Médiocre bonheur humain (German Edition)
Contents:
Anniversaire
Political Science as Critical Theory Chapter On the Critique of Social Nature Chapter Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge: Social Constitution and Class Struggle Chapter Against Obstacles to Public Debates Chapter The Melancholy Science Chapter Critical Discourse and Capitalist Modernity Chapter Philosophy of Praxis as Critical Theory Chapter Mimesis Beyond Realism Chapter Introducing Paulo Arantes Chapter Fredric Jameson Chapter The Theory of Interstitial Revolution Chapter Radical Political or Neo-Liberal Imaginary? Nancy Fraser Revisited Chapter Axel Honneth and Critical Theory Chapter Society and Violence Chapter Society and History Chapter Totality and Technological Form Chapter Theology and Materialism Chapter Social Constitution and Class Chapter Critical Theory and Utopian Thought Chapter Praxis, Nature, Labour Chapter Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: The Frankfurt School and Fascism Chapter Society and Political Form Chapter The Administered World 1 Chapter Commodity Form and the Form of Law Chapter Security and Police Chapter On the Authoritarian Personality Chapter Antisemitism and the Critique of Capitalism Chapter Race and the Politics of Recognition Chapter The Culture Industry Chapter Aesthetics and Its Critique: The Frankfurt Aesthetic Paradigm Chapter Rather No Art than Socialist Realism: Adorno, Beckett, and Brecht Chapter Critical Theory and Literary Theory Chapter Cinema — Spectacle — Modernity Chapter On Music and Dissonance: Art, Technology, and Repetition Chapter On Ideology, Aesthetics, and Critique Chapter Contexts of Critical Theory Chapter Marx, Marxism, Critical Theory Chapter Critical Theory and the Sociology of Knowledge: The most famous example of a filmmaker who refused to acknowledge any dividing-line between novels and movies, or to relinquish devotion to his source material, was Erich von Stroheim.
It is generally assumed that Stroheim went about trying to film the novel paragraph by paragraph—and indeed, there are many direct correspondences of that kind—but the truth is somewhat more complicated, as Jonathan Rosenbaum usefully notes in his essay in Film Adaptation: Anyone who has seen Greed—either in its studio release or in the fascinating four-hour restoration by Rick Schmidlin, which incorporates recently discovered still photographs and dialogue cards—can attest to its thick texture of background objects, signs, faces, clothing, all of which generate a poignantly convincing material atmosphere, brick by brick.
Norris confessed that his mentor in naturalist fiction was Emile Zola, who also loved to pile up the details, and to roam, like a tracking camera, over his chosen milieux see, for instance, the marvelous department-store descriptions in Au Bonheur des Dames. If Flaubert, as was frequently observed, could be said to have anticipated cross-cutting in the agricultural fair sequence in Madame Bovary, Zola was much more important to the movies as avatar and inspiration.
Although atmosphere at one time may have belonged more properly to the poetic and painterly arts rather than to the novel, which was considered the medium of social analysis and intrigue, in the s atmosphere had descended like a cloud on the narrative arts of novel and film. The bane of many filmed novels is the episodic, that hurrying-along effort to cram in so many scenes from the book that highpoints get flattened and everything ends in a blur.
One strategy circumventing that pitfall has been a highly stylized, austere, anti-naturalistic approach. Rather than try to cram in as many sensational incidents as possible to capture a story spanning several decades, the filmmakers slowed down their fifty-five minutes by patiently recapturing unhurried moments of being such as a man smoking a cigarette on a stairwell, or sitting down to his customary breakfast at a hotel , which achieved the Bazinian ideal of ontological reality.
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The result was a masterly contemplation of the way daily life goes on in the midst of historical upheaval. Manoel de Oliviera, in his Doomed Love, filmed a famous nineteenth-century Portuguese novel of the same name by Camilo Castelo Branco, more or less in its entirety, by having a narrator speak voluminous voiceover texts when the actors were not engaged in dialogue.
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This method imposed an intentionally static rhythm, as the actors were obliged to stand around while the voiceover narration unfurled, though sometimes the camera went its own way, tracking to a window, for example. Yet somehow the results were mesmerizing. One is superficial, anecdotal, sentimental and very explicit; the other is much more profound. Since I was adapting a work of literature to an audio-visual medium—a work of great beauty, moreover—I thought it would be legitimate to concentrate on the text, the words, and the let the images have a more serene form. The cinema being story-hungry, it looked from its first silent days to novels and plays for raw material.
