Film Phenomenology and Adaptation: Sensuous Elaboration 9789048543052

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Film Phenomenology and Adaptation: Sensuous Elaboration

Film Phenomenology and Adaptation Sensuous Elaboration

David Evan Richard

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Still from Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016). Paramount Pictures/Photofest. Cover design: Kok Korpershoek Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 210 0 e-isbn 978 90 4854 305 2 doi 10.5117/9789463722100 nur 670 © D.E. Richard / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2021 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: A ‘Fleshly Dialogue’ If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes Fuzzy and Sticky: The Stigma of Subjective Impressionism in Adaptation Studies Beyond ‘Intertextual Dialogism’: Phenomenology, Film, and a ‘Fleshly Dialogue’ Corpus Works Cited

7 11 11 16 25 33 38

1. Grave Visions: Visual Experience and Adaptation Introduction: Eye-Opener Visible and Visible: The ‘Carnal Density of Vision’ Early Cinema Aesthetics as an Attractive Possibility for Screen Adaptation Draped in Shadow: Murnau’s Nosferatu Glittering Night: Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula Conclusion: Out of Sight Works Cited

48 53 60 68 69

2. Resonance and Reverberation: Sounding Out Screen Adaptation Prelude Acoustic Shape and the Sonic Wizardry of Screen Sound Listening to the Voice’s ‘Acoustic, Sensuous Impression’ Heart of Glass: Rendering the Sounds of Depression in The Hours Alienated Language: Under the Skin Final Note Works Cited

73 73 75 78 84 90 97 97

3. Textural Analysis: Touching Adaptation Introduction: Scratching the Surface Skin and Bone: Fleshing Out Tactile Experience in Film Theory ‘Thumbprints’ and an ‘Irritating’ Performance: In the Cut’s ‘Tactile Orientation’ A Touching Sight: Embodied Voyeurism

101 101 103

43 43 45

114 122

Conclusion: Final Touch Works Cited

125 126

4. Textures of Imagination Introduction: From Sight to Insight Wonder, at the Limits of Adaptation Studies Wonder, Make-Believe, and Simulation: Cognitive Approaches to Imagination Embodied Imagination and Intercorporeality: Mind the (‘­Epistemic’) Gap! Inside-Out and Upside-Down: Mood Indigo’s Existential Feelings A Cute Grief: Feeling Blue in Mood Indigo Conclusion: From Percept to Precept Works Cited

129 129 133

5. (Re-)Mediating Memory’s Materiality Introduction: Tracing Memory’s Role in Adaptation Untangling the ‘Thick’ Tissue of Memory Textu(r)al Traces: Memory in Literature and Film Straight-Laced: The Danish Girl, in Transition Poison’s ‘Ambivalent Aesthetic’ of Memory Conclusion: The ‘Pressure of the Past’, Pushing Towards the Future Works Cited

161 161 164 170 175 184 198 199

Conclusion: Body Language Arriving at an Embodied Theory of Adaptation Departures: Towards an ‘Ethics of Adaptation’ Works Cited

203 203 214 222

Bibliography

227

Filmography

243

Index

245

137 141 145 152 154 156

Acknowledgements This book’s first life began at The School of Communication and Arts at The University of Queensland, where it was financially supported by an APA Scholarship by the Australian Government, and was completed with support from my new friends and colleagues at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). I am absolutely indebted to Lisa Bode and Jane Stadler, whose intellectual and personal generosity kept me grounded, albeit always on my toes. Both have been friends and heroic champions while I ‘adapted’ this material into its current form, and any lumpy bits are certainly not caused by their hands. Jennifer Barker and Julian Hanich provided dazzling suggestions and advice on an earlier form of this book, while Julie Sanders and another anonymous reader provided stimulating readings of the manuscript. Thank you, also, to Maryse Elliott and all at Amsterdam University Press who saw promise in the book, as well as to Emily Russo at Zeitgeist Films, and Sydney Foos at Killer Films. I also must thank: Matthew Cipa, John Edmond, Greg Hainge, Samantha Lindop, Christian Long, Jessica Mai, Ted Nannicelli, Tom O’Regan, and Matthew Sini. Sections of this book have been published as: ‘Film Phenomenology and Adaptation: The “Fleshly Dialogue” of Jane Campion’s In the Cut’, Adaptation, 11.2 (2018); and ‘The “Eloquent Gestures” of Language in Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival’, Cinephile, 12.1 (2017). I thank the editors of these journals for the kind permission to reproduce this material. Finally, a special note of gratitude to my family: Russ, Barb, Cath, Al, Linky, Edie, and Mat.



List of Figures

Frankenstein (J. Searle Dawley, 1910) Dr. Graves (Larry Maxwell) drinks the ‘sex drive’ in Poison (Todd Haynes, 1991).  Dr. Graves’ skin—and Todd Haynes’s filming style—evokes disgust in Poison (Todd Haynes, 1991).  The staginess and artificiality questions the reliability of memory in Poison (Todd Haynes, 1991).  The layering of footage in Poison (Todd Haynes, 1991) questions the reliability of the documentary form as a mediation of memory.

51 189 190 195 197



Introduction: A ‘Fleshly Dialogue’ Abstract This chapter positions the book in the extant scholarship of adaptation and phenomenology. It establishes the book’s argument that in order to ‘make sense’ of adaptations as adaptations, we must first attend to their sensual presence: their look, their sound, their touch, and how they materialize in the embodied imagination. This chapter builds on foundational adaptation scholarship by Robert Stam, Linda Hutcheon, and Christine Geraghty who advance an intertextual approach to studying adaptation. Rather, this chapter employs the existential phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty—and how it has been adapted to film studies by Vivian Sobchack—to propose an intersubjective account of adaptation. Keywords: adaptation; film-phenomenology; perception; synaesthesia; embodiment

If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes Film Phenomenology and Adaptation: Sensuous Elaboration draws its name from Susan Sontag’s ‘The Imagination of Disaster’, an essay that considers screen adaptation as a phenomenon in all senses of the word. Although discussing the particular case of science fiction novels adapted for the screen, Sontag’s article nonetheless evokes the stigma that tends to be attached more generally to screen adaptation that concerns the difference between modes of aesthetic engagement. Reading a novel requires imagination and cognition, while, as Sontag puts it, in lieu of ‘an intellectual workout, [these films] supply something that novels can never provide—sensuous elaboration’.1 Yet Sontag’s words do not comfortably sit with my experience of many film adaptations that certainly do demand an ‘intellectual workout’—and more— of its spectator. Indeed, adaptation theorists have adequately challenged the 1

Susan Sontag, ‘The Imagination of Disaster’, p. 212.

Richard, D.E., Film Phenomenology and Adaptation: Sensuous Elaboration. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463722100_intro

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assumption that the experience of literary and cinematic arts might demand different responses of their beholder, that literature requires imaginative engagement, for instance, while a film simply appeals to the senses.2 In doing so, these scholars have overthrown any hierarchies of value that are implicitly (or explicitly) formed in such categorizations: that novels are complex, demanding, and therefore worthy, while films are dismissed as facile entertainments, with the particular form of the film adaptation seemingly furthest removed from the realm of art due to its fundamentally derivative nature. I build on this scholarship to further advocate that film adaptations certainly do involve an ‘intellectual workout’. But in doing so, this book does not disavow the pleasure of an adaptation as a physical workout as well, so to speak: far from it. This book aligns with recent developments in sensual scholarship and embodied spectatorship to argue that the means by which film adaptations appeal to the senses—how they delight the eye, resonate in the ear, and appeal to the skin—not so much precludes intellectual meaning and aesthetic significance, but rather grounds it. In doing so, this book challenges scholars who might have turned a blind eye to the sensual contours of an adaptation, or those who that have lost touch with the critical value of the sensual capabilities of the body. Even scholarship that would seem to be explicitly sympathetic to the sensual form of a film adaptation tends to show a reluctance to deeply engage with the senses, or to simply dismiss an adaptation’s overt sensual appeal as excess. For instance, in his examination of the science fiction film adaptation, film genre theorist Barry Keith Grant suggests that ‘because film is primarily a visual medium, it tends to concentrate on the depiction of visual surfaces at the expense of contemplative depth’ and that therefore the novel’s ‘philosophy is replaced with frisson’.3 In doing so, Grant appears to overlook the multisensory and synaesthetic nature of the film experience, for films are not only seen but are also heard and felt. Following the work of phenomenological film theorists, I would suggest that films not only have contemplative depth but also have textural depth too. 4 The specific case of the film adaptation thus raises even more beguiling questions for sensory scholarship. How might the 2 See Thomas Leitch, ‘Twelve Fallacies’, pp. 149-171; Kamilla Elliott, ‘Novels, Films’, pp. 1-23. Elsewhere, Elliot gives extensive literature reviews of the development—and limitations—of the adaptation studies discipline in ‘Theorizing Adaptation’, pp. 19-45 and ‘Adaptation Theory and Adaptation Scholarship’, pp. 679-697. 3 Barry Keith Grant, ‘“Sensuous Elaboration”’, p. 20. 4 I am indebted to scholars such as Vivian Sobchack, Jennifer M. Barker, Laura U. Marks, and Tarja Laine. I will explicate the aesthetic experience of touch and texture—and its implication

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textural intersect with an adaptation’s innate textual depth? How do texts rub against one another, and, in doing so, what is its sensory appeal, and to what aesthetic purpose? This book takes these questions as its starting place. In doing so, I argue that any sense of frisson that emerges through these layers of contact not so much replaces philosophy (to recall Grant’s words) but, rather, ignites it. A brief example illuminates this idea, one drawn from the very form of adaptation criticized by Sontag and Grant: the science f iction f ilm adaptation. Consider Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) as an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Both novel and film follow a relatively similar plot: Rick Deckard (played in the film by Harrison Ford) is employed to search for and destroy (‘retire’) a technologically advanced group of androids or ‘replicants’. As Deckard gets further entrenched in his task, and as he becomes further entangled with the sophisticated replicant Rachael (played in the film by Sean Young), both novel and film become meditations on human nature and how memory and imagination, emotion and perception ‘make us’ human whether biologically determined or artificially manufactured. Although both novel and film are rich in significance, what interests me in particular is how Blade Runner, far from being impoverished as its nature as a screen adaptation, augments and inscribes the themes of Dick’s novel onto the surface of the film. That is, Blade Runner takes the quite literally ‘meaty’ existential philosophy of the novel and in turn fleshes it out through the film’s ‘meat’: its décor, its sound, its style. Striking about the film in particular is its play with surface detail, depth, and texture that continually solicits the eye. Take the moment in which Rachael takes the Voight-Kampff empathy test administered by Deckard. Lit with a noir sensibility that creates a stark contrast between light and shadow, Rachael’s face glows against the darkness behind her, her face an impassive mask that is further obfuscated by thick plumes of cigarette smoke that curl and lace in the air. Later, Deckard hunts down and ‘retires’ Zhora (Joanna Cassidy). As Deckard shoots her in the back, the camera cuts to a long shot as Zhora bursts through a plate-glass window. Filmed in slow motion, Zhora leaps and falls, her flapping translucent raincoat virtually indistinguishable from the shards of glass that tumble towards the camera. And towards the end of the film, Pris (Daryl Hannah) hides from Deckard in a derelict warehouse. Assuming the ‘disguise’ of a shop in the experience and analysis of screen adaptation—later in this introduction, as well as in Chapter Three.

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mannequin, Pris drapes herself with a sheer veil. Cutting to a tight close-up, the camera captures her face as it is bathed in golden light. Diffused by the veil, the golden light has a heavy quality, thick with dust and tension as Deckard closes in. It is particularly telling that Scott’s heavily textured mise en scène so frequently intersects with the depiction of the replicant, or what the film also refers to as ‘skinjobs’. Blade Runner’s replicants—‘more human than human’, according to their creator Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel)—act as a warning to not take things at face value, to not be tricked by a bewitching surface that disguises its dangerous truth.5 Much like the famous sequence in which Deckard uses a form of technological apparatus to zoom in on a photograph to reveal its secrets, Scott’s mise en scène compels us to look at the details. And if Blade Runner’s play with texture and light was not enough evidence of the film’s continual provocation to look, so too does its frequent reference to eyes, from the close-up of the iris that opens the film to the way that the replicant Roy (Rutger Hauer) tells Chew (James Hong) ‘if only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes’. By foregrounding an appeal to the spectator’s vision so overtly, Blade Runner asks us to recognize an innate artifice that supports its world of duplicity. Therefore, Blade Runner, as an adaptation, certainly does not ‘concentrate on the depiction of visual surfaces at the expense of contemplative depth’, as Grant might suggest, as its construction of surfaces is necessarily tied to its politics. But beyond its optical appeal, Blade Runner appeals to the spectator’s other senses to dynamize and thicken its source material. One striking element of the world in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is its pervasive and oppressive silence as Earth is described as depopulated and toxically radioactive. Characters often reflect on a silence that seems to radiate in the air like the poisonous atmosphere. John Isidore, a ‘chickenhead’, describes the silence like it ‘flashed from the woodwork and the walls […] It rose from the floor […] it oozed out […] It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it—the silence—meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes’.6 Re-imagined for an audio-visual medium, Blade Runner’s composer, Vangelis, translates this ‘deafening’ silence into a score that pervades the film with sonic fullness. 5 More could be said here about the patterns between the surface of/in the film, the artificiality of the replicant in general, and its gendered construction in particular. For similar arguments, see Aylish Wood, Technoscience in Contemporary American Film, and Catherine Constable, ‘Surfaces of Science Fiction’ pp. 281-301. 6 Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, p. 18.

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Atonal synth phrases drone and pulse, and although this might seem cold and mechanical, the score is punctuated with clashing percussions, tinkling chimes like electric rain, and a soaring refrain that seems to resonate in the spectator’s sternum. In doing so, Vangelis’s score imbues what could be a lifeless synth sound with palpable warmth, echoing the way that the film’s synthetic characters are nonetheless capable of emotional feeling. And indeed, beyond the way that it mimics the synaesthetic quality attributed to auditory experience in the novel, the way that I have just described how Vangelis’s score ‘resonates in the sternum’ testifies to the importance of touch to further ‘make sense’ of the film and further ground its philosophical weight. Film scholar Lesley Stern has evocatively reflected on this, analysing Pris’s movements as she suddenly shifts from stasis to incredible speed as she flips and spins in the air. As she contends, Pris’s incredible movement seems to be reciprocally felt in the spectator’s body: There is a lurching in the pit of your stomach. But something more happens when you witness the somersault—as the figure becomes again ordinary, returning to an upright position the momentum remains in your body as a charge, a whoosh, a sense of exhilaration—the effect persists, the fear and exhilaration, the frisson.7

Crucially, for Stern, such ‘frisson’ is not dismissed as an affective side-effect or pleasure of the cinematic experience, but rather, it is ‘an acting out of a philosophical precept […] an instantiation of the thoughtful body’ (p. 352). Rather than a Cartesian duality that places conscious experience solely in the mind (as Pris wryly remarks, ‘I think. Therefore I am’), Pris’s bodily movement is a hyberbolic illustration of how ‘an assertion that subjectivity, history, memory (manufactured or not) are lived through the body’ (p. 352). Of course, the extraordinary bodily experience and capabilities of the replicant nonetheless differ from the human, which is why Stern suggests that this sequence not so much describes or depicts differences in bodily capability as much as enacts them. Prompted by Pris’s extraordinary movement, that lurch in the stomach ‘insinuates a kinesthetic connection’ that on the one hand is exhilarating, but on the other dread-full, a moment that sharply emphasizes the embodied differences between human and artificial movement. In this moment of connection with Pris—quite literally a ‘skinjob’—spectators can concretely grasp the uncanny sensation the replicant’s bodily intelligence. In sum, although the novel’s title asks us 7

Lesley Stern, ‘I Think’, p. 352

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to consider the conscious experience of its robotic creatures, the film’s sensuous and imaginative grasp of us demands an embodied experience of the spectator. Thus, just like the ‘empathy boxes’ that characters plug themselves into to stave off affective and emotional isolation in the novel, Blade Runner sensuously and emotionally provokes us to share in the experience of characters—human and artificial alike—and, in doing so, grounds its philosophical significance in lived experience. This short case study thus raises many of the issues that ground this book. Film Phenomenology and Adaptation: Sensuous Elaboration takes its title from the way that the film adaptation—as a repetition (but not, to evoke the world of Blade Runner, a replication) of a previous source—is able to fill out the sensual details of a prior text. But the story does not end there. According to The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, ‘elaborate’ is drawn from the Latin root laborare, to labour, to work. This book therefore draws on the philosophy and research methodology offered by phenomenology to examine the work of the spectator’s senses in ‘making sense’ of screen adaptations. I argue that this approach is a necessary corrective to a critical myopia to the sensual experience of screen adaptations.

Fuzzy and Sticky: The Stigma of Subjective Impressionism in Adaptation Studies This phenomenological model of screen adaptation offers a vital rejoinder to the discipline that has not only ‘lost touch’ with the spectator’s sensual experience of adaptations but has also actively distanced itself from the senses through its critical approaches. For instance, although she titles her article ‘Materializing Adaptation Theory’, Simone Murray does not examine the material texture of screen adaptations, but instead analyses the adaptation industry itself as a coalescence of material forces including production contexts, distribution channels, and reception practices. Indeed, Murray steers adaptation studies away from evaluating the emergent patterns of aesthetic texture—a ‘questionable project’, as she puts it—and suggests rather that sociological approaches would be productive to reveal the political economy of adaptation.8 Although such an approach is certainly useful, emphasizing industry, circulation, and the broader cultural landscape side-lines an adaptation’s physical materiality as well as its physiological experience. This book, rather, follows Kyle Meikle’s intelligent development 8

Simone Murray, ‘Materializing Adaptation Theory’, pp. 11-15.

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of Murray’s work, in which he argues for a reassessment of the ‘material culture of the adaptive process’ through media archaeology.9 I emphsize the body’s materiality and what it brings to the process of adaptation. I suggest that before screen adaptations can be categorized in terms of their cultural function and meaning, they must be first be examined as they are meaningfully lived. Two critical roadblocks have deterred adaptation studies from thoroughly grasping the lived experience of adaptation. As Robert Stam notes, the discipline has been dogged by an ‘anti-corporeality’ sentiment in which the screen adaptation ‘offends through its inescapable materiality, its incarnated, fleshly, enacted characters, its real locales and palpable props, its carnality and visceral shocks to the nervous system’.10 Stam’s perspective is informed by a historically pervasive ‘iconophobia’ that contrasts with ‘logophilia’, a celebration of the written word. By this dichotomy, images (and the moving image in particular) are considered irrational in their bodily and sensual appeal, contrasting with literature’s cerebral and transcendent use of the imagination. Associated with this divide is the question of media specificity, the idea that certain forms of media are uniquely equipped with features that ‘determine the proper domain of effects of the art form in question’.11 Containing forms of art into their ‘proper domain’ can be traced at least to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 1766 treatise Laocoön: or, The Limits of Poetry and Painting in which he describes the capabilities of verbal and visual art. Per Lessing, poetry expresses the experience of time while the visuality of painting depicts space; but, importantly, those artworks that attempt to transcend the perceived ‘material limitations’ of their form are described by Lessing as instances in which ‘equitable and friendly neighbours’ intrude upon the other’s territory.12 Lessing’s metaphoric evocation of war was influentially developed for adaptation studies by George Bluestone, who describes literature and film as ‘overtly compatible, secretly hostile’ as the ‘percept of the visual image and the concept of the mental image lies the root difference between the two media’.13 Bluestone’s analysis established many of the categorical distinctions that ground the iconophobia/logophilia debate, such as the notion that only the novel can express interiority whereas on film, the ‘rendition of mental states—memory, dream, imagination—cannot be 9 10 11 12 13

Kyle Meikle, ‘Rematerializing Adaptation’, p. 174. Robert Stam, ‘Introduction’, p. 6. Noël Carroll, Theorizing, p. 34. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, ‘From Laocoön’, pp. 558-567. George Bluestone, Novels into Film, pp. 1-2.

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as adequately represented [however, film] can show us characters thinking, feeling, and speaking, but it cannot show us their thoughts and feelings. A film is not thought; it is perceived’ (pp. 47-48). Few adaptation scholars—particularly now that the discipline has moved from its traditional roots in English literature departments—would agree with such claims. But I would suggest that the lingering stigma of iconophobia has thwarted sustained interest in the sensual properties of an adaptation. So too has the stigma of fidelity blocked adaptation studies from exploring the sensual and embodied dimensions of screen adaptations. Fidelity criticism suggests that a given text possesses core or essential features that must be faithfully adapted for its perceived success. Therefore, as Stam observes, an adaptation being described as ‘unfaithful’ to its source ‘gives expression to the disappointment we feel when a film adaptation fails to capture what we see as the fundamental narrative, thematic, and aesthetic features of its literary source’.14 This ‘disappointment’ and sorrow, and other words used in the evaluation of adaptations such as ‘“infidelity”’ and “betrayal” […] translate our feeling, when we have loved a book, that an adaptation has not been worthy of that love’.15 These emotional responses that underpin fidelity criticism are dismissed for their critical impropriety—and further, that these responses are somehow embarrassing or shameful in their overt bodily presence—mirrors the Platonian distrust of the senses that characterized iconophobia. Subjective responses such as sensation and emotion are positioned against detached rationality and critical engagement. Focusing on the spectator’s expressed ‘love’ for the source of adaptation (and assumed ‘hate’ for, or ‘disappointment’ with, its adaptation), Shelley Cobb explains that for many critics ‘[love] is subjective, personal, and relational; criticism is analytical, public and institutional. Love is partial; criticism is objective. Love is sensation; criticism is intellect’.16 Positioning emotion against criticism in this manner leads the critic to compile an ongoing list of binary oppositions: subjective/objective, passivity/activity, affective/rational, and so on. Although I acknowledge that emotional evaluation should not be a critical endpoint in itself, adaptation studies has been too quick to dismiss the senses and emotional responses as if they were diametrically opposed to critical objectivity. What interests me here is therefore less the way that fidelity criticism continues to colour

14 Robert Stam, ‘Beyond Fidelity’, p. 54. 15 Robert Stam, ‘Introduction’, p. 14. 16 Shelley Cobb, ‘Adaptation, Fidelity, and Gendered Discourses’, p. 32.

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subjective evaluations of screen adaptations,17 but rather how this discourse has stimulated adaptation theory’s kneejerk response away from subjective responses wholesale. The perceived critical impropriety that accompanies subjectivism in adaptation studies led scholars to advance a rigorous (and resolutely objective) critical agenda that focused on a comparative narratology. The concurrent influence of Structuralism in film studies proved to be fruitful. With its emphasis on semiology and linguistics, a structuralist approach to film studies encouraged theorists to unpick ‘the cinema’s signifying procedures, its combinatory rules, in order to see to what extent these rules articulated diacritical systems of “natural language”’.18 Christian Metz, for instance, influentially developed a ‘grand syntagmatique’ that examined how the ‘grammar’ of film language articulated narrative through sequentially arranged shots. Although Metz cautions the critic against taking the comparison of the ‘syntagma’ of the filmic sequence with the linguistic sentence structure too far,19 adaptation scholars grappled with the mutual ‘narrative semiology’ of literature and film, and how its complexities—not only plot, but point of view, tense, and enunciation—could be transferred or adapted across media forms. Seymour Chatman, for instance, took a narratological approach to adaptation to analyse how description and point of view shifts between medium forms, but this is not a wholly satisfactory approach. Chatman, for instance, suggests that the novel’s descriptive passages create tableaux vivants that invite a mode of aesthetic contemplation, something denied by film’s ‘excessive […] “overspecification”’ of visual detail that resolutely marches on due to narrative pressure.20 So too does Chatman suggest (quite ironically, no less) that the novel offers greater flexibility in 17 The extent to which f idelity criticism has hindered the development of the adaptation studies discipline is contested. Brian McFarlane, for instance, argues that a ‘near-fixation’ with fidelity has ‘inhibited’ adaptation studies (p. 194), while Thomas Leitch suggests that ‘[despite] innumerable exceptions to the rule, adaptation theorists have persisted in treating fidelity to the source material as a norm from which unfaithful adaptations depart at their peril’ (Film Adaptation, p. 127). Kamilla Elliott, though, claims that the supposed stranglehold of fidelity criticism on adaptation studies is ‘myth’ rather than fact, a ‘unifying force’ for a sprawling discipline (‘Adaptation Theory’, p. 691). For Elliott, scholars cite the f idelity myth at best to justify the originality of their research or, at worst, out of sloppy scholarship. But as anyone who has taught an adaptation course or a film studies subject that includes an adaptation of a popular novel on the syllabus knows, primary responses are often subjective and emotional evaluations. 18 Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics, p. 33. 19 Christian Metz, ‘Some Points’, pp. 74-75. 20 Seymour Chatman, ‘What Novels Can Do’, p. 123.

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narrative voice and point of view. By Chatman’s account, the film’s narrator (which Chatman reduces to the function of the camera) is fixed in its position to record the narrative from a distance. Meanwhile however, the novel’s narrator is given unrestricted freedom to move between multiple perspectives, ranging from a detached omniscient point of view to a highly subjective vantage points that ‘enter solid bodies and tell what things are like inside’ (p. 133). Thus, in advocating ‘what films can do that novels can’t’, Chatman turns a blind eye to not only the way that cinematic spectacle can ‘freeze’ the narrative to invite the spectator’s aesthetic contemplation, but also to the dynamic way that films can narrate from multiple perspectives that range from a detached, omniscient perspective to those that are highly subjective. Indeed, the novel is hardly privileged in its ability to ‘enter solid bodies’. Films not only can align spectators with the sensual experience of their characters (through point of view shots, subjective sound, and voiceover), but can also reveal psychological states such as emotion, imagination, dreams, and memory. Inspired by Chatman, Brian McFarlane made it his task to propose a ‘more rigorous, objective [theory]’ adaptation of narrative, for it is ‘at the level of enunciation—the means by which narrative is displayed and organized—that most rigour is needed to offset the lure of mere subjectivism’.21 McFarlane is more sympathetic to the multi-track dimensions of the cinema, although he is quick to maintain some of the categorical distinctions that have plagued adaptation studies. For instance, he reinforces the values associated with the logophilia/iconophobia dualism in claiming that the novel is conceptual while the film ‘works directly, sensuously, perceptually’, as if the conceptual and the cognitive were absent from the film experience. Further, McFarlane privileges the film’s ability to adopt the novel’s ‘distributional functions’ of plot and narrative events, while devaluing ‘integrational functions’ such as characterization and atmosphere that must be adapted. Therefore, in his desire to remove the ‘fuzzy impressionism’ of adaptation theory (p. 29), McFarlane’s comparative narratology appears oblivious to the cinema’s dynamic and creative potential, preferring transfer and equivalence to adaptation proper and change. Beyond these structural approaches that characterize comparative narratological studies, Stam suggests that post-structuralism—particularly Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, and Gérard Genette’s work on intertextuality—offers the means of circumnavigating the problem of fidelity. As he puts it, the ‘concept of intertextual dialogism suggests that every text 21 Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film, p. 195, p. 202.

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forms an intersection of textual surfaces. All texts are tissues of anonymous formulae […] conscious and unconscious quotations, and conflations and inversions of other texts’.22 Rather than accepting adaptation as a one-way transfer between original and derivative, looking at adaptation through the lens of intertextuality helps reconceive adaptation as a dynamic process of transformation and exchange. The post-structuralist intertextual approach heavily informed Linda Hutcheon’s influential A Theory of Adaptation, explicitly drawing on Genette’s literary theory to describe adaptations as ‘“palimpsestuous” […] haunted at all times by their adapted texts’.23 Hutcheon’s work on the adaptation-as-palimpsest is provocative as it further unshackles adaptation from being perceived as a mere linear process of transfer. Rather, palimpsests is a layering process, an accrual of citations— some thicker than others—to earlier work that may or may not be apparent to the beholder. What I find especially appealing in Hutcheon’s description of an adaptation’s mosaic ‘palimpsestuousness’ is that in its analysis of textual identity it usefully gestures towards a mode of textural appreciation. Although he aligns with Hutcheon’s position, Dudley Andrew points out that an adaptation is a palimpsest, albeit a ‘peculiar one [as] the surface layer engages, rather than replaces, a previous inscription’.24 And for Christine Geraghty, screen adaptation should be approached ‘in terms of layering and transparencies’ that enables an analysis of ‘layers of different thickness and significance’ whereas ‘a thin gauzy layer allows for much to be seen through it, while a more opaque sheet attempts to substitute its own presence for the layers that lie behind’.25 Andrew and Geraghty’s perspectives here are useful as they expand adaptation from the mere transfer of narrative to foreground how film aesthetics—its mise en scène, cinematography, sound, and editing—actively enrich the adaptation. Indeed, Andrew explicitly extends the metaphor as a ‘palimpsestuous’ layering of texts to consider the film’s celluloid itself as a layer in the construction of an adaptation. His analytic model is therefore decidedly textural as he explores how these various ‘layers’ align and inflect one another. As he puts it, ‘[when] the layers appear nearly congruent—the film filling in with vibrant colors the fading skeletal lines of the original—the effect and the value of the adaptation are greatly multiplied’.26 22 23 24 25 26

Robert Stam, ‘Beyond Fidelity’, p. 64. Linda Hutcheon, Theory of Adaptation, p. 6. Dudley Andrew, ‘Adapting Cinema’, p. 191. Christine Geraghty, Now a Major Motion Picture, p. 11, p. 195. Dudley Andrew, Adapting Cinema’, p. 191.

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But I take issue with Andrew’s assertation here. Although he usefully gestures towards the importance of analysing the design of an adaptation and its texture, Andrew seems to quickly slip back into an evaluative model that evokes fidelity criticism. He describes the appropriate analytical methodology as first an ‘[investigation] into its congruence with the shape of its source […] and next into the appropriateness of its “feel” (the texture of detail, point of view, tone)’ (p.193). But why should value be only given to those adaptations that are ‘nearly congruent’ with their structuring texts? And further, Andrew’s suggestion of what is ‘appropriate’ in capturing and expressing the ‘texture’ of an adaptation reinforces the morally-loaded discourse that plagues fidelity theory. Therefore, although these approaches make inroads into a more dynamic analysis of screen adaptation, they are not wholly satisfying as they skirt around the film’s sensual dimensions and how they visually, audibly, tangibly, and viscerally entangle the spectator. Such entanglement might be congruent with the ‘skeletal lines’ of the original, or the adaptation might express ‘vibrant color’ and texture in wildly creative ways. But either way, in screen adaptation the ‘skeletal lines’ of the source material are always brought to life through the spectator’s flesh. As Stam has noted, film’s inherent sensuality impacts on ‘our stomach, heart, and skin’.27 Novels certainly have the power to viscerally affect their readers. Imagine the lengthy descriptions of sexual violence, torture, and death that pepper Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho. When Ellis’s narrator—Patrick Bateman (played by Christian Bale in Mary Harron’s 2002 adaptation)—describes how he feeds a rat into a woman’s vagina,28 it is hard to not involuntarily shudder and gag at the imagery conjured through Ellis’s graphic words. However, the audio-visual nature of screen media is certainly privileged in its ability to sensuously affect the spectator. The projected image (particularly if viewed in the cinema) dazzles the eye with light and colour while sound—whether a whispered caress or a piercing blast—sonorously envelops the spectator. Indeed, describing sound as a ‘caress’ or ‘piercing’ testifies to the film experience’s synaesthetic and kinetic appeal. Not only audio-visual, films also invite a tactile response whether it be through indistinct ‘haptic imagery’ that appeals to the skin, or camera movement that rushes and jolts through space in a way that ranges from the exuberant to the dizzying. So too do the inner rhythms of the viscera—connected to smell and taste—physically and emotionally affect 27 Robert Stam, ‘Introduction’, p. 6. 28 Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho, p. 315.

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the spectator, while recent neuro-cinematic research reveals the way that mirror neurons make meaning below the threshold of consciousness in what can be thought of as the ‘embodied imagination’.29 Screen adaptations enrich their sources by crafting this brute sensual data into more specific codes, such as the ability to bring characters to life through screen performance, an ‘uncanny amalgam of photogenie, body movement, acting style, and grain of the voice, all amplified and moulded by lighting, mise-en-scène, and music’.30 But even before such organization, the cacophony of sensual information is—quite literally—vital to the experience and interpretation of screen adaptation. In sum, as Stam points out, ‘the cinema has not lesser but rather greater resources for expression than the novel’ as it ‘thickens, takes on flesh’ and becomes undeniably tangible.31 But while Stam’s points are convincing, he does not advance a rigorous methodological framework with which to examine this phenomenon. This book proposes such a methodology. In doing so, I challenge a lingering problem of the discipline that—in the hopes of maintaining critical distance—has lost sight of adaptations as works of art. Sarah Cardwell, in her thorough critique of the discipline’s limitations, argues that adaptations ‘are rarely studied for themselves—rarely is interpretation valued as much as theorizing; broader theoretical issues take precedence over local aesthetic concerns’.32 Cardwell uses British prestige television adaptations to more concretely evaluate and appreciate the aesthetics of adaptation. As she correctly points out, such an aesthetics should not focus only on the transfer of narrative, ‘but also [on] the visual pleasure that they provide—their texture, sensuality, and form’.33 But to do so necessitates aspects of a comparative analysis, the kind of criticism that has been labelled—as dismissed—as fidelity criticism. This position is shared by philosopher Paisley Livingston who argues that comparative analyses reveal the aesthetic achievements of adaptation. As he puts it, an ‘appreciator who is oblivious to the source and can draw no […] comparison manifests a blind spot pertaining to artistically essential features of the adaptation’, and that a comparative analysis rather allows the appreciator to evaluate the similarities and changes from an adaptation’s source material, and how they contribute to 29 For research into the role mirror neurons play in meaning-making in the cinema, see Vittorio Gallese’s article ‘Embodied Simulation’, pp. 23-48, and Arthur P. Shimamura’s edited collection Psychocinematics. 30 Robert Stam, ‘Beyond Fidelity’, p. 60. 31 Robert Stam, ‘Introduction’, p. 20, p. 27. 32 Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation, p. 69. 33 Sarah Cardwell, ‘Adaptation Studies’, p. 51.

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its aesthetic achievement (or failing).34 Throughout this book, then, I have avoided this ‘blind spot’ by keeping the formal texture of adaptations in clear sight. But my interest is not in terms of similarities or differences in terms of characterization or plot (the form that most comparative analyses, particularly in the popular press or those that emerge in everyday conversation). Rather, my interest is in the form and function of the senses and how other structures of embodied experience are solicited in screen adaptation. For instance, in Chapter One I examine how F. W. Murnau’s ‘unofficial’ adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Nosferatu (1922), articulates the unreliability of vision that is coded into the novel, while Chapter Three analyses how Jane Campion’s adaptation of In the Cut (2002) translates Susanna Moore’s first-person voice through the spectator’s skin. Therefore, this book is not only concerned in how screen adaptations accurately render or translate a novel’s world as it is described, but also how the appeal to the spectator’s senses transform and revitalize the novel’s sources. In doing so, this book also answers Livingston’s important call for adaptation scholars to attend to those ‘artistic problems confronted by filmmakers undertaking an adaptation, including artistic problems that are and are not shared by the creators of literary sources’ (p. 123). For instance, Chapter Two analyses the sonic design of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013). This film is adapted from the novel by Michel Faber, yet very little of Faber’s plot or characterization of the alien creature is maintained. However, attending to the film’s score reveals how Glazer transforms the alien Isserley’s (unnamed in the film, played by Scarlett Johansson) alienation so that it is aurally grasped by the spectator. Therefore, not only does this book examine how sensual experience is translated and transformed from page to screen, but also how the spectator’s sensual experience acts as a form of translation and transformation that ‘fleshes out’ an adaptation’s source material. Far from the fears that attending to the lived experience of adaptation would lead to ‘fuzzy impressionism’, to recall McFarlane’s words, film-phenomenology offers a rigorous philosophy and methodology with which to examine the experience of film adaptations. In doing so, I argue that attending to screen media’s synaesthetic and kinetic possibilities not only further develops an ‘aesthetic of adaptation’, but also brings a renewed awareness both to the materiality of film and the materiality of the body.

34 Paisley Livingston, ‘On the Appreciation’, pp. 106-110.

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Beyond ‘Intertextual Dialogism’: Phenomenology, Film, and a ‘Fleshly Dialogue’ My embodied model of adaptation extends the studies of Hutcheon and Kamilla Elliott who both approach the embodied experience of adaptation from quite different perspectives. Hutcheon’s approach tends to how understanding adaptation as both a product and a process requires attention to the different ‘modes of engagement’ offered in their multiplicity: telling, showing, and participation. Literature is expressed in the ‘telling’ mode within ‘the realm of the imagination […] unconstrained by the limits of the visual or aural’.35 Hutcheon explains that the experience of being ‘shown’ a screen adaptation does not mean that the spectator is passive: besides being a sensual event, film spectators are also responsive through their imagination, cognitive processing, and patterns of emotional engagement. However, Hutcheon undoes her careful qualifications about the spectator’s agency and activity when she argues that novels and plays nonetheless stimulate the imagination in a way that films cannot. Obviously, reading a novel involves different kinds of imaginative activity, involving differing degrees of direction, attention, and duration. But do film and television adaptations, in the showing mode, ‘[move] from the imagination to the realm of direct perception’ as Hutcheon claims (p. 23)? I find this too dismissive of the kinds of imaginative involvements that occur during the film experience in general and the adaptation experience in particular. This is the task of Chapter Four, in which I ask adaptation studies to review how different forms of imaginative engagement—such as the ‘bodily imagination’—might enrich the adaptation experience. Having said that, Hutcheon does address the importance of perception, saying that a film’s address to the senses powerfully enriches its storytelling, such as the physical performance of the actor,36 or how sound may be emotionally expressive and affective. These are valid points, and I will explore many of these possibilities throughout the chapters of this book. However, Hutcheon’s claim that the showing

35 Linda Hutcheon, Theory of Adaptation, p. 23. 36 The presence and performance of the actor’s body is clearly felt in adaptations that are performed on the stage. Indeed, all theatrical productions can be thought of adaptations—either of pre-existing work or of the play’s script itself—and terrific work in adaptation studies has grasped with the physical and temporal demands that are brought by the actor’s fleshy liveness. See for instance: Katja Krebs, ‘Ghosts We Have Seen Before’, pp. 581-590; Frances Babbage, Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre, pp. 9-44; Kyle Meikle, Adaptations in the Franchise Era, pp. 133-158.

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mode overall has difficulty adapting novels as ‘the camera limits what we can see’ is a position that I do not share.37 Hutcheon reserves the hermeneutic value of physical and kinetic experience in adaptation for videogame and virtual reality adaptations— ‘kinesthetic provocations’, as she calls them—that invite their user to palpably feel incorporated within a storyworld. Even more immersive is the theme park, participatory spaces ‘where our own bodies are made to feel as if they are entering an adapted heterocosm’ (p. 51). The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios in Orlando recreates the spaces of J. K. Rowling’s series of novels and extends their fans’ contact with storylines and characters. This is clear in attractions like Escape from Gringotts, a dark ride that not only speeds its passengers along its tracks but also includes 3D technology, screen performances from the stars of the film adaptations, and pyrotechnics. Therefore, the ride not only offers a narrative but also sensorial extension of the Harry Potter universe as our ‘tour’ of Gringott’s vault is interrupted by Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) and Bellatrix (Helena Bonham Carter). But screen adaptations too not only solicit the eyes and ears but can provoke the body’s tactile sensitivity. Although it is not experienced in quite the same way as Escape from Gringotts, the dynamic cinematography of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (David Yates, 2011) stimulates a kinetic thrill as Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) plummets into the bank’s depths on his own rollercoaster, the camera adopting his point of view as his rusty carriage shakes and rattles around its looping track. I contend that the ‘kinesthetic provocations’ to the body are not unique to the videogame or rollercoaster,38 as cinema spectators experience an intense immersion in the screen world as well, one that is at times felt in the bones and gut, or as a disorientating rush that catches in the chest. Therefore, although the way that she frames her analysis through different modes of engagement certainly offers insight into the dynamics and experience of adaptation, Hutcheon gives an unsatisfactory account of the film experience. I suggest this is because she draws her analysis of the spectator’s film experience from psychoanalytic theory that suggests a relationship between spectator and screen world based on illusion, identification, fantasy, and the unconscious. For instance, she refers to Metz’s claims regarding the spectator’s so-called voyeuristic relationship as they sit in the dark and stare at a glowing screen like ‘spectator-fish, taking in everything

37 Linda Hutcheon, Theory of Adaptation, p. 43. 38 See Kyle Meikle, Adaptations in the Franchise Era, pp. 133-158.

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with their eyes, nothing with their bodies’.39 But as I discuss below—and as I reveal through the case studies studied in this book—Metz’s account of a distanced and disembodied spectator does not accurately capture the fullness of the cinematic experience, and has been refuted by more recent directions in film studies that emphasize spectators’ cognitive and phenomenological responses. Elliott attends more carefully to the dynamic and synaesthetic dimensions of screen adaptation in her meticulous study Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. In order to navigate around the trap of media specificity, Elliott heavily leans on the analogy of form and content being akin to body and spirit to devise a series of models to account for the way that adaptations split form and content. Although some of her concepts are more colourful than helpful—such as the ‘ventriloquist’ and ‘de(re)composing’ concepts of adaptation—I will focus on her ‘incarnational concept’ that offers the most for an embodied approach to screen adaptation. This concept references Christian doctrine to suggest that screen adaptation is akin to ‘the word made flesh’. As she puts it, the written word in novels is only able to suggest perceptual experiences—vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell—that are incarnated and sensually fulfilled by its adaptation to the screen. As the cinema is a phenomenological art form par excellence as it directly appeals to the senses, it brings synaesthetic richness to adaptation, ‘bringing to life’ its source material. The problem with Elliott’s approach, however, is that in emphasizing the spectator’s bodily experience she raises the ghosts of the iconophobia/iconophilia debate: the very thing she tries to avoid. She references the idea that ‘[the] word made flesh is also the word brought down to the level of flesh’ and that adaptation appears as a sacrilegious ‘carnalization, a sordid morally reprehensible corruption of spiritual and transcendental signification’.40 Further, although she draws attention to the film adaptation’s ability to sensually render its source material, she does not propose a working model to explore the dynamics of the embodied and incarnated fulfillment of the novel by both spectator and screen, admitting that further study is necessary to ‘probe the philosophical and semiotic issues in the depth and detail they warrant’ (p. 183). Building on this important scholarship, this book employs phenomenology to do some of this necessary philosophical and semiotic probing to enrich the analysis of screen adaptation. Phenomenology is a philosophy and research procedure that describes and reflects on experience as it is meaningfully 39 Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis, p. 96. 40 Kamilla Elliott, Rethinking, pp. 166-167.

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lived. Transcendental phenomenology—as advanced by Edmund Husserl— sought to examine the ‘essences’ of experience, abstracting them into a universalized ‘transcendental ego’. 41 Rather, existential phenomenology, radically developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is grounded in the body’s lived experience. As Merleau-Ponty attests, ‘[my] body is the fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my “comprehension”’. 42 Although some film-phenomenologists follow Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, 43 Vivian Sobchack’s semiotic phenomenology of film experience—informed by Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of perception—has been profoundly influential, and it is this approach I follow. Thus, rather than Elliott’s ‘incarnational concept’ of ‘transcendental signifiers’, this book attends to the significance of lived experience in the carnal comprehension of screen adaptation. Sobchack’s phenomenology of film experience radically counters psychoanalysis’s claim of a ‘silent, motionless […] vacant spectator’. 44 Instead, film phenomenology describes the spectator as being sensually filled up by their perceptive experience in a manner that grounds all cinematic intelligibility. As Richard McCleary writes, existential phenomenology demands that to understand the world ‘we must first describe the life-world we perceive and then reflexively determine the essential meaning-structures of the self in its relation to itself, to other persons, and to the world’.45 Therefore, a phenomenology of film experience entails not only a description of objective phenomena, but also necessitates reflection on how such phenomena are subjectively lived and made meaningful. While etiquette in the cinema still calls for the ‘silent, motionless spectator’ as posed by psychoanalytic theory,46 a phenomenological analysis reveals how the spectator nonetheless

41 Edmund Husserl, Paris Lectures, pp. 29-35. 42 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, p. 273. 43 For instance, see Alan Casebier’s Film and Phenomenology: Toward a Realist Theory of Cinematic Representation, and Harald Stadler’s ‘Film as Experience: Phenomenological Concepts in Cinema and Television Studies’. See Sobchack for an extended critique of transcendental phenomenology (Address of the Eye, pp. 32-38). 44 Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis, p. 96. 45 Richard McCleary, ‘Preface’, p. xiv. 46 Although the theatrical experience of a f ilm is rarely completely silent, and nor is the spectator ever completely motionless. Indeed, the physically and audibly reactive spectator forms an important role in some contexts. Julian Hanich, for instance, explores the pleasurable dimensions of the cinema as a communal experience (Cinematic Emotions, pp. 246-248). Much of the pleasure of horror and cult films is how they are experienced as a communal event with emotions—disgust, fear, tension, and relief—that ripple through the crowd like waves.

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‘speaks back’ and is profoundly moved by their perceptive experience in a way that is first expressed through the fleshy contours of the lived-body. The ‘lived-body’ refers to how conscious experience of the world is always existentially embodied in the flesh, and is enacted through an existential structure of ‘intentionality’ that correlates acts of consciousness with its object. The lived-body is both a subject in the world and an object for the world: that is, the lived-body subjectively perceives the world, and is also able to objectively express and signify for others. Therefore, the core capacity for the intrasubjective commutation of perceptive and expressive modalities forms the intersubjective ‘primacy of communication’.47 As she puts it, ‘long before we constrain “wild meaning” in discrete symbolic systems’, such as speech, ‘we are immersed in language as an existential system. In the very movement of existence, in the very activity of perception and its bodily expression, we inaugurate language and communication’ (p. 12). Thus, as Sobchack summarizes, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy offers a sustained investigation into ‘the sensuous contours of language, with meaning and its signification born not abstractly but concretely from the surface contact, the fleshly dialogue, of human beings and the world together making sense sensible’ (p. 3). Sobchack parallels the reversibility of perception and its expression through language, gesture, and movement with the perceptive and expressive capacity of the ‘film’s body’. Although materially different from the human body, the film’s body is similarly embodied in its world, and similarly demonstrates an intentionality that is constituted by its own intrasubjective commutation of perception and expression that is enacted through its own technologically constructed ‘organs’ of camera lens, projector, and screen. As she explains, ‘the film experience is a system of communication based on bodily perception as a vehicle of conscious expression. It entails the visible, audible, kinetic aspects of sensible experience to make sense visibly, audibly, and haptically’ (p. 9). Therefore, before the film experience is abstracted into various theoretical paradigms or deconstructed into ‘readings’, films employ the modes and structure of embodied experience to quite literally ‘make sense’. In doing so the film is not reduced to an object that is beheld by a disembodied spectator. Rather, through its own intentional agency, the film invites the spectator to be held close in a shared and intersubjective process of sense-making. Sobchack terms this an ‘embodiment relation’ as the film’s body incorporates and extends the intentional interest of filmmaker, film, and spectator 47 Vivian Sobchack, Address of the Eye, p. 41.

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(p. 181). The technology offers a clear form of audio-visual extension into the screen world, such as the way that the close-up brings visual details into sharp relief, or an acoustic close-up that reveals sound in its full materiality, as I explore in Chapter Two. But as the term ‘embodiment relation’ reveals, the cinema not only offers a form of audio-visual extension but also extends the spectator’s tactile and proprioceptive sense into the screen world. In Chapter Three, for instance, I argue that the film’s body offers what I describe as a ‘tactile orientation’ in relation to screen characters. This is significant for screen adaptation, as rather than considering the way that narratives are ‘focalized’ around particular characters (a term that seems to privilege optical ‘point of view’), ‘tactile orientation’ offers an account of how spectators can be aligned with a character’s sense of touch and kinesthetic behaviour in their world. But Sobchack’s phenomenology of f ilm experience explicitly maintains that there is no universal experience of a given phenomenological structure. Although the f ilm’s body can transparently incorporate the spectator through a realistic and familiar expression of perception, it can also transform it into the unfamiliar and strange. So too the film’s body might gesture its intentional choice-making activity in a way that might align with, or wildly differ from, our own interest. As an expression of perception, then, a film not only shows us what is seen, but also more fundamentally how vision is always embodied and ‘framed’ by a particular perspective. Here phenomenology reveals itself not only as a philosophy of existential experience, but also a research procedure that questions and clarif ies the habituated ‘givenness’ of perception. Merleau-Ponty refers to this as the ‘natural attitude’ of phenomena, and that ‘in order to see the world and grasp it […] we must break with our familiar acceptance of it’. 48 To do so, a systematic process of ‘reduction’ interrogates phenomenological experience. The phenomenological reduction begins with the description of phenomena as they are given, setting aside or ‘bracketing’ any presuppositions that might be associated with them. Then, horizontalization unpicks any ‘hierarchies of significance’ that might structure the phenomena, which are then thematized through imaginative experiments that determine its invariant structural features. 49 Then, after performing this series of reductions and thought experiments, the phenomenological method calls for interpretation, revealing the significance of the phenomena to its lived experience. 48 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. xv. 49 Vivian Sobchack, ‘Phenomenology’, 436.

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Film-phenomenology has been criticized for what is perceived as a tendency for introspective solipsism, for being overly personal and impressionistic. Summarizing the criticism against film-phenomenology, Julian Hanich explains that using ‘a method that draws on first-person descriptions at this historical point when some film scholars start to embrace the methods of the natural sciences might be considered a provocation, a methodological ignorance, or an outright stupidity’.50 So too has some phenomenological film criticism been dismissed for its apparent universalizing tendencies, as if the experience of one spectator is type-identical to that of another. Christian Ferencz-Flatz and Hanich describe this as the ‘problem of incompleteness’ that plagues phenomenological analyses, as they appear flawed as the critic’s response cannot possibly speak for all possible experiences.51 This is traced back to the original phenomenological philosophers, in that while the lived-body ‘has been explicitly articulated as “every body” and “any body” […] it has implicitly assumed a male, heterosexual, and white body’,52 causing some theorists to suggest that phenomenological film criticism similarly marginalizes the experience of female, queer, and rationalized bodies. This criticism is perhaps ironic, considering Sobchack’s polemic Address of the Eye sought to revitalize contemporary film theory from its psychoanalytic abstraction, and to carefully attend to embodied experience that includes embodied difference. Building on Merleau-Ponty’s claim that the ‘most important lesson’ of the phenomenological reduction is the ‘impossibility of a complete reduction’,53 Sobchack explains that phenomena have ‘provisional forms and structures’ so that while the phenomenological reduction ‘may begin with a particular experience, its aim is to describe and explicate the general or possible structures and meanings that inform the experience and make it potentially resonant and inhabitable for others’.54 For Sobchack, the ‘proof’ of a phenomenological analysis does not rest with whether the reader has shared the experience in a type-identical way, but, rather, ‘whether or not the description is resonant and the experience’s structure [is] sufficiently comprehensible to a reader who might “possibly” inhabit it (even if in a differently inflected or valued way)’ (p. 5). In order to invite the reader to share in or ‘inhabit’ a phenomenological description, the language used by the critic must be both precise—hence 50 51 52 53 54

Julian Hanich, Cinematic Emotions, p. 41. Julian Hanich and Christian Ferencz-Flatz, ‘What is Film Phenomenology?’, p. 35. Vivian Sobchack, Address of the Eye, p. 148. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. xv. Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, p. 5.

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my careful attention to the exact words used by others in this section and throughout this book as well as detailed description of the phenomenological properties of adaptation—and evocative. Metaphoric language is therefore essential to a phenomenological analysis for as Hanich points out, a phenomenological analysis describes ‘often reaches beyond where words can go’ to describe perceptive, imaginative, and emotional experience, however, ‘metaphors help us to come closest to an adequate description of our lived-body experience for which we would otherwise have no words’.55 As Paul Ricoeur wonderfully explains, metaphors infuse feeling ‘into the heart of the situation’, extending ‘the power of double meaning from the cognitive realm to the affective’.56 Therefore, throughout the phenomenological descriptions and analysis that structure this book, I use evocative and metaphorical language in the hopes that the reader may be invited to share in type-similar, or type-possible, if not type-identical experience. Film phenomenology insists that ‘we dwell on the ground of experience before moving on to more abstract or theoretical concerns, that we experience and reflect on our own sight before we […] cite others’.57 If performing a phenomenological reduction allows the critic to bracket prior assumptions about phenomena under investigation, a phenomenology of film adaptation sets aside any previous theoretical paradigms about adaptation that dictate particular ‘readings’, such as the desire for fidelity, structural approaches to narrative, and so on. Indeed, the fact that screen adaptations are drawn from previous sources assists a phenomenological analysis as the film’s source material offers one such ‘imaginative variation’ required to fully grasp the ‘shape’ of phenomena. Then, by using metaphoric language, throughout this book I hope to solicit the sensory and imaginative capabilities of the reader in order to invite them to inhabit my case studies. Or, at least—to follow Hanich’s qualification—that they are ‘recognizable enough to evoke embodied understanding’.58 It is from this experiential base from which I build my phenomenological model of adaptation. Earlier I drew attention to how the ‘concept of intertextual dialogism suggests that every text forms an intersection of textual surfaces. All texts are tissues of anonymous formulae, variations on those formulae, conscious and unconscious quotations, and conflations and inversions of other texts’.59 55 56 57 58 59

Julian Hanich, Cinematic Emotions, p. 43. Paul Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, p. 224. Vivian Sobchack, ‘Fleshing Out’, p. 194. Julian Hanich, Cinematic Emotions, p. 45. Robert Stam, ‘Beyond Fidelity’, p. 64.

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But rather than considering the ‘anonymous formulae’ that comprise an adaptation’s ‘intertextual surface’, a phenomenology of screen adaptation insists on intersubjectivity and the very personal lived-body as ‘meaning and its signification [is] born not abstractly but concretely from the surface contact, the fleshly dialogue’ between body and world, spectator and screen.

Corpus Phenomenology is at times a theoretically challenging philosophy, but one of its most attractive aspects is how it directs attention onto the ‘things themselves’,60 and Sobchack is correct when she explains that the best way of understanding phenomenology is to do phenomenology.61 Therefore, this book’s phenomenological model of screen adaptation will be conceptualized and illuminated through the close analysis of a range of case studies. I largely avoid drawing on adaptations of classical and canonical literature for these analyses. Although a phenomenological approach to such films would raise critical insight into the nature of their adaptation, such works often come with a deep sense of familiarity, or a preconceived sense of the author’s ‘vision’, that makes it more challenging to bracket ideas and beliefs of what the adaptation should be rather than what the adaptation is. By grounding my analysis in a range of case studies from popular genres—such as horror, science fiction, and noir—I jettison this baggage while opening the field to more diverse and (to my mind) more interesting choices. Indeed, many of these adaptations have yet to be discussed within the discipline of adaptation studies, while others are what Catherine Grant refers to as ‘free adaptations’, those adaptations that resist conventionality and instead trade in their difference and ‘manifest innovation and ingenuity with regard to interpreting […] their “sources”’.62 Using ‘free adaptations’ as case studies extends the field beyond questions of narrative transfer: indeed, the central question of this book is not what has been translated from page to screen but how? This book argues that the synaesthetic richness of perception and the embodied structures of imagination and memory offer radical insight into the dynamics of adaptation. Each chapter, therefore, examines the relationship of a particular mode of subjective access to an adaptation: 60 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. ix. 61 Vivian Sobchack, ‘Fleshing Out’, p. 194. 62 Catherine Grant, ‘Recognizing’, p. 58.

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vision, hearing, touch, imagination, and memory. In structuring this book in such a manner, I do not suggest that one mode of access is more valued than another in a particular experience of adaptation, or that other modes of access are absent from the experience in a given case study. This is particularly important to remember when thinking through the activity of the embodied imagination and memory—the subjects of Chapter Four and Five respectively—as perception and imagination are inherently intertwined in conscious experience. However, revealed through a series of phenomenological analyses, each chapter proposes a range of techniques that screen adaptations employ to solicit, provoke, or evoke a specific mode of experience that enhances the spectator’s understanding and embodied appreciation of an adaptation. Chapter One, for instance, banishes the ghosts of iconophobia to argue that the visible textures of screen adaptations have been subjected to a critical oversight. To illustrate my claim, I primarily draw on two adaptations of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula: Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992). Dracula was written at a time of great technological innovation (a period that notably included the invention of the cinema) that transformed perception. The reliability of vision is therefore a consistent theme in Stoker’s novel, which I argue is thickened by these two adaptations. The developing language of special effects is clearly seen in Nosferatu that weaves trick effects throughout what is often a naturalistic mise en scène to unsettle and disturb vision. Released seventy years later, Coppola’s Dracula harks back to the aesthetics of early cinema to relish the playful tricks to the eye. This self-reflexivity, along with its warped perspectives, lurid colour, and subversion of classical Hollywood conventions perforate the frame and attack the eye. It is my contention that these techniques—exemplified by these adaptations but extendable to many others—fundamentally returns awareness to what Linda Williams terms the ‘carnal density of vision’.63 Chapter Two examines the function and value that screen sound brings to adaptation. In doing so, I extend critical approaches to sound and adaptation that largely attend to the introduction of dialogue in the synchronized sound period. Rather, in this chapter, I emphasize the textural qualities of voice and music. Actors do not only embody characters through their costume and physical performance but also through their vocal performance. As Lesley Chow puts it, ‘the voice can be our way into a film, becoming

63 Linda Williams, ‘Corporealized Observers’, p. 36.

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inseparable from its overall texture’.64 Music too lends texture, at times smoothing the narrative’s flow, revealed in my analysis of how the score of The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002) bridges the film’s multi-strand narrative structure, while its repetitive orchestration also expresses the depression felt by the film’s characters. But just as Chapter One discusses visual effects that seem to perforate the frame and grab hold of the spectator, the sonic texture of film music and the voice can be obtrusive, unsettling, and estranging. To demonstrate this, I examine how The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013), as adaptations, creatively use textural sound effects, vocal performance, and scoring to thicken their source material and—in doing so—ensnare spectators into the horrible machinations of their monstrous protagonists. Speaking of how music and voice has a ‘texture’—something that is not only apprehended through the ear, but also felt on the skin, teeth, and viscerally in the guts—reveals how the cinema is not only an audio-visual medium but also synaesthetically appeals to touch. In Chapter Three, I analyse cinema’s ability to provoke tactile responses in spectators by following film phenomenologists such as Sobchack, Barker, and Laura Marks, and the influence of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical suggestion of ‘flesh’. Through employing haptic imagery—indistinct and textured visuals that invites an eye ‘more inclined to graze than to gaze’65—coloured lighting, kinetic movement, and sound, cinema appeals to the skin, proprioceptive awareness, and the viscera. Primarily using Jane Campion’s adaptation of In the Cut (2003) as a case study, I argue that these tactile responses hold unique possibilities for screen adaptation by inviting what I term a ‘tactile orientation’ with screen characters. In doing so, this chapter importantly expands critical approaches to narrative ‘focalization’ to include haptic experiences, marshalling the critical value of passion and touch. How spectators become orientated around the tactile perspective of characters demonstrates the synaesthetic imagination at work. In Chapter Four, I provide a more comprehensive account of the function of the embodied imagination in the experience of adaptation. Rather than separating imagination from perception, I follow the work of Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei who argues that ‘imagination relies upon the embodied basis of thinking, grounded both in the brain and its connections throughout the body and in interaction with the world’.66 Rather than cognitive accounts that posit 64 Lesley Chow, ‘The Actor’s Voice’, p. 33. 65 Laura U. Marks, Skin of the Film, p. 162. 66 Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, Life of Imagination, p. 27.

