Anamorphic Authorship in Canonical Film Adaptation: A Case Study of Shakespearean Films [1st ed.] 978-3-030-16495-9;978-3-030-16496-6

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xii
Introduction (Robert Geal)....Pages 1-7
Front Matter ....Pages 9-9
Dialogism and the Radical Text (Robert Geal)....Pages 11-33
Poststructuralism and the Radical Critic (Robert Geal)....Pages 35-65
The Dead Author and the Concealed Author (Robert Geal)....Pages 67-99
Front Matter ....Pages 101-101
‘Fainomaic’ Adaptation from the Verbal to the Visual (Robert Geal)....Pages 103-155
‘Állagmic’ Adaptation from Shakespearean to Non-(/Less-)Shakespearean Settings (Robert Geal)....Pages 157-182
The Drama of Foreknowledge (Robert Geal)....Pages 183-206
The Drama of the Diegetic Author (Robert Geal)....Pages 207-219
Back Matter ....Pages 221-247

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ADAPTATION AND VISUAL CULTURE

Anamorphic Edited by Authorship in Elizabeth Gregory Stacy Carson Hubbard Canonical Film Adaptation A Case Study of Shakespearean Films Robert Geal

Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture Series Editors Julie Grossman Le Moyne College Syracuse, NY, USA R. Barton Palmer Clemson University Clemson, SC, USA

This new series addresses how adaptation functions as a principal mode of text production in visual culture. What makes the series distinctive is its focus on visual culture as both targets and sources for adaptations, and a vision to include media forms beyond film and television such as videogames, mobile applications, interactive fiction and film, print and nonprint media, and the avant-garde. As such, the series will contribute to an expansive understanding of adaptation as a central, but only one, form of a larger phenomenon within visual culture. Adaptations are texts that are not singular but complexly multiple, connecting them to other pervasive plural forms: sequels, series, genres, trilogies, authorial oeuvres, appropriations, remakes, reboots, cycles and franchises. This series especially welcomes studies that, in some form, treat the connection between adaptation and these other forms of multiplicity. We also welcome proposals that focus on aspects of theory that are relevant to the importance of adaptation as connected to various forms of visual culture. Advisory Board Sarah Cardwell, University of Kent, UK Deborah Cartmell, De Montfort University, UK Timothy Corrigan, University of Pennsylvania, US Lars Ellestrom, Linnaeus University, Sweden Kamilla Elliott, Lancaster University, UK Christine Geraghty, University of Glasgow, UK Helen Hanson, University of Exeter, UK Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto, Canada Glenn Jellenik, University of Central Arkansas, US Thomas Leitch, University of Delaware, US Brian McFarlane, Monash University, Australia Simone Murray, Monash University, Australia James Naremore, Indiana University, US Kate Newell, Savannah College of Art and Design, US Robert Stam, New York University, US Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Australia Imelda Whelehan, University of Tasmania, Australia Shannon Wells-Lassagne, Université de Bourgogne, France More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14654

Robert Geal

Anamorphic Authorship in Canonical Film Adaptation A Case Study of Shakespearean Films

Robert Geal Department of Film, Media and Broadcasting University of Wolverhampton Wolverhampton, UK

Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture ISBN 978-3-030-16495-9 ISBN 978-3-030-16496-6  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16496-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Iñigo Fdz de Pinedo/Getty Images Cover design by eStudio Calamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For my parents, Diane and John

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the friends and colleagues who have provided me with invaluable feedback and support during the research and writing of this book. I am particularly indebted to Fran Pheasant-Kelly, Glyn Hambrook, Stella Hockenhull, Eleanor Andrews and Gabriela Steinke. Thanks also to the series editors Julie Grossman and R. Barton Palmer, for their support throughout the writing, and to Lina Aboujieb and Ellie Freedman at Palgrave. I also need to mention Pascal Nicklas, who brought my attention to the work of Eckhard Lobsien, in a paper entitled The Trope of Repetition: Adaptation Aesthetics in Consuming Franchise presented at the Association of Adaptation Studies Annual Conference, University of Amsterdam, September 2018. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my family, as I could not have undertaken this project without their support. I am eternally grateful to my parents, who encouraged me to enjoy learning from an early age, and I would especially like to thank my wife Abby and daughter Livia, for all their encouragement and love. A brief portion of Chapter 2 was published as ‘Dialogism’s Radical Texts, and the Death of the Radical Vanguard Critic’ in The Routledge Companion to Adaptation, edited by Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs and Eckart Voigts (2018). Parts of Chapter 7 were published as ‘Anomalous Foreknowledge and Cognitive Impenetrability in ‘Gnomeo and Juliet’’

vii

viii   

Acknowledgements

in the journal Adaptation (2018). An early version of part of Chapter 8 was published as ‘Suturing the Action to the Word: Shakespearean Enunciation and Cinema’s “Reality-Effect” in ‘Shakespeare in Love’ and ‘Anonymous’’ in Literature/Film Quarterly (2014).

Contents

1 Introduction 1 Part I From Barthesian and Bakhtinian to Benvenistene Adaptation Studies: Theories of Film Adaptation 2 Dialogism and the Radical Text 11 3 Poststructuralism and the Radical Critic 35 4 The Dead Author and the Concealed Author 67 Part II The Drama of Authorship: A Taxonomy of Anamorphic Authorship 5 ‘Fainomaic’ Adaptation from the Verbal to the Visual 103 6 ‘Állagmic’ Adaptation from Shakespearean to Non-(/Less-)Shakespearean Settings 157

ix

x   

Contents

7 The Drama of Foreknowledge 183 8 The Drama of the Diegetic Author 207 Conclusion 221 Index 241

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6 Fig. 5.7 Fig. 5.8 Fig. 5.9

Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953, MGM): authored words adapted into ‘un-authored’ images Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953, MGM): authored words adapted into ‘un-authored’ images Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953, MGM): ‘un-authored’ images accompany Antony’s manipulation of the crowd Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953, MGM): ‘un-authored’ images accompany Antony’s manipulation of the crowd Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953, MGM): ‘un-authored’ images accompany Antony’s manipulation of the crowd Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953, MGM): ‘un-authored’ images accompany Antony’s manipulation of the crowd Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953, MGM): ‘un-authored’ images accompany Antony’s manipulation of the crowd Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953, MGM): ‘un-authored’ images accompany Antony’s manipulation of the crowd Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968, BHE Films): the fragmentary drama of vision accompanies the drama of authorship Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968, BHE Films): the fragmentary drama of vision accompanies the drama of authorship Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968, BHE Films): the fragmentary drama of vision accompanies the drama of authorship

80 86 112 112 113 113 113 113 118 118 118

xi

xii   

List of Figures

Fig. 5.10

Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968, BHE Films): the fragmentary drama of vision accompanies the drama of authorship 118 Fig. 5.11 Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968, BHE Films): the fragmentary drama of vision accompanies the drama of authorship 119 Fig. 5.12 Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000, Double A Films): authored Shakespearean verse adapted into ‘un-authored’ cinematography and mise-en-scène 122 Fig. 5.13 Olivier’s Hamlet (1948, Two Cities): authored Shakespearean verse adapted into ‘un-authored’ mise-en-scène 123 Fig. 5.14 Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953, MGM): visual adaptation pointing temporally back and forth 126 Fig. 5.15 Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953, MGM): visual adaptation pointing temporally back and forth 127 Fig. 5.16 Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996, Twentieth Century Fox): authored Shakespearean writing adapted into semi-diegetic writing 128 Fig. 5.17 Castellani’s Romeo and Juliet (1954, Rank): the Chorus as sign of authorship 135 Fig. 5.18 Castellani’s Romeo and Juliet (1954, Rank): the Chorus as sign of authorship 135 Fig. 5.19 Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000, Double A Films): the film’s title screen 138 Fig. 5.20 Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000, Double A Films): the film within the film’s title screen 139 Fig. 5.21 Olivier’s Richard III (1955, London Film Productions): establishing shot 147 Fig. 5.22 Olivier’s Richard III (1955, London Film Productions): (almost) direct address becomes eyeline matches 147 Fig. 5.23 Olivier’s Richard III (1955, London Film Productions): (almost) direct address becomes eyeline matches 148 Fig. 5.24 Olivier’s Richard III (1955, London Film Productions): (almost) direct address becomes eyeline matches 148 Fig. 5.25 Olivier’s Richard III (1955, London Film Productions): (almost) direct address becomes eyeline matches 148 Fig. 7.1 Cognitive impenetrability: the Müller-Lyer optical illusion (self-created image) 190 Fig. 7.2 Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996, Twentieth Century Fox): image of the foreknown ending 193

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Anamorphic Authorship in Canonical Film Adaptation: A Case Study of Shakespearean Films develops a new approach for the study of films adapted from canonical ‘originals’ such as Shakespeare’s plays. The book problematises adaptation studies’ current broad consensus that adaptations are heightened examples of the premise that all texts are in dialogue with other texts, so that all artworks inform and are informed by other artworks. The book instead argues that film adaptations of canonical texts partake in and extend cinema’s inherent manipulation and concealment of its own artifice. These source texts, which may have subtle gradations of artifice and verisimilitude in their ‘original’ forms are, to a greater or lesser extent, adapted into film texts which foreground the constructed, re-performative nature of the adaptation in relation to the source—the film adaptation announces that it has an artifice derived from the author in a manner that is quite different from other (nonadapted) films. As such, these adaptations are reflexive in the sense that the canonically foregrounded fictionality of the ‘original’ marks out the adaptation as another foregrounded fiction—such an adaptation is canonically reflexive. This foregrounding of artifice in relation to the source text can range from having the ‘original’ author’s articulative status dominate the adaptation through widely known and iconic characters, narratives, dialogue and so forth, on the one hand, to more subtle

© The Author(s) 2019 R. Geal, Anamorphic Authorship in Canonical Film Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16496-6_1

1

2  R. GEAL

traces of the ‘original’ author present in the name of a contemporary high school or a seemingly insignificant element of the mise-en-scène such as a painting or poster, on the other. In order to analyse this process, the book moves from a dialogic to a psychoanalytic poststructuralist account of film adaptation. Such a theoretical reorientation requires a detailed discussion about the historical development of different scholarly approaches to film, to literature, and to the adaptations in which film and literature intersect. The first half of the book is devoted to this account of competing academic paradigms, and to the theoretical ‘gap’ that it intends to bridge. Adaptation studies, which was for a long time dominated by a fidelity-based approach that judged adaptations against the perceived ‘spirit’ of the ‘original’, has recently reached a broad consensus which can be characterised as dialogism, a methodology in which adaptations are conceptualised as heightened examples of the ubiquitous intertextual relationships between all artworks. These dialogic relationships have been used to overturn the false binary of valorised ‘original’ and vulgar ‘copy’, which is central to the prior fidelity approach, and to analyse how multiple historical iterations of the same source text demonstrate shifting cultural values which challenge a text’s monolithic status, in an explicitly politicised liberationist manner. The dialogic approach is informed by the writings of Barthes (1995 [1967])1 and Bakhtin (1981 [1934–1941]) (amongst others). This book, however, problematises one element of the consensus, arguing that the dialogic model, while making important insights into how adaptation can challenge the hegemonic status of canonical authors, fundamentally misconstrues the ideological operations of concealed canonical authorship in film adaptation. The solution to this is grounded in a poststructuralist methodology informed by Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and by the linguistics of Émile Benveniste (1970) which Christian Metz (1985) applied to the study of film. This approach conceptualises popular films as examples of what Colin MacCabe calls the ‘classic realist text’ (1985, 33), which are ideological artefacts that temporarily foreground and then repeatedly obfuscate all traces of their constructed nature. Distinctions between visual perceptions of the real world and audiences’ visual perceptions of the fictional world of film diegesis are temporarily revealed and subsequently concealed and muddled through the conventionalised status of film grammar in relation to shot composition and editing (and to a lesser extent mise-en-scène).

1 INTRODUCTION 

3

Each of these cinematic elements partly, and temporarily, ­ emonstrates that the film has been constructed—there is some form of d enunciation which makes it apparent that the film is a fiction rather than unfiltered ‘reality’. The enunciation, however, is quickly and repeatedly subsumed into a form of verisimilitude which has some of the features of this unfiltered ‘reality’. Cinema’s manipulation of these different enunciative registers is, according to Stephen Heath (1981), an anamorphic process which continuously oscillates between a reflexive revelation of artifice and a subsumption of that revelation, with the oscillation binding spectators into a film’s narrative world, and into the ideological system that produces the film. This approach has been applied to how filmmakers anamorphically reveal and then obscure visual markers of the film’s constructed nature (Heath 1981, 1985), but not yet to how traces of canonical authorship operate in a similar manner in adaptations. The book proposes, then, that authorship in realist adaptations is another anamorphic trace analogous and additional to the conventionality of film grammar. Because Heath calls film’s anamorphic manipulation of film grammar the ‘drama of vision’ (1985, 514), I term adaptation’s analogous manipulation of authorship the ‘drama of authorship’. In order to make this claim, it is necessary to position the rival methodologies of fidelity criticism and dialogism within historically specific sociocultural contexts, because there are particular reasons why a poststructuralist methodology has not already been applied to the study of adaptation, and because existing approaches provide specific rival explanations for the particular forms of analysis I undertake. This ­historical-discursive context is the book’s starting point, tracing the ways in which the history of adaptation studies’ development, in relation to broader trajectories in the related disciplines of literary, film and cultural studies, inflects scholarly approaches to adaptation. There is a strong tradition of this kind of historical self-analysis in adaptation studies, because of the field’s relatively recent emergence, and because of its perceived junior status in relation to the more established disciplines out of which it developed. The articulation of a poststructuralist account of anamorphic adaptation along the lines of that proposed in the book was not made, at the time (approximately 1970s to early 1980s) when poststructuralism exerted a significant influence on film and literary studies because adaptation studies was then still somewhat ­un-institutionalised. By the time that adaptation studies emerged as a more coherent field, poststructuralism in film and literary studies

4  R. GEAL

was being displaced by a number of other methodologies which facilitated the shift towards dialogism’s pluralistic understanding of texts. Via this historical and discursive accident, the field of adaptation studies has missed an important methodological approach which offers unique insights into the ontology of adaptation. The dialogism that currently dominates adaptation studies inadvertently prevents the kind of analysis undertaken in this volume. A central component of dialogism’s liberationist project is the displacement of the knowability and importance of the ‘original’ author’s intentions—no matter that an ‘original’ text might encode certain discriminatory values inherent to a particular historical moment if an adaptation re-encodes these into progressive values more in tune with the cultural sensibilities of the later historical period. The dis-placing of the ‘original’ author, however, also inadvertently mis-places the ‘original’ author, since that author’s enunciative status has an important ideological dimension in relation to cinema’s reality-effect. Unpicking the philosophical differences between the dialogic and the poststructuralist approaches to authorship is therefore integral to the elaboration of realist adaptation’s ‘drama of authorship’. Once these differences have been addressed, in the first half of the book, it is possible to construct an extensive and detailed taxonomy of how authorial anamorphism operates in realist film adaptation, in the second half. The taxonomy uses Shakespearean film adaptations as a case study. These films offer the kind of comparative qualities that make for a useful and manageable case study for three reasons.2 Firstly, they provide an extensive number of adaptations, so that there is no shortage of data to analyse. Secondly, my argument relies on the canonical status of the ‘original’ author, and the Anglophone world offers no better example of this than Shakespeare. Thirdly, there is a specific element of Shakespearean (meta-)drama which has the potential to extend adaptation’s anamorphism. My central argument does not require the ‘original’ text to have any specific metadramatic elements in order for the adaptation to operate anamorphically. It is merely sufficient that the ‘original’ be conceptualised by audiences, to a greater or lesser extent, as an existing piece of pre-authored artifice which the adaptation in some sense re-performs. Realist adaptations of these canonical ‘originals’, then, manipulate, temporarily foreground, and subsequently obfuscate those ‘original’ authorial traces. However, the specifics of the Elizabethan/ Jacobean stage also include numerous metadramatic elements which

1 INTRODUCTION 

5

can extend realist adaptation’s anamorphism. Thus, for example, filmed ­soliloquies can oscillate between a direct address to the audience which foregrounds authorial artifice, and the suppression of that artifice through various conventionalising techniques.3 The taxonomy which comprises the second half of the book has four principal elements covered in four chapters. The first three of these elements constitute three different forms of (and definitions of) adaptation. Chapter 5 addresses the first of these—adaptation’s partial translation from the author’s foregrounded artifice, articulated in this case study through Shakespearean dialogue, into a visual form of narration which displaces that foregrounding. This is realist adaptation’s defining ontological feature. The subsequent taxonomic elements are all optional additions to this ontological form of adaptation that an individual film may or may not exploit. Chapter 6 explores adaptation from authorially ‘appropriate’ settings into those which juxtapose certain revelations of authorial artifice with ostensibly non-authorially ‘appropriate’ (most frequently contemporary) locations, costumes and characters. In terms of the book’s case study, this means films that shift from an avowedly ‘Shakespearean’ setting into ostensibly ‘non-Shakespearean’ settings. This locational shift relates to general audience perceptions about settings which replace verisimilar expectations about a historical or colloquially ‘Shakespearean’ location (such as a Roman forum or a Medieval castle) with a setting in a contemporary high school or on a distant planet in the future. What is significant here is not the precise relationship between an adaptation and the specific ways in which the Shakespearean stage could negotiate different settings, in the manner that a literary scholar might be interested in such an issue. Instead, it is the articulative status of the film’s location that is important, with an unproblematically ‘Shakespearean’ setting (as a general audience might understand a Julius Caesar set amongst ahistorical white-washed Roman pillars and porticos, or a Hamlet which begins with a half-ruined fortress) fitting neatly with a popular conception of where these ‘original’ narratives occur, and with a shift to a mise-en-scène not usually associated with Shakespeare potentially problematising a verisimilar synthesis between narrative and location. Chapter 7 investigates the ways in which canonical adaptations manipulate foreknown elements of their narratives. Audience foreknowledge about how the narratives of certain adaptations will unfold has the potential to function as an additional layer of authorial anamorphosis in

6  R. GEAL

terms of foregrounding an aspect of an adaptation’s constructed nature, and subsequently subsuming and obfuscating that foregrounding in various ways. Chapter 8 analyses those films which narrativise the life of the canonical author him/herself. The chapter explores the ways in which these films, which are technically biopics rather than adaptations proper, anamorphically foreground the diegetic author’s creative acts, and locate moments of that creativity within visually narrated events which unfold according to the logic of seemingly un-authored realist cinema. Each element of this taxonomy tightly combines movements from the reflexive revelation of canonically derived artifice to the suppression and obfuscation of that revelation. These movements are all heightened examples of realist cinema’s ideological anamorphism. Each element of the taxonomy also demonstrates how the canonical status of the author, and the biases inherent to adaptation studies discussed in the first half of the book, mean that scholarly analyses of these films repeatedly give Shakespearean explanations for that which I identify as examples of anamorphic authorship. Such scholarship, again, demonstrates the unintended impact of the field’s discursive history which, in this case, provides legitimation for realist adaptation’s ideological effects. These various forms of authorial anamorphism play out in complex ways. What they have in common is an oscillation between foregrounding and subsuming/obfuscating their authorial signs. The analysis of this process must begin with a history of how the field of adaptation studies has conceptualised these authorial signs in films based on canonical sources, and how these conceptualisations have prevented, and continue to prevent, such an analysis taking place.

Notes 1. The original dates of texts reissued a significant amount of time after the first publication date are included in square brackets after their first mention, so as to avoid any confusion about the chronology of academic discourse. 2. There is actually also a fourth reason for selecting Shakespearean adaptations for analysis. These films also offer numerous examples of adaptations of the same sources from different time periods, which will be an important element of a follow-up which develops the argument in this book in another direction. See the Conclusion for a description.

1 INTRODUCTION 

7

3. In terms of the way that I use terms like Shakespearean ‘texts’ and ‘drama’ in this book, I employ the former term in its widest sense, meaning an object that can be read (and in relation to its canonical status, an object which is foregrounded as authorial artifice), rather than the complexities and subtleties of published texts such as Quarto, Folio and so on. Shakespearean ‘drama’, however, is an additional element of those ‘original’ texts’ specific characteristics which can have some bearing on how they are adapted into film.

References Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. 1981 [1934–1941]. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barthes, Roland. 1995 [1967]. “The Death of the Author.” In Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern, edited by Seán Burke, 125–30. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Benveniste, Émile. 1970. Problems in General Linguistics. Translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables: Miami University Press. Heath, Stephen. 1981. Questions of Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1985. “‘Jaws’, Ideology and Film Theory.” In Movies and Methods Volume II, edited by Bill Nichols, 509–14. Berkeley: University of California Press. MacCabe, Colin. 1985. Theoretical Essays; Film, Linguistics, Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Metz, Christian. 1985. “Story/Discourse: Notes on Two Kinds of Voyeurism.” In Movies and Methods Volume II, edited by Bill Nichols, 543–9. Berkeley: University of California Press.

PART I

From Barthesian and Bakhtinian to Benvenistene Adaptation Studies: Theories of Film Adaptation

CHAPTER 2

Dialogism and the Radical Text

Adaptation is a hybrid process. Julie Grossman’s recent account of this hybridity positions adaptation as the Hideous Progeny (2015) of two parents: literature and film. But adaptation studies, too, is as hybrid as its subject matter. Like Grossman’s hideous progeny, adaptation studies is a bastard child. Just as adaptation is descended from the media of literature and film, adaptation studies is descended from the disciplines which investigate the monstrous offspring’s parents: literary studies and film studies.1 The historical development of those parent disciplines has had a significant impact on the study of adaptation. Some elements of this impact have been extensively accounted for, so that it is almost compulsory for contemporary adaptation studies to criticise the field’s long adherence to an under-theorised fidelity model derived from Romantic, humanist and formalist approaches to the literary canon. These approaches advocated a hierarchy of authors and of media that the fidelity model utilised to judge adaptation’s ‘copy’ against the perceived meaning of the literary ‘original’. The broad consensus about how to best remedy the limitations of this fidelity model is an approach which conceptualises adaptation as a heightened example of the ubiquitous intertextual dialogues between all artworks, with a shift in focus, around the turn of the Millennium, from adaptation as ‘faithful’ or ‘unfaithful’ replicas of literature, to adaptation as Grossman’s Hideous Progeny. I call this approach dialogism. Its proponents have positioned fidelity criticism within a particular historical sociocultural framework, © The Author(s) 2019 R. Geal, Anamorphic Authorship in Canonical Film Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16496-6_2

11

12  R. GEAL

but dialogism itself has not been subjected to the same historically ­contextualising rigour. This book is an analysis of the unintended consequences of the field’s historical development, and an alternative account which remedies some of those unintended consequences. The relationships between adaptation studies and its parent disciplines are central to this analysis. Both fidelity criticism and dialogism reflect broad methodological and ideological undercurrents which are derived from the historical development of theoretical debates within literary studies and film studies. There is an important dimension to the bastard child, however, which distinguishes adaptation studies’ discursive development from that of its parents. Much has been written about the first stage of this development,2 and the intricate details of this process do not need repeating here. The salient features of the early influence of the parent disciplines were that the first adaptation studies were conducted by literary scholars informed by Romantic and formalist approaches. Studies such as George Bluestone’s Novels into Film: The Metamorphosis of Fiction into Cinema (1957), Roger Manvell’s Shakespeare & the Film (1971) and Anthony Davies’ Filming Shakespeare’s Plays: The Adaptations of Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Peter Brook and Akira Kurosawa (1988) are prominent examples of this fidelity criticism. They focus on adaptations derived from what F.R. Leavis called The Great Tradition (1948), which demonstrates ‘a vital capacity for experience, a kind of reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity’ (1948, 18), and which can only be nurtured and propagated by a small ‘minority [upon whom] depends our power of profiting by the finest human experience of the past; they keep alive the subtlest and most perishable parts of tradition’ (Leavis 1930, 5). Given that this approach stresses that in this minority’s ‘keeping […] is the language, the changing idiom upon which fine living depends, and without which distinction of spirit is thwarted and incoherent’ (Leavis 1930, 5), it was important that the fidelity critic applied the centrality of this language to film in such a way that could ‘faithfully’ explore, as Jack Jorgens put it, the ‘expressive possibilities of shifting relations between words and images’ (1977, 17). Although the influence here comes predominantly from literary studies, and despite the fact that these early adaptation studies scholars came from literature departments, there were also contemporaneous theoretical ideas from adaptation studies’ other parental discipline, film studies, which could be synthesised with the Leavisite focus on canonical authority. Auteur theory invokes a similar focus on artistic greatness,

2  DIALOGISM AND THE RADICAL TEXT 

13

and scholars such as Michael Hattaway have argued that the successful adaptation ‘director […] inevitably displaces the author and become[s] the auteur of the film’ (2000, 95). Thus Jorgens’ aforementioned study of Shakespeare on Film is organised into methodologically logical chapters on directors such as Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Roman Polanski and Grigori Kozintsev. Although these auteurs might not quite qualify as original articulators of Leavis’ ‘finest human experience of the past’, they at least can count amongst those who ‘keep alive the subtlest and most perishable parts of tradition’ (Leavis 1930, 5). Dialogism, the second stage of adaptation studies’ development, however, has not been sufficiently historicised. That is not to say that dialogism’s historically specific theoretical antecedents have not been acknowledged. Robert Stam (2005a, 26–46), in particular, has been meticulous in articulating how earlier theoretical writing facilitates dialogic insights. Stam’s two main influences are Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian philosopher and critic active in the early to mid-twentieth century, and Gérard Genette, the French literary theorist whose principal writings, or at least those which informed Stam’s dialogism, were written in the 1980s.3 Stam states that: Bakhtinian ‘dialogism’ […] refers in the broadest sense to the infinite and open-ended possibilities generated by all the discursive practices of a culture, the matrix of communicative utterances which ‘reach’ the text not only through recognizable citations but also through a subtle process of indirect textual relays. (Stam 2005a, 27)

All texts, then, are in some kind of complex dialogue with other texts and forms of discourse. A dialogic critic like Thomas Leitch thinks of ‘all texts as intertexts, all reading as rereading, all writing as rewriting’ (2005, 239). From this basis, Stam can claim that ‘[a]daptations in a sense make manifest what is true of all works of art – that they are all on some level “derivative”’, and that such derivations mean that adaptation ‘is a work of reaccentuation, whereby a source work is reinterpreted through new grids and discourses. Each grid, in revealing aspects of the source text in question, also reveals something about the ambient discourses in the moment of reaccentuation’ (2005a, 45). Stam uses Genette’s five categories of dialogic relationships, which he calls ‘transtextual relation[s]’ (Stam 2005a, 27) to conceptualise how adaptation relates to these other texts and discursive practices.

14  R. GEAL

Certain historical elements are central to Stam’s claims. The various, potentially innumerable intertexts engaging with any adaptation each have particular historical and sociocultural characteristics. Each of these historical fragments mutates together in complex ways to form any given adaptation, which is an intersection of at least two historical and sociocultural discursive contexts (the context informing the ‘original’, and the context informing the ‘copy’). However, what are not so historically central, in this dialogic model, are the specific sociocultural and academic-discursive contexts that inform dialogism as a paradigm itself. This is particularly clear, and particularly significant, because adaptation studies made a paradigmatic shift from fidelity criticism to dialogism in a way that is very different from the discursive development of its parental disciplines. Both literary studies and film studies did develop paradigms which correlate, in some wide and consistent ways, with dialogism. The interrelationships between these paradigms will be an important part of my subsequent criticism of dialogism in adaptation studies. But what is centrally different, in terms of the paradigmatic shifts occurring in the parental disciplines and their bastard child, is the presence of another key theoretical approach which dominated literary studies and film studies for a decade or more, and which is almost entirely elided from the study of adaptation. That theoretical approach is somewhat eclectic, very influential and highly contested. It goes by a number of different names, sometimes depending on which elements of the diverse influences it stresses, but there are some important shared premises and aims that unite developments which emerged in 1970s’ literary studies and film studies such as feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, (post)structuralism, (neo-) Marxism, apparatus theory et al., to the extent that the common project and ambition of these approaches has simply been called, sometimes with a capital ‘T’, Theory. This book is concerned with the consequences of adaptation studies’ elision of such Theory, and the application of its methodology to the study of adaptation, because authorship, which is a central issue for adaptation studies, has fundamentally different characteristics for the two different paradigms of dialogism and 1970s’ Theory.

The Political Project of 1970s’ Theory The historical development of adaptation studies as a discipline is very different from the development of its parental disciplines. While adaptation scholars applied fidelity to their chosen texts, broad and influential

2  DIALOGISM AND THE RADICAL TEXT 

15

movements in literary studies and film studies were attempting to ­overthrow the hierarchical binaries on which fidelity criticism relied. It is difficult, in retrospect, to capture the vigour and ambition of this movement. Paul H. Fry draws on William Wordsworth’s praise of another great social, cultural and political upheaval, the French Revolution, in an attempt to encapsulate the atmosphere of the moment: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’ (Fry 2012, 5). Although Fry does not spell this out, there are three specific correlations between Theory and the French Revolution. The first is the centrality of Paris (site of the Storming of the Bastille, the radical legislature of various Revolutionary Assemblies, and much of la Terreur, as well as the civil unrest which crystallised around les événements in May 1968); the second is the influence of underpinning Francophone thinkers more generally (Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Denis Diderot in terms of the French Revolution; Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser et al. in terms of Theory); the third, and most significant, is the similar emancipatory projects of both revolutionary movements: for Terry Eagleton, likening academic discourse to Carl von Clausewitz’s infamous statement about war, ‘theory has been the continuation of radical politics by other means’ (Eagleton 1994, 3). Both literary studies and film studies took part in this heady political project. But adaptation studies, like a Royalist c­ ounter-revolutionary in the Vendée, was temporarily impervious to the radical shift. It is instructive to consider some of the publication dates of key works in this era. In literary studies, Paul de Man’s early essays were collected together in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism in 1971; Eagleton published Marxism and Literary Criticism in 1976; Barbara Johnson published The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading in 1980. In film studies, JeanLouis Comolli and Jean Narboni wrote Cinema/Ideology/Criticism in 1969; Laura Mulvey published Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in 1975; Stephen Heath published Questions of Cinema in 1981. These writers were taking part in a project aiming to, as Eagleton put it, ‘take apart the received wisdom of the humanities’ (1996, 207). Meanwhile, adaptation scholars were regurgitating that received wisdom: Charles W. Eckert published Focus on Shakespearean Films in 1972; Geoffrey Wagner published The Novel and the Cinema in 1975; and Jorgens published Shakespeare on Film in 1977. Indeed, it is possible that the challenge to hegemonic hierarchies in the heart of literature departments directed

16  R. GEAL

those atavistic Romantics who became the first adaptation scholars towards what they (incorrectly) perceived as the less theorised medium of film. Early adaptation studies, therefore, was a Leavisite remnant of an obsolete paradigm pushed to the margins of the parental discipline of literary studies. It remained resistant to Theory’s political project because of its un-institutionalised status, but it did so only temporarily. At length, its hierarchical binary of valorised ‘original’ and vulgar ‘copy’ would be challenged and overturned. It is of fundamental importance, however, that this delay meant that it did not simply catch up with the Theoretical project of its parent disciplines. The delay meant that adaptation studies temporally overshot the Theory which had been Eagleton’s ‘continuation of radical politics by other means’ (1994, 3), because this project had come under sustained criticism and revision in literary studies and film studies throughout the 1980s and the 1990s. This is not to say that there have been no individual attempts to apply some ideas from the Theoretical turn of the 1970s to the study of adaptation. These (few) works have had no significant impact on the discursive development of the field, however. Kamilla Elliott (2013), ­ who relegates the referencing of these works (four in all) to a footnote, has drawn attention to some of them, but notes that: summaries of the field included work by scholars who deconstructed medium specificity, promoted intertextuality over translation models, reader response over author intent, and advocated a Marxist, historical approach to adaptations in the late 1970s and 1980s. Yet neither [Robert B.] Ray nor Stam include any of these scholars in their overviews of the field. Such lapses in citation prevented them from building upon prior scholarship that had already answered their calls. Unfortunately, subsequent scholars have relied too much on Stam’s and Ray’s partial summaries of prior scholarships, producing a selective, distorted, sometimes mythological history of our field. (Elliott 2013, 25–6, original emphasis)

Elliott recognises that these earlier theoretical attempts to address the field’s fidelity paradigm had little impact until after the articulation of dialogism, if at all. Furthermore, the content of these earlier theoretical works pre-empted dialogism (‘answer[ing] their calls’ [2013, 26]), instead of applying the wider totalising Theoretical paradigm, which is the concern of my subsequent argument, to the study of adaptation.4

2  DIALOGISM AND THE RADICAL TEXT 

17

The Decline of 1970s’ Theory: From Radical Academics to Radical Texts Given the influence of Theory during its heyday, its passing (or more accurately its mutation, which is a difference that has had significant consequences for adaptation studies) has inevitably generated much debate.5 For some of its critics, Theory was inevitably flawed at the logical level. In literary studies, Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels argued that: Theory attempts to solve […] a set of familiar problems: the function of authorial intention, the status of literary language, the role of interpretative assumptions, and so on. […] [T]he mistake on which all critical theory rests has been to imagine that these problems are real. In fact, we will claim such problems only seem real – and theory itself only seems possible or relevant – when theorists fail to recognize the fundamental inseparability of the elements involved. (Knapp and Michaels 1982, 723–4)

Similarly, in film studies Noël Carroll argued that ‘once the reigning ­psychoanalytic-marxist theory is assessed according to canons of rational enquiry and compared to alternative cognitive theories, it appears baroque and vacuous, indeed, altogether an intellectual disaster’ (1992, 200). In adaptation studies, which had no politicised Theory to overturn, no comparable criticisms were made. For practitioners of Theory, however, the waxing and waning of ­paradigmatic discourses are inevitably connected with the rise and fall of the sociocultural contexts which inflect those discourses. The Marxism, feminism and (post)structural semiotics of the 1970s, as Eagleton noted, ‘broke out in the only period since the Second World War in which the political far left rose briefly to prominence, before sinking almost out of sight’ (2003, 24). The far left’s real-world political decline led not to a complete ‘defeat for this [theoretical] project, […] but a defeat for the political forces which originally underpinned the new evolutions in literary theory’ (Eagleton 1996, 192). The impact of these shifts on literary studies and film studies took two broad forms. The first shift has had minimal influence on adaptation studies. It pursued the empirical element of Knapp and Michaels’ (1982), and Carroll’s (1992) criticisms of Theory into the paradigms of neopragmatism in literary studies, and cognitivism in film studies. Such programmes have been methodologically eclectic, but have tended

18  R. GEAL

to focus either on rational, deductive and perceptual activities,6 or on how evolutionary biology influences literary and film production and consumption.7 The second main shift emanating from the decline of 1970s’ Theory, however, has had an important impact on adaptation studies which has not yet been properly analysed. Although adaptation studies was still chronologically behind its disciplinary parents, which underwent this paradigmatic change in the 1980s and the 1990s, the eventual articulation of dialogism fits in with the general revisions which ­characterised literary studies and film studies in this era, and which persisted into the time period when dialogism emerged as a coherent paradigm. This was because the leftist spirit of the preceding Theory was not entirely destroyed with the defeat of its underlying real-world political determinants. Radical left-wing politics was not completely undone, but its character was fundamentally altered, and this modification generated new forms of left-wing academic theory. Such revisions, although they were not yet applied to the study of adaptation, would take hold in literary studies and film studies through the 1980s and the 1990s, and would be ready-in-waiting to assist in the articulation of dialogism around the turn of the Millennium. These paradigmatic shifts had some significant shared characteristics that would be instrumental to dialogism as a paradigm. Such characteristics are immediately discernible in some of the key developments in literary studies and film studies following the decline of 1970s’ Theory. One of the most important elements of these developments was an area of continuity with the displaced Theory. Despite Knapp and Michaels’ argument that ‘the theoretical enterprise should […] come to an end’ (1982, 742), an overview of literary studies such as that conducted by Raman Selden et al. could claim that what Theory’s decline ‘portends is less a dramatic apocalypse than a reorientation’ (2005, 267). Unlike the neopragmatist and cognitivist rejections of the inherent link between literature/film and politics, the main paradigmatic shifts in literary studies and film studies continued to pursue a leftist politics, but in a way that reflected real-world political changes. Eagleton links these developments as follows: Working-class militancy, nationalist insurrection, civil rights and student movements […] had been based on a belief in a struggle between mass political organization on the one hand and an oppressive state power on

2  DIALOGISM AND THE RADICAL TEXT 

19

the other; most of them envisaged the radical transformation of capitalism, racism or imperialism as whole, and so thought in ambitiously ‘totalizing’ terms. By about 1980, all of this had come to look distinctly passé. Since state power had proved too strong to dismantle, so-called micropolitics were now the order of the day. […] [T]he new styles of theory had to be a species of anti-theory: local, sectoral, subjective, anecdotal, aestheticized, autobiographical, rather than objective and all-knowing. (Eagleton 1996, 195)

Practitioners in adaptation studies were not yet ready to explore these ‘new styles of theory’, but literary studies and film studies were now dominated by a leftist politics that no longer sought the complete overthrow of capitalism or patriarchy, and which instead looked for smaller and inherently heterogeneous acts of resistance to hegemony. Central to this development was a changing conceptualisation of the role of the academic. The ‘totalizing’ bent of 1970s’ Theory advocated revolution in classic Leninist and/or Maoist terms. Many influential Theorists were members of various Communist parties; journals such as Cahiers du Cinéma and Tel-Quel had Maoist editorial collectives, with Tel-Quel editors including Barthes and Kristeva visiting Mao’s China in 1974. Successful Leninist and Maoist political revolutions had been organised and carried through by an intellectual vanguard who had revolutionised and directed the masses, and academics in literature and film studies departments had thought of themselves as part of a similar vanguard for the upcoming revolution in the West: as examples of what Antonio Gramsci called ‘organic intellectuals’ who act as ‘constructor, organiser, “permanent persuader”’ (1971 [1947–1951], 10). Realist literary and film texts,8 in this understanding, are tools which generate the non-conscious consent of the oppressed, and stifle the revolutionary potential which they would otherwise employ to overturn their oppression. It was the vanguard academic’s task to critique the processes whereby the realist text interpellated individuals into hegemony. This would shatter the text’s ideological illusion, work towards revealing the various mechanisms that perpetuate capitalism, and thereby build a revolutionary base across society to overthrow it. By the end of the 1970s, the failure of the Leninist/Maoist vanguard to deliver meaningful revolution in the political realm of the capitalist West led to the decline of the vanguard model as an academic concept. Leftists could no longer feel optimistic about genuine social and political revolution, and of the role of an intellectual vanguard class in

20  R. GEAL

spearheading such change. The more modest leftism which emerged from the decline of 1970s’ Theory had to shift its focus from total, homogeneous revolution to small, heterogeneous acts of defiance. The role of the academic in this was now very different. He/she was no longer a Gramscian ‘organic intellectual’ (1971, 10) who activated the latent revolutionary potential of the always-already duped masses. Instead, the academic would look for existing forms of resistance in literary and film texts, or in the reception of those texts. These forms of resistance would be diverse: There was a shift in analysis, from a monolithic ideological textual imposition, in which all readers and spectators would be inevitably interpellated into hegemony (unless an organic intellectual could reveal the text’s ideological operations), to a focus on how individual authors, filmmakers, readers and spectators might negotiate their ideological environment in complex ways dependent on their specific sociocultural and demographic contexts. Broadly, then, this was a movement from conceptualising readers/ spectators as being automatically duped by unavoidably ideological texts to conceptualising readers/spectators as negotiators of potentially fractured texts, and from thinking of academics as the radical agents who would reveal texts’ inevitable ideological operations to thinking of academics as quasi-ethnographic recorders of various small acts of defiance. The shift was both pessimistic, in accepting that total revolution was no longer possible, but also optimistic, in rejecting the idea that the interactions between texts and readers/spectators were inevitably ideological, and allowing that certain elements of texts and/or readers’/spectators’ responses to those texts might somehow (and somewhat) resist hegemony. The hope was no longer for complete revolution, but for analyses of how people negotiated living within hegemony. The stress was no longer on unity, and on the struggle against the common hegemonic enemy, but on difference, and on multifarious experiences of operating within the constraints of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, homophobia, ableism, religious intolerance and other forms of oppression. In literary studies, this meant not only a paradigmatic shift, but a change in the subject matter and status of the discipline itself. Rather than studying how canonical authors operate, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, as ‘cultural treasures’ which are ‘the spoils […] carried along in the […] triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate’ (1969 [1923–1936], 256), there were diffuse analyses of hitherto marginalised voices which went so far beyond

2  DIALOGISM AND THE RADICAL TEXT 

21

the canon as to essentially contribute a new, or at least completely reoriented, discipline: Antony Easthope wrote a book whose ‘title is ­ intended as both indicative (“Literary into cultural studies”) and an imperative (“Literary into cultural studies!”)’ (1991, 5, original emphasis). This cultural studies turn maintained 1970s’ Theory’s rejection of a binary opposition between ‘high’ literature and ‘low’ popular culture, and in this sense, continuing the earlier correlation between Theory and the French Revolution, operates as a kind of Code Napoléon which extends a particular radical idea beyond its original context into another. In another sense, however, the cultural studies turn is indicative of the paradigmatic movement from total Theory: instead of an all-encompassing critique of ideology’s operations exemplified through the canonical ‘spoils’ in the rulers’ ‘triumphal procession’ (Benjamin 1969, 256), there was a new focus on heterogeneous voices.9 Film studies underwent a similar evolution. In part, this meant moving from the study of canonical auteurs and inevitably ideological genres and systemic practices to scholarship of subject areas such as Third Cinema, women directors and New Queer Cinema. It also entailed detailed analyses of audience responses, which were no longer assumed to be monolithic absorptions of dominant ideology. A new paradigm called reception studies or reception theory began to investigate audience responses to film in order to construct what Tony Bennett (1983, 5) calls ‘reading formations’, each of which is ‘a set of intersecting discourses that productively activate a given body of texts and the relations between them in a specific way’. Crucially, these reading formations could resist a text’s ideological potential. Jacqueline Bobo’s study of black women’s responses to Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple (1985), for example, is indicative of the wider move from 1970s’ Theory’s claims that only the vanguard academic could break the ideological illusion of the realist text. Bobo accepts that the film is potentially ideological: she notes that ‘Tony Brown, a syndicated columnist and the host of the television program Tony Brown’s Journal has called the film […] “the most racist depiction of Black men since The Birth of a Nation and the most anti-Black family film of the modern film era”’ (1988, 90). Bobo, however, is not concerned with articulating this critique in detail, in order to reveal how the audience is inevitably interpellated by the film’s ideological racism. Instead, she is concerned with how the reception of the film can be used to ‘examine the way in which a specific audience creates meaning from a mainstream text and uses the reconstructed meaning

22  R. GEAL

to empower themselves and their social group’ (1988, 93). A potentially regressive, conservative text could thereby be reclaimed by (certain) audiences in a progressive sense, without needing the intervention of the vanguard academic to facilitate that reclamation. Instead, the academic records that reclamation, which is generated by the audience members themselves, who are not directed by the academic acting as Gramsci’s ‘constructor, organiser, “permanent persuader”’ (1971, 10).

Dialogism and the Radical Text These broad shifts in literary studies and film studies did not ­immediately impact on adaptation studies, which still lingered under the fidelity model while the parental disciplines developed these paradigmatic approaches. But these paradigms were the new orthodoxy, at least amongst leftist academics, once these academics began to analyse adaptations, and to critique the field’s under-theorised and atavistic fidelity model. In part, indeed, the cultural studies turn in literary studies facilitated a new interest in adaptation. Adaptations derived from canonical authors are texts which have the potential to clearly demonstrate cultural studies’ erasure of the false binary between ‘high’ literature and ‘low’ popular culture. Easthope’s ‘imperative’ (1991, 5) move into cultural studies establishes that ‘new developments must do two things: take up cultural analysis within an international and not simply a national perspective; direct itself impartially at high cultural texts as well as those from popular culture, eroding the distinction by crossing the boundary’ (1991, 106). Dialogic adaptation studies is conducive to the first of those imperatives, with the potential for insightful analyses of how texts cross between cultures. Yet even more significantly, adaptation is the subject matter par excellence which ‘erod[es] the distinction by crossing the boundary’ (Easthope 1991, 106) between high and popular culture. Scholars would therefore find texts matching Easthope’s imperative in adaptations of canonical ‘originals’. The cultural studies turn also facilitated another of dialogism’s key elements: the revised position of the academic in relation to the ideological status of the text. Film studies’ reception analyses had demonstrated that the ideological effects of texts could be overcome by audiences without the assistance of the vanguard academic. Dialogism shares this optimistic approach to resisting ideology, but shifts the analysis from the interpretation(s) of the audience outside the text to the act(s) of

2  DIALOGISM AND THE RADICAL TEXT 

23

interpretation(s) from the ‘original’ within the adapted text. Just as the study of the spectator-subject turned to the diversity of multiple and conflicting forms of audience reception, so too could the study of the text-object turn to the diversity of multiple and conflicting forms of textual hybridity. Reception theory had borrowed its methodology from a key text in the cultural studies turn, Stuart Hall’s notion of Encoding/Decoding (1980), which held that although a text might encode ideological meaning, the audience’s decoding of that text might involve negotiated and/ or oppositional readings of it, as well as dominant ideology’s preferred reading. But cultural studies also suggested a way in which interpretations within the text-object might be thought of as oppositional in the way that reception theory considers an audience-subject response as potentially oppositional. John Fiske’s 1989 account of popular culture, for example, was a critique of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s (1972 [1944]) approach to what they called the ‘culture industry’ which, much like the 1970s’ Theoretical approach to art which was then coming under the kind of assault described above, saw ideology as a constraining force that could only be overcome by a vigilant academic vanguard. Dwight Macdonald, a proponent of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Frankfurt School approach, characterised mass culture within this context as being ‘imposed from above. It is fabricated by technicians hired by businessmen; its audiences are passive consumers, their participation limited to the choice between buying and not buying’ (Macdonald 1957, 60). For Fiske, this account fails to recognise how that which is imposed from above can be appropriated in counter-hegemonic contexts. Giving the example of how young people from various non-hegemonic subcultures customise and individualise an industrial product such as a pair of jeans, he argues that ‘[t]he creativity of popular culture lies not in the production of commodities so much as in the productive use of industrial commodities. […] The culture of everyday life lies in the creative, discriminating use of the resources that capitalism provides’ (Fiske 1989, 27–8). Fiske’s distinction between production and productive use of commodities, which he called ‘excorporation’ (expunging the corporate origins of the commodity), can be thought of as a prelude to dialogism’s focus on adaptation’s productive uses of source texts, which one might call ‘excanonation’ (expunging the canonical origins of the text). Even if culture consists largely of an attempted ideological imposition from above, the product or text does

24  R. GEAL

not necessarily impose the hegemony identified by the Frankfurt School. Just as Fiske thought that capitalism’s false choice between Levi and Wrangler jeans could be transcended by a personalising customisation of those jeans, so too proponents of dialogism think that canonical culture’s false choice between, for example, Shakespeare and Dickens can be transcended by adaptation’s dialogic customisation of those texts. There is thus a historically and culturally determined similarity between Fiske’s (1989, 28) analysis of how ‘popular forces transform the cultural commodity into a cultural resource, pluralize the meanings and pleasures it offers, evade or resist its disciplinary efforts, fracture its homogeneity and coherence’ and Stam’s claim that: [m]any revisionist adaptations of Victorian novels […] ‘de-repress them’ in sexual and political terms; a feminist and sexual liberationist dynamic releases the sublimated libidinousness and the latent feminist spirit of the novels and of the characters, or even of the author, in a kind of anachronistic therapy or adaptational rescue operation. Postcolonial adaptations of colonialist novels […] retroactively liberate the oppressed colonial characters of the original. (Stam 2005a, 42)

This broad historical and cultural sensibility helps to explain both ­dialogism’s historical emergence and its subsequent successes. Due to the long dominance of the Leavisite approaches to adaptation, by the time that a dialogic critic like James Naremore denounced fidelity criticism as ‘constitutive of a series of binary oppositions that poststructuralist theory has taught us to deconstruct’ (2000, 2), proponents of dialogism did not adopt the approaches of poststructuralism tout court because those approaches had already been discredited within the then more theoretically current disciplines of literary/cultural studies and film studies. Instead, adaptation studies both engaged with and foregrounded the era’s shift from Theory as radical to the uses of texts as radical. If it was no longer possible to be optimistic about the interventions of the radical vanguard academic, then it was important to instead be optimistic about the possibilities of more widespread textual and interpretative radicalism. Dialogism could then think of texts as replacing the radical function that Theory had until then claimed only for itself. So, in the aforementioned examples given by Stam (2005a, 42) it is not the feminist academic who ‘de-represse[s]’ the Victorian novel, or the postcolonial academic who ‘retroactively liberate[s] the oppressed colonial characters’

2  DIALOGISM AND THE RADICAL TEXT 

25

of the colonial novel. Rather, it is the adapted text which is itself either feminist or postcolonial, and which makes an intervention within its text. Stam (2005a, 46) argues, therefore, that ‘[w]e can still speak of successful or unsuccessful adaptations, but this time oriented not by inchoate notions of “fidelity” but rather by attention to […] “readings” and “critiques” and “interpretations” and “rewritings”’. Replacing the obsolete vanguard academic, ‘[a]daptations, then, can take an activist stance toward their source[s]’ (Stam 2000a, 64).10 This optimistic spirit is a defining feature of dialogism and, indeed, extends beyond an optimistic account of texts’ emancipatory potential into an optimistic understanding of how the until recently much-maligned field of adaptation studies can move out from what ­ Timothy Corrigan (2007, 30) called the forlorn ‘gap’ between literary studies and film studies. Both adapted text and adaptation studies are understood within this context. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan can thereby write, in their recent survey of the field, both about ‘the excitement of encountering in every site of adaptation an entirely new set of relations which allows us to draw promiscuously on theoretical tendencies in film and literary studies and to observe how, in that process of adaptation, something unique is produced’ (2010, 22) and about their ‘increasing confidence in the space we [adaptation studies] occupy across the disciplines of literary, film and TV studies, and beyond’ (2010, 9). Adaptation studies, then, emerged from its fidelity ‘gap’ at a historical and cultural moment which both facilitated its optimistic approach to textual hybridity and which legitimated that approach to textual hybridity to each of its parent disciplines. It could thereby go, in a short period of time, from, as Leitch puts it, ‘being stuck in the backwaters of the academy’ (2008, 63) to a more appropriate place ‘at the very center of intertextual – that is, of textual – studies’ (Leitch 2008, 168).

Dialogism and Authorship Dialogism, then, transcends fidelity criticism’s ‘gap’ between literary studies and film studies, and does so by extending the movement of the parent disciplines from ideological text/radical academic to radical text/ethnographic academic to its logical conclusion. But in so doing it leaves another gap which has significant potential consequences for the field that have not yet been considered. This other gap is theoretical: the bypassed vanguard political project of 1970s’ Theory.

26  R. GEAL

The motivation for bridging this gap, moreover, is not merely a spirit of methodological thoroughness. The distinct approaches to the ideological status of the text, and the academic’s role in relation to that ideological status, are at the heart of the differences between dialogism and a Theoretical paradigm which has yet to be articulated in adaptation studies. And these differences revolve around an issue that is central to both literary studies and film studies, and which is crystallised in how the subject matter of those disciplines intersect in adaptation: authorship. For dialogism, the author is almost entirely displaced. This is the case for both the author/auteur of the adaptation, and for the author of the ‘original’, which was the central concern of fidelity criticism. In conceptualising texts as sites where ‘the infinite and open-ended possibilities generated by all the discursive practices of a culture’ (Stam 2005a, 27) intersect, dialogism displaces the centrality and knowability of an author’s intentions and individuality. The cultural studies turn which informs this sensibility therefore directly addresses the main issue that dialogism was attempting to resolve in adaptation studies: fidelity criticism’s fetishisation of the ‘original’ author’s intentions. Bakhtin’s claim that ‘all utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve’ (1981, 428) leads Stam to argue that ‘Bakhtin’s notion of author and character as multi-discursive and resistant to unification’ means that ‘if authors are fissured, fragmented, multi-discursive, hardly “present” even to themselves, the analyst may inquire, how can an adaptation communicate the “spirit” or “self-presence” of authorial intention?’ (2005a, 9). Authorship is therefore almost entirely displaced in dialogic adaptation studies, for the politically sound reason that valorising canonical authors maintains a hegemonic binary of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, and for reasons derived from the cultural studies turn away from the ideological text/radical academic towards the radical text/ethnographic academic. But certain psychoanalytic poststructuralist strands of the 1970s’ Theoretical project have a very different notion of authorship. Unlike dialogism’s analysis of how texts absorb meaning from numerous sources, this aspect of poststructuralism is concerned with how texts reveal and/or conceal their authorial sources, and on how a text’s articulative status reveals and/or conceals the values, perspectives, and prejudices of those who constructed it. Dialogists are interested in accounting for the multifarious voices which contribute to a text,

2  DIALOGISM AND THE RADICAL TEXT 

27

whereas poststructuralists are concerned with how those voices reveal and/or conceal themselves; in whether those authorial voices announce that they speak from a particular position specific to history, class, ­gender, race and sexuality, or whether they attempt to obfuscate their constructive work, and pass off the text’s content as a natural and objective rendering of reality rather than a partial representation derived from a particular ideological position. The distinctions between these two approaches to authorship have not yet been explored. That is this book’s task. As this chapter has demonstrated, the reasons why these distinctions have not been investigated are a historical accident: 1970s’ Theory (of which poststructuralism is a part) and dialogism are motivated by different forms of leftist politics inflected by specific historical sociocultural conditions and discourses. Both dialogism and poststructuralism have a leftist agenda, but it is my contention that the specific form of this leftism which has generated dialogism’s displaced author has had the unintended consequence of assisting the realist text’s obfuscation of that author. The fourth chapter explores the interactions of these different approaches to authorship in detail. However, before the distinctions between the two paradigms of dialogism and psychoanalytic poststructuralism can be investigated it is necessary to outline the specific character of this poststructuralism, a task which is undertaken in the next chapter.

Notes



1. Literature and film are not the only media analysed in adaptation studies, but they constitute the field’s main subject matter. There have been, nevertheless, some studies which extend out what might be conceptualised as adaptation, which for Linda Hutcheon extends to ‘everything from videogames to interactive art installations to hypertext fiction’ (2013, xx). 2. James Naremore (2000), Robert B. Ray (2000), Thomas Leitch (2003), and Robert Stam (2000a, 2005a) have conducted extensive analyses and critiques of early adaptation studies’ fidelity paradigm. 3. Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (1981) is a collection of writings originally published in Russian in the 1930s and the 1940s. Genette’s Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1997) was published in French in 1982, and Narrative Discourse Revisited (1988) was published in French in 1983.

28  R. GEAL







4. Perhaps the most rigorous pre-dialogic attempt to apply theoretical ideas which (at least potentially) challenged the field’s fidelity model was conducted by Dudley Andrew (1984). Like the studies discussed by Elliott, however, the impact of Andrew’s argument was limited, as indeed was the potential impact of his suggested method. His application of structuralism was limited to a somewhat formalist and lingeringly fidelity-based analysis of the ‘achievement of equivalent narrative units in the absolutely different semiotic systems of film and language’ (1984, 103). His claim that ‘[i]t is time for adaptation studies to take a sociological turn’ (104) was more requoted by other academics than pursued into anything resembling a paradigm, so that, prior to the articulation of dialogism, adaptation scholars did not seem to agree with Andrew’s claim that ‘discourse about adaptation is potentially as far-reaching as you like’ (96). The major reason why Andrew’s argument did not successfully dispense with fidelity as a critical criterion was that it recast rather than replaced it. As Kyle Bishop has argued, Andrew ‘continue[s] to fixate upon [the] issue of fidelity, assuming a one-to-one relationship between a film and its literary origins that has almost unilaterally been challenged by current adaptation theorists’ (2010, 268–9). 5.  A small sample of some examples of, and comments on, this debate includes Bordwell and Carroll (1996), Eagleton (2003), Easthope (1991), Knapp and Michaels (1982), Rodowick (2014), Sokal and Bricmont (1998) and Žižek (2001). 6. Examples of these studies include Anderson (1998), Bordwell (1985), Gerrig (1993), Hochberg and Brooks (1996) and Michaels (2004). 7. Studies relating evolutionary biology to literature and film include Boyd (2009), Dissanayake (1992), Grodal (1997) and Plantinga (2009). 8. I will articulate a detailed account of what psychoanalytic poststructuralism means by film ‘realism’ in the next chapter. For the purposes of this book, and passing over some complex caveats at this stage, the realist film text attempts to obscure its constructed nature, and pass itself off as unfiltered ‘reality’, whereas avant-garde film attempts to interrogate realism’s conventionality. 9. The transitional 1980s was also an era in which literary scholars developed paradigms that attempted to bridge the gap between Theory’s vanguard project and the cultural studies turn towards the radical potential of some textual engagements without the need for such vanguardism. New historicism and cultural materialism are examples of this development. Of the two paradigms, new historicism is more aligned with vanguard Theory. The new historicist analysis of contemporaneous non-literary texts alongside canonical literary texts might suggest inconsistencies in the historical culture which produced them, but those inconsistencies could only

2  DIALOGISM AND THE RADICAL TEXT 

29

be subversive in the context of the lost historical moment. In Stephen Greenblatt’s much-quoted aphorism, therefore, ‘there is subversion, no end of subversion, only not for us’ (1985, 45). The radical potential of texts was therefore always contained, so that new historicism is perhaps the ultimate expression of the defeat of the leftist political movement which had originally inspired 1970s’ Theory: Walter Cohen claims that new historicism’s ‘social basis […] is the United States government’s mass murder of Indochinese peasants followed by the failure of the American anti-war movement to achieve any of its radical goals and then by the rightist recovery of the 1980s’ (1987, 36). Cultural materialism, however, has more in common with the broader cultural studies turn. This is because it develops Raymond Williams’ claim that although literary works ‘contribute to the effective dominant culture and are a central articulation of it’, they ‘express also and significantly some emergent practices and meanings’ (1973, 14). There is therefore some radical potential in literary texts, but cultural materialism clings to an element of 1970s’ vanguardism in claiming that, as Frank Lentricchia puts it, ‘it is the task of the oppositional critic to re-read culture so as to amplify and strategically position the marginalised voices of the ruled, exploited, oppressed, and excluded’ (1983, 15). The text is potentially radical, but that potential can only be fully activated by the academic. Cultural materialism’s oppositional rereading also maintains Theory’s explicit political project, rather than being content merely to record heterogeneous acts of negotiating hegemony: Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield’s manifesto for the paradigm states that ‘it registers its commitment to the transformation of a social order which exploits people on grounds of race, gender and class’ (1985, viii). Such synthesis has allowed the paradigm a degree of institutional success and longevity: in 1996 Eagleton could claim that ‘cultural materialism formed a kind of bridge between Marxism and postmodernism [which he associates with cultural studies], radically revising the former while wary of the more modish, uncritical, unhistorical aspects of the latter. This, indeed, might be said to be roughly the stand which most British left cultural critics nowadays take up’ (1996, 199), and as recently as 2012, Neema Parvini could argue in a book entitled Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory: New Historicism and Cultural Materialism that ‘new historicism and cultural materialism far from being “over” are in fact still the overwhelmingly dominant approaches of Shakespeare scholars today’ (2012, 2). 10.  Dialogism conceptualises academic theory and fictional text in a strikingly similar pluralistic emancipatory manner. Stam calls his simultaneous deployment of ‘literary theory, media theory, and (multi)cultural studies […] a kind of methodological cubism’ (2005b, 15) and likewise

30  R. GEAL notes that ‘cinema can literally include painting, poetry, and music or it can metaphorically evoke them by imitating their procedures; it can show a Picasso painting, or emulate cubist techniques’ (2005a, 24). The same pluralist, modernist, emancipatory art movement, cubism, is therefore applicable to both adaptation and adaptation studies. Moreover, Stam also links this back to the wider turn which I have identified as facilitating the shift from radical criticism to radical texts, writing in the introduction to a film theory reader from the dawn of adaptation studies’ dialogic era, ‘Film and Theory offers a kind of cubist collage of theoretical grids’ (2000b, xv).

