INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

Virginia Woolf writing on Cinema in her essay "The Cinema" (1926)

had expressed her misgivings about this new art form and called it

'hubble, bubble, swarm and chaos.' She saw Cinema invading the

literary terrains and becoming an art with a new meaning.

All the famous novels of the world, with their well known characters, and their famous scenes, only asked, it seemed, to be put on the films ... But the results are disastrous to both. The alliance is unnatural. Eye and brain are thrown asunder ruthlessly as they try vainly to work in couples. The eye says: 'Here is Anna Karenina'. A voluptuous lady in black velvet wearing pearls comes before us. But the brain says 'That is no more Anna Karenina than it is Queen Victoria? For the brain knows Anna almost entirely by the inside of her mind - her charm, her passion, her despair. All the emphasis is laid by the Cinema upon her teeth, her pearls and her velvet. ("The Cinema", 1926.).

The advantage Cinema had over laboriously written novels troubled

Woolf. It had the capacity to concretise and visualise for the reader

a 'Anna Karenina' in flesh and blood. She continues with her fears

of misrepresentation in cinematic adaptations of literary texts and

says: -

So we lurch and lumber through the most famous novels of the world ... A kiss is love. A broken cup is jealousy. A grin is happiness. Death is hearse ... None of these things has the least connection with the novel that Tolstoy wrote, and it is only when we give up trying to connect pictures with the book that we guess from some accidental scene -like the gardener mowing the lawn­what the Cinema might do if it were left to its own devices. (The Cinema, 1926).

Virginia Woolf had correctly identified, almost thirty years before

George Bluestone's seminal work, Novels into Film (1957), that the

indexical and iconic characteristics of Cinema was gradually

evolving its own new language and vocabulary. What Virginia Woolf

Introduction

had not foreseen was that the cinematic adaptation of literary text

will not only generate a body of critical theory but will also establish

itself as new genre and an area of study.

The process of adapting novels for film has continued unabated for

ninety years and more and the motivations have ranged from

creatively visualising literary classics to earning pure commercial

profits. Even at the risk of the viewer complaint about having

betrayed the 'original novel', the adaptation of novels to films has

only gained in stature as a serious art form. Christian Metz echoed

Woolfs sentiments when he contested the problem of violation of

the original. He said, "the reader will not always find his film, since

what he has before him in the actual film is now somebody else's

fan tasy" . 1

Interestingly enough Virginia Woolfs novels show an affinity with

cinematic techniques. Keith Cohen in his book, Film and Fiction 2

uses passages from Virginia Woolf to suggest how the modern

novel, uses techniques of Eisenteinian 'montage cinema'.3 Literature

and film have always been related. The debate about the inter­

relationship of the verbal and the visual goes back to the nineteenth

century Pre-Raphaelite discussion on poetry and painting. From the

early days of the film, when 'classic' novels were made into movies,

filmmakers have continually been indebted to literature in a variety

of ways. So to, a number of writers from Pirandello to Nathanael

2

Introduction

West, have shown that the influence goes both ways, a cross-

fertilisation in Keith Cohen's terms.

Sergei Eisenstein the famous director of the silent film classic

Battleship Potemkin (1925), tries to document the importance of the

English novelist to the early American filmmaker. He found specific

film techniques in the Victorian novel. In his seminal essay

"Dickens Griffith and the Film Today" in his book Film Fonn (1949)

he argues that the rcots of the American film aesthetic are to be

found in the Victorian novel especially those of Charles Dickens. He

discovers a "close-up" in The Cricket of The Hearth, a (dissolve" in A • Tale of Two Cities (1859) montage in "Oliver Twist'(1838) and

