SCREENPLAY Christopher Nolan Screenplays

Christopher Nolan Screenplays


Inde Film Hustle, 13 Sept 2017


All downloadable pdfs, not dialogue transcripts


Dunkirk (2017)
Interstellar (2014)
The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Inception (2010)
The Dark Knight (2008)
The Prestige (2006)
Batman Begins (2005)
Memento (2000)
Following (1998)
The keys of the Street (1997)

SCREENPLAYS The Best Websites To Download & Read Screenplays

The Best Websites To Download & Read Screenplays


20 sites

FILM SCREENPLAY American Hustle [2013]

American Hustle [2013]


Screenplay from Sony Pictures, written by Eric Warren Singer and David O. Russell


No date.


Mentioned on Plotbot, the online screenwriting site.


In the side bar under screenplays for ease of later access

FILM ADAPTATION And Its Discontents

Part 1: The Process and Reception of Book to Film Adaptations


Part 2: The Process and Reception of Book to Film Adaptations


Part 3: The Process and Reception of Book to Film Adaptations


Steve McCarthy, Motion Brothers, 8 Sept 2014

‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’: The Peak of British Comedy

‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’: The Peak of British Comedy


Love a film longform. A pleasing long, compendious one from Cinephilia and Beyond with all those juicy bits about how the film was made.


Add to the pleasure a really pleasant surprise – a facsimile final draft [note the thee hole binder] of the script! Read it in the page, though it’s not comfortable. Better to find the little pdf link to download it.

At the bottom of the script the now famous letter from producer Mark Forstater to Mike White, another producer, the story of which is told in I would like to retain ‘fart in your general direction’ in Letters of Note.

Google Forstater to follow the other story of what happened when Forstater as producer of The Holy Grail, attempted to get more royalties much later on as a result of the stage adaptation Spamalot making oodles.

FILM The French Lieutenant’s Woman book and film

John Fowles ~ Karol Reisz

“Secret Energy and Vital Intelligence”: On Karel Reisz’s Adaptation of The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981)


Gordon Thomas


Bright Lights Film Journal, 5 October 2015


The French Lieutenant’s Woman – eBook


An earlier COTA post John Fowles, book and film.


It highlights a post by Litlove of the book, and links to the late great Harold Pinter website, where he writes a bit about his approach [and to other screenplays]. O.k., who can list his screenplays? Who forgot he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005?


There is a link to TFTW dialogue script from script-o-rama. The warning I always add is, don’t forget these are transcriptions and do not have the necessary, essential screenwriter stage instructions that the proper script has. Why not try splitting the script up into scenes and add your own directions.


Other COTA posts on Pinter can be found by searching on Pinter. One on his screenplays which was never filmed, ended up as a successful BBC Radio drama, The Pinter Proust Play, with Pinter narrating.

FILM SCREENPLAY 10 Scripts to Read Before You Die

10 Scripts to Read Before You Die


Cameron Cubbison


in


Screencraft


17 January 2013


Two of my favourite films in there: Chinatown and Network.

I’m not saying I’m going to wade through Forrest Gump as a script. Or even The Godfather. Films are sometime just fine as films. Chinatown’s one joke still stands up in print, but what you don’t get, even with the stage directions, is the wonderful way the 4 characters are framed in the main shot.

I’ve linked to the Network script somewhere. That is well worth reading. The film is so fast and furious, half the clever bits are missed. You saw Network yonks ago, know it’s good and think you might like to watch it again? Do so, then immediately read the script. That’s my advice.

This is the starting point for thinking about one’s favourite scripts. Or rather one’s favourite films. Bear in mind as I have said dozens of times in posts, that most of the scripts you find online thinking they scripts are actually dialogue transcriptions, which are naturally a fraction of what a script it. It is possible to add in one’s own mise en scene and instructions because the film is familiar. Instructive to do so for a transcription and then get the script proper!


This is of course merely the start point for a ramble through the web for similar offerings.

Here’s a starter:


10 Essential Screenplays Every Aspiring Screenwriter Must Read


As becomes immediately apparent: is it scripts because you write scripts or scripts because you are curious to see the undercarriage of films you love? Or scripts of films that didn’t do justice to the subject and you want to pick at like a large scab to help to see where you thought things went badly wrong. Not that you were going to re-write it yourself…

I tweeted a frantic series about The Imitation Game over many weeks leading up to the Awards season, trying to demonstrate with bits of script how it didn’t deserve an award. No one showed any interest whatsoever. It was a popular film and box-office, but no self-respecting member of the filmoscenti was going to be seen wasting time on that!!

Graham Moore’s screenplay had praise heaped upon it in some quarters. I began to see the elements of a Hollywood story about a scriptwriter there. Not that hasn’t been done so often in various ways. The cynic in me quickly imagining someone was already scribbling a synopsis about a young Hollywood newby desperately trying to work up script from a difficut subject, wondering if he’s taken on too much, can he sell the idea, can he deliver (all things Graham had talked about in his 100s of interviews). I could see possibilities myself and started to rough out a few ideas – a riff on Altman’s The Player. Hey, that’s worth a read. The script of The Player, that is.

(How often, scriptwriters explain, the script is not the film and what you write rarely gets to screen…whereas the novel is your work alone.)

I have linked to The Imitation Games script too, which is a real script in facsimile, from the Harvey Weinstein site. (Never can be sure if scripts are final scripts without doing a bit of research..) I thought it had a lot of questions to answer, both in structural terms and in the way it played liberties with the known facts of the life portrayed, which had me scratching my head through the screening. And showed despite research obviouly having been done (in this case Andrew Hodge’s long biography of Turing), obvious elements were left out altogether because it was a Hollywood script. Comparing the various other attempts at Turing films is instructive too.

FILM The Imitation Game vs. The Imitation Game

The Imitation Game vs. The Imitation Game




other


Why Can’t Movies Capture Genius?
–Three films about British brains show the trouble of bringing otherworldly intelligence to the big screen. You can show J.M.W Turner’s paintings or Alan Turing’s computer but never get inside their minds.


Clive Irving, Daily Beast, 14 Dec 2014


Why Are We So Obsessed With Geniuses on Film?


