Showing papers in "Literature-film Quarterly in 1996"

The Accidental Tourist on Page and on Screen: Interrogating Normative Theories about Film Adaptation

Abstract: The issue of adaptation has long been a salient one among film critics for quite practical reasons, as Dudley Andrew has observed: The making of a film out of an earlier text is virtually as old as the machinery of cinema itself. Well over half of all commercial films have come from literary originals, though by no means all of these originals are revered or respected. (10) While a diverse range of literary genres has spawned film adaptations, the novel has been by far the most popular written source throughout the history of the cinema. Morris Beja estimates that in the typical year, about 30 percent of American movies are based on novels. And among the films that have won either the Academy Award or the New York Film Critics Award for "Best Picture" since 1935, the largest proportion have been film adaptations of novels (Beja 78). In light of the important role novels have played in service to filmmaking, then, it is not surprising that, when faced with the prospect of evaluating a film based on a novel, critics often ground their judgments in assessments of the effectiveness of the adaptation. Yet, it is not uncommon to find contradictory evaluations of the same film, with one critic judging the adaptation successful while another deems it a failure. Some might argue that such disagreement simply illustrates the utter subjectivity of criticism; however, I contend that these differences in judgment stem from the critics' adoption of differing paradigms for evaluating the film adaptation. In this essay, I examine four prominent paradigms concerning film adaptation that are at work in contemporary academic criticism, and I explore the limits and possibilities of discourse that each paradigm permits, using the film adaptation of Anne Tyler's novel The Accidental Tourist to illustrate. It is not my purpose to conclude that one particular paradigm is necessarily best, for such a judgment would ignore a complexity of factors that mitigate in the individual case, including the linguistic qualities of the specific novel and the socio-historical circumstances of the film's creation. Rather, this essay is an attempt to re-configure the critical discourse about film adaptation, by pointing to the assumptions behind the critic's adoption of a particular paradigm and the constraints upon critical commentary that result from that decision. Four Critical Paradigms of Film Adaptation . The first and perhaps oldest paradigm applied by critics in their evaluations of film adaptations might be called the "translation" paradigm. A critic adopting this perspective judges the film's effectiveness primarily in terms of its "fidelity" to the novel, particularly with regard to narrative elements, such as character, setting, and theme. Dudley Andrew refers to this as the film remaining faithful to the "letter" of the text (12). Michael Klein and Gillian Parker have argued that this criterion is a viable basis for evaluation, even though, as countless theorists have noted, omissions from the novel are inevitable in the film adaptation: There has to be a good deal of selection and condensation when a novel... is transposed into a film of roughly two hours: scenes have to be cut, minor characters simplified or eliminated, subplots dispensed with. But this need not exclude fidelity to the main thrust of the narrative, to the author's central concerns, to the natures of the major characters, to the ambiance of the novel, and, what is perhaps most important, to the genre of the source. (9) The criterion of fidelity is often articulated explicitly in critics' evaluations of film adaptations. For example, Constance Spiedel judged the film Terms of Endearment, directed by James L. Brooks, a poor adaptation because the film significantly changes one of the novel's primary characters: James L. Brooks has proved once again that a successful film does not need to be a faithful adaptation, but Terms of Endearment raises the question, why bother to adapt? …

Concerning the Weary Legs of Wyatt Earp: The Classic Western According to Shakespeare

Abstract: "Shakespeare, huh? He musta been from Texas." John Wayne, in The Dark Command (1940, Republic Pictures) "People talk about classic Westerns. The classic thing has always been the space, the emptiness. The lines are drawn for us. All we have to do is insert the figures, men in dusty boots, certain faces. Figures in open space have always been what film is all about. American film. This is the situation. People in a wilderness, a wild and barren space. The space is the desert, the movie screen, the strip of film, however you see it. What are the people doing here? This is their existence. They're here to work out their existence. This space, this emptiness is what they have to confront." Don DeLillo, The Names1 "Shakespeare? In Tombstone?" The astonishment from gunslinger and gambler Doc Holliday within John Ford's My Darling Clementine probably anticipates moviegoers' reactions. But notwithstanding its curious borrowings from Hamlet, Ford's 1946 rendition of the Wyatt Earp legend has been seen as "the perfect example of the classic Western" (Lovell 169). Historically, performances from Shakespeare would have been common enough in Tombstone, as they were throughout the mining towns of the West.2 What's surprising is less Shakespeare in the Tombstone of 1882 than Shakespeare in the Hollywood of 1946, by which time the cultural division between the two sorts of "classics" was all but complete, with low-art moviemaking split off from high-art Shakespeare.3 The scene that opens The Arizonian (1935, RKO; directed by Charles Vidor) projects a twentieth-century "highbrow/ lowbrow" hierarchy back onto the nineteenth-century frontier: Hamlet so bores the audience of miners that they shoot the ghost of Hamlet's father off the stage. Hamlet also bores the Clanton gang in My Darling Clementine, but the reaction from the other gunfighters-and from the film itself-is rather more complex. Ford's film uses Shakespeare's words in a thoroughly contradictory way to further an almost exclusively visual argument. We will come around to this, and to the way that this transformation away from dialogue toward what Hamlet would call "dumb show" may help to get at the core of Ford's elusive cinematic genius. But it is probably helpful first to recall the outline of the film's rather predictable story. On the harsh desert outside of Tombstone, Arizona, Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) meets Old Man Clanton (Walter Brennan) and turns down his offer to buy the cattle the four Earp brothers are herding west. That evening, the three eldest brothers ride back from the "wide-awake, wide-open town" to find eighteen-year-old James Earp murdered and the cattle rustled. Wyatt accepts the job as Tombstone's marshal and, through a barroom confrontation, reaches an accommodation with Doc Holliday (Victor Mature) that leaves Doc in charge of the gambling. Arriving by stagecoach is Clementine Carter (Cathy Downs), a genteel Boston beauty, Holliday's abandoned fiancee and nurse from his days as a practicing doctor. She incites distant admiration from Wyatt and quick jealousy from Chihuahua (Linda Darnell), the saloon singer who calls herself, with reason, "Doc's girl." Clementine cannot persuade the apparently tubercular Doc to return east with her and makes plans to return alone. Wyatt spots Chihuahua wearing the silver pendant stolen from James Earp at his murder. She claims it to have been a present from Doc, but, when confronted by him, admits it was a gift from one of Clanton's four sons, Billy-who shoots her at the moment of her confession and is himself mortally wounded as he gallops from town. Pursuing Billy, Virgil Earp arrives at the Clanton ranch, where he is shot in the back by Old Man Clanton. Meanwhile, Doc returns to his surgical skills to operate on Chihuahua. Later that evening, Virgil's body is dumped onto the main street by the Clantons, and Chihuahua dies of her wounds. At sunup, Doc joins the two surviving Earps for a showdown with the four surviving Clantons at the O. …

The Functions of the Narrator's Voice in Literature and Film: Forster and Ivory's Maurice

Abstract: "How do intelligent film adaptations grapple with the overtly prominent narrator, the expositor, describer, investigator of characters' states of mind, commentator, philosopher?" Thus, in Coming to Terms (163), Seymour Chatman poses a question with broad implications for narrative forms: is the agency of film narrative a narrator; is it useful, even in analyzing novels, to posit a narrator as the source of narration. How these issues are framed will serve either to connect novels and films under an umbrella theory that strengthens the universality of narrative constructs or to separate these media through the formation of narrative distinctions. The study of adaptation serves as a heuristic point of entry into the entire subject of narrative structure. Chatman now believes that "every narrative is by definition narrated," but he writes that "some narratogists-I include myself-even claimed that the [literary] narrator had disappeared" (Terms 115). Some narratologists assert that, in films at least, the narrator has never existed. David Bordwell calls the narrator an "anthropomorphic fiction": "Narration is better understood as the organization of a set of cues for the construction of a story. This presupposes a perceiver, but not any sender, of a message" (62). Although this formulation may sound strange to users of ordinary language-a message is that which is sent-the idea is part of Bordwell's rejection of a communication theory of art. His schema assigns all of the work of creating meaning to the film viewer; what is often understood as the filmmaker's work, "the organization of the set of cues," is effaced in favor of the perceivers' responsive processes. This shift of focus from a work's creator to its recipient rids us of that critical culde-sac "intention," but does not dispel our awareness of judgments operating through the text. In the novel, judgment is often expressed by narratorial tone, "the implicit evaluation which the author manages to convey beyond his explicit evaluation" (Booth 74). Bordwell acknowledges the presence of "judgmental factors" in cinema: "When we say that film takes pity on its characters or has contempt for its audience, we are talking, however loosely, about ways in which a film's narration can strike an attitude" (61). Chatman, who had previously held that "the camera, poor thing, is powerless to invoke tone, though it can present some alternative to it" ("Novels" 132), has, more recently, returned to this issue: "If we are to say that both telling and showing can transmit stories, and in any combination, we need a term that can refer to either or both indifferently. If 'to narrate' is too fraught with vocal overtones, we might adopt 'to present' as a useful superordinate. Thus we can say that the implied author presents the story through a tell-er or a show-er or some combination of both. Only the one who tells, then, can be said to have a 'voice.'" (Terms 113) I find the use of quotation marks around "voice" important because, although it may be argued that "said" has governed their use, they also suggest that Chatman understands voice in all non-oral narrative media as metaphorical. In any event, the voice of the novel's narrator is inscribed by means of diction and word order, that is through the codes of written verbal language. It is my contention that the voice of the film's presenter, to use Chatman's term, is inscribed through filmic means-camera work, sound, editing, etc.-and that camera placement or editing juxtapositions, for example, can thus be tonal, using the term, of course, metaphorically. Gerard Genette has, in Narrative Discourse, carefully articulated the various functions performed by the literary narrator. By employing Genette's categories to analyze E.M. Forster's Maurice and its film adaptation-directed and cowritten by James Ivory-I hope to demonstrate that a single terminology and method is applicable to both media and easily generalizable beyond the specific works under consideration; that literary and film narratives are narrated by narrators and, thus, voiced, granting that voice in film, as in the novel, is inflected by various genre-specific codes and conventions. …

Coveting the Feminine: Victor Frankenstein, Norman Bates, and Buffalo Bill

Abstract: Hannibal Lector: "What does he do, this man you seek?" Clarice Starling: "He kills women" Lector: "No, that is incidental What is the first and principal thing he does? What needs does he serve by killing?" Starling: "Anger, social acceptance, sexual frustration " Lector: "No He covets" The Silence of the Lambs Behavior deemed "monstrous" often involves crossing gender boundaries and this practice, still flourishing in contemporary cultural texts, has a long history Although I will focus in this essay on the similarities between Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein,1 and the film characters of Norman Bates in Psycho (1960) and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), there are any number of other characters in popular texts who might have served the purpose I do not argue that these three characters have exactly equivalent psychological states and motivations Nor do I put aside the enormous differences in cultural context and narrative form that separate these three texts Instead, what I am attempting to demonstrate is that there are provocative textual links between the novel and the two films I believe that grouping them together as a set for these limited purposes is productive, for taken together they provide excellent points of departure for an examination of the persistent equation of gender crisis with monstrousness All three feature protagonists who manifest extreme behavior in a desperate attempt to circumvent cultural restrictions on the expression of forms of sexuality judged inimical to the status quo There is little question that the extremes they are driven to are indeed "monstrous" Perhaps we might apply that term also to the repressiveness of the societies that spawn the monster In her essay "Metaphors of the Mind" Gaylen Hoyle has argued for the existence of a "tripartite consciousness" in Frankenstein comprised of Victor, the Monster, and Wallon While her argument is a persuasive one, it does not negate the essential duality between Victor and Monster that will be the focus in this analysis Hoyle concludes her essay with the following observation: Because the examination of multiple personalities in nineteenth century literature such as Frankenstein can be shown to resonate back upon the culture which gave birth to it, it follows that the examination of current manifestations of multiple personality disorder may help reveal to us many of the crucial issues of the twentieth century, the metaphors of mind through which we can gain a better understanding of ourselves and our culture (13) This passage is as good an introduction to the present analysis as might be found anywhere What I hope will be made clear in the passages to follow is the cultural confluence in the pathology shared by Victor Frankenstein, Norman Bates, and Buffalo Bill I suggest that the institutions and ideologies which produce such a pathology live on from generation to generation While authors such as Carol Clover have written persuasively of the centrality of questions of gender in the contemporary horror film, I hope to point toward a broader reach of influence Clover, for example, observes that The notion of a killer propelled by psychosexual fury, more particularly of a male in gender distress, has proved a durable one, and the progeny of Norman Bates stalk the genre up to the present day (27) In this essay I look both backward and forward-to Norman Bates's antecedents as well as his predecessors Because Psycho is so often considered a benchmark of contemporary horror, I situate this analysis around it, examining one of the earliest related texts and one of the most recent in the process of pursuing an intertextual thread that centers around gender problematics I will argue for instance that the fundamental narrative crisis in Frankenstein is Victor's attempt to re-capture the feeling of wholeness which forever evades him as an adult "split subject" (to use Lacanian terminology) …

