes made all the more exquisite by the fact that Blom allows his camera to linger lovingly over every detail of it.
In the dialogue scenes between the two girls, the pacing is consciously slowed down, and yet never the slightest bit boring. Much like Japanese Kabuki, the slow, deliberate pacing allows each moment to emerge through a detailed study of the emotions and reactions that Storesund and Martinsen are able to display in what are extraordinary and richly detailed performances.
Parallels can also be drawn to the plays of Harold Pinter, and their use of pauses and silences as deeply impactful – and very deliberate – dramatic devices. Used appropriately, as they are in Blom’s film, they can be just as powerful, if not more so, than words.
Blom’s pacing creates an atmosphere that is, by turns, both exquisitely beautiful and deeply disturbing. We need only look at what I consider to be the film’s key scene – the first sexual overtures between these two children – to find and reveal Blom’s artistry and its power with this material.
It happens in the film’s first twenty minutes, in which we see, oddly enough, not the meeting of the two girls, but what is effectively their “first date”. We find out subsequently that they have already met and become friendly, and what the dynamics of that friendship are, but the film begins with that back-story already in place.
In the first few minutes of the film, Siss arrives at Unn’s house, where she lives with her aunt, and the two adjourn to Unn’s bedroom. Blom establishes that Unn is “different” by revealing a series of glamorous “cheesecake” pin-ups on her bedroom wall… she is clearly more interested in girls than boys.
In a scene that takes a full fifteen minutes of screen time, we see the two of them exchange barely a dozen words, before Unn suggests, in the spirit of mutual curiosity, that they both undress. They do so, and as they stand awkwardly in front of each other, seemingly less interested in each other’s bodies than they are in each other’s faces, Unn suddenly – and, initially, inexplicably – decides that it’s too cold, and that they aren’t going to “play”. She tells Siss that she has a dark secret that will damn her to eternal hellfire if it is ever revealed.
But Siss finds nothing wrong either with Unn, or with that to which she is clearly referring. Indeed, Siss is shown as rapidly warming to the idea of “playing” with Unn. Despite her initial hesitancy and her apparent role as “the seduced”, Siss is seen to be quite comfortable with being naked with her new friend, and is genuinely saddened and perplexed when Unn calls off their “play” so abruptly.
In the hands of another director, or indeed another culture, the scene would have been staged and paced differently in any number of ways. Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, the full frontal nudity involving the two twelve-year-old actresses would almost certainly not be depicted quite so frankly – even given the scene’s (indeed, the entire film’s) exquisite cinematography. Certainly in today’s censorious climate, the “unworldliness” (“innocence” is the wrong word) that forms the heart of this story - and this scene in particular – is well and truly out of step with the hardened, cynical knowingness of contemporary American-influenced political correctness.
And while a scene such as this is commonplace in the lives of many children (it certainly was for me), and therefore hardly shocking in and of itself, its appearance in IS-SLOTTET is very much of its time and place. In this respect, it is as much a representation of a culture and an era as it is of a film-maker’s stylistic choices.
But what is significant about the way in which Blom depicts the naked bodies of these two pre-adolescent actresses is the slow and – yes, I’ll say it – erotic nature of their “play”. As Unn removes the last of her clothing and moves to the mirror to brush her hair, Siss is seen casting a surreptitious glance towards her friend’s now naked body. Blom makes us complicit in this apparently taboo ogling, offering us – through Siss’ eyes – a “tantalising” glimpse of Unn's naked body. Siss’ reaction remains brilliantly ambiguous, and it’s not until they both stand, fully nude, and directly opposite one another, that we see Siss’ fascination with, and warmth towards, the awkward elegance of her friend’s naked body.
Tellingly, though, Blom does not reveal all of Unn’s body. It’s Siss who provides us with the scene’s major moment of full frontal nudity, underlining the elemental fear that will ultimately drive Unn – whose POV the shot is representing – to her tragically untimely death.
In keeping with the film’s all-pervasive dream-like tone, this single full frontal shot of Siss is as artistically lit and filmed as any serious studio photographer’s major nude studies would be.
Another way in which the scene would have been handled differently is the dialogue and the staging. Where another director might have said, “If they’re going to be awkward and embarrassed, they need to be doing stuff – lots of business, or they need to be speaking inanely of random nonsense… it’ll reveal their awkwardness."
Of course this is incorrect, and Blom proves it, by showing just how awkward two hitherto lively, energetic, happy young girls can become in this moment of intense privacy. Unn and Siss are seen as being reduced to almost total catatonia – cripplingly awkward in the paucity of their verbal exchanges and their physical inertia as they fumble their way through a charmingly naïve attempt to find ways of expressing their nascent sexual attraction towards each other.
Every word, every thought before speaking a word, is measured and given its own weight. Every move, every gesture, every furtive glance, is deliberately placed and paced. There are no concessions to “keeping it interesting” or “adding in some business”. It is a slow, deliberate crawl through the quagmire of adolescent homosexuality that is at once romantic, charming, terrifying, exhilarating, and agonising in its painfully protracted longeurs.
What follows in the remainder of the film is both a continuation, and an expansion, of the stylistic choices Blom introduces in this pivotal early scene.