References Anderson, Joseph D. 1998. The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Andrew, Dudley. 1984. Concepts in Film Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1969 [1923–1936]. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zorn. New York: Schocken. Bennett, Tony. 1983. “Texts, Readers, Reading Formations.” Midwest Modern Languages Association 16, no. 1: 3–17. Bishop, Kyle. 2010. “Assemblage Filmmaking: Approaching the Multi-source Adaptation and Reexamining George Romero’s ‘Night of the Living Dead’.” In Adaptation Studies: New Approaches, edited by Christa Albrecht-Crane and Dennis Cutchins, 263–77. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Bluestone, George. 1957. Novels into Film: The Metamorphosis of Fiction into Cinema. London: University of California Press. Bobo, Jacqueline. 1988. “‘The Color Purple’: Black Women as Cultural Readers.” In Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television, edited by E. Deidre Pribram, 90–109. London: Verso. Bordwell, David. 1985. “The Classical Hollywood Style.” In The Classical Hollywood Cinema, edited by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, 1–84. London: Routledge. Bordwell, David, and Noël Carroll, eds. 1996. Post-theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Boyd, Brian. 2009. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carroll, Noël. 1992. “Cognitivism, Contemporary Film Theory and Method: A Response to Warren Buckland.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 6, no. 2: 199–219.

2  DIALOGISM AND THE RADICAL TEXT 

31

Cartmell, Deborah, and Imelda Whelehan. 2010. Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Cohen, Walter. 1987. “Political Criticism of Shakespeare.” In Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, edited by Jean E. Howards and Marion F. O’Connor, 18–46. London: Routledge. Comolli, Jean-Louis, and Jean Narboni. 1969. “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism.” Cahiers du Cinéma 216: 11–15. Corrigan, Timothy. 2007. “Literature on Screen, a History: In the Gap.” In The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, edited by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, 29–43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davies, Anthony. 1988. Filming Shakespeare’s Plays: The Adaptations of Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Peter Brook and Akira Kurosawa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Man, Paul. 1971. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dissanayake, Ellen. 1992. Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes from and Why. New York: Free Press. Dollimore, Jonathan, and Alan Sinfield. 1985. Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Eagleton, Terry. 1976. Marxism and Literary Criticism. London: Methuen. ———. 1994. “Discourse and Discos: Theory in the Space Between Culture and Capitalism.” Times Literary Supplement July 15: 3–4. ———. 1996. Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2003. After Theory. London: Penguin. Easthope, Antony. 1991. Literary into Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. Eckert, Charles W., ed. 1972. Focus on Shakespearean Films. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Elliott, Kamilla. 2013. “Theorizing Adaptations/Adapting Theories.” In Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions, edited by Jorgen Bruhn, Anne Gjelsvik, and Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, 19–46. London: Bloomsbury. Fiske, John. 1989. Understanding Popular Culture. London: Routledge. Fry, Paul H. 2012. Theory of Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press. Genette, Gérard. 1988 [1983]. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1997 [1982]. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Gerrig, Richard J. 1993. Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971 [1947–1951]. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Translated by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

32  R. GEAL Greenblatt, Stephen. 1985. “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, ‘Henry IV’ and ‘Henry V’.” In Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, 18–47. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Grodal, Torben. 1997. Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grossman, Julie. 2015. Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny: Adaptation and ElasTEXTity. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Hall, Stuart. 1980. “Encoding/Decoding.” In Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, edited by Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis, 128–38. London: Hutchison. Hattaway, Michael. 2000. “The Comedies on Film.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, edited by Russel Jackson, 85–98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heath, Stephen. 1981. Questions of Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hochberg, Julian, and Virginia Brooks. 1996. “Movies in the Mind’s Eye.” In Post-theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, edited by David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, 368–87. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 1972 [1944]. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Herder and Herder. Hutcheon, Linda. 2013. A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge. Johnson, Barbara. 1980. The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jorgens, Jack J. 1977. Shakespeare on Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Knapp, Steven, and Walter Ben Michaels. 1982. “Against Theory.” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4: 723–42. Leavis, Frank Raymond. 1930. Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture. Cambridge: Minority Press. ———. 1948. The Great Tradition. London: Chatto & Windus. Leitch, Thomas. 2003. “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory.” Criticism 45, no. 2: 149–71. ———. 2005. “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Adaptation: *Especially if You’re Looking Forwards Rather Than Back.” Literature/Film Quarterly 33, no. 3: 231–45. ———. 2008. “Adaptation Studies at the Crossroads.” Adaptation: The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies 1, no. 1: 63–77. Lentricchia, Frank. 1983. Criticism and Social Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

2  DIALOGISM AND THE RADICAL TEXT 

33

Macdonald, Dwight. 1957. “A Theory of Mass Culture.” In Mass Culture, edited by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, 59–73. New York: Free Press. Manvell, Roger. 1971. Shakespeare & the Film. London: J.M.Dent & Sons Ltd. Michaels, Walter Ben. 2004. The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3: 6–18. Naremore, James. 2000. “Introduction: Film and the Reign of Adaptation.” In Film Adaptation, edited by James Naremore, 1–16. London: Athlone. Parvini, Neema. 2012. Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory: New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. London: Bloomsbury. Plantinga, Carl R. 2009. Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience. London: University of California Press. Ray, Robert B. 2000. “The Field of ‘Literature and Film’.” In Film Adaptation, edited by James Naremore, 38–53. London: Athlone. Rodowick, David Norman. 2014. Elegy for Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Selden, Raman, Peter Widdowson, and Peter Brooker. 2005. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, 5th ed. Harlow: Pearson. Sokal, Alan, and Jean Bricmont. 1998. Intellectual Impostures. London: Profile. Stam, Robert. 2000a. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” In Film Adaptation, edited by James Naremore, 54–76. London: Athlone. ———. 2000b. “Introduction.” In Film and Theory: An Anthology, edited by Robert Stam and Toby Miller, xiv–xviii. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2005a. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” In Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation, edited by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, 1–52. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2005b. Literature Through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation. Oxford: Blackwell. Wagner, Geoffrey. 1975. The Novel and the Cinema. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Williams, Raymond. 1973. “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.” New Left Review 1, no. 82: 3–16. Žižek, Slavoj. 2001. The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski Between Theory and Post-theory. London: BFI Publishing.

Filmography The Color Purple. 1985. Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA: Warner Bros.

CHAPTER 3

Poststructuralism and the Radical Critic

There is much which unites the various radical Theoretical projects of the 1970s, and also a good deal which divides them. Some of these ­divisions are purely methodological, while others are partly derived from disciplinary subject matter, so that, for example, scholars of film have been interested in explaining visual pleasures in a manner more akin to scholars of painting than scholars of literature, but have attempted to understand narrative more like scholars of literature than scholars of painting and so on. These methodological and subject-specific differences can present a confusing picture and lead to inconsistencies in terminology and theoretical scaffolding. Slavoj Žižek, for example, contributes some important insights to my subsequent definition of poststructuralist film theory, but assigning his thinking to a particular discipline-specific paradigmatic form of psychoanalytic poststructuralist theory is also problematic. One of the key foundational theorists for psychoanalytic poststructuralism in film studies has been Lacan. Žižek, however, argues ‘against the distorted picture of Lacan as belonging to the field of “post-structuralism”’ (1989, 7). The reasons for this are because of Žižek’s specific interpretation of poststructuralism, which elsewhere he associates with the deconstruction of Derrida (Žižek 2005, 193–5; see Belsey 2002, 93–4). Derridean deconstruction has certainly been a significant element of one possible definition and method of poststructuralism, most notably in literary studies/cultural studies. Indeed, for some scholars in literary studies/cultural studies, the terms © The Author(s) 2019 R. Geal, Anamorphic Authorship in Canonical Film Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16496-6_3

35

36  R. GEAL

deconstruction and poststructuralism are almost interchangeable,1 despite Derrida’s own contradictory commentary on the matter: ‘especially in the United States, the motif of deconstruction has been associated with “poststructuralism” (a word unknown in France until its “return” from the United States)’ (1988, 3). Derrida’s influence on what might be described as poststructuralist film studies, however (some notable exceptions notwithstanding),2 has been relatively minimal. Poststructuralist film studies has been more influenced by the Lacan and Marx (though perhaps not so much the Hegel) which inform Žižek’s own methodology, and therefore, despite his protestations, it is possible to associate Žižek’s thinking with the particular Lacanian and Marxist strand of poststructuralist film studies I am interested in here. It is not my intention to explore all the various nuances of these many methodological differences in politicised Theory in both of adaptation studies’ parent disciplines. Such a task would require an entire book in its own right. Instead, I want to outline, in this chapter, one particular strand of psychoanalytic poststructuralism which has been influential in film studies, so that it can be developed into a methodology relevant to adaptation which can be juxtaposed with dialogism, in the next chapter, and then be applied into a taxonomy in the second half of the book. There are some specific elements to this psychoanalytic poststructuralism which distinguish it from other forms of poststructuralism such as Derridean deconstruction, and these specifics have generated a good deal of debate both from within and from without the Theoretical paradigm. I will address these particularities throughout the chapter. There are also, however, some fundamental principles structuring this psychoanalytic poststructuralism, which, despite being subjected to criticism from those who reject politicised Theory in toto (see, e.g., Bordwell 1989; Carroll 1988; Prince 1996), are not contested, in their broadest sense, within the film studies paradigm of psychoanalytic poststructuralism. There are two main aspects to this fundamental backdrop, although, as we shall see, they are almost completely inseparable. These are: first, ideology— that is the idea that prosperity and security are divided unequally, and that this inequality is principally established and maintained through deception rather than through force; and second, the unconscious—that is the idea that individuals partly think and act in ways which are beyond their rational control. These two elements combine to provide the insight that social inequality, derived from Marx’s material relations, is perpetuated though the manipulation of the exploited’s unconsciousness.

3  POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND THE RADICAL CRITIC 

37

And importantly, since the pleasures of realist texts like Hollywood films are inescapably ideological, only new ways of thinking, derived from the academic endeavours of poststructuralist critics, can expose and challenge the exploitative inequality of hegemony.

Ideology and the Unconscious Unifying what might otherwise be disparate elements to psychoanalytic poststructuralism, then, is a focus on ideology as an unconscious process. This idea rests on the premise that consciousness itself is determined by factors outside its own control, which is a highly contested claim. Perhaps the most lucid clarification of the difference between the theories which conceptualise consciousness as being determined by external processes, and the theories which conceptualise consciousness as independent of those external processes, is provided in Paul Ricoeur’s Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Method (1970). Ricoeur juxtaposes two ways in which the human mind can understand the world. He calls the first of these the ‘hermeneutics of truth’. This approach is sceptical about the status of the external world. Evidence derived from the external world might be ambiguous or even deceptive. Our senses may misinterpret the exact nature of what they perceive. However, although objective knowledge about the external world is problematic, the internal processes governing the way that human consciousness makes sense of that external world are stable and rational. Ricoeur writes that this approach is concerned with ‘a care or concern for the object [the objective world … which] presents itself as a “neutral” wish to describe and not to reduce’ (1970, 28, original emphasis). The second, and rival, approach to the hermeneutics of truth is the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. This approach claims that it is not only the status of the external objective world that is unreliable, but also that the human subject is not fully in control of the internal mental mechanisms by which he/she attempts to understand the objective world. Ricoeur writes that, for this latter approach, the ‘home of meaning is not consciousness but something other than consciousness’ (1970, 55). He associates this model principally with Marx, in which the ‘something other than consciousness’ is ideology determined by material relations; with Nietzsche, in which the ‘something other than consciousness’ is the conventionality and limitations of language; and with Freud, in which the ‘something other than consciousness’ is the unconscious.

38  R. GEAL

Various derivations of these Marxist, Nietzschian and Freudian ­ ermeneutics inform different versions of politicised Theory. They all h share, however, the central claim of the hermeneutics of suspicion that consciousness is at least partly determined by external factors. Each of these elements impacts, in varying degrees, on the specific form of psychoanalytic poststructuralism I am interested in here. The Marxist understanding of consciousness is the most explicitly political, and makes poststructuralism’s analysis of the unconscious a radical project, rather than merely an exercise in cathartic therapy. For Marx, human ideas and institutions derive from material relations. He explained these relationships within the framework of his base/ superstructure model (1970 [1859]). The base is the economic realm of divisions of labour, property ownership and the means of material production—that is, the various ways in which humans interact with the natural world to produce and distribute food, clothing, shelter, tools, luxury goods and so on. The superstructure is the cultural and institutional realm which is determined by, and which legitimates, the material relations in the economic base—the organised and laborious production of food, for example, is conducted by social classes such as, in different historic epochs: slaves, peasants, or migrant workers. Significantly, this base/superstructure relationship means that material conditions determine more than just the kind of social divisions which would need to be enforced on the exploited at the point of the sword, the tracks of a tank or through the threat of a sadistic secret police force. Material conditions also produce ideological ways of thinking which formulate the consciousness of the exploited in such a way as to generate their consent in their own exploitation. Material conditions such as communal agriculture, for example, may facilitate belief in a deity who bestows bounty through crops, and who punishes disobedience through famine. Marx writes, therefore, that ‘[t]he mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness’ (1970, 20–1).3 The Marxist influence on film studies has therefore been an attempt to expose how these ideological processes operate through consensus-generating and consensus-reinforcing apparatus such as the cinema. The Nietzschian approach to consciousness, as opposed to the Marxist and Freudian approaches, has had the most ambiguous impact on poststructuralism in film studies. Nietzsche’s philosophical claims certainly

3  POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND THE RADICAL CRITIC 

39

have the potential to be interpreted in a variety of different ways, influencing thinking as diverse as Derridean deconstruction and Nazi ­ racial supremacy. In terms of an impact on film studies, his influence has been mostly indirect. Nevertheless, the linguistic dimension, which is central to how Nietzsche understands constraints on the independence of human consciousness, has been important in the development of the structuralism out of which poststructuralism emerged at the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s. The structuralism to which poststructuralism refers was a model based on structural linguistics and semiotics, and was itself a reworking of early to mid-twentieth-century linguistics (associated with Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Lévi-Strauss) by philosophers such as Barthes in the 1950s and 1960s. This reworking positioned linguistics within Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion, so that language was thought of as a constraining force that shapes human consciousness. The structures to which structuralism refers, beginning with language and extending out into multifarious cultural and societal forms, were perceived to constrict human agency and condition thought. For Richard Lapsley and Michael Westlake, ‘the [human] subject for structuralism is more constituted than constituting, no longer the self-determining individual […] but the effect of that into which he or she is born and lives’ (Lapsley and Westlake 2006, xi). The task of the structuralist theorist was to reveal this process, and in film studies, this meant demonstrating film’s conventionalised structures which limit spectatorial agency. What distinguished structuralism from the poststructuralism which followed after it, in film studies at least, was the incorporation, into the latter, of the Marxist approach to consciousness outlined above, and the Freudian (and then Lacanian) understanding of split consciousness. In Freud’s much-quoted metaphor, ‘[t]he mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water’. This split in consciousness means that ‘the ego […] is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind’ (Freud 1963 [1916], 284–5). Freud’s principal objective, in his development of this psychoanalytic approach to split consciousness, was to provide a model of therapy for neurotic patients who had repressed the memory of traumatic events into their unconscious. The application of Freudian psychoanalysis into poststructuralist film studies, however, has had a very different intention. Synthesising Freud’s idea of split consciousness with Marx’s famous claim that

40  R. GEAL

‘philosophers have only interpreted the world: the point is to change it’ (1976 [1845], 5, original emphasis), liberationist academic movements like feminism could employ psychoanalysis, as Laura Mulvey put it, ‘as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form’ (1975, 6). This is one of the defining (and unifying) features of psychoanalytic poststructuralism in film studies: a combination of Marxist politics and Freudian method to transform psychoanalysis from a science of therapeutic catharsis into a theory of radical praxis. Psychoanalytic film scholars do not study cinema in order to uncover those films which might function as a form of therapy for those with neuroses. There is a body of writing, pioneered by Gary Solomon (1995), which does attempt to use films as therapy. However, Solomon (and others developing his form of cinema therapy) is a practising psychotherapist rather than a film scholar, and as the title of his foundational book The Motion Picture Prescription: Watch This Movie and Call Me in the Morning (1995) suggests, cinema as therapy focuses on curing patients, or readers looking for self-help, by prescribing films such as It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946) for a depressive who feels insignificant, or Steel Magnolias (Herbert Ross, 1989) for someone struggling with the loss of a loved one. Psychoanalytic films scholars, on the other hand, eschew film’s potential for healing the neurotic individual, and instead investigate the ways in which cinema operates as an unconscious agent of dominant ideology. The analysis element of scholarly psychoanalysis is therefore an attempt to identify the nature of sociocultural injustices, rather than individual neuroses. For the broad poststructuralist approach to film, then, the synthesis of Marxism and psychoanalysis means that society is conceived as a system operating to maintain the hegemony of elites (whether those be thought of in terms of class, gender, race or sexuality) through a culture that unconsciously legitimates the status quo by concealing material and sociocultural relations which might otherwise expose the injustice of hegemony—as Althusser puts it, ‘[i]deology represents the imaginary relation of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ (1971, 153). Realist film is one part of this process: a p ­ leasure-generating apparatus which obfuscates, legitimates and perpetuates inequality. The poststructuralist film academic attempts to expose, and thereby transcend, this unconscious ideological process. There have been a number of different attempts to construct models to undertake this task, and these have been the subject of much debate, both from rival proponents within

3  POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND THE RADICAL CRITIC 

41

poststructuralism, and from those who criticise the theory in toto from without. But one important trend in this radical poststructuralist project is conducive to the analysis of authorship in film adaptation, and it locates film’s ideological effects within a specific element of psychoanalytic thought derived from Lacan’s reworking of Freudian split consciousness.

The Symbolic Order and Anamorphosis Lacan’s psychoanalysis makes a number of revisions from that of Freud. For Lacan, this is entirely appropriate since psychoanalysis is always an attempt to uncover something from the past, so that psychoanalytic time does not move in a simple linear manner. He calls this notion après-coup (1977a [1966], 30–113), which translates roughly as ‘deferred action’. Just as therapy reveals buried trauma, so too can the significance of ideas only be understood retrospectively. Consequently, Lacan’s whole project was a rereading of Freud which revealed the absences and slippages in meaning which had until then been overlooked. This partly meant that Lacan’s après-coup was a reworking of Freud’s concept of retrospection (nachträglichkeit), but at the more fundamental level meant that Lacan thought of his own work as a further discovery of meaning which Freud had already begun to uncover. It is beyond the remit of this book to explore all Lacan’s après-coup developments of Freudian psychoanalysis. One particular area of development, however, is central to poststructuralist film theory. This is Lacan’s categorisation of three different registers, or Orders, in the human mind: the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. The nuances of these Orders will be teased out in the discussion which follows, but the fundamental aspects of each Order are as follows. The Imaginary Order is occupied by the child before he/she can speak, and before he/she has become aware of sexual difference, and aware even of his/her own bodily separation from the mother. Exploiting language’s potential slippages in meaning, Lacan (1977a, 197) puns that this child is an hommelette (both a ‘little man’ and a diffusion of coherent single eggs in an ‘omelette’), without an understanding that he/she is confined in a body with finite borders, and unaware that an individual foot or arm which comes into view is an integral component of a unified whole. When this child sees him/herself in the mirror and realises that he/she actually resides in a coherent body, a process of misrecognition

42  R. GEAL

takes place: the child imagines an illusory mastery over him/herself, when, for example, he/she raises one leg, and the mirror image does the same. Both these stages of the Imaginary Order are characterised by an illusory bliss (jouissance) derived from the hommelette’s nebulous bodily indeterminacy and from the mirror child’s perceived mastery over the unified body. The child’s blissful occupation of the Imaginary Order does not last long, however. He/she soon enters into the Symbolic. Lacan associates this transition with the male child’s Oedipal trajectory— simultaneous desire for the mother, and fear of her castrating lack of a penis. Entry into the Symbolic Order occurs when the male child affirmatively answers the father’s prohibition against incestuous sexual relations with the mother, repressing the desire to form the unconscious. Feminist Lacanians such as Kristeva (1989) and Luce Irigaray (1985) have revised Lacan’s explanation of the male child’s Oedipal development into an analysis of the female child’s Oedipal trajectory. Despite some important differences in the reasons for the female child’s Oedipal development, and a different conception of how this trajectory is resolved as male and female children reach maturity, Kristeva and Irigaray still think of the female child as assenting to patriarchal authority and entering the Symbolic Order through language. The Symbolic Order is therefore the realm of authority and discipline, structured through the language which articulates the Law of the Father. The assenting child uses this language to articulate his/her position within this gendered Law, and thereby constructs his/her sense of identity—his/her subjectivity—in the process. This subjectivity is another illusory form of misrecognition. The Symbolic Order designates various subject positions which determine what it means to be a participating member of the society that produces the Symbolic Order. The idea of being ‘a man’, for example, with so many unspoken but quite specific (and historically and culturally fluctuating) expectations and prohibitions ranging from appearance to behaviour, is a structure in the Symbolic Order, against which real individuals are measured (and measure themselves). Individuals’ very sense of who they are, then, is defined by illusory forms of subjectivity residing in the Symbolic Order, which is anterior to the subject. Each individual subject is a descanted iteration of innumerable Symbolic characteristics based on historically and culturally specific possibilities derived from class, education, gender, race, sexuality, family

3  POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND THE RADICAL CRITIC 

43

structure, religion, war and peace, and so on, in an infinitely complex and overdetermined equation of incalculable complexity. The agency that any individual subject has, in responding to the various Symbolic stimuli of life, is determined by how that individual’s subjectivity has responded to prior Symbolic stimuli. Individuals might have choices, but those choices are influenced by the subject’s internalised Symbolic repository. The relationship between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, however, is not merely one of replacement. Rather, the two Orders are always co-present, with the Symbolic regulating, rather than entirely displacing, the Imaginary. The jouissance of the hommelette or the pre-Oedipal child in the mirror conflicts with the limitations and prohibitions of the Symbolic Order. Lacan, and in particular his pupil Jacques-Alain Miller (1977/1978), used the term ‘suture’ to describe how the Symbolic Order regulates the Imaginary. The word suture is derived from the medical process of stitching together a wound, and like that process, the subject it stitches together, out of the Symbolic Order’s regulation of the Imaginary, is marked with a scar that preserves the sign of the wound and of the stitching. Lacan’s third Order, the Real, is not an expression of ‘reality’ itself, but is the potential consequences of the Symbolic Order’s regulation of the Imaginary. Typically, suture ensures that the subject can structure his/her identity in relation to the Symbolic Order. However, the limits of the illusionistic Symbolic Order, which can never fully correlate any given individual with his/her image of themselves in that Order, can also resist or transcend suture. The above-mentioned ‘man’ designated by the Symbolic Order, for example, can never be fully and finally reconciled with any given individual male human subject. Suture usually regulates this misrecognised image of what the subject ‘should’ be, but the failed reconciliation of the subject with the Symbolic image can also generate brief glimpses of the Real, which is a realm beyond the jouissance of the Imaginary or the law of the Symbolic. The Real, moreover, is inherently traumatic. It might be supposed that the inevitable fissures in the Symbolic Order which generate momentary fragments of the Real could be emancipatory, so that the individual human male subject failing to live up to the expectations of ‘being a man’, from the above example, would recognise the deception, and develop his own identity without and beyond the artificial constraints of the Symbolic Order. But because the subject’s position designated by the Symbolic Order is so central to his/her identity, with, indeed, his/her own subjectivity

44  R. GEAL

almost entirely an illusion structured by that Order, any fissures in that subjectivity are perceived as a threat to the entire living status of the subject. Hence, the Real, which resides in those moments when the subject perceives a disjuncture between his/her incomplete reproduction of the positions designated by the Symbolic Order, is a traumatic threat to subjectivity itself. Each human subject, then, has a conception of how they should ­operate in society. This image is derived from a limited set of possible subject positions, each with specific characteristics, which reside in an internalised Symbolic Order. But because this image is an illusion, and no subject can ever fully occupy such positions, the fractures in the Symbolic Order keep offering traumatic glimpses of the Real. Lacan uses a number of examples to explain his Orders. The most useful of these, because it demonstrates how the visual aspect of the Orders can be applied to film, is his analysis of Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors (1533). This is a painting of two French ambassadors to Henry VIII’s court, together with a number of still life objects representing various aspects of sixteenth-century Renaissance culture. The ­painting subscribes to the (then relatively recently developed) geometric logic of perspectival painting, but also includes an element which defies that geometric logic. This is an oblique skull, which dominates the bottom of the painting, and which only obtains its own perspectival unity if the viewer moves to a position which breaks the perspectival unity of the rest of the work. These two different perspectival orientations, for Lacan, are examples of the Symbolic and the Real. The Symbolic Order, as the realm of a culture’s understanding of human subjectivity, structures the perspectival geometry which gives the illusion of the majority of the painting’s three-dimensional verisimilitude organised around a vanishing point. This is not merely a technical exercise, or just a development that marks Renaissance painting as being distinct from the earlier non-perspectival painting of the Middle Ages. It is also an aesthetic manifestation of a broad cultural sensibility which structures the Symbolic Order during this historic era. This sensibility has numerous manifestations, including at the verbal epistemological level. The defining verbal expression of this, for Lacan, and for Ricoeur, in his articulation of the historic development of the hermeneutics of truth, was René Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy (1982 [1644]). Descartes’ attempt to explain how one might know that the world exists, and that the senses are not merely an illusion, rested

3  POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND THE RADICAL CRITIC 

45

upon his famous expression cogito ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I am’) (1982, 5), in which although the subject might doubt the existence of the objective world, the subject could rely upon the existence of the consciousness which does the doubting. The Cartesian subject, for Ricoeur, ‘knows that things are doubtful, that they are not such as they appear; but he does not doubt that consciousness is such as it appears to itself’ (1970, 33). This historically specific form of subjectivity, expressed in precise, verbal epistemological terms by Descartes, has concomitant forms of aesthetic expression too. Paul H. Fry (2012, 6–7) has argued that Cartesian doubt is present in the works of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Lacan makes an even more specific point about Cartesian doubt and its aesthetic manifestations. This is because Descartes makes a series of deductions that position the objective world in a certain relation to his conception of subjectivity. First, cogito ergo sum, the subject knows that it, if nothing else, must exist. Second, because it exists it must have been created. Third, the act of creation would require an omnipotent God. Fourth, an omnipotent God must be benevolent; and fifth, therefore not wish to fool the subject’s senses. Thus, the objective world can reasonably be supposed to exist, but it is something that emanates out from the more certain centrality of the cogito and from which its epistemological status is derived. Descartes clarifies this distinction with two terms: the res cogitans, the ‘thinking thing’, which knows it exists because of its defining characteristic of thinking; and the res extensa, the ‘extended thing’ whose existence can be extrapolated from the perception of the res cogitans human subject. The Cartesian subject is therefore the centre of meaning, knowledge and certainty, which is an epistemological approach that finds an aesthetic form in the geometry of perspectival painting. Geometric perspective constructs an impression of res extensa reality that flows out from the res cogitans viewing subject. Erwin Panofsky was the first art historian to make this link between epistemological geometry and aesthetic geometry, conceptualising, in the title of an influential essay, Perspective as Symbolic Form (1991 [1927]). He claims that in the Early Modern period both ‘“aesthetic space” and “theoretical space” recast perceptual space in the guise of one and the same sensation: in one case that sensation is visually symbolized, in the other it appears in logical form’ (1991, 45). Lacan builds on Panofsky’s argument, stating that during the Early Modern period,

46  R. GEAL we find the progressive interrogation of the geometral laws of perspective, and it is around research on perspective that is centred a privileged interest for the domain of vision – whose relation with the institution of the Cartesian subject, which is itself a sort of geometral point, a point of perspective, we cannot fail to see. (Lacan 1977b [1973], 86)

Just as Descartes conceptualised the res extensa objective world as a ­logical extension of the res cogitans human subject, perspective painting’s compositional unity constructs a transcendent illusion of both space and subjectivity with a singular point designated to what Bill Nichols calls ‘the imaginary subject whose place we propose to fill, a place we are nominated to assume’ (Nichols 1981, 53). Prior to the solipsistic concept of human subjectivity in the Symbolic Order articulated by Descartes, painting did not geometrically extend out of the Renaissance’s single perspectival position because earlier stages of the Symbolic Order did not conceptualise the human subject as the centre of meaning and epistemological certainty. Hierarchical proportion, in Ancient Egyptian or Medieval painting, for example, provides the clearest counterexample to Renaissance perspective. The Egyptian astronomer-priest in the Eighteenth Dynasty (fifteenth century BCE) Tomb of Nakht is depicted hunting with servants who are half the size of their master, not because they are supposed to be literally smaller, or further away, but because they are less significant, and occupy less metaphorical space in the Ancient Egyptian Symbolic Order. The early fourteenth century CE Maestà altarpiece by Duccio di Buoninsegna, similarly, shows an oversized Madonna sitting amongst angels and saints who are only slightly larger than the Christ child on her lap, to again demonstrate symbolic significance in terms of depicted size. In these examples of hierarchical proportion, as Jacob Bronowski puts it, ‘[t]here is no attempt at [geometral] perspective because the painter thought of himself as recording things, not as they look, but as they are: a God’s eye view, a map of eternal truth’ (1976, 180).4 In the Early Modern era developments in the Symbolic Order, verbally articulated in Descartes’ cogito, completely reorient the relationship between the res cogitans human subject and the res extensa object which emanates out of the subject’s centrality, and painting demonstrates this development in visual terms. As Lapsley and Westlake state,

3  POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND THE RADICAL CRITIC 

47

[i]t was not simply that the paintings of the Renaissance began to speak the language of bourgeois ideology through their adoption of greater realism, more secular subject matter and an increasingly marked individualism of style, but also, and more importantly, the system of perspective based on a convergence towards a vanishing point in the picture indicated that there was a single, unique point in the imaginary space outside it from which its content was perceived. In other words, perspective gave the spectator an omniscient place from which to view what was depicted, thus reinforcing the bourgeois notion of the subject as a free unique individual. (Lapsley and Westlake 2006, 79)

For Nichols, the Renaissance perspectival system, then, should be thought of ‘in terms of the constitution of the self-as-subject’ (1981, 53) because the vision and the viewer are constructed dialectically: ‘The painting stands in for the world it represents as we stand in for the singular but imaginary point of origin; we recognize the identification marks of the world re-presented while this very identification marks our position, our capture and appropriation’ (1981, 53). Geometral perspective contributes to, and aesthetically reinforces, the illusion of a particular conception of human subjectivity in the Symbolic Order. Lacan’s critique of the Cartesian cogito is central to how psychoanalytic poststructuralism in film studies conceptualises the relationship between realist film text and spectating subject. I will develop the specific element of this which relates to authorship in canonical adaptations shortly, but it is important to stress at this stage what Lacan’s approach to subjectivity does claim, and what it does not, because many criticisms of Lacanian film studies have mischaracterised this. For example, Noël Carroll, one of its most systematic (and influential) critics claims that psychoanalytic film theory ‘maintain[s] that film spectators are rapt in the illusion that what is represented – the cinematic referents – are really present’ (1988, 43), despite the common-sense observation that ‘[n]o one thinks that the Empire State Building is in the screening room during King Kong [Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933]: how could it be?’ (1987, 399). One of the key theorists criticised by Carroll, however, is Christian Metz (to whom I shall turn in detail in the next chapter), who states, in a work which Carroll directly engages with, that ‘the audience is not duped by the diegetic illusion, it “knows” that the screen presents no more than a fiction’ (Metz 1982, 72), but that this insight only partly explains a

48  R. GEAL

psychoanalytic account of cinema since ‘[o]ne will never be able to ­analyse a film by speaking directly about the diegesis […] because that is equivalent to examining the signifieds without taking the signifiers into consideration’ (Metz 1974, 143, original emphasis). Carroll’s highly partial analysis of how psychoanalytic film theory employs concepts derived from thinkers like Lacan is therefore characterised by Heath as ­‘falsification, construction of straw positions against which to argue, skilful deployment of ignorance, and so on’ (1983, 66). Lacan’s concept of subjectivity thus functions in a much more subtle manner than its critics suppose. The Symbolic Order inflects consciousness in a myriad of different ways, but most fundamentally, in relation to the contemporary Cartesian subject, in terms of the illusion that the subject is the active self-constituting rational res cogitans hierarchically positioned over and above a passive, subsidiary res extensa. Descartes has the world emanate out from the subject, whereas psychoanalysis (and particularly Lacan’s concept of misrecognition which regulates the relationship between the subject and the Symbolic Order) conceptualises the relationship between res cogitans and res extensa as operating in precisely the opposite direction. For Lacan, the subject is a construct of the Symbolic Order, which existed prior to the birth of the subject, and which will continue to exist after the death of the subject. As Lacan puts it, ‘I am not a poet, but a poem. A poem that is being written, even if it looks like a subject’ (1977b, viii). This radially revised conception of what a subject is means that Lacan reworks Descartes’ foundational statement ‘I think, therefore I am’ (1982, 5) into ‘I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think’ and ‘I think of what I am where I do not think I’m thinking’ (Lacan 1977a, 166). As Malcolm Bowie states, ‘“[t]he subject” is no longer a substance endowed with qualities, or a fixed shape possessing dimensions, or a container awaiting the multifarious contents that experience provides: it is a series of events within language, a procession of turns, tropes and inflections’ (1991, 76). If this insight had completely reoriented every subject’s conception of itself then the Symbolic Order’s illusion of Cartesian subjectivity would be transcended. That has not been the case, however. Bowie states that ‘[t]he subject is irremediably split in and by language, but “modern man” still has not learned this lesson’ (1991, 77). Indeed, Lacan goes so far as to claim that the persistence of the Cartesian centralised ego ‘is structured exactly like a symptom. At the heart of the subject, it is only a privileged symptom, the human symptom par excellence, the mental illness of man’ (1988, 16).

3  POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND THE RADICAL CRITIC 

49

The ‘symptom’ of Cartesian subjectivity, moreover, does not merely entail illusion for each individual subject. Its effects are much more pernicious. Perhaps the greatest crime inflicted by this symptom has ­ been slavery and colonialism—for Finn Fordham ‘[t]he split of mind and matter is equivalent to the split of the subject-who-knows and the object-that-is-known, which in turn informs the power dynamic between the imperialist and the colonized’ (2010, 251). This dualism also has malignant consequences on human relationships with the natural world. Ecological scholars have noted how Cartesian dualism, which is, for Richie Nimmo, ‘strikingly persistent in many ways’ (2011, 61) ­facilitates an anthropocentrism which legitimates treating animals as passive, non-thinking elements of the res extensa (Donovan 2017; Nimmo 2011), and more pressingly, operates as what Lorraine Code calls an ‘epistemology of mastery’ (2006, 30) which has the potential to push Descartes’ claim that the res cogitans should be ‘masters and possessors of nature’ (1998 [1637], 35) to the point of environmental apocalypse (Grear 2011). The consequences of the anthropocentric illusion of Cartesian subjectivity in the Symbolic Order are thereby significant enough to threaten the very survival of humanity via environmental degradation. And, central to Lacan’s conception of subjectivity, the Symbolic Order perpetuates itself through numerous unacknowledged rituals and assumptions. The aesthetic mirroring of the relationship between res cogitans and res extensa in the geometral perspective system is one such ideological ritual. Criticisms, such as Carroll’s (1987, 399) above, that film spectators are not completely and inevitably brainwashed dupes (given that spectators demonstrate diverse responses to film texts, and engage in conventions such as decoding erotetic narrative structures, and willingly suspending their disbelief) do not recognise the subtlety and ubiquity of the illusion of Cartesian subjectivity. There is one more important element to Lacan’s analysis of perspectival geometry in Holbein’s The Ambassadors that is important for subsequent psychoanalytic poststructuralism in film studies. This relates to the painting’s relationship between its two different perspectival orientations. Without the oblique skull both Descartes’ verbal epistemological superstructure and Holbein’s pictorial aesthetic superstructure, reflect the same historically specific epistemology: the centralised, unified Cartesian subjectivity of the res cogitans. However, Holbein’s oblique skull, since it is either out of perspective, or requires a reorientation of perspective

50  R. GEAL

which makes the rest of the painting go out of perspective, shatters this Cartesian subjectivity (or, at least, has the potential to, which is an important distinction I am coming on to). The skull can demonstrate the limitations of the Symbolic Order, of which Cartesian subjectivity is a part, and reveal instead the trauma of the Real, where that Cartesian subjectivity is shown to be an illusion. Crucially, since the Real is always present in the fissures of the Symbolic Order, for Lacan this revelation appears as an inevitable consequence of the historically specific attempt to locate a particular form of subjectivity in that Symbolic Order: ‘at the very heart of the period in which the [modern Cartesian] subject emerged and geometral optics was an object of research, Holbein makes visible for us here something that is simply the subject as annihilated’ (1977b, 88). Another clear articulation of this historical era’s conception of Cartesian subjectivity, and its relationships to the Symbolic and the Real, is Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The eponymous protagonist articulates the res cogitans subject’s position as centre of knowledge and of the universe: ‘What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god – the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!’ (2.2.305–9). But, like Holbein’s skull, Hamlet sees the fissures in this illusory form of subjectivity designated by the Symbolic Order, and, like Holbein’s (and Yorick’s) skull, the revelation is a trauma which threatens to not only displace the Cartesian subject’s centrality, but to obliterate the subject entirely: ‘And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?’ (2.2.309–10). For both Holbein and Shakespeare, the recognition that the res cogitans is an illusion relegates this ‘thinking thing’ to the lifeless ‘extended thing’ of the res extensa. For Lacan, particularly in the visual sense exemplified by Holbein, this oscillation between the Symbolic Order and its inevitable fissures which reveal the Real is an anamorphic process. The term anamorphosis itself predates Lacan: it means a distorted projection or perspective which requires a specific vantage point or device (such as a mirror) to make sense of an image. It was used, in the Renaissance, as a trompe l’oeil device to conceal an image. At times, it might have been politically expedient to do this, so as to possess an image of a treasonous or heretical allegiance which could only be seen by those holding a mirror in a certain position. Although Holbein’s skull lacks this explicit conspiratorial/political context, it is nonetheless anamorphic in these pre-Lacanian

3  POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND THE RADICAL CRITIC 

51

terms. Lacan develops this idea of anamorphosis much further. For Lacan, anamorphosis is the moment when the fissures in the Symbolic Order are exposed to temporarily show the Real. It is an aesthetic articulation, through a visual distortion, of the inconsistencies in the Symbolic Order. For Heath, Lacanian anamorphosis is ‘the recognition and exploitation of the possibilities of this distortion’ (1981, 28). This anamorphosis, then, is discernible in Hamlet’s conceptualisation of what it means to be human, or in Holbein’s handling of geometral perspective. Lacanian film theorists, such as Heath, noticed how this anamorphosis could be used to explore film’s basic visual processes and conventions. Holbein’s The Ambassadors is anamorphic because its oblique skull demonstrates perspective painting’s limitations in terms of delivering a single ‘place we propose to fill, a place we are nominated to assume’ (Nichols 1981, 53), as the skull only comes into the kind of focus consistent with perspective painting if it is observed from a different, non-centralised position. Film, however, seems to extend one particularly heightened and reflexive example of visual anamorphosis in perspective painting, and manipulates this anamorphosis into a defining element of the film medium’s ontology. Cinema, because of its movement and its interchange of images, is like an overly anamorphic perspectival painting whose transcendent subjective point of origin is constantly in flux. The Ambassadors is anamorphic because it incorporates a second perspectival position alongside its principal perspectival position. But this shifting perspective is the very thing which distinguishes film from still imagery. Cinema therefore constantly threatens the ideological power of Renaissance painting’s fixed subject position. Renaissance painting aesthetically articulates the Symbolic Order’s Cartesian subjectivity, with an occasional remarkable reflexive example of an anamorphosis which reveals a glimpse of the Real in a work like The Ambassadors. Cinema, on the other hand, is inherently and ontologically anamorphic.

Filmic Anamorphosis and Masochism Lacanian poststructuralist film theory conceptualises cinema in terms of an anamorphic relationship between static Cartesian geometry representing the Symbolic Order (inherent in the still images out of which the impression of movement is generated) and a shift in that geometric perspective potentially representing the Real (inherent in the mobility of the camera, and the camera’s alternating positioning through editing).

52  R. GEAL

And, reflecting poststructuralism’s synthesis of psychoanalysis with Marxist praxis, this analysis of anamorphosis is framed in terms of ideology. The main thrust of this analysis concerns how realist cinema avoids the Symbolic Order’s inevitable revelation of the Real by suturing, instead, with the Imaginary Order. Jean-Pierre Oudart (1977/1978) conducted the first systematic account of cinematic suture. His ideas have been controversial and undergone much revision in subsequent poststructuralist theory, but they are useful in terms of explaining some integral elements of cinematic anamorphosis. Oudart concentrated particularly on the editing convention of shot/reverse shot. In, most typically, a conversation between two screen characters, the first shot presents the spectator with an image of perspectival unity, flowing out, like the majority of Holbein’s The Ambassadors, from the same Cartesian ‘place we are nominated to assume’ (Nichols 1981, 53) by perspectival painting. This image is anchored in the Symbolic Order, with the viewing subject making sense of the image from within his/her designated position in that Order—he/she is a res cogitans from which the res extensa of the fictional film world seems to emanate. The potential threat to the viewing subject is that a cut to a reverse shot might extinguish the res cogitans’ centrality, constructing a new res extensa from a different subject position. Such a cut might reveal the fact that the res cogitans’ centrality is an illusion designated by the Symbolic Order and, like the anamorphic disruption of perspectival unity in Holbein’s The Ambassadors, reveal the skull-like Real. However, for Oudart, the reverse shot which follows the first image, far from revealing the Real, is related to the first image in a manner that sutures over the fissure which the movement from the static perspectival geometry of the first image reveals in the Symbolic Order. Suture, recall, is the Symbolic Order’s regulation of the Imaginary. In the Imaginary, a spectator can be like the hommelette—unconfined by the body or by the Cartesian subjectivity which structures perception as emanating out from that perceiving body. The reverse shot transcends the usual rules of perspectival vision. An observer of a real conversation, after all, could not shift position instantaneously, at the precise moment when an observation of the other speaker demands such a shift or when a subtle expression by one of the interlocutors reveals something about their intentions, since the observer of a real conversation is constricted within a body confined by physical space. The edit in a shot/reverse shot, however, grants the spectator the

3  POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND THE RADICAL CRITIC 

53

hommelette-like ability to move outside the limits of the perceiving body (which is linked to the subject in the Symbolic Order), and to experience the transcendent jouissance of the Imaginary. This suturing between the Symbolic and the Imaginary oscillates back and forth from one Order to the other. The reverse shot is linked to the first by conventions such as the eyeline match, so that the hommelette’s disembodied transcendence is momentary and therefore not a mystical or spiritual denial of the body and the Symbolic Order. Indeed, the eyeline match and the new perspectival unity of the reverse shot mean that the spectator is sutured back into the Symbolic Order almost instantaneously. Rather, then, than editing demonstrating a fissure in the Symbolic Order which generates glimpses of the Real, realist cinema employs the grammatical techniques of continuity editing such as shot/reverse shot and eyeline matches to suture over the fissures in the Symbolic, and instead exploit the pleasurable jouissance of the Imaginary while simultaneously enforcing the subjectivity of the Symbolic. Heath’s (1985) revision of Oudart’s model develops the ideological consequences of cinematic suture to the extent that he conceptualises realist film as not merely compensating for the medium’s anamorphism, but making an ideological and pleasurable virtue out of that anamorphism. He explains this process through an analysis of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), which is worth exploring in some detail. The opening sequence of this film begins with an underwater shot that will subsequently be attributed to the eponymous shark’s point-of-view. It cuts to a night-time beach party; with dramatic changes in colour, from blue-greens to orange-yellows; in music, from the famous ominous non-diegetic theme to diegetic harmonica; and in the camera’s rhythm, from the shark’s forward point-of-view thrust to a smooth track across the party-goers. The continuity editing techniques of eyeline match and shot/reverse shot further establish the narrative space and inscribe the audience’s position into that space. Shortly after a girl swims into the sea, the forward thrusting, desaturated non-human point-of-view shot is used to signify an imminent attack by the shark. This interchange of shots, for Heath, demonstrates that suture is a more ubiquitous phenomenon than Oudart’s conceptualisation of suture in the shot/reverse shot structure. Film has an interminable dialectic oscillation between vision’s claim to transcendental truth (derived from the Cartesian subjectivity of the res cogitans in the Symbolic Order) and the inevitable discontinuities and disruptions intrinsic to the camera’s

54  R. GEAL

mobility and editing. The coherence of cinematic grammar in the scene on the beach, summoning up a comfortable, believable narrative space, and positioning the spectator within it, is an attempt to reconstruct the truth of vision within a medium in which grammatical coherence is always dialectically juxtaposed with potentially alienating grammatical incoherence (Heath 1985, 513). Heath’s understanding of the space on the beach, structured around shot/reverse shot and eyeline matches, is much like Oudart’s. But Heath is just as interested in the potentially alienating elements of the scene, associated with the shark’s point of view, as he is with those elements which suture over the potential alienation. It is these potentially alienating elements which point to the ideological consequences of suture, and which have ramifications for the study of adaptation. Heath is interested in the ideological consequences of suture because his psychoanalytic poststructuralism is partly based on an approach to cinema which looks for evidence of whether or not a film draws attention to its own constructed status. The concern with how film enunciates, perhaps best exemplified by Jean-Louis Baudry (1985), explores film in terms of both ideology and the unconscious. Given that ideology operates by concealing material relations, which it passes off as natural rather than derived from economic and sociocultural conditions, Baudry was interested in how film foregrounds or elides its constructed nature, and thereby how it foregrounds or elides the fact that it represents the interests and values of those who made the film, rather than offering the illusion of a neutral objective view of how the world ‘really’ is. Baudry defined realist film as a product which attempts to efface all traces of its own construction. Almost all forms of editing and storytelling constitute a reality-effect that conceals cinema’s inherent transformative work. These processes are intrinsically ideological since they create the impression of a seamless flowing of events in spectators who are placed into a created, passive position which, since it seems to be the origin of images and events that have had their constructed nature elided, masquerades as a creative, transcendent position. Baudry may have gone too far in conceptualising spectators as being inevitably and completely duped by cinema’s illusionism, but Heath’s more subtle approach to the ways in which film regulates its artifice begins with Baudry’s insight that realist film is ideological in the sense that it performs the Cartesian dualist binary distinction between viewing res cogitans and the viewed res extensa which seems to emanate out from the spectating subject. Only by revealing the

3  POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND THE RADICAL CRITIC 

55

transformative work of the cinematic apparatus can a denunciation of this ideology be achieved. The important question to ask about the relationships between film, enunciation and ideology is therefore, for Baudry, is the work made evident, does consumption of the product bring about a ‘knowledge effect’, or is the work concealed? […] In which case, concealment of the technical base will also bring about an inevitable ideological effect. Its inscription, its manifestation as such, on the other hand, would produce a knowledge effect, an actualisation of the work process, as denunciation of ideology. (Baudry 1985, 533–4)

Heath positioned his analysis of cinematic anamorphosis in this context. Those inevitable moments which rupture the static composition of Cartesian perspectival geometry always have the alienating potential to reveal film’s constructed nature. The suture which regulates this alienation thereby does not just substitute the jouissance of the Imaginary for the trauma of the Real, as Oudart had it. Suture also prevents the subject from seeing Baudry’s ‘actualisation of the work process’ (1985, 534) and from recognising his/her passivity as a subject of the Symbolic Order being deceived by an hommelette-like disembodied transcendence. For Heath, this is realist cinema’s central ideological effect. Baudry’s explanation of how the cinematic apparatus ideologically positions subject-spectators is insufficient because it does not explain the pleasure of being so positioned, whereas Oudart’s explanation of suture does not contextualise anamorphism’s pleasures as ideological. Indeed, the way that Heath combines these two concerns, spectatorial passivity as both (and simultaneously) ideological and pleasurable, allows him to develop the idea that film’s ideological pleasures are principally dependent on anamorphism. Heath therefore argues that cinema’s inevitable grammatical inconsistencies are an almost paradoxical element of how a film is not reducible to its ‘ideology’ but is also the working over of that ideology in cinema, with the industry dependent on the pleasure of the operation. […] Film is the constant process of a phasing-in of vision, the pleasure of that process – movement and fixity and movement again, from fragment […] to totality (the jubilation of the final image). (Heath 1985, 514)

56  R. GEAL

There is one more significant element of Heath’s argument which is relevant to my approach to adaptation, but before coming to that it is necessary to elaborate a final theoretical modification to his account of cinematic anamorphism. The reason for this is because Heath’s model points towards the idea that the pleasures of anamorphism are masochistic, but he does not spell this out explicitly. Colin MacCabe (1985) and Michele Aaron (2007) make the connection between anamorphism and masochism clear by linking suture to Freud’s explanation of the child’s fort/da game. Freud relates (1955 [1920], 14–7) how his young grandson, who was just beginning to develop language skills, frequently played a game with a bobbin. He would repeatedly cast away the object with the cry of fort (‘gone’), before winding it back up while roughly articulating the word da (‘here’). Freud interpreted this game as a metaphor for the child’s separation from its mother. The child could not really dictate when it had access to her, and so created a ritual in which this access could be allegorised. It thereby claimed limited and illusionistic agency over that which was beyond genuine control, moving from being passively abandoned to actively abandoning. Crucially, for Aaron, ‘[w]hat Freud suggests is that the pleasure of recovery is not only experienced through the pain of loss, but is actually increased by it’ (2007, 54), so that the unpleasure of non-access to the mother, and the pleasure of access, were both equally enjoyable at the allegorical level. The temporary unpleasure of the former is worth the cathartic resolution of the latter. The fort/da game is therefore masochistic, in that it stages a trauma over which the child has no genuine control, in order to achieve the semblance of mastery over that trauma. The pleasure of this illusory mastery is entirely dependent on the prior allegorical staging of the trauma over which no genuine mastery is possible. Cinematic anamorphosis operates in similar terms. Grammatical inconsistency temporarily reveals fissures in the static perspectival geometry emanating out from the spectating Cartesian subject of the Symbolic Order. This grammatical inconsistency is like the child’s fort (‘gone’)—a painful staging of the fissures in the Symbolic Order, and a potential indication that the spectator’s subjectivity is derived from that incomplete Order. The suture over these grammatical inconsistencies, via the conventions of continuity editing, is like the child’s da (‘here’)—a cathartic and masochistic resolution of those inconsistencies, and of the subject’s illusory status designated by the Symbolic Order, which derives

3  POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND THE RADICAL CRITIC 

57

its pleasure from the prior unpleasure. The deferred pleasure of the spectator misrecognising him/herself as a self-constituting transcendent ‘self-as-subject’ (Nichols 1981, 53) through grammatical consistency is therefore worth the prior revelation of the passive process of the ‘constitution of the self-as-subject’ (Nichols 1981, 53, my emphasis) apparent in moments of grammatical inconsistency. Spectatorship is therefore a masochistic process—the acceptance of a temporary, painful revelation that not only is film an illusion, but that an ideological system positions the spectator as a constituted subject within that system. As MacCabe puts it, [d]esire is only set up by absence, by the possibility of return to a former state – the field of vision only becomes invested libidinally after it has been robbed of its unity. […] The charm of classical realism is that […] the threat [to grammatical consistency] appears so that it can be smoothed over and it is in that smoothing over that we can locate pleasure – in a plenitude which is fractured but only on condition that it will be re-set. (MacCabe 1985, 68)

The spectator’s positioning in the Symbolic Order is enforced by the prior unpleasure of the temporary revelation that such subjectivity is constructed from without. The momentary revelation of cinema’s reality-effect, and its ideological and pleasure-inducing subsequent disavowal is, for Heath, MacCabe and Aaron, inherent to all realist cinema. In the next chapter I will argue, extending this premise, that the revelation and cathartic resolution of the grammatical disruption inherent in presenting adaptation as an authored re-articulation of a prior form of artistic artifice functions as another enunciative trace similar to the traces left by the director through continuity editing. Before moving onto that, however, the final element of Heath’s approach to anamorphosis can be outlined, now that the ­masochistic nature of his model has been established. This last part of Heath’s poststructuralism concerns the way that film exploits masochistic anamorphism. Heath claims that since anamorphism is so central to film’s ontology, it becomes inscribed into films themselves at the narrative, thematic and visual level—‘the drama of vision in the film returns the drama of vision of the film’ (1981, 44). Consequently, ‘the drama of vision becomes a constant reflexive fascination in films’ (1985, 514, original emphasis). Heath perceives the aforementioned

58  R. GEAL

Jaws, in this context, as a metadramatic ‘play on the unseen and the unforeseeable, the hidden shark and the moments of violent irruption’ (1985, 514), and conceptualises the relationship between the masochistic continuity editing process and narrative in terms of ‘the pleasure of that process – movement and fixity and movement again, from fragment (actually thematized in Jaws as dismemberment) to totality (the jubilation of the final image)’ (1985, 514). Just as audiences unconsciously thrill to the momentary disruption of cinematic coherence, so too do filmmakers unconsciously inscribe this disruption into narrative form. In the same way as with the fort/da game, the deferred pleasure of regaining an imagined mastery is so worth the prior temporary recognition of passivity that realist cinema cannot help but inscribe such pleasures into its narratives.5 Cinema, then, offers spectators a way of seeing that grants both gains and losses; both illusory pleasures which break the spectator out of his/her bodily/subjective constraints, and powerful reorientations of anthropocentric vision which re-inscribe that momentarily problematised subjectivity. When the camera sweeps over a character to show the spectacular extent of a landscape or a battlefield or an outer-space vista, it grants the spectator a privileged position that real-life subjective viewing cannot generate—even if a real-life viewing subject had a jetpack or superhero-like wings they would not be able to move around the real world in perfect synchronisation with the balletic movements of spaceships or clashing armies or zombie hordes. Such a jetpack-bound realworld viewer would not, either, be able to instantaneously shift from the bird’s-eye view to a reversed close-up of a particular character’s reaction, and to a side-shot from another perspective, and from a position which avoids any of the perils that those characters and the perspectives that they do or do not occupy might undergo. Neither would that real-world viewer be able to slow down or speed-up time, or instantaneously add context-specific music or spoken voice-over without playing around with audio equipment. In film, the sweeping, transcendent, atemporal bird’seye position may even be destroyed, with a cut from the obliteration of the subjective position occupied a moment earlier by the spectator, to a shot of that position crashing to earth or exploding. This almost god-like transcendence of space, of time, and even of life and death offers spectators thrills, but also problematises what it means to be a Cartesian res cogitans perceiving subject at the centre of an unfolding res extensa universe—this cinematic transcendence

3  POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND THE RADICAL CRITIC 

59

is a reminder that the spectator is mis-perceiving how he/she knows reality actually appears. The thrilling gains of perceptual transcendence are accompanied by alienating losses that de-centre the spectator. These gains and losses oscillate continuously in an anamorphic manner, and even generate a masochistic form of pleasure in that oscillation— threatening and reassuring the spectator’s subjectivity, revealing the constructed nature of both film and the subjectivity of the spectator who perceives it, before suturing over and concealing that revelation.

Film Adaptation and Anamorphic Masochism Heath’s claim that film reflexively narrativises the masochism of visual anamorphosis provides the basis of my model for applying Lacanian poststructuralism to the analysis of adaptation. Realist film’s inevitable suture from grammatical inconsistency (which reveals artifice) to grammatical consistency (which subsumes that revelation) can be accompanied with a suture from realist adaptation’s foregrounded authored nature (which reveals artifice—the film is demonstrably a re-performance of an established fiction) to techniques which subsume and contain that foregrounded authorship. For Heath, the peculiarities of film grammar mean that the cinema has an inherent reflexivity—film is grammatically reflexive. Adaptations of foregrounded canonical ‘originals’ combine this reflexivity with an additional form of revelation/subsumption of artifice associated with the foregrounding of the ‘original’ author— such adaptations are both grammatically reflexive and canonically reflexive. Realist film inevitably (and unconsciously) manipulates Heath’s drama of vision, while realist adaptation manipulates both this drama of vision and what I call the drama of authorship. And, just as Heath claimed that ‘the drama of vision becomes a constant reflexive fascination in films’ (1985, 514, original emphasis), so too I argue that the drama of authorship becomes a constant reflexive fascination in adaptations. This is a very different approach to a dialogic analysis of film adaptation. In the previous chapter, I discussed some of the broad differences between dialogism and politicised Theory. The next chapter interrogates these differences in detail, exploring the consequences of the dialogic displacement of the author, in relation to the poststructuralist analysis of the anamorphic author.

60  R. GEAL

Notes 1.  Peter Barry’s introduction to literary and cultural theory claims that ‘“deconstruction” […] can be roughly defined as applied ­post-structuralism’ (1995, 70). Perhaps the clearest articulation of deconstruction as the natural successor to structuralism is Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (1982). 2.  See Brunette and Wills (1989), Conley (1991), Ropars-Wuilleumier (1981), for examples of Derridean film studies. 3.  Although Marx does not use explicit Freudian terminology, which, of course, had not yet been developed when he was writing, there is something proto-psychoanalytic about his approach. For Friedrich Engels, Marx’s closest collaborator, ‘[i]deology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all’ (Marx and Engels 1959 [1893], 408). Indeed, Lacan, discussing the notion of the symptom, which is an example of how Freud’s “return of the repressed” (Freud 1962 [1896], 70) inevitably leads to expressions of unconscious processes in symbolic terms, claims that ‘[t]he notion of the symptom was introduced well before Freud by Marx, as the sign of what does not work in the real’ (Lacan 1974, xi). Žižek uses this Lacanian claim about Marx to argue that there is a fundamental homology between the interpretative procedures of Marx and Freud – more precisely, between their analysis of commodity and of dreams. In both cases the point is to avoid the properly fetishistic fascination of the ‘content’ supposedly hidden behind the form: the ‘secret’ to be unveiled through analysis is not the content hidden by the form (the form of commodities, the form of dreams) but, on the contrary, the ‘secret’ of this form itself. (Žižek 1994, 296, original emphasis) Žižek focuses particularly on Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism, the process whereby the specific material relations between people are concealed within the relative values of commodities, which is also somewhat proto-psychoanalytic. Marx writes that The existence of the things quâ commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arriving therefrom. […] In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the product of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour. (Marx 2007 [1867], 83)

3  POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND THE RADICAL CRITIC 

61

Žižek relates Marx’s evocative recourse to ‘the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world’ with a Freudian reading of the unconscious. He compares the process of ‘dreamwork’, in which desire is repressed and concealed, with Marx’s description of the pseudo-magical value that commodities derive from the way in which they repress and efface the material relations within society (Žižek 1994, 296–331). 4.  Hierarchical proportion juxtaposes with Renaissance perspective almost diametrically, but it is also the case that the history of art provides more nuanced examples of approaches to perspective which attempt to replicate reality in more mimetic terms than Egyptian painting, but which still do not correlate with Cartesian geometry. Panofsky was interested in establishing the precise philosophical and aesthetic distinctions between the types of perspective employed in the art of classical antiquity and the art of modernity. The particulars of those differences are not important here, but what is important is the fact that the philosophical conditions to facilitate geometric perspective were not available to the artists of classical antiquity: ‘Antique perspective is […] the expression of a specific and fundamentally unmodern view of space [since] [a]ntique perspective is furthermore the expression of an equally specific and equally unmodern conception of the world. […] Systematic space was as unthinkable for antique philosophers as it was unimaginable for antique artists’ (Panofsky 1991, 43). 5. For Heath, the fort/da game generates a quite specific form of reflexivity, but it is also the case that fort/da has been applied to the most basic elements of how narrative operates. Eagleton states that Fort-da is perhaps the shortest story we can imagine: an object is lost, and then recovered. But even the most complex narratives can be read as variants on this model: the pattern of classical narrative is that an original settlement is disrupted and ultimately restored. From this viewpoint, narrative is a source of consolation: lost objects are a cause of anxiety to us, symbolizing certain deeper unconscious losses […], and it is always pleasurable to find them put securely back in place. (Eagleton 1996, 160–1)

References Aaron, Michele. 2007. Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On. London: Wallflower. Althusser, Louise Pierre. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster. London: Monthly Review Press. Barry, Peter. 1995. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

62  R. GEAL Baudry, Jean-Louis. 1985. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” In Movies and Methods: Volume II, edited by Bill Nichols, 531–42. Berkeley: University of California Press. Belsey, Catherine. 2002. Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bordwell, David. 1989. Making Meaning: Influence and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bowie, Malcolm. 1991. Lacan. London: Fontana. Bronowski, Jacob. 1976. The Ascent of Man. London: BBC Books. Brunette, Peter, and David Wills. 1989. Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Carroll, Noël. 1987. “Conspiracy Theories of Representation.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 17: 395–412. ———. 1988. Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Code, Lorraine. 2006. Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Conley, Tom. 1991. Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Culler, Jonathan. 1982. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1988. “Letter to a Japanese Friend.” In Derrida and Différance, edited by David Wood and Robert Bernasconi, 1–5. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Descartes, René. 1982 [1644]. Principles of Philosophy. Translated by Valentine Roger Miller and Reese P. Miller. London: Kluwer. ———. 1998 [1637]. Discourse on Method. Translated by Donald A. Cress. Cambridge: Hackett. Donovan, Josephine. 2017. “Interspecies Dialogue and Animal Ethics: The Feminist Care Perspective.” In The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies, edited by Linda Kalof, 208–24. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eagleton, Terry. 1996. Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Fordham, Finn. 2010. I Do I Undo I Redo: The Textual Genesis of Modernist Selves. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1955 [1920]. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey, vol. 18, 3–64. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1962 [1896]. “Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey, vol. 3, 162–85. London: Hogarth Press.

