Senses of Cinema – The Filmmaker as Adaptor: Fred Schepisi Takes on Patrick White... Page 1 of 3 CURRENT ISSUE ABOUT US LINKS TOP TENS GREAT DIRECTORS SPECIAL DOSSIERS WORLD POLLS ARCHIVE CONTACT US DONATIONS ← Previous Post Next Post → Search The Filmmaker as Adaptor: Fred Schepisi Takes on SUBSCRIBE Patrick White in The Eye of the Storm Name: Email: by Brian McFarlane October 2011 Fred Schepisi Dossier, Issue 60 | October 2011 Register It needs real nerve to come out of a film based on a Features Editor: Rolando Caputo famous novel and declare unreservedly that you Festival Reports Editor: Michelle Carey Book Reviews Editor: Wendy Haslem enjoyed the film much more than the book. I mean, Cteq Annotations & Australian Cinema Editor: Adrian books came first. Literature, as a study, preceded film Danks by decades. Adaptation of novels into film brings out Webmaster and Administrator: Rachel Brown the cultural cowardice in so many of us. Could you Social Media Editor: Hayley Inch imagine anyone daring to “prefer” a film version of, say, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations or Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady to their illustrious predecessors? Well, courageously, that is what I’m about to IN THIS ISSUE… do. Welcome to Issue 66 of our journal Much of the reputation of the “new Australian cinema” of the 1970s was derived from somewhat decorous films adapted from respected Australian novels, preferably set in the past and most often with a coming-of- Features age narrative line. Fred Schepisi, having made his name with The Devil’s Playground (1976), from his own From Ubu Roi to My Generation: A Tribute to Albie Thoms screenplay, next adapted Thomas Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), again writing the screenplay himself, and no one could have thought of this as “decorous”: set in the past certainly, the film, Cinémathèque Annotations on Film however, confronted issues central to contemporary Australian life. Schepisi went on to direct several impressive films derived from literary sources: Plenty (1985), from David Hare’s exploration of a woman’s Book Reviews attempt to come to terms with life in post-war England; the very smart and witty Six Degrees of Separation (1993), from John Guare’s play; and best of all, Last Orders (2001), the beautiful, affecting version of Graham Festival Reports Swift’s novel. And now he’s taken on Patrick White. In his function as adaptor – whether as director or screenwriter or both – of other men’s fictions, Schepisi DONATE TO SENSES has shown a respect for the antecedent works without letting this topple into a crippling reverence. The movies he has made from novels and plays suggest a filmmaker who has found something to excite his attention in the original and to suggest cinematic strategies for rendering this “take” on the original. In the Click here to make a donation. If you are an Australian resident, any donations over $2 are tax deductible. case of Jimmie Blacksmith, he and Keneally both made painfully clear the fact that Jimmie, at the end, belongs nowhere, but, whereas Keneally arrives at this point via an austere choice of words, Schepisi does so through a passionate arrangement of images. In the case of Plenty, screenwriter David Hare (adapting his TAGS own play) is on record about Schepisi’s wish to retain more of the original dialogue, but the film never feels like a mere conversation piece, even though it doesn’t undervalue the impact of the eloquent spoken word. It moves fluently between past and present in cinematising Susan Traherne’s (Meryl Streep) adjustment to the Albie ThomsAlfred HitchcockAndrei present as she comes to terms with her wartime experiences as a Resistance worker. In the process of Tarkovsky rendering this, the film also works as an allegory of England’s loss of direction and prestige in the decades Australian after the war. In relation to Plenty, Schepisi acknowledged the importance of Streep’s star power in getting cinemaAustralia on filmBarbara the project adequately funded and distributed. That is, there is more at stake than just a matter of “transferring” a story and characters created in one medium to another. StanwyckCarl DreyerChris MarkerClaire DenisDavid Lynchdocumentary Elio PetriEmeric Six Degrees of Separation is a film that makes daring demands on its audience from several points of view. Pressburger Eric RohmerfeaturedFrank BorzageFrançois Schepisi, working from Guare’s adaptation of his own play, insists that we listen carefully to an incessant TruffautFritz LangG.W. PabstHoward flow of often-dazzling talk, far more than is the case with most films. However, it is no more a conversation HawksIngmar Bergman Jacques piece than Plenty, and it requires the closest attention as it darts about in time and place, depending on the interview minutiae of mise en scène to keep us informed about its