John Powers, Vogue, November 25, 2014


3 approaches


Our Genius Problem
–Why this obsession with the word, with the idea, and with the people on whom we’ve bestowed the designation?


Marjorie Garber, Atlantic, 23 Mar 2011

FILM SCRIPT The English Patient [1996] – Almásy’s Bosphorus

Almásy: Well, a thing is still a thing no matter what you place in front of it.

Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again.

“Um, Maddox, that place — that place at the base of a woman’s throat, you know, the hollow, here. Does it have an official name?”

“In case you’re still wondering, this is called a suprasternal notch”

How often should one re-watch The English Patient?

I’d recommend a 2 to 2 1/2 year interval. Lawrence of Arabia about 3.

Screenplay

The English Patient “Red Original” [someone might enlighten us as to what red refers to..]

The English Patient (1996) “movie script, Revised Draft. 28th August, 1995.”

Adaptation

The Lion of Literary Adaptation: How Anthony Minghella’s ‘The English Patient’ Became as Enduringly Definitive as It Has Been Challenging by Christine Spines, Word & Film, 4 October 2011

FILM SCRIPT WES ANDERSON The Grand Budapest Hotel

At the Movies – Michael Wood

The Grand Budapest Hotel


LRB, Vol. 36 No. 8, 17 April 2014


The Grand Budapest Hotel

Screenplay by Wes Anderson


pdf/ pp. 122

Novel vs. Screenplay

Photo from: Christopher Fowler*’s Blog

‘The differences between a screenplay and a novel are equivalent to the differences between a blueprint and a finished building.’

–Peter Bauer

The idea came to me to search on novel vs. script, without really knowing precisely what I was looking for. Mostly about, Am I writing a novel or a screenplay?, and if others puzzle over and articulate on this. But one thing leads to another.

Rebecca Chace, a published novelist, writing in Publishing Perspectives, did screenplay to novel to screenplay: Literary 360: Rebecca Chace on Going from Screenplay to Novel to Screenplay. Summary:  if you write a screenplay then feel like writing the novel, put the script away and write from scratch.

I don’t think I could do that. I’m pretty sure I’d be checking scenes in the script and trying to pad it out with prose and re-jig. Though they say since a script is for a film – sound and vision – how you piece together the story is so radically different in a novel, that’s not going to achieve the result.

True perhaps of the narrative structure, but the scenes you have written in a script can be visualised so well, are bound to be there as you write your novel. After all you sit there seeing the scenes and then you write the script. I can see one particular part of a story I wrote. I can live inside this place, move around it so easily, even ‘film’ extra shots and re-see them edited in where I think they might fit. How to ‘epoché’ the lot written as a script to sit down and write from scratch looks impossible from where I’m sitting.

At the same time, how can you not think of the beginning of a novel, a long, drawn out languorous first few paragraphs, and not see it or attempt to frame it visually? O.K., pick a really hard one to be awkward. Para 1, Book 1, The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, [Wilkins/Kaiser translation].

There was a depression over the Atlantic. It was traveling eastwards, towards an area of high pressure over Russia, and still showed no tendency to move northwards around it. The isotherms and isotheres were fulfilling their functions. The atmospheric temperature was in proper relation to the average annual temperature, the temperature of the coldest as well as of the hottest month, and the a-periodic monthly variation in temperature. The rising and the setting of the sun and of the moon, the phases of the moon, Venus and Saturn’s rings, and many other important phenomena, were in accordance with the forecasts in the astronomical yearbooks. The vapour in the air was at its highest tension, and the moisture in the air was at its lowest. In short, to use an expression that describes the facts pretty satisfactorily, even though it is somewhat old-fashioned: it was a fine August day in the 1913.

MWQ has never been filmed. Not because of that intro that could be scripted, but it’s an essayist novel. Always had the same trouble with A la Research, though it’s been attempted usually in part such as Time Regained, Raul Ruiz,1999. (Sidenote: BBC radio version of Proust was effective. Pinter’s Proust Play – a screenplay no one would film – was brilliant, but had whole chunks of the book missing. Pinter decided to leave out the Madeline, and use the sound of bells as a linking device. But this is another subject: film script vs. radio script)

How To People all over the place are having their say about novel and script [screenplay]. The Novel vs. The Screenplay: A Practical Guide for Talented Writers by James Bonnet in Storymaking.com. One thing caught my eye:

…the screenplay can be an excellent first draft for a novel.

Anyone who has started writing a story, who is interested in both forms, knows this can go either way. And sometimes there can be such a conflict that a novel and a script are developed in parallel without a final decision about which to finish and which to drop. The advantage of doing both is if you were shifting more to novel – but you’ve been playing  with a script – you’re ready to think about the adaptation! Then there’s the thing about writing a novel in a film like way. Common now. But go back to writers like Graham Greene.

From Screenplay to Novel

Peter Bauer says briefly pretty much the same thing (‘The differences between a screenplay and a novel are equivalent to the differences between a blueprint and a finished building.’ ), but shows how the script can’t just be transposed into a novel and why.

All these things are what you work out for yourself but it’s handy to have someone laying it out clearly.

Screenplay vs. Novel in Anatomy of Perceval, 20 July 2013. All sorts of writing things and 6 degrees to.

(Every wonder if a website on writing you are reading is just some guy in a bedroom with a dream? He hasn’t got a published novel nor is he a Hollywood scriptwriter…)

* wiki: Christopher Fowler

FILM Are screenplays literature?

This was a post in a previous blog of mine called Moleskine modality, which is linked to from here. Looking for a post I did on Bliar and the Iraq invasion of 2003, I also had a quick look at what I had written in Moleskine. It’s defunct as a posting site, but has a great many links to all sorts of things that might be useful. It was as much about books and writers as film. I decided to move on to a dedicated film (and a bit of photography) blog instead of book/film. It was partly because I was getting fed up with Blogger. It seems a lot better now, and has even got pretty good free themes which tend to show up WordPress.

So here’s the post on screenplays as literature, or not:


It’s his title, not mine. This essay has three parts:

Are Screenplays literature? Part I

Are Screenplays Literature? Part II

Are Screenplays Literature? Part III

This came about because of a decision suddenly – the decision version of a flash memory which had a simple, clear nachrechtfertigung to drop a very absorbing and pleasurably expanding (the polite word for ideas-creep) novel in favour of a very ancient screenplay/novel project which began in the late 80s.

