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Judit Pieldner
•
Adaptation, Remediation and Intermediality

Forms of In‐Betweenness in Cinema
The publication of this volume was supported
by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Judit Pieldner
Adaptation, Remediation
and Intermediality
Forms of In‐Betweenness in Cinema
Presa Universitară Clujeană

2020
Scientific Reviewers:
Prof. Ágnes Pethő
Assoc. Prof. István Berszán
Consultant Editor:
Assist. Prof. Melinda Blos-Jáni
Descrierea CIP a Bibliotecii Naţionale a României

PIELDNER, JUDIT
Adaptation, Remediation and Intermediality: Forms of In‐
betweenness in Cinema / Judit Pieldner. ‐ Cluj‐Napoca: Presa
Universitară Clujeană, 2020
Conține bibliografie; ISBN 978‐606‐37‐0707‐0
791
© 2020, Judit Pieldner.
Universitatea Babeş‐Bolyai
Presa Universitară Clujeană
Director: Codruţa Săcelean
Str. Hasdeu nr. 51
400371 Cluj‐Napoca, România
Tel./fax: (+40)‐264‐597.401
E‐mail: editura@editura.ubbcluj.ro
http://www.editura.ubbcluj.ro/
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ...................................................................................... 7
Introduction
Shifting Forms of In‐Betweenness in Cinema .......................................... 9
Part I.
Strategies of Screen Adaptation ................................................................. 21
CHAPTER ONE
Medial Equivalences, Functional Analogies?
The Rhetoric of Adaptation
(Tom Jones, Orlando, The French Lieutenant’s Woman) ............................. 23
CHAPTER TWO
Space Construction in Screen Adaptations of Hamlet ........................... 45
CHAPTER THREE
In‐Between the Stage and the Screen.
Representation of Consciousness in Gábor Bódy’s Hamlet .................. 69
CHAPTER FOUR
Remediated Bodies, Corporeal Images
in Gábor Bódy’s Narcissus and Psyche ...................................................... 81
Part II.
Remediation: In‐Between the Immediacy
and Hypermediacy of Cinematic Experience ......................................... 101
CHAPTER FIVE
Remediating Past Images. The Temporality
of “Found Footage” in Gábor Bódy’s American Torso ......................... 103
5
Adaptation, Remediation and Intermediality: Forms of In‐Betweenness in Cinema
CHAPTER SIX
Along the Track of the Effaced Trace in Michael Haneke’s Caché ..... 127
CHAPTER SEVEN
History, Cultural Memory and Intermediality
in Radu Jude’s Aferim! ............................................................................. 149
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Camera in House Arrest.
Tactics of Non‐Cinema in Jafar Panahi’s Films .................................... 169
Part III.
Figurations of Intermediality in Contemporary Cinema .................... 195
CHAPTER NINE
Performing the Unspeakable.
Intermedial Events in András Jeles’s Parallel Lives .............................. 197
CHAPTER TEN
The Anamorphic Perspective In‐Between the Painterly
and the Cinematic in András Jeles’s Sinister Shadow ........................... 213
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Magic Realism, Minimalist Realism and the Figuration
of the Tableau in Contemporary Hungarian and Romanian Cinema .. 227
CHAPTER TWELVE
From Paragone to Symbiosis.
Sensations of In‐Betweenness in Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson ...... 263
Bibliography .............................................................................................. 287
6
Acknowledgements
With a few exceptions, the essays included in the present volume

are the outcome of research carried out within the framework of two
grant‐funded group projects financed by the Romanian Ministry of
National Education, CNCS – UEFISCDI, Re‐mediated Images as Figurations
of Intermediality and Post‐mediality in Central and East European Cinema
(2013‐2016), project number PN‐II‐ID‐PCE‐2012‐4‐0573, and Rethinking
Intermediality in Contemporary Cinema: Changing Forms of In‐Betweenness
(2017‐2019), project number PN‐III‐P4‐ID‐PCE‐2016‐0418, both led by
Ágnes Pethő, Professor of Film Studies at the Sapientia Hungarian
University of Transylvania, Cluj‐Napoca. The editing of this volume was
finalized within the framework of the second project.
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Ágnes Pethő for
her inspiring guidance and unconditional support over the years, and
also for supervising and editing the essays. I also thank Melinda Blos‐Jáni
for her assistance in editing the papers for Acta Universitatis Sapientiae,
Film and Media Studies. Many thanks go to the project members, Ágnes‐
Karolina Bakk, Melinda Blos‐Jáni, Hajnal Király, Mihály Lakatos, Katalin
Sándor and Andrea Virginás for the joint achievements resulting from
long‐term cooperation within the projects.
I also express my thanks to Cambridge Scholars Publishing and
Scientia Publishing House, as well as Horea Avram and Claudiu Turcuș,
editors of the scientific journal Ekphrasis, for granting permission to
republish the articles in the present volume. I hereby express my
gratitude to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and its Regional
Committee in Cluj for supporting the publication of this book.
7
Introduction
Shifting Forms of In‐Betweenness in Cinema
The essays included in this volume are the outcome of my

researches carried out in the past decade in which I have approached
phenomena of contemporary cinema from the perspective of intermedial
relations. This collection brings together multiply overlapping
investigations under the three key terms, adaptation, remediation and
intermediality, which constitute focal points of film studies today.
Therefore, it has been demanding but also stimulating to respond to the
challenge posed by them, and to contribute with colourful mosaics to the
theoretical approach and spectatorial perception of contemporary
cinema. The range of films analysed in this book reflect an endeavour to
approach not only widely known representatives of – mostly European –
art‐house cinema, but also lesser‐known film products born in the Eastern
European region. My interest in Hungarian experimental filmmaking
connects back to the research carried out within the framework of my PhD
studies. My research preoccupations have also taken me beyond the
geocultural boundaries of European film and beyond the borders of
cinema itself through the investigation of thought‐provoking films
belonging to contemporary Iranian cinema. The major concern of these
writings is in‐depth analysis placed in relevant theoretical framework. The
present volume is intended to provide a new context for these film
analyses, in which manifold connection points among both theoretical
aspects and cinematic phenomena may come into view.
The first part of the volume (Strategies of Screen Adaptation) is
dedicated to the theory and practice of screen adaptation. The
9
introductory essay on Medial Equivalences, Functional Analogies? The

Rhetoric of Adaptation (Tom Jones, Orlando, The French Lieutenant’s Woman)
provides a lead into adaptation studies, and surveys some of the major
concerns of the theoretical discourses on screen adaptation. Literature, as
an infinite source of themes and narrative models, has always meant a
prosperous inspiration for film, and screen adaptations have existed ever
since film art was born. Cinema has always been “literary” in the sense that
it has attempted at telling stories, borrowing the idea of plot and technique
from literary narratives. The “literary” feature of the film has been
abundantly documented by film critics and historians who have pointed
at the common roots of the two media. On the other hand, film has defined
itself by getting distanced from literature, stressing the differences more
than the similarities. In several moments of film history, the denial of
literature constituted the most challenging starting point for filmmaking.
Recent approaches – having in view an integrated, interdisciplinary
treatment of questions of narratology and intermediality – dwell on the
term “relation,” and propose various terms with further implications.
According to Gérard Genette’s typology, the relation between the literary
pretext and the film version belongs to the realm of hypertextuality. The
relationship between the verbal and the visual is conceived of as an
intermediary existence, association, simultaneity and dissemination,
which can be best grabbed in terms like palimpsest (Gérard Genette),
rhizome (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), or heterotopia (Michel
Foucault). The essay deals with reflexive adaptations in particular,
choosing three adaptations of three canonical literary texts and
investigating the possibilities of film in rendering metafiction and textual
reflexivity spanning over literary‐historical periods that encompass the
aesthetics of the “premodern” (Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones), the “modern”
(Virginia Woolf’s Orlando) and the “postmodern” (John Fowles’s The
French Lieutenant’s Woman) respectively.
10
Introduction: Shifting Forms of In‐Betweenness in Cinema
The next chapters are in‐depth analyses which complement, in

their turn, the analysis of the relationship between literature and film
with additional viewpoints nourished by space theories, narratology,
theatre studies, corporeal studies and intermedial studies. Accordingly,
the essay entitled Space Constructions in Screen Adaptations of Hamlet
investigates cinematic space, namely the significance of horizontal and
vertical space division, the creation of symbolic/ stylized/ abstract,
realistic and simultaneous spaces, the role of scenery in expressing
states of mind and in conveying ideological messages in particular
adaptations of Hamlet, created in various moments of film history,
directed, among others, by Laurence Olivier (1948), Grigori Kozintsev
(1964), Tony Richardson (1969), Franco Zeffirelli (1990) and Michael
Almereyda (2000). An approach to the adaptations of Hamlet from the
viewpoint of space construction completes the existing thematic,
stylistic and generic typologies and highlights those films which,
through the exploration of (meta)cinematic space as a powerful means
of creating meanings in the language of the film, go beyond cinematic
realism and initiate an intermedial dialogue with the spatial purport of
the Shakespearean text and with the (meta)theatrical specificities of the
Renaissance Theatrum Mundi.
Starting from theoretical considerations regarding the
relationship between the dramatic text and its representation, the next
chapter, entitled In‐Between the Stage and the Screen. Representation of
Consciousness in Gábor Bódy’s Hamlet, proposes to investigate the
Hungarian experimental filmmaker’s stage/video adaptation of the
Shakespearean play. The performance makes use of a “bio‐radical”
setting modeling the shape of a dissected human brain. On the one hand,
the essay focuses on the multimedial feature of the aesthetic experience
provided by the television version of the performance, blending both
theatrical and cinematic space experience. On the other hand, it argues
that the performance initiates a fruitful dialogue between tradition and
11
innovation, simultaneously evoking the emblematic character of the early

modern theatre and setting up a postmodern experimental stage. The
consciously explored simultaneity of various representational and
theatrical traditions/ inventions results in a neo‐avant‐garde
reinterpretation of the Renaissance Theatrum Mundi, aimed at staging the
micro‐ and macrocosmic (corpo)reality of the subject and its social
environment.
The fourth chapter, entitled Remediated Bodies, Corporeal Images in
Gábor Bódy’s Narcissus and Psyche, deals with the screen adaptation of
Sándor Weöres’s Psyché, published in 1972, a biography in verse and
prose drawing the figure of a forgotten early 19th‐century Hungarian
poet, László Tóth Ungvárnémeti, counterpointed by the figure and
oeuvre of a fictitious poetess, Erzsébet Lónyai. Going far beyond the
scope of screen adaptation, Bódy’s monumental film experiment of
encyclopedic character, conceived in the spirit of the new narrativity and
new sensitivity of the 1980s, becomes a multilayered, intermedial and
self‐reflexive meditation upon the eye as the connecting link between
the body and the image, as the sensory organ privileged in the course of
the separation of the senses and the industrial remapping of the body
taking place in the 19th century (Jonathan Crary). Thus, the intertwining
story of Narcissus and Psyche, extending over several generations,
turns into the narrative of the evolution history of optical media, from
the laterna magica, through Marey’s chronophotography and
Muybridge’s photo sequences, to the birth of the moving image, as well
as into a reflection upon the discourses of the body from 19th‐century
medicine, through avant‐garde performances, to neo‐avant‐garde body
art manifestations. Through the anatomic representation of ill bodies,
male and female, the film carries out an ample criticism of
representation, rethinking film in terms of the corporeality of the
medium, reinscribing corporeal perception and haptic visuality (Laura
U. Marks) into the cinematic experience.
12
The second part of the book (Remediation: In‐Between the Immediacy