camera technique everywhere. Eisenstein derides the idea that film

is an autonomous, self-contained and independent form. 4 On the

other hand critics like Alan Spiegel, Keith Cohen and Richard

Pearce argue that all the technical novelties introduced in the

novels after 1920 are borrowed from the films.s They emphasize the

modern novel's need to recount specific action by articulating visual

images through word play, metaphor and description. The

disruptive tendencies of post modern literature and the techniques

of the new unframable, distanced novel is also attributed to the

influence of the techniques of film making. While Eisenstein's well

known Film Sense is actually an expanded version of what has been

called the literary imagination, for the modern critics like Richard

Pearce, the modern fictions of Joyce, Faulkner and Beckett are only

the literary versions of the cinematic imagination. 3

Introduction

Film had recognised its influences of and kinship with literature

right since its inception. Some narrative techniques employed in

novels presupposed a cinematic imagination- like Flaubert's

anticipation of cinematic crosscutting in the scene of the

agricultural fair in Madame Bovary (1857) or Conrad's inclusion of

a subliminal flashback in The Heart of Darkness, (1918) when

Marlow prepares for a nocturnal meeting with Kurtz.6 Eisenstein

drew parallels between the narrative methods of Charles Dickens

and those of D.W.Griffith the American filmmaker. His own

montage theories and practice had precedent in James Joyce's

work. The opening Chapter of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a

Young Man, (1921) with its free movement between time and space,

is one of the finest examples of Eisensteinian montage in fiction. 7

If one considers literature as the art of words, that is to say, if it is

letters or words that give literary activity its peculiar and distinctive

character, then it follows that film is not literature, nor even

literary, certainly not in the silent era and only marginally in the

sound era. If it is the primacy of the word that creates literature,

then one would have to say that the film is at best analogous to

literature, having its own pictorial vocabulary and its montage for

syntax. But if we shift the focus a little and consider literature as a

narrative art that creates images and sounds in the reader's mind,

then a film is 'literary' and we can safely assert that the film is only

an extension of the older narrative arts.

4

Introduction

According to Andre Bazin, Cinema is the furthermost evolution to

date of plastic realism, the beginnings of which were first manifest

in Renaissance and which found its expression in Baroque

paintings.8 In the nineteenth century the Pre-Raphaelite painting

was torn between two ambitions, one primarily aesthetic, namely

the expression of spiritual reality wherein the symbol transcended

its model and the other purely psychological i.e. a duplication of the

world outside. The Pre-Raphaelite's painted directly from natural

objects. They chose subjects from contemporary life and portrayed

subjects borrowed from Shakespeare, Keats, Dante and Malory in a

contemporary light. They attempted to perfectly imitate the world

outside and created an illusion of reality.9

Walter Pater's concern with concreteness of sensations and

impressions was ye~ another expression of the same attempt. The

Pre-Raphaelites had .solved the problem of form, had even suggested

movement yet not quite. Realism was forced to continue the search

for some way of giving dramatic expression to the moment

captured, "a kind of psychic fourth dimension that could suggest

life in the tortured immobility of Pre-Raphaelite paintings" .10 With

the availability of camera, the artist was in a position to create the

illusion of three-dimensional space within which things appeared to

exist as our eyes in reality saw them. The first photographic images

thus captured by Lumiere brothers in 1886 depicted scenes of a

railway station and labourers coming out of a factory- once again

scenes from daily life but this time with all the real movements. The 5

Introduction

satisfaction of achieving an illusion of reality had finally been

achieved.

Robert Scholes, In his essay, "Narration and Narrativity in film"

(1957) has persuasively argued that film is capable of combining

the essential qualities of both narrative literature (verbal narrative)

and visual art (pictorial representation) .11 Scholes' insight can be

further extended: we may say that, insofar as film is an

encyclopedic and synthesizing art form, it combines aspects of not

only literature (that is, fiction, drama, poetry) and painting, but

also photography, mime, dance, architecture and music. The film is

capable of drawing upon most aspects of its artistic heritage to

document, render and interpret experience. Camera position,

camera movement, framing, lighting and sound all may individually

or severally reproduce shape and thus express and evaluate the

significance of a narrative. Andre Bazin, Bela Balazs, George

Bluestone and Sergei Eisenstein talk at length how camera situates

and frames action, what is the iconic and the analytic and

expressive possibilities of spatial, tonal. and cognitive montage.

Their critical writings have thoroughly surveyed the nature and

method of the adaptation as an interelative link between literature

and film.

It is interesting to note that the French word for a filmmaker is

Realisateur - one who "realises" or actualises" a fluid text. When a

literary narrative is transformed into a cinematic narrative, a spatial

6

Introduction

and temporal dimension is added on to it. The resemblance between

literature and Cinema is strictly structural. Both the mediums are

subjugated by the authority of the narrative, structure, like the

necessity to have a defined beginning, middle and end. The essence

of both literature and Cinema is drama. The drama lies in the

method in which the theme unfurls itself. The continuous

movement back and forth of the structure a phenomena known as

flashback and flash-forward in Cinema creates this drama. It is also

created by the sequential exposition of the theme. In literature

sequential continuity is broken by syntax, paragraphs, chapter etc.

