Odyssey

Real pop right before rolls with you know right here at ninety one point five FM WBEZ Chicago. Since the beginning of cinema filmmakers have turned to novels for ideas. I'm Gretchen health and today an odysseys Film Forum Friday. We'll talk about this Hollywood habit of adaptation why it is done and why it ever started. What makes for a good adaptation whether a literal rendering or a reinterpretation. Some of the pitfalls of adapting novels to the screen and whether it is true that the movie is never as good as the book. That's today an odyssey. Next after the news from NPR here on WBEZ Chicago. From National Public Radio News in Washington I'm Chad program. Today Secretary of State Madeline

Albright held out little hope for a diplomatic solution to the latest Iraq crisis. The crisis began when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein stopped cooperating with U.N. weapons inspectors known as Anscombe. NPR's Ted Clark reports. At a State Department news conference Albright said there isn't much that can be done diplomatically because Saddam Hussein violates the agreements he enters into. Albright offered the Iraqi president only one way to avert airstrikes from the growing U.S. Armada near Iraq. I said I can publicly rescind his. Non-compliance his decision to kick out Albright implied that Saddam Hussein should publicly rescind the decision quickly that U.S. strikes could be launched any time now. No further warnings are needed. That is our position. No further warnings are needed. Ted Clark NPR News Washington. In Baghdad prices at the markets are rising as the U.S. continues to threaten military action against Iraq. British Prime Minister Tony Blair says neither his government nor the Clinton

administration can back down now. Russian leader Boris Yeltsin says he is against military strikes but is urging Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors. U.S. special envoy Dennis Ross returned to the Middle East today to try to keep Israel and the Palestinian Authority focused on the new peace deal. Ross had been planning to go to the region but delayed the mission until Israel's cabinet approved the deal signed in late October in rural Maryland. Ross is meeting with both Israel Prime Minister Bijan Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Negotiations are underway in Nigeria to try to free eight oil workers including three Americans who are being held hostage. Hillary Anderson reports from Lagos. The eight men are facing their third day in captivity. They were taken hostage on Wednesday when their speedboat with hijacked by community activists from a small settlement of Iraq deep in the swamps of the oil rich Niger Delta. The three Americans on board are oil workers contracted to work on an oil rig run jointly by have on Texaco.

Among the hostages are also an attorney and a brick and a Croatian and a South African. Because the actions are underway between Texaco the Nigerian government and the community to try to secure their release. But so far without the contacts over recent months the Niger Delta has descended into a state of near anarchy with communities using force to demand that the oil companies do something to fight the poverty in the area. For NPR News this is going to be Anderson in Lagos Nigeria. Jakarta was again walk by violence today. Student protesters clashed with Indonesian security forces as many as five people were killed. Hospitals report their emergency rooms are filled with leading students on Wall Street the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 46 points at 88 76. This is NPR News. In NPR's business update the International Monetary Fund has announced a 41 billion dollar aid package for Brazil. Brazil is South America's largest economy. The Fund wants to avoid an Asian style financial crisis in Latin America. Investors began

fleeing Brazil this fall. Concerned about a major downturn there. The country has kept from devaluing its currency the reality. The stock market appears to be poised to end the week on an up note especially after some stronger than expected sales numbers last month ahead of the holidays. NPR's Jack Speer reports. The Commerce Department reported today retail sales rose a full percentage point last month that was nearly twice what the analysts had expected. It was fueled by the biggest gain in new car sales in 15 months. The numbers are important because retail sales account for roughly a third of the nation's overall economic activity. At the same time the government released its latest data on inflation at the wholesale level which was relatively benign last month. The government's Producer Price Index a measure of the cost of goods as they move down the pipeline to consumers was up a smaller than expected two tenths of a percent. Stock in Dell Computer is lower today despite the fact Dell last night reported a 55 percent jump in earnings. That's amid investor concerns over future growth of the company which is currently the world's biggest direct seller of PCs. Jack Speer NPR News Washington.

Profits at Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. are expected to be off by as much as 20 percent than forecasted after the Media Group reported a lower quarterly result. Operating income at Murdoch's Fox Network fell 19 percent. Analysts attribute that decline to the summer strikes of General Motors which meant the carmaker bought less television advertising. The Nasdaq composite is up four points just before the hour at eight hundred fifty five. I'm Chad program NPR News Washington. Support for NPR comes from Borders Books and Music where imaginations can run wild. Over 200 locations nationwide 800 6 4 4 7 7 3 3. Morning and welcome to Odyssey N.W. Chicago ninety one point five FM AM. It is Friday it's not just Friday it's Film Forum day here on Odyssey. And we're

going to talk about adapting novels into movies as as you are all I would assume well aware there is the adaptation film adaptation of Toni Morrison's beloved It was released recently starring Oprah Winfrey. We're going talk about the whole this is a latest in a long line of films that come out of the tradition of adapting novels both good and bad for the screen and talk about that today with Tom Dunning professor in the departments of history art history and cinema and media studies at the U of C and Jim Chandler who is professor in English Language and Literature at the U of C and author of England in 1819 Good morning to both of you. Thanks for coming back. Good morning. Tom let's start with a little history. People have been adapting novels or using novels as sources for movies since almost since I started making movies. That's right. I mean. Movies when they appeared were hungry for material. First up they took it from every day life. Then they took it from vaudeville and they took it from theater and probably the first adaptations of novels that I

