A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation

Deborah Cartmell

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781118917534, 9781444334975
• eBook ISBN: 9781118312049
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is a comprehensive collection of original essays that explore the aesthetics, economics, and mechanics of movie adaptation, from the days of silent cinema to contemporary franchise phenomena. Featuring a range of theoretical approaches, and chapters on the historical, ideological and economic aspects of adaptation, the volume reflects today's acceptance of intertextuality as a vital and progressive cultural force.

• Incorporates new research in adaptation studies
• Features a chapter on the Harry Potter franchise, as well as other contemporary perspectives
• Showcases work by leading Shakespeare adaptation scholars
• Explores fascinating topics such as 'unfilmable' texts

• Includes detailed considerations of Ian McEwan's Atonement and Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Part I
History and Contexts: From Image to Sound

1

Literary Adaptation in the Silent Era

Judith Buchanan

When the nascent moving picture industry emerged in the 1890s, its significance in technological, social, and economic terms quickly became apparent. Less clear, however, was the dominant use to which moving pictures should be put. What did they do best? Through what sort of subjects could they most effectively broadcast their technological wizardry, showcase their artistry, and maximize their returns? Was this a medium for recording the world with previously untapped verisimilitude, or a medium in which the fantastical imaginary could be given rein as never before? A vehicle for exploring life as it was, or life as it might be? A medium of description or creation? A mechanism or an art form? Film offered what James Monaco has termed a “neutral template” (2009: 45) to be appropriated differently by producers according to their priorities, interests, and broader thinking about the medium’s strengths and potential. And surveying the uses to which this “neutral template” was put in cinema’s pioneering years (1896–c.1906) reveals no immediate consensus about where the industry thought it should principally channel its energies. This sustained equivocation about what sort of films it should be producing is graphically reflected in the diverse nature both of production company output and of exhibitors’ film programs across this period.

An 1896 Edison catalogue advertising its films to exhibitors, for example, reveals much about the company’s breadth of production. Each film subject that Edison had for sale is, as the catalogue introduction announces, “tabulate[d] and concisely describe[d] … in a manner which will enable our patrons to select intelligently from our list, those pictures which are best suited to the tastes of their audiences” (Herbert et al., 1996: 19). At a cost of £4 for each fifty-foot film subject, the catalogue lists films by genre: “Dances” (stick dances, Sioux Indian dances, Japanese dances, London Gaiety Girl dances, buck dances, and a dancing dog); “Combats” (a Mexican knife duel, a broadsword fight in full armor, a Graeco-Roman wrestling match, female fencers, and a pair of boxing cats); “Military Scenes” (a dress parade, a mess call, a skirmish drill); “Acrobatic Performances” (trapeze acts, head balancing, an Arabian knife tumbler, and a “marvelous lady contortionist”); and “Descriptive Scenes” (a fire rescue scene, a scalping, ‘Chinese Laundry’ scene, Joan of Arc, and two different scenes adapted from David Henderson’s stage burlesque of George du Maurier’s popular 1894 novel Trilby). Some exhibitors may have favored one film genre over another in deciding what was “best suited to the tastes of their audiences.” Surviving exhibitors’ programs, however, suggest that what was most frequently valued in exhibition venues of the period was variety.

Let us consider one London film program from 1899 to sample the flavor of a picture-going audience’s viewing experience from the very early days of the industry. The program of “The American Biograph” exhibited at the Palace Theatre of Varieties in London on September 20, 1899 featured shots of Queen Victoria in her carriage inspecting the Honorary Artillery Company, of “Madame Dreyfus Leaving the Prison” (capitalizing on the popularity of the ongoing Dreyfus affair), of the Henley regatta, of a panoramic view of Conway Castle, of the Meadowbrook Hunt, of a sketch entitled “Man Overboard,” and of an international hurdles race at the Queen’s Club. And, on the same program, sandwiched directly between “Polo at Hurlingham” and some actuality footage of American naval hero “Admiral Dewey,” was the first public exhibition of the first Shakespeare film ever made (some brief action recorded from Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s contemporaneous London stage production of Shakespeare’s King John).¹ Moreover, as part of a broader program of music-hall acts, the films projected were also jostling for position alongside live variety acts of various sorts (comedians, acrobats, musicians, actors performing brief “scenes,” jugglers). What might a brief encounter with a Shakespearean dramatic fragment on screen such as that on offer here have been expected to achieve in the midst of such varied fare? Or, similarly, how might audiences have responded to the comparably fleeting encounter with a re-textualized work provided by Edison’s scenes from Trilby (parodically mediated through Henderson’s stage burlesque), or by American Biograph’s contemporaneous releases dramatizing scenes from the same novel?

