Being of a generation that found joy, release, longing, belonging and mercy in books, I sniff around this subject warily, fully aware of my bias for story on the written page. Oral storytelling comes close, but hits different spots. We hold on to books for dear life, not just to the stories within but to their form, as familiar and different as a lover on different days—the smell of the spine, sometimes calling up a darkened room with its knot of anticipation, othertimes a whiff of peeling teflon; and always, the weightlessness of the pages, crackling with possibility or clammy with rains past, begging to disengage and disgorge.
Despite that bias, plus a too-slim repertoire of films watched, especially adaptations, I am intrigued by the subject Torchlight has put before me: bookish love and film. I figure I can do no better than plunge into coffee and conversation with Alka Hingorani, friend, fellow explorer of stories, art historian, and teacher of film narratives. Of a Sunday morning, spiked by sturdy coffee and fluffed by spinach omelettes and then over endless text messages, we plumb our experiences of adaptations and why some worked for us while others failed.
“If I were to wonder about whether a book can be translated adequately enough across media to be savored the same way on film,” Alka ponders, “books I have loved will always feel a little violated by the diktat of another medium. But it seems as if what you’re asking here may be questioned/answered another way too: is it possible for film to create such feeling as words do? My immediate answer would be tentative, but not negative.” We recall books that have made the transition to film with aplomb, beginning with Remains of the Day, whose adaptation did justice to the Kazuo Ishiguru book (for me, it was more than the book). And yet, when it comes to Never Let Me Go, an Ishiguro story I hold sacred, I am loathe to watch its well-received adaptation, deeply attached as I am to the way it plays out in my head, its most provocative parts etched in pain upon my imagination.
Alka makes an objective distinction: she wouldn’t diss a film simply because it was different from the book that inspired it, but certainly if it were less than the book in a fundamental way. In The English Patient for instance, she mentions critical departures from the book that simply did not work for her. Despite writer Michael Ondaatje’s generous appreciation of filmmaker Anthony Minghella’s creative departures from the book (youtube link), she rues that the film did not pay homage to the last scene of the book—a departure, she believes, that fundamentally shifted the weight of the story in a way that simply no longer worked for her (in her words).
Clearly, the question of fidelity to the original story becomes irrelevant when a film maker who is a great storyteller in his own right takes a story or even merely a wisp from a book and flies it so far away you could crick your neck looking back for commonality. Alka, unabashed Terrence Malick acolyte, underscores the tenuous connection that his film Thin Red Line has with the book of the same name that she says, would have at best ‘inspired’ the film. In the film, she believes Malick has simply accepted the premise of war and the theatre of war from the book, and that is all. “After that, it is a meditation on war by allowing every soldier on the frontline time for contemplation and reflection. There is not a war movie like that, never been.”
Sometimes it takes a single character, a verse or a snip of a line rather than a whole story from text to catalyse a memorable widget in a larger, even forgettable film. Alka references the classic Chaiya, chaiya in which songwriter-director Gulzar takes a single line from a Bulle Shah (16thC Sufi poet) poem and makes it his own. This is no sneaky snatching following a bankruptcy of creativity, Gulzar’s spin-ons are veritable homages. Time and again, he has taken a line, a moment, from classic literature, and put it plonk into the popular imagination, giving it contemporary elegance but never once denigrating the original. The other kind of mapping Alka recognizes in Gulzar is when he “will take one particular line from an earlier poem and that line will become the starting line or the most important line of something that he writes.” So Dil dhundta hai phir vahi fursat ki raat din is the end of Mirza Ghalib’s poem—but the opening line of Gulzar’s (Mausam, 1975). Alka also references Faiz’s Mujh se pehli si muhabbat / Mere mehboob na maang…Teri aankhon ke siva duniya mein rakha kya hai”—Gulzar took just that small (latter) phrase to create a classic song for Chiraag (1969).
For us who cling to the joy of stories within books, pace and imagination top the list of reasons why we are so attached to the experience of reading. Who can argue with the wonder of being a part of the creative process? Books allow us to draw our characters with curls and moles and chin clefts omitted by the writer, and to step away from the story to process a particularly dark or poignant moment. “I think an important part of the experience is that we have some say in the pacing,” says Alka, speaking of the reading experience vis-à-vis that of watching a film. “And we can exercise it most times without disturbing the pace or unfolding of the tale… pause when overwhelmed or moved to contemplation, return at will to passages that shift the ground beneath our feet or leave us otherwise transformed, ponder the pace of the writer and the writing while still gliding on its wing… film is unforgiving in that regard, which is also why it leaves less room for our imagination.”
