Antti Alanen: Novelli ja elokuva / The Short Story and the Cinema. Cinema Orion, Helsinki, 23 Aug 2013
The film we just saw, Lady with the Dog (1960), is based on a short story by Anton Chekhov, and the film adaptation was directed by Iosif Kheifits. Kheifits had debuted in the 1920s collaborating with Alexander Zarkhi, and switched to a solo career after Stalin's death, becoming one of the first directors of the thaw, launching Aleksey Batalov and directing him in six films. Batalov became a signature actor of the thaw in films such as The Cranes Are Flying. Lady with the Dog is Kheifits's masterpiece, followed by further Chekhov adaptations (In the Town of S, based on Ionich, and The Duel).
A big fan of Kheifits's Lady with the Dog film adaptation was Ingmar Bergman who stated that Chekhov's stories are practically synopses ready to be filmed: - visually suggestive - with a strong atmosphere - with characters clearly drawn - and with a lot of dialogue. The fundamental reason for such adaptability being that Chekhov was always a dramatist who thought in scenes.
Seán Ó Faoláin highlighted Chekhov's story Lady with the Dog in his book The Short Story which became influential in Finland, as well, quoted liberally by Annamari Sarajas, and Pekka Tarkka, among others, in key writings.
Ó Faoláin quoted the first sentence in Chekhov's late story (Chekhov only wrote four more stories after that, having by then already written over 600 stories altogether): "Говорили, что на набережной появилось новое лицо: дама с собачкой." / "It was reported that a new face had been seen on the quay; a lady with a little dog."
"The amount of information conveyed in that sentence is an interesting example of the shorthand of the modern short-story. What do we gather from it? 'It was reported that a new face had been seen on the quay; a lady with a little dog.' We gather, altogether by implication, that the scene is laid in a port. We gather that this port is a seaside resort, for ladies with little dogs do not perambulate on commercial docks. We gather that the season is fine weather - probably summer or autumn. We gather that this seaside resort is a sleepy, unfrequented little place: for one does not observe new faces at big, crowded places like Brighton or Deauville. Furthermore, the phrase 'it was reported' implies that gossip circulates in a friendly way at this sleepy resort. We gather still more. We gather that somebody has been bored and wakes up at this bit of gossip; and that we shall presently hear about him. I say 'him,' because one again guesses, when it is a question of a lady, that the person most likely to be interested is a man. And sure enough the next sentence confirms all this. 'Dimitri Gomov who had been a fortnight at Yalta and got used to it... ' And so on." (Seán Ó Faoláin: The Short Story, p. 151).
In a film adaptation such an art of suggestion is lost, and the essence of the work must be conveyed in an entirely different manner.
The question of adaptation has been central in narrative cinema since the earliest days, since Georges Méliès, and since the veritable flood of adaptations that was launched fast already during the period of early cinema.
When Alfred Hitchcock was asked why he does not film works of his favourite authors such as Dostoyevsky, Poe, and Kafka, he answered that he would not have anything to add to them. Almost all of his films were adaptations, but not of the greatest classics of literature.
Yet great films have been made on the basis of great literature. Our "The Short Story and the Cinema" series has been a year in the planning, and we decided to mount a programme of great films based on great stories:
Lady with the Dog / Anton Chekhov - Iosif Kheifits
Diamonds of the Night / Arnošt Lustig - Jan Němec
Le Plaisir / three stories by Guy de Maupassant - Max Ophuls
Katsastus / The Inspection / Joni Skiftesvik - Matti Ijäs
The Dead / James Joyce - John Huston
La Chute de la Maison Usher / Edgar Allan Poe - Jean Epstein
Rashomon / Ryunosuke Akutagawa - Akira Kurosawa
Kun on tunteet / Feelings at Play / Maria Jotuni - Erik Blomberg and Mirjami Kuosmanen
Brokeback Mountain - Annie Proulx - Ang Lee
Returning to the origins of storytelling, to the age before the emergence of the short story as an established literary form, we need to discuss fairy-tales. Hopefully for each of us this refers to the origins of storytelling in our personal lives, too, as it is a great privilege that fairy-tales have been read aloud to us when we were little children and could not yet read. Fairy-tales may be short or long (even The Lord of the Rings is a fairy-tale); short stories are as a rule short works of prose which take place in a realistic world. Yet fairy-tales are relevant for several reasons. They are fountainheads of the narrative, and several currents of narrative run from fairy-tales. The distinction of the folk-tale and the art tale is important. Vladimir Propp's analysis of the functions of the folk-tale has been hugely influential and fruitful in the analysis of entertainment cinema in general. Many art tales, such as certain dark tales by H. C. Andersen, are actually not suitable for children at all.
