Adaptation and the Avant-Garde: Alternative Perspectives on Adaptation Theory and Practice 9781628928518, 9781441163523

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Acknowledgments

I would not have been able to complete this book without the support and understanding of my wife, and I thank her for her patience and generosity during the entire writing process. I also thank my daughter, who provided many joys and laughter during moments when relief was most needed. Shooting hoops and ker-plopping always made me happy. I would also like to thank the department and administration at my university for their support.

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Introduction

Film adaptations of previously published or existent material, from novels, stories, and plays to less “suitable” material such as operas, other films, biography, or history, have been an essential aspect of film history since the silent era. Countless films have been produced that have either directly adapted material and texts to the screen, or have more elusively appropriated them. Adaptations still make up a large percentage of films created in Hollywood, the independent sector, and as part of global cinema. There is a certain sense of familiarity to spectators of these works, whether they are drawn from Shakespeare, Jane Austen, or Stephen King. Adaptation studies has become an increasingly rich field of research and inquiry over the past 40 years but has gained a bit more credibility more recently. George Bluestone’s Novels into Film (1957) was the first of its kind, and since its publication, there have been varied studies of the process, theory, and practice of adaptation. Adaptation studies straddles both film and literary studies, making it unique to a wide range of scholars. While a great many of the books on adaptation are beneficial to understanding it as a filmic conversion of previous texts, there have been no studies, or rarely, any mentions of avant-garde films that are based on previous sources. Hence, this book seeks to fill the gap and offer an introduction to avant-garde film adaptation. Avant-garde and experimental film is a vibrant and significant part of film history, culture, and society. Avant-garde films historically have ideological and political overtones, are formally innovative, are distinctively individualistic, and approach subjects both familiar and odd with a verve and spirit often absent from the mainstream. Avant-garde filmmakers also have adapted a variety of texts to the screen, and this book serves as an introduction to the practice of adaptation in the world of avant-garde cinema. Much like any Hollywood adaptation, an avant-garde adaptation chooses and selects material that provides interesting stories. But avantgarde films also bear the emblem of creativity, personal vision, formal innovation, and experimentation, sometimes rendering the source material unrecognizable, transfigured, or extraneous. Generally speaking, most

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mainstream adaptations do not try to exploit the source material like avant-garde adaptations. In avant-garde adaptation, more risks are taken in terms of narration, spatial and temporal location, form and style, and visual and aural representation, and in most cases, fidelity is not an issue. Avant-garde and experimental film offers a wide resource for understanding the cinematic medium as an aesthetic process and product, much more so, I believe, than mainstream film. The intimacy, creativity, and subjectivity of avant-garde filmmakers and the formal processes at work provide ways into understanding vision, spectatorship, narrativity, and formal production in ways that are different from and beyond more conventional films and filmmaking. This is not to denigrate largerbudgeted films or filmmakers who choose to adapt books or other texts with fidelity (or box office receipts) in mind; rather, it seems that avantgarde films have been relegated to the margins for so long that any mention of them as cultural artifacts usually means they are shunned and misunderstood by too many, while embraced and promoted only by cinephiles, museums, or scholars. Hollywood will always “win out” over the avant-garde, but one of the aims of this study is to suggest how avantgarde films and avant-garde adaptations, in particular, are far more nuanced works of cinematic art versus popular cultural artifacts. While the most successful kinds of adaptation, and by successful I mean those that are produced by studio financing, like the Harry Potter franchise or the Lord of the Rings trilogy, will always garner popular favor, avant-garde adaptations exist in a kind of nether region where production, distribution, and exhibition are tenuous and financing is haphazard. But there is something entirely unique about a film adaptation that is liberated from both the text(s) it adapts and the dictates of the studios. The structure of the book is threefold: Part I offers an overview of adaptation theory and criticism; a working definition of avant-garde as it applies to film; a defense of avant-garde adaptation; a suggestion for a particular type of adaptation associated with avant-garde film, exploitation; and a section addressing appropriation as an adaptive practice. Part II is a brief chronological narrative of avant-garde adaptation. In part, this section is simply meant to provide an overview of the filmmaking climate during each decade of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, highlighting tendencies of both mainstream and alternative film practice. It is not exhaustive. I mention at least one (and sometimes more) avant-garde adaptation per decade since the beginnings of cinematic practice to showcase certain films, filmmakers, and adaptations that were working with previous source materials yet adapting them in unusual or

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Introduction

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idiosyncratic ways. Part III offers case studies, in-depth examinations of different avant-garde adaptations. I analyze the films in terms of their styles, themes, and forms and provide commentary on their methods of adaptation. I examine adaptations based on familiar texts (Alice in Wonderland, The Tempest), and less familiar ones (Wisconsin Death Trip, Street of Crocodiles) and their subsequent film adaptations, in order to show the wide range of avant-garde adaptation practice in cinema. Overall, this study is an introduction to the theory and practice of avantgarde adaptation. My goal is to provide a starting point for considering avant-garde adaptations as viable texts worthy of examining in film studies, literary studies, cultural studies, and adaptation studies. Studying avant-garde film opens up many doors; knowing the history of avantgarde film, its influential directors, and certain adaptations provides ways of rethinking film culture and adaptations in general. One of the arguments I make is for a more pronounced kind of adaptation that is willing to take risks and eschew standards, which avant-garde and experimental film does uniformly and unabashedly. There have been a handful of intelligent studies of avant-garde cinema. The works of P. Adams Sitney and Scott MacDonald, in particular, have shaped the discourse within the field. There have also been some very good studies of adaptation theory and practice. These scholars, including Thomas Leitch, Linda Hutcheon, Brian McFarlane, and James Welsh, have provided insight into this area of film/literary studies and have provided certain templates for analyzing the processes involved in transferring a source text to the screen. My goal with this book is to bring the two fields together in dialogue, in the hope of generating interest in avantgarde filmmaking by way of adaptation studies. Avant-garde adaptation has been a rather neglected area of film studies, so my wish is that this book provides some general understanding of the practice and theory of avant-garde filmmaking through a discussion of several avant-garde film adaptations. Not every film I describe may be traditionally considered an adaptation, nor will every filmmaker I mention be categorized as avantgarde by other scholars. Still, the methods they choose to adapt previous texts points to a specific tendency that makes the adaptation avant-garde, hence, I describe it as such. There really is not true methodology for adaptation. I believe that taking liberties, even extreme measures, when adapting a previous source yields a new text that can achieve a high level of artistic achievement. I hope to shed some light on this with the films I describe, and an unorthodox, idiosyncratic approach to adaptation, which occurs in avant-garde film, seems most appropriate.

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Chapter 1

Defining the Avant-Garde Film

Avant-garde films are not always easy to define in an all-inclusive manner, but they are typically recognized by cineastes and even average spectators because of their very nature of being “different.” Experimental and avant-garde films do not necessarily comprise a large, coherent genre of their own (even though the avant-garde can be called a genre), because they are so diverse; rather, they tend to rework genres in new ways, playing with tropes and subverting or undermining traits, characteristics, or expectations. Additionally, avant-garde films disrupt narrative continuity by often presenting a nonlinear plot. Characterization may or may not be important to the particular film, but almost all avant-garde films have to do with perception, or how one sees things, and so they establish new parameters for defining and emphasizing the representation of vision and subjectivity. Avant-garde films also explore the possibilities of film language, seeking to break from traditional methods of using miseen-scène, cinematography, editing, or sound. In this way, avant-garde film tends to challenge, destabilize, or distort prevailing discourses on cinema, cinema theory, and cinema history. Tracing the history of the avant-garde film, for example, leads one on both tangential and radically alternative paths that sometimes cross with the mainstream but more often than not create their own culturally and socially significant avenues of exploration, as oppositions to the norm/mainstream. Still, as Dudley Andrew asserts, “In laboring to thwart the normal ‘way of the cinema,’ the radically avant-garde film draws attention to the strength and ubiquity of that ‘way.’ ”1 In other words, typical audiences find themselves seeking normalcy when confronted with the avant-garde. Defining an avant-garde film is not impossible, but some of the characteristics mentioned imply that there is a clear-cut way to label, classify, or catalog them depending on their specific attributes or characteristics. For instance, there are film poems, “trance” films, structural films, and abstract or graphic films. Most of these descriptions come from P. Adams Sitney’s

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monumental and irreplaceable Visionary Film, but Sitney, too, is weary of the label avant-garde. In the preface to the first edition of the book, he writes, “‘Avant-garde’ in itself is unfortunate [as a label.] On the one hand it implies a privileged relationship to a norm which I do not wish to affirm, and on the other hand it has been used to describe thousands of films which fall outside the scope of this book . . .”2 This is still very true today. However, it seems that using avant-garde as a descriptive category of filmmaking can be advantageous because it suggests an alternative form of communicating meaning, as opposed to the more customary form found in multiplexes. Rightfully so, though, there are far too many avant-garde films produced to ever fully be accounted for, and many are bad. Also, Sitney’s categories of avant-garde film allow for like-minded filmmakers to be aligned into one group, for example, “visionary.” Another well-known critic and scholar of avant-garde film, Fred Camper, delineates six “qualities” to “naming and defining avant-garde or experimental film.” Camper suggests not all six need to be present in any one given film. They include, and I paraphrase: (1) a film made by one person or occasionally a small group of like-minded people using his or her or their own money; (2) the films avoid assembly-line production, like most mainstream films; (3) they typically do not offer linear stories; (4) they focus very clearly on film form, the “materials of cinema”; (5) they are in opposition to mass media and mainstream culture; and (6) they offer various messages, not a clear “univalent” (or singular) one. Camper concludes by saying, “I don’t propose any mechanical method whereby meeting, say, five of the six automatically qualifies a film, but rather suggest that considering these characteristics might be useful in thinking about this body of work”3 Camper’s six qualities (and he also calls them a “six-part test”) offer many ways to discuss or “test” the inherent traits of avant-garde film. All things considered, discovering a quick, easy, all-encompassing definition for avant-garde films is nonexistent. But they are recognizable, as are avant-garde adaptations. Nearly all avant-garde films offer ways to comprehend reality in unconventional yet meaningful ways. The avant-garde is artistically ambitious; filmmakers working in this realm pay little attention to convention and instead maintain a rigorous devotion to their own aesthetic, political, or critical vision. Avant-garde denotes a historical moment of specific activities and practices not necessarily associated with any particular artistic style or strategy. The avant-garde advances new techniques, forms of expression, and subject matter, existing outside the “culture industry” and showcasing a heightened awareness of the trappings of commercial art. The avant-garde, which encompasses most artistic forms (painting,

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Defining the Avant-Garde Film

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music, and literature, for instance) or at least is aware of other artistic forms, either challenges the understandings of contemporary art or uses the other arts in the filmmaking process, seeking equivalents in signs, codes, or language. The avant-garde is a “personalized, noncommercial, non-narrative, and reductive use of the medium that, in most cases, is related to other art forms, such as painting, music, or poetry.”4 This relationship immediately sets the avant-garde apart from the mainstream, simply because the avant-garde filmmaker is far more interested in attaining a highly individual vision akin to a poet, painter, or composer, working in opposition to classical narrative cinema and “privileging the personal over the pecuniary.”5 The avant-garde has routinely been defined as either a collective group of like-minded filmmakers or as lone artists working in remote corners of the film industry (but shunning the industry). Sometimes, avant-garde directors bring more attention to social problems that hamper human endeavor, but their rationale for making films is not typically overtly political. The avant-garde also has been described as a forward-looking practice and art—one that clearly see the future of the medium. The avant-garde started as a more politically minded creative output, seeking to disrupt the bourgeois idea of art. Matei Calinescu, in his still useful book, Five Faces of Modernity, does a fine job tracing the history of the avant-garde, from its origins as a politically oppositional term in the early nineteenth century to its use in the twentieth century as a kind of artistic practice. The avant-garde artist, for example, is similar to the romantic poet, a characteristic that expert avant-garde critic P. Adams Sitney has also outlined, or, as Calinescu says, “The idea that poets are endowed with visionary powers, that they are indeed ‘mirrors of futurity,’ and as such in advance of their time, was shared by many progressive-minded romantics,” which in turn describes the type of art the avant-gardist creates—advanced or ahead of its time.6 The origin of the term avant-garde is martial. It describes the “advanced guard” that led the troops into battle—they were “in the lead” or “in front of” the rest, hence, the connotative use of avant-garde to imply a futuristic movement and thus perhaps its application to politics. Not every avant-garde filmmaker is interested in politics or ideology, however, and most are not. However, because the term derives from the military, there are specific connotations that cross to the practice of film. As Calinescu points out, The obvious military implications of the concept point quite aptly toward some attitudes and trends for which the avant-garde is directly

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indebted to the broader consciousness of modernity—a sharp sense of militancy, praise for nonconformism, courageous precursory exploration, and, on a more general plane, confidence in the final victory of time and immanence over traditions that try to appear as eternal, immutable, and transcendentally determined.7 All of these categories of defiance can describe avant-garde filmmakers, even though Calinescu is talking more broadly about the artistic avant-garde and its relationship to modernity, a term that implies progress, creativity, and inevitable advancement. Avant-garde film and having an avant-garde attitude, especially in terms of other art forms, are not necessarily the same thing. However, many filmmakers adopt an avant-garde attitude or, more appropriately, an avant-garde aesthetic or approach when making decisions. As Andras Balint Kovacs points out, “The important difference between what is commonly called the avantgarde/experimental movements in film and the avant-garde of fine arts is that the former is not a typically political movement.”8 Furthermore, “Avant-garde/experimental/underground cinema is a specific cinematic practice that may or may not include a political component. It differs from classical cinema as well as from modernist art cinema precisely by virtue of its practice.”9 The distinction between politically motivated art and artistically driven film is important because it allows us to examine the film itself on its own terms, without seeking a specific ideological agenda to determine its meaning(s) or value as a film or film adaptation. Artists who stand at the forefront of new ideas, ones that are innovative or experimental, help distinguish the avant-garde filmmaker. The avant-garde film makes cognizant use of the materials of cinema, normally sidestepping linear stories in favor of either abstract or nonlinear stories—if a story is even part of its narrative structure. Many times, the avant-garde filmmaker works as more than just the director: He or she is also the scriptwriter, perhaps the editor or cinematographer, or the producer. The films are often deliberately ambiguous, which in turn suggests they offer connotative, associative meanings for individual spectators. Kovacs also suggests, As a cinematic practice, avant-garde/underground/experimental filmmaking is always aimed at private, self-expressive use of the cinema. It is the laboratory of the audio-visual medium, a formal experiment more or less inspired by modern painting and literature, distributed in a noncommercial circuit, for a restricted audience. That is what always

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Defining the Avant-Garde Film

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aligns the avant-garde with the arts and literature. It rejects cinema as a commercial institution but affirms it as a personal form of artistic expression whereby all kinds of artistic trends and movements can find their way to the cinema.10 The cinema has the capacity to be an amalgam of all the arts, an argument articulated in the silent era by many practitioners such as Eisenstein, and therefore it can best represent the importance of the individual in creating a new form of representation and “artistic expression,” as Kovacs suggests. Whether or not avant-garde film is “inspired by modern painting and literature” is true—it remains an argument—it can be said that certain avant-garde films interact with modernist forms of art, hence Kovacs’s assertion. This is important to consider when taking into account adaptations, since, as I will outline later, the better kinds of adaptations always acknowledge their interactions and conflicts with the source text or a variety of sources. The avant-garde filmmaker makes films for self-expressive use, and he or she almost always explicitly makes use of film form to showcase themes or has such a unique yet recognizable vision that his or her style becomes a focal point for discussion. These both aid in identifying and distinguishing certain adaptations made by avant-garde filmmakers. Avant-garde films often juxtapose realist and antirealist aesthetics or forms, challenge the spectator’s subjectivity, address issues concerning the unconscious, and openly concentrate on film form. Editing, cinematography, and sound combine in unique ways to create particular visions of the filmmaker, with the deliberate overturning of genre or the subversion of generic tropes, the employment of dissociative images and narrative constructs, or the thwarting of spectator omniscience. Because of these characteristics, avant-garde film adaptations arguably are more creative than mainstream productions. Avant-garde films can disrupt narrative time and space, creating temporal and spatial disorientation for spectators through a variety of means, such as “shifts from diegetic continuity to discontinuity, fast editing, disruptions of conventional transitional shots, disorienting shots through unmatched shots or a simultaneous representation of a multiplicity of perspectives.”11 Avant-garde films have to do with perception, and the way filmmakers decide to construct the film both in style and form plays a large role in how the spectator reacts to the film. Andrew has noted, “Avant-garde filmmakers over the years have disrupted the codes of perception by altering the usual focus, framing, and even the speed and direction of visual recording.”12 The terms that

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characterize descriptions of the avant-garde, such as disrupted or discontinuous, imply a deliberate attempt to challenge or thwart the more normal codes of mainstream cinema. These types of films offer alternatives to the cinematic status quo. Classical narrative cinema features narrative comprehension and closure, realist styles, linear plots, clear identification of character motivation, and continuity editing. Avant-garde films may often bear some of these traits, but mostly they can be thought of as being created in direct opposition to and confrontation with these characteristics that dominate mainstream narrative film; “[i]t has always been the domain of experimental cinema to seek to disrupt [the] artificially enforced order” of mainstream cinema.13 Many avant-garde filmmakers view the mainstream as uninteresting or uninventive. Spectators alike see too many clichés and unimaginative elements in conventional cinema. The same can be applied to adaptations: why are there not enough film adaptations that embrace alternativeness? Why can there not be film adaptations that want to create difference? The purpose of my study is to answer these questions by examining the alternative film adaptations of avant-garde directors, which means exploring traditional discussions of adaptations differently—the same way one would discuss avant-garde films as being antithetical to mainstream productions. If “the function of the avant-garde, as the vanguard of autonomous bourgeois art, is to ensure that all cultural products that penetrate the realm of the bourgeoisie are rendered superfluous,” then film adaptations that welcome interpretive creativity serve a similar purpose: to render those forms of mainstream art to the wayside, in order to showcase the significance of avant-garde film and avant-garde art.14 According to Calinescu, “What the artists of the new avant-garde were interested in doing . . . was to overthrow all the binding formal traditions of art and to enjoy the exhilarating freedom of creativity.”15 This “new” avant-garde, which refers to the artists of the twentieth century, “believed that to revolutionize art was the same as to revolutionize life.”16 Avant-garde film breathes “new life” into the cinematic medium itself, and avant-garde adaptations revolutionize the way we can imagine how to transfer previous sources to the screen. Avant-garde film has been described as being wholly personal (the American avant-garde of the 1940s–60s), detailing abstract ideas or forms (the German avant-garde of the 1920s–30s), or addressing the formal characteristics of the medium (the French avant-garde of the 1920s–30s). All of these areas constitute specific historical occurrences of the avantgarde and are important in defining a coherent way of speaking about avant-garde film. Avant-garde film can be highly subjective by focusing

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Defining the Avant-Garde Film

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on the interior life of the director or of a character, and it can highlight its formal features, drawing our attention to its artifice by employing a scratched or painted filmstrip, using trick photography, or using techniques that are self-reflexive. This structuralist–materialist approach is considered more European, while the more “personal” cinema is associated with the American pioneers of the 1940s or the underground artists of the 1960s. In all its forms, the avant-garde forces us to notice the capabilities of the film medium. Within the realm of the avant-garde, anything is possible. The goal of many avant-garde films is to expand one’s vision. One of the fundamental questions that the avant-garde gives rise to is, What is it that you see when you are looking at something? Different ways of viewing reality or the presentation of the interior life dictates how one should approach an avant-garde film. The same applies to an adaptation: The spectator must be willing to suspend disbelief and any fidelity to the original and instead receive the new form of representation that the avant-garde adaptation offers. In describing the experimental cinema of the 1960s, which included underground and avant-garde film, Wheeler Winston Dixon suggests, “What was sought above all other considerations was a new way of apprehending the visual world,” and that “what was at stake was nothing less than the care of the soul.”17 Perhaps this is a grandiose statement, but the point is that these artists wanted to present new ways of comprehending the “visual world,” which suggests that they wanted to change or alter the way people already see or have been seeing the world. Additionally, it might be said these artists felt the need—a compulsion—to change the way people think about vision and perception. The avant-garde does not only challenge conventional aesthetic tastes, but it forces us to reexamine the fundamental precepts of perceiving reality as well. We also get the privilege of reconsidering our ideas and perceptions about what cinema can do. Avant-garde films can be lyrical or abstract, but they always serve as vehicles for the filmmaker’s vision. An avant-garde adaptation is a filmmaker’s unique interpretation of the original source material, whether literary, cultural, historical, or another artistic form. Avant-garde directors are truly visionary and iconoclastic, and they want to make films— and therefore adaptations—in a more personal manner. Their films are often described as “shocks” for the audience or deliberate “jabs” at passive spectators. In this sense, these directors are often deemed reactionary or confrontational—both positive words in the world of the avantgarde—and therefore seek to destroy through active creation. Calinescu cites Bakunin’s anarchist maxim, “To destroy is to create” as “actually

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applicable to most of the activities of the twentieth century avant-garde.”18 Further, he states, “The avant-gardist, far from being interested in novelty as such, or in novelty in general, actually tries to discover or invent new forms, aspects, or possibilities of crisis.”19 This stress on crisis is relevant to avant-garde adaptations because they tend to force spectators and critics into crises of comparison, interpretation, and reevaluation. This is indeed a predicament or dilemma and not a regular problem to be solved. In this way, avant-garde films are points of departure for further discourse, instead of being films that are easily deciphered. Rather, these films are continuously explored and probed for meaning, which, in the case of adaptations, allows us to recognize that any given adapted text can yield multiple interpretations and ways of seeing. Avant-garde adaptations can mix the popular with the experimental, a point of contention for purists because many mainstream films have moments of “strangeness” in them, such as rapid montage, superimpositions, and abstract plot structures. But the avant-garde film does not use these techniques as gimmicks; rather, they are part of the aesthetic makeup of the typical avant-garde film and a unique weapon in the arsenal of the filmmaker. Working outside the institutional mode of filmmaking practices, the avant-gardist resists the economic or political pressures of the mainstream. Because these filmmakers are forward thinking and forward looking, the focus is on the work itself and not the “present rules” of filmmaking, and the artist works solely for him- or herself. Artworks that are part of the industrial or cultural world lose their vitality. According to Kovacs, “The avant-garde attacks artistic institutions on the premise that institutionalization confines art to its pure aesthetic dimension and isolates it from its social functions,” which suggests that the avant-garde work of art, such as a film, may have larger functions within the historical, social, and cultural milieu, rather than serving as a barometer for economic success.20 Avant-garde art forms spawn philosophical declarations and proclamations; in this regard, they serve purposes beyond that of their particular era. Avant-garde films can likewise attain long lives that carry historical and cultural significance in ways that continually provoke. Avant-garde adaptations also have the same influence; because they take unusual approaches to the practice of adaptation, they not only make us think but instruct us on the process itself.

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Chapter 2

Adaptation Theory and Practice

Introduction Most histories of the cinema account for adaptations of literary texts because they have been a practice since the origins of film. Still, the history of adaptation theory and practice and, particularly, the often contentious relationship between film and literature is rife with ambivalence and tenuous associations, conflicts and confrontations that belie a convinced degree of uncertainty. (Adaptation studies is predominately the study of novels to films, though there is a generous amount of scholarship on plays, such as those by William Shakespeare, and stories, such as those by Ernest Hemingway.) There is no overarching methodology to adaptations, and the multiple ways they are discussed can prove as limiting as they are revealing What I would like to do in this section is examine some of the discussions on adaptation theory and practice, not offering resolutions but making suggestions toward a greater perspective on avant-garde adaptations. As the cinema has become the most recognizable form of cultural and commercial consumption of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the idea of film as an inferior art to serious literature has become less arguable, if only because the majority of people from around the world can view and relate to a film, whereas they may not be able to read and relate to James Joyce’s Ulysses, for example. The cultural hierarchy that has generally placed literature over film has come under question, and I would suggest that in the area of avant-garde film, the question becomes moot. Avant-garde adaptations are as striking, original, confrontational, and artistic as the source material, often superseding it in terms of theme and style. Avant-garde films provoke the spectator, often to the point of acknowledging the film as the more original text—if a comparison needs to be drawn.

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As such, comparisons between novel and film dominate studies of adaptation histories and theoretical inquiries, but such analyses often prove limiting when considering avant-garde films. Avant-garde films have the capacity to retell stories with such imagistic force and visually stimulating actualization of human or abstract identity and meaning that one realizes literature merely describes. Still, this study is not aimed at comparing the original with the source but at delineating the finished adaptation, the film, with the multitude of cultural products that inspire it, which might include a novel but can also include other sources. Delineating the original from its source will provide a basis for interpreting avant-garde film adaptations as meaningful works of art in themselves. In other words, I do not wish to enter the debates over which is better, the source text or the film, but rather shed light on a unique area of film, literary, and cultural studies that will enable us to consider the way visionary directors choose to adapt material for their avant-garde films. If anything, what is discovered through comparison is the fact that avant-garde adaptations are far more intellectually and aesthetically challenging than their more mainstream counterparts, that is, perhaps, other adaptations of the same source. Even if the practice of adaptation has been around since the origins of cinema, many critics have rightly pointed out that there has been little serious discussion of adaptation theory until more recently. For example, James Naremore, in his introduction to Film Adaptation says, “The very subject of adaptation has constituted one of the most jejune areas of scholarly writing in the cinema.”1 Likewise, Thomas Leitch, in Film Adaptation and Its Discontents, spends time lamenting the “rupture” between film studies and literature based on a “privileging” of the novel over film.2 One reason for the speculative and inconclusive discourse on adaptation may be that the two artistic mediums, film and literature, while sharing similar features, are nonetheless separate mediums of expression and should be treated as such. Both literature and film can be discussed in terms of narration, style, character, tone, point of view, setting, and plot. Still, it is by these very nuances that film adaptation should and can be approached and breached in interesting ways, which means one should also consider connotations, imagery, metaphors, and symbols that either are present in the source material or are interpreted by the adapter and so are completely adequate for transferring or adding to the finished film. The discussions on film adaptations of literature too often focus on issues of fidelity and the comparison between novelistic and cinematic technique. This method results in prioritizing the fictional original over the resulting film. Thus, the purpose of comparison

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becomes the measurement of the success of the film. Typically, when contemporary film directors discuss their film adaptations of popular books, they generally say they want to remain faithful to the books so as not to alienate the audience. Avant-garde film adaptations do not follow this plan. But fidelity is only useful if the adapter seeks a faithful adaptation, which more often than not proves limiting; as Brian McFarlane has said, “Fidelity is obviously very desirable in marriage; but with film adaptations I suspect playing around is more effective.”3 Robert Stam has also argued against fidelity, suggesting, The shift from a single-track verbal medium such as the novel to a multitrack medium like film, which can play not only with words (written and spoken) but also with music, sound effects, and moving photographic images, explains the unlikelihood, and I would suggest even the undesirability, of literal fidelity.4 Searching for textual fidelity in the adapted film may be fun and part of the viewing process for some, but it limits the far-ranging aspects of adaptation that can and do occur. Fidelity critics often address issues concerning exactly what is transformed from one expressive medium to another by looking for equivalents for film language in verbal language. While this process yields some interesting and fruitful results, strictly confirming fidelity overlooks both intertextuality and critical interpretations by the filmmaker/adapter, which can enhance or at least expand the reading of the source text, whether it is a novel, biography, opera, or whatever that inspires the artist-as-adapter. As Leitch says, “Fidelity makes sense as a criterion of value only when we can be certain that the model is more valuable than the copy,” which is not the way one should practice adaptation studies.5 In short, adhering to fidelity criticism simply leaves one asking more questions rather then receiving satisfying results. This study of avant-garde adaptations will focus on the various forms that adaptations have taken or can take, specifically, that films based on prior material simply means the “material” itself can be derived from a variety of sources. Not all adaptations are based on literature. This goes without saying, but many adaptation studies focus on the interrelations between literature and film, while overlooking history or historical moments that have been adapted, biographical content that has been adapted, appropriations, or the intertextual, metatextual, or hypertextual levels that intersect during the adaptation process. I believe the better way of examining avant-garde adaptations is to consider them as exploitations, which

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means certain films need to be examined in terms of how and what they (ab)use and render from the source text. Creating a new text (the film) from an original source text relies on certain distinct and interpretive choices that are made in the adaptation process. Studying adaptation as a form of exploitation provides various avenues to explore avant-garde film, since exploitative “translations” are forms of “repositionings” themselves. Translations convert, transform, render, and explain, and they also recast the language of medium into another. A translation of something written, a verbal text, to something visual, a film, “can be said to be an imitation, creative transposition, or an appropriation. All these words are synonyms for translation.”6 Avant-garde films exploit the prior text, which means they do not have to be the same as the original and therefore “transpose” ideas from the source or adapted text. Most would agree that translations are inherently created as points of comparison, but I would suggest the avant-garde adaptation does not have to rely on the kinds of comparisons that dictate whether or not the film is a “success” or not (in terms of faithfulness or economic return), mainly because these types of adaptations rely on other means, specifically, the exploitation of the adapted text. Because of this, the finished adaptation should be considered its own entity, one that might owe the source text a debt of gratitude, but one that essentially stands on its own.

Defining Adaptation Much has been written about the theory and practice of film adaptation, especially as more film historians and theorists have devoted critical attention to it as a unique area of textual studies. Adaptation should itself be considered a discipline or at least a disciplinary act; adaptation is, inherently, the study of transcription, which is a form of translation, in the sense that one thing is being transformed into another. Certain methodologies of adaptation offer ways to discuss the process of transformation in either broad, generalized forms or in more approachable specific ways. Adaptations can “borrow” or “transfer,” as some of the typical descriptions go, but, more appropriately, they exploit ideas, image clusters, and sound patterns. Further, the best kind of film adaptation that translates the source text to the screen does so exploitatively in order to render an entirely new text that does not have to rely on issues of fidelity. An exploitative adaptation destroys and rebuilds, nullifies and re-creates networks of discursive patterns because new meanings and patterns of

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discourse are formed through translation. Avant-garde films are precisely the kinds of texts that perform exploitative adaptations: they take advantage of, abuse, and re-create in order to present and represent the original material in ways that startle, confound, and satisfy spectators in startling ways. The avant-garde adaptation is the kind of film that stands on its own as an inspired form of adaptation, one that eschews fidelity to the original source(s) in order to make a more associative kind of interpretation. Linda Hutcheon’s useful book, A Theory of Adaptation, offers some interesting ways of thinking about adaptation. She advocates focusing on different “modes of engagement,” specifically “narrating, performing, and interacting,” as the best way of understanding the processes involved in transcribing one text to another, wherein telling (narrating), showing (performing), and engaging with the film (interacting) create the specific modes.7 Adaptations are, according to Hutcheon, “[a]n acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works; a creative and interpretive act of appropriation/salvaging; [and] an extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work.”8 These three points aid in examining and critiquing an adapted film, and I believe her second point about creating and interpreting best suits the similar idea I have on avant-garde films and the exploitation of the original, adapted text. Avant-garde filmmakers are highly subjective in their representations of reality or any other phenomena or imagined time/space. The film adaptation created by the avant-garde filmmaker is always the representation of his/her subjective understanding of the literary (or other) source. Obviously any filmmaker makes choices during the adaptation process, but the avantgarde filmmaker interprets more than faithfully reproduces. While some may seek some correspondence between the source(s) and the adaptation, most think of the source(s) as material ready to be reshaped. There is not an inherent need to accurately transfer or translate the adapted text to the screen in a completely faithful manner, as is the case with most mainstream productions. Choices regarding mise-en-scène, for example, mean interpreting the original’s setting, its metaphors, or its visual description in an individual way. Thomas Leitch describes certain (non-avant-garde) directors as being antithetical to literary analysis; he suggests they “were important precisely because their defiantly antiliterary brand of cinema resisted assimilation into traditional canons of aesthetic value,” which I would carry over to almost every avant-garde filmmaker.9 Avant-garde filmmakers tend to be discussed in terms of poetics, but rarely are they embraced by literary schools of thought

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for their unique style and form; they tend to be on the outside looking in. Avant-garde filmmakers are bold, which offers “in some sense, a radical reworking of the precursor text, a kind of commentary on its great antecedent, a new work”10 As Hutcheon notes, “Visually-oriented filmmakers . . . can move from [a] single-track language to a multitrack medium and thereby not only make meaning possible on many levels but appeal to other physical senses as well.”11 Avant-garde films are synaesthetic experiences that engage spectators on a kinesthetic, visceral, and cognitive level, or, as Leitch suggests, all films “invoke not only visual codes but auditory codes, narrative codes, fictional codes, and a rhetoric of figuration.”12 Every reading of a source text, particularly a literary text, is a highly individual act that involves personal interpretation and imagination, so a finished adapted film also offers multiple, individual interpretations by the same individual readers. In this regard, there can never be a “true” adaptation; the material will always be exploited by the filmmaker/adapter and the spectator. Dudley Andrew distinguishes three relational modes between film and text: “borrowing, intersecting, and transformation,”13 wherein borrowing keeps the “material idea or form” of the original text, intersecting preserves the “uniqueness of the original to such an extent it is left unassimilated in the adaptation,” and transformation strictly relies on fidelity.14 Of these, intersecting still holds promise in terms of defining a certain type of adaptation. Andrew clarifies this mode, claiming, “Such works fear or refuse to adapt—instead they present the otherness and distinctiveness of the original text, initiating a dialectical interplay between the aesthetic forms of one period with the cinematic forms of another period.”15 Avant-garde filmmakers are either overtly or more subtly interested in reactionary relationships with the mainstream—the dialectical interplay that offers a competing or contentious means of expressing a film based on another text. (Of course, many avant-garde and experimental filmmakers also do not actively engage with the mainstream and instead operate completely in their own sphere.) What this also suggests is that a compromise is rarely reached; there is an ongoing dialogue between the film and the adapted text. The adapted source text is therefore something to be constantly interpreted, argued with, rewritten, and reproduced. As Peter Brooker suggests, “An adaptation may remove itself from its source text, edit or amplify a part of it, or transpose the whole, in a spirit of deference, homage, critique, opportunism, or indifference.”16 Avant-garde filmmakers remain authentic first to their visions, second to adapted texts.

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Almost all of the critical theory on adaptation addresses novels as the adapted texts. While the discourse on this subject is worthwhile for establishing what is useful for avant-garde adaptations, it is not exhaustive. George Bluestone’s foundational text, Novels into Film (1957), relies on “implicit metaphor of translation, which governs all investigations of how codes move across sign systems.”17 Bluestone’s book is effective at outlining ways of considering the relationship between literature and film, particularly when discussing perception, a key idea of avant-garde filmmakers, who rely on their own ways of seeing to portray worlds on film. Bluestone suggested that “the film, by arranging external signs for our visual perception, or by presenting us with dialogue, can lead us to infer thought.”18 In other words, the perceptual process of watching a film creates specific ways of seeing for the spectator, so that when considering an adaptation, an individual creates his/her own interpretation of the film without being overly concerned with the adapted text or at least being more concerned with individual visual perception based on interpretation or inference. Still, Bluestone’s approach—which has influenced many adaptation readings—focuses primarily on textual fidelity, or the search for the formal capabilities of both film and literature. Such a method overlooks far too many ways to investigate the relationship between sources and the film, including parody, pastiche, imitation, allusion—all specific intertextual instances that suggest how films exploit the adapted text. Intertextuality holds strong promise for considering adaptations, because the original text is only one facet of the film’s intertextuality. Using intertextuality to study adaptations, and particularly avant-garde adaptations, highlights the relations between the filmic text and source text without presupposing the hierarchal nature of literature over film, while delineating a more nuanced exchange between them, which ultimately adds to our understanding of both source and adaptation. While I do believe this method serves the purpose of examining the film and its adapted text, with avant-garde films, as previously mentioned, they become texts that are arguably more original, more unique, and more distinguished than the source. Often, these films bear little resemblance to the original, which both highlights the individuality of the adaptation but also may lead some back to the original inspiration for the film, a point of comparison perhaps but not one based on fidelity or commercial or critical success but rather on seeking out the means by which the adaptation has exploited the original source to such an extent that it warrants reevaluation and reexamination. If film, as Alexandre Astruc famously said, is “quite simply becoming a means of expression . . .

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gradually becoming a language,” then naturally one may discuss adaptations in terms of their intertextuality.19 Leitch argues that intertextual studies will lead to greater literacy, that is, to a better understanding and knowledge of the contexts that give rise to adaptations and their subsequent contextual interpretations. This will allow adaptation studies to “dethrone English departments’ traditional emphasis on literature . . . [replacing] it with literacy, the study of the ways texts have been, might be, and should be read and rewritten.”20 The important concept here is that texts are rewritten during the adaptation process, which echoes the idea that the filmmaker interprets the original source in order to find something to translate to the screen. According to David Kranz, “Film adaptations can criticize aspects of [original] sources, debate their themes, and translate them into different cultures and times in ways which alter their meanings and effects, among other relational properties.”21 Avant-garde filmmakers actively seek difference and utilize the capacities of film itself to strengthen this difference. According to Robert Stam, The intertextuality of cinema is multitrack. The image track ‘inherits’ the history of painting and the visual arts, while the sound track ‘inherits’ the entire history of music, dialogue, and sound experimentation. Adaptation, in this sense, consists of amplifying the source text through these multiple intertexts.22 Because film can represent anything—reality, unreality, illusion, subjectivity—through its multiple tracks, it inherently is able to exploit anything, whether a novel, story, opera, picture, or historical moment. The cinema can transpose or translate anything to the screen in any variety imaginable, and in the world of the avant-garde, it is commonplace to seek alternatives. Hutcheon writes of adaptations as palimpsests, because in some fashion, “[p]alimpsests make for permanent change.”23 Additionally, she says, “As a creative and interpretive transposition of a recognizable other work or works, adaptation is a kind of extended palimpsest and, at the same time, often a transcoding into a different set of conventions.”24 The conventions of film include mise-en-scène, cinematography, sound, editing, and narrative. The multitrack nature of film and the ability of the camera to move and showcase temporal or spatial dimensions or dislocations expands our perceptions, perhaps more so than a novel. Perception, or ways of seeing, is fundamentally essential to avant-garde filmmakers. In film, a multitrack medium, “[e]verything can convey

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point-of-view: camera angle, focal length, music, mise-en-scène, performance, or costume.”25 This trait is important because it helps us see that film can ultimately separate itself from the confines of literary analysis. In other words, the tropes of cinema and the multiple styles filmmakers can take signify a new system of investigating the adaptation. Brian McFarlane discusses the vital significance and difference between the novel’s techniques and the cinema’s, writing, The camera—what it chooses to attend to and from what angle and distance according to what kinds of focus, whether it is still or moving, how it frames what is presented to its lens, or what information it chooses to withhold—is, in collaboration with the editor who decides on the suturing of shots to act out the director’s intention, as capable of complexity and subtlety, of ensuring emotional and intellectual engagement, as the writer is on the page in the exercise of a quite other sign system.26 Avant-garde filmmakers implicitly know how to convey emotional and intellectual responses by using the camera in profoundly unique ways. While McFarlane and Hutcheon rightfully place emphasis on the multitrack capabilities of the cinema, Leitch suggests we notice the differences between literature and film based on “performance.” He suggests, “Instead of saying that literary texts are verbal and movies aren’t, it would be more accurate to say that movies depend on prescribed, unalterable visual and verbal performances in a way literary texts don’t.”27 In essence, to establish a fair analysis of the film would mean to disregard the adapted text, to the extent that it does not “interfere” with the film, and focus on what is going on in front of the viewer on the screen, to simply pay attention to the details of the “performance” of film. Realizing the intertextual nature of the finished film helps distinguish the film text from the adapted text. The source text is not completely ignored; rather, it remains a touchstone but not one to use as a basis of comparison. Divorcing the film and adapted text from each other is impossible, as Hutcheon notes, because “when we call a work an adaptation, we openly announce its overt relationship to another work or works.”28 Adaptation always implies a change and not an alignment, and the finished film will always make us rethink the original or at least recognize the original in a new light—and this is a good thing. As Brooker says, “If there is one primary source text and the adaptation remains in significant textual contact with it, then it will not only present a changed version of its source but transform our understanding and valuation of that primary source too.”29

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Literary or other texts are not stable products and change through their own cultural, historical, and sociological permutations. Film adaptations “can outline the changing role of the literary text by examining the ways in which [they] embody the diverse interpretive possibilities that contribute to the text’s continuing vitality in various cultures and contexts.”30 This may go without saying, but it is important to consider with avant-garde films, which, by their very nature, ask us to reconsider the source text as a point of departure rather than a constant or unwavering entity. The avant-garde adaptation of a literary or other text is grounded in a particular moment in the filmmaker’s life. Understanding the visual and aural codes of a particular avant-garde film requires knowing something about the filmmaker’s style, whereas, I would suggest, it does not require a firm knowledge of the source text. In other words, having a solid perceptual knowledge and an innate conceptual knowledge will aid the spectator of the avant-garde film, inasmuch as being familiar with the codes of a literary text and the corresponding codes of film language. Again, the true nature of revealing a “successful” avantgarde adaptation depends on interpretation, both by the filmmaker and the spectator. As early as 1916, Hugo Munsterberg wrote that “the photoplay shows us a significant conflict of human actions in moving pictures which, freed from the physical forms of space, time, and causality, are adjusted to the free play of our mental experiences.”31 Films trigger internal responses—intellectual and emotional—based on the free play of our imaginations and memories. The perception of the film, the perceptual knowledge one receives through viewing, creates sensory impressions that affect individual responses and interpretations to films. Hutcheon comments that “each mode of engagement also involves what we might call a different ‘mental act’ for its audience,” meaning, the showing, telling, or interacting with stories requires a certain degree of individual interpretation and meaning-formation.”32 She continues, Telling requires of its audience conceptual work; showing calls on its perceptual decoding abilities. In the first, we imagine and visualize a world from black marks on white pages we read; in the second, our imaginations are preempted as we perceive and then give meaning to a world of images, sounds, and words seen and heard on the screen.33 In short, adaptation requires of its creator a large amount of imaginative and creative processes that enable spectators to interpret meaning based on a wide array of cinematic codes that demand equal attention. These

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codes can be cinema specific or extracinematic and so ask us to recognize the contexts and intertexts at play in the act of adaptation and reception. There may be multiple possible combinations of the codes, signs, structures, and events that are in the source text, which may be then exploited in the film. Avant-garde adaptations do this in a variety of ways. The translation of source material into a second medium, film, requires imagination on the part of the adapter. Like a literary translation, the transposition of any text to another demands insightful and ingenious decisions. The adapter-filmmaker relates stories in individual ways using methods that are best suited to the type of film he or she wants to make. These methods include the concretization of ideas, the actualization of symbols or metaphors, the amplification of nuances from various sources, and the criticism of the various texts that inspire the adapter’s interests. To translate literally means to change or transform something. Adaptations, however, are changes from one medium to another, so, according to Hutcheon, they become “re-meditations, that is, specifically translations in the form of intersemiotic transpositions from one sign system (e.g. words) to another (e.g. images).”34 This definition echoes Roman Jakobson’s idea of translation, “which is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of nonverbal sign systems,” and it plays on the popularity of semiotics as a means of discussing adaptations.35 While this is beneficial, it also suggests somewhat of a reliance on literary tropes for understanding the film.. Still, using ideas that discuss sign systems ultimately yields ways of addressing how the film differs from the original source. Hutcheon again says this kind of translation acts specifically “as transmutation or transcoding, that is, as necessarily a recording into a new set of conventions as well as signs.”36 This again may lead back to the notion of medium specificity, that film generates a system of signs and codes that are unique to it and therefore can be discussed in highly detailed ways. As Leitch suggests, “Interpreting and integrating these [filmic] codes into a single signifying system of a given film surely requires as much conceptual initiative and agility as interpreting the verbal (and narrative and fictional and figurative) signifying systems of a given novel.”37 Leitch is specifically discussing the translation of novels to film, which does not account for the hybridity of adaptations and the fact that films are often based on various written works, visual ephemera, and metatextual sources, but his comment is still useful. In other words, the fact that films can adapt aural, visual, and narrative codes from many sources to create one final text demonstrates its flexibility in terms of the transcoding of verbal signs into visual ones. We must

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take into account the language of film first before deciding whether or not certain codes were translated from the original source(s). Film is a language with its own properties, and, as Astruc wrote, film language is a “form in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel.”38 The focus on the filmmaker’s obsessions or thoughts reiterates the compulsion of avant-garde filmmakers to rely solely on the creative impulses that spring from within. Why should there be so much speculation about the theoretical and practical implications of adaptation? There is no common ground on which to discuss them, but the field of adaptation studies is rife with guesswork. Adaptations as translations, transmutations, or transitionings all become sites of inference and interpretation, a field where mental acumen is as important as technical competence. The avant-garde filmmaker seeks alternative ways of making films and rarely believes in adhering to mainstream formulas or narrative constructs. As a language, film has the capacity to express any kind of thought, and an adaptation can express any kind of variation on the original. This transference from one language medium to another means that ultimately the adaptation becomes something new. The avant-garde filmmaker rightly chooses creative ways to make films of previous material. Films create meaning based on techniques that provoke, invoke, and evoke connotative or more straightforward significance or importance for individual spectators. Understanding why certain avant-garde films do these things is central to understanding the meanings in the film itself, rather than the meanings associated with or transferred from the original. Leitch writes, “The primary lesson of film adaptation [is] that texts remain alive only to the extent that they can be rewritten and that to experience a text in all its power requires each reader to rewrite it.”39 Film adaptations are rewrites of original texts, constructed by both filmmaker and viewer alike. Because of this, there can be numerous ways the film constructs meaning, from the filmmaker’s vision and choices to the viewer’s own sensibilities. Adaptations stress—or should stress—differences versus similarities. As Naremore suggests, adaptations focus on “individual styles rather than formal systems,” which highlights the fact that adaptations are new, different texts.40 Even the famous theorist Andre Bazin wrote that “[f]aithfulness to a form, literary or otherwise, is illusory: what matters is the equivalence in meaning of the forms.”41 While this typically does not always occur in avant-garde adaptations, mainly because the avant-garde filmmaker is interested in many things besides equivalence, Bazin’s comment

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nevertheless stresses the importance of meaning, which I think has to do with interpretation. Film adaptations engage in a continuing discursive relationship with their source texts, so much so that “adaptation is less a resuscitation of an originary word than an ongoing dialogical process.”42 The constant dialogue that exists between film and adapted text allows us to see that adaptations are ongoing processes. The appeal of adaptations lies in their ability to engage the spectator in multiple texts, which in turns allows us to see how intertextuality informs the production and reception of adaptations. If approached this way, then relying on fidelity criticism becomes only a minor facet of interpretation. Cinematic language is a rich synaesthetic experience. It is open to many kinds of references, metaphors, allusions, and symbols, as well as verbal and pictorial practices. The cinema can represent almost anything real or unreal, present ideological positions, juxtapose competing theses, encompass various aesthetic movements, and engage with cultural and societal manifestations. The cinema can translate whole entities into its technological and cultural apparatus. Adaptations serve the cinema better than any other artistic medium because it can represent and represent stories from tradition, fiction, or memory. Walter Benjamin discussed the “auratic” quality of art forms and, in particular, the means by which some forms either lose or maintain their aura once projected, displayed, and consumed by culture. Hutcheon relies on Benjamin in one of her definitions of adaptation, specifically determining that films as adaptations do not lose their auratic qualities, which is true: Because each adaptation must also stand on its own, separate from the palimpsetic pleasures of doubled experience, it does not lose its Benjaminian aura. It is not a copy in any mode of reproduction, mechanical or otherwise. It is repetition without replication, bringing together the comfort and ritual and recognition with the delight of surprise and novelty. As adaptation, it involves both memory and change, persistence and variation.43 As an act of translation, an adaptation maintains its uniqueness while inherently keeping its ties to the adapted text; there is no complete separation. Benjamin’s 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” argues that film has the ability to challenge the traditional forms of art, like literature, that seemingly make them “untouchable” as unmalleable categories. In the essay, Benjamin claims “that the ‘auratic’ reading and viewing formations of those classical arts

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must give way before the cinema’s radical reworkings, transformations, and adaptations.”44 Benjamin suggests that translation, or adaptation, does not attempt to recapture what is embedded in the original but to free it in a new form, the film. Therefore, the original text must be freed from its original language in order to be appreciated and to take on a new life in its new language of the cinema. As Hutcheon surmises, Benjamin argues that “translation is not a rendering of some fixed nontextual meaning to be copied or paraphrased or reproduced; rather, it is an engagement with the original text that makes us see that text in different ways.”45 Translators—the adapters—can liberate the source text from its own limitations and restrictions, which produces a wealth of material that can be translated to the screen in the adaptation, which, in turn, creates its own auratic quality. Duncan Reekie suggests that imitative copies of original works of art—the mechanical reproduction—create a hierarchy of auratic valorization, that each subsequent adaptation or alteration of an original diminishes the auratic quality of the source.46 This may be true in some instances, especially in painting or sculpture, but film is unique because it exists in the public and private realms. The cinematic apparatus creates aura through its very process of duplication and reduplication. Avant-garde filmmakers who, existing primarily in the private sector of art, create adaptations ultimately make films that have their own auratic identity and worth, their own value and cultural and social credence. The arguments that persist over the aura of art as posited by Benjamin will always remain contentious, but it is important to consider how adaptations can indeed create their own aura, tied to but also free from the original text’s aura, however large or slight it may be.

Historical Trajectories A fascination with moving images in early cinema history drew on the pictorial arts, so much so that by the end of the nineteenth century, the many cinematic devices that were created stemmed from the power of the image over the power of the written word. The increased interest in and fascination with realism as both a practice and, later, artistic (mainly literary) theory led early film directors to literary texts as sources of inspiration. The primitive nature of early filmmaking, particularly the centrally framed stationary camera, lended a “staged play” quality to movies that appealed to audiences for their melodrama as much as their familiarity. Filmmakers borrowed scenes, concepts, and stories from literature

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to create a form of old-fashioned style of adaptation, one that presents rather than represents. (Tom Gunning has called this era of filmmaking the “cinema of attractions,” where spectacle [showing] trumps narrative [telling].) Another reason early filmmakers looked to literary sources was to establish film as a more respectable art than the novelty it was originally perceived as being. The practice of using prior literary texts as sources for films also gained film a new, more sophisticated audience, one with more cultural credence and class status than the immigrant workers who flocked to the movies. One argument about traditional adaptations, those that stem from recognized literary masterpieces, concerns the issue of characterization and the capacity of readers versus movie spectators to identify with the protagonist (or antagonist). Readers can certainly identify and sympathize with characters in fictional books, but real people captured moving (and later emitting sound) spoke to a more heightened sense of verisimilitude that provided spectators with an enhanced degree of identification and sympathy. This idea is debatable and is really of greater concern to historical debates rather than spectators of the avant-garde, where characters often become abstractions instead of flesh-and-blood people. Still, in early cinema, the addition of movement to printed words—in the form of intertitles—gave audiences a reason to believe the fictional portrayal of well-known stories from literature. Issues of character empathy have also dominated adaptation studies in more recent years, as cognitive theory shifted critical analyses away from psychoanalytic interpretations to ones based on the psychology of the spectator. Adaptations take many permutations, and avant-garde films that are inspired by particular sources tend to be more personal and reflective of individual styles. Certainly there are those films (and directors) that can be analyzed as having recurring stylistic techniques or themes, but the world of avant-garde film assumes no direct relation to fidelity, taking an interpretive approach instead. The rise of auteurism in film studies has only enhanced the role of the avant-garde; in no other film genre, if the avant-garde can be called one, is there more representations of the auteur. In the present environment of media conglomerates that own studios, the interest lies in financial gain. Avant-garde filmmakers exist in a world where there is mainly concern for integrity and vision. Adaptations take on a new life independent of, or interdependent with, the original source. Visualizing something that has existed before as a cultural artifact means interpreting that particular source in ways suitable to the visualization of the filmmaker. In other words, adaptations

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serve as synergetic texts that both adhere to some ideas present from the original but also outwardly acknowledge the differences that simultaneously operate in the world of the adaptation. Standard adaptations often stress the sameness factor—the film is overly and deliberately similar to the original. Again, this is why the concept of exploitation serves as an effective means of discussing the adaptation as a new text. Most adaptations privilege parts of the original over others; for instance, some might only translate the essence, tone, or mood of the original while ignoring the plot or characters entirely. Exploitative adaptations also appropriate other elements, a key feature that I will discuss further when addressing particular avant-garde films that are appropriations. We should remember that film has two separate narratives: One that is verbal, and one that is visual. Many avant-garde films do not have speech at all, but any utterance can be considered a verbal exchange, whereas visual narration occurs when the film displays the world around us in new and unique way, offering a way of seeing the words or prior images the film is adapting. There are many terms that can be applied to adaptation, words that have an assortment of connotative meanings, but ones that also are important in understanding the process of adaptation in general. A few of the terms are: z z z z z z z z z z

Recycling Remaking Retelling Reproduction Rewriting Mutation Metamorphosis Transfiguration Transposition Borrowing

The list could certainly be extended. The terms included relate to issues of fidelity but, more appropriately, shun notions of loyalty, faithfulness, and devotion to the original, which is a good thing. According to Stam, “If ‘fidelity’ is an inadequate trope, what tropes might be more appropriate?” He continues, Adaptation has available a rich constellation of terms and tropes—translation, actualization, reading, critique, dialogization, cannibalization,

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transmutation, transfiguration, incarnation, transmogrification, transcoding, performance, signifying, rewriting, detournement—all of which shed light on a different dimension of adaptation.47 Many critics and scholars of adaptation have used these ideas in numerous systems used for analyzing and interpreting adaptations. Studies of adaptations are therefore laden with complications over the use of the best methodological approach, but I would suggest that, instead of prioritizing the methods, we should whichever ones are best suited for certain and specific adaptations. Exploitative adaptations are ones that utilize all of the methods of adaptation, so that it becomes relevant to address all models, both theoretical and practical, when discussing avant-garde films. We should remember, too, that adaptations are forms of critique—of the original source, of the sociocultural milieu in which it was created, and of other adaptations themselves. Texts that are translated from one medium to another are refunctioned as works that both enable and inhibit specific correct ways of discussing them. In other words, adaptations elude one particular way of describing them; they are far too complicated. A film adaptation creates a new story; it is not the same as the original, nor should it be considered as such. The film takes on a new life and the characteristics of the source text—everything from plot and characterization to setting—has the potential to drastically change. Narratives and characters become independent of the original text, though each is based on the original source. Film scholars have often considered the study of adaptation as a kind of hybrid approach thatsometimes results in a literary analysis instead of a film analysis. One of the reasons I think addressing adaptations as exploitations and translations can be beneficial is simply because it opens new avenues of exploration—of considering the process of adaptation rather than the finished product (though the film itself should be discussed on its own terms as a film). An exploitative adaptation considers adaptations as a kind of ongoing discourse that broaches both the original and adapted text as entities that should be thought of as independent. Translations offer a means of analyzing adaptations that differ from previous studies because they focus less on fidelity and more on how adaptation should be defined and discussed as a critical inquiry separate from literary studies. According to Linda Hutcheon, “An adaptation is a derivation that is not derivative—a work that is second without being secondary.”48 I tend to agree with this assertion that, while adaptations are secondary re-formations of texts, they are not lacking in

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originality. Instead, they are intrinsically new texts wherein the spectator forms meaning based on the immediate experience of watching the film. Some prior knowledge of the adapted text may be helpful, but it is not necessary to enjoy the film as its own new thing. Spectators can “fill in gaps” during and after the viewing process. According to Brooker, “Translation becomes a ‘hybridizing instance’ marked by disparity, gaps, and indeterminacy rather than equivalence.”49 An adaptation therefore opens up many channels of reference and transformation, seeking not to argue equivalence but rather to uncover the difference between the film and the many texts that give it meaning and substance. Given the fact that there have been many recent fruitful contributions to adaptation studies, it may seem tedious to offer another study. I want to sort through some of these methods before elaborating on the idea of an adaptation as translation, which is a kind of exploitation. Translation indicates change; it is the rendering of one thing into another, a transformation or conversion in form and appearance, but one that has to rely on its source while distancing itself from it. Translations also indicate that there is a change in spectatorship, from reading to viewing, if it is a novel-to-film adaptation, for instance. Adaptations also appropriate the meaning of the source text, which implies a certain degree of violence rendered on the original. This “theft” is precisely what causes panic in purists: If the film is vastly different from the novel, then the novel has seemingly been corrupted. Appropriation raises questions of individual agency, but the end result is what matters: What exactly has been chosen from the original to satisfy the needs of the spectator or, more adequately, the director in the new one? To a certain extent, adaptations are based on the denial and acceptance, even to excess, of certain narrative elements or strategies over others. As Brian McFarlane suggests, “Adapting literary texts to film is a creative undertaking, but the task requires a kind of selective interpretation, along with the ability to recreate and sustain an established mood.”50 The film adaptation becomes a site where choices have to be made—even creative choices on the part of the adapter—to present the same material in a new way, to a different audience, much the same way a translator makes choices when translating a text from one specific textual culture and audience to another. Considering adaptations as exploitations and translations will enable one to gain a much greater knowledge of the translated product, the film, and the reasons the translator—the film director—has made certain decisions and choices in the translation process. To be an adapter means exploiting the source material; it necessitates a creative change.

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Film adaptations have the ability to connect with larger areas of discourse, including sociological, cultural, economic, and historical ones, which in turn allows spectators to differentiate among various adaptation processes by placing them in a broader context. Attempting to understand how adaptations interact with sociocultural contexts allows us to see how and why directors make certain choices in the adaptation process. For example, a more mainstream adaptation, such as a comic book adaptation, may be intended primarily for financial gain, thereby basing the adaptation on the elements that are going to please the audience enough to secure greater profits. Doing so may mean altering the original or omitting crucial characters. Still, the end result is based on the discretion of the creator of the film. Avant-garde adaptations actively pursue alternative forms and narrative strategies in order to render a successful adaptation. This idea is contrary to the typical discussions of adaptation theory, which either aim for fidelity to the original or attempt to maintain the core attributes of the original. Deliberately sidestepping issues of fidelity, the avant-garde adapter wants to create an entirely new text based more on mood and interpretation. The exploitation of the original source material, whether novel, poem, document, or video, signifies the avant-garde director as a major progenitor of alternative adaptation methods. The exploitative adaptation emphasizes the adapter’s individual vision and discernment of the source material; it is a more personal reading of the source text that further serves as an inspiration rather than an outline for copying. The exploitation of the source text demonstrates an acute awareness of the endless possibilities that adaptations can become; it stresses the need for varying approaches. To exploit something or someone suggests an exposure, a revealing way of using and abusing the source material to produce new perspectives and meanings. Essentially, when considering avant-garde adaptations, one must keep an open mind to the endless possibilities that emerge from the process and the products of the adaptation process.

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Chapter 3

Appropriation

The “theft” of previously available artistic works, cultural artifacts, historical data, or biographical information, whether in performance or as a published piece, has been a common practice of creative endeavor, whether in filmmaking, writing, or visual art, for centuries. Appropriation generally has had a negative connotation since the term means to “steal or misuse”; however, in the arts, appropriation refers to the practice of borrowing or adopting, which, when considered in adaptation studies, is not a detriment at all but rather a way of viewing the original work in a new way, and one that also allows us to see the original as a foundational text on which to build and interpret. Most avant-garde filmmakers are individualistic in their approach to adaptations, and appropriation is no different, even though the filmmaker is taking things that are already existent but using them in new ways in a particular kind of adaptive process. There are films that incorporate images, words, or sounds that suggest a relationship with the appropriated source. Rose Hobart (1936), Joseph Cornell’s avant-garde film of the actress Rose Hobart from the film East of Borneo (1931), uses appropriation to completely alter narrative causality, time, and space. Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, one of the most important avant-garde films of the 1960s, appropriates images of biker culture, Jesus, and pop songs to tell its narrative. Filmmakers who engage in appropriation do so for the purpose of reevaluating the source text(s) from which they borrow, while at the same time creating an exclusively new form of art, the film. Anger’s film, for example, is completely subversive; through using images of Christ as a parallel narrative to the biker leader’s journey, we see how established patterns of acceptance become reimagined through the film. Appropriation is an act of examination, of sifting through the range of source texts available to the filmmaker (or writer, as many discussions of appropriation focus on literature) in order to uncover how one uses them in creating something new. To appropriate, then, is to engage in intertextuality, the

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process of examining the ways in which texts interact and the ways in which spectators respond to the multiple threads of texts that can inform the film adaptation. Avant-garde films are antithetical to tradition, so if they do participate in the act of appropriation, they may typically do so in an abusive fashion. What this means is that the film might serve as a critique of the original adapted source text(s). According to Julie Sanders, “[A]ppropriation carries out the same substantial engagement as adaptation but frequently adopts a posture of critique, even assault.”1 By contrast, an outright adaptation may have a more prolonged engagement with the source text. Many Shakespeare adaptations function in this way, however, there are those Shakespeare adaptations that also serve as critiques, such as Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (which I will discuss more fully in Chapter 14) or Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which appropriation becomes more functional. Appropriation may borrow, reconstitute, mimic, echo, allude, imitate, continue, rewrite, or refashion elements or characteristics of the original, including styles, plots, themes, motifs, subject matter, or generic tropes, but do so in a way that allows us to see both the originality of the new work (here, a film) and to point us back to the source for reexamination. According to James Young, appropriations may become authentic artworks themselves, even if they look to other texts for material, which is true when regarding avant-garde films. He states: Works that are an expression of an artist’s individual genius are characterized by personal authenticity. Personal authenticity is an aesthetic merit. All things being equal, a work of art that is an original expression of an artist’s genius is more valuable than a derivative one. The original artwork opens up new perspectives. It excites the imagination in new ways.2 While defining genius is problematic, Young’s point is important because in regard to avant-garde films, the opening of “new perspectives,” coupled with exciting the imagination, occurs in almost every instance of avantgarde filmmaking—indeed, it is often its purpose to engage, enlighten, and inspire the spectator, whether it is an adaptation or not. Avant-garde appropriations and adaptations are of equal significance as the original text; they are not necessarily only a derivation. In other words, avantgarde appropriations and adaptations showcase “genius” and “personal authenticity” as much as an original work. Young also makes the point

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that “[a]rtists who appropriate content, styles, or motifs do not need to worry that their works will necessarily be inauthentic or otherwise aesthetically flawed.”3 More precise, avant-garde adaptations do not become lesser kinds of art; they do, as I have suggested, often become even better or more pronounced forms of art that enable creative expression and perception in spectators. Appropriations sometimes invite comparison-and-contrast evaluations, but avant-garde films that rewrite texts by exploiting them—with either exploitative appropriation or adaptation— become texts beyond imitative products. As Sanders suggests, “The ‘rewrite’ invariably transcends mere imitation . . . [by] adding, supplementing, [and] improving. The aim is not replication as such, but rather complication, expansion rather then contraction.”4 What avant-garde films do is allow us to see how source texts are amendable to expansion or supplementation, which makes the films better than their source texts in terms of representation. Appropriations become new forms of representation through their collective assemblage of style, theme, mood, or form. Relationships between intertexts and their referents also constantly remind us of the process of revision, and avant-garde adaptations participate in revisions or reworkings of texts in ways that force us to reexamine original works. Postmodernism has scrutinized past historical events, aesthetic or otherwise, to remind us of the processes of reinvention or intervention involved in discussing any and all art forms. Postmodern theory also touches on the notions of real and fake, or the “hyperreal,” all ideas that become elusive when attempting to fortify a large, grand narrative theory. Adaptations or appropriations deal with the relationship between what is real (the source text) and what is the imitation (the not-real adaptation), and while most critics argue over the true aesthetic quality of the reproduction (the adaptation), what actually needs to be considered or scrutinized is how much the successor text supersedes or supplants the source text based on its own authenticity. Films that appropriate from other art forms, such as literature, film, historical events, or biographical data, all serve as unique case studies for investigating meaning. Appropriations are a type of adaptation, and many avant-garde films utilize appropriation in order to present their subjects, and in the process become alternative ways of rethinking either precursor texts or historical or biographical events. According to Sanders, No appropriation can be achieved without impacting upon and altering in some way the text which inspired the adaptation. So influential,

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indeed, have some appropriations become that in many instances they now define our first experiences or encounters with their precursor work of art.5 Adaptations are often concerned with providing commentary on source texts. Appropriations of styles or themes from previous works also serve as critical perspectives. The avant-garde adaptation that uses appropriated material becomes a form of art that offers radically new perceptions of the original, even as it divorces itself from the original to become something as original as the precursor text(s) that inspire it. As mentioned, avant-garde films challenge the ways we see things by altering styles or forms of the apparatus itself, to reimagining themes that may pervade our everyday lives (love, hate, life, death). In this way, avant-garde films continuously make us reshape subjectivity or question any kind of subjective presentation of material. The same occurs in adaptation and appropriation: The source text is reviewed through the new critical lens of the avant-garde. In today’s society, it is arguable that almost any cultural artifact or manifestation is somehow influenced through appropriation or forms of appropriation like pastiche, allusion, or quotation. The presumed or acknowledged intertextuality of literature or film encourages an ever-evolving construction of meaning, and avant-garde film participates in the process of changing meaning inasmuch as it supports expanding meaning. Appropriations often point to ways of criticizing the original source(s) for the adaptation. According to Sanders, “Intrinsic to appropriations rather than the movements of proximation or cross-generic interpretation . . . central to adaptation, here we have a wholesale rethinking of the terms of the original.”6 As I will discuss in my analysis of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Hitler, A Film from Germany (1977), the immensity of ideas present in the film not only encourages us but forces us to rethink the original (Hitler and the Hitler legacy) through bricolage, collage, and Brechtian distanciation, devices Syberberg uses to confound and enthrall the spectator. Syberberg’s use of many materials—film clips, newsreels, radio voiceovers, tableaux—creates a tapestry of intermingling texts. “Encouraged interplay between appropriations and their sources,” suggests Sanders, “begins to emerge, then, as a fundamental, even vital, aspect of the reading or spectating experiences, one productive of new meanings, applications, and resonance.”7 In this sense, appropriations enrich and elevate texts, here a film, rather than “stealing” their essence from them.