know of are actually from Yet the utricle versions I mean the the earliest probably famous ones still famous today is one thousand three Edwin Porter production for the Edison Company of Uncle Tom's Cabin. But the adaptation there is really very much from the stage play of Uncle Tom's cabin cleaning cakewalks And you know very spectacular things. They didn't go back to the novel but the novel was very important. Why why would filmmakers look to novels What did they what were the advantages of using a novel versus using any other material. Well in fact about five years after that around one thousand eight to nine hundred twelve film. Revolutionized itself and it began to try to really build an audience that would be more stable and less just coming to a film for novelty. And what they realized was that they really had to tell stories they really had to develop characters in order to give audiences the type of pleasure that they got from other media. And although theater was still a very important model the novel accords with

its ability to do something that film could do. But the theater couldn't so well which is shipped in space and time very effortlessly became a very important model for people like D.W. Griffith's and in kind of honing what I believe is the basic vocabulary and logic for making films. So the novels pointed out ways that stories could be told that film could almost effortlessly replicate and that theatre couldn't do so easily. I think in turn add to that in its origins as my colleague Paul Hunter has suggested the novel had been ported relations to the documentary forms to newspapers to journalism and that it was used all through the 1980s as a kind of mode in which. Everyday life could be documented and set forth the novels of Balzac for example or for a good case in point here and cinema to have that kind of ambition. Early on to to show life as it was that the kind of

mode that the car emphasizes when he talks about film that that the film can be a record of things as they are. What kinds of novels did they use I mean was it were they popular novels with a classical novels where there was any old novel where the filmmaker happened think the story was interesting I mean was there it was it necessary that the audience knew the novel was at the draw whether they knew this story and I'd like to see it again. Initially it was almost the cultural capital of the novel for the first things in this first period was where adaptations of classic novels of Dickens a daiquiri of Walter Scott of novels that had a name recognition and also a kind of you know cachet a kind of respectability this was a period when film was still looked on askance by by most people and was often threatened with a great deal of censorship. So adapting classical novels was a way that they got you know legitimacy. But by the time of the future film which was around the time of World War 1 when bills became longer they more and more adapted contemporary novels. And although name recognition was important just as important was really the

source material being able to tell stories develop characters. Novels in some ways could deliver this very richly to cinema. And in fact it's interesting in terms of what Jim said because it took films a while although being filmed every day events very early. It took them a while to realize how to incorporate those into into stories and the novel really showed them how to do that in a way that theater couldn't as well that you could really have these kinds of incidental every day events. I think that's right. You know what's what's ironic in the story of course is that the novels were themselves such an illegitimate form in the 100 18th or 19th century ethical so long for them to achieve which intimacy they were so trashed by the respectable reviews especially around the maid in the early 19th century that the struggle is legendary of their of their coming into legitimacy. So they should become a figure of legitimacy for the early producers is it is a great irony in this story. Well do we see as this becomes a practice in Hollywood and as novels in great numbers are

adapted for the screen do we see patterns emerging in the ways that stories get adapted techniques of adaptation or techniques in terms of what a what the person doing the adaptation might choose to include versus what they might choose to leave out. Well there are different patterns. Film is of course under much more intense scrutiny in terms of censorship. But novels are so that films tend to sanitize novels. Certainly Intel been 100 50s or 1960s Probably so but there are a lot of things that are in novel of the get you know eliminated or covered over in films. I mean it's fascinating if you take an example like from the 40s by Howard Hawks is film of The Big Sleep in the detective film and it's often legendary probing almost impossible to understand and that's actually not a problem because it's such a wonderful mystery. But if you look at the novel you realize at every point where you get the big in the film this way or something it's explicitly sexual. Where characters are homosexual where they're making pornographic

movies things like that and that Hox and his adapter who is actually William Faulkner with one of the people who worked on that script had to leave those things out. And so the film becomes more mysterious actually maybe to its benefit. So Jim flush this out a little bit because I know that that you thought a lot about different ways that novels end up making it to the end to the big screen. Different modes in which they might choose to use a novel as source material. Well what can I add to that. I think that the question of of sympathy and Aphex emotions in cinema can be very closely related to the history of the novel and especially the history of the sentimental novel which is a very important sub jar within the history of the novel. Because the sentimental novel is all about the capacity to sort of put yourself in the place of the other. To think about how the world would feel to another

person. It's there all over Dickens for example all those very important moments in Dickens or in George Eliot where one character sits down with another and really understands their situation their case. And I think that early cinema learned a lot from that and I have a theory may well contradict right here on the spot and for the audience to hear that that the early techniques of shot reverse shot that the idea that the way to the way to handle a conversation in a sophisticated narrative is not simply to plant the camera in front of two people as they did early on in the silent films but to put the camera over the shoulder of either one of them and cut back and forth is actually a kind of a. Exemplification or conquered ization of the of this principle of sympathy that so dear to the to this sentimental novel and to the whole theory of commerce out of which the XPS sentimentality was born the idea that to make a deal in commercial society you have to understand what it's in the interest of the other person to to to to. It was coming to that.