3  POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND THE RADICAL CRITIC 

63

———. 1963 [1916]. “Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey, vol. 16, 243–463. London: Hogarth Press. Fry, Paul H. 2012. Theory of Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press. Grear, Anna. 2011. “The Vulnerable Living Order: Human Rights and the Environment in a Critical and Philosophical Perspective.” Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 21, no. 1: 23–44. Heath, Stephen. 1981. Questions of Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1983. “Le Père Noël.” October 26: 63–115. ———. 1985. “‘Jaws’, Ideology and Film Theory.” In Movies and Methods Volume II, edited by Bill Nichols, 509–14. Berkeley: University of California Press. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by Gillian Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1989. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Translated by Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1974. “Seminar XXII of Jacques Lacan, R.S.I.” Translated by Jack W. Stone, Ellie Ragland, Greg Hyder, Filip Kovacevic and Zak Watson [unpublished papers online]. https://www.scribd.com/document/ 33124001/10724-The-Seminar-of-Jacques. ———. 1977a [1966]. Écrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock. ———. 1977b [1973]. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: The Hogarth Press. ———. 1988. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I. Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–1954. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by John Forrester. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lapsley, Richard, and Michael Westlake. 2006. Film Theory: An Introduction, 2nd ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press. MacCabe, Colin. 1985. Theoretical Essays: Film, Linguistics, Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Marx, Karl. 1970 [1859]. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Edited by Maurice Dobb. Translated by Salo W. Ryazanskaya. London: Lawrence & Wishart. ———. 1976 [1845]. “Theses on Feuerbach.” Collected Works, vol. 5. Translated by Clemens Dutt and W. Lough. New York: International Publishers. ———. 2007 [1867]. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 1—Part 1, The Process of Capitalist Production. Translated by Edward B. Aveling and Samuel Moore. New York: Cosimo. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1959 [1893]. Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy. Edited and translated by Lewis S. Feuer. London: Doubleday.

64  R. GEAL Metz, Christian. 1974. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Translated by Michael Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1982. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Translated by Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Miller, Jacques-Alain. 1977/1978. “Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier).” Screen 18, no. 4: 24–34. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3: 6–18. Nichols, Bill. 1981. Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other Media. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nimmo, Richie. 2011. “The Making of the Human: Anthropocentrism in Modern Social Thought.” In Anthropocentrism: Humans, Animals, Environments, edited by Rob Boddice, 59–80. Leiden: Brill. Oudart, Jean-Pierre. 1977/1978. “Cinema and Suture.” Screen 18, no. 4: 35–47. Panofsky, Erwin. 1991 [1927]. Perspective as Symbolic Form. Translated by Christopher S. Wood. New York: Zone Books. Prince, Stephen. 1996. “Psychoanalytic Film Theory and the Problem of the Missing Spectator.” In Post-theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, edited by David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, 71–86. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Translated by Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire. 1981. Le Texte Divisé. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Solomon, Gary. 1995. The Motion Picture Prescription: Watch This Movie and Call Me in the Morning. Fairfield: Aslan Publishing. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. ———. 1994. Mapping Ideology. London: Verso. ———. 2005. Interrogating the Real. London: Continuum.

Filmography It’s a Wonderful Life. 1946. Directed by Frank Capra. USA: RKO. Jaws. 1975. Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA: Universal. King Kong. 1933. Directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. USA: Radio Pictures. Steel Magnolias. 1989. Directed by Herbert Ross. USA: TriStar.

3  POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND THE RADICAL CRITIC 

65

Paintings Anon. C15th BCE. Tomb of Nakht. Paint on stone. Thebes, Egypt: Tomb TT52. di Buoninsegna, Duccio. 1308–1311. Maestà. Tempera and gold on wood. Museo dell’Opera Metropolitana del Duomo: Siena. Holbein the Younger, Hans. 1533. The Ambassadors. Oil on oak. London: National Gallery.

CHAPTER 4

The Dead Author and the Concealed Author

Perspectival Anamorphosis and Authorial Anamorphosis The previous chapter outlined how psychoanalytic poststructuralism in film studies conceptualises cinema as anamorphic—geometric perspective orientates the spectator as the perfectly positioned locus of meaning, and the threats to this positioning, inherent in the camera’s mobility and through editing, are contained by the mechanisms of suture. This theory was developed from Lacan’s analysis of the anamorphic skull in Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors (1533). A somewhat similar discussion of artifice in another reflexive painting from the Early Modern period, Foucault’s analysis (1974) of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), suggests how the perspectival anamorphism inherent to all (realist) cinema might be accompanied, in (realist) adaptations of canonical ‘originals’, with a form of authorial anamorphism. Las Meninas, which translates from Spanish as The Ladies-in-Waiting, is a painting of the royal Habsburg family and entourage that inverts the conventionalised rules of court painting. Velázquez positions the typical subject matter of such paintings, the King and Queen, outside the canvas, with merely their reflection shown in a small mirror located at the painting’s vanishing point. The majority of the painting is filled with depictions of the young Infanta, her entourage and the painter himself, working at a large canvas. These figures stare out both at the King and Queen the artist is painting onto the canvas, and at the painting’s viewer. © The Author(s) 2019 R. Geal, Anamorphic Authorship in Canonical Film Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16496-6_4

67

68  R. GEAL

For Foucault, this ‘picture in which the painter is in turn looking out at us’ invokes a slender line of reciprocal visibility [which] embraces a whole complex network of uncertainties, exchanges, and feints. […] Though greeted by that gaze, we are also dismissed by it, replaced by that which was always there before we were: […] No gaze is stable, or rather, in the neutral furrow of the gaze piercing at a right angle through the canvas, subject and object, the spectator and the model, reverse their roles to infinity. (Foucault 1974 [1966], 4–5)

Perspectival painting’s conventional ‘singular but imaginary point of origin’ (Nichols 1981, 53) is inverted into the content of that on which the painting’s artist is working. Perspectival painting’s ‘imaginary subject whose place we propose to fill, a place we are nominated to assume’ (Nichols 1981, 53) is revealed to be an illusion: ‘at the vanishing point is the mirror image of [Velázquez’s pictorial] subject, The King and Queen of Spain, occupying the place of origin yet being represented in the painting. This construction seems to exclude or bar the viewer from his place at the same time as it displays that place’ (Foucault 1974, 52). In so doing, like The Ambassador’s anamorphic skull, or Jaws’ alienating shark pointof-view, Las Meninas reveals the perspectival system’s illusionistic ‘constitution of the self-as-subject’ (Nichols 1981, 53). But instead of demonstrating how this constitution is contingent upon perspectival relations alone, Las Meninas combines the revelation of the perspectival illusion with the explicit disclosure of the work’s construction at the hands of the artist. Just as Holbein’s The Ambassadors provided the theoretical ­foundations for the analysis of film’s perspectival anamorphosis, so too Velázquez’s Las Meninas can provide the theoretical foundations to extend this analysis to adaptation’s authorial anamorphosis. Realist filmic adaptations of foregrounded canonical non-film texts operate like the image of Velázquez staring out of the canvas, inscribing the foregrounded artist/author into realist cinema’s illusory perspectival ­ system which seems to emanate out, in an un-authored manner, from the spectating subject. If film is the constant flux between an alienating mobility which decentres and threatens, but then continuously ­reactivates perspectival painting’s ‘singular but imaginary point of origin’ (Nichols 1981, 53), then adaptation’s foregrounded author is a further allegorical layer (temporarily) demonstrating that those origins

4  THE DEAD AUTHOR AND THE CONCEALED AUTHOR 

69

lie not with the spectating self-as-subject, but with another who in fact ­constructs the spectating subject’s illusory centrality. The temporal and temporary aspect of this foregrounding is central to the suturing of the anamorphic author into the grammatical logic of ­realist cinema’s perspectival illusion. Lacan makes a distinction between the eye and what he calls ‘the gaze’, a margin which stresses both the eye’s geometral optics and the gaze’s disruptive sense that the viewing subject can also be someone else’s viewed object. The Ambassadors both ­subscribes to the logic of perspectival painting and also demonstrates, via its anamorphic skull, the futility of that logic and of the res cogitans subject position it proposes that the viewer fills. Something similar can be said of Las Meninas—it exists within the broad conventions of perspectival painting, but problematises the system’s subjective focal point by presenting it as the locus of the artist’s, rather than the viewer’s, vision. The images in Las Meninas cannot fully be thought of as perspectival painting’s conventionalised res extensa emanating out from the viewing res cogitans subject, because both that viewing subject’s position and the painted subject matter extending out from that position are foregrounded as constructs of the artist. Film adaptation, too, problematises the illusion that the filmic res extensa emanates out from the spectating res cogitans, because the ­‘original’ author in some sense gazes back out at the spectator, revealing that the film extends out from someone other than the spectator. Realist film subsumes the inevitable fissures in its Symbolic Cartesian geometry through mechanisms of suture. Since realist film adaptation operates within the broad conventions of realist perspectival cinema, it too suppresses film’s inevitable perspectival inconsistencies. In addition, however, realist adaptation has another layer of inevitable fissures which problematise the Symbolic Order’s illusion that the filmic res extensa emanates out from the spectating res cogitans—the authored nature of that res extensa is foregrounded, and it is evident that the filmic res extensa emanates out from the ‘original’ author, rather than the spectating subject. Just as realist film subsumes and manipulates perspectival anamorphosis for a masochistic ideological effect, however, so too realist film adaptation subsumes and manipulates both this inevitable perspectival anamorphosis and the authorial anamorphosis inherent in re-performing the foregrounded artifice of canonical authors. Realist adaptation manipulates the masochistic oscillation between the Lacanian eye’s perspectival unity and the fact that the returning Lacanian gaze is a ‘sensitive spot, a

70  R. GEAL

lesion, a locus of pain’ (Lacan 1992, 140). Thus, like Las Meninas, realist adaptation combines perspectival anamorphosis with authorial anamorphosis. Not only is the inevitable revelation of film’s perspectival illusion sutured into the conventionalised logic of realist grammatical consistency, but the performative foregrounding of adaptation’s constructed origins is also manipulated for an ideological masochistic effect, and ­subsumed within realist film’s grammatical logic. The second half of this book is a taxonomy of how film adaptation can manipulate authorial anamorphosis, using Shakespearean films as a case study. Before elaborating this, however, it is necessary to conceptualise how adaptation signals and/or conceals its authored origins. This is particularly important, not only to be thorough, but because contemporary adaptation studies, dominated by the dialogism discussed in Chapter 2, has a very different understanding of the authorship derived from an adaptation’s ‘original’. These different approaches to authorship determine whether adaptation is thought of as a heightened dialogic example of ‘the infinite and open-ended possibilities generated by all the discursive practices of a culture’ (Stam 2005, 27), or as a heightened example of how film masochistically and anamorphically reveals and subsequently subsumes all traces of its artifice. Proponents of dialogism might characterise this account as an example of the second of twelve pre-dialogic fallacies identified by Thomas Leitch: ‘[d]ifferences between literary and cinematic texts are rooted in essential properties of their respective media’ (2003, 150). Leitch’s criticism is valuable if it challenges the notion of a singular and authorially prescribed translation from word to image. But the analysis of adaptation’s different media need not only focus on fidelity’s humanistic ‘expressive possibilities of shifting relations between words and images’ (Jorgens 1977, 17). It can also explore media translations’ ideological consequences. Analysing these translations is not, then, an inevitable fallacy which valorises canonicity. The dialogic characterisation of the analysis as inevitably such is problematic in the way it elides realist adaptation’s masochistic manipulation of foregrounded authorship. The rest of this chapter uses two film adaptations of the same Shakespearean source, Julius Caesar, and two academic analyses of these adaptations (Belsey 1998; Calbi 2014), to outline the d ­ ifferences between the dialogic conceptualisation of authorship, principally derived from Bakhtin and Barthes, and a psychoanalytic poststructuralist ­conceptualisation of authorship, derived from Emile Benveniste.

4  THE DEAD AUTHOR AND THE CONCEALED AUTHOR 

71

Benvenistene, Barthesian and Bakhtinian Authorship: ‘Who’s There?’ Hamlet (1.1.1)1 Although there are some important differences between Bakhtinian and Barthesian approaches to authorship, and between how these approaches have been applied to adaptation, there is a substantive overlap between the two, particularly in contradistinction to a Benvenistene approach to authorship. As Chapter 2 addressed in detail, dialogism’s central project is a focus on adaptations as ‘“readings” and “critiques” and “interpretations” and “rewritings” [which] can take an activist stance toward their source[s]’ (Stam 2000, 64). Such an approach relies on analysing how multiple voices contribute new insights into an adapted text and displace the centrality of the ‘original’ author, within the context of Bakhtin’s claim that ‘all utterances are heteroglot in that they are ­functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and therefore ­ impossible to resolve’ (1981 [1934–1941], 428). In constructing accounts of intertextual adaptation, proponents of dialogism displace the centrality and knowability of ‘original’ authorial intentions. The theoretical background to this displacement is diverse—Stam links Bakhtinian heteroglossia most explicitly with Barthes’ The Death of the Author (1995 [1967]), but also with the writing of Kristeva, Genette, Derrida, Lacan and Foucault (Stam 2005, 8–9). Indeed, the influence of these diverse approaches to authorship is appropriately dialogic—Pelagia Goulimari, in an apposite example of Barthes’ claim that ‘writing is the destruction of every […] point of origin’ (1995, 125), argues that ‘Barthes’ famous critique of the author in “The Death of the Author” […] involves a rewriting of Bakhtinian heteroglossia’ (Goulimari 2015, 162). I will address the specific differences between Bakhtinian and Barthesian authorship shortly, but both approaches have inflected dialogism by focusing attention away from the ‘original’ author, ­ and towards the multiple voices which reconfigure the source text. Benveniste’s approach to authorship, on the other hand, concerns the author’s articulative status—whether an author reveals or conceals his or her enunciation, and whether and how, therefore, a text foregrounded or conceals its artifice. Benveniste defined these two different enunciative registers as discours (discourse), which reveals the source of its articulation, and histoire (story), which conceals that source: the former announces that it offers a subjective articulation derived from a particular

72  R. GEAL

perspective, while the latter suppresses any such traces and passes itself off as an objective account of how things ‘really are’. Benveniste states that with histoire, ‘no-one speaks here; events seem to tell themselves’ (1970, 241). Benvenistene authorship has been an important element of psychoanalytic film theory. Christian Metz applied these two registers to the analysis of how realist film conceals its technical base, and passes itself off as a seamless, un-authored unfolding: traditional film is presented as story [histoire], and not as discourse [discours]. And yet it is discourse [discours], […] but the basic characteristic of this kind of discourse [discours], and the very principle of its effectiveness as discourse [discours], is precisely that it obliterates all traces of the enunciation, and masquerades as story [histoire]. (Metz 1985, 544)

Metz’s manipulation of Benvenistene authorship looks for the ways in which the inevitable enunciative traces of a film’s construction are suppressed. Realist film does this by positioning different forms of ­ articulation into a hierarchy. Diegetic characters express personal opin­ ions which may conflict with those of other characters, and which may be revealed to be false. A suspect may lie to a detective, for example, or an undercover spy might provide false intelligence. The sources of these articulations are foregrounded, and as such, they function as discours: they are a particular opinion, which may differ from other proffered opinions. The overall narrative of which these characters are a part, however, has a different articulative status. Although the filmmakers, too, are motivated by personal, social, cultural and industrial pressures, they operate from a position which offers the illusion of an objective rendering of reality, eliding those pressures—the film itself ‘masquerades as story [histoire]’ (Metz 1985, 544). So, in the aforementioned examples, mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, non-diegetic music and so on can show which of the detective’s suspects are lying, or which spy is a double agent. The filmmakers might have subjective reasons why they select certain characters for this duplicity, but unlike the duplicity of those characters, the filmmakers’ own partiality is obfuscated by the medium’s conventionalised ostensibly objective visual grammar. Thus, a misogynistic film noir might depict women in various negative ways, but it does not frame this depiction as the opinion of the filmmakers and production company—instead, it seems to show how women ‘really are’. As MacCabe puts it, realist film’s ‘narrative discourse simply allows reality to appear and denies its own status

4  THE DEAD AUTHOR AND THE CONCEALED AUTHOR 

73

as articulation. […] The camera tells us what happens – it tells the truth against which we can measure the [other] discourses’ (1985, 36–7). Metz’s approach to cinematic enunciation has not yet been applied to the study of canonical adaptations. This is partly because of film studies’ broad focus on the constructive impact of auteurs/directors rather than authors/script-writers,2 and partly because of the temporal theoretical gap I identified in Chapter 2, which prevented the articulation of vanguard Theory in adaptation studies. Realist adaptations of canonical ‘originals’, however, are conducive to such an approach because, like all realist film, they subsume revelations of the work’s discours-like construction into the histoire of grammatical consistency, but they also contain an additional layer of discours-like artifice: the foregrounded re-performance of a fiction derived from the ‘original’ author. If non-adapted realist film corresponds clearly with Benveniste’s claim that in histoire ‘no-one speaks here; events seem to tell themselves’ (1970, 241), then realist canonical adaptations like Shakespearean films have the potential to function as a form of discours in which one might say that ‘Shakespeare speaks here; events are told by the author’. Adaptations of canonical ‘originals’ negotiate the different enunciative registers of discours and histoire in various ways, but those that employ the conventionalised grammar of realist cinema, and which I therefore identify as realist adaptations, all oscillate between an authorial foregrounding that marks out the adaptation as not being like other ‘normal’ films, and a use of cinematic grammar that makes the canonical re-performance operate in the same manner as other ‘normal’ films. Both filmmakers and audiences recognise realist adaptation’s dual (and ostensibly contradictory) nature as simultaneously not like other realist films, and paradoxically the same as other realist films, and a short analysis of filmmakers’ commentaries demonstrates this. Laurence Olivier, for example, has written, about his adaptation of Hamlet (1948), that Hamlet is probably the best known of all the great plays. We are only too aware […] that […] we shall receive dozens of letters, mainly abusive, telling us what we already know, namely that this or that famous passage has been omitted. Here, the mere fact that the play is so well known helps to put this matter in perspective. For one thing, it means that we have had to do our work, as it were, in the open, because we knew that no careless emendation or sleight-of-hand would pass unnoticed or be tolerated. (Olivier 1948, 3, my pagination)

74  R. GEAL

Olivier recognises, here, that audiences will be aware they are watching a re-performance of foregrounded artifice. However, Olivier’s text editor, Alan Dent, explains the necessity of these omissions in terms of cinematic effect: A stage-play that is to be turned into a film worthy of the name has to be far more drastically treated than any novel or short-story on which ­similar execution is contemplated. Its plot has to be re-told in terms not of the play-house but of the cinema. This may or may not involve modification of the dialogue (it usually does). But it almost invariably involves ­modification of, and a far greater mobility in, the action. […] [T]he spoken ‘Murder of Gonzago’ has been scrapped entirely, and been replace by the Dumb Show. […] One would leave it to the film critics to decide upon the dramatic, i.e. cinematic, advantages of this procedure. (Dent 1948, 6, 14, my pagination, original emphasis)

Olivier’s director of photography, Desmond Dickinson, gives some examples of how these modifications of action were achieved: All the soliloquies were planned to a great deal of movement, so that audiences listening to an uninterrupted speech would not become restive, since the screen would be taken up with all kinds of action to hold their attention. If the actors were not moving around, then the camera was. (Dickinson 1948, 33) One of the main assets of deep focus photography is not in any revolutionary kind of shot, but in the greater illusion of reality that it supports. […] Olivier decided that for ‘Hamlet’ he would like to make scenes without so much cutting from shot to shot. (Dickinson 1948, 30)

Such modifications accept that adaptation still needs to subscribe to at least some of the conventions of realist filmmaking, particularly in relation to a canonical element which challenges these conventions, ­ such as a soliloquy. The filmmakers therefore accept that film adaptation is partly not like other realist films, since audiences will notice how a particular adaptation relates to the playtext and to other performances, but that film adaptation is also partly like other realist films, since certain conventionalised modifications are required to create a ‘greater illusion of reality’ (Dickinson 1948, 30) in order to ensure that ‘audiences […] would not become restive’ (33). A realist adaptation such as

4  THE DEAD AUTHOR AND THE CONCEALED AUTHOR 

75

Olivier’s Hamlet, then, is two ostensibly contradictory things at once—a foregrounded re-performance in which any specific iteration invites ­ ­comparison with previous iterations and with the ‘original’ source, and also a ‘normal’ film like any other, which operates according to the ­conventionalised logic of seemingly un-authored realist grammar. A comparable analogy to this simultaneous non-realism/realism is provided in Jane Feuer’s analysis of the genre of film musicals. In part, as I discuss in the next chapter, Feuer identifies a particular element of musicals which might provide the same challenge to realism as a particular element of Shakespearean film adaptation derived from Shakespearean stage convention: direct address. But Feuer’s point about musicals’ potential non-realism also applies, more broadly, to adaptation’s ambiguous foregrounding of artifice. Feuer claims that [w]hen performers in musicals turn to face us directly, we do enter another register, but […] the potentially disorienting effects of the break in the narrative are minimized […] by mechanisms of identification. Even when the break in register does throw us out of the narrative it’s for the purpose of praising show business, not burying it. […] [W]hen the direct address comes, we’re prepared for it. The change from third person to first person isn’t perceived as a grammatical error. (Feuer 1982, 36–7)

Potentially non-realist elements of musicals, then, do not threaten ­realism’s overall effect of suturing spectators into an illusory position of ostensible enunciation. A musical is partly clearly marked as un-real, with characters spontaneously bursting into song, with diegetic voices accompanied by non-diegetic musical instruments, and with, as Feuer notes, characters sometimes directly addressing the camera. These non-realist elements, however, support rather than subvert film’s overall illusionism—paraphrasing Antony’s funeral oration from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Feuer states they have the ‘purpose of praising show business, not burying it’ (1982, 36–7). Feuer calls this combination of realism and non-realism ‘conservative reflexivity’ (1982, 102). Adaptation of canonical originals can be thought of as conservatively reflexive in similar terms. As such, my definition of what I mean by canonical authorship here is guided by the extent to which any given film foregrounds the fact that it re-performs what is broadly known to be an authored artifice, rather than on whether the author in question constitutes part of what Leavis called The Great Tradition (1948), in evaluative terms. I am

76  R. GEAL

not principally interested in a fidelity-based canon which demonstrates ‘a vital capacity for experience, a kind of reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity’ (Leavis 1948, 18), or in a dialogic approach which conceptualises the canon as a hegemonic repository which ‘revisionist adaptations [can] “de-repress” […] in a kind of anachronistic therapy or adaptational rescue operation’ (Stam 2005, 42). Rather, the authorship I explore in this book is canonical in the sense that it functions as a discours-like signifier of artifice, with the author somewhat gazing back out of the screen at the spectator, like the painter in Velázquez’s Las Meninas. Eckhard Lobsien’s phenomenological approach to literature suggests an applicable model for how adaptation functions in this respect. Lobsien claims that certain forms of repetition in literature may be recognised by readers in relation to prior texts. If the first iteration of a text (or the reader’s first knowledge of that text) can be represented by the figure A, then the repetition of that A ‘is registered in consciousness as a second appearance, whereby A modifies itself to A plus […], ie to A°’ (1995, 181, my translation). Whenever a film adaptation is recognised as a repetition of an ‘original’, it functions as one such A°, announcing its derivation from a pre-known artifice. The mechanisms structuring this authorial foregrounding in any given film adaptation are vague, culturally and historically specific, and can vary from spectator to spectator, depending on their personal experiences and interests. A dedicated comic book fan, for example, might watch a film adaptation of a beloved character while paying close attention to the relationships between ‘original’ and ‘copy’. Similarly, a fan of the novels of Robert Bloch might watch a film like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) with an eye for how the film adaptation faithfully or unfaithfully relates to the novel Psycho (1959). In these two instances, certain spectators might be consciously aware of a Lobsien-like A component which mentally configures the film adaptation as a re-performed A° (1995, 181). General film viewers, however, are not so likely to recognise foregrounded authorship in these instances, due to the source texts’ relative non-canonicity. These audiences respond to the A° adaptation more as an ‘original’, unknown and somewhat un-authored ‘new’ A. Hitchcock, after all, infamously insisted that audience members should not enter the cinema after the screening of Psycho had begun, refused to allow prerelease screenings for critics and so on, in order to generate shock at the shower scene. Psycho can hardly then be classified as an A° adaptation in the

4  THE DEAD AUTHOR AND THE CONCEALED AUTHOR 

77

same sense that Olivier’s Hamlet is—the ‘originals’ both narrate important narrative deaths, but it is almost inconceivable that a film spectator could respond to Ophelia’s (Jean Simmons) drowning or Hamlet’s (Laurence Olivier) poisoning in the same way that Hitchcock intended his audiences to respond to Marion’s (Janet Leigh) murder. Both of these films are ­technically adaptations, but Bloch does not gaze out of Hitchcock’s film in the way that Shakespeare gazes out of Olivier’s. It is therefore the relative canonicity of these two authors which determines whether or not their authorship functions as an anamorphic signifier of artifice. Jaws is also an adaptation with a similar relative non-canonicity to Psycho. Robert Benchley’s novel (1974) was a financial success prior to the release of the film a year later, so that contemporary audiences might be aware of a certain authorial foregrounding, but Jaws was Benchley’s first novel, and his artistic gravitas does therefore not dominate the whole film—audiences are not expecting to hear dialogue with anything like the foregrounded canonical weight of famous sections of Shakespearean verse. (The film’s most famous line—‘you’re gonna need a bigger boat’— was ad-libbed rather than taken directly from the novel.) It is also the case that the signifiers of Shakespearean artifice are more overt than signifiers of a similar authorial artifice in the novel Jaws (or in the novel Psycho). As this chapter and the next go on to discuss, authorship in an example such as Shakespeare consists of patterns of speech and behaviour that are very different from those in Jaws and Psycho, where the cultural gap between speech and behaviour in novel and film is practicably zero. There is nothing in Spielberg’s or Hitchcock’s films which demands that the spectator recognise an entirely different and non-colloquially artificial authorial voice, in the way that Olivier’s Hamlet does. Admittedly, it is not possible to say that every spectator of every canonical adaptation recognises the film’s authorial artifice—indeed, in Chapter 6, I discuss loose adaptations which seem to dispense with the canonical author almost entirely. Nevertheless, for at least some ­spectators, certain film adaptations of certain canonical ‘originals’ anamorphically foreground their discours-like authorial artifice while subsuming that foregrounding into the histoire-like grammar of filmic realism. This seemingly oxymoronic quality to canonical realist film adaptation means that it is never entirely a re-performance nor a seemingly unauthored spontaneous unfolding of events. From a purely ­ theoretical perspective, it might be supposed that adaptation’s ­ re-performative nature could have two non-realist consequences, although my

78  R. GEAL

subsequent analysis will demonstrate that neither possibility stands up to close scrutiny. Firstly, it might always be apparent, to all audiences at all times, that the adapted film is a re-performed fiction, which therefore operates in a completely different manner from other realist films. Secondly, it might be possible, since in adaptations of the work of canonical authors the narrative discourse’s status as articulation is explicit, that its constructed nature is not, as Metz has it, ‘obliterate[d]’ (1985, 544). Discours might not masquerade as histoire if the constructed nature of the adaptation’s discours is foregrounded. As such, adaptation might reveal cinema’s transformative work, fulfilling Baudry’s argument that ‘its inscription, its manifestation as such […] would produce a ­knowledge effect, an actualisation of the work process, as denunciation of ­ideology’ (1985, 534). Again, if this were the case, adaptation would be ­non-realist, but this time in a radical, as opposed to canonical, manner. Canonical realist film adaptations, however, suppress this non-realist potential. In the previous chapter, I outlined how realist film more generally obfuscates and subsumes its inherent visual markers of artifice. The taxonomy in the second half of the book addresses the many ways in which realist adaptations obfuscate and subsume their inherent markers of authorial artifice. All these forms of obfuscation and subsumption, however, operate in the context of Benvenistene discours and histoire. A short example of this process is useful, at this stage, to demonstrate the ubiquity of the most basic form of this suppression of authorial discours into cinematic histoire, and to contrast with existing Bakhtinian and Barthesian approaches to authorship in dialogic adaptation studies. My subsequent critique of Barthesian and Bakhtinian authorship in dialogic adaptation studies uses two adaptations of Julius Caesar, and I therefore start my outline of how Benvenistene authorship can be applied to film adaptation with the first of these two films, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953). Mankiewicz’s adaptation is ostensibly discours, the characters within it articulating non-colloquial dialogue, with a foreknown narrative and theme that are foregrounded as Shakespearean, and therefore as constructed. The precise foregrounding of artifice depends on each ­ spectator’s knowledge of the original, which may be extensive or even, conceivably, completely non-existent. However, a spectator completely ignorant of the authorial origins of a Shakespearean film adaptation is more the stuff of comedy than a likely real-life audience member. The British sitcom The League of Gentlemen (Steve Bendelack, 1999–2002),

4  THE DEAD AUTHOR AND THE CONCEALED AUTHOR 

79

for example, has two minor characters, teenagers Ally (Reece Shearsmith) and Henry (Steve Pemberton), who repeatedly meet up in a video store to find their favourite kind of films. Their catchphrases establish both the genres of films they like—‘how many killings?’—and their knowledge of these genres—‘seen, seen, seen, seen…’ When Henry picks up a copy of Richard Loncraine’s Richard III (1995), adding the caveat that he only saw it after his sister rented it, Ally reads out the title as ‘Richard I…I…I’, rather than as ‘Richard the Third’, and Henry doesn’t correct him. This joke, amongst others involving the pair, stresses their ignorance stemming from their generic insularity, with the sitcom’s audience in on the gag, and therefore aware of the play’s and the film’s correct title, and of its Shakespearean origins. Thus, a film spectator as unaware of these Shakespearean origins as Ally and Henry could only unknowingly encounter an adaptation in a comic accident such as this (and even then, Henry reports that he found out that the film is not a horror, but ‘a Shakespeare’). In terms of Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar, most Anglophone ­spectators are likely to have some basic familiarity with the narrative, with it coming as no surprise that the titular character (Louis Calhern) is murdered, or that he says ‘Et tu, Bruté’ (3.1.76) before dying. Other portions of dialogue, such as the Soothsayer’s (Richard Hale) prophesy, or the ­ opening lines of Antony’s (Marlon Brando) funeral oration, have also passed into the wide repertoire of well-known quotations, each of which demonstrates that the speaking character is articulating authored dialogue, rather than spontaneously expressing themselves ex tempore. The extent to which the opening of Antony’s funeral oration, for example, operates as widely known discours is demonstrated in the parodic historical comedy Carry on Cleo (Gerald Thomas, 1964), in which Kenneth Williams’ Julius Caesar repeatedly shrieks ‘I know!’ to the unnecessary whispered prompts of ‘countrymen’ from whoever stands closest to him as to as he greets everyone with ‘Friends, Romans…’ (Julius Caesar 3.2.74). Even if these lines are not known by certain spectators, the non-colloquial nature of the Shakespearean verse functions as a marker of artifice—it is clear to spectators that they are watching a performance of a Shakespeare-like artifice, rather than voyeuristically observing something which passes itself off as un-authored ‘reality’. The adaptation is broadly, therefore, marked as a form of authored discours-like artifice. However, film’s visual nature involves the translation of some of this foregrounded artifice into a form of cinematic grammar that

80  R. GEAL

replaces this foregrounding with an ostensibly un-authored ­unfolding. So, for example, when the conspirators arrive at Caesar’s house to take him to the Senate where they will assassinate him, Caesar asks one of them, Trebonius (Jack Raine), to ‘Be near me that I may remember you’ (2.2.123), to which Trebonius replies ‘Caesar, I will’ (2.2.124). In the playtext he adds, in an aside, ‘and so near will I be/That your best friends shall wish I had been further’ (2.2.124–5). The film cuts the aside, and instead, the camera zooms in on Trebonius’ menacing expression (Fig. 4.1), accompanied by the beginning of ominous non-diegetic music that provides a sound bridge to the assassination sequence. Both Trebonius’ aside and the cinematic conventions which replace that aside convey the same information—Trebonius is feigning loyalty to Caesar and will use that feigned allegiance to get close enough to Caesar to murder him; Caesar should not trust Trebonius. Caesar’s and Trebonius’ dialogue which precede the cut aside, however, is marked as discours-like Shakespearean artifice—the characters speak verse which some spectators might know from the playtext, and which other spectators might interpret as non-colloquially Shakespeare-like, and therefore non-verisimilar. If Trebonius were to deliver the aside within the conventions of the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage, with the illusory integrity of the diegetic space suddenly problematised, as one character is abruptly unable to hear another character whom he could hear only moments before, and with the conventionalised grammar of the cinematic fourth wall broken, then the dialogue’s discours-like artifice would extend to explicitly disrupting film’s histoire-like grammar. Instead, the same information that the aside contains is communicated through ostensibly objective cinematic grammar. Part of the adaptation’s foregrounded artifice is thereby suppressed. Its articulative status shifts from a discours in which ‘Shakespeare speaks here; events are told by the author’ to a filmic

Fig. 4.1  Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953, MGM): authored words adapted into ‘un-authored’ images

4  THE DEAD AUTHOR AND THE CONCEALED AUTHOR 

81

histoire where Shakespeare’s speech is cut out and replaced by a cinematic grammar in which ‘no-one speaks here; events seem to tell themselves’ (Benveniste 1970, 241). In MacCabe’s terms, ‘the narrative discourse simply allows reality to appear and denies its own status as articulation. […] The camera tells us what happens – it tells the truth against which we can measure the [other] discourses’ (1985, 36–7): Trebonius is not to be trusted, as he has personal and political motivations which other characters in the film will contest, whereas the camera can be trusted, as it reveals a character’s personal and political motivations, and is not itself driven by any such personal and political motivations, but instead operates from an omniscient and objective position. Camera zoom, figure expression and non-diegetic music are all ­conventionalised elements of cinematic grammar that, as Baudry puts it, ‘conceal […] the technical base’ (1985, 533). In this instance, they all contribute to translate the cut aside from Shakespeare’s verbal authored discours into cinema’s ostensibly un-authored visual histoire. Instead of Caesar not hearing the discours-coded Shakespearean voice that the audience can only hear because of a breakdown in verisimilitude generated by an aside, Caesar cannot see the histoire-coded filmic revelation of a subjectively motivated lie captured by an ostensibly objective and now un-authored (non-Shakespearean) cinematic truth. In so doing, filmic grammar temporarily ‘obliterates all traces of the enunciation’ (Metz 1985, 544), or at least those traces of the enunciation that are translated from Shakespearean dialogue into conventionalised elements of film grammar. Thus, although the adaptation ostensibly foregrounds its constructed nature, it also includes moments which disavow that construction through the conventionalised logic of realist cinematic grammar. Adaptation’s oscillations between discours and histoire function, like all realist film’s oscillations between these articulative registers, within the context of masochistic anamorphism discussed in the previous chapter—film anamorphically exploits its inevitable revelations of artifice for a masochistic ideological effect. Therefore, in the above example, Mankiewicz’s zoom into Trebonius not only translates Shakespeare’s verbal discours into cinema’s visual histoire, but it does so in a manner that is fundamental to the way in which realist cinema produces pleasure. Those foregrounded Shakespearean discours-like elements that precede and follow the translation operate like Heath’s grammatical inconsistency. Their authored artifice is temporarily foregrounded, so that spectators are briefly made aware that they are not witnessing an un-authored

82  R. GEAL

res extensa emanating out from their own res cogitans subject position. There is some ‘actualisation of the work process’ (Baudry 1985, 534). But the oscillation to histoire is cathartic, suturing over the prior revelation. Trebonius’ response to Caesar ceases to be an element of Shakespeare’s enunciation and instead becomes an element, within a medium in which ‘events seem to tell themselves’ (Benveniste 1970, 241), of the spectators’ own perceived illusory enunciation. The relationship between these two enunciative states is masochistic— the transcendence of the histoire (with the spectating subject reconfirmed as the centralised Cartesian cogito) worth the revelation, via the prior discours, that the spectating subject is not the res cogitans centre of meaning. Within the context of Freud’s fort/da game, discours-like foregrounded authorial enunciation functions like the child’s fort, which self-imposes traumatic unpleasure, while the histoire-like subsumption of the authorial enunciation into the conventionalised logic of realist film grammar functions like the child’s da, which creates the pleasurable illusion of control over the traumatic unpleasure. In the previous chapter, I discussed how Heath conceptualised realist film’s masochistic presentation and subsequent disavowal of its artifice as ‘a constant reflexive fascination in films’ (1985, 514, original emphasis), with ‘the industry dependent on the pleasure of the operation’ (1985, 514). Since I define the oscillating presentation and subsumption of authorial enunciation as an articulative trace analogous to Heath’s claims about how the conventions of continuity editing suture over grammatical inconsistencies, then just as Heath argued that ‘the drama of vision becomes a constant reflexive fascination in films’ (1985, 514), so too, I claim, the masochistic drama of authorship becomes a constant reflexive fascination in adaptations. Thus, just as Heath argued that the limitations and contradictions of perspectival vision get unconsciously encoded into film narrative and imagery in reflexive terms, as ‘discontinuities, disruptions, “shocks”’ (1985, 513–4), adaptation’s authorially enunciative limitations and contradictions are also encoded into adapted film’s narrative and imagery in reflexive terms, as oscillations between revealing, concealing and obfuscating traces of canonical authorship in various different ways. The drama of authorship, then, is necessarily reflexive, in a conservative ideological manner. This approach problematises existing adaptation studies which conceptualise Shakespearean reflexivity in film adaptations as the medium’s principle way to manipulate and explore the plays’ pluralistic themes and overcome realist film’s monolithic

4  THE DEAD AUTHOR AND THE CONCEALED AUTHOR 

83

interpretations (e.g. Brown 2004; Buchanan 2005; Rasmus 2001; Rothwell 1994). My poststructuralist account of the drama of authorship, however, far from understanding Shakespearean reflexivity as the key to transcending realist cinema’s perceived fixing of the plays’ inherent pluralism, conceptualises such reflexivity as another level of narrativising realist film’s masochistic anamorphism. The intricacies of adaptation’s anamorphic oscillations between discours and histoire are explored in the second half of the book. This exploration is based on a Benvenistene approach to authorship which is not employed in existing dialogic adaptation studies. The differences between Benvenistene and Bakhtinian/Barthesian authorship need explaining in detail, therefore, both to clarify how the model employed in this book diverges from existing studies, and to analyse how existing studies inadvertently contribute to realism’s ideological elision of the canonical ‘original’ author.

Benvenistene and Barthesian Analysis Although, as mentioned above, Bakhtin’s model of authorship has been more influential on dialogism than Barthes’ model, there is a degree of overlap between the two.3 It is worth beginning with an analysis of how Barthes’ model (rather than Bakhtin’s) relates to the Benveniste conception of authorship for two reasons.4 Firstly, Barthes’ ‘death’ of the author is more explicit, in terms of advocating the author’s displacement, than Bakhtin’s claim that ‘all utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve’ (1981, 428). Secondly, the example Barthes used to discuss the author’s ‘death’, Honoré de Balzac’s novella Sarrasine (1830), was also used by Benveniste as an example of how his two enunciative registers operate, so that the differences between the two writers’ accounts are clarified through their application to the same fictional text. Barthes and Benveniste, therefore, apply their different approaches to authorship to the same novella. Indeed, they both ask, of the non-dialogue authorial voice in Sarrasine, the same question: ‘Who is speaking thus?’ (Barthes 1995, 125). Their answers, or perhaps more accurately lack of answers, could not be more different, however. For Barthes, the question is unanswerable ‘for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative

84  R. GEAL

where all identity is lost’ (1995, 125). For Benveniste, the question is unanswerable because ‘there is no longer even a narrator. […] No one speaks here; events seem to tell themselves’ (1970, 241). The author is absent for both, but Barthes wants to reveal this absence to open up the text’s hermeneutic possibilities, and avoid any attempts to ‘impose a limit on […] [a] text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing’ (Barthes 1995, 128–9). Benveniste, on the other hand, claims that this absence is the concealing of partiality and constructivity. Barthes’ absent author is ideological because interpretative attempts are constantly made to uncover him or her, and in so doing define the actually indefinable authorial voice—it is in this sense, in particular, that dialogic adaptation studies can be thought of as Barthesian, because dialogic analyses challenge the idea that a text has a fixed meaning deposited by the ‘original’ author. Benveniste’s absent author, however, is ideological precisely because he/she is hidden and concealing his or her voice, disavowing the partiality that Barthes accuses the reader/viewer/interpreter of constructing. Barthes’ author is ‘dead’; Benveniste’s is hiding. If proponents of dialogic adaptation studies wish to optimistically celebrate the ‘original’ author’s ‘death’, a psychoanalytic poststructuralist should instead be pessimistically wary of the author’s hiding. This distinction is central to this book’s revision of adaptation studies. Catherine Belsey’s critique (1998) of Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar chronologically precedes the development of dialogic adaptation studies proper, but it provides a clear example of how Barthes’ model of authorship influences studies of adaptations which analyse how filmmakers reconfigure perceived authorial meaning, in contradistinction to Benvenistene analyses which might conceptualise such reconfigurations as foregrounding and/or subsuming markers of authorial origins. Belsey begins by locating the film’s ideological context within the history of the playtext’s interpretation, arguing that ‘any reading of a Shakespeare play which offers to define the play’s single meaning is partial in both senses of the word’ (1998, 61). The ‘play-in-performance necessarily interprets the text’, so that the ‘history of Shakespearean production is thus in an obvious sense the history of the interpretation of Shakespeare, and this clearly does not exist in isolation from the history of ideas’ (1998, 61). She contrasts the interrogative, plural nature of the Renaissance stage with the subsequent development of the proscenium arch and with ‘film [which] is the final realisation of the project of perspective staging. Depth of field, the vanishing point holding and closing off the spectator’s gaze,

4  THE DEAD AUTHOR AND THE CONCEALED AUTHOR 

85

offers the possibility of an illusion of balance between the world of the audience and the fictional world offered as a replica of it’ (1998, 66). The specific scene that Belsey uses to support her argument demonstrates how a Barthesian focus on the ways that an adaptation reconfigures perceived authorial meanings prevents a Benvenistene analysis of how an adaptation can obfuscate the enunciative nature of those authorial origins. In the funeral oration, two characters, Brutus (James Mason) and Antony, give two competing accounts of Caesar’s assassination. Brutus says that Caesar’s ambition posed a threat to the state, and that the assassins removed the threat. Antony says that Caesar was benevolent, and offered no such threat. As such, from a Benvenistene perspective, they offer subjective opinions which are clear examples of histoire—their own personal beliefs motivated their respective attitudes towards Caesar. Antony’s speech is particularly histoire-like in the way that it demonstrates his willingness to deceive to further his own cause. After apologising for beginning to violate Brutus’ prohibition that he should not praise Caesar, Antony claims that he is overcome with emotion. Belsey writes that the film’s triumph […] is the certainty with which it clarifies an area left uncertain in the [play]text. Antony pauses in his address to the Romans, overcome with emotion: ‘Bear with me/My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar. …’ (III.ii.105–6). As he turns away, the camera swings round to show his calculating expression. The citizens, wrought to hysteria by his rhetoric, are seen as gullible victims of the demagogue. This reading is clearly possible, if partial. But it would be harder to establish on the stage without benefit of close-up, and virtually impossible at the Globe, where Antony’s expression would have had to be visible to an audience located on at least three sides of him, and possibly four. The effect of the close-up here is to produce ethical and political coherence, and in the process to close off many of the ethical and political questions left open by the [play]text. (Belsey 1998, 62–3)

Belsey interprets the close-up of Antony’s calculating expression (Fig. 4.2) as a non-Shakespearean interpolation, a filmmakers’ addition that was not specified by the ‘original’ author. In the playtext, however, this scene ends with Antony’s brief aside, which is cut from the film: ‘Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot/Take thou what course thou wilt’ (3.2.253–4). The close-up of Antony’s calculating expression therefore translates the Shakespearean verbal into the cinematic visual.

86  R. GEAL Fig. 4.2  Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953, MGM): authored words adapted into ‘un-authored’ images

Such a translation does not close off the playtext’s inherent p ­ lurality, as Belsey claims, but instead suppresses Shakespeare’s enunciating ­presence in favour of a seemingly un-authored cinematic revelation. The Shakespearean dialogue that precedes the close-up operates as discours which reveals its enunciation, with Antony’s words foregrounded as a re-performance of Shakespearean artifice. When an element of this Shakespearean discours is transformed into images, however, Antony’s manipulation of the mob acts as histoire. The close-up of his calculating expression follows the logic of diegetic cinematic narration, with spectators granted a privileged glimpse of a character’s motivations which seems to come directly from that character’s interactions with his diegetic world, rather than from an explicitly enunciating authorial source foregrounded through a non-verisimilar form of communication such as Shakespearean dialogue (which would also be heightened through the use of an aside that is not part of realist cinematic convention). The scene’s oscillation between enunciating discours and unfolding histoire follows the logic of Metz’s claim that cinema ideologically ‘obliterates all traces of the enunciation, and masquerades as story’ (1985, 544), or, more accurately, cinema ‘obliterates [some] traces of the enunciation, and masquerades as story’ (1985, 544), since the oscillation between the two registers is an integral part of film’s masochistic ideological effect. Belsey’s Barthesian focus, however, is on how the filmmakers attempt to ‘impose a limit on […] [a] text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing’ (Barthes 1995, 128–9), rather than on Benvenistene ‘events [that] seem to tell themselves’ (Benveniste 1970, 241). Indeed, Mankiewicz’s visual translation is so seamless that even a scholar who studies the scene repeatedly does not recognise the suppressed trace of authorial enunciation, and interprets this as a non-Shakespearean interpolation from without. By replacing Belsey’s Barthesian conception of authorship with a Benvenistene conception of

4  THE DEAD AUTHOR AND THE CONCEALED AUTHOR 

87

authorship, it is possible to shift the focus from the ways in which adaptation negotiates and alters perceived authorial intention, to the ways that adaptation manipulates and displaces traces of the ‘original’ author’s enunciation. Furthermore, these contrasting scholarly approaches to how adaptation negotiates authorial enunciation are themselves revealing in the context of the ideological suppression of discours into histoire. If translating Shakespeare’s dialogue into conventionalised film grammar suppresses the revelation of authorial enunciation, as mentioned above, then an account such as Belsey’s is doubly suppressing. It is not only the mechanisms of realist film grammar that subsume markers of authorial enunciation—Barthesian analyses, such as Belsey’s, also contribute to realism’s subsumption of authorial enunciation by interpreting the subsumption as a reconfiguration. Constructing a scholarly account which dis-/misplaces the author, within a context in which the authorial enunciation’s obliteration is central to cinema’s ideological work, doubly suppresses the potentially non-realist discours-like nature of foregrounded authorial enunciation in realist film adaptation—the first suppression occurs when realist adaptation translates authorial discours into visual histoire; the second suppression occurs when a scholarly account interprets this cinematic translation as a manipulation of authorial ‘meaning’, rather than as a manipulation of enunciation.

Benvenistene and Bakhtinian Analysis The contrasts between Benvenistene and Barthesian authorship are clearer than those between Benvenistene and Bakhtinian authorship, but it is still possible to juxtapose the latter two approaches, in order to demonstrate the main difference between existing dialogic adaptation studies and the psychoanalytic poststructuralist method employed in this book. As mentioned above, Barthesian and Bakhtinian conceptions of authorship are broadly similar: both displace the importance of the ‘original’ author. Bakhtin, however, was particularly interested in the multiplicity of voices which inflect a text, and with how those inflecting voices alter texts as they travel through time and geographic/cultural/ social space. It is this focus on the ways that texts absorb multifarious discourses which informs dialogism. Such a focus, like that derived ­ from a Barthesian conception of authorship, also displaces the ‘original’ author. However, whereas scholarship drawing on the Barthesian

88  R. GEAL

authorial displacement argues against the ways that an adaptation might fix the source text’s actually inherently unstable authorial ‘meaning’, dialogic scholarship, drawing on the Bakhtinian authorial displacement, looks for evidence of the multiple, potentially emancipatory discourses which rework the ‘original’ author’s intervention in a text’s interminable intertextual network. As such, it is important, for the psychoanalytic poststructuralist method advocated here, that the dialogic optimism in the ways in which adaptations can refashion ‘original’ texts inadvertently diverts attention away from realist adaptation’s continued (and most important) ideological effect: the masochistic anamorphism of foregrounding and subsequently subsuming traces of the ‘original’ author. Thus, Stam claims that ‘[e]very age, Bakhtin suggested, reaccentuates in its own way the works of the past’ (Stam 2005, 28), but even this ostensibly progressive reaccentuation may operate ideologically. This is because the reaccentuation not only displaces the canonised status of the original (as proponents of dialogism would advocate, for sound political and ethical reasons), but in so doing, this displacement prevents an analysis of the ideological consequences of translating an accent that is foregrounded as fictitious into one that is reaccentuated into something ‘familiar’ in terms of ‘living’ dialects, and into something ‘relevant’ in terms of ‘living’ experiences rather than closed-off and potentially distant origins. This reaccentuation thereby conceals the marks of its construction in relation to a foregrounded piece of artifice and works within Benveniste’s context of ‘events [that] seem to tell themselves’ (1970, 241). Discours is therefore again subsumed into histoire, and as with Belsey’s appropriation of Barthesian authorship, the translation occurs both within adaptations themselves and within their legitimating academic interpretations. Thus, when adaptations reaccentuate the ‘original’ text, and when dialogic scholarship optimistically explores the progressive sociocultural developments informing this reaccentuation, the main ideological effect inherent to realist adaptation is not addressed. Continuing with adaptations (and academic interpretations) of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the Taviani brothers’ Cesare Deve Morire (Caesar Must Die) (2012) and Maurizio Calbi’s study thereof (2014) demonstrate this unintended conservative use of Bakhtinian authorship. This film is also useful in terms of establishing the ontological parameters of realist adaptation, because it is, by certain measures, more an example of an avant-garde rather than a realist film—Calbi refers to elements of the filmmaking as

4  THE DEAD AUTHOR AND THE CONCEALED AUTHOR 

89

‘quasi-Brechtian’ (2014, 235), and for scholars like MacCabe (1985) and Peter Wollen (1985), Brechtian methods are an essential part of challenging realism. As the following argument demonstrates, however, even a somewhat avant-garde, and indeed somewhat overtly Bakhtinian5 adaptation like Cesare Deve Morire, perpetuates realism’s subsumption of discours into histoire, and therefore functions as anamorphically realist adaptation. The film is set in an actual Italian prison, Rebibbia. The prison’s real inmates are shown rehearsing for, and performing the Shakespearean play, but elements of their daily lives, which relate to their preparations for the performance, are also shown. It is possible to make a broad Benvenistene distinction between these two registers—acted out scenes from the playtext are marked as Shakespearean discours, while those other parts of the film in which the inmates/actors offer their opinions (about the rehearsals, the playtext, their crimes and incarceration, and one another) function as ostensibly spontaneous, un-authored histoire. The relationship between these two registers, however, also facilitates a Bakhtinian analysis of how an ‘original’ text is reaccentuated in an adaptation. The two principal ways in which the film ‘reaccentuates in its own way the works of the past’ (Stam 2005, 28) are through its literal reaccentuation, from Shakespearean English to Italian and then to the cast’s regional dialects, and through the parallels drawn between the playtext’s themes of honour, betrayal, ambition, murder and the prisoners’ own experiences. These two elements are combined most explicitly when the convicts’ dialects are contextualised within the conventions of mafia culture. The first of these two elements is the most explicitly Bakhtinian. For Calbi, the inmates’/actors’ ‘dialects continually shift from more formal to less formal registers; they refract and “rewrite” each other in a kind of Bakhtinian heteroglossia’ (2014, 241). In so doing ‘the translation of Julius Caesar into a number of dialects bears witness to the fact that “Shakespeare” does not properly belong; that it is an “entity” […] that lends itself to an almost infinite variety of “migrations”’ (2014, 240, original emphasis). It is perhaps an exaggeration to say that this lack of belonging ‘obliterates all traces of the enunciation’ (Metz 1985, 544) as surely as Belsey’s Barthesian elision of foregrounded enunciation, given the way that Calbi recognises the ‘uncanny survivance of this specter [Shakespeare]’ (2014, 248, original emphasis). Nevertheless, if this survivance means that enunciation is not fully obliterated, Shakespeare’s

90  R. GEAL

authorial voice is still, as Bakhtin would have it, ‘impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve’ (1981, 428). In Calbi’s claim that ‘[i]f it is a “foreign Shakespeare,” therefore, it is “foreign” more than once, inscribing a movement across and in-between, a rhyzomatic movement that frustrates – and irremediably defers – points of arrival or destination’ (2014, 241, original emphasis), the foregrounded centrality that marks Shakespearean enunciation as discours is dissipated. The film’s second reaccentuation of the ‘original’—connections between the inmates’ experiences and the events in the playtext—also demonstrates how the Bakhtinian dis-placed author operates in dialogic analyses. For Calbi, the imprisoned actors ‘explore the extent to which their real-life experiences of violence, ambition, and betrayal interface with the life and vicissitudes of the Shakespearean characters’ (2014, 236). In relation to the same scene, that of Antony’s funeral oration, in which Belsey located a manipulation of Shakespearean language that I have characterised as the shift from discours to histoire, Calbi discusses another manipulation of the foregrounded Shakespearean language which destabilises that foregrounding: the translation of ‘honourable men’ as ‘uomini d’onore’ (in both Italian and dialect), an expression invariably used to refer to members of the mafia, and its ironic reiteration throughout the scene, are amongst the most emblematic examples of the extent to which notions of Roman honour resonate with the codes of honour of organised crime associations. (Calbi 2014, 242, original emphasis)

Shakespearean themes are here translated into a form of relevance that is both dialogic and diegetic, linking the reaccentuation of the Shakespearean language with characters experiencing these themes personally. In contradistinction to the foregrounded fiction of the Shakespearean text and the Shakespearean characters, the juxtaposed verisimilitude of the ‘real’ dialogue and the ‘real’ characters subsumes Shakespearean discours into ostensibly un-authored histoire. A dialogic analysis not only prevents the Benvenistene investigation of how the film manipulates discours into histoire, but it actually interprets this fundamentally conservative manipulation as an emancipatory reaccentuation of the ‘original’. Thus, Stam’s claim that adaptation’s reaccentuations ‘can take an activist stance toward their source[s]’ (Stam 2000, 64) is perpetuated in Calbi’s analysis of Cesare Deve Morire.

4  THE DEAD AUTHOR AND THE CONCEALED AUTHOR 

91

This ‘activist stance’ is most clearly articulated in Calbi’s account of a scene in which the camera pans across the prison in long shot, before dissolving into a close-up of Caesar/the prisoner Giovanni Arcuri. Calbi interprets this scene as a dialogic reaccentuation of two elements of the playtext—first, the textual Brutus asks, as the conspirators bathe their hands in Caesar’s blood, ‘How many ages hence/Shall this our lofty scene be acted over,/In states unborn and accents yet unknown!’ (3.1.112–4); second, the textual Cassius describes the supernatural events occurring in Rome (and by extension the Republic itself) as ‘some monstrous state’ (1.3.71). In the playtext, or on the Elizabethan stage, these ‘accents yet unknown’, and the ‘monstrous state’, might refer either/both to the play’s Roman subject matter and/or to the Elizabethan political context in which the play was performed. A dialogic analysis, however, addresses how the ‘accents yet unknown’ and the ‘monstrous state’ relate to contemporary political and social issues, so that Calbi claims that ‘[o]ne of the “states unborn” (or “kingdoms”) is Rebibbia prison itself, which is in many ways a “monstrous state” (1.3.71)’ (2014, 240). He notes the camera’s visual work, but links it with metamorphoses of language and experience, explaining how the longshot pan across the prison is accompanied by the sounds, but not the sights, of prisoners’ private melancholy thoughts regarding their predicament: Like the ‘watch’ mentioned by Calphurnia, they see ‘horrid sights’ (2.2.16). One could go as far as to argue that, in the film, the ‘ghosts’ that ‘shriek and squeal about the streets’ (24) – in fact, most of the ‘prodigies’ and ‘portentous things’ (1.3.28,31) of Shakespeare’s play – metamorphose into the haunting ‘specters’ of past and present traumatic experiences. And, perhaps, the camera itself is such a ‘watch,’ taking upon itself the ethical task of recording the traumas triggered by the ‘monstrous state’ (71) of the prison, and doing so in a dream-like, almost nightmarish manner. (Calbi 2014, 246)

For Calbi, the camera’s task here is ethical, as it transforms the canonical ‘original’ into a contemporary critique of the prison system and its underlying social injustices. When the slow pan across the prison gradually dissolves into a low-angle shot of a purposeful Caesar en route to the Senate and to his death, Calbi notes the connection between these two images and the conflation of Shakespearean themes and the subjugated prisoners’ experiences:

92  R. GEAL for a few seconds, a close-up of a self-satisfied Caesar is superimposed upon the image of the prison building, which cogently furthers the identification of ‘Caesar’ with a ‘monstrous’ prison system. It is a close-up that symbolically makes him into a target of grievances to be urgently redressed: Caesar – indeed – must die. (Calbi 2014, 246)

This dialogic focus on the camera as ethical prevents an analysis of the camera as grammatical—that is, it diverts attention away from the enunciative status of the film’s reaccentuating camera. Although Cesare Deve Morire’s specific reaccentuation might use the prisoners’ subjugated voices to take ‘an activist stance toward [its] source’ (Stam 2000, 64), it does so using the conservative grammar of realist cinema. The Bakhtinian analysis of the progressive reaccentuation prevents a Benvenistene analysis of the conservative form in which this reaccentuation is enunciated. The Bakhtinian approach to authorship thereby makes a dialogic virtue out of realism’s ideological anamorphism, conflating potentially emancipatory content (a criticism of how prisoners are treated) with an inherently conservative form of grammatical narration. Indeed, this dialogic approach interprets histoire-like oscillations away from foregrounded authorial enunciation as a disruption of conventional filmmaking. Thus, Calbi claims that ‘the actors interpret Shakespearean roles but also play themselves, often stepping out of these roles, in a quasi-Brechtian fashion, to offer comments on the Shakespearean text’ (2014, 235). His analyses of the scenes in which this happens, though, are less suggestive of Brechtian alienation than of conservative diegetisation: [the prisoner] Salvatore Striano [rehearsing his role as Brutus] stops acting as soon as he delivers the lines: ‘O that I then could strip out the spirit of the tyrant and not tear open his chest!’ (see the original’s ‘O that we could then come by Caesar’s spirit/And not dismember Caesar!’ 2.1.168–69), because they remind him of the words spoken by a friend – ‘they were different but the same,’ as he puts it – as the latter was about to kill a snitch (infame) on behalf of a local camorra boss. (Calbi 2014, 244, original emphasis)

The dialogic interpretation of this shift between enunciative registers conceptualises the re-performance of the ‘original’ authorial voice as a non-emancipatory repetition of the canonical fixing of what is really an interminably intertextual discourse (albeit in Cesare Deve

4  THE DEAD AUTHOR AND THE CONCEALED AUTHOR 

93

Morire the re-performing voices are somewhat verbal reaccentuations). When another, contemporary and clearly non-canonical voice, such as Striano’s, offers a commentary on the ‘original’ authorial voice and makes a connection to it that reaccentuates and revitalises that ‘original’ authorial voice, the dialogic analysis identifies the potentially emancipatory ways in which, as Stam puts it, ‘[e]very age, Bakhtin suggested, reaccentuates in its own way the works of the past’ (Stam 2005, 28). Indeed, Calbi identifies this shift to a reaccentuating voice as ‘quasiBrechtian’ (2014, 235). From the perspective of Bakhtinian authorship, merely re-performing the ‘original’ author is conservative, but reaccentuating the ‘original’ author is potentially radical. From the perspective of Benvenistene authorship, however, the conservative and radical elements of re-performing or reaccentuating the ‘original’ author are completely reversed. The re-performance foregrounds the adaptation’s artifice, which might have, as discussed above, potentially non-realist consequences. The reaccentuation of that ‘original’ voice, on the other hand, conservatively subsumes the prior foregrounding of artifice, and passes itself off as un-authored verisimilitude. Whereas Bakhtinian dialogism conceptualises re-performance as conservative and reaccentuation as radical, Benvenistene psychoanalytic poststructuralism conceptualises re-performance as (potentially) radical and reaccentuation as conservative. Calbi’s aforementioned analysis of Striano’s commentary on the lines he has just delivered as Brutus demonstrates these diametrically opposite approaches to re-performance and reaccentuation: Calbi states that ‘Striano stops acting as soon as he delivers the [Shakespearean] lines…’ (2014, 244), but from the perspective of Benvenistene authorship this is where Striano pretends to stop acting, or more precisely stops acting a foregrounded form of acting, in which it is clear that an actor takes on the role of a character, and instead pretends to be a ‘real’ person expressing, ex tempore, his genuine inner feelings. A Bakhtinian conception of authorship can also be used to provide a dialogic, rather than an enunciative, explanation for translations of f­oregrounded Shakespearean dialogue into conventionalised film grammatical images (like the close-ups of Trebonius and Antony in Mankiewicz’s adaptation, mentioned above). Calbi puts Cesare Deve Morire’s visual metaphors for foregrounded Shakespearean themes into the context of relevance to the diegetic actor/prisoner, as with the aforementioned lap dissolve from the prison walls to Caesar, which offer a

94  R. GEAL

reaccentuated critique of the contemporary prison system, or in this interpretation of Striano/Brutus giving his understanding of the playtext’s relevance a physical manifestation: Striano rehearses Brutus’ monologue from Act 2 Scene 1, in which the threat of Caesar’s growing power is used as the basis for Brutus’ decision that ‘It must be by his death’ (2.1.10). Calbi writes that ‘[w]e then see him sweeping the floor while continuing to recite Shakespeare, with words embodying a crescendo of aggressivity: it is almost as if the menial task he is forced to execute as Striano-the-convict inexorably fed into Brutus’s desire for freedom’ (2014, 241–2, original emphasis). A Benvenistene analysis of this scene would focus on how Striano’s/Brutus’ motivations are communicated twice: firstly via the foregrounded Shakespearean discours of the speech (albeit reaccentuated through Striano’s Neapolitan dialect), and secondly via the conventionalised realist histoire of a voyeuristically observed film character ostensibly expressing his inner feelings and emotions through figure movement. A Bakhtinian analysis, however, in focusing on how a contemporary discourse reaccentuates the ‘original’ text, diverts attention away from the different ways in which the reaccentuating contemporary discourse and the ‘original’ authorial discourse are enunciated.

