Modernist Fiction on Screen:

Can modernist novels be successfully adapted for the screen?

Elisa Scubla
Student Number: 10033973 Module: CP6010

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of the Arts in Film &Broadcast Production Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture & Design London Metropolitan University

May 2013

Contents: 1. Introduction.. 3 2. Adaptation and its meanings... 4 3. Cultural theories concerning Modernism and adaptations.. 9 4. Modernism and Avant-Garde..... 12 5. Case Study: Orlando novel & film..... 20 6. Conclusions... 26 Bibliography.. 27

1. Introduction Film and literature are two completely different media but since the birth of cinema they have become increasingly entwined. The advent of cinema marked a specific time in history which was already characterised by radical changes in society, culture, science and philosophy. Modernity brought along a new concept of reality which was fragmented, subjective and ever-changing. Literature at the turn of the 20th century had to adapt; the realist tradition was incapable of capturing the modern man experiences and therefore writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust developed new writing techniques that would represent the modern reality. Reproduction is a key word of the 20th century panorama. Scholars of the Frankfurt School like Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno theorized about the emergence of mass culture, a movement often described as a regression of the human intellect. Cinema became the case study of many such scholars and writers, criticized in its most commercial form but also praised for the ability to transcribe emotions that could not otherwise be expressed by the written word. In my study I will first analyse three main topics which will take into consideration the concepts of adaptation, Modernism and Avant-Garde and culture theory concerning new media and adaptations. All these notions will then be applied to the case study of Orlando by Virginia Woolf in comparison with Orlando by Sally Potter, in order to discover whether novels of the Modernist tradition can be successfully adapted for the screen. The very concept of success is subjective but this dissertation will aim to draw out some general conclusions based on the theories and concepts mentioned above. I will first analyse Orlando novel and film based on adaptation theories and then consider in more detail the relationship between Modernist literature and in this case Avant-garde cinema; this will tie up with the studies upon culture theory which specifically looked at the relationship between the high-culture represented by literature and the low-culture represented by cinema.

2. Adaptation and its meanings In 1964 semiotician and narratologist Claude Bremond wrote: [Story] is independent of the techniques that bears it along. It may be transposed from one to another medium without losing its essential properties: the subject of a story may serve as argument for a ballet, that of a novel can be transposed to stage or screen, one can recount in words a film to someone who has not seen it. These are words we read, images we see, gestures we decipher, but through them, it is a story that we follow; and it could be the same story. (Cited in Ryan, 2004. Logique du rcit. Paris: Seuil, 1973). The act of narration enables humans to tell stories and the means by which this is made possible are numerous. In the late 19th century the invention of cinema gave way to a new generation of storytellers: the filmmakers. Cinema, in its essence, is visual storytelling but nonetheless relies on a text, the screenplay, which can be originally written by the screenwriter or adapted from other literary works. Film adaptations of famous books have always been popular, with some writers being more exploited than others. Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen - just to name a few - have been adapted countless times for big blockbusters, TV series and, to a lesser extent, art-house films. The reason for this success, according to Hutcheon, is the idea of pleasure derived from the recognition and remembrance of a ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise (2006: 4). What many scholars have wondered though is whether these film adaptations are really true to the original texts and, prior to this, what exactly is the definition of fidelity when concerning adaptations. The problem regarding the analysis of film adaptations is partly caused by the lack of satisfactory studies in this area. Critical models tend to come from literary studies which are biased, putting literature on a higher level than cinema (Mayer, 2002) the discourse about high culture and mass/low culture will be analysed later on. Because on the two different media cinema and written word and the length of the original work opposed to the standard two hours film, distortions are inevitable. The whole process of the adaptation de-centres the original author making the attribution of the authorial responsibility problematic. Who is the author? (Reynolds, 1993). According to Robert Stam (2005), fidelity to the original text is virtually impossible because of

the change of medium: novels are single-track verbal media, films are multi-track media which play not only with words but also with music, sound effects and moving images. Similarly, Hutcheon notes that adaptations are often compared to translations but just as there is no such thing as a literal translation there cannot be a literal adaptation (2006). The critique of film adaptation has undergone a substantial shift through time, going from critical models in which fidelity to the original source was considered of paramount importance to models in which the same fidelity was regarded as the arch-villain of adaptation. More recently, the study of literary adaptations has become somewhat more acceptable within English and/or Media Studies but it is still surrounded by preconceptions. Some critics noted how not only films drew inspiration from novels, but also novels became more cinematic and new texts were produced in relation to cinema such as printed screenplays and films to novels publications (Cartmell and Whelehan, 1999). In one of the earliest analysis of film adaptations, Wagner (1975) listed three types of adaptation: transposition a novel directly given on screen (Wagner, 1975: 222), commentary when an original is taken and either purposely or inadvertently altered in some respect (Wagner, 1975: 223); and analogy when a film shifts the action forward or backward in time or otherwise changes the essential context (Cartmell and Whelehan, 1999). Given the role of the filmmaker in relation to the literary source there can be different types of adaptations. The most popular is what is known as the psychic concept of adaptation; it relies on a Hegelian concept by which art is understood to be a transcendent object, like a spirit, that can be expressed via an external vehicle. In this sense the spirit of a text exists regardless of the form and can therefore be transposed to other media. However, the spirit is often regarded as the spirit of the author and this gave way to a flourishing of films in which filmmakers identified with the literary authors. Some examples are Francis Ford Coppolas Bram Stokers Dracula, Kenneth Branaghs Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, Peter Kosminskys Emily Bronts Wuthering Heights and Baz Luhrmanns William Shakespeares Romeo + Juliet (Ryan, 2004).

