Typologies: planning what comes where in order to start

"Texts are assumed to be not windows, but paintings that invite readers to look at or into them, not through them" (Leitch, "12 Fallacies of Film Adaptation Theory")

Dear Friends,

I am quiet and my days pass quietly.   I find that I’m not missing teaching and am neither more or less lonely than usual.  A student whom I’m mentoring came to my house yesterday and we had a great couple of hours together. I found another use for my Clarissa paper: I was able to show her how to do a proposal and then a paper out of it by showing her my proposal for that and then my paper.   Beautiful time.

Jim and I have been emptying out this workroom by getting rid of a huge computer and monitor; he picked up all the wires on the floor and rationalized them. I rearranged some of my pictures, put new ones up, like this of Austen gazing out at the landscape by Cassandra, a water color of it.

I put it high up on one wall, to the corner. Overviewing yet looking away.  Perfect. Two new Poussins (meditative landscapes, one I’ve put just below), two local pictures of Alexandria Old Town (one a street in snow — one we walk through not infrequently).  I rearranged to be more consistent too:  all the movie pictures on one wall, and a new Gainsborough with the 18th century rococo landscapes in another area.

Travellers Resting in a Landscape

Izzy and I have gone to a couple of superb movies: Is Anyone There? last week (very moving, about dying, and how hard it is to make a living and maintain affection in life — Michael Caine, very great); and this one Every Little Step, a documentary of the auditioning story across many months for the revival of Chorus Line. The movie became a metamovie about the desperate need for a job and success for each contestant as they were gradually eliminated until the very end.  All three of us have been to the Austrian embassy twice this week. Tonight it was a stunning treat:  Hans Gal, a German Austrian Jewish musician wrote music and a script for a half-mocking set of songs while in a Scottish internment camp and this was recreated at the embassy. A crowd of people were there.  To see the human spirit manage these kinds of ironies with high art; it reminded me of Paradise Road where the women so much worse treated (killed, raped, tortured) nonetheless created and those who survived persevered with making a chorus and singing.

The pussycats continue to develop distinct personalities and we all form a family.

Inwardly I’ve been bothered by by my not going on to do direct study and write.  The problem is the plan. What to do first and then second and how to go about it.  I again faced how important it is to define what I have in order to tell my story.  So I returned to the vexing problem of categories.  As I used to write on my old blog, in order to do a close reading of a film, as with a book you should first ask what genre it belongs to.  We must understand and can judge a thing only by its own peculiar aims.  I originally came up with a tripartite scheme for film adaptation:

1) the apparently faithful or transposition:  the film-makers have attempted to match the original story, and to reproduce most of the characters and stayed with the central dramatic turning-points of the novel and famous lines, with some allowance for modernizing interpretations and necessary as well as advantageous alterations filmic media provides;

2) the critical or commentary type:  the film-makers intend considerable fidelity, but attempt this through departures from the original which often include altering central pivotal events (an event perceived as crucial) and the way in which the events are presented dramatically, in order to comment on, critique or alter Austen’s theme by making emphatic or highlighting specific aspects of her original novel.  Signs of this is the invention of a new character; a major change in the story or character switch or alteration; some technique which does not have an equivalent one in the book (voice-over and journal or letter writing where there is none in the major source text);

The slide between the apparently faithful and commentary: on the other hand, if a commentary, the 07 MP is unusual for its ambivalence and even hostility towards social life; now that is in Austen. Wadey’s Fanny and Edmund are escaping after the strains of her birthday picnic (the event is moved to another place in the story and Edmund made more sympathetic to Fanny’s desire to retreat).

3) the free adaptation or analogy:   film-maker has abandoned historical costume drama, but reproduces enough recognizable idiosyncratic analogous hinge-points, individual characters, character functions from the source novel, and overt (unsubtle) thematic intersections between the movie and source novel to make the film manifestly intelligible as an adaptation; in addition, the source novel is often explicitly discussed by characters in the film.

The problem for me has become that the type 1 and 2 are not distinct enough. Davies may be said to do Type 1, but he is ever pushing the envelope; his presentation or enunciation sometimes changing the spirit (there’s a mystique or undemonstrable characteristic) of the original book in his film.  Clarissa 1991 is a commentary because of the major change of having Belford kill Lovelace, the dropping of Morden, and change in Anna’s character: now that last is my subjective judgement, and it may be said that otherwise every effort is made by the film-makers to be faithful and their interpretation of the book is accurate.  And what does one do with a film like Lost in Austen: it does fits both commentary and free adaptation, but then is it not a pastiche, and is that a genre or a type of adaptation?

I  knew of Dudley Andrew’s (transforming, borrowing, intersecting — and these don’t work except as techniques within an adaptation) and of course Wagner’s (which mine correspond to).  Now this week I came across new articles & books which proposed other schemes.