The Canonical Author Dis-placed/Mis-placed Like Belsey’s application of Barthesian authorship, Calbi’s use of Bakhtinian authorship prevents an analysis of the ways in which adaptation invokes a foregrounded revelation of artifice only to masochistically suppress that foregrounding. The Barthesian and Bakhtinian approaches differ, but they both offer explanations that seek to displace the importance of authorial textual ‘origins’. Both inadvertently close off analyses of the ways in which these textual ‘origins’ are manipulated for an ideological effect. Both of the adaptations that Belsey and Calbi discuss manipulate the fundamentally ontological translation of Shakespeare’s enunciated words into ostensibly un-authored visual images, and both adaptations facilitate academic interpretations that position these translations within contexts that were formulated to help critique ideological cultural practice, but which miss one of adaptation’s most ideological elements. In the politically and ethically laudable attempt to displace the hegemonic primacy of textual origins, Barthesian and Bakhtinian studies thereby paradoxically contribute to realist cinema’s ideological attempt to disavow

4  THE DEAD AUTHOR AND THE CONCEALED AUTHOR 

95

its own status as a construction. The Barthesian analysis of adaptation’s attempts to ‘impose a limit on […] [a] text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing’ (Barthes 1995, 128–9) can help to problematise fidelity criticism’s ideological claims towards knowing the ‘original’s’ inherent ‘meaning’. Similarly, the Bakhtinian analysis of adaptation’s intertextual elements can help to problematise fidelity criticism’s ideological claims, contextualising adaptation within Leitch’s understanding of ‘all texts as intertexts, all reading as rereading, all writing as rewriting’ (2005, 239). But in so doing, these analyses elide canonical realist film adaptation’s fundamental ideological process: the anamorphically masochistic revelation and suppression of authorial enunciation. The Barthesian death of the author, Bakhtinian dialogics and realist adaptation itself all displace the centrality of authorial enunciation, even if they do so for very different reasons, and make very unwilling bedfellows. A Benvenistene conception of authorship, in which foregrounded discours-like artifice is subsumed into a histoire in which ‘[n]o one speaks here; events seem to tell themselves’ (Benveniste 1970, 241) can align this authorial displacement with realist cinema’s manipulation of its constructed nature. Barthesian and Bakhtinian analyses, in attempting to problematise the canonical author’s ideological value, prevent an analysis of adaptation’s ideological masochism, within which the displacement of the foregrounded author is central. The dis-placing of the author’s significance, which is so central to dialogism’s liberationist project, thereby inadvertently and paradoxically mis-places the ideological significance of the author’s concealed status. The Benvenistene taxonomy of how canonical realist adaptation anamorphically manipulates authorial enunciation, which is explored in the second half of the book, can reconceptualise the ‘original’ author not as dead, but as concealed in various different ways.

Notes 1.  All quotations from Shakespeare’s plays are taken from The Complete Works: Compact Edition, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (1988). 2. As early as the second decade of the twentieth century, screenplay-writers were making the case that they should be considered film’s primary creative source (Eisner 1969, 39), but the impact of the politique des auteurs from the 1950s onwards firmly established the director as the focus of critical and theoretical attention. As a consequence, studies of adaptation have not been able to locate authorial enunciation within the ideological

96  R. GEAL context in which poststructuralist film theory conceives cinematic enunciation. Similarly, the impact of the politique des auteurs, and its concomitant rejection of the creative impact of screenplay-writers and source texts, has led film theory to conceive of enunciation solely in relation to continuity editing and the manipulation of mise-en-scène at the expense of other enunciative traces—as an auteur-ial rather than an authorial imprint. 3. Proponents of dialogism more frequently refer to Bakhtin than Barthes, partly to re-chronologise Goulimari’s (2015) aforementioned assertion about Barthes’ rewriting of Bakhtin’s earlier argument, but more specifically because Bakhtin’s intertextuality offers the more optimistic account of textual hybridity, whereas Barthes’ distinction between ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts is more reminiscent of psychoanalytic poststructuralism’s distinction between realism and the avant-garde, and of criticism’s vanguard role in articulating and exploring the distinction. Nevertheless, Stam’s claim that ‘Bakhtin’s notion of author and character as multi-discursive and resistant to unification’ means that ‘if authors are fissured, fragmented, multidiscursive, hardly “present” even to themselves, the analyst may inquire, how can an adaptation communicate the “spirit” or “self-presence” of authorial intention?’ (2005, 9) is similar to Barthes’ claim that ‘writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin’ (1995, 125). 4. The differences between Barthesian and Benvenistene authorship are striking. Jonathan Culler, discussing competing definitions of discours and histoire, argues that ‘Barthes has very nearly reversed the categories while claiming to follow Benveniste’s example’ (2002, 233). 5.  Although the Taviani brothers might not couch their adaptation in as explicitly theoretical terms as Calbi’s analysis thereof, they do include scenes in which their stand-in, the play within the film’s director, encourages the prisoners to use their own dialects as well as their own experiences.

References Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. 1981 [1934–1941]. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barthes, Roland. 1995 [1967]. “The Death of the Author.” In Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern, edited by Seán Burke, 125–30. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Baudry, Jean-Louis. 1985. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” In Movies and Methods: Volume II, edited by Bill Nichols, 531–42. Berkeley: University of California Press. Belsey, Catherine. 1998. “Shakespeare and Film: A Question of Perspective.” In Shakespeare on Film, edited by Robert Shaughnessy, 61–70. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

4  THE DEAD AUTHOR AND THE CONCEALED AUTHOR 

97

Benchley, Robert. 1974. Jaws. New York: Doubleday. Benveniste, Émile. 1970. Problems in General Linguistics. Translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables: Miami University Press. Bloch, Robert. 1959. Psycho. New York: Simon & Schuster. Brown, Eric C. 2004. “Cinema in the Round: Self-Reflexivity in Tim Blake Nelson’s ‘O’.” In Almost Shakespeare: Reinventing His Works for Cinema and Television, edited by James R. Keller and Leslie Stratyner, 73–85. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Buchanan, Judith. 2005. Shakespeare on Film. Harlow: Pearson. Calbi, Maurizio. 2014. “‘In States Unborn and Accents yet Unknown’: Spectral Shakespeare in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s ‘Cesare deve morire’ (‘Caesar Must Die’).” Shakespeare Bulletin 32, no. 2: 235–53. Culler, Jonathan. 2002. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge. de Balzac, Honoré. 1830. “Sarrasine.” Revue de Paris. Dent, Alan. 1948. Hamlet: The Film and the Play. London: World Film Publications. Dickinson, Desmond. 1948. “Camera and Lighting.” In The Film ‘Hamlet’: A Record of Its Production, edited by Brenda Cross, 29–35. London: Saturn Press. Eisner, Lotte H. 1969. The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt. Translated by Roger Greaves. Berkeley: University of California Press. Feuer, Jane. 1982. The Hollywood Musical. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 1974 [1966]. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Translated by R.D. Laing. Bristol: Tavistock. Goulimari, Pelagia. 2015. Literary Criticism and Theory: From Plato to Postcolonialism. Abingdon: Routledge. Heath, Stephen. 1985. “‘Jaws’, Ideology and Film Theory.” In Movies and Methods Volume II, edited by Bill Nichols, 509–14. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jorgens, Jack J. 1977. Shakespeare on Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1992. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–60. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Denis Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leavis, Frank Raymond. 1948. The Great Tradition. London: Chatto & Windus. Leitch, Thomas. 2003. “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory.” Criticism 45, no. 2: 149–71. ———. 2005. “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Adaptation *Especially if You’re Looking Forwards Rather Than Back.” Literature/Film Quarterly 33, no. 3: 231–45.

98  R. GEAL Lobsien, Eckhard. 1995. Repetition and Likeness: Phenomenology of Poetic Language [Wörtlichkeit und Wiederholung: Phänomenologie poetischer Sprache]. Munich: Wilhelm Fink. MacCabe, Colin. 1985. Theoretical Essays; Film, Linguistics, Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Metz, Christian. 1985. “Story/Discourse: Notes on Two Kinds of Voyeurism.” In Movies and Methods Volume II, edited by Bill Nichols, 543–9. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nichols, Bill. 1981. Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other Media. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Olivier, Laurence. 1948. “Foreword.” In Hamlet: The Film and the Play, edited by Alan Dent, 1–5, my pagination. London: World Film Publications. Rasmus, Agnieszka. 2001. “‘I Could a Tale Unfold…’ From Metatheatre to Metacinema: Films Within the Films in Shakespeare on Film.” Cadernos de Traduçäo 1, no. 7: 147–68. Rothwell, Kenneth. 1994. “Representing ‘King Lear’ on Screen: From Metatheatre to ‘Meta-cinema’.” In Shakespeare and the Moving Image: The Plays on Film and Television, edited by Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells, 211–233. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shakespeare, William. 1988. The Complete Works: Compact Edition. Edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Stam, Robert. 2000. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” In Film Adaptation, edited by James Naremore, 54–76. London: Athlone. ———. 2005. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” In Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation, edited by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, 1–52. Oxford: Blackwell. Wollen, Peter. 1985. “Godard and Counter Cinema: ‘Vent D’Est’.” In Movies and Methods Volume II, edited by Bill Nichols, 500–509. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Filmography Carry On Cleo. 1964. Directed by Gerald Thomas. UK: Anglo-Amalgamated. Cesare Deve Morire (Caesar Must Die). 2012. Directed by Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani. Italy: Kaos Cinematografica. Hamlet. 1948. Directed by Laurence Olivier. UK: Two Cities. Julius Caesar. 1953. Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. USA: MGM. The League of Gentlemen. 1999–2002. Directed by Steve Bendelack. UK: BBC. Psycho. 1960. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. USA: Paramount. Richard III. 1995. Directed by Richard Loncraine. UK: United Artists.

4  THE DEAD AUTHOR AND THE CONCEALED AUTHOR 

99

Paintings Holbein the Younger, Hans. 1533. The Ambassadors. Oil on oak. London: National Gallery. Velázquez, Diego. 1656. Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour). Oil on canvas. Madrid: Museo del Prado.

PART II

The Drama of Authorship: A Taxonomy of Anamorphic Authorship

CHAPTER 5

‘Fainomaic’ Adaptation from the Verbal to the Visual

The second part of this book is a taxonomy of the principal ways in which film adaptations of canonical ‘originals’ negotiate and thematise the theoretical approach to anamorphic authorship outlined in the previous chapter. Throughout, I discuss films adapted from Shakespeare’s plays. I have already set out the reasons why Shakespearean films make for a manageable and useful case study, but they are worth repeating at this point: firstly, Shakespeare’s plays have been adapted into a large number of films, providing both plentiful texts for analysis and various different types of adaptations that facilitate this case study’s exploration of how adaptations manipulate canonical reflexivity in multiple ways. Secondly, my approach to adaptation is based on various forms of audience awareness about the presence of the ‘original’ author in the adaptation—the canonicity of this authorship must be somewhat apparent (albeit in diverse ways, as the taxonomy addresses). Shakespearean films provide both clear examples of this foregrounded authorial canonicity and subtle examples of almost completely sublimated authorial canonicity. Thirdly, certain elements of Shakespearean (meta-)drama have the potential to further complicate this aforementioned canonical reflexivity.1 In order to set out this taxonomy as clearly as possible, I use examples from a number of different adaptations, letting the theoretical development of the taxonomy determine which scenes and films are analysed, rather than exploring one or two films as detailed case studies (which might produce a potentially haphazard array of theoretical categories). © The Author(s) 2019 R. Geal, Anamorphic Authorship in Canonical Film Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16496-6_5

103

104  R. GEAL

The chosen examples mostly come from a fairly small selection of reasonably well-known adaptations. Their familiarity is useful, both because many readers will know the scenes I explore quite well and because there are numerous existing academic analyses of the films I discuss. This helps to clarify how different theoretical approaches diverge, and also demonstrates how academic interpretations legitimate the adaptations’ subsumptions and obfuscations of authorial anamorphosis, as I discuss below. This is not to say that I have no interest in how anamorphic authorship operates in nuanced examples, ambiguous examples or even counter-examples. The ways that films relate to theoretical premises are inevitably historically and culturally specific, and I am interested in these specificities, but not at the expense of a necessary clarity at this stage. As I discuss in the conclusion, if authorial anamorphism has an unfolding history, then numerous adaptations of the same source from different historical moments provide the ‘laboratory’ conditions2 to map that history. At this stage, however, the following chapters use examples which most clearly demonstrate how anamorphic authorship operates. The following chapters divide the taxonomy into four distinct (though interrelated) elements. The last three of these are dealt with in less detail, because they focus on elements of anamorphic authorship which may or may not operate within realist adaptations, depending on the particular film. These are: shifts from perceived canonically appropriate settings for Shakespearean drama into ostensibly ‘non’-­Shakespearean locations (Chapter 6); manipulations of foreknowledge that film audiences may have about Shakespearean narratives (Chapter 7); and dramatisations of Shakespeare’s life (Chapter 8). Each of these relates, in various ways, to the theoretical premises discussed in the previous chapter. But the anamorphic authorship explored in most detail is that which engages with the previous chapter’s theory most directly, and which comprises a fundamentally ontological element of realist adaptation. This is the anamorphic translation of the verbally foregrounded Shakespearean into the ostensibly un-authored visual nature of realist filmmaking, and it is this element which I turn to first. New terminology is required to clarify these different forms of anamorphic authorship. This chapter focuses on the translation from the verbalised expression of constructed authorial discours into the visualised revelation of seemingly un-authored film grammatical histoire, which is a defining feature of realist Shakespearean adaptation. I define this suppression of Shakespeare’s enunciating presence into a seamless cinematic

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

105

unfolding as a ‘fainomaic’ adaptation. I derive this term from the Ancient Greek verb fainomai, meaning ‘to appear’, since it makes the verbal appear as the visual. The fainomaic translation realises Colin MacCabe’s claim that in realist cinema ‘the narrative discourse simply allows reality to appear and denies its own status as articulation’ (1985, 36), despite the adaptation’s overall ostensible foregrounding of that articulation. Instead of Shakespeare’s enunciating words potentially challenging realist film’s conservative hierarchy of discourses, ‘[t]he camera tells us what happens – it tells the truth against which we can measure the discourses’ (MacCabe 1985, 37). The examples provided from Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar and the Taviani brothers’ Cesare Deve Morire (Caesar Must Die) in the previous chapter are clear illustrations of this process—amongst the foregrounded artifice of Shakespearean dialogue, the filmmakers transfer some of that dialogue into images which convey the same information as the replaced dialogue, but which suppress and obfuscate that dialogue’s foregrounding of authored artifice. Showing rather than verbalising even a small element of Shakespeare’s playtextual discours therefore changes at least the element which has been translated into histoire. Dialogue is central to Shakespearean discours because of the medium in which Shakespearean canonicity operates—his authorial voice principally consists of characters’ first-person speech rather than an explicitly non-character third-person narration (some of the ambiguities about this distinction are discussed throughout this chapter). However, it is also the case that this form of fainomaic adaptation is applicable to canonical authorship from other media, such as novels, in which characters’ speech is accompanied by the kind of authorial narration so important to Barthes and Benveniste, as discussed in the previous chapter. This is not to say that adapting dialogue from novels cannot be canonically reflexive in the same manner as adapting Shakespearean dialogue—whenever a filmic Oliver Twist asks for more, for example, character dialogue foregrounds film adaptation’s re-performative nature. Indeed, famous lines from canonical novels which are not originally character dialogue are sometimes shifted into character dialogue in numerous film adaptations. As Cartmell and Whelehan (2010, 94) have noted, the famous opening sentence of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) has been frequently spoken by diegetic characters. Even a loose parodic adaptation like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Burr Steers, 2016) has Elizabeth Bennet (Lily James) announce that ‘It is a truth universally

106  R. GEAL

acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains’. These examples, then, all foreground canonical authorship through characters’ speech. More typically, however, and more systematically, film adaptations of canonical novels foreground and fainomaically obfuscate authorship through the techniques set out in this and the following chapters—that is, by employing a conventionalised verisimilar mise-en-scène which manipulates an authorially foregrounded setting; by employing ostensibly un-authored editing and cinematography in addition to explicitly authored indications about character, narrative, theme and so on; by rendering verbal imagery as visual imagery; by including images of written traces of canonical authorship; and by manipulating foreknowledge about the narrative trajectories in the ‘original’.3 The fainomaic elements of the following taxonomy all function to subsume and/or obfuscate the foregrounding of Shakespearean enunciation. Since this process involves a hermeneutic response which establishes the discours element of anamorphic authorship—spectators are aware, to a greater or lesser extent, that they are watching a Shakespearean re-performance—an important part of the fainomaic translation is the way that it provides a Shakespearean (or other authorial) legitimation for its visualisation of the verbal. After all, the kind of adaptation that I am interested in here would not be anamorphic, in authorial terms, if a spectator was completely unaware that the film re-performed a canonical ‘original’. Existing academic analyses of Shakespearean films provide detailed and instructive examples of how fainomaic suppressions of discours into histoire can be disavowed. The examples from adaptations of Julius Caesar discussed in the previous chapter demonstrate this process: Mankiewicz’s close-up of Antony’s calculating expression suppresses Shakespeare’s verbal discours into cinematic histoire, but Belsey’s Barthesian analysis is concerned with how the film alters and fixes the potentially plural meanings of the Shakespearean discours. Similarly, the Taviani brothers show Brutus/Striano aggressively sweep the floor in a histoire-like spontaneity that suppresses the foregrounded discours of Act 2 Scene 1’s monologue, but Calbi’s Bakhtinian analysis is concerned with how the sweeping reaccentuates the Shakespearean discours for the marginalised and the oppressed. These academic interpretations contribute to the films’ fainomaic anamorphism by providing an account for the suppression of discours into histoire which interprets that suppression as a manipulation of the discours—as a question of how authorial ‘meaning’ is transferred or

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

107

altered as it moves either across media or across cultures. Dialogic interpretation, as these examples demonstrate, is inadvertently complicit in this process, because at every stage the potential meanings of texts have the quality only of discours: a voice or coming together of voices that articulate a dialogue between other voices. The dialogic critic investigates how adaptation might redistribute those voices along egalitarian and liberatory lines, but from the Benvenistene perspective each of these voices is a foregrounded form of discours, assigned and designated to particular agents. The dialogic project of dismantling the myth that a canonical text belongs only to one fixed authorial voice analyses how one form of discours gets manipulated into other (and multifarious) forms of discours, but the task is always one of assigning a speaker or speakers to a text. Existing dialogic analyses thereby provide examples of how fainomaic adaptation operates in the sense that whenever dialogism asks, with Barthes, ‘Who is speaking thus?’ (Barthes 1995, 125), and answers with evidence of multiple emancipatory voices, the following taxonomy will instead find evidence of Benveniste’s claim that ‘[n]o one speaks here; events seem to tell themselves’ (1970, 241). Even clearer examples of how academic analyses interpret fainomaic translations as manipulations of discours are provided, however, by broadly fidelity-based studies. This is because the principal task of fidelity criticism is an attempt to find examples of what Jorgens calls ‘the expressive possibilities of shifting relations between words and images’ (1977, 17). Like dialogic analysis, fidelity criticism undertakes this task with a focus on discours alone, although fidelity criticism is concerned with how discours is perpetuated in the adaptation between different media, with the perceived ‘meaning’ of that discours unaltered, whereas dialogism is concerned with how discours mutates as it traverses through different voices and cultures. Nevertheless, both of these approaches identify moments in canonical film adaptations in which an element of the ‘original’ is manipulated in some form, and then position that manipulation in relation to the ‘original’ as either a fidelity-based transmedial or dialogic transcultural manipulation. As such, both of these existing forms of analysis study the same elements of adaptations that the following taxonomy of anamorphic authorship is concerned with, although the conclusions derived from these analytic methods are all different. But it is certainly the case that the same scenes and filmic techniques analysed by fidelity and dialogic critics also provide evidence for the elaboration of anamorphic authorship. Thus, the kind of texts and scenes chosen by Jorgens to

108  R. GEAL

demonstrate the ‘shifting relations between words and images’ are also examples of fainomaic translation, if the requisite change is made from an emphasis on how this shift facilitates ‘expressive possibilities’ (Jorgens 1977, 17) to how the shift facilitates the anamorphic suppression of discours into histoire. Existing academic analyses, then, provide a wide array of examples both of how adaptations operate in fainomaic terms, even if those analyses do not conceptualise the adaptations’ manipulations in those terms, and of how those analyses disavow fainomaic translations in either canonical or excanonical terms. As such, these existing analyses demonstrate the full extent of the hermeneutic processes at play in anamorphic adaptation—the realist film adaptation foregrounds its authored discours and suppresses some of that discours into histoire, while existing academic analyses legitimate that suppression by providing either a canonical explanation which elides that suppression, in terms of fidelity criticism, or an excanonical explanation which elides the suppression, in terms of dialogic criticism. The following taxonomy, therefore, is not only guided by existing analyses of Jorgens’ ‘shifting relations between words and images’ (1977, 17), but interrogates how these existing analyses legitimate and complete the anamorphic suppression of discours into histoire. Whereas the existing academic analysis looks for ways in which adaptations, as Hamlet would have it, ‘suit the action to the word’, the following taxonomy is concerned with how this process also ‘[sutures] the action to the word’ (3.2.17–18).

Fainomaic histoire in Addition to Shakespearean Dialogue’s discours The most explicit examples of fainomaic translation are those already identified in the previous chapter and mentioned again above—­realist film grammar communicates the same information as, and directly replaces, a particular line of dialogue at the same place in the temporal structure of the playtext, or at least very close to the place where the replaced line of dialogue comes in the playtext. More often, however, fainomaic imagery occurs in addition to, rather than in the place of, the piece of Shakespearean dialogue which is rendered into visual form. This is an inevitable function of filming within the conventions of realist cinematic grammar, in terms of mise-en-scène, cinematographic framing and editing. With regard to mise-en-scène,

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

109

this means that film establishes a coherent fictional space in which the narrative takes place. The next chapter will discuss those adaptations that shift locations from a perceived ‘Shakespearean’ setting, but for a film like Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar this means that the setting fulfils a basic function of approximately corresponding to expectations about an appropriate place for the fictional events to occur. These expectations operate within the context of Tzvetan Todorov’s claim that verisimilitude is not simply what appears ‘realistic’, but also what has become conventionalised (1977, 87). As such, the mise-en-scène in Mankiewicz’s adaptation functions as appropriately ‘Roman’. Shakespearean scholars might point out that the costumes in the film are potentially anachronistic, since actors on the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage wore contemporary dress, while an art historian might complain that the film’s whitewashed buildings and statues reflect an ahistorical approach to classical architecture and sculpture, prevalent since the Renaissance, whereas the real Ancient Rome was vibrantly polychrome (see Grossman 2003, 82). Thus, the film’s mise-en-scène is not completely ‘realistic’, if measured in detail against the specific ‘real’ historical Rome. Nevertheless, the film’s mise-en-scène sufficiently corresponds with popular conceptions about how a narrative set in Ancient Rome should look, and it therefore fits into a broader conventionalised expectation that realist films should appear to exist in a believable fictional world.4 It is the case, of course, that a theatrical performance of Julius Caesar can employ similar costumes, props, backdrops and so on to invoke the same kind of verisimilar setting as Mankiewicz’s film—indeed, mise-enscène is a term that film studies borrows from the theatre. However, miseen-scène in realist films has a coherence that is very different from the mise-en-scène on a stage, since film does not show the boundaries of the mise-en-scène which thereby reveal the presence of a real world outside the diegesis. To be more precise, it is not entirely accurate to say that film does not show the boundaries of its mise-en-scène. Cinematic framing inevitably cuts off parts of the fictional world. However, this is where the anamorphic mechanisms of suture, discussed in Chapter 3, operate to subsume the potential markers of artifice generated through the fact that framing cuts off part of the mise-en-scène. The conventions of shot/reverse shot move the spectator around and inside the mise-en-scène in such a way that the spectator’s perceived Cartesian centrality is repeatedly re-inscribed. Each time that the cinematic framing inevitably shows only part of the mise-en-scène, and cuts from that particular framing to a

110  R. GEAL

different framing, the spectator is granted a viewing position with both psychic losses and psychic gains. The losses reveal that the film is artifice, showing fragments of images that de-centre the spectator in what could potentially be a bewildering array of positions that problematise the Cartesian subject’s illusory centrality. The gains re-inscribe that centrality through a new framing of part of the mise-en-scène which makes narrative sense of the cutting and framing, and which reveals that the previous frame’s limitation to the mise-en-scène did not mean that the miseen-scène ended at the borders of the previous shot, but instead continues around and between all of the shots. Suture’s shot/reverse shot conventions, then, both temporarily show and then disavow the borders of the fictional diegesis and, as such, they are part of the anamorphic drama of vision, oscillating between a revelation of artifice and the subsumption of that revelation. The mise-en-scène of a stage play has borders that mark off the diegesis from the real world, and it shows those borders. Realist film’s mise-en-scène, too, has borders that mark off the diegesis from the real world, and it too shows those borders. However, realist film obfuscates and disavows those borders through the suturing mechanisms of continuity editing, so that the miseen-scène has an object permanence in which the fictional world consists not only of that which can be seen in any one shot at any one moment. At the broadest level, something similar is true of theatre, where characters and locations also have an object permanence—a theatrical diegetic Brutus doesn’t cease to exist when he vacates the stage to allow Antony to speak, for example. But there is still an important difference in how theatre and film establish the diegesis which extends out beyond that which is directly shown, because film editing so frequently and continuously shows specific fragment after specific fragment of the miseen-scène. The theatre requires, to a greater or lesser extent, that audiences employ what the Chorus in Henry V calls ‘imaginary forces’ (Prologue 18) to ‘Piece out the imperfections’ (Prologue 23) of the mise-en-scène. Film, on the other hand, provides the ‘muse of fire’ (Prologue 1) which shows the diegesis without needing spectators to employ their ‘imaginary forces’ (or at least not in a conscious manner), and which moves around within that diegesis in a way that offers a greater impression of reality, despite the continuous showing of the borders of the mise-en-scène. Realist film adaptation, therefore, employs an illusory mise-en-scène and editing regime that makes the fictional world of the narrative operate as anamorphically oscillating fainomaic verisimilitude.

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

111

Some elements of this anamorphosis are inevitable and constant oscillations between a foregrounded authorial discours and the verisimilar conventions of realist film grammar. Thus, the two examples from Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar, discussed in the last chapter, are not only authorially anamorphic solely in those moments when a specific line of dialogue is replaced with a specific close-up that conveys the same information as the dialogue. It is also the case that the overall grammatical verisimilitude of the film acts as a form of cinematic histoire continuously oscillating with the dialogue’s foregrounded discours. Throughout the funeral oration, Antony speaks words that have the potential to foreground artifice, but within a mise-en-scène and editing regime that subsumes those markers of artifice—the costumes, props and setting all seem appropriately verisimilar, characters’ facial expressions and figure movement seem spontaneous rather than authored, and the camera can pick these visual cues out in a manner that seems less authored than the clearly authored dialogue. The shot/reverse shot editing regime disavows the borders of the mise-en-scène, and moves the spectator around within that mise-en-scène in a manner that grants the spectator a privileged position to view how characters ‘spontaneously’ respond. This viewing of characters’ responses is important in enunciative terms, since the camera doesn’t as clearly foreground its authored nature, in contradistinction to the explicitly authored voice that tells information to the audience in a non-colloquial dialect, and thereby foregrounds its artifice. Mankiewicz’s funeral oration demonstrates how very specific elements of film grammar can subsume foregrounded authorship. The crowd’s reactions to Antony’s speech, shown via long shots of the whole crowd, and via medium shots that pick out smaller numbers of plebeians amongst the crowd, reveal the subtleties of how adaptation can manipulate the relationships between authorial discours and cinematic histoire, so that it is not simply a case that the scene operates entirely as discours apart from one specific example of histoire in the close-up which replaces Antony’s aside. Instead, the reaction shots of the crowd facilitate realist adaptation’s obfuscation of authorial enunciation in a nuanced manner. Some of these reaction shots have characters speak Shakespearean dialogue, while some of them show crowd members silently watching the oration or exchanging meaningful glances. Either way, these shots convey information in visual terms—in the pause between speeches, after Brutus (James Mason) has persuaded the crowd that Caesar deserved to die, but before Antony begins his oration and convinces them otherwise, small

112  R. GEAL

groups of the crowd are shown in low-angle shots (Fig. 5.1) when they articulate sceptical opinions about Antony such as ‘Twere best he speak no harm of Brutus here’ (3.2.68) and ‘Caesar was a tyrant’ (3.2.69). A few minutes later, after the close-up on Antony signals that he has begun to manipulate the crowd, reaction shots show small groups of the crowd from higher angles. In the first of these, the initial character who had warned that Antony should not criticise Brutus speaks the Shakespearean line ‘Methinks there is much reason in his sayings’ (3.2.109), and then literally takes a step down from the scaffolding he was standing on to lower his position in the camera’s framing (Fig. 5.2). His companion, who had called Caesar a tyrant moments earlier, is then shown saying ‘Caesar has had great wrong’ (3.2.111) from a slightly higher angle (Fig. 5.3), before another crowd member says, of Antony, ‘Poor soul! His eyes are red as fire with weeping’ (3.2.116) with the camera at a higher angle still (Fig. 5.4). When Antony turns back to address the crowd that he is beginning to have control over, he is shown from an extreme low-angle looming over the citizens who are also in shot (Fig. 5.5), and then in an isolated extreme low-angle shot (Fig. 5.6). The filmic conventions of low- and high-angle shots convey information about the hierarchical status of characters. So, when the crowd

Fig. 5.1  Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953, MGM): ‘un-authored’ images accompany Antony’s manipulation of the crowd

Fig. 5.2  Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953, MGM): ‘un-authored’ images accompany Antony’s manipulation of the crowd

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

113

Fig. 5.3  Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953, MGM): ‘un-authored’ images accompany Antony’s manipulation of the crowd

Fig. 5.4  Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953, MGM): ‘un-authored’ images accompany Antony’s manipulation of the crowd

Fig. 5.5  Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953, MGM): ‘un-authored’ images accompany Antony’s manipulation of the crowd

Fig. 5.6  Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953, MGM): ‘un-authored’ images accompany Antony’s manipulation of the crowd

pose a threat to Antony, they are given a position of authority, with the camera looking up at them through low-angle shots, whereas once they begin to be manipulated they are given a position of subservience, with the camera looking down on them through high-angle shots. The manipulating Antony is positioned highest of all in the shots up to this point through an extreme low-angle shot. Spectators are not likely

114  R. GEAL

to notice the presence of these conventions, at least in contradistinction to how the Shakespearean dialogue announces its authored artificiality—these conventions are not meant to be noticed. Nevertheless, filmic conventions such as high- and low-angle shots do have a nonconscious (or at least less conscious) effect—although they are not meant to be noticed, they are still meant to have an impact. The filmic nature of these conventions thereby has an important enunciative dimension— these conventions have a less foregrounded artificial quality, in relation to the explicitly artificial Shakespearean quality of the supervening dialogue. A spectator may non-consciously (or semi-consciously) ascent to the intended effects of low- and high-angle shots—recognising that Antony is beginning to manipulate a crowd that were hostile to him moments before—but in so doing the spectator does not ascribe those effects to an enunciating source in the manner that he/she ascribes the effects of the dialogue to the foregrounded canonical author. Whether the camera shows characters from above or below seems to be merely the way that the unfolding world appears, in contradistinction to how the Shakespearean dialogue foregrounds its artifice. It is also the case that the cutting between these shots operates within the context of anamorphic suture structured around the oscillations inherent to shot/reverse shot conventions. These conventions are the métier of the drama of vision, in the sense that they continuously re-centre the spectating Cartesian subject. Thus, the dramas of authorship and of vision operate simultaneously and symbiotically. The drama of authorship, here, oscillates from a foregrounding of artifice through the non-verisimilar Shakespearean dialogue to a suppression of artifice through the angles of shots that communicate information in a way that downplays the authored articulation. The drama of vision oscillates from a foregrounding of artifice through editing cuts that de-centre the spectator to a suppression of artifice that re-centre the spectator as the locus of meaning in the reverse shots. It is not sufficient, then, to say that a scene such as this is mostly, and exclusively, Shakespearean discours with an occasional and definitive suppression into cinematic histoire when the close-up of Antony’s calculating expression completely replaces a specific piece of dialogue. Rather, a scene such as this functions by overlapping Shakespearean discours with cinematic histoire, without either of these two enunciative codes completely dominating. Moments that do completely collapse Shakespearean enunciation into a direct fainomaic rendering, then, such as the close-up

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

115

of Antony, are part of a broader, more sustained and more subtle anamorphic oscillation. This overlap between authorial dialogue and cinematic imagery is also played out when Shakespearean films show events that occur offstage and are merely recounted by characters onstage in the playtexts. These fainomaic images are another example of how visual histoire may either accompany or replace verbal discours, because a filmed adaptation can show offstage events accompanied by or unaccompanied by character narration. Three different film Hamlets, for example, adapt the drowning of Ophelia in three different ways. In the playtext, the drowning occurs offstage and is reported to Laertes and Claudius by Gertrude (4.7.135–57). Grigori Kozintsev’s film (1964) visualises Ophelia (Anastasiya Vertinskaya) beneath the water without showing Gertrude’s (Elza Radzina) speech, via crosscutting or dissolves, and without including the sound of Gertrude’s speech via voice-over. Olivier’s Hamlet shows Ophelia in a not dissimilar way, but links verbal discours and cinematic histoire closely together, with Gertrude’s speech, and Laertes’ (Terence Morgan) response to it heard but not shown at all. Gertrude’s voice-over in fact pauses so that the floating Ophelia may be heard ‘chant[ing] snatches of old tunes’ (4.7.149). To further complicate these layers of enunciative foregrounding, Olivier deliberately invokes John Everett Millais’ famous painting of the scene (1851–1852), so that part of the visual fainomisation draws on imagery that some spectators might recognise as foregrounded artifice. Branagh’s Hamlet (1996), however, shows Gertrude (Julie Christie) telling Laertes (Michael Maloney) about the death without any crosscutting to the event (although the scene does end with a cut from a medium close-up of Gertrude to a brief still image of Ophelia’s [Kate Winslet] dead face below the water, suggesting that Gertrude remembers or imagines this image). Branagh’s scene, then, downplays the fainomaic potential by refusing to show the images that Gertrude narrates (until the single image at the end of the scene, at least). Peter Holland provides an academic analysis that diverts attention away from these fainomaic issues. He contends that ‘[f]ilms of Hamlet for instance find it difficult to have Gertrude describe the drowning of Ophelia and instead feel obliged to show her floating in the water’ (1994, 59). His argument that these visualisations move ‘attention from the act of narration to the act that is narrated’ (1994, 59) might suggest an awareness of the anamorphic impact of concealing Shakespearean enunciation. His approach to narration here, though, is limited to

116  R. GEAL

the diegetic register. In contending that the ‘choice [to visualise the drowned Ophelia] seems to me a mistaken response to the cinema’s need to show rather than say; it diminishes the fact of the narration and Gertrude’s response to the death she is describing’ (1994, 59), Holland understands narration as belonging only to a character within the narrative, rather than as the cinema’s arrangement of mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing and so on. Academic legitimation, again, thereby interprets enunciative issues as fidelity issues.

The Drama of Cutting: ‘Form of the Thing, Each Word Made True and Good’ (Hamlet 1.2.210) In the previous chapter, I set out Heath’s conception of cinematic anamorphism, which he called the ‘drama of vision’—film oscillates from a movement and fragmentation that disrupts a stable spectatorial position to a fixity that reinstates spectatorial stability and centrality. The drama of authorship is an extension of this drama of vision, in which there is an additional layer of anamorphic oscillation between foregrounding and subsuming markers of artifice derived from the adaptation’s ‘original’ author. Because realist adaptation is also realist film, in terms of Heath’s broader conceptualisation, it also entails the inevitable, and ontological, anamorphism of film grammar. Unavoidably, this drama of vision operates in realist adaptation in the same way as it operates in any other form of realist film. It is the case, however, that adaptation can closely bundle together the drama of vision with the drama of authorship, and provide characteristically Shakespearean academic legitimations for this bundling. For Heath, it will be recalled, the conventions of continuity editing are the principal mechanisms by which the potentially alienating status of the mobile camera and the de-centring nature of editing are sutured over. This suture, however, is never complete, with a repetitive oscillation between ‘movement and fixity and movement again, from fragment (actually thematized in Jaws as dismemberment) to totality (the jubilation of the final image)’ (Heath 1985, 514). Since realist adaptations are also realist films, they inevitably feature this same anamorphic oscillation, and since, as Heath claims, this ‘drama of vision becomes a constant reflexive fascination in films’ (1985, 514, original emphasis) so too realist adaptations thematise this drama in reflexive terms. Realist adaptations derived from canonical texts can link these reflexive thematisations with

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

117

their canonical content, so that the dramas of vision and of authorship become tightly entwined, and so that an adaptation’s source becomes a legitimating mechanism to explain the anamorphism as an authorially relevant manipulation of discours rather than as a grammatical manipulation of the relations between discours and histoire. The examples discussed in the previous chapter suggest some of the outlines of this process: it is editing cuts and fragmenting framings in close-up and medium shot between Mankiewicz’s Antony and the crowd that accompany the film’s fainomaic subsumption of Shakespeare’s dialogue, and it is a lap dissolve that links the Taviani brothers’ image of Caesar with the camera’s pan across the Rebibbia prison and with the sounds of different prisoners in different cells. Each of these examples links Heath’s ‘movement […] from fragment […] to totality’ (1985, 514), whereas Belsey’s and Calbi’s analyses interpret this oscillating movement in relation to the manipulation of Shakespearean discours. But perhaps the clearest example of this process, both in an adaptation and in its attendant academic legitimation, appears in the opening scene of Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968) and Peter Donaldson’s analysis thereof (1990). Like Jaws’ dismembered limbs that Heath interprets as reflexive thematisations of the ‘fragment’ (1985, 514) element of the drama of vision, the sword fight between the Montagues and Capulets in Zeffirelli’s opening scene displays fragments that link mise-en-scène, cinematography and editing—body parts fragmented by the frame of the camera and by the cutting of editing. This process begins even before the fight breaks out. The scene starts with a static shot of a marketplace. The Capulets, the first of the warring factions to be shown, are introduced with a cut from the marketplace to a shot of their legs (Fig. 5.7), from which the camera moves up to show their whole bodies. Shortly after, the arm which contains the thumb that Sampson (Dyson Lovell) will ‘bite’ (1.1.40), in an attempt to enrage the Montagues, is fragmented both by an edit that brings it into shot and by compositional cinematography that cuts it off at the elbow (Fig. 5.8). Sampson begins the fight by tripping a Montague. This is again shown by both a cut to the action and a framing which cuts off body parts, in this case those above the knee (Fig. 5.9). When the fight begins, Zeffirelli employs rapid editing to simulate the chaotic danger of the encounter, and the camerawork frames rapidly moving body parts in a confusing movement of limbs. These shots, again, emphasise the body in fragments. There is a pause in the fighting

118  R. GEAL Fig. 5.7  Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968, BHE Films): the fragmentary drama of vision accompanies the drama of authorship Fig. 5.8  Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968, BHE Films): the fragmentary drama of vision accompanies the drama of authorship Fig. 5.9  Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968, BHE Films): the fragmentary drama of vision accompanies the drama of authorship Fig. 5.10  Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968, BHE Films): the fragmentary drama of vision accompanies the drama of authorship

when Tybalt (Michael York) arrives, but he and his fellow Capulets are again introduced by a cut to fragmented body parts, in this case legs (Fig. 5.10). When the fighting resumes, an enthusiastic Capulet throws his hat high into the air—the camera cuts to this stand-in for another fragmented body part (Fig. 5.11). Finally, the drama of this visual anamorphism is inscribed into verbal narrative with Tybalt’s slightly paraphrased interpolation from Coriolanus,5 as the camera cuts to him stabbing Benvolio (Bruce Robinson) in the face: ‘hie thee home, fragment!’ The opening scene concludes with the Prince’s (Robert Stephens) intervention that ends the rapid and fragmenting editing and compositional

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

119

Fig. 5.11  Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968, BHE Films): the fragmentary drama of vision accompanies the drama of authorship

cinematography. Heath’s ‘moments of violent irruption’ (1985, 514) are temporarily suspended, but the opening scene’s editing and compositional fragments produce a quite sustained example of Heath’s claim that realist film oscillates between ‘movement and fixity and movement again, from fragment (actually thematized in Jaws [and here in Romeo and Juliet] as dismemberment) to totality (the jubilation of the final image)’ (1985, 514). What makes this scene’s drama of vision even more anamorphic than it would be in a film not adapted from a canonical ‘original’, though, is the way that the fainomaic drama of authorship extends and further mystifies the drama of vision. This is where Donaldson’s analysis of the scene demonstrates both how fainomaic translation can operate, and how his interpretation also disavows that fainomaic translation. For Donaldson, the violent sexuality of the scene sums up the play’s attitudes towards patriarchy and feud, making visual the playtext’s numerous equations of ‘erect penis and sword. ‘Me they shall feel while I am able to stand’ (1.1.27); ‘Draw thy tool’ (1.1.31); ‘My naked weapon is out’ (1.1.33)’ (Donaldson 1990, 153). On the one hand, Donaldson points here towards how the scene operates in fainomaic terms, noting that the ‘camera […] replicate[s] the verbal texture of anxious phallic wordplay’ (1990, 153–4), and that the male body is ‘anatomized’ here, seen in parts or as a whole at the discretion of a selective and intrusive camera. […] The spectator cannot see exactly what is occurring; bodies appear in pieces even as the swords of the youths threaten to cut them into pieces. (Donaldson 1990, 154)

Donaldson does not, however, interpret this fragmenting ‘anatomization’ in anamorphic terms. He does not conceptualise the visualisation of the above-mentioned lines of dialogue from Act 1 Scene 1—‘Me they shall feel while I am able to stand’ (1.1.27); ‘Draw thy tool’ (1.1.31); ‘My naked weapon is out’ (1.1.33)—as a suppression of Shakespearean discours, with each of these lines cut from the film, into

120  R. GEAL

visual histoire. Instead, he is concerned with how the Shakespearean discours is maintained as it is adapted into a different medium, so that, since the ‘central feature of the sex-gender system in place in Shakespeare’s [play]text is the obsessive verbal equation of erect penis and sword, […] [t]he camera […] replicate[s] the verbal texture of anxious phallic wordplay’ (Donaldson 1990, 153–4). Replication, rather than enunciation, is key for Donaldson: the discours is only manipulated in the sense that the same meaning can be communicated in a different medium. But that which Donaldson interprets as replication can also be interpreted as fainomaic translation, both in terms of how Zeffirelli’s opening scene visualises the specific lines of dialogue that Donaldson quotes and that Zeffirelli cuts, and in terms of how the scene visualises a more general consensus about the play’s ‘equation of erect penis and sword’ (1990, 153–4). The most significant element of Donaldson’s analysis, though, is the way that recourse to Shakespearean meaning, foregrounded in the adaptation’s avowed re-performance, generates a legitimation for how the scene manipulates the dramas of vision and of authorship which diverts attention away from those anamorphic dramas. If a Shakespearean explanation for an adaptation’s manipulation of discours is available (and as the rest of this taxonomy demonstrates, it always is), then such an explanation inevitably obfuscates authorial anamorphism. This scene demonstrates, then, how realist film’s inevitable drama of vision can be extended in realist adaptation, by fainomaically linking the drama of vision to the drama of authorship, and by providing Shakespearean explanations for the anamorphic consequences of those dramatic links. Both the director’s and the academic’s manipulation of and recourse to Shakespearean dialogue help bind together anamorphic continuity editing and narrative, exploiting the dramas of both vision and authorship. Jaws has no such legitimating academic layers, and indeed, does not require any. It is enough that its audiences gain pleasure from the drama of vision. Adaptation’s drama of vision goes further, though, and is not merely the manifestation of anamorphism’s unconscious thrill, but another level of narrative justification taken from a valorised canon, and an extra level of academic legitimisation. That adaptations, and the academic studies surrounding them, provide additional layers of conservative reflexivity demonstrates Shakespearean cinema’s anamorphic potential. This is particularly the case since dramatising continuity editing is not a unique characteristic of adaptation, but merely an inherent element of all realist cinema that realist adaptation cannot help but re-dramatise

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

121

and re-legitimise. Indeed, just as Jaws’ dismembered limbs thematise the cutting of continuity editing, so too Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet’s anatomisation thematises the cutting out of the enunciating author, and uses an element of that author’s enunciation to do this.

Adapting Verbal Imagery into Visual Imagery Specific examples of Shakespearean dialogue, which involve direct substitution or addition of an image for a verbal description, are not the only elements that can be translated into visual form. Shakespeare’s dialogue also includes numerous examples of more subtly articulated verbal imagery. These authored articulations may also be translated into filmic images. The above example from Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet also fits into this category, since the verbal connections between sword and phallus are not only given a fainomaic visual form at the precise moment when the (cut) dialogue mentions such a connection. In addition, the visual connection between fragmented male anatomy and swords extends across the whole scene, so that a specific example of verbal imagery expands out into a broader and more sustained fainomaic visual metaphor. The most frequent examples of this process, across Shakespearean film adaptations, operate in this diffused and sustained manner. Thus, for example, Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000) extends Hamlet’s claim that ‘Denmark’s a prison’ (2.2.246) and Marcellus’ observation that ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ (1.4.67) by employing a repeated visual regime of external shots filmed from low angles which frame characters with rigid bar-like vertical lines of skyscrapers and their geometric windows looming menacingly over and around them (Fig. 5.12). These repeated low-angle external sequences do not just directly translate one line into one fainomaic image, but run across various scenes throughout the entire adaption. Specific examples of authorially verbal discours are translated into a fainomaic visual histoire that threads across an entire film. The anamorphic oscillation between these two enunciative registers thereby becomes an overlapping and intermittent process rather than one that makes clearer and more temporally specific shifts in register, such as were demonstrated in Mankiewicz’s close-ups of Antony and Trebonius. Almereyda’s commentary about how he provides other visual metaphors for Shakespearean dialogue demonstrates additional examples of this process in this particular adaptation:

122  R. GEAL

Fig. 5.12  Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000, Double A Films): authored Shakespearean verse adapted into ‘un-authored’ cinematography and mise-en-scène ‘Denmark is a prison,’ Hamlet declares early on, and if you consider this in terms of contemporary consumer culture, the bars of the cage are defined by advertising, by all the hectic distractions, brand names, announcements and ads that crowd our waking hours. And when, in this independent film, the ghost of Hamlet’s father [Sam Shepard] vanishes into a Pepsi machine, or Hamlet finds himself questioning the nature of existence in the ‘Action’ aisles of a Blockbuster video store, or Shakespeare’s lines are overwhelmed by the roar of a plane passing overhead – it’s meant as something more than casual irony. It’s another way to touch the core of Hamlet’s anguish, to recognize the frailty of spiritual values in a material world, and to get a whiff of something rotten in Denmark on the threshold of our self-­ congratulatory new century. (Almereyda 2000, xi)

Almereyda takes a single element of authorially verbal discours—­ ‘Denmark’s a prison’ (2.2.246)—and fainomaically translates this into numerous visual metaphorical forms of histoire which appear not just in his scene that stands in for Act 2 Scene 2, but throughout and across the film, in numerous different visual forms. Olivier’s adaptation (1948) of the same play does something similar in terms of how it links the ‘Something […] rotten in the state of Denmark’ (1.4.67) with Gertrude’s sexual ‘increase of appetite [which] had grown/By what it fed on’ (1.2.143–4), and which culminates in her ‘most wicked speed, to post/With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!’ (1.2.156–7). Even without addressing the much-discussed potential Oedipal context to these verses, and to Olivier’s film, it is clear that Olivier gives his Gertrude’s (Eileen Herlie) ‘incestuous sheets’ a visual manifestation in what existing academic analyses describe as a ‘suggestively shaped bed’ (Jorgens 1977, 217) which is ‘vaginally hooded’ (Donaldson 1990, 34) (Fig. 5.13).

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

123

Fig. 5.13  Olivier’s Hamlet (1948, Two Cities): authored Shakespearean verse adapted into ‘unauthored’ mise-en-scène

Like Almereyda’s fainomisation of Denmark’s ‘prison’, and unlike Mankiewicz’s close-ups on Antony and Trebonius, Olivier’s visual histoire-like fainomaisation of the Shakespearean dialogue’s discours is staggered through the film, as it neither directly replaces nor directly accompanies the specific Shakespearean dialogue at the same moment in the playtext or adaptation. Indeed, Olivier films almost all of Hamlet’s verbal condemnation of his mother from Act 1 Scene 2, but this speech is not shown in Gertrude’s bedroom, and is not accompanied by images of Gertrude’s bed through crosscutting, montage, or through edits into or out of the scene. The specific lines of Shakespearean discours that Olivier fainomaically translates into visual histoire do not thereby overlap or directly interact. Olivier first shows Gertrude’s bed when the camera moves through the internal space of Elsinore, after the guards have encountered the ghost, but amongst a movement that also introduces other locations in the castle, and which culminates on Claudius (Basil Sydney) rather than on Gertrude. There is therefore no direct temporal or spatial contact between the discours of Hamlet articulating ‘incestuous sheets’ (1.2.156–7) and the histoire of the bed as fainomaic mise-en-scène. Instead, spectators are invited either to construct the link through their existing knowledge of the playtext, or offered a visual metaphor for that which a character articulates at a different point in the narrative. Either way, the anamorphic nature of this fainomaic translation is diffused from one specific moment of manipulation between discours and histoire into an extended and further obfuscated manipulation of those enunciative registers. If these two examples from Hamlets demonstrate how specific small elements of authorial discours can be diffused across an adaptation, a return to Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar shows how this form of fainomaic anamorphism can operate in terms of both one-to-one visualisations of particular lines of dialogue, and in terms of more diffused visualisations.

124  R. GEAL

Just as the playtext of Romeo and Juliet can be interpreted in terms of verbal links between swords and phalluses, so too the playtext of Julius Caesar can be interpreted in terms of verbal links between flesh and stone. And, just as Donaldson analyses how Zeffirelli’s adaptation exploits this verbal link in visual terms, so too Robert F. Wilson Jr. (2000) analyses how Mankiewicz’s adaptation shifts the playtext’s verbal links between flesh and stone into medium-appropriate visual links. Wilson’s analysis is fidelity based, claiming that the adaptation ‘relies heavily on busts and statues to establish a compelling mise-en-scène and underscore thematic elements’ (2000, 149). He emphasises the relationship between this mise-en-scène and textual fidelity when he writes that ‘Mankiewicz makes us believe that the busts and statues are omens just as significant as lions or “men in fire” [1.3.256] walking the Roman streets’ (2000, 150). Here, the efficacy of the film’s visual imagery is measured against the playtext’s verbal imagery, and Wilson’s judgement is that it is ‘just as significant’ (2000, 150). For Wilson, then, these translations of playtextual imagery underscore the articulation of Shakespeare, revealing his presence rather than, paraphrasing Antony’s funeral oration, burying him. The enunciative issue of such translations fainomaically suppressing authorial enunciation is thereby suppressed. In terms of these visualisations as anamorphism, however, the adaptation features some complex manipulations between a direct visualisation in the same place as its originating line of dialogue, and more diffused fainomisations that thread across the film. The film’s temporally direct examples of this process actually employ visual fainomisation in addition to, rather than instead of, specific lines of authorial dialogue, in a similar manner to the crowd’s response to Antony’s funeral oration, discussed above. So, for example, when Cassius (John Gielgud) attempts to persuade Brutus to join the conspiracy to execute the would-be tyrant, he discusses how Caesar ‘doth bestride the narrow world/Like a Colossus, and we petty men/Walk under his huge legs’ (1.2.136–8), while standing beneath a looming statue of Caesar (and while referring to the Colossus of Rhodes, the enormous Hellenistic statue of the sun-god Helios). Cassius then contrasts this mythologised figure with the real man by listing his human weaknesses and faults (1.2.102–30). He then touches the base of a bust of Lucius Junius Brutus, the ‘Brutus once’ whom he refers to as he reminds Brutus of his regicide ancestor: ‘There was a Brutus once that would have brooked/Th’eternal devil to keep his state in Rome/As easily as a king’

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

125

(1.2.160–2). This immutable, legendary Brutus is then contrasted with the contemporary Brutus whose ‘honourable mettle may be wrought/ From that it is disposed’ (1.2.309–10), with a verbal pun between the human quality ‘mettle’ and the inanimate material ‘metal’. Both of these statues have a fainomaic function in the sense that they are given visual status in the mise-en-scène, but they accompany rather than replace the Shakespearean dialogue’s discours, unlike in the above-mentioned closeups of Antony and Trebonius, where the image replaced the dialogue entirely. The discours is thereby not as significantly adapted into histoire in the example with Cassius and the statues, and is instead part of a subtle oscillation between and across these enunciative registers. However, the film also demonstrates how visual links between flesh and stone can be temporally diffused backwards and forwards from the verbal articulations of the flesh/stone dialectic. One of the playtext’s central connections between flesh and stone, both thematically and in terms of temporal structure, is Calpurnia’s premonition about the impending assassination, which Caesar recounts: ‘She dreamt tonight she saw my statue/Which like a fountain with an hundred spouts/Did run pure blood’ (2.2.76–8). Mankiewicz’s adaptation does position a bust of Caesar on the balcony where Calpurnia (Greer Garson) tries to persuade her husband to stay at home, but this bust has a less direct link to bleeding or to a fountain than two other statues which are shown at different points in the film. The first of these is a bust of Caesar in the middle of a fountain in the public square where, in the film’s opening scene, the tribunes berate the common people for their fickle devotion to the would-be tyrant. To some extent, the presentation of this statue as mise-en-scène provides a visual manifestation of dialogue from this specific scene of the Shakespearean playtext—Flavius (Michael Pate) tells Murellus (George Macready) to go about Rome and ‘Disrobe the images/If you do find them decked with ceremonies’ (1.1.64–5). The playtext does not specify that there are any such ‘images’ in the scene itself, but Mankiewicz presents one ‘decked with ceremonies’ by draping garlands of flowers on the bust, and by having the tribunes physically remove those garlands. In addition, the scene contains some verbal (Shakespearean) connections between flesh and stone, which Mankiewicz keeps in his adaptation— Murellus calls the commoners ‘You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things! (1.1.35), and Flavius makes the same pun that Cassius later employs, after the tribunes’ rebukes cause the commoners to flee:

126  R. GEAL

‘See whe’er their basest mettle be not moved./They vanish tongue-tied in their guiltiness’ (1.1.61–2). These verbal connections between inanimate materials and men are therefore partly given visual form in the fountain’s bust, at this same stage in the adaptation. In part, then, the temporal positioning of the verbal discours and the fainomaic histoire is the same. The fountain element of this bust, however, points temporally forward to Calpurnia’s premonition in Act 2 Scene 2. The water spout which protrudes from the base of the opening scene’s bust (Fig. 5.14) connects most directly to the dream about Caesar’s ‘statue/Which like a fountain with an hundred spouts/Did run pure blood’ (2.2.76–8). The histoire of the statue from Act 1 Scene 1 is a fainomaic visualisation of the discours of the verbal dialogue from Act 2 Scene 2, without any direct repetition of that visualisation during the adaptation’s rendering of the second scene. Here, Calpurnia is shown waking from her dream screaming the line ‘They murder Caesar!’ (2.2.3—in the playtext, Caesar states that Calpurnia has said this in her sleep), but there is no dream sequence showing the fountain bust, and the scene does not edit out of or into a scene with the fountain bust. Instead, an ambiguous fainomaic link is included—the other bust of Caesar on the balcony (Fig. 5.15), mentioned above. This bust has no direct connection to water spouts or to blood, as the fountain bust does, but they are both very similar in size and identical in subject matter, and both busts are positioned in the frame in a similar manner, passively gazing off, to the right of the active speaking character (see Figs. 5.14 and 5.15). The bust on Caesar’s balcony, then, refers temporally back to the fountain bust, while less directly referring to Calpurnia’s connection between stone and blood from the same scene. Fainomaic adaptation, here, is multi-layered, subtle and further obfuscated by its complex temporality.

