Jsse 1272

Journal of the Short Story in English
Les Cahiers de la nouvelle
59 | Autumn 2012
Special Issue: The Short Story and Cinema
Editor: Linda Collinge-Germain
Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1272
ISSN: 1969-6108
Publisher
Presses universitaires de Rennes
Printed version
Date of publication: 1 September 2012
ISBN: 0294-0442
ISSN: 0294-04442

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Linda Collinge-Germain
Articles
Introduction to Robert Olen Butler

Alice Clark-Wehinger
Cinema of the Mind

Robert Olen Butler
Reveal to Reel: Short Fiction’s ‘Special Relationship’ with Cinema

Ra Page
Faulkner’s Modernist Short Story in the Age of the Silent Movie

Jacques Pothier
A Long Way for a Short Story: The Filmic Narrative Mode of The Glass Menagerie
The Intermedial Trajectories of Angela Carter’s Wolf Tales

Michelle Ryan-Sautour
The Aesthetics of Revealing/Concealing in “The Killers” by Ernest Hemingway and in its

Adaptation by Robert Siodmak
Du texte à l’écran, deux avatars de la Maison Usher au cinéma

Gilles Menegaldo
Rêve et fantasme dans Traumnovelle et Eyes Wide Shut

Jocelyn Dupont
Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

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Introduction
1 The thrust of the research on the short story conducted over the past fifteen years in
the CRILA Research Center has been the poetics of the short story, in other words, the
specificity of the short story as genre, and we were pleased in this respect to have
Charles E. May as a keynote speaker in our research center two years ago. Most
recently the Center has studied the relation between the image and the short story, and
Liliane Louvel’s keynote address to the center’s conference on the Image and the Short
Story held in 2010 analyzed the “strong affinity between the short story and the
visual,” taking into special consideration the unity of effect as defined by Poe, Valerie
Shaw’s suggestion that “by careful contrivance, the idea [becomes] an image,” and John
McGahern’s view that “a central image condenses the whole story” (19, 24).
2 During the conference, two participants studied the dynamics between the short story
and cinema, a specific visual medium. Ailsa Cox analyzed the “visual and cinematic” in
a story by Elizabeth Bowen, noting in her preliminary remarks that Bowen herself drew
attention to the importance of instantaneity. Bowen’s “emphasis on instantaneity,”
said Cox, “identifies the short story’s chronotopic affinity with the boundless present,
an affinity shared with cinematic form, in which narrative unfolds in the moment of
being” (49). Cox also noted that “film narrative, like narrative in the modern short
story, is elliptical and elusive; meaning often lies in the gaps between what is said and
what is seen” (56). Michelle Ryan-Sautour looked at the “cinematographic image” in
Angela Carter’s story “John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore’” and concluded that “Carter’s
high-flown experimentation with intermediality in this story [the eponymous John
Ford being a conflation of the 17th Jacobean playwright and the 20 th century Western
filmmaker] creates politically charged effects, using the intensity, density, and
multilayered quality of short-story discourse to heighten the reader’s exercise of his/
her imagination” (71).
3 These studies, centered on cinematic qualities of short-story writing, were a transition
of sorts to the CRILA’s concentration on film adaptations of short stories. Three one-
day conferences on the Short Story and Cinema were held between 2010 and 2012. The
first took place at the Sorbonne in June 2010 and was organized by Emmanuel
Vernadakis of the CRILA, Irène Bessière of the Fondation Maison des Sciences de

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l’Homme de Paris and Jean Bessière of the Sorbonne research group CERC. The second
was held in June 2011 in Versailles and was organized by Emmanuel Vernadakis and
Alice Clark-Wehinger of the CRILA and Taïna Tuhkunen of the Suds d’Amériques
research group at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. Robert Olen
Butler, short-story writer and author of the essay “Cinema of the Mind,” republished
here, was the guest speaker. Finally, in March 2012, Morgane Jourdren of the CRILA
organized the third one-day conference, held at the University of Angers. Guest
speakers were Ra Page, short-story editor and filmmaker, along with Maylis de
Kerangal, French author of the short story “Ni fleurs ni couronnes,” and Charlotte
Erlih, the filmmaker who adapted the story into a film. The present volume contains
selected papers from these three short conferences.
4 In her recent theoretical work on adaptations, Linda Hutcheon concedes that “when
most of us consider the move from print to performance, it is usually the common and
familiar phenomenon of the adaptation of novels that comes to mind” (39). Indeed her
twenty-three-page bibliography contains scores of studies devoted to adaptations of
novels (as well as to adaptations of Shakespeare) and not a single reference to the
adaptation of short stories. Stephanie Harrison’s 2005 critical anthology of thirty-five
short stories which have been adapted into films is a useful tool in bringing the subject
to the fore and Adrian Hunter, in his Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English
(2007), reminds us of the affinity between cinema and short story: 1
In the classic accounts of the short story–by Bowen, H.E. Bates, and Frank
O’Connor–one repeatedly encounters the idea that the short story is somehow ‘up
to speed’ with the realities of modern life. Bates, for example 2 citing Bowen, claims
that the form is a ‘child of this century’ in the same way that cinema is. Like film, it
conducts narrative not by extended exposition, as the novel does, but ‘by a series of
subtly implied gestures, swift shots, moments of suggestion, an art in which
elaboration and above all explanation are superfluous and tedious.’ (3)
5 Even Linda Hutcheon’s remarks about the adaptation of novels indirectly and perhaps
unknowingly are of interest to the study of the short story and cinema and resonate
with the remarks in the previous quote:
[A] novel, in order to be dramatized, has to be distilled, reduced in size, and thus,
inevitably, complexity. […] Most reviewers saw this cutting [of a novel for a film] as
a negative, as subtraction, yet when plots are condensed and concentrated, they
can sometimes become more powerful. (36)
6 This observation is interesting in the sense that it first of all associates condensation
and “powerfulness”, an association which precisely defines the short story. Short-story
writers commenting on their craft repeatedly evoke the importance of concision. The
following extracts from interviews by short-story writers are telling in this respect: 3
A story must never explain, it must enact and suggest. - VS Pritchett
Description is part of the superfluous that I was mentioning about the novel. I find
it useless and boring. An atmosphere develops on its own, around the story,
somewhat magically. If you see, so does the reader, a few suggestions suffice. -
Mavis Gallant (my translation)4
One should really leave something for the reader to construct, something individual
so that every reader should get something special for himself. - Muriel Spark
One of the things that I am at home with in Chekhov is the degree to which he
trusts his reader to travel beyond the given, to collaborate with him in the making
of his stories. - Tobias Wolff

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7 A.S. Byatt’s remark below even additionally parallels McGahern’s view presented
earlier that “a central image condenses the whole story”:
I started seeing things in a very condensed clear way, as images. I start making it
into a thing much more like a poem, which is a story, and it can have people
attached to it who don’t have to have immensely complex characters or histories. -
A.S. Byatt (20)
8 Clearly, powerfulness is essential to these writers and derives from condensation.
Hutcheon’s remark, while making this association (“when plots are condensed and
concentrated, they can sometimes become more powerful”) and therefore suggesting
that condensation is a positive value, poses, albeit unwittingly, the problem of adapting
a short story into a feature-length film, for such an adaptation often paradoxically
results in expansion, the inverse movement of the “distillation” required for adapting a
novel.
9 We might wonder then to what extent filmmakers adapting short stories take into
consideration this paradoxical situation. In his adaptation of John McGahern’s short
story “Korea,” Cathal Black finds an interesting objective correlative for the unsaid, the
invisible part of the iceberg, in a cage of writhing eels which are plunged below the
surface of the lake that the young protagonist’s father has fished for a living. The
concision in McGahern’s story is extreme (Douglas Cowie’s analysis views the story as a
poem), an effective means to express the “hidden violence” 5 lying under the surface of
the words spoken for example by the protagonist’s father when he excitedly tells his
neighbour that Luke Moran’s family received money from the American government
after he was killed as a soldier in Korea. Though Cathal Black expands McGahern’s
story, he nevertheless repeatedly and almost subliminally inserts the image of the cage
of eels, subtly evoking the hidden violence in the unsaid. Articles in the present volume
take into consideration the aesthetics of concision or suggestion in film adaptations,
my own as I consider Siodmak’s use of revealing and concealing in his film noir
adaptation of “The Killers,” and Michelle Ryan-Sautour’s as she studies Neil Jordan’s
adaptation of Carter’s Wolf Tales. She says the following:
It is telling that Michael Dare, in his introduction to an interview with Neil Jordan,
emphasizes the literary structure of the film: ‘In order to understand what was
going on stylistically, I found myself pretending I was reading a short story rather
than watching a movie’ (Dare para. 5). The narrative structure draws the spectator
into the active role of piecing the puzzle together. The openness and emphasis on
the reader’s participation is therefore equally present in the film version of the
tales, although in different ways. On numerous occasions the scenes are filmed
through the trees, as if to place the spectator in the role of observer, almost voyeur,
as if to replace the absent voice of the didactic narrator present in the stories […].
10 Both Siodmak and Jordan, like their literary counterparts, use techniques which solicit
spectator/reader participation. Ra Page, in his article “Reveal to Reel,” argues that one
of the difficulties in adapting short stories to the screen is the cinema’s specificity of
showing as opposed to telling; he studies “the deep-seated tension within cinematic
story-telling: the need to withhold information (in order to keep the viewer guessing)
versus the inevitable tendency of the visual image to give too much away, to show
everything.”
11 Adrian Hunter’s aforementioned study of the short story genre also draws attention to
the visual; he argues that the modern short story and the cinema are both products and
expressions of modern life and its technological advancements, one of the expressions

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of modernity being its “privileging of the visual over other sorts of experience” (46). 6
Indeed, as most theoretical studies of film adaptation remind us, 7 George Bluestone’s
1957 seminal essay established a link between statements made by the writer Joseph
Conrad and by the filmmaker D.W. Griffith based on the visual. Conrad wrote, in the
Preface to his 1897 novella: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the powers of
the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel–it is, before all, to make you see”
(5). Sixteen years later, in 1913, Griffith declared: “The task I am trying to achieve is
above all to make you see.” (qtd. in Jacobs, 119). In the present volume, the writer’s
interest in the visual is corroborated in Robert Olen Butler’s essay “Cinema of the
Mind” where he draws attention not only to the writer’s willingness to “make you see,”
as Conrad put it, but also to the use by writers of cinematographic-type techniques
such as equivalents of establishing shots or close-up shots. He postulates: “When you
read a work of literature, the characters and the setting are evoked as images, as a kind
of dream in your consciousness.” He bases his demonstration in part on Hemingway’s
stories, and indeed Hemingway’s writing has been defined as “cinematic.” Jacques
Pothier applies Butler’s hypothesis to the works of Faulkner, an author avowedly
influenced by the cinema, studying for example the effects of visual juxtaposition,
similar to those obtained by a dissolve in the cinema. Gilles Menegaldo, in his article,
postulates that Poe’s writing in “The Fall of the House of Usher” is conducive to
adaptation to a visual medium: the gothic image of the isolated and decaying house, the
tarn/mirror, the interior decoration of the house and its lighting effects, and the
parallel drawn between the house and its owner which is conducive to juxtapositional
editing for example. He further argues, as does Jocelyn Dupont in reference to
Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, that the cinema, by its use of magically fascinating appearing
and disappearing images, places the spectator in a state of semi-consciousness, a
dream-like state similar to the hypnagogic state, between waking and sleep, which Poe
refers to in “The Pit and the Pendulum” and which Arthur Schnitzler conjures up in the
evocatively entitled Traumnovelle ( Dreamstory in English), a “dream in your
consciousness,” as Butler would put it. Similarly, Alice Clark-Wehinger studies
Tennessee Williams’ intermedial experimentation with a screen device incorporated
into one of his early versions of the memory play The Glass Menagerie as a means of
evoking a character’s “hallucinatory images” for example, the screen device on stage
serving as the scene of memory or perhaps even as “l’autre scène” (the other stage) to
use Octave Mannoni’s expression.
12 The current issue begins with theoretical considerations by a writer, Robert Olen
Butler, and a short story editor and filmmaker, Ra Page. The articles which follow are
studies of particular works by short story writers and/or filmmakers: Poe, Schnitzler,
Hemingway, Faulkner, Williams, Carter; Siodmak, Epstein, Corman, Rapper, Jordan,
Kubrick and stage director Jacques Nichet. The studies consider writers’ attraction to
the visual or cinematographic, filmmakers’ attraction to literature (nearly all of
Kubrick’s films are adaptations of literary works), the specificities of each medium, the
synergy created between them, and the relationship between reader/spectator and
text. The studies could be considered as adopting the position promoted by Stephanie
Harrison in the introduction to her anthology:
Rather than viewing a film adaptation as a cultural replacement for a story or
novel, it seems closer to the truth to view each work as a variation on a theme […].
It may, in fact, be Altman who has come closest to pointing the way for us, when he

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said, with admirable simplicity, “In the end the film is there and the stories are
there and one hopes there is a fruitful interaction.”(xviii-xix)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Black, Cathal, dir. Korea. 1994.
Bluestone, George. Novels into Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957.
Collinge, Linda and Emmanuel Vernadakis, ed. Journal of the Short Story in English 41 (Autumn
2003).
Collinge-Germain, Linda, ed. Journal of the Short Story in English, The Image and the Short Story in
English 56 (Spring 2011).
Conrad, Joseph. Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus”. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1945.
Cowie, Douglas. “‘Korea’ by John McGahern”. Journal of the Short Story in English, Special issue: The
Short Stories of John McGahern. Ed. Claude Maisonnat. 53 (Autumn 2009): 237-248.
Harrison, Stephanie, ed. Adaptations: From Short Story to Big Screen. New York: Three Rivers Press,
2005.
Hunter, Adrian. The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2007.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. London, New York: Routledge, 2006.
Jacobs, Lewis. The Rise of the American Film. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939.
McGahern, John. Interview by Linda Collinge and Emmanuel Vernadakis. Journal of the Short Story
in English 41 (Autumn 2003): 123-141.
--“Korea”. The Collected Stories. London: Faber and Faber, 1992.
Mellet, Laurent and Shannon Wells-Lassagne. Etudier l’adaptation filmique. Rennes: PUR, 2010.
NOTES
1. See as well Ailsa Cox’s remarks above on Bowen’s writing about cinema.
2. H.E. Bates, The Modern Short Story: A Critical Survey, London: Thomas Nelson, 1941 (21).
3. See JSSE issue n° 41 for interviews of short-story writers conducted by members of the CRILA
research center and the introduction to it in which these quotes are brought together.
4. “La description fait partie de ce superflu que j’évoquais à propos du roman. Je la trouve inutile
et ennuyeuse. Une atmosphère se dégage d’elle-même, elle se crée autour du récit, comme par
magie. Si vous voyez, le lecteur voit aussi, quelques indices suffisent”.
5. “Ireland was always a very violent society, and, like most things there, it was very hidden
there as well.” Interview of John McGahern by Linda Collinge and Emmanuel Vernadakis, Journal
of the Short Story in English, 41 (Autumn 2003): 133.
6. See “Part II The modernist short story, Introduction: ‘complete with missing parts.’”

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7. One of the most recent being Etudier l’adaptation filmique by Laurent Mellet and Shannon Wells-
Lassagne, Rennes: PUR, 2010.
AUTHOR
LINDA COLLINGE-GERMAIN
Linda Collinge-Germain is an Associate Professor at the University of Angers where she teaches
English language and literature and is an active member of the Centre de Recherches
Interdisciplinaires en Langue Anglaise. She is the author of Beckett traduit Beckett: de Malone
meurt à Malone Dies, l’imaginaire en traduction (Droz, 2000), a study of Beckett as self-translator,
and has also published articles on the subject which have appeared in Samuel Beckett Today/
Aujourd’hui or thematic collections. Her areas of interest are the bilingual works of Samuel
Beckett, reception theory and more currently, cultural in-betweenness in short-story writing,
and film adaptations of short stories as a form of translation. She was co-editor of the Journal of
the Short Story in English from 1997 to 2012 and has been editor since 2012.

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Articles

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Introduction to Robert Olen Butler

1 The second annual occurrence of the CRILA’s conference on The Short Story and
Cinema took place in collaboration with the research group Suds d’Amériques
(University of Versailles-St-Quentin-en-Yvelines) which hosted the event. Our guest of
honour, Robert Olen Butler, whose short story collection A Good Scent from a Distant
Mountain won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, is an Eppes Distinguished Professor at Florida
State University. Prominent film producers Jason Kilot and Paul Cohen are in the
process of making an independent film of his latest novel, A Small Hotel (2011), based on
the screenplay Butler has just written.
2 Robert Olen Butler’s interest in the correspondence between film and fiction
techniques takes formal expression in From Where You Dream (2005), a compilation of
illuminating lectures which argue that the sensorial register must play an active role in
the fictional medium, itself organically linked to the cinematic register. In Chapter 4,
“Cinema of the Mind,” Butler explains how basic film concepts, familiar to us all, are
deeply rooted in literature and in the short story medium, in particular: “When you
read a word of literature, the characters and the setting and the actions are evoked as
images, as a kind of dream in your consciousness. The primary senses–sight and sound–
prevail, just as in the cinema, but in addition to seeing and hearing, you experience
taste and smell, you can feel things on your skin as the narrative moves through
consciousness. This is omnisensual cinema. Consequently, it makes sense that the
techniques of literature are those we understand to be filmic” (64).
3 The chapter “Cinema of the Mind” bore particular relevance to our one-day conference
on the Short Story and Cinema as it offered a response to a number of questions that
our research group has formulated in conferences over time. In 2011, the subject of
debate focused on the manner in which the passage from the written to the filmic
medium takes place. As a starting point, the précis for the conference proposed to
explore the technical affinities between the fictional medium of the short story and the
filmic medium. Under the aegis of Robert Olen Butler, the debate centered on
considering how the short story is inherently linked to cinema, and consequently
favorable to adaptation. From the point of view of Butler, it is a kind of memory shot
which plays out “the cinema of the inner consciousness” (64).

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4 The extent to which the cinematic channel can be carried over to a fictional medium of
concision like the short story was of core interest to our conference. Some of the points
of concern which came up were: how the short story, with its elliptic precision and its
capacity to dispense with extensive narration, could serve as an ideal medium for
expressing the primary senses and immediacy. Here again, the connection between film
technique and short story technique proved to be, de facto, a given–all of this despite
two seemingly diverging genres. As Butler has noted: “What we think is film technique
has already existed in fiction writing for centuries” (84). To support this conviction, he
examined the writing techniques of Flaubert, Dickens and Hemingway, all of which use
cinematic devices.
5 It is with immense gratitude that we reach out to Robert Olen Butler, extending
warmest thanks to him for having come all the way from Capps, Florida to Versailles,
France in order to participate in our conference. Butler’s enlightening observations
about fundamental filmic concepts and how they function within the framework of the
short story medium brought our conference an invaluable artistic and intellectual
contribution which we will continue to draw upon in the future.
AUTHORS
ALICE CLARK-WEHINGER
Alice Clark-Wehinger is an Associate Professor of Literature at the University of Nantes. Her work
on Shakespeare and Nerval: Le Théâtre romantique en crise, Shakespeare et Nerval, Paris: Harmattan,
2005, was short-listed for a research prize by the SAES and the AFEA. She is the author of a
collection of poems in French and English (Imaginaires, University of Nantes, 1997) and numerous
critical articles in French literary reviews. She has also co-authored a book on the Anglo-Saxon
short story (La nouvelle anglo-saxonne, une étude psychanalytique, Paris: Hachette, 1998). Alice
Clark’s short story collection, A Darker Shade of Light, received Technikart Manuscript’s first prize
award at le Salon du Livre (March 2011).

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Cinema of the Mind

Robert Olen Butler
“If only we could pull out our brains and use only
our eyes.”
Pablo Picasso
1 Fiction technique and film technique have a great deal in common. We’re not talking
here tonight about how to translate a book to the screen or how a film could be
transformed into a novel, but about deep and essential common ground.
2 The great D. W. Griffith (I say great in the sense of movie-maker; he was a loathsome
human being)—who did those massive silent screen epics in the teens of the last
century, Intolerance and Birth of the Nation—was rightly credited with inventing modern
film technique. Griffith himself credited one man with teaching him everything he
knew about film, and that was Charles Dickens. Of course, Dickens died several decades
before film was invented, but what Griffith learned from him about this new art form of
the twentieth century goes to the heart of the experience of literature as we read.
3 Pause for a moment and consider what goes on within you when you read a wonderful
work of fiction. The experience is, in fact, a kind of cinema of the inner consciousness.
When you read a work of literature, the characters and the setting are evoked as
images, as a kind of dream in your consciousness, are they not? The primary senses—
sight and sound—prevail, just as in the cinema, but in addition to seeing and hearing,
you experience taste and smell, you can feel things on your skin as the narrative moves
through your consciousness. This is an omni-sensual cinema. Consequently, it makes
sense that the techniques of literature are those that we understand as filmic.
4 All of the techniques that filmmakers employ, and which you understand intuitively as
filmgoers, have direct analogies in fiction. And because fiction writers are the writer-
directors of the cinema of the inner consciousness, you will need to develop the
techniques of film as well. I want to deal with some of those techniques tonight,
because I think they can help you overcome some of the problems I’ve been describing
in the past few weeks: the impulse for abstraction and analysis, for summary and
generalization, problems of rhythm and transition—how to get from one scene to
another, or one image to another or one sentence to another—how to put all the parts

12
together, where to place your own personal focus when you’re in your own creative
trance.
5 I inveigh against abstraction in these works called novels and stories. Consider how
Jack Nicholson as a crotchety old bachelor in a movie looks at Helen Hunt. We see his
face on the screen; he lifts an eyebrow; his lip curls. If the screen suddenly went blank
and the word “wryly” came up, or “sarcasm,” or “contempt,” how would you react?
You can imagine: with great discomfort. For readers who know how to read,
abstraction, generalization, analysis, and interpretation have the same deleterious
effect.
6 Let’s turn to a few basic film concepts, most of which will be familiar to you, and then
let’s look at some literature together and see how it is that writers have always been
filmmakers.
7 The shot is the basic building block of film. Strictly speaking, the shot is a single
segment of film from when the camera begins running to when it stops. But in fact
that’s not how it works. From your point of view as spectator, it is rather a unit of
uninterrupted flow of imagery. From the moment that image begins, to whenever that
image is interrupted, by whatever—that is the shot. That is the basis of every film.
8 Then there are a number of transitional devices for getting from one shot to another.
By far the most common, used for the vast majority of transitions, is the cut. You see an
image on the screen, and snap! it’s not there; another image is there in its place. It’s
called a cut because originally when film was edited—and this has only changed in the
last few years—the film stock was literally cut and then spliced together with the image
that followed.
9 And, of course, shots are connected into scenes and scenes are developed into
segments. Scenes are unified actions occurring in a single time and place—maybe a
single shot, more likely a group of shots. A sequence is a group of scenes comprising a
dramatic segment of a film.
10 These concepts can be seen as descriptive of the inevitable flow not only of the film but
also of the narrative voice as picture-maker. These pictures have a life in time. They
begin, they develop and they end, in equivalents of the filmic concepts. As in film, it is
the manipulation of these “shots” accumulating into “scenes” and “sequences” that
creates meaning and produces the rhythm of the voice of the narrator.
11 The narrative voice in fiction is always adjusting our view of the physical world it
creates, which is equivalent to another group of film techniques on a continuum from
extreme long shot to extreme close up, and the many stages in between. The long shot,
the medium shot, the close up, the extreme close up—you can slice that sausage as fine
as you wish. The narrative voice always places our reader’s consciousness at a certain
distance from the images it’s creating. It can place us at a far distance or bring us into a
position of intimate proximity by its choice of detail, by what it lets through the
camera lens.
12 Not only do fiction and film adjust us in terms of our physical relationship to the image,
they are also constantly adjusting our sense of time. Fiction and film both often speed
time up or slow it down, operating in slow motion and fast motion. You’re familiar with
the moment when the lovers are finally reunited, and they run to each other in slow
motion across the plaza or the meadow. In the late sixties or early seventies Sam
Peckinpah invented slow motion violence—at the end of the Western The Wild Bunch, for

13
example, when a gang of criminals all get blown away in excruciating slow motion.
That technique has by now become a filmic cliché: every bullet’s impact is in lugubrious
slow motion.
13 Fast motion in film, however, is almost always comic in effect. Some filmmakers have
tried to overcome the comic uses of fast motion, but without much success. A
wonderful and deadly serious early silent film, Nosferatu, has a sequence in fast motion,
when Nosferatu’s coffin arrives from abroad and is taken off the ship and carried into
the hearse in fast motion—and it looks comic. I can’t think of an example in modern
filmmaking where fast motion is used except for comic effect. In fiction, though, fast
motion can be used with infinite variety of emotional nuance.
14 Another technique shared by fiction and film is cross-cutting, where the fiction writer or
the filmmaker cuts back and forth between two separate parallel actions. These actions
are not happening at the same place or even the same time, but by cutting back and
forth you create a meaning or resonance between them.
15 The last film technique I want to lay on the table for you is one of the most crucial. It’s
called montage. Montage is a concept developed by Sergei Eisenstein, a great Russian
early film director. Simply put, montage creates meaning by placing two things next to
each other, juxtaposing elements. In a work of art everything is laden with affect, and
whenever you put two of anything next to each other, a third thing emerges; that’s what
montage is about. If you see an image on the screen of a grassy slope and a freshly dug
and refilled grave, and we cut to a woman in black walking slowly down a gravel path
beneath some trees, the montage leads you instantly to understand that this woman
has left a loved one in the grave she has just visited. In film the juxtaposed elements are
most often visual, but in fiction the flexibility is almost infinite.
16 Let’s look at some examples now. I’m going to start with a piece from a short story by
Hemingway, “Cat in the Rain.” I want you to just listen to the flow here of Hemingway’s
narrative voice, and then we’ll come back to it and examine it in cinematic terms:
The American wife stood at the window looking out. Outside right under their
window a cat was crouched under one of the dripping green tables. The cat was
trying to make herself so compact that she would not be dripped on.
“I’m going down and get that kitty,” the American wife said.
“I’ll do it,” her husband offered from the bed.
“No, I’ll get it. The poor kitty out trying to keep dry under a table.”
The husband went on reading, lying propped up with the two pillows at the foot of
the bed.
“Don’t get wet,” he said.
17 “The American wife stood at the window looking out.” Hemingway here evokes the full
figure of the wife standing at the window. In interior terms, it’s a kind of medium long
shot. We see her fully across the room.
18 “Outside right under their window a cat was crouched under one of the dripping green
tables.” What has happened here? We have now cut to what she is seeing. You
understand this same technique when you’re watching a movie: In Out of Africa, you see
Robert Redford’s face on the screen. He looks. Cut. We now see a lion bounding toward
the camera. We understand that this is what he is seeing because of that montage:
Robert Redford’s face, a lion coming this way; and the third thing emerges. The most
deprived, illiterate youngster understands this.