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A large percentage of adaptations and appropriations occur within a preordained canon of literature, and the subsequent adaptation is also often assimilated into the same hierarchy. The discourse surrounding adaptations of canonical works thus become discussions of similarity. Avant-garde adaptations and appropriations set themselves apart because they focus on differences, allowing a more fruitful discourse on the significance of intertextuality or the multitude of connotations that accompany adaptations or appropriations, terms and ideas that are both enriching and sometimes admittedly ambiguous, for instance, possession, haunted, homage, grafting, supplement,and continuation. While it can be productive to discuss how avant-garde adaptations are similar to their sources, whether they participate in outright or subtle forms of adaptation or appropriation, most of these unique kinds of transpositioning allow us to see how ideas that emerge from the source text inform subjective, interpretive, and creative adaptations or adaptations that appropriate from a single (or variety of) source(s). Avant-garde adaptations often signal a direct relationship to their source text(s), a specific version of the source, but nevertheless constitute an ongoing contentious affiliation and association while also becoming something new. The transference or translation of generic codes, temporal and spatial schemes, and historical or cultural boundaries in the avant-garde adaptation or appropriation signifies a shift to a more nuanced way of considering the process of appropriating materials in order to create the new adapted text. The use of appropriation in avant-garde films generally points to a distancing from the original or informing source, so much so that the resulting adaptation becomes an entirely separate product. Setting texts against one another, the avant-garde appropriation signifies a shift toward outright speculation on the part of the filmmaker and spectator: The viewing experience becomes one of questioning just as it is one of enjoyment. According to Sanders, “The spectator or reader must be able to participate in the play of similarity and difference perceived between the original, source, or inspiration to appreciate fully the reshaping or rewriting undertaken by the original.”8 The original document that transforms itself through appropriation becomes the fuller original adapted text, and the spectator relationship with the text, like the reader relationship, evolves. Avant-garde films force us to reconsider notions of perception and subjectivity, ideas that can either invigorate spectators or cause them to turn away from the film. In an adaptation, at least the potential familiarity of the source assists one when viewing; perhaps the reliability of awareness helps spectators not used to viewing avant-garde

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film. Avant-garde films that use appropriated material either force spectators into a contentious relationship with the source text(s), making us reconsider the very source(s) themselves, or they cause spectators to disassociate themselves from the new revitalization of the world of the avant-garde adaptation. As Johanna Burton comments, “Appropriation might be seen as a mode of revealing language, representation and even social space to be so shape-shifting as to subsist simultaneously as both weapon and target.” Appropriation can, she continues, “reveal critically the ways that subjectivity is crafted, consumed and controlled.”9 The avant-garde film is indeed contentious, even reactionary by nature; it breaks rules, which suggests that transgression provokes disavowal in the discomfited or threatened viewer. Many theoreticians and cultural critics, from T. S. Eliot to Gèrard Genette, have commented on the inevitability of appropriation, that meanings are formed by the interrelations among or between texts and that authors—for they primarily discuss novels—are subject to (in) direct influence. Appropriations act as filtrations of cultural commodities, whether they are literary, filmic, musical, or visual, or, as often the case, biographical or historical, and thus they exploit (take, borrow, or use) these items in new and exciting ways for the avant-garde adaptation. Appropriations actively assimilate, construct, and utilize—they do not function as mere imitations but rather as ongoing processes of critical and aesthetic commentary. Appropriation has significantly played a part in the historical trajectory of the avant-garde (and other arts or genres). As David Evans suggests, “The readymade, collage and montage are presented as the three innovations of the historic avant-gardes that cumulatively register this fundamental transition, without which any notion of contemporary appropriation art is unimaginable.”10 Citing the fact that appropriation is really an inevitable daily occurrence might lead one to consider how the appropriated material is used. What function might it serve? In an avant-garde adaptation, the appropriation of previous existing artistic or social or cultural materials, whether historical or biographical, fiction or nonfiction, helps identify them as special occurrences of regeneration. What constitutes the intermingling of texts is the process of appropriation as adaptation, which allows us to appreciate how the avant-garde filmmaker uses them to unusual or new effect.

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Chapter 4

The Exploitative Adaptation

Almost any text, whether literary or cultural artifact, can be rewritten or appropriated through public consumption or by an individual artist. Adaptations can change dramatically from original sources to their finished, or secondary, status, and the process involved in this alteration can take many directions, which makes understanding the processes at work of great significance. Any filmmaker who chooses to create an adaptation knows instinctively that he or she must be willing to transform a previous text (or texts) in highly subjective ways; “successful” adaptations depend on the ability to transfer material from one medium to another through subtlety, severity, or selectivity. Being successful is also highly subjective, and when determining the worth of an adaptation, we should not just consider the ways in which an adaptation is close to the original text, nor should we rely on box office receipts, especially for avant-garde adaptations. Rather, focusing on the differences and highlighting the individual creativity of the filmmaker seems more likely to yield discussions of how successful the adaptation is in a particular context and as filtered through the particular vision of the filmmaker. In this light, the emphasis falls on the spectator to interpret the methods of adaptation and to recognize perhaps the nuances of the source material(s) but also to discover—and welcome—the ways by which the filmmaker has chosen to revise, modify, or rework the original. An avant-garde adaptation works in this way, allowing us to avoid pestering questions of fidelity but more importantly allows us to see how the source text has been exploited. Exploiting the source material means creating an alternative adaptation. Exploitative adaptations recognize the need for an ongoing intertextual dialogue between the source and the adapted text. The exploitative adaptation highlights the adapter’s personal vision and understanding of the source material; it demonstrates cognizance of the need for varying approaches. Avant-garde cinema is capable of expressing any kind of representation or personal vision, whether grounded in

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reality or the unreality of dreams. Avant-garde film can be abstract or lyrical. Exploitative adaptations have some connections to the original text—they must—but they also are new texts and so should be treated as such. If they are new texts, then they can be examined by focusing on the varying methods of narration (created and developed through cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing, and sound) that signify an audio-visual film text or on the gaps between the original and the adaptation. There are many proponents of focusing on what is “missing” between texts, and the exploitative adaptation emphasizes this process. For example, Thomas Leitch determines [i]t would hardly redress the balance between literature and literacy to think of each adaptation not on terms of what it faithfully reproduces—what it selects, emphasizes, and transforms—but of what it leaves out. The very process of supplying omitted material draws each reader closer to the story, its world, and the process of world making.1 The exploitative adaptation welcomes the multiplicity of viewer responses. Creating worlds of comprehension based on individual interpretation matters most in determining the rewards of the adaptation. Hence, someone may watch Cocteau’s La belle et la bête (Beauty and the Beast, 1946) and possibly either find it dazzling in its combination of lyricism, realism, and surrealism, or another may see it as a failure, an adaptation that takes too many liberties, omits plot structure, or remains too foreign. To exploit something or someone means to utilize varying ways/forms of exposure to produce a new perspective and meaning. The avant-garde filmmaker who chooses to adapt something focuses on uncovering meanings in the source text and in creating new meanings based on interpretation and the filling in of gaps or omissions with his or her own ideas. In this way, we can consider the exploitative adaptation as a kind of active ongoing process—a way of constantly reshaping the source text through the finished film. Exploitative adaptations do not ignore the original text nor do they completely cancel out the original text. Rather, they always probe the original for meaning, constantly asking us to revisit it for further investigation. Exploitative appropriations work similarly. An avant-garde film is something that provokes and evokes strong intellectual and emotional responses, and an adaptation or appropriation that can be considered experimental will likely do the same. Adaptations inherently cause spectators to reshape the original source, no matter how familiar they might be with it, mainly because a change from one medium to another

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involves a change of context and therefore a shift in point of view. This alone causes patently different interpretations of a work. The term exploit normally has negative connotations, but in terms of adaptations and, specifically, avant-garde adaptations, it signifies a more constructive or affirming approach. Exploitative adaptations are creative endeavors that focus on the processes of creative interpretation and transformative translation. By nature, avant-garde films are radically different enterprises altogether; they challenge our typical experiences and knowledge of film form or style, and therefore make us rethink the ways in which stories can be told or the way images can be presented. Audiences unfamiliar with avant-garde film yet aware of the original source text may find bountiful rewards in viewing an avant-garde adaptation because its appeal lies in discovery. According to Linda Hutcheon, “A doubled definition of adaptation as a product (as extensive, particular transcoding) and as a process (as creative reinterpretation and palimpsestic intertextuality)” helps broaden any “phenomenon of adaptation.”2 Thinking of exploitative adaptations as product and process is beneficial simply because Hutcheon reiterates what I believe to be the fundamental importance of adaptation: the need for alternative approaches that stress subjective interpretation and intertextuality. Similarly, the exploitative approach asks viewers to see the avant-garde film as a product and as an ongoing process. In this way, spectators become more aware of the film as a means of communicating ideas through audio and visual components, through the creative use of the camera, and through the narrative strategies employed by the filmmaker to retell the story. According to Dudley Andrew, “The standard cinema and the avantgarde are two imaginary poles between which all other films are laid out.”3 Adaptations could also be discussed as being either completely faithful to the original or, at the other end of the spectrum, entirely different from the source. Between these poles lies the majority of adaptations, though most lean toward fidelity. Avant-garde film adaptations stretch the boundaries of fidelity because they are often formally abstract or self-reflexive. Still, I think that a vast majority of avant-garde films have a distinct point of view that allows us to make interpretations of their meanings through careful analysis. Avant-garde films teach us that new cinematic codes and modes of subjectivity are not just possible in cinema, they are preferred. The exploitative adaptation operates the same way: It displays the alternative viewpoints of its creators while also employing new cinematic codes for apprehension. Perhaps the greatest aspect of avant-garde adaptations that we should consider is that they do

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not necessarily fit neatly into any specific historical definition of adaptation theory or practice—they are their own things. Adaptations are texts that are in constant phases of shift—they move, change, alter, modify, and reallocate—when in cultural consumption. Fictional narratives—and even biographical or historical narratives—create fields of comprehension for readers and spectators. Avant-garde films can address the inner processes of thought and emotion through their narrative structures and stylistic techniques. Adaptations are stories and they tell new stories simultaneously; more accurately, what one receives from viewing an adaptation is the narrative construction of the new text. That is, when watching an avant-garde adaptation, or any adaptation, we become part of the process of rewriting the original in order to create conceptual schemas, so that we understand both the process of adaptation and the resulting adaptation proper. According to Linda Hutcheon, An emphasis on process allows us to expand the traditional focus of adaptation studies on medium specificity and individual comparative case studies in order to consider as well relations among the major modes of engagement: that is, it permits us to think about how adaptations allow people to tell, show, and interact with stories.4 An exploitative adaptation draws attention to the formal characteristics of the film (as an avant-garde film) and also to how it constructs the story through aural and visual means. Paying attention to the formal qualities of film language, especially with an avant-garde film, provides better and more inviting ways to comprehend the film, since some avant-garde films are viewed as inherently difficult to grasp. Many avant-garde films are unapproachable to audiences; those only familiar with mainstream cinema and more traditional adaptations will quite possibly have a difficult time acknowledging the avant-garde film. However, a successful adaptation does not need to rely on a deep knowledge of the source text; rather, with avant-garde film, acknowledging the differences, which includes different formal presentations and representations, can create a particular pathway into the world of the film. Brian McFarlane suggests that paying attention to film form helps in comprehension. He notes, “The film, if it is to make any serious impact on us, will require that we pay attention to the intricate interaction of mise-en-scène (what is visibly there in the frame at any given moment), the editing (how one shot of film is joined to/separated from the next), and sound (diegetic or nondiegetic, musical or otherwise).”5 Taking these characteristics as important

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cues in comprehension will aid the spectator of the avant-garde film and perhaps will lead to a greater appreciation of the process of adaptation. Some exploitative adaptations can be discussed as instances of texts that are inspired by previous material. This label—“inspired by”—occurs frequently in adaptations, and it can be troublesome. Many purists of adaptation, for instance, will quiver at the thought of a film being inspired by a novel rather than being a straightforward (attempt at) adaptation. But with avant-garde film, a great many adaptations are interpretive acts, which is somewhat equivalent to being inspired by source material of some form. Exploitative adaptations mine the source for inspiration, as starting points for creating something new that is both connected to and separate from the source. While these films are not at all similar to mainstream films inspired by true stories (as many of them claim to be), they nevertheless choose and select—or even ignore—what is there in order to create the adaptation. They play on the range of intertexts to create the film. Avant-garde works inevitably refashion the texts that inspire them while becoming entirely new works themselves. The avantgarde is often considered a critical practice; its historical origins were based on a critical view of bourgeois mores. Avant-garde adaptations can also be thought of in this light: They are criticisms of the source text(s). Hutcheon describes certain kinds of adaptations as falling on a continuum, where there are particular instances of alternative ways of discussing adaptations and where, for example, some are tangential to strict fidelity (they can be reimaginings) or are contextual to other sources. She suggests that “a continuum model has the advantage of offering a way to think about various responses to a prior story; it positions adaptations specifically as (re-)interpretations and (re-)creations.”6 If this is so, then avant-garde exploitative adaptations certainly can be considered re-creations and reinterpretations of prior stories. In essence, the avantgarde film must become a new retelling of the source. An exploitative adaptation signifies a transposition, a shift from one genre to another or a change from one medium to another, or within the same medium, for instance, when a film becomes an adaptation of a previous film (e.g. La jetée and Twelve Monkeys). This formal transfer has alternately been called appropriation, rephrasing, or interrelating. The abundance of terms used to describe adaptations can be confusing, but they also rightfully point to the many ways that adaptations can be unpacked and deciphered. The exploitative adaptation uses many of the traits of the models of adaptations, mainly because here, in the exploitative realm, one does not necessarily pay heed to any other cultural or

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theoretical influence, rather focusing on the subjective, personal connection with the adapted text. Hence, in avant-garde films, we get individualistic approaches to adaptation that focus on the use and abuse of the source—the exploitation of what is there to develop a particular kind of perspective. This ontological point of view means that the filmmaker can change almost anything he or she desires in order to present the material in a way that is reflecting the original source; the filmmaker can take advantage of the materials of the source (novel, poem, dance, or biography, for example) for his or her personal use. It is beneficial to exploit the original because it allows for creative freedom. An exploit, as a noun, means an exciting event or an audacious, interesting, courageous undertaking. If taken this way, then an exploitative adaptation becomes a work that should be applauded for its daring or bold approach. An avant-garde filmmaker is intrinsically intrepid: He or she does not heed the criteria of evaluation that often supersedes creativity in the adaptation process. Instead, the avant-garde filmmaker focuses on breaking the restrictions that accompany adaptations, whether formally, stylistically, or thematically. Timothy Corrigan addresses adaptations as consisting of a dual nature: in practice and as a discipline. He says, The relationship between two terms, “adaptation” and “discipline,” strikes me as an especially useful framework within which to measure the [dynamics of film]. On the one hand, adaptation, in its specific and more general sense, suggests alterations, adjustments, and intertextual exchanges, while on the other, discipline denotes and connotes rules, boundaries, and textual restrictions. The changing relationship between literature and film . . . can . . . be mapped across this gap between film as an adaptive practice and film as a discipline.7 If this method becomes a way to discuss adaptations, then it is useful to point out that many avant-garde filmmakers seek to create their own rules in the discipline of film. Wheeler Winston Dixon, in discussing the filmmaker and spectator response to underground cinema, suggests that “all value judgments, however universally accepted (in either the positive or negative sphere), are almost entirely subjective, particularly when dealing with a cinema that set itself the preordained task of abolishing all the established rules of film/video syntax and structure.”8 Rightfully so, avant-garde filmmakers who exploit the source material when creating an adaptation want to alter, adjust, or create intertextual exchanges in order to revitalize, invigorate, or rejuvenate the original adapted text.

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Avant-garde films mix genres, methods, and forms. Point of view and linear narrative are spatially and temporally disrupted. Watching an avant-garde film requires discipline on the part of the viewer. Because avant-garde films are predetermined as oppositional films—that is, as traditionally defined in oppositional relationships to mainstream or commercial cinema—then it may be safe to say the spectator immediately must be prepared for something that showcases its otherness. Situated as an other, avant-garde film perhaps exists in a universal contentious relationship with the cinema of the mainstream and is defined as an independent enterprise because there is no codependency involved in the avant-garde world. In discussing underground cinema of the 1960s, which includes avant-garde film, Dixon suggests, “The independent cinema is a figurative ground of contestation, in which ideas, gender roles, metaphoric/ironic/metatextual concepts and gestures of overt defiance form much of the text of the discourse,” surrounding them.9 I would suggest this “ground of contestation” is also quite literal, that the discourses generated in and out of oppositional cinema, like underground, independent, experimental and avant-garde, force us to examine how these types of cinema are both figuratively and literally conditioned. When considering exploitative adaptations, one must also consider these stipulations; one must, that is, remember the subjectivity of the artist in his or her interpretation of the source material, while also regarding the ways the codes of the avant-garde film create in spectators more acute perceptual, personal responses. Recognizing the otherness of the avant-garde film aids one in understanding and appreciating the work, regardless of its status as an adaptation. The exploitative adaptation also operates as an other/another, as a unique form of adaptation that I think best represents avant-garde film, because like the films of the avant-garde, this type of adaptation is selfconsciously aware of being different, unusual, and advanced. If, as Matei Calinescu asserts, the avant-garde attains novelty status through the “sheer process of the destruction of tradition,” then a correlative exists with the exploitative adaptation for it to breaks from traditional modes of adaptation.10 All avant-garde movements, from the surrealists in the 1920s to the underground filmmakers and artists of the 1960s, sought to liberate the creative spirit from the shackles of tradition and the mainstream. In doing so, the avant-gardist becomes the progenitor par excellence in any form of creation, let alone cinema. The avant-garde adaptation is therefore on the forefront of filmmaking, adaptation theory and practice, and the interdisciplinary relationship between film and the other arts.

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Chapter 5

Why Avant-Garde?

Avant-garde films have more often than not been relegated to the margins of film history. Any comprehensive film history text will cover avantgarde film, but the amount of information provided is usually a chapter (if one is lucky) or less. The main reason for the dearth of material on avant-garde film is simply because, as a whole, these films are too far removed from the mainstream to ever really infiltrate popular culture and thus are addressed mainly by scholars or practitioners or by devoted cineastes whose knowledge of avant-garde film comes from an inherent appreciation of alternative forms of art. As vital as avant-garde filmmaking is, as a practice, genre, or threat, it remains in the margins, never fully becoming a part of the public consciousness when discussing film. That said, there are still instances of the avant-garde penetrating the cultural bubble that protects the mainstream. For example, avantgarde films have been discussed as underground or cult films, genres that have intense areas of spectatorship with already preexisting and solid fan bases. Names such as Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, or Kenneth Anger routinely make lists of more familiar underground avant-garde filmmakers—and rightfully so. David Lynch or John Waters are filmmakers who have often been placed in the underground or cult arena. Filmmakers are also tied to aesthetic movements, like Luis Buñuel or Jean Cocteau’s association with surrealism, which ultimately can either become a distracting label or can indicate a particular style that bridges or signifies their uniqueness. Avant-garde filmmakers usually are well aware of the mainstream market as well as the fringe; they understand the mechanisms of historical and social occurrence, popular culture, and the significance of other artistic mediums. Because they are so singular and independently driven, however, they seek not to destroy the temples of accepted art or film but rather to be creative and free—two extremely important and often forgotten aspects of filmmaking or any other artistic practice.

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Adaptations are constantly being used and recycled by the mainstream. Popular taste swallows adaptations on an extraordinarily frequent basis. Taste, as it were, is manufactured by the media machines that dictate what the masses consume, and the film adaptation is one of the more popular items on the table. Any examination of a year-by-year production and distribution of film will locate a preference for the adaptation, a perhaps curious statistic because of the apparent lack of literary knowledge existent among most moviegoers, or so the argument goes. (Of course, one does not need to be well read in the classics to see an adaptation. But it can help, especially if the point of seeing the film is because one liked the book.) Popular reads routinely become films (the Twilight franchise, for example). While there may be nothing wrong with this fact, it helps delineate the chasm that exists between the mainstream and the avantgarde, where literacy arguably thrives. The spectator of the avant-garde typically has an extended knowledge of film. Thomas Leitch sees the need for literacy as a relatively new way of discussing adaptation, because it “does not approach adaptations as either transcriptions of canonical classics or attempts to create new classics but rather as illustrations of the incessant process of rewriting as critical reading.”1 If an adaptation is a rewriting, then it certainly can aid in the discussion of adaptations as amendments, alterations, modifications, or revisions (re-visions) of the adapted text. Does this create cultural literacy? Perhaps. But in the realm of the avant-garde, having intimate knowledge of previous material is not a prerequisite for watching the film. The film itself is the text, and any attachment to its source (novel, play, story,) becomes a point of comparison only after the film is viewed, judged, analyzed, or evaluated on its own. The avant-garde adaptation is a re-vision of the source material; it is, essentially, a new way of seeing. Avant-garde adaptations work in ways that allow spectators to “instinctively shape it into a representation of something familiar to them,” so if the adaptation itself is unusual, more visual than verbal, interpretive or experimental, then it separates itself from the source by opening avenues for exploring associations.2 Avant-garde film is already constructed (and construed) as a formal opposition to mainstream Hollywood cinema, which means that avant-garde adaptations also already exist outside the typical discourses on mainstream adaptation practices. One of my goals in this study is to address the problems of bridging the gap between mainstream popular cultural consumption of adaptations and avant-garde adaptations; if avant-garde filmmakers deliberately position themselves outside the conventional, then how should we consider them

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and their films in terms of adaptations? According to Wheeler Winston Dixon, “[Experimental] cinema was embraced by the transalterity of those for whom there has previously been no effective agency; it sought to escape the tyranny of history, and the commodification of the future in the mainstream cultural industry, through the abdication of all conventional standards of photographic representation.”3 In this sense, any avant-garde adaptation also will intrinsically be against the “tyranny” of proper adaptations through the renunciation of rules, standards, typographies, and practices of adaptations—as the avant-garde film does. The avant-garde attitude, first derived from military and political rhetoric, is always forward thinking, focusing on the future of a practice. If this is so, then we have much to gain from the avant-garde adaptation, a progressive, even revolutionary, practice of cultural production that needs recognition. Avant-garde cinema exists as an other, an outsider often deemed contentious, harmful, even threatening to traditional filmmaking. Avant-garde filmmakers are ones who resist the mainstream, defy categorization—other than being “avant-garde”—and refuse compromise. The avant-garde filmmaker is looked on as a true artist, the lone practitioner working in a medium dominated by economic and cultural acceptance and governance. They are often referred to as amateurs, a term not meant as a belittling remark about their skills as filmmakers but rather as a description of their status as oppositional outsiders or, as Dixon and Foster comment, “[t]heir self-description as amateurs [implies] artistic integrity and [is] predicated on a self-definition in opposition to the commercial film industry.”4 Being one who opposes conformity in filmmaking certainly demands respect, especially if the goal is to maintain a personal vision rather than compromising it to audiences’ tastes or to corporate mechanisms. Jan-Christopher Horak even suggests that “[t]he amateur film enthusiast, ‘the lover of cinema,’ [is] seen as the most ardent supporter of the avant-garde.”5 These enthusiasts are both filmmakers and the audiences who seek alternative forms of representation. If an adaptation is considered a translation in its most literal sense, we must keep in mind that that also implies a continual, reciprocal relationship, a back-and-forth analysis between the texts. While it is perhaps important to be mindful of the original, it is also equally important to view the second text, the film, as something translated, which means it is not just new but also original. I think the avant-garde adaptation becomes an original text because of the way it re-presents the source material. In other words, the avant-garde adaptation already exists

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outside popular culture, so the film also exists beyond the reaches of tradition, convention, and rule when it comes to defining the adaptation proper. Avant-garde filmmakers exploit the source and also the medium: They are often most radical in their subversion of cinematic (or literary) codes that are openly disruptive. Avant-garde practitioners may use every available technique from the apparatus itself, but they almost completely disregard rules that govern classical cinema. The adaptations that result from such manipulation and outright dismantling of traditional cinematic codes and techniques is intended to yield something quite extraordinary. Avant-garde adaptations are complex, artistic, and vastly imaginative enterprises that demand attention because they can provide new understandings of the cultural merit of adaptations, in general, and more specifically, they can aid in our understanding of the processes involved in transferring a host of mediums to one other, film. Perhaps, then, the question that should be asked is, Why not avantgarde? In other words, examining a host of experimental filmmakers or avant-garde films that use previous sources for inspiration allows us to see the multidimensional, alternative, and radical approaches to adaptation that often are overlooked in critical studies. In studying adaptations, inevitably, we come across examples that break free from the problematic of fidelity and venture off into the hazy region of experimentalism. Viewing avant-garde films heightens awareness of the endless possibilities of adaptation. Fashioning something new out of previous material, a recycling of sorts, points both to the creation of something new and to something previous. It also points sideways, to other adaptations. In other words, an avant-garde film adaptation delineates three planes of exploration: the source text, the new text, and the comparative text. Of course, the adaptation may also point in several other directions, but the avantgarde adaptation inevitably not only demarcates these three avenues to venture on, it also crosses them and crosses them out. Unlike traditional adaptations, ones that constantly hark back to the previous source text, the avant-garde adaptation often allows us to consider the process of erasure—of cancelling or at least shunning the comparisons to the original because they ask us to compare them to other forms of art, namely, the visual arts, architecture, music, or film. Still, it is useful to view the avantgarde adaptation and the source(s) as well. Avant-garde films historically have fallen into categories such as abstract expressionism, surrealism, structuralism, or architectonic films. An avant-garde adaptation might also rightly point us toward these descriptive groupings in addition to

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asking us to reconsider the original source material. Avant-garde films, in general, require a different kind of viewing experience, one that asks us to consider formal elements, lyrical styling, or poetic interpretation. Active spectatorship is essential. So, why the avant-garde? Ultimately, the spectator will be rewarded for accepting an alternative form of presentation and representation.

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Chapter 6

A Brief Narrative History of Avant-Garde Film Adaptation or, Some Instances of Avant-Garde Adaptation

There is no formal academic study or history of avant-garde adaptation; what I am attempting to do is offer a few ideas about some alternative forms of adaptation that have occurred since the origins of cinema, highlighting specific examples rather than making an exhaustive bibliographic history or account. Detailing a comprehensive list of avantgarde film adaptations is a cat-and-mouse endeavor, mainly because it is impossible to track down many avant-garde films (let alone adaptations), and many of them are so obscure or unknown that guessing about their sources of inspiration and appropriation can proves moot. More importantly, most avant-garde films are original enterprises, films that, unlike traditional mainstream adaptations, do not always seek previous available material for inspiration but instead interpret a source text or appropriate several sources or ideas to compose their films. Still, there are many examples of alternative adaptations, where the filmmaker chooses to adapt based more on individual insight versus faithfulness to the source text(s). There are also so many films produced around the world in both small and large national cinemas, some of which are avant-garde or experimental, in some fashion, and many of which are also most likely some form of adaptation. Most film adaptations seek fidelity to their sources. Even when a film is independent or deemed unusual, it does not make it avant-garde, so many films that have atypical or strange narrative structures or styles may be “quirky” or alternative and may even contain moments of avant-gardism, but the overall approach to adaptation is not necessarily—or ever—a deliberate attempt at exploitative adaptation. Thus, many of the films I describe in this section and the ones that get fuller attention in Part III are ones that I am defining as avant-garde adaptations based on how they use

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the source material. Hence, some films I outline may not be considered even avant-garde films to some purists and certainly may not be labeled adaptations by others. Even when an avant-garde film is based on previous material, it is still tricky uncovering exactly all of the sources that may have inspired the adaptation. Still, what I will detail in this brief section is an overview of only some of the avant-garde film adaptations that have been made for more than a century, highlighting the many forms such films take. Instead of giving an inclusive overview of the kinds of adaptations that are more likely not to be found in multiplexes, I will mention a handful of adaptations that are avant-garde films, movies produced since the inception of cinema that are vastly different from more traditional adaptations that also have been around since the origins of film history until the present. In most cases, I have picked one film per decade, in others, two or more. Adaptations are such a crucial part of film history, yet their significance is either often critically overlooked or relegated to specific case studies of certain canonical authors, and rarely thought of as theoretically significant in shaping film practice. Although this is true to some extent, I would suggest that most adaptations produced in the mainstream are the ones that tend to be uninspired, whereas avantgarde adaptations, a most overlooked area of film studies, warrants serious consideration. Avant-garde films (as adaptations) have received little interest from casual moviegoers or film historians (save the occasional chapter in a film history text); their reputations as difficult viewing preclude any serious in-depth examination. What I would like to do in this section is narrow the gap between avant-garde film and mainstream adaptation, highlighting those avant-garde films that were adapted from a variety of existent sources to showcase their relevance to film culture and to adaptation studies. Along the way, I hope to answer a few questions about how avant-garde film adaptation has influenced and interacted with the mainstream, even though some of the films themselves have been considered unrelated to more mainstream film histories because of their complex or idiosyncratic roots. Simply put, avant-garde adaptations have rarely been discussed in critical fashion and, in this section and in Part III, I hope to shed some light on the history and practice of avant-garde adaptation and appropriation. As mentioned, some of the films I describe as adaptations may not be considered as such by others; I hope to justify them in my brief descriptions here and more fully in Part III.

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The Silent Era Part of the problem of labeling a silent film as an avant-garde adaptation is that there are so many shorts (with a great many of them lost or unavailable) that are derived from other sources. In order to gain cultural merit, early filmmakers more often than not looked to literary sources for inspiration, which included contemporary stage plays, creating many types of adaptations—but not so many outright avant-garde adaptations. Such films—the one-minute to three-minute shorts—may or may not be considered avant-garde; production values, static camera work, and little to no editing all combine to produce films that are inherently mainstream in production value. Still, some of the films of this early period of cinema history are avant-garde or at least display some of the (then primitive) techniques later developed more fully in the historical avant-garde films of the 1920s, 1940s, and 1960s. The avant-garde films from the postwar era are very similar to early, “primitive” cinema. In discussing early cinematic practice and its relation to Hollywood’s dominate mode of production, film historian Charles Musser notes, [I]ndependent or avant-garde filmmaking has contributed extensively to our understanding of early film form. It is safe to say that without the “experimental” cinema of the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, historians would still find it difficult to recognize early cinema’s otherwise unfamiliar representational practices for what they were—something quite different than a simplified, rudimentary precursor of a natural, universal “film language.”1 Essentially, avant-garde film has allowed us to look back at early cinema and discover hints of what would come. Avant-garde film practices have many affinities with early cinematic practices, characteristics that help shed new light on them, just as adaptation theory and practice may allow us to return to early cinema with a new arsenal of interpretation. Musser is not talking about adaptations, but what he suggests indicates the potential for adaptation studies to examine early film practice for analogues with more contemporary acts of appropriation or adaptation, which, I suggest, is most welcome in the avant-garde. Some of the films of this early era (1895–1906), which has been detailed by Tom Gunning in his influential essay, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” can be described as

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avant-garde because they take alternative approaches to the presentation or representation of the subject matter. However, it should be noted that most filmmakers of this era were trying to figure out the mechanisms of the camera apparatus itself, and so instances of avant-gardism occur in films even if the entire work is not avant-garde. Rarely, if ever, were any directors making absolute avant-garde adaptations. Gunning asserts that the performative spectacle of films from this time were attractions, films that present rather than represent and show rather than tell stories. These attractions are akin to later displays of formal ingenuity, thematic content, and stylistic inventiveness that dominated the avant-garde. Gunning writes, “It is precisely this harnessing of visibility, this act of showing and exhibition which I feel cinema before 1906 displays most intensely. Its inspiration for the avant-garde of the early decades of [the twentieth] century needs to be re-explored.”2 In his essay, Gunning describes how the “attraction” of the image itself—its novelty but also its surprise and shock—was similar to avant-garde films that came later. The lack of narrative is very much a part of the historical trajectory of avant-garde film. Adaptations almost always have a discernable narrative; avant-garde adaptations likewise maintain story, but narrative continuity is often displaced creating nonlinear or associative films that implore the spectator to uncover its narrative, if there is one. When Gunning sets one characteristic of the cinema of attractions as a glance or even a stare directly at the camera, he implies that this technique would be used to great effect in avant-garde film. So, when actors look at the audience, as John Gielgud (as Prospero) does in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991), it is an example of avant-garde techniques that have been around since the earliest days of cinema. As Gunning says, “In fact the cinema of attraction does not disappear with the dominance of narrative, but rather goes underground, both into certain avant-garde practices and as a component of narrative films, more evident in some genres than others.”3 In addition to the attractions that dominated the earliest film production, “trick” films, those that used superimposition, distortion, or the stop/start technique of camera manipulation, which allowed for the sudden appearance or disappearance of a person or object, became ways of interrupting or disrupting narrative continuity, or, in some cases, to represent dream states, the unconscious, or characters’ thoughts. Georges Méliès was an early pioneer of special effects, and his contributions to film history have been detailed extensively. Méliès was a magician; he was interested in tricking cinemagoers into believing they

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were seeing things that were either not there or were created directly in front of them (poof! there it is!), trompe l’oeil treats that remained present after the viewing experience because they were so new, exciting, and different. While Méliès is generally considered one of the foremost practitioners of narrative development in early cinema history, some of his trick films were based on literary sources, and they are more akin to attractions than narrative films. These include The Cabinet of Mephistopheles (1897), Cinderella (1899), and The Palace of the Arabian Nights (1905). None of these are outright avant-garde films in the sense I have been describing in Part I, but they are early instances of the types of camera manipulations, which include optical illusions, slow motion, superimposition, and fades and wipes, that became increasingly familiar to avant-garde film production beyond the silent era. Méliès’s theatrical nature eventually subsumed his camera tricks into complete narrative, so what remains of these early examples of adaptations are the types that gained a wider audience based on their literary pedigree, which, all things withstanding, was an important part of developing cinema as an art. The avant-garde techniques were essential to his films’ appeal, even if he was not consciously trying to develop an avant-garde film. Edwin S. Porter’s Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906) is based on vaudeville and theatrical skits of drunkards, as well as purportedly a comic strip by Winsor McCay. According to Charles Musser, “Porter not only borrowed the title [from McCay] but shared McCay’s dream-based narrative structure,” a trait figuring prominently in avant-garde films that recreate dreamlike states.4 Dream of a Rarebit Fiend employs many avantgarde techniques: superimposition, trick photography, unsteadily jagged camera movement, frame manipulation like split screen, and somewhat plotless association. Porter is not at all interested in adaptation proper but instead chooses a popular form of contemporaneous entertainment (vaudeville), combines it with the appropriation of the comic strip, and translates them to the screen. The film is really marvelous as it follows the wanderings of an inebriated gentleman and his wild, surreal, and fantastical dream-reality. As Musser suggests, “[Dream of a Rarebit Fiend] convincingly realized McCay’s surreal imagery on the screen using a variety of photographic tricks.”5 Surrealism, of course, becomes a dominant mode of production and expression in avant-garde film and avant-garde adaptation. Porter is rightfully credited for instigating narrative into cinema in his more mature films, but Dream of a Rarebit Fiend is a good example of an early avant-garde film that relies on source material that is utterly transformed to the screen. He uses McCay’s comic strip to great

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effect; spectators would have been familiar with it, but Porter’s presentation also highlights his creativity with the source. The vaudeville act of the drunk was also well known. (Vaudeville performances featuring a comically drunken man were exceedingly popular, immortalized by the likes of Charlie Chaplin and W. C. Fields.) Porter’s rendering of a drunkard’s spree is clever and humorous, and the camera tricks add formal novelty and complexity associated with the cinema of attractions and the avant-garde. We see, for instance, a car that drives up the side of a building and then flies through the sky. In another shot, miniature people are superimposed onto the upper bedrail of the sleeping man and pound hammers at his head, which is shown in actual size proportionate to the frame. As Musser surmises, “The changing tricks and discontinuities disorient the spectators in ways analogous to dream,” much like the structures of more famous avant-garde films from the likes of Jean Cocteau, Maya Deren, or Gregory J. Markopoulos.6 Porter was highly innovative in several of his films, including The “Teddy” Bears (1907), which contains object animation using small stuffed animals referenced in the title. Animation would later dominate avant-garde practice in many forms and styles. Porter also made Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1910), a ten-minute adaptation of the Lewis Carroll classic. While more narrative than typical avant-garde films, it nevertheless has remarkably surreal elements, particularly the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, both shown as puppets (or actors in costumes), and their strange gestures and movements come across as more frightening than childlike. Surrealism becomes a trademark of many eventual avant-garde films, and in particular, an avant-garde adaptation like Jan Švankmajer’s Alice. Again, Porter is not trying to create surrealist scenes but achieves them nevertheless through the carefully calculated mise-en-scène and editing. Jan-Christopher Horak has detailed many types of avant-garde films from the silent era, or, as he calls it “the first American film avant-garde,” which includes a handful of instances of alternative and exploitative adaptation. I will not detail all of these films here but simply mention some of the categories he uses to differentiate various avant-garde films. These include: city symphonies, what Horak calls the “Poetics of Urban Space”; lyrical nature; painting in motion; terpsichore; short stories; parodies; and symbolist and surrealist films.7 The films that comprise such categories often are adaptations of literature, poetry, painting, biography, other films, or actualities of real-life events. I will describe a couple of city symphony films below, but many avant-garde films from this era use a variety of unusual, odd, and inventive techniques when presenting

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their narratives to the viewer. These include elliptical storytelling, imperceptive camera angles, and expressionistic or impressionistic sets and lighting. Horak, when describing the symbolist or surrealist leanings of some filmmakers, which also includes the formal nature of city symphonies, lyric films, and dance films, aptly surmises, “Lacking any kind of narrative cohesion, these seemingly diverse films nevertheless are evidence of authorial voices that foreground the subjectivity of the artist.”8 In avant-garde adaptation, this becomes especially true. Many other short films made during the first decade or so of cinema history are based on previous material, most often from literary sources. But almost all of these adaptations are attempts at narrative integration and continuity; rarely is there an outright avant-garde film adaptation of a book or play. Part of the difficulty in addressing avant-garde film adaptation lies in this murky realm of “instances” of the avant-garde, where certain films, adaptations or not, have moments of inspired creativity that resemble avant-garde filmmaking. These types of adaptations are not avant-garde films, so I will not describe them in detail; other film historians have illustrated their importance as adaptations. Still, it is crucial to recognize what certain filmmakers were doing in order to see how avant-garde film adaptation developed. German expressionistic films, for example, which include The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and Nosferatu (1922), are just two examples of films that have instances of the avant-garde. Expressionistic techniques were co-opted by many burgeoning avant-garde filmmakers in the 1920s. Dark shadows, intricate or symbolic mise-en-scène, and terrific or terrible storylines dominated expressionistic film (and art), and some of these technical aspects of film became inspirations for other (avant-garde) filmmakers, such as James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), which I discuss in Part III. Caligari is not an adaptation, of course, but Nosferatu is a version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that has become a cinema classic. Its style inspired countless imitations. While there are not many instances of avant-garde filmmaking in it, it still contains inventive shadow play and distorted camera angles that could be considered moments of avant-garde technique. Two further examples of avant-garde adaptation are Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927) and Carl-Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), two biopics that have secured their position in the film pantheon of masterpieces, but neither of which have been discussed as avant-garde adaptations. Both are groundbreaking in their presentational style and form, an essential quality and aesthetic component of avant-garde filmmaking in general.

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One particular genre of filmmaking during the silent era that was exceedingly popular was the biographical film, or biopic. Films based on a person’s life were—and still are—popular, and were adapted to the screen with much frequency during the silent era. Almost all of these took a straightforward narrative approach and so are not avantgarde. I will detail the specifics of an avant-garde biopic in my analysis of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Hitler, A Film from Germany in Part III, but The Passion of Joan of Arc and Napoléon are early examples that use specific techniques that make them highly unusual, even when they are making attempts at an actual depiction of the life of the title character. Following Gance’s equally impressive and somewhat avant-garde La Roue (1922–23), Napoléon is an eccentric hodge-podge of stunningly re-created documentary-like war footage, intimate biographical portrait, and ambitious epic. Like Dreyer’s film, it is based on actual events of Napoleon’s life, and also like Dreyer, Gance is interested in exploring how to manipulate cinema to portray such a complex individual. Gance uses multiple frames, usually in triptych form, cameras tied from ropes that swing merrily among dancers and from chandeliers, the entire cache of silent film tropes such as wipes, fades, and irises, and perhaps most significantly, metaphorical intercutting that is more suggestive and associative than concrete in its actualization of a narrative thread through Napoleon’s life. (The film was the first in a planned series that was never completed, so it focuses only on Napoleon’s childhood, the Italy campaign, and the revolution in France.) He also used superimposition, sometimes layering up to 16 images onscreen. According to David Bordwell, Gance used techniques appropriated from the impressionist school of aesthetics, particularly the use of emotion to convey narrative. Gance innovatively does this with an impressionistic camera style. Gance used new lenses, multiple frame images, and widescreen ratio to simulate impressionism. According to Bordwell, The most influential Impressionist technological innovation was the development of new means of frame mobility. If the camera was to represent the character’s eyes, it should be able to move with the ease of a person. Impressionists strapped their cameras to cars, carousels, and locomotives. For Gance’s Napoléon, the camera manufacturer Debrie perfected a handheld model that led the operator to move on

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roller skates. Gance lashed the machine to wheels, cables, pendulums, and bobsleds.9 Gance truly had aspirations that were beyond what anyone had been doing with the camera, and the avant-garde techniques he developed would last through the tradition of avant-garde filmmaking. He placed the camera inside a football that was thrown to simulate a bomb. Gance also strapped the camera to the back of a galloping horse and also tossed it off the side of a mountain to depict Napoleon diving into the water. The entire film uses these radical cinematographic advancements; Napoléon is for these reasons an avant-garde biopic, a highly complex retelling of the life of Napoleon. The Passion of Joan of Arc is an astounding version of the trial and death of Joan of Arc. Dreyer purportedly based the film on actual trial transcriptions, so in a sense, it is a relatively straightforward transpositioning of the source material. However, what makes the film ultimately avant-garde is the extreme use of close-ups, which dominate most of the cinematography, the canted camera angles, and the decentered framing. Dreyer also uses the camera freely, like Gance, having it fly through the air at one point near the end of the film, which results in the scene being filmed upside down. Dreyer uses so many close-ups that the film has been regarded as a case study of overindulgence. But because Dreyer relies so heavily on this one technique, the film breaks new territory: If we are to get a true sense of the anguish of Joan of Arc, then we need to see her face continuously and register her extreme pain and the passion of her endurances and ultimate death. Having the camera constantly show close-ups of Joan (and other characters) in the film creates an unsettling effect. Using close-ups throughout a film is an avant-garde technique thatrarely occurs and would be considered antithetical to mainstream production values. The film constantly forces us to scrutinize Joan; the actress, Maria Falconetti, is shown in such suffering, grief, and torment that it overwhelms the audience’s senses and allows for a certain participation that is not frequently elicited in more mainstream films. For this reason, The Passion of Joan of Arc is considered a masterpiece of silent cinema and one of the most innovative films ever made. According to Astrid Witting, the style of Dreyer’s work is “here carried to [its] extreme: the predilection for closed interiors, the focusing on faces, his framings that either mask the lens or allow objects and people to be cut by the frame, leaving only a limited part of the image

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visible.”10 These techniques would be later adopted by many avant-garde filmmakers, and this legacy and influence have established The Passion of Joan of Arc as a watershed work in avant-garde film technique. The fact that it is based on well-known source material (numerous versions of Joan of Arc had appeared onscreen previously and since Dreyer’s film) adds a certain realism to the portrayal of Joan’s life, however innovative Dreyer is with his camera. Discussing the film, David Cook writes that it is a “radical formal experiment,” adding, “This austere and anguished film, which condenses the trial, torture, and execution of St. Joan into a single tension-charged twenty-four-hour period, was based on actual trial records and shot in sequence, largely in extreme close-ups against stark white backgrounds, to enhance its psychological realism.”11 The actors in the film did not wear makeup, which emphasized their facial expressions and the positioning of countenance as a formidable cinematic strategy. Using biography and history is a form of adaptation practice that has been prominent in cinema, especially mainstream cinema, but how it is rendered can make the resulting film adaptation avant-garde. Napoléon and The Passion of Joan of Arc are the kinds of avant-garde adaptations that are based on biographical material, on actual events, so when transcribed to the screen, they ultimately undergo a typically severe process of condensation. They are two examples of the highly subjective process of selection and appropriation, that is, of selecting from real-life events and adapting or transcoding them to the screen. This transcoding is a transpositioning of real events into a fictional medium, film, a recasting, as it were, of chronology, action, and subject. As Linda Hutcheon suggests, “Transposition can also mean a shift in ontology from the real to the fictional, from a historical account or biography to a fictionalized narrative or drama.”12 The process of shifting a subject from reality to fiction, from biography to biographical film, is troublesome for adaptations, whether they are avant-garde or not, for they often deliberately (or indeliberately) alter many aspects of a person’s life. It is how they are rendered that can make the resulting adaptation avant-garde. This ontological change is important in understanding how an avant-garde biopic operates, especially ones that are technically innovative, like Napoléon or The Passion of Joan of Arc. The reliance on style and form or, rather, the emphasis on aesthetics takes precedence over the strict biographical formula most often used for more mainstream versions of biopics.

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Three City Symphony Films City symphony films, or city films, so named because they present a vivid depiction of a particular city, using speed, modernity, and often juxtaposed shots of nature and city as focal points, were very popular in the 1920s and into the sound era. Several city films have become avantgarde film classics, and two of the three I will discuss here, Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta (1921)and Dziga Vertov’s celebrated Man with a Movie Camera (1929), are also generally accepted stunning examples of cinematic form, grand exercises in style and modernity. The third film, Marie Menken’s Go! Go! Go! (1962–64) is a later example of the genre. The obvious question that might arise from my naming these films as avant-garde adaptations is, what exactly are they adapting? City films are highly stylized pseudodocumentaries and are avantgarde because theydisregard—mostly—any sort of narrative continuity. They create senses of rhythm and abstraction based on the movements of people, cars, and trains and through shots of architecture that focus on angles, cubes, patterns, and light and shadow. A filmmaker who chooses to document the city in such a fashion, utilizing certain avantgarde strategies and techniques rather than simply offering an objective documentary of the city, adapts the cityscape itself. True documentaries might have an overriding theme or specific point of view, but the avantgarde city film typically shows the city as a vibrant entity unto itself. We are invited to speculate on the images, rhythms, and movements created through montage, cross-cutting, or inventive cinematography. The avantgarde city film in essence adapts the sights of the city to serve as a template for an exercise in abstract movement; it adapts reality and molds it into a new form of seeing reality. According to William Uricchio, avantgarde city films “introduced an alternative to the two dominant nonfiction strategies of ‘description’ and character-based ‘interpretation.’”13 The avant-garde adaptation that becomes a city film creates a particular kind of nonassociative story that is more akin to aesthetic sensibilities found in architecture and the visual arts, particularly cubism, Dadaism, and futurism. They are essentially exercises in form, an important characteristic of many avant-garde films and avant-garde adaptations in particular. Uricchio continues, Often specifically indebted to the deployment of compositional and cutting techniques in films ranging from Ballet Mécanique (1925) to

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Potemkin (1925), the city film reworked these techniques in terms of the site-specific tangibility and social construction that the period’s urban subject entailed. ‘Documentaries’ within Grierson’s sense of interpretation, these films nevertheless broke from the narrative trajectory which Nanook had mapped out and which films such as Rien que les Heures (1926) followed, profoundly changing both the style of urban depiction and the parameters of nonfiction representation.14 What Uricchio essentially seems to be describing is how the avant-garde aesthetic of the city film changed the way people perceived reality, here, the very city they thought they knew. Perception and altering modes of perception are fundamentally important to the avant-garde filmmaker; these kinds of adaptations fit neatly into the practice of changing one’s perception of the everyday world, which is why I suggest they adapt everyday reality—real moments—that are then rendered anew in the adaptation. Strand and Sheeler’s Manhatta is a well-known example of avant-garde filmmaking. It is what Jan-Christopher Horak calls a “quasi travelogue,” a film that combines modernist experimentation and presentation with romantic sensibilities.15 In addition to being a portrait of the city, providing us with glimpses of streets, harbors, skyscrapers, and boats, Manhatta is a tour de force of rhythmic editing precipitated by image/word interplay. Several intertitles appear throughout the film, words taken directly from Walt Whitman (an appropriation), whose poetic ode to both the city and the country mesh wonderfully with Strand and Sheeler’s avantgarde agenda. To Horak, this makes the film unique among city films. Manhatta offers different ways of viewing the cityscape, mainly by offering a multiple, reflexive point of view of the city and its mechanistic workings. This creates a paradox of sorts, based primarily on the juxtaposition of word and image. To Horak, Strand and Sheeler’s commitment to modernism is mitigated by aesthetic concerns and philosophical premises that are archaic and antimodernist. In its conscious attempts to create an avant-garde, nonnarrative, and formally abstract cinematic experience in opposition to classical modes of address, Manhatta nevertheless never quite relinquishes those structures which manifest themselves most visibly in the tension between the image and the verbal text, between its modernist perspectives and a romantic longing for a universe in which man remains in harmony with nature.16

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The film is thus different from typical travelogues or straightforward documentaries in that it seeks to present the city as both a refuge and as a modernist dynamic of movement, where individuality, the “romantic longing” à la Whitman, is pushed aside due to ongoing progress and forceful energy. Strand and Sheeler film Manhatta with a keen eye for the subtleties of city life, rendered large through a mix of wide shots, medium shots, and close-ups, though the film predominately focuses on shapes and rhythms created through manmade buildings, streets, and ships. These images are adapted and reconditioned through the dynamism of the film. The film consists of many static shots as well, but within these are the patterns of movement that create a sense of vibrancy that keeps the city alive. It may seem paradoxical that a film that is comprised of mostly static shots creates a sense of rhythm, but, as Eisenstein formulated, the positioning of shots creates a “montage of attractions” that highlights increasing movement through contrasts and editing. There is movement within shots and within frames, which when edited, create the dynamism associated with modernity. Manhatta adapts images—reality. It is a particular form of adaptation that relies on the insistence of the ontology of the image. It has been likened to photography, rightfully so, due to Strand’s well-known photography, but it appropriates the tropes of photographic realism and meshes them with a more modernist inclination toward abstraction to create an avant-garde film that sets a template for others, like Man with the Movie Camera or Go! Go! Go!. According to Horak, the film is comprised of many abstract shots. He says, Breaking down images into their basic geometric construction, privileging abstract and formal compositional elements over the image’s iconic signifying functions, while at the same time positioning the subject through straight photography conventions to read those images as ‘reality,’ Sheeler and Strand created visual interest through dynamic compositional force.17 The film’s positioning of the subject via geometric patterns created through specific camera angles and slight movement makes the film avant-garde. Watching it means accepting it as a nonnarrative portrait of a city, despite the fact that the intertitles provide some sense of narrative guidance, though I would suggest they are meant to offer ironic commentary on the images, another avant-garde tactic based on decentralizing the familiar. As Horak concludes, “Manhatta merely approaches

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closure, implying a narrative that allows for the subject’s inscription in the film’s final transcendental image.” This suggests the open-ended nature of the avant-garde film, and is why Horak suggests the film is a combination of modernist and antimodernist sensibilities and unresolved in terms of narrative.18 Ultimately, Manhatta provides an excellent example of the kind of avant-garde adaptation that is entirely unique to cinema—the city film, one that adapts and appropriates the ephemeral into an avant-garde aesthetic. Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera has been called the best city film ever made, and it directly suggests how film can manipulate reality, how, that is, through the medium of film, one can transcend everyday reality and see more clearly how the elements of a city operate. Like Manhatta, the film adapts images—appropriates reality—to forge its unique adaptation. Perhaps paradoxically, Vertov was a realist filmmaker, in that he took his camera to the streets, searching for Kino-Pravda or “cinema truth,” and Man with the Movie Camera is a document of the city but one couched in avant-garde techniques. The film is almost entirely associative, which allows spectators to make certain conclusions based on how they view the images onscreen and also how they interpret the way the film is constructed. The film revolves around the equation of the camera lens with the photographer’s eye. The opening sequence shows a camera in close-up, followed by the cameraman himself, shown in miniature in double exposure, who then climbs on top of the camera. He sets a camera on a tripod and then sits down on top of the seemingly gigantic camera before climbing off the colossal-appearing device. These camera tricks are crucial to the development of avant-garde film, and the superimpositions of the cameras and the camera eye(s) suggest the theoretical ideas present throughout the film. Vertov proclaims that cinema has the power to alter reality, and he readily welcomes the audience’s identification with the camera in order to prove this thesis. As Robert Stam points out, “The obligation of the filmmaker, for Vertov, was to decipher mysteries and expose mystifications, whether found on the screen or three-dimensional life.”19 The entire film revolves around how the camera can manipulate what one sees, creating tricks that suggest how movement, lighting, and editing create, sustain, and perpetuate city life. We see people in the city going about normal, everyday routines, but we also get the sense that we are seeing aspects of city life newly uncovered. The process of filmmaking itself is equated with industrialization and mechanized labor. Vertov does so many things with the camera: placing it on moving train, a motorcycle, on top of building ledges; in one

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scene the camera is animated and seems to awaken and walk. All of these avant-garde techniques suggest how film can alter the way we see everyday activities vis-a-vis a city symphony film, and it also points to how one can appropriate images from daily life and use them in contradictory, rhetorical, or metaphorical ways. Marie Menken’s Go! Go! Go! is a fast-paced portrait of New York City and, as indicated by the title, shows how movement is crucial to interpreting the city itself. The film is shot using time-lapse photography, which makes all the objectsmove--from pedestrians to cars to boats--at hyperspeed. The result is a city that never seems to be still. Like other avantgarde city films, Go! Go! Go! adapts the images of daily life in new ways, avoiding documentary style in favor of a visual assault. Menken also films a wedding and a bodybuilder as juxtapositions or static moments, as well as her husband, the poet and filmmaker Willard Maas, who is shown typing at an old typewriter. These scenes are cut at a rapid speed that suggests the power of film editing and cinematography. Stan Brakhage describes the film as being full of spirit in its collagelike approach: “Go! Go! Go! . . . gracefully tackles the complexities of New York City and the varieties of public ceremony and private ‘home-movie’ living.” He adds, “Marie achieved a mastery of rhythm which very few have matched and, I think, none have surpassed in the history of film.”20 Go! Go! Go! might seem repetitious—as other city films do—but Menken’s choice to film in time lapse makes it entirely different from other likeminded avant-garde films. What she achieves is poetry: a free-form experiment in collision, formed by textures, rhythms, colors, and lights. City films are not traditional adaptations, but they are a kind of “attraction” described by Gunning, in that they typically eschew traditional narrative for a more associative story about something, here, simply, a “day-in-the-life” attitude toward the city itself rather than a specific story of an individual. The exhibition of the city served as a source text to be transcribed into images. As Gunning says, though not directly about city films, “The enthusiasm of the early avant-garde for film was at least partly an enthusiasm for a mass culture that was emerging at the beginning of the century, offering a new sort of stimulus for an audience not acculturated to the traditional arts.”21 City films are displays of mass culture rooted in modernity, a line that can be traced from Manhatta through Go! Go! Go! and to more contemporary city films such as Koyaanisqatsi (1982), which can be considered an avantgarde adaptation of everyday reality and the images that create and heighten perception.

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The 1930s Considering the advancements made in film technology—mainly sound—the avant-garde filmmakers of the 1930s were still primarily interested in creating works that eschewed the standards that accompanied the overnight changes in film production that accompanied the switch to sound film. Sound may have been used in avant-garde films, but nonsynchronization, sound effects, or experiments with manipulating voices or music were more often utilized in avant-garde silent films. Still, most avant-garde films continued to defend “the visual—hence purely visual—cinema for many years to come.”22 The 1930s was the decade of the studio system, which means that in addition to B pictures, opulent star-driven vehicles, and genres such as screwball comedies and lavish musicals, the studios produced large-scale adaptations (Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz). Avant-garde film adaptations in the 1930s were less than plentiful by comparison (as they are in any decade). French, British, eastern European, and Soviet national cinemas, among others, all flourished in terms of avant-garde film, but again the emphasis was not on adaptation but rather on experimentation. According to Michael O’Pray, “An important context for the avant-garde film in the 1930s was the visual arts. Contemporary artists were divided roughly into three camps—realists, surrealists and constructivists (or abstract artists)—all of whom had an impact on film.”23 This split into different spheres of influence would inevitably lead to certain practices that were adopted by avant-garde and experimental filmmakers beyond the 1930s. A particular kind of adaptation, based in appropriation of found materials, was the collage film, a type that consists of manipulating images (or sounds) into particular ways that alter perceptions of reality—similar to a city film in some regards—but also one that became highly influential for its use of found footage. A found-footage film is compiled partly or entirely of footage that has been appropriated by the filmmaker from other sources, including other films, educational or scientific films, or stills. The filmmaker changes and controls meaning by placing the found footage in a new context, altering perception on the part of the spectator, based on the principle of adapting these materials in profoundly different ways. Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart Joseph Cornell was an artist who exemplified the do-it-yourself aesthetic. His collage films are experiments in form, functioning and existing

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somewhere between serious art and playful amateurism, which is not a critical judgment but simply a descriptive term often used for his works. Nevertheless, his films are exercises in avant-garde style and attitude. Rose Hobart (1936) is an experimental film that consists of a completely re-edited and shortened version of the film East of Borneo (1931), a minor film starring the actress Rose Hobart. Cornell edited his film from many different shots of the original and added in shots of an eclipse. The result is one of the most famous appropriations in avant-garde film history. To add to the film’s pedigree of an avant-garde and surrealist masterwork, Cornell first projected the film through a piece of blue-tinted glass and slowed down the speed to match silent film. He also added songs not from the original source film but rather from his own collection that added metacommentary to the film as well. Reportedly, when the film was first shown, Salvador Dali became so enraged that Cornell “stole” his idea for Rose Hobart that he knocked over the film projector. Rose Hobart is a collage film, a certain type of adaptation that uses found footage to comprise its own narrative (or un-narrative, as the case may often be). I will detail the collage film more in depth in Part III when discussing Craig Baldwin’s Spectres of the Spectrum, but Cornell’s film is the progenitor for this type of adaptation, where the filmmaker uses previously available film footage for the subsequent film adaptation. This type of appropriation is almost always a form of avant-garde adaptation. It is an amalgam of shots arranged in a seemingly disorderly way that suggests the surrealist notion of dreamlike associations that lack coherent explanation. According to Bruce Posner, Cornell “took the options for appropriation further by jettisoning the entire plot of the source material, East of Borneo, and focusing primarily on the reaction shots of the film’s star, Rose Hobart.”24 This in turn created a film in which the editing superseded any notions of plot, a surrealist exercise in that the “blueprint for constructing cinematic dreams [became] an illogic that would replace conventional narrative structures.”25 There is an incredible amount of energy that stems from the film not being moored to narrative. Surrealism is an important aspect of avant-garde film, mainly due to the wide influence of Buñuel and Dali’s Un chien andalou, and Cornell follows suit. Rose Hobart participates in the surrealist idea of the associative and connotative meanings that come from objects in temporal and spatial dislocation. As Michael O’Pray states, “It can be argued that [the surrealists’] strongest impulse was not to make films but to experience them and to marvel at Hollywood’s naivetè, its extraordinary expressions of innocence, desire and mad love—in other words, its very unconscious.”26 Rose Hobart is precisely an exercise in the unconscious

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states of the actors in East of Borneo, a complete transcoding of the meanings of the images that have been appropriated from the original source material. In the film, we see the heroine, the hero, and the villain moving in slow motion, glancing at an absent person, cut with shots of character reactions from other parts of the film. The actors move through empty rooms, caress curtains, and, due to Cornell’s editing of the film, never meet face to face. We can never know who exactly Rose Hobart is talking to or why she is reacting in certain ways, which “make her fears and anxieties seem to be in response to the very mystery which the collagist’s editing has made of the film.”27 As Horak surmises, Their looks lead nowhere, their erotic desires careen into a void, while the audience is left with a mystery, as the film’s purple-tinted eroticism masks unfulfilled desire. In keeping with the surrealist creed, Cornell subverts not only the standard conventions of Hollywood filmmaking, but also viewer identification, draining the gaze of meaning.28 Rose Hobart gets rid of plot and dialogue to create a collage of images that we can either form into our own narrative or that can leave us baffled. Either way, it is good (surrealist) fun. Cornell’s film encapsulates the surrealist and avant-garde tradition of “freeing the cinema” from the strictures of narrative and from hermetic temporal and spatial dimensions. As P. Adams Sitney suggests, “[Rose Hobart] is a breathtaking example of the potential for surrealistic imagery within a conventional Hollywood film once it is liberated from its narrative causality.”29 Cornell wanted to manipulate emotions and actions in such a manner as to facilitate a new way of thinking about the process of cinematic collage. The same can be said of an avant-garde adaptation, where the spectator is encouraged to reconsider the source material based on its reconstitution in the film. In Rose Hobart, scenes are fragmented, actions are unexplained, such as the opening and closing of doors without people entering or leaving, and images are exploited for surrealistic purposes. In taking a previously existing film and adapting it through reconstruction, Cornell utterly transforms the content of the original, its images now emitting new meanings that are mysterious, surreal, unexplained, and often lyrical and beautiful.

Norman McLaren’s Hell Unltd. Iconoclastic filmmaker Norman McLaren got his start in Scotland before settling in Canada, and his filmmaking career, which spans nearly seven

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decades, is that of a true maverick avant-gardist, someone who, like Cornell, was intimate in his craftsmanship. His Hell Unltd. (1936) is also a collage film, a remarkable mix of found footage, animation, and abstract graphics that work together to create an extraordinary experimental and ideological avant-garde adaptation. McLaren uses the materials as social commentary; the film is structured as a lecture, punctuated by appropriated broadcasts and images of war. McLaren (working with sculptor Helen Biggar) edits the film in an extremely rapid pace, an Eisensteinian montage of images from several sources that addresses the audience in an innovative, experimental way. McLaren cuts between re-creation (actual acted footage), found footage of World War I, animated sequences, and graphic illustration to produce the collage effect that is both unsettling and uncanny. Intertitles pop up reading “Die” or “To make a World safe for Democracy,” ironic commentary juxtaposed with the imagery. The film is political because it takes an antiwar stance, a position that other avant-garde filmmakers would adopt (particularly in the 1960s) in some of their films. In one sequence, the film speedily cuts from live action to animation to an image of a man sitting in a chair in his room, where a tableside plant begins to grow uncontrollably and sprout hand grenades. Hell Unltd. is the kind of film adaptation that overtly exploits its sources by rearranging their original meanings into new ones. The film is one of the more powerful examples of how appropriation can be used as a statement not just about cinematic form, but also of ideological significance.