Exhibited at a standard projection speed, each of the Edison films from the 1896 catalogue represented approximately a minute’s runtime. The short films on the 1899 London Biograph program would have had a projection time of between one and four minutes. Each film therefore gave merely a sample snapshot, isolated episode or temporal slice of the subject being showcased. It was the task of the accompanying musicians in the exhibition venue to attempt to make sense of the transitions of pace and tone between actualities and brief sketches, the skittish and the serious, that bumped up against each other so percussively on picture programs of the period. The joy to be had in any one performance, or in any one projected film short from such a program, was, therefore, dependent in no small measure on its contribution to the cumulative variety line-up.

The adaptive life of early cinema was certainly not limited to an exclusive relationship with literary texts. In the fluid intermedial traffic of subjects and ideas that characterized the freewheeling cultural momentum of the period, material and styles from vaudeville skits, music-hall acts, magic lantern shows, topical, satirical and saucy cartoons, works of art, tableaux vivants, opera, illustrations, popular songs, and other forms of cultural expression (performed and printed) were variously appropriated, referenced, and re-couched by filmmakers. In the interests of delimitation for this volume, however, it is those films (more than plentiful in themselves) that had a discernible relationship with prior literary and theatrical texts that will absorb my attention. This being the case, what particular value might a film trailing literary and theatrical associations have brought to the giddy and fast-moving mélange of other spectating pleasures that made up the early film programs? To consider this question, I return to the 1896 scenes from Trilby released by two separate (competitor) American production companies and to the Biograph’s King John scenes. Firstly, both Trilby and King John were on offer as the vehicle for heightened dramatic performances – and both featured the hyperbolized drama of a death scene (of Svengali and King John respectively). Secondly, drawing upon the invaluable early cinema commodity of “audience foreknowledge” (Musser, 1990a: 257–9), for some in the audience both films would have triggered a bank of broader familiarity with the novel or play synecdochically summoned by the brief scenes projected. Thirdly, in the person of Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the King John film gave international audiences access to one of the “great” Shakespearean actors of the moment as was explicitly acknowledged in the film’s altered title for its U.S. release, “Beerbohm Tree, The Great English Actor” (Brown and Anthony, 1999: 228), thereby self-consciously adding cultural ballast to an exhibition program. Fourthly, the Edison Trilby scenes, being an 1896 satirical quotation from a recent stage burlesque of an 1894 serialized novel, signaled both the contemporaneity of the new moving picture industry’s pool of reference and its will to insert itself directly into the cross-referencing networks of other expressive media, as both commentator upon and contributor to their cultural operations. Fifthly, and relatedly, as the Biograph Trilby scenes were played on London programs in 1897 (Buchanan, 2009: 60–1), these would have evoked Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s own famously successful London stage adaptation of Trilby from the 1895–6 season – a production in which he had himself played a memorably creepy Svengali. Lastly, as played at London’s Palace Theatre in autumn 1899, the King John short film cannot but have served, in an innovatively transmedial marketing ruse and further indication of the industry’s up-to-the-minute topicality, as, in effect, a teaser-trailer for Tree’s full-length stage production of King John then playing at Her Majesty’s Theatre down the road (Buchanan, 2009: 68; McKernan, 2000).

