Calendar: Monday

Impossible Adaptations

The impossible performed; the unimaginable imagined; the unfilmable filmed.

What can and what cannot be adapted to film? It’s a question that seems, at first, to be closely related to the central concern of translation: what can be translated, and what is lost in translation? But the objectives are in fact diametrically opposed, for the successful translation is the invisible one, the wholly transparent work through which the reader can experience the original just as if he or she were reading it fluently. The successful adaptation, however, is not invisible but equivalent, not transparent but reflective: it presents itself as the equal of its source, as the same but different.

There are works easy to adapt. How do we know them? One way is that when successfully adapted, the resulting film does exactly what we expect of it, precisely what we want it to do. This is not a criticism, but an observation. We say, ‘that’s just as I imagined it!’ or, as Roger Ebert wrote of Pakula’s excellent Presumed Innocent, a rendering of a book by Scott Turrow, ‘having read the novel, I was nevertheless in suspense during a great deal of the movie.’ Great films are made of works easy to adapt, and just as a successful adaptating job doesn’t necessarily result in a successful film, a lousy adaptation of a book can itself be terrific cinema. more

There are also works so difficult to adapt that they seem impossible. How do you film historical collage, or a massive, multi-volume novel set almost exclusively within memory and mental states, or instructions on how best to die? What if there’s no storyline at all, or characters? Movies, we are frequently told, are all about action; what if nothing happens?

In a remarkable essay published in Sight and Sound in 1961, that great cinematic adapter Stanley Kubrick stated a position so diametrically opposed to conventional wisdom as to be at face value truly bizarre: “The perfect novel from which to make a movie is, I think, not the novel of action but, on the contrary, the novel which is mainly concerned with the inner life of its characters. It will give the adaptor an absolute compass bearing, as it were, on what a character is thinking at any given moment of the story. And from this he can invent action which will be an objective correlative of the book’s psychological content, will accurately dramatise this in an implicit, off-the-nose way without resorting to having the actors deliver literal statements of meaning.”

I take Kubrick’s point to be that the assumption that what movies do best is tell stories is completely wrong. He is, of course, correct. Movies tell stories remarkably poorly, especially in comparison to novels. What film does best is evoke mood, generate atmosphere, stimulate feeling – exactly what prose is worst at. The eeriest of Lovecraft and Poe, the funniest of Rabelais and Twain, the most romantic of Brontë and Austen, the most tragic of Hardy and Dostoevsky – great artists all, none can surpass the achievements in tone, in emotion, of the cinema’s greats: Edgar G. Ulmer, Tex Avery, Michael Powell, Douglas Sirk. Kubrick recognized that while a novel can (and perhaps needs to) use a plot as its skeleton, for stories are what novels are best at, in order to adapt that novel the plot must be regarded as unimportant.

Most of the films in this series have been adapted from novels of such exceptional quality and such experimental form as to make ‘straight’ filming unimaginable, and all are from texts that refuse that perennial command of simplicity, ‘less is more.’ These are over-reaching texts, and the films made from them must similarly risk disaster in order to chance magnificence. Each of them has found innovative, brilliant, and perhaps even great ways of recognizing Kubrick’s insight.

Recently, films like A Cock and Bull Story, Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy, and Tykwer’s Perfume have demonstrated exceptional artistry in achieving the ‘unachievable.’ Art has always thrived under duress, has been at its best when it is most unlikely to succeed. The apparent impossibility of the adaptations in this series has resulted in a stunning variety of last-ditch technique and emergency genius. KB close

Naked Lunch
David Cronenberg, 1991 - 115 min.

David Cronenberg, the world’s greatest living director, adapts William S. Burroughs. The novel’s disconnected, cut-up structure, its incongruous, wildly offensive, and tonally divergent routines, and its hallucinatory and flamboyantly pansexual imagery make straightforward filming impossible. Instead, what he delivered is a bizarre hybrid of Burroughs’ novel, his biography, and Cronenberg’s cavalcades of meat and fluid: a film as trapped between two competing sensibilities (Cronenberg’s and Burroughs’) as Hitchcock and Selznick’s Rebecca. Come for the William Tell routine; stay for the Mugwump jism. 35mm.

Ulysses
Joseph Strick, 1967 - 140 min.

Common consensus is that Joyce’s great novel is the very definition of the impossible adaptation: mammoth in scope, endlessly allusive in structure, and microscopic in its attention to detail both physical and psychological. It must have taken self-confidence bordering on hubris for award-winning documentarian Joseph Strick to set himself the task – and perhaps he even succeeds. Brilliant or demented, his dedication and vision are everywhere in evidence. Whether a grand experience of cinematic transformation or an instance of mid-brow kitsch, it’s unforgettable. 35mm.
Introduced by Assistant Professor Liesl Olson.