Unn’s journey through the cavernous expanse of the inside of the ice palace is as lengthy and as deliberately paced a sequence as one will find in any cinema outside of the experimental fringe. Siss’ attempts to duplicate her friend’s fate, by lying naked in a bathtub full of freezing water, is as intensely and painfully protracted as it is heartbreaking. And consecutive scenes of Siss struggling to stay awake as she watches the search party try to find the missing Unn (they never do) followed by her tossing and turning in bed as she dreams uncomfortably of that fateful night of awkward nudity, is equally agonising in its calculated elongation.
It is a film that evokes mood, and for the patient viewer, provides a journey through what might be described as a “subconscious landscape”. In adopting a dreamlike mise-en-scene for his adaptation of Versaas’ revered novel, Blom brings us into, and allows us to understand, a physical and an emotional landscape that, while alien, is nonetheless deeply human.
Genre obviously plays a vital role in determining this pace. An action film will generally always have a moderately-to-extremely frantic pace, with rapid fire editing piecing together a stream of set-piece sequences in a way that keeps an audience energised and engaged at all times. In this respect, the action genre stands alone when compared to other genres, all of which – bar the majority of the drama genre – can vary its pace depending on the specific needs of the individual narrative… whether based in the conventions and iconography of sub-genre/hybrid-genre or not.
In Comedy, Horror, Science Fiction, etc., the pacing can swing either way – either frenetic and highly energised, or it can be slowed right down to the slowest crawl… and every variation in between, depending on the project’s narrative and stylistic requirements. Even within a film, the pace can change from scene to scene depending on the needs of the narrative.
In the theatre, I have seen the exact same comedy script tackled by two completely different directors with two completely different approaches. One paced it right up, the other took his time. Both were valid interpretations and each had much to offer.
At the opposite end of the spectrum from the action genre – where the pace is generally swifter and more energised almost by default – character-driven drama, by contrast, slows the pace down considerably. This, too, is a matter of default, and speaks to almost every film that falls within this genre. Because drama is generally more concerned with the characters, their emotional journey(s), and a much more detailed portrait of the subtleties and dynamics of human interaction, more time needs to be spent letting these nuances settle into an audience's perceptions. Rather than treating them as links to the next set-piece action scene or scare moment, ie: a means unto an end, the characters in a drama are the end.
We live in a gung-ho, music-video-and-TVC-driven world of contemporary filmmaking. The average viewer’s attention span shortens virtually on a daily basis, and this average "consumer”, living and wallowing in our absurd and bloodthirsty culture of instant gratification, expects everything to be laid out in the first thirty seconds and explained in triplicate. Thus, as a film-maker, one is constantly confronted with the average producer or executive producer's defiantly market-driven mantra of “keep the story moving”. Rarely does one hear a producer or executive producer say, “slow it down”, or “can we make this scene longer”, or “less cuts”.
But even within the drama genre, it’s always interesting to compare how even those conventions are subverted and toyed with by independent film-makers.
Per Blom’s 1987 Norwegian film IS-SLOTTET (THE ICE PALACE) is a miraculous work on many levels. But the chief factor that renders it such an important film for makers of cinematic chamber drama is the pace it adopts throughout its entire seventy-eight minute running time.
If filmed in a conventional, mainstream, “Hollywood” style, the film would probably run less than an hour, possibly a mere thirty minutes. Blom’s staging of the story, however, and the pace he adopts, slows the film down considerably, and makes the pacing one of the film’s central defining attributes, speaking directly to the film’s themes and concerns.
At times, the pacing is almost funereal, the camera lingering over extraordinarily protracted - and frequently wordless - exchanges between characters. At other times, the camera lingers on a single character’s face for over a minute as they simply stand there thinking. The acting is so extraordinarily subtle and minimalist that one could be excused for thinking they weren’t acting at all.
The story itself centres on two eleven-year-old girls, Siss (Line Storesund) and Unn (Hilde Nyeggen Martinsen). Unn has recently arrived in a tiny, remote community in the bleak but incredibly beautiful Norwegian countryside. Her mother has recently died, and she has never met her father. She lives with her aunt. Being the new girl in the local school, Unn finds it difficult to make friends.
Siss, by contrast, has many friends and both of her parents. The two girls become increasingly attracted to each other, and quietly, slowly, with every beat played to its fullest potential, begin to express their feelings towards one another. They meet one evening in private, and what begins as a perfectly harmless childhood sexual experimentation suddenly changes course dramatically as Unn becomes frightened, and ends their private moment before anything serious can happen further.
Both are suddenly forced to confront the reality of what their feelings for each other mean, and while Siss is apparently quite happy to follow this strange new path, Unn is unable to deal with what her feelings for Siss may bode. The following day, confused and distraught, she skips school and visits a nearby ice castle that has been created by a waterfall. She climbs into the castle and begins exploring the vast tunnels and caverns, baffled by its beauty. She becomes disoriented and cannot find her way out. She dies of hypothermia. Her last word is ”Siss".
Siss is overwhelmed by loss and loneliness, and makes a promise that she will never forget Unn. She takes upon herself the role that Unn had played – standing alone in the schoolyard, refusing to play or speak. She struggles through a long and harsh winter – literal and symbolic - trying to find her way out of her own emotional ice castle, before she can continue towards adolescence and adulthood.