The 1940s and 1950s The 1940s to the 1950s was a time of great filmmaking in the avant-garde, especially in the United States. The filmmakers who began in the 1940s and 1950s—Maya Deren, James Broughton, Kenneth Anger, Sidney Peterson, Marie Menken, James Markopoulos, Stan Brakhage to name a few—largely created a new type of personal filmmaking that, while influenced from a variety of sources from literature and the visual arts, nevertheless avoided outright adaptation. These filmmakers are credited with ushering in a more poetic, mythic, visionary, and personal/private filmmaking practice that was generally absent from American cinema. All of these filmmakers have been documented quite exhaustively by film historians like P. Adams Sitney and Scott MacDonald, so I mention them only briefly here to acknowledge their undeniable contributions to avant-garde filmmaking as complex, individualistic, and rightfully groundbreaking in terms of their involvement in developing a new kind

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of film language for the avant-garde. The techniques, tropes, methods, and styles of these filmmakers led to a form of filmmaking that would influence the underground movement of the 1960s but eventually would also be relegated even further to the margins between the 1970s and 1990s, when Hollywood blockbusters and fancy adaptations dominated cinema. In addition to these well-known American filmmakers, the European avant-garde flourished during the 1940s and 1950s as well. * * *

Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast Jean Cocteau is one of the leading practitioners of avant-garde art, a bold artist whose drawings, plays, and films sum up surrealism and experimentalism. La belle et la bête (1946) is actually a rather faithful adaptation of the classic fairy tale by Leprince de Beaumont, but it has many flourishes of surrealism that are characteristic of Cocteau’s more unusual Orphic Trilogy films, themselves avant-garde adaptations. His version of Beauty and the Beast is highly poetic, often stylized, and entirely extravagant, a feast for the eyes. As Dixon and Foster conclude, “Cocteau’s dazzling visual sense, combined with his flair for the fantastic, created a world that belonged to him alone, a zone of spectacle, desire, and unfettered imagination.”30 This may be more apt for a film such as Blood of a Poet (1932), but it also applies to his version of the fairy tale, rendered, as it were, as an adult fantasia filtered through a surrealist lens. Cocteau adapts the essential plot and characters of the original story, and he more or less keeps the setting intact, but he presents these people, places, and actions in highly poeticized ways. In one scene, the camera slowly pans through a long hallway where we see all the candelabra that emerge from the wall held by human hands. In another, the reflections of mirrors capture youth, beauty, or ugliness and are shown in highcontrast expressionistic lighting. Like in his other films, Cocteau uses a mirror as a mode of transporting from the real to the surrealistic worlds, using the mirror for introspective exploration. The Beast is covered in fur and makeup, and wears a fetching princely costume, an extravagant (and romanticized) rendering of the character who at turns is defiantly beastly and loving toward Belle. There are shots in slow motion and ones shown in reverse. Cocteau’s adaptation metamorphoses the text from a playful (and short) fable about kindheartedness and turns it into a surrealist fantasy. Cocteau is aiming to tell a fairly straightforward story, but

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he embellishes it with surrealist imagery, a kind of comingling of real and unreal elements, appropriate for a fairy tale but rendered in a way befitting the avant-garde and especially an avant-garde adaptation. At the beginning of the film, during the credit sequence, Cocteau appears and implores the audience to think and view like a child, suggesting the connections between surrealism and primitive states. This is rather untraditional in terms of adaptation. In an interview, Cocteau describes his method of presentation, that what he was attempting with La belle et la bête was a poetic reverie of unreal sensations. He says: The main reason I chose [to adapt the fairy tale] was that the story as I saw it was a fairy-tale without fairies. In the film La Belle et la Bete as in L’Eternel Retour, I noticed that the two passages where poetry is best expressed disappointed many people. In the first film, the sisters in the farm-yard; in the second, the garage. This is because the public expects fairies, or at least, in default of fairies, it expects what in modern parlance is termed évasion, escape. But genuine poetry has no use for evasion. What it wants is invasion, that is, that the soul be invaded with words and objects which, just because they don’t present a winged appearance, impel it to plunge deep into itself.31 Cocteau here describes how he has transformed the original fairy tale into something more poetic—more thought provoking and personally inspiring—something entirely poetic in the sense that it is lyrical, elegiac, and rhythmical. Most fairy tales do not receive a similar treatment (especially Hollywood/Disney versions). Cocteau also said he chose this story for his film adaptation because he wanted to expose its hypocrisy, that instead of living “happily ever after,” Belle is condemned to a stereotypical fairy tale life, which is terrible for Belle since she was more attracted to and comfortable with the Beast, not Prince Charming. In this regard, Cocteau has made the film realistic, as it becomes a reflection of bourgeois society in all its trappings. (Cocteau said he was aiming for realism with La belle et la bête, though adding the touchings of poetry and surrealism also make it a hybrid—a surrealist fantasy of the real.) Surrealism was embraced by avant-garde filmmakers because it allowed for the rendering of literally anything; any idea or dream could be presented onscreen, no matter how odd or disassociated from reality it may be. “For the Surrealists,” writes Robert Stam, “the cinema had the transcendent capacity to liberate what was conventionally repressed, to mingle the known and the unknown, the mundane and the oneiric, the

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quotidian and the marvelous.”32 Cocteau was a poet first, filmmaker second, so his works tend to be decidedly personal endeavors that explore themes that are most individual to him. He had his own mythology, best explored in the Orphic Trilogy, but present also in La belle et la bête. In discussing the film, and especially how his own mythology corresponded with the fairy tale, Cocteau said, Quite apart from the fact that I chose that particular fable just because it corresponded to my personal mythology, the funny part of it all is that the objects and happenings for which I’m held responsible are to be found in a book by Madame Leprince de Beaumont, written in England, where there are countless stories about monsters hidden in old family mansions. It was, precisely, what was true in that book that tempted me and led me to the unreal realism I have mentioned earlier on.33 This wonderful description again points to Cocteau’s way of adapting the source text. He is suggesting his own interpretation, the personal mythology, is found in the original text, which would imply a faithful adaptation, but he also adds that he has taken the “truth” of the book and made it “unreal”—the “unreal realism” that is so characteristic of avant-garde filmmaking and surrealist filmmaking in general. In this regard, the finished film adaptation is unique in terms of its translation to the screen. Cocteau has made the film a combination of realism, from sets to décor, and added elements of the unreal, the Beast, the handheld candles, the mirrors as viewing devices. As an avant-garde adaptation, Cocteau succeeds at keeping the spirit of the original by uncovering its mythology, while making it utterly his own by adapting it to his own personalized mythology and vision.

Gregory Markopoulos’s Swain Gregory Markopoulos made a loose adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel Fanshawe called Swain (1950). To P. Adams Sitney, this is Markopoulos’s version of the trance film, a type of movie in which dream, dance, ritual, and sexuality inform the structure and content of its narrative thrust, though a complete, coherent narrative may often be absent. Swain is a severe reworking of the Hawthorne original, merely taking the characters and the basic plot description as a starting point. Markopoulos condensed the two main male protagonists into one and

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focused on the (erotic) quest of this protagonist to self-enlightenment. The novel, published in 1828, was based on Hawthorne’s days at Bowdoin College, but Markopoulos is not at all interested in re-creating the college years. Instead, he creates a dense, metaphoric account of a man’s personal journey to self-discovery. There are symbolic shots of flowers, woods, hills—nature—coupled with stone buildings and a gargoyle that is intercut with images of the man and the woman. The couple chase each other, recline in bed, and have what appears to be a conversation. There are moments of rapid montage, “image clusters” to use Sitney’s phrase, which creates both tension and speed. Like other trance films, Swain deals with dreamlike imagery, unexplained symbolic and metaphoric associations, and an inconclusive or ambiguous narrative structure. Markopoulos does not adapt Hawthorne in any conventional fashion. According to Sitney, Markopoulos admitted “it was the early description of Fanshawe that inspired him, not the plot.”34 Sitney then quotes Markopoulos describing his intent/interpretation of Hawthorne’s source text: “A ruler in a world of his own and independent of the beings that surrounded him.”35 This description is apt for it signals the kind of avant-garde attitude and aesthetic approach that Markopoulos and other like-minded filmmakers take toward the original text(s) they choose to adapt in unconventional ways: They rule their domains themselves, creating film/adaptations unlike any other and under no constraint. Markopoulos’s description, in other words, can be applied to the avantgarde filmmaker, the avant-garde adaptation. Markopoulos, like Stan Brakhage, Robert Beavers, Hollis Frampton, Kenneth Anger, and other well-known American avant-garde filmmakers who emerged between the 1940s and 1960s, adapted and appropriated material from a variety of sources (literature, painting, music) that inspired them to create some of the most important avant-garde films of the twentieth century, as well as some alternative forms of adaptation.

Jiří Trnka and Czech Animation The work of Jiří Trnka, a master of stop-motion puppet animation, marks a significant addition to avant-garde filmmaking. He made a wellreceived adaptation of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Sen noci svatojánské) in 1959. What made the film unusual for its time was the combination of animation and live-action photography, which created a surreal and often discomfiting environment. Trnka made

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many animated films based on Czech fairy tales and folklore, and he has rightfully been credited with being the founding father of Czech animation. (Jan Švankmajer, the contemporary Czech avant-garde filmmaker, is arguably far more influential. I will discuss his adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in Part III.) One could argue Trnka’s version of Shakespeare is original only because it is made with animated puppets; however, labeling it simply a puppet film does it a slight disservice, for Trnka uses the camera, lighting, and editing in ways that resemble live action. While keeping a great deal of Shakespeare intact, Trnka distills the text to create an engaging mix of sometimes scary puppetry (menacing looks, short legs, protruding eyes) with an elegant poetry rarely found in traditional adaptations of Shakespeare—especially when considering the film is mostly silent with musical accompaniment. There are only a few lines of dialogue. According to Edgar Dutka, this was Trnka’s preferred method of filmmaking, which is why the film was not an immediate success: [In] 1955 he started and in 1959 he finished his masterpiece, the wide screen puppet feature film The Midsummer Night’s Dream and – it failed. Both abroad and at home too. Even – or because – this adaptation of Shakespeare contains Trnka’s entire opinions and esthetic notions about a puppet film. The elements he used were: an internationally known story, a carefully prepared screenplay (co-writer J. Brdecka), perfect characters and brilliant puppet animation, not too much dialogue and only a few lines of narration from time to time. Trnka never allowed lip-synch, he thought it was barbaric for puppets-sculpturessubjects of art to be treated in this manner. Music was always preferred to the spoken word.36 This description hints at why Trnka is an acquired taste: He adamantly sticks to his own ideas about the purpose and nature of filmmaking, especially the kind of filmmaking that is avant-garde by utilizing stop-motion puppetry in his adaptation. But like Švankmajer, Trnka’s films are meant for adult audiences; puppetry in film does not equal a puppet show. His films are somber, dark, mysterious; his adaptation of Shakespeare proves that one need not make a faithful condensation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; rather, the original text only challenges the filmmaker to adapt something foreign into his specific milieu. It is a feat most avant-garde adapters strive for . . . and succeed at doing. In 1966, three years before his death, Newsday lauded him as “second to Chaplin as a film artist

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because his work inaugurated a new stage in a medium long dominated by Disney.”37 This is high praise for someone who is not as well known today as he was on the international scene of the 1950s and 1960s. The works of Trnka were complemented by Karel Zeman, who also made several avant-garde animated adaptations, including Vynález zkázy (The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, 1958), and later Czech animators such as Jiří Barta (The Pied Piper of Hamelin, 1985), and of course Švankmajer. These films consistently challenge our ideas about animation and adaptation, for they create atmospheric spatio-temporal wonders that are nightmarish yet full of life and almost always make us return to the source material enlightened by the very nature of the unusual, exploitative approach to transforming it to the screen. The cinematic new waves of the 1950s and 1960s helped transform filmmaking and film culture. Adaptations were still being made by Hollywood and countries around the world, but the new cinemas, which ranged from the French New Wave, the Czechoslovak New Wave, the Polish School, and Brazil’s Cinema Novo, to name but a few, gave some credence to interpreting source texts in more liberal ways. Avant-garde adaptations from this era were original, experimental, and embraced a wide range of texts or sources for their enthused adaptations. Specifically discussing the French New Wave, and its influence (and cultural and social context) on adaptation, Robert Stam writes, The advent of the New Wave coincided with the emergence of various avant-garde-inflected movements in criticism and the arts in France: Barthes and nouvelle critique in literary theory; Beckett and Ionesco and absurdism in the theater; Boulez in music; and the “new novel” in literature. It was no accident that the subtitle of Astruc’s 1948 “Camera Stylo” essay was “For a New Avant-garde.” What would differentiate the “new avant-garde” of the late 1940s from the “historical avant-gardes” of the 1920s was its hybrid character as a compromise formation negotiating between entertainment and vanguardism. While the avantgardists of the 1920s called for “pure cinema,” the New Wave preferred a “mixed cinema” which mingled a certain formal audacity (reflexivity, sound/image disjunction) with the pleasures of mainstream cinema (narrative, performance, desire, spectacle).38 This combination of vanguardism and entertainment has long been a tradition of adaptation. The New Wave allowed for this kind of commingling in avant-garde adaptation. Numerous examples abound from this

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era that are more experimental in form and do not necessarily adhere to big-budgeted studio adaptations: Jules and Jim (1962), Contempt (1963), The Conformist (1970). Never seeking outright acceptance into the mainstream, these kinds of adaptations were becoming more recognized as legitimate film adaptations in addition to being avant-garde—that is, out of the establishment and financially risky, yet formally audacious, and, I suggest, frequently coherently narrative--though they tend to favor formal and stylistic innovation over strict, faithful adaptation. The major figures of avant-garde film that started in the 1950s–—and 1960s really came of age in the 1970s and 1980s. There are numerous filmmakers who expanded the language of film, demonstrating the formal capabilities of the medium could be ever expanding, and who created such diverse, intense, and idiosyncratic works. * * *

The 1960s Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Mother Joan of the Angels Basing a film adaptation on actual events can be a risky choice, unless, perhaps, one decides to render it in a hallucinatory way, which allows for a more creative approach that may or may not cloud the actual events of the source material. In other words, the adaptation can become a kind of surreal or intense reflection on historical data, that is, a reflection on real, historical occurrences. Mother Joan of the Angels (1961) is a Polish film that defies categories, or at least may fall into several; it is a religious parable, a love story, a horror show, and a socialist allegory. It is also an adaptation of a reportedly actual event that took place in Loudun, France, in 1634 and reworks several other sources that retell the story of the mass demonic possession of a group of nuns. Some of the appropriated source texts are a novella by Polish writer Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and The Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley. (The well-known story was also adapted by Ken Russell into The Devils [1971].) The film employs a variety of avant-garde strategies to tell the story of the nuns’ possession: symbolism and allegory; the manifestation or representation of dreams, expressed in formal visual techniques and sound textures; overtones of philosophical inquiry, from theology to existentialism to feminism, which become more thematic devices than plot points; exaggerated gestures and geometric configurations including the positioning of bodies; fragmentary narrative structuring; and bizarre humor. These elements

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work in combination to depict how evil—demonic possession—enraptures individuals into sexual hysteria and mass panic. Using history onscreen, or rather, interpreting history means appropriating facts and adding detail constructed by the filmmakers for the narrative. Sometimes this works well, but it also can be controversial (see Oliver Stone’s JFK or W). According to Robert Rosenstone, “We come to understand the past in the stories we tell about it, stories based on the sort of data we call fact, but stories which include other elements that are not directly in the data but arise from the process of story telling.”39 I will discuss this idea a bit more in the chapter on Syberberg in Part III, but the point is crucial to understanding adaptation as a process of interpretation and appropriation: both fictional and creative material will be added to a seemingly historical or factual occurrence. Kawalerowicz, of course, has some leeway; the story of actual demonic possession should be told from an alternative perspective, one that both creates the historical moment but also allows for creative exploration. The story is rather simple: A group of nuns begins to have convulsions, act improperly, and engage in shocking and indecent behavior. A priest comes to exorcise them and, in the process, invites the demons into his own body, which then becomes possessed. (The actual priest who performed these exorcisms was later tried and burned at the stake, having been accused of sexually and mentally abusing the nuns.) Mother Joan of the Angels is stark in its black-and-white cinematography and its bare mise-en-scène, but it ultimately can be called an avant-garde adaptation because it exploits the source material(s) for specific effect. For example, the film takes place almost entirely in the monastery, and Kawalerowicz films scenes tightly, creating a claustrophobic effect for the spectator. It is an odd, unsettling experience, just as much as it is for the characters in the film, who clearly are dealing with emotions that are locked or closed inside. Characters frequently directly address the camera, adding to the mysterious and unnatural feel of the film, and suggesting the avantgardism of the “cinema of attractions.” The subject matter itself is taboo, almost begging to be filmed by a radical filmmaker (and Kawalerowicz was just that) who wants to adapt not just the known story but to add a sense of disorientation that is as unnerving as it is complacent, considering it can be called a religious film, or at least one that depicts religious experience. This juxtaposition is created by the ease with which Kawalerowicz uses the camera. He frames shots centrally, moving slowly about corridors and entryways, focusing our attention on mirrors—stylistic devices that create tension from the exotic subject matter. Mother

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Joan of the Angels is not a faithful adaptation; it takes liberties with the source material, but Kawalerowicz ultimately creates an adaptation that, because of its phantasmagoric mood, produces an avant-garde film that begs to be rediscovered. Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in U.S.A. Godard has received so much critical attention that I will limit my discussion to only one of his radical experiments of the 1960s, Made in U.S.A. (1966), a noir-influenced detective story in the vein of The Big Sleep (which it freely adapts or more noticeably appropriates) that is part crime thriller, political allegory, and candy-colored consumerist critique. The film is also based in part on the novel The Jugger, by Richard Stark (the pseudonym of Donald E. Westlake) and, like other of Godard’s remarkable filmic output of the 1960s, is self-reflexive. Critic J. Hoberman remarks in the liner notes that accompany the DVD release that the film was made “so quickly that it could almost be considered an improvisation,” which implies a certain spontaneity associated with the avant-garde.40 Jonas Mekas, godfather of the American avant-garde of the 1960s, and also a prominent theoretician of avant-garde cinema, writes that improvisation is a key ingredient to the style and aesthetic of avant-garde film. He says, Improvisation is the highest form of condensation, it points to the very essence of a thought, an emotion, a movement . . . . Improvisation is, I repeat, the highest form of concentration, of awareness, of intuitive knowledge, when the imagination begins to dismiss the pre-arranged, the contrived mental structures, and goes directly to the depths of the matter. This is the true meaning of improvisation, and it is not a method at all, it is, rather, a state of being necessary for any inspired creation.41 Though Mekas was writing about the American scene before Made in U.S.A was released, his description of improvisation rings true for someone like Godard and especially his loose form of adaptation. Godard is the quintessential improvisational director, in Mekas’s terms—one, that is, who is highly intuitive, full of imagination and inspiration, and, I’ll add, politically agitated, which is also an important attribute of the historical avant-gardes of the 1920s. His films do “dismiss” any kind of “pre-arranged” set of arbitrary rules; Godard is an experimentalist in this regard because his films, especially those of the 1960s, were interrogations or

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investigations in form, style, and theme. Godard would probably not call himself an avant-garde filmmaker, but for my purposes here, he has created an avant-garde adaptation with Made in U.S.A. Made in U.S.A. is an(other) exercise in style, a true Godardian cinematic expression. The colors are bright and saturated and exaggerated; the camera work is obvious and intrusive; music or street noise often occludes dialogue; scenes abruptly end without resolutions or transitions; and there is a voice-over commentary (by Godard) that is a noir tactic but also a political and self-reflexive one, as Godard comments on both the film and its supposed meanings, culturally, politically, and societal. Toward the end of the film, the commentator (known as Richard Politzer) says, “We were certainly in a film about politics; Walt Disney plus blood.” The film offers a metacommentary on film noir as a genre, consumerist culture, and emerging extremist politics; ultimately, what the film concludes is that consumerism has trumped politics as cultural capital. None of these ideas are present—or are at least partially so—in the source material. Godard appropriates The Big Sleep, using the film as both homage and pastiche, and dismantles The Jugger so it becomes nearly invisible and irrelevant, creating instead a new text almost completely separate from the source material. (Westlake successfully sued to prevent the film’s commercial distribution in the United States because Godard never actually got the rights to the book, hence, there are many liberties taken with the narration, which suited Godard just fine.) As Hoberman concludes, “Made in U.S.A is self-reflexive and self-conscious: when characters speak, it’s often to speculate on the nature of language or note the time passing.”42 Anna Karina, the film’s star and Godard’s muse, is shown in extreme close-ups and complementary light, and she also has a voice-over throughout the film, another avant-garde tactic since we do have multiple voices: actual narrative-driven dialogue, (two) voice-overs, and the occasional monologue, which often occurs as asides. Made in U.S.A is a good example of the kind of avant-garde adaptation that transforms the source material so completely that the adapted text essentially becomes irrelevant: We are only interested in Godard’s film and not the book. The fictitious French city of Atlantic City becomes the setting, while characters are named Richard Nixon and Robert McNamara. There are references to Donald Siegel, Richard Widmark, Guillaume Apollinaire, and the Japanese filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi. Godard appropriates film noir tropes from American cinema, subverts them, and creates his own method of re-presentation. According to Peter Wollen, “Godard treated Hollywood as a kind of conceptual property store from which he could

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serendipitously loot ideas for scenes, shots and moods.”43 In other words, Godard has little problem with appropriating items for his interpretive, avant-garde adaptation. The novel is mostly set in Nebraska, following the exploits of a safecracker, an idea not really present in Godard’s loose interpretation. The novel is pulp, featuring hard-boiled language, characters, settings. Godard turns this inside out, creating less an adaptation than a complete reshaping. Made in U.S.A is a very particular hodgepodge of adaptation(s)--pastiche, deconstruction, intertextuality, criticism—all rendered in a way that is both exasperating yet engaging, as bewildering as it is fascinating.

The 1970s The 1970s gave rise to the serious age of film theory and feminist theory that would influence and change the way films are discussed today: social, political, cultural, ideological, and formal. As a result, a more pronounced kind of criticism developed that stemmed from the radical avant-garde, experimental, and underground cinema of the 1960s. It was a time, too, for highly personal cinematic explorations. Feminist filmmakers, for example, were not as interested in adaptation as placing personal stories or cultural critiques onscreen. Still, there were instances of avant-garde adaptation among many diverse filmmakers, ones who were working outside the Hollywood machine, which, as film history tells us, exploded into a blockbuster- and formula-driven enterprise during the 1970s. Adapting novels to the screen started to become more of a standard Hollywood practice as well. But outside Hollywood and in regions around the world, independent-minded directors who used previous sources for inspirations for their adaptations sometimes did so in unconventional ways, making their works avant-garde in nature.

Kichachiro Kawamoto’s The Demon Japanese master animator Kichachiro Kawamoto has created some of the most fantastic, surreal, and original films over a long and distinguished career. He helped develop the stop-motion technique pioneered by Jiří Trnka (Kawamoto’s mentor) in Japan and, as a result, produced a handful of intricate and “exquisite”—as the Kino DVD release of his films proclaims—cinematic animations that combine puppetry, abstract graphic design, Japanese theater traditions (Noh and kabuki), and avant-garde

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aesthetics. The Demon (1972) is a stop-motion puppet film, based on a Japanese medieval folklore story, in which the puppet characters move in front of a two-dimensional painted backdrop. It appears simplistic, but the camera work, which combines static shots, canted angles, close-ups, and pans, creates a startling depth of field and an intense sense of drama. The film’s source is taken from the text Konjaku monogatarish ū, which roughly translates to “anthology of tales from the past,” a collection of ghost stories, folklore, and Buddhist teachings. The Japanese title of the film, Oni, translates to “demon” and situates the film in a larger context of Japanese sociocultural customs and beliefs. Oni are creatures from Japanese folklore, and are popular characters in Japanese myth and culture. Oni are usually portrayed as giant creatures with sharp claws, protruding teeth, wild long hair, and sometimes two horns emerging from their heads. Kawamoto’s film incorporates these elements in his adaptation. The story follows two brothers who go hunting in the forest, leaving behind their ailing and feeble mother, and encounter a demon that turns out actually to be their mother. Their temptation leads them astray, and as a consequence, they pay by being caught by the demon. The way Kawamoto shows this is extraordinary and experimental: The characters are all puppets, animated through stop-motion photography, and they appear to dance along with the simple musical accompaniment, jerking in step to its rhythms. The effect is eerie and mysterious—like the source story. Using stop-motion animation makes the film different from traditional animation and also showcases the formal and stylistic abilities of adaptation when using animation to translate a story to the screen. The result is a surreal, spiritual, and emotional film. “Puppets make their own stories,” Kawamoto remarked in an interview, and indeed, The Demon shows how what we know to be lifeless—puppets—can come to imaginative life through avant-garde techniques.44 Lawrence Jordan’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Lawrence Jordan has been making avant-garde animated films and collages since the 1950s, and his works have been generally accepted as what I will call mature obsessions, detailed animations and collages that require an obsessive attitude and temperament. His work is baroque. Drawing on influences as diverse as Victorian etchings and the collage works of Joseph Cornell (with whom he worked), his work defies categorization beyond the use (usually) of two-dimensional animation, where the uncanny mixes freely with the rational and creates unsettling,

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disturbing, and always fascinating worlds. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1977) is one of his more celebrated films, even if it is relatively straightforward: the lines of the poem is kept, and he uses the famous Doré illustrations of the poem from 1876. But the film is also experimental; Jordan uses the camera in such a compulsive fashion that the images seem to come to life, converge, and enact the poem through still, animated engravings, an illusion of movement rendered through meticulous cinematography. The film is also strange because Jordan, in a weird and wonderful case of filmic metacommentary, was able to get Orson Welles to recite the poem. (Welles, of course, by this point in his career, was game to try almost anything.) The resulting adaptation is akin to a dream: Coleridge’s original text becomes a reverie, a fantastical and nightmarish visualization of one of the world’s best-known poems. In order to achieve the effect he wanted with the film, Jordan uses multiple color tints, various optical prints, and precise, detailed cinematography—filming in and through the Doré illustrations—to create a sometimes surreal interpretation of the poem. Adapting poetry to the screen requires a highly inventive transposition; the elaboration or visualization of a poem involves subjective analysis and creativity. In describing the film, Jordan says, I wanted to depict the complete poem via Doréè illustrations, yet infused with dream-irrelevancies that would carry the film at least one step out of the realm of the merely filmic illustrations of a poem . . . I tried to infiltrate the world of Doréè and Coleridge, through the agency of Orson Welles’s deep, rumbling voice. When I realized that color tint that shifted with the shot changes was not subtle enough for this film, it meant I was forced to optically print, or re-make the entire film, frame by frame on the [optical] printer . . .45 Jordan describes how he had to manipulate the image in order to create the vision he had for the poem—even if it meant becoming part of the process itself. The result is a film that wears its form on its sleeve. Animation is a painstaking process; Jordan’s film is paradoxical because he abandons actually making objects move and instead makes the concreteness of the illustrated book move and come alive. Discussing the film in 1978, programmer Carmen Vigil said, Larry Jordan has taken the Coleridge poem, narrated by none other than the great Orson Welles, along with the classic Doréè prints, and

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created a film which utterly transcends all its various parts. The film, far from being a mere visual accompaniment to the poem, has an integrity of its own . . . [Jordan’s style has] turned old material into new, translating nineteenth-century art into a totally new kind of masterpiece. The Mariner ‘lives’ as he has never lived before.46 Jordan’s proclivity toward engravings, etchings, and nineteenth-century ephemera suits his interpretive film adaptation of Coleridge perfectly. Coleridge’s poem is structured primarily in ballad form, which creates a sense of rhythm along with the narrative about a wedding guest and his encounter with an old mariner. The poem is odd; Coleridge added marginalia—explanatory notes—that distort rather than clarify the ambiguous moral of the tale. Jordan seems to understand that translating the poem to the screen involves interpreting the poem, filming the Doréè illustrations, and adding his own working aesthetic to produce something that retains all the power and intensity one could hope for given its strange transformation. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a study in multiple aural and visual textures and an excellent example of translating poetry to the screen, even when the poem itself remains throughout. Chick Strand’s Cartoon le Mousse One of the most important and radical experimental filmmakers of recent avant-garde production, Chick Strand has established a reputation as a feminist, ethnographic, and collagist filmmaker, someone whose sensibilities bridge documentary-like footage with collage-like experimentation. Her short film Cartoon le Mousse (1979) is an abstract compilation of found footage, a “rigorous experiment in assemblage that, nevertheless, manages to involve the viewer’s emotions through oddly evocative images.”47 It is an unusual adaptation in that it takes found footage and reassembles it in a distinct manner, altering the meanings of all the original sources, which include cartoons, educational films, and re-created footage resembling old B movies. Strand also has appropriated dialogue, or at least snippets of narration, that take on different meanings outside their sources and even counter or contradict the images onscreen. The film consists of footage from old cartoons and educational films that are edited together—assembled—in ways that create metaphorical associations rather than narrative clarity. Strand weaves the images together to offer a commentary on Western culture and society, juxtaposing cartoons with live-action footage, combining dark shadows with the

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brightness of some of the animation to present an absurdly provocative analysis of culture through visual and linguistic metaphor. According to Gene Youngblood, “If poetry is the art of making evocative connections between otherwise dissimilar phenomena, then Chick Strand is a great poet, for these films transcend their material to create a surreal and sublime universe beyond reason.”48 Maria Pramaggiore describes the film as “dark” and “mournful,” and indeed, the images seem melancholy, which is unusual based on the combination Strand uses of cartoon, found footage, and her own filmed scenes. Like other collage films, there are multiple ways to read the images that are edited so that they take on metonymic or metaphoric meanings. This is characteristic of avantgarde films. Strand has appropriated the aural and visual equivalents of accepted cultural meaning, altering their given referents into new visual representations.

The 1980s and 1990s The 1980s and 1990s saw a proliferation of avant-garde filmmaking in smaller sectors. Video allowed for a cheaper and quicker method of production. Many video installations of the time can be considered avant-garde, and some were inspired by or based on previous texts. In some ways, avant-garde film became more culturally visible—but still in museums, cine clubs, or college campuses. Large-scale adaptations still dominated feature filmmaking. Younger generations of avant-garde filmmakers were indebted to the pioneering artists of the 1940s—to the 1970s (which include Deren, Brakhage, Anger, Broughton, Markopoulos, Mekas, Snow, Frampton, Kubelka, Warhol, Menken, Rainer, Strand, Breer, Land, and a host of others). These figures are decidedly avantgarde. They are the artists who defined avant-garde filmmaking (in the United States) for a generation. Many of the films I have discussed are not generally considered avant-garde, and the in-depth analyses that will follow in Part III include films and filmmakers who again may not be accepted as avant-garde filmmakers in the same vein as their generally acknowledged forebears, but I believe their approaches to adaptation warrant their films as good examples of avant-garde adaptation. The 1980s—and 1990s saw an ever-expanding definition of what constitutes an avant-garde film. “Experimental film” tends to be used frequently when describing the works of filmmakers who emerged in the 1980s, including Su Friedrich, Lynne Sachs, Carolee Schneemann, Peter

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Hutton, James Benning, Robert Beavers, and Abigail Child, to name but a few (again, in the United States, even though avant-garde film flourished around the world), and the many examples of adaptation that occur in various national cinemas often take alternative approaches to the process of transferring one or more texts to the screen. These are instances of avant-garde adaptations. The current generation of avantgarde filmmakers who choose to adapt or appropriate various sources, histories, arts, or other mediums for their own text, often take a “pluralist approach . . . in which the past is not something to be built upon or developed but rather pillaged and looted.”49 If this is the case, then we must pay attention to those avant-garde artists who use cultural appropriation when they create an adaptation. Paying homage to the forerunners of experimental and avant-garde filmmaking is crucial in understanding the (contemporary) practice as a whole, while investigating adaptations that exploit the source material also provides insight into the intertextual nature that exists not only among sources and their adaptations but also among avant-garde adaptation and more mainstream adaptations. * * * Derek Jarman’s The Last of England The Last of England (1987) is another one of enfant terrible Derek Jarman’s cinematic feasts: an audiovisual onslaught of disparate images, sounds, techniques, and commentary. A highly charged personal exploration of memory, contemporary culture, heritage, and the apocalypse, the film is a collision of avant-garde sensibility and theatrical absurdity, making it one of the more unique visions brought to the screen that effectively adapts several sources: the painting by Ford Maddox Brown after which it is named; personal history and memory of his father and his own upbringing, including old home movies by his grandfather and his father; England’s political climate; war; and Jarman’s own book (of the same name, though also known as Kicking the Pricks) that accompanied the film. In Kicking the Pricks, Jarman describes the mix of inspirations and influences that he uses: “The film is an attic . . . full of the junk of our history, of memory and so on; there’s a hurricane blowing outside, I open the doors and the hurricane blows through; everything is blown around, it’s a cleansing, the whole film is a cleansing. I need a very firm anchor in that hurricane, the anchor is my inheritance, not my family inheritance, but a cultural one . . . .”50 In describing the film and book,

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Tim Ellis notes, “The film, like the book, is on the surface a fairly convincing mix of heterogeneous materials that threatens to overwhelm the viewer with its speed and content.”51 The film’s apocalyptic setting, tone, and action also call to mind T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” which Jarman also discusses in his book, and the film renders the work convincingly through its cinematography, mise-en-scène, and montage editing. Like other avant-garde adaptations, the film is loose in its appropriation and amalgamation of these often disparate source texts, but Jarman manages to make them cohere into something as dynamic as it is offputting for the majority of viewers. The Last of England is not Jarman’s best-known adaptation; that would be his version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. But because The Last of England exemplifies the collage-appropriation approach to avant-garde adaptation, I want to focus on it instead of his The Tempest (1979), even though it, too, is an avant-garde adaptation. Brown’s painting, from 1855, is of two émigrés leaving England on a small boat for a new life abroad. In the painting we can see the faces of a few other people behind the centrally framed couple and, more tellingly, the last visages of the white cliffs of Dover, painted small in the upper corner. Jarman’s film is not a re-creation of this event; rather, he takes its theme—departure for an envisioned new land—as a starting point for his film, which is about a future England that is in tatters. In the painting, the people on the boat do not know their future; they are headed to an unknown land. The characters in Jarman’s film also are positioned in an unknown land: England is violent, aflame, and viciously cruel and brutal. Not so much an adaptation of a painting, The Last of England is a hybrid film, combining docudrama with social commentary. It also has been read as an allegory of Jarman’s own personal battle as an openly gay filmmaker working in a medium that paradoxically relegates him to the margins while affording him greater opportunity for self-reflection, which means Jarman appropriates his own life into the narrative. The film employs montage, nonsynched sound and imagery, no narrative structuring, and loosely drawn vignettes of characters who become emotional symbols of a world suffering from great loss. The Last of England is strange yet emotionally powerful for all of its dissonant and disparate parts. Jarman shot the film on Super 8 millimeter, edited it on video, then blew it up to 35 millimeter for projection. This transference causes images to be hazy, beautiful, and surreal. As Jarman notes in his accompanying book,

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You could achieve effects on video which would have cost a fortune on film. . . . Blown up to 35mm, the quality is something quite new, like stained glass, the film glows with wonderful colours. The video gives you a pallette like a painter, and I find the result beautiful. Most 35mm looks pretty hard and brassy in comparison. The system produces blacks like the lead in stained glass, shadowy and mysterious, even when the sun is blazing. Much of The Last Of England seems to be filmed at sundown, Eliot’s violet hour.52 Much of the film is like peering through stained glass; images bleed into one another, become contorted, and often remain bizarre and stunning. Jarman also gives us insight into the film’s basic formal devices, noting that early English literature provides some impetus for the avant-garde adaptation: The film has “dream allegory [in which] the poet wakes in a visionary landscape where he encounters personifications of psychic states. Through these encounters he is healed . . . . The Last Of England is in the same form . . .”53 As a dream allegory, the film shows shifts in space and time that are generally unannounced, creating an unsettling effect. Elsewhere in the book, Jarman calls the film a documentary. This mixing of genres, as it were, serves a specific formal and aesthetic function. The purpose is to get the spectator to think about the political, social, and cultural arguments present in the film; the emotional and psychological effect for the viewer makes the film also avant-garde in its underlying aesthetic approach and appeal. Ellis says the film is not so much about politics but is “an attempt to mimic or represent structures of thought or feeling, and the primary grounds on which to evaluate its effectiveness are aesthetic.”54 Avant-garde films strive for an authenticity—an ontology— that ultimately creates such responses in viewers. What Jarman has accomplished with his adaptation is astounding and remarkable: He has used the deeply familiar and personal (the home movies and his memories) as a vehicle for dialogue about art, ideology, and contemporary culture. The result is a phantasmagoria, a visionary film made by a maverick director. Amy Greenfield’s Antigone/Rites of Passion Trained as a dancer, Amy Greenfield was led to filmmaking through a close affinity with and admiration of directors such as Maya Deren and Carolee Schneemann, and like these directors, she puts performance first, especially the movement of a woman’s body. Antigone/Rites of Passion (1990) is a loose adaptation of the immortal Greek tragedy, a highly

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personal meditation on the effects of family on individuality. Sophocles’ play is about a family that has a curse on it, how the members deal with the ramifications of it, and the ultimate concern of free will. In essence, the play poses the question: How might one exert free will having been cursed or destined to be trapped? Greenfield makes the play contemporary, wherein the lead character, Antigone, is faced with a similar question. The film is experimental in several ways. Greenfield did not want to produce a dramatic staging of the plays or film a staged version. The actors perform in pantomime, articulating facial expressions and exaggerated gestures for the original dialogue and conventional acting. There is a spare, barely-there voice-over that is complementary rather than intrusive or explanatory. Additionally, Greenfield uses the camera as a fluid body like a dancer’s. It slides among the actors/dancers, stopping for close-ups of faces and bodies or abstract shapes of buildings, shadows, or costumes. Greenfield also edits the film in a jarring fashion, offering mismatches and abrupt cuts, a fragmentation that echoes the theme of the play. To render this even further, the droning electronic music, by avant-garde musicians and composers Diamanda Galas, Glenn Branca, Paul Lemos, Elliot Sharp, and David Van Tieghem, add an emotional weight juxtaposed with a jarring disconnection that mirrors the characters’ interactions. As Robert Haller suggests, “Greenfield’s Antigone is a character trapped by her origins,” wherein Greenfield herself (who plays Antigone), identifies “with being trapped in the coils of destiny, yet overcoming her fear through the choice of action.”55 In other words, Greenfield’s decision to make Antigone/Rites of Passion is predicated on the fact that such an avant-garde project is too unorthodox to find an audience; like Antigone, Greenfield had to perform and act in order to rid herself of the past (and present) that has trapped her, particularly as a woman and as an avant-garde film director. Discussing her motivation, Greenfield says, I had to rise from my own personal bitterness to Antigone’s power to curse, and the text gave me that ability to transform the personal. So it was always finding layers of the personal and objectifying it. And “personal” can mean another woman’s inspiration, too. There are great women everyday who defy the law. But that’s the job of everyone working on a classic where the leap of imagination to internalize text and character has to be great. Now that I’m finished with the film and know what I had to go through to make it, I think what drew me to Antigone herself is something her sister, Ismene, said about her: “You are in love

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with the impossible.” I think you feel the personal right away, especially because you teach the play. I don’t start with the play. I start the film back with the journey of Antigone and her father, Oedipus, outside society and the political structure. Highly intimate, and from Oedipus at Colonus, which was very personal to Sophocles. So there’s an emphasis on the family curse, family law, before it expands to political law and spiritual law.56 This explanation describes Greenfield’s subjective decision making, an important aspect of avant-garde adaptation. Stripping the plot only to essentials that adhere to her vision, Greenfield employs her personal film-dance vocabulary, itself structured or informed by dreams, psychic states, and expressionism, to create a thoroughly modern adaptation of the original text. Sophocles’ play is transformed into an original fusion of movement, both of dancers/actors and the camera, set against stunning natural and architectural locations to emphasize the original’s tragic sensibility. Greenfield essentially is attempting to animate words through movement, an avant-garde tactic that works beautifully in the particular context she has crafted. Greenfield has not attempted a proper adaptation of Sophocles. Rather, she is more interested in an expressionistic adaptation that highlights the rhythms of dance created by the actors and camera. Dance on film has been a mainstay in cinema history since its origins. Performances and numbers that occur in traditional film musicals are in themselves avant-garde for they disrupt space and time. Early attractions, to use Gunning’s term, spectacles of display, include Carmencita (1894), Annabelle the Dancer (1895), and Serpentine Dances (1895). More avantgarde dance films include Danse Macabre (1922), which uses animation and multiple exposures, and Hands (1926–27), a milestone avant-garde film that shows close-ups of hands dancing through expressionistic and miniaturized sets. Maya Deren’s influential A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) is a landmark avant-garde dance film. None of these are adaptations, but they created a legacy of dance on film that extends to Greenfield’s Antigone/Rites of Passion. Maya Deren, in her essay “Cinema as an Art Form,” addresses the correlation between dance and film, something, I believe, that imbues Greenfield’s vision. Deren writes, “There is a potential filmic dance form, in which the choreography and movements would be designed, precisely, for the mobility and other attributes of the camera . . .”57 In Antigone/Rites of Passion, we see this kind of avant-garde filmic form take shape. As Haller sees it, when discussing Greenfield’s

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use of dance, “[T]hrough the envelope of the body she hoped to open up images of the mind. Thus, the movements in Greenfield’s films come from internal sources that are less deliberate than automatic; they are driven by the unconscious . . .”58 Antigone/Rites of Passion is thus an intertextual adaptation, incorporating Sophocles, autobiography, psychology, feminism, and the legacy of dance on film. A highly lyrical, expressionistic, and unconventional film, it is a good example of the resulting benefits and liberties that taking an avant-garde approach provides.

The 2000s The first decade of the twenty-first century has produced many adaptations, including a host of avant-garde ones. Still remaining outside the constrictions of finances and cultural merit, these films have become examples of how certain filmmakers may approach film from both a nostalgic and forward-thinking viewpoint. In other words, many of the avant-garde adaptations currently made are tied to other historical movements, while others are still pushing the boundaries of interpretation and creativity. There are many adaptations that proliferate in foreign cinemas. Indian cinema, for example, has adapted Shakespeare, including Maqbool (2004), a version of Macbeth, and Omkara (2006), a version of Othello. The interesting thing about these adaptations is that they would generally be considered typical Hindi films: They have song-and-dance numbers, intricate plots, romance, and rivalry. However, when viewed by a Western audience, one might note the generous liberties taken with Shakespeare’s text that provide an extreme example of adaptation wherein poetry is rendered through contemporary music. While not outright avant-garde, these two films nevertheless demonstrate how adaptation operates within certain national cinemas. Another example of how film adaptation may be culturally and nationally defined is the Hungarian film Taxidermia (2006), a wonderfully bizarre and surreal movie based on the stories of writer Lajos Parti Nagy. The film portrays three generations of men from a doomed family with unique talents: One shoots flames from his penis, another is an abnormally large speed eater, and the third one is an embalmer fascinated with his own self-preservation. The film is highly surrealistic in its imagery, and it does not resist putting the body on display, a fundamental avant-garde performative act. The film combines dark humor with intense dramatic sequences that stem from the short stories, which ultimately demonstrate

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how an audiovisual medium can turn a seemingly unfilmable text into something stunningly strange. Much has been written about the maniacal (yet manically talented) Danish director Lars von Trier, so I will briefly address his exercise in metacinema, The Five Obstructions (2003), as an adaptation that appropriates film, memory, autobiography, and the tropes of documentary filmmaking to create both an homage to and parody of the genre by having filmmaker Jorgen Leth insert experimental films into von Trier’s docudrama narrative. The premise of The Five Obstructions is fun and provocative: von Trier challenges Leth to remake his 1967 film, The Perfect Human, five different times with five separate limitations or obstructions that force Leth to rework the original film, itself rather experimental. Von Trier’s goal is to open up the possibilities of cinema, to seek truth and authenticity where it has seemingly vanished. Like Godard’s Contempt (1963), The Five Obstructions is an exercise in intertextuality; it is “a ‘meta-text,’ one that deals with the process of filmmaking and exposes this process through its own rendering.”59 However, von Trier’s film is about the dialectical nature of power and control, as the two filmmakers are seen in conversation jousting about the goals and obstructions von Trier has placed on Leth. Leth adapts his own film into five versions, all while von Trier smiles feverishly on, which makes The Five Obstructions an interesting case study in originality, art, humanity, collaborative rivalry, and the mysterious idea of perfection, the theme of Leth’s original film. While there are many adaptations produced around the globe, most aim for a faithful transposition and rendering of the source text. Highly inventive adaptations that can be considered avant-garde are often forgotten quickly because they are either never seen or have such a limited release and run that they never penetrate the bubble surrounding film production in the United States. I will mention two experimental adaptations below that had very limited release but somehow managed to find specific audiences for their radically different interpretations of the sources.

Andrew Repasky McElhinney’s Georges Bataille’s The Story of an Eye Georges Bataille’s The Story of an Eye (2004) might be called a bold experiment in avant-garde style and pornographic fetishism, a transgressive film adaptation of Georges Bataille’s Story of an Eye (1928), a book about transgression, which makes an unorthodox and controversial approach almost necessary. McElhinney’s film is dazzling in its conception, even if

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its taste leans toward the hyperbolic (un)eroticism found in high-minded pornography. Yet the film is not about pornography (even though there are graphic sex scenes); rather, it is more about the randomness of chance and physical and emotional collision. The plot, if there is one, revolves around several couples who wander through what appears to be an abandoned old mansion, where they drift somnambulistically into one another and engage in sexual interludes. There is no communication exchanged among them, and they perform their couplings in a dreamlike daze, as if hypnotized or at least seriously disengaged from one another and from life. The lack of a complete narrative coupled with very little dialogue—there is a brief voice-over at the beginning— makes the film avant-garde. McElhinney films in highly saturated colors and uses extremely bright lights. This technique is unorthodox, for its gives the film a detached feel, like the film itself is floating in space. The closest resemblance to Bataille’s philosophical novel comes in a brief narration that uses a few sentences from Bataille, but the narration ends abruptly after telling us a little about Bataille. The performers all connect without speaking, and it is possible McElhinney is commenting on the impossibility of transgressive transcendence through this rhetorical device. Like Bataille’s novel, we are forced to gaze on the principal players in the film; the camera guides us, much like a “story of an eye.” Additionally, McElhinney uses ambient noise, sound effects such as a clock ticking and seagulls crying, and some music to establish a semblance of tone. The graphic sexual nature of the film, however, will certainly be offputting to anyone. It does make one wince; but, keeping in mind this is an adaptation of an erotically charged semipornographic novel, perhaps McElhinney has done it justice. Or perhaps it is overblown self-indulgence. But there are moments of avant-garde adventure; in one sequence, a pallid woman wearing a negligee rises from a bed, smokes a cigarette, leaves the cluttered floor of her room and wanders down a staircase and then a long dark hallway. The same sequence is then shown six times from six different angles, each adding a new perspective, informed by lighting, camera placement, and editing. It is ingratiating, but it is a tactic meant to provoke. Bataille’s novel is a provocation itself, and McElhinney deliberately wants to provoke his audience as well. Again, could this mean he has adapted the source text rather faithfully? Perhaps, since he has maintained the dark tone of the original and has made the audience uncomfortable in the face of transgressive acts and transgressive filmmaking. The setting is baroque, highlighting its themes of philosophical and emotional confrontation of societal norms. I am

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guessing that McElhinney wants to symbolically represent the themes of power, seduction, control, sexuality, and convention through his characters and their wordless rabble-rousing. Georges Bataille’s The Story of an Eye opens with clinical footage of the birth of a baby, an appropriation of educational film footage that perhaps signifies that what we are about to see is not the kind of film about procreative love. There is a curious intertitle that also speaks to McElhinney’s preferred method of adaptation; it reads, “arranging narrative is a bourgeois mania,” taken from Bataille’s text. The film is a series of vignettes. Its characters engage in various carnal desires: straight sex, gay sex, sadomasochism. There is also an intertextual reference to Fred Astaire (two women, heads and arms hidden under oversize top hats, torsos painted to resemble faces, perform a tap routine to Irving Berlin’s “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails” on a private stage for a man who is masturbating). What follows is a series of encounters that end when the screen goes gray and then finally black. There is an increasingly loud ambient-industrial sound that, aside from the graphic imagery, also causes one to wince. The buzzing persists long enough to induce aggravation, until finally it stops and color bars appear onscreen. Surely McElhinney means something by this, but just what is somewhat ambiguous. As an avant-garde adaptation, however, the film succeeds at thwarting any expectations, unless one is familiar with the Bataille text. Then the film might seem quite appropriate. Interestingly enough, McElhinney first exhibited the film in art galleries as a video installation. More contemporary avant-garde films often are shown in museums or art galleries as experiments in video production. The film is shot on digital video, and the format is well suited to a series of video screens dotting the walls of a gallery—an uncomfortable proposition, but one that ultimately suits the film because it is essentially a work of art demanding the gaze, like a stroll through a museum directs one’s eyes to certain exhibits. Despite the pretentiousness of the spectacle, it is disturbing and, for open-minded spectators, thought provoking. Bataille was a philosopher, poet, and provocateur, and McElhinney, with Georges Bataille’s The Story of an Eye, does his best to render the tone of the original. With good reason, for most viewers, the film will be unerotic, unliterary, and uniformly offensive. John La Bouchardière’s The Full Monteverdi The British film The Full Monteverdi (2007) is an adaptation of an adaptation: La Bouchardière produced a live production of the same

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name, which was based on Claudio Monteverdi’s fourth book of madrigals (1603) which, in turn, is a collection of poems by such Italian Renaissance poets as Giovanni Battista Guarini, Ottavio Rinuccini and Torquato Tasso. What makes the film unique (and avant-garde) is the fact that it not only appropriates a variety of sources but presents them all as madrigals, songs that are sung by the cast of the live production and by the British vocal ensemble I Fagiolini. Films that are entirely sung are rare; The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), itself an experiment in narrative, is perhaps the best-known example. The Full Monteverdi is both visually and narratively dazzling. Most of the film is set in a restaurant where six couples sing their thoughts while the camera moves gracefully among them. Claudio Monteverdi was a revolutionary composer who wrote a collection of songs for six voices in six parts in his 1603 book of madrigals, but the film makes them seem contemporary. The madrigals explore the differing emotional states that abandoned lovers must work through. La Bouchardière shows how Monteverdi’s texts (transcribed or adapted by poets such as Guarini, Rinuccini, Arlotti, Gatti, Moro, and Tasso), visualized through contemporary, everyday twenty-first-century environments and the latest film techniques but without any computergenerated imagery (CGI) intervention, can spell out every emotional conflict lovers still feel today. The film has a recognizable narrative since we see in brief flashbacks of the couples when they are more in love and what has led them to this point in the restaurant. But the thrust of the film comes from the restaurant setting, where the free-floating cinematography feels both nuanced and like cinéma vérité—an odd mix but one that evokes other avant-garde films, from Godard to Mekas. It is brave enough to put opera onscreen—it is a medium perhaps best suited for the theatrical stage, but here, La Bouchardière makes the songs both poignant and unobtrusive: it is us, as spectators, who intrude on the intimacy of the couples as their relationships disintegrate. It is peculiar to watch close to 20 songs of sensitive and severe despair tumble from the mouths of six seemingly ordinary, modern, and relatable individuals as their backstories silently unfold. We even have to watch the others react to these songs, a marvel of acting (or reacting): the bullied wife, the fiancée who has found out about the affair, the lover who has promised to leave his family but does not, the husband who cheats on a pregnant wife, the boyfriend who does not want children—typical stories of hopelessness that are rendered truthfully and accurately to the source material. The camera focuses on the faces of these characters, seen in multiple close-ups. It

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is this extreme use of close-ups that renders the emotion palpable; to continuously frame faces in close-up is an avant-garde trait that recalls Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc or the experiments of seminal directors such as Deren or Anger. For a film that does not have spoken dialogue and offers perspectives from six different couples who are breaking up simultaneously, the film foregrounds its form by taking the unusual approach of using song to convey meaning. Diegetic or nondiegetic music is always crucial to films, but here La Bouchardière takes the idea to a new level: Every emotion and thought is conveyed through a 400 year-old book of songs that are sung contemporaneously. While the results could be overly sentimental or melodramatic, here, the songs take on new meanings based on the context. The avant-garde arrangement of the film is based in the musical material, which is of highly contrasting and interrelated polyphonic voices. Madrigals are based on the interplay of voices, and the overlaying of them in the film works to great effect. An innovative and experimental film, The Full Monteverdi is precisely the kind of adaptation that rarely is attempted or gets made: one that flies in the face of convention, daring to be different.

Conclusion Avant-garde adaptation is not the norm. When large studios seek books to adapt, they do so primarily with the sole goal of making money and pleasing the readership, the built-in audience that wants fidelity. There is little to no risk involved. Ironically, the mainstream cinema of Hollywood took what was happening in the alternative, underground, and experimental cinema of the 1940s through the 1960s (such as handheld cameras, distortions, decentered frames, to name but a few characteristics), and adapted or co-opted them as their own. The appropriation of techniques by Hollywood, and especially the filmmakers at the vanguard of the 1970s New American Cinema (Scorsese, Coppola, De Palma, for example), made their films invigorating and exciting. They were not really interested in producing avant-garde adaptations, however. Kubrick made some visually daring adaptations with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971), but both are not necessarily avant-garde in their approach to their corresponding source texts. Sometimes we see these avant-garde techniques in mainstream film adaptations, but Hollywood and studios around the world consistently aim for fidelity.

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Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002) plays with the idea of adaptation as an intertextual nightmare. It is a mainstream production that has elements of experiment in it, but it is a rare case. With the advent of the internet, from the mid-1990s until the present, almost anyone with a sense of technology can produce a film. As a result, there are many new kinds of avant-garde films being produced via the internet, the majority of them too bland, derivative, or bad because they lack a specific vision or are inadvertently pretentious or amateurish; only sporadically are there ones that generate excitement, and even fewer that are adaptations. Still, there are many filmmakers working outside the realm of the internet and its inherent amateurism (in the negative sense of the word), and some of them I will outline in Part III. But the avant-garde has always remained alive, even when pushed to the side, both in the United States and in many countries around the world. Searching out an avant-garde adaptation becomes harder though, because most avant-garde and experimental filmmakers produce original works, though when asked, many would admit to being inspired by particular texts that on some (unconscious) level may have been appropriated into their films. We can only hope that those filmmakers interested in adapting a novel, play, story, or poem to the screen, or those who wish to appropriate images, cultural artifacts, ideas, or other ephemera will seek alternative or exploitative means by which to bring life to these assorted texts. Such an approach does exactly that, bring life to the texts and to the screen.

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Chapter 7

The Fall of the House of Usher

Edgar Allan Poe’s stories have provided endless inspiration for film adaptations and rightfully so: the cleverness of Poe’s writing offers many interesting ways to depict the fantastic, terrifying, and shocking elements that fill his work. Many adaptations of his work are made solely as horror vehicles. I want to examine two versions of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (first published in 1839) that are avant-garde adaptations. The first, directed by James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber, is a wellknown example of American expressionist cinema. It was made in 1928, a time when both expressionism and surrealism were influencing the cinema. It is one of the most celebrated adaptations of Poe ever committed to the screen. The second, from 1980, is a version of the Poe tale by Jan Švankmajer, the great Czechoslovakian director who I will discuss further in Part III. Both films take liberties with the text, because both films interpret the material in ways that highlight the filmmakers’ specific interests in presenting the original text in suggestive, figurative ways instead of a literal transcription. The style that each director uses makes the films good case studies of avant-garde adaptations. The Fall of the House of Usher recounts the story of a man, Roderick Usher, and his sister, Madeline, who live in a dark and decrepit house, as told by the narrator who has paid his old friend Roderick a visit. The story is about the increasing derangement and fragmentation of Roderick, symbolized by the complete collapse of the house at the end of the story. Roderick and his sister each have an “illness,” and it is clear they feel entrapped by the very house in which they live, a constraint that is reiterated in the course of the story by the premature burial of Madeline, who Roderick believes is dead, into a vault in the lower portions of the house. She awakens one night, a great storm raging outside, and the narrator flees the house just as it collapses on Roderick and his newly resurrected sister. It turns out Madeline was not dead, just in a cataleptic state.