The fairy-tales of Aisopos, Perrault, Grimm, Andersen, Topelius, Swan, Krylov, and others have been always been material for an immense amount of film adaptations, including animations. It is in the nature of the fairy-tale that they are destined to be re-told and re-adapted, and the cinema has done its share. A Thousand and One Nights belongs to the most important wellsprings, also of film adaptations.
The first artist of the cinema, Georges Méliès, also belonged to the family of the great masters of the fairy-tale, as did another early film artist, Wladyslaw Starewicz who filmed Krylov, Aisopos, and Gogol.
Direct links from the fairy-tale heritage lead to
STORIES OF HORROR AND FANTASY - E. T. A. Hoffmann (The Sandman, The Nutcracker) - "une intrusion brutale du mystère dans le cadre de la vie réelle; il est généralement lié aux états morbides de la conscience" - le fantastique in the the cinema - Feuillade, Cocteau, Franju - Pushkin and The Queen of Spades - Edgar Allan Poe
Linked to the fairy-tales of A Thousand and One Nights are also
EROTIC STORIES - they have a short story format even when they are compiled into episodic novels, plays or memoirs - such as Li Yu's The Play of the Wind and the Moon (The Carnal Prayer Mat), Don Juan's conquests, Casanova's memoirs, Reigen / La Ronde, or The Song of the Scarlet Flower - all these are favourites in film adaptation
Besides fairy-tales another fundamental source of veritable origins is
THE HOLY BIBLE the stories of which have provided models and inspiration for short stories, and many stories of which have been adapted into films. Also the object lessons of Jesus Christ were often provided in the form of stories and parables (The Prodigal Son, The Good Samaritan, The Hidden Treasure, The Good Shepherd, The Mustard Seed, The Rich Man and Lazarus).
After such great predecessors
the actual tradition of the short story in Western literature starts in Boccaccio's Decamerone, which in its turn inspired Geoffrey Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales.
There is one film-maker who has filmed all three works most relevant to birth of the short story - A Thousand and One Nights, Decamerone, and The Canterbury Tales: Pier Paolo Pasolini, who also got to film parables of Jesus Christ in The Gospel According to St. Matthew.
To its greatest prominence the short story rose in the 19th century thanks to the emergence of the modern press. Both newspapers and magazines published short stories and serial novels. Norms of lengths of various categories of stories became more standardized. Serious authors could earn a living with short stories. New genres emerged such as the detective story (Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes - most of his adventures appeared in short stories, although there were a few novels, as well).
Key names in establishing the short story as an art form in the U.S.A. include Washington Irving (Rip van Winkle, Sleepy Hollow), Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Henry James and Herman Melville.
In France the masters of the short story included Honoré de Balzac, Prosper Mérimée, Guy de Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, and Anatole France.
In Russia, Alexander Pushkin was the first great artist of the short story, a model for all who followed, such as Nikolai Gogol ("we have all emerged from under Gogol's coat", said Dostoyevsky), Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky.
Anton Chekhov wrote at first all kinds of stories, entertainment novels, comedies, piquant stories in the manner of Boccaccio and Balzac, story-driven prose, and cynical sketches. Starting with The Steppe he focused on his own personal characteristic strengths: the power of observation and the development of an urgent latent, interior development.
The Steppe was the turning-point not only for Chekhov but for the entire history of the short story. Chekhov now broke conclusively free from the traditional, Boccaccio-inspired, plot-driven, dramatic novella, and created an oeuvre of stories based on atmosphere and interior development that became the foundation of the art of the modern short story.
(However, the case of The Steppe is a bit more complicated than that: Chekhov considered The Steppe a cluster of stories or sketches, tied together by the framing story of the little boy's first voyage from the safety of his childhood home towards an uncertain future.)
In Ingmar Bergman's opinion Chekhov's stories were synopses ready to be filmed, but hardly any immortal masterpieces of the cinema have been made from them, with the exception of Lady with the Dog. One reason may be that the film-makers have tried to adapt the films from the externals, and doing so they have lost the art of concision well analyzed by Ó Faoláin. Instead, the focus should be on the inner currents, which can be difficult to convey in a film adaptation. Bergman, himself, may have been influenced by Chekhov in films such as Wild Strawberries and Winter Light, but a direct adaptation might have been overwhelming even for him.
Kheifits succeeded exceptionally in bringing out the inner current of Chekhov's story in Lady with a Dog by focusing on his splendid actors Aleksei Batalov and Iya Savvina. More precisely: by focusing on their eyes. In the film adaptation their eyes and their looks tell Chekhov's story of interiority. And there is a special charge in this film about unlived lives, thwarted hopes and ambitions. During the age of the thaw truths could be told after long decades of silence and oppression.