Blom’s film is based in the seminal novel of the same name by Tarjei Vesaas… a classic of Norwegian literature. Like the novel, the film is not merely a coming-of-age story, but a story of loneliness and alienation. These two young girls, on the threshold of adolescence and adulthood, are forced to confront the reality of consequence, and the costs incurred by their dreams and aspirations, as well as by the dominant cultural expectations of their community.
Blom shoots Vesaas’ novel in a stark, desolate, and yet staggeringly beautiful cinematic language… haunting, wintery landscapes made all the more exquisite by the fact that Blom allows his camera to linger lovingly over every detail of it.
In the dialogue scenes between the two girls, the pacing is consciously slowed down, and yet never the slightest bit boring. Much like Japanese Kabuki, the slow, deliberate pacing allows each moment to emerge through a detailed study of the emotions and reactions that Storesund and Martinsen are able to display in what are extraordinary and richly detailed performances.
Parallels can also be drawn to the plays of Harold Pinter, and their use of pauses and silences as deeply impactful – and very deliberate – dramatic devices. Used appropriately, as they are in Blom’s film, they can be just as powerful, if not more so, than words.
Blom’s pacing creates an atmosphere that is, by turns, both exquisitely beautiful and deeply disturbing. We need only look at what I consider to be the film’s key scene – the first sexual overtures between these two children – to find and reveal Blom’s artistry and its power with this material.
It happens in the film’s first twenty minutes, in which we see, oddly enough, not the meeting of the two girls, but what is effectively their “first date”. We find out subsequently that they have already met and become friendly, and what the dynamics of that friendship are, but the film begins with that back-story already in place.
In the first few minutes of the film, Siss arrives at Unn’s house, where she lives with her aunt, and the two adjourn to Unn’s bedroom. Blom establishes that Unn is “different” by revealing a series of glamorous “cheesecake” pin-ups on her bedroom wall… she is clearly more interested in girls than boys.
In a scene that takes a full fifteen minutes of screen time, we see the two of them exchange barely a dozen words, before Unn suggests, in the spirit of mutual curiosity, that they both undress. They do so, and as they stand awkwardly in front of each other, seemingly less interested in each other’s bodies than they are in each other’s faces, Unn suddenly – and, initially, inexplicably – decides that it’s too cold, and that they aren’t going to “play”. She tells Siss that she has a dark secret that will damn her to eternal hellfire if it is ever revealed.
But Siss finds nothing wrong either with Unn, or with that to which she is clearly referring. Indeed, Siss is shown as rapidly warming to the idea of “playing” with Unn. Despite her initial hesitancy and her apparent role as “the seduced”, Siss is seen to be quite comfortable with being naked with her new friend, and is genuinely saddened and perplexed when Unn calls off their “play” so abruptly.
In the hands of another director, or indeed another culture, the scene would have been staged and paced differently in any number of ways. Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, the full frontal nudity involving the two twelve-year-old actresses would almost certainly not be depicted quite so frankly – even given the scene’s (indeed, the entire film’s) exquisite cinematography. Certainly in today’s censorious climate, the “unworldliness” (“innocence” is the wrong word) that forms the heart of this story - and this scene in particular – is well and truly out of step with the hardened, cynical knowingness of contemporary American-influenced political correctness.
And while a scene such as this is commonplace in the lives of many children (it certainly was for me), and therefore hardly shocking in and of itself, its appearance in IS-SLOTTET is very much of its time and place. In this respect, it is as much a representation of a culture and an era as it is of a film-maker’s stylistic choices.
But what is significant about the way in which Blom depicts the naked bodies of these two pre-adolescent actresses is the slow and – yes, I’ll say it – erotic nature of their “play”. As Unn removes the last of her clothing and moves to the mirror to brush her hair, Siss is seen casting a surreptitious glance towards her friend’s now naked body. Blom makes us complicit in this apparently taboo ogling, offering us – through Siss’ eyes – a “tantalising” glimpse of Unn's naked body. Siss’ reaction remains brilliantly ambiguous, and it’s not until they both stand, fully nude, and directly opposite one another, that we see Siss’ fascination with, and warmth towards, the awkward elegance of her friend’s naked body.
Tellingly, though, Blom does not reveal all of Unn’s body. It’s Siss who provides us with the scene’s major moment of full frontal nudity, underlining the elemental fear that will ultimately drive Unn – whose POV the shot is representing – to her tragically untimely death.
In keeping with the film’s all-pervasive dream-like tone, this single full frontal shot of Siss is as artistically lit and filmed as any serious studio photographer’s major nude studies would be.
Another way in which the scene would have been handled differently is the dialogue and the staging. Where another director might have said, “If they’re going to be awkward and embarrassed, they need to be doing stuff – lots of business, or they need to be speaking inanely of random nonsense… it’ll reveal their awkwardness."
Of course this is incorrect, and Blom proves it, by showing just how awkward two hitherto lively, energetic, happy young girls can become in this moment of intense privacy. Unn and Siss are seen as being reduced to almost total catatonia – cripplingly awkward in the paucity of their verbal exchanges and their physical inertia as they fumble their way through a charmingly naïve attempt to find ways of expressing their nascent sexual attraction towards each other.
