The view from the cliffs of Walton-On-The-Naze, Essex from 27.10, Brindle, Sanditon Film-Of-The-Play (thanks to Chris Brindle for supplying it [Olympus Digital Camera]
Joanna Harker and Jennifer Ehle as Jane and Elizabeth, the central pair of the novel brought out beautifully by so many scenes between the sisters in Davies’s 1995 P&P
Sidney Parker (Theo James) and Charlotte Heywood (Rose Williams) bypassing one another in Davies’s Sanditon (Part 2)
Dear friends and readers,
A blog on Austen herself is long overdue, so by way of getting back to her texts, I offer tonight two videos on or of film adaptations.
Miss Bingley claims a dance from Darcy at an assembly ball (1940 MGM P&P)
Elizabeth Garvie as Elizabeth (1979 P&P, Fay Weldon)
Over on Janeites@groups.io, Nancy Mayer sent the URL to this interesting (not overlong at all) video: “Book vs. Movie: Pride and Prejudice in Film & TV (1940, 1980, 1995, 2005)” or “Pride and Prejudice by the Book:”
I find it an an excellent video review. It’s not original in approach but each of the four perspectives, and the points made are accurate and as a composition, the whole makes sense. Comparing these four makes sense too because they are (as the narrators says) of the faithful (heritage it’s called sometimes) approach. What makes the video especially good, gives it some distinction is the choice of shots, the scenes and dialogues chosen, and how they are put together. The video-makers had to have watched all movies four over and over again, made very careful slices, and then spent a long time putting together juxtapositions and montages. The one drawback is many of the dialogues from the movies in the clips, are too shortened, not enough of the conversation cited. For example, in Joe Wright’s 2005 P&P, when Claudie Blakeley as Charlotte accusingly says to Elizabeth, before telling Elizabeth of her decision to marry Mr Collins, “don’t you judge” (a few words to this effect), the eloquent speech just afterwards would have brought out not just the quality of the modernization of the language of this one, but the in-depth interpretation offered by the script-writer Deborah Moggach, with some help from Emma Thompson
The incandescent Lawrentian erotic close of Joe Wright’s 2005 P&P, Keira Knightley and Matthew MacFayden as Elizabeth and Darcy (tacked onto the American version)
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Sanditon is now airing on ITV, will in January 2020 be shown on PBS, and the creator, script-writer, Andrew Davies, has a new and freer adaptation of Austen than he’s done before. After watching several of his adaptations over the 2 decades from 1990, we can see how far he has come (going with the era he’s developing a film for) from his first adaptation – he has now “done” P&P, Emma, S&S and Northanger Abbey — all of these very good in their Davies way, a re-vision partly from a male point of view. I note he has said no more and think to myself he is no fan of Mansfield Park and is avoiding the dark melancholy and unfinished state of Persuasion (captured very well in 2007, directed by Adrian Shergold, written by Simon Burke)
Two stills from Andrew Davies’ Sanditon, the first episode, the first glimpses of the place and beach; the second POV Charlotte Heywood (Rose Williams) and Tom Parker (Kris Marshall)
For some first impressions of the Part 1 Sanditon, and now Part 2
The second video, I offer by contrast: the cabaret style YouTube of the musical Sanditon as it played cabaret style in London this past late July.
I’ve written too many blog-reviews and commentaries on Chris Brindle’s filmed play of Sanditon (heritage style the faithful type), and a couple of the songs, so accompany this one just by a photograph of the English shoreline down south, here unspoilt (uncommercialized)
Here is a still I’ve not put up yet of Charlotte Heywood in comic anguish:
Act I of Brindle’s Sanditon — Amy Burrows as Charlotte Heywood
Part 2 of Davies’s Sanditon — Rose Williams as Charlotte emerging from bathing in English channel
A closing thought: it seems to me that a remarkable variety of types of films (genre, or heritage/appropriation), points of view, film techniques have been used across Austen’s corpus, testifying to how capable the books are of suggesting lines of approach for each era they have been read in.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
Many Thanks Ellen,
All of my ‘Sanditon’ output can now be accessed from my website http://www.Sanditon.info;- that is my very heritage/faithful Film-Of-The Play Adaptation, and in its own way a very faithful Musical version of Sanditon, as a very 21st Century pop band are persuaded to get involved with Austen’s dialogue, her characters, and the situations in her last unfinished novel ‘Sanditon’. Also on the website is the text of both the Austen and Lefroy fragments of ‘Sanditon’ and also my documentary filmed at all the main Austen sites in Hampshire and Berkshire which explains that ‘Sanditon’ was part of Austen’s strategy to become a literary immortal and is so much more than just an unfinished novel. I am delighted that it is receiving so many views.
