THE SCREENPLAY AS LITERATURE:
A CASE STUDY OF HAROLD PINTER
The genre of screenwriting began right from the days of cinematographic history and so
is over a hundred years old. Yet many people scoff at the idea of defending the
screenplay as a form of literature and serious critics maintain that it is not an end-product,
that it is just a stop-gap measure. A brief survey of this art-form shows that in the first
few decades of this century, instead of according literary recognition to the screenplays of
that day, critics were concerned in discussing not the individual merits of the writer but
instead their literary motivations. Did they write for the screen in order to express
themselves in a way impossible in any order medium, yet with the same dedication and
meticulousness as writers in the more traditional literary arts? Or did they consider their
screen writing endeavours as mere "hack" assignments, undertaken only to give them the
financial support necessary to embark on a real "labor of love," such as writing a good
novel or play? Unfortunately, in the history of the American film script, the latter has
more often been the case. Very few critics seriously consider the screen work of great
American writers like William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald in an exhaustive study of
their literary accomplishments. In Europe, on the other hand, we find the first real trend
of accomplished writers gravitating to the cinema in order to further their literary career
and not to suspend them. In France, in particular, such well-known literary personages as
Jaques Prevert, Jean Cocteau, Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet have all gone on
to pursue very distinguished careers in film, not only as scriptwriters but, in some
instances, as directors too.1
Movie scripts seldom make for interesting reading precisely because they are
mere blueprints of the finished product. Unlike a play script, which usually can be read
with pleasure, too much is missing in a screenplay and even highly detailed scripts
seldom offer us a sense of a film's mise-en-scene, one of the principal methods of
expression at the director's disposal. However, the claim that screenplays are actually
literature is based not so much on the recent trend to publish them (along with the fact
that many of them do make very good reading), but on the new status that cinema itself
has attained -- that of an art form. The post-Second World War cinema has proved once
and for all that movies can not only entertain people but enlighten them as well, with the
same subtleties and complexities that are to be found in any other art or literary form. As
early as 1948, in an article entitled "La Camera-Stylo" ("camera-pen"), the French critic
Alexandre Astruc first called attention to some of the changes that cinema was
undergoing at that time:
...the cinema is quite simply becoming a means of expression, just as all the other arts have been
before it...
...After having been successive a fairground attraction, an amusement analogous to boulevard
theatre, or a means of preserving the images of an era, it is gradually becoming a language. By
language, I mean a form in which and by which an artist can express his obsessions exactly as he
does in the contemporary essay or novel. That is why I would like to call this new age of cinema
the age of camera-stylo...By it I mean that the cinema... [becomes] a means of writing just as
flexible and subtle as written language.2
Perhaps more than any of the director's other collaborators, the scriptwriter has been
suggested from time to time as the main "author" of a film. After all, the writer is
generally responsible for the dialogue, he outlines most of the action and sets forth the
main theme of a film. Most great directors take a major hand in writing their scripts, but
they bring in other writers to expand on their ideas. Fellini, Truffaut, Kurosawa, and
Antonioni all work in this manner. The American studio system also tended to encourage
multiple authorship of scripts. Often writers had a certain specialty, such as dialogue,
comedy, construction, atmosphere, and so on. Some writers were best at "doctoring"
weak scripts, others were good "idea" people but perhaps lacked the skill to execute their
ideas. In such collaborative enterprises, the screen credits are not always an accurate
reflection of who contributed what to a movie. Furthermore, even though many directors
like Hitchcock contribute a great deal to the final shape of their scripts, they often refuse
to take screen credit for their work, allowing the official writer to take it all. Surprisingly,
few major directors depend entirely upon others for their scripts. Joseph Losey and
Harold Pinter, Marcel Carno and Jaques Provert, Vittorio DeSica and Cesere Zavattrni
are perhaps the famous director-writer teams.3
"I 'm a writer," That statement used to conjure up images of a solitary life, one of
manual typewriters, converted attic offices and "Don't disturb him, he's writing" While
some of this may still hold true, especially for the novelist or dramatist of romantic or
sentimental temperament, the screenwriting game is much different. These days, terms
such as "gross points," "right of first refusal," "WGA arbitration," and "script doctor" are
as necessary a part of a screenwriter's lexicon as plot point, transition element and high
concept. Also, the business of screenwriting has indeed become a 'business' as much as it
is simply a profession. Today's writers and writer/ directors have quite a bit of business
that they need in order to make a go of it in the modern movie-making environment.