Wyler's Version of Brontë's Storms in Wuthering Heights

Abstract: Emily Bronte's only novel, Wuthering Heights, abounds with complex characters involved in complex relationships and subplots that contribute to the resolution of the major and minor themes. The structure of the novel is complex in that the major portion of the story is told as a flashback through first person narration. Ellen Dean, the servant who grew up with the Earnshaw children, tells the story from a thirty-year perspective, and often colors the story with opinions of her own. She accounts for action that occurred when she was not present either by retelling information obtained from other characters or by the use of a letter. Wuthering Heights is a novel of intensely emotional characters, enveloped in an atmosphere of storms and spirits, who speak poetic dialogue as they try to reveal the thoughts and feelings hidden in the depths of their hearts. Catherine Earnshaw most often reveals her thoughts to Nelly as she tries to explain the nature of her relationship to Heathcliff. On the evening that she decides to marry Edgar, she tries to explain the complex emotions that war within her. She finally acknowledges to Nelly that she is marrying Edgar to rescue Heathcliff from Hindley and clearly declares that there will be no separation between the two of them even after she marries Edgar. She avows, "Every Linton on the face of the earth might melt into nothing, before I could consent to forsake Heathcliff" (83). But only Heathcliff can understand the kind of relationship that Catherine is desperately trying to explain. Nelly, a practical, forthright person, can't comprehend Catherine's declaration. The scene becomes even more poetic as Catherine continues her explanation: My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning; my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger; I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like foliage in the woods; time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath-a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! (84) Heathcliff's language has its own kind of poetry in the violent images he uses in his venomous tones. He states, "I'd not exchange, for a thousand lives, my condition here, for Edgar Linton's at Thrushcross Grange-not if I might have the privilege of flinging Joseph off the highest gable, and painting the house front with Hindley's blood "(5 2)! Because of this poetic language, the complex narrative structure, the intense and at times melodramatic characters, and the atmosphere of spirits and storms, filming Wuthering Heights becomes a particularly challenging task, one to which director William Wyler was well suited. Finding one central theme on which to concentrate becomes vital because there are too many themes in the novel to all be represented in cinema. Screenwriters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur chose to concentrate on the mysterious oneness of the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff and their inability to survive in a socially proper world. The screenwriters took several liberties with deletions and additions to maintain the relationship as the film's central theme. A principle to keep in mind when studying an adaptation such as Wuthering Heights is expressed by Hungarian critic BeIa Balazs, who asserts that it is possible to take the subject of a novel and make it into a film and produce perfect works of art in each case-the form being adequate to the content. It is possible because, while the subject, or story, of both works is identical, their content is nevertheless different. It is this different content that is adequately expressed in the changing form resulting from the adaptation. (Wagner 221) In his book Novels into Film, George Bluestone asserts that the final standard by which to judge an adaptation is determined by whether or not "the film stands up as an autonomous work of art. …

Hairspray: The Revolutionary Way to Restructure and Hold Your History

Abstract: In Hairspray, John Waters's 1988 musical-comedy film about desegregation in Baltimore during the early 1960s, the director revives the turbulent times as backdrop to a television dance show phenomenon. This phenomenon, The Corny Collins Show (Waters's film rendition of the actual Buddy Deane Show), allows historic moments in popular culture to supersede and actually change those in our nation's political culture (at least for the time of the film). The first real television stars that John Waters remembers were the kids who danced on Baltimore's Buddy Deane Show, a local version of American Bandstand, which aired from 1957 to 1964. Waters writes, It was the top-rated local TV show in Baltimore and, for several years, the highest rated local TV program in the country.... Every rock 'n' roll star of the day (except Elvis) came to town to lip-sync and plug their records on the show: Buddy Holly, Bill Haley, Fats Domino, the Supremes, the Marvelettes, Annette Funicello. Frankie Avalon and Fabian. . . . You learned how to be a teenager from the show. Every day after school kids would run home, tune in and dance with the bedpost or refrigerator door as they watched. .. And because a new dance was introduced practically every week, you had to watch every day to keep up. It was maddening: the Mashed Potato, the Stroll, the Pony, the Waddle, the Locomotion, the Bug, the Handjive, the New Continental and most important, the Madison, a complicated line dance that started here [in Baltimore] and later swept the country. (88-89) The Buddy Deane Show, for some the channeler of innocence and "home" to the "nicest kids in town," proved a nagging, racist appropriator of African-American music as well as a segregationist stronghold to the torn community of Baltimore. According to Waters, Integration ended "The Buddy Deane Show.' When the subject comes up today, most loyalists want to go off the record. But it went something like this: 'Buddy Deane' was an exclusively white show. Once a month the show was all black. . . So the NAACP targeted the show for protests.... There were threats and bomb scares; integrationists smuggled whites into the all-black shows to dance cheek-to-cheek on camera with blacks, and that was it. "The Buddy Deane Show' was over.. .January 4,1964. (97) Like many of us who have had to take a second look at the seedier sides of those constructs of popular culture that we adored in our youth, Waters takes his camera onto the set of his simulated Buddy Deane Show and investigates the situation. In effect, he hunts down with his camera the particular racist impulse behind the scenes while attempting to sustain the innocence of the teenage stars as well as the impact of the dances on teenage Baltimore, white and Black. Waters seizes the language of film, the medium that actually sparked the desegregation debate in Baltimore in 1962, and he makes it say something he prefers to hear and see. In Hairspray, he sets out to renegotiate the racist events of one moment in time through the art of film. His film emphasizes a desire for the way it could have been. Waters's technical revisionary devices include enlarging the screen-he takes a television phenomenon to the big screen thereby making the show as well as the issues of the film larger than life. His Corny Collins Show 'expands' the Buddy Deane Show and makes room for more dancers and for larger dancers (his main character, Tracy Turnblad, is played by Ricki Lake, who weighs more than the average teenager) as well as a larger viewing audience. He also broadens his own reputation from that of pseudo-pornographic director of such films as Pink Flamingoes and Polyester to that of politically-aware, revisionary artist. The scenes that occur on the set of the Corny Collins Show appear in color. When the camera takes us away from the set, and we watch the Show from the viewpoint of the 1962 home viewers in their living rooms, the television screen projects a black and white image. …

Framing the Underworld: Threshold Imagery in Murnau, Cocteau, and Bergman

Abstract: The plots of Murnau's Nosferatu, Cocteau's Belle et Bete and Orphee, and of Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece Wild Strawberries are structured by the hero journey cycle and a visual vocabulary of various passageways to the underworld (doorways, windows, stairways, corridors, mirrors, etc.). The films fall into that large category of literary and artistic works of the Modernist period which explore the myth of the descent to the underworld as a means of giving what T.S. Eliot called "shape and significance" (rev. of Ulysses) to their material. 1 While the impact of Joseph Campbell's notion of the hero journey cycle (separation-initiation-return) is well known, no one to my knowledge has carefully examined the basic mythic structure of the descent to and return from Hades in the four films or connected the technical details of the cinematography (frame by frame) to this structure. The vocabulary of windows, doorways, hatches, and arches as images of the descent to the underworld connects the films to a long mythic tradition going all the way back to Sumerian and Egyptian roots, and continuing in a long line of transmission and transformation in the literary tradition from Virgil to Dante, to Blake, and on into Modernism. The Egyptians pictured the nightly journey of the Sun God Ra as a passage through a sequence of doorways connecting the twelve chambers of the underworld domain of Osiris, with a different set of demons guarding each threshold. The climax of the journey-for Ra as well as for the departed soul-came with a vision of Osiris, Lord of the Dead, enthroned in his coffin or pillar (Budge 17Of). In the somewhat earlier Sumerian "Descent of Inanna to the Great Below," the Goddess passes through a sequence of seven gateways, shedding an article of royal clothing at each, until she stands naked in front of the Goddess of Death, Ereshkigal (Wolkstein and Kramer 52-61). This archaic notion of the underworld as a labyrinthine mansion of many chambers also recurs in Virgil's Halls of Dis and in the illuminated manuscript traditions, which picture the gateway into Hell as the gaping jaws of the devil leading into an infernal palace. Hence, our three filmmakers have their protagonists follow the footsteps of many a previous mythological hero.2 Throughout Nosferatu, the two hero journeys of Jonathan Harker and Count Dracula are significantly juxtaposed-Barker's from Bremen to Transylvania and back to Bremen, Dracula's from Transylvania to Bremen and back to Transylvania. This parallelism is reflected repeatedly in minute juxtapositions of imagery which link the domestic and the demonic realms. Many of these juxtapositions, emphasized by the technique of montage, cut between frames from Harker's realm to Count Dracula's and focus on doorways, arches, hatches, and windows, all suitable visual symbols of the movement between the two realms which shapes the overall plot structure of the film. The call to adventure which leads to Barker's separation from Bremen and the domestic security of his marriage to Nina comes in the form of a letter from Count Dracula requesting a copy of the contract outlining the terms of Dracula's proposed rental of an abandoned property across the river from Barker's home. Marker is then sent by his company to the remote corner of the Carpathian Mountains where Dracula lives, and he sadly takes leave of his weirdly distraught wife. Mountains and the separation from home are thus the first archetypal symbols in the film. Mountains are associated not only with the demonic realm of witches and the supernatural in the German literary tradition (from Faust to The Magic Mountain), but also with the underworld of the mythological tradition (from the cedar mountains in Gilgamesh and the Sumerian kur, to the Egyptian, Semitic, and Islamic traditions [Budge 171], to the hollow hills of the Celtic faeryland). These conventional affiliations between mountains and the underworld are reinforced in Mumau's film by the related conventions that link river crossings to the heroic descent: in Nosferatu, Marker is driven by horse drawn coach at sunset to the edge of the "Land of Phantoms," where he must disembark and cross a bridge over a river before being met by the relay coach sent by Count Dracula. …