14
19 Hemingway has just used the same technique. “The American wife stood at the window
looking out,” and, “Outside right under their window a cat was crouched under one of
the dripping green tables.” We see that cat, again in a kind of medium long shot, the
table and the rain and the cat underneath. How many inexperienced writers, having
written “The American wife stood at the window looking out,” and now wanting us to
understand what she’s seeing, are going to put her back into the next sentence? “The
American wife stood at the window looking out. She watched a cat crouching under one
of the dripping green tables.” Right? You now have a slack, awkward run of prose. It is
as if, in the film, we saw Robert Redford’s face on the screen. Cut. Now we see the lion
bounding this way, but in the foreground is the back of Robert Redford’s head. Can you
imagine the awkwardness of that shot? Yet we all write sentences with that kind of
built-in awkwardness, when we don’t need “her” in the sentence; montage takes care of
it much more elegantly and powerfully.
20 “Outside right under their window a cat was crouched under one of the dripping green
tables. The cat was trying to make herself so compact that she could not be dripped
on.” What just happened? We zoom in for a close-up on the cat.
21 “‘I’m going down to get that kitty,’ the American wife said.” How many times in film
have you seen an image, and then a line of dialogue, somebody’s voice coming in over
that image, and then an image of the speaker? Images linger and other images come in
on top. This is all happening very fast, but I promise you it’s happening as you read, and
it’s exactly what Hemingway does here. The dialogue tag doesn’t come until the end;
first it’s a voice, then we know who speaks. There’s an after-image of the cat until
Hemingway puts in the character.
22 “‘I’ll do it,’ her husband offered from the bed.” Notice that we don’t have any
equivalent to “The American wife stood at the window.” We know he’s on the bed but
don’t know what his physical position is; we do not see him fully, and so for the
moment it’s a close up of him as he speaks.
23 “‘No, I’ll get it. Poor kitty, out trying to keep dry under a table.’” No dialogue tag this
time. So we stay with him as her voice floats through. We know it’s her because of the
conventions of paragraphing in dialogue. But our attention is not brought back to her.
We stay with him, and we’re still close on him. And then, the husband “went on
reading, lying propped up with the two pillows at the foot of the bed.” The camera pulls
back slowly, revealing him as finally full figure, reading and lying propped up at the
foot of the bed. “‘Don’t get wet,’ he said.”
24 When I read that, a number of you smiled. Why? Because he has not moved a muscle.
You do not have to say, ‘I’ll do it,’ her husband offered insincerely from the bed. You need not
abstract that, because all of the affect in the scene is embedded in the sensual way
Hemingway directs the scene. The revelation comes through montage. The husband
says ‘I’ll do it,” we see him lying there doing nothing, and next comes, “Don’t get wet.”
It’s raining out; of course she’s going to get wet.
25 So much is said about the relationship in so few words!—because Hemingway was a
brilliant filmmaker.
26 Fast action, slow motion: What I want to show you now is how these venerable film
techniques can work for us writers of narrative. This passage is from the Book of Judges,
2,500 years old. The Old Testament—King James version, of course. The passage is self-

15
explanatory except for the character of Sisera—a bad guy who’s bringing his armies to
face Israel.
Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be, blessed shall she be
above women in the tent.
He asked water, and she gave him milk; she brought forth butter in a lordly dish.
She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workmen’s hammer; and
with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head, when she had pierced
and stricken through his temples.
At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet, he bowed, he fell: where he
bowed, there he fell down dead.
The mother of Sisera looked out at a window and cried through the lattice, Why is
his chariot so long in coming?
27 Pure cinema: “he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet, he bowed, he fell: where he
bowed, there he fell down dead.” That is slow motion violence à la Sam Peckinpah. He is
falling forever. And then that wonderful cut, that wonderful bit of montage, sans
transitional device: “…he fell down dead. / The mother of Sisera looked out a window.
. . .” You can see the lattice work, the shadow of it on her face. “Why is his chariot so
long in coming?” He should be finished raping and pillaging by now. Time for dinner.
28 Next I want to read you a little bit of Henry James with some ellipses in it. I want to give
you a cheek-by-jowl example of three speeds in a brief section of “The Siege of
London.” Here is an example of appropriate summary—I’ve used summary as an epithet
in these lectures, but the summary that’s destructive races through what needs to be
done in the moment; it is summary that has no sensual impact on the reader. Sensual,
carefully and judiciously used summary can be effective and, indeed, is how you mostly
achieve fast motion—fast action—in fiction.
29 The “glass” referred to here is an opera glass; that is, a little pair of binoculars.
That solemn piece of upholstery, the curtain of the Comédie Française had fallen
upon the first act of the piece, and our two Americans had taken advantage of the
interval to pass out of the huge hot theatre in company with the other occupants of
the stalls.
She turned and presented her face to the public, a fair well drawn face with smiling
eyes, smiling lips ornamented over the brow with delicate rings of black hair and,
in each ear, with the sparkle of a diamond sufficiently large to be seen across the
Théâtre français. Livermore looked at her, then abruptly he gave an exclamation.
“Give me the glass!”
“Do you know her?” his companion asked as he directed the little instrument.
Livermore made no answer. He only looked in silence. Then he handed back the
glass.
“No, she’s not respectable,” he said, and he dropped into his seat again.
As Waterville remained standing he added, “Please sit down. I think she saw me.”
30 Now this is the great thing about fiction. We can move from fast action to slow motion
to real time seamlessly and with great nuance. The first part of that was fast action
—“that solemn piece of upholstery”—it’s summary but with wonderful sensual impact—
that pretentious, heavy thing. “…the curtain of the Comédie Française had fallen upon the
first act… and our two Americans had taken advantage of the interval to pass out of the
huge hot theatre in company with the other occupants of the stalls.” He never lets go of
the image in our minds but we move quickly. Then time stops. We examine her face in
very slow motion. “She turned and presented her face to the public,” and there’s this
lovely little bit of close examination of her face: “a fair well drawn face with smiling
eyes, smiling lips ornamented over the brow with delicate rings of black hair and, in

16
each ear, with the sparkle of a diamond…” Then we shift into real time, the moment to
moment time that is your normal speed as fiction writers. The normal speed, I
emphasize: “Livermore looked at her, then abruptly he gave an exclamation. “Give me
the glass!’” We watch him sit down. We watch the handing of the glass. We hear the
words of their exchange. It’s all in real time there.
31 Next I’m going to give an example from the writer who taught D. W. Griffith everything
he knew about film. This is the opening of the novel Great Expectations by Charles
Dickens. Our narrator, Philip Pirrip, is writing in his adulthood, looking back to his
childhood as an orphan, and he refers to himself sometimes in the third person,
sometimes in the first person. During his childhood he was called Pip. The people
mentioned here are his dead siblings and his parents.
32 This is the opening of Great Expectations. Just go to the movies here.
Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty
miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things,
seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening.
At such a time I found out for certain, that this bleak place overgrown with nettles
was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of the parish, and also Georgiana
wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew,
Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and
buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with
dikes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes;
and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair
from which the wind was rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers
growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.
“Hold your noise,” cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the
graves at the side of the church porch. “Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your
throat!”
A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat,
and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied around his head. A man who had
been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by
flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and
glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the
chin.
“Oh, don’t cut my throat, sir!” I pleaded in terror. “Pray don’t do it, sir!”
“Tell us your name,” said the man. “Quick!”
“Pip, sir.”
“Once more,” said the man, staring at me. “Give it mouth.”
“Pip. Pip, sir.”
“Show us where you live,” said the man. “Pint out the place.”
I pointed to where our village lay, on the flat in-shore, among the alder-trees and
pollards, a mile or more from the church.
The man, after looking at me for a moment, turned me upside down, and emptied
my pockets. There was nothing in them but a piece of bread. When the church came
to itself—for he was so sudden and strong that he made it go head over heels before
me, and I saw the steeple under my feet—when the church came to itself, I say, I
was seated on a high tombstone trembling while he ate the bread ravenously.
33 Dickens begins with the shot they call the establishing shot. We’re at “a memorable raw
afternoon toward evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place
overgrown with nettles was the churchyard…” We get a long shot in the gathering dark
of the churchyard. And then, what does Dickens do? He cuts to close-ups and pans one
after another along the tombstones—as we can tell from the formal phrasing “late of
this parish.”

17
…that Philip Pirrip, late of the parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were
dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger,
infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried.
34 These are, in fact, the graves of Pip’s dead father, his dead mother, and dead brother,
dead brother, dead brother, dead brother, dead brother—one after another.
35 You see the absolutely essential quality of fiction-as-film when you see what he does
then. We go from that last dead brother to what?
…and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dikes
and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes…
36 He lifts his camera from the dead brother and looks off to a long shot out over the
mounds and gates and dikes to the marshes, beyond the churchyard, and then where?
… and that the low, leaden line beyond was the river…
37 Then we go to an even longer shot:
…and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea…
38 He takes us to an extreme shot at the furthest horizon. Then what? He cuts from that
distant horizon to a close-up of the orphan child, the narrator of our novel, “the small
bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry was Pip.”
39 How many writers would do this, with perfect logic?
At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place […] was the churchyard
and that Philip Pirrip […] and also Georgiana wife of the above and Alexander,
Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children […] were also dead and
buried […] and the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to
cry was Pip.
40 Perfectly logical. Perfectly thoughtful. Dead father, dead mother, dead brother, dead
brother, dead brother, dead brother, dead brother, last remaining child of the family.
41 Montage, of course. But in such a novel, where you went from that last dead brother to
the remaining child, you would be in a totally different world from the one that
Dickens is creating. You would be in a world where the focus is on the plight of an
orphan, a family in trouble—a sociological problem, a sentimental tale of a struggling
child.
42 Dickens’ world is about something far greater, and Pip does not yearn for a family; he
yearns for his destiny. When you move from that last dead child to the marshes and the
river and to the far horizon, and the whole sensual world is bleak and empty and
mysterious, and there’s a dark wind blowing from that far horizon, and then you cut to
the child—that montage creates something utterly different, a world in which the issue
is not just, “Gosh, I don’t have parents. I’m a kid struggling,” but “I am a human soul
trying to work out the destiny of my existence.”
43 Let’s go further:
“Hold your noise,” cried a terrible voice as a man started up among the graves at
the site of the church porch. “Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat!”
44 How does Pip respond to this? He says, “Oh, don’t cut my throat, sir!” I pleaded in
terror…” Now, I don’t mean to presume to edit Charles Dickens, but Dickens sometimes
wrote in haste. Does he really need to say “in terror”? Do you understand what I’m
talking about in terms of abstractions? Certainly the world of emotional abundance
he’s creating can tolerate these extra taps on the knee, but it is not necessary. Pip’s
terror is manifest already, is it not?

18
45 But the important thing to understand here is that the man says, “I’ll cut your throat,”
and Pip says, “Don’t cut my throat.” How long do you think it took him to come to that
response? A nano-second. And how is it written? Pay attention, because there’s
something really interesting about these three sentences:
“Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat!”
and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied around his head. A man who had
been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by
flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and
glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the
chin.
“Oh, don’t cut my throat…”
46 Time stops here, doesn’t it? This is extreme slow motion, because all of that comes
between “I’m going to cut your throat” and “Oh, don’t…” What is the psychological
reality of that? When was the last time you skidded your car on a wet pavement? What
happens? You hear every beat of your heart; that telephone pole is floating in your
direction, in extreme slow motion, right? It is absolutely organically appropriate for
time to slow down drastically in a moment of terror like that. And remember I’m
talking about the organic nature of art; every tiny sensual detail has to resonate into
everything else. What’s unusual about those three sentences in that paragraph where
time has stopped? I bet most of you didn’t even notice that not one of those is a
complete sentence. Listen to it again:
and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied around his head. [“Tied around his
head” is a subordinate clause here.] A man who had been soaked in water,
smothered in mud, lain by stones and cut by flints and stung by nettles and torn by
briars, who limped and shivered and glared and growled, and whose teeth chattered
in his head as he seized me by the chin.
47 There’s not a single independent verb in those three sentences. Why? Time has
stopped. What are the parts of speech that signify the passage of time? Active verbs.
Things happen. But here nothing is happening except perception. It is beautifully
appropriate—and you don’t even notice, except afterward, in an analytic way. The
organic nature of art, down to syntax.
48 We’ve dealt so far with very clear examples, I think, of the correspondence of film and
fiction techniques, but there are many, many others. I dare say that if you examine the
tiniest filmic concept, the most subtle nuanced filmic concept, you can find its
equivalence in fiction.
49 I want to leave you with one more example, a subtle one, but I think an unmistakable
one. This concerns the common transitional device called dissolve. The dissolve is a
transition from one image to another where the first fades while the second comes into
focus superimposed over the first. The two things, then, mix inextricably for a time.
50 I want to give you an example of dissolve from my own work—a novel hardly ever read
by anybody, called Wabash. I need to give you some background first. Deborah and
Jeremy Cole live in a fictional steel mill town of Wabash, Illinois. It’s 1932. They’re both
struggling with private demons of one sort or another. He’s getting involved in radical
politics at the steel mill where he works; she’s trying to reconcile a family of women
who rip each other to pieces as a matter of daily course. But Jeremy and Deborah carry
a shared grief that has been a barrier to them in their marriage for some time—the

19
death of their little girl Lizzie, who died from pneumonia a couple of years before. They
have not made love since Lizzie died. They do not touch. There’s no intimacy between
them at all. In this scene they go off for a picnic on an ancient Indian burial mound, a
gesture toward reconciliation, trying to find moments when they can reconnect. But as
the scene progresses, they lapse into separate memories about their daughter,
memories that are lovely but painful.
51 The scene partly represents a technical problem—not, I need hardly stress anymore,
that I was conscious of finding a technical solution to an analytically perceived
problem. This is analysis after the fact. But the problem was that I wrote the book in
the third person limited omniscient, with two point of view characters, Deborah and
Jeremy. In the sections that begin in Jeremy’s sensibility, the narrator has no access to
Deborah. And in the sections that begin with Deborah, the narrator has no access to
Jeremy. This is so for the first eighty some pages of the book. But in this scene of the
picnic, just as they aspire to come together—so does the narrator get into both
sensibilities at the same time. So the narrator moves between these two isolated
reveries, hoping to bring them together somehow.
52 A couple of things you need to know: the memory that Deborah has is of seeing Lizzie
outside the house one day crouching near the grass, swaying in front of a poisonous
copperhead snake, singing a variation of the old nursery rhyme: “Hush little snaky,
don’t you cry;” and the snake is swaying and coiling as well. Lizzie has literally
charmed the snake.
53 Jeremy’s memory involves Lizzie and his work at the steel mill. In this memory he has
Lizzie on his shoulders. It’s night time. He’s stopped near the slag pile and has an
unobstructed view of the blast furnace. He’s watching its beauty: the flames of the
ovens and the billows of smoke, the constellation of lights on the equipment, and a
single prominent smokestack that is flaring off a flame from the excess gasses.
54 Here is the passage using the technique of the dissolve:
Deborah waited motionless as Lizzie sang to the snake and finally Deborah
whispered come away now, and her daughter rose slowly and left the copperhead
where it lay charmed on the grass and when Lizzie was near Deborah grasped her
hand and Jeremy reached up to grasp his daughter’s hand and she said, “What’s
that jelly fire?” and he looked and he knew at once what she meant, the flame
coming from the tall thin stack. “It’s a bleeder valve,” he said, and he felt her chin
touch the top of his head. He could imagine her resting her head on his so that she
could study this flame, and when Lizzie looked up at her mother she smiled a smile
that seemed full of some special knowledge, and Lizzie’s thoughtful study of the
flame and her smile at the charming of the snake brought both Jeremy and Deborah
the same tremor of grief. They each felt it in the other’s body and to feel the other’s
grief was too much to add to their own and they pulled gently apart. Jeremy rose
and walked to the western edge of the mound and he looked off at the mill, and
Deborah lay flat and closed her eyes against the sky and she thought she heard a
gliding nearby in the grass but she did not care and did not move.
55 Did you hear the dissolve? It’s set up with Lizzie’s question, “What’s that jelly fire?” and
Jeremy knows at once what she means. Focus on “He could imagine her resting her
head on his head so that she could study this beautiful flame, and when Lizzie looked
up at her mother…” Now we are in his reverie and for a moment there the two images
are superimposed because the “looking up” we first take to mean Lizzie looking up
from her father’s head toward that bleeder valve; but then we realize it’s with her
mother. “And when Lizzie looked up.” It’s even tapped a little bit, because it is linked to

20
the same gesture that Jeremy made to look in the same direction. So we have a clear
sense of looking up at the flame and then all of a sudden she’s also looking at her
mother. Then we adjust to seeing her looking up only at her mother. And so one
dissolves into the other. After this the narrative voice goes back for a long while into
the two separate sensibilities. So the flowing together in the narrative voice has a kind
of ironic sadness to it, which resonates in the detail, because it gives a sense of what
could happen between these two people but, in fact, it does not.
56 So I urge you as fiction writers to recognize that the nature of the process you’re
working with is filmic. A lot of the problems that I’ve been articulating for you in the
last few weeks can yield to you if you give yourself over to elements that are visual,
sensual, transitional. Otherwise, you can get bogged down in the stodgy, unyielding
doughiness of abstraction. You try to put the transitions in, and explain these things,
and the narrative power is lost.
57 Before I leave you with all this talk of film I want to borrow one more notion from
another art form, music, which you will recognize as relevant to film and is also
important to fiction. When you’re listening to a song, a certain kind of expectation
develops—harmonically, or in its key or in its rhythm or in its color—and when that
expectation is set up, the moment that gives you chill bumps is the moment when it
cuts against the grain. It suddenly spins the harmonic, shifts the key, varies the
rhythm, sets the orchestration askew. Musicians call it the rub. Two things rub against
each other, and that’s what gives it life, the unexpected thing that nevertheless feels
just right. And that is what happens too in the creation of character. When you are
inside your characters’ yearnings, whenever they’re feeling one way, going in one
direction, showing certain attitudes, emotions—open your unconscious to the opposite;
cut against the grain. Rub the thing that seems predictable.
58 [Republished from From Where You Dream, Grove Press, 2005]

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Reveal to Reel: Short Fiction’s

‘Special Relationship’ with Cinema
Ra Page
1 The ‘special relationship’ between cinema and the short story is one that has not gone
overlooked. Fans of the two media have often commented on the disproportionate
number of feature-length films that confess to being ‘based on a short story’,
considering the far greater success and availability of the full-length novel in the
literary world. Indeed many writers who are far better known in print as novelists, still
fare better on celluloid as short story writers (Stephen King, Daphne du Maurier, Clive
Barker, etc.).
2 Much anecdotal evidence has been amassed to demonstrate, or even explain, this
affinity between the two forms. Before moving on to a more structural approach to the
relationship, it is worth noting some of these observations. Certain staples of modern
cinema and television can clearly be traced back to nineteenth-century short-story
writing. Whole cinematic genres can be traced back, in fact: detective and science
fiction either first appeared in the short form, or found their audience through it. But
very specific story elements can also be tracked back to individual stories, sequences of
‘short story DNA’, if you like, that have wormed their way into cinema and television,
as a virus might before inserting its own code into the genome of the new host. The
screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce once offered two such examples in a talk at Version
Festival (Manchester 2009). The pretentious office clerk, Akaky Akakievich, in Nikolai
Gogol’s 1842 story, ‘The Overcoat’ has been reincarnated countless times in small- and
big-screen funnymen, he argued, from Charlie Chaplin’s The Tramp to Ricky Gervais’
David Brent. Guy de Maupassant’s ‘Boule de Suif’ (‘Little Ball of Fat’) is another virulent
piece of short-story DNA, according to Boyce; as a microcosm of society at large (and its
social inequities) it can be seen in the ‘thrown-together survivors’ ensemble formula
that dominates almost all disaster movies – Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure,
Sunshine… you name it. John Ford’s Stagecoach is ‘patient zero’ in this particular
outbreak.
3 Amid all this anecdotal evidence, there is one early contender for an explanation.
Screenwriters often speak of the importance of the ‘elevator pitch’ in the film industry.

22
This is the harsh truth that when it comes to speaking to the kind of person who might
be able to green-light a movie (i.e. an executive producer with a major studio), the
screenwriter or director will probably only have the shortest space of time in which to
pitch the film – literally the time it takes to ride in a lift with them, from the ground
floor to whichever floor their office is on. Screenwriters have argued that the elevator
pitch is so vital it is one of the reasons why movie plots have, over the years, generally
stayed compact, so as to be deliverable in a short, neat, oral way; in other words it is
why they have remained pocket-sized.
4 Rather than build on this albeit persuasive anecdotal argument, I prefer to base my
exploration of the cinema-short story relationship on my own personal experience – as
an editor of short fiction primarily, and more recently as an occasional script
developer, working in short film. Rather than begin with their similarities, I suggest we
start with the difficulties of translating a text for the big screen, the ways in which
cinematic story and prose fiction in general are incompatible. As my primary source, I
shall refer to a film adaptation I commissioned and developed, whose failings perhaps
illuminate the challenges of adaptation. ‘Letters Home’ (directed by Ronald J. Wright)
was an 18min short film produced in 2009/10, based on a short story by the thriller
writer Martyn Bedford. The story was originally commissioned by Comma as part of its
‘Reading the City’ series designed to explore the interaction between urban fiction and
the real-world landscapes (and historical contexts) it uses as its backdrop. ‘Letters
Home’ tells the story of an asylum seeker awaiting a decision on his asylum application,
living in Leeds in 2002 against the backdrop of an infamous court case in the city – the
Lee Bowyer/Jonathan Woodgate trial. This was a case in which four men, two of them
Leeds United football players, were charged with affray and grievous bodily harm after
being involved in a racist attack on a Pakistani student (Sarfraz Najeib) outside a
nightclub – a fight which left the student unconscious with a broken leg, nose and
cheekbone. Martyn Bedford’s story takes place in the weeks and months after this case,
and in it his protagonist experiences repeated racial taunts from local youths –
including having the name of one of the accused footballers, Lee Bowyer, chanted at
him. The presumption of this character’s ethnicity by the taunting locals is key to the
story. They think he is Pakistani – like the attacked student – but the only thing we do
know about the ethnicity of the character, from the text, is that he not a Pakistani, nor
is he a Turk. Clues are sewn, apparently offering ways to deduce his ethnicity, to unlock
his racial anonymity – but they prove to be red herrings, dead-ends. In a way, the
whole point of the story is that you cannot sleuth out his racial identity.
5 In approaching this case study I would like to begin by proposing a simple maxim:
M1: The withholding of vital information is the motor that drives all story.
6 It cannot be just any information of course, but vital, explanatory ‘story information’.
What is more, the knowledge that this vital information exists – information that will
give sense and shape to the events unfolding – but is being deliberately withheld from
us is what makes us read on… not simply turn the page, but move from one sentence to
the next, one word to the next. Some of these unknowns will become known of course,
and our own attempt to ‘sleuth them out’, until they are revealed to us, is part of our
engagement with the story. There is comfort in the knowledge that certain unknowns
will always have to be revealed. Other pieces of information are not necessarily shown
to us, and this is one of the ingredients that make the short story truly unique. When
something is left permanently ‘unrevealed’ it invites us to question not just the

23
contents of the story (that have left us foxed), but the assumptions we, as readers, took
into the story with us, and that failed us in our attempts to crack it. In Martyn
Bedford’s story, we reach for possible solutions to the racial identity question, until
eventually we are thwarted. The result is we see the world, finally, through the eyes of
the protagonist for whom racial identity is not relevant (or something he does not want
to be relevant).
7 With fiction, the writer holds all the cards, not least when it is delivered in, or close to,
a first-person narrative. Here the author is in supreme control of what information is
drip-fed to the reader, and more importantly what is not. Film, by contrast, is a more
democratic process; the cards are not held close to the chest of the director, but laid
out on the table, face up. The example of ‘Letters Home’ demonstrates that certain
types of information can never be withheld in film, certain things can never be kept
from being explicit in the first split-second of an establishing shot (e.g. a character’s
racial identity). In re-writing the story for the screen, the very first thing we needed to
do, then, was make a decision about exactly where he came from. This was not just so
that we could know what he needed to look like, for the purposes of casting, but also
because we wanted to use parts of the letters he was writing in a voice-over. In order to
do this, we needed to decide on the actual language they were being written in (in the
story text they are conveniently, and unrealistically, provided in English), so that the
voice-over could be presented in an authentic language, with the English translation
provided in the subtitles. In other words, we needed to remove all anonymity and pick
a nationality. We went from a story where racial identity was deliberately not the issue,
to it being decided, seen and heard explicitly in almost the first scene.
8 With this experience in mind, I would like to posit a first ‘rule of thumb’ in adaptation:
RT1: Within any particular moment, all information in any way connected to the
physical reality of that moment has to be shown, that is to say spoken, acted out,
seen, or in some way very clearly externalised.
9 The degree of this externalization is sometimes quite shocking for writers making their
first transition from prose fiction to screenwriting. For me personally, the transition
felt like moving from a tense, professional poker game to a drunken game of Snap.
Speed and vociferousness were what you needed in front of the camera, not subtle
interpretative skills.
10 Why does everything have to be so explicitly externalised in front of the camera, you
might ask. Simply because if we do not strictly marshal every piece of potential
signposting in each shot, that shot will go ahead and find its own signposts (no matter
in what direction these signposts are pointing). Information will always rush into the
visual image, engulf the camera lens, whether we like it or not. The scriptwriter’s job is
to vet this visual data and make sure only the right information rushes into view.
11 This brings us to the second rule of thumb in adaptation:
RT2: Every piece of story information will eventually have to be contained in a shot.
12 This carries its own set of challenges. Passage of time, for example, is very tricky to
‘contain’ in a shot, and scriptwriters have to deploy a number of cheats to get round it.
Straightforward jumps to later points in time are easy to deal with. Where the text says,
‘later that night’, for example, the film editor simply drops in a brief exterior shot of
the setting or building at nighttime (i.e. in the dark) – having deployed an earlier,
establishing shot of the exterior in daylight so we know what it looks like! When plot
information is tied more intrinsically to a passage of time, it becomes more difficult. A

24
sentence like ‘After two years of living with him, she had grown to hate him’ could
never be directly translated into film, for example. Slow, gradual, imperceptible change
cannot be caught on camera; instead it has to be gathered up and dramatized into a
single, instantaneous step-change with presumably long periods of unseen stasis either
side. In short, with a sentence like this you would have to cut to a single, simplified
moment in the intervening time and show in it an event, a trigger, a tipping point when
suddenly absolute love turned to absolute hatred.
13 This is the case with every shot in fact. Gradual changes are replaced with sudden, step-
changes. Indeed every shot has to be committed to demonstrating nothing but step-
changes. Even the most unimportant shots – ‘cutaways’ or ‘inserts’, as they are called,
those brief glimpses of details that add to the context of the main shot (the sight of a
glass on a table, for example) – even these have to show the moment when something
changes. You cannot show the glass just sitting on the table, you have to show the glass
being placed there or, better still, being picked up.
14 The step-change, I would argue, is the microscopic building block of filmmaking, the
fundamental unit of all cinema. And like all fundamental building blocks, it projects
self-similarity throughout the structure – that is to say a repetition of its shape or
pattern appears at every scale. Thus, we find the step-change (or a slightly slower
version of it) in the macroscopic story shape. This brings us to perhaps the first point of
affinity between filmmaking and the short story. The short story, unlike the novel, is
entirely about change; moreover, as it has to occur in a very short space of time, a step-
change. To put it another way, short stories are entirely about endings (whilst novels
are very often concerned with the process of returning to the home after a long
journey, to a preserved, abiding, unchanging home). Another distinction between the
short story and the novel is the latter focuses on the contents of a character, the weight
and ballast of a life being lived, and the atmosphere of a time or place being lived in – in
other words, the interior of a life. Conversely the short story steps back and looks at
the exterior shape of that life, its wider topology. Although apparently focusing on a
small detail, it finds in that detail a much wider, instantaneous truth – or rather a
pattern that projects outwards from a single moment, to show us a wider, all-
encompassing shape. In this sense the short story shows us a moment of fracture, a
turn, an ending.
15 All endings are also beginnings, of course, so it could also be said that a short story
presents a moment of opportunity, a brief window, a once-in-a-lifetime chance to start
again – whether that opportunity is taken (in which case it marks the end of a bad
time) or not (in which case it marks the last chance to escape a fate, the final nail in the
coffin).
16 When exploring cinematic parallels to this short story structure we must bear in mind
that short films and feature films work quite differently. The short film has a similar
structure to the short story in that it marks an opportunity, the main difference being
that it is more often front-loaded. The imperative of the short filmmaker is that the
plot ‘hits the ground running’, in medias res; typically the window of opportunity to
change starts in the opening shot – sometimes very literally with a knock at the door, a
visitation from, or an encounter with a ‘mysterious stranger’; the arrival of this
stranger poses a challenge to the protagonist that forces him to reconsider his life; the
stranger holds up a mirror to that life, and for once its failings cannot be ignored. (Very
often the ‘stranger’ is not a complete stranger, they represent a different route, an

