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Cinematic concepts and techniques in the adaptation and staging of chamber theatre

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Cinematic concepts and techniques in the adaptation and staging of chamber theatre

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Content CINEMATIC CONCEPTS AND TECHNIQUES IN THE
ADAPTATION AND STAGING OF CHAMBER THEATRE
by
LYNN CHRISTINE MILLER
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Communication Arts & Sciences)
July 1980
UMI Number: DP22358
All rights reserved
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
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This dissertation, written by
......lynn.. chrijti. ne. _ m l l e r ........
under the direction of h^T.... Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by a ll its members, has
been presented to and accepted by The Graduate
School, in partial fulfillm ent of requirements of
the degree of
T h .T > .
'81
J i v j z q t
M /
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
Dean
Date.
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairman
ACKNOWLE DGEMENTS
I wish to sincerely thank my advisors--Dr. Janet
Bolton, Dr. Walter Fisher, and Dr. Harvey Goldstein, my
parents, and the movies.
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................. . . ii
CHAPTER I; INTRODUCTION. ......... . . . 1
Justification of the Study
Statement of the Problem
Definitions of Key Terms
Methodology of the Study
Scope of the Study
Review of the Literature
Plan of Reporting
CHAPTER II; FICTION AND FILM AS
PRESENTATIONAL MEDIA.................... 17
Language in Cinema and Fiction
Time and Space in Cinema and Fiction
Chronological Time in Cinema and Fiction
Psychological Time in Cinema and Fiction
CHAPTER III: CHAMBER THEATRE AND THE
NARRATIVE STRUCTURE OF CINEMA.........49
Point of View in Cinema and Chamber
Theatre
Omniscient Narration in Cinema and
Chamber Theatre
Narrator Agents in Cinema and Chamber
Theatre
Stream-of-consciousness in Cinema
and Chamber Theatre
Summary
CHAPTER IV; LITERARY AND CINEMATIC CONSIDER
ATIONS IN LAST YEAR AT~ MARIENBAD ..... 91
Point of View in Mariehbad
Time and Space in; Mariehbad
Implications of Marlenbad for Chamber
Theatre
Summary
iii
CHAPTER V: THE LIME TWIG: ANALYSIS
AND STAGING...............................127
Point of View in The Lime Twig
Symbol and Archetype in The Lime Twig
Time and Space in The Lime Twig
Summary
CHAPTER VI: SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS...... 161
Summary
Conclusions
Suggestions for Further Research
BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................... 181
iv
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
The modern novel and the modern cinema have a history
of both shared and divergent traditions. Although the
novel predates the cinema, the aesthetics of the two media
run parallel and interweave as often as they extend in
different directions. As film developed, borrowing heav
ily from the novel for plots (D.W. Griffith's Resurrec
tion , George Cukor's Gone With the Wind, and Vincente
Minnelli's Madame Bovary are early examples of novels
adapted into films), structure, and narrative devices,
the novel has steadily become more cinematic. For exam
ple, films often use the devices of first person narra
tion (Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity), omniscient third
person narration (Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon), or
stream-of-consciousness (Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon
Amour). Cinematic techniques in novels include cross
cutting (Flaubert's Madame Bovary), description func
tioning as an "establishing shot" in exposition (D.H.
Lawrence's "The Horse Dealer's Daughter"), or detailed
close-ups (Robbe-Grillet's In the Labyrinth).
1
Justification of the Study
Since cinematic concepts and techniques are fre
quently used in modern and contemporary fiction, they re
late to and provide possibilities for the staging of fic
tion in chamber theatre. The narrator in a novel or short
story shares similarities with the camera in film-— both
control the reader's/viewer's interpretation of events,
and both focus the audience's attention on aspects of the
characters, situation, and action, making the study of
cinema a resource for structuring narrative and visual
izing action in the adaptation and staging of chamber
theatre.
In chamber theatre, the narrator (like the camera) is
the filter through which the audience views the action.
The camera or narrator reveals psychological as well as
actual realities. Robert Breen, in Chamber Theatre,
states:
We are interested in Chamber Theatre, which
shares with film the necessity for making
manifest the inner life, and shares equally
with the novel its reliance on language
for developing and maintaining a point of
view.1
Chamber Theatre as a presentational form is a mixed
medium. While it is based on the verbal art of fiction,
it employs the theatricality of the stage and has some of
the visual power and immediacy of film. As chamber theatre
represents a transformation of media (as does the perfor
mance of literature as a whole) from the medium of print
2
to the medium of live performance, the study of other
media, their aesthetic similarities and differences, is
necessary to determine the unique properties of the medium
of chamber theatre and to obtain an understanding of the
transformational process itself.
Film has particular relevance for chamber theatre.
Both media share with fiction an essentially narrative
structure, both are able to manipulate freely time and
space, and both are tied to fiction in some way, film
through the cross-influences of cinema and the novel, and
chamber theatre as it is based on and adapted from fic
tion. To again quote Breen:
Chamber Theatre sees in the cinematic
qualities of the novel and the inter
pretative capacities of the camera an
opportunity to increase the reader's
responsiveness to the structure of the
novel.^
While the relationship of cinema to the performance
of literature has been discussed by Breen in a brief over
view in his book, Chamber Theatre, and by Christie Logan
in her unpublished dissertation which studies the formal
properties of theatre, film, and fiction in determining an
aesthetic of adaptation for readers theatre, the subject
has not been explored fully for its application and value
in the adaptation and staging of chamber theatre. As
cinema creates its environment and style visually and
through spatial relationships, and the novel establishes
3
its reality through language, the areas of time, space,
language, and point of view are primary points of compari
son in understanding the aesthetics of the two media. A
study of cinematic concepts and techniques can suggest
solutions and illuminate the problems for the chamber thea
tre director in transforming a work from the medium of
fiction to that of the staged presentation.
Statement of the Problem
I propose to explore the implications of cinematic
concepts and techniques for the adaptation and staging of
chamber theatre. Such a study will consider the following
questions:
1. What is the relationship of cinema to fiction and
hence to chamber theatre in the areas of language, time and
space, and point of view?
2. How is point of view handled in the cinema and how
can cinematic concepts of narrative clarify staging of psy
chological fiction in chamber theatre productions?
3. What cinematic techniques can be transferred to
the staging of chamber theatre and what specific functions
can they perform?
4. How can the study of a screenplay illuminate prob
lems of staging in chamber theatre?
5. What general principles can be stated for applying
cinematic concepts and techniques to the staging of modern
4
and contemporary fiction?
One of the chief problems in adapting much of modern
and contemporary fiction for the stage lies in its develop
ment of the inner life, its preoccupation with the psycho
logical and with the mental processes of its characters.
In other words, chamber theatre directors must develop a
set of principles for visualizing that which is unseeable,
of physicalizing and externalizing the internal states of
dream, memory, and fantasy that characterize much of modern
fiction. Through montage, through its almost unlimited
combination of images, the cinema can create a powerful and
vivid replication of mental associations. Christie Logan
states;elements of the film experience:
While operating in the perceptual present
of dream experience, the relations in time
of the scenes can be asserted through the
treatment of the image individually and in
montage juxtapositions. Because the images
of dream are chaotic, moving through space
and time at will, a fragmented time scheme—
or perspective on time— can be easily
assimilated into the illusion.^
The chief significance of the study will be to explore
possibilities of using filmic renderings of time and space
and cinematic techniques to clarify, by movement, gesture,
and composition, the inner life of the characters on stage
and their psychological relationship to one another. The
study will examine the formal and presentational properties
of fiction and film to determine pragmatic approaches in
staging the landscape of the mind for chamber theatre.
5
Definitions of Key Terms
Chamber theatre is a technique of adapting narrative
fiction for the stage using the theatrical devices of the
stage without sacrificing the narrative elements of the
literature.^
Cinematic concepts refer to aesthetic characteristics
and pragmatic principles of the art of film: for this
study, those applying to language, point of view, and time
and space are of particular importance.
Cinematic techniques refer to movements and manipula
tion of the camera in editing, in creating montage and fo
cus in a film. Terms like the "crosscut," the "reverse-
angle shot," etc. will be defined as they occur in the
study.
Fiction refers to narrative prose, namely the short
story and the novel.
Point of view, the angle or source of vision in the
telling of a film or a story, will also be compared as it
is employed in cinema and fiction for use in staging cham
ber theatre productions with omniscient narration, narrator
agents, and stream-of-consciousness narration.
The handling of time and space in a novel, short story,
or film affects narrative structure and creates psychologi
cal and physical boundaries which define the environment
and world of the work. Time and space will be compared and
6
contrasted in film, fiction, and chamber theatre with
emphasis on how time and space in cinema can provide sta
ging concepts in transforming fiction into chamber theatre
productions.
Methodology of the Study
The methods employed in the study will be analytical,
critical, and creative. Primary sources, including feature
films, novels, and short stories, will be analyzed to demon
strate similarities and differences in the narrative tech
niques of film and fiction, and to provide examples of
adapting and staging fiction. Critical methods will be
used to determine the aesthetic principles underlying film,
fiction, and chamber theatre as art forms. Creative methr>'
ods will be used in applying cinematic concepts and tech
niques to the adaptation and staging of specific works of
fiction.
The investigation will take the following course;
1. Review theories and aesthetics of fiction and
film.
2. Compare and contrast fiction and film in terms of
language, time and space, and point of view.
3. Explore how techniques and concepts of film are
used in fiction and.can be transposed for use in chamber
theatre.
4. Analyze the film script Last Year at Marienbad for
____________________________________________________________________7
its use of literary and film concepts and techniques and
discuss staging concepts for chamber theatre that can be
"borrowed" from film.
5. Analyze and apply cinematic concepts to the adap
tation and staging of John Hawkes' novel, The Lime Twig.
6. Draw conclusions about: 1) the relationship of
film to fiction and the staging of fiction; 2) the unique
properties of chamber theatre as a medium; 3) the effec
tiveness of certain film concepts and techniques in expres
sing language, point of view, and time and space in the
staging of chamber theatre; and 5) general principles for
applying cinematic concepts and techniques to the staging
of modern and contemporary fiction.
Scope of the Study
The study will analyze, compare and contrast film and
fiction as presentational media. Both media will be ex
plored to determine individual and shared methods for pre
senting language, point of view, and time and space and for
their implications on the staging of chamber theatre.
After an examination of the effects of using
filmic concepts and techniques in staging, I will analyze
a narrative film script, Last Year at Marienbad. Mariehbad
was selected for: 1) its unique treatment of psychological
rather than naturalistic reality, a property it shares with
much psychological fiction; 2) its treatment of time and
space; and 3) its blend of cinematic and literary effects.
8
The study will conclude with an analysis and applica
tion of cinematic considerations to staging difficulties
in The Lime Twig by John Hawkes. The Lime Twig was chosen
for: 1) its representative characteristics of psychologi
cal fiction; 2) its complex narrative structure and manipu
lation of time and space? 3) its use of cinematic techni
ques; and 4) its reliance on symbolism, archetype, and a
surrealistic tone and style.
Review of the Literature
Although a large share of films have been adapted from
novels, surprisingly little research exists on the subject
of the relationship of film and fiction and even less on
the staging of fiction. The classic and most comprehen
sive study comparing film and fiction is George Bluestone's
Novels into Film.5 His work contains an excellent chapter
on the individual and collective properties of the novel
and the narrative film as well as four case studies of fea
ture films adapted from novels.
Unlike Bluestone's book, Fiction into Film6 by Rachel
Maddux, Stirling Silliphant, and Neil Isaacs, concerns it
self with the adaptation of one novel, A Walk in the Spring
Rain, into film. The book details specific production pro
cedure and problems but does not contribute any aesthetic
or theoretical principles.
Claude-Edmone Magny wrote an excellent pioneering
9
study on film and the novel in 1948, The Age of the Ameri
can Novel. She discusses how films inspired a new immedi
acy and objective style of narrative in American literature
and then influenced world literature. She says that film
has changed our perception, has caused a "profound modifi
cation of our collective sensibility."^
Story and Discourse— Narrative Structure in Fiction
and FilmS;.by.Seymour Chatman and Film and the Narrative
Tradition^ by John Fell both discuss the film's contribu
tion to modifications in narration in the novel. Chatman's
work is valuable to this study for his contributions to
ways of using and understanding time and space in fiction
and film, and for his rhetorical perspective. He describes
the perceptual effects of narrative devices on the reader
or viewer. Fell's work is less theoretical and makes his
torical connections between narrative techniques in the
novel and film. Of special interest is the chapter, "Space
Time, and Victorian Prose."
Several works are essential to an understanding of
film as an art form. Most important to this study is
Rudolf Arnheim's landmark study of 1957, Film as Art, for a
grounding in the aesthetics of film. Arnheim stresses the
image as primary in cinema, stating that "dialogue narrows
the world of the film," and "it was precisely the absence
of speech that made the silent film develop a style of its
own, capable of condensing the dramatic situation."10
10
Also important to a knowledge of film aesthetics are Andre
Bazin's What Is Cinema?,H Erwin Panofsky's "Style and
Medium in the Motion Picture, Ralph Stephenson and J.R.
Debrix's The Cinema as A r t ,13 an^ Sergei M. Eisenstein's
The Film Sense.1^
Lee R. Bobker's Elements of Film, ^ although general,
is useful for its discussion of the elements of cinemato
graphy and the creation of images and effects from the
filmmaker's point of view.
I found Charles Thomas Samuels recent Mastering the
Film and Other Essays helpful for the discussion of the
formal properties of film. As well as comparing film to
its related arts of literature and drama, he discusses how
film aesthetically molds elements like dialogue and rhythm,
story, character, and theme into a new significance. His
discussion of speech in film has significance, as speech
in chamber theatre also often has the importance of ges
ture :
That speech normally upstages action was,
of course, contended by most early ana
lysts of film, who therefore believed that
sound increased audience appeal at too high
an aesthetic price. But when speech becomes
a sign, like gesture, rather than a statement
of what would otherwise remain invisible, it
completes the illusion of reality that is
film's principal achievement.16
Christian Metz, in Language and Cinema, ties cinema
into our cultural and linguistic systems, which elevates
11
the art form to other deeply-rooted language systems:
"namely, the oldest arts such as myths, social rituals,
beliefs, collective representations, tales, symbolic behav
ior, ideologies, etc."-*-^
For a thorough description of technical terms and de
vices used in film, Bernard F. Dick's Anatomy of Filmic is
excellent. Of particular interest to this study, he des
cribes how narrative modes in fiction are transposed to
work in the cinema.
Wolf Rilla, in The Writer and the Screen, ^ describes
the making of film from the screenwriter's point of view.
As an analysis of the structuring of plot, language, char
acter, dialogue, and mise-en-scene it is an excellent tool
for the adaptor of fiction for the stage.
In the field of interpretation, several studies exist
on the staging of fiction, including Joanna Hawkins Ma-
clay' s Readers Theatre: Toward a Grammar of Practice,20
Coger and White's Readers Theatre Handbook,21 Long, Hudson,
and Jeffrey's Group Performance of L i t e r a t u r e,22 an(j Robert
Breen's Chamber Theatre. Of the above, only Breen's work
offers an in-depth consideration of the theory and aes
thetics of adapting fiction for the stage, and only his
work considers the relationship of cinema to staging. His
book is valuable for its general theory of chamber theatre
and particularly valid to this study for his chapter on the
12
relationship of chamber theatre and film.
Christie Ann Logan's unpublished dissertation, Adapta
tion of Narrative Fiction to Readers Theatre Performance,
examines the presentational features of fiction, film, and
theatre. Her work develops an aesthetic of adaptation
"which would serve in the exploration of the underlying
principles that define the art of readers theatre perfor
mance, and would provide criteria useful for the critic,
teacher, and student of the a r t . "24
An art form like interpretation, which focuses on the
theory and practice of transforming the medium of litera
ture to the medium of performance, can increase its practi
cal and theoretical knowledge of the process of adaptation
and staging by comparing and contrasting the medium of film
and fiction. More research is needed to provide solutions
and principles for replicating onstage the psychological
landscapes and mental process of the mind which absorbs
writers of modern fiction.
Plan of Reporting
Chapter II, "Fiction and Film as Presentational
Media," will compare and contrast fiction and film in the
areas of language and time and space.
Chapter III, "Chamber Theatre and the Narrative Struc
ture of Cinema," will explore point of view in cinema and
chamber theatre and apply cinematic concepts and techniques
13
to specific works of fiction.
Chapter IV, "Literary and Cinematic Considerations in
Last Year at Marienbad," will focus on Alain Robbe-Grillet's
screenplay by the same name. Special consideration will be
given to the manipulation of time and space and point of
view in the film.
Chapter V, "The Lime Twig: Analysis and Staging," will
be a practical analysis and application of filmic concepts
in staging fiction.
Chapter VI will make summaries and conclusions, and
project other research directions in the relationship of
film, fiction, and chamber theatre.
14
NOTES
1 Robert Breen, Chamber Theatre (Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1978) p. 56.
2 Breen, p. 58.
3 Christie Ann Logan, Adaptation of Narrative Fiction
to Readers Theatre Performance, Diss. University of South
ern California 1978, p. 93.
4 Breen, p. 4.
5 George Bluestone, Novels into Film (Berkeley: Uni
versity of California Press, 1957) p. viii.
6 Rachel Maddux, Stirling Siliphant, and Neil Isaacs,
Fiction into Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).
7 Cl aude^-Edition de Magny, The Age of the American Novel:
the film aesthetic of fiction between the two wars (New
York: Frederick Ungar, 1972) p. 37.
3 Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse— Narrative
Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press , 1978) .
^ John Fell, Film and the Narrative Tradition (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1974).
10 Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1957) p. 229.
11 Andre Bazin, What is Cinema?, 2 vols. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1967).
12 Erwin Panofsky> "Style and Medium in the Motion
Picture," in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Gerald Mast
and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press,
1974) .
13 Ralph Stephenson and J.R. Debrix, The Cinema as Art
(London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1965).
15.
13 Sergei M.Eisenstein, The Film Sense,trans. and
ed. Jay Leyda (New York; Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1942).
15 Lee R. Bobker, Elements of Film (New York: Har
court, Brace and World, Inc.,1969).
16 Charles Thomas Samuels, Mastering the Film and
Other Essays (Knoxville; University of Tennessee Press,
1977) p. 46.
17 Christian Metz, Language and Cinema (The Hague:
Mouton, 1974) p. 38.
18 Bernard F. Dick, Anatomy of Film (New York: St.
Martin's Press-, 1978)...
19 Wolf Rilla, The Writer and the Screen (New York:
William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1974).
2 0 Joanna H. Maclay, Readers Theatre: Toward a Grammar
of Practice (New York: Random House, 1971).
21 Leslie Irene Coger and Melvin R. White, Readers
Theatre Handbook, 2nd ed. (Glenview: Scott, Foresman, and
Co., 1967).
22 Beverly Whitaker Long, Lee Hudson, and Phyllis Jef-
frey, Group Performance of Literature (Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall, 1978) . . .
22 Logan, p. 4.
16
CHAPTER II
FICTION AND FILM AS PRESENTATIONAL MEDIA
Fiction and film are essentially narrative forms. Al
though fiction is a linguistic medium and cinema is basi
cally a visual one, both proceed, in developing action,
characterization, and setting, in scenes or episodes. While
both media share elements of point of view (as will be de
veloped in Chapter III) and plot structure, the means of
developing narrative differs in fiction and cinema.
This study explores the relationship between cinema,
fiction, and chamber theatre. Before the unique properties
of the medium of chamber theatre can be determined, it is
necessary to provide a grounding in the aesthetics of fic
tion, which provides chamber theatre's raw material, and of
cinema, from which it can derive clarity in staging.
The following discussion compares and contrasts the
aesthetia foundations of cinema and fiction in the areas of
language and manipulation of time and space to provide
background for: 1) the study of chamber theatre as a pro
cess of transforming the medium of fiction to the medium
of performance via the medium of cinema; 2) application of
________________________________________________________________17
cinematic principles to the adaptation and staging of cham
ber theatre; and 3) a definition of chamber theatre as a
presentational form combining properties of both fiction
and film.
Language in Cinema and Fiction
Rudolf Arnheim, in Film as Art,, mentions the essen
tial similarity in narrative effect of fiction and film:
In literature language is often used
simply to describe concrete events—
to say what the characters in a story
are doing and thinking, what the sur
roundings are like; and if the people
talk, their conversation generally turns
on very concrete matters.... In this
matter, then, there is no essential
difference between literature and film.
Literature uses words for description,
film, pictures. In both media the guid
ing ideas are not given in abstract form
but clothed in concrete episodes.1
Christian Metz echoes this view when he says in Film
Language that "the art of film is located on the same semi-
ological 'plane' as literary art...."^ Despite this essen
tial similarity, literature is basically a verbal, linguis
tic medium, cinema essentially a nonverbal, visual one.
This difference affects the consciousness and reaction of
the beholder. As this chapter will illustrate, film has
advantages of immediacy, the simultaneous sensory impact
on the viewer of the images as they appear on the screen
and as he/she perceives them, and of mirroring nonverbal
experience, and yet does not have the potential for abstrac
18
tion, for capturing dream and memory, of rendering subtle
ties of behavior and psychological description that fiction
has.
By virtue of its existence through images, cinema has
an instant force and impact on the viewer. As George Blue-
stone says in Hovers into Film;
Where the moving picture comes to us
directly through perception, langu
age must be filtered through the screen
of conceptual apprehension.3
Similarly, Christian Metz states; "the cinema is an 'art
of presence' (the dominance of the image, which 'shuts out'
everything external to itself)."^ Cinema has the advantage
of showing complete physical detail that provokes an immedi
ate recognition in the viewer. In mere seconds, through
editing and montage, the camera can have set in the obser
ver's mind a situation, an environment, and an emotion.
For example, in Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion, in which the
wife believes her husband is attempting to kill her, we
have only to see Cary Grant slowly ascend the stairs with a
tray containing a single glass of milk to feel impending
terror. His magnified shadow advancing up the wall as he
ascends, the tension of the background music, the deter
mined look on his face, the camera's focus on that single
glass, lead us in moments to the same dread felt by the
heroine, Joan Fontaine. Emotion that may take pages to
build in a novel, can be played quickly in a literal sense
19
on the screen:
In literature,denoted meaning}appears
as the purely linguistic signification,
which is linked, in the employed idiom,
to the words used by the author. In
the cinema, it is represented by the
literal (that is, perceptual) meaning
of the spectacle reproduced in the image,
or of the sounds duplicated by the sound
track-5
Film has the power of language without its complexity
(although as will be mentioned, the lack of complexity is
also a disadvantage). Its visual vocabulary is particu
larly suited to show reaction, process, the sheer movement
and relationship of things, people, and events. Robert
Richardson defines its language in "Verbal and Visual Langu
age" :
the vocabulary of film is the simple
photographed image; the grammar and syn
tax of film are the editing, cutting, or
montage processes by which the shots are
arranged.®
Through this comparatively abbreviated language, film gives
a flux and flow to its narrative that fiction can't dupli
cate. Watching a film, the spectator does not have the
liberty to divide up or ponder over separate elements. For
one thing, the spectator is tied to the time of the reels
in the projector, while the reader of a novel can deter
mine his/her own reading time. For another, the processes
of editing and montage create broad strokes of feeling
and thought rather than intricate ones. As Robert Breen
20
states in Chamber Theatre:
The film-maker moves in the other
direction, relying less on words than
does the novelist and philosopher, and
by strengthening the "faint images"
that form the ideas of literature, makes
vivid the impressionistic source of
experience.^
Even in a film as complex in emotional detail as Ingmar
Bergman * s Autumn Sonata, where the powerful, frequent close-
ups of Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullman chronicle the pain,
disappointment, and anger that marks their mother-daughter
relationship, the tiny layering of emotional or psycho
logical nuance that literature can present is not possible.
For example, it would be almost impossible for the cinema
to depict the process that Peter in Virginia Woolf's Mrs.
DaTloway goes through of defining what he sees, making
judgments from his perceptions, and at the same time rela
ting the scene to his life in a few short sentences in the
following excerpt;
But she's not married; she's young;
quite young, thought Peter, the red
carnation he had seen her wear as she
came across Trafalgar Square burning
again in his eyes and making her lips
red,... There was a, dignity about her.
She was not worldly, like Clarissa; not
rich, like Clarissa. Was she, he won
dered as she moved, respectable? Witty,
with a lizard's flickering tongue, he
thought (for one must invent, must allow
oneself a little diversion), a cool
waiting wit, a dainty wit, a darting
wit; not noisy.8
The cinema can show, in a sense, the bold primary co-
21
lors of its subject, not ones with delicate gradations of
color. Christian Metz comments on the cinema's method of
building action; "the cinema is initially deprived of dis
crete elements. It proceeds by whole 'blocks of reality,'
which are actualized with their total meaning in the dis
course. These blocks are called the 'shots.'"9 Articula
tion through montage differs from literary language. A
film-maker shows a succession of partial views, not the
whole landscape, to transform the world into discourse.
"But this kind of articulation is not a true articulation
in the linguistic sense. Even the most partial and frag
mentary 'shot' (the closeup) still presents a complete
segment of reality."^0
Development of narrative through motion forms another
strong component of film language. Robert Richardson, com
paring the two media, writes that film has the force and
movement of verbs in strong action prose. He mentions four
ways that film achieves force and movement: 1) from its
recording of action; 2) from the movement of the camera
around a moving or nonmoving object; 3) from the process of
editing which can join static shots together to produce a
powerful tension and energy (The film High Noon is an exam
ple of static material producing verbal force. While we
wait for the train to arrive we see the tracks shimmering
in the heat, the waiting men, the town clock, the vacant
22
streets, the expression on the Marshall's face); and 4) by
its accompanying dialogue.H Simply by virtue of its pre
sentational form, the motion picture, film can never be
static. Unlike the reader of a novel who has the luxury
to stop and experience the sensations aroused by reading,
the viewer of a film is captive to the film experience for
90-120 minutes with no control over its pacing or movement.