Without getting through the first part of this essay on the screenplay I was already running with the notions. Yes, of course, the film = the novel. Then: what, if we are drawing tables of analogues, is the novel equivalent of the screenplay? Reading on I see the publication of screenplays as if they were literature has become the thing.

I have never seen the screenplay as the finished product. The bit that we do when we read the book (because it is the reader input which adds the final touch to the skill and insights of the writer) is what the writer (constantly readjusting his script to the needs of the film), director, actors, cinematographer, stage designer, location manager do. Then, as I have hinted at in some of the links under screenplay/scripts, there are later adaptations of the original screenplay floating about which the novice would have no idea are not the start point. It can be difficult to see which is which when someone hasn’t been careful enough at the time to record what is what, and/or because things get lost.

I have mentioned something I noticed when doing a generalised screenplay foray a while back: often what you see online is someone’s transcription of the film, not the screenplay itself.

To make the screenplay as much like the finished novel ( = [novel] + [readers cognition]} necessitated the writer’s instructions. Stating the bleeding obvious, though a perfect dialogue by itself can work pretty well given an imaginative reader, without ‘stage’ direction something of what is in most novels has been left out. Strictly speaking like is not being compared to like.

The money quotes come from part III:

What is Literature?

The 19th-century novelist George Eliot (a woman writing under a man’s name) defined literature this way: “the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds (=limits) of our personal lot (=fate).”

Terrence McGiver, a teacher, expands the definition: “Literature helps us grow, both personally and intellectually. It provides an objective base for knowledge and understanding. It links us with the cultural, philosophic, and religious world of which we are part. It enables us to recognize human dreams and struggles in different places and times that we otherwise would never know existed. It helps us develop mature sensibility and compassion for the condition of all living things — human, animal and vegetable. It gives us the knowledge and perception to appreciate the beauty of order and arrangement, which a well-constructed song or a beautifully painted canvas also gives us.”

Other observers have pointed out that literature is written to be read aesthetically; that it emphasizes character over plot; that it must be worth re-reading; that it contains enduring human themes; that it is the opposite of trash.

All these definitions give clues why it’s so easy to conclude that screenplays are not literature.

FILM Screenwriting 2.0 in the Classroom? Teaching the Digital Screenplay

Screenwriting 2.0 in the Classroom? Teaching the Digital Screenplay


Andrew Kenneth Gay, Frames Film Journal, Issue 1 2012 [University of St Andrews]


Table of Contents Issue 1

Little patch of yellow wall or a single asparagus? Harold Pinter’s The Proust Screenplay {2}

9 Dec 2022

THE LINKS IN THIS POST ARE BROKEN. BUT COPYING AND PASTING TITLES FOR GOOGLE SEARCH USUALLY WORKS.

We read The Proust Screenplay with all kinds of things in our mind: Proust, Pinter’s reading of Proust; the problem of abridgment, the problem of dramatization, the problem of visualization; the film which might have been made from this script; the script itself as a literary work, words on the page. In permitting and controlling the interplay of these things Pinter has created a small masterpiece of wit and understanding.

Michael Wood, Times Literary Supplement, June 2nd 1978

(Source: HaroldPinter.org)

..the study of adaptation is logically tantamount to the study of the cinema as a whole.

Dudley Andrews [Concepts in Film Theory]

Now I have the Pinter Screenplay book, instead of relying on the audio tape, it seems only sensible to do a second post to try pull things together.

First, the first post.  If it was not obvious: the asparagus was my little joke to illustrate the book to film problem.

Second, having read Michael Woods Foreward and Pinter’s Introduction, I can see I pretty much got to the gist of it.  [1]  How the Pinter screenplay and radio version worked.  [2] Other attempts apart from Pinter’s, including screenplays, finished films and the BBC radio serial. [3] Adaptation in general.

Here I want to to consolidate with quotes from Wood’s and Pinter’s intros. and a few more online articles. Maybe in a third post, I’ll tackle the screenplay in more detail.

Wood first classifies scripts/screenplays into the stages they reach, from glints in the mind through partial completed scripts to those that have been made into films, then places Pinter’s script in the category, along with Visconti’s version, that was completed but not realised in film.

He goes on (my break into numbered sections for convenience) :

[1] …it is also something else, a distinguished representative of yet another genre: the film script which already, as a text, has an unmistakable life of its own.

[2] Reading a work of this kind has particular challenges and attractions, both resembling and not resembling those of reading the text of a play.

[3] The play text is close to the film script, because in both cases we have to imagine the whole show in our heads. The difference is that with a play we hear it more than we see it, we conjure up possible voices and tones, think about insinuations and intentions. We concentrate on the dialogue, worry less about furniture and the set and the blocking out of the actor’s movements.

[4] Reading a film script, we invert these priorities. We hear the words in our head, certainly, but mainly we see the settings, the faces, the gestures, the light. We even need to see – this may be the most important feature of our reading – the spaces between the shots and the sequences  they make. We need to reconstruct for ourselves the visual language of the unseen film, turn it into something that is neither  just a collection  of moving photographs nor a story that could easily have been  told in another medium.

Pinter:

For three months I read  A la Researche du Temp Perdu every day. I took hundreds of notes while reading but was left at the end quite baffled as to how to approach a task of such magnitude.

[..] We decided that the architecture of the film should be based on two main and contrasting principles: one, a movement, chiefly narrative, towards disillusion, and the other, more intermittent, towards revelation, rising to where time that was lost is found, and fixed forever in art.

[..]  Proust wrote Du Cotes de Chez Swann first and Le Temp Retrouve, the last volume, second.

[..] The relationship between the first volume and the last seemed to us the crucial one. The whole book is, as it were, contained in the last volume. When Marcel in Le Temp Retrouve, says that he is now able to start his work, he has already written it.  Somehow this remarkable conception had to be found in another form.

[..] In Le Temp Retrouve, Marcel, in his forties, hears again the garden bell of his childhood. He is conscious of himself as a child, his memory of the experience, is more real, more acute than the experience itself.