I was not at all persuaded by Kamilla Elliott’s in Rethinking Novel/Film.  They solve the problem of half-accusing the film-makers of disingenuousness by not referring to how much the film has literally taken over. She instead makes the categories correspond to the film-makers’ deeper transformative techniques: psychic, ventriloquist, genetic, de(re)composing, incarnational, trumping. The trouble here is she has no literal features by which she can split and lump; it all comes down to her interpreting a film first.

Genette (in a book and quoted by others) calls all films adaptations and divides them all up into 6.   He collapses the faithful with the commentary in his first category: intertextuality (actual presence of one text in another). His second and third seems to me to refer to devices within the films: paratextuality (framing and defining devices), metatextuality (one text refers to another without necessarily citing it).  The last two are different means used by free adaptations:  hypertextuality (any means by which you unite text a to text b), architextuality (generic cues and conventions)  Film adaptations would be hypertexts. His terms are not commensurate.

Troost (in an article for Cartmell’s Cambridge Companion) invents again 3 types; Hollywood style (1940s and 96 Miramax Emma); heritage style (1970s BBC); fusion  of Hollywood and heritage (86 NA; 99 MP; 05 P&P); imitation (free adaptations Clueless and I have found it) The way she comes up with putting films into the categories is through broad responses, and she is reductive. Then she backtracks and says  95 P & P&P are both entertainment and heritage.  Trouble with her categories is they depend on her insights and are also based on a kind of caricature impressionistic criticism. Her idea seems to be that fusion combines Hollywood style (free) and heritage (solemn serious accuracies attempted). It’s really a condescending essay looking at films as cynical commodities sheerly.

Then there’s Leitch (Film Adaptation and Its Discontents) whose types seemed better or more accurate than mine for a time:

1) celebrations:  these subdivide into curatorial (BBC mini-series), replication, homage (one film adaptation recreates previous), heritage (museum aesthetic, Jewel in the Crown and 1998 Elizabeth).  Canonical books found here, pictorial realizations, liberation of material the original had to repress. He proposes the umbrella term literalizations, and says they correspond to Kamilla Elliot’s incarnation

2) adjustment: promising text rendered more suitable.  This is also what Elliott means by genetic (getting at deep underlying narrative structure and keeping that so 1940 P&P does that); McFarlane talks of the story and its enunciation (presentation, the discursive level and Davies 08 SS has a different presentation than conventions for Austen’s). So we have subtypes of compression, expansion, correction (correcting what are seen to be flaws in original, includes adding happy ending), updating, superimposition (stars imposed, stars themselves insisting on certain things), censoring, unacknowledged coauthors (like Emma Thompson for the 2005 P&P), a company’s or group’s house style (1940 P&P a MGM film, a Greer Garson film, an Olivier film, Merchant Ivory films; BBC style), antihouse or budgetary constraints, superimposition of generic conventions (film made to conform to popular film genre, for teen audience work repackaged)

3)  de(re)composing: film and book decompose, merge, and form new composition at underground levels of reading. Film a composite of textual and filmic signs merging audience consciousness together with other cultural narratives so we can’t tell what is book and what films.  Example:  I have found it.  So this subdivides into neoclassic imitation (West Side Story, Ian McKelln in R3), reverence includes satiric bent so Clueless a neoclassic imitation (this is like Griffith’s idea of adaptation as imitation, an aesthetic problem solved & communicated through many artistic choices. He sees these as also incarnations (?).

4) revisions (transforming the text); they seek to rewrite the original, now in imitations the past is the measure of the present; here the reassessment is primary. They seek to alter the spirit as well.  1999 MP, Branagh’s Henry V.  Some of these import historical events into novel. 1931, 41 versions of Jekyll and Hyde, explicit critiques of Victorian mores.

5) colonization: corresponds to ventriloquist, empties out novels signs and fills them with new filmic spirits, a composite of film and book. Ruby in Paradise, Lake House.  Vessels to be filled with new meaning, can be ideological critique and go in another direction entirely.  Nair’s Vanity Fair, Bride and Prejudice, Kuroawa’s Ran

6) (meta)commentary or deconstruction. He puts Jane Austen in Manhattan here. These can fictionalize problem of adaptation and staging, examine problems of arranging pre-existing material

7) Analogue: Bridget Jones’s Diary, Metropolitan (criteria is the analogy is discontinuous, and episodic) Unintentional analogues: Tevre’s Daughters by Sholem Aleichem

8) Parody and pastiche:  Lost in Austen.  Jameson:  pastiche is imitation of peculiar mask, speech in a dead language, neutral practice of mimicry, no ulterior motive to satirize, devoid of laughter at object or any onveniction alongside abnormal tongue you have chosen a healty linguistic norality exists.  Blank parody.  films have embedied parodies in them, Holmes movies are parodied.

9) secondary, teriary or quaternary imitations: Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason which is both a sequel to an adaptation film and an adaptation of a sequel book. Why not allow (as there are such things) where the adaptation focuses on the characters rather than replaying the story line

10) allusion.  What we have is microtexts embedded in the film’s larger structure

It would be hard to find a film that did not freely mix different strategies.