25
alternative set of values, but they usually turn out to be connected to the protagonist’s
past, in some way an equal, a twin – a character that started from the same place).
17 A feature film, by contrast, has more time to assert its characters as fixed entities in its
opening scenes; the knock at the door does not come immediately, and it does not
usually come in the literal form of another person, showing a need to change. Instead it
emerges as a more general threat, illustrating a need to adapt, rather than to re-boot
completely. In both cases survival (of the protagonist’s deep-seated sense of identity) is
the wider goal, and change is the means to that goal. In both cases the solution to that
change lies in a ‘withheld’ back-story. In a front-loaded short film, the back-story
comes shortly after the opening scene – in which we learn the relevance of the
stranger’s advice very shortly after learning about the current situation they are
advising on. In a feature film, the backstory is often withheld or delayed much more,
sometimes right up to the point just before the traditional ‘resolution’ (i.e. the climax
of the classic Three-Act Structure). This backstory often reveals the true nature of a
cast member (not the protagonist), and provides a means to the final resolution. This
might occur some time after the ‘escalation moment’ of classic Second Act.
18 Clearly there are two sets of structures in place here and we should take a moment to
distinguish them. In the bluntest terms of the protagonist’s well-being, the Classic
Three-Act Structure certainly applies: these three acts being states of (i) tension, (ii)
escalation, and (iii) resolution. But in terms of the protagonist’s means of reaching a
resolution there is a very different three-act structure at play in film narrative. This
second structure applies to information access and meaning, rather than action and
well-being. It goes without saying the protagonist’s point-of-view (or access to
information) is not always the same as the viewer’s. But for the purposes of the story,
these two only need to be in alignment once for the story to work: that moment is a
crucial point of congruence – where the viewer might be seeing something for the first
time (viewer revelation), and the protagonist might be either seeing, fully appreciating
and/or acting on the same truth for the first time (protagonist revelation). In many
ways this ‘congruent revelation’ is more dramatically important than the ‘resolution’ of
the Classic Three-Act Structure.
19 I will call this second structure the ‘Information Structure’; its three acts being very
simply: (i) the brink, (ii) the backstory, (iii) the stepping off. The first act here shows us
to be on the verge or onset of an act from which the character cannot return, an act
that cannot be undone. The second act reveals to the viewer (and the protagonist) the
true context and meaning of this act, why it represents a point of no return, and why so
much is at stake with regard to the change on offer. The third, interestingly, is an act
whose full consequences are never seen (but understood fully from the second act). The
protagonist takes the leap, steps off the ‘sheer verge’, and that is it.
20 Needless to say, this structure suggests a very different kind of story to the one going
on in the Classic Three-Act Structure, even though the two architectures often occupy
the same space – like one set of translucent plans laid on top of the other. For one, the
Classic Three-Act Structure places far more emphasis on the last act, the drama of the
resolution. In the Information Structure, the final act is almost superfluous; it is much
shorter, a final scene more than a final act, and one that offers little more than an
ellipsis in which we are left reflecting on what has gone before as much as what lies
ahead (for the protagonist). Far more important is the second act, the discovery and
interpretation of the backstory. There is also a philosophical difference between the

26
two structures. In the Classic Three-Act Structure, the protagonist is a self-determining

agent, someone who struggles to find a means to resolve his or her personal crisis. In
the Information Structure, the final act is more of an inevitability, a destiny; the
challenge is not to find out what the resolving act must be – because even in Act 1, we
are already there, on the verge of that act – but to interpret and understand that act,
that destiny, before it is accepted or realised.
21 This brings us to the second major affinity between cinema and the short story, indeed
a second shared ‘fundamental building block’ alongside the step-change. Namely, the
backstory. And once again, as an elementary unit, it provides self-similarity through
the wider narrative, a repeated shape occurring at different scales (the microscopic and
the macroscopic).
22 Let us start with the microscopic. One of the most common terms cinematographers
use when dividing up a scene into shots is ‘the reveal’. While literary theorists may only
use this term when talking about overall plot arcs – revelations and epiphanies – the
cinematographer uses it in almost every scene. To understand why, you only have to
combine the first adaptation rule of thumb, RT1, with the maxim M1. If all physical
information needs to be shown (RT1), but at the same time some vital information has
to be withheld (M1), then the cinematographer has no choice but to set up a kind of on-
going dance, one that alternates between satisfying one demand while temporarily
delaying the satisfaction of the other. Thus we have a cinematographic rhythm
established between the delivery of physically disembodied information, and the
delayed embodiment of that information (following shortly after). Thus, when
watching a film, we hear a character say something before we see them, or we see them
say it before we see who they are saying it to; we hear the sound of a train from the next
scene creeping over into the last few seconds of the scene before. This rhythm is like an
iambic, two-beat tattoo – ta-dum – the first beat, ‘ta’, being the set-up (the disembodied
or uncontextualised information), the second, ‘dum’, being the reveal (of the body, the
context, etc.). To these two beats, a third always needs to be added which is the action
taken by the now-contextualised agent. We hear a gun fire; we see the holder of the
gun, mid-gunfight; we see them take a second shot, this time on target. Ta-dum-ta. In
this way, the three-beat pulse of the ‘reveal’ shot (with the emphasis on the
contextualising middle-beat) maps perfectly onto the wider ‘Information Structure’ of
the whole film: thus we get self-similarity.
23 So what about the short story? At this point I need to make one serious qualification.
When talking about film’s ‘special relationship’ with the short story, most of the time
we are only really talking about one specific type of short story. In my introduction to
the anthology Parenthesis, I proposed that all short stories could be fitted into one of
three different types: the Epical, the Lyrical and the Artificial story - borrowing the
first two terms from the critic Eileen Baldeshwiler.
24 To re-cap: the Epical story is the most common, realist short-story form and is defined
by the way it withholds, not just a vital detail, but a new, conflicting and further-
reaching narrative until almost the very last moment. In the Epical story, this withheld
second (and wider) story is both unexpected and in hindsight probably inevitable, being
the only thing that could explain previous, almost unnoticeable deviations from the
predictable ‘apparent plot’. In order for it to be a true revelation, this second story,
when it comes, has to re-illuminate all that preceded it. This Epical structure applies to
both external revelations of the traditional, nineteenth-century kind (i.e. revelations

27
regarding plot events, and/or another character’s true nature/identity), as well as

internal revelations of the modernist Chekhovian or Joycean kind (revealing the
protagonist’s true nature). Whether it is Sherlock Holmes fingering a perpetrator and
briefly revealing the ‘second’ story (i.e. what actually happened) in retrospect in the
penultimate scene, or a Joycean character having a seemingly inexplicable and highly
unexpected last-minute change of heart, in both cases the reader is learning something
new and further-reaching at the very last moment.
25 If the Epical story has, according to Baldeshwiler, ‘a decisive ending that sometimes
affords universal insight,’ the Lyrical story, by contrast, ‘relies for the most part on the
open ending.’ Instead of focusing on plot, the Lyrical story is distinguished by its
emphasis on a central recurring image or symbol, around which the narrative revolves,
and from which it acquires an open and flexible meaning. An obvious example of this
open or flexible meaning can be found in Mansfield’s short masterpiece, ‘The Fly’. Here,
the image of the fly being tortured by the old man (‘the boss’) can be interpreted in
various contradictory ways (symbolising the boss’s previous relationship with his son;
allowing him a form of revenge on the world; demonstrating the boss’s lack of grief;
betraying the boss’s repression of grief). By being ‘open’, the symbol does not insist on
one reading, or meaning, but allows for many. It remains unexplained and unresolved,
and continues to burn in the mind of the reader, the way a bright light burns on the
retina after its removal. Once established – usually early on in the story – the image
may be returned to and re-interpreted several times in the story but it remains,
externally at least, static.
26 Finally, we have the Artificial story. This is not so named because it is in some way
inauthentic or inferior, but because it deploys a nugget of ‘artifice’ at its start – that is
to say, something that should not be there, something that is very definitely out of
place.1 The exemplar text here is, of course, Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’. By inserting
something so ‘out of place’, the author actually sets in motion two separate stories that
will ultimately run parallel, or rather equidistant, both of them illuminating the other.
The absurd storyline of the bug takes on moments of great mundanity, while the realist
surrounding storyline is cast in an absurdist light, though in many ways the two stories
never quite make contact with each other.
27 Thus, put very simply, there are three different short story structures:
28 So why the crash-course in short story structure? Precisely so as to limit my claims

about the special relationship between film and short fiction. The ‘ Information
Structure’ of film only has parallels with the first, revelatory short story structure
above, the Epical story. The delayed backstory and almost-redundant ellipsis-like final
act is entirely in tune with the epical structure.
29 The unresolved image of the Lyrical story, however, has a much more problematic
relationship with cinema. To go back to my original source material, Martyn Bedford’s

28
text ‘ Letters Home’ is a third-person narrative which describes the protagonist

composing letters to his wife and son back home, occasionally going into the voice of
these letters. The protagonist never writes these letters down, though, and certainly
never sends them – if he were to post them, we are told, it might put his wife and son
in danger. Here, we have a classical Lyrical ingredient, the image of an unwritten, un-
posted letter. This may not be an entirely physical or tangible image, but it is
memorable nonetheless and has one intrinsically Lyrical quality to it. It does what all
Lyrical images do, namely act as a stand-in where the protagonist is perhaps
inexplicably unable to express him- or herself. In Mansfield’s ‘The Fly’, the old boss has
‘arranged’ a time in which he can have a cry about his dead son, but then finds he
cannot. The torture of the fly fills that gap. In other classic Lyrical stories the central
image again stands where an expression was wanted but never came, or alternatively it
represents the inability to express oneself; the pear tree in Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’, the
arranged furniture on the lawn in Carver’s ‘Why Don’t You Dance?’, the helmet of ice in
David Constantine’s ‘The Loss’. These all represent a desire to say something that the
protagonist cannot say, to let tears flow, or joy abound. The un-posted, unwritten letter
of Bedford’s story is no different.
30 Thus, when adapting this story for the screen, we had to re-wire the original premise
and have the protagonist physically write his letters down (so that we could see them –
RT2). Then we had to physically show what he did with them. These two
‘externalisations’ became plot points of their own, external acts, and as such moved
from being Lyrical elements to Epical ones. In short, they became things that needed to
be resolved. The task of showing the protagonist’s uncertain intentions with his un-
posted letters was achieved with four separate shots: hesitatingly taking a letter to a
postbox and tapping the letter on the lip of the postbox; tapping it almost identically
on the lip of a nearby dustbin; stashing it on a mantle piece on top of a pile of similar,
un-posted letters; and finally, in a different scene, we see him tearing the letter up and
dropping it into a river. These epical-like acts set up a letter-story (a plot-line entirely
associated with the letters) which demands its own turn (or twist), to coincide
approximately with the more important ‘turn’ in the character’s internal plot-line
(regarding his attitude toward the country he finds himself in). In the closing scene, we
see him finally post a letter (and we hear, in the voice-over, the positive, upbeat lie that
the letter tells his family about how friendly and welcoming they will find England – in
contrast to the pessimistic truths he wrote in the letters that he did not send).
31 It is not that films need resolution, as such, but that the lyrical image is so externally
static it needs to be chivvied into motion if it is to appear in a film. In other words it
needs to be deployed in an action (an elementary step-change), and this microscopic
step-change will need to eventually be involved in a macroscopic one, an action in the
opposite direction.
32 The reality is short stories rarely fit purely and perfectly into just one category, and
more often contain elements of both the epical and lyrical at the same time. Thus the
adaptation process often involves dramatising stray lyrical components and turning
them into epical story-points. At a recent book launch, the Polish writer Pawel Huelle,
who writes a lot for stage and screen, was asked about the adaptation process.
‘Adaptation,’ he replied, ‘is like the joke about the man in the hospital bed. A doctor
comes up to him and says, “It’s up to you. I can amputate your foot or your hand. Your
choice!”’ This is certainly the case when adapting novels for the screen, but it seems it

29
is also true, to a lesser extent, when adapting short stories – certainly those with a mix
of epical and lyrical components. The screenwriter has to make a choice: to betray
something or lose it altogether; the hand or the foot.
33 As for the third type of short story – the artificial story – I have yet to see anything like
it in film.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baldeshwiler, Eileen. “The Lyric Short Story: The Sketch of a History”. The New Short Story
Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Ohio: Ohio University Press. 1994.
Bedford, Martyn. “Letters Home”. The Book of Leeds. Eds. Maria Crossan, Tom Plamer. Manchester:
Comma Press. 2006.
Carver, Raymond. “Why Don’t You Dance?” What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. New
York: Knopf. 1981.
Constantine, David. “The Loss”. Under the Dam. Manchester: Comma Press. 2005.
Mansfield, Katherine. “The Fly”. The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield. London: Penguin
Classics. 1922.
May, Charles E. The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice (Genres in Context). Oxford: Routledge. 2002.
Page, Ra. Ed. Parenthesis: The Next Generation in Text. Manchester: Comma Press. 2006.
NOTES
1. It’s worth noting the word ‘artifice’ has been used by other short story critics, particularly,
Charles E May, to denote something quite different from what I intend. For May, artifice is a
quality of the folk story or fairy tale, the mythic, ancestral or allegorical, now resurfacing in
contemporary narrative. For my purposes, ‘artifice’ denotes a deliberate injection of a single
non-realist element into an otherwise realist story. The key word here is ‘deliberate’.
ABSTRACTS
Cet article se penche sur les similitudes de structure entre les nouvelles et les films dans le but
d'expliquer la popularité de ce genre littéraire en tant que source pour la narration
cinématographique. Il postule l’existence de deux fondamentaux en matière «d'informations
explicitées par le récit » : le changement radical et le contexte. Les deux formes de narration
partageant ces fondamentaux, l'article explore la façon dont l'union de ces fondamentaux

30
réconcilie une tension profondément enracinée dans la narration cinématographique : le besoin

de dissimuler des informations (pour provoquer du suspens), opposé à la tendance inévitable du
cinéma, par son caractère visuel, à dévoiler trop d’informations. Cette tension se résout à
différents niveaux de la narration cinématographique, en lui donnant un rythme : au niveau
microscopique, celui-ci se manifeste dans le « plan révélateur » du réalisateur qui consiste à
montrer une action en gros plan, suivi d’un plan plus large pour contextualiser. En maintenant ce
rythme sur l'ensemble du film, à l’échelle macroscopique, le récit filmique suit inévitablement ce
que j’appelle « la structure informative », structure extrêmement proche dans sa nature de celle
de la nouvelle « épique ». Ainsi, adapter une nouvelle revient souvent à transformer des éléments
non-épiques en éléments épiques.
(Résumé traduit par Lucie Collas et Emilie Piarou)
AUTHOR
RA PAGE
Ra Page is the founder and Managing Editor of Comma Press, one of the UK’s most prolific
publishers of short fiction. He is the editor of numerous anthologies (including The New Uncanny –
which won the Shirley Jackson Award, 2008, Litmus: Short Stories from Modern Science, voted one of
2011's books of the year by The Observer, and Bio-Punk: Stories from the Far Side of Research). He is
also the coordinator of a regional development agency for independent publishers, Literature
Northwest, and works as a commissioner across a number of short film projects, including
Comma Film and Version Film Festival. He has previously worked as a journalist.

31
Faulkner’s Modernist Short Story in

the Age of the Silent Movie
Jacques Pothier
1 Adapting short stories to the screen involves complex operations that go far beyond
translation from one medium to another. Thinking in terms of adaptation seems to
imply that the short story and the screen could be two media trying to make the best of
“real” plot and character material that would precede these cultural creations, waiting
for the medium or media that would reveal it to the reader/audience. Obviously this is
not the case: the short story or the film are not the containers of a neutral plot in
search of a writer/producer, but each creation is inseparable from the features of the
medium in which it is created. It is therefore better to think of adaptation as
recreation.
2 Now, while it is more common to think of the initial creation as a short story, and of
the later recreation of the material as a film-script, obviously many short stories were
composed after films had become a common experience of the general public, so it is
legitimate to wonder to what extent short stories of the modernist period onward may
have been influenced, if not altered by the techniques of narration and composition
developed by the movies.
3 The remarks I propose to develop here are based on the example of William Faulkner,
one of the modernist writers who were at the same time major figures in the history of
literature and had a long and repeated experience in the movie industry throughout his
career. Faulkner was the author of more than a hundred short stories and spent an
accumulation of approximately ten years in Hollywood working for the movie industry
as a screenwriter, scene-doctor and plain buddy of a few directors—Howard Hawks in
particular1.
4 While it may be argued with considerable strength that Faulkner picked many plot
ideas or characters from the cinematographic plots he was exposed to, as from all the
fiction he read voraciously, his personal experience with the profession suggested or
provided remarkably few unquestionably traceable plot ideas. Only one short story out
of well over a hundred was set in the world of Hollywood—that is “Golden Land”

32
(1935). But there is evidence that Faulkner was deeply aware of the profound influence
the cinema had in the everyday life of his fellow citizens, and it is the place of the
cinema in his work before he ever took the train to Hollywood that I would like to draw
attention to. In this essay I would like to draw attention to three features about
Faulkner’s short stories: the cinematic montage; the presence of silent movies in the
plots; and the expressionist use of establishing shots as adapted in Faulkner’s early
fiction.
I. Montage in Short Stories

5 As Robert Butler has claimed here and before, there is a certain kinship between some
techniques of literary writing and film. But some special features of the short story
genre make it even closer to the cinema than other types of fiction writing.
6 Montage is one of them. Film makers discovered early on that it was not systematically
necessary, actually not necessary at all, to explain the transition between sequences by
squeezing in an intertitle or title card. The viewer could be trusted to make sense of the
shift from one scene, even from one time period to another without the literary crutch
of a clumsy “Meanwhile, back at the ranch…” Not that scenes did not need to be
divided: but the juxtaposition of shots with nothing but blunt cuts between them could
create dynamic effects and contribute to meaning in interesting ways, and you could
play with the psychological effect of consecution. As early as Edwin S. Porter’s Great
Train Robbery (1903), this being the generally accepted first occurrence, it was
discovered that by splicing together two shots you created in the viewer’s
consciousness a subjective contextual relationship—something that was further
explored by the famous Kuleshov experiment.
7 Now some writers of short stories had reached this awareness before. In the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, while the common career of short stories was to be published
in magazines and then to be collected, short story writers and their editors became
aware that the order in which short stories was presented in a collection mattered,
even though there might be absolutely no connections between the plots, atmospheres
or subject matter. It had an aesthetic value, it could strongly contribute to the effect on
the reader, and moreover it could add to meaning by shifting emphasis with minimal
imprint but strong effect.
8 In 1856, when Herman Melville, one of Faulkner’s favorite writers, put together some of
the short stories he had published in 1853 or 1854 in Putnam’s Magazine as “Benito
Cereno and other stories,” which included the now famous “Bartleby, the Scrivener”,
his first idea was to provide a preface, as was customary at the time, but he eventually
preferred not to. On January 19, 1856, he wrote to Dix & Edwards, his publishers:
During my talk with Mr Dix I volunteered something about supplying some sort of
prefatory matter, with a new title to the Collection; but upon less immature
consideration, judged that both those steps are not only unnecessary, but might
prove unsuitable.2
9 Four weeks later (February 16), he had changed his mind:
The new title selected for the proposed volume is “The Piazza Tales” and the
accompanying piece (“The Piazza”) as giving that name to the book, is intended to
come first in order. I think, with you, that “Bartleby” had best come next.

33
10 Appended next to the prefatory “Piazza,” “Bartleby” was not just the story of its title
character—a clerk stifled by the weight of the big city jungle—but suggested
identification between the retired sea-captain enjoying the picturesque view of the
world from the piazza of his country-house, and the “elderly lawyer” who tried to make
sense of Bartleby. Included in the collection, the story shifted emphasis from Bartleby
to the narrator and his estrangement from his familiar world. This process of
reverberation placed emphasis on the flawed gaze of the more fortunate, even when
they thought of themselves as benevolent and enlightened social agents, and how their
point of view distorted while it attempted to clarify the story’s meaning, as in the
segmented title of the story—“Bartleby, the Scrivener, A Story of Wall Street”—that
turns out to be like three tentative titles to the story, as if the narrator could not
choose between three ways of focusing on the tragedy of Bartleby as that of an
individual, of an occupation, or of a socio-economic milieu.
11 When arranging short stories, authors and their editors are now routinely aware that
the juxtaposition of short stories within one volume creates important interactions
between the stories, as long of course as the reader accepts to read them in the pre-
ordained order3. Melville’s sensibility was pre-modern, but it may have taken the silent
movie to massively introduce this pattern of radical discontinuity in literary fiction. So
Faulkner need not have watched films to adopt the techniques of montage. This
technique was to find its climax for Faulkner in the composition of the novel The Wild
Palms, which is made up of ten chapters alternating between two plots that do not
interfere with each other, except through the thematic echoes that their juxtaposition
may create.
II. Silent Movies in Faulkner

12 My second point is about the sheer presence of the screen in the plot motifs of Faulkner
stories. The 1931 short story “Dry September” is one of Faulkner’s most commonly
anthologized ones: the story begins in the context of a stifling sixty-two days of dry
heat that, the reader may easily understand, have made the townspeople somewhat
tired and irritated. A group of men in the barbershop are discussing an indefinable
“something” that happened to one Minnie Cooper, a middle-aged woman, in relation
with a black man. The short story is divided, like “A Rose for Emily”, into five sections,
alternating narratives of contemporary events and glimpses of the female character’s
past, throwing a light on the present time of the narrative. Although attention is most
often drawn to the violence of the lynching party, the parallelism with “A Rose for
Emily” encourages the reader to pay as much attention to the story of the woman
whose probably imaginary rape but real loneliness sets off the violent outcome. The
first explicit reference to the movies comes in the early description of one of the white
men discussing the rumor at the barber-shop: “In his frothy beard he looked like a
desert rat in the moving pictures” (170). In section 4, Minnie, certainly nervous either
because she realizes that her offhand allegations of harassment by the black man led to
his murder or because she is too distracted to weigh it, has to come out in the streets of
the town where everybody is going to watch her. She cannot repress her nervous
laughter until she reaches a place that is public but that provides a background against
which reality can be simplified—Faulkner’s metaphor is that in this theater the world
becomes thankfully two-dimensional:

34
They reached the picture show. It was like a miniature fairyland with its lighted
lobby and colored lithographs of life caught in its terrible and beautiful mutations.
Her lips began to tingle. In the dark, when the picture began, it would be all right;
she could hold back the laughing so it would not waste away so fast and so soon. So
she hurried on before the turning faces, the undertones of low astonishment, and
they took their accustomed places where she could see the aisle against the silver
glare and the young men and girls coming in two and two against it. (181)
13 The position of the moviegoer, a gaping spectator hidden in the dark, is similar to that
of the observer concealing himself behind an obstacle, an observer recurrent in
Faulkner, and not just in the short stories. The initial scene of the novel Sanctuary, with
the bootlegger Popeye (note the suggestive name) hidden behind a bush and watching
someone drink at the spring, is one of the most famous instances, and this is a novel
whose writing was more or less simultaneous with that of “Dry September”. This
“sanctuary” proves terribly insecure.
14 In “Dry September” obviously what Faulkner shows his protagonist to be sensitive to is
the power of the “silver screen” to create a displacement into another world—all the
more so, no doubt, when the films were silent and in black and white. On the
background of the screen, or more precisely as figures on the ground that constitutes
the screen, the couples become impersonal double figures. This is how the text
continues:
The lights flicked away; the screen glowed silver, and soon life began to unfold,
beautiful and passionate and sad, while still the young men and girls entered,
scented and sibilant in the half dark, their paired backs in silhouette delicate and
sleek, their slim, quick bodies awkward, divinely young, while beyond them the
silver dream accumulated, inevitably on and on. She began to laugh. In trying to
suppress it, it made more noise than ever; heads began to turn. Still laughing, her
friends raised her and led her out, and she stood at the curb, laughing on a high,
sustained note, until the taxi came up and they helped her in. (181)
15 Minnie watches two celluloid-made dreams: the world of life in all its dreamlike
intensity in the movie, and the de-realized dream of the young people’s love stories. It
is interesting to note that in Faulkner’s description the celluloid images “accumulate”,
as if building up to a point of saturation which becomes ultimately as stifling as the
palpable dry air of the Southern heat, so that the nervous laughter starts again and
Minnie has to expose herself again to the gazes she had been trying to escape in the
dark of the theatre.
16 The last section of the story is very short, a kind of epilogue: it is set in the house of
McLendon, the leader of the lynching party, on his return home. Another woman is
here, his wife of course, and she is shown reading a magazine, as if to create a kind of
dissolve between the unaccountable violence of the lynching and the middle-class
comfort of this contemporary Southern home, as cozy as a bird-cage, the author notes:
IT WAS MIDNIGHT when McLendon drove up to his neat new house. It was trim and
fresh as a birdcage and almost as small, with its clean, green-and-white paint. He
locked the car and mounted the porch and entered. His wife rose from a chair
beside the reading lamp. McLendon stopped in the floor and stared at her until she
looked down.
“Look at that clock,” he said, lifting his arm, pointing. She stood before him her face
lowered, a magazine in her hands. Her face was pale, strained, and weary-looking.
“Haven't I told you about sitting up like this, waiting to see when I come in?” (182)
17 The dissolve actually leads on to the contemporary stage of violence in the nation: the
short story, in its original context of publication (interestingly a magazine, the kind of

35
medium McLendon’s wife is reading) is published side by side with an essay on the
brutal methods of police and justice in the 1920s’ South4. Between section 4—Minnie at
the movie-theater—and section 5—Mrs McLendon reading her magazine in her
birdcage of a house—a parallel sense of illusory security is conveyed; but the escape
from the stifling drought of September into the black and white two-dimensional world
of fiction turns into the trap of a violent society. The cinematic dissolve technique
elaborated in silent movies proves quite efficient to create meaning by counterpoint
between juxtaposed textual sequences.
III. Literary incipits as establishing shots

18 My third remark will have to do with another feature of Faulkner’s technique of
composition: the way he would tend to start from what you could describe as an
establishing shot, a visual thematic summary of the tensions the narrative is going to
stage.5 In his stories Faulkner’s sense of the grotesque seems to borrow from the silent
movies’ expressionism. He thinks in terms of striking silent shots, often one figure
watching motionless and unseen, like the audience in a movie theater, while the action
develops laterally across a static camera’s angle of view that reveals a whole
relationship in one scene.
19 Let us turn to a less well-known instance of this pattern, an unfinished manuscript
fragment of what might have been a short story, but did not develop, until decades
later it was eventually turned into Faulkner’s three-volume saga, the Snopes trilogy 6:
It can begin here, with Flem himself sitting in a new Mission oak chair, behind the
new plate glass window of his recently remodeled bank, while his opaque
expressionless gaze contemplates with complete inscrutability the buxom and still
disturbing image of his silk clad wife apparently passing the casual time of day with
Colonel Hoxey in front of the post office.7
20 It is interesting that in this working note, Faulkner’s idea for a story comes in the form
of stage directions toward an establishing shot which would combine all the key
elements for the character and the plot: the Balzacian pattern of the redneck son
turned nouveau-riche who traded his attractive wife for a position in the bank. The next
version of this snapshot was in Father Abraham, Faulkner’s earliest draft of the novel
that was eventually to run into a three-novel trilogy, but for the moment ran to a long
short that Faulkner laid aside for more than ten years before resuming it as a set of
novels. In this version, the scene was extravagantly contextualized, with mock-heroic
comparisons of the character to religious, political or mythic figures preceding the
“establishing shot” of sorts—but overloaded with ideas and abstractions:
He is a living example of the astonishing byblows of man’s utopian dreams actually
functioning; in this case the dream is Democracy. He will become legendary in time,
but he has always been symbolic. Legendary as Roland and as symbolic of a form of
behavior; as symbolic of an age and a region as his predecessor, a portly man with a
white imperial and a shoestring tie and a two gallon hat, was; as symbolic and as
typical of a frame of mind as Buddha is today. With this difference: Buddha
contemplates an abstraction and derives a secret amusement of it; while he behind
the new plate glass window of his recently remodelled bank, dwells with neither
lust nor alarm on the plump yet disturbing image of his silkclad wife passing the
time of day with Colonel Winword in front of the postoffice. 8
21 This heavy-handed commentary to contextualize the central character would seem to
remind one of the style of Balzac, who was a deep influence on early Faulkner. But

36
again, this is from a draft: in actual realization, Faulkner relied more economically on
an expressionist tableau to reveal the tensions between the characters that were at the
heart of the plot. The snapshot of Miss Emily in “A Rose for Emily,” one of Faulkner’s
first mature short stories, is a much more visual establishing shot, deriving its power
from its gothic expressionism as the silent movie inherited it from the whole romantic
tradition of narrative painting:
We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in
the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her
and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front-door.
(CS 123)
22 Faulkner’s modernist techniques thus blend the legacy of his most innovative literary
forerunners with the intensifying factor that inspiration from the budding
cinematographic techniques of the silent movie provided him with.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Butler, Robert Olen. From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction, ed. Janet Burroway. New
York: Grove, 2005.
Faulkner, William. “A Rose for Emily” (1930); “Dry September” (1931); “Golden Land” (1935); in
William Faulkner, Collected Stories. New York: Random, 1950.
----. Father Abraham, ed. James B. Meriwether. New York: Random, 1983.
Liénard-Yeterian, Marie. Faulkner et le cinéma. Michel Houdiard, 2010.
Melville, Herman. The Piazza Tales (1956). Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern UP, 1998.
NOTES
1. The most extensive recent study of these aspects of Faulkner’s career is Marie Liénard-
Yeterian’s recent book, Faulkner et le cinéma.
2. <http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~ehrlich/361/melville_letters.html>
3. Unfortunately in the case of Melville’s stories this opportunity is rarely presented to the
reader. Popular selections of Melville’s stories rarely consider that the order Melville suggested
might be relevant. Only the Northwestern-Newberry authoritative edition restores the
arrangement of the original Piazza Tales collection.
4. “Dry September” first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine 85 (January 1931), 49-56. The next item
in the periodical was an essay by Dudley Cammett Lunt entitled “The American Inquisition,” that
started with this chillingly suggestive paragraph: “A flash of lighting revealed their destination
to the Negro. He glimpsed a mass of swaying trees with their branches lashing and relashing
against the massed clouds. Beneath stood row upon row of white stones, wet and gleaming in the
darkness. It was the cemetery.” The article exposed that torture and intimidation were more and
more often interfering with due process of justice in the nation.