and Hypermediacy of Cinematic Experience) gathers essays centred on the
concept of remediation. In their volume entitled Remediation.
Understanding New Media (1999), Jay Bolter and David Grusin define
remediation as the formal logic by which new media refashion prior
media forms, caught in the interaction between the immediacy of experience
(i.e. the authenticity of representation, the impression of the “real”) and
the hypermediacy of experience (i.e. the mediated character of
representation, the emphatic presence of the medium). The cases of
remediation illustrated by the chapters of this part demonstrate the
interconnectedness between the impression of transparent representation
and the perception of the medium itself.
The chapter entitled Remediating Past Images. The Temporality of
“Found Footage” in Gábor Bódy’s American Torso proposes to bring into
discussion particular modes of occurrence of “past images,” whether in
the form of the use of archival/ found footage or of creating visual
archaisms in the spirit of archival recordings, within the practice of the
Hungarian experimental filmmaking of the 1970s and 1980s, more
specifically, in Gábor Bódy’s films. The return to archival/ found footage
as well as the production of visual archaisms reveal an attempt of
remediation that goes beyond the cultural responsibility of preservation:
it confronts the film medium with its materiality, historicity, and
temporality, and creates productive tensions between the private and the
historical, between the pre‐cinematic and the texture of motion pictures,
between the documentary value of the image and its rhetorical
dimension. The essay argues that the authenticity of the moving image in
Gábor Bódy’s American Torso (1975) is achieved through a special
combination of the immediacy and the hypermediacy of experience. Bódy’s
interest in “past images” goes beyond the intention of experimentation
with the medium; it is aimed at a profound, reconsidered archaeology of
the image and a distinct perception of the cinema.
13
The next chapter, Along the Track of the Effaced Trace in Michael
Haneke’s Caché, focuses on the shift of perspective that can be identified
in the interest of postmedia‐age motion picture in the employment and
incorporation of other media to reveal the relationship between the
medium and the mediated trace, between the nonhuman technical
apparatus and the perceiving self, between fiction and documentary,
between truth and the ethical dimension of the image. Michael Haneke’s
Caché (2005), as a subversive remake of the late modernist paradigm
embodied by Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow‐Up (1966) – and related to
problems that reverberate with Gábor Bódy’s concept of the cinematic
image, also present in his Dog’s Night Song (1983) –, reconsiders the set of
relations among the medium, the trace and the self, and points at the
failure of “blowing up” the traces of reality and narrative identity
through the act(s) of (re)mediation.
The essay with the title History, Cultural Memory and Intermediality
in Radu Jude’s Aferim! deals with a film that simultaneously constructs
and deconstructs the illusion of historical reality. It unfolds in the in‐
betweenness of the seemingly “natural,” unmediated, and the artificial,
mediated. On the one hand, the film creates the impression of historical
reality as an experience of immediacy through a series of devices: period
mise en scène informed by a vast amount of visual (illustrative,
photographic, painterly and cinematic), historical and literary material,
created through both the profilmic (setting, costumes, the characters’ way
of speaking and behaving) and the style of cinematic mediation. On the
other hand, the effet de réel is overwritten by the hypermediacy of
cinematic experience. Aferim! is in fact a hypermediated patchwork of
diverse medial representations that can be best grasped in terms of
intermediality. Through its ingenuous (inter)medial solutions (black‐
and‐white film, with an implied media‐archaeological purport; period
mise en scène but with an assumed artificiality and constructedness; a
simple linear plot infused with a dense dialogue in archaic Romanian,
14
drawn from a multitude of literary and historical sources; a sweeping

panorama of 19th‐century Walachian society presented in a succession of
tableau compositions), Radu Jude’s ironical‐critical collage defetishizes
the traditional historical iconography and debunks the mythical national
imaginary, unveiling the traumatic history of an ethnic and racial mix.
The last chapter of this part, The Camera in House Arrest. Tactics of
Non‐Cinema in Jafar Panahi’s Films, deals with the reflexive and
intermedial possibilities that open up at the boundaries of filmmaking,
dwelt on in specialist literature as non‐cinema. In close intratextual
connection with earlier pieces of Jafar Panahi’s oeuvre, pre‐eminently The
Mirror (Ayneh, 1997) and Offside (2006), his recent films made in illegality,
including This Is Not a Film (In film nist, Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba
Mirtahmasb, 2011), Closed Curtain (Pardé, Jafar Panahi and Kambuzia
Partovi, 2013) and Taxi Tehran (Jafar Panahi, 2015), reformulate the
relationship between cinema and the “real,” defying the limitations of
filmmaking in astounding ways. Panahi’s artisanal and secret use of the
camera in deterritorialized conditions and extreme limitations as regards
profilmic space – house arrest, fake taxi interior – gives way for
multilayered reflexivity, incorporating non‐actorial presence,
performative self‐filming and theatricality as subversive gestures, with a
special emphasis on the off‐screen and remediated video‐orality
performed in front of, or directly addressed to, the camera. The essay
explores the ways in which the filmmaker’s tactics become powerful
political gestures that call for the (inter)medial as an also indispensably
political act.
The third part of the volume (Figurations of Intermediality in
Contemporary Cinema) contains essays on various cases of intermedial
figurations that can be encountered in contemporary arthouse cinema. A
distinction has to be made between the intermediality of film, which
constitutes the inalienable specificity that defines film as a hybrid
medium from the onset of cinema, and the intermediality in film, which
15
refers to the ways in which film interacts with other media incorporated
in its medium, with the aim of exploring the media tensions and fusions
that arise from this interaction. In this use of the concept of intermediality,
Joachim Paech’s clarification offers useful guidance: “[i]ntermediality is
the introduction or repetition of a medium – as its form – ′in another‚
media form.’ This assumes that in the same representation different
forms can be observed which formulate, besides, different media
properties” (2011, 15). An intermedial analysis of film is aimed at
exploring the various forms in which the involved media leave their mark
on the medium film with their own media properties. The notion of
intermediality implies a dynamic category within which media
constellations are in continuous motion, being reconfigured by one
another, the cinematic medium becoming a playground of media
interactions and meaning emerging out of the tensions, collisions, on the
boundaries, in‐between. The examination of intricate media interplays
within film – and emphatically, with the medium of film – sheds light on
cinema as a complex formation that is to be conceived in the in‐
betweenness of media and art forms. The focus of the essays grouped in
this part has been directed on media entanglements in film that involve
not merely “’an inscription’ of one medium into another, but a more
complex ‘trans‐figuration,’ in the process of which one medium gets to
be transposed as a ‘figure’ into another, a figure of ‘in‐betweenness’ that
reflects on both the media involved in this intermedial process” (Pethő
2011, 78).
The methodological opportunities that open up in the in‐depth
analyses of intermedial figurations have proved particularly fruitful in:
examining intermedial moments in film, such as literary, painterly and
musical references or the reflexive use of archival footage as special sites in
the narrative which profoundly determine the reception and perception of
the moving images; localizing painterly anamorphosis, as a key to, but also
challenge of, the interpretation of the experimental feature film template;
16
identifying converging tendencies in different trends of contemporary

Central and Eastern European cinema, such as the utilization of tableaux
vivants and tableau compositions in magic realist and minimalist realist
representational modes; and ultimately, looking at the dancefilm practice
as a possibility for film to fathom the essence of its own mediality through
the medium specificities of dance and the other arts.
The essay entitled Performing the Unspeakable. Intermedial Events in
András Jeles’s Parallel Lives investigates intermedial figurations embedded
in the texture of András Jeles’s Parallel Lives (Senkiföldje, 1993). András
Jeles Hungarian experimental filmmaker formulates the paradox that a
particular medium can best express its own mediality through the
“foreign” material of other arts and media. The medial consonances and
dissonances transform the cinematic medium into a liminal space where
meaning as event can take shape. Jeles’s film is aimed at such event‐like
liminality in several respects: culturally, it turns towards a burdened site
of the still unprocessed past of the Hungarian society; thematically, it
addresses the topic of the Holocaust; and medially, it proposes to
artistically render the unrepresentable. The film appeals to the other arts,
incorporating a set of literary, painterly and musical allusions that
contrast a culturally aestheticized view of the child in pain with the
ultimate, inescapable and incommensurable reality.
The next chapter, entitled Anamorphosis as the Figuration of In‐
Betweenness in András Jeles’s Sinister Shadow, extends the examination of
the Hungarian experimental filmmaker’s oeuvre by looking at his recent
film, Sinister Shadow (A rossz árnyék, 2017), which carries out an
intermedial cross‐cutting by transposing the painterly figuration of
anamorphosis to the medium of film. By integrating Hans Holbein the
Younger’s The Ambassadors, together with its interpretive aura, within the
body of the film, Jeles applies the frame of painting to film, he devises an
anamorphic narrative in which this painterly figuration gains an
overarching signification, intended to effect a surplus potential that film
17
is capable of only through the other arts. Jeles resorts to techniques such
as masking the image, visual and sound collage, tableau and installation‐
type, stylized theatrical and painterly compositions in order to maintain
the anamorphic perspective, that is, a “continuous rupture” in the film’s
medial perception. In this way, he translates his vision of humanity into
an anamorphic way of storytelling: he creates an askew perspective from
which the filmic image emerges as a surreal stage in‐between the macabre
and the sublime, the unwatchable and the visually pleasurable.
The chapter entitled Magic Realism, Minimalist Realism and the
Figuration of the Tableau in Contemporary Hungarian and Romanian Cinema
surveys two modes of representation present in contemporary
Hungarian and Romanian cinema, namely magic realism and minimalist
realism, as two ways of rendering the “real” in the Central Eastern
European geocultural context. New Hungarian Film tends to display
narratives that share the features of what is generally assumed as being
magic realist, accompanied by a high degree of stylization, while New
Romanian Cinema is more attracted to creating austere, micro‐realistic
universes. The essay argues that albeit apparently being forking modes
of representation that traverse distinct routes, magic realism and
minimalist realism share a set of common elements and, what this study
especially focuses on, converge in the preference for the tableau aesthetic.
The chapter examines the role of tableau compositions and tableaux vivants
in representative films of the Young Hungarian Film and the Romanian
New Wave, namely Szabolcs Hajdu’s Bibliothèque Pascal (2010) and
Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills (După dealuri, 2012). An excessive use
of the tableau can be detected in both films, with many thematic
connections, in subtle interwovenness with female identiy and
corporeality performed as a site of traumatic experiences, upon which
(institutional, colonial) power relations are reinscribed. The tableau as a
figuration of intermediality performs the tension between the sensation
18
of the “real” and its reframed image, and proves especially suitable for
mediating between low‐key realism and highly stylized forms.
The closing chapter of the book, From Paragone to Symbiosis.
Sensations of In‐Betweenness in Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson, starts from
the assumption that Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson (1997), an homage to
the Argentine tango, situated in‐between autobiography and fiction,
creates multiple passages between art and life, the corporeal and the
spiritual, emotional involvement and professional detachment. The
romance story of the filmmaker Sally Potter and the dancer Pablo Verón is
also readable as an allegory of interart relations, a process evolving from
paragone (i.e. the contest of art forms) to symbiosis, the inseparable co‐
existence of arts. With a special focus on dancefilm strategies, the essay
examines the intermedial relationship between film and dance in their
cine‐choreographic entanglement. Across scenes overflowing with
passion, the film’s haptic imagery is reinforced by the black‐and‐white
photographic image and culminates in a tableau moment that foregrounds
the manifold sensations of in‐betweenness and feeling “other” of the
protagonists, caught in‐between languages, cultures, and arts.
Ultimately, what the essays gathered in this book wish to
demonstrate, is that the examined cinematic phenomena grouped around
the key notions of adaptation, remediation and intermediality, with manifold
interconnecting passageways and interpretive possibilities, reveal
nuanced perceptions of contemporary cinema, delineating spaces
“between‐the‐images” (Bellour 2012) and drawing attention to
multifarious sensations of in‐betweenness: between the (narrative/
poetic/ dramatic) text and the (moving) image, the stage and the screen,
documentary and fiction, the natural and the artificial, the “real” and the
(hyper)mediated, stasis and motion, life and art, cinema and non‐cinema.
19
Part I.
Strategies of Screen Adaptation
CHAPTER ONE
Medial Equivalences, Functional Analogies?
The Rhetoric of Adaptation
(Tom Jones, Orlando, The French Lieutenant’s Woman)
Fidelity or Adultery? Adaptation Theories1
The study of the relationship between film and literature is of