Though relegated to 'B-status' of writing, this paper seeks to explore how far the
screenplay can be considered as literature and as a case in point I wish to focus on Harold
Pinter's screenwriting.
The very mention of the name of Harold Pinter brings to our mind the image of
dramatist who, along with Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Arthur Admov , became
representative of the Theatre of the Absurd. His plays, which are supposedly esoteric
avant -garde, and so often superciliously dismissed as nonsense or mystification, made
deep impact upon the literary scene in England from the sixties decade. Striving to
express its sense of the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the
rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought,
Pinter regards life in its absurdity as basically funny to a certain extent:
Everything is funny; the greatest earnestness is funny; even tragedy is funny. And I think
what I try to do in my plays is to get to this recognizable reality of absurdity of what we
do and how we behave and how we speak. 4
His sparse style and gift for creating tension and horror though the most economic of
means has made him one of the most respected playwrights of our day. By what is
significant is the fact that apart from writing plays, Pinter also simultaneously pursued an
illustrious career as a professional scriptwriter for the cinema. After a lukewarm response
to his first professionally produced play, The Birthday Party (1958), Pinter rose to fame
with the1960 stage production of The Caretaker. But with 1963's The Servant, he made
his bow as a screenwriter, and also essayed his first role (he has since acted in other films
but hasn't declared any intention of making this his life's work). While many of his films
are adapted from his own plays, just as many have been screen originals.
Unlike George Bernard Shaw, who was very particular during the filming of
adaptations made from his own plays and took an active role in many of the productions,
Pinter primarily preferred to adapt other authors' plots and to play the role of the
conscientious and highly professional craftsman. Interestingly, his film scripts aren't quite
as enigmatic or confusing as his plays, in fact many of them have been models of clarity
and succinctness. Though critics call screenwriting a totally different media, nevertheless
much of Pinter's characteristic quality remains and enriches the films, most notably the
ones which have been directed by Joseph Losey, a film-maker whose sensibility is
beautifully attuned to Pinter's terse, elliptical style, his silences, and pauses. Losey
directed The Servant (after a novel by Robin Maugham, 1963) and Accident (after a novel
by Nicholas Mosley, 1967). Other films which Pinter scripted were The Pumpkin Eater
(after a novel by Penelope Mortimer, 1964), The Quiller Memorandum (based on a
thriller The Berlin Memorandum by Adam Hall, 1966), The Go-Between (after the novel
by L.P Hartley in 1971)5, The Last Tycoon (after the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald in
1976), Langrishe, Go Down ( from A. Higgins, 1978), his Oscar-nominated adaptation of
John Fowles' complex novel The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981)6, Turtle Diary
(from R.Hoban, 1985), Heat of the Day (from E. Bowen's novel, 1989), The Handmaid's
Tale (from Margaret Atwood's novel in 1990), The Comfort of Strangers (from I .
McEwan's novel 1990), Victory (from Joseph Conrad's novel, 1990), and The Trial (by
Franz Kafka, 1991). Besides these, his masterly adaptation of Proust's great novel A la
Recherche du Temps Perdu, which has till now remained unfilmed because of financial
difficulties, was published as a book in 1978,7 and shows Pinter's astonishing ability to
translate a complex narrative into a series of powerful visual images.
The paper will concentrate on just three screenplays by Pinter, two produced by
mainstream movie companies and one till date unproduced, but all of them adapted from
other people's work. Due to space constraint, I shall leave out the adaptations made out of
his own plays. The first screenplay is Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, which was
directed by Elia Kazan and is an exemplary model for auteur criticism. Based upon a
posthumously published unfinished novel, which Edmund Wilson edited into seventeen
episodes of a story that was still evolving, none of them regarded by the author as final
drafts-- the novel has nonetheless continued to be read and admired since its publication,
having the unofficial honour of being the best American book about Hollywood. The film
faced a lot of criticism because the unfinished form of the novel left many problems
unsolved in the film version as well. And this is where Harold Pinter's involvement came
under discussion. Although we may have doubts about Fitzgerald's capacity for retaining
his modified first-person narration while completing a complicated, naturalistic plot and
connecting it to the protagonist's tragic love story, many critics have chosen to define the
film's problems by conferring auteur status to the scenarist, Pinter and then blaming him
for having either too much reverence for the original or not nearly enough. Kazan has
claimed that he did not change a word of Pinter's script, which Mike Nichols, the film's
first director, and Sam Spiegel both worked on. "It wasn't Fitzgerald I was reverential
toward. It was Harold,"8 he stated. In attacking Pinter's failure to "fill in the characters
and clarify the conflict" of the novel, Pauline Kael has described Kazan's decision as
"reverence piled upon reverence."9 Others, however, have criticized Pinter for radically
changing Fitzgerald's intention, though they frequently disagree about the nature of the
alterations. Thus, Richard Combs accuses the screenplay of being "more satirical but less
perceptive" about Hollywood by emphasizing the political machinations and hypocrisy
Fitzgerald left only in his notes for the uncompleted sections of the novel.10
The hero of The Last Tycoon of course, is Monroe Stahr, a movie producer on the
order of Irving Thalberg, a "production genius" with a special feeling for "quality
pictures". This fact alone is sufficient to nominate another candidate as the film's auteur.