37
5. An establishing shot can sometimes be considered as the equivalent of novelistic

contextualization. I am considering it here in a slightly different manner.
6. The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959).
7. Faulkner collection, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, #9817, Box 1, item 5,
“description of Flem Snopes sitting in the window of his bank.”
8. William Faulkner, Father Abraham, 13.
ABSTRACTS
Trois remarques sur le cousinage entre cinéma et nouvelle moderniste: le parallélisme entre la
construction des recueils de nouvelle depuis Melville et le montage cinématographique, la trace
du cinéma muet dans les nouvelles les plus anciennes de Faulkner, le parallélisme entre sa
méthode de composition et la technique du plan de situation développée par le cinéma.
AUTHORS
JACQUES POTHIER
Jacques Pothier teaches American literature at the Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin en
Yvelines, where he is a member of the Centre d’Histoire Culturelle des Sociétés Contemporaines
and the dean of the Institute for Languages and International Studies. He is the vice-president of
the Institut des Amériques (France) for North America. He has published two books, William
Faulkner: essayer de tout dire (Paris: Belin, 2003) and Les nouvelles de Flannery O'Connor (Nantes,
France: Le Temps, 2004). His fields of research cover the literature of the South, the theme of
space, the epistemology of American Studies, the role of literature in the construction of local or
national identities and as privileged field for cultural transfer. He is involved in the edition of the
works of William Faulkner in la Pléiade, Gallimard.

38
A Long Way for a Short Story: The

Filmic Narrative Mode of The Glass
Menagerie
1 The long genesis of The Glass Menagerie from short story to one-act play to film synopsis
to Broadway play, testifies to Tennessee Williams’ predilection for reorganizing
material: rewriting it obsessively until it finally evolved into what he considered a
finished aesthetic piece. A close examination of the genesis of The Glass Menagerie brings
to the fore its distinct affiliation with the short story and the filmic genre. This paper
will explore the cinematic underpinnings of The Glass Menagerie as it evolved from a
short story, “Portrait of a Girl in Glass,” written before 1943 and published in One Arm
and Other Stories (1948) to a sixty-page-one-act play,1 which Williams reworked as a film
synopsis, The Gentleman Caller (1943)2 to the play we all know today, The Glass Menagerie.
Finally, it will focus on Jacques Nichet’s3 La Ménagerie de verre, an adaptation of
Williams’ play which demonstrates how the work can manoeuvre between theatre and
cinema.
2 The Glass Menagerie evolved in different stages, starting with the manuscript that
Williams called the “reading version” which he sent to his agent in the fall of 1943. It
was published by Random House in 1945, and reprinted by New Directions in 1949 and
has become known as the “written version,” as opposed to the “acting version,”
published by the Dramatists Play Service in 1948. A conscientious critic should be aware
of these different versions for several reasons, notably because the Dramatists Play
Version removed the thirty-four screen devices, which were originally in the written
version. Reference here will be to the New Directions, written version that incorporates
these metadramatic elements. As far as adaptations go, this paper will briefly consider
Rapper’s film, The Glass Menagerie (1950), and most importantly, Jacques Nichet’s French
staged adaptation, la Ménagerie de Verre4 (2011). Nichet integrates the missing screen
devices into his play and, aware of the missing movie script, he creates a cinematic
interface for a filmic narrative mode to take shape within his adaptation. The scope of
this paper expands into a vast number of genres and semiotic languages which rely on

39
different narrative strategies and repertoires. As a result, it is not an exhaustive survey

of the filmic effects in the works mentioned previously.
3 In keeping with the topic of short story and cinema, this paper will begin with a brief
examination of the nascent visual register of The Glass Menagerie’s hypotext: “Portrait of
a Girl in Glass,”5 considering, in particular, the visual and sensorial character of
Tennessee Williams’ narrative style. One of the most striking aspects of his short story
is its capacity to achieve a sense of image flow, generated from a series of concentrated
Expressionistic visual peaks contrasting light and dark imagery. Many passages from
the short story involve the simultaneous interplay of signifiers associated with the
visual mode of theatre and cinema. Laura’s bedroom, for example, overlooks a “dusky
areaway” nicknamed “Death Valley.” It is depicted as a theatre of light and darkness.
The semantic interface between the visual and narrative semiotic systems establishes a
relationship with the mise en scène of the bedroom, infused with chiaroscuro lighting.
This passage can be read as a tiny script where Mrs. Wingfield speaks in direct
discourse. She is talking to the secretary of the business school over the phone and, at
the same time, Tom and Laura are listening in on the conversation. This scene of
disclosure is staged with histrionic emotivity. Refusing to believe that Laura has
skipped school for two months, Mrs. Wingfield bellows out: “Laura has been attending
that school of yours for two months, you certainly ought to recognize her name!” (1).
The equivalent of a pan in on Laura’s face occurs, as the narrator, Tom, describes his
sister lying in bed “tense and frightened” (1), aware of the fact that her mother now
knows that she has been playing hooky from business college. A long description of
Laura’s bedroom follows. The narrative sequence evokes a cinematic change of shot
that directs focalization onto the layout and lighting of Laura’s bedroom:
She kept the shades drawn down [...] her days were spent in perpetual twilight [...]
When you entered the room there was always this soft, transparent radiance in it
which came from the glass absorbing what ever faint light came through the shades
on Death Valley. I have no idea how many articles there were of this delicate glass.
There must have been hundreds of them. (2)
4 The signifiers describing the bedroom use the paradigm sets of the dramatic and
cinematic modes to elicit chiaroscuro effects. The lighting effects contribute to staging
the bedroom as a conflicted mental landscape, symbolic of Laura’s divided inner
consciousness. The external effect of chiaroscuro lighting corroborates the young
woman’s inner battle against darkness (alienation and depression), and her attempt to
seek salvation in the light of her glass menagerie.
5 The line from the next paragraph suggests a change of shot—a dissolve—as Laura’s
room fades out and the paradigm of music takes over: “She lived in a world of glass and
also a world of music” (2). The intersemiotic texture of the passage is enriched through
the auditory paradigm of music. Laura’s mental universe is evoked in Expressionist
terms, substantiating the return of the repressed, since the music she plays is an
expression of the memory of her lost father: “The music came from a 1920 Victrola and
a bunch of records that dated from the same period, pieces such as ‘Whispering’ or ‘The
Love Nest’ or ‘Dardanella.’ These records were souvenirs of our father, a man whom we
barely remembered, whose name was spoken rarely” (2). This is but one example of
how different semiotic systems do work together semantically to corroborate the sense
of loss and melancholy which is the hallmark of both the short story and the play. The
interrelationship of the semiotic registers of music (the old records which conjure up
the repressed father figure) and darkness construct a network of signifiers organized

40
around the affective element of melancholy, which orchestrates plot and character
development in the short story, the play and the movie. As a result, Williams’ use of
highly visual, sensorial and emotive paradigms takes fiction back to its primary
sources. In his chapter “Cinema of the Mind,” in From Where You Dream, Robert Olen
Butler insists that the fiction writer must be capable of developing a writing technique
which uses vivid sensorial experiences so that the reader can see the story in a filmic
way:
When you read a work of literature, the characters and the setting and the action
are evoked as images, as a kind of dream in your consciousness [...]. The primary
senses—sight and sound—prevail, just as in the cinema, but in addition to seeing
and hearing, you experience taste and smell, you can feel things on your skin as the
narrative moves through your consciousness. This is omnisensual cinema. (64)
6 Both Butler and Williams accentuate the importance of the organic and the sensorial in
art. In his “Production Notes” to The Glass Menagerie, Williams stresses this point:
The straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice-cubes, its
characters who speak exactly as the audience speaks, corresponds to the academic
landscape and has the same virtue of a photographic likeness. Everyone should
know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or
reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest
[...]. (131)
7 From this point of view, Tennessee Williams’ approach to writing converges with
Robert Olen Butler’s organic model of creativity. Both writers consider the primary
senses as the impetus for organizing aesthetic material and use sensory modes of
perception in writing. To suggest the superiority of the visual over the intellectual
paradigm, Butler cites Picasso: “If only we could pull our brains out and use only our
eyes” (“Cinema of the Mind” 63). This epigram points to the fact that narrative
techniques have their source in the primary senses—specifically sight—which prevails
in cinema. Butler thus leads us to the conclusion that cinematic techniques are
embedded within the mode of fiction writing itself: “All of the techniques that
filmmakers employ, and which you understand intuitively as filmgoers, have direct
analogies in fiction” (64). Williams’ fiction is inextricably linked to the filmic narrative
mode, from his career as a short story writer on to playwright and scriptwriter. His
early short stories: “The Resemblance between a Violin Case and a Coffin” and “Portrait
of a Girl in Glass” both develop a narrative technique whose chiaroscuro effects
produce visual-sensorial scenes which function like cinematic shots. The titles of the
two short stories, with their insistence on the pictorial: “Portrait,” and the visual:
“Resemblance,” are harbingers of the filmic narrative mode which would soon become
Tennessee Williams’ hallmark. As “Portrait of a Girl in Glass” began to evolve from a
narrative to a dramatic form, the title changed to The Glass Menagerie, but essentially it
still maintained a very personal focus on memory as an omni-sensorial activity
stimulated from the ebb and flow of visual and tactile stimuli. Unlike traditional plays,
The Glass Menagerie was written and staged as a memory play. 6 The memory play
requires the use of innovative techniques in order to allow the experience of the inner
self to flow into the fictional medium. It functions much like a cinematic shot, or a unit
of uninterrupted flow imagery. There is no doubt that in writing and in staging The
Glass Menagerie, Williams had decided that memory would be the motivating force of
characterization, staging and plot development. In Scene One, stage directions give a
brief description of the Wingfield apartment. The home environment is intended to be

41
an extension of the inner self and music is played in the background to color the
opening scene with a heightened sense of nostalgia7:
The scene is memory. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details;
others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches,
for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. (143)
8 Memory, indeed, orchestrates Jacques Nichet’s Expressionistic interpretation of la
Ménagerie de Verre. Nichet combines sound, color and lighting to stage emotion as a
synaesthetic experience. In the exposition scene, the title of the play is projected onto a
moveable screen in the middle of the stage, followed by Tennessee Williams’ name,
which appears in gigantic letters. Technically speaking, the device allows for a
transition to take place from one medium to another: from the stage to the cinematic
screen and back again. In his “Production Notes” to The Glass Menagerie, Williams
explains that the moveable screen and the filmic devices can be used to enhance the
play’s “emotional appeal” (132). However, he averts the more concrete question of how
these innovative screen devices may eventually affect audience response. In answer to
this last question, Griselda Pollock’s Vision and Difference (224) argues that the devices
lend themselves to Bertolt Brecht’s strategies of distanciation. The screen device, with
the thirty-four images and legends proved to be problematic for directors and
producers alike. They were never used in the acting version of the Broadway play.
Williams insists that he did not regret the omission of the screen device, adding:
I think it may be interesting to some readers to see how this device 8 was conceived.
So I am putting it into the published manuscript. These images and legends,
projected from behind, were cast on a section of wall between the front-room and
dining-room areas, which should be indistinguishable from the rest when not in use
[...]. An imaginative producer or director may invent many other uses for this
device than those indicated in the present script. In fact the possibilities of the
device seem much larger to me than the instance of this play can possibly utilize.
(132)
9 In the Dramatists Play Service version of The Glass Menagerie, which is now commonly
referred to as the “acting version,”9 all of the thirty-four screen devices have been
removed, leaving eighteen music cues in their place. Today, the cinematic interstices
are rarely used. There is the exception of Nichet’s Expressionist adaptation that
incorporates the screen device and allows for a transmutation of the screenplay to take
place, bringing it closer to the cinematic medium. In the opening scene, 10 an image of
huge billowing white masses is projected onto the screen device where Tom’s shadowy
figure emerges onto the stage. The projection of massive clouds transforms into
thunderous waves, which can be heard howling in the background where boats are
quivering on the surface of the water. The flow of imagery evokes the Expressionist
vein in which Williams’ play was initially conceived. And the nautical images on the
screen remind us that Tom has joined the marines. Thus the screen device allows
Nichet to reinstate the analeptic structure of the original version, by having Tom
appear on stage to recount the memory scenes as a long flashback. Dressed in a duffel
coat, Tom describes his new life in the Merchant Marines after having fled Saint-Louis
and his smothering mother. Dramatic emphasis is then shifted to Tom’s struggle to
escape the stifling atmosphere of his home, and the melancholic memories of his past,
which continue to haunt him.
10 By placing the moving curtain in the proscenium, the director adds a metastructural
angle of interpretation to the play. In Act One, for example, the moving curtain cuts the

42
stage into two parts, allowing the director to introduce a dual temporal perspective
where the adult Amanda reviews her past in a hallucinatory sequence of images where
she appears as a young Southern Belle, surrounded by a hoard of suitors. This is the
celebrated Blue Mountain Scene. Amanda’s early courtship days are staged as an
analeptic flow of memories. They are captured and projected onto the screen device
which bears an oversized image of her family mansion, Blue Mountain. The chromatic
blue tones, which saturate the scene, infiltrate it with an ambient melancholic past,
indicative of the Wingfield sensibility. Lined up on the side of the stage, her children
are seated on folding chairs. Both Tom and Laura try to disguise their boredom,
averting their eyes as their mother rambles on about her glorious past. Amanda’s gaze
floods a seemingly empty space, which she fills with memories recaptured from her
idealized Southern Belle past at Blue Mountain Plantation. She recalls, in particular, the
day when seventeen gentlemen called on her. Here, the screen device functions as an
Expressionist frame where memories from the distant past are allowed to continue to
ebb and flow within the central time frame of immediate action. Aside from this
structural advantage, the memory flow images enhance the emotional effect of
melancholic memories. The melancholic “blue note” of the play thus weaves itself into
the inner consciousness of the characters who are either locked in the past, like the
Wingfield women, or paralyzed by the future, as is the case of Tom.
11 The Blue Mountain passage, which focuses on the Old Plantation South, corresponds to
Scene One of the New Directions’ written version of Williams’ play. In an analeptic
passage, Amanda tells Tom and Laura about her glorious days amongst plantation
gentry: “One Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain—your mother received—seventeen!
gentlemen callers! Why, sometimes there weren’t chairs enough to accommodate them
all” (148). Stage directions indicate: [Image on screen: Amanda as a girl on a porch,
greeting callers.] Then Amanda’s memories of the genteel Southern culture of
courtship come reeling back: “They knew how to entertain their gentlemen callers. It
wasn’t enough for a girl to be possessed of a pretty face and a graceful figure—although
I wasn’t slighted in either respect” (148). In the short story, there is no reference to
Blue Mountain. The material for Blue Mountain and the extended references to old
Southern aristocracy were most probably destined for the one-act play/movie script:
The Gentleman Caller.11 This romanticized vision of the plantation South provided
Williams with a means of targeting a Hollywood audience that fed upon the stuff of
romantic encounters and heroic ideals attached to the Civil War. Unlike its hypotext,
which focuses on the inner-consciousness of Laura, the hypertext had to fulfill the
demands of a film synopsis, using frame-by-frame images of an idealized South, rather
than the internalized memory flashes that are part and parcel of “Portrait of a Girl in
Glass.” Williams shifted the temporal focus from the Depression Era in the short story
to the Plantation South in the movie script with the likely intention of providing
Hollywood with a second generation Gone With the Wind. Indeed, both stage devices and
characterization in The Glass Menagerie (the moving screen and Tom’s cinephilia) testify
to Williams’ fascination with the film industry at the time. In Tennessee Williams’
Notebooks, Margaret Thornton mentions a letter Tennessee Williams wrote to his
literary agent, Audrey Wood, in 1943, where he attests to having written a stage version
of The Gentleman Caller, based on the short story “Portrait of a Girl in Glass”, which was
destined to become a film for MGM studios (Thornton 374). Williams evokes the
sixteen-page short-story manuscript as a short excursion into the same material he was
using for the stage version of The Gentleman Caller:

43
I am sending you herein a hastily prepared synopsis or film story treatment of The
Gentleman Caller. I have worked this out in spare time since I’ve been here, but as
you know, the stage version, in a rough draft, is already written before I signed
here. (Thornton 370)
12 If we consider Williams’ correspondence with Wood below, images of the Old South
certainly formed the thematic core of the missing movie script. He mentions the
synopsis, or film story treatment, of The Gentleman Caller and his enthusiasm was so
great that he believed it offered more than the stage version:
I feel this could be made into a very moving and beautiful screen play—much better
than the stage version could be—only it would have to run unusually long, about as
long, I should think as Gone With the Wind. (Thornton 370)
13 Gone With the Wind was originally rough-cut at six hours in length and it was
undoubtedly the model for Williams’ missing film script. He described the opening shot
of his film as including “wide flat fields, the dark cypress brakes, the river and the
levees and bluffs along it. Negro share-croppers’ cabins and immense Greek revival
mansions” (Thornton 370). In fact, Williams imagined the film as having a “lighter and
more cheerful conclusion than the stage version.” One film story treatment ends with
Laura sitting on the front porch with “almost a regiment of young soldiers”
approaching. Williams goes on to add: “Perhaps even—at the very end—the first Tom
Wingfield or the second returns from his travels” (Thornton 370).
14 This happy ending has the effect of curing the melancholic fever of the Wingfield
family by offering them a rosy future, a version far removed from both the short story
and the play. At the same time, it quite obviously appeals to the Hollywood cult of rags-
to-riches stories so essential to perpetuating the American dream. From this
perspective, the happy ending of the movie script veers away from the play’s original
Expressionist medium, focused on accessing the unconscious depths of the self. In 1943,
the happy ending was intended to catch the attention of Hollywood directors at a
moment when Williams was adamant about getting his foot in the door of the movie
industry. Having held down dozens of odd jobs up until then—waiter, teletypist,
cashier, to name a few—Williams was more than eager to sacrifice some of his personal
convictions for Hollywood fame. After all, earning fifty dollars working in Hollywood
paid better than his seventeen-dollar-a-week job as theatre usher. As chance would
have it, the movie script (of which only twenty-one pages remain; the other thirty-nine
are still missing) was turned down by MGM and Williams was able to get a grip back on
his independence.
15 At the core of Nichet’s staging, there lies a fascination with the unanswered question
regarding this missing movie script that formed a cinematic link to the play:
I have not been able to establish the existence of a movie script by Tennessee
Williams: is it filed away in the archives of a library somewhere? Has it
disappeared? Between ‘Portrait of a Girl in Glass’ and The Glass Menagerie, a link is
missing. Paradoxically, this missing cinematic link can be detected very clearly in
the theatrical version. On the other hand, the short story makes absolutely no
allusion to it. The word isn’t even mentioned.12
16 Critics, in general, seem to disregard the existence of the movie script. In “The Glass
Menagerie, from Story to Play,” Lester Beaurline evokes four previous versions of The
Glass Menagerie,13 but insists that there is little material evidence of a complete movie
script, although fragmentary drafts are known to exist. In Jacques Nichet’s adaptation,
the missing Hollywood manuscript remains in the shadows; focalization is on the play

44
and the melancholic past of the Wingfields. In addition, there is no mention of an

Antebellum past— notably because the Wingfields live in Paris! The eradication of the
Southern Confederate past from the French version can be explained by the fact that
Nichet intended to align his adaptation with the paradigm of the memory play by
focusing on archetypal family conflicts. Understandably, references to American
history and social critique travel less easily than more universal psychological themes.
As a consequence, Nichet’s staging embraces minimalism, and stage props indicative of
social background are practically non-existent. The stage is Spartan, with a rare
folding-chair or a pillow for substance. Stage lighting, on the other hand, is of primary
importance. It may signify Laura’s schizophrenic break with the world which is
dramatized through the chiaroscuro effect of lighting. In Scene Two, Amanda
penetrates the shadows, which engulf the stage, to confront Laura with the fact that
she has dropped out of secretarial school. Laura does not go home during the daytime;
instead she wanders around in parks and museums. With the aid of the screen device,
Nichet projects an oversized image of trees in a park onto the stage. Technically, the
screen device in the play functions as an equivalent to a montage effect in cinema. It
allows for the juxtaposition of places and events to occur. The screen forms a structural
bridge between movies and theatre, giving the impression of a cinematic slide show
encased within the architecture of a play. In this way, it allows the director greater
flexibility in bringing the theatrical medium closer to the cinematic, all the while
providing the audience with a heightened visual experience.
17 Nichet dramatizes mental suffocation, repression and entrapment through oversized
images and texts which dwarf the characters. Following the Expressionist medium,
which inspired Williams, Nichet focuses on enclosure as a mental process. He evokes
the process of enclosure through chromatic images and musical effects. In so doing, he
creates a stifling mental landscape of the Wingfields’ existence: “The characters find
themselves with their back against the wall: a wall of images and legends which tower
above them, crushing them.”14 He places his characters in an oversized world of objects,
images and words, and insists on the importance of the screen device in achieving the
effect of symbolic repression: “The screen which seems to fall from the sky
consequently obliterates any potential reference to naturalism.”15 Tom, for example,
escapes from the drudgery of everyday life by taking refuge in movie theatres, and
other escape mechanisms like drinking and smoking, as Nichet notes:
Tom is addicted to the movies. Each and every film is an antidote to the sterility of a
monotone existence in which he finds himself trapped, day in and day out. This
magic lantern enables him to escape from an otherwise stifling quotidian existence.
16
18 Tom’s cinemania is a sign of depravation in his mother’s eyes—a mark of decrepitude

and the cause of one of their worst domestic quarrels. In Scene Three, Nichet uses the
screen device to project gigantic red letters―“Fed up”―onto the curtain. This
announces the violent verbal altercation about to take place between mother and son.
The quarrel soon transforms into a scene suggesting mental and sexual entrapment.
Amanda crawls underneath her son’s towering body where she lies in a semi-erotic,
semi-embryonic position as he hurls insults at her. Nichet’s staging hints at a sado-
masochistic relationship. It puts the limelight on Tom’s attempt to disengage himself
from the confines of a latent incestuous relation that has played a part in keeping him
enslaved to Amanda.

45
19 Nichet’s closing scene is aligned with the original script; Laura blows out her candles,
putting an abrupt end to the play. The French director preferred this alternative to the
“happy ending” which was exploited in Irving Rapper’s cinematic adaptation (1950) 17
where, Nichet notes, “almost everything was rewritten except the title!” 18 Rapper
discarded the Old South ending that Tennessee Williams had imagined for his
Hollywood script, preferring a modern romantic scene with Laura waiting for Richard,
the next gentleman caller, to arrive. Paradoxically, Rapper’s adaptation, with its
insistence on realism, is a throwback to everything that Tennessee Williams vilipended
in his “Production Notes” to The Glass Menagerie. It could be argued that to the
detriment of the organic and Expressionistic, the film reinstates “the photographic
likeness” Williams had denounced so adamantly. This raises questions that go far
beyond the scope of my paper. One illuminating article by Hugh MacMullan, dialogue
director of Rapper’s Glass Menagerie, is worth mentioning here. In “Translating The Glass
Menagerie to film” (26), MacMullan cites problems that directors like Irving Rapper
inevitably encounter when trying to adapt Williams to the big screen. MacMullan
suggests that The Glass Menagerie is essentially literary and symbolic in style and is not
readily adaptable to the cinematic medium. Following this assumption, he notes that
the dramatic style of the play does not blend with the cinematic of real people existing
in a real world. MacMullan finally concludes on an encomium of Rapper’s happy
ending, which had initially been appended, and has been the subject of much critical
debate. Williams, for one, took a firm stance on Rapper’s ending.
20 In his letter to Irene Selznick (June 14, 1949), Williams avows being “terribly shocked”
by the ending: “I don’t remember it being quite that bad.” He adds emphatically:
“Unfortunately, the only true ending was the one in the play […]” (Thornton 502). In
essence, The Glass Menagerie has always proved to be a challenge for directors to adapt
to television and to the big screen.19 In general, stage directors are more attuned to the
original text than Hollywood directors, as Williams pointed out himself. Irving Rapper’s
ending, for example, espouses the Hollywood impulse to foist the optimistic narrative
of the American dream onto the story line in order to satisfy the expectations of the
larger public. In contrast, Jacques Nichet’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ memory
play remains faithful to Tennessee Williams as far as its Expressionist medium goes. In
addition, Jean-Michel Déprats’ translation takes care to align itself with the original
text. All of the thirty-four legends and images, missing from the acting version of the
play, are included in the French text.
21 However, there is a caveat here; the visual effects of Nichet’s play all too often succumb
to burlesque inconsistencies. As a result, the audience’s responsiveness gravitates
towards a conflicted sense of melancholy and comic appraisal. This is to the detriment
of the audience’s capacity to tap into the play’s expressionism and the sensibility of the
Wingfield family. Laura’s black combat-style boots (intended to call attention to her
handicap) are intriguing, but they clash sharply with her delicate summer dresses,
making her stand out as a figure of feminine endurance in the play. Furthermore,
Nichet’s decision to portray Laura’s melancholy as a descent into autism, after her
romantic deception, gives the young actress the aspect of a character from mute
theatre. Finally, focus on displaying Tom’s bare muscular biceps runs astray of
projecting the character of a fragile poet, as it gives the impression of a redneck, rather
than a rebel. As for the missing screen device, which Nichet incorporates into his
adaptation of The Glass Menagerie, it does provide a vivid and entertaining visual

46
reference for the audience. But the hyperbolic overstatements in acting and in stage
effects run the danger of draining the literary quality of the play, which is the hallmark
of The Glass Menagerie.
22 During an interview with one of the stage managers who worked with Nichet for the
Nantes production in 2009-2010, it became clear that the question of how to make the
tragedy of the Wingfields less tragic was of central concern for the French adaptation.
A concerted effort was thus made to lighten up The Glass Menagerie by altering the
element of pathos and introspective melancholy at the expense of Tennessee Williams’
initial design. Of course, the question of Tennessee Williams’ initial design is complex.
Each version of The Glass Menagerie—from short story, to movie script to play—is
different, but all of them inevitably confront the problem of repressed desire, more or
less explicitly. The hint of incest in the brother-sister interaction is visible in some of
the adaptations; and depending on the director, it is given more or less importance.
The staging of the memory play has incessantly toyed with a repressed representation
of the quasi-incestuous and doomed love between brother and sister ever since the
Broadway opening of The Glass Menagerie. The incestuous tension of Tom and Laura’s
relationship lies pulsating under the surface of many adaptations, yet Nichet displaces
it onto a mother-son relationship. This is a problematic stance to take, bearing in mind
the fact that the genesis of The Glass Menagerie, from short story to movie script to
memory play, has given a privileged relationship to that of brother and sister. In the
short story and in the second draft, which made up the one-act version of the play that
served as a synopsis for the movie script, there was an explicit allusion to this
relationship at the end, but Tennessee Williams censured it in the written and acting
versions that followed (Beaurline 144). In Scene Seven of The Glass Menagerie, which
forms the serpent’s tail of the play, bringing us back to the beginning, Tom appears on
stage one last time and avows that he cannot settle down in one place. He ventures an
elusive explanation as to why he stays on the run: “I would have stopped, but I was
pursued by something” (237). This announces a dramatic turning point as Williams
introduces the mnemic device of colored glass to represent the agent that arouses
repressed memories as Tom recollects images of his sister:
Tom: The window is filled with pieces of colored glass, tiny transparent bottles in
delicate colors, like bits of a shattered rainbow. Then all at once my sister touches
my shoulder. I turn around and look into her eyes. (237)
23 In “Portrait of a Girl in Glass,” Tom’s recollections of Laura were aroused by the
presence of colored glass and they opened up on more explicit desires. These forbidden
memories crack through defense mechanisms, literally spilling out in the closing lines
of Tom’s narrative:
In five years’ time I had nearly forgotten home. I had to forget it. I couldn’t carry it
around with me. But once in a while, usually in a strange town, before I have found
companions, the shell of deliberate hardness is broken through. A door comes softly
and irresistibly open […] I hold my breath, for if my sister’s face appears among
them - the night is hers! (103)
24 In the second draft, the one-act play, the repressed returns like a boomerang and is
expressed in even more graphic terms. Lester Beaurline notes: “In the one-act version,
Williams heightened the incestuous implications of the speech which became more
explicit:
In five years time I have nearly forgotten home. But there are nights when memory
is stronger. I cannot hold my shoulder to the door, the door comes softly but

