We have met today to talk about film as a useful and attractive tool, a teaching aid and basically the purpose of this seminar is to encourage the use of film in the teaching of British Studies, Literature and History. Let me begin my paper perversely, with recalling the experience that I am sure is all too familiar to those of you who have ever taught literature; namely facing a class of students whose knowledge of the set text is based on the film only. And I am sure that whether you actually bother to ask your students if they have read the book or only seen the film, or not, more or less half-way through the class you can tell where their knowledge comes from. And, please correct me if I am wrong, but again I am sure that then your feeling is that your students have missed something, that they cannot discuss the novel having only watched the film.

In this paper, I would like to look at the differences between literature and film that result from the different media that these arts use; and to talk about what film adaptations cannot do very well; and finally to show on the example of Karel Reisz’s adaptation of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, (1981, script by Harold Pinter) how some of these problems can be dealt with. I have used the work of Alicja Helman on film adaptation and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Dudley Andrew’s paper on ‘Adaptation’ and a chapter from Seymour Chatman’s Coming to Terms; the Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film.

In his paper on adaptation, Andrew lists three modes of relation between the film and the text: borrowing, intersection, and fidelity of transformation. Borrowing is the most frequent mode of adaptation, where the artist employs the material, idea or form of an earlier, successful text. Medieval paintings and miracle plays featuring biblical iconography are examples of borrowing. The adaptations of Shakespeare or other texts that have reached the status of myth are further examples; there is no question of the replication of the original. Instead the audience is expected to enjoy basking in the pre-established presence and to call up new, or especially powerful aspects of a cherished work. The success of such adaptations rests on their fertility not fidelity.

Intersecting is an opposite mode of adaptation. Here the uniqueness of the original text is preserved to such an extent that it is intentionally left unassimilated. Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest is the chief example, Bresson showed the writing of the diary on screen, it is not cinematized, it is a novel as seen by the cinema. Intersecting is a mode of adaptation that emphasizes the distinctiveness of the original text.

The last mode, fidelity of transformation, involves finding stylistic equivalents in film to render the 'letter' or the 'spirit' of the text.

The fundamental difference between film and literature and the main source of difficulties, according to Andrew, is the fact that generally, film works from perception to signification, from external facts to interior motivations, it gives us an image of the world and then cuts out a story out of that world. Literary fiction works oppositely. It begins with signs, building to propositions which attempt to develop perception. As a product of human language it naturally treats human motivation and values seeking to throw them out into the external world, elaborating a world out of the story. The central problem of film adaptations is to transform narrative features that come easily to language, but hard to a medium that operates in ‘real time’ and whose natural focus is the surface appearance of things - hence film’s traditional difficulties with temporal and spatial summaries, abstract narratorial commentary, representations of the thinking and feeling of characters, and so on. Films prefer to rely on the audience’s ability to infer things that a literary narrator might put explicitly into words.

I would like to present the film adaptation of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman as an example of an intelligent way of dealing with this fundamental problem: the overtly prominent narrator, the expositor, the describer, investigator of characters’ states of mind, commentator and philosopher. Fowles’s novel is at once traditional and postmodernist, traditional because it is modelled on the Victorian novels; postmodernist, because it is self-conscious, it is a novel set in the Victorian era and about the Victorian era. The wide-ranging narrator’s commentary forms an essential part of the novel. The main protagonist Charles Smithson becomes totally absorbed by his love for Sarah Woodruff. Sarah is the ‘French Lieutenant’s Woman,’ notorious in Lyme Regis for her reputed seduction and abandonment by a French naval officer. Actually the seduction never occurred; she uses the story as a way of asserting her difference from the rest of her community. Though Sarah’s is the one consciousness that the novel does not generally enter, she is portrayed as a kind of evolutionary mutant, a woman far ahead of her time who escapes the stereotypes of Victorian morality by asserting her rights to physical love, profession and equality with men. She is a mystery to Charles and an object of the narrator’s analysis. For example, to explain her uncanny ability to classify other people’s worth he says that it was: ‘as if jumping a century, she was born with a computer in her heart.’ To Charles she remains a fascinating mystery, and he breaks off his engagement with the conventionally submissive Ernestina for her, which causes a public scandal that ruins his reputation. Sarah disappears after their only intimate encounter during which Charles discovers that the seduction by the French lieutenant must have been a myth. She reappears two years later at the house of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as a model in the pre-Raphaelite group and she has with her a child, which is Charles’s, we assume. The novel offers two endings between which the narrator refuses to choose. In the first, Charles learns that the child is his own; he accepts both mother and daughter and they all live happily ever after. In the second, Charles is so furious that he does not notice the child and rejects Sarah’s invitation to remain a friend.