Time Regained
Raoul Ruiz, 1999, 158 min.

Reviewing this rendering of Proust’s multi-part novel that adapts almost exclusively from the concluding section, Jonathan Rosenbaum described Time Regained as ‘inviting the spectator who knows Proust to engage in a dialogue with it and the unitiated spectator to get lost in the swirling patterns of an enchanting and highly entertaining trailer.’ Ruiz uses his mastery of cinematic techniques to flatten the linear time of film into a tremendous and moving moment of infinite possibility and relationship, one in which all that can be connected is shown, magically, to already be so. In French with English Subtitles 35mm.

Christabel
James Fotopoulos, 2001, 74 min.

A rendering of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, Christabel presents itself as a kind of internal travelogue, following the titular character in her relationship with another woman. Fotopoulos wrote, ‘One of the reasons I like that poem is that it’s so interior – it’s like a barrage of imagery close to the type of fragmentation that I try to do in my movies,’ and said, ‘One way most adaptations fail is they focus on one aspect of something. But it’s impossible to focus on one aspect of anything. You have to head in, and take on all the aspects. 35mm.

Home, Sweet Home
D. W. Griffith, 1914 - 70 min.

One of Griffith’s experiments in constructing feature-length films, Home, Sweet Home uses John Howard Payne’s popular song as its structuring device, telling multiple thematically connected stories. The framing tale tells Payne’s own story, covering his life as an unhappy but brilliant playwright, composer, and world traveler. Intercut with this are three dramatizations of his song, each exploring a different facet of its redemptive power. Featuring nearly every member of Griffith’s lead actors, including Mae Marsh, Blanche Sweet, Courtnay Foote, Donald Crisp, Dorothy Gish, and Lillian Gish as an angel. 16mm.

Mourning Becomes Electra
Dudley Nicholas, 1947 - 159 min.

Master screenwriter Nichols (Stagecoach, The Informer, Bringing Up Baby) adapted and directed Eugene O’Neill’s epic, itself a transposition of Greek mythology into the American Civil War. In transforming the six-hour behemoth to film, Nichols constructs a quiet masterpiece of exacting composition, of precision staging, of piercing, interrogatory camerawork. The degree of radical fidelity to his source that Nichols embraces, while at the same time cutting more than half of the script away, brought his film scorn from highbrow critics in 1947, but it is the reason that today the film demands reevaluation. 35mm.

Under the Volcano
John Huston, 1984 - 112 min.

Malcolm Lowry’s towering achievement of a novel follows the final day of Geoffrey Firmin, a hopeless alcoholic who recently left his job as a diplomat in Quauhnahuac, Mexico, and whose marriage exploded when his wife and brother had an affair. John Huston’s film, part of the masterful end-game of his career, brings clinical, painfully distinct imagery in place of Lowry’s gothic mental meanderings. Forcefully evacuated of interiority, Huston’s characters move as tragic automata programmed for disaster, literalizing the metaphorical use Lowry had for setting his narrative on the Day of the Dead. 35mm.

Quick Billy
Bruce Baillie, 1967-70 - 56 & 16 min.

Baillie described this as a ‘horse opera in four reels,’ adding that it is ‘a kind of interior documentary’ formulated as a rendering of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. A record of Baillie’s near-death from hepatitis and its aftermath, filmed over the course of three full years, in the course of which the viewer metaphorically enters into the underworld, is transformed, and finally released back into the world through the power of light itself. 16mm.
Following the feature, six short reels of film shot for, but unused in, Quick Billy will be shown

Passages from Finnegan's Wake
Marry Ellen Bute, 1965-67 - 97 min.

A half-forgotten, half-legendary pioneer in American abstract and animated filmmaking, Mary Ellen Bute, late in her career as an artist, created this adaptation of James Joyce, her only feature. In the transformation from Joyce’s polyglot prose to the necessarily concrete imagery of actors and sets, Passages discovers a truly oneiric film style, a weirdly post-New Wave rediscovery of Surrealism, and in her panoply of allusion – 1950s dance crazes, atomic weaponry, ICBMs, and television all make appearances – she finds a cinematic approximation of the novel’s nearly impenetrable vertically compressed structure. 16mm.

Wisconsin Death Trip
James Marsh, 1999 - 76 min.

Michael Lesy’s experimental, fanciful, and beautiful 1973 book is a collection of newspaper articles and photographs from Black River Falls, Wisconsin, written and shot in the 1890s. It’s a chronicle of disease, tragedy, madness, murder, arson, and horror. Adapting less the brief stories excavated from newspapers, director Marsh focuses instead on the astounding photographs. Above all, Marsh’s film is a frightening and sobering challenge to the stability and value of the American Dream, of Western expansion, of the peaceable and tranquil influence of civilization. Ian Holm narrates.35mm.