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imagination as a purely cognitive process of simulation and judgement, thinking through—or better yet, feeling through—the embodied imagination puts the critic in contact with a character’s thoughts and emotions to prompt embodied understanding. I illustrate these claims with an analysis of Mood Indigo (2013), Michel Gondry’s imaginative adaptation of Boris Vian’s absurdist novel. Although the film’s dazzling mise en scène and eyepopping special effects overtly solicit the spectator’s perception, I argue that this does not negate the embodied imagination. Rather, I suggest that the film—evoking the neurological basis of the embodied imagination—crafts a ‘multidimensional, “we-centric” shared space’67 that allows us to feel the palpable weight of grief. As I have already pointed out in this introduction, adaptation has been conceived as a textual layering of sources in a manner that allows the appreciator to see (and feel) the traces of the past. This process parallels how memory too is constructed by the layering of the traces of subjective experience that connect us with the past. In recognition of the mutual ‘palimpsestuous’ nature of both adaptation and memory, Chapter Five posits adaptation as a form of memory work. In this chapter, I follow the work of philosophers of memory—such as Edward Casey and Paul Ricoeur—who suggest that memory has a ‘thickness’ that is weighted with significance. Memory is not only a subjective phenomenon, but also an intersubjective experience, and novels, films, and adaptations form part of this rich tapestry of collective memory. Thinking through adaptation as a form of memory work draws attention to not only what stories are ‘remembered’, but also how and why. I track several incarnations of Lili Elbe—the first woman to receive gender-confirming surgery—from her memoir, to novelization, to Tom Hooper’s prestige biopic The Danish Girl (2015). I argue that although the process of adaptation valuably draws attention to Lili and the continued struggle for the acceptance of transgendered individuals, her experience is nonetheless co-opted and reshaped for other uses. Thinking through the ‘use’ of memory, then, I turn to Todd Haynes’s Poison (1991), a mosaic of references to the novels of Jean Genet and cinema history. In doing so, I argue that adaptations can be critical of their sources and memory itself. Poison adapts Genet’s formal and narrative play, and shares a resistance to mainstream conventions (both social and aesthetic) that opens a space for the articulation of marginalized identities that helps reshape cultural memory. Adaptation’s capacity to not only reshape texts but culture itself testifies to how any aesthetics of 67 Vittorio Gallese, ‘Roots of Empathy’, p. 172.

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adaptation also necessitates attention to an ethics of adaptation, a line of thought I complete in the books’s conclusion. Hutcheon points out that because the word ‘adaptation’ refers to both a formal product and a process of change, she argues for the ‘need for a theoretical perspective that is at once formal and “experiential”’.68 This book offers this theoretical perspective. In doing so, I augment recent approaches to adaptation that are concerned with affect, such as Anne Gjelsvik’s work on adaptation and violence,69 and John Hodgkins’s approach to the affective economy and transmission of adaptation. While these studies are enticing, they still remain reluctant to engage with the fleshy properties of the body and its role in ‘making sense’ of the ‘fleshly language’ of the world, let alone an adaptation. Although Hodgkins’s analyses affect—typically thought of sensations on the body that are felt prior to cognitive reflection—through a Deleuzian lens, he claims that his study will not ‘necessarily devolve into reductive conversations about “your” body or “my” body’.70 In hedging his bets in such a manner, Hodgkins seems almost ashamed of the sensing capacities of the body, and all too easily gives in to the criticisms levelled at phenomenology as a purely subjective—and therefore not objective—form of criticism. But as Amanda Ruud has usefully argued, ‘adaptations produce experiences at the same time as they reflect on experiences’, and that it is ‘[in] the act of seeing, hearing, touching, playing [that] receivers and adaptors meet, connecting across time and space by means of the body’.71 Therefore, although phenomenology might be dismissed for its subjective impressionism, it is important to remember that phenomenology can also ‘enlarge our capacities for conscious awareness, refine our cultural sensorium, and change our perspective on the world’.72 Grounded in the analysis of the phenomenological experience of screen adaptation, this book answers Cardwell’s call for an ‘aesthetics of adaptation’,73 and offers an enhanced awareness of the poetic means by which the filmmakers can translate story worlds from page to screen. Indeed, some scholars prefer the term ‘translation’ to ‘adaptation’.74 As Linda Costanzo Cahir puts it, it is ‘[through] the process of translation a fully 68 Linda Hutcheon, Theory of Adaptation, p. xiv. 69 Anne Gjelsvik, ‘What Novels Can Tell’, pp. 245-264. 70 John Hodgkins, The Drift, p. 16. 71 Amanda Ruud, ‘Embodying Change’, p. 247, p. 255. 72 Julian Hanich, Cinematic Emotions, p. 15. 73 Sarah Cardwell, ‘Adaptation’, p. 58. 74 Lawrence Venuti, ‘Adaptation, Translation, Critique’, pp. 25-43; Dennis Cutchins, ‘Bakhtin, Translation and Adaptation’, pp. 36-62.

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new text—a materially different entity—is made, one that simultaneously has a strong relationship with its original source, yet is fully independent from it’.75 But just as the word is translated to the screen, the senses too go through a material process of translation, and attending to the synaesthetic richness of perception reveals the spectator’s entanglement in the making of meaning. Earlier in this introduction I suggested how adaptation scholars such as Stam, Andrew, and Geraghty all employ the metaphor of the layer to explore the intertextual relationships between texts as surfaces that come into contact. Here, I add that the spectator’s body is another such layer in a relationship that is not only intertextual, but intersubjective and textural. Cardwell writes that the early writing on adaptation appealed due to being ‘emotionally vivid, even passionate’ and that the ‘selection of appropriate analytic tools for analysing adaptations was in great part determined by the “gut feelings”, emotional reactions, [and] desires’ of early theorists.76 Unlike those that reject the ‘fuzzy impressionism’ or subjective analysis, Cardwell finds value in it, arguing not only for its insights but also for the way it leads to more ‘engaged and engaging’ analyses (p. 31). I hope that the analyses that I offer in this book help propel a return to such—quite literally—impassioned writing. I propose that film phenomenology provides the rigorous critical methodology and the language required to fully examine the subjective experience of screen adaptation—a ‘sensuous elaboration’—an endlessly pervasive and provocative phenomenon of words made flesh.

Works Cited Andrew, Dudley. ‘Adapting Cinema to History: A Revolution in the Making’, in A Companion to Literature and Film, ed. by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 189-204. Babbage, Frances. Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre: Performing Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Bluestone, George. Novels into Film: The Metamorphosis of Fiction into Cinema. Berkeley: U of California P, 1961. Cahir, Linda Costanzo. Literature into Film: Theory and Practical Approaches. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Cardwell, Sarah. Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002. 75 Linda Costanzo Cahir, Literature into Film, p. 14. 76 Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation, p. 31.

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——. ‘Adaptation Studies Revisited: Purposes, Perspectives, and Inspiration’, in The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation, ed. by James M. Welsh and Peter Lev (Lanham: Scarecrow, 2007), pp. 51-63. Carroll, Noël. Theorizing the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Casebier, Alan. Film and Phenomenology: Toward a Realist Theory of Cinematic Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Chatman, Seymour. ‘What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (and Vice Versa)’, Critical Inquiry, 7.1 (1980), 121-140. Chow, Lesley. ‘The Actor’s Voice’, Cinéaste, 31.4 (2006), 33-35. Cobb, Shelley. ‘Adaptation, Fidelity, and Gendered Discourses’, Adaptation, 4.1 (2010), 28-37. Constable, Catherine. ‘Surfaces of Science Fiction: Gender and “Humanness” in Ex Machina’, Film-Philosophy, 22.2 (2018), 281-301. Cutchins, Dennis. ‘Bakhtin, Translation and Adaptation’, in Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film, ed. by Katja Krebs (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 36-62. Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? London: Gollancz, 2001. Elliott, Kamilla. ‘Adaptation Theory and Adaptation Scholarship’, in The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. by Thomas Leitch (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017), pp. 679-697. ——. ‘Novels, Films, and the Word/Image Wars’, in A Companion to Literature and Film, ed. by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 1-23. ——. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. ——. ‘Theorizing Adaptation/Adapting Theory’, in Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions, ed. by Jørgen Bruhn, Anne Gjelsvik, and Eirik Frisvold Hanssen (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 19-45. Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. London: Picador, 1991. Ferencz-Flatz, Christian, and Julian Hanich. ‘What is Film Phenomenology?’ Studia Phænomenologica, 16 (2016), 11-61. Gallese, Vittorio. ‘Embodied Simulation: From Neurons to Phenomenal Experience’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 4 (2003), 23-48. ——. ‘The Roots of Empathy: The Shared Manifold Hypothesis and the Neural Basis for Intersubjectivity’, Psychopathology, 36.171 (2003), 171-180. Geraghty, Christine. Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008. Gjeslvik, Anne. ‘What Novels Can Tell That Movies Can’t Show’, in Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions, ed. by Jørgen Bruhn, Anne Gjelsvik, and Eirik Frisvold Hanssen (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 245-264. Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World. Columbia UP, 2018.

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Grant, Barry Keith. ‘“Sensuous Elaboration”: Reason and the Visible in the Science Fiction Film’, in Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader, ed. by Sean Redmond (New York: Wallflower, 2004), pp. 17-23. Grant, Catherine. ‘Recognizing Billy Budd in Beau Travail: Epistemology and Hermeneutics of an Auteurist “Free” Adaptation’, Screen, 43.1 (2002), 57-73. Hanich, Julian. Cinematic Emotion in Horror Film and Thrillers: The Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear. New York: Routledge, 2010. Hodgkins, John. The Drift: Affect, Adaptation, and New Perspectives on Fidelity. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Husserl, Edmund. The Paris Lectures. Trans. by Peter Koestenbaum. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. London: Routledge, 2006. Krebs, Katja. ‘Ghosts We Have Seen Before: Trends in Adaptation in Contemporary Performance’, Theatre Journal, 66 (2014), 581-590. Leitch, Thomas. Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007. ——. ‘Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory’, Criticism, 45.2 (2003), 149-171. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. ‘From Laocoön’, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. by Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2001), pp. 554-570. Livingston, Paisley. ‘On the Appreciation of Cinematic Adaptation’, Projections, 4.2 (2010), 104-27. Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke UP, 2000. McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. McCleary, Richard. ‘Preface’, in Signs by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Trans. by Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964), pp. ix-xxxii. Meikle, Kyle. Adaptations in the Franchise Era 2001-16. London: Bloomsbury. ——. ‘Rematerializing Adaptation Theory’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 41.3 (2013), 174-183. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 2002. Metz, Christian. Psychoanalysis and the Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier. Trans. by Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti. London: Macmillan, 1982. ——. ‘Some Points in the Semiotics of the Cinema’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford UP, 2009), pp. 65-77.

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Murray, Simone. ‘Materializing Adaptation Theory: The Adaptation Industry’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 36.1 (2008), 4-20. Ricoeur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language. Trans. by Robert Czerny, Kathleen McLaughlin, and John Costello. London: Routledge, 2003. Ruud, Amanda. ‘Embodying Change: Adaptation, the Senses, and Media Revolution’, in The Routledge Companion to Adaptation, ed. by Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs, Eckart Voights, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 245-255. Shimamura, Arthur P. Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies. New York: Oxford UP, 2013. Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. ——. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004. ——. ‘Fleshing Out the Image: Phenomenology, Pedagogy, and Derek Jarman’s Blue’, in New Takes in Film-Philosophy, ed. by Havi Carel and Greg Tuck (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 191-206. ——. ‘Phenomenology’ in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. by Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 435-445. Sontag, Susan. ‘The Imagination of Disaster’, in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Picador, 1966), pp. 209-225. Stadler, Harald. ‘Film as Experience: Phenomenological Concepts in Cinema and Television Studies’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 12.3 (1990), 37-50. Stam, Robert. ‘Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation’, in Film Adaptation, ed. by James Naremore (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2000), pp. 54-76. ——. ‘Introduction’, in A Companion to Literature and Film, ed. by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 1-52. Stam, Robert, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis. New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond. London: Routledge, 1992. Stern, Lesley. ‘I Think, Sebastian, Therefore… I Somersault’, Paradoxa, 3.3-4 (1997), 348-366. Venuti, Lawrence. ‘Adaptation, Translation, Critique’, Journal of Visual Culture, 25.6 (2007), 25-43. Williams, Linda. ‘Corporealized Observers: Visual Pornographies and the “Carnal Density of Vision”’, in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. by Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995), pp. 3-42. Wood, Aylish. Technoscience in Contemporary American Film: Beyond Science Fiction. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002.

1.

Grave Visions: Visual Experience and Adaptation Abstract Rather than approaching the ‘look’ of adaptation through point of view or the ‘vision’ of the adapter, this chapter examines the material, visible texture of screen adaptation. Using two adaptations of Bram Stoker’s gothic novel Dracula, I analyse how each uses mise en scène, cinematography, and editing to thicken and make tangible Stoker’s questioning of the reliability of vision in modernity. The first, Nosferatu (F.W Murnau, 1922) employs the tricks of early cinema to shock spectators, while the second—Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)—uses a neo-baroque aesthetic that ruptures the screen and engulfs the spectator, much like one of Dracula’s victims. This chapter suggests that critical insight into an adaptation can be found quite literally in sight, and embraces how the materiality of adaptation overlaps with the materiality of vision. Keywords: vision, early cinema, cinema of attractions, adaptation, Dracula, Nosferatu

Introduction: Eye-Opener This chapter focuses on the look of screen adaptation. At first glance, this statement might appear dull, promising to only but skim across the text’s surface rather than plunge into the inner depths of the adaptation and the dynamics of its beholder’s engagement. However, I argue that the (quite literal) oversight of screen adaptation’s look is due to the lingering critical spectres that haunt the discipline. Specifically, I claim that critics have turned away from the sensual allure of the screen, effectively blinding themselves to what may appear as only superficial. While Film Phenomenology and Adaptation: Sensuous Elaboration aims to help return adaptation

Richard, D.E., Film Phenomenology and Adaptation: Sensuous Elaboration. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463722100_ch01

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studies (and adaptation critics) to its senses, the specific task of this chapter is to reveal how critical insight is found in sight. This chapter primarily draws on two adaptations of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula: the German Expressionist Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (F.W. Murnau, 1922), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992). The gothic tale is well-known: with the help of Jonathan Harker, Dracula—a blood-sucking Transylvanian count—moves to London and wreaks havoc on modern society. Roger Luckhurst notes that Dracula, at its core, stands as an allegory for the way that fin de siècle culture enacted a range of ‘insidious attacks’ that threatened the coherence and integrity of (Anglo-Saxon) identity.1 These ‘insidious attacks’ are not only external threats to the body such as viruses or foreign others, but also those that threatened a stable sense of subjectivity from within, such as anxieties surrounding the ‘New Woman’ and sexual identity. 2 But importantly, Dracula presents a ‘weird occult doubling’, with the fantastic and delusion being offered on the one hand, with science and its implications for rational thought on the other. In this chapter, I raise adaptation studies’ neglect of the visual, and stake my claim for the specific suitability of Dracula to redress this oversight. As I argue, the ‘weird occult doubling’ that Luckhurst describes is in no small part due to the change to visual perception wrought by modern technology, as visual entertainments seduced, bewitched, and tricked the eye, renewing an awareness of what Linda Williams terms the ‘carnal density of vision’.3 It is therefore not surprizing that Dracula’s screen incarnations—from Nosferatu to Hotel Transylvania (Genndy Tartakovsy, 2012)—revel in visual excess, simultaneously seducing and shocking the spectator’s eye. In what follows, I first outline the aesthetic of the early cinema, born at the time of Stoker’s tale, to argue that the trick effects of this period—emphasizing shock and sensation—provide a fertile ground for approaching adaptation. Then, in this chapter’s main case studies, I study how both the shadowy Nosferatu and glittering Bram Stoker’s Dracula overtly solicit the spectator’s vision. In doing so, I not only argue that these adaptations bring their source material to visible life on the screen, but that through the spectator’s visual experience they also renew awareness of the body’s materiality. 1 Roger Luckhurst, ‘Introduction’, p. xxix. 2 See Lyn Pykett, ‘Improper Feminine’, pp. 139-142; Christopher Bentley, ‘Monster in the Bedroom’, pp. 26-29. 3 Linda Williams, ‘Corporealized Observers’, p. 36.

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Visible and Visible: The ‘Carnal Density of Vision’ If visual experience is discussed in adaptation studies, it is usually framed in terms of a comparative narratology. Consider how narrative theorists (such as Gérard Genette) employ visual metaphors such as ‘focalization’ and ‘point of view’ to describe both the perceptive and cognitive perspectives afforded to a novel’s characters and narrator(s). But the way that the cinema directly presents spectators with the vision of screen characters complicates the degrees and kinds of narrative focalization. François Jost suggests, then, that for clarity narratologists should distinguish between ‘focalization’ and ‘occularization’. On the one hand, focalization should refer to how stories are f iltered through different levels of knowledge of narrative events (from limited and subjective narration through to an all-knowing and omniscient narrator). On the other, occularization should be more specifically used to describe optical perspective. For Jost, distinguishing between ‘focalization’ and ‘occularization’—and how these different perceptual and cognitive perspectives are translated from page to screen—would more concretely map the dynamics of adaptation that are required by the comparative narratological approach that I detailed in the introduction to this book. 4 Besides comparative narratologists’ interest in mapping the shifts in optical perspective, sometimes adaptation theorists bring the visible itself into focus. By this I refer to how the adaptation’s mise en scène captures—or diverges from—the author’s vision. In their impeccable detail and historical accuracy in their costuming, sets, and décor, adaptations such as A Room with a View (James Ivory, 1985) or Pride and Prejudice (Joe Wright, 2005) perform for what Thomas Leitch has evocatively described as the ‘embalming of beautiful dead cultures’.5 These adaptations not only strive to capture the time and place of their literary sources, but also seek to evoke the spectator’s nostalgia for the period’s values (or, at least, a romanticized view of them). But as Leitch goes on to explain, while such attention to detail attracts attention to the superficial, the decorative also simultaneously conceals the film’s political edge. For Leitch, peeling back the gilded shell of the heritage adaptation reveals its hidden socio-political complexity that questions class, gender, and national identity. But it appears to me that it is often unnecessary to peel away the layers of seductive artifice to see what is concealed beneath its manicured surface, for often this ‘inner’ detail is hidden in plain sight. 4 5

François Jost, ‘Look’, p. 80. Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation, p. 167.

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Take William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, first published in 1848: a satire on social mobility, external appearance, and manners (or, at least, strategically mannered performance) as Becky Sharp attempts to scheme her way out of impoverishment and into refined society. With such focus it is not surprizing that Mira Nair’s 2004 adaptation is so concerned with surface detail, performance, and ways of seeing. The film’s opening credit sequence is accompanied by a montage of close-ups of beautiful trappings that fade in and out: the crest of a peacock, the folds of a flower petal, a string of pearls, a colourful skirt that billows as its unseen wearer spins. From its very opening, then, the film invites the spectator’s eye to take in what are usually small decorative details that might go unmissed, here looming large in close-up. After the credit sequence, Lord Steyne (Gabriel Byrne) pays a visit to Becky (played as an adult by Reese Witherspoon) and her artist father to purchase a painting. ‘Look, look as long as you want’, he tells Lord Steyne who is entranced by a canvas. But the artist could be directly speaking to the spectator whose eye is snared by Nair’s richly detailed and colourful mise en scène. At times the frame shimmers with gold and rose; sumptuous dresses are embroidered with golden threads and floral embellishments; ribbons, gossamer, and gauze are woven into coiled ringlets of hair that perch like crowns. Even the film’s derelict spaces seduce the eye as dust motes dance in the filtered light against mud-caked walls and straw-lined floors. This cannot only be attributed to Nair’s desire to visually please the spectator. Neither can it only be an ‘embalming of [the] beautiful dead] past, as Nair’s mise en scène is anachronistic, heavily textured with the colours, fabrics, and accoutrement of her Indian heritage. Although some critics, like Laura Marks, dismiss Nair’s exaggeration of her Indian culture as a ‘panderer of cultural exoticism for white audiences’,6 in each frame Nair’s lush and colourful mise en scène makes visible how the wealth and excess that is enjoyed by white British high society came by exploitation and conquest of brown bodies. The textured mise en scène not only exposes the adaptation’s political vision, but also shapes the way the spectator is invited to look at—and assess—Becky herself. Her constant performance of social mobility is emphasized in the way that Becky is frequently framed by doorways and windows (and at several times she is literally a performing spectacle, singing and dancing for a crowd). As spectators peer at Becky through her ornate masks and veils, or struggle to catch a clear view of her through glass that distorts her face, the spectator is frequently reminded that we are not given 6 Laura Marks, Skin of the Film, p. 4.

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a clear look at her true self and only see the carefully constructed and manicured surface that she allows others to see. This gloss of Vanity Fair’s glossy mise en scène reveals how the film wears its politics on its sleeve, so to speak. What this chapter argues then is that a phenomenology of vision can renew focus on how the visible and the subjective experience of sight are harnessed by screen adaptations as sites of meaning. This chapter returns the gaze to the ‘superficial’ layer of the adaptation, and argues that the screen’s visual display is a primary, rather than primitive, site of meaning. I have chosen to structure this chapter with analyses of Dracula’s screen incarnations as they are rich for such a phenomenological analysis through the visual appeal of their heavily textured mise en scene, from the gloomy German Expressionism of Nosferatu to the baroque splendor of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But further, Dracula foregrounds the visual experience of its characters and their ability to trust their senses. In doing so, Dracula illustrates the changes to perception wrought by modernity. Until the eighteenth century, understanding vision—the ‘noblest of the senses’,7 according to Martin Jay, as the distance between perceiving subject and externally-perceived object seemingly established its objective verifiable truth—was modelled on the camera obscura that constructed what Williams describes as a ‘“decorporealized” observer’.8 But an explosion of new visual technologies—kaleidoscope, thaumotrope, stereoscope, zoetrope, and especially the development of the cinema—helped to develop a new model of vision, that made it ‘increasingly clear that perception was not a matter of a relatively passive reception of an image of an exterior world, but that […] an observer contributed to the making of perception’, as Jonathan Crary has astutely noted.9 The new visual regime that emerged thus emphasized the body’s role in visual experience, taking on a new ‘“thickness” worthy of observation itself and producing its own kind of knowledge’ in what Williams provocatively terms the ‘carnal density of vision’.10 Attending to its subjective ‘carnal density’ troubled vision’s claim to rationality, objectivity, and truth, and became a major theme in modern culture. Vision is certainly fallible and contested in Dracula, a story that shimmers with hallucinations and impossible disappearances, while hinting 7 8 9 10

Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes, p. 26. Linda Williams, ‘Corporealized Observers’, p. 7. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception, p. 155. Linda Williams, ‘Corporealized Observers’, p. 11, p. 36.

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at the body’s changing relationship to its world through its use of technology (the camera, the typewriter, the train). This is articulated by Harker himself, when he records that when witnessing one of Count Dracula’s bodily tricks, ‘I could not believe my eyes. I thought it was some trick of the moonlight, some weird effect of shadow; but I kept looking, and it could be no delusion’.11 But although Harker is referring to Dracula’s otherworldly behaviour, he could just as easily be describing the way that technology changed the behaviour of perception in this world. Indeed, the way that Harker was compelled to ‘keep looking’ could easily refer to the early consumer of visual entertainments. As Williams argues, ‘images of all sorts [began] to seduce and excite a wide variety of viewers […] in direct, multiple, and sensory ways’.12 In the next section, I explore the aesthetics of early cinema, an aesthetic that certainly hinges on a ‘trick of the moonlight’ to astonish and delight its beholder. In drawing attention to the aesthetic of early cinema, I hope to renew focus on how screen adaptations of Dracula—and screen adaptation more generally—can draw on the ‘weird effect of the shadow’ to dynamize and vivify their literary sources.

Early Cinema Aesthetics as an Attractive Possibility for Screen Adaptation From the development of the cinema, the motion picture industry expressed an impulse to adapt previously existing work. Tom Gunning has argued that screen adaptation lent an effective means of providing a form of shorthand during the development of cinematic narrative through the source story’s familiarity,13 while Deborah Cartmell suggests that the cinema’s compulsion to adapt was part of a drive for its cultural legitimacy.14 But even in this early period, cinema audiences actively and sophisticatedly appreciated adaptations as adaptations. Judith Buchanan has explained how audiences compared the narrative and style of the adapted work and, in doing so, showed sensitivity to the possibilities the developing medium had for telling already known and beloved stories.15 Yet this relationship between early cinema aesthetics and adaptation—and its legacy—has been insufficiently 11 12 13 14 15

Bram Stoker, Dracula, p. 38. Linda Williams, ‘Corporealized Observers’, p. 12. Tom Gunning, ‘Intertextuality’, p. 127. Deborah Cartmell, ‘100+’, p. 2. Judith Buchanan, ‘Literary Adaptation’, p. 20.

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explored, likely due to a lack of narrative cohesion demonstrated in this period. Gunning influentially termed the output of films before 1907 as the ‘cinema of attractions’, a mode of filmmaking that demonstrated a supposed lack of interest in developing psychological motivation of characters or a coherent diegetic world. As Georges Méliès, the prolific and productive filmmaker who anchored the period, puts it: ‘[as for the tale], I only consider it at the end. I can state that the scenario constructed in this manner has no importance, since I use it merely as a pretext for the “stage effects”, the “tricks”, or a nicely arranged tableau’.16 But while the cinema of attractions might be marginalized for its apparent lack of narrative coherence or psychological depth, film historians such as Gunning have recouped and celebrated its aesthetic value. The cinema of attractions resists its ‘primitive’ label through its knowing desire to display, and its pointed ‘lack of interest’ in character and narrative development. Gunning considers the cinema of attractions as a kinetic reversal of ‘energy’. Rather than drawing energy inward to absorb the spectator within the diegesis, energy is expelled outward to directly—and pleasurably—engage the spectator through their spectacular appeal. But these pleasures—stimulated through shock, surprise, and delight—should not be dismissed as crude, infantile, or ‘primitive’ bodily reflexes that contrast with ‘sophisticated’ cognitive responses that developed with narrative integration. Gunning argues that the cinema of attractions offered a type of spectatorship that challenged the idea of the spectator as a ‘static, “stupid” voyeur’ (p. 59). Rather than merely static, this kinetic and exhibitionistic cinema statically charged spectators: in the heightened sensual charge that courses through the body in response to the screen, along with an active and complicit sense of ‘joining in’, the cinema of attractions displaced spectators from their usual countenance and habituated ways of seeing. Importantly, the cinema of attractions grabbed the spectator’s bodily attention and shook up bourgeois norms of safely beholding art from a contemplative distance. Filmmakers became increasingly concerned with narrative integration after 1907, churning out literary adaptations for their narrative shorthand and familiarity with the audience. For many, this came at too high price for the cinema as an artform. The evocative Béla Balázs, for instance, describes the literary adaptation as having the ‘transparency of an X-ray’ that vanishes ‘the lovely flesh of profound ideas’ to leave nothing ‘but a skeleton […] that needs a completely different covering of flesh, a different epidermis, 16 Quoted in Tom Gunning, ‘Cinema of Attraction’, p. 64.

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if it is to acquire a visible, living shape in film’.17 Besides identifying its aesthetic constraints, others mourned how adaptation seemingly blunted the political edge of the cinema. The Surrealists championed the cinema’s direct address to the spectator’s senses, and how it could subvert reality and bring them to the threshold of the marvelous. But while the cinema had the capacity to ‘blow up the universe’, according to Luis Buñuel, ‘we […] sleep in peace, because the cinematographic light is carefully drugged and imprisoned’, repeating the same (bourgeois) stories of the novel and stage.18 Rather than a kinetic aesthetic that actively reaches towards an ‘ecstatic’ spectator and shakes them from their habituated ways of seeing the world, the film’s enslavement to the earlier arts constrains it as an inert anaesthetic, placating spectators who turn a blind eye to the world around them and sit, willingly stupefied, before an illusion of life. ‘What is the use of all this visual drapery’, questions Buñuel, ‘if the situations, the motives which animate the people, their reactions, the very subjects are taken from the most sentimental and conformist literature?’ (p. 120). But Buñuel himself turns a blind eye to the cinema’s sustained use of spectacle, tricks, and special effects that were in no small part prompted by adapting works of literature. While the cinema arguably sought aesthetic legitimacy by adapting the ‘prestigious’ bourgeois novel, it still maintained contact with the bawdy popular entertainments of mass culture that appealed to the working class. The cinema therefore adapted works of genre f iction to the screen to maintain this audience’s interest: stories of criminality, gothic horror, science f iction, and tales of the fantastic, all of which continued to develop cinematic magic and trick effects that were so central to the appeal and pleasure of early filmmaking. The first adaptation of Mary Shelley’s gothic classic Frankenstein (J. Searle Dawley, 1910), for instance, makes use of trick effects such as impossible disappearances and reverse footage, such as when Dawley cuts between shots of Frankenstein peering into a machine and his monster’s birth. Making good use of Shelley’s subtitle ‘The Modern Prometheus’, reverse footage reveals Frankenstein’s monster slowly taking shape and emerging from the flames of a cauldron. Later, when Frankenstein’s monster contemplates himself (and his mortality) in a mirror, he suddenly vanishes to leave only his mirror image remaining in the glass. Frankenstein looks into the mirror and is horrif ied to see his monster, not his own reflection, peering back at him. In the blink of an eye Frankenstein’s 17 Béla Balázs, Early Film Theory, p. 23. 18 Luis Buñuel, ‘Cinema’, p. 117.

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Frankenstein (J. Searle Dawley, 1910)

monster vanishes altogether, and Frankenstein presses on the glass of the mirror in disbelief. This delightful early adaptation articulates the competing concerns of filmmaking in the period, for it is not simply a series of tricks that astonish the spectator, nor is it enslaved to its literary source. The adaptation uses developing cinematic language and narrative codes to convey meaning, such as point of view shots when Frankenstein peers into his machine, to guide the spectator. So too does the adaptation use visual trickery to drive its—and the novel’s—thematic point. When Frankenstein looks into the mirror and sees his monster staring back at him, the film asks its audience to question who really is the monster? And, not only does the adaptation make literal Frankenstein’s unique ability to ‘bestow animation on lifeless matter’, as it is described in the novel,19 but with its repeated emphasis on looking, mirrors, and the dual spectacles of the uncanny movement of both monster and image, Frankenstein becomes self-reflexive about the cinema’s general ability to animate life. Although Shelley was no scientist herself, the magical properties and possibilities of scientific discovery shimmer in the novel. When Victor Frankenstein enters the University of Ingolstadt, 19 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 55.

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Professor Waldman warns Frankenstein of his naïve interest in the dark magic of alchemy. But Professor Waldman celebrates the ‘performed miracles’ achieved by those that study natural science: ‘they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows’ (p. 48). Here Professor Waldman seems to directly foretell the scientific magic of cinema, an apparatus that surely ‘commands’ thunder, ‘mimics’ earthquakes, and is a mirror of ‘shadows’ that is able to reflect—and mock—the world. If Shelley’s novel prefigures the tensions between science, nature, technology, and embodiment that would emerge in modernity, Dawley’s little adaptation puts these concerns under a microscope. Eileen Bowser notes that from 1911 technological development refined cinematic trick artistry as the industry was increasingly driven to disguise and incorporate effects as a tool in the expressive arsenal of the director.20 But the attraction did not disappear altogether after narrative integration; rather than being foregrounded, the attraction went underground, punctuating narratively integrated films with moments of spectacle. Recently, Ian Christie has proposed the term ‘sensation’ to usefully characterize the shifting landscape of attractions, tricks, and special effects through the period of narrative integration. He claims that although there was a drive to disguise the blatant artifice of spectacular tricks in the goal of crafting a sense of realism, ‘sudden eruptions of the uncanny’ continued to seduce spectators.21 But the sensational genre of the fantastic then—with its emphasis on changing bodies, unexplainable appearances and disappearances, and other images that test the limits of reality and imagination—specifically relishes attraction, sensationalism, and visual (dis)play. Championing the fantastic, Buñuel writes that the cinema is a glass ‘charged […] with affectivity. I fight for the cinema which will show me this kind of glass, because [it] will broaden my knowledge of things and people, will open up to me the marvelous world of the unknown, of all that which I find neither in the newspaper or in the street’.22 Just as Victor Frankenstein presses his eyes up to the glass in Dawley’s Frankenstein, the fantastic demands that ours too are glued to the screen. As tricks give way to special effects, screen adaptations are privileged in their ability to render the stunning worlds of the fantastic, and to simultaneously 20 Eileen Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, p. 254. 21 Ian Christie, ‘Visible’, p. 108. 22 Luis Buñuel, ‘Cinema’ p.121.

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bring the spectator to their senses. Further, through the affective charge of its imagery, the fantastic—despite at times ostensibly seeming far removed from reality—offers insight into our own world. Although Dracula himself cannot cast a reflection, these adaptations certainly offer a dark reflection of reality. For the rest of this chapter, I turn to the play of shadow and light that characterizes adaptations of Dracula. In doing so, this chapter seeks to not so much describe how these adaptations ‘bring to life’ Stoker’s work. Rather, this chapter examines how their visual texture grips the spectator’s eye, awakens their senses, and—perhaps in doing so—brings spectators themselves to life.

Draped in Shadow: Murnau’s Nosferatu Buñuel’s lamentation that literary adaptation stymied the use of ‘visual drapery’ cannot be said of Murnau’s Nosferatu, for it is draped in shadow. Not only is the screen’s surface cloaked, but so too is the narrative of Stoker’s novel thinly veiled, as Murnau elides and tweaks many details in an unsuccessful attempt to, as Thomas Elsaesser explains, avoid copyright infringement.23 Nosferatu follows a clerk named Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) who is sent by Knock (Alexander Granach) to Count Orlok (Max Schreck) in Transylvania. Despite the protest of his wife Ellen (Greta Schröder), Hutter becomes a guest—then hostage—in Orlok’s ruinous castle. Orlok travels by boat to Wisborg, killing all the crew on the way. The quite literal ghost ship arrives in Wisborg and spreads pestilence, plague, and death. Learning that the only way to defeat the vampire is for a pure woman to sacrifice herself, Ellen distracts Orlok by allowing him to attack her in her bedroom, keeping him occupied until daybreak. As the sun rises, Orlok dissolves in a wisp of smoke. In what follows I am less concerned with how Dracula’s plot is radically streamlined and its characters transformed, but rather with how Nosferatu maintains what James Harold has recently described as ‘thematic fidelity’ to the novel.24 Indeed, I view Nosferatu not so much as an adaptation, but, rather, a literal re-vision of Stoker’s novel. That is, although Murnau weaves Nosferatu with a visual texture that dramatically reshapes and cloaks Dracula’s form, its overt appeal to the eye, its use of shadow, its blurring of the uncanny with the everyday, transforms the novel’s anxiety regarding the ‘“thickness”’ of modern vision. 23 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Six’, p. 12. 24 James Harold, ‘Value’, p. 99.

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As Gilberto Perez describes it, Nosferatu is beguiling in its ‘strange, impassioned poetry; its sense of mystery, of opaqueness inherent in a world seemingly fully revealed before our eyes; its view of the world as inescapably oppressive and sinister, however natural and commonplace it may seem’.25 Perez’s reading here is important as it alludes to the film’s German Expressionist visual politics, an artistic movement that flourished in a period of post-war ‘intellectual excitement’.26 The shock of a war that had claimed the lives of the young and lingering political turmoil had left the country economically and psychologically reeling. German Expressionist films—along with other forms of artistic production—appeared to externally manifest and work through this emotional and psychological trauma. Films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920), Waxworks (Paul Leni, 1924), and Warning Shadows (Arthur Robison, 1923) expressed the nation’s psychological and political fracture. Indeed, Anton Kaes has evocatively described German Expressionist film as ‘shell shock cinema’, reading films like Nosferatu as allegories for the experience of war and the mass death of a ‘lost generation’ of young men, and the impact that it had on those who waited for them at home.27 German Expressionist films routinely featured tyrannical figures, doppelgängers, madness, and duped masses, but what is particularly striking is how wounds of war (psychological, emotional, physical) are woven into their visual fabric. Chiaroscuro lighting stains the screen, while the theatrical sets—often maniacally smeared with paint—evoke a nightmare world of twisted cobblestone streets, warped alleyways, and rows of houses that curve into the sky like crooked teeth. The camera, too, serves to distort perspective, capturing the action in strange and oblique angles that further set the world on edge. As Lotte Eisner suggests, this distortion represents ‘the complexity of the psyche’, and that ‘linking this psychical complexity to an optical complexity [releases] an object’s internal life, the expression of its “soul”’.28 Such dark vision resonates with Buñuel’s call that the cinema should be an affectively charged ‘glass’ that allows greater insight into the world beyond the shackles of bourgeois representational forms, such as naturalism and realism. As J. P. Telotte describes, ‘the expressionist tradition repeatedly forced viewers to confront the extent to which conventional narratives and, indeed, conventional society carefully constructs their everyday 25 26 27 28

Gilberto Perez, ‘Shadow’, p. 150. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari, p. 43. Anton Kaes, Shell Shock, pp. 37-44. Lotte Eisner, Haunted Screen, p. 24.

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experience’.29 By challenging the spectator’s perception in the auditorium, German Expressionist films forced spectators to reassess their perspective of their own world, as if the sharp angles and jagged lines of the films could scrape the scales from their eyes. In some ways Nosferatu adheres to the German Expressionist credo that ‘phenomena on the screen’ are perceived as expressions of the ‘phenomena of the soul’.30 Performances are exaggerated and stilted, as if the bodies of the actors were being controlled like marionette dolls. Knock’s madness is evident in every twitch and twist of his limbs while Orlok’s monstrosity legible in his pointed ears and prominent teeth, sliding through the frame like a glacier, the figure of cold death. Enhanced through the film’s flickering image, Orlok certainly seems to embody the fear etched into the cultural imagination that ‘the ghosts of unburied soldiers would roam the earth in search of a final resting place’, following the war’s massacre of soldiers whose bodies lay strewn and abandoned across the land.31 But at other times, Nosferatu retools some of the aesthetic conventions of German Expressionism. Although Nosferatu conveys character through physiognomy, the film does not use the ‘latent physiognomy’ of objects and the environment in the same explicit manner of Caligari or Waxworks.32 For rather than framing the action within a grotesquely artificial universe, Nosferatu foregrounds the natural world. Rare for German Expressionist filmmaking, Nosferatu was filmed on location, with the North German towns of Wismar and Lübeck standing in for the fictional village of Wisborg. But most striking is Hutter’s journey to Transylvania, filmed in the Slovakian wilderness. When Hutter leaves the domestic security of Ellen and travels on horseback, the camera follows his progress through the vast landscape of rocky ravines and bubbling brooks, while clouds ominously churn. In one shot, the camera slowly pans across a barren field that draws the spectator’s attention to a large mountain that looms heavy and menacing overhead, its base lined with prickly trees that look as if they have been scratched into the celluloid. These landscape shots are certainly grand and impressive, and their documentary-style authenticity grounds the uncanny story in our world. Indeed, as Perez points out, despite Nosferatu’s ‘unyielding photographic naturalism’ that is established through its landscape shots, ‘something […] remains elusively 29 30 31 32

J. P. Telotte, ‘German Expressionism’, p. 26. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari, p. 71. Anton Kaes, Shell Shock, p. 47. See Béla Balázs, Early Film Theory, p. 46.

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beyond what the camera can capture. The physical world, placed almost tangibly before our eyes, is still somehow distant, inscrutable, ghostly’.33 Although these images loom before the eye, they are lit with a flicking glow that gives them an intangible and spectral quality. So too does Murnau’s tinting affect the spectator’s response to the image. This is not merely a matter of a retrospective viewing through contemporary eyes that, habituated to saturated colour, invest a more haunting quality to the tinted image. By the 1920s, colouring techniques (such as hand colouring, stenciling, tinting, and toning) had long shifted from their early use as a site of spectacle and fascination, but rather were used to enhance a film’s narrative, either by clarifying the temporal progression of the story (blues or greens for night, golden or pinks for morning, and so on) or mood. As Joshua Yumibe puts it, even in its nascent stages, filmmakers were aware how colour could ‘[harmonize] sensually, and by synaesthetic/metaphoric extension, emotionally with an audience’.34 Indeed, the tinted landscape shots in Nosferatu most certainly are affectively charged. The first landscape shot, tinted in aqua, not only signifies night, but it also associates the landscape with sickliness and decay. Tellingly, the shot when Hutter leaves the domestic space is tinted in a warm amber that conveys the safety and security of the family home. In another, a rocky ravine and deep valley spread before the spectator. The shot is filmed in deep focus that draws the eye into the depts of the image. As Perez suggests, Murnau frequently draws on the spectator’s ‘distant vision’ so that ‘our gaze spreads over the entire visual field [and] the central object of attention becomes the space between objects, the hollow space that reaches to our eyes as objects recede into the distance, the air in which all seem to float like a mirage’.35 This sensation of the image as a mirage is intensified in the shot of the valley when the shadow of a cloud passes through the foreground of the image, causing the image to slightly shimmer. Combined with its aqua tint, the shot seems to ripple like the reflection in a pool of water when skimmed by a stone, destabilizing the spectator’s sure visual grasp on the landscape. These shots emphasize how Murnau infuses a sense of the fantastic and the supernatural even within shots that detail the ordinary natural beauty of the world. Indeed, Murnau’s adaptation transports Dracula’s gothic horror tale into the realm of the uncanny, creating a world in which the safety of the natural world is but a shimmering mirage for a malevolent underbelly that 33 Gilberto Perez, ‘Shadow’, p. 153. 34 Joshua Yumibe, ‘Harmonious Sensations’, p. 172. 35 Gilberto Perez, Material Ghost, p. 135.

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flickers in and out of view. Besides visually associating its villains with animality—particularly spiders and rats—Nosferatu more generally warns about the danger lurking in the everyday environment. Professor Bulwer (John Gottowt) teaches a class on the ‘dreadful methods of carnivorous plants’ that encourages one to ‘[view] with horror the mysterious workings of nature’. The camera cuts to a close-up of a fly settling into the open mouth of a Venus flytrap that snaps down on its prey. The shot is held for several seconds to take in the fly’s struggle against its toothed cage, as Bulmer smirks ‘Like a vampire, no?’ to his students. Later, Bulwer examines ‘a polyp with tentacles […] transparent, almost ethereal […] little more than a phantom’. As if peering through a microscope, one of these phantom polyps swells on the screen, and its tentacles float through the blackness to ensnare its sustenance. Although Nosferatu is largely filmed with long shots, these close-ups confront the spectator with the horror of nature. And indeed, the microscope warns the spectator to quite literally take a closer look at the danger that might be lurking unawares in front of them. This is combined with the way that dread seems to pervade the natural world and everyday objects. Waves churn and crash onto the beach; curtains billow in the frozen air; the silhouette of an empty hammock swings in memory of a dead sailor; while cut flowers remind Ellen of death and destruction (‘why did you kill them?’ she asks Hutter). As one early reviewer of the film notes, one shot of ‘extremely imaginative beauty’ is a ‘schooner sailing in a rippled stream [that is] photographed in such a manner that it has the illusion of color and an enigmatic weirdness that’s more perplexing than the ghost action of the players’.36 By investing these seemingly innocuous shots with immanent and tangible threat, Murnau expertly crafts an ‘indissoluble fusion of the quotidian with the uncanny’.37 Murnau contrasts Nosferatu’s subtle evocation of the uncanny within the everyday by confronting and challenging the visual perception of its characters and its spectators. When his porters abandon hum in the foothills of Transylvania, an intertitle explains that Hutter ‘was seized by […] eerie visions’. In one shot, Hutter walks down a narrow path that meanders through the wild growth. Filmed in long shot, the landscape towers around him, almost as if the vegetation is trying to swallow him. Suddenly, a horse-drawn carriage comes careening around the corner. The motion of the carriage is unnatural: the footage has been sped up and it jolts and jerks down the path before coming to a sharp halt right before Hutter. The driver (Orlok, 36 Anonymous, ‘Nosferatu’, p. 30. 37 Gilberto Perez, ‘Shadow’, p. 153.

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swaddled in black cloth) gestures for Hutter to enter the carriage before it takes off again, tumbling and rolling down the path at a breakneck pace. Hutter looks out the window and opens his eyes wide in disbelief at the astonishing sight (and feel) of travelling at supernatural speed. And while Hutter acts as if he cannot believe his eyes, neither can the spectator. For when the shot cuts back to the carriage as it travels down the road, Murnau has inverted the film’s negative. In doing so, the image shimmers with a preternatural silver glow while the carriage is transformed into what looks like a prison being drawn by the skeletons of horses. Projected at a regular speed, the ghoulish carriage glides across the screen while the flickering silver light envelops the spectator in Nosferatu’s ghostly world. Nosferatu employs other visual tricks that are drawn from the ‘cinema of attractions’ to play with vision, and they are particularly harnessed to underscore Orlok’s peculiar (in)tangibility. At times Murnau edits between shots using a dissolve, a kind of transition that momentarily layers sequential shots into a composite image. For instance, imprisoned in Orlok’s castle, Hutter soon realizes that he is in danger and he peeks behind his bedroom door. Along with Hutter, the camera peers down the inky black hallway in an extreme long shot, spying Orlok pressed against the back wall. Orlok stands rigid in a pool of hard light, doubled by his shadow that spreads like a stain on the wall. Although he remains rigidly frozen, this image dissolves into a long shot, bringing his body much closer to the camera. The effect of the transition—particularly the way that Orlok’s body and shadow multiply through the dissolve—enhances the sense of Orlok’s peculiar immateriality and ability to vanish and reappear at will. Murnau also uses other effects, such as double exposure, for a similar effect. On the ghost ship, for instance, a spectral Orlok shimmers into view, his ghostly outline horrifying a feverish sailor, while when Orlok is seduced by Ellen and is destroyed by the morning sun, his body dissolves from the image and is replaced by wisps of smoke. Although sped-up footage is used to affect the spectator at times, Murnau also manipulates time by using stop-motion animation. When Orlok abandons Hutter in his castle to travel to Wisborg he prepares several coffins that are filled with foul earth for his journey. Staring out from his room, Hutter watches in disbelief as Orlok races back and forth at superhuman speed, seemingly commanding the coffins to pile themselves on top of one another onto a cart. After Orlok arranges himself in the top coffin, its enchanted lid leaps into the air and seals him in. Jennifer Barker suggests that stop-motion animation interrupts the cinema’s illusion of motion by exaggerating its gaps and discontinuities. In doing so, stop-motion animation

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‘entices us to feel the stops and starts in our own physical “animation”’ that ‘[raises] interesting questions about temporality as it is co-constituted by the film, by the objects represented on screen, and […] the viewer’.38 Thus, along with dissolves and double exposures that lend stereoscopic density and invite the eye to graze over the image, Nosferatu’s use of stop-motion animation arguably enhances the film’s tactile appeal. Complementing its moment of sped-up animation, stop-motion animation interrupts the smooth temporal flow of the projected images making it viscerally felt by the spectator. I explore the tactile appeal of other film adaptations in greater depth in Chapter Three. However, here I want to draw attention to one final point about the visual experience of Nosferatu. This feature has less to do with Murnau’s explicit aesthetic vision, but undoubtedly textures the visual experience of the film’s spectator nonetheless: that is, the scratches and other imperfections to the celluloid that are visible as the film plays. For even in its most loving restorations the image is unable to be scrubbed clean of its visible ‘noise’ and—whether the f ilm is played on DVD or digitally—each viewing of Nosferatu bears its history as a projected film. But rather than considering these imperfections as flaws of the image, the flickering visible decay and scratches that dance before the spectator’s eyes thematically resonates with the f ilm’s overall emphasis on visual experience. In a different context, Vivian Sobchack describes how attending to the flickering scratches and imperfections of the celluloid ‘visibly indicates spatial and temporal projection and movement’ as invariant structural features of the cinema.39 Therefore, just as the use of stop-motion animation interrupts the illusion of film as a continuous projection of still images, the scratches and other forms of visible wear and tear reveal how the film breathes life into a series of still images through its projection. But crucially, attending to visible phenomena (whether aesthetically intended like special effects, or merely a formal part of the medium like visible evidence of the celluloid) reveals another invariant structural feature of the film experience, which is the ‘material, immanent, presence’ of the spectator’s body to the film that grounds any transcendent act of consciousness (p. 200). Reflecting on both visible phenomena and visual experience offers fresh insight into Nosferatu as an adaptation of Dracula as both novel and film narratively foreground visual experience. Moreover, beyond this narrative 38 Jennifer Barker, Tactile Eye, pp. 137-140. 39 Vivian Sobchack, ‘Fleshing’, p. 197.

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emphasis, a phenomenological analysis of the objectively visible reveals how the cinema is materially grounded as a technology that animates life. But also, reflecting on vision as it is subjectively lived reveals how the film is primarily grounded in the body’s materiality. As the analysis of the special effects that attempt to trick the eye makes clear, vision is not abstracted from the body, but is ‘fleshed out’ across the skin and through the viscera. In sum, although both Dracula and Nosferatu are objectively about death, a phenomenological analysis of visual experience as the novel is ‘brought to life’ on screen reminds the spectator that—enacted through the mutual materiality of bodies of both film and spectator—its adaptation to the screen is perhaps more about life itself.

Glittering Night: Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula The previous section concluded with the suggestion that a phenomenological analysis reveals temporality as an invariant structure of the film experience, specifically the way that a film’s projection animates or breathes life into still images. Laura Mulvey writes that the ‘cinema combines […] two human fascinations: one with the boundary between life and death and the other with the mechanical animation of the inanimate, particularly the human figure’. 40 Therefore, the figure of the vampire—the dead being brought back to life—f inds obvious resonance with the cinema that reanimates past images, stories, and people. Indeed, this trope finds its apotheosis in Bram Stoker’s Dracula as this adaptation not only explicitly acknowledges its literary origin, but Coppola more generally crafts a textured palimpsest of f ilm history. In this section, I examine the selfreflexivity of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, along with its spatial destabilization, special effects, and colour that crafts what Richard Dyer describes as an ‘aesthetic of engorgement’. 41 In doing so, I claim that while Nosferatu could only hint at the illusion of colour, or offer a mirage of depth, Coppola’s adaptation not only sparkles like rubies but also seemingly perforates the frame to engulf the spectator. Coppola’s use of both cinematic and literary influences points to a certain irony in the title of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (hereafter Coppola’s Dracula). Referencing the author’s name in the film’s title explicitly markets it not only as an adaptation, but the possessive announces an intention to faithfully 40 Laura Mulvey, Death, p. 11. 41 Richard Dyer, ‘Dracula’, p. 10.

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capture the author’s vision.42 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Kenneth Branagh, 1994), for instance, acknowledges the adaptation’s fidelity to Shelley’s original novel, and, perhaps more importantly, distinguishes it from James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and the iconic monstrosity of Boris Karloff that more radically transmutated its source material. Coppola’s Dracula also acknowledges its literary origins by displaying what Leitch, in his discussion of adaptation as an ‘invisible genre’, would describe as an ‘obsession with authors, books, and words’. 43 For the film not only adapts Stoker’s narrative content to the screen, but it also evokes its epistolary narrative structure. The narrative of the first half of the film is propelled by characters as they record their perspective of events through diary entries, letters, and phonograph recordings. For instance, while Jonathan Harker (played by Keanu Reeves) is on his original mission to visit Count Dracula (Gary Oldman), his fiancée Mina (Winona Ryder) types an entry for her diary on a typewriter, a ‘ridiculous machine!’ according to her friend Lucy (Sadie Frost). As Mina’s voice-over narrates her entry, the camera captures in close-up the words as they are hammered onto the paper. Jonathan himself writes in his journal while en route to Transylvania. In another voice-over, Harker describes his journey, specifically the changing landscape and climate as he leaves the ‘civilized’ West and enters the mysterious new land. Accompanying this voice-over description is the visible page of the journal. Harker’s diary looms large on the screen, engulfing the frame while a miniature steam train chugs its way seemingly across the top of Harker’s diary, the shadow of its voluminous smoke obscuring some of his writing. The diary is held before the camera close enough that the spectator can read Harker’s cursive script and take in the fibrous texture of the paper while listening to Harker’s voice. In another shot, the camera adopts Harker’s perspective as he looks at a map while his voice over narration explains his geographic movement. But in a reverse shot of Harker’s face, the map’s contour lines seemingly press against Harker’s skin. Through the way that words, maps, and writing are woven into the fabric of the film—and indeed, at times are layered against the skin of its characters—Coppola explicitly acknowledges the ‘palimpsestuous’ nature of his adaptation. Christine Geraghty claims that moments such as these that layer different forms of media expression within the film invites spectators to ‘set 42 There are, however, some dramatic changes from Stoker’s novel, most notable the evocatively realized backstory to Count Dracula that contextualizes why his ‘love never dies’, a point to I flesh out later in this chapter. 43 Thomas Leitch, ‘Adaptation’, p. 112.

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one media experience against another’ in a ‘parallel shift in perception’.44 Although in the novel Jonathan briefly refers to taking photographs with his Kodak camera, 45 the birth of the cinema is not mentioned. Coppola, however, takes advantage of this absence by foregrounding not only the physical space of the turn-of-the-century cinematograph, but also by citing film history, specifically the tricks of the early cinema. Coppola’s Dracula foregrounds different forms of media to not only reference Stoker’s original narrative structure, or to allude to the novel’s numerous references to modern technological changes in recording and communication (Mina’s ‘ridiculous’ typewriter, the phonograph, the telegram). But further, I claim that Coppola foregrounds the cinema to self-reflexively emphasize Dracula’s status as an adaptation while celebrating the sensationalism of early cinema aesthetics. It is telling that when Dracula arrives in London from Transylvania, his first contact with the modern urban masses is evoked through the aesthetics of early cinema. After some grainy footage of newspaper headlines that detail an ‘escaped wolf’ from the zoo, an iris effect opens into a high-angled crane shot of a bustling London street. The noisy whirring of a projector clicks and clacks as the camera jerkily travels down to capture the people and horsedrawn carriages that hurry across the footpaths and cobblestoned street. Matching the frame-rate and image quality of early cinema, the figures on the crowded street move quickly while the image is coarse and grainy, dominated by grey. The sequence cuts between shots of the street’s movement and shots of Dracula as he walks among the Londoners, his mouth agog as he observes the street’s action. When the film first introduces Dracula, he takes the form of an elderly—and through his hairy palms, fingernails like nicotine-stained razors, and hair arranged into enormous twin buns, clearly monstrous—man. But he cuts a dashing figure in this sequence: youthful with cascading black curls of hair and a sprightly gait. The foregrounding of the cinema in this sequence, then, draws a comparison between Dracula’s rejuvenation to life and the spectacular animation of the cinema. Indeed, over the cranking of the projector, a man’s voice can be heard calling out to attract business for the early cinema. ‘See the amazing cinematograph!’ shouts the man, ‘The greatest attraction of the century! The new wonder of the world!’ Dracula shares this enthusiasm for the cinematograph when he visits it with Mina, watching an erotic trick film in which two women cavort on top of a man until they suddenly disappear and are replaced by 44 Christine Geraghty, ‘Foregrounding’, p. 95. 45 Bram Stoker, Dracula, p. 25.

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the man’s wife. ‘Astounding’, Dracula announces, ‘There are no limits to science’. Mina is less impressed and seems to judge the new technology for its indecency and appeal to the senses rather than the scientific mind. ‘How can you call this science?’ she asks, ‘Do you think Madame Curie would invite such comparisons?’ And even before she had seen the bawdy short film, Mina takes a moralistic position against the cinema. When Dracula discovers Mina on the street of London, he tries to talk to her by asking for directions to the new cinema, but Mina curtly cuts him off by telling him ‘If you’re looking for culture, visit a museum’. Elsaesser argues that Coppola’s self-reflexivity positions him within the ‘New Hollywood’ movement of the mid-1970s. Along with industrial changes in film marketing and distribution (such as the blockbuster) and aesthetic challenges to classical Hollywood style, New Hollywood filmmaking employed a ‘self-conscious use of old mythologies, genre stereotypes, and the history of the cinema itself’.46 Thus although Stoker’s name is foregrounded in the film’s title, Coppola’s New Hollywood thumbprint remains visible for Coppola not only parallels Dracula with the dawn of the cinema, but he also litters his mise en scène with allusions and visual quotations to early films of the cine-fantastic, such as La Belle et la Bête (Jean Cocteau, 1946), The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), and Murnau’s Nosferatu. Cinematic allusion is one means by which Coppola acknowledges a ‘knowing audience’, an audience that is aware that it is experiencing a work that has been adapted from an earlier source. 47 This explicit reach towards the spectator is important in the context of New Hollywood filmmaking: along with a self-reflexive intertextuality and new marketing and distribution strategies, New Hollywood filmmaking retooled classical Hollywood narrative and aesthetic conventions. Classical Hollywood film style is grounded in a three-act narrative structure, clear patterns of cause-and-effect and psychologicallydeveloped characters. As this narrative structure developed, so too did a system of aesthetic conventions to ensure the spectator’s clear understanding of causal and spatial relationships, such as deep focus, lighting designed for clear illumination, and continuity editing.48 Classical Hollywood style, then, emphasized unity and coherence. But, as Elsaesser argues, New Hollywood challenged the ‘spatio-temporal-specular’ conventions of classical Hollywood, and that rather than adhering to a regime that carefully constructs unity, coherence, and an ‘invisible’ spectator, Coppola invests his filmmaking 46 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Francis Ford’, p.195. 47 Linda Hutcheon, Theory of Adaptation, p. 120. 48 See David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, Classical Hollywood, pp. 265-328.

