After reading the Bierce and Munro stories, and their film versions, how do you see the different strategies of storytelling between the media playing out in these examples? Are there specific moments that strike you as instructive of the differences between film and literature storytelling? How might the concepts of narration, action, and description matter in these examples?
9 thoughts on “Responses for 9/16”
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As I watched tonight, I was surprised by the aural aspect of film watching, merely because sound is so definitively cinematic. In his short story, Bierce describes how Farquhar’s ticking clock sounds. He is capable of capturing its general aura. He describes it as “a sharp distinct, metallic percussion like the stroke of a blacksmith’s hammer upon the anvil…”, as having a “ringing quality,” and as being “as slow as the tolling of a death knell.” He is also able to describe how the sound made Farquhar feel and, by doing so, causes his reader to both imagine the sound and its relation to Farquhar, but Bierce can never actually produce nor reproduce a sound and its exact definitive qualities. A film can do this. And the film does do this. Some of its sound choices are conspicuous. I’m thinking specifically of the song interlude that chimes in when Farquhar’s realizes that he is alive. Other sound choices we may miss because they are so natural to the setting, so atmospheric. Noises like breathing, stepping, pacing, the wind, almost become unnoticeable, and we learn to hear but yet ignore them.
Although we did not delve into this in class, I think we can also classify sounds as being either narration, action and description. I’m not sure whether I can come up good, specific examples for each, but I will try. A character’s dialogue and the sergeants commanding fire are verbal actions. The previously mentioned song interlude is narration, in that it purposely sways the viewer’s emotions and affects how a viewer interprets the narrative. It is a directorial decision that is meant to be impactful. And an example of description… might be the noise of the soldiers walking on the bridge, due to the lack of consequence of the sound’s noise. It is merely atmospheric. Yes? I’m not sure if I’ve gotten a perfect grasp on these categorical distinctions and would be interested in hearing how other people feel about sound or any element of sound used in the film (I’m sure someone wants to comment upon that song interlude).
This is more of an advantage film has over literature than a film strategy, but the thing that struck me the most between the movie and short story versions of “An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge” was the shock value the film version can deliver that the a piece of literature cannot. The short story could pinpoint exactly where the bullets were splashing around the main character, even describe the noise they were making. However, it could not recreate the shock value of the movie, hearing the thunderously loud bullets that especially stand out in a mostly quiet film explode around his head. The scene where this aspect most comes into play is the final scene of the story, where it is revealed that the main character never escaped, but was executed on Owl Creek Bridge. The literature version can describe this scene in extreme detail, an advantage pointed out in the Chatman chapter, even delve into the thoughts of the main character during the scene. However, it cannot reproduce the shock value an audience experiences from seeing the main character embracing his wife to hanging from the bridge that the film version can.
I must admit, tonight’s screening was unexpected in regards to the pace of the films. It’s not uncommon to see a narrative heavy feature and become immersed in the swift progression to get to one scene to another. However, watching the French take on Ambrose Bierce’s short story, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, was very “drawn out,” dare I say dry at particular points. Further, Away from Her, felt longer than conventional dramas. Nonetheless, having read both stories and understanding the cathartic tone of the two, which justify the long and expressionistic persona of each character.
Surprisingly, Ambrose Bierce’s short was astoundingly sound driven. Though there was little to no sound, the absence of sound still resonates to audiences referencing the reflexive nature of the dying man. Conversely, I visually felt the nature of the shots did not achieve the same shocking tone as I first read the story. It appeared there were plenty of establishing and first person perspectives, but the literal translation of the short felt as if I was “reading literature on screen.” I felt a divergence from the omnipresent narrator should have been shifted to the interior introverted nature of Farquhar.
Away from Her, which dealt inextricably with the emotionality and interior strife of the central character, Grant Anderson (Gordon Pinsent), was remarkably done. Throughout the film there were extended shots of Grant’s face, which expressed the struggle he was experiencing. I felt truly the narrative structure in regards to action, description, and narration could be combined within one shot of Grant.
Though this interpretation is not final I am interested to hear what others think about the pace and how emotionality was captured to progress the story itself.
On “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge:” Bierce describes Farquhar’s pain during his escape in such detail that you almost have the impression that he himself went through the ordeal. I think at one point he says F.’s ‘brain’ is ‘on fire.’ Bierce doesn’t gloss over the pain, either. He dwells on it. He draws it out. Probably I have a morbid curiosity because I couldn’t get enough of those passages. And not surprisingly the film version is lacking in the pain department. There are plenty of shots showing F. with agonized expressions, and I think there is one underwater close-up shot that’s included solely for that purpose, but no shot said to me ‘his brain is on fire,’ and no shot ever could. The action is there, but the action can say only so much.
On “Away from Her:” Whereas in the above example there seems to be an irreconcilable gap between narrative capabilities in literature and narrative capabilities in film, I was surprised to see that in the case of Munro’s story and the film adaptation the capabilities of literature and film seem to coincide. That is to say, the story is written in a cinematic way. As I was reading it (before I saw the movie) it struck me that this story would actually be pretty easy to adapt. I hate to say ‘easy,’ because of course it isn’t ‘easy,’ but what I mean is that it lends itself to the film medium. It is pretty rich in dialog first of all, and it doesn’t indulge in lengthy descriptive or subjective passages. It has the pace of a movie. People do things, simple, practical things.
The most significant overlap between the film and the story, I think, is that they both use a sort of leapfrog chunking of two main lines of discourse. In the case of the story, chunks of present day alternate with chunks from the past, Fiona and her deterioration with Grant and his philandering. In the case of the film there are also flashbacks to Grant’s adulterous days, but the main alternation is between the Fiona/Grant narrative and the Grant/Marian narrative. So what is interesting is that even though the film and the story used this same kind of discourse device, they used it to emphasize two different sets of storylines.