Therefore, the cinema must rely on the sheer force of im
pression , of sensations created carefully by a montage of
separate shots.
Language in fiction is more precise and definable, as
it is a linguistic entity, than is the picture language of
film. In even a static photograph, the wealth of detail
makes difficult any assertion of which detail(s) makes the
strongest impression on the viewer; it is even harder to
decide what precisely creates the tone of a series of
shots, Meaning in cinema is, therefore, different from
meaning in words or statements:
Even the most complex statement is
reducible, in the final analysis, to
discrete elements (words, morphemes,
phonemes, relevant features), which are
fixed in number or nature.
To be sure, the filmic shot is also the
result of an ordering of several ele
ments (for example, the different vis
ual elements in the image--what is some
times called the interior montage), but
these elements are indefinite in number
and undefined in nature, like the shot
itself,,. One can decompose a shot, but
23
one cannot reduce it.12
Paradoxically, while verbal language seems more pre
cise than visual, the cinema is more bound to the specific
than the novel. Cinema can present only physical reality
in the sense that only physical data can be photographed.
Even a subtle emotion portrayed on screen depends on a
physical vehicle--an actor's face, an object or series of
objects, action, etc. While it is precisely that physical
detail which overwhelms and immerses the spectator in the
cinematic experience, it also provides a limitation. Film
in general is not suited to abstractions or abstract
thought. The medium itself forces specificity. By con
trast, the novelist has infinite possibilities for abstrac
tion, Rudolf Arnheim comments in Film as Art:
Does not the particular nature of lit
erature consist precisely in the abstract
ness of language, which calls every ob
ject by the collective name of its species
and therefore defines it only in a generic
way, without reaching the object itself
in its individual concreteness?.... The
poetical word refers directly to the mean
ing, the character, the structure of
things; hence the spiritual quality of
its vision, the acuteness and succinct
ness of its descriptions. The writer is
not tied to the physical concreteness of
a given setting; therefore he's free to
connect one object with another even
though in actuality the two may not be
neighbors either in time or in space....
He does not have to worry whether the
combinations he creates are possible
or even imaginable in the physical world.
By contrast, everything pictured in the cinema must
24
first have existed in the physical world in order to have
been photographed,. All sensations, of touch, smell, taste,
must be rendered through our visual sense.
.For the same reason, film also has difficulty with
complicated logic. Patterns of thought on an abstract
plane and those divorced from the physical realm of objects
and detail do not flow well on film. A play like Duerren-
matt's The Physicists, for example, with its intricate
counterplotting between three scientists and a psychiatrist
at an insane asylum, is too static in visual possibilities
and too blatantly verbal for film. The same plot, charac
ters, and setting could be much more vivid as a novel. As
Robert Richardson states;
Film logic tends...to be either the
sort that works by analogy or the sort
that draws a conclusion from a mass of
evidence.14
Thoughts or states of consciousness which require the pre
cision of language to be communicated to an audience can
not be detailed on film, where relationship develops through
spatial arrangement.
The detail of film language creates the potential for
films to become artifacts of their era of creation more
absolutely than do novels or short stories. A work of lit
erature does not have to date itself: its words can main
tain a vivid and fresh impression and portray an emotion
without revealing its historical setting (subject to changes
______________________________________________ 25
in the style of language). Of course, most fiction deals
with the realities of custom, society, and manners. Yet
the novel is not detailed in the same physical sense. Cin
ema is so physically detailed by modes of dress, make of
automobiles, manners and habits, modes of speech, etc. that
particular films almost always reveal their time of filming.
Because cinema is so visually realistic, with less
capacity for abstraction, it lacks the infinite range of
metaphor that literature employs. Metaphor, as used in
fiction, requires a cognitive process more suited to the
reader engaging with language at an individual pace than
to the spectator absorbing the sensory spectacle of the
film. George Bluestone, discussing the use of metaphor,
states:
The linguistic trope is the novel's
special way of rendering the shock
of resemblance. By juxtaposing simi
lar qualities in violently dissimilar
things, language gets its revenge on
the apparent disorder of life. It binds
together a world which seems atomized and
therefore chaotic to the primitive mind.
Metaphor not only employs the cognitive process in
literature, of course, or its power to transform the rea
der's imagination and vision would be much smaller than it
is. Because of their verbal nature, literary tropes carry
with them a whole realm of denotative and connotative
associations. They work as "packed symbolic thinking
which is peculiar to imaginative rather than visual acti-
26
vity.1,16
While the cinema creates its own world of metaphor,
via the arrangement of shots through editing and montage,
it is once again more specific than that conveyed by lan-,
guage. A series of close-ups of an actor's face can render
powerfully an emotion that could take pages of narrative to
describe. It is stark and ultimately recognizable. As
Bela Balazs says in Theory of the Film: "The facial expres
sion on a face is complete and comprehensible in itself
and therefore we need not think of it as existing in space
and time."17
And yet the power of the image on the screen cannot be
separated from the individual actor portraying it. Unlike
expression in literature, emotion expressed by facial ex
pression in the cinema is specific and not universal. To
see Garbo in Anna Karenina is not just to watch the love
and suffering of a woman, it is to see and feel the power,
beauty, and torment inextricably tied to the face of Greta
Garbo. After seeing the film and then reading the novel,
the face of Garbo will supercede any imaginings the reader
might have had of Anna from the novel alone. The charac
ter in many ways becomes Garbo; "In the novel, the line of
dialogue stands naked and alone; in the film, the spoken
word is attached to its spatial image."18 The character
coming to us through the cloak of language can be more
27
subtly drawn, and his/her emotions can be more complexly
defined, than the character appearing on the screen. The
character on the screen is powerful only as far as that in
dividual face affects us.
The languages of cinema, ..and fiction can render any
thing available to perception. As Charles Thomas Samuels
says in Mastering the Film: "Description and representa
tion are fundamental to both forms.Both are limited:
film by its use of visual detail and fiction by its verbal
reality. Film does not have the luxury of linguistic pre
cision with its limitless possibilities for exploration of
ideas and feelings, emotional nuances, and comparisons. But
it does have a power and motion that language itself pre
vents prose from having. Bluestone states the ability of
cinema to show process:
The moment our attention with re
spect to nonverbal experience shifts
from substance to process, from being
to becoming, from stasis to flux, the
discrete character of language no lon
ger seems adequate.^
T^e content of the image as compared to the content ex
pressed by language is very different. Montage can make
connections on a purely perceptual level that can circum
vent the cognitive process of images suggested by language
in fiction. The language of film cannot precisely be trans
lated into the language of prose. The opposite holds true,
and the many films made from novels attest to that. There
28
may be similarities,, but the experience of the novel and its
filmic version are two different experiences.
Charles Thomas Samuels sees the formal properties of
film as combining the sense of the verbal and nonverbal
characteristics of poetry more than fiction:
The glory of cinema is also its funda
mental challenge; unalterably a mixed
medium, it insists that the film-maker
makes choices in the priorities he as
signs to various components. No film
maker can entirely eliminate the dra
matic element in film (dialogue) nor the
musical (rhythm), but he can grant them
varying emphases. In this sense, film
is less like prose than like poetry,
which combines words with music (prosody)
in combinations that vary from work to
work.21
In summary, cinematic language is both more specific,
in terms of the physical realism of photography, and less
detailed, as it develops narrative through blocks of action
rather than by the layering of detail possible in the novel,
than fiction. Cinema tells a story by association, through
the juxtaposition of images;'fiction relates action by the
more cognitive process of literary (and hence abstract)
metaphor and linguistic description.
The viewer experiences the action on the screen as it
unfolds, while the reader of a story or novel perceives
events through a "screen” of language which he/she then
interprets into images. Because of this difference in per
ceiving the experience of the two media, cinematic language
29
flows and has an immediate impact on the spectator who
becomes absorbed in the process of the visual experience.
Literary language has greater precision and capacity for
detail; it can express nuances of emotion, ideas, and
character.
Time and Space in Cinema and Fiction
As narrative forms, both cinema and the novel have
enormous flexibility in creating and surrounding the viewer/
reader with an environment. Both transport their audience
into an arrangement of time and space. Film is constrained
by its restriction to physical images and to its dependence
on the unity of the frame, which necessarily breaks contin
uity into pieces (literally 24 pieces per second). The
major constraint of the novel is also its major strength:
the limitations of language and the verbal process.
Fiction has the capacity to explore time with great
leisure and subtlety, while film has the luxury of endless
variations of spatial arrangement. Bluestone summarizes
this difference between the novel and the film:
Both the novel and the film are time
arts, but whereas the formative prin
ciple in the novel is time, the forma
tive principle in the film is space.
Where the novel takes its space for
granted and forms its narrative in a
complex of time values, the film takes
its time for granted and forms its
narrative in arrangements of space.22
Although restricted by the realistic demands of shoot-
30
ing a scene, the camera can evoke a total environment, cre
ate a complex mise-en-scene, through manipulation of move
ment and space that affects mood, characterization, and the
entire context of the film. For example, in Carol Reed's
The Third Man, time ceases and space expands to fill the
suspended moment when Orson Welles appears in the empty
square at night. The slow pan of the dark square, the ba-"
roque fountain, the visible quiet, the sound of footsteps
echoing on a street, all contribute to chilling suspense,
an expectation of a great moment. The sheer visual expanse
shown by the camera angles and the juxtaposition of objects
and sounds sets up the momentous context of the scene with
out the speaking of one word.
In 2 001; A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick seems to
show the transcendence over space itself when Kerr Dullea's
spaceship breaks the barrier into the future, the barrier
of life itself, near the end of the film. The explosion of
light accompanied by a powerful sound track, seems to shat
ter us and hurl us into another reality; we have been
moved forcibly into that other world. Although the novel
too can shatter and transport us, the cinema cannot be
matched for a momentary but sheer physical mastery over our
senses. At such moments in the cinema, the spectator has
no choice but to be carried along in the wave of perception.
Claude-Edmonde Magny explains that the essence of the
31
aesthetic of film
is to produce in us the illusion
that everything in the universe, man
and things alike, is united in a close
solidarity and that each object is con
nected to all the others in a complete
system of reciprocal dependence, from
which it derives its own existence.23
The cinema does this through the spatial arrangement of its
shots, through montage. Disparate entities are linked to
gether to create a new reality; "Montage depends for its
effects on instantaneous successions of different spatial
entities which are constantly exploding against each
other."24
Spatial awareness in film differs from the novel also
as in the cinema both focal and peripheral objects can catch
the attention of the viewer. Therefore, the viewer is in
fluenced by an incredibly rich landscape of physical detail.
A film director can choose to focus on the subject(s) of
greatest impact, and use secondary detail to influence, al
most subconsciously, the impact of the scene on the viewer.
Conversely, everything in the novel is pointed up simply
because it’s detailed by language; narratives by nature
~seiect and by so doing restrict what the reader can see or
experience. The cinema has great versatility to use spatial
relationships to depict relative importance, create a coun
terpoint to an emotion, event, or character, heighten or
diminish effects, etc.
The spatial mobility of cinema makes time accordingly
more flexible. The key to this process of moving space
and time lies in the way the cinema shows only a part of
reality yet actually depicts a totality. For example, in
Nicholas Roeg's Don' t Look Now, there is a sequence show
ing Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie making love. In
tercut with their lovemaking are shots of them getting
dressed for dinner afterwards. The cross-cutting of intense
physical intimacy with moments of trivial but tranquil do
mestic facts (dressing, combing hair, applying makeup,
weighing on a scale) give us a sense of their life together,
of the character of their interaction as a couple. Because
we are able to watch them enact their lives for these mo
ments, they become familiar, and thus very real, to us. We
feel we know a great deal about their lives, not just selec
ted moments of it,
The novel, too, even though it has more time to explore
motivation or character, must be selective. But in contrast
to the way film shows relationship^-through visible behav-
ior'-'-the novel best explores relationship through thoughts
of the characters or narrator, or shows us the process of
assessment in people about characters, events, and situa
tions, The narrator of a novel or short story can pause
comparatively indefinitely and show glimpses of thoughts,
perceptions, and feelings. The film’s narrator, the camera,
33
must constantly show visible action which reveals the in
ner life. For that reason, novels (like those of James
Joyce and Proust) that deal with inner reality translate
poorly to film.
While the novel can describe any environment and cre
ate its own spatial arrangement, it does not have the dra
matic immediacy of the visual image. Seymour Chatman,
discussing space, says:
In verbal narrative, story-space is
doubly removed from the reader, since
there is not the icon or analogy pro
vided by photographed images on a screen....
There is no "standard vision" of exis-
tents as there is in the m o v i e s .2 5
But the novel has something else: the infinite flexibility
of language, a larger time frame in which to explore its
subject, and the lack of physical limitation (words can des
cribe anything), The spatial impact of film is powerful
but at the same time fragile. Since it cannot explore the
mind’s surfaces with leisure, each sequence must be care
fully orchestrated to reveal as much detail and nuance
as possible;
If the cinematic eye can link
diverse spatial images, the images
themselves must be meticulously ar
ranged. Like musical notes, each im
age must have the proper timbre before
the entire sequence can be strong.2 6
The novel has the advantage of having three separate
tenses, past, present, and future, while the film only has
34
the present tense. In the visual world, as in the process
of memory, all events are in the process of happening.
Alain Robbe-Grillet .and Alain Resnais explored the concept
of time in Last Year at Marienbad (to be discussed fully in
Chapter IV). The film imitates the labyrinthine perception
of time itself and calls into question the illusion and
reality of memory and fantasy as they merge with present
events. The viewer wonders, was there a last year at Mar
ienbad at all? Robbe-Grillet and Resnais say the events
at Marienbad only exist for the two-hour span of the film;
there is no past or future beyond the film's present.
Film thus has the advantage of visualizing the flux
and process of time. Language, with its obvious use of
tenses, points up the discrete sections of time. Much of
the richness of the novel as a form comes from its ability
to capture the presentness of consciousness and yet provide
background and context by interweaving this present with
the past and the realm of possibility, Bluestone states
that "language, consisting as it does of bounded, discrete
units cannot satisfactorily represent the unbounded and
c o n t i n u o u s ."27 yet Robert Breen, in Chamber Theatre,
claims that tenses give flexibility and do not rigidify
the time process of the novel:
In the novel the action is actually
in the present and only virtually in
the past, for though the past tense
normally conveys past action, the nov
35
elist actually creates for the rea
der a moment-by-moment image of the
action.... the reader accepts the
events as happening in the actual
present because the image is created
in the actual present, but the use
of the past tense gives the sense of
a virtual or "seeing" past, and this
is the experience we have of m e m o r y . 28
The difference is simply one of perception. When reading
a novel, the reader accepts the conventions imposed by
language. Cinema can interface the past and present and
world of fantasy through movement. In Robert Enrico's film
of Ambrose Bierce's An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, where
the soon-to-be-hung soldier's fantasies of freedom seem more
real than his actual situation, the cinema can show the free
overlapping of psychological and actual time. The novel
makes the time-leaps more obvious, in a linguistic and cog
nitive sense, yet it can explore the effects of time more
fully. An example is William Faulkner's short story, "Barn
Burning," where the action is seen by a narrator existing
in several time levels; he gives us perceptions of the
young protagonist in the present, by him at an older age,
and at a still greater perspective from the action as in
the following excerpt:
That night they camped, in a grove
of oaks and beeches... The nights were
still cool and they had a fire against
it...a small fire, neat, niggard almost,
a shrewd fire? such fires were his fa
ther's habit and custom always, even in
freezing weather. Older, the boy might
have remarked this and wondered why not
36
a big one;...And older still, he
might have divined the true reason:
that the element of fire spoke to
some deep mainspring of his father's
being....
But he did not think this now and he
had seen those same niggard blazes
all his life.29
It is in this realm of mental process that the novel
excels. The quotation above from Faulkner's story reflects
an awareness that lacks correlates in the visible, physical
world of the film. Of course, the images are accompanied
by sound and dialogue, yet there is simply not enough time
in a 90 to 120 minute film to develop the action, create
an environment and characterization, and also to develop
the kind of introspection possible in a novel. And more
important, the film does not lend itself, as does the novel;
to the kind of communion a narrator develops with a central
character. Stream-of-consciousness, the mental states of
memory, dream, and imagination, all are difficult for the
film to represent in its compact physical w o r l d ? 20 such
states are better explored by language.
'Chronological Time in Cinema and Fiction
Just as the novel has three tenses, it has three le
vels of chronological time; 1) the duration of the reading
time of the book; 2) the duration of the narrator's time;
and 3) the span of narrative events. Film really has only
two of them, as the camera takes the role of the narrator
37
in the film. Therefore, the camera's movements and inten
sity of focus contribute to the span of events. The first
point also fails to correlate, as the viewer's absorption
time is set by the running time of the reels.
Both the narrator in a novel and the camera (via the
director) in a film manipulate time to give focus and inten
sity to certain moments and events. In that sense, "real
time" means nothing. In the novel, time moves between
scene (actual time), summary (condensed time), and descrip
tion (expanded time). Because sensations in fiction are
perceived through a screen of language, the reader cannot
immediately interact with the words as s/he can with an
image on a screen. Language must be transformed through
thought to feeling. Description in a novel thus lasts
much longer than the actual time in many cases. A similar
effect can occur in a film when, for instance, a man enters
a room and the camera does a slow pan of his surroundings.
The difference is that in real life we may not study the
room in such minute detail, but as the camera pans the
room, so do we as spectators. Thus, there is a time link
between the movement of the camera and the spectator (our
eyes seem to move with the character's eyes) that does not
exist between the words of a novel and the reader. Watching
the film the spectator achieves simultaneity with the im
ages; in the novel the reaction is delayed according to the
___________________________________________________ 38_
reader’s perceptual pace. Chatman sums this up, saying:
"Unlike the verbal medium, film in its pure, unedited state
is absolutely tied to real time."31
Instead the novel offers a complete suspension and
reordering of time. The reader, unlike the film viewer,
suspends disbelief completely and does not expect the same
kind of physical accuracy the camera offers. The novel
creates its own milieu, its own expectations of time and of
space? it lifts the reader out of real time and places him/
her into a new reality. Claude-Edmonde Magny describes the
novel’s reality as follows;
The true time of the novel, its normal
time, the time most often encountered
(the very function of the genre seems to
exploit it literarily), is what Bergson,
in one of those simple and superficial
views so characteristic of him, called
"lived time." 32
Novels like Joycels Ulysses and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dallo-
way occupy only the classical span of 24 hours. Their ex
panse is not one of action or motion, but of inner life
and space.
Psychological Time in Cinema and Fiction
Both the novel and film, ..through the use of flash
backs, flashforwards, intercutting, and dream and memory
sequences, have steadily conquered the concept of linear
ity in time just as they have conquered the restrictions of
chronological time. Yet, while the novel has more control
39
over the manipulation of time (through tenses and the free
dom to describe the expanse of the mind), the cinema is
less bound by time through its visual medium and its spatial
manipulation. Language can only be perceived in a linear
and verbal fashion, and thus the novel can never achieve
the flux and immediacy of the nonverbal medium of the mo
tion picture. Grammar alone interupts the flow of the
imagination in the way that images do not.
In the area of psychological time cinema differs most
from fiction. There are no real equivalents between how
the two media express the time-flux of perception.
In Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Ryder comes
with his military company to Brideshead, the scene of a
great tragedy in his life years before. He asks the second-
in-command "What's this place called?" and his memories
wash over him;
He told me and, on the instant, it was
as though someone had switched off the
wireless, and a voice that had been
bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously,
for days beyond number, had been sud
denly cut short; an immense silence fol
lowed, empty at first, but gradually, as
my outraged sense regained authority, full
of a multitude of sweet and natural and
long-forgotten sounds'— for he had spoken
a name that was so familiar to me, a con
jurer's name of such ancient power, that,
at its mere sound, the phantom's of those
haunted late years began to take flight.33
In one paragraph Waugh introduces the power the place has
for his main character, the tremendous "presence" of Brides-
40
head that takes over his mind and feelings so completely.
Such a packed paragraph of thought, detail, impression, and
characterization could never translate into film: it is too
abstract, too complex. Only the novelist could so weld .the
present to the past and show us the inside of the character
as he stands there thinking. Even though the language it
self is linear, the sense of time merging seems nonlinear,
associational, and therefore real.
Similarly, in the Alain Resnais' film, Hiroshima Mon
Amour, the film opens with a scene of a Japanese man and a
French woman in bed. At first, their contrasting skins look
wet with perspiration, but as the scene proceeds we realize
they are covered with something resembling ash. As they
talk about Hiroshima, she saying she saw the city, he say
ing she saw nothing (meaning she has no idea of the enor
mity of the bombing of Hiroshima), their physical intimacy
is intercut with images of disaster from the bombing years
before. We see their physical closeness, their cultural
separateness, their different realities of Hiroshima in the
present, and the horror of Hiroshima's past, all at once.
The ash covering them symbolizes the pervasiveness of the
city's past. Just as Waugh's paragraph depends on the pow
er of language, this scene depends upon the flow and im
mediacy of the visual images accompanied by sparse dialogue.
As Henri Bergson says in Time and Free Will, language
41
gives a fixed form to fleeting sensations; "Not only does
language make us believe in the unchangeableness of our sen
sations, but it will sometimes deceive us as to the nature
of the sensation felt."34 in that sense, language prohib
its the reader from reacting as spontaneously as s/he can
in watching a film, and yet it provides a specificity, a
capturing of the abstract, of the moment of thought through
time that film lacks the ability to produce.
Both language and cinematic images build impression
through showing relationships to other people and things,
cinema through spatial arrangement and camera angles, the.
novel through the accumulation of word images and point
of view. Neither can be reduced or changed and retain its
impact. Bergson makes a similar conclusion discussing dura
tion in time when he mentions that the length of a sensa
tion alters its nature;
But we forget that states of con
sciousness are processes, and not
things? that if we denote them each
by a single word? it is for the con
venience of language; that they are
alive and therefore constantly chan
ging, that, in consequence, it is im
possible to cut off a moment from them
without making them poorer by the loss
of some impression, and thus altering
their quality.3 5
Bergson also discusses how motion aids in pro
jecting time through space and allows time to become a
measurable quantity.36 Obviously the cinema's capacity for
42
creating spatial relationships, for montage, allows time
to appear real, to appear to unfold on the screen and in
the spectator's mind at the same time. In Fred Zinneman's
' Julia, Jane Fonda as Lillian Heilman searches exhaustively
for signs that her friend Julia's child is still alive.
The sequence shows her feet relentlessly walking on the
pavement between scenes of her inquiring at various baker
ies for the child. The walking scenes are a summary and
yet they capture the fatigue and seeming endlessness and
futility of her search.
While the novel achieves flexibility over time and
yet is also bound by its expression through language, the
use of language (dialogue) in a film aids in its showing
the process of time. Dialogue, sound, and music are sec
ondary and only reinforce what occurs on the screen. As
Wolf Rilla notes in The Writer and the Screen:
Both the theatre and the novel base
their use of speech on articulacy;
and again this is where film dialogue
differs, for at its most effective, it
is based on essential inarticulacy.^7
Dialogue and sound in film can only exist in the present.
Even when Laurence Olivier talks to Joan Fontaine about
his past in Hitchcock's Rebecca, we see the impact on his
present. The feeling of pastness is there, but not com
pletely. We cannot forget his brooding face or melancholy
yoice’ -'rboth in the present--as he returns to the past.
43
Sound, in the cinema, underscores and creates echoes of
emotions and events. Words, particularly, should never
overshadow the visual image or obscure the drama of the
human face.
The cinema, then, excels in showing the process and
presentness of time in creating a visual familiarity and an
intimacy that is concrete. Time has more obvious boundaries
in the novel, but it can be shown in that medium with all
its complexity and abstraction. It can be used to develop
psychological connections inside the novel's characters
as well as show connections between events, objects, and
people^-those exterior relationships that are shown so
well also on the screen. Seymour Chatman writes; "As the
dimension of story-events is time, that of story-existence
is space,As a rough distinction, we can conclude that
the novel's great strength lies in its control over time
and as a result, in its integration of thought, emotion,
and events; the cinema, conversely, has control over spa
tial relationships and is unigue for its presence.
As the following chapters will further explore, chamber
theatre combines properties of both media. Preserving the
narrative elements of fiction while existing as a staged
presentation, it has both strong linguistic and visual di
mensions. Its visual "language" allows it to juxtapose
objects, characters, and props and manipulate sets and
lighting to create secondary focus and an impact similar to
44
the spatial existence of film. Also like the film, chamber
theatre has a set performance time-'-usually one or two
hours--that while influenced by the audience, cannot be
controlled by the viewer as a reader controls his/her
absorption of a novel. In the dimension of time, chamber
theatre.can suspend action (through the narrator) as the
novel does and yet create the presentness and immediacy
of cinema by the unfolding of past and future actions and
the recreation of them in the spectator's present.
Using this comparison of fiction and film in language,
time and space as a departure, the next chapter will relate
chamber theatre to cinema and fiction, particularly in
the aspect of point of view.