In Cinema it is done at the editing stage by cuts, inter-cuts, fade-

outs fade in etc.

The translation or the transformation of a literary narrative into a

cinematic narrative occurs through a screenplay. A screenplay,

which forms the blueprint for the 'mechanised muse', the Cinema,

often reads like a literary piece. The written word in a screenplay

provides a language within a language. How successfully the verbal

gets translated· into the visual depends entirely upon the

screenplay. Constitution of meaning in Cinema is undertaken

through various devices. In a colour movie, black and white shots

are sometimes used to denote a time in the past. Shyam Benegal's

film Trikaal( 1985) was suffused with a golden light through out, to

evoke the metaphorical golden era of Goa under the Portuguese

rule. Govind Nihalani's Rukmavati Ki Haveli (1992) an adaptation of

Lorca's The House of Bernard Alba (1934) was entirely shot in tight 7

Introduction

frames and close ups to convey a claustrophobic ambience.

Rukmavati Ki Haveli was also displaced in time and space i.e. to a

village in Rajasthan in twentieth century India. Similarly in Orson

Welles' adaptation of Kafka's novel The Trial (1962), the visual

externalisation of the character's state of mind is done through long

shots and shots of lengthening shadows. Sometimes musical

leitmotifs and the soundtrack function as verbal and visual

substitutes for the anguish-ridden ambience of the scene.

The novel, far from being a copy of the source is a transposition or

translation, from one set of conventions for representing the world

to another. This brings us to the objective of the present study. The

present study will be a comparative analysis of these two somewhat

similar and yet distinctly different modes of representation. Kazuo

Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day (1989) and the film The I

Remains of the day (1993) by James Ivory and Ismail Merchant

shall be correlated and evaluated in the light of theoretical issues

discussed. I believe that combining the verbal with the visual and

aural produces a new narrative. When a literary work is translated

into a film, it is metamorphosed not only by the camera, the editing,

the performances, the setting and the music, but also by distinctive

film codes and conventions, culturally signifying elements, and by

the producer and director's interpretation as well. Meanings that

may have been lost when the text of the narrative first became the

screenplay, condensed and bereft of some of its linguistic resources,

may be resurrected and new meanings added subsequently in the 8

Introduction

new medium in a different form and through a different kind of

imaginative process. The present study will attempt to unravel this

craft of constitution of meaning in the mentioned novel and its

cinematic representation.

When a filmed script comes alive on the screen and is experienced

by an audience, the dialectic between the film and viewer is not

exactly the same as that between literary text and reader. Robert

Scholes has observed that film is, for e.g., a more collaborative

process than literature; -

In cinematic narrative, the spectator must supply a more categorical and abstract narrative .... The images presented to us, their arrangement and just positioning are narrational blueprints for a fiction that must be constructed by the viewer's Narrativity.12

The signs and codes and convention depend upon shared cultural

context or geist and the audience experiencing a film supplies the

appropriate feelings perceptions, interpretations, and thus in a

sense, completes the film. Thus the present study will attempt to

also analyse the impact of these two modes of representation on the

reader and the viewer respectively. A brief account of the author of

the novel; under consideration at this juncture is pertinent.

Nagasaki born Ishiguro is a J apanese-English man who came to

England at an early age. Fully educated into the idioms and

assumptions of British life, Ishiguro is distinguished for his

understatements, exquisite precision and subtle humor. Ishiguro's

novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), was awarded the Winfred Holtby

9

Introduction

prize by the Royal Society of literature. His second novel, An Artist

of the Floating World (1986) shortlisted for Booker was the

Whitebread Book of the year. His third novel The Remains of the

Day (1989) won the Booker prize in 1989. Each of his novels has an

unmistakable identity; yet he displays his virtuosity in his use of a

different narrative voice in each. Some critics see in Ishiguro' quite

mannered narratives and delicate understatement, draft and

elegant strokes of Japanese paintings. However the author

vehemently opposes such reading of his novels.

