Death Comes to Pemberley: the coloration of the film
Dear friends and readers,
My proposal has been accepted:
The Eighteenth Century on Film: A proposal for the coming ASECS in March 2015: “What work does a screenplay or shooting script perform?
The argument of my paper will be that using the screenplay or shooting script to close read a film yields far more accurate and instructive information and insight about the film than comparing it directly (as is often done) to its eponymous novel. I will have three examples where the sources (beyond other films and other intertextual references) and types of films are usefully different.
Death comes to Pemberley: one of the many scenes in the wood near Pemberley; a group scene (script calls for lines interacting over scenes juxtaposed)
First I’ll present my findings from an analysis of the final shooting script by Juliette Towhidi for P.D. James’s Death comes to Pemberley against the 2013 romantic mystery thriller mini-series. In this first case we have an intermediary novel, P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley, and, as it is close sequel, a specific originating Austen novel (Pride and Prejudice) with its underlying material literally important to the film but strongly changed first by P.D. James and then by Towhidi. We will be able to see three levels of transference: Death Comes to Pemberley, the film from its shooting script; then the shooting script’s transference from Death Comes to Pemberley, the novel, itself a close sequel to Pride and Prejudice in the way the characters are developed from the original novel.
Metropolitan: Individual and group debate over ideas central to this film
The second part of the paper will tell my findings from an analysis of the screenplay for Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan. I choose this film because it’s a realistic novel of manners done within 2 hours and there is no intermediary novel. In this second case also the originating novel (Mansfield Park) however recognizable through analogy is far from the literal movie story line and characters and yet is there transformed. I hope to make visible the direct transference which still makes the novel newly available with the contemporary slant of an appropriation. I will bring up Victor Nunez’s Ruby in Paradise briefly as it too has no intermediary novel and yet a recognizable Austen novel as its underlying material (Northanger Abbey). One sparrow does not a summer make so a few comments on this second poetic shooting script is there to make more convincing the perspective and argument I made about a film made directly from a script.
Jonny Lee Miller as Mr Knightley walking away from Emma after a strong spat
Agasin from Emma (2009): after Box Hill, Romola Garai as Emma to Michael Gambon as Mr Woodhouse: to his query doubting the good time, she says she doesn’t think she’ll do it again soon, as “one can have too much of a good thing …”
If it’s just 15 minutes I keep to a brief coda bring the 2009 heritage mini-series adaptation of Emma by Sandy Welch. (I’ll omit Andrew Davies’s 1995 Emma film; after all it’s been analyzed elsewhere). What I was to show is the shooting script of a mini-series shows how the cyclical nature of such a film changes the novel fundamentally in the way we experience it even if impressionistically viewers and film critics alike talk as if we have a close “faithful” transference.
Ruby in Paradise: New Henry Tilner in Mike McClasin (the 2008 JJFeilds the same type out of Andrew Davies scripts) an environmentalist who has opted out for a time, playing his horn in the wood outside his cabin-house
2008 Northanger Abbey: JJ Fields as Tilney appealing to Catherine Morland his vulnerability
It is still common for film criticism to ignore or not use centrally the screenplay or shooting script for close readings of films. With the popularity of adaptations, increasingly film-makers use sequels of famous books as well as previous film versions as part of their terrain. So, the purpose of my paper is to show how much more effective a study of a film can be if we use the shooting script or screenplay whether there is an intermediary novel, no intermediary novel or just an originating novel. One reason for the use of the novel rather than the screenplay or shooting script is they are often not made available. For Austen films they are more often than many other classic books because she is such a cult figure and attracts respected film-makers. My hope is studies like mine will help lead to more publication of screenplays and shooting scripts which are valuable works of literature in their own right.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
Verna:
“I find the experience of “seeing” to be a rather more passive engagement in storytelling. Reading requires us to flesh out and imagine characters and settings. In film we are participating through someone else’s vision and although I find that appealing I wonder if the modern preoccupation with visual arts hasn’t led to a rather more passive, less intellectual response in some cases. The choices a screen writer and director makes as to what constitutes kernel events are a fascinating topic. Also dialogue..so many Adaptations of Jane Austen novels are enhanced because her wittier dialogue and phrases become a point to anchor character, themes and narrative. I sometimes find watching the “bonus” material at the end of a DVD necessitates re watching the film….maybe I should make the interviews and monologues with producers, screen writers, directors, costume designers et al. First rather than last port of call.”
My response:
Well yes true — about how we have to do the imaginative work ourselves when we read, but consider this: in order to understand the film more deeply we are left to do the intellectual conception behind the visuals and sound ourselves. The difference between the satisfaction of French criticism in comparison to most others until the last 10 years or so is the French critics had the courage to expatiate on what they were seeing without having the words to support their interpretations. That’s hard: it makes watching images and hearing sounds become a form of work where you then have to intuit its deeper meaning without a narrator to guide you.In this work a screenplay is central because what happens when we watch movies is they go so fast we miss a lot and the first time round usually don’t see what’s being juxtaposed. That does not mean our re-seeing is a form of cheating: when we anaylyze a poem we have to reread it and often find that we missed a lot the first time round.
I think here we see how our culture values the verbal over the visual in that when a critic or reader is confronted with the sheerly verbal, he or she values it and expatiates; when confronted with a aesthetic object that is centrally visual with the words as epitomizers, he or she resists or does not think to value it strongly enough to expatiate, intuit, elaborate.
Thank you for this dialogue; it will be a real help giving my paper in March.
Certainly a screen play performs a very different role to the original novel. The screen writer is inevitably mindful that they are creating visual images from dialogue, and that dialogue or voice-over works with and through the medium of images on screen. It is quite startling for example how very different two adaptations of Persuasion can be for example.