Writing before The Last Tycoon's release, Hollis Alpert put the case very bluntly: "Make
no mistake. It's Spiegel's picture. Auteur theory be damned."11 The movie is not precisely
an adaptation of a finished literary work, but a realization of that work-- a term evoking
Elia Kazan's favourite word for director, the French "realisateur." This is specifically
found in the film's emphasis on work, morality and the immigrant theme. But what is
remarkable is the way Pinter contributes to the film by offering the ‘film within a film'
formula that makes his later contribution to The French Lieutenant's Woman so
significant. According to Fitzgerald's manuscript, in the flickering darkness of the
screening room, Stahr has re-discovered each day the possibilities for shaping and
unifying the collective dreams of the people. The movie begins here in the screening
room with black-and-white footage from a standard gangster picture. Stahr offers a few
comments, then watches the dailies for a technicolor romance and another black-and-
white melodrama. In accordance with Thierry Kuntzel's theory granting a movie's
opening sequence a privileged place in its structure, these three clips all serve to
anticipate the large film's major action and themes. Together, they constitute virtually
The Argument for The Last Tycoon, part of movies which seem in retrospect to have
impelled the film into being. Their content may be summarized as follows:
1. A femme fatale type meets her gangster boyfriend in an
Italian restaurant; as she leaves for the powder room, he is executed by
machine gun fire from a passing car.
2. A young woman walks away from her lover on an empty beach; the camera
stays on his reaction.
3. A foreign woman and a Latin lover type conduct their affair in her apartment;
after her husband phones, she tells her lover to leave, then changes her mind
and tells him to stay.
The first sequence foreshadows Stahr's ultimate destruction, which is linked both to a
woman's betrayal and the forces of unseen men (collectively referred to as "New York" in
the film). The second presages his love affair with Kathleen at the unfinished beach
house and her eventual departure from his life. The third specifically refers to Kathleen in
several ways: she is British, her “no's'' to Stahr repeatedly turn out to mean "yes," and she
belongs to another man who is always absent. These three films-within-the-film shown in
the screening room also reflect the particular nature of the cinematic signifier. Each of
them depicts a "presence of absence," which Christian Metz has defined as the
distinguishing characteristic of cinema as opposed to theatre, where stage actors and
props are actually present during a performance. In film, Metz explains, the actor is
present at shooting when the audience is not, but is absent during the film's projection,
leaving only a "tracing" on the screen. Thus, cinema always presents us with a "double
withdrawal" represented by our own distance from the screen and by the delegated image
of absent objects being traced there. It is especially interesting that when we see a later
portion of this last movie, the only one of the three whose progress we follow through
production, we experience both a compounding of the self-reflexive functions we have
been describing and the entropic effect which envelops the final stages of The Last
Tycoon.
The second Pinter screenplay under discussion is The French Lieutenant's
Woman. Now this was a novel of ideas in the most extreme sense. A large part of the
book is devoted to exploring the whole idea of story. It is also devoted to exploring both
some of the characters and the idea of character. Further, to some extent, the novel also
compares two very different times in history - Victorian times and our own. Again, it was
in some sense an "academic literary" novel – i.e., to some extent an exploration of formal
literary theory. How does one bring such a novel to the screen? Indeed, so problematic
was the translation that it took John Fowles eleven years to find a director and
screenwriter willing to attempt it. Pinter's screenplay takes for granted an audience
familiar with Fowles' story and like much of his earlier work in film, entails a search for
metaphor rather than literal reproduction. The "excitement" in scripting the novel exists,
in Pinter's own words, "in finding out how it can properly live in film." "It was a
question," the playwright continued, "of how to keep faith with Fowles' complexity
without being tortuous in film terms:
...the technical demands are, to use a cliché, a great challenge to solve. But also it's entering into
another man's mind, which is very interesting ...They try to find the true mind...there are boundaries,
proper limitations, that you have to adhere to, otherwise you are distorting, playing about, and
having your own good time, which is not the idea. But there remains within that the freedom of the
medium.