The ventriloquist concept of adaptation is described as a ventriloquist who takes the inanimate of a novel and infuses it with new content; this is often criticized, as what the film adds is new or omits aspects of the original novel. On the contrary, according to the genetic concept of adaptation texts are like genetic codes and can be transferred to film without losing the original data. The problem for the filmmakers is that they have to find signs which are equivalent to the writing techniques used by the author (Ryan, 2004). Interestingly, Robert Stam gave another concept of adaptation which considered film adaptations and their literary sources as entirely separated from each another in the sense that adaptations are equated to transformation. Drawing ideas from the film Adaptation (2002) by Spike Jonze which is specifically about the passage from text to screenplay, the author takes the films referencing of The Origin of the Species to pose questions as to whether adaptations are but a form of evolution: Do not adaptations adapt to changing environments and changing tastes, as well as to a new medium, with its distinct industrial demands, commercial pressures, censorship taboos, and aesthetic norms? (Stam and Raengo, 2005: 3). Adaptation in its general meaning has always been present in the arts. Artists in all fields looked back at earlier traditions to gather inspiration for their works, often rewriting stories that had already been told. With film adaptations though there is a substantial difference as the means by which narratives are expressed use completely different techniques. In this sense it is difficult to judge whether any of the above types of adaptations can be truly considered as faithful to the original literary source but it is interesting to note that at the turn of 20th century literature itself was undergoing significant changes and the links to the newborn cinema were perhaps deeper than what was first thought. Modern writers witnessed the birth of cinema; it represented a new invention which could enable them to experiment in ways that the written word would not allow them. Some writers like Tolstoy, Joyce and Woolf had neutral or mixed opinions whereas

other authors like Orwell and Lawrence were entirely against cinema - which they regarded as an empty tool subduing the masses to popular culture (Sinyard, 1986). Allegedly, Joyce met with Eisenstein in 1929 and, although he was irremediably blind at that point, it seems Eisenstein was one of the few directors he might have entrusted to adapt Ulysses for the screen. Joyce did go to the cinema but there are no specific records of films he saw or which particularly impressed him. Unlike other writers, he never mentioned cinema in his works (Trotter, 2007). Early criticism of films debated over the autonomy of cinema, whether it was one of the Arts like literature, painting, theatre, music etc. or if it was something separate. Eisenstein claimed that cinema was not a virgin-birth of this art but rooted back to Edison as well as literary history and culture in general (Bradshaw and Dettmar, 2006). In an interview he said: Let Dickens and the whole ancestral array, going back as far as the Greeks and Shakespeare, bereminders that both Griffith and out cinema prove our origins to be not solely as of Edison and his fellow inventors, but as based on an enormous cultural past[on] literature whichis, in the first and most important place, the art of viewing not only the eye, but viewing both meanings embraced in this term (quoted in Klein and Parker, 1981: 1). Indeed film has often been described as a quintessentially modernist form. Some modernist and avant-garde artists and writers regarded it as a break with the habituated perception. Still photography represented a first breakthrough in bringing art, nature and technology together; film put it motion. Some avant-garde movements such as Futurism, Cubism, Dada and Constructivism particularly aspired at bringing speed and movement into their works. In the 1920s many artists experimented with film, including Duchamp and Ray. For Soviet filmmakers like Eisenstein and Pudovkin, montage was inseparable from film. Surrealist cinema emerged in the same period and worked with narrative to challenge perception and concepts of reality. Dada instead rejected linear narrative completely. The 1920s were the years of the city films which used editing as a way to representing the rhythms of the city and this is an affinity with the idea of the city in the modernist works (Bradshaw and Dettmar, 2006). Stam suggests that the

digitalisation of cinema has changed the perception of adaptations and perhaps given new means to filmmakers who want to adapt particular novels such as those of the Modernist tradition. The new technologies of 3D, virtual realities, multitrack sound etc. would seem the perfect tools to give the sense on multiple voices and realities of works such as those by Joyce and Proust (2005). It might be pretentious to say that literary techniques influenced cinematic techniques but it is possible to draw parallelisms between the two art forms. Flaubert anticipated cinematic crosscutting in the scene of the agricultural fair in Madame Bovary, Conrad used subliminal flashbacks in Heart of Darkness when the main character Marlowe prepares before meeting with Kurtz; even more notably, Joyces opening chapter in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is one of the finest examples of montage in fiction with its free movement between time and space (Sinyard, 1986). Some famous writers also went on to have a career in Hollywood as screenwriters, including: William Faulkner, Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood. On the opposite, the literary achievements of screenwriters have never been considered with the same relevance as those of novelists and poets (Sinyard, 1986). Unlike Joyce, Virginia Woolf wrote extensively about both modern fiction and cinema. In her essay The Cinema she criticized the movies calling those watching them savages; she described the act of going to the cinema as the brain settles down to watch things happening without bestirring itself to think (1966: 268). Concerning adaptations she argues that cinema, like a predator, fell on its prey, literature, with extreme easiness but the results are disastrous to both; the alliance is unnatural. (269). She then implies that some types of films are over simplistic as they sum up in a visual image the immense work of the writer in a novel. When considering The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari though she wonders whether cinema has the power to show feelings and emotions that could not otherwise be described by the written word. She suggests that cinema should avoid what is accessible to the words; according to her cinema possesses the power to render feeling and emotions through abstract images and music in a possibly better way than literature. She concludes by saying that cinema as an art is yet to be fully formed despite possessing a technical proficiency which is exclusive among all other arts (Woolf, 1966).