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Like so many of Poe’s stories, the effective use of language sets the tone of the story. For example, Roderick suffers from “a morbid acuteness of the senses”; Madeline’s illness is characterized by “a settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person and frequent although transient affections of a partly cataleptical character,” which caused her to lose consciousness and feeling. There is a sense of death and decay surrounding the Usher mansion. Although “[n]o portion of the masonry had fallen . . . there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones . . . . [T]he eye of a scrutinizing observer might have [noticed] a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.” The description of the house mirrors Roderick’s unhealthy state of mind, an ingenious stroke of parallelism and metaphor from Poe, which Švankmajer, in particular, visualizes to great effect in his film adaptation. After Madeline is entombed, “[a]n observable change came over the mental disorder of [Roderick] . . . . He roamed from chamber to chamber . . . . The pallor of his countenance had assumed . . . a more ghastly hue [and] the luminousness of his eye had utterly gone out . . . . [He gazed] upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude of the profoundest attention, as if listening to some imaginary sound.” Roderick then imagines the final horrific scenario: “Not hear it?—yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long—long—Long—many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it—yet I dared not—oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am!—I dared not—I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them—many, many days ago—yet I dared not—I dared not speak!” He tells the narrator they have buried Madeline alive in the tomb and therefore insists on retrieving her. Before they can leave the room, a gust of wind blows open the doors to the reading room where they have been, making Roderick exclaim: “Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!” The narrator says, “there did stand the enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline . . . . There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold, then with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon . . . her brother, and in her violent and now final death agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse . . . .”1 Poe has been criticized for his exuberant prose, but it registers effectively as more a psychological case

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study of the onsetting lunacy of an individual inasmuch as it depicts a horror scene. Poe was writing about the fragmentation of the mind, a psychological state exacerbated by hallucination, fear, and paranoia, as well as a fear of the unknown. For articulating these themes as evocatively as he did, Poe was a master craftsman. Jan-Christopher Horak notes that Watson and Webber’s film is “possibly one of the most highly regarded amateur film productions of its day.”2 It is amateur only because the filmmakers are nonprofessionals and not because the film appears amateurish. When dealing with Poe, the question for the adapter becomes, How can I translate the language of Poe to the screen? Poe’s works are highly verbal, marked by their many descriptive passages that can inform the images onscreen. Watson and Webber’s film is just less than 15 minutes, uses no intertitles, relying instead on the visuals to tell the story. It is all mood. The stark black-and-white cinematography, the heavy makeup of the actors, and the dark geometric lines that compose and frame characters in the mise-en-scène, all generate a peculiar feel to the film. There are superimpositions, canted angles, optical distortions, enigmatic montages, exaggerated sets and props, character doubling, and expressionistic accompanying music. The film uses an entire arsenal of avant-garde tropes to adapt Poe’s story to the screen. The effective thing about the film, and why it is a good example of an exploitative avant-garde adaptation, is the fact that it mostly eschews the narrative of Poe’s story, instead condensing several actions into a series of expressionistic shots or scenes. Watson and Webber are not tempted to follow a linear story or plot; everything is suggestive and evokes an eerie, unsettling visual account of the straightforward narration in the original text. The basic plot of Poe’s tale is abstracted, creating a film based entirely on imagistic, perceptual phenomena. The focus on percepts, as opposed to concepts, signifies a type of avant-garde film that encourages spectators to use the imagination, to participate in the interpretive act of story construction. According to Lisa Cartwright, “Watson claims that he and Webber selected the Poe story as the basis for their first film collaboration precisely because they had not read it in ten or fifteen years, and therefore would be free of its influence. This claim is supported by the film’s scant reference to the story’s narrative.”3 By not making the narrative explicit, one sees the film as a meditation on the original, a complete rewriting of the text in images that (sometimes) correspond to Poe’s words but more often than not are formed entirely by Watson and Webber as their own perspective of the source material. A few of the striking images that occur in the film are also surreal, especially the arresting

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images of Madeline’s blank face refracted in several shards of glass in kaleidoscopic fashion. There is also a scene where a top hat appears to float in space atop the character’s absent head (and body). The images are not horrific, as one might associate with Poe. Rather, they allow us to see how a visualization of a handful of Poe’s verbal codes can inform their translation into visual codes. The lack of intertitles provides an alternative aesthetic that is antithetical to many silent films, which in turn makes the film dependent on atmospherics to create the mood and (individualized) story. One expressionistic shot occurs when there is a superimposition of two images of a wiry spiral staircase that is separated from a particular part of the house. The shots are blended so they appear as a twisted, jagged, symbol; they seem to be stairs leading nowhere. The stairs move upward for a long period of time, adding to the characters’ (and our) discontent and bewilderment. Another example of the film’s expressionistic qualities is the repeated shot of a sledgehammer, shown in close-up, that falls downward at various speeds. It increases in speed as it crashes into Madeline’s tomb, and the accelerating music crescendos with it. The outright rejection of Poe’s narrative in favor of images is a good example of how a filmmaker can choose and select the material that best suits his vision of the adapted text. The multiple shots of the interior of the house lay bare the core of Poe’s story, that the house itself is somehow infecting Roderick, which is one of the main themes found in the original. The movement of the camera, coupled with the shots of cloistered interiors and exaggerated lines, makes for an unsettling experience, as if we, too, are trapped inside the house, just as Roderick feels trapped. It is a dreamlike mood, surely a nod to expressionism and surrealism. The play of light and shadow, the angular set design, and the depiction of the interior life through imagery are all similar to expressionistic art. According to Lucy Fischer, the filmmakers “use of a combination of techniques including disjunctive narrative, psychological complexity and ambiguity graphically expressed, unusual architectural angles, dramatic lighting, anamorphic lens shots, and multiple exposure suggests that they were informed by a wide range of European and Soviet modernist conventions,” making their film not just avant-garde but modernist as well.4 An interesting footnote to the film is the fact that e. e. cummings worked on the script with Watson and Webber. cummings is known for his verbal experimentation as a modernist poet. Whatever exact contributions he made to the film are unknown, but the way the film is constructed, with props that highlight their discrepancies in size and the claustrophobic interiors with their bizarre decorations and outlines,

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destabilize conventional form and perspective, a trait perhaps similar to some of cummings’s writings. The house itself is the main character in Poe’s story, and Watson and Webber make great efforts to convey the sense that the house overwhelms Roderick and Madeline. (Švankmajer’s film version of the Poe story capitalizes on the house as a living force, as I will describe.) For instance, the house is shown from several angles, often showing long rectangular halls or rooms. According to Cartwright, Optically fragmented and reduplicated, the house interior is a specular cave. . . . It is not surprising that the space of the home around which the film is organized is Madeline’s ‘region of horror’—the subterranean tomb to which Roderick relegates her body, a space rendered unrepresentable insofar as it is optically fractured, duplicated, and destabilized. It is to this region that Roderick descends in a montage of unstable and shifting stairs to beat upon his sister’s coffin with a superimposed hammer, and it is here that a gloved, disembodied hand intrusively palpates Madeline’s catatonic body.5 Cartwright explicitly wants to analyze the film in psychoanalytic ways, like so many critics have done with Poe, but rather than focus on the hypothetical, it is perhaps better to recognize that Watson and Webber simply portray the disintegration of a man and a house in strikingly unusual visual ways, which make the film avant-garde. The journey to the nether region of the house (the “region of horror,” as Poe wrote), is shown in such a fantastic and fast-paced way, with superimpositions of letters circling the air (spelling out words or perhaps a word, scream), the fall of the hammer, and the quick montage of close-ups, medium shots, and medium close-ups render the ending scenes shocking. The fractured construction of the final scene, and almost all the scenes in the film, effectively translates Poe’s story of the fracturing mind of Roderick. Jan Švankmajer’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1980) is a remarkable avantgarde film that interprets the Poe tale in an entirely different way from Watson and Webber. In almost all of his films, Švankmajer presents the inanimate world fully come to life: Objects force themselves into the lives of people, and they often intrude to a level of discomfort, dismay, or deliciously dark humor. The influence of surrealism is important to his films, and certain images lend themselves to surreal motifs, understandings, and tactics. Even though Švankmajer sometimes focuses on life’s absurdities, it is these moments that help shape character, define personality, and open doors to entirely new worlds of imagination. He seems to have grasped

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the fact that Poe was not so much a “strange” individual writing “weird” stories but rather someone who had the uncanny ability to portray broken psyches through an array of sensory description. Švankmajer’s film version of Poe’s story touches on the realm of the sensorial, the fact that objects have lives of their own and therefore take precedence over human life, at least to a certain extent. His Usher contains no human figures and no representations of ones through effigy or shadow. Instead, actions are performed by objects of all sort: A coffin moves by itself throughout the house and the yard; tree roots entangle one another; furniture shuffles around looking for space to go; and viscous mud writhes on the ground trying to form a shape. Because of this, the film is unsettling, uncanny, and brilliantly conceived. Švankmajer described the film as being about “a swamp in motion and the life of stones. And of course horror, unmotivated horror.”6 It is horrific, mainly because we see the house and the objects come alive. The soundtrack is full of creaking, moaning, shuffling, and squeaking, all of which emanate from the objects as they move in and around the house of Usher. The house itself is old, made of stone, drab and dreary; the feeling of decay is evident, adding to the horror, an atmospheric element present throughout Poe’s original. Švankmajer’s highly personal interpretation of Poe’s story is far more exploitative than a straightforward adaptation. Švankmajer’s dedication to surrealism and the desire to depict a surrealistic state onscreen informs his adaptation to a high degree. Surrealism aims to change the way people perceive their surroundings. Surreal and hallucinatory images proliferate in The Fall of the House of Usher. As Švankmajer attests, citing surrealist leader André Breton, “The dream has always created one of the constants of Surrealism. Dream and reality were ‘communicating vessels.’ I believe that the character of my films documents this fully.”7 In essence, then, what Švankmajer accomplishes is the uncanny ability to make films that are reflective of surrealistic states. This allows him complete freedom from generic or stylistic restrictions, ideological extremes, the rational thought process, and stasis. He freely explores the world of the imagination and to the free life of objects, so his version of Poe becomes an investigation into bizarre, distressing, surreal, absurd, disconcerting, and illogical situations. Švankmajer feels no real compulsion to adapt Poe’s story in a manner that suggests fidelity, relying instead on the inner states of consciousness articulated in surrealism that allow him to exploit the source material. Švankmajer’s The Fall of the House of Usher displays the uncanny—an anxious, psychological place and space prone to unusual or eerie

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situations and circumstances, which are, ultimately, couched in the reality of everyday life. Objects move and interact with one another—and suggest they do so when no one is around. Surrealism is a catalyst for exploration and for uncovering meanings in the nuances of everyday activities. More specifically, “[Švankmajer’s] habits of flexible recycling, of repetition-with-variation, together with his wry asymmetrical and panicky transitions, [offers] a perfect model of poetic thought as understood by Surrealism.”8 His working process, as influenced by surrealism, then, evinces itself as a constant passion for discovering the unconventional, paradoxical, and spontaneous association among things in reality, which he visual demonstrates in The Fall of the House of Usher by having objects freely roam around or by having tree limbs writhe or mud form shapes. Švankmajer’s films make the unconscious seem palpable. A surrealistic style uses predominately visual imagery from the hidden recesses of the mind to create art that does not confine itself to categorical explanation or interpretation, instead inviting creativity of spirit. Švankmajer has referred to his films as “tactile experiments,” a good way of understanding his method and especially the kinship he discovers in Poe’s tales. The physicality of the tangible world becomes for Švankmajer the material for his films. Inasmuch as he is inspired by Poe, Švankmajer is also determined to incorporate his own understanding of the best way to render onscreen the content he has discovered in the text. Dryje points out, “Švankmajer’s tactile experimentation is, as in The Fall of the House of Usher, resurrected as a function of film communication.”9 In interview, Švankmajer delineates this relationship between the tactile and Poe: When I subsequently began to work on Poe’s story ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ and I began to probe the complex world of Poe’s imagination, I discovered that touch played a vital role in his psychological studies. The sense of touch, of which we are hardly aware in real life, becomes highly sensitive in moments of psychic tension. . . . Poe was aware of this and thus his stories are crammed with descriptions of the tactile. For the reader, of course, these are feelings which have been conveyed to him, he has not experienced them for himself, but tactile imagination is capable of transforming these feelings and making them considerably intensive.10 This insight provides a great way of understanding Švankmajer’s adaptation process. He finds in Poe a high degree of tactile moments and descriptions. Instead of focusing on a literal transposition of the text,

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Švankmajer translates the feelings conveyed through “tactile imagination,” a way of rendering the inanimate animate. Švankmajer’s method of exploitative adaptation should be admired: He finds a way of interpreting the original text in a way that shuns fidelity, sidesteps literalness, and instead focuses on how to translate descriptive passages into audiovisual ones. The tactile experimentation uses matter as expressive subjects or elements. Another example of the direct expressivity of his tactile experimentation occurs in the film when the poem (a central motif of the story) is read. The poem is significant to the plot and symbolism of the Poe story; in the film, it is read aloud by the narrator, “and illustrated by means of an analogy, the ‘gestural’ animation of clay and sometimes mud.”11 The “gestural animation” describes the tactile forms of objects, and the way Švankmajer manipulates them into expressive images or even expressive characters in the film: “The forms of the material change before our eyes, spill over, appear and disappear, and create, both rhythmically and arhythmically, figures which are both symmetric and asymmetric.”12 Another way Švankmajer visualizes language is through the description of the house itself, provided in Poe’s original. Poe writes about Roderick’s growing malady by describing the house: This opinion, in its general form, was that of the sentience of all vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy, the idea had assumed a more daring character, and trespassed under certain conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganisation . . . The belief, however, was connected . . . with the gray stones of the home of his forefathers. The conditions of the sentence had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones—in order of their arrangement, as well as that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around—above all, in a long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn. Its evidence—the evidence of the sentience—was to be seen, he said (and I here started as he spoke), in the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls. Švankmajer makes great use of Poe’s words by showing how the environment itself is alive. Poe makes clear Roderick’s fear of his own house, the “sentience of all vegetable things,” and Švankmajer demonstrates this well by bringing the inanimate objects—and the house itself—to life. Perhaps the most significant departure Švankmajer makes from Poe’s story is the absence of human characters, something that makes Watson

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and Webber’s film different in terms of how they chose to adapt the material. In a world devoid of people, the natural objects perform instead. The only interference of acting comes from a voiceover, a narrator who reads the Poe story as the inanimate objects move about as complements to the language we hear. The house is the most prominent character in Poe’s story and so becomes central to Švankmajer’s vision. The stones in the walls appear broken, chiseled, hollowed out, and they constantly undulate. The fissures seem to ooze as they move; there are cracks that form and zigzag. Accordingly, In Švankmajer’s hands, stones turn out to be as fluid as water, and as volatile as fantasy; in The Fall of the House of Usher, the cracks in dry earth, the root formation of a tree and the pattern of lightning in the sky can celebrate a momentous coincidence of forms, a synthesis rather less compelling as a moment in the film’s Gothic narrative than it is as a free-standing proposition in its own right.13 The casket that slides through the house burrows through and into gaps in the walls, irrupting into the growing crevices that become fluid with motion themselves. Švankmajer cuts between the activities of the objects in the house and the natural world outside it: Tree roots twist and appear to reach for things, digging into the ground then reappearing before becoming mixed with other limbs or roots. At the end of the film, the house rejects all of the moving objects, spewing them forth from its windows and doorways, out into the musty, putrid tarn. Many of Švankmajer’s films focus on destruction—ruin, disintegration, and decay—which becomes a central motif in The Fall of the House of Usher: Nothing remains stable, fixed, or permanent. Objects become characters, living things brought to life through Švankmajer’s painstaking animation process. His adaptation is one that completely ignores much of the text to devote attention to the subtext; instead of visualizing a narrative, he visualizes words through object movement, very much an avant-garde technique and attitude. Again, the emphasis on the tactile, the physical and concrete essence of things, makes his film strange and mysterious, much like the effect Poe achieved in the original story. Švankmajer’s goal of reproducing the horror of Poe’s tale lies in his extraordinary use of animation. Švankmajer has always maintained that the objects that surround us have lives of their own, and it is through the process of animation that we begin to recognize them as things with their own stories to tell. Švankmajer’s allegiance to surrealism enables him

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to focus on the surrealistic descriptions of objects in Poe’s story (not that Poe was striving for surrealism himself). According to Michael O’Pray, Švankmajer has remarked on the way in which objects imbibe the emotions and moods of those with whom they are in contact. His art is a means of releasing those emotions and moods. This idea informs much of his work, but particularly a film such as The Fall of the House of Usher, where he has stripped the original story of any characters and instead, taking Poe’s lead, allowed the very materiality of objects and natural matter to express the torment and horror of Roderick Usher.14 By stripping the original text of a great deal of what constitutes its essence, Švankmajer has created an avant-garde film that eschews any formulaic adaptation. He is far more interested in the ways in which a text can speak to you individually, interested in translating to the screen his own visions, nightmares, interactions, and exchanges with Poe’s original story. He deliberately destabilizes form by refuting rule-driven cinematic discourses that favor plot, linearity, and a stable referential structure. He also, much like Poe, implicates the spectator in the narrative, producing a similar effect that Poe does. Poe uses intense first-person narration in an effort to simultaneously fetter and liberate the reader. Švankmajer uses a similar technique in his film. Translating verbal codes to filmic visual codes requires a certain amount of creative exploration—an exploitation—and, to this end, Švankmajer uses a subjective handheld camera for much of the film. Like Poe’s words, this device places the spectators in the position of the narrator and allows them to witness the decay, shifting walls, and moving objects from an unsettling perspective. Whereas Watson and Webber focus on characterization to bring their version of the Poe text to the screen, Švankmajer relies on the associative meanings of words. Both devote attention to the mood of the original, but they approach this in separate ways. Watson and Webber create a nightmarish expressionistic milieu, and Švankmajer uses surrealism to portray the same (or similar) thing. Since both films avoid direct linear causal narrative, they are avant-garde and excellent examples of exploitative adaptations. Instead of attempting to translate the material literally, each rewrites Poe, using intertextual moments (expressionism, surrealism) to render effectively an entirely new text that intersects with the adapted text. The films do not necessarily represent the Poe story; instead, they reflect and refract it. As exploitative adaptations, they use, abuse, and misuse elements of the original in order to translate particular visions to the screen.

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Chapter 8

Scorpio Rising

Kenneth Anger’s seminal underground film Scorpio Rising (1963) presents a unique case of adaptation, in that he specifically uses appropriation to piece together a powerful film rife with images and music taken from popular culture, reconfigured, and adapted to the screen anew. The film uses several avant-garde techniques, including pop songs, to convey narrative instead of traditional dialogue. It also employs montage editing alongside pans and occasional seamless editing, low-key lighting that diffuses colors, and the overriding strategy of collage. The various elements of collage work together and simultaneously to comment on the specific episodes—the sequences set to a different song—in the film, which are edited to imply spatial and temporal continuity. The film is a depiction of a motorcycle gang and the myth and/or cult that surrounds it, and it foregrounds the spiritual dimensions of the leader’s (Scorpio) Christlike spell or guidance over his followers/disciples. Anger cleverly cuts found footage of a cheap film of the life of Jesus into the narrative of the bikers, so that when we see the bikers rally around their leader, it appears he is equated with Christ and his disciples. There is a fetishization of the bikers, their motorcycles, and icons such as James Dean and Marlon Brando and an ironic juxtaposition between music and image. The film culminates in a raucous Halloween party/initiation rite and then a race where one of the bikers dies. Scorpio Rising has rightfully been called one of the most important avant-garde films ever produced. My intention here is to discuss the use of appropriation as a form of adaptation practice that punctuates the structure and themes of the film. The appropriation of artistic content by filmmakers has a long tradition in film, as evidenced by Joseph Cornell, but its use in avant-garde adaptations is resoundingly more engaging, in the sense that the objects or contents of other sources serve to unify the film’s structure and theme. This is certainly the case with Scorpio Rising. Elements from various sources can provide inspiration and, more specifically to Scorpio, interrogation of

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meanings in artistic or popular circles. Using appropriation often means partaking in a critique of society, culture, or ideology, and, in terms of aesthetics, art or the reproduction of art. The imagery of Scorpio Rising participates in an intertextual discourse. “Intertextuality,” as Julie Sanders suggests, “has come to refer to a far more textual as opposed to utterancedriven notion of how texts encompass and respond to other texts both during the process of their creation and composition and in terms of the individual reader’s or spectator’s response” to them.1 Anger’s film presents us with several textual discourses existent in popular culture: biker gangs, pop songs, iconicity, fetish, religion, and myth. While Anger has not deliberately sought other texts to create an adaptation proper, what he has done is make a film that comments on the nature of intetexuality, a form of adaptation and appropriation, which suggests a tendency of movement toward an entirely new exchange of ideas. Appropriation often shapes a more significant shift away from the informing sources into a completely new cultural sphere or idiom. Scorpio Rising is ostensibly a film about a biker gang, its rituals, and its camaraderie, but it also is about the power of manipulation since Anger structures the film in a dialectical manner. Scorpio Rising is divided into sections, each comprising a series of song sequences that highlight both the themes and formal structure of the film. It is presented almost like a documentary of the bikers; we see them polish and assemble their bikes, lounge in their rooms, attend a party, and partake in a race. The bikers themselves seem overly joyous throughout, and one thing Anger does remarkably well is undermine their masculinity through the ironic use of songs, which ultimately portrays the group with homoerotic undertones. The movie’s 13 songs that accompany each scene provide commentary on the image. For instance, in one, we see a blond man get dressed up for the ensuing party and don his leather outfit with masculine reassurance. The accompanying song is “Blue Velvet.” Anger describes the use of the song in this scene as a narrative device. He says, In Scorpio Rising, the songs are an ironic commentary on what’s going on in the picture. They’re a kind of narration. When I have the fellow from the Athletic Model Guild put on his leather jacket, the music is ‘Blue Velvet,’ which specifically says, ‘She wore blue velvet.’ It’s a deliberate gender switch that suggests that he’s as vain as any girl would be.2 In another scene, Anger cuts between the leader of the biker gang and the footage from the Christ film, The Road to Jerusalem, using the song “He’s a Rebel” to indicate the way religion and popular culture intersect.

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The camera focuses on the image of the leader’s boots as he walks, then we see Christ also walking past his followers. Anger’s film is color, and the Christ film is black and white, juxtaposing a difference in contexts. Still the point is unmistakable: The biker gang leader is assuming the role of a Christ figure who blindly leads others to their demise (as we see at the end of the film). As P. Adams Sitney suggests, “The heroic Christ figure is wrenched from the traditional Christian interpretation.”3 The montage sequence of intercutting between the leader and Christ suggests a dialectical interplay of conflicting ideas and emotions. Like “Blue Velvet,” the song choice here offers a narrative thread to the imagery, specifically suggesting that just as the bike leader is a rebel, so was Christ. This commentary also implies the limpness of religion when confronted or juxtaposed with the strong virility of youth. The motorcycle subculture of American society is portrayed as both cultish and mythic. The incorporation of found footage, television images, pin-up idols, popular music, and cartoons demonstrates Anger’s avantgarde sensibilities toward the vagaries of contemporary popular culture through montage and the inclination for combining diverse elements. Appropriation means reusing artifacts in a different manner, recasting ideas first used in other mediums or in other ways in culture or society. Anger’s appropriation makes him an artist creating an aesthetic experience that allows new perspectives on culture to flourish. Because he mingles texts, Anger tries—and succeeds—in Scorpio Rising to establish a dense web of interrelated yet conflicting signifying fields, in the process creating a film that becomes a touchstone for avant-garde aesthetics and practice. According to Sanders, when using appropriation, “This may or may not involve a generic shift, and it may still require the intellectual juxtaposition of (at least) one text against another that . . . is central to the reading and spectating experience of adaptations.”4 Anger’s film is dazzling in its heady mix of poeticism and visual intensity. It employs a collage technique reminiscent of earlier stands of avant-garde filmmaking (like Joseph Cornell), but it also presents an innovative narrative structure that is uniquely his own. Like many of Anger’s films, from Fireworks (1947) to Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), Scorpio Rising’s narrative is presented as a ritual invoking spiritual forces (the many allusions to mythical figures and iconography, plus the direct presentation of Christ) that typically begins slowly then builds to a frenzied finale. Interestingly enough, the film also evokes several dialectical structures, including desire and death, the poetic and reality, gay and straight, fetishism and commoditization, and excessive/expressionistic mise-en-scène and documentary-like footage. Sitney says the film “represents Anger’s clearest

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and most intricate thought on the dialectics of reality and imagination,” particularly in the “He’s a Rebel” and “Heat Wave” sequences.5 Sitney also sees Anger’s entire oeuvre of having a dialectical intent: “Scandal, evil, violence, and Fascism, like Hollywood, are centers of fascination for Anger, and his films are fields in which the dialectic of that fascination is played and fought.”6 These ideas and issues clash in Scorpio Rising, and the film provides more ambiguity than resolution concerning them, another characteristic of avant-garde film. Avant-garde films, that is, provide intellectual stimulation and contemplation to a higher degree than mainstream films. Juan Suarez writes that “Scorpio Rising is deeply ambiguous, since it both glamorizes the marginal group’s rebelliousness and seemingly condemns its self-destructive behavior.”7 Anger’s technique, however, presents the biker gangs’ behavior straightforwardly. It is the intercutting of various images and songs that perhaps supplies the ambiguity of the figure of the rebel and his “self-destructive behavior.” Suarez also sees ambiguity in another facet of the film: “Ambiguity is also the result of confluence in the film of two contradictory paradigms of mass culture: modernist condemnation, and pop celebration of its expressive potentials.”8 Again, avant-garde films tend to evoke personal responses to its imagery, style, form, or thematic ambitions. In some regards, Scorpio Rising’s depiction of the fetishized bike subculture combines pop aesthetics, such as camp, and more nuanced ideas of youth culture. The idea of camp or campiness or even a camp sensibility was popularized by Susan Sontag’s well-known essay “Notes on Camp” (published in 1964—around the time of Scorpio Rising). In it, she suggests certain objects in culture reveal deeper implications about their nature as things, producing a camp feel to them. She writes, Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a “lamp,” not a woman, but a “woman.” To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of metaphor of life as theater. . . . The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious.9 Sontag makes clear that camp is an aesthetic. Anger may or may not have been deliberately making a camp film or statement, but to read Scorpio Rising as partially camp is not incorrect. Camp displays its outrageousness as a critical device, much like pastiche, parody, or collage, including critiques of everything from mass consumerism to stylized acting to gender roles. The lyrics to the songs Anger uses, for instance, provide ironic statements about the visual images. The songs are appropriated from popular

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culture and turned on their collective heads. No longer do they seem teenage romanticized notions of love or deceit (“Wind-up Doll,” “Heat Wave,” My Boyfriend’s Back”). Sontag also notes that camp emphasizes style over content, but in Scorpio Rising, it is clear that the way the film is stylistically put together, its very form, is intimately connected to its content. Scorpio Rising’s depiction of the homoerotic culture of the biker gang is a unique adaptation because it borrows materials from several cultural mediums, producing a montage of sound and image that was unprecedented at the time of its release. Just the subversion of gender specification and gender roles marks the film as avant-garde, especially in the manner in which Anger presents it, namely with the songs and other images appropriated from mass and popular culture. For example, the sequence that involves the song “(You’re the) Devil in Disguise” finds the biker leader in his small, cramped bedroom, lounging on the bed. He is reading several comics, including “Dondi,” “Li’l Abner,” and “Freckles and His Friends,” that are presented as containing homosexual undertones. Anger follows the strips in tight close-up, cutting rapidly between them, the biker’s face while reading them, and the images and objects found in the room. For instance, in the background a television displays the image of Marlon Brando in The Wild One; the walls are plastered with pinups, including multiple images of James Dean; and an ashtray, a club diploma, and a star are all shown in different cutaways. The biker dons his leather clothes while Elvis Presley croons about the deception of the girl in the title of his song. The biker’s appearance mirrors Brando’s and Dean’s—cool, seductive, dark clad, and sexy. All of the appropriated images, coupled with the ironic metacommentary of the music exemplifies the avant-garde aesthetic Anger achieves throughout the film of juxtaposing images appropriated from various texts into one. Suarez sees this scene (and others) as “extending the gay spectatorial gaze” found implicitly in the way Anger shoots the film. The purposeful nature of the camera’s perspective allows for the subversive reading of the film as a commentary on gender roles. Suarez continues, “The biker’s mimicry [of Brando and Dean] should not be read as a blind reflex conditioned by the media, but as a defamiliarizing reading that ‘outs’ the repressed homosocial and homoerotic significations of these specific popular texts,” while “the images appropriated and the process of appropriation itself contain a violence and negativity that recur throughout the film.”10 Whether or not the film is deliberately a statement about gay suppression is arguable, but the film consistently presents shots of male crotches, phallic imagery, and even what appears to be sodomy, all suggesting the homoeroticism prevalent in the film, or, rather, provides a way of reading the film as queer. On the subject, Anger

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himself has said, “In [Scorpio Rising] I’m viewing a certain phenomenon that was happening at that particular time. I don’t see the film as a homosexual statement. I see it as a human statement.”11 We should take his comment at face value. I would suggest this remark is exactly why the film is subversive: its content really is applicable to anyone, and the ambiguity of the song lyrics, as used in the film, highlights this. While the film does end in a violent death, Anger also has a mischievous sense of humor. The lyrics always have a new meaning when coupled with the imagery, so concluding that the film is inherently violent or negative adequately summarizes everything that is occurring within the narrative. Either way, the fact that the film challenges the status quo and subverts dominant ideology makes it avant-garde by continuing the legacy of such directors as Buñuel who forcefully confronted the mainstream or those such as Jonas Mekas who championed an independent spirit. Scorpio Rising is sometimes heralded as the definitive underground film, which implies that as an avant-garde film, it remains below the radar of mainstream film or popular culture and also that it contains specific aesthetic qualities associated with underground cinema in general. Underground filmmakers in American cinema who were working at the same time as Anger include Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Bruce Conner, and Ken Jacobs, all highly respected avant-garde practitioners. The underground film movement “was made up of loosely affiliated groups and individuals who mixed humor, iconoclasm, and intransigence” in their works.12 The underground was part of the overall counterculture of the 1960s, and people like Anger, or more appropriately, his film Scorpio Rising, were a huge influence not just on the movement but also on creating an identity for a particular kind of filmmaking practice. Because Scorpio Rising intercuts footage of motorcyclists with scenes from a lowbudget life of Christ, while pop music of the era blares over each scene, Anger, like other members of the underground, established a motif used in avant-garde film: subversion. Subversion implies an act of rebellion, of performing something transgressive, or partaking in an act of rabblerousing, but for these filmmakers, the idea also suggests an attempt to subvert meaning. According to A. L. Rees, “Among the tactics of ‘detournement’, or subversion, [are cutting] commercial found footage literally to pieces, scratching and painting the film surface and frame, adding texts and soundtracks to further dislocate its original meaning.”13 Anger’s film dislocates meaning by using images and songs from popular culture to suggest alternative interpretations of similar images based on how the appropriated images and songs are used in the adaptive process. Scorpio

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Rising was one of the first films to use a compilation score of rock-androll songs to provide ironic commentary to its visual imagery. Because Anger also combines a touch of surrealism (in framing, lighting, and imagery), camp, and a combination of documentary, found footage, and fictional re-creation, the film becomes a prime example of an avantgarde adaptation through appropriation. Anger also has abstract compositions, combines pans with montage, close-ups with broader shots, and the subverted male gaze that plays with notions of homoeroticism. Further, Scorpio Rising has an underlying mystical feel to it, as the bikers are glorified as being a mythical unit of mythical characters, which would make it not unlike some of Anger’s other films such as Invocation of My Demon Brother or Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954). According to Sitney, “Scorpio Rising is a mythopoetic film . . . [asserting] the primary of the imagination through ritual and myth.”14 Mythopoetic films used specific myths or mythological figures to convey a new cosmology or typography of universality among its contemporary characters and settings. Sitney continues, The triumph of the mythopoetic film in the early sixties sprang from the filmmakers’ liberation from the repetition of traditional mythology and the enthusiasm with which they forged a cinematic form for the creation or revelation of new myths. Scorpio Rising is an excellent example of this new vitality.15 The “new” mythology of Scorpio Rising rests on the fact that Scorpio, the biker leader, is presented as a Christlike figure, that he has a power influenced by popular cultural icons, and that he also (ironically) appropriates Nazi imagery into his commanding sway. The film’s climax begins with Scorpio at an abandoned church, where he waves around Nazi paraphernalia. Scorpio has just left the biker party and enters the church where he sees the altar draped with a Nazi flag. Anger cuts between the party and the church and finally to the bikers leaving and their eventual going to the final race. These montage sequences are rife with abstract images: pictures of Hitler, Nazi items, swastika checkers. Scorpio even appears with a submachine gun shouting out orders. During these images, we see the final race and the crash and the flashing red lights that end the film. All of the contrasting imagery—leather-clad bikers, pictures of Hitler and the Grim Reaper, shots of crotches and buttocks-slapping party-goers, and the lyrics playing over the music—suggests the film showcases the dialectical nature of maintaining individuality amid so much popular culture

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influences (which include Hitler and Christ). For Sitney, all of the imagery points toward the mythical status of Anger’s vision. He says, Scorpio Rising is a mythographic film. It self-consciously creates its own myth of the motorcyclists by comparison with other myths: the dead movie star, Dean; the live one, Brando; the savior of men, Christ; the villain if men, Hitler. Each of these myths is evoked in ambiguity, without moralizing. From the photos of Hitler and a Nazi soldier and from the use of swastikas and other Nazi impediments, Scorpio derives ecstasy of will and power.16 The evoking of myth through the appropriation and accumulation of images is what makes Anger’s film an avant-garde adaptation. The fact that Anger also uses montage to create a specific effect for the spectator highlights its resemblance to Eisenstein’s theories of montage. When the bikers are having their wild orgiastic party—their Walpurgis Night—Anger cuts the scene with glimpses of the Christ figure peering into an offscreen space. Anger cuts back to the revelers, indicating a type of moral judgment. When the bikers enter the final race, Anger returns to the Christ film, showing Christ hoisted onto a donkey. The accompanying song is “The Point of No Return.” To further show how montage creates effect, Anger also intercuts these images with crosses, skulls, and the Grim Reaper. We also see Scorpio becoming more and more frenzied, desecrating the altar in the church. All of the appropriated images create a frantic and harried ending to the film. Achieving a mythical status on its own through the appropriation of mythical images makes Scorpio Rising a remarkable example of how myths can be both manipulated and transposed to other contexts. The use of Nazi imagery, for example, shows how such representative evil iconography dictates and alters spectator knowledge. Anger himself said of the Nazi imagery, “I’m not trying to say, ‘Don’t do [what the bikers are doing] because you’ll end up a Nazi.’ [But] there often is a rebellious dimension in biker groups that makes some bikers defiantly enjoy doing things that might scare other people—like sporting swastikas.”17 The myths surrounding Nazi Germany are appropriated as images of defiance and rebelliousness, and Anger rightfully sees how this is ironic. Anger’s notes for the film use terms that are associated with myth and mythology, and, to some extent, the occult. He describes the film as “[a] conjuration of the Presiding Princes, Angels, and Spirits of the sphere of MARS, formed as a ‘high’ view of the Myth of the American Motorcyclist. The Power Machine seen as tribal totem, from toy to terror. Thanatos

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in chrome and black leather and bursting jeans.”18 Myths are narratives that stretch across temporal, geographic, and ethnic barriers. Julie Sanders sees the importance of using myth in appropriation. She says, “A culture’s mythology is its body of traditional narratives. Mythical literature depends upon, incites even, perpetual acts of reinterpretation in new contexts, a process that embodies the very idea of appropriation.”19 Scorpio Rising exploits American mythology of Hollywood image, style, and text and reinterprets them in new ways, signifying how appropriation enacts meaning determined by new contexts. Thanatos is the Greek god of death, or is often reconfigured as the death drive. Anger’s use of this myth in his description of the film implies a new way of interpreting it as a power-driven rebel named Scorpio (himself a reference to astrological/cosmological interpretative myth) whose imminent destruction and death is not just an individual act but one that leads others to their doomed fates as well, as seen in the final montage of images from the party, the church, and the race. Scorpio Rising’s reputation rests on its ability to capture a precise moment in American history, namely the biker subculture that was popular in the postwar United States before the transformative influences of the Hell’s Angels or the film Easy Rider (1969). Anger said in interview, “Scorpio Rising was me putting that experience on their society, seeing their society as an outsider, which can be a limitation but also an advantage.”20 The emphasis on his own subjective depiction of the bikers suggests that Anger’s motivation was to present the biker culture—“their society”—in a way that makes them recognizable but also immediately unfamiliar through his use of appropriation. This destabilizing effect is a tactic of the avant-garde. To this point, Anger also says, “[The actors] were showing off a bit, or maybe a lot, for the camera. This was a case where the camera changed things, but it changed them in a direction that I wanted. So Scorpio Rising is my take on their lifestyle, not their lifestyle untouched.”21 Anger suggests that he has deliberately altered the portrayal of the bikers to his own liking, implying that the way the film is constructed is done so to manipulate them through images and music, offering a brutal critique of the myths surrounding popular iconic images. To critic Ed Lowry, Anger’s manipulations of the culturally overloaded imagery of Nazism, sado-masochism, and the occult finally result in a film which refuses to conform to any dominant, edifying reading whatsoever—an almost unparalleled achievement which should earn Scorpio Rising an enduring place in the artistic annals of the 1960s, a decade remembered for the challenges it posed to ruling ideology.22

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Anger finds in popular culture certain icons that translate to archetypes and acquire mythic status through pure manipulation. His careful reimagining of the American ethos through the configuration of biker culture is exhilarating and subversive, a heady mix of avant-garde technique and Hollywood-style exploitation. Scorpio Rising provides a dialectical collision between Hollywood rebels such as Dean and Brando and the hit songs of artists such as Rick Nelson and Elvis Presley. The appropriation of such objects into the film also points to the practice of intertextuality as an adaptation design, essentially signaling how several texts influence or converge on others. Anger’s “rewriting” of the texts that he uses makes Scorpio Rising a good example of an avant-garde appropriation. The film openly encourages a comparison and contrast between what one perceives and what one believes. Youth culture presents a particular area for analysis and so, coupled with the subculture of biker gangs, Scorpio Rising becomes a larger manifestation of appropriation. According to Suarez, Scorpio Rising adopted, along with style bursting out of narrative bounds, the strategies of containment through which narratives set limits to such exuberant explosions of youth style. Anger’s film then reproduced the same mismatch between attempted ideological containment and rebellion that characterized many commercial depictions of youth culture.23 Typical portrayals of youth culture may have bounded narratives, where characters (like Dean or Brando) are used to highlight the discrepancy between “containment and rebellion.” Scorpio Rising not only extends this idea, it makes it metaphorical, allegorical, and allusive. Many adaptations openly declare themselves as interpretive acts. Anger’s film is indeed a rereading of popular cultural texts, specifically, images and songs and figures such as Christ and Hitler that encompass his particular vision of society at that moment. Sanders reminds us that “appropriations can represent or suggest a range of relations ranging from ‘direct contact to indirect absorption,’” which, when thought of in conjunction with Scorpio Rising, tells us that it does both: It “comes into contact” with the objects it wants to appropriate, and it also absorbs them into the unique perspective of the filmmaker, Kenneth Anger.24 The film becomes a complex representation of society through its use of appropriation. Its “singular acts of appropriation [in its narrative] point to the openness and political potential of popular texts.”25 Scorpio Rising ultimately illustrates the kind of exploitative adaptation that uses appropriation to structure its narrative.

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Chapter 9

Fruit of Paradise

How does one make a film adaptation of Genesis, more particularly, the story of Adam and Eve? Is it possible to make a literal translation of the Bible to the screen? And not just the Gospels, which have long served as impetus for inspirational adaptations throughout cinema history, but something that is purported to be Scripture, the “Word of God”? Is it impossible? Hardly. Věra Chytilová’s fantastically bizarre and experimental film Fruit of Paradise (1970) is a testament to solitary imagination, vision, interpretation, and temerity. It is a radical avant-garde adaptation of the story of Adam and Eve, rendered beautifully through a variety of techniques akin to painting, suggestive narrative, and oblique symbolism. It is an audacious, formal experiment in color, music, and cinematography that artfully renders a particular individualistic visualization of portions of the Adam and Eve story, inviting spectators to make their own conclusions about its meaning(s). It certainly can be dubious, troubling, or even heretical (according to some) to try and adapt the Bible or portions of it, but Chytilová has none of these concerns in mind. Rather, she is more interested in conveying a metaphoric parable, one that suggests the timelessness of the story but also one that does not moralize. Fruit of Paradise offers a polemic on the nature of truth, morality, and the spiritual, emotional, and intellectual awakening of its protagonists and, in particular, Eva, the character that represents Eve. For all of its ambiguous structure, the film effectively portrays the story of Adam and Eve as one that speaks to Chytilová’s belief that active engagement is necessary on the part of the spectator, that inferring meaning is subjective, and that symbol, metaphor, and formal experimentation best articulate these processes. The film is a striking example of an avant-garde adaptation of a seemingly untouchable text, the Bible. Why can one not adapt portions of the Bible, or, perhaps why should one not interpret it in an investigative way like many a theologian has? There have been many profound films taken from the Bible (Cecil B. DeMille’s

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The King of Kings [1927], Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew [1964]) and countless films that relate parables or psalms. Perhaps part of the problem lies in the fact that these films and others are based on the Gospels, which are inherently narrative; the Adam and Eve story contains narrative, but it is primarily visual, hence Chytilová’s rendering it in images. Still, the question of authorial intent comes into play when discussing adaptations of biblical stories. According to many critics and scholars, as well as historians, Scripture serves as a model for all texts of the “unquestionable author.” Thomas Leitch cites Erich Auerbach and Mikhail Bakhtin on this issue: “Scripture is not just another text; it is a series of texts that, as Auerbach and Bakhtin point out, claim a literally transcendental authority that should brook no appeal to what can only be lesser texts.”1 If you want to interpret the Bible in an avant-garde fashion, then you stand the chance of receiving admonishment. But so what? Should biblical stories not be interpreted? I have to admire someone like Chytilová who has the nerve to undertake a radical vision of “God’s word.” The resulting adaptation is one that provokes the contemplation of spirituality and the nature and state of intra- and interpersonal relationships, perhaps even more so than any catechism could afford. Fruit of Paradise combines experimental formalism, cinéma vérité, some exposition, and allegorical storytelling. It is a daring avant-garde film that portrays the story of Adam and Eve in two separate ways: one in bold superimposed and live-action colors during the prologue and the other in a somewhat more conventional narrative frame that follows Eva, Josef (as Adam), and the Satan figure Robert at a seaside resort/ spa. The film poses a question that is far too loaded to answer: What is the nature of truth? The prologue section has a tonal choir singing the phrase “Tell me the truth” several times, while Eva’s character repeats it, most notably after she leaves Eden and later, at the end of the film, when she reenters it. Fruit of Paradise is not so much a literal retelling of the Bible and the story of Adam and Eve; instead, it plays with the idea of truth and questions our capability and capacity to recognize it, grasp it, or accept it. Chytilová famously said that “not telling the truth should be made illegal,” which was basically a reflection of the working conditions for her and other filmmakers under communism at the time of the film’s production.2 What she attempts here, as she did with her other provocative and wonderful avant-garde film, Daisies (1966), is to show just how tenuous truth is, or rather she suggests that truth is only a creation of subjectivity, that believing in truth is too slippery a notion. This thematic concern aside (for the moment), what makes the film stand out is its

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visual rendering of Eden: a combination of avant-garde aesthetics and formalism that is astounding in its execution. The film begins with a prologue, full of rich colors and camera tricks. Combined with the soundtrack, which includes vocal incantations, ambient music, and found sounds, the opening sequence is a tour de force of experimentalism. The credits are hand-painted in a floral style that reflects the distorted colors and flowers and trees we see during the prologue sequence. In the midst of the flora, Josef and Eva are shown in several shots from multiple angles; they are naked but are hidden by carefully tinted frames. The characters are shown in various tableaux; in one shot they are lying beneath a tree; in another, they are in the grass. All the while, quotations from Genesis are recited or intoned over the soundtrack. These cantata recount how if the Adam and Eve figures eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge, it will result in their death. We also see the serpent, first shown coiling down the tree, animated by the sudden jerks or “hiccups” of the camera—jolts to the left or right or up and down send the serpent in motion. The heavily saturated colors imbue every scene with a sense of grandeur and beauty. The actors cleverly appear as if they are mixed with the colors, writhing with or among the saturated yellows, blues, and reds. The prologue sequence ends with a shot of Eva catching the falling apple from the tree of knowledge; as she catches it, the screen transforms from the ornately constructed color patterns to a more ostensibly realistic scene, where the colors are monochromatic. Most poignantly, Chytilová joins the formal style with theme here, as we hear chants of “Tell me the truth” on the soundtrack as the final images unfold. This imaginative opening sequence offers a radical way of considering the Adam and Eve story: we see a modern couple frolicking, making love, and resting among the fruits of paradise, rendered through both avant-garde music and cinematographic formal patterns. It is an intense visual rendering of the exposition of the biblical story, and it sets in motion the rest of the film, where Adam and Eve participate in modern rituals of courtship and infidelity. The highly stylized introduction symbolizes the union of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden. Lurking in the garden with them is Robert (the devil), who, in the guise of the serpent, waits to tempt them. Josef refers to him as “the one that everyone is waiting for.” When the story switches to the modern telling, we discover that Robert is a tempter and murderer, who has designs on killing Eva. Instead, it is she who kills him. The formal construction of the prologue makes it avant-garde. From the credit sequence, consisting of paintings of fruits and trees, to the

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ambient sounds (which includes a peacock and bell chimes), the choral music, and the naked bodies of Adam and Eve filmed in slow motion, the opening is a testament to the powers of formalism and experimentation in creating the mise-en-scène and in the cinematography and editing. Chytilová’s camera shows extreme close-ups of their bodies, covered in the natural textures of the flora and fauna; the exquisite detail, from the leaf veins to the dominating colors of orange and blue, highlight the way the characters are used symbolically. The rhythmic editing—including shots of daisies, leaves, tree stems, grass, and a rose—are shown along with the people. The serpent, which later transforms into a redclad human, Robert, disappears amid red berries and flowers, a seamless blending of the colors and the figures. This approach is also utilized in the shot of the naked Eva, standing amid the autumnal vegetation that envelops and enmeshes her. As Peter Hames puts it, “This extraordinarily beautiful prologue shows Adam and Eve as literally part of a natural paradise broken only by the words of the serpent, the demand for the truth and the hardness of rock.”3 As the sequence transitions to the modern story, the soundtrack is punctuated by a loud clanging thump and an image of a gray rock. So what exactly is Chytilová adapting? The story of Adam and Eve is so well known—through the Bible, folklore, myth, and metaphor—that translating it to the screen in such an avant-garde manner immediately sets the film apart as something beyond mere retelling. Chytilová instead presents a visual and aural associative montage, an emotional and intellectual challenge to the senses and aesthetic sensibility of the spectator. The beautiful opening sequence is formalism as its height; avant-garde films often foreground the way they are made, and here Chytilová demonstrates the capabilities of film to render something familiar in an entirely new and enthralling way. She combines a type of distanciation effect with experimentalism; the montage of colors and sounds and the tableaulike staging of figures disregard a filmic realism, instead favoring a symbolism based on images, juxtaposition, and conceptual shock. In the more straightforward part of the film, we get a sense that Chytilová is sticking to a chronological narrative, but it still does not obey the laws of linear storytelling; it is too enigmatic, and she is not willing to let the viewer off that easy. Active participation is encouraged. According to Hames, “The film defies any realistic interpretation and, to some extent, interpretation of any kind. However, in the spirit of Chytilová’s ‘active interpretation,’ the attempt is worthwhile.”4 Chytilová’s manner of adapting the story of Adam and Eve involves the recognition of the critical

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undertaking of the viewer, supported through formal effects and visual and aural associations. The visual qualities of the film dominate it so much that we are forced into examining them in detail. To this end, Fruit of Paradise becomes a film where the activities of the spectator become almost as important as the activities of the filmmaker and the characters onscreen. For many, this is too offputting, for the film is disjunctive, odd, and, for many viewers, an “unfaithful” adaptation. Still, the surreal and untroubled atmosphere of the film and Eva’s search for truth are captivating for some, making the film a welcome—and better—addition to those films that attempt to present religion or biblical passages on film. The discourse on religion and film adaptations of religious passages and stories “seek[s] differing ways to make manifest the unrepresentable.”5 Film and religion are similar in that each attempts to render or tell through images. The Bible may be unrepresentable simply because it is considered a text that cannot be adapted, yet it always is: Its iconic status well established in many forms and in various media. Fruit of Paradise partakes in the process of rendering something that is symbolically relevant to many; it is a filmic attempt to show the mythic and symbolic importance of the Adam and Eve story. According to Brent Plate, “Two of religion’s most powerful components are myths and rituals, replete with symbols. Symbolism fused with myths and rituals create worlds for their adherents who predominately and temporarily participate in these constructed worlds.”6 If this is so, then Fruit of Paradise can be considered an avant-garde film that presents both mythic and ritualistic behavior— familiar figures and actions that are meant to stimulate and provoke. (Chytilová is not a religious filmmaker, nor do I think she is interested in religion per se; rather, I think she attempts to expose the hypocrisy inherent in the “truths discovered” by adherents of religious myth.) Leitch suggests that certain biblical stories are more amenable to adaptation because they are less offensive and more narrative driven; these include the stories of the Nativity, the Magi, the temptation of Jesus, Lazarus, and the Last Supper, “all those that are most dramatic, most readily compressed, most easily visualized, least preachy, and least likely to bore or offend contemporary audiences.”7 Something like the Adam and Eve story is better “organized as illustrations rather than retellings” because it contains, in Chytilová’s rendering, conflicting and unresolved polarities.8 The themes that are present in the story and translated to the screen in Fruit of Paradise are universal, hence Chytilová’s insistence on active viewing. According to John May and Michael Bird, “[Themes] that are traditionally related to religious belief or moral conduct [include]: mystery,

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transcendence, evil, freedom, grace, conscience, [and] sex,” which eventually makes discussing such themes in religion or religious stories like Adam and Eve “impossible to avoid.”9 Chytilová seems to be addressing the need for open discussion; even if she is making a critique of societal limitations placed on women (the film is really Eva’s story, though it does not necessarily have to be called a feminist film) or the condemnation of a broader imposing force on individuals, the themes that emerge from Fruit of Paradise are those that are related to “belief or conduct.” The modern portion of the film takes place at a spa/resort, where people come to relax, take mud baths, dine in fancy restaurants, and play on the beach. Robert is a bachelor, so he roams freely among the guests, focusing his attention on Eva. His serpentine qualities (at one point he is shown stretched out on a tree branch) enable him to “slither” among the people. Eva becomes fascinated with Robert; he is mysterious, beguiling, and exudes a confidence and sexuality that Josef does not. She becomes interested in Robert’s red satchel, which presumably holds something exciting and exotic. She first meets him when she climbs over the wall (apparently the wall containing Paradise) to pick vegetables and sees him urinating. They have a brief, absurd exchange, but she notices his satchel. Later, while Eva plants carrots, Robert appears again with his satchel. After Eva finds Robert’s room key, which he has dropped while pursuing another woman on the beach, she enters his room and searches through his desk drawer. There she finds enigmatic and symbolic items: cherries, assorted buttons, keys, an apple, nutshells, and leaves. We are never given any clear indication of what the items mean, but that is the point and an aspect of avant-garde films: It is best to leave things unexplained. When Robert unexpectedly returns to his room, Eva hides behind the curtains and finds his satchel. She opens it to discover lace and rubber stamps. She stamps herself with the number six, which she later discovers is the number Robert places on his intended victim. The scene is filmed using a mix of close-ups and medium shots, with a wide-angle lens that distorts the images. Again, there is no correct way to interpret all of the symbolic qualities or characteristics of the objects, but “in opening the suitcase, Eva has presumably selected herself as the next victim, since, to echo the film’s prologue, knowledge equals death.”10 Fruit of Paradise is a film that exposes or uncovers illusions and preconceptions about truth, especially accepted truths associated with religious or moral interpretation, hence the assertion that acquiring knowledge equals death. This idea is made even more forcefully in the final meeting between Eva and Robert and also in the ending of the film. The scene is

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filmed using jump cuts and wide angles, which draws extreme attention to the film’s formal qualities. After a sequence in which Eva, dressed in a white dress, is chased by a red-scarfed Robert through the green forest, they are shown by the lakeside, lumbering in highly stylized poses; a shot rings out and Robert falls to her feet. Eva feels in his overcoat, which she is wearing, and discovers a pistol in one pocket and a rose in the other. They have presumably been lovers, though it is not entirely clear, and it is also ambiguous as to whether or not Eva actually fired the gun. Robert’s last words to her are “Everything is nothing but a dream. You are a lie.” Holding the metaphoric and/or symbolic pistol and rose, we see that the film’s opening incantations of “Tell me the truth” ring true here: Robert’s words and the pistol and rose suggest the inherent ambiguity in discovering or creating meaning. Eva runs desperately to the wall she climbed over earlier when she first met Robert. She cannot scale its walls. In the final, memorable scene, Eva approaches Josef across a now snow-covered field and calls out to him, saying, “Don’t try to find out the truth, I no longer wish to know.” With that, the film ends with Eva holding a red rose in front of the camera in close-up and a final chant taken from the Genesis: “And they knew they were naked / Then they heard God / they hid from his eyes / They hid away among the trees of the garden.” The final shot shows green grass that dissolves in a simultaneous wipe and fade, then the colorful paintings of the trees from the prologue, here leafless and lifeless. In the end, the film suggests, perhaps, that the boundary to knowledge will continuously be infringed on, as people seek to acquire more and thus approach death while ironically seeking to understand life. In Hames’s summation, The film’s verbal message clearly lies in Josef’s comment that he does not understand anything, Robert’s view that everything is a dream, and Eva’s wish to give up the search for truth. To search for truth whether or not personified in a romantic ideal (i.e. Robert) is to court death. It is, of course, a fulfillment of the biblical prophesy and a comment on the nature of the film, but, in view of Chytilová’s earlier insistence on ‘truth,’ it could also be interpreted as a personal statement.11 Fruit of Paradise does not yield to a single meaning or perspective, inviting viewers to construct meaning based on associative recognition, on Chytilová’s personal aesthetics and a literal and metaphoric search for truth. The movie is, perhaps, an attempt to rationalize morality, to explain it through temptations, rather than accepting it as a God-given

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truth. Chytilová is challenging accepted notions of truth as dictated by social structures. Fruit of Paradise is a wonder, a film that is beguiling and challenging and exists on its own terms and merits. Eva’s spiritual and sexual awakening (to moral incomprehension) is depicted through visual and aural distortions. Optical effects derived from the use of fish-eye lenses and slowed and accelerated motion, along with oscillating voice volumes, sound effects, echoes, and rapid montage juxtaposed with static imagery, make the film stimulating formally as well as intellectually. The music and sounds accompany almost every scene. It is not an outright religious film, rather it examines religion in society as both an ambiguous entity and enabler. Studying religion means examining “the processes at work in mythopoesis and meaning-making,” and here, Chytilová certainly wants to challenge our accepted notions of how meaning has been constructed for us.12 She wants to challenge us aesthetically, emotionally, and intellectually—not an easy task but one that an avant-garde approach can assume and succeed at trying. According to Plate, “Avant-garde film . . . seems to be the privileged location for filmic experience that takes seriously the relation of aesthetics and logic.”13 Plate also equates viewing avant-garde film with religious ritual and myth, where “myths and rituals assist in the creation of worlds through activities that frame, exclude, focus, organize and re-present elements of the known world.”14 Chytilová adopts this approach with Fruit of Paradise, creating a filmic world where our ideas of everyday reality are challenged and renegotiated due to the formal experimentation and the thematic exploration. The surrealism that distorts the reality present in Fruit of Paradise makes the religious references more an aid to shaping our interpretation rather than defining it; more generally, the structure of the film asks for open-ended discussion instead of steadfast conclusion, which is precisely the way Chytilová suggests myth or ritual should be interpreted or used. Hence, Hames can conclude, Fruit of Paradise “is genuinely experimental in that it explores unconventional and ‘impossible’ associations, and Chytilova’s strength lies in the confidence with which she approaches just such impossibilities.”15 Films that adapt religious texts can do so in a variety of ways. Literal renderings of the Gospels—essentially, the life of Jesus—have been popular because they are “the principal types of story that most clearly express religious self-understanding.”16 Chytilová is interested in exploring the tangential themes that emerge from religious storytelling—the substantively, functionally, formally involved aspects of religious-based texts, like the Adam and Eve parable. According to Wright, there is a

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taxonomy for the types of films that explore religion or religious issues. There are films that: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

make use of religious themes, motifs, and symbols in titles; have plots that draw from religion; are set in the contexts of religious communities; use religion for character definition; deal directly or indirectly with religious characters, texts, or locations; (6) use religious ideas to explore the experiences and transformation or conversion of characters; (7) address religious themes or concerns, including ethical issues.17 While most films generally will not easily slide into one or more of these categories, the listing of them suggests an overriding impulse to label religious-oriented films in specific ways, which can be beneficial, especially when dealing with an avant-garde film such as Fruit of Paradise. For example, one could argue that religious questions can emerge from most life-affirming or challenging moments: others/self, separation/ return, division/unity, risk/security, and life/death. Fruit of Paradise utilizes several of these taxonomic qualifications, but Chytilová was certainly not adhering to a set of standards when making her film. Rather, she is exploring the nature of the meaning of such taxonomies or labeling— these truths are what need to be examined or overturned. As Hames rightly says, surveying several of Chytilová’s films, It could be suggested that the films of Chytilová, since they are more ambiguous, challenge the ways in which the world is ‘seen.’ Even if this is an aesthetic challenge, it can have political implications. Because the relationship between filmmaker and audience is changed, a more conscious interaction can be promoted with both Chytilová’s films and more traditional works.18 Fruit of Paradise requires its audience to construct its own meaning of truth and religion and its own interpretation of the Adam and Eve story. Avant-garde films, and Chytilová’s avant-garde adaptation, ask the audience to rethink how the world is seen and how the original text is interpreted. Again, this method of adaptation belies a certain tendency toward outright condemnation of convention and authorial prominence (even when dealing with the Bible). Chytilová asks us to see the alternative view

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of reality—the view, according to her, that is more consistent with truth. According to Plate, Because avant-garde film in particular does not rely on conventional cultural representations of the world, but engenders ‘creative use of reality,’ in Maya Deren’s phrase (1987: 60), the viewer sees something ‘other,’ something potentially even non-recognizable . . . . [The] otherorientation of the avant-garde film can then lead to a new way of seeing and being in the world . . . . [No] longer is the viewer reaffirmed in an objective, stable position, gazing at the other; rather, the subjectivity of the viewer is called into question.19 Significantly, Fruit of Paradise, like other avant-garde films, questions viewer subjectivity, presents something other as unrecognizable, and therefore allows us to see the story of Adam and Eve in a new way. It takes a religious story, indirectly applies its characters to modern equivalents, and addresses ethical concerns about the transformation. Fruit of Paradise is a film that presents a particular way of perceiving reality and the truth. It adapts an essentially unchallenged source and makes us question experience based on its formal and thematic ideas. For Chytilová, “The abolition of a single style promoted a diversity of approach in which the methods of critical realism, lyricism and the avant-garde combined in the same struggle—to tell the truth about a system based on ‘untruth.’ ”20 Chytilová’s playfulness, the ability to combine formal innovation with intellectual stimulation, is engaging and not willfully oblique. It is not a film that religious-minded advocates will embrace nor mainstream audience either. It deliberately and thoughtfully provokes us into serious contemplation about its own construction and its themes, an undertaking that is refreshing, especially for a film adapted from religious material. As Plate surmises, “By returning viewers to the everyday through defamiliarization and refamiliarization, the cinematic ritual of avant-garde film offers the possibility for aesthetic, ethical and religious renewal.”21 Perhaps this is a bold estimate, but Fruit of Paradise proves that the personal exploration of aesthetic, ethical, and religious ideas creates a template for many avant-garde films and avantgarde adaptations: that to seek the truth, one must travel a forbidden route. Chytilová’s avant-garde investigation into the meaning of interpersonal relationships, moral ambiguity, and the allegory of Adam and Eve continuously fascinates as it perplexes and remains elusive.

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Chapter 10

Hitler: A Film from Germany

History, as portrayed through narrative film, is often discursive, didactic, or subjective, reflecting not just an event in time but the goals and ambitions of the filmmaker. The director’s vision can purposefully or purportedly distort objectivity, thus producing a film that examines historical events with a critical and instructional eye. The interpretation of history by a filmmaker can prove profitable if it is accepted on its own terms as a film. However, the rhetorical possibilities such a film offers can also make it a historical document itself, a text to be studied, analyzed, or reinterpreted by others. In other words, the events themselves are not necessarily completely altered, but the director chooses and selects from the material surrounding the subject and intensifies it through a critical lens. This is often the case with documentary works (like Ken Burns’s “historical” films, which often find ways to popularize events so that they may appear palatable to audiences), but what should we make of a fictional construal and evaluation of real events? Such is the case with Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977), a film that examines German culture and society, history and identity, myth and ritual, and, by extension, the mourning necessary to understand and come to terms with the travesties wrought by a single individual. Syberberg’s film is grandiose and often tedious, and it serves as a grand example of the kind of biographical and historical appropriation suitable for an avant-garde approach. Syberberg appropriates a wealth of material to construct his massive portrait of Adolf Hitler. This form of adaptation, an appropriation, attempts to reimagine the source material in ways more suitable to the director’s vision, hence the idea of “stealing” bits and pieces of history to construct a final film. But Syberberg appropriates not just images, voices, and texts of Hitler but also German history (in the guises of King Ludwig II of Bavaria and Richard Wagner, to name two), Brechtian distanciation technique, German popular culture and myth, and also tidbits

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of historical data and biography, all scattered throughout a seven-hour investigation into the life and legacy of Hitler. Syberberg examines Hitler in a multifaceted way, using allusions to and appropriations of literature and other films, and offers fantasy and dream sequences, vivid visualizations of internal thoughts, memories, and ideas. Additionally, he uses long diatribes performed by actors on a constructed stage—almost as if the actors are portraying dramatic monologues in tableau. In many ways, Syberberg’s unique perspective is far more definitive than most historical adaptations because he dares to show things that most would deem unnecessary. This makes his film avant-garde; its style is antithetical to any kind of typical filmmaking, and his approach to history—indeed, his adaptation of history—is also experimental. Syberberg’s radical aesthetic forces the viewer to reassess and reevaluate the nature of the source material, here, Hitler, German history, and the collective unconscious. First and foremost, he is an adapter: someone who transposes other material and reshapes it into his own. He practices exploitative adaptation, highlighting the differences between texts instead of the similarities. Syberberg’s exploitation of the history—the appropriation of images— signifies him as a major progenitor of alternative adaptation methods. He clearly believes an adaptation signifies an ongoing intertextual dialogue between the original (Hitler’s biography) and the adaptation (his film). Using history as a backdrop for adaptation is a common practice. Fiction writers often incorporate real places and people and events into their works, minimizing the line between the imaginary and the real. According to Julie Sanders, Historical fiction is a wide umbrella term. It can, for example, include novels or plays which choose to locate themselves in the “past,” known or otherwise, providing contextual details of the “past” as an authenticating strategy: we “believe in” or yield to the events of such novels or plays partly because the background detail is so accurately drawn.1 Syberberg recasts history as a blending of fact and fiction, creating an avant-garde film version of the public and private life of Hitler as the overriding influence on German (and by extension world) memory and mourning. Syberberg (ab)uses the source material in order to make better sense of it. For example, he reveals character through visual motifs rather than dialogue. As a filmmaker, he must make choices in regard to mise-en-scène, cinematography, and editing that function in several ways in order to capture the atmosphere, his subject’s thoughts, and to create

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metaphors and symbols that heighten our understanding and awareness, which is why the film can be considered avant-garde. Syberberg is innovative with Hitler: A Film from Germany: It is structured like a drama in the form of a circus, with separate “rings” for depicting fragmentary moments in the history of Germany and of Hitler, and it emphasizes active interpretation on the part of the spectator. Syberberg’s drama about Hitler stresses how a well-known figure can be interpreted through specific life incidents, so in this regard, the way the film becomes an adaptation is through manipulation, re-creation, and actuality. History and historical occurrence serve only to create a backdrop. According to Benjamin Buchloh, “In aesthetic practice, appropriation may result from an authentic desire to question the historical validity of a local, contemporary code by linking it to a different set of codes, such as previous styles, heterogeneous iconic sources, or to different modes of production and reception.”2 Syberberg questions the validity of codes by offering his own and by appropriating iconic images and sounds and cultural and social data and then blending them into a wholly different and avant-garde enterprise, where fragment, nonlinearity, achronology, and formal experimentation dictate content. Syberberg’s film is a social history of Germany in the twentieth century, and he specifically examines the Third Reich to see how the populace was—and still is—affected by Hitler, how Hitler as person and Hitler as idea penetrates national and individual psyches. Even more interestingly, Syberberg posits that we can view Hitler as a film, as the title suggests, one that will always be shown and thus always demand an audience. I believe the title should be read literally, that what matters most to Syberberg is the idea that Hitler was and is a film, which in turn implies that he is an image or a series of images in search of spectators and that, as an image, he will always be projected either literally or figuratively. This kind of adaptation, wherein Hitler is presented as a film, is certainly avant-garde, but it is in the way that Syberberg presents the material that makes the style, in addition to the way the subject matter is treated, avant-garde too. In focusing on Hitler in such a way, the movie serves not only as a work of art (as a film), it also serves as a narrative account of history, specifically demonstrating that the spectacle of cinema itself—in the guise of Hitler as film—helps elucidate history, which ultimately may distort spectator response and reaction and thus problematize the historical accounts of Hitler. In other words, the film forces spectators to contemplate the historical record, to search within themselves, and to collect the radical ideas Syberberg posits into some form of record. It is not an easy

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task. Through his own personal aesthetics, his own critical analysis of Germany, and his own interpretation of German history, Syberberg challenges the problem of identity and art through the twentieth century’s most important “film,” Hitler. Hitler: A Film from Germany is lofty in its ambitions: in length (seven hours), in themes (film as art and document, guilt and mourning, the irony of Hitler’s myth, and corrupt film practices from Hollywood, to name a few), and in scope (twentieth-century German history and the responsibility of the general populace). It is divided into four parts, whose titles suggest the film’s texture: “From the World Ash Tree to the Goethe Oak in Buchenwald,” “A German Dream,” “The End of a Winter’s Tale,” and “We Children of Hell.” Within these confines, Syberberg digresses and repeats himself, pauses and examines, exaggerates and ridicules with melancholy humor. Susan Sontag’s essay on the film, from 1980, claims that the movie is one of the greatest works of art of the twentieth century. She says, However rich in precursors, the truly great work must seem to break with an old order and really is a devastating if salutary move: such a work extends the reach of art but also complicates and burdens the enterprise of art with new, self-conscious standards. It both excites and paralyzes the imagination. Thus, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Hitler: A Film From Germany is not only daunting because of the extremity of its achievement, but [also] discomfiting.3 Accordingly, the tone of the film is serious and breaks with traditional styles of filmmaking and narrative structure, which creates, by extending “the reach of art,” as Sontag says, a different kind of viewing experience. Syberberg places the audience in an uncomfortable position—he asks the viewers to study themselves through close scrutiny and questioning, to discover the Hitler they created, which, because he is presented and re-presented as a film, still resides in society, the psyche, and culture, as imagistic particles that collectively create a whole being. Provoking the audience is normal in avant-garde film. Syberberg has a very specific aesthetic agenda that he uses to convey his ideas about Hitler; he ultimately believes that all citizens (German or other) are somehow responsible for making Hitler, which is why they want to view Hitler the “film.” This culpability is meant to provoke audiences—again, German or all people—into feeling shame and mournful remembrance. The film ultimately undertakes the difficult task of invoking myth, irony, pathos, and

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mourning to interpret history, to show how a historical event occurred and how it still influences people in the present, which Syberberg does through an extremely experimental template, one not lacking temerity. The film works as an adaptation in several ways. It appropriates material to create a new, specific text on Hitler and history, one that can be read/viewed as an adaptation of biography and historical moment. But the way Syberberg shows this is uncanny and is also why the film has many detractors. Staging the film like a play, using static cameras centrally framed on what appears to be a large theatrical stage, creating tableaux, constructing gigantic rear-projection images on screens, overdubbing actual radio broadcasts of Hitler’s voice and others’ voices, and re-creating scenes from history are all specific ways to adapt moments, texts, objects, sounds, and images. Because the film adaptation is staged as a grand Wagnerian operatic stage play, it takes on its subject matter as both spectacle and exhibition—as grandiose and as something to be looked at and studied. The act of appropriation and of adaptation in general has a potent shaping effect. Using a multitude of allusions to literature, theater, music, film, and history, Syberberg posits the adaptation as quotation in extremis. According to Douglas Crimp, “Appropriation, pastiche, quotation—these methods extend to virtually every aspect of our culture . . . [like the] retrograde works of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg.”4 Syberberg’s extravagant project uses a variety of methods of appropriation. He has created a palimpsest, a continuation, a graft, a rewriting, a refashioning, and a paratext—all in order to draw our attention to Hitler as person, myth, and even footnote. Syberberg’s avant-garde adaptation can be considered a citation of these aspects of Hitler. A citation is a particular way of stretching out the text in different directions, leading the adaptation back and forth between it and its sources, and Syberberg clearly is engaged with a text—Hitler—that produces such hypertexts. Because Syberberg’s movie is so ambitious in scope and length, I will simply provide an overview and not an in-depth analysis of particular scenes. Taken as a whole, Hitler: A Film from Germany explores critical issues surrounding German culture and history and examines them in highly symbolic, poetic, and emotional ways. Syberberg wants to get into the psyche of the German people, and he does so through the phenomenon of Hitler as image and image creator. As a historical text, it deals with its (historical) subject by fragmenting it as history—like a series of photos running through a projector. In other words, Syberberg presents the historical Hitler in such a way as to make him seem an amalgam of things—art, rhetoric, film, emotion, image, event. Near the beginning of

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the film, for example, a ringmaster, dressed in top hat and tails, enters a circus ring and proclaims the goals of the film. The circus master says, “We will show the world of Hitler in the form of projections, fantastic dreams, projections of the will that gave shape to these visions.” The visions of Hitler the historical figure and of Hitler the film rely on their being reprojected again and again for maximum manipulation. Syberberg dramatizes this possibility and so has constant images of Hitler on display throughout the movie. The film is not a documentary of the Nazi regime or Hitler but rather becomes a new text itself of the historical past, which means it invites intense speculation and close interpretation in order to arrive at a destination—and not necessarily an ending. Like other avant-garde adaptations, it provokes rather than placates. Hence, the title also alludes to a never-ending film: Hitler, who, because he is a film, as Syberberg posits, continues to haunt and perplex spectators and so still invites repeated viewings in order to find some minute spark of comprehension. Thus, as an avant-garde adaptation, the film perpetually invites speculation toward its source text. Hitler: A Film from Germany is so layered, complex in structure, and overly ambitious in approach that it often overwhelms the spectator. The film is an aural and visual amalgam: It uses documentary footage, large-screen still photographs and paintings as backdrops, recordings of German radio broadcasts, puppets representing Hitler and various SS officers, actors dressed in various personas of Hitler, and ample use of Wagner’s “music dramas.” It is in his grandiose summations of German history and unorthodox use of footage and theatrical setting (every scene takes place on a sound stage with actors reciting long monologues; the Third Reich is, essentially, created on a sound stage) that Syberberg may become discursive or overly didactic. But a good portion of the film is meant to be both since he is focusing on Hitler the person and Hitler the film. If we are to accept Syberberg’s themes, we must be subjected to a radical, subjective analysis that is preachy, long, and instructional. Syberberg is interested in the physical and psychic dislocations experienced by Germans, and he offers a film history to help viewers cope with the present that the past has produced through an experimental, critical lens. He wants the spectator to feel a particular way about the images and speeches that often overwhelm the film, and it is this subjective explanation that is absorbing, exasperating, and extraordinary. Hitler: A Film from Germany is about deep processes of identification, projection, and representation and these processes involve a recognition and corresponding mourning from spectators. As an avant-garde adaptation, the film exploits and