I have not come across a comment by Anton Chekhov on the cinema whereas
the comments of his contemporaries such as Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky
are famous.
These brief chronological remarks about the evolution of the short story lead us to the start of the Film Age.
James Joyce (The Dubliners) and Ernest Hemingway (The First Forty-Nine Stories) became masters of the short story, both memorably filmed. Hemingway also refined "the iceberg theory" of the short story. Sean Ó Faoláin's remarks on the first sentence of Lady with the Dog are an excellent object lesson on the iceberg theory of the short story.
New avenues were opened by Jorge Luis Borges in stories of essayistic fantasy (The Garden of Forking Paths), with cinematic affinities and influences from Orson Welles to Bernardo Bertolucci.
The circle of a brief chronological survey of the short story can be closed with Franz Kafka. His stories and parables can be compared with The Book of Job in the Bible. They can be called surrealistic, absurd, and existentialistic. They can also be compared with the fairy-tales of H. C. Andersen. "But in Kafka's evil fairy-tale nobody can tell how it is with the emperor's new clothes" (Annamari Sarajas).
A "protean variety" is a hallmark of the short story.
The short story can be a little sketch.
In the other extreme, it can be a novella (a short novel).
It can be a yarn, a fable, a parable, a fairy-tale (Märchen, skazka). It can be a Humoreske (a humoristic story), a tall tale, a horror story, un conte drolatique, a wilderness story, or a detective story.
The terms in various languages hardly translate at all into other languages, and they are inconsistent even in their own languages.
In English, there are the (short) story and the tale.
In Italian, there are la novella and il racconto.
In French, la nouvelle and le conte.
In Russian, rasskaz, skazka, povest.
In German, Kurzgeschichte, Erzählung, Novelle, Märchen.
For instance, in English, the novella can mean two completely different things: a story in the classic Boccaccio format - and a long tale which comes close to a novel and is often also called a novel (Death in Venice, Heart of Darkness).
Within the fairy-tale the distinction between a folktale and a literary tale is crucial. - Skazka folklornaya / skazka literaturnaya. - Volksmärchen / Kunstmärchen. - Conte populaire / conte littéraire. - La fiaba popolare / la fiaba d'autore.
In this jungle of terminology the essential distinction is again between - this key distinction is worthy of repeating:
THE CLASSIC NOVELLA, "the falcon story" of Boccaccio, based on the art of compression, with something curious to tell, with a striking turning-point, and
THE MODERN SHORT STORY, based on an inner charge, an illumination, an insight, what James Joyce called epiphany.
THE CYCLE: there is a tendency towards forming cycles of short stories: - Dubliners (James Joyce) - Winesburg, Ohio (Sherwood Anderson) - Go Down Moses (William Faulkner) - Sketches from a Hunter's Album / Записки охотника (Ivan Turgenev) - Lettres de mon moulin (Alphonse Daudet) - Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Edgar Allan Poe)... - in which there is an affinity with films with an episodic structure and multi-character studies. In Finland, too, feature films have been made based on compiled short stories by Aapeli or Maria Jotuni. - Anton Chekhov saw his The Steppe as a cycle of short sketches.
THE FRAMING DEVICE: there is also a tendency to using a framing device (eine Rahmenerzählung) in short story collections, starting with A Thousand and One Nights, Decamerone, and Canterbury Tales, not forgetting The Metamorphoses / The Golden Ass by Apuleius, or Die Serapionsbrüder by E. T. A. Hoffmann. - The framing device has been very popular in films of many kinds, with a straight narrative, with episodes, or with a mosaic structure. A masterpiece in the portmanteau format with a framing device is the Ealing horror film Dead of Night, where there is also a twist ending in the framing device.
EDGAR ALLAN POE'S view about the tale has been much quoted. (Edgar Allan Poe, “Review of Twice-Told Tales”, Graham’s Magazine, May 1842, pp. 298-300). A tale proper is "not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour. Within this limit alone can the highest order of true poetry exist. We need only here say, upon this topic, that, in almost all classes of composition, the unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance. It is clear, moreover, that this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in productions whose perusal cannot be completed at one sitting.". "If his [the author's] very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design."
This view has inspired the still-continuing cultivation of good storytelling in the classical, Boccaccio-derived short story format. Besides the criteria of
- the story being readable - and analysable - in one sitting of no more than an hour and
- the unity of impression, further criteria include
- a moment of crisis and
- a symmetry of design.