The deal too to do so that seems to me one crucial technique I think everybody recognizes the shot reverse shot as part of the bread and butter of early narrative cinema and its insincerely development. And I think this actually comes out of the sentimental tradition. Tell me anything about that. Well I think it makes a lot of sense particularly if you view it not just in terms of technique but in terms of the way that. Films will get viewers to get involved with the characters there's an early extraordinary film called The Italian made in 1918 which is an early feature film about immigrants life in New York City. And it actually begins with a prologue in which the actor who played the Italian immigrant is in a well dressed kind of reading a smoking jacket in the library and he takes out a book which is the Book of the film. There was no book that was actually based on an original screenplay. And he sits down and begins to read it and then you get the whole film as a kind of visualisation of his reading and it actually ends with him closing the book and it ends very

tragically. And I think the indication there was that audience members for a film should be able to get in the characters that they should be able to read it in such a way that they would become that character just as one does with the novel. And the interesting thing though is that I think the sympathy required in a film is almost more dictatorial than in the novel I think with Andrew Faris who pointed out that in the novel The Grapes of Wrath there's an early scene where the Joad family on the road swerved to hit a dog. And as he said if you included that in John Ford's film none of the audience would ever be able to care about these people the better what their tragedies no matter what their other sterling qualities of survival and and so on might be they had hit a dog that would just you know eliminate them from anything to be for an audience. Whereas in the novel it was possible to see that as part of their you know larger culture at those and not immediately condemn them so that they're interesting. It's so I think Jim's right it's as though film took something from the 19th century novel about sympathetic identification that in fact 20th century novels would begin to question this might actually be a

good point to jump ahead to the present day and talk about beloved because Jim you were talking a lot about the perspex subjective the subjective camera in Beloved which I think has a great deal to do with this whole notion of sympathy but also the the question of what you can what can work on film and what can work in a novel and where that gap lies. But do you want to talk a little bit about a lot of it and the issue of sympathy as you see it in that case. I like Tom's last example about the grapes of wrath and I think it actually helps set up a discussion about beloved. I just saw the film last night for the first time and apparently like Toni Morrison herself when she first heard of plans to make this film I thought when I heard about it was so this is impossible. Why why do you think it was possible. Well because the because the book itself is so much about the the the process of storytelling and

so much of the way the story is so much about how the story is told rather than what's told what's told is certainly powerful and Central but partly because of how powerful the what is the history of American slavery the how of the handling it becomes all important seems to me in the book. So how far you go with the story. This is this is a book that's all about. When to stop this baby segues as knowing when to stop people begin to tell stories and they stop. When you first hear the story of Denver's birth. It's narrated up to the point where Amy Denver begins to massage Cephas feet so that she can walk again. And we have a line. There's a lot of pain when things come back to life. And just at that moment that story stops. It's not resumed again in the book for another four or five chapters. When and when Denver picks it up again

in narrating it narrating the story to beloved who's a kind of sponge for a narrative right. Tell me Tell me tell me she's English. So that kind of issue of stopping and starting with narrative knowing when to tell and when not to tell when to remember when not to remember what's under you control what's not under your control. Those are the kinds of things that I think it's very difficult for a film to handle. I think this is true for example in Norman Maclean's a river runs through it which also deals with trauma of this sort. I think it's true in another novel of the Midwest a thousand acres by Jane Smiley quite a good book made into an interesting movie. But this issue of how you narrative eyes and memorialize trauma seem to be so crucial. So how did Demi choose to deal with this. Well I think essentially he decided just to leave it out. The past surfaces in Beloved in initially in flashes when you have those quick literally flashbacks to moments when

the white boys are stealing the milk from Seth. These quick flashes back into the past the novel does not work by quick flashes it does not work by flashback in every sense Tony Morrison is well aware of cinematic technique. It's as if she had decided not to do what is called in cinema always called flashback. And yet that's that's the resource that cinema has for dealing with this and so Demi had to resort to it. There's a sense in which one's always on a path with a story. And I think Demi does try to pursue that line a little bit by having his camera follow characters very much as he did in Silence of the Lambs when you follow Jodie Foster through the passageways of that house. But somehow that doesn't reduce the narrative or equate to the kind of narrative process of what Morrison calls re memory. I think in the same way that it's worked out in the book in the novel. Maybe this will. Sort of. I think this is what you're saying in the novel that the past is told is narrated in the present. It isn't that the novel jumps back to the past and you have episodes from the past. You have people in the present telling other people in the present this is what happened to