…sorry for the long post.
Did anyone else notice this? In “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” apparently Grant and Fiona had “gone over to Meadowlake a few times several years ago to visit Mr. Farquhar, the old bachelor farmer who had been their neighbor.” Is Meadowlake not too far from Owl Creek? As far as “distended” time realities go, I’ll say.
What I find interesting about cinematic version of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is that, while it was able to simultaneously show description and action when Farquhar was getting tied up by the soldiers, the scene/moment leading up to him getting dropped felt as stretched out as in the short story. The short story took its narrative time describing some of the soldiers, for example, while the film created many shots from different angles at different parts of the location on the bridge.
What I thought was very cool about the leap frogging that “Away from Her” does, for the sake of speeding through narrative details in the short story, was begin the very start of the movie in the present while Grant was driving to Aubrey’s place, flashback to an 18 year old Fiona when she informally proposed to Grant, and dub the image with the conversation Grant had with the nurse relaying the memory; the conversation had happened between the memory flashback and the current present.
I decided to read the stories only after I had seen the films so that I would not have any predisposed thoughts as to what anything “should” look like. What struck me the most about “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is how well Bierce captures sound. Sound is one those senses that is so utterly difficult to describe in comparison to sight, but Bierce does such a fantastic job at illustrating exactly what it is he wants the reader to hear. Enrico does a wonderful job at portraying the short story–he stays very true to it; what I noticed in both the film and the short story is that Farquhar’s “return” to the bridge was just as abrupt in the short story as in the film–at least I thought so.
The one particular moment that I’d like to point out in the film is one that really only film could capture–when Farquhar returns home–his arrival seems to extend much longer than the physical space would have actually allowed. We see the same actions repeated over and over almost to symbolize his epic, yet impossible, quest back to the woman that he presumably loves. The characters’ actions (tears, struggled expressions) progress, but their actual motion is not propelled forward. The cut to him and then back to the woman and then back to him and then back to the woman is a powerful oscillation that resets their starting point every time. To describe that in words would be rather close to impossible. I was very impressed (and momentarily confused) by that sequence.
I agree with Andrew in that the film version of Owl Creek allows us to feel the perceptions of characters “more viscerally” as Habibi phrases it. I feel like this comes through especially in the opening of the film when the camera slowly pans over the bridge and the various soldiers. In the short story, Bierce writes line after line of description. The reader must carefully analyze his words while in the film world, all the details are immediately apparent. As a viewer, you do not need to process and create the world of the film as you would when you read the story. The fact that the description is presented visually allows you to become immersed in the action and to move through the narrative more easily without dealing with flowery language that may remove you from the action of the narrative.
I absolutely loved the short story A Bear Came Over the Mountain. Stories don’t tend to have such a strong emotional effect on me, though we do know that I am a sucker for story lines about old people. Away From Her had a similarly emotional reaction, but I think some of the subtlety that could have been added to the story through visual conveyance was unfortunately lacking due to a tendency to unnecessarily add important plot points into dialogue. In class, we discussed the scene in which Fiona is talking to Grant in the car, and makes it clear that he cheated on her by blatantly stating it. This could easily have been done in a more subtle manner, like when Grant tells the nurse he thinks Fiona is punishing him for something, but the decision to add such an expositional statement about it from Fiona kind of took away from the power of the statement.
This brought me to start thinking about the idea of “showing, not telling”. In the short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Ambrose Bierce is very detailed in describing the situation and surroundings, and tells the story as a story. He gives small hints anticipating the twist at the end, but it is extremely difficult to portray a dream-like world when not speaking from the perspective of he who is dreaming it.
I believe that the short film version of the story actually did an even better job of portraying this dream state than the story, despite the genius of the story itself. The film could add the narrative elements of non-diagetic music that really added to our understanding of the haze that the character was in, and we also got things like extreme close ups of nature, repetitive motion of Farquhar and his wife coming toward each other, and point of view shots from the main character, like that in which he is looking down at the plank he is about to jump off of. All of this added to the narration of the story and made for an extremely interesting film.
I was surprised by the faithfulness of the film version of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” to the literary version. There seems to have been an attempt to literally translate the events depicted in verbal prose to moving pictures. One obvious omission that was made in the crossover from literature to film was the second scene in the short story where Peyton Farquhar talks with a soldier near his home. This scene breaks up the narrative in the short story, coming right before Farquhar falls down. In terms of film, such a break in the action may seem jarring. In “Film and Television Narrative,” Mittell points out that a key difference between literature and film is that written prose is subject to the pace of the reader, while moving pictures portray continual forward momentum of events into the future: “Literary narrative has the temporal freedom to freeze story-time to indulge in detailed descriptions or asides.”
I thought that the underwater sequence was well adapted and successfully portrayed, visually, the agony and the struggle of the protagonist trying to escape from his watery death trap. This scene also highlights the most obvious difference between cinematic storytelling and literary storytelling, namely the difference between showing and telling. It is one thing to read a sentence from this scene in the short story: “They [his hands] beat the water with downward strokes, forcing him to the surface.” It is quite another thing to this sentence actually happening. I did think some translations were unclear. For example, I thought the close up shot of the soldier’s eye as he points his rifle at Farquhar did not really communicate clearly the paradox that Don Hibibi points out, the paradox of the protagonist seeing the soldiers with such visual detail despite being so far away. Maybe such was not the intention in that scene.