The Return of the Father in Spielberg's the Color Purple

Abstract: When Steven Spielberg set out to film Alice Walker's The Color Purple, he was faced with a problem that confronts most directors who choose to adapt novels into film: length. Walker's tersely written three hundred-page novel, covering fifty years and two continents, contained enough material for a mini-series. Even with numerous American episodes removed and the African section reduced to a fraction of its length in the novel, the film ran more than two and a half hours. Nonetheless, Spielberg chose to add a timeconsuming and seemingly unnecessary subplot: the story of Shug's estrangement from, and final reconciliation with, her father. Given the time constraints Spielberg faced, what made this subplot important enough to add to an already daunting body of material? I will argue that this subplot is exemplary of the film's modification of strong ideological elements of the novel, in particular its feminism and its religious heterodoxy. Such modification might have been expected in any film designed for a mainstream audience. Walker's 1982 novel may have attained the literary imprimatur of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, but its celebration of a lesbian relationship, its unorthodox religious views, and its portrayal of whites routinely abusing blacks and men routinely abusing women were hardly calculated to recommend it to a popular readership. Even before Spielberg's The Color Purple appeared late in 1985, many people were prepared to dislike the film-some because they disliked the politics of Walker's novel, and some because they thought Spielberg did not share Walker's ideology. The mainstream press readied its attacks for the director: David Ansen (writing in the ne-Schindler's List era) began his review by suggesting that the idea of Spielberg directing The Color Purple seemed as improbable as that of Antonioni directing a James Bond movie. "What could be stranger," Ansen asked, "than America's popular practitioner of boy's adventure-a man who some leftist critics have assailed for his white-male-supremacist fantasies-adapting Alice Walker's feminist, matriarchal novel about the Southern rural black experience?" When they saw the film, most reviewers complained that the level of sentimentality in Spielberg's rendering diluted the effect of the novel's strong statements about relationships between the sexes and between the races. New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby said that although the film is faithful to the events of Walker's "grim, rudely funny, black feminist" novel, "it sees those events through lavender-color glasses that transform them into fiction of an entirely different order" (H 17). Many critics agreed with John Simon that the book's "feminist and lesbian coloration" is "lost in a mise en scene doing its damnedest to look like a cartoon film." While the film establishment was waiting to take on Spielberg, another group was waiting to attack the film on the basis of its objections to Walker's novel. A number of prominent African-American men criticized both book and novel for their negative portrayal of black males.1 Writing in the Antioch Review, for instance, Gerald Early derided the film for selecting as its villain "the black male, the convenient and mutable antihero of the white American psyche for the past 150 years" (269). Filmmaker Spike Lee stated in Film Comment that "the quickest way for a Black playwright, novelist, or poet to get published has been to say that Black men are shit" (Glicksman 48). Many other black male reviewers likewise attacked Walker's novel on the score of its scathing portrayals of its principal male characters: Mister, Celie's brutal husband; "Pa," the father who rapes Celie and disposes of her two children; and Celie's stepson Harpo, who ruins a loving marriage by taking his family's advice to beat his wife. In a climate of such opposition, it would be surprising if a mainstream filmmaker such as Spielberg did not respond by trying to avoid potential criticism of his work. …

The Construction of Racism through Narrative and Cinematography in the Letter

Abstract: We see (in The Birth of a Nation) Negroes shoving white men off the sidewalks, Negroes quitting work to dance, Negroes beating a crippled old white patriarch,... Negroes "drunk with wine and power," Negroes mocking their white master in chains, Negroes "crazy with joy" and terrorizing all the whites in South Carolina. We see the blacks flaunting placards demanding "equal marriage." We see the black leader demanding a "forced marriage" with an imprisoned and gagged white girl. And we see continually in the background the white Southerner in "agony of soul over the degradation and ruin of his people." (Hackett 96) Two popular films about Chinese in the last twenty years were actually about China at the turn of the century and in the 1920s: 55 Days at Peking (1962) and The Sand Pebbles (1962). In both films, the Chinese are portrayed as deceitful, cruel, addicted to drugs, engaging openly and constantly in slave practices and prostitution, and harboring an intense and violent hatred of all Westerners. The Chinese appear to be ignorant and manipulated by their evil political masters. (Oehling 201) When a script calls for an Asian, it is to provide a backdrop or "an Oriental feeling" to the main story. TV's Hawaii Five-O is a consistent offender. In the state with the largest percentage of Asian-Americans, two blue-eyed Yankee devils had to be imported from the mainland to solve the Asians' crimes. Jack Lord (white) is head of the police department, James MacArthur (white) is his assistant. Over both of them is the governor (white). After the three whites come the Asians-one is a fat Chinaman stereotype, and the other a fat Hawaiian stereotype. On a typical program their lines are simple statements of fact: "Steve, take a look. Finished." "The governor wants you." "So far no trace anywhere." "There it is, Steve." "This the one?" The producers and writers allow them no character development or participation in the plot other than to draw guns and kick down doors. Other Asians are shown as technicians who feed facts to the whites. So much for the good guys. (Paik 30) Mass media criticism has long established the fact that both Classic Hollywood cinema and American television have embodied racist and ethnocentric attitudes. As the above quotes indicate, most studies have concentrated on characterization and performance in reaching this conclusion. For example, Donald Bogle approaches the racism in The Birth of a Nation through an analysis of its African-American characters. He describes the renegade Gus as an archetypal "black buck" (13) with a single objective: to make love to a white woman. ("Bucks are always big, baaddd niggers, oversexed and savage, violent and frenzied as they lust for white flesh.") Everett Carter illustrates his thesis by describing nonverbal character beats: "Ben Cameron places his hand paternally upon the shoulders of one (slave), and shakes hands with another who bobs in a perfect frenzy of grateful loyalty..." (137). Peter Nobel, meanwhile, includes performance factors in his essay, noting that Gus was played by a tough-looking white actor made "even more hideous ... by the liberal application on his features of what appeared to be black boot polish" (129). In short, the documentation of stereotyped behavior and exaggerated performance remains the principal strategy by which racism in the mass media is revealed. This paper also examines racism in a single Hollywood film, but extends its analysis beyond characterization and performance. In particular, it will compare the film to its original source story and examine how both narrative structure and cinematography are used to vindicate the lead character's racist point of view. Through these variables, her Asian rival is denied her humanity, and the viewer is manipulated into an empathy with a self-absorbed adulterer/murderer who justifies her actions on the basis of race. "The Letter" was originally a short story written by W. …

Once upon a Time in Hollywood; or, the Commodification of Form in the Adaptation of Fictional Texts to the Hollywood Cinema

Abstract: When I once asked a film composer friend if he had seen the remake of Les Liaisons Dangereuses he responded with the comment, "No, but I heard the soundtrack." It was, of course, an ironic response, but as an ironic response it makes an implicit statement on the relationship between cinematic and literary forms as well as cinematic and musical ones. The usual response to the query "have you read such-and-such a novel?" is often "No, but I've seen the movie," or vice versa, both of which imply an equivalence of art forms, so that the relationship between what one reads and what one sees, based on the same material, is somehow equal as well. However, another response that "I saw the movie and it's better than the book," or vice versa, somehow implies an inequivalence. In other words, there is something integrally superior in one that is apparently inferior in the other. Caught in between the art forms as either being equivalent or not, one is also left foundering between whether the art forms are equal or not. Obviously, they are not, but for someone to think that in some way they are equal, or may be or could be, implies a method of adaptation that is generally incumbent upon the target material adapted, which is usually, though not always, fiction. Though in fact original screenplays can be "novelized," that, in itself, is a purely commercial process of "reverse adaptation" in which the commodification is nothing more than the unmitigated attempt to expand a 120-page screenplay into a "novel-like" form of between 180 and 240 pages by merely expanding the linear narrative and the preexisting dialogue; but what we're interested in is how fiction is "cinematized." What is in question is how a work of fiction is adapted to the screen in such a way that a reader/viewer can postulate it is or isn't as good as the original text. What is a reader/viewer comparing? Metaphor? Irony? Style? Is it something that is fundamentally rooted within the structure of the text that is being compared or is it something else? Is it the symphony of the sentence, its rhythm, the ability of the writer to master his/her material that is translated for the reader/viewer to synthesize? Is it, perhaps, the power and expression of the dialogue? Or is it merely the beauty of the written word? Actually, it is none of these. What reader/viewers tend to compare consciously or unconsciously are the veritable cornerstones of traditional "Realistic" fiction; that is, story line and character, and how these fictional idioms are conveyed; namely, through a linear narrative that has the correct proportions of agitation and resolution coupled with a dialogue that propels the story line toward its inevitable, and usually obvious, conclusion. In other words, how the story is told and with what efficacy the characters are realistically presented become the standards on which the work is evaluated. This form of adapting material often tends to undermine the effusive nature of a work of fiction by transforming it, transfiguring it, into a linear narrative that pays homage to the "state of realism," or the "state of storytelling" that was founded upon the principles of narration doubtlessly begun with Aesop, if not Moses, and polished by Walter Scott and Balzac. But the question still lingers: "Why is this aspect of Aristotelian poetics, of telling a story in a particular manner, so appealing to Hollywood?" Presumably, it is because that particular movement is familiar to the public. Of all the elements Aristotle analyzes in the Poetics, plot "holds first place" and plot, "in its fullest sense is the artistic equivalent of 'action' in real life" (Butcher 334). In other words audiences are shown a film the plot structure of which somehow resembles stories they have been told in the past, which has an element of action, mainly external, that propels the plot forward. It is not that the story itself is similar in content (though Hollywood thrives on the iterative), but the manner in which it is told is familiar. …

Star Trek V: The Search for God

Abstract: If Star Trek V had been subtitled "The Search for God" instead of "The Final Frontier," the change would have been more than a statement of the movie's central theme; it would also have been a recognition of the theological preoccupations of the earlier films in the series and, behind that, of the episodes in the television series itself1 In Star Trek I (Star Trek : The Motion Picture) a machine finds a soul; in Star Trek II Spock dies that his shipmates (and he himself) might live; in Star Trek III Spock's soul is discovered and reunited with his body; and in Star Trek IV the resurrected Spock comes to terms with himself and the human and Vulcan (mortal and divine) halves of his nature, and the crew of the "late Starship Enterprise" saves Earth before the ship itself is reborn Where else can the Enterprise go in the fifth film but in quest of God? Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is an exploration of issues first raised in the original television series These include the nature of God(s), of frontiers, of paradises (especially Edens or beginning places), and-of necessity-the intertextual (almost scriptural) nature of Star Trek itself Vivian Sobchack, for example, asserts that "The Star Trek firms constitute a particularly poignant and intertextually grounded pseudo-history of their own" (276) Almost from the beginning Star Trek had a purpose and consistency unusual in series television, in part due to Gene Roddenberry and in part due to the dedication of the actors to their characters Director Vincent McEveety complains, for instance, that by the third season "There was a growing domination of the scripts by the actors" (Gross 91) The process continued in the films, where both Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner provided stories and directed2 But there is another powerful force at work in shaping the Star Trek universe-the audience3 For the fans, the true spirit of Star Trek had to be protected, if necessary, even from the filmmakers themselves4 Star Trek II was threatened with a boycott when news leaked out that Spock was to be killed (Cohen 97), and similar threats were made against Star Trek III because of the Enterprise's destruction (Cohen 99) As Allan Asherman describes "orthodoxy" in Star Trek II: "Would there be any concern about keeping within the existing parameters of the 'Star Trek' universe? Many fans of Trek' reached the conclusion that since Mr Spock was rumored to die in the film, efforts to remain faithful had been abandoned They were wrong: fidelity to the original was a vital concern of the new team" (158) Jay A Brown's positive review of Star Trek II is typical: 'This time, the affecting story superbly captures the spirit of the original series" (429) Even Captain Kirk is subject to such audience expectations or expectational texts5 William Shatner assured an interviewer shortly before Star Trek Vs release that the film was "like the best of the old TV series this movie epitomizes what Gene Roddenberry had in mind from the beginning My feeling is that Star Trek V may be a big budget motion picture but its heart and soul is still a one hour TV show" (Shapiro 43) It is thus as a text among other texts that Star Trek V must be "read" The characters in the film have long histories and enduring attitudes The series itself has a recognizable philosophy and an enthusiastic audience willing to expound, endorse, and ensure the survival of that philosophy Many of the signs and signals in Star Trek V will be misread or simply missed without the intertextual, almost interscriptural background from which they are built6 Roger Ebert, for example, a critic who is generally favorable to the Star Trek films but disliked Star Trek V, said, "As the Enterprise approached the Barrier [the] movie seemed to be remembering what was best about the fictional world of Star Trek: Those moments when man and his ideas are challenged by the limitless possibilities of creation" (706-07) …

