Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ

7. Traditions of Quality

c h a p t e r s e v e n Traditions of Quality Though it seems an unlikely companion to Gone with the Wind and the Lord of the Rings trilogy as an example of transmedia synergy, the 1995 BBC television miniseries Pride and Prejudice has been greeted just as rapturously, and in much the same terms, by respondents to the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com). Apart from a few curmudgeons who express reservations about Jane Austen or a fondness for the 1980 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice —not a single respondent prefers the 1940 MGM adaptation with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier—the hundreds of comparisons of the 1995 series to Austen’s novel are so consistently enthusiastic that the most common observations are “perfection!” and “what more can I add?” Writing on March 31, 2005, cymanasseh says,“This film is better than perfect.”Redheadliz25 avers on September 4, 2004,“The movie is the book and is truly wonderful! 11/10!”—a rating stpete48, writing on February 26, 2003, suggests is too modest:“10 out of 10; No! 20 out of 10 . . .do I hear 30!”Even the few respondents who findAusten tough going are impressed by the adaptation’s fidelity to her novel. In accord with the laws of synergy, Austen’s sales rose dramatically in the wake of Pride and Prejudice, the 1995 BBC Persuasion, Douglas McGrath’s 1996 Emma (star- ring Gwyneth Paltrow), and Sense and Sensibility, whose screenwriter and star, Emma Thompson, accepted her Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay of 1995 with the wish that Jane Austen could know how well she was doing in Uruguay. There is, of course, a darker side to the question of fidelity to a beloved literary source,a side exposed most influentially by François Truffaut.In his landmark essay“A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,”Truffaut described the “Tradition of Quality” of Claude Autant-Lara, Jean Dellannoy, René Clement, Yves Allegret, and Marcel Pagliero as defined by their screenwriters rather than their directors. Asserting that “I consider an adaptation of value only when written by a man of the cinema,”Truffaut brusquely dismissed Autant-Lara and Dellannoy, whose films staked their aesthetic claims on the literary respectability of their sources. His insistence that “I do not believe in the peaceful coexistence of the ‘Tradition of Quality’ and an ‘auteur’s cinema’” shaped by directors like Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Max Ophüls, and Jacques Tati turned the Tradition of Quality into a term of contempt even as such traditions continued to flourish, for example, in the hands of the BBC.1 The distinction that has most often been abstracted from Truffaut between adaptations willing to reinvent their sources and adaptations condemned to servile imitation implies that all members of the Tradition of Quality are interchangeable . To the Internet Movie Database commentators on Pride and Prejudice, however, evaluative distinctions between different adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, even among different BBC adaptations of Austen’s novel, are instinctive. Evidently there is not a single Tradition of Quality but several competing traditions. Even when a film’s avowed aim is simply to reproduce the experience provided by a celebrated novel, different films may try very different strategies—a truth acknowledged by Truffaut in his remarks about different screenplays adapting Georges Bernanos’s Journal d’un curé de campagne . Indeed, Truffaut’s broadside, usually read as a simple denunciation of literary rather than cinematic values, a cornerstone in the politique des auteurs, is remarkably helpful in distinguishing several different Traditions of Quality. The aesthetic of the BBC miniseries that include Pride and Prejudice is best approached by contrast with earlier aesthetics that also invoke associations with literary respectability. Moreover, one of those earlier traditions, the one associated with Hollywood studio adaptations of the 1930s and 1940s, has been unfortunately neglected and vilified for many years, squeezed to death between 152 Film Adaptation and Its Discontents the specifically antiliterary bias of the nascent discipline of film studies thirty years later and the casting of these studio films as villainous antitypes by still later generations of adaptations and fans who hailed the BBC miniseries precisely because it was not the MGM version. The 1995 Pride and Prejudice offers itself less as a new achievement than as a...