45:
NOTES
1 Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1957) p. 143.
2
Christian Metz, Film Language; A Semiotics of the
Cinema, in Film Theory and Criticism ed. Mast and Cohen
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1974) p. 107.
3
George Bluestone, Novels into Film (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1957) p.
•
o
CM
4
Metz, p, 119.
5
Met z, p . 107,
6 Robert Richardson, "Verbal and Visual Language," in
Film and Literature: Contrasts in Media, ed. Fred Marcus
(Scranton: ..Chandler Publishing Co., 1971) p. 115.
7
Robert Breen, Chamber Theatre (Englewood Cliffs;
Prentice-Hall, Inc,, 1978) p, 57.
8
Brace &
Virginia Woolf, Mrs, Dalloway
World, Inc,, 1925) p. 79.
(New York; Harcourt,
9
Metz, p, 117.
10
Metz, p, 118.
11
Richardson, p. 117.
12
Metz, p. 119,
13
Arnheim, p, 2,
14
Richardson, p. 123.
15
Bluestone, pp. 20-21,
16
Bluestone, p. 23,
46
Bela Balazs, Theory of the Film, in Film Theory
and Criticism, ed. Mast and Cohen (New York: Oxford Uni
versity Press, 1974) p. 188.
18 Bluestone, p. 58.
19 Charles Thomas Samuels, Mastering the Film and
Other Essays (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
1977) p. 12.
20 Bluestone, p. 12.
21 Samuels, pp. 66-67.
22 Bluestone, p. 61.
23 claude-Edmonde Magny, The Age of the American Novel
(New York: Frederick Ungar, 1972) p. 28.
24 Bluestone, p. 19.
25 Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse— Narrative
Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1978) p. 106.
26 Bluestone, p. 19.
27 Bluestone, p. 55.
28 Breen, p. 62.
29 William Faulkner, "Barn Burning," in Collected Sto
ries (New York: Random House, 1950) pp. 7-8.
3 0 Bluestone, p. 47.
31 Chatman, p. 84.
32 Magny, p. 129.
33 Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (New York: Dell
Publishing Co., 1945) p. 20.
84 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will (New York:
Macmillan, 1913) p. 131.
35 Bergson, p. 196.
36 Bergson, p. 124.
47
37 Wolf Rilla, The Writer and the Screen (New York:
William Morrow and Co., 1974) p. 89.
38 Chatman, ps 101.
48
CHAPTER III
CHAMBER THEATRE AND THE NARRATIVE
STRUCTURE OF CINEMA
While fiction, film, and chamber theatre differ in
language and the means of manipulating time and space, all
three share a similar narrative structure. The following
discussion summarizes the cross-influences of fiction and
cinema in point of view and movement of action, describes
three forms of narration common to fiction (and hence cham
ber theatre) and film— omniscient, narrator agents, and
stream-of-consciousness— and applies cinematic concepts and
techniques to specific works of fiction in the process of
adaptation and staging for chamber theatre.
Robert Breen states in Chamber Theatre that "the ideal
literary experience is one in which the simultaneity of the
drama representing the illusion of actuality...may be pro
fitably combined with the novel's narrative privilege of
examining human motivation at the moment of action.
Few art forms can approximate the simultaneity of cinema,
with its almost unlimited potential for representing physi
cal reality. Just as the novel was a primary model and
source for the early cinema for plots, characterization,
49
and literary devices like flashforwards, flashbacks, and
point of view, the modern hovel, beginning particularly
with Dos Passos' trilogy, U.S.A., has been influenced by
the ability of the cinema to project immediacy and process.
John Fell compares film to the modern novel:
For with movies, to use Leon Edel's des
cription of modern prose, the experience
is "simultaneous rather than consecutive”™
simultaneous in the representation of in
terior and exterior reality.^
As a form of adapting fiction fo the stage, the dis
tinctive element of chamber theatre is its full retention
of the narrative elements of the literature. As was men
tioned in Chapter I, the narrator in chamber theatre is
similar to the camera eye, establishing point of view, in
terpreting the action, relating details, emotions and
thoughts to the audience. According to Breen:
The conditions in the Chamber Theatre,
when the narrator takes the place of
the camera, are similar to those that
obtain in a film studio. The audience
sees the action taking place on the lot
or sound stage just as it would in a
legitimate theatre, but it also sees the
camera in action, dollying, tracking,
panning, tilting, etc. On the stage in
a Chamber Theatre production of the
scene the audience would see, not the
camera, but replacing it, the narrator
in action.
Since much of modern fiction has absorbed cinematic
concepts and devices, the use of filmic techniques in its
adaptation to chamber theatre is a natural process. The
50
attention to surface detail and the seemingly objective
scrutiny of narrators in, for example, Hemingway's or Dashi-
ell Hammett's fiction shows the degree to which the cinema
has affected literature. Hammett was a master at capturing
the essence of physical reality in a scene as in the follow
ing description from his novel, Red Harvest:
Poisonville's prize fighting was done
in a big wooden ex-casino in what had
once been an amusement park on the edge
of town. When I got there at eight-thirty,
most of the population seemed to be on
hand, packed tight in close rows of fold
ing chairs on the main floor, packed
tighter on benches in two dinky balconies.
Smoke. Stink. Heat. Noise.^
Even nineteenth-century fiction predated the cinema,
using descriptions in a way that we now view as cinematic.
As John Fell says in "Space, Time, and Victorian Prose":
"The nineteenth-century sense of movement-as-exposition was
manifest in the 'camera zooming' kind of aerial shot which
sometimes introduced a story.An example from this period
of a narrator introducing a story by a broad camera pan,
occasionally zooming in for a closer look, can be found in
the introductory section of George Eliot's The Mill on the
Floss:
A wide plain, where the broadening
Floss hurries on between its green
banks to meet the sea, and the loving
tide, rushing to meet it, checks its
passage with an impetuous embrace. On
this mighty tide the black ships— laden
with the fresh-scented fir planks, with
51
rounded sacks of oil-bearing seed, or
with the dark glitter of coal— are borne
along to the town of St. Ogg's, which shows
its aged, fluted red roofs and the broad
gables of its wharves between the low
wooded hill and the river bank, tinging
the water with a soft purple hue under the
transient glance of this February sun.®
The narrator, like the camera, alternates long, medium,
and close shots in the above segment.
The lines between literary and cinematic techniques
have become blurred. While the novel gave to the cinema
the concept of narrative, the cinema has altered the con
ventions of point of view by its ability to move the camera
to capture varying depths and angles of vision. John Har
rington says in The Rhetoric of Film:
A story or an essay can funnel every
thing through a single viewpoint. Film
cannot because it must normally rely on
the tensions among various points of view.
Yet it is the dramatic tensions of film
that involve a viewer and that ultimately
draw him into clashing viewpoints, thrus
ting upon him the need for response and
judgment.^
Because the cinema utilizes photographed images and because
the camera can be carefully choreographed to examine mi
nutely the surfaces of objects and people, things or events
viewed in a movie seem more real than those of other art
forms, sometimes more real than life itself, so persuasive
and powerful is the effect of the macro-image on an audi
ence. The appearance of objectivity and reality is false.
As in fiction, what the camera reveals and its point of
52
view are carefully crafted, are subjective visions of the
artist behind them.
Nevertheless, many modern authors have borrowed from
cinema the appearance of objectivity, using a sparse, visu
ally descriptive style. Robert Richardson comments in
Literature and Film:
From about the time of Henry James,
the novel has become increasingly con
cerned with its visual qualities.... From
this point on, the modern novel tends
more and more to think of itself as some
thing fully dramatized, the ideal being
a story in which the reader sees every
thing, is told nothing, and in which one
cannot detect the presence of the author
at all.8
Some aims of this cinematic style are to achieve immediacy,
to make transitions that are perceptual rather than intel
lectual, to heighten the reader's sensory participation
in the story.
Cinematic transitions are common in literature and are
effective in linking action sequences and key images.
Claude-Edmonde Magny speaks of the cinema as an art of
ellipsis.9 Selected details can suggest, and often more
powerfully, an entire sequence of events than a complete,
unedited version. She cites Chaplin's use of ellipsis in
A Woman of Paris: he shows the departure of the train not
by filming the movement of the cars but by filming the re
flection of lights and shadows on the face of the woman
left on the platform as the train passes. The use of se
53
lected details in fiction increases its dramatic effect on
the reader. For example, in The Pain Curse, Dashiell Ham
mett has his narrator show us the passage of time between
Chapter IX and X rather than tell us time has passed:
(end of IX)
Sitting there in the dark I understood
why people bit their fingernails. I sat
there for an hour or more...I took off
my shoes, picked the most comfortable chair,
put my feet on another, hung a blanket
over me, and went to sleep facing Gabrielle
Leggett's door through my open doorway.
(beginning of X)
I opened my eyes drowsily, decided that I
had dozed off for only a moment, closed my
eyes, drifted back into slumber, and then
roused myself sluggishly again. Some
thing wasn't right.
The above excerpts show not only an attention to physical
details but imply spatial editing similar to a camera:
Chapter IX ends with a medium shot on the hero, cuts to
closer shots of him removing his shoes, a longer shot of
him choosing a chair, a close shot of his feet, ending with
a long shot of him, alone, waiting, in the room. Chapter
X begins with a close-up of his face or eyes awakening.
This kind of cutting in the novel makes narrative action-
oriented rather than completely cerebral.
Point of View in Cinema and Chamber Theatre
The chamber theatre is a unique combination of telling
and showing. Because it uses fiction for its raw material,
it is a verbal as well as a visual medium. In many novels
54
and short stories the narrative voice dominates the action
and characters. One of the main challenges in chamber thea
tre consists of staging and presenting the narration in a
dramatically interesting manner.
The degree of difficulty in staging depends partly on
the psychological distance of the narrator from the action
he/she describes in the story adapted. A first person
narrator, heavily involved in the action of the story as
well as in relating to the reader/audience, has the person
ality of his/her character to draw upon. Such a narrator,
like Hilary Burde in Iris Murdoch's A Word Child, controls
and is central to the action of the book. He is a person
the audience has an automatic interest in if it has an in
terest in the events at all. A third person narrator, par
ticularly one who is distant from the action, can be more
difficult to characterize and thus make interesting. An
extreme example of the objective omniscient narrator who
shows almost no human personality can be found in French
New Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Erasers or Jealousy.
The narrators in both of these books are intensely cine
matic and impersonal in their seeming objectivity and in
their chronicling of visual detail.
Film as a narrative form shares similar categores of
narrative with fiction. The difference is that, while there
may be a first or third person voice narrating a film, the
55
camera ultimately narrates and controls the film. Charles
Thomas Samuels states;
The camera gives film an authorial
presence found in fiction but not in
drama, and the overtness of its move
ments, optical effects, etc., allows
style to be a vehicle of expression
just as it is in prose.I1
As in chamber theatre, the narrator in film (the camera)
sets the tone and tempo of the action. The following sec
tion will discuss common narrators in cinema and their simi
larities to narrators in chamber theatre. Use of cinematic
concepts and techniques can not only make chamber theatre
visually more dynamic, but can provide insights into the
style and movement of the novel or short story adapted.
Breen, speaking of film's contribution to chamber theatre,
states:
Chamber Theatre sees in the cinematic
qualities of the novel and the inter
pretative capacities of the camera an
opportunity to increase the reader's
responsiveness to the structure of the
novel. The suggestion here is that the
narrator in certain novels can be seen
profitably as a camera, not, however,
simply as an objective eye, impersonal
and lacking any capacity for interpre
ting surface events.^
Omniscient Narration in Cinema and Chamber Theatre
One form of narration in film implies an omniscient ,
author. In Robert Altman's political/social commentary
on the American scene, Nashville, the camera alone is the
narrator— no one character or series of characters shapes
56
the point of view. The focus of this and similar films cen
ters on displaying a panorama of characters, events, and
situations. The protagonist of Nashville is the environ
ment itself and its spectacle is explored on all its shift
ing planes and through its web of personal relationships.
In this kind of narrative scheme, the choreography of the
camera creates a visual style and rhythm. The tone is set
by the camera, intruding into and changing scenes at will,
and not by the characters themselves. In fiction, a simi
lar narrator (third person omniscient) can be found in nov
els such as Alain Robbe-Grillet's In the Labyrinth or Mel
ville's The Confidence Man, any work where a narrative
voice outside the action controls the movement and rhythm
of the novel.
In a chamber theatre production of such a novel, the
narrative can be handled similarly to the camera in film.
First, the narrator must be impersonal. As the narration
is omniscient, to give the impression of its all-encompas
sing control to the audience, the director may choose to
divide up the narrative passages, using several actors as
narrators or distribute the narrative entirely to actors
who also play other roles, thus preventing any audience
identification with one or two actors as specific narrators.
At times, however, the omniscient narrator penetrates the
consciousness of one of more of the characters, moving
57
closer to the action, and thus becoming more personal than
when describing a panorama of people and scenes.
In any case, the narrator(s) would, like the camera,
project a style but not a specific human personality. Ac
ting as a filter through which the audience perceives the
onstage reality, the narrator would fully cover the stage,
opening and closing sequences by speaking directly to the
audience, moving in for a close-up on certain stage areas,
perhaps activating the actors in and out of freezes or
cueing them to change from one role to the next in a pro
duction calling for each actor to play multiple roles.
Such a narrator primarily should appear as the essence of
the production, its controlling voice. The omnipotence of
the narrator can be shown by the staging: this narrator
should have complete use of all stage areas. By his/her
positioning, the narrator could focus similarly to the
close-up, or to long or medium shots in the cinema, could
by walking across the stage while describing the scene do a
pan of the action or isolate a certain detail. The empha
sis falls on showing the control of the narrator and hold-:
ing him/her above the action that s/he chronicles.
John Dos Passos' The 42nd Parallel uses an omni
scient narrative presence. Descriptions of incidents are
interspersed with newsreel flashes and headlines, fragments
of songs, interior monologues, and dialogue. In a chamber
58
theatre production the narration would provide structure
and rhythm for the action. Because of the mixed-media
approach to arranging the novel, the narration would most
probably need to be divided among the actors, with one cen
tral narrator focusing the action and handling the more
traditional stories within the book like "Mac," "J. Ward
Moorehouse," or "Janey." A typical page:
Newsreel V
BUGS DRIVE OUT BIOLOGIST
elopers bind and gag; is released by dog
EMPORER NICHOLAS II FACING REVOLT OF
EMPIRE GRANTS SUBJECTS LIBERTY
paralysis stops surgeon's knife by the
stroke of a pen
the last absolute monarchy of Europe...
On the banks of the Wabash far away
Mac
Next morning soon after daylight Fainy
limped out of a heavy shower into the rail
road station at Gaylord. There was a big
swagbellied stove burning in the station
waitingroom. The ticket agent's window
was closed. There was nobody in sight.
Cinematic techniques such as "dissolves," "moving
shots," "sound bridges," and the concept of the "associa
tive sequence" could aid in the handling of a diverse scene
like this one. The newsreel and newspaper items could be
dispersed among several actors, accompanied by banners,
slides, and music.
A dissolve often divides a film just as a chapter does
59
in a novel; one scene simply fades and dissolves into
another. The dissolve in chamber theatre can be performed
by arranging the actors onstage in one configuration for the
news summary beginning "paralysis stops surgeon's knife...,"
having them freeze at the sequencers end, then rearranging
their position for the song fragment "Wabash" and then
freezing and moving again into "Mac." During this time,
a central narrator could connect each episode by acting as
the screen through which the audience perceives the onstage
action by orchestrating the events: handing an actor a
banner, providing slight changes of costume, and by his/her
movement across the stage signalling (as the camera does
in film) a redirection of the audience's focus to various
stage areas.
The cited chapter from The 42nd Parallel keeps refer
ring back to the fall of Tsar Nicholas of Russia. In the
sequence entitled "Mac," beyond the section quoted, Mac,
Fainy, and Ike discuss the revolution in Russia again. The
subject recurs three times from the opening of Newsreel V .
If the mention of the Tsar is accompanied by a certain
sound or light cue, the raising of a banner, or a recog
nizable positioning or action of the narrator, the effect
will be similar to an associative sequence in cinema,
where the repetition of an image or object unifies an en
tire scene.
__________________________________________________________________________
An example of an associative sequence in cinema that
unifies two seemingly unrelated scenes can be found in the
opening sequence from Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now.
Outside of a house in the country, the daughter of Donald
Sutherland and Julie Christie, wearing a bright red rain
coat, plays around a pond with a ball. Inside, Sutherland,
a restorer of historic buildings, studies some slides from
a cathedral in Venice. Just as we see the young girl go
into the water to retrieve her ball, drops spill across the
surface of the slide in Sutherland’s hand.^ Red flows across
the picture. At that moment, stirred by a premonition, he
runs outside to see the red raincoat floating on the pond
as his daughter drowns. The red spilling on the slide and
floating on the water heighten the suspense and impact as
well as unify the two scenes. By centering the audience's
focus on a prop, an actor, a color, even a phrase, the nar
rator can accomplish this same effect.
Basic moving shots borrowed from the cinema could of
ten be used by the narrator in a production where the actior
is constantly fast-paced and changing. In cinema, the cam
era pan refers to the horizontal rotation of the camera,
usually moving from left to right. As the narrator moves
across the stage, carrying the eyes of the audience with
him and focusing them on stage areas as s/he goes, a pan
occurs. The travelling shot occurs when the camera "tracks'
61
or follows the action. In this case, instead of signalling
the action as in a pan, the narrator could be "behind" the
action, in peripheral rather than central focus, commenting
on the central onstage action. Specifically, using the
Dos Passos excerpt the narrator could use a travelling shot
in the "Mac" sequence. The audience's focus should be on
Fainy, moving into the railroad station, but the narrator
would follow, changing his/her distance as the narrative
indicates. For example, Fainy limping out of the rain com
prises a long shot compared to the narrator's saying,
"There was a big, swag-bellied stove burning." At that
time, the narrator could accompany or trail closely behind
Fainy as s/he perceives the action at close range, like any
other occupant of the station.
One further transitional cinematic technique particu
larly useful in a production of a novel with omniscient
narration is the sound bridge. As Dos Passos moves in and
out of various traditional story lines between the brief,
more panoramic effects, specific sound cues could signal
the beginning of another "Mac" sequence, "bridging" over
the intervening scenes and preserving the continuity of
Mac's story. Aso, sound cues of a specific tempo and tonal
quality could key the audience to (respectively) a newsreel
sequence, a headline sequence, a news-blurb sequence, etc.
62
Narrator Agents in Cinema and Chamber Theatre
The narrator agent presents a direct contrast to the
impersonal, objective perspective of the omniscient narra
tor. Such narrators are either first person (like Nick
Carroway in either the fiction or film version of Fitzger
ald's The Great Gatsby) or third person, subjective narra
tors as in James Purdy's Malcolm, where the narrator (while
occasionally speaking beyond Malcolm's perspective) is
usually closely associated with Malcolm's movements and
perceptions. As the narrator agent is always a part of the
action, his/her perspective is always subject to the nar
rator's involvement; motives determine this narrator's
interpretation of people and events.
Novels such as Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, where each
chapter features narration by one of the characters, dis
play a richness of characterization and point of view. The
reader has access into the thought processes and motives of
each of the narrators and can view the events from the dis
parate positions of each. No pretense of objectivity
exists in such a novel: the "truth" (or the various distor
tions of it) must be determined by the reader. Identifica
tion increases for the audience toward the characters in a
film or novel or chamber theatre production featuring the
subjective narrator precisely because of this human falli-
63
bility. Wayne Booth states in The Rhetoric of Fiction:
Whether or not they are involved in
the action as agents or as sufferers,
narrators and third-person reflectors
differ markedly according to the degree
and kind of distance that separates them
from the author, the reader, and the
other characters of the s t o r y .14
In a staged production, therefore, the director must first
determine the degree of distance that the narrator agent
assumes from the events he/she unfolds.
The following discussion will focus on the first
person narrator agent as first and third person narrators
in this category present similar staging problems, and the
first person narrator agents appear frequently in contemp
orary fiction. The major difference between the two is
that the third person narrator has more flexibility: he/
she can relate information seen either through the major
character or through his/her own eyes, while the first
person narrator usually is the major charactor and is thus
restricted to a single perspective. In a chamber theatre
production using a narrator agent in the first person,
several factors need emphasis: 1) creating the personal
style of the storyteller; 2) maintaining the impression that
all events are shaped by the angle of vision of the narra
tor; and 3) handling smoothly the time process inherent in
first person narration. Often a first person narrator
begins talking in the present and then flashes back to the
story-events (as in Nabokov's Lolita) or intercuts
64
the past and present (as in Alice Walker's "'Really, Doesn't
Crime Pay'").
While every narrative indicates the overall style of
the author and presents a particular style characterizing
the work (as to rhythm of 'language, depth and kind of char
acterization, and the creation of virtual life),first per
son narratives are dependent upon the protagonist not only
as the key to events but also as the key to the style of
the work, through his/her dialect, education level, inter
ests, and most importantly, depth of insight and perception.
Alice Walker's short story, "'Really, Doesn't Crime
Pay?'" begins as follows:
I sit here by the window in a house with
a thirty-year mortgage, writing in this
notebook, looking down at my Helena Ruben-
stein hands...and why not? Since I am
not a serious writer my nails need not be
bitten off, my cuticles need not have
jagged edges.
I lift them from the page where I have
written the line "Really, Doesn1t Crime
pay?" and send them seeking up my shirt
front (it is a white and frilly shirt) and
smoothly up the column of my throat, where
gardenia scent floats beneath my hair
line. If I should spread my arms and legs
or whirl, just for an instant, the sweet
smell of my body would be more than I
could bear. But I fit into my new sur
roundings perfectly; like a jar of cold
cream melting on a mirrored vanity shelf.
The narrator of Walker's story falls into Wayne Booth's
category of self-conscious narrators, those "aware of them
selves as writers.She is a writer by vocation (her
65
remark "since I am not a serious writer" betraying her cyni
cism at how she views herself and is viewed by others), and
her craft as a writer is built into the structure of the
story: the segments appear to be from her diary and are
arranged in an irregular order of its pages, with the first
three segments labeled "page 118" through "120" then jump
ing to "page 2," "page 4," and so on. She possesses enough
cynicism and detachment to stand outside herself, observing
herself enough to say that she's like "a jar of cold cream
melting on a mirrored vanity shelf." Her detachement sets
the tone for the entire story and the reader views the e-~
ventsof her relationships with her lover and her husband
and her subsequent breakdown with a shock all the more
chilling because she relates her tale so calmly, so objec
tively.
The story's journal format provides a key to her de
tachment: the events were recorded after they occurred,
most likely after any waves of emotion were already past.
The narrator, like the author herself, has carefully ordered
the events and thus her perceptions. There is nothing
spontaneous about this story: it is calculatedly self-con
scious. Although the story chronicles her direct experi
ence, it is remembered experience. Susanne Langer comments
on the distinction between experience in life and experience
in art in Feeling and Form:
66
Memory is the great organizer of con
sciousness. . . It is the real maker of his-
tory--not recorded history, but the sense
of history itself, the recognition of the
past as a completely established (though
not completely known) fabric of events,
continuous in space and time, and causally
connected throughout.... To remember an
event is to experience it again, but not
in the same way as the first time.- * - 7
We can see in Walker's story a deliberately-ordered
series of events, events that are distorted by the narra
tor's slightly-mad calmness in the face of the emotional
void of her life. The other characters are two-dimensional,
pawns in the drama of her story, her experience.
A chamber theatre production of this and similar sto
ries presents several challenges: 1) maintaining the de
tachment of tone in describing emotionally powerful events;
2) showing the narrator in the present while showing her
levels of development in the past which created her as she
is now; and 3) staging the story in a nonstatic way with
its convention of the writer's mental process as structure
for the action. The narrator provides the style and es
sence of the story even more than the omniscient narrator
previously discussed, and uses his/her transcendence over
time to provide a continuing link with the audience. The
audience has the privilege of seeing the narrator in the
present tense as storyteller (after the actual events of the
story) and in the past as the story unfolded. Breen de
scribes, the omnipresence of the narrator in chamber theatre:
67
In a Chamber Theatre production the
narrator provides an agreeable transi
tion between the scenes in a flashback
because of his/her physical presence in
both the here-and-now and the far-away-
and-long-ago. There is no difficulty in
accepting a scene as present when all the
evidence suggests that the events are
occuring now. What may trouble us is the
feeling both in films and on stage that
what is remembered by a character is nev
ertheless present, though it is clearly
something that happened in the past. We
see and hear all that memory recalls with
the same immediacy that characterizes
events happening in the present.
More than in any other narrative form, the audience becomes
totally enveloped in and manipulated by the personal vision
of the narrator.
Because such an intimate link exists between the nar
rator's present self and the narrator's past self, and yet
because there is such a separation in terms of self devel
opment and circumstance, it is often possible to cast sep
arate actors to represent these selves separated in time,
which also provides more opportunities for staging than a
single narrator. For example, in the Alice Walker story,
an entry from "September 1961)"reads:
We have moved in and bought new fur
niture. The place reeks of newness, the
green walls turn me bilious. He stands
behind me, his hands touching the edges
of my hair. I pick up my hairbrush and
brush his hands away. I have sweetened
my body to such an extent that even he
(especially he) may no longer touch it.
I do not want to forget the past; but I
say "Yes," like a parrot. "We can for-
68
get the past here."
The past of course is Mordecai Rich, the
man who, Ruel claims, caused my breakdown.
The past is the night I tried to,murder
Ruel with one of his chain saws.