Every word, every thought before speaking a word, is measured and given its own weight. Every move, every gesture, every furtive glance, is deliberately placed and paced. There are no concessions to “keeping it interesting” or “adding in some business”. It is a slow, deliberate crawl through the quagmire of adolescent homosexuality that is at once romantic, charming, terrifying, exhilarating, and agonising in its painfully protracted longeurs.
What follows in the remainder of the film is both a continuation, and an expansion, of the stylistic choices Blom introduces in this pivotal early scene.
Unn’s journey through the cavernous expanse of the inside of the ice palace is as lengthy and as deliberately paced a sequence as one will find in any cinema outside of the experimental fringe. Siss’ attempts to duplicate her friend’s fate, by lying naked in a bathtub full of freezing water, is as intensely and painfully protracted as it is heartbreaking. And consecutive scenes of Siss struggling to stay awake as she watches the search party try to find the missing Unn (they never do) followed by her tossing and turning in bed as she dreams uncomfortably of that fateful night of awkward nudity, is equally agonising in its calculated elongation.
It is a film that evokes mood, and for the patient viewer, provides a journey through what might be described as a “subconscious landscape”. In adopting a dreamlike mise-en-scene for his adaptation of Versaas’ revered novel, Blom brings us into, and allows us to understand, a physical and an emotional landscape that, while alien, is nonetheless deeply human.
Friday, 2 December 2011
Stages of Screen
"It’s almost like we weren’t making a film. It’s like we were putting it on record, what we did (in the theatre), through a different kind of focus and means."
- actor Frances de la Tour, speaking about filming “THE HISTORY BOYS” (Nicholas Hytner, 2006)
Actors who have been lucky enough to work extensively in both theatre and film are regularly asked which of the two media they prefer to work in. Is the immediacy of live theatre and the corresponding connection it affords with a live audience more compelling to them than the permanency and generally higher pay rate of working in film, or is the reverse closer to the truth?
Generally, the response is that they like both media for different reasons – and generally the ones cited above; and indeed these two forms of storytelling are extremely different in a multitude of ways, even if the essential thrust of each is virtually identical - the journey of a character or characters through a series of obstacles to some sort of resolution.
But even though this decidedly simplistic common link defines the central connecting point for both forms, it is also nonetheless unquestionably true that both theatre and cinema are each inextricably wed to two very different fundamental imperatives... essential historical and cultural points-of-departure that separate and define the two art forms utterly.
Put simply… theatre is text driven where cinema is image driven. And while each borrows heavily from the other, with theatre and its bastard cousin, opera, advancing the technology of spectacle exponentially in its quest to dazzle with visuals, and cinema finding all kinds of ways to sustain lengthy dialogue scenes, this fundamental point-of-difference continues to be the elephant in the room when it comes to the adaptation of stage works to the screen, and vice-versa.
The two continue to feed off each other, with each providing fodder for the other as vessels of narrative storytelling: a growing number of films are being adapted as stage productions, at almost every level of the theatre industry… from the Disney Corporation’s Broadway adaptations of their own large-scale movie musicals like THE LION KING (Roger Allers/Rob Minkoff, 1994) BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (Gary Trousdale/Kirk Wise, 1991), MARY POPPINS (Robert Stevenson, 1964), and THE LITTLE MERMAID (Ron Clements/John Musker, 1989), right down to small amateur and semi-professional versions of equally intimate film pieces such as RESERVOIR DOGS (Quentin Tarantino, 1992), THE LAST SUPPER (Stacy Title, 1995), and HUMAN TRAFFIC (Justin Kerrigan, 1999).
In this way, stage practitioners have been returning the favour begun by film makers who, from the very earliest days of cinema, have been looking to the theatre for material to fuel an art form that was ultimately – in the 20th century – to eclipse the theatre’s dominance as the popular entertainment of the 19th century.
But the question is always the how… the problem of reconciling the two forms' distinctions and dynamics in order to ensure that – whichever way the adaptive process travels – each project borne of source material not originally created for that medium can exist satisfactorily as an entity in its own right.
In adapting THE LION KING to the Broadway stage, director Julie Taymor's approach was to completely re-think the text from a defiantly theatrical viewpoint, revelling in the theatre’s inherent artificiality and interpreting the material from scratch, almost entirely voiding its cinematic origins. The phenomenal success of her production was born not only of the endlessly inventive ways that she and her creative team were able to find to reconcile the material’s inherent staging difficulties, but also out of the mere fact of having taken the gambit at all. In other words, the stated commitment to completely re-examine the material in such a defiantly theatrical manner, and to avoid the act of merely attempting to replicate the film onstage, was as much to do with international audiences embracing the production as anything else.
In the reverse adaptive direction, a film worth mentioning for similar virtues is AMADEUS (Milos Forman, 1984). Here was a film that began its life as a highly stylised, three-hour, text driven stage play, replete with an eight-page opening monologue and a five-page closing one for its central character, Salieri.
The play’s entire narrative is driven by the largely monologue-based “confession” by the character Salieri to the “murder” of his friend and contemporary Mozart. In the theatre, all of Salieri’s monologues are delivered directly to the audience, whom he dubs “ghosts of the future”, and who serve as witnesses to his “confession”. It is an overtly theatrical device and one that serves the expository mode of the play well.