The Remains of the Day (1989) renders with humor and pathos a

memorable character Mr. Stevens who is occupied with a single

question all his life, which is, 'What makes a great butler'? This may

seem an extraordinary question for a young novelist to pose at the

end of the twentieth century; yet Ishiguro uses it in order to be able

to ask the far more important question of how a man's life is

justified. The novel is a stream of memory told by an elderly English

butler on holiday in the West Country, reflecting on his service in a

very grand house the Darlington Hall in the 1930's. His obsessive

and Jeevesian meditations are punctuated with a nagging thought

that something is badly wrong somewhere. He recalls the glittering

house parties, visiting dignitaries, his impassivity at his father's

death and the romantic overtures of a female colleague.

The mask of the perfect servant is gradually cracked by

retrospection during his tour of Wessex. In short the novel tells us a

10

Introduction

melancholy and humorous love story: it is a political meditation on

the democratic responsibilities and failings of an ordinary man, and

an elegiac tale of how best intentions go awry. As in Ishiguro's

second novel, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), this novel also

deals with an old mc:n coming to terms with personal and public

guilt after the Second World War. A remarkable feat of imagination,

since Ishiguro recreates a butler of an era long extinct. This

humorous and enqulrmg novel was made into a film in 1993 by

Ismail Merchant, James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Its

producer, director and scriptwriter as a team have repeatedly

explored the English mind and are known for having perfected the

art of film adaptations of literary classics. The Remains of the Day,

thus both in its verbal and visual representation is a symbolic

outsider's rendition of the British class and culture.

In Chapter 1- Reality and Representation, ,an attempt has been

made to trace the debate on 'reality and its representation' in art

and the literary theory surrounding it from Plato till the present

day. This debate touches on various issues related to mimesis. It

discusses how representation of reality can be made to function as

a controlling mechanism of human imagination and hence its

relation to the power discourse which operates in a society. It also

explains how a visual medium like Cinema can alter, transform,

recreate reality with its unique repertoire of cinematic codes. In this

chapter an attempt has also been made to summarise the literary

theory on mimesis from Plato onwards. The chapter also touches on 11

Introduction

how film theorists like Sergei Eisenstein and Pudovkin drew upon

these theories of mimesis to evolve a theory of film viewing. The

debate extends the frontiers of theories of mimesis by highlighting

the technological apparatus of Cinema, which can generate reality,

which is 'probable' and 'perceptual' and fits the notion of reality in

the minds of viewer with no refferent in the real world.

Chapter 2- Page to Screen traces the journey of the novel to

Cinema and the ensuing critkal theories. This chapter highlights

the similarities and the differences of two different systems of

signification and two different modes of representation and reality.

This chapter also discusses the narrative elements of the novel

those that are transferable on film and those that cannot be. An

attempt is also made to define certain unique features of the film,

which provides the medium with an added advantage for purpose of

narration. The discussion highlights the 'gaps' that occur when

'verbal' is transformed to 'visual'. Various cinematic and film

techniques like flashback'. 'crosscutting' and the soundtrack are

defined in this chapter. A discussion is carried out to explain how

the film apparatus with its repertoire of lighting, sets, soundtrack,

camera angles and editing etc. collectively or individually constitute

meaning in the film text. The discussion also highlights the

differences between theatre and Cinema.

In Chapter 3- Theories of Adaptation, an attempt has been made

to discuss all the film theories pertaining to film adaptation of

12

Introduction

novels. From George Bluestone's seminal, pioneering work Novels

into Films (1957) to Kracauer's views on adaptation of novels from

films in The Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality

(1960) is discussed at length. The various categories or types of

adaptation of literary texts to film is also discussed in this chapter

followed by a sample analyses of five films based on novels. This

analysis is undertaken to highlight how novelistic elements are

transferred to screen and also to study the resultant gaps the

process of constitution of meaning in the film medium and whether

films adhere to any particular category of adaptation.

In Chapter 4, The Remains of the Day- a detailed analysis of the

film is followed a comparative reader-viewer response of the novel

and the film. The film analysis takes into account the additions,

, deletions in the film script vis-a.-vis the novel and provides reasons

, for them. The analysis also traces the process of constitution of ~-

meaning as it takes place in every scene of the film. The analysis

also traces the thematic shifts that takes place in the film due to a

different foregrounding of the story elements of the novel. The

chapter also provides a graphic model of the film apparatus, which

translates a screenplay into a film.