Fig. 5.14  Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953, MGM): visual adaptation pointing temporally back and forth

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

127

Fig. 5.15  Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953, MGM): visual adaptation pointing temporally back and forth

The second statue that relates to Calpurnia’s dream, and which occupies a different temporal position from that dream, comes in Antony’s speech over Caesar’s dead body after the assassination. This is not a statue of Caesar, but of his defeated military and political rival, Pompey. Antony promises vengeance to Caesar’s corpse (3.1.257–78) while leaning against the base of the statue which is marked with Caesar’s blood. As such, the blood on this stone relates back to Calpurnia’s dream from Act 2 Scene 2, and the bust of Caesar in that scene therefore again subtly alludes to another statue from another point in the adaptation. The bloody statue base from Act 3 Scene 1 also points forward, too, with Antony providing the Shakespearean discours to the filmic statue’s fainomaic histoire in the funeral oration (Act 3 Scene 2), when he tells the crowd that ‘at the base of Pompey’s statue/Which all the while ran blood, great Caesar fell’ (3.2.186–7). Mankiewicz’s fainomaic statues, then, both directly accompany specific examples of Shakespearean dialogue, in the example where Cassius compares Caesar and Brutus to statues, and also act as subtle and sophisticated visualisations of verbal imagery that become diffused back and forth across the course of the film. Visual manipulations of verbal imagery can thereby take numerous forms and operate in various ways to communicate the playtext’s discours in complex and overlapping ways. The enunciative status of these elements, therefore, is never completely clear, and the anamorphic relationship between authorial artifice and filmic realism is obfuscated.

Written Authorial Text as Anamorphic Enunciation Shakespearean adaptation can also mobilise and manipulate a certain written, rather than merely verbal, element to the authorial discours. The fact that Shakespearean plays should be thought of more in terms

128  R. GEAL

of writing rather than performance is perhaps no surprise given how Shakespeare is often taught in schools. As late as 2016, a book entitled Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach advocates ‘[c]lose reading [which] means a text is read over and over again, and for the purpose of this book we mean read silently but also: read aloud, read chorally and enacted; and texts may be listened to, or seen performed’ (Thompson and Turci 2016, 11). This focus on reading the written Shakespearean text influences the way that Shakespearean discours is understood, so that part of adaptation’s foregrounding of authorial artifice has the potential to generate a written element, as well as a verbal element. Written Shakespearean text in film adaptation frequently has a diegetic quality—writings on posters, banners, adverts and so on. These written forms of enunciation actually most frequently appear in loose adaptations which dispense with the Shakespearean dialogue, and I will address these in the next chapter. The clearest examples of how these written traces operate in anamorphic terms, however, occur in the opening sequence of Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996). The initial part of this sequence’s written enunciation is diegetic, or at least semi-diegetic. A news anchorwoman (Edwina Moore) delivers the playtext’s Prologue from a television suspended in blackness, the television screen’s news headline emblazoned with the Shakespearean text ‘Star-Cross’d Lovers’ (Prologue 6) (Fig. 5.16). This is semi-diegetic because a news report on a television set is unproblematically verisimilar, but that television set is not set amongst other objects as mise-en-scène, and instead floats in non-verisimilar darkness. As the Prologue nears its end, Luhrmann cuts to rapidly edited scenes of urban violence between Montagues and Capulets, in shots replete with fast zooms and whip pans. These images are accompanied by melodramatic choral music, and a repeat of the Prologue in voice-over, this time in a deeper male voice (Pete Postlethwaite, who later becomes a diegetic character as Father

Fig. 5.16  Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996, Twentieth Century Fox): authored Shakespearean writing adapted into semi-diegetic writing

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

129

Laurence, the film’s stand-in for the playtext’s Friar Laurence). Selected lines from this voice-over are non-diegetically shown on a black screen amongst this montage, into which Luhrmann then inserts two further layers of written enunciation—diegetic newspaper and magazine headlines referring to the Montague/Capulet feud, and the non-diegetic names and descriptions of important characters next to frozen close-ups of their faces. The sequence not only foregrounds the source text’s written, fictive, enunciated nature, but shows this in a highly oscillatory manner. It moves back and forth from the ambiguous diegetic quality of Shakespearean writing on a television floating in blackness to definitively non-diegetic written accompaniments; to ostensibly non-diegetic verbal Shakespearean dialogue (only ostensibly non-diegetic because this narrator is eventually diegetised); to diegetic written expressions of that dialogue; to the verisimilitude of realist filmmaking; to a semi-­ suspension of this verisimilitude through freeze frames with accompanying non-diegetic writing. Moreover, the pleasure-giving nature of this anamorphic oscillation is demonstrated by the way in which Luhrmann edits together written enunciation, images of violence, and the scene’s melodramatic non-diegetic choral soundtrack, with an acceleration in the cutting of these shots (echoing, again, Heath’s notion of the ‘drama of vision’ [1985, 514]). This acceleration builds to a staccato crescendo that finally cuts to the film’s opening scene of the fight between the Montagues and Capulets, a sequence that is filmed in a more conventionalised realist manner (albeit heavily stylised like a Spaghetti Western, and with some continuation of occasional freeze frames, so that there is still some visual and authorial anamorphism in the fight sequence). Again, then, the foregrounding of authorial artifice is accompanied by obfuscations and suppressions of that foregrounding. And, again, this oscillation also facilitates academic interpretations that disavow its anamorphic nature. Such interpretation can locate the film’s semi-artificiality in a context that is simultaneously fidelity based and somewhat dialogic. Thus, James N. Loehlin recognises, for example, that the film ‘foregrounds its own status as a mediated representation; it […] begins and ends as a television broadcast, and sets several scenes in an abandoned cinema, the Sycamore Grove’ (2000, 123). This foregrounding, however, is interpreted as part of Luhrmann’s ambiguous (ir)-reverence towards his source text: the ‘double presentation of the prologue, once in a cheeky pop-culture parody, once with grave

130  R. GEAL

seriousness and an earnest bow to textual authority, sums up the film’s divided approach to the chaotic world of Verona Beach and the timeless tragedy of the lovers’ (2000, 126). For Loehlin, then, Luhrmann simultaneously celebrates the playtext’s ‘timelessness’ and adaptation’s potential to interrogate that ‘timelessness’. Courtney Lehmann, too, claims that Luhrmann’s Prologue’s juxtaposition of different forms of writing contributes to the film’s postmodern nature (2002, 136). Both scholars therefore interpret the anamorphic oscillation of complex enunciative layers in terms of manipulating Shakespearean meaning, and both thereby divert attention from the ways that Shakespearean writing in film adaptation simultaneously foregrounds and obfuscates authorial artifice.

Shakespeare’s Reflexive Metadrama and Adaptation’s Reflexive Metacinema The above-mentioned forms of fainomaic authorship are all reflexive in two interconnected senses: they draw attention to their artifice through foregrounding Shakespearean authorship, and they map this authorial reflexivity onto existing narratives and themes derived from the Shakespearean canon. Thus, the reflexive nature of cinema’s inevitable cutting and fragmenting is gridded onto a perceived Shakespearean theme relating to phallic wordplay in Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, and the reflexive nature of partly revealing authorial artifice by providing fainomaic manifestations of verbal imagery is mapped onto a perceived Shakespearean theme relating to that verbal imagery in Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar, and so on. This relationship between the anamorphic drama of authorship and the narratives and themes to which it connects is similar to Heath’s claim that the ‘drama of vision becomes a constant reflexive fascination in films’ (1985, 514, original emphasis). Filmmakers, for Heath, unconsciously manipulate grammatical anamorphism into their films, by constructing narratives and themes which reiterate that anamorphism in a sublimated aesthetic form: thus, film’s movement from fragment to totality is ‘thematized in Jaws as dismemberment’, while film’s ‘play on the unforeseen and the unforeseeable [is narrativised as] the hidden shark and the moments of violent irruption’ (1985, 514). When it comes to adaptation’s reflexive narrativisation of the dramas of vision and of authorship, it is more accurate to say that narrative and theme

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

131

are applied to anamorphism, rather than devised in order to fit that anamorphism, since the narrative and perceived theme pre-exist. (Given this caveat, it is more accurate to say that the anamorphism of Jaws also exploits pre-existing narrative and theme, given that it, too, is an adaptation. What I am suggesting is that adapting filmmakers unconsciously recognise elements of pre-existing narratives and themes that will be amenable to anamorphic reflexivity.) This latter form of reflexivity, the bundling up of anamorphic elements into reflexive forms of narrative and theme, helps to explain why existing academic analyses can make such convincing cases for this reflexivity as a manipulation of authorial meaning. The above-mentioned forms of reflexive anamorphism are most fundamentally derived from the fact that the illusionism of cinematic realism oscillates with some form of foregrounded authorial artifice. Without too much alteration, this anamorphic drama of authorship could apply to any act of adapting canonical works foregrounded as a fiction into realist film—adaptations of novels by Charles Dickens or Jane Austen, for example, can also foreground and then subsume their authorial artifice. In addition, though, there are specific elements of Shakespearean (meta-)drama that can extend adaptation’s anamorphism. My central argument does not require the original text to have any specific metadramatic elements in order for the adaptation to operate anamorphically. It is merely sufficient that the original be conceptualised by audiences, to a greater or lesser extent, as an existing piece of pre-authored artifice which the adaptation in some sense re-performs. However, the specifics of the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage also include numerous metadramatic elements that can extend realist adaptation’s anamorphism. These metadramatic elements further enhance, further complicate and further obfuscate realist Shakespearean adaptation’s foregrounding of authorial artifice. The precise nature of these metadramatic elements, in terms of their history and their specificity to the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage, is not especially important for this study. A full discussion of these particulars could easily fill a whole book—indeed, has filled many whole books: these range from James L. Calderwood’s very wide conceptualisation that ‘would not want to limit metadrama [only] to plays that make forays across or at least flirt around the borders between fiction and reality’ since ‘dramatic art itself […] is a dominant Shakespearean theme’ (1971, 5) to Richard Hornby’s more systematic approach which claims that the ‘possible varieties of conscious or overt metadrama are as follows:

132  R. GEAL

(1) The play within the play. (2) The ceremony within the play. (3) Role playing with the role. (4) Literary and real-life reference. (5) Self reference’ (1986, ii). There is much debate about these particulars, but the details of this are not relevant here. Instead, and again, what is important here is how an aspect of an adaptation’s foregrounding of authorship might simultaneously foreground the adaptation’s artifice, in this case because certain elements of the ‘original’ have an artifice-like metadramatic quality in relation to the adaptation’s overall cinematic verisimilitude. The fainomaic adaptations in the first half of this chapter were anamorphic whether or not the discours that they manipulated had intrinsic metadramatic elements, because the very discours-like status of the re-performance of the ‘original’ foregrounds the artifice of the adaptation. However, that foregrounding of artifice can be enhanced if the discours has a specific anti-realist quality derived from its metadramatic nature. The following breakdown of how some of these metadramatic elements relate to fainomaic authorship is not necessarily exhaustive, but it is possible to outline the principal ways that Shakespearean film adaptation manipulates existing forms of Shakespearean metadrama into three main metacinematic areas in order to provide a comprehensive enough overview of these processes: these three areas are Chorus figures, films or plays within the films, and direct address in soliloquies. Like all the other examples of fainomaic adaptation discussed above, each of these three metadramatic/metacinematic elements operates anamorphically, at both the filmic level and the level of academic legitimation. In a similar way to how adaptation fainomaically translates direct examples of the verbal to the visual, adaptation’s metadramatic metacinema functions within the oscillating mechanisms of anamorphosis, both disrupting realist grammar and subsequently subsuming and obfuscating the disruption. This subsumption and obfuscation operate both in terms of how metacinema is thematised into narrative, and in terms of how the translation from metatheatre to metacinema is interpreted in a Shakespearean rather than grammatical context by legitimating academic interpretation. Shakespearean metacinema is therefore conceptualised in a manner that sheds light upon and explores themes deemed to be inherent to the playtexts, rather than in a way that interrogates the ideology and grammar of cinema. Judith Buchanan, for example, demonstrates this approach to reflexivity when she argues that ‘[t]o be self-­referentially alive to the characteristics of the medium in which one is working

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

133

is, of course, itself a thoroughly Shakespearean project’ (2005, 16). For Agnieszka Rasmus, this means that scholarship should study how ‘[i] n adapting Shakespeare to the screen, the filmmaker must […] respond to the plays’ metatheatricality by either rejecting alienating devices or finding a cinematic counterpart to the theatre’s self-reflexivity’ (2001, 147). For Rasmus, the shift from metatheatre to metacinema does not consist of the ways in which theatrical convention might challenge realist cinematic convention, but new, inherently filmic ways to create entirely different alienating devices that stand in for the theatre’s existing alienating devices. These forms of academic interpretation thereby legitimate realist cinema’s anamorphic oscillation between metacinema and verisimilitude. The first of the three principal categories of Shakespearean metadrama manipulated into metacinema concerns Chorus figures. As with any of the other Shakespearean elements in this taxonomy, there is a good deal of debate about Choruses, the full details of which are not important here. The defining feature, in terms of how adaptations might employ Choruses in enunciative terms, is the fact that, as James E. Hirsch puts it, ‘in contrast to ancient Greek choruses, no Shakespeare Chorus ever interacts with the characters who are engaged in the fictional action’ (2003, 199). The Chorus, on the traditional Elizabethan/Jacobean stage, is a single speaker who introduces and comments on the action, but stands outside of it. In this sense, the Chorus is a marker of artifice, demonstrating two different registers with different fictive statuses—one occupied by the fictional action and one by the Chorus. In the sense that this revelation challenges the verisimilitude of a film which maintains the distinction between fictive registers, the Chorus can be thought of as a metadramatic borrowing that has potential metacinematic qualities. Quasi-choric characters in films not derived from Shakespearean ‘originals’ do not quite follow the Shakespearean prohibition against engaging with the fictional universe (nor, indeed, do those in Shakespearean adaptations, as I will discuss). If these characters do not exactly impact on the narrative, such as the ‘Shouters’ (Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye) who sing musical accompaniments directly to the camera in the comedy Western Cat Ballou (Elliot Silverstein, 1965), then they at least wear costume that does not differentiate them from other characters in the same location, and can interact with the miseen-scène, even if they don’t interact with characters who do take part in the narrative (such as when Cat Ballou’s ‘Shouters’ sit on a stagecoach, without any suggestion that this stagecoach is not part of the diegesis,

134  R. GEAL

or without a suggestion that the Shouters do not obey the physical laws of the diegesis, and just happen to be levitating in a position that looks like they are sitting on part of the diegesis. Thus, other characters might ignore the Shouters, but they are still present in the same diegetic world as those other characters). The non-diegetic status of Choruses in Shakespearean films may be emphasised or downplayed in various ways. The Chorus (Laurence Olivier) in Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet is spoken only in voice-over, without the Chorus taking on a visualised embodied form, and without any writing on screen of the spoken Prologue. The images shown establish the location—they are fainomaic in the sense that they display locations that stand in for the spoken ‘fair Verona, in which we lay our scene’ (Prologue 2), but the Chorus’ voice-over is not as metacinematic as it might be if it were accompanied by images of a Chorus figure. Renato Castellani’s adaptation of the same play (1954), on the other hand, does include images of the Chorus (John Gielgud) which have a more reflexive quality. The Chorus is dressed in Elizabethan costume, with ruff and hose, and this separates him somewhat from the fictional world of the rest of the film, where characters are dressed in a brighter late Medieval or early Renaissance fashion, as opposed to the Chorus’ more austere and more Protestant later Renaissance/early Baroque black clothes with white ruff. This difference in costume suggests that the Chorus speaks from the time of Shakespeare and may indeed be the author—both Michael A. Anderegg (2004, 27) and Stephen M. Buhler (2002, 78) associate this Chorus with Shakespeare. The sense that the Chorus occupies a different space to the rest of the film is reinforced by a dissolve from the opening dark indoor space to a bright outdoor scene establishing Verona’s city walls in long shot. This dissolve from one space to another might not necessarily suggest that the two locations occupy different fictive statuses, but it is also the case that the Prologue begins with the Chorus looking at an open book which the camera can also see, and this open page displays the Droeshout portrait of Shakespeare from the First Folio (Fig. 5.17). The image thereby establishes ambiguity about the fictional status of the diegesis: if this Chorus is Shakespeare, then he is reading from his own work (even though the First Folio was published after his death), but if not then the artifice of the Prologue is still foregrounded through the image of the author, staring out like Velázquez in Las Meninas (1656). If the Chorus is interpreted as Shakespeare, furthermore, then the dissolve to Verona, with the image of

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

135

Fig. 5.17  Castellani’s Romeo and Juliet (1954, Rank): the Chorus as sign of authorship

Fig. 5.18  Castellani’s Romeo and Juliet (1954, Rank): the Chorus as sign of authorship

the face lingering longest over the image of the city, given that most of the rest of the first shot is so dark (Fig. 5.18), suggests that the following fiction unfolds as the author personally imagined it. In this dissolve, two potentially different fictive registers intersect. The artifice of foregrounding the Chorus’ less diegetic quality thereby anamorphically oscillates back to the ostensibly un-authored (or more accurately less authored) diegesis of the rest of the film. If these Chorus figures begin with an ambiguous relationship to the diegesis of the following fiction, then it is also possible for Chorus figures to operate anamorphically even if they are explicitly separated out from the diegesis that follows. Branagh’s Henry V (1989), for example, begins with a Chorus (Derek Jacobi) in a deserted film studio, surrounded by the cinematic apparatus, and wearing contemporary dress. Here, an explicitly Shakespearean metadrama (the Chorus exists outside the fictive world of the rest of the play) combines with an explicitly filmic metacinema (the Chorus exists behind the scenes of the fictive world of the rest of the film, which employs a Medieval mise-en-scène) to foreground artifice. This foregrounding, however, is still part of the drama of authorship’s oscillating anamorphism. Although the Chorus states that the subsequent film is as much a fiction as the backstage Prologue—‘Can this cock-pit hold/The vasty fields of France’ (Prologue 11–2); ‘Piece

136  R. GEAL

out our imperfections with your thoughts’ (Prologue 23); ‘your humble patience pray/Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play’ (Prologue 33–4); and so on—the rest of the film consists of realist grammar and mise-en-scène that establishes and maintains a verisimilar diegesis, and is therefore less a foregrounded artifice than the Prologue. Indeed, the Chorus later appears during the Agincourt campaign to speak the Prologue to Act 4, but this time he stands in the diegetic world of the soldiers, his hair soaked with rain, and the collars of his contemporary coat turned up for protection. At the end of his speech, he does not retire back to the warmth and shelter of a film production’s trailer, in line with his first backstage appearance, but follows the bedraggled English army through the rain and mud towards Agincourt. The relationship between the backstage world of the Chorus and the diegetic world of the participating characters is oscillatory, then, and blurs as the film goes on, with the verisimilitude of the diegetic world becoming more forceful. Although there are still oscillating markers of metadramatic/metacinematic authorial artifice, these markers are partly subsumed and obfuscated into cinematic realism. Academic legitimation, too, conceptualises this metadrama/­metacinema as a manipulation of Shakespearean meaning from one medium to another, rather than as a manipulation of enunciative registers. Although Kenneth Rothwell, for example, interprets the Prologue’s backstage setting as a ‘touch of Brechtian alienation in its meta-cinematic concern with the mechanics of making the movie’ (1999, 247), he conceptualises this ‘alienation’ as the director’s manipulation—‘[a] pragmatic Branagh uses whatever film grammar works to his advantage’ (1999, 248)—of specifically Shakespearean meaning: ‘When he lights a match to locate the giant studio switchboard, the sudden spluttering and flare gives [the line] “Muse of fire” [Prologue 1] a clever spin. And the glare of the studio arc lights suggests “the brightest heaven of invention!” [Prologue 2]’ (1999, 247). Rothwell recognises that the film has a reflexive quality which draws attention to its artifice, but focuses on how that artifice successfully translates—‘a clever spin’—Shakespearean dialogue into something appropriate for the medium of cinema. The anamorphic potential of Choruses can even generate choric-like figures in adaptations of playtexts that do not have Choruses. The playtext Titus Andronicus, for example, does not have a Chorus. Julie Taymor’s adaptation, Titus (1999), however, opens with an interpolation of a contemporary (possibly 1950s’) boy (Osheen Jones), introduced

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

137

in extreme close-up, watching television violence via holes cut through a paper bag over his head, and feeding himself through a third hole. Responding to the screen, he begins violently playing with toys and food. An explosion outside his kitchen window leads to an invasion by a grubby man (Dario D’Ambrosi) in goggles and smock who carries him down a long staircase and into the Shakespearean drama. The status of the boy, once within the Shakespearean diegesis, is initially ambiguous, with him observing rather than interacting with other characters, but he soon begins to participate, first through action and then through dialogue, where he speaks Young Lucius’ lines. Titus’ interpolated Chorus-like figure thereby follows the same diegetising trajectory as the Chorus in Branagh’s Henry V and Pete Postlethwaite’s Chorus (who later becomes diegetised as Father Laurence) in Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. In each of these examples, the Choruses repeat realist adaptation’s oscillation between authorial discours and fainomaic histoire. The back and forth dialectic between foregrounding authorial artifice through dialogue and subsuming that artifice into cinematic realism is mirrored and extended by a back and forth dialectic between two different registers, one (mostly) fictive and one (mostly) less fictive. Another sign of authorial artifice is first foregrounded and then subsumed into diegesis. The second of the three categories of Shakespearean metadrama manipulated into metacinema concerns the device of dramatising the theatre within the plays. By so doing, the plays invite reflection about their fictive status, but may also make the supervening fiction appear more real, in relation to the less real play within the play (see Fischer and Greiner [2007] for an overview of scholarly debates on the subject). In terms of how these internal dramas operate in film adaptation, it is clear that they are more easily diegetised than the Chorus figures discussed above. Internal plays, in film adaptations such as Olivier’s and Zeffirelli’s (1990) Hamlets, are not part of the same medium which presents them. They are therefore not a threat to cinematic realism in the sense that they do not set up another register which directly challenges the diegetic status of the fictive world in which the play is performed—both the film characters watching the play and the performers of the play are diegetic. These internal plays do act as a reminder, however, that the film’s overall fictive diegesis has origins in the Shakespearean theatre, and they therefore act as another form of authorial discours which foregrounds the artificial origins of the film.

138  R. GEAL

Transferring these internal plays into films, so that they become a film within the film, is also not necessarily as reflexive as Chorus figures. Just like in the real world, diegetic characters may go to the cinema—characters in non-adapted films often do this. Indeed, internal films may operate as a way to suppress the reflexive potential of Shakespearean metadrama. Almereyda’s Hamlet (Ethan Hawke), for example, makes video diaries onto which he records his thoughts, which in the playtext are soliloquies. These self-made videos thereby elide the potential reflexivity of direct address (which I will turn to more fully below) by diegetising some soliloquies into film recordings. These are not Shakespearean films within films in the strictest sense, given that their origins are soliloquies rather than plays within plays. Nevertheless, they demonstrate the potential for films within the films to operate in clearly verisimilar diegetic terms, so that when Almereyda’s Hamlet screens his ‘Mousetrap’ both the court as audience and the film they watch exist in a clear and singular diegesis. Films within the films do have some potential to problematise the singularity of the diegesis, but these manipulations are both subtle and, eventually, anamorphic. Almereyda’s screened ‘Mousetrap’ film, for example, begins with three title screens of bold white letters on a red background stating ‘THE MOUSETRAP’, ‘A TRAGEDY BY’ and ‘HAMLET’. In some sense, these title screens are reflexive, manipulating foreknowledge that the original play is a tragedy, and utilising the conventionalised written textual status of the author as a marker of artifice. In addition, the title screens refer back to the beginning of the overall film adaptation, which included a title screen (Fig. 5.19) almost identical to the character’s internal film title screen, with the only differences being that the opening titles of ‘The Mousetrap’ have a different aspect ratio and are shown with the diegetic film screen’s dark border around them (Fig. 5.20). This second iteration of the white text ‘HAMLET’ on a red background occurs fifty-two and a half minutes into Almereyda’s film,

Fig. 5.19  Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000, Double A Films): the film’s title screen

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

139

Fig. 5.20  Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000, Double A Films): the film within the film’s title screen

so that it takes a full fifty minutes to anamorphically suture from the first non-diegetic iteration to the second diegetic one—so long, in fact, that audiences are unlikely to remember the first. Indeed, I only noticed the link on repeated viewings, although there are examples of academic legitimation which connect this repetition with the film’s postmodern nature (e.g. Abbate 2007, 380; Cook 2011, 192; Worthen 2003, 112). From the perspective of anamorphosis, though, the second iteration is a diegetic reminder that the supervening film adaptation is also fictive, although this connection between the two different enunciative statuses of the images of white text ‘HAMLET’ on a red background is minimised by temporal distance. Internal films, then, have reflexive potential, but operate in an anamorphic manner that offers only minimal problematisations to verisimilar diegesis. The third and final category of Shakespearean metadrama manipulated into metacinema relates to the anti-realist potential of direct address derived from soliloquies. Hirsch identifies three types of theatrical soliloquy. In each of these, the ‘character […] does not intend the words to be heard by any other character’ (2003, 13), but the character may or may not intend to be heard by someone outside the diegesis (the audience): ‘Interior monologue […] do[es] not represent words spoken by the character but words merely passing through the mind of the character’; in ‘[s]elf-addressed speech […] [t]he character is unaware of playgoers and speaks only to himself’; whereas in ‘[a]udience-addressed speech […] [t]he character (not just the actor) is aware of and speaks to playgoers’ (Hirsch 2003, 13, original emphasis). Whether a particular soliloquy qualifies as one or other of these types in theatrical tradition is not important here, since adaptations can select which type to apply to which soliloquy. Indeed, different adaptations of the same sources can present the same soliloquies as different types (or even, as I will address

140  R. GEAL

shortly, shift from one type to another mid-soliloquy). What is more important, again, is the enunciative qualities of filmed soliloquies, and the ways that academic legitimations interpret these enunciative qualities in Shakespearean rather than grammatical terms. Non-Shakespearean films, of course, can also include what Hirsch calls audience-addressed speech. Direct address in films can have numerous functions and can, somewhat like Hirsch’s categories, be addressed to diegetic characters through subjective point-of-view shots or to audiences themselves without any character mediation. Tom Brown has perhaps conducted the most extensive survey of cinematic direct address, which he divides into seven principal ‘functions’: intimacy; agency; a ‘superior epistemic position within the fictional world’; honesty; instantiation; ‘alienation (if that term is reconsidered)’—by which he means non-grammatical (specifically non-Brechtian) alienation; and ‘(sometimes) stillness’ (2012, 13–8). There are some subtleties to Brown’s types that are interesting in relation to soliloquies in Shakespearean film adaptation, but he is concerned to shift the study of cinematic direct address away from questions of enunciation, and therefore does not provide the most useful model for an analysis of how Shakespearean adaptation might employ soliloquies in terms of how metadrama is adapted into metacinema. Before exploring the potential enunciative repercussions of direct address in soliloquies, it is first necessary to bracket off those filmic soliloquies that are not examples of Hirsch’s ‘[a]udience-addressed speech’ (2003, 13, original emphasis). The most definitive way to suppress a soliloquy’s enunciative qualities is to cut it out of the film altogether, or cut it out in an anamorphic and fainomaic manner which replaces the spoken soliloquy with images that convey the same information. The two key examples from Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar, discussed above and in the previous chapter, are examples of this process—two asides which verbally communicate characters’ thoughts, and which are metadramatically unheard by other characters, are transformed into close-ups that convey those characters’ thoughts via verisimilar film grammar. In addition to these direct and definitive fainomaic translations, a large number of soliloquies are adapted in various ways that keep a soliloquy’s words while eliding any direct and potentially alienating communication with the non-fictional world that might problematise the diegetic coherence. Hamlet’s first soliloquy in Olivier’s adaptation, for example, is delivered as a character’s subjective voice-over, rather than spoken

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

141

(or, more accurately, it is mostly not spoken). After the court leaves Hamlet alone, the camera cranes in towards the Prince’s face and cuts into a close-up before the voice-over (which criticises his mother’s marriage only ‘A little month’ [1.2.147] after his father’s death). The voiceover thereby operates as a means to convey thought without challenging cinematic verisimilitude, with Olivier’s melancholy facial expression and subdued figure movement, as he meanders around the throne room, contributing to a sense of a believable fictional world. Russell Jackson claims that the ‘isolate[d] Hamlet on his chair in the now empty, shadowy council chamber [is] a setting expressionistically appropriate for his state of mind’ (2000, 26). The cinematic rendering, then, is fainomaic, presenting the potentially metadramatic discours as verisimilar histoire, and legitimating academic analyses like Jackson’s can position this translation in terms that focus on the manipulation of Shakespearean meaning from one medium to another. Olivier’s Hamlet does speak some lines of the soliloquy in this sequence, but these punctuate the voice-over as moments when his thoughts cannot help but burst out. The second of these outbursts, in particular—‘and yet within a month! (1.2.145)—is delivered in a rapid staccato, his eyes shooting up to the skies in frustration, so that the spoken lines become an outpouring of emotion. In none of the spoken lines does Hamlet look towards or address the camera. Thus, the voice-over operates as Hirsch’s ‘[i]nterior monologue [which] do[es] not represent words spoken by the character but words merely passing through the mind of the character’, and the spoken lines operate as ‘[s]elf-addressed speech [in which] [t]he character is unaware of [the audience] and speaks only to himself’ (2003, 13, original emphasis). Neither of these types explicitly threaten the coherence of the fictional world by taking the character temporarily out of the diegesis, or by having the character temporarily recognise that a camera/audience intrudes into the diegesis. Some of Almereyda’s Hamlet’s soliloquies, mentioned above, operate as the same movement between interior monologue and self-addressed speech in the sense that they consist of voice-over and speech not delivered to the camera. The ‘To be, or not to be’ (3.1.58) soliloquy, for example, begins with voice-over and moves to spoken dialogue, with Hamlet’s eyeline pointed down and away from the camera, so that he merely mutters to himself rather than addresses an audience existing outside his diegesis. His video diaries, too, subsume the

142  R. GEAL

potential alienation of direct address into diegesis. The film’s first dialogue turns Hamlet’s ‘I have of late – but/wherefore I know not – lost all my mirth’ (2.2.297–8) speech (which in the playtext is not a soliloquy, as it is delivered to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) into a direct address soliloquy, with Hamlet looking straight into the camera. However, it is more accurate to say that he looks straight into a camera, since the image is coded, through the use of low-fidelity black and white cinematography and inexpert framing, to look like a self-made recording. This specific visual style contrasts with the colourful and high-fidelity opening credits, and with the image of Hamlet that follows the speech, in colour, looking at and increasing the volume on the black and white image of his soliloquy on his handheld device’s screen. The direct address of this soliloquy is thereby diegetised—although a character speaks directly to a film audience, this audience is the diegetic Hamlet himself, rather than the supervening film’s real-life audience existing in an entirely different space outside the fiction. This is, again, an oscillation from a suggestion of reflexivity that questions the enunciative status of the fiction to a fainomaic diegetisation that subsumes the markers of artifice. Soliloquies can also, however, function as a form of direct address that does problematise film’s discrete and unified fictional coherence. There is an existing scholarly discourse debating the enunciative status of this kind of direct address. In the first iteration of this discourse, Peter Wollen (1985) claims that direct address in the films of Jean-Luc Godard functions as an example of anti-realist counter-cinema, while in the second iteration of the discourse Jane Feuer (1993) identifies how certain mechanisms and generic conventions can suppress direct address’ anti-realist potential. Wollen sees direct address as a filmmaking technique with the potential to challenge what Baudry saw as realism’s ‘reality effect’, and instead help to generate a ‘knowledge effect, an actualisation of the work process, as denunciation of ideology’ (Baudry 1985, 534). Wollen states that the ruse of direct address breaks not only the fantasy identification but also the narrative surface. It raises directly the question, ‘What is this film for?’, superimposed on the orthodox narrative questions, ‘Why did that happen?’ and ‘What is going to happen next?’ Any form of cinema which aims to establish a dynamic relationship between film maker and spectator naturally has to consider the problem of what is technically the register of discourse, the content of the enunciation. (Wollen 1985, 503)

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

143

For Feuer, in the film genre of musicals, a number of techniques and conventionalised expectations work to disavow the grammatical disruption which Wollen thinks of as being inevitably caused by direct address: When performers in musicals turn to face us directly, we do enter another register, but […] the potentially disorienting effects of the break in the narrative are minimized […] by mechanisms of identification. Even when the break in register does throw us out of the narrative it’s for the purpose of praising show business, not burying it. […] [W]hen the direct address comes, we’re prepared for it. The change from third person to first person isn’t perceived as a grammatical error (as it is in a Godard film). (Feuer 1993, 36–7)

Direct address in filmed Shakespearean soliloquies can function in a similar manner to Feuer’s account of direct address in musicals. The principal way this operates is through the foregrounded discours-like status of an adaptation as a re-performance of an artifice that is given licence to behave in certain particular non-realist ways that are not conceptualised as anti-realist, but as specifically Shakespearean. Although these forms of direct address might ostensibly raise Wollen’s question ‘[w]hat is this film for?’ (1985, 503), they provide an answer that elides the question and focuses instead on how ‘[e]ven when the break in register does throw us out of the narrative it’s for the purpose of praising [Shakespeare], not burying [him]. […] [W]hen the direct address comes, we’re prepared for it. The change from third person to first person isn’t perceived as a grammatical error’ (Feuer 1993, 36–7). Academic legitimations provide numerous examples of this disavowal of direct address as grammatical, and scholarly studies of Olivier’s (1955) and Loncraine’s (1995) adaptations of Richard III provide some of the clearest of these. The most frequent explanation for these films’ direct address is located in their perceived narrative function, as though they represent just one more filmmakers’ technique to convey story arc, characterisation and theme. Thus, academic discourses focus on how these narrative functions explore themes deemed to be inherent in the playtexts, rather than on enunciative issues. Anthony Davies, for example, gives a detailed account linking Olivier’s use of direct address, in his Richard III, to the means of conveying Richard’s (Laurence Olivier) control over the story’s narrative, concluding that ‘[t]he narrative dimension of [Olivier’s] RICHARD III […] is implicit in the play’

144  R. GEAL

(Davies 1988, 68). H.R. Coursen similarly connects Olivier’s Richard’s manipulation of the camera with the play’s mobility (2000, 100), a point also made, in relation to Loncraine’s adaptation, by Christopher Andrews, who argues that after Richard’s (Ian McKellen) coronation, and following numerous previous examples of direct address, ‘McKellen refuses to make eye contact with us, only reinforcing our feelings of isolation and betrayal’ (Andrews 2002, 156). That which is potentially problematic or radical in the context of cinema’s reality-effect can therefore be seen in a context that provides an interpretation without recourse to enunciative issues (or indeed to a more critical problematisation of theatrical practice). Davies can thus write, of Olivier’s adaptation, that ‘[a]t the start of RICHARD III we are made aware of theatricality on the occasion of King Edward’s [Cedric Hardwicke] coronation, and the theatrical mode is then taken up in the long opening monologue by Richard as he takes us and the camera with him’ (Davies 1988, 75). Buhler similarly argues that ‘Olivier’s Richard does not hesitate to address the camera directly, reinforcing a sense of the theatrical rather than the cinematic’ (2002, 102). This logic has also been applied to quite specific elements of soliloquy’s direct address, such as Kathy M. Howlett’s contention, about Loncraine’s adaptation, that the cut from the beginning of Richard’s opening soliloquy, delivered as a victory speech via a microphone to a crowd, to a direct address ending in the private space of a toilet, means that ‘[t]he camera follows the movement of Richard’s speech as it travels from the political and social sphere to the personalized space of the body […], puncturing the boundaries of outside and inside, just as in the play Richard’s rhetorical asides puncture the play’s dominant rhetorical style’ (Howlett 2000, 135). Consequently, the mixture, and potential juxtaposition, of soliloquy as both diegetic speech to a shown audience, complete with reaction shots and eyeline matches, and soliloquy as direct address to the camera, is explained within the context of the perceived inherent meaning of the playtext and the history of theatrical performance, as though the two techniques best suit different elements of the same monologue. Jorgens, similarly, claims that the playtextual Richard is both a moral and physical outsider, and links Olivier’s soliloquies to this interpretative tradition. He therefore works outwards from a conceptualisation of the playtextual Richard as a ‘charming, Machiavellian, grotesque, Faustian hero […] – a wit, a self-conscious actor of great skill, a renaissance wolf

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

145

amongst medieval sheep’ (1977, 136), to an explanation of how Olivier’s film explores this characterisation: ‘His list to one side often makes him the most pronounced diagonal in the frame; the camera shows him askew in a world in which he does not belong, and this feeling is confirmed by his habit of staring into and confiding with the camera’ (1977, 143). Buhler makes a similar link between McKellen’s Richard, who addresses the camera/audience directly when he spots it in the bathroom mirror, and the character’s physical and sexual dysfunction (2000, 45). This interpretative link between character and appropriate forms of cinematic grammar extends to the perceived effects of direct address upon audiences. Coursen, for example, argues that McKellen’s Richard notices us half-way through the [opening] speech, accusing us implicitly of being Toms peeping on his peeing. Unlike Olivier’s charming Richard, McKellen’s Richard never does ask ‘us to join him’ […]. He sneers at us as he sneers at the feeble characters he manipulates in the film. The result is an alienation from him, as opposed to the fascinated emotional participation in his schemes and our sharing in his response to their success that Olivier’s evil schemer invites. (Coursen 2000, 103)

These examples of direct address are situated within an overall aesthetic that links Shakespearean character with cinematic style. Jorgens argues that Olivier ‘stresses Richard’s power by having him look down on his victims from heights when they are unaware of his presence, and the camera consistently takes his point of view’ (1977, 143). Andrews also connects the textual Richard’s domination over his contemporaries with domination over the cinema audience through direct addresses and point-of-view shots—‘Richard controls us by controlling our vision’ (2002, 151). Several writers take this further and explicitly link Richard’s manipulation of the audience with the perceived inherent nature of cinema, thereby completely countering the Wollen thesis that direct address challenges realism. Indeed, Richard’s relationship with the camera is seen as encouraging the voyeurism and passivity of realism. Davies writes that ‘the natural tendency of cinema towards voyeurism corresponds with the voyeuristic trait in Richard’s personality structure, and because they hold this in common, Richard and the camera become easy accomplices’ (1988, 69), and claims that ‘the effectiveness of the direct-­ address shots […] lies in those special dimensions of response which

146  R. GEAL

[film scholar André] Bazin noted as being peculiar to the cinema audience’s passivity’ (1988, 70). Andrews also connects direct address with realism, arguing that ‘[o]n film the soliloquy, when spoken in direct address to the camera, becomes most intimate and most successful. […] It is no wonder that a play in which a villain-hero not only acts, but directs, manipulates, and deceives, works so well on film, a medium itself given to manipulation and deception’ (2002, 157). Howlett argues that ‘[i]t is entirely consistent with the methods of framing in Shakespeare’s play that Loncraine’s film should violate his audience’s experience of the frame through methods Richard employs with others, such as breaching boundaries in face-to-face interactions’ (2000, 15). Any potential Baudrian ‘knowledge effect’ (Baudry 1985, 534) caused by the alienation of direct address is thereby conceived in terms of debates about perceived Shakespearean meaning.7 The metadramatic, and potentially metacinematic, disclosure of enunciation is interpreted as a meditation upon, or a knowledge effect revealing, something about the relations between the playtext and a particular re-performance, rather than something about cinematic enunciation. Shakespearean film adaptation is interpreted as being not exactly like other realist films not because of its authorial anamorphism, but because of its authorial quirks, which legitimate its reflexivity as Shakespearean rather than grammatical. Somewhat like Feuer’s claim about the genre of musicals, then, Shakespearean adaptation has a quasi-generic function in relation to direct address, so that ‘[e]ven when the break in register does throw us out of the narrative it’s for the purpose of praising [Shakespeare], not burying [him]’ (Feuer 1993, 36–7). These academic legitimations all exist outside the film text, but it is also the case that adapted film itself can subsume and obfuscate the potential grammatical disruption of direct address in an oscillating anamorphic manner similar to that occurring in relation to Choruses, discussed above. This is achieved through an interplay between grammatical disruption and conventional realism. The admixture of classical realist techniques with the potential alienation of direct address helps to facilitate the disavowal of the latter. At the beginning of Olivier’s adaptation, for example, the opening monologue, which is delivered in an unambiguously direct address to the camera, is preceded by Edward’s interpolated coronation. The King is crowned to the sound of ambiguously diegetic trumpet flourishes—such sounds might well accompany this kind of ritual, but the musicians are not shown, as in Olivier’s Hamlet. A frontal

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

147

shot of the king cuts to a side shot with the back of a head dominating the foreground (Fig. 5.21). As the camera moves downwards, the head turns, and it is Richard. He almost looks straight at the camera, but on closer inspection it can be seen that his first glance is just to the camera’s left (Fig. 5.22). The eyeline match in the next shot shows that he was looking at Buckingham (Ralph Richardson), and it is this cut that most clearly signals that Richard was looking at another character rather than the camera. Buckingham shows through a slight reorientation of his eyeline that he has recognised he is being looked at (Fig. 5.23) and then turns to his left. The camera moves back to show Buckingham is now looking at Clarence (John Gielgud), who returns the looks to both Buckingham (Fig. 5.24) and Richard (Fig. 5.25). This last eyeline match completes the spectator’s unproblematic sense of narrative space, with the three characters geographically arranged in a triangle, and with the visual interactions between those characters clear and comprehensible. The first two close-up shots of faces (Figs. 5.22 and 5.23) almost look straight to camera, but this potential revelation of cinematic enunciation is resolved by the subsequent shots which demonstrate that these glances are eyeline matches. The momentary threat of grammatical destabilisation is thereby sutured over by classical continuity editing which Fig. 5.21  Olivier’s Richard III (1955, London Film Productions): establishing shot

Fig. 5.22  Olivier’s Richard III (1955, London Film Productions): (almost) direct address becomes eyeline matches

148  R. GEAL Fig. 5.23  Olivier’s Richard III (1955, London Film Productions): (almost) direct address becomes eyeline matches

Fig. 5.24  Olivier’s Richard III (1955, London Film Productions): (almost) direct address becomes eyeline matches

Fig. 5.25  Olivier’s Richard III (1955, London Film Productions): (almost) direct address becomes eyeline matches

re-positions the previous shot’s potentially destabilised audience position into a subjectivised, diegetic location. Allying these mechanisms with a subsequent disruption of realist grammar in the direct address soliloquy that follows soon after means that, as with Feuer’s analysis of enunciative subsumption in musicals, these temporary potential threats to realism are not ‘perceived as a grammatical error’ (1993, 37). Richard Allen argues, relating the editing process of suture to Freud’s fort/da game, and emphasising how this process enacts and overcomes masochism, that ‘the lack upon which the subject’s relationship to cinematic discourse is founded […] is elided. The spectator’s anticipation of the second image and recollection of the first binds the spectator into the discourse of the

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

149

film’ (1995, 35). The blurring of the lines between realism and non-realism inherent in Shakespearean soliloquies can be seen to act out this masochistic process of disavowal, with the fort of the audience’s direct address relationship with Richard tempered and contained by the da of the film’s realism. In this example from the interpolated coronation, the subsequent direct address is prepared for by an example that almost employs direct address, but which sutures over this threat to cinematic verisimilitude through eyeline matches in the first instance. This anamorphic oscillation also fulfils the two other inherent, interrelated elements of the drama of authorship. Firstly, the anamorphosis is thematised into narrative, with the transgressive direct address mirroring the playtext’s narrative—Richard manipulates characters, and therefore, Richard manipulates the audience through direct address. In this sense, the drama of authorship again mirrors Heath’s contention that ‘the drama of vision becomes a constant reflexive fascination in films’ (1985, 514). Or, more accurately, since the narrative pre-exists, the anamorphosis is fitted to a plausible theme within the narrative. Secondly, academic discourses legitimise and complete the anamorphic subsumption of grammatical disruption into narrative, explaining Heath’s reflexive fascination as a metacinematic exploration of Shakespearean meaning. Andrews, for example, can thereby argue that Olivier’s adaptation ‘is constructed so as to allow us opportunity to withdraw from the relationship which feeds upon our inherent bloodlust, return to the side of the moral and the just, and leave Richard alone in his despair’ (2002, 149). The fort of the audience’s direct address relationship with Richard is therefore not only tempered and contained by the da of the film’s realism, but is inscribed into a narrative form, mirroring the playtext’s narrative arc, which facilitates legitimating academic disavowal of the anamorphosis. This interplay between grammatical disruption/containment, the inscription of this into narrative, and the disavowal of this inscription through academic legitimation means that ‘when the direct address comes, we’re prepared for it. The change from third person to first person isn’t perceived as a grammatical error (as it is in a Godard film)’ (Feuer 1993, 37).

Conclusion This chapter has identified various forms of authorial anamorphosis that operate as fainomai: each element in the chapter ‘appears’ on screen as ostensibly un-authored visual manifestations of foregrounded authorial

150  R. GEAL

artifice. Fainomaic adaptation oscillates between these two enunciative registers, revealing and then subsuming and obfuscating markers of adaptation’s fictive origins in canonical authorship. Fainomaic anamorphosis oscillates between these enunciative registers in complex and overlapping ways. When one marker of authorial artifice is being suppressed another may be foregrounded. Thus, in the example of Olivier’s first soliloquy from Hamlet discussed above, the artifice which might be revealed if Hamlet spoke directly to the camera is suppressed by making the speech a ‘thought’ voice-over, but that voice-over still operates as some kind of marker of authorial artifice, in terms of its non-colloquial dialect and its repetition of famous Shakespearean lines such as ‘frailty, thy name is woman’ (1.2.146). In an even more complex manner, the potential challenge to fictional verisimilitude in a direct address soliloquy such as that at the start of Olivier’s Richard III is legitimated and contextualised by the adaptation’s foregrounded Shakespearean origins. The overlapping nature of these many fainomaic elements is what generates their most anamorphic effect, so that the oscillations between foregrounding and subsuming artifice become blurred, and so that the distinctions between re-performance and verisimilitude are never clear. The fainomaic drama of authorship, therefore, includes a constant moment-by-moment oscillation between Shakespearean dialogue as discours, and cinematography, editing and mise-en-scène as histoire, as well as a more temporally diffused oscillation between a discours of verbal imagery rendered as visual histoire; between written traces of authorship and obfuscations into realist verisimilitude; and between potential metadramatic elements of the source texts that are either subsumed into cinematic realism or somewhat paradoxically legitimated as not anti-realist because of the specific metadramatic nature of those source texts. These many fainomaic layers constitute the principal elements of the drama of authorship, but there are others. The next chapter analyses the enunciative consequences of film adaptations that move Shakespearean narratives out of what are popularly perceived as appropriate Shakespearean locations.

Notes 1. This last reason is not necessarily relevant to all other (non-Shakespearean) examples of canonical adaptation, but the first two reasons are more widely applicable. I discuss this wider applicability below, in a more substantial endnote.

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

151

2. Dudley Andrew has discussed how film adaptation provides ‘laboratory’ conditions (1984, 97–8), but his focus was on analysing the relationships between ‘original’ and ‘copy’, rather than on how different iterations of copies might develop over time. The field does not have a strong record of constructing such histories: as Gregory Semenza puts it, ‘[d]iachronic histories, or studies of changes across larger periods of time, have been extraordinarily rare in adaptation studies’ (2018, 62). 3. Although a detailed explanation of the specific characteristics of anamorphic authorship in adaptations of canonical novels is beyond the remit of this book, it is possible to demonstrate the workings of such fainomaic authorship with a brief account of David Lean’s adaptation (1946) of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1861). The film begins by oscillating from foregrounded authorship to the fainomaic suppression of that authorship. The protagonist, Pip (John Mills), provides a voice-over narration of the novel’s opening lines. The image on screen is the opened pages of the novel. Both Pip’s and Dickens’ authorship are thereby foregrounded. This image quickly dissolves into the fainomaic visualisation of the hitherto explicitly authored words—a novelistic Pip verbally/lexically explaining how he came to call himself thus is replaced with a cinematic image of the young Pip (Tony Wager). The transition between the two images, and these two enunciative registers, is marked by a wind which whips over the pages of the book. Indeed, this wind, which ends Pip’s voice-over, continues in the next scene’s gusty graveyard, or even seems to come from the graveyard scene, with the emanation from the histoire of realist diegesis violently displacing the discours of foregrounded authorship. Specific authorially foregrounded descriptions of characters and settings are also adapted from (explicitly authorial) verbal imagery into (ostensibly un-authored) visual imagery. Thus, the novel’s description of Wemmick as seemingly being chiselled from wood becomes fainomaic, with Brian McFarlane claiming that Lean communicates this wooden grotesquery by casting ‘an actor of thin-lipped severity, whose physical impression is appropriate to his function’ (1996, 133–4), and through additional cinematic metaphors such as framing, chiaroscuro lighting and composition, so that the translation from one enunciative register to another is, according to McFarlane, ‘largely a product of the manipulation of mise-en-scène, though sound […] and cutting […] make their contribution’ (1996, 134). As such, the film’s Wemmick ceases to be explicitly articulation by Dickens. Instead, Lean’s Wemmick becomes a fainomaic visualisation that suppresses Dickens’ enunciation. As such, although the case study in this book principally applies to adaptations from play to screen, it is also the case that adaptations from novel to screen are also canonically reflexive in fainomaic terms.

152  R. GEAL 4. To some extent the ways that films portray historical settings actually help to establish verisimilar expectations about those settings. Shakespearean film adaptations play their own part in this conventionalising process. Arthur Lindley (2002) has claimed that the technically ahistorical character of Orson Welles’ Macbeth (1948) has influenced the appearance of many subsequent films set in a verisimilar Middle Ages. 5. The playtext’s line is ‘Go get you home, you fragments’ (1.1.221). 6. The exact line in the playtext is actually ‘Men all in fire’. 7.  Analyses of Pacino’s semi-documentary Looking for Richard also frequently contextualise the film’s interrogativity with an attempt to explore Shakespearean meaning rather than the parameters of cinematic grammar. Sarah Hatchuel writes that [w]hen the character of Richard woos Lady Anne [Winona Ryder] in a more or less realistic sequence, the diegesis is brutally interrupted by a surprising, extradiegetic shot of Pacino-the-actor uttering[, directly to camera,] a loud ironic ‘Ha!’ commenting on Richard’s hypocrisy and reflecting his double nature. It is as if the actor’s subtext and research on the character were explicitly revealed. (Hatchuel 2004, 103)

References Abbate, Alessandro. 2007. “The Text Within the Text, the Screen Within the Screen: Multi-layered Representations in Michael Almereyda’s ‘Hamlet’ and Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Romeo + Juliet’.” In The Play Within the Play—The Performance of Meta-theatre and Self-reflection, edited by Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner, 377–92. New York: Rodopi. Allen, Richard. 1995. Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Almereyda, Michael. 2000. William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Screenplay Adapted by Michael Almereyda. London: Faber and Faber. Anderegg, Michael A. 2004. Cinematic Shakespeare. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Andrew, Dudley. 1984. Concepts in Film Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Andrews, Christopher. 2002. “Richard III on Film: The Subversion of the Viewer.” In Shakespeare into Film, edited by James Michael Welsh, Richard Vela, and John C. Tibbetts, 147–58. New York: Checkmark. Austen, Jane. 1813. Pride and Prejudice. London: Thomas Egerton. Barthes, Roland. 1995 [1967]. “The Death of the Author.” In Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern, edited by Seán Burke, 125–30. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Baudry, Jean-Louis. 1985. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” In Movies and Methods: Volume II, edited by Bill Nichols, 531–42. Berkeley: University of California Press.

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

153

Benveniste, Émile. 1970. Problems in General Linguistics. Translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables: Miami University Press. Brown, Tom. 2012. Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Buchanan, Judith. 2005. Shakespeare on Film. Harlow: Pearson. Buhler, Stephen M. 2000. “Camp ‘Richard III’ and the Burdens of (Stage/ Film) History.” In Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle, edited by Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray, 40–57. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Buhler, Stephen M. 2002. Shakespeare in the Cinema: Ocular Proof. Albany: State University of New York Press. Calderwood, James L. 1971. Shakespearean Metadrama. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cartmell, Deborah, and Imelda Whelehan. 2010. Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Cook, Patrick J. 2011. Cinematic Hamlet: The Films of Olivier, Zeffirelli, Branagh, and Almereyda. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Coursen, H.R. 2000. “Filming Shakespeare’s History: Three Films of ‘Richard III’.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, edited by Russell Jackson, 99–116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davies, Anthony. 1988. Filming Shakespeare’s Plays: The Adaptations of Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Peter Brook and Akira Kurosawa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dickens, Charles. 1861. Great Expectations. London: Chapman & Hall. Donaldson, Peter. 1990. Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors. London: Unwin Hyman. Feuer, Jane. 1993. The Hollywood Musical, 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Fischer, Gerhard, and Bernhard Greiner, eds. 2007. The Play Within the Play: The Performance of Meta-theatre and Self-reflection. New York: Rodopi. Grossman, Janet Burnett. 2003. Looking at Greek and Roman Sculpture in Stone. Los Angeles: Getty Publications. Hatchuel, Sarah. 2004. Shakespeare, from Stage to Screen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heath, Stephen. 1985. “‘Jaws’, Ideology and Film Theory.” In Movies and Methods Volume II, edited by Bill Nichols, 509–14. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hirsch, James E. 2003. Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies. London: Associated University Presses. Holland, Peter. 1994. “Two-dimensional Shakespeare: ‘King Lear’ on Film.” In Shakespeare and the Moving Image: The Plays on Film and Television, edited by Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells, 50–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hornby, Richard. 1986. Drama, Metadrama and Perception. London: Associated University Presses.

154  R. GEAL Howlett, Kathy M. 2000. Framing Shakespeare on Film. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Jackson, Russell. 2000. “From the Play-script to Screenplay.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, edited by Russell Jackson, 15–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jorgens, Jack J. 1977. Shakespeare on Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lehmann, Courtney. 2002. Shakespeare Remains: Theatre to Film, Early Modern to Postmodern. London: Cornell University Press. Lindley, Arthur. 2002. “Scotland Saved from History: Welles’s ‘Macbeth’ and the Ahistoricism of Medieval Film.” In Shakespeare into Film, edited by James Michael Welsh, Richard Vela, and John C. Tibbetts, 141–5. New York: Checkmark. Loehlin, James N. 2000. “‘These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends’: Baz Luhrmann’s Millennial Shakespeare.” In Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle, edited by Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray, 121–36. Basingstoke: Macmillan. MacCabe, Colin. 1985. Theoretical Essays; Film, Linguistics, Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press. McFarlane, Brian. 1996. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rasmus, Agnieszka. 2001. “‘I Could a Tale Unfold…’ From Metatheatre to Metacinema: Films within the Films in Shakespeare on Film.” Cadernos de Traduçäo 1, no. 7: 147–68. Rothwell, Kenneth. 1999. A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Semenza, Gregory. 2018. “Towards a Historical Turn? Adaptation Studies and the Challenges of History.” In The Routledge Companion to Adaptation, edited by Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs, and Eckart Voigts, 58–66. London: Routledge. Thompson, Ayanna, and Laura Turci. 2016. Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach. London: Bloomsbury. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1977. The Poetics of Prose. Translated by Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wilson, Robert F., Jr. 2000. Shakespeare in Hollywood, 1929–1956. London: Associated University Presses. Wollen, Peter. 1985. “Godard and Counter Cinema: ‘Vent D’Est’.” In Movies and Methods Volume II, edited by Bill Nichols, 500–9. Berkeley: University of California Press. Worthen, W.B. 2003. Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

5  ‘FAINOMAIC’ ADAPTATION FROM THE VERBAL TO THE VISUAL 

155

Filmography Cat Ballou. 1965. Directed by Elliot Silverstein. USA: Columbia. Cesare Deve Morire (Caesar Must Die). 2012. Directed by Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani. Italy: Kaos Cinematografica. Great Expectations. 1946. Directed by David Lean. UK: Cineguild. Hamlet. 1948. Directed by Laurence Olivier. UK: Two Cities. Hamlet. 1964. Directed by Grigori Kozintsev. USSR: Lenfilm. Hamlet. 1990. Directed by Franco Zeffirelli. USA: Warner Bros. Hamlet. 1996. Directed by Kenneth Branagh. UK: Castle Rock/Columbia. Hamlet. 2000. Directed by Michael Almereyda. USA: Double A Films. Henry V. 1989. Directed by Kenneth Branagh. UK: Renaissance Films. Jaws. 1975. Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA: Universal. Julius Caesar. 1953. Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. USA: MGM. Macbeth. 1948. Directed by Orson Welles. USA: Mercury Productions. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. 2016. Directed by Burr Steers. UK/USA: Cross Creek Pictures. Richard III. 1955. Directed by Laurence Olivier. UK: London Film Productions. Richard III. 1995. Directed by Richard Loncraine. UK: United Artists. Romeo and Juliet. 1954. Directed by Renato Castellani. UK/Italy: Rank. Romeo and Juliet. 1968. Directed by Franko Zeffirelli. UK/Italy: BHE Films. Titus. 1999. Directed by Julie Taymor. USA: Twentieth Century Fox. William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. 1996. Directed by Baz Luhrmann. USA: Twentieth Century Fox.

Paintings Millais, John Everett. 1851–1852. Ophelia. Oil on canvas. London: Tate Britain. Velázquez, Diego. 1656. Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour). Oil on canvas. Madrid: Museo del Prado.

CHAPTER 6

‘Állagmic’ Adaptation from Shakespearean to Non-(/Less-)Shakespearean Settings

In the previous chapter, I described the adaptation of the verbal to the visual as fainomaic, from the Ancient Greek verb fainomai, meaning ‘to appear’. This chapter addresses a different form of adaptation which is another possible, rather than an inevitable, element of realist film adaptations of canonical ‘originals’. Since it covers shifts in location, filmmaking style, character and (possibly) language I define it as an ‘állagmic’ translation, from the Ancient Greek noun állagma, meaning the process of ‘change’ or ‘replacement’. Like all the following elements of this taxonomy of anamorphic authorship in Shakespearean films, állagma is a technique that adaptations may employ, but which can vary greatly, or might not be used at all. Állagma is therefore a possibility of realist film adaptation, rather than part of its ontology, or one of its preconditions. Manifestations of állagmic adaptation are less systematic than manifestations of fainomaic adaptation because of this inherent optional nature, as the rest of this chapter demonstrates. However, many of the manifestations of állagmic translation have significant areas of continuity, and this continuity mirrors the same kind of anamorphism inherent to the fainomaic element of adaptation, in term of exploiting a complex blend of foregrounding and disavowing artifice within film texts, with a similar array of academic legitimisation. Állagmic adaptation, therefore, is an optional, attendant form of anamorphism that may or may not operate in addition to realist film adaptation’s more general, ontological and © The Author(s) 2019 R. Geal, Anamorphic Authorship in Canonical Film Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16496-6_6

157

158  R. GEAL

inherent fainomai. Állagma demonstrates the multifaceted potential of authorial anamorphism, even if it is not necessarily inherent to it. The principal distinction, amongst these many, that delineates different forms of állagmic translation in Shakespearean films, is whether an adaptation employs Shakespearean dialogue, or whether an adaptation has characters take part in a narrative derived from Shakespeare’s plays, but in which those characters speak in a colloquial (or otherwise non-Shakespearean) dialogue. To complicate matters, there are adaptations that mix together some Shakespearean and some colloquial dialogue. This chapter deals with the differences between those adaptations that replace the Shakespearean dialogue, and those that do not, presently. However, in both of these subcategories what is consistent about állagma is that it consists of changes to setting, mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing and music associated with filmic styles related to the new settings into which the Shakespearean characters, narrative and theme (and possibly dialogue) have been adapted. Locational shifts are a problematic concept because some form of locational shift is inevitable during the process of adapting into film— any Shakespearean adaptation unavoidably shifts location from the Renaissance stage to a greater or lesser extent. A spectator’s potential judgement about what constitutes such a shift might depend on a host of factors. However, the same kind of concerns about verisimilitude that I discussed in the last chapter, in relation to perceived appropriate Shakespearean settings, applies here. According to Todorov (1977, 87), it will be recalled, verisimilitude is more about expectation and convention than about empirical correspondence to reality. Thus, certain very rough mise-en-scène approximations of how the real worlds of Classical Rome, Medieval France or Renaissance Italy might have looked all pass as verisimilar, despite the potential protestations of an expert on any of those historical cultures. An állagmic adaptation shifts the location from unproblematically ‘Shakespearean’ settings, and employs a mise-en-scène which has the potential to position Shakespearean narratives, characters and themes in a location that seems somewhat un-Shakespearean, according to the verisimilar conventions set out above. For an állagmic adaptation to be considered realist its setting must have a mise-en-scène that is consistent in itself—Almereyda’s Hamlet is set in a believable New York on the cusp of the new Millennium, while Fred M. Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet (1956) (adapted from The Tempest) evokes a believable futuristic space mission and so on.