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depicts a historical event and figure for their rich imaginative content and for their connotative, allusive, paralleling, and comparative links to the present, the past, and the way the two work simultaneously to create the new text of Hitler: A Film from Germany. Syberberg clearly has an alternative way of depicting the horrors of Nazism, but his method is not without precedent. Syberberg could be considered a postmodern filmmaker, certainly in aesthetics and technique. Someone who is highly self-reflexive, critical of standard filmmaking practices, or critical of empirical data could be considered a postmodern filmmaker, but the term implies much more. Historian Robert Rosenstone suggests, correctly, that “postmodern history,” which Syberberg references in his daunting movie, engages the spectator in a number of ideas. These types of histories and, in this case, Syberberg’s history film . . . [f]oreground their own construction; tell the past self-reflexively and from a multiplicity of viewpoints; forsake normal story development, or problematize the stories they recount; utilize humor, parody, and absurdist modes of presenting the past; refuse to insist on a coherent or single meaning of events; indulge in fragmentary or poetic knowledge; and never forget that the present moment is the site of all past representation.5 Syberberg indulges us with these methods, but he also wants us to try and discover a meaning through the imagistic and theatrical excess and his critical assumptions of history. In other words, despite the absurdity of the method, there is an underlying tone of seriousness that makes the spectator feel comparably serious but also uneasy. We can express amusement—or feel discomfort—at puppets of Hitler, but we are reminded of past horrors through the amount of words that proliferate the movie. Syberberg undoes then re-creates history by means of appropriation and adaptation, questioning the stability of historical accuracy. Linda Hutcheon notes, “Postmodernism does not deny [history] . . . it merely questions how we can know past real events today, except through their traces, their texts, the facts we construct and to which we grant meaning.”6 Syberberg’s adaptation, unique because it is an appropriation of a real person, posits questions about authenticity and how an individual like Hitler becomes, literally and figuratively, a cultural artifact like a film. Throughout the movie, Hitler is portrayed realistically in different ways and forms through the main actor’s performance. But Syberberg’s

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concern with cinema’s relationship to history produces other interesting and disturbing images of Hitler. For example, in one sequence, several actors caricature Hitler: We see him as a house painter, Chaplin’s Great Dictator, Napoleon, Wagner’s Parsifal, a court jester, and Frankenstein’s monster. Later, Hitler becomes or is portrayed as a stuffed dog, a cardboard cutout, a dummy, and a marionette. Syberberg suggests that Hitler could have risen to power at any moment in history and could have assumed any role—from Napoleon to a toy. Hitler is a “showman” inasmuch as he is a fascist dictator; he is portrayed as someone inextricably linked to showing himself to the masses. According to Syberberg, Hitler staged an epic historical spectacle as both star and director. The cinema has the capacity to amend representation in such a way, and Syberberg clearly suggests these representations are what haunt spectators: By presenting the evil incarnation Hitler in so many different disguises, the spectator becomes desensitized to the reality that in all actuality—factually and historically—this person was a mass murderer. This should be enough to provoke feelings of guilt in the spectator. How does one get rid of these images of Hitler as Chaplin or dummy or court jester? You cannot, Syberberg seems to say—if the film version of Hitler is viewed, then spectators are forced to deal with the past. Even more frightening is the notion that Hitler was a creation of the people (a fact not lost on historians). Syberberg presents a figure that becomes exactly what the people wanted. By using a multitude of puppets and marionettes to portray Hitler, Syberberg makes his point clear: the people controlled him just as much as he did them. Thus in the film, an actor stands behind the Hitler marionettes and pulls the strings. Metaphorically, this represents the role of the spectators in Syberberg’s tale: they somehow control Hitler. Syberberg places guilt on the people because he suggests that Hitler was simply doing what everyone asked him to do. Using the puppets reinforces this notion. Syberberg has said, “All these techniques used with the marionettes elucidate the fact that it is we who have given life and movement to Hitler.”7 By presenting Hitler this way, the movie conflates fact and theatrics. It also reinforces the theme of the perpetual Hitler as film or Hitler as image that still lives through the continued puppetlike manipulation of the cinema. Again, this sort of presentation is avant-garde, especially in how Syberberg adapts these images into one grand—yet complex—portrait of Hitler. Syberberg believes that film combines the aesthetic qualities of all artistic endeavor—theater, the visual arts, literature, music—and so can transcend mere image making. This collage effect is a part of avant-garde

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film history, and it can rightfully be said that Syberberg uses it to the extreme. At the same time, he uses film as a tool for instruction, both by presenting Hitler in a unique way—as person, myth, and image— and by examining the aesthetic possibilities of the film medium itself. Not only do these beliefs align with an avant-garde sensibility, they also suggest that a film is undoubtedly a mix of other texts, that film, and especially Syberberg’s films, are always intertextual in nature. Further, avant-garde film was often used as a political weapon; Syberberg sees this as well. To him, film always gives a more accurate depiction of society, especially if it is used as he proclaims, as an instrument of instruction with deliberate rhetoric, full of subjective monologues. For example, at one point in the movie, Heinrich Himmler receives a massage, and during the scene, he reveals his innermost thoughts. There are numerous moments when Hitler—or other characters, such as Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Goering, or Albert Speer—speak for more than ten minutes or more about particular subjects. In one instance, Hitler rises from the grave of Wagner wearing a toga and proceeds to elaborate on culture and politics. These long monologues serve a challenging purpose. They are orations on Hitler and the Hitler myth; either a real historical figure appears as a character, like a Himmler or Hitler in various guises, and speaks of how and why Hitler needs to be (re)examined by both history and individual consciousness, or a representation appears (a dummy or stuffed dog; Hitler’s sperm is also discussed at one point). There is also a frightening scene when a kneeling SS officer speaks the entire confession speech from the end of the movie M; it is both terrifying and ominous to watch and at once illustrates the power of cinema or the cinematic image to penetrate far beyond the limits of the screen. Here, a classic German movie is recast as an antidote to the terrible past. These allusions add to the constant bombardment of images, from the use of rear-screen projection to the figures of Hitler that appear. These representations all point to Syberberg’s proposal that cinema serves as the best medium to project and reproject images and ideas. As he points out, “Film is the most important art form that the democratic twentieth century has produced. Film should register a few things about the condition of the general will of a country and its current situation.”8 Ironically, the century also produced the world’s most discomforting film, Hitler himself. Syberberg also addresses Hitler in the guise of filmmaker; Hitler becomes a “director” of history, desire, image, and war. An overabundance of images almost drowns the film, but the historical record of

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Nazism has been shaped by images. Syberberg sees little difference between the perversion of dreams and the “films” of Hitler. By contrast, he sees little hope for understanding Hitler the film as a recurring presentation. Hitler the filmmaker and Hitler the film each require an intense amount of self-reflection. Images, after all, can be shown again and again, so the question Syberberg asks is, What should we make of this surplus? It is incomprehensible, but it is worth examining anyway. (The Nazis, of course, used film more than other previous political regimes, which mesmerized audiences—the same way that Syberberg’s Hitler film does.) Syberberg presents Hitler as a product of the public’s taste and, by depicting Hitler as a film, reinforces the public’s need or desire for a commercialized product—even when manipulating or, essentially, exploiting actual footage of the Nazis or Hitler. Hitler himself, says Syberberg, becomes the master filmmaker because he knew what to present to the people, namely spectacle. Because the film undertakes the daunting task of uncovering the myths surrounding Hitler and Nazism, it suggests that history exists only in the form of quotation and image. The film itself is an adaptation that uses quotation to resurrect and sustain imagery. The myriad amounts of speech that fill the film seem so overdone that it seems impossibile to uncover any rational truth about its subject matter. Scholar Ian Kershaw claims that “an adequate explanation of Nazism is an intellectual impossibility. In Nazism, we have a phenomenon which seems scarcely capable of subjection to rational analysis.”9 The reason it is difficult for some to comprehend the phenomenon is due to the nature of the subject matter: Hitler and Nazism always generate universal bias. Audiences especially feel this way. However, for Syberberg, the investigation into Hitler is an intellectual possibility, namely because the filmmaker takes risks but also because he latches onto the idea of Hitler as one big spectacle. As Sontag notes, Syberberg “offers a spectacle about spectacle: evoking the ‘big show’ called history in a variety of dramatic modes—fairytale, circus, morality play, allegorical pageant, magic ceremony, philosophical dialogue.”10 All of these representational modes figure heavily into Syberberg’s portrait of Hitler. The idea of spectacle is closely associated with the cinema as display, image, and scene. Hitler as film becomes a spectacle that the whole world watched and continues to watch. The title of the movie alone reiterates Syberberg’s belief that in cinema truth can become a rhetorical device. What survives of Hitler (the person) are images and words, both of which can be projected in the cinema, evoking a “‘big show,’” as Sontag says. Syberberg accentuates this point

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by having a circus master enter the ring at the beginning of Part 1; he becomes a master of ceremonies and calls for the spectacular display of Hitler to begin (we are told it is the “Greatest Show on Earth”). There is a certain amount of irony to this notion, of course, but Syberberg would have us believe that history becomes film and that film becomes (or should become) history. Critic Russell Berman notes, The fantastic images of cinema offer a substitute, or the utopian promises [that] an unscrupulous politician might mobilize the masses. Aesthetics or politics, film or Hitler—Syberberg regards them as twin solutions within the single historical context of the modern industrial world.11 Syberberg the filmmaker and Syberberg the historian are the same and of equal importance, and both view society the same way—as in need of great art (film) to understand the past (Hitler). Historians may find this approach somewhat irresponsible, since Syberberg appears to trivialize events or at least appropriate what he wants for his adaptation. But Syberberg’s goal is not necessarily hinged on giving a chronological historical account of Hitler or the Hitler as film; Syberberg is far more interested in spectators’ response or their duty to respond to the film in a particular manner. It is one of the reasons he has Hitler (played by Hans Schubert) say, “Let’s give him his chance, let’s give ourselves our chance.” In order to view the Hitler as film, people must examine themselves first. In Syberberg’s view, it was not the actual physical presence of Hitler that historically mobilized the masses but Hitler as representation and spectacle—and as adaptation. Because Hitler is a film and therefore will be projected somewhere, spectators’ expectations are compromised; the audience is instructed to remember all aspects of the past, to question it, and to try and reach a better understanding of what they have created—Hitler—through guilt and mourning. Syberberg’s confidence in his art as adequate to his great subject matter draws from his idea of cinema as a way of knowing, which invites speculation to take a self-reflexive turn, a highly avant-garde tactic, that other directors such as Jean-Luc Godard or Su Friedrich adopt in their metatextual cinema. The audience is left to decide for itself what meaning it has given to Hitler. Present in Syberberg’s film is the search for historical motivation; it has less to do with a chain of events than with “the development of the imaginative structure, irrational desires, and psychological projection” that form a cultural identity, “tragically

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climaxing with Hitler.”12 Hitler was—and is—a product of the people. Another reason that spectators are compromised, or at least have their subjectivity displaced, is because the film has an associative plot, no complete narrative structure, and no strict chronology, all characteristics of avant-garde film. There is a dialectic involved when viewing the film, for as spectators search for narratives where few exist, they are also in full engagement with the images and the monologues. Both visually and verbally, the movie demands that the audience find its own place in a text that belongs to the audience yet is concomitantly too much for it. The film constantly provokes through a continuous flow of words, images, and overwrought theatrics. Syberberg’s is a decidedly intellectual cinema where rich imagery never overpowers language; illusion remains subordinate to enlightenment. Hitler: A Film from Germany rightly becomes a new text, an exploitative adaptation, in which spectators find themselves searching for answers based on the variety of appropriated materials used to construct the text itself. The film involves spectators because it actively engages them in a process—a self-reflexive experiment of sorts. Audiences have universal bias against Hitler, which is why Syberberg is confrontational: They are forced to deal with an issue—indeed, an idea and image of their own creation and involvement—they otherwise may not want to face. Syberberg’s technique disallows any facile identification with Hitler, but it establishes connections by means of visual quotations. These visual stimuli are meant to induce mourning in the spectator. The constant mix of voice and image forces the spectator to respond, whether willingly or not. In presenting his story of history this way—in long monologues and through images and minimal actions—Syberberg’s intellectual argument is carried out in the multiplicity of appropriated material and takes precedence over historical chronology. The themes of the film are both vast and immediate, but all involve some amount of audience participation. To this degree, Syberberg says, “A montage of the cinematic devices of the irrational has everything; the spectator must decide.”13 This irrationality is a stylistic and thematic concern for Syberberg; Hitler appealed to the irrational in German people, and so, to exorcise the legacy (or image) of Hitler, spectators have to face the monster they created, if they are to come to a more rational understanding of Hitler. Focusing on irrationality is also a hallmark of the avant-garde, particularly the surrealists. The film registers clearly the “perversion of irrational desire in the climactic forms of a single figure.”14 The problem is that a rational explanation can never occur, which again is an essential characteristic of avant-garde film. Even

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though Syberberg would have us believe that by uncovering the myth of Hitler we may come closer to an understanding, he also clearly realizes it is nearly an impossible task. His goal is to have spectators keep asking the necessary questions, not to have complete comprehension but to have a better sense of their involvement and to prompt their own sense of mourning. In many regards, Syberberg’s movie acts in an accusatory fashion—it blames the audience for the tragic past. Film—the best artistic medium to explore history for Syberberg—allows this to take place. Syberberg says, Irrationalism . . . exists in art as an anti-world, perhaps better than reality, affording a chance for paradises, utopias, a reality of its own, proving a likeness to God in its own strength . . . [and] the continuation of life by other means, including the issues of guilt, ceremonies of expunging guilt, the work of mourning as the reflection of this loneliness of infinity.15 Irrationality, for Syberberg, affords a better understanding of the past or demonstrates how a society should be engaged with its past. It also lends itself to avant-garde adaptation. Such documents, like his own film, are not considered trustworthy sources, perhaps, to most historians; still, the fact that Syberberg believes that his film is not just a cinematic work of art but a text worth interpreting makes it worthy of reflection. If the audience is to purge any guilt through mourning, it must accept the irrationality of Hitler and the irrationality of their own behavior in their creation of him. The claims Syberberg makes are certainly over the top, but he firmly believes that in the world of cinema, anything can be possible, including irrational discourse. Hence, irrationality makes one ponder the rational, real world. In turn, spectators reflect on the ironies and ambiguities that history affords. After all, his subject matter is the most irrational figure of the twentieth century, and film, where desires become manifest and where any possibility may occur, also means that illogical or irrational things can occur. An avant-garde adaptation is perfectly suited to carry this weight—or burden. The main issue at stake for Syberberg, as far as spectator response, is the ability to mourn. The film asks spectators to undergo a type of transformation; it instructs through a specific emotional response: mourning. The tragic past should make people mourn, the film essentially argues. Sontag suggests, “The film is not designed to meet a standard of information but claims to address a (hypothetical) therapeutic

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ideal. Syberberg repeatedly says that his film is addressed to the German ‘inability to mourn,’ that it undertakes ‘the work of mourning.’”16 In this sense, the film’s social immediacy is given prominence: Syberberg addresses his audience—specifically the German but also the international spectator—and asks them to mourn for their past and thus reassess their present. To Syberberg, only in film can we adequately mourn the past because it works as a document-text that can reconcile past with present. Here again the idea of the adaptation as palimpsest becomes prominent. Hutcheon calls adaptations a “ubiquitous palimpsestic form,” which suggests Syberberg’s method of adaptation by focusing on the ubiquity of Hitler as a palimpsestic text himself.17 The notion of a work of mourning, and Syberberg’s film is in a way an adaptation of the national psyche, an attempt to adapt mourning itself, is self-consciously played out in the film. The combination of Brechtian defamiliarization and Wagnerian bombast works to this effect. According to Caryl Flynn, the massive scale of the film perpetuates the mourning of loss ephemera: Its sets are strewn with what [Thomas] Elsaesser calls “the kitschy clutter of social and cultural memento,’ puppets, scraps of celluloid, with Richard Wagner’s big sculpted head overseeing everything. This, of course, is completely deliberate, ‘staged,’ in the fullest sense of the term. Near the end of the film, Andre Heller speaks to the Hitler puppet at length: ‘You killed the Wandering Jew. You destroyed Berlin, Vienna . . . . You took away our sunsets, sunsets by Casper David Friedrich . . . . You made old Germany kitschy with your simplifying works and peasant pictures.”18 The cluttered stage, full of lost objects, suggests the mourning. Syberberg sees that the loss of the past, of innocence, of memory—all somehow influence the present. But Syberberg also believes there is room for resurrection, and in using Wagner as the godhead, he entrusts music to claim the detritus of history, including Hitler and Hitler the film. What could be more avant-garde than to offer such an extravagant and complicated solution? Syberberg is the mourner who longs for a different future by ironically attaching credence to the past. This is why he appropriates so many images of Germany’s romantic past before Hitler. As Flynn suggests, “Syberberg’s sense of the future is decidedly backward looking, an ironically tinged nostalgia for the phantasmatic, unified culture Hitler purportedly made impossible: an irrecoverable grail, in short.”19

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The film examines this relationship between the past and present, and through an analysis of this connection, Syberberg attempts to initiate his work of mourning. Mourning can allow for a release or reconciliation necessary for stability or relative peace in the present—and it is the internal peace that becomes the focus, hence the stress on individual spectator’s ability to mourn. It is Hitler—the person, the presence— that forces people to confront the past. Critic James Franklin suggests that “[The film] is a work of meditation and of mourning.”20 In order to mourn, spectators first have to meditate on the subject matter. The film locates guilt in every individual, for each person is responsible somehow for creating Hitler. In turn, all people must mourn their creation (à la Frankenstein—Hitler is at one point in the film portrayed as Frankenstein’s monster). This premise also complicates the spectatorial experience because it addresses the Hitler-in-us phenomenon. Syberberg claims that since German people are all responsible for the creation of Hitler, then he must reside within each individual. Deliberate provocation of the spectator, indeed, creating a sense of awe, bewilderment, and anger is the goal of many avant-garde films. The difficulty of the film is that it reprojects a representation that a democratic century has condensed (as evil) and displaced (as past) and so forces the spectator to admit culpability directly. This audience interaction is the most central aspect of the theme of acceptance and mourning. The questions the film poses to its historical subject, Hitler, double back continually and piercingly on the spectator as the actual and more pertinent subject matter: the “Hitlerin-us, our individual guilt for the Nazi phenomenon.”21 Syberberg also states, “I never would make a film about a man called Adolf Hitler but— rather about the people who decided to have a Hitler.”22 For Syberberg, Hitler is not necessarily the cause but rather a product of a cause, which is why he implies that Hitler resides in all people. He continues, “Hitler is not conceivable without us. Hence, the film is about us.”23 In this sense, the film’s portrayal of Hitler somewhat eschews traditional historical accounts so that it may focus on the role of the spectator, which also signifies an avant-garde adaptation, in which the director freely appropriates such a vast array of material that history is reconfigured much like a text is during the adaptation process. What Syberberg assumes is that all spectators are somehow responsible for Hitler, and so perpetuate the myth of Hitler through continuous viewings of the film Hitler. No one can escape the myth of Hitler; the film’s title when released in the United States was Our Hitler, emphasizing the collective creativity and shared guilt that Hitler represents. Syberberg believes that people

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must unburden themselves of the myth that Hitler exploited the people. Syberberg argues there are still powerful desires that feed “our” Hitler as they fed the historical Hitler. The people exploited him, “[s]eeking through Hitler the fulfillment of their noblest and darkest desires.”24 His film shows exactly how the people created and perpetuated a Hitler through various images, speeches, representations, and writings. The implication is that part of Hitler’s rise to power was based on the projection of his image, which is also why he continues to dominate the imagination or popular psyche. The audience—the spectators forced to watch the image—is eager for entertainment, and so views the film (Hitler) over and over again. Syberberg uses film because it projects images that can be saved, duplicated, and reviewed. When Hitler is the subject (and a film), he, too, can be projected and thus saved, duplicated, and reviewed. Corrigan rightly points out, The recollected representation of the dead Hitler becomes simply that, a collection of icons and imagistic indices kept alive by history’s audiences. . . . [W]hat the film projects is the representational reality of a repressed darkness, a demonic angel, that is in very sense the exhibition of an excess and the source of the film’s fiery and hypnotic attraction.25 This collection of images is what fires the imagination, instigates a historical interpretation, and prolongs the spectator experience. It also leads to a collage approach to filmmaking, another typical form associated with the avant-garde. Using so many materials and blending them into a whole makes his film an avant-garde adaptation. To Syberberg, the evil Hitler incarnate has been in existence for a long time and is manifested in the mythic and imagistic Hitler with the help of everyone (hence the Hitler-in-us idea) and through the help of cinema. History in the film is thus a conflation of the myths of the masses (public) and those of individuals (private). Together they form the myth of Hitler, the film Hitler, and show how these elements portray a society deeply engaged—or confronted—with the past. Sontag correctly sums, “By Hitler Syberberg does not mean only the real historical monster responsible for the deaths of tens of millions. He evokes a kind of Hitler-substance that outlives Hitler.”26 It is this “substance” that becomes the Hitler-as-film motif, as clearly indicated by the title. Hitler: A Film from Germany demands repeated viewingsto appreciate more fully its intricate structure and presentation, including the use of

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Brechtian distanciation effect, the inclusion of Wagner and other classical music, the critique of Hollywood and the use of other filmic images, and the overriding impulse of myth. The film serves as a historical document and, for Syberberg, a (historical) reality of society and culture, as defined by Hitler as both image and individual. Syberberg accomplishes the retrieval and cataloging of Hitler as cinematic representation. Hitler is media image, a myth, a representation, a presentation, and an attraction. As an avant-garde adaptation, the film serves as a history text and deserves analysis, interpretation, and reevaluation as an important—if not controversial—investigation into the irrationality of human desires, the film Hitler, and the collective mourning of a populace still haunted. According to Benjamin Buchloh, “Appropriation of historical models may be motivated by a desire to establish continuity and tradition and a fiction of identity, as well as originating from a wish to attain universal mastery of all codification systems.”27 Syberberg clearly wants to master many codification systems with Hitler: A Film from Germany, but the film is not an outright attempt at codifying Hitler. It instead wants to arrange material in a particular way to produce a unique vision. Still, the identity of Hitler is presented in fanciful, fictional, and realistic ways, making the adaptation of biography and history inventive and daunting. Hitler’s inner life is portrayed through external events—they are visualized through oration, reenactment, and symbolic gesture. The social, political, and cultural framework Syberberg constructs through the mass appropriation of personal minutiae and historical detail is made so precise that the film serves as the kind of adaptation that works best when overloading the senses. Because of the subject matter, Syberberg has to take an alternative, avant-garde approach—it is necessary. Hitler’s biography is as much fiction as a novel, in that it involves selections, omissions, hyperboles, and outright interpretations that reflect Syberberg’s views much more than historians. That is precisely why the film works so well; the truth of Hitler is not a linear, chronological, simulation of a spurious realism. Syberberg adopts a surrealist style of imaginative interpretation in an attempt to probe the inner truth of Hitler and convey what he felt and thought in addition to focusing strictly on what he did. Syberberg is interested in creating the historical imaginary, and he succeeds in this endeavor using an overly ornate avant-garde style and form, showcasing technique inasmuch as he exploits his source text, Hitler.

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Chapter 11

Street of Crocodiles

Timothy and Stephen Quay, identical twins who are American born but have lived and worked in London all of their filmmaking lives, produce darkly disturbing and densely textured films highlighting their fascination with and mastery of stop-motion puppet and object animation. Whether creating expressionistic or surrealistic sets and subject matter, their films function like dream worlds: visually poetic and mysterious journeys into darkened, claustrophobic corners of figurative and/or literal places and spaces. The Quays have made a career fashioning short films using puppets, dolls, and object animation to evoke these unusual places. These dream worlds appear antiquated or existing in faraway lands: sepia tones and chiaroscuro shades of darkness and light dominate the color schemes, and the films often appear dirty or scratched, while omnipresent classical music accompanies the scenes. Street of Crocodiles (1986) is their best-known film, a 20-minute tour de force of animation, live action, experimental cinematography, meticulously constructed mise-en-scène, and avant-garde adaptation. The film is based on a story by eccentric Polish writer Bruno Schulz. Schulz’s writing has often been described as “dream-logic,” which suggests a kind of literary output predicated on the notion that what occurs internally on the level of dreams is what matters in terms of how one writes and even constructs sentences. For this reason, his writing could be deemed experimental since it does not rely on conventional narrative, which makes his prose ripe for an imaginative and interpretative adaptation. The Quays’ films are cryptic, lyrical, and highly stylized. These techniques make their films inimitable among contemporary filmmakers: careful cinematography and abundantly rich mise-en-scène enables them to devote their attention to uncanny, metaphysical fairy tale worlds where anything seems possible. They animate assorted objects that interact with the dolls or puppets that make their short films not only highly original but also strangely compelling and oddly beautiful. Most, too,

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contain object animation, a prototypical element of stop-motion animation—the bringing to life of dead or inanimate things. The films focus on spaces, the interplay of light and shadow, and trancelike excursions into strange or surreal worlds, and Street of Crocodiles is no exception. In addition to the puppets, which really are the focus of their films and tend to resemble old dolls that have been abused by unscrupulous children, the Quays build their own sets, operate the cameras, select appropriate music (a highly important component of their films), and arrange all the lighting. Given this, it is no surprise they are considered auteurs, which implies a certain level of creative license: What they choose to adapt (Schulz) and how they decide to present it (in an avant-garde manner) is reflective of their aesthetic. The world they create in Street of Crocodiles is both suggestive in a symbolic and metaphoric sense. In addition, the film contains poetic, textual, and musical associations which complement the animated objects. Their puppet and object animation tends to displace spectator perspective, since everything is done in miniature and is part of a self-contained universe of an alternative space and place. Little is explained, and much is left to the imagination. Spectators are deliberately drawn into the textures of these worlds. The dense scenes compel viewers to examine these textures. Multiple camera angles also allow spectators to look at varying perspectives of the detailed scenes, which make Street of Crocodiles a remarkable achievement in avant-garde style. Street of Crocodiles is an homage of sorts to Bruno Schulz, a loose adaptation and reimagining of a series of Schulz stories, the primary one being “The Street of Crocodiles,” that focus on his time in Poland just before and during the World War II. The setting of Schulz’s story is a quasimythical land somewhere in Poland just before the war, and the Quays have rendered it as a dark nightmarish underground labyrinthine place. The city operates as its own living organism: Particles of dust come to life, mechanical pulleys clang and clack, pieces of meat come alive, and half-skulled dolls perform odd semiritualistic maneuvers and behaviors. Animation critic Paul Wells describes Street of Crocodiles as “The Quays adaptation of a Bruno Schulz short story, embodying their engagement with anti-narrative and the process of re-animation of the assumed narratives in objects, detritus, and uncertain environments.”1 Schulz wrote about how the city is akin to a living body, and the Quays portray this idea in a surrealistic fashion, giving life to objects (reanimating them), and having them interact with the marionette that serves as the lead character in the story or has them simply outline their own narratives. The “people”—really old dolls and puppets—who reside in the Quay’s city

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appear half alive, with empty heads. The dolls look much like a child’s doll, just menacing and dirty. The main character, a marionette without strings, an animated puppet, traverses the underground city-lair encountering the oddities found therein. The whole world of the dolls and the city is “set in motion” from above: In what appears to be either a deserted auditorium or decrepit museum with shelves, an old man (a live actor) spits into an old kinetoscope machine, which then falls through a series of mechanisms until it reaches the bottom where the marionette comes to life. In his writing, Schulz anthropomorphizes the objects of the world he evokes, and the Quays have effectively portrayed this on film with the man’s saliva serving as the impetus for the reanimation that occurs below the surface. Street of Crocodiles creates a world that fully comes alive through animation, and the world is surreal, fantastical, bizarre, eerie, and dreamlike. It is odd enough to be described as nightmarish, as I have done, but the Quays themselves rightfully suggest that the environment of Street of Crocodiles is not necessarily one of a nightmare because it contains and is guided by its skewed logic. In an interview with Roberto Aita, the brothers respond to a query about their films being claustrophobic or nightmarish by suggesting, It is not so much a nightmare. We really believe that with animation one can create an alternate universe, and what we want to achieve with our films is an ‘objective’ alternate universe, not a dream or a nightmare but an autonomous and self-sufficient world, with its particular laws and lucidity.2 Street of Crocodiles has its own internal logic, but it is not readily decipherable to the spectator, which adds to its avant-garde aesthetic of ambiguity. But I would suggest it is nightmarish for this reason; the Quays simply are not trying to put a nightmare onscreen. Schulz’s story is odd and surreal, dreamlike though couched in a certain type of realism (due to the vivid descriptive passages), and an adaptation of it warrants an avant-garde approach. For example, in one part of his book, Schulz describes a section of the town that is entirely made up, make believe, fake; elaborate facades disguise the buildings. The mood is dominated by “sham and empty gesture,” he writes. The intermingling of real people in real locations and their subsequent wanderings into fake sections of the city is rendered by the Quays through the device of the kinetoscope and the imaginary world below, the Street of Crocodiles.

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Street of Crocodiles is the Quays most famous film, one that is highly regarded in cult circles and cine clubs and, as an adaptation of Schulz, works to maintain the imaginative narrative of the story and the formal characteristics of avant-garde animation techniques. After the museum keeper spits into the eye of the kinetoscope device, below, a puppet wanders through underground realms of dirt and grime, searching perhaps for something, coming into contact with dolls and objects. The film relies more on dream logic than narrative storytelling, as is the case of the source material, even though the filmmakers take some liberties with Schulz’s text. The lone puppet roams through a netherworld of sometimes familiar but mostly unfamiliar settings, where logic, perspective, and natural law remain unsettlingly disproportioned. According to Laura Marks, “All the surfaces in Quay films have heavy patina of tarnish and decay, so that even floors and furniture have a sense of aura—that is, the marks of a long-gone, living presence. These richly textured, miniature scenes compel a viewer to move close, yet at the same time they multiply the points of contact all over the screen.”3 The Quays suggest this despoiled landscape is stored in a deserted museum, which, with the image of the kinetoscope, suggests the primordial powers of the cinema to animate strange places and spaces. The puppet encounters bizarre machines doing rote and repetitive activities. Meanwhile, a small roguelike figure makes objects come to life by reflecting light on them. The puppet makes it to a room where a tailor remakes things to his liking. There are disturbing images in his office space: three vaguely female dolls with hollowed-out heads, pulsating animal or human organs stuck with needles, a woman’s shoe whose heel is a screw, a map of Poland, dirty tables, piles of dust. (Esoteric ephemera decorate all of the Quays’ films.) This imagery is so dense and detailed it is often overwhelming to the eye: The scale of the set pieces combined with a low depth of field force us into the scene and make our gaze travel among its textures. Street of Crocodiles typifies the Quays’ highly personal world of objects, puppets, skewed perspectives, and dark, sinister, and unexplained actions. What is really remarkable is that Street of Crocodiles seems simultaneously believable while obviously being an intricate process of animation and highly stylized formalization, let alone a unique form of exploitative adaptation. Bruno Schulz is regarded as a cult figure in literature. His works, which also include Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, itself adapted into an avant-garde film, interweave personal memory with period pieces that result in a hybrid form of writing, a kind of quasimemoir or lyrical fiction. Street of Crocodiles is semiautobiographical, and in it, Schulz

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creates a kind of mythology built on his own reminisces and personal actions. He favors strong personification, which translates perfectly to the Quays’ adaptation. Schulz essentially personifies everything: the city, animals, furniture—all sorts of objects come to life through his descriptions. The Quays’ method of animation, itself atypical of cartoon animation and therefore more cutting edge and experimental, highlights the importance discovered in objects. Much like Jan Švankmajer, the Quays take discarded objects—dolls, screws, clothes, pins—and animate them through their vibrant stop-motion technique. The reanimation of lifeless or dead things is an avant-garde practice; using a highly sophisticated way of detailing the minutiae of objects and their environments, the Quays painstakingly combine experimental camera angles and perspectives, working in combination with music, sound effects, and intricate narrative, which results in a peculiar world reminiscent of the odd one created by Schulz. In describing their method, Suzanne Buchan says, The Quays work almost exclusively in 3D animation; puppets, décors, and objets trouvés are initiated in the cinematic metamorphosis which is the technique’s quintessence. They are animated, brought to life, embedded in elliptical narratives and musical structures. The inherent possibilities of a form that enables the transcending of natural physical laws such as gravity, perspective, and the strictures of real time make film an obvious choice for artists interested in various concepts of perception, vision and its subversion, and the preverbal world of dream and inner voice.4 In using these methods, particularly the avant-garde technique of transforming perception through animation, the Quays manipulate perspective and meaning through a series of detailed shots and scenes in Street of Crocodiles that leaves the viewer uneasy from experiencing such an overwhelming, synaesthetic film. The Quays appropriate the mannequins, puppets, and marionettes that Schulz describes in his intricate prose. Schulz writes, “Do you understand the power of form, of expression, of pretense, the arbitrary tyranny imposed on a helpless block, and ruling it like its own, tyrannical, despotic soul?” He continues, “You give a head of canvas and oakum an expression of anger and leave with it, with the convulsion, the tension enclosed once and for all, with a blind fury for which there is no outlet.”5 In Street of Crocodiles, the Quays directly link such description to their dolls and puppets, especially the main character that appears haggard, torn, and manipulated. He stares with a combination

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of fear and detachment as he watches the other dolls perform their ritual behaviors of sewing and constructing other dolls or clothes, all while maintaining the same blank expressions. Schulz writes, “Weep over you own fate, you see the misery of imprisoned matter, of tortured matter which does not know what it is and why it is, nor where the gesture may lead that has been imposed on it forever.” Watching the dilapidated marionettes and dolls from the film provokes feelings of unease; we are drawn in by the formal style of the animation process but are also taken aback by the function of the animation in the narrative. To this end, the way the Quays have adapted the source material is brilliant. Schulz writes in “The Street of Crocodiles” about how matter constantly moves, evolving and changing as it sees fit. Schulz has the father character in his story profess a doctrine, the Great Heresy, which espouses the view that matter forms and has its own internal strivings. Schulz writes, “Matter has been given infinite fertility, inexhaustible vitality, and, at the same time, a seductive power of temptation which invites us to create as well.” The words seem apt for the Quays’ approach to cinema, specifically the methods they use to reanimate objects like puppets and dolls, and reflects their inspired method of adaptation: Schulz’s words are themselves adapted through imagery. The Quays use alchemy to conjure a world of aberrations, where ordinary objects take on mysterious implications beyond their literal functions. All of the Quays’ films remind us that we are surrounded by objects that become organic and thus have their own thoughts, actions, and points of view. The synthesizing of puppets, stop-motion animation, and complex and claustrophobic spaces is at once both disturbing and beautiful. The worlds they create are alive, an odd paradox since they are creating animated things from inanimate things. Street of Crocodiles exemplifies these tendencies. Watching it means entering a world where dream logic appears to exist and persist. As Suzanne Buchan puts it, Watching any Quay Brothers film means entering into a complicity of furtive glances, choreographed shadows, and a mélange of artistic, musical, and literary tropes. Theirs is an instantly recognizable style, a shifting composite of chiaroscuro, an assemblage of obscure and fragmented nonnarrative structures.6 Their films appear lost in time—there is no distinguishing mark of place, just the dust-filled objects suggesting strange arcane machines, cracked and broken mirrors, half-headed dolls, or sepia-toned spaces

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that dominate each scene, which is used to great effect in their adaptation of “The Street of Crocodiles.” Often this effect is disarming since we are offered no cues to the narrative. The demiurgic father character from Schulz’s story also says that he will make “creatures” but insists on their fleeting nature: “We shall not insist on either durability or solidity of workmanship; our creations will be temporary . . .” The Quays’ version of Schulz shows dolls with half a head or one arm missing. In a final macabre scene, the dolls surround the puppet and perform a mad scientist–type surgery on him, switching heads and replacing its empty skull with cotton. The walls and shelves are covered with needles, strings, screws, jars, and drawings of human body parts (skulls, jaws, and genitalia). The entire mise-en-scène pulsates with life, casually yet sinisterly moving about in constant flux. Schulz’s father character in the story states, matter of factly, “There is no dead matter; lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown life forms.” We clearly see this onscreen with the adaptation. The influence of Schulz on the Quays’ films has extended beyond Street of Crocodiles, and the brothers have routinely discussed how certain aspects of his work, and particularly the book they have adapted, have influenced their way of approaching filmmaking. For example, in response to a question about Schulz and the interviewer Andre Habib’s, observation that “[i]t seemed as though Schulz had seen all your films” (an impossibility since Schulz was murdered in 1942), the Quays offered a spirited reply: We saw all of his films, rather! (laughs) It’s as if he wrote the secret scenario for the films. [After reading Schulz] it was such a challenge, since we had been reading his work and we thought that this was the direction we really wanted to go with the puppets. We had to sort of grab them, and not be fearless, not be afraid of the puppets. Schulz in a way liberated us. He’s such a powerful writer. We could make films around Bruno Schulz for the rest of our lives and still try and grasp, apprehend his universe.7 Clearly, the Quays found in Schulz the kind of writer who was not only inspirational but also one who had a similar aesthetic to their own work. The Quays have been able to adapt Schulz in an effective manner, realizing that an avant-garde approach is essentially the best and only method of translating his work to the screen. Other influences on the Quays’ work include Robert Walser and Franz Kafka. (Walser’s novel Jakob Von Guten served as the basis for their feature-length debut, Institute Benjamneta,

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itself an avant-garde adaptation.) These literary figures were marginal during their lifetimes, and the puppet characters in the films are also often on the outside looking in. The focus on otherness permeates all of their films, whether in general theme, cramped or claustrophobic décor, or by the nature of their approach. Schulz came up with something called “the thirteenth month,” a state of dreamlike intermediacy, a hallucinatory other place that influenced the Quays’ work, particularly Street of Crocodiles. In other interviews, they have reiterated their connection to Schulz: Stephen Quay said, “What Schulz’s own work proposed was to push us in that domain of the ‘thirteenth freak month’ and the whole notion of the poetic ascendancy of the everyday, degraded with reality.” Timothy added, “[All] the sorts of themes were already in us but seemed more systematically organized by Schulz. . . . [Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles] is really like a poetic essay about matter. We just said, ‘It’s not much of a narrative, but it’s enough.’ It was a real discovery for us”8 Elsewhere, they have discussed Schulz’s influence on their films and how they wanted to adapt Street of Crocodiles in a particular, avant-garde manner. In the interview with Habib, they state, “We are not that interested in psychology, unless it’s pathology, fetishism. It’s the aberration which takes you on the journey away from the main street. You go down the side-alley, or you descend into the cellar, or into the attic.” Habib then interjects, “Into the Thirteenth month . . .” The Quays respond: “That is precisely the greatest metaphor for us. It’s this thirteenth freak month. It’s everything that animation embodies and where its greatest freedom lies. Creating a realm, a universe that is totally self-sufficient in its freakiness.”9 The animation in Street of Crocodiles depicts this “freakiness” to the extreme. Their animation is a kind of sophisticated visual language, consisting of lighting, mise-en-scène, music, stylized movement, close-ups and pans, used consistently to construct the avant-garde style of filmmaking that invites us into a dream world of metaphor and visual poetry. Again discussing Schulz, the Quays say, [His work] managed to make us understand animation as a type of metaphysics . . . [when] Schulz summarizes the ‘thirteenth freak month,’ I think I discovered a metaphor that adapts itself well to animation, or rather animation that lives on the margins of mainstream production. We want animation to be like a mark on the margins, a grand apocryphal, in the sense of Bruno Schulz’s work. It is a defiance we picked up thanks to his work, which has pushed us to create something of which we are quite proud.10

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Their work stands at the margins like many other avant-garde filmmakers’. The fact that they have created such an indelible adaptation also makes them antimainstream; Schulz’s work is not amendable to the screen and would never work its way into mainstream production. The Quays’ work, that is, is marginal, existing in another world both literally—as short animated works—and also figuratively, in the “thirteenth month.” But through their animation, their wildly eccentric and experimental method, Schulz appears ready made for an avant-garde adaptation. The Quays’ defiant approach to filmmaking enables them to adapt such a work. Street of Crocodiles is a study in surrealism and expressionism, a film that relishes in its antiquated presentation of its source material. The main figure, the puppet, wanders through the mazelike streets filled with dim alleyways, mirrors, and shop windows. The puppet is a kind of prototypical representation of Schulz’s characters in his story, namely the protagonist, but also perhaps the father figure who appears. The puppet is made of chipped and dirty crafted plaster, has sunken dark slits for eyes and long, pointedhands and fingers, and wears a tattered coat on its frail form. The camera follows his journey, intermingling point-of-view shots with objective pans and close-ups. As he wanders, we see various animations: a cube of ice forms, screws stand erect and appear to dance, piles of dust shift and scurry across the floor. It is a netherworld where physical space is deconstructed in order to present the scope of its inhabitants or objects. The puppet appears lifelike; it achieves a sense of vitality that works against the environment and especially the three sinister dolls with hollowed-out heads who, at the end of the film, restrain the puppet and work on it in movements like a tailor. In interview, the Quays have said, “For us, real marionettes, string marionettes, [produce] moments of otherness, they [create] a spell, something very unnerving, disquieting. . . . [What] we’re trying to do is release their strangeness.”11 Their avant-garde adaptation of Schulz’s strange world is embodied in these puppets. Simply using marionettes and other assorted objects brought to life makes their film avant-garde. Watching it beholds wonders, both surreal and disarmingly real, especially in terms of the ambiguous nature of human behavior, here symbolized by the dolls. According to Vincent Canby, Surrealist films aren’t meant to be interpreted in the systematic manner of a foreign language. One reads into them what one will, and, in this case, if one has any knowledge of the source material, what one can. The Quay films have the initial impact of monstrous, extremely personal visions of disorder, set in a pocket-sized universe where effects have little to do with causes.12

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The Quays have said they are not aiming to present surrealist states or even to use surrealism in their films, but Street of Crocodiles is guided by a fractured spatial and temporal schema reminiscent of surrealist texts. Because the film also has dreamlike qualities, it bears associations with surrealism. The viewer has to decipher the combination of images and sounds to form a particular view of the film, which is possibly informed by surrealism. Street of Crocodiles captures the uncanny in animation. Objects become both familiar and alien, they and their environment both intimidating and uncomfortable. To create a perverse and strange world through animation shows a direct link between animating the inorganic while juxtaposing it with the organic (represented by the puppet). Schulz’s story operates in the same fashion. The protagonist of the story also wanders the streets, and Schulz describes the city with maplike precision. He uses a map as a metaphor for how people live and exist. In the film, the Quays show a torn and sutured map of Poland. The site of urban decay—the city—becomes manifest in the film, while the image of the map is a knowing wink to Schulz’s ideas. Schulz presents the city in miniature—as a map—and the Quays accurately portray this in the film through the miniaturized sets and the figures that inhabit them. When objects are animated in this world, they try to adapt to the environment, much like the puppet figure, but they are ultimately displaced. There is an overwhelming sense of disorientation, which again, stems from the original source. The Quays use macrolenses, quick zooms and pans, dirty lenses, and flickering lights among the dark shadows to heighten the disorienting effect. The spaces of Street of Crocodiles thus appear to paradoxically occupy both infinite and confined space, creating the surrealist effect of losing a sense of reality. This effect is heightened by the fact that, because the puppet figure continuously creeps through this dirty world, we seem to be in a subconscious, otherworldly place, where mechanical, unexplained actions dominate and dark, shadowy figures loom. Hence, critic Sarah Scott can conclude, “The Street of Crocodiles requires the viewer to reach forward toward the screen and sense the filmic objects rather than relate to them in a purely logical manner.”13 The Quays do not focus on the general purpose of objects that they animate, which is why the film is horrifying, like Schulz’s metaphoric story of living in Poland during the occupation. The film synthesizes the fragmentary moments found in Schulz into dense textures. The objects and puppets of the film allow us to recognize the importance of the smallest details—the slightly ajar window, the dark shadows across faces, the movement and life of objects.

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As an avant-garde adaptation, Street of Crocodiles is almost unsurpassed in its audacity, originality, and sheer inventiveness. The film is wonderfully strange. It is the type of adaptation that immediately wants you to discover the source material and to also watch the film again. Although they take some liberties with the text, the essence of Schulz is in the adaptation. Critic Robert Fulford writes, Schulz’s own report on our controlling unconscious is fascinating, and always oblique. While he considered storytelling central to human life (‘The most fundamental function of the spirit is inventing fables, creating tales’), his own stories are not simple. No one ever called their appeal universal. ‘Poetry happens,’ he explained, ‘when short-circuits of sense occur.’ His work is full of crossed wires, wild fantasies colliding with humble realities.14 To this end, the Quays’ adaptation focuses on the “crossed wires,” the areas where logic may be disregarded, imagination enforced, and the senseless re-created. They have created an avant-garde adaptation based solely on their (in)direct link to the heritage of Schulz, taking his story and translating it in a way that suits their style. Schulz describes the Street of Crocodiles as an empty space—imaginary, fake, faceless—amid the real cityscape, a combination of the “sensible and the metaphysical.” The Quays latched onto this idea with their adaptation, saying, “It’s like when Bruno writes that Street of Crocodiles is just a white area on the map. Schulz does that so beautifully. I think life can be apprehended in that way, if you’re alert and wait for it.”15 They describe Schulz’s fiction as akin to a fairy tale, where one “gets lost” or “loses the handrail,” concluding that “[t]he fear, the disquiet, the malaise is a very subtle and disturbing thing which is also very real. We know that feeling. It’s very disturbing to think that, while you think you’re fine, there is something navigating deep inside you.”16 Street of Crocodiles is the kind of film that creates the sensation of fear and excitement because it is dark and disturbingly, but somehow compellingly, beautiful in its own way. The “white area” of the map becomes manifest, becomes imagined through the experimental adaptation process the Quays undertake. Schulz fills in the blank white space of the map with ongoing descriptions of a dirty industrial city space where the people are portrayed as slightly lunatic. Taking such a strange work like Schulz’s and turning it into visionary avant-garde cinema seems only appropriate. The Quays are a strange pair of filmmaking stylists, animators who believe that the cinema is

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meant for larger undertakings than mere amusement. Working with the Schulz text provided a catalyst to stretch the lines of what an adaptation can do, mostly because Schulz’s work is highly cerebral. The Quays discussed their way of adaptation, highlighting how they read “cinematically.” They say, When you’re reading, as you’re discovering something, your brain is also asking: ‘can this be made cinematic, in a parallel way?’ Can you free the text from its literary side and yet make an equivalent universe in its visual, aural side. It’s a quiet homage to the author and then it becomes a very personal homage to the author. . . . [You] have to feel something very deep about what you’re adapting. It’s above all an intimate thing. You’re releasing it for yourself, to discover that universe and see what you can do with it.17 With Street of Crocodiles, the Quays have managed to create an adaptation that strives for intimacy through its intricate cinematography, editing, and mise-en-scène. They have let loose Schulz’s universe, adding their own specific touches and flourishes to an already complex text. They add, “We gave the story a theatrical dimension gleaning a lot of other things from Schulz, and even other things which we thought were Schulzianesque, which we thought would work in terms of a Schulzian universe.”18 The Quays seem to work through experimentation. The music for Street of Crocodiles, for instance, was composed first, with the Quays creating scenes around it. They have rightfully made their own interpretation of the original text, exploiting it for what it gives and for what it evokes; hence, they adapt Schulzian ideas, motifs, sounds, and other images to complement their vision. The formal possibilities intrinsic in animation are crucial characteristics of a surrealist dream, or at least an inner vision that simulates a half-awake state of consciousness, since inanimate things are brought to life. One reason for this is that puppetry can create a synthesis of realistic and nonrealistic elements that blur lines of ordinary narrative comprehension. Spectators are forced to reimagine reality through the Quays’ films or at least are coerced into suspending disbelief, and Street of Crocodiles proves that approaching material with an avant-garde attitude and aesthetic helps demonstrate the elusiveness of everyday phenomena. Bringing life to puppets—the concept of automatization—which also happens to the objects in the film, allows for the visualization of the puppets’ secret lives. We see this at the beginning of Street of Crocodiles

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when the marionette, after landing in the subterranean world, has his strings cut. Stop-motion animation—the kind employed by the Quay brothers—involves intricately and precisely moving objects or puppets and then filming every small movement. This process lends a realism to the objects’ or puppets’ world, indeed the plausibility of the scenes in the Quays’ films. As Marks aptly suggests, “And what is animation but to make animate—to impart life, or to divine the interior life of objects? In other words, animation acknowledges the aura of things, the life they contain whether imparted by humans or somehow inherent.”19 What we get, then, is the secret world of the objects and puppets, a world never known to us except through animation, all aptly shown through the Quays’ intense and poetic avant-garde adaptation.

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Chapter 12

The Dante Quartet

Not so much an adaptation than an inspired argument with Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Stan Brakhage’s The Dante Quartet (1987) takes Dante as a starting point for his own personal meditation on the meanings associated with, derived from, and hovering around heaven, hell, and purgatory. Brakhage is interested in how Dante can be transcribed into our daily lives; Dante, for him, provides a source text for considering his own autobiography. The films that comprise Brakhage’s quartet (Hell Itself, Hell Spit Flexion, Purgation, and existence is song) all aim to satisfy the need for primordial vision: What one sees in Brakhage’s film is the elemental nature of vision itself, here metaphorically and symbolically adapted to the screen as a series of densely colored frames that inspire active viewer participation in construction not just meaning, but the image itself. Brakhage has long been considered the most ambitious avant-garde filmmaker of the twentieth century. His films are extremely personal yet universal in scope (as with The Dante Quartet), and they all propose a teaching or guiding of the eye, a recalling or reclaim to vision, a euphoric consideration and attention to the minutiae of visual vacillation and effect. He emphasizes the immediate instance of perception; The Dante Quartet, which is one of Brakhage’s hand-painted films, instructs us in the process of visuality itself by forcing the contemplation and close examination of the way colors, textures, rhythms, light, and speed interact to create something only perceived through cinema. Painting directly on the filmstrip suggests the endless spaces and shapes that collide, form, and dissipate, even when the film frames themselves do not present outright pictures but instead contain connotations, allusions, metaphors— things that can only be acquired through the process of active viewing, an essential characteristic of avant-garde filmmaking and certainly the cornerstone to Brakhage’s films. Brakhage attempts to render onscreen hypnagogic vision or closed-eye vision, what one sees when the eyes are closed, which is Brakhage’s aesthetic touchstone. Thus, in something like The Dante Quartet, which is essentially a moving painting, what one

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“sees” is images both constructed on the filmstrip and what one imagines as well. As Brakhage describes it, “I started painting on film primarily to create a corollary of what I could see with my closed-eye vision or hypnagogic vision because there was no way I could get the camera inside my head or create a photographic equivalent of those shapes streaming across my closed eyes . . . .”1 The Dante Quartet is an approximation of the closed-eye vision Brakhage derives from the themes, images, and moods of the original Dante text. Dante’s text has provided many different types of adaptations, from music to literature to the visual arts. Brakhage’s film adapts the text in a manner befitting abstract expressionism; it is a cinematic approximation of the artistic rendering of inner thought and especially inner vision, inspired by the Dante original. The film is constantly shape shifting; the colors are thick and stand alone and mix freely, generating an intense and wonderful amalgam of textures. The film was made over a period of seven years, and it is composed of hand-painted cells, superimposed imagery (including images from Billy Wilder’s Irma la Douce [1963]), and various film stocks, including 35 millimeter, 70 millimeter, and IMAX. Brakhage also scratches the surface of the filmstrip and drips paint onto it. In an interview with Scott MacDonald, Brakhage comments, “I was making The Dante Quartet by painting on IMAX film with very thick, halfan-inch-thick paint, belts of paint. I had no sense that it could be printed or that I’d ever be able to show what I was doing to anybody . . .”2 The resulting film consists of fragments from each film stock, which alters the size and dimensions of the image during the course of projection. Akin to Dante’s conception of hell, purgatory, and heaven, these shifts emphasize mood, rhythm, and light in multifarious ways. Because Brakhage makes the paint so thick, perspective also shifts and changes during the film, creating a sense of depth and layering. This makes the film largely abstract, which seems only appropriate when attempting to adapt a complex (and personal) work like Dante’s epic poem to the screen. Also, Brakhage acknowledges the original source as providing a constant pull on him: “Thirty years of reading all the translations in English of Dante’s The Divine Comedy—I even tried to learn Italian at one point—as well as brooding on the Christian concept of hell, purgatory and heaven”3 Dante’s poem is a highly personal meditation on the afterlife. It is subjective, so it only makes sense that such a highly personal filmmaker like Brakhage would adapt it to the screen in such an unconventional yet comparable manner. That is, when adapting poetry, perhaps the highest form of personal inquiry, Brakhage seems right at home. Brakhage’s

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own personal investment in creating the film was high: After nearly thirty years, his marriage was ending, and its impact on the film mirrors Dante: “As Dante put it, ‘Mid life I entered a dark wood’ and that dark soon leads to ‘Abandon all hope Ye who enter here’ as he engages with hell and then with purgatory and finally with heaven.”4 He continues, Having finished [Hell Spit Flexion] I had to go back to hell itself and that fell out when the whole marriage began to fall apart. Then the struggle to try and transform oneself, if nothing else to scrub out the horror one has engendered, and the wrongs. Transformation or purgation as I call it in the film.5 The key to this idea, and indeed, the means to creating a specific, personal interpretation of the film, is Brakhage’s idea of “transformation or purgation.” The film is so personal in its theme and its technique that it recalls Dante’s own transformation and purgation, which can manifest itself in any attentive viewer’s imagination or concept of Dante. Watching the film, one sees how the colors and textures transform words (Dante) to images, and the images speak in multiple ways. Describing the film is difficult, mainly because it consists of multiple hues, lights, scratchy or grainy images (of Irma la Douce and also a volcano), white and black leaders, and sprocket holes and projected light. Hell Spit Flexion begins as a frame within the larger frame of the film. Blue, browns, and finally blacks swirl in rhythmic play. Purgation begins with a clear leader, so that light escapes through holes and gaps between the paint, then transforms through reds, blacks, and dominant blues. The existence is song section has a strong mix of blue shades and red. The colors are in constant motion throughout the film. Hell Itself has creamy whites that push across and around the screen into oranges, yellows, and reds, finally pushed back by blues and blacks. The dark vision discovered in Dante’s source text fuels Brakhage’s adaptation, though Brakhage is also keen on suggesting there may be a way out of the hell or hellish purgatory that hinders mobility, sight, or ability. Brakhage has noted that in addition to Dante’s text, he was also inspired by William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. In particular, he notes, “Then, not presuming more about heaven than what has been given to me to have on earth, I was moved by Rilke’s ‘existence in song.’ And that is the closest I would attempt at Heaven at that time”6 P. Adams Sitney sees the reclaiming of song as the transformative power of liberation from hell

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or purgatory, a purgation, citing Rilke’s phrase as the inspiration for Brakhage’s foray into heaven. He suggests, The story of The Dante Quartet, as we glean it from Brakhage’s catalog notes and interview statements, is that there is a way out of the spasmic magma of hellish proprioception: an optical reflex, like the rhythmic expectoration of phlegm, transmits through a liminal stage of purgation into the realm of song, where the psychic and somatic narrative is sublimated in orphic and Promethean myths: The earth sings in perpetual, volcanic self-creation.7 This estimation is an elaborate way of saying that The Dante Quartet is a very good approximation of the source text, for it follows the personal journey of an escape from purgatory and the strive for heaven, discovered on earth. In this sense, the film can be called a relatively straightforward adaptation—but in actuality, it is far from it, because Brakhage is solely interested in how the manipulation of celluloid fosters a more associative and imaginative interpretation of the source text than any kind of literal rendering. That is, the film is a very truthful retelling of Dante, but one whose “truth” is perceivable first to Brakhage, then to us. The emotional weight that instigated the film (the breakup of his marriage, the wrestling with the concepts of hell, purgatory, and heaven) inspired (or conflicted) Brakhage to such an extent, the film is, in some regards, the filmmaker’s equivalent of these three realms. In its attempt to adapt the four stages of ascent from hell as told by Dante, The Dante Quartet is a stunning visual translation, and avant-garde adaptation grounded in personal interpretation (and hypnagogic vision). Brakhage describes the “hypnagogic equivalents of Dante’s three-fold vision” as painstakingly difficult and highly personal—the means by which many avant-garde adaptations are created. He states, describing the adaptation process, I made Hell Itself during the break-up with Jane and the collapse of my whole life, so I got to know quite well the streaming of the hypnagogic process that’s hellish. Now, the body can not only feed back its sense of being in hell but also its sense of getting out of hell, and Hell Spit Flexion shows the way out—it’s there as a crowbar to lift one out of hell toward the transformatory state—which is the third state—purgatory. And finally there’s a fourth hypnagogic state that’s fleeting and evanescent—a sort of heavenly feeling. I’ve called this last part existence is song quoting Rilke, because I don’t want to presume upon the after-life and call it “Heaven.” So what I tried to do in the quartet was to bring down

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to earth Dante’s vision, inspired by what’s on either side of one’s nose and right before the eyes: a movie that reflects the nervous system’s basic sense of being.8 This long description pinpoints the importance of the everyday, of one’s “sense of being,” and the fact that accepting it through hypnagogic vision allows a creative way of adapting something—here the Dante text—into a film. It is a complex process, and one that is highly subjective and personal, but for Brakhage, it is the best (and perhaps only) way to find equivalents onscreen for the transformatory states of reality of the terrestrial, even ephemeral world. Because the entire film consists of paint on the filmstrip, it is impossible to say that it is a simple transformation of text to screen. It is more a mood or feeling adaptation, a symbolic and metaphoric rendering of ideas, images, themes, and moods from Dante than a transcoding of words. Brakhage’s film, like almost all of his films and especially the painted films, explores and reveals form and texture, imagery that is at once unfamiliar but becomes familiar through shape shifting and association. The visual text we see is such a dense union of allusion and transformation of various source materials, globs of carefully mixed paint and light and textures, that the eye constantly is in flux, as mobile as the images and the frame. As Fred Camper notes, Brakhage’s vision had “an interest which transmuted itself into a desire to free objects from structures based on language”9 These “adventures of perception,” as Brakhage liked to call his films, emphasize formal technique, a broad range of thematic concerns (as evidenced in The Dante Quartet), and an endless drive toward experience as process. Watching The Dante Quartet, one discovers new ways of visualizing the world: the way the paint moves and creates its own rhythm suggests not just a unique way of adapting Dante but also of instructing us in how to see. According to Sitney, “Brakhage’s Dante is a poet of visionary and visual discriminations, rather than the social prophet of cosmic justice and redemption, and his homage to [Dante] is a series of hand-painted films inspired by hypnagogic vision”10 The hypnagogic vision, showcased and represented in layers of paint, creates the visionary poetics of Dante’s verse, remarkable for a nine-minute film. There are brief glimpses of text that “suggest the world of Dante’s writing without ever really anchoring the film’s ‘representational’ realm”11 Brakhage conflates subject/object and images/thoughts; colors, textures, and optical rhythms advocate textual alliances as well as descriptive intricacies of vision and thought, all in a dense abstraction of moving paint that becomes the film qua text of Dante. Brakhage’s lifelong

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obsession with vision presumed a kind of avant-garde filmmaking that displays a certain universal/subjective perceptional experience for viewers: “Brakhage was convinced that there was a primary level of cognition that preceded language which he came to call ‘moving visual thinking’ in his later theoretical writings. It was the unconscious of vision, which he aspired to make visible”12 The Dante Quartet is an attempt to conceive this vision on film while maintaining some allegiance to the source text. Ultimately, The Dante Quartet is a highly individualistic adaptation of Dante. But it should be—how else should Brakhage respond to a text that he grappled with for so many years? Brakhage is one of the most intimate of all filmmakers, and he is at the apex of avant-garde and experimental film, so it is no surprise that his film is so unusual in its scope and approach. (It should be noted, too, that Brakhage has said that a great many of his films stem from his interactions with literature. His Faust films are also a prime example of avant-garde adaptation.) Brakhage adapts Dante with a dialectical idea: intimately composed layers of paint projected on an immense screen. As he describes it, “I wanted the dimensions of the film to match those of an IMAX screen which is about three to four stories tall and half a city block wide. A film that would be like an enormous mural painting . . . but what is appalling is that you can see it today only in a postage size version”13 Imagine the prospects if Brakhage got his wish and the film was viewed in IMAX; it would have completely overwhelmed the senses and created a new kind of spatial/temporal dislocation and disassociation that would make it even more experimental. According to Sitney, “The minimal iconography befits the monumental scale of this conception: broad swirls of color, latticeworks of cracked paint, holes and crevices of white light bore through a throbbing wall of blended hues”14 The complexity of the film is in this concept; it “offers an obscure, off-centre and idiosyncratic perspective” of Dante, vision, and active participation.15 If Dante’s original is an allegorical tale about the soul’s ascension to heaven, rendered through philosophical and theological themes, then Brakhage’s avant-garde adaptation is clearly one person’s journey created through hypnagogic vision, a film that presents a visual approximation of the world of Dante as conceived by the inner-eye world of Brakhage. It is one of the most inspired and relevant adaptations of Dante for this reason, and the film offers new ways for us to explore the original source text. Its formal innovation begets a type of filmmaking unheralded yet unmatched in its creativity and selfconfidence, so we must applaud Brakhage for his endeavors.