Losing the Feminist Drift: Adaptations of Les Liaisons Dangereuses

Abstract: In spite of the difficulties involved in adapting a novel written in letter format to the screen, Choderlos de Laclos's 1782 epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses has spawned two recent filmic adaptations: Stephen Frears's Dangerous Liaisons (1989) and Milos Forman's Valmont (1989).1 While the contemporary filmic adaptations of de Laclos's work maintain its psychological penetration into the minds of its ruthless, amoral central characters and the prurient pleasures the graphic presentation of their sexual exploits affords, a study of the adaptations reveals, however, a significant reduction of the original work's openness to a feminist reading. A number of critics have seen the novel as at least in part an examination of the sexual inequality in eighteenth century French society and have attributed de Laclos's sympathetic view of the plight of women to his own feelings of marginality as a result of the repeated failure of his military career ambitions (Vailland 27, Donvan and Free 266-67). The novel is undoubtedly rich in its portrayal of the various types of aristocratic women in eighteenthcentury French society, types which can be read as part of de Laclos's condemnation of a society where women are stifled and abused by a social system that leads them not only to accept their social victimization but even to contribute to it. Madame de Merteuil has been called "the most strong-willed character in French literature," a "femme revoltee" whose determination to combat male patriarchal privilege in a society that affords her no legitimate outlet for her ambitious nature leads her viciously to attack all those around her (Malraux 61). Cecile embodies youthful innocence first victimized by the abusive socialization of women through convent education, maternal neglect, and arranged marriage and then corrupted by Merteuil's and her male co-conspirator Valmont's machinations. Madame de Tourvel represents the convention-bound religious "prude," destroyed by empty religiosity, blind adherence to social convention, and unacknowledged female sexuality. Madame de Volanges and Rosemond signify an older generation of women who maintain the patriarchal status quo by conveying their conventional social beliefs to their younger charges. Volanges is the consummate female hypocrite, condemning others' failings but neglecting her own daughter's needs and education. Rosemond is a seemingly wise matriarchal figure, yet her resigned and fatalistic adherence to the society's belief in male supremacy and to its doctrine of female submission to male desires leads her to support her nephew Valmont in spite of his victimization of other women. Within this array of female figures, Madame de Merteuil attempts to distinguish herself by exhibiting a strength, determination, intelligence, and independence that-until the novel's conclusion-shape the lives of its female and male characters alike. Merteuil declares herself in the novel's "Letter 81" unlike other women. She is her "own work," the product of her studious adherence to a philosophy the principles and methods of which she claims are "unknown to anybody but [her]self." As she informs Valmont, she believes she was born to avenge her sex (de Laclos 177). Indeed, her manipulations affect the lives of all around her, but in a way that can only be seen as sadistically cruel and destructive. She engineers Valmont's break with Madame de Tourvel; precipitates Tourvel's self-inflicted illness and death; arranges Cecile's corruption and seduces her devoted lover Danceny; vanquishes Prevan, the roue who determines to ruin her spotless reputation; and arranges the duel which leads to Valmont's death. Crucial to a feminist reading of the novel is its rendering of the Prevan episode as an illustration of Merteuil's attempts to combat the double standard that rendered women subservient to men in eighteenth-century French society. Prevan, a roue known for deliberately and sadistically ruining the reputations of his mistresses, sets out to seduce Merteuil in order to destroy her reputation for virtue. …

Civil Rights and the Black Presence in "Baby Doll"

Abstract: Tennessee Williams's screenplay Baby Doll was aie film celebre of 1956 Released by Warner Brothers, it was one of the most provocative collaborative ventures between Williams and director Elia Kazan1 Baby Doll caused a scandal because of its shocking eroticism, 1956style The most famous publicity for the film also aroused opposition A billboard, more than a block long, of Carroll Baker as Baby Doll, dressed in seductive baby doll pajamas, hovered over Times Square2 The National Legion of Decency attacked Baby Doll as "morally repellent both in theme and treatment" and for dwelling "almost without variation or relief upon carnal suggestiveness in action, dialogue, and costuming Its unmitigating [sic] emphasis on lust and cruelty is degrading and corruptive" (qtd in Corliss 44) From the pulpit of St Patrick's Cathedral, Francis Cardinal Spellman denounced Baby Doll in language reminiscent of Torquemada's: "The conscienceless venal attitude of the sponsors of this picture constitutes a definite corruptive moral influence; since these degrading pictures stimulate immorality and crime they must be condemned, and therefore in solicitude for the welfare of the country, I exhort Catholic people from patronizing this film under pain of sin " ("Cardinal Spellman" 28) Condemnation was not confined to ecclesiastical precincts Many in the secular press rabidly attacked the film Time reported that Baby Doll was "just possibly the dirtiest American-made motion picture that has ever been legally exhibited" ("New Picture" 61) In his assessment for Saturday Review, Arthur Knight branded Baby Doll "one of the most unhealthy and amoral pictures ever made in this country" (23) Joseph P Kennedy, the father of JFK and RFK, refused to show Baby Doll in his chain of twenty New England theaters, insisting, "I have been in the business forty-five years and I think this is the worst thing that has ever been done to the industry I think it should be banned" ("Kennedy's Chain" 27) Baby Doll, however, is a far more subtle and subversive film than critics emphasizing its sexual content ever recorded The script boldly moves beyond sexual titillation or cliches about the grotesqueries of Williams's Deep South Its characters are part of a much more ambitious agenda than the "Tobacco Road" origins Nancy Tischler claimed for them in Tennessee Williams: Rebellious Puritan Williams and Kazan's film unleashed an attack on racism at a crucial juncture in American social history; it lampooned institutional codes of race and authority Baby Doll thus anticipated as it reflected the emerging cultural anxieties about race relations in America at a time-1956-when the civil rights movement was just beginning The year before Baby Doll was released, Rosa Parks, the "Mother of the Civil Rights Movement," refused to go to the back of the bus in segregated Montgomery Issues of race relations, therefore, were much in the thoughts of Americans in late 1956 Baby Doll is very much in keeping with both the director's and playwright's unflagging opposition to racism A product of the socially conscious Group Theatre in the 1930s and a force in the Actors Studio of the 1950s, Elia Kazan deplored prejudice, racial or ethnic In 1949, he directed one of the most poignant films denouncing prejudice-Pinky-where a light-skinned young black woman is victimized by the Southern community that knows her as black, but is extolled by the North where she has passed for white In an interview with Gene Phillips, Kazan emphasized that he did "extensive location work" for Baby Doll to stress the "social context" of the film, and he believed that Baby Doll was "the film in which he best portrayed black characters" (93) Shot in Benoit, Mississippi, the film included "some of the people" of this Mississippi Delta town In fact, blacks appear more than twenty times in Baby Doll, and their function is often highly politicized3 Speaking of how clearly Kazan sized up the Benoit community (white and black), Carroll Baker pointed out in her autobiography that "Kazan was a clever politician" (151) …

Word and Image: The Articulation and Visualization of Power in Great Expectations

Abstract: In his introduction to The English Novel and the Movies, Michael Klein recognizes both the universality and the uniqueness of film as an art form. While film synthesizes aspects of literature, dance, and painting, it manifests its message through its own unique forms: Indeed film is capable of drawing upon most aspects of its artistic heritage to document, render, and interpret experience. It does so, however, through its own particular formal and signifying properties. Camera position, camera movement, framing, lighting, sound and editing are, perhaps, the primary means by which a director may reproduce shape, and thus express and evaluate the significance of a narrative. A film of a novel, far from being a mechanical copy of the source, is a transposition or translation from one set of conventions for representing the world to another. (Klein and Parker 3) Wisely, David Lean, in his 1947 adaptation of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, does not try to put the "novel into a film," but rather uses the "signifying properties" of film to give significance to Dickens's narrative. Lean makes choices that accentuate certain parts of the novel-the parts that excited him. Lean believes "a writer gives actors their words, their characters, everything. He gives me the material and I give it visual interpretation" (qtd. in Zambrano 155). The "material" that Dickens gives, and Lean's "visual interpretation" of it, is the concern of this paper. In selecting the events, themes, and characters to visually interpret, Lean had many options open to him. Certainly one theme that Lean wanted to emphasize was the fantastic nature of Great Expectations. As Lean himself observed, "We realized that to a certain extent we had a fantasy on our hands. The characters were larger and more highly colored than in life; and we deliberately kept them that way, because it was part of our intention to make a fairy tale" (Zambrano 154). Another element Lean wanted to preserve (and to make his own in terms of the film) is the autobiographical impulse of the novel, that is, the recognition that Great Expectations is not just Pip telling his story, but Pip constructing himself from the poor shivering waif on the marshes to the man who can defy Miss Havisham and become an active center, mature enough to articulate his own narrative. Pip gains this mature voice through intricate negotiations of the power relations throughout the narrative. The manner in which these power relations are manifested in the book and the film obviously differ. In the novel we can trace specific linguistic patterns, primarily the use of imperatives and interrogatives, that serve to "educate" Pip into his final position of moral balance. In the film, visual devices of framing, perspective, and specific compositions are used to convey these relations. Pip's struggle to speak and so to precipitate his voice into the novel structures the three stages of his expectations.1 The first stage shows Pip as a victim of the speech of other characters. But the structures of speech that restrict him also serve as a model; he learns that certain speech patterns-particularly interrogatives and imperatives-allow a greater access to power. Thus, in the second stage, Pip adopts some of these linguistic strategies, but he finds that they are not the means to fulfillment. Finally, in the third stage-through his own experience and the return of Magwitch-he articulates a voice of moral balance. A close examination of the first stage of Pip's expectations (chapters 1-19) reveals three main centers of action that shape Pip's voice: Pip's meeting with Magwitch on the marshes, Pip's homelife at the forge, and Pip's visits to Satis House. Pip is central to each of these and yet he is passive. Indeed, the last sentence of the opening paragraph of the novel-"So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip" (emphasis added)-reveals the erosion of Pip's self-reflexive impulse. …