3. Cultural theories concerning Modernism and adaptations Following the ideas expressed in Virginia Woolfs essay we can notice similarities with a prominent school of thought which emerged in the same period, that is, the Frankfurt School and in particular its theorists Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Throughout the 20th century scholars and intellectuals witnessed the emergence of the so-called mass culture, opening questions on a more general level about culture itself. Culture has been understood in different ways throughout the centuries. Lewis defined it as that shared (imagined-meaning) space where the media and the audiences interact (2008: 5). The idea of an abstract space in which culture exists is shared by many intellectuals. Williams (The Analysis of Culture in Storey, 1998) describes three categories that define culture: the ideal, the documentary (that is the body of intellectual and imaginative work) and the social definition (that is a particular way of life/behaviour). These categories recalls of Arnolds definition of culture as (i) the ability to know what is best; (ii) what is best; (iii) the mental and spiritual application of what is best; (iv) the pursuit of what is best (Storey, 2006: 14). By these definitions we understand that there are many factors involved when talking about culture; there are: media producers, texts and audiences where media can stand for culture (Lewis, 2008). We should not forget another factor, which is the decision taken when choosing what is within a certain culture and what is not. Interestingly, Williams distinguishes between three levels of culture: the lived culture of a particular time and period which can be accessible only to those who lived in that time; the recorded culture, that is the documentation; and the selective tradition, that is what survives in the records. This last level in greatly influenced by the historical periods that follow, which gradually compose a tradition. This selection is also governed by the social situation of the period, class interests and educational institutions (The Analysis of Culture in Storey, 1998). Weber argues similarly that knowing is a form of cultural action which is constrained, as it is constituted, by morality, heritage, tradition, conventions and reason. Members of a social group create a reality for a given purpose at a given time (cited in Lewis, 2008: 42).

We then understand that there are different kinds of culture: the high culture or the one selected by the institutions and the sub-cultures, sometimes referred to negatively as low culture,. This discourse emerged as soon as the retainers of the high culture felt threatened by the birth of new social, political and economical orders. Lewis states that the new societies based on capitalism and governed by the middle classes which emerged during the Modern Era brought philosophers and intellectuals to reconsider the fundamentals of society: the high society as opposed to the modern society of men (2008: 36-37). With the decay of an aristocratic society formed by a few educated elites, many intellectuals feared the spread of anarchy. Arnold thought that the State should function as a controlling apparatus, on order to ensure order and the spread of high culture. F. R. Leavis arguments a similar discussion: according to the Leavisites the 20th century had been the terrain of a cultural decline; the emergence of a mass culture had offered a source of addiction to alienated men and again, there was fear for social anarchy (Storey, 2006). It is evident that the previous elite societies felt not only threatened by this mass culture but also thought that there was generally no cultural or artistic value in the new media such as radio, television and cinema. The works of Adorno and Benjamin specifically take into consideration these new media which developed in the 19th and 20th century. According to Adorno culture lost its higher status by becoming entwined with the empirical reality. Moreover, culture is held monopolistically and forbids everything that is not readily grasped, preferring instead to re-use what has already been produced in the past; in essence all mass culture is fundamentally adaptation (Adorno, 1991: 67). This is echoed by Benjamin when he says that mass culture removes the thing that is reproduced from the realm of tradition and actualizes it, making it closer to whatever situation the person apprehending it is in. He cites the film director Abel Gance in a similar quote to Eisenstein when in 1927 he said that Shakespeare, Rembrandt and Beethoven will make films. The frame is obviously different as Benjamin took cinema as the perfect example in which conventions are accepted without criticism by a dull audience who seeks attentive-free forms of pleasure (Benjamin, 2008). Adorno has similar thoughts about cinema, he calls it a regression manufactured on an industrial scale. Concerning adaptations he says: The artistic difference between the media is

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obviously still greater than expected by those who feel able to avoid bad prose by adapting good prose (1991: 179). As he continues though we find some analogies with what Woolf said about the power of films. Adorno suggests that films can perhaps capture moments like the flow of interior images of ones mind and as the objectifying recreation of this type of experience, film may become art (180). The weak element of cinema is contained within: its elements, however abstract, always represent something. He then suggests that films potential perhaps lies in the collaboration with other media and that Emancipated film production should no longer depend uncritically upon technology (184). Adorno and Benjamin witnessed not only the influences of mass media but also the aftermath of modernism, that is, the post-modern era. Until now, new cultures have emerged and challenged the distinction between high and low culture; this happened in particular with the so-called postmodern culture. The term postmodernism was firstly used in the 1930s to describe some aesthetic reactions against the Modernist art and literature. During the 1960s it was re-adapted to distinguish a particular avantgarde culture from the high Modernism of authors such as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot et alii (Lewis, 2008). Storey says that: The insistence on an absolute distinction between high and popular culture came to be regarded as the unhip assumption of an older generation (1998: 346). Nonetheless postmodernism has been criticised for its irreversible relativism and the assumption that everything is acceptable as long as it brings pleasure to the individual (Lewis, 2008). In terms of Modernism and filmic adaptations it is interesting to note how this distinction of high culture versus low/mass culture is still visible in the sense that categories of cinema such as art cinema are regarded in a higher position than commercial productions. According to Geraghty (2008), film adaptations of modernist novels are treated differently by critics and audiences. The reasons for this distinction are to be identified in three main characteristics, that is: modernist novels are often the sources of art films, a specific category which has other canons of verisimilitude if compared to the commercial Hollywood productions; the complex language and techniques of the literary sources are emphasised by the possibilities of art cinema and validated as artistically significant; and art cinema often adds a second author to the original author of the novel, incorporating a whole new perspective to the final piece (Geraghty, 2008).