So where will this from Clueless go? We have a version of Mr Weston courting Miss Taylor with occupations and personalties changed, and it didn’t actually occur before us in Emma.

After puzzling over this for days, I’ve finally come to the conclusion that like Genette’s, Leitch’s represent different approaches to film-making rather than sticking to minute parallel criteria.  I can use the three part scheme, saying simply that sometimes a film hovers; I can call Lost in Austen commentary as a type, pastiche as its genre. Like the 1940 P&P is a commentary but its subgenre is screwball comedy.  The 1981 S&S is faithful and it is mostly poigant melodrama in genre.

I did like this from Leitch:  there is far more than one precursor text, and we should pay attention to a film’s other precursor texts. Here I come up against the problem that I don’t know how to close read two different sets of stories and characters, especially when the teams of people making them are made up of different individuals.  But thinking about this I think I can discern alikeness in David Giles’s choices of films and work, Denis Constanduros, Alexander Baron and so on, and what I can discern if more general will have to do.

If I return to my original idea of not organizing my book around Austen’s novels (so it would be six chapters for the six books and maybe a 7th for films that don’t correspond to a single book), how do I organize it?  A vast chapter on 12 transpositions won’t do and it would be boring to go on about the older mini-series; as a group unless I did startlingly good close readings, I’d have nothing new to say, and I know so many readers don’t see what the literary-filmic critic sees, so who am I writing to?  What publisher would pay for this?

The opening chapter should outline the movies by types and describe the three types effectively.  Then separate chapters on each set of movies arranged by major source book by Austen.  These chapters could have for lines of argument what distinguishes each subset and what that shows us about Austen both from what’s put in and what’s left out.  How do I cope with the reality that  the 1971 S&S, 1972 Emma, and 1981 S&S all form a group by virtue of Constanduros’s presence in all three.  The criss-crossing and grouping of other films has this problem. The 1940 P&P is a precursor of the 1996 Miramax Emma but also the other screwball comedies in the free adaptations, including (in spirit at least) the 1995 Clueless. 

I have to make up my mind that I have to lean on a few characteristics in close-reading too: say female narrators and voice-over as special to the Austen films. One real problem is how much space it takes to do close readings of films. There’s too much to say.  Mise-en-scene takes up everything from what is in the picture, to the angle, to the light, the music (about which I know so little) to the acting and each shot has this immense amount. So many questions. Is it true that films owe so much to novels or is to to painting they owe (costume drama especially) or drama, the stage — as the heart of the film is still the close encounter, the scene.

The above picnic in the grass from Kubrick’s 1975 Barry Lyndon alludes to George Seurat’s La Grande Jatte (see the configuration of the women to the side) as well as a couple of impressionist paintings (the group in the center). The woman’s hat is pure Gainsborough studio. I also note that the recent Aristocrats has a still very like this (it’s in our archives under "Aristocrats"), not that the director there had BL in mind particularly, but that this sort of thing became part of the grammar of the costume drama. I hope I’ve helped myself by writing this out tonight.

I have to face that I need to watch more movies during the day to get more evidence.  There is how a particular film has a director, writer, producer and different major actors and so to look at other films by all these people. Luckily I seem to have seen a number by or with each by now:  the BBC and Miramax people and quality film adaptations do repeatedly go for an interlocking group of individuals. I don’t mind spending time this way at all. I just loved Stanley Kurbrick’s Barry Lyndon which I spent three nights watching this week.

Then there is the problem of distinguishing the Austen movies.  Surely this is the last chapter.  What beyond the books makes them a distinct subtype. One thing is the unusual amount of movies attempting apparent fidelity.  Another may be the cross-borrowing (so in the 1995 Sense and Sensibility Brandon gives Marianne a piano, a completely transformed version of Frank Churchill giving Jane Fairfax a piano in Austen’s Emma — though I noticed this in Raven’s Pallisers (he borrows from other novels by Trollope occasionally, as Dolly Longestaffe for example from Trollope’s The Way We Live Now throughout the series). is that enough?  No. A certain kind of landscape. A certain kind of dialogue, prevailing mood?  That we go to compare them with the book and in the case of other books people don’t usually think of the book and are not aware it’s an adaptation.

This is a key still to them all: it recurs with people and without:

95 S&S, Dawn after Marianne’s near death

Raining out now. About 1:30 in the morning.  Ian mewing outside my door. I have managed thus far this summer not to put the air-conditioning and rely on my two fans. Nick unwell or not going to post to me (or lists or blog) for weeks and weeks again perhaps.  It frees me up. I wasn’t liking David Powell’s Man of the People: Charles James Fox, who needs this slick, cagily worldly spirit; there’s just not enough about the man’s inward life: Powell tries to imitate Strachey without the genius. I’ve switched back to Nicola Beauman’s literary biography, The Other Elizabeth Taylor and am trying Joanna Trollope’s The Rectors’ Wife (about which I shall write on WTTTA or Ellen and Jim have a blog, Two), but I shall miss him, especially as once he was when we originally met, our first bout of togetherness and talking of books here on the Net, and as he occasionally has been again.  Oh yes.