interest for, and benefits from, both literary and film theory. The research
of film often relies on the terminology of literary theory, just as literary
theory cannot ignore the considerations of film and media studies. As a
particular example, the study of literature as a medium is a recently
popular field of study in which the two discourses filter through each
other. The condition of survival of literary theory is, in an
interdisciplinary approach, to open it up towards the study of the visual
(Miller 2000).
A marginal, yet most extensive area of film theory deals with the
questions of adaptation. Literature, as an infinite source of themes and
narrative models, has always meant a prosperous inspiration for film and
literary adaptations have existed ever since film art was born. Cinema has
always been “literary” in the sense that it has attempted at telling stories,
borrowing the idea of plot and technique from literary narratives. The
1 This is a slightly modified version of the essay originally published in the volume
of studies Words and Images on the Screen: Language, Literature, Moving Pictures, ed.
Ágnes Pethő, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, 58–75.
Published with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
23
“literary” feature of the film has been abundantly documented by film

critics and historians who have pointed at the common roots of the two
media. On the other hand, film has defined itself by getting distanced
from literature, stressing the differences more than the similarities. In
several moments of film history, the denial of literature constituted the
most challenging starting point for filmmaking. The French New Wave
cinema is alienated from the tradition of the “literary” film, it turns
against the authority of the literary source by making use of subversive
techniques, in an attempt to liberate the film expression from under the
oppression of literature (Kline 1992).
Film theory offers a great variety of definitions, classifications and
appreciations related to adaptation. Similarly, film criticism offers a
whole range of metaphors related to the relationship between film and
literature. Robert Stam gathers the tropes with negative connotations
from the rhetoric of the conventional language of adaptation criticism.
Such are the moralizing terms “infidelity” and “betrayal,” “deformation”
suggesting aesthetic incongruity, “violation” having sexual connotations,
“vulgarization” implying degradation. He considers that the hostility to
adaptations can be traced back to several cultural reasons like the
historical seniority of literature, the tendency of comparing good
literature to weak films, the conception of the relationship between film
and literature in terms of fight for dominance, the frustration of the film,
the “anxiety of influence” in Harold Bloom’s terms and, last but not least,
the protestant iconophobia (Stam and Raengo 2004).
In what follows, let us survey some theoretical and critical
considerations around the term adaptation. André Bazin examines the
hierarchical relations between the film and the other art forms, par
excellence, literature. Having in view the films of a distinct artistic value,
he distinguishes two cases of adaptation: in the first case, the adaptation
uses the literary source as a “trade mark,” in the second case, the director
24
Part I. Strategies of Screen Adaptation
is inspired by the literary text, attempting to create a work of art of an

equal value, “translating” literature into film language (Bazin 1967b).
Béla Balázs (2010) relates the difficulties and problems of
adaptation to “the inner structure of film essence.” He reveals the
paradox that the literary texts that are highly visual represent the greatest
challenge for adaptation. He expresses this view – which will be the basis
of the semiotic approach – in a set of plastic metaphors: the camera
transilluminates the literary works as a Roentgen ray, and shows the
skeleton of the plot, which is no longer literature and not yet film, but the
content that is the essence of neither of the two (Balázs 2010).
In an essay written in the early period of film history, Boris
Eichenbaum analyses the relationship in question. He does not appreciate
literature on the stage, applying to it the rhetoric of loss: literature
becomes poorer, renounces many of its devices, as theatre deprives
literature of some kind of surplus. Nevertheless, literature turned into
film, conceived of as translation into film language, is a positive
phenomenon. Literature does not get materialized as in the theatre, its
presence in film acquires a floating quality, similar to that of a dream. As
such, film proves its raison d’être, activating “transmental” energies,
beyond reason. Here Eichenbaum formulates the concept of an aesthetic
of reception relying on biological grounds. The reception of the film is
entirely different from the process of reading, it rather resembles a kind
of inner speech. Further on, he argues that although film culture is many
times opposed to verbal culture, their meeting is a natural phenomenon.
Film is not subject to literature, but rivals it, and the contest between the
two is an unquestionable fact of culture. It is not only literature that is the
source of the film, but film can also constitute a literary source, hence the
temptation to approach literature from the angle of film and to consider
it a potential script, especially if the text bears film‐like features.
According to Eichenbaum, the film is not “silent,” the verbal dimension
25
is not exiled from it, as it gains a significant role in the inner speech of the
act of reception as well as in captions. The latter ones are not only
restricted to conveying information, they are important factors of
providing effect and nuancing meaning (the present essay will examine
the parodic potential of captions in Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones). He
speaks of the relationship between film and literature in terms of
legitimate/ illegitimate marriage, and within, fidelity/ infidelity. In this
marriage, the role of the husband is fulfilled by the film (Eichenbaum
1971, 582).
Contrary to this concept, Walter Benjamin (2008 [1935]) applies
the rhetoric of loss not to the theatre, but to film itself. The possibility of
reproducing a work of art is as old as art itself, however, in the period of
technical multiplication, other aspects of representation manifest
themselves, which, in the spirit of a negative teleology, lead to the
reconsideration of the classical term of art, to the alienation from artistic
tradition. In this respect, film (and within, adaptation) occupies a place
inferior to literature.
According to the extent to which the film preserves the
specificities of the literary text, Andrew Dudley distinguishes three
modes of relation: borrowing (relying on the authority and prestige of the
original text), intersection (reproducing essential features of the literary
source) and transformation (aiming at total fidelity to the “letter” and to
the “spirit” of the text). In Dudley’s terms, there is a “transcendent
relation” between any adaptational attempt and the original text, the
original sign, conceived of as either signified or referent: “Adaptations
claiming fidelity bear the original as a signified, whereas those inspired
by or derived from an earlier text stand in a relation of referring to the
original” (Dudley 1984, 96).
Semiotics examines the relation of the cinematic sign system to
another, a priori existing sign system, and operates with the term
transformation. If we consider the term of adaptation in its wider sense,
26
then every film – as re‐presentation – adapts an a priori concept, whereas

in the narrow sense a textual model constitutes the starting point. In this
approach, the task of adaptation is to reproduce the essence of the
original text, in order to meet the standards represented by the text. The
most problematic or, as it has often been argued, even impossible task for
adaptation is to find the stylistic equivalences, which “involves the
systematic replacement of verbal signifiers by cinematic signifiers”
(Dudley 1984, 101). While the materiality of literature differs from the
materiality of the film, at the level of the narrative they share common
grounds. Their relationship is described as code transfer, in the sense
that, though words and images belong to distinct sign systems, at a
certain level of abstraction they share common codes (narrative,
perceptual, referential, symbolic codes), which make the transformation,
the comparison possible and provide solid median links between the two
media (Cohen 1979). While the general features of the narrative can be
regarded as common to both, the visual imagery of the literary text and
montage in the film are specific to the medium (of course, this does not
mean that literature cannot use montage as a literary device, or film does
not have ways of rendering literary visuality). Due to the differences of
the two media, the task of adaptation is to find an aesthetic equivalent
appropriate to the literary texts.
Beyond the semiotic basis and terms like transformation or
translation, Marie‐Claire Ropars‐Wuilleumier (1990), inspired by
Barthes, Derrida and Lyotard, introduces the term “scripture” into the
examination of the relation in question, and argues that the film text
rewrites the original text and liberates its productivity; she probes the
new horizon of approach in a series of film “readings.” From a
hermeneutical viewpoint, the relationship of the film to the “prior” text
can be conceived of on the analogy of the hermeneutical circle, which
models understanding and interpretation: the film version, as a potential
(mis)interpretation, is based on the understanding of the prior text, which
27
is a circular process, the ulterior interpretation turns back to the moment

of understanding, altering the reading of the text itself. Dudley applies
the hermeneutical circle in terms of the dialectics of the part and the
whole: the film version, as conveying partial meaning, affiliates with the
literary text, which represents the whole, the totality of potential
interpretations (Dudley 1984, 97).
Recent approaches – having in view an integrated, interdisciplinary
treatment of questions of narratology and intermediality – dwell on the
term “relation” and propose various terms with further implications.
According to Gérard Genette’s typology, the relation between the literary
pretext and the film version belongs to the realm of hypertextuality. The
script inspired by the literary source is an “intermediary” text, bearing
close connections with the original text, being in an intertextual
relationship with the film. In this respect, the act of “cinematization”
creates an intertextual and also intermedial terrain, where the prolific
possibilities of interpretation gain ground. Joachim Paech (2000)
considers intermediality as medial transformation, and places adaptation
between the symbolic and material type of intermediality. The
relationship between the verbal and the visual is treated as an
intermediary existence, as association, simultaneity and dissemination,
which can be best grabbed in terms like palimpsest (Gérard Genette),
rhizome (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), or heterotopia (Michel
Foucault). On these grounds, it is worth reconsidering the matter of
“faithful adaptation” as well: “Instead of the question of a faithful
adaptation (which is, on the one hand, an unattainable ideal, as it is never
the text but rather the interpretation that is ′adapted,’ and on the other
hand, as an ideal it is also meaningless, as why should the literary
experience be doubled), therefore it is more interesting to describe the
mutually controlling motions of the dual consciousness [film and
literature], and to point out the way the literary elements (those that can
be traced back to literary sources) become part of the totality of the
28
intertextual network. From a non‐normative point of view, the idea is not

that we should weigh and appreciate the extent to which the original text
′penetrates’ through the filter of the film texture and the extent to which
literature as ′source’ can ′nourish’ and serve the film” (Pethő 2003, 105;
translated by me, J. P.).
Adapting (to) the Impossible.