narrative twists and turns – and about its RivetteJean-Luc GodardJean-Pierre philosophical and cultural intentions. MelvilleJerzy SkolimowskiJohn FordJoris IvensKenji MizoguchiLee MarvinLouis MalleMarlene The matter of establishing a fluid concurrency of past and present, of here and there, is crucial not just to DietrichMichael HanekeMichael MannMichael Plenty and Six Degrees of Separation but also to Last Orders and to The Eye of the Storm, and this feature, PowellMIFFOrson WellesPaul CoxRobert common to several of Schepisi’s adaptations, is an area in which the screen is potentially and peculiarly BressonRoberto Rossellini Roman adept. Playwrights and novelists risk confusion if they fragment the time continuum in this way: it presents PolanskiSamuel FullerStan BrakhageViviane staging difficulties for theatre and even novels which embark on such alternations of tense and that need to VaghYasujiro Ozu prepare the ground a little more thoroughly than film, in which a shift in mise en scène may reorient the viewer immediately. This was brilliantly achieved in Last Orders. I had the experience of reading Swift’s Booker Prize-winning novel just prior to seeing the film, and was amazed at how closely it adhered to the book’s sequence of http://sensesofcinema.com/2011/60/the-filmmaker-as-adaptor-fred-schepisi-takes-on-p... 1/07/2013 Senses of Cinema – The Filmmaker as Adaptor: Fred Schepisi Takes on Patrick White... Page 2 of 3 events and to its ways of narration, of letting bits of information slip in. It was hard for me to sort out what I knew from the book, what from the film. By this I don’t mean it was a tediously non-cinematic exercise in fidelity to the original; only that, to an extraordinary degree, it sought and found cinematic means of rendering the emotional texture and elegiac atmosphere of the novel as well as its incidents and characters. It is much easier to replicate incidents and characters, far less so texture and atmosphere – even supposing the filmmaker wants to, and in my view there is no reason why he/she should feel any such obligation. It’s the filmmaker’s job to make something new and compelling, whether he/she is working on an adaptation or from an original screenplay; and Schepisi now has an impressive record of doing just that. Which brings us to his latest venture in adaptation. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Patrick White has not attracted much film attention. There have been several TV versions of his plays (A Cheery Soul, 1966; Big Toys, 1980; The Ham Funeral, 1990); Jim Sharman made a moderately interesting film of the novella, The Night the Prowler (1978), for which White wrote his own screenplay; and there was talk of a film version of Voss, to be directed by Joseph Losey from a screenplay by David Mercer, that never came to anything. Now, Schepisi has filmed The Eye of the Storm from a screenplay by former actor, Judy Morris, and while sticking to the overall trajectory of White’s narrative, he has honed persuasive drama from the family tensions at its heart. For my money, Schepisi has achieved a major success in recycling a novel of misanthropic malice and irritatingly over-ornate and affected stylistic posturing, and keeping a more humane eye on the lives of the dying Elizabeth Hunter, her son and daughter, and various others who touch on the Hunters’ affairs. Having just reread the book, I couldn’t quite rinse out the nasty taste by the time I saw the film, but, even if it had nothing else going for it, the film lasts only two hours as distinct from the 580 pages it takes White to rub our noses into the more repellent aspects of his characters’ lives before a flick of “grace” at the end. As if that stood a chance against all that had gone before, whether lovingly rendered details of snot or shit or misogynistic observation of a woman’s least attractive features. So what, in narrative terms, is being adapted? Elizabeth Hunter, rich, once-beautiful, cruelly self-absorbed, lies moribund in her Sydney mansion (actually a Melbourne location passes for this in the film), and her two children have flown in from Europe to see her but, more important, to ensure their inheritances. Basil Hunter, Sir Basil, has reached a middling eminence as an actor in England, an eminence he is at pains to gloss, while sister Dorothy, now the Princesse de Lascabanes, is miserably separated from her French husband. They are drawn not by affection for their mother, and don’t have much for each other. Elizabeth is tended by three nurses, named for allegory rather than life as Badgery, De Santis and Manhood; by a German Jewish housekeeper, Lotte Lippmann, who has had a past in cabaret which she puts to use in diverting the dying matriarch; and by a lawyer named Arnold Wyburd, whose wife Lal has (White is pleased to tell us, for no very good reason) a “single pockmark on one cheek beside the nose” (1).