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Chapter 13

Alice

Jan Švankmajer’s Alice (1988) is one of the most original adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland because of his inimitable style that combines stop-motion animation and live action. Švankmajer infuses his film with the darker undercurrents that highlight the original work, making it, in my estimation, the best film version of the novel. The film is a wonderful example of an avant-garde adaptation because it uses highly innovative techniques, exploits the original source, and presents a personal, creative, and interpretive vision. Alice is a surreal and disturbing version of the Carroll stories. (Švankmajer uses both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass for his film, though the majority of the adaptation comes from the former.) Švankmajer’s Alice is a reimagining and a highly uncompromising avant-garde film, one that shocks the spectator by transposing Carroll’s novel to an equally uncanny cinematic world full of object animation. Švankmajer’s film is an astounding version of Carroll and focuses on perception, imagination, and dream, all through his trademark style of tactile representation, where objects appear tangible through their coming to life. Like Carroll’s book, Švankmajer’s film has its own sense of fractured logic and spatial and temporal dislocation, and, interestingly enough, has little allure and attraction for children; it is a film more likely to appeal to adult audiences, which makes it different (and better) than simplified versions for children or teens (Disney, Tim Burton). Given their subject matter, characters, and out-of-the-ordinary locales, Carroll’s books that serve as the basis for an adaptation beg to be filmed as strange, bizarre, and fantastic. Some versions of the film—and there are many adaptations of Carroll’s books—lighten the subject matter, minimize or dismiss the surrealism prevalent in the texts (and ripe for screen translation), and reshape it with an eye to box office receipts. In other words, most versions of the film forgo the avant-garde aesthetic altogether, instead relying on computer-generated imagery (like in the more recent Burton version), or psychedelic-inspired mayhem (like the 1966 version, clever

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as it might be). Švankmajer’s film is an incredible feat of both avantgarde adaptation and visionary eclecticism. Jan Švankmajer’s unique aesthetic approach and imaginative vision make him one of the most respected and distinctive filmmakers working today. His works are highly inventive and ambitious in form and style, combining live action, puppets and marionettes, collage, various forms of animation (object, drawn, and clay), and montage. He finds inspiration from alchemy and Surrealism. In his adaptation Alice, he presents the inanimate world fully come to life: Objects enforce themselves into Alice’s life, and they often intrude to a level of discomfort, dismay, or deliciously dark humor. His work is entirely original, visionary, sometimes reactionary, and often hard to grasp. Instead of offering answers to often bewildering or absurd questions about human nature, his films probe, examine, and irritate—and rarely appease. Like other avant-garde filmmakers, Švankmajer challenges the audience by stimulating the mind and the eye. Alice is a prototypical Švankmajer film in this regard, and it also presents a good case for an avant-garde adaptation. Even though he participates in the surrealist tradition and is therefore very much an avant-garde filmmaker, all of his films, including Alice, are universal because they appeal to and are reflective of general notions of identity, culture, and liberty, muted themes found in Carroll’s source books. His feature films, which also include avant-garde adaptations of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Faust, 1994) and a mix of Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade (Lunacy, 2005), are allegorical tales that present us with nightmarish realms of human experience, combining surrealist aesthetics within a realist context. When pieces of meat come alive or kitchen utensils rebel, as they do in several of his films, Švankmajer shows how they affect normal, real conditions, as surreal as the images appear. Surrealism, in general, is concerned with irrationality, the unconscious, and liberation. The influence of surrealism is important to his films, and certain images lend themselves to surreal motifs, understandings, and tactics. (Švankmajer has long been a member of the Czech Surrealist Group.) Even though Švankmajer sometimes focuses on life’s absurdities, it is these moments that help shape character, define personality, and open doors to entirely new worlds of imagination, which are, arguably, themes of Carroll’s book. For example, in an early scene in Alice, when Alice descends into the rabbit hole, we get a good sense of the nightmarish and surreal world of Svankmajer’s adaptation. After we get a point-of-view shot of the white rabbit (a stuffed animal that Švankmajer brings to life through animation) scurrying across desertlike

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terrain, Švankmajer shows Alice’s descent through a school desk drawer, where she climbs in and, through animation, squeezes into the small drawer, then goes down the rabbit hole as if using an antiquated pulley system. It is dark and claustrophobic, and the clack and crack of the chains as the pulley system slowly goes down, deeper and deeper, makes the scene nightmarish. She sees shelves containing strange objects as she passes downward. Almost all of the objects she sees are reproductions of what was in her room, which will later come to life in Wonderland. These objects help identify Alice and later help her maneuver through Wonderland and return home. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is not a children’s book per se, and Švankmajer understands this, which is why, instead of using many wellknown actors to play various parts, he uses only one actor for Alice and his characteristic stop-motion animation of objects and puppets for the other characters, which breathes new life into the original. Carroll’s book is charged with ideology, politics, satire, allegory, and metaphor—not to mention rather darkly comic interludes—that when presented as a film, some of these ideas may be best articulated to a more mature audience or at least one more receptive to the avant-garde. (Obviously, one need not be familiar with the avant-garde to understand or enjoy Švankmajer’s film, but because it is so different and does use avant-garde techniques, it would be appreciated more for that reason.) Much of the “adult” content of the book (and to some extent Švankmajer’s film) stems from the idea that Alice is adrift in a world where little makes sense because she encounters representations of the adult world. Švankmajer’s adaptation plays with these ideas, highlighting the subversion of Carroll’s original text rather than burying or ignoring it. Subversion is associated with the surrealism of the historical avant-gardes. Certain filmmakers wanted to portray the irrationality of dream worlds through subversion of the normal or the everyday. Many filmmakers have been inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and many make claims that it is a direct connection to the dream world. André Breton claimed as much, suggesting the book presents a particular instance of the interconnectedness of dream/waking life and faith/reason (Breton included a chapter on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in his Anthologie de l’humour noir). Švankmajer has discussed how he favored the book as a child and as an adult, which makes his adaptation all the more telling. As Peter Hames rightly points out, “Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) provided a text admired by the surrealists and a subject very much in line with Svankmajer’s own concerns—a dialogue with childhood and

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the child’s world of unrestricted imaginative play.”1 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is about a young child’s imagination, her literal and figurative growth, and the arbitrary rules that govern society. Švankmajer’s vision of the story led him to create the avant-garde adaptation highlighting absurdity, nightmare, power, and maturation. Švankmajer’s roots in experimental theater and puppetry influenced him far more than the contemporary cinema of the 1960s when he began making films, which is significant because it immediately points to his personal visionary leanings. (He has said that the only thing his films share with the Czech New Wave is a certain “anti attitude.”)2 If anything, the Czech (and eastern European) tradition of the avant-garde influenced him more. As Peter Hames suggests, The work of the Czech “avant-garde” or “independent” film clearly relates to the concerns of the international avant-garde—non-narrative, an emphasis on formal concerns, abstract, using realist imagery as a springboard for aesthetic or psychological investigation, and deriving principally from the inspirations of photography and the visual arts.3 These characteristics inform the collage approach that Švankmajer employs but, more importantly, suggest his desire to present realistic scenes that just happen to be laced with surrealist imagery. His films correspond to certain tendencies in Czech traditions, because he “best represents the quintessence of Czech culture in his passionate fascination with alchemy, animation by hand, magic, natural history, puppetry, and Surrealism,”4 all important aspects of both folk and experimental traditions. All of these influences also point to Švankmajer’s use of appropriation and adaptation in his works: He assembles an amalgam of far-reaching sources in addition to the one text his films are based on. According to Julie Sanders, the collage technique is a specific kind of adaptation process. She suggests, “The creation of collage [is done] by assembling found items to create a new aesthetic object. . . . This purposeful assembly of fragments to form a new whole is, undoubtedly, an active element in many postmodernist texts.”5 Švankmajer uses many found objects in his films; in Alice, there are scissors, cookies, dolls, leaves, and a handful of assorted items such as buttons, nails, and rocks that all are animated and used together to create the nightmarish world of Wonderland. Whether or not Švankmajer can be considered postmodern is debatable, but his approach, especially in Alice and in some of his short films, is rooted in the assemblage of fragments. Carroll’s books can be described as fragmentary, simply because they are episodic in nature.

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Like the source text, Švankmajer creates episodes that come together to present a whole narrative. As an avant-garde filmmaker, his work defies conformity and sentimentalism, and he refuses to be bound by genre or convention. He uses elaborate, contrasting editing founded on montage, alternates static images with camera pans or tilts, juxtaposes close-ups with wide shots, and heightens sound to amplify the significance of mundane activities and objects. In contrast to many mainstream films, the narrative components of Švankmajer’s films are usually subordinated to the visual elements, which is a characteristic of avant-garde film, and they guide the story of Alice. However, the way he tells stories is vastly different from other filmmakers. Švankmajer presents a way of thinking and communicating that is articulated through objects instead of words. The real storytelling comes by way of objects and how these material things converse and supersede verbal communication. In this regard, his films cast doubt on and interrogate the fine line between what one perceives and what one imagines, an important trait of avant-garde film. By the very nature of his films—their content and style—Švankmajer has positioned himself as a master surrealist, though he also draws on experimental and avant-garde tendencies in the arts to complete his “Surrealist investigations.”6 Surrealism aims to change the way people consider life and the way they perceive their surroundings. But, Švankmajer says surrealism is not an art: “Surrealism is a journey into the depths of the soul, like alchemy and psychoanalysis. Unlike both of these, however, it is not an individual journey but a collective adventure.”7 Švankmajer’s films underscore the concealed hopes, wishes, and dreams of his characters, puppets, and objects: He brings them to the surface in all of their ambiguous and terrifying condition, which is why he focuses on the “collective adventures” of anyone and anything in his films. Hence, Alice’s adventures are equivalent to the other animals and objects in Alice. Still, surrealism is not a means to an end for Švankmajer. The stories he tells are surrealist because they contain fantastic images that appear to be contradictory or conflicting, though they make the stories complete by providing visual unity and continuity. As he says, “I speak of Surrealism in film—Surrealism is psychology, it is philosophy, it is a spiritual way, but it is not an aesthetic. Surrealism is not intended in actually creating any kind of aesthetic.”8 Švankmajer’s films engage with the way that memory formations and organizations are fixed in the unconscious, which is a key aspect of surrealism. Alice, for example, hinges on the idea that her adventures are either a dream, dreamlike, or dream induced. Hence, her memory may possibly structure the narrative. In Alice, “The mind-expanding elements in Švankmajer’s take on Carroll involve a

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deep investigation into the nature of dream and the unconscious state,”9 which ultimately blurs the line between reality and unreality, a feature of surrealist thought. The mad tea party is a good example of how surrealism is used in Alice. The scene is hectic, confused, and repetitive in its frenetic pacing. It is an avant-garde moment that showcases the overall dark tone of the film. Švankmajer lets his objects run wild; “His awakening of the stirring in the souls of dormant objects to animate wonderland is Švankmajer’s greatest illusion.”10 In Švankmajer’s version of the mad tea party, there is a kind of organized chaos, a paradox, that occurs because there is a blending of the surreal and the real. Alice enters the tea party and watches the ritualized actions of the March Hare and the Mad Hatter as they go about their routines. The March Hare and Mad Hatter perform their finite rituals of buttering tin can lids and pouring tea. Švankmajer’s signature rapid and rhythmic editing quickens the pace of the scene. The Mad Hatter speaks lines to the hare that do not make any sense. The idea of spitting out useless non sequiturs can be considered an avant-garde surrealist tendency as well because it thwarts expectations and sets up the potential for nonlinear storytelling. During the tea party, Alice keeps attempting to interject questions, but her queries remain unanswered. She seeks guidance in some form, but the mad monotony of the players at the tea party only act and speak in enigmas. Švankmajer’s film draws heavily on the nature of dream worlds, particularly in conjunction with how dream influences reality—a key idea in surrealism and also a major component of the original text. Tina-Louise Reid, for instance, suggests, “With Alice, Jan Švankmajer maintains his uncompromising vision as he explores a world inspired by Carroll’s tales whilst demonstrating the interconnectedness of dream with waking life.”11 Alice is set up as a dream from the beginning during the credit sequence. After a scene that mirrors Carroll’s text, in which Alice is reading by the side of the river, the credits begin and Alice, whose mouth is shown in extreme close-up whenever she speaks and thus fills the entire frame, tells us or rather instructs us, “First you must close your eyes, or you won’t see anything.” This directive couches the film in surrealism and immediately marks its departure from the original source, taking us, too, on its avant-garde path. Frantisek Dryje notes, “This paradoxical sentence from the introduction to Švankmajer’s film is an exhortation to dream—to experience something which contains the truth about our lives.”12 Carroll’s text has also been interpreted as commentary on the social and political mores of Victorian England; here, Švankmajer is

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asking us to partake in dreaming to realize truth, again, an avant-garde tactic. After Alice’s instruction, the film begins with a survey of her room; the camera pans slowly so we see the objects that will eventually reappear in Wonderland (and come to life via Švankmajer’s masterful animation). The fact that the objects reappear in Wonderland is crucial in understanding Švankmajer’s adaptation; Roger Cardinal says, “One thing seems clear: the treatment of objects within Wonderland corresponds to the fantastical treatment of dream-work,” suggesting how objects become central to interpretation.13 The significance of the objects in Alice’s room is that they come alive through imagination and/or dream, the same kind of logic that permeates the Carroll source text. According to Reid, “Since children instill toys and other objects with life through animation, childhood serves as a potent setting for Švankmajer’s resurrections, with Carroll’s Wonderland as the most advantageous backdrop.”14 Wonderland, as sketched by Carroll and as adapted by Švankmajer, becomes a place and space where spatiotemporal dimensions are created through dream logic. Because Alice narrates the story, Švankmajer allows her to create Wonderland herself. Whenever someone speaks in the film, which is rare, Alice’s mouth appears in close-up, saying things such as “. . . sighed the White Rabbit,” or “. . . cried the Mad Hatter,” or even, “. . . Alice thought to herself.” Having a mouth onscreen that takes up the entire frame is certainly unusual, and it shows that Švankmajer’s adaptation is thoroughly uncompromising, even though Švankmajer has mentioned in an interview how he wanted to maintain some semblance of the (ill) logic found in Carroll’s book. For instance, Švankmajer notes, “Alice as I filmed it and how, of course, Lewis Carroll conceived it on paper, is an infantile dream. I strictly adhered to its ‘logic’ when making the film.”15 Švankmajer takes liberties with the source, as any adaptation must, but he also purposefully makes the film avant-garde by adapting it according to his own interests; he is not so much interested in fidelity than he is the tone and thematic character of the source text, focusing on the way a child’s dream can alter, enhance, or influence her immediate, waking life. According to Reid, “Švankmajer engages in a dialogue with dream rather than losing himself in a fantasyland.”16 Several facets of surrealism are irrationality, the unconscious, and liberation, and Alice ably demonstrates how taking an avant-garde approach to adaptation means creating a film that is intertextual due to its commingling of Alice in Wonderland, surrealism, and animation. Švankmajer’s puppets, which he uses in almost all of his films, also suggest a close affinity with

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childhood imagination. The puppets come to life through animation, but a child’s toy comes to life through the imagination. “Švankmajer’s use of puppets steeps Alice in the realm of magic extending from Carroll, a source rich in irrationality, a quality that exists in magic ritual, dream and child’s play,” which also elicits dreams of childhood from the spectator.17 Švankmajer wants the audience to think about the importance of dream and memory and feel the textures of his animated objects, which, because they are rendered in striking stop-motion animation, appear alive, much like the creatures in Carroll’s book are similar to humans. The importance of memory and especially childhood memories also pervades Švankmajer’s work. The stress on childhood comes from the power to dream and then to realize these dreams—even when they are nightmares. Animating objects from one’s childhood is essentially reenacting the playmaking that children perform when they play with toys. Švankmajer’s animation perfectly demonstrates this, though the objects often are menacing. The creatures of Carroll’s book are somewhat akin to the child’s toy that comes to life through the imagination. Švankmajer is inspired by Carroll, but focuses on the codependence of dream and waking life, an area often explored in avant-garde film. At the beginning of the film, Alice announces to the audience, “Alice thought to herself, now you will see a film for children perhaps; perhaps not, but, I forgot, now you must close your eyes, otherwise, you won’t see anything.” Her words stress the seeming inseparability of dream and reality. The dreamlike structure also comes into play at the end, since Alice sees that the White Rabbit is still missing from its glass enclosure where it was kept in her room. Since it is gone, we are not quite sure if Alice imagined or dreamed her time in Wonderland, though it does not really matter since surrealism is a reflection of reality. Hames correctly notes, “At the end of Alice, when returned to the nursery with all her toys and fantasies apparently in place, Alice finds that the White Rabbit is missing—evidence for the reality of her adventures.”18 Memories that derive from dreams also help structure our understanding of the present, which was one of the key ideas in Carroll book, and it is why Hames can conclude that Alice’s adventures were real. The many creatures in Švankmajer’s Alice are also distinguished by their odd construction, again something similar to the strange creatures of Carroll’s book. For example, the animals that assist the White Rabbit as he tries to capture Alice are made of skeletons. As Will Brooker notes, “The representation of the Rabbit and his skeletal crew—a vicious canine and a team of ill-assembled skeletons, clacking their limbs as they drag

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mismatched tails behind toothy skulls—only emphasizes the sadism and violence present in the original story.”19 Švankmajer perfectly captures the tone of Carroll: its absurdity and its horror are made clear in the adaptation. Švankmajer’s object animation emphasizes how it can change the parameters of the everyday, destabilize our accepted ideas of reality, and challenge the conventional understanding of our existence—hallmarks of avant-garde cinema. This is why Alice questions her surroundings in Wonderland. Švankmajer’s animation brings to life tools, rocks, scissors, buttons, socks, and leaves, and they interact with Alice as human and Alice as doll (itself an animated object). (Whenever Alice eats the cookie and shrinks, she becomes a doll, which Švankmajer animates brilliantly.) Švankmajer’s understanding of animation and his method of evoking moods and themes are quite different from traditional ways of thinking about animation, and thus he is an avant-garde animator. Švankmajer believes animation becomes an essential tool for capturing the power of the imagination so that, in his films, one sees how objects have personalities of their own; his animation reveals the mysterious personalities existent in dormant objects. This is entirely an avant-garde motif. As Švankmajer puts it, “I use real animation for mystification, for disturbing the utilitarian habits of the audience, to unsettle them, or for subversive purposes.”20 Animating the world of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland through stop-motion animation suits the adapted material well. That is, using stop-motion creates both an unsettling and rejuvenating effect, elements of Carroll’s text that transfer easily to the adaptation. The ending of the film highlights the unique form of adaptation. Alice is back in her room, but because we see the broken glass of the rabbit’s enclosure, the implication is that all is not right in the world. The ending has a certain wicked playfulness to it instead of offering a happy sense of closure. According to Reid, “In Alice, the space does not constitute the visible leap, it is the creatures, objects, and activities within them that do.”21 The spaces of Wonderland are claustrophobic, dark, and menacing. Alice’s room is the same way—full of intricate and odd objects that create the threatening tone to the film. Švankmajer’s camera shows the accoutrements of her room in detail so that we can register them: “The camera moves hurriedly around the girl’s bedroom, sliding across apple cores, a mousetrap, jars of pickled fruit, dead flies, and faded drawings; among the props it picks out are skulls, beetles, and dolls that will later appear in her dreamworld.”22 The confined space of her bedroom becomes the ultimate setting for Wonderland. In another horrific scene, which differs from Carroll, the skeletal creatures set on her. The creatures hunt her

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down and cause her to fall into a pot full of milky-colored water. This graphic scene is Švankmajer’s own imaginative way of rendering the violence in Carroll’s text in an uncompromising way: in it, the animals hit Alice’s face with small stones and the pigeon “beats her violently with its wings.”23 Švankmajer’s Alice is subject to punishment. According to Dryje, “The need for aggression, aimed at a certain object, and the need for its adoration are balanced, and this has a certain cathartic effect. The same principal provides the foundation for the emotional (and informational) blueprint of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”24 Švankmajer is attuned to the violent nature of the source text, but his adaptation creates a particular way to depict it that is harrowing and perfectly apt. Alice is a personal adaptation, one that distinguishes itself by taking an alternative approach to material that has inspired many versions. As Reid suggests, “The transportation to other nonsensical realms not unlike our own has prompted many artists to filter Wonderland through their own sensibilities,” maybe none perhaps more so than Švankmajer.25 Švankmajer’s allegiance to surrealism makes his film avant-garde. According to Chris Jenks, Where centuries of classical philosophy, also in pursuit of the truth, had essentially recommended that we ‘should not let our imaginations run away with us,’ the Surrealists demanded that we should. Thus imagination (untrustworthy), the unconscious (inarticulate), and desire (unspoken), should now become trustworthy, articulate, and find voice, they should combine as out new mode of cognition and break out from the moral constraints that contemporary classifications of experience have placed upon us.26 Švankmajer’s Alice precisely and deliberately delves into the imagination, the unconscious, and desire, and therefore reflects the avant-garde tendencies of tying dreams to everyday awareness. It is important to also realize that “[t]he dream does not rule over reality, nor reality over the dream; their relationship is dialectical.”27 There is an ongoing investigation of the relationship that the imagination and the dream world has with normal cognition. Švankmajer’s film allows us to recognize the importance of the everyday in our shaping of how we understand the significance of our imagination—to see, that is, how objects interact with themselves and with us when we choose to imagine it. The mundane can become magical. It is a powerful and vital message that is present in Carroll but is more fully realized in Švankmajer’s vision. What Švankmajer’s Alice teaches us is how the visions of childhood can

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commingle with those of the adult world once memory is enacted. This also occurs in forms of adaptation, and I would suggest avant-garde adaptations are the most fertile area where memory can be represented more fully, persuasively and aesthetically. As an avant-garde adaptation, Alice exploits the source material, focuses on subjectivity, and uses tactile creativity through animation. Švankmajer drops Alice among antiquated toys, objects, taxidermied animals, and moveable pieces of meat, not unlike the way Carroll’s Alice is thrust among the menacing Jabberwocky, the suspicious Tweedledum and Tweedledee (who are absent from Švankmajer’s film), the grinning and mischievous Cheshire Cat (also absent from Švankmajer’s film), or the threatening presence of the Red Queen (shown in the film as an actual card that is animated). Švankmajer represents the imaginary world of Wonderland as an alarmingly intimidating and often frightful place, where logic does not exist and where individual ingenuity must be consistently summoned— again, like Carroll’s book. But Švankmajer is not one whose intent is pure stylization. The White Rabbit, for instance, is a shaggy rag doll stuffed with sawdust, whose baggy and sagging eyes, large choppy teeth, and malevolent attitude, suggest how he is far more interested in himself than Alice. The Red Queen’s pack of cards is just that: animated cutouts that try to surround and corral Alice. The setting appears decayed, slightly bombed out, and ominous. Carroll’s books are the kinds of texts that demand a creative interpretation; a straightforward adaptation seems ineffective at rendering the nuances of the text, and Švankmajer sees that adhering to his own personal avant-garde aesthetic is the only way for him to imagine the wonders of Wonderland. Švankmajer’s vision suggests an all-encompassing view of the adaptation process, which means, his film combines memories, dreams, surrealism, and personal revelation. Robert Stam says that the “cinema’s variegated chronotopic capacities enable it to transpose and enrich absolutely any aesthetic, whether realist or anti-realist, illusionist or self-reflexive.”28 In Alice, Švankmajer combines illusionism and self-reflexivity, with a touch of realism and surrealistic tendencies. The film is a good example of the highly personal form of adaptation that relies on interpretation and aesthetics that are always in line with the director’s other works. Švankmajer never strays from this. Using a particular form of animation is a decidedly different approach to adaptation, and Švankmajer’s method of object animation is even more far reaching in its avant-garde mannerisms. The stylistic and formal concerns that exist in Švankmajer’s short and feature films are: rhythmic, precise, and rapid editing; the combination of various forms of animation (stop motion, drawing, marionettes and puppets, dolls, clay, and objects)

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with live action; hyperreal sounds; surrealism; humor; and the fantastic. His unyielding and unerring imagination that brings to life inanimate objects is alternately serious and playful, straightforward and symbolic. There is total freedom in his films—anything is possible. He is unique, too, because he does not define himself by either style or genre: “It is not my aim or wish to be a director of animation and live-action film together. I am doing it because, when I am working on my themes, they ask themselves for this approach.”29 His films are often dark: There are sinister settings, nightmarish dreams and memories brought to life, deaths, and mutilations (though occurring to objects or puppets). Švankmajer uses animation to question our understanding of objects and the senses. According to Paul Wells, “Animation foregrounds its own intrinsic difference and yet produces the common imagery that unites the reader’s imagination with their own consciousness of the writer’s text, uniquely bringing insight and understanding to the experience, needs, and intentions of both.”30 Any familiarity with Carroll’s novels becomes somewhat lost when watching Švankmajer’s vision since it is so radical, able to effectively capture mood and environment. His blending of animation and live action establishes this mood from the beginning. Carroll’s books are famous for their accompanying illustrations, but Švankmajer’s animation both “foregrounds its difference,” as Wells says, and establishes a link to potential reader recall. Animation helps Švankmajer explore reality through the imaginary. Even more of an avant-garde attitude and technique, Švankmajer attests that objects have their own memories and, as an animator, he shows them. Memories are often scattershot to say the least; making them manifest is part of Švankmajer’s process. His films “seriously reflect the workings of the mind in its operation of comparison, discrimination, categorization, dialectical evaluation, generalization, and memorilaization.”31 In this regard, Alice reflects not just memories but the way the mind reacts and interacts with everyday reality—which is the fundamental essence of surreal realism: dealing with the uncanny in reality. Memories also stir anxiety, which is why Švankmajer’s films are often considered morbid or pessimistic. While there are bleak, tragic, and even gothic elements in some of the films, it is Švankmajer’s sense of humor that rescues them from becoming complete horror stories. As he says, “For me, black humor is the only humor.”32 Alice has moments of dark humor. In one disturbing scene, Alice, after eating a cookie (like the Alice in the novels) grows to a larger size and finds herself confined to a room that can barely contain her. The animals that have been chasing her descend on her with rocks to try and hurt her. Her long arm protrudes from a window and swipes at them. It is absurd imagery that speaks to the surrealistic nature of the film. In another scene, Alice

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finds herself in a plastic or porcelain case, a model of herself, which has enclosed her except for her eyes, which we see darting about in confusion and fear. The tension and anxiety that occurs in the films also occurs in viewers as well, stemming from the surreal images that intrude into reality. Ordinary objects and animals take on unforeseen functions and help create the unsettling and uncanny effect of the film. Alice herself appears in both human and puppet form, a disquieting device that suits Švankmajer’s avant-garde aesthetic and treatment of animation perfectly. According to Švankmajer, Alice is an adaptation of Carroll “fermented by my own childhood, with all its particular obsessions and anxieties.”33 In Michael O’Pray’s estimation, Alice is “a story of a child under threat by her own fantasies, peopled by creatures in an impossible ‘irrational’ world.”34 Carroll’s novel is often interpreted as a child’s initiation into the irrational world of adults, and to some extent, Svankmajer’s film picks up on this theme. The importance of the irrational, coupled with memories stemming from childhood and a child’s imagination, is akin to the surrealist tendency of depicting the unconscious through associative collage, which includes Švankmajer’s form of animation. O’Pray concludes, It is Švankmajer’s commitment to the world of the imagination, of dreams and fantasies, a world which shapes and forms his own experiences, thoughts and feelings, that explains the importance he ascribes to childhood. If art is gained through an access to the unconscious and the latter is formed by childhood, it is natural he should explicitly acknowledge its influence.35 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Švankmajer’s source text, is in part about the interaction of dream and reality, the unconscious and consciousness, and childhood and adulthood. Švankmajer’s film presents these motifs in a way that recalls the interaction of reality and surreality because there is no real sense of logic at work in the film, only absurdity. Švankmajer remarked that Alice is not entirely like Carroll’s book, stating, however, that “I believe in the spiritual affinity of my Alice with Carroll’s Alice.”36 (It should be noted, too, that the Czech title of the film, Něco z lenky, translates to “Something from Alice,” which suggests Švankmajer’s form of adapting only what suits his particular vision/version of the Carroll book.) Alice is an exploitative avant-garde adaptation for this reason. Švankmajer wants to tap into specific areas of the source text, extract them, implant them into his filmic system, and produce an entirely new text that serves as both commentary and re-presentation of the original. His Alice is an imaginative translation that speaks volumes about how

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an avant-garde adaptation becomes something tangentially attached to but utterly separate from the source text. According to Peter Brooker, “To understand the process of adaptation as one of translation or, at its fullest, of a stratified dialogic and cross-cultural transformation over time, simultaneously undermines the predetermined status of the ‘original’ and the idea of a unilinear reference back and forward down one channel.”37 Švankmajer’s film is one that divorces itself from the original—yet not completely. It is a refashioning of Carroll to a different time and place, with its own spatial and temporal locations. By making objects come alive, Švankmajer shows how they have their own lives and memories because he liberates them through animation, even if they are dangerous, which is shown in the film. Švankmajer has said, For me, objects are more alive than people, more permanent and more expressive—the memories they possess far exceed the memories of man. Objects conceal within themselves the events they’ve witnessed. I coerce their inner life out of them—and for that animation is a great aid which I consider to be a sort of magical rite or ritual.38 Because he believes in the emotive, psychical, and sustaining power of objects, Švankmajer shows how these objects absorb the emotions and moods of those with whom they are in contact. Alice’s constant changes in size, for example, are rendered as a change from human to doll, where the live Alice becomes an inanimate thing animated by Švankmajer, who renders her like the stylized objects when they, too, come alive. It is why his films resonate on universal levels of acceptance and empathy: Objects may lack literal speech, but they have the command and control to present themselves to our perception as interlocutors who in turn bring about meaning, significance, or implication. Alice as doll may not have the same capacities of Alice as human, which might create a crisis of identification (for her and for us), but she attempts to maintain a sense of understanding. In one comical scene, when Alice meets the caterpillar, who is an old sock with a pair of false teeth and sewn-on buttons for eyes, she tells him, “I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir, because I’m not myself, you see.” The animator can only contrive an illusion, but in Švankmajer’s world, the illusion proves as authentic as reality. The interaction between animated objects and real people signifies Švankmajer as an avant-garde artist. The metamorphosis of Carroll to Švankmajer’s Alice contains layers of implied and direct confrontation between the two texts and also hints at the unlimited possibilities of creating a kind

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of adaptation that is interpretive, suggestive, creative, and imaginative, precisely the kind that suits an avant-garde approach. Alice is an extraordinary film. It embodies the notion of transformation, both in the sense of the transformative power of avant-garde cinema and in the process of transformation involved in adaptation. It also suggests how one can take a popular text, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and transform it through the alchemical process of animation. Švankmajer’s film may be inspired by the source text, and this is because he never really wants to film the book as a faithful or straightforward version of the book. Instead, he focuses on how the protagonist, Alice, constructs the fantastical narrative herself. She creates the dream world of Wonderland through her imagination. But her Wonderland, as mentioned, is far from the harmless world of Carroll’s childlike reverie. Hers is a nightmarish place full of cluttered spaces of typical household items, antiquated toys, stuffed animals, and utensils and tools. The objects are first seen in her room and thus become part of her imaginative world. The White Rabbit appears stuffed in a glass cage and eventually comes to life and frees itself by shattering the glass. The White Rabbit is one of the principal characters in Alice’s world. Along with the March Hare and the Mad Hatter, it becomes one of the puppets that SŠvankmajer animates to interact with Alice. As described by Peter Hames, All three have the appearance of old toys—the White Rabbit’s stuffing repeatedly falls out and has to be secured with a safety pin and the March Hare’s eye has to be pulled back into place (and he has to be wound up). While the puppet of the Mad Hatter, made of carved and beaten wood, is less obviously part of childhood memory, he also partakes of that surrealist sense of the ‘magically old’—to quote Breton, ‘old fashioned, broken, useless.’39 The puppets are used to create a world that is ambiguous and often terrifying, but more importantly, they shorten the gap between living creatures and inanimate objects. Marionettes or puppets (or other animated objects) give the impression of possessing personality; thus, they are expressive inasmuch as people are, which again underlines Švankmajer’s blending of the real and unreal in Alice. He “deals with a particular type of inanimate rendering of the animate—namely, with the puppet, marionettes and other mechanically operated effigies, which are often vested with a power beyond that normally provided by their manipulator.”40 In this regard, the inanimate world of puppets, marionettes, and objects

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becomes as valid, essential, and unnerving as real individuals, which makes Švankmajer’s filmic world of Alice enthralling—and frightening. Alice demonstrates the power of avant-garde filmmaking and the potential for alternative adaptation practices. It is an imaginative retelling of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that takes it upon itself to exploit the literary source by blending of realism and surrealism—that is, a mix of live action and animation, dream and reality. In the majority of his works, by focusing on live action and animated objects—the mixture of reality and the unreal—Švankmajer is able to express the fantasies, desires, and fears that motivate human behavior. Realism purports to show daily life as it is; Švankmajer’s unique take on this makes his films adhere more to a kind of subjective realism. How one perceives reality is important to Švankmajer and is one of the dominant themes to emerge from his films, including Alice. Objects, marionettes, and other inanimate things live in Švankmajer’s art since his films deal with the alteration of the real and the unreal. Basically, Švankmajer suggests, if you can imagine it to be real, then it will be: in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the real and the unreal join to make a whole whose truth lies in both the inner workings of the mind and in its outward manifestations. As the filmmaker has suggested, “I always endeavor to make sure that the audience has the feeling of a certain ‘everyday reality.’ The feeling of something which actually could happen.”41 Švankmajer is essentially a magician—an alchemist who conjures strange worlds but then makes them tangible and believable. The images from Alice conceal a more sinister reality that people oftentimes do not want to know about. This is why the film has a universal appeal— the distinctly absurdist humor and grotesque interpretations of everyday life and activity confront us in a way that is unsettling yet allows us to question our own urges and desires. Alice is an adaptation of Carroll’s book, but it also appropriates Czech puppet theater, collagelike assemblage, and found objects. To his credit, Švankmajer realizes the book needs intensely creative interpretation in order to bring it to the screen without simplifying its dark qualities or presenting it as a children’s film. As an avant-garde adaptation, it heightens our awareness of the latent possibilities existent in texts and so strives to render them in such a way that makes them tangible. Few adaptations can admit this occurs, but Švankmajer’s film provides something original to avant-garde cinema and the filmgoing experience. Part of his genius lies in his ability to turn film into an entirely sensual and tactile experience. You do not just watch the films inasmuch as you feel or experience them. With Alice, we feel its tactile immediacy in full force.

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Chapter 14

Prospero’s Books

Peter Greenaway has long been a maverick director, one who has typically worked in his distinct postmodern painterly style. Using exquisite attention to detail, particularly color and mise-en-scène, coupled with oddly engaging narratives, Greenaway has developed a unique method all his own, one that can be regarded as avant-garde. Greenaway has made several adaptations: Nightwatching (2007), a pseudobiography of Rembrandt van Rijn and an adaptation of his famous painting The Night Watch; 8 ½ Women (1999), a reimagining of Fellini’s great film 8½; A TV Dante (1993), an interpretation of Dante’s work; and Prospero’s Books (1991), a wildly imaginative adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. My focus here will be on Prospero’s Books, a film that defies category but one also ripe for discussion about the possibilities of an exploitative adaptation. Shakespeare has been adapted for the cinema since its infancy, and there have been degrees of creativity involved in the process of bringing Shakespeare to the screen. Greenaway’s film is not just one of the best Shakespeare adaptations but an avant-garde film that completely reimagines the text and contexts of The Tempest. Prospero’s Books is a daring interpretation of Shakespeare’s final play and features John Gielgud as Prospero. He not only speaks almost all of the dialogue (the majority of it being directly from Shakespeare’s text) but also writes the play as it unfolds onscreen. We see him at work writing and cataloging the story of The Tempest, and in a highly unconventional manner, the text appears onscreen with other images, creating a colorful multilayered visual experience. It is an experimental film and an imaginative deconstruction of the original text. To achieve the written text that appears onscreen, Greenaway employs a device called an electronic paintbox, which allowed him to fill the screen with intricate layers of text, image, voice, music, and sound in a series of intertextual overlays of double exposures, transparencies, and multiple framings. The result

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is spectacular: a complete synaesthetic experience rich with tableaux, formal experimentation, color, detail, and, of course, Shakespeare. Shakespeare films take many forms: theatrical, generic, hybrid, historical. Shakespeare adaptations involve credibility as well as intimidation: Using Shakespeare adds credence, but it also means undertaking one of the most formidable and esteemed authors in the language. Perhaps no other author endures as much scrutiny (mainly from literary scholars) than Shakespeare, especially in terms of the multitude of film adaptations that have occurred with regularity for more than a century. Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa—the names of these respected filmmakers are summoned when one discusses Shakespeare adaptation. According to Julie Sanders, “Studies of Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation become a complex means of measuring and recording multiple acts of mediation and filtration.”1 Because of the hierarchal positioning of Shakespeare in the literary canon, adapting his works becomes a process of renegotiating meanings, contexts, cultural and historical circumstances, and modernization. For the avant-garde filmmaker, using Shakespeare provides fertile ground for extracting themes and characters and exploiting them for specific purposes, just as Greenaway does in Prospero’s Books. (Derek Jarman does something similar with his Tempest, as does Julie Taymor with Titus.) Mediating and filtering the texts of Shakespeare means retelling them to new audiences, with new insights and with legacy and heritage attached to the stories anew. Greenaway provides a great example of how a director—an avant-garde auteur—can change the Shakespeare text in such a multivariate way that we not just reconsider the original source but also demand that other adaptations of Shakespeare perform exploitations of the original plays, transforming them into new texts, palimpsests, hypertexts, or metatexts that trigger profoundly innovative films that comment on texts, contexts, and adaptation processes. Not everyone believes the Bard should be tampered with, demanding instead that any successful Shakespeare adaptation must adhere to the poetry of the original. James Welsh, for instance, remarks, “Derivative adaptations that ignore Shakespeare’s language while exploiting his plots and characters should be considered misguided and corrupt.”2 What then of Prospero’s Books, a film adaptation of Shakespeare that keeps the language of Shakespeare but also exploits the plot and characters? As mentioned, I think the film is a remarkable avenue into The Tempest, and Greenaway should be applauded for his audacious approach. Welsh offers a modest appraisal of the film, albeit one that still does not suggest

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such a form is the best way to understand Shakespeare. Some films change the plays and lose the poetry, but [t]hat is not the case, however, with Peter Greenaway’s profoundly odd, disrespectful spectacle of Renaissance iconography, Prospero’s Books, which contains the text of Shakespeare’s Tempest, though that text is not exactly dramatized. It is recited by the most gifted Shakespearean actor still working at the time Greenaway made his film. Visually it is a bizarre feast for the eyes, a triumph of art direction (if not, exactly, of taste), but verbally it is Shakespeare. Of course that doesn’t make it any more appealing to student viewers . . .3 Why should it be appealing to student viewers? Greenaway’s aesthetic approach is far more insightful than a simple theatrical presentation of the play. If it is disrespectful and distasteful in any way, then perhaps the intended or ideal viewer is not the student seeking a condensed form of the play nor is it the Shakespeare scholar who seeks accuracy in a filmic representation. Instead, Greenaway’s film is for him and for the audience willing to accept the alternative approach—those willing to enjoy the avant-garde adaptation as its own work of art. It is a retelling and rewriting of Shakespeare’s play and is also, I suggest, a successful adaptation because watching it does not make it adversarial to Shakespeare. Instead, it is complementary. As Sanders suggests, “This, perhaps, is the essence of literary archetypes: their availability for rewriting means that they are texts constantly in flux, constantly metamorphosing in the process of adaptation and retelling.”4 Shakespeare provides the metatext for many, a literary archetype, so it seems plausible that his familiar characters and stories should be reconstituted, transmogrified, and interpolated. Greenaway can rightfully be called an auteur, which means his unique style, temperament, direction, and caméra-stylo, is bold, original, and immediately identifiable. In terms of filmmaking, this suggests that he will interpret Shakespeare in a particular manner. According to Peter Wollen, when discussing the auteur’s relationship with the author, “The director does not subordinate himself to another author; his source is only a pretext, which provides catalysts, scenes which use his own preoccupations to produce a radically new work.”5 Prospero’s Books rightfully is a film that uses Shakespeare as a catalyst in order to produce a radical adaptation. The avant-garde typically works against dominant cinematic structures, and the same could be said for Greenaway’s Shakespeare adaptation: It positions itself as both a comment on Shakespeare, a

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reworking of Shakespeare, and as a commentary on the process of adapting Shakespeare. The theatrical space of Shakespeare is radically different from cinematic space, except only when a film version of a Shakespeare text becomes “filmed theater.” So, the director of a Shakespearean adaptation needs creativity, intelligence, imagination, and skill in order to translate the places and spaces of Shakespeare to the screen. Greenaway focuses much of his attention on the text of The Tempest and to the performances of certain characters, even though their lines are spoken by Prospero. Caliban, in particular, performs the words: His body movements draw our attention to the physicality that is juxtaposed with Prospero’s stasis, a contrast that also highlights the thematic duality of sensuality versus intellectuality. When Caliban first emerges from the murky water, as Prospero speaks for him, he writhes around the rock to which he is chained in dancelike contortions. Greenaway captures the essence of Caliban’s physical self, his sensuousness and his connection to water (a significant allegorical element in both The Tempest and Prospero’s Books). The performance of John Gielgud also marks his long association of playing Prospero in theater productions of The Tempest. Speaking all the play’s lines until the final act, he gives a commanding performance as Prospero, foregrounding text. The opening of the film illustrates the kind of radical avant-garde aesthetic that dominates Greenaway’s style and his approach to Shakespeare. In medium close-up of characters’ hands, we see a large book being passed from one set of arms to another, from one frame to another. Greenaway literalizes the idea of a palimpsest by passing the book along, emphasizing the changing nature of the text through thousands of years. It also highlights the focus on books—texts that serve as protectors, givers of knowledge—and draws our attention to the process of adaptation. The process of handing the book to others happens over the credits, where Greenaway utilizes an extended horizontal tracking shot. As the book is passed along, the frame is filled with objects, elaborately costumed (or nude) characters, and water dripping into a pool. The scene continues into Prospero’s library where we see spirits blowing dust off large books scattered about the room. Immediately, from this complex, intricate, and aesthetically daring opening, we get thesense that Greenaway is focusing our attention to the books of the film’s title, to the heritage of acquiring books, and to the transpositioning of books, like a Shakespeare work (a dramatic text), to the screen (a film text). More than one critic of the film has noted that Greenaway as auteur is somewhat equivalent to Prospero as creator. In some sense, “Greenaway doubles and triples the

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possibilities of reading the play as an autobiography of artist as Magus.”6 Moreover, “The Greenaway/Shakespeare Tempest shows Prospero in the author/magus role of creating Shakespeare’s The Tempest with, of course, Greenaway revisions.”7 Prospero is shown throughout the film writing the text of The Tempest and speaking its lines. The opening sequence shows how Greenaway focuses on the act of creating. As mentioned, the opening offers a way of thinking about the process of creating texts and the value of writing, reading, and interpreting texts in multiple contexts, which in turn could point to a kind of metacommentary on the process of adaptation. According to James Tweedie, the opening perfectly encapsulates the process of adaptation. He suggests the passing of the book addresses Three issues of overriding concern in contemporary film adaptation: first, will the text itself be overwhelmed by the spectacle on the screen or offscreen; second, will the film present an unreflexive, “faithful” rendition of the original or will it interrogate and unsettle the book’s canonical status and thereby reconsider its exchange value within the “imagined community” it addresses; and third, can a film incorporate a classic text without inviting comparisons to an idealized original, without capitulating to that original’s cultural capital, without merely blowing the dust off old and venerated volumes?8 Perhaps the opening sheds light on these queries, but essentially, it becomes clear from the start that Greenaway has different intentions for the Shakespeare text. An avant-garde adaptation positions itself in both a complementary and reactionary way to the original text. So, Prospero’s Books addresses the text but is also full of spectacular imagery; it interrogates the original text, a fundamental aspect of avant-garde adaptation; and it incorporates Shakespeare but leads us to a revaluation of The Tempest based on its far-reaching method of presentation. Greenaway’s reworking of The Tempest showcases his avant-garde sensibilities. His is a revision, a revisionist, visionary film. The union of word and image, of display and spectacle informs and dominates every frame of Prospero’s Books. According to Leitch, “Unlike adaptations that aim to be faithful to the spirit rather than the letter of the text, revisions seek to alter the spirit as well.”9 Greenaway certainly exploits Shakespeare’s original, but in some regards, he maintains the spirit of The Tempest, because its presence is clearly established in Prospero’s Books. One of the larger arguments or contexts for discussing Shakespeare adaptations focuses on whether or not the original has any chance of maintaining

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its integrity, its essence, when translated to the screen. It is a question almost impossible to answer in an objective way—which is an aspect of many avant-garde adaptations in general and for Greenaway’s film in particular. Adapting a Shakespeare text by decreasing its faithfulness provides room for experimentation. (I am not referring to the mainstream adaptations like Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet or Nelson’s O. Those kinds of adaptations are made for profit and should not be considered revisionist works but rather, more appropriately, updates. Neither of these films is experimental or avant-garde.) Rather, a film that exploits the original by performing an aesthetically challenging and intellectually rewarding experience, based on the audiovisual capacities inasmuch as the Shakespeare experience, is likely more apt to evoke (and provoke) emotional and critical responses. According to Douglas Lanier, The truth is that all film performances by their cinematic nature must radically reinvent their Shakespeare. The great virtue of unfaithful or free adaptations—beside the strengths of individual films themselves—is that they foreground issues of remediation and ideological recoding often tacit in many Shakespeare films.10 Greenaway’s film is faithful to the text in the sense that we actually hear it, but the film radically changes the rest of the source material, freeing Greenaway’s creation from the original Shakespeare text. Having Prospero speak all the lines, having the (mostly nude) characters enact the lines, using the paintbox to write over the images—everything about Prospero’s Books speaks to the avant-garde. Yet ironically perhaps, the film does point us back to The Tempest. What Greenaway offers is a new way of imagining the original text. By focusing on Prospero, by visualizing his books, his mind and creative powers, we see how one can interpret a specific character’s position within The Tempest. (A similar tactic is used in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, where the minor characters allow us a new avenue into Hamlet.) As Sanders suggests, “Seeing things from marginal, or even offstage, characters’ points of view is a common drive in many adaptations and appropriations.”11 Additionally, “If drama embodies within its generic conventions an invitation to reinterpretation, so the movement into a different generic mode can encourage a reading of the Shakespeare text from a new or revised point of view.”12 Greenaway’s revised perspective focuses solely on Prospero, and like Prospero, Greenaway creates his entire cinematic “island” through books. Greenaway successfully appropriates Shakespeare’s text—or at

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least most of the text—to completely reimagine it as a play (now a film) about the self-referential processes of artistic creation, long a standard interpretation of Shakespeare’s original. Greenaway seems to be interested in how a dramatic work such as The Tempest can signify a new world of meaning based on a simple declaration made by a character from the original play. His interpretation of The Tempest stems from one line by Prospero: “knowing I loved my books / he [Gonzalo] furnished me from mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.” These lines serve as a metaphor for the entire film. The world of Prospero’s Books centers on the bringing to life of the books. For this reason, the film is highly verbal in nature. Passages of the text are recited word for word by Prospero, they are written on the screen by Greenaway, and they are visualized in baroquely embellished, stylized, and colorful ways. As Judith Buchanan notes, “Daringly for a Shakespearean project—and surprisingly, perhaps, given the proliferation of words seen and heard in the film—meaning has been largely wrested from the domain of the verbal.”13 Greenaway uses words to construct the mise-en-scène, the characters, and the drama, even though there is not so much a dramatic act occurring, as most shots are centrally framed or shot with a slow-moving horizontal tracking shot or pan, reemphasizing the tableaulike placement of the actors. The drama itself stems from the construction of the story’s own production. The books give rise to the action of the film, which essentially is the movement of the books when they are opened. According to Marlene Rodgers, Perhaps Greenaway’s most imaginative strategy in adapting The Tempest is his use of Shakespeare’s brief mention of Prospero’s magical books. Greenaway creates fantastical volumes that encompass the vast knowledge Prospero required to create his island utopia. The twenty-four books, which punctuate and structure the narrative, include anatomy texts with organs that throb and bleed and architectural texts with buildings that spring out, fully formed.14 Just as Prospero’s Books is an avant-garde adaptation of The Tempest, it is also a meditation on the relationship between books, authors, readers, and writing. Greenaway presents this relationship as both a creative endeavor and a hybridizing act. The blending of voices, images, and texts create a daunting enterprise, but one Greenaway succeeds at pulling off. Because the 24 books are mysterious or even supernatural, they constitute the magical, even alchemical, creation of words onscreen. The world of The

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Tempest and the world of Prospero’s Books are created for us as we view the film. As critic Vernon Gras puts it, Embedded in this rich Renaissance culture, Prospero/Shakespeare, quill in hand, scratches out the script of The Tempest while Gielgud/ Prospero reads all the lines as they are being written. His words in turn evoke the filmic staging of the story as it is being written/told/created. We watch as a better world emerges right before our eyes.15 The 24 books that make up Prospero’s library create the film. Again, this inventive process gives us the dual idea of artistic creation, from Greenaway and from Prospero. On one hand, Greenaway has created a film, utilizing digital technology to bring alive his books and characters, while on the other, Prospero ventriloquizes the other characters, essentially creating them through his magical books, writing their lines and voicing them, “embodying the tyranny of authorship by retaining total control over their performances.”16 Likewise, Greenaway exerts control over his film. But does the “tyranny of authorship,” so prevalent in Shakespeare, ever completely dissolve, fade, or retreat? Shakespeare adaptations signify their relationship to the original plays simply from their titles alone. Prospero’s Books, however, talks back to Shakespeare. This iconoclastic approach—suggesting that Shakespeare needs to be interrogated—signifies a more innovative undertaking. Changes that occur on a discursive level, which happens when one text (a play) is adapted to another medium (film), suggest that something like Prospero’s Books signifies a new relationship with the original play. The relationship to the original remains present and relevant, but there is a transmogrification that occurs. This more creative approach warrants praise, and certainly, Greenaway should be applauded. According to Sanders, when discussing different formations of Shakespearean adaptations, [t]here are further sub-groups which deploy a source text as a creative springboard for another, often wholly different, text, a movement also signaled frequently by title. This creative move is sometimes achieved by extrapolating a particular storyline or character’s trajectory from the original, and reimagining it in a new context, historical and/or cultural.17 Prospero’s Books definitely fits this kind of descriptive category of Shakespeare adaptation. Greenaway’s film takes The Tempest and wrestles from it a new trajectory or storyline that emerges from being embedded in the play. What he achieves is remarkable, given that there is no lengthy discussion

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or description of the books that serve as the narrative thread for his film. Theorist Mikhail Bakhtin wrote about artistic embeddedness present in Shakespeare, suggesting that “semantic treasures” lay buried in the plays. Robert Stam treats this idea as a means of investigating adaptations in general. He suggests, “The notion of embeddedness goes far beyond the literary-historical philological tradition of the tracing of ‘sources’ and ‘influences’ to embrace a more diffuse dissemination of ideas as they penetrate and interanimate” various texts.18 Perhaps, then, Greenaway is discovering the embedded language of Prospero, as contained in his magical books, and so uses them as the impetus for creating new texts and intertexts. The emphasis placed on one character, Prospero, and his relationships with other characters as both mouthpiece and creator indicates a kind of adaptation that Leitch might label a “(meta)commentary or deconstruction.” He suggests that “the most characteristic films of this sort are not so much adaptations as films about adaptations, films whose subject is the problems involved in producing texts.”19 Greenaway does not really have a problem with producing a film text; we see this because Prospero creates as he writes. However, his film is removed from the basic plot of The Tempest, despite retaining much of the language. Marlene Rodgers surmises, “The film is highly literary and self-referential in its constant reminders that The Tempest is text: Greenaway conceives the play as Prospero’s own creation, and we see the pen of the magician-playwright as it moves across the parchment, leaving baroque, calligraphic lines of the text in its wake.”20 The result is a dazzling array of words, both spoken and written, that envelop the screen and, by extension, the viewer. While the imagery of Prospero’s Books constantly pushes the boundaries of the frame/screen, the scenes that perhaps best exemplify Greenaway’s avant-garde approach are when the books come to life. Each one, with names such as A Book of Mythologies, The Book of Water, A Book of Architecture and Other Music, and The Book of Utopias, spring from these various texts and fill the screen with intense and colorful images of movement within a secondary or often third frame. Because the images and words in the books come alive—animated by Greenaway’s paintbox—they denote “the world represented in them [as] ever-expanding, open, and dynamic rather than a fixed text.”21 Because they are not fixed, they also suggest the constant need for revision, another metacommentary on the nature of adaptation and the significance of acquiring knowledge through reading. The books are marvelous to behold. The Book of Motions, for example, depicts birds in flight and rolling ocean waves. A Book of Architecture and Other Music unfolds into three-dimensional reproductions of buildings and shapes that rise from the pages. The Book of Universal Cosmography

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contains lists, tables, data, and catalogs that constantly shift, move, rearrange, and blur because they are printed on a human body (a glimpse of what will emerge in Greenaway’s film The Pillow Book). Prospero’s books provide an encyclopedic overview of almost everything, from animals to plants to humans to the cosmos. According to Paula WilloquetMaricondi, in her analysis of the film, the books represent a complete postmodern sensibility (which indeed would be the case with Greenaway, a self-identified postmodern filmmaker). She suggests that the books are “open texts in the full sense of the term: they impose no limits in space or time, no epistemologies, no chronologies, no linear narratives.” She continues, Like the film itself, Prospero’s books are pluralistic and postmodern: they celebrate ambiguity and complexity, challenge the limits of visual perception by engaging all of our senses, obscure the distinction between fiction and represented reality, and contest the ideology of the Cartesian transcendental subject. Prospero’s books and Prospero’s Books recognize that representation—whether linguistic or imagistic—is always metaphorical and allegorical.22 The fact that the film delves into postmodern theoretical speculation also hints that it is essayistic, which makes it avant-garde, mainly because watching it is an intense intellectual experience that will shock inasmuch as it will enlighten and entertain. Greenaway “challenge[s] the limits of visual perception,” which, I think, is a key component of avant-garde filmmakers, namely, to always challenge our preconceived notions of cinema, perception, seeing, and cognition. The information from Prospero’s books leaves us wanting and wondering; seeing them creates a certain anxiety and awe. As Hutcheon says, “All that this Prospero knows, he has learned from books; therefore, the magic world he creates is a very bookish—and painterly— one.”23 His island utopia is bookish because of the 24 volumes he opens during the course of the film, and it is painterly because Greenaway, himself a schooled painter, has a keen eye for visual representation. The books are so full of life that they become real things, both to us and to Prospero. Other Shakespeare characters from The Tempest are present in Prospero’s Books: Ariel, Caliban, Ferdinand, Alonso, Miranda. They are seen throughout the film and represent another avant-garde characteristic of Greenaway’s aesthetic. Because Prospero voices them all until close to the end, Greenaway engages in creating voice where there is none. The most intriguing character to emerge from this process is Ariel, who in the film is portrayed by three different actors. Ariel is important to the

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text of The Tempest and central to the freeing of voice in Prospero’s Books. Ariel juxtaposes movement to Prospero’s stasis. According to Peggy Phelan, the intercombination of voices constitutes a particular historical tendency of avant-garde film and theater. She writes, As a condensation of the history of avant-garde film in which several actors play one character, and in counterpoint to the tradition of Renaissance theatre in which one actor often played several roles, Ariel functions as Prospero’s surveying camera, his timekeeper, his means of perception, his “representational apparatus.” Like any relation between an artist and his medium, it is stormy, productive, and for the rare and true artist transformative.24 Ariel is in some regard the medium to which Phelan alludes. Ariel, the spirit conjured and created by Shakespeare/Prospero, observes the other characters throughout the film, interacting mainly with Prospero. Ariel, too, is the one who disobeys Prospero’s command, which ultimately allows the characters to speak for themselves. This plot device comes from Shakespeare as well. Although the film has amended the tone of the play noticeably but not completely, it still taps into and releases some of the potential meanings of the original source text. Buchanan believes the film frees meanings, “notably the sense of the play as a self-referential comment on the processes of artistic creation, and the plot-turning significance of the crucial moment when Ariel dares momentarily to displace Prospero as moral arbiter.”25 Ariel has been Prospero’s faithful servant, and when he chances to disobey Prospero, he is threatened with a 12-year servitude. In Prospero’s Books, Ariel finally enables all the characters to speak after he defies Prospero’s command. Ariel tells Prospero he disapproves of the’s “revengeful humiliation” he inflicts on his enemies. Yet the most significant assertion of autonomy comes when the three versions of Ariel Greenaway uses throughout the film (a child, an adolescent, and a grown man) get together and write in one of Prospero’s books, putting their voices into Prospero’s plan, essentially changing the course of action: “Your charm so strongly works ’em / That if you now beheld them, your affections / Would become tender” (The Tempest, V.i.17–19). Prospero replies, “Dost thou think so, spirit?” to which Ariel concedes, yes, if he were human. Prospero decides to release the prisoners that Ariel has seen in torment. After the three Ariels take Prospero’s quill, write in the book, and convince him to set free his enemies, Prospero loses his power over the construction of the play, and Greenaway vividly depicts Prospero’s decision to “drown [his]

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book[s].” He says: But this rough magic I here abjure, and, when I have required Some heavenly music, which even now I do, To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book. (The Tempest, V.i.50–56) Here, Gielgud breaks his quill and tosses his books into the water, each shown with a splash and accompanied by striking music composed by Michael Nyman. Prospero becomes a participant in the play he has been creating rather than merely its writer. Prospero’s Books thus changes from being depicted entirely in Prospero’s mind to becoming a dramatic/cinematic act. It is an astounding moment to change courses so drastically and sets up the avant-garde images of the ending of the film. In Greenaway’s final long take, the camera tracks slowly from a close-up of Prospero’s/Shakespeare’s face speaking the famous epilogue of The Tempest. As the camera pulls back, we see that Prospero’s face is contained within a small frame. This frame is contained within the larger frame that suddenly bursts open when Prospero finishes the lines of the epilogue. We see the young sprite Ariel leap through and toward the audience, as if in a three-dimensional space, creating the illusion of transparency for the spectator: Ariel has loosened himself from the play/film and now is free. This final sequence suggests that “Greenaway, like Prospero, ends by releasing the magical possibilities of his filmic space.”26 It shows Ariel’s flight from the site of the play’s performance by running through a long group of courtiers who are all applauding (another indication of the artifice of the play/film as a performance). As he runs, Greenaway creates the multiple framing that intersperses two-dimensional space with three-dimensional space. The frame eventually condenses upon itself, and Ariel leaps through it entirely. Greenaway slows the motion considerably as Ariel jumps, suggesting the transformative processes of how art reflects and changes perception. Avantgarde films routinely play with perspectives, meanings, ideologies, and the power of cinematography to alter vision. Greenaway does this with great skill and art. As commentator Yong Li Lan describes it, This sequence is a virtuoso display of cinematic showmanship that is unsecured by narrative motivation, unlike Prospero’s or Shakespeare’s arts; it is a metaperformative rejection of the return at the end of The

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Tempest through a reassertion of the action of the magic eye of what cannot any longer be called the camera because it does not mediate objects as images but generates them.27 Ariel essentially launches himself into a space that is neither cinematic nor book or page based; it is somewhere in between, prompting Tweedie to suggest, “This final image suggests that only if the text remains unencumbered by such culturally imposed boundaries, if it remains perpetually in flight, can it support the crossing from Shakespeare’s time to our radically different cultural milieu.”28 While this image may suggest that’s Ariel’s flight signifies the process of adaptation of Shakespeare into different cultural milieus, it perhaps more appropriately comments on the duality of cinematic space and spectatorial space. The ending of Prospero’s Books indicates that it, as a film, underscores The Tempest by setting free the creative spirit. Greenaway visualizes this to great effect. In an interview, Greenaway has mentioned that [w]e now have the technologies . . . embraced by the potentiality of not simply reproducing the syndrome of one finite frame which repeats its format chronologically from a beginning to an end, but gradually insisting that the cinema screen should break up, fragment not only in terms of pace, of architecture, and of space, but in the whole lateral way of thinking which is becoming endemic of our attitude towards the notion of ideas at the end of the twentieth century. So away with the notions of linear cinema, let’s embrace the potential of a much more lateral thinking cinema. I’d like to think that Prospero’s Books was an attempt to consider these ideas.29 Greenaway’s avant-garde film certainly succeeds in this capacity to extend the frame, but it also creates an extremely dense mise-en-scène, a mobile framing device tracking between spaces, which ultimately retells Shakespeare in terms of the performance of the image as opposed to the dramatic performance of the characters, which one would see onstage. The mutability of a text’s meanings in imagistic performance suggests that the source text, The Tempest, is impermanent. Most critics have agreed that The Tempest is Shakespeare’s farewell to the world of the play, of illusion, and Greenaway also suggests this in his film. But Greenaway also shows us that a source text like The Tempest has endless possibilities for adaptation, reinterpretation, and creative enterprise. Greenaway’s repetitive imagery and camera movement are replete with meanings; visually every frame of Prospero’s Books operates on a cinematic plane, a textual plane, and a spatial plane. Greenaway’s exploitation of the source play

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and his manipulation of technology reinforce the hybrid nature of intertextuality in adaptation. Greenaway seems less concerned with transcribing The Tempest as a faithful adaptation than he is with opening the text up for intense exploration. Greenaway’s adaptation, “at times literally word for word, both demonstrates how those words themselves were ‘put together’ and performs their disintegration into constituent elements.”30 Yet whereas Greenaway seeks to renounce the introjection of theater as text, he presents theater as a cinematic and textual experience. Theater is an art of performance in terms of the actor’s physical presence and also as a literary text—not a visual one—to be read and then performed, where words dominate the reader’s or playgoer’s experience. Prospero’s Books’ avant-garde representation of theater as performance displays the artistic creativity and imagination of Greenaway as director. Prospero’s Books combines oral, audio, and visual presentation through voice, music, and imagery that we see created and performed as it is constructed. This avant-garde technique, particular to Greenaway in many of his films, has often been described as baroque. The baroque style is typified by a self-conscious attempt at grandiloquence, excess, and mannerism, punctuated by diverse interpretational strategies. A baroque style of filmmaking has also been called, alternatively, avant-garde and labyrinthine. According to Cristina Degli-Espositi Reinert, The aesthetic figurae of the baroque uses a series of scopic regimes. These observational strategies include the conceit, mannerist representation, repetition, parody, satire, the menippea, intertextuality, mirroring, trompe l’oeil, the labyrinth, carnivalization, morphing of forms, staging, distortion, contradiction, instability, disorder, chaos, detail, and fragment. These scopic strategies propel artistic transformations, metamorphoses, and consequent morphogeneses of any given artform.31 The combination or utilization of several of these strategies occurs in Prospero’s Books to such an extent as to potentially overwhelm the spectator. The baroque idioms Greenaway uses include a highly stylized theatrical mise-en-scène, tableaux, quotation from painting, and intense lighting and framing. The baroque mise-en-scène and cinematography complement the encyclopedic and water-related allusions in the film, from Shakespeare to Renaissance art to mythological figures, shown in the opening tracking shot. Greenaway does not shy away from such allusions. He uses his graphic paintbox to layer image upon image, to superimpose multiple images and words, and to consciously reframe characters and objects. This graphic manipulation indicates a radical new way of seeing cinematic space, a

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tradition upheld in Renaissance art and mannerist painting. In Prospero’s Books, the frames used to show images and pages of books are revealed to contain worlds that recall extraframing spaces and sources like Renaissance painting, highlighting the multiple divergences of Greenaway’s avant-garde adaptation. What we see onscreen is constantly shifting due to numerous frames and perspectives, a technique creating various visual stratifications that often show painterly, literary, or theatrical allusions. “These inter-framing techniques explore a viewing power of optical neobaroque quality. The screens within screens are digressing devices that work to arrange the organization of a hypertext.”32 The hypertext, in Genette’s terminology, is the adaptation, here Greenaway’s film version of The Tempest. Hypertext, too, can denote the multiplicity of narratives and frames at work simultaneously onscreen; there are various texts, in other words, interlocking or pushing against one another. In sum, according to Degli-Espositi Reinert, Prospero’s Books violates the dominant experience of movie watching, presenting itself as an erudite filmic hypertext that exceeds the limits of mainstream conventions and engages in the dispensation of an aesthetic conception of the neo-baroque and its encyclopedic quality in the cinema. Using a particular kind if imaging to render the diverse coexistence of many encyclopedic levels of reality, the film self-reflexively reprises motifs from Greenaway’s earlier films in an all-pervasive postmodern manner that expands, re-invents, parodizes the very concept of the art of filmmaking in order to make it encyclopedic, continuously testing out intertextual competence and the knowledge one might have acquired from “background texts.”33 This summative argument touches on the avant-garde ideas of breaking conventions, employing self-referentiality, and especially of violating spectatorial experience. Clearly, Greenaway’s adaptation values the belief of difference, of translating a source text by exploiting its potential for creative interpretation. The many changes at the discursive level that Greenaway enacts, from compression to expansion, from transpositioning to superimposition and grafting, all indicate that his adaptation presents a meditation on The Tempest, on adaptation, and on the relationship between (or among) the plethora of texts that inform the cinematic representation of Prospero’s world. Prospero’s Books reminds us that to experience Shakespeare as an avantgarde adaptation is to enter into a new realm of visual and cognitive experience where the rediscovery of texts involves theoretical speculation, ideological involvement, and historiographic allusion. Foremost, the film allows us to see the potential of cinema as a radically advanced form of illusion.

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Chapter 15

Wisconsin Death Trip

The statement that a book is “unfilmmable” is frequently overused, but often, because a book’s form and content is precisely difficult to translate to screen, the resulting film adaptation becomes something to behold, a small (or large) marvel of the process of exploitative adaptation. Declaring that a book is “impossible to adapt” can provide the impetus for making a film in the first place. There is a certain amount of subjectivity involved when suggesting a book is “untranslatable” anyway, which implies that those who do undertake an adaptation of a problematic text are ones willing to take chances or risks. And by “problematic” texts, I do not mean standard classics or popular fiction. (Granted, some books, such as The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, The Hours, and Ulysses have received interesting adaptations.) Instead, texts that are seemingly perfectly suited for one medium may prove elusive for filmmakers. Such is the case with Michael Lesy’s underground or cult book (as it has been routinely described or categorized) Wisconsin Death Trip (first published in 1973), a coffee table book that was adapted into a film of the same name by director James Marsh in 1999. The book is a shocking compendium of newspaper clippings, photographs (including many of dead men, women, and children), asylum records, and contemporaneous poetry and regional fiction that detail roughly a ten-year span, from 1890 to 1900, in the town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin. The book is shocking only in its matter-of-fact depiction of the horrific and dark events that engulfed the town. The book chronicles the social, moral, psychological, and physical decimation of the town during the depression of the 1890s. The book is a wonderful example of the intersection of American history and folklore, providing a richly entertaining and mordantly original text about the failings of mind and spirit. How, then, should one adapt such a strange blend of brief text and mostly photography? Wisconsin Death Trip is an original enterprise, a film that admirably shows how an avant-garde approach to material proves fruitful and inspiring.