These events in the novel are abundantly ornamented with the narrator’s intrusive commentary on the Victorian age and its differences from our own. The narrator is obsessed with history and comments on the political, economic, scientific, social and linguistic aspects of Victorian life. It almost seems at times that the story is only a pretext for the commentary. Traditionally, film has supplied narratorial commentary by using a voice-over, in this case however, Reisz and Pinter achieve a similar effect by using more cinematic devices.

The film offers only anecdotal visual glimpses of Victorian history. The film’s only real theme is love - Victorian versus modern. But while the novel’s narrator examines Victorian love clinically, he explains erotic states of mind that moderns might find incomprehensible, the film immerses the viewer in the experience of Victorian love. This Victorian love story is contrasted with the modern love affair between the leading actors. The film version gives up the double ending, Sarah and Charles are rowing off into a peaceful and satisfying future onto a quiet lake. The modern lovers part dramatically, the hero cannot hope to recapture the solid security of Victorian love.

Whereas the novel’s implied author undertakes to recover the reality behind our cliché d attitudes to the Victorians, showing us how exotic a time it was, the film represents the modern life as less comprehensible. These diverging intentions result in important changes in plot, theme and above all, character. In the film, it is the modern actress Anna, who is presented as enigmatic, Sarah is made purer to establish a better contrast with her modern counterpart.

The central problem facing this adaptation was not how to render the novel’s plot details. The challenge was to capture the narrator’s commentary that is not only elaborate, but modern in its slant. Instead of turning the twentieth century narrator into a character, the film introduces the modern framing story that functions as a metaphor for the original. The love affair between Mike and Anna ( Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep, who play Charles and Sarah) is not a replay of the Victorian, it is more of a dramatization of the commentary in its juxtaposition of the two stories; the contrasts between Victorian and modern attitudes to love. The film makes us believe that Victorian love has as much to tell us about modern love as vice versa.

Seymour Chatman, in his detailed analysis of the film explains how Reisz achieves this effect by using the technique of ‘crosscutting’; separate but interspersed assemblage of shots back and forth between two strands of a story which ultimately get tied together. Intercutting in The French Lieutenant’s Woman is unusual because the modern story is not just one component or strand of the total story. The interrelations between the two are much more complex. At one level, the modern story serves as a surrogate discourse of the Victorian story, a dramatized alternative to more directly vocal narration. At another level the modern story is autonomous; it goes beyond framing and even commenting on the Victorian story to present, in its own right and with seemingly ‘irrelevant’ details, a certain modern state of affairs. This autonomy is hard to recognize in the early part of the film, where the focus remains persistently on the Victorian tale, and the modern sequences are brief and elliptical, each usually consisting of a single shot. It takes us a while to understand why we should be concerned about the actors playing the Victorian characters. Only toward the end of the film does their drama begin to approximate and even outweigh that of the Victorians, the outcome of which becomes fairly predictable once Charles learns Sarah’s whereabouts. Throughout the film the modern story intersects thematically and formally with the Victorian story and ultimately it displaces it as the focus of dramatic attention.

Let me give you a summary of some of the important points of intersection:

1. The modern story opens in Anna’s hotel room; she and Mike have spent the night together, and he answers her makeup call. They joke about how the whole company will now know they are lovers and how that makes her a ‘whore’.

2. In Mike’s bedroom Anna reads about the number of prostitutes in London, Mike jokingly calculates the Victorian gentleman’s average visits; Anna laughs at his statistics.