In adapting the play to film, however, the latter medium’s “essential historical and cultural points-of-departure” dictate that the confession be given a literal reality that makes logical sense of the act. This is done by the simplest of moves… introducing a priest character, Father Vogler, who facilitates a (heavily truncated) version of the same “confession” heard by theatregoers.
Peter Shaffer adapted his own play for the screen, and during the four months that he and director Milos Forman spent locked away re-writing the play into a workable screenplay, he completely re-worked not only the vast majority of the play’s central narrative action, but also its entire basic structure – all in an effort to make the film a film, and not merely the play performed in front of cameras.
Some of Salieri’s monologues, many of them purely expository, are retained as narration, and serve to underscore an obviously more visually detailed and literal representation of what, on stage, would have merely been alluded to. Some are omitted entirely and replaced with wholly visual interpretations. Several entirely original scenes – not resembling anything in the original stage script – are interpolated holus-bolus, and again, usually by purely visual means (Mozart’s pauper’s burial, for instance). Characters are added or expanded as necessary, with Mozart himself given much more prominence beyond Salieri’s image of him, a key component of the Salieri-centric play that was untenable for a comparatively photo-realistic – not to mention necessarily commercial – film.
In virtually every case, these moments are so effective in communicating the central thrust of their respective dramatic importance that entire reams of the play’s original dialogue are not merely trimmed, but often excised in their entirety.
"(T)he film medium requires a fundamental transition from verbal to visual effects and a much greater economy on the textual level. Thus, the text of the drama often has to be reduced in amount as well as in expressiveness. The result is a gap that must be filled with visual means of expression; it is not at all sufficient to concretise the setting. It is here that many adaptations fail to convey the play’s essence due to a slavish fidelity to the dramatic text. A good screenwriter should not hesitate to reduce a long monologue to one fierce look, or a dialogue to an emotional gesture, if the conveyed message remains unchanged.” (Kurowska, 1998)
Kurowska subsequently references AMADEUS explicitly, pointing out the success of one particular re-interpretation that Shaffer and Forman adopt in translating a narrative conceit shared between both versions of the story:
"On stage, Salieri recites a long monologue in which he curses God and makes an oath to destroy Mozart. In the film, his speech is much shortened, but while he is swearing revenge, he looks up at the wooden cross on the wall, then takes it off, and throws it into the fireplace where it lies, burning brightly. This is a powerful image, and it manages to replace the original monologue more than adequately."
Even though Shaffer’s play was a major success in both London’s West End and New York’s Broadway, and has since become a firm fixture on the rosters of amateur and professional theatre companies alike, it is a piece that has come to us comparatively recently, and has thus not yet entered the realm of consistent re-interpretation and re-invention enjoyed by the works of William Shakespeare.
In discussing the ways in which filmmakers are able to tackle the visual treatment of extant text-based narrative conceits, one cannot ignore the methods employed to give Shakespeare a life on screen.
"On stage, Shakespeare’s sublime poetry and prose are his greatest glory. In mainstream film-making, the Bard’s reliance on “words, words, words” is his greatest commercial liability, erecting a language barrier for the vast majority of viewers." (Rosenthal, 2007)
Daniel Rosenthal’s article “The Bard on Screen” extolled the virtues of the “genre adaptations” of Shakespeare’s plays – teen comedies and gangster thrillers – that have rejected Shakespeare’s language entirely and focused instead on a full re-interpretation. But it’s interesting to examine how “original language” Shakespeare films can reconcile the inherently wordy nature of retained text with the medium's fundamental requirement to be visually stimulating into the bargain.
And it isn’t merely “opening the play out” onto spectacular locations, or providing a more detailed and richly textured background plate for scenes set on busy avenues or battlefields (larger armies than can be fit onstage, for example), nor indeed cutting, re-working, or even re-assigning text. This is what Kurowska was speaking of when she warned against the tokenistic impulse to merely “concretise the setting".
Re-interpretive success (or failure) ultimately depends on how filmmakers transcend, or not, these ubiquitous (i.e.: given) advantages of film’s tools and means, and push their visual bag of tricks into realms that underline, in truly creative ways, the central thematic idea(s) of the work at hand. Images have to mean something.
Lawrence Olivier’s HAMLET (1948) was able to send its cameras creeping along the uterine corridors to evoke a feeling of dread and palpable Oedipal sexual tension. Roman Polanski's MACBETH (1971) was able to introduce a sense of palpable horror to Shakespeare’s witch-and-ghost-filled Grand Guignol; and Branagh’s HAMLET (1996) managed to find – alongside its tricksy and all-too-obvious flashbacks, parallel scenes, and representative imaginings – a genuine sense not only of Elsinore’s internal political machinations, but also of the external political ramifications of Hamlet’s actions… the sense of an era ending before our very eyes; the demise not only of a family (two, in point of fact) but also of a nation, with Hamlet’s behaviour ultimately giving the conquering Fortinbras the opportunity to redraw Europe’s maps comprehensively.
