Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature Through Cinema and Cyberspace

Chapter Nine Cinema as a Digest of Literature

chapter nine Cinema as a Digest of Literature A Cure for Adaptation Fever p et er ve rs tr at en According to a well-known definition introduced by Ricciotto Canudo in 1923, film is the seventh art. The cinema owes this label to its heterogeneous nature. Film is not the seventh art because it is the successor of six other arts, but because, according to Canudo, it is a synthesis of three rhythmic and three plastic arts. The rhythmic arts are dance, music, and poetry; the three plastic ones are architecture, sculpture and painting.1 It is remarkable, to say the least, that theater and literature fall outside the scope of the definition, since they are generally considered the sister arts of cinema. The exclusion of literature and theater, however, is due to the idea that these two arts risk pulling film into the swamp of storytelling. The familiar argument runs that film can develop into a ‘‘true’’ art form only on the condition that it avoid the pitfall of narrativity. In short, a film can stake an artistic claim on when it distances itself from literary and theatrical influences. According to a strictly esthetic vision on cinema, literature works like a kind of poison. In spite of this vision, film is still all too often compared to literature. The logic resides in the destination that, willynilly , has been attributed to the cinema. Those who pioneered with moving image at the end of the nineteenth century, such as Étienne-Jules Marey and the brothers Lumière, were merely interested in scientific applications. They were hardly enthusiastic about the possibility of reproducing lifelike scenes on the screen. If one goes back to the originating years of the medium, the technological aspect tends to be 173 174 Peter Verstraten stressed. The new invention was seen as a device to marvel at for the sheer fact that moving images could be projected, and the status of cinema had best be compared to a fairground attraction.2 Cinema was predicted to have a poor future around the date of its birth, and it could turn into a seminal medium of the twentieth century only thanks to its potential for storytelling, which was recognized only with the advent of cutting. Since the first cut, cinema has been dominated by a constant narrative pressure; as Seymour Chatman observes, story time in film is always ‘‘ticking away.’’3 In the words of André Gaudreault, cinema is a ‘‘machine which is doomed to tell stories ‘for ever.’’’4 And as a narrative medium, film is both a companion and a rival to literature. Jan Simons once wrote that film and literature are caught up in a ‘‘tragic-comical’’ competition. As a verbal medium, literature is usually automatically privileged over an audiovisual medium. Film is the underdog that time and again has to undergo a decisive test in order to prove its worth. The rivalry between the two media has a tragic-comical dimension, Simons argues, because each time film is able to stand the test, literature is reintroduced as an arbiter to another trial.5 Critics who discuss the battleground between film and literature usually remind us that film can never carry the day, since literature can always appeal to a rich tradition. The Bible clearly favors words over images: the word was God, according to St. John’s Gospel, and the Second Commandment forbids the production of idols. Moreover, the conventional argument of seniority also privileges literature over film: Thanks to its longer history, literature would be the better art form, because the older, the more prestigious. Furthermore, the idea runs that words and literature stimulate our thoughts, while images and film provoke our senses. And whereas a novel can dedicate ample space to describe characters or landscapes, a film can show them at a glance. In contrast to the presumed cultivated nature of literature, the cinema is at times considered as potentially vulgar.6 From this perspective, film has lost the ‘‘battle’’ in advance unless we change our policy. To adopt a new approach, I return to the ideas of André Bazin, who wrote about film in the 1940s and 1950s. He was opposed to the notion of film as the seventh art, and he suggested that it would be wise were film to ‘‘digest’’ the traditions of theater and literature. As a case study, I use Spike Jonze’s 2002 film Adaptation, which has ‘‘digested’’ literature to the maximum...