And yet, it doesn’t take much dredging to pick a pile of adaptations that have splendidly altered the way we have thought of stories we knew from books. Admitting that Mario Puzo’s Godfather is a tour de force, Alka says what she remembers most about the story is from the film experience. “Not just Brando, who was born to basically act in three films—Streetcar, Waterfront, and Godfather—but also others in smaller roles, such as the tragically flawed Fredo, played by John Cazale, who are simply superlative. There’s no return to Puzo without these faces and personalities in mind.” Our scepticism about adaptations serving lesser gods shushed, we chuckle at recollections of Jeeves and Wooster, the series with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry—absolutely binge-worthy if anything is. Alka swears the series owes its success to Laurie, “no one could have played Bertie Wooster, Laurie single-handedly took PG Wodehouse off the page.” So he did, lifting the series, compelling our family to abandon the dinner table and much else to catch every episode when it was aired some years ago. This despite finding Fry a tad too sniffy a Jeeves, lacking in the secret milk of human kindness that flows beneath the brainiac’s starch as we all know.
As for the ways in which cinema is able to say what words can’t, Alka reverts to Malick……, apart from his Thin Red Line, she describes his Tree of Life and Days of Heaven as “…not so much films as they are a rumination of the mind’s eye.” Having watched Tree of Life alongside Alka a few of years ago, I am sucked into her mind’s eye when she reflects that she cannot imagine words transforming her the way the cinematography did in that film. “…I cannot imagine words transforming me the way this cinematography does,” she says, “nor words easing my unspoken ache as does the solace offered by the silent interiority of his characters… I cannot imagine capturing that on a page.”
Films do certainly offer us the unsaid, images haunting us long after the popcorn is swept up, begging for meaning and interpretation. I cannot think of films that work in ways beyond words without referencing Shoplifters. How would mere words tell the story of that splendid, poignant 2018 Japanese drama that gnaws at indefinable notions of family and identity? The camera spends a great deal of time sitting cheek by scrappy jowl with a poor family in a small, overcrowded shanty that is at odds with the enviable relationships it houses. Much of the film’s drama comes from its setting, mood, emotional interplay and unspoken drama, all beyond words. Then again, there is Moonlight (2016), where one sequence stops all the clocks: the young protagonist Little is being taught how to swim by drug dealer Juan. It is a painterly scene awash in transparent blues, its still backdrop framing the very dynamic interaction up front between mentor and child. Water laps against the camera, against our noses, as a white sky rolls quietly. I try to find words to describe the David-Hockney-like streaks of light that move the blue water and caress the characters, but fail. The scene floats on the fringe of my memory, filliped to the front by the strangest things—a trick of light on Juhu Beach that stills everything except lines of gun metal that crackle on thin waves, white cracks in a charcoal sky, new hair prickling through the nape of my teen neck. In the same scene, what haunts Alka is the line, “In the moonlight, black boys look blue,” also the name of the play on which the film was based. But as I later recollect our conversation in tranquillity, I wonder—without the long lingering exploration by the camera of the sky, the sea, the man and the boy, would these words have the import they do?
Among books that were bested by their adaptations, Alka names Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, which she believes was written to be adapted to film, “…the psychological conceit of the book materializes so cleverly on film—the device of two characters representing one split mind—that it takes your breath away! It helps to have Ed Norton and Brad Pitt play the roles to perfection too!” And then we have short stories that somehow never make it on their own but manage to germinate adaptations so splendid one forgets their beginnings. Her favourites: Short Cuts by Robert Altman, which Alka says “seemed to create a sum of Raymond Carver’s stories that was greater than the parts” and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, so much more enjoyable than Cornell Woolrich’s It had to be murder, lovely though that short story was.
The list of which medium works for whom and for what kind of tale is endless—each allusion simply triggering another, each reflection more amorphous and subjective than the one before. Finally, it is each story’s contours, its medium, the teller’s craft, and our own very individual responses—intellectual, emotional or visceral—that make us go whoa, that pinged something in me! Importantly, the ways in which we receive and respond to storytelling is a factor of our comfort with a medium and its vocabulary as much as personal experience and mental makeup. Our ruminations for Torchlight highlight the endless ways in which old and new media are channelling stories to us every day. Technology keeps us on the edge, opening up magical new possibilities for storytelling, from audiobooks to virtual reality and implanted devices. New media are already compelling us to look carefully at the merits of total control over our story experiences versus the loss of agency over what we watch or listen to—explorations for another day.