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with a ‘material density’.49 Elsaesser explains that describing the spectator’s experience via a model of ‘specularity’ inadequately captures the depth of the spectator’s experience, and rather suggests that a model that describes the spectator’s ‘engulfment’ could help describe how a ‘body-based pliability of the image might modify the terms of the viewer’s subject position’ (p. 202). If ‘specularity’ refers to a model of spectatorship that posits a voyeuristic and ‘invisible’ spectator, ‘engulfment’ evokes a fleshed out and corporealized spectator that actively responds using their full sensorium. Elsaesser’s spectatorial model of engulfment nicely parallels how Dyer describes Coppola’s Dracula as employing an aesthetic of ‘engorgement’.50 This can be attributed to the characters themselves, particularly Lucy who, transformed into a vampire, becomes ‘bloated with lust’ (p. 10). Lucy is entombed in her bridal gown (one of the drop-dead gorgeous designs by Eiko Ishioka), and its glittering white fabric cascades around her body—her head crowned by an ornate crest of white silk petals—while an elaborate ruff of jagged lace chokes her throat. Combined with her chalk-white skin that makes her look as if she was carved from marble, Lucy exudes a swollen hardness that seems to burst from the screen. When she raises her head to vomit a putrid stream of viscous blood (in another nod to The Exorcist) over the face of Professor Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins) the splatter seems to threaten the borders of the frame. But as Dyer points out, the film’s visual excess is not limited to the lusciously erotic or ludicrously bloody, but also the ‘fullness of the image [itself], bursting to the edge of the frame with thick colour and dense visual texture’ (p. 10). In the previous section I described how colour tinting in Nosferatu heightened the spectator’s affective engagement. But the affective power of colour certainly finds its limit point in Coppola’s Dracula. For example, the film’s prologue that develops Count Dracula’s backstory as Vlad the Impaler is filmed against a blood red sky that sears the retina. The same lurid hue is used during Jonathan’s journey to Transylvania, telegraphing danger and impending violence. Later, when Dracula has assumed the form of a wild beast, he spies Mina in a dark garden. As the camera zooms in on Mina’s shocked face, it appears as if her skin becomes translucent, and against the inky-black of night, neon shades of pink, violet, and red seemingly map out her beating heart and capillary system. The film’s prologue is one of Coppola’s clear deviations from the novel, inserting it to outline the origins of Count Dracula and his undying love 49 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Francis Ford’, pp. 202-203. 50 Richard Dyer, ‘Dracula’, p. 10.

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for his murdered wife. Although Coppola’s prologue adds little to the narrative (or indeed detracts from it, explaining gothic obsession as a story of reincarnation) it is visually striking, in a way that—quite literally—works to create the ‘dense visual texture’ that Dyer describes. The violence enacted on the bodies of soldiers in the prologue’s battle sequence is disguised in silhouette, featuring shadows that stab, hack, and impale each other before the neon sky. The sequence evokes the look of shadow puppets, a proto-cinematic form of entertainment (and one that is glimpsed again in the cinematograph). But beyond being just another self-reflexive reference to the history of cinema, Coppola’s use of shadow plays with the image’s depth so that the eye grazes across a violent dance of shadows. The colours and shadows in these examples illustrate how Coppola plays with depth and perspective. Although these shots seem to evoke a certain shallowness to the image (albeit a shallowness that is countered by a lurid sense of colour that seizes the spectator’s eye) at other times Coppola evokes visual texture by layering his mise en scène. In an early scene, Jonathan and Mina sit together on a stone bench in a lush garden and the camera slowly draws away from the couple as they kiss. As the camera pulls backwards the tail feathers of a peacock slowly fall in front of the camera like an embroidered curtain, so that the spectator is invited to peer through the indigo and green threads. When the eye of a peacock feather in centre frame, the shot dissolves into a train-mounted travelling shot as it rollicks through a tunnel that frames a glowing red ball of the sun, its shape matching the eye of the peacock feather. Therefore, not only does Coppola layer his mise en scène with a keen eye for depth—using objects and camera movement to trouble the distinction between foreground and background—but frequently dissolves between shots to add a further lush texture. A clear example (although, as will be seen, the image is anything but clear) is when Dracula and Mina drink absinthe in a salon. Dracula purrs to Mina that absinthe is ‘the aphrodisiac of the soul’, and as he pours the liquid over a sugar cube, the film mimics its hallucinogenic properties. Just as ‘the green fairy’ dissolves the cube of sugar, Coppola uses dissolves to layer shot upon shot: an eye becomes the rim of a glass; the label of the bottle blends into the pale green liquid as it drops from a spoon, enchantingly dripping, bubbling, and dancing before the spectator’s eyes. All the while chimes that sound like they are coming from a demented jewellery box tinkle a mysterious melody as Mina—and perhaps the spectator—succumbs to a trance. The film then performs another series of dissolves—a close-up of Dracula’s eye; a bubbling glass of absinthe that transforms into what look like blood

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cells—before settling into a two-shot of Mina and Dracula. However, although Mina’s face is held chokingly close to the camera in profile, Dracula’s face swims in and out of the black background, much less tangible than Mina’s as it is slightly transparent. Not only does the shot capture Dracula’s ephemeral intangibility and the way that he is seemingly able to crawl into Mina’s mind, the incredibly textured sequence troubles the spectator’s sure grasp of the image, inviting the eye to brush across the image. Previously this chapter drew on Dyer’s analysis that suggested that Coppola’s images ‘[burst] to the edge of the frame’ (my emphasis), such as these sequences that have layered textural depth. However, at other times Coppola designs his shots to seemingly burst out of the frame and toward the spectator. For example, the lunatic Renfield (Tom Waits) is introduced in a high-angle shot that peers down at him as he crouches in a corner of his padded cell in the asylum. As Renfield gasps his devotion to his ‘master’ and desire for eternal life in a dry whisper he rises to stand in his cell, and the camera very slightly moves backwards and upwards. The combination of figural and camera movement (along with its angle) is unsettling as it warps the spectator’s perspective, allowing Renfield to seemingly rise like a giant in the confines of his cell. This play with perspective is enhanced when Renfield reaches off-screen for a fly. His hand slowly comes out towards the camera before finally exiting the frame. This gesture lends a stereoscopic quality to the shot, as if his hand almost emerges from the screen to touch the spectator. After placing the fly in his mouth, Renfield again sits down in his cell, but the camera remains still, and Renfield sinks deeper and deeper within the shadows of the frame, rupturing the spectator’s expectations of the spatial dimensions. So far this section has explored how Coppola uses colour, depth, texture, and other optical effects as strategies to ‘engulf’ the spectator. Although these techniques are overt, Coppola also uses a more subtle technique to undermine the spectator’s clear visual grasp of the film. If, as Elsaesser suggests, the ‘specularity’ model of spectatorship was developed by classical Hollywood style such as continuity editing, it is little surprise that a model of ‘engulfment’ should subvert these very conventions. One unnerving example is the moment that Dracula lays his eyes on Mina as they are both walking on the busy London street. As earlier mentioned, the film replicates the look and feel of early cinema as Dracula parades along the street until he suddenly freezes in his tracks. He is positioned on the left-hand side of the frame and is filmed in a medium-long shot, although the top of his head is severed by the top of the frame. Dracula looks across the road, slightly to his right. The camera then cuts to what he is looking at: Mina walking on

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the other side of the street. However, she enters the shot from the frame’s right-hand side. The effect is subtle but disorientating as Dracula’s line of sight does not match Mina’s position and direction. Further destabilizing the editing of these two shots is that at this moment the film switches back into its ‘regular’ look, as if seeing Mina had jolted Dracula back to its senses. Elsaesser claims that moments that either exaggerate classical Hollywood conventions—such as the frequent graphic matches of usually circular shapes like the moon and, most frequently, the eye—or the conscious decision to subvert them are an ‘irritation’.51 But as Angela Ndalianis argues, the ‘refusal to respect the limits of the frame that contains the illusion’ is a feature of the baroque.52 Paralleling Elsaesser’s description of New Hollywood, Ndalianis suggests that post-classical filmmaking (along with industrial and economic transformations) developed what she describes as a neo-baroque aesthetic. Indeed, screen adaptation itself might be considered a neo-baroque practice as in the neo-baroque ‘closed forms are replaced by open structures that favor a dynamic and expanding polycentrism’ to invite seriality, intertextuality, and ‘cross-media extensions’ (p. 24, p. 41). But, importantly, the neo-baroque delights in spectacle, sensation, and the ‘perforation of the frame’ (p. 25). Special effects contribute to the neobaroque aesthetic as their overt appeal to the eye dissolves the boundary between spectator and spectacle. In doing so, the (neo-)baroque ‘[creates] the illusion of the merging of an artificial reality into the phenomenological space of the audience while simultaneously inviting the spectator to recognize this deception to marvel at the methods employed to construct it’ (p. 159). Thus the ‘virtuosity’ of the filmmaker—and their team of special effects artists—to command and create special effects becomes central to understanding the neo-baroque, with audiences encouraged to explicitly examine and admire the film’s technological construction, along with the blood, sweat, and tears that refined its artistry. This is certainly appropriate for the special effects in Coppola’s Dracula. Not only does the film self-reflexively refer to its nature as an adaptation or the history of the cinema, but it is also a museum of cinematic special effects. In the first instance, this is sewn into the narrative when Dracula and Mina visit the cinematograph where along with the spectacle of the moving image itself, proto-cinematic tricks—like shadow puppets and a Pepper’s Ghost—are on display. Coppola revisits these optical effects and updates them for his film: for instance, the prologue’s battle scene and the 51 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Francis Ford’, p. 203. 52 Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque, p. 25.

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way that Mina’s skin dissolves to reveal her arterial system are overt nods to these proto-cinematic special effects. By referring to these, Coppola parallels the spectator of his film with the early spectator whose ‘scopic pleasure’ vacillated between the thrill of sensation and a curiosity about the mechanisms of optical effects.53 This vacillation between curiosity and sensation is important as a key aspect of neo-baroque spectacle is that it is not concerned with maintaining the illusion of reality. Rather, the neo-baroque draws attention to itself as a construction, one that produces heightened sensory and emotional effects that redirect attention to the spectator’s body. Craig Barron, one of the special effects specialists on the film, explains how Roman Coppola (who was the director of visual effects) would ‘[talk] to us in terms of the emotions a shot makes you feel rather than adhering to realism’.54 Therefore, although Mina indicates her distaste for the sensational address of the new cinema, Coppola revels in it, appropriating the tricks of early cinema to affect the spectator. Trick photography, superimpositions, miniature models, and matte paintings craft a strange world that resists visual logic, but one that simultaneously seduces through its ornate beauty. Editing and cinematography conventions, too, invite the spectator to share in characters’ madness, delirium, and lust. Although Elsaesser points out that Coppola’s rejection of classical Hollywood conventions ‘irritates’ the eye, this is precisely the point. For although Coppola’s Dracula, like its literary original, is obsessed with (in)visibility and visual experience, the film’s lush imagery, texture, and palpable heat creates a dizzying and intoxicating experience that is grasped by the spectator’s full sensorium.

Conclusion: Out of Sight This chapter has argued that the ‘look’ of screen adaptations should not be disregarded, and that attending to an adaptation’s mise en scène—and optical effects wrought by cinematography and editing—reveals how critical insight into the dynamics of an adaptation can be woven within plain sight. Bram Stoker’s Dracula proved an apposite case study as, set against the technological and industrial upheaval of modernism, the novel foregrounds the fallibility of vision and rationality. Nosferatu cloaks its narrative in a rich visual texture that wove German Expressionist influences and optical 53 Tom Gunning, ‘Aesthetic’, pp. 121-124. 54 Quoted in Ron Magid, ‘Effects’, p. 59.

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and special effects that, like the ‘cinema of attractions’, demand to be seen, while the lurid neo-baroque aesthetic of Coppola’s Dracula—with its use of colour, special effects, depth and texture, and disruption of Hollywood conventions—demonstrate how Coppola ‘perforates’ the frame to engulf (to use a term that seems especially fitting in the case of Dracula) the spectator in a heightened sensory state. This point would be further developed by attending to the other sensory dimensions of these adaptations. I have (quite consciously) ‘overlooked’ how the creative use of sound further enriches Nosferatu and Coppola’s Dracula. Nosferatu uses a compelling underscore that not only expresses the experience of its characters but also shapes the spectator’s emotional response. Similarly, just as Coppola’s Dracula plays with optical illusions, stereoscopic depth, and trompe l’œil to trouble the spectator’s sure visual grasp, the film’s sound design similarly works to provoke affective responses. Indeed, the f ilm uses what could be described as a trompe l’oreille as sound effects trouble spatial dimensions. When Jonathan is exploring Dracula’s castle, for example, water can be heard dripping upwards, while the whispered voice of Mina passes through multiple audio channels—a literal ghost in the machine—around the spectator’s head. Attending to the adaptations’ use of sound would certainly enhance an analysis of how the f ilms evoke the tension between presence and tangibility and ghostly absence. The next chapter begins such a task, examining how sound, music, and the textures of the voice enrich an appreciation of film adaptation.

Works Cited Anonymous. ‘Nosferatu the Vampire’, Variety, 25 December 1929, p. 26+. Balázs, Béla. Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, ed. by Erica Carter. Trans. by Rodney Livingstone. New York: Berghahn, 2010. Barker, Jennifer. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley: U of California P, 2009. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. London: Routledge, 1985. Bowser, Eileen. The Transformation of Cinema 1907-1915. London: Simon and Schuster, 1990. Buchanan, Judith. ‘Literary Adaptation in the Silent Era’, in A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation, ed. by Deborah Cartmell (Malden: Blackwell, 2012), pp. 17-33.

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Buñuel, Luis. ‘Cinema, Instrument of Poetry’, in The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writing on the Cinema, ed. by Paul Hammond (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1991), pp. 117-121. Cartmell, Deborah. ‘100+ Years of Adaptations, or, Adaptation as the Art Form of Democracy’, in A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation, ed. by Deborah Cartmell (Malden: Blackwell, 2012), pp. 1-13. Christie, Ian. ‘The Visible and the Invisible: From “Tricks” to “Effects”’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 13.2 (2015), 106-112. Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 2001. Dyer, Richard. ‘Dracula and Desire’, Sight and Sound, 3.1 (1993), 8-12. Eisner, Lotte H. The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt. Trans. Roger Greaves. Berkeley: U of California P, 2008. Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Francis Ford Coppola and Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. by Steve Neale and Murray Smith (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 191-208. ——. ‘Six Degrees of Nosferatu’, Sight and Sound, 11.2 (2001), 12-15. Geraghty, Christine. ‘Foregrounding the Media: Atonement (2007) as an Adaptation’, Adaptation, 2.2 (2009), 91-109. Gunning, Tom. ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator’, in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. by Linda Williams (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1995), pp. 114-133. ——. ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, the Spectator, and the Avant-Garde’, in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. by Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker (London: BFI, 1999), pp. 56-62. ——. ‘The Intertextuality of Early Cinema: A Prologue to Fantômas’, in A Companion to Literature and Film, ed. by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 127-143. Harold, James. ‘The Value of Fidelity in Adaptation’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 58.1 (2018), 89-100. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. London: Routledge, 2006. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Jost, François. ‘The Look: From Film to Novel: An Essay in Comparative Narratology’, in A Companion to Literature and Film, ed. by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 71-80. Kaes, Anton. Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009.

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Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. Leitch, Thomas. ‘Adaptation Studies at a Crossroads’, Adaptation, 1.1 (2008), 63-77. ——. Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007. Luckhurst, Roger. ‘Introduction’, in Dracula by Bram Stoker (New York: Oxford UP, 2011), pp. vii-xxxii. Magid, Ron. ‘Effects Add Bite to Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, American Cinematographer, 73.12 (1992), 56-64. Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke UP, 2000. Mulvey, Laura. Death at 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion, 2006. Ndalianis, Angela. Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment Media. Cambridge: MIT P, 2004. Perez, Gilberto. The Material Ghost: Films and Their Mediums. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. ——. ‘Shadow and Substance: Murnau’s Nosferatu’, Sight and Sound, 3.36 (1967), 150-159. Pykett, Lyn. The ‘Improper Feminine’: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing. London: Routledge, 1992. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus. London: Penguin, 2007. Sobchack, Vivian. ‘Fleshing Out the Image: Phenomenology, Pedagogy, and Derek Jarman’s Blue’, in New Takes in Film-Philosophy, ed. by Havi Carel and Greg Tuck (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 191-206. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. Telotte, J. P. ‘German Expressionism’, in Traditions in World Cinema, ed. by Linda Badley, R. Barton Palmer, and Steven Jay Schneider (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006), pp. 15-29. Williams, Linda. ‘Corporealized Observers: Visual Pornographies and the “Carnal Density of Vision”’, in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. by Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995), pp. 3-42. Yumibe, Joshua. ‘“Harmonious Sensations of Sound by Means of Colors”: Vernacular Colour Abstractions in Silent Cinema’, Film History, 21 (2009), 164-176.

2.

Resonance and Reverberation: Sounding Out Screen Adaptation Abstract This chapter attends to the phenomenological quality of sound and how it contributes to the experience and appreciation of adaptation. Attending to an adaptation’s soundscape not only reveals how it faithfully ‘re-sounds’ its source novel through the use of dialogue, but also how an adaptation might use sound to be creatively divergent from its source. This chapter therefore not only examines how an adaptation’s non-diegetic score can smooth its narrative structure or give emotional and psychological insight into its characters. But further, this chapter also examines how the warped and uncanny use of the actor’s voice—or an extremely atonal soundscape and score—can palpably affect the spectator. In doing so, this chapter examines how sound—both ‘faithful’ and ‘unfaithful’ recording of its source—intersects with adaptations both ‘faithful’ and wonderfully ‘unfaithful’ to its source. Keywords: adaptation, phenomenology, sound, The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002), The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)

Prelude In the previous chapter, I examined how literary narratives can be brought to the screen in glorious and visually spectacular displays that resonate with the spectator. However, as Siegfried Kracauer explains, ‘our eyes cannot register a single object without our ears participating in the process’.1 In this chapter, then, I attend to how screen adaptations ‘resonate’ with the spectator in a more fundamental sense. As the etymology of ‘resonate’ is 1

Siegfried Kracauer, Theory, p. 134.

Richard, D.E., Film Phenomenology and Adaptation: Sensuous Elaboration. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463722100_ch02

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the Latin resonare, to re-sound, I will draw attention to how the audible dimension of screen adaptation quite literally resonates and reverberates within the spectator. This chapter analyses how sound design strategies thicken our engagement with screen adaptations, from the voice in The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and music as an adaptive strategy in The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002) and Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013). Although this cluster of adaptations might appear disparate, they are united through their creative use of the voice, music, and the way in which they reveal the acoustic texture and density to what Béla Balázs describes as ‘the intimate whisperings of nature’.2 Attending to an adaptation’s soundscape not only reveals how it faithfully ‘re-sounds’ its source novel through the use of dialogue, but also how an adaptation might use sound to be creatively divergent from its source. This play between fidelity and wilful infidelity is particularly important, as an adaptation’s use of sound has been historically tied to questions of fidelity since the development of synchronized sound. As Deborah Cartmell argues, the presence of the spoken word stimulated fidelity criticism in the form of ‘word counting’: the amount of words that were included or excluded in comparison with its source,3 while Balázs warned that the sound film may be reduced to a ‘copying device’ if it merely spoke aloud novels or imitated theatrical productions. 4 So too did synchronized dialogue fuel medium specificity debates, with the literati and cinephiles alike protesting the incommensurability of literature and the screen, fuelling the ‘fear that a film could replace the book, or that the existence of the adaptation would be a threat to the reading of a novel or play, potentially obliterating […] literary value’.5 Therefore, although The Hours relatively maintains Michael Cunningham’s storyline and dialogue, this chapter is also keenly interested in how music can estrange an adaptation from its source. In doing so I also show support for Balázs’s desire for screen sound to move beyond the faithful reproduction of sound and to ‘[reveal] something hitherto hidden from our eyes—or ears’.6 Through the analysis of these case studies I argue that each foregrounds sound, employing it to not only revel in the power and pleasure of screen sound, but to also dynamize and enrich their source material in creative ways. 2 3 4 5 6

Béla Balázs, Theory, p. 197. Deborah Cartmell, ‘Sound’, p. 80. Béla Balázs, Theory, p. 197. Deborah Cartmell, Adaptations, p. 5. Béla Balázs, Theory, p. 197.

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Acoustic Shape and the Sonic Wizardry of Screen Sound But to say that sound is ‘foregrounded’ is an inadequate way to describe the structure of aural perception as it is a misleading description of the shape and structure of acoustic experience. To bring something to the ‘fore’ means to bring it forward, to place it in front of that which lies behind. Describing something as having a foreground and background might be appropriate for things that appear in a visual field: even if peering through the ‘corners’ of the eye, vision is resolutely unidirectional so that only turning the head—or using a mirror—allows one to behold what stands to the side or behind. However, hearing is not unidirectional, but ‘omnidirectional’, as Michel Chion points out.7 Phenomenologist Don Ihde describes that hearing possesses a different ‘field-shape’ that ‘does not appear so restricted to a forward orientation. As a field-shape I may hear all around me, or, as a field-shape, sound surrounds me in my embodied positionality’.8 Mark Kerins has beautifully documented how the development of 5.1 channel Dolby Digital Surround Sound (DSS) in the 1990s dramatically altered the cinematic soundscape. Not only could sound mixers more accurately control the volume of sound, but they also could layer sounds with greater flexibility and control.9 In doing so, Dolby DSS enabled the diegetic and auditorium space to be f illed with a depth and breadth of sound that more fully replicates the ‘f ield-shape’ of everyday acoustic perception. For instance, early in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (David Yates, 2009), a group of Death Eaters—the henchmen of the fascist wizard Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes)—unleash an act of terror on London’s Millennium Bridge. The Death Eaters take the form of long plumes of dense black smoke, and they whip and whirl through the air like tornados. But the Death Eaters’ movement is not contained to the screen. At times the violent plumes exit the screen’s frame and seem to fly around the audience’s head as the sound of their movement—a mélange of flapping rags, and somewhat metallic-sounding whooshing air—passes from channel to channel. The Death Eaters provide an elegant (albeit sinister) example of Vivian Sobchack’s description of how Dolby technology can ‘describe’ or ‘map’ space as sound effects travel from channel to channel.10 7 8 9 10

Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, p. 33. Don Ihde, Listening, p. 75. Mark Kerins, Beyond Dolby, pp. 53-65. Vivian Sobchack, ‘When the Ear Dreams’, p. 9.

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Kerins claims that sound mixers are somewhat limited by the spectator’s capacity for aural perception in that, for acoustic clarity, mixers must only ‘shape their soundtracks to focus audience attention on only two (or at most three) perceived aural objects at a time’.11 However, the density of layered sound can be effectively used for physiological and emotional stimulation and manipulation. Therefore, not only could the advances of Dolby DSS faithfully replicate screen sound or the phenomenological structure of hearing, but the technology also rendered acoustic phenomena. Chion evokes Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology when he describes how the senses are not isolated but rather inform one another (for instance the sound of a speeding truck that is not only heard but felt in the legs). He calls this the ‘global impact of the event […] a perceptual “lump”’.12 To ‘render’ sound in this manner is to impart the lived experience of sound by using ‘materializing sound indices’ that ‘pull the scene towards the material and the concrete’.13 Staying within the Potterverse, David Yates’s 2007 adaptation of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix illustrates Dolby DSS’s technological wizardry, with a particular eye (or, more appropriately, ear) for how the adaptation’s sonic design enriches its experience as an adaptation. The f ifth in Rowling’s magical series, Phoenix is a turning point in the narrative. Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) has matured: not only has he gone through the life-changing process of puberty, but he has also been affected by death, particularly the murder of his godfather Sirius Black (Gary Oldman). But also, the end of Phoenix sees the return of the fascist Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), and, in the film’s climax, he is confronted by Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) in a battle of magical power. As Harry Potter is about a parallel world of witchcraft and enchantment, magic ripples throughout all its adaptations. Usually these sequences are accompanied by a sense of childlike wonder, with Harry’s awe at magic as he peers through his glasses being mirrored by spectators who peer at the screen, enchanted by the film’s magical special effects. The battle between Voldemort and Dumbledore is certainly spectacular. However, unlike previous magical tricks that tend to emphasize visual illusions—such as levitations, transformations, and flight—the intense force of magic is greatly enhanced by sound. The two wizards fire off competing blasts of magical energy that fuse together in a long rope of blinding light that crackles 11 Mark Kerins, Beyond Dolby, p. 68. 12 Michel Chion, ‘Quiet’, p. 71. 13 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, pp. 112-114.

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like raw electricity. At times Voldemort flicks his wand to the side, sending pulsing magic off-screen. As he does so, the electric sounds move around the speakers, as if the blasts of energy have perforated the screen to enter the spectator’s space. Cutting back to Dumbledore, the sizzling sounds of magic again travel through the speakers, but this time towards the screen as the spells zip past Dumbledore to shatter and explode the tiles behind him. This short but powerful sequence offers an evocative example of how the adaptation uses Dolby DSS to great effect as the sounds of magic are layered into a thick sonic texture that snarls, crackles, and hums like a livewire. But sound also effectively maps space, rupturing the distinction between the spaces of the diegesis and the spectator as the two wizards blast and block bolts of magic that seem to whizz around the spectator. Further, sound not only maps these exterior spaces, but also can construct personal ‘interior’ space, such as when Voldemort controls Harry’s mind. As he probes Harry’s consciousness, Voldemort’s slithering voice seems to take over all the sound channels, so that his words fill the space that surrounds the spectator’s head. Just as Voldemort enters Harry’s mind, the use of Dolby ensures that Voldemort’s voice works its way into ours, while his serpentine diction sneaks under the skin. Harry is stunned to be in the presence of such magic. The novel describes how ‘the force of the [spells]’ was such that he ‘felt the hair stand on end as it passed’.14 And the adaptation’s sound here certainly wields a tactile force as the pulsing and crackling of electricity (and indeed, fluorescent light) seems to almost graze the skin. At one point, Voldemort throws a thick torrent of black magic at Dumbledore who blocks it with a force-field. However, the sound of the spell is still affective: a loud roar of static that is accented with a staccato pulsing that somewhat sickeningly sounds as if it is being tapped directly onto the eardrum. Indeed, also enhancing this is the look of the spell as its dense blackness ripples with shuddering static, much like the waves and lines that can appear in the vision of those that suffer migraines. But although the magic in this sequence is visually stunning, it is sound that expresses the wizards’ might. In sum, the sequence’s magical display certainly offers what Chion refers to as ‘a clump of sensations’ as soundwaves are visualized into light waves, but also are materialized into a tangible and visceral response that mirrors Harry’s embodied response.15 This brief analysis of Phoenix’s sound design reveals that sonic relations cannot be only considered in terms of a ‘foreground’ and a ‘background’. 14 J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, p. 718. 15 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, p. 112.

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Rather, the ‘f ield-shape’ of sound includes—and exceeds—depth and breadth, and importantly can establish (and rupture) spatial relationships between characters, their external space, their interior space, and the spectator. In doing so, a creative use of sound has the ability to further involve the audience in the adaptation’s storyworld, or foster character engagement. But Dolby is not—in the candid words of Chion—’Jesus Christ, dividing an era before from one after’, and the creative use of sound certainly exists beyond special sonic effects.16 Throughout this chapter, therefore, I explore the aesthetic function of voice and music to argue that screen adaptation has adopted a variety of sonic techniques to, as Rudolf Arnheim puts it, ‘interpret, to enrich, to make more tangible’ their literary source.17

Listening to the Voice’s ‘Acoustic, Sensuous Impression’ In this section, I raise the value of attending to the expressive and textural qualities of the voice, or what Balázs has described as the ‘acoustic, sensuous impression’ of spoken words.18 I begin here for, as I previously noted, synchronized sound and audible dialogue were at first met with resistance, with the fear that its introduction would dilute both literary and film art. Balázs himself bemoaned that ‘the camera had just started to acquire sensitive nerves and an imagination […] The silent film was on its way to acquiring a psychological subtlety, a creative power almost unprecedented in the arts [but] the technical invention of the sound film burst upon the scene, with catastrophic force’.19 Film adaptations of literature were to bear the brunt of this criticism, as their emphasis on words and dialogue ‘made an adaptation more “literary” or “theatrical” and therefore less “filmic”’.20 Erwin Panofsky argued that films must avoid imitating the speech-based forms of the theatre or novel, and that films that expressed a character’s interiority by merely using words alone were both boring for their audience and an embarrassment for their filmmakers. Panofsky suggests the ‘principle of coexpressivity’ helps solve the perceived problems synchronized sound brought to the cinema, wherein the image and sound tracks must work in concert, not allowing sound (and particularly dialogue) to express more than 16 17 18 19 20

Michel Chion, ‘Quiet’, p. 72. Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art, p. 202. Béla Balázs, Theory, p. 195. Béla Balázs, Early Film, p. 183. Deborah Cartmell, ‘Sound’, p. 72.

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what the image reveals, and that if ‘a poetic emotion, a musical outburst, or a literary conceit […] [is to] entirely lose contact with visible movement, they strike the sensitive spectator as, literally, out of place’.21 For Panofsky, the body and voice of the actor must crucially maintain such expressive coherence. He illustrates this with an analysis of Greta Garbo’s performance in the early ‘talkie’ adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s tragic epic Anna Karenina (Clarence Brown, 1935), in which he claims that she is weak when is giving a large speech, but strong when: she silently moves along the platform of the railroad station while her despair takes shape in the consonance of her movement (and expression) with the movement of nocturnal space around her, filled with the real noises of the trains and imaginary sound of the ‘little men with the iron hammers’ that drives her, relentlessly and almost without her realizing it, under the wheels (p. 27).

Panofsky’s criticism does not claim that synchronized sound detracts from cinema’s expressive potential. The thorn in his side is when films rely on words: clunky chunks of dialogue that might suit Tolstoy’s novel but poorly translate to the screen. Indeed, his analysis of Anna Karenina provides an elegant example of Panofsky’s ‘principle of coexpressivity’ as Anna’s despair ‘takes shape in the consonance of her movement’ along with the soundscape. With her personal and social life in ruin, Anna’s depression and resolve to commit suicide is communicated through close-ups of Garbo’s face. Crucially though, sound heightens Anna’s emotional distress as the clanging of the train metaphorically stands in for her madness, increasing in pitch and frequency matching her resolve to throw herself under the train. But other critics praised Garbo’s vocal performance, indicating that the tonal quality of her voice not only captured and expressed Anna’s interiority, but also validated her acting talent and screen presence. One anonymous reviewer for Film Weekly writes that her voice did not disappoint: ‘[from] a few hundred hearts goes up the sigh which will be echoed […] by thousands, a sigh first of relief and then of delight, for we are listening to perhaps the most thrilling of all talkie voices’.22 The reviewer describes the tangible quality to Garbo’s voice as ‘Very low and somewhat husky it is, musical and enticing with its Swedish hardening of consonants […] it is a voice that grips you with its infinite expression, its range, its subtle modulation: above all, it 21 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Style’, pp. 21-22. 22 Anonymous, ‘Talkie’s’, p. 4.

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is the voice of the soiled angel the star is playing’ (p. 4). Garbo’s ‘hardening of consonants’ is thus an expressive and specifically aural strategy which can bring to life characters and their emotional states as they are translated to the screen. I argue that such ‘hardening of consonants’ (along with a range of other modulations that strengthen vocal performance) harmonizes with the ‘consonance […] of movement’ of both character and film. In sum, despite critics’ concerns about early sound adaptations being strangled by f idelity to dialogue, from the beginning early sound f ilms experimented with how sound could sensually render screen characters and stimulate the spectator’s engagement with them through the voice. The ‘acoustic, sensuous impression’ of the voice has attracted contemporary f ilm scholars who value it for its ability to craft spaces of cohesion and pleasure. Chion describes the voice as that which gives unity to the diegetic space, arguing that ‘the presence of a human voice structures the sonic space that contains it’23 Beyond structuring the ‘sonic space’, Mary Ann Doane claims that the voice anchors and unifies the ‘fantasmatic’ body of the cinema, drawing on psychoanalysis to explain how the voice not only lends the ‘consistency of the real’ but, also, stimulates pleasure through its ‘singularity and stability’.24 But rather than this psychoanalytic approach to the voice’s pleasure, this book argues that the voice’s ‘acoustic, sensuous impression’ is a site of phenomenological pleasure. Just as some actors are visually alluring by being particularly photogenic, we might also say that voices can be alluringly phonogenic, like how Holly Hunter plucks and twangs at her dialogue, or the way that Jodie Foster’s gravelly rasp seems to somehow warm her words. But phonogenie does not only refer to voices that sound beautiful or appealing. One of the weaknesses of a psychoanalytic approach is that it values coherent voices that, according to Doane, cohesively stitch together the bodies of character, actor, and spectator. But some of the most pleasurable and memorable voices in the cinema are those that actively seek to disrupt the supposed ‘singularity and stability’ of the voice. For instance, Chion argues that the affective power of the acousmêtre ‘truly allows sound to reveal itself in all its dimensions’. 25 Particularly signif icant for the voice, the acousmêtre is sound not attributed to a body on the screen, a ‘talking and acting shadow’.26 The acousmêtre appears in many genres, such as films that have 23 24 25 26

Michel Chion, Voice, p. 5. Mary Ann Doane, ‘Voice’, pp. 34-45. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, p. 31. Michel Chion, Voice, p. 21.

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an off-screen narrator, like the ‘sententious […] swollen’ voices that narrate the impending doom of characters in films noir, 27 or in documentaries. Filmmakers might select their narrator’s voice not only for its ability to communicate fact, but how that voice’s textural qualities add extra layers of meaning, such as Morgan Freeman providing his distinctive vocals to the English dub of March of the Penguins (Luc Jacquet, 2005). Sensuously alluring in its warm and worn richness, Freeman’s bass voice is comforting and trustworthy. But the acousmêtre can also be estranged through dubbing and technological manipulation, such as its use in the transformation of innocent Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) in The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973). After being possessed by the demon Pazuzu, Regan gradually transforms from a wholesome and loving child with shiny bangs and rosy cheeks into a monstrous, vile, and homicidal beast that is in serious need of a good shampoo. Although the spectator might be horrified when her head spins—bones and ligaments cracking—the stagnant rasp of her changed voice (dubbed by Mercedes McCambridge) is as shocking as the foul language (and the thickly viscous green bile) she spits. As Chion suggests, the way that Friedkin dubs Regan’s voice ruptures any sense of the voice constructing a cohesive and unified space, revealing how the ‘cinematic voice is “stuck on” to the cinematic body’, denaturalizing the voice as ‘oozing from the body on its own’.28 Attuning to The Exorcist’s excruciating sound and oozing voice reveals it not only as a masterwork of horror cinema, but also its importance as an adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel. Blatty’s novel is decidedly intermedial: beyond the way that Chris MacNeil (played in the film by Ellen Burstyn) is a film star, or the way that Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller) is frequently described as looking like Marlon Brando, the cinema’s influence is clear in his prose. At times Blatty evokes the cinema in his descriptions, so that the reader imagines the shocking events on the page as if they were explicitly being projected on a screen. For instance, describing Chris watching one of Regan’s fits of possession, Blatty writes: Chris slapped at the light switch. Turned. Saw grainy, flickering film of a slow-motion nightmare: Regan and the doctors writing on the bed in a tangle of shifting arms and legs, in a melee of grimaces, gasps, and curses, and the howling and the yelping and the hideous laughter, with Regan oinking, Regan neighing, then the film racing faster and […] she 27 Mary Ann Doane, ‘Voice’, p. 41. 28 Michel Chion, Voice, p. 164.

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wrenched up a keening shriek of terror torn raw and bloody from the base of her spine.29

Although this passage clearly evokes the flickering shadows of German Expressionism, it also testifies to how Blatty crafts an evocative soundscape for the reader. For example, when Pazuzu begins to possess Regan, it makes a knocking sound like ‘Alien code, tapped out by a dead man’ (p. 12), or how when Regan licks her cracked lips it makes a sound like a ‘hand smoothing crumpled parchment’ (p. 339). Curiously, both these examples gesture to sound’s tactile quality. Indeed, in the novel Chris reflects on the feeling of sound (and, conversely, silence) when she realizes that she feels ‘the silence […] Something in the house. A tension. A gradual thickening of the air. A pulsing, like energies slowly building up’ (pp. 335-336). It is unsurprising, then, that Friedkin invested much time and money in crafting the soundscape for his adaptation. As Jay Beck has astutely noted, Friedkin is keenly interested in the ‘pure physical stimulation of his audience’, and is quoted as explaining that audiences ‘want to see movies because they want to be moved viscerally […] I am interested in gut level reaction. What I’m interested in is an audience in the palm of my hand’.30 To evoke how the demon Pazuzu ‘thickens’ the air to stimulate a ‘gut level’ response from his audience, Friedkin employed horrific sound effects, like the eerie scratchings that haunt the MacNeil house that were designed to sound like ‘tiny claws scratching at the edge of the galaxy’ (p. 184). But further, Friedkin perverts sound design conventions, blurring the distinction between dialogue, sound effects, and music to further unsettle the audience. As Beck puts it, The Exorcist’s music functions ‘on the level of liminality, being either barely perceptible or indistinguishable from general background sounds’ (p. 183). The Exorcist opens with a slow tracking shot of the MacNeil’s house before dissolving into a close-up of a statue of the Virgin Mary. But adding to the unease of the creeping cinematography is a creepy musical score. But it would be difficult to describe this as music per se: the soundtrack slowly swells with a hollow ringing sound, while what sounds like mechanical strings build into a scratchy crescendo. The film then moves to Iraq where Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) discovers a figurine of Pazuzu and visits a shrine to the demon. The sound effects in this opening sequence are loud and obtrusive: the rhythmic clanging of the metalworkers, dogs that snarl in fight, the clatter and cries of the bazaar. As Merrin gazes 29 William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist, p. 143. 30 Jay Beck, Designing Sound, p. 180.

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at a statue of Pazuzu in the Iraqi desert, sounds are increasingly layered with violently growling dogs and sand-blasting wind mixed to sound like a demonic sigh as a thicket of frenzied high-pitched strings scream. The image, too, is layered, with a series of dissolves—Father Merrin and Pazuzu, a bloody sunset, and the street of Georgetown—effectively communicating the poisoned atmosphere and impending doom. But while the film’s use of warped and weird sound effects and droning music is certainly evocative, its estrangement of the voice certainly horrifies. It was important to make Regan’s voice as hideous as possible considering that her changed voice one of the key indicators of her possession. The novel frequently describes Regan’s voice in horrific detail. In one of the most disturbing moments of The Exorcist, Chris discovers Regan masturbating with a crucifix, and the novel describes Regan’s screams as a ‘piercing cry of terror turned to a guttural, yelping laugh of malevolent spite and rage triumphant while she thrust down the crucifix into her vagina and began to masturbate ferociously, roaring in that deep, coarse, deafening voice […] “Let Jesus fuck you!”’.31 To add to the horror of the obscene language (and action) of this sequence in the adaptation, sound engineer Chris Newman explains in the documentary The Fear of God (Mark Kermode, 1998) that Friedkin wanted Regan’s ‘voice to sound like [a] Hieronymus Bosch’ painting, something McCambridge achieved by using the ‘thickness’ of her voice to give her dialogue a strangely atonal and almost metallic texture. As Friedkin explains in the documentary, helped by a diet of raw eggs, cigarettes, and alcohol, ‘the most curious sounds would happen in her throat. Double and triple sounds would emerge at once’. For some though, the rupture between Regan’s body and her voice was too much. For instance, Michael Dempsey in his review of the film claims that McCambridge’s dubbed voice transforms Blair’s ‘charming’ performance ‘into a film technician’s Frankenstein’.32 Indeed, Beck suggests (with a touch of irony) that Friedkin loses his own ‘voice’, not only in terms of being a rather faithful adaptation of Blatty’s novel, but in his extravagant use of optical— and sonic—special effects. Evoking the criticism levelled at optical special effects, Beck laments that Friedkin’s sonic sound effects—although creative and diverse—are too overt, and therefore do not satisfactorily integrate within the film’s overall narrative. Beck argues that Regan’s dubbed voice is the most ‘unsubtle’ sound effect, and that it ‘introduces a highly conflicted element into the film: a deliberate break with the ontological nature of 31 William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist, p. 215. 32 Michael Dempsey, ‘The Exorcist’, p. 62.

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sound’ that pulls spectators from their immersion.33 But Beck’s criticism seems to ignore how Friedkin’s aim is that very rupture: in unsettling sound conventions for the cinematic body in general, and estranging the voice from the performing body in particular, The Exorcist unsettles the spectator’s body too, heightening the film’s physiological and emotional power. Beyond its suitability for the horror genre, Friedkin’s strange use of sound—and his desire to evoke the sonorous world of Blatty’s novel—more broadly holds interesting promise for adaptation studies more broadly. Curiously, such sonic play reconciles with Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov’s political manifesto of screen sound, and how it intersects with questions of adaptation and cinematic art. While the Soviets championed cinema’s affective power for political purpose, they lamented the development of synchronized sound. They argued that it weakened the cinema’s ‘textural possibilities’, and would only lead to ‘intensify its unimaginative use’ for bourgeois narrative film, particularly those based on esteemed literature.34 Just as the Soviets favoured sound that countered or challenged sound conventions, Kracauer desired that speech should be ‘undermined from within’ and that emphasis should ‘shift […] from the meanings of speech to its material qualities’.35 By estranging and detaching the voice from a body seen on the screen, the acousmêtre and other audio techniques bring spectators back to their own bodies, as they respond to the invisible contours of the voice. But while frequently articulated by acousmatic sound, the voice in all its manifestations is a powerful means of ‘corporeal implication’ the way that ‘we feel in our body the vibration of the body of the other’.36 This ability to capture and project a character, allowing it to resonate beyond the confines of the screen and to directly engage the spectator’s body, is a dimension of adaptation theory that needs to be further fleshed out.

Heart of Glass: Rendering the Sounds of Depression in The Hours Although the previous section emphasized how attending to the voice and vocal performance enhances an appreciation of The Exorcist as an adaptation, its music certainly adds another layer to its aesthetic texture. Indeed, one of 33 34 35 36

Jay Beck, Designing Sound, p. 186. Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov, ‘Statement on Sound’, p. 316. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory, pp. 107-109. Michel Chion, Voice, p. 51.

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the eerie aspects of the film is its lack of music. In core sequences—such as Regan’s exorcism—there is no music to guide the spectator’s response, and moments of extreme loudness (screaming, yelling, smashing, and wailing) are contrasted with vast pockets of aching silence. But at times the film’s score creeps in—a scratching of strings that seem to worry at the edges of the diegetic world, so that they too sound like ‘tiny claws scratching at the edge of the galaxy’ to recall Friedkin’s description of the sounds of the attic’s ‘rats’ from the previous section. This section, therefore, further questions the relation between screen music as a particular strategy of adaptation. Much wonderful research has already investigated the history, philosophy, and aesthetics of screen music. Just as the classical conventions of classical Hollywood realism demand discrete editing, unobtrusive lighting design, and naturalistic performances that enhance the spectator’s absorption into the diegetic space through the invisibility of the apparatus, Claudia Gorbman argues that film music hinges on its inaudibility. By this, Gorbman describes how film music surrounds spectators in a ‘bath or gel of affect’, its goal to ‘render the individual an untroublesome viewing subject: less critical, less “awake”’.37 However, despite describing film music as a ‘bath or gel of affect’, Gorbman does not fully investigate how the affective dimension of film music stimulates the spectator’s response to and interpretation of film narrative. Rather, Gorbman’s psychoanalytic approach presents film music’s affect as an anaesthetic, a ‘hypnotic voice bidding the spectator to believe, focus, behold, identify, consume’ (p. 69). More recently, however, cognitive approaches reject psychoanalysis’s foregrounding of the ‘hypnotic’ effect of film music, and how it makes the spectator ‘less critical’ and ‘untroublesome’, as Gorbman suggests. As Jeff Smith has noted, rather than spectators existing as a ‘passive receptacle’ for music (and its ideological meaning), a cognitive approach to music explicitly attends to the spectator’s mental experience that processes how music conveys ‘setting, character, and point of view’.38 Although Noël Carroll uses similar language to Gorbman in describing film music, such as how it ‘saturates the scene expressively’ and that ‘music gives the filmmaker an especially direct and immediate means for assuring that the audience is matching the correct expressive quality with the action at hand’, he emphasizes the spectator’s autonomous cognition.39 Carroll 37 Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, p. 5. 38 Jeff Smith, ‘Unheard Melodies?’, pp. 239-240. 39 Noël Carroll, Theorizing, p. 143.

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is particularly engaged with the function of what he terms ‘modifying music’, whereby the expressive or tonal qualities of f ilm music work to actively shape the audience’s response to characters, actions, and sequences. Film music may either enhance or—quite literally—underscore its imagery, or music may contradict what is visible on screen to create tension through its juxtaposition. Furthermore, music may or may not express the psychological disposition of a character. Therefore, rather than a somnambulant spectator—hypnotized and enchanted by the music—film music actively engages the spectator’s cognition, directing and clarifying their interpretation. One of the most fascinating functions of f ilm music is its ability to create mood that helps shape the audience’s interpretation of the narrative. Unlike emotions, which are causal and object-directed, moods are more general and pervasive and need not be tied to a specific object. For cognitivist theorists like Carl Plantinga, literature and film not only evoke a mood in the audience (such as apprehension or unease) but can also express an ‘art mood’ which is its ‘affective character or tone […] that together characterize the overall experience of the work’. 40 Art moods are therefore important as they lead to more complex cognitive engagement: by creating an evocative ‘art mood’ through formal techniques such as lighting, colour, cinematography, and crucially music, f ilmmakers can quickly establish narrative expectations and cue us for stronger emotional attachments and more complex reasoning. Central to Plantinga’s analysis is the relationship between art mood, human mood, and perception, as moods ‘pervade perception rather than just focus it […] Moods are like frames of mind, setting a broad agenda’, and that moods are ‘ways of seeing, ways of experiencing, ways of perceiving’ (pp. 468-469). Therefore, by carefully crafting art mood (particularly through music) fictional narratives offer us the ability to share in the perspectives of others. Chapter Four more fully explore the vital possibilities of mood, imagination, and adaptation, but this chapter explicitly asks: how does screen music create an ‘art mood’ that guides its audience’s perception, and what is the relationship between screen music’s ‘modifying’ value and adaptation? Indeed, although theoretical approaches to screen music are diverse, it has yet to be thoroughly integrated within the specific discipline of adaptation studies. 41 But as Glenn Jellenik attests, attending to an adaptation’s score 40 Carl Plantinga, ‘Art’, p. 461. 41 For some studies that do engage with adaptation and music see Annette Davison, ‘High Fidelity?’, pp. 212-225, or Christa Albrecht-Crane’s argument that the aesthetic structure of

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not only ‘reflects’ the process of adaptation as an audio-visual translation of literary material but also ‘affects it, and at times acts as one of its prime engines’.42 To demonstrate this, I will illustrate this claim with an analysis of Phillip Glass’s score for The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002) and how it shapes the film as an adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s 1998 novel. Following a day in the lives of three women The Hours, at its heart, is about depression. Virginia Woolf (played in the f ilm by Nicole Kidman) struggles with both the writing of her novel, Mrs. Dalloway, and her mental health as she contemplates death; Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), a pregnant mid-century housewife in Los Angeles who, while reading Mrs. Dalloway, dreams about committing suicide; and Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep), a contemporary ‘Mrs. Dalloway’, who is organizing a party for her friend Richard (Ed Harris), a poet suffering AIDS in millennial New York City. By the end of The Hours, Richard decides to commit suicide, and his death forces Clarissa—and Laura, revealed to be his mother—to confront the value life holds in its cumulative movement of both grand and quiet moments. As an adaptation, then, The Hours is made more complex by the multilaminated surface of the novel itself: a textured mosaic of biographical detail and fictional extrapolation about Woolf’s eventual suicide, Cunningham’s general adaptation of Woolf’s modernist literary style in his rendering of consciousness and time, and his specific translation of Mrs. Dalloway into Clarissa ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ Vaughn. Rather following approaches to adaptation that foreground its textual layers,43 this chapter continues my concern with an adaptation’s textural layers, specifically how Glass’s score contributes to the adaptation and the spectator’s response. There is something delightfully circuitous about examining The Hours’s music—and how it contributes to a better understanding of the work as an adaptation—considering Cunningham’s self-professed approach to adapting Woolf’s story and style. As he puts it, he was not trying to rewrite or adapt Mrs. Dalloway, but, rather claims: ‘What I wanted to do was more akin to music, to jazz, whereby a musician will play improvisations on an existing piece of great music from the past—not to reinvent it […] but to both honour it and try to make another work of art out of an existing work of art’. 44 music itself can be adapted to the screen in her chapter ‘Lost Highway as Fugue: Adaptation of Musicality as Film’, pp. 244-262. 42 Glenn Jellenik, ‘Quiet’, p. 225. 43 See Peter Brooker, ‘Postmodern Adaptation’, pp. 114-118. 44 Quoted in James Schiff, ‘An Interview’, p. 113.

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Glass’s score certainly contributes to the artistic achievement of Daldry’s adaptation of the novel in a much more literal and profound sense. An analysis of the adaptation’s music firstly reveals how film music ‘rounds out the sharp edges, smooths roughnesses [sic], masks contradictions, and masks spatial or temporal discontinuity’ that manifest in the film’s braiding of three storylines that span time and space.45 Although at one point in the novel Richard explains to Clarissa that his illness makes him feel as if he has ‘fallen out of time’, 46 it is music that ensures that the spectator remains anchored in the film’s complex narration. But beyond its relationship to narrative clarity, 47 Glass’s score is instrumental to create a series of ‘art moods’ that range from despair to hope. Not only then does the use of film music provide codes and cues that ‘modify’ responses to narrative situations and characters, but in its crafting of mood, the film can more thoroughly express a particular kind of worldly experience. Thus, while Cunningham’s novel is certainly rich in literary allusion and expresses the effect of depression on the self and the family unit, the film adaptation expresses depression’s palpable affect. Glass is known for scores that hold a powerful emotional sway over the spectator in a variety of genres, from experimental documentaries like Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1982) to the most mainstream of narrative films (like Scott Hicks’s 2007 cookie-cutter romantic comedy No Reservations). As music critic Tim Page explains, Glass’s scores are: based on the extended repetition of brief, elegant, melodic fragments that weave in and out of an aural tapestry. Listening to this music is something like watching a challenging painting that initially appears static, but seems to metamorphose slowly as one concentrates […] the listener is immersed in a sonic weather that surrounds, twists, turns, develops. 48

Glass’s strength in creating ‘sonic weather’ allows him to command the mood that pervades the atmosphere of many of his films. And The Hours evocatively illustrates how spectators are ‘immersed’ in the ‘sonic weather’ of his scores. Befitting the narrative’s emphasis on depression and suicide, Glass’s score is sorrowful. Throaty violas swell and ebb and swell again to 45 Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, p. 59. 46 Michael Cunningham, The Hours, p. 62. 47 For an extended analysis of how this is achieved, see Deborah Crisp and Roger Hillman, ‘Chiming the Hours’, pp. 30-38. 48 Quoted in Michael Dempsey, ‘Qatsi Means Life’, p. 12.

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evoke the current of the river that drowns Virginia Woolf as it ripples and surges. But the repetitive structure of the music also captures the general affective structure of depression that is never fully held at bay and is prone to frequent recurrence. While Glass’s score transforms at times to match different points in the narrative, this core refrain emerges throughout the film, telling the spectator of the relentlessness of depression and the inevitability of Virginia’s death. Therefore, The Hours’s score cannot be dismissed as mere ‘background music’ as it is a constant and palpable force. Glass’s score not only bolsters the image but seems to overwhelm the acoustic register and is given visible presence on the screen. A remarkable sequence begins with Laura lying on a bed in a generic hotel. She has come to the hotel to kill herself; she stares at the bottles of pills neatly lined up next to her body and falls asleep. Cutting to a bird’s eye shot, the camera peers down at Laura as she sleeps, her hands holding her pregnant belly. A refrain of piano and violins swell on the soundtrack, and the intensity and repetition of the scales being played emphasizes Laura’s emotional turbulence. The way that the music expresses Laura’s emotional life—how she feels drowned by her domesticity—is also visually represented. Water, green and thick with seaweed, explodes from the base of her bed and fills the room. With a roar, waves envelop her body and she is submerged (the tonal quality of the water changes here as if we too are hearing the surging water from below its depths). But something curious happens with the score in this moment. As the music swells to match the flooding torrent of Laura’s imagination, the piano soars in a repeated series of trilling scales that almost seem to sparkle. The brightness of the score at this moment sharply contrasts with the dark imagery as Laura contemplates the suicide of Virginia and, indeed, her own. Michael LeBlanc points out the irony of this choice in his impressive musicological analysis of the film when he claims that ‘the strings at this moment become ecstatic, ascending an octave and a half in pitch as they emphatically climb the scale in triplets, signifying, in a moment of apparent death, instead a mobile potency climbing a signif icant expanse’. 49 But this choice makes quite literal sense when examining this moment as an adaptation of the novel. As Laura contemplates committing suicide in the bland hotel room, she thinks ‘It is a reckless, vertiginous thought, slightly disembodied […] She could decide to die. It is an abstract, shimmering notion, not particularly morbid’.50 Glass’s score thus translates Laura’s 49 Michael LeBlanc, ‘Melancholic Arrangements’, p. 131. 50 Michael Cunningham, The Hours, p. 151.

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‘abstract, shimmering’ thought of death—a prospect that Laura considers as having a ‘dreadful beauty’ (p. 151)—into a concrete musical equivalent. LeBlanc identifies a similar irony in musical choice that closes the film. He explains that although The Hours seemingly ends on a melancholy note with Virginia wading into the River Ouse, the soundtrack nonetheless leaves its audience in a more optimistic mood. Virginia wades into the river in a long shot where she pauses, neck-deep in the water, and looks ahead. As Glass’s score burbles and churns like the river, her voiceover reads the letter that she has left for her husband Leonard (Stephen Dillane): ‘to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is […] to love it for what it is. And then to put it away. Leonard, always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours’. But ‘the music comes alive with celebratory movement only after the image cuts to black’ as Glass’s score ‘opens up as the words end, filled with energy and confidence’.51 The score of The Hours therefore testifies to the complexity of film music, as not only is it used to smooth over editing transitions, as is common in narrative film, but further this score more specifically gives a sonic tangibility to the ripples of time that emerge as the film’s three storylines overlap like concentric waves. But Glass’s score also demonstrates the ‘modifying’ function of screen music. In creating ‘sonic weather’, Glass effectively creates a series of ‘art moods’ that invite spectators to share in the shifting emotional landscape of Virginia, Laura, and Clarissa. Film music therefore has ethical as well as aesthetic value in that it crafts a ‘way of being, a kind of recording of a possible conscious experience of the world, integrating perception, cognition, and feeling’ and makes it resonant for the spectator.52 In doing so, not only does the music of The Hours invite us to inhabit the experience of the depressed, but also is instrumental in expressing a world of hope and joy, and how—like Laura—one might always have a change of heart, and be opened to the possibilities of a bright future.

Alienated Language: Under the Skin While the music of The Hours occasionally draws attention to itself and is palpably felt, for the most part of the film it works beautifully but conservatively, ensuring continuity, unity, and ‘inaudibility’ to recall Gorbman. But now I approach the creative power of film music in screen adaptation by 51 Michael LeBlanc, ‘Melancholic Arrangements’, p. 107. 52 Carl Plantinga, ‘Art’, p. 470.

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turning to Mica Levi’s score for Under the Skin. This score is certainly not drawn from the Romantic tradition of screen music and is more obtrusive than many scores in narrative film, and indeed deliberately foregrounds its audibility. Combined with the film’s imagery that shifts between being indistinct and completely stark and is rich in abstract imagery and expressionist lighting, Under the Skin’s score approaches the hope held by Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov for a ‘hammer and tongs’ approach to film music, an ‘orchestral counterpoint of visual and sound images’ that could shock the spectator’s senses.53 I argue that Under the Skin’s unusual musical design has been effectively used by Glazer to, recalling Arnheim’s words, ‘interpret […] enrich […] make more tangible’ Michel Faber’s novel as its strange beauty gets under the audience’s skin. The novel follows the labour of Isserley, an alien creature living in Scotland, who collects humans (‘vodsels’) to be sent back to her home planet for food. Isserley has been surgically altered to look like a human, something she despises, finding her manufactured body hideous and painful, and she has learnt to speak by listening to the radio and television, which often leads to misunderstandings that Faber communicates by phonetically transcribing her victims’ Scottish brogue.54 But the novel’s clear narrative is elided in Glazer’s adaptation. Glazer himself prefers to call his film a ‘companion piece’ to the novel, rather than a ‘straight adaptation’.55 But, considering how central music is to his adaptation, I would argue that—like Cunningham’s approach to Mrs. Dalloway—it would be more appropriate to call Glazer’s film a ‘riff’ on Faber’s novel as, like a jazz musician, Glazer improvises and improves on Faber’s novel. Reflecting on the adaptation process, Glazer claims ‘I actually only read the novel once and then I worked with the impression it had left on me’ (n.p.). In his film, these impressions largely manifest in its incredible score in concert (and in discordance) with the image. The film lacks narrative clarity and character motivation is purposefully left ambiguous. In the film, the ‘Isserley’ character does not even have a name (even the end credits just list the actors with no connection to their characters, adding to the ambiguity). We are introduced to The Female56 (played by Scarlett Johansson) as she drags the body of her doppelgänger from a ditch, and—in what seems like a blindingly white void—strips the 53 Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov, ‘Statement on Sound’, p. 317. 54 Michel Faber, Under the Skin, p. 116. 55 Quoted in Anonymous, ‘Under His Skin’, n.p. 56 Although the character is not named in the film or credits, the IMDb has labelled Johansson’s character as ‘The Female’.