The first two paragraphs are the perceptions of the narra
tor in the past, reacting to the new house. The last para
graph, however, reveals a more comprehensive and omnipre
sent voice, that of the writer who tells the story, bridg
ing and interpreting the past and present, and in this case
also foreshadowing an event in the past less distant from
their move into the house, the night she tries to murder
her husband. In staging, one actress could appear in cen
tral focus with Ruel in the past, another perhaps down
stage, commenting on the action from the perspective of the
present.
In terms of cinematic elements, use of "editing," the
"form dissolve," and "freezing the frame" can dramatize
the narrator's personal vision and style, and can clarify
the movement of the story in time and preserve continuity
between the past and present visions of the narrator.
Borrowing the concept of editing from the cinema can
establish the control of the first person narrator over
both past and present story events. A narrator like
Walker's, who is "writing" of the past, iss an editor; she
carefully selects and orders detail from her life to create
a particular effect or explanation. The story could open
69
with her present self downstage and all the characters and
props of her past life upstage, including her past self.
As she speaks (or "writes") she can stroll among these
artifacts of her life, and by her words, gestures, and
proximity to them bring them back to life. The narrative
structure of the story, with its dates and page numbers
preceding each scene in nonchronological order, also shows
the process of editing. For her to announce "page 218" or
"page 79," accompanied by her movement in the scene and
lighting changes also dramatizes her function as the editor,
the creator of her version of the past. Similarly, she can
emphasize the manipulation of her journal in transitions,
discarding certain pages, dwelling on others, etc. Her
frequent encapsulizing statements, like "I fit into my new
surroundings...,'1 at the end of sequences, her announcing
of pages at the beginnings of scenes, accompanied by her
movement downstage to the audience or upstage to the ac
tion, establish her as the life force behind the story,
the "camera eye," the inner director of the story in con
tent and style.
The form dissolve occurs in film as a transition link-
ing two images with the same shape or contours to create
a contrast or make a point. The device often appears to
emphasize or make external an inner transformation, as
when the outline of Dr. Jekyll's face slowly assumes the
70
contours of Mr. Hyde's. Another common use of the form
dissolve is to visualize the fantasies of a character, cre
ating suspense or terror when he/she looks at an object or
person and sees it become someone or something else.
The form dissolve depends (for use in chamber theatre)
on a suspension of motion known in cinema as freezing the
frame, a device long used in melodrama and in readers thea
tre performances. In the excerpt above from "'Really,
Doesn't Crime Pay?,'" the actress who plays the protago
nist in the past stands with Ruel looking at their house.
She says "Yes, we can forget the past here." At that mo
ment they freeze, the lights dim on their figures and come
up on the narrator in the present who then explains: "The
past of course is Mordecai Rich..." After that paragraph,
the lights go up again on the present and the man behind
her is no longer Ruel; instead it is Mordecai Rich. The
next section of the story deals with her relationship with
the young writer, Mordecai Rich. The use of the freeze and
the substitution of actors point up her psychological con
trol over the plot through her memory, as well as provide
a transition from one segment of the story into the next,
visually creating a form dissolve for the audience (although
in slower motion than a similar sequence in the cinema).
More importantly, the dissolve from Ruel to Mordecai
can symbolically show the difference in feeling the narra
71
tor has for the two men. When Ruel stands behind her, she
is tense, unyielding, unwilling for him to touch her. Af
ter the dissolve, with Mordecai, her posture would be to
tally different, accepting, yielding, and excited.
The form dissolve could also be used as a time bridge
between the narrator's different selves: in a scene where
the story jumps from past to present, the narrator in the
present could assume the outline in a scene recently fea
turing the narrator in the past. She could then "step out"
of the scene to talk to the audience, in effect also step
ping away from the past. For example, in another scene
in the story, she relates:
He took me in his arms, right there
in the grape arbor. "You sure do have
a lot of heavy, sexy hair," he said,
placing me gently on the ground. After
that, a miracle happened. Under Morde
cai 's fingers my body opened like a flower
and carefully bloomed. And it was strange
as well as wonderful. For I don't think
love had anything to do with this at all.20
In this scene between the past narrator and Mordecai, the
present narrator could substitute for the past narrator
between "placing me gently on the ground" and "After that,
a miracle happened." The present narrator then could walk
out to the audience, while the lights dimmed on Mordecai
and that scene from the past, completing the rest of her
reflections about her affair with Mordecai.
72
Stream-of-consciousness in Cinema and Chamber Theatre
Chapter II discussed the difficulty that the cinema
has (compared to the novel) in portraying a character's
inner life and in capturing the movement and jumps of the
mind through memory and dream. For example, in Guy Green's
A Walk in the Spring Rain, Ingrid Bergman walks through a
shower and reflects back on her recent past, her conflicts
with her husband and her love affair with Anthony Quinn.
Although film can show the immediacy of the reflection pro
cess by intercutting her walk in the present with scenes
from the past, pictures and minimal dialogue alone cannot
represent the movement of the mind as precisely as the
novel can with its larger scope and time frame. In the
novel, writers like Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf,
and James Joyce pioneered the device of stream-of-conscious-'
ness, stripping away the objective voice of the narrator
and revealing the characters' inner voices. In doing so,
they achieved a simultaneity and reality that is similar
to that achieved in film, as John Fell points out:
what the stream-of-consciousness device
does preeminently is altogether to in-
teriorize exposition so that reader and
writer have undertaken to share the
events of the novel as it happens in
the most direct experiential confron
tations; in other words, to make the book
like a good movie. 21
Director Alain Resnais (aided by screenwriters Alain
Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras respectively) has at--
73
tempted to integrate stream-of-consciousness narration into
his two films, Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima Mon
Amour. The films have a distinct "literary" flavor because
to replicate stream-of-consciousness effectively requires
not only intercutting dialogue with montage sequences but
also using a great deal of voice-over narration to repli
cate the mind's movement precisely. For example, we see
in the second half of Hiroshima Mon Amour the woman wash
ing her face and during this action hear her interior dia
logue :
SHE: You think you know. And then, no
You don't. In Nevers she had a German
love when she was young....
We'll go to Bavaria, my love, and there
we'11 marry.
She never went to Bavaria. (Looking at
herself in the mirror)
I dare those who have never gone to Ba
varia to speak to her of love.
You were not quite dead.
I told our story.
• • •
For fourteen years I hadn't found...
the taste of an impossible love again.
Since Nevers.
Look how I'm forgetting you....
Look how I've forgotten you.
Look at m e . 22
As cinema has borrowed from fiction to scrutinize the in
terior life, chamber theatre can borrow from cinema in
effectively staging novels or short stories that feature
stream-of-consciousness narration.
Virginia Woolf's novels (most notably Mrs. Dalloway,
To the Lighthouse, and The Waves) show rather than tell the
74
inner life of the characters by revealing their direct
thoughts and emotions. Joan Bennett, in Virginia Woolf,
describes Woolf's basis for her style:
The will to discover and record
life as it feels to those who live
it was the originating cause of Vir
ginia Woolf’s rejection of existing
conventions. It was this primarily
that impelled her to eliminate narra
tion and comment.23
The power of the stream-of-consciousness style, both
for the reader and the viewer of a film or of chamber thea
tre, lies in its revelation of the characters, the stripping
away of surface detail until the naked emotions remain.
Narratives styled in stream-of-consciousness voice enable
the audience to acquire a more complete knowledge of the
interior of the characters than any other narrative style.
The first person narrator agent presents him/herself inti
mately but in a more disguised way: the presence of the
storyteller who has "ordered" the sequences of his/her
story is always present. There is a subsequent objectivity
and craft that disappears in the stream-of-consciousness
technique.
For the director of chamber theatre, stream-of-con
sciousness presents several specific challenges: 1) achiev
ing the simultaneity of the thought process of the charac
ters; 2) developing stage movement that symbolically repre
sents inner movements rather than exterior states; and 3)
75
making clear the rapid shifts of the narrator in time, sub
ject, and tone. Cinematic devices that can aid in achiev
ing the kind of fluidity that this form of narration de
mands are "crosscuts," a modified "split screen technique,"
and the concept of manipulating the surfaces of objects.
In Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe
reflects on the past and her life after the death of Mrs.
Ramsey (in the "To the Lighthouse" section of the book):
But the dead, thought Lily, encoun
tering some obstacle in her design which
made her pause and ponder, stepping back
a foot or so, oh the dead I she murmured,
one pitied them, one brushed them aside,
one had even a little contempt for them.
They are at our mercy. Mrs. Ramsey has
faded and gone, she thought. We can over
ride her wishes, improve away her limited
old-fashioned ideas. She recedes further
and further from us. Mockingly she seemed
to see her there at the end,of the corridor
of years saying, of all incongruous things,
"Marry, marry1" (sitting very upright early
in the morning with the birds beginning to
cheep in the garden outside). And one would
say to her, It has all gone against your
wishes. They're happy like that; I'm
happy like this. Life has changed com
pletely. At that all her being, even her
beauty, became for a moment, dusty and
out of date. For a moment Lily, stand
ing there, with the sun hot on her back,
summing up the Rayleys, triumphed over
Mrs. Ramsey, who would never know how Paul
went to coffee-houses and had a mistress;
how he sat on the ground and Minta handed
him his tools; how she stood there painting,
had never married; not even William Bankes.
Mrs. Ramsey had planned it. Perhaps, had
she lived, she would have compelled it. Al
ready that summer he was "the kindest of men."
76
He was "the first scientist of his age, my
husband says." He was also "poor William— -
it makes me so unhappy when I go to see him,
to find nothing nice in his house— no one
to arrange the flowers." So they went for
walks together, and she was told, with that
faint touch of irony that made Mrs. Ramsey
slip through one's fingers, that she had a
scientific mind; she liked flowers; she was
so exact. What was this mania of hers for
marriage? Lily wondered, stepping to and fro
from her easel.
(Suddenly, as suddenly as a star slides in
the sky, a reddish light seemed to burn in
her mind, covering Paul Rayley, issuing from
him. It rose like a fire sent up in token
of some celebration by savages on a distant
beach. She heard the roar and the crackle.
The whole sea for miles around ran red and
gold. Some winey smell mixed with it and
intoxicated her, for she felt again her own
headlong desire to throw herself off the
cliff and be drowned looking for a pearl
brooch on a beach.y
In this section, we get both Lily's direct thoughts and the
occasional voice of the omniscient narrator who describes
the physical surroundings ("stepping back a foot or so")
and takes the reader in and out of Lily's thoughts ("Sud
denly... a reddish light seemed to burn in her..."). To the
bighthouse is a series of interior views of individual
characters tied together by an omniscient narrator who "di
rects" the action, in a larger sense, in the same manner
of other third person omniscient narrators. Of chief con
cern in this discussion, however, is the movement of the
interior, stream-of-consciousness voice.
Lily Briscoe's observations and her interior views
77
do not simply reveal her, they are threads that tie into
and shape the fabric of the entire novel. As Joan Bennett
says:
Virginia Woolf was not content with
the record of a single mind. She want
ed ' ■ to communicate the impression made
by one individual upon others and to re
veal human personality partly through the
picture projected by it upon other minds. 5
While Lily's reflections take place inside her, they can
never be divorced from the other characters and situations
in the novel; instead, her interior thoughts add to the
complexity and completeness of other characterizations as
well as her own.
In staging the novel, therefore, possibilities arise
for using the other characters visually and vocally to cre
ate the scenes in her mind and to show the interlocking
threads tying the psyches of the other inhabitants of the
novel together. While the focus is on Lily Briscoe, her
impressions bring to life the other people in her sphere.
One cinematic device that would promote the simultan
eous process of her mind as it moves through time and
space is the crosscut. While used in novels before the ad
vent of cinema (the seduction scene in Madame Bovary be
tween Rodolphe and Emma at the fair, when he courts her in
the midst of the announcement of prizes for livestock com
prises one ironic example), the crosscut became widely used
only after cinema became a popular art form. Crosscutting
78
occurs when the camera moves from one sequence to another,
interweaving them to create a comment or an effect. The
cutting can be fleeting, as during the filming of a scene
where a man is stalking an animal and the scene cuts
quickly from the hunter to the prey, or longer in duration,
as in Sorry, Wrong Number where we see the advance of the
killer in between cuts of a frantic Barbara Stanwyck try
ing to evade the murderer and call for help.
The effect of crosscutting in chamber theatre can be
achieved through lighting, through the narrator's switching
focus from Lily to the object of her thoughts, or by cal
ling attention to another stage area by enacting the scene
in her thoughts.
Much of the above sequence from To the Lighthouse cen
ters on Lily's thoughts of how events have transpired since
Mrs. Ramsey's death and how Mrs, Ramsey would have viewed
them, While Lily is painting in one stage area, Mrs. Ram
sey could be present in another, and the sequence could
move from Lily to Mrs. Ramsey. Mrs. Ramsey should occupy
an isolated position onstage as by this time in the novel
she is only a memory and only interacts with other char
acters by association in their thoughts. The sequence be
ginning, "For a moment Lily, standing there... triumphed
over Mrs. Ramsey.,.. Mrs. Ramsey had planned it..." At
this time the focus could switch to Mrs. Ramsey, who says ,
79
"Perhaps, had she lived, she would have compelled it."
Lily then muses, "Already that summer he was "the kindest
of men.'" As that phrase is an echo from a frequent com
ment made by Mrs. Ramsey, they could say that phrase to
gether, dramatizing the connection between them in both the
past and present.
The crosscut can also point up the frustration Lily
occasionally felt about Mrs. Ramsey, even though she greatly
admired her. Lily thinks, "So they were sent for walks
together and she was told, with that faint touch of irony
that made Mrs. Ramsey slip through one's fingers, that she
had" and here Lily could pause to let Mrs. Ramsey calmly
continue: "that she had a scientific mind; she liked flow
ers; she was so exact." To which Lily impatiently responds
in the present: "What was this mania of hers for marriage?
Lily wondered..." The past and the present merge using
this technique and Mrs. Ramsey's presence briefly dominates
the scene just as she dominates Lily's memory at this point.
The crosscut replicates the smooth flow of the mind from
image to image as Claude-Edmonde Magny describes:
The truth the author wants to com
municate will flash out as a result of
the mutual impact of these stories in
our consciousness, where a mechanism
analogous to the one responsible for per
sistence of vision makes for a residual
memory of every scene that has preceded
the one we are in the process of reading.26
Another technique that would visualize the flux of
Lily's impressions is a modified split screen technique,
often used during phone calls in earlier films (the tech
nique currently appears rarely) to contrast the reactions
of both parties on the telephone. In chamber theatre the
device could be used to show the interior and exterior
states of Lily Briscoe simultaneously. Physically, Lily is
painting, and her thoughts run parallel to and intersect
with her brushstrokes. At times her work absorbs her con
sciousness, perhaps triggering another memory, another
thought. In any event, the impulses flowing from her mind
onto her easel merge with and are distinct from her thoughts
alternately. Both are represented.
To clarify Lily's inner and outer movements, two ac
tresses could play the role of Lily, each in different
stage areas (ideally at the same depth of focus to give
the split screen effect). One actress would assume the
role of the objective self, the one who answers the observa
tion."but the dead..." with "thought Lily, encountering
some obstacle in her design which made her pause and pon
der. .." This division of self would not only show the ob
jective and subjective selves, but dramatize the process
of their interaction and allow the audience to see reac
tions at both levels of awareness.
In the latter section of the narrative quoted above,
there is a physical transition into the last paragraph which
81
takes place completely inside her mind. The objective
narrator says, "Lily wondered, stepping to and fro from her
easel." As that narrator paints, then pauses lost in
thought (perhaps freezing in position) the inner voice says,
"Suddenly, as suddenly as a star slides in the sky, a red
dish light seemed to burn in her mind, covering Paul Ray-
ley, issuing from him...." The sensual images of her imag
ination captivate her and overshadow her physical self. Her
objective self at this point is figuratively frozen. She
occupies another time and space, and is out of touch with
her actual environment around her. The juxtaposition of
the two selves emphasizes the split and yet the connection
between the life of the mind and of the body. And in the
case of most stream-of-consciousness narratives, the life
of the mind is far richer and varied than the physical
realities of the characters.
Because the inner life is so dominant, the chamber the
atre director may wish to cast more than one actor to play
the inner self, particularly if the character operates on
several levels of consciousness (as in the narration of
Faulkner's story, "Barn Burning."). The use of more than
one inner self would also allow for more possibilities of
staging the inner narration, for while the crosscut and
the split screen devices aid in replicating the process of
thought, the interior/exterior divisions of self, and clar-
82
ify the free movement of the mind in space and time, they
do not solve completely the problem of staging inner move-
ment.
One additional way film has captured the mind's per
ception over time is by photographing the changing sur
faces of objects so that the objects contribute to the
mental state of the characters, changes in environment, mood
and tone. Where this can work in the novel (Alain Robbe-
Grillet has described objects minutely in such novels as
In the Labyrinth and Jealousy), the technique is especially
effective in film because of the visual impact of the image
and the control of the cinematic medium over space and dura
tion. In film as in life, perceptions that last a mere
second may seem to the perceiver to stretch beyond time1s
measurements. For example, in Hitchcock's Spellbound, Gre
gory Peck plays a victim of amnesia; the shock of witnes
sing a murder while on a skiing trip blocked his memory.
Certain surfaces trigger his repressed vision of ski tracks
in the snow as the victim toppled over the edge of a cliff:
railroad tracks, linen patterns, fork tines all provoke a
response that we can see flashing visually through his
mind for varying lengths of time. Through his perception
of their meaning, the objects assume distorted shapes in
lis vision. The Salvador Dali dream sequence in the same
Film, where objects symbolically take on lives and deeper
83
meanings of their own, dramatizes the connection between
Peck's perception of objects and the emerging vision of the
truth.
Robert Breen notes in Chamber Theatre that "the novel
must learn what the film already knows— -how to reproduce
7 7
the sensual surface of objects." In a chamber theatre
production, the director does not have the same resources
as the cinema director visually or spatially; however,
photographed images can be projected to enhance manipula
tion of key objects on stage. For instance, in the To the
Lighthouse sequence, Lily is painting as she reflects. The
other characters in the novel see her as reserved, with
drawn; only in her inner life and in her painting does she
express her sensibility. The canvass she works on, there
fore, has significance as the physical parallel to her
hidden perceptions. The quoted section above continues
as follows;
And the roar and the crackle repelled
her with fear and disgust, as if while
she saw its splendor and power she saw too
how it fed on the treasure of the house,
greedily, disgustingly, and she loathed
it. But for a sight, for a glory it sur
passed everything in her experience, and
burnt year after year like a signal fire
on a desert island at the edge of the sea,
and one had only to say "in love" and in
stantly, as happened now, up rose Paul's
fire again. And it sank and she said to
herself, laughing, "The Rayleys;" how Paul
went to coffee-houses and played chess.
She had only escaped by the skin of her
84
teeth though, she thought. She had been
looking at the table-cloth, and it had
flashed upon her that she would move the
tree to the middle, and need never marry
anybody and she had felt an enormous exul
tation. 2 8
Even in the midst of her rush of romantic feeling cen
tering on the image of Paul Rayley, Lily remembers how she
had retreated once before into herself, at the dinner party
years ago (and much earlier in the novel, in the section
called "The Window "), by looking at the tablecloth and
solving a problem in the picture she was working on at the
time: "she would move the tree to the middle." Thus her
work both triggers her desires and becomes a means for
repressing them or at least making them subordinate, con
trollable .
In the chamber theatre production of this scene, Lily's
painting becomes a metaphor for her inner vision and outer
control. An actual painting could be used onstage or if
the director prefers, it could be located offstage in the
audience. In the first case, the canvass could be worked
on by the exterior Lily. Occasionally, the narrator or
narrators representing her inner sensibility could also
move to where she is standing, scrutinize the painting,
perhaps move it to another section of the stage during a
sequence showing the interior Lily.
The section beginning "Suddenly, as suddenly as a star
slides in the sky, a reddish light seemed to burn in her
mind..," would be an excellent place to integrate slides
35
or a film into the production. It is as if the colors on
her canvass and on her artist's palette have become part
of a much larger canvass, encompassing her life totally for
several moments. Projecting the changing shapes of colors
and perhaps objects onto a screen could make more dramatic
her inner flight into a realm of sensual surfaces, away
from her usual control emotionally, and her usual control
over her brush as she applies it to her work: the image
takes over Lily Briscoe completely. At the end of the se
quence, when she remembers how she had saved herself by
looking down at the tablecloth, her control would return,
the projected image would fade, and she would make con
tact once more with the physical canvass in front of her.
Summary
The parallels and cross-influences between point of
view in fiction and in cinema have applicability to chamber
theatre. In staging major forms of narration, the omni
scient narrator, the narrator agent, and the stream-of-con
sciousness narrator, in providing spatial and temporal
transitions, and in making vivid the processes of thought
and memory, filmic concepts and devices work to sharpen
audience focus and clarify shifts between interior and
axterior movement in adapting fiction to chamber theatre.
Concepts and techniques such as the dissolve, the form
lissolve, various moving shots, editing, the associative
86
sequence, the crosscut, the split screen effect, sound
bridges, and the manipulation of objects provide a means
to capture the illusion of psychological process on stage,
the merging of past and present, and the appearance of the
simultaneity of perception that so often characterizes the
modern novel.
Cinematic techniques in chamber theatre can increase
audience involvement: they (the spectators) become wit
nesses to the process whereby the characters and story
unfold before them. Claude-Edmonde Magny discusses a simi
lar benefit that the novel derives from film:
We can now understand that what has
been offered the novelist as a tech
nique for expressing his existential
vision of man is a technique allied to
that used by the movies, an art form
which, more than any other, is engage,
inherently capable of giving us (despite
its apparent objectivity) any image that
is abstractly impersonal.29
In a sense, chamber theatre has an advantage over
both the novel and the cinema: like the novel, it can stop
the action for the narrator to reflect or interpret, and
like the film it can visualize the dynamics between char
acters and between characters and their environment. It
can also dramatize better than either medium the distinc
tions between the various selves within a single character.
Chamber theatre as a mixed medium can to a degree overcome
many of the limitations fiction and film have, for example
____________ 87
the problem of significance which Robert Richardson notes:
Imagery is used both for vividness and
for significance; and one might say that
literature often has the problem of mak
ing the significant somehow visible, while
film often finds itself trying to make the
visible significant.^
This chapter only explores the possibilities of cine
matic devices to express point of view. Many other tech
niques used in the cinema are not mentioned here; others
will be detailed in the analysis of a film script in the
next chapter.
88
NOTES
I Robert Breen, Chamber Theatre (Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall, 1978) p. 5.
O >
John Fell, Film and the Narrative Tradition (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1974) p. 69.
3 Breen, p. 55.
^ Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (New York: Vintage
Books, 1972) p. 69.
Fell, p. 65.
6 George Eliot,: The Mill on the Floss (New York: Wash-
ton Square Press, Inc., 1964) p. 3.
n
John Harrington, The Rhetoric of Film (New York:
Scribner's Sons, Inc., 1953) p. 93.
® Robert Richardson, Literature and Film (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1969) p. 93.
9 Claude-Edmonde Magny, The Age of the American Novel
(New York: Frederick Ungar, 1972) p. 52.
- * - 0 Dashiell Hammett, The Pain Curse (New York: Vintage
Books, 1972) p. 75.
II Charles Thomas Samuels, Mastering the Film and
Other Essays (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
1977) p. 12.
12 Breen, p. 58.
13 John Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel (New York:
Washington Square Press, 1961) p. 62.
Wayne Booth,' The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1961) p. 155.
89
Alice Walker, " 'Really,, Doesn't Crime Pay,?"' in
In Love and Trouble (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich,
1967) pp. 10-11.
16 Booth, p. 155.
17 Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form (New York:
Scribner's Sons, Inc., 1953) p. 263.
18
Breen, p. 61.
19 Walker, p. 12.
20 Walker, p. 17.
21 Fell, p. 69.
22 Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour (New York:
Grove Press, Inc., 1961) p. 73.
23 Joan Bennett, Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: at the
University Press, 1964) p. 94.
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York; Har
court, Brace & World, Inc., 1927) pp. 260-261.
2 5 Bennett, p. 91.
2 6 Magny, p. 89.
27 Breen, p. 66.
28 Woolf, pp. 261-262.
2 8 Magny, p. 88.
50 Richardson, p. 118.
90
CHAPTER IV
LITERARY AND CINEMATIC CONSIDERATIONS IN
LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD
Last Year at Marienbad, scripted by Alain Robbe-Grillet
and directed by Alain Resnais, represents a landmark in
the treatment of time and the portrayal of an inner, psy
chological landscape in the film. While certainly not the
first film to discard traditional concepts of plot and
character, Marienbad was a pioneering effort in attempting
to show the process of time itself. Prior to this film
(and to Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour mentioned in Chapter
III) only the novel dealt so extensively with memory, dream,
and the psychological life of its characters.