In Chapter 5- Encoding and Decoding Meaning: The Reader

Viewer Response, the theoretical underpinnings of the reader-

viewer response debate is discussed at length. In the backdrop of

this theoretical discussion a graphic model is proposed which

13

Introduction

indicates a mUltiple text scenario which emerges from the viewing

experiences of a reader who watches a certain film adaptation of a

novel. This chapter also discusses how the ideological apparatus at

times dominates the constitution of meaning in films and other

visual mediums. Towards the end of the chapter a brief exercise is

undertaken to highlight how the process of encoding and decoding

of meaning takes place in The Remains of the Day- the film.

The issue of adaptation has attracted critical attention for more

th~ sixty years. George Bluestone's work Novels into Films (1957)

is still regarded by many as the last word on the subject of

adaptation. Bluestone was of the view that cinematic adaptations

could alter the novel to suit the needs of the medium without

changing the novelist's intention and meaning. Bela Balazs writing

before Bluestone had credit,ed the screenplay adaptation as a new

art form. According to him literature provides raw material for film

adaptations, and the film creates new visual forms and thematic

contents. However both Bluestone and Balazs felt that only certain

novels could be rendered into films while others resist translation

because of the inherent differences in the media.

Sigfried Kracauer who continued the adaptation debate in his work

Theory of Film: The Physical Redemption of Reality (1960)

approvingly refers to Bluestone's conclusion that the film The

Grapes of Wrath (1940) directed by John Ford based on John

Steinbeck's novel by the same name is a remarkably successful

14

Introduction

adaptation because the novel lends itself so well to "the images of

physical reality. "13 According to Kracauer adaptation of novels fail

because they are 'uncinematic'14 For Kracauer 'redemption of

physical reality' is the sole purpose of Cinema and an examination

of the psychological state of Emma Bovary has no place in this

scheme.

The discussion on adaptation has been bedeviled by the fidelity

issue from the very beginning. Even those who concede the

. -impossibility of an exact translation from page to screen, frequently

argue, that it is possible to be faithful to some amorphous,

indefinable spirit or essence of the novel. Jean Mitry adding to the

fidelity debate says:

... at the level of mise-en-scene - if we define the phase simply as the creation of dramatic space ........ the adapter can compose the world which the novel suggests, its climate, it ambience and record it with the camera. 1S

For Mitry then, adaptation of literary texts or novels are no longer

creation or expression but are only representation or illustration,

which sometimes would even echo the style and manner of the

author, Dickens for e.g.: in David Lean's Great Expectations (1946).

Eisenstein was of the view that different media employs different

methods to convey the same meaning. However Eisenstein

presupposes an 'organic vision' in the mind of the creator who then

finds equivalence for that vision in the mind of the receptor through

the medium of fIlm or novel. What Eisenstein failed to take into

account was the 'organic vision' could never be one but there could

15

Introduction

be multiplicity of visions or interpretations in mind of vanous

creators or filmmakers. He also fails to confront the fact that inspite

of the clinically designed montage technique the intertextuality that

operates in the viewer's perception would effect his response.

Andre Bazin put forward the most convincing theory of equivalence

in his essay "In Defense of Mixed Cinema" .16 He argues that fidelity

to the source text is a virtue and that adaptation should be

regarded as a form of translation from one language into another .

. ' But_ Bazin further complicates the analogy of translation by

prefixing it with a 'fortunate understanding of the text.' Adaptation

involves selective interpretation and perception, which mayor may

not coincide with that of the critic and hence Bazin's fidelity issue

becomes meaningless. Moreover the analogy of translation was

dismissed by Christian Metz .He established that 'film cannot be

considered as a language in any complete sense consequently,

resemblances can never become equivalents'.

However Bazin changes his stance when he writes his famous

essay, "The Stylistics of Robert Bresson." In his book What is

Cinema? (1967), Bazin comments extensively on Bresson's film,

Diary of a Country Priest (1950) based on the Bemanos novel. Bazin

found the voice-over narration in the film as an attribute to 'fidelity'

to the source text. However in order to reconcile his theory with the

numerous ellipses in the Bresson film and its shift from the

Bernanos novel, Bazin went on to say: -

16

Introduction

It is a question of building a secondary work with the novel as foundation. In no sense is the film "comparable" to the novel or "worthy" of it. It is a new aesthetic creation, the novel so to speak multiplied by the Cinema. 17

Bazin was close to discarding the now almost bankrupt concept of

fidelity but somehow never could do it. Adaptation for Bazin merely

raised the whole of Cinema, " to the level of literature". 18 However,

Andre Bazin was futuristic when he observed that adaptation had a

number of important social functions, one of which was

pedagogical.

