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Death of a Salesman Now how all this will translate on film we don’t know. This is an experiment . I think I’ll only try and help how best we can what has been so successful on stage put on film. See that these walls don’t quite fit. It is not so much that we wanted to make an economy but to make clear from the beginning and all the way through that this is not a real house. Because if you have that much reality, you don’t need that many words any more. This being a play, a reality should be created through the words. If the reality is there anyhow in front of the camera, they don’t need to talk that much and it doesn’t fit together then. You will contribute greatly by creating reality through your performances. Everything should be fake except for the emotions . They’ll be real. And they’ll be what we’ll be moved by. —Volker Schlöndorff, addressing the cast of Death of a Salesman (from Private Conversations) Death of a Salesman marks a departure for Volker Schlöndorff. It was his first film made in the United States from an American subject, his first Englishlanguage production since Michael Kohlhaas, and his first screen adaptation of a play since Baal. The production, presented on U.S. television on September 15, 1985, was an enormous critical and popular success, racking up ratings twice as good as those for the last television presentation of the play almost twenty years earlier (“‘Death’ . . . Doubles 1966 Audience”). With the noted exception of his cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus, Schlöndorff used a largely American crew. Yet despite the new ground broken, Death of a Salesman bears some similarities to Schlöndorff’s other works: it was a faithful adaptation of a literary classic; it was made with an aesthetic awareness that its primary use would be on television; and it has a theme typical of Schlöndorff, namely, the damage wrought to human relationships as a result of capitalism. Schlöndorff’s Death of a Salesman was in part an attempt to translate to film 20 223 the successful Broadway revival of the Arthur Miller play that opened in May of 1984 and ran for some 250 performances. The production starred Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman, the proud but despondent, physically and psychologically ailing salesman who has difficulty communicating sincerely with his loving wife, his emotionally distanced sons, and his sympathetic neighbor. Death of a Salesman was, like Swann in Love, a project into which Schlöndorff entered relatively late. Working from a determined script and with almost all the actors from the stage production and using a set that derived from the one used on Broadway, Schlöndorff took on the role of metteur en scène. If in the publicity that accompanied this filming of Death of a Salesman Schlöndorff often took backseat to Miller and Hoffman, that very inconspicuousness and selfeffacement may well be the director’s triumph, for it is a movie that intentionally showcases Miller’s text and Hoffman’s performance to maximum degrees. (See illustration 30.) In discussing Death of a Salesman, we consider three major issues. First and foremost is the issue of adaptation, for in many ways Death of a Salesman is an exemplary film adaptation of a theatrical work. Related to this is Schlöndorff’s particular and deliberate use of space, both to enhance the play’s theme of freedom versus confinement and to provide for a mise-en-scène closely associated with the play’s dialogue. Death of a Salesman’s use of space is, in short, one built around the spoken word. Finally, we treat the question of emotion in Death of a Salesman to inquire as to how Miller and Schlöndorff’s manipulation of the audience’s affective responses relates to the production’s aesthetic and political effects. Adaptation andTheatricality In considering Death of a Salesman as a theatrical adaptation, two things stand out. For one thing, Schlöndorff adapts the play with scrupulous faithfulness; for another, his adaptation confronts the theatricality of the play itself, acknowledging and emphasizing its artificiality and departures from realism. Let us consider these issues in relation to the writing of two theorists of film and theater , André Bazin and Yann Lardeau. One of the most famous essays on the subject of theater-to-film transformations is André Bazin’s two-part essay...

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