Alain Robbe-Grillet, at the time of this film's pro
duction (1961), was known chiefly as a novelist, a leader
in France's New Novel school of writers. In his novels,
for example The Voyeur and La Maison de Rendez-Vous, he
experimented with new concepts of narrative, character,
and action. He rejected linear plots and the necessity
to depict traditional characters, thereby promoting strong
identification for the reader. Instead, Robbe-Grillet,
like other New Novelists, tried to capture the movement of
91
the mind and the perception of time. Events do not happen
in a chronological sense or framework, but rather as they
happen psychologically. Human perception and thought pro
cesses do not follow an ordered, linear sense of time, and
in the quest for an inner reality, neither do the new
novels. Fleeting impressions, complex events, routine acts
of the past, present, and future all merge into the pre
sent— at the time they are remembered or brought into men
tal focus. Robbe-Grillet describes the process of the mind
in contrast to linear plots of the old-fashioned cinema
in his introduction to Last Year at Marienbad:
In reality, our mind goes faster— or
sometimes slower. Its style is more varied,
richer and less reassuring; it skips cer
tain passages, it preserves an exact record
of certain "unimportant" details, it repeats
and doubles back on itself. And this mental
time, with its peculiarities, its gaps, its
obsessions, its obscure areas, is the one
that interests us since it is the tempo of
our emotions, of our life.1
Marienbad has importance in a study of the relation
ship of film to chamber theatre for its merging of literary
and cinematic narrative modes to create the landscape and
movement of the mind. This chapter summarizes the film,
analyzes its use of literary and cinematic forms in the
context of point of view and time and space, and proposes
implications for chamber theatre.
Lastv Year at Marienbad is a study in mental process,
92
in the blending of past, present, and future, in vivid
impressions of fantasy and desire, all blending into a
perceptual present that unfolds before us as we read the
script or experience the images on the screen. The reader/
viewer is not any more aware of what actually happened than
the characters experiencing life at Marienbad. And indeed,
whether what takes place is "real" or not makes no differ
ence. The process itself forms the only reality we can
identify. As Jacques Brunius states in "Every Year at
Marienbad":
It can safely be said that Marienbad is
probably the first film where, to a very
great extent, the content i£ the form, and
would not exist outside this particular
form.2
Taking place in a magnificently-decorated hotel of
monumental proportions, the film pictures X, a lover or
would-be lover of A, who is staying in the hotel with M,
who may or may not be her husband (initials are only used,
as in the film script, for convenience in character
identification). X attempts, and finally succeeds, in per
suading A that they had an affair last year at Marienbad,
that she told him he must wait a year, and that now he has
come to hold her to her promise and to take her away.
The events of last year, which did or did not occur with
equal probability, are shown in varying perspectives
from X's imagination as he tries to persuade A,
93
and from A's mind as she struggles to resist, as she inves
tigates possibilities of what might have occurred, tries
to picture X's account, etc.
The film is almost a perfect blend of content and
form; in fact, Last Year at Marienbad can be described as
form itself. Speaking of the cinema, Robbe-Grillet states:
"This is precisely what makes the cinema an art: it cre
ates reality with forms. It is in its form that.we must
look for its true content."(p. 7) Marienbad has no con
tent outside of the mental process of those who occupy its
terrain. As Julius Bellone says in Renaissance of the
Film: "The substance of the film is the labyrinth of hu
man thoughts, recollections, and fantasies that engross
the viewer in their kinetic unfolding."3
Marienbad is constructed in the same cyclical form as
many of Robbe-Grillet1s novels; the form itself questions
the concept of time and its relation to content. The film
begins as a theatrical presentation is taking place in one
of the salons of the hotel. Consisting of two actors, a
man and a woman, the presentation contains the same elusive,
fantastical quality as later conversations between A and X.
In the play, too, the man appears to be persuading the wo
man of something. It closes with her saying, "Very well...
now I am yours." (p. 26) The voice of X is interspersed
with the closing moments of this play. His words spoken
94
at the film's beginning are similar, in some cases identi
cal, to those that he says to A during and in the final
stages of the film. Always, he describes himself as moving
("stalking" is really more appropriate) through the hotel,
alone, watching, looking for something, waiting for some
one. Similarly, the rest of the actors move elegantly
through the labyrinth of the huge, usually dark, rooms of
the hotel. Everyone dresses in evening clothes at all
times, adding to the formal, heavy baroque quality of the
setting.
The image of the labyrinth is crucial in the develop
ment of the film. The characters are not only dwarfed by
the towering structure of the hotel, but it is. as if their
entire lives had been spent there; they are caught in the
maze of the hotel and subject to experiences they encounter
there. Many of the descriptions of the rooms include a
reference to "trompe l'oeil," and the entire film aptly
represents one gigantic illusion and "trick of the eye,"
as the characters weave through the endless passageways.
Thus, Marienbad is entirely self-contained; the hotel and
its garden and its occupants have no other life. The spec
tator is left wondering about "last year" but last year
is not important as Robbe-Grillet explains:
As for the past the hero introduces by
force into this sealed, empty world, we
sense he is making it up as he goes along.
95
There, is no last year, and Marienbad is
no longer to be found on any map. This
past, too, has no reality beyond the mo
ment it is evoked with sufficient force;
and when it finally triumphs, it has merely
become the present, as if it had never
ceased to be so. (p. 12)
The maze of the hotel provides an ideal backdrop for the
complex interweaving of fantasy, dream, memory, and sugges
tion taking place in the characters' minds:
X's voice: There were always walls— every
where, around me— smooth, even, glazed, with
out the slightest relief, there were always
walls....
The camera continues moving slowly, steadily,
zigzagging through the hotel. The course
covered in this way must be extremely rich in
various sequences of columns, porticoes, lob
bies, little staircases, intersecting corri
dors, closets, etc. Moreover the labyrinth
effect is increased by the presence of monumen
tal mirrors that reflect other perspectives
of complicated passageways.... It happens
that the same point is passed several times,
that the same people are encountered at dif
ferent points, that several routes are fol
lowed in attempting to find a.way out, etc.
(p. 89)
Certain images are repeated over and over again, their
meaning changing in relation to the changing events around
them; the sound of footsteps on gravel, A walking barefoot
in the garden, the statues in the formal gardens of Fred-
ericksbad, A standing with one shoe off, a line of men in
a shooting gallery, the detonations of the guns, M playing
his favorite game of matches which he never loses, even
to X, etc. Jacques Brunius says, about Marienbad: "This
96
film is presented as a process of recollection. Secondly,
it has the atmosphere and form of a dream.Brunius
believes that Marienbad tells the story of not only X's
dream but A's also, and their dreams (or versions) of their
relationship at times differ, at times converge, and even
tually compromise and merge together.
Point of View in Marienbad
Marienbad's narrative structure blends literary and
cinematic techniques, consisting of: 1) the omniscient
and yet subjective camera; 2) the voice of X; and 3) the
recollections of A and X. Unlike most traditional narra
tion, these components frequently are at odds with one
another. Although X is really the central narrator of the
film, as it is his fantasy/dream/desire that moves the
action as he seeks to force his view upon A, the camera
does not always cooperate: images are not always the way
he describes them, and A's mental images often conflict
with his. At first, for instance, A does not believe his
story of last year. She insists that she's never even met
him, that he is mad. He tells her he first saw her in the
gardens at Fredericksbad, which A insists she's never seen.
He says that she is leaning on a balustrade in the garden
in a certain pose, but the image the camera shows does not
show her in that position. X waits, A shifts her position
97
in the image to what he has described, and then he goes on
talking, as if he had been waiting for the shift in her pose
to resume his monologue. At another point, X describes a
photograph they had taken. He says that she was not laugh
ing, but in the photograph enlarged as a scene, A is clearly
laughing. Many images that X describes are shown in semi-
complete versions, but there is no way of knowing which is
the complete version or the "correct" version, or in whose
imagination the scene takes place, or at what point the
scene took place in time. For example:
The camera, which has pivoted to follow
the fugitive, suddenly reveals the whole
garden— the garden "a la francaise" which
has been seen in imagination since the
beginning— at the same time that A herself
discovers it.(p. 116)
Although it is impossible to be certain, it is doubt
ful that the camera reflects an authorial presence of its
own; rather, the confusion the camera at times displays
(when, for example, it does not reflect X's or A's words
as they speak) most probably results from the converging
or contradicting of the mental images of the chief charac
ters— the camera becomes "confused" at the conflicting
mental signals it receives. The camera often mirrors the
emotional tone of the film or the emotional state of the
characters. For example, a bedroom is often described by
X in which they met last year. The version of what hap
pened there changes. At times we see X come in and A focus
98
on him a look of surprise, at other times fear or horror,
at others a blank look. In one version, X rapes her. Prior
to X's entrance, M (who may be A's husband) had just left.
X's voice: He had come in....You had been
surprised by his visit.... He didn't seem to
have any specific purpose. He referred to
the concert of the night before. I think....
or else it was you who began talking first....
No...No... I don't remember anymore.... I
don't remember anymore myself. (a pause,
then in a very weary voice). I don't remem
ber anymore.
A stands up, sets the pearls on the chest,
looks at the floor again....
During this interval, the camera itself has
given certain signs of agitation: executing
various rotations, reversals, and even sud
den changes of shot.(p. 13 0)
We don't know if the camera's agitation reflects A's or X's
agitation with this recollection, or both. Bruce Kawin,
in Mindscreen, says of the film:
The entire film may be a fantasy in X's
head, inspired by the play before him, or
he may himself be an element of a similar
fantasy going on in the mind of A... It is
more likely that.the film itself is a laby
rinth incorporating the mental experience
of several characters and answerable to no
imposable time sequence.^
A's imagination, her perceptions of reality, often nar
rate the action, but the connection between her mind and
the screen proves even more elusive, and more difficult to
ascertain for the spectator or reader. For example, A
never describes the bedroom where they supposedly met
99
one night last year, yet many varying views of the room
are flashed on the screen. A protests X's account, where
he says he came into her room after slowly opening and
closing the door to the vestibule, the sitting room, and
finally her room:
X's voice: You already know the rest.
A: No, no, noI (the first word is spo
ken quite low, then the tone rises:) No,
I don't know what happened then. I don't
know you. I don't know that room, that
ridiculous bed, that fireplace with the
mirror...
X: (turning toward her:) What mirror?
What fireplace? What did you say?
A: Yes... I don't know anymore... It's
all wrong... I don't know anymore... (pp. 110-111)
At one dramatic point in the film, A's and X's memo
ries of the night in the bedroom converge in the present.
The camera cuts back and forth between A and X in the bar
of the hotel together and various impressions of A's bed
room.
X: At night, most of all, you enjoyed not
talking.
Immediately there appears a very brief shot
(one second?) representing an empty, bare
bedroom, furnished with nothing but a single
bed. It is the bedroom that will be shown
later with the customary decoration and
furnishings— that is, with a rather elabor
ate ornamentation, like all the rest of the
hotel. But for the moment there are only
bare walls, painted a uniformly pale color
(almost white) and its only furniture this
extremely narrow bed with rumpled sheets....
100
But the image of the bar returns at once,
just as it was a second before, with X and
A, who have not moved an inch....
X: One night, I went up to your room...
And after a silence, the image of the bed
room returns. And again the bar, etc. While
the large orchestra is heard tuning up, the
two alternating shots— the bedroom, full of
light, with A alone in the middle of the
floor, and the bar with X and A, much darker--
succeed each other at a rapid rhythm, each
appearance of the bedroom lasting impercep
tibly longer than the preceding one, while
the shots of the bar, on the contrary, grow
emphasized by a violent noise from the orches
tra tuning up; drum roll or cymbal crash,
trumpet call, etc.(pp. 83-85)
The scene then remains in the bedroom, where A is changing
her shoes before X's arrival: "A is changing her shoes,
but she is making the wrong gestures: looking for her
shoes where there are none, trying to put a shoe on her
left foot when it is her right foot that is bare, etc."
(p. 85), At this point X appears, and A looks at him, her
smile freezing. Back in the bar, A makes a sudden move
backward, and the scene switches to the bedroom where X
moves toward A and she steps backward as if to escape.
But she has really stepped back in the bar, although her
mind is still visualizing the scene in the bedroom. She
knocks over a glass: "The glass breaks on the floor, mak
ing a considerable noise (no doubt an abnormal one, since
it even manages to drown out the music)."(p. 87) During
101
this scene, triggered by X's mention of night and room,
their thoughts merge on the bedroom scene as they sit in
the bar. The memory (or fantasy) is enough to involve A
to the point where she forgets where she is, in the bar and
not in the bedroom. We don't know if the scene on the
screen is also the one in Xis mind, however it is possible,
as the description of the bedroom varies through the se
quence, that images from both their minds are flashed on
the screen.
This sequence clearly shows the visual narration of
both X and A— their mindscreens intersect, to use Kawin's
term. The mindscreen "presents a personalized world, one
that both incorporates the emphases and distortions of its
organizing intelligence and expresses the mind's relation
to its materials."6
This nonclarity in point of view serves to emphasize
the psychological process of the film, successfully render
ing the changing perceptions of several minds over time
that is common in actual life, but difficult to portray
on the screen. Bruce Kawin addresses the contribution of
Marienbad toward the persuasability of the mental process
even when not connected to an absolute reality:
Through its direct visualization of the
thought processes of its characters, and
its refusal to unscramble these mindscreens
from what happened, Marienbad asserts that
mental imagery has no less presence (or sub-
102
jective validity) when it originates in
fantasy than when it is more conventionally
coordinated with physical events in objec
tive time and space.?
As there is no way to judge truth from falsehood, imagina
tion from reality, distortion from accuracy, the viewer
ultimately becomes the narrator. The spectator must self-
narrate, making the jumps and juxtapositions that form the
film's immediacy. Robbe-Grillet addresses this merging of
past and present, reality and illusion, exterior world and
inner world when he says:
Hence the total cinema of our mind admits
both in alternation and to the same degree
the present fragments of reality proposed
by sight and hearing, and past fragments,
or future fragments, or fragments that are
completely phantasmagoric.(p. 13)
Besides the heavy use of voice-over narration in the
film (by X), there are other literary devices used in estab
lishing or emphasizing point of view. As in Robbe-Grillet's
fiction, Marienbad employs extreme use of detail. X de
scribes the intricacies of the hotel in his narration but
complementing his words is the subjective camera which moves
through the hotel and the gardens, sometimes smoothly and
impersonally, at other times erratically, depending upon
the emotional tone of X or A, and less frequently, M.
Robbe-Grillet's use of, description is intensely cinematic
even while it has a literary flavor. The camera work is a
form of visual narration, which is of course usual in ..film;
103
where Marienbad differs from most films is in its attachment
to the voice-over narration and dialogue. Since the film
portrays the mental landscape of X and A, its interior vi
sion is brought into focus by the way it enhances, contra
dicts, or departs from the verbal elements of the film.
In this sense, Marienbad utilizes both cinematic and liter
ary narrative techniques to achieve a totally present
tense, stream-of-consciousness process.
Marienbad manipulates and integrates the audience into
its singular reality from the first moments of the film.
The theatrical presentation at the beginning merges with X's
narration and provides a departure point for X's fantasies
or memories, creating a blending of fiction and reality.
Ironically, although the "play" is supposedly fiction, it
appears no less real than X's subsequent parallel enactment
of it as he tries to convince A of their relationship last
year and A's promises to leave with him this year.
The use of the play provides a foreshadowing of the
action that is traditionally literary. Although the plot
is nonlinear and in flux rather than static, the flashfor-
ward is a narrative tool to engage the reader/viewer and to
set up echoes that reverberate throughout subsequent events.
The play integrates as well as foreshadows the action.
While the play has a distinct audience in one of the
salons of the hotel, X's and A's meetings also appear to
104
have an audience. Rarely are they alone. Usually they are
surrounded by the slowly-moving crowd in evening dress
around them. In such a contained world as Marienbad all
actions have a formal, theatrical quality. Often the inter
actions between the characters appear rehearsed, and the
repetition of so many of the sequences suggests a nonspon-
taneous, unreal kind of interaction. For instance, the re
petition of M's match game in the casino even has a perfor
mance quality. The matches are arranged in a 7-5-3-1 pat
tern, and are pulled out of the rows by the two contestants,
each taking as many matches as he wishes as long as they
are from only one row. The player left with a match in
front of him loses: xxxxxxx
xxxxx
xxx
x
M never loses, no matter with whom or how often he plays.
The deliberate ambiguity of the film is achieved cine-
matically, however, as well as literarily. Although the
characters' verbal narration changes, the camera work delib
erately creates tension in the viewer by its uncertainty
and variance. Camera directions like the following are
common:
The man and the young woman take.a step
or two toward the side of the screen and
A appears behind them, a little farther
away, motionless and staring straight at
the camera. {Is it possible that she be
comes gradually more distinct although re
105
maining at a distance, while the charac
ters standing to one side in the foreground
grow blurred?).(p. 42)
Unanticipated cuts, dissolves, and reverse angle shots are
used frequently and enhance the dreamlike qualities of the
film. The reverse angle shot is used particularly effec
tively as it provides a constantly-shifting perspective of
the same objects, people, and situations. For example,
during the play the camera focuses on the stage and the two
players and shows only the backs of the heads of the audi
ence. When the applause begins, the camera does a reverse
angle and shows the audience standing and applauding. This
switch emphasizes the audience as not merely participants
but also as players. Occasionally the reverse angle shot
will be used to show a new perspective of the same sequence,
but one that reveals a different detail, calling into ques
tion once again the time sequence of the film: is this
shot happening at the same time as a previous one or is this
a past shot, an alteration, and in any case, which shot is
the "real" one? For example, in one outdoor scene in the
gardens, X is describing A's position as she is surrounded
by other guests conversing:
The shot immediately changes.
Reverse angle, showing a group of persons
in the same garden. A is seen from behind,
in exactly the same position and the same
place as in the preceding shot, but she has
her shoes on.... The characters were pre
106
cisely the ones who were watching the game
with the sixteen matches.(p. 76)
Not only does the camera work, in the case of reverse angles
and frequent series of objects viewed from close, mid, and
long shots, continually' question the permanence of the
images pictured, but it emphasizes the elusive quality of
perception itself. In this sense, Marienbad is reflexive,
an illustration of the creative process.
The camera movements and rotations at times makes the
objects themselves characters, capable of movement. For
example, in one sequence X's voice is heard over the image
of A in the garden:
After the word alive, but with a few sec-
:onds delay, a smile gradually appears on
A's face, yet an absent smile that seems
meant for no one.
And while X's voice continues, the camera
begins to turn toward the statue, which be
comes the center of the image, while A, on
the contrary, disappears from the field of
vision, while continuing to smile, motion
less and frozen....
Still focusing on the statues, the camera
does not remain motionless. It begins turn
ing around it, at the distance and the
height of a man's eye...(p. 63)
Such a manipulation further confuses reality with fan
tasy. The viewer cannot even depend on stability or per
manence from the physical world. There is no distinct men
tal vision as divorced from a physical vision. In the per
ceptual landscape of Marienbad, all events, objects, and
107
people are in a state of flux, elements that shape and
reshape themselves into the tapestry of the story.
Time and Space in Marienbad
Although stream-of-consciousness narration was pio
neered by the novel, only the medium of cinema could manipu
late space to provide a psychological context in the mode of
Marienbad. After the opening theatrical performance ends,
the camera pans the audience in a series of varied shots,
focusing on A briefly, then moving on. Shots of the hotel
are intermingled with shots of groups conversing and we
hear fragments of their conversation. X appears on the
screen near an elaborate mantelpiecea fragment of an
argument between a man and a woman becomes audible for sev
eral minutes. The man's words about the silence and the
walls of the hotel which seem to imprison him, preview X's
description of the hotel and its connection with his fan
tasy (the words are delivered offscreen):
X's voice:...these fingers made to clasp,
these eyes made to see you, that must turn
away from you--toward these walls covered
with ornaments from another century, black
woodwork, gilding, cut-glass mirrors, old
portraits--stucco garlands with interlacing
baroque ribbons— trompe l'oeil capitals,
false doors, false columns, painted perspec
tives. (p. 34).
X's words, the drifting couples inhabiting the hotel,
the elaborate decor, all provide a background for X's fan-
108
tasies, are inseparable from them. The external world and
the internal world--the mindscreens of X and A---a 11 provide
context in a cinematic way. The disconnected, fragmentary
quality of the beginning would not work in fiction (or at
least not in the same way; the visual narration would have
to be transformed into a verbal one). On film, the montage
of shots in the beginning creates an- image of an isolated
world existing timelessly, beyond the bounds of physical
laws or of cause and effect. There's no sense of linearity,
or a clear sense of past or present; everything merges into
a panorama, a tapestry of action and setting.
Wolf Rilla says in The Writer and the Screen:
In point of fact, there is no such thing
as "background" in the cinema. What we do
have is a context- — the context of the story,
and the more detailed contexts of individual
scenes. This is as dynamic a factor as char
acterization, dialogue, and plot; it is a
narrative ingredient which defines the style
in which the story is told, and the story
itself.
The temporal and spatial elements of the film are tied
to the context of Marienbad. Everything about the resort
hotel at Marienbad is elusive--the guests stay for undeter-
nined lengths of time, the conversations are always fragmen
tary and incomplete, relationships seem undetermined--and
paradoxically so as the hotel itself appears so solid, or
nate, and lasting. Marienbad represents a labyrinth: peo
ple and events exist in it; there is no starting or ending
point,
___________________________________________________________ 109
This labyrinthine perception of time is captured in
the film by the use of repetition of key images (always with
some details slightly changed), rapid cuts between often-
nonconnected sequences, dissolves, music that echoes or
counterpoints the turmoil or tranquility of the scene and
the camera work, and the dreamlike quality of X's mono
logues and his dialogues with A. The camera shots, the
sound track, the dialogue are all orchestrated to create a
time sense and reality that differs from the natural world,
one that exists inside the characters rather than external
to them.
Music is an integral part of the film, becoming dis
torted or disturbed when the minds of the characters
become so:
The serial music already heard throughout
the scene...now resumes, but imperceptibly:
very low at first, a few scattered notes,
then gradually acquiring volume, but with
out achieving its earlier violence. Slightly
troubled music, but none the less indicating—
by its sudden and shrill notes, its abrupt
jumps— the shock that the discovery of the
garden represents: a kind of expected and
therefore reassuring shock.(p. 117)
At other times the music ties together a series of sequences
as when X and A attend a concert in the middle of the film.
The orchestra plays a piece:
The piece it is playing has already served
as an accompaniment for certain scenes of
the film since the beginning: serial music
consisting of notes separated by silences,
110
an apparent discontinuity of notes and
unrelated chords. But at the same time
the music is violent, disturbing and for
the spectator who is not interested in
contemporary music it must be both irri
tating and somehow continually unresolved.
(p. 96)
During this sequence, while they supposedly listen to the
concert, the camera shows the garden previously mentioned,
where they were supposed to have spent much time last year.
They are standing together, X touching A who is slightly
disturbed. She murmurs: "Please... let me alone." The
music from the concert plays over this scene, continuing
when the camera leaves them and continues through the empty
garden. A cymbal crash signals the return (visually) of the
orchestra. The music plays through several more sequences,
giving a sense of temporal relationship to scenes that have
often occurred before or to those that seem disconnected
in space and time. But actually, the music only perhaps
connects elements in X's or A's (or both) minds at the
time of the concert, or thoughts that have some emotional
connection with the troubled music.
The film extensively uses flashbacks and flashforwards,
both originally literary devices. However, as we have no
way of knowing what is present, past, or future (such dis
tinctions are irrelevant here), we as spectators have to
assemble our own narrative structure or merely observe the
process unfolding in front of us. As Robbe-Grillet says:
111
"The essential characteristic of the image is its present
ness -...by its nature, what we see on the screen is^ in the
act of happening, we are given the gesture itself, not an
account of it."(p. 12)
By contrast, the novel can never achieve the present
ness of the cinema. Although Robbe-Grillet in his own
novels has attempted to achieve the immediacy of film, he
has not completely succeeded in overcoming the boundaries
of linearity and verb tense restrictions contained in langu
age and thus in fiction. Marienbad's events take place
over roughly two hours— one experiences it as it unfolds.
Susanne Langer explains this difference between actual
events and the events of literature in Feeling and Form:
The primary illusion created by poesis
is a history entirely "experienced," and
in literature proper (as distinct from
drama, film, or pictured story) this vir
tual history is in the mode typified by
memory. Its form is the closed, completed
form that in actuality only memories have.^
The director and writer of Marienbad sought not to portray
a "closed, completed form" in their film, but rather an
open-ended one. No discrete units of time exist (as in
"last year” or "next year"). The only certainty in the
film is the juxtaposition of images as they occur.
Spatially, the film is also an integration of the
characters* fantasy, the film's context, and the repetition
of key images that retain their essential focus but have
112
subtle variations. Because the film pictures the percept. • :
tions of X and A, spatial manipulation reveals the process
of their thoughts and reactions. As their versions of cer
tain scenes differ (most markedly in the bedroom scene),
the spectator at times feels as though the visual elements
of the film are the result of some kind of mental battle
between X and A as they try to force their version onto the
screen. And yet the subjective camera has a life beyond
their perceptions. The camera does not always show what
X, the principal narrator of the film, describes. The
subjective camera provides the context of Marienbad, a
structure that exists even beyond X's fantasies of "last
year."
The camera, with its rotations, its agitations, its
singling out of partial conversations and glimpses of life
in the salons, casino, shooting gallery, establishes the
shifting and yet stable and untouched world of Marienbad.
The spectator, in a sense, feels that his/her senses and
perceptions are at the mercy of the subjective camera more
obviously than in films where the plot and characters are
more predictable and traditional.