There are a great number of Proust articles and essays in findarticles.com. A few deal directly with Pinter and his screenplay, but my favourite is the Duncan McColl Chesney:

Giving Proust the Pinter treatment

Independent, The (London) ,  May 17, 1997 by Robert Hanks

Proust at the Movies

Modern Language Review, The ,  Jan, 2007 by Jane Walling

Radio: Proust for the pressed

Independent on Sunday, The ,  Mar 20, 2005 by Nicholas Lezard
Deals with the BBC Radio 4 Classic Serial 6-parter.

Proust and Cinema, or Luchino Visconti’s search by Duncan McColl Chesney
12 page essay
Dudley Andrew’s typology of adapatation
– “three modes : borrowing, intersection, fidelity of transformation.”
[page 3: detail and examples]

Here I’ll add Anita Brooker’s short review, A grand overview, of Paintings in Proust by Eric Karpeles, which is interesting of itself but also because it helps to illustrate the problem Pinter had in chosing how to represent the art in Proust:

She says right away:

Proust was a translator of Ruskin, yet he rejected Ruskin’s message that art has a moral foundation. For Proust art was a self-explanatory and self-sustaining exercise which excluded praise and condemnation.

Little patch of yellow wall or a single asparagus? : Harold Pinter’s The Proust Screenplay

My greatest pleasure was asparagus, bathed in ultramarine and pink and whose spears, delicately brushed in mauve and azure, fade imperceptibly to the base of the stalk.

Pinter interests me mostly because of his screenplays. Wiki: Harold Pinter lists them.

In 2007, I was checking out Proust and rediscovering and enjoying re-listening to my cassettes of the 1995 BBC Radio 3 version of The Proust Screenplay, which was never made into a film. Coming across Vermeer’s View of Delft recently has brought me back to my tapes and reawakened my fascination with how Pinter tackled Proust.

In 1972 Joseph Losey asked Pinter to do a screenplay. Pinter had written the screenplay for Losey’s, The Servant (1963), Accident (1967 and The Go-Between (1970 ). Writer, director, translator and BBC person, and Proustian, Barbara Bray was involved in the Proust project.

They say The Go-Between was his best, but my favourite Pinter adaptation, till learning of his Proust, was his adaptation of John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), directed by the late Karel Reisz. Wiki: French Lieutenant’s Woman (film) explains the history of the script development. Not many people who loved the book thought the dual story idea effective. But Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep as the actors does sort of take the role of the author’s interjections by forcing us to leave the story in a similar way.

Looking at Pinter’s later interpretation of Fowles might shed light on how he tackled Proust. These litnotes on the book may help if you are re-watching TFLW. I haven’t yet found a screenplay of TFTW. And so far, I’ve not come across anything substantial online about Pinter and Fowles. All in due course.

As transcribed from the audio tape the first few lines of The Proust Screenplay, adapted for radio by Michael Blakemore, aired on BBC Radio 3, 24 December 1995, illustrates a sparkling nodule of Pinter’s genius as a screenwriter:

{ [..] is actual sounds not narration. }

YELLOW SCREEN

[sound of bell]

OPEN COUNTRYSIDE. A LINE OF TREES SEEN FROM A RAILWAY CARRIAGE. THE TRAIN IS STILL.

NO SOUND.

MOMENTARY YELLOW SCREEN.

THE SEA SEEN FROM A HIGH WINDOW. A TOWEL HANGING ON A TOWEL RACK IN FOREGROUND.

NO SOUND.

VENICE. WINDOW ON A PALAZZO SEEN FROM A GONDOLA.

NO SOUND.

MOMENTARY YELLOW SCREEN.

THE DINING ROOM AT BALBEC. NO SOUND. EMPTY

EXTERIOR OF THE HOUSE AT THE PLACE DE GEURMANTE, PARIS 1921. AFTERNOON. A MIDDLE-AGED MAN, MARCEL, WALKS TOWARDS THE HOUSE.

In the middle of writing this post, I have acquired the book, which has the beginning:

1. Yellow screen. Sound of a garden gate bell.
2. Open countryside, a line of trees, seen from a railway carriage. The train is still. Quick fade out.
3. Momentary yellow screen.
4. The sea, seen from a high window, a towel hanging on a towel rack in foreground. No sound. Quick fade out.
5. Momentary yellow screen.
6. Venice. A window in a Palazzo, seen from a gondola. No sound. Quick fade out.
7. Momentary yellow screen.
8. The dining room at Balbec. No sound. Empty.

#

If I had been set the task of writing the screenplay and was re-reading the book and around the subject, coming across The Death of Bergotte {The Captive}, one of Proust’s alter egos, and that his second to last dying words were,

“Little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping roof, little patch of yellow wall.”

I doubt I would have come up with that yellow screen. Possibly a scene with Bergotte uttering the words as he sank down on the settee, but not a screen full of yellow!

When you learn {1}, what Proust thought of the painting and see the words Bergotte is made to utter it is not hard to see why Pinter found it irresistible.

And it was important to find such a key because  A la Researche is much concerned with art and the Arts as well as being the journey a writer travels in time and memory to get to the point where he at last decides to begin writing. It’s a literary conceit for such a man as Bergotte to think of an artifact, a human creation – something at one remove from life yet as real to him – rather than a person or event or even some equivalent of Denis Potter’s “blossomiest blossoms“. But it works for me. Or, maybe if we look up famous last words, thinking of a painting might not be uncommon. Perhaps we should all have one ready in case we get mown down by that big red bus: “The Girl in the P….”

Pinter’s screenplay (not the working script – we don’t really know what would have gone into final cut of the Losey film, let alone what anyone else who might have tried it after Losey would have made of it) eschews the detailed art and art aesthetic which saturates the book, except in so much as the film itself would have compactly demonstrated, visually, much of what Proust believed about art.

There is some dialogue or voiced thought about art. A Botticelli is mentioned to compare a woman to. There is brief dialogue such as

CHARLES HAVE YOU MET THIS YOUNG MAN?