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4. Modernism and Avant-Garde The word Modernism opens up a whole range of different ideas, having different meanings in art, literature, philosophy and science. Before proceeding further it is necessary to make a few considerations. We have already talked about postmodernism but there is another cultural concept we mentioned that needs clarification, that is, the avant-garde. This term is sometimes used in very close relationship to modernism and modernity but although presenting some similarities there are essential differences. In his Theory of the Avant-Garde Peter Brger conceived avant-garde as an historical instance whose analysis requires a complete alienation from the institution of art itself. When considering the development of art he identifies three categories in time and in relation to the function/autonomy of art: the sacral art, both produced and consumed collectively; courtly art, produced individually by the artist but still consumed collectively; and bourgeoisie art, in which production and reception are individual acts. The separation of art from the praxis of life became the main characteristic of the autonomy of the bourgeois in what was the current of the Aestheticism. What the avant-gardiste did was to negate this institution of art as separated from the praxis of life and demanded a return to practicality. Said that, they did assent on the aesthetics rejection of the world and its means-end rationality. The difference is that they based life praxis on art. In Aestheticism art is for arts sake and therefore functionless; in the avant-gardiste manifestations you cannot identify any function or non-function. In terms of production, the avant-gardiste artist negates the category of individual creation (as for example Duchamps signature on the urinal). And he also negates the concept of individual reception; reactions to something like a Dada exhibition are collective rather than isolated personal experiences (Brger, 1984). This recalls Benjamin when discussing about the collective act of watching a film although his judgement of viewers sharing a communal experience had a negative value. Avant-gardistes sought to portray chance, as tells the example of the hasard objectif (objective chance) deployed by the surrealists. Objective chance can be described as a chance occurrence that brings together totally unrelated events; in opposition to the

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means-end rationality of the bourgeoisie, the surrealists looked for the extraordinary in the everyday life. For the surrealists, ultimate meaning is unattainable. The author uses Benjamins analysis of allegory in relation to the avant-garde. This category combines both the production and reception of the work of art (as it separates it from the original contexts and joins fragments to create a new meaning). The classicists identify their material as the carrier of meaning, the avant-gardiste only see it as an empty sign to which they can impart significance. The attitude towards the material is equally different: whereas the classicists produce works giving them a picture of totality, the avant-gardiste joins fragments with the intent of positing meaning (montage). Montage plays a role in different forms of art. In film its both a technical and artistic device. It is an artistic principle in painting, as seen in artistic movement of Cubism, where the same reality fragments are glued together and rendered with a new meaning. The use of montage in avant-garde art fragments meaning and therefore affects the recipient who is shocked by this refusal to provide one meaning. The shock is consumed, what remains is the enigmatic quality of the form (Brger, 1984). Defining Modernism is difficult not only because of all the other cultural movements happening in the 20th century but also because the term itself has been used with different connotations in various disciplines. Historians of philosophy referred to modernity in relation to a particular thinking that followed Descartes theories at the base of the Enlightenment. On the opposite, modern writers and thinkers like Joyce, Nietzsche, Flaubert and Freud denounced this antiquarian mentality fostered by the German universities, the blind fate in progress and the nave optimism for modernity. Nietzsche criticized the inheritance of an overburdening, dead knowledge which could not help to retrieve present life; though he was aware that a complete rejection of tradition was impossible (Rabat in Bradshaw and Dettmar, 2006). It is equally difficult to place modernism in a specific span of time because of the many different experiences it included but it is normally placed from the 1890s to 1945. According to Peter Brooker, modernism should be rather seen as a transitional period. The common judgement is that modernism, understood as a self-referential mode, alert to its own formal composition and the constructedness of the real, defined itself against realisms assumption of a pre-given external reality (Brooker in