Equivalents of the “Specifically Literary”
From Dudley’s typology of the modes of adaptation, we are

hereby interested in what he calls intersecting, more precisely, in films
which foreground the adaptation process itself. Such films have long
been in the focus of research; however, some aspects of “the genre of self‐
consciousness” (Stam 1992) are worth reconsidering in the limelight of
the relationship between narrativity and reflexivity. Such aspects can be
revealed through the investigation of adaptations of three canonical
literary texts and investigating the possibilities of film in rendering
metafiction and textual reflexivity spanning over literary‐historical
periods that encompass the aesthetics of the “premodern” (Henry
Fielding’s Tom Jones), the “modern” (Virginia Woolf’s Orlando) and the
“postmodern” (John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman)
respectively. Reflexive and intermedial adaptations seek cinematic
equivalences for literary reflexivity, and rely on medial relations. The
texts belonging to “the other tradition” represented by a series of authors
like Fielding, Sterne, Gide, Queneau, Borges, Nabokov and Fowles (Stam
1992), to that of “partial magic” (Alter 1975), all have a parodic and anti‐
illusionistic character, they challenge dominant literary discourses –
Neoclassicist, Modernist as well as Victorian ones respectively –, and
their rhetoric of textual pleasure represents an “impossible mission” for
any adaptational attempt to find equivalences of literary reflexivity at the
level of form, content and style. The starting point for discussion is
29
whether they can be approached from a non‐normative viewpoint stated

above, beyond their being considered exemplary – or not – in the
discourse around fidelity. I attempt to grasp the potential of “cross‐
fertilization” between the two media, the aspects of interrelatedness
between the visual and verbal rhetoric.
Medial Analogies. Henry Fielding/ Tony Richardson: Tom Jones
Stam considers Fielding’s novels as illustrative examples of the

self‐conscious mode of writing. The narrator of Tom Jones (Tony
Richardson, 1963) challenges reading experience by interrupting the
story from time to time in order to reflect on the act of novel writing. The
contract of fiction is repeatedly and systematically broken by the anti‐
illusionist narratorial commentary. Due to the shortcomings of literary
theory contemporary to him, Fielding ingeniously defines the novel as a
“comic epic poem in prose.” This eclectic, humorous rather than scientific
term suggests that the genre of the novel, conceived of as a hybrid form,
gains a parodic quality through the interaction of the genres which it is
supposed to involve. Stam draws attention to a parallel phenomenon in
literary and film history: not long after the establishment of the English
novel, its parody was also born (see the parody of Samuel Richardson’s
sentimental epistolary novel, Pamela, entitled Shamela by Fielding), in the
same way as early film production develops, already in the 1920s, the
genre of comedy. He points out several parallel features of Fielding’s
burlesque and Buster Keaton’s films. Interestingly, it is the very
adaptation of Tom Jones that reminds of this analogy by imitating the
tradition of silent cinema. The analogy is valid: the 18th‐century novel, as
an early film supplement, has many features that bear resemblance to the
later art form.
Both the text and the film exploit the anti‐mimetic effect of titles,
subtitles, chapters and captions. In Joseph Andrews, Fielding compares the
30
spaces between the books of the novel to a pub where one can rest along
with a drink, and compares the division of the books into chapters to a
butcher’s work. At the beginning of Tom Jones, the narrator invites the
reader to a banquet and offers the novel as a menu, and the chapters as
meals. In the early period of film history, the silent cinema also relies on
the anti‐illusionist and humorous effects of captions.
The narrative peculiarities, self‐reflective features of the novel
constituted a challenge for the “Angry Young Men” of the British theatre
(besides John Osborne, the script writer and Tony Richardson, the
director, Albert Finney, the actor playing the main part also directed films
occasionally in the sixties), however, in the selection of material they were
also motivated by the possibility of social criticism and by the act of
revolt. Tom Jones is a foundling, an outcast of society; his viewpoint is a
perfect angle for ridiculing contemporary English society. The film is an
artistic manifesto of the young generation of post‐war Britain.
Contemporary critics appreciate the adaptation of Tom Jones, they
assign its success to the fact that it managed to find an analogous
rhetorical technique, which adequately renders the spirit of the text.
Perhaps the main difficulty of adapting this text lies in differences of
length. The film uses various techniques of fitting the plot and subplots,
digressions and narratorial comments of the voluminous 18th‐century
novel, consisting of three parts and eighteen books, into the limits of two
hours. According to the picaresque tradition, the story is presented in an
eventful, colourful and humorous way, while in the introductory
chapters of the “books” – which can also be read as distinct essays –
Fielding is engaged in long discourses on the theory of the novel. Before
turning to the novel, Fielding used to be known as a playwright, hence
the great amount of elements proving the author’s dramatic craft
(episodic structure, quick scenes, witty dialogues, etc.). The creators of
the film are also men of the theatre, who understand the language of the
stage; still, the novel is crowded with episodes and characters that the
31
film cannot cope with, given the limits of the medium. Besides, the
differences of perception between the verbal description and visual
presentation of the scenes should also be taken account of. Whereas in
prose the scenes and the details of the plot unfold in the reader’s lingering
upon them and through his/ her imaginative contribution, in the case of
the film the viewer does not have much time to record and turn back to
many of the elements, as the quick pace of the film does not make it
possible (Chatman 1981).
Richardson’s film seems to meet the difficulties, and to turn the
evident obstacles to its advantage. It adjusts the differences of length by
means of devices which I will call the figures of adaptation: by shortening
the sjuzet, transcribing some of its elements, condensation and ellipsis.
The film ignores the elements that are not essential to the story, and
changes them for the sake of a dynamic unfolding of the plot and for the
sake of humour. It renounces total fidelity to the original story. The figure
of condensation is applied when adapting descriptive parts of the novel
to film. Fielding’s novel gives a panoramic view of the 18th‐century
English society; long descriptions are one means of characterization. In
the episode of hanging, for instance, the film offers a description of the
poor from London in a much more economical way, by foregrounding
their portraits. The figure of ellipsis is a source of humour specific of the
film. Squire Allworthy, returning home, gets out of his carriage, and after
the servants greet him, a caption follows: “after dinner,” but the viewer
does not find out what has happened in the meantime; or, in a following
scene, Squire Allworthy enters the room in travel clothes, and
immediately after it he comes out in nightclothes.
Before the main title appears, we can see overacted scenes in the
burlesque style of the silent cinema, which are about how the baby Tom
was found in Allworthy’s bed and how he was adopted by the squire.
The imitation of the silent movie proves to be an original solution and
fulfils several functions. Here again we meet the figure of condensation:
32
the silent episode concentrates about two chapters of the story, in an

economical way, it starts the action in medias res, introducing the comic
element from the very beginning; the allusion to the early film history
reminds the viewer that Fielding’s novel had also been written at the
dawn of the genre (this may be called medial analogy). The parallel with
the silent movie is an excellent choice, Fielding’s style and humour may
well be related to that of silent cinema.
By evoking the silent cinema, Richardson’s film plays off the
expectations of the viewers. The conventional function of the first scenes is
for the viewer to get to know the characters, the time and place. The quick
scenes of the silent film do not make this possible, the characters are not
presented in detail, the situations are not clear enough. The ellipsis makes
the pace of the scenes even quicker. In the same way, the relationship
between the images and the texts of the captions are also a source of
humour: the caption is redundant, we can also read what the image makes
obvious, e.g. in the scene in which Mrs. Wilkins is shocked to discover
Squire Allworthy in nightclothes, it can be read on the caption: “Ohhh!” –
though her gestures and mimics well express her reaction. When the baby
is found in the bed, we can see the baby on the image, and then we read:
“a child”; the next caption expresses the loud outburst with capital letters:
“ABANDONED!” After the title of the film appears and the film turns into
a sound film, the pantomime‐like acting goes on.
The function of the omniscient narrator in the text is taken over by
an ironical voice‐over. The protagonist looks into the camera from time
to time, winking with a conspiratorial smile or, being concerned with
what the camera sees, reaches out of the shell of fiction and hangs his hat
onto the camera [Fig. 1.1]. In this way, Tom, acted by Albert Finney, steps
out of the story and assumes an ironical, distancing attitude. In these
gestures a metaleptic shift takes place, the distance between the narrated
time and time of narration is dissolved, the viewer is reminded of the film
construct, just as the reader is initiated into the secrets of novel writing.
33
As a whole, the success of adaptation lies in its capacity to create a

consistent medial analogy of the literary source, and, on the other hand,
in its freedom of subverting artistic conventions in a rebellious,
nonconformist way.
Gender, Identity, (Film) Narrative.

Virginia Woolf/ Sally Potter: Orlando
Virginia Woolf’s art of writing is a “room of one’s own” in the

history of modernist literature: her essays and novels require a special
approach and interpretation strategy, and not even the act of re‐reading
can explore to the full the “otherness” of her texts. Woolf’s texts
deconstruct the dominant, (fal)logocentric discourse, undermine the
schemes of interpretation that rely on binary oppositions and make any
kind of totalizing approach impossible. Because of its unsettling
otherness, Orlando has often been ignored by interpreters. On the other
hand, various approaches and interpretive trends consider it a challenge
to deal with this text, according to which Orlando is the landmark of
feminist discourse (Moi 1991, Knopp 1992), the discourse of desire on a
psychoanalitic basis (Kalmár 1997); from the point of view of subject
theories, the issue of identity, the symbolism of androgynity, the
relationship between gender and personality, between time – as
permanence vs. change – and identity, the woman as the trope of human
psyche are the most widely treated themes of the novel (Minow‐Pinkey
1987). Contemporary interpretations of the novel point out the
subversion of social‐cultural identity based on the binary opposition of
the sexes in the subversive linguistic, rhetorical games of the text.
Sally Potter’s screen adaptation of Orlando (1992) has often been
interpreted as a “postmodern turn”: it reads the text, the game of gender
and social role taking place in an ever changing social‐cultural
34
environment, within a fictitious, parodic biography, comprising a life