47
irresistibly open. I hold my breath. I reach for a cigarette. I buy a drink; I speak to
the nearest stranger. For if that vision goes on growing clearer, the mist will divide
upon my sister’s face, watching gently and daring to ask for nothing. Then it’s too
much: my manhood is undone and the night is hers.20
25 The image of a partly repressed incestuous love, explicitly represented in “Portrait of a
Girl in Glass” and the one-act play, is attenuated in The Glass Menagerie where the
bedroom scene has been expurgated. Contrary to the short story and the one-act play,
where Tom’s closing lines can be equated with the symbolic reenactment of an
incestuous vision, The Glass Menagerie portrays him as actively trying to ward off this
fantasy through a filmic narrative mode saturated with chiaroscuro effects. Williams’
stage directions―“the moon breaks through the clouds” (236)―further evoke the inner
landscape of Tom’s sexual ambivalence. The contrast between obscurity and light is
sustained until the moment Tom comes on stage to pronounce his closing lines. Indeed
his speech ends at the very moment Laura blows out her candles:
Tom: Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I
intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a
bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger— anything that can blow your
candles out! (237)
26 The memory play, with its imbricated layers of souvenirs and its focalization on the
Gentleman caller, which I have not treated here for want of time, contributes to
concealing the implicit story which resurfaces in the return of the repressed; it is the
story Tom cannot escape, but attempts to through escape mechanisms. It is, above all,
the story which has been both censored and censured in the final drafts of The Glass
Menagerie. To corroborate this assumption, let us consider an instance of dreamwork
that Tennessee Williams recorded in his Notebooks.21 The diaries describe vivid scenes of
forbidden desire linked to Rose, which form a peculiar resonance with mnemic images
of Laura, elicited in the closing scene of the short story and the play. In his personal
diary, Williams evokes a secretive world of dreams in which Rose resurfaces as a
complex signifier for the displacement of sexual desire, entrapment and suffocation.
The first entrance corresponds to Monday, 6 December 1948:
I dreamed of my sister. Woke up. Then went to sleep and dreamed of her again. At
one point I was lying in her bed, the ivory-colored bed: but it was not a dream of
incest, although I am at a loss to explain it. I was standing naked in a room. Heard
footsteps. Jumped in the bed to cover myself. Discovered it was my sister’s bed. She
entered the room. Spoke to me angrily and pulled back the covers. I struggled not
to expose my nakedness. [...] There I woke up. Another time during the night I woke
up gasping for breath: had a feeling of dying […]. (495)
27 In the second entry (Monday, 19 October, 1953) the mnemic trace of the love-object
resurfaces through the color beige. Both desirable and repelling, it provokes a similar
feeling of suffocation, entrapment, and sexual ambiguity six years later when Williams
dreamed of his sister again:
I’ve dreamed of my sister, seeing her in a cream-colored lace dress which I had
forgotten. In the dream a lady who looked like my sister wore it - then I had it on
and then I was struggling to sit down between two tables and was wedged so tightly
between them I couldn’t breathe. (599)
28 The extratextual record of this dreamwork forms a palimpsest upon which we can
decipher intertextual mnemic traces of repression, which resurface in The Glass
Menagerie and “Portrait of a Girl in Glass.” As such, the dreamwork expresses something
equivalent to a filmic narrative sequence in which the mnemic image of Laura

48
encapsulates a complex signifier where death and desire are cleaved together in a
primal way. This further enlightens the theme of entrapment, which haunts The Glass
Menagerie, suggesting that beneath the surface appearance of Tom’s suffocating
quotidian existence, there lies a deeper ambivalence about the trappings of sexuality
(in both its incestuous and gender manifestations). As a result, the dreamwork from
Tennessee Williams’ Notebooks serves to corroborate the assumption that both literature
and dreams are all part of the “cinema of the inner consciousness” (Butler 64), which
we can understand to be filmic.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beaurline, Lester. “The Glass Menagerie: From Story to Play.” Modern Drama, 7, n°8 (1965): 142-149.
Bloom, Harold. Tennessee Williams: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House Publishers,
1988.
Butler, Robert Olen. “Cinema of the Mind.” From Where You Dream. New York: Grove Press, 2005.
MacMullan, Hugh, “Translating The Glass Menagerie to Film.” Hollywood Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 1,
(Autumn 1959): 14-32.
Nichet, Jacques, la Ménagerie de verre. Compagnie l’Inattendu, video recording of the play, filmed at
Théâtre de la Piscine, Chatenay Malabry, 2011.
---. “L’écran inattendu.” Alternatives Théâtrales, 101, Extérieur cinéma, Théâtre National de Nice
(1999) : 1-4.
Pollock, Griselda. “Screening the Seventies: Sexuality and Representation in Feminist Practice—a
Brechtian perspective.” Vision and Difference. London: Routledge, 1988.
Thornton, Margaret B. (ed.) Tennessee Williams’ Notebooks. London: Yale University Press, 2006.
Tischler, Nancy. Tennessee Williams: Rebellious Puritan. New York: Citadel, 1961.
Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. The Theatre of Tennessee Williams. Vol. 1. New York: New
Directions, 1990.
---.The Glass Menagerie. New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc., 1976.
---.“The Resemblance between a Violin Case and a Coffin.” Hard Candy. New York: New Directions,
1967.
---. “Portrait of a Girl in Glass.” One Arm and Other Stories, New York: New Directions, 1948.
APPENDIXES
SCREEN ADAPTATIONS
Harvey, Anthony. The Glass Menagerie: Katherine Hepburn, Joanna Miles, Sam Waterson,
1973. TV adaptation.

49
Newman, Paul. The Glass Menagerie: Joanne Woodward, Karen Allen, John Malkovich,
James Naughton, 1987.
Rapper, Irving. The Glass Menagerie: Jane Wyman, Gertrude Lawrence, Arthur Kennedy,
Kirk Douglas, 1950.
NOTES
1. See pages 64-65 for more details about the missing script of which only twenty-one pages have
survived. I will refer to it as “the missing script,” since the manuscript is incomplete.
2. Williams went to California to work on a movie script in 1943. Before he left, he worked up a
synopsis for a film named The Gentleman Caller. (See Nancy Tischler, Tennessee Williams, 92).
3. Nichet is director of “Théâtre National de Toulouse” and “Chair de création artistique au
Collège de France. ”
4. Jacques Nichet’s adaptation has been staged in several French theatres: Théâtre de la Commune,
Paris, 2009; Le Grand T, Nantes, 2009-2010, and Théâtre de la Piscine, Chatenay Malabry 2011.
5. Quotes from the short story are taken from One Arm and Other Stories, New York: New
Directions, 1967.
6. In his “Production Notes” to The Glass Menagerie, Williams associates the memory play with
Expressionism and elaborates on the specific purpose of the screen device in theatre: “It gives
accent to certain values in each scene. [...] The legend or image upon the screen will strengthen
the effect of what is merely allusion in the writing and allow the primary point to be made more
simply and lightly than if the entire responsibility were on the spoken lines. Aside from this
structural value, I think the screen will have a definite emotional appeal [...].” (New York: New
Directions, 1971) 131-2.
7. All citations from The Glass Menagerie are taken from the authoritative edition by New
Directions.
8. See The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, Vol I. New York: New Directions, 1971,
reedited 1990. Williams’ reference to screen devices has been conserved in this written version.
9. The Glass Menagerie. New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc., 1976.
10. All descriptions and quotes are from Jacques Nichet’s la Ménagerie de verre; Compagnie
l’Inattendu, video recording of the play, filmed at Théâtre de la Piscine, Chatenay Malabry, 2011.
11. The Gentleman Caller is the title of the sixty page one-act play in five scenes from which the
synopsis for a film script, with the same name, was taken.
12. My English translation. See J. Nichet, La Ménagerie de Verre, ed. Théâtre National de Nice, p. 1.
“ Je n’ai pas pu prendre connaissance du scenario de Tennessee Williams: est-il archivé dans un
fonds de bibliothèque? A-t-il disparu? Entre le Portrait d’une Jeune Fille en Verre et La Ménagerie de
Verre, un chaînon manque. Paradoxalement, ce manque de cinéma s’affirme fortement dans la
version théâtrale. En revanche, la nouvelle n’y fait aucune illusion, le mot n’apparaît même pas. ”
13. For more details see my introduction and Lester Beaurline, “The Glass Menagerie, from Story to
Play,” 143.
14. My English translation. See J. Nichet, p. 1 “Les personnages se trouvent dos au mur, un mur
d’images et de légendes bien plus grandes qu’eux.”
15. My English translation. Ibid. « Cet écran tombé du ciel écrase toute tentation ou tentative
naturaliste. »
16. My English translation. Ibid. “Cinéphage, Tom se drogue. Chaque film, n’importe lequel, lui
offre un antidote à l’ennui stérile, répété, jour après jour, au gâchis de sa vie piégée dans une
“ boîte […] Cette lanterne magique lui permet d’échapper à l’étouffement quotidien […].”

50
17. With Kirk Douglas, Jane Wyman and Gertrude Lawrence and Tennessee Williams’
collaboration.
18. My English translation. Ibid. « Presque tout a été réécrit sauf le titre! »
19. Cinematic adaptations: Irving Rapper (1950); Paul Newman (1987) and TV: Anthony Harvey
(1973).
20. The quote is taken from the one act-play manuscript, C. Waller Barrett Library, University of
Virginia [MS.p. 103 (60)] 144.
21. M. B. Thornton, Tennessee Williams’ Notebooks.
ABSTRACTS
Une analyse de la genèse de The Glass Menagerie met en lumière ses nombreux liens avec la
nouvelle “Portrait of a Girl in Glass” dont elle est d’ailleurs tirée. Nous verrons aussi qu’il existe
une filiation avec le scénario The Gentleman Caller dont il ne reste qu’un maigre manuscrit. Cet
article examine la structure tripartite inhérente à The Glass Menagerie. En effet, cette pièce est
passée du stade de la nouvelle à celui d’un scénario rédigé à la hâte pour Hollywood avant de
devenir ce que Williams appelle une “memory play”. Si l’on en croit ce que Williams écrit dans
“Notes de théâtre”, la pièce aurait été initialement conçue comme un genre hybride: à la fois
théâtrale et filmique, ceci grâce à l’insertion de ce qu’il avait imaginé comme “cinematic
devices”–un écran mobile sur lequel se projetaient des images. Lorsque le metteur en scène
Jacques Nichet s’avisa que la pièce de Williams était régulièrement présentée sans ces supports
filmiques, il prit la décision de l’adapter en intégrant la technique cinématographique voulue par
l’auteur. Cet article se propose d’explorer la façon dont les supports filmiques fonctionnent en
tant qu’innovation esthétique dans La ménagerie de verre de Nichet, et d’analyser la fidélité de
cette production à la conception originelle de Williams: ce dernier, en effet, souhaitait poser les
jalons d’un genre novateur, la narration filmée comme instrument de la dramatisation théâtrale,
osant ainsi l’hybridation des deux modes d’expression représentés par le cinéma et le théâtre.
AUTHORS
ALICE CLARK-WEHINGER
Alice Clark-Wehinger is an Associate Professor of Literature at the University of Nantes. Her work
on Shakespeare and Nerval: Le Théâtre romantique en crise, Shakespeare et Nerval, Paris:
Harmattan, 2005, was short-listed for a research prize by the SAES and the AFEA. She is the
author of a collection of poems in French and English (Imaginaires, University of Nantes, 1997)
and numerous critical articles in French literary reviews. She has also co-authored a book on the
Anglo-Saxon short story (La nouvelle anglo-saxonne, une étude psychanalytique, Paris: Hachette,
1998). Alice Clark’s short story collection, A Darker Shade of Light, received Technikart
Manuscript’s first prize award at le Salon du Livre (March 2011).

51
The Intermedial Trajectories of

Angela Carter’s Wolf Tales
Michelle Ryan-Sautour
1 Susannah Clapp has quoted Angela Carter as liking “anything that flickers,” (American
ix) and Carter’s attraction to the cinema is apparent in both the structure and themes
of her work. She admits to a fascination for experiences of collective viewing that reach
back to the Granada Tooting, a cinema from her childhood described as a “dream
cathedral” which incarnated the “apotheosis of the fake” in its very architecture
(Carter, “Granada” 400). In a Radio 4 (1989) interview, she comments on how the
cinema had influenced her fiction: “‘I’m perfectly conscious of using all kinds of
narrative technique that I’ve taken from the cinema. Our experience of watching
narrative in the cinema has completely altered the way that we approach narrative on
the page, that we even read nineteenth-century novels differently’” (qtd. in Crofts 92).
Intermedial concerns are indeed interlaced with Carter’s writing, as she wrote for the
radio, the cinema, and television. In her introduction to Carter’s collected dramatic
works, Clapp explains that “These pieces [...] By their form and extent [...] enlarge the
scope and alter the contours of a rich body of work” (Curious ix), and Charlotte Crofts
has emphasized the importance of approaching Carter’s work through the lens of
media.
Carter’s work in media has been sidelined by the academy because it does not fit
neatly into generic or canonic categories. But in editing out her mediated texts,
contemporary critical responses offer an incomplete picture of her work. As the
texts discussed here reveal, Carter’s writing for radio, film and television is not an
aberration from her real vocation as a writer of fiction, but ‘an extension and an
amplification of writing for the printed page’ (Carter 1985: 12-13). (Crofts 194)
2 A self-consciousness of the “screen,” whether internal or external, pervades much of
Carter’s fiction, reflecting what Robert Olen Butler refers to as the “dream in your
consciousness” that is set into place by a “work of literature” with its “characters and
the setting” (64). In her work with the fairy tale Carter foregrounds the performance of
story-telling and the power of image-making. She also demonstrates a consciousness of
how such dreams might be perpetuated and amplified by machines that “do our
dreaming for us,” as “within that ‘video gadgetry’ might lie the source of a

52
continuation, even a transformation, of storytelling and story-performance” (Carter,

Virago Book, xxii).
3 It is commonly known that Carter’s 1977 translation of tales by Charles Perrault led to
the writing of The Bloody Chamber (1979), a collection of revisionist tales that was
published concomitantly with her feminist appropriation of the Marquis de Sade’s
ideas in The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (1979). As Jack Zipes observes
in The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy Tales (2011), discursive elements
from Carter’s critical survey of Sade’s pornography are woven into her fairy tales,
particularly in the way she endows “the characters with flesh and blood and the plots
with more intricacy” (135), thus taking them beyond the realm of archetypal forms. I
would like to argue, however, that Carter’s tales also delve into the troubling potential
of “terrorism of the imagination” she attributes to the pornography of Sade:
Nothing exercises such power over the imagination as the nature of sexual
relationships, the pornographer has in his power to become a terrorist of the
imagination, a sexual guerilla whose purpose is to overturn our most basic notions
of these relations, to reinstitute sexuality as a primary mode of being rather than a
specialised area of vacation from being. (Carter, Sadeian 21-22)
4 She indeed makes of the reading “dream” an arena for reflection which is colored by
affect, drawing upon the reader’s expectations to tease him/her on multiple levels.
Robert Olen Butler speaks of the “rub,” that is a combination of aesthetic elements that
gives rise to the unexpected (Butler 84)1. Carter’s aesthetics hinge upon such an effect,
that is on the friction caused by her collage of intellectual, literary and cultural
artifacts. I will argue that it is the spirit of the “rub” more than content and theme that
informs the intermedial transformations of Carter’s wolf tales, that is three tales from
The Bloody Chamber: “The Werewolf,” “The Company of Wolves” and “Wolf Alice.” The
tale “Red Riding Hood” (AT333) serves as a nexus for these three stories that were
adapted for the radio in 1980 (The Company of Wolves, directed by Glyn Dearman) and
into a film of the same title directed by Neil Jordan in 1984. Such adaptations attest to
the intermedial metamorphoses of Carter’s politically saturated aesthetics.
5 Each of the three aesthetic productions is characterized by a reflection on re-writing
and the act of storytelling. Playing with the palimpsestic relations inherent to the fairy
tale, Carter’s stories foreground the ghosts of previous tellers and tales, as if to release,
as Cristina Bacchilega has observed, forgotten layers of sedimented storytelling:
“Postmodern revision is often two-fold, seeking to expose, make visible, the fairy tale’s
complicity with ‘exhausted’ narrative and gender ideologies, and, by working with the
fairy tales’ multiple versions, seeking to expose, bring out, what the institutionalization
of such tales for children has forgotten or left unexploited” (Bacchilega 50). The wealth
of criticism about The Bloody Chamber attests to the success of Carter’s enterprise in the
realm of academia. However few critics have focused on the intermedial shifts that
occur in Carter’s different versions of the wolf tales. According to Bacchilega, writers
such as Carter focus not only on the content of the tale, but on its telling, on its
performative aspects: “This kind of rereading does more than interpret anew or shake
the genre’s ground rules. It listens for the many ‘voices’ of fairy tales as well, as part of
a historicizing and performance-oriented project” (50). She speaks of how Carter
“explodes the stereotype of the fairy tale as a static and ‘closed system’ by mobilizing
the multiple and contradictory refractions of sexualized imagery” (50).

53
6 This is particularly evident in Carter’s self-conscious narrative performance. The three

tales are juxtaposed in The Bloody Chamber, as if to play one against the other. “The
Werewolf” is a rendition of “Red Riding Hood” in which the grandmother is actually a
werewolf. She is killed and replaced by Red who “lived in her grandmother’s house”
and “prospered.” “The Company of Wolves” is a collage of “wolf” stories: a hunter kills
a wolf only to see it transformed into the body of a man, a witch transforms a wedding
party into wolves because “the groom had settled on another girl,” and a version of Red
Riding Hood ultimately strips and lies down with the wolf. The final story, “Wolf Alice”
revisits the motif of the feral child, a girl who lives with wolves.
7 There is a predominate third person narration throughout the three stories with shifts
in the temporal position of the narrator, and a frequent use of “you” and “we” to foster
a didactic complicity with the reader, as if to accentuate the voice of a storyteller
persona. In “The Werewolf” the narrator states clearly: “To these upland woodsmen,
the Devil is as real as you or I,” (“Werewolf” 108), in “The Company of Wolves,” the
narrator says: “You are always in danger in the forest, where no people are. Step
between the portals of the great pines where the shaggy branches tangle about you [...]
if you stray from the path for one instant, the wolves will eat you” (“Company” 111),
and in “Wolf Alice” the reader is invoked as part of “we” in the first sentence: “Could
this ragged girl with brindled lugs have spoken like we do she would have called herself
a wolf” (“Alice” 119).
8 The reader is even invited to “see” the images. The use of the word “will” underlines
how the reader’s images, projected onto an imagined cinematic screen, emerge from a
stereotypical “ur” text that reads like a screenplay: “There will be a crude icon of the
virgin behind a guttering candle, the leg of a pig hung up to cure, a string of drying
mushrooms. A bed, a stool, a table. Harsh, brief, poor lives” (108). Similar attention to
detail is present in “The Company of Wolves” in the description of the grandmother’s
house: “Two china spaniels with liver-coloured blotches on their coats and black noses
sit on either side of the fireplace. There is a bright rug of woven rags on the pantiles.
The grandfather clock ticks away her eroding time” (115). The senses of the reader are
explicitly invoked and self-consciously underlined through a focus on eyes:
At night, the eyes of wolves shine like candle flames, yellowish, reddish, but that is
because the pupils of their eyes fatten on darkness and catch the light from your
lantern to flash it back to you – red for danger; if a wolf’s eyes reflect only
moonlight, then they gleam a cold and unnatural green, a mineral, a piercing
colour. If the benighted traveller spies those luminous, terrible sequins stitched
suddenly on the black thickets, then he knows he must run, if fear has not struck
him stock-still.
But those eyes are all you will be able to glimpse of the forest assassins as they
cluster invisibly round your smell of meat as you go through the wood unwisely
late. They will be like shadows, they will be like wraiths, grey members of a
congregation of nightmare; hark! his long, wavering howl… an aria of fear made
audible. (“Company” 110)
9 Such visual interpellation along with the use of “you” is repeated throughout the story.
At the end of the story, the reader is asked to observe the girl sleeping in the arms of
the wolf: “See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the
tender wolf” (“Company” 118). In addition to weaving connections between stories, the
reader is invited into a literary “dream” with broad ranges of affect from fear to
marvel, playful symbolism and moments of reflection. Carter reiterates the didactic
thrust of Perrault’s tale, for example, in a way that resonates with the previous

54
message and opens up for further interpretation, particularly the placement of female
sexuality at the center of the tale:
She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an
unbroken egg; she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance
to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not
know how to shiver. She has her knife and she is afraid of nothing. (“Company”
113-114)
10 Carter thus lays bare the didactic symbolism of Perrault’s version that so irritated
Bruno Bettelheim (Bettelheim 169), but her narrative opens up this symbolism, or
rather “explodes” it, in Bacchilega’s words, for further investigation by the reader.
11 It is the creation of such open spaces that drew Carter to the radio as a medium.
Charlotte Crofts, in reference to Clare Hanson, observes the parallel between the
openness of the short story form and the medium of radio:
Radio’s ‘open-endedness’ mirrors the elliptical structure of many short stories
which, as Clare Hanson has argued, stirs the imagination of the reader in a
particular way [...] Both forms paradoxically contain more imaginative space
precisely because of their ‘lack’. The ‘blindness’ of radio, the absence of visual
stimuli, necessitates the stimulation of the listener’s imagination (in Hanson’s
terms, activating the ‘image-making faculty’), creating space for their active
involvement in the process of meaning production (inviting the listener’s ‘desire’
into the text). The lack of narrative space in short fiction contributes to its open-
endedness as a medium, demanding a similarly active readership. (23)
12 Carter explained this open-endedness through the “three-dimensional story-telling” of
radio that goes beyond the linearity of both written and oral narrative because of its
characteristic devices:
Radio may not offer visual images but its resources blur this linearity, so that a
great number of things can happen at the same time. Yet, as with all forms of story-
telling that are composed in words, not in visual images, radio always leaves that
magical and enigmatic margin, that space of the invisible, which must be filled in by
the imagination of the listener. (Carter, Preface 497).
13 Crofts has focused on the complex interplay between the oral tradition of the fairy tale
and Carter’s recuperation of its voices for the radio. I would suggest that it is not
simply the recuperation of the voices, but also the types of imaginative spaces it
fosters, that links the radio to the political aesthetics of Carter’s written tales. In her
performative reprisal of familiar narratives she carves out a space that reveals the
underlying forces behind the waking “dream.” Liliane Louvel has used the term
“pictorial third” to indicate the in-between space that emerges between image and
text:
In these “ dark machines ” that we are, the dynamic of the pictorial third plays
itself out: movement and energy that lead to a disruption, a surplus of meaning and
affect, a waking dream that dances between the two. Neither one nor the other, it is
one and the other in the back and forth sway with the image. It is really a modality
that belongs to the order of the living, of movement, of desire, of lived experience,
of the event in the sense of what happens: an operation as well, a performance. [my
translation] 2
14 Carter’s radio plays create a similar performative space, where the linearity of text is
pushed to the background to allow for the emergence of the personal image, an image
with a dynamism and fluidity that lends itself to inquiry.

55
15 Part of this dynamism is achieved, much like in the stories, in the experimentation with
narrative voices. Carter’s radio play reproduces the three stories to varying degrees but
shifts the narrative emphasis to create a Chinese box structure. A framing story is
presented, that of a grandmother talking with her granddaughter (referred to
explicitly in the radio play as Red Riding Hood). The grandmother adopts the
storyteller role, accompanied by the interventions of a didactic, anonymous narrator,
and weaves together different tales in a fading in and out of narratives that touch upon
the werewolf motif, Red Riding Hood, and the feral child. The characters in the
narrative occasionally take over the narration, be it the werewolf, the bride of the
werewolf, the wolf who attacks Red Riding Hood, or even Red Riding Hood herself. The
listener is faced with a medley of voices and noises that ask him/her to draw
connections. This is strikingly apparent in the following excerpt where the narratives
of granny, werewolf hunter, and main narrator blend and overlap. A hunter had just
baited a pit with a duck to trap the wolf.
[extract 1]
GRANNY: And into the trap went the silly wolf. ([and stuck himself directly on that
pointed stake])
(Animal shriek)
HUNTER: (Centre.) So I jumps down and slits –
(Throat slitting from pit and grunts from hunter.)
his throat quick as a wink. And commenced to lop off his paws, for I had a fancy to
mount this brute’s great pads, d’you see, to decorate my mantel, along with the
boar’s head and the moose head and the great carp my uncle caught ten winters ago
that he had stuffed (Thwack; dull thud.) . . . but only the one paw did I chop off
because, so help me, as I stand here –
(From pit.) Mother Mary and all the saints in heaven protect me!
GRANNY: (Far left.) Upon the ground the hunter saw there fall no paw at all but –
HUNTER: (From pit.) A hand! A man’s hand!
(Wind faded out:)
NARRATOR: (Centre. Close). The desperate claws retract, refine themselves as if
attacked by an invisible emery board, until suddenly they become fingernails and
could never have been anything but fingernails, or so it would seem. The leather
pads soften and shrink until you could take fingerprints from them, until they have
turned into fingertips. The clubbed tendons stretch, the foreshortened phalanges
extend and flesh out, the bristling hair sinks backwards into the skin without
leaving a trace of stubble behind it.
(Clock and fire back.)
WEREWOLF: (Approaching from mid right to RED RIDING HOOD.)
RED RIDING HOOD: Ooh . . .
WEREWOLF: Now my skin is the same kind of skin as your skin, little sister. There!
my hand . . . won’t you take hold of my hand?
RED RIDING HOOD: (Gasps)
WEREWOLF: See . . . it’s just the same as any other hand, only perhaps a little larger
. . . didn’t you see the enormous prints I left in the snow? (Carter Curious 66-67)
16 The narratives move in and out of each other with a fluidity that would be difficult to
attain in a textual narrative. Radio, according to Carter, thus transcends the limits of
the cinema: “radio can move from location to location with effortless speed, using aural
hallucinations to invoke sea-coast, a pub, a blasted heath, and can make extraordinary
collage and montage effects beyond the means of any film-maker” (Carter, Preface 497).
Carter explains how the elasticity of this medium allows her to “explore ideas” which
for her “is the same thing as telling stories since, for me, a narrative is an argument
stated in fictional terms” (Carter Preface, 497). Such speculative play is further

56
accentuated by the inherent self-consciousness of the radio play in a contemporary

context (even that of the 1980s in which the play was first broadcast). Because of a
marked contrast with the types of suspension of disbelief solicited by visual media, the
devices of the radio play stand out, bringing the listener to not only experience the
story, but also to reflect upon its performance. The sound of the paw/hand falling to
the ground, the growling sounds of the wolf, and even the sound of the clock acquire an
artificial quality and invite the listener into the mechanics of the performance, giving it
a semi-serious quality that adds to the range of images and effects. The listener is led to
vacillate between plunging into the tale’s illusion and perceiving the various tricks
used to “stage” the story for the radio. This ambivalence is accentuated by the
moments of wry commentary on the part of the narrator, such as when the claws
retract as if faced with “an emery board” (66) or Granny’s qualification of the wolf as
“silly” (66).
17 Carter’s reiteration of fairy tale elements is indeed infused with irony. The “Granny”
refers indirectly to what Marina Warner identifies as the “grandmotherly or nanny
type” of narrator, often involving “bedside or laplike mannerisms that create an
illusion of collusive intimacies, of home, of the bedtime story, the winter’s tale.”
(Warner 25). She comments on Carter’s irreverent exploitation of this “mannerism” in
her literary performances: “Angela Carter knew the storyteller’s time-honoured ruses,
and played with the masks, the spells and the voices in her brilliant variations on fairy
tales” (Warner 195). Carter’s stereotypical scenario in the radio play focuses the
listener’s attention on this device, and exaggerates it ten-fold to set it forth for
reflection. This irony in the performance is doubled by cautionary statements to Red
Riding Hood, such as “But the worst thing of all, my dearie, is – some wolves are hairy
on the inside” (64) and warnings that “If you spy a naked man among the pines, my
dearie, you must run as if the devil were after you” (72). Such irony is mirrored in the
sounds and story events, when the wolf confronts and eats Granny:
NARRATOR: And now, as the old lady quivered with dread before him, she
witnessed the unimaginable metamorphosis, the course, grey, the tawny, bristling
pelt springing out from the bare skin of her visitor…great jaws slavering…his red
eyes, now burning with far greater intensity than the coals in her hearth…
GRANNY: …and his privates, of a wolf, huge…he naked as a stone, but…hairy he…
aaaaaaagh! (Echo.)
(Fade GRANNY. Hold wind for a moment. Then fade in logs crackle, clock ticks, mastication
and lose wind.)
WEREWOLF: (Right centre.) Here’s a tough old bird, indeed…veritable jaw-cracker ….
Not much meat on her, all sinew…still, waste not, want not; down the red lane with
Granny…and isn’t dessert trotting through the wood towards me this minute, and
she tender as a peach…juicy as a wood strawberry…
(Swallow, Lip-smacking. Belch.) (Carter, Curious 77-78)
18 The variations in tone, along with a self-conscious narrative structure, lead the reader
to engage with the speculative dimension of an “in-between” space where sensation
and irony mingle, creating a “rub” with a titillating effect. The juxtaposition of the
transformation of the wolf with the granny’s comments about the wolf’s “privates” and
the munching sounds and belch of the wolf results in a discordance between humor,
irony and speculation, creating a semi-serious game with the “once upon a time” world
of story-telling.
19 This universe, much like Carter’s fiction, engages the reader in reflection, not only in
the call to seek out the ideological messages behind Carter’s play with the Red Riding