Dudley Andrew in his essay titled 'Adaptation' (1984) years after

Bazin, hi'nted at similar social functions. He said that certain

adaptations at certain period of time cater to the political need of

the time and hence it was imperative that studies on adaptation

should be used to understand "the world from which it comes and

the one towards which it points"19. The study of film adaptations

based on literary texts can then be read as discourse of a particular

age and time.

Two critical areas of debate which the present area of study will also

touch upon are the 'reality and its representation' and the 'process

of viewing that representation'. Debates about 'realism and

representation' in European culture can be traced back to Plato and

Aristotle. That realism cannot be confined to a particular style of

representation and is always in a flux is increasingly being felt in

the present era of digital modes of representation. However in the

late nineteenth century a group of painters made their mark as

17

Introduction

'realists' by painting, truthful objective representation of the real

world based on meticulous observation of life. Photography made

that experience even more concrete. In the arena of literature the

realists cast themselves as careful painters of human life. Emile

Zola's 'Naturalism' became an extreme form of realism where

observation and reproduction of detail became ends in themselves.

When Cinema arrived in 1885-86, realism suddenly found the

domain of dynamic visual realisation. The nineteenth century

audience already exposed to the genre of novel and fiction found a

medium where both the fantastic and the spectacular could be

enacted through a narrative and in a believable setting. Before

Cinema the commercial stage was the arena for such renditions.

Cinema was somehow waiting to happen In this age of

industrialisation and capitalism. The new middle class was as if in

search for a new medium of representation to mirror a new reality

emerging out of a more complex changing socio-political context.

The early film theorists such as Munsterberg, Malraux, Arnhiem,

Balazs and Eisenstein used formalist theories to anlayse the new

medium-Cinema. The formalists believed that form constrained

meaning and new meaning could be achieved only if the shape or

the pattern of the container is changed. The neo-formalists such as

David Bordwell and Kirsten Thompson draw on this assumption to

claim that realism can only be achieved if it breaks with familiar,

conventional patterns - i.e. the process of defamiliarisation. Andre

18

Introduction

Bazin broke away from the formalist school and rejected

Eisenstein's montage technique as a restrictive means of

representing reality where events are ordered to suit rhetorical

needs. Bazin showed preference for yet another kind of montage -

the continuity editing style of mainstream films. He felt a long take

and depth within the image was inherently more realistic. Bazin

also favored a de familiarisation technique that breaks with already

established codes and conventions in the interests of generating

realism and interpretive ambiguity. Bazin advocated a realistic

Cinema that preserved the freedom of spectators to choose their

own interpretations of an object, character or event. However

Dudley Andrew later argued that techniques alone cannot

guarantee reality.

In film studies, Colil1 MacCabe forcefully argues the post-

structuralist position20 . MacCabe argues that a nineteenth century

literary novel has several discourses each proposing a version of

reality. But among them only one discourse is privileged as the

bearer of the truth; this discourse functions as 'metalanguage'

against which the truth or falsity of other discourses can be judged.

The metalanguage corresponds to the narrating source of the fiction

no matter whether the narrating voice is first person or third

person. MacCabe claims that fiction films are similarly structured,

where voice-overs and numerous images present different versions

of reality - with images taking precedence over words. The image

track shows the spectator what really happens, the camera thus 19

Introduction

providing the metalanguage by situating the spectator within the

fictional diegesis of the film. In filmed fictions, the narrating

discourse is rendered transparent through the camera and it resists

questioning. The viewer or the spectator is in possession of the

complete and final knowledge of events and hence the truth.

David Bordwell criticises MacCabe's formulations since it fails to

take into account the various sub-genres of a nineteenth century

novel, lik~ the novel of manners, Gothic romance etc. and it also

doe_s not take into account omniscient and restricted point-of-view.

Moreover according to Bordwell the nineteenth century novel is as

not so much hierarchy of discourses, as it is a Bakhtinian

heteroglossia or dialogue where conflicting visions of the world,

struggle to articulate themselves throughout various discourses.