A Nice Little Irony: Life Lessons

Abstract: You need an erection to paint and this one never goes down because it never gets used. He lives in his own personal hell, never changing, never having anything deep with anybody. He's a slave to his art, but even more to his own glory, his own need to be glorified. He sacrifices everything to that. -Richard Price I Martin Scorsese remembers the genesis of Life Lessons (1989) this way: In the late '60s, I wanted to make a film out of Dostoyevsky's The Gambler. And then around '72 or '73, Jay Cocks [a friend from the NYU days and onetime critic for Time magazine] gave me a Christmas present of a new translation of The Gambler along with Diaries of Paulina [sic], who was Dostoyevsky's mistress, and a short story that she wrote about her relationship with him. All in the same book. After the affair had gone down, he exorcised Paulina out of his system by putting her as the main female character in The Gambler. And her story is great because you read The Gambler first, and you get his interpretation of it. Then you read the diaries, and you see a reality. "He came to the door, it's Fyodor again, he's crying. I hate when he does that." (Hodenfield 50) The book in question, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1972, is The Gambler with Polina Suslova 's Diary, translated by Victor Terras and edited by Edward Wasiolek. Scorsese's thumbnail book report is partially accurate. The Gambler, perhaps Dostoyevsky's most directly autobiographical novel, does feature a character named "Polina," an extremely attractive young woman with whom the narrator, an impoverished tutor and hanger-on named Aleksei Ivanovich, is deeply in a state of lingering amour fou. Dostoyevsky's version of certain events, however, is not, strictly speaking, an "interpretation" of those events: rather, it is a comic and calculated embellishment on them, and The Gambler is in fact a minor masterpiece of aesthetic distancing projected onto a heavily ironic gallery of broadly conceived, borrowed, and camouflaged portraits in which even the crucial figure of the lovely and sympathetic Polina must suffer telescoping with the figure of an incurably shallow golddigger with whom the protagonist, having temporarily gambled his way to a small fortune, ultimately has an admittedly humiliating affair amidst the cultured pretenses of gilded-age Paris. Polina's version of the actual events is recorded in her diary, her version of Dostoyevsky's passion for her in an unpublished short story entitled "The Stranger and Her Lover," also printed in the volume that Cocks gave to Scorsese. 1 The story is a transparently thin transcription of events recounted in the diary and, ironically, rendered even less detached in its study of a tortured human relationship by the presence of a heroine who narrates in a barely tenable third-person voice. The teller of Anna Pavlovna's story seems unable to avert her narrator's eyes from her heroine's "sensitive being" and "noble, chaste brow" and, especially, "her beautiful face," which bears throughout "an expression of that calm which is acquired at the price of long suffering" (Wasiolek 321, 323, 320); there is, it seems, "something infinite about it," something "majestic in a melancholy way," and in her "deep, gentle and loving, sadly pleading glance," there is revealed "the fateful fanaticism which distinguishes the faces of madonnas and Christian martyrs" (320, 324, 326, 308). Her lover, meanwhile, the Dostoyevsky figure Losnitsky, is given to "quivering" and pressing her hand "convulsively," suffering his feet to be "trembling" in her presence and his heart to be "pounding hard," and at least once "falling to her feet" in "painful sobs" (309,317,309-10); Anna's biographer reports the lover's observation that "your face ... is so beautiful. I now recall people's talking about your beauty. But what they say about your beauty is nothing compared to what I alone know" (328). "She must have been beautiful," suggests Scorsese (Hodenfield 51), but it is painfully obvious that Polina/Anna's account of her beauty and of Dostoyevsky/Losnitsky's prostration before it contains very little of dramatic adaptability. …

Goethe and Kurosawa: Faust and the Totality of Human Experience-West and East

Abstract: Akira Kurosawa has continually been drawn to literature as a basis for his films, and, more than any other director, he has been tempted-and undaunted-by the truly great giants of Western literature, such as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Dostoevsky, whose plays and novels have delved deeply, perceptively, and explosively into the soul and mind of Western man and have become universalized into a part of the collective Western experience. In the cases of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, Kurosawa's transliterations, even transmogrifications, have been explicit and thoroughly explicated, despite Kurosawa's initial coy denials of his sources.1 But such has not been the case with Kurosawa's Ikiru, although it is as close to Goethe's Faust as Throne of Blood is to MacBeth and Ran is to King Lear, the only association critics have made between Kurosawa's film and Goethe's plays has been a passing observation of a few "Faustian allusions," such as the black dog and the Writer referring to himself as a Mephistopheles. As with MacBeth, King Lear, and The Idiot, Kurosawa in Ikiru has followed Goethe's Faust with minute faithfulness to the structure, characters, episodes, and general intent of the original, but has transformed it into a vision of man's place on "this earth" and in the "yonder" that is uniquely his own. In his two Faust plays, Goethe presents the totality of human experience within the context of the Western world-"the small world first, and then the great one too" (Faust 1:2052)-personal experience and social experience. Essentially, that is what Kurosawa has done also, but from the perspectives of the twentieth century and of more than the Western world. Most frequently and most successfully, when filmmakers base their films on literature they choose lesser works that can be reworked and molded to their own concerns and artistic visions rather than appropriating those works in the literary pantheon with which even the tiniest of tampering calls up such vociferous cries of protest and outrage that no matter how fine the resulting film may actually be, the filmmaker can never quite be deemed successful. Why then does a filmmaker as creative and as cinematic as Kurosawa turn to such monumental works of Western literature for his own work? Certainly for the challenge, but more likely also because these works have most essentially examined and depicted what Dostoevsky called "the eternal questions"-those of humans in their relations to themselves, their society, and their universe-the same questions Kurosawa has explored in his films. Kurosawa has recognized the universality of these works and has felt that their universality encompasses the Eastern world as well, modified and irisated, however, through his Eastern eyes. It is because of such universality, doubtless, that Kurosawa has been drawn to these works. He has been called the most "Western" of the Japanese directors, yet he is unquestionably a product of and a spokesman for his own time and culture. With two of these writers, Shakespeare and Goethe, Kurosawa has chosen works that either are not predicated on traditional Western Christianity or that transcend it. Dostoevsky's The Idiot is, of course, a novel whose essence is traditionally religious in its Orthodox Russian Christianity and the fervent declaration of the messianic mission of Russia, but Kurosawa's emphasis is not on those aspects.2 Shakespeare's philosophy is generally a non-religious stoicism, and Goethe's great poem is determinedly pagan despite its use of Christian symbolism. Kurosawa uses these works as a paradigm on which to construct his own edifice, showing that the problems are universal-and the solutions may be as well, though necessarily modulated by his own personal and cultural Weltanschauung. First, the similarities are remarkable and intriguing, and inescapably intentional. The structure of Faust and Ikiru is exactly the same-two parts so distinct that the reader/viewer must take notice of the division. …

Language and the Music of the Spheres: Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Abstract: From its multi-lingual opening to its multi-lingual finale, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is about language: verbal, visual, electronic, and musical-communication and its limitations, language and its possibilities; and it is about the ineffable things which are beyond speech or imaging-things having to do with emotion and yearning, things touching upon the spiritual and the supernatural. In his article "Politics and Parousia in Close Encounters of the Third Kind" Robert Torry called Steven Spielberg's classic science fiction film of 1977 "the most rhetorically compelling film of the American bicentennial era" (188-96). America's post-second World War attainment of superpower status encouraged a sense of what Torry called "a divinely willed national purpose" (189), a sense of fitness for great things which had its origins in America's Calvinist past and was not extinguished by the traumas of the Vietnam Era. However, Close Encounters'^, themes are not narrowly national. The arrival of the Mother Ship occurs in America, but though the story is told from an American perspective, Close Encounters is actively, thematically supra-national. Indeed, rather than being a glorification of the nation at the second century mark, the film might be seen now, at the distance of twenty years, as an early view of a world in which in some respects, communication being one of them, national boundaries are all but transparent. Indeed, the film is about breaking down barriers-national, linguistic, physical, and bureaucratic-in pursuit of knowledge. When the barriers are broken, it culminates in an event which is world-changing. It suggests that humankind has reached the point where it is ready to enter the community of the cosmos, and it provides an American, Roy Neary, to demonstrate some of the characteristics which perhaps make humans worthy to do so. It should be noted that while it is a computer interface which makes the final musical conversation with the alien guests possible, the characteristics which allow Neary to make his way to the final meeting at Devil's Tower have little to do with technical expertise or computer literacythe virtues which we are being told in the nineties are basic for evolving twenty-first century humans. Rather, Neary demonstrates tenacity, creativity, curiosity, excitement, courage, and, finally and perhaps most importantly, the conviction that, as he says repeatedly in the film, all this "means something. This is important." Almost every critic who has written about Close Encounters discusses its religious dimensions, what B.H. Fairchild, in his excellent 1978 article on the film, identified as "the simple recognition that there is More, that the natural and mundane are not closed but openended and extend ultimately perhaps into the supernatural" (342-49). The spiritual is linked to no particular religion in the film. The volunteers selected by officialdom to interact with the alien visitors attend a chapel service before they troop out to the Mother Ship. Amid a variety of symbols drawn from a many religions, the chaplain prays that the Lord may "send his angels" to guide the travelers on their journey. A higher reality is invoked, but this reality is not the tiny figures that emerge from the ship, rather it is inclusive of them as well as of humankind. Another, nearly contemporary, filmic example of the sense of spiritual yearning seen in Close Encounters, outside a specific religious context, can be found in a scene in Federico Fellini's 1974 filmAmarcord in which boatloads of villagers go out to wait in the cold of the night for the passing of a brightly lighted ocean liner not unlike the Mother Ship in its mysterious enormity. Their anticipation and yearning for the mysterious transit of the huge ship filled with its unseen passengers and traveling into the night while they watch and marvel in their tiny stationary boats may serve to illuminate comments made by Fellini and quoted by Fairchild: Like many people, I have no religion and I am just sitting in a small boat drifting with tide. …

The Blurring of Time in the French Lieutenant's Woman, the Novel and the Film

Abstract: The French Lieutenant's Woman, written by John Fowles in the late 1960s, was adapted to the screen by screenwriter Harold Pinter and director Karel Reisz in the early 1980s. Almost two decades elapsed between the release of the novel and the making of the movie. Such a span in time is particularly meaningful in light of the novel's treatment of temporality. Indeed, the film adaptation of The French lieutenant's Woman reflects the novel's concern with time-its restrictions in real life as well as the possibility to manipulate it in fictional works. In addition, since The French lieutenant's Woman is a 1960s account of nineteenth-century events, the film becomes a 1980s version of a twenty-year-old narrative of Victorian occurrences. . . . Transcending Time In Literature This novel's treatment of temporality is quite unique insofar as it breaks several literary conventions. First, the work features a highly self-conscious, contemporary narrator, who comments on the nineteenth-century narrative from a twentieth-century perspective. The work is thus not only sprinkled with anachronisms, but also enriched with the narrator's enlightened retrospection. For instance, when he describes Mrs. Tranter's maid Mary, the narrator not only describes her from a modern perspective, but also offers readers information that was not available at the time of the story: Mary's great-great-granddaughter, who is twenty-two years old this month I write in, much resembles her ancestor; and her face is known over the entire world, for she is one of the more celebrated younger English film actresses. But it was not, I am afraid, the face for 1867.(65) Numerous temporal allusions are packed into this short excerpt. First, Mary's descendance implies another time period; then, the exact age of her offspring is given at a precise moment in time (the month when the above paragraph was written). Finally, contemporary beauty criteria are contrasted with those from the Victorian Age. These aspects stress the evanescence of time, whether it be in the passing of generations, in the time elapsed during the writing of a novel, or in the evolution of beauty canons. The narrator also uses his twentieth-century retrospection to contrast his era with that of his characters: "One of the commonest symptoms of wealth today is destructive neurosis; in his [Charles's] century it was tranquil boredom"(16). Sometimes, the narrator further transcends time by drawing parallels between the story's present, past and future: Perhaps you see very little link between the Charles of 1267 with all his newfangled French notions of chastity and chasing after Holy Grails, the Charles of 1867 with his loathing of trade, and the Charles of today, a computer scientist deaf to the screams of the tender humanists who begin to discern their own redundancy. (234) By weaving elements from past and future into the general narrative, a blurring of temporal dimensions occurs that goes well beyond the simple reshuffling of plot events encountered in conventional literary works. Second, the narrator openly asserts and comments on the power that the novelist has over his narrative's temporality: You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work so that· the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different reasons.... Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. (81) Here, the narrator entwines the notions of tense and fiction. His fictional power enables him to recreate the past and to toy with the future of his characters-he may change his mind at Chapter Thirteen and deviate from the future he predicted at the onset of the novel. In doing so, he creates a diegesis that ignores the boundaries of past, present, and future and is only limited by the confines of the narrator's imagination. …