span from the Elizabethan Age to the present time of the act of writing
the novel, namely 1928, in view of the postmodern crisis of identity, the
instability of identity. As such, the film offers a (re)/ deconstruction of the
Woolfian text (Ferriss and Waites 1999). Many interpreters refer to the
postmodern features of the Woolfian text itself (e.g. the presence of a
radically self‐conscious narrator, the contradictory games of the rhetoric
of the text or the narrator’s irony).
The stream of consciousness narrative technique is often brought
into relation with film art, both gaining ground at the beginning of the
20th century. In Virginia Woolf’s novels, the visual aspect plays a
prominent role, the verbal expression of the activity of the mind, of the
overwhelming power of impressions, perceptions and emotions is
carried out with the help of narrative methods borrowed from the
cinema. The Woolfian texts create a series of images projected onto the
living canvas of consciousness (Nathan 1971, 622). Woolf experiments
with this technique, with its possibilities and limitations. She studies the
phenomenology of cognition in almost all of her writings. In this way, the
film version of Orlando by Sally Potter endeavours to adequately render
the visuality of the text. One way of achieving this is by making use of
the pompousness and great variety of clothes functioning as signifiers of
different ages, genders and social roles, in this respect, the film can be
“read” as an imitation/ parody of costume films. The exaggerated
presence of the fashions of different ages ridicules the interrelatedness of
gender and clothing. In one episode of the film, the viewer can see
Orlando as a woman, in fashionable female clothes typical of the 18th
century, surrounded by poets. The poets take the clothes for the identity,
and (dis)regard the woman as “having no character at all” and as being
merely “a beautiful romantic animal who should be adorned.” On the
analogy of the relationship between clothes and personality, the novel as
35
well as its adaptation subvert the relation between identity and gender:
just as one changes his/ her clothes, s/ he may also change sex, and there
is a figurative relation between the two (clothes as signifiers of gender/
gender as the trope of identity).
The screen adaptation of Orlando cannot ignore the subversive
games of the text, the narratorial interventions, and the irony of narration
as long as it is aimed at some degree of “fidelity.” The ambivalence of the
sexes, the destruction of binary oppositions man/ woman, essence/
appearance becomes evident already from the very beginning of the
novel: “He – for there could be no doubt about his sex, though the fashion
of the time did something to disguise it – was in the act of slicing at the
head of a Moor which swung from the rafters” (Woolf 1998, 9). The
argumentation of the text does not support the narrator’s statement; on
the contrary, it makes it doubtful. It displaces the evidence by stating:
“there could be no doubt about his sex,” referring to the “fashion of the
time,” alienating in this way the personal pronoun “he,” used in an initial,
emphatic position, from its meaning, inscribing a gap, a distance between
the signifier and the signified. The text becomes a semiotic field in which
the meaning of the words becomes floating, far from being evident. Thus
the text deconstructs gender identity from the very start. The gesture of
male bravado2 as an unquestionable evidence of the sex foreshadows the
parodic quality of the text.
The game of making a statement and immediately questioning its
meaning is transposed to the film by disrupting the conventional position
of viewing. In the opening episode, the voice‐over reads the slightly
altered words of the novel: “There can be no doubt about his sex – despite
the feminine appearance that every young man of the time aspires to […].
2 The allusion to “the head of a Moor” can be interpreted as the victory over death
of Orlando’s forefathers if we read the word Moor as the distorted version of the
Latin “mors” – meaning ‘death’ –, and as such, on a symbolic level it foreshadows
Orlando’s immortality.
36
But when he” – and here Orlando, while being engaged, not in the act of
exercising his fighting skills, but instead, in the act of writing his poem,
looks into the camera and adds: “that is, I,” establishing a direct contact
with the viewer, becoming the narrator of his own story [Fig. 1.2]. This
interpolated moment can be regarded as a metafictional gesture through
which the issue of gender and identity is transcribed onto the level of
narrated identity, that is, into an issue of film narrative. The film renders
the instability of gender identity as the instability of narrative identity.
The main hero(ine) repeats the gesture of looking into the camera, thus
breaking the fourth wall through direct address (cf. Brown 2012) several
times throughout the film, commenting on the events either by an
expressive look or by verbal observations, also reflecting in this way on
the film construct itself.
In the episode in which Orlando appears as Queen Elizabeth’s
favourite, and the queen promises him estates on condition that he never
grows old, Orlando looks into the camera again and remarks: “a very
interesting person indeed.” The remark may refer not only to the queer,
charitable old queen, but, beyond the story, also to the actress, better said,
actor embodying her: to the extravagant homosexual transvestite
Quentin Crisp, who fully deserves this comment as a real person. The
double – intradiegetic and extradiegetic – reference doubles the
perception of the narrative layers of the film as well. When Orlando
wakes up from the long sleep, the look into the camera is not only a sign
of self‐discovery as a woman (in the mirror), but also a comment on the
relationship between sex and identity, a metanarrative moment: “Same
person; no difference at all. Just a different sex.”
Orlando switches his/ her roles in a quick pace, just as the child
plays the game of imaginary identifications in the Lacanian sense, from
aristocrat into a poet, from ambassador into a gypsy, from man into a
woman. In the same way, the film switches the clothes and ages in a quick
37
pace. The leaps in time, the stages of the fictitious biography are marked
by captions, which divide the film narrative into parts similar to chapters
in a book.
The story of the novel ends exactly on October 11, 1928, date which
marks the melting of narrated time and time of narration. The film
extends narrated time until the present time of making the film. The
opening and ending scenes evoke the same imagery, but with a
significant alteration: in the opening scene we can see Orlando as a reader
first, then as a poet with a pen in his hand, struggling with writing his
poem, whereas in the final scene we witness Orlando’s daughter
handling a handy camera. Orlando once again looks into the camera and
sums up her experiences: “At last I’m free, neither a woman, nor a man;
we are joined, we are one on earth and in outer space.” The move from
the pen to the handy camera alludes to a paradigmatic change from the
verbal to the visual; the amateur use of the camera counterpoints the
artistry of the film. Orlando’s last word, “Look,” repeatedly draws the
viewer’s attention to the film texture.
The gaze is of central importance in the film. The direct
relationship between the cast and the viewer – a recurrent element from
burlesque to commerce films, as a potential source of comic – can be
interpreted in several ways. Orlando, just as the actor on the Elizabethan
stage, steps out of his/ her role, and addresses the audience. His/ her
remarks, placed in key moments of the unfolding of events, mark not
only the character’s irony, but also indicate an ironical distance from the
story, undermining the viewer’s position. Orlando, the (female) object of
the gaze, supposed to be a twofold victim of scopofilic enjoyment, looks
back, becomes a viewer herself, displacing the undisturbed position of
conventional film perception. The simultaneous presence of the voice‐
over as well as of the homodiegetic hero(ine) – acting and narrating his/
her story in parallel – creates a temporal/ ontological rupture in the course
38
of narration. In this way, the screen adaptation recognizes the problem of

identity as the problem of (film) narration, questioning the possibility of
narrating a life story as a frame which constructs identity.
Metafiction and Allegory. John Fowles/ Karel Reisz:

The French Lieutenant’s Woman
John Fowles’ novel has become a paradigmatic work ever since its
publication in 1969. Equally successful in criticism and with the public, it
has gained its distinguished place within the English literary canon by its
autonomy, self‐reflexivity, inventive narrative and postmodern
character. The popularity and recognition of the novel was largely
enhanced by the film version created more than a decade after the
publication of the novel, suggested by Fowles himself to the director and
script writer of the film.
Tamás Bényei considers the novel as an “experimental text prone
to compromise,” which easily fits into the English tradition of novel
writing while engaging into a productive dialogue with it, and at the
same time finds its place within the postmodern phenomena of
contemporary literature, in the company of texts by Muriel Spark and
Anthony Burgess (Bényei 1993, 91). The works of theorists dealing with
the relationship between postmodernism and metafiction are crucial to
the reception history of the novel. Fowles’ novel is recurrently referred to
in the critical discourse mainly represented by Linda Hutcheon (1988),
Brian McHale (1987), Hilary Lawson (1985) and Patricia Waugh (1984).
In Linda Hutcheon’s words, Fowles’ novel employs the devices of
“historiographic metafiction,” experimenting with the modes of relating
to a past narrative. The self‐conscious, self‐interpretive novel renders
problematic the narrative display itself: it celebrates fiction and at the
same time it questions the authenticity of the ways of fictional
39
representation, the possibility to separate reality from fiction, and creates

a playful, parodic way of writing. The postmodern author represents
himself in the process of creation, parodies the discourse of the 19th‐
century realist novel by applying the technique of the omniscient
narrator, thus undermining the narrator’s authority.
The text is a “mimicry” of the Victorian novel, complemented with
a metacommentary referring to Victorian fiction, social historical
background and mentality (in other words, Fowles carefully “spoils” the
perfect imitation). The narrator’s metatext is characterized by the mentality
and reflections of the 1960s, projected a hundred years back into Victorian
England. Fowles hyperbolically exaggerates the time span between time of
narration and narrated time; the narrator’s discourse contains a great
number of – creative – anachronisms, 20th‐century allusions. The narrator
compares the bulwark on the shore to a Henry Moore statue; draws
attention to the differences between Victorian narration and modern
discourse; describes the landscape in such a manner that it is closely
reminiscent of an aerial view; reminds the reader of the lack of cinema and
television in connection with a Victorian evening spent at home, and
mentions psychoanalysis and Freud’s name when presenting the
characters’ psychological problems. According to Brian McHale (1987), the
anachronisms of narration are clearly separated from the narrated story;
the ontological difference, that is, the discontinuity of the two narrative
levels is maintained throughout the novel.
The film adaptation of the novel (The French Lieutenant’s Woman,
Karel Reisz, 1981) “translates” the commentary on Victorian society and
the self‐reflexive text into a different medium, creating thus a
metafictional allegory. The film emphatically renounces fidelity to the
novel inasmuch as it does not attempt to directly transpose the narrative
technique of the novel to the film. Fowles’ narrator has no counterpart in
the film, the story in the motion picture contains no writer reflecting upon
writing, nor a film director reflecting upon directing. Instead, Reisz
40
chooses the option of “functional correspondence,” that is, he attempts to

represent the ontological differences in the novel by a similarly
differentiated structure, that of the “film‐within‐the‐film.” He thus
directs the attention towards the creative process – in this case not the
novel writing, but the shooting of the adaptation. A slight alteration is
one example of this functional correspondence: in the book Sarah writes
a diary, in the film she paints her self‐portrait. According to the director,
this alteration, the search for a visual correspondence takes place for the
sake of a closer likeness to film, while the character’s self‐quest, her desire
for self‐interpretation is well expressed in both cases.
The parallels, connections, and mutual reflections between the
Victorian and the modern love story are meant to replace the literary
metanarrative. The metatextual level of the novel is complemented in the
film with a Pirandellian motif, the question of the relationship between
the actor and his role: while commenting on and interpreting their roles,
the 20th‐century actors playing the characters of John Fowles’ novel also
become redefined by them, the role they play profoundly affecting their
own life stories as well. At the same time, the film creates a multiply
layered reflexive space through direct transitions from the field of
“fiction” to that of “reality,” superimposed narrative layers, episodes,
events, metaleptic gestures, relations simultaneously pertaining to the
“reality” of the framework story and the embedded story level within the
film, a space in which the stable meanings of “reality” and “fiction”
become just as problematic as in the narrator’s elusive comments in the
novel. The spectator finally finds that the two stories merge, they cannot
be separated any longer, just as the roles (Sarah/ Anna, Charles/ Mike)
become ambiguous, as, for instance, Anna looking into the mirror
dressed in Sarah’s costume appears in both “roles” at the same time [Fig.
1.3]. When Anna leaves on the last shooting, Mike calls her Sarah. The
functional correspondence of the novel’s narrative strategy, the recursive,
embedded film‐within‐the‐film structure multiplies the references, the
links between the two stories.
41
The novel offers alternative endings, forcing the reader into the
trap of impossible choices, encoding the endlessness of interpretation
into the text as an open work of art. The characters’ dialogue projects
forth the double ending of the adaptation. To the question of which
ending he chooses, Mike answers that in fact he chooses both. The film‐
within‐the‐film ends happily according to Victorian conventions, the
hero and heroine, Charles and Sarah are reconciled, and their boat drifts
away peacefully in the finale, while at the level of the framework story
the hero, Mike, loses the heroine, Anna. However, the film doesn’t end
with the episode belonging to the level of the shooting, but with the one
of the Victorian story. Thus, the embedded story advances into a frame
story, and this leaves the spectator in a state of incertitude. In this way,
the film narrative dissolves the boundaries between the various narrative
levels, and results in an ambiguous ending similar to the novel’s open
ending.
Conclusion
The analysis of reflexive adaptations offers promising possibilities

of interpretation, as this type of screen adaptation engages into a fruitful
dialogue with the literary narrative and presents various strategies of
estrangement from the conventions of classical film narration. The
discussed reflexive adaptations make use of the tradition of the silent
cinema (Tom Jones), subvert narrative and identity by the displacement of
the gaze (Tom Jones, Orlando), or rely on the technique of film‐within‐the‐
film, creating a metafictional allegory (The French Lieutenant’s Woman).
The examined adaptations are of experimental character, just as their
literary sources. They work against creating a transparent structure,
laying bare the act of creation and rendering the film apparatus visible –
The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a classic example in this respect. The
selected films can be regarded as instances of fictional and/ or medial
42
metalepsis. Gérard Genette (2006) extends the use of the term – originally
belonging to rhetoric – to the field of narratology, and applies it to all the
cases where there is a rupture, an ontological shift between the diegetic
and metadiegetic level, where a cross‐border violation of the narrative
boundaries takes place. He speaks of the scandal or miracle of metalepsis,
regarding it as a show or trick of fiction. Undermining the course of the
narrative, the intentional breach of the contract of fiction, the ways of
interpolation are recurrent modes of metalepsis, from burlesque to
experimentalism. At the same time, metalepsis is the trope of reception,
as the activity of the reader/ viewer conforms to this rupture and
experiences its disturbing strangeness. The parallel examination of the
rhetoric and narrative of the literary text and its screen adaptation
outlines further possibilities of comparative analysis, attesting to the
fruitful reciprocity between the verbal and visual domains.
List of Figures
Figure 1.1. Looking into the camera.