Bordwell concludes by saying that MacCabe reduces, the range of

filmic narration by equating metalanguage with camera. The

camera cannot be privileged ·over filmic techniques such as speech,

gesture written language, music, colour, costumes, sound offscreen

space etc. 21

The other area of debate is in the domain of spectatorship or

viewership of the cinematic representations. A filmmaker mediates

information about characters and situations in reference to the

dominant conceptions of what constitutes reality. These dominant

conceptions could be dependent upon public opinion according to

Barthes.22 This pubic OpInlOn represented through critical

20

~

.0 M t+-O"")

Introduction

discourses, promotional literature and advertising help constitute

the climate of interpretation that surrounds the popular reception

of a film or media text. While a professional viewer draws upon this

referential context to measure realism in films an ordinary viewer

judges his assessment on the basis of plausibility in the filmic

context. The viewer engages himself in a process, which swings

between suspension of disbelief and a willingness to playa game of

make-believe. The viewer considers a fiction film realistic provided

the characters and situation make sense in the world they inhabit.

They draw upon their own experience of what constitutes reality

including their knowledge of other realities.

l David Bordwell provides a useful approach to questions of r t- plausibility and rationality in film texts23 • Bordwell's work engages

with cognitive theories that are interested in exploring how we make

sense of our physical and material world; he argues that we use the

same processes to make sense of films. The cognitive theory defines

the culturally embedded knowledge of characters and events held

by the viewer as the personal schemata. This personal schemata

helps the viewer to identify and comprehend similar representation

lL of characters and events on screen. This process of identification

~ .. leads to constitution of meaning. Bordwell identifies three areas of 01 0' cognitive activity that are brought into play when we watch a film: 0'" '~ a) Our perceptual capacities: the ability to perceive colour and to

:I Z

construct a three dimensional-space on a two dimensional plane

through depth cues etc. 21

Introduction

b) Our prior knowledge and experiences.

c) The material and structure of the film itself.

The personal schemata thus enables us to extract meaning from a

vast amount of sensory data. This existing schemata comes in to

play while watching a film and assessing its 'realism'. The process

of recognising an elderly person, for e.g.: as a realistic character in

a fiction lies beyond the mimetic capacity of sound and image

technologies. They merely reproduce a recorded physical and aural

liket::ess or a copy of a real person. The filmmaker and the viewer

draw upon the cultural knowledge of elderly people in the real

world, of an environment at a particular point in time, to encode

and decode the representation.

Murray Smith defines the viewer identification with the character as

'alignment' and argues that, "character structures are perhaps the

major way by which narrative text solicit our assent for particular

natures, practices and ideologies"24 . Murray Smith extends his

definition of 'allegiance' to bring into its ambit a moral dimension

missing in Bordwell's schema. Murray tries to explain the

'satisfaction' aspect of the viewer involved in the process of

identification. He distinguishes between recognition, alignment and

allegiance: 25

Recognition: 'a process by which the spectator recognises the

Cinematic signs as a character in a fiction, through mimetic

reference to human beings in real life'.

22

Introduction

Alignment: 'a process by which spectators are placed in relation to

characters in terms of access to their actions and to what they

know and feel'.

Allegiance: 'a process whereby the spectator evaluates and

responds emotionally to the traits and emotions of characters'.

Murray Smith thus introduces the 'emotional dimensions In

spectatorship'. Smith's category of 'alignment' is however further

expanded into various sub-categories to explain various kinds of

relationship between the actor and the viewer constructed by film

and television discourse 26 • They are:

a) Intellectual Alignment: 'the processes by which information,

reasoning and understanding is received by the spectator from

the text'.

b) Interest alignment: the curiosity element - 'What will happen

next?'

c) Concern Alignment: 'hope and fear invested by the spectator in

the film characters'.

d) Moral Alignment: 'the text's position towards the character

defines the spectators position. The validation, condemnation or

distancing position of the text towards the protagonist

constructs spectators' moral alignment too'.

e) Aesthetic Alignment: 'a sUbjective category, which allows the

spectator to enjoy the physical attributes and the personality

23

Introduction

features of the characters. However all such attributes have to

be in consonance with the prevalent cultural norms of beauty'.

f) Emotional Alignment: 'a process whereby the spectator is

positioned to share the emotional responses of the characters.

This emotional engagement will not be premised primarily on the

character but on the situation'.