One key to the spatial manipulation of the film is
the importance of inanimate objects in expressing the psy
chological landscape of the film. The statues in the gar
den, the twisting hallways of the hotel adorned with heavy
113
decoration, the changing decor of A's bedroom, at times
stark and barely furnished, at times opulently decorated
depending on the version of the recollection or fantasy,
the line of men firing in the shooting gallery. All of
these things lack human expression but their position in a
frame, their relative importance in the camera's focus,
their distortion or clarity, all give clues to the tone
of a scene or the state of mind of X or A. For example,
near the end of the film when X has almost convinced A,
a series of shots .are shown representing the same images
that have chiefly occupied the screen during the course of
Marienbad: the garden, the bedroom, the hotel, etc.:
Sudden change of shot: X mounting a hotel
staircase, monumental and empty...
And then comes the bedroom again, but as it
was before the proliferation of the orna
ments; all the supplementary accessories
have vanished... After a few seconds, A looks
up toward the mirror, her eyes fixed on the
camera through the mirror. Her face is sud
denly agonized.
The shot immediately changes: A is still in
the same position and setting, but not seen
in the mirror...
* » •
X appears in the foreground, seen from be
hind. Rather swift and brutal rape scene...
Fade. A long, deserted corridor down which
the camera advances quite rapidly. The
lighting is strange; very weak on the whole,
with certain lines and details violently
emphasized.
Long, labyrinthine trajectory— continuous
or at least giving the impression of contin-
114
uity. Same darkness, same effects of light.
There is no one left in the entire hotel.
X's voice; No, no, no! (violently) That's
wrong... (calmer;) It wasn't by force...
Remember... For days and days, every night...
All the rooms look alike.... But that room,
for me, didn't look like any other.... There
were no more doors, no more corridors, no
more hotel, no more garden.... There wasn't
even a garden any more.
Finally the camera comes out onto the garden
at night...(pp. 146-149)
In this sequence, it is as if X is' weary, he wants
this to end; "There were no more doors, no more corridors,
no more hotel," but his mind cannot turn off its fantasies
or memories. Or, perhaps, A's fantasies at this point
perpetuate the images. We are not sure, but the rape
scene represents some kind of culmination of X or A's fan
tasies (perhaps one of their worst fears), and after it is
over the film winds to its conclusion of the two of them
leaving together. In any case, the camera shapes the
rhythm of the film by its cuts and fades between images,
by its dwelling on an expression (as in A's face looking
terrified) in close-up and then returning to pan the hotel
or garden. This switching from the human acts or thoughts
of A and X to the physical presence of the hotel or garden
intertwines the setting with their fantasies until the set
ting becomes alive too, just as indicative of an emotion
or thought as their facial expressions or words. Often,
115
the background is much more expressive as X or A, and the
other actors, wear dreamlike expressions, nonfocused and
unemotional.
The spatial movement of the film establishes character
and mood and the parameters of the events in a distinctly
cinematic way. In fiction, this effect can be attempted
with an omniscient, objective narrator who switches quickly
from objective description to objective description. But
the effect is not the same. The reader does not engage in
the process of the fades and dissolves in the same way that
he can in watching the images on film. The peculiar, dis
jointed effect of Marienbad's visual images, their flow
and yet inconsistency, creates a mental landscape that is
elemental, wordless, made up of gesture and not necessarily
cognitively explainable. That process can be approximated
by the cinema, but not the novel.
The manipulation of objects adds to the viewer's uncer
tainty about what is past and what is present, what is fan
tasy and what is actuality. For example, A looks at a
photograph album in her bedroom. X has told her that he
took a picture of her in the garden last year, that the
photo should provide proof of their time together. She
drops the book and a picture falls out of it. It is, as
X said, of her'in a garden. As she looks at it, the photo
graph begins to grow and fills the screen
116
so that it is no longer evident that it
is a candid snapshot. It is, moreover,
a real shot and no a stationary photo
graph, but since A remains motionless in
it, it is scarcely (or not at all) appar
ent that the image is animated.(p. 127)
The juxtaposition of images in Marienbad approximates
the movement of the mind. Unlike in fiction where time
moves in scene (normal time), summary (speeded up time),
and description (slowed down time), Marienbad exists to
tally in the present tense, in scene. But "normal time"
does not exist as the scenes are visualized perception and
their rate, their focus, their spatial dimensions and move
ment, changes and jumps in time and space as does the per
ception of the mind.
Implications of Marienbad for Chamber Theatre
Last Year at Marienbad has particular value for cham
ber theatre in its successful integration of physical and
psychological realities; the exterior representation of
events merges with the interior states of the characters
to form one perceptual landscape. As much modern and con
temporary fiction attempts to capture the subjective view
point of its characters and views events as a process sub
ject to change depending on the subjective perceptions of
the reader, a study of Marienbad offers possibilities for
staging psychological fiction.
In many first person or stream-of-consciousness narra-
117
tives (for example, in works by Virginia Woolf, Tillie Ol
sen, William Faulkner, Michael Butor), as in Marienbad, the
validity or truth of a major character's viewpoint is unim
portant. Of greater relevance is the process of thought
and the unveiling of the inner life of the characters.
Marienbad represents an attempt to capture the pure form of
recollection, dream, and fantasy. All perceptions have
equal validity? reality takes on the shape of human per
ception.
Implications for chamber theatre that can be drawn
from a study of Marienbad include: 1) creating a context
that reflects the tone and point of view of the story or
novel by integrating details-.-of sound, lighting, staging,
and rhythm of language— to create a psychological land
scape; 2) incorporating the idea of the subjective camera
into the narrator of a chamber theatre production; and 3)
employing cinematic transitions to capture the flux and
process of time.
Marienbad blends tone and narrative into its context
by visualizing an environment that symbolizes the thoughts
and fantasies of its characters. The details of the ornate
hotel and gardens represent an exterior labyrinth that mir
rors the interior one existing inside the characters' heads.
In a chamber theatre production of a psychological piece
of fiction, set pieces, props, and lighting can be manipu
118
lated to create a physical context that builds on the men
tal one of the characters.
For example, in Tillie Olsen's short story, "I Stand
Here Ironing," the mother irons in the present while she
flashes back to the past to explain her daughter Emily's
behavior, the conditions of Emily's childhood, and the
resultant mother-daughter relationship. The act of ironing
has little to do with the story other than provide a vehi
cle for the mother's reflections and symbolize how tied
she is and has been to constant duties and her domestic
burden. Certain things fill the past— continual poverty
and hard work, the Depression, her daughter's loneliness,
the mother's guilt for having neglected her daughter
(through circumstance);which carries over into the present.
The exterior world then should express this inner guilt
and despair over the past. One way would be to manipulate
objects, creating distorted or out-sized set pieces that
represent her drudgery and lack of time for the emotional
aspects of her life--objects like enormous abstract house
hold items, even a clock without hands, posters depicting
scenes from the Depression, a large portrait of Emily as a
sad, wistful child. If the pieces were arranged so that
they occupied different stage areas and could be sat upon,
stood on, or walked through, they would aid in providing
a physical link to various areas of her psychological past
119
that the characters could literally move through.
Walking into a different stage area dominated by a
specific set piece could provide a metaphorical "close-up"
of that state of mind similar to how a film achieves focus
through montage. Lighting that singles out a stage area
and the use of colored gels to further emphasize emotional
tone could be combined with music and sound cues to repli
cate her mental process surrounding a particular era.
Echoes of certain sounds and lighting effects could be
orchestrated to provide a rhythm for her thoughts and pro
vide a bridge between past and present. Her movement on
the stage, the positioning and focusing (through lighting)
of the set pieces, sound and music all would provide a con
text inseparable from the content of the story.
In addition, the idea of the subjective camera could
be incorporated into the narrator's role to further exter
nalize the inner life of the characters. As this particular
story has a first person narrator, most likely two or per
haps three selves of the mother could narrate the action,
one in the present and one or two in the past. Not only
could the movement of the narrators provide for a movement
of her thoughts through time by emulating the "tracking,"
"panning," and "travelling" shots as well as long and close
focus on stage areas, characters, or props, but they would
orchestrate connections between past recollections by using
120
a "reverse angle" shot and a "metaphorical dissolve."
In the story the mother often comments on the public
Emily— -the happy, carefree "clown" who makes the other high
school students laugh— and the private Emily— withdrawn,
shy, deprived of attention in her early years. The reverse
angle shot often shows two different perspectives of the
same scene in cinema. In this production the lights could
come up on one stage area, showing Emily in school. She
and other students could be facing forward towards the
audience, lights focusing on Emily, who steps out from the
group, alone, withdrawn, and isolated. The lights could
then focus on another stage area showing the same scene
from the: rear. This time Emily and the students have their
backs to the audience. Emily again gets up and stands
apart as she did in the previous scene, but this time she
turns around, facing her classmates and begins to perform
for them. The juxtaposition of the two sequences shows
both sides of Emily's personality— and the physical transi
tion of the reverse angle shot mirrors her transition to
her other self.
The metaphorical dissolve works in film by juxtaposing
two common inages, their union creating a symbolic meaning.
In "I Stand Here Ironing," the relationship between Emily's
"difficult" personality and the mother's concern for her
could be shown by this kind of dissolve. For example, in
121
the previous sequence where Emily stands isolated, facing
the audience, the mother in the present could be looking
at a photograph album as she thinks about Emily. With the
lights cutting from the mother's anxious face studying
one photo (presumably of Emily), to Emily's face as she
stands alone, the photograph effectively "dissolves" into
the actual Emily, thus linking mother and daughter in the
present with her thoughts of the past. The union of the
two faces, the mother's worried and Emily's expressing
loneliness, creates a metaphor for the isolation each
feels, as well as making vivid the mother's guilt and
concern for her daughter.
The use of montage in Marienbad to capture the elusive
ness of time and its lack of linear relevance in how the
mind experiences emotion and perception can be transformed
for chamber theatre. In Tillie Olsen's story, the mother's
mind jumps and skips through the past and connects with her
present perceptions. Her thoughts about Emily and herself
follow no linear pattern. As in Marienbad, the form is
cyclical. Her point of departure is concern for her daugh
ter as she performs the task of ironing. After experien
cing her thoughts and feelings for an undetermined period—
as in Marienbad her experience is structured only by the
"running time" of the short story— she returns wholly to
the present and to her ironing still concerned with her
122
daughter's future. Her conversation with herself has no
final - quality— she very probably has had it before and
will again in the future. And it has no definiteness in
time; the entire episode may have flashed through her con
sciousness in a few moments or in many.
As in Marienbad, then, the process of time must be
represented in all its perceptual uncertainties: the
viewer of the chamber theatre experiences her recollections
without being able to structure them into a beginning,
middle, or end. The repetition of key images showing the
range of her mind as she focuses on past images, and the
establishment of the flux of her thoughts in time (we only
know she's thinking this when her daughter is 19) are both
important in representing her thought process.
In staging ,the movement of her thoughts Lin time can
be made immediate and yet nonparticularized (to show that
her reflections are part of a whole mental process and not
just one moment in time) by dividing her thoughts into
several narrators. Just as the subjective camera in Mari
enbad focuses on objects with various movements (sometimes
panning smoothly, occasionally rotating to show many angles,
sometimes appearing agitated), the narrators, each focused
upon individually through lighting, can recollect individ
ual instances with various emotional tones, tempos, etc.
in different stage areas. The "crosscutting" between these
123
different voices and physical presences and areas empha
sizes that each thought— while it occurs— appears to have
the same impact and immediacy as the one before or after
it and also emphasizes by the discontinuity of the personae
that the thoughts are not linked chronologically but asso-
ciatively. The whole story is one large "associative
sequence" and the manipulation and focus on certain key
objects mentioned earlier will provide a physical metaphor
for her thoughts.
As the image of Emily as isolated and unhappy reappears
throughout the story as does the image of the mother as
overworked, trapped, and regretful, these images could be
repeated throughout the production to tie her thoughts to
gether and emphasize the cyclical, associative rather than
ordered, process of memory. Actors playing Emily and her
mother could emulate a "freeze the frame" effect by assum
ing certain postures as transitions between memories to
capture the central significance that the thoughts revolve
around. By using a "split screen" device, certain images
could be juxtaposed to show the simultaneity of the mind's
process: two sequences could be pantomimed using the mul
tiple narrators while a voice-over or onstage narrator
described a related (or even contrasting) memory, allowing
the spectator to experience the effect of the mind's juxta
posing various or unrelated aspects of an event.
124
Summary
Last Year at Marienbad displays a blend of cinematic
and literary considerations as a film that can apply to the
staging of psychological fiction. While Marienbad has not
the verbal complexities of fiction, the complex camera
movement revealing the intricate details of people, objects,
and events has a similar flavor: the context and perspec
tive take on the complexities of language. Its handling
of time and space, its complex narrative structure, and its
replication of mental process and perception poses cine
matic solutions for staging problems arising in fiction
that shares similar psychological processes.
Marienbad’s blending of physical and mental realities,
its creation of a context that mirrors the labyrinthine
content and situation, and its capturing of the states of
dream and fantasy, achieves a merging of content and form.
Techniques taken from this film--the repetition of key
images, the manipulation of objects, the subjective camera,
the reverse angle shot, the metaphorical dissolve, cross
cutting and others— have value for chamber theatre as it
seeks to symbolize or physicalize complex, interior states,
either of characters or the form of the material itself.
125
NOTES
1 Alain Robbe-Grillet, Last Year at Marienbad (New
York: Grove Press, Inc., 1962) p. 9. All further refer
ences to this work appear in the text.
Jacques Brunius, "Every Year xn Marienbad," from
The Renaissance of the Film, ed. Julius Bellone (New York:
Macmillan Co., 1970) p. 131.
3 Julius Bellone, The Renaissance of the Film (New
York: Macmillan Co., 1970) p. 127.
4 Brunius, p. 132.
3 Bruce Kawin, Mindscreen (Princeton: Princeton Uni
versity Press, 1978) p. 82.
6 Kawin, p . 84.
? Kawin, p. 81.
8 Wolf Rilla, The Writer and the Screen (New York:
William.Morrow and Co., 1974) p. 100.
9 Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York:
Scribner's Sons, Inc., 1953) p. 264.
126
CHAPTER V
THE LIME TWIG: ANALYSIS AND STAGING
John Hawkes' novel. The Lime Twig, blends memory with
the present, fantasy with actuality, symbol and archetype
with commonplace detail. As in his other novels (i.e. The
Blood Oranges, Second Skin, Travesty) he creates situations
out of the dreams and pasts of his characters. In The Lime
Twig, their dreams come to life with the inevitability and
vividness of nightmare.
The novel has relevance for a study exploring the rela
tionship of cinema to the adaptation and staging of fiction
because of its use of cinematic transitions and narrative
devices, and its particular challenges for performance.
hs in Last Year at Marienbad and much psychological fiction,
the complex narrative structure, the plot with its psycho
logical motivations and symbolic content, and the use of
time and space pose the problem of visualizing for an audi-
snce a mental landscape as well as a physical one, of creat
ing a world bound by its own laws of space, time, and ac
tion. This chapter summarizes the novel, discusses its
point of view, symbolic form, and time and space, and offers
127
after each section an application of cinematic concepts to
the adaptation and staging of this particular work, concepts
that can be generalized to other works of fiction.
The Lime Twig opens with a monologue by William Hen-
cher, an aging bachelor who lives in Dreary Station with a
young couple, Michael and Margaret Banks. He tells of his
years of living in poverty with his mother, of whom he took
care devotedly. After she died from burns sustained in a
fire in their flat, the flat was taken over (years later)
and restored by the Banks. Renting from them brings Hen
cher's life full circle; the curiosity and devotion he once
felt for his mother, he now feels for the Banks.
The opening sequence establishes Hencher's voyeurism,
his dependency upon viewing others for a sense of intimacy.
He absorbs the inner glimpses of other people's lives rather
than living his own, as when he uses Margaret and Michael's
toilet articles, or brings them breakfast early in the mor
ning, so that he can watch them while they sleep. He says:
"Love is a long close scrutiny like that. I loved Mother
in the same way."1 Love and life are not involvement, but
observation, fantasy, dream. The end of the first chapter
sums up Hencher's life:
But red circles, giving your landlord's
bed a try, keeping his flat to yourself
for a day--a man must take possession of
a place if it is to be a home for the wait
ing out of dreams. So we lead our lives,
128
keep our privacy in Dreary Station, spend
our days grubbing at the rubber roots,
pausing at each other's doors. I still fix
them breakfast now and again and the cheru
bim are still my monument. I have my billet,
me memories. How permanent some transients
are at last.
I hear Michael in the bath, I whet Margar
et's knives. Or it is 3 or 4 a.m. and I
turn the key, turn the knob, avoid the
empty goldfish bowl that catches the glit
ter off the street, feel the skin of my
shoes going down the hallway to their door.
I stand whispering our history before that
door and slowly, so slowly, I step behind
the screen in my own dark room and then, on
the edge of the bed and sighing, start peel
ing the elastic sleeves off my thighs. I
hold my head awhile and then I rub my thighs
until the sleep goes out of them and the
blood returns. In my own dark room I hear a
little bird trying to sing on the ledge where
the kidneys used to freeze.
Smooth the pillow, pull down the sheets for
me. Thinking of Reggie and the rest of them,
can I help but smile?
I can get along without you, Mother.(pp.17-28)
Hencher sells Michael Banks on the idea of helping to
steal a race horse, Rock Castle. Michael's fantasy has
always been the image of a horse; he dreams of a violent
destiny linked with the power and beauty of a stallion.
Hencher and Banks join a gang of professionals: Larry,
Little Dora, Sparrow, Needles, Sybilline Laval, Thick.
Registering the horse in Michael's name, the gang uses him
as a front.
As the horse is being unloaded at the stables, Hencher
129
dies violently, kicked to death by Rock Castle in his van.
When Michael discovers the body, he knows that his life has
irrevocably changed, that he has joined in a complicity that
will bring him to his destiny:
Together they will bury Hencher with
handfuls of straw, bolt the doors, wipe
their hands, and for himself there will be
no cod at six, no kissing her at six, no
going home’ — not with Hencher kicked to
death by the horse. And forward in the dark
the neck is lowered and he sees the head
briefly as it swings sideways at the level
of the front hoofs with ears drawn back and
great honey-colored eyes floating out to
him.(p. 67)
From the occurrence of Hencher's death, Hawkes weaves
his story in the form of a growing nightmare. Michael
finds himself kept under close tabs by Larry’s mob. He
summons Margaret to join him, only to have them kidnap her
and keep her bound in a cheap room. Cowles, the man who
was with Hencher when he died (the horse's trainer), is
found with his throat slit in the baths. Margaret is
beaten to death. Until the race, the Golden Bowl, the mob
keeps Michael, their cover, occupied. Sybilline Laval se
duces him during a night of revelry, the last night before
the running of the race. A man out of control of his own
life, Michael finds himself the victim of his fantasies:
the owner of a race horse, satiating himself with women and
pleasure, always conscious of disaster approaching.
On the day of the race, Michael breaks away from the
130
mob and stops the race in progress, throwing himself in the
path of Rock Castle. As the horse runs over him, crushing
him, the race is disrupted and the horses too crash to the
ground. The mob quietly slips away. The novel ends with
the police discovering Hencher*s body under a pile of straw
in the stable, anonymous, the victim of unknown causes, of
unknown motives.
Point of View in The Lime Twig
Three narrators tell Hawkes' story: 1) Hencher, in
the first chapter, speaks a monologue; 2) Sidney Slyter,
a columnist, begins each chapter with a column that fore
shadows the action to come in the chapter; and 3) a third
person omniscient narrator penetrates into the minds of
the major characters, chronicling the story after Hencher's
opening chapter.
Like Hawkes* novel, Travesty, in which a man drives
his racing car with its occupants to a certain and prede
termined death, The Lime Twig moves steadily into a night
mare that seems inescapable and inevitable. The narrative
structure of the novel continually reminds the reader of
coming events: Sidney Slyter announces both his suspicions
of what is to come and actual events that occur in each
chapter. The dreams of the characters themselves, as chron
icled by the omniscient narrator, describe their eventual
destinies.
131
The violent dream serves as a metaphor for the novel
as a whole and provides plot and narrative structure, as
the characters' dreams become reality and destroy them.
For example, Michael's dreams of a horse foreshadow,his
eventual destruction under Rock Castle's hoofs;
Knowing how much she feared his dreams:
knowing that her own worst dream was one
day to find him gone, overdue minute by
minute some late afternoon until the inex
plicable absence of him became a certainty;
knowing that his own worst dream, and best,
was of a horse which was itself the flesh of
all violent dreams; knowing this dream, that
the horse was in their sitting room— he had
left the flat door open as if he meant to
return in a moment or meant never to return— 1
seeing the room empty except for moonlight
bright as day and, in the middle of the
floor, the tall upright shape of the horse
draped from head to tail in an enormous
sheet that falls over the eyes and hangs
down stiffly from the silver jaw; knowing
the horse on sight and listening while it
raises one shadowed hoof on the end of a
silver thread of foreleg and drives down
the hoof to splinter in a single crash one
plank of that empty Dreary Station floor;
knowing his own impurity and Hencher's
guile; and knowing that Margaret's hand has
nothing in the palm but a short life span
(finding one of her hairpins in his pocket
that Wednesday dawn when he walked out into
the sunlight with nothing cupped in the lip
of his knowledge except thoughts of the night
and pleasure he was about to find)— knowing
all this, he heard in Hencher's first ques
tion the sound of a dirty wind, a secret
thought, the sudden crashing in of the plank
and the crashing shut of that door.(pp. 33-34)
Hencher and Michael share their fascination and dreams
about the horse, are lured into the plot to steal Rock Cas
tle by their fantasies, and not coincidentally, die similar
132
violent deaths under the horse's hoofs. On the boat as
they go to steal the horse, Hencher remarks on the horse's
ancient and heroic past:
Power, endurance, a forgotten name—
do you see it, Mr. Banks? He's ancient,
Rock Castle is, an ancient horse and he's
bloody well run beyond memory itself.... (p. 39)
In Michael's dreams the power of the horse, its destructive
hoofs, Margaret's short life span, are all tied together
and all become the substance of his waking life.
Hawkes' beginning the novel with Hencher's monologue
creates a strong reader identification with that character.
Because it's told by Hencher, the first chapter stands out
uniquely: it has a different style and flavor. It also
creates some dissonance with the reader because after set
ting up such a strong identification, Hencher becomes the
first victim in the novel's series of violent events. And
yet Hencher provides a frame for the events of the book.
It is through his eyes that we first see the seamy sides of
the city, of the world of poverty, greed, and crime that
underlie the environment of the book. Hencher introduces
the pattern of personal isolation that afflicts most of his
characters. We get Hencher1s images of his life with his
mother, of the blackened city during the war after the
bombing, of his voyeurism. One scene in which he describes
his sitting in an abandoned fighter plan illustrates his
fantasies of masculine power and sexuality, belonging to an
________________________________________________________________133
arena that represents action and achievement--neither of
which he ever participated in. As he tries on the helmet
in the cockpit, addressing Reggie's Rose (the female figure
drawn on the aircraft) he says:
"How's the fit, old girl?" I whispered.
"A pretty good fit, old girl?" And I
turned my head as far to the right as I
was able, so that she might see how I—
William Hencher-— looked with my bloody
coronet in place at last.(p. 23)
As Hencher opens the novel, introducing its themes of
loneliness, lovelessness, powerlessness, a yearning for
the past and future characterized by a feeling of dissatis
faction with the present, he closes it too. Although he has
been dead since early in the novel, the final scene shows
him discovered— a corpse--under the straw. The discovery
completes the book's cycle— Hencher dies alone, unheralded,
forgotten. His dreams, and the dreams of Michael and Mar
garet Banks, have turned to ashes.
Unlike the intimate and somewhat pathetic voice of
Hencher,the voice of Sidney Slyter, the columnist at the
onset of each chapter, resembles his name. Sly, safe, and
invulnerable, Slyter is part private eye, part journalist,
part soothsayer. Although his column is brief, it has
great impact on the tone of the book. In contrast to the
lyrical and detailed voice of the third person narrator,
Slyter's voice is breezy, cynical, and shrewd. His obser
vations are often flippant but penetrating, and his know-
134
ledge distances his from the action. Consequently, he seems
untouchable, invulnerable; his voice frightens us because
he seems to know the future: he has already seen the fate
of those who surround Rock Castle.
As suspense builds throughout the novel by the slow
movement toward inevitable destruction, Slyter contributes
in a pointed way to the mounting danger the reader feels.
At the beginning of Chapter 5, his column previews the death
of Rock Castle's trainer, Cowles, heightening the precari
ousness of Michael Banks' position:
SIDNEY SLYTER SAYS
Mystery Horse's Odds Rise Suddenly...
Rock Castle's Trainer Suffers Gangman's
Death...
Marlowe's Pippet: The Youngster Can
Scoot...
...my great pleasure in announcing that I
have sent five pounds, as promised, to one
Mr. Harry Bailey, Poor Petitioners, Cock &
Crown, East End. Mr. Bailey, carter by
trade, suggests that in his own words, "The
horse will win...." There's a tip to make
Sidney Slyter quake, there's one for your
pals I Dead, alive, uncertain of age, uncer
tain of origin, suspected ownership— victory
these things say to our reader in East End I
...Eddie's just the boy for checking files...
And this is a new development: officials here
have made it known that T. Cowles, of undesir
able character and listed as trainer of Rock
Castle, has been stabbed to death by members
of a gang to which the victim belonged. And
Sidney Slyter says queer company for Mr. Banks?