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body of its clothes. Following this is several sequences as she drives around the Scottish Highlands in a large white van, interacting with various men and trying to lure them into her car. If successful, the men suffer a poor fate. In a trance, the men follow her through the doorway of her house and into a black void where they both strip their clothes. The floor is like a black mirror, and although she can find sure footing, the men sink down as if they are sucked into a dark pool. Later, it is revealed that underneath the surface is what can only be described as a blue-tinged vat of alien goo that suspends—and perhaps sustains—the men until suddenly their bodies are jolted away, leaving their skin to crumple and float away like a plastic bag caught in the wind. Gradually though, The Female begins to question her nature: pricking her finger on a rose stem makes her bleed; a piece of cake makes her gag; she attempts to have sex but realizes that she physically cannot. She runs away into a forest, and, as it begins to snow, finds refuge in a cabin. She wakes up to find a man trying to rape her and, in the struggle, he rips off a part of her skin, revealing a glittering black form underneath. As she pulls off her human disguise, the man douses her in fuel and sets her on fire. As she burns in the snow, the final shot points up to the sky as the flakes of snow merge with ash. Under the Skin is a film about looking, and indeed a productive argument could be made about the film’s gender and sexual politics, performance of femininity, and surveillance.57 But despite this emphasis on the visual, Under the Skin foregrounds a certain inscrutability. This inscrutability is not limited to the way it is frequently hard to make sense of the image (such as the use of abstract shapes or lighting), or the way certain scenes are hard to watch (such the drowning of a man, wife, and dog, leaving a terrified baby screaming and ignored on the beach). Most inscrutable of all is The Female herself: for most of the film she is blank and disaffected, revealing little motivation or reason for her existence or behaviour, a remarkable shift from the novel’s narration that is an endless burble of Isserley’s thoughts as she gropes with her material existence. But music lends depth to both the shallowness of the image and The Female’s character. Some musical sequences in Under the Skin are perhaps examples of Balázs’s hope that the sound film would develop ‘pure’ music that would be complemented by the image (rather than vice versa), ‘[reflecting] ideas aroused by musical listening, the fantasies that scurry before us like clouds across the sky […] Not film with accompanying soundtrack, but 57 See Alicia Byrnes, ‘Johansson’s Real Performance’, pp. 29-35 and Ara Osterweil, ‘Under the Skin’, pp. 44-51.

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sound made visible in film’.58 This is not a purely conceptual pipe dream, as contemporary sound theorists similarly argue that sound wields a force over the image. In the introduction to this book, I mentioned how Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) crafts a peculiar texture of light and sound that makes palpable Philip K. Dick’s philosophical novel. Chion similarly argues that Scott uses the weight of light as it refracts through rain and mist to complement the soundtrack’s synth drone inviting a ‘feeling that this visual volubility, this luminous patterning is a transposition of sonic velocity into the order of the visible’.59 Similarly, Sobchack describes the possibility of the cinema’s ‘auditory imagination’ in which the cinema’s ‘unseen […] ear dreams [the] visible image’, allowing sound to emerge as a ‘visible being on the screen in a temporalized, reverberant, and echoed response to an inaugural sounding-out that calls the image forth in the formal vagueness of something much like a dream or memory’.60 Following Chion and Sobchack, I submit that Under the Skin uses ‘pure’ music, or such an ‘auditory imagination’ to bring ‘sonic velocity into the order of the visible’. But its first use resembles not so much a memory or dream but rather a nightmare, when it is used to underscore what happens to the bodies of The Female’s victims. After a man’s body ‘sheds’ its skin it floats in the pool of liquid; at this point the score is a textured clash of distorted and grating strings. Suddenly, the image cuts to what looks like a trough of churning water. Yet the image is indistinct: surrounded by blackness, the water swirls and gushes towards a narrow band of light in the middle of the screen. Both this band of light and the water itself is neon red, while the water moves in an unnatural way, as if it were flowing backwards. An alarm clangs, and as the water vanishes into the band of light, an incredibly high pitched and persistent beeping—like the final warning before the explosion of a bomb—pierces through the cacophony. The beeping alarm, clanging bells, and metallic chimes all overlay the grinding of the strings and we are offered a series of abstract shots, all of which are the same neon red: close-ups of swirling viscous fluid; two bars of neon that flare and spin; and a long thin band of red light that pulses and vibrates as the alarms drone on before the sound fades out. While these images can be interpreted (the shots vaguely resemble smeared slides of blood cells, flashing emergency lights, and the flat-lining of a heartbeat), the indistinct and abstract images ensure our response is primarily shaped by music. Indeed, the music seems 58 Béla Balázs, Early Film, pp. 202-203. 59 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, pp. 135-136. 60 Vivian Sobchack, ‘When the Ear Dreams’, pp. 5-6.

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to not only shapes our response, but it also appears as if the music is shaping the visible as the neon light swirls, flares, and vibrates. Not only does Under the Skin use music to add a sense of depth to its frequently indistinct and abstract imagery, but also adds depth to its inscrutable central character. The opening sequence provides a good example. Slowly, over a black screen, a low murmur emerges that increases in volume into a mechanical whirring. Rapid and staccato stringed instruments begin to scratch out a ‘tatata-tatata-tata-ta-ta’, becoming louder and more persistent like the chugging of an oncoming train. A tiny dot of white light appears in the middle of the black screen. The stringed instruments become more textured: a violin repeatedly scratches out a high note, as if a toddler was pressing a bow to strings for the first time. Abstract images soon appear: a doughnut shape, backlit by blue light; a glossy black sphere that slowly absorbs thick bands of grey and white like a black hole. Finally, the image cuts to an extreme close-up of an eye, and a voice can be heard sounding out the sounds of words. At first these are only phonetic tongue exercises (‘buh’, ‘nuh’, ‘djuh’) but slowly become more clearly defined words. Just as the tongue struggles around forming these words, the voice itself sounds strange, as if it has been recorded and projected on cheap equipment. Although the stuttering voice has not yet developed into language, the music is certainly expressive. This early layering of the estranged voice over the dynamic music attests to the way in which music—rather than dialogue—is the main means of communicating The Female’s interior life. Ryan Lattanzio, who reviewed Levi’s score, describes the music as ‘[sounding] more than a bit like far-flung Morse code from outer space’.61 This was the intention of Levi, who explains that ‘the music is supposed to express what [She] is feeling as she’s going through her story’.62 In doing so, Levi’s score exemplifies Sobchack’s hope for the science fiction film—seeing as they are frequently filled with fantastic beings and worlds—to creatively use music to replace an alien language, one that is ‘indecipherable in its particular meanings yet emotionally communicative. Or, one could envision altering the shape and instrumentation of music as to create a disorientating and dissonant physical and emotional response in the viewer’.63 Levi’s score certainly achieves these possibilities. Levi comments that ‘altering the shape and instrumentation’ of the music was certainly part of her design, ‘a mixture of bad recording technique, on my part, and not-fine 61 Ryan Lattanzio, ‘Mica Levi’, n.p. 62 Quoted in Nadia Khomami, ‘Making Music’, n.p. 63 Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space, p. 208.

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playing’ of instruments.64 As she puts it, the creative process in composing the score was to examine ‘the natural sound of an instrument to try and find something identifiably human in it, then slowing things down or changing the pitch of it to make it feel uncomfortable’.65 Classically trained on the viola, Levi is intimately familiar with the phenomenological dimensions of the sound it produces, describing the instrument as being ‘harmonic as they contain a lot of air. A viola is not solid, the sound it produces is like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy […] you get an airiness, and creepiness’ and that the ‘vibrato doesn’t ring out. It’s dead’.66 Levi tries to rationalize and explain her music, offering examples of the tangible things that the music might represent. For instance, she describes ‘a cymbal roll […] [that] acts as the cosmos and nature and the planet and beyond the planet and part of the unexplainable’ while a ‘seductive snake charmer-ish melody’ evokes an intoxicating perfume, and a ‘hocketed note is neurons connecting and the idea of energy being moved around’.67 But at times the music exceeds her ability to fix it with clear meaning, such as the ‘fragmented aleatoric stuff’ being ‘the complexity of out-of-space and aliens and energy that we can’t describe and that we don’t know about’ (n.p.). Although such music may be ‘indecipherable’, it certainly is nonetheless an emotionally powerful and persuasive force. Rather than intellectually looking for specific ‘meaning’ or clear interpretation, such music (through its incoherence, atonalism, and its general unpleasant assault on the listener’s ears) particularly reminds us of the importance of our phenomenological response as a means of grounding interpretation. Attending to the phenomenological quality of the music reveals how distorting human and natural sounds to make them sound ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘dead’ perfectly communicates to the audience the alien creature’s inhumanity and the threat she poses. Rather than trying to explain the noises as things ‘we can’t describe and that we don’t know about’, attending to the phenomenological dimensions of the ‘fragmented aleatoric stuff’ that Levi describes certainly does reveal meaning. The seemingly randomized staccato grinding on distorted violas creates a textured web that sounds very much like a hive of mechanical bees. Therefore, before we even meet The Female, or come to understand her mission, the droning music tells us to fear a swarming and predatory force. 64 65 66 67

Quoted in Ryan Lattanzio, ‘Mica Levi’, n.p. Quoted in Jayson Greene, ‘Mica Levi’, n.p. Quoted in Ryan Lattanzio, ‘Mica Levi’, n.p. Quoted in Lucy Jones, ‘Under the Skin’, n.p.

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Although it is not literally spelled out like the novel, The Female becomes more curious about her body and human nature. As Johansson’s physical performance is reserved—and as we are certainly not offered any dialogue that communicates her thoughts and feelings—this is largely communicated by music. After abandoning her job in luring men to their doom, The Female explores her sexuality with a man. Unlike the long shots that frame her body in the earlier sequences of seduction, the camera is tightly held on her face as she parts her lips for a kiss. Also, unlike the stark lighting of earlier sequences that illuminates Johansson’s body, the lighting is warm and the image is indistinct. But the music still warns of danger. A few textured chords of instruments soar up and down a scale of notes, clashing and discordant like an out of tune orchestra of bagpipes. The effect is disorientating and a bit sickening, like the effect of swelling and ebbing waves on a boat in stormy water. The notes continue as they kiss, but as the man tries to penetrate her (and as they both discover that he cannot), the strings hold a sustained high note, like an alarm. In the earlier seduction sequences, the beckoning of the strings and slow tapping of the drum are perversely hypnotic. Levi notes that she was inspired by ‘strip-club music’,68 while while Greene compares this music to the ‘processed strings’ that form the refrain from Britney Spears’s pop track ‘Toxic’.69 The way that these influences are stretched into something uncomfortable and disturbing effectively communicates the blurring of sexual allure and danger that The Female represents. Indeed, the distorted stringed instruments are a dark parody of the instrumental music that features in love scenes in more conventional romantic and dramatic films. Therefore, not only can this shift to a (slightly) more romantic style music be interpreted as The Female’s desire to experience human emotion and sensation, but, dissonant and disturbing, the music points to this as an impossibility. Sean Redmond has described the score in this moment of failed seduction as a ‘scrape of strings’ that is ‘as if the film itself is expressing its own melancholy and loss’.70 Indeed, Redmond argues that Under the Skin blooms like a ‘black dahlia’ to become a ‘perfect metaphoric and experiential exploration of [the] epidemic and epidermis of loneliness’, a skin that is shared by spectators through the sonic structure of the film (n.p.). Therefore, although the alien creature might be attractive to the eye, the soundscape of Under the Skin

68 Quoted in Ryan Lattanzio, ‘Mica Levi’, n.p. 69 Jayson Greene, ‘Mica Levi’, n.p. 70 Sean Redmond, ‘Sounding Loneliness’, n.p.

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repulses us by making the skin crawl and sickening the stomach, testifying to the way that we listen not only with the ears, but with the entire body.

Final Note This chapter has attended to sound’s phenomenological dimension and the role it plays in the experience and appreciation of adaptation. I argued that the textural qualities of the voice, music, and its visceral impact not only are used to interpret, enrich, and make more tangible their literary origins, but create a new artwork that not only delights the eye but also ensnares the ear. Not only does the voice and the actor’s vocal performance heighten realism and convey character, but I also explored how estranging the voice—through techniques such as the acousmêtre, manipulation, and dubbing—affects spectators. So too can music be affecting, cueing us to emotionally respond, while maintaining the narrative’s cohesion and continuity. But I also examined how the creative use of music could disrupt such cohesion, translating linguistic expression and dialogue into its own expressive language. This chapter argued that sound not only brings screen adaptations to life, but in specifically attuning our ears to its ‘acoustic, sensuous impression’ can open ‘a new sphere of experience’ that involves the whole sensorium.71 As demonstrated in my analysis of Under the Skin’s score, screen sound has an explicitly visceral dimension: a tactile force that gets under the skin and resonates from within. Screen adaptations not only appeal to the eyes and ears, but also the skin, bones, and guts and, in the next chapter, I draw on phenomenological film theory that proposes films as a haptic and tactile experience to further develop an embodied understanding of adaptation.

Works Cited Albrecht-Crane, Christa. ‘Lost Highway as Fugue: Adaptation of Musicality as Film’, in Adaptation Studies: New Directions, ed. by Christa Albrecht-Crane and Dennis Cutchins (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2010), pp. 244-262. Anonymous. ‘Talkie’s Most Thrilling Voice: Greta Garbo’s Great New Triumph’, Film Weekly, 12 April 1930, p. 4. 71 Béla Balázs, Early Film, p. 195, p. 184.

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——. ‘Under His Skin’, New Economist, 13 March 2014. (accessed 3 February 2016). Arnheim, Rudolf. Film as Art. Berkeley: U of California P, 1964. Balázs, Béla. Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, ed. by Erica Carter. Trans. by Rodney Livingstone. New York: Berghahn, 2010. ——. Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. by Edith Bone. New York: Dover, 1970. Beck, Jay. Designing Sound: Audiovisual Aesthetics in 1970s American Cinema. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2016. Blatty, William Peter. The Exorcist. New York: Harper, 1971. Brooker, Peter. ‘Postmodern Adaptation: Pastiche, Intertextuality and Refunctioning’, in The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, ed. by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 107-120. Byrnes, Alicia. ‘Johansson’s Real Performance: Documentary Style in Under the Skin’, Science Fiction Film and Television, 11.1 (2018), 29-35. Carroll, Noël. Theorizing the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Cartmell, Deborah. Adaptations in the Sound Era: 1927-37. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. ——. ‘Sound Adaptation: Sam Taylor’s The Taming of the Shrew’, in A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation, ed. by Deborah Cartmell (Malden: WileyBlackwell, 2012), pp. 70-83. Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. ——. ‘Quiet Revolution… And Rigid Stagnation’, trans. by Ben Brewster, October, 58 (1991), 69-80. —— . The Voice in Cinema, trans. by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. Crisp, Deborah and Roger Hillman. ‘Chiming the Hours: A Philip Glass Soundtrack’, Music and the Moving Image, 3.2 (2010), 30-38. Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. London: Harper, 2008. Davison, Annette. ‘High Fidelity? Music in Screen Adaptation’, in The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, ed. by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 212-225. Dempsey, Michael. ‘The Exorcist’, Film Quarterly, 27.4 (1974), 61-2. ——. ‘Quatsi Means Life: The Films of Godfrey Reggio’, Film Quarterly, 42.3 (1989), 2-12. Doane, Mary Ann. ‘The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space’, Yale French Studies, 60 (1980), 33-50.

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Eisenstein, Sergei, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov. ‘Statement on Sound’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford UP, 2009), pp. 315-317. Faber, Michel. Under the Skin. Edinburgh: Cannongate, 2011. Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. Greene, Jayson. ‘Mica Levi: Under the Skin OST’, Pitchfork, 17 April 2014. (accessed 29 July 2018). Ihde, Don. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. Albany: State U of New York P, 2007. Jellenik, Glenn. ‘Quiet, Music at Work: The Soundtrack and Adaptation’, in Adaptation Studies: New Approaches, ed. by Christa Albrecht-Crane and Dennis Cutchins (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2010), pp. 221-243. Jones, Lucy: ‘Under the Skin of Mica Levi’s Masterful Film’, NME, 17 March 2014. < https://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/qa-under-the-skin-of-mica-levismasterful-film-score-20635> (accessed 2 January 2016). Kerins, Mark. Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2011. Khomami, Nadia. ‘Making Music for Scarlett: How an Indie Composer Hits the Big Time’, Guardian, 27 December 2014. < https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/ dec/27/mica-levi-under-the-skin-scarlett-johansson> (accessed 3 June 2015). Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997. Lattanzio, Ryan. ‘Mica Levi on Why Composing Under the Skin Was “Really Mental”, Indiewire, 10 November 2014. < https://www.indiewire.com/2014/11/ mica-levi-on-why-composing-under-the-skin-was-really-mental-190232/> (accessed 15 June 2015). Leblanc, Michael. ‘Melancholic Arrangements: Music, Queer Melodrama, and the Seeds of Transformation in The Hours, Camera Obscura, 61.1 (2006), 105-145. Osterweil, Ara. ‘Under the Skin: The Perils of Becoming Female’, Film Quarterly, 67.4 (2014), 44-51. Panofsky, Erwin. ‘Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), pp. 15-32. Plantinga, Carl. ‘Art Moods and Human Moods in Narrative Cinema’, New Literary History, 43.3 (2012), 455-475. Redmond, Sean. ‘Sounding Loneliness in Under the Skin’, Senses of Cinema, 78 (2016), n.p.

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Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. London: Bloomsbury, 2004. Schiff, James. ‘An Interview with Michael Cunningham’, The Missouri Review, 26.2 (2003), 111-128. Smith, Jeff. ‘Unheard Melodies?: A Critique of Psychoanalytic Theories of Film Music’, in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. by David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1996), pp. 230-247. Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2001. ——. ‘When the Ear Dreams: Dolby Digital and the Imagination of Sound’, Film Quarterly, 58.4 (2005), 2-15.

3.

Textural Analysis: Touching Adaptation Abstract While the previous chapters have explored the materiality of adaptation and perception, this chapter explicitly examines how screen adaptations appeal to the spectator’s tactile sensitivity. This chapter draws on film-phenomenological approaches—such as Vivian Sobchack, Laura Marks, and Jennifer Barker—that characterize vision as being haptic and synaesthetic. Drawing on an analysis of Jane Campion’s film In the Cut (2002), I argue that the adaptation translates the novel’s protagonists tactile experience of her world and language into a haptic experience, in what I term the spectator’s ‘tactile orientation’. In doing so, this chapter further explores how not how adaptation should be considered as a textual layering of material, but also a textural layering that includes the spectator’s body in a moment of entanglement. Keywords: adaptation, phenomenology, touch, embodiment, tactile cinema, In the Cut (Jane Campion, 2002)

Introduction: Scratching the Surface Film Phenomenology and Adaptation: Sensuous Elaboration builds on the important work of Linda Hutcheon and Christine Geraghty who both define adaptation as a process of textual layering. As outlined in the introduction, Hutcheon claims that adaptations are ‘multilaminated’ palimpsests and that ‘we always feel its presence shadowing the one we are experiencing directly’.1 Building on Hutcheon’s work, Geraghty describes adaptation ‘in terms of layering and transparencies’, allowing the critic to attend to different ‘layers of different thickness and significance […] a thin, gauzy layer 1

Linda Hutcheon, Theory of Adaptation, p. 6.

Richard, D.E., Film Phenomenology and Adaptation: Sensuous Elaboration. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463722100_ch03

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allows for much to be seen through it, while a more opaque sheet attempts to substitute its own presence for the layers that lie behind’.2 This chapter extends the work of these critics and argues that not only do novel and film come into contact in a mosaic of layers, but the spectator’s body also forms another layer in the ‘multilaminated’ palimpsest. In doing so, I suggest that as the adaptation’s source material becomes kinetically brought to life on the screen, the spectator not so much ‘sees’ through the textual layers, but rather becomes entangled within a textural layering. Not content to merely peel back and reveal the textual layers that comprise an adaptation, this chapter rather argues that the cinema offers a tactile experience that can solicit the skin, beckon the muscles, and otherwise plunge the spectator into the textural density of the story world. This chapter contributes to a growing corpus of studies that explore the relationship between the sensing body and adaptation. Some scholars have explored the relationship between adaptation and affect3—that is, preconscious reflexes and physiological sensations—while others have turned to how in certain genres the body’s materiality becomes foregrounded in the experience adaptations, for instance in horror and pornography.4 But as Kyle Meikle puts it, ‘[a] phenomenology of adaptation is precisely what is missing from adaptation studies’ that would help to further make sense of the relationships that emerge between texts and bodies.5 Building on this foundation, this chapter explicitly draws on recent developments in phenomenological film criticism that suggest that the spectator’s full sensorium—including the sense of touch—is a vital site of meaning. I mobilize these theoretical approaches to embodied spectatorship in the analysis of this chapter’s major case study, Jane Campion’s In the Cut (2003), her adaptation of Susanna Moore’s novel of the same name. In the Cut provides an apposite case study for theorizing an embodied approach to adaptation as Campion’s cinema, as Kathleen McHugh argues, enjoys an ‘ongoing and focused exploration of the relationship between spoken or written words and moving images’, creatively employing screen aesthetics to ‘[convert] the abstraction of language and diagram into images, bodies, action’.6 But, in particular, In the Cut is a violent erotic thriller that pulses with a sensual heat that demands a physical response from the spectator’s body. 2 Christine Geraghty, Now a Major, p. 11, p. 195. 3 John Hodgkins, The Drift, p. 16; Anne Gjelsvik, ‘What Novels Can Tell’, pp. 245-264; Amanda Ruud, ‘Embodying Change’, pp. 247-255. 4 I.Q. Hunter, ‘Adaptation XXX’, pp. 424-440; Kyle Meikle, ‘Pornographic Adaptation’, pp. 123-140. 5 Kyle Meikle, ‘Pornographic Adaptation’, p. 127. 6 Kathleen McHugh, Jane Campion, p. 31.

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I argue that Campion invites the spectator’s tactile perception to closely align them with the sensual experience of her heroine. I term this ‘tactile orientation’ as a means of thinking beyond ‘focalization’, a term drawn from narrative theory that privileges optical point of view. Importantly, the narrative of In the Cut hinges on a moment of voyeurism. Yet, as I argue, In the Cut is a feminist revision of the erotic thriller, not only reversing the genre’s familiar gendered structure of a male voyeur who spies on the female body. But beyond this ‘re-vision’, I also suggest that In the Cut offers a ‘touching up’ of the genre, by employing haptic imagery to trouble vision and to invite a tactile sensitivity in the spectator. Besides this strategy, with its neo-noir iconography of mistaken identity, doubles, mirror images, and distorted points of view, In the Cut tells us to reject the rationality that has been traditionally associated with vision, and to embrace a tactile way of knowing about and feeling toward the world. Rather than a methodology that considers an intertextual reading of the adaptation, I make my argument by employing what Jennifer Barker has termed a handling of the adaptation’s textures as a means of more firmly grasping the dynamics of the adaptation.7 Building on the important work of phenomenological film scholarship, I provide the tools with which to probe, provoke, and invigorate the discipline of adaptation studies to the possibilities of an embodied entanglement.

Skin and Bone: Fleshing Out Tactile Experience in Film Theory Some films literally touch us, such as those released with gimmick technology that directly stimulate the spectator’s tactile receptivity, as when William Castle created buzz for his shocker The Tingler (1959) by developing ‘Percepto’ technology to literally shock his audiences with electric motors affixed to cinema seats. Contemporary equivalents include D-BOX technology that shakes, rattles, and rolls the spectator’s seat in a range of contemporary blockbusters from Fast & Furious (Justin Lin, 2009) to Magic Mike XXL (Gregory Jacobs, 2015). In most film experiences, however, the body is not directly touched by shocks to the skin, nor do technologically enhanced chairs vibrate the muscles. However, films still wield a palpable force as light hits the retina and soundwaves brush against the eardrum. Michel Chion attests to this quite literal connection between sound and spectator, pointing out that cinematic sound can be ‘tactile, you heard 7

Jennifer Barker, Tactile Eye, p. 25.

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it as if you were touching it, like the touch of the skin of a peach, which gives some people the shivers’.8 Indeed, Chapter Two’s analysis of warped voices, grating sound effects and resonant musical scores demonstrated how sound has a profoundly visceral effect on spectators, while continued developments in Dolby technology has intensified sound as a force that is felt in the spectator’s feet, sternum, and teeth. But long before this technological wizardry, the cinema has been historically associated with its ability to palpably affect the spectator, with both early filmmakers and theorists describing—and celebrating—the form’s haptic address to the spectator’s body. Both Sergei Eisenstein and Walter Benjamin testified to the political power of the film to shock. Eisenstein, for instance, claims that the cinema entails the ‘dynamization of perception’, a ‘projection […] onto the whole expressive bodily system of man’.9 Alternatively, Benjamin writes that the cinema could be ‘an instrument of ballistics’ and that it ‘[hits] the spectator like a bullet […] acquiring a tactile quality’.10 For Siegfried Kracauer, while the camera was an instrument that could record physical reality, understanding the cinematic experience required an understanding of how its projection played upon the physical dimensions of the spectator. Conceiving the spectator as a ‘corporeal-material being [with] skin and hair’, Kracauer explains how the ‘material elements that present themselves in film directly stimulate the material layers of the human being: his nerves, his senses, his entire physiological substance’.11 And as Béla Balázs puts it, the cinema has the capacity to become an extension of human perception, operating not only as eyes (and later, ears), but that it also ‘becomes our fingertips’.12 Importantly, these early film theorists recognized that the spectator’s physical and tactile responses were not to be dismissed as affective excess, or thought of as having no value beyond a primitive function to thrill and entertain. Rather, such kinetic responses provided the grounds for cinematic intelligibility. ‘You create meaning; you don’t have to understand it’, Balázs advises filmmakers, and that ‘You need it in your fingertips, not your heads’ (p. 6). But despite these early approaches that welcomed film’s tactile and sensual dimensions, film theory largely brushed away the spectator’s affective experience. Rather, affect was subsumed within theoretical regimes such as 8 9 10 11 12

Michel Chion, ‘Quiet Revolution’, p. 69. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form, p. 53. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 238. Quoted in Miriam Bratu Hansen, ‘“With Skin and Hair”’, p. 458. Béla Balázs, Early Film, p. 183.

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structuralism and psychoanalysis that positioned the screen as a space of illusion, with the spectator’s response cued by fantasy and the unconscious and ideology. For instance, in an important article on cinematic affect, Linda Williams argues that the ‘body genres’ of melodrama, pornography, and horror are culturally and critically denigrated as seemingly possessing no value beyond their vulgar appeal to the spectator’s body. Williams posits that moments of emotional and physical excess of the body on screen—melodrama’s heaving bodies of sadness, the orgasming body in pornography, and the explosive violence of horror films—have ‘no logic or reason for existence beyond their power to excite’, and that the spectator’s body ‘is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the [screened] body’.13 Williams proposes that these moments of bodily excess, and their mimetic effect on the spectator, offers a way of solving ‘problems’ of sexual identity development, with each of the ‘body genres’ reflecting different repressed fantasies of the unconscious. Therefore, although Williams’s study valuably redirects critical attention to the affective dimensions of screen spectatorship—and addresses questions that may rise in critical discussions of (gendered) spectatorship—her analysis is rooted in a psychoanalytic framework that does not adequately account for the embodied pleasures and epistemological function that cinematic affect provides. Phenomenological film criticism redressed this critical neglect. As Vivian Sobchack explains, ‘[we] see and comprehend and feel films with our entire bodily being, informed by the full history and carnal knowledge of our acculturated sensorium’.14 Given that ‘comprehend’ is derived from the Latin root prehendere, to seize, our sense of touch at the cinema is particularly significant. As I established in the introduction, Sobchack’s film phenomenology is grounded in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of perception, particularly his discussion of ‘flesh’. For Merleau-Ponty, perception is made possible through ‘the thickness of flesh between the seer and the thing [that] is constitutive for the thing of its visibility as for the seer of his corporeity; it is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication’.15 A metaphysical structure that grounds all perception, flesh forms a communicative membrane where the perceiving self and the phenomenal world intertwine. Also known as the ‘chiasm’, the flesh is a reversible ‘exchange between me and the world […] between the perceiving and the perceived: what begins as a thing ends as consciousness of the thing, what begins as a 13 Linda Williams, ‘Film Bodies’, pp. 3-4. 14 Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, p. 63. 15 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Visible, p. 135.

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“state of consciousness” ends as a thing’ (p. 215). A metaphysical structure that grounds all perception, flesh forms a communicative membrane where the perceiving self and the phenomenal world intertwine. As the point of contact between body and world, the flesh also enacts what philosopher Elizabeth Grosz describes as the ‘crisscrossing’ between the different sense modalities.16 Merleau-Ponty describes the ‘intertwining of all forms of perception’ in an evocative passage: these visions, these touches, these little subjectivities, these ‘consciousnesses of…’ could be assembled like flowers into a bouquet […] my synergic body is not an object, that it assembles into a cluster the ‘consciousnesses’ adherent to its hands, to its eyes, by an operation that is in relation to them lateral, transversal […] bound in such a way as to make up with them the experience of one sole body before one sole world.17

The flesh enacts the ‘lateral, transversal’ relationship between the senses, gathering and binding them like ‘flowers into a bouquet’. Clear from this passage that directly cites touch and vision as mutually informed ‘consciousnesses of…’, the relationship between these senses is especially significant in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological thought, reflected in his use of the term ‘flesh’ itself. While Merleau-Ponty extends the meaning of the word ‘flesh’ beyond its usual meaning of the biological tissue of muscles, tendons, and ligaments that hold together the body, his choice of word tellingly points to how his theory of perception describes how our entire ‘corporeity’ is ‘caught up’ and held in its perception of the world. Indeed, rather than a sense that maintains distance from perceiver and perceived, vision is a ‘palpation with the look’, possessing ‘tactile qualities’ (p. 134). ‘We must habituate ourselves to think that every visible is cut out in the tangible’, instructs Merleau-Ponty, and that ‘every tactile being in some manner promised to visibility, and that there is encroachment, infringement, not only between the touched and the touching, but also between the tangible and the visible’ (p. 134). Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion that the flesh connects the body to the world and synaesthetically translates sight to touch provides a clear model for grasping cinematic tactility, as the spectator’s experience of the screen is ‘fleshed out’ beyond responses to audio-visual phenomena. Sobchack positions the spectator as a ‘cinesthetic subject’, a term that describes not only the inherent synaesthesia of the senses, but also the spectator’s capacity 16 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 96. 17 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Visible, pp. 141-142.

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for kinesthetic perception of the orientation, position, and movement of the body.18 As she explains, the spectator then is ‘able to commute seeing to touching and back again without a thought and, through sensual and cross-modal activity, [is] able to experience the movie as both here and there rather than clearly locating the site of cinematic experience as onscreen or offscreen’ (p. 71). Therefore, although the sights and sounds of the screen might not exactly press against the skin, the cinesthetic subject works to fill the sensory gap that is formed through a film’s audio-visual construction, a sensory experience that is perhaps partial and diffuse, but is nonetheless resonant and meaningful. As Sobchack explains ‘I will reflexively turn toward my own carnal, sensual, and sensible being to touch myself touching, smell myself smelling, taste myself tasting, and, in sum, sense my own sensuality’ (p. 77). Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996) provides a good—albeit disgusting—illustration. In his review of the film, John Leland writes that the film ‘crackles with [the] dead-end grit’ of Irvine Welsh’s novel.19 This grit is not solely caused by its subject matter that follows the exploits of a group of impoverished Scottish heroin addicts, or how the performers bring to life the coarseness of their language and accents that are transcribed in the novel through the narration of Renton (Ewan McGregor). But further, Trainspotting’s ‘grit’ is woven into its mise en scène in ways that continually provoke the spectator’s disgust and discomfort. For instance, and despite fantasizing about ‘a massive, pristine convenience [with] brilliant gold taps, virginal white marble, a seat carved from ebony, a cistern of Chanel No. 5, and a flunky handing [him] pieces of raw silk toilet roll’, in one memorable scene Renton gets diarrhoea in ‘The Worst Toilet in Scotland’ after taking narcotic suppositories. But there certainly is nothing “convenient” about this toilet. Everything is caked with fecal slop: the floor, the cracked and broken toilet, and the walls, which, from the position of the camera on the floor (and Renton’s position over the toilet) push in on the spectator’s own sense of personal space. After his bowels explode with blasts of patulous wetness, he fishes around in the fudgy slurry of the toilet water to find his lost drugs. Gagging and spitting, Renton continues to churn through the digested soup, splashing diarrhoea-water (complete with chunky droplets of mucous-slimed shit) over the bowl and his hands. As these foul sights and sounds smear against the cubicle and the camera, they also seem to smear against our skin, and we gag along with Renton. The toilet gradually 18 Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, p. 67. 19 John Leland, ‘Track Stars’, p. 52.

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swallows Renton—his legs comically kicking in the air—until he disappears into its foul depths, emerging in clear blue water that he swims through as he searches for his drugs. By appealing to the spectator’s skin through its mise en scène and cramped framing—along with blurring fantasy with reality—the sequence gives the spectator f irst-hand knowledge of the (literal) depths that Renton would go to get his hit. Since Sobchack first offered her critical ‘touching up’ of the spectator’s experience in the cinema, other scholars—notably Barker and Laura Marks—have further probed our tactile engagement of film. Following Sobchack’s lead regarding the ‘film’s body’, Barker theorizes the contact between spectator and film through as emerging through mutual structures of ‘skin’, ‘musculature’, and ‘viscera’. Exceeding screen and celluloid, the film’s skin ‘includes all the parts of the apparatus and the cinematic experience that engage in the skin’s activities—[the] simultaneous expression and perception […] revelation and concealment—and constitute its texture’.20 The f ilm’s skin beckons toward the spectator’s own skin that actively demonstrates its own capacity for perception and expression, forming a contact zone between screen and spectator. These ‘styles of touch […] may be placid and gentle or aggressive and cruel, comforting or uncomfortable […] pleasurable, horrible, or a complex combination of the two’ (p. 39). Whether pleasurable or disgusting, the tactility of the cinema sensitizes us to a carnal awareness that exceeds the solicitation of the skin. But, as I discuss later, it is also felt in the muscles and the inner rhythms of the body as film and spectator synchronize (or fail to). Barker’s suggestion of the film’s ‘skin’ and our tactile perception of it is drawn from Marks’s description of screen haptics. Rather than ‘optical visuality’ which insists on maintaining distance between the perceiver and the perceived, ‘haptic visuality’ is a mode of seeing in which the eyes seemingly brush against the surface of the image much like our fingertips do when we reach out and feel out the sensuous contours on an object. Marks describes haptic visuality as occurring when our eyes skim across the surface ‘of its object […] not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture. It is more inclined to move than to focus, more inclined to graze than to gaze’.21 Denied visual clarity as the images shifts from the visually distinct to the indistinct (and back again), the spectator is invited to use other modes of sensual engagement to feel their way across the image: blurred and shallow focus, extreme close-ups of surfaces, an overstuffed 20 Jennifer Barker, Tactile Eye, p. 29. 21 Laura U. Marks, Skin of the Film, p. 162.

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or gaudy mise en scène, layers of coloured light, and scratches and paint on the surface of the celluloid itself all invite tactile responses. The appeal of haptic imagery and to the spectator’s skin offers a screen adaptation an evocative means of aligning the spectator with the tactile experience of characters. For instance, Before Night Falls (Julian Schnabel, 2000), is adapted from the memoir of gay Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas (played in the film by Javier Bardem). The memoir documents his life from his boyhood to his student days in Havana in the 1960s and his passionate affairs that simmer away under the political turmoil of Fidel Castro’s regime. After spending various times in prison, Arenas escapes to the United States where, debilitated by AIDS, he commits suicide. In his review of the film, Kenneth Turan writes that it is with some irony that ‘for a film about a poet, it’s the scenes without words […] that are the most successful’, as Schnabel headily evokes the ‘intoxicating […] hothouse sensuality of Havana’ and the erotic charge of flesh.22 Stephen Holden agrees, describing how the film ‘conjures up fragments of his consciousness […] as a succession of bright, feverish illuminations’.23 Not only seen, the clammy heat of fever is evoked in a way that is felt by the spectator through the ‘voluptuous majesty’ of the film with ‘dizzyingly gorgeous, surreal evocations of a sopping semi-jungle environment […] a sensual endless summer of hot pliable flesh and lapping turquoise waters’ (p. E14). These reviews for Before Night Falls tend to emphasize the how the film adaptation translate Arenas’s verbal poetry into an intoxicating and dizzying ‘visual poetry’ that is palpably felt on the skin. 24 However, as words like ‘intoxicating’ and ‘dizzying’ imply, embodied spectatorship involves not only the solicitation of the skin but also a kinaesthetic perception that is felt in the muscles and viscerally in the stomach. Barker’s discussion of the f ilm’s ‘musculature’ is helpful here. Just as the f ilm’s ‘skin’ exceeds any one piece of the cinematic apparatus, to speak of the f ilm’s ‘musculature’ is not limited to its mechanical technology, such as cranes and tracks that afford the camera far-reaching flexibility and mobility through space (although these certainly lend a hand). Rather, the musculature refers to that which ‘enables bodily comportment’, says Barker, ‘and it gives us the means to express ourselves through our movements and the arrangement of our body in space’. 25 Importantly 22 23 24 25

Kenneth Turan, ‘The Screen is a Lush Canvas’, n.p. Stephen Holden, ‘Retracing a Poet’s Journey’, p. E14. Kenneth Turan, ‘The Screen is a Lush Canvas’, n.p. Jennifer Barker, Tactile Eye, p. 77.

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then, the musculature does not simply provide the framework that enables movement, but expresses its intentionality and responsiveness through gesture. Merleau-Ponty evocatively describes the signif icance of the gesture as: The communication or comprehension of gestures comes about through the reciprocity of my intentions and the gestures of others, of my gestures and intentions discernible in the conduct of other people. It is as if the other person’s intention inhabited my body and mine his. The gesture which I witness outlines an intentional object. This object is genuinely present and fully comprehended when the powers of my body adjust themselves to it and overlap it.26

Merleau-Ponty here is articulating how gesture develops significance and meaning through our mutual ability to expressively gesture our conscious experience of the world. When we see someone express their perception through gesture—such as a stiffened back or clenching the jaw when seeing someone unpleasant—their gesture is inhabitable for us as we understand the reflex to physically strengthen the body in emotionally trying times. Therefore, before we intellectually ascribe reason or meaning to the gesture, the gesture is itself communicable and meaningfully felt in the body. As Merleau-Ponty explains, ‘I do not understand others by some act of intellectual interpretation […] I join it in a kind of blind recognition which precedes the intellectual working out and clarification of the meaning […] It is through my body that I understand other people’ (p. 216). Of course, we do (usually) come to intellectually understand other people, but Merleau-Ponty attests to the body’s pre-reflective power of our embodied knowledge for gestural comprehension, or how we can understand other point of views—in a tangibly felt way—by standing in their shoes. Indeed, in his own essay on the cinema, Merleau-Ponty argues that just as the visible gestures of others alert us to their inner psychological state, so too do a film’s gestures reveal inner meaning. ‘[The] meaning of a film is incorporated into its rhythm just as the meaning of a gesture may immediately be read in that gesture’, he claims, and that as ‘[for] the movies as well for modern psychology dizziness, pleasure, grief, love, and hate are ways of behaving’.27 Barker’s work picks up on the mutual ability of both film and spectator for expressive body language to signif icantly develop Merleau-Ponty’s 26 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, p. 215. 27 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense, pp. 57-58.

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philosophy of the gestural capacity of the cinema and its capacity to stimulate a kind ‘muscular empathy’ between spectator and f ilm and their mutual ability for expressive body language. By turning to f ilm’s muscular empathy, Barker extends her analysis beyond the way onscreen bodies can mimetically stimulate the spectator, such as Williams’s analysis of the spectator’s mimetic response to bodily ecstasies of ‘body genres’. Just as the intentional meaning of another’s gesture is grasped as ‘the powers of my body adjust […] and overlap’ them, to recall Merleau-Ponty’s words, the f ilm’s similar capacity for perception and gestural expression also invites the spectator to inhabit and share its intentional attitude. As Barker explains, ‘Our bodies orient and dispose themselves toward the body of the film itself, because we and the film make sense of space by moving through it muscularly in similar ways and with similar attitudes’.28 This is a similar point to the one Sobchack argues, that film and spectator are mutually embodied subjects that both perceive and express an intentional consciousness. ‘Thus, at this primary level of the body subject’, Sobchack argues, ‘the viewer intersubjectively and prereflectively recognizes and understands the camera as sharing the manner of [their] own existence, as manifesting the material and kinetic code of an embodied and intentional consciousness’.29 These ‘material and kinetic code[s]’ particularly manifest in the moving interest of the camera, which gesturally indicates a shifting intentional interest as it turns, travels, changes perspective, and otherwise moves through space in a manner that evokes human embodied consciousness. The gestural signification afforded to the cinema—and its evocation of embodied human consciousness—is perhaps most clearly seen (or, more ‘fittingly’, muscularly felt) when the camera offers us the subjective perception of screen characters as they move through their diegetic world.30 Other kinds of camera movement, too, express an attitude towards the world that is grasped by the spectator. Handheld camera movement, for instance, has specific phenomenological implications for the spectator. As Jean-Pierre Geuens argues, the filmmakers of the French New Wave embraced the handheld camera with its potential to seemingly replicate ‘the sensations experienced by a human being’ through its mobility, a 28 Jennifer Barker, Tactile Eye, p. 75. 29 Vivian Sobchack, ‘Toward Inhabited Space’, p. 327. 30 Albeit in a transformed—and limited—way. Sobchack offers a nuanced analysis of the impossibility of reconciling camera and human embodiments in The Address of the Eye, pp. 230-248.

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technique that held political significance.31 ‘Physiologically, the changes forced on one’s body by this quickened pace make themselves known instantly’, explains Geuens: the feet experience the pressure of forward momentum as one attempts to run around the corner; and, when one climbs the stairs, the body feels the strain through the pounding of the blood and the acceleration of the heartbeat. Although the handheld camera cannot reproduce these physiological reactions per se, it can—through its ups and downs, bumps and joggles—nonetheless visually echo the excitement that accompanies the physical endeavor. [This is] ‘recognized’ by the audience as more real, more alive (p. 11).

But as Geuens correctly points out, in our daily movement—even if that movement is when we run for our life (either on a treadmill or a in hurried flight from danger)—the ‘ups and downs, bumps and joggles’ are invisible to us as we are too busy subjectively living through vision rather than reflexively observing the objective contours of the ‘look’ of vision. But Steadicam technology, in which the camera is attached to its operator by a breastplate, offers ‘an image of motion that was more physiologically truer to our senses’, smoothing wild movement with ‘the grace and fluidity of a jazz dancer’ (pp. 10-12). The camera’s movement—fluctuating between smoothness and jolting roughness—is beautifully expressed in City of God (Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002), adapted from Paulo Lin’s semi-autobiographical account of life in the Brazilian slums. Peter Bradshaw describes City of God as ‘a movie with all the dials cranked up to 11, an overwhelming, intoxicating assault on the senses, and a thriller so tense that you might have the red seat plush in front of you—or even some unfortunate’s hair—gripped in both fists’.32 What is specifically thrilling about this film about the gangs of Rio de Janeiro is how the film invites the spectator’s muscular response through its own sense of muscular comportment. As Bradshaw describes, City of God ‘rushes forward at a full, breathless tilt, swerving, accelerating, doubling back on itself […] Meirelle’s film flashes and sweeps around you, dizzying, disorientating, intoxicating’ (p. B9). Its opening sequence, for instance, plunges spectators immediately into the simmering cauldron of the ‘Cidade de Deus’ slum. The film begins with a 31 Jean-Pierre Geuens, ‘Visuality and Power’, p. 11. 32 Peter Bradshaw, ‘Ghetto Blasters’, p. B8.

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series of extreme close-ups of a blade being sharpened on a whetstone, before the film bursts to life with a montage of a group of people preparing and eating chickens. The camera cuts in close as carrots are chopped, feathers are plucked, limes are squashed into mojitos, and men and women play music and dance. The shots are very rapid and disorientating; along with the syncopated rhythm of the musicians, spectators are caught up in the pulsing energy of the street. In between these shots is a close-up of a live chicken that is tied by the foot as it awaits its fate. Suddenly, the chicken shakes loose of its restraints and escapes into the street, and it is chased by a group of children who brandish guns. A handheld camera follows the chase in a dizzying sequence of close-ups as the chicken runs through the slums and flaps into the air (at one point it looks as if the camera is attached to its distressed body). The chicken chase comes to an abrupt halt as the group runs into Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues) who attempts to pick up the chicken. But behind Rocket the police arrive, and he is caught in a standoff between the gang and the police. Rocket explains in a voice-over that ‘in the City of God, if you run away they get you, and if you stay they’ll get you too’. The camera begins to circle Rocket during his narration, getting faster and faster until—like a vortex—the film whizzes the spectator back in time to begin its brutal story of slum life. Therefore, although Lins’s well-researched novel reports on life in the slums, from its first frames the film grabs hold of the spectator and drags us in. Like the inhabitants of the Cidade de Deus, City of God ‘gets us’ and refuses to let go and carries us—shaking and jolting—through a cacophonous riot of music and violence. Sharing similar modes of embodied experience, all f ilm is graspable as it takes hold and carries us through the narrative world. The film can either handle us with kid gloves, or it can more violently shake us. By exercising its muscularity the film demands a renewed awareness to our own comportment, sometimes stimulating bodily reflexes as we grip the seat in excitement, jump in shock, or completely turn away when it all becomes too much. Whether pleasurable or painful, our muscular embrace with the film’s body ultimately reminds us of the lived dimensions of our bodies and the way we inhabit our world. Even in those terrible moments when we most tangibly feel the embodied and intentional difference between our bodies and we try to resist its embrace, we are renewed to the sensation that we are thankfully not made of stone—or, for that matter, electrical wires, mechanical parts, and pieces of celluloid—but are flesh and blood with the capacity to feel both pleasure and pain, to cry, and to be moved.

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‘Thumbprints’ and an ‘Irritating’ Performance: In the Cut’s ‘Tactile Orientation’ For the rest of this chapter I will put these critical points in contact with Jane Campion’s adaptation In the Cut to further explore the evocation of tactile responsiveness. Campion’s cinema is an appropriate case study for an embodied approach to adaptation as it consistently revisits political themes of women’s experience and embodiment. According to McHugh, Campion ‘[crafts] visual stories drawn from genres that are especially attentive to women’s bodies, to their agency, their vulnerability, and to their dispossessing passions […] [generating] crises where ethics, vulnerability, sexuality, and violence (or its threat) coalesce’.33 So too does Campion maintain a recognizable style. As McHugh goes on to describe, Campion’s ‘visual imagination, lush, tactile, and sensuous, is shot through with an ethnographer’s investment in apt, characteristic detail, just as her interest in the “nasty” side of things […] sexual violence, and death [is] blended with a sophisticated and wholly unsentimental wit’ (p. 47). Therefore, due to her marked visual style, repeated thematic content, and political message, Campion is often celebrated as an auteur. Recently, film scholar Jake Ivan Dole has synthesized Sobchack’s semiotic phenomenology of camera movement, cognitive narrative theory, neurocinematics, and auteur theory to argue that the camera can be interpreted as the visible gesture of the director’s body. Although I would hesitate to align the body of the film with that of the director, I do agree with Dole’s claim that directors ‘impose themselves on their work physically […] The author’s grasp transcends the diegetic limits of the story, and demonstrates a seemingly unlimited power to manipulate the work’s formal contours’.34 Therefore, while I would argue that our engagement with film is far too complex to claim that we ‘identify with [the] camera as the author’s body’ tout court, I do agree that ‘film becomes the author’s raw material at hand, while the viewer is made to feel the manipulation of that material with his or her body’ (p. 10). Such a description is apt for approaching Campion’s œuvre, as not only does she mark her cinema with a consistent political ideology and distinguishable visual style, but in its ‘lush, tactile’ sensuality, Campion’s films always invite the spectator’s own incarnated response that particularly foregrounds the sense of touch. Indeed, Campion’s 1993 film The Piano provoked Sobchack’s essay ‘What My Fingers Knew’, which 33 Kathleen McHugh, Jane Campion, p. 2. 34 Jake Ivan Dole, ‘The Author’s Gesture’, p. 10.

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was so influential in articulating how ‘our lived bodies sensually relate to “things” that “matter” on the screen and find them sensible in a primary, prepersonal, and global way that grounds’ cinematic intelligibility.35 So when Campion extends her reach to previously existing work and translates it to the screen she undoubtedly leaves a thumbprint in her grasp on the material and the spectator. A thumbprint is a subjective marker of identity: each thumb is unique in its topographic whorls and ridges, wrinkles and callouses. But a thumbprint is also an objective mark that acknowledges a point of contact between the self and the other, attesting to an affective relationship through the lingering and perceptible trace. Applied to an adaptation, the thumbprint is another perceptible layer that accrues in the textual palimpsest. Just as if we are looking at a laptop computer that bears the smudgy traces of our fingers at the edge of the screen from where it has been flipped open, the thumbprint does not obscure what lies beneath it, but rather inflects perception. Rather than just ‘seeing through’ layers of textual film (audio-visual, literary, or otherwise), employing the trope of the thumbprint allows for other productive ways of engaging with adaptations, such as the way identity politics and authorship inflect the interpretation of an earlier work. But when Campion’s politics of abjection press against the traditionally elite, as she does with her 1996 adaptation of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, she tends to rub her critics the wrong way. Critic Jesse Green uses Campion’s adaptation as a case study in his argument against film adaptations, regurgitating much of the criticism typically levelled at the field, such as the inability of the film to replicate how the reader envisioned the fictional world. He argues that ‘readers very quickly resent the thumb print of someone else’s perusal in what they have come to believe is their very own classic’.36 So too does Green’s criticism evoke the form versus content debate when he laments ‘[why] would a director choose as his source a virtually untranslatable classic? Why would he attempt to honor a powerful text by squeezing it into a format that all but enforces its desecration?’ (p. H29). But it is curious that Green here uses the male pronoun ‘he’ to describe the director, for he seems most displeased with the way Campion ‘squeezed’ and left her feminine thumbprint over James’s text. Green gets himself into a twist over Campion’s manipulation of James, and complains that ‘calling this […] an adaptation is like saying that Hitler adapted Poland’ (p. H23). Rather than appreciating the way Campion tries to palpably evoke the constricted 35 Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, p. 65. 36 Jesse Green, ‘That Was No “Lady”’, p. H23.

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experience of Isabel Archer (Nicole Kidman)—and her sexual desire—Green lambasts her for ‘improperly exposing’ her to contemporary values. But Campion’s handiwork on In the Cut is evocative and compelling, enhanced no doubt by Moore’s similar thematic preoccupations. Both novel and film roughly follow the same plot as the protagonist embarks on a dangerous voyage of sexual self-discovery. In the novel she is an unnamed English teacher, but in the film her name is Frannie (played by Meg Ryan).37 Frannie is a repressed English teacher: although she loves words, slang, and poetry, she is not very good about expressing her desires and seems distant from the world and other people. This changes when Frannie watches a woman performing oral sex on a man in a shadowy basement of a seedy bar: while she cannot see his face (although he sees her), she notices a distinctive tattoo on his wrist. The woman ends up dead and ‘disarticulated’, meaning that her hands and head were severed from the body. Frannie becomes attracted to the detective investigating the murder, Malloy (Mark Ruffalo), partly due to his cocky swagger and sexual confidence, but also, after noticing an identical tattoo on his wrist, she is attracted to the danger he exudes. The danger quickly escalates: Frannie is mugged on the street and bodies pile up, including Frannie’s sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Grieving her death, Frannie takes sexual solace in Malloy; putting on his coat, Frannie discovers a lost charm from her bracelet when she was mugged. Assuming Malloy to be her mugger and the killer, Frannie runs into the arms of Malloy’s partner Rodriguez (Nick Damici), who takes her to an isolated lighthouse. After Frannie notices that he has the same tattoo as Malloy, Rodriguez reveals himself to be the killer. In the novel, he cuts and slices ‘My face. My throat. My breasts’, leaving her to narrate her own death, switching from a first-person perspective to third to signal her loss of subjectivity and ‘objectification’ into a corpse.38 However, in the film Frannie kills Rodriguez with Malloy’s gun and returns to him, the film ending as they embrace. Moore and Campion share many thematic concerns, particularly the expression of (female) subjective experience, the evocation of the sensual in general, and the tension between the visual and tactile dimensions of erotic allure (and the threat of violent pain). Hence they seem a harmonious match for collaboration, even more so considering how both author and filmmaker weave both cinematic and literary elements into their work. The novel, through its emphasis on sex and violence, voyeurism, and neo-noir 37 I will refer to the character in both novel and film as ‘Frannie’ for ease. 38 Susanna Moore, In the Cut, p. 179.

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atmosphere, shows obvious debt to erotic thriller films, such as Body Double (Brian De Palma, 1984) and Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992). Not lost on readers, Michiko Kakutani notes in her review that the novel contains sensationalized ‘highly graphic descriptions of violence and sex, as if she were trying to translate the work of Joe Eszterhas and Paul Verhoeven to the page’.39 Kakutani does not mean this as a compliment, baulking at the vulgarity of the body in terms of both its presence in the text as well as its intended effect on the reader’s body. Therefore, it is with a measure of irony that she writes that Moore’s ‘strong, tactile prose’ saves In the Cut from being another ‘run-of-the-mill hothouse thriller’ (p. C15). What Kakutani means here is that language has a palpable force, heavy with literary allusion and reflexivity that structures the narrative. Written in the first-person, Frannie’s observations and reflections evoke the stream of consciousness literary style that her students think is ‘like writing down your dreams except without punctuation’. 40 Further, Frannie is obsessed with words, and she collects and admires fragments of poetry and slang like other people collect stamps. Early in the novel her student Cornelius (played in the film by Sharrieff Pugh) reminds Frannie that she once said that ‘every word a writer writes, even the conjunctions, even the punctuation […] is a reflection of him or her’ (p. 7). Her research with Cornelius helps to articulate how language is associated with cultural identity, but Frannie takes special interest in the relationship between language and the body: how the body literally ‘figures’ in linguistic expression. She draws on malapropisms such as ‘Old Timer’s Disease’ and ‘Very Close Veins’ to show the ‘onomatopoetic logic’ and poetry of words ‘that is more appealing, sometimes even more accurate, than correct usage’ (p. 27). Her interest in the relationship between language and both cultural and physical bodies merge in her dictionary of slang, in which words are frequently associated with sexuality or violence against the body (or both): ‘skins, n., sex from a female’ (p. 63); ‘broccoli, n., pubic hair’ (p. 121). Perhaps most tellingly is the way in which Frannie reflects on the meaning of ‘In the cut’ as ‘A street word […] From vagina. A place to hide. To hedge your bet. But someplace safe, someplace free from harm’ (p. 178). As she ponders the double meaning of the word—and its ironic use to mean someplace safe—while Rodriguez is sexually mutilating her, evocatively illustrates the literary irony with which Frannie’s students so struggled. But although Kakutani praises the way in which Moore evokes a narrator whose ‘reportorial skills’ reflects ‘her eye [proving] just as keen as her ear’ 39 Michiko Kakutani, ‘She Has an Ear’, p. C15. 40 Susanna Moore, In the Cut, p. 3.

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for slang, and despite acknowledging the tangible and tactile quality to her words, Kakutani criticizes In the Cut for producing a ‘disembodied creature subject only to perverse desires and whims’41 Perhaps this is the ultimate irony of In the Cut: although its stream of consciousness narration allows us to constantly see through Frannie’s eyes, and although Moore’s commanding prose is impeccably articulated, we never really get close enough to Frannie to feel her passion or get a handle on her motivations, and she remains dislocated from us until she is but disarticulated remains. Some reviewers of the film had a similar response to Kakutani, finding Frannie (and Ryan’s performance) irritating. Roger Ebert, for instance, writes that Frannie droops around as if she is on ‘hog tranquilizers’,42 while Sean Smith points out that Ryan ‘probably says more in a single scene of When Harry Met Sally than she does in this entire film’. 43 Indeed, Campion was quite shrewd in her casting of Ryan in a film that ‘disarticulates’ fantasies of romance. Known for her leading roles in a string of romantic comedies—such as Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You’ve Got Mail (1998)—Ryan is associated with an extroverted exuberance. Chirpy and blonde, these characters embodied an indefatigable optimism of love and romance. Campion explains that her choice was intentionally discomfiting, explaining that in her notes to help Ryan’s performance, ‘I told her, “Meg, don’t try to be liked”’. 44 Ryan herself acknowledges how the change in her image could rub the public up the wrong way, saying ‘What I did […] was betray an archetype […] If your public character is simplistically defined, any complexity that you add to it, any sexuality, any darkness—maybe it’s just irritating to people’. 45 But while her character does not say much, Ryan gives a commanding physical performance, using her body to get under the skin of Frannie and communicate her social and romantic isolation. The sequence in which Frannie meets Malloy, her future lover, is telling. Firstly, and most obviously, Frannie keeps physical distance from Malloy. This is partly enacted by the camera as it cuts between Frannie and Malloy, and later peers through the latched-door as Frannie tries to verify his identity. But once Frannie finally allows Malloy to come inside her apartment, it is her own body language that communicates her wariness. Literally keeping Malloy at arm’s length, 41 42 43 44 45

Michiko Kakutani, ‘She Has an Ear’, p. C15. Roger Ebert, ‘In the Cut’, n.p. Sean Smith, ‘Love is Dangerous’, p. 83. Quoted in Cathy Horyn, ‘The New Meg’, p. 152. Quoted in Sean Smith, ‘Love is Dangerous’, p. 81.