The original sin, so to speak, was for movies to ape the theater.
Adapt This
As it turns out, they were wrong. When James Agee, in praising the neo-realist Shoeshine to the skies, qualified his enthusiasm by saying: Two forms of snobbism and prestige are involved here: Novels originally brought cultural prestige to movies. Classics and established novels of the day have always enjoyed the marketing advantage of being pre-sold, familiar names, and the percentage of novels adapted for higher-budgeted, Oscar-friendly pictures from Quo Vadis to Memories of a Geisha is much greater than for lower-budgeted ones.
It was this built-in prestige attached to novels that raised the hackles of those Cahiers du Cinema critics in the Fifties, who would go on to comprise the New Wave. Of course this hostility was suspended when an auteur they admired, such as Robert Bresson, adapted Georges Bernanos.
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And Truffaut went on to reverse himself in his own directorial career by making many loving pictures drawn from novels, such as Jules and Jim, Two Englishwomen, etc. But some of the bad odor surrounding literary adaptations has remained.
Even now, there are auteur directors such as Otar Ioselliani who go on record saying that they will never engage in such a stinking practice as filming a novel: In line with this anti-literary sentiment is a mistrust of two other devices that are frequently used in novel adaptations: Screenwriting teachers routinely advise students to avoid these two practices as a form of cheating and caving in to uncinematic practice.
This in spite of the many visually virtuosic films, from Citizen Kane to Goodfellas to Kill Bill, that employ one or both techniques. Sarah Kozloff, in her excellent book Invisible Storytellers, analyzes the prejudice: If one believes that all true film art lies in the images, then verbal narration is automatically illegitimate. Granted that voice-over narration adds a certain slant, or even definite bias, to a film—why is this bad?
Where are the laws saying that films have to be realistic, objective, or impersonal to begin with? Certainly no such statutes govern fiction films.
One such premise is that it is easier to make a fine film out of a mediocre novel The tragedy of Greed, that his nine-and-a-half hour version of Frank Norris's novel the marvelous department-store descriptions in Au Bonheur des Dames). as the inspiration for a film about how a bourgeois German family coped with the. Louis Blavet was also considered mediocre and does not seem to have been widely the posthumous seventh edition of the TMS, which was identical to the sixth edition published .. formulated by the former German historical school. .. imaginèrent d‟attribuer à l‟âme humaine une faculté nouvelle.
In film buff circles, we learned to scoff at the BBC Masterpiece Theatre or Merchant-Ivory adaptations of classic novels as stuffy, meaning, visually uninventive. In truth, there was often something drearily mechanical about the way each scene from a Trollope or Bronte novel got broken down into establishing shot, two-shot and sneering or teary reaction shot, as coercive in its emotional signals as soap opera.
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On the other hand, Merchant-Ivory made some subtle, astringent film adaptations, such as Mr. Generally, one looks to television more and more for the transposition of a novelistic mind-set onto film or videotape. I realized this with a shock when, some years ago, I saw a televised series, From Here to Eternity, with Natalie Wood, that came much closer to the feeling of the James Jones novel, thanks to its relaxed unfolding over several nights, than had the original, overheated, Oscar-winning movie version directed by Fred Zinneman.
Appendix. One Hundred Non-Metropolitan Monographs, 1893-1969
Some filmmakers persistently exhibit a novelistic temperament. Visconti, after adapting Giovanni Verga, James M. Stanley Kubrick seemed always to require a novel to get his cinematic juices going. Not only did Mikio Naruse turn again and again to Fumiko Hayashi and Yasunari Kawabata for source material, but even when he filmed original screenplays they continued to de-emphasize the dramatic in favor of novelistic atmosphere and the patient accumulation of behavioral patterns. Of course the influence flows the other way too: Though rather dated it is drawn from American movies between and , when the Production Code still exerted a puritanical influence , it does raise key questions, and I have to admire the thoroughness with which Bluestone drew the parameters of a then-new field.
Bluestone summarized the difference between the production of novels and films as follows: The film, on the other hand, has been supported by a mass audience, produced co-operatively under industrial conditions, and restricted by a self-imposed Production Code. Bluestone quoted a study which showed that forty-three per cent of the novel adaptations sampled were altered to give them a romantic happy ending.
I doubt the figure would be that high today, but studio executives remain in thrall to the falsely redemptive.