WORD INTO IMAGE: WHOSE TEXT IS IT ANYWAY? - Somdatta Mandal

Ever since Edwin S. Porter created the first story-telling film, The Great Train Robbery, in 1903, the opinion has prevailed in many circles that the film is essentially a form of literature. This, however, is not exactly true. While the film and literature both aim to express concrete situations involving the development of a plot and the exposition of character and environment - the mediums through which they seek to accomplish these ends are entirely different. The film depicts concrete situations involving plot development and characterisation, setting and environment, emotional reactions and philosophic attitudes and concepts, by means of a series of plastic images, visual representations projected upon a screen in a darkened room before an audience. It is thus seen and heard by its audience and secures its characteristic form and rhythm by the purely filmic process of editing. The medium of literature, however is words. The novelist originally creates words or sentences in order to achieve the maximum literary power and to stir the thoughts and emotions of the readers. In spite of such basic differences of form and style, it is a well accepted fact that right from the birth of this new art form in the twentieth century, filmmakers had to turn to literature, and especially novels, to go on supplying them with the essential ingredient upon which their narration is based, namely the story.

Though film theorists as well as literary critics constantly dwell upon the interrelationship between the two art forms of literature and film, they also make us aware that both of them are not the same medium. Thus the controversy about the relationship between the novel and the film is perhaps a hundred years old, beginning right from the days of cinematographic history. Though ideally the novel and the film should be regarded as independent entities, several critics have harped upon the question of narrativity and fidelity to the text. Geoffrey Wagner1 , for example, divided film adaptation into three ‘modes’: the transposition, in which a novel is directly given on the screen with a minimum of apparent interference; the commentary, where an original story

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is taken and either purposely or inadvertently altered in some respect; the analogy, which must represent a considerable departure for the sale of making another work of art. According to the French critic, Jean Mitry, “ a novel is a narrative that organizes itself into a world; a film is a world that organizes itself into a narrative”.2 Mitry argues that the adaptation of a novel to film rests of the absurd assumption that there exists a content which can be transferred- transformed - from one form of expression to another. But in art, the content, if the word must be used, does not exist apart from its form. A change of form, therefore, results in another content. In short, in adaptations you express a different thing. Marie Seton, in her biography of Satyajit Ray specifically mentions this problem when she admits, “Books are not primarily written to be filmed, if they were, they would read like scenarios; if they were good scenarios, they would probably read badly as literature”.3 It is for this reason that it is possible for a picture like The Birth of a Nation(1915) both to be a great film and to have as its literary source Thomas Dixon’s tenth-rated novel, The Clansman, which though containing scattered references to various battles of the American Civil War did not match the battle scenes that the director D.W.Griffith conceived and which for sheer brutal impact and plastic eloquence have never been surpassed. But this is a rare case because whenever a viewer goes to see a movie made from a famous novel or short story, he is invariably led to expect a literal transcription to follow, and because most of the time his expectations are not met, he or she is left with a sense of betrayal. It is probably this difference that George Bluestone, the critic, had in mind when he admitted that “the history of the fitful relationship between novel and film: overtly compatible, secretly hostile”4 .

In discussing the various problems of adaptation, Joy Gould Boyum in her book stresses on the notion of ‘fidelity’. “I’ve already suggested that a film might be considered faithful to its source”, she argues, “to the extent that its implicit reading remained within the confines of that work’s interpretative possibilities, to the extent that it neither violated nor diminished them”5 But in the case of a classic literary work, at least, there seems to be something else at stake: that an adaptation will be considered faithful to the extent that its