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The film is an idiosyncratic mix of documentary-like re-staging, dramatization, and reproduced photographs from the book. Some filmed parts of the movie are shot at 30 frames per second, creating an eerie, hazy slow-motion effect reminiscent of early silent films and also such “lost artifacts” as antiquated photographs. The film is shot (brilliantly by Eigil Bryld) in black and white and sepia, which highlights and encapsulates the tone of the book and the historical time frame. Marsh also includes present-day scenes of the town to contrast the past and present. These scenes often detract from the overall narrative of the film and at times seem tedious and even condescending. (They also are more suitable to a straightforward documentary and not an avant-garde film.) Still, the overall structure of the film suggests a strong affinity with experimental approaches to adaptation. Wisconsin Death Trip is an avant-garde adaptation because it makes one rethink how a movie can be constructed from an eccentric source book that, by and large, is something that is perhaps not well suited for the screen since it is a visual testament on its own, where photographs convey much more than the text. (That Lesy wanted to originally make a film out of the book in 1973 is important. I will touch on this later.) The resulting film is a series of vignettes that do not seem dramatized as much as staged, like real-life dioramas or large tableaux. The photographs themselves are what make the film haunting and, combined with the slow-motion sequences, create an archaic, grainy, detached realism. This qualified realism would on the surface appear to be antithetical to the avant-garde aesthetic, but the formal experimentation and the radical transpositioning of the book make Wisconsin Death Trip a unique example of how appropriating a book consisting of collagelike material works well for an avant-garde adaptation. The book is a litany of real-life cruel, weird, and horrific stories and photographs, and the film version reconstitutes some of these in an abbreviated form. Marsh slowly pans across images, restages scenes, and generally eschews narrative continuity in favor of a more associative response. Some of the terrible stories include: z z z z z z z

An arsonist run amok A spurned lover who kills his beloved, then himself A serial window smasher (who becomes a sort of heroine in the film) Self-immolation Hanging Death by freezing A teenager who kills a farmer just for the fun of it

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A faded opera singer who goes insane A farmer who blows his head off with dynamite

These bizarre and horrible stories are depicted along with stories of the depression, cruel and harsh weather conditions, and general dislocation, as most of the town residents were immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia. The photographs of the people from the town are grim and disturbing, mainly because they are real. Marsh adapts the book by extracting the photographs and placing them into a context that makes them even more alive through movement and reenactment. The book’s prominent depiction of mental illness, murder, suicide, business failure, drug addiction, tramps and thieves, diseases such as diphtheria and typhoid, and wayward youth make it dreadful to peruse and, in turn, often make the film difficult to watch. Their graphic nature, however, is also part of the power of the images: They haunt because they speak to a certain degree to how people live, cope, mange, suffer, and perish. Marsh stated that the inspiration, as it were, for the tone and style of the film was derived in part from the fact that the photographs were so haunting: “In a film you can create a whole complex of emotions, a situation, in a single image. For Wisconsin Death Trip, I was already informed to the power of the single image: looking at the book and the ghosts staring back at me.”1 The film vividly adapts these “ghosts”: The frame enlargements of the photographs stare from the screen; the reenactments showcase the placid stone-faced countenances of the actors (mostly nonprofessional) who not so much act rather than stand in place; and the shadowy look of the entire film seems to suggest a world full of lurking ghosts—images that speak despite their dead qualities. The book uses montage and collage, taking items from the local paper [the Badger State Banner] and placing them with the photographs (taken by town photographer Charles Van Schaick) to create a dense text. A majority of the newspaper accounts of the town’s troubles are morbidly (and unintentionally) humorous or witty, which is re-created to great effect in the film by actor Ian Holm who provides the voiceover narration, taken or adapted directly from the book’s articles. The combination of words and images proves powerful. Describing the book, and especially the way the images are both haunting and inspiring, Greil Marcus concludes, In words, the story was almost too much to take in, the accumulation of awful facts nearly mute in their cacophony. But the pictures spoke. From

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Van Schaick’s archive Mr. Lesy made a tableau of disassociation, terror and insanity passing for everyday life. It was all in the blank eyes, the frozen mouths in family portraits: those were the ghosts James Marsh saw.2 The book’s mesmeric quality stems from the way the photographs speak for themselves in spite of having the occasional news text that accompanies them. The stories of murder, mania, mayhem, and mortal illness are best told by viewing the photographs. In turn, in order to adapt the book into a film, it only makes sense to incorporate some of the images. The avant-garde flourish comes from the re-created moments and from the similar montage approach that Lesy took in the original text. Lesy’s book is in some ways a history text but not the kind typically used in schools. To learn from history is to delve into the many topics that have the ability to engage the intended audience. The audience for the film version of the work, Wisconsin Death Trip, is limited; the film has no linear narrative, no stars, no budget, and no discernable marketing value, all traits associated with the avant-garde. The book and film provide a distinctive and provocative look at an otherwise obscure moment of American history, and it is often these obscure moments that stand out from the others. What Lesy and Marsh have done is uncover a rich tapestry of stories about a particular moment in time that resonate because they are universal in theme. Despite the grim nature of the events, there are aspects to the stories that are relevant to almost anyone. Lesy’s book was not necessarily meant to be history; it is an art book rather than social history per se. “The selection and juxtaposition of the images and incidents allowed it to be viewed as a kind of down-home surrealism,” suggests Michael Eaton, “[a] metropolitan discovery of the bizarre in the rural life of years gone by.”3 Discovering the bizarre in mundane America, like David Lynch did in Blue Velvet, potentially marks a certain kind of tendency toward stereotyping, but Marsh avoids this since he decides to re-create events in super slow motion, use sepia tone, and present the material without an excess of irony. (The only deliberate irony—and perhaps stereotyping—occurs with the color scenes of present-day Black River Falls.) Ian Holm’s narration is often juxtaposed in an ironic way with the images of death and madness, but as a whole, the film avoids being sarcastic or mocking; there is a sense of respect and sincerity to the way the images of the dead children, for example, are displayed for us. Wisconsin Death Trip keeps its intellectual distance from the subject matter, drawing us in through its experimental, avant-garde style, even when it becomes overly gloomy and gruesome. The film is morbid and

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somewhat melancholy given its subject matter, but it escapes extreme pathos, mainly due to the stunning cinematography; the inspired music, ranging from Debussy to DJ Shadow; and the stylistic and formal innovation it displays in relation to its source text. Marsh appropriates the images and words from Lesy’s book to create an unsettling semidocumentary fever dream of a film. Its hallucinatory quality makes it akin to surrealism, while its collagelike approach harks to avant-garde filmmakers such as Joseph Cornell or Bruce Conner. Its use of archival photography even suggests the work of a mainstream documentarian such as Ken Burns. Its expressionistic cinematography recalls the early Poe adaptations of The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and The Tell-Tale Heart (1928). While there is a loose narrative thread in the film revolving around the changing of the seasons, it more or less appears episodic and nonlinear, focusing on a select few stories from the original book. By structuring the film around the seasons, Marsh gives a sense of the seasonal transitions that both instigate and accompany the shifts in behavior of the people, from relativel normalcy to outright insanity. Black River Falls comes across as a place of seasonal madness, sudden violence, and extreme eccentricity. The film begins with a voice-over stating, “It is safe to assume that nowhere in the length and breadth of this great continent of ours can be found a more desirable residence than Black River Falls.” Then we hear a loud boom, a camera flash, before seeing the photograph of the dead body of a little girl being placed in her miniature coffin. After the credits, the camera takes an unusual position below a man’s dangling feet—he has hung himself. This sequence demonstrates that the title of the film should be taken quite literally and also shows how ingenious Marsh is with the camera, making a quick experimental leap from the girl to the point-of-view shot looking up at a man hanging. The initial voice-over is spoken in a calm, soothing tone, extolling the virtues of the town and its way of life, sounding like the beginning of a fairy tale. Like a fairy tale, however, the story becomes increasingly dark, as does Holm’s voice. He recites the same speech at the end of the film but, by then, the words have an entirely separate meaning, and his tone is no more comforting than it is menacing. Using voice-over is not typically an avant-garde technique, but in Wisconsin Death Trip, the words are lifted directly from the newspaper accounts scattered throughout Lesy’s book. This provides a sense of continuity between the two, a kind of appropriative act that signals not just a shift in medium but demonstrates how the words are used in separate ways to get separate meanings, which is a form of experimental writing. Holm’s reading of the text is

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often deadpan, then ominous, then intimidating, and eventually hissing. It creates irony and unexpected humor at times, like an old overthe-top tongue-in-cheek Vincent Price monologue that comes across as scornful yet presented with serious intent. As Stephen Holden suggests, “The sardonic tone of the book is accentuated by the voice of Ian Holm reading the newspaper accounts of the murders and suicides in an insinuating voice that conveys an attitude of sly, supercilious amusement. Occasionally he dramatically lowers his voice to a hissing conspiratorial whisper.”4 The voice-over accompanies the endless parade of insanity, murder, suicide, arson, and drowning, and the way the images interact with the text is disarming, creating a dislocating effect. Are we to laugh or shudder? This effect could be described as avant-garde; taking words and using them in another medium or context can yield similar and different results or reactions, and the narration demonstrates how, like earlier avant-garde shorts, the images speak as words just as the words induce imagery. In essence, the way the narration interacts with the images onscreen provides a conflicting spectatorial response that is akin to watching other avant-garde films: We are mentally, emotionally, and physically disjointed and divided as we watch. In an interview with Robert Birnbaum, author Michael Lesy describes how he wanted to originally have Wisconsin Death Trip be released as a movie and not a book, remarking that the material was suggestively powerful as a film text. He says, “I wanted to make it a movie. But it cost too much to produce. So it was just a poor man’s way of making a movie in book form.”5 A film book is an avant-garde form, depending on how it is assembled. One of the great advantages for Marsh as the director was to adapt a book that essentially was a film on the page. According to Lesy, “I made a book that had film sequences in it.”6 Marsh’s transposition of the book to the screen involves taking the film sequences suggested on the page and delivering them to the screen, which he does through the vivid tableaux and reenactments, which are filmed using the avant-garde technique of slowing down the frames per second to create a cloudy, hallucinatory effect. The way the book is put together also lends itself neatly to an avant-garde adaptation. In the same interview, Lesy says, “The collages were inspired by Max Ernst and Heartfield—all the surrealist stuff. To the extent that the collages intervene in the book: at that time they were meant to be sledgehammers.”7 Watching avant-garde films, adaptations or not, is sometimes like being pounded by a particular motif or formal device—a sledgehammer—that forces one to rethink what is being shown and how the showing affects perception. Marsh does a fine

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job of creating the effect in the film version of Lesy’s book. It combines surrealism and collage, both in its antimainstream stylistic and its formal filmmaking choices. The result of watching an avant-garde film like Wisconsin Death Trip makes one either responsive, deadened, enraptured, puzzled, or numb—all conflicting and competing emotions that speak to how an avant-garde film deliberately provokes the spectator. According to Lesy, the book had a similar intent. He says: I tried to create sequences that would be interrupted by rather heavyhanded interventions to say, “Think and look again.” The text had one message—but it was meant to be combined with the messages of the images. And the intent was to hope that one could create through this complex layering of information or collage making a kind of soup bowl in which information could be sucked on and enjoyed. I am much more inclined—much more interested in creating wonder and fear and amazement and confusion than to preach.8 Lesy’s description of how a reader of the text should possibly react is similar to the viewing experience of the film. As discussed in the introduction, avant-garde films tend to make viewers rethink notions of cinema during and after the viewing process. Wisconsin Death Trip provides a way to be amazed at the approach to the material—presented as a collage, still images, and reenactments—and to the tentative, nondefinitive messages inscribed in them. Hence, viewers come away puzzled but drained from watching the stories unfold. According to Michael Eaton, the way Marsh has translated the text speaks to its hybridity, to the nature of how reading texts involves intertextual connections and multiple viewing responses. He suggests, Already a subtle transformation has occurred: the texts are now married to images that illustrate rather than allowing seemingly random juxtapositions to create a third meaning. What emerges is a shift of emphasis from the social/political to the individual/psychological. It’s now far easier to view Black River Falls as an aberrant gothic liminal zone rather than as a cracked synecdoche for the whole of the Union.9 While it is arguable if the town stands alone, as Eaton suggests, rather than representing what a generalized sense of Americana, the emphasis on the psychological aspects of both the material and the spectator is what makes the experience noteworthy. This unsettling effect is a basic

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tenet of surrealism as outlined by André Breton; an avant-garde film juxtaposes images to create more meanings for the viewer than previously expected from typical moviegoing. (In his Surrealist Manifesto, Breton defined surrealism as “pure psychic automatism.”)10 Wisconsin Death Trip adheres to this principle in several ways, making it an uncommon experience. The film contains no dialogue (save for the present-day scenes), just photographs and static-camera black-and-white reenactments with several slow pans across images. The lurid material is accompanied by symphonic excerpts that are juxtaposed with the deathly images and stories. The material is arranged in a way that showcases how the town devolved into insanity and brutality at different times of the year, as depicted in vignettes that are eerily similar to old, decrepit, and fading silent films. This approach captures the book’s bleak tone and also creates its own moody atmosphere. Ultimately, the film offers us ways of not just rethinking the past, based on the actual events or the way it is assembled, as a means of rethinking cinematic form. It also makes us reflect on how the past interacts with the present. The film has plenty to say about the small community of Black River Falls in the 1890s, but it also suggests that there is a thread of continuity connecting similar towns through all periods of time. The film shows the American gothic come to life; Marsh points to the particular rituals and customs that most people do not give a second thought. These are highlighted in the present-day scenes and include homecoming parades, the singing of the “Star-Spangled Banner” at a retirement home, and high school football. Beneath this sheer veneer lurks the nature of violence that plagued towns like Black River Falls in the 1890s. Marsh does not seem overly didactic, but the film suggests that the violence and mass dementia of the town are not actually that abnormal. Of course, it also implies that the gothic doings are entirely isolated. Even more, the film suggests that individuals cause harm when they become insane. It is these multiple meanings that the film presents that cause it to be ambiguous, and ambiguity is a staple of many avant-garde films. The film offers a commentary on the timelessness of human nature and depravity, most of it being disturbingly depressing but also grotesquely fascinating. It is a part of human nature to sometimes romanticize the past, but Wisconsin Death Trip shows how the links to the past via Black River Falls do not always yield pleasant memories. The film is arguably about the spectacle of death and insanity and unusually harsh conditions and actions. Its episodic arrangement and staging on the nature of human behavior provides a sense of that

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particular moment in history, but, paradoxically, without suggesting it is of a determinate moment, which is due in large part to the avant-garde style of the film. The sense of dislocation, the bogging down of time (due to the 30-frames-per-second shooting speed), the trauma of displacement, and the outright loneliness that stems from the stories in the film add to our own sense of disillusionment over the structure and rigidity of small town homeliness. The material is presented in a way that makes us play witness to the siege of unexplained madness that gripped the town. We recognize the demons of the past from a slightly safe distance—as if viewing an antiquated museum or sideshow attraction—but we are ultimately reminded of our own mortality. The sordid events are presented as if they are common occurrences; Marsh does not sentimentalize nor psychologize the people. Instead, what we get is an engaging portrait of imperfect, perverted, and grotesque people and their unusually horrific displays of violence. We get a sense of suspended isolation, of insulation, of a world trapped or frozen in time, mainly from how the film uses photography as a rhetorical device, which is then used to construct the adaptation through a variety of avant-garde techniques. Greil Marcus noted that when the book was adapted to the screen, “I could imagine the result, or think of a book less amenable to film. [The book] seemed absolutely a thing in itself: its own construct, its own nightmare, its own scream.”11 Marsh, too, suggested the book appeared unfilmable, but he also saw in the text a particular series of ideas that he could translate to the screen in an imaginative way, one that needed, I propose, avant-garde aesthetics to achieve. While the film eventually yields a multitude of social, cultural, and historical interpretations and implications, Marsh did not want to capture any sort of outright ideological position with the film, which often occurs in the act of appropriation or adaptation. He says, What I did get from the book was a rhythm: the emerging incremental idea. But in terms of the stories themselves, the starting point was definitely photographic. Start with an image, a single image, and then move—a lot of long tracking shots, to keep a sense of the still image moving. But I knew I couldn’t film it. Do I try to contextualize the story, or do I let the stories yield their own mysteries—or do I have someone sitting in a chair explaining? That was the first choice I made, not to try and explain the social-political-culture history of anything. The stories are based on a respect for these individual tragedies and disasters.12

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The sense of respect comes through to some extent in the film, but the method of shooting the “still image moving” supplies the avant-garde aesthetic that marks it as truly original. The film is a visually audacious meditation on the source material. While the book contains plenty of news articles about the tragedies of Black River Falls, the real emotional weight is carried by the photographs. Translating the stills to moving form is what makes Wisconsin Death Trip a harrowing avant-garde film. “When the movie is celebrating the book,” writes Stephen Holden, “It is a creepily enthralling document that illustrates the susceptibility to breakdown of what we think of as sanity and civilization.”13 The offcenter subject matter, the icy voice-over, the use of lateral pans and tracking shots across still images, the re-created slow-moving dramatizations, and the deliberate fracturing of narrative time and space make the film an avant-garde adaptation. As mentioned, these techniques also might distance the spectator from the material, which results in a more subjective interpretation of what we see. History becomes a nonlinear reality, a shadowy corner of unspeakable acts that trigger personal interrogation. As Lesy himself says about the goal of his book, and of creating a work of art in general, which applies equally to the avant-garde adaptation, “If you are good at what you make, you create something that’s a puzzle that can be worked but that always leaves the person unsatisfied, leaves him wanting to work it again, to solve it better.”14 While the resulting film Wisconsin Death Trip allows spectators to draw conclusions and make interpretations, it does make one want to re-view it again as a puzzle that can satisfy expectations anew. As an avant-garde adaptation, Wisconsin Death Trip is a hodgepodge of collage and assemblage, a fertile mix of appropriated text and image that results in a somber study of real-life hardship and depredation. There is bluntness to the showcasing of violence and violent behavior, but the gallows humor keeps the film from becoming a dire exercise in unmediated stylization or simple gawking. The avant-garde techniques Marsh uses—the sepia tone, slow motion, the fragmented narrative, and the dark chiaroscuro lighting and framing—make it a marvel to behold.

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Chapter 16

Spectres of the Spectrum

A film that is a nearly complete mash-up or reassemblage of many, various, and different clips from other films is arguably not an adaptation at all since it is comprised of others’ materials instead of one’s own. But the appropriation of a multitude of clips that are used in a distinctive manner to create an entirely new film is both avant-garde (and has traditional ties to avant-garde practices of collage) and also an exceptional form of adaptation because the resulting work takes previously produced things—images, texts—and puts them together to create something refreshingly and insightfully new. Such is the case with Craig Baldwin’s Spectres of the Spectrum (1999), a found footage film consisting of old television shows and serials, science fiction B movies of the 1940s and 1950s, industrial and educational films, advertisements, and cartoons, which are edited together with live-action footage of the two main characters (called Yogi and his daughter Boo Boo) and complete with low-grade special effects, to create a smorgasbord of science fiction, conspiracy theory, time travel, and kitschy biography of such notable pioneers of electronics including Nikola Tesla, Philo Farnsworth, and Guglielmo Marconi. The film is incomparable when it comes to found footage films, a type of film practice that describes a system or technique of compiling films through editing part or entire of footage from found sources that have not been created by the filmmaker, and changing the meaning of the found clips by placing them in a new context. This type of filmmaking is indeed experimental and stems from early avant-garde filmmakers such as Joseph Cornell, Bruce Conner, and Ken Jacobs and, more recently, Bill Morrison, all artists who made films using previously discarded and disposed footage. The collage approach is a specific kind of avant-garde film that can, as I believe, be regarded as an original film adaptation as well. Spectres of the Spectrum is cleverly put together as a feature film with a plot, narrative structure, and motivated characters—hallmarks of

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traditional cinema. But the plot is complicated (if not convoluted): In 2007, a man named Yogi and his daughter Boo Boo decide they must save the earth from the New Electromagnetic Order, a large and shadowy entity that plans on erasing the memories of all people. Yogi is holed up in an underground bunker, so it is left to Boo Boo to travel back in time to the 1950s, when her grandmother left a coded message in an awful science fiction television show, Science in Action, uncover the message, travel back in time, and prevent the catastrophe. Along the way, we are presented with an extremely large amount of footage from old movies and television shows that are edited into the hokey narrative to create a complete collage of image and sound. Choosing to make a science fiction film proves a fruitful choice, as there are so many cheesy, kitschy, even campy science-fiction B films that Baldwin appropriates. Found footage is considered disposable; it is film that has been thrown away, left to deteriorate in the ash heaps of history. But using clips from a variety of sources and suturing them into a loose story line is a kind of avant-garde practice predicated on the surrealist and Dadaist tendencies of found memory, hallucination, dream states, and associative meaning, let alone collage, which appropriates film footage from a variety of filmic sources. Using an assortment of film clips in a particular manner creates entirely new meanings and associations for the spectator, so much so that the question arises over the authenticity of the meanings of the originals that serve as the sources: anything and everything becomes connotative. Spectres of the Spectrum uses the found footage in order to create a new mythology of electronic media. According to A.O. Scott, “[The film] marshals a great deal of evidence to support many provocative arguments about technology, the media, electromagnetism, the science of cosmography and the spirit world,” making it not just a film overloaded with tacky or tasteless clips from many sources but also one with a potential ideological agenda, a kind of avant-garde adaptation that not just thwarts expectations but challenges traditional forms of communication.1 In an interview with critic Alvin Lu, Baldwin even suggests, “I hate to describe myself as a moralist, but there really is this drive behind the film, not only to make something that’s beautiful-slash-ugly, but also to raise consciousness. That’s my missionary zeal.”2 Avant-garde artists traditionally have challenged preconceived notions of reality, of the ways people accept meaning. Baldwin here suggests that Spectres of the Spectrum is a film that not only is “beautiful and ugly,” hinting at the way it is constructed, but also one that deliberately wants to elicit change. The original avant-garde

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of the 1920s was predicated on the idea of upsetting the order of art, of creating avenues for artists to shuffle completely ideas about the functions of art by attacking the bourgeoisie. Spectres of the Spectrum is an amazing work that not only provides fun and humor but also helps us redefine our ideas about what becomes of communication media. In this regard, the film works on two levels: It poses questions about the nature of information transmission, making it an ideological treatise, but also makes us reconsider the nature of filmmaking by showing us that a feature film can consist almost entirely of appropriated pieces from many sources that when working together create an adaptation that is original and even far removed from the source(s). Baldwin, in creating his film, wants to expand our ideas about film viewing and media transmission. The film is a quasi–science fiction film that really is an amalgamation of styles and genres. Baldwin has been called a media archaeologist for the types of films he makes, and Spectres of the Spectrum is a kind of avant-garde film that digs into the past to recover seemingly lost objects, only to reintroduce them into culture through filmic means. The way the footage of the old movies, television shows, and advertising spots is edited is dazzling; the constant barrage of imagery is both compelling and frustrating, if only because it encourages sensory overload. This seems to be part of Baldwin’s intention. A collage approach to filmmaking assumes that there will be a mixing of various elements—a kind of alchemical process—that results in a finished product both independent of and reliant on its sources. The film provides an educational experience in filmmaking: Its editing is so masterfully done that, in addition to presenting us with wacky and eccentric histories of such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin and David Sarnoff, the film revels in its own creative process of construction. Many avant-garde films are formalistic endeavors, deliberately pointing to their artificial construction, and in Spectres of the Spectrum, Baldwin readily asserts the medium’s capacity to reproduce through manipulation. The film is eccentric and experimental because it approaches its sources as if they were snippets of texts that can be woven together with other texts (the narrative of the film) to create something new. It is rare to see a film that is complex, humorous, political, original, and also timely, but Spectres of the Spectrum manages to provoke many responses, the kind of adaptation that asks us to accept it on its own terms. Appropriation consists of using artistic content from previous sources, which can include the smallest amount of something that is recast in different or innovative ways in the adaptation. In choosing material

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from a variety of films, Baldwin has transferred images that have been extracted from original sites of meaning and placed them in another environment—essentially, a new text—which ultimately suggests more than just a sampling or borrowing. Terms associated with appropriation, as suggested by Julie Sanders, are as far ranging and diverse as “stealing, indebted, haunted, possessed, homage, mimicry, travesty, echo, [and] allusion.”3 Perhaps what Spectres of the Spectrum is engaged in is a new form of palimpsest, a hypertext that is using other images to continue a new string of images. Appropriation and adaptation are involved in the performance of cultural allusion, a kind of commentary on artifacts past and present. By exploiting the films and television programs of the past, the film grafts itself to them, creating an adaptation that is part of what I would suggest consists of bricolage and pastiche. Spectres of the Spectrum is a nonstop barrage of visual quotes, a seemingly amorphous collage of sound and images that creates a fine example of pure cinema. Spectres of the Spectrum engages in bricolage, a French term for “Do-it-Yourself (DIY), which helps to explain its application in a literary context to those texts that assemble a range of quotations, allusions, and citations from existent works of art.”4 Because the film is comprised of a series of found objects, and because Baldwin assembles them in a particular way to induce specific meaning, he participates in the process of bricolage. The use of quotation, allusion, citation, and, to a large extent, forced excerpt and extraction makes Spectres of the Spectrum a type of film based on the idea—or principal—of “do it yourself.” Bricolage is sometimes considered a fragmentary process of assembling disparate parts in the hope that something new emerges. The various examples of found footage that Baldwin uses separate his film from being a series of fragments, mainly because he wants to make a complete film, one that has a plot and compelling characters. The potential advantage and strength of the bricolage technique is that it allows for a particular way of layering the transposition. Spectres attempts to assemble a collage of images from a handful of mostly disparate sources, which is why they acquire new meanings through and in the finished adaptation. The film is composed of scraps from old television shows, schoolroom biographical films, industrial and educational films, television advertisements, cultural references (simply naming the characters Yogi and Boo Boo gestures to this), to Defense Department films that work together to make a documentary collage and bricolage-inspired fictional narrative. Because of the dislocation of images from their original settings, the film adapts them in ways that skewer their meanings and intentions. The result is a

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strange and compelling science fiction film, full of radical ideas about politics, telecommunication, social interaction, and the process of adaptation itself. A work of art, whether literary, aural, or visual can be considered a pastiche if, like bricolage, it assembles a hodgepodge assembly of items in the form of imitation. However, Baldwin’s film is no mere imitation; it is a barbed yet meaningful parable about America’s use of information, its faith in science, and its use of technology to either exert or subvert power over people, a kind of self-effacing critique inasmuch as it is an original avant-garde adaptation. According to Sanders, “Pastiche is often assumed to have a satiric undertow or a parodic intention, although there are exceptions to this rule.”5 Spectres of the Spectrum is the kind of film that pays homage to its multiple sources (you get the sense that Baldwin has some degree of admiration for the schlocky science fiction nonsense he appropriates), while also satirizing the sources and offering a parody of how technology and information has the potential to usurp ways of living. Pastiche is a complicated form of adaptation in this regard; “In some respects there is often a complicated blend of admiration and satire at play in pastiches,” which makes a film like Spectres of the Spectrum an intricate and convoluted example of how intertextuality works on a particular level.6 Here, the intertextual nature of appropriation is taken to new heights: The complete assemblage of parts that constitute the whole are so overwhelming that the resulting film is one that suggests that any form of cultural production is heavily reliant on so many other texts that creating a new text in any medium almost always relies on other forms of cultural and social production. That is, you cannot escape adaptation. (Many critics and theorists have discussed this notion in regard to literature, including Roland Barthes, for example.) This film adopts the avant-garde approach of bricolage, collage, pastiche, and palimpsest. Spectres of the Spectrum is the kind of avant-garde adaptation that foregrounds its construction, which suggests its alignment with particular forms of avant-garde art that are wholly formalistic. Many avant-garde films are like this, and so the film actively uses its found footage in ways that let us recognize that it is intended as artifice, a construction made before our eyes. Cut-up filmmaking, like the collage approach, has been around since the origins of cinema and has been best used in avant-garde filmmaking. Mashup literary works are often described as either postmodern or as collages and have increasingly become a popular form of writing. Assembled films, like Spectres of the Spectrum, use material either tossed out and disregarded or archived. The material is painstakingly

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viewed, and the footage is appropriated based on its significance to the narrative of the film, its visual strength and interdependence with other images, and its potential as part of the larger fabric of the montage of the film. In some instances, the found material helps construct the film’s narrative; the adaptation thus stems from how the material is appropriated from the various types of sources made available. According to cultural critic David Cox, Baldwin participates in “culture-jamming,” a more recent and somewhat postmodern term to describe the process of appropriating material to cerate and judge contemporary culture, particularly the circulation of visual imagery through multiple media forms. He says, “Culture-jammer work looks ruefully around the contemporary landscape and sees little other than visual and social evidence of a world made ugly, dull and boringly by the all-pervasive influence of commerce.”7 Spectres of the Spectrum arguably references this kind of work, since it offers a pointed critique of society’s misuse of technology. Cox, however, delineates this idea further: The “spirit of experimentation and play is at the very core of the culture-jammer aesthetic. The collage/essay style of filmmaking, for example, takes delight in the actual process of film assembly itself, and makes this explicit within the film’s structure.”8 Spectres of the Spectrum is the kind of avant-garde film that highlights its formation, reveling in the adaptation process. The film continuously offers a self-reflexive commentary on the nature of assemblage, using and displaying the filmic parts it has appropriated for its narrative. In this regard, Baldwin uses the found film footage as a kind of ideological impetus to tell his outrageous tale of electromagnetism, time travel, information appropriation, and telecommunication commodification. To this end, Cox concludes: Building from the ground up out of film text and graphic materials at hand, Baldwin makes the collage/essay film as an assembly. His work comments on the circumstances of its own production. Baldwin urges the film viewers to take heed from Spectres of the Spectrum’s conclusion: that electromagnetism is a free energy source, which should be available to anyone.9 Baldwin appropriates the films he has found in order to do what he wants them to do, rather than using them as simple clips. In this way, Baldwin treats the found films as artifacts that, as loosed media fragments, become agents of new information when appropriated into the film. Perhaps a great irony to Spectres of the Spectrum is that it addresses the notion that, in a disposable culture like ours, it takes what is disposed and

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resurrects it to offer a critique. Found footage films are ones that are, as mentioned, media archaeology—their creators dig around the past (and present) to unearth, clean up, and reuse what has been buried by time and advanced technology. These kinds of films can be considered avant-garde for this reason; their method of production is amateurish (but not in the negative sense of the term), their style is collagelike, they often have an ulterior motive such as an ideological critique, and they are extremely innovative and unlike anything found in the mainstream, in fact, eschewing (or skewering) tropes consistent with typical forms of filmmaking. As an avant-garde adaptation, Spectres of the Spectrum not only uses a particular style that makes Baldwin an experimental filmmaker but one that is predicated on the belief that appropriation is essential to creating something. The results are dizzying in their complexity; as critic J. Hoberman says, “Baldwin . . . believes that sensory overload can only be fought with more of the same.”10 The film is so densely textured and tangential, touching on everything from EdWood–type special effects to kitschy educational films on the likes of Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Wilhelm Reich to Bfilms, old kinescopes and TV shows, military films to the internet and Bill Gates. In describing this method, critic A. O. Scott concludes, The images come at you in a rush—Dean Martin, Sputnik, Thomas Edison, Wilhelm Reich, the Zapatistas, the Van Allen Belt—and the voice-over along with them. Mr. Baldwin tells and retells recent history as an epic of suspicious coincidence, wild science and the struggle between individual freedom and corporate domination.11 The idea of so many tangential stories, ideas, and film clips overwhelms the spectator but, at the same time, makes sense in the world of the film and especially in the world of this particular kind of avant-garde adaptation, the collage. Scott also says, “[Baldwin] works cheaply and with evident cinematic flair. What he produces, exhausting and ultimately bewildering as it is, is not without a certain visual and conceptual brilliance, or, thankfully, a sense of humor.”12 Baldwin’s method of severe and intense amalgamation can be tiresome, didactic, and even indulgent (to some), but it is also original, humorous, and crafty, which makes the film steer clear of imitation and commerciality. Baldwin said in an interview with Release Print, “It has never been my intention to kiss the ass of the audience.”13 Instead, Baldwin sets himself in opposition “to the commercial technique, where you text-market a film and conform [it] to the

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expectations of the audience. It seems backwards to me.”14 This defiance of creating commercialized work is common to independent filmmakers and avant-garde artists, practitioners who deliberately, forcefully, and angrily sidestep the mainstream aesthetic, whether in production or in distribution and exhibition. Spectres of the Spectrum demonstrates how someone working outside the mainstream commercial system can create an original work of art and, in this case, an avant-garde adaptation that takes the rules of adaptation and tosses them aside as well. The film works on its own terms; its appropriation of a seemingly endless list of sources makes it one of the rare types of films that never reconcile their methods to the norms of artistic production. As an adaptation, it uses what it finds to re-create something new, even when the objects used are akin to the finished product (such as using sciencefiction B-film footage in his own sciencefiction, time travel film). As Gregory Avery concludes in his review of the film, Along with being an invective and a warning against the privatization of communication, [Spectres of the Spectrum] also works as an amusing trip into the past, an adventure story, socio-political commentary, a David and Goliath story, and further proof that Baldwin can take anything, from anywhere, and use it to convey messages that the original makers never dreamed of telling.15 Spectres of the Spectrum is a highly involved film, and it engages the spectator on various levels. It is an eclectic and complex mix of appropriation, but rather than distancing spectators completely, it often draws them in further due to its own sense of logic. It reminds us that avant-garde film adaptations are adventurous and adventurously made.

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Chapter 17

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

Of all the plentiful vampire film adaptations, Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002) is the most inventive, exploitative, and visually stimulating. It is daring in all aspects of its production, including its mode of adaptation (from a stage ballet that itself was adapted from the novel); its acute condensation of Bram Stoker’s novel; its technically exciting cinematography; its silent film aesthetic milieu; and its use of tinting, music, and sound effects. It stands apart from other adaptations of Dracula, mainly because director Guy Maddin is such an individualistic, maverick, and original filmmaker whose sensibilities are unparalleled. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is avant-garde because it defies not only the expectations that come with any association to the original source novel but also because Maddin presents the material in such an unusual way. The film resists outright categorization: It is a hybrid adaptation, an appropriation, and an original work that stands apart from any descriptive category associated with mainstream filmmaking. Maddin is interested in exploiting the techniques of film. He prefers silent film conventions: intertitles, musical and sound effect cues, irises, overlapping dissolves and superimpositions, color tinting, and soft focuses. The film appears as if produced in another era, and while this is entirely unorthodox and avant-garde for mainstream contemporary cinema, it is the preferred working conditions for Maddin, whose films tend toward the archaic and anachronistic world of the silent era. It is why critic Milan Pribisic can rightfully conclude, “[Maddin’s] Dracula in particular [is] the work of a visionary director whose originality always already looks like an adaptation—that is, like it has been found somewhere else and reconstructed, rearranged, recast, and transformed.”1 Additionally, adding to his already unique aesthetic milieu, Maddin has filmed the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s own adaptation (by Mark Godden) as his filmic adaptation of Stoker. Essentially, Maddin has crafted an exploitative adaptation of the ballet, “[a]nd as a filmed ballet, whatever canons to fidelity

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to the original staged performance it may be offending against, it utterly avoids anything static or simply documentary.”2 One might describe it as a “silent, black and white ballet film,” but that still would not do the film justice, as it offers, perhaps, a version of Dracula that is faithful to its source material. Is it possible to reinvent the vampire film and, more importantly, the most famous of vampires, Dracula? Dracula has remained in the public consciousness—and in cinema—ever since Stoker’s book was published in 1897. What Maddin has done is relevant to any sort of (re)consideration of Dracula and also to avant-garde adaptation. Maddin’s films are all original enterprises, so it comes as no surprise that he would film a version of Dracula based on a ballet, all while maintaining his distinctive style: bold black-and-white cinematography, dark thematic material, rapid editing, sparse lighting, grainy film stocks, primal imagery. The film, like other Maddin works, is constructed as a silent film, which means it contains all the tropes one would associate with the genre. For example, the beginning of the film has close-ups of each character with accompanying intertitles announcing who they are, a significant trope of silent-era and early sound cinema. The character of Lucy is shown superimposed over the undulating ocean waves. As William Beard puts it, “In another silent film gesture, this time from the historical avant-garde, there appear a pair of shots of Lucy cut out and pasted, as it were, on a background of rolling sea waves, her eyes opening into a startled stare.”3 Maddin employs computer graphics to enhance the color schemes (red and green, in particular) and uses a mobile camera that tracks the dancers’ moves with ease and grace. The plot of the film is mostly straightforward and sticks to the book: Dracula preys on the blood of virgins; he seeks Lucy first then Mina; Van Helsing discovers Dracula’s identity; the male mob tracks Dracula down and drives a stake through his heart. The beginning of the film even has a title card that reads, “There are bad dreams for those who sleep unwisely,” which is taken directly from Stoker’s novel. Maddin has admitted that he is not particularly interested in dance, but what he has done with the ballet adaptation of Dracula is remarkably in tune with both the novel and the mechanizations of dance and performance, creating a version of Dracula that is inimitable among its fellow adaptations, especially considering the overblown screen images of Dracula that seem to proliferate in screen adaptations. Maddin’s filming of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s Dracula shows his own way of highly inventive and imaginative avant-garde adaptation. His film engages Godden’s ballet, returns us to Stoker’s novel, and invites us to

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silent era cinema. He also asks us to become thoroughly enmeshed in his kinetic, frenetic style, marked by the dramatic mise-en-scène, the stark black-and-white cinematography, and the visceral editing. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is different from the many manifestations of Dracula that have appeared in popular consciousness: from Nosferatu to Tod Browning and Bela Lugosi to the Hammer films to the current crop of popularized vampires that populate movie and television screens. Maddin’s version is not so much a filmed recording of a stage production; rather, he has reimagined Stoker’s Dracula as a metaphoric text on immigrant and xenophobic hysteria, female empowerment and sexuality, and the inadequacy of men when faced with a virile other. All of these themes are present in Stoker’s book, and Maddin has chosen to focus on them simply because they are what he perceives to be the major ideas in the source book. I consider it to be an excellent adaptation and an exploitative one, simply from its imaginative, dynamic force. Beard compares the film with other adaptations and also suggests its supremacy: Watch five minutes of Dracula—Pages from a Virgin’s Diary and five minutes of Coppola’s lavish spectacle Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) that is trying so extravagantly hard to be faithful to the original, and the empty ornateness of the latter and what one can only call the natural procedures of the former, are immediately clear. Maddin, with his bargain-basement production apparatus, his antiquarian cinematic language branded with avant-gardisms, and his mocking yet naïve narrative stance, connects directly with Stoker’s world, and with those of Victorian stage melodrama, Griffithian sexual hysteria, Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), and James Whale’s 1930s monster movies.4 Indeed, Maddin has made a remarkable film adaptation of Stoker’s book, all while maintaining his own idiosyncratic tastes and proclivities as a filmmaker. While he is also interested in presenting the ballet, he films it as a dramatization of the novel, not as a dance film. Maddin noted, “[We’d] decided to make it a silent movie that just happened to have dancing in it, rather than a dance film.”5 Maddin’s film is a mix of theatricality and cinema, a hybrid form that suggests an ongoing dialogue between the two artistic mediums. By applying silent era film aesthetics to ballet, Maddin blends cinematic and theatrical tropes, using audiovisual imagery from each, while keeping the narrative of Stoker’s Dracula intact. In discussing the film, critic Milan Pribisic calls Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary a

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“theater film,” which is “an encounter between the two media that encourage dialogue between them and not their fusion, blending, or melting.”6 The two media in question are theater and film, and Maddin has rightfully juxtaposed the two, but he has also, I would offer, seamlessly mixed them: His camera is as fluid as a dancer; it moves among the ballet performers throughout the film, capturing not just their bodily movement but also their facial expressions and hand gestures. Pribisic continues, “Theater film openly exploits its hybrid nature and a relational dialectics found at the meeting point of the two different media.”7 What Maddin has done, instead of choosing a straightforward adaptation of the Stoker text, is exploited it by finding themes that are rendered through the ballet (and through the accompanying Mahler score). The ballet focuses on the sexual tension in Stoker, the fear of outsiders, and the interactions among the principal players (Lucy, Mina, Harker, Van Helsing, and Dracula). Dracula has an enormous sexual appetite for virgins; his seduction of Mina and Lucy are central to Stoker’s original and the ballet, and so Maddin uses them as the focal points for his film. Maddin’s characteristic wicked sense of humor emphasizes the sexuality theme, which is embodied by the dancers of the ballet. As Beard suggests, “At every point Maddin has seized on the ballet’s sexual characterizations and extended them with relish.”8 The first half is devoted to Lucy while the second is to Mina. In describing his choices, Maddin said, “As soon as women acknowledge lust, the men who care for, admire and desire them can’t deal with this, and have to track down the source of this lust somehow, meanwhile hurting the women who have created the jealousy in them.”9 The novel’s focus on Lucy and Mina’s exchanges and diaries suggests why Maddin focuses on the two of them and their awakening sexuality. Adapting Dracula provides a challenge for any filmmaker, mostly because of its structure. It is a Victorian melodrama, which suits Maddin’s style and sensibilities well, but it also provides ample room for exploring different themes and genres, hence its legacy as a horror novel. The novel addresses (or at least suggests) diverse ideas surrounding purity, loyalty, desire, and compassion, and Maddin’s film plays on these ideas through the dancers’ interactions, the music, and the intertitles. However, Maddin is also interested in the theme of infection, specifically the tainting of the pure, symbolized in the novel by the mixing of blood. There is also the idea of how gender is represented as passive (the “moral” men) and aggressive (the sexualized Dracula and his minions). In comparing the novel, the ballet, and Maddin’s film, Beard points out that the novel’s publication date, 1897, coincided with the birth of cinema, and that the

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end of the Victorian era was sped up by the technological and scientific sides of modernity. He suggests, The ballet jettisons almost all of Stoker’s modern technology, it points backwards instead, from the antique Victorian world to the timeless and mythological realm of Dracula. But the film reimports the collision [of modernity versus tradition, modernism versus romanticism, progress versus regression, reason versus the sublime and the terrifying], now (as so often in Maddin) between past and present, between a period sensibility/aesthetics and the contemporary sensibility/aesthetics, between Dracula (an atavistic force, an expression of an earlier culture and narrative medium) and the movie (electricity, filmmaking technology that is in this film newly emphasized).10 Beard points out how Maddin is capable of making Dracula (as a film) technologically advanced by harking back to the origins of cinema as his stylistic and formal inspiration, perhaps a paradox, but one that suits Maddin and his form of adaptation well. By his own admission, Maddin was interested in creating a film adaptation based on his interpretation of Stoker’s themes of otherness, immigration, and female sexuality and presenting them in a manner befitting the Godden ballet and his own unique style. As he says, “I decided early on that I wanted to make the most faithful adaptation of the novel ever made, with the strange exception that it is all being danced!”11 Hence, he used Godden but adds in Renfield and Lucy’s mother (who were both absent from the ballet version but important to the novel). To this, he incorporates his view of Dracula as “just a big pleasurable lust fluttering around from woman to woman.”12 So in keeping with the novel’s themes, Maddin wants us to see the story of Dracula in a particular way that suits his style of filmmaking, which here has the added element of dancing. Since it is a silent film, Maddin uses intertitles to help further the narrative. According to Pribisic, Introducing direct quotes from Stoker’s book also serves as a reminder of the original source for both ballet adapter Godden and film adapter Maddin. This move exposes the dialogic nature of the theater film, wherein the steps in the process of transcoding from the original to the different adaptations are acknowledged and appreciated. Reading these phrases on the screen mimics the act of reading stoker’s novel, as well as what the characters in it have been doing throughout the narrative.13

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Maddin’s use of intertitles informs his adaptation; they point to the intertextual nature of the avant-garde adaptation, here combining novel, ballet, and cinematic techniques. The plot elements of Stoker’s novel remain in Maddin’s adaptation: good versus evil, male jealousy, female repression, and sexual transgression, and he transforms these into bits of screen time, edited furiously together to create a montage that recalls Eisensteinian collision. Maddin essentially transforms Stoker’s novel from epistolary pastiche to cinematic appropriation: The combination of intertitles, direct quotes, ballet moves, musical cues, sound effects, and speedy montage create an adaptation that injects the original novel and ballet with a surprisingly amendable screen style. In summarizing the film, Donato Totaro suggests, In Dracula, Maddin uses every possible visceral effect to keep the viewer sensorially stimulated and agitated. Shots come and go at break-neck pace, and edits alternate from being fluid to cubistic; the camera is in constant motion, often moving as if a partner with the dancers; and the image continuously alternates in speed, color, shape, and format. The result is the richest demonstration to date of what constitutes Maddin’s signature style: the archaic made (post)modern.14 These stylistic techniques are hallmarks of Maddin’s films, and while Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary uses them to great effect, they do not necessarily supersede the narrative. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is an avant-garde adaptation mainly because it chooses to visualize the material in such a dazzling technical fashion, using black and white film stock with color toning and tinting to exaggerate thematic ideas. For example, the inside of Dracula’s cape is red, his eyes are red, and the blood is red; money is often tinted green or even red, emphasizing the correlation of passion and greed. While mainly monochromatic, there are bright textures and tints of green, blue, purple, and crimson. There are occasional fades that frame the scenes like silent films. The sound effects include the tender squish of fangs entering a neck and the halting thwack of a stake through Dracula’s heart. The remarkable aspect of Maddin’s film, however, is the way it is edited. The pace is lightning quick, with sometimes three to four separate shots in a matter of seconds. One is reminded of both Maddin’s The Heart of the World (2000) and 1920s Soviet montage. According to Beard, [In] Dracula Maddin has grafted some of the editing language of Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov (and their descendants all the way down

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to the mainstream present) onto the generally slower and visually more stable world of melodrama. Making this work in Dracula is perhaps easier because of the fact that Maddin is adapting an already fully realized narrative creation in the form of the [Royal Winnipeg Ballet] ballet and simply applying this editing language to it, or seeing how it can be expanded and cinematized by such an application.15 This only heightens the ballet; at times the dancing complements the narrative while at others the narrative drives the dancing. This is accomplished through the meticulous editing and cinematography. The ballet helps distinguish the film as a Dracula adaptation, but it also serves as inspiration for movement and the classical, romanticized view of vampires as fluid\ free-floating entities that move among us with grace and ease. Using different cameras—16 millimeter, 8 millimeter, video—and three separate camera operators allows Maddin freedom to experiment. The result is a film that appears fragmented, even primitive in places. (Maddin employed editor deco dawson [sic] for the film and has graciously acknowledged his contributions to the editing style.) According to Totaro, “The influence of dawson’s ‘micro-editing’ and the new found freedom of computer editing meets its zenith in Dracula, a technical and stylistic tour de force where Maddin/dawson re-energize Eisenstein’s ‘montage of attraction’ by taking the idea of collision and contrast to its fullest conceptual level.”16 The combination of the dancing, the narrative, and the editing create a film that forces us to become involved in its foregrounded style, a characteristic of many avant-garde adaptations. As Beard surmises, [Filming] in three dimensions instead of in some kind of proscenium configuration, with cameramen darting through the action and swishpanning around it, certainly has its origin in the fact that Maddin could, in Dracula, insert himself in this fashion into a production that was already staged in three dimensions. And these endlessly active hand-held cameras form a natural partnership with a more radically interventionist editing style.17 The constant motion of the cameras works perfectly with the constant movement of the dancers and ultimately produces a radical way of interpreting an interpretation of the novel. As Maddin says, “I got to work with non-stop music and fluid camera along the way, then cut it all up with little halting hiccup-cuts, jump-cuts, and good ol’ fashioned bad

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continuity.”18 Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is a moody, expressionistic take on the original text, but it never loses sight of the content of that original: While its style often overshadows narrative, the film adheres to Stoker’s novel as well, which makes it both oddly new while reminding us of the story it retells through its unique adaptation process. Maddin goes back to Stoker (while also transposing the ballet) for the film’s themes and narration. From Stoker, Maddin gets the overt fear of the other—manifested, of course, in Dracula—but also exploits the latent xenophobia of the eastern Europeans found in Stoker’s text. Maddin also latches onto the dormant sexuality of Anglo-Saxon Victorian England by focusing, again following Stoker, on the mob mentality that places blame on the women. According to Erica Spiller, “There is one constant throughout [Stoker’s] Dracula and its adaptations: the threats of the patriarchal Western tradition, specifically, women and foreigners, and the fear of the ‘other’ crossing the boundaries set by the dominant ideology.”19 Maddin’s film heightens these tensions. As he notes, “I immediately identified with how the men responded to the threat from the Other: from a romantic rival, from a foreigner, from someone who might take your money out of the country. I just know that in every human’s nature, that fear and hatred of the Other, and women are often blamed for the presence of the Other, too.”20 Clearly Maddin is interested in preserving the major themes from the adapted text. The result is an unabashed adaptation that remains faithful because it ramps up the sexual/immigration issues, while simultaneously presenting an innovative stylistic tour de force. By focusing on the ideological and psychosexual issues that have been a part of the discourse surrounding the novel for more than a century, Maddin’s film is a testament to how an avant-garde work need not stray too far from the original. Dracula is played by Asian dancer Wei-Quiang Zhang, so the dual appropriation of other—as foreigner (literally) and undead presence—from the ballet and novel serves as a reminder that the novel is not merely about a bloodsucking vampire but also someone chastised and feared for his uniqueness. Maddin takes the familiar story and myth of Dracula and repackages it in a distinctive way—much like he takes the tropes of old cinema and reconstitutes them to his liking. Stoker’s novel has an epistolary framework; it is told through letters, diary entries, newspaper clippings, and Harker’s recounting of his journey to the Carpathians. The fragmented style of Maddin’s film is similar to this structure. Though the film is structured around Lucy and Mina and their encounters with Dracula, the loose narrative complements the hodgepodge style of Stoker’s original. Maddin has admitted to reading

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only half of the novel and extrapolating from it what he wanted for his adaptation. Such an approach may seem insufficient for purists of adaptation, but it exemplifies the avant-garde adaptation: piecing together a film based on a previous text based solely on personal likes and dislikes. He says, “I only ever read the first half of it, but it was enough for me to get what the book was really about: the way men propagandize against women who make them jealous, creating a monstrous perfect man that they measure themselves against, spending all their time trying to expunge him . . .”21 In Maddin’s film, Dracula becomes a representation of male jealousy, and the women serve as reminders of the inadequacies of their living suitors. Both Lucy and Mina come alive sexually in the presence of Dracula; the dancers who play the characters are both seductive and seduced. Maddin’s Dracula has flowing black hair, blood-red eyes, and a flowing black cape. He is a sexual figure who reminds us of the benign, chaste, unsexual male figures (Harker, Holmwood, and Seward). Dracula has power: He is undead, is mysterious, and is an aristocrat. Maddin takes this figure, which has undoubtedly become a stereotype and icon, and creates something new, based on how he is presented to us. As a ballet dancer, Dracula is elegant and sophisticated, stylish and stylized. Ballet dancing is highly performative, and Maddin’s Dracula is a work that performs its adaptation. There is constant motion. Dracula is as much a performer as he is a character. The cinematography and editing work in conjunction with the dancers to produce a new form of dance film. Ballet is a type of dance that showcases the body and gestures of the performer. As Maddin noted in an interview, “[By] simply overlapping the action on cuts, either through jump cuts or those overlapping cuts, you can fetishize a gesture quite nicely so that it takes on a cool meaning. And that’s sort of what dance does too. I thought that was kind of a nice match.”22 In the DVD commentary track, Maddin also discusses the dancers as “Expressionistic silent-movie actors.” Dracula as a character is similar to the analogy made by Maddin in his interview and echoed by his commentary. He captures this combination of dancing and expressionistic acting because of the way he films the ballet: The moving body replaces any existing form of actor or voice as the primary conveyor of both meaning and emotion. Because Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is based on a ballet, it takes into consideration that medium’s aspects in its own hybrid adaptation. According to Thomas Leitch, Grand Opera conventionally divided its music into readily reproducible arias that, like song-and-dance numbers in Broadway musicals a

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century later, marked moments of heightened lyricism and emotional intensity and recitative passages designed, like musicals’ more severely functioned continuity, to move the story along.23 While Maddin does not employ arias, the film does play on the “heightened lyricism and emotional intensity” of intimate ballet dancing that often accompanied various operas. They, too, move the plot. During Maddin’s film, when Dracula encounters Lucy or Mina, they engage in an intimate performative ritual that recalls the text (enhanced through the use of intertitles) and also shows the text inasmuch as it tells the story. Because Maddin shows as much as tells, he has to condense the story, much like a ballet would. (Godden’s Dracula is a complex three-act ballet that focuses on dance. Maddin takes the dance to new levels of performance through his camera work and editing.) A filmed version of an opera or ballet might make for a static, tableau-style film, where “the naturalistic conventions of cinema are used to translate a most unrealistic staged art form,” but Maddin’s is anything but.24 It is clear that Maddin wanted the challenge of translating both the novel and ballet to the screen, and his experimental style suits the task appropriately. He has incorporated movement to such a degree that, as a filmmaker, he becomes a performer as well, moving in, about, and around the dancers as they perform the ballet of the text of Dracula. This complex weaving of style and text is utterly fascinating and marks Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary as the most intensely avant-garde adaptation of Stoker yet. From ballet, “Maddin plucks the luxuriant movement of the dancers, adding even more excess to his melodramatic madness.”25 It should be noted that the film is slightly over the top in its acting, humor, and showiness. But Maddin does this deliberately: Performance trumps actorly accessibility. This is another reason why spectators might find the film too idiosyncratic for their tastes, but it also points to the work’s affinity with silent film. In describing how he approached the material, Maddin notes how he wanted to treat the dancing as a narrative device in order to maintain a sense of stability, however infrequent. Ballet does not always afford a sense of continuity, especially if one is unfamiliar with how the dancers use the music to serve as markers of plot. He says, At least I knew this was a narrative dance, so I said OK, I’ll do the narrative. If we were going to smash the proscenium arch, like we all agreed we were going to do to make this watchable, we needed to make the narrative clearer than it was on stage. I added more pantomime, and

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also the intertitles, just to let people know that if they were lost momentarily there would always be an intertitle coming soon to get them on track. I also thought we’d treat it like a movie where dancers just happened to be performing the roles, so I would have about the right ratio, whatever that is, of close-ups, medium shots, and wide shots.26 This method allows spectators to enjoy the dancing, the performing, and the narrative. Seeing Dracula presented in this way makes it all the more enticing because it is refreshing and also because it recasts the story as a particular type of adaptation. Watching a stage performance in person requires an active spectatorial experience of engagement and interpretation; onscreen, the same process occurs, but now the unrealistic act of performing dance and music provokes an even more intense scrutiny of interpretive work, especially when the adaptation is avant-garde. In other words, Maddin is right in attempting to invoke the audience through stylistic and narrative devices. According to Linda Hutcheon, when viewing adaptations of opera or staged plays, “No matter what our response, our intertextual expectations about medium and genre, as well as about this specific work, are brought to the forefront of our attention.”27 With Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, our expectations about the original work and the ballet are directly perceived through the experience of dance, music, and the performance of the text. Maddin’s own discussions of his approach to the ballet and the novel help elucidate his method of adaptation. The ballet is filmed from within; it is also perceived through mirrors, shadowed by plumes of fog, sped up to heighten tension, and occasionally slowed down to illustrate and complement the sexual give and take between Dracula and his victims. Of the ballet dancers, Maddin remarked, “Their personality is expressed facially as much as through their bodies, and they all act with their faces.”28 On the DVD commentary, Maddin states, The dancers are just superb silent-movie performers; they’re not just dancers but exquisite mimes . . . You would think that because facial expressions are not even visible from the cheap seats, or even from the front row in most cases, that they wouldn’t even bother. But [the dancers] give close-up-worthy melodramatic performances, and by ‘melodramatic’ I mean proper stage melodrama, not any derogatory connotation at all. Hence, we see a lot of close-ups of the main characters as they interact through dance. In one scene, Dracula swoops into the room out of

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darkness, brandishes his red cape, grabs the woman from behind, and gracefully plunges his teeth into her neck. We see this action from several vantages. This type of filmmaking, of fluid camera movement and rapid editing, creates a unique way of seeing the characters and action. Maddin also comments, Far from being insulted that their dancing bodies were being removed from their heads, the dancers were actually enjoying the close-ups and doing a lot of work with their faces and fingers that reminded me of the great, expressionist silent-movie actors. I kept finding myself returning to the hands and then back up to the faces for ways of capturing expression.29 Maddin’s analogy to silent film positions his film alongside Nosferatu and even Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr, as one of the great “silent” film adaptations of Dracula. (Dreyer’s film was released in 1932, but it maintains the shadowy style of expressionism.) Film versions of Dracula tend to heighten the horror factor to appease audiences. But Maddin has a playful (and exploitative) relationship with Stoker’s text. As Beard suggests, “As Stoker moves forward (telegraph, photo-diaries, etc.) and backwards (superstition, irrationality, primeval horror), so Maddin moves forward (modernism, postmodernism, technology, avant-gardism) and backwards (silent cinema, Expressionism, melodrama, historical ‘degradation’).”30 Filming Dracula in 2002 as a silent film is avant-garde in and of itself; Maddin unmistakably wants the film to have a certain mood to it, which he renders through gesture and facial expression, mainly because, as he says, “It was kind of fun just to film it as a silent movie, trying to keep the narrative focus a little more than the stage ballet did, because stage ballet has a captive audience.”31 Maddin’s phantasmagoric style causes the audience to also be captive, to be active in the viewing and construction of meaning simply because the film demands it. Hutcheon notes that “adaptations for the ballet stage not only add a visual dimension but they also subtract the verbal, even when they retain the musical,” which is similar to what Maddin has done with Godden’s ballet adaptation.32 Peranson even suggests, asking rhetorically, “But isn’t Dracula best done today silent, anyhow? Though the details of Bram Stoker’s novel may be unfamiliar, Dracula has become such a popular icon of popular culture that dialogue is almost a stumbling block to respectability.”33 Using the music of Gustav Mahler enhances Stoker’s melodrama. The opening of the film is a powerful testament to the avant-garde adaptation approach, where Maddin uses lines from the novel, the silent era tropes

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of intertitles, and the musical accompaniment fit for the ballet and the film. Beard describes the beginning as a “silent film style,” appropriate for Maddin’s particular aesthetic and for his approach to adaptation: As Mahler’s powerful and evocative music pours from the soundtrack, each character is introduced in a separate iris-shot title card. In double exposure, Mina is set against a handwritten diary page, Harker against a corsage of white blossoms, Lucy against a candelabra, and Van Helsing counterposed to his large black portmanteau (full of vampire hunting tools). All of the background shots are marked with copious rivulets of black blood gliding down the frame or splashing off the flowers or suitcase behind.34 This wonderful opening sequence exemplifies the exploitative approach: An amalgam of texts, it signifies Maddin’s use of Mahler’s music, Stoker’s text, expressionistic imagery, and silent era film traits. The Mahler music, in particular, is used to great effect in Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, enhancing the drama, the dancing, and the narrative thrust of the film’s story. Pribisic even suggests, “Godden’s choice of Mahler’s dramatic, symbolic tonality keeps fear and horror as points of departure, but also lets the dancers’ body movements and gesticulation follow the sound-world of the music, transforming the narrative into a story of pure love under attack by impure, morbid impulses.”35 The musical cues that Maddin has appropriated from Godden’s ballet complement and emphasize the tensions inherent in the dancers’ interactions and the story of Dracula itself. Mahler’s music evokes tension and beauty, which complements the dancers of the ballet (albeit, in a perhaps paradoxical fashion, as the death of Dracula coincides with the “Resurrection Symphony”), but Dracula is eternal, both literally and figuratively, and Maddin adapts this notion fully into his film. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is an avant-garde adaptation because of its unusual style and way of rendering the original source text. Maddin is interested in reworking the archetypes associated with the Dracula myth, recasting them in ways that suggest a way of perceiving Dracula, the text, as a springboard for choreographed experimentation—a paradox but one that Maddin achieves effortlessly. To tell the story of Dracula as an avant-garde silent film, adapted from a ballet and the novel, means discovering a code that shows the story as filtered through three media: novel, stage, and film. “In the context of movement,” writes Pribisic, “The film can be seen as transcoding a stage ballet into a kinetic dance

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of images, camera, bodies, and music.”36 Whereas choreographers have a built-in audience—those in their theater seats in the auditorium— Maddin finds a way to incorporate the stage world with the filmic world. This balance between the two suggests why Maddin essentially becomes a dancer himself as he moves the camera among the dancers. Maddin’s adaptation relies on the interchange among the novel, ballet, and film, serving “as a double for the existing stage performance, but not so much in terms of faithfulness or equivalence.”37 Maddin is engaged in a process of creative interpretation of the novel and the ballet, creating an avant-garde film adaptation that exploits both in order to create his film version. Maddin’s film is, metaphorically, like Dracula, an other—a threatening presence that challenges the hierarchy. Any avant-garde film does this; to take such a well-known icon and transform and re-present it is a testament to Maddin’s temerity and tenacity as a visionary filmmaker. As Beard surmises, “Like so much else in the film, the aesthetic end product is an image-set that is simultaneously connected to old cinematic practice and to a stylized, avant-gardish contemporaneity.”38 This combination of styles signals an avant-garde film, and it also complements the avant-garde adaptive approach where freedom from any particular motive (fidelity or genre fixity, for instance) dictates the final product. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary “challenges our prior definitions: of a dance film, a silent film, and because of the method of its production, a ‘film’ itself.”39 The film is an astonishing and intelligent mix of excessiveness—in style, affect, and audiovisual stimulation. Taking a ballet and novel and turning expectations on their head, Maddin has achieved a vibrant form of adaptation that is part remediation and part innovation, “a process of creative interpretation and palimpsestic intertextuality,” a visualization that confronts us directly in its maddening glory.40

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Conclusion

Cinema adaptations of well-known novels proliferate, and there will always be a demand for them because they reinforce the popular cultural idioms and tastes of both the impressionable youth (Twilight, Harry Potter) and the high-minded (Merchant Ivory or theatrical Shakespeare productions). There is nothing inherently wrong with having a large number of adaptations produced in Hollywood (and abroad). There needs to be a more cognizant reception of alternative forms of adaptations, ones that, as I have suggested, exploit their source(s) in order to produce a vibrant new text that eschews traditions, standards, methodologies, and assumptions. The rewards that such adaptations bring are practically innumerable: We can enjoy their aesthetic value; the stylistic innovations, which may be formal or technical; their unpacking or layering of themes; or their brash representational styles that indicate visionary directors making visionary films. Avant-garde film is an incredibly rich area for studying the ontology and epistemology of the image itself, where lyricism, abstractness, and originality flourish. Directors who make avant-garde or experimental films do not necessarily care about receiving attention; they make films because there is an inherent pleasure and artistic drive to do so. When one creates a radical adaptation, it makes us give pause to what we already think we know about translating books (or other materials) to the screen, and that is a good thing. Avant-garde adaptation is an area of film and literary studies ripe for extended analysis. There are countless films made from preexisting sources, whether novels, plays, and stories, or, as I have suggested, appropriations of images, words, texts, and other ephemera that also constitute an avant-garde adaptation. Filmmakers who are “on the cutting edge” and seek individualistic and interpretive means of presenting various texts to the screen certainly grow in numbers every year. The majority of exciting—and different—adaptation work happens in the margins. There are many experimental filmmakers who look to previous texts for inspiration, and often, these inspirations inform and influence the finished film, which, all things considered, becomes an adaptation. Tracing

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these influences is not always easy. For example, some avant-garde and experimental films use myths as their sources, which inevitably means they are re-creating and reconstituting these myths in a more modern way, taking, that is, anything from Zeus to Icarus to Sisyphus to Cassandra and using them in ways that perhaps color the myth to such an extent that they are unrecognizable. Yet this is what makes them exploitative as well. Using sources for exploitative gain means reconfiguring them (that is, adapting them) so that they may become unrecognizable. These kinds of adaptations are common in avant-garde filmmaking, where there are multiple source texts or even singular texts that become adapted to the screen through severe interpretation and creative imagination. These kinds of reconfigurations, these avant-garde adaptations, are compelling works of cinematic art that deserve more recognition for their daring, audacity, and bold originality. Studying adaptations and studying and examining avant-garde adaptations, in particular, affords us the opportunity to study how texts are transposed, rewritten, investigated, and probed for meaning and revision. Texts are not infallible, and avant-garde filmmakers who use material for their works realize that any variety of sources can instigate a creative interpretation, which more often than not results in a unique text ready for interpretation and admiration. Purists may scoff, but when an avantgarde filmmaker or a filmmaker who makes an avant-garde adaptation chooses to dismantle a source text—or even when the source text’s ideas, moods, themes, or styles are contained—we need to acknowledge that the process warrants close consideration of how and why certain texts are adapted in particular ways. An intertextual approach to adaptation studies and especially to avantgarde adaptation is crucial and important in developing further avenues of discourse surrounding avant-garde adaptation as theory and practice. Bakhtinian analysis—championed by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo—is perhaps a good starting point for investigating avant-garde adaptation. Hybridity, palimpsestuousness, translation, transpositioning: the terms all indicate a relationship between texts predicated or built on notions of intertextuality. I have asserted that avant-garde adaptation is an intertextual practice that exploits the source text(s) in order to create a new, original, interpretive text(s). Avant-garde films have always presented a dilemma for moviegoers because the typical audience for them is one who already has an interest in alternative approaches to (and acceptances of) film form, style, and subject matter. When these filmmakers or films undertake an adaptation, the audience grows thinner,

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but I hope to have established some groundwork for considering avantgarde adaptations as an important part of film culture and history. Avant-garde film requires a certain spectatorial experience, one that challenges and enhances expected beliefs of representation and illustration. The process of accommodating expectations, generic or otherwise, does not really exist in the world of avant-garde or experimental filmmaking; all one knows upon entering the viewing experience is that it will be different and will present something different(ly). When one considers an avant-garde adaptation, there is at least a possible familiarity with the source (but only when dealing with adaptations based on novels, plays, or stories), however, because that very source has been exploited through formal, stylistic, and thematic interpretation and creativity, the resulting avant-garde film adaptation becomes something only tangentially associated with the original, thereby rendering it unfamiliar. But as I have suggested, watching an avant-garde adaptation allows us to reconsider the source text itself, its variants through cultural transmission, and the possibility of the metamorphosis it undergoes—an evolution rather than a simple process of replication. Avant-garde adaptations also suggest the need for change: They tell us more about the methods of adaptation as a critical practice more so than a methodology based on faithful or accurate transformation. For this reason, avant-garde adaptation remains a ripe area for investigating the theoretical and practical possibilities of the narratological, formal, and epistemological opportunities generated through individual creative processes.