THE UNITY OF IMPRESSION was applied by Poe to Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, and his view was still within the classical-romantic perspective. But in the modern short story, from Chekhov on, the concept of "the unity of impression" is still valid. It now transcends the demands of drama and is linked to the core thematic level of the story (this expression is by Pekka Tarkka in Novelli ja tulkinta). In James Joyce's stories the impression pursued is epiphany. In Hemingway's story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place", nothing is what it is about.
THE SYMMETRY OF DESIGN is based on Aristotle's Poetics (Περὶ ποιητικῆς), including his view that a plot must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. This question is widely discussed by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in their hugely influential textbook anthology Understanding Fiction (1943) in the spirit of New Criticism. A model story is Maupassant's The Necklace / La Parure. A woman sacrifices her entire life to be able to compensate a lost diamond necklace, but in the end she finds out in passing that the necklace was an imitation.
The Chekhovian turn can be defined as discarding the principle of the symmetry of design and the Aristotelian structure of drama. According to Chekhov a writer may write a beginning and an end to his story, but he should strike them before publication. This turn in storytelling is parallel to Chekhov's revolution of the play, in which he rejected the Aristotelian arc of classical drama and the popular structure of la pièce bien faite, the well-made play. Chekhov started as a traditional writer of stories, novels, and plays, and a definitive turn in his development as a story-writer took place around 1888 (The Steppe) and, in the theatre, around 1894 (The Seagull), but these turns did not emerge out of the blue.
HOW SHORT IS A SHORT STORY? It can be anything between less than one page and around a hundred pages. The "long short story" is called a novella. It can also be called a short novel, and it can be published as a separate slim volume. Yet it is still readable within one sitting.
There is a consensus that in a tale or a story there need to be at least three actions linked with one another. An example might be the tale of The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the first book (Genesis) of The Bible: - Eve tastes forbidden fruit - Adam tastes forbidden fruit - their eyes are opened - they are expelled from Paradise. This might also be the first epiphany.
The type of the short story best suited for the cinema is naturally the "long short story", the novella, the short novel - best suited in the sense that the scope of the story corresponds a feature film quite well, without a need for padding or removing things - the ca 100 pages length is quite compatible with a screenplay for a feature film - stories such as
Carmen by Prosper Mérimée, one of the most-filmed stories, often also via the opera by Georges Bizet,
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson), also very often filmed, with a dream role for an actor,
Death in Venice (Thomas Mann), filmed by Luchino Visconti,
or the povesti by Leo Tolstoy, such as
Father Sergius, filmed by Jakov Protazanov, starring Ivan Mozzhukhin
Hadji Murat, filmed by Alexandre Volkoff as The White Devil, also starring Ivan Mozzhukhin, and
The False Note, filmed by Robert Bresson as L'Argent, among others,
and stories by F. M. Dostoyevsky, such as
White Nights, filmed by Luchino Visconti and Robert Bresson (Quatre nuits d'un rêveur), or
A Gentle Creature, filmed by Bresson (Une femme douce).
Crainquebille by Anatole France was filmed with a fine sense of realism and humour by Jacques Feyder.
L'Étranger by Albert Camus is generally considered a novel; it was interestingly filmed by Visconti, starring Marcello Mastroianni.
AN ASIDE ON THE NOVEL
The novel is an undisciplined and omnivorous beast which can contain almost anything, and we are not even speaking about Ulysses by James Joyce here. Digressions, sermons, lectures, history, geography, biology, astronomy... anything goes. Many great novels contain also short stories or semi-detached episodes which could be autonomously filmed. If I would film Moby Dick or Anna Karenina I might consider focusing on one of the great episodes, which are never filmed otherwise, because they are unnecesssary for the plot. Yet the whole is also in the part, and the part is a special reflection of the whole.
THE FILM STRUCTURE AND THE SHORT STORY
As we can see from the nine movies in our series, good films can be made from good stories in different ways.
Certain structures of the cinema are especially fruitful for short story adaptation. There is an affinity in certain films to short stories even when they are not based on short stories, and when they are actually based on novels.
THE PORTMANTEAU FILM, THE OMNIBUS FORMAT
THE QUERSCHNITT FORMAT (THE CROSS-SECTION FILM)
THE ROBERT ALTMAN STRUCTURE, MULTI-CHARACTER STUDIES, Altman preceded by Otto Preminger, and followed by Paul Thomas Anderson, among others.
These films may take place on a train (The Lady Vanishes), an ocean liner (Ship of Fools), or a hotel (Grand Hotel). Querschnitt classics follow the path of money (L'Argent), a ball night ticket (Carnet du bal), war boots (Yhdeksän miehen saappaat / Nine Men's Boots), or a car (In jenen Tagen / In Those Days). Examples of Altmanian multi-character studies include Nashville, A Wedding and Short Cuts.