I HAD NOT SEEN SWANN FOR A LONG TIME. AND ASKED MYSELF WHETHER IN THE OLD DAYS HE USED TO CLIP HIS MUSTACHE. FOR I FOUND IN HIM SOMETHING ALTERED. IT WAS INDEED THAT HE HAD GREATLY ALTERED BECAUSE HE WAS VERY ILL.

HOW DO YOU DO.

I’M AMAZED THAT YOU REMEMBER ME SIR.

OF COURSE I DO. OF COURSE I DO.

ARE YOUR PEOPLE WELL?

THEY ARE THANK YOU.

[Guermantes]

CHARLES, YOU’RE AN EXPERT, I WANT YOU OPINION OF THIS PAINTING. WHAT DO THINK OF IT? I’VE JUST SWOPPED IT FOR A COUPLE OF MONET’S. I THINK IT MIGHT BE A VERMEER. WHAT DO YOU THINK?

DIFFICULT TO SAY…

OH, COME ON, WE ALL KNOW YOU’RE AN EXPERT. YOU’RE WRITING A BOOK ABOUT VERMEER, AREN’T YOU?

HARDLY A BOOK. JUST AN ARTICLE ABOUT ONE PAINTING.

VIEW OF DELFT?

YES.

MARCEL: THAT PATCH OF YELLOW WALL..

YES.

PATCH? WHAT PATCH MARCEL?

MARCEL! [me: Swann recognises Marcel] OF COURSE!

MARCEL: I THINK IT’S THE MOST BEAUTIFUL PAINTING IN THE WORLD.

[G:] I’VE PROBABLY SEEN IT. BUT ANYWAY, CHARLES, WHAT WOULD YOU SAY THIS PAINTING WAS.

[S:] A BAD JOKE.

OH, WOULD YOU.

Pinter includes his version of the Red Shoes scene after this dialogue.

I haven’t yet found in the Pinter script a full-blown Proustian rumination on life and art, but the way Marcel responds to his environment, for example in the repeated shots of the steeples (and three trees) and how from the train they change their positions relative to each other, is the mind of the artist (whether writer or painter, who knows exactly?) at work, as much as it is a man comparing what he sees with what he remembers seeing.

Stanley Kauffmann in an article, A La Recherche du Temps Perdu: The Proust Screenplay, re-published in 2005 when Pinter received the Nobel prize (and originally published in 1977),  asserts it is “incomparably the best screen adaptation ever made of a great work”, and explains this has been achieved by “deliberate omission and imaginative recomposition.”

The play of the film of the novel explains how Pinter’s script eventually ended up in a stage version. I’d like to see the working script of that.

It bears repeating: there is probably not a screenwriter in the world who, handed Proust with a brief for a standard length film, would not start at the beginning, or soon after, with some lesser image, perhaps of the pesky dunk your madeleine episode, in the belief that it crystallised the essence of Proust. Pinter saw it differently. He didn’t fall for it. In the book the tea cake doesn’t start Swann’s Way, but it is near the beginning [ p.50]. Pinter resists, with the merest tinkling of a spoon by a waiter at the house at the Place de Guermante hinting at, but not telegraphing, an activation Marcel’s involuntary memory.

#

A page with the View of Delft with the virtual magnifying glass is re-linked here.  There is a post in didyktile, a little patch of yellow, which has both a brief explanation of Proust/Bergotte and the Vermeer, and two versions View of Delft, one which expands to full size, the other which shows the right section where the yellow wall might be. There is also a link to the Web galley of Art, which includes Vermeer. It’s an obsession with one sunlit yellow wall (or two, or three) but it might be instructive to look at the others and wonder if Proust might have taken as much interest in light in Vermeer as a whole.

There is a newer “petite pan de mure jaune” at the exceedingly good essential Vermeer.com

For more Vermeer light there is a slide-show of 38 Vermeer paintings at Slideshare.

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Many who have not read Proust might be surprised by how much art is in the book. The blogroll in Moleskine Modality has a section on Proust, including links to the individual Gutenberg e-books. If you don’t fancy reading the whole lot but want to get an idea of the art in Proust, check out the e-texts using FIND in your browser.

But what to search on? ‘Artistic’ does a pretty good job of getting close to the sections of the text where Proust waxes about art or the Arts. But take this review, Pictures worth a thousand words, of Eric Karpeles’, Paintings in Proust, published in 2008, and make a list of some of the paintings mentioned in A la Researche, et voila vous êtes dans l’action. Note the drawing by Paul Helleu of Proust on his deathbed. On the NYT review page there is slide show of four of the paintings in Proust, with quote from The Book. Look at the first one and you’re in Balbec on the beach, courtesy of Whistler!

Another review of the Karpele in New Statesman, The eye of the beholder, by Paul Taylor, is also a source of painters names (and about Proust and art).

An interview with Lorenzo Renzi, author of  Proust and Vermeer: An Apologia of Imprecision, gives more fascinating suggestions including the observation that he tends to go for nature and landscapes and that View of Delft was Vermeer’s only exterior.

In Consciousness, art and the brain: Lessons from Marcel Proust [a .pdf file] Russell Epstein looks at Proust as the first neuroscientist. Proust’s approach to art is explained clearly and concisely.

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Time Regained mentions a translation of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies seen on the bookshelves of Baron Charlus. Proust translated the book into French with the help of his mother who was better at English than he was.

Marcel Proust – Ephemera site
has English translations of Proust on Ruskin, an obituary of Ruskin, and much more.

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Pinter is the voice of the screenplay in the BBC Radio version, which was adapted for radio by Michael Bakewell.  That deep-voiced narrator of the script really does make it special. After all he wrote it. Let’s hope the BBC re-air it as part of the inevitable retrospective of his plays and the films he scripted. And that someone gets the it out on DVD, pronto.

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So if Marcel (and Proust mentioned the smell of asparagus in his own chamber pot as perfume) gets excited about asparagus, why not start with a flash of a close up of a painting (which turns out to be a Manet) of an asparagus instead of yellow representing the Vermeer?

Karpele gives a nice example of how Proust could twist his own encounters with art to the ends he needed for his novel. His friend Ephrussi once admired Manet’s small painting A Bunch of Asparagus (1880). In his eagerness to purchase the work, Ephrussi sent the artist 200 francs more than the asking price of 800. Manet responded by dashing off and dispatching to him a picture of a single stalk of asparagus to even things up.