6  ‘ÁLLAGMIC’ ADAPTATION FROM SHAKESPEAREAN … 

159

To some extent, then, an állagmic adaptation may be more like other non-Shakespearean films than non-állagmic adaptations are—the journalist David Gritten, for example, refers to Loncraine not mentioning the ‘S-word’ during his filming of a Richard III in a 1930s’ setting: ‘“I’m encouraging everyone working on this film not to think of it as Shakespeare” says director Richard Loncraine. “It’s a terrific story and who wrote it is irrelevant”’ (in Boose and Burt 1997, 11). An állagmic adaptation, therefore, has the potential to downplay authorial artifice by positioning believable-looking characters wearing believable costumes in a believable setting, with each of these elements operating as markers of ‘normal’ film as opposed to foregrounded re-performance. However, the unproblematic consistency of an állagmic adaptation’s mise-en-scène may have certain enunciative qualities that emerge through a potential juxtaposition with foregrounded Shakespearean elements which seem less consistent with the mise-en-scène. It is not only popular conceptions of Shakespearean locational verisimilitude that drive this distinction between állagmic and non-állagmic settings. Legitimating academic discourses also provide a conventionalising rubric for interpreting locational shifts, grounded, once again, in culturally prescribed notions of Shakespeare’s canonical status. Certain settings are deemed to be unproblematically ‘Shakespearean’ (e.g., Coursen 2005, 1; McBride 1996, 122; Manvell 1971, 123). Shifts out of these conventionalised settings, however, are understood as potentially alienating, as is demonstrated by Graham Holderness’ analysis of Peter Hall’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1968): The film opens with a deliberate disruption of naturalist film convention: superimposed on an English neo-classical house, surrounded by images of order and authority, appears the title ‘Athens’. The assurance customarily guaranteed by film techniques which confirm our normal habits of perception, is subverted: what we see on the screen may well be deceptive. (Holderness 1998, 77)

For Holderness, this shift from Athens to England causes a ‘disruption of naturalist film convention’ because a setting in the real Athens, or something that approximates Athens, would be an unproblematic Shakespearean setting, whereas a setting in England, in this instance, is problematically non-Shakespearean. The perceived historical element of the shift is also important—Holderness doesn’t specify the historical context that the shift is made from, but the shift to a ‘neo-classical house’

160  R. GEAL

(1998, 77) makes it clear that a significant movement has been made not only in space but also in time. There is, then, a broad (though vague) consensus about what constitutes unproblematically Shakespearean and problematically non-Shakespearean (or more accurately, as we shall see, less-Shakespearean) settings, in terms of verisimilar expectations. It is these latter problematically non-(/less-)Shakespearean settings that I define as állagmic. There are also films that make these shifts, but in which állagmic juxtaposition against perceived appropriate Shakespearean settings is not really applicable. Branagh’s Hamlet, for example, makes the same kind of temporal forward shift as Hall’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so that Branagh employs a mise-en-scène from a historical period a century or two after Shakespeare’s death. There are a number of factors, however, that downplay Branagh’s állagmic shift. His Baroque setting in Blenheim evokes a slightly earlier historical period than Hall’s neoclassical house, and the verisimilar expectations about the ‘original’ historical context being shifted from may also be different. Most significantly, perhaps, Branagh’s film has a snowy setting to emphasise its Danishness—Olivier’s, Kozintsev’s and Zeffirelli’s explicitly Medieval/­ Renaissance non-állagmic adaptations do not include snow anything like as ubiquitously as Branagh does, perhaps because their historical context is sufficiently and verisimilarly Shakespearean without it. Branagh’s adaptation, too, although situated in a historical context from after Shakespeare’s death, is relatively non-állagmic in the sense that it does not juxtapose the Shakespearean dialogue with a mise-en-scène and visual style that are so conspicuously non-Shakespearean, in verisimilar terms, as occurs in an adaptation in a contemporary setting, such as Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, as the rest of this chapter addresses. Branagh’s setting may be állagmic, in technical terms, but it evokes an appropriately believable world in which people might speak non-contemporary dialogue, and behave in various non-contemporary ways, in verisimilar terms. Állagmic adaptation does not only relate to setting, however. The different settings that the playtexts are adapted into may have associated forms of cinematography, editing and non-diegetic music. These, too, relate to an adaptation’s foregrounded Shakespearean status in verisimilar terms. The example of non-diegetic music is perhaps the clearest demonstration of this. An állagmic adaptation such as Almereyda’s Hamlet does

6  ‘ÁLLAGMIC’ ADAPTATION FROM SHAKESPEAREAN … 

161

not only employ a non-Shakespearean setting in New York at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It also uses a pop music soundtrack at certain points, including in the opening scene. This is consistent with the film’s fictional coherence, since it does not utilise music from a historical period later than the setting, but the setting and the music together do both somewhat problematise verisimilar expectations of appropriate Shakespearean settings and music. Just as with the setting, it is verisimilitude rather than precise historical reality that regulates the relationships between what non-diegetic music is deemed appropriate for either a Shakespearean film generally or for a Shakespearean film in a specific historical context. Consider the impact of including pop music similar to that used in Almereyda’s Hamlet in Zeffirelli’s adaptation, released only ten years earlier in a real world full of such pop music, but set in a Medieval world prior to the invention of this music or the electric guitars and scratching record players on which that music is played. Such non-diegetic pop music playing over a Medieval setting would threaten verisimilitude. However, Zeffirelli’s adaptation, like Olivier’s and Kozintsev’s films, includes non-diegetic music that is also not appropriate for a Medieval/ Renaissance setting, in a precise technical sense, since these films’ scores are composed and performed in a style derived more from nineteenth-century Romanticism than from Medieval or Renaissance music, and played on instruments that were not yet invented in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. This non-diegetic music is also not realistic, in a precise technical sense, but it does correspond to general and vague verisimilar expectations about the kind of music that is appropriate for an adaptation set in a perceived appropriate Shakespearean location. Again, then, these verisimilar contexts determine which kind of adaptation is állagmic and which is not—Zeffirelli’s, Olivier’s and Kozintsev’s Hamlets have some non-diegetic music that is technically állagmic, but only in a sense so precise and pedantic as to make these adaptations effectively non-állagmic. Állagmic adaptations such as Almereyda’s Hamlet, then, can include music that is contemporaneous to the setting (as well as classical music that evokes an earlier historical context). Both the setting and the contemporary music, despite being verisimilar in relation to one another, partake in a shift away from a setting and music consistent with perceived Shakespearean verisimilitude. Something similar is true of állagmic adaptation’s use of cinematography and editing. It is the case that some

162  R. GEAL

scholars criticise any form of filmic cinematography and editing as a false imposition on the playtexts. Belsey’s criticism of Antony’s funeral oration in Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar, discussed at length in the last two chapters, is an example of this approach—cinematographic framing and editing combine so that the ‘effect of the close-up here is to produce ethical and political coherence, and in the process to close off many of the ethical and political questions left open by the [play]text’ (1998, 63). For Belsey, realist cinematography and editing are inevitably inappropriate for adequately exploring Shakespeare’s ‘ethical and political questions’ (1998, 63). However, Belsey’s approach does not consider the appropriateness or otherwise of various styles of cinematography and editing. An állagmic adaptation such as Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet suggests that certain filmmaking styles are deemed more or less appropriately Shakespearean, in verisimilar terms that depend on the relationships between these filmmaking styles and the Shakespearean or non-(/less-)Shakespearean settings in which they might be employed. Defining the parameters of these filmmaking styles is a potentially gargantuan task which risks an overdeveloped sidetrack into another contested academic area. For the sake of clarity and brevity, but in order to contextualise my point sufficiently, the parameters of these filmmaking styles can be approximately divided into what David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson and Janet Staiger call Classical Hollywood Cinema (1985), and what Barry Langford calls Post-classical Hollywood (2010). Without going into the debates and nuances about these terms, it is possible to broadly characterise the two styles as follows: Classical filmmaking attempts to communicate narrative and tone using a restrained and unambiguous array of specific techniques— relatively ubiquitous conventions govern the relationships between establishing shots, medium shots and axial cuts into close-ups, for example. Classical filmmaking does not deliberately try to draw attention to these devices. (In this sense, classical filmmaking is very clearly realist filmmaking.) Post-classical filmmaking has more stylistic flair— some of the classical filmmaking principles may be pushed to the limits of their conventionality or subverted entirely (although such stylistic exaggerations and subversions typically still serve narrative or thematic purposes, so that post-classical filmmaking is still realist filmmaking, as the examples of állagmic adaptations in this chapter will demonstrate).

6  ‘ÁLLAGMIC’ ADAPTATION FROM SHAKESPEAREAN … 

163

The previous chapter addressed one example of this exaggerated filmmaking style in Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet— numerous freeze-frames used to introduce characters, both during the Prologue and during the following fight between Montagues and Capulets. The extent to which these freeze-frames are exaggerations of classical filmmaking rather than total subversions is demonstrated by the occasional use of freeze-frames in some unambiguously classical films, such as It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946), where a freeze-frame is also used to introduce a character. Nevertheless, Luhrmann’s repeated use of this effect, combined with text on screen, and amongst a montage with whip-pans, accelerating editing and so on can certainly be interpreted as employing an exaggerated post-classical as opposed to classical style. The important point here is the fact that this post-classical style does not necessarily work against the other állagmic elements of the film, such as its contemporary setting and its use of pop music. Indeed, these állagmic elements, while they might operate as some form of juxtaposition with the film’s Shakespearean dialogue, as I will discuss shortly, all function together to create a specific form of verisimilitude. Thus, during the fight sequence Luhrmann borrows cinematographic, editing and musical conventions from the Spaghetti Westerns that constituted a significant influence on post-classical Hollywood style. This includes repeating Sergio Leone’s use of freeze-frames, as well as his stylistically noticeable cuts to extreme close-ups on feet, cigarettes and parts of weapons, his use of exaggerated slow motion, and Leone’s ubiquitous and distinctive Ennio Morricone soundtrack, which Luhrmann copies in this scene by using snatches of deliberately Morricone-esque non-diegetic guitar riffs and panpipes in a clear homage. As such, an állagmic adaptation like William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet is verisimilarly consistent in terms of how mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing and music fit together, without any one of these elements drawing on a stylistic tradition that isn’t typically fitted together in numerous other film texts. Verisimilar expectations mean that, as with the hypothetical example of a Medieval adaptation using pop music discussed above, certain filmmaking conventions seem appropriate for an állagmic adaptation that would not seem appropriate for a non-állagmic adaptation. All forms of cinematography and editing, then, are non-Shakespearean in the sense both that they utilise forms of technology that were not available on the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage, and in the sense of Belsey’s (1998) claim about how cinematography

164  R. GEAL

and editing may constrain the pluralism of that stage. However, the conventions of classical Hollywood filmmaking at least don’t draw attention to themselves, and so don’t announce the cinematography’s and editing’s manipulations of Shakespeare in the same way as the kind of post-classical filmmaking employed by Luhrmann. In this sense, classical filmmaking is more Shakespearean than post-classical filmmaking, in verisimilar terms, because it downplays its inevitably non-Shakespearean presence. An adaptation with a non-állagmic Medieval setting but utilising a post-classical filmmaking style like that employed in Luhrmann’s fight scene would combine together a confusing juxtaposition of setting with filmmaking style very different from the symbiotic combination of these elements in a genuinely állagmic adaptation like William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. As such, the only potential challenge to the verisimilar consistency of an állagmic adaptation comes from the foregrounded Shakespearean element of the adaptation. This potential challenge to verisimilitude revolves around the relationships between the Shakespearean discours and the állagmic filmic histoire in terms of whether the adaptation foregrounds that discours by using Shakespearean dialogue that might juxtapose with the állagmic mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing and music, or whether it replaces that dialogue with speech more consistent with the mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing and music.

Shifting Context(s) While Keeping the Shakespearean Language Combining perceived non-Shakespearean settings, mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing and music with foregrounded Shakespearean dialogue impacts on verisimilitude in an anamorphic manner. Any realist adaptation, it will be recalled, has an anamorphic oscillation between an authorial discours (generated by the Shakespearean language, written traces of authorship, certain metadramatic conventions and so on) and a fainomaic histoire (that suppresses and obfuscates the markers of authorial artifice). An állagmic adaptation which continues to use the foregrounded artifice of Shakespearean dialogue while positioning that dialogue in a diegesis that has some verisimilarly non-Shakespearean characteristics is potentially more anamorphic than a non-állagmic adaptation that situates the authorial discours into a diegesis in which that discours seems more appropriate. This is because a non-állagmic adaptation

6  ‘ÁLLAGMIC’ ADAPTATION FROM SHAKESPEAREAN … 

165

can subsume authorial discours into filmic histoire relatively easily since the settings and filmmaking techniques used seem to fit together relatively interchangeably—characters speak a foregrounded authorial dialogue in locations and wearing costumes in which such speech seems relatively reasonable. Audiences do not live their day-to-day lives in these historical contexts and can reasonably expect that the characters who do live in these settings will talk in a manner that is somewhat different from contemporary speech. Állagmic adaptation, however, increases the gap between authorial discours and filmic histoire because the foregrounded artifice of the dialogue is enhanced when spoken in an environment in which spectators are unused to hearing such speech, and in a filmmaking style in which spectators are also unused to hearing such speech. However, since visual and authorial anamorphism derive their catharses from the subsumption and obfuscation of inevitable disruptions to verisimilitude, állagmic adaptation can close this increased gap between authorial discours and filmic histoire in similarly anamorphic terms. Before outlining the subsuming and obfuscating elements of this anamorphism, it is worth stressing the extent to which the potential juxtaposition of verisimilarly non-Shakespearean mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing and music with the Shakespearean verse operates at the popular non-academic level. Luhrmann’s account of his own juxtaposition of these elements in William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet demonstrates this: To keep the audience alive […] you’ve got to have a device, right, a distancing device, […] essentially there’s got to be something that keeps the whole cinematic experience heightened, so you don’t fall into, ever, a feeling that it’s somehow keyhole, that it’s psychological. […] In Romeo and Juliet it’s the language. (Luhrmann 2011)

It is significant that Luhrmann both thinks of the juxtaposition as ‘distancing’ and that this distancing isn’t employed in order to convey a Baudrian ‘knowledge effect, an actualisation of the work process, as denunciation of ideology’ (Baudry 1985, 533–4), but instead, and quite the opposite, to function as ‘something that keeps the whole cinematic experience heightened’ (Luhrmann 2011). Luhrmann seems, here, to unconsciously intuit the pleasures of anamorphism—a ‘distancing device’ that temporarily foregrounds artifice, but that, to rework Feuer’s

166  R. GEAL

(1993, 36–7) paraphrasing of Antony’s funeral oration, is ultimately for the purposes of praising cinematic realism, not burying it. Part of the subsumption and obfuscation of the foregrounded állagmic artifice is situated in the otherwise unified relationships between the állagmic mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing and music, so that everything in the film apart from the dialogue is conventional and believable. This unity still has the potential to juxtapose with foregrounded Shakespearean dialogue, however. The anamorphic oscillation between these two elements is grounded in two interrelated processes—first, a fainomaic component to the relationship between Shakespearean dialogue and non-Shakespearean setting and filmmaking style and second, a hermeneutic spectatorial regime in which these relationships are perceived as manipulations of perceived Shakespearean meaning, rather than in terms of enunciative issues. This second element is most clearly demonstrated by the ways in which academic legitimations interpret these relationships. Állagmic adaptation is also fainomaic adaptation in the sense that the mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing and music that might ostensibly clash with verisimilar expectations about appropriately Shakespearean mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing and music can be rendered as visual manifestations of the foregrounded Shakespearean dialogue. In the aforementioned fight sequence in Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, for example, the film’s visual style might clash somewhat with verisimilar expectations about what is appropriately Shakespearean, but the film still presents visual representations of foregrounded dialogue from the playtext. At the most general level, this means that actors stand-in for Shakespearean characters, providing those characters with visual embodiments. But at a more specific and more important level, particular parts of this dialogue can be given a fainomaic form that aligns the potentially juxtaposed non-Shakespearean setting with that dialogue. Thus, Luhrmann’s fight sequence keeps the Shakespearean line ‘Put up your swords’ (1.1.61). The dialogue’s mention of a sword could be problematic here—the characters have already been shown with guns, rather than swords. The guns fit in with the contemporary setting and with a filmmaking style intentionally reminiscent of a Leone-esque Mexican standoff. As such, Luhrmann could have avoided this potential clash between Shakespearean dialogue and állagmic setting and style by equipping his Montagues and Capulets with swords rather than guns. This would threaten the otherwise consistent verisimilitude of the

6  ‘ÁLLAGMIC’ ADAPTATION FROM SHAKESPEAREAN … 

167

állagmic setting and style, however. Conversely, Luhrmann could cut out all the dialogue mentioning swords—lines such as ‘Draw if you be men’ (1.1.59) and ‘What, art thou drawn among these heartless hinds?’ (1.1.63) can apply to drawn guns as well as to drawn swords—indeed both of these lines are used to apply directly to guns as fainomaic manifestations of those lines in the scene. Similarly, verses such as ‘Part fools. Put up your swords. You/know not what you do’ (1.1.61–2) and ‘I do but keep the peace. Put up thy sword,/Or manage it to part these men with me’ (65–6) would still make sense if the mentions of swords were cut out by changing the lines to ‘Part fools. […] You/know not what you do’ (1.1.61–2) and ‘I do but keep the peace. […] part these men with me’ (65–6). Cutting out these mentions of swords, however, would also remove some of the heightened potential for Luhrmann’s ‘distancing device […] that keeps the whole cinematic experience heightened’ (2011). Luhrmann does not want to entirely suppress the potentially ‘distancing’ effect of this relationship between verbal swords and visual guns. Instead, Luhrmann creates an anamorphic oscillation between the verbal and the visual by establishing a potential contradiction which he then resolves at the fainomaic visual level. The initial visual presence of guns rather than swords precedes the verbal mention of swords. So, to begin with, the verbal articulation of a more general form of violence that does not specify either swords or guns—‘Quarrel, I will back/thee’ (1.1.32–3)—is followed by close-ups and extreme close-ups of three different characters’ guns. At this stage, spectators, although they might have some vague verisimilar idea that Montagues and Capulets generally fight with swords in Renaissance marketplaces, rather than with guns at petrol stations, are nevertheless not confronted by an explicit juxtaposition between verbal Shakespearean sword and visual cinematic gun. When Benvolio (Dash Mihok) does eventually speak the name of the explicit Shakespearean weapon, he does so in such a way that resolves the juxtaposition in clear fainomaic terms. His lines, ‘Part fools. Put up your swords. You/know not what you do’ (1.1.61–2) is interrupted by a substantial pause before ‘Put up your swords’. In fact, Luhrmann utilises the above-mentioned possible way to deliver the line without mentioning swords at all by moving the structure of the dialogue around, so that the film Benvolio actually says ‘Part fools. You know not what you do’ prior to this pause. The pause includes a freeze-frame, the non-diegetic writing on which

168  R. GEAL

introduces ‘Benvolio MONTAGUE Romeo’s cousin’. In this freezeframe, Benvolio waves his gun into the foreground, thereby establishing his motives and the weapon he uses in an attempt to enforce these motives, without any subsequent need for the rest of the verse that mentions swords. However, the shot after this freeze-frame is a rapid zoom into an extreme close-up of the side of his gun, on which the words ‘SWORD 9MM SERIES S’ are engraved. The camera cuts back to Benvolio and to one of the fools he is trying to part, before he eventually delivers the first potentially juxtaposing mention of a different form of weapon by saying ‘Put up your swords’. Luhrmann thus collapses the two potentially different weapons into one verisimilar bundling of the word sword and the image gun. This ‘SWORD’ gun, then, is both fainomaic in the sense that it renders the dialogue in a believable visual form, and állagmic in the sense that it shifts the context of that fainomaic rendering from a sword that is ostensibly unproblematically part of Shakespearean verisimilitude into a gun that could be problematically not part of Shakespearean verisimilitude, but is inscribed into that verisimilitude through mapping a visual fainomisation onto a verbal articulation. The ‘SWORD’ gun is thereby not completely unproblematically Shakespearean, but it is made less-Shakespearean rather than completely non-Shakespearean. It is important, too, that the zoom into the extreme close-up of the ‘SWORD’ gun precedes Benvolio’s mention of sword. The fainomaic image thereby prepares the way for the dialogue that follows it, so that the image legitimates the word, rather than vice versa. The rapid zoom into the image is also part of Luhrmann’s post-classical frenetic visual style at this point, with the first sound of the Morricone-esque panpipes accompanying this image almost like a leitmotif. Filmmaking style, as well as the specific mise-en-scène of the gun, has an állagmic function at this point, bundling together to form a consistent visual tone that has the potential to juxtapose with verbal mentions of swords, but into which those verbal mentions are collapsed through fainomaic representation. This is a quite specific example of állagmic anamorphism rendered in fainomaic terms—verbal sword and visual ‘SWORD’ gun. It is also the case, though, as with the kind of fainomaic anamorphism of Shakespearean themes and characters discussed in the previous chapter, that this scene contains a more general and more temporally diffused fainomisation of állagmic mise-en-scène. Thus, extreme close-ups of the

6  ‘ÁLLAGMIC’ ADAPTATION FROM SHAKESPEAREAN … 

169

butts of rival guns show ornate crests with the words ‘MONTAGUE’ and ‘CAPULET’, and one of the car license plates reads ‘CAP 005’. (There is also an advertising sign selling petrol featuring the written line ‘Add more fuel to your fire’, interpolated from 3 Henry VI [5.4.70].) These images are a less specific form of fainomai than the ‘SWORD’ gun, but they demonstrate how adaptation can employ diffuse, as well as particular, fainomaic images. It is also the case that these images focus on Shakespearean discours’ potential written quality, as the previous chapter discussed. The enunciative properties of the scene, then, are complex and overlapping, with a register that raises the potential for an állagmic juxtaposition with the Shakespearean dialogue, and a register that subsumes and obfuscates that potential in an anamorphic manner. As with the more general fainomaic examples discussed in the last chapter, academic legitimation demonstrates how these relationships can be interpreted as manipulations of Shakespearean meaning rather than as anamorphic in enunciative terms. Michael Anderegg, for example, has noted a distinction between ways that Luhrmann employs the Shakespearean language. The first does not challenge verisimilitude: ‘At times, the film can simply pretend that the language and the “poetic” diction are not alien to contemporary sensibilities. A line like “thy drugs are quick” [5.3.120] fits easily into the drug culture of the Capulet ball sequence’ (2003, 60). The second emphasises a form of discontinuity: At other times, the language is allowed to remain ‘Shakespeare’ – so, for a critical example, the sonnet lines Romeo [Leonardo DiCaprio] and Juliet [Claire Danes] recite at first meeting are spoken in their entirety in spite of the fact that the meaning is not self-evident. […] Shakespeare’s sonnet transports us momentarily back to the sixteenth century and in so doing collapses the worlds of Verona and Verona Beach. (Anderegg 2003, 60)

However, even this second, potentially alienating use of Shakespearean language operates in a cinematic context that ensures the language’s comprehensibility, Anderegg arguing that this scene will ‘work’ [because], Luhrmann […] gives us the meeting of Romeo and Juliet in effect several times over through time expansion and repetitive editing patterns, and he precedes the sonnet meeting with the fish-tank meeting where the exchange of glances and the matching of identities have already been made. (Anderegg 2003, 60–1)

170  R. GEAL

Anderegg’s concern with the dialogue’s intelligibility, with whether ‘meaning is self-evident’ (2003, 60), diverts attention away from authorial anamorphism, since in asking how Luhrmann communicates in both verbal and visual ways the enunciative repercussions of these different forms of communication are elided. It is true that the words between Romeo and Juliet are made more understandable by preceding them with non-spoken images of these characters falling in love, but the relationship between the verbal and the visual registers also suppresses the potentially alienating challenge to realism caused by juxtaposing Shakespearean language with contemporary mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing and music. The purely visual fish-tank meeting between Romeo and Juliet is a fainomaic translation of the enunciated Shakespearean dialogue, with the authorially foregrounded dialogue’s discours subsumed and obfuscated by the conventionalised histoire of cinematic narration. This anamorphic process, however, can be interpreted as a question of intelligibility, with the juxtaposition between language and setting providing its own (Shakespearean) explanation for its potential anti-realism. The relationships between Shakespearean language and non-Shakespearean settings are even more complex in films that mix together verse from the playtext with contemporary speech. Again, it is academic legitimation, and the claims of adaptational filmmakers, that most clearly demonstrate how this complex anamorphism is disavowed into Shakespearean terms. The director Gus Van Sant, for example, explains how his My Own Private Idaho (1991) uses a combination of mostly contemporary non-Shakespearean speech with some verses from the Henriad in an attempt ‘to transcend time, to show that those things have always happened, everywhere’ (1993, xlii–xliii). My Own Private Idaho translocates the Henriad to the streets of contemporary America. The film’s Falstaff-like character, Bob Pidgeon (William Richert), is the tutor to and exploiter of two young hustlers, Michael Waters (River Phoenix), the equivalent of peasant Poins, and Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves), the contemporary manifestation of Prince Hal, temporarily experiencing a different life from his predestined high office. The film’s juxtaposition of conventionalised contemporary settings with Shakespearean verse is particularly complex because most of the film’s dialogue is not Shakespearean. The relationship between the film’s two forms of dialogue is interpreted, within academic legitimation, in a variety of contexts that all share an unconscious bias somewhere between fidelity

6  ‘ÁLLAGMIC’ ADAPTATION FROM SHAKESPEAREAN … 

171

criticism and dialogism that obfuscates állagmic anamorphism. This legitimation provides a Shakespearean explanation for the juxtaposition between a consistent contemporary dialogue in a contemporary setting, on the one hand, with an inconsistent Shakespearean dialogue in a contemporary setting, on the other. Susan Wiseman, for example, links these changes in language to a verbal/visual binary that, firstly, allegorises character trajectory: Shakespeare marks the text as a demand that the audience transfer attention to the spoken, Shakespearean word. The film’s contrasting of verbal and visual signifiers and sequences organizes, too, the differentiation of the narratives of the doomed Michael Waters and the rising Scott Favor; Michael’s past is signalled in visions, Scott’s control of the situation is shown in his Prince Hal-like control of dialogue and its placement in relation to Shakespeare. (Wiseman 2003, 208)

Shakespearean dialogue is thereby interpreted as a means to provide a commentary on the respective authority of different characters. Wiseman explicitly links this hierarchy of authority, moreover, with the Shakespearean derivation of those characters. Secondly, Wiseman interprets this verbal/visual binary within a reflexive context, although such a context depends upon the cultural status of Shakespeare’s canonicity: Bob Pigeon speaks in ‘Shakespeare’ and those involved in prolonged conversation are drawn into it. [In contrast,] the desperate side of the underworld is […] untouched by Shakespearean language. […] The entry of ‘Shakespeare’ into the text produces, or emphasizes, the visual/verbal split and initiates the ‘movie within a movie’ effect derived as much from the way ‘Shakespeare’ as a cultural anchor takes over the text as by the text’s carnivalizing or radicalizing of Shakespeare. (Wiseman 2003, 209)

Wiseman thus thinks of these juxtapositions as a manipulation of something inherent in the film’s relationship to the Shakespearean text, and perhaps to the process of adaptation more generally, arguing that the film has a metarelationship to Shakespeare. Even as it thematises the struggles between fathers and sons, and to an extent offers a social critique of these issues, Idaho could be figured as in an oedipal relationship to the material out of which it produces itself, particularly ‘Shakespeare’. (Wiseman 2003, 208)

172  R. GEAL

This oedipal relationship to Shakespeare therefore elides the potential alienation of the film’s complex mixture of the Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean. My Own Private Idaho’s ambiguous intertextuality can thereby be understood as Shakespearean, rather than as something that anamorphically foregrounds and disavows the artificiality of Shakespearean adaptation. Andrew Murphy can consequently argue that the film is perfectly well located within the broader Shakespeare tradition, in the sense that, just as the typical Shakespeare play provides an interweaving of materials drawn from other sources, so van Sant [sic], in fashioning his narrative, draws upon Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight [Orson Welles, 1965], which, in its turn, draws on Shakespeare’s Falstaff material. […] What van Sant [sic] offers, then, is a complex intertextual narrative in which the Shakespearean material operates within a [sic] elaborate and intertwined cultural referencing system. (Murphy 2000, 19–20)

Here, Murphy interprets the film’s complex mixture of the Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean within a canonical context, so that the manipulation of the ‘original’ is only somewhat ‘unfaithful’ in order for it to ‘faithfully’ comment on ‘the broader Shakespeare tradition’ (2000, 19). For Kathy Howlett this Shakespearean source to the film’s intertextuality facilitates a dialogic reimagining of the Henriad. The combination of Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean dialogue can then be used to explain how ‘by writing Shakespeare’s play into the centre of his script and by imitating Welles’s celebrated tavern scenes, Van Sant breaks down the binary opposition between high and low culture to reveal the vitality of the Shakespearean text’ (Howlett 2002, 168). The extent to which Howlett’s academic legitimation sutures the potential alienation of foregrounding the juxtaposition of Shakespearean dialogue with non-Shakespearean dialogue/filmmaking is demonstrated by the simultaneously dialogic and fidelity-based context in which she locates her approach to the film’s intertextuality: Such a metamorphosis is licensed within the Henriad itself when Poins bids Hal ‘put on two leather jerkins and aprons, and wait upon him [Falstaff] at his table as drawers.’ [2 Henry IV, 2.2.163–4] Hal describes his transformation as that ‘from a […] prince to a prentice? A low transformation! That shall be mine, for in everything the purpose must weigh

6  ‘ÁLLAGMIC’ ADAPTATION FROM SHAKESPEAREAN … 

173

with the folly.’ [2.2.166–8] Hal’s purpose – to expose Falstaff – justifies the ‘low transformation,’ much as Van Sant’s reframing effectively subverts and exposes the nostalgia established in Welles’s film for ‘Merrie England’ and the world of Falstaff’s tavern. (Howlett 2002, 165)

Indeed, given the specific nature of language within the Henriad, this intertextual mixing of language and filmmaking is understood by Howlett as the only way to be faithfully Shakespearean: Van Sant degrades the carnivalesque language of the Shakespearean text to liberate it. […] Shakespeare’s play not only spoke to contemporary [Elizabethan] anxieties about the displaced and marginalized but spoke about it in a vulgar carnivalesque discourse of its time. In a very real sense the play offers a critique of contemporary anxieties in a degraded and popular guise not dissimilar to Van Sant’s own agenda. Yet, as Van Sant’s film implies, subversive expressions become absorbed by the culture that they criticize. Today the play’s carnivalesque language is enshrined within the ‘official’ linguistic codes that the play itself mocks and parodies. Within this context we begin to understand that Van Sant’s project in revisioning the language of Shakespeare’s play is, in effect, an attempt to bring it into accord with the energies of the ‘original Shakespeare’. (Howlett 2002, 178–9)

Alienating combinations of the Shakespearean and the non-Shakespearean are therefore interpreted as the only effective way to communicate Shakespeare’s original juxtaposition of the worlds of tavern and court, rather than as an anamorphic effect that might foreground and simultaneously subsume the adaptation’s constructed nature. Again, when a form of potential threat to verisimilitude ‘breaks not only the fantasy identification but also the narrative surface’, raising Wollen’s question, ‘What is this film for?’ (1985, 503), the answer from academic legitimation is emphatically: ‘for exploring Shakespearean meaning’. The anamorphic nature of Shakespearean language in ostensibly non-Shakespearean settings, then, can be interpreted in canonical and dialogic terms, rather than in enunciative terms.

Shifting Context(s) and Changing the Shakespearean Language Adaptations that shift context(s) away from the verisimilarly Shakespearean most frequently replace the Shakespearean language entirely (or, in some of the subsequent examples, almost entirely).

174  R. GEAL

These films’ relationships to Shakespearean sources are therefore necessarily less foregrounded, because characters speak contemporary dialogue consistent with a contemporary setting, but they demonstrate forms of anamorphism similar to those of more ‘traditional’ non-állagmic adaptations or állagmic adaptations that keep the Shakespearean verse. Indeed, linking the elision of Shakespearean language with shifts to contemporary settings, mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing and music has the potential to downplay the foregrounding of Shakespearean enunciation almost entirely. In the previous section of this chapter, I discussed how adaptations in contemporary settings that continue to use Shakespearean dialogue potentially set up a non-verisimilar juxtaposition between the Shakespearean and the ostensibly non-Shakespearean. However, in replacing the potentially alienating Shakespearean verse with colloquial dialogue that is completely consistent with the rest of the film’s setting, mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing and music, certain loose adaptations potentially have no foregrounded authorship to juxtapose or oscillate with. Indeed, one strand of existing academic legitimation effectively cuts such loose adaptations off from their Shakespearean sources entirely, James M. Welsh arguing, for example, that ‘[d]erivative adaptations that ignore Shakespeare’s language while exploiting his plots and characters should be considered misguided and corrupt’ (2007, 105). In part, then, replacing Shakespearean with contemporary dialogue erases the potential anamorphic effects of the former. Instead of the alienating juxtaposition of archaic language with contemporary settings, mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing and music marked as so important by Luhrmann (2011), Anderegg (2003, 60), and Howlett (2002, 168), discussed above, all elements of the adaptation fit within conventionalised historical and/or generic expectations. This elision of foregrounded authorial artifice is also potentially increased by the fact that many of these loose adaptations are marketed at teenage audiences.1 Some of these audiences may have such adaptations shown to them in school or college, in which case authorial elements would be foregrounded, but these films are marketed in the context of teen genres rather than Shakespearean adaptations, with Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt claiming, of 1990s adaptations, that ‘the fact that Shakespeare is the author seems to be becoming not only increasingly beside the point but even a marketing liability’ (1997, 11). However, although the enunciated presence of Shakespeare in these films is sublimated, and indeed is entirely unnecessary, it is something

6  ‘ÁLLAGMIC’ ADAPTATION FROM SHAKESPEAREAN … 

175

that repeatedly resurfaces. For example, the names of characters and locations are frequently either taken directly from the adapted playtexts or slightly anglicised, so that they act as a form of authorial foregrounding. She’s the Man (Andy Fickman, 2006), for example, a loose teen adaptation of Twelfth Night, features many of these sublimated references. The playtext’s Isle of Illyria is shifted to Illyria High School, whose principal soccer rival is named Cornwall, after one of the play’s characters. These quasi-Shakespearean names are not only mentioned by characters (many of whom also have Shakespearean names), but are emblazoned on buildings and a large soccer scoreboard. Similarly, Twelfth Night’s subtitle, What You Will, becomes Illyria’s school play, with this title displayed on a board advertising the event, and accompanied by a drawn portrait of Shakespeare. These Shakespearean references, furthermore, are not only enunciated in a visual fainomaic manner, but also in written form, demonstrating again the close link between authorial anamorphosis and written Shakespearean enunciation, discussed, in relation to Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, in the previous chapter. Academic legitimation again acts to obfuscate these Shakespearean resurfacings. Boose and Burt explain these enunciative traces thus: In the wake of the present displacements of book and literary culture by film and video culture and the age of mechanical reproduction by the age of electronic reproduction, the traditional literary field itself has already, to some extent, been displaced as an object of enquiry by cultural studies. [This form of sublimated enunciation] enacts this displacement, invoking the high status literary text only to dismiss it. (Boose and Burt 1997, 10)

L. Monique Pittman locates such Shakespearean traces in She’s the Man within a similar cultural context: This tissue of allusions to Shakespeare and England imagine the playwright as a pastiche of cultural references and construct a subjectivity for the poet akin to postmodern understandings of the self as a series of intersecting and contradictory discourses. (Pittman 2008, 133)

If this ‘tissue of allusions’ were limited to postmodern adaptations, then this argument might be entirely persuasive. There are examples, though, of much earlier loose Shakespearean adaptations using contemporary

176  R. GEAL

dialogue and settings2 that also seem compelled to invoke ‘the high status literary text only to dismiss it’ (Boose and Burt 1997, 10). An Honourable Murder (Godfrey Grayson, 1960), for example, one such adaptation of Julius Caesar set in the contemporary business world of 1960, precedes Pittman’s ‘postmodern understandings of the self as a series of intersecting and contradictory discourses’ (2008, 133), but also contains both what Pittman describes as a ‘tissue of allusions’ not dissimilar to those in She’s the Man, and a reflexive fascination with the textual origins of reworked source material much like that which I discussed in relation to Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet in the previous chapter. The film opens, after two title screens providing the names of the principal actors and film title, with a written and textually foregrounded example of Shakespeare’s enunciation from the source play out of which the film is loosely adapted, and from which the latter’s title is also derived—this writing states ‘“They that have done this deed are honourable men.” Julius Caesar Act 3 Sc.2 William Shakespeare’. Characters’ names are either taken from the playtext, or slightly anglicised, so that there is a Brutus (Norman Wooland), a Cassius (Douglas Wilmer) and a Julian, rather than Julius, Caesar (John Longden). Almost all of the dialogue is verisimilarly colloquial, but occasional moments of direct Shakespearean verse are incorporated so that, for example, Julian Caesar describes Cassius as having a ‘lean and hungry look’ (1.2.195) and wishes he were instead surrounded by the ‘fat and sleek-headed’ (1.2.193–4). In a similar way to how She’s the Man re-presented Shakespeare’s locations as rival schools, An Honourable Murder incorporates Shakespearean elements into the names of the rival companies ‘Pompey Shipping Line’ and ‘Imperial Petroleum Company’, the latter of which is rendered into fainomaic form as a small statue of a Roman imperial eagle on Cassius’ desk. The visual theme of statues representing Shakespearean enunciation also appears in a bust of Caesar which Antony (Philip Saville) and Caesar’s secretary (Elizabeth Saunders) stand beside while ruminating on the dangers to the statue’s personification. This moment is not dissimilar to Cassius’ juxtaposition, while standing beneath Caesar’s statue in Mankiewicz’s adaptation, discussed in the previous chapter, between how Caesar ‘doth bestride the narrow world/Like a colossus, and we petty men/Walk under his huge legs’ (1.2.133–5) with the real man’s weaknesses and faults (1.2.101–29). Indeed, An Honourable Murder’s

6  ‘ÁLLAGMIC’ ADAPTATION FROM SHAKESPEAREAN … 

177

use of statues here is a demonstration of the fainomaic presentation of Shakespearean enunciation similar to that in Mankiewicz’s adaptation, and potentially also relates to visualised forms of thematising foreknowledge and film’s deceptive ontology that is discussed in the next chapter. The diachronic continuity between the Shakespearean ‘tissue of allusions’ (Pittman 2008, 133) and the foregrounding of Shakespeare’s written enunciations within the historically disparate films An Honourable Murder, She’s the Man and William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet therefore suggest the operations of unconscious anamorphism, rather than historically specific ‘postmodern understandings of the self as a series of intersecting and contradictory discourses’ (Pittman 2008, 133). Replacing Shakespearean with contemporary dialogue, within this form of állagmic adaptation, does thereby not remove the conservative reflexivity of foregrounding the film’s constructed nature via barely repressed Shakespearean enunciation. This suggests that there is something inherent in this form of állagmic translation. Even though the overt signifiers of Shakespearean enunciation are replaced with signifiers of cinematic histoire-like verisimilitude, elements of Shakespearean discours repeatedly and anamorphically resurface. Állagmic adaptation of this kind can even render this anamorphism in a fetishistic manner, both in terms of authorial resurfacings and in terms of the written fainomisation of Shakespearean enunciation. An example of this fetishism is provided in The Street King (James Gavin Bedford, 2002), another loose contemporary adaptation, this time of Richard III, set amongst the Hispanic street gangs of California. The names of Shakespearean characters are again partly kept and partly reworked, in this case into a Hispanic form—Richard himself is Rico (Jon Seda), King Edward is Eduardo (Timothy Paul Perez), Lady Anne is Anita (Tonantzín Carmelo), and her dead husband, slain once again by Richard/Rico is transformed from Edward into Alejandro (Adam Rodriguez), to distinguish him the film’s other Edward/Eduardo. As in the playtext, Richard/Rico decides to woo the widow/girlfriend of the man he killed. Once he accomplishes this, the film’s Rico rips open Anita’s shirt and descends down her body, pausing to lick and kiss the written enunciation, in tattoo form above the belly button, of the dead former lover. This is an adaptation that once again renders its Shakespearean origins into visualised and bastardised form, the icon of the Bard contemporised into graffiti. The fetishisation of Shakespeare’s written traces, in the close-up of Rico’s abdominal kiss,

178  R. GEAL

is highly sexualised, demonstrating how adaptation not only exploits Shakespearean origins for narrative and thematic purposes, but does so masochistically: Anita’s acquiescence to Rico’s advances could certainly be seen as masochistic, while Rico’s kiss of the tattoo borders on an emasculating, homosexual fellatio of the usurped dead rival. It is not enough that Rico woos and wins Anita as the playtextual Richard does, he must masochistically fetishise both what he appropriates from the source text, and the verisimilarly written nature of that source text. These loose adaptations that remove the Shakespearean verse demonstrate the extent to which an unconscious and underlying anamorphic process can take on narrative form. Heath, it will be recalled, claimed that realist cinema’s pleasures rely so much on visual anamorphism that ‘the drama of vision becomes a constant reflexive fascination in films’ (Heath 1985, 514, original emphasis)—hence Jaws’ unseen shark, its violent irruptions, the fragments of dismembered limbs referring to the fragmentary nature of cinematography and editing and so on. Adaptations that remove the Shakespearean verse have a similarly reflexive fascination with the drama of authorship—almost all traces that foreground authorial artifice have been removed because they have no specific non-reflexive narratorial purpose, but these traces repeatedly resurface. Thus, a film which has no need to draw attention to its authorial artifice cannot help but do so, in order to set up and tease out some anamorphic pleasure.

Conclusion Állagmic adaptation is not an inherent component of films derived from canonical sources, but those adaptations that shift their narratives from verisimilarly Shakespearean to verisimilarly non-Shakespearean settings do so in three different anamorphic ways. First, állagmic adaptations employ the same kind of fainomaic translations of Shakespearean verse into cinematic images as those films that do not make an állagmic shift in setting. The second and third anamorphic processes are optional additions to the fainomai depending on whether the film keeps the Shakespearean verse in the ostensibly non-Shakespearean setting or replaces that verse with a dialogue more in keeping with the setting. Keeping the Shakespearean verse has the potential to set up an alienating juxtaposition between word and image, but adaptation can subsume and obfuscate this juxtaposition through fainomaic manipulations, and

6  ‘ÁLLAGMIC’ ADAPTATION FROM SHAKESPEAREAN … 

179

through a legitimating hermeneutic that positions the potentially alienating juxtapositions in a canonical context. Replacing the Shakespearean verse has the potential to downplay or completely remove the alienating juxtaposition, but foregrounded authorship can resurface in snippets of Shakespearean verse, names, and fainomaic imagery, particularly in a written form that draws attention to a film’s canonical origins, before subsuming this into an unproblematic believably contemporary verisimilitude. Each of these processes repeats the anamorphic oscillation between foregrounding and subsuming/obfuscating foregrounded authorial artifice. As with the non-állagmic examples discussed in the previous chapter, these multiple forms of anamorphic oscillation can overlap one another in complex ways. Állagmic adaptations, however, are potentially even more anamorphic than non-állagmic adaptations because they include an enhanced oscillatory juxtaposition between a foregrounded authorial discours that is even more distinct from the cinematic histoire of a verisimilarly non-Shakespearean setting.

Notes 1. There is a relatively sizeable body of academic writing on Shakespearean films in teen settings. See, for example, Balizet (2004), Boose and Burt (1997), Burt (1998, 2002), Clement (2008), French (2006), Osborne (2008), Pittman (2008). 2. These include, for example, A Double Life (George Cukor, 1947), Kiss Me Kate (George Sidney, 1953), Joe MacBeth (Ken Hughes, 1955), The Bad Sleep Well (Akira Kurosawa, 1960), An Honourable Murder (Godfrey Grayson, 1960), and West Side Story (Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, 1961).

References Anderegg, Michael. 2003. “James Dean Meets the Pirate’s Daughter: Passion and Parody in ‘William Shakespeare’s Romeo  +  Juliet’ and ‘Shakespeare in Love’.” In Shakespeare, the Movie, II: Popularising the Plays on Film, TV, Video, and DVD, edited by Richard Burt and Linda E. Boose, 56–71. London: Routledge. Balizet, Ariane M. 2004. “Teen Scenes: Recognising Shakespeare in Teen Film.” In Almost Shakespeare: Reinventing His Works for Cinema and Television, edited by James R. Keller and Leslie Stratyner, 122–36. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

180  R. GEAL Baudry, Jean-Louis. 1985. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” In Movies and Methods: Volume II, edited by Bill Nichols, 531–42. Berkeley: University of California Press. Belsey, Catherine. 1998. “Shakespeare and Film: A Question of Perspective.” In Shakespeare on Film, edited by Robert Shaughnessy, 61–70. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Boose, Linda E., and Richard Burt. 1997. “Totally Clueless? Shakespeare Goes Hollywood in the 1990s.” In Shakespeare, the Movie: Popularising the Plays on Film, TV, and Video, edited by Linda E. Boose and Richard Burt, 8–22. London: Routledge. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, eds. 1985. Classical Hollywood Cinema. London: Routledge. Burt, Richard. 1998. Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan. ———. 2002. “T(e)en Things I Hate About Girlene Shakesploitation Flicks in the Late 1990s, or, Not-so-Fast Times at Shakespeare High.” In Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema, edited by Courtney Lehmann and Lisa S. Starks, 187–204. London: Associated University Presses. Clement, Jennifer. 2008. “The Postfeminist Mystique: Feminism and Shakespearean Adaptation in ‘10 Things I Hate About You’ and ‘She’s the Man’.” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation [online] 4, no. 1: 1–24. https://www.borrowers.uga.edu/781814/pdf. Coursen, H.R. 2005. Shakespeare Translated: Derivatives on Film and TV. New York: Peter Lang. Feuer, Jane. 1993. The Hollywood Musical, 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Macmillan. French, Emma. 2006. Selling Shakespeare to Hollywood: The Marketing of Filmed Shakespeare Adaptations from 1989 into the New Millennium. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press. Heath, Stephen. 1985. “‘Jaws’, Ideology and Film Theory.” In Movies and Methods Volume II, edited by Bill Nichols, 509–14. Berkeley: University of California Press. Holderness, Graham. 1998. “Radical Potentiality and Institutional Closure.” In Shakespeare on Film, edited by Robert Shaughnessy, 71–82. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Howlett, Kathy M. 2002. “Utopian Revisioning of Falstaff’s Tavern World: Orson Welles’s ‘Chimes at Midnight’ and Gus Van Sant’s ‘My Own Private Idaho’.” In The Reel Shakespeare: Alternative Cinema and Theory, edited by Lisa S. Starks and Courtney Lehmann, 165–88. London: Associated University Presses. Langford, Barry. 2010. Post-classical Hollywood: Film Industry, Style and Ideology Since 1945. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

6  ‘ÁLLAGMIC’ ADAPTATION FROM SHAKESPEAREAN … 

181

Luhrmann, Baz. 2011. “New American Independents & the Digital Revolution.” Interview by Mark Cousins. The Story of Film: An Odyssey. Channel 4 Television, Series 1 Episode 14. McBride, Joseph. 1996. Orson Welles. New York: Da Capo. Manvell, Roger. 1971. Shakespeare & the Film. London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd. Murphy, Andrew. 2000. “The Book on the Screen: Shakespeare Films and Textual Culture.” In Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle, edited by Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray, 10–25. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Osborne, Laurie. 2008. “‘Twelfth Night’s’ Cinematic Adolescents: One Play, One Plot, One Setting, and Three Films.” Shakespeare Bulletin 26, no. 2: 9–36. Pittman, L. Monique. 2008. “Dressing the Girl/Playing the Boy: Twelfth Night Learns Soccer on the Set of ‘She’s the Man’.” Literature/Film Quarterly 36, no. 2: 122–36. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1977. The Poetics of Prose. Translated by Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Welsh, James M. 2007. “What Is a ‘Shakespeare Film’, Anyway?” In The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation, edited by James M. Welsh and Peter Lev, 105–14. Plymouth: Scarecrow Press. Wiseman, Susan. 2003. “The Family Tree Motel: Subliming Shakespeare in ‘My Own Private Idaho’.” In Shakespeare, the Movie, II: Popularising the Plays on Film, TV, Video, and DVD, edited by Richard Burt and Linda E. Boose, 200– 12. London: Routledge. Wollen, Peter. 1985. “Godard and Counter Cinema: ‘Vent D’Est’.” In Movies and Methods Volume II, edited by Bill Nichols, 500–9. Berkeley: University of California Press. Van Sant, Gus. 1993. ‘Even Cowgirls Get the Blues’ and ‘My Own Private Idaho’. London: Faber and Faber.

Filmography Bad Sleep Well, The. 1960. Directed by Akira Kurosawa. Japan: Toho. Chimes at Midnight. 1965. Directed by Orson Welles. Spain/Switzerland: Internacionale. Double Life, A. 1947. Directed by George Cukor. USA: Universal. Forbidden Planet. 1956. Directed by Fred M. Wilcox. USA: MGM. Hamlet. 1948. Directed by Laurence Olivier. UK: Two Cities. Hamlet. 1964. Directed by Grigori Kozintsev. USSR: Lenfilm. Hamlet. 1990. Directed by Franco Zeffirelli. USA: Warner Bros. Hamlet. 1996. Directed by Kenneth Branagh. UK: Castle Rock/Columbia. Hamlet. 2000. Directed by Michael Almereyda. USA: Double A Films.

182  R. GEAL Honourable Murder, An. 1960. Directed by Godfrey Grayson. UK: Warner-Pathé. It’s a Wonderful Life. 1946. Directed by Frank Capra. USA: RKO. Jaws. 1975. Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA: Universal. Joe MacBeth. 1955. Directed by Ken Hughes. UK: Columbia. Julius Caesar. 1953. Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. USA: MGM. Kiss Me Kate. 1953. Directed by George Sidney. USA: MGM. Midsummer Night’s Dream, A. 1968. Directed by Peter Hall. UK: Filmways. My Own Private Idaho. 1991. Directed by Gus Van Sant. USA: Fine Line Features. She’s the Man. 2006. Directed by Andy Fickman. USA: DreamWorks. Street King, The. 2002. Directed by James Gavin Bedford. USA: Mistral Pictures LLC. West Side Story. 1961. Directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins. USA: United Artists. William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. 1996. Directed by Baz Luhrmann. USA: Twentieth Century Fox.

CHAPTER 7

The Drama of Foreknowledge

The previous two chapters established that fainomaic adaptation is inherent and even ontological to realist film adaptations of canonical ‘originals’, whereas állagmic adaptation is relatively optional. This chapter focuses on an element of adaptation that falls somewhere between these two poles, exploring the consequences of the fact that some spectators of canonical adaptations like Shakespearean films may have explicit foreknowledge about certain narratives, characters, themes and dialogue. Audiences might watch a film for the first time knowing which characters are going to be murdered or betray one another, or might expect to hear some of Shakespeare’s most famous lines, and so on. These specific expectations about what a spectator might expect to see and hear in an adaptation are similar to the broader foregrounding of artifice inherent in fainomaic adaptation, which requires that the spectator has a degree of knowledge that they are watching authored discours rather than ostensibly un-authored histoire, so that even if spectators are unfamiliar with the specific details of how an adaptation develops in narrative terms, they are still aware on some level that they are watching an established cultural signifier like ‘Shakespeare’, and this signifier foregrounds an adaptation’s artifice. But specific foreknowledge of certain elements of the ways in which canonical narratives develop has the potential to provide an additional layer of foregrounded artifice. In the examples selected in this chapter, then, it is not only Shakespeare’s dialogue that is rendered © The Author(s) 2019 R. Geal, Anamorphic Authorship in Canonical Film Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16496-6_7

183

184  R. GEAL

into visual form. The outcome of that which unfolds before audiences is already (potentially) somewhat foreknown. There is a degree of variance within the ways in which these foreknown elements are foregrounded. Állagmic adaptations that suppress traces of Shakespearean enunciation and are marketed at teen audiences do not necessarily carry overt traces of foreknowledge—most teenagers watching She’s the Man for the first time will not already know the specifics of how the film will end through a detailed knowledge of Twelfth Night, for example, unless they are being shown the film as part of a school or college class. On the other hand, adaptations that contain clearer signifiers of Shakespearean enunciation more necessarily negotiate the fact that (some) audiences might have (some) foreknowledge of the films’ narratives, characters, themes and dialogue. Other than the apocryphal philistine who sees Hamlet for the first time and complains that it is full of clichés, most spectators can reasonably be supposed to expect any given Hamlet to die at the end of a Hamlet adaptation, and even if they don’t know the verse inside out, most spectators will anticipate hearing lines such as ‘To be, or not to be’ (3.1.58), will await the appearance of Yorick’s skull and so on. As with the two forms of adaptation discussed in the previous two chapters, Shakespearean foreknowledge works within the mechanisms of anamorphosis. The principle of Benveniste’s cinematic histoire (Metz 1985, 544) is that film passes itself off as an ostensibly un-authored unfolding which obfuscates its constructed nature. Part of this histoire is located in a (degree of ) lack of knowledge about how the film will unfold in temporal terms, so that it is not completely clear, during the course of watching a film for the first time, how characters will respond to the situations in which they find themselves (or, more accurately, into which they are placed). In this sense, histoire corresponds with reality, in which an individual can never know exactly what might happen, whereas discours may diverge from this aspect of reality if certain aspects of what will happen are foreknown. The colloquial term ‘spoilers’, referring to a discourse between those who have already seen a particular film that might be heard or read by those who have not yet seen that film, is instructive here, with its etymological claim that an important element of a film’s pleasure is ruined if the spectator finds out what will happen in that film prior to watching it. There are some subtleties to this generalisation that I will address throughout the chapter—film narratives tend to unfold along relatively

7  THE DRAMA OF FOREKNOWLEDGE 

185

narrow conventionalised lines organised around genre, star status, historical and cultural production contexts and so on. It is also true that spectators can enjoy multiple viewings of the same film, despite the fact that they know its outcome. Nevertheless, it is the case that, in a similar way to the anamorphic effects identified in my account of fainomaic adaptation, realist film’s traditionally temporally unfolding histoire is potentially foregrounded as partial, constructed discours because an adapted film’s narratives, characters, themes and dialogue may already be known to some spectators, so that the adapted film has something like pre-established ‘spoilers’. And, as with the foregrounded markers of artifice generated by fainomaic and állagmic adaptation, foreknowledge’s discours-like threat to cinematic histoire is subsumed and obfuscated in anamorphic terms. The relationship between these forms of histoire and discours, in terms of foreknowledge, is similar to their relationship in terms of fainomaic translation in two key ways. Firstly, anamorphosis is in operation when the discours is first presented, and subsequently subsumed and obfuscated into histoire. Just as Heath identified the disruption to and subsequent subsumption back into realist grammar as something inscribed into narrative as the ‘drama of vision’ (Heath 1985, 514), so too the exploitation and thematisation of what is already known about Shakespearean texts can be understood as the ‘drama of foreknowledge’, when that foreknowledge is subsumed and/or obfuscated in various ways. Secondly, academic legitimation locates this subsumption/obfuscation within the context of the Shakespearean rather than the enunciative. Many of the examples discussed in the previous two chapters demonstrate that fainomaic re-presentation of Shakespearean verse and anamorphic foreknowledge can frequently interact and overlap. The fight between Montagues and Capulets in the opening scene of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, for example, as has already been established, unconsciously links the camera’s anatomisation of male bodies and the cutting processes of continuity editing. Peter Donaldson’s analysis of this scene connects the camera’s anatomisation with the ensuing street fight in playtextual terms. The temporal link between these elements, and the foreknowledge inherent in this temporal link, is demonstrated in Donaldson’s description of how [t]he male body is ‘anatomized’ here, […] zooms show us parts of bodies, not only displaying them to the gaze but also, disquietingly, prefiguring the danger and terror of the street fights that quickly follow. […]

186  R. GEAL The spectator cannot see exactly what is occurring; bodies appear in pieces even as the swords of the youths threaten to cut them in pieces. (Donaldson 1990, 154, my emphasis)

Thus, the drama of foreknowledge is in operation here because the director thematises the audience’s foreknowledge of how the narrative will unfold within the camerawork and editing, rapidly cutting between framings of bodies that refer to what will subsequently happen to those bodies. The filmmaking in this scene is thereby reflexive, inscribing foreknowledge about narrative into a form of film grammar that refers to this narrative foreknowledge. However, academic legitimation, again, plays an important role in demonstrating a hermeneutic context that shifts attention away from the scene’s bundling of reflexive and narrative foreknowledge, and instead onto how the scene’s ‘prefiguring’ of violence against the male body operates in a canonical context: ‘A central feature of the sex-gender system in place in Shakespeare’s text is the obsessive verbal equation of erect penis and sword’ (Donaldson 1990, 153); ‘The motif of the body in pieces as it is used in the opening scenes of [the film] draws attention to the phallic character of the feud’ (1990, 154). Donaldson, therefore, does not think that the scene’s foreknowledge problematises cinema’s conventionalised temporally unfolding histoire because he locates the foreknowledge in a Shakespearean context, rather than a cinematic context. Zeffirelli’s opening sequence is not the clearest example of this process, however, because its reflexive and narrative prefiguring occurs in such close temporal proximity to the events that are being prefigured. A more temporally sustained example of the drama of foreknowledge operates in relation to Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar’s portrayal of statues. I have already established that Mankiewicz uses statues as a fainomaic representation of the playtext’s verbal connections between stone and blood/flesh. The central example of this is the bust of Caesar in a fountain that fainomaises Calpurnia’s dream about Caesar’s bleeding statue. In terms of the drama of foreknowledge, this bust is therefore not only a fainomaic manifestation of foregrounded Shakespearean dialogue, but is also a fainomaic manifestation of foreknowledge about the Shakespearean narrative—the bust is a visual stand-in for narrative events that predict what will happen in later narrative events. Mankiewicz’s temporal positioning of this bust, in the opening sequence almost forty minutes before Calpurnia has her dream and Caesar recounts it, not only

7  THE DRAMA OF FOREKNOWLEDGE 

187

temporally diffuses the fainomaic translation of word into image across the film, as I claimed in Chapter 5. In addition, the bust is also a fainomaic foreshadowing of what will happen in the narrative (and of what a character will say will happen before it happens). The film thus presents audiences with an image of what will occur right in its opening moments, reminding spectators of their (potential) foreknowledge about its authorial artifice, so that this enhanced foreknown authorial artifice can then be subsumed and obfuscated into a heightened anamorphic oscillation with a cinematic histoire in which narrative events seem to temporally unfold, rather than be pre-authored. The relationship between foregrounding and subsuming/obfuscating foreknowledge has some important theoretical dimensions that need addressing, but first it is important to note how Mankiewicz’s manipulation of this relationship can be elided by a form of academic legitimation that interprets his fainomaic representation of the drama of foreknowledge in canonical terms. Wilson’s analysis of the film, which I have already discussed in relation to fainomai, links Mankiewicz’s statues to foreknowledge, but to a foreknowledge derived entirely from, and relating entirely to, the playtext. Wilson discusses how the playtext sets up various omens that characters go on to ignore at their peril, the most famous of which is the Soothsayer’s warning to ‘Beware the ides of March’ (1.2.19). Calpurnia’s dream about the bleeding statue is another such omen. Within the context of fidelity criticism, Wilson notes how omens in the playtext also become omens appropriate to the cinematic medium, so that the film ‘relies heavily on busts and statues to establish a compelling miseen-scène and underscore thematic elements’ (2000, 149), and thereby ‘Mankiewicz makes us believe that the busts and statues are omens just as significant as lions or ‘men in fire’ [1.3.25] walking the Roman streets’ (2000, 150). Therefore, ‘[i]n a play that tests men’s judgment and their ability to decipher and use omens and signs to their best advantage, [Mankiewicz’s] marble statues deliver crucial “speeches” to those who will listen. Caesar proves deaf to this warning’ (2000, 150). The way in which statues’ prophesies thematise the inherent foreknowledge of presenting authorial enunciation is entirely elided. Instead, within the tradition of fidelity criticism, the focus on the film’s faithful replication of a playtextual theme disavows the film’s unconscious manipulation of the drama of foreknowledge.