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interpretation remains consistent with those put forth by the interpretative community, with the interpretation ( or possible interpretations) of that classic work, then that made it classic in the first place. In other words, every great work if not because of its greatness and the chance it offers to replicate in another work of art some of the qualities that accounted for that greatness? Thus the question of fidelity turns out to be more than one of an adaptation being responsible to its masterful source; it becomes an issue of making the adaptation a work that is masterful in itself, so much so that we are also tempted to ask that vital question that scholars often raise, “Whose text is it anyway?” In a discussion on Channel 4 television,6 Martin Amis, Gore Vidal and Salman Rushdie appeared alarmingly in agreement on the subject of the pre-eminence of the cinema in modern culture. It is as if novelists, in millennium fever, are belatedly rushing to embrace the technological future: the Internet, the virtual world, the primacy of the visual as the communicator in a global village. In the arts, film rules, and men of letters are running scared, scrabbling for something called “cineliteracy”. It remains unexplained why these writers presented such a dispiriting sight. Since the birth of cinema it is literature that has inspired film-makers to ever greater technique and artistry in the search for visible expressiveness to rival the power of words. Film’s strength has always been the expression of emotion but as Orson Welles once said, and as Gore Vidal resignedly grumbled on television, the camera is still unable to photograph thought and, as such, it remains a blunt instrument - like a sledge-hammer. Without words, the essence of cinema remains the Eisensteinian formula: the one image juxtaposed against another gives rise to a third in the viewer’s mind ( or, just to prove its irrationality: one plus one equals three). This, as we know makes film the greatest aid to propaganda that exists. Today, the cinema is an Orwellian tool of social engineering of terrifying power, but few novelists have ever got seriously involved with it. This leads to adaptation, with all its inherent problems.

In discussing the aesthetics of film adaptation, the basic question pertains to what the literary text gains or loses in the process of celluloid transposition. The filmisation of

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a literary piece of work depends on the filmmaker’s, specifically, the director’s (a) approach towards the filming of the literary work, (b) the principal objective for putting it on film. Before coming down to the specifics, one must be clear about the difference between translating a literary piece of work from the print media of words to the audiovisual media of film, and adapting a short story or a novel or a play for and through a film. When a director is merely translating, the question of aesthetics would not assume much significance. Even so, it would be pertinent here to quote the instance of Edwin Porter’s film , The Life of an American Fireman (1902). The Edison catalogue (1904) claimed that the aim of this film was to portray the subject “without exaggeration and at the same time to embody the dramatic situations and spectacular effects which so greatly enhance a motion picture performance”. As a way of fusing these two lines of action - the documentary footage of the firemen on the job and - the melodramatic situation of a woman and child threatened by the fire - Porter devised the technique of editing. He used it to adapt the narrative conventions from literature and drama. Editing gave him the distinct advantage of (i) treating the shot as the basic cinematic unit and (ii) to achieve motion both within individual shots as well as in the continuity between them. Porter’s example proves, once and for all, that direct translation from literature to film is not possible because of the tremendous change in dimension and technique of the two media Therefore one goes into the question of adapting a story from the print medium onto film and finds out that there could be several reasons: 1) He/she simply wishes to filmise the story because he likes it very much and therefore wishes to narrate it to his audience through his/her own language of film. ( The filmic rendering of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English August is a case in point. The recent film Earth by Deepa Mehta , which won accolades at the Toronto Film Festival in November 1998 serves to exemplify the point further. Based on Ice-Candy Man by Bapsi Sidhwa, the novel as well as the film renders the trauma of the Partition as seen through the eyes of an eight-year old girl Lenny. Mehta of course confessed that this film was part of a proposed trilogy on human relationships, the earlier production being

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called Fire.) 2) He wishes to adapt because he believes the story lends itself beautifully to the medium of film. (William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights and Vincente Minnelli’s Madame Bovary or the 1956 version of John Huston’s Moby Dick are some examples). 3) He wishes to present his personal interpretation of the original story through his own language of film. (Satyajit Ray’s Charulata which is based on Tagore’s novelette Nastaneer exemplifies the great potential that cinema can offer over ordinary expression in literature. The opening sequence for example, cinematizes in a few minutes of screen time several pages of the story and through this relatively short sequence, we come to know a lot about Charu. A simple device like the opera glasses, a rack of books including the works of Bankim Chandra and a few slatted windows suggest the loneliness, the boredom of her life till Amal enters the scene.) 4) He wishes to re-interpret the story by relocating it in terms of time, setting, place etc. (The immediate examples which come into mind are Akira Kurosawa’s Ran and The Throne of Blood as adaptations of Shakespeare’s King Lear and Macbeth or Satyajit Ray’s Indian adaptation of Ibsen’s play, Enemy of the People) in order to make it acceptable to an ethnically and culturally different audience. 5) He wishes to take up the challenge of recreating a period in history and the original literary source has been picked up mainly for the period element than for its theme or plot. ( The film version of Forster’s A Passage to India is such a period piece reminding us of the Raj days, where the mysticism of the original novel is lost. A similar period piece is also the film based on Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha where the director focuses upon projecting the lavish opulence of a bygone era in mythological India - a soft target for luring the Western audience. 6) He wishes to adapt, because he believes that the story does not lend itself to the film medium and that itself offers a tremendous challenge to him, as an artist, as a craftsman.( The best example that comes to mind is Peter Brooke’s The Mahabharata. It seems fortunate that the director completed his experimental project several years ago otherwise with the rise in Hindu fundamentalism at present

