The French Lieutenant’s Woman

The French Lieutenant’s Woman (John Fowles, 1969)

The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Dir. Karl Reisz, 1981)

That frame above is one of the first images, preceding even the main title, in Karl Reisz’s film adaptation of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. For readers of Fowles’ novel, the gesture will register as clever and perhaps a little too early. The fourth wall that Fowles crushes in his novel at the  95 page mark isn’t even bothered with here. The film never gives the illusion that we are inside a story, never tries to trick us into thinking that we are transported to Lyme Regis, 1868, never even allowing us a moment to think that this might be about Victorian people in their own age. We know from the moment it begins that this movie is about Victorian people in our age, or in 1981. It works from the outside in, which pushes the viewer to see everything on screen as a construction meant to be juxtaposed against today. Or, perhaps, it is the other way around, and we are supposed to see everything we are today as set against the Victorians. The strategy is done in the spirit of Fowles’ novel, no doubt, but this new, more abrupt attack on the fourth wall pushes the limits of the novel’s original trick: there’s no apparent ringmaster this time, because Fowles, having finished the novel about 12 years before the movie was made and moved on to other things, is no longer here to guide us. Even the film’s screenwriter, Harold Pinter, never allows himself to be seen. What we are watching is actors in their “real lives” alongside the roles that they are made to play in the film version The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Instead of being on a sort of guided tour of his own story by Fowles, the concerns he delineates through commentary have now been narrativized for us.  This is not how we would expect a high romantic film of the Victorians to open. If the novel reads as nearly impossible to adapt for film, that’s because it is, at least as it is written. But Reisz and Pinter do exactly what a good adaption should do: they bring all the literary tricks over into the film form without seeming to miss a beat, adjusting them to fit the new medium.

The Paper Screen: An Introduction

Welcome to The Paper Screen!

This blog will operate on a simple premise: when narrative is transposed from one medium to another, its meaning changes. Through individual screen adaptations, we will explore how that process works.

Many people have deeply involved, almost ecstatic experiences in reading novels. Immersed in a world from the inside out, the novelistic form goes beyond the voyeurism of filmmaking to a place where innermost thoughts can be known and the author is given the latitude to explore his or her most indulgent detours, because the reader is rarely asked to consume the book in one sitting. After spending weeks or even months on a novel such as Les Miserables, it is deflating to see its expanse crammed into a two or three hour time space. The constraints of filmmaking seem to suffocate the life out of the story, leaving the viewer with a seemingly light shadow of their former experience.

And then, at the water cooler or over dinner with friends, we mention that we’ve seen the new film version of Gone Girl. Pressed for an opinion on the movie, we harken back to the experience of the written word and say, “It was alright, but it wasn’t as good as the book.” While this response may be experientially true and honest, the conversation is now dead in the water. What else can be said? Judgement has been pronounced and the authority of the source material has been appealed to as though it were an unassailable document.

This has, I confess, been my own reaction to the film adaptations of cherished novels. John Ford’s adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath initially registered as puny without Stienbeck’s ending. Stanley Kubrick’s rendition of The Shining has struck me as too cold and too pulverizing to elicit any of the fear that King’s novel filled me with in junior high. To Kill a Mockingbird lost the voice that Harper Lee gave to Scout and the episodic wonders of Macom in exchange for a streamlined and throughly ineffective courtroom drama. Atonement lost its literary claws to the cinema’s tyranny of the visual image. What was an elegant symphony in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas became a three hour long clanging of symbols at the theater. And so on and so fourth.

But in every one of those examples, the meaning of the source material had been altered along with its dramatic structure, which makes for an interesting discussion if we can just set aside our preferences. To use the most obvious example from those films, To Kill a Mockingbird, while still privileging Scout’s character above most others, renders her perspective in the form of three or four cursory voice overs. Every scene in Lee’s novel is understood through Scout. She’s not just a character in a story, but she is the story itself. By taking a more objective approach in the film, even to the point of excluding Scout from some scenes, the film is now a coming of age story that has less to do with perception and more to do with the proverbial wisdom espoused by Atticus Finch. We remember Atticus Finch rather than Atticus Finch as filtered through Scout. We are free to make a value judgement on that choice (my judgment is that the film is indeed a poor substitute for the novel), but if we start with the judgement we never get to have the conversation.

There will be a few ground rules for this blog.

1. There will be spoilers. If you want to read the article, you are expected to be at least vaguely familiar with the literary source material. I won’t write much in the way of plot synopsis here. You can go to online Cliff Notes for that.

2. This blog will focus mostly on observation and exploration. It will not cover any given adaptation or its source material with any attempt at being comprehensive. And though judgements may be rendered at times, I’ll work to not focus on that aspect.

3. My strengths are in film. I will try to build up my weakness in literature as I go fourth, but the bulk of this blog will focus on how the film adaptation visually renders the literary ideas.

My hope here is that my years of watching movies and reading novels will grow into something valuable for the rest of the world, not just something that I insulate myself with in my free time.

Nathan Marone

January 16th, 2015

Black Narcissus, 1947, adapted from the novel by Rumer Godden. My favorite movie.