The networks of intermedial reference to, and association with, the world beyond the exhibition hall that these adapted films courted made them some of the most allusively intricate of any of the 1890s films. Tom Gunning’s influential argument (1989) that pioneering cinema created “an aesthetic of astonishment” as part of a “cinema of attractions” has now passed into the received wisdom about what early cinema was. In the process, Gunning’s paradigm has, in the way of things, sometimes been reduced to a cruder and misleading summary of itself in which a stupefied audience for early cinema is posited, watching in awed astonishment as the wondrous moving images unspool before their eyes. Many of the generously allusive signals within early films such as Trilby and King John, pointing knowingly (and multiply) beyond their own borders, provide an antidote to that critically reductive tendency by reminding us that the “astonishment” provoked by early cinema was not one that deactivated participative discernment or associative thinking, or that equated in any way to stupefaction. From the first, in fact, the moving picture industry offered a product whose viewing pleasures were partly to be found specifically in active and judicious comparison – comparison with the extra-cinematic world of lived experience and, crucially, comparison with other, known cultural works and styles of artistic address.

For all the stimulating associative reach of these films, catalogues and programs from the 1890s and the early years of the twentieth century reveal that titles with literary and/or theatrical connections were far from dominant in terms of industry output and market exposure. Nevertheless, in the fast-moving early cinema period, all production and exhibition conventions were subject to ongoing adjustment as they responded relatively nimbly to evolving market demands. And, as other things in the industry changed (camera and projection technology, film stock, exhibition venues, distribution channels, the commercial relationship of production companies to distributors and exhibitors, the authorial branding of films, ticket pricing, star power, the legislation that governed the industry), so too, through the early years of the twentieth century, was the balance of type of production company output significantly adjusted. Audiences, now accustomed to the wonders of the no-longer-new technology, became less satisfied by films simply celebrating the pure kinetics of graceful, powerful or startling movement, and, alongside this, correspondingly more ambitious in their own viewing tastes and narrative aspirations. In relative market terms, therefore, in a move traceable from c.1903 onwards, the brief actualities, scenic views, sporting snapshots, whirling dancers, and fight films that had dominated early film exhibition, were losing out to cinema’s impulse to tell stories (Musser, 1990b: 337–69). And with the enthusiasm for stories came the need for narrative material. Original scripts were not forthcoming fast enough to meet industry needs, nor to provide the tonal variety required to please all corners of the house. Given the dizzying production rate and voracious appetite of the market, where should the industry turn for material? Unsurprisingly, it reached gratefully for the library shelf and from c.1907 onwards, adapting the work of existing authors became one in a range of standard story-telling production practices for most of the leading film companies. In his published catalogue of Books and Plays in Film, 1896–1915, Denis Gifford lists 861 authors (alphabetically organized, Adams to Zola) whose work was adapted to film in the first twenty years of the industry. But what “adapted” meant in practice, of course, changed significantly across exactly this period.

In the pioneering years, making a film of a novel or play would rarely require an interest in the totality of the work, or even in its overall structural shape. The brevity of each exhibited film in this period did not allow for such comprehensive ambition. Rather the project was, in effect, to produce cinematically animated, brief, visual quotations from a work. Where possible, the cameos were attractively designed and entertainingly played but rarely under an obligation to generate narrative coherence across the ellipses between scenes.² Gunning has termed the privileging of isolated cameo references over a consistent narrative drive in such films a “peak moment” approach to a source (2004: 128). Choosing key moments from the inherited story – whenever possible those that already had some heightened recognition-value in the public consciousness – gave the advantage of speedy intelligibility for a picture-going audience independently able to contextualize the unplaced moment playing out before them. This text-allusive/audience-collusive approach produced a slew of short films that “quoted” selectively from literary sources in cinema...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• 100+ Years of Adaptations, or, Adaptation as the Art Form of Democracy
• Part I: History and Contexts: From Image to Sound
• Part II: Approaches
• Part III: Genre: Film, Television
• Part IV: Authors and Periods
• Part V: Beyond Authors and Canonical Texts
• Part VI: Case Studies: Adaptable and Unadaptable Texts
• Index