Psycho's Allegory of Seeing

Abstract: Recent studies by Rosalind Krauss and Martin Jay consider surrealist photography and film as part of a more generalized revolt against the philosophical tradition of the Cartesian self; for both writers, surrealism's protest often took the form of an assault against ocularcentrism-against the privileged status accorded the sense of vision as the correlative of the grail of hermeneutics, the achievement of some true theoretical perspective. For Krauss and Jay, Bataille's enucleated eye, Magritte's trompe d'oeil and Dali's sliced-eyeball are artistic anticipations of the philosophic interrogation of hermeneutics intensified later in the century by deconstruction.1 Of course, Hitchcock's admiration for DaIi is well known; their collaboration on Spellbound (1945) reflects a fascination with the eye as a metaphor that recurs in Vergigo (1958) and Psycho (I960).2 At the center of Psycho is Marion Crane's dead eye, which, in a famous dissolve, gradually replaces the image of a bathtub drain. Critics have interpreted the dissolve in many ways, without consensus.3 Following Krauss and Jay, I will examine it and the film as a whole as an extension of the same subversion of hermeneutics they find manifested in surrealism. At the same time, adapting the thesis of Paul de Man, I explore Psycho-in both its plot and its reflections on itself-as an allegory of seeing in the figurative sense of understanding-a dramatization of the necessity for the seer/interpreter to mistake a sign for a signified presence.4 If Marion's eye only apparently sees, it may signify the illusion of true vision or reading; its emergence from the dissolving bathtub drain suggests how both may be considered apertures to nothingness. By this reasoning, what the eye takes in, in viewing or reading, is like diluted blood down the drain-a sign only of emptiness and death. What the world calls perception may be no more than illusions that temporarily keep mortality at bay. On this level, what we see or read in Psycho is reducible to the drain-eye image that subverts psychologies and perceptions as mistakings of absences. No one-not Marion, Norman, Arbogast, Sam, LiIa, the psychiatrist, or the critic-ever sees truly; each is condemned to the search for a signifying presence ultimately exposed as illusory-love or money, reason or cause, theme or meaning-as a substitute for nothingness. Psycho allegorizes this universal delusion by showing that its characters' hunts for signified presences are mistaken. Marion Crane's search for love necessitates, first, a search for money. It is as if an advance toward a goal requires first a retreat, a substitution, a mistaking; the embezzlement is a literal example of "taking" new signs. (Of course, the necessity to "take" signs as real is as fundamental to reading or viewing films as it is to love, so Marion Crane's misappropriation only repeats as it exposes, belatedly, the viewer's act in taking as real a cinematic play of light and dark signs.) The idea that Marion's substitute goal, cash, consists of new signs momentarily taken as referents is reinforced when Marion hides it, like a signified message, inside an envelope. The idea that cash functions as the object of the viewer's curiosity is reinforced by the way the camera lingers over it. If we take Marion's cash as a metaphor for the sought-after locus of signified meaning-the goal of hermeneutics-we can observe how the film dramatizes the futility of its pursuit. The cash or putative meaning is wrapped in an envelope and also a newspaper, like the destination of a reading, and it is this signifier that provides the rationale for Arbogast's interpretive quest (which in turn triggers Lila's, which triggers the psychiatrist's and then the reader's). Marion converts some of her signsinto a new putative signified, a car, and hides the rest, which Norman unknowingly returns to her car. In the end, signifier and an interchangeable putative signified-cash, car, Cartesian self-sink into the quicksand, down the drain, into oblivion. …

Despair Not, Neither to Presume: The French Lieutenant's Woman: A Screenplay

Abstract: Both Magritte's and Pirandello's works involve as their primary subject other works of art. In both, the border between the interior work and the larger reality that surrounds it is obscure, creating a confusion of reality levels. And both raise questions regarding the nature of art and the relationship between reality and representations of reality. . . . while operating within the tradition of illusionistic art, both Pirandello and Magritte subvert that tradition.... they turn illusionism against itself, creating illusions inside illusions, ambiguous structures that confuse the audience and threaten to break down the distinction between life and art. (Gaggi 35-37) Since The French lieutenant's Woman opened in 1981, critics and scholars alike have focused upon its novelistic verisimilitude: Is the movie faithful to John Fowles's book? Specifically, does it successfully convey the novel's '"diachronic' dilemma" (Fowles X)-the result primarily of its metafictional devices? As you will recall, the story of Sarah Woodruff, the "French lieutenant's woman," takes place in mid-Victorian England, but the novel's omniscient narrator is placed firmly in the twentieth century. Never distancing himself from the work-in-progress, he intrudes upon the tale with observations about the past and present, and reflections about the novelist's craft: This story I'm telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my characters' minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in ... a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God. He may not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does. But I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the word. (Fowles 80) By calling attention to his task, Fowles undermines the fiction's powers of illusion. Frederick P.W. McDowell writes that his "commentary approximates the 'alienation effects' used in modern theater, whereby the dramatist interrupts his work to dispel illusion... and to remind his audience that a fiction, not a transposed reality, is being presented" (428). As Barry Olshen points out, one of this novel's subjects "is the contemporary novel itself, or rather the difficult task of writing a contemporary novel" (89). In order to accommodate both modern and mid-Victorian viewpoints, Harold Pinter wrote a twentieth-century frame story whose characters and action parallel Fowles's nineteenth-century one; to reflect this "novel-in-the-making" (Wolfe 127; Olshen 89), the playwright wrote a screenplay about a "film-in-the-making." In the nineteenth-century tale, Sarah Woodruff has a brief affair with Charles Smithson, a Victorian gentleman; in the twentieth century, Anna, the actress playing the role of "Sarah" in a movie titled The French lieutenant's Woman, has an affair with Mike, the actor playing the role of "Charles." Scholars and critics have had mixed reactions to Pinter's solution to the "'diachronic' dilemma." Some, like Joanne Klein and Enoch Brater, find the framing story successful. Klein writes that it "faithfully materializes a legacy of problematic concerns from the novel" (151). More directly, Brater calls Pinter's solution "a clever juxtaposition of manners, plots, and social and sexual mores" (142). Others grow rapturous. Neil Sinyard, for one, pronounces it "a magnificent metaphor" (135). Less enthusiastically, but nonetheless admiringly, Peter Conradi calls Pinter's solution "a curious commentary on a remarkable novel" (56). There exists, however, a less appreciative camp. Reviewing the film when it first opened, Vincent Canby found the contemporary frame to be peculiarly flat. It illuminates nothing more about the differences between the manners and mores of 1867 and 1981 than any reasonably alert 1981 adult might be expected to bring into the movie theater uninstructed. …

Driving Doctor Ford

Abstract: The motion picture House of Games is a "battle of the sexes" played out by its protagonists. Judith Fetterley has argued that much of what passes for romance in American literature is a power struggle between the main male and female characters disguised as romantic involvement. House of Games presents a rather brutal power struggle with a taste of sex in the middle for flavor, as it were. Sea of Love, Fatal Attraction, War of the Roses, and Sleeping with the Enemy (to name a few) have carried this theme to extremes. House of Games is an earlier instance of this explicitness about the violently adversarial nature of relations between the genders. I will discuss House of Games in terms of its relation to Hollywood genres, and evaluate its relation to the liberating potential of the "woman's film." Feminism is a theoretical and practical underpinning of my examination of this film. I will be approaching the film as a text (with the understanding that a cinematic text has properties peculiar to itself which must be specifically taken into account). As a text, however, the film is read or interpreted using the framework of a general semiotic approach within which a variety of other strategies and critical tools may also be brought into play. This text permits a great deal of latitude for word games, beginning with its title. Both "house" and "game" are basic tropes or narrative generators. "House" indicates an area of containment, safety, familiarity, and intimacy, a circumscribed space associated in most iconographies with the feminine. Games imply a certain kind of open-endedness and ambiguity, in that they incorporate the operations of chance. These are bounded, however, by a set of pre-ordained rules. Games (as understood in most cultures), though they may take a wide range of forms, are consistently based on an agonistic model-there must be a loser for there to be a winner in most games. While the unknown and challenge or adventure are implied in a game, it also suggests a model of laws or the Law-generally a nexus associated, historically and in Lacanian psychoanalytic thinking, with the masculine. It is a conflict between candor and knowledge on the one hand and deception and ambiguity on the other that propels the plot of House of Games. What I particularly want to examine is how the central conflict that drives the plot is coded through gender, and what are some of the issues involved in this coding. First of all, to place this particular text in the larger context of classic cinema, House of Games makes sophisticated use of classic genres, in particular film noir or thriller and the "woman's film." It doesn't closely conform to these but rather evokes them and works variations and deformations on them. In addition, it must be remembered that a genre is a contingent label we use to talk about a group of works sharing some part of a set of characteristics which are not hard and fast. At any rate, one of the genres evoked is the "woman's film" of the 1930-5Os, for a working definition of which I turn to Annette Kuhn: One of the defining generic features of the woman's picture as a textual system is its construction of narratives motivated by female desire and processes of spectator identification governed by female point of view. ("Women's Genres" 339) Several feminist critics have attempted to locate sources of resistance to dominant patriarchal ideology in the Hollywood tradition in the so-called "woman's film."1 While films such as Stella Dallas, Mildred Pierce, Letter from an Unknown Woman, and Now, Voyager, for example, offered resistant moments, they generally functioned as pieces of the Hollywood apparatus and did not pose much of a fundamental challenge to the system of representation of women in Hollywood cinema. As Christine Gledhill has suggested, the "woman's film" is historically a subset of melodrama. In the usual Hollywood melodrama there figures some kind of fated and/or failed romance as well as a deception, usually practiced upon the woman. …

Comparison of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows and R.W. Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul; or, How Hollywood's New England Dropouts Became Germany's Marginalized Other

Abstract: Comparison of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows and R.W. Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul; Or, How Hollywood's New England Dropouts Became Germany's Marginalized Other Rainer Werner Fassbinder loved watching movies, and he loved making movies. Above all he loved making movies of the ones he had watched. Echoes of his favorite director-Raoul Walsh, Michael Curtiz, Josef von Sternberg, Billy Wilder, and above all Douglas Sirk-can be found in most of his films. Sometimes the allusions to the classics are Fassbinder's idiosyncratic borrowing of UFA/Hollywood style-melodrama, camera angles, glitzy decor. His Lili Marleen, for example, offers viewers a parody of Hollywood high budget, high concept films which emphasize style over substance. Even the more experimental Fontane Effi Briest shows the influence of the Hollywood masters in its use of tropes of confinement-door frames, windows, veils. Perhaps the only films of his which do not derive their style from directors of classic cinema are early works such as Katzelmacher and Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? The static nature and forced ugliness of these films seem to be uniquely Fassbinderian although the minimalist rhythms could be traced to Jean-Marie Straub and the emphasis on post adolescent ennui owes much to Jean-Luc Godard.1 Occasionally Fassbinder's allusions become full-scale homages to his heroes as in his remakes of Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, Sternberg's The Blue Angel, or Sirk's All That Heaven Allows. But even these remakes are highly personalized, and thus their source is not always immediately noticeable. The writer/fading actress relationship in Veronika Voss, for example, may suggest its origins in Wilder's Sunset Boulevard. Moreover, Fassbinder's use of lighting, shadows, veils, and reflective surfaces is clearly indebted to Wilder and other European/Hollywood directors. But the emphasis on addiction and the repressive nature of relationships stems from Fassbinder. Similarly, the title Lola may reveal that the inspiration for this film comes from The Blue Angel, even though again Fassbinder made the original film's emphasis of human and institutional corruption conform to his own vision of human weakness and addiction. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is the director's homage to Douglas Sirk in general and to his All That Heaven Allows in particular. Unlike with his other remakes of Hollywood classics, however, the relationship between the original film and Fassbinder's is not always clear. Whereas reviewers, for example, seldom forget to mention that Veronika Voss and Lola are remakes, they sometimes fail to acknowledge Sirk's film as the inspiration for Ali. Indeed, as biographers point out, the story of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul can be found in Fassbinder's The American Soldier, a film which predates the director's fascination with Sirk (Fischer and Hembus 90). Yet, Fassbinder, who had become familiar with Sirk's work by the time he made AH: Fear Eats the Soul, clearly had Sirk's film in mind when making his movie. There are too many similarities between the films to overlook his indebtedness to Sirk. His "remake" of the Hollywood classic, however, reflects the experience he had while watching All That Heaven Allows. It is not a remake of the movie itself. In reflecting his experience, rather than imitating Sirk's characters, situations, and melodrama, Fassbinder fashions a complex parody. He changes locale, period, and atmosphere. He moves the story from a romanticized if somewhat satirized New England in the fifties to a de-romanticized Munich in the seventies and uses ensemble players rather than star actors. The upper-middle class professionals and drop-outs of Sirk's movie, created in a Hollywood dream factory, are in Fassbinder's film lower-middle class German workers rooted in social reality. These differences might seem superficial at first, but they are tied directly to more profound changes in theme and vision. For with them, Fassbinder relocates the story from the personal sphere of banal lovers' quarrels to the sociopolitical sphere of discrimination and exploitation. …