Metaleptic gestures of the protagonist in Tom Jones (Tony Richardson, 1963).
43
Figure 1.2. Direct address in Orlando (Sally Potter, 1992).
Figure 1.3. Transgressing narrative boundaries: Anna looking into the mirror
dressed in Sarah’s costume. The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Karel Reisz, 1981).
44
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“You’d rather the subject would be dress, I fancy,” Mrs. Hopkins
remarked, with a little severity.
“To be sure I would,” Lettice laughed, as she walked off. “Sometimes
I feel as if I must be saucy to Aunt Martha,” she said to her cousin.
“Tell me about Rhoda, Cousin Joe. Is she pretty? What does she
look like?”
“She is fair, with light hair and blue eyes. She is rather slight, and is
quiet in her manner. She does not talk very much unless she is
deeply interested, and then she is very earnest.”
“Then there will be a chance for my chatter,” returned Lettice, the
dimples showing around her rosy mouth. “Does she wear her hair in
curls, as I do, Cousin Joe?”
“No, she wears it quite plainly.”
“And is she tall?”
“Yes, rather so.”
“Taller than I?”
“Yes; you are not above what I should call medium height.”
“I may grow.”
“True; there is time for that.”
“Should you like me better then?” Lettice gave a side glance, and
then dropped her curly black lashes over her big blue eyes.
Her cousin laughed. “You would coquet even with me, I verily
believe; with me, who am as good as married.”
The violet eyes opened wide. “I am not trying to at all. Would I
coquet with my blood cousin, who, moreover, is a double cousin?”
“Perhaps not, if you could help it; but you do coquet even with Pat
Flynn.”
“Now, Cousin Joe, you are trying to tease me.”
“And with Mrs. Flynn,” Joe continued, “and your father and your
brothers.”
“My brothers—That reminds me, Cousin Joe, that if there is going to
be a war, I suppose they will want to fight too. Alas! I’ve a mind to
turn Yankee and cry down war.”
“And let Patrick go unavenged, after all the sweet looks you have
cast on him and the honeyed words to his mother?”
“Quit your nonsense, sir. You know I would never give soft glances to
a common sailor.”
“Thank you, and what am I?”
“No common sailor, but an uncommonly pert young gentleman. You
may walk to Julia Gittings’s with me, and there leave me; I’ll warrant
her brother will see me home.”
“I warrant he will if I give him a chance, but I’ve no notion of
deserting you, Cousin Lettice. You asked me to walk with you, and I’ll
complete my part of the contract.”
Lettice gave him a soft little dab with her white fingers, and another
moment brought them to a standstill before one of the comfortable
houses fronting the square below their own home. They found Miss
Julia surrounded by a bevy of young gentlemen in short-waisted
coats, and by as many young ladies in as short-waisted gowns.
“Law, Lettice, is it you?” cried Julia. “Have you heard the news? They
say we’ll surely have war. Won’t it be exciting! Howdy, Mr. Joe. Come
sit here and tell me of your exploits. Mr. Emery has just been trying
to fool us by relating a story of your being overhauled by the British.”
“It is true. Isn’t it, Joe?” spoke up one of the young men.
“True enough, as three of my boys have sad reason to know,” Joe
replied. And then again must an account of his experiences be
given, amid soft ejaculations from the girls and more emphatic ones
from the young men. It was not a specially new theme, but one that
had not come home to them before, and not a youth that did not walk
away toward his home that night with a determination to avenge the
outrage at the first opportunity. The next day came the news that war
was declared.
CHAPTER II.
The Work of a Mob.
Within the week Rhoda Kendall arrived with her father from Boston.
As her Cousin Joe had described her, Lettice was not surprised to
meet a quiet, reserved girl. By the side of Lettice’s dark hair, pink
and white complexion, and deep blue eyes, Rhoda’s coloring
seemed very neutral, yet the New England girl was by no means as
supine as her appearance would indicate, as Lettice soon found out;
for before twenty-four hours were over she was arguing with her new
acquaintance in a crisp, decided manner, and was so well-informed,
so clever with facts and dates, that Lettice retired from the field sadly
worsted, but with the fire of an ambitious resolve kindled within her.
“She made me feel about two inches high,” she told her father, “and I
appeared a perfect ignoramus. Why don’t I know all those things
about politics and history, father?”
“Go along, child,” he replied. “Deliver me from a clever woman!
Learn to be a good housewife, and be pretty and amiable, and you’ll
do.”
“No, but I’ll not do,” Lettice persisted. “I am not going to let that
Boston girl make me feel as small as a mouse, and I don’t mean to
sit as mum as an owl while she entertains the gentlemen with her
knowledge of affairs. She’ll be having them all desert our side yet.”
Her father laughed. “That’s the way the crow flies, is it? My little lass
is like to be jealous, and she’ll have no one stealing her swains from
her. I see. Well, my love, what do you want to know?”
“I want to know why we shouldn’t have war. When I listen to Rhoda,
she fairly persuades me that we would be a blundering, senseless
lot, to war with a great nation like England. She has such a big navy,
and we have none to speak of, Rhoda says, and she laughs when I
say we won’t let ourselves be beaten. We will not, will we, father?”
“No, we will not,” he emphasized; “and as for our navy, we have not
a bad record. Their ships can sail no faster and are no better
manned than ours.”
“I’d like to see any one manage a vessel better than you or Uncle
Tom, and even Brother William or Brother James, and Cousin Tom
can do anything with one of our clippers. Why, they are as much at
home on the water as on the land.”
“To be sure. There are no better seamen anywhere than America
can produce, and we can show fight. At all events, daughter, we do
not mean to be bullied, and though New England has little mind to
help us, we’ll make our fight on righteous grounds of complaint.”
“But won’t our trade be spoiled? Rhoda says so.”
“You let me talk to Rhoda,” said Mr. Hopkins, rising, “and leave
politics alone, little one. Run along and help your aunt.”
“She doesn’t want any help, and she doesn’t like me to be in the
kitchen. Father, dear, when shall I be old enough to keep house for
you, and have Aunt Dorky, and Lutie, and all of them for our
servants?”
He put his arm around her caressingly. “We cannot think of such
things till this war matter is settled, my pet. I must be on hand to
serve if need be, and I couldn’t leave my little girl alone, you know.”
“I wish I could fight,” said Lettice, solemnly.
Her father smiled. “Pray heaven that you’ll never see fight,” he said.
But Lettice was soon to see the first effects of war, for the following
evening Rhoda’s father came in and pulled a paper out of his pocket
as he sat down to the table. “What do you think of this, Tom?” he
said. “There’s a level-headed man for you!” and he read: “We mean
to use every constitutional argument and every legal means to
render as odious and suspicious to the American people, as they
deserve to be, the patrons and contrivers of this highly impolitic and
destructive war, in the full persuasion that we shall be supported and
ultimately applauded by nine-tenths of our countrymen, and that our
silence would be treason to them.”
“What do I think of that?” said Mr. Hopkins, “I think that Mr. Hanson is
laying up trouble for himself, for I suppose that is the Federal
Republican you have there.”
“It is, and I fully agree with Mr. Hanson, if he is the editor.”
“You of Massachusetts may, but we of Maryland do not,” returned Mr.
Hopkins, with some heat; “and Mr. Hanson will find out to his cost
that he cannot disseminate such a publication without endangering
himself and his property.”
Sure enough, on the following Monday evening a party of indignant
citizens destroyed the type, presses, paper, etc., of the Federal
Republican, and razed the house to its foundations, following out Mr.
Hopkins’s predictions.
“Outrageous!” cried Rhoda, when she heard the reports. “What a
lawless set you are here.”
“Almost as much so as you were up in Boston some forty years ago,”
retorted her Cousin Joe, lazily, at which Rhoda’s pale blue eyes
flashed, and she set her lips defiantly.
“You are talking nonsense!” she said. “That was for our liberty, and
this is but the furthering an unnecessary conflict which will ruin the
country our fathers so bravely fought for.”
“And for which our fathers will bravely fight again, won’t they, Cousin
Joe?” Lettice broke in. “Mine will, I know, although I don’t suppose
yours will, Rhoda.”
“Sh! Sh!” cried Mrs. Hopkins. “Don’t quarrel, children. I hoped you
two girls would be good friends, but you are forever sparring. You
are not very polite, Lettice. You’ll be sending Rhoda home with a
poor opinion of Southern hospitality.”
This touched Lettice to the quick. She looked up archly from under
her long lashes. “Then I’ll be good, Rhoda,” she said. “Come, we’ll
go to market for aunt. I want you to see our Marsh market. Strangers
think it is a real pretty one.” And the two girls departed, Lettice with
basket on arm, curls dancing, and step light; Rhoda with a deep
consciousness of the proprieties, giving not so much as a side
glance to the young blades who eyed them admiringly as they
passed down Market Street. But Lettice dimpled and smiled as this
or that acquaintance doffed his hat, so that presently Rhoda said
sarcastically, “It is plain to see why you like to come to market,
Lettice.”
“And why?” asked Lettice, opening her eyes.
“Because of the many pretty bows you receive.”
Lettice gave her head a little toss, and then asked, a trifle wickedly,
“Is it then a new experience to you to count on receiving a bow from
a gentleman?”
“No,” returned Rhoda, somewhat nettled; “but from so many.”
“Oh, so many; then you girls in Boston cannot account your
acquaintances by the dozen.”
“We don’t want to,” returned Rhoda, shortly. “We are not so lavish of
our smiles as to bestow them upon every masculine we meet.”
“It is plain to see why you like to come to market.”
“That’s where you lose a great deal,” replied Lettice, suavely. “Now,
I’ve been taught to be sweetly polite to everybody, and my father
would bow as courteously to Mrs. Flynn as to Mrs. Dolly Madison,
and so would my brothers.”
“You have two brothers, I believe,” said Rhoda, changing the subject.
“Yes; one has not been long married and lives at our old home in
eastern Maryland.”
“A farm?”
“A tobacco plantation, although we raise other crops. My younger
brother, James, lives there, too.”
“And how old is he?”
“Old enough to be a very fitting beau for you,” laughed Lettice.
Rhoda frowned, to Lettice’s delight. “Why don’t you say, Such
frivolity! that is what Aunt Martha always says when I mention beaux.
One would suppose it a wicked thing to marry or to receive a
gentleman’s attention. I wonder how Aunt Martha ever brought
herself to the point of becoming Uncle Tom’s second wife; but I
believe she says he carried her by storm, and she was surprised into
saying yes. How do the young men carry on such things up your
way, Rhoda? Do they sit and tweedle their thumbs and cast sheep’s
eyes at you, as some of our country bumpkins do? or do they make
love to the mother, as I have heard is the custom in some places?”
“Nonsense, Lettice, how your thoughts do run on such things! Is that
the market?”
“Yes, and now you will see as fine a display as you could wish.”
A moment after Lettice had become the careful housewife, selecting
her various articles with great judgment, tasting butter, scrutinizing
strawberries to be sure their caps were fresh and green, lifting with
delicate finger the gills of a fish to see if they were properly red, and
quite surprising Rhoda by her knowledge of and interest in articles of
food.
“One would suppose you were the housekeeper,” she said to Lettice.
“How did you learn all those things?”
“My mother taught me some, and our old cook others. My mother
considered certain matters of housekeeping the first for a girl to
learn, and I hope to keep house for my father in another year, if this
wretched war is over then.”
“War!” replied Rhoda, scornfully. “It is so absurd to talk of war.” But
not many days after came the first ominous outburst of the future
storm. It was on July 27, about twilight, that Lettice and Rhoda, who
were slowly sauntering up and down the pavement, saw a crowd
beginning to gather before a respectable-looking house on Charles
Street.
“I wonder what can be the matter,” said Lettice, pausing in her
account of a fox-hunt. “Do you see yonder crowd, Rhoda?”
“Yes, let us go and find out what it means.”
“Oh, no!” And Lettice, who had surprised Rhoda by telling how she
could take a ditch, was not ready to cross the street to join the
crowd.
“There can’t be any danger,” said Rhoda.
“Oh, but there is. See there, Rhoda, they are throwing stones at the
windows. Oh, I see, it is the house which Mr. Hanson now occupies,
since they tore down his printing-press. Oh, this is dreadful! Come,
Rhoda, run, run; the crowd is growing larger; we’ll be caught in the
midst of it.”
But Rhoda still hesitated. “Is that the gentleman whose paper my
father commended?”
“Mr. Hanson? Yes, it is; he is the editor of the Federal Republican,
and it is evident that he has written something to enrage his
enemies. Come, Rhoda, do come. I am afraid we shall be hurt, and
anyhow, we must not mingle in such a rabble. I’m going to run,” and
suiting the action to the word, she ran swiftly along the street toward
home, Rhoda following at a slower gait.
They met their Cousin Joe hurrying toward them. “Oh, Cousin Joe,
Cousin Joe,” cried Lettice, grasping his arm, “there is something
dreadful going on! Take us home! I am scared! I don’t want to see or
hear what they are doing. They are throwing stones at Mr. Hanson’s
house, and are breaking the windows, and yelling and howling like
mad! Listen! What do they mean to do? Why are they so fierce? I am
so afraid some one will be killed.”
“It means that war has begun,” said her cousin, slowly.
“But what a way to do it!” said Rhoda, indignantly. “A rabble like that,
to attack a few innocent people!”
“Innocent from your point of view, but not from the mob’s.”
“You uphold the mob?”
“No; but I don’t uphold the utterances of the Federal Republican.
Come home, girls, and don’t poke your noses out of doors, or at
least don’t leave our own front doorstep.”
“I’ll not,” cried Lettice, clinging to him. “I will go out into the garden
and sit there. Where are my father and Uncle Tom?”
“They have gone down to see Major Barney, to inquire what can be
done about this disturbance. I will keep you informed about what
goes on.”
“Don’t go back into that mob, Cousin Joe,” Lettice begged. “You
might get killed.”
“I must see what is going on, but I will take no part in violence.”
“But what would Patsey say?” Lettice asked half archly.
Joe looked down at her with a little smile. “If she is the brave girl I
take her for, she’ll trust to my good sense to look out for myself.”
“But they are firing from the house. Listen! you can hear the reports.”
Joe listened, and then he said, “I will not go too near, little cousin. I
promise you that. Run in now.”
“You’ll come back and tell us if anything more serious happens,” said
Rhoda. “I wish my father were not in Washington.”
“He’s better off there,” Joe assured her. “For my part, I am thankful
he is not here.”
The girls retired to the garden at the back of the house. Danny with
wide-open eyes peeped out of one of the lower windows. “What’s de
matter, Miss Letty?” he asked in a loud whisper. “Is dey fightin’?”
“Yes; at least there is a riot out there. Some people are attacking the
house where Mr. Hanson is—Mr. Wagner’s house on Charles Street.
It began by a rabble of boys throwing stones and calling names.”
“Golly, but I wisht I’d been there!”
“Danny, go back to bed, and don’t get up again,” his mistress
ordered.
Danny crawled reluctantly down from his place on the window-sill.
“Whar Mars Torm?” he asked.
“He has gone down town,” Lettice informed him.
Danny still hung back. “Miss Letty,” he whispered. She went a few
steps toward him, despite her aunt’s reproving voice, “You and your
Uncle Tom ruin that boy, Lettice.”
“What is it, Danny?” Lettice asked.
“Ef anythin’ tur’ble happen, I skeered you all gwine leave me hyar.”
Lettice laughed. “There isn’t anything terrible going to happen to this
house, and if there should, I’ll let you know, you needn’t be scared,
Danny.”
The noise in the street increased. As yet no military appeared to
quell the mob. Mrs. Flynn, worked up into a great state of
excitement, trotted from corner to corner, coming back so often to