And that is the whole point...I don't really feel...any kind of constrictions. I always work -- and
certainly in the case of "The French Lieutenant's Woman" -- from a substantial respect for the work
itself.12
Pinter freely credits Reisz with the idea for the modern subject, though its elaboration
was his own. The solution of director Karel Reisz and scenarist Harold Pinter was of
another order altogether - and one so startlingly simple it seemed curious that no one had
thought of it before and which paradoxically is also so stunningly original as to make the
film as much of a tour de force as the novel. Since the book is essentially a novel within a
novel, reasoned the director, why not, in translating it to screen use the device of a movie
within a movie as Francois Truffaut did previously in Day for Night? Thus emerged not
one love story but two: that of a contemporary actor and actress who are working
together on a period movie, intercutting the tale of their affair with the period movie
itself.13 The period movie is, of course, The French Lieutenant's Woman, and though
considerably condensed, it otherwise follows Fowles' story line quite closely. As in the
novel, the action begins when Charles Smithson (Jeremy Irons), gentleman, amateur
scientist, and Darwinian disciple, proposes marriage to the wealthy and charming
Ernestina Freeman. Shortly thereafter, he catches a glimpse of the woman who will end
up changing his life. Hooded, mysterious, standing mournfully on the quay at Lyme
Regis –– the English coastal town –– she is Sarah Woodruff (Meryl Streep), who,
according to local gossip and her own account as well, has been seduced and abandoned
by a worthless officer in the French navy and who so flaunts her shame and melancholy
as to suggest she may be insane. Nonetheless, to Charles she becomes an obsession that
intensifies: first, when he becomes her lover and discovers, to his total puzzlement, that
he is the only lover and she has ever had: and second, when she abruptly disappears,
leaving him as desperate an outcast as she herself has been.
So goes the film within the film. As for the one that frames it, breaking into it
only briefly and intermittently at the outset and more frequently and extensively towards
the end, it too focuses on a love affair: between Mike, a young British actor who is
portraying Charles in the film, and Anna, an American actress who is playing Sarah.
Like Charles, Mike is committed to another woman –– though she is not his fiancée but
his wife. Like Sarah, Anna has a French lover –– only this time an authentic one who
seems totally committed to her. Like Charles too, Mike display a passion that is
obsessive: while like Sarah, Anna proves ultimately elusive. Pinter, very effectively,
provides a double vision and an opportunity for double ending –– in the Victorian tale the
lovers are united in the end; in the modern one, Anna runs off, leaving a despairing Mike
behind her. The fourteen scenes detailing Mike and Anna's relationship are purely
Pinter's invention and the screenplay switches back and forth between 1867 and 1979 in a
clever juxtaposition of manners, plots, and social and sexual mores. Past comments on
present, present comments on past. Many viewers find themselves bewildered by this
framing device, troubled as to what to make of it and how to evaluate it. According to
Peter Conradi's telling summary, the modern love-affair "acts as an acoustic chamber
within which the Victorian affair can resonate, amplify and ironise some of its meanings.
It is a brilliant device." 14
Although the movie was a screen-adaptation of the book, the filmmakers
experimented a bit with the subject and the result is peculiar in a way, but very
interesting. For instance the film-within-a-film segments are presented without too many
distracting reminders of what they are. Here and there, a sound bridge pulls up out of our
reverie –– as when, immediately before a shift to the present tense from the Victorian era,
we hear a telephone ringing, or the sound of a helicopter or automobile. At another
moment, immediately after watching Anna rehearsing a fall in the present, we cut (via a
stunning edit) to Sarah executing that fall in the past, carrying overtones of what is
happening in the present into our awareness of the past. The first sequence of the movie
is set at the Cobb in the Victorian town of Lime Regis:
It is dawn, 1867: "A clapperboard. On it is written: THE FRENCH
LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN. Scene 1 Take 3. In shuts and withdraws, leaving a
close shot of ANNA, the actress who plays SARAH. She is holding her hair in
place against the wind."
VOICE (off screen)
All right. Let's go.
The actress nods, releases her hair. The wind catches it.
VOICE (off screen)
Action.