3. In a kind of garden shed, Mike and Anna in modern clothes, rehearse the scene that corresponds to the novel’s second meeting of Charles and Sarah on the Undercliff. Sarah is supposed to slip and Charles to catch her; Anna does it poorly at first, making Mike visibly edgy. The second time she finds the right note, and in one of the film’s most striking moments Mike stares at her as if she suddenly has become Sarah, right before his eyes. His look is so intense that it seems to register his own astonishment as well as Charles’s participation in the fictional scene. To emphasize Anna’s transformation and Mike’s response, the cinematic narrator cuts, in midshot, to the real Victorian scene; it is Anna who begins the fall, but Sarah, in red wig and Victorian clothes, who ends it, slipping not to the floor of the garden shed, but to the ground of the Undercliff.

4. As Mike stands moodily smoking at the window of his hotel room, we suddenly hear for the first time in the modern story Sarah’s haunting musical theme which has been associated with her from the opening shot. This musical ‘bleedover’ is the first of several that suggest commentatively, Mike’s infatuation with a woman of the previous century. The theme seems to tell us that Mike is more in love with the character than with the actress who plays her, that the character is replacing the actress. Anna is asleep, in her sleep she murmurs the name of David, her French lover. Mike says: ‘It’s not David. It’s Mike.’ The scene foreshadows both his anachronistic love and its ultimate disappointment.

The modern story consists of seven more scenes, including one of Anna and David, who seems to grow suspicious; Mike and his wife Sonia and a party at their house and the final scene of the cast party on the Windermere set. The soundtrack is dominated by rock music, and the scene is visually chaotic. The camera whirls around as members of the cast dance. Mike signals to Anna to meet him in the house. As he waits for her in the room in which the last scene of the Victorian story was played, Sarah’s theme music suddenly replaces the rock music on the soundtrack. Mike hears a car pulling away. He rushes to the window and shouts out ‘Sarah!’

Mike has fallen anachronistically in love with a fictional Victorian character. Like Pygmalion he tries to bring his beloved to life in Anna, but Anna refuses to play Galatea. This impossible search for a fictional woman out of a bygone era is not a subject proposed by the novel. The film’s theme is the plight of an actor who gets a taste of a better, older way of loving and hence living. Unfortunately for him the world that made this kind of loving possible, no longer exists. The character and the actor thus provide reverse images: just as Charles longs for a woman of the future, Mike longs for a woman of the past. It is in this way that the film reflects some of the novel’s commentary on Victorian morality, but also commentary on our own. The film takes from the novel only the erotic theme - in particular the suggestion that that Victorian mores may have been superior to our own. The novel’s narrator argues that their very self-restriction may actually have given the Victorians a sexual drive keener than ours, that indeed they may in some unconscious way have set such elaborate inhibitions for the purpose of intensifying sexual pleasure, as a person may intentionally fast the whole day the better to enjoy a gourmet dinner in the evening.

For all its differences and abridgements, the film communicates a similar attitude. So we are dealing with a peculiar form of ‘fidelity of transformation’ in this adaptation. However, the most spectacular achievement of the film is the fact that using purely cinematic techniques (the framing modern story) and in particular by intertwining it with the Victorian story, the director managed to recreate the distance between the audience and the Victorian story that Fowles achieved by using the intrusive narrator in the novel. The reader of the novel is at once removed from the story, because it is a pastiche and a self-conscious novel; the audience in the cinema is placed in the same position by being constantly reminded that this is a fiction film acted out by a cast of people. Thus we are dealing with a peculiar instance of ‘fidelity of transition’ where the film adaptation considerably alters the source text in order to retain its ‘spirit’.

I would like to show to you an extract from the early part of the film to illustrate how the modern story cuts into the Victorian and in fact comments on it ironically. This is Charles’s first meeting with Sarah followed by the scene in which Sarah is interviewed for the post of a secretary and companion and finally a scene from the modern story, please note how the themes correspond.

Later in the film this irony is going to be turned against the modern story, in fact.

Summing up I would like to persuade you that film adaptations of the works of literature can be made into a useful tool not only because they are a quick way of getting the gist of the story. But actually, if we bear in mind the differences between the two media, we can go back from the film to the book, to look at the choices that the author of the script and the director made, which aspects of the literary text are retained in the visual, which are altered. This comparison will throw some light on both works and hopefully encourage the students to reach for the book.