me. That's a very good way to put it that there's one. The one time frame in the novel. Yes that all of the modulations in and out of time and all these. All the work of what she calls remembering that wonderful word re memory in one sense all take place in the in the present in memory and storytelling events and in the weight of the past in the ghosts of the past the haunting of the past haunts the present but it haunts it in the present. In the cuts to the to the past that have to be shown. As the past as another seen as another time in the movie break that. But the question is how do you do that. We talked on the show last time about how John Sayles would pay pan into the past in in Lone Star which which is I think his attempt to solve this kind of narrative problem how to locate the past in the present Demi went another direction I think. Tom you want to add anything to. Well yeah I mean the key thing and why I think beloved is such a good film. And I do think it's a very very strong film as the novel is a very very strong

novel is that it's different. And it reminds me of a story that when did you see. Told me that he had said his poem afternoon of a follow on to music. My mate said Oh well I've already done that with music in in the words. But of course BBC Music is extraordinary and it's different from LMA poem and although I don't know if I put you know Demi quite at that level I think that we have a similar thing it's a difference between image and words. And this is exactly why films can be exciting when the Adept strong novels or even when they end up sometimes bad novels is that they're doing something different and I don't necessarily mean in terms of faithfulness because in fact the love it is is the film is fairly faithful to the novel. But even when it's faithful it's it's very very different and I think precisely in the ways that images work differently from words the words telling the

story in this. For me in the in the novel is very different from. Well it's it's an interesting situation because Jim talks about there only being present in the in the novel but of course we have a sense of the past tense literally in the words novelist Eleanor agree eg when said about cinema cinema has no past tense it only has a present tense. Now of course we have flashbacks that we understand are happening in the past but we experience them not differently than in other scenes they don't have they don't at every moment have a bird that says this is a path we feel them happening in front of us in a way. And I think that part of the power of Demi's film in evoking memory is that it is the sense of the overwhelming trauma of memory where memory becomes present again which is in many ways different from from some of Morrison's not only techniques but I think ideas but I think it's extremely powerful for an audience member to suddenly have this sense

of you know here is this past that we cannot get away from. Even though in Morrison's kind of like how do we uncover it. So it's as though in the film it's the negative images in the film what we have is the the you know almost physical presence of these these horrors. Where as in the book it's the kind of repression of those whores that is really motivating and of course the fact that repression is like all repression is unsuccessful they keep on coming out. But I know one of the reasons I find it beloved such a strong film. I was terrified of it. I was just constantly kind of like you know going oh my God you know. And although the book is extremely moving the extremely disturbing. I didn't have that almost visceral experience that they do in the film and I think that's a very important different aspect of the film Deliverance. It's as if the film could reveal the sources of the trauma but not the resources for working through it. This is this is the distinction I was trying to make before I think it's very good I'm revealing the sources of the trauma. And I think again in in the film

version of nor Maclean's a river runs through it which is also about trauma the loss of his brother. You you see the source of that of the pain that's driving that story very clearly in a way that McLain never lets you quite see it because it's all covered over his lyricism his wit his ironies and so on. And I agree that that was a demis choice and I also agree that it's a successful movie but it's as if it's a kind of supplement to the. To the novel rather than a version of it. OK but this now this raises an interesting question I mean what is an adaptation of a novel supposed to be. Is it any less of a movie because it is not because it is less faithful to the novel or just simply unable to do what the novel has done. It's the constant tension between Does it stand alone as a film or does it stand always in relation to the novel there's no response. There's no reason why it has to do any one thing a novel like this one has achieved an extraordinary place in our culture very very quickly it seems to me. My wife Elizabeth just ran a Midwest faculty seminar on beloved where

50 liberal arts futures futures from colleges around the West came in and discussed the the the the book with. Members of faculty of U.S. and in fact with with Toni Morrison herself who is visiting this year as she will be for a couple of years. And what was extraordinary in what we've learned about this was that this is a book that's taught not just in sort of African-American lit courses in colleges but is now taught in the most general of the general education courses right there with sort of Plato Descartes and so on. It's really it really has a well-deserved monumental place that's achieved already. Now you're making a film contemporaneous with it with a with a with a book that already has this kind of stature in the culture. It can have a different kind of relation to it than certainly what Koppel is Godfather has with the Mariel Puzo book which doesn't have anything like that kind of place in the culture and therefore can just simply absorb it and reinvent it or even the relation that a film can have to a classic in the way Tom was talking about earlier on in the early days of cinema. You know you make a Dickens film it's not the

only one there been lots of great expectations so you can have a great great expectations that set Miami which we had this year. You know it's fine. That's that's a new version of Great Expectations but it seems to me Demi has a very tricky kind of task here in doing something this book which as dealing as it does with such sensitive matters and having the place it doesn't the culture now. Places all kinds of restrictions on what you can do to me. But at the same time I would like to indicate that I think his approach is not as different from Morrison's perhaps as it is as we've been indicating. I think one of the things that's incredibly powerful about the book is that it's not just about someone remembering the trauma of slavery. It's about as she puts it it taking on flesh. You know it's a ghost story. It's not only a ghost story with an invisible phantom at the beginning but with a tangible physical and very physical presence. And I think one of the reasons that I feel the film is so frightening and so successful is