SARAH starts to walk along the Cobb, a stone pier in the Harbour of Lyme. It is
dawn. Windy. Deserted. She is dressed in black. She reaches the end of the
Cobb and stands still, starting out at the sea. (p.1)
In this opening scene, Pinter's adaptation is particularly apt, since it seems to hearken
back to the origins of the novel itself. Yet our awareness of the modern day world comes
only gradually, for the first shot of the movie crew is followed by 25 consecutive period
scenes. Only in scene 27 are we back in 1979:
Dim light. A man and a woman in bed asleep. It is at once clear that they
are the man and the woman playing CHARLES and SARAH, but we do
not immediately appreciate that the time is the present. (p. 8)
Pinter meant for us to be disoriented. "It's a kind of distancing, isn't it?" he admits, "I
remain very, very interested......as to whether a given audience will find the presence of
the modern scenes undermining to the Victorian tale. But I'm not a theoretician. I work
mainly by instinct and sense of smell, as it were".15 The film's double vision is seen in
many other modern segments: Mike is shown at lunch wearing Charles's make-up and
costumes, whereas Charles makes no reference to Mike; Anna is shown selecting fabric
for one of Sarah's dresses, whereas Sarah shows no awareness of Anna's existence; while
in the final scene, Mike registers the loss of Anna is the very same room that only
moments before served as the setting for Charles and Sarah's reconciliation. Scenes 113
and 118 point towards the same asymmetry. In the first Mike "is lying on a sofa, staring
at the ceiling. Jazz is playing from a transistor radio." (p.46) In the second, Charles is
lying on the sofa in dressing gown, starting at the ceiling: "Same set-up as shot 113." (p.
47) Pinter makes us see that Mike's affair, despite the jazz, is becoming as complicated as
Charles Smithson's. Thus, though the film certainly places its Victorian segments in
quotation marks, we still watch them with only minimal interference –– with the result
that rather than experiencing them as fantasy, we reflect on them as such only after the
fact. Sometimes this montage is executed in a very sophisticated way. For example, a
rehearsal for a scene between the actors suddenly switches to the scene in the 'movie' and
sometimes with the fun of playing with it. Irons, as actor Mike, discusses the end of the
movie plot in one scene, with dialogue approximately like this:
Man : "did you take the happy end or the sad end of the plot now?"
Irons (busy eating): "We took the first."
Man : "Which one was the first ?"
Irons (still absent-minded): "I mean, the second one."
Again, while the novel hints at the extent to which we not only sometimes
confuse illusion and reality, but actually try to impose one on the other, the film makes
the point explicit. Pinter also heightens irony by inlaying the past with the present in the
other scenes as well. In scenes 72-74 the "actors" Mike and Anna will use the lines of
their "script" to refer to their own situation in the present.
CHARLES
May I accompany you? Since we walk in the same direction.
She stops.
SARAH
I prefer to walk alone.
They stand.
CHARLES
May I introduce myself?
SARAH
I know who you are. (p. 24)
In the scene that follows, set in Anna's caravan on the set, Mike and Anna will play with
the same "text," but the nuances they interject foreshadow the end of their affai :
ANNA
Hello ! MIKE comes in.
MIKE
May I introduce myself?
ANNA
I know who you are. They smile. He closes the door.
MIKE
So you prefer to walk alone ?....
ANNA
Not always. Sometimes I prefer to walk alone (pp. 25-26).
Pinter has made the dialogue serve both his "modern" and "period" ends. So much
emotion –– and so much irony –– has been grafted into this exchange that when Mike and
Anna do another "take" of the same Victorian scene from another camera angle, the
tableau they have been trying to sustain breaks down completely. Reality intrudes into
cinematic illusion:
CHARLES
May I accompany you? Since we walk in the same direction.
She stops.
SARAH
I prefer to walk alone.
CHARLES
May I introduce myself?
SARAH
I KNOW WHO YOU ARE.
She collapses in laughter. He grins.
VOICE (off screen)
Cut! (With bewilderment.) What's going on ? (p. 26)
At the end of the movie, Mike, seeing Anna drive off and out of his life, cries out,
"Sarah." For him, quite clearly, art has become indistinguishable from life or, perhaps,
preferable to it. And we can see why. The "illusory" ending that has proceeded this
discomforting "realistic one" was much more optimistic, offering a soft, romantic image
of Charles and Sarah together in a boat on a lake. In this way, we at least have a chance
to choose a happy (if make-believe) ending, should that be our preference.