Queer and dangerous? Fellow who operates the
135
lift said Mrs. Laval was not available
tonight; stepped out for dancing and bit
ters with a friend, he said. So Sidney Slyter
can sit in the pub with the constable, or go
throw dirty dice in the lane. But cheer up,
cheer up, Eddie will be through to your Sidney
Slyter soon....(pp. 109-110)
When Slyter says things like, "There's a tip to make
Sidney Slyter quake...," it has a ring of insincerity. But
the effect is to build suspense, for while Sidney is un
touchable, Michael and Margaret Banks and the victims of
Larry's gang'— in this case, Cowles— are vulnerable.
Slyter's voice becomes increasingly frightening as one-
by-one his predictions come true. The omniscient narrator
describes things both vividly and yet incompletely, and
the contrast of Slyter's brief remarks with the slow, sur
realistic and certain progression of the third person nar
rator becomes more sharp, more frightening as the book
develops.
The third person narrator who tells most of the story,
like Hencher and Slyter, also predicts and foreshadows
events. When Margaret leaves her flat to meet her husband
in Highland Green, the narrator describes her youth and
innocence, intertwining it with the fate that surely awaits
her:
An hour later she locked the flat, went
down the stoop, signaled a high-topped
taxicab to carry her to the train at Dreary
Station. Hurrying she gave no thought to
people on the streets. She was a girl with
136
a band on her finger and poor handwriting,
and there was no other world for her. No
bitters in a bar, slick hair, smokes, no
checkered vests. She was Banks' wife by the
law, she was Margaret, and if the men ever
did get hold of her and go at her with their
truncheons or knives or knuckles, she would
still be merely Margaret with a dress and a
brown shoe, still be only a girl of twenty-
five with a deep wave in her hair.(pp. 69-70)
A short time later, in one of the most disturbing scenes in
the book, Margaret is truncheoned to death by Thick, one
of Larry's gang.
Unlike either Hencher's or Slyter's voices, which are
highly idiosyncratic, the omniscient narrator describes
events dispassionately but in detail, as if he is telling
them from a great emotional distance but in physical
close-up. He treats all events with the same interest and
detail and in the case of violent events, adds to the
reader's horror by his dispassionate tone.
The narrator of The Lime Twig can be called cinematic
in the mode of his telling. As in cinema, he presents only
selected detail, tells events in ellipsis, cutting in a
series of close and medium shots to various particulars
surrounding an incident. This partial visualization shocks
often more than a complete picture of the scene, adding to
the surrealistic, slightly-hazy quality of the sequences.
As in a nightmare, the lack of clarity, the feeling of
being a helpless victim affected by events that seem real
and yet vague, adds to the terror of the dreamer.
137
An example of the ellipsis technique can be found in
the description of Margaret's beating:
Then he came at her with the truncheon
in his hand— it made her think of a bean
bag, an amusement for a child— and wearing
only his undervest and the trousers with
the top two buttons open. He was in his
stockinged feet and cigarette smoke was still
coming out of his nose. She could see the
dial of the little dry-cell radio in his
glasses.
Then something happened to his face. To
the mouth, really. The sour sweat was there
and the mouth went white, so rigid and dis
tended that for a moment he couldn't speak;
yet all at once she knew, knew well enough
the kinds of things he was saying— to him
self, to her— and in the darkness and hearing
the faint symphonic program, she was suddenly
surprised that he could say such things.
His arm went up quivering, over his head with
the truncheon falling back, and came down
hard and solid as a length of cold fat stripped
from a pig, and the truncheon beat into her
just above the knee... It made a sound like
a dead bird falling to empty field. Once he
stopped to increase the volume of the radio....
(pp. 127-129)
The narrator gives us the thoughts and feelings of such
characters as Larry, Michael, and Margaret, but always from
a distance. The emotional reaction one has to the book
stems not from the narrator's impassioned language or tone,
but rather from the lack of it, from the horror arising out
of watching the characters moving, trapped, toward their
own destruction.
The three narrators in The Lime Twig shape the narra
tive structure into a layered effect, each showing a dif-
138
ferent level of involvement, yet each integrating to pro
vide the unusual tone of the book: dreamlike, intense,
mysterious, detached and yet involving. The sense of in
evitability, of action that cannot be reversed, character
izes each narrative voice.
In staging the narration, a chamber theatre director
would have to handle differently Slyter as narrator from
the third person narrator. As Slyter does not interact
directly with any of the characters (with the exception of
Sybilline whom he says he is constantly attempting to meet
for drinks and information), his voice must pervade the pro
duction but not the action. And unlike Hencher or the
third person narrator, all of Slyter*s columns and there
fore remarks are public.
As Slyter previews the action in each chapter, height
ening suspense by creating premonitions in the reader, he
could be portrayed effectively in. voice-over fashion, nar
rated in an eccentric voice, with the lights focusing on a
screen on which flashes of scenes to come appear. The
slides could include glimpses of his newspaper column:
"Freak Accident Halts Famous Race," "Rock Castle's Trainer
Suffers Gangman's Death," and shots of key sequences to
come. As the actors become familiar to the audience, and
their certain destiny approaches, the voice and slides
would become more ominous. Key phrases of Slyter1s could
139
be used as transitions, as sound bridges, to heighten sus
pense, like "The horse will win...." That phrase could echo
effectively after sequences as when Hencher is trampled or
Cowles is killed, and even ironically at the end when Rock
Castle lies in the turf upon the body of Michael Banks.
During the chapter where Hencher narrates, the narra
tion is the most intimate. The actor narrating the past
Hencher would closely interact with the Hencher in the pres
ent. In that first chapter we get the sense of Hencher as
journeying through time, and the use of the present narra
tor to emulate travelling shots, close-ups on past actions,
and camera pans over the expanse of time would highlight
that effect. When the past Hencher enacts certain scenes
in one stage area, a freeze and a form dissolve executed
with lighting could emphasize the fact that Hencher will
forever carry these memories with him, that his past and
present and future overlap intimately because of Hencher1s
voice. The narrator in the rest of the book must literally
stand away from the action in a way that the actors in the
Hencher section cannot.
Symbol and Archetype in The Lime Twig
The dream and nightmare, as has been mentioned, serve
as motifs throughout the; novel. Michael Banks' dreams of
the horse motivate him to get involved with the gang who
steal Rock Castle, and after that point he has no choice
140
or control over events. The tone and style of the novel
are surrealistic. Rock Castle embodies both the symbolic
horse of Michael's dream, and the mythic qualities of power
and timelessness. As Michael waits on the barge, he ob
serves around him:
The whistles died one by one on the
river and it was not Wednesday at all,
only a time slipped off its cycle with
hours and darkness never to be accounted
for. There was water viscous and warm
that lapped the sides of the barge; a
faint up and down motion of the barge which
he could gauge against the purple rings of
a piling; and below him the still crouched
figures of the men, and, in its moist alien
pit, the silver horse with its ancient head,
round which there buzzed a single fly as
large as his own thumb and molded of shin
ing blue wax.(pp. 49-50)
The horse, of uncertain age and grand ancient origins,
symbolizes the ultimate fantasy to Michael and Hencher as
well as the gang. To the gang, Rock Castle is the vehicle
toward triumph and wealth. To Michael he is an unattain
able object, representative of all he most fears and yet
desires, a harbinger of his fate. The above description
has a dreamlike quality consistent with the book. Michael
cannot really believe that the horse exists or that it
could be associated with him. Rock Castle represents time
itself. With his ancient lineage and present potential, he
links past and present and future. As the gang loads the
horse, Michael looks on:
He looked down upon the naked back, the joc-
141
key's nodding cap,the big man Cowles
and the knife stabbing at the ropes, un
til Cowles grunted and the three of them
pulled off the tarpaulin and he was staring
down at all the barge carried in its hold:
the black space, the echo of bilge and, with
out movement, snort, or pawing of hoof, the
single white marble shape of the horse, whose
neck (from where he leaned over, trembling,
on the quay) .was the fluted and tapering neck
of some serpent, while the head was an elong
ated white skull with nostrils, eye sockets
uplifted gracefully in the barge's hold—
Draftsman by Emporer's Hand out of Likely Cas
tle by Cold Masonry, Rock Castle by Castle
Churl out of Words on Rock by Plebian...
until tonight when he's ours, until tonight
when he's ours....(p. 49)
The entire movement of the horse from the barge seems
surreal, exaggerated, seen dimly as in a fog:
He stared down at the lantern-lit blue fly
and at the animal whose two ears were deli
cate and unfeeling, as unlikely to twitch as
two pointed fern leaves etched on glass, and
whose silver coat gleamed with the colorless
fluid of some ghostly libation and whose decor
ous drained head smelled of a violence that
was his own.(p. 50)
And as they wait upon the sea, the air appropriately hangs
heavy with fog. The image of the fog occurs often during
the novel and ties in with the motif of the dream. Fog
becomes a portent and a symbol of fate: it fills the air
on the night the horse is taken, Margaret notices it on the
train to Highland Green, Michael crawls about in the hot
fog of the steam room when Cowles is murdered. Michael
notices the fog on the fateful night of the taking of Rock
Castle:
142
Fog of course and he should have expected
it, should have carried a torch. Yet, what
ever was to come his way would come, he knew,
like this--slowly and out of a thick fog.
Accidents, meetings unexpected, a figure emerg
ing to put its arras about him: where to dis
cover everything he dreamed of except in a fog.
And, thinking of slippery corners, skin suddenly
bruised, grappling hooks going blindly through
the water: where to lose it all if not in
the same white fog.(pp. 44-45)
Fog provides a mystical quality, a thin veil for the events
of the story, a pervasive air of mystery and destiny. Both
the occurrence of dreams and of fog coincide with violent
images or violent acts. The two excerpts above exemplify
the connection: the horse whose head "smelled of a vio
lence that was his own" and the mention of "accidents...
a figure emerging to put its arms around him...skin sud
denly bru i sed. "
Another recurring image that ties in with destruction
and violence are those of war and its ruins and other mili
tary images. In the first chapter, Hencher talks about the
blackened city during the bombings that started fires
throughout the city, one of which claimed his mother's life.
Living near him at the time were a captain and a corporal,
who exemplify a wartime expediency and a reminder of the
military structure causing the fires. His fascination with
the grounded bomber establishes a connection between vio
lence and curiosity with the instruments of violence. Hen
cher survives unscathed; he observes the bombing and flames
143
from a distance. As he tries the equipment in the cockpit,
his voyeurism is obvious:
...I saw a palm-shaped cone of steel and
took it up... I looked at it, then lowered
my head and pressed my nose and mouth into
its drawn cup. My breath came free. The
inhalation was pure and deep and sweet. I
smelled tobacco and cheap wine, was breathing
out of the pilot's lungs, (p. 22)
As Michael looked back at land from the barge during
the kidnapping of Rock Castle, he noticed that "the spires
and smokestacks and tiny bridges of the city black as a
row of needles burned and tipped with red."(p. 41) The
images of war machinery, of the charred city, add to the
background of decay, corruption, and latent violence that
permeate the novel.
Interestingly, the war remains have an echo in Larry,
the mob leader, and while the remains harken to the past
and a sense of decay, Larry emerges as a victorious man of
the present and future. While his life is steeped in crime
and violence, he appears to be an archetypal hero, a super
man. The narrator consistently describes him as dressed
impeccably, his strong, well-muscled body and clean-featured
face warranting admiration. Dispassionate and always in
control, he can be cruel, but always for a calculated rea
son. He also has a strong sense of loyalty to his follow
ers.
Larry's seeming perfection, his flawless execution of
everything he does, makes him one of the most sinister
144
forces in the novel. His calm, careful violence seems
more frightening and horrible than violence that displays
hysteria and hence emotion. The first description we have
of him, when Margaret sees him from the train, focuses
on his size: "The man was big, heavy as a horse cart of
stone; there was not a wrinkle in his trenchcoat over the
shoulders, the chest was that of a boxer."(p. 73) Later,
as he stands with his cohorts, he is perfection amidst
the squalid surroundings:
All of them stared, and there was no
dirt on Larry's collar. Now Larry was in
the room, and even when drunk he could com
port himself. But he was not drunk, was
at the other extreme from the full bottle,
cognac preferred, which it took to make him
laugh. Stood straight as he did when pre
dicting, Larry who was an angel if any angel
ever had eyes like his or flesh like his.(p. 83)
Larry always carries arms, fitted with a sleek vest
of steel links and a shoulder weapon. He represents the
ultimate professional: accurate, dispassionate, precise
in his movements, never wasting a moment or a gesture.
When he ministers to the crippled Sparrow, he appears like
a dark angel of mercy, compassionate and patient;
As often as Sparrow fainted, Larry re
vived him. Whenever Sparrow could stand
on his feet no longer, whenever he went
down in the crooked swoon, helpless as when
he had first screamed from his bloody blan
kets— he had won a fiver from the kid of the
batallion only that sundown--Larry the angel,
the shoulder man, who later drowned the oper
ator of the half-track in a shell hole filled
with stagnant water and urine of the troops,
took him up in his arms as carefully and coolly
145
as a woman of long service.(p. 87)
Larry symbolizes the blend of distanced reality and the
stature of fantasy that so pervade the novel.
As Larry fills a position of the perfect masculine
specimen, Sybilline Laval represents an archetypal tempt1 -
ress: elusive, provocative, real but not substantial. Both
characters are distorted, surreal. The criminal and amoral
undersides of them both betray their physical perfection.
Sybilline seduces Michael. With her he is helpless; their
sexual bond enslaves him to the degree that his other fan
tasies— particularly those involving Rock Castle— have
enslaved him. When Michael first meets her in the pavil-
lion:
He looked at the tip of her tongue and
smelled the gin. Suddenly in the mist
of weak eyes, puffy shirts, wallets
stuffed with photographs of dead mothers
and home, and on his person carrying still
the clamminess, he found himself thinking
he could bear the crowds for this, and
felt his feet dragging, his fingers pres
sing white against the sticky metal of
the chair.
Only her eyes were left and Banks could
not frown at them. "I'm a married man,"
he said. But there was a waltz coming out
of the speaker, and she was laughing, twis
ting a curl the color of nail polish round
her finger.(pp. 98-100)
Margaret and Michael Banks, like Hencher, are victims
of their own wants and fantasies. The life the Banks have
together, the simple values they live by, are laughed away
146
by Sybilline Laval, unrecognized by Larry. Their naivete,
the simple love they have for one another, the routine they
follow, make them prey to the gang for whom such modest
virtues are merely trinkets to be shattered. Their life
together is fragile, their identities can be wiped away in
a moment. Sparrow and Thick go to their flat in Dreary
Station: "Thick was grinning because he always loved a
smashing." They loot the room and in a short time:
Bare walls, bare floors, four empty rooms
containing no scrap of paper, no figured
piece of jewelry or elastic garment, no
handwriting specimen by which the identity
of the former occupants could be known:
it was a good job, a real smashing; and at
dusk, on a heath just twenty miles from Al
dington, they stopped and dumped the contents
of the van into a quagmire round which the
frogs were croaking.(p. 102)
Their possessions destroyed, their wills and freedom of
movement controlled by the gang, Michael and Margaret can
only escape by dying, and it is clear from early on in the
novel that it is only a matter of time until they do.
The novel builds from a symbolic base. As in dreams,
where the characters are archetypal and symbolic rather
than realistic and events proceed surrealistically, de
tached and yet involving, The Lime Twig integrates the
dreams and fantasies of the characters into their lives with
nightmarish results.
In a chamber theatre production, the symbolic and
archetypal elements need to be integrated into the staging
147
to produce the surrealistic environment of the novel.
Realism, of action and setting, should l5e avoided. Besides
the dream symbolism, which is inherent in. the form of the
novel (and will be discussed in the time and space section),
Rock Castle embodies both the symbol of ultimate fantasy
and the subsequent key to actions and motivations. More
than a racehorse, he is mythical, ageless, belonging to no
time or place, too large to exist except in the imagination.
While the characters are nonrealistic also, they can at
least be portrayed as larger than life in the case of Larry
and Sybilline. The horse, however, cannot be represented
in any literal form. One solution would be to use a camera
zoom effect and picture parts of Rock Castle's body greatly
enlarged on a screen during sequences like the barge scene
where the gang unloads him and during the running of the
race itself. While Michael runs toward the stampeding hor
ses during the running of the Golden Bowl, for instance,
a brief flash of Rock Castle's enormous hoofs accompanied
by deafening sound, could add to the sense of impending
disaster. Other elements, like the fog, can achieve a
comparable symbolic effect to that of the novel by the use
of lighting. A particular-colored gel used to herald
violent sequences, like the killing of Cowles or Hencher,
could be used to transform the lighting cues into an
associative sequence, just as fog in the novel has associa-
148
tions of portent and disaster.
Manipulating objects can represent some of the arche
typal elements of the characters. The images of war ma-v
chines early in the novel are echoed in Larry's character
istic carrying of a gun, wearing a steel vest, and even his
appearance of strength, control, and invincibility. Just
as the use of slides exaggerating Rock Castle's size can
add to the surrealistic quality of the environment, large
posters or paintings depicting militaristic images and dis
torting mirrors in specific stage areas particularly asso
ciated with Larry would emphasize his superhuman facade
and visualize the distortions of his character.
As has been mentioned, much of the novel is narrated
in a cinematically elliptical style. This ellipsis tech- -
nique can work in staging by using selected details to
represent whole scenes. For example, the brutal scene of
Thick beating Margaret would lose effectiveness if it were
presented realistically on stage. Instead, selected de
tails can be used to create metaphorical dissolves, allow
ing the audience to create the whole in its imagination.
By employing lighting to focus on Thick in a frozen posi
tion with an upraised truncheon, quickly cutting to Mar
garet's inert figure, and then cutting the lights entirely
before bringing them up on a new scene, a metaphorical
dissolve is accomplished. Without having the scene visual-
149
ized for them, the audience would know what has occurred.
Time and Space in The Lime Twig
The events in The Lime Twig do not appear to have any
measurement in terms of days, weeks, or months. Rather, it
is as if a certain number of incidents must occur and then
the novel will end. This sense of inevitability, of events
proceeding to a predetermined end, supplies a psychological
awareness of time, not as an entity, but as a process that
occurs within the context of events.
Rock Castle embodies time in the novel. His own age
and origin are uncertain. As Hencher says: "he's bloody
well run beyond memory itself..." He existed subcon
sciously, in Michael's dreams, long before Michael ever
saw him. The story spins out according to the movements
of Rock Castle in many ways: from the time the gang steals
him, lives center around his function, to run in the Gol
den Bowl. And while time goes on after his collapse in the
race as he crushes Michael Banks, the circle of energy that
held the characters together and determined their motives
is forever broken. By then, time has literally run out
for Michael, Margaret, Hencher, and Cowles. The rest of
the gang slips away, only likely to reappear somewhere else.
Sidney Slyter also disappears after the race. Chapter
9 begins without him as the police discover Hencher's body.
_____ 150
As part of the movement toward predetermined events, his
function ends when the inevitable finally occurs. Slyter
exists above time: his knowledge extends beyond the ra
tional mind; he somehow knows the outcome of the events he
discusses. An example of Slyter's role as a bridge between
past and future can be found in his column at the beginning
of Chapter 6:
...Because Eddie Reeves came ringing
through my wires at 4 a.m. and what he
read me was an accolade proper for the
obituary of the King of the Turf: He's
run the Golden Bowl before, Sidney. Hear
me Sidney? Entered in the Golden Bowl three
times and three times the winner. Hear me
Sidney? Then the dates; then Eddie coughing
through the dawn; then the minutes of each
winning race. Then reading on:...Bred by the
Prince of Denmark, Sidney, bred by the Prince
and commanded to win by the Prince and ordained
to win by the Prince and forebears of that
1ine, too. And by his order— just to get the
royal stamp on him, Sidney— the King's own
surgeon transplanted a bone fragment from the
skull of Emporer * s Hand into Rock Castle1s
skull... The horse will win, Sidney, the horse
will win.... Rigid; fixed; a prison of heri
tage in the victorious form; the gray shape
that forever rages out. round the ring of
painted horses with the band music piping and
clacking; indomitable. And somebody knew this
already, and it wasn't Mr. Banks. But who?
Sidney Slyter wants to know: and Sidney Sly
ter wants to know what's the matter with Mr.
Michael Banks....(p. 124)
The frequent flashforwards used by all three narrators
merge the past, present, and future. The scenes of violence
and the fates of Margaret and Michael particularly are all
previewed, adding to the predominant tone of inevitability.
151
Within sequences, the time and space of actions have
the form of a dream. The details seem hazy, then suddenly
vivid. The description of a room or the setting for a con
versation are seen from long view, then close-up, then with
glimpses of only part of the scene. As Margaret thinks
when Thick is beating her: "For how many minutes'he had
kept it up, she did not know. Nor how long ago it was when
he started."(p. 129) Actual time has no importance: the
psychological impressions of time, both on the characters
involved and the reader of the book, are important. During
Michael Banks' last night alive, he has a series of sexual
encounters. The night seems endless and the picture we
have of him is the most vivid in the novel. As in a dream,
certain incidents stand out vividly and in great detail
while others pass by in a flash. The novel is constructed
like memory: the amount of time, the order of events, the
movement of objects through space are all less central to
the memory than..certain outstanding moments. Such moments,
the stealing of Rock Castle, Hencher and Cowles' deaths,
Michael with Sybilline, the running of the Golden Bowl,
are points existing beyond or above time, moments of clar
ity in the surrealistic movement of the novel.
The chief adaptation and staging difficulties of the
novel center around this inherent form of the dream. Much
of the novel, like Marienbad, occurs in the surreal land
scape of the mind; the key scenes represent the process of
152
perception. The following scene, the climactic moments of
the book during the running of the Golden Bowl, warrants
detailed analysis:
The blinders, the tongue tied down, the
silver neck sawing in stride; the riders
coming knee to knee with tangle of sticks
and the noise; dust, the dangerous dust,
rising high as a tall tree, and pebbles
flying out like shots. He put an arm
across his face, whispered Margaret, Mar
garet , and in the vacuum, the sudden silence,
heard no hoofs, no roar, but only the thwacking
of the crops and the clear voice of Jimmy
Needles: "Make way for the Prince of Den
mark. ..out of my path, St. James..." He knew
he must put a stop to it.
"You can't do thatI Grab him, for God's sake,
Charlie I"
But he was over the rail then and into the dust
at last. It was a long way to go--directly
across the track in the open sun— and he stum
bled, tried to hold the hat. He heard his
heart--far away a child seemed to be beating
it down the center of a street in the End--
heard the sound of air being sucked beneath
the spot where the constable had landed two
heavy blows, and his feet were falling upon
the same loose earth so recently struck by
iron.
• » •
Then he was on the green, splashed through an
artificial pond, ran headlong into roses and
hedges that came up to his shins. It was a
park, a lovely picture of a park with a mad
crowd down one edge and thirteen horses whir
ling round. His shoe came down on the blade
of a shears some gardener had overlooked.
He nearly fell. He would have to be fast, very
fast, to stop them now.
He heard his shoes snapping off the thorns
and trampling the grass, and yet he seemed only
to be drifting, floating across the green. But
it was a good run, an uphill run. The wind was
153
catching his saliva when suddenly he
veered round the man rising up between
the rose bushes with a pistol. He saw
the gunhand, the silencer on the barrel
like a medicine bottle, the quickness of
Sparrow's waist-high aim, and then felt
both shots approaching, overtaking him, go
ing wild. And he reached the third and final
fence, crawled through.
The green, the suspended time was gone. The
child pounded on his heart with anonymous rhy
thm and he found that after all he had been
fast enough. There were several seconds in
which to take the center of the track, to
position himself according to the white rails
on his right and left, to find the approach
ing ball of dust ahead and start slowly ahead
to encounter it. Someone fired at him from
behind a tree and he began to trot, shoes
landing softly, irregularly on the dirt. The
tower above the stands was a little Swiss hut
in the sky; a fence post was painted black; he
heard a siren and saw a dove bursting with air
on a bough. I could lean against the post,
he thought, I might just take a breath. But
the horses came round the turn then and once
more his stumbling trot was giving way to a
run. And he had the view that a photographer
might have except that there was no camera,
no truck's tailgate to stand upon. Only the
virgin man-made stretch of track and at one
end the horses bunching in fateful heat and
at the other end himself-— small, yet beyond
elimination, whose single presence purported
a toppling of the day, a violation of that
scene at Aldington, wreckage to horses and
little crouching men.
The crowd began to scream.
• • •
"...the blighter! Look at the little blighter
go! "
Quietly, holding the girl's arm in the midst
of the crowd: "Let me have the binoculars,
Sybilline."
• # •
"He's crossed us," whispered Sybilline, "he's
crossed us, hasn't he?"
154
Out beyond the oval and past the broken
threads of the rail the cloud stopped short
and rose, spending itself dark as an explosion's
smoke. Then Larry was done and Sybilline took
a look for herself: dust abruptly curling,
settling down, horses lying flat with reins in
the air, small riders limping among the ani
mals or'.in circles or off toward the fence.
And the silver horse was on its side with Banks
and Jimmy Needles underneath. And three dirty-
white Humber ambulances were racing up the
track.
"Take me out to him...take me out to him,
please."(pp. 168-171)
This scene represents the culmination of Michael’s
fantasy/nightmare. As he races to stop the race, he ful
fills his destiny and in essence frees himself from his role
of prisoner and victim of the gang in the only way he can—
by dying and destroying Rock Castle with him. During this
suspended moment in time, when his past and future meet
in the present, ingrained memories (of Margaret) and recent
events (the constable's assaulting him the night before)
assail him. As the whole sequence takes place as his per
ception, with certain glimpses of the crowd's reaction, the
following cinematic concepts can make vivid the staging of
the abstract: a split-screen effect, a form dissolve, sound
bridges, crosscutting, the associative sequence, and the
metaphorical dissolve.