188  R. GEAL

‘Anomalous’ Suspense and ‘Anomalous’ Foreknowledge Adaptation’s oscillations between foregrounding foreknowledge and then subsuming and obfuscating that foreknowledge can exploit the anamorphic potential of a particular aspect of human cognition and perception which is relevant to the interrelated mental processes of understanding narratives, making sense of visual stimuli, and generating hypotheses about how events might play out—all of which are central to the experience of watching a film, and of watching a film adaptation. The human mind relates to these processes in a complex way that generates forms of misrecognition which are anomalous responses to what might occur in the real world, but which function as part of the conventions regulating fiction. These anomalous processes are somewhat different, though interrelated, in the following examples. Central to the ways that an adaptation can exploit foreknowledge about how events occur in the ‘original’ is the cognitive schemata whereby the human brain responds in particular ways to what it already knows will happen. I derive my understanding of how these schemata operate in adaptation from a related form of narrative foreknowledge that Richard Gerrig calls ‘anomalous suspense’. Gerrig is concerned with repetition of the same written narratives, rather than adaptations of previous narratives in different media, but his approach can apply to both. His aim is to explain how a reader might experience suspense about the outcome of a narrative on repeated readings, even if the reader is 100% certain about the outcome of that which is coded towards being suspenseful. He explains this by situating the reader’s response in an evolutionary context in which responding to various stimuli by expecting only a limited number of outcomes would be a dangerous activity. Generally, perceptual stimuli are responded to in very routine ways determined by habituation. Thus, Gerrig claims that ‘cognitive processes optimally deliver schematic expectations’ (1993: 173). This line of thinking corresponds to more recent developments in neurobiology, exemplified in Jakob Hohwy’s The Predictive Mind, which argues that ‘[t]he mind exists in prediction. Our perceptual experience of the world arises in our attempts at predicting our own current sensory input’ (2013: 258). Typically, then, the human mind pays attention to a small number of stimuli which it predicts will be relevant and repeated. However, the human mind also evolved in an environment in which habitual, expected stimuli could also be accompanied by more infrequent

7  THE DRAMA OF FOREKNOWLEDGE 

189

dangers. Charles Darwin’s description of this threatening environment, in which ‘each at some period of its life […] has to struggle for life, and to suffer great destruction’ (2009 [1859], 61), has influenced a biocultural approach to film which stresses how the human mind searches for traces of such threats amongst the more frequent and predictable security of the habitual. So, for Torben Grodal, ‘[i]f we suddenly see or hear something, we may experience a shock although we may find out after a short analysis that there is no reason to be alarmed. […] The perceptual impact is caused by inferior, automated, and non-conscious processes that register strong changes of stimuli’ (1997, 32). This is the context which determines what Gerrig calls our ‘expectation of uniqueness’ (1993, 170, original emphasis). Although our ancestors might cognitively process their repeated, habitual visits to reliable sources of food or to a watering hole in response to a number of mostly non-threatening perceptual stimuli, as Hohwy claims, ‘[t]he mind exists in prediction’ (2013, 258). Predicting the possibility of an unlikely, but possible, disruption of the habitual, in the form of an attack from predators or rivals, enhances the chances of survival in Darwin’s brutal ‘struggle for existence’ (2009, 5). At infrequent but very important moments, perceptual stimuli might demonstrate Gerrig’s ‘uniqueness’, and in response, the human brain processes perceptual stimuli with this expectation in mind. Humans have therefore evolved with the need to expect the unexpected in order to survive and thrive, and our contemporary cognitive processes have maintained this flight or fight response to the kind of threatening situations which might be replicated and manipulated in suspenseful narratives. Suspense, then, can be anomalous—even after our higher-level rational brain functions tell us that there is no threat, our lower-level non-rational brain functions warn us to be on our guard— ‘our moment-by-moment processes evolved in response to the brute fact of nonrepetition’ (Gerrig 1993, 171). Various forms of narrative can exploit this evolutionary cognitive distinction to create suspense even when we know the outcome of that which is coded as being suspenseful. David Bordwell (2007) uses Gerrig’s notion of ‘anomalous suspense’ to explain the affective experiences of repeat viewings of suspenseful films such as North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959), and of films which relate to well-known historical events such as the assassination of Abraham Lincoln (The Birth of a Nation [D.W. Griffith, 1915]) or the devastation of 9/11 (United 93 [Paul Greengrass, 2006]). He expands on Gerrig’s distinction between high- and low-level

190  R. GEAL Fig. 7.1  Cognitive impenetrability: the Müller-Lyer optical illusion (self-created image)

cognitive processes by using John Fodor’s (1983) notion of ‘cognitive impenetrability’. Perception, for Fodor, is modular, with different parts of the brain operating different processes. Optical illusions, such as the famous Müller-Lyer pair of inward and outward facing arrows containing horizontal lines of equal length (Fig. 7.1), demonstrate this impenetrability—just as our higher brain functions know that the two lines are the same length but our lower brain functions cannot help but perceive them as different, so too we know, after the first viewing of North by Northwest, that Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) will save Eve Kendell (Eve Marie Saint) from plummeting off Mount Rushmore, but cannot help responding to the cinematic cues about the danger with anomalous suspense, as though with each repeat viewing she might actually fall. This account could apply to adaptations of well-known non-film texts in a relatively linear manner. Just as repeat viewings of the same suspenseful films might produce anomalous suspense, so too viewings of adaptations of the same repeated ‘original’ narratives might produce something that one might call ‘anomalous foreknowledge’. Anomalous foreknowledge, in this context, is more than just an effect that foregrounds artifice by reminding spectators that they are watching a film in which certain events will occur that they already knew would occur. Existing academic legitimations conceptualise adaptations’ foreshadowing of future narrative events that spectators might already know about as non-anomalous. The two relatively detailed examples of anomalous foreknowledge that I look at below are both adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, which makes for an appropriate study both because the tragic ending is so well known, and because the playtext and most adaptations announce this tragic ending at the beginning of the playtext/adaptation in the Prologue. Academic legitimations of foreknowledge in adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, however, position any filmic signs pointing towards the narrative’s conclusion within the context of medium-specific replications of the foreshadowing within the playtext, and not as potentially anomalous reversals of tragic inevitability.

7  THE DRAMA OF FOREKNOWLEDGE 

191

Patricia Tatspaugh (2000, 140), for example, notes how an iron grille which separates the lovers in Castellani’s adaptation prefigures the couple’s fate generally, and the Friar’s (Mervyn Johns) disastrous quarantine more specifically. Similarly, Courtney Lehmann links Zeffirelli’s adaptation with imagery of warfare, weaponry and Christianity, all of which contribute to a ‘foreshadowing of the bloody business to come’ (2010, 141). These accounts analyse foreknowledge not as an established conclusion about events which might somehow be anomalously overturned, but as subtle translations of foreknown Shakespearean themes into a different, medium-specific form of language. Alfredo Michel Modenessi interprets foreshadowing in Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet in a manner that combines this elision of anomalous foreknowledge with the same kind of anamorphic subsumption of written Shakespearean enunciation that I discussed in relation to the same film in Chapter 5. Modenessi links these two forms of obfuscating foregrounded authorial artifice thus: ‘Act 1 of the film […] presents us with a conspicuously “bookish” Romeo who, in the corner of the proscenium of the abandoned movie-house, reads the strangely detached verses that we will soon notice are in his own handwriting’ (2002, 78). Modenessi’s explanation for this presentation of written Shakespeare is that Romeo’s detachment from the written verse ‘underscores the irony of a play that repeatedly tricks its protagonists into performing a predetermined script for which few acting tips are provided, but where improvisation is impossible’ (2002, 78).1 The focus of these analyses is on how an adaptation might exploit and manipulate authorial fidelity, rather than on how it might exploit and manipulate spectators’ cognition and perception. For these accounts, the pleasures that audiences might derive from film adaptations of canonical sources are located in a conscious engagement with how the adaptation manipulates an existing form of ironic foreknowledge into a new medium, rather than on an anomalous response which temporarily, partly and non-consciously believes that, this time, the tragic outcome might be averted. Thus, adaptations can utilise imagery to reinforce, at the visual perceptual level, spectators’ foreknowledge about the upcoming events to which the images refer. Indeed, the potential pleasures of manipulating an audience’s anomalous foreknowledge are something which seems to influence how filmmakers approach certain canonical adaptations. Luhrmann’s views on the subject are particularly appropriate. Discussing his adaptation, he claims that

192  R. GEAL The audience know this is gonna happen. How can it happen in a way in which their delicious expectation and enjoyment of ‘it’s gonna happen’ can be suspended so that when it happens it’s a surprise that they knew was gonna happen? Romeo and Juliet opens with something like ‘Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife’ [Prologue 8]. You are told right up front that the lovers, or a lover, is going to die […], you know where it’s going to conclude. (Luhrmann 2011)

Luhrmann wants an audience reaction to be not merely an ironic response to Shakespeare’s transmediality, or different ways in which an individual adaptation might render and manipulate the tragic inevitability of the ‘original’. This quote suggests, unconsciously, that Luhrmann recognises the potential for the significance of the anamorphic relationship between foregrounding and subsuming/obfuscating artifice in terms reminiscent of Heath’s account of how ‘film is the constant process of a phasing-in of vision, the pleasure of that process’ (1985, 514). Luhrmann does not discuss the theoretical context of how foregrounded foreknowledge might problematise cinema’s reality-effect, but he does seem to recognise that in order to maximise the audience’s cinematic pleasure he needs to employ a technique ‘in which their delicious expectation and enjoyment of “it’s gonna happen” can be suspended so that when it happens it’s a surprise that they knew was gonna happen’ (2011). Crucially, his intentions are not to exploit foreknowledge for any subversive, anti-grammatical purpose, but to create ‘delicious expectation and enjoyment’. The drama of foreknowledge can thereby operate in anamorphic terms. Luhrmann’s adaptation builds up towards this anamorphic and anomalous response by repeating and emphasising the opening Prologue’s foreknowledge in very specific ways. As I already discussed in Chapter 5, that which tells the audience how the narrative will unfold is narrated twice over, and twice rendered into written form. The discours-like nature of Shakespearean enunciation operates here on the levels of both written fainomai (literally enunciating the constructed nature of that which appears, in written form) and foreknowledge (telling the audience what will happen at the end of the film). This conflates two elements of potentially alienating disruption to realist film’s traditional temporal unfolding, and, somewhat paradoxically, does this for the purposes of audience pleasure, rather than for the kind of alienating Brechtian purposes that Wollen (1985) identified in Godard’s films.

7  THE DRAMA OF FOREKNOWLEDGE 

193

The climatic conclusion to this opening not only builds momentum through scenes of violence and rising choral music, but also through the way in which the rapid montage includes scenes from the play’s and the film’s inevitable ending, showing the lovers’ families mourning at the death scene, and Romeo’s point-of-view shot of the cathedral interior where Juliet lies (Fig. 7.2). The foreknowledge here, then, operates in visual fainomaic terms as well as in the prior spoken and written terms. Luhrmann’s ‘delicious expectation and enjoyment of “it’s gonna happen”’ (2011) is further emphasised through images suggesting an orgasmic context to the montage’s climax. Exploding fireworks and an open-mouthed, eyes-closed-in-ecstasy transcendent choirboy, synthesise with the accelerating scenes of violence and foreknowledge. Romeo’s view of the cathedral interior, furthermore, is partial in both senses of the word, as the lead only begins to open the door, not yet revealing the tragedy awaiting within, teasing towards how Luhrmann’s ‘delicious expectation and enjoyment of “it’s gonna happen” can be suspended so that when it happens it’s a surprise that they knew was gonna happen’ (2011). At the film’s climax, Luhrmann manipulates the audience’s anomalous foreknowledge by having Juliet wake before Romeo, thinking she is dead, unwittingly drinks the poison. The suturing conventions of shot/reverse shot show her smiling up at her lover, who does not see her as his eyeline moves from the vial of poison up to the heavens. Her hand is shown in close-up beginning to move before a cut back to Romeo about to drink. Her hand then emerges by the side of his face as he lifts the vial to his lips, but the hand caresses his cheek a fraction of a moment too late to prevent him from drinking the poison. Luhrmann thereby attempts to foster a form of anomalous foreknowledge here, encouraging spectators to think that Juliet might be able to signal Romeo before it is too late. Spectators have a foreknowledge of the playtext (and the repetition of this foreknowledge in the opening Prologue) which means

Fig. 7.2  Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996, Twentieth Century Fox): image of the foreknown ending

194  R. GEAL

that they know Juliet will not signal Romeo in time, but the cinematic cues encourage a momentarily anomalous response which thinks that she might be successful, this time. Thus, as Luhrmann puts it, the audience’s ‘delicious expectation and enjoyment of “it’s gonna happen” [is] suspended so that when it happens it’s a surprise that they knew was gonna happen’ (2011). Luhrmann’s statement, and his treatment of these scenes, seems almost paradoxical, because further textual and visual references to the narrative’s outcome actually contribute towards suspending foreknowledge and enhancing surprise. This paradox demonstrates the anomalous potential of foreknowledge in canonical adaptations. In this example, increasing references to the narrative’s inevitability paradoxically contributes towards an audience’s anomalous hope that the ending might be undone. Luhrmann’s delicious pleasures, here, combine a number of examples of anamorphosis. Heath’s ‘drama of vision’ (1985, 514) is present in the Prologue’s rapid cutting and in the suturing nature of the death scene’s shot/reverse shot conventions. Transcendent eroticism is present in the accelerating, climactic pacing of this cutting, and in elements of its subject matter. The drama of authorship is present in the fainomaic presentation of Shakespearean enunciation, and in a heightened state when this enunciation is in written form. And finally, the linking of these elements with the presented and foregrounded inevitability of that which will unfold represents the drama of foreknowledge. The intersection of these dramas demonstrates the extent to which adaptation can provide numerous layers of overlapping and symbiotic anamorphosis. Luhrmann’s adaptation exploits anomalous hopes that the tragic ending might be averted, but it does not satisfy this hope. It is possible, however, for adaptations to do this. In a similar manner to all the other elements of this taxonomy, adaptations that satisfy the tragedy-averting hopes of anomalous foreknowledge do so in reflexively anamorphic terms. A clear case of this reflexive manipulation of the drama of foreknowledge is Gnomeo and Juliet (Kelly Asbury, 2011), an állagmic adaptation that shifts the star-cross’d lovers from the stage and Verona to an animated film and suburban English gardens populated by garden gnomes and other related anthropomorphic objects. Gnomeo and Juliet is specifically relevant here because it combines the reflexivity of the drama of foreknowledge with a reflexivity related to an anomalous form of perception inherent to film and exaggerated in film animation. One final element of Bordwell’s account of cognitive

7  THE DRAMA OF FOREKNOWLEDGE 

195

impenetrability points part of the way towards the idea that it should be animated adaptations that can extend anomalous foreknowledge to its logical conclusion by overcoming the playtext’s tragic inevitability. This aspect of cognitive impenetrability relates to the film medium’s metacinematic potential for manipulating these two forms of reflexivity within adaptations of canonical sources, so that film adaptation offers more potential for reflexivity than repeated performances on stage. In a paragraph of merely two sentences, and as a means to demonstrate cognitive impenetrability using a filmic example, rather than as the prelude to an investigation into the potential relationships between cognitive impenetrability and filmic perception, Bordwell writes that ‘[a]s students of cinema, we’re familiar with the fact that vision can be cognitively impenetrable. We know that movies consist of single frames, but we can’t see them in projection; we see a moving image’ (2007, 4, my pagination). This is an ontological element of how the cinema activates and utilises the perception of its audiences, and it is possible for film to render this ontology into thematic, visual and narrative form. Film adaptations of famous non-film texts not only contain film’s inherent cognitive impenetrability in relation to how single frames gain the illusion of continuous movement, but also contain anomalous foreknowledge in relation to repeating foreknown narrative events that can continue to elicit suspense or doubt about foreknown outcomes. Both of these perceptual activities rely on the same evolutionary distinction between low level non-rational automated responses (in which film gives the impression of movement, and in which foreknown events can still be responded to as though they were happening for the first time) and higher level rational responses (in which the movements which are perceived are mapped onto schemata of motivation, speculation, characterisation and so on, and in which there are various forms of interplay between how a particular adaptation relates to the ‘original’/other adaptations of the same source, and to those automated activities which respond to the narrative as though it might unfold unpredictably). An animated adaptation like Gnomeo and Juliet can activate a heightened manipulation of these complex metacinematic relationships in ways which go far beyond the non-animated adaptations discussed above. This is because animation relates to the cognitive impenetrability of single frames appearing as continuous movement in a more fundamental way than live action film. Live action film stages real moving pro-filmic events, turns these into a series of still analogue or digital images, and

196  R. GEAL

then projects these at speeds which create the impression of continuous movement. Animation dispenses with the real moving pro-filmic events. Even if real objects are used, such as in stop-motion animation, they are, at this initial stage, motionless. The extent to which this process defines animation is demonstrated by the name of the medium/genre. As such, loosely adapted állagmic animated adaptations do not only avert some of Shakespeare’s tragic endings because they are marketed at children who are accustomed to less traumatic narrative conclusions. In addition to this marketing/generic consideration, these films employ a reflexive bundling of illusory animated movement and transcendence of the foreknown. However, the foreknown element of most examples of this kind of adaptation is almost entirely sublimated, particularly given the age and presumed lack of cultural capital of the targeted audiences. The Lion King (Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, 1994), for example, includes some Hamletian narrative elements such as a brother who murders a King to seize the throne, the reappearance of the dead King as a ghost who demands that his son avenge him, a pair of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern-like acquaintances for the son and so on. Most of the film’s intended audiences are unlikely to recognise these elements as a foregrounding of authorial artifice, however. They are therefore unlikely to have a foreknowledge, derived from their acquaintance with the playtext, that the protagonist will die, and which the adaptation eventually alters into a happy ending (this despite the fact that the film cannot help but fainomise certain authorially foregrounded elements, such as rumination over Yorick’s skull, which is held by the Claudius-like Scar [Jeremy Irons] rather than the Hamlet-like Simba [Matthew Broderick]). Gnomeo and Juliet, however, is different in that it pushes the twin reflexive elements of animating the inanimate and foregrounding foreknowledge about an ending that it will alter to their limits. The animals in The Lion King, after all, might be technically animated, but the real animals on which the characters are based can move of their own volition. Animation, though, can exploit a reflexive impulse that allegorises and thematises the process of animating the inanimate. Animated films such as Pinocchio (Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske, 1940) and the Toy Story franchise (Toy Story, John Lasseter, 1995; Toy Story 2, John Lasseter, Ash Brannon and Lee Unkrich, 1999; Toy Story 3, Lee Unkrich, 2010) feature objects which should be inanimate, but which become literally animated in the diegetic world, and cinematically animated in the industrial animation process. This is a reflexive narrativisation of animation’s ontology.2

7  THE DRAMA OF FOREKNOWLEDGE 

197

Gnomeo and Juliet shares this reflexive narrativisation, as various diegetic garden objects which should be inanimate can move of their own volition, and this movement is rendered in the form of animation. But this is also an adaptation of a well-known ‘original’, or at least an ‘original’ which has numerous narrative elements that have achieved the status of cultural conventions to the point where an animated film like Gnomeo and Juliet, which is at least partly marketed at children, can make assumptions about audiences’ foreknowledge of how the story will unfold, and can manipulate these assumptions in a metacinematic manner. As such, the film combines the reflexive manipulation of cognitive impenetrability in relation to doubly animating the inanimate with a reflexive manipulation of anomalous foreknowledge in relation to foreknown narrative elements. The film begins by immediately linking these two metacinematic manipulations. A static shot looks onto an empty proscenium stage, with the red curtain still down. The only sounds are (off-screen) orchestral instruments tuning up, intermittent (off-screen) audience coughs and then the (off-screen) conductor clicking his/her baton to usher in silence. Although the image appears to be computer designed, rather than a projection of recorded pro-filmic reality, it is not yet animated, as nothing moves on screen at this point. The film’s audience is positioned as a member of a theatrical audience, foregrounding an authorial canonicity which downplays an important element of traditional realist cinema. To some extent, then, this opening shot operates as discours, foregrounding the fact that the work is derived from an acknowledged enunciating theatrical source. But this foregrounding will be swiftly suppressed into histoire, when the acknowledged enunciating source is replaced with the presentation of gnomes who attempt to transcend the foreknown discours by altering the foreknown narrative ending. The film’s metacinematic animation of the supposedly inanimate gnomes is also discours-like, in that it narrativises the illusory process of animation, revealing the filmmakers’ constructive work. In diegetically animating the diegetically inanimate, the process of aesthetically animating the aesthetically inanimate is reflexively allegorised. The source of the film’s animators’ enunciation is revealed, but this enunciation is manipulated into an aesthetic form which makes a narrative virtue of this potentially alienating revelation of enunciation. Thus, if this enunciative revelation is discours, reflexively manipulating this revelation into narrative form is histoire.

198  R. GEAL

This anamorphic oscillation between discours and histoire is played out in the film’s first animated movements. A small gnome scurries onto the stage, turns to the audience and announces that ‘the story you are about to see has been told before – a lot. And now we are going to tell it again – but different’. This is an immediate admission that the film is discours (‘told before’), which is almost as immediately shifted into histoire (‘but different’). The gnome goes on to elaborate about the star-cross’d lovers, all the while remaining very static, only his mouth moving. This first brief example of mobile animation, then, is linked to a discours-like articulation of foreknowledge, and is preceded by an absence of animation (the static image of the stage) and accompanied by a very limited form of animation (only the mouth moving). An even more explicit example of foreknowledge quickly follows, as the gnome announces that before the retelling can begin he must read a ‘rather long, boring Prologue’. This heightening of foreknowledge is accompanied by a heightening of animation. The scroll under the gnome’s arm is unfurled, and one end of this sweeps forwards, off the stage into the theatrical audience. As the gnome reads the playtext’s opening lines, a shepherd’s crook enters from each side of the stage to whip the gnome away, but each time the gnome notices, slightly turning his head, and the crook recedes. Just before the gnome reaches Shakespeare’s definitive opening statement about the foreknown fate of the protagonists, ‘a pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life’ (Prologue 6), a trap door opens up below him, sweeping away gnome and textually foretelling scroll in a moment of rapid animation. This is a complex interplay of, on the one hand, foretelling what will happen (discours) and suggesting that the foreknown might in fact not occur (histoire) and, on the other hand, that which should be immobile being able to move and the temporary reluctance of this potentially mobile object to animate itself/be animated. The film’s Prologue concludes with the incontrovertible articulation of the foreknown tragic ending narrowly prevented through an act of rapid animation, in a sequence in which the animation of the supposedly inanimate gnome had until then been minimised. The film proper then begins with the two feuding human owners of the gardens in which the gnomes live. Each leaves their home and drives off to work. These figures are animated, but they are also diegetically human, and therefore should be able to move. A signal is sent to the garden gnomes that they too are now free to move,3 and this signal is delivered by figures that possess self-animating qualities somewhere between

7  THE DRAMA OF FOREKNOWLEDGE 

199

a human and what one would expect of an inanimate figurine. They are weathervanes: a pig over one garden and a cockerel over the other. They turn, as though blown by the wind, to show the gnomes that the humans have gone, but then also smile and wink to reveal that they can move according to their own volition. The gnomes can now begin their daily routines, and in a similar way to how the minimisation of animation accompanied the foreknown elements in the Prologue, these movements are not yet accompanied by the overt discours of the adaptation’s Shakespearean origins. Before the humans opened their front doors, the two houses’ post boxes are shown, and these contain such fainomaic Shakespearean traces, the street sign below labelled ‘Verona Drive’, one post box labelled ‘Montague’ and numbered ‘2B’, the other labelled ‘Capulet’, and with a cross through the number and letter ‘2B’. Although the cinematography of this Shakespearean discours includes the impression of a whip pan from one post box to the other, there is no diegetic animation of that which should be inanimate at this stage. Anomalous foreknowledge in relation to the Shakespearean narrative is thus displayed while the cognitive impenetrability of both the animated film medium and the supposedly inanimate gnomes is downplayed. When the gnomes begin to move about their gardens, this process is reversed—their Montague- and Capulet-like characteristics are downplayed to the level of blue and red clothing colour codings, with no mention of these Shakespearean last names and, at this stage, no Shakespearean dialogue or paraphrases thereof. The cognitive impenetrability of the medium and gnomic subject matter is metacinematically displayed, while the anomalous foreknowledge of Shakespearean discours is downplayed. At this early stage, then, the film’s two metacinematic manipulations of anomalous foreknowledge and cognitive impenetrability concerning the animation of the supposedly inanimate are separated. More overt Shakespearean references which bundle together these metacinematic manipulations only occur once the notion of foreknowledge about the outcome of the original has been articulated by one of the characters. After Juliet (Emily Blunt) returns to her garden from her first accidental meeting with Gnomeo (James McAvoy), she is interrogated about her sheepish behaviour by the Nurse-like Nanette (Ashley Jensen), a ceramic frog water fountain. On finding out that Juliet’s new beloved is a ‘blue’ Nanette become very excited, because such a love, she claims, is inevitably ‘doomed’. More overt Shakespearean references now come thick and fast, Juliet musing, from a high pedestal above her unseen

200  R. GEAL

paramour, ‘Gnomeo, Gnomeo, […] why must you wear a blue hat, why couldn’t it be red?’ Nanette, similarly, ushers Gnomeo away with a flirtatious ‘Good night, sweet prince’ (an interpolation from Hamlet 5.2.312), and ‘Parting is such sweet sorrow’ (Romeo and Juliet 2.1.229). These examples, though, although they foreground that which the playtext claims will happen, do not yet suggest ways in which this particular adaptation might subvert that foreknowledge. Such an exploitation of this foreknowledge only occurs when Gnomeo meets the font of said foreknowledge, Shakespeare himself. When Gnomeo is swept away from the gardens in a mid-film fight with his red enemies, he is transported to a park. There he talks to a giant statue of Shakespeare. This statue is introduced through a close-up of the Bard’s name inscribed onto a plaque, again foregrounding the discours-like status of the source narrative, in this case literally carved in stone. As in the blue and red gardens, in the park the inanimate becomes animate. Voiced by the Shakespearean-coded voice of Patrick Stewart, the Bard remarks that Gnomeo’s problems are reminiscent of one of his plays, which ends in the tragedy of Romeo arriving too late to save Juliet’s life. Gnomeo argues that such a conclusion sounds ‘rubbish. There’s gotta be a better ending than that!’ Shakespeare’s response accepts that an alternate ending is conceivable—‘I suppose that he [Romeo] could have made it back in time to avert disaster… But, I like the whole death part better’. Gnomeo argues that he is sure all will work out for him, but a plastic flamingo from his garden suddenly arrives to tell him that ‘Juliet’s in danger’. ‘Told you so’, says Shakespeare, sure that his foreknowledge of this adaptation will come to fruition. To Gnomeo’s declaration ‘I’ve got to get back to Juliet and save her’, Shakespeare delivers the foreknown and discours-like riposte ‘that’s what he said, but she was dead before he got home’. The defiant Gnomeo, however, expresses the temporally unfolding conventionality of cinema’s non-foreknown histoire with a dramatic ‘we’ll see about that!’ The figure of Shakespeare here closely combines the film’s two metadramatic manipulations of anomalous perception. His is the voice of tragic inevitability—the written text, with its foretelling immutability carved into stone at the base of his statue, given voice and movement. And the diegetically mobile Shakespeare statue also reflexively manipulates the medium’s illusion of movement operating at both the perceptual/ontological and narrative levels. The scene’s anomalous tension between foreknown discours and unknown histoire will eventually be resolved, but not before an explosion

7  THE DRAMA OF FOREKNOWLEDGE 

201

in the gardens produces a cut to the statue of Shakespeare in the park, who looks over his shoulder at the distant mushroom cloud and repeats his foreknowing statement, ‘told you so’. The explosion, however, is part of the final fight between blues and reds which settles the question of the film’s anomalous foreknowledge and fulfils Metz’s claim that ‘the very principle of [realism’s] effectiveness as discourse [discours], is precisely that it […] masquerades as story [histoire]’ (1985, 544). As a result of the explosion, the couple are buried under a tomb-like mound of earth, suggesting that the foreknown tragic ending has indeed come to pass. In their grief, Gnomeo’s mother (Maggie Smith) and Juliet’s father (Michael Caine) bury their strife, vowing that their feud is over. But Gnomeo’s histoire-like confidence that Shakespeare’s tragic ending could be overcome is at last assured, as the couple eventually emerge from the earth, with this happy ending temporarily delayed by the emergence, first, of an irrelevant gnome, prior to the final triumphal emergence of the lovers. As the formerly antagonistic clans unite in celebration, and the couple ride a lawnmower towards a heart-shaped arch of hedge, Gnomeo again expresses the pleasures of histoire’s temporally unfolding triumph over the foreknown: ‘I don’t know about you, but I think this ending is much better’. Linking these manipulations of foreknowledge with the mobility of the doubly immobile directly thematises not only anomalous suspense, but also suggests the allegorisation of cinema’s most basic ontological visual processes. Even if humans have a memory of having seen something before, we are still hardwired to respond with suspense under the right conditions. The same applies to cinematic vision, which ‘consist[s] of single frames, but we can’t see them in projection; we see a moving image’ (Bordwell 2007, 4, my pagination). Manipulating the inanimateness, or otherwise, of supposedly inanimate objects echoes the visual trick of projecting static images, and the same visual trick applies to the way the human brain processes the foreknown. Gnomeo and Juliet exploits these two allied elements of cognitive impenetrability, manipulating cinema’s most basic and most ontological visual processes. Both of these elements exploit the brain’s modular distinctions between automated and conscious perceptual responses, and the oscillation between these elements operates in an anamorphic manner—foregrounding what will inevitably happen, and then overcoming that inevitability in explicitly cinematic terms. Gnomeo and Juliet anamorphically exploits these two allied elements of cognitive impenetrability,

202  R. GEAL

pleasurably disavowing cinema’s most basic and most ontological visual processes. Just as Heath saw the suturing manipulation of grammatical disruption and continuity editing as the anamorphic ‘drama of vision [which] becomes a constant reflexive fascination in films’ (1985, 514), so too the anamorphic drama of foreknowledge is inscribed into reflexive narrative and visual form in Gnomeo and Juliet.

Systematising and Cheating Foreknowledge There is one final potential element to the drama of foreknowledge, and this relates to how foreknown elements from other adaptations (or theatrical performances) can be employed, manipulated and subverted. All realist film can do something like this in terms of establishing how certain forms of cinematography or editing convey meaning, and then exploiting, manipulating and subverting this meaning. Heath provides a clear example of how the drama of vision can operate in these terms. The anamorphic oscillation between the problematically attributed viewpoint of the shark in Jaws and the continuity editing that subsumes this prior alienation sets off a number of other series which knot together as figures over the film. […] [T]he underwater shot is then used in the first part of the film to signify the imminence of attack. […] Once systematized, it can be used to cheat: it occurs to confirm the second day-time beach attack, but this is only two boys with an imitation fin. (Heath 1985, 512–3, my emphasis)

Adaptation may cheat in a similar way, presenting a conventionalised collection of images or camerawork which can then be refashioned in a similarly anamorphic manner, but these can be extended in adaptations because expectational conventions can be established in one adaptation and then cheats relating to these conventions can be made in another adaptation. The temporal relations between these expectational conventions and cheats can operate within the context of the drama of foreknowledge. Furthermore, and in keeping with the subsumption of authorial anamorphosis within scholarly discourse, academic legitimation can conceptualise this ‘cheating’ potential of the drama of foreknowledge within purely canonical terms. Loehlin’s account of William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet’s balcony scene is an example of how these elements come together. He interprets the scene as a

7  THE DRAMA OF FOREKNOWLEDGE 

203

witty parody of Zeffirelli, playing on the audience’s conventional expectations for the scene. In mid-long shot, Romeo emerges from the foliage into a dreamy, moonlit Renaissance courtyard; the camera angle, lighting and mood match Zeffirelli’s treatment of the scene exactly. Suddenly the courtyard is bathed in searchlights: Romeo has set off the security system’s motion detector, and he trips over the poolside furniture in a clumsy panic. Collecting himself, Romeo climbs a trellis toward Juliet’s balcony, where a shadowy form appears on the illuminated curtains. No sooner has Romeo intoned, ‘It is the east and Juliet is the sun!’ (II.ii.3), than the windows are flung open to reveal the portly middle-aged Nurse [Miriam Margolyes]; meanwhile, Juliet walks out of an elevator next to the swimming pool. Romeo’s approach to the startled Juliet ends up tumbling both of them into the pool. (Loehlin 2000, 127)

Loehlin is eloquent in expressing the comedy potential of this juxtaposition of expectation and a very limited kind of subversion of that expectation. His academic legitimation’s broader context for such a juxtaposition resides in Emma French’s (2006) argument that Luhrmann’s clash between high and popular culture helps construct a genre which appeals to teenagers because such adaptations treat irreverently that which the target audiences had hitherto been taught to treat reverently. More specifically, Loehlin gives the juxtaposition of convention/subversion and reverence/irreverence a specific (anti-)canonical context, so that the parodic comedy of the first part of the scene frees the young actors from expectations of grand and lyrical passion. Having invoked and discarded the traditional trappings of the famous love duet, Luhrmann can film an appealing scene about two wide-eyed kids in a swimming pool. (Loehlin 2000, 128)

An understanding of the pleasure-giving process of manipulating foreknown narratives and conventions ‘knot[ted] together as figures over [adaptations that, once] systematized, […] can be used to cheat’ (Heath 1985, 512–3) is thereby replaced with a purely Shakespearean context. Furthermore, both the filmed manipulation and the academic legitimisation exist within the context of fainomaic translation—the foregrounded, conventionalised, pre-known Shakespearean dialogue of the balcony scene is replaced with a fainomaic unfolding: ‘They communicate their desire not with their [Shakespeare’s] words but with their eyes, which appear huge and shining in the surreal light from the pool’ (Loehlin 2000, 128).

204  R. GEAL

What makes this specific ‘cheating’ form of the drama of foreknowledge more anamorphic than the ‘cheat’ which Heath identified in Jaws is the fact that the latter cheat needs to be set up within the same film text in which the cheat occurs: ‘Once systematized, it can be used to cheat’ (Heath 1985, 513). Luhrmann’s cheat, however, relies on a foreknowledge of something systematised in a different film, so that this systemisation is part of the foreknown diachronic development of how various adaptations and performances operate. Luhrmann’s anamorphic oscillation between expectation and subversion of expectation, then, is more obfuscated than Spielberg’s oscillation in Jaws because the precise origins of that which is being subverted are diffused outside the specific film text, into an ambiguous, unclear but parody-able set of foreknown expectations.

Conclusion The drama of foreknowledge is partly dependent on the extent to which spectators are familiar with the canonical texts that are adapted into films, or with the narratives from the canonical texts conveyed vicariously by adaptations or through popular culture. This drama gains its anamorphic quality when it foregrounds this existing knowledge about what will happen during the course of the film, and when it then subsumes and obfuscates that foreknowledge in various ways. Because this anamorphic drama is dependent on specific forms of audience foreknowledge, it is not as ontological as the more generally fainomaic drama of authorship. Nevertheless, filmmakers can exploit the drama of foreknowledge to extend and supplement an adaptation’s drama of authorship, and thereby further obfuscate an adaptation’s anamorphic authorship.

Notes 1. Loehlin makes a similar link between authorially foregrounded foreknowledge and written enunciation, claiming that ‘[t]he pervasive keynote of hip irony returns again and again throughout the film. Romeo laboriously writes out his Petrarchan conceits in a journal […] then impresses Benvolio with his poetic romanticism by seeming to invent them extempore’ (2000, 126). The visualised foregrounding of the adaptation’s constructed, enunciated nature is thereby explained within the context of the playtext’s irony, or of Luhrmann’s complexly postmodern (ir)reverent ‘hip irony’ towards the

7  THE DRAMA OF FOREKNOWLEDGE 

205

playtext. The potentially grammatically disruptive revelation of enunciation through foreknowledge and written Shakespearean verse is thereby contained through recourse to Shakespearean canonicity. 2. See Geal (2018) for a fuller discussion of how the Toy Story films manipulate this reflexivity. 3. No explicit reason is ever given, either in the Toy Story films or in Gnomeo and Juliet, for why the self-animating objects should hide their sentience and mobility from humans. I discuss some historical, cultural and reflexive explanations for this apparently self-imposed prohibition in Geal (2018).

References Bordwell, David. 2007. “This Is Your Brain on Movies, Maybe.” David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema. www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2007/03/07/ this-is-your-brain-on-movies-maybe. Darwin, Charles. 2009 [1859]. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Donaldson, Peter. 1990. Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors. London: Unwin Hyman. Fodor, Jerry A. 1983. A Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. French, Emma. 2006. Selling Shakespeare to Hollywood: The Marketing of Filmed Shakespeare Adaptations from 1989 into the New Millennium. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press. Geal, Robert. 2018. “Animated Images and Animated Objects: Reflexively and Intertextually Transgressive Mimesis in the ‘Toy Story’ Franchise.” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 13, no. 1: 69–84. Gerrig, Richard J. 1993. Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press. Grodal, Torben. 1997. Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heath, Stephen. 1985. “‘Jaws’, Ideology and Film Theory.” In Movies and Methods Volume II, edited by Bill Nichols, 509–14. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hohwy, Jakob. 2013. The Predictive Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lehmann, Courtney. 2010. Screen Adaptations: Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: The Relationship Between Text and Film. London: Bloomsbury. Loehlin, James N. 2000. “‘These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends’: Baz Luhrmann’s Millennial Shakespeare.” In Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle, edited by Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray, 121–36. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

206  R. GEAL Luhrmann, Baz. 2011. “New American Independents & the Digital Revolution.” Interview by Mark Cousins. The Story of Film: An Odyssey. Channel 4 Television, Series 1 Episode 14. Metz, Christian. 1985. “Story/Discourse: Notes on Two Kinds of Voyeurism.” In Movies and Methods Volume II, edited by Bill Nichols, 543–9. Berkeley: University of California Press. Modenessi, Alfredo Michel. 2002. “(Un)doing the Book ‘Without Verona Walls’: A View from the Receiving End of Baz Luhrmann’s ‘William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet’.” In Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema, edited by Courtney Lehmann and Lisa S. Starks, 62–85. London: Associated University Presses. Tatspaugh, Patricia. 2000. “The Tragedies of Love on Film.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, edited by Russell Jackson, 135–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, Robert F., Jr. 2000. Shakespeare in Hollywood, 1929–1956. London: Associated University Presses. Wollen, Peter. 1985. “Godard and Counter Cinema: ‘Vent D’Est’.” In Movies and Methods Volume II, edited by Bill Nichols, 500–9. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Filmography Birth of a Nation, The. 1915. Directed by D.W. Griffith. USA: Epoch. Gnomeo and Juliet. 2011. Directed by Kelly Asbury. USA: Touchstone Pictures. Jaws. 1975. Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA: Universal. Julius Caesar. 1953. Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. USA: MGM. Lion King, The. 1994. Directed by Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff. USA: Disney. North by Northwest. 1959. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. USA: MGM. Pinocchio. 1940. Directed by Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske. USA: Disney. Romeo and Juliet. 1954. Directed by Renato Castellani. UK/Italy: Rank. Romeo and Juliet. 1968. Directed by Franko Zeffirelli. UK/Italy: BHE Films. She’s the Man. 2006. Directed by Andy Fickman. USA: DreamWorks. Toy Story. 1995. Directed by John Lasseter. USA: Disney Pixar. Toy Story 2. 1999. Directed by John Lasseter, Ash Brannon and Lee Unkrich. USA: Disney Pixar. Toy Story 3. 2010. Directed by Lee Uncrich. USA: Disney Pixar. United 93. 2006. Directed by Paul Greengrass. USA: Universal. William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. 1996. Directed by Baz Luhrmann. USA: Twentieth Century Fox.

CHAPTER 8

The Drama of the Diegetic Author

The final element of the taxonomy of anamorphic authorship relates to films that aren’t really adaptations of canonical ‘originals’, in the precise sense. The films of interest in this last short chapter are more accurately biographical films or biopics about the life of the canonical author, who becomes a diegetic character in a historical drama. The film narratives about these diegetic authors need not, hypothetically, have any specific relationship to the kind of anamorphic authorship discussed in this book— although a biopic about Shakespeare might foreground the fact that he wrote certain fictional works, these fictional works do not necessarily have to mirror or comment on the supervening film’s narrative trajectory, so that there could be clear distinctions between the fictional dramas that the diegetic writer creates and the ostensibly unfolding narrative about that diegetic writer. However, the films discussed in this chapter make specific links between the foregrounded fictions created by the diegetic writer and the narrative events which happen to that writer—the eponymous Shakespeare in Love (John Madden, 1998), for example, ‘spontaneously’ undergoes experiences that he works into the Romeo and Juliet that he is writing. In this sense, certain elements of the biopic are essentially adaptations of foregrounded authorship, and as such they operate in the same kind of anamorphic terms outlined in the rest of this book. Just as adaptations of canonical ‘originals’ are part of an anamorphic drama of authorship, so too biopics about canonical authors can be part of an anamorphic ‘drama of the diegetic author’.1 © The Author(s) 2019 R. Geal, Anamorphic Authorship in Canonical Film Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16496-6_8

207

208  R. GEAL

Dramatisations of Shakespeare’s life, then, can operate according to the mechanisms of foregrounding and subsequently subsuming and obfuscating signs of authorial artifice, with academic legitimation completing the process. Indeed, films which narrativise the author’s life have the potential to particularly stress the differences between the two different forms of authorial presence/absence that I established in Chapter 4 as the foundational distinction between the academic paradigms of dialogism and psychoanalytic poststructuralism. Barthes (as well as Bakhtin), it will be recalled, conceptualises the author as dead, whereas Benveniste conceptualises the author as hiding. Films in which that author either returns from the dead, or comes out of hiding, are therefore those films in which the contested authorial absence inherent to both Barthes and Benveniste is most clearly allegorised. The fact that these two different theoretical approaches can make different interpretations of the same authorial presence/absence is most clearly demonstrated in Shakespeare in Love, a film that locates the genius of the playtext Romeo and Juliet in the experiences of forbidden love that the author (Joseph Fiennes) is shown sharing with the betrothed Viola (Gwyneth Paltrow), who disguises herself as a man in order to act in the theatre. The Benvenistene approach looks for ways that the film foregrounds and obfuscates authorial artifice. The diegetic Shakespeare writes text on paper, and he and the other diegetic actors read out these verses in rehearsals and theatrical performance. The fictional play that these characters write and read is foregrounded as a discours-like artifice, but that diegetic fictional artifice relates to the film’s supervening histoire-like narrative in a way that blurs the boundaries between the foregrounded fiction of the play and the ostensibly unfolding verisimilitude of the film. During and after their first night of passion together, for example, the diegetic Shakespeare and Viola are shown spontaneously expressing their love for one another within the context of ostensibly un-authored cinematic histoire. When Viola tells Shakespeare that it is morning, and he must leave or be discovered, he responds with a verse that the explicitly fictional Juliet is shown speaking to Romeo, when in a similar situation requiring dawn flight—‘Believe me, love, it was the [owl]’ (3.3.5) (with the film dialogue replacing the playtext’s ‘nightingale’ with a bird that contemporary audiences will recognise as unambiguously nocturnal). In the following scene, the impression that the fictional play draws on a ‘real’ love affair is reinforced by editing back and forth from the lovers

8  THE DRAMA OF THE DIEGETIC AUTHOR 

209

alone in Viola’s bedroom, reading from Shakespeare’s freshly scribbled pages and making love while continuing these verses in a ‘spontaneous’ manner, to the diegetic actors rehearsing Romeo and Juliet’s expressions of love on the foregrounded discours of the diegetic stage. At the culmination of this scene, the editing regime explicitly collapses the two locations, and the ‘real’ love with the ‘fictional’ love. An off-screen knocking at a door over a shot of Shakespeare and Viola making love cuts to Viola’s Nurse (Imelda Staunton), at her door. The next image is a low-angle shot of the boy actor playing Juliet (Daniel Brocklebank) on his/her balcony. He/she responds, presumably to a similar noise made by the actor playing Juliet’s Nurse (Jim Carter), but simultaneously, due to the cut, to Viola’s ‘real’ Nurse, with the line ‘I hear some noise within. Dear love, adieu’ (2.1.178). The swap between locations is then reversed. The actor playing Juliet’s Nurse calls out ‘Juliet!’, and the response to this, the next line from the playtext, ‘Anon, good Nurse!’ (2.1.179), is provided by Viola, to whom the film cuts, and is then repeated by the boy actor Juliet, after a cut back to the stage. The distinctions between authored discours and ostensibly unauthored histoire are thereby extremely blurred, with a complex anamorphic oscillation between these two enunciative registers. The diegetic Shakespeare here becomes a cinematically fainomaic stand-in for the foregrounded artifice of the playtext. Jane E. Kingsley-Smith, on the other hand, demonstrates how a Barthesian approach to this obfuscation of foregrounded authorship focuses instead on how the film’s presentation of authorship ‘respond[s] to an authorial absence [by] enacting a comic ritual in which the death of the Author is threatened but finally averted’ (2002, 158). So, KingsleySmith interprets the film’s Shakespeare agonising over how to write his signature, and repeatedly inscribing his name on parchment, as an atavistic riposte to Barthes’ The Death of the Author (1995) that ‘evoke[s] a Romantic conception of authorship by privileging such scenes of writing’ (Kingsley-Smith 2002, 159). The act of ‘writing his name over and over again—a joke that Barthes might have appreciated’ (2002, 161) is understood as the triumph of the Barthesian author’s return (2002, 159). Applying Barthes’ definition of authorship to Shakespeare in Love does allow for a critique of the conservatism of this particular film, and explains how ‘the author emerges triumphant, more formidable after its encounter with the giant-killers of poststructuralism’ (Kingsley-Smith 2002, 162).2 What this Barthesian approach does not

210  R. GEAL

do is question what these presentations of authorship mean in terms of film’s enunciative qualities, and the degree to which such depictions problematise cinema’s conventional reality-effect. Authorship is understood only within the parameters of challenging authorial intention, rather than as a heightened example of cinema’s inherent anamorphosis. It is not only the case that the diegetic Shakespeare repeatedly writes his name down in an attempt to forcibly re-impose his authorship. It is also the case that this presentation of written Shakespearean enunciation simultaneously foregrounds and disavows authorial discours, since the diegetic author’s signatures are not only shown within the context of written authorial enunciation, as the author puts quill to parchment, but are also shown in the context of such written authorship being literally obliterated, as the diegetic Shakespeare repeatedly strikes through the signatures with his quill, before throwing the parchment in the bin. These struck-through signatures thereby represent adaptation’s simultaneous demonstration and destruction of ‘original’ authorship. The extent to which the different interpretations of Barthes and Benveniste meet in Shakespeare in Love is demonstrated by Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack’s argument that ‘the film continually reminds us that we are witnessing the construction of narrative’ (2004, 155), which they interpret as evidence for a conservative presentation of pre-Barthesian, Romantic authorship. But Benveniste’s definition of authorship suggests, instead, that this reminder might be a potentially transgressive form of foregrounded discours, with the thematisation of ‘the construction of narrative’ oscillating anamorphically with the illusionism of cinematic histoire. The specific link between un-authored Benvenistene verisimilitude, ‘events [that] seem to tell themselves’ (Benveniste 1970, 241), and Barthes’s alternate authorial absence is demonstrated by Kingsley-Smith’s argument that by suggesting that what has been already spoken and written finds its way unconsciously into Shakespeare’s text, the film alludes to theories of intertextuality that might challenge its whole conception of the author. Barthes’s […] authorial absence is predicated upon the theory of intertextuality. (Kingsley-Smith 2002, 161)

Privileging Barthes’s over Benveniste’s understanding of authorial presence/absence here means interpreting the film’s translation of authored

8  THE DRAMA OF THE DIEGETIC AUTHOR 

211

discours into cinematic histoire as an atavistic challenge to the author’s death, rather than as the anamorphic manipulation of his presence. Richard Burt (2000) interprets the montage of Will and Viola’s above mentioned impromptu creation of lines of dialogue while in bed together, which then appear as the text of Romeo and Juliet in dress rehearsals for the play’s performance, in this Barthesian context. The scene’s potential translation of histoire (conversation that spontaneously unfolds between two lovers) into discours (a foregrounded piece of writing and performance) is thereby interpreted, not in the context of cinematic anamorphosis, but ‘as an effect which naturalizes the film’s character as the historical truth of the work’s genesis’ (Burt 2000, 220). It is revealing, in fact, that the specific nature of this authorial act resides in a Barthesian form of intertextuality that relies on ‘real’, shown events rather than on a prior act of authorship. Kingsley-Smith notes that no mention is ever made, in the film, of Shakespeare culling his plots from anything that had been previously written (2002, 161). From a Benvenistene perspective, this means that the montage depicting the creation of Romeo and Juliet’s playtext shows histoire shaped into discours, but not discours reworked as another form of discours. As such, the transformation of spontaneous histoire into authored discours reinforces cinema’s illusionism and subsumes the potential transgression of foregrounding the created nature of discours. Presenting the manipulation of one form of discours into another would not have the same effect. Kingsley-Smith, however, states that the film’s ‘disregard for the book is dictated by the visual demands of cinema, or perhaps by the power struggle between text and image that goes on in Shakespeare films’ (2002, 161). She then problematises this interpretation, by contrasting the way in which Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991) dramatises books (2002, 161–2), without providing an alternate account (such as favouring Benveniste’s conception of authorship) for Shakespeare in Love’s privileging of intertextuality between people over intertextuality between texts. Depicting Shakespeare taking ideas from a book, a site of authored discours, as opposed to an ‘everyday’ site in which ‘events seem to tell themselves’ (Benveniste 1970, 241), would present an authored account of cinema much more transgressive than a diegetic world in which even the most foregrounded authorship is initiated in an ostensibly spontaneous unfolding. This Barthesian dominance of the critical discourse explains the focus on Shakespeare’s authorial ‘return’ in Shakespeare in Love. It may be

212  R. GEAL

telling, for example, that Burt, discussing this return in the context of the authorship controversy between Stratfordians and Oxfordians, writes, ‘[t]hough an Oxfordian website set up a page entitled ‘Shakespeare in Love: the True Story’, I doubt that we can expect a film entitled Oxford in Love to be released anytime in the near future’ (2000, 222). Titling a film thus would indeed emphasise the old Stratfordian/Oxfordian debate, and constitute a lapse into pre-Barthesian Romanticism not dissimilar to that identified by Kingsley-Smith, Davis and Womack, and Burt in Shakespeare in Love. Titling a film about Oxford’s writing of the Shakespearean canon Anonymous (Roland Emmerich 2011), however, suggests a potentially more overtly Benvenistene exploration of authorship, and one that directly allegorises cinema’s inherent un-authored verisimilitude, even in a film that thematises authorship. Anonymous is a film in which the contested identity of the author overwrites Shakespeare’s enunciation while simultaneously foregrounding an alternate authorial articulation. Shakespeare himself may be obliterated, but authorship is narrativised. Not only is the plays’ scripted nature foregrounded, but the writing process is fetishised. These fetishisations serve to raise the issue of authorship only to mythologise it, allegorising the anamorphic fort/da-like dialectic of presenting and then subsuming/obfuscating authorial enunciation. Oxford’s (Rhys Ifans) inscription of Shakespeare’s (Rafe Spall) name onto his plays is the film’s epitome of this mythologisation of enunciation. As I discussed above, Shakespeare in Love also showed the author writing the name ‘William Shakespeare’, a presentation interpreted by Kingsley-Smith as ‘a joke that Barthes might have appreciated’ (2002, 161), and in the context of the film’s ‘encounter with the giant-killers of poststructuralism’ (2002, 162), by which she principally means Barthes. But both of these acts of writing signatures are also Benvenistene disavowals of the author doing the writing. In Shakespeare in Love, the foregrounded authorship is subsumed by having the diegetic author strike through and throw away his signatures. In Anonymous, the act of writing is obfuscated by displacing the foregrounded enunciation connected to the signature from one author to another. Clearly, as Barthes argued, with this signature the film presents ‘that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost’ (1995, 105). It also presents, though, Benveniste’s premise that ‘[n]o one speaks here; events seem to tell themselves’ (1970, 241), since the foregrounding of authorial enunciation inherent in a man writing the two words ‘William Shakespeare’ is

8  THE DRAMA OF THE DIEGETIC AUTHOR 

213

simultaneously disavowed by the film’s claim that not only were the plays written by a man with another name, but that the plays’ true author could never be revealed. Mythologising the plays’ origins in this way obfuscates the status of authorial enunciation in film as well as in the film, making a conservative virtue out of the potentially transgressive nature of obliquely addressing adaptation’s authorial artifice. The dual nature of these signatures, simultaneously valorisations of Romantic authorship, in a Barthesian context, and traces of transformative work, in a Benvenistene context, aptly demonstrates the importance of academic traditions to understandings of adaptation’s enunciative possibilities. Derrida’s approach to written signatures echoes the paradox. A signature not only ‘implies the empirical nonpresence of the signer’, a situation that requires, in order to tether the signature to its source, ‘the absolute singularity of a signature-event and a signature-form: the pure reproducibility of a pure event’ (Derrida 1988, 20). It also requires that ‘to be readable […] it must be able to be detached from the present and singular intention of its production’ (1988, 20, my emphasis). This decoupling of the written expression of subjectivity from a presumed authorial intention is strikingly reminiscent of Barthes’s rejection of the knowability and relevance of these intentions. This decoupling is also echoed by Dudley Andrew’s (1995) and André Bazin’s (2009 [1951]) analyses of written enunciative traces in film adaptations. Andrew interprets Emile Zola’s signature at the beginning of Jean Renoir’s La Bête Humaine (The Human Beast) (1938) as ‘authentic and authenticating. […] Zola addresses us through this film’ (Andrew 1995, 307). Andrew presumes that the auteur-ial intention behind this authentication is an attempt to link foreknowledge of the novel’s prophesies with the pessimistic social context at the time of the adaptation, arguing that Zola’s ‘visage wants to hover over the movie, spelling doom for its characters, and for the Third Republic that received its tainted start at the close of the novel’ (1995, 307). Andrew interprets neither foreknowledge of the film’s conclusion, nor the foregrounding of enunciative construction inherent in the presentation of Zola’s signature, as traces of the film’s transformative work. Authored discours is translated into cinematic histoire despite the presentation of authored enunciation in textual form. Bazin analyses the written presentation of the diary in Robert Bresson’s adaptation (1951) of Georges Bernanos’s Journal d’un Curé de Campagne (Diary of a Country Priest) in a similar manner. He argues

214  R. GEAL

that Bresson not only renders the curé’s (Claude Laydu) diary in written form because ‘the mental and emotional impact of a line that is merely read is very different from that of a spoken line’ (Bazin 2009, 128), so that the film therefore ‘includes all that the novel has to offer plus, in addition, its refraction in the cinema’ (2009, 143), but also claims, in a pre-Barthesian manner, that ‘acknowledgement for [the film’s artistic pleasure] must go to the genius of Bernanos’ (2009, 143). KingsleySmith, Andrew, Bazin and Derrida all apply a loosely Barthesian interpretation to the signature, examining the writer’s/director’s intentions, rather than the ways in which the signature foregrounds the transformative work of enunciation. Anonymous’ Shakespearean signature allegorises these paradoxes. Instead of Shakespeare in Love’s ‘effect which naturalizes the film’s character as the historical truth of the work’s genesis’ (Burt 2000, 220), or La Bête Humaine’s ‘authentic and authenticating’ (Andrew 1995, 307) articulation, Anonymous presents the Shakespearean signature as a performative lie, as the suturing manifestation of the transformative work inherent in the foregrounding of authorial enunciation. The film also raises its conception of authorial enunciation to a pathological, almost de-humanised level. When his wife (Helen Baxendale) demands to know whether he is writing again, Oxford equates his work with madness or demonic possession. This account of authorship mystifies the writing of Shakespeare’s plays into a process that only a superhuman or an idiot savant could execute, foregrounding a mythic conception of authorship while simultaneously denying the true author. That the film portrays these plays as the written, sole discours-like possession of this mythologised author, rather than the collaborative creation of a playwright and acting troupe, is demonstrated by the way that Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto), who is entrusted custody of Oxford’s manuscripts, buries them under the Rose Theatre’s stage when pursued by Robert Cecil’s (Edward Hogg) henchmen, who are trying to destroy Oxford’s work. Although these soldiers burn the theatre down Jonson returns the next day to uncover the texts from a sturdy box, lovingly handling their slightly charred pages. Authorial enunciation is thereby simultaneously fetishised and disavowed. Oxford’s charred manuscripts are presented as the fragile fonts of originality and genius narrowly saved from oblivion within a medium in which authorship is mythologised so that it can be simultaneously exhibited and obfuscated in anamorphic terms.

8  THE DRAMA OF THE DIEGETIC AUTHOR 

215

As with Shakespeare in Love, Anonymous adapts elements of the plays into ‘real’ events that spontaneously happen in the diegetic author’s life. Narrativising moments from Shakespeare’s plays into events from Oxford’s life is one way in which writing is obfuscated into that which cinematically unfolds, as though it simply happened. The young Oxford’s (Jamie Campbell Bower) reaction to being spied upon, for example, is to stab blindly through a curtain, so that he undergoes events that will then be written into Act 3 Scene 4 of the play Hamlet, where the protagonist repeats the confusion about who is hiding behind a curtain, and mistakenly stabs the wrong person. Hamlet’s closet scene is thereby turned into a fainomaic form of ostensibly un-authored histoire, which spectators might appear to produce before their own eyes, rather than as discours, a partial, foregrounded authorial artifice. The fact that some audience members might recognise the Shakespearean enunciation behind Oxford’s reaction, however, foregrounds the very act of authorship that the scene seems to obliterate. When the scene from Hamlet in which Polonius is slain in the same manner is later shown on the diegetic Elizabethan stage, the film narrativises the anamorphic oscillation between presenting and subsuming this authorial enunciation. This dialectic between authored theatre and ostensibly spontaneous cinema is central to how the film negotiates anamorphosis. When Henry V is shown playing at the Rose, the Chorus’ (Mark Rylance) plea for the audience to ‘Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them’ (Prologue 26) intermittently cuts to scenes of the Earl of Southampton (Xavier Samuel) and his men riding off to war, as though they were about to fight at Agincourt. The Chorus’ anti-realist stress, to the theatre’s audience, that it is ‘your thoughts’, with these first two words repeated, ‘your thoughts, that must deck our kings’ (Prologue 28), is immediately followed by the work of computer-generated imagery and mobile camera, decking the kings without the need for spectators to employ their ‘imaginary forces’ (Prologue 18). The constructed, collaborative and anti-realist theatre, with the author Oxford looking on, almost like the Brechtian director at the side of the stage (Brecht 1965), is here juxtaposed with unfolding cinematic diegesis. The theatre’s backstage apparatus is similarly revealed in a way that emphasises the disavowal of the cinematic apparatus’ transformative work. The film’s opening scene shows a narrator (Derek Jacobi) on a contemporary proscenium stage outlining the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship. In the wings, actors who will play Jonson and Robert Cecil’s

216  R. GEAL

soldiers are shown preparing for their cues. The fact that these actors exist in a contemporary diegesis different from the fictional world of that in which they will perform is demonstrated through a juxtaposition between the actors’ Elizabethan costumes, and the contemporary technology of a gas lighter that a stagehand uses to ignite the soldiers’ torches. The actors do not enter onto the stage, however. The last shot of the narrator on stage is a medium close-up, with the back of the shot obscured in darkness and pouring rain. Both this darkness and rain are part of the stage effects that have already been shown, but when the narrator turns to the darkness, and moves out of frame to reveal the events that he has introduced, a flash of lightning reveals not the stage which had already been established, but a definitively cinematic and Elizabethan mise-en-scène, without the borders to this diegesis marked by proscenium arch and wings. The actors who were preparing in the wings, and who stood amiably next to one another in that location, are sutured directly into the cinematic diegesis that emerges from behind the narrator. They are now no longer diegetic actors playing Jonson and soldiers, but are now the diegetic Jonson and soldiers, fleeing and chasing in life or death peril. The artificial status of these characters is foregrounded while they are shown within the confines of the theatrical world, but they slip effortlessly into unquestioned artifice once they enter the histoire-like realm of the purely cinematic. In the same scene, the theatrical mechanics of the dramatic effect of lightning and rain pouring upon the narrator are revealed—­a stagehand is shown turning a large light on and off to simulate the lightning. Another cranks a wheel, and the film then cuts to a low-angle shot of a high up spinning apparatus pouring out water. An extreme long shot then shows the narrator holding up an umbrella to protect himself from this simulated rain, and the theatrical apparatus that creates this simulated rain can be seen spinning high above his head. Later in the film, there are further weather effects, but these are presented as the heavens’ punctuations of key emotional moments, rather than as manipulative theatrical or cinematic devices. Rain begins to fall during the performance, on the Rose’s outdoor stage, of Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be’ (3.1.58) speech, showering the mood with a seemingly ‘natural’ commentary beyond the will of any of the film’s characters. At this moment even the Renaissance stage, hitherto presented as an anti-realist space, falls under the diegetic logic of an ostensibly spontaneous coming together of word, action and third-person metaphor.