Paintings in Proust reproduces both images with a passage from Le Côté de Guermantes (The Guermantes Way). This third volume of the novel was Proust’s attack on the shallowness of French upper-class society, embodied by the aristocratic Guermantes family. Here, the Duc de Guermantes is incensed at the suggestion that he should buy a painting of a bunch of asparagus. The price, he declares, is extortionate. “Three hundred francs for a bundle of asparagus! A louis, that’s as much as they are worth, even early in the season.” With the same paintings as touchstones, Ephrussi’s gesture of generosity has been transformed into a parable about the tight-fisted philistinism of the aristocracy.

[Source: The Eye of the beholder, by Paul Taylor, New Statesman, 16, October 2008]


For additional information about asparagus, Proust and artistic inspiration read what there is of the GoogleBook of:

French 19th Century Painting and Literature: with Special Reference to the Relevance of Literary Subject-matter to French Painting

By Ulrich Finke

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Pinter decided on a well-lit patch of yellow on a famous painting to represent Proust’s aesthetic concerns (and of course, memory). What a pity we cannot see it expressed in a completed film of Pinter’s screenplay, which will surely have gone beyond the screenplay in the process of trying to make yellow filling the frame of the camera, and the screen, and the few flashed of yellow thereafter, and what flowed from it in the script, realisable cinematographically. It has to be shown to relate to Bergotte in some way, and yet on my listening (the book of the script in on the way to check) the patch of yellow could be connected to Marcel the narrator and Marcel the character. Well, yes you say, it is, because Marcel the narrator considers Bergotte the novelist. Yes, but whose memory is the yellow patch? Bergotte’s. So either Pinter didn’t get that bit – not likely – or he knew he had to show (in a few flashes) the connection between Bergotte’s dying words and Marcel/Marcel’s examination of Vermeer.

Tom Lubbock in examining Vermeer’s View of Delft, does it from the Proust angle, says:

The passage suggests that the little patch all by itself, the sheer precious substance of its painting, so dense and luminous, is what transfixes Bergotte. But the picture suggests otherwise. It’s only within the whole view that this patch – suddenly brighter and purer than you’d expect, and with its yellow animated by the adjacent reds and blues (Vermeer always a great one for the primaries) – blazes out. It’s not a self-sufficient and extractable gem. It’s an integrated effect, a climactic note.

In other words, Bergotte dies under an illusion. His illusion is normal enough. With any climactic note, we tend to feel that it can be isolated and extracted – that its power and preciousness lie somehow within itself, rather than depending on that to which it is a climax.

But this is why it’s such a good image of the man’s fading consciousness and will to live. Bergotte wants to see this detail as a separately precious thing, something he can isolate and grasp in his hand. Yet he can’t – any more than can hold on to this last precious moment of his life.

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A lesser man than Pinter might have ended up with :

CLOSE UP OF MANET’S “SINGLE ASPARAGUS”

BRUSH STROKES CLEARLY VISIBLE.

[SOUND OF BELL]

etc.

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Georges Bataille: “The solitary asparagus of Manet is not a still life like others: although still, it is, at the same time, lively.”

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(Buy all your favourite art images from Allposters) – that’s where the single asparagus painting came from.)

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There are wonderful things to play with online for writers trying out ideas. Here, for example, at Research Project- Painting Techniques of Impressionism and Post-impressionism, it is possible to closely examine the string tying Manet’s Still Life with Asparagus. I wonder what Pinter might have made of that! Check out the full report in the ‘pdf. There are sets of amazing close-ups of the textures of the painting.

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It will be apparent, if you have got this far, that the impetus for my Notes on Pinter’s Proust gathers around the question of questions : [1] Can Proust be adapted to film or radio? (The Book is the Book, and that is that, etc.), [2] In what way has Proust been adapted, [3] What is the best medium for an adaptation? [4] Can one judge the quality of Pinter’s or anyone else’s adaptation of Proust without understanding Proust? (Well of course not, but there are things to grasp in a film of Proust without a complete understanding, which I do not claim to possess.)

The All-England Summarise Proust Competition.

A worthwhile Proustian digression in the search for lost answers to these questions, particularly Q.4, is the In Our Time BBC Radio 4 programme on Proust.

One of the the experts on the programme, Jacqueline Rose, Professor of English at Queen Mary College, London, in talking about her novel Albertine, touches on some of the problems of adapting Proust through changing him. I picked up on one phrase which I think is useful both in looking at the novel, its interpretation, and in adapting the story: “……the expectations of a Proust-literate readership.”

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And, now, for something completely outstanding, the more traditional (non-Pinter) BBC radio adaptation. This is not a Pinteresque interpretation, and yet, and yet, can the adapters not have spent some time enjoying the Pinter radio version? It follows the story faithfully and in detail. Get a few minutes in to it, and one should be saying to oneself this is the medium to do it in. Why bother attempting film?

The Pinter screenplay as radio was effective. But why hasn’t someone had a go at making the film or as TV (yes….)? And then we could compare the results. Even if brilliantly done, it would be of limited interest: mostly to those who had already read the book, or at least attempted it, or, even less at least, who had read about it and knew the main characters, author’s intent and how it was achieved. [….pretentious but lazy readers.]

Perhaps film is useless in getting over the story Proust wrote. Any attempt at brevity simply sending the viewer of the film who didn’t know the basics into a spiral of increasing incomprehension.

There is the Jeremy Iron’s Swann’s Way. But that’s a cop-out because Swann’s Way is regarded as the easy option.

There is Raoul Ruiz’s Time Regained, starring Catherine Deneuve, based on the final book, Le Temp Retrouve. The article which lists other film attempts and scripts, including one for Visconti, reckons the Ruiz did a reasonable job.