Well tomorrow Jim will show me how to put up a new document onto my website using different software. I’m going to put my filmography of the Austen films on my website. I know there is one on the JASNA page, but that is organized by book. I’ll organize mine by my tripartite division and arrange it more concisely.

Ellen

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The Cinematic Austen: life as study, reading, writing

As I remarked to Judy, this autobiographical blog might not seem so different from the impersonal or essay one (Ellen and Jim have a blog, Two).  Why?  Because what I like to do best is read and study and take notes; also after an initial deeply pleasurable watch (or not so great but interesting enough and in my area), watch movies carefully and take down the transcripts and make notes (capturing stills as I go).  Jim said on our holiday in Vermont last year, "Ellen is doing what she likes to do best," and there was a picture of me reading away.

So on these beautiful early summer days I am going out to walk with Jim (lovely last night in old Town), movies with Izzy, gym, and occasionally playing with cats (sleeping with them nightly and they keep me company in my dawn reading) and Jim and I and sometimes Izzy eating and drinking and talking.  I actually ironed one of Izzy’s blouses, and then shopped with her and we got the first things we saw at Macy’s for her: elegant silk black suit and soft turquoise blouse; for me it took a little longer, but not much: a nightgown and light robe for me.  Two concerts with Jim, one with Izzy and Jim.  We all worked over the four weeks and succeeded in a slow motion fixing of our porch in several stages.  But what does not change and goes on for hours each day is staying in my room between two fans and reading books on Austen and right now her S&S and then skimming and rereading film studies of Austen films, a few general but most of them about the Sense and Sensibility films.  This is a report of what I’ve come up with in the last three days or so.

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One of many beloved stills of Hattie Morahan as Elinor, 08 S&S

First, The cinematic Austen by Monaghan, Wiltshire and Hudelet. This is the book I read carefully before skimming through all the essays I have on the S&S films.

I recommend it as a film study as well as for what it reveals about Austen and the films under discussion. In brief, the aim in all but two is to move from screen to page, not page to screen. They study the movies to see what they teach us about the texts, and we learn a good deal.  They also look to see the interlationships between movies and successfully (this is hard) the interrelationship of a novel with the movie adaptations.  The latter is achieved by creating some precise definitions of what we mean by cinematic and some precise definitions of what is done in a verbal text and then comparing and seeing what we can learn about both.

Wiltshire shows us how recent movies made a use of old light (candles, early versions of gas lamps) and says this has become a trait shared by Austen films, a mark of them.  I qualify this by saying it’s found as early as 1981 and intermittently in the 72 BBC Emma and 79 BBC P&P.  He suggests when film brilliant it reflects back on pastness of past, uncovers hidden sources of her art — in light, overhearing use of light and darkness, mise-en-scene in Austen brought out (how her descriptions are pointed at objects and heavily psychologized) — including its subjectivity instead of visuality.

Hudelet shows how Austen has micro-intensity, enhancement of details and nuance, close up reactions in her scenes. She tells us what the soundtrack of the best movies teaches us about Austen.  She also is alive to how the treatment of space in films has changed recently. We’ve gone well beyond no longer treating space as a stage.

Yes, I’d say the visions are themselves continually on movement and re-angled. She’s not articulate enough here but she’s right.  Izzy and I saw Is Anybody There? this weekend and it shows this new use of space frequently. A good start in the Austen movies is Wright’s 2005 S&S and then watch his 2007 Atonement.

Like the Indian critic whose book on Indian films included a long section on the use of mirror, Hudelet is good on mirrors in these films.  (See http://www.jimandellen.org/austenblog/930.html )

By the way there is but one scene in all Austen which has mirrors — if Diana reads this I would be grateful for correction — it’s in Persuasion where Admiral Crofts tells Anne he is embarrassed to be surrounded by so many mirrors. Hudelet’s arguing Austen’s specific kinds of themes and unfolding of characters lend themselves to sophisticated filmic techniques:  flashbacks within flashbacks, epistolarity, mirrors, optical games. She argues that the movies don’t impose a truth on an Austen text but rather convey the evolution of the text, the variabilities of readings, of imaginary visions produced by the novel.

Monaghan’s conservative politically and persists in writing fidelity criticism; he begins with Austen’s text and evaluates movies in accordance with how close they come. He does it rigorously and you learn a lot about the books as he sees them and the movies more objectively (paradox here).  Tellingly and quite unconsciously he reveals the rigidity of literary schemes when he comes to discuss Persuasion, his Anne Elliot becoming a sort of rigid conception he can beat liberal literary critics of the film and book with; he can also one-up Rozema by taking her at her word and showing the ending of the original book does not fit the film she made and that we can see cowardice and a need for a wide audience prevented her from changing the ending to one more appropriate.