Too often, film versions resemble a filmed stage performance – Olivier’s RICHARD III (1954), Michael Radford's THE MERCHANT OF VENICE (2004); and even more often, they simply rely on the effectiveness of a single location (Branagh’s 1993 MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING), or a gimmicky conceit (Michael Almereyda's 2000 modern-dress HAMLET).
But for every complete misfire (Branagh’s dire 2000 musical version of LOVE'S LABOURS LOST) there are – very occasionally – some complete successes.
Grigori Kozintev’s 1971 Russian version of King Lear, KOROL LIR, is one of the most hauntingly poetic visual treatments of this sombre, intense tragedy. Like Peter Brook’s version from the same year, it is filmed entirely in black and white, and is set in a bleak, almost post-apocalyptic landscape. Its desolate atmosphere is palpable from the very opening moments, when we see the bedraggled citizens of Lir's kingdom staggering towards the remote castle where their king is due to give audience.
As the film progresses, a sequence of ever more startling images roll out before us, many of them of the mercenary school mentioned before – that of merely taking advantage of the tools of cinema for visual effect… but images of Lir surrounded by hawks and eagles, the wordless open air marriage of France to Cordelia with her father’s castle standing ominously in the background, the constant Christ-like imagery when depicting the tortured Edgar, and the image of a doting Cordelia escorting her dying father through a raging battlefield are all devastatingly impactful representations of character and status, and an extraordinary mastering of cultural engineering through imagery.
Baz Lurhmann’s ROMEO + JULIET (1996) shares much in common with Kozintsev's efforts, albeit from an entirely different cultural imperative. Where KOROL LIR had successfully sifted Shakespeare’s tragedy through a bleak Soviet sensibility, painting a portrait – both literally and symbolically – of a cruel, merciless landscape, Lurhmann’s film adopted a stylistic language that spoke to the play’s status as a piece about – and therefore presumably for – young people.
His use of what has been dubbed the “MTV” style of camera work and editing allowed the work’s intended audience to understand the play visually where they would perhaps struggle to understand it linguistically if given a more reverential treatment insofar as the written text was concerned. It quite literally translated the entire play into a language that they could understand, much as one would do when translating it for performance in a non-English speaking foreign country.
In this way, Luhrmann successfully applied what Deborah Cartmell called “cinematic codes”, which “provide a filmic shorthand”, and “both compete with and replace the words of the source text”. (Cartmell, 2000)
Virginia Woolf’s observation that “the cinema has within its grasp innumerable symbols for emotions that have so far failed to find expression (in literature)” is rarely more evident than in these two films, which both successfully manage to align Woolf’s “emotional symbols” into meaningful meditations on themes and ideas inherent within the works they seek to interpret cinematically.
But while filmmakers who are drawn to Shakepeare’s plays as material for cinematic adaptation will always be confronted with the fact that it is, as Kurowska observed, "difficult to convey the thoughts or feelings of the characters without words, using only visual means of expression”, the abiding joy of tackling the Warwickshire Bard's seminal, elemental plays – the “DNA” of all modern drama, according to British director Richard Eyre – is to find the means to do just that.
REFERENCES:
1. Malgorzata Kurowska – “Peter Shaffer’s play AMADEUS and its film adaptation by Milos Forman” (1998)
2. Deborah Cartmell – “Interpreting Shakespeare On Screen” (2000)
3. Daniel Rosenthal – “The Bard on Screen” (The Guardian, April 7, 2007)
4. Virginia Woolf – “The Cinema” (1926)
- actor Frances de la Tour, speaking about filming “THE HISTORY BOYS” (Nicholas Hytner, 2006)
Actors who have been lucky enough to work extensively in both theatre and film are regularly asked which of the two media they prefer to work in. Is the immediacy of live theatre and the corresponding connection it affords with a live audience more compelling to them than the permanency and generally higher pay rate of working in film, or is the reverse closer to the truth?
Generally, the response is that they like both media for different reasons – and generally the ones cited above; and indeed these two forms of storytelling are extremely different in a multitude of ways, even if the essential thrust of each is virtually identical - the journey of a character or characters through a series of obstacles to some sort of resolution.
But even though this decidedly simplistic common link defines the central connecting point for both forms, it is also nonetheless unquestionably true that both theatre and cinema are each inextricably wed to two very different fundamental imperatives... essential historical and cultural points-of-departure that separate and define the two art forms utterly.
Put simply… theatre is text driven where cinema is image driven. And while each borrows heavily from the other, with theatre and its bastard cousin, opera, advancing the technology of spectacle exponentially in its quest to dazzle with visuals, and cinema finding all kinds of ways to sustain lengthy dialogue scenes, this fundamental point-of-difference continues to be the elephant in the room when it comes to the adaptation of stage works to the screen, and vice-versa.
The two continue to feed off each other, with each providing fodder for the other as vessels of narrative storytelling: a growing number of films are being adapted as stage productions, at almost every level of the theatre industry… from the Disney Corporation’s Broadway adaptations of their own large-scale movie musicals like THE LION KING (Roger Allers/Rob Minkoff, 1994) BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (Gary Trousdale/Kirk Wise, 1991), MARY POPPINS (Robert Stevenson, 1964), and THE LITTLE MERMAID (Ron Clements/John Musker, 1989), right down to small amateur and semi-professional versions of equally intimate film pieces such as RESERVOIR DOGS (Quentin Tarantino, 1992), THE LAST SUPPER (Stacy Title, 1995), and HUMAN TRAFFIC (Justin Kerrigan, 1999).