“In filmmaking, like in painting you have the story and you have the picture. In the story, one thing comes after another. In a picture everything happens all at the same time. I thought what was worthwhile from the filmmaking point of view in
Proust was the fact that these two functions are reversed. We expect Proust to basically tell a story and he produces a picture. He tells us about very intense moments in a minimalist way. And when expect him to produce a picture he tells it to you. He sees someone standing still and then tells you all about the story behind that person. That’s what the film depicts. I would have liked to have done even better but that aspect is indeed a priority in the film. We have this strange Proustian emotion which fascinates many people including me. One is moved, you don’t know why. You feel like crying. And you don’t know why. Nothing serious has actually happened.”

Raoul Ruiz

Reading Kevin Hagopian in Film Notes: Time Regained, discussing the Ruiz, it is clear one better assesses what the Pinter could have been through other attempts to bring the book to life in film. Simply: one needs to study the films made so far to re-assess the Pinter script.

Then there is Chantal Akerman’s La Captive.

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The Pinter radio adaptation doesn’t represent what it would be as film. The narrative voice provided by Pinter himself gives much more orally delivered information that the film would do. For example, would dates and Marcel’s age be included on screen? When you hear Pinter say, “Marcel aged 21”, you forget that this might not be in the film.

Proust in the novel is perfect: in film almost impossible: through radio very acceptable. Proust filtered through another fiction {=meta-meta-fiction} – novel or film – is likely to be even more successful than radio renderings which attempt faithful renderings. That is purely and simply because there is no obligation to present “the case for Proust” in full through another novel. Characters can quote Proust, discuss Proust, claim Proust effects (or effected) their lives, without the novelist – who may be a kind of Proust the narrator/Marcel the narrator if he wishes – claiming to be adapting or ‘doing’ Proust. Is this not what the attempts at film have tried to do? Well, not quite. Pinter’s screenplay and the BBC 6 -parter tried the whole, in different ways, others have tried parts.

I argue the imagined Pinter film would be almost exclusively for a restricted niche audience defined by those already mentioned categories of people (readers of the book and those who know what it was about but who either hadn’t finished it or had given up), rather than by people who didn’t have any pre-knowledge of the story. This is not to say that un-Proustian ignoramuses would get nothing out of the film of Pinter’s script (or from the more recent Proust films), but it would almost certainly be too little about Proust’s book. Certainly the non-Pinter BBC radio series worked well, in part because it was an almost oral-aural ‘transcription’ made possible by its length.

I love radio, and I think Proust would see the point of an aural meta-filter through which we the listeners have to re-construct his characters and absorb the ideas. In my view, the complexity – both of structure and ideas – comes over better in the listening than in reading. This may be about how the brain retains and organises. All we need is a 36 hour word-for-word radio version to prove the point.

But there will be an argument there – because Proust is also examining what is possible in the novel, in his novel, as well as the other things he is attempting – that this aural/text choice is mere preference. A test is to try a very long, difficult passage from the book and its equivalent in the BBC 6-parter (if there is one…). The audio might be somewhat filleted, but it might still be a reasonable comparison. Try to find a section of the serial that is pretty intact. I’ll have a try.

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Can radio or film can do the better job?

Despite the fact that Pinter’s Proust was written filmically, unless a film is the length of Bela Tarr’s Satantango, it won’t truly reflect the book. The BBC radio adaptation is roughly 6 hours long and in some ways comes near to the book because long stretches of complex combinations of action and thought are woven into it. As an example, the part in Time Regained where Marcel overhears soldiers talking was very well done in the radio version, with all sorts of overlaps, both in conversations and in memory and thought.

Another candidate in the audio category (a strong contender for ultimate Proust medium after text), is Neville Jason’s Naxos production. Here he writes about his Proust: Life and Work of Marcel Proust. Putting his and the BBC radio 6-parter in a head-to-head might be instructive. I haven’t listened to the Jason, but an extract in a radio interview he did a few years ago, shows he did all the parts himself. If you don’t like his voice, it will not save his version no matter however well filleted and done. The BBC radio serial with a great cast, is really beautifully done. Corin Redgrave as Charlus.

A personal note: I used to see Neville with his thick sheaves of paper when he came to his holiday home in Norfolk. I had no idea he was working on an audio abridgement. Nor that he took 6 years on the project. I knew he was an actor and I once said I was writing something. He volunteered to read my stuff. Maybe I should have overcome my fears and let him have a look. If he managed to abridge Proust satisfactorily he could have planned and organised the Normany landings in 1944 all by himself.

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Emily Zants, a retired professor, has put online what she calls an adaptation of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, titled The Social Aquarium.

Those of you who know your Proust (again: by direct immersion or secondhand) will immediately lock into the Balbec restaurant scene in the Zants. Why, you might be asking, didn’t Pinter use that? Yellow screen? What’s the point of that? Aquarium. Now, that’s more like it: fish, different types, each analogs of people in the restaurant and, by implication, each exemplar radiating out, reflecting other characters and character types in the novel. What was Pinter thinking? How can he possibly have missed it? Well, he didn’t: there is section in which Marcel complains about the people in the restaurant, but we do not know how the film of Pinter might have presented this visually.

An answer to the problem of what to emphasis in a compacted, re-imagined Proust is succinctly explained by Claude Reich, a reviewer in the Amazon site of the new book on Proust’s art by Eric Karpeles’, Paintings in Proust (Thames & Hudson, £25), is:

[This book is all the more important to the understanding of Proust as] he himself acknowledged that “La Recherche” was a work whose theme was the birth of an artistic vocation in the narrator’s soul, the novel itself being the result of this birth. He {Proust} also wrote that ” my book is a painting”

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Pinter read the book, read about the book, read the experts, debated with Proustians like Barbara Bray [pdf], {2} and then decided this was a book about art as much – no, more than – the ethology of French aristocratic society (and Dreyfus) at the turn of the 20th. century. And yet, his screenplay in dialogue concentrates mostly on Marcel, family and the elite! No way round it. So we are left only with the art being represented visually: both art and Marcel’s observation of things that he, in effect, tells us are indistinguishable from art, things that arise from within himself as a word expression of art itself.

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Film: Proust: time-waster? tells us a little of the process Pinter went through which I have up till now guessed at.

“Working on A la Recherche was the best working year of my life,” Pinter later claimed. He had steeped himself in Proust, visiting the author’s old haunts and taking copious notes while reading the book. “For three months I read A la recherche every day … but was left at the end quite baffled as to how to approach a task of such magnitude.”