Jumping to Wiltshire at the end, it’s a superb essay (he is so smart) but like so many critics, he has decided the three recent films of 2007 (90 minutes) are available for bashing and faults the 2007 Persuasion for changing the ending of the film as it’s not like the book’s inner structure, but the film provides a different set of themes and emotions (he admits all films do to some extent) which makes its choice of ending appropriate for it. He’s not having that and in this essay he returns to an insistence on fidelity as partly an evaulative standard.  Much food for thought here too (and nothing of the rigidity of Monaghan): he says you must look at all the films in terms of source book because simply that’s its source, but also one another.  Good comments: points out how there is reversal of Austen’s project in 95, 00, 08, Perkins says she means to feminize men and make women at the center

The penultimate essay is by Hudelet and concentrates on the free adaptations, Indian, I have found it, and modern California, The Jane Austen Book Club, to make some superb points about adaptation as such. For example, that it’s ubiquitous (think of operas, theme parks, radio plays, stage plays) and commits "the heresy of showing that form can indeed be separated from content.  At the opening of the book Monaghan takes an older argument first found in Jonathan Miller that shows that adaptations in films are not distinct species which we can’t compare to texts:  at the heart of our understanding of both are conceptions and emotions and understandings in our minds and it’s that that we write out of.  This is repeated in a book by Kamilla Elliot — better known than Miller’s Subsequent Performance which seems only to be quoted for his (out of character with the rest f the book) bashing of TV adaptations   She shows why and how Austen’s texts have come to be available for so many cultures, how they function to be applied to diverse cultures and their needs.

Unfortunately Frances Cuka’s performance as the fiercely angry malevolent and yet poignantly desperate Lucy (gratingly insistence to Joanna David as Elinor) is not well known, nor Patricia Routledge as Mrs Jennings in comic anguish, messenger telling (reliving) scene where Edward is ejected from home by mother and sister:

both from the71 S&S by Denis Constanduros

A less positive aspect of this was brought up by Diana in her excellent blog (The Selling of Jane Austen) where I contributed a reply that paraphrases and coins phrases from Barthes which Hudelet takes over:  "Jane Austen" becomes a vague sort of sacralized myth which is made up of books (which perceivers align with Austen), films, box office stars, paraphernalia; this site or imaginary exists to be appropriated.  And of course unscrupulously sold. And that’s what you can see in meetings (& editions) increasingly.

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Older volume JA goes to Hollywood edited by Troost and Greenberg has a number of the essays very good in the sense the films are carefully studied and understood, but they can go no further than criticizing the films for not being like the book on the grounds of their interpretations of Austen (which are not always correct) and their ideas about what these interpretations mean culturally. Forever left without bringing film in to play with novel filmically and that’s what Cinematic Austen tries to do.

The best I found in the older volumes in general and just on S&S:   Devoney Looser in Troost and Greenberg on the real feminism of the films; Tom Hoberg in 19th century women’s novels on film, ed B. Lupack for his genuine generous insights into the 1981 and 1995 S&S; he shows flaws but also the strengths of both movies.

Diana Fairfax as Mrs Dashwood given a number of her own scenes in 81 S&S, strong presence, made intelligent and reasonable and emotional, supportive of Edward, memorable

An intriguing new book:  Judith Mayne’s Private Hotels, Public Films. She says she is going to analyze film adaptations from the point of view of how one is meant for a private experience and dwells on the private a lot, and the other experienced as a social experience and directed to uphold social life. I can see she also treats of interiority in these forms.  I was drawn to it because I noticed a discussion of the 1991 Clarissa (which I had missed) as well as several of the Austen movies.

Joss March on Dickens and Edzard’s Little Dorrit:  what matters most is the emotional tone of the work; if that is lost, if novelist’s viewpoint not absorbed into emotional life of film, work is lost.  A scene a writer never wrote gives us visual and aural equivalents of words author did write; apparent distance can conceal extraordinary sensitivity to text. So despite it’s being a comic drawing room play, Constanduros gives us the long trips and a deeply musing sensitive Marianne whose Cassandra act in the drawing room defending Elinor is one of the great climaxes of the 71 film:

Ciaran Maddan as Marianne in carriage driving away from Norland

A.A. Milne in his preface to his play, Elizabeth Bennet, how important and justified it is for an adaptor to draw out the implications and flesh out characters in the original text.

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On Austen’s Sense and Sensibility:  Gene Ruoff’s book:  the whole of Ruoff’s book on S&S seems to me absolutely accurate — and important for a comparative study of the film;  in particular the comment:  Austen has not yet managed to free the representation of women’s lives from the hegemony of men’s stories, p 109.  He brings out how memory is so central to Austen’s MP, and how many times Fanny appears compared to Elizabeth Bennet in P&P:  Stuart Tave’s analysis dwells on memory; well, the 1983 BBC MP is drenched in memory filmic techniques and Fanny as voice over narrator; deep past of Anne Elliot suggested in traumatized diary representations of Wentworth and Anne in 2007 Persuasion.