that you really see this this visitor from another world this visitor from the past tangible physically really there. And I think the performance is extraordinary in the casting is extraordinary in really making this you know an embarrassing presence not just a metaphor and that physicality that relationship to bodies in presence is of course what cinema can do that literature can't do directly. But I think it's something that the more it's novel strives for and that the film is doing brilliantly. Did that you're touching on something else that I think is is interesting in adapting this particular novel. So much of Seth his experience of slavery of her trauma is mediated through her body the vast majority of the trauma she experienced was physical you know violations and beatings and all of these sorts of things and then both the novel and the movie are very much about her body and how she relates to her body and other people's bodies as well. And it seems to me that in depicting that on film you run some

risks that you don't necessarily run in depicting it in a novel writing about takings that there's milk for example is one thing but to actually show it I mean frankly to show a naked breast is is fraught with all sorts of things and it seems to me that a movie this movie or any movie has certain obstacles to overcome in choosing to do that or certain baggage that it brings with it in choosing to do that. I agree but I think it's it's part of the challenge and risk taking of the movie that it tackles that words are ways that we supplement experience and all those images are two images are more direct. You know they're sensual and of course we should talk about sound as well here not just the the visual image. And I guess I feel that all that physicality of the film is partly what makes it strong. If it with more prudish about you know showing you know you're an Asian bird you know. But they don't have that kind of again visible effect. And I think that's

one of the things that Demi really understood and which partly understood because he'd worked in the horror film in its last film in Silence of the Lambs and understood the way that these images can be used to disturb audiences too to get under their skin literally. And I think that that's one of the real triumphs of the film even though it's one that I think makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But that's what that film should do. That's really interesting that having this film made by Jonathan Demi automatically makes it related to other films by Jonathan Demi and not just this novel and that he would have made a novel. I mean he would have made a movie from a novel like Silence of the Lambs which is also about a woman haunted by her past and also about trauma to many different peoples bodies and about the house and about how. This guy needs to branch out a little bit. Let's take a quick break we're talking today with Tom gunning and Jim chancellor of University of Chicago were talking about adapting novels for the screen. We'll take a break when we come back we'll keep talking take some calls our number 3 1 2 8 3 2 3 1 2 4 8 3

2 3 1 2 4 Give us a call if you want to ask a question make a comment join in the conversation. This is Odyssey I'm Gretchen Helfer And you're listening to WBEZ Chicago support for this WBEZ program is provided by Einstein Brothers bagels with bagels for breakfast and for any other time of day Einstein Brothers offers food for a mind boggling world support for this WBEZ program is provided by Navy Pier announcing the opening of its outdoor ice rink. November 22nd the arrival of Santa at 5:00 p.m. and the lighting of the pier concluding with a large fireworks display set to holiday music. More information at 3 1 2 5 9 5. Support for programming on WBEZ is provided by the Terra Museum of American Art presenting Robert Cappa photographs on now through January 3rd featuring almost 200 photographs from his career. On Thursday November 17th at 6pm Tara will feature Vicky Goldberg photography historian New York Times critic and author of photography how photographs change our lives. She will discuss the evolution and transformation of photo journalism from the Civil War

to the Gulf War Information 3 1 2 6 6 4 39 39. This is WBEZ Chicago ninety one point five FM. I'm Gretchen Helford and we're talking about film here on Odyssey we're taking some calls 3 1 2 8 3 2 3 1 2 4 8 3 2 3 1 2 4. We've been talking about Toni Morrison's beloved And Jim as you pointed out this is a movie that comes at a time when this book is occupying sort of a unique and really quite amazing place in the culture but plenty of movies get made for novels that no one's ever read no one's ever heard of. And they they carry no baggage with them. I mean the filmmaker obviously faces a different challenge but is there what it what how does that change the film. Well it's it's it's absolutely true I mean people said were great novels or other more great films have been made from the work of W. R. Burnett with the kind of but gangster novel writer of the 30s

then from Dr. esky and I think that's probably true. You know I mean little feet there Asphalt Jungle are great films made from Burnett's novels if anyone wants to watch the you know the adaptation of Hollywood from Hollywood a brother's care mobs up with no brainer. Well they may have my best condolences I guess. Hitchcock once with asked about this and he was asked why haven't you ever made Crime and Punishment. And he said Well Crime and Punishment is a great novel with many many words and all of those words mean something. I said I would rather get a novel. I read it once I get the basic idea of the plot and then I'm very free to express myself as a filmmaker I'm not in a slave relationship to a master text. And in fact I think it's true that probably I mean beloved I think is an exception and there are a number of exceptions of very fine movies made from from great books but most of them most of the faithful adapted to classics are ponies you know they're at They're there for. You know for students to