report that it would seem as if she would wear herself out. “There be
a gintleman addhressin’ the crowd, Mrs. Hopkins, mum,” she said.
“They do say they’ll be rig’lar foightin’ nixt. Glory be to Pether! but
hear thim cracks av the goons!” And back she trotted to return with:
“Howly mother av Moses! they’re murtherin’ the payple in the streets.
A gintleman, be name Dr. Gale, is kilt intoirely, an’ siveral others is
hurthed bad, an’ the crowd is runnin’ in ivery direction. Do ye hear
thim drooms a-beatin’? I’ll be afther seein’ what’s that for.” And out
she went again.
“Come, girls, go to bed,” said Mrs. Hopkins. “It is near midnight, and
you can do no good by sitting up. I wish Mr. Hopkins would come in.”
But neither Mr. Tom Hopkins nor his brother appeared that night, and
all through their troubled slumbers the girls heard groans and hoarse
cries, and the sound of a surging mass of angry men bent on
satisfying their lust for revenge. Even with the dawn the horrors
continued to be carried on throughout the day.
It was not till late in the afternoon that Mr. Tom Hopkins returned
home. He looked pale and troubled. “We have heard terrible reports,
Uncle Tom,” said Rhoda. “Is it really true that some of your most
respectable citizens have been murdered by a brutal horde of
lawless villains, and that they have been tortured and almost torn
limb from limb?”
“I fear there is much truth in it,” he replied gravely.
“Oh!” The tears welled up into Letty’s eyes. “Is General Lingan killed,
and General Lee? Oh, Uncle Tom, is it so dreadful as that? And
where is my father?”
“He is with Major Barney. General Lingan, I fear, is killed. General
Lee, I am not so sure about. I hope he is safe. There has been much
wrong done, and an ill-advised mob is hard to quell, especially when
it is a principle rather than a personal grudge which is involved,
because it is the whole mind of the party which works with equal
interest. I regret exceedingly the manner of their opposition to Mr.
Hanson’s paper, but—” He frowned and shook his head.
Rhoda fired up. “It is a disgrace. I should think you would feel it to be
a blot on your city and state, that such things have been allowed by
the authorities. I wish I had never come to this place, peopled by a
set of villanous murderers.”
“Rhoda!” Her aunt spoke reprovingly.
“I don’t care.” Rhoda’s cheeks were flushed. “It is true. It is a
dreadful, dreadful thing to murder men for saying they will not
countenance a war with England.”
“It is a dreadful thing,” returned her uncle, “but we have many
wrongs to avenge. Our poor seamen have been flogged to death,
have been as brutally treated as this mob has treated the
Federalists, and a desire for vengeance which will not be satisfied
with less than an eye for an eye, is the motive power which has
controlled these late horrible scenes. It is the first battle of our war
for freedom, ill-advised as it is.”
Lettice was sobbing nervously. “I want to go home, too,” she cried, “I
don’t want to stay here, either. I want to go home, Uncle Tom. I am
afraid more dreadful things will happen.”
“I am afraid so, too, and I think you would all be safer and more at
ease down in the country. I think, Martha, you had better take the
girls and go down to Sylvia’s Ramble as soon as you can get off.”
“And leave you?”
“I am safe enough; at least, if need comes, you know what I shall
do.”
Mrs. Hopkins sighed and shook her head.
“At all events,” continued Mr. Hopkins, “you all will be better off in the
country, and I will come down as soon as I can feel free to do so.”
Then Lettice dried her eyes, and while Rhoda was protesting that
she could not go away in the absence of her father, Mr. Kendall
walked in.
CHAPTER III.
On the Bay.
The curiously indented shore of the Chesapeake Bay presents a
country so full of little rivers and inlets that it is oftener easier to cut
across a narrow channel by boat than to drive from one place to
another. Especially is this true of the Eastern shore: in consequence,
the dwellers thereon are as much at home on the water as on the
land, and are famous sailors. This Rhoda soon discovered, and was
filled with amazement to find that Lettice could manage a sailing
vessel nearly as well as could her brothers.
It was much against Rhoda’s will that she finally made ready to
accompany her aunt and Lettice to the country. Her father informed
her that he must return to Washington, and though she begged to be
allowed to go with him, he said she would be better off in the hands
of her aunt, and he would join her at Sylvia’s Ramble a little later.
Mr. Tom Hopkins’s plantation lay next to his brother’s. The two
formed part of an original tract granted by Lord Baltimore to an
ancestor of the Hopkins family. Part of the land lay along the bay,
and one or two small creeks ran up from the larger body of water, so
that when one approached the houses, it seemed as if a vessel must
be moored in the back yard, for tall spars shot up behind the
chimneys, seemingly out of a mass of green. Rhoda’s puzzled look
upon being told that their destination was the next place made
Lettice ask what was wrong.
“What in the world is it that looks so curious?” said Rhoda. “Aunt
Martha tells me that the house is the next one, and surely that is a
vessel behind it? Do you use ships for barns?”
Lettice laughed. “You will see when we get there. We don’t land in
the creek. Uncle Tom has a landing this side, on the bay shore. Just
there it is.”
Their little sailing vessel was gliding in, having passed Kent Island on
the left. The fresh breeze had brought them down in a comparatively
short time, and Lettice was soon scanning the small wharf to see
who stood to meet them. “There’s Brother James,” she cried; “and I
do believe it is Patsey Ringgold herself, Cousin Joe. Yes, there she
sits on her white horse.” And almost before the boat had touched the
sands, Lettice was ashore, crying: “Howdy, Brother James! Howdy,
Patsey. Here we are, safe and sound, and so glad to get here.”
A warm color came into the face of the girl sitting on her horse ready
to welcome them, and she slid down, before James could help her,
to be heartily kissed and embraced by Lettice, who said: “I am dying
to hear the neighborhood news, and, Patsey dear, there is so much
to tell you, and I have brought a new sleeve pattern, and oh, tell me,
have the gowns come home yet?”
“They are on the way,” Patsey told her. “Who is the young lady,
Lettice?”
“That is Rhoda Kendall, my Aunt Martha’s niece, from Boston. I see
Brother James is already making his manners to her.”
“Yes, I have heard of her,” returned Patsey; “but I wonder that she
should come down here just now.”
“Her father is obliged to be in Washington, and thought it safer that
she should come down here with us, since there are such troubles in
the city.”
“Troubles, yes; and there are like to be more of them, if what we hear
is true. Every one is talking of the war, and the planters are making
ready for defence.”
“And they are sending out vessels from Baltimore to chase the
British cruisers; Cousin Joe—” Lettice paused, for Patsey cast an
apprehensive look at the tall figure then stepping over the side of the
vessel. “Cousin Joe,” Lettice repeated, “will tell you all about it.”
Up toward a white house set in a grove of locust trees, they all took
their way, attended by an escort of negroes, big and little, who
lugged along whatever was portable. Lettice linked her arm in that of
her brother, when her Cousin Joe joined Patsey, and this youngest
pair fell behind the rest. “You’ll take me straight home, Jamie dear,
won’t you?” Lettice coaxed. “I do so want to see Sister Betty and the
baby, and Brother William, and oh, so many things! You don’t know
how glad I am to get back! Does Betty make a good housekeeper,
and has she changed the place much?”
“No, very little,” her brother made reply; “and, yes, she is a fair
housekeeper; perhaps not so good as our mother was, but Betty has
some years before she will need to have great things expected of
her. How is father? and what is this I hear of his going to join the
troops? Joe says Uncle Tom is talking of going, too.”
Lettice gave a little start. “I knew they talked of it, but I didn’t know it
meant that they would go soon. Do they really mean to join the army
at once?”
“So Joe says.”
“And will you go? and Brother William?” Lettice asked in visible
distress.
“If we are needed. They are getting up companies everywhere, to
protect the state.”
Lettice gave a deep sigh, and clung closer to him. He was a
pleasant-looking lad of eighteen, with curling, ruddy brown locks and
fearless blue eyes, and with such a winning, careless, happy nature
as caused many a little lass to give her smiles to him. “So you don’t
want to stay under Aunt Martha’s wing any longer,” he said, smiling.
“No, I’d rather be under Betty’s. Does she know I am coming?”
“She expects you, and is in a twitter of delight over having you back
again with us.”
“Then don’t let us tarry.” And, indeed, she cut her good-bys very
short, and with her brother was soon cutting across fields to her old
home, there to be welcomed joyously by Sister Betty and the
servants.
“I declare, Letty, you grow like a weed!” was Betty’s greeting as, with
her baby in her arms, she came into her sister-in-law’s room that
evening, to watch her make her evening toilet. “Have you many
pretty things?”
“A few. Aunt Martha doesn’t encourage extravagance in dress.”
Lettice drew down the corners of her mouth and dropped her eyes in
a little prim way, while Betty laughed.
“Nonsense! she is an old Puritan. It is natural for girls to like pretty
things, just as it is for babies to want to catch at something bright.
Isn’t it, my pretty?” And Betty gave her cooing baby a hug, as he
vainly tried to clutch the shining chain his mother had been dangling
before him. Lettice smiled and surveyed her dainty little figure
complacently, then held out her hands for the baby.
“No, don’t take him now,” said Betty; “he’ll rumple your pretty frock.
He’d rather be with his mammy than either of us, anyhow.”
“Is dear old Dorcas his mammy?”
“Yes, of course; ‘she done nuss de whole mess o’ Hopkins, an’ she
right spry yet,’” replied Betty, laughing. “Come, let’s go find her.
William will be coming in pretty soon, and I must be ready to meet
him, and oh, Lettice, I remembered how fond you were of buttermilk,
and I told Randy to put a bucket of it down the well to keep cool for
you.”
Lettice gave a sigh of content and followed her sister-in-law down
the broad stairway. It was so good to be at home again; to see the
table set with the familiar dishes, and Speery standing there with a
green branch beating away the flies. Speery giggled gleefully as she
caught sight of the figure which had paused before the door. “Law,
Miss Letty, yuh is a gran’ young lady, sho ’nough,” she said. “I mos’
skeered to speak to yuh.”
“You needn’t be, Speery,” Lettice replied, her eyes wandering over
the dark mahogany furniture, and returning to take in the details of
old silver and India china upon the table. “Is that one of Miss Betty’s
wedding presents—that pitcher? How pretty it is.”
“Yass, miss, dat one o’ ’em. I done fergit who given it to ’er.”
“Don’t forget my buttermilk, Speery,” said Lettice, as she turned
away.
“Naw, miss,” giggled Speery. And then Lettice went out on the porch
to be hugged and kissed by her big brother, she declaring that even
though she could no longer lay claim to being the baby of the family,
she meant to be as much of a pet as ever.
But at the table the talk became very serious, and a cloud settled on
Betty’s fair brow as her husband questioned minutely as to the
trouble in the city, and when, after supper, they all gathered on the
porch to get the cool breezes from the bay, Betty drew very close to
William, and, despite the gladness of her home-coming, Lettice felt
that she was not beyond an atmosphere of anxious dread, even here
in this quiet corner of the world.
Rhoda chafed at being obliged to remain in a community of fire-
eaters, as she called them, to James’s amusement. The lad loved to
tease, and more than once brought tears of rage to Rhoda’s eyes.
She liked him, too; perhaps that was the reason he could so easily
annoy her. His curly head was wont to appear very often over the
railing of the porch at Sylvia’s Ramble, and his greeting was usually,
“Howdy, Miss Rhoda, have you heard the news?”
“No,” Rhoda invariably returned, looking around sharply. And then
James would lean indolently against the porch and gaze up at her
with a beguiling expression in his eyes, and would make some such
remark as, “They say Massachusetts is getting ready to secede.”
Then Rhoda would turn away with a fling and say, “I don’t believe a
word of it!”
“If she does, you’ll stay down here with us, won’t you, Miss Rhoda?”
James would say, giving her one of his fetching glances. Then
Rhoda would look confused, and say that she would call her aunt.
Once or twice they quarrelled in good earnest, for Rhoda pretended
to despise everything which savored of the South, while James
never failed to sound Maryland’s praises. “You know,” he said one
day, “Maryland is mighty plucky. She stood out against you all in
1778, when the question of setting a limit to Western lands came up.
You know she wouldn’t yield an inch, and was the only one of the
states that stood up for the public good against all odds. She just
wouldn’t, and she wouldn’t join the confederation of states unless
they’d come around to her way of thinking.”
“Pshaw!” returned Rhoda, but half convinced. “I never heard so
much talk about nothing. We never hear that discussed up our way.”
“Course not,” James answered. “Good reason why. Massachusetts
was one of the states that held Western lands. When did she ever
want to give up anything for the public good?”
“When did she? You are crazy to talk so! You forget Lexington and
Bunker Hill.”
“Humph!” James’s eyes twinkled. “That’s what you always say. One
would think you all up there had won the independence of the
colonies by your two or three little skirmishes. The real battles took
place farther south than New England. Precious little she suffered
compared to the Southern states! We’d never have won if the South
hadn’t given Washington, and hadn’t sent their troops and their
supplies and their help of all kinds to get you out of your scrape up
there. I think you are right-down ungrateful to us. Why, laws, child,
you didn’t know anything about fighting up there. They didn’t get at it
hot and heavy till the war left Massachusetts soil. You have no
reason to be stuck up over your little old Bunker Hill.”
“We began the war, anyhow,” retorted Rhoda.
“You flatter yourselves. The Regulators in North Carolina did the
starting.”
“That wasn’t till after our Stamp Act riot.”
“Sure enough; you score one there. At all events, you would still be
under England’s dominion if we hadn’t come to your aid; though from
the looks of it, that’s where you want to be, and your Bunker Hill will
go for nothing.”
Then Rhoda arose in a towering rage. “You are a detestable
creature! I wish I had never seen you. If I were a man, I’d—I’d fight a
duel with you, and—”
“Kill me?” said James, leaning toward her. “You can slay me now
with your killing glances if you will. ’Deed, Miss Rhoda, I do love to
make you mad. You are always running down Maryland, you know,
and calling us fire-eaters, and it just does me good to make the
sparks fly. Look around here—please look.”
But Rhoda persistently kept her head turned away, perhaps to hide
the tears of anger standing in her eyes. She was not to be mollified
by any soft speeches.
“What are you up to, James?” called his aunt. “How you do love to
tease. I don’t think you will give Rhoda a very good idea of Southern
gallantry.”
James looked properly repentant. “’Deed, Miss Rhoda,” he said
softly, “I’m sorry, I’m dreadfully sorry. You’re not crying?” in troubled
surprise.
“No, I’m not,” snapped Rhoda. And, getting up, she passed him
swiftly, with head up, to enter the house.
“Sho!” exclaimed James, looking after her, “I’ve been and gone and
done it this time, Aunt Martha. She’ll never forgive me, will she?”
“I am sure I don’t know; she oughtn’t to,” returned Mrs. Hopkins. “You
have no right to berate her native state in that way; it is very rude, to
say the least.”
“So it is, for a fact. It’s right-down mean of me. I’ll have to find some
way to make up for it.”
And find a way he did. First his special messenger, black Bounce,
came over that afternoon with a basket of the finest peaches that
Rhoda had ever seen, and next Lettice was seen galloping up the
lane on her bay mare. She stopped in front of the porch where
Rhoda sat sedately sewing. “Rhoda, Rhoda,” cried she, “put down
your work; we are going fishing, and will take supper with us, and Mr.
Sam Osborne is going to let us have a dance in his new barn this
evening.”
Rhoda made no response, but sewed quietly on.