Julia Hallam and Margaret Marshment 27 by proposing the above

categories which explains how a spectator gets situated vis-a-vis the

char:.acter have brought the spectatorship debate centrestage. By

suggesting that these categories overlap and slide into one another

and may not merely focus on the character, have shifted the debate

to spectator's relation with situation and event in the filmic text

from the spectator's relation with the character. Thus in the present

era of digital modes of representation the spectatorship will

continue to be an important area of critical enquiry.

The film adaptation of novels has been viewed differently by

different film theorists. The present study will attempt to trace the

issue related to the study of adaptations over the years. The present

study is also relevant in the light of a resurgence of film productions

based on novels. The film studies programme is also being launched

by almost all academic institutions allover the world. The media

studies is increasingly occupying centre stage and finally a

convergence of word and image, the verbal and the visual is taking

place not only in the world of media but also in academic and

24

Introduction

critical circles. In a media saturated environment like ours an

adaptation is naturally dense with intertextuality with borrowings

from books, other movies, music, news headlines, video coverage of

news events and all other arts. Film in itself is a powerful

synthesizing medium rich with connotations and hence with its

genre of adaptation should be an immediate area of query and

analysis.

Introduction

Notes

1. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier (Bloomingdale: Indiana University press, 1977), p.12.

2. Keith Cohen, Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p.5.

3. Montage: A technique in Cinema proposed by Sergei Eisenstein the Russian film Director and Film theorist. Borrowing from the Japanese ideogram, (in which two pictures, items, or symbols combine to produce one emotion), Kabuki Theatre (in which motion and gesture replace words to express internal conflict) and Haiku (in which details and design express brief,

- sharply defined mage); Montage evolved as a technique where several disparate shorts are fused together to form a collage to produce a specific emotional, intellectual or descriptive effect.

4. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form and the Film sense. Trans. Jay Leyda (Cleveland: Meridian, 1957) pp.28-84.

5. Alan, Spiegel, Fiction and the Camera Eye: Visual consciousness in Film and the Modem Novel (Charlottesvile: University Press of Virginia, 1976). Spiegel coined the term 'concretized form' to explain the modem novel's emphasis on concrete experience encouraged by film's dependence on visual image. Keith Cohen in Fflm and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange, emphasised the modern hovel's need to recount specific action by articulating visual images through word play, metaphor and description.

6. Neil Sinyard, Filming Literature (London : Croomhelm, 1986), p. vii -viii.

7. Sergei Eisenstein, "Dickens, Griffith and the film today" in Film Form: Essays in Film theory p.213.

8. Andre Bazin, "What is Cinema?" essays Trans.and Ed. Hugh Gray, (London; University of California press, 1971) pp. 10- 11.

9. Edward Arnold, Victorian Poetry (UK: Butler and Tanner ltd., 1972), pp156-157.

10 . Op. Cit. Bazin, p. 10-11.

26

Introduction

11 . Robert Scholes, 'Narration and Narrativity in Film,' Quarterly Review of film Studies (Aug 1957), in G. Mast and M. Cohen, Film Theory and Criticism. 2nd edition (NY: OUP,1979), pp. 417-33.

12 . Op. Cit. Bluestone, p.5

13. Sigfried Kracauer, Theory of film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, (NY: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 239.

14. Jean Mitry, "Remarks on the Problem of Cinematic Adaptation", Bulletin of the Midwest Modem Language Association, IV, No.1 (1971).

15 . Op. Cit. Bazin, p.67.

16 .- Ibid., p. 66.

17. Ibid., p.142

18. Ibid., p. 140

19. Dudley Andrew's essay on "Adaptation" in James Naremore ed: Film Adaptation (London: The Athlone Press, 2000), p.37.

20. Colin MacCabe (974), "Realism and the Cinema : Notes on some Brechtian Theses", Screen 15.2, 7-27

21. David Bordwell, Narration in Fiction Film (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), p.18-20.

22. Roland Barthes,), "The Realistic Effect" Trans.Gerald Mead in Film Reader 3, p.131-5, 1978.

23. Op. Cit. Bordwell, p. 18-20.

24. Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p.85.

25. Ibid., p.133.

26. Ibid., p.135

27. Julia Hallam, Margaret Marshment, Realism and Popular Cinema (New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), p.134-136.

27