get out of the video store when they had a term paper and they gave me the book you know I buy very few of Jim's knotting and I had this experience at his behest. And I think the I mean the example for me I mean it's interesting there is a great film which is actually based on crime and punishment which is French director of bare breasts on a pickpocket. But as you can guess from the title if you even if you haven't seen the film he was very freeing of adaptation The character doesn't murder anybody He's a pickpocket. And it's only kind of halfway through that you go oh my god this is crime and punishment and it's not an adaptation but it becomes a kind of dialogue with a great text. That's there's been several examples of even recent ones. My favorite of the recent Jane Austen adaptations and God knows we've had quite a few of those is clueless which is the one that is least faithful to its text Emma but which is in a certain way for that reason able to capture more about a sort of Austin like understanding of manners

and how people conduct themselves under the. Restraint of manners then. Then what we find in these more antiquarian exercises that were produced of persuasion and Sense and Sensibility I don't think they're bad films I just think that clueless has a kind of vitality that the others don't have. Thinking of Hitchcock I mean he did do an adaptation early on of what might be a great play you know in the pay cock. OK so Sean Casey's play of the 20s and the constraints are somewhat different with place and I think there have interestingly been great films made of plays and especially of Shakespeare of Shakespeare's plays. I think of of Welles as adaptations which I think in some cases are in fact great films I think his Macbeth doesn't have a lot to do with Macbeth but it's really quite a quite a great film. And his Falstaff of love and the Othello but there again I think that the that the

the play is a form has just a different relation to cinema than the novel does. Partly because of the supply of dialogue I think that with Beloved how how little dialogue there is and how much the screenplay has to depend on dialogue and how the dialogue is always sort of beside the point in the book whereas it becomes much more the point in the film I don't mean to get back on beloved But apropos of this question of of classics it's not just classics as such. There's a certain kind of rivalry between the novel and the cinema I think. That doesn't that isn't the that isn't there when we think about the relation to drama. Well let me ask you Will we give our number again 3 1 2 8 3 2 3 1 2 4 if you like to give us a call 8 3 2 3 1 2 4. Jim I have to ask you as a as a teacher of literature. What from the point of view of trying to teach literature. What do you think about these films I mean what do you think about the fact that there are so many adaptations of classical films that frequently don't work

or you know frankly are just sort of boring and awful and whether your students are sneaking off to see them instead of reading the book or not. What would you teach about the relationship of these two forms of the same story. Let me answer that slightly obliquely but I hope hopefully by returning to my theme that there are all sorts of ways to understand the relation between these different forms in different media. One can think of this mutually supplementary one can think of versions one can think of adaptations one can think of remakes. These are all different ways of thinking about what we're looking at. When someone comes along and decides to make a film of X whatever X is as a literary work here's an interesting example. I recently screened Frank Capra's first movie is a 15 minute film he made nine hundred twenty one. As part of a con game he walked into a San Francisco drama studio and said he was a director from Hollywood. And he didn't have any money he was trying to get $75 from this man he

got the $75 to make a film of a fish's boarding house a Kipling poem he liked the poem so much got caught up in the fantasy went back and said I'll make the film. He had to get actors who weren't really actors so we just went out to Barker Darrow various places I was going got these people brought him into a room and made a film. If you got real actors they would have known he wasn't a real director and his cover would have been blown. So he makes the following film starts very much in the way that Tom was describing this other other film before with a man reading a book by a fireplace camera comes over the book and you see the stanzas of Kipling's poem. On the page it's in 1903 Illustrated text it has a little border illustration which is depicting what's in the poem. The film then runs we dissolve into the film the action and the stanzas of this poem are superimposed over the action through the film there's no dialogue given the only words that are shown are the stanzas of the poem and it becomes unclear in the course of this in very

provocative and interesting way whether it we're looking at is a film that uses the stanzas of the poems to explain what's going on or whether we're looking at a poem that has an especially animated form of illustration. Now this seems to me a kind of emblem for the uncertainty of the relation between these two media and some of the possibilities that this 25 year old kid coming in off the street Frank Capra could imagine when he was just thrown into the mix without. All of this sort of training and discipline that goes with other kinds of productions. To see what he can do let's take some calls 3 1 2 8 3 2 3 1 2 4 is the number 8 3 2 3 1 2 4. Let's talk to Sally. Good morning Sally and WBEZ. Hi I just wanted to comment that I think maybe the modern novel is selling out a little bit. Sometimes I mean you take you know going back to beloved where you know it's a very difficult still difficult book

to adapt and I think that's a good thing I think you know if you take like Melancon DeRose work like The Unbearable Lightness of Being which was made into a film which which if you read the book because it doesn't. I mean it was very good but. But the book goes so much deeper because it is meant to be a book and also Melancon Garrett and his and his book immortality. You know he even mentioned that he says I don't want this book to be made into a film I'm making this novel so that it can stand alone as a novel and cannot be made into a film. I think many authors nowadays kind of write their books hoping that they'll be made into a film. And so maybe the novel is just selling out a little bit nowadays. Jim would you I know that you think that there's been certainly the effect on the two media has not been one way. I don't know if you'd say selling out maybe you would but certainly movies have had in your view an influence on novels and the way novels get written.