I think Andrew Davies’ ‘Sanditon’ is a far cry from his beloved BBC ‘Pride & Prejudice’ for a start he says he was too busy to write all of the script just writing the first three and the last episodes, and using little more than the names of some of Austen’s characters, and given them the bare minimum of dialogue to get from one shot to the next. The other problem with bringing Austen’s ‘Sanditon’ to life is that uniquely in her work the situation and the place – the developing Seaside Resort in the early 19th Century is as much a character in the story as any of the actors. This the ITV / Red Planet story rushed into production totally fails to recognise. For a start ‘Trafalgar House’ needs to have a real location that overlooks the sea, not stuck down in an unconvincing townscape. ‘Sanditon’ as a TV mini-series or feature film deserves a much better script attuned much more closely to to the original inspiration and the events of the time, with a much larger budget to buy the locations, the sets and the CGI to do the concept justice:- so a budget of tens of millions, rather than single digit millions.
For me, working by myself with my own money I feel that a two hour big stage version of my stage musical is probably the answer to dramatising Sanditon, with a budget of tens of thousands of pounds, rather than the tens of millions required for a feature film that would do the story justice. Where much more of the narration is replaced by action – and seeing the events unfold as they happen. On stage we know it’s not real, but we can still get lost in the sheer exuberance of the performance. I will spend the next year trying to find backers to make this a reality. If I can prove I would have an audience for my Musical I can get backers, so please do follow me on Facebook on Twitter and You Tube.
All feedback gratefully received.
Many Thanks
brindle_chris
brindlechris@aol.com
http://www.SanditonProductions.com
http://www.Sanditon.info
Well thank you very much, Chris. You will note that I’ve revised the blog now. Since writing it last night, I watched the first episode of Davies’s Sanditon. An Irish friend has sent me copies of the first two episodes. Even the airing was done on the cheap as my DVD video has odd breaks, suddenly goes still, divides up and then comes back again. My friend also eliminated the commercials, of which there seemed to be at least 4 and this within a 44 minute episode. Thank you so much for telling me that Davies wrote only 4 of the 8 episodes. This first one lacks the depth he ordinary manages in his adaptations: it was going far too quickly, trying to cover too much territory and yes trying to pay attention to the beach itself. I will be writing on Sanditon on this blog when I’ve seen at least half of Davies’s Sanditon. Two episodes are not enough to make any pronouncements over.
I’m also glad that you put the single URLs to your website. I have several blogs here and feared my reader is getting tired of the set so now they can go to the central website for these.
Recently Davies has triumphed with two film adaptations that he was given a small budget for and not enough time, given the size of the books. I refer to his War and Peace and Les Miserables. I thought both superb, but especially admired the Les Miserables because for the first time (I felt) the meaning and actual stories of the book were put before us strongly and graphically so the politics were clear. I have long wished (with Davies I think) that his proposal presented many years ago to do a new Pallisers would be accepted. He is getting old now and the high commercialization of the BBC (and lack of funds at any PBS station) seems to have ended all hopes of this.
The photo from Brindle’s Sanditon points to the “the difficulty of finding locations to do justice to the subject matter of Jane Austen’s ‘Sanditon’, avoiding wind turbines, container ships, aircraft, satellite dishes etc. etc. In my imagination Trafalgar House should be on top of a cliff and below we should see a beach scene something like the attached (although the groynes are probably much later than 1817) This scene near Bournemouth on the South Coast” (Brindle).
As well as revising the blog, I rewatched the first episode so here is a bit more about it: it is not as bad as the first vibes from scuttlebutt implied. I liked some of it: he has conceived it as a happy piece, something filled with a kind of wild gaiety on the beach, and the beach itself or the place is a character. He is making a virtue of necessity as the fragment is very fragmentary; he decided to keep the mystery; Sidney Parker is a darker character than I have imagined but I know there is enough (however wispy) to suggest a dark side, a brooding man who can be unreliable — perhaps how Austen was beginning to see her brother Henry by this time. Sanditon‘s alternate title is The Brothers. Davies has hired a familiar comic actress for Lady Denham so she is not to be another of these harridan women. And yes there is nudity. The men dress in a tent and we see them from the back totally naked rushing into the sea. From reading I gather that men bathed in the nude until well into the later 19th century. Modern bathing suits didn’t exist. I felt sorry for the three young women who had to wear these long outfits and hats too. Before our eyes we see how gendered and limited is the experience of these young woman at this beach. Davies also insists on the race prejudice against Miss Lamb; despite her wealth and free status, she has a hard time attracting a male partner at the ball the Parkers throw.
