"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)
No comments:
Post a Comment