Emma Thompson as Elinor captures Susan Morgan’s idea about  Austen’s S&S best:  perplexed, thinking, doing right insofar as she can.  Lonely too but controlled and therefore not dependent on contingencies of the moment until a real crisis occurs.

And finally an intriguing way of justifying intertextual studies galore in films and novels too by Jocelyn Harris in Jane Austen on Screen, edd. MacDonalds. her idea is films and novels are so disparate there’s no use analysizng for fidelity in effect; the film is an imitation of the book in another media.  18th century idea of imitation as articulated by Dryden begins her analyses and then what she does is meditate the work (film or book) out of what her own richly stocked mind can draw from intertextuality.  It makes me want to reread Forster’s Howards End and then rewatch the Merchant/Ivory/Jhabvala film for Emma Thompson as Margaret Schlegel/Elinor Dashwood the way I watched Mira Nair’s Namesake for Tabu as Ashima/Elinor Dashwood.

Tabu as Ashima at job at Digital Software when she spies Mano (Edward character) walking across the lobby.

Perhaps I’ll come back later today to say add comments (details from Looser’s essay).  Harriet Margolis in the MacDonald Jane Austen on Screen volume suggests that we who write on the Net about Austen are all recreating her as validly in our way as any academic scholar, money-making film- or sequel-maker.  She denies the debate over how to talk about Austen is a question of commercializing but one about power and control.

Miss Drake — who we all recall (Gaudy Night anyone?) took decades over her dissertation

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Dreaming the Austen movies: Lost in Austen (1)

Dear Friends,

To explain to Diana (or if I may, Miss Shuster-Slatt), the kind of writing I mean to put on this blog first I will differentiate this from the previous blog (Ellen and Jim have a blog, too) and then provide a description, analysis, and meditation on the latest mini-series, Lost in Austen both below and in the comments to this reverie-blog.

So, when I wrote www.jimandellen.org/austenblog/701.html "Dreaming the Austen Movies" on my old blog, I wrote an essay on the in-depth reach of costume drama, especially in the subgenre the Austen movies, and then did talk of how I dreamed about them in my sleep.  I provided a still of John Carson as particularly beautiful (actually caught from the 1972 BBC Emma.

For this Reverie under the Sign of Austen, I will instead this morning first say as I woke up in the dawn I realized I had been dreaming that the actors from Lost in Austen had been filming the movie in my house for several nights, and half-believing it as I went about my daily activities. Then I offer another still, a particularly evocative one for me — among the many oneiric ones in the film:

And out of that, an description, analysis and evaluation of Lost in Austen.

On the weekend I watched the opening 2 episodes of Lost in Austen. The opening prologue, paratexts, and repeat of prologue is very powerful for an Austenite or Janeite.

We see a book coming out of a bag and then as the words (voice over) starts, we see a woman reading P&P in a familiar Penguin edition).  She speaks in a deeply sonorous tone:

It is a truth generally acknowledged that we are all longing to escape.

[then begins a sequence of clips which are set up to recall different Austen movies]

I escape always to my favorite book Pride and Prejudice [her voice becomes ever so slightly choked with emotion]. I’ve read it [turning of pages heard] so many times now, the words just say themselves in my head [warmer and warmer]

[Insert we see a man dressed in 18th century clothes on a terrace looking out at a beautifully set up countryside: this is an exact quotation at least of the 1981 S&S where Brandon (handsome Robert Swan) so looks out]

and it is like a window opening. It’s like I’m actually there

[scene of her dressed in an outfit that recalls one of Jennifer Ehle's only she's walking down a stone stairwell that is very like one in the 1983 BBC MP where Mary Crawford wears the colors she has on]

It’s become a place I know so intimately I can see that world I can

[she is now running down the stairs, and has an outfit precisely like Ehle's; she and we see the man on the terrace from afar, now close up from behind and he begins to turn and resembles Colin Firth]

I see Mr Darcy …. whoooo! ….

[back to modern scene of her on couch and she shuts book to stop herself]

Amanda. [we hear a car starting up and she breathes hard ...]

Now where was I? ….

Then come a series of comic paratexts which like those in the 1979 P&P anticipate the story. In this one Jane will marry Mr Collins.  After the paratexts a reprise of that opening, only this time preceded by her at work (montage of stress, anxiety, people coming to her telling her absurd stories as she writes on the computer, in the noisy streets, in the bus trying to read P&P and home again …

I know that Austen is no escape, but this does call to my heart as I read Austen for refuge too, and I feel I know it by heart, and the appeal to how it resonates somewhere, as well as the quotations of effective moments in previous films is superbly right.  I would be a hypocrite were I to say otherwise.

