Читать книгу Filming the Unfilmable - Ben Hellmann - Страница 5

Since the publication of the first edition of our book, several reviews have come out, aimed at the general public,[1] as well as professional[2] and interest groups.[3] While the reviewers’ appreciation has been rather generous,[4] we would like to use this opportunity to engage with the few instances of criticism.

One reviewer has accurately noted the absence of any theoretical framework in our book.[5] This has been a deliberate decision on our part. ‘Showing instead of telling is what movies are supposed to do’,[6] and in that sense the largely descriptive and meditative nature of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, coupled with its lack of spectacular action and love interest, does not readily lend itself to screen adaptation. Filming the unfilmable successfully is nothing short of a miracle. Can one really develop a theory of something as exceptional as this?

And what exactly is a success, when it comes to film adaptations? Another reviewer alleges that we have presented ‘Wrede’s One Day as a success due simply to its fidelity to the literary source’.[7] If this is how it looks, it is primarily because Wrede himself had opted to make faithfulness to Solzhenitsyn’s book an integral part of his adaptation strategy. It is probably true that, although used all too frequently by film critics, filmgoers and filmmakers alike, ‘fidelity to its source text <...> is a hopelessly fallacious measure of a given adaptation’s value because it is unattainable, undesirable and theoretically possible only in a trivial sense’.[8] On the occasion, however, it would be unfair not to judge Wrede by his own criteria. As for our own general standpoint on the matter, we are inclined to share Walter Kendrick’s view: ‘it seems self-evident that to film a book is to interpret it, comment on it, violate it perhaps, but not <necessarily> to capture it’ and ‘in the rendering of literature into movies, too much respect is worse than too little’.[9]

This quote may serve as our response to the reviewer who has expressed his preference for ‘a clear<er> authorial position’.[10] It has to be pointed out, though, that the same reviewer happens to cite from David Robinson’s analysis of Wrede’s One Day, published in The Financial Times of 14 January 1972. It is precisely this analysis that comes closest to our own perception of the film’s strengths and weaknesses (in particular, the section on Solzhenitsyn’s and Wrede’s use of understatement that yields different results and makes One Day powerful more as a book than as a film[11]). We do hope that other readers have also deducted where our sympathies lie, without much need for us to state it in so many words in a patronisingly obvious way.

On a related issue, another reviewer has wished we would deal more ‘with the failure of the film to connect emotionally with numerous critics’.[12] What is termed here a ‘failure’ may well be rooted in Solzhenitsyn’s original: his fan mail contains both complimentary and reproachful mentions of One Day’s dispassionate manner.[13] Similarly, Wrede’s ‘style of directing was not flamboyant… so what you saw was pretty unadorned when you saw it… [He] wanted the audience to receive what the <film or> play was about, straight’.[14] Could it be, then, that in the case of One Day’s adaptation, Wrede’s reserve proved to be somewhat less efficient than Solzhenitsyn’s because cinema (as well as theatre) – in contrast to the printed word per se – is fundamentally more about the need to arouse concentrated and strong-felt emotions (if only because the spectators have to be kept in their seats for a relatively short period of time, while books are rarely read in one sitting)? Besides, manipulating emotions was not what Wrede had in mind for his version of One Day. According to its star, Sir Tom Courtenay, the director ‘wanted the film to be otherworldly, which it is’.[15] Going for estrangement in preference to empathy may have been Wrede’s way of allowing for the ‘basic – perhaps unbridgeable – gap of understanding’[16] (i.e. the inability of the free world to comprehend, and relate to, the suffering under totalitarianism).

The same reviewer observes that we mention ‘the documentary-like feel of the film <...>, but without any exploration of the significance, origin, or even intent of this effect’.[17] Once again, the documentariness originates from Solzhenitsyn’s book. The author was understandably keen to make the GULAG experience a matter of public record. One Day’s first readers, many erstwhile GULAG prisoners among them, called it ‘a truthful document’ and ‘a felicitous snapshot of life in a labour camp’, and challenged anyone to find as much as ‘a modicum of fancy’ in it.[18] It is not therefore too surprising to discover that in the transition from page to screen Wrede retained Solzhenitsyn’s documentary-like approach, just like he tried to keep everything else the book had. Knowing full well that an event has a better chance of surviving in the memory of future generations if it is properly recorded, Wrede presciently did all he could to preserve One Day for the visual age.

