III. the Heritage Film and Henry James
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Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem Bölcsészettudományi Kar DOKTORI DISSZERTÁCIÓ Huszár Erika KARAKTER FUNKCIÓK REGÉNYBEN ÉS FILMEN: HÁROM HENRY JAMES REGÉNY ÉS FILMADAPTÁCIÓIK ELEMZÉSE CHARACTER FUNCTIONS IN NOVEL AND FILM: AN ANALYSIS OF THREE HENRY JAMES NOVELS AND THEIR FILM ADAPTATIONS Irodalomtudományi Doktori Iskola A doktori iskola vezet ője: Dr. Kállay Géza egyetemi tanár Modern angol és amerikai irodalom program A program vezet ője: Dr. Ferencz Gy őző PhD, egyetemi tanár A bizottság tagjai: Elnök: Dr. Péter Ágnes CSc, professor emerita Hivatalosan felkért bírálók: Dr. Henry Edward Bailey PhD, Dr. Kenyeres János CSc Titkár: Dr. Farkas Ákos PhD, habilitált egyetemi docens További tagok: Dr. Kovács Ágnes PhD Dr. Friedrich Judit CSc Dr. Péteri Éva PhD Témavezet ő: Dr. Sarbu Aladár DSc, professor emeritus Budapest, 2015 ADATLAP a doktori értekezés nyilvánosságra hozatalához I. A doktori értekezés adatai A szerz ő neve: Huszár Erika MTMT-azonosító : 10033876 A doktori értekezés címe és alcíme: Karakter funkciók regényben és filmen: három Henry James regény és filmadaptációik elemzése DOI-azonosító: 10.15476/ELTE.2015.022 A doktori iskola neve: Irodalomtudományi Doktori Iskola A doktori iskolán belüli doktori program neve: Modern angol és amerikai irodalom program A témavezet ő neve és tudományos fokozata: Dr. Sarbu Aladár DSc, professor emeritus Témavezet ő munkahelye: ELTE BTK II. Nyilatkozatok 1. A doktori értekezés szerz őjeként a) hozzájárulok, hogy a doktori fokozat megszerzését követ ően a doktori értekezésem és a tézisek nyilvánosságra kerüljenek az ELTE Digitális Intézményi Tudástárban. Felhatalmazom az ELTE BTK Doktori és Tudományszervezési Hivatal ügyintéz őjét, Manhercz Mónikát, hogy az értekezést és a téziseket feltöltse az ELTE Digitális Intézményi Tudástárba, és ennek során kitöltse a feltöltéshez szükséges nyilatkozatokat. 2. A doktori értekezés szerz őjeként kijelentem, hogy a) az ELTE Digitális Intézményi Tudástárba feltöltend ő doktori értekezés és a tézisek saját eredeti, önálló szellemi munkám és legjobb tudomásom szerint nem sértem vele senki szerz ői jogait; b) a doktori értekezés és a tézisek nyomtatott változatai és az elektronikus adathordozón benyújtott tartalmak (szöveg és ábrák) mindenben megegyeznek. 3. A doktori értekezés szerz őjeként hozzájárulok a doktori értekezés és a tézisek szövegének Plágiumkeres ő adatbázisba helyezéséhez és plágiumellen őrz ő vizsgálatok lefuttatásához. Kelt: Budapest 2015. január 8. a doktori értekezés szerz őjének aláírása Table of Contents I. Introduction ...........................................................................................................................1 II. On the Art of Adaptation ....................................................................................................3 III. The Heritage Film and Henry James .............................................................................15 IV. The Europeans ...................................................................................................................31 1. The Europeans as a Novel..............................................................................................31 2. Characters and their Functions in The Europeans .....................................................37 3. The Europ eans as a Film................................................................................................44 4. The Use of Cinematic Devices in The Europeans ........................................................54 5. Scenes in the Novel and in the Film..............................................................................70 V. The Portrait of a Lady .........................................................................................................82 1. The Novel and its Characters........................................................................................82 2. Jane Campion and The Portrait of a Lady .................................................................100 VI. The Golden Bowl .............................................................................................................137 1. Critical Approaches to The Golden Bowl as a Novel ................................................137 2. Further Remarks on the Interpretation of The Golden Bowl ..................................146 3. Post-heritage Films ......................................................................................................158 4. The Focuses of the Film...............................................................................................160 5. The Use of Cinematic Devices.....................................................................................188 6. Scenes in the Novel and in the