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Appendix

Some Avant-Garde Film Adaptations

This list is comprised solely of a selection of adaptations that are avantgarde in form or style or in the transpositioning of the source materials’ themes. Some of the films listed are avant-garde in inspiration or attitude, both in approach and execution. The list is not comprehensive. It is not meant to be a comprehensive gathering of all avant-garde adaptations but rather a list of some film adaptations that take an alternative approach to the process of adaptation. Many of the films on the list are ones that others might not find either as an adaptation or as avant-garde, but they are ones that I believe represent the types of avant-garde adaptations I have described in this book. There are plenty of other avant-garde adaptations that are not on the list. The films are first organized chronologically, then by type of avantgarde adaptation, here divided into four categories: biopic; collage/ appropriation; novel/story/poem/play; and Bible. Some films are deliberately in more than one category. In the chronological list, I have given a brief description of the source texts for the subsequent adaptation. Cinderella—Georges Méliès (1899) [fairy tale] Dream of a Rarebit Fiend—Edwin S. Porter (1906) [comic strip appropriation] Tepeyac—José Manuel Ramos, Carlos E. González and Fernando Sáyago (1917) [biopic about the Virgin of Guadalupe’s appearance in Mexico in 1531] Manhatta—Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler (1921) [city symphony] Häxan—Benjamin Christensen (1922) [Malleus Maleficarum, appropriated images] A Page of Madness—Teinosuke Kinugasa (1926) [Yasunari Kawabata, novel] Napoléon—Abel Gance (1927) [biopic] Berlin: Symphony of a City—Walter Ruttman (1927) [city symphony collage and appropriated images]

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The Passion of Joan of Arc—Carl Dreyer (1928) [biopic] La coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman)—Germaine Dulac (1928) [Antonin Artaud scenaraio] The Fall of the House of Usher—Jean Epstein (1928) [Edgar Allan Poe] The Fall of the House of Usher—James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber (1928) [Edgar Allan Poe] The Tell-Tale Heart—Charles Klein (1928) [Edgar Allan Poe] Man with the Movie Camera—Dziga Vertov (1929) [city symphony] Borderline—Kenneth MacPherson (1930) [H. D., Pool Group poetry/ aesthetics] The Orphic Trilogy: The Blood of a Poet (1932), Orpheus (1949), and Testament of Orpheus (1959)—Jean Cocteau [myth of Orpheus] Lot in Sodom— James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber (1933) [Bible] Rose Hobart—Joseph Cornell (1936) [collage film, appropriation] Hell Ltd.—Norman McLaren (1936) [collage, appropriation] Beauty and the Beast—Jean Cocteau (1946) [Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont story] Pacific 231—Jean Mitry (1949) [based on Arthur Honegger’s symphonic piece] Swain—Gregory Markopoulos (1950) [Nathaniel Hawthorne] Four in the Afternoon—James Broughton (1951) [based on Broughton’s poetry] The Plague Summer—James Broughton (1951) [based on a poem by Kenneth Patchen] N.Y N.Y.—Francis Thompson (1957) [collage film, appropriation, and city symphony] 8 × 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements—Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Cocteau (1957) [Sigmund Freud, Lewis Carroll, fairy tales, appropriated images] Les têtes interverties (also known as La cravate, The Transposed Heads, and The Severed Heads)—Alejandro Jodorowsky (1957) [Thomas Mann’s play The Transposed Heads] A Movie—Bruce Conner (1958) [collage film] Vynález zkázy (The Fabulous World of Jules Verne)—Karel Zeman (1958) [Verne stories] A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Sen noci svatojánské)—Jiří Trnka (1959) [Shakespeare] Mother Joan of the Angels—Jerzy Kawalerowicz (1961) [history, biopic] An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge—Robert Enrico (1962) [Ambrose Bierce story]

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21–87—Arthur Lipsett (1963) [collage film] Go! Go! Go!—Marie Menken (1962–64) [city symphony] Scorpio Rising—Kenneth Anger (1964) [appropriation and collage] The Passion of Saint Matthew—Pier Paolo Pasolini (1964) [Bible] Batman Dracula—Andy Warhol (1964) [Superhero appropriation] A Trip down Memory Lane—Arthur Lipsett (1965) [collage film] The Saragossa Manuscript—Wojciech Has (1965) [based on the 1815 novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potock] Made in U.S.A.—Jean-Luc Godard (1966) [The Jugger, by Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake), appropriation] The Face of Another—Hiroshi Teshigahara (1966) [Kōbō Abe, the novel The Face of Another] Marat/Sade—Peter Brook (1967) [biopic; writing of Marquis de Sade] Fando y lis—Alejandro Jodorowsky (1967) [Fernando Arrabal, play Fando y lis] Oedipus Rex—Pier Paolo Pasolini (1967) [Oedipus the King by Sophocles] The Color of Pomegranates—Sergei Paradjanov (1968) [biopic] Teorema—Pier Paolo Pasolini (1968) [Pasolini’s novel of same name] Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son—Ken Jacobs (1969) [collage, found footage appropriation] L’amour fou—Jacques Rivette (1969) [André Breton, Mad Love] Don Juan—Jan Švankmajer (1969) [Don Juan legend/myth] Invasión—Hugo Santiago (1969) [Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge Luis Borges, different fiction] Fruit of Paradise—Věra Chytilová (1970) [Bible] Zorns Lemma—Hollis Frampton (1970) [collage film, biopic appropriation] Vampir-Caudecuc—Pere Portabella (1970) [Bram Stoker, appropriation] W. R.—Mysteries of the Organism—Dušan Makavejev (1971) [biopic] The Decameron—Pier Paolo Pasolini (1971) [Decamerone by Giovanni Boccaccio] The Canterbury Tales—Pier Paolo Pasolini (1971) [Chaucer] Jabberwocky—Jan Švankmajer (1971) [Lewis Carroll] Out 1—Jacques Rivette (1971) [Honoré de Balzac’s La comédie humaine, particularly the History of the Thirteen] The Demon—Kichachiro Kawamoto (1972) [Japanese folklore] Ludwig—Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (1972) [biopic] Aguirre, the Wrath of God—Werner Herzog (1972) [biopic] The Hourglass Sanitorium—Wojciech Has (1973) [adaptation of Bruno Schulz’s story collection Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass]

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Mahler—Ken Russell (1974) [biopic] Karl May—Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (1974) [biopic] Immoral Tales—Walerian Borowczyk (1974) [André Pieyre de Mandiargues, the novel La Marge] Arabian Nights—Pier Paolo Pasolini (1974) [adaptation of the ancient Arabic anthology One Thousand and One Arabian Nights] Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom—Pier Paolo Pasolini (1975) [Marquis de Sade] Black Moon—Louis Malle (1975) [appropriation, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland] Heart of Glass—Werner Herzog (1975) [based on the legendary Bavarian prophet Mühlhiasl] The Mirror—Andrei Tarkovsky (1975) [appropriation: autobiographical, blending childhood memories, newsreel footage, and poems by his father, Arseny Tarkovsky] Sebastiane—Derek Jarman (1976) [biopic] Angel of Vengeance, or Lady Hamlet—Metin Erksan (1976) [Shakespeare] The Rime of the Ancient Mariner—Lawrence Jordan (1977) [Coleridge poem] Hitler: A Film from Germany—Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (1977) [biopic] The Case of the Grinning Cat—Chris Marker (1977) [collage film and appropriated images] That Obscure Object of Desire—Luis Buñuel (1977) [La femme et le pantin (The Woman and the Puppet) by Pierre Louÿs] Cartoon le Mousse—Chick Strand (1979) [collage, appropriation] All That Jazz—Bob Fosse (1979) [biopic] The Tempest—Derek Jarman (1979) [Shakespeare’s The Tempest] Salome—Stan Brakhage (1980) [various appropriations of the Salome story] The Fall of the House of Usher—Jan Švankmajer (1980) [Edgar Allan Poe] The Garden of Earthly Delights—Stan Brakhage (1981) [a double homage: to Bosch’s celebrated canvas and to the flower paintings of Emil Nolde] Forbidden Zone—Richard Elfman (1982) [based on the stage performance The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo] Car Cemetery—Fernando Arrabal (1983) [based on Arrabal’s play of the same name] Sans soleil—Chris Marker (1983) [collage film, appropriation] The Pendulum, the Pit, and Hope—Jan Švankmajer (1983) [Edgar Allan Poe story]

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First Name: Carmen—Jean-Luc Godard (1983) [Bizet’s Carmen and myth/ legend] The Pied Piper of Hamelin—Jiří Barta (1985) [fairy tale, poem] Hail Mary—Jean-Luc Godard (1985) [Bible] Angel’s Egg—Mamoru Oshii (1985) [Yoshitaka Amano, graphic art appropriation] Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters—Paul Schrader (1985) [biopic] Caravaggio—Derek Jarman (1986) [biopic] Cinderella—Erika Beckman (1986) [fairy tale] Street of Crocodiles—The Quay Brothers (1986) [Bruno Schulz novel] King Lear—Jean-Luc Godard (1987) [Shakespeare’s King Lear] Walker—Alex Cox (1987) [biopic] The Dante Quartet—Stan Brakhage (1987) [Dante’s Inferno] The Last of England—Derek Jarman (1988) [painting, text appropriation] Alice—Jan Švankmajer (1988) [Lewis Carroll] The Decalogue—Krzysztof Kieślowski (1988) [Bible] The Deadman—Peggy Awesh and Keith Sanborn (1989) [Georges Bataille story] A TV Dante—Peter Greenaway (1989) [Dante’s Inferno] Visions in Meditation #1—Stan Brakhage (1989) [Gertrude Stein’s poetry] Visions in Meditation #3—Stan Brakhage (1990) [Plato’s Allegory of the Cave] Antigone/Rites of Passion—Amy Greenfield (1990) [Sophocles] Edward II—Derek Jarman (1991) [biopic, Marlowe play adaptation] Prospero’s Books—Peter Greenaway (1991) [Shakespeare’s The Tempest] Lyrical Nitrate—Peter Delpeut (1991) [collage film] Passage à l’acte—Martin Arnold (1992) [collage, appropriation] Wittgenstein—Derek Jarman (1993) [biopic] Smoking/No Smoking—Alain Resnais (1993) [Intimate Exchanges by Alan Ayckbourn] 24 Hour Psycho—Douglas Gordon (1993) [collage film and appropriated images] The Metamorphosis—Carlos Atanes (1994) [Franz Kafka] Faust—Jan Švankmajer (1994) [Goethe] Vanya on 42nd Street—Louis Malle (1994) [Anton Chekov, Uncle Vanya] Lumière and Company—Various artists (1995) [collage, appropriation] Institute Benjamenta—The Quay Brothers (1995) [Robert Walser novel] Spectres of the Spectrum—Craig Baldwin (1999) [collage film]

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Titus—Julie Taymor (1999) [Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus] La captive—Chantal Akerman (2000) [Proust’s La Prisonnière] Little Otik—Jan Švankmajer (2000) [based on the folktale “Otesánek” by K J Erben] Ichi the Killer—Takashi Miike (2001) [comic book, manga] Claire—Milord Thomas (2001) [adaptation of the Japanese fairy tale “Kaguyahime”] Karmen Gei—Joseph Gai Ramaka (2001) [Carmen opera] Annabel Lee—George Higham (2001) [Edgar Allan Poe, poem] Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary—Guy Maddin (2002) [Bram Stoker, Royal Winnipeg Ballet] Decasia—Bill Morrison (2002) [collage film] The Fall of the Louse of Usher—Ken Russell (2003) [Edgar Allan Poe] Woodenhead—Florian Habicht (2003) [brothers Grimm, appropriated fairy tales] Alila—Amos Gitai (2003) [Yehoshua Kenaz novel Returning Lost Loves] The Five Obstructions—Lars von Trier (2003) [appropriation] Chinese Series—Stan Brakhage (2003) [various Chinese writings, ideograms] George Bataille’s The Story of an Eye—Andrew Repasky McElhinney (2004) [Bataille novel] Innocence—Lucile Hadžihalilović (2004) [based on the novella MineHaha, or On the Bodily Education of Young Girls by Frank Wedekind] Star-Spangled to Death—Ken Jacobs (2004) [collage, found footage] Maqbool—Vishal Bhardwaj (2004) [Shakespeare] Lunacy—Jan Švankmajer (2005) [Marquis de Sade and Edgar Allan Poe] The Fine Art of Love: Mine Ha-Ha—John Irvin (2006) [based on the novella Mine-Haha, or On the Bodily Education of Young Girls by Frank Wedekind] Taxidermia— György Pálfi (2006) [Lajos Parti Nagy’s stories] Omkara—Vishal Bhardwaj (2006) [Shakespeare] Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor—Kōji Yamamura (2007) [Kafka story] The Full Monteverdi—John La Bouchardière (2007) [Claudio Monteverdi’s fourth book of madrigals (1603) which, in turn, is a collection of settings of poems by such Italian Renaissance poets as Giovanni Battista Guarini, Ottavio Rinuccini, and Torquato Tasso] Nightwatching—Peter Greenaway (2007) [biopic] The Cave: An Adaptation of Plato’s Allegory in Clay—Michael Ramsey (2008) [Plato]

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The Philosopher’s Stone—Raymond Salvatore Harmon (2008) [Faust legend, biopic] The Tempest—Julie Taymor (2010) [Shakespeare]

Types of Avant-Garde Adaptation Biopics Aguirre, the Wrath of God—Werner Herzog (1972) All That Jazz—Bob Fosse (1979) Caravaggio—Derek Jarman (1986) The Color of Pomegranates—Sergei Paradjanov (1968) Edward II—Derek Jarman (1991) Hitler: A Film from Germany—Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (1977) Karl May—Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (1974) Ludwig—Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (1972) Mahler—Ken Russell (1974) Marat/Sade—Peter Brook (1967) Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters—Paul Schrader (1985) Mother Joan of hte Angels—Jerzy Kawalerowicz (1961) Napoléon—Abel Gance (1927) Nightwatching—Peter Greenaway (2007) The Passion of Joan of Arc—Carl Dreyer (1928) The Philosopher’s Stone—Raymond Salvatore Harmon (2008) Sebastiane—Derek Jarman (1976) Tepeyac—José Manuel Ramos, Carlos E. González and Fernando Sáyago (1917) Walker—Alex Cox (1987) Wittgenstein—Derek Jarman (1993) W.R.—-Mysteries of the Organism—Dušan Makavejev (1971) Zorns Lemma—Hollis Frampton (1970) Collage Film/Appropriation 21–87—Arthur Lipsett (1963) [collage film] 24 Hour Psycho—Douglas Gordon (1993) 8 × 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements—Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Cocteau (1957) Angel’s Egg—Mamoru Oshii (1985) Batman Dracula—Andy Warhol (1964)

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Berlin: Symphony of a City—Walter Ruttman (1927) Black Moon—Louis Malle (1975) Cartoon le Mousse—Chick Strand (1979) The Case of the Grinning Cat—Chris Marker (1977) Decasia—Bill Morrison (2002) Dream of a Rarebit Fiend—Edwin S. Porter (1906) The Five Obstructions—Lars von Trier (2003) Forbidden Zone—Richard Elfman (1982) The Garden of Earthly Delights—Stan Brakhage (1981) Go! Go! Go!—Marie Menken (1962-64) Häxan—Benjamin Christensen (1922) Hell Ltd.—Norman McLaren (1936) [collage, appropriation] The Last of England—Derek Jarman (1988) Lumière and Company—Various artists (1995) Lyrical Nitrate—Peter Delpeut (1991) Manhatta—Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler (1921) Man with the Movie Camera—Dziga Vertov (1929) The Mirror—Andrei Tarkovsky (1975) A Movie—Bruce Conner (1958) N.Y N.Y.—Francis Thompson (1957) Pacific 231—Jean Mitry (1949) Passage à l’acte—Martin Arnold (1992) The Philosopher’s Stone—Raymond Salvatore Harmon (2008) Rose Hobart—Joseph Cornell (1936) Salome—Stan Brakhage (1980) Sans soleil—Chris Marker (1983) Scorpio Rising—Kenneth Anger (1964) Spectres of the Spectrum—Craig Baldwin (1999) Star-Spangled to Death—Ken Jacobs (2004) Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son—Ken Jacobs (1969) A Trip down Memory Lane—Arthur Lipsett (1965) Vampir-Caudecuc—Pere Portabella (1970) Woodenhead—Florian Habicht (2003) Zorns Lemma—Hollis Frampton (1970) Novel, Story, Play 8 × 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements—Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Cocteau (1957) Alice—Jan Švankmajer (1988)

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Alila—Amos Gitai (2003) L’amour fou—Jacques Rivette (1969) Angel of Vengeance, or Lady Hamlet—Metin Erksan (1976) Angel’s Egg—Mamoru Oshii (1985) Annabel Lee—George Higham (2001) Antigone/Rites of Passion—Amy Greenfield (1990) Arabian Nights—Pier Paolo Pasolini (1974) Beauty and the Beast—Jean Cocteau (1946) Black Moon—Louis Malle (1975) Borderline—Kenneth MacPherson (1930) La captive—Chantal Akerman (2000) The Canterbury Tales—Pier Paolo Pasolini (1971) Car Cemetery—Fernando Arrabal (1983) The Cave: An Adaptation of Plato’s Allegory in Clay—Michael Ramsey (2008) Cinderella—Erika Beckman (1986) Cinderella—Georges Méliès (1899) Claire—Milord Thomas (2001) La coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman)—Germaine Dulac (1928) The Dante Quartet—Stan Brakhage (1987) The Deadman—Peggy Awesh and Keith Sanborn (1989) The Decameron—Pier Paolo Pasolini (1971) The Demon—Kichachiro Kawamoto (1972) Don Juan—Jan Švankmajer (1969) Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary—Guy Maddin (2002) The Face of Another—Hiroshi Teshigahara (1966) The Fall of the House of Usher—James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber (1928) The Fall of the House of Usher—Jan Švankmajer (1980) The Fall of the House of Usher—Jean Epstein (1928) The Fall of the Louse of Usher—Ken Russell (2003) Fando y lis—Alejandro Jodorowsky (1967) Faust—Jan Švankmajer (1994) The Fine Art of Love: —Mine Ha-Ha—John Irvin (2006) First Name: Carmen—Jean-Luc Godard (1983) Four in the Afternoon—James Broughton (1951) Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor—Kōji Yamamura (2007) The Full Monteverdi—John La Bouchardière (2007) George Bataille’s The Story of an Eye—Andrew Repasky McElhinney (2004)

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Some Avant-Garde Film Adaptations

Heart of Glass—Werner Herzog (1975) The Hourglass Sanitorium—Wojciech Has (1973) Ichi the Killer—Takashi Miike (2001) Immoral Tales—Walerian Borowczyk (1974) Innocence—Lucile Hadžihalilović (2004) Institute Benjamenta—The Quay Brothers (1995) Invasión—Hugo Santiago (1969) Jabberwocky—Jan Švankmajer (1971) Karmen Gei—Joseph Gai Ramaka (2001) King Lear—Jean-Luc Godard (1987) Little Otik—Jan Švankmajer (2000) Lunacy—Jan Švankmajer (2005) Made in U.S.A.—Jean-Luc Godard (1966) Maqbool—Vishal Bhardwaj (2004) The Metamorphosis—Carlos Atanes (1994) A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Sen noci svatojánské)—Jiří Trnka (1959) An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge—Robert Enrico (1962) Oedipus Rex—Pier Paolo Pasolini (1967) Omkara—Vishal Bhardwaj (2006) The Orphic Trilogy: The Blood of a Poet (1932), Orpheus (1949), and Testament of Orpheus (1959)—Jean Cocteau Out 1—Jacques Rivette (1971) A Page of Madness—Teinosuke Kinugasa (1926) The Pendulum, the Pit, and Hope—Jan Švankmajer (1983) The Philosopher’s Stone—Raymond Salvatore Harmon (2008) The Pied Piper of Hamelin—Jiří Barta (1985) The Plague Summer— James Broughton (1951) Prospero’s Books—Peter Greenaway (1991) The Rime of the Ancient Mariner—Lawrence Jordan (1977) Salome—Stan Brakhage (1980) Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom—Pier Paolo Pasolini (1975) The Saragossa Manuscript—Wojciech Has (1965) Smoking/No Smoking—Alain Resnais (1993) Street of Crocodiles—The Quay Brothers (1986) Swain—Gregory Markopoulos (1950) Taxidermia—György Pálfi (2006) The Tell-Tale Heart—Charles Klein (1928) The Tempest—Derek Jarman (1979) Teorema—Pier Paolo Pasolini (1968)

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Les têtes interverties (also known as La Cravate, The Transposed Heads, and The Severed Heads)—Alejandro Jodorowsky (1957) That Obscure Object of Desire—Luis Bunñuel (1977) Titus—Julie Taymor (1999) A TV Dante—Peter Greenaway (1989) Vampir-Caudecuc—Pere Portabella (1970) Vanya on 42nd Street—Louis Malle (1994) Vynález zkázy (The Fabulous World of Jules Verne)—Karel Zeman (1958) Woodenhead—Florian Habicht (2003)

Bible The Decalogue—Krzysztof Kieślowski (1988) Fruit of Paradise—Věra Chytilová (1970) Hail Mary—Jean-Luc Godard (1985) Lot in Sodom—James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber (1933) The Passion of Saint Matthew—Pier Paolo Pasolini (1964)

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Notes

Chapter 1 1

2

3

4

5

6

7 8 9 10 11

12 13

14

15 16 17 18 19 20

Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 47. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), xii. Fred Camper, “Naming, and Defining, Avant-Garde or Experimental Film,” http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/AvantGardeDefinition.html (August 22, 2010). András Bálint Kovács, Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950–1980 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007): 28. Jan-Christopher Horak, “The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945,” in Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945, ed. JanChristopher Horak (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 14. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 108. Ibid., 95. Kovács, 30. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 29. Susan Hayward, Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2000), 28. Andrew, 66. Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Exploding Eye: A Re-Visionary History of 1960s American Experimental Cinema (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 4. Duncan Reekie, Subversion: The Definitive History of Underground Cinema (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 44. Calinescu, 112. Ibid., 112. Dixon, 5. Calinescu, 117. Ibid., 124. Kovács, 15.

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Notes

247

Chapter 2 1

2

3

4

5 6

7 8 9

10 11 12

13

14 15 16

17 18

19

20 21

22 23

James Naremore, “Introduction: Film and the Reign of Adaptation,” in Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 1–16. 1. Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 1–21. Brian McFarlane, “It Wasn’t Like That in the Book . . .,” in The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation, eds. James M. Welsh and Peter Lev (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007), 3–14. 6. Robert Stam, Literature Through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation (Malden, MD: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 4. Leitch, 6. Sung-eun Cho, “Intertextuality and Translation in Film Adaptation,” in Journal of American and British Studies 12 (June 2005), 1–19. 9. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2006), 10. Ibid., 8. Thomas Leitch, “Where are we Going, Where have we Been?” in The Literature/ Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation, eds. James M. Welsh and Peter Lev (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007), 327–33. 328. McFarlane, 8. Hutcheon, 70. Thomas Leitch, “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory,” in Criticism 45 vol. 2 (Spring 2003), 149–71. 156. Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (London: Oxford University Press, 1984), 98. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 100. Peter Brooker, “Postmodern Adaptation: Pastiche, Intertextuality and Re-functioning,” in The Cambridge Guide to Literature on Screen, eds. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 107–20. 118. Naremore, 7–8. George Bluestone, “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film” from Novels to Film, in Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader, ed. Timothy Corrigan (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1999), 197–213. 201. Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camèra-Stylo from The New Wave,” in Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader, ed. Timothy Corrigan (Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 1999), 158–62. 159. Leitch, “Where are we Going, Where have we Been?,” 332. David L. Kranz, “Trying Harder: Probability, Objectivity, and Rationality in Adaptation Studies,” in The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation, eds. James M. Welsh and Peter Lev (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2007), 77–102. 84. Stam, 7. Hutcheon, 29.

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248 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41

42 43 44

45 46

47 48 49 50

Notes

Ibid., 33. Ibid., 55. McFarlane, 11. Leitch, “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory,” 154. Hutcheon, 6. Brooker, 118. Cho, 5. Hugo Munsterberg, “The Means of Photoplay” from The Film: A Psychological Study, in Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader, ed. Timothy Corrigan (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1999), 103–11. 111. Hutcheon, 130. Ibid., 120. Ibid., 16. Cho, 9. Hutcheon, 16. Leitch, “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory,” 156. Astruc, 159. Thomas Leitch, “Literature vs. Literacy: Two Futures for Adaptation Studies,” in The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation, eds. James M. Welsh and Peter Lev (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007), 15–34. 25. Naremore, 8. André Bazin, “Adaptation, or The Cinema as Digest,” in Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 19–27. 20. Stam, 4. Hutcheon, 173. Timothy Corrigan, “Literature on Screen, a History: In the Gap,” in The Cambridge Guide to Literature on Screen, eds. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 29–43. 41. Hutcheon, 16. Duncan Reekie, Subversion: The Definitive History of Underground Cinema (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 40. Stam, 4. Hutcheon, 9. Brooker, 113. Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 7.

Chapter 3 1 2

3 4

Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006), 4. James O. Young, Cultural Appropriation and the Arts (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 47. Ibid., 152. Sanders, 12.

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Notes 5 6 7 8 9

10

249

Ibid., 158. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 45. Johanna Burton, “Subject to Revision,” in Appropriation, ed. David Evans (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 205–13. 208. David Evans, “Introduction: Seven Types of Appropriation,” in Appropriation, ed. David Evans (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 12–23. 15.

Chapter 4 1

2 3

4 5

6 7

8

9 10

Thomas Leitch, “Literature vs. Literacy: Two Futures for Adaptation Studies,” in The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation, eds. James M. Welsh and Peter Lev (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007), 15–34. 32. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2006), 22. Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1984), 120. Hutcheon, 22. Brian McFarlane, “Reading Film and Literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, eds. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 15–28. 16. Hutcheon, 172. Timothy Corrigan, “Literature on Screen, a History: In the Gap,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, eds. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 29–43. 30. Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Exploding Eye: A Re-Visionary History of 1960s American Experimental Cinema (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 2. Ibid., 3. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 117.

Chapter 5 1

2

3

4

Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 16. Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 47. Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Exploding Eye: A Re-Visionary History of 1960s American Experimental Cinema (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 5. Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, “Introduction,” in Experimental Cinema: The Film Reader, eds. Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (London: Routledge, 2002), 17.

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250 5

Notes

Jan-Christopher Horak, “The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945,” in Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945, ed. JanChristopher Horak (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 17.

Chapter 6 1

2

3 4 5 6 7

8 9

10

11

12 13

14 15

16

17 18 19

20

21

Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 550. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” in Film and Theory: An Anthology, eds. Robert Stam and Toby Miller (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 229–35. 229. Ibid., 230. Musser, 341. Ibid., 341. Ibid., 342. Jan-Christopher Horak, “The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945,” in Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945, ed. JanChristopher Horak (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 31–55. Ibid., 55. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 9th edn (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), 465 Astrid Soderbergh Widding, “Denmark,” in Nordic National Cinemas, eds. Tytti Soila, Astrid Soderbergh Witting, and Gunnar Iverson (London: Routledge, 1998), 10. David Cook, A History of Narrative Film, 4th edn (New York: Norton, 2004), 311–12. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2006), 8. William Uricchio, “The City Viewed: The Films of Leyda, Browning, and Weinberg,” in Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945, ed. Jan-Christopher Horak (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 287–314. 288. Ibid., 291. Jan-Christopher Horak, “The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945,” in Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945, ed. JanChristopher Horak (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 31. Jan-Christopher Horak, “Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta,” in Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945, ed. Jan-Christopher Horak (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 267–86. 267. Ibid., 275. Ibid., 283–4. Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 46. Stan Brakhage, Film at Wit’s End (New York: McPherson and Company, 1989), 42–3. Gunning, 232.

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Notes 22

23

24

25 26 27

28 29 30

31

32 33 34 35 36

37

38

39

40 41

42 43 44

45 46 47

48

49

251

A.L. Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 1999), 51. Michael O’Pray, Avant-Garde Film: Forms, Themes and Passions (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), 44. Bruce Posner, Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894–1941, liner notes, n. p. Ibid. O’Pray, 20. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), 330. Horak, “The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945,” 53. Sitney, 330. Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, eds. A Short History of Film (London: Routledge, 2002), 144. André Fraigneau, Cocteau on the Film: Conversations with Jean Cocteau recorded by André Fraigneau (New York: Dover Publications, 1972), 64. Stam, 56. Fraigneau, 64–5. Sitney, 130. Ibid., 131. Edgar Dutka, “Jiri Trnka—Walt Disney of the East” Animation World Magazine 5.04 (July 2000). 15 August 2010. http://www.awn.com/mag/issue5.04/5.04 pages/dutkatrnka2.php3 The Extraordinary Puppet Films of Jiri Trnka, http://www.rembrandtfilms.com/ jiritrnka.htm Robert Stam, Literature Through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), 258. Robert Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History (Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman, 2006), 155. J. Hoberman, Made in USA, liner notes, n. p. Jonas Mekas, “Notes on the New American Cinema,” in Experimental Cinema: The Film Reader, eds. Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (London: Routledge, 2002), 53–70. Hoberman, n p. Peter Wollen, Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (London: Verso, 2002), 76. Jasper Sharp, “Kihachiro Kawamoto Interview,” Midnight Eye (November 29, 2004), http://www.midnighteye.com/interviews/kihachiro_kawamoto.shtml (accessed October 10, 2010). Lawrence Jordan, The Lawrence Jordan Album, liner notes, 19. Carmen Vigil, The Lawrence Jordan Album, liner notes, 19. Maria Pramaggiore, “Chick Strand’s Experimental Ethnography,” in Women’s Experimental Cinema, ed. Robin Blaetz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 188–210. 201. Gene Youngblood, “Avant Cinema 3.7 film-makers’ cooperative” (March 31, 2010). http://www.austinfilm.org/page.aspx?pid=1085 (accessed September 14, 2010). O’Pray, 119.

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252 50

51

52

53 54 55

56

57 58 59

Notes

Quoted in “The Films of Derek Jarman—The Last of England” (February 8, 2006) http://jclarkmedia.com/jarman/jarman06england.html (accessed September 24, 2010). Tim Ellis, Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 134. Quoted in “The Films of Derek Jarman—The Last of England” (February 8, 2006) http://jclarkmedia.com/jarman/jarman06england.html (accessed September 24, 2010). Quoted in Ellis, Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations, 143. Ellis, 141. Robert Haller, “Amy Greenfield: Film, Dynamic Movement, and Transformation,” in Women’s Experimental Cinema, ed. Robin Blaetz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 152–66. 161. Tony Pipolo, “Making Antigone/Rites of Passion: An Interview with Amy Greenfield,” Millennium Film Journal 26 (Fall 1992 Archaeologies). http://mfj-online.org/ journalPages/MFJ26/AmyGIntv.html (accessed September 17, 2010). Quoted in Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000, 39. Haller, 156. Caroline Bainbridge, The Cinema of Lars von Trier: Authenticity and Artifice (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 160.

Chapter 7 1

2

3

4

5 6

7

8

9

10

All quotes from Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” taken from The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Modern Library Edition, 1992). Jan-Christopher Horak, “The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945, in Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 46. Lisa Cartwright, “U.S. Modernism and the Emergence of ‘The Right Wing of Film Art’: The Films of James Sibley Watson, Jr., and Melville Webber,” in Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 157. Lucy Fischer, “The Films of James Sibley Watson, Jr., and Melville Webber: A Reconsideration” in Millennium Film Journal 19 (1987): 40–9. Cartwright, 162. Quoted in Michael O’Pray, “Jan Švankmajer: A Mannerist Surrealist,” in Dark Alchemy: The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer, 2nd edn, ed. Peter Hames (London: Wallflower Press 2008), 58. Peter Hames, “Interview with Jan Švankmajer,” in Dark Alchemy: The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer, 2nd edn, ed. Peter Hames (London: Wallflower Press 2008), 113. Roger Cardinal, “Thinking Through Things: The Presence of Objects in the Early Films of Jan Švankmajer,” in Dark Alchemy: The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer, 2nd edn, ed. Peter Hames (London: Wallflower Press 2008), 82. Frantisek Dryje, “The Force of Imagination,” in Dark Alchemy: The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer, 2nd edn, ed. Peter Hames (London: Wallflower Press 2008), 146. Hames, 117–18.

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Notes 11 12 13 14

253

Dryje, 163. Ibid., 163. Cardinal, 82. O’Pray, 57–8.

Chapter 8 1 2

3

4 5 6 7

8 9

10 11

12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25

Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006), 2. Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 5: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 41. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000 (London: Oxford University Press, 2002), 106. Sanders, 26. Sitney, 105. Ibid., 83–4. Juan Suarez, “Pop, Queer, or Fascist? The Ambiguity of Mass Culture in Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising,” in Experimental Cinema: The Film Reader, eds. Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (London: Routledge, 2002), 115. Suarez, 116. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 275–92. Suarez, 124–5. Robert A. Haller, “Kenneth Anger,” in Galaxy: Avant-Garde Filmmakers Look Across Space and Time (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 2001), 6. A. L. Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 63. Ibid., 63. Sitney, 109. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 106–7. MacDonald, 39. Quoted in Sitney, 103. Sanders, 63. MacDonald, 37. Ibid., 38. Ed Lowry, “The Appropriation of Signs in Scorpio Rising,” in Velvet Light Trap (Summer 1983). Suarez, 120. Sanders, 59. Suarez, 130.

Chapter 9 1

Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 56.

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254 2 3 4 5

6

7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Notes

Peter Hames, The Czechoslovak New Wave (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), 6. Ibid., 197–8. Ibid., 198. Melanie J. Wright, Religion and Film: An Introduction (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008), 4. S. Brent Plate, Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), 6. Leitch, 49. Ibid., 50. John R. May and Michael Bird, eds. Religion in Film (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982), 28–9. Hames, 198. Ibid., 199. Wright, 5. Plate, 61. Ibid., 7. Hames, 200. May and Bird, 33. Wright, 18–19. Hames, 272. Plate, 68. Hames, 273. Plate, 69.

Chapter 10 1 2

3

4

5

6

7

8 9

10 11

Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006), 138. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Parody and Appropriation in Francis Picabia, Pop and Sigmar Polke,” in Appropriation, ed. David Evans (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 178–88. 178. Sontag, Susan. “Syberberg’s Hitler,” in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 137–65. 137–8. Douglas Crimp, “Appropriating Appropriation,” in Appropriation, ed. David Evans (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 189–93. 189. Rosenstone, Robert A., History on Film/Film on History (London: Pearson Longman, 2006), 19. Quoted in Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006), 143. Quoted in Timothy Corrigan, New German Film: The Displaced Image (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 151. Ibid., 156. Kershaw, Ian. The Nazi Dictatorship: The Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (London: Edward Arnold, 1989), 4. Sontag, 138–39. Berman, Russell. “Hans-Jürgen Syberberg: Of Fantastic and Magical Worlds,” in New German Filmmakers: From Oberhausen Through the 1970s. ed. Klaus Phillips (New York: Ungar, 1984), 359–78. 371–2.

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Notes 12 13

14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27

255

Corrigan, 152. Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen. “Introduction,” in Hitler, A Film From Germany, Trans. Jaochim Neugroschel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), 18. Corrigan, 156. Syberberg, 10. Sontag, 152–3. Hutcheon, 139. Caryl Flynn, The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2004), 10. Ibid., 15. James Franklin, New German Cinema (Boston: Twayne, 1983), 164. Quoted in James Franklin, New German Cinema (Boston: Twayne, 1983), 164. Quoted in Ott, Frederick, The Great German Films: From Before World War I to the Present (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1986), 280. Syberberg, 13. Ott, 284. Corrigan, 162–3. Sontag, 150–1. Buchloh, 178.

Chapter 11 1

2

3

4

5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12

13

Paul Wells, Animation: Genre and Authorship (London: Wallflower Press, 2002), 130. Robert Aita, “Brothers Quay: In Absentia,” OffScreen (30 September 2001), n.p. http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/quay_italian.html (accessed June 20, 2010). Laura Marks, “The Quays’ Institute Benjamenta: An Olfactory View.” Afterimage (September/October 1997): 11–13. Suzanne H. Buchan, “The Quay Brothers: Choreographed Chiaroscuro, Enigmatic and Sublime,” Film Quarterly (Spring 1998): 2–15. 8. All quotes of The Street of Crocodiles from Penguin Classic edition, 1992. Buchan, 4. Habib, André. “Through a Glass Darkly: Interview with the Quay Brothers.” Senses of Cinema. February 2002 (May 20, 2010). (accessed June 20, 2010), n. p. Jonathan Marlow, “Tales from the Brothers Quay.” www.Greencine.com. November 2006 (accessed June 20, 2010), n.p. Habib, n. p. Aita, n. p. Habib, n. p. Vincent Canby, “Brothers Quay, Animation,” New York Times (April 29, 1987). http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9B0DE5DC163DF93AA15757 C0A961948260 (accessed June 20, 2010), n.p. Sarah Scott, “Fetish, Filth and Childhood: Walking down The Street of Crocodiles,” Senses of Cinema (2005). http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/05/36/ street_of_crocodiles.html (accessed June 20, 2010), n. p.

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256 14

15 16 17 18 19

Notes

Robert Fulford, “Deep into Private Mythology with Bruno Schulz.” Globe and Mail (July 22, 1998), n. p. Habib, n. p. Ibid, n. p. Ibid, n. p. Ibid, n. p. Marks, 8.

Chapter 12 1

2

3 4

5 6 7

8 9

10 11

12

13 14 15

Suranjan Ganguly, “Stan Brakhage: The 60th Birthday Interview,” in Experimental Cinema: The Film Reader, eds. Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (London: Routledge, 2002), 147. Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 4: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 102. Ganguly, 148. “Stan Brakhage at the Cinémathèque Québécoise, Montreal, January 27–28, 2001,” transcribed by Donato Totaro, February 28, 2003, http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_ offscreen/brakhage_montreal2.html (accessed May 28, 2010). Ibid. Ibid. P. Adams Sitney, Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (London: Oxford University Press, 2008), 256. Ganguly, 149. Fred Camper, “Stan Brakhage: A Brief Introduction,” http://www.fredcamper. com/Film/Brakhage4.html (accessed May 28, 2010), n. p. Sitney, 250. Adrian Danks, “Across the Universe: Stan Brakhage’s The Dante Quartet,” senses of cinema (June 2004), http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/ cteq/04/32/dante_quartet.html (accessed May 28, 2010), n. p. P. Adams Sitney, “Stan Brakhage Obituary” (2003), http://www.fredcamper. com/Brakhage/Sitney.html (accessed May 28, 2010), n. p. Ganguly, 149. Sitney, 251. Danks, n. p.

Chapter 13 1

2 3

Peter Hames, “The Core of Reality: Puppets in the Feature Films of Jan Švankmajer,” in Dark Alchemy: The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer, ed. Peter Hames (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), 88. Peter Hames, The Czechoslovak New Wave (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), 211. Peter Hames, “The Film Experiment,” in Dark Alchemy: The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer, ed. Peter Hames (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), 14.

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Notes 4

5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12

13

14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29

30

31 32 33 34

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Tina-Louise Reid, “Neco Z Alenky/Alice,” in The Cinema of Central Europe, ed. Peter Hames (Wallflower Press, London and New York, 2004), 216. Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006), 4. Hames, The Czechoslovak New Wave, 256. Peter Hames, “Interview with Jan Švankmajer,” in Dark Alchemy: The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer, ed. Peter Hames (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), 112. Wendy Jackson, “The Surrealist Conspirator: An Interview with Jan Švankmajer,” Animation World Magazine, Issue 2.3 (June 1997) (accessed May 17, 2010), n. p. Reid, 218. Hames, “Interview with Jan Švankmajer,” 113. Reid, 218. Frantisek Dryje, “The Force of Imagination,” in Dark Alchemy: The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer, ed. Peter Hames (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), 156. Roger Cardinal, “Thinking Through Things: The Presence of Objects in the Early Films of Jan Švankmajer,” in Dark Alchemy: The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer, ed. Peter Hames (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), 75. Reid, 217. Hames, “Interview with Jan Švankmajer,” 114. Reid, 218. Ibid., 223. Hames, “The Core of Reality,” 98–9. Will Brooker, Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture (New York: Continuum, 2004), 216. Hames, “Interview with Jan Švankmajer,” 120. Reid, 218. Brooker, 215. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (London: Penguin, 1865), 65. Dryje, 174. Reid, “Alice,” 215. Chris Jenks, Transgression (London: Routledge, 2003), 154. Dryje, 155. Robert Stam, Literature Through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 15. Jonathan Marlow, “Lunacy: A Roundtable with Jan Švankmajer,” August 2006. http://www.greencine.com/central/node/201 (accessed April 4, 2008), n.p. Paul Wells, “Classic literature and animation: all adaptations are equal, but some are more equal than others,” in The Cambridge Guide to Literature on Screen, eds. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 199–211. 210. Cardinal, 82. Marlow, n. p. Quoted in Hames, Dark Alchemy, 66. Michael O’Pray, “Jan Švankmajer: A Mannerist Surrealist,” in Dark Alchemy: The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer, ed. Peter Hames (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), 66. Ibid., 66. Hames, “Interview with Jan Švankmajer,” 122. Peter Brooker, “Postmodern adaptation: pastiche, intertextuality and re-functioning,” in The Cambridge Guide to Literature on Screen, eds. Deborah Cartmell

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and Imelda Whelehan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 107–20. 118. Quoted in Brigid Cherry, “Dark Wonders and Gothic Sensibility: Jan Švankmajer’s Alice,” www.kinoeye.org. Vol. 2 Issue 1 (January 2002) (accessed April 4, 2008), n.p. Hames, “The Core of Reality,” 88–9. Michael O’Pray, “Jan Švankmajer: A Mannerist Surrealist,” 58. Peter Hames, “Interview with Jan Švankmajer,” 118.

Chapter 14 1 2

3 4 5

6

7

8

9

10

11 12 13 14

15 16

17 18

Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006), 62. James M. Welsh, “What Is a Shakespeare Film Anyway?” in The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation, eds. James M. Welsh and Peter Lev (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2007), 105. Ibid., 111. Sanders, 62. Quoted in Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2006), 113. Peggy Phelan, “Prospero’s Books,” in Performing Arts Journal 14(2) (May 1992): 43–50. Vernon Gras, “Dramatizing the Failure to Jump the Culture/Nature Gap: The Films of Peter Greenaway,” in New Literary History 26(1) (Winter 1995): 123–43. James Tweedie, “Caliban’s Books: The Hybrid Text in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books,” in Cinema Journal 40(1) (Autumn 2000): 104–26. Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 106–7. Douglas Lanier, “William Shakespeare, filmmaker,” in The Cambridge Guide to Literature on Screen, eds. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 61–74. 68–9. Sanders, 57. Sanders, 48. Judith Buchanan, Shakespeare on Film (London: Pearson Longman, 2005), 177. Marlene Rodgers, “Prospero’s Books—Word and Spectacle: An Interview with Peter Greenaway,” in Peter Greenaway: Interviews, eds. Vernon Gras and Marguerite Gras (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 135–46. 136. Gras, 140. Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, “Prospero’s Books, Postmodernism, and the Reenchantment of the World,” in Peter Greenaway’s Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema, eds. Paula Willoquet-Maricondi and Mary Alemany-Galway (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2008), 177–202. 184. Sanders, 55. Robert Stam, Literature Through Film (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 363–4.

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28 29

30 31

32 33

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Leitch, 111. Rodgers, 136. Willoquet-Maricondi, 196. Ibid., 198. Hutcheon, 82. Phelan, 48. Buchanan, 177. Phelan, 49. Yong Li Lan, “Returning to Naples: Seeing the End in Shakespeare Film Adaptation,” in The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation, eds. James M. Welsh and Peter Lev (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2007), 121. Tweedie, 123. Lawrence Chua, “Peter Greenaway: An Interview,” in Peter Greenaway: Interviews, eds. Vernon Gras and Marguerite Gras (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 176–85. Tweedie, 111. Cristina Degli-Espositi Reinert, “Neo-Baroque Imaging in Peter Greenaway’s Cinema,” in Peter Greenaway’s Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema, eds. Paula Willoquet-Maricondi and Mary Alemany-Galway (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2008), 51–78. 52. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 68.

Chapter 15 1

2 3

4

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11

Quoted in Greil Marcus, Film Review: “Wisconsin Death Trip: A Record of Despair Born of a Single Image,” New York Times (November 28, 1999). http:// www.wisconsindeathtrip.com/reviews.html (accessed June 7, 2010), n.p. Marcus. Michael Eaton, Film Review: “Vanishing Americans,” British Film Institute. http:// www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/100/ (accessed June 7, 2010), n.p. Stephen Holden, Film Review: “How a Town in Wisconsin Went Mad,” New York Times (December 1, 1999). http://www.wisconsindeathtrip.com/reviews. html. (accessed June 7, 2010), n. p. Robert Birnbaum, “Interview with Michael Lesy,” Identity Theory (September 16, 2003). http://www.identitytheory.com/interviews/birnbaum125.php (accessed June 7, 2010), n. p. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Eaton, n. p. André Breton, Surrealist Manifesto (1924). http://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/ Jbutler/T340/SurManifesto/ManifestoOfSurrealism.htm (accessed June 11, 2010), n. p. Marcus, n. p.

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260 12 12 14

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Ibid, n. p. Holden, n. p. Birnbaum, n. p.

Chapter 16 1

2

3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15

A.O. Scott, Film Review: “Yogi, Boo Boo, Yes, But Not One Picnic Basket,” New York Times (March 17, 2000), http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/17/movies/ film-review-yogi-and-boo-boo-yes-but-not-one-picnic-basket.html (accessed June 7, 2010), n.p. Quoted in Gary Morris, “American Apocalypse: Craig Baldwin’s Spectres of the Spectrum,” Bright Lights Film Journal 44 (May 2002), http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/44/spec.php. (accessed June 7, 2010), n. p. Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006), 3. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 5. David Cox, “Notes on Culture Jamming,” http://sniggle.net/Manifesti/notes. php (accessed June 7, 2010), n. d., n. p. Ibid. Ibid. J. Hoberman, Film Review: “Missions Impossible,” Village Voice (March 14, 2000). http://www.villagevoice.com/2000-03-14/film/missions impossible/1/ (accessed June 7, 2010), n. p. Scott. Scott. Quoted in Hoberman. Quoted in Hoberman. Gregory Avery, Film Review: “Spectres of the Spectrum,” Nitrate Online (December 24, 1999), http://www.nitrateonline.com/1999/rspectres.html (accessed June 7, 2010), n. p.

Chapter 17 1

2

3 4 5

Milan Pribisic, “Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Virgins, Vampires, and the ‘Theatre Film,’” in Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin, ed. David Church (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2009), 159–70, 168. William Beard, Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 164. Ibid., 168. Ibid., 168–9. William Beard, “Conversations with Guy Maddin,” in Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin, ed. David Church (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2009), 239–65. 255.

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10 11

12 13 14

15 16 17 18

19

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Pribisic, 159–60. Ibid., 160. Beard, Into the Past, 185. Cheryl Binning, “Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary—the making of a dance film,” Take One (March 1, 2002): 15–17. Beard, Into the Past, 188. Mark Peranson, “Count on the Dance: Guy Maddin on Dracula—Pages from a Virgin’s Diary,” Cinemascope 10 (March 2002): 5–11. Ibid, 6. Pribisic, 165. Donato Totaro, “Guy Maddin: Tales from a Maverick’s Diary,” Offscreen 8 (September 30, 2004). http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/maddin_intro.html (accessed October 21, 2009). Beard, Into the Past, 179–80. Totaro. Beard, Into the Past, 177. Mike White, “Tales of Guy Maddin,” Cashiers du Cinemart 13 http://www.impossiblefunky.com/archives/issue_13/13_maddin.asp?IshNum=13=Tales%20 of%20Guy%20Maddin. Erica Spiller, “(M)other Dracula and Its Adaptations,” MP: An Online Feminist Journal (October 2009), 1–13. Peranson, 5. Beard, “Conversations with Guy Maddin,” 255–6. Peranson, 7. Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 24. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2006), 49. Peranson, 8. Ibid. Hutcheon, 22. Peranson, 10. Beard, “Conversations with Guy Maddin,” 255. Beard, Into the Past, 188. Beard, “Conversations with Guy Maddin,” 256. Hutcheon, 42. Peranson, 7. Beard, Into the Past, 167. Pribisic, 167. Ibid., 164. Ibid., 160. Beard, Into the Past, 173. Peranson, 10. Pribisic, 160.

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Index

abstract 7, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 26, 41, 42, 50, 65, 66, 67, 70, 73, 84, 87, 92, 105, 119, 164, 167, 172, 232 adapters 28, 78 alchemy 155, 170, 172, 173 Alice 60, 169–84 Alice in Wonderland 3, 175 ambiguity 106, 116, 118, 120, 129, 132, 152, 194, 207 Andrew, Dudley 7, 11, 20, 42 Anger, Kenneth 34, 47, 73, 77, 113–22 Antigone/Rites of Passion 91–4 art forms 9, 10 artworks 14, 27, 35, 36 Astruc, Alexandre 21, 26, 79 Austen, Jane 1 auteur 29, 151, 186, 187, 188 avant-gardist 9, 14, 46, 73 B movie 87, 210 Bakhtin, Mikhail 124, 193, 233 Baldwin, Craig 71, 210–17 ballet 65, 218–31 Bataille, Georges 95, 96, 97 Bazin, Andre 26 Beauty and the Beast 41, 74–6 Benjamin, Walter 27, 28 biopic 61–4, 235 Bluestone, George 1, 21 Bordwell, David 62 Brakhage, Stan 69, 73, 77, 88, 163–8 Breton, Andre 108, 171, 183, 207 Browning, Tod 220 Bunuel, Luis 47, 71, 118 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari 61 Calinescu, Matei 9, 10, 12, 13, 46

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camp aesthetic 116–17 Camper, Fred 8, 167 Carroll, Lewis 60, 169–84 Cartoon le Mousse 87–8 Chaplin, Charlie 60, 78, 140 Chytilova, Vera 123–32 cinema of attractions 29, 57, 58, 60, 81 cinema verite 98, 124 cinematography 7, 11, 22, 41, 63, 65, 69, 81, 86, 90, 98, 105, 123, 126, 134, 150, 161, 196, 198, 204, 218, 219, 220, 224, 226 cinephile 2 city symphony 60, 65, 69 close-up 63, 64, 67, 68, 83, 85, 92, 93, 98, 99, 106, 107, 117, 119, 126, 128, 129, 157, 158, 173, 174, 175, 188, 196, 219, 228, 229 Cocteau, Jean 41, 47, 60, 74–6 collage 37, 39, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 85, 87, 88, 90, 113, 115, 116, 140, 148, 170, 172, 181, 184, 201, 202, 204, 205, 206, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 235 The Conformist 80 Contempt 80, 95 Cook, David 64 Cornell, Joseph 34, 70–3, 85, 113, 115, 204, 210 Corrigan, Timothy 45, 148 crosscutting 65 cubism 65 dada 65, 211 Dali, Salvador 71 The Dante Quartet 163–8 de Sade, Marquis 170 DeMille, Cecil B. 123

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Index

The Demon 84–5 Deren, Maya 60, 73, 91, 93, 132 disassociate 39, 75 Disney 75, 79, 83, 169 Dixon, Wheeler Winston 13, 45, 46, 49, 74 D-I-Y 213 documentary 62, 65, 69, 87, 91, 95, 114, 115, 119, 133, 138, 201, 204, 213, 219 Dorè 86, 87 Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary 218–31 dream 41, 58–60, 71, 75–8, 80, 86, 91, 93, 96, 106, 108, 129, 134, 136, 138, 142, 150, 152–5, 157, 159, 161, 169, 171, 173–81, 183, 184, 204, 211, 217, 219 Dream of a Rarebit Fiend 59–60 Dreyer, Carl-Theodor 61–4, 99, 229

filmmakers 28, 34, 47, 232 The Five Obstructions 95 found footage 70, 71, 73, 87, 88, 113, 115, 118, 119, 210, 211, 213, 214, 216 Friedrich, Su 88, 143 Fruit of Paradise 123–32 The Full Monteverdi 97–9 futurism 65 Gance, Abel 61–3 Genette, Gerard 39, 199 George Bataille’s The Story of an Eye 95–7 Go! Go! Go! 65, 67, 69 Godard, Jean-Luc 82–4, 95, 98, 143 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 136, 170 Gone with the Wind 70 Greenaway, Peter 35, 58, 185–99 Greenfield, Amy 91–4 Gunning, Tom 29, 57, 58, 69, 93 Harry Potter 2, 232 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 76, 77 Hell Unltd. 72, 73 Hemingway, Ernest 15 Hitler, A Film from Germany 37, 62, 133–49 Hollywood 1, 2, 48, 57, 71, 72, 74, 75, 79, 83, 84, 99, 116, 121, 122, 136, 149, 232 Horak, Jan-Christopher 49, 60, 61, 66, 67, 68, 72, 105 Hutcheon, Linda 3, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 31, 42, 43, 44, 64, 139, 146, 194, 228, 229 Huxley, Aldous 80

Easy Rider 121 editing 7, 11, 12, 22, 41, 43, 57, 58, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 78, 90, 96, 113, 126, 134, 161, 173, 174, 179, 210, 212, 219, 220, 223, 224, 226, 227, 229 Eisenstein, Sergei 11, 67, 73, 120, 223, 224 Eliot, T.S. 39, 90 experimental 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 20, 41, 46, 48, 49, 50, 55, 57, 70, 71, 73, 74, 79, 80, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 92, 95, 99, 100, 123, 124, 125, 126, 130, 134, 137, 138, 150, 154, 158, 160, 168, 172, 173, 185, 190, 201, 203, 204, 210, 212, 216, 227, 232, 233, 234 exploitation 2, 17, 18, 19, 30, 31, 32, 33, 45, 112, 122, 134, 186, 198 expressionism 50, 93, 103, 106, 112, 158, 164, 229

imagination 20, 24, 25 IMAX 164, 168 intertextuality 17, 21, 22, 27, 34, 37, 38, 42, 84, 95, 114, 122, 198, 214, 231, 233

The Fall of the House of Usher 61, 103–11, 204 Fellini, Federico 185 fidelity 17 Fields, W.C. 60

Jacobs, Ken 118, 210 Jakobson, Roman 25 Jarman, Derek 89–91, 186 Joyce, James 15 Jules and Jim 80

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Index Kafka, Franz 156 Kawamoto, Kichachiro 84–5 King, Stephen 1 Kovacs, Andras Balint 10, 11, 14 Koyaanisyatsi 69 Kurosawa, Akira 186 La Bouchardiere, John 97–9 La Jetee 44 The Last of England 89–91 Leitch, Thomas 3, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 41, 48, 124, 127, 189, 193, 226 Lesy, Michael 200, 201, 203, 204, 205, 206, 209 Lord of the Rings 2 Luhrman, Baz 190 Lynch, David 47 lyrical 13, 41, 51, 75, 94, 150, 153 Macbeth 94 McCay, Winsor 59 MacDonald, Scott 3, 73, 164 McElhinney, Andrew Repasky 95–7 McFarlane, Brian 3, 17, 23, 32, 43 McLaren, Norman 72, 73 Maddin, Guy 218–31 Made in U.S.A 82–4 Mahler, Gustav 221, 229, 230 mainstream (film) 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16, 19, 20, 26, 33, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 53, 56, 57, 63, 64, 79, 80, 89, 99, 100, 116, 118, 132, 157, 158, 173, 190, 199, 204, 216, 217, 218, 224 Man with a Movie Camera 65 Manhatta 65–9 Markopoulos, Gregory 60, 73, 76–7 Marsh, James 200–9, 211 Mekas, Jonas 82, 88, 98, 118 Melies, Georges 58, 59 Menken, Marie 65, 69, 73, 88 metaphor 16, 19, 21, 25, 27, 46, 62, 69, 77, 87, 88, 104, 116, 122, 123, 126, 129, 135, 140, 151, 157, 159, 163, 167, 171, 191, 194, 220, 231 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 77–8

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mise-en-scene 19, 22, 23, 41, 43, 60, 61, 81, 90, 105, 115, 126, 134, 150, 156, 157, 161, 185, 191, 197, 198, 220 modernism 66, 222, 229 modernity 10, 65, 67, 69, 222 montage 14, 39, 65, 67, 73, 77, 90, 105, 107, 113, 115, 117, 119, 120, 121, 126, 130, 144, 170, 173, 202, 203, 215, 223, 224 Mother Joan of the Angels 80–1 Munsterberg, Hugo 24 Musser, Charles 57, 59, 60 myth 73, 76, 85, 113, 114, 115, 119, 120, 121, 122, 126, 127, 130, 133, 136, 137, 141, 142, 145, 147, 148, 149, 151, 154, 166, 193, 198, 211, 222, 225, 230, 233 Napoleon 61–3 Naremore, James 16, 26 narration 2, 16, 30, 41, 78, 83, 87, 96, 105, 112, 114, 202, 203, 205, 225 New Wave 79, 172 nightmare 100, 112, 152, 172, 176, 208 Nosferatu 61, 220, 229 Olivier, Laurence 186 opera 1, 17, 22, 98, 137, 202, 226–8 O’Pray, Michael 70, 71, 112, 181 Othello 94 otherness 20, 46, 157, 158, 222 painting 8, 9, 10, 11, 22, 28, 60, 77, 89, 90, 118, 123, 125, 129, 138, 163, 164, 168, 185, 198, 199 palimpsest 22, 42, 137, 146, 186, 188, 213, 214, 231, 233 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 124 The Passion of Joan of Arc 61–4, 99 pastiche 21, 37, 83, 84, 116, 137, 213, 214, 223 perception 7, 11, 13, 21, 22, 24, 36, 37, 38, 66, 69, 70, 154, 163, 167, 168, 169, 182, 184, 195, 196, 205 photography 13, 59, 67, 69, 77, 85, 172, 200, 204, 208 Poe, Edgar Allan 103–12

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poetic 19, 51, 60, 66, 73, 74, 75, 109, 115, 119, 137, 139, 150, 151, 157, 162, 167 poetry 9, 60, 69, 75, 78, 86, 87, 88, 94, 157, 160, 164, 186, 187, 200 Porter, Edwin S. 59, 60 postmodernism 36, 139, 229 Prospero’s Books 35, 58, 185–99 puppets 60, 77, 78, 84, 85, 138, 139, 140, 146, 150–9, 161, 162, 170–3, 175, 176, 179–81, 183, 184 Quay brothers 150–62 reality 8, 13, 19, 22, 41, 59, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 75, 108, 109, 115, 116, 130, 132, 140, 145, 149, 157, 159, 161, 167, 174, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 184, 194, 199, 209, 211 Rilke, Rainer Maria 165, 166 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 85–7 Rose Hobart 34, 70–2 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead 35, 190 Rosenstone, Robert 81, 139 Sanders, Julie 35, 36, 37, 38, 114, 115, 121, 122, 134, 172, 186, 187, 190, 192, 213, 214 Schulz, Bruno 150–61 Scorpio Rising 34, 113–22 Shakespeare 1, 15, 35, 77, 78, 90, 94, 185–99, 232 Sheeler, Charles 65–7 silent (film) 1, 11, 57, 59, 60, 62, 63, 70, 71, 78, 106, 201, 207, 218, 219, 220, 222, 223, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231 Sitney, P. Adams 3, 7, 8, 9, 72, 73, 76, 77, 115, 116, 119, 120, 165, 167, 168 Smith, Jack 47, 118 Sontag, Susan 116, 117, 136, 142, 145, 148 Sophocles 92, 93, 94 sound 7, 11, 17, 18, 22, 24, 29, 34, 41, 43, 65, 70, 79, 80, 89, 90, 96, 97, 108, 117, 118, 125, 126, 130, 135, 137, 154, 159, 161, 173, 180, 185, 211, 213, 218, 219, 223, 230

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spectatorship 2, 32, 47, 51 Spectres of the Spectrum 71, 210–17 Stam, Robert 17, 22, 30, 68, 75, 79, 179, 193, 233 Stoker, Bram 61, 218–23, 225, 227, 229, 230 stop-motion animation 85, 151, 155, 162, 169, 171, 176, 177 Strand, Chick 87–8 Strand, Paul 65–7 Street of Crocodiles 3, 150–62 subjectivity 2, 7, 11, 22, 37, 38, 39, 42, 46, 61, 124, 132, 144, 179, 200 surrealism 41, 47, 50, 59, 60, 71, 74, 75, 103, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 119, 130, 158, 159, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180, 184, 203, 204, 206, 207 Svankmajer, Jan 60, 78, 79, 103, 104, 107–12, 154, 169–84 Swain 76–7 Syberberg, Hans-Jurgen 37, 62, 81, 133–49 Taxidermia 94 Taymor, Julie 186 The Tempest 3, 90, 185, 186, 188–99 theater 79, 84, 116, 137, 140, 172, 184, 188, 195, 198, 221, 222, 231 translation 18, 19, 21, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 38, 42, 49, 76, 106, 123, 164, 166, 169, 181, 182, 233 transposition 18, 19, 22, 25, 30, 38, 44, 63, 64, 86, 95, 109, 188, 199, 201, 205, 213, 233, 235 Trnka, Jiri 77–9, 84 Twilight 48, 232 The Umbrellas of Cherbourg 98 Un Chien Andalou 71 uncanny 73, 85, 108, 137, 150, 159, 169, 180, 181 unconscious 11, 58, 71, 94, 100, 109, 134, 160, 168, 170, 173, 174, 175, 178, 181 underground 10, 13, 45, 46, 47, 58, 74, 84, 99, 113, 118, 200

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Index Vertov, Dziga 65, 68, 223 video 33, 45, 88, 90, 91, 97, 224 Von Trier, Lars 95 Walser, Robert 156 Warhol, Andy 47, 88, 118 Waters, John 47 Watson, James Sibley 61, 103, 105, 106, 107, 110, 112

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Webber, Melville 61, 103, 105, 106, 107, 110, 112 Welles, Orson 86, 186 Welsh, James 3, 186 Whitman, Walt 66, 67 Wisconsin Death Trip 3, 200–9 The Wizard of Oz 70 Youngblood, Gene 88

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