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Frannie holds out a coffee cup full of water for him to extinguish his cigarette; later, Frannie stands rigidly against the counter of her kitchen, her arms folded across her chest as Malloy tells her the details of the crime. Ryan’s performance is taut. While she holds her body still—and is rather monosyllabic—Ryan employs micro-expressions like a slightly raised eyebrow, a shift in eye direction, or turning her head to shake the hair over her face to show her thought. As she makes these fractional movements while Malloy tells her grisly details (such as that the arm of the victim was found outside her window), and while her answering machine message plays an irate message about her sex life from her actor-turned-doctor ex-boyfriend, John (Kevin Bacon), furthers our perception of Frannie as apathetic and isolated. But Frannie’s micro-expressions take on more significance after she spies Malloy’s tattoo as her attitude begins to change. Finding her unresponsive, Malloy leaves his business card. With the camera positioned just behind her shoulder, we see the card in close-up as Frannie holds it and reads Malloy’s details. Indeed, she does not so much hold the card as caress it: Frannie flicks and scratches at it, pressing on it as she pins it to the wall. Just as the image is brought into close-up here, sound too is intensified so we hear the rough scratching of her fingernail over the card, giving us a sense of its weight and texture. In an unusual gesture, Frannie traces Malloy’s name with her fingertip, before leaning backwards to contemplate the card, her hand still pressed against its surface. Although her earlier gesture with the coffee cup kept Malloy at arm’s length, here her gesture that at once pushes herself away from Malloy yet remains connected reveals her uneasy attraction. Along with Ryan’s physical performance, Campion brings Frannie’s experience well within the spectator’s grasp as she is equipped with the full sensory capabilities of the cinema and its ability to gesture. A. O. Scott notes the affective quality of the film’s cinematography, describing how when ‘it surveys the grimy streets and cramped apartments of Lower Manhattan, [the camera] trembles as if it were running a fever […] jumpy and bleary-eyed’. 46 By using such anthropomorphic language to describe the camera’s ‘look’, Scott intimates how the camera also expresses subjective experience, one that focalizes (albeit maintaining a bleary-eyed focus) around Frannie’s experience. Unlike the concept of ‘occularization’ (as introduced in Chapter One, which refers to the camera’s visual alignment with a character), ‘focalization’ is drawn from Gérard Genette’s theory of perspective-taking in literary narratives. 47 Edward Branigan applies Genette’s model of literary 46 A. O. Scott, ‘A Mystery of Language’, n.p. 47 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, pp. 188-189.

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point of view—ranging from ‘zero’, ‘external’, and ‘internal’ focalization—to cinematic narration, describing how focalization offers the spectator access into the way in which characters live in and experience their world. Like Genette’s categorization, Branigan describes how events can be either externally or internally focalized around a character. External focalization means that we retain some distance from a character, although we largely infer what they are seeing and hearing through eye-line matches that approximate the character’s visual perspective, diegetic sound cues, and so on. Internal focalization ‘is more fully private and subjective’ and is not accessible to other characters in the narrative and ‘ranges from simple perceptions (e.g., the point-of-view shot), to impressions (e.g., the out-of-focus point-of-view shot depicting a character who is drunk, dizzy, or drunk), to “deeper thoughts” (e.g., dreams, hallucinations, and memories)’. 48 Campion’s choice to employ a highly subjective style of cinematography is appropriate in her adaptation of a novel that uses stream of consciousness narration (fixed internal focalization, per Genette), for as Branigan describes, focalization is the ‘attempt to represent “consciousness” of’ narrative events (p. 106). Thus, although Frannie is not verbally articulate, and while Ryan’s somnambulant performance rubs some viewers the wrong way, the film largely expresses her experience through both internal and external focalization. As Frannie is in most of the film’s scenes the narrative is usually externally focalized around her point of view, while at other times Frannie’s fantasies and dream sequences provide us specific internal access to her subjective perspective that give us (literal) insight into her psychological motivation and behaviour. Although Branigan’s discussion of focalization is certainly useful, it does not grasp the whole picture in this case, as—except in one extraordinary sequence that blends drunken stupor with nightmare—the fuzzy and blurry layers of the image are not used to convey Frannie’s impoverished vision. Rather, their effect is to provide a more diffuse ‘tactile focalization’ of how she feels in her skin. I call this ‘tactile orientation’, as although Branigan makes it clear that focalization also includes acoustic cues, ‘focalization’ all too easily privileges visual perspective. ‘Tactile orientation’ is a more holistic term that accounts for both how the spectator can be aligned with tactile phenomena as well as gesturing towards the function of proprioceptive awareness and spatial relationships in character engagement. When Malloy sees that the walls of Frannie’s apartment are wallpapered in quotes and poems she explains to him that she has a ‘passion’ for language. 48 Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension, p. 103.

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The extreme experience of passion, according to Sobchack, ‘brings subjective being into intimate contact with its brute materiality’. 49 Therefore, the way that Frannie’s ‘passion’ for words is expressed by the film and grasped by the spectator offers a compelling example of the dynamics of tactile orientation in screen adaptation. At several points in the narrative Frannie reads the poetic phrases emblazoned on the walls of subway cars as part of New York City’s ‘Poetry in Motion’ programme. These phrases not only catch her eye but pull her from her experience of the ‘real world’ (that is, the crowded subway car as it rollicks along) to be absorbed in the world of language. This is adequately described in the novel, for example when reading a poem by García Lorca ‘the word that thrilled me was espesura. I whispered it many times, breaking it into syllables, trying it this way and that, rushing it, slowing it down […] Espesura, or thicket. Also a beautiful word, thicket. As in bajo espesura de besos. Under a thicket of kisses’.50 This passage provides a good example of the novel’s ‘strong […] tactile prose’, for not only does Frannie drift into reverie as she contemplates the poetic phrase, but the words take on tangible and malleable form. Grasping the words she plays with their sensual and temporal dimensions, ‘breaking’ them down, ‘trying it this way and that, rushing it, slowing it down’. However, while the novel describes the effect of words on Frannie, the film enacts the affective experience of these words when she is riding the crowded subway. The shot’s constrained framing emphasizes the crowded car as Frannie’s face is captured profile is in the bottom right of the screen, framed (and partly obscured) by the arm of another commuter. Frannie’s mouth opens and closes in silent speech as she looks off-screen, while the sounds of the rattling carriage fades and are replaced with a smoother and slightly atonal humming. The next shot aligns the spectator with Frannie’s point of view as she reads the poem, (Frannie’s imagination is heard in voice-over). Not only is the jiggling and shaking shot unstable in its physical movement, but it shifts its focus as well as the words of the poem swim in and out of focus as she reads. When she is out on the subway platform, the poem repeats in Frannie’s imagination as she jots it down. Frannie exits the subway platform in slow motion, her eyes drawn to a woman walking in the opposite direction down the stairs. Cutting to Frannie’s perspective again reveals that the woman is wearing a tank top that is decorated with an abstract face with pursed lips, the word ‘kisses’ scrawled several times over the fabric. We hear the words ‘under a thicket of kisses’ again as the woman walks past 49 Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, p. 287. 50 Susanna Moore, In the Cut, p. 28.

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the camera, while the atonal humming of the subway car takes on a more melodious prominence. Thus we are offered first-hand knowledge of Frannie’s intense passion for language. Although, as the camera adopts Frannie’s visual perspective, the sequence could be described as using ‘internal focalization’. However, the dynamic and shifting focus exceeds this term as the eye does not physiologically behave in the same manner. Rather, the shot invites tactile orientation as the blurry focus—compounded with the claustrophobic framing—lends a haptic sense of intoxicated dizziness. Further, the repeated murmur of ‘under a thicket of kisses’ seems to act like a magical incantation, slowing down the world around Frannie as she emerges from the subway. Therefore, the ‘Poetry in Motion’ is not only hypnotic and pleasurable for Frannie, but the film invites the spectator to grasp Frannie’s passion by putting poetry into motion.

A Touching Sight: Embodied Voyeurism Writing about how the ‘skin’ of a film beckons to the spectator’s sense of touch, Barker describes that the ‘palpable tactility of the contact between film’s skin and [the] viewer’s […] challenges traditional notions of film and viewer as distant and distinct from one another’, and argues that the ‘tactile relationship’ between spectator and screen is ‘fundamentally erotic’.51 It is little wonder, then, that feminist and queer scholars have particularly celebrated film’s tactile potential as a political act that challenges the psychosocial structure of vision by reversing ‘the relation of mastery’ between vision’s subject and object.52 Haptic film theory thus responds to Laura Mulvey’s influential description of how narrative cinema is characterized by scopophilia, a pleasure taken in an ‘erotic [way] of looking’ that relies on separation and clearly demarcated distinctions between the ‘active’ subjects of the look (frequently coded as male within the diegesis, with whom the spectator, via interpellation of the apparatus, identifies) and the ‘passive’ object for the look (the woman, who is styled and displayed in such a manner that emphasizes her ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ or her ‘visual and erotic impact’).53 Rather than an ‘erotic’ engagement with film resting on a ‘sense of separation’ between subject and object of the look, Barker argues 51 Jennifer Barker, Tactile Eye, p. 34. 52 Laura U. Marks, Skin of the Film, p. 185. 53 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure’, p. 11.

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that an erotic connection between spectator and screen emerges in mutual contact, while for Marks, a ‘visual erotics’ is ‘an encounter with an other that delights in the fact of its alterity, rather than attempt to know it […] Visual erotics allows the object of vision to remain inscrutable. But it is not voyeurism, for in visual erotics the looker is also implicated’.54 With this in mind, it is apt that In the Cut’s ‘re-vision’ of the erotic thriller genre reverses the typical structure of voyeurism, it is a man who makes his body a spectacle for a woman’s gaze. But even further, perhaps it is more appropriate to describe In the Cut as a ‘touching up’ of the erotic thriller, as the sequence collapses the distance between Frannie and the man—and the spectator and the film—by inviting tactile stimulation. Frannie’s voyeurism occurs in a dimly lit and cluttered basement. In long shot, and aligning with Frannie’s point of view, the camera reveals a man sitting in a chair with a woman between his legs, her head moving in his lap. The room is lit only by a red neon light that casts a hellish glow and a dim sickly yellow-green light that spills onto the woman’s head. Noticing Frannie’s interested look, the man grips the woman’s hair and raises it to expose her mouth on his penis, and the camera cuts to an extreme close-up of the woman’s blue fingernails as she performs fellatio. Following this is a series of more extreme close-ups: blue fingernails that scratch the cheap pilling fabric; his fist gripping her hair tightly; his tattooed wrist. Thus, aligned with Frannie’s vision, we share in this act of voyeurism. Yet because the close-ups afford the spectator much closer contact with the events that Frannie’s physical proximity, the events are not internally focalized in quite the same manner as Branigan’s description. Rather, the spectator is more appropriately orientated through Frannie’s tactile sensitivity to the sights and sounds of the couple’s erotic activities. Further, the sequence troubles the clear demarcation between subject and object by reflexively directing us to the contours of our vision. Our eyes grope through the shadows of the basement; further, our eyes press against the textured landscape of the basement, bathed in coloured light, creating a stifling and humid environment. Sound, too, lends a tactile density to the sequence. While the noises of the bar drop away, non-diegetic music begins to play, which amplifies as Frannie watches the sex act. It begins as a metallic hollow whooshing—a bit like the hum of stale air being sucked into a dilapidated air conditioning vent—but it begins to take on a throbbing density as stringed instruments slowly grind out bass chords. The effect signals the shift from a mood of fear and danger to one that begins to signal Frannie’s desire (indeed, although in its bass rumbling the score 54 Laura U. Marks, Touch, p. 18.

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never loses the trace of menace, it is telling that a more fully developed—and more romantic—version plays in future love sequences with Malloy, fusing danger with eroticism). The humidity evoked by the neon glow is also further enhanced through the soundscape. Punctuating the score is a slowly dripping tap that slowly plops in cool wetness that contrasts with the sounds of hot sucking wetness of the woman’s mouth, while the blue fingernails scratch and snag the fabric. In sum, although it is scene of voyeurism, the tactile richness of this sequence implicates our full sensorium. The way Frannie’s vision touched her is given concrete form in a later sequence after Frannie meets Malloy and (mis)identifies him as the man in the basement. The sequence acts as a mirror to the sequence in the basement, reversing Frannie’s voyeuristic pleasure in her look to expressing an exhibitionistic pleasure in being looked at as she masturbates. Frannie lies on her bed, dimly lit in a pool of yellow light, while the camera swims in and out of focus as it crawls down her body to her curling toes. Something catches Frannie’s eye; but rather than an eye-line match the next shot is a projection of Frannie’s inner sight as she imagines that she is in the basement being watched by the man. The man is more clearly defined as Malloy, he leans forward out of the red light and squints at Frannie. The camera is positioned behind Frannie as she removes her bra, and shoots through the bend in her arm so it looks as if she is cradling his head (the sequence uses a telephoto lens to reduce the space between the two bodies). Along with the fantasy of being watched, Frannie fantasizes about the tactile contact between the woman and man in the basement, repeating the extreme close-ups of the fingernails scratching the fabric and the man’s pulsing wrist as it grips the woman’s hair. After the shot of the man’s wrist the sequence cuts back to Frannie’s bedroom, and a close-up of her hand as she touches the small of her back; the juxtaposition of the two shots seems to connect Frannie’s desire to be touched. After these shots, the camera retreats out of Frannie’s fantasy and again crawls up and down her body, capturing Frannie’s hand as it grips her leg in orgasm. This sequence (and as I argue, the film more broadly) illustrates the way that Christiane Voss suggests that the body of the spectator ‘in its mental and sensorial-affective resonance with the events onscreen […] “loans” a three-dimensional body to the screen’ that embeds the film’s narrative in ‘a somatic space of meaning’.55 While elsewhere, Elena del Río describes how an ‘affect-driven vision that is corporeally and temporally grounded’ forms a membrane between spectator and screen, and as sight translates 55 Christiane Voss, ‘Film Experience’, p. 145.

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to touch it is more appropriate to conceive each as ‘surfaces in contact, engaged in a constant activity of reciprocal re-alignment and inflection’.56 As Frannie takes her pleasure into her own hands and fantasizes about being watched—literally ‘scratching the itch’ caused by her vision—she actively demonstrates the synaesthetic pleasure of sight as it is translates to touch. But not only does Frannie translate visual pleasure into tactile stimulation, but also this is expressed to the spectator through what del Río calls the ‘affect-generated layer’ that is the film’s body (p. 102). The warmth of the lighting design and the camera’s cataract vision gives the sequence a fuzzy texture, while the resonant score is palpably felt in the chest as an ache of longing. Combined with the camera’s movement and tight framing that almost caresses Frannie’s body, the sequence evokes a palpable amalgam of surfaces in contact as the bodies of Frannie, her ‘vision’, the film, and the spectator are layered.

Conclusion: Final Touch The last section of this chapter suggested that In the Cut formed an ‘affectgenerated layer’ that diminishes the distance between spectator and screen, heightening a haptic sensitivity in what I have termed ‘tactile orientation’ that gives particular access to the narrative. In doing so, I have sought to expand our understanding of an adaptation’s palimpsestic textual layering to value its textural experience. But as del Río importantly makes clear, such an ‘affectgenerated layer’ is also ‘subjectively-inflected […] an individuated form of perception and interaction’ (p. 102). Although the film’s fuzzy cinematography, warm lighting, and resonant score might invite tactile orientation, it does not guarantee its success. This is evident in the range of responses to the film, some sympathetic and others apathetic. Scott writes that In the Cut presents a ‘fascinating mélange of moods, associations and effects […] images and ideas that stick like splinters under your skin’,57 while Manohla Dargis describes it as a fusion of ‘hot sex, icy sentiment and warm-running blood […] filled with surreal hothouse flourishes’.58 But other reviewers felt their experience of In the Cut less pleasurable, evident in vernacular responses to the film. On the Internet Movie Database, for instance, user ‘hconover’ writes that the film is a ‘stuttering, hazy, out-of-focus mess’, while ‘081454’ suggests that the ‘sheer 56 Elena del Río, ‘Body as Foundation’, pp. 97-101. 57 A. O. Scott, ‘A Mystery of Language’, n.p. 58 Manohla Dargis, ‘Hot and Cold’, n.p.

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stupidity of the characters and the ugly way they were portrayed made my skin crawl. Somehow I felt the whole mess could be cleared up by an encounter with Prozac or the purchase of 2 or 3 lamps from Ikea’. I do not argue that such an interpretation and reaction to the film is wrong, nor do I suggest that the film has a complexity that has gone ‘over the heads’ of unsophisticated film viewers in raising these responses. But what this selection of both positive and negative reviews reveals, however, is the specific way the spectator’s body—even if seemingly unresponsive to the film—is still implicated as an important site of meaning regardless. Far from suggesting that In the Cut has gone ‘over their heads’, these reviews colourfully and evocatively articulate how the film has gone through their bodies. From warm caresses felt on the skin, violent jolts to the muscles, dizzying confusion, and, perhaps, sluggish weight of a film that we interminable wait for anything to happen, our tactile experience is anything but superficial. This chapter fleshed out critical developments in haptic film theory and put them into contact with screen adaptation. Using the specific case study of Campion’s In the Cut, I suggested that ‘tactile orientation’ is a productive term that attests to how the spectator may be aligned with the sensory experience of screen characters beyond their visual and auditory perception. Tactile orientation invites the spectator to more fully grasp the screen world, and in the case of In the Cut’s Frannie, awakens the spectator to her ‘passion’ for both sensual pleasure and language.

Works Cited Balázs, Béla. Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, ed. by Erica Carter. Trans. by Rodney Livingstone. New York: Berghahn, 2010. Barker, Jennifer. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley: U of California P, 2009. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 2007. Bradshaw, Peter. ‘Ghetto Blasters’, Guardian, 3 January 2003, pp. B8-9. Branigan, Edward. Narrative Comprehension and Film. London: Routledge, 1992. Chion, Michel. ‘Quiet Revolution… And Rigid Stagnation’, trans. by Ben Brewster, October, 58 (1991), 69-80. Dargis, Manohla. ‘Hot and Cold’, Los Angeles Times. 22 October 2003. (accessed 4 May 2016).

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Del Río, Elena. ‘The Body as Foundation of the Screen: Allegories of Technology in Atom Egoyan’s Speaking Parts’, Camera Obscura, 38.2 (1996), 92-115. Dole, Jake Ivan. ‘The Author’s Gesture: The Camera as a Body in Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love’, Cine-Files, 10 (2016), 1-15. Ebert, Roger. ‘In the Cut’, RogerEbert.com, 31 October 2003. < https://www.rogerebert. com/reviews/in-the-cut-2003> (accessed 14 February 2014). Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form and The Film Sense: Essays in Film Theory, trans. by Jay Leyda. Cleveland: Meridian, 1957 Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980. Geraghty, Christine. Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008. Geuens, Jean-Pierre. ‘Visuality and Power: The Work of the Steadicam’, Film Quarterly, 47.2 (1993), 8-17. Gjeslvik, Anne. ‘What Novels Can Tell That Movies Can’t Show’, in Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions, ed. by Jørgen Bruhn, Anne Gjelsvik, and Eirik Frisvold Hanssen (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 245-264. Green, Jesse. ‘That Was No “Lady”: Pilfering Literature’, New York Times, 11 May 1997, p. H23+. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Hansen, Miriam Bratu. ‘“With Skin and Hair”: Kracauer’s Theory of Film, Marseille 1940’, Critical Inquiry, 19.3 (1993), 437-469. Hodgkins, John. The Drift: Affect, Adaptation, and New Perspectives on Fidelity. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Holden, Stephen. ‘Retracing a Poet’s Journey to Despair’, New York Times, 6 October 2000, p. E14. Horyn, Cathy. ‘The New Meg Ryan’, Harper’s Bazaar, November 2003, pp. 150-155. Hunter, I.Q. ‘Adaptation XXX’, in The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. By Thomas Leitch (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017), pp. 424-440. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. London: Routledge, 2006. Kakutani, Michiko. ‘She Has an Ear for Slang and an Eye for Trouble’, New York Times, 31 October 1995, p. C15. Leland, John. ‘Track Stars’, Newsweek, 15 July 1996, pp. 52-55. Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke UP, 2000. ——. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. McHugh, Kathleen. Jane Campion. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2007.

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Meikle, Kyle. ‘Pornographic Adaptation: Parody, Fan Fiction, and the Limits of Genre’, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, 8.2 (2015), 123-140. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 2002. ——. Sense and Non-Sense, trans. by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1971. ——. The Visible and the Invisible, ed. by Claude Lefort, trans. by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1968. Moore, Susanna. In the Cut. New York: Vintage, 2007. Mulvey, Laura. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16.3 (1975), 6-18. Ruud, Amanda. ‘Embodying Change: Adaptation, the Senses, and Media Revolution’, in The Routledge Companion to Adaptation, ed. by Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs, Eckart Voights, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 245-255. Scott, A. O. ‘A Mystery of Language, a Mystery of Murder’, New York Times, 22 October 2003. (accessed 14 February 2015). Smith, Sean. ‘Love is Dangerous’, Newsweek, 22 September 2003, pp. 82-84. Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. ——. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004. ——. ‘Toward Inhabited Space: The Semiotic Structure of Camera Movement in the Cinema’, Semiotica, 41.1 (1982), 317-335. Turan, Kenneth. ‘The Screen is a Lush Canvas in Before Night Falls’, Los Angeles Times, 22 December 2000. < https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000dec-22-ca-3287-story.html> (accessed 4 May 2016). Voss, Christiane. ‘Film Experience and the Formation of Illusion: The Spectator as “Surrogate Body” for the Cinema’, Cinema, 50.4 (2011), 136-150. Williams, Linda. ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess’, Film Quarterly, 44.4 (1991), 2-13.

4. Textures of Imagination Abstract Rejecting any binary thinking that would have reading novels as an act of imagination while films are received through perception, this chapter examines how adaptations are experienced through the embodied imagination. This chapter builds upon approaches to imagination in cognitive aesthetics to argue that imagination is grounded in perception. This chapter draws on two case studies, Wonder (Stephen Chbosky, 2017) and Mood Indigo (Michel Gondry, 2013), both criticized for making tangible their literary sources in a manner than nullif ies imaginative engagement. Rather, I argue that spectators feel their way into the worlds and existential feelings of their characters through the embodied imagination. This chapter suggests that perception can lead to a greater imaginative understanding of a work, the world, and others, and how such an imaginative connection might shift our point of view. That is, screen adaptations are equipped to enact a leap from sight to insight. Keywords: adaptation, imagination, synaesthesia, embodied imagination, character engagement, existential feelings

Introduction: From Sight to Insight Film Phenomenology and Adaptation: Sensuous Elaboration’s attention to perception as the meaningful grounds of grasping adaptation and appreciating it as an aesthetic experience has firmly emphasized the critical value of attending to the materiality of screen adaptation. In doing so, this book has continued to challenge any claims that it is only novels that are conceptual and complex works that appeal to the reader’s imagination, while screen adaptations in their sensual density are merely grasped by perception, and are impoverished or simplistic versions of previous material. But as the previous three chapters have shown, this is far from accurate: in their appeal to the eye, ear, and in their very tangibility, screen adaptations vivify their

Richard, D.E., Film Phenomenology and Adaptation: Sensuous Elaboration. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463722100_ch04

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source material. In doing so, whether an adaptation’s sensuous contours enhance or transform their source material is, in the first, grasped by the spectator’s own materiality and their capacity to translate the senses into cognitive sense. Therefore, far from perception nullifying its activity, the sensing capabilities of the lived-body actively grounds imagination. This chapter seeks to flesh out the relationships between the ‘embodied imagination’ and the appreciation and evaluation of screen adaptation. Troubling this analysis is the fact that imagination is a complex and varied aspect of conscious life, with rich philosophical, psychological, and neurological histories. Imaginings can be categorized as being either imagistic (imagined sensory content) or non-imagistic;1 so too can the umbrella term ‘imagination’ refer to fantasy, engagement with fiction, projective mindreading and empathy, or a creative or recreative activity (as we will explore in the next chapter on adaptation as a form of memory work).2 My concern in this chapter emphasizes how imagination, as philosopher Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei argues, ‘relies upon the embodied basis of thinking, grounded both in the brain and its connections throughout the body and in interaction with the world’.3 The reversible structure of intentionality that grounds Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and its expression as conscious and reflective thought immediately signals the embodied imagination at work, and indeed imagination is an important aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of perception. As revealed in Chapter Three’s discussion of what could be thought of as the synaesthetic imagination as sight (and sound) translates to touch, Merleau-Ponty argues that synaesthesia is the ‘rule’ of perception, and that we have ‘unlearned how to see, hear, and […] feel’ through our gradual acculturation from birth. 4 But if we have ‘unlearned’ perception’s inherent synaesthetic dynamism through biological development and cultural conditioning, phenomenology presents the opportunity to re-learn it through imagination and the imaginative variation that lies at the heart of the phenomenological method. ‘I weave dreams round things’, as Merleau-Ponty evocatively describes the synaesthetic imagination, with his sensual experience being ‘filled with a play of colours, noises and fleeting tactile sensation which I cannot relate precisely to the context of my clearly perceived world, yet which I

1 2 3 4

Dominic Gregory, ‘Imagination’, pp. 97-110. Amy Kind, ‘The Heterogeneity of Imagination’, pp. 141-159. Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, Life of Imagination, p. 27. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, p. 266.

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nonetheless immediately “place” […] without ever confusing them with my daydreams’ (p. xi). Although Merleau-Ponty rather poetically describes how imagination fleshes out a synaesthetic understanding of the world, his philosophy has been verified by recent philosophical, psychological, and neurological research. Philosopher Bence Nanay has suggested that mental imagery (including auditory, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory imagery), particularly the kind he calls ‘amodal perception’, is necessary for a coherent synthesis of sensory phenomena,5 while psychologist Lorraine Bahrick reports that recent neurological research is keenly interested in how the ‘synchrony’ and ‘asynchrony’ of different sense modalities help to ground and ‘unify’ a sense of self.6 Thus, although imagination is often conceived of as being weightless, or an act of mental projection beyond the fleshy confines of the body, these recent studies advance a greater understanding of imagination’s ‘depth and breadth across human thinking, its rootedness in embodied life’.7 Although it grounds all conscious thought and its expression in language, the creativity of the embodied imagination is perhaps most pronounced in artistic practice. While the gestural artforms such as ballet literally figure the embodied imagination in their practice, audio-visual artworks—such as f ilms—also demonstrate it at work. This book has followed Vivian Sobchack’s conception of the ‘film’s body’, and in this chapter in particular I want to consider the film’s imagination: that is, the ‘film’s actualization of its emotional impressions […] its capacity not only to see the world but also to transform, dream, and fantasize its world as a possible world’.8 I am curious how this intersects with questions of adaptation. Adaptation scholar Thomas Leitch dismisses the diminishment of imagination in adaptations, demonstrating how novels and other sources act as blueprints for the adaptor’s imagination. As he puts it, ‘[just] as gaps are the engine of narrative engagement for the audience, they are the license for the kinds of filmmaking inventions that elevate adaptations above servile transcriptions’.9 As I will discuss in the following sections, the notion of the ‘gap’ becomes important in discussing the relationship between perception and imagination, for imagination is often thought of as flourishing in 5 6 7 8 9

Bence Nanay, ‘Imagination and Perception’, p. 130. Lorraine Bahrick, ‘Body Perception’, p. 1039. Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, Life of Imagination, p. 8. Vivian Sobchack, Address of the Eye, p. 255. Thomas Leitch, ‘Twelve Fallacies’, p. 161.

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absence. But just because an adaptation is an imaginative treatment of an existing work does not mean that the spectator’s embodied imagination is negated, that it has nothing left to do. Rather, screen adaptations solicit the embodied imagination to synaesthetically ‘fill in’ sensual gaps and share in the experience of characters beyond propositional imaginings about them. Therefore, considering the role of the embodied imagination at work in adaptation becomes a rather complex affair, necessitating attention to the creative imagination of the filmmaker, how a film acts as a demonstration of its own embodied imagination, and the way in which the spectator’s embodied imagination is activated in their experience. It is my contention that traversing these textures of imagination further illuminates our understanding and appreciation of the processes—and products—of adaptation. The first section of this chapter overviews some of the debates regarding the relationship between imagination in the experience of adaptation, before examining how imagination has been conceived in the appreciation of fiction, particularly in terms of character engagement. But I argue that these approaches—typically from the cognitivist perspective—marginalize the activity and value of the embodied imagination in grasping a lived understanding of a character’s thoughts, emotions, and what philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe describes as the general ‘existential feeling’ of their relationship with their body and world. To illustrate these claims, the main case study of this chapter is Michel Gondry’s 2013 Mood Indigo [L’écume des jours], an adaptation of Boris Vian’s novel. Interestingly, the French title has been translated as both Foam of the Daze or Froth of the Daydream, both of which testify to Vian’s dizzying prose that crafts a world of imagination that does not adhere to the logic or physical presence of our own. But I suggest that the way that Gondry concretizes Vian’s prose—and adds his own imaginative flourishes—does not negate the spectator’s embodied imagination in their experience of the film. Rather, my analysis demonstrates that film spectators come to understand the emotional and physical suffering of its characters through the embodied imagination. Just as a screen adaptation is a mediated version of an existing work into a newly embodied form, in everyday life the embodied imagination mediates perception to cognitive reflection and produces lived understanding. In doing so, not only does my analysis reveal that the embodied imagination is necessary to bridge sense to sense-making. But further, I also suggest that this enactment of Vian’s novel lends ethical and moral gravity to the narrative, something that dissolves in the reading of the novel like sherbet on the tongue, or dissipates like seafoam on the shore.

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Wonder, at the Limits of Adaptation Studies Adaptations are often framed as demonstrating a lack of imagination, in terms of both a perceived lack of creativity as an aesthetic form as well as an absence of imaginative activity of their beholder. Such a ‘lack’ of imagination leads to an accompanying perception of a lack in cultural value. Such thinking has its aesthetic roots in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s discussion of distinctions between the formal properties of linguistic and visual art that not only had ‘limitations’ of what could be expressed—time being the domain of poetry, and space for painting—but also how these forms were tied up in important cultural distinctions that testified to their aesthetic worth. Lessing privileges imagination over perception. Although acknowledging that the two are interrelated, he claims ‘only that which gives free reign to the imagination is effective’ and that ‘to present the utmost to the eye is to bind the wings of fancy and compel it, since it cannot soar above the impression made on the senses, to concern itself with weaker images, shunning the visible fullness already represented as a limit beyond which it cannot go’.10 As discussed in this book’s introduction, Lessing’s position regarding the differences between artforms were notably developed into adaptation studies by George Bluestone who argues that ‘between the percept of the visual image and the concept of the mental image lies the root difference between the two media’.11 And although Bluestone is sensitive to the aesthetic value of the cinema, throughout his study he nonetheless reinforces the notion that the different forms are better suited to expressing different aspects of experience, with films orientated towards action and exterior detail, while novels being associated with their power to enter the inner realm of imagination and emotional life of its characters. Although I would question Kamilla Elliott’s assertion that Bluestone’s taxonomies have been maintained by adaptation scholars ‘without objection’,12 surveying responses to adaptation across a broad period of time shows the persistence of Bluestone’s position. Virginia Woolf famously criticized the movies for lacking aesthetic sophistication, seeing them only as sensual, entertaining, and pleasurable. In the film experience, ‘[all] is hubble-bubble, swarm and chaos. We are peering over the edge of a cauldron in which fragments of all shapes and savors seem to simmer’, and our ‘eye licks it all up instantaneously, and the brain, agreeably titillated, settles down to watch 10 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, ‘From Laocoön’, p. 558. 11 George Bluestone, Novels into Film, p. 1. 12 Kamilla Elliott, ‘Novels’, p. 2.

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things happening without bestirring itself to think’.13 Elsewhere, Sarah Cardwell references critic D. J. Enright claim that the audience’s ‘imagination is starved’ watching films, and Leon Edel’s idea that ‘camera-vision cripples the use of the mind’s eye’, leading to a wholesale rejection of screen adaptation as an art form.14 But even more recent approaches to adaptation can easily slip into reductive binary thinking. By Linda Hutcheon’s description of the different ‘kinds and degrees of immersion’, reading is conceptual and appeals to the imagination, while the cinema or television immerses us through our senses to the extent that ‘[our] imaginations are permanently colonized by the visual and aural world of the film’15. In doing so, Hutcheon aligns with a long (if misguided) line of thinking that proposes that the screen has the power to neuter or co-opt the imagination. Victor Perkins writes that the ‘powerful combination of picture and movement tempts us to disregard the involvement of our imaginations in what we see’,16 while psychoanalytic accounts of spectatorship describe a passive viewer—alarmingly described by Christian Metz as ‘spectator-fish’—that are ‘swallowed up’ into the cinematic ‘imaginary’.17 This in turn leads to a perception that a novel is more ‘difficult’ than a film as it seemingly requires the reader’s imagination to translate words, sentences, and descriptions into mimetic sensory content. As André Gaudreault and Phillippe Marion put it, the reader ‘[draws] on their own imagination to mentally represent what has not been given in perceptual terms (sound, movement, temporality). Once we have supplanted this lack, filled in the void, the [novel’s] world communicates the idea that our imaginary is directly responsible for the experience’.18 In doing so, some scholars, such as Brian McFarlane, conceive reading as involving ‘a kind of personal adaptation on to the screen of one’s imaginative faculty as one reads’.19 As authors rarely give an exhaustive description of every facet of a character’s personality, their appearance, or their world, exactly how the reader imagines characters, locations, and actions in a novel is highly subjective. As Julian Hanich has persuasively argued, the act of reading—the intimacy of holding the novel in one’s hands, the temporal ‘freedom’ of reading, its necessity for attention and command of the reader’s imagination—develops a co-creative feeling of ‘mineness’ that 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Virginia Woolf, ‘The Movies and Reality’, p. 264. Quoted in Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited, p. 36. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, p. 122; p. 133. Victor Perkins, Film as Film, p. 63. Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, p. 96; p. 67. André Gaudreault and Phillippe Marion, ‘Transécriture’, p. 68. Brian McFarlane, ‘Reading Film and Literature’, p. 16.

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creates a ‘wish for congruence’ between what the reader imagines and what appears on the screen, a wish that causes disappointment if not satisfied.20 A recent critical response to the adaptation of Wonder (Stephen Chbosky, 2017) models these tensions between imagination, perception, audience’s experience, and critical value. Wonder tells the story of August ‘Auggie’ Pullman (Jacob Tremblay). Auggie and his sister Via (Izabela Vidovic) live with their parents Isabel (Julia Roberts) and Nate (Owen Wilson) in a beautiful New York brownstone. In many ways, Auggie is like other ten-year-old children: he loves his dog Daisy, he is fascinated by science, and he is nervous about the approach of his f irst day at a new school. But as Auggie tells us in the novel, ‘the only reason I’m not ordinary is that no one else sees me that way’,21 for he has Treacher Collins Syndrome, a genetic disorder that manifests—among other things—as severe craniofacial deformities. Auggie’s condition means that he has been home-schooled and generally isolated, but after a series of painful surgeries on his face—and armed with a seemingly indefatigable sense of positivity—the first day of middle school seems like the ideal opportunity to re-join his community at a progressive school. But once entering the school, the response from Auggie’s schoolmates initially range from apprehension, disgust, and anger, with most finding it difficult to look beyond his face, unable to imagine what Auggie thinks and feels. As Auggie explains, ‘it’s like people you see sometimes, and you can’t imagine what it would be like to be that person, whether it’s somebody in a wheelchair or somebody who can’t talk. Only, I know that I’m that person to other people’ (p. 300). But as Auggie makes friends they overcome their prejudice. In doing so, Auggie teaches those who come into contact with him about the dangers of taking things at face value, and to instead imagine what it might feel like to be in another’s skin. Palacio’s novel is rather transparent in its aim to develop the moral awareness of its young readers. Although largely centred on Auggie, the novel is structured through a shifting first-person perspective that gives insight into a variety of characters and how they perceive Auggie, and how their relationship with him impacts their shifting worldview. So too does the novel invite sympathy through its clear and appealing characterization, 20 Julian Hanich, ‘Great Expectations’, pp. 426-441. Beyond disappointment, anger and disgust are also common emotional responses to an adaptation, sadly tied to questions of ethnicity, casting, and characterization. Consider the racist response of fans of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games novels when the character of Rue was played by Amandla Stenberg, a black actress in the adaptation (Gary Ross, 2012). Anna Holmes investigates the fan response to this casting and ‘imagining race’ in The Hunger Games (‘White Until Proven Black, n.p.). 21 R. J. Palacio, Wonder, p. 3.

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cultivating an awareness of the importance of empathic understanding. Wonder explicitly asks its reader to reflect on codes of morality that structure ethical behaviour. Auggie’s teacher Mr. Brown (played in the film by Daveed Diggs) offers a ‘daily precept’, the most overt of which is on the nature of kindness. As the school’s principal Mr. Tushman (Mandy Patinkin) reflects: ‘One should always be kinder than needed […] we carry with us, as human beings, not just the capacity to be kind, but the very choice of kindness. What does that mean? […] How do we know we’ve been kind? What is being kind anyway?’ (p. 300). The core precept of Mr. Brown—and Wonder itself—is that we should always ‘choose kind’ in our interpersonal relationships. Just as Auggie encourages his classmates to imagine what it is like to be different, Wonder similarly instructs us to abandon a superficial gaze and to judge others not by their appearance but, rather, by the quality of their characters and actions. In its focus on appearance and being, sight and insight, it is therefore useful to consider Wonder’s skilful weaving of perception and imagination in its context as an adaptation. For some, like critic Maria Russo, the film’s sensory content defuses the appeal to the spectator’s imagination. As she puts it, the greatest pleasure of the novel is that ‘a compelling visual mystery lies at its core’, and that ‘you have to solve it for yourself, completely within the confines of your own imagination’.22 The ‘visual mystery’ that Russo refers to here is the precise nature of Auggie’s face. In the novel, the exact contours of Auggie’s face are largely withheld from the reader. As Auggie himself says, ‘whatever you’re imagining: it’s worse’.23 We do get clues, though, such as when he describes the intimacy his mother shows him, and how she ‘kissed my eyes that came down too far. She kissed my cheeks that look punched in. She kissed my tortoise mouth’ (p. 60). It is not until the narration changes to the perspective of Via that we get a better ‘look’ at Auggie. Via describes his facial features as looking as if ‘they’ve been melted, like the drippings of a candle […] His upper teeth are small and splayed out’ (p. 88). Palacio’s highly metaphoric descriptions direct the reader to ‘fill in’ the details of Auggie’s face in particular ways (his ‘tortoise mouth’ or skin like a melted candle). For some, Auggie’s skin might droop and heavily sag around his jowls like bulbous wax drippings. For others, Auggie’s face might be tight, smooth, and red—stretched by repeated surgeries—with a small gash of a mouth sliced into his skin like a jack-o-lantern. The way that Palacio’s open descriptions invite a variety of possible imaginings of the 22 Maria Russo, ‘Through Wonder’, p. C1. 23 R. J. Palacio, Wonder, p. 3.

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reader is precisely why Russo argues that Wonder falters as an adaptation as in the film Auggie’s face is directly presented to the spectator’s perception and is fixed in the specific design of Arjen Tuiten, the film’s special effects coordinator. Indeed, the ‘visual mystery’ of Auggie’s face is quickly solved in the film. The film opens with a montage of Auggie as he does things familiar to many children: jumping on his bed, playing videogames, riding his bike. Throughout this sequence Auggie wears a large astronaut’s helmet that he uses to hide his face, but after a few minutes he stops before a mirror and removes it. As Auggie’s voice over introduces himself to the spectator, the camera takes in the extent of his facial difference. The camera observes Auggie’s face in profile, documenting the folds of skin and scars that line his face, before the camera cuts to a frontal close-up. This shot allows us to see how Auggie’s craniofacial deformities have altered the shape of his face: Auggie’s cheeks hang low on his face, and his nose appears somewhat stretched. So too do Auggie’s eye sockets bulge and droop, exaggerating his almond-shaped eyes to give him an almost feline appearance. But seeing what she terms as the ‘non-negotiable truth’ of Auggie’s face in the film f ills Russo with a ‘peculiar mix of satisfaction and letdown’. 24 Russo’s disappointment therefore appears to very well be attributed to Hanich’s suggestion of an unfulfilled ‘wish for congruence’. But on reflection, such disappointment seems somewhat misguided as Russo’s focus on the ‘visual mystery’ of Auggie’s face counters Wonder’s political message by reducing our imaginative engagement with Auggie to the surface of his skin. Rather, as the adaptation shows us his face quickly—and with relatively little fanfare—the film invites spectators to ‘see through’ Auggie’s disability, and to instead see him for what he is: a regular kid with the same insecurities and desires as any other.

Wonder, Make-Believe, and Simulation: Cognitive Approaches to Imagination Russo’s emphasis on the reader’s imagination and Auggie’s face reduces the role of imagination to imaging, a limited view of the spectator’s imagination at work that is rather a tapestry of memories, judgements, beliefs, synthesis and creativity as the narrative progresses. The complexity of the spectator’s imaginative activity has been the focus of much cognitive work in 24 Maria Russo, ‘Through Wonder’, p. C1.

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film studies, particularly in terms of emotional experience, and character engagement. Much of this work has been in response to the paradox of belief: that is, if we know that the book we are reading or the film we are watching is a work of fiction, how is it that we can have genuine emotional responses? The stakes are perhaps even greater in the case of adaptation: how is it that—and this is especially the case in those forms of adaptation that substantially draw on the characters and plot detail of its source—that we emotionally engage with something with which we are already familiar and often have the same feelings despite knowing the outcome? I read Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt before seeing Todd Haynes’s adaptation Carol (2015), yet nonetheless I experienced similar emotions: concern for Therese (played by Rooney Mara) and Carol (Cate Blanchett) as they navigated their bourgeoning romance, anxiety when their relationship is exposed by a private investigator, and relief when the film ends with an optimistic outlook for their future. Kendall Walton has influentially suggested that the experience of fiction is akin to a game of ‘make believe’ in that we imagine as if the characters are real (and, in the case of repeated readings/viewings, anew), in a manner that taps into the agent’s real-world psychological mechanisms to promote emotional engagement.25 Gregory Currie makes a similar point when he suggests that our usual perceptive, cognitive, and imaginative patterns run ‘off-line’ during the experience of fiction in which we simulate participation and step into the character’s shoes. Primary imagining is the first step of engagement in which the beholder entertains beliefs regarding the fictional world, while secondary imagining is a specific form of imaginative simulation of a character’s thoughts, perspectives, or emotional experiences within the diegesis.26 Murray Smith likewise proposes that spectatorship involves both acentral and central imagination, both valuable concepts to analyse the different kinds and degrees of character engagement. Acentral imagination involves how we come to sympathize with characters through a structure of recognition, alignment, and allegiance or moral evaluation, while central imaginings are those processes that promote empathetic engagement such as affective mimicry of facial cues, automatic responses such as startle reflexes, and specific emotional simulation in which we ‘imagine from the inside’.27 Approaching a work of adaptation in terms of our imaginative engagement is therefore a far more complex matter than simply mapping the differences 25 Kendall Walton, ‘Spelunking’, p. 40. 26 Gregory Currie, Image and Mind, p. 153. 27 Murray Smith, ‘Imagining’, p. 415.

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between the ‘imaging’ of film and the spectator. Rather, as adaptation scholars we must be sensitive to other dimensions of imaginative activity, such as inflections in character engagement and embodied resonance. For instance, one of the emotional hinges of Wonder occurs at Halloween, Auggie’s favourite time of the year as he—along with everyone else—is disguised by costumes and masks. But while in his disguise, Auggie overhears his friend Jack (Noah Jupe) trying to fit in with school bully Julian (Bryce Gheisar) by saying that he is only pretending to be his friend. Auggie is understandably devastated and runs away, explaining in the novel that ‘I was looking for a tiny spot to disappear into. I wanted a hole I could fall inside of: a little black hole that would eat me up’.28 While the novel invites us to metaphorically imagine Auggie’s emotional anguish in physical terms, his body shrinking and swallowed into nothingness, the film’s handling of this event also encourages us to imagine Auggie’s perspective ‘from the inside’. When Auggie tells Via about what happened at school, the camera cuts in close to his face to capture his expressive eyes that fill with tears, his voice cracking and choking when he says that Jack would rather ‘kill himself’ than look like Auggie. As cognitivist film scholar Carl Plantinga has documented, the close-up of the human face is a powerful elicitor of empathy as it prompts the kinds of affective mimicry that constitute central imaginings.29 So too do the textures of Auggie’s voice prompt somatic resonance in spectators, his hysterical voice and rasping breaths making his anguish palpable in a way that is unavailable in literature. I argue that such somatic resonance is a form of carnal knowledge that fosters embodied understanding of Auggie by appealing to our capacity for empathy, directly aligning with the political intent of the novel. This does lead me to an important change in the adaptation. Although I have claimed that Russo’s criticism of the film adaptation dismisses important aspects of the spectator’s imagination, she does raise a valuable point regarding Auggie’s own embodied imagination and how he feels inside his skin. She argues that while the novel offers fragments of Auggie’s appearance that are to be filled out by the reader’s imagination, Auggie’s first-person narration at times valuably ‘[focuses] on what it is like to live in his body’.30 Along with craniofacial abnormalities, Treacher Collins Syndrome also presents with conductive hearing problems due to irregularities in the development of the outer and inner ear. Auggie experiences deafness and 28 R. J. Palacio, Wonder, p. 78. 29 Carl Plantinga, ‘The Scene of Empathy’, p. 240. 30 Maria Russo, ‘Through Wonder’, p. C1.

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wears hearing aids, and in the novel he conveys its experiential quality. ‘My hearing was getting worse’, he tells the reader, and that ‘[the] ocean sound that was always in my head had been getting louder […] like I was underwater’, and that switching on his hearing aids made him ‘hear sounds like shiny lights in my brain […] I don’t know if there’s a word that means the same as “bright” in terms of hearing, but I wish I knew one, because my ears were hearing brightly now’.31 Much like his earlier description of wanting his body to shrink in sadness and shame, Auggie recognizes here the value of synaesthetic metaphor to convey the quality of his hearing to make it inhabitable for the reader. But this is an aspect of Wonder that is inadequately translated in its adaptation to the screen. Although the adaptation fosters the spectator’s sympathy for Auggie and his condition—that is, feeling for him—it is less successful at evoking embodied empathy, or feeling with him, except in moments of extreme emotional distress, such as his devasted response to Will’s betrayal. Although Wonder at times depicts Auggie’s imagination, such as when he imagines being an astronaut, or bringing Chewbacca to school, the film does not use subjective sound or point-of-view shots that would trigger ‘central imagining’, limiting our access to embodied insight of him. Ascertaining the relationship between perception and imagination is complex and slippery, and some scholars would refute the role imagination actually plays in ‘central imagining’. This is the position that cognitivist film scholar Jinhee Choi takes when she argues that it is actually impossible to ‘imagine from the inside’ when films offer the subjective perspective of characters as imagination relies on absence, and therefore there is nothing left for it to fill in. As she explains, there needs to be an ‘epistemic gap’ between spectator and character in order to trigger simulations such as ‘central imaginings’.32 Following this line of thought, the adaptation’s lack of techniques that constitute ‘central imagining’ per Smith might actually promote ‘imagining from the inside’. But this position seems inadequate to me. As I have established, perception and imagination are not separate realms of conscious life, but rather are interwoven in the texture of experience. I follow Gosetti-Ferencei when she emphasizes that any conception of imagination must engage with ‘the body itself as the medium of imagining’.33 Although imagination in all its facets draws on embodied life, sensitivity to the embodied imagination is critical in grasping our empathetic 31 R. J. Palacio, Wonder, pp. 211-214. 32 Jinhee Choi, ‘Leaving it Up to the Imagination’, p. 19. 33 Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Life of Imagination, p. 159.

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engagement with others. With the help of embodied imagination, it is no longer metaphorical to claim that empathy constitutes an imaginative ‘reaching toward’ another. But beyond the role it plays in empathic engagement and other-oriented perspective taking, embodied imagination is crucially connected with physical and creative expression. Fleshing out its contours in the next section, I suggest that the embodied imagination quite literally ‘minds’ the ‘epistemic gap’ between characters, spectators, and the screen, and gesture towards its value to appreciating the creativity of screen adaptation.

Embodied Imagination and Intercorporeality: Mind the (‘Epistemic’) Gap! While challenged, Smith’s description of the spectator’s ‘central imagination’ importantly foregrounds how perception might act as an imaginative bridge to the embodied understanding of others. Putting the body back into an account of imaginative experience is vital as cognitive approaches to imagination can be criticized for being overly obtuse and limiting our involvement to responses to mental schemas or thought contents. That is, for cognitivists, I do not see Auggie crying on his bed, but rather I employ ‘perceptual imagining’ to imagine-seeing him that triggers emotional engagement, either personally as if I were present in the scene (Walton), or impersonally (Currie).34 Such an approach has been criticized for dismissing the actual work of perception, or as Malcolm Turvey explains, ‘[divorces] the spectator’s capacity to respond emotionally to fiction from the unique attributes of the cinematic medium as a physical entity’.35 Recently, phenomenological film scholars have sought to resuscitate the role of what Tarja Laine refers to as the ‘affective imagination’.36 Rejecting aesthetic philosopher Dominic McIver Lopes’s claim that ‘cinema does not allow much in the way of sensory imagining unless it is tactile, gustatory, or olfactory’,37 Hanich has convincingly argued that the spectator’s sensual imagination is actually a much more frequent phenomenon, triggered through a film’s use of suggestion or omission. When Clarice Starling (Jodie 34 Kendall Walton, Mimesis and Make-Believe, p. 264; Gregory Currie, Image and Mind, pp. 161-191. For a cogent discussion of this hypothesis, see Margrethe Bruun Vaage, ‘The Role of Empathy’, pp. 109-128. 35 Malcolm Turvey, ‘Seeing Theory’, p. 434. 36 Tarja Laine, ‘Dangerous Liaisons’, p. 247. 37 Dominic McIver Lopes, ‘Out of Sight’, p. 223.

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Foster) first visits Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) in The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1992), she is warned to adhere to the facility’s strict security protocol due to Lecter’s sadistic violence. She is shown a photograph of the damage he inflicted on a nurse, and although we cannot see the contents of the photograph, we can see Starling’s face in shock. So too can we hear the voice of Dr. Chilton (Anthony Heald) describing how they ‘managed to save one eye’, and that Lecter swallowed her tongue. Combined with the low camera angle and the demonic red lighting of the shot, the spectator is invited to ‘complete’ the picture by imagining the nurse’s ruined face on the photograph.38 So too are we invited to sensually imagine other modes of perception. Jane Stadler has extended Hanich’s argument to explore the ‘sonic imagination’,39 while Vivian Sobchack’s ground-breaking philosophy of film experience frequently mines the synaesthetic possibility of sensual imagining, clearly marked in titles such as ‘What My Fingers Knew’, ‘When the Ear Dreams’, and ‘The Dream Olfactory’. 40 Chapter Three of this book has developed Jennifer Barker’s work on the tactile imagination, drawing attention to her conception of how the f ilm’s ‘musculature’—enacted through the camera’s gestural movement—stimulates a form of embodied empathy with the spectator.41 It might seem difficult to wrap one’s head around how a spectator ‘empathizes’ with the film’s body at first: films are not sentient beings, and Barker’s conceptualization of ‘muscular empathy’ sidelines the cognitive dimension of other-orientated perspective taking that is central to traditional accounts of empathy. Yet Barker’s account of muscular empathy can be plotted within a philosophical lineage that emphasizes the centrality of the body as the grounds for empathic experience, a critical approach that has been substantiated by recent neurological studies. The etymology of ‘empathy’ is derived from Einfühlung, a German word that means ‘to feel into’. Coined by Robert Vischer in 1873, the term was popularized by philosopher Theodor Lipps in 1897 who used it to describe aesthetic appreciation as a form of projection of the beholder and their fusion with the art object. 42 Later Empathists, such as Herbert Langfeld, considered aesthetic appreciation as a form of ‘motor imagining’—in which the beholder 38 Julian Hanich, ‘Omission, Suggestion, Completion’, n.p. 39 Jane Stadler, ‘Cinesonic Imagination’, pp. 8-15. 40 Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, pp. 53-84; ‘When the Ear Dreams’, pp. 2-15; ‘The Dream Olfactory’, pp. 121-143. 41 Jennifer M. Barker, Tactile Eye, pp. 73-82. 42 Lipps was also the first to theorize how empathy might allow for embodied understanding of another’s mental state. For discussion see: Christiane Montag et al, ‘Theodor Lipps’, p. 1261.

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of an artwork, a sculpture, might ‘grasp’ its shape, texture, or density by imagining one’s hands touching its marble—or was to be enriched through the beholder’s ‘motor memory’. He explains how we ‘assume a motor attitude’ towards the (art-)object of perception: The memory of former movements, which are so revived that they form a nervous pattern; that is, the nerve paths going to the necessary muscle groups are opened, and those to opposed muscle groups are closed, and this pattern, which is ready on additional stimulation to produce actual movement, is sufficient to give us our perception of space, weight, form, smoothness, delicacy, and many of our other experiences. 43

Currie has warned that the Empathists’ early writing should be taken with a grain of salt as at times their florid descriptions ‘threatens to reduce aesthetic experience to callisthenic exercises’. 44 Nonetheless, Langfeld’s suggestion that ‘nervous patterns’ are activated in the experience of aesthetic objects (and other people) has been substantiated by recent research into the neurophenomenology of empathic engagement. The discovery of mirror neurons, for instance, troubles thinking about empathy as a ‘top-down’ cognitive exercise in other-orientated perspective taking in which I imaginatively simulate the thoughts and feelings of another agent.45 Rather, as neurologist Marco Iacoboni has shown, mirror neurons fire in the brain of a subject when either performing an action or observing it, positioning empathy as a ‘bottom-up’ act of embodied imagination. Studying the relationship between facial expressivity, its observation, and neurological activity, researchers suggest that ‘connections with the limbic system via the insula would allow mirror neurons to send signals to limbic areas, such that the observer can feel what others are feeling’. 46 Sound is connected to mirror neurons as well, with Vittorio Gallese describing how mirror neurons fire not only when performing or watching actions, but also while listening to them. Thus, Gallese posits that our innate ‘intercorporeality’ grounds and animates intersubjective experience, and that ‘others become our second selves’. 47 In doing so, embodied simulation creates a ‘multidimensional, “we-centric” shared space’ that builds social identity and the ability to relate to others.48 43 44 45 46 47 48

Herbert Langfeld, Aesthetic Attitude, pp. 110-111. Gregory Currie, ‘Empathy for Objects’, p. 84. Amy Coplan, ‘Empathic Engagement’, pp. 143-145. Marco Iacoboni, ‘Within Each Other’, p. 50. Vittorio Gallese, ‘Embodied Simulation’, p. 33. Vittorio Gallese, ‘Roots of Empathy’, p. 172.

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I argue that the screen itself forms a ‘multidimensional, “we-centric” shared space’, a position that is verified through neurological experiments that reveal that mirror neurons are not only activated ‘in the flesh’ but also through the spectators’ screen experience. 49 Although spectators’ mirror neurons are certainly triggered by engaging with screen characters,50 research conducted by Gallese, Michele Guerra and others proves that cinematographic choices (such as handheld camera work or the Steadicam) increase embodied simulation responses, lending credence to Barker’s notion of spectators experiencing ‘muscular empathy’ with the camera’s movement.51 Neuroscientist Michael Burke suggests that there is evidence that a similar automatic response is triggered in the brain while reading fiction.52 However, this brief discussion of the neurological function of intercorporeality and the embodied imagination substantiates this book’s philosophical underpinning in film-phenomenology and intersubjective experience. Narrative film uses embodied actors to drive their narratives: as this section’s presentation of the neurological basis of intercorporeality attests, before conscious cognitive responses (directed imagining, reflection, and interpretation), spectators experience an ‘implicit, automatic, and unconscious process of embodied simulation’ that grounds the intelligibility of intersubjective experience.53 Therefore, I contend that screen narratives not only incorporate spectators into immersive sensual experiences from without. But spectators—even before they are consciously aware of it—also incorporate the screen world from within through the imagination that is sensual and propositional, embodied and transcendent. Rather than being conjured in moments of an ‘epistemic gap’ to recall Choi, the absence of embodied knowledge of another, the embodied imagination transforms me into what psychiatrist and philosopher Thomas Fuchs terms a ‘felt mirror’ as the body itself becomes the medium for producing carnal insight.54 The screen itself is an extension of this capacity, for what else is the cinema but a ‘felt mirror’, a vehicle that expresses its creative imagination that is in turn sensually, imaginatively, and emotionally grasped? As Matthew Kieran and Dominic McIver Lopes argue, a more holistic understanding 49 See Bruno Wicker et al, ‘Both of Us’ pp. 655-666. 50 See Adriano D’Aloia, ‘Cinematic Empathy’, pp. 93-108. 51 See Jane Stadler, ‘Experiential Realism’, pp. 439-465, for a thorough overview of the developing field of ‘neurophenomenology’ that empirically studies neurological dimensions of cinematic experience. 52 Michael Burke, ‘Neuroaesthetics’, p. 8. 53 Vittorio Gallese, ‘Roots of Empathy’, p. 174. 54 Thomas Fuchs, ‘Corporealized and Disembodied Minds’, p. 98.

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of our imaginative engagement with an artwork involves not only valuing propositional imaginings, but also close attention to how ‘the expressively imaginative aspect of a work, which concerns the connections, associations, emotional mood, or tone’ shapes other kinds of imaginative responses, including perceptual imaginings and aesthetic judgments.55 In what follows, I continue this discussion between the embodied imagination and the aesthetics of adaptation in my analysis of Mood Indigo. This is an adaptation that gets right to the heart of the issues at stake here, as it is a film that teases the porous membrane between imagination and perception, as it invites us to share in the existential experience of its characters.

Inside-Out and Upside-Down: Mood Indigo’s Existential Feelings Mood Indigo provides a compelling case study to examine the role of the embodied imagination in the aesthetic experience of screen adaptation, as it is grounded in the experiential fluctuations between presence and absence, expressing both the vitality of life and the aching hollow of grief that blooms in its loss. At its heart, Mood Indigo is a tragic love story. Colin (played by Romain Duris) is a wealthy Parisian bachelor who spends his days eating and drinking with his friend Chick (Gad Elmaleh). One day, Colin meets Chloe (Audrey Tatou) and they fall immediately and completely in love, reflected in their world that fizzes like a glass of pink champagne. But on their honeymoon Chloe unexpectedly begins to grow a waterlily in her lung, becomes increasingly ill and dies, leaving Colin emotionally broken and financially broke. Gondry was presented with a particular challenge in his adaptation, as Vian’s novel is linguistically playful, telling the story of Colin and Chloe whirlwind love—and loss—through an endless stream of wordplay and puns. So too is the novel intensely descriptive, heavy in similes and synaesthetic metaphors that conjure the feeling of Colin and Chloe’s world. For instance, Colin describes the ‘flesh-coloured nylon’ stockings of some girls on the street as having seams that meander ‘like fabulously long slinky caterpillars leading up to the articulated concave curves’, or how Colin, when meeting Chloe, literally tastes the chemistry between them as if his mouth ‘were stuffed with the frizzled crumbs of burnt doughnuts’.56 Further adding to the difficulty of adapting the novel to film is the sheer surrealism of Vian’s prose, for although set in post-War Paris, Mood Indigo is 55 Matthew Kieran and Dominic McIver Lopes, ‘Introduction’, p. 8. 56 Boris Vian, Mood Indigo, p. 34, p. 36.