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Shiach, 2007: 33). But modernism and realism often coexisted and realism looked for new forms and idioms just like modernism, it is difficult then to draw the line between the two movements. Modernism is rightly often associated with Joyce and Woolf in the 1920s but other contemporary writers, despite retaining a conventional narrative, reflected upon modern themes and ideas of creativity. Perhaps the best definition of Modernism is contained in the words of M. Bradbury and J. McFarlane when they described it as: Art consequent on Heisenbergs Uncertainty principle, of the destruction of civilization and reason n the First World War, of the world changed and reinterpreted by Marx, Freud and Darwin, of the capitalism and constant industrial acceleration, of existential exposure to meaninglessness or absurdity. It is the literature of technology. It is the art consequent the dis-establishing of communal reality and conventional notions of causality, on the destruction of traditional notions of the wholes of individual character, on the linguistic chaos that ensues when public notions of language have been discredited when all realities have become subjective fictions. (27). As noted above the turn of the 20th century brought a series of changes in all aspects of life and culture which shaped the idea of Modernism and modernity itself. Religion represented a constant thought in the modernist writers minds. At the turn of the century Nietzsche pronounced that God was dead; a general crisis of institutional religions was felt throughout the century and led many intellectuals to search for new forms of religious experience. For some, the most important substitute for religion was literature itself. The process of critique against the dogmatic visions of religion started in the Victorian Era with the important discoveries of Charles Darwin, who with his The Origin of the Species proposed an evolutionary vision of life. Authors in poetry often used poems as religious invocations, sometimes quoting from sacred texts from different religions. Yeats, Auden and Eliot are among them; the latter famously wrote about the modern man relationship to religion as one where men are left with nothing but a heap of broken images (T.S. Eliot in Kermode and Hollander, 1973: 1984). Politically, some critics saw modernist art and literature as forerunners of anarchy, nihilism and revolt of the masses; to others it appeared as a
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rejection of democratic values in favour of an elitist world-view. In the 1920s, close to the modernist literature annus mirabilis scholars of the Frankfurt School such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse saw modernist art and literature as an alternative critical perspective to the commercialization of culture and propaganda. The avant-garde movements that were born in the 20th century were often political and for some critics, avant-garde rather than modernism represented a true attempt to restore arts power in social life (Miller in Bradshaw and Dettmar, 2006). The physical sciences and the new studies of the psyche also contributed to the development of the modernist fiction. In 1919, the announcement of the proof of Einsteins principle of relativity shook the very fundaments of science and life. The relativity theory introduced a whole new panorama: unlike Newtonian physics, Einstein explained gravitation as due to distortions in space-time. Another challenge to the Newtonian theories was Plancks discovery of the quanta, minimum units of energy. In literature this translated with a general relativity in all the characters lives and actions as well as a fragmented vision of reality (Whitworth in Bradshaw and Dettmar, 2006). In psychoanalysis the mind was no longer partitioned into good and evil, but into the rational and the irrational. In modernism it is the idea of the unconscious that joins literature with psychology. T.S. Eliot, in a review of Joyces Ulysses, discovered what the called the mythical method: by setting his novel in the frame of Homers Odyssey, Joyce touched on a shared unconscious knowledge of the Indo-European past. Woolf was instead influenced by a more material/social unconscious in which people have double lives, that of the norm and that of transgression (Meisel in Bradshaw and Dettmar, 2006). In literature we already noted how changes were already happening before the canonical time modernist fiction is normally associated with. The modern novel evolved from the Victorian one as a reaction in favour of progress in fiction writing. The Victorian novel was characterized by moral/idealized vision; narrators were usually omniscient and gave realistic descriptions of sometimes-fixed plots. Modernity had changed everything and modern writers found that the previous limitations impeded them from representing the modern reality. The modernist novel was also motivated by a desire to stress the art of novel itself, and a change in the

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nature of human relationships. The impulse to modernise the novel dates back at least to the 1850s, with Flauberts Madame Bovary. The modernist novel developed and reached its high point just after the First World War with Ulysses. Other stone pillars of modernist literature are Prousts In Search of Lost Time for its dealing with temporality; Steins The Making of Americans which stretched the bounds of novelistic cultural history past its linguistic limits and Musils Man Without Qualities for the dramatisation of the fragmented modern self. The modernist novel perhaps ended there, since the rise of the totalitarian regimes in the 1930s posed other matters in the writers minds, making the concern over temporality and consciousness pointless or even irresponsible. Some critics say that the modernist novel was born and died in the 1930s, and laid buried by the postmodern developments of the 1960s (Matz in Bradshaw and Dettmar, 2006). Modernist writers often concerned themselves with the concept of time and in particular with the Bergsonian concept of duration which is defined as: the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances and What are we, in fact, what is our character, if not the condensation of the history that we have lived from our birth nay, even before our birth, since we bring with us prenatal dispositions? (Bergson, 1960: 5). The dualism between interiority and exteriority is part of the novels structure but the nineteenth century novel saw in particular this dichotomy as a confrontation between private and public ; subjective versus objective. This duality is also reflected in the very structure of the narrative sentence of the modernist novel: terms which refer to time such as now, today and yesterday, are usually avoided; the writers used the free indirect speech to represent a third person subjectivity. The tense is presented in two styles, one centred around the present time of a subject and the second independent of the subject. Similarly, time is recounted in a different way from the realist novel: whereas the first one usually presents a detailed summary of chronological events, the second one recounts only some highlighting moments of the past (Banfield in Shiach, 2007). The interest in the human mind was greatly influenced by Freuds psychoanalysis. When in 1895 the Lumire brothers projected a film for the first time it was also the year that saw the publication of Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freuds Studies on