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in India, it would probably have been difficult for him to withstand the Rushdian kind of fatwa imposed upon him especially for the liberty he took in reinterpreting the Indian epic). 7) He wishes to filmise because the story as literature reflects, in some way or another, his own ideological stand on a particular subject/issue and his use of the film medium is to convey this ideology to his audience. (Kumar Sahani’s 1997 directorial venture in interpreting Rabindranath Tagore’s 1933 novel Char Adhyay ( Four Chapters) best exemplifies the case in point. Questioning blind nationalism and blind adherence to a leader, the book does not have a clearly defined narrative, nor a linear story line. In fact, many, like Sahani consider it the breakdown of the novel. Yet, as a director he was drawn by Tagore’s very different ideas about nationalism. “The novel was written in Kandy and already Tagore was moving towards a pan-Asiatic internationalistic vision”, he says. “He believed in the right to self-determination, self-realisation, what was higher than an ethnicised concept of nationalism”. Tagore’s descriptive passages are in the dialogues and the director has been faithful to the novel: “My take-offs are in between the four chapters”.7

I would now like to narrow down my focus on the problems of adaptation by discussing two examples in detail. It is ironic, informative and ultimately not at all surprising that the work of an author considered particularly ‘cinematic’ has yielded a problematic adaptation. Take the case of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.8 In the novel, time is often recalled as a place. The unnamed “English patient”, burnt beyond recognition, lies in bed in the abandoned Villa San Girolamo in Tuscany and, dipping into his well of memory, tells “stories……which slip from level to level” to a young Canadian nurse, Hana. The patient’s notebook is a copy, an English translation of The Histories by Herodotus to which he has added, “cutting and glueing in pages from other books or writing his own observations”, proving that the body of the Heroditus’ text is not fixed for him. Hana, too, is unconstrained by the static text and writes her thoughts in

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the blank pages of books and then hides them in the high shelves of the villa’s library. She reads aloud to the English patient in the evening, unconcerned with chronology or continuity. “She simply brought out the book and said ‘page ninety-six’ or ‘page one hundred eleven’. That was the only locator”. In the post-modern politics of this novel, Ondaatje moves defiantly to a provocative sense of nation and community. In the interactions of politics, culture and language of his four “citizens of morphia” Ondaatje maps new psychic and physical cartographies which exceed rules, rationality and the boundaries that have formed the western cultural hegemony. In forms closer to Teshome Gabriel’s “travelling aesthetics” (cinema) and what Gilles DeLeuze calls “nomad thought”, Ondaatje opens both the community and aesthetics in the novel to all that is decentered, context sensitive, shifting, provisional and dispersive. Brilliantly questioning the western modes of understanding history - from Herodotus to Caravaggio - he explores a new provisional community whose bonds of intimacy and of cultural politics might be described as: I) defiant of closure; 2) rejecting the structural model of beginning, middle and end; and 3) reflecting a cosmic integrity in the realm of representation. Apparently speaking, adapting such a novel for the screen should not have posed any problem for Anthony Minghella, whose screenplay was not a literal translation of the novel. The average reader will probably remember the Oscar-laden epic film The English Patient(1997) more for the drop-dead gorgeous Naveen Andrews who cuts a heroic dashing figure and actually gets together with the delectable Juliette Binoche (something that most men aspire to). But, I think, the real challenge of adaptation lies elsewhere - not in the misplaced faith in the true-to-life replication of Ondaatje’s surface events, but in finding cinematic equivalents to the tensions he inscribed into that web of linguistic interrelations which constitute his text. Apart from the non-verbal signifiers - namely, music, iconic images, ambient sounds and other audio-visual manipulations which according to Joy Gould Boyum’s suggestion is also a ‘language’, it is the literary language which have no cinematic equivalents that pose the real problem and eludes adaptation. At the simplistic level, Ondaatje is not read in order “to find out what happened next”, as E.M. Forster puts it in Aspects of the Novel, but for what is written

