Chekhov's Mistress
Books as Movies and Movies as Books
Human Stain vs. Wild Strawberries: No Contest, Movies, Philip Roth, Ingmar Bergman, Novels, Cinema-photography, Fiedler, Gone With The Wind, Movies filling the void of novels.
Over the past week I’ve watched two movies that stand in contrast to one another in the following way: One is a movie made from a book and the other is a movie written as an original screenplay. The movies are the Human Stain, based upon the novel by Philip Roth, and Ingmar Bergman’s The Wild Strawberries.
As movies, there’s little to compare, Wild Strawberries is a masterpiece and The Human Stain was a bit of a bomb. But the contrast to me is their respective literary merits. I read Roth’s novel and didn’t really enjoy it. I felt the pop culture references and narrators involvement were too contrived which became warts that I couldn’t see past. It’s not a wonder it didn’t make for a good movie.
Wild Strawberries was written by Bergman, and as far as I can tell from IMDB it is not based on any previous piece of literature. That makes it all the more remarkable because the thing that stands out is how much the movie is like a novel. The depth of the characters and layers of meaning give the evocative photography purpose, and the protagonist’s journey vicariously becomes the viewers.
Sadly, so many movies made today have great photography, but little in the way of literary merit. There are exceptions, of course, The Barbarian Invasions (one of the most quietly cynical movies in memory), was quite good in that regard as well as City of God, a moving memoir of a boy growing up in the violently poor ghettos of Rio.
I tend to stay away from movies made from great books so as not to spoil my own set of images and my own interpretations. The critic Leslie Fiedler said that a testimony to a great piece of literature is its ability to transcend its medium. He was speaking specifically about Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind at the time, a book that did indeed transcend its medium, so much so that you might say that it transformed itself into the new medium. But I don’t agree with Fiedler. I think that a great novel in no way transcends its medium and that’s what makes it what it is. A novel by its nature must have more fat to chew on than a movie or we would only watch movies. The glaring exception to this being Welles’ version of Kafka’s The Trial, which in no way replaces the novel, but, appropriately, adds to it. With all this non-reading going on, you would think that movies would be trying to fill that void, that is, be more like novels, but that doesn’t seem to be happening.
Thoughts? Suggestions?
comments
I somewhat disagree with you. I believe what Fiedler was saying is indeed true. A great novel tells a great story and a great story is multidimensional. It can live outside of the book, off of the pages and into other mediums (movies, plays, ballets, operas etc.)
– Y.S.T. (07/26 at 10:20 PM)
Since we’re on a theme of Nabokov on the site here, I will use a quote of his, regarding Kubrick’s Lolita, to help along my point:
“The film is only a blurred, skimpy glimpse of the marvellous picture I imagined...” “I do not wish to imply that Kubrick’s film is mediocre; in its own right, it is first-rate, but it is not what I wrote.”
So I should submit to your disagreement, and clarify by saying that a great novel probably can’t be duplicated in all its complexity in a visual, abbreviated medium, which also, one might argue, is consumed more passively than a novel.
– Chekhov's Mistress (07/26 at 11:44 PM)
It seems more often that a bad novel makes a great movie.
An interesting related phenomena: Gilbert Adair rewrote his novel “The Dreamers” after making a movie of it with Bertolucci.
– derik (07/27 at 01:15 PM)
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: July 26, 2004
- Filed Under:
Wise Men Fish Here: Literature
- Comments:3
- Links to this Post: Technorati