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Hysteria, the book precursor to the studies on psychoanalysis. In it very essence cinema moves like the human imagination in its ability to break free from the constraints of photography and theatre. Film becomes a form of public dreaming and it has many things in common with Freuds studies, such as the figures of myth (the Oedipus complex, which is often transposed as a narrative structure in films), the shock-effect to induce reactions in the patient as well as in the viewer and of course the idea of the free flowing of thoughts in the human subconscious (Lebeau, 2001). Woolf describes the flow of human thoughts as: A myriad of impressions trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from the old (Woolf, 1966: 106). The modernist exploited two main possibilities of represented thought: frequent shifts in point of view (the writer gives insights into different characters emotions and thoughts) and the arresting of the moment (meaning that time, being subjective, does not need to last 24 hours but could even last a lifetime). That of the modernist characters is a post relativity world, that is, it is formed by private worlds, each happening in their own time not necessarily synchronized with each other. The writers would often write their novels like Impressionists: capturing the multitude of facets happening in a unit of time which could be called moment. Something that Faulkner called a forever crystallized instant. But to have time there must be a sequence of instants and indeed the modernist time is a passing of arrested moments, like it could be an Impressionistic painting such as Monets Rouen cathedral. This can happen by going from one persons now to another persons now by shifting point of view, or by going from one now to another now in time. The modernist novel builds its stories in a specific time called middle age; it is a moment of lapse in which the protagonist looks back at his or her life. Characters build their identities through the past experiences, told in the form of memories. Some characters may have a shared past but their way of absorbing experiences gives different outputs in terms of personalities. For modernist writers like Faulkner and Conrad, the characters

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remember their historical past through different pieces of oral histories put together (Banfield in Shiach, 2007). Another quintessential element of the modernist literature is the wanderer character, a person who idly strolls the streets of the city and is invested by a million thoughts, feelings etc. Woolf and Joyce both used the stream of consciousness technique, with Joyces technique being more closely similar to the chaotic succession of thoughts in the human mind. This is even more evident in the famous final monologue by Molly Bloom, in which the complete absence of punctuation and paragraphing embodies the unbroken flow of thoughts that occur by free association in ones consciousness (Fernihough in Shiach, 2007). A faster, fragmented writing would depict exactly what the modern man felt. All these changes made also writers doubt their senses and judgement, making therefore doubt central to the whole modernist literature. It also portrayed the human failure has a truth generally acknowledged. Like in Conrads Heart of Darkness the modern men had a dark core, full of unconscious desires. Perceptions are generally fallible and even the search for truth varies from ones perspective to anothers. Truth is relative and subjective. Characters became fragmented, lost into an ocean of perceptions, motives, memories and desires. Modern novels became more interested in aesthetics than morality, preferring ambiguity to a strict position. Sexuality and basic physical experience were no longer omitted despite they still faced censorship. Modern writers often hoped that their novels would be counteracts to the bad effects of modernity and that they could reform culture (Matz in Bradshaw and Dettmar, 2006). According to Woolf, what distinguishes the modern writers is precisely this attempt to capture life as it is. So for example Mr Joyce is spiritual rather than materialist as some writers of the past. The point of interest for modernists is psychology itself and Nothing no method, no experiment, even of the wildest is forbidden, but only falsity and pretence (Woolf, 1966: 110). Writer and scholar E. M. Forster ended his Aspects of the Novel with the question whether novel writing would change over time, whether it would be killed by cinema and so on. He said that we had to imagine the novelists of the last two hundred years all writing together in one room, subject to the same emotions and putting the accidents of their age into the crucible of

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inspiration (1949: 117). He then stated a possibility which was being pursued by a few novelists but impeded by the institutions, and that was a new perception of a human nature, something that would alter novels themselves because individuals would look at themselves in a new way (1949).

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5. Case Study: Orlando novel & film The adaptation from novel to film that I analyse in this study is the film transposition of Virginia Woolfs novel Orlando: A Biography (1928) by British filmmaker Sally Potter. Orlando represents a rather peculiar experiment about writing biographies and possesses a vast repertoire in terms of settings, visuals and characters. Orlando (1992) by Sally Potter is an equally striking filmic experience that even today stands out for its originality in terms of direction and performance. Different scholars and critics have argued over the relationship between Orlando-film and Orlando-novel. Opinions are hugely split among those who harshly dismissed Potters Orlando as completely separate from the original literary source, and those who argued that, despite the necessary changes, it captured the essence of the book. On a surface level, the two works have both female authors, a trait not so common at the beginning of the 20th century and, arguably, not even in the present day film industry given the minority of successful women directors. Virginia Woolf was born in 1882. Since she was a child she had the determination to become a writer. Her parents deaths caused the first of many nervous breakdowns in her life. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf and together they decided to make a living out of writing and journalism. Since 1908 Virginia had been writing her first novel, The Voyage Out, published in 1915. In 1917 the Woolfs had bought a small hand printing press which was firstly used as an experiment but then put to full use. By 1922 the Hogarth Press had become a business. From 1921 Virginia Woolf always published with the Press, except for a few limited editions. Woolfs greatest novels were published one after the other: Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931). In 1939 the II World War caused grave distress to Woolfs fragile state. There are many accounts around her death but from its general record we know that on 28th March 1941, Woolf put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse near her home and drowned herself (Virginia Woolf Society and Clarke S. N., 2000). Sally Potter emerged in a particular period in the British film industry. In the 1970s women directors either avoided or were excluded form the mainstream cinema, preferring instead avant-garde or feminist films. Several production, exhibition and distribution networks were set up to promote women filmmakers. The most famous were the London Film-makers Co-