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next and how it is worded. Consider for example one line towards the latter part of the novel: It was as if he had walked under the millimetre of haze just above the inked fibres of a map, that pure zone between land and chart, between distances and legend, between nature and storyteller. Sandford called it geomorphology’(p.246) This kind of narration certainly is very difficult to replicate in cinematography. To keep the film to its standard length, the director therefore takes course to ‘larding’ or ‘padding’ the text, often audio-visual pleasures exceeding narrative functionality. Going back to the point I made earlier, we are left with a negative reaction from the audience to the director’s most sincere effort of authentic adaptation.

Coming to home ground, i.e. the Indian context, the problem of authenticity acquires a newer dimension in the sense that often regional languages create more distance. The general problems pertaining to literary translation from SL to TL ( source language to translated language) also become apparent in films. For example, take the instance of Mahasweta Devi’s Hazaar Churasi Ki Ma ( “Mother of 1084”). Told in simplistic terms, it narrates the story of an unsuspecting mother who faces the trauma and tribulations after the death of her young Naxalite revolutionary son in Calcutta when she is called upon to identify his corpse and the narration centres around how she gets involved in her son’s political activities only after his death. Though Govind Nihalani, the director, was true to the spirit of the translated text, and though Mahasweta Devi herself had given a most heartening endorsement for the performance of Jaya Bachchan in the lead role of the mother, for serious viewers across Bengal, the film seemed to have failed in the depiction of the haunting memories of the turbulent 70’s and the depiction of the actual Naxalite movement seemed too insipid. Yet considered from the psychosociological angle, the film can be called successful in the depiction of the lead role of Sujata, the mother, who is the prototype of every urban Indian woman who pretends to have established a great channel of communication with her children, but seldom dig deep to understand what might be bothering them. And after she does, she often gives up, saying that she cannot handle them any more. 8

Another interesting deviation of the same problem occurs when the original text as well as the filmic version happen to involve masters in their respective fields. Take the case when Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World (“Ghare-Baire”)9 is made into a film by the world-class avant-garde filmmaker like Satyajit Ray. Tagore’s 1916 novel, written in the diary form of narrative is a significant, yet rather complex work of fiction. Embedded in it is a historical moment of the Swadeshi in Bengal around the years 1903 to 1908- a period in Indian nationalism when the concerted demand for selfgovernment and the boycott of British goods seemed for a while to rock the very foundation of Imperial administration in India. This theme is dealt in detail by juxtaposing the character of the firebrand revolutionary, Sandip, with Nikhil, the noble but misunderstood hero who personally believed that each individual has a freedom to choose his own way of serving the cause of social and political emancipation. What is more significant is how Tagore portrays the invasion of this swadeshi political movement to “home”, and ultimately brings in a threat to feminine virtue. When such a complex story is made into a film one is naturally interested to see how the symbolic meanings of the “home” and the “world” are analysed. Closely following the text, Ray’s statement that he “did not use a single line of Tagore’s dialogue in the film …. The way people talk in the novel would not be acceptable to any audience”10 puzzles us. Again, though Tagore presents his introspective story through multiple points of view, shuffling through the narratives of the three main characters at random, Ray’s straight forward narration in the film makes some critics feel that the film is structurally weak. One such view11 endorses that the film is divided into three separate water-tight sections. “The first section deals exclusively with Bimala. The political involvement of Sandip and Nikhil covers the second section. The third section primarily focuses on the Hindu/Muslim riot and clash”. These three sections according to this critic do not seem well co-ordinated, or in other workds, one section does not automatically lead to the other. Again, though critics and the viewers in general accept the changes when a work of art is transferred from one medium to another, from one set of codes to another, one of the most frequently raised questions regarding The Home and the World is that whereas Tagore left his novel rather

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“open-ended” ( with the communal riots breaking out, Sandip runs away to safety and Nikhil rides off into the night to face the hostile mob), Ray makes his story rather “wellclosed”. In the film, Bimala is seen looking out of the window and she sees the people carrying in Nikhil’s dead body in a procession and immediately the image of the widowed Bimala fills up the screen. The film, considered one of Ray’s failures, is now merely referred to as a definite ‘period’ story. Tagore had come to realize that “cinema continues to be a sycophant to literature because no creator has yet liberated it from this servitude by the strength of his own genius”12 and Satyajit Ray attempted to do just that.