DER BILDUNGSROMAN (the coming-of-age story) is an essential form of the novel, yet with an affinity with a short story series. The episodes can be quite independent, connected by the theme of the development of the protagonist. We have already mentioned Anton Chekhov's The Steppe, which is a long short story, povest, and a coming-of-age story. The classic is Goethe's Wilhelm Meister series, filmed by Wim Wenders as Falsche Bewegung, revealing its road movie connection. A Nordic favourite is Johannes Linnankoski's The Song of the Scarlet Flower, filmed by Mauritz Stiller, among others. We have just screened in our 50 Years Ago series Sammy Going South by Alexander Mackendrick, an orphan boy's coming-of-age adventure with episodes of an African journey from Egypt to South Africa.
THE PICARESQUE NOVEL is also an important type of the novel, also close to the form of a short story cycle. They are very fruitful for film adaptation, as are VIA DOLOROSA STORIES, PILGRIMAGE STORIES and CHASE STORIES. Luis Buñuel's Nazarín is a classic secular via dolorosa story based on the novel by Benito Pérez Galdós. This fall we are screening Vittorio De Sica's La porta del cielo (The Gate of Heaven), a pilgrimage story which takes place on a train. We see as flashbacks ten desperate life stories of protagonists hoping for a miracle at the destination. The miracle may actually happen, but only when the protagonist discovers the solution inside, yet the voyage may have made it possible. 39 Steps is the first full-blown Hitchcockian chase film based on the concept of the chased chaser and taking us to many different locations across a country; also it is based on a novel; yet with a characteristic episodic or vignette structure.
THE ODYSSEY itself is one of the prototypes for narrative, for storytelling. The protagonist is a wanderer, an aberrant, Ulysses, Dante, Faust, Don Quixote, Don Giovanni, Sinbad, Jean Valjean, Captain Ahab - the structure of the adventure is episodic, and episodes can be added or removed. The Western, the swashbuckler, the adventure film, the Nordic lumberjack film, the space odyssey, the road movie - they all belong here, and they all are fruitful for short story like narration.
THE EROTIC CINEMA, as distinct from a romantic love story, also has an affinity with a short story cycle. Li Yu's The Play of the Wind and the Moon, Casanova's adventures, the conquests of Lola Montès, Bel Ami, and Reigen / La Ronde resemble short story cycles, and they have all been filmed with different selections of episodes. Even hard core pornography in the 1960s and the 1970s belonged here, until hard core porn exploded into cyberspace, where depersonalization became total, and it did no longer even matter who the partners were. They can be switched at will in the middle of the act without a problem. From characters in stories they were reduced to magma in the instinct world.
EPISODE FILMS are an old tradition, and they go back to the birth of the feature film.
At their most popular they were in Italy in the 1960s, often in pan-European co-productions, and the best directors participated - directors such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, and Jean-Luc Godard. The tradition survives, and in many contemporary top directors' filmographies are entries for episode films.
In the commedia all'italiana episode films were very popular, and this autumn we screen some examples directed by Vittorio De Sica, such as Ieri, oggi, domani / Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. De Sica's Il giudizio universale / The Last Judgment is a mosaic-like vignette film, a multi-character study observing some twenty people's reactions to the announcement of an imminent end of the world.
EPISODE FILMS BASED ON A SPECIFIC AUTHOR have always been popular, as well. There are many Anton Chekhov episode films. W. Somerset Maugham episode films are a mini-genre. Good directors such as Howard Hawks participated in O. Henry's Full House. Horror episode films have been popular for a long time (a German favourite was Unheimliche Geschichten, filmed twice with inspired performances), and there are ones based on Edgar Allan Poe only, such as Histoires extraordinaires, with episodes by Federico Fellini and Louis Malle. In our series we screen two fine examples: Le Plaisir by Max Ophuls based on three stories by Guy de Maupassant, and Kun on tunteet by Erik Blomberg and Mirjami Kuosmanen, based on 13 stories by Maria Jotuni.
The cinema has received infinitely from other arts, including from the art of the short story. Narrative cinema started as filmed theatre. During the 20th century the development of the cinema was so compelling and persuasive that other arts started to approach the state of the cinema, as Andrew Sarris has observed. At the Helsinki Festival presently going on the use of the cinema in other arts is a basic theme, including in the Don Giovanni interpretation of last night, directed by Erik Söderblom. There is hardly a gallery exhibition without moving images. No longer do we see filmed theatre. Rather we see theatricized cinema.