The stage can be set with a large screen in the center.
A split-screen effect is achieved by having one side of
the stage occupied by the observers*— Larry, Sybilline, Lit
tle Dora, and anonymous watchers--with two narrators on the
155
other side. One narrator records Michael's external per
ceptions: "The blinders, the tongue tied down, the silver
neck sawing in stride...," while the other details his
inner perceptions: "He heard his heart'— far away a child
seemed to be beating it down..." Michael leaves the group
of observers on "But he was over the rail then..." and
joins the narrators. The split-screen effect emphasizes
the difference between Michael's perceptions of the race
and the observers' perceptions, and his psychological dis
tance from the gang. The split-screen continues while
Michael experiences the floating effect of the dream. Af
ter he crawls through the final fence and the narrator
says: "The green, the suspended time was gone..." he not
only runs in fantasy but in actuality and at that point,
the split-screen should end, and the stage becomes inte
grated once more.
Through lighting and focusing of action onstage, the
director can achieve crosscutting between Michael's dream
on one side of the stage and the "reality" of the other
side. For example, the appearance of the man with the
gun (Sparrow) should take place on Larry's side of the
stage and then cut to Michael's side with the narrator
describing how effortlessly he avoided the gunfire (in
Michael's floating, free-form run of the "dream".he is
indestructible).
156
The convergence of the present and Michael's thoughts
can be emphasized by using the form dissolve. For example,
early in the passage, when Michael stands with Larry and
Sybilline, the narrator says; "He put an arm across his
face, whispered Margaret, Margaret..." As the narrator
speaks, Michael looks at Sybilline and the lights empha
size her face. At the mention of Margaret, the lights
focus on the screen where Margaret's face flashes for an
instant, creating a form dissolve: the image of Sybilline,
the present scene, triggers the memory of Margaret and the
present dissolves into the past.
The entire sequence of Michael's running toward his
own destruction can be tied together by sound bridges. The
beating of Michael's heart, mentioned twice by the internal
narrator, the pounding of Rock Castle's hoofs, signalling
the inevitable ending, and the occasional plopping of
Michael's own shoes on the grass and turf, can be inter
mingled to create suspense and intertwine the present sus
pended moment with Michael's ultimate destiny.
In conjunction with the unifying effect of sound
bridges, an associative sequence can be created by the
appearance of Rock Castle's hoofs at intervals on the large
screen. His hoofs should gradually increase in size and
shift in position during these flashes and the final frame
should freeze with the hoofs shown head-on, hoofs raised
as if to trample.
The narrative long-shot at the end of the sequence,
where the scene details the end result of horses and men
crumpled on the track, can be heightened by use of a meta
phorical dissolve. The dissolve can be aided by sound cues:
the sound of Michael's heartbeats, which have been increas
ing in volume, suddenly cease while the sound of the horses'
galloping increases. The lighting cuts from the screen
where Rock Castle's hoofs are seen in a rearing position
(at this point the hoofbeats cease also) to Sybilline low
ering her binoculars, looking at Larry with a carefully-
blank expression, and the girl in the crowd saying; "Take
me out to him..." The combination of visual and auditory
focusing allows the audience to create the event themselves;
the images metaphorically dissolve into the realization
that Michael is dead.
Summary
The Lime Twig can be called a "cinematic" novel: the
pseudo-objective eye of the narrator as he visualizes
scenes in ellipsis, carefully selecting physical detail;
Sidney Slyter's column that resembles a voice-over narrator
in film, someone who has a special omniscience, who knows
events but is above them; its frequent use of cinematic
devices in the narration, like tracking shots, camera pans,
alternating close and long views of the action, crosscut-,
ting, etc. all blend cinematic and literary techniques
and form.
Structured around the form of the violent dream, the
characters are caught in a trap formed by their own fan
tasies and desires. The key challenges in adapting and
staging The Lime Twig center around capturing the surreal
istic form of the dream. In a chamber theatre production,
a director would have to: 1) preserve the contracts in
point of view between the voice of the third person narra
tor, Sidney Slyter, and the relatively brief segment narra
ted by William Hencher; 2) create the symbolic significance
of certain details and characters; and 3) dramatize the
surrealistic quality of the action as it occurs in time
and space. This chapter explores these three aspects of
the novel and suggests cinematic concepts and techniques
that can be employed to clarify and visualize more con
cretely the book’s abstractions and psychological process.
159
NOTES
John Hawkes, The Lime Twig (New York: New Direc
tions, 1961) pp. 8-9. All further references to this
work appear in the text.
160
CHAPTER VI
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
Modern fiction and modern cinema have related and yet
divergent aesthetic foundations. On this assumption this
study explored the relationship of cinema to fiction and to
the adaptation and staging of fiction in chamber theatre.
The study attempted to answer the following questions:
1. What is the relationship of cinema to. fiction and
hence to chamber theatre in the areas of language, time and
space, and point of view?
2. How is point of view handled in cinema and how can
cinematic concepts of narrative clarify staging of psycho
logical fiction in chamber theatre productions?
3. What cinematic techniques can be transferred to the
staging of chamber theatre and what specific functions can
they perform?
4. How can the study of a screenplay illuminate prob
lems of staging in chamber theatre?
5. What general principles can be stated for applying
cinematic concepts and techniques to the staging of modern
and contemporary fiction?
161
This chapter summarizes the answers to these questions,
proposes conclusions, and suggests implications based on
these questions.
Summary
Chapter II, Fiction and Film as Presentational Media,
covered the aesthetic foundations of cinema and fiction in
language, and time and space.
Fiction and film are essentially narrative forms. Al
though fiction is a linguistic medium and cinema is basic
ally a visual one, both proceed, in developing ideas, char
acters, setting or action, in scenes or episodes. Charac
terized by its realistic physical detail, and its immedi
ate impact on the viewer, the cinema excels at showing non
verbal experience. Its "language" consists of visual
images arranged to affect the viewer through editing and
montage. The spatial juxtaposition and movement of images
provides the rhythm, denotation, and connotation of film
language.
By contrast, fiction has less immediate and direct
sensory impact on the reader but has the potential for ren
dering abstraction, subtleties of behavior and psychologi
cal description. Language in fiction is more precise than
the language of film, and along with its linguistic com
plexity has the use of three verb tenses which can place
events specifically in time. Grammar and the process of
162
reading distance the reader from the flow of action in a
way that the visual language of film, proceeding in a con
stant present tense, cannot.
An art that flows in an uninterrupted process of move
ment, film excels at juxtaposition and montage, revealing
the relationships among objects, people, and events. On
the other hand, fiction can detail emotional and intellec
tual nuance, judgments, subtle gradations of feeling and
thought. Tied to its physical and external world (every
thing shown on the screen must first be photographed and
thus must exist in the physical world), the medium of cin
ema forces specificity. While language can be abstract,
the photograph requires a physical vehicle. Symbolic, meta
phorical thinking has more possibilities for expression in
fiction than in cinema.
As cinema is tied more firmly to the external "real"
world, it also is more bound to actual time than the novel.
Unlike fiction, which exists in three tenses, cinema
exists only in the present tense; the viewer experiences
each event as it happens on the screen; past, present, and
future are interwoven into one time process. This same
process in fiction must conform to the relative rigidity
of language. The past and future can merge into the pres
ent in a single fluid moment on film, while in fiction
grammar, syntax, and the linear nature of language itself
163
screens the process of events from the reader and interrupts
their flow.
The novel, however, has freedom to explore time with a
precision and license that film does not possess. Free from
physical time and place, the novel creates its own reality.
The novelist can halt time and minutely describe what would
normally be a fleeting emotion or thought. While film
attempts such detail through montage, it must find literal
picture equivalents to do so. While it may not capture
the flow of time as vividly as cinema, fiction can create
complex associations of thought, detail, and impression
too abstract for visual representation.
Cinema, then, excels in showing the process and pres
entness of time and in creating concrete spatial relation
ships. Fiction has control over the psychological details,
the inner life, of characters and events, and can manipu
late time, suspending it, and yet interweaving its abstract
levels in detail.
Chapter III, Chamber Theatre and the Narrative Struc
ture of Cinema, covers point of view in fiction, film, and
chamber theatre.
The lines between fiction and cinema have become
slurred. While the novel gave the cinema the concept of
narrative, cinema has altered the conventions of point of
view by its ability to move the camera to capture varying
depths and angles of vision. Borrowing concepts of showing
164
time and movement, the novel often uses cinematic transi
tions and techniques like "crosscuts," "camera zooms," and
"pans," "tracking shots," "form dissolves," "fades," etc.
Film, fiction, and chamber theatre share similarities
of narrative structure. Of special concern to this study
are the categories of omniscient narration, first person
narrator agents, and stream-of-consciousness narration.
Cinematic concepts and techniques can provide a means of
visualizing the complex layers of psychological motivation
and the inner life explored so extensively by the medium
of fiction, thus providing methods to adapt and stage psy
chological fiction.
In a chamber theatre production with an omniscient
narrator, the narrator can be handled similarly to the
camera in film. Like the camera, the narration is objec
tive and impersonal, projecting a style but not a specific
human personality. The narrator becomes a screen, a fil
ter, through which the audience perceives the reality of
the action; his/her movement can create "close-ups,"
"long" and "medium shots," "travelling" and "tracking
shots," and "camera pans" which focus in an interpretive
way, establishing the relative importance of stage areas,
events, and characters. Such "camera movement" emphasizes
the narrator as the controlling presence of the production.
Besides the already-mentioned "moving shots," the narrator
______165
could trigger other cinematic devices like "sound bridges,"
"dissolves," and an "associative sequence" to provide tran
sitions and clarity for a work like Dos Passos1 The 42nd
Parallel which integrates several literary styles to create
a multi-media effect.
In staging a narrator agent, the director is faced
with three main concerns: 1) creating the persona of the
storyteller; 2) maintaining the impression that all events
are shaped by the angle of vision of the narrator; and 3)
handling smoothly the time process inherent in first per
son narration. By dividing the narrator, as in Alice Wal
ker's "'Really, Doesn't Crime Pay?,'" into her past and
present selves and using the cinematic concept of "editing"
along with techniques like the "form dissolve" and "freezing
the frame," the director can dramatize the narrator's per
sonal vision and style, can clarify the movement of the
story in time, and preserve continuity between the past and
present visions of the narrator. Use of cinematic concepts
and techniques can make visual that which is purely percep
tual, make exterior an interior state of mind.
Stream-of-consciousness narration reveals the inner
life most completely of the traditional forms of narration.
Objectivity and the appearance of the narrator's craft are
stripped away and the intimate voice of the characters
remain. Staging this form of narration presents several
166
challenges: 1) achieving the simultaneity of the thought
process of the characters; 2) developing stage movement
that symbolically represents inner movements rather than
exterior states; and 3) making clear the rapid shifts of the
narrator in time, subject, and tone. Cinematic techniques
that promote the fluidity demanded by this form of narra
tion (for example, in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse)
are "crosscuts," a modified "split screen technique," and
"manipulating the surfaces of objects."
Use of cinematic concepts and techniques in chamber
theatre provides a means to capture the illusion of psy
chological process onstage, making vivid the processes of
thought and memory and providing spatial and temporal tran
sitions. The audience becomes witness to the unfolding of
the narrator's and the characters' perception and perspec
tive of events.
In Chapter IV, Literary and Cinematic Considerations
in Last Year at Marienbad, a screenplay was analyzed for
its combination of literary and cinematic forms and its
implications for chamber theatre.
Last Year at Marienbad, directed by Alain Resnais,
represents a cinematic landmark in the treatment of time
and in the creation of mental process and psychological
landscape. The screenplay, written by Alain Robbe-Grillet,
has relevance to chamber theatre for its merging of both
167
literary and cinematic narrative modes, its use of time
and space, and its creation of context. The film is useful
for the study of the transformation of media and the visual
izing of psychological perspective.
In Marienbad, past, present, and future blend into a
perceptual present. The two major characters, X and A,
have different recollections and fantasies of what actually
did happen last year at Marienbad and the viewer eventually
realizes that there may not have been a last year at all.
Reality has no place in Marienbad; individual perception
of reality instead forms the basis of action and reaction
in the film.
In its blending of physical and mental realities, its
creation of a context that mirrors the labyrinthine content
and situation, and its capturing of the states of dream and
fantasy, Marienbad achieves a merging of content and form.
Marienbad thus proposes staging possibilities for chamber
theatre: 1) creating a context that reflects the tone and
point of view of the story or novel by integrating details
of sound, lighting, staging, and rhythm of language to
create a psychological landscape; 2) incorporating the idea
of the subjective camera into the narrator of a chamber
theatre production; and 3) employing cinematic transitions
to capture the flux and process of time. Techniques from
the film, applied to Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing”
168
to visualize the inner landscape, include the "repetition
of key images," the "manipulation of objects," the "reverse-
angle shot," the "metaphorical dissolve," "crosscutting,"
and the concept of the "subjective camera."
Chapter V, The Lime Twig: Analysis and Staging, ana
lyzes a work of modern, psychological fiction, describes its
particular problems in staging, and uses cinematic concepts
and techniques to solve difficulties in staging point of
view, and time and space.
The Lime Twig, by John Hawkes, has relevance for a
study of cinema and chamber theatre because of its use of
cinematic transitions and concepts in narrative structure
and action, its psychological content, and its surrealistic
form. Centering around a group involved in the stealing of
a race horse, Rock Castle, and the coming of an important
race, the Golden Bowl, the novel is told through three
narrators. In the first chapter, William Hencher narrates
his story in the first person. After .chapter one, each
chapter begins with a column by Sidney Slyter, and continues
through an omniscient narrator. A chamber theatre director
of the novel would have to: 1) preserve the styles of each
narrator? 2) emphasize the symbolic significance of certain
characters, the horse Rock Castle, and the motifs of fog,
war, and nightmare? and 3) dramatize the surrealistic
quality of the action as it occurs in time and space.
169
Both Hencher and Slyter narrate in styles that are
personal and subjective. Slyter, however, is uninvolved
and untouched by the action of the novel. In contrast to
both, the omniscient narrator's voice has an impersonal,
objective style to a degree; like the camera, he is really
subjective, selecting details and describing them to create
a certain impact. Cinematic concepts of "voice-over narra
tion," and techniques like the "repetition of key phrases,"
"sound bridges," "form dissolves," and "moving shots" can
work to highlight the differing degrees of distance and the
transitions in time within each narrative style.
To emphasize the symbolic and archetypal qualities of
characters and images, effects like the "camera zoom,"
exaggeration, and "manipulation of objects," "elliptical"
staging, and effects with lighting and slides can be used.
Time and space in the novel, as in Marienbad, follow an
associational pattern tied to the perception of the main
characters. To transcend time and create context, the
following techniques can visualize the abstract, psycho
logical qualities of the book: a "split-screen" effect,
a "form dissolve," "sound bridges," "crosscutting," "asso
ciative sequences," and a "metaphorical dissolve."
Conclusions
Chamber t he a tre as a presentational form represents an amal
gam of characteristics of "fiction and film;
170
1. Based on the verbal art of fiction, chamber thea
tre can express the nuances of character and emotion that
language permits; yet it also has some of the visual power
and immediacy of film. Unlike the novel, perceived in a
time frame determined by the reader, it is performed in
front of a live audience; the audience actually experiences
the novel as it is performed. It has neither the set form
of a novel nor of film as its rhythm and quality of per
formance are always affected by the interaction of per
formers with audience.
2. Chamber theatre has neither the complete leisure
of the novel to explore its subject— like the film it must
conform to a limited performance time, usually approximately
two hours— nor the linear restriction in reader perception
necessitated by language. Because of its visual dimension,
peripheral detail in the arrangement of sets, actors, and
props can convey meaning, reinforcing or providing counter
point to a scene of primary focus occurring elsewhere on
stage.
3. Chamber theatre is, like film, more tied to visual
representation than the novel. Yet as the form retains the
narrative perspective of the fiction upon which it is based
and combines this literary focus with a visual one, chamber
theatre becomes a medium of communal experience, like film,
and of individual experience, like the novel. The onstage
171
narrator, who can suspend time and provide detail like his
novelistic counterpart, preserves the individual experience
as each viewer perceives such narrative episodes from his/
her own perspective.
4. Spatially, like cinema, chamber theatre is an art
of ellipsis: selected details can often suggest an entire
sequence more powerfully than complete detail. Unlike film,
however, chamber theatre can be as visually or abstractly
representative as the director chooses or the material war
rants. By using lighting and a minimum of sets and props
with the narrator verbally describing the background of a
scene, no physical limitations are put on the audience's
mental perceptions of the physical setting of the produc
tion.
5. The interior psychological states at which the
novel excels can be represented and, in some cases, height
ened by chamber theatre. By dividing the narration into
interior and exterior selves, for example, one expressing
the private, inner self and the other expressing the public,
observable personality, or by dividing the characters into
past, present, and future selves, one can visualize the con
flicts within a personality and highlight the difference
between the appearance of a character and his/her actual
thoughts or desires. Chamber theatre combines the process
of cinema with the subtlety of fiction.
172
6. The language of chamber theatre operates on verbal
and nonverbal levels. While it does not have the detail and
realism of photography, neither does it have its limitat
tions. Chamber theatre can utilize both the perceptual pro
cess of film, the visual art, and the metaphorical and ab
stract connections of fiction,, the verbal art.
7« Chamber theatre has the potential both to suspend
time as the novel does and yet create a link, as the camera
3oes, between the flow of the action and the viewer's per
ception of it, creating a "presentness" and immediacy to all
levels of time. It has the cinematic advantage of creating
spatial relationships and visual immediacy, and the literary
facility to express abstractions, various states of con
sciousness, and provide context.
Cinematic concepts and techniques clarify the staging of
point of view in adapting fiction for chamber theatre;
1, Just as the choreography of the camera creates a
visual style and rhythm in omniscient narration in film,
the narrator in chamber theatre, by replicating moving
shots, can focus and interpret the action for the audience.
The control of the narrator over the use and function of
stage areas, over the characters' identities, and over the
use of special effects visually replicates the manipula
tion of the camera in film,
2, The personal, subjective vision of the narrator
173
agent is often revealed in fiction through a communion of
past and present selves, a continuous juxtaposition of past
and present events, and an often-changing perspective on
the past. Visual metaphors and transitions borrowed from
cinema can "show" what the novel "tells." By dividing
those disparate yet connected selves among different actors
and physicalizing psychological perception, chamber theatre
can stage the transformation of perspective within char
acters over time.
3. Stream-of-consciousness narration, in both fiction
and film, strips away surface detail and reveals the inner
voice of a character. Unlike other forms of narration,
stream-of-consciousness replicates the process of the mind
itself, moving freely among time boundaries, associations
of thoughts, people, and objects. By combining the stream-
of-consciousness voice in the fiction adapted with cine
matic modes of manipulating time and the physical environ
ment to exteriorize perception, chamber theatre can effec
tively stage the inner voice of a character.
Representative cinematic techniques and concepts provide
transitions and visual metaphors in the staging of fiction
for chamber theatre;
Concepts
1. The "associative sequence" unifies two seemingly
unrelated scenes. It keys a relationship between the scenes
174
more vividly than, but similarly to, the "sound bridge."
2. The filmic concept of "context" refers to creating
a total environment that represents both realistic and psy
chological perception, the integration of lighting, set
pieces, movement, costumes, and style of presentation to
create a psychological landscape.
3. The concept of "editing" can be actively used by
a narrator to show the process of creating a story or in
terpreting events.
4. "Ellipsis" refers to the cinematic concept of
manipulating space and action, allowing a part of an action
to represent the whole. Use of selected details allows
audience participation as the whole scene then takes shape
in each spectator's imagination.
5. "Manipulation of objects" allows set pieces to
become representative of a.character's inner vision. By
exaggerating their size, positioning them a certain way, or
distorting their shape or function, objects become a key
to perception.
6. The cinematic concept of "montage" can be trans
formed for chamber theatre by a repetition or juxtaposition
of key images throughout a production. Such use of montage
also encompasses the creating of "context" and the "sub
jective camera."
7. The concept of the "subjective camera" translates
175
to chamber theatre through the narrator's function as an
interpretive screen between the world of the audience and
the world on the stage- The narrator becomes "above time,"
aware and a part of both worlds, but able to move freely
between them.
Techniques
1. The "camera zoom" effect highlights an action, per
son, or object by visually isolating one thing as meta
phorical or symbolic to the scene taking place.
2. The "crosscut" interweaves two sequences of events,
creating a counterpoint in meaning or effect between the
two (or more) separate actions.
3. "Dissolves" allow one scene to fade into another,
visually emphasizing a spatial relationship between two
events in the plot sequence.
4. The "form dissolve" visualizes an associational
link between objects or people, triggering an almost-immedi
ate link of memory of fantasy, creating a contrast, build
ing suspense, or making a point.
5. "Freezing the frame" suspends motion to emphasize
a key action, the stopping of time, or to create a transi
tion into another effect, for example the "form dissolve."
6. The "metaphorical dissolve" juxtaposes two images
or actions to create a symbolic association between them.
7. "Moving shots" (travelling shots, camera pans,
176
close, medium, or long shots) visualize the narrator's con
trol over interpreting action, scrutinizing characters or
events, and use of stage areas.
8. The "reverse-angle shot" can show the two different
physical or psychological perspectives of a single action
by literally viewing the same scene from two different
angles.
9. "Sound bridges" connect sequences of action
through music or sound effects that are not in chronological
order but have associational connection in a character's
perception or in the movement of the plot.
10. The "split-screen effect" contrasts two actions
occurring simultaneously. In chamber theatre it can also
highlight the different reactions between the exterior and
interior selves, or the past, present, and future selves.
The study of a screenplay such as Last Year at Marienbad has
relevance in applying cinematic concepts to chamber theatre:
1. The screenplay, like the film for which it is a
blueprint, represents a transformation from the printed
medium to the visual medium. Often the screenplay is an
adaptation of a literary work or, as does Marienbad, util
izes both cinematic and literary narrative structure and
techniques. As a transformation from fiction to stage,
chamber theatre can benefit from a study of other media
and their transformations.
177
2. The concept of the subjective camera, the creation
of a context that replicates the merging of interior and
exterior states, and the visual metaphors that create echoes
in the perceptions of a character, thus transcending time
and creating a perceptual present, are transferable to
staging psychological fiction in chamber theatre.
3. A study of Marienbad can elucidate how literary
and cinematic modes can be combined to achieve advantages
of both media in chamber theatre: the immediacy and the
process of perception of film can be combined with the
stylized, abstract settings and the narrator's ability to
suspend time and describe action precisely.
General principles can be drawn from a study of cinema and
chamber theatre for applying cinematic concepts and tech
niques to the staging of modern and contemporary fiction.
Cinematic concepts and techniques:
1. can aid in visualizing memory, dream, and fantasy;
2. provide a vivid present for events existing in all
levels of time;
3. provide visual contrasts, counterpoint, and meta
phors to interior sensations and perceptions;
4. create concrete visual equivalents in adapting
nonrealistic material;
5. visualize the narrator's control as storyteller
and make his/her role as an interpretative vehicle clearer;
178
6. provide methods to integrate all aspects of a
production into a representative psychological environment;
7. clarify the process inherent in transforming ma
terial from one medium to another;
8. provide physical equivalents for mental perceptions
and associations;
9. contribute to the establishment of a production's
overall tone as well as clarify narrative style;
10. aid in the audience's understanding of the struc
turing of point of view, character, and action in the fic
tion being presented.
Suggestions for Further Research
This study explored the aesthetics of film, fiction,
and chamber theatre and applied cinematic concepts and tech
niques to the adaptation and staging of chamber theatre.
Related research directions include: 1) the application
of other media (i.e. radio, television, and music) to cham
ber theatre; 2) the exploration of the relationship of film
and other media to other forms of solo and group perfor
mance other than chamber theatre; 3) an exploration and
determination of principles on the transformation process
of adapting one medium to another; and 4) a study of the
experimental possibilities in combining media for perform
ance, redefining what actually constitutes performance.
While the scope of this study was limited, the impli-
179
cations of cinema for chamber theatre and the art of
performance in general have few limits. Film, the art
form that most closely resembles the form of our dreams,
has the potential to create environments that displace
reality, totally encompassing the spectator:
Yet the spectator cannot hope to appre
hend, however incompletely, the being of
any object that draws him into its orbit
unless he meanders, dreamingly, through
the maze of its multiple meanings and psy
chological correspondences. Material exis
tence, as it manifests itself in film,
launches the moviegoer into unending pur
suits.... There is no end to his wanderings.
Sometimes , though, it may seem to him that
after having probed a thousand possibilities,
he is listening, with all his senses strained,
to a confused murmur. Images begin to sound,
and the sounds are again images. When this
indeterminate murmur— the murmur of existence—
reaches him, he may be nearest to the un
attainable goal.
--Siegfried Kracauer
Theory of Film
180
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Creator Miller, Lynn Christine (author)

Core Title Cinematic concepts and techniques in the adaptation and staging of chamber theatre

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication Arts and Sciences

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag OAI-PMH Harvest,Theater

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Bolton, Janet (committee chair), Fisher, Walter (committee member), Goldstein, Harvey (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c17-698788

Unique identifier UC11343550

Identifier DP22358.pdf (filename),usctheses-c17-698788 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier DP22358.pdf

Dmrecord 698788

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Miller, Lynn Christine

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

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