Considering the novel versus film debate with special focus on the problems of adaptation, it can therefore be unanimously accepted that as long as popular novels or literary masterpieces will be adapted to the screen, these problems will persist and critics will go on harping that the sanctity of the literary text has been destroyed. Andrey Tarkovsky’s declaration that “the time has come for literature to be separated, once and for all, from cinema”13 can find theoretical acceptance but as long as the film industry relies on literature to go on constantly supplying them with the raw material, adaptation with its varied problems will continue to worry critics, readers and viewers alike. Adaptation of course, can never be synonymous with betrayal of the original work which motivated the adaptation in the first place, except perhaps, in the case of popular cinema of the mainstream where there is this brazen aim of glamorising the text through form and content. An example of this kind of ‘betrayal’ , if of course, one can call it that, is Dev Anand’s film adaptation of R.K. Narayan’s The Guide. One can easily draw a parallel between this kind of film and that of packaging a product beautifully so that its saleability in the mainstream market goes up. Of course this is true of mainstream cinema everywhere. In keeping with the familiar Aristotelian strictures of the well-made play, even Hollywood cinema is goal-driven, its hermeneutic moves through character-based causality towards a logical conclusion. On the other hand, there are also instances when an ordinary run-of the mill story like Khuswant Singh’s A Train to Pakistan can be rendered on the screen to depict the horror, trauma of the 1947 Partition more or less accurately. Though it can be argued that a cinematic adaptation of any work of fiction at

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least helps the less perceptive reader/viewer to understand and appreciate that particular work of art or oeuvre of the novelist better, it would be appropriate to conclude the eternal debate by quoting from Joy Gould Boyum: In assessing an adaptation, we are never really comparing book with film, but an interpretation with an interpretation - the novel that we ourselves have recreated in our imaginations, out of which we have constructed our own individualized ‘movie’, and the novel on which the filmmaker has worked a parallel transformation. For just as we are readers, so implicitly is the filmmaker, offering us, through his work, his perceptions, his visions, his visions, his particular insight into his source. An adaptation is always, whatever else it may be, an interpretation”. 14 Henry James’s assertion that “Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints” also ably sums up the relationship of literature and film.

Notes and References 1

Geoffrey Wagner. The Novel and the Cinema. New York: Asso. Univ. Press, 1975.

2

Jean Mitry. Esthetique et psychologie du cinema, Paris, Vol.I Les Structures, 1963. Trans.and quoted by Gaston Roberge, The Subject of Cinema. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1990.

3

Marie Seton. Portrait of a Director: Satyajit Ray London: Dennis Dobson, 1971. Rpt. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1976.

4

George Bluestone. Novels Into Film: The Metamorphosis of Fiction into Cinema. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California P, 1957.

5

Joy Gould Boyum. Double Exposure: Fiction into Film. Calcuuta: Seagull Books, 1989.

6

A review of this programme by Margaret Leclre entitled “Not Such a Novel Idea” appeared in The Spectator.

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8

. Madhu Jain. “Char Adhyay: Disturbing View”. India Today. July 14,1997,p.92. Michael Ondaatje. The English Patient. London: Bloomsbury, 1992.

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10

Rabindranath Tagore. The Home and the World. Trans. Surendranath Tagore. New York: Macmillan,1919. Rpt. Macmillan India, 1985. In an interview published in a Bangla film-magazine Chitrabhas, Jan-June 1985, p.99. Translation mine.

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12

Bidyut Sarkar. The World of Satyajit Ray. New Delhi: UBSPD, 1992.pp.89-90. ibid. p.56.

13

Andrey Tarkovsky. Sculpting in Time. London: The Bodley head, 1986.p.15.

14

Boyum, pp.61-62.

Somdatta Mandal teaches English and American Literature at the University of Calcutta. She also works as Guest Lecturer at Rabindra Bharati University, Calcutta. A Fulbright scholar, she has several national and international publications to her credit, and her special area of interest is in the interrelationship of literature and film.

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