The modern tale inserted into The French Lieutenant's Woman in all the more
Pinteresque once we consider its relationship to the playwright's recent work for the
theatre, for Mike and Anna's story is a tale of upper-middle-class adultery, the sad litany
of infidelity that Pinter portrays in Betrayal. His plays are noted for their use of silence
to increase tension, understatement, and cryptic small talk. Equally recognizable are the
'Pinteresque' themes –– nameless menace, erotic fantasy, obsession and jealousy, family
hatred and mental disturbance. His dialogue in his plays follows a line of associative
thinking in which sound regularly prevails over sense and his playwriting style
distinguished by tension-filled pregnant pauses are missing in his screenplays. Part of the
secret of this movie's success of course, is that Pinter did not make a literal translation.
He altered the plot elements (including adding a whole new framing device) in order to
convey the same ideas and emotions as the novel. In short, he was completely faithful to
the spirit of the novel and John Fowles, the author was quite happy with the result, calling
the framing device itself "a brilliant metaphor" for the novel. Also, Pinter offered a good
solution to the problem of the novel's troublesome point of view.
But there is also another explanation for this adaptation’s special power. Apart
from being analysis of the Victorian age: an existential exploration, a commentary on art,
The French Lieutenant's Woman is above all, "a love story" (Pinter's own words) –– a
novel about romance, about the complexities of passion, about the intricacies of male-
female relationships, about the acceptance of love in society and the private problems that
come with it, and, about the mysterious and illusory power of women. Both the
relationships offer a way of dealing with it: while in the past, the lovers are ready to give
up their bonds with society and family and face the problems that come with it, in the
more 'modern' world, the affair is still hidden from others and even the own family.
Pinter's next screenplay differs from the two mentioned here in several ways.
Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past is considered to be among the most
cinematic novels in style. In a 1935 essay entitled "The Proustian Camera Eye," Paul
Goodman offers a point-by-point comparison between the Proustian techniques and those
of the cinema. He identifies "the Proustian free-association with the dissolving flow of
cinema, the Proustian idée fixe [the obsessive return to a single idea, image, or sensation]
with the focusing of the camera, the Proustian revelation [or sudden flash of memory,
usually set off by a sensation –– for example, the taste of Proust's famous Madeleine
dipped in a cup of tea which brings back to him his entire childhood at Combray] with
the unexpected juxtapositions of the cutting-room, and the passivity of the Proustian
narrator [the ultimate "voyeur"] with the 'photographic' quality of the newsreel."16
Extensive as are Goodman's claims for Proust's cinematic quality, French critic Jacques
Bourgeois makes even greater ones. Putting forth the notion that, as a writer committed
to visualizing sensation and to the image above all, Proust had "invented" all varieties of
cinematic techniques, Bourgeois goes on to suggest that these techniques hold within
them the promise of a "cinema of tomorrow" 17 –– a claim that turned out to be prophetic.
For the Proustian or subjective cinema, what Bourgeois envisioned in his 1946 essay is
precisely the type of "first-person" cinema that has been realized in the world of Resnais
and Bergman, among others.
But there are other qualities, aside from its technique, that make Remembrance of
Things Past tempting to film. A Bergsonian meditation on the fluidity of time and
consciousness, on the ever-changing nature of personality, on the power of art and
memory to recover mores and fashions, of snobbery and declassement, of the decay of
the aristocratic society of the nineteenth century and the ushering in of the triumphant
bourgeois one of the twentieth, it is also an exploration of the idealization and
impermanence of love, of the destructive obsessiveness of jealousy, of what in the
homosexual eyes of Proust was the "vice" of homosexuality. It is also a study of the
growth of an artist and especially of the nature of perception. All of this may boggle and
intimidate the would-be adaptor, seeming so utterly, totally untranslatable; yet, the novel
also offers endless materials and possibilities. [Here I am omitting the discussion of
Volker Schlondorff's Proust adaptation, Swann in Love as the film is based on a fragment
of a fragment, one of the several parts that make up the first volume of the whole novel
cycle.]