In this way, stage practitioners have been returning the favour begun by film makers who, from the very earliest days of cinema, have been looking to the theatre for material to fuel an art form that was ultimately – in the 20th century – to eclipse the theatre’s dominance as the popular entertainment of the 19th century.
But the question is always the how… the problem of reconciling the two forms' distinctions and dynamics in order to ensure that – whichever way the adaptive process travels – each project borne of source material not originally created for that medium can exist satisfactorily as an entity in its own right.
In adapting THE LION KING to the Broadway stage, director Julie Taymor's approach was to completely re-think the text from a defiantly theatrical viewpoint, revelling in the theatre’s inherent artificiality and interpreting the material from scratch, almost entirely voiding its cinematic origins. The phenomenal success of her production was born not only of the endlessly inventive ways that she and her creative team were able to find to reconcile the material’s inherent staging difficulties, but also out of the mere fact of having taken the gambit at all. In other words, the stated commitment to completely re-examine the material in such a defiantly theatrical manner, and to avoid the act of merely attempting to replicate the film onstage, was as much to do with international audiences embracing the production as anything else.
In the reverse adaptive direction, a film worth mentioning for similar virtues is AMADEUS (Milos Forman, 1984). Here was a film that began its life as a highly stylised, three-hour, text driven stage play, replete with an eight-page opening monologue and a five-page closing one for its central character, Salieri.
The play’s entire narrative is driven by the largely monologue-based “confession” by the character Salieri to the “murder” of his friend and contemporary Mozart. In the theatre, all of Salieri’s monologues are delivered directly to the audience, whom he dubs “ghosts of the future”, and who serve as witnesses to his “confession”. It is an overtly theatrical device and one that serves the expository mode of the play well.
In adapting the play to film, however, the latter medium’s “essential historical and cultural points-of-departure” dictate that the confession be given a literal reality that makes logical sense of the act. This is done by the simplest of moves… introducing a priest character, Father Vogler, who facilitates a (heavily truncated) version of the same “confession” heard by theatregoers.
Peter Shaffer adapted his own play for the screen, and during the four months that he and director Milos Forman spent locked away re-writing the play into a workable screenplay, he completely re-worked not only the vast majority of the play’s central narrative action, but also its entire basic structure – all in an effort to make the film a film, and not merely the play performed in front of cameras.
Some of Salieri’s monologues, many of them purely expository, are retained as narration, and serve to underscore an obviously more visually detailed and literal representation of what, on stage, would have merely been alluded to. Some are omitted entirely and replaced with wholly visual interpretations. Several entirely original scenes – not resembling anything in the original stage script – are interpolated holus-bolus, and again, usually by purely visual means (Mozart’s pauper’s burial, for instance). Characters are added or expanded as necessary, with Mozart himself given much more prominence beyond Salieri’s image of him, a key component of the Salieri-centric play that was untenable for a comparatively photo-realistic – not to mention necessarily commercial – film.
In virtually every case, these moments are so effective in communicating the central thrust of their respective dramatic importance that entire reams of the play’s original dialogue are not merely trimmed, but often excised in their entirety.
"(T)he film medium requires a fundamental transition from verbal to visual effects and a much greater economy on the textual level. Thus, the text of the drama often has to be reduced in amount as well as in expressiveness. The result is a gap that must be filled with visual means of expression; it is not at all sufficient to concretise the setting. It is here that many adaptations fail to convey the play’s essence due to a slavish fidelity to the dramatic text. A good screenwriter should not hesitate to reduce a long monologue to one fierce look, or a dialogue to an emotional gesture, if the conveyed message remains unchanged.” (Kurowska, 1998)
Kurowska subsequently references AMADEUS explicitly, pointing out the success of one particular re-interpretation that Shaffer and Forman adopt in translating a narrative conceit shared between both versions of the story:
"On stage, Salieri recites a long monologue in which he curses God and makes an oath to destroy Mozart. In the film, his speech is much shortened, but while he is swearing revenge, he looks up at the wooden cross on the wall, then takes it off, and throws it into the fireplace where it lies, burning brightly. This is a powerful image, and it manages to replace the original monologue more than adequately."
Even though Shaffer’s play was a major success in both London’s West End and New York’s Broadway, and has since become a firm fixture on the rosters of amateur and professional theatre companies alike, it is a piece that has come to us comparatively recently, and has thus not yet entered the realm of consistent re-interpretation and re-invention enjoyed by the works of William Shakespeare.
In discussing the ways in which filmmakers are able to tackle the visual treatment of extant text-based narrative conceits, one cannot ignore the methods employed to give Shakespeare a life on screen.
"On stage, Shakespeare’s sublime poetry and prose are his greatest glory. In mainstream film-making, the Bard’s reliance on “words, words, words” is his greatest commercial liability, erecting a language barrier for the vast majority of viewers." (Rosenthal, 2007)
Daniel Rosenthal’s article “The Bard on Screen” extolled the virtues of the “genre adaptations” of Shakespeare’s plays – teen comedies and gangster thrillers – that have rejected Shakespeare’s language entirely and focused instead on a full re-interpretation. But it’s interesting to examine how “original language” Shakespeare films can reconcile the inherently wordy nature of retained text with the medium's fundamental requirement to be visually stimulating into the bargain.