Here I think literary historians especially have been at fault in the 20th century for not recognizing how important cinema has been in the novel as we know it. The fact that the James Joyce and Virginia Woolf were actually quite avid cinema goers simply has to have something to do with the fact that they invented what we think of as a new form of narration a 20th century stream of consciousness. I think there's now a little bit of work on this but there's not nearly enough. It's impossible for a novelist I think to sit down nowadays and write as if. What he or she were producing as a novel weren't didn't have some relation to cinema. Whether it's the idea that it might be the book might be turned into a movie if they're ambitious and commercially enterprising or if not just the experience in our culture of the cinematic narrative has to be something that colors the way a novelist thinks about these things.

But there's already a relation built into cinema in a contemporary novel including Kundera as I would say that has to be reckoned with there in the first place I think it's there in Morrison. It's not it's not simple because some of what you doing is cinematic. Some of it is deliberately anti cinematic but both of them both poles of the novel the cinematic in the at the cinema and the cinematic have some relation to cinema as such even before it goes onto the screen. So that is a complicated story to tell and it's not necessarily to the detriment of the novel I mean it's not necessarily degrading of the novel as Sally apparently thinks that novels get I mean certainly you can read novels where it's clear that it's the author's intention to have you picturing the movie not just the story but the movie short of the novel but not necessarily you know it's a case by case judgment I think you would I wouldn't want to make any kind of blanket claim about that. Well the important thing I think to keep in mind here is is what Jim was saying there that you can't write a novel without it. Can temporarily without having this intimate somewhere in your head. But you can write a novel against the cinema. You know absolutely

and and I think Sally's point is that there are novels that should not be adapted or that are written in such a way that that there they would have to be brilliantly adapted and that very often I mean I think it absolutely is true that there are a lot of very indifferent spotless adaptations which just kind of you know translate the story into a not very interesting film. The issue is to that any of that adaptation have to do with the fact that there is this extreme difference between word and image between narrating and showing. And and in body that in whatever they produce. What about magic realism that strikes me as as perhaps a form that would be highly influenced by cinema. And at the same time certain attempts to make films of magic realist novels have been completely disaster as well. It's an interesting situation that I think very often when you read a book and go oh God this is so cinematic. That is the book that's going to have trouble being adapted into a film. I mean nothing is hard and fast. But in other words that what gives the feeling of

a cinematic influence in the novel is very often a brilliant way that the author has taken something cinematic and put it into words. And it's not a two way street. You can't necessarily be just translated back. The other thing though is that I think. You have to have with a great novel a great filmmaker and unfortunately you know the films have been made for him. The South American and Central American novelist have not encountered great filmmakers so far and that the limitation they really have to be a sense of I think adaptation contest as a kind of battle between equally strong opponents. All right let's take another call our number 3 1 2 8 3 2 3 1 2 4 8 3 2 3 1 2 4 Give us a call. Let's talk to Dorothy Good morning Dorothy on WBEZ. Good morning. I I think maybe what your guests have just said about the differences between cinema and literature are really relevant to the point that I wanted to make but

I think that powerful literature is very image rich and that it packs a wallop emotionally and I was distressed when I heard that the dialogue wasn't very important. And Morrison's novel because I think it is very important. It doesn't the narrative is carried by the multitude of resources which Marson had at her disposal. But I think that that dialogue is important there as well as it is in the film. And I think. The film strength rests on very effective utilization of the medium of film to put those images that she so deftly created on the page into another form. And I really I think it's important to recognize that these are two very different

mediums in many ways and that good at hip adaptations of literature utilize the medium of film and its strength. You can say the same overall impact it's not just the story line but the whole experience. And I you know I just found the I read a good portion of the love but before I saw the film and I was just stunned with the effectiveness. Do you want to this is sort of your you know one who made the comment about dialogue you two points. I certainly don't want to deny that that the literary medium can be powerfully affecting. That's what Dickens is all about in a sense. So you're living so. Oh yeah big trouble. That's right. Didn't Dickens write that way is what Griffin said when he was explaining his own technique. As for the other point about dialogue. Nor

do I mean to say that Morrison isn't skillful with dialogue but rather that the dialogue that we have in the book gains the power that it has in the book because of its relation to what's happening in the narration. And I think stripped of its context from the narration those forms of re memory that are told outside the dialogue form in a kind of free floating consciousness or in the narrow Tauriel consciousness that stripped of those relations the dialogue seems. More one dimensional and somewhat stripped of some of its power that its power is relational. That's all I meant to be saying. Also interesting thing and again in the case of beloved and I'm sure in other novels is that sometimes you have a trance currency of words that are not dialogue in the book into dialogue in the movie and they then they stand in a very different relationship to the characters there's a scene in Beloved where Paul says some things to Seth that he thinks