When such a cinematic novel is made into a screenplay, one definitely expects a
unique avant-garde production. In the early 1970's Pinter joined forces with director
Joseph Losey and Barbara Bray to develop this screenplay of Proust's masterpiece and
took more than a year to conceive and write it. There could be no more fascinating
demonstration of how a literary masterpiece, vast in scope, complex in structure and
subtle in philosophy, could be dismembered and then reassembled and yet, by some
miracle of tact and skill, lose little of its essence. Though it has not been produced, yet it
has been published and is considered a fine piece of literature. Obedient to the very
difficult architecture of the book, Pinter made an extraordinarily good screenplay out of
this famous sequence of novels; a work that has been "thought out clearly and faithfully;
it is a beautiful working-model in which Proust's million-and-a-half words have been
brought lucidly down to 455 separate, seldom extensive shots." 18 Thus we read The
Proust Screenplay with all kinds of things in our mind: Proust, Pinter's reading of Proust:
the problem of abridgement, the problem of dramatization, the problem of visualization;
the film which might be made from this script: the script itself as a literary work, words
on the page. In the Introduction to the published screenplay, Pinter clearly states:
For three months I read A la Recherchedu Temps Perdu everyday. 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. The one thing of which I was certain was that it would be wrong to
attempt to make a film centered around one or two volumes..... If the thing was to be
done at all, one would have to try to distill the whole work, to incorporate the major
themes of the book into an integrated whole.... 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 cote de Chez Swann [Swann's Way] first and Le Temps Retrovue [Time
Regained], the last volume, second. He then wrote the rest. 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.
...We evolved a working plan and I plunged in the deep end on the basis of it. The
subject was Time....
Working on A la Recherche du Temps Perdu was the best working year of my life.19
The Proust Screenplay thus manages to capture much of the thrust and movement of the
entire novel cycle: its circularity, its pattern of motifs, its texture as a series of
experiences that both inspire the creation of a work of art and constitute a work of art
themselves. Astoundingly too, it touches on almost all of the major Proustian themes.
But what Pinter grasps and emphasizes most of all is that central Proustian concern with
inner states, with the subjective nature of experience, with the fluidity of time and
consciousness. Establishing "Marcel" as central consciousness, the screenplay presents
the experience of the whole exclusively from his point of view –– though, unlike the
novel where he is essentially both invisible and passive, he appears here also as
participant. We meet him first in a scene taken from the final volume of the series, as a
middle-aged man en route to a musicale at the Guermantes mansion. In Proust, the
narrator stumbles on an uneven flagstone in that scene, setting off a series of memories
which are further intensified as he sits in the Guermantes library. Similarly, in Pinter,
Marcel also stumbles, also sits in the library, and we move via his thoughts back to his
childhood; we then proceed chronologically from that point forward in time. As in the
novel, however, that forward movement is often interrupted –– sometimes with a flash-
forward, other times with an associative montage.
Pinter carries us. moreover, through just about every major dramatic event in the
novel. He introduces us to most of its major characters as well, and compresses it all with
breathtaking skill. A critic, Mark Graham opines that there are no parallels in the novel
for the kind of rapid juxtaposition of both events and images found in the Pinter
screenplay.20 Cinematic as Proust's techniques may be, Proust is also so leisurely that we
often lose sight of his total design. This isn't true of Pinter's adaptation which has the
virtue of making that design –– the thematic unity of the whole, he analogies between the
various phases of Marcel's experience, the echoes, the repetitions, the sustained motifs ––
more strongly evident. Also present in the screenplay are sequences that convey the
Proustian stress on the importance of perception, on the shifting nature of point of view.
Significantly, Pinter has chosen to preserve the two scenes in the novel most crucial in
expressing Proust's vision. For example, we can cite Marcel's glimpse of the church
steeples and his sight of the trees on the road to Hudimesnil. Pinter's description in both
instances emphasizes (as does that of Proust) the continual alteration of Marcel's
perspective and of his perceptions in turn. Choosing to center the film on Marcel's
subjectivity, Pinter at the same time omits the entire opening section of the novel where
the narrator, lying sleepless in bed, recalls his past. What he gives us instead in a
montage of images which, much more immediately cinematic in nature, works quite
exquisitely to the same end. That is, like the Madeleine and the section devoted to the
narrator musing, these images both assert the film's inner focus and establish the various
motifs which will be developed later. The film begins:
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. No sound. 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 is a palazzo, seen from a gondola. No sound. Quick fade
out.
7. Momentary yellow screen.
8. The dining room at Balbec. No sound. Empty.
9. EXT. THE HOUSE OF THE PRINCE OF GUERMANTES. PARIS. 1921.
AFTERNOON.
In long shot a middle-aged man (Marcel) walks towards the PRINCE DE
GUERMANTES' house.
His posture is hunched, his demeanour one of defeat.
Many carriages, a few cars, a crowd of chauffeurs. Realistic sound.
10. INT. LIBRARY. THE PRINCE DE GUERMANTES'S HOUSE. 1921.
A waiter inadvertently knocks a spoon against a plate. MARCEL, large in
foreground, looks up.
11. INT. DRAWING ROOM. THE PRINCE DE GUERMANTES'S HOUSE.
1921.
The drawing room doors open.
The camera enters with MARCEL, who hesitates.
