Unfinished Sentences in Matthew Eberle's Film James Joyce's "The Sisters"

James Joyce's "The Sisters" introduces us to the world of Dubliners. The short story is mediated through the consciousness of a first-person narrator who recounts his experiences as Father Flynn's friend and pupil. As it unfolds, we listen in on a sequence of elliptical suggestions about the boy's aversion to old Cotter, his uncle's concerns regarding the boy's masculinity, his ambivalent feelings of freedom and grief at his mentor's death, what the priest taught, and the cause of his physical and spiritual decline. The narrator reflects on the bits and pieces that he hears from old Cotter's conversation with his uncle: "Though I was angry with old Cotter for alluding to me as a child I puzzled my head to extract meaning from his unfinished sentences" (D 5). The reader is removed from the truth about Flynn because the narrator often misses or fails to understand parts of these exchanges.

Joyce puns on the senses of "sentence" as both "[a]n authoritative decision" (OED 3) and as "[a] series of words in connected speech or writing, forming the grammatically complete expression of a single thought" (OED 6.a.) to show how speech and judgment are both frustrated. "The Sisters" is the subject of Matthew Eberle's recent short-film adaptation, which stars Brett Thomas as the narrator (named Seamus here) and Paul Bond as Father Flynn. In what follows, Eberle and I discuss some of the decisions required for filling in the narrator's strategic silences, as well as the visual aspects of the film and Eberle's interpretation of Joyce's ambiguous story. Eberle was born in California. His youth was spent between the West Coast and the Midwest. He majored in screenwriting at Sierra Nevada College, graduating in 2013 with a B.F.A. in Creative Writing and English with honors. Eberle gained his M.F.A. in Film Production from Chapman University's Dodge College in 2017. James Joyce's "The Sisters," his graduate thesis film, runs just over 18 minutes. It was selected for the Leo Freedman Foundation First Cut grant, and it was a finalist for the 2017 ASC Heritage Award for Cinematography.

tom ue:

Congratulations on James Joyce's "The Sisters"! What spurred you to adapt this particular story from Dubliners?

matthew eberle:

I guess ultimately it was because I wanted to adapt "The Dead" but realized that was just not going to happen—at least not as a short film. Never mind the rather daunting task of trying to reinterpret and re-adapt not just Joyce but also John Huston's cinematic version. I first read "The Dead" as part of a class and instantly fell in love with the story and with Joyce's use of language. I read all of Dubliners shortly thereafter and carried those stories with me as I entered graduate school. As for my choice to direct "The Sisters," I felt that there were a lot of interesting similarities between it and the final story, and they act as bookends to Dubliners as a whole. Although the story is, in many ways, not very active visually, I was drawn to these characters, at opposite ends of life, examining or reexamining their faith. There is plenty in the story that I love: the disconnection between what the narrator feels for Father Flynn and how that contrasts with the way others talk about him (see Figure 1). I wondered how that might play out visually on screen. But the question of what faith is, which really became the core of my adaptation, is a story I was interested in telling.

tu:

Dubliners juxtaposes the stories of many characters, some of whom we read about only in passing. How do you see "The Sisters" as fitting in?

me:

Assuming you mean the characters and not the stories in which they appear, I'm not sure I have an easy answer for that. I can tell you that I don't see them as mere representations of the paralysis that grips Ireland and the Irish people...