Let us return, however, to the issue of a film adaptation’s success. The box office takings aside, it can be claimed that an adaptation is successful if it works as a film, quite irrespective of its relationship to its literary source. Yet one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and it is not always possible to establish beyond any doubt whether or not a film actually works. An example is Den Første Kreds / The First Circle (1973) by Aleksander Ford, a Danish/Swedish co-production based on another famous book by Solzhenitsyn and released shortly after Wrede’s One Day.

The Polish-Jewish director Aleksander Ford held what might be called a competitive advantage in turning Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle into a successful film. А forty year long carrier in the film industry had given him the necessary professional skills. As a card-carrying Communist and head of the Polish film production during the first years of Soviet Poland, he had gained quite an insight into the nature of Stalinism. However, in 1968-69, this influential film director and member of the intellectual elite was dismissed from the Polish Filmmakers’ Union, expelled from the Communist Party and forced to leave his country as a victim of an anti-Semitic campaign. His films ended up on the list of prohibited works and his name was wiped out from the history of Polish filmmaking. Outside the Eastern Bloc, he managed to resume his work as a film director, with The First Circle, shot in Denmark, being his most ambitious project, restricted only by financial considerations.

The film’s critical reception upon the 1973 premiere makes a strange reading.[19] An extremely harsh, not to say insulting, tone of many reviews is rather striking. The film is called ‘fairly unforgivable’ (New York Times), ‘a complete shambles’ deserving ‘to be laughed off the screen’ (The New York Daily News), ‘a crime against literature’ (Newsday), а ‘barbarous adaption of the novel’ (Time), ‘an atrocity’ and even ‘crap’ (the New York magazine). It looks as if some critics, anticipating Solzhenitsyn’s negative attitude, took the task of defending the honour of a respected writer, persecuted in his own country and unable to speak up against the attempts by profit-hungry producers in the West to create sensation and make money off his work. Turning a large novel with its many themes and characters into a 100-minute long film was considered a task even more difficult than Wrede’s endeavour. It was a priori doomed to fail both as a work of art and an illustration of Solzhenitsyn’s novel. Consequently, all aspects of the film were seen as disastrous by the distrustful critics.

In their reviews, Ford was accused of turning the book into a flat, static film, lacking in passion and immediacy. The filmmakers’ wish to cover the novel in its entirety resulted in very little of it being left. Solzhenitsyn’s criticism of the Communist system became reductive and his anger nullified. The novel’s characters were moved to a timeless, abstract unreality, with all their features simplified. The descriptive parts of the novel were rendered through pale and lifeless visual devices. Ford also came under attack for filming in colour, instead of black and white. His choice of a multinational cast produced an ‘international mess’ with a tastelessly dubbed dialogue. As a result, spectators watched The First Circle without any emotional engagement.

Nevertheless, there were alternative voices, cautiously ready to accept Ford’s film on its own terms. It packs ‘a considerable punch’, declared Newsweek. The agony was there: it was a passionate cri de coeur against the tyranny of our times. And The New Yorker found The First Circle to be a thoughtful film, forcing cinema audiences to face the same issues that the book had raised. It was ‘an intelligent condensation of the novel’, true to the spirit of Solzhenitsyn’s work, declared Washington Post. The power of accusation was still there (Dagens Nyheter) and Solzhenitsyn’s anti-totalitarian message did come through (Chaplin). Even the cast was praised as talented and apt.

It seems as if The First Circle – in fact, a decent, sombre and respectable film – gains in credit as Solzhenitsyn’s struggle against Communism recedes into history and the audiences no longer seek primarily to compare the book and the film and to judge the latter, first and foremost, by its truthfulness to every aspect of the novel. Phil Berardelli, an enthusiastic cineaste, includes The First Circle among his five hundred favourites, calling Ford’s film ‘a compelling work’, ‘a small movie, but beautifully written and crafted – and making as a point of wisdom that a man who has nothing to lose also has nothing to fear’.[20] And the influential Finnish cinema critic Antti Alanen, who watched the film in 2012 on its Finnish premiere, has found the structure of the screenplay to be successful in its own right. According to him, the film did justice to Solzhenitsyn’s main themes and wit, and its atmosphere rang true, as if personally felt. ‘It’s a memorable movie’,[21] concluded Alanen.

The First Circle can easily serve as an example of how fatally misunderstood some films are. It seems every now and then that all a film needs is a bit of luck. We do hope that, sooner or later, Wrede’s One Day will have its lucky break.

BH, AR