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seemingly removed from the physical (and moral) laws of our world. Chairs can wriggle and squirm while men are paid to nurture weapons that grow in the earth like tulips; meanwhile, a dance craze called The Squint (renamed Le Biglemoi in the film) sweeps through the Parisian soirées, a sultry movement of bodies that literally vibrate in resonance with one another. As Vian puts it in his preface to the novel, Mood Indigo’s ‘materialization […] consists basically of a projection of reality, under favourable circumstances, on to an irregularly tilting, and consequently distorting plane of reference’ (p. vii). Film critic Jonathan Romney argues that Mood Indigo ‘is the sort of book you visualize so vividly while reading it that there doesn’t seem any pressing reason for actually turning it into images on a screen’.57 But if anyone was up to the task it would certainly be Gondry, an imaginative director whose oeuvre consistently materializes a peculiar ‘projection of reality […] on to an irregular tilting and consequently distorting plane of reference’. Consider Gondry’s use of stop-motion animation and rearprojection as fantasy collides with reality in The Science of Sleep (2006), or his use of warped perspective and bleary cinematography as he conjures the searching function of memory in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). Gondry harnesses many of these practical effects and more in his eye-popping adaptation, leading film critic Peter Bradshaw to note that ‘not a single scene or frame goes past without the cymbal clash of wackiness or the splat of surreality’.58 Take the film’s opening sequence which follows Colin’s morning routine. Over the upbeat jazz of Duke Ellington’s ‘Take the A Train’, the camera cuts to Colin submerged in the purple water of his bath. Instead of merely pulling out the plug to drain the bathwater, Colin drills a hole in the bath: as his bath drains (filmed in stop-motion), purple water pours through the floor and into the apartment below, where a woman catches it to water her pot plants that bloom into colourful (but artificial) flowers. Looking in the mirror, Colin then uses scissors to ‘trim’ his eyelids, and they plop—lashes and all—into the sink like plasticine pouches. And then, while walking through his hallway, Colin stops to play with his mouse (played by Sacha Bourdo, miniaturized and wearing a rudimentary mouse costume) as beams of light shine into the room. But these are solid beams of light, made from elastic string, and Colin plays them like a harp in time to the music as the little mouse dances between them. Gondry’s relentless visual aesthetic can certainly be too much for some. Bradshaw says that Gondry is an ‘acquired taste’ and that for many Mood 57 Jonathan Romney, ‘Film of the Week’, n.p. 58 Peter Bradshaw, ‘Kaleidoscopic Kidulthood’, n.p.

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Indigo will be ‘like eating an anvil-sized block of Marmite, drinking liquid Marmite and breathing Marmite in gaseous form’ (n.p.) Hanich would agree, dismissing the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Wes Anderson, and Gondry for their overt figuring and foregrounding of their imaginativeness and inventiveness. He terms this particular form of filmmaking as ‘precious cinema’, and claims that ‘since every frame is a painting, filled with visual puns and lovely arrangements and funny little things to discover, I feel like I am standing in front of [a] crammed wall in the Louvre […] dizzy with cinematic Stendahl Syndrome’.59 As he puts it, precious cinema ‘leaves nothing for me to fill in’ and that ‘[all] I can do is watch, with wide eyes, the relentless and overstimulating visual gimmicky flow’ (p.265). But this sounds as if the film’s overt appeal to the senses and perception precludes the spectator’s capacity to think and reflect on what they see. That is, when Hanich’s says that there is ‘nothing for me to fill in’, he effectively claims that a film’s overt demonstration of the directors’ imaginativeness cuts off the spectator’s imagination. Hanich’s discussion of ‘precious cinema’, its overt solicitation of the spectator’s perception and seemingly lack of imaginative engagement therefore collides with the earlier discussion of imagination and adaptation. Certainly, Vian’s prose dictates the use of the director’s creative imagination to achieve the novel’s tone and events, such as the way that Colin uses scissors to snip at ‘the corners of his eggshell eyelids to add a touch of mystery’, or how the brightness of the light produced ‘fairylike effects’ as the kitchen mice dance to the music the sun makes as it bounces off the apartment’s gleaming surfaces.60 But some responses to Gondry’s adaptation evoke the logophilia/iconophobia divide—as detailed in the introduction to this book—that dismiss a screen adaptation for its concrete sensuality and how it ‘offends through its inescapable materiality, its incarnated fleshly enacted characters […] its carnality and visceral shocks to the nervous system’.61 Romney evokes such a position. He claims that the novel ‘is by nature light, a construct of weightless, casually handled language from which images emerge as if by magic’: in adapting the novel’s ‘poetic hallucinations […] makes for a sometimes oppressive literalism’, and that the materiality of the film cannot ‘match the weightless delirium you can conjure’ when reading.62 59 60 61 62

Julian Hanich, ‘Oh Inventiveness!’, p. 265. Boris Vian, Mood Indigo, pp. 3-5. Robert Stam, ‘Introduction’, p. 6. Jonathan Romney, ‘Film of the Week’, n.p.

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I would like to pause here for a moment on this idea of the ‘weightlessness’ of the imagination and the insistence of the film, because Mood Indigo’s tangibility is central. As Audrey Tatou says, the aim was to make the ‘fantasy palpable’.63 I suggest that Gondry’s film expresses the existential feelings of its characters, making them palpable for the spectator. Existential feelings are similar to mood, so it is worth untangling the terminology briefly here. Unlike emotions that are intentional (in that they are directed towards something) and include cognitive judgments and bodily affect, moods are generally thought of being non-intentional in character. One might find oneself in a particular mood without any clear reason, and may be stuck in it for an uncertain time. Pervasive and diffuse, moods permeate and inflect all experience. Everything is irritating if one is in a ‘bad’ mood: simple tasks seem a burden while sounds seem louder and more intrusive, while caring looks and cheerful words—rather than soothing—rub the wrong way. Moods also more subtly shape experience. Ratcliffe describes moods as a phenomenological ‘background sense of belonging to a meaningful world’ that provides the context for the possibility of intentionally directed experience.64 In doing so, moods should not be dismissed as being merely ‘weaker’ or less complex forms of emotion; rather, they should be valued as a core affective state that opens us to (or closes us from) the world’s significance and possibilities. As Ratcliffe argues, ‘[some] of those experiences we call “moods” are not generalized emotions or feelings without intentionality; they are “ways of finding oneself in the world.” As such, they are what we might call “pre-intentional”, meaning that they determine the kinds of intentional states we are capable of having, amounting to a “shape” that all experience takes on’.65 For instance, the feeling of being in good health is not necessarily tied to a ‘mood’ as the word is typically used, but rather describes the feeling of the vitality of a body that optimistically inhabits a world that brims with potential. So too do other bodily feelings emerge from time to time in our experience of the world: feelings of illness, withdrawal, disengagement, uncanniness, indifference, estrangement, or harmony. Ratcliffe therefore offers the term ‘existential feelings’ to more precisely describe the kinds of bodily feelings that provide the lived and material context of our lives and, when ordinarily functioning, existential feelings enmesh us in the world and attune us to its significance as a shared space of possibility. 63 Quoted in Stefan Pape, ‘The Hey U Guys Interview’, n.p. 64 Matthew Ratcliffe, ‘The Phenomenology of Mood’, pp. 356-357. 65 Matthew Ratcliffe, Experiences, p. 35.

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The ability for a film or television text to evoke mood or a particular atmosphere that provoke more complex evaluations has been a subject of recent interest in cognitive film studies, as I mentioned in Chapter Two’s discussion of music and mood.66 As Robert Sinnerbrink explains, attending to the mood of a film shifts critical interest from plot and characterization to ‘the aesthetic dimensions of the image—its giving of life and expression to human figures, spaces and material things’.67 So too has cognitive film scholar Jens Eder suggested how films can represent, express, and evoke existential feelings. Representing existential feelings is largely related to how characters behave on screen, and—in the case of Mood Indigo—Tatou and Duris clearly telegraph their characters’ relationship(s) with each other and their world through their giddy performances that become increasingly enervated as Chloe’s illness develops. But I am particularly interested in how films can more powerfully and comprehensively invite spectators into the experience of their characters by expressing existential feelings. Analysing how screen narratives can express existential feelings therefore includes attending to the non-verbal and gestural performance of characters, but also how the film or television show’s style uses audio-visual cues to synaesthetically convey the character’s ‘specific felt patterns of interaction with [their] environment’.68 Then, by effectively immersing them in the existential qualities of a film’s ‘world’, screen narratives can evoke or elicit similar existential feelings in spectators. That is not to assume that spectators are powerless or are passively absorbed into the unfolding world. As Plantinga has convincingly written regarding cinematic mood, an ‘art mood’ that is generated by a fictive work’s form may or may not elicit a congruent mood in the spectator, but, rather, should be viewed as a potential elicitor of human moods. As he suggests, cinematic art moods ‘have the tendency to draw together cognition, judgment, memory, and associations based on prior experience’.69 Thus, the aesthetic texture of a film is first grasped by the spectator who synthesizes it with their own experience (fleshing out memories, imaginings, anticipations, and judgements) to prompt an embodied understanding of existential feelings. Writing well before contemporary cognitive film scholarship, Béla Balázs recognized how a ‘film consists of its texture, of that language of images in 66 See Carl Plantinga, ‘Art Moods’, pp. 76-91; Robert Sinnerbrink, ‘Stimmung’, pp. 148-163; Saige Walton, ‘Air, Atmosphere, Environment’, n.p. 67 Robert Sinnerbrink, ‘Stimmung’, p. 149. 68 Jens Eder, ‘Films and Existential Feelings’, p. 83. 69 Carl Plantinga, ‘Art Mood’, p. 469.

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which every group, every gesture, every perspective, every lighting set-up has the task of conveying the poetic mood and beauty that are normally to be discovered in the words of an author’.70 Therefore, and far from merely replicating Vian’s novel with ‘oppressive literalism’ to recall Romney’s criticism, Gondry uses images—and music—to ‘transcribe the feeling’ of Colin’s world and to make it inhabitable for the spectator.71 Like Chapter Three’s discussion of ‘tactile orientation’, Gondry seeks to give us a literal ‘feel’ of Colin and Chloe’s world by appealing to the spectator’s sense of touch. Indeed, the novel is obsessed with the tactile quality of surfaces and substances. An orchid’s colour shimmers ‘like shot silk’, Isis (played in the film by Charlotte Le Bon) wears outfits made of plastic while her apartment’s floor is transparent Perspex, while a pink cloud—changed in the film to a cloud-shaped chairlift—transports them around Paris, feeling warm and fuzzy and smelling like ‘candy-floss and cinnamon’.72 Gondry’s handmade aesthetic is therefore an appropriate tool in Mood Indigo’s adaptation, and he litters the mise-en-scène with objects made from knitted wool, fuzzy felt, and smooth cool plastic. All these substances certainly invite a synaesthetic response in the spectator, an appeal to the fingers that makes this world strangely tangible. But beyond expressing a (at times, quite literal) ‘warm and fuzzy’ textural quality, Gondry uses ‘tactile orientation’ to more cohesively express Colin and Chloe’s relationship within and towards their world. More specifically, Gondry’s style expresses—and evokes in the audience—existential feelings of levity, comfort, and contentment that accompany emotional feelings of love, happiness, and joy. One of the most pleasant moments of the film eschews many of Gondry’s stylistic flourishes yet nonetheless uses a sensual tactility to prompt embodied insight into Colin and Chloe’s existential feeling. After getting married, Colin and Chloe lie in a field of tall, golden grass. The camera is held quite close to Chloe’s face as she lovingly gazes at Colin as he strokes her fuzzy white cardigan, brushing and caressing its tufty softness with his fingers. The softness of this shot is augmented by the use of shallow focus and warm light, while birds gently twitter offscreen. On the one hand, this short moment from the film offers an explicit conjuring of Colin’s wish in the novel to be ‘lying deep in lightly toasted grass, with sunshine and warm earth all around—the grass crisp and yellow as straw […] with hundreds of buzzing insects, and clumps of soft dry moss too’ (p. 41). 70 Béla Balázs, Early Film Theory, p. 13. 71 Quoted in Stefan Pape, ‘The Hey U Guys Interview’, n.p. 72 Boris Vian, Mood Indigo, p. 22, p. 46.

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But I would also suggest that this moment is illustrative of how Gondry turns the existential feelings of Colin and Chloe inside-out to express them towards the spectator. Therefore, not only do spectators perceive the physical or objective aspects of Mood Indigo’s world through sight, sound, and touch, but also imaginatively reach toward Colin and Chloe and ‘make sense’ of their subjective, experiential feeling. When Colin announces in the novel that ‘There’s love in the air […] It’s boiling!’, Gondry insists that we feel the heat of their love, something that is grasped by the embodied imagination. Besides his handmade décor Gondry uses other special effects to trigger central imaginings. Importantly, these are largely practical special effects as Gondry has expressed disdain for digital manipulation and blue-screen effects, as it can conjure the sensation that ‘actors just aren’t in the same world’.73 This might seem a little ironic though, as conjuring a sense of dislocation appears to be his very design. Fishing line makes objects move, exaggerated sets make the mouse look small, and double exposure creates a giddy world that does not follow the logic nor physics of our own. Gondry’s use of rear-projection is particularly interesting, as it is not used in a means to even remotely trick the spectator into feeling like the characters are in a cohesive space but rather relishes in its artifice. At times dismissed as a formal flaw—a clumsy and cheap special effect—rear-projection can at times accentuate the theme or mood of a film. For instance, Sobchack has drawn attention to how rear-projection creates a ‘spatial “lie”’ that makes tangible the feelings of claustrophobia and paranoia felt by its characters.74 I would argue that the rear-projection in Mood Indigo similarly operates in that it manipulates a sense of spatiality, but rather than evoking a sense of claustrophobia it creates a feeling of dislocation and displacement. This is clear in the sequence in which Colin and Chloe race to get married. The minister at the church informs them that he will only marry the ‘winning couple’ that first arrive at the altar. Colin and Chloe jump into a wooden toy cart, while the other is taken by Chick and Alise (Aïssa Maïga) (‘Now’s our chance to change the narrative!’, Alise says, in one of several self-reflexive moments of the film that allude to its construction and nature as an adaptation). Filmed in stop-motion, the carts enter the church and then whizz up and down its staircases like a bizarre rollercoaster. But the background of the ride is blatantly false. The stained-glass windows of the church move and dance in a kaleidoscopic riot of surreal colour while the image itself is blown-up, warping the perspective of the church’s interior as the cars 73 Quoted in Chloe Hodge, ‘Divergent Portrayal’, n.p. 74 Vivian Sobchack, ‘Detour’, p. 117.

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twist and plunge through its stone archways. Thus, although imagination might be described as weightless—something that is inherently lost in its materialization on the screen—the film nonetheless appeals to the spectator’s sense of proprioception and turns it upside-down. The film’s blatantly artificial use of rear-projection and stop-motion is felt as a giddy rush of disorientation, evoking the characters’ exhilaration and rush of love.

A Cute Grief: Feeling Blue in Mood Indigo The practical effects of both rear-projection and stop-motion animation are used to physiologically and phenomenologically affect the spectator that in turn invites them to share, via the embodied imagination, in the existential perspective of Colin and Chloe. Rear-projection disorientates us, while the use of stop-motion animation desynchronizes us: it throws us for a loop. It interrupts time as it is naturally lived through and raises an awareness of time as it is felt. Perhaps the idea that time is felt is best articulated at the point when the film enters Chloe’s body as she inhales a snowflake that blooms across her heart. Made from bundles of red wool, and animated with stop-motion, the film directly draws attention to the materiality of the body and perhaps evokes its fragility and finitude in the face of death. Entering Chloe’s body is the turning point of both the novel and film. While the first half expresses the whirlwind feeling of blooming love, the second half inverts it to concretely explore pain, loss, and the shrinking existential feelings that accompany Chloe’s illness and Colin’s grief. In some ways, the existential feelings expressed in this second part are even more pronounced. This is related to the experience of existential feelings themselves for, as Ratcliffe explains, most of the time we are unaware of those existential feelings that ground the ‘phenomenological context’ of our lives, and instead ‘they only become salient to us only when they shift or take on a form that involves strangeness, novelty, and/or lack’.75 I am interested in the phenomenological similarities between pain and grief as forms of this existential estrangement, and how the film can be understood as a meditation on the nature of both Chloe’s physical pain in illness and Colin’s emotional pain in grief. Curiously, philosophers Fuchs and Fredrik Svenaeus—examining the existential feeling of grief and illness respectively—agree that a structuring presence of both is a bodily feeling of the uncanny. Drawn from the German word Unheimlich, that which is 75 Matthew Ratcliffe, Experiences, p. 85, p. 39.

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‘unhomelike’, Fuchs and Svenaeus’s philosophies usefully connects with Sobchack’s chapter in Carnal Thoughts in which she engagingly argues that ‘our bodies are the essential premises of our being in the world’, and that the embodied imagination often metaphorically conceives the lived body as either a home, a house, or a prison depending on the degree of transparency in which we live through the body.76 We feel ‘at home’ in the body in good health and high spirits, and we seamlessly enact our intentional projects in the world. But at other times ‘our bodies are less lived as ourselves than they are lived in by ourselves […] marking the movement [to] an increased sense of noncoincidence between one’s consciousness and one’s body’ (p. 183). When the body’s objectivity emerges, its ‘thingness’, we might think of being dislocated from the comfort of the home and made aware of the body as more akin to a ‘house’ that has its own demands, that needs work. Finally, in its most extreme forms, the body can feel like a prison, an encasing that blocks access to the world and our interest in it. The ‘uncanny’ experience of illness and grief marks that sense of being thrown out the security and comfort of being ‘at home’ in one’s body during good health, and rather being trapped in an existential prison. As Svenaeus claims, the experience of illness is like feeling an ‘obtrusive unhomelikeness in one’s being-in-the-world’,77 while Fuchs conceives the uncanniness of grief as emerging through the palpable ambiguity between the absence of the dead, and yet their lingering presence in memory and imagination. As he puts it, grief ‘remains as background feelings of lack, loss and isolation, which like a mood tinge one’s whole experience and fill the environment with an atmosphere of sorrow and futility’, and that the world of the bereaved ‘appears darkened, homeless, [and] alienated’.78 Both novel and film make literal the metaphor of the body as a home, house, or prison, as it decays and shrinks as Chloe’s illness progresses. At one point Colin’s lawyer (and chef) Nicholas (Omar Sy) exclaims that it is the tiles ‘couldn’t breathe properly’, while the windows shrivel, the carpets vegetate, ‘a smell like locked cellars hovered over the walls’ that spurt growths ‘like some kind of leprosy’.79 These descriptions are evocatively rendered by Gondry’s impressive mise en scène. Colin’s once vast, light-filled apartment—gleaming with glass and pastel whimsy—rots with mould, while the windows and surfaces become clogged with webs of vine and tree roots. Even the shape and size of the 76 77 78 79

Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, p. 183. Fredrik Svenaeus, ‘Das Unheimliche’, p. 10. Thomas Fuchs, ‘Presence in Absence’, p. 48, p. 44. Boris Vian, Mood Indigo, p. 97, p. 144.

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apartment changes, with rooms becoming smaller, rounder, the ceiling pressing in on its inhabitants until—once Chloe dies—it collapses and crumbles to nothing. After Chloe’s death, Colin is consumed by grief. Fuchs explains that the core existential characteristic of grief is affective numbness (or derealization), manifesting primarily as ‘bodily heaviness, passivity, constriction and withdrawal’.80 The novel describes Colin’s derealization by paralleling emotional pain with physical pain, such as when we read that Colin ‘was harrowed by fatigue, which stiffened his knees and hollowed his cheeks. His eyes saw only the ugliness of people’.81 But the adaptation can enact Colin’s grief. This is achieved not only through Duris’s performance as Colin withdraws in on himself and slouches between a series of depressing jobs, but also through the ‘f ilm’s body’. We share in how Colin’s world loses its vibrancy and vitality as the film’s colour gradually bleeds away into black and white. So too is Colin’s constriction visibly expressed as the frame gradually shrinks and darkens around the edges, like we are looking through a peephole. The f ilm’s stunning f inal moments show Colin truly in a state of bodily heaviness, passivity, and constriction as he plunges into the murky water of Chloe’s burial site, which also illustrates Fuch’s claim that the uncanny feeling of grief is attached to a ‘fundamental division in time’ that separates the bereaved from that which ‘sinks back into the past’.82 As Colin hangs suspended in the water, Chloe’s childish drawings of the couple in happier times are projected behind him, evidence of how Colin can only find comfort in ‘living in the past’,83 a memory of his earlier happiness, but a memory that has lost its tangible presence.

Conclusion: From Percept to Precept Hanich rejects the ‘precious cinema’ by directors such as Gondry as being ‘nice and harmless films [that] show no social or political urgency. If only they had something more important on the agenda than their self-aggrandizing inventiveness!’84 But this analysis of Mood Indigo has revealed that there 80 81 82 83 84

Thomas Fuchs, ‘Presence in Absence’, p. 46. Boris Vian, Mood Indigo, p. 204. Thomas Fuchs, ‘Presence in Absence’, p. 50. Boris Vian, Mood Indigo, p. 209. Julian Hanich, ‘Oh Inventiveness!’, p. 267.

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certainly is aesthetic, social and political urgency in its highly imaginative construction. Gondry harnesses the ‘froth’ and ‘foam’ of Vian’s imagination and concretizes it into his own fantastical and whimsical creations. But that is not to say that Mood Indigo purely appeals to that which is given to perception. As I have argued in this chapter, Mood Indigo triggers the spectator’s synaesthetic imagination to allow them to feel their way into Colin and Chloe’s world. Thus, while Vian also uses synaesthetic metaphors to describe the feeling of Chloe’s illness in material terms, such as when her cough is compared with ‘a rip through a gorgeous piece of silk’,85 Gondry’s film transcribes and enacts the ‘feeling’ of her illness and Colin’s grief. I have suggested that the film is able to express and evoke the existential feelings of its characters by creating a ‘multidimensional, “we-centric” shared space’, to recall Gallese’s conception of the embodied basis of imaginative engagement with others. In doing so, Mood Indigo activates the embodied imagination to fill the ‘epistemic gap’ between us and its characters, allowing spectators to reach towards and grasp a lived understanding of their shifting relationship to each other, their bodies, and their world. Although Lessing was suspicious of how that which is presented to perception could ‘bind the wings of fancy’, he nonetheless urged that ‘the more we see, the more we must be able to imagine. And the more we add in our imaginations, the more we must think we see’.86 Lessing’s words not only testify to the potential for the synaesthetic imagination, but also suggest at how perception can lead to a greater imaginative understanding of a work, the world, and others, and how such an imaginative connection might shift our point of view. That is, screen adaptations are equipped to enact a leap from sight to insight. Just as Mood Indigo asks us to imagine what it feels like to experience the giddy rush of love—and the constriction and weight of illness and grief—Wonder actively attunes us to Mr. Brown’s precept to always ‘choose kind’ as the adaptation normalizes Auggie and marshals our allegiance. Thus, far from being unimaginative copies of previous work that have little value, screen adaptations can serve social and political purpose. As Walton puts it, ‘[we] imagine doing things, experiencing things, feeling in a certain way. We bring much of our actual selves, our real-life beliefs and attitudes and personalities, to our imaginative experiences, and we stand to learn about ourselves in the process’.87

85 Boris Vian, Mood Indigo, p. 84. 86 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, ‘From Laocoön’, p. 558. 87 Kendall Walton, ‘Spelunking, Simulation and Slime’, p. 38.

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Works Cited Bahrick, Lorraine E. ‘Body Perception: Intersensory Origins of Self and Other Perception in Newborns’, Current Biology, 23.23 (2013), R1039-41. Balázs, Béla. Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, ed. by Erica Carter. Trans. by Rodney Livingstone. New York: Berghahn, 2010. Barker, Jennifer. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley: U of California P, 2009. Bluestone, George. Novels into Film: The Metamorphosis of Fiction into Cinema. Berkeley: U of California P, 1961. Bradshaw, Peter. ‘Kaleidoscopic Kidulthood’, Guardian, 1 August 2014. (accessed 23 November 2018). Burke, Michael. ‘The Neuroaesthetics of Prose Fiction: Pitfalls, Parameters and Prospects’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9.442 (2015), 1-12. Cardwell, Sarah. Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002. Choi, Jinhee. ‘Leaving It Up to the Imagination: POV Shots and Imagining from the Inside’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 63.1 (2005), 17-25. Coplan, Amy. ‘Empathic Engagement with Narrative Fictions’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 62.2 (2004), 141-152. Currie, Gregory. ‘Empathy for Objects’, in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. by Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), pp. 82-99. ——. Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. D’Aloia, Adriano. ‘Cinematic Empathy: Spectator Involvement in the Film Experience’, in Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices, ed. by Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), pp. 93-108. Eder, Jens. ‘Films and Existential Feelings’, Projections, 10.2 (2016), 75-103. Elliott, Kamilla. ‘Novels, Films, and the Word/Image Wars’, in A Companion to Literature and Film, ed. by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 1-23. Fuchs, Thomas. ‘Corporealized and Disembodied Minds: A Phenomenological View of the Body in Melancholia and Schizophrenia’, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology, 12.2 (2005), 95-107. ——. ‘Presence in Absence: The Ambiguous Phenomenology of Grief’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 17 (2018), 43-63. Gallese, Vittorio. ‘Embodied Simulation: From Neurons to Phenomenal Experience’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 4 (2003), pp. 23-48.

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——. ‘The Roots of Empathy: The Shared Manifold Hypothesis and the Neural Basis for Intersubjectivity’, Psychopathology, 36.171 (2003), pp. 171-180. Gaudreault, André, and Philippe Marion. ‘Transécriture and Narrative Mediatics: The Stakes of Intermediality’, in A Companion to Literature and Film. ed. by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 58-71. Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World. Columbia UP, 2018. Gregory, Dominic. ‘Imagination and Mental Imagery’, in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination, ed. by Amy Kind (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 97-110. Hanich, Julian. ‘Great Expectations: Cinematic Adaptations and the Reader’s Disappointment’, New Literary History, 49.3 (2018), 425-446. ——. ‘Oh, Inventiveness! Oh, Imaginativeness! Precious Cinema and Its Discontents’, in Unwatchable, ed. by Nicholas Baer, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Gunnar Iversen (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2019), pp. 263-268. ——. ‘Omission, Suggestion, Completion: Film and the Imagination of the Spectator’, Screening the Past, 43 (2018), n.p. Hodge, Chloe. ‘Divergent Portrayal’, Aesthetica, 1 August 2013. < https://www. aestheticamagazine.com/divergent-portrayal/> (accessed 3 December 2018). Holmes, Anna. ‘White Until Proven Black: Imagining Race in The Hunger Games’, New Yorker, 30 March 2012. < https://www.newyorker.com/books/pageturner/white-until-proven-black-imagining-race-in-hunger-games> (accessed 23 March 2018). Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. London: Routledge, 2006. Iacoboni, Marco. ‘Within Each Other: Neural Mechanisms for Empathy in the Primate Brain’, in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. by Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), pp. 45-57. Kieran, Matthew and Dominic McIver Lopes. ‘Introduction’, in Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 1-12. Kind, Amy. ‘The Heterogeneity of Imagination’, Erkenntnis, 78.1 (2013), 141-159. Laine, Tarja. ‘Dangerous Liaisons and Counterfeit Affections: Cinema as Seduction’ in Acting and Performance in Moving Image Culture, ed. by Jörg Sternagel, Deborah Levitt, and Dieter Mersch (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2012), pp. 247-258. Langfeld, Herbert Sydney. The Aesthetic Attitude. New York: Harcourt, 1920. Leitch, Thomas. ‘Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory’, Criticism, 45.2 (2003), pp. 149-171. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. ‘From Laocoön’, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. by Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2001), pp. 554-570. Lopes, Dominic McIver. ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind’, in Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts, ed. by Matthew Kieran and Dominic McIver Lopes (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 207-224.

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McFarlane, Brian. ‘Reading Film and Literature’, in The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, ed. by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 15-29. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 2002. Metz, Christian. Psychoanalysis and the Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier. Trans. by Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti. London: Macmillan, 1982. Montag, Christiane, Jürgen Gallinat, and Andreas Heinz. ‘Theodor Lipps and the Concept of Empathy: 1851-1914’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 165.10 (2008), 1261. Nanay, Bence. ‘Imagination and Perception’, in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination, ed. by Amy Kind (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 124-134. Palacio, R. J. Wonder. London: Corgi Books, 2013. Pape, Stefan. ‘The HeyUGuys Interview: Audrey Tatou on Chinese Puzzle and Mood Indigo’, HeyUGuys, 18 June 2014. < https://www.heyuguys.com/interview-audreytautou-chinese-puzzle-mood-indigo/> (accessed 3 December 2018). Perkins, Victor. Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies. New York: Penguin, 1972. Plantinga, Carl. ‘Art Moods and Human Moods in Narrative Cinema’, New Literary History, 43.3 (2012), 455-75. ——. ‘The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face on Film’ in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. by Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999), pp. 239-257. Ratcliffe, Matthew. Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015. ——. ‘The Phenomenology of Mood and the Meaning of Life’, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, ed. by Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), pp. 349-372. Romney, Jonathan. ‘Film of the Week: Mood Indigo’, Film Comment, 17 July 2014. (accessed 23 November 2018). Russo, Maria. ‘Through Wonder, the Power to Imagine’, New York Times, 27 November 2017, p. C1. Sinnerbrink, Robert. ‘Stimmung: Exploring the Aesthetics of Mood’, Screen, 53.2 (2012), 148-163. Smith, Murray. ‘Imagining from the Inside’, in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. by Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), pp. 412-430. Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.

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——. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004. ——. ‘Detour: Driving in Back Projection, or Forestalled by Film Noir’, in Kiss the Blood Off My Hands: On Classic Film Noir, ed. by Robert Miklitsch (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2014), pp. 113-129. ——. ‘The Dream Olfactory: On Making Scents of Cinema’, in Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics, ed. by Bettina Papenburg and Marta Zarzycka (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), pp. 121-143. ——. ‘When the Ear Dreams: Dolby Digital and the Imagination of Sound’, Film Quarterly, 58.4 (2005), 2-15. Stadler, Jane. ‘Cinesonic Imagination: The Somatic, the Sonorous, and the Synaesthetic’, Cinephile 12.1 (2018), 8-15. ——. ‘Experiential Realism and Motion Pictures: A Neurophenomenological Approach’, Studia Phænomenologica, 16 (2016), 439-465. Stam, Robert. ‘Introduction’, in A Companion to Literature and Film, ed. by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 1-52. Svenaeus, Fredrik. ‘Das Unheimliche: Towards a Phenomenology of Illness’, Medicine, Health Care, and Philosophy, 3.1 (2000), 3-16. Turvey, Malcolm. ‘Seeing Theory: On Perception and Emotional Response in Current Film Theory’, in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. by Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), pp. 431-458. Vaage, Margrethe Bruun. ‘The Role of Empathy in Gregory Currie’s Philosophy of Film’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 49.2 (2009), 109-128. Vian, Boris. Mood Indigo, trans. by Stanley Chapman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. Walton, Kendall. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1990. ——. ‘Spelunking, Simulation and Slime: On Being Moved by Fiction’, in Emotion and the Arts, ed. by Mette Hjort and Sue Laver (New York: Oxford UP, 1997), pp. 37-49. Walton, Saige. ‘Air, Atmosphere, Environment: Film Mood, Folk Horror, and The VVitch’, Screening the Past, 43 (2018), n.p. Wicker, Bruno, Christian Keysers, Jane Plailly, Jean-Pierre Royet, Vittorio Gallese, and Giacomo Rizzolati. ‘Both of Us Disgusted in My Insula: The Common Neural Basis of Seeing and Feeling Disgust’, Neuron, 40 (2003), 655-664. Woolf, Virginia. ‘The Movies and Reality’, in Film and/as Literature, ed. by John Harrington (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1977), pp. 264-269.

5.

(Re-)Mediating Memory’s Materiality Abstract Adaptation criticism may begin as an act of memory, but while adaptation is a medium for memory it is also a medium of memory. This chapter considers adaptation as a form of memory work, paralleling adaptation’s textual layering with memory’s layering of experience. Adaptations can offer us experiential knowledge of the past—either fictional texts or a historical ‘truth’—or be antagonistic or self-reflexive about its formal remembrance. This chapter examines phenomenological approaches to the ‘tissue’ of memory and puts them in contact with two adaptations (one prestige, one arthouse), both concerned with the experience of marginalized bodies. In doing so, this chapter not only asks ‘what texts are remembered?’, or ‘who is remembered?’, but also questions ‘how are stories, identities, and lives remembered?’. In doing so, this chapter points to how an embodied approach to adaptation not only involves aesthetic appreciation but also ethical understanding. Keywords: adaptation, memory, embodiment, queer, The Danish Girl (Tom Hooper, 2015), Poison (Todd Haynes, 1991)

Introduction: Tracing Memory’s Role in Adaptation Adaptation criticism begins as an act of memory. Equipped with intimate knowledge of its source material, the critic compares similarities and differences between characters, plot, and style, performing the kind of ‘conceptual flipping back and forth’ that Linda Hutcheon describes between the adaptation and their knowledge of its origins.1 Although the comparative approach has been dismissed as mere subjective impressionism, dangerously leading to emotional responses such as disappointment, contentment, or anger rather than dispassionate critical insight, Film Phenomenology 1

Linda Hutcheon, Theory of Adaptation, p. 138.

Richard, D.E., Film Phenomenology and Adaptation: Sensuous Elaboration. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463722100_ch05

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and Adaptation: Sensuous Elaboration has followed Paisley Livingston’s suggestion that the comparative approach is necessary to appreciate an adaptation ‘as an artistic achievement’,2 and that the comparative approach illuminates what has been adapted and how, providing a concrete basis to begin to answer the question of why. But while adaptation is, on the one hand, a medium for memory it is also, on the other, a medium of memory, as adaptation can be thought of as a memory of an earlier work. And just like the performance of human memory, sometimes that memory is sharp, with the adaptation reproducing the features of its source with accurate detail. But, in other cases, an adaptation’s textual memory might be more fuzzy, ‘forgetting’ elements of the original story or ‘recalling’ it differently by changing its tone or theme. But while memory’s fallibility might lead to problems in everyday life, an adaptation that ‘forgets’ or ‘misremembers’ its source’s textual features might be critically revered. Although the desire for an adaptation to maintain fidelity to its source is often marked as an important dimension of adaptation (particularly so in popular discourse), the sheer length of a novel means that it is often impractical to maintain such a strict standard of fidelity in practice. The problem with an entirely faithful adaptation becomes clear in those films that slavishly reproduce its source as if unwilling to cut even the most extraneous moment. What emerges is something plodding and bloated, qualities that characterize the Young Adult Blockbuster adaptation cycle that attempt to honour their audiences’ reading memory by keeping it all, stretching their stories into dreary (but lucrative) franchises that do not seem to want to end.3 Rather than slave to the memory of a novel, some filmmakers might therefore choose to forget it almost entirely. One proponent of this approach is Alfred Hitchcock who, while speaking to François Truffaut, reflected on the process of adapting Daphne du Maurier’s short story to make The Birds (1963). As Hitchcock explains, he would not be able to describe many of the features of du Maurier’s story as his technique in adaptation was to ‘read a story only once […] [and] forget all about the book and start to create cinema’. 4 For Hitchcock, adapting du Maurier was not a matter of necessarily bringing to life her characters and story (although, 2 Paisley Livingston, ‘On the Appreciation’, p. 106. 3 This is particularly demonstrated in the trend in adapting the final novel in enormously popular Young Adult series that was adapted into two parts. Here, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 and Part 2 (David Yates, 2010-11), The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 and Part 2 (Bill Condon, 2011-12), and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 and Part 2 (Francis Lawrence, 2014-15) are exemplary. 4 Quoted in François Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 71.

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obviously, these traces remain). But, rather, it was more about evoking its atmosphere, its pervasive feeling of dread, largely enacted through its warped sound design and claustrophobic framing of its caged-in characters. If, to follow Dudley Andrew, adaptations are palimpsests, a layering of textual citations in which ‘the surface layer engages, rather than replaces, a previous inscription’,5 adaptation—as a process and a product—becomes a beautiful metaphor for memory itself. As will be discussed in this chapter, memory can be conceived of as an accrual of layers—traces, as philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls them—that help to structure our conscious awareness of the self. But the trace of memory not only helps determine the private and subjective world. Rather, memory’s externalization—through oral recounting, literature and film production, memorial sites, and so on—means that memory is a social and intersubjective experience as well. In this chapter, then, I want to move beyond thinking of memory in the experience of adaptation as an inside-out phenomenon: how the adaptation appeals to and negotiates with an existing memory of the source held by the spectator. But further, I want to tease apart how adaptation itself forms a tissue of memory, and how the experience of adaptation operates as an outside-in exchange between the phenomenal experience of a text and its beholder. Such an approach raises a series of perplexing and interrelated questions: how do adaptations circulate as forms of collective memory? As collective memories, do adaptations reinforce or challenge their cultural moments of production? And how are they used to construct individual identity in their reception? If memory is tied to a claim to truth, to what degree does fidelity matter in adaptation as a form of memory? Such an approach requires sensitivity to not only what texts are remembered and how, but also,—vitally—what has been forgotten in the process of adaptation. In this chapter, I first rehearse some of the philosophical approaches to memory that detail its embodied and collective ‘thickness’. Then, I draw on Ricoeur’s analysis of how creative works—such as literature and film—also act as a ‘trace’ of memory, through the mediating process of narrative that constitutes both historical and fictional understanding. But as memory scholar Susannah Radstone explains, although literature and film both have strong critical agendas that examine each as a form of ‘memory work’, ‘research has yet to focus fully on the articulation of memory across media’.6 This chapter begins to do this work and, in doing so, reveals the complexities of adaptation as a form of (re-)mediated memory. Adaptations 5 Dudley Andrew, ‘Adapting History’, p. 191. 6 Susannah Radstone, ‘Cinema and Memory’, p. 341.

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might offer us experiential knowledge of the past—either fictional texts or a historical ‘truth’—or an adaptation might take a more critical stance and be antagonistic or self-reflexive about its formal remembrance. As scholar Suzanne Diamond has nicely put it, ‘how we remember and forget is inherently political’.7 In order to illuminate this claim regarding the aesthetic politics of memory and adaptation, the two major case studies of this chapter are both inherently political as they examine the lived experience of marginalized identities. The first examines the several incarnations of Lili Elbe, the first woman who received gender-confirming surgery in the 1930s. I examine how Lili’s story shifts—and is shifted—across memoir, literature, and its final form as the prestige biopic The Danish Girl (Tom Hooper, 2015). Then, I examine a more radical form of adaptation, Poison, Todd Haynes’s 1991 film. Poison is a complex form of adaptation: not only does it adapt the narrative content of Jean Genet (whose semi-autobiographical work already troubles the relationship between memory and adaptation), but it tells its story through three distinct genres in a heightened form of what Paul Grainge refers to as ‘genre memory’.8 In doing so, Haynes also adapts Genet’s narrative structure that weaves past and present, memory and imagination, truth and lies. In doing so, Haynes not only raises Genet’s rejection of the conventions of language and narrative to adequately capture and express unconventional embodied experiences. But, further, his conscious and reflexive style forces spectators to confront how all stories have been constructed and shaped for us, forcing his audience to consider the ‘use’ and ‘reuse’ of stories as forms of cultural memory.

Untangling the ‘Thick’ Tissue of Memory The previous chapter gestured to the fear that screen adaptations—in their materiality and presence to perception—would neuter the spectator’s imagination. A similar suspicion haunts the relationship between adaptation and memory. As adaptation scholar Joy Gould Boyum argues, those familiar with a source text compare the adaptation with their personal memory of its experience. ‘Ultimately we are not comparing book with film, but rather one symbolization with another’, she says, and that we inevitably expect ‘the movie projected on the screen to be a shadow reflection of

7 8

Suzanne Diamond, ‘Whose Life is It, Anyway’, p. 97. Paul Grainge, ‘Introduction’, p. 9.

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the movie we ourselves have imagined’.9 But beyond feelings of (positive) validation or (negative) disappointment that arise in its comparison,10 the experience of an adaptation is laden with the suspicion that the screen incarnation will overpower its ‘shadow’ and replace its memory. For instance, after seeing Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, actors Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal inevitably will appear as the characters Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist if I recall Annie Proulx’s short story. This does not prove to be much of a problem in this case for me as their performances of the role—and the chemistry between them—endorses my memory of Proulx’s story. But other cases might prove more worrying, such as how the Native American Tiger Lily was played by the lily-white actress Rooney Mara in Joe Wright’s critically-panned Pan (2015). What are the stakes here if this portrayal were to replace the memory of the character from J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan series of books? I would not suggest that fidelity always matters per se, and throughout this book I have been arguing that in many cases an adaptation’s lack of f idelity offers an opportunity for creativity and innovation in meaningful and valuable ways. However, in some cases fidelity (or its lack) becomes a political choice and has greater importance. The power of an adaptation to affect memory—to supplant it, mould it, shape it—simultaneously gestures to how an adaptation may create and circulate new memories. As any act of memory is simultaneously an act of forgetting, this immediately signals how the aesthetic choices of an adaptation also pose ethical problems. The slipperiness between imagination and memory in the context of adaptation studies is another example in a difficult long history of trying to untangle memory from imagination. This problem can be traced back to the philosophical roots of memory to Plato who argued that that memory was the presentation of an absent thing—an eikōn—which squarely put it within the domain of imagination, testifying to ‘the constant danger of confusing remembering and imagining, resulting from memories becoming images in this way, affects the goal of faithfulness corresponding to the truth claim of memory’.11 But while imagination is associated with bridging gaps of knowledge, or premeditating future possibilities, memory is specifically concerned with the re-presentation of past experience. Plato’s metaphor of memory as akin to a wax tablet—further developed by Aristotle—conceives

9 Joy Gould Boyum, Double Exposure, p. 50. 10 See Julian Hanich, ‘Great Expectations’, pp. 425-446. 11 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 7.

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memory as a repository of sense impressions. In Theaetetus, the reader is asked to imagine: that there is in each of our souls a block of writing-wax. The block is bigger in some people and smaller in others; it is made of purer wax in some people, of less pure in others; it is harder in some and softer in others; but there are those in whom its consistency is just right […] whenever we want to keep in our memory some one of the things that we see or hear or conceive of for ourselves, we hold the wax tablet under these perceptions or conceptions, and make an impression of them on it, as if we were using signet-rings to make wax seals. Whatever we so imprint, we remember and know as long as its image remains there on the block. But whatever gets rubbed out, or cannot be imprinted in the first place, we forget and do not know.12

The metaphor of the wax tablet signals memory’s fallibility. Not only does the wax tablet evoke how some things are not remembered (unable to be imprinted into the ‘hard’ wax) but also the effacement of memories. So too does Plato’s metaphor raise the possibility for memory to leave a faulty imprint in the ‘softness’ of the wax, or through error by the hands of the subject who improperly marks the wax through their stance or attitude towards that which they are remembering. Although the metaphor of the wax tablet is certainly illustrative, it obviously provides an incomplete picture of the complexities of the experience of memory. But having said that, Plato’s suggestion of memory’s imprint has developed into the concept of memory’s trace, a phenomenon that continues to hold much value in contemporary philosophical and psychological accounts of memory as that which stores information about the past and tangibly connects us to it. As philosopher Sarah Robins argues, memory traces provide consciousness with an object to attend to the activity of remembering, and they serve to form ‘an uninterrupted causal chain’ between the past and the present that enables action.13 Recently, better understanding memory’s neural trace has formed an important element of neuroscientific research into the Encoding-Storage-Retrieval (ESR) model of memory, demonstrating how the ‘trace’ of memory is not merely metaphoric but a lived, material phenomenon.14 12 Plato, Theaetetus, p. 191c-d. 13 Sarah Robins, ‘Memory Traces’, pp. 79-81. 14 See Daniel Schacter and Donna Rose Addis, ‘Cognitive Neuroscience’, pp. 773-786.

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Memory’s trace is tied to subjective, experiential memories. Ricoeur— evoking the mechanism of Plato’s wax tablet—argues that sensations and affectations leave a phenomenological trace that are heightened in experiences of ‘striking’ or ‘marking’ events. But memory’s trace textures even prosaic personal memories, known as episodic memory.15 As Robins explains, episodic memories are ‘quintessential memories’ that supply the imagery for when memory is metaphorically aligned ‘to a photo album or movie reel’. Following the important work of Endel Tulving,16 philosophers such as Kourken Michaelian conceive episodic memory as a form of ‘mental time travel’, a ‘drawing on a range of past experiences to produce a novel representation of the target episode’.17 But although Tulving and Michaelian testify to memory as a form of mental time travel, it is important not to neglect how such an act is one of embodied simulation that involves the entire sensorium. That is, although memory is associated with visual imagery (reflected in its frequent metaphor as a camera, photo album, or a movie), memory can also include acoustic, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory content, such as recalling a song that was playing on the radio, the smell of a fireplace as it burns, or the taste of nasturtium flowers, picked on a warm spring day. As philosopher Edward Casey has nicely put it, memory involves not only the retrieval of semantic content or knowledge, but a revival of the past in the body, albeit in a modulated or transformed way.18 Casey’s philosophy of memory is stimulating as he dedicates much of his study to those forms of memory that extend beyond the mind, considering forms of memory that are produced by the lived-body and how forms of memory might extend into the world itself. Body memory is not confined to memories of the body, but rather describes those forms of memory that emerge from or through the body. The base kind of body memory is habitual memory, those moments that are ‘incorporated into the living present, unmarked, unremarked as past’, such as the forms of muscle memory that emerge while driving a manual car or unlocking a smart phone with a series of swipes on the surface of its touch screen.19 The twin experiences of trauma and pleasure leave a more pronounced trace for body memory’s revival: these are the kinds of embodied memory that Ricoeur would call ‘corporeal memories’ that ground further reflection (p. 40). However, all 15 16 17 18 19

Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 14 See Endel Tulving, ‘Origin of Autonoesis’, pp. 17-34. Kourken Michaelian, Mental Time Travel, p. 103. Edward Casey, Remembering, p. 51. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 24.

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body memories can be phenomenologically described through shared properties. Firstly, body memories have a ‘density in depth’ that describes the fluctuations of their emergence and submersion in the depths of the lived body. 20 This phenomenological quality resonates with Drew Leder’s conception of the body’s ‘dys-appearance’, in which (particularly in moments of illness or pain) the body becomes less something that is transparently subjectively lived through but becomes objectively some thing that that is endured.21 The second way that body memories are determined is according to how they demonstrate the ‘co-immanence of past and present’ that attests to how memory is not merely a distant ‘picture’ of the past, but is—in varying degrees—integrated into the present. But further, it is important to recognize that it is through body memory’s co-immanence that the past is not necessarily merely repeated (although this might be the case with memory disorders that afflict those suffering PTSD) but, rather, is actively harnessed by the remembering subject for use in the present. As Casey writes, the present modif ies the past memory ‘by extending intentional threads to ever-changing circumstances […] to leave a residue or remainder which maintains difference in the very context of sameness. It is a matter, in short, of a mutual com-plication of past and present in each other’s fate’.22 These lived dimensions of body memory—how they seemingly (re-) emerge from the body’s recesses as a felt presence, ‘entangling’ the past and present—testifies to memory’s presence, its ‘thickness’. Memory thus not only orientates the subject in terms of the passage of time, the ‘push from behind’ of the past, or how the future follows an ‘inverse movement of transit from expectation toward memory, across the living present’ that helps modify behaviour and gives a greater understanding of the self.23 But beyond helping to orientate us in time, memory’s ‘thickness’ helps orientate us in space. That is, any discussion of the ‘place’ of memory must recognize that memory does not only reside in the mind, nor only in the body, but extends to reside within in the places of our life world. Places become saturated with memory, what Casey describes as ‘congealed scenes for remembered contents’, so much so that they might be thought of as a material extension of the self.24 Evoking Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s existential 20 21 22 23 24

Edward Casey, Remembering, p. 166. Drew Leder, Absent Body, pp. 69-99. Edward Casey, Remembering, p. 168. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 97. Edward Casey, Remembering, p. 189.

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phenomenology that emphasizes the reversibility of embodied experience, philosopher Dylan Trigg evocatively argues that: Being attached to a place means allowing memories to be held by that place. In turn, being held by a place means being able to return to that place through its role as a reserve of memories. Not only do places hold memories in a material sense—as the archive of our experiences—but those same places crystallize the experiences that occurred there. Being in place is not temporally static. Rather, our memories pursue us as we pursue place, both forming an ambiguous zone somewhere in between.25

The ‘ambiguous zone’ that constitutes place memory reconciles with Casey’s claim that memory’s ‘thickness’ not only emerges in its ‘withness’: that is, how due to the embodied nature of memory, all memory is produced with the body. But memory also has an ‘aroundness’ that speaks to how—as embodied and enworlded agents—we come to know the world around us as places become saturated and congealed with memory.26 Along with memory’s ‘withness’ and ‘aroundness’, Casey also suggests that memory has a ‘throughness’ as it is stimulated by a ‘remembering-through’ objects and sites of memory (p. 218). Memory’s ‘throughness’ marks a shift from conceiving memory as a private, subjective phenomenon to understanding it as a collective and intersubjective process. Ricoeur argues that collective memory is ‘a collection of traces left by the events that have affected the course of history’ that invite commemoration through specific rituals, holidays, and specific sites of memory.27 But, as Casey claims, ‘the remembering-through that lies at the basis of commemorating is always a remembering through a text’.28 This emphasis on memory’s text—and the texture of memory—speaks to the importance of language to grasp memory. Although memory might come as flashes of sense impressions or past experiences, it is language that allows us to ‘make sense’ of memory, such as how memories are structured into coherence through narrative. Narrative works through memories and integrates them into subjective coherence by ordering events and making causal links between them to tell one’s own ‘life story’. The intimate relationship between memory, language, and narrative offers productive 25 26 27 28

Dylan Trigg, Memory of Place, p. 9. Edward Casey, Remembering, p. 259. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 119. Edward Casey, Remembering, p. 232.

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possibilities for engaging with the processes of adaptation. If literature and film are mutual ‘traces’ of memory, how does memory leave its ‘trace’ in adaptation? How are memory and adaptation both palimpsests, mutual forms of ‘reproduction’ or ‘revival’ of the past? And, to remember Ricoeur, if memory is tied to ‘an ambition, a claim—that of being faithful to the past’,29 do the aesthetics of adaptation also signal an ethical obligation of faithfulness to the textual past, or can memory and adaptation form a thick, textual weave that holds creative and political promise? That is, to follow Casey, how does the ‘thickness’ of memory act not only a ‘mere repository of experience’ but also acts as ‘a continually growing fund for experience’ and communities of embodied commemoration?30 These are the questions that will guide the remainder of this chapter.

Textu(r)al Traces: Memory in Literature and Film The previous section of this chapter detailed how philosophical and psychological approaches to memory conceive of its ‘thickness’ in terms of its layering of traces in a density of feeling in and around the body, as well as how memory is experienced through memorial objects. Taken in this way, memory quite literally has a materiality as it is actively produced, stored, and shared with others. In the first, memory’s material trace emerges in the fabric of language, and indeed, thinking through language as a textual and textural trace of memory lies at the heart of this chapter’s discussion of the relationship between memory and adaptation. The language of memory— oral tales, reminiscences, testimony, memoir, literature, and film—has an archival function, giving intersubjective access in a manner that develops communities of remembrance. This section focuses on two forms of material traces of memory, literature and film, to explore the relationship between memory and narrative. In fleshing out the role narrative plays in historical and fictional memory—with consideration of how the formal features of a work can vivify the past into an intersubjective experience, a form of embodied ‘time travel’—this section further contributes to an understanding of the mechanics of adaptation, and the allure (and dangers) it holds for memory studies. Literature and memory share a cluster of similarities, starting with the attribute of both as a selective process. Except for those of us with eidetic 29 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 21. 30 Edward Casey, Remembering, p. 284.

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memory or ‘total recall’, it is impossible to remember everything that is experienced or learnt. Rather, memory acts as a form of condensation, an accrual of affective and epistemological layers, a process that is mimicked by the literary (and as I will suggest, adaptive) palimpsest. The way that memory and literature are both composite objects is mirrored in how both are compositional activities: that is, both emerge from a particular point of view that is organized through narrative. As scholar of cultural memory Astrid Erll explains, ‘every conscious remembering of past events and experience—individual and collective—is accompanied by strategies which are also fundamental for literary narrative’.31 In both instances, distinct episodes or identified and causally connected in a way that gives meaning and value. Identifying the relationships between memory, narrative, and literature is indebted to Ricoeur’s work on what he terms as the ‘healthy circle’ of mimesis that he argues constitutes both fictional and historical narrative understanding.32 For Ricoeur, time is mediated by narrative in a threefold process of mimesis. The first stage, mimesis1 or prefiguration, testifies to a fundamental narrative competence in that, as embodied and enworlded subjects, we can identify and understand that the world is temporally (and spatially) structured, and is characterized by the actions of human, goalmotivated agents. This ‘practical understanding’ of the rules that govern the world supply us with the means for ‘narrative understanding’ (p. 55) that is achieved through mimesis2, or configuration. For Ricoeur, configuration is the specific emplotment of the narrative that mediates—a ‘grasping together’—the heterogenous elements of the storyworld such as its agents, their goals, their interactions, conflicts, and outcomes (p. 66). Ricoeur goes on to point out that mimesis2 relies on an ‘interplay of innovation and sedimentation’ (p. 68). Established schemata such as genre patterns provide conventional formats to encode experience that also lends meaning to a given narrative through the expectations as they circulate throughout culture. Genres, themselves a form of ‘media memory’ (a point to which I will later return), not only clarify narrative expectations and structure but also may be used to structure forms of cultural memory that might be challenging or otherwise difficult to process, such as the use of the epic to stage narratives of political and ideological struggle and its resulting trauma. Along with using familiar schemata and generic patterns, narrative configuration also requires formal innovation to make it vital. Formal 31 Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture, p. 148. 32 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, p. 76.

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innovation is a ‘rule-governed deformation’ as the narrative must correspond with at least some of the reader’s expectations that form part of mimesis1 (that is, a pre-narrative recognition and understanding of a world of action) for it to be received and understood (p. 69). But how the shift from mimesis1 to mimesis2 is achieved is of core importance when analysing literature as a form of cultural memory due to its creative figuration. At first, the way that memory culture might value literature for its creativity might be a viewed as counter-intuitive, especially considering Ricoeur’s statement that memory is tied to ‘an ambition, a claim—that of being faithful to the past’33. If this is the case, surely creativity—innovation, invention, and imagination—should not be a process to be valued in the act of memory, along with its mediation into material traces. Erll addresses this complication by explaining that literature’s value to cultural memory emerges in how it can ‘bring together, reshape and restructure real and imaginary practices of remembering and forgetting’, and that the configuration of memory into literature works to separate aspects of cultural memory ‘from their original contexts and can be combined and arranged in novel ways, into new and different memory narratives’.34 Memory in this context therefore is not just a matter of its reproduction, but quite literally a (re)creation, a process of that fleshes out and thickens the past. The creative treatment of memory might enact a change in the narrative’s focalization, giving a new voice and perspective on the past, while creative metaphors might also be used in the narrative’s configuration if it helps serve the author’s poetic purpose. But the way that mimesis2’s process of emplotment creatively mediates memory is not isolated into its configuration into literary narrative. Film too is a form of cultural memory: its narratives condense and synthesize ‘episodes’ into complex and poetically configured texts that are understood—in the first—by the spectator’s ‘practical understanding’ of the world that constitutes mimesis1. Indeed, as I have been arguing throughout this book, a film’s phenomenological texture prompts us to reach an embodied understanding of its narrative. Understanding the mediation of memory therefore not only involves grasping how emplotment ‘mediates’ memory into narrative configuration, but also how media form itself mediates memory into a tangible experience. Thinking through the aesthetic texture of cinematic memory augments previous scholarship on memory and film that view the past as a literal trace on the surface of the celluloid that developed in tandem

33 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 21. 34 Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture, p. 154.

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with Modernist writing on the trace or ‘aura’ of the photograph.35 While these perspectives have usefully informed approaches to cinematic realism36 and documentary film,37 my interest in this chapter is on the formalist aesthetics of narrative film and how they construct—and shape—the experience of memory as they reconstruct and reshape their sources in adaptation. Film shares with photography the ability to capture the ‘trace’ of the past, but one of film’s strengths is that it can also capture the movement of memory. I mean ‘movement of memory’ in three ways. Firstly, memories are not stored as static snapshots of the past, but rather are multi-sensory and alive with movement. Secondly, memory itself is a form of movement. Memory is often described as a ‘drifting’ through the mind like clouds, a ‘flowing’ like a river, or that the act of memory is like ‘taking a walk down Memory Lane’. These metaphors testify that one of memory’s invariant features is its activity of movement, a form of travel that might take us back to the past, albeit not necessarily in a direct way. Furthermore, memory is constituted by associational movement: that is, while memory can be actively searched (anamnēsis), at other times memories seem to emerge at their own volition (mnēmē), perhaps stimulated from something perceived or from a thought that leads to a memory. As the cinema is a medium of movement, it is certainly able to evoke the movement of memory as it mediates between the past and the present. How a film is edited—the flow of its shots and sequences—captures memory’s associational movement, whether they logically connect or evoke the dream-logic of memory. Editing patterns therefore evoke the phenomenological experience of memory, most commonly in the narrative device of the ‘flashback’, but also can more specifically conjure the dimensions of memory’s activity, such as the sequences of anamnēsis in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004) where Joel (Jim Carrey) desperately searches his erased memories for Clementine (Kate Winslet). So too is the cinema able to accurately capture and translate memory’s synaesthetic density. As Elise Wortel and Anneke Smelik have written, the sensual density of narrative cinema offers ‘haptic performances of memory’ that are palpably felt by the spectator.38 The way that spectators ‘make sense’ of the (cinematic) past through the senses forms an important part of what 35 For overviews of key figures such as Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes see Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience, pp. 104-131; Laura Mulvey, Death at 24x a Second, pp. 54-65. 36 Andrew Bazin, ‘Ontology’, pp. 4-9. 37 Malin Wahlberg, Documentary Time, pp. 3-44. 38 Elise Wortel and Anneke Smelik, ‘Textures of Time’, p. 187.