Film............................................................................192 VII. Conclusion .....................................................................................................................210 Works Cited...........................................................................................................................219 Filmography ..........................................................................................................................223 Acknowledgements Thanks are primarily due to my supervisor Professor Aladár Sarbu for all the knowledge he shared with me during my years as a PhD student, as well as for his exquisite help in the bureaucratic maze of the doctoral procedure. I would also like to acknowledge Dr. Edward Bailey, Dr. Ákos Farkas and Dr. Ferenc Takács for their useful comments on my dissertation and for their professional corrections in the text. In addition, I appreciate the work of Mr. David Parker for his part in the correction of the dissertation text as a native speaker. Finally, thanks are also due to my entire family for their support, tolerance, and understanding. I. Introduction Several sources claim that the turn of the millennium saw an unprecedented surge in the demand for Henry James-based films. The simultaneous release of three Henry James films1 was heralded in with the following words by an often quoted 1997 The New York Times article: “Move over Jane Austen: Here comes Henry James” (Smith, “Hollywood Trains Its Lights on a Master of Shadow”). The new millennium saw further Henry James film premiers: in 2000 Merchant- Ivory’s The Golden Bowl went to the big screen and at the beginning of 2001 a new WGBH2/BBC version of The American was introduced. Henry James scholars are likely to be surprised by the phenomenon, since James is reputed to have been an elitist author who never achieved the wide-scale success he was so intensely longing for. Film, however, is known to be a genre that is highly dependent on financing, it is an art form that can also be considered as a form of investment on the producers’ side, consequently the filmmakers are seldom if ever allowed to indulge in the luxury of making films that do not attract a large enough audience. It becomes apparent on the examination of J. Sarah Koch’s 2002 Henry James filmography that – notwithstanding the undoubted financial risks – this interest in James is not new-found, since Koch’s list contains 125 “screen works” based on 46 different Jamesian texts with issue dates spanning the complete length of film history. A lot of these works, however, are just fragments, and most of them are intended for television with no other aim than educating audiences. The latter intention is especially relevant in case of the BBC’s James series produced between 1968 and 1972. All in all, in the Henry James filmography there are only nine works which can be classified as feature films, i.e. films intended for wide-scale cinema audiences. If we narrow our focus to feature films, we can indeed observe a growing interest in Henry James material since the advent of the so-called heritage era. The heritage film subgenre’s emblematic film-maker trio, Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala, released their version of The Europeans in 1979, and by 2000 six more full-length movies were produced based on the 1 Jane Campion: The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Ian Softley: The Wings of the Dove (1997), Agnieszka Holland: Washington Square (1997). 2 WGBH-TV, channel 2, is a non-commercial, educational public television station located in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. 1 texts of Henry James. Prior to 1979 there had only been two attempts at adapting James to the big screen: William Wyler filmed Washington Square as early as 1949, and Peter Bogdanovich released his Daisy Miller in 1974. In view of the above it seems reasonable to suppose that it was the heritage film era that brought Henry James into the centre of the film industry’s attention. Several questions arise in connection with this assumption. First and foremost, why did heritage filmmakers consider James’s texts such good raw material? In order to answer this question, the heritage film’s political and economic background has to be examined, a field in which I have found several comprehensive studies. Secondly, the heritage film’s trademark characteristics have to be identified, an issue which has remained controversial despite the high number of works concerned with it. Thirdly, one also has to consider and attempt to identify those characteristics of James’s fiction that are likely to have attracted heritage-filmmakers. In this field research is scarce, and the answers given are general and could basically apply to any author. The most important, and perhaps most original, focus of my work, however,