Nevertheless, the critics admired his adaptation. “It’s a beautiful working model in which Proust’s million-and-a-half words have been brought lucidly down to 455 shots,” enthused the New Statesman, but no financiers were found to bring that tidy model to life.

The article by Goeffrey Macnab, deals with Pinter in the context of films that have been made.

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Though Farms, trees, and bell-towers: The “hidden meaning” of triads in Proust’s “recherche”, is just an extract, there is enough to see again Pinter’s script, to re-enter Pinter’s preoccupations with Proust. I will add here the script sections reiteration of the three trees, three spires, seen at different times, or remembered, when the book of the script arrives, which should be any day now.

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Proust’s novel is about other things apart from memory, time and art such as photography (in the sense of mechanical capture and reproducibility), speed (he had a chauffeur driven car in which he whizzed hither and thither) and possibly film (though many say not, that he was not a great watcher of films, the book certainly reads like film). This summary of The Aesthetics of the Windshield: Proust and the Modernist Rhetoric of Speed, gives a hint of where that goes.

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Returning, finally, to Pinter’s Proust – an encomium – it may seem the little patch of yellow was the thing on which he hung his whole adaptation. Not true. There are more little bells than yellow screens in the script. To see what he is doing, listening to the audio version is a clearer way of showing the whole process. In a clever Pavlovian trick, he links the yellow to the sound of the bell, then leaves the yellow behind, till, right at the end he brings it back.

The bells are the sound of the garden gate at Combray. This sound is in turn linked to

…Was not nature herself from this point of view, on the track of art, was she not the beginning of art, she who often only permitted me to realise the beauty of an object long afterwards in another, mid-day at Combray only through the sound of its bells, …

and Marcel’s (and Proust’s) bed-side bell.

Marcel at the end of Time Regained:

…I had jumped out of bed and had stood in my nightshirt
by the window through which the moonlight shone, until I heard M.
Swann go away. My parents had accompanied him, I had heard the door open, the sound of bell and closing door. At that very moment, in the Prince de Guermantes’ mansion, I heard the sound of my parents’ footsteps and the metallic, shrill, fresh echo of the little bell which announced M. Swann’s departure and the coming of my mother up the stairs; I heard it now, its very self, though its peal rang out in the far distant past. ‘Then thinking of all the events which intervened between the instant when I had heard it and the Guermantes’ reception I was terrified to think that it was indeed that bell which rang within me still, without my being able to abate its shrill sound, since, no longer remembering how the clanging used to stop, in order to learn, I had to listen to it and I was compelled to close my ears to the conversations of the masks around me. To get to hear it close I had again to plunge into myself. So that ringing must always be there and with it, between it and the present, all that indefinable past unrolled itself which I did not know I had within me. When it rang I already existed and since, in order that I should hear it still, there could be no discontinuity, I could have had no instant of repose or of non-existence, of nonthinking, of non-consciousness, since that former instant clung to me, for I could recover it, return to it, merely by plunging more deeply into myself. It was that notion of the embodiment of Time, the inseparableness from us of the past that I now had the intention of bringing strongly into relief in my work.

And let us not forget Pinter’s waiter’s spoon. And so marvel at his yellow screen. And bells.

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Maybe Proust before the culture machine by Michael Naas [Culture Machine, Vol 1 (1999) ] will find itself a better niche in these notes later. For the meantime, let them rest here.





Asparagus leaves in autumn

Screenplay: Chinatown [1977]

Screenplays for you includes Robert Towne’s Chinatown.

As when scripts were put up in Moleskine Modality, note it is not clear from the site whether these are the originals or transcribed from movies.

I came here from a comment Townes made (sorry, can’t find it again, just a few scribbled notes) about  the symbolism of the title. One of the nubs being about how J.J. ( Jake) Giddes (Jack Nicholson) doesn’t ever know whether he is helping or hindering a situation.

In the wiki:Chinatown, it says “Chinatown can symbolically mean here an alien place beyond J.J. Giddes understanding or control.”

John Fowles, book and film.

Litlove (Tales from the Reading Room) has written an exemplary post on The French Lieutenant’s Woman. However, if you are curious, if you haven’t read the book, it has the spoiler built in, so beware.

One thing she hasn’t tackled is book vs. film, which I have always been obsessed by, partly because I believed it told me so much about film writing.

Karl Reisz directed. Harold Pinter wrote the screenplay {1}. Having later heard in the BBC radio version what he did with Proust in The Pinter Proust Play, {2} which itself is an object lesson in screenwriting, though never used, I can now turn back again, being reminded of the FLW , to the way he ended up doing Fowles:

wiki: The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Screenplay of The French Lieutenant’s Woman

(Not sure if these are Pinter’s ‘stage directions’ – just a few- or if they have been created afresh in lieu of the real thing, but the dialogue seems true to the film)

There is a long essay by Mary Lynn Dodson, which was originally published in Literature Film Quarterly, in 1998, which takes the book vs. film discussion in its full context, including Fowles’s other books, his own attempt to adapt the book, and his attitude to filming The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman: Pinter and Reisz’s adaptation of John Fowles’s adaptation

{ SEE Moleskine Modality post Petit pan de mur jaune for a soupçon of Pinter’s Proust.}

screenplay resources

• Screenplays for You
• INFlow’s film script repository
• A – Z screenplays/movie scripts

A selection (which happen to be excellent films too):

• Network
• The Battle of Algiers (1965)

For these two (also a great film) the thing is to compare transcript and script proper:

• Charade (1963)
• Charade (1963)

Here from Moleskine Modality, gathered together all the film related post (some are not on film per se but have ‘film’ in the text). Again, by using

EDIT > FIND in this page > HIGHLIGHT all

it’s easy to scamper down the page quickly looking for all occurrences of the word film to find something you might be interested in, rather than trawling through the lot.

It would be better to get everything across in bulk to make the text and links a better database to access, but it’s not possible, so various bits are being selected as they re-interest me. Today its film.

There is a movie category in the Moleskine Modality blogroll with a mixture of fiction and non-fiction films which came into view. They are not all serious. One link is to Great Directors from the great film site Senses of Cinema