Hundreds of faces, some of which turn towards him, grotesquely made-up,
grotesquely old.
A tumult of voices.
12. The sea from the window. Silent
13. Spoon hitting plate.
14. Continue Marcel's progress into the drawing room. Voices. Faces. The wigs
and makeup, combined with the extreme age of those who with difficulty
stand, sit, gesture, laugh, give the impression of grotesque fancy dress.
The scene is confusing at first, perhaps, but completely, inescapably Proustian. Besides,
whatever the immediate dislocation, there are significant clues to what is going on and
what it all means. We can assume that the stream of images before us most likely
constitute the man's "steam of consciousness" –– and all the more so because certain of
the shots, such as the one through the open window, imply an observer. In the course of
the film, moreover, each of these images clarifies itself, the yellow screen almost
immediately. For in Shot 22, the camera pulls back to reveal that the yellow screen is
actually a portion of Vermeer's View of Delft, the painting which as Marcel will tell us
later, is "the most beautiful painting in the world."
This is Pinter, not the playwright of the Absurd, but a different Pinter nonetheless.
Taking Harold Pinter's case of writing the Proustian screenplay, we can conclude by
repudiating filmmaker Ingmar Bergman's claim when he states:
It is mainly because of this difference between film and literature that we should avoid
making films out of books. The irrational dimensional of a literary work, the germ of its
existence, is often untranslatable into visual terms –– and it, in turn, destroys the special,
irrational dimension of the film. If despite this, we wish to translate something literary
into film terms, we must make an infinite number of complicated adjustments which
often bear little or no fruit in proportion to the effort expended. 21
Also, it implies that when an adaptation fails it isn't because of any inherent limitations in
the film medium or because a novel simply can't be put on screen; it suggests that the
cause lies instead in a very individual failure of either courage or imagination on the part
of the filmmaker. What's more, the way Pinter handled such a difficult literary work
proves that the finest adaptation is centered on the most sensitive reading of its source
and that it consequently exists not simply as art but as a significant commentary; and that
rather than diminishing film, the contact with literature tends to enrich it.
--------------------------------------------
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1. Douglas Garrett Winston, The Screenplay as Literature. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. P,
1973, 14.
2. Alexandre Astruc, "La Camera-Stylo". Ecran Francais.(1948). Translated and reprinted in The New
Wave. Ed. Peter Grahman. New York: Doubleday, 1968. 17-18.
3. Louis D. Giannetti, Understanding Movies.
4. Pinter interview with Tennyson.
5. Harold Pinter, Five Screenplays. 1991. See also Joanne Klein, Making Pictures :The Pinter
Screenplays. Ohio State Univ. P, 1985.
6. _________. The French Lieutenant's Woman: A Screenplay. Boston: Little Brown & Co. 1981.
7. __________, The Proust Screenplay: A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.London: Chatto & Windus,
1978.
8. Charles Silver and Mary Corliss, "Hollywood Under Water: Elia Kazan on The Last Tycoon, Film
Comment, 13 (Jan-Feb, 1977): 43.
9. Pauline Kael, "The Current Cinema," New Yorker 52 (29 Nov, 1976) :159-60.
10. Richard Combs, "The Last Tycoon," Sight and Sound 46 (Spr'77): 24.
11. Hollis Alpert, "Fitzgerald, Hollywood and The Last Tycoon." American Film 1 (March '76):9
12. Leslie Garis, "Translating Fowles into Film," New York Times Magazine ( 30 Aug. 1981)51.
13. Joy Gould Boyum, Double Exposure : Fiction into Film. Calcutta: Seagull Books ,1989.
14. Peter Conradi, Jorn Fowles, Methuen, London & New York, 1982, 100. See also Conradi's article,
"The French Lieutenant's Woman: Novel : Screenplay, Film." Critical Quarterly 24 ( Spring 1982).
15. Garis, 51.
16. Stanley Kauffmann and Bruce Henstell, eds. American Film Criticism. New York: Liveright, 1972:
311-14.
17. "Le cinema a la recherche du temps perdu," la Revue du Cinema, Numero 3G, 1946 : quoted in Le
Monde, February 23, 1984.
18. John Sturrock's review in New Statesman.
19. Introduction. The Proust Screenplay. VII-VIII.
20. Mark Graham, "The Proust Screenplay:Temps perdu for Harold Pinter?" Literature/Film Quarterly,
1982.
21. Ingmar Bergman, "Introduction," Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1960. (Translated from the Swedish by Lars Malmstrom and David Kushner. xviii)