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Ebook Adaptation Remediation and Intermediality Forms of in Betweenness in Cinema 1St Edition Judit Pieldner Online PDF All Chapter

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Adaptation Remediation and

Intermediality Forms of In Betweenness

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Caught In Between Intermediality in Contemporary

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Presa Universitară Clujeană

Descrierea CIP a Bibliotecii Naţionale a României

© 2020, Judit Pieldner.

Bibliography .............................................................................................. 287

With a few exceptions, the essays included in the present volume

The essays included in this volume are the outcome of my

introductory essay on Medial Equivalences, Functional Analogies? The

The next chapters are in‐depth analyses which complement, in

innovation, simultaneously evoking the emblematic character of the early

The second part of the book (Remediation: In‐Between the Immediacy

drawn from a multitude of literary and historical sources; a sweeping

identifying converging tendencies in different trends of contemporary

Fidelity or Adultery? Adaptation Theories1

The study of the relationship between film and literature is of

“literary” feature of the film has been abundantly documented by film

is inspired by the literary text, attempting to create a work of art of an

then every film – as re‐presentation – adapts an a priori concept, whereas

is a circular process, the ulterior interpretation turns back to the moment

intertextual network. From a non‐normative point of view, the idea is not

Adapting (to) the Impossible.

From Dudley’s typology of the modes of adaptation, we are

whether they can be approached from a non‐normative viewpoint stated

Medial Analogies. Henry Fielding/ Tony Richardson: Tom Jones

Stam considers Fielding’s novels as illustrative examples of the

the silent episode concentrates about two chapters of the story, in an

As a whole, the success of adaptation lies in its capacity to create a

Gender, Identity, (Film) Narrative.

Virginia Woolf’s art of writing is a “room of one’s own” in the

environment, within a fictitious, parodic biography, comprising a life

of narration. In this way, the screen adaptation recognizes the problem of

Metafiction and Allegory. John Fowles/ Karel Reisz:

representation, the possibility to separate reality from fiction, and creates

chooses the option of “functional correspondence,” that is, he attempts to

The analysis of reflexive adaptations offers promising possibilities

Figure 1.1. Looking into the camera.

Figure 1.2. Direct address in Orlando (Sally Potter, 1992).

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