The movie is a kind of Jane Austen meets Mark Twain.  Elizabeth Bennet comes to her house and tricks Amanda Price into taking her place. Prince and Pauper. Arriving and unable to go back, Amanda is a irritant who brings another world’s perspective (but not satiric or burlesqueing the characters) and gets in the way of the story so as to disturb and make it end differently.  A mix of Connecticut Yankee in King’s Arthur’s Court and Six Characters in Search of an Author.

They have chosen actresses and clothes which recall the 95 P&P more than any other film, but for example the Bennet house corridor is precisely that of the 79 P&P.  A metamovie you might say   The anamesic music which plays at the opening of each part is exactly that which plays at the opening of the 95 P&P. I suppose they paid a lot for that.  It’s strong rousing music.  For transcripts and stills and more themes, see

Lost in Austen:  The Harrowing of Amanda’s Dream

Lost in Austen:  We must not reproach ourselves for unlived lives.

Andrew Davies usually gets strong active rousing music for his film adaptations, especially when it’s by a woman and is about romance and subtle and delicate. Immediately he tries to attract viewers who would not normally pick up a woman’s novel or think of a novel of sensibility as somehow without strength or vigor.  In his Daniel Deronda he chose an operatic score, and in NA kept the background black with a white script and chose eerie music in a minor key.

But here the overt important thing is he repeats the music of the 95 P&P which was (as he knows) an important sociological event in the growth of recent Austenmania. I have girl students who will say they love Austen’s P&P and when I question them, they admit they have not read her book but rather watched his movie over and over — he makes it Darcy’s story as much or more than Elizabeth’s.

Lots of jokes over clashes in outfits – she is dressed supersexy for the era.

It’s very clever and at first works self-reflexively wittily (and some of the principals are very good — Alex Kingston as Mrs Bennet, Hugh Bonneville as Mr), but it falls off as the writers have to come up with a different story and they make one which doesn’t cohere either with Austen’s own characterse (which doesn’t matter that much) and also with the characters as they’ve reimagined them.

As I recall it seemed to me to fall off as the new changes in the story engendered by Amanda’s presence) were worked out.  Now I’m thinking that by having Jane marry Mr Collins, the writers bring home that Bingley was wrong and create a real result from his having abandoned Jane and allowed himself to be persuades. The importance of virginity or chastity is not gone from us for the movie actually uses the same device as Burney (!): we are to believe Mr Collins and Jane are not going to bed  with one anotther, doubtless to save her vagina up for who? 

This time I was wondering if I was missing the satire, if there was more than I thought in a muted way and am seeing some of this in the way Darcy is treated.  He is also made to suffer for his arrogance and we are made to see it as arrogance.  For example, his famous insult is clearly overheard by Amanda, meant for her (in the way it is in Bridget Jones’s Diary)

To conclude:  returning to the out-of-proportion popularity of P&P to the other novels by Austen: when I reread it last summer to teach it for the first time I became aware of a difference between it and the other 5.

It omits social minutiae; it is very bare of any kind of outside sociological and other detail which the later 3 books are rich in, and is intermixed with the stories of S&S strongly.  The last book, NA (published last with P) has as much aesthetic as social detail.

I did a study of abridgements once and read articles on them: what’s done is more than cut chapters; they also thin out the text to remove all detail of an informative kind, much nuance from history. 

I believe one of the way Austen "lopp’d and chopp’d" P&P was to cut this kind of detail and that is also why it’s so popular. The short talks and papers on it were often good: they saw the obvious symmetries and many missed the darker currents altogether. Not hard to do really.

So Lost in Austen can readily present the Austen house and Netherfeld and all the rest of it cut off from the nightmare of history at the time.  This book lends itself to the wild romance vision of Joe Wright.  And it’s been adapted at least 10 times since 1939 – though one might suggest that early movie was not as  popular as people suppose since the next Austen movie was not until 1971 and the choices were Persuasion & S&S.  P&P wasn’t done from 1939 to 1979 – not in a full length movie form.

The early choices of actors for the BBC series also shows that Austen was not regarded as supreme and requiring box stars after the 1939 (where you do have them).

And for myself, well the sense of the experience at night while dreaming made me happier during the days, and I’m a little sorry I now have a grasp on reality more precise. I probably won’t be able to have exactly these sets of lovely images (for that’s what dreams are) floating in my head again.

Ellen

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A journal of spontaneous thoughts and record of Miss Drake’s existence & that of her family & friend

Dear Friends,

Last night I wrote my first entry and how I meant to use this space for spontaneous thoughts as they come to me (to save them) and as a record of my doings (to remember).  I didn’t say how I came to decided to write here, and divide my writing on the Net into a blog for informal essays on my interests (which you see up in the corner) and journal of my personal life.