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op, Cinema of Women, the Berwick St Collective and the Other Cinema. Sally Potter was among those director and possibly one of the most imaginative. She began her film career with the short film Thriller (1979), a reworking of La Bohme financed by the Arts Council. The Gold Diggers (1983) was her first feature film and it starred Julie Christie. Orlando had been in preparation for many years and it was finally released in 1993. Potter managed to get international funding; she wrote the script and was heavily involved in the technical aspects of the filming process. Quite surprisingly it was a success at the box office (Harper, 2000). She has since directed other five feature films: The Tango Lesson (1997), The Man Who Cried (2000), Yes (2004), Rage (2009) and Ginger & Rosa (2012). The novel Orlando is dedicated to Woolfs lover Vita Sackville-West. Woolf wanted this mock biography to have satire and wilderness; she planned Orlando as a pleasurable diversion but also a new way of writing biographies. Reading Orlando can be a disorientating. In Orlando, Woolf explores how different contexts require different selves; it is: A modern understanding of subjectivity as something multiple and in process, something shapes by material circumstance and social constellation (Goldman, 2006: 68). The story tells of a young nobleman and aspiring poet, Orlando, who in the 16th century becomes the Queens favouring, gaining favours and titles. Soon after the death of Elizabeth I he becomes infatuated with Sasha, a Russian princess visiting the royal court during the Great Frost of 1608. Sashas sudden departure leaves Orlando heartbroken. He continues the writing of his great poem The Oak Tree and meets with poet Nicholas Greene, who despite Orlandos excitement criticizes his writing, leaving him once more fractured in his ego. In the late 17th century he becomes the new Ambassador of Constantinople by appointment of King Charles II; he performs his duties well until social unrest and war plagues the city. One day he goes to sleep and wakes up no more; physicians are brought in to examine the young Ambassador but all they can do is to confirm that he is asleep. When waking up, Orlando discovers the most extraordinary change: he is now a woman. The new Lady Orlando escapes from Constantinople thanks to a band of Gypsies and goes on to live with them for

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some time until she feels nostalgia for her home country. After embarking on a ship to England she finally returns to Knole, her perennial estate, and becomes entwined with the 18th century life, meeting with the great poets of the period, evading marriage proposals and marring in the Victorian period with the sea captain Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine. In 1928, she publishes her poem The Oak Tree and wins a prize. Married and with a son she greets her returning husband. The analysis of this text and its film counterpart has already been studied in journals and books. I will highlight discussions both in favour and against Potters adaptation of Woolfs novel and then conduct my own analysis. Potter obviously had to compromise when adapting Orlando for the screen but the argument is that she did not only adapted it but also introduced new themes and changed part of the plot. There are three main knots that stand out as clear departures from the original literary source and I will group them in three main categories which are: postmodernity, gender and sexuality, and costume drama. The perhaps most notable change between film and novel is the ending suggested by the film. Potters Orlando is brought up to the present time; she is not a poet but rather a writer of some sort. In fact, theres nothing to stop the audience from presuming when she hands over a manuscript to a literary editor that they are actually looking at the script of the film itself (Mayer, 2008). This postmodernist twist is pushed even further by Potter when, in the last scene of the film, we see Orlando being video recorded by her daughter (who in the novel is a son). In this ending scene Orlando seems also to recall what Woolf mentioned at the end of her essay The Cinema when she theorized that cinema as an art form might be brought to birth although this seems to suggest a death of literature. In the film we see the androgynous Orlando through the lens of her daughters camera; in the sky theres an angel singing that he is coming across the divide to you, born and now dying. This perhaps suggests a death of literature in favour of cinema (Ouditt in Cartmell and Whelehan, 1999). In this sense, the child-artist is not a literary figure, however, but a film maker. As such, Potter offers a metacomment on her own film and on filmmaking itself (Ferriss and Waites, 1999). To some extent we can argue that Woolfs novel implicitly had a postmodern critique itself. From her diaries and essays we learn that Woolf was keen

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on changing the bonds of what we call novel. The heavy distasteful bondage that Woolf wanted to leave behind was the tradition of the social realist novel. Orlando the novel could be thought as partly postmodern specifically for this critique of contemporary fiction and also because of the self-reference to novel writing as for the passage where Orlando publishes her own manuscript The Oak Tree the same day as Orlando was published. Gender and sexuality are key elements of Woolfs novel. Orlando both film and novel questions the bounds that define one sex or the other and what indeed defines ones gender. Woolf famously begins the story of her hero/heroine with the sentence: He for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it (2008: 13). In the literary reality we now have our own picture of the main character but in the film there is an underlying problem: Potters choice of casting an actress (Tilda Swinton) poses a univocal response on the matter as the audience recognises her femininity from the start. According to Hollinger and Winterhalter, this represents a major departure from Woolfs work: When Woolfs narrator assures us of Orlandos sex, the testimonial voice insinuates the very doubt it purports to dispel; in so doing, she created a metanarrative voice that invites readers to watch as identity is produced by the language used to describe stereotypically gendered behaviours. In the film, however, the gender-dismantling initiated in this aside loses it deconstructive edge and, because Swinton is clearly masquerading as male. Becomes obvious parody or comedic Shakespearian cross-dressing (2001: 240). Arguably though, Potter finds other ways of capturing Woolfs concern of genderfixing. According to Ferris and Waites, this can be noticed in the films parodic framing of some scenes: in one episode we see Orlando looking at this parents portrait before posing with his betrothed; the parodic element stands in the fact that Orlando is clearly standing in his mothers position whereas his betrothed is in fathers position. Another such example is when Orlando, just after escaping the maze, rushes into the Victoria Era and there falls face-to-face with Shelmerdine,