57
Hood palimpsests, but also with symbolism and allegory. In the radio-play Red Riding
Hood echoes the statement about puberty evoked in Carter’s story: “An egg not yet
cracked against the cup. I am the very magic space that I contain. I stand and move
within an invisible pentacle, untouched, invincible, immaculate. Like snow. Waiting.
The clock inside me, that will strike once a month, not yet…wound…up… I don’t bleed. I
can’t bleed” (64-65). Such statements, along with the interventions of the narrator,
highlight deciphering as a dominant effect.
20 This effect is translated to the medium of film in Neil Jordan’s adaptation of the stories
for the cinema in The Company of Wolves. Carter’s collaboration with Neil Jordan began
in Dublin in 1982 when she approached him about the idea of making a film version of
her wolf stories. They collaborated throughout 1983 on the writing of the screenplay,
and Jordan suggested a Chinese box structure based on The Sargasso Manuscript
[Wojciech Jerzy Has, 1964] which they had both seen. (Jordan Production Notes, 507).
“Once we had agreed on the structure, the writing seemed to grow quite naturally from
it, since it gave free rein to Angela’s own taste for narrative subversions” (qtd. in Crofts
507). The film also proposes a frame narrative, that of a middle-class girl and her family
who live in a Georgian house. Much like the figure of Red Riding Hood, the girl,
Rosaleen, is on the edge of becoming a woman. She is shown to be tossing and turning
in her sleep, and her dream becomes a realm in which a multiplicity of tales are
unleashed (Carter’s interest in Freud is evident here).3 The spectator gains access to the
dream through the window of her room, a symbolical cinematic passage that is fraught
with signification. The spectator is led to understand that he/she is penetrating into
the girl’s unconscious, announcing the speculative dimension of the film from the
beginning. Carter indeed places the idea of dreaming at the center of story-telling: “I
have studied dreams extensively and I know about their structure and symbolism. I
think dreams are a way of the mind telling itself stories” (Interview with Rosemary
Caroll).
21 In her dream, Rosaleen’s sister is killed by wolves, and much of the narrative centers on
the grandmother’s attempts to console young Rosaleen. Characterized as a young
peasant girl, she lives in a village in a forest, and various aspects of her pubescence are
outlined and reflected in this embedded story: she is courted by a local boy, she
wanders in the forest and encounters symbolical spaces, she sees her parents having
sex in their small, one-room house. Most importantly, her interaction with her
grandmother as a didactic figure is foregrounded. Her presence multiplies the
storylines in the embedded narrative, in a disjointed mise en abyme. The granny figure
of the grandmother (played by Angela Lansbury), gives advice in the form of stories to
Rosaleen. This grandmotherly influence is echoed by Rosaleen in the movie, as she later
repeats some of her grandmother’s stories. She also repeatedly quotes her
grandmother throughout the film, as if to point to the female genealogy of folk and
fairy tales.
22 The grandmother tells the story of the man who disappears on his wedding night and
who is ultimately revealed to be a werewolf. In another story, a young man is given
lotion by a “prince of Darkness.” The lotion grows hair on the young man’s body,
revealing his animalistic nature. Rosaleen later reiterates her grandmother’s story of a
wedding party in which a woman returns to take revenge on the lover who rejected her
by transforming them all into wolves. In the end, in an overt re-telling of Little Red
Riding Hood, Rosaleen comforts the wolf she has injured with the hunter’s gun, and

58
tells the story of a feral child, who lived with the wolves, and then Rosaleen, herself,
metamorphoses into a she-wolf. The viewer is therefore faced with a series of cuts in a
montage that borders on fantasy, horror, and the fairy tale, thus faithfully adapting the
generic tight-wire walked by Carter in much of her fiction.
23 It is telling that Michael Dare, in his introduction to an interview with Neil Jordan,
emphasizes the literary structure of the film: “In order to understand what was going
on stylistically, I found myself pretending I was reading a short story rather than
watching a movie” (Dare para. 5). The narrative structure draws the spectator into the
active role of piecing the puzzle together. The openness and emphasis on the reader’s
participation is therefore equally present in the film version of the tales, although in
different ways. On numerous occasions the scenes are filmed through the trees, as if to
place the spectator in the role of observer, almost voyeur, as if to replace the absent
voice of the didactic narrator present in the stories as well as in the radio play. The
levels of reality are also played with in the film as the initial landscape of the frame tale
is presented in a realistic manner, whereas the forest is littered with objects
emblematic of childhood (dollhouses, toys), and is characterized by exaggerated,
unnatural monster mushrooms that place it on the edge of fantasy, described by Carter
in the screenplay as “a brooding, Disney forest” (Carter Curious 187). David Wheatley
expresses doubts as to the efficacy of The Company of Wolves, describing the movie as
“flat” and speaking of the dangers of adapting a short story to film: “I think there is a
danger in Angela’s work that when you dramatize it, you stretch the drama. It’s like a
row of pearls. You stretch it so thin, if you’re not careful, it is just beads, and it no
longer—you lose the narrative drive, with incidents colliding into one another” (237).
However, in addition to the puzzle of the narrative structure, the film openly displays a
multi-layered allegorical dimension, setting forth elements that call for interpretation,
like much of Carter’s fiction. The scene in which Rosaleen witnesses eggs hatching and
revealing tiny cherubs invites critical reflection. Similarly, the detailed listing of
objects in Rosaleen’s bedroom at the beginning of the screenplay, many of which are
reproduced on screen, engages the spectator in an act of interpretation.
An open cupboard reveals a mix of school uniform garments and teenage high style.
There is a bookshelf above it with Enid Blyton books and school stories. Among
them a sex-instruction manual – Jane Cousin’s Make it Happy, and dog-eared copies
of fairy-tale books.
The GIRL shifts on her pillow. There is a sense of oppressive heat, oppressive and
unfocused sensuality, adolescent turbulence.
A breeze comes through the curtains and stirs her hair.
Outside, the dog whines louder.
The breeze stirs the pages of Iona and Peter Opie’s The Classic Fairy Tales which lies
on the window-sill, beneath the flapping curtains. The room has darkened subtly.
We glimpse fairy-tale illustrations through the shifting pages, until the illustrations
by Doré for ‘The Little Red Riding Hood’ are reached. (Carter Curious 187)
24 An imaginary dream space is therefore suggested as a mise en abyme of the spectator’s
perceptions of the fairy tale as constructed through books and various cultural
artifacts. It is such consciousness about fairy tale genealogy and culture that the story
sets into place, and it perhaps is the most successful aspect of the adaptation in that the
images are culturally coded, and often ironic. This film proposes a world where images
are more than they appear, as Keith Hopper comments in his thorough overview of the
film’s conception and reception. He speaks of the “fluid ambiguity” of Carter’s imagery
and of the ambivalence created in critics such as Maggie Anwell concerning the

59
mingling of horror and menstruation (Hopper 21-22), revealing the troubling potential
of Jordan’s film. Marina Warner underlines the capacity for Carter’s fiction to create
such effects: “Her humour was of the unsettling variety, that made it necessary to
examine one’s own received ideas. It was so very impolite, with its particular
idiosyncratic feminism, its blend of the irreverent and the gothic, its dazzling linguistic
intricacy and relish for imagery. But it is this humour, its dark and even snaky stabs,
that above all produced the shock and unease people felt at her work” (Warner
196-197). According to Hopper, the film produced similar levels of unease in censors
and critics, and the film was labeled as an over-18 film by the British Board of Film
Censors because of its lack of a moral lesson in regards to female sexuality. In addition,
it could be neither marketed as a horror film nor as a pure fantasy film. It was caught
somewhere in-between (Hopper 19).
25 Much of this unease also stems from an ironic citationality on the level of film which is
similar to that found in much of Carter’s fiction; the images waver between dark
fantasy and humoristic or ironic cuts. The scene of the werewolf’s transformation when
he comes back to visit his former bride is emblematic of such combinations. Jordan’s
horror image is so extreme that it pushes the limits of the genre to the point of
exaggerated humor. The ironic reiteration of the abusive husband scenario in relation
to both the werewolf and human is also loaded with ambivalence. As with much of
Carter’s fiction, the range of tone, humor, irony, and citationality create an elusive
ideological game. Hopper devotes an extended section to the intricacies of Carter and
Jordan’s coded messages about the unconscious. I would maintain, however, that it is
not only the reflection that is relevant, but also the manner in which the spectator is
drawn into such reflection and the unease that results from methods that challenge
categories, expectations, or even the perception of a satisfactory ideological message.
The film, however imperfect, fosters many ranges of ambivalence. For example, the
granny figure warning her granddaughter about men who are hairy on the inside and
whose eyebrows meet in the middle, constitutes a humoristic reprisal of Perrault’s
message about being careful of “wolves.”4 Similarly, when the grandmother’s head is
knocked off by the wolf-man, the uncertain message conveyed by the scene is openly
displayed, particularly when the wolf’s tongue protrudes in the fashion of horror films.
Zipes’s interpretation of the scene reflects its potential for mixed reaction or
interpretation: “To a certain extent, the film ‘justifies’ the werewolf’s devouring of the
bigoted grandmother, whose aggressive storytelling is antiquated and needs to be
replaced by her granddaughter’s” (150). An aura of irony is indeed evident when the
grandmother asks for a kiss from Rosaleen in exchange for her “storytelling.” This
accentuates the ambiguity surrounding the grandmother’s later murder, particularly in
its parodic citation of horror film devices. The scene suggests multiple layers of irony
and affect.
26 The ending of the film is where Carter’s role as an author is complicated, and it
certainly provokes some of the strongest reactions in critics. Jordan’s film ends with a
pack of dogs running through the house and crashing through a painting in Rosaleen’s
bedroom into the realm of reality represented by the frame story. Rosaleen appears to
wake up screaming in terror as the world of her dream invades what is to be
interpreted as her conscious mind, while in a voiceover Rosaleen recites a morality
similar to those at the end of Perrault’s tales:
Little girls this seems to say,
Never stop upon your way.

60
Never trust a stranger friend,

No one knows how it will end.
As you’re pretty so be wise,
Wolves may lurk in every guise.
Now, as then, ‘tis simple truth,
Sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth.
27 Angela Carter was out of the country, in Australia, when they filmed the ending, and
she speaks of being “furious” about it, wishing that Jordan had ended with the more
ambiguous image of the feral child and the reddening flower. “When I went to the
screening I sat with Neil and I was enjoying the film very much and thinking that it had
turned out so well—just as I had hoped. Until the ending which I couldn’t believe—I was
so upset, I said, ‘You’ve ruined it.’ He was apologetic” (Carter Interview Carroll). The
ending in the screenplay involves Rosaleen [Alice in the screenplay] diving into the
floorboards:
ALICE stands up on the bed. She looks down at the floor below the bed. She bounces
a little on the bed, as if testing its springs. A long howl can be heard – this time
from somewhere beyond the open door.
ALICE suddenly springs off the bed, up into the air, as if off a diving-board. She
curls, in a graceful jack-knife and plummets towards the floor. The floor parts. It is
in fact water. She vanishes beneath it.
The floor ripples, with the aftermath of her dive. Gradually it settles back into plain
floor again. (244)5
28 However, Jordan couldn’t manage this ending because of the limits of special effects at
the time, and claimed that the screaming Rosaleen fosters an equal amount of
ambivalence. Jack Zipes condemns the ending, seeing it as a “revolting contradiction
that belies the screenplay” (149). It is, perhaps, where the film departs most drastically
from the space Carter describes as being “about the deep roots of our sexual beings”
(Carter Interview Marxism 22), a realm her work seeks to explore, rather than condemn
through the representation of pure terror.
29 If Carter’s work fosters ambivalence, it is perhaps because Carter was doubtful about
the potential of art to make clear-cut changes: “I don’t think art is as important as all
that and I don’t think you can do all that much with fiction” (Carter Interview Marxism
22), demonstrating a consciousness of the diffuse nature of politics of and in art.
Jacques Rancière in addressing the question of aesthetics and politics, speaks of the
capacity of art to “frame” a “space of presentation” with its own “specific space-time”:
Art is not, in the first instance, political because of the messages and sentiments it
conveys concerning the state of the world. Neither is it political because of the
manner in which it might choose to represent society’s structures, or social groups,
their conflicts or identities. It is political because of the very distance it takes with
respect to these functions, because of the type of space and time that it institutes,
and the manner in which it frames this time and peoples this space. (Rancière 23)
30 Carter’s ironic citationality, when played out via different media, speaks of such
framing. The wolf tales, from their initial re-performance in Carter’s The Bloody
Chamber, through their intermedial metamorphoses, occupy various times and spaces,
thus allowing voices behind elusive palimpsests to emerge, even the voices of Freudian
appropriations of the tale (Bettelheim), or of feminist revisionists that have come to
light in contemporary perspectives about the tale.
31 Carter’s wolf tales in their intermedial trajectories thus set forth “space-times” that
frame common experience.6 When questioned about the film in Marxism Today in 1985,

61
Carter comments on how “The Thatcherite censorship certainly found it subtly

offensive. They couldn’t put their finger on it but they knew something was wrong”
(Carter Interview Marxism 22), reflecting a sense of what Rancière refers to as the
“intolerable” in and of images. It is perhaps in the shifting nature of this “intolerable,”
in the multiple forms of aesthetic “rub” in Carter’s intermedial performances that the
reader/listener/spectator ultimately engages with Carter’s politics.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bacchilega, Cristina. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment. 1975. London: Penguin, 1991.
Butler, Robert Olen. From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction. New York: Grove Press,
2005.
Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber. 1979. New York: Penguin, 1993.
---. The Curious Room. Ed. Mark Bell. 1996. London: Vintage, 1997.
---. “The Granada, Tooting.” 1992. Shaking a Leg. Ed. Jenny Uglow. London: Chatto & Windus, 1997.
400.
---. Interview. Marxism Today. January 1985. 20-22.
---. Interview by Rosemary Carroll. BOMB 17/Fall 1986. Web. http://bombsite.com/issues/17/

articles/821. Retrieved 28 May 2011.
---. Introduction. The Virago Book of Fairy Tales. Ed. Carter, Angela. London: Virago, 1990. ix-xxii.
---. Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Other Classic Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault. 1977. London:
Vintage, 2008.
---. The Sadeian Woman. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.
---. “Preface to Come Unto These Yellow Sands.” 1978. The Curious Room. Ed. Mark Bell. 1996. London:
Vintage, 1997. 497-502.
Clapp, Susannah. Introduction. 1993. Carter, Angela. American Ghosts and Old World Wonders.
London: Vintage, 1994. ix-xi.
---. Introduction. Carter, Angela. The Curious Room. Ed. Mark Bell. 1996. London: Vintage, 1997. vii-
x.
Crofts, Charlotte. ‘Anagrams of Desire’: Angela Carter’s Writing for Radio, Film, and Television.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.
Dare, Michael. “In the Company of Neil Jordan: Teaching Little Girls Not to be Afraid of Wolves.”
L.A. Weekly. April 19, 1985. Web. 10 May 2011. http://www.dareland.com/emulsionalproblems/
jordan.htm. Retrieved 10 May 2011.

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Hopper, Keith. “Hairy on the Inside: Re-Visiting Neil Jordan's ‘The Company of Wolves.’ The
Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 29, No. 2, Irish Cinema / Le cinéma irlandais (Fall, 2003),
17-26. Published by: Canadian Journal of Irish Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/
25515470. Retrieved 27 April 2011.
Louvel, Liliane. Le Tiers pictural. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010.
Perrault, Charles. Contes. Paris: Gallimard, 1981.
Rancière, Jacques. Aesthetics and its Discontents. 2004. Trans. Steven Corcoran. Malden, MA: Polity
Press, 2009.
Tatar, Maria, Ed. The Classic Fairy Tales. New York: Norton & Co, 1999.
Warner, Marina. From The Beast to the Blond: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. 1994. London: Vintage,
1995.
Wheatley, David. Interview by Cristina Bacchilega. “In the Eye of the Fairy Tale: Corinna Sargood
and David Wheatley Talk about Working with Angela Carter.” Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale. Ed.
Danielle M. Roemer and Cristina Bacchilega. Detroit Michigan: Wayne State University Press,
2001. 225-241.
Zipes, Jack. The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy Tale Films. New York: Routledge,
2011.
The Company of Wolves. Dir. Neil Jordan. Prod. Stephen Woolley. Screenplay by Angela Carter and
Neil Jordan. Palace Productions, 1984. Special edition DVD with a commentary by Neil Jordan. ITC
Entertainment.
NOTES
1. Cf. also the last paragraph of Robert Olen Butler’s “Cinema of the Mind” in the present volume.
2. “Dans ces ‘machines obscures’ que nous sommes, joue la dynamique du tiers pictural :
mouvement, énergie qui entraîne une perturbation, un surplus de sens et d’affect, une rêverie
qui danse entre les deux. Ni l’un ni l’autre, il est l’un et l’autre en tours et retours de l’image. Il
s’agit vraiment d’une modalité qui est de l’ordre du vivant, du mouvement, du désir, de
l’expérience ressentie, de l’événement au sens de ce qui advient : une opération aussi, une
performance”. (260)
3. “I am interested in the way people make sense, or try to make sense, of their experience and
mythology is part of that, after all. I’m a Freudian, in that sense, and some others, too. But I see
my business, the nature of my work, as taking apart mythologies, in order to find out what basic,
human stuff they are made of in the first place” (Carter Interview Carroll).
4. MORALITÉ
On voit ici que de jeunes enfants,
Surtout de jeunes filles
Belles, bien faites, et gentilles,
Font très mal d’écouter toute sorte de gens,
Et que ce n’est pas chose étrange,
S’il en est tant que le Loup mange.
Je dis le Loup, car tous les Loups
Ne sont pas de la même sorte ;
Il en est d’une humeur accorte,
Sans bruit, sans fiel et sans courroux,

63
Qui privés, complaisants et doux,

Suivent les jeunes Demoiselles
Jusque dans les maisons, jusque dans les ruelles ;
Mais hélas ! qui ne sait que ces Loups doucereux,
De tous les Loups sont les plus dangereux.
Perrault (145)
English Translation:
From this story one learns that children,
Especially young girls,
Pretty, well-bred, and genteel,
Are wrong to listen to just anyone,
And it’s not at all strange,
If a wolf ends up eating them.
I say a wolf, but not all wolves
Are exactly the same.
Some are perfectly charming,
Not loud, brutal, or angry,
But tame, pleasant, and gentle,
Following young ladies
Right into their homes, into their chambers,
But watch out if you haven’t learned that tame wolves
Are the most dangerous of all.
(Translated by Maria Tatar)
5. There is much ambiguity surrounding the main character’s name in the screenplay where
Rosaleen appears as the alter ego of Alice. In the film, Alice is Rosaleen’s sister, and Rosaleen is
the main character’s name throughout. This takes away a reflection on identity that would have
amplified the puzzle of relations in the film.
6. “Fairy tales are part of the oral tradition of Europe. They were simply the fiction of the poor,
the fiction of the illiterate. And they’re very precisely located. [...] the circumstances of the
stories are simply transformed accounts of ordinary people’s lives. It’s something to do with
Western Europe that these stories have gone into the bourgeois nursery and have been
dissociated from the mainstream of culture.” (Carter Interview Marxism 22)
ABSTRACTS
La traduction des contes de Charles Perrault publiée par Carter en 1977 est connu de tous, car
c’est à partir de ce moment-là qu’elle s’est engagée dans l’écriture de The Bloody Chamber (1979),
un recueil de contes de fées révisionnistes publié concomitamment avec The Sadeian Woman: An
Exercise in Cultural History (1979), une appropriation féministe des idées du Marquis de Sade. Trois
contes tirés de The Bloody Chamber, “The Werewolf,” “The Company of Wolves” et “Wolf Alice,”
ont été adaptés ultérieurement pour la radio et pour le cinéma. Le conte du « Petit Chaperon
Rouge » (AT 333) sert de lien unificateur pour ces trois contes dans une adaptation pour la radio
BBC en 1980 (The Company of Wolves, réalisé par Glyn Dearman), et dans le film, A Company of
Wolves, réalisé par Neil Jordan en 1984. Dans cet article je montrerai dans quelle mesure ces
adaptations manifestent sous des formes différentes le potentiel troublant du « terrorisme de

64
l’imagination » qu’attribue Carter à Sade. En effet, Cartet transforme l’espace illusoire de la

lecture, l’espace de l’écoute de la radio, et l’espace visuel de l’écran cinématographique en
champs de réflexion complexe. Dans leurs transformations intermédiales respectives, ces trois
contes construisent des trajectoires à partir des spécificités de chaque médium. Ainsi ils
préservent un des effets dominants de la fiction de Carter, à savoir le jeu sur les attentes du
lecteur/spectateur afin de le provoquer à différents niveaux. Cet article abordera cet effet
politique qui persiste à travers les métamorphoses intermédiales de l’esthétique idéologique de
Carter.
AUTHORS
MICHELLE RYAN-SAUTOUR
Michelle Ryan-Sautour is Maître de Conférences (Associate Professor) at the Université d’Angers,
France where she is director of the short story section of the CRILA research group. Her research
focus is the speculative fiction and short stories of Angela Carter and Rikki Ducornet with a
special emphasis on authorship, reading pragmatics, game theory, and gender. She has published
in Marvels and Tales, Journal of the Short Story in English, Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines, and in
several edited collections.

65
The Aesthetics of Revealing/

Concealing in “The Killers” by
Ernest Hemingway and in its
Adaptation by Robert Siodmak
1 Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers” was first published in Scribner’s Magazine in March
1927, then again in the same year in the collection Men Without Women, during the
“roaring twenties” when prohibition and prosperity went paradoxically hand in hand.
It is a crime story whose theme Hemingway did not extensively pursue but which
influenced writers of the hard-boiled school of crime-writing such as Dashiell Hammett
whose Maltese Falcon was published only three years after “The Killers” in 1930. And it
was the crime story that interested Robert Siodmak, a Hollywood film director of
German descent, influenced by German expressionism and who, though virtually
unknown to the general public today, actively participated in developing in the 1940’s
what later became known as the “film noir” genre. Anthony Slide provides the
following useful definition of the genre:
The term [film noir] was used to designate a group of films that was different from
the usual crime and gangster films, both visually and structurally. Visually, the
high-key lighting used in most Hollywood films was replaced by a repeated use of
low-key lighting, so that the screen was often literally in the dark. Structurally, the
redemptive elements of the gangster and crime film–the police win; the city is
cleaned up; the gangster dies–are replaced by a narrative in which no one is able to
win, especially not the hero. (73)
2 Siodmak entitled his 1946 adaptation of Hemingway’s story The Killers. Its status as a
film noir masterpiece makes it a compatible companion to Hemingway’s story and the
dynamics created between the two works makes them worthy of study. Such, as we
know, is not always the case: excellent stories can be adapted into mediocre films, just
as excellent films can be made from less than perfect short stories.

66
3 The aim of this article is to look at the short story “The Killers” as a striking example of
Hemingway’s elliptical style, a paradigm of modern short story writing and its
aesthetics of implicitness;1 then to see how Siodmak’s film noir fills in the gaps of
Hemingway’s story and how the detective figure, in his investigation and attempt to
make sense of what is unsaid, is emblematic of the reader of the short story in quest of
meaning, but also how the aesthetics of film noir, an aesthetics of revealing and
concealing, is in fact akin to the aesthetics of the modern short story: both film noir and
short story withhold information from the reader/spectator and progressively provide
it, or not.2
4 Hemingway was able to define very early in his career the style that interested him and
that would become his hallmark. “Out of Season,” published in 1923, was written on his
“new theory” according to which “you could omit anything [like the character hanging
himself] and the omitted part would strengthen the story”. 3 In Death in the Afternoon, he
proposed the analogy of the iceberg that would give its name to “the iceberg theory”:
If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit
things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have
a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The
dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.
(169)
5 “The Killers” offers abundant examples of such omissions. Omitted information is
withheld information and withholding information is a device used to create dramatic
tension, both at the diegetic and the extra-diegetic levels, and in the case of this crime
story, to create a threatening atmosphere.
6 As is the case in most short stories, the plot of “The Killers” is limited, as is the number
of characters. The plot is as follows: Two men enter Henry’s lunch-room and, observed
by Nick Adams seated inside, order their evening meal. After having been served, by
George, the meal prepared by Sam, the two men threateningly sequester Nick and Sam
before announcing that they intend to kill Ole Andreson, a customer of the lunch-room
whom they plan to shoot when he comes in for supper. Once they are convinced that
Ole will not show up, they leave the lunch-room. Nick goes to Ole and tries to warn him
of the danger, but Ole fatalistically abandons himself to the idea that his death is now
inevitable.
7 The story begins in medias res, so with very little contextualization: “The door of
Henry’s lunch-room opened and two men came in. They sat down at the counter” (43). 4
No description is given either of the geographical situation of the lunch-room, of the
lunch-room itself or of the two men. In fact the story contains few descriptions, either
of characters or setting, and the objective observations of the narrator–whom Genette
identifies as an external focalizer5–reveal no information about the feelings of the
characters. Indeed, in his definition of external focalization, Genette calls attention to
an observation made by Michel Raimond and establishes a link between mystery and
the use of external focalization: “Michel Raimond has rightly observed that in the
adventure story ‘in which mystery is a crucial element,’ the author ‘doesn’t
immediately reveal to the reader all he knows’ and indeed many adventure stories
begin with external focalization” (207, my translation). 6 In “The Killers,” the very
limited number of narrated passages contain little more than objective stage-direction-
like indications defining the characters’ movements. Very few adjectives or adverbs are
used to interpret the facts:

67
George put the two platters, one of ham and eggs, the other of bacon and eggs, on
the counter. (45)
The little man walked after Nick and Sam, the cook, back into the kitchen. (46)
The door from the street opened. A street-car motorman came in. (48)
George had cooked the sandwich, wrapped it up in oiled paper, put it in a bag,
brought it in, and the man had paid for it and gone out. (48)
The cook opened the door from the kitchen when he heard Nick’s voice. (52)
8 Only three manifestations of a narrator’s subjectivity appear in the story. They appear
in the form of comparisons:
Their faces were different, but they were dressed like twins. (44, my emphasis)
[Al] was like a photographer arranging for a group picture. (47, my emphasis)
George watched them, through the window, pass under the arc-light and cross the
street. In their tight overcoats and derby hats they looked like a vaudeville team. (49,
my emphasis)
9 The comparison in the last excerpt could of course be attributed to George as he is the
focalizer in this passage, but for our purposes the effect is the same: subjectivity is
limited.
10 The short story is almost completely composed of dialogue, text which is unmediated
by a narrator. Reporting clauses are often omitted before or after the direct speech,
leaving the speaker unidentified, often pushing to the reader’s limits the amount of
omitted information that can be tolerated, as the following example illustrates:
‘What’s the idea?’ George asked.
‘None of your damn business,’ Al said. ‘Who’s out in the kitchen?
‘The nigger.’
‘What do you mean the nigger?’
‘The nigger that cooks.’
‘Tell him to come in.’
‘What’s the idea?’
‘Tell him to come in.’
‘Where do you think you are?’
‘We know damn well where we are,’ the man called Max said. (46)
11 And as this excerpt also illustrates, with only three exceptions in the story the
reporting verbs are limited to “said” or “asked”. No adverbs are used to describe the
manner in which the character speaks or to indicate tone, not even “coldly” or “flatly”
for example which could have indicated an absence of feeling on the part of the
characters.
12 The title of the story potentially introduces characters–killers–and consequently a
possible event–killing. Yet the story itself begins with a description of the characters
entering the diner limited to “two men”, the plural implying that they are perhaps the
killers of the title, but only suggesting it. Though the aggressive language and
boisterous behavior of the two men as well as the “black overcoat” and “gloves”
continue this suggestion, confirmation of their intentions and therefore of their
identity as “the killers” of the title comes much later, five pages into the ten-page
story7 when they announce: “‘We’re going to kill a Swede’” (47). This information was
indeed withheld from the reader just as it was withheld from the other characters in
the story–Nick, George and Sam–in spite of their insistence: “‘What’s the idea?’” says
Nick when told to “go around on the other side of the counter,” a question that is
repeated twice and answered evasively either with “‘There isn’t any idea’” or “‘None of
your damn business’” (45). Similarly, when George asks the question “‘What are you

