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Film appreciation with K S Sivakumaran:
Fiction into film
This week’s column rests primarily on what a well known film academic
and critic wrote a quarter century ago. She was Joy Gould Boyum. Her
book ‘Double Exposure’ explained the subject: Fiction into Film. Among
other things, the writer discusses Film as Literature. For my purposes,
I take this chapter and share with you some of her statements.
These definitions need to be remembered and taken note of:
“A drama is a story told to us without the intervention of a
storyteller; a narrative is a story in which a teller always stands
between us and the tale. Thus, narrative theory distinguishes between
one story telling art and another. Thus, too, film asserts itself less
as the primarily dramatic form it might seen at first and as an
essentially narrative form instead.
 Film
may contain all of the elements of drama isolated by Aristotle: plot,
character, diction, spectacle and song. It may also, since it uses
actors who impersonate these characters, share with it the quality of
performance. But unlike theatre, where our eye is free to wander, to
look anywhere or at anyone and in whatever order it pleases, film, by
virtue of the presence of the camera-narrator, always mediates its
materials and controls and directs our perceptions. So it is with the
novel, to which film turns out to bear a good deal more resemblance than
it does to a play.”
Here is an intrusion from me:
There are many different kinds of films that are made in some
countries. But not all of them would appeal to everybody. People have
different tastes conditioned by their chosen taste. Most go for
entertainment only and not bothered about how ‘cinematic’ they are. It’s
the storyline that matters.
As the film scholar rightly identifies “Film and fiction thus share
not only the same narrative forms and many storytelling strategies, they
also share the very same basic appeal. Most of us have always gone to
movies for the same reasons we read: for escape, for fantasy, for the
opportunity to identify with – even to transform ourselves into –other
human beings for awhile and vicariously participate in their lives. All
of these accounts in part of this book’s particular focus- -for toe fact
in the chapters that follow, the discussion of adaptation will center
not on plays, but on prose fiction. There is another explanation,
however.”
This is important: cinema is a moving image.
“In fact, whatever the similarities between prose fiction and film
and whatever parallels in their languages, to translate page to screen,
word to image, requires a major act of creative imagination and of
interpretations as well”
Joy Gould Boyum was the film critic for The Wall Street Journal and
professor of English and Communication Arts at New York University. She
was also a member of the prestigious New York Film Critics Circle and
the National Society of Film Critics o in America.
This book has three parts: In Defence of Adaptations, Adaptation and
Interpretation, and the Rhetoric of Adaptation
Those interested in cinema as an art can benefit in understanding the
cinematic medium.
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