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revealing male and female as mirror images (1999). Concerning sexuality it is argued that Potter completely omitted the suggestion of a lesbian relationship from her film. With reference to this discourse, Hollinger and Winterhalter admit that Potter was perhaps justified in omitting the lesbian elements based on the belief that Woolf regarded Sapphis as a secondary concern, but in doing so she missed the social importance that surrounded the whole idea of suggesting a lesbian character in Woolfs days (2001). Clothing is somehow connected to gender, particularly in the text and film. Potters use of imaginistic scenes capturing each eras conventions disrupt the linear narrative of mainstream films but also poses gender questions: the exaggerated fashion of the 17th century appear to the modern viewer as quite feminine. Later in the film Orlando, now a woman, struggles again with her uncomfortable 18th century clothing, making it almost parodic. It seems that Potter is here translating from Woolfs words when she wrote that clothes are but symbols that hide something beneath (Ferris and Waites, 1999). According to Ouditt, Potters costume drama is also a satire of the successful period dramas of the 80s in England (1999). Considering Potters adaptation of Orlando we can identify it with the psychic concept of adaptation, which considered the filmmaker as bearer of the original text spirit regardless of the form. In an interview, Potter said: My task with the adaptation of Virginia Woolf's book for the screen was to find a way of remaining true to the spirit of the book and to Virginia Woolf's intentions, whilst being ruthless with changing the book in any way necessary to make it work cinematically (Sony Pictures Classics). Clearly Potter identified with Woolf herself despite little can we know as to whether Woolf would have considered Potters Orlando as a faithful representation of her work. In addition, Potter had also ideological reasons for adapting Orlando for the screen by telling a story to evoke a more biting and satirical view of the English class system and the colonial attitudes arising from it (Potter, 1994: xi). From her essays we know that Virginia Woolf did not have much sympathy for cinema but a few films made her wonder about the potentialities of cinematic works of art. Similarly, Adorno argued about the power of cinema to render feelings and emotions through images that could not otherwise be achieved with the

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written word. Potters Orlando makes vast use of symbolical images, like the maze, the lush and pomp of court, the mirror scenes, as well as music (composed by Potter herself) which all contribute to posing new layers to the film just as Woolf did in the novel. If we try to compare film and novel considering them as part of Modernism and Avant-Garde we find even more similarities. At the time Orlando was published it broke the conventions of what we normally associated with the idea of biography. Also, it was Modernist in the way it dealt with time presenting us with a story that follows subjective time rather than objective time, as in Bergsons theories and in the depiction of its main character, Orlando, who is fragmented in several personalities. Through the centuries we see different Orlandos: the Orlando-man, Orlando-woman, Orlando-ambassador, Orlando-gypsy, Orlando-woman-dressed as man, Orlando-mother and so on. Potters Orlando could be equally considered a modernist or, most accurately, a post-modernist work of art. It broke the conventions by making a parody of what was considered the standard for costume dramas. Also, it challenged the viewer by addressing the audience directly and by posing a meta-narrative within the film. In addition, if we consider the key character of the Modernist novel, the wanderer (like Joyces Leopold Bloom or Prousts Narrator) we can notice that Potters Orlando is indeed a wanderer who walks de facto from century to century. Modernist fiction departed from the Realist tradition in the way it dealt with the subjective, Freuds concept of the unconscious and psyche. Avant-garde films departed from mainstream films dominated by conventions devised to create linear, reality-like images; they instead challenged the audience perceptions and reading of images.

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6. Conclusions The aim of my analysis was to highlight different concepts concerning literary adaptations, culture and modernism in order to use them as tools to compare a modernist novel such as Orlando with its filmic adaptation. The answer to the question posed by this dissertation has two sides. One is that yes, films can partly translate Modernist fiction to the screen even better that other genres of fiction because of the similarities between some Modernist techniques (the montage, the interior monologue etc.) and the nature of cinema. Nonetheless the answer is also subjective as the idea of successful differs from what we personally consider as such. In this regards, I found that my case study partly supported the idea that an unconventional novel like Orlando could be successfully adapted for the screen, but as we noticed from the different critiques people had different ideas about this matter. Personally, after reading the novel and then watching the film I have to go back to a quote by Umberto Eco when he argued that the question about adaptation was inconsistent as in his case the novel he wrote The Name of the Rose and the film directed by Jean-Jaques Arnaud The Name of the Rose were two completely different entities (quoted in Ryan, 2004). When reading the novel Orlando I had a completely different experience from watching the film Orlando. This does not mean that Potter failed at adapting Woolfs novel for the screen. In fact, I believe that this type of adaptation represents a positive example precisely because it took a literary work and, while retaining its essence, it built upon it to create a brand new work of art. In conclusion, I go back to what Woolf wrote in her essay about cinema, that is: films have the power of creating images that literary works cannot create because of the nature of the medium. In this sense, adaptations of books which quote word-for-word will always lack some of the evocative power of the readers imagination. On the other side, adaptations that build upon the original work and take advantage of the cinema medium to add what novels cannot tell are in fact more successful transpositions.
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