"This Is a Riot You're In": Hollywood and American Mass Culture in Nathanael West's the Day of the Locust

Abstract: It is an obvious understatement to say that Hollywood has played an important role in twentieth-century American culture As much as the films which it produced, Hollywood itself has been a central component of our national mythology; a site, both real and symbolic, for the collision of conflicting energies and agendas: business and art, work and leisure, success and failure, sex and death Hollywood possesses a contradictory cultural identity as both the "promised land" and the "wasteland," a redemptive paradise built upon an ethos of leisure and consumption or the epicenter of cultural crisis and moral decay It has often evoked the sense of an ending: not just the terminal point in the historical process of Western expansion but the conclusion of a journey toward national identity, either the fulfillment or the betrayal of the American dream For some Hollywood has been an embodiment of our national character while for others it has been the center of cultural influences which are essentially "foreign," a contaminating presence which needs to be censored and contained Above all Hollywood has been America's dream factory, both the center and the source of collective fantasies in the movies, and as such its image has been tied to an ongoing set of arguments over the character of American mass culture Of course it was Hollywood's films of the twenties and thirties which comprised its most direct contribution to American culture But Hollywood was always more than just a place where movies were made During its "Golden Age," Hollywood was a highly charged, symbolic site in the American landscape, a focal point of mass expectations and desires, by turns both envied and reviled On the one hand it offered a remarkably appealing set of images and values to the rest of the country based upon an ambiance of opportunity and affluence, an exaggerated version of the American myth of success At the same time Hollywood was linked to an image of sexual excess and moral lassitude which made it a frequently evoked symbol of crumbling social values and cultural decline Here, unique geographic, technological, and economic circumstances combined to produce a social milieu rife with metaphorical possibilities for the interpretation of American culture, making it a microcosm of the best and worst in American life As Katherine Fullerton Gerould observed, "Hollywood, you see, is not simply a suburb of Los Angeles; it is a suburb of every town in the country" (157), and it is precisely this larger, symbolic purview which Nathanael West evoked in his 1939 novel The Day of the Locust One of the most important discursive sites in which arguments about Hollywood have been presented is prose fiction, particularly that genre of American writing known as the Hollywood novel Fictional treatments of Hollywood have generally functioned, with varying degrees of purpose and insight, as commentaries on mass culture, and the tenor of this commentary has been largely critical Hollywood fictions of this period often reveal what Warren Susman refered to as "the great fear" which runs through much of the writing of the twenties and thirties: a pervasive cultural anxiety about "whether any great industrial and democratic mass society can maintain a significant level of civilization, and whether mass education and mass communication will allow any civilization to survive" (107) While much postmodern cultural theory sets out to reclaim the products of mass culture through deconstructive or resistant readings aimed at uncovering oppositional elements at work there, fiction about Hollywood has most often embraced an analysis of mass culture which sees in it a mechanism of control based on manipulation and deceit For most writers who approached it, the Hollywood "culture industry" was synonymous with vulgarity, sham, and deception and it often served as a convenient symbol for the moral and aesthetic emptiness of ersatz American culture Writing out of implicitly modernist cultural assumptions, their works frequently presented Hollywood as an emblem of cultural decline, a totalized and demonic figure for a system of cultural production which they saw as undermining established aesthetic forms and values through the mass market formulas of popular entertainment …

Homer Simpson Meets Frankenstein: Cinematic Influence in Nathanael West's the Day of the Locust

Abstract: In The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West adopts a cinematic motif to enhance his criticism of the culture that developed around the Hollywood film industry. West invokes images suggestive of James Whale's 1931 film Frankenstein to comment on the indistinct boundaries between cinematic illusion and Hollywood life. West's most obvious use of Whale's Frankenstein motif is in his development of Homer Simpson, but he also draws on incongruous elements of the film that parallel the Hollywood he observes. In commenting on the Hollywood community and employing a motif in his novel, West offers more than simple criticism of the superficial aspects of Hollywood culture: he reveals the social disorder that occurs when a body of people adopt the artifice of film and integrate it into their lives as a representation of reality. West intermittently lived and worked in Hollywood during a period when the horror film achieved wide popularity. He lived there while employed by Columbia Pictures from July to December of 1933, and returned in 1935, eventually working at Republic Studios from 1936 to 1938, and briefly at R.K.O. in 1938.1 West began his work on The Day of the Locust in 1935 and 1936. It was accepted for publication by Random House in May 1938 (Martin 203-89). Through both his personal experience with Hollywood and his own interest in popular culture, West would have been familiar with the wide appeal of the Frankenstein films and the imagery associated with them.2 The horror picture enjoyed popularity beginning in 1931 with Whale's film. As an avid observer of popular culture, West would have certainly been familiar with Frankenstein and with its sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, which was released in 1935 (Florescu 193). These films were initially so successful that in 1938, Universal Studios re-released such films as Dracula and Frankenstein, and produced new films intended to exploit their popularity (Dardis 175). The cinematic Frankenstein motif is most apparent in West's development of Homer Simpson. West provides an oblique clue to the film influence late in the novel during a scene in which Homer is introduced to the child, Adore Loomis. Adore's mother observes that he "thinks he's the Frankenstein monster" when Adore twists his face into a caricature of the monster made famous by Boris Karloff. Adore, in turn, redirects our attention back to the character at whom he is "making faces": Homer (140). This clue introduces a new perspective on earlier descriptions of Homer, which, in retrospect, reveal a striking physical parallel to the monster. Tod Hackett's first view of Homer Simpson in Chapter 6 is of a man with "fever eyes and unruly hands" (79). This is only an introduction to the bizarre figure that will emerge in Chapter 8. Therein, West reveals his own composite creation in Homer as he awakens from a nap: ... he began to work laboriously toward consciousness. The struggle was a hard one. His head trembled and his feet shot out. Finally his eyes opened, then widened... He lay stretched out on the bed, collecting his senses and testing the different parts of his body. Every part was awake but his hands. They still slept. He was not surprised. They demanded special attention, had always demanded it. When he had been a child, he used to stick pins into them and once had even thrust them into a fire. Now he used only cold water. He got out of the bed in sections, like a poorly made automaton, and carried his hands into the bathroom. He turned on the cold water. When the basin was full, he plunged his hands in up to the wrist. They lay quietly on the bottom like a pair of strange aquatic animals. When they were thoroughly chilled and began to crawl about he lifted them out and hid them in a towel. (82) Homer does not awaken from sleep, but comes to life, much like Mary Shelley's monster, who quickens with a "convulsive motion." 3 His individual physical components are disassociated from one another, often functioning independent of any control he may attempt to exert over them. …

Joy Luck: The Perils of Transcultural "Translation"

Abstract: Picture yourself in a Tokyo cinema. The film you are about see is based on a novel written by a young American woman who grew up in Japan, and her story is that of a foursome of expatriate American mothers and their ethnically American but culturally somewhat Japanese daughters. The lights go out, and the movie begins. The opening scenes depict life in the American-Japanese corporate community, and being an expatriate yourself the activities seem familiar. You are ready to go where the story will take you. The scene shifts, and a flashback brings you to of all places New York, your old home. It is an episode from the life of one of the mothers. She, her husband, and a corporate associate (judging from his suit) are seated around a living room coffee table. The woman, a young wife at the time, lowers her eyes, carefully pours out scotch into a pair of shot glasses and, with a smile and bows of her head, passes the glasses to the men. Without so much as a nod to his wife the husband says, "Mr. Anderson.... Terrible shame for you and your company the deal through to have fallen." He frowns and shakes his head gravely. The associate grimaces and draws air in through his clinched teeth with a loud sucking sound. "Mr. Taylor," he says shaking his head, "The contract with demands too great to be met was written." Hey, you suddenly hear a voice inside you say, wait a minute. Something in this picture doesn't fit, and I know what it is: These guys aren't speaking American English; they're talking Japanese! The two men on screen raise their glasses together, throw back their heads, and empty the liquid contents. They set their tumblers back down on the table with a single thump. These guys aren't American businessmen, continues the inner voice with a mounting sense of alarm, they're kereitsu "salarymen"! You look around nervously at the Japanese audience. Do they recognize this stuff for what it is? Or do they credit it as accurate by virtue of the ethnic background of the author? You have nothing against Japanese language and culture, but if only this movie could convey the tone of your language and the texture of your culture. The next thing you know the salaryman's young son buys a handgun and is killed in a high school shootout. The young wife in her grief runs off to join a religious cult. You sink deeper into your seat. Several years ago I listened to the audiotape of The Joy Luck Club twice. Amy Tan had recorded it herself, and I liked listening to her read. Also, being a Chinese-American myself, the scenes of Chinese-American life rang familiar and true. Be that as it may, I needed to hear the parts set in China a second time. My Mandarin is fluent but precarious, my personal lexicon is abridged, and there is a definite limit to my eloquence. So I had to confirm my impressions. After second review, the dialogue did indeed seem wrong. In fact, it was worse than wrong; it was phony-stereotypically wooden and metaphorical. Chinese is highly metaphorical, but the full richness of the language derives from its mixture of metaphor, abstraction, and wit. Had Amy Tan written like James Fenimore Cooper and given her characters an acrobatic Oxbridge command and delight in the spoken word she would have come closer to the mark. In the book's prologue the main character's mother contemplates her daughter's future in America through the statement "And over there she will always be too full to swallow any sorrow." There is the common Chinese expression "to eat bitterness," but this means to endure hardship as in "by taking twenty credits next semester you're really going to eat bitterness" or to put in hard work as in "you say you want to master the piano, but are you willing to eat bitterness?" No Chinese, whether in vernacular use, lyrical prose, or poetry, could conceivably make the awkward statement that the main character's mother does. Later in the story Auntie Lena tells her daughter, "You cannot put mirrors at the foot of the bed. …