And it isn’t merely “opening the play out” onto spectacular locations, or providing a more detailed and richly textured background plate for scenes set on busy avenues or battlefields (larger armies than can be fit onstage, for example), nor indeed cutting, re-working, or even re-assigning text. This is what Kurowska was speaking of when she warned against the tokenistic impulse to merely “concretise the setting".
Re-interpretive success (or failure) ultimately depends on how filmmakers transcend, or not, these ubiquitous (i.e.: given) advantages of film’s tools and means, and push their visual bag of tricks into realms that underline, in truly creative ways, the central thematic idea(s) of the work at hand. Images have to mean something.
Lawrence Olivier’s HAMLET (1948) was able to send its cameras creeping along the uterine corridors to evoke a feeling of dread and palpable Oedipal sexual tension. Roman Polanski's MACBETH (1971) was able to introduce a sense of palpable horror to Shakespeare’s witch-and-ghost-filled Grand Guignol; and Branagh’s HAMLET (1996) managed to find – alongside its tricksy and all-too-obvious flashbacks, parallel scenes, and representative imaginings – a genuine sense not only of Elsinore’s internal political machinations, but also of the external political ramifications of Hamlet’s actions… the sense of an era ending before our very eyes; the demise not only of a family (two, in point of fact) but also of a nation, with Hamlet’s behaviour ultimately giving the conquering Fortinbras the opportunity to redraw Europe’s maps comprehensively.
Too often, film versions resemble a filmed stage performance – Olivier’s RICHARD III (1954), Michael Radford's THE MERCHANT OF VENICE (2004); and even more often, they simply rely on the effectiveness of a single location (Branagh’s 1993 MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING), or a gimmicky conceit (Michael Almereyda's 2000 modern-dress HAMLET).
But for every complete misfire (Branagh’s dire 2000 musical version of LOVE'S LABOURS LOST) there are – very occasionally – some complete successes.
Grigori Kozintev’s 1971 Russian version of King Lear, KOROL LIR, is one of the most hauntingly poetic visual treatments of this sombre, intense tragedy. Like Peter Brook’s version from the same year, it is filmed entirely in black and white, and is set in a bleak, almost post-apocalyptic landscape. Its desolate atmosphere is palpable from the very opening moments, when we see the bedraggled citizens of Lir's kingdom staggering towards the remote castle where their king is due to give audience.
As the film progresses, a sequence of ever more startling images roll out before us, many of them of the mercenary school mentioned before – that of merely taking advantage of the tools of cinema for visual effect… but images of Lir surrounded by hawks and eagles, the wordless open air marriage of France to Cordelia with her father’s castle standing ominously in the background, the constant Christ-like imagery when depicting the tortured Edgar, and the image of a doting Cordelia escorting her dying father through a raging battlefield are all devastatingly impactful representations of character and status, and an extraordinary mastering of cultural engineering through imagery.
Baz Lurhmann’s ROMEO + JULIET (1996) shares much in common with Kozintsev's efforts, albeit from an entirely different cultural imperative. Where KOROL LIR had successfully sifted Shakespeare’s tragedy through a bleak Soviet sensibility, painting a portrait – both literally and symbolically – of a cruel, merciless landscape, Lurhmann’s film adopted a stylistic language that spoke to the play’s status as a piece about – and therefore presumably for – young people.
His use of what has been dubbed the “MTV” style of camera work and editing allowed the work’s intended audience to understand the play visually where they would perhaps struggle to understand it linguistically if given a more reverential treatment insofar as the written text was concerned. It quite literally translated the entire play into a language that they could understand, much as one would do when translating it for performance in a non-English speaking foreign country.
In this way, Luhrmann successfully applied what Deborah Cartmell called “cinematic codes”, which “provide a filmic shorthand”, and “both compete with and replace the words of the source text”. (Cartmell, 2000)
Virginia Woolf’s observation that “the cinema has within its grasp innumerable symbols for emotions that have so far failed to find expression (in literature)” is rarely more evident than in these two films, which both successfully manage to align Woolf’s “emotional symbols” into meaningful meditations on themes and ideas inherent within the works they seek to interpret cinematically.
But while filmmakers who are drawn to Shakepeare’s plays as material for cinematic adaptation will always be confronted with the fact that it is, as Kurowska observed, "difficult to convey the thoughts or feelings of the characters without words, using only visual means of expression”, the abiding joy of tackling the Warwickshire Bard's seminal, elemental plays – the “DNA” of all modern drama, according to British director Richard Eyre – is to find the means to do just that.
REFERENCES:
1. Malgorzata Kurowska – “Peter Shaffer’s play AMADEUS and its film adaptation by Milos Forman” (1998)
2. Deborah Cartmell – “Interpreting Shakespeare On Screen” (2000)
3. Daniel Rosenthal – “The Bard on Screen” (The Guardian, April 7, 2007)
4. Virginia Woolf – “The Cinema” (1926)
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