Here is what happened and why I’ve chosen to do what I’ve done:

Thanks to Fran (a good friend on WWTTA), the Admiral and I discovered a virus had infected one of the 3 servers Jim has set up beyond our Chicago network “solution” to keep extra copies of all he, I, and Yvette do. It turns out that she didn’t avail herself of server4 nor emacs (a way of putting things on our website) so she will not have to change her presence on the Net at all (she posts to the net much fiction and poetry as well as having a blog). The alert was the new photo I put onto my first page of my website: it contained a script which this virus on the server was sending out.

Luckily (we all try to see a bright side, even me), the virus seems to have infected the server in early May, and the script could only be sent out to those parts of my website I updated since around May 1st. Very very few in comparison to what’s there. In fact I have stopped adding to my website much; I write mostly on this blog. But I had revamped and changed the Clary material (though much that I did I did before May 1st); had been evaluated so changed my CV, and for teaching I was updating regularly a few pages. Anway we cleaned out all this on the website entirely. It took hours. The website need not change at all as it is recorded or kept (or whatever is the appropriate word) in our domaine at Chicago (Network Solutions, jimandellen.org).

But if anyone should get any message about my website that there is something risky there, please to let me know and he and I will go after the particular script that escaped our notice.

The malice of this ought to astonish us. Server4 is a lost case. Jim says the virus is made out of a Java script in such a way that he cannot reach or dig it out; it has destroyed everything in server4. Think of someone dying of small pox covered in those hideous sores.

So we have shut down server4. The problem was "Ellen and Jim have a blog, too". While everything we do is on our JimandEllen.org account at a Chicago site (not infected, a major commercial place), the blog is not. It’s been just on server4. So now we had to find a way to reinstate this blog up to today and move elsewhere to continue. The reinstatement would not have been a real blog but only a record of what was that appears the same . So we decided against that as it was so hard to do anyway.

We then did something I know we should have done months ago. I had separated out all the postings I wrote on Austen, women’s novels, memoirs, poetry and films; on Trollope and the 19th century; on the 18th century; reports of conferences I’ve been to; blogs on costume dramas, film adaptations and contemporary art films Yvette and I go to. He’s written a script and I will put these separately on single pages in the different sections of my webiste (I have sections on Austen, Trollope, conference papers, women’s poetry, and the films will go with the part of the website called “Writing on the Net”).

The blog at wordpress will not have diaries entries and only be situtational: I will situate with a minimal autobiography of how Yvette and I or he and I or all three came to go to this play or that museum, and then proceed to the matter.

This blog will be a separate blog as a journal of my life.

I do know that Ellen and Jim have a blog two will be the less without the deep personal musing, and this one won’t have the extensive talk about books, plays, movies, pictures &c.  But as many people know who practice of keeping the personal to a minimum when you talk about literature or art, the average person and certainly editors do not feel this way. 

Literature and art is therefore the lesser. I got bitter attacks on the first Trollope list when I first started to post there for telling of the origins of my reading perceptions. I don’t get invited to most big literary blogs because I’ve persisted in this.  I will — as I cannot but — tell something, but not as much, partly because it does take strong energy.

The sicknesses of viruses are the sicknesses of human nature. I read in a column by Katha Pollitt how a respected organization of peopel who call themselves the National Alliance for mental illness calls the US way of treating such illness “disastrous” and gives it a D, this quite apart from the slashing of services (very bad for you if you can keep away) in recent decades. Not that the malice which makes this kind of virus seeks mental help: no rather probably the kind of people who do this do perfectly well in society, thrive, like Rigaud in Dickens’s Little Dorrit.

A further problem: The scheme Jim concocted to transfer the UK videotapes Judy sent me won’t work because it’s dependent on using my old computer. After all he didn’t quite believe it was as gone as I claimed; now he has his proof. We still are unable to watch the videocassettes sent from the UK & we can’t transfer them to MP2 into a external hard drive because the old machine insists the hard drive is full when it’s nearly empty. Jim says someone is trying to invent something we could use, so our problem is shared by others. We may hope we may eventually or sooner than that be able to transfer the tapes to MP2s.
 

Miss Drake

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A Diary of Thoughts & Doings

Dear Friends,

This is the first of what could be a series of diary entries. I’ve opened a new blog with my husband, "Ellen and Jim have a blog, Two" (a sequel to "Ellen and Jim have a blog, too").  "Ellen and Jim have a blog, two" is meant really to have essays and meditations on topics where I don’t try to work out problems and thoughts or feelings. 

"Reveries" is to record what I do and think as the days and nights go by, with an emphasis on travels in real space and travels in books, art, and movies. I thought I might bring in my daily experiences and memories in deep past too, but am not sure how much. The truth is I often don’t care about the here and now beyond that it be comfortable and pleasant for me to read, write, and study — and nowadays watch films in.  Most of my memories are painful and perhaps embarrassing or too personal (or for others tiresome) to read. When I do meet with friends in cyberspace or the physical world, or teaching I might talk about that.

I’m not sure. I know I love having a blog to write more freely than the kind where I stick to one topic in, and that I write it in the spirit of my original blog.  To an or imagined friends.

So here goes for the first posting here,
Miss Drake

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