68
going to do with [Sam]?’”, Al, one of the “two men,” avoids providing information when
he answers: “‘Nothing […] What would we do to a nigger?’”, and when George insists,
asking: “‘What’s it all about?’”, the two men answer by returning the question: “What
do you think it’s all about?’” (46). This tantalizing game of cat and mouse, of
withholding vital information, is continued by Al and Max as they refuse this time to
explain the motive of their killing in spite of George’s repeated question “‘What are you
going to kill Ole Andreson for?’” (47). Max’s uninformative answer “‘We’re killing him
for a friend’” is nevertheless ironically considered by Al to be excessively informative as
he accuses his partner of “talk[ing] too goddam much.’”
13 “Talking too much” is precisely what Hemingway avoids as his open-ended story does
not allow the reader to know if the killers do indeed “kill the Swede.” George only
speculates in the end that “‘[t]hey’ll kill him’” (52), just as he only speculates about the
motive for the imagined crime: “‘Double-crossed somebody. That’s what they kill them
for’” (53). Ole’s ambiguous explanation for the motive of the potential crime–“‘I got in
wrong’”–does not allow Nick or the reader to determine if Ole indeed deserves
punishment or if he is simply the victim of circumstances.
14 This very threatening story proposes a world vision in which violence is latent,
unexplained and inevitable (Ole’s room at Hirsch’s rooming house is at “the end of a
corridor” [50]), possible at any time (the clock is omnipresent in the story though not
reliable) and in any place, even places as familiar as Henry’s lunch-room or Hirsch’s
rooming-house.
15 Robert Siodmak had several reasons to be attracted to Hemingway’s story. 8 First of all,
as previously mentioned, the text is made up almost solely of dialogue, making it ready
for performance and eliminating the difficulty of adapting narrative voice. Secondly, it
is a short story and offers the major advantage the short story does over a novel for
feature-film adaptation: it proposes a plot but offers the possibility of expansion; for
the filmmaker, adding material in the film-making process is potentially more
artistically satisfying than subtracting material. Finally, it is a potential crime story but
without a crime or a motive. The unanswered questions in the short story can then be
answered in the film adaptation, making the story’s implicit explicit. We could even
amusingly wonder if Siodmak was not applying Hemingway’s iceberg theory to his
adaptation, as the twelve-minute prologue of the ninety-eight-minute film, almost
exactly one-eighth of the film, is the mostly faithful transcription of “The Killers,” what
is “visible” to the reader (with two significant and necessary modifications: Ole is shot
to death by Al and Max as he lies in his room at the rooming-house after having
confessed to Nick: “Once I did something wrong,” a blatant admission of guilt that is
absent in the ambivalent “I got in wrong” of the story). The remaining eighty-six
minutes of the ninety-eight minute film, literally seven-eighths of the iceberg, are
Siodmak’s speculation on what might have motivated the crime, what Hemingway left
unsaid, what he left under the surface of the visible part of the iceberg. In adding this
material, Siodmak creates two new stories which Dominique Sipière describes in his
introduction to Les récits policiers au cinéma as being a specificity of crime fiction:
In the crime novel: Two stories coexist and interconnect: first of all the story which
led to the crime and which is often continued in the narrative; secondly the story of
the investigation, which constitutes the majority of the novel. The aim of the second
story (the investigation), is to reconstruct the first one (the crime). (4, my
translation)9

69
16 The primary device used by Siodmak to fill in the gaps left in Hemingway’s story and
explain the motivation for the crime (Ole’s murder) is the flashback, a device used as
well by most other filmmakers of the noir genre.10 In order to understand why Ole was
killed, his past has to be reconstructed. The “second story,” to use Sipière’s
terminology, features the detective whose role is to conduct the investigation and
perform this reconstruction using the collected information. Gilles Menegaldo
individually analysed the eleven flashbacks of Siodmak’s film and observed that “the
incursions into the past do not follow any specific pattern but […] concern more and
more important witnesses and […] lead us closer and closer to the truth […] with no
strict chronological ordering”(159). I would intensify the qualifier “important”
witnesses and suggest that the flashbacks progress from memories of innocent
witnesses to those of guilty witnesses: the investigator progressively penetrates the
criminal world, his work becomes more and more dangerous, a source of dramatic
tension in the film.
17 The second of the eleven flashbacks11 is one of the first to provide information about
Ole’s past though it portrays a scene from the very end of Ole’s secret life. The
character remembering is Queenie, the chamber maid who visited Ole’s room on the
night he learned that a woman had betrayed him, the film noir’s mandatory femme
fatale–Kitty–whom Siodmak introduced in spite of Hemingway’s story being published
in the collection entitled Men Without Women! Queenie, on the other hand, is not a
femme fatale and her complete innocence contrasts with the violence of the scene in
which Ole furiously ransacks the room and attempts suicide following the departure of
an unidentified woman. The technique used to introduce the flashback is one that is
repeated at regular intervals throughout the film to present eleven different episodes
of Ole’s life: a medium shot is used to frame and isolate the investigator and the
witness, the investigator questions the witness (here “Why did you think he’d killed
himself?”), a reverse shot is then used to frame the witness who is filmed close-up, a
dissolve and a sound bridge are used to move from present to past, the witness
remembers, a dissolve and sound bridge are used to return to the present. It should be
noted that the dissolve editing procedure was a relatively complex one in 1946. Using it
so extensively meant a certain mastery of technique which I will be referring to later.
18 The second point I would like to make concerning this expansion of the short story is
that the investigation is led by a private detective whose job is not only to question, but
also to interpret, to put the pieces together, and that he is emblematic in this respect of
the reader who constructs meaning by filling in the gaps. The detective’s search for
truth can be easily associated to the short story reader’s search for meaning, recreating
order from, if not chaos, then at least confusion. Denis Mellier has observed that the
“interpretative project of all detective stories can be considered as a metadiscourse on
writing, the text and reading” (12, my translation),12 but this fact seems to be
particularly relevant in the case of the reading of the modern short story. In The Killers,
Siodmak devotes three scenes to the reconstruction and interpretation of Ole’s past by
Reardon, the investigator.13 The scenes take place in the daytime, contrary to most of
the other scenes in the film, clearly a metaphor for understanding: Reardon sheds light
on the subject. The second of the scenes14 takes place in the office of the Company
director after Reardon has interrogated five characters (Siodmak added twelve
characters and dozens of extras to Hemingway’s story) whose witnessing appears in the
form of the flashbacks previously mentioned. This reconstruction scene comes after

70
eight flashbacks: Reardon is then putting into chronological order eight episodes
presented previously both to him and to the spectator in no chronological order. The
script is as follows, the numbers in parentheses corresponding to the order of the
flashbacks in the film:15
Reardon: This [the scarf] is the one that was used in that hold-up. (8)
Boss: How do you know that?
Reardon: Follow me. Take an ex-pug the name of Swede (3), falls for a girl named
Kitty Collins. (4) He takes a three-year rap for her. (5) When he gets out, he’s
brought into a robbery set-up through (7) an old-time thief named Charleston. (5)
There’s a girl present the night of the big pow-wow. Charleston wouldn’t name names
but my guess is that same Kitty Collins. (7)
Boss: Go on.
Reardon: The Prentiss Hat robbery was July 20th, 1940. (8) That same night the Swede
and an unidentified woman check into a small hotel in Atlantic City. Two days later
the woman takes a powder and the Swede tries to pile out a window. A chamber
maid saves his life and he’s grateful enough to leave her his insurance. (2)
Boss: That all?
Reardon: Just about. Until six years later we find the Swede in Brentwood. As far as
anyone knows, a filling-station attendant. Except, he’s waiting for some killers to
come and get him. (1) Nice of them to hang on to this (6) wasn’t it? Without it, I’d
have gone on about my business and the whole thing would have blown over. (my
emphasis)16
19 The contrast between the order of the flashbacks in the film and their order in the
reconstruction (8, 3, 4, 5, 7, 5, 7, 8, 2, 1, 6) is evidence of Reardon’s capacity to make
order out of confusion, his injunction “Follow me” signifying the complexity of the
undertaking.17 Reardon also makes it clear that he is filling in the gaps left in the
witnesses’ testimony: “Charleston wouldn’t name names but my guess is that same
Kitty Collins.”
20 But if Hemingway appreciated Siodmak’s adaptation as he apparently did, it was
probably not because Siodmak filled in the gaps. Hemingway said, once again: “the
omitted part would strengthen the story” (my emphasis). Hemingway’s appreciation was
perhaps due instead to Siodmak’s aesthetics of omitting, an aesthetics in which not
everything is revealed, the aesthetics, precisely, of the film noir: chiaroscuro. 18
21 Chronologically, Edward Hopper was inspired first by Hemingway’s story. He painted
“Nighthawks”19 in 1942, a painting which in turn inspired Siodmak for his own
adaptation of the story four years later. Both artists clearly took their cue from
Hemingway’s story, whose very limited number of descriptions are often devoted to
lighting (when not to the characters’ movements as mentioned previously), and
especially to the contrast between light and dark, already creating a chiaroscuro effect:
Outside it was getting dark. The street-lights came on outside the window. (43)
George watched them, through the window, pass under the arc-light and cross the
street. (49)
Outside the arc-light shone through the bare branches of a tree. Nick walked up the
street beside the car-tracks and turned at the next arc-light down a side-street. (50)
Nick walked up the dark street to the corner under the arc-light (52)
22 Siodmak used dramatic lighting techniques, as other German filmmakers of the
Expressionist movement had before him, not only to create a threatening mood, but
also as a means to formally reveal and conceal, to visually withhold information. The
techniques include the use of sharp contrasts between light and dark, of low-lighting
(whether natural or artificial, the light source provides minimal lighting: the moon, the

71
stars, a table lamp, a candle) and the use of shadows and silhouettes. In addition to the
major source of light, a small secondary light source may even be a detail used to
thematize light. Such techniques can often be seen as a means to visually represent
metaphors such as “to be left in the dark” or “to shed light on something.” Of course
black and white are the most appropriate “colors” for such treatment of light and they
provide a distanced and therefore irreal representation of reality, a feature which also
must have attracted Hemingway.20
23 A number of examples illustrate these techniques used in The Killers. In the establishing
shot of the diner’s exterior,21 an obvious allusion to Hopper’s painting, light sources are
both visible and invisible. The street lamp and the small outdoor light on the building
are visible, while the light behind the diner, whose source is not visible, creates more
light than the visible sources. This invisible source creates the shadows of the diner and
of the characters on the pavement in front of the diner. The silhouettes and the
shadows both reveal and conceal the characters: we see their contour, but not the
details within the contour. During the scene at the morgue following Ole’s shooting, 22
the source of light is a ceiling lamp which sheds light on the coroner who has the
knowledge about Ole’s death. Reardon and Nick Adams are still “in the dark,” as Gilles
Menegaldo has remarked (160). Their identity is first concealed (they are only
silhouettes and their backs are to the camera), then slowly revealed as they turn to face
the camera and come into the light.23 In the scenes of Ole’s funeral and the prison cell
occupied by Ole and Charleston,24 the light source is the moon and characters appear
once again either as silhouettes or with the same half-lit faces that Hopper features in
“Nighthawks.”
24 But certainly one of the most striking chiaroscuro images of The Killers comes within
the context of Lieutenant Lubinsky’s first flashback.
25 Ole has just lost his boxing match and though Lubinsky tries to encourage his friend,
Ole walks away alone into the brightly lit street.25 I consider this image as a paradigm of
the aesthetics of revealing and concealing in its defamiliarizing juxtaposition of light
and dark. It functions at several levels, first of all for the character himself. Ole has just
lost his fight and is forced to abandon his boxing career. His future is now a threatening
blank, unrevealed to him. The strong light into which he walks (too strong in fact to be
realistic) is paradoxically symbolic of the unknown and not of a revelation to the
character.26 Additionally, the light produces a silhouette, concealing the character’s
features, symbolizing his loss of identity. The blinding light is also proleptic of Ole’s
future blindness, his incapacity to see that he is being double-crossed by Kitty. For
Lubinsky, Ole’s friend, the light is also paradoxically the photographic negative of a
“black hole.” As Ole walks into the light, Lubinsky says “After that I didn’t see much of
Ole” (my emphasis). And for the spectator, the information about Ole that the flashback
was intended to provide is withheld.
26 The mastery of technique that is apparent in Siodmak’s use of chiaroscuro is visible in
Hemingway’s stories as well and also what many short story writers foreground when
they talk about their work.27 They work again and again to master the technique of
concision, of concealing and revealing, in which every word counts, honing the text
until it becomes a gem, similar to this gem proposed to the viewer by Robert Siodmak.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abouddahab, Rédouane (Guest editor). Journal of the Short Story in English, Special Issue Ernest
Hemingway. 49 (Autumn 2007). Angers: Presses Universitaires d’Angers.
---. “Scène américaine et scène textuelle: Hopper et Hemingway.” Les Cahiers du GRIMH 1 (2000):
235-250.
Bächler, Odile. “Origines et fonctions du flash-back dans le film policier américain.” Les récits
policiers au cinéma. Eds. Dominique Sipière and Gilles Menegaldo. Poitiers : Publications de la
licorne, 1999. 25-36.
Beegel, Susan. Hemingway’s Craft of Omission: Four Manuscript Examples. Ann Arbor: UMI Research
Press, 1988.
Brenner, Gerry. Concealments in Hemingway’s Works. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1983.
Chabrol, Marguerite. “De la nouvelle de Hemingway au film noir de Siodmak.” Suppléments, Les
Tueurs. Edition Collector Limitée, 2007.
Collinge-Germain, Linda. “Foreword: Writers’ Insight.” Journal of the Short Story in English Special
20th Anniversary Issue. 41 (Autumn 2003). Presses Universitaires d’Angers. 16-21.
Genette, Gérard. Figures III. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast (1964). London: Vintage, 2000.
---. Death in the Afternoon (1932). London: Vintage, 2000.
---. “The Killers”. Men Without Women (1927). London: Arrow Books, 2004. 43-53.
---. Selected Letters: 1917-1961. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner. 1981.
Hily-Mane, Geneviève. Le Style d’Ernest Hemingway: la plume et le masque. Paris: Presses

Universitaires de France, 1983.
Johnston, Kenneth G. The Tip of the Iceberg: Hemingway and the Short Story. Greenwood, Fla.:
Penkevill, 1987.
Krutnik, Frank. In a Lonely Street: film noir, genre, masculinity. London and New York: Routledge,
1991.
May, Charles E.. The Short Story, The Reality of Artifice. New York and London: Routledge, 2002.
Mellier, Denis. “L’impossibilité filmique de l’énigme policière.” Les récits policiers au cinéma. Eds.
Dominique Sipière and Gilles Menegaldo. Poitiers : Publications de la licorne, 1999. 9-24.
Menegaldo, Gilles. “Flashbacks in Film Noir.” Crime Fictions: subverted codes and new structures. Eds.
François Gallix and Vanessa Guignery. Paris : PU de la Sorbonne, 2004. 157-175.
Siodmak, Robert. The Killers (1946), Les Tueurs, Edition Collector Limitée, 2007.
Sipière, Dominique. “Avant-propos.” Les récits policiers au cinéma. Eds. Dominique Sipière and
Gilles Menegaldo. Poitiers: Publications de la licorne, 1999. 3-6.
Slide, Anthony. The New Historical Dictionary of the American Film Industry. Chicago, London: Fitzroy
Dearborn Publishers, 1998.

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NOTES
1. In his introduction to the JSSE Special Issue on Hemingway’s short stories, Rédouane
Abouddahab draws attention to studies devoted to Hemingway’s stylistic method (especially
Geneviève Hily-Mane’s Le Style d’Ernest Hemingway: la plume et le masque, 1983) and to specific
aspects of his writing style, including omission (G. Brenner, Concealments in Hemingway’s Works,
1983; K. Johnston, The Tip of the Iceberg: Hemingway and the Short Story, 1987; S. Beegel, Hemingway’s
Craft of Omission: Four Manuscript Examples 1988), (33) and includes in his bibliography
“Hemingway et l’écriture du silence”, Rédouane Abouddahab, 1999.
2. Contrary to Hemingway’s story, Siodmak’s film was produced after enforcement of the Hays
Code in 1934. Censorship is therefore also a potential source of discretion in the film, but one I
will not dwell on here.
3. Recounted in “Hunger Was Good Discipline.” A Moveable Feast (63). The idea was present in a
December 24th, 1925 letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald: “At that time […] I wanted to write a tragic story
without violence. So I didn’t put in the hanging. Maybe that sounds silly. I didn’t think the story
needed it.” (Selected Letters, 180-181).
4. All page numbers in the article refer to the 2004 Arrow Books Edition of the story.
5. “…external focalization [was] made popular in the 20s and 30s by Dashiel Hammett’s novels in
which the hero acts before us without our knowing his thoughts or feelings, and by certain short
stories by Hemingway, such as “The Killers” or even more so “Hills Like White Elephants” in
which discretion is pursued to the point of enigma (207, my translation). “…le récit à focalisation
externe, [fut] popularisé entre les deux guerres par les romans de Dashiel Hammett, où le héros
agit devant nous sans que nous soyons jamais admis à connaître ses pensées ou sentiments, et par
certaines nouvelles d’Hemingway, comme The Killers ou davantage encore Hills Like white Elephants
(Paradis Perdu), qui pousse la discrétion jusqu’à la devinette.”
6. “Michel Raimond remarque justement que dans le roman d’intrigue ou d’aventure, ‘où l’intérêt
naît du fait qu’il y a un mystère’, l’auteur ‘ne nous dit pas d’emblée tout ce qu’il sait’, et de fait un
grand nombre de romans d’aventures […] traitent leurs premières pages en focalisation externe.”
7. In the 2004 Arrow Books Edition of the story.
8. Several of these are mentioned in Marguerite Chabrol’s presentation of Hemingway’s story and
Siodmak’s film in the Bonus section of the Collector edition of The Killers.
9. “Dans le roman policier: Deux histoires coexistent et se croisent: d’abord celle qui a conduit au
crime, et qui se poursuit souvent dans le récit; ensuite celle de l’enquête, qui constitue l’essentiel
du récit proprement dit. La seconde histoire (l’enquête) a pour objet de reconstituer la première
(le crime).”
10. Anthony Slide remarks that “Flashbacks become crucial for film noir, as a mood of
hopelessness and fatality is established by beginning the film with the protagonist defeated […]
and then flashing back to see how this state was brought about” (73).
11. Time code 21.29 to 22.37 in the Collector edition of The Killers. All other references are to this
edition.
12. “On sait que le projet herméneutique de tout récit policier constitue l’abyme parfait où lire
un métadiscours sur l’écriture, le texte et la lecture.” Charles E. May, in his brief presentation of
Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” notes that the story is
“particularly interesting for its focus on the readerly interpretation of clues by the detective
figure” (145).
13. The spelling “Reardon” is as it appears in the film, on the investigator’s office door at 22.51
for example.
14. Time code 57.48 to 58.51.
15. Order of the flashbacks in the film by names of witnesses: 1) Nick Adams; 2) Mary-Ellen
Daugherty, the chamber maid; 3) Lieutenant Lubinsky; 4) Lily; 5) Lieutenant Lubinsky; 6)

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Charleston; 7) Charleston; 8) The newspaper article; 9) Blinky Franklin; 10) Blinky Franklin; 11)
Kitty Collins.
16. The spelling “Prentiss” is as it appears in the film, both in the newspaper clipping (55.21) and
on the gate at the scene of the robbery (55.33).
17. In his chapter “The ‘tough’ investigative thriller,” Frank Krutnik insists on the virility of the
investigator which this reconstruction exemplifies: “[Riordan’s] effectiveness as a masculine
investigator is signified by his success in constructing a coherent picture of the ‘truth’ from the
disordered network of clues” (115, 116).
18. An aesthetics which is complementary to the narrative structure of withholding described by
Odile Bächler in her essay “Origines et fonctions du flash-back dans le film policier américain”:
“In a crime film, placing the murder or the motivation for it in the past makes it possible to begin
the story with the investigation and to hide the murderer or the motive. Withholding
information is essential to the genre” (26, my translation). “Dans un film policier, placer le
meurtre ou le motif du meurtre dans ce qui est révolu permet de commencer le récit par
l’enquête et de cacher meurtrier ou motif. La rétention du savoir est essentielle au genre.”
It must also be observed that the absence of chronology in the flashbacks is an obstacle to
comprehension and though Reardon reconstructs the story, his oral account does not have the
power to completely override the impact that the visual representation of the events has had on
the viewer. The viewer must still construct meaning; Reardon’s reconstruction does not suffice.
19. “Nighthawks” portrays two men and a woman being waited on at a diner in the evening.
Contrast between light and dark is an essential feature of the painting. For a more detailed study
of the two works, see for example Rédouane Abouddahab, “Scène américaine et scène textuelle:
Hopper et Hemingway.”
20. The first films in color appeared in the late 1930’s.
21. Time code 2.00 to 2.15.
22. Time code 14.14 to 15.10.
23. In the morgue, Reardon lifts the sheet from Ole’s corpse. Though this is not an example of
chiaroscuro, it is an example of play on revealing/concealing. The corpse is revealed to the
investigator but concealed from the spectator.
24. Time codes 44.50 and 46.23 to 48.44 respectively
25. Time code 34.05 to 34.11. This still can be seen at the following address: https://
buddwilkins.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/thekillers1946_2.jpg.
26. …as well as being an interesting contrast to the Western’s more upbeat final image of the
cowboy riding off into the sunset.
27. See for example the anthology of interviews by short-story writers in the special issue of the
Journal of the Short Story n° 41.
ABSTRACTS
L’article étudie la nouvelle d’Ernest Hemingway « The Killers », paradigme de l’écriture
moderniste dans son usage de l’implicite, et l’adaptation filmique de Robert Siodmak. Le film de
Siodmak remplit les blancs de la nouvelle et met en scène une figure emblématique de la quête
du sens, le détective, figure à rapprocher du lecteur de la nouvelle moderniste. Néanmoins,
Siodmak adopte une esthétique du caché/montré (notamment le clair-obscur) proche de

75
l’esthétique de Hemingway. Ainsi film noir et nouvelle privent le spectateur/lecteur

d’information puis progressivement la divulguent, ou pas.
AUTHORS
LINDA COLLINGE-GERMAIN
Linda Collinge-Germain is an Associate Professor at the University of Angers where she teaches
English language and literature and is an active member of the Centre de Recherches
Interdisciplinaires en Langue Anglaise. She is the author of Beckett traduit Beckett: de Malone
meurt à Malone Dies, l’imaginaire en traduction (Droz, 2000), a study of Beckett as self-translator,
and has also published articles on the subject which have appeared in Samuel Beckett Today/
Aujourd’hui or thematic collections. Her areas of interest are the bilingual works of Samuel
Beckett, reception theory and more currently, cultural in-betweenness in short-story writing,
and film adaptations of short stories as a form of translation. She was co-editor of the Journal of
the Short Story in English from 1997 to 2012 and has been editor since 2012.

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Du texte à l’écran, deux avatars de

la Maison Usher au cinéma
Gilles Menegaldo
1 Le récit de Poe offre des possibilités de dramatisation visuelle en raison de sa structure

narrative très élaborée, articulée sur une progression subtile proche d’un parcours
initiatique. La première phase concerne l’arrivée d’un étranger dans un monde clos en
état d’équilibre instable ou plutôt soumis à un lent processus de dégradation comme le
signifie la fissure qui zèbre les murs de la maison de Roderick Usher. La confrontation
de cet étranger (qui est aussi le narrateur) avec Roderick, être fantasque, artiste
dévoyé, dernier représentant d’une lignée menacée de disparition, présente un
potentiel dramatique évident. Un autre motif susceptible de dramatisation concerne la
présence d’une héroïne emblématique en la personne de la sœur de Roderick,
Madeline, personnage fragile qui associe beauté et mortalité, à l’instar de la plupart des
femmes poesques. La notion de retour, de revenance a déjà fait l’objet d’une
exploitation systématique au cinéma à travers le motif du mort-vivant, vampire ou
zombie. De même, la mort de Madeline, enterrée vivante, et son retour spectaculaire
sous une forme effrayante se prêtent à une mise en scène théâtralisée. En outre, la
dialectique de l’apparition/disparition participe du dispositif cinématographique lui-
même, de sa dimension magique, exploitée depuis les origines par des cinéastes comme
Georges Méliès et d’autres. Le cinéma implique un double processus : d’abord
l’absorption de la « réalité » (le pro-filmique) par la caméra, sa transformation en
images mouvantes et la projection de ces images sur un écran ; ensuite, la captation du
spectateur, saisi par l’effet fascinatoire des images et des sons, placé dans un état de
semi-conscience, voisin d’un état onirique, proche de l’état hypnagogique dont parle le
narrateur dans « Le puits et le pendule ».
2 Un autre aspect essentiel du récit concerne le paysage, identifié à un organisme mort
(paysage-cadavre), qui affecte le psychisme du narrateur et génère un sentiment
d’oppression et de malaise, une mélancolie qui ne peut être apaisée. Le point focal de ce
microcosme est l’étang miroir dont émane une énergie négative, mortifère. La maison
elle-même est caractérisée de manière très visuelle. Son isolement, son caractère
dégradé, renvoient à l’archétype gothique si souvent exploité au cinéma. La décoration

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intérieure de la maison illustre les traits principaux de l’esthétique poesque : forme

géométrique des salles, mobilier, effets de lumière (rôle des vitraux colorés,
candélabres, rideaux, draperies). Ces différents éléments constituent un défi
intéressant pour un décorateur. Le motif de la maison-personnage, l’approche
anthropomorphique privilégiée par Poe afin d’établir une relation analogique entre la
maison et son propriétaire, implique la mise en place d’un réseau d’échanges qui
peuvent donner lieu à des équivalents visuels mis en relation par le montage alterné ou
parallèle. Ainsi, Epstein met en place un complexe réseau d’images associant le
paysage, la maison et le personnage d’Usher. De fait, la nature torturée, énigmatique de
ce personnage peut donner lieu à une performance et constitue un défi pour un
comédien désireux d’en donner une incarnation forte à l’écran, ce qui sera le cas de
Jean Debucourt et de Vincent Price. La nature hypersensible de Roderick Usher appelle
l’idée de l’expressivité, de l’émotion, et de leur transcription visuelle, ce qui est bien
compris par les cinéastes, aussi bien Epstein que Corman qui propose cependant une
version sensiblement plus libre, mais aussi plus illustrative de la nouvelle de Poe.
3 Il s’agit donc ici de confronter deux visions cinématographiques de la nouvelle
canonique de Poe. L’une, celle de d’Epstein, se fonde sur des affinités profondes entre le
cinéaste et l’écrivain, mais s’inscrit aussi dans un mouvement avant-gardiste visant à
célébrer la puissance d’évocation poétique et onirique du médium cinématographique.
L’autre, celle de Corman, relève d’un cinéma populaire à petit budget et son ambition
théorique est moindre, mais elle manifeste de vrais choix thématiques et formels qu’il
conviendra de mettre en lumière.
I. La Chute de la maison Usher, Jean Epstein, 1928