8  THE DRAMA OF THE DIEGETIC AUTHOR 

217

Likewise, when the Earl of Essex (Sam Reid) leads his rebellion against Queen Elizabeth (Vanessa Redgrave) to ruination, Oxford is shown gazing through a window at his friend’s failure, the camera zooming into a close-up as rain begins to fall upon the panes with what would be, outside of cinema’s artificiality, impeccable dramatic timing. This scene culminates with Oxford’s nemesis, Robert Cecil, telling the film’s protagonist that his childhood under the wardship of William Cecil (David Thewlis) was part of an elaborate scheme to manipulate Elizabeth’s succession. Robert Cecil’s claim that the plan would have succeeded were it not for Oxford’s neglect of his duties ‘all to write … poetry’, is followed by an ominous rumble of thunder. Cecil’s dramatic pause and its ostensibly un-authored counterpointing imparted by the thunder again highlight the film’s fetishisation of writing. Each of these weather effects, taken in isolation, would merely be part of cinema’s overall reality-effect, an element of verisimilitude so conventionalised as to be unnoticeable. Juxtaposing, however, these ostensibly un-authored weather effects with a prior foregrounding of their artificiality, in the preceding presentation of the contemporary theatre, again demonstrates the oscillating anamorphism of foregrounding and obfuscating enunciation. That the last of these examples punctuates Cecil’s melodramatic denunciation, ‘all to write … poetry’, underscores the link between Anonymous’ fetishisation of authorship and its accompanying disavowal. A Barthesian reading of these scenes would, as with the interpretations of Shakespeare in Love analysed above, make a useful critique of Anonymous’ atavistic valorisation of Romantic authorial genius. But it would not be able to understand the film in the context of cinema’s inherent anamorphism and, given that the film’s obfuscation of authorship directly allegorises the cinema’s transformative work, does therefore not address that which is most ideological about Anonymous. The film’s thematisation of authorship simultaneously acts as a disavowal of the issue of authorship, and a Barthesian interpretation of this authorship would complete the anamorphic process.

Conclusion Biopics about canonical authors do not necessarily need to operate in anamorphic terms since they have no ontological imperative to mix together the foregrounded artifice of the author’s diegetic fiction with

218  R. GEAL

the less foregrounded artifice of the supervening fiction about the author. When biopics about canonical authors do mix together these different enunciative registers, however, they do so in an anamorphic manner that obfuscates artifice in a similar way to the drama of vision and the drama of authorship, and which can be called the ‘drama of the diegetic author’. This drama draws attention to the ways that the artifice of the ostensibly un-authored film blurs with the artifice of the diegetically foregrounded authorial fiction. The discours-like status of this revelation oscillates back into histoire-like obfuscation of this revelation by employing the conventionalised mechanisms of the drama of vision and the drama of authorship, and by mythologising the creative impact of the diegetic author. This last element is most clearly articulated by a Barthesian form of academic legitimation that focuses on how the diegetic author operates in canonical terms, rather than enunciative terms—with how the diegetic author returns from the dead, rather with how the author simultaneously reveals himself and continues to hide his enunciation.

Notes 1.  This book uses Shakespearean authorship as a case study, but biopics about other canonical writers can share the same impulse as the films discussed in this chapter to adapt certain elements of the authors’ writings into the unfolding drama of their diegetic lives. A few examples of these films include Becoming Jane (Julian Jarrold, 2007), about Jane Austen; Finding Neverland (Marc Forster, 2004), about J.M. Barrie; In the Heart of the Sea (Ron Howard, 2015), about Herman Melville; and Kafka (Steven Soderbergh, 1991) about Franz Kafka. 2. It also facilitates an exploration of the ways in which the privileging of authorship intersects with the culture industry. Courtney Lehmann, for example, argues that Shakespeare in Love’s romantic (in the contexts of both the Romantic author and the romantic film hero) lead’s ‘corpus, in all its incarnations—bodily, textual, commercial and critical—returns from the dead to implore us not to love but, rather, to enjoy’ (2002, 214).

References Andrew, Dudley. 1995. Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1995 [1967]. “The Death of the Author.” In Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern, edited by Seán Burke, 125–30. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

8  THE DRAMA OF THE DIEGETIC AUTHOR 

219

Bazin, André. 2009 [1951]. “‘Diary of a Country Priest’ and the Stylistics of Robert Bresson.” In The Films of Robert Bresson: A Casebook, edited by Bert Cardullo, 9–24. London: Anthem Press. Benveniste, Émile. 1970. Problems in General Linguistics. Translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables: Miami University Press. Brecht, Bertolt. 1965. The Messingkauf Dialogues. Translated by John Willett. London: Methuen. Burt, Richard. 2000. “‘Shakespeare in Love’ and the End of the Shakespearean: Academic and Mass Culture Constructions of Literary Authorship.” In Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle, edited by Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray, 203–31. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Davis, Todd F., and Kenneth Womack. 2004. “Reading (and Writing) the Ethics of Authorship: ‘Shakespeare in Love’ as Postmodern Metanarrative.” Literature/Film Quarterly 32, no. 2: 153–61. Derrida, Jacques. 1988. Limited Inc. Translated by Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Kingsley-Smith, Jane E. 2002. “Shakespearean Authorship in Popular British Cinema.” In Shakespeare into Film, edited by James Michael Welsh, Richard Vela, and John C. Tibbetts, 201–6. New York: Checkmark. Lehmann, Courtney. 2002. “‘Shakespeare in Love’: Romancing the Author, Mastering the Body.” In Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema, edited by Courtney Lehmann and Lisa S. Starks, 125–45. London: Associated University Presses.

Filmography Anonymous. 2011. Directed by Roland Emmerich. USA: Columbia. Becoming Jane. 2007. Directed by Julian Jarrold. UK/Ireland: Buena Vista International. Bête Humaine, La (The Human Beast). 1938. Directed by Jean Renoir. France: Paris Film. Finding Neverland. 2004. Directed by Marc Forster. UK/USA: Miramax. In the Heart of the Sea. 2015. Directed by Ron Howard. USA: Warner Bros. Journal d’un Curé de Campagne (Diary of a Country Priest). 1951. Directed by Robert Bresson. France: Brandon Films. Kafka. 1991. Directed by Steven Soderbergh. France/USA: Miramax. Prospero’s Books. 1991. Directed Peter Greenaway. UK: Allarts. Shakespeare in Love. 1998. Directed by John Madden. USA: Universal.

Conclusion

The drama of authorship is an inevitable element of any film which foregrounds the fact that it is adapted from a canonical source, and which narrates according to the conventions of cinematic realism. Canonical realist adaptations reveal their constructed authorship, and then subsume and obfuscate that revelation. The oscillation between these two enunciative registers is an anamorphic process, continuously repeating Freud’s masochistic fort/da game (1955, 14–7), with the fort of revealing authorial construction cathartically resolved by the da of immersion in cinematic verisimilitude. In this sense, then, realist film adaptation foregrounds itself as (or more precisely masquerades as) constructed discours but transforms itself into an anamorphic hybrid of authored discours and ostensibly un-authored histoire. Indeed, realist adaptation is fundamentally the adaptation of discours into an anamorphic discours/histoire hybrid. Realist adaptation of a canonical ‘original’, therefore, does not just entail the shift of a text from one medium to another, and from one time period/culture to another. More fundamentally, realist canonical adaptation means a shift from discours to anamorphic discours/histoire—it is the adaptation of discours into anamorphic discours/histoire. The word ‘adaptation’ therefore has two interrelated meanings—adaptation is not just the replication of one fictional text by another fictional text; adaptation is also the process of changing a text in which authorial artifice is retroactively foregrounded into a text that announces, subsumes and obfuscates that artifice. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 R. Geal, Anamorphic Authorship in Canonical Film Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16496-6

221

222  Conclusion

This secondary meaning is conceptually difficult because adaptations of canonical ‘originals’ operate within a self-obfuscating context. The very mechanisms that set up adaptation’s oscillating anamorphism between authored discours and ostensibly un-authored histoire have within them the means to subsume that oscillation into those mechanisms. Thus, a Shakespearean film adaptation generates the common-sense observation that the film is self-evidently a re-performance, and self-evidently something that a spectator knows is a fiction, rather than something spontaneously somewhat ‘real’. But this common-sense observation operates within the context of the subtle anamorphic mechanisms of belief/disbelief. After all, a similar common-sense observation regulates the brain’s interpretation of film’s most basic visual processes. In Chapter 7, I discussed how film’s illusory impression of movement is cognitively impenetrable. Even if our higher brain functions know that film is composed of a series of static images, our lower brain functions interpret these still images as movement. The extent to which this cognitive impenetrability is conventionalised is demonstrated by my own textual analyses in this book—I write that the camera zooms into a close-up, or that a character sweeps the floor with a mop, but I do not actually see a movement towards a face or a character sweeping. Instead, I see a series of still images, and my brain processes the visual stimuli in a way that makes sense of them. The perceptual anomaly constitutes the basic units of this misrecognition, but higher-level brain functions such as identification with characters, speculation about narrative events, appreciation of aesthetic composition and so on, all support this complex investment in something that I know is not real, but simultaneously partly respond to as though it has some of the characteristics of reality. Foregrounded authorial artifice is another part of this anomalous response to fictional stimuli. Just as still images are interpreted as selfevidently movement, so too the inseparable oscillating anamorphosis of realist adaptation’s discours/histoire hybridity is interpreted as self-evidently a re-performance of the ‘original’ that spectators know ­ is an artifice at all times. The effect generated by film projection, the impression of movement, is self-obfuscating because it does not draw attention to the mechanisms which facilitate the effect—film projection causes a specific anomalous effect and also provides conventionalised patterns of spectatorial behaviour to elide the mechanisms which facilitate the effect. Even if the spectator knows that he/she is watching a series

Conclusion

  223

of still images, he/she responds to those images as though he/she was watching movement. So too, the effect generated by realist adaptation, the obfuscation of foregrounded artifice into an anamorphic discours/ histoire hybrid, is self-obfuscating because it does not draw attention to the mechanisms which facilitate the effect—realist adaptation causes a specific anamorphic effect and also provides conventionalised patterns of spectatorial behaviour to elide the mechanisms which facilitate the effect. Even if the spectator knows that he/she is watching a foregrounded authorial artifice, he/she responds to that artifice as though he/she was watching something that has a certain reality-effect. Authorial anamorphism, then, is another anomalous process, exploiting the brain’s modular distinctions between higher brain functions which recognise that realist adaptation is a re-performance and lower brain functions which problematise that recognition by responding to realist adaptation as though it has some of the qualities of reality. Authorial anamorphism relies on the foregrounding of artifice, against which the subsumption of that artifice oscillates. But that very foregrounding of artifice provides a canonically sanctioned legitimation of this anamorphic oscillation—the fact that the artifice reveals itself to be Shakespearean provides the context for explaining the oscillation between enunciative registers as something that relates to that foregrounded Shakespearean artifice rather than as an unconscious anamorphic effect. This is the full efficacy of the drama of authorship—that which is most ideological about it also provides the context to elide the unconscious ideological effect. Shakespearean film is clearly not ‘normal’ film, states the critic of my method—it is a re-performance. This book has tried to demonstrate, however, that this common-sense observation elides the complex ways that Shakespearean film both re-performs artifice and simultaneously functions as realist cinema, and how that dual nature is self-legitimating.

Fitting Psychoanalytic Poststructuralism into Adaptation Studies I finish by making a few comments about the potential use-value of the methodology set out in this book. Poststructuralism, at the end of the brief historically specific period when it constituted something like a rough orthodoxy across much of the humanities, was almost fatally

224  Conclusion

criticised for a number of reasons that I discussed in Chapter 2. Critics of the methodology employed in this book will have little difficulty redeploying those same criticisms. As such, I want to briefly contextualise the limitations and advantages of my approach to film adaptation, and give particular consideration to the different ways that psychoanalytic poststructuralism and dialogism might contribute towards their shared struggle against sociocultural injustice and oppression. The first element of this contextualisation must be a broad defence of psychoanalytic poststructuralism in film studies, given that the paradigm is so frequently treated as a historical aberration—Noël Carroll’s description of the paradigm as ‘an arcane branch of psychoanalysis’ (1982, 131) which ‘treats the central Lacanian propositions as so many philosopher’s stones’ through its ‘reference to almost mystical concepts’ (1982, 132) suggests that psychoanalytic poststructuralism is as misguided, inevitably unsuccessful, esoteric, fraudulent and consigned to a less enlightened period of history as alchemy. The book’s second chapter discussed how poststructuralism briefly rose to ascendency in the 1970s, before coming under assault from rational cognitivism, and in response mutated into the more modest culturalism, out of which dialogism eventually developed. Such a history is inevitably heuristic, however, and psychoanalytic poststructuralism has continued to exert an influence on the discipline and, importantly, has continued to develop as a theoretical paradigm. Additional responses to cognitivist criticisms, alongside the culturalist turn, were continuing discourses that refined and adapted psychoanalysis in various different ways. In part, the influence of these discourses has been facilitated by the same fluctuating real-world determinants that Terry Eagleton (2003, 24) saw as the forces which had raised and then lowered vanguard 1970s’ Theory. I have argued elsewhere (Geal 2015) that the cognitivist victory over poststructuralism chronologically corresponds to the triumph of capitalism over communism which Francis Fukuyama characterised as the End of History (1992). Just as real-world explicitly socialist leftism was defeated by what Derrida describes as the illusion of ‘victorious capitalism in a liberal democracy which has finally arrived at the plenitude of its ideals’ (1994, 56), so too explicitly vanguard scholarship was defeated by cognitivism. However, what Robert Kagan calls the Return of History (2008) in the twenty-first century has overturned Fukuyama’s optimistic consensus through the re-emergence of ideological and class conflict, boom and bust economics, authoritarian regimes and quasi-authoritarian populism, refugee crises, enhanced environmental degradation and so on.

Conclusion

  225

If psychoanalytic poststructuralism underwent reverses during the temporary (and geographically specific) ‘good times’ of a brief End of History, then the return of History’s numerous vicissitudes necessitates a resurgent vanguard scholarship to address renewed and emerging forms of injustice and oppression. Reports of the death of psychoanalytic poststructuralism have therefore been exaggerated or precipitous. John Mullarkey, for example, finds it ‘droll, then, that just when many theorists thought that they had seen the back of the last Freudian film analysis, suddenly, and seemingly from nowhere, its most ardent and prolific champion appeared in the figure of Žižek’ (2009, 61). It is also the case that the more recent strand of psychoanalytic scholarship has identified and rectified some elements of theory which limited its effectivity. Thus, Žižek reorients a central component of 1970s’ film theory in the following manner: The way the Lacanian problematic of the gaze works here in England is mediated through Foucault’s work on the Panopticon: for the male gaze, the woman is reduced to an object, etc. Whereas for Lacan it is the opposite: the gaze is the object, it is not on the side of the subject. In this way, for Lacan, it is woman who occupies the place of the gaze. If there is something totally alien to Lacan it is the idea that the male position is that of the gaze that objectifies woman. (Žižek 1996, 27)

Richard Allen, similarly, puts some of the limitations in psychoanalytic film theory down to ‘an error enshrined in Althusser’s own appropriation of psychoanalysis’ (2009, 454). These Foucauldian and Althusserian variations on Freudian and Lacanian premises mean that ‘what looks to cognitive theorists such as David Bordwell like bad science appears to Lacanian theorists like Joan Copjec and Slavoj Žižek like bad psychoanalysis’ (Allen 2009, 454). Psychoanalytic poststructuralism can thus overcome certain internal methodological shortcomings through a self-analysis reminiscent of Lacan’s concept après-coup (1977, 30–113), in which psychoanalytic time is nonlinear, with subsequent reinterpretations uncovering buried meaning from previous interpretations. As such, contemporary psychoanalytic poststructuralism activates an aprèscoup reinterpretation of 1970s’ Theory in a similar way to how Lacan reinterpreted Freud, reinvigorating and reanimating an incomplete theory at a time when the necessity of such a theory is pressing. Žižek’s, Copjec’s and my own work (amongst others) are part of this après-coup psychoanalysis.

226  Conclusion

Psychoanalytic poststructuralism and dialogism are rival paradigms in the sense that they conceptualise repressive hegemonic ideology in different ways, but they are allied paradigms in the sense that they both seek to counter the effects of hegemonic ideology. A genuinely politically rival approach to the study of film and literature such as rational cognitivism, for example, makes it clear that what Bordwell calls ‘culturalism […] attracted followers because in many respects it continues the program of subject-position theory [Bordwell’s term for poststructuralism]’ (1996, 12). Bordwell sets out a number of ‘deep continuities of doctrine and practice’ (1996, 13) between these two leftist scholarly methods (1996, 13–26). Poststructuralism and dialogism may disagree on the details of how hegemony operates, and how resistance to that hegemony might be understood, but they both attempt to address the same sociocultural injustices, if from different angles. The specific difference between these two paradigms identified in this book relates to one element of dialogism only, albeit an important element. Dialogism analyses the potential benefits of dis-placing the author—a canonical voice historically used to assert a particular exclusionary hierarchy of identities can be reworked into a multiplicity of voices celebrating diverse inclusionary identities. I would not want to invalidate the progressive potential of this reworking and the scholarship that analyses it. Psychoanalytic poststructuralism, however, is concerned to also address the potentially regressive consequences of this authorial dis-placing, which also functions as a mis-placing of an ideologically important form of enunciative anamorphism. So, a psychoanalytic poststructuralist approach can still celebrate an important aspect of a dialogic rewriting of a canonical original that challenges hegemonic approaches to the canon. Psychoanalytic poststructuralism does not seek to entirely invalidate the conclusions of such dialogic analyses—it is (politically) better for an adapted text to ‘de-repress’ (Stam 2005, 42) the original than for it to perpetuate nostalgic hegemony. It is still the case, however, that an important element of this de-repression involves another ideological operation that limits the emancipatory efficacy of the de-repression. This means that de-repressed dialogic adaptations act somewhat like what Colin MacCabe calls ‘progressive texts’ (1985, 44). He distinguishes this form of film from the unambiguously hegemonic ‘classic realist text’ and the anti-grammatical ‘revolutionary text’ (1985, 50), which employs avant-garde devices, such as the direct address that Wollen (1985) identified in Godard’s films, to challenge cinematic

Conclusion

  227

realism. For MacCabe, the ‘progressive text’ has a narrative that opposes dominant ideology to some extent. He gives the example of how a hypothetical film ‘in which a strike is represented as a just struggle in which oppressed workers attempt to gain some rightful wealth would be in contradiction with certain contemporary ideological discourses and as such might be classified as progressive’ (1985, 44). Texts such as ‘the films of Costas-Gavras or such television documentaries as Cathy Come Home [Ken Loach, 1966]’ demonstrate this approach. However, the progressive text still narrates using the conventions of classical realism, and those conventions are derived from and support dominant ideology. MacCabe thus thinks of their ‘progressive’ project as reforming rather than revolutionary—‘these films tend […] to be linked to a social democratic conception of progress – if we reveal injustices then they will go away’ (1985, 44). A short comedy television film that intuits MacCabe’s argument, and exaggerates it for comic effect, is The Strike (Peter Richardson, 1988), in which former Welsh miner Paul (Alexei Sayle) has his screenplay about the 1984 Miners’ Strike against Margaret Thatcher’s colliery closures turned into a Hollywood film. Paul is dismayed when his vision of gritty social(ist) realism becomes a bombastic action movie starring Al Pacino (Peter Richardson) as the very un-Hollywood union leader Arthur Scargill. This may be an example pushed to parodic limits, but it unconsciously refers to a broader understanding of cinematic realism as a mechanism that re-inscribes and reinforces ideologically regressive Cartesian subjectivity, no matter what events or perspectives which that mechanism may narrate. As such, like MacCabe’s progressive texts, dialogic elements of adaptations might employ reworked narratives that challenge dominant ideology, but they still narrate using the conventions of ideological realism. Psychoanalytic poststructuralism can tentatively celebrate such texts’ reworked emancipatory narratives, and at the same time offer a critique of their conservative form, in which the dis-placed original author operates as an additional layer of anamorphosis. My method thereby offers a corrective to one inadvertent element of dialogism, rather than a manifesto to reject its political project in toto. Poststructuralist analyses can thereby operate in addition to insights from dialogic analyses. Indeed, poststructuralist analyses can also operate in addition to insights from fidelity criticism. I do not claim that there is any logical or philosophical flaw in dialogism’s arguments

228  Conclusion

about transcultural adaptation, or fidelity criticism’s arguments about transmedial adaptation. Both of these methodologies make persuasive claims about how adaptations relate to their sources, and it is incontestably the case that certain adaptational filmmakers attempt to ‘faithfully’ shift meaning from one medium into another, and/or attempt to ‘dialogically’ shift meaning from one cultural context to another. These shifts can still take place while a film adaptation simultaneously manipulates authorship in an anamorphic manner. The example with which I began my outline of anamorphic authorship, the close-up of Antony’s calculating expression in Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar, and Belsey’s analysis thereof (1998), demonstrates how these three ostensibly different paradigms each offer an explanation of one part of an adaptation’s potential effects. Belsey claims that the playtext is interrogative in the sense that it raises contested political questions relative to Elizabethan England without providing definitive answers to those political questions: Julius Caesar can alternatively be seen as bringing into collision two antithetical political orders; one hierarchic, authoritarian, ritualistic and, if we take Antony’s account of Caesar’s will seriously, benevolent; the other deeply distrustful of despotism, convinced of the rationality of the people, a proto-liberalism as yet unauthorised in 1599, whose only mode of assertion is political assassination. This collision finds a focus in the juxtaposition at the centre of the play of the two speeches in the marketplace. The [play]text’s plurality – and its political significance in its own period – lies above all in its inability or unwillingness to choose decisively between absolutism and the right to resist. (Belsey 1998, 63)

The (proto-)dialogic element of Belsey’s analysis resides in the way that she positions Mankiewicz’s film in a different historical moment: In the context of the Cold War such questions were not open to debate. What was known with certainty was that social disorder was produced by unscrupulous individuals in quest of personal power. The message of the film is that Romans (the costume and settings), Elizabethans (the play is by Shakespeare) and modern Americans (for whom the film paradoxically provides a mirror) are all instances of the universal, tragic and timeless truth that integrity, however heroic, is no match for political sophistication, and that the people are perpetually in danger, easily misled by demagogues pretending to have their interests at heart. (Belsey 1998, 63–4)

Conclusion

  229

Belsey’s (proto-)dialogism is perhaps different from the paradigm of dialogism proper which emerged at the turn of the Millennium in the sense that it does not see the later historical culture as emancipatory, but her argument clearly fits within the context of the dialogic focus on how the potential meanings of texts mutate as they travel through time and across cultures. Belsey’s argument is also somewhat aligned with fidelity criticism in the sense that it identifies how authorial meaning can be either successfully maintained or unfortunately altered in the process of adapting to the film medium. Thus, Belsey thinks of the close-up on Antony as an unfortunate alteration of the play’s interrogative meaning: ‘the camera swings round to show his calculating expression. The citizens, wrought to hysteria by his rhetoric, are seen as gullible victims of the demagogue’ (1998, 63), whereas this meaning would be harder to establish on the stage without the benefit of close-up, and virtually impossible at the [Elizabethan] Globe, where Antony’s expression would have had to be visible to an audience located on at least three sides of him, possibly four. The effect of the close-up here is to produce ethical and political coherence, and in the process to close off many of the ethical and political questions left open by the [play]text. (Belsey 1998, 63)

Like Belsey’s dialogism, her recourse to issues of fidelity is different from most other forms of fidelity criticism—Belsey sees the ‘original’ as pluralistic and the adaptation as conservative, whereas most fidelity criticism focuses on the unaltered transfer of broadly conservative elements. Nevertheless, Belsey demonstrates that an adaptation has some important qualities derived from the ways that meaning can be conveyed in different media. My point about Belsey’s argument concerning Mankiewicz’s film, and of the alternative argument set out in this book, is that each paradigm makes a persuasive and useful account of how the film operates. I have already stated that Belsey misses an important part of how the film negotiates the playtext’s interrogativity, because the close-up of Antony’s calculating expression does not completely introduce an answer to this interrogativity from outside the playtext, since the playtext announces the same information as the close-up with the verses ‘Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot/Take thou what course thou wilt’ (3.2.253–4). Nevertheless, Belsey still makes a convincing argument about how this

230  Conclusion

scene, and the film more generally, invokes ‘the universal, tragic and timeless truth that integrity, however heroic, is no matter for political sophistication, and that the people are perpetually in danger, easily misled by demagogues pretending to have their interests at heart’ (1998, 63–4). I agree with this broader claim—I agree that the film operates ideologically, confirming certain historically relevant quasi-McCarthyist values, and I agree that these values are partly ‘unfaithful’ distortions of the ‘original’ playtext’s potential meanings. As such, I agree with an analysis of the film that simultaneously has the qualities of dialogism and fidelity criticism. The element that I would want to add to Belsey’s argument—the claim that an enunciative anamorphosis is also in operation, most clearly exemplified in those fainomaic moments which subsume foregrounded authorial discours into ostensibly un-authored cinematic histoire—does not invalidate Belsey’s dialogic or fidelity insights. So, my full argument about this scene would be as follows: the playtext has certain specific pluralistic possibilities (particularly on the Elizabethan stage). One of the film adaptation’s ideological effects is the un-‘faithful’ narrowing of this pluralism into a dialogically conservative quasi-McCarthyism. Another of the film’s ideological effects is its authorial anamorphosis (as well as its inevitable visual anamorphosis). Thus, academic analyses, both fidelity based and dialogic, identify films and scenes that can also be analysed as examples of anamorphic authorship. Whenever a fidelity scholar identifies an adaptation’s clever movement between how a source text communicates meaning and a film text replicates that meaning, or whenever a dialogic scholar identifies how an adaptation manipulates and reworks meaning between historical moments and between cultures, it is also possible for a psychoanalytic poststructuralist scholar to identify how these transmedial and transcultural movements also operate in anamorphic enunciative terms. One of the advantages of this poststructuralist insight is that it allows for a broader understanding of filmmakers’ and spectators’ motivations than fidelity criticism or dialogism. This breadth has two dimensions. Firstly, the poststructuralism I advocate is broad because it can accept the insights of fidelity criticism and dialogism in addition to its own, as discussed above. Secondly, poststructuralist adaptation theory is broad because it conceptualises certain aspects of filmmaking and film spectating as relatively universal and ahistorical. The anamorphosis inherent in Cartesian subjectivity, as the book has demonstrated,

Conclusion

  231

has historical antecedents going back to Descartes’, Holbein’s and Velázquez’s Early Modern period. The authorial anamorphosis that is pleasurable for a spectating Cartesian subject is more generalised than the specific historical forms of spectatorship that Belsey identified in the performance of the play Julius Caesar in the 1590s and in the 1950s’ film adaptation. And, given the pluralistic first breadth dimension from the start of this paragraph, psychoanalytic poststructuralism can provide insights about relatively universal anamorphic spectatorship in addition to the more specific dialogic and fidelity-based insights about historical forms of spectatorship. Poststructuralism thus conceptualises filmmaking and spectating as relating to much more ubiquitous forms of human behaviour than either fidelity criticism or dialogism. Fidelity criticism relies on filmmaking motivations and a spectatorial response that draw on a discerning knowledge of a specific kind of cultural capital. Adaptational filmmaking and spectatorship involve one of two irreconcilable models—either agreement, prior to making or watching an adaptation, about a certain set of themes and devices operating in the ‘original’, and about ways to draw out and descant on those themes and devices in a different medium, or filmmaking that mistakenly abandons those themes and devices, and spectatorial disengagement with these cultural values. A hyperbolic example of this latter approach is the teenage action film fan Danny (Austin O’Brien) in Last Action Hero (John McTiernan, 1993), who provides a whispered criticism over Olivier’s Hamlet’s hesi­ tation about stabbing Claudius at prayer, when forced to watch the adaptation at school—‘Don’t talk, just do it!’ Danny instead fantasises about his favourite action hero Jack Slater (Arnold Schwarzenegger) playing the Dane, destroying Elsinore with machine gun fire, explosions and one-liners like ‘Not to be!’ This is the fidelity binary writ large—the high culture of Shakespeare and a ‘faithful’ adaptation like Olivier’s, and the low culture of the popular cinema and undiscerning mass audiences, with filmmaking and spectatorship conceptualised as a choice about which side of that binary to occupy. If fidelity criticism is the paradigm of the cultural elitist, then it conceptualises adaptational filmmaking and spectatorship, or at least the best kind of filmmaking and spectatorship, as similarly elitist (or if not, philistine). Dialogism relies on filmmaking motivations and a spectatorial response that draws on specific real-world experiences derived from personal experiences of disempowerment and potential re-empowerment.

232  Conclusion

Filmmakers encode certain culturally specific values into the way that they rework the canon—Taymor’s The Tempest (2010) transforms the male Prospero into the female Prospera (Helen Mirren), and Branagh casts a black Don Pedro (Denzel Washington) in Much Ado About Nothing (1993) because these adaptational elements demonstrate progressive attitudes reflecting certain historical, cultural and social conditions. A spectator can then either share the adaptation’s cultural values, and celebrate the changes made, or reject those cultural values and complain that the canon is being bastardised (in a less likely, but conceivable midpoint between these two extremes, a spectator might go into the cinema rejecting the adaptation’s progressive values, but be won over and ‘converted’ by them). If dialogism is the paradigm of the progressive cultural activist, then it conceptualises adaptational filmmaking and spectatorship as similarly activist (or if not, reactionarily hegemonic). Psychoanalytic poststructuralism, on the other hand, provides insights about filmmaking motivations and spectatorial responses that are more multiple than the narrow conceptual parameters of fidelity criticism’s elitism and dialogism’s activism. Psychoanalytic poststructuralism does not completely close off the claims of the other paradigms—both fidelity criticism and dialogism make powerful cases about how adaptations cleverly manipulate meaning across different media, and about how adaptations rework cultural values across time and space. My approach to adaptation can accept that filmmakers both attempt to celebrate certain elements of the ‘original’ and also attempt to rework certain elements of the ‘original’. I would not want to argue that spectators do not engage with these elements in relation to their own cultural values. However, psychoanalytic poststructuralism claims that filmmaking and spectatorship involve additional processes that operate at the unconscious level. Even if a spectator recognises how an adaptation perpetuates canonical values in a different medium, or even if a spectator celebrates the way that an adaptation challenges hegemonic cultural values, such a spectator is still taking part in an unconscious ideological process in which his or her awareness about how the film communicates these values is being manipulated in anamorphic terms. This pluralistic approach to adaptational filmmaking and adaptational spectatorship can facilitate a task which is beyond the remit of this book, and which will require a full-length follow-up. That task is an investigation of the historical development of these different approaches to making and watching adaptations. A brief account of this future project is as

Conclusion

  233

follows: academic paradigms tend to be mutually exclusive models, with spectators either conceptualised as rational agents or passive dupes, atavistic Bardolators or activist iconoclasts, and so on. Throughout this book, however, I have identified how dialogic scholarship and fidelity criticism have made persuasive interpretations of the same scenes in which I have analysed authorial anamorphism. The same film, or body of films, can be interpreted along competing epistemological lines. Indeed, it will be my subsequent argument that filmmakers can encode these competing epistemological ideas into their films, in inadvertent and (most frequently) unconscious ways.1 Given this unconscious quasi-theoretical form of filmmaking, scholars need not necessarily decide which theory they advocate, and apply this to film texts at the expense of other theories. Instead, film texts demonstrate evidence of various competing interpretations of how films operate. Adaptations of canonical original authors offer privileged conditions to test how these filmmaking strategies operate. Not only do adaptations feature an additional layer of anamorphosis, they also feature numerous diachronic interpretations of the same sources, which facilitate the analysis of how these filmmaking strategies develop historically. Such an analysis has the potential to clarify the way that all film, not just canonical adaptation, functions in relation to unresolved scholarly debates.

Fitting Poststructuralist Adaptation Theory into Leftist Praxis The previous section addressed how poststructuralist adaptation theory can fit into the academy. Poststructuralism’s scholarly origins, however, stress an additional arena in which theory should be active—the real world of politics, culture and society. This is an arena where the historical 1970s’ Theory iteration of poststructuralism struggled. Despite some grandiose claims, and some perhaps naive scholarly optimism about how the humanities could become some kind of revolutionary vanguard, poststructuralism struggled to effect any meaningful change outside university campuses. Even a one-time proponent like Bill Nichols has claimed that poststructuralism’s psychoanalytic critique of sexuality [for example] has not left the academy. Feminists working in other institutions, or in other social settings, or on issues other than phallocentrism and discourse theory – that is, on issues

234  Conclusion such as equal rights, gay and lesbian rights, day care, and sexual harassment – find little in the poststructuralist critique to guide them. Neither the concepts nor the articulation of the concepts presents a very useful political model. (Nichols 1985, 24)

Poststructuralists have struggled to counter this argument. Indeed, as I discussed in Chapter 2, the shifting currents of real-world politics, and the failure of 1970s’ Theory to contend with those shifts, ushered in a revision of leftist academic theory which later facilitated dialogic adaptation theory. Nevertheless, I want to finish this book by making the case for what psychoanalytic poststructuralism still has to offer, in terms of a move out of the academy into the broader political, cultural and social realm, and by stating how poststructuralism might help the left to overcome certain deficiencies inherent in the culturalism that lies behind dialogism. Dialogism has some distinct advantages over poststructuralism. Dialogism is clearer in terms of communicating its method and its analyses—Nichols accepts that poststructuralism’s ‘level of stylistic or syntactic difficulty […] provokes charges of obscurantism, hostility or diffidence toward the reader, and contempt for the popularizing impulse’ (1985, 22). Little wonder, then, that the culturalist turn away from poststructuralism, as Bordwell has put it, ‘came as a something as a sigh of relief. […] Given a forced choice, who would not rather peruse Raymond Williams than Lacan, or Baudrillard’s America instead of Kristeva’s Révolution du langage poétique?’ (Bordwell 1996, 11). Dialogism is also clearer in terms of articulating how its leftism can intervene against injustice—cultural moment x (in which the ‘original’ was written) expresses certain hegemonic sentiments, but cultural moment y (in which the adaptation was made) reinterprets and reworks those sentiments in a progressive manner. This clarity has allowed the culturalism underlying dialogism to successfully migrate out of the academy, with broad consensuses amongst many audiences, media commentators and film/television makers/producers that hitherto marginalised groups should be progressively represented in recent financial successes such as Wonder Woman (Patty Jenkins, 2017) and Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018). Poststructuralism is nothing like as clear in identifying how conservative texts discriminate against and constrain individuals, or in how emancipatory texts might help to empower individuals. Indeed, with poststructuralism, the boundaries between discrimination and empowerment, constraint

Conclusion

  235

and emancipation, even between the oppressor and the oppressed, are never fully clear, with all human consciousness inflected by overdetermined factors outside the control of that consciousness. But this is also poststructuralism’s strength. In an era in which the factionalised barriers of belonging are being asserted between various elements of the left, poststructuralism is a methodology which stresses that all are complicit in unacknowledged and unconscious ideological ways of thinking, and that all existing patterns of thought and behaviour are historically and culturally conditioned. It is not sufficient to only celebrate the decolonisation, or the de-masculinisation, or the de-heterosexualisation of canonical texts in our multicultural gender fluid society. It is also necessary to identify the ways that existing forms of ideological thinking about individual agency, and about how subjects define themselves, continue to operate, and perhaps even become paradoxically strengthened in a culture that celebrates each individual’s ability to structure their own identity from a neoliberal shopping list of highly prescribed and limited choices. Psychoanalytic poststructuralism is the only leftist methodology that can problematise the cultural gains won by the left without falling into a conservative critique of the whole leftist project. It is an uncomfortable methodology for the left, because it is reflective about how subjects define themselves in a climate where the contemporary left (dialogism included) mobilises various group identities as a source of resistance against conservative hegemony. Instead of pointing an incendiary activist fist against a clearly defined regressive enemy, psychoanalytic poststructuralism asks the potential activist to carefully consider his or her own complicity in the ambiguous agency/structure of Cartesian subjectivity. As Žižek has argued, Today, more than ever, we need time to think. This doesn’t mean that we don’t protest or do what’s possible. But let’s not behave as if everything is clear. ‘We just need to act.’ But do what? Act how? Here I’m deeply skeptical. I don’t think we even have a really convincing theory of where we are today. (Žižek 2007)

Žižek recognises the leftist impulse to take up arms against a sea of repressive troubles, stating that his argument is often met with ‘something like, “Are you aware that for every word that you used in your speech, ten children died of hunger in Africa?” or “Do you know that

236  Conclusion

for every sentence that you uttered, a women [sic] was brutally raped in this country?”’ (2007). Indeed, Simon Critchley, using a comparison appropriate for the subject matter of this book, claims that Žižek is like ‘a Slovenian Hamlet, utterly paralyzed but dreaming of an avenging violent act for which, finally, he lacks the courage. […] Žižek’s work leaves us in a fearful and fateful deadlock […]: the only thing to do is nothing’ (2011, 63). There is no simple solution to this problem—as Critchley and Žižek’s unnamed interlocutors argue (and, indeed, as Žižek accepts), intervention against injustice, poverty, war, environmental degradation and so on is absolutely necessary, with an urgent sense that we are Living in the End Times (Žižek 2011). Žižek’s call for pause and thought seems paradoxical for a left built around Marx’s claim that ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world: the point is to change it’ (1976, 5, original emphasis). Psychoanalytic poststructuralism seems to reverse this imperative, and its use-value is therefore open to question. But our ability to make any interventions against hegemony meaningful, rather than merely palliative and/or ideologically repetitive, is hindered both by our very own limited understanding of the exact nature of the problems that we face and, even more fundamentally (and even more disturbingly), by our limited understanding of our own consciousness, and how we might attempt to assert control over that consciousness. Our current theoretical models, then, are not fully up to the task of addressing injustice and oppression, or perhaps even more importantly, of addressing the complexly overdetermined factors generating and perpetuating that injustice and oppression. How, exactly, does an analysis such as that conducted in this book contribute to the left’s ability to make meaningful interventions against injustice? I have attempted to demonstrate how in one area of cultural behaviour, watching certain films adapted from certain canonical sources, spectating subjects are encouraged to think and perceive in a certain way, but are also at least partly being deceived into misrecognising exactly how they think and perceive—the mechanisms of cinematic realism reinforce the ideological illusion of Cartesian subjectivity, even if a film ostensibly declares it artifice, or simultaneously effects an excanonical critique of certain elements of historical or contemporary hegemony. Realist film adaptation facilitates a complex unconscious manipulation of a spectator’s subjectivity, and conceals this manipulation within a common-sense conventionalised canonical context. I would not want to

Conclusion

  237

deny that spectators engage with this canonical context while watching a realist film adaptation—the academic legitimations that I have analysed in this book, alone, demonstrate that audiences can look for and identify patterns of transmedial and transcultural adaptation. However, the book’s psychoanalytic poststructuralist account has identified how additional processes operate at the unconscious ideological level, and how these processes are concealed by the more common-sense explanations associated with fidelity criticism and dialogism. This is an ambitious claim, an ambiguous claim and a non-empirical claim—these limitations are staple criticisms of psychoanalysis and poststructuralism. Given the precipice upon which humanity stands, however, in which Marx’s call to change the world is more pressing than ever, the argument in this book is part of a broader attempt to put in place a fuller interpretation of both the world and ourselves, so that we might then adequately address Marx’s imperative and make meaningful and lasting interventions against injustice. Psychoanalytic poststructuralism is simultaneously ambitious and tentative—ambitious in the sense that it claims some enormously complex factors influence human thought and behaviour, and tentative in the sense that it can offer only a rough sketch of these processes, and in the further sense that it has not mapped out detailed schemata to transcend these limitations on human subjectivity. Psychoanalytic poststructuralism does not offer a clear binary picture of either the hegemonic enemy or the emancipatory activist, but it does offer the best method yet articulated to understand the world’s bewildering array of structures and agents in all their overdetermined complexity. With one last manipulation of Marx’s imperative, we must go on attempting to interpret the world before we can change it in ways that might finally ameliorate injustice and oppression. This book is one small part of that attempt at interpretation, with a hope, rather than a promise, that such interpretation might eventually be politically meaningful.

Note 1. See Geal (2017) for an account of how this process operates in contemporary science fiction films.

238  Conclusion

References Allen, Richard. 2009. “Psychoanalysis.” In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, edited by Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga, 446–56. London: Routledge. Belsey, Catherine. 1998. “Shakespeare and Film: A Question of Perspective.” In Shakespeare on Film, edited by Robert Shaughnessy, 61–70. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Bordwell, David. 1996. “Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory.” In Post-theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, edited by David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, 3–36. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Carroll, Noël. 1982. “Address to the Heathen.” October 23: 89–163. Critchley, Simon. 2011. “Violent Thoughts About Slavoj Žižek.” In Philosophy and the Return of Violence: Studies from This Widening Gyre, edited by Nathan Eckstrand and Christopher Yates, 61–77. London: Continuum. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge. Eagleton, Terry. 2003. After Theory. London: Penguin. Freud, Sigmund. 1955 [1920]. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 18, 3–64). Edited and translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. London: Penguin. Geal, Robert. 2015. “‘Theory Is Always for Someone and for Some Purpose’: Thinking Through Post-Structuralism and Cognitivism.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 13, no. 3: 261–74. ———. 2017. “Psychoanalytic and Cognitivist Dramas in Contemporary Science Fiction Films.” Messengers from the Stars 2: 46–60. Kagan, Robert. 2008. The Return of History and the End of Dreams. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Lacan, Jacques. 1977 [1966]. Écrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock. MacCabe, Colin. 1985. Theoretical Essays: Film, Linguistics, Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Marx, Karl. 1976 [1845]. “Theses on Feuerbach.” Collected Works (Vol. 5). Translated by Clemens Dutt and W. Lough. New York: International Publishers. Mullarkey, John. 2009. Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Conclusion

  239

Nichols, Bill. 1985. “Introduction.” In Movies and Methods Volume II, edited by Bill Nichols, 1–25. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stam, Robert. 2005. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” In Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation, edited by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, 1–52. Oxford: Blackwell. Wollen, Peter. 1985. “Godard and Counter Cinema: ‘Vent D’Est’.” In Movies and Methods Volume II, edited by Bill Nichols, 500–9. Berkeley: University of California Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1996. “Lacan in Slovenia.” In A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals, edited by Peter Osborne, 21–35. London: Routledge. ———. 2007. “The Day After: An Interview with Slavoj Zizek.” Filip [online] 5. https://fillip.ca/content/the-day-after. ———. 2011. Living in the End Times. London: Verso.

Filmography Black Panther. 2018. Directed by Ryan Coogler. USA: Marvel. Cathy Come Home. 1966. Directed by Ken Loach. UK: BBC. Hamlet. 1948. Directed by Laurence Olivier. UK: Two Cities. Julius Caesar. 1953. Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. USA: MGM. Last Action Hero. 1993. Directed by John McTiernan. USA: Columbia. Much Ado About Nothing. 1993. Directed by Kenneth Branagh. UK/USA: BBC Films. Strike, The. 1988. Directed by Peter Richardson. UK: Channel 4. Tempest, The. 2010. Directed by Julie Taymor. USA: Touchstone. Wonder Woman. 2017. Directed by Patty Jenkins. USA: DC/Warner Bros.

Index

0-9 1970s’ Theory, 14, 17–21, 25, 27, 29, 224, 225, 233, 234 A Aaron, Michele, 56, 57 adaptation állagmic adaptation, 157–166, 174, 177–179, 183–185, 194 dialogic adaptation, 22, 26, 78, 83, 84, 87, 226, 234 fainomaic adaptation, 105, 107, 126, 132, 150, 157, 166, 183, 185 realist adaptation, 3–6, 59, 69, 70, 73, 74, 78, 87–89, 95, 104, 111, 116, 120, 131, 137, 164, 221–223 adaptation studies dialogic adaptation studies, 22, 26, 78, 83, 84, 87 fidelity criticism, 12, 14, 15, 26 állagma, 157, 158 Allen, Richard, 148, 225

Almereyda, Michael, 121–123, 138, 139, 141, 158, 160, 161 Althusser, Louis Pierre, 15, 40, 225 The Ambassadors, 44, 49, 51, 52, 67–69 anamorphosis, 5, 41, 50–52, 55–57, 59, 67–70, 104, 111, 132, 139, 149, 150, 175, 184, 185, 194, 202, 210, 211, 215, 222, 227, 230, 231, 233 Andrew, Dudley, 213, 214 animation, 194–199 anomalous foreknowledge, 190, 191, 193–195, 197, 199, 201 anomalous suspense, 188–190, 201 Anonymous, 212, 214, 215, 217 B The Bad Sleep Well, 179 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, 2, 13, 26, 27, 70, 71, 83, 87, 88, 90, 93, 96

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 R. Geal, Anamorphic Authorship in Canonical Film Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16496-6

241

242  Index Barthes, Roland, 2, 15, 19, 39, 70, 71, 83, 84, 86, 95, 96, 105, 107, 208–210, 212, 213 Baudry, Jean-Louis, 54, 55, 78, 81, 82, 142, 146, 165 Bazin, André, 146, 213, 214 Becoming Jane, 218 Belsey, Catherine, 70, 84–90, 94, 106, 117, 162, 163, 228–231 Benveniste, Émile, 2, 70–73, 81–84, 86, 88, 95, 96, 105, 107, 184, 208, 210–212 biopics, 6, 207, 217, 218 The Birth of a Nation, 21, 189 Black Panther, 234 Bobo, Jacqueline, 21 Bordwell, David, 28, 162, 189, 194, 195, 201, 225, 226, 234 Branagh, Kenneth, 115, 136, 160, 232 Hamlet, 115, 160 Henry V, 135, 137 Much Ado About Nothing, 232 Brecht, Bertolt, 215 Brown, Tom, 140 Buchanan, Judith, 83, 132 Burt, Richard, 159, 174–176, 179, 211, 212, 214 C Calbi, Maurizio, 70, 88–94, 96, 106, 117 Calderwood, James L., 131 canon, canonicity, 11, 21, 70, 76, 77, 103, 105, 120, 130, 171, 197, 205, 212, 226, 232 Carroll, Noël, 17, 28, 36, 47–49, 224 Carry On Cleo, 79 Cat Ballou, 133 catharsis, 40 Cathy Come Home, 227

Cesare Deve Morire (Caesar Must Die), 88–90, 92, 93, 105 Chimes at Midnight, 172 Chorus figures, 132, 133, 135, 137, 138 Classical Hollywood cinema, 162 Clement, Jennifer, 179 cogito, 45–47, 82 cognitive impenetrability, 190, 194, 195, 197, 199, 201, 222 cognitivism, 17, 224, 226 The Color Purple, 21 cultural studies, 3, 21–24, 26, 28, 29, 35, 175 D Darwin, Charles, 189 Davies, Anthony, 12, 143–145 de Balzac, Honoré, 83 deconstruction, 35, 36, 39, 60 Derrida, Jacques, 15, 35, 36, 71, 213, 214, 224 Descartes, René, 44–46, 48, 49, 231 dialogism, 2–4, 11–14, 16, 18, 22–29, 36, 59, 70, 71, 83, 87, 93, 95, 96, 107, 171, 208, 224, 226, 227, 229–232, 234, 237 diegesis, 2, 48, 109, 110, 133–139, 141, 142, 151, 152, 164, 215, 216 direct address, 5, 75, 132, 138–140, 142–150, 226 discours, 71–73, 76–83, 86–90, 94–96, 104–108, 111, 114, 115, 117, 119–123, 125–128, 132, 137, 141, 143, 150, 151, 164, 165, 169, 170, 177, 179, 183– 185, 192, 197–201, 208–211, 213–215, 218, 221, 222, 230 Donaldson, Peter, 117, 119, 120, 122, 124, 185, 186

Index

A Double Life, 179 drama of authorship, 3, 4, 59, 82, 83, 114, 116, 118–120, 130, 131, 135, 149, 150, 178, 194, 204, 207, 218, 221, 223 drama of foreknowledge, 185–187, 192, 194, 202, 204 drama of the diegetic author, 207, 218 drama of vision, 3, 57, 59, 82, 110, 114, 116–120, 129, 130, 149, 178, 185, 194, 202, 218 E Eagleton, Terry, 15–18, 28, 29, 61, 224 enunciation, 3, 55, 71, 73, 75, 81, 82, 86, 87, 89, 90, 92, 95, 96, 106, 111, 114, 115, 120, 121, 124, 127–129, 140, 142, 146, 147, 151, 174–177, 184, 187, 191, 192, 194, 197, 204, 205, 210, 212–215, 217, 218 epistemology, 49 F fainomai, 105, 149, 157, 158, 169, 178, 187, 192 Feuer, Jane, 75, 142, 143, 146, 149, 165 fidelity criticism, 3, 11, 12, 14, 15, 24–26, 95, 107, 108, 170, 187, 227–233, 237 film grammar, 2, 3, 59, 81, 82, 87, 108, 111, 116, 140, 186 film studies, 11, 12, 14–19, 21, 22, 24–26, 35, 36, 38–40, 47, 49, 60, 67, 73, 109, 224 film within the film, 138, 139 Finding Neverland, 218 Fiske, John, 23, 24

  243

Fodor, Jerry A., 190 Forbidden Planet, 158 foreknowledge, 5, 104, 106, 138, 177, 183–188, 190–202, 204, 213 fort/da game, 56, 58, 61, 82, 148, 221 Foucault, Michel, 15, 67, 68, 71, 225 Freud, Sigmund, 37, 39, 41, 56, 60, 82, 148, 221, 225 Fukuyama, Francis, 224 G the gaze, 68, 69, 185, 225 Genette, Gérard, 13, 27, 71 Gerrig, Richard J., 28, 188, 189 Gnomeo and Juliet, 194–197, 201, 202, 205 Godard, Jean-Luc, 142, 192, 226 Gramsci, Antonio, 19, 22 Grossman, Julie, 11 H Hall, Stuart, 23 Hamlet, Almereyda, 121, 122, 138, 139, 141, 158, 160, 161 Hamlet, Branagh, 115, 160 Hamlet, Kozintsev, 161 Hamlet, Olivier, 75, 77, 115, 123, 137, 141, 146, 161, 231 Hamlet, Zeffirelli, 137, 161 Hatchuel, Sarah, 152 Heath, Stephen, 3, 15, 48, 51, 53–57, 59, 61, 81, 82, 116, 117, 119, 129, 130, 149, 178, 185, 192, 194, 202–204 Henry V, Branagh, 135, 137 hermeneutics of suspicion, 37–39 hierarchy of discourses, 105 histoire, 71–73, 77, 78, 80–83, 85–90, 92, 94–96, 104–106, 108, 111,

244  Index 114, 115, 117, 120–123, 125– 127, 137, 141, 150, 151, 164, 165, 170, 177, 179, 183–187, 197, 198, 200, 201, 208–211, 213, 215, 216, 218, 221, 222, 230 Hitchcock, Alfred, 76, 77, 189 North by Northwest, 189, 190 Psycho, 76 Holbein the Younger, Hans, 44 Holderness, Graham, 159 hommelette, 41–43, 52, 53, 55 An Honourable Murder, 176, 177, 179 Howlett, Kathy M., 144, 146, 172–174 I ideology, 21–23, 36, 37, 40, 47, 52, 54, 55, 132, 142, 165, 226, 227 Imaginary Order, 41, 42, 52 intertextuality, 16, 96, 172, 210, 211 In the Heart of the Sea, 218 Irigaray, Luce, 42 It’s a Wonderful Life, 40, 163 J Jackson, Russell, 141 Jaws, 77, 117, 119–121, 131, 178, 202, 204 Joe MacBeth, 179 Johnson, Barbara, 15 Jorgens, Jack J., 12, 13, 15, 70, 107, 108, 122, 144, 145 jouissance, 42, 43, 53, 55 Journal d’un Curé de Campagne (Diary of a Country Priest), 213 Julius Caesar, Mankiewicz, 78–80, 84, 86, 105, 109, 111–113, 123,

126, 127, 130, 140, 162, 186, 228 K Kafka, 218 King Kong, 47 Kingsley-Smith, Jane E., 209–212, 214 Kiss Me Kate, 179 Knapp, Steven, 17, 18, 28 Kristeva, Julia, 15, 19, 42, 71 Kurosawa, Akira, 12, 13, 179 L La Bête Humaine (The Human Beast), 213, 214 Lacan, Jacques anamorphosis, 41, 50, 51 the gaze, 69, 225 hommelette, 41 Imaginary Order, 41, 42, 52 jouissance, 43, 53, 55 the Real, 41, 43, 44, 50–53, 55 Symbolic Order, 41–44, 46–53, 55–57, 69 Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour), 67–70, 76, 134 Last Action Hero, 231 The League of Gentlemen, 78 Leavis, Frank Raymond, 12, 13, 75, 76 Lehmann, Courtney, 130, 191, 218 Leitch, Thomas, 13, 25, 27, 70, 95 The Lion King, 196 literary studies, 3, 11, 12, 14–20, 22, 25, 26, 35 Lobsien, Eckhard, 76 Loncraine, Richard, 79, 143, 144, 146, 159

Index

Luhrmann, Baz, 128–130, 137, 160, 162–170, 174–176, 191–194, 203, 204 M Macbeth, Welles, 152 MacCabe, Colin, 2, 56, 57, 72, 81, 89, 105, 226, 227 Mankiewicz, Joseph L., 78–81, 84, 86, 93, 105, 106, 109, 111–113, 117, 121, 123–127, 130, 140, 162, 176, 177, 186, 187, 228, 229 Manvell, Roger, 12, 159 Marxism base/superstructure, 38 praxis, 52 vanguardism, 28, 29 Marx, Karl, 36–39, 60, 61, 236, 237 masochism, 51, 56, 59, 95, 148 metacinema, 130, 132, 133, 135–137, 139, 140 metadrama, 130–133, 135–140 Metz, Christian, 2, 47, 48, 72, 73, 78, 81, 86, 89, 184, 201 Michaels, Walter Benn, 17, 18, 28 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hall, 159, 160 Millais, John Everett, 115 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 43 Much Ado About Nothing, Branagh, 232 Mulvey, Laura, 15, 40 musicals, 75, 143, 146, 148 My Own Private Idaho, 170, 172 N Naremore, James, 24, 27 Nichols, Bill, 46, 47, 51, 52, 57, 68, 233, 234

  245

North by Northwest, 189, 190 O Olivier, Laurence, 73, 74, 115, 122, 123, 134, 140, 141, 143–146, 149, 150, 160, 161, 231 Hamlet, 74, 77, 115, 123, 137, 141, 146, 161, 231 Richard III, 147, 148, 150 organic intellectual, 19, 20 Oudart, Jean-Pierre, 52–55 P painting, 2, 30, 35, 44–47, 49–52, 61, 67–69, 115 Panofsky, Erwin, 45, 61 perception, 2, 5, 45, 52, 188, 190, 191, 194, 195, 200 perspective, 22, 26, 45–47, 49–51, 58, 61, 67, 72, 77, 84, 85, 93, 107, 139, 211, 227 Pinocchio, Sharpsteen and Luske, 196 Pittman, L. Monique, 175–177, 179 play within the film, 96 play within the play, 132, 137 post-classical filmmaking, 162, 164 poststructuralism, 3, 24, 26–28, 35–38, 40, 41, 47, 49, 52, 54, 57, 59, 67, 93, 96, 208, 209, 223–227, 230–237 praxis, 40, 233 Prospero’s Books, 211 Psycho, 76, 77 psychoanalysis, 2, 39–41, 48, 52, 224, 225, 237 R radical politics, 15, 16 Rasmus, Agnieszka, 83, 133

246  Index Ray, Robert B., 16, 27 the Real, 41, 43, 44, 50–53, 55 realism, 28, 47, 57, 75, 77, 83, 87, 89, 92, 96, 127, 131, 136, 137, 142, 145, 146, 148–150, 166, 170, 221, 227, 236 reception theory, 21, 23 reflexivity, 59, 61, 82, 83, 103, 120, 130–132, 138, 142, 146, 177, 194, 195, 205 res cogitans, 45, 46, 48–50, 52, 54, 58, 69, 82 res extensa, 45, 46, 48–50, 52, 54, 58, 69, 82 revolution, 19, 20 Richard III, Loncraine, 79, 143 Richard III, Olivier, 143, 144, 147, 148, 150 Ricoeur, Paul, 37, 39, 44, 45 Romeo and Juliet, Castellani, 134, 135 Romeo and Juliet, Zeffirelli, 117–119, 121, 130, 134, 185 S Sarrasine, 83 semiotics, 17, 28, 39 Shakespeare in Love, 207–212, 214, 215, 217, 218 She’s the Man, 175–177, 184 shot/reverse shot, 52–54, 109–111, 114, 193, 194 soliloquy, 74, 139–142, 144, 146, 148, 150 Solomon, Gary, 40 spectatorship, 57, 231, 232 Spielberg, Steven, 21, 53, 77, 204 The Color Purple, 21 Jaws, 53 Stam, Robert, 13, 14, 16, 24–27, 29, 30, 70, 71, 76, 88–90, 92, 93, 96, 226 Steel Magnolias, 40

The Street King, 177 The Strike, 227 structuralism, 28, 39, 60 structural linguistics, 39 suture, 43, 52–56, 59, 67, 69, 82, 109, 110, 114, 139, 148, 149, 172 Symbolic Order, 41–44, 46–53, 55–57, 69 T Taviani, Paolo and Vittorio, 88, 96, 105, 106, 117 Taymor, Julie, 136 The Tempest, 232 Titus, 136, 137 theatre, 109, 110, 133, 137, 208, 214, 215, 217 The Tempest, Taymor, 158, 232 Titus, Taymor, 136, 137 Todorov, Tzvetan, 109, 158 Toy Story franchise, 196 U United 93, 189 V vanguardism, 28, 29 Van Sant, Gus, 170, 172, 173 Velázquez, Diego, 67, 68, 76, 134, 231 verisimilitude, 1, 3, 44, 81, 90, 93, 109–111, 129, 132, 133, 136, 141, 149, 150, 158, 159, 161, 163–166, 168, 169, 173, 177, 179, 208, 210, 212, 217, 221 W Wagner, Geoffrey, 15

Index

Welles, Orson, 12, 13, 172, 173 Chimes at Midnight, 172 Macbeth, 152 West Side Story, 179 William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, Luhrmann, 128, 137, 160, 162– 166, 175–177, 191, 193, 202 Wilson Jr., Robert F., 124, 187 Wiseman, Susan, 171 Wollen, Peter, 89, 142, 143, 145, 173, 192, 226 Wonder Woman, Jenkins, 234

  247

Z Zeffirelli, Franco, 117, 120, 124, 160, 161, 186, 191, 203 Romeo and Juliet, 117–119, 121, 130, 134, 185 Hamlet, 137 Žižek, Slavoj, 28, 35, 36, 60, 61, 225, 235, 236