Rory O’Farrell:
“In Co Dublin, at Sandycove, the Forty Foot was a nude bathing place, where men bathed in the nude until at least 30 years ago; I am not aware if this still continues – the Sisterhood may have joined them.
The early swimming costumes for men were often of woollen materials, either pieced from fabric or knitted. As a child I certainly learned how to swim in woollen bathing trunks. They stretched in the water and if one stood out of the water the crotch might droop towards one’s knees with the weight of water. They also, in Irish weather, took several days to dry, and if one were being made every day they were most uncomfortable and clammy to put on on subsequent days – this is one reason why I was never a devoted swimmer.
It is recorded that in the early (Sanditon) period men often dispensed with these, particularly as their wet weight made them fall off when the men stood in the water (elastic not invented until c1835); so rather than be encumbered with them men would swim in the nude; some women followed this, with clearly specified separate beaches or coves for men and women, often on different sides of the town, with perhaps a more regulated beach in between with bathing machines and ‘dippers’, to immerse reluctant females, such an area more suitable for family parties. Rowlandson drew many pictures of bathing scenes, including several of a liberated woman diving and bathing in the all-together; the nude bathing areas he often depicted as overlooked by cliffs with a population of onlookers.
If I recollect correctly, Frances Kilvert, a clergyman, curate of Clyro in Wales, in his diaries of the 1870s recorded bathing in the nude in a local river or lake. Checking, I find:
‘ Kilvert was an enthusiast for public bathing in the nude, which he regarded as natural and healthy. The first entry in Kilvert’s diaries in which he records his naked bathing was for 4 September 1872, at Weston-super-Mare. He writes: “Bathing in the morning before breakfast from a machine. Many people were openly stripping on the sands a little further on and running down into the sea and I would have done the same but I had brought down no towels of my own”. However, next day Kilvert joins in the fun: “I was out early before breakfast this morning bathing from the sands. There was a delicious feeling of freedom in stripping in the open air and running down naked to the sea where the waves were curling white with foam and the red morning sunshine glowing upon the naked limbs of the bathers”.’
I watched Part 2 of Davies’s Sanditon. Davies is taking the novel in a different direction from Anna Lefroy, than Chris Brindle, and than the continuations as speculated, theorized by scholars i’ve heard give papers on it. Last night I was rereading Sanditon for the first time in quite a while and realize I misremembered or interpreted Lady Denham far more harshly than one need to do: there’s a tendency to because of the existence of other woman of this domineering Catherine-de Bourgh type in the oeuvre, but as sketched in the fragment, Anne Reid’s comic stance (not kind of course, but not chillngly vicious, odious like Mrs Norris) can be garnered. The three continuations I’ve read dwell on the economics of the new expansion of capitalism into spas and are ominous over the coming loss of money; in Brindle’s Sidney Parker is going to save the say. Not Davies. He has the actor who played the rapist in Downton Abbey (episode 1) play Parker: he is savage, aggressive, nasty to our heroine Charlotte; as with Brindle brings along a group of idle louts not to be trusted with him (Lefroy adds a bad man to Sidney Parker’s entourage too), but he is somehow connected to Miss Lamb. They have a previous relationship and he has come to Sanditon because of this; we see insidious dialogues between them. Obviously Davies is taking this from Emma where Frank shows up in Highbury because he’s engaged to Jane Fairfax. Davies also darkens Edward Denham and his sister, Esther considerably — but Esther is a kind of caricature and reminds me of the way Miss Bingley is presented in Joe Wright’s P&P: she is on the alert for sexual transgression and knows that Clara Brereton and her brother have had sex (short of fucking — it’s insinuated or more than hinted she was practicing fellatio on him when Charlotte saw them from afar); she is presented as mean in the way of Miss Bingley in the Wright P&P. Charlotte (Rose Williams) is a kind of older Catherine Morland, learning about the world, a young lady’s entrance into the world; Tom Harker and his wife are very like they are usually thought of: Kris Marshall does the part perfectly …
I should have mentioned that the way Charlotte and Sidney are also presented is sort of reminiscent of Elizabeth and Darcy. While Charlotte is so open to a new relationship, Sidney is arrogant and soon by Episode 2 they are sexual antagonists. Davies is taking as much as he can from other Austen’s novels as motifs. Ellen