A Season of Fear: The Blacklisted Teleplays of Abraham Polonsky

Abstract: A Season of Fear is Abraham Polonsky's metaphor for political repression. It is the title of his 1956 blacklist novel, which crystallizes the existential attitude that pervades his significant writings: In today's world every man has the expectation of becoming a refugee. You can even be a refugee in your own country, or should I say especially in your own country? Well, a refugee can retain his dignity only by becoming an exile, a man who passionately struggles to return home, to overturn the government which has banished him or pursued him. A man must love his native land and refuse to give it up. (Polonsky 52)1 The author of these words, which were written from the perspective of an outcast during the Cold War, is the same Polonsky who is openly acknowledged as the creator of two cinema classics: Body and Soul (1947), which essentially defined the Hollywood boxing movie, and Force of Evil (1948), a film noir/social problem film/cult phenomenon of enduring celebrity. This is the same writer-director of Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here ( 1969), a postblacklisting story with rich autobiographical resonances, which deals with a renegade American Indian's struggle against the white man's oppressive authority.2 It is known that Polonsky was blacklisted for seventeen years-from I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1951), the last screen credit under his own name, until Madigan (1968). What is not so openly acknowledged is the work which he created during this period utilizing pseudonyms or "fronts." Most noteworthy of these writings are his feature-length screenplay for Odds Against Tomorrow (1959, directed by Robert Wise, with a writing credit "signed" by John O. Killens and Nelson Gidding) and teleplays for the CBS-TV series You Are There (1953-1955, directed by Sidney Lumet, with writing credits attributed to fronts "Jeremy Daniel" and "Leo Davis"). This is work which has acquired a critical cachet of its own: Odds Against Tomorrow was embraced by the Cahiers du Cinema critics-one of the three all-time favorite films, along with The Best Years of Our Lives and The Asphalt Jungle, of the great French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville; while the You Are There series enjoys classic standing from the television "Golden Age," with two Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award for Outstanding Achievement in Education (Wilmington; Ceplair 43-47). He was called "the most dangerous man in America" by Congressman Harold H. Velde during Polonsky's appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) on 25 April 1951, a characterization prompted by his awareness of Polonsky's "Black Radio" activities for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS-now the CIA) during WWII. And yet here he was in the 1950s writing the screenplay text for a United Artists feature film on racial intolerance, and providing regular commentaries (via the You Are There teleplays) on intellectual and political freedom in a dominant electronic medium for major capitalist sponsors-the CBS Television Network, the Prudential Insurance Company of America, and America's Electric Light and Power Companies. The exile strikes back. What sort of a day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our time . . . and You Were There. (Tag for each You Are There episode, written by Abraham Polonsky) Charles W. Russell (an actor in The Purple Heart and The Late George Apley) was the producer and something of a hero of the You Are There affair. He had always considered himself apolitical. But he did employ three blacklisted writers, Walter Bernstein (The Front, The Molly Maguires), Arnold Manoff (a novelist, Telegram from Heaven, and short story writer, "All You Need Is One Good Break," of some note), and Abraham Polonsky, to provide teleplays, under the cover of fronts, for a series called Danger, 1951-54; (see Appendix I for a selective listing of Danger episodes, the blacklisted authors who wrote them, and the "fronts" employed). …

From der Reigen to la Ronde Transposition of a Stageplay to the Cinema

Abstract: Arthur Schnitzler, a Viennese contemporary of writer and physician Sigmund Freud (Nehring 179-94) wrote many plays and short stories. He is considered to be perhaps the best chronicler of fin-de-siecle Vienna and the dying Austro-Hungarian empire (Alter 11). Schnitzler wrote Der Reigen in 1896-97. Max Ophiils made the film La Ronde, based on Schnitzler's play, about a half a century later in France. Both works consist often dialogues, or ten scenes, portraying a series of preludes to sexual intercourse where one person has sex with a new partner until in the final scene the circle is completed and we are back with the original female partner. Except for sex, these people have nothing in common. In none of the scenes is sexual intercourse portrayed. Yet in the hands of these two artists, play and film transcend their narrow banal subject matter and let us reflect on the elusiveness of love and sex without commitment. Schnitzler seems to view man and his world as a rather absurd combination of chance events where only death stands out as a certainty and towers over all human problems. Therefore the philosophy of carpe diem underlies the characters' hunger for sensual or emotional experiences. This egocentric concept of life, where language unmasks the hypocrisy of the speakers, reveals the stark loneliness of the characters (Alter 72-73) and made Reigen such a disturbing play of human sexuality. According to Susan Sontag, cinema often takes its inspiration from theatrical models. She explores the medium of the cinema: The history of cinema is often treated as the history from theatrical models.... Because the camera can be used to project a relatively passive, unselective kind of vision-as well as a highly ("edited") vision generally associated with movies-cinema is a "medium" as well as an art, in that sense it can encapsulate any of the performing arts and render it in a film transcription. (362) Sontag convincingly shows that movies are images and that the distinctive unit for films is the principle of connection between the images, the relation of a shot to the one that preceded it and the one that comes after (363). With the creation of a narrator and the use of music-a waltz, of course-Max Ophiils connects the scenes in La Ronde, softening Schnitzler's portrayal of sex, loneliness, and death, ever present in his work. liebelei, the first film by Ophiils based on a Schnitzler play, shows the same tendency to substantially modify the emotional tone of the play: "Schnitzler's ferocity seems to dissolve in a generalized sentimentality" (A. Williams 79). The nuances of language so important in the original plays largely have been lost, or perhaps they were impossible to render in French. As the importance of language decreases, all other cinematographic devices gain in importance. The viewer is thus inclined to forget the deeper implications of loneliness, pessimism, hypocrisy, and melancholy. Schnitzler stresses the sexual drive more than Ophiils's romantic film, in which women seem to long for some sort of affection and tenderness, which forever eludes them. What is left is the melancholy of time passing, and living for the moment. The play, as well as the film, shocked censors and public alike. It might therefore be appropriate to give a quick overview of the reception of both. Because of the subject matter, Der Reigen was published in a private printing in 1900 and was not for sale. The work was well received by Schnitzler's friends, but as early as 1903 some scenes evoked sharp criticism in Munich on moral grounds. According to Gerd Schneider's well-researched article on the reception of book, play, and film, it was not any one scene in particular that created an uproar, but how family life, marriage, Christian religious values, the officer class, and the class of actors were defamed and degraded. Yet in the play, not one sexual act is shown; either the lights are dimmed or the curtain falls. …

Auto-Ethnographic Impulse in Rue Cases-Nègres

Abstract: Education stunts rather than educating. Colonial power hinders rather than advancing. Education and colonialism become sites of power and oppression within the framework of the filmic text Rue cases-Negres. This paper investigates how "auto-ethnographic impulse" represents the under- or mis-represented Afro-Caribbean culture (ignored, misnamed, or distorted by the French colonial educational system and media). Rue cases-Negres, anchored to this site, is a particular space where race, class, and power apparatuses intersect, where the colonized artist/intellectual negotiates the decolonization of his/her mind, and where struggle over resistance strategies is articulated. The film's director, Euzhan Palcy, discovered Joseph Zobel's novel La Rue cases-Negres (published in 1950, translated in 1980 as Black Shack Alley) outside of the context of the colonial educational system. Palcy demonstrates the problematical nature of mapping the boundaries of cultural identity when only canonic texts are available. She says that before reading Zobel she only studied white French men: "It was the first time," she says, "that I read a novel by a black man, a black of my country, a black who was speaking about poor people" (Linfield 43). The lack of representation of black Martinicans heightened Palcy's sense of the invisibility of her own culture and her own subject position as a black (and I use the term advisedly) "Third World" woman. Palcy interrupts the institutional power of the media by rewriting Rue cases-Negres. Released in 1983, but set in the early 1930s, the film explores the relationship of the educational system and the media to the construction of cultural identity. The protagonist, Jose, is a boy who grows up watching his grandmother give her labor to the sugar cane fields; he resolves, with her help, to educate himself and to escape poverty. Palcy's fascination with Zobel's novel stems from the novel's parallels with her own experiences in the French educational system as it is reproduced on the island, as well as from the novel's valorization of Martinican experience rather than simple imitation of metropolitan French writers, a strategy employed by Martinican writers before Cesaire arrived on the literary scene. Etienne Lero also condemned West Indian blacks who took pride in the fact that whites could read their work without knowing the color of their skin. Martinicans tended to imitate the metropole because the colonial policy of assimilation propagated a very narrow and rigid definition of culture. Definitions of culture had been transported by the educational system from France and replicated in the colony. Palcy's film demonstrates how the colonized negotiates the validity of her own culture when she has been taught that she has no culture, that France will paternalistically impart its own ways of thinking, however irrelevant, as part of its mission civilisatrice to the savages who are likened to children in need of nurturing. Palcy dramatizes this point through her representation of the education of Jose, and the cementing of the canon of French literature. Jose must read classics of French drama such as Corneille and Moliere which nearly succeed in turning him off reading altogether. Jose must also read Alphonse Daudet, an exemplar of rural folkloric French culture, while his own rural folkloric traditions are ignored. Jose reacts quite differently when introduced to works by black Caribbean authors such as Rene Maran and Claude McKay. Palcy's film functions similarly to these texts, working against dominant notions of value in relation to transplanted colonial culture and canonic texts. The cultural legacy of colonialism is felt in places other than inside the walls of educational institutions. The inhabitants of Martinique are descendants of Carib Indians, the original inhabitants; West African slaves; East Indians, brought over to work after slavery was abolished; and French slave holders or bekes. …

All That Jazz : Bob Fosse's Solipsistic Masterpiece

Abstract: In his magnificent creation All That Jazz, Bob Fosse implies that all our lives are magnificent creations, for there is no reality outside of the imagination that conceives it and the mind that perceives it. Life is an individual experience as each imagination engenders a reality uniquely its own: chipping off raw chunks of matter from the mine of subconscious environmental impressions, spilling chemical and genetic colors onto them, and churning it all into consciousness via the neural, intellectual, and emotional systems. Because our sensibilities register experience differently-depending on temperament, intelligence, interests, moods, values, tastes, etc.-life looks and feels different for everyone. This notion of the relativity of reality is of course the central premise of solipsism, which denies the existence of any objective world because all experience is inseparable from the subject perceiving and responding to it; thus, we ourselves create the realities in which we live. Just as quantum physics acknowledges no reality independent of the perceiver (whose act of perception actually influences the movement of the atoms being observed), so solipsism finds no reality other than the one fashioned through one's perception. I can say, for example, that I know one of my students, or he can say that he knows me-but what kind of knowledge is possible? I know my student as a student only-not as a son, brother, friend, lover, nephew, athlete, or even student in another class where he may be more or less impressive than he is in mine. Similarly, he knows me as a teacher of this particular course, but certainly doesn't know me as a better or worse student may know me, as my wife or children may know me, as my dog or neighbor or niece may know me, etc. Furthermore, we're limited not only by what we know of others but also by what we can respond to in them. Because of this, all siblings have different parents (even when they are the same people): one child sees, understands, or is touched by things in the mother that a sibling is closed or unsympathetic to; another senses and relates to things in the father that are outside of a sibling's relationship with him. Everything, in short, is subject to a variety of interpretations and perceptionsand each is as true as another. Finally, our experience of reality is filtered through particular hues and patterns that imprint them upon our consciousness with such immediacy, cogency, and impact that life as any "I" knows it seems life as it surely must be. All That Jazz is a spectacular achievement in many ways, but certainly one of its greatest triumphs is its artistic expression of a unique vision: life as it is lived, perceived, and experienced through one person's head, heart, and nervous system. That person is Joe Gideon, Fosse's persona for his own-allowing for slight modifications-life story. 1 Fosse uses extraordinary invention to pull us beneath Gideon's skin where we are made to see and feel the world as he does. First, his narrative technique is breathlessly kinetic, almost kaleidoscopic. Rather than presented in a discursive way, the story is virtually hurled at us-past, present, and future converging as explosively as fireworks. This is no narrative line but rather a narrative whirlpool, whipping us around in a way that assaults our senses, bombarding them with colors, costumes, characters, music, dances, and plot fragments. As it sucks us in, we come to experience life in the image of its creator. Joe Gideon's life is hopelessly fragmented: he's currently working on two projects at once-the final stages of editing a movie and the initial stages of preparing a Broadway musical. He's also split- or better, splintered-emotionally as he deals with his past wife in her role as present friend and leading lady of Ms play and mother of his daughter; his daughter, whom he adores but has trouble finding time to adequately accommodate; his present girlfriend, Katie, whom he also loves but is cheating on; his current infatuation, Victoria, who is likely to remain a one-night stand; and the mystifying beauty dressed in white, Angelique, with whom he converses in short scenes interwoven throughout the film and with whom he will sleep but once yet forever, for it is clear that she is death itself. …