Movie Enthusiast Issue 38: Books vs. Movies vs. Theater; Twin Peaks
I’ve been reading some André Bazin, the French intellectual who was among the founding editors of Cahiers du cinéma and whose writings on film are anthologized in a collection titled What Is Cinema? He’s the kind of writer who is both so articulate and so eloquent that everything he writes is immediately convincing. Even if some of his observations seem out of date in our current age, they only seem that way because his thinking was so enormously influential to the development of the French New Wave and, subsequently, cinema as we now know it.
I especially like Bazin’s observations on the differences between the movie, the stage play, and the novel, and adaptations from one medium to the other. Here he is, for example, on the difference between the play and the novel:
[I]t may be argued that the greater the dramatic quality of a work the more difficult it is to separate off the dramatic from the theatrical element, a synthesis of the two having been achieved in the text. It is significant that while novels are often dramatized, a novel is rarely made from a play. It is as if the theater stood at the end of an irreversible process of aesthetic refinement. ¶ Strictly speaking one could make a play out of Madame Bovary or The Brothers Karamazov. But had the plays come first it would be impossible to derive from them the novels as we know them. In other words, when the drama is so much a part of the novel that it cannot be taken from it, reciprocally the novel can only be the result of a process of induction which in the arts means purely and simply a new creation. Compared with the play, the novel is only one of the many possible syntheses derivable from the simple dramatic element.
…and here he is with a somewhat provocative stance on “faithfulness” in film adaptations of books:
What strikes us about the fidelity of [Jean Renoir’s adaptation of Madame Bovary] is that paradoxically it is compatible with complete independence from the original. […]¶ Undoubtedly the novel has means of its own—language not the image is its material, its intimate effect on the isolated reader is not the same as that of a film on the crowd in a darkened cinema—but precisely for these reasons the differences in aesthetic structure make the search for equivalents an even more delicate matter, and thus they require all the more power of invention and imagination from the flim-maker who is truly attempting a resemblance. One might suggest that in the realm of language and style cinematic creation is in direct ratio to fidelity. For the same reasons that render a word-by-word translation worthless and a too free translation a matter for condemnation, a good adaptation should result in a restoration of the essence of the letter and the spirit.
Good stuff! Agree with him or not, I highly recommend checking Bazin out for yourself.
The finale of Twin Peaks: The Return aired this Sunday. Wow! What a journey it’s been for everyone watching. I don’t have any takes for you, nor am I interested in trying to interpret anything that Lynch is trying to communicate to us. (I would much rather fans and journalists ask him about his process in filming and editing certain scenes, like that weird jittery sequence where Agent Cooper meets the eyeless woman for the first time. Also, how, uh, did they do her makeup?) I am, however, very interested in celebrating all the excellent lines Lynch and Mark Frost gave us in this season of a television show that’s already renowned for iconic lines (“Damn fine cup of coffee!” “It is happening again” “There was a fish in the percolator”). So here you go: my *entirely objective* ranking of the 25 best lines of the new season. Looking at them all grouped together out of context really drives home for me so many of the key themes of the series, not least of all Lynch’s ability to imbue the banal with incredible emotional meaning. Spoilers ahoy!
25. I finally understand cellular phones!
24. Someone manufactured you.
23. I am not your foot.
22. What happens in season 2?
21. Hello Johnny, how are you today?
20. WILSON! HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I TOLD YOU, THIS IS WHAT WE DO IN THE FBI!!!
19. What kind of world are we living in where people can behave like this, treat other people this way without any compassion, or feeling for their suffering? We are living in a dark, dark age and you are part of the problem.
18. Last night, I had another Monica Bellucci dream.
17. —What can I getcha, Ed?
—Cup of coffee. And a cyanide tablet.
16. Sure is a mystery, huh.
15. Laura is the one.
14. Is it future, or is it past?
13. I told them they could fix their hearts or die!
12. F#!@ Gene Kelly, you m$%@!
11. He’s dead.
10. HellooooOOOOOoooo!
9. [extremely Laura Dern voice] F#!@ you, Albert/Gordon/Tammy.
8. It’s yrev very good to see you again old friend.
7. You know about death. That it’s just a change, not an end. Hawk, it’s time. There’s some fear, some fear in letting go. […] My log is turning gold.
6. We are like the dreamer, who dreams and then lives inside the dream. But who is the dreamer?
5. —Where are we going?
—We’re going home.
4. People are under a lot of stress, Bradley.
3. What year is this?
2. Gotta light?
1. I am the FBI.
My most recent movie review is a few weeks old by now (that’s what I get for drifting from my every-other-Monday newsletter schedule), but the movie in question has been doing pretty well at the box office so it’s not irrelevant yet! I wrote about Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River, which is a decent enough thriller with its heart in the right place. My biggest problem with the movie—other than that Sheridan has obvious room for improvement as a director; blocking is your friend!—has to deal with the words it puts into the mouths of its Native American characters. It’s so clearly a well-intentioned white guy doing the talking that whatever realism Sheridan was going for just doesn’t work.