4 Le film de Jean Epstein réalisé en 1928 n’est pas à proprement parler une adaptation de
la nouvelle de Poe, mais plutôt, comme le sous-titre l’indique, une « variation » sur
quelques motifs poesques, à partir de deux textes majeurs : « La chute de la maison
Usher « et « Le Portrait ovale ». Il s’agit aussi d’un film d’avant-garde, une œuvre quasi
expérimentale proposant une réflexion esthétique et philosophique sur des
problématiques qui sont également au cœur du projet de Poe.
5 Epstein est un fin connaisseur de l’œuvre et de ses concepts philosophiques. Ceci se
manifeste dans ses écrits théoriques où il fait aussi référence au pouvoir obsédant de la
fiction poesque. Un de ses commentaires illustre cette fascination : « L’horreur chez
Poe est due davantage aux vivants qu’aux morts et la mort elle-même y est une sorte de
charme. La vie aussi est un charme. La vie et la mort ont la même substance, la même
fragilité ».1
6 Dans la mesure où Poe est intéressé (voire obsédé) par le brouillage de la frontière
entre la vie et la mort, le sujet et l’objet, l’organique et le mécanique, Epstein aura
recours à la magie du cinéma (cadrage, mouvements de caméra, angle de prises de vues,
montage, effets spéciaux) pour en donner une équivalence. Les objets filmés doivent,
selon lui, acquérir une sorte d’intériorité, une qualité spirituelle. Ceci peut faire écho au
texte de Poe qui évoque un paysage sentient (doué de sensations). De la même manière,
la caméra d’Epstein confère la vie aux choses inanimées et vise à transmettre au
spectateur un sentiment de l’interaction entre l’humain et l’inhumain.
7 Le film propose une version qui, loin de s’en tenir à une adaptation littérale, combine
deux récits de Poe, et fait aussi référence à d’autres textes, directement ou

78
indirectement, par l’image ou les cartons qui s’affichent à l’écran. Ainsi la mention du
nom de Ligeia au début du film, dans un insert sur le bas d’un cadre de tableau (Ligeia,
Lady Usher : 1717), permet d’associer Madeline à d’autres héroïnes poesques dans une
sorte de filiation textuelle qui reduplique la filiation de la lignée. Plus tard, l’ami de
Roderick Usher baptisé Allan (et qui n’a plus un statut de narrateur) lit un texte qui
n’est autre que le poème de Poe intitulé « Silence ». Au plan visuel, on peut aussi noter
la présence insolite d’un chat noir au pied d’une armure, clin d’œil évident de la part
d’Epstein à l’attention du spectateur averti. On remarque également la présence
d’oiseaux dans des motifs décoratifs : le bas du manteau de la cheminée représente un
oiseau aux ailes déployées, le portrait de Madeline est inscrit dans un cadre doré,
agrémenté de motifs baroques, entouré d’ailes d’oiseaux. Plus tard dans le film, un
hibou insolite est associé, à l’instar du corbeau du célèbre poème, au moment de la
mort de Madeline. La présence des horloges et du motif du pendule rappelle des thèmes
récurrents chez Poe, notamment dans « Le masque de la mort rouge » et « Le puits et le
pendule ». En outre, dans le script écrit par Epstein en 1951 en vue d’une adaptation
parlante du récit qui n’a jamais pu être réalisée, l’auteur introduit explicitement cette
fois le motif du corbeau. Il utilise aussi deux autres textes de Poe (que le narrateur lit à
Madeline pour apaiser sa mélancolie). L’un de ces textes est « Le diable dans le beffroi »,
nouvelle qui concerne aussi la manipulation du temps et la relation entre l’ordre et le
chaos et dont Epstein modifie considérablement le contenu. L’autre est « Lionnerie »,
nouvelle beaucoup moins connue qui appartient au cycle des contes grotesques. La fin
du script est d’ailleurs plus conforme au texte de Poe que la version de 1928, puisqu’elle
se termine par la mort du frère et de la sœur enlacés. Seul Allan parvient à s’échapper.
8 Le scénario du film réalisé, outre l’association avec « Le Portrait ovale » (qui donne lieu
à l’une des scènes les plus spectaculaires du film), se différencie clairement du texte de
Poe. Epstein ajoute un prologue : Allan, le voyageur, n’arrive pas directement au
domaine d’Usher, mais fait halte dans une auberge voisine pour s’enquérir d’un
véhicule qui le conduirait à la maison le soir même. Ce cadre narratif rappelle le
Nosferatu (1922) et constitue un hommage à Murnau. Il est facile d’établir une analogie
entre le voyageur qui insiste pour être conduit à la maison Usher de nuit alors que les
villageois rencontrés à l’auberge expriment leur réticence et refusent même son
argent, et le personnage de Jonathan Hutter qui souhaite se rendre directement au
château de Nosferatu, faisant fi des avertissements prodigués par l’aubergiste. On peut
aussi remarquer le rôle similaire joué par le cocher qui accepte d’emmener Allan à
Usher, mais refuse de le conduire jusqu’à la maison et cédant à la panique, s’enfuit en
jetant à terre les bagages du voyageur. Ironiquement, ce personnage est enveloppé
dans une longue cape similaire à celle qu’arbore le vampire déguisé en cocher dans le
film de Murnau. Cet épisode met en relief la notion de frontière, de limite à ne pas
transgresser. La séquence de l’auberge, traitée de manière réaliste à l’inverse du reste
du film, entretient le suspense et suggère un élément de crainte, exprimé par la
réticence des habitants du lieu (en dépit de l’argent offert) et renforcé par l’attitude de
la jeune femme présente, le regard chargé d’appréhension et d’épouvante : son visage, à
demi déformé par l’angoisse, les yeux hagards et fous, s’inscrit dans une fenêtre
fonctionnant comme écran secondaire, mettant en abyme le dispositif filmique lui-
même. Ce visage exprime un sentiment de terreur intense et devient lui-même objet
d’épouvante pour le spectateur qui est seul à le voir.
9 Cette référence à Nosferatu est reprise un peu plus tard avec le plan insistant sur le
cercueil transporté à l’intérieur du château. Cette scène évoque l’arrivée du vampire

79
portant son cercueil sous le bras dans les rues de la petite ville de Wismar alors qu’il est
à la recherche de Nina, sa future victime. Enfin Epstein utilise, comme Murnau dans la
scène de la traversée de la forêt, une image en négatif, lors de la séquence de la mort de
Madeline. En outre, Epstein, grâce à ce prologue, maintient le suspense et trouve un
équivalent visuel du célèbre incipit de la nouvelle : « During the whole of a dull, dark,
and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in
the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract
of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within
view of the melancholy House of Usher ».2 Il donne cependant à voir au spectateur la
maison Usher et ses habitants, bien avant qu’Allan ne la découvre. Le réalisateur a donc
recours à une double stratégie de retardement partiel et d’anticipation avant l’arrivée
d’Allan au château, ce qui crée un écart en termes de savoir entre le spectateur et le
personnage.
10 Le personnage d’Allan est placé d’emblée en position d’infériorité en raison de son
manque d’informations mais aussi de son manque de contrôle sur la situation. A
l’inverse, le narrateur de Poe est présenté comme un personnage fiable qui utilise ses
compétences médicales et ses facultés analytiques pour proposer un diagnostic
concernant la maladie qui affecte son ami Usher. Dans le film d’Epstein, Allan est
beaucoup plus âgé que Roderick Usher. Il est présenté comme un quasi-vieillard qui
s’efforce de jouer un rôle protecteur vis-à-vis de son ami. Il incarne une sorte de figure
paternelle bienveillante (et quelque peu naïve) plutôt qu’un alter ego. Il empêche Usher
d’agresser le médecin (figure inquiétante, assez proche du Dr Mabuse de Lang) qui tient
à clouer le cercueil de Madeline et il tente de consoler son ami après l’enterrement de
celle-ci en lui faisant la lecture. Cependant, outre l’évocation répétée de sa sensibilité
excessive au froid et au vent, il est surtout présenté comme étant dépourvu
partiellement de deux facultés sensorielles essentielles : la vue et l’audition. Il se situe
ainsi aux antipodes de l’hypersensibilité d’Usher qu’Epstein traduit par la gestuelle
agitée et les mimiques expressives de l’acteur.
11 Allan est associé de manière insistante à un cornet acoustique signalant sa difficulté à
entendre (Usher doit lui crier dans l’oreille). La surdité est aussi évoquée par des jeux
de scène. Allan est animé de gestes compulsifs, il nettoie le cornet, enfonce son doigt
dans son oreille comme pour nettoyer celle-ci, la rendre plus efficace. Un deuxième
accessoire est la loupe qu’il utilise systématiquement. La loupe a une fonction
ambivalente. Elle permet un examen attentif, rationnel et méthodique de la réalité et
facilite l’accès au savoir. On voit en effet, à plusieurs reprises, Allan compulser des
manuscrits anciens. En même temps, le recours à cet instrument suggère une
déficience. Allan apparaît donc, en contraste avec Roderick Usher, comme celui qui voit
mal et surtout n’entend pas. En effet seul Usher semble être sensible à certains
phénomènes, notamment lors du retour de Madeline. Cette caractérisation quelque peu
négative de l’ami est accentuée par un traitement du personnage qui confine parfois au
burlesque, en particulier dans la scène où il tente de faire venir à lui un petit chien qui
s’enfuit, effrayé, à son approche (rare moment d’humour dans le film).
12 A l’inverse, Usher (Jean Debucourt), apparaît comme une forte personnalité. Il combine
en fait les caractéristiques des deux personnages dont s’inspire Epstein, Roderick
Usher, mais aussi le peintre du « Portrait Ovale ». D’où l’ascendant qu’il exerce sur
Madeline. Cependant, le personnage est aussi un être mélancolique, à l’identité duelle
(bi-part being poesque), alternant des phases d’enthousiasme frénétique et de

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dépression. Il est ainsi représenté dans un état d’indolence quand il joue de la guitare,
mais, lorsqu’il peint, il est animé au contraire d’une furieuse énergie créatrice.
13 Usher apparaît aussi comme un homme de savoir. Les cartons font référence à son
intérêt pour le magnétisme, ce qui laisse supposer qu’il utilise ses pouvoirs pour faire
revenir Madeline d’entre les morts. Ainsi, il veille auprès de sa dépouille avec un livre
sur le magnétisme.3 Usher est donc beaucoup plus actif qu’il ne l’est dans la nouvelle de
Poe où il semble4 subir les évènements. Loin d’être une victime passive, il tente
d’exercer un contrôle sur le réel et s’efforce d’empêcher le clouage du cercueil comme
s’il anticipait la possible résurrection de Madeline. Une autre différence essentielle se
justifie par l’emprunt au « Portrait Ovale ». Madeline n’est plus la sœur mais la femme
de Roderick Usher, ce qui gomme certaines ambiguïtés présentes dans la nouvelle
quant à une éventuelle relation incestueuse. Cette modification peut aussi s’expliquer
par la volonté du réalisateur d’atténuer certaines résonances autobiographiques.
14 Ce qui est plus perturbant pour le spectateur, c’est la transformation de la fin du récit.
Madeline revient d’outre-tombe mais loin de s’effondrer, cadavre entraînant son frère
dans la mort, elle est sauvée par Usher et tous deux assistent à distance, en compagnie
du narrateur, à l’incendie de la maison en un « happy end » peu convaincant et qui
fausse l’interprétation de la nouvelle. Celle-ci en effet repose sur l’idée de la fusion de la
maison, et des jumeaux Usher et Madeline. Le narrateur, à demi-initié seulement, est
exclu du processus, mais, de ce fait, il peut raconter son histoire. Cette dissociation
finale narrateur/héros, centrale chez Poe, est donc totalement évacuée. Epstein y
substitue le symbolisme étrange de l’arbre de vie constitué d’étoiles qui s’élève au-
dessus de la maison en flammes. Aux antipodes de l’ambiance chaotique et
apocalyptique de la fin de la nouvelle, cette inscription d’une harmonie divine, d’une
quasi-transcendance qui réordonne le cosmos, est peu compatible avec la philosophie
de l’écrivain.
15 Cependant, à d’autres moments, Epstein réintroduit la dichotomie poesque entre la vie
et la mort, l’attraction et la répulsion. Au cours de la scène de l’enterrement de
Madeline dans le caveau, il alterne des plans signifiant la mort (le cercueil, l’attitude
des personnages endeuillés) et des plans évoquant la vie organique et même, plus
spécifiquement, la reproduction, avec l’image récurrente et insolite d’un couple de
crapauds en train de copuler. Epstein traduit ainsi, à sa manière, la tension entre les
deux forces antagonistes décrites dans l’essai philosophique Eureka. Au moment même
où on cloue le cercueil de Madeline sous le contrôle sévère du sinistre médecin — son
hochement de tête mécanique scande les coups de marteau —, la force vitale est
exprimée par ces huit plans répétitifs de batraciens filmés dans un cadrage de plus en
plus serré. Epstein accorde une place importante aux livres et au processus de lecture,
comme s’il tenait à rendre compte d’un aspect essentiel du texte de Poe qui utilise déjà
la lecture comme ressort dramatique avec le texte enchâssé du manuscrit médiéval
« The Mad Trist » (le rendez-vous insensé) lu par le narrateur à Usher et qui constitue
une mise en abyme du texte principal. Le réalisateur montre Allan lisant un recueil de
poèmes, puis l’œil collé aux pages d’un manuscrit surdimensionné, déchiffrant les
caractères à la loupe avant de les lire à Roderick qui écoute, comme pétrifié. Le vent fait
s’écrouler, au ralenti, des piles de livres entassés sur des étagères, prélude à un
processus entropique généralisé.
16 En dépit du respect très relatif de l’intrigue rendue hybride, Epstein parvient à rendre
compte des principaux aspects narratifs et thématiques des textes source. Cependant,

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son principal mérite est d’avoir réussi à donner une traduction visuelle de l’univers de
Poe par la grâce d’une mise en scène extrêmement élaborée, notamment un travail sur
la composition du plan, le rythme des images, et le montage. Epstein est en effet, tout
comme Poe, un praticien et un théoricien, un expérimentateur de formes. Il exprime
ses idées sur l’art cinématographique dans plusieurs essais 5 rédigés tout au long de sa
carrière. Certaines de ses idées traduisent des préoccupations esthétiques et
philosophiques assez proches de celles de Poe.
17 Epstein insiste d’abord sur l’importance de la photogénie et la nécessité de construire le
film sur le visage et en particulier le gros plan de visage qui est censé exprimer non
seulement les affects, mais également l’intériorité, l’âme du personnage. 6 Epstein pose
également la question de la temporalité, de la relation entre passé et présent mais plus
généralement de la différence entre le temps mathématique et le temps subjectif. Un
troisième problème soulevé concerne l’absence de frontières entre l’animé et l’inanimé
en liaison avec une vision anthropomorphique de la nature. Enfin on peut noter dans
les écrits d’Epstein une référence constante à l’univers de la machine, sans doute liée à
son admiration à l’égard de l’œuvre du peintre Fernand Léger. Cet aspect mécanique
concerne aussi bien — c’est là que le rapport avec Poe devient pertinent — les objets
que les êtres humains.
I.1. Le visage, le gros plan et la fragmentation métonymique.
18 Tout comme Poe évoque la force expressive du visage d’Usher, Epstein met en valeur
par le gros plan cette expressivité. Selon Epstein, avec le gros plan, l’image vient vers le
spectateur, joue avec lui, le conduit dans une autre dimension : « Le gros plan modifie
le drame par l’impression de proximité […], le gros plan limite et dirige l’attention. Il
me force, indicateur d’émotion ».7 Ainsi, le visage envahit l’écran, s’expose
ostensiblement, se donne à voir.
19 Les gros plans sur le visage de Jean Debucourt sont très nombreux. On notera en
particulier ceux où, filmé de face, il peint le portrait de Madeline hors champ, dans une
position qui correspond à celle du spectateur comme si celui-ci voyait à travers les yeux
du portrait.8 Ces gros plans9 suscitent des effets divers. Parfois, il semble que le pinceau
de l’artiste traverse la frontière écranique pour toucher le spectateur qui est à la place
du portrait. A d’autres moments, le visage extatique du peintre, déformé (par la courte
focale), les lèvres tordues, la bouche largement ouverte, suggèrent le caractère
mortifère (vampirique) du processus artistique. Le visage d’Usher peut enfin devenir
presque fantomatique en raison du flou et de l’éclairage diffus, illustrant cette phrase
de Gilles Deleuze : « le gros plan fait du visage un fantôme et le livre aux fantômes ». 10
20 Le gros plan de visage donne lieu à d’autres effets, en particulier quand s’y ajoute le
procédé de surimpression. Ainsi, dans la très belle scène de la mort de Madeline, son
visage se dédouble—deux images glissent l’une sur l’autre au ralenti—puis se
démultiplie. A ce gros plan en mouvement se substitue une image fixe en négatif du
visage qui constitue un masque mortuaire suggérant la perte d’énergie vitale du
personnage. Ensuite, ce masque apparaît de nouveau mais, filmé avec un éclairage
différent, il s’apparente à une statue (ou un masque de cire) signe de la pétrification du
modèle. Epstein, en combinant gros plan, ralenti et surimpression, parvient à suggérer
un processus de transformation énergétique par lequel le personnage glisse lentement
dans la mort. Ce travail de cadrage ne se limite pas au visage. Ainsi, les très nombreux

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gros plans métonymiques des mains d’Usher mettent en évidence aussi bien son
tempérament d’artiste que son obsession, sa fébrilité ou sa terreur. On peut aussi
évoquer les très nombreux plans serrés ou inserts sur des objets ou instruments comme
la guitare d’Usher, l’horloge, le cornet acoustique, les livres etc.
21 Les surimpressions sont fréquentes dans le film, suggérant la coexistence de plusieurs
niveaux de réalité. Epstein y a recours au moment où les protagonistes portent le
cercueil de Madeline entre deux rangées d’arbres dépouillés de leurs feuilles. La scène
s’ouvre sur un plan d’ensemble où l’on voit de très loin le petit groupe d’hommes.
D’immenses cierges allumés brillent dans le ciel. Un troisième élément plastique et
rythmique consiste en quelques feuilles mortes qui tombent au ralenti dans ce paysage.
Plus loin, on voit, dans le même plan, en surimpression, le voile de la morte, les cierges
et les feuilles tourbillonnantes. Plus tard, les cierges s’inscrivent le long des berges du
lac. Ceci suggère de manière très graphique l’idée d’un paysage mortifère et endeuillé.
Le paysage n’est pas seulement un paysage-cadavre, il participe à l’émotion des
humains. Par ailleurs, certains plans (sur les cimes des arbres) montés en alternance,
sont filmés en contre-plongée verticale et semblent correspondre au point de vue de la
morte, ce qui accentue encore le trouble du spectateur.
I.2. La temporalité.
22 La dimension temporelle s’exprime au-delà des péripéties narratives de la linéarité

chronologique11. Epstein traduit de manière presque palpable l’écoulement du temps
par une utilisation extrêmement travaillée du ralenti. Le caractère tragique de la
dissociation du visage de Madeline est accentué par le fort ralentissement qui accentue
également ce qui semble être sa chute interminable dans la mort. L’action du vent sur
les tentures donne lieu à de superbes images où le ralenti évoque l’idée d’une onde
énergétique (un temps matérialisé ?) qui affecte de manière éphémère les humains et
les objets. Le très beau plan où le voile/linceul diaphane de Madeline flotte légèrement
au-dessus de l’eau suggère peut-être la vie qui anime encore l’esprit et le corps. Ce voile
est la première manifestation visible du « retour » de la morte. On le voit très
lentement sortir du cercueil, puis s’insinuer hors du caveau. Le ralenti suggère aussi le
caractère inexorable du temps. Le balancier de l’horloge filmé en insert flotte dans un
espace totalement vide et abstrait et son mouvement pendulaire filmé en fort ralenti
semble encore plus menaçant. Parfois enfin, le ralenti participe de l’exagération
grotesque. Ainsi les mouvements quasi-mécaniques des hommes qui portent le cercueil,
fortement ralentis et exagérés encore par le mouvement de haut en bas de la caméra
qui les filme en décrivant des sinusoïdes, acquièrent une dimension caricaturale,
soulignant la pesanteur des gestes.
23 En de rares occasions, le filmage évoque la rapidité du mouvement. Ainsi la série de
travellings au ras du sol suggère une fois encore le point de vue subjectif de la morte-
vivante en marche et met en relief la volonté dynamique du personnage de Madeline,
anticipant son retour final. Il s’agit cependant d’un leurre pour le spectateur
puisqu’elle est encore dans le caveau à ce moment du film. Enfin, la rhétorique de la
répétition est utilisée de manière systématique : récurrence des gros plans du visage et
des mains d’Usher (trahissant sa frénésie de peindre ou son angoisse), mais aussi plans
de pendule, de voile, de cercueil, de tentures agitées par le vent, d’arbres décharnés etc.
Le montage de plans répétés traduit la perception subjective de la durée. Ainsi, dans la

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scène où Roderick, halluciné, achève le portrait de sa femme, Epstein montre en

alternance des plans du peintre et des plans de Madeline selon un rythme rapide (plans
brefs) qui illustre les mouvements fébriles de la main et du bras de l’artiste et les
contraste violemment avec le visage crispé et douloureux (semblable à une Mater
Dolorosa) du modèle filmé en très fort ralenti. Les variations rythmiques traduisent ici
des perceptions différentes du temps, mais aussi différents états psychiques.
24 Une autre séquence suggère le rapport privilégié qui s’instaure entre Usher et la nature
extérieure. Un montage alterné d’une vingtaine de plans associe d’une part Roderick et
sa guitare (insert des mains, insert sur les cordes), d’autre part la nature extérieure qui
semble réagir aux sons de l’instrument, entrer en résonance avec lui. Nous avons ainsi
une série d’images en succession rapide, filmées selon des angles différents, en fonction
d’une structure précise. D’abord un plan de demi-ensemble de paysage brumeux avec
des roseaux agités par le vent suivi d’un gros plan des mains de Roderick jouant,
ensuite une contre-plongée sur les arbres morts sur fond de ciel gris, et un plan large
sur l’eau agitée par le vent (ou les ondes sonores de l’instrument ?) suivis d’un plan
serré sur les mains, ensuite une série de trois plans de nature et de nouveau les mains.
Le montage instaure un rythme reposant sur la répétition (avec variation légère) et
l’alternance, mais aussi la progression (selon le schéma 1/1, 2/1 puis 3/1). Epstein vise
ainsi à suggérer une sorte d’empathie entre Usher et un paysage agi par la musique
autant que par les éléments atmosphériques.
I.3. Le mécanique et le vivant
25 Epstein, à l’instar de Poe, établit une autre forme de correspondance entre l’humain et
le mécanique. On connaît l’importance, chez l’écrivain, de cet aspect qui se traduit, en
particulier, par le motif récurrent de l’horloge, mais aussi par l’utilisation d’objets
mécaniques dans de nombreux contes (« Le puits et le pendule », « Le joueur d’échecs
de Maelzel ») ou encore par la déconstruction du corps en fragments dans « L’homme
qui était refait ».
26 Selon Epstein, l’objet mécanique se différencie de l’objet naturel, dont les formes
varient dans des limites étroites, en ce qu’il se prête à la déformation, à la
transformation, et donc à l’invention. Epstein s’intéresse à l’objet-machine qui, en
raison de ses formes géométriques, manufacturées, composites, invite au
fractionnement, à la fragmentation de la représentation. Cette approche est illustrée
dans le passage où les différents rouages du mécanisme interne de l’horloge, filmés au
ralenti en très gros plan, semblent acquérir une sorte de vie autonome, suscitant un
effet de fascination quasi hypnotique chez le spectateur.
27 Ce caractère mécanique peut aussi affecter les individus, qui dans l’œuvre de Fernand
Léger sont aussi machinisés, tubulaires, huilés, carrossés. Sans aller aussi loin, Epstein
suggère, comme Poe, le caractère mécanique du vivant, notamment dans la séquence
où Usher se balance d’avant en arrière dans un fauteuil, le visage rigide et les jambes
agitées d’un mouvement répétitif alors qu’il est totalement immergé dans les
sensations visuelles et surtout auditives signalant le retour de Madeline.
28 Jean Epstein cherche constamment à surprendre le spectateur qu’il entraîne dans un
continuum spatio-temporel où toutes les barrières sont abolies. La parenté avec Poe est
évidente. L’écrivain et le cinéaste ont la même volonté de transgresser les limites,
d’établir des relations entre l’animé et l’inanimé, la vie et la mort, l’organique et le

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mécanique, mais leur entreprise commune consiste en une exploration de la dimension

temporelle dans toute sa diversité et son ambivalence. Il en va autrement dans
l’adaptation de Roger Corman, amateur de Poe mais aussi tributaire d’une tradition du
film d’horreur soigneusement ancrée à Hollywood et qui renaît également en Europe
(Angleterre et Italie en particulier) dans les années soixante.
II. House of Usher, Roger Corman, 1960

29 Alors qu’Hollywood puise depuis longtemps dans les récits poesques en se servant de la
réputation encore sulfureuse de l’écrivain, aucun des films réalisés dans les années
trente ne rend vraiment justice à son univers. La référence à Poe se limite le plus
souvent au titre du film, à quelques éléments de scénario où à la présence d’un motif
emblématique comme le chat noir qui effraie le Dr Werdegast (Bela Lugosi) dans The
Black Cat (Edgar Ulmer, 1934) ou la chambre des tortures dans The Raven (Louis
Friedlander, 1935). Il faut attendre le renouveau apporté par Roger Corman qui réalise
autour et à partir des textes courts de Poe un cycle comportant huit films en l’espace
d’à peine cinq ans. La Chute de la maison Usher (1960) ouvre ce cycle qui se clôt avec La
tombe de Ligeia réalisé en Grande-Bretagne en 1964 et distribué en 1965. La Chute de la
maison Usher est le plus proche du récit source, même si de très nombreuses distorsions
se manifestent. C’est aussi le film où Corman met en place un dispositif et une
esthétique qu’il va conserver tout au long du cycle.
30 Le scénario est signé par Richard Matheson, grand écrivain de récits fantastiques et
auteur de très nombreux scénarii, outre ceux de Corman. La direction artistique
(notamment les décors) est assurée par Daniel Haller qui sera un collaborateur régulier
de Corman pour tout ce cycle, tout comme Floyd Crosby, le chef opérateur. Haller a
racheté des vieux décors du studio Universal : colonnes brisées, candélabres, portes
rouillées et se servira d’une vieille grange (seul décor réel) pour l’incendie final. Cette
présence régulière des mêmes artistes donne leur unité esthétique aux films de
Corman, la même chose ayant lieu pour les films de la firme Hammer produits à la
même époque en Angleterre. Un autre point commun avec la Hammer concerne la
récurrence des mêmes acteurs, ce qui assure encore plus de cohésion et satisfait les
attentes des spectateurs, heureux de retrouver régulièrement Vincent Price dans le
rôle principal. Corman joue habilement à ce niveau non seulement de l’héritage
cinématographique, mais d’un imaginaire spectatoriel teinté de nostalgie en ayant
recours parfois de manière parodique à des icônes comme Peter Lorre, mais aussi Boris
Karloff (dans le Corbeau notamment) et Basil Rathbone.
II.1. Structure narrative
31 A la différence d’Epstein, Corman se dispense de prologue et commence le film à

l’arrivée de Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon) qui n’est pas en position de narrateur. Les
plans d’exposition sont très limités et ne peuvent rendre compte de
l’ambiance poesque. Il s’agit d’ailleurs des seuls plans tournés en extérieurs, en dehors
de la séquence de clôture symétrique. Corman, contrairement à Epstein qui privilégie
les décors naturels, choisit de tout réaliser en studio afin de rendre compte de
l’atmosphère étouffante et claustrophobique de Poe. Corman déclare que l’Univers de
Poe est le « monde de l’inconscient » et il utilise des décors artificiels pour faire baigner

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le film dans une ambiance irréaliste, onirique, saturée de couleurs. Seul le paysage des
premiers plans et le paysage idyllique (arbres en fleurs et prairies verdoyantes) du
flash-back sont filmés en extérieurs. Corman utilise simplement pour l’incipit une
étendue de bois calcinés, au flanc d’une colline brûlée par un incendie près
d’Hollywood.
32 La principale transformation concerne l’ajout d’une intrigue romanesque absente du
texte source. Le narrateur poesque anonyme devient Philip Winthrop le fiancé de
Madeline (Myrna Fahey) venu de Boston pour l’épouser. Ce choix scénaristique
entraîne diverses transformations. Ainsi sont ajoutées de multiples scènes qui traitent
de la relation entre Madeline et Philip, des scènes qui évoquent les ancêtres et leurs
tableaux et visent à amplifier le poids de l’hérédité. Cette notion est renforcée par
l’affirmation d’un pouvoir occulte de la maison sur ses occupants. Pour Corman en
effet, la maison est le véritable monstre. L’histoire traumatique de la lignée Usher est
dramatisée à travers l’illustration, la matérialisation et la récitation du poème de la
nouvelle, « Le palais hanté ». Le motif du labyrinthe présent dans le récit est repris et
amplifié par les passages secrets empruntés par Philip dans la dernière séquence du
film.
33 L’emprise de Roderick sur l’état d’esprit de Madeline, convaincue de sa mort prochaine,
est amplifiée dans une scène où le personnage incarne la vie alors que dans la nouvelle,
elle