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scholar Alison Landsberg has influentially termed as the potential for the cinema to offer ‘prosthetic memories’, those forms of memory that are not drawn from one’s own lived experience, but are ‘implanted’ from cinematic experience.39 Therefore, although memory itself is often thought of as a form of ‘mental time travel’, the cinema itself becomes analogous to a time machine that transports spectators and gives them embodied knowledge of the past. In sum, the cinema’s capacity to evoke the movement of memory demonstrates how memory is never quite simply just a reproduction, but rather might be better thought of as performances of the past that become intertwined with the present. As Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik write, memory is performative in the sense that it makes ‘the past present in ways that can be experienced, generating a knowledge of the relationship between past and present that is oftentimes troubling, other times comforting’.40 It is this point on the forms of (embodied) ‘knowledge’ that are produced through the performance of memory that are important here, as it leads back to Ricoeur’s ‘healthy circle’ of mimesis that constitutes historical and fictional narrativization. The third stage is mimesis3, or refiguration, that point in which the ‘world’ of the text intersects—or, better, intertwines—with the ‘world’ of its beholder and becomes a ‘field of reference’ for the agent. 41 This process of refiguration makes clear how memory grounds identity: not only does memory provide a link to the past, those experiences of which we claim ownership that constitute the self, but also provides ‘a continually growing fund for experience’, to recall Casey’s philosophy of memory, that directs us towards our future endeavours and shapes behaviour. 42 But it is not only subjective, autobiographic memories that constitute identity. Memory’s objective trace in literature and film also contribute to our sense of self as well as our social interaction with others. This is an important element of Landsberg’s discussion of ‘prosthetic memory’, as she argues that the ‘portability’ of prosthetic memories—that is, how they are objectified, easily carried or moved throughout culture, and worn ‘in a bodily fashion’—‘is both the crisis and the allure’ of mediated memory. 43 That is, although prosthetic memories are alluring in their ability to produce and circulate what were once subjective, private experiences into intersubjective and collective memory cultures, mediated memories might also signal a 39 40 41 42 43

Alison Landsberg, ‘Prosthetic Memory’, p. 239. Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik, ‘Performing Memory’, p. 3. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, p. 71. Edward Casey, Remembering, p. 284. Alison Landsberg, ‘Prosthetic Memory’, p. 242.

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crisis. This crisis is not solely limited to a working away at the stability of identity, but also questions memory’s reliability as well. If memory is necessarily mediated, how might memory be manipulated and be manipulative of its receiver? This is particularly the concern of adaptation as a form of double (and beyond) mediation of memory: that is, memory that is mediated into one form, and then remediated into another. Analysing adaptation as a process allows for a critical reflection on what has been remembered from a source text, and also what has been forgotten. So too does engaging with adaptation as a product reveal how a text has been remembered, or how its form produces new forms of embodied knowledge. In turn, examining how adaptations give us a ‘feel’ for the past, producing new forms of embodied knowledge, allows for critical reflection on the use of adaptation as a form of cultural memory. It is my suggestion that—just like pleasures and dangers associated with the experience of prosthetic memories—analysing the memory of texts (and the texture of memory) reveals ‘both the crisis and the allure’ of adaptation as a form of memory work.

Straight-Laced: The Danish Girl, in Transition Now, I turn to The Danish Girl to illustrate the complexities of adaptation as a form of memory work. The Danish Girl is an apposite case study with which to examine the politics of remembering and forgetting as the text has evolved over several different incarnations, documenting the life of Lili Elbe, reportedly one of the earliest recipients of sex reassignment surgery in the 1930s. First came Man into Woman: The First Sex Change—A Portrait of Lili Elbe was Elbe’s memoir, edited by Niels Hoyer, and first published in 1931. This served as the source for David Ebershoff’s 2000 literary reimagining that was adapted into the prestige biopic by Tom Hooper in 2015. In many ways, this process of adaptation is a process of becoming that mirrors Lili’s transformation and emergence from her earlier life as Einar Wegener, a celebrated Danish landscape painter. But this process of textual change also raises some concerns. If, to recall Ricoeur, that memory is tied to ‘an ambition, a claim—that of being faithful to the past’, 44 how does the increasing process of narrativization and other textual transformations affect the claim to the truth? The aesthetic politics of fidelity in the context of adaptation therefore seems most pressing when considering the biopic in general, as life’s materiality becomes the ‘source’ text that may be transformed in a 44 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 21.

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variety of ways, depending on the filmmaker’s agenda and critical stance taken towards the subject. But these concerns are heightened here, considering Elbe’s marginalized identity and the fraught social reception of transgender identity that continues to this day. The repeated process of adaptation does not only provide the answer of ‘Who is Lili?’, as all provide Lili’s life story from her marriage to Gerda, the realization of her authentic identity, to her death after a failed uterine implantation surgery. Rather, the repetition of her story seems to rather raise further questions such as ‘Where is Lili?’ or ‘What function does ‘Lili’ serve?’. For instance, the way that Lili’s life story is appropriated and politicized is directly signalled by a title card at the film’s ending that connects her life (and death) with the continued struggle for the acceptance and rights of transgender identities. If repeated stories form part of the tapestry of collective memory—and are used to (re-)orientate us towards the future—these questions signal how the aesthetics of adaptation are inherently entangled with questions of the ethics of representation and their ‘use’ as mediated memories. The first question that might arise is the question of fidelity, that the adaptation should faithfully capture the ‘authenticity’ of the self. Taken this way, the autobiographical memoir might seem as the ideal form with which to locate the ‘authentic’ sense of self. Indeed, the original publication of Elbe’s memoir Man into Woman included the subtitle: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex. This chapter’s previous section explained how narrative is that what structures both historical and literary memory. This is a process that is perhaps even more apparent in self-reflective accounts of transgendered identity as ordering and synthesizing past experiences through autobiography—a ‘grasping together’45—in turn helps the transgendered subject to grasp a coherent sense of self in the face of an existential experience that can be isolating and fragmentary. This idea is beautifully argued by Jay Prosser when he compares the narrative structure that constitutes autobiographical remembering with the physical (re)ordering process materially experienced by transgender individuals. As he puts it, narrative forms ‘a kind of second skin’ that is woven around the body that makes the process of self-discovery and becoming able to be ‘read’ and understood by oneself and others. 46 In Man into Woman, Elbe recognizes the centrality of narrative to understanding a sense of self, and at times reflects on the difficulty of articulating the shifting voice 45 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, p. 66. 46 Jay Prosser, Second Skins, p. 101.

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and perspective that grounds her transformation from Einar (given the pseudonym ‘Andreas’ in her memoir) to Lili. At one point, Elbe ponders whether she should: write a preface […] to explain why, when speaking of Andreas, I always use the third person, as in a novel? But […] what other form of narrative could I have chosen? I could not relate the story of Andreas’ life in the first person. Nor could I employ the third person when speaking of my own life and experiences, after Andreas had vanished. I was too close to everything. Hence, I often found it repugnant to speak of myself as of a third person. 47

Narrative’s use in autobiography to ‘[meld] together a body narrative in pieces’48 is referenced in adaptations of Man into Woman. Notably, towards the end of the film when Lili (played by Eddie Redmayne) is seen scribbling in a journal, she tells Gerda (Alicia Vikander) that writing her diary ‘makes sense of things’. But beyond the way that autobiographical narrative helps make sense of the self, the literary form of memoir also allows readers to ‘make sense’ of the personal and subjective feelings of the author. Indeed, Elbe recognizes the pedagogical function that writing her memoir will have, and that readers might be curious about the emotional and physical/ medical changes that she experiences. As she explains, she herself lost interest in reading as there were no accounts that spoke to her own lived experience. ‘What were the fates of strange persons to me’, she questions, ‘unless I could find consolation reading about a person of my kind?’49 But as Helen Parker writes in her forward to the memoir, Man into Woman fills this epistemological gap, and that ‘it confirms what many of us struggle to tell you but are unable to put into words’.50 Elbe frequently relies on embodied metaphor to convey her fractured experience. At times she refers to her body being at war, such as when she describes that ‘in my sickly body dwelt two beings […] hostile to each other’.51 So too, to recall the previous chapter’s discussion of the embodied imagination, she uses the metaphor as the body as a house to describe how she does not feel ‘at home’ in her own skin. As she puts it, ‘I was obsessed by the delusion that this body did 47 48 49 50 51

Lili Elbe, Man into Woman, p. 261. Jay Prosser, Second Skins, p. 121. Lili Elbe, Man into Woman, p. 111. Helen Parker, ‘Forward’, p. 7. Lili Elbe, Man into Woman, p. 111.

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not belong to me alone […] like a person who owned merely the façade of his house’ (p. 111), and that ‘I lived a first life encased in a prison’ (p. 260). While the memoir might give coherence to the fractured experience of transgendered identity and lend the reader subjective access to its lived experience, the form should not be uncritically received. The memoir nonetheless inspires questions regarding the authenticity of the author’s testimony, a concern more pressing with Man into Woman as it is acknowledged as having been posthumously edited by Niels Hoyer. As Rachel Carroll has suggested, Hoyer’s editorial fingerprints on Elbe’s prose far exceeds simply selecting and arranging her journal entries to make thematic or chronological sense of Elbe’s life. But further, Man into Woman employs literary techniques such as characterization, suspense, mood, shifting narration that swings from subjective to omniscient points of view, and imaginative projection, qualities that demonstrate how Elbe’s memoir ‘is shaped by the conventions of storytelling’ that seems to align it with fiction.52 Narrative might be that which ‘composes the self’,53 and autobiographical writing gives a clear opportunity for its reader to begin to understand the fracture—and reconciliation—of the experience of transgendered identity. However, the slipperiness between testimony and fiction dangerously points to how such narratives may be co-opted or ‘reauthored’ by another. The danger of Lili’s memories (and, in turn, the memory of Lili) being reconstructed or ‘reauthored’ becomes even more clear through the process of adaptation. Ebershoff’s novel, for instance, ends with a postscript in which the author points out that although he was ‘inspired’ by Lili’s story—gleaned from Man into Woman, but also news articles in the Danish press such as Politiken—her story ‘as recounted here with its details of place and time and language and interior life, is an invention of [his] imagination’ to the extent that ‘the characters in these pages are entirely fictional’.54 The novel does draw on Elbe’s bodily con-fusion of both Einar and Lili, when Einar realizes that ‘Lili and he shared something: a pair of oyster-blue lungs; a chugging heart; their eyes, often rimmed pink with fatigue. But in the skull it was almost as if there were two brains, a walnut halved: his and hers’ (p. 56). So too does the novel reference the lived feelings of constriction and imprisonment that accompany Lili’s gender dysphoria, when ‘Something made him feel as if his soul were trapped in a wrought-iron cage: his heart nudging its nose against his ribs, Lili stirring from within, shaking herself awake 52 Rachel Carroll, Transgender and the Literary Imagination, p. 129. 53 Jay Prosser, Second Skins, p. 120. 54 David Ebershoff, The Danish Girl, p. 311.

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rubbing her side against the bars of Einar’s body’ (p. 85). But Ebershoff’s intention in The Danish Girl appears primarily ‘to explore the intimate space that defined [the] unique marriage’ of Einar and Gerda (p. 311). In doing so, the novel frequently shifts focus to the character to Greta, the more anglicized version of Gerda’s name that is used in Ebershoff’s novel. But beyond the change in name, Greta is also more radically transformed as a character in the novel, becoming a wealthy American heiress of Danish heritage who falls in love with Einar, her art professor in Copenhagen. In making these changes, Greta becomes an emblem for the kind of modern femininity that was available for the wealthy woman of the 1930s: she is educated, independent, internationally mobile, and socially conscious. Such a shift in characterization is not necessarily a problem. But what is striking is how the novel’s shift in focalization to the ‘other’ Danish girl serves to offset Greta’s modern womanhood against Lili’s rather regressive portrait of femininity. This is drawn from the memoir Man into Woman, when Elbe admits that: I was quite superficial. Deliberately so, for I had to demonstrate every day that I was a different creature from him, that I was a woman. A thoughtless, flighty, very superficially-minded woman, fond of dress and fond of enjoyment […] Other women could be ugly, could commit every possible crime. I, however, must be beautiful, must be immaculate, else I lost every right to be a woman.55

Lili’s superficiality is heightened in The Danish Girl, manifesting in Lili’s obsession with clothes, fabric, makeup, and jewellery. The transformative power of clothing acts as one of the chief narrative catalysts that stimulates Einar’s gender dysphoria when, acting as a replacement model, Einar tries on a dress to pose for Gerda/Greta. Elbe puts it in her memoir that ‘I liked the feel of soft women’s clothing […] I felt much at home in them from the first moment’ (p. 66). The way that clothing makes Einar feel ‘at home’ in the body is mirrored in The Danish Girl when Einar notices that he could feel his skin ‘ripening’ under the dress, and that its silk and lace fabric ‘was so fine and airy that it felt like a gauze—a balm-soaked gauze lying delicately on healing skin’.56 The materiality of fashion and costume therefore stands in for the physical and medical ‘fashioning’ of the body that preoccupies Lili. Indeed, Lili comes to recognize gender itself as a kind of fleshy costume 55 Lili Elbe, Man into Woman, pp. 222-223. 56 David Ebershoff, The Danish Girl, pp. 11-12.

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that is worn through (if not on) the body. ‘Einar was a guise’, Lili muses, and that if one were to ‘[peel] away the trousers and the striped tie […] only Lili was left’ (p. 144). This realization arrives at a Parisian peep show, not a source of erotic titillation for Einar/Lili—at least, not at first—but, rather, one of instruction. That is, Einar visits the peep shoe in order to examine the movements and bodies of the performers, ‘the curve and heft of their breasts, to watch the thighs, eerily white and tremulous like the skin on a bowl of steamed milk’, studying the women ‘to see how their bodies attached limb to trunk and produced a female’ (p. 121). In doing so, the novel shifts from the memoir in terms of how Lili is produced. That is, while the memoir form produces Lili through the process of narrativization that structures autobiographical remembering, the novel emphasizes Lili as a material production, a repetition of learnt gestures and movements. Although obviously Lili’s fleshy and material becoming is certainly important, particularly as both Man into Woman and The Danish Girl give insight into the medical procedures that constitute her physical sex change. However, the novel’s emphasis on feminine artifice threatens to reduce Lili’s claim to womanliness to the surface of her skin, emerging perhaps most strikingly in how she takes erotic pleasure in being watched herself at the peep show arcade. Lili’s autoeroticism of being watched, her taking pleasure in her ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ to conjure Laura Mulvey’s important work on visual pleasure and female spectacle,57 becomes worryingly entangled with the spectacle of the transgender body itself. These issues regarding the material production of the transgendered body, gender as a performance, and the visual politics of looking and being looked at overtly materialize in Hooper’s film adaptation. The transformative moment in which Einar stands in for Gerda’s model Ulla (Amber Heard) and tries on her stockings and dress is expressed through Redmayne’s performance. The camera cuts in to a tight close up of his face while he holds the material against his chest, a flicker of what seems like recognition perceptible in his eyes. So too do his lips seem to twitch—as if his mouth cannot decide between a smile or a frown—until a contented smile blooms on his lips. The camera then cuts to a reverse angle of Einar, so that we see his hands as they caress the fabric around his neck, before cutting to an extreme close up of his fingers stroking the firm ridge of one of the gown’s seams. Accompanying this extreme optical close up is an acoustic close up of the scratching and snagging of the fabric as Einar’s fingers caress its gauzy lace that somewhat allows spectators to share Einar’s tactile experience of the 57 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure’, p. 11.

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dress, along with the amplified sounds of his breath that seems to get stuck in his throat. Along with his facial performance, the performance of breath, and the use of textural sound, Alexandre Desplat’s score helps to communicate Einar’s psychological point of view. The orchestra’s string section softly repeats a scale of notes as a piano burbles and twinkles. The play between strings and piano gradually becomes more complex—increasing in volume and insistence—as Einar’s fingers explore the dress until, suddenly, Ulla bursts into the room, a riot of colour and laughter. This is an overt moment of discovery and transformation that centres on clothing; however, the costumes of Paco Delgado thematically communicate the transformation of Einar (and also Gerda) in a more subtle manner. Early in the film, for instance, Einar dresses in a series of grey suits, all rigid lines that swallow him up with oversized starched collars seem to choke him, while his hair is smoothed into a neat and flat part. As Lili blossoms, however, Einar’s hair tumbles forward on his forehead, akin to Lili’s auburn wig, while his clothes become looser, softer, such as the androgynous cream and lilac suit that he wears in Paris when he is assaulted by a pair of homophobic thugs (‘Are you a lesbian?’ they ask, ‘Are you a man or a woman?’). So too does Gerda, at the beginning of the film, wear a series of heavy dresses of grey and navy crêpe that are gradually replaced with warmer tones—gold and amber—that are often panelled with modern prints or fringed to lend extra movement as she wields her paintbrush (and her cigarettes) with increasing confidence. But costume is but one dimension of how the film might express the embodied experience of a film’s characters, as the previous chapters of this book has shown. Certainly, the audio-visual (and synaesthetic) nature of the film’s body holds great promise to express the lived experience of bodily difference. As a visual artist, Elbe herself recognized the potential for the non-verbal arts to express experiences that might be more difficult to put into words. As she writes in her memoir, ‘one day I shall be able to give a visible-audible expression to all this, in some artistic form, whether it be painting, or music, or prose, or something else’.58 However, the film adaptation does not often take the opportunity to evoke the embodied imagination of Einar’s discomfort in his body and world. The spectator is offered glimpses at times, such as when Einar first tries on Ulla’s dress, and the camera briefly adopts his optical point of view as he peers at the dress, blurring in and out of focus in a manner that enhances the texture of its lace and netting while also evoking the feeling of having just woken up, a bleary-eyed looking at a fresh day. Cinematography is expressive at 58 Lili Elbe, Man into Woman, p. 235.

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times too. At Lili’s ‘debut’ at one of Ulla’s parties, she meets Henrik (Ben Wishaw) who seems to take a romantic interest. However, when Lili later visits Henrik’s house, Henrik reveals that he is gay and thinks that Einar is too, assuming that ‘Lili’ is just an act of cross-dressing. Lili leaves in despair, and although her shame and anguish is well-telegraphed through Redmayne’s performance, it is also communicated through the camera. Lili is framed in a long shot as she walks down the cobbled Danish streets, the camera quite low on the ground, at a slightly low angle. The effect of the framing seems to put the world off-kilter with rows of identical houses slightly bend in towards her like teeth. While this is quite a subtle use of cinematography to express Lili’s relationship to her world, when she is attacked in Paris, the world literally is turned on its head, recording her upside-down as she is kicked on the ground. These moments are quite rare though, with the film generally preferring a composition that is always beautiful, and always orderly, balanced, and polished to the point of it feeling somewhat straight-laced. Everything gleams like freshly coated paint in a manner that invites the eye to linger on the film’s surface. The film indeed seems to pick up on the novel’s obsession with surfaces and artifice. When Einar and Gerda move to Paris, their apartment is lined with hand-painted screens and mirrors that create a mise en abyme effect, while other locations feature ornately patterned wallpaper, oversized frescos, or rococo ironwork. Combined with the film’s order and balance, the overall effect is one of theatricality, of staginess, that we are watching a performance. Perhaps the moment in which Einar/Lili (and here I purposefully combine their names, and use plural pronouns through this section, as this moment quite literally dissolves the distinction between them) visits the peep show brings the play between surface and performance into clarity. Einar/Lili watch the performer as she rubs her skin and neck with her hands. Cutting to the inside of the performer’s room, the camera captures Einar/Lili as they mirror her actions. and they begin to mirror her actions. Einar/Lili is framed by the window of the peep show, so the performer’s image is reflected in the window, giving a layered effect. This play of surfaces is continued in the next shot as the camera shifts its focus backwards and forwards between the performer and Einar/Lili, seeming to almost as if dissolve their bodies into one. In doing so, the film certainly appears to reinforce the way that the novel’s suggestion that gender is a matter of performance. This is something that Einar is painfully aware of: at one point in the film, Einar tells Gerda that he will not attend a party as ‘I feel as if I’m performing myself’, and later—when developed into Lili, she states ‘I want to be a woman, not a

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painter’, paralleling an artist’s material construction of an aesthetic object with that of a woman. I would not disagree with proponents of queer theory that state that gender is a performance, a set of ritualized and institutionalized repeated actions and effects.59 But—perhaps as it is trapped in the conventionalized beauty of the prestige biopic genre—The Danish Girl cannot fully wrestle with the thick texture of tension that emerges between biological sex, gender identity, and embodied experience. The Danish Girl seems to say that to be a woman is all performance, a reduction to the surface of one’s skin, a skin that is beautifully cultivated and decorated for another’s gaze. This is brought into high relief when Lili and Gerda return to Denmark after Lili completes the first stage of her gender confirmation surgery in Dresden. Taking a job at a fancy department store, Lili’s manager tells her that ‘The store is a stage […] we’re here to perform’, and she quickly uses her skills to instruct shoppers in the ‘proper’ behaviour of the chic Parisian woman, the kind of woman who Lili, in turn, has modelled herself upon. Thus, although at one point in the film Lili tells Gerda that ‘it doesn’t matter what I wear: it’s what I dream. They’re Lili’s dreams’, the audience is rarely given such access. Indeed, Lili’s superficiality is contrasted with Gerda, who is a more fully fleshed out character, and whose subtlety of emotion is powerfully embodied by Vikander. That is, while Redmayne’s acting is undoubtedly very good, there is a theatrical showiness to his exaggerated performance of femininity, with each gesture of Lili’s passivity, her fresheyed wonder, and her whispering voice nonetheless loudly proclaiming ‘I’m acting!’. Although the newness of Lili’s emergence—and the period’s rarity of known cases of transgendered identities—contributes to this performance, Lili seems a superficial character, with layers of artifice replacing the layers of characterization. And placing this character next to Gerda—a more modern portrait of femininity and a woman much more comfortable in her skin—might make her more engaging for the audience. In doing so, the story displaces its emotional heart to Gerda, the ‘other’ Danish girl. In doing so, the memory of Lili Elbe is remarkably ‘thinned out’, reduced to a superficial layering of surfaces and performances as her important story of transgender struggle and identity is diverted and filtered through its heterosexual ‘supporting’ character.60 Such displacement returns me to the ‘use’ of adaptation and the ethics of remembering. Stories such as these 59 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, pp. 181-190. 60 Vikander was nominated—and won—the Best Supporting Actress Oscar at the 2016 Academy Awards, although I would argue that her performance and presence in both screen time and gravity would make ‘Gerda’ a leading role.

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that seek to document the physical, emotional, and psychological struggles endured by transgender people remain of vital importance. But the stories shift from memoir, to imaginative and overall fictional novelization to film adaptation means that Elbe’s experience largely remains a fleeting textual memory. Although Elbe explains that ‘I lived a first life encased in a prison’, and although—through narrative, material, and medical intervention—she is able to break free of her cage, Hooper’s The Danish Girl seems to put her back in, albeit a gilded one. With its sumptuous décor and decorous behaviour, the film does not fully allow the memory of Lili Elbe to become, to thrive, or be grasped in the present. Adaptation as a process of repetition and performance of the past—an act of material becoming—in many ways mimics the repetition of actions that constitute both gender and genre conventions. Indeed, as a prestige biopic, The Danish Girl reveals the problems that emerge in such repetition might have not necessarily materialize only in its text but rather in its generic context. That is, as a mainstream production, Hooper’s The Danish Girl makes sure to carefully ensure that it tells Lili’s story with ‘good taste’, using the conventional markers of ‘quality’ in its costuming, score, cinematography, and performances that mark it for wide distribution and maximum profitability. Therefore, although I would argue that The Danish Girl does maintain some of the pedagogical function that Elbe hoped Man into Woman would serve by helping to historicize the plight of transgendered individuals and exposing Elbe’s pioneering journey to a mass audience, it is, nonetheless, shaped by its desire to be marketable, and is therefore unwilling to dig too deeply under its tasteful surface. The next section of this chapter turns to Haynes’s Poison, a low-budget film that is certainly not afraid of challenging the ‘good taste’ of its audience. I suggest that examining Poison as an adaptation reveals how it acts as a performance of memory—of life, of sexual identity, of genre—to enact social change in the present.

Poison’s ‘Ambivalent Aesthetic’ of Memory The previous section of this chapter illustrated how film adaptation—as a process and product—could be conceived of as a form of ‘performance’ of memory. In doing so, its case study of The Danish Girl revealed both the ‘crisis and the allure’ of mediated memory.61 That is, on the one hand, film adaptations offer us the means to come to an embodied understanding of 61 Alison Landsberg, ‘Prosthetic Memory’, p. 242.

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the past as the ‘intentional threads’ of memory leave their trace, leading to ‘a mutual com-plication of past and present’ to recall Casey’s philosophy.62 However, on the other hand, the (re-)mediation of memory—the process of narrativization that constitutes memoir and literature, as well as its translation into audio-visual (and synaesthetic) expression—challenges the authenticity of memory, how it is tied to an ‘a claim […] of being faithful to the past’,63 a problem that seems particularly urgent in adapting the memory of a minority figure such as Lili Elbe. Philosopher and psychologist Mark Freeman has addressed the apparent danger that narrative and artifice hold in the mediation of memory. Recalling Ricoeur’s discussion of mimesis2, or narrative configuration as a ‘grasping together’ of narrative elements,64 Freeman values poetic creativity in the (re-)construction of memory. As he puts it, ‘poets strive neither for a mimetic re-presentation of the world nor a fictive rendition […] what they seek to do is rewrite the world through the imagination, such that we, readers, can see or feel or learn something about it that might otherwise have gone unnoticed or undisclosed’.65 Narrative’s poetic value therefore lies in the creative use of language to re-arrange and reconstruct elements in a way that reveals hidden truths of the past. In doing so, such a poetic or creative treatment of memory reveals how mediated memories come in different modes that serve different functions. While the experiential mode is certainly important to give embodied knowledge of the past and is frequently associated with autobiographical forms of remembering, mediated memory can also be antagonistic and reflexive. In the antagonistic mode, a work seeks to challenge the dominance of a particular form of knowledge of the past. Such revisionist memories often constitute mediated memories in feminist and postcolonial contexts. In a similar vein, the reflexive mode refers to those kinds of mediated memories that conjure the past yet demonstrate a conscious awareness of their means of representation and critically engage with its formal limitations. Erll claims that literature is clearly a medium that ‘simultaneously builds and observes memory’ through its form.66 However, I would suggest that the cinema also powerfully offers mediated memories in the reflexive mode. Films not only ‘remember’ the people and stories of the past, what can be thought of as the raw material of adaptation. But, as a technology of reproduction, films might 62 63 64 65 66

Edward Casey, Remembering, p. 168. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 21. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, p. 66. Mark Freeman, ‘Telling Stories’, p. 275. Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture, p. 159.

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also self-reflexively ‘observe’ the reproduction of memory itself. In doing so, a film might self-reflexively critique its very nature as a reproduction of memory by drawing attention to its form, forcing its audience to question why or, more importantly, how a film has adapted the past. Radstone argues that one way that films might self-reflexively question its means of reproducing and mediating memories is in the way that they draw from a ‘cultural memory bank of cinematic images and sounds’, and that such films ‘remember the past, in part, by means of […] cinematic quotations, alluding not just to a history the films purport to share with their spectators, but to a commonly-held memory-store constituted by the films of the past’.67 Paul Grainge views this practice as an explicit form of ‘genre memory’ that forces spectators to think about how the film has appropriated particular icons, sounds, motifs, and conventions to produce a particular effect.68 The cinema of Todd Haynes demonstrates a repeated interest in not only stories of the past, but also his intimate familiarity with film history and form. In doing so, his films are frequently self-reflexive, drawing on cinematic allusion and pastiche that requires spectators to question the means of their (re-)production. Almost any of his adaptations would illuminate the processes of memory, adaptation, and embodied experience, such as his use of performing Barbie dolls in his biopic Superstar! The Karen Carpenter Story (1988), the multiple actors of different ages, genders, and ethnicities that play Bob Dylan in I’m Not There (2007), or his pastiches of the classical Hollywood melodrama in Far from Heaven (2002), Mildred Pierce (2011), and Carol (2015). However, in this section I turn to Poison, his first feature film. Poison is a heady cocktail of different genres and cinematic allusions that sets the self-reflexive tone that characterize his career. Poison also remains one of his more complicated films, as the film lacks any clear narrative but rather is an entanglement of three different stories that each have wildly different styles: ‘Hero’ (television documentary), ‘Horror’ (campy science fiction), and ‘Homo’ (an erotic prison film). But while it is tricky to try to cognitively ‘make sense’ of its narrative, Poison’s use of the cinematic, literary, and lived past and its anachronistic structure are nonetheless intoxicating to the senses. Writing of the use of anachronism in the cinematic performance of memory, Wortel and Smelik argue that such films ‘explore the nonlinear quality of time forgotten by’ traditional historical films, and that they ‘unravel the past through the creation of lived sensations in the present. Sensations are immediate, volatile, dynamic and nonnarrative 67 Susannah Radstone, ‘Cinema and Memory’, p. 328. 68 Paul Grainge, ‘Introduction’, p. 10.

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[…] time becomes a tangible texture that writes itself onto the bodies of spectators’.69 In what follows, I examine the vicissitudes of memory as they emerge in Poison, and argue that this film offers an evocative example of how the cinema not only acts as a mnemotechnic device, but also acts as a form of mnemopoiesis that invites spectators to feel their way through the lived texture of time. How Poison invites spectators to ‘feel’ through the textures of time demonstrates an intertwining of aesthetics and politics as Poison is a foundational text in the New Queer Cinema (NQC) movement. NQC is a bold, angry, and sexy cluster of films that challenged the conservative political regime of the 1980s that wilfully ignored the AIDS crisis and its horrific effects on the LGBT community. NQC is not united by a singular aesthetic vision, evident through the comparison of the vastly different styles of Gus Van Sant’s dreamy road movie My Own Private Idaho (1991) and Marlon Riggs’s poetic documentary Tongues Untied (1989). However, as B. Ruby Rich explains, in all ‘there are traces of appropriation, pastiche, and irony, as well as a reworking of history’.70 In doing so, NQC often adopts an explicitly antagonistic stance towards memory of the past, with its films rejecting the invisibility of homosexuality in public record. And further, by using the codes and conventions of Hollywood genre cinema, NQC also offers a revision to cinematic memory. As Barbara Mennel puts it, NQC explicitly ties politics with aesthetics by ‘heightening the aestheticism of a time gone by but also excavating and reflecting on the politics inherent in those aesthetic traditions in the f irst place’.71 One way in which NQC ‘excavates’ and ‘reflects’ on aesthetic politics is by using the kinds of ‘genre memory’ that I earlier described. If genres are a repeated series of conventions that structure a film—and if Hollywood genre films typically render the lives of queer people invisible—it would make sense that NQC filmmakers would not only resist conventionality in terms of content but also style. That is, although many f ilms in the NQC movement do explore the lives of queer people, others are queer only in style and work by appropriating and ‘queering’ the codes and conventions of Hollywood genres. Haynes himself puts it well when he parallels genre and heterosexuality as mutually ‘imposed’ structures, and that how heterosexuality def ines, constrains, and makes conventional social behaviour is reinforced by the conventions of narrative filmmaking. 69 Elise Wortel and Anneke Smelik, ‘Textures of Time’, p. 199. 70 B. Ruby Rich, New Queer Cinema, p. 18. 71 Barbara Mennel, Queer Cinema, p. 85.

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‘If homosexuality is the opposite or the counter-sexual activity to that, then what kind of structure would it be?’ asks Haynes, and that ‘[for] me, it’s the way the narrative is structured, the way that films are machines that either reiterate and reciprocate society—or not’ that issues NQC’s challenge to convention and conformity.72 Poison, therefore, not only challenges the mainstream in its content but also in its form as it resists convention by weaving together its three storylines. Although it would perhaps be more accurate to say that they ‘knot’ or ‘clump’ together, as other than the loose theme of persecution and the social outsider (something that I will return to later) there is no clear sense of rhythm or synthesis in Poison’s stories. So too does Poison use pastiche, irony, and hybridization in its play with conventional genres to, as Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin explain, ‘make his viewers aware that they are watching a highly stylized movie—thus queering any sense of reality within the story’.73 ‘Horror’, for instance, is filmed in the style of a trashy B-grade science fiction film that is already—thanks to its ‘mad scientists’ that seek to interrupt human reproduction and its style that flaunts many conventions of ‘good’ narrative film—an inherently queer genre. Dr. Thomas Graves (Larry Maxwell) is researching the human hormone system and—although his studies of ‘molecular coagulation’ are rejected by his medical peers—he manages to isolate and extract a pure sample of the sex drive. But when distracted by Dr. Nancy Olson (Susan Norman), an earnest researcher who wants to join his lab, he accidentally drinks the sample. His body begins to break down and he becomes covered in disgusting pus-filled lesions that leak and spread to others. Dr. Graves’s contagious illness is transparently an analogy for AIDS: the isolated sex drive hormone looks like a cup of viscous semen, the lesions that cover his body evoke the Kaposi sarcoma that can develop on the patient’s body, while the virus is sexually transmitted (Graves kisses and infects a prostitute and Dr. Olson). So too does the medical community’s rejection of Grave’s research and the city’s panic surrounding the ‘Leper Killer’ mimic how AIDS caused similar social and media frenzy, leading Dr. Graves to give an impassioned speech before his suicide: ‘You think I’m dirt. Scum. I’ll tell you something. Every one of you down there is the same. Only you’ll never know it, ‘cause you’ll never know what pride is. ‘Cause pride is the only thing that lets you stand up to misery […] the kind of misery the whole stinking world is made of’.

72 Quoted in Justin Wyatt, ‘Cinematic/Sexual Transgression’, p. 8. 73 Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin, Queer Images, p. 228.

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Dr. Graves (Larry Maxwell) drinks the ‘sex drive’ in Poison (Todd Haynes, 1991). Image courtesy of Killer Films and Zeitgeist Films.

But how does the form of ‘Horror’—its ‘genre memory’—contribute to its social commentary on the AIDS epidemic? I suggest that it is its ambivalent aesthetic—how ‘Horror’ swings between ugliness and beauty, disgust and pleasure—that does a lot of the work here. There is certainly a sense of rough cheapness that pervades ‘Horror’. The segment is filmed in a harsh black and white. The exposure of the camera also seems rather unstable: at times white areas of the screen are blown out, while in other moments the screen is plunged into inky darkness in which its shady characters hide. The rough filming style of ‘Horror’ is matched by its disgusting imagery that heavily features bodily fluids. At one point, Dr. Graves and Dr. Olson walk down the street and approach two little girls. Looking at him in horror, one of the little girls suddenly spits on Dr. Graves, and saliva drips on his forehead. Later, Dr. Graves and Dr. Olson eat at a street café where the lesions on his forehead split, thick pus leaking and mingling with the mustard on his hotdog. Perhaps the most disgusting moment of ‘Horror’ is when the section’s rough aesthetic brushes against such imagery. After Dr. Grave’s delivers his speech, he throws himself off the balcony (this is filmed from a subjective point of view so spectators are put into Dr. Graves’s shoes as he tumbles from the balcony). The next shot finds Dr. Graves as he briefly regains consciousness in a hospital bed. A fly can be heard noisily buzzing

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Dr. Graves’ skin—and Todd Haynes’s filming style—evokes disgust in Poison (Todd Haynes, 1991). Image courtesy of Zeitgeist Films and Killer Films.

over the beeping of the heart monitor, as a doctor leans in close to Dr. Graves as he whispers, ‘I can hear angels farting on the ceiling’. The camera captures Dr. Graves’s ruined skin in close-up, his face a mess of wet lumps that are coated in a thick clear ooze. The proximity of the camera—along with the sharp colour contrast—gives Dr. Graves’s skin a palpable stickiness. Chapter Three of this book drew on Jennifer Barker’s claims regarding the inherent eroticism of cinematic tactility, but it is important to remember that the palpable proximity of such imagery also potentially triggers disgust in spectators. As Barker explains, ‘the viewer discovers […] the carnality of vision and may be horrified (and thrilled, quite possibly) by the easy with which the film’s skin can touch our own, contaminate us, and give us the creeps’.74 Just as Dr. Graves’s illness spreads and contaminates to other residents of the city, the disgusting imagery of ‘Horror’ seems to similarly ‘contaminate us’, while its ‘rough’ filming style and ‘sharp’ lighting further invites an embodied experience that allows us to somewhat grasp Dr. Graves’s estrangement from both his body and his world. But ‘Horror’ is not purely disgusting, and its style not only serves to disturb. Rather, beauty emerges from ‘Horror’ in strikingly pleasurable moments. For example, its 74 Jennifer M. Barker, Tactile Eye, p. 56.

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chiaroscuro lighting and oblique angles create abstract patterns that are expressionistic and visually appealing, such as one impressive shot in which a prostitute slowly emerges from an inky pool of darkness that surrounds Dr. Graves as he sits at a grimy bar. At the beginning of the film, a montage of close-ups capture the hands of a child as he plays with a toy doctor’s set, the smoothness of the plastic layering with the smoothness of the boy’s skin, prompting a kind of tactile response that is very different to the kind invited by Graves’s skin at the end of the film. Sound too is remarkably pretty in ‘Horror’. Styling their performance on Vincent Price’s distinctive voice, a voice over narrator explains that ‘science: man’s sacred quest for truth was [Dr. Graves’s] first and only love’, each word dripping from the soundtrack like warm honey. And throughout, the score is an arrangement of clarinets and oboes that give a lush, ornate texture in support of the images. The final moments of Poison’s ‘Horror’ story perhaps best illustrate its ambivalent aesthetic. When Dr. Graves says that he can hear angels in the room, a couple of brief subjective point of view shots cut into the close-up of his ruined skin. Although these shots are but merely fragments—their fleetingness perhaps evoking their ephemerality—the camera captures the figure of the ‘angel’ peering into the camera, his ‘wings’ a blur in the background. In these moments, the sounds of the fly buzzing around the room are intensified and warped, becoming more insistent and somewhat mechanical. The way that the shots are cut, and the layering of the sound and image, seems to collapse any distinction between disgust and the sublime. By injecting beauty and poetry into the rough and disgusting, ‘Horror’ seems to resuscitate its origins and invites spectators to revel and take pleasure in the trash aesthetic. In doing so, Poison parallels aesthetic trash with the social ‘trash’ of the infected patient, asking us to not overlook the beauty and pleasure that nonetheless remains in the body of the infected. Although Dr. Graves is not gay—indeed, he is explicitly framed as being heterosexual, and it is his desire for Dr. Olson serves as the cause of his monstrous accident when he ingests the semen-like hormone substance—he nonetheless emerges as one of the ‘sexual outlaw’ characters that define NQC. The sexual outlaw challenged two dominant queer stereotypes in narrative film: the tragic homosexual, who often died by the film’s end and inspired pity in spectators, and the tasteful, tolerated gay character that serves to reinforce heteronormative traits and values. Rather, sexual outlaws flaunted their outsider status and relished in their threat to bourgeois norms. Set in a sweaty prison of sexually ambiguous and muscular young men, it is Poison’s ‘Homo’ storyline that most clearly develops the sexual outlaw figure. Furthermore, although Poison itself is ‘inspired’ by Jean Genet’s

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novels (and fragments from his 1949 The Thief’s Diary provided intertitles throughout the film), it is its ‘Homo’ strand that most clearly adapts Genet, in particular his 1946 novel Miracle of the Rose and his cine-poem Un chant d’amour (1950). This is important, as Genet’s literary work certainly helped to establish many of the tropes of the sexual outlaw that were embraced by NQC as his novels are filled with criminals: murderers, thieves, pimps, prostitutes and delinquents, all of whom use sex as both a form of power and pleasure, regardless of their sexuality. As Genet explains that he is attracted to the criminal figure in his work, as they ‘[repudiate] the virtues of your world’ and they ‘organize a forbidden universe’.75 What is curious about Genet’s writing—as well as Un chant d’amour, his only film—is how he not only includes a heavy amount of queer content, but his structure and style are both inherently queer. That is, just as his queer criminals ‘organize a forbidden universe’ that challenges social conventions, the structure and his novels (and film) themselves open up a ‘forbidden universe’ that challenges formal conventions too through disruption and destabilization. Cultural historian Elizabeth Stephens has pointed out that Genet viewed language as an ‘inherently heteronormative’ structure that mediates representation, and that therefore his writing practice ‘draws attention to the overlooked potential of writing itself to reconfigure the relationship between sexual subjectivity and language as mutually constitutive and transformative, providing new ways to think about what is at stake in the inscription of homoeroticism’.76 Just like the thieves and sexual ‘perverts’ that stalk through his worlds, Genet ‘thieves’ words and images from their original context and ‘perverts’ them by combining them in new ways, creating an intoxicating world of brutality and fragility, filled with prisoners whose chains turn into flowers, blood and semen sparkle like rubies and pearls, and gardens bloom with thorny roses that perfume the air of the latrine. One of the main ways that demonstrates how Genet actively constructs queer identity through language is achieved is through the semi-autobiographical form of his novels. As Genet explains in Miracle of the Rose, ‘the aim of this book is only to relate the experience of freeing myself from a state of painful torpor’, as a way of freeing himself from both social and bodily imprisonment.77 Genet’s novels weld the memories of his own youth and time spent in French jails with a fantasy world of prison life. Therefore, his novels often take an antagonistic and reflexive stance 75 Jean Genet, ‘Erotic Ritual’, p. 40. 76 Elizabeth Stephens, Queer Writing, pp. 5-12. 77 Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose, p. 27.

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towards memory. In doing so, Genet not only ‘queers’ content and form, but seems to ‘queer’ memory itself, forcing his reader to interrogate the aesthetic politics of how memory and its trace are constitutive of identity. Miracle of the Rose is a memory-cum-fantasy of his time spent at Fontevrault prison, and an earlier period spent at a boy’s reformatory in Mettray, and the love, lust, and violence that filled the days of both. Genet’s prose is meandering and constantly self-reflexive about his writing and the difficulty in capturing his memories. He writes that sometimes captures ‘its traces […] to recall the precise details’ of his memory so that it ‘flares up within me’, but he cannot make it last, and worries that his reader will be unable to share in his experience (p. 171). As he explains, ‘I rack my brains trying to find some device, some artifice that would enable me to convey to you the peculiar feel of certain moments at Mettray. How can I make you taste and understand the […] flavour of Sunday mornings, for example?’ (p. 170). He achieves this through the poetic combination of words and images, and a heavy use of metaphor, but it is striking how his film, as a synaesthetic medium, is able to capture, translate, and express the ‘feeling’ of his memory. Un chant d’amour is a film without words at all, yet its images are evocative and palpably erotic. The film is split into two: the first part roughly follows a prison guard who spies on inmates as they dance, masturbate, and steal furtive glances and touches with one another; the second is coded more of a fantasy sequence in which two inmates escape from the prison and frolic in the nearby forest. While Un chant d’amour offers a commentary on voyeurism with its exchange of glances between prisoners and their wardens, its black and white cinematography gives the image a palpable and tactile grit: sweat-slicked bodies writhe and grind against the mud-caked walls of their cells. In one compelling sequence, a prisoner rubs and kisses the wall that separates him from another man, before he pokes a straw through a small hole. He blows his cigarette smoke through the straw, and the camera cuts to the other man who opens his mouth wide, breathing in the other man’s exhaled breath. The imagery is confronting and erotic, disturbing and provocative, an ambivalent aesthetic response that characterizes Genet’s fiction as well as its legacy in NQC. Indeed, Poison’s ‘Homo’ sequence draws on both Miracle of the Rose and Un chant d’amour to create a textured memory of its literary and cinematic sources that also extends Genet’s argument regarding the relationship between language, desire, and identity. ‘Homo’ follows John Broom (Scott Renderer) who enters the Fontenal prison. There, he meets Jack Bolton (James Lyons), someone he had first met when he was a teenager in Baton, a juvenile facility. Fontenal is a dark labyrinth of stone and bodies, while

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the soundscape is hushed except for the offscreen sound of dripping water, whispering voices—’sssh!’, ‘faggot!’, ‘fuck!’—and sex. Indeed, the soundscape of Fontenal certainly evokes Genet’s description of Fontevrault that ‘vibrates with the sound of kisses’ (p. 44). Filmed in a style evocative of Un chant d’amour, the Fontental sequences capture John’s erotic obsession with Jack. The prison is dimly lit with a blue-tinged light that makes the sweat and sheen on the prisoner’s bodies glimmer like diamonds, while their bodies are framed in suffocating close-ups. In one erotically-charged sequence, Jack shows off his scars from a knife fight to John. He explains that he used to be called a ‘pretty boy’, and asks John if he thinks that his scars make him look ‘tough’. But the way that his body is filmed makes him appear quite soft: filmed with a soft blue side light, Jack stretches his body—his arm behind his head—and strokes his skin his close-up, the camera trailing up and down his body as Jack brushes his fingers against his stomach, chest, and nipples. Throughout ‘Hero’, John remembers Baton where—like in Miracle of the Rose—the boys performed makeshift marriage ceremonies, devoting their lives and bodies to each other. But just as Genet shifts between autobiography and fiction, memory and fantasy, John’s memory is contested and is unreliable. At one point John’s voiceover explains that Jack’s body and personality at Fontenal ‘contradicted any memory I had of him as a child […] Something about my memory disturbed me. But I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. All night long I built an imaginary life in which he was the centre. And I always gave that life, which was begun over and over, and transformed a dozen times, a violent end’. John’s memories of Baton are filmed in a very different style to Fontenal’s darkly erotic atmosphere. Rather, they are brightly lit and filtered with a warm hue, while a simple melody of panpipes burbles on the soundtrack. On the one hand, these sequences have the feeling of a ‘good’ memory, the golden aura of halcyon days gone by. But, on the other hand, the sequences at Baton come off as highly constructed. The memories of Baton take place in a rocky grove, but the space looks highly artificial. The way that these sequences are filmed in long shot—as opposed to the close-ups that characterize Fontenal—also give a ‘staginess’ to John’s memories. The reliability of John’s memory is tested most clearly when he remembers watching on as a group of boys spit on Jack. Crouching on his knees, Jack opens his mouth wide open as the giggling boys spit on him over and over again, covering his face with thick saliva. As the music—now strings—increase in volume, the camera cranes out from Jack’s face, cutting to a subjective point of view from Jack that shows the boys’ faces as they jump and spit, an impossible perspective

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The staginess and artificiality questions the reliability of memory in Poison (Todd Haynes, 1991). Image courtesy of Zeitgeist Films and Killer Films

if this sequence is to be taken as John’s memory. So too does ‘memory’ blur with fantasy here, as the globs of spit transform into rose petals that fall on Jack’s face. The Baton sequences leave many questions unanswered: is this a memory or a fantasy? Does Jack enjoy being, the ‘object of an amorous rite’ as in Miracle of the Rose (p. 257), or is he disgusted and ashamed? Indeed, ‘Homo’ not only questions the reliability of memory but also raises the devastating consequences when such memory is ‘used’, as John uses this ‘memory’ to try to seduce Jack. Although Jack rejects his advances as he identifies as being straight, John eventually overpowers and rapes him, becoming the kind of predatory ‘sexual outlaw’ that is simultaneously celebrated and reviled in Genet his legacy in NQC. Poison’s third narrative, ‘Hero’, at first seems far removed from the camp excesses of the other two storylines, and certainly seems most distant from Genet. However, ‘Hero’ also uses its form to question memory’s reliability, as well as its themes of social rejection. ‘Hero’ adopts the style of a ‘true crime’ television documentary, investigating how and why Richie, a young boy, murdered his father and—quite literally—vanished into thin air. A series of interviews with his mother, Felicia (played by Edith Meeks), teachers, and schoolfriends, gradually builds a portrait of Richie. It gradually becomes apparent that Richie is a trickster, or as one puts it,

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‘a chronic liar’. He lies to his friends that he is descended from royalty, he runs naked into his neighbour’s house and defecates in front of her ‘like an animal’, and he convinces his friend Gregory (Buck Smith) to spank him, qualities that certainly align him with Genet’s characters. Just as ‘Horror’ perverts heterosexuality through Dr. Graves’s accidental ingestion of the ‘sex drive’, so too does ‘Hero’ pervert the domestic space of the family home. Felicia reveals that Richie walked in on her while she was having sex with her gardener, and again when his father was beating her up: the event that caused him to fetch the gun and kill him. Rather than a safe and inviting space, ‘Hero’ posits the family home as a kind of prison, a place that must be rejected and escaped. This is literally rendered when Felicia testif ies that after shooting his father, Richie jumped through a window and flew away. Richie’s literal flight from home is an impossible activity, and it interestingly rubs against the supposed transparency of its documentary aesthetic, that which gives an authentic ‘trace’ of the past.78 Indeed, ‘Hero’ is filmed as a very stripped back way—lacking any persuasive artifice such as nondiegetic music, coloured lighting, or tricky cinematography (except in a few important instances)—that gives it a claim to truth. But although most of ‘Hero’ is comprised of ‘talking head’ interview footage, there is a moment that stands out for its striking artifice. And, tellingly, it centres on a recreation of Felicia’s memory. When Richie discovers his mother in bed with the gardener, Felicia tells the camera that Richie’s face was like an ‘oath in some other language’, and that he had the same look on his face as when she walked in on Richie being spanked by his father. Both of these memories are conveyed with a doubling of Super 8 film within the same shot. In both, Richie is positioned in the foreground while Felicia is in the background, framed by a doorway. But as the shots are layered with different footage, its foreground and background do not match in exposure or perspective. In the bedroom shot, the camera suddenly zooms in on Felicia’s face as she sits in bed, her face grotesquely filling the doorframe; in the second, she stands as a looming presence in the doorway, slightly washed out that gives the impression that she is but a projection on a screen. In doing so, the warping of Super 8 footage, a form of media that evokes the home movie and is therefore afforded a ‘feeling’ of the real from its everyday familiarity, certainly interrupts receiving the documentary as a transparent mediation of reality.

78 Malin Wahlberg, Documentary Time, pp. 39-40.

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The layering of footage in Poison (Todd Haynes, 1991) questions the reliability of the documentary form as a mediation of memory. Image courtesy of Zeitgeist Films and Killer Film

Mapping how Poison ‘remembers’ Genet reveals not only how it clearly adapts the ‘Homo’ storyline from Miracle of the Rose, but also how it more generally conjures the figure of the ‘sexual outlaw’ that features in ‘Horror’ and ‘Hero’. So too does Poison’s multiple narrative structure and its blending of style evoke Genet’s wilful play with formal structure to create a new means of expressing marginalized subjectivity. But Poison’s cultural legacy exceeds its contribution to NQC and the formal expression of queer desire and identity. Poison’s repurposing of ‘genre memory’—how it weaves the seemingly stylistically banal ‘Hero’ with the expressionism of ‘Horror’ and ‘Homo’—invites audiences to reflect on how all stories, even those that are presented as factual, have nonetheless been shaped and framed. Memory, both subjective and collective, is posited as a site of contention, something that should not be accepted transparently, but rather is a constructed process that is liable to be manipulated. Therefore, in Haynes’s cinema, memory—subjective and textual—becomes a complex form of remediation that becomes ‘alive because of the work that you do as a viewer’.79 This work is not only cognitive, the kind of mental processing that is required to ‘make sense’ of Poison’s layered storyline. But just as importantly, this 79 Quoted in Justin Wyatt, ‘Cinematic/Sexual Transgression’, p. 8.

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work is the labour of the senses. Poison’s anachronistic use of cinematic and subjective memory, its layering of texts, citations, genres, and bodies demand an embodied experience from spectators. In doing so, Poison offers a compelling—if complex—case of how the cinema is not only a form of mnemotechnics, but also able to achieve a kind of ‘mnemopoiesis’, a poetic use of memory that opens us to new experiences of the past and that might direct us to new ideas about the future. With this in mind, and in the body, the sensuous elaboration of adaptation can be more comprehensibly understood as a form of memory work.

Conclusion: The ‘Pressure of the Past’, Pushing Towards the Future This chapter has posited that memory has a ‘thickness’ that exceeds an accrual of affective, cognitive, and neurological storage ‘traces’. But, rather, has drawn attention to how memory’s ‘thickness’ also emerges in how it might spring from the body’s ‘carnal knowledge’, or how it becomes intertwined with spaces and others. As Freeman puts it, rather than conceiving of memory as being a ‘mere videotape-like replica of the personal past’, memory is ‘a richly textured, multivocal text’.80 Indeed, memory is further thickened, fleshed out, and literally ‘textured’ through the experience—and re-experience—of texts. The memories of the texts we consume can be just as evocative, precious, and meaningful as those other forms of memory that we build our sense of self. Adaptation, too, has a ‘thickness’, an accrual of textual layers that are understood texturally. Taken in this way, the mutual ‘thickness’ of adaptation and memory intersect in varied, complex, and at times tantalizing ways. Adaptation is not only a product of textual memory, one form ‘remembered’ into another; nor does adaptation merely appeal to the process of memory through the active comparison of an adaptation and its source. This chapter has considered adaptation as a kind of ‘memory work’, a form of labour that necessarily involves the senses. In doing so, thinking through adaptation and memory should not rest on questions of what texts have been remembered. As I have demonstrated in this chapter, the scholar should also examine how they have been remembered. Adaptations can have a highly ambivalent relationship with the past, both historical and textual. An adaptation might be critical of its sources, or it might purposefully 80 Mark Freeman, ‘Telling Stories’, p. 263.

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‘misremember’ or demonstrate a forgetfulness that reshapes our embodied knowledge of the past. Others, like Haynes’s Poison, might be self-reflexive of its nature as a form of mediated memory (and as a memory of media), prompting viewers to question the ‘use’ of such memories. How we negotiate the production and circulation of memories is important, for as Grainge points out it ‘describes the echo and pressure of the past as it is configured in present-based struggles over the meaning of lived experience’.81 Our experience of (re-)mediated stories have the power to not only reframe our understanding of the past, but to—quite literally—change our point of view. In doing so, adaptation and memory reveals itself as a two-way and reversible process. In adapting and readapting the stories of the past, our memories in turn adapt us, as we are opened to new experiences that reshape and reorientate ourselves towards the future, the kind of ‘refiguration’ that Ricoeur describes as constituting mimesis3. The aesthetics of adaptation thus necessarily entails an ethical dimension, a phenomenon I turn to in the conclusion of this book.

Works Cited Andrew, Dudley. ‘Adapting Cinema to History: A Revolution in the Making’, in A Companion to Literature and Film, ed. by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 189-204. Barker, Jennifer. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley: U of California P, 2009. Bazin, André. ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, Film Quarterly 13.4 (1960), 4-9. Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. Boyum, Joy Gould. Double Exposure: Fiction into Film. New York: Universe Books, 1985. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 2002. Carroll, Rachel. Transgender and the Literary Imagination: Changing Gender in Twentieth Century Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018. Casey, Edward S. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000.

81 Paul Grainge, ‘Introduction’, p. 3.

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Diamond, Suzanne. ‘Whose Life Is It, Anyway? Adaptation, Collective Memory, and (Auto)Biographical Processes’, in Redefining Adaptation Studies, ed. by Dennis Cutchins, Laurence Raw, and James M. Welsh (Lanham: Scarecrow, 2010), pp. 95-110. Ebershoff, David. The Danish Girl. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000. Elbe, Lili. Man into Woman: The First Sex Change—A Portrait of Lili Elbe, ed. by Niels Hoyer. London: Blue Boat Books, 2004. Erll, Astrid. Memory in Culture, trans. by Sara B. Young. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011. Freeman, Mark. ‘Telling Stories: Memory and Narrative’ in Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, ed. by Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (New York: Fordham UP, 2010), pp. 263-277. Genet, Jean. ‘Erotic Ritual’. Aperture 149 (1997): 40-47. ——. Miracle of the Rose, trans. by Bernard Frechtman. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. Grainge, Paul. ‘Introduction: Memory and Popular Film’ in Memory and Popular Film, ed. by Paul Grainge (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003), pp. 1-20. Hanich, Julian. ‘Great Expectations: Cinematic Adaptations and the Reader’s Disappointment’, New Literary History, 49.3 (2018), 425-446. Hansen, Miriam Bratu. Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley: U of California P, 2012. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. London: Routledge, 2006. Landsberg, Alison. ‘Prosthetic Memories: Total Recall and Blade Runner’ in Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader, ed. by Sean Redmond (New York: Wallflower, 2005), pp. 239-248. Leder, Drew. The Absent Body. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. Livingston, Paisley. ‘On the Appreciation of Cinematic Adaptation’, Projections, 4.2 (2010), 104-127. Mennel, Barbara. Queer Cinema: Schoolgirls, Vampires, and Gay Cowboys. New York: Wallflower, 2012. Michaelian, Kourken. Mental Time Travel: Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge of the Personal Past. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 2016. Mulvey, Laura. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16.3 (1975), 6-18. Parker, Helen. ‘Forward’ in Man into Woman: The First Sex Change—A Portrait of Lili Elbe, by Lili Elbe, ed. by Niels Hoyer (London: Blue Boat Books, 2004), pp. 5-7. Plate, Liedeke, and Anneke Smelik. ‘Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture: An Introduction”, in Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture, ed. by Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 1-22. Plato. Theaetetus, trans. by Joe Sachs. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004. Prosser, Jay. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Columbia UP, 1998.

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Radstone, Susannah. ‘Cinema and Memory’, in Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, ed. by Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (New York: Fordham UP, 2010), pp. 325-342. Rich, B. Ruby. New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut. Durham: Duke UP, 2013. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. ——. Time and Narrative: Volume 1. trans. by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. Robins, Sarah K. ‘Memory Traces’, in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory, ed. by Sven Bernecker and Kourken Michaelian (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 76-87. Schacter, Daniel, and Donna Rose Addis. ‘The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive Memory: Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B, 362.1481 (2007), 773-786. Stephens, Elizabeth. Queer Writing: Homoeroticism in Jean Genet’s Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009. Trigg, Dylan. The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny. Athens: Ohio UP, 2012. Truffaut, François, and Helen G. Scott. Hitchcock. New York: Touchstone, 1983. Tulving, Endel. ‘Origin of Autonoesis in Episodic Memory’ in The Nature of Remembering: Essays in Honor of Robert G. Crowder, ed. by Henry Roediger, James Nairne, Ian Neath, and Aimée Suprenant (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2001), pp. 17-34. Wahlberg, Malin. Documentary Time: Film and Phenomenology. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. Wortel, Elise, and Anneke Smelik. ‘Textures of Time: A Becoming-Memory of History in Costume Film’, in Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture, ed. by Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 185-200. Wyatt, Justin. ‘Cinematic/Sexual Transgression: An Interview with Todd Haynes’, Film Quarterly, 46.3 (1993), 2-8.



