On translating literary classics into the language of cinema
In her new book, Shoma A. Chatterji looks at two towering figures of Bengali culture, Tagore and Satyajit Ray, and at the representations of the female protagonist in their work. An excerpt.
By Shoma A. Chatterji Publisher: HarperCollins Pages: 342 Price: Rs 499
The interplay between cinema and literature is as old as the medium of celluloid. It will continue as long as there are good books to read and filmmakers with the vision to translate them into films. There will be controversy, and criticism. But however good or bad an adaptation, one must remember that the original will always remain; it cannot be obliterated or erased by the existence of its celluloid version. At times, the celluloid version might be so remote an interpretation that it distances itself from the source. The film becomes a film unto itself, alienated completely from the original, such as Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas.
If the film adaptation/interpretation/relocation is remarkable, the film will stand on its own. The histo- ry of world cinema is littered with brilliant examples of immortal classics made into archival films, such as Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1939), produced by David O. Selznick; Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, turned into a film first in 1935 starring Greta Garbo in the title role, and then in 1948 starring Vivien Leigh; Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957), which transposes William Shakespeare’s Macbeth by placing it in feudal Japan; and Satyajit Ray’s Charulata, which is an interpretation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Nastaneer. Writers can take heart from the fact that the medium of cinema takes their works to a much wider audience than their original literary work does. Many writers recognise that to reach a wider audience, their works should be open to interpretation. Cinema expresses the private vision of the filmmaker, be it in accurate imitation, political propaganda, or visual abstraction, and the critical emphasis should be on the work of art—the film itself—and not on its comparison with the literature it springs from.
We generally tend to overlook the basic difference between literature and its adaptation on celluloid. This lies in the physicality of the celluloid interpretation vis-à-vis the lack thereof in literature. Literature gives the reader the freedom to imagine how the characters and the objects would actually look in real life. But cinema needs to invest characters and objects with three-dimensional physicality, thereby restricting the viewer’s imaginative freedom. For example, if the literary piece says, “He came into the room and sat A collection of seventeen wonderful short stories showing that twotime Oscar winner Tom Hanks is as talented a writer as he is an actor. Alternatingly whimsical, moving and occasionally melancholy, this is a book that will delight as well as surprise his millions of fans. It also establishes him as a welcome and wonderful new voice in contemporary fiction, a voice that perceptively delves beneath the surface of friendships, families and love everyday behaviour. on the only chair standing against one of the walls’”, it remains trapped within the words, and leaves the reader to imagine what “he” or the “room” or “the chair” and the “wall” would possibly look like, allowing the reader’s imagination to run wild. The reader gives the man the ‘face’s/he imagines the man has, creates the body language that would suit this “face” the best, and so on.
The same sentence translated on film would offer the filmmaker the challenge of precisely defining how the man would look, which includes what he should be wearing or not wearing, how he should walk and how he should sit on the chair, what the “room’” should look like and what colour the wall should be, generally drawing from the literary source and then working on it. This will lead him to decide whether the chair would be a period piece or an old, broken chair with one of the four legs wobbling and bent, a designer chair, an antique piece, and so on. In cinema, therefore, it is the director’s imagination that is set into play. He can toy around with the period and the backdrop, and bring it to a contemporary setting in a way that would fit his modified script of the original text.
Alternately, he might choose to remain totally loyal to the text his film is based on. The scriptwriter, director and cinematographer should bear in mind the kind of lighting and lensing to be used to give the scene the desired effect and texture. Deciding on the time of day would also determine the light effects. What would the lighting focus on? Would it focus on the face of the man? Would it be in half-light or in silhouette? Would it close in on the face or track back to capture the entire figure seated on the chair, or take a mid-shot till the waist? Would it be a topangle shot looking down on the man seated on the chair? Or would the camera first pan across the room to offer the point of view of the man after he enters and then zero in on the subject—the man— and convert him into the object of the camera? Would the actor playing the man be old, or young, or very young? What sound would the director choose? Would he keep the soundtrack silent? Will he use a piece of music or song? Will the music be just a single strain or note, or will it spill over after the scene is over? All these offer great scope for the director to imagine the aesthetics of the scene, its relevance in the script, its chronological positioning within the film, and so on, to be decided by editorial touches during post-production.
A film is a composite of concrete images. This sets it in a completely different class from the novel or the play, which is composed of abstract written or spoken words. A film is a kind of writing, but picture writing. It can even express completely abstract ideas, provided they are adapted to the nature of the medium and formulated in concrete, pictorial terms.
As film offers the opportunity for concrete images, objects that might or might not be present at all in the original literary text often take on a character of their own when the story is made into a film.
This happens more when the given object is linked to a leading character in the film. Even if it is present in the original text, it begins to assume a larger and more specifi c meaning in the film. A lucid example is the stick of lipstick Edith Simmons, Arati’s Anglo-Indian colleague, gifts her with in Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar.
One effect of this stress on the physical surfaces and behavior of objects and figures is to de-emphasize the author’s personal narrating voice, so that we learn to read the ostensibly unmediated visual language of the later nineteenth- century novel in a way that anticipates the viewer’s experience of film, which necessarily presents those physical surfaces. Conrad and James further anticipate the cinema in their capacity for “decomposing” a scene, for altering point of view so as to focus more sharply on various aspects of an object, for exploring a visual field by fragmenting it rather than presenting it scenographically (that is, as if it were a scene from a stage presentation).
While both a film and its literary source have the common aim of expressing concrete situations involved in the development of a plot, and the exposition of character and environment, the language in which they seek to accomplish these ends are entirely different. The film depicts concrete situations involving plot development and characterization, setting and environment, emotional reactions and philosophic attitudes and concepts, by means of a series of plastic images, visual representations projected upon a screen in a darkened room before an audience. It is thus seen and heard by its audience and secures its characteristic form and rhythm by the purely filmic process of editing. The medium of literature, however, is words. The novelist originally creates words or sentences in order to achieve the maximum literary power, and to stir the thoughts and emotions of the readers. In spite of such basic differences of form and style, it is a well-accepted fact that right from the birth of this new art form in the twentieth century, film-makers had to turn to literature, and especially novels, for a continuous supply of the essential ingredient upon which their narration is based, namely the story. Extracted with permission from Woman at the Window by Shoma A. Chatterji, published by HarperCollins