in the book and he doesn't say and it strikes me that that changes their relationship a little bit especially in a book that's so much about how to make things explicit what can be made explicit when under what circumstances. For how long all that so that it matters crucially in a book where the question of what becomes explicit is so absolutely central. One of the things that's striking about the movie Beloved is that the dialogue is I'd say about 90 percent directly from the book whereas in many adaptations that is the thing that gets changed. You know I mean I think of films that I think is horrendous the adaptation of wings of the dove which you know not now admittedly Henry James dialogue would probably be difficult to adapt to cinema but this kind of you know very conversational tone that the characters take in the film and it's just totally betrays the whole quality of that novel. But the other thing that I'd like to pick up from what Dorothy was saying was this idea of the image rich text and it's absolutely true. When

we read we imagine images but we imagine them and one and I think beloved gives a very good example in that I think one of the most extraordinary images in the film is a sequence of beloveds arrival her kind of coming out of the river and all of that is only alluded to in the novel properly so because in fact I think if you said what she came out she had this type of dress and there were bugs drop crawling on her bed. In fact it would not be so effective and Morrison knows that we have to to imagine this and it's there in fact that the demi. Imagination has really served him I mean I think that that whole kind of surrealist imagery of her coming out is something that will absolutely be remembered from this film. And my guess is I found this with a few people people will imagine that it was in the novel in that degree of specificity which of course it isn't shouldn't be but it should be in the film. So the filmmaker realizes images that that novelists hint at or develop in words in a different medium and exactly that move between words and

images which is what the excitement is all about. Though that can work the other way too. Demi has to produce what are now called special effects to indicate the presence of the ghost in the house in the beginning. He I think produces some of the weakest passages in the film the flashing red lights and so on feels like something out of a kind of a B movie from the 70s. And so the moments where having to literalize the images can can cause problems. But that I mean I wonder if that is because your references for seeing the flashing red light are horror movies of the 70s whereas reading about a flashing red light or red glow in the house isn't necessary or necessarily think of a horror movie but yeah it was a little Amityville Horror. I think it isn't fair enough but I think it's good now. I mean I actually think that one of the resources that Demi drew on was the horror film. And and that is I don't think one of the things that Morrison is drawing on although hard to tell. But in fact I think the very kind of quality of the horror film in the 70s

with this very strong visual special effect nature allows. It's one of the things I was very glad he did that he didn't treat this as a classic that he treated it as something that in the very first scene he could do this very strong special effects sequence. And I I'm talking more about the stuff with the cake and so on. And that instead of doing the kind of Masterpiece Theater you know very deep you know that he he starts out with a bang of action which is only kind of alluded to in the novel and which we see very strongly is in fact I think it did. It pulls away all your defenses. You're not just oh I'm going to watch I'm going to lives your one away and I'm going to be a general education and OH MY GOD THAT dogs. I felt it and I know some people had trouble with that but I think it's actually very strong. You might argue actually that in doing that he's capturing something about the way the book works in the sense that it begins somewhat in a gothic mode. And ends in a rather different mode. As a narrative of social integration in every sense with Denver's going to the city we see much more of

the city. And so at the end of the book it becomes more about the book that Greek chorus that that Morrison brings in to to to to create the resolution and the film works a bit that way too it starts off like the contemporary equivalent Gothic you know the cheap horror movie and then moves toward something rather different toward the end which is this film with more realistic facts and social integration as its as its intent. Yeah the end of the film definitely has a distinctly different feel from the beginning of the film and appropriately so. Dorothy thanks very much for your call and see if we get one more call in. Let's talk to Ed good morning. Ed you're on WBEZ. Yeah go ahead. How do you just look at it. Times you have to ask a quick you know shoot it's a quick one. How did the filmmaker screw up bonfires of vanity. Well I have to say I didn't read the book and I did see the movie. And so I can't make that comparison but to tell you the truth I saw the movie after all of the disasters reviews and I thought it wasn't as bad as as indicated.

Now I don't have the comparison but in fact I am not a big fan of Tom Hanks his performance in the Academy Award winning. You know Forrest Gump but I think its performance and Bonfire Of The Vanities is brilliant because it's a very unsympathetic performance and to see this kind of gushy you know sympathetic much more me actor play someone who you don't like. I found was very effective but it certainly wasn't a really good movie. And I guess you know if I'd read the book I might have been disappointed but of course this is a question What preconceptions do we bring. We're doing so definitely. You know anything that's not a big bonfire of the Vanities fan. All right well Ed thanks very much for your call. We're running short on time but I want to thank everyone who called. My apologies to those we didn't get to. Want to thank my guests Jim Chandler professor an English language and literature at the University of Chicago and the author of England in 1819 which is a study of the literature and politics in the year of Britain's Peter loo massacre. And you're working on a book Frank Capra right we will look forward to that.

And Tom Dunning who is a professor in the departments of art history and cinema and he's saying this wrong art history and cinema and media studies at the University of Chicago. Thank you both very much for coming in. Pleasure. Stay tuned. JOE MCDONALD up next with worldview Monday we're going to talk about Chicago's lake front and the future there of so I certainly hope you'll tune in for that. This is Odyssey I'm Gretchen Helfrich And you're listening to WBEZ Chicago. Support for this WBEZ program is provided by the Chicago Tribune in print.