Conclusion: Body Language Abstract The conclusion of the book re-examines the value of film-phenomenology in the evaluation and appreciation of film adaptation. I argue that before we make sense of an adaptation we must first attend to their sensual experience: their sight, their sound, their feeling, and how they are groped in embodied structures of imagination and memory. The conclusion fleshes out how an aesthetics of adaptation is inherently tied up with an ethics of adaptation, and gestures towards future work that needs to be done. Keywords: adaptation, phenomenology, embodiment, ethics, Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016), 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

Arriving at an Embodied Theory of Adaptation Approaching adaptation—as a process, a product, and indeed a discipline—is a challenging task. As much as scholars attempt to pin it down with a dazzling array of interests, perspectives, and theories, adaptation seems to slip out of grasp. Kamilla Elliott, with expected rigour and clarity, has recently argued that adaptation actively resists theorization which are both ‘rival, overlapping, mutually resistant, cultural processes each vying to subject the other to their operations’.1 As she puts it: ‘theorization […] resists adaptation when it fails to conform to its tenets, denigrating, opposing, and ignoring it; even so, adaptation continues to resist theorization, blithely surviving and thriving in culture and practice, even when theorization pronounces it to be a theoretical impossibility, offending theorists as it promiscuously shifts theoretical allegiances, never fully aligning itself to any’ (p. 176).

1

Kamilla Elliott, Theorizing Adaptation, p. 7.

Richard, D.E., Film Phenomenology and Adaptation: Sensuous Elaboration. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463722100_concl

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Also assisting the disciplinary slipperiness of adaptation is the vast forms of texts, objects, and practices that are considered through the lens of adaptation, with each bringing its own critical traditions. Although film and theatrical adaptations form the bulk of adaptation criticism, scholars are increasingly examining a dizzying range of cultural products—such as comic books,2 videogames,3 toys,4 new media,5 social media6—and cultural practices, including GIFs and digital communication7 and fan participation.8 But what unites these diverse forms of adaptation is us: their beholder. It is our sensual grasp of an adaptation that becomes the grounds for making sense of them as adaptations. Further, embracing a sensual approach to adaptation recognizes not only adaptation as occurring between forms, but also the adaptation of sense modalities as they criss-cross in the embodied imagination. As Elliott has put it, a synaesthetic approach to adaptation unites perception with conception, and ‘[what] theorization has torn asunder, let synaesthesia join together’.9 Film Phenomenology and Adaptation: Sensuous Elaboration has taken such an approach by celebrating the fleshy substance of both the body and adaptations themselves, using the philosophy and research methodology of phenomenology to reflect upon and interrogate adaptations as they are materially and meaningfully lived. This book has put Robert Stam’s evocative suggestion that adaptation ‘creates an active weave, a relational tissue wrought from […] various strands’ in dialogue with the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and phenomenological scholarship.10 Reflecting on the body as the carnal foundations of meaning and language, Merleau-Ponty writes that the ‘body is the fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my “comprehension”’.11 This book posits the body as one of the ‘various strands’ that comprises the experience of adaptation. While ‘intertextual dialogism’ offers a productive approach for considering the relationship between source material and adapted work, knitting together film phenomenology with 2 Henry John Pratt, ‘Making Comics into Film’, pp. 145-164. 3 Kevin M. Flanagan, ‘Videogame Adaptation’, pp. 441-456. 4 Kyle Meikle, Adaptations in the Franchise Era, pp. 159-172. 5 Costas Constandinides, From Film Adaptation; Michael Ryan Moore, ‘Adaptation and New Media’, pp. 179-192. 6 Anna Blackwell, ‘Tweeting from the Grave’, pp. 287-300. 7 Eckart Voigts, ‘Memes, GIFs, and Remix Culture’, pp. 390-402. 8 Kyle Meikle, Adaptations in the Franchise Era, pp. 49-92. 9 Kamilla Elliott, Theorizing Adaptation, p. 288. 10 Robert Stam, ‘Introduction’, p. 24. 11 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, p. 273.

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adaptation offers a fresh perspective that reinstates the body as the material source of cinematic intelligibility through a ‘fleshly dialogue’ between body and world, spectator and screen. The five chapters of this book have developed what I call an ‘embodied’ theory of adaptation, a model grounded in perception—seeing, hearing, and touching—that is also sensitive to the forms of insight made available through the embodied structures of imagination and memory. Now that I have arrived at an embodied theory of adaptation, in the final part of this book I will demonstrate how these tools can be employed together in an analysis of the (aptly named) adaptation, Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016). Arrival is an apposite case study with which to conclude this book as the translation between two very different languages (one verbal, and one audio-visual no less) is narratively significant. In doing so, Arrival offers a poignant analogy for the dynamics of adaptation between media forms, while itself offering a rich sensual event that ‘fleshes out’ its source material. After this case study, I will rehearse the original contributions I have made to the field, before gesturing to the future directions of research an embodied approach to screen adaptation might take. Arrival opens with a series of vignettes as Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) interacts with her daughter as she is born, grows into a plucky adolescent, and then dies of cancer. Along with their golden and sepia tones, Louise’s voice-over establishes these vignettes as memories, albeit with the warning that ‘memory doesn’t work the way I thought it did. We are so bound by time, by its order’. Louise is a professor of linguistics, and her skills as a translator are required to determine an alien race’s intentions when twelve spacecraft position themselves around the world. The aliens (named ‘heptapods’ for their seven legs) ‘speak’ through incomprehensible groans and vibrations; however, Louise discovers that they also communicate through a vibrant visual language. Through their trunk-like legs, the heptapods weave great circular patterns that shimmer in the air like smoke. Unlike the linear connections of graphemes and morphemes, the heptapod’s logograms are circular and continuous. As Dr. Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) explains, their ‘logograms are not bound by time […] their language has no forward or backward’ movement that prompts the scientists to question ‘is this how they think?’ The film references the ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ that posits that language is not only a mechanical means of expressing thought, but also structures thought and perception. Linguist Basel Hussein glosses the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and explains that language ‘determines how [we] perceive and organize […] both the natural world and the social world’ and that language ‘defines your experience for you […] [it] is neutral but gets in the

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way, imposing habits of both looking and thinking’.12 As Louise becomes fluent in Heptapod, her perception of the world—and time—changes. Rather than remaining on a linear plane, Louise begins to experience time as a simultaneous structure that blurs past, present, and future. The film’s major conceit reveals that the ‘memories’ that opened the film are actually fragments from Louise’s future, a future that she embraces despite knowing the impending tragedy that awaits. Arrival is based on Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life’, a philosophical short story about free will and determinism. Littered with mathematical equations, diagrams of physics, and anecdotes about music notations and linguistics, the story describes in more detail how different forms of language structures experience. ‘The physical universe [is] a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar’ itself, muses Louise, and that ‘[every] physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological’ depending on whether it was grasped by a ‘sequential’ or ‘simultaneous’ mode of awareness.13 Louise reflects that the heptapods’ ‘simultaneous’ mode of conscious awareness meant that ‘speech [was] a bottleneck because it required one word to follow another sequentially’, but in their logograms: every mark on a page was visible simultaneously. Why constrain writing with a glottographic straitjacket, demanding that it be just as sequential as speech? […] Semasiographic writing naturally took advantage of the page’s two-dimensionality; instead of doling out morphemes one at a time, it offered an entire page full of them all at once (p. 135).

But crucially, the novel explains that the heptapod’s language is performative. As the heptapods have a different awareness of time, ‘[instead] of using language to inform, they used language to actualize’ (p. 138). Human speech is performative too of course; Judith Butler for instance argues that a performative speech act is a ‘discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names’, its power constructed through a ‘ritualized production, a ritual reiterated’ that circulates throughout culture.14 But here I want to emphasize not only how language is discursively performative, but how Arrival materially performs the heptapods’ seemingly incomprehensible language itself. 12 Basel Hussein, ‘The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Today’, p. 644. 13 Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life, pp. 133-134. 14 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 13, 95.

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Early in the f ilm, Louise gives a lecture on the sonic anomalies of Portuguese, explaining that the language originated in the Kingdom of Galicia where ‘language was seen as an expression of art’. In doing so, Arrival foreshadows how the spectacular logograms of Heptapod resemble works of art as they form ephemeral Rorschach patterns that hang in the air. The first time that the heptapods perform their visual language is filmed in a long shot: the logogram blooms in the air before fully materializing in centre frame. The camera then cuts to the astonished faces the scientists who gawp at the spectacle. Fittingly, the shot then cuts to a camera that is recording the display as Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) asks his technician ‘Are you getting this?’ But he could be speaking directly to the spectator: doubly framed by the cinema screen and the diegetic visual technology, the visually stunning language commands the spectator to look on in wonder. As if responding to the desire of the spectator (and the scientists) to get a closer look, the shot cuts to an extreme close-up. The camera crawls down a section of the logogram, capturing its materiality that is reminiscent of black smoke or squid ink that is suspended in still water. Additionally, the logographs are accented by sound. The film’s sound editor Sylvain Bellemare explains that the sounds of the otherworldly logograms were made by the very domestic sounds of vegetables that were dropped in water, dried rice, and metal brushes being scratched across plastic boards.15 Indeed, although the heptapods’ visual language is certainly (and quite literally) foregrounded, it is not the only way that Arrival performs their language as the heptapods have a sonically resonant form of speech. Like the prosaic sounds that comprise the aliens’ visual language, Bellemare outlines how their speech was crafted by sampling and layering a range of natural noises: camels, pigs, birds, and a traditional Māori flute. Elsewhere, Bellemare describes that the heptapods needed to sound organic, ‘a bit like whales [or] a subaquatic creature. That was a goal, to make them as a living beast, [perceived] at a very low frequency’.16 But as discussed in Chapter Two and Three of this book, when sound is transmitted at low frequency it is not only acoustically heard but it is also viscerally felt. Therefore, although the specific translation of the heptapod’s speech might go over our heads, its meaning—alerting us to the awesome power of the alien beings—is felt from within. Arrival beautifully illustrates Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s insistence that language is materially grounded in the perceiving and expressive body and 15 Quoted in Jennifer Walden, ‘Creating’, n.p. 16 Quoted in Matt Grobar, ‘Arrival’, n.p.

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is the basis for intersubjective communication. Describing Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodiment, Vivian Sobchack explains that the ‘lived-body projects and performs its perceptual perspective and situation and bears meaning into the world as the expression of that situation. The highest level of this performance is speech and its fixation as writing’.17 But although speech and writing might be the ‘highest’ or more sophisticated means of expression, ‘long before we consciously and voluntarily differentiate and abstract the world’s significance […] in discrete symbolic systems, we are immersed in language as an existential system […] in the very activity of perception and its bodily expression, we inaugurate language and communication’ (p. 12). As Merleau-Ponty maintains throughout his phenomenology, language’s significance is not only expressed through words ‘but also through that of accent, intonation, gesture and facial expression’ and that ‘these additional meanings no longer reveal the speaker’s thoughts but the source of his thoughts and his fundamental manner of being’.18 Merleau-Ponty’s description of the importance of gesture and facial expression in communication pertinently applies to Louise’s ability to understand Heptapod. When Weber recruits Louise, he tries to get her to translate a few moments of the heptapods’ rustling language, but she tells him that ‘it is impossible to translate from an audio file’ and that she would ‘need to be there to interact with them’. This is proved later in the field: the first interactions with the heptapods are held in the cavernous antechamber of the spacecraft. In addition to a large opaque screen that separates the humans from the aliens, the scientists all wear heavy protective gear that disguises their bodies and faces (at times the spectator is offered a subjective point-of-view shot that shows how the mask obscures Louise’s vision). Louise realizes that their translation sessions will not progress if she is distanced from the aliens so, against the orders of the military, she takes off her protective gear (‘they need to see me’, she says) and approaches the screen. Louise presses her hand against the screen and, mirroring her movement, one of the aliens presses one of its appendages against the glass. In doing so, the film comments on the importance of gestural communication (perhaps further enhanced in that the way that the heptapods resemble hands). Merleau-Ponty describes that the ‘comprehension of gestures comes about through the reciprocity of my intentions and the gestures of others’, continuing that gestures ‘[outline] an intentional object. This object is genuinely present and fully comprehended when the powers of my body 17 Vivian Sobchack, Address of the Eye, p. 41. 18 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 174.

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adjust themselves to it and overlap it’ (p. 215). Arrival gives an exaggerated illustration of this when the heptapods tap on the glass barrier, and Louise realizes that they want her to write a logograph on the screen between them. She places her hands on the screen at the same spot as the heptapod and it emits a vast cloud of its ‘ink’ that swirls between them. Louise says that she cannot write ‘with both hands’ and takes one away. At this moment, the heptapod bangs the screen; the heavy knock blends into the deep vibrating groan of the heptapods’ speech that resonates through the air and the body. Louise is profoundly affected and, in a trance, she closes her eyes and is pulled into one of her ‘memories’ (touching and caressing her infant daughter). Opening her eyes, Louise and the heptapod slowly—and in a symmetrical curve—move their hands on the screen to craft a circular logogram together. In this powerful moment, then, Louise’s body seems to ‘adjust […] and overlap’ the heptapods’ intentionality, and their bodies come together in a moment of expressive meaning-making. In sum, Arrival visually, audibly, and kinetically performs the specific language of the heptapods. In her review of the film, Manohla Dargis describes the space for the language performance as ‘a type of stage, an immersive theatre that engages sight, sound, and a sense of touch’.19 But further, the moment in which Louise and the heptapods ‘adjust […] and overlap’ one another—mediated through a screen—is analogous for the general relationship between the spectator and the cinematic screen. Sobchack’s phenomenology of film experience maintains that films call on ‘the visible, audible, kinetic aspects of sensible experience to make sense visibly, audibly, and haptically’. 20 Therefore, just as the heptapods’ logograms ‘[take] advantage of the page’s two-dimensionality’,21 the story’s translation to the screen takes advantage of its materiality, employing the modes of embodied experience to invite the spectator to inhabit a multi-dimensional space. Besides marvelling at the special effects, the spectator might also reflect on the visible textures of the film, such as the contrast between the antiseptic brightness of the alien space and the intimate warmth of Louise’s memories. But even before such reflection, the cinema ‘brings the existential activity of vision into visibility’ in a way that signals ‘an anonymous, mobile, embodied, and ethically invested subject of worldly space’.22 The ‘film’s body’ gestures its shifting attention through camera movement (including 19 20 21 22

Manohla Dargis, ‘Aliens Drop Anchor’, p. C1. Vivian Sobchack, Address of the Eye, p. 9. Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life, p. 135. Vivian Sobchack, Address of the Eye, p. 62.

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physical movement and optical movement as in the zoom). At times the film’s body adjusts to the spectator’s intentional interest (such as the cut to the extreme close-up of the logogram) and at other times confounds it. So too might the film’s body adjust itself to the intentional behaviour of screen characters. Therefore, not only do screen adaptations present the visible performance of embodied and expressive actors, but they can also visually align with characters’ points of view to further invite spectators’ engagement. As she is the protagonist, the film is focalized around Louise’s experience and at times explicitly adopts her visual perspective. Indeed, the film not only offers material instances of Louise’s vision, but also offers moments of her ‘inner sight’ and imagination, as dream and memory texture her experience. But as this book has made clear, screen narratives not only ‘focalize’ around a character’s visual experience, despite the term’s association with vision. Acoustic experience, too, plays an important part, such as the sounds of Louise’s breathing when she is wearing her protective suit. Gripped with nerves about her first meeting with the alien creatures, Louise takes a rapid series of shallow breaths until she almost hyperventilates. The sound of her breath has been transformed by her radio equipment so that it sounds sharp and metallic. Occasionally the camera adopts her visual perspective as she peers through a mask that obscures her view; however, the camera holds her anxious face in close-up for most of the sequence. But the sounds of Louise’s ragged breathing continue to fill the soundscape from all speaker channels, giving the effect that the spectator has been positioned inside her suit. Therefore, although the camera might be able to escape the confines of her suit, the soundscape ensures that the spectator remains trapped inside along with Louise. Describing the sounds of Louise’s breaths as ‘sharp and metallic’ further testifies to Arrival’s appeal not only to the eye and ear but also the skin and guts. So too is the description of Louise’s subjective imagery as ‘warm and fuzzy’ certainly appropriate. Shot in rich yellow and orange tones gives the impression that they have been lit by a glowing fire, while the imagery is often indistinct, inviting the eye to graze across the image and to probe it for clarity. I have already mentioned how the low-frequency sounds of the heptapods’ speech is viscerally perceived in the stomach, but Arrival also uses other techniques to kinetically affect the spectator. Take, for instance, the moment when Louise arrives at the military base in a helicopter. On the helicopter’s approach, Louise looks outside the window to get her first glimpse of the spacecraft. The shot is undeniably impressive: the ovular vessel—a slim onyx egg—floats in a field surrounded by mountains as a

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thick plume of cloud or fog cascades down a mountainous ridge and lightly pools on the grass below. Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score punctuates this visually stunning shot with what sounds like an orchestra of out-of-tune bagpipes, lending an unsettling sense of dread. This is compounded by the way that the camera swoops around the camp before lowering down to the ground. Although the camera movement is fluid, its circular movement—combined with Jóhannsson’s dissonant score—is dizzying and reflects Louise’s overwhelmed frame of mind. In doing so, the spectator’s imagination is not only activated to ‘fill in’ epistemic gaps, or to ‘make sense’ of its circular narrative. But, further, the phenomenological textures of Arrival enact the spectator’s embodied imagination, a groping towards a carnal understanding of Louise. Film scholar Tarja Laine posits the film experience as an affective and corporeal entanglement, a ‘halfway meeting’ between the spectator and cinema in which as comprehension ‘does not come from observing f ilms at a distance, but rather from direct, bodily engagement with them’. 23 Just as Louise cannot understand the heptapods by merely observing them, comprehending Arrival is certainly impoverished if the critic does not consider the synaesthetic richness of its aesthetic structure and how it entangles the spectator. Arrival might narratively concern the arrival of alien life. However, attending to the f ilm’s affective-aesthetic structure returns the spectator to their senses and how it feels—and what it means—to be materially alive, and the importance of contact with others here on earth. The film’s (quite literal) ‘fleshing out’ of Chiang’s story and its theme of contact between bodies illuminates the embodied model of adaptation that I have crafted in this book. This model distinguished itself from current theoretical approaches that largely conceive and analyse adaptation in terms of their intertextuality. Stam, for instance, describes screen adaptation as hinging on an ‘intertextual dialogism’ that posits texts as an ‘intersection of textual surfaces’ or ‘tissues of anonymous formulae’.24 In my model of screen adaptation, I conceive the spectator’s body as another such ‘tissue’ in this formula; yet, far from anonymous, this ‘tissue’ is profoundly personal. Interrogating the phenomenological contours of screen adaptation—that is, not only what they look and sound like, but also their tactile and visceral appeals to the full sensorium and proprioceptive awareness of the body—furthers an understanding of what Linda Hutcheon terms as the ‘double definition’ 23 Tarja Laine, Bodies in Pain, p. 161. 24 Robert Stam, ‘Beyond Fidelity’, p. 64.

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of adaptation as both a process and a product.25 On the one hand, attending to an adaptation’s sensual dimensions not only helps the critic understand the adaptation as a process, that is, identifying what has been adapted and how. But further, and crucially, analysing screen adaptations through my embodied model provokes reflection on adaptations as products that are materially—and meaningfully—lived. This model of adaptation thus turns away from earlier approaches, such as those that foreground the translation of literature into the signifiers of ‘film language’, for instance. Rather, this book constructed a radical model of screen adaptation, one grounded in the lived significance of the ‘body language’ of both film and spectator. Here, I draw attention to the double meaning of terming this a ‘radical’ model. Firstly, the term is political in the sense that I have issued a charge for adaptation studies to change direction and return to an in-depth analysis of the aesthetic structure of adaptations and how they are sensually grasped by spectators; textural analyses rather than the purely textual, so to speak. But this return to the senses harkens to another meaning of ‘radical’. Derived from the Latin radicalis, or root, the Oxford English Dictionary defines radical as that which forms the ‘basis, or foundation; original, primary’. Thus, developing an embodied model of screen adaptation is not only illuminating but necessary as it returns the scholar to the carnal grounds of language and meaning. In this book’s introduction, I posed that phenomenology palpates ‘the sensuous contours of language, with meaning and its signification born not abstractly but concretely from the surface contact, the fleshly dialogue, of human beings and the world together making sense sensible’.26 Sobchack’s phenomenology of film experience provided me with the language—and methodology—to construct my model of embodied adaptation. So too has the recent work by other film phenomenologists such as Jennifer Barker and Laine given me the tools to further probe the ‘sensuous contours’ of the film experience and how their textures enrich an understanding of film adaptation. Through the five chapters of this book—focusing on sight, sound, and touch, along with the embodied structures of imagination and memory—I add my voice to the chorus of scholars who commit to an embodied engagement with screen narratives with the particular accent of adaptation studies. Earlier I mentioned that Laine argues that the most powerful moments of the cinema are enacted through an affective and corporeal entanglement of the screen and spectator. As she puts it, cinematic intelligibility is a 25 Linda Hutcheon, Theory of Adaptation, p. 9. 26 Vivian Sobchack, Address of the Eye, p. 3.

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‘bodily event, in which the “corporeal style” of the f ilm entangles with the lived-body of the spectator’.27 Considering the spectator’s engagement as an ‘entanglement’ is a productive means of feeling the way through the spectator’s engagement with a film. Firstly, ‘entanglement’ conjures a rather messy union between bodies: there is no guarantee that we will accept a film’s invitation, and we may respond with tangential (or contradictory) responses. Secondly, an ‘entanglement’ suggests that emotional and imaginative involvement is not only held in the cognitive realm. Part of Laine’s rationale for proposing film as an emotional event is to ‘[shift] the focus from character-affinity’—such as the important work of cognitivist film scholars such as Plantinga, Murray Smith, and Amy Coplan—to focus on ‘aesthetic elements that are less character-bound’.28 Laine’s model of entanglement or incorporation explores how bodies of all kinds—those of the film, the spectator, as well as characters—are interwoven through an emotional and visceral dynamic that is f irst grasped in an affective register. Laine contends that ‘a special methodology’ is required to confront the film experience as an affective, emotional, and imaginative entanglement between the spectator and the screen.29 Across the five chapters of this book I have provided a series of tools for an embodied analysis of screen adaptation that comprehends the ‘fleshly dialogue’ between source material, film, and spectator’s body. Rather than being wary of the limitations of the individual case study, the kind of anxiety that ripples through responses to the comparative approach, such a methodology importantly returns adaptation studies to examine to the aesthetic texture of specific adaptations. This lack of detailed textual analysis is something lamented by scholar Sarah Cardwell who argues that ‘[the] most unsatisfactory and disappointing aspect of the dominant […] tradition is that, somewhere along the line, adaptation theorists seem to have lost sight of the adaptations themselves’.30 Cardwell advocates for an ‘aesthetics of adaptation’ that attends not only to ‘narrative significance but also […] the visual pleasure they provide—their texture, sensuality, and form,31 a task to which I have hopefully contributed. Far from ‘losing sight of the adaptation themselves’—or focusing merely on their ‘visual pleasure’—this book has foregrounded the fullness of sensory 27 28 29 30 31

Tarja Laine, Bodies in Pain, p. 18. Tarja Laine, Feeling Cinema, p. 5. Tarja Laine, ‘Diving Bell’, p. 302. Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation, p. 68. Sarah Cardwell, ‘Adaptation’, p. 58.

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and visceral experience to resuscitate an embodied engagement with screen adaptation. Although I may have used specific case studies to develop my argument, it is my hope that the kinds of analyses performed in this book will be adaptable themselves, opening up new channels of investigation into adaptation as an intersubjective and intermedial phenomenon. In doing so, I also follow Cardwell’s claim that developing an aesthetics of adaptation not only breathes life into the adaptation discipline, but also augments an understanding and appreciation of cinematic art. Studying adaptations—and examining what has been adapted, how it has been adapted, and why—leads to a greater understanding of the capabilities of different forms of media, as well as the creativity of those artists working in different forms of media. In taking this approach, I am not necessarily agreeing with the medium-specif icity thesis. Screen adaptations offer the unique opportunity to test the limits—and possibilities—of aesthetic expression. Attending to an adaptation’s aesthetic dimensions allows the critic to examine how they have been vivif ied, dynamized, enriched, and transformed. Thus, although novels are grasped through the senses, are certainly emotionally moving, f ilms are privileged in their persistent sensual address and affectivity. Although the novel can describe its protagonist’s desire, the use of ‘tactile orientation’ in Jane Campion’s In the Cut (2003) makes us feel the warm heat of entangled bodies. So too while Boris Vian’s novel Mood Indigo can tell its reader about Colin’s grief, Gondry’s f ilm enacts it, not only through Romain Duris’s physical performance but through his imaginative screen aesthetic that captures—and provokes—the embodied imagination of both Colin and spectator. But this is just the beginning for grasping an embodied model of screen adaptation. In the next, and final, section of this book, I point towards some future directions this model might take the discipline. In doing so, I argue that an embodied model of screen adaptation not only advances an ‘aesthetics of adaptation’, as Cardwell desires, but also grounds the possibility of what could be described as an ‘ethics of adaptation’.

Departures: Towards an ‘Ethics of Adaptation’ The critic Jean Mitry was sceptical of film adaptation, as he thought that the change in medium would mean that the adaptation ‘would take on another meaning, open onto different perspectives, because the means of expression in being different would express different things—not the same

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things in different ways’.32 Yet to me, being offered a change in perspective is one of the riches of artistic practice and is central to its appreciation. As phenomenologist Drew Leder points out, ‘how we see the world is subtly shifted as we incorporate the artist’s gaze’.33 But sometimes these shifts are not subtle at all, for better or for worse. Through the process of adaptation, filmmakers have at their disposal both the opportunity and the means to enact shifts in perspective, of both the source material and the spectator. As films ‘make sense’ by using the same modes of embodied experience, such changes in perspective can open a space of profound ethical significance. ‘If cinema is concerned with gestures’, as Robert Sinnerbrink has recently written, ‘in all their performative ambiguity and disruption of meaning, as well as with images, actions, emotions, and experience, the aesthetics must join forces with ethics […] to understand the medium’s philosophical as well as cultural-historical significance’.34 Jane Stadler has usefully proposed that film phenomenology can be mobilized to grasp ethical experience. As she rightfully points out, ethical insight involves ‘felt experience, rather than something that can be grasped on a purely conceptual level’ alone, and she argues that ‘embodied actions and responses including sensory perception, emotive and imaginative experiences, and practices of attention’ bolster ethical deliberation and evaluation.35 Following Sobchack’s film-philosophy, Stadler notes that films not only show us the objective properties of the world, but also reveals how vision is a selective and evaluative process. Therefore, a phenomenological approach to cinematic ethics attends to how films—as an expression of perception—make visible perspectival and evaluative choice-making, revealing ‘the unseen judgments of seeing, and articulate the unnoticed selectivity of hearing’ and therefore makes ‘these perceptual activities visible and audible and subject to analysis’ (p. 61). Such moments appear in 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013), adapted from the Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir.36 In one harrowing sequence Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is strung up from a tree by John Tibeats (Paul Dano) to be executed. Although he is saved at the last minute, Solomon is still left hanging regardless. In an extreme long shot the camera watches Solomon as he hangs and sways from the bough of the tree, inches from 32 33 34 35 36

Jean Mitry, ‘Remarks’, p. 1. Drew Leder, Absent Body, p. 166. Robert Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics, p. 3. Jane Stadler, Pulling Focus, p. 61. Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave.

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death as the tips of his boots slip and slide in the thick mud. Not only filmed in long shot, but the shot is also filmed in an extremely lengthy take, and Solomon continues to sway from the tree as the minutes crawl by. There is no music here to guide the spectator’s emotional response to the screen: only the relentless grinding of cicadas and the occasional breath of wind (and the creaking of the rope) is heard. The camera’s gaze is fixed and forces spectators to confront their own visual behaviour by choosing where to look in the frame. We can either look on at Solomon’s tortured body, or we can choose to look away and take in other things, such as the moss that also hangs and sways from the tree or the other slaves in the background as the farm comes back to life. After is a series of shots that bring his struggling body closer to the camera. But these shots refuse the spectator a clear look at Solomon. Although one shot captures Solomon’s face in close-up, the camera instead focuses on three children playing on the grass behind him, reducing Solomon’s body to a shaking and indistinct shadow. In another, the camera f ilms from behind Solomon’s body. Using shallow focus again the camera directs its attention to the mistress of the house who stands and watches the spectacle from her luxurious balcony before turning and walking away. And, in a third, the camera pulls even further away. Filmed from the porch of a slave’s hut, the spectator’s eye is invited to actively search through space to find Solomon’s body that hangs in the far distance. But along the way they might pause to take in another slave that is closer to hand as she languidly peels vegetables, or indeed miss him altogether as he disappears against the background. This excruciating sequence of shots illustrates film’s capacity to express the evaluative nature of perception. Changing the depth of focus, for instance, expresses the attention and perspectival interest of the film’s body, thus revealing the ‘unseen judgments of seeing’.37 Phenomenological reflection demands that we attend to such choices to reveal their significance. Changing the focus, for instance, literally obscures Solomon’s suffering, and reduces him to an anonymous black body. Focusing on the little children playing behind him giving him no heed—or, more tellingly, on the white body who does look toward him but turns away—invites the spectator to reflect on the visibility of black suffering. Indeed, the shots that use deep focus also provoke ethical reflection. These sprawling shots allow the eye to scan around the frame. Spectators can choose to either bear witness to the trauma or turn away to more appealing images. 37 Jane Stadler, Pulling Focus, p. 61.

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When the intentional interest and behaviour of the ‘f ilm’s body’ differs from that of the spectator offers a clear illustration of when the film’s aesthetic structure opens a space for embodied ethical evaluation. Although we recognize and grasp the phenomenological structure through which the camera inhabits its world, ‘the phenomenon of embodiment also clearly separates and defines the viewer and the camera as different in their similarity, as singular lived-bodies’.38 Sobchack describes this as the ‘problem and pleasure of embodiment’ as we become aware of the similarities and, importantly, embodied differences between the film’s body and our own. The problem of embodiment, to use Sobchack’s term, is when we notice the gaps and discrepancies between the film’s interest and behaviour and our own. For instance, in Chapter Three I referenced Jean-Pierre Geuens who argues that Steadicam technology was a camera that more accurately rendered the physiological behaviour of vision as an agent moves through space. However, although the technology affords a greater sense of perceptual realism to better incorporate the spectator, the Steadicam can ‘[feel] synthetic, once-removed’ for its ‘uncanny ability […] to float through space as if it were truly unfettered from gravity and materiality’.39 Although Geuens means that the Steadicam is ‘unfettered from gravity and materiality’ in the sense of the lived physical conditions that inhibit movement through inhabited space, this term can also describe how the Steadicam’s gestural signification can seem dislocated from the moral and ethical gravity that gives material weight to the world. As Sobchack describes, if the camera ‘inhumanely (but not inhumanly) moves through carnage and does not shudder, or caresses violence, when it breaks a taboo and tries to get a better look at something we regard as visually forbidden, we may turn our eyes away from the “other”’. 40 12 Years a Slave offers a compelling example when Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o) is brutally flogged. The slaves’ sadistic owner Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender) instructs Solomon to perform the lashing. The sequence plays out in another brutal long take. But rather than being filmed with the stationary camera that featured in Solomon’s hanging, McQueen gets up close and personal in Patsey’s torture with a Steadicam. To be sure, the camera does not ‘caress’ the violence enacted to her body in the same manner as the zooming close-ups of the torture wrought to the body of Jesus (Jim Caviezel) in The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson, 2004). Only once does 38 Vivian Sobchack, ‘Toward Inhabited Space’, p. 328. 39 Jean-Pierre Geuens, ‘Visuality and Power’, p. 15. 40 Vivian Sobchack, ‘Toward Inhabited Space’, p. 329.

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the camera briefly turn its attention towards the destruction enacted on Patsey’s body as she is flayed by the whip. For most of this extended shot the Steadicam moves through space and around the performing bodies. In doing so, the visible movement of the camera sharply contrasts with the other visible bodies that are watching the flogging who hold themselves perfectly still during the torture, silently watching on like statues. Rather, the Steadicam glides between Solomon and Patsey as he reluctantly whips her, before creeping behind the post to which Patsey is tied to record her face in tortured anguish, her face so close to the camera that it is as if the spectator could almost reach out and touch her. But the camera does not pause for long, moving again as Epps grabs the whip and brutally lashes Patsey. On the one hand, and combined with the camera’s ‘unblinking eye’, to use reviewer Robbie Collin’s description, 41 the Steadicam’s movement lends a sense of complicity in the action as it weaves through space. But the way that it records Patsey’s tortured face (if not so much her tortured body) is profoundly visceral, its brutality ‘as sleek as a knitting needle, and slips between your ribs to get at you somewhere deep, beyond simple expressions of disgust or disbelief’ (n.p.). Indeed, the spectator’s ‘disbelief’ is impossible as the film demands the spectator to share in and feel this trauma. As Mark Kermode writes in his review, 12 Years a Slave uses ‘the medium of film for its highest purposes: to elevate, educate, and ultimately ennoble the viewer by presenting them with something that is visceral, truthful, and electrifyingly “real”’. 42 After Patsey’s flogging the film moves to a brief sequence set inside one of the slave’s huts that opens with a close-up of her wounds as she lies on a cot, her back an explosion of flesh. Hands cautiously enter the frame and tend to her lacerated skin with dabs of salve, while Patsey’s body shudders and jerks at their touch. The camera then cuts to a group of men—including Solomon—who are positioned around the room. The atmosphere in the room is one of resignation and defeat: one man trails his finger in the dirt on the floor; another holds his head in his hands, barely moving. Patsey slightly pushes herself off the cot to look at Solomon. Her face is slick with sweat, mucous, and tears; she tries to say something but there are no words for the horror she has endured and she collapses back onto the cot. The camera cuts to a close-up of Solomon’s face: horrified, non-comprehending, and inconsolable. 41 Robbie Collin, ‘This, at Last’, n.p. 42 Mark Kermode, ’12 Years a Slave’, n.p.

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The visceral response to Patsey’s flogging, and the emotional timbre of its aftermath, invites what Stadler has described as a ‘compassionate gaze’, which she describes as an ‘aesthetic mode that functions to bridge the distance between self and other, establishing a foundation for ethical understanding’. 43 Stadler’s conception of the ‘compassionate gaze’ is influenced by Martha Nussbaum’s moral philosophy that posits compassion as emerging through cognitive processes such as beliefs and evaluations to connect an agent with others. But by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary’s definition, compassion also entails the ‘participation in another’s suffering’. Stadler therefore augments Nussbaum’s description of compassion from one that emphasizes the cognitive processes of the imagination to also include the affective register to produce a carnal understanding of another that is produced through the embodied imagination. This is not to say that the experience of the spectator is type-identical to the tortured characters on the screen. No matter how drawn into the narrative world I am, or how much my heart (and, in some modulated form, skin) pains for Patsey, I am all too aware that I am a white Australian man, living in twenty-first century Australia, and that when the violence on the screen has ended I can return to the comfort of the air-conditioned theatre, a knowledge that produces its own form of ethical reflection. Indeed, the sequence illustrates the criticisms levelled at phenomenology as described by Christian Ferencz-Flatz and Julian Hanich that I raised in the introduction to this book: the problems of generality and incompleteness. 44 What are the limits of the spectator’s embodied entanglement with the screen? And how are these limits enacted through differences in embodiment, such as race, gender, sexuality, age, and ability? These questions come to light through an encounter with 12 Years a Slave, a film that hinges on the (in)visibility of the black body and actively solicits spectators’ embodied understanding of historically real raciallydirected trauma. Phenomenologist of race Linda Martín Alcoff describes that ‘race works through the domain of the visible, the experience of race is predicated first and foremost on the perception of race […] race is a structure of contemporary perception’. 45 She proposes a ‘subjectivist account’ of racial identity ‘to explore how race operates preconsciously on spoken and unspoken interaction, gesture, affect, and stance’ (p. 184). However, as Alcoff warns, such an approach might dangerous veer towards collapsing 43 Jane Stadler, ‘Cinema’s Compassionate Gaze’, p. 27. 44 Christian Ferencz-Flatz and Julian Hanich, ‘What is Film Phenomenology?’, p. 49. 45 Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities, pp. 187-188.

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the specificity of lived experience, raising the ‘fear that phenomenological descriptions of felt experience will naturalize or fetishize racial experiences […] as if the experience itself is fully self-presenting and explanatory’ (p. 184). Alessandro Raengo has productively put perspectives of critical race studies and embodiment in dialogue with adaptation studies, arguing that the fluctuations between visibility and tangibility, presentation and representation of the black body ‘[compels] us to think about the moment, circumstances, and repercussions of embodiment not as an afterthought within a more serious and rigorous engagement with different textualities, but, especially for some subjects, as an element that overdetermines the adaptation process from the beginning’. 46 Therefore, she explains that ‘[more] flexible tools are needed to address […] the different auspices under which different subjects might inhabit the field of vision, as well as the way some bodies more than others might be affected by the very process of adaptation’ (p. 108). As I have argued throughout this book, phenomenology offers such a theoretical framework to examine the complexities of lived experience that emerge in the process of adaptation, one that grounds aesthetic appreciation and ethical evaluation. Phenomenology, as Sobchack makes clear, leads to an ‘appreciation of how our lived bodies provide the material premises that enable us, from the first, to sense and respond to the world and others—not only grounding the logical premises of aesthetics and ethics in “carnal thoughts” but also charging our conscious awareness with the energies and obligations that animate our “sensibility” and “responsibility”’. 47 This is evident in an analysis of 12 Years a Slave as it refuses to let spectators merely ponder or evaluate the terrible experience of slaves in antebellum America from a safe intellectual distance. So too does the film provoke a sense of compassion that far exceeds pity, an emotion that frequently operates with clear self-other differentiation. The film’s body visibly articulates the evaluative nature of perception, prompting spectators to confront their own visual behaviour and the way that they witness or turn a blind eye to acts of human suffering. But further, the film’s aesthetic structure resonates within the spectator’s body, collapsing the distinction between subject and object, self and other. Perhaps most clear is the foregrounding of violence wrought to the body. Laine writes that screen violence invites a ‘fleshy intimacy’ between character, spectator, and screen, so much so that these scenes are not only ‘painful to watch’ but is ‘experienced […] as 46 Alessandra Raengo, ‘Out of the Literary Comfort Zone’, p. 116. 47 Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, p. 3.

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a physical sensation on [the skin]’. 48 In doing so, the spectator’s pain is of ethical significance as sharing in the other’s pain redirects to the materiality and finitude of the lived body. Indeed, the goal of McQueen’s adaptation was largely to confront spectators with the disposability and commodification of the slave’s body throughout history. In an interview with Catherine Shoard, McQueen explains that when he discovered Northup’s memoir he compared its significance with Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, but that ‘I was upset with myself that I didn’t know this book and then I realized no one […] knew about it’. 49 For McQueen, translating the memoir to film offered the opportunity to—and I do not use this term lightly—passionately educate his audience about the lived experience of black bodies by immersing them in a sensory and emotionally charged experience. ‘When you see the ins and outs of it, it does something different’, claims McQueen, ‘[and] if that starts a conversation: wonderful, excellent’ (n.p.). This has ethical implications, for ‘[if] racism is manifest at the level of perception itself and in the very domain of visibility […] A reduction of racism will affect perception itself, as well as comportment, body image, and so on. Toward this, our first task […] is to make visible the practices of visibility itself’.50 As I suggested in Chapter Five of this book, adaptation is a form of memory work. The selection of texts that are ‘remembered’—as well as how they are remembered—is of keen importance as adaptations shape those stories that become woven into the fabric of our lives. Adaptations open us to not only new ways of experiencing texts, but, in doing so, perhaps also new ways of experiencing others. These textual memories become incorporated into our own, and we use them to (re-)orientates us towards the future. It is my contention that adaptation studies should further probe how screen adaptations express the experience of other bodies. Specifically, adaptation studies should focus on those bodies that are frequently made invisible by contemporary culture, such as ethnic, queer, and disabled experience.51 In pulling the experience of marginalized bodies quite literally ‘from the margins’, screen adaptations are empowered to—and to evoke the neurological basis of the embodied imagination that I raised in Chapter 48 Tarja Laine, Bodies in Pain, p. 119. 49 Quoted in Catherine Shoard, ‘Steve McQueen’, n.p. 50 Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities, p. 194. 51 For perspectives that engage with the relationships between marginalized identity and adaptation see: Alessandra Raengo, ‘Out of the Literary Comfort Zone’, pp. 106-119; Imola Mikó, ‘From Corpographies to Corporealities’, pp. 189-211; Pamela Demory, ‘Queer Adaptation’, pp. 146-156.

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Four—quite literally create a ‘multidimensional, “we-centric” shared space’ that, hopefully, invites ethical understanding.52 Cardwell writes that ‘the existence of adaptations is vital. They cross the boundaries; challenge or reassert our notions of medium specificity and art, interpretation, and evaluation; and refresh our intellectual appetites—and we are intrigued all over again’.53 But throughout this book I have argued that by their translation to the screen, adaptations also satisfy our sensory and carnal appetites. Screen adaptations appeal to the eyes and ears; so too can they get under the skin. Screen adaptations can be inspiring, drawing spectators into a narrative world that sensually, intellectually, and imaginatively fulfils them. Such a bi-directional incorporation testifies to how screen adaptations not only ‘bring to life’ the stories and characters that are held on the pages within. But, more profoundly, they bring us to life. This is not only of aesthetic value, but also of ethical significance. Film phenomenology offers fresh insight into how adaptations not only materialize their sources on the screen, but also how they are materialized in the flesh. The phenomenological approach to adaptation that I have proposed in Film Phenomenology and Adaptation: Sensuous Elaboration therefore not only examines the dynamics of adaptation from a system of transfer between page and screen, for instance. Rather, in attending to the body’s sensual experience as grounds of sensibility, an embodied approach to adaptation renews an awareness of the material conditions of being alive and gestures towards our responsibility to others.

Works Cited Alcoff, Linda Martín. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. Blackwell, Anna. ‘Tweeting from the Grave: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Social Media’ in The Routledge Companion to Adaptation, ed. by Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs, and Eckart Voigts (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 287-300. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York: Routledge, 1993. Cardwell, Sarah. Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002.

52 Vittorio Gallese, ‘Roots of Empathy’, p. 172. 53 Sarah Cardwell, ‘Adaptation’, p. 61.

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——. ‘Adaptation Studies Revisited: Purposes, Perspectives, and Inspiration’, in The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation, ed. by James M. Welsh and Peter Lev (Lanham: Scarecrow, 2007), pp. 51-63. Chiang, Ted. Stories of Your Life and Others. New York: Vintage, 2016. Collin, Robbie. ‘This, at Last, Really is History Written with Lightning’, Telegraph, 4 June 2016. < https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2016/06/03/12-years-a-slavereview-this-at-last-really-is-history-written > (accessed 30 January 2018). Constandinides, Costas. From Film Adaptation to Post-Celluloid Adaptation: Rethinking the Transition of Popular Narratives and Characters across Old and New Media. London: Bloomsbury, 2010. Dargis, Manohla. ‘Aliens Drop Anchor in Arrival, but What are Their Intentions?’, New York Times, 11 November 2016, p. C1. Demory, Pamela. ‘Queer Adaptation’, in The Routledge Companion to Adaptation, ed. by Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs, and Eckart Voigts (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 146-157. Elliott, Kamilla. Theorizing Adaptation. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Ferencz-Flatz, Christian, and Julian Hanich. ‘What is Film Phenomenology?’ Studia Phænomenologica, 16 (2016), 11-61. Flanagan, Kevin M. ‘Videogame Adaptation’ in The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. by Thomas Leitch (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017), pp. 441-456. Gallese, Vittorio. ‘The Roots of Empathy: The Shared Manifold Hypothesis and the Neural Basis for Intersubjectivity’, Psychopathology, 36.171 (2003), pp. 171-180. Geuens, Jean-Pierre. ‘Visuality and Power: The Work of the Steadicam’, Film Quarterly, 47.2 (1993), 8-17. Grobar, Matt. ‘Arrival Sound Editor Sylvain Bellemare on First Sci-Fi Experience and Working with Denis Villeneuve to Craft an Alien Sound’, Deadline, 18 November 2016. < https://deadline.com/2016/11/arrival-amy-adams-denisvilleneuve-sylvain-bellemare-sound-editor-awards-interview-1201847450/> (accessed 3 December 2016). Hussein, Basel Al-Sheikh. ‘The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Today’, Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2.3 (2012), 642-646. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. London: Routledge, 2006. Kermode, Mark. ‘12 Years a Slave: Review’, Guardian, 12 January 2014. < https:// www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jan/12/12-years-a-slave-review> (accessed 22 January 2018). Laine, Tarja. Bodies in Pain: Emotion and the Cinema of Darren Aronofsky. New York: Berghahn, 2015. ——. ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as an Emotional Event’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 34 (2010), 295-305.

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Filmography 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013) American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2002) Anna Karenina (Clarence Brown, 1935) Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016) Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992) Beauty and the Beast [La Belle et la bête] (Jean Cocteau, 1946) Before Night Falls (Julian Schnabel, 2000) The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963) Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) Body Double (Brian De Palma, 1984) Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992) The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari [Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari] (Robert Wiene, 1920) Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015) City of God [Cidade de Deus] (Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002) The Danish Girl (Tom Hooper, 2015) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004) The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) Far from Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002) Fast & Furious (Justin Lin, 2009) The Fear of God (Mark Kermode, 1998) Frankenstein (J. Searle Dawley, 1910) Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 and Part 2 (David Yates, 2010-11) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (David Yates, 2009) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (David Yates, 2007) Hotel Transylvania (Genndy Tartakovsy, 2012) The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002) The Hunger Games (Gary Ross, 2012) The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 and Part 2 (Francis Lawrence, 2014-15) I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007) In the Cut (Jane Campion, 2002) Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1982) Magic Mike XXL (Gregory Jacobs, 2015) March of the Penguins [La Marche de l’empereur] (Luc Jacquet, 2005) Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Kenneth Branagh, 1994) Mildred Pierce (Todd Haynes, 2011) Mood Indigo [L’Écume des jours] (Michel Gondry, 2013)

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Film Phenomenology and Adaptation

My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991) Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror [Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens] (F.W. Murnau, 1922) Pan (Joe Wright, 2015) The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson, 2004) Poison (Todd Haynes, 1991) Pride and Prejudice (Joe Wright, 2005) A Room with a View (James Ivory, 1985) The Science of Sleep [La Science des rêves] (Michel Gondry, 2006) The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1992) Sleepless in Seattle (Nora Ephron, 1993) Superstar! The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes, 1988) The Tingler (William Castle, 1959) Tongues Untied (Marlon Riggs, 1989) Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996) The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 and Part 2 (Bill Condon, 2011-12) Un chant d’amour (Jean Genet, 1950) Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013) Vanity Fair (Mira Nair, 2004) Warning Shadows [Schatten: Eine nächtliche Halluzination] (Arthur Robison 1923) Waxworks [Das Wachsfigurenkabinett] (Paul Leni, 1924) Wonder (Stephen Chbosky, 2017) You’ve Got Mail (Nora Ephron, 1998)

Index acentral imagination 138 acousmêtre 80-81 adaptation ethics 165, 176, 183, 214-221 adaptation theory as discipline 203-204 early cinema 48-51, 78 fidelity criticism 18-19, 22-24, 74, 78 iconophobia 17-18 intertextuality 20-22, 211 memory 164-165 music 86-87 palimpsest 21, 61, 101-102, 170 Structuralism 19-21, 45 translation 37-38 value hierarchy 11-12 vision 45-46 affect 37, 84, 88, 102, 124-125 affective imagination 141 Alcoff, Linda Martín 219 allusion 63, 186 American Psycho (novel by Bret Easton Ellis) 22 amodal perception 131 anamnēsis 173 Andrew, Dudley 21-22, 163 Aristotle 165-166 Arnheim, Rudolf 78, 91 Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016) 205-211 atmosphere (see also: mood) 163 auteur 114-116 authorship 114-116, 150, 162-163 autobiography 176-177 Bahrick, Lorraine 131 Balázs, Béla 49, 74, 92, 104, 150 Barker, Jennifer M. 59, 103, 108-109, 111, 122-123, 142, 190, 212 Before Night Falls (Julian Schnabel, 2000) 109 Benjamin, Walter 104, 173 biopic 109, 175, 184 The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963) 162-163 Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) 13-16, 93 Bluestone, George 17, 133 ‘body genres’ 105 body language (see also performance) 118-119 body memory 167-168 Bowser, Eileen 52 Boyum, Joy Gould 164 Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992) 60-68 Branigan, Edward 119-120 Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005) 165 Buchanan, Judith 48 Buñuel, Luis 50, 52 Butler, Judith 183, 206

Campion, Jane 102, 114-115 Cardwell, Sarah 23, 38, 134, 213-214, 222 Carroll, Noël 85 Carroll, Rachel 178 Cartmell, Deborah 48, 74, 78 Casey, Edward 167-170, 174, 185 central imagination 138, 151 Chatman, Seymour 19-20 chiasm 105-106 Chion, Michel 75-76, 80, 93 Choi, Jinhee 140, 144 Christie, Ian 52 ‘cinema of attractions’ 48-50, 58-59 cinematography 111-112, 181 ‘cinesthetic subject’ 106-107 City of God (Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002) 112-113 Cobb, Shelley 18 cognitive film theory 85-86, 213 costume 64, 181 Crary, Jonathan 47 Currie, Gregory 143 The Danish Girl (novel by David Ebershoff, 2000) 175, 178-180 The Danish Girl (Tom Hooper, 2015) 175, 180-184 defamiliarization (formal) 192 del Río, Elena 124-125 depression 87-90 Diamond, Suzanne 164 disgust 190 Doane, Mary Ann 80 documentary 196 Dolby Digital Sound 75-77 Dole, Jack Ivan 114 Dracula (novel by Bram Stoker) 44, 47-48, 62 du Maurier, Daphne 162-163 Dyer, Richard 60, 64-65 dys-appearance (body) 168 dysphoria (body) 178 Eder, Jens 149 Einfühlyng (see also: empathy) 142 Eisenstein, Sergei 104 Elliott, Kamilla 25, 27, 203-204 Elsaesser, Thomas 63, 67 embodied spectatorship (see also ‘tactile cinema’) 109-111, 123-125 embodiment 208, 217, 219-220 emotion 86, 148 activity 25 character 132 criticism 18 sound 82

246  empathy 136, 139-140, 142-143 Encoding-Storage-Retrieval (model of memory) 166 entanglement 213 Erll, Astrid 171-172, 185 eroticism 116, 122-125 Escape from Gringotts (dark ride) 26 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004) 173 ‘existential feelings’ 132, 148, 151-154 The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) 81-84 fidelity 18-19, 22-24, 74, 78, 175-176 ‘film’s body’ 29-30, 131, 217 flashbacks (editing technique) 173 ‘flesh’ (philosophy) 105-106 focalization 45, 119-120, 209 Frankenstein (J. Searle Dawley, 1910) 50-51 Frankenstein (novel by Mary Shelley) 51-52 Freeman, Mark 185, 198 Fuchs, Thomas 144, 152-154 Gallese, Vittorio 143 Genet, Jean 191-195 Genette, Gérard 119 Genre 187 ‘genre memory’ 164, 171 Geraghty, Christine 21, 62, 101 German Expressionism 54-55 gestural arts 131 gesture 110-111, 208 Geuens, Jean-Pierre 111-112, 217 Glass, Phillip 87-90 Gorbman, Claudia 85 Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer 130, 140 Grainge, Paul 164, 186 Grant, Barry Keith 12 Grant, Catherine 33 grief 152-154 Grosz, Elizabeth 106 Gunning, Tom 48-50 ‘haptic visuality’ 108-109, 122 handheld cinematography 111-112 Hanich, Julian 31-32, 134-135, 141, 147, 154 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (David Yates, 2011) 26 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (David Yates, 2009) 75 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (David Yates, 2006) 76-77 ‘healthy circle’ (see also: mimesis) 171-175 Hitchcock, Alfred 162 Hodgkins, John 37 The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002) 87-90 Hutcheon, Linda 21, 25-26, 101, 134, 161, 211 Iacoboni, Marco 143 iconophobia 17, 20, 147 Ihde, Don 75

Film Phenomenology and Adaptation

illness (see also: ‘existential feelings’) 152-154, 168 imagination 129-155 activity 25 adaptation 131-134 affective 141 auditory 93 cinema 141-142, 147 cognitive perspectives 138, 140-141 collective (objective) 174-175 embodied imagination 23, 35, 130-132, 135, 139-141, 143, 153, 155, 177, 181, 211, 222-223 sonic 75, 93, 142 synaesthetic 130-131, 142, 150, 155 vs memory 165 vs perception 133-136, 164 imagining (primary and secondary) 138 intercorporeality 143 In the Cut (Jane Campion, 2002) 116-126 Jay, Martin 47 Jost, François 45 Kaes, Anton 54 Kerins, Mark 75-76 kinesthesia 26 Kracauer, Siegfried 54-55, 73, 104 Laine, Tarja 141, 212-213, 220-221 Landsberg, Alison 174, 184 language 117-118, 121, 169-170, 205-206, 208 fallibility of 164 LeBlanc, Michael 89-90 Leder, Drew 168, 215 Leitch, Thomas 45, 61, 131 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 17, 133, 155 Levi, Mica 93-95 Livingston, Paisley 23-24, 162 logophilia 17, 20, 147 Lopes, Dominic McIver 141 Man into Woman: The First Sex Change—A Portrait of Lili Elbe (memoir edited by Niels Hoyer) 175-180, 184 Marks, Laura U. 46, 108, 122-123 McFarlane, Brian 20, 24, 134 McHugh, Kathleen 102, 114 Meikle, Kyle 16-17, 102 Méliès, Georges 49 memory 36, 151-199 antagonistic 164, 185, 192-193 associational 173 collective 163, 169 episodic 167 embodied 167, 174 fallibility 166 habituated 167 language 170 literature 171-175 philosophical approaches 165-170 place 168-169 prosthetic 174

247

Index

media 162-163 narrative 169-170 ‘mental time travel’ 167, 170 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 28, 105-106, 110-111, 130, 204, 208 metaphor 32, 140, 145, 153, 173, 177 Metz, Christian 19, 27, 134 Michaelian, Kourken 167 mimesis (see also: narrative) 171-175 mirror neurons 143, 155 mise en scène 45-46, 64-65, 108, 182 Mitry, Jean 214 mnēmē 173 ‘mnemopoesis’ 198 modernity (technology) 61-62, 173 mood 86, 148-150, 163 Mood Indigo (Michel Gondry, 2013) 132, 145-155 morality 135-136 Mulvey, Laura 60, 122, 180 Murray, Simone 16 music 14-15 Nanay, Bence 131 narrative 164, 169, 171-176 Ndalianis, Angela 67 neo-baroque 67-68 neurocinematics 144 New Hollywood 63-64 New Queer Cinema 187-188, 191 Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (F. W. Murnau, 1922) 53-60 Palacio, R. J. 135 palimpsest 21, 61, 101-102, 170-171 Pan (Joe Wright, 2015) 165 Panofsky, Erwin 78-79 Perez, Gilberto 54, 56 performance (acting) 23, 28, 34, 118-119, 183 performance (gender) 179, 182 performance (language) 206-207 Perkins, Victor 134 phenomenology 27-33, 38, 105-106, 110, 207-208, 220 criticism of 31, 219 film-phenomenology 28-33, 59-60, 105, 107, 209 language 208 race 219-220 sound 75, 80 transcendental 28 place memory 168-169 Plantinga, Carl 86, 139, 149 Plato 165 Poison (Todd Haynes, 1991) 186-199 The Portrait of a Lady (Jane Campion, 1996) 115 Prosser, Jay 176 ‘prosthetic memory’ 174 psychoanalysis 26-27, 105, 134

Radstone, Susannah 163, 186 Raengo, Alessandra 220 Ratcliffe, Matthew 132, 148-149, 152 reading 134 rear-projection 151 Redmond, Sean 96 Rich, B Ruby 187 Ricoeur, Paul 163, 167, 171, 175-176, 185 Robins, Sarah 166 Ruud, Amanda 37 ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ 205-206 scopophilia 122-123, 180 score (music) 84-90, 92-97, 180, 191 The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme 1992) 141-142 Sinnerbrink, Robert 149, 215 Smith, Jeff 85 Smith, Murray 138 Sobchack, Vivian 28-31, 59, 75, 93, 105, 106-107, 111, 131, 151, 153, 208-209, 212, 217, 220 Sontag, Susan 11 sound effects 69, 75-76, 82-83, 207 soundtrack 82, 85, 88-90 cognitive theory 85-86 psychoanalysis 85 Soviet filmmakers 84, 91, 104 Stadler, Jane 142, 215, 219 Stam, Robert 17-18, 21-23, 147, 204, 211 Steadicam 112, 217-218 Stephens, Elizabeth 192 Stern, Lesley 15 stop-motion animation 146 Surrealism 50 Svenaeus, Fredrik 152-153 sympathy 138 synaesthesia 24, 38, 106, 130-131, 150, 173, 193 tactile cinema 22, 59, 84, 103-105, 107-113, 119-120 ‘tactile orientation’ 103, 120-122, 125, 150, 209-210 Telotte, J. P. 54 texture 102 trace (see also: memory) 163, 166 Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996) 107-108 transgender identity 176-184 trauma 167-168 trick effects (early cinema) 52-53, 58-59, 62 trick effects (recent cinema) 146, 151-152 Trigg, Dylan 169 Tulving, Endel 167 Turvey, Malcolm 141 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013) 215-221 Un chant d’amour (Jean Genet, 1950) 192-193 Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013) 91-97 Unheimlich 152-153 Vanity Fair (Mira Nair, 2004) 46-47 Vian, Boris 132

248  vision in modernity 47-48 evaluative 215-216 voice 78-84 acousmêtre 81 performance 79-80, 191 ‘phonogenic’ 80 Voss, Christiane 124-125 voyeurism 123, 193

Film Phenomenology and Adaptation

Wahlberg, Malin 196 Walton, Kendall 138, 155 Williams, Linda 47-48, 105 Wonder (Stephen Chobsky, 2017) 135-140, 155 Woolf, Virginia 133 Young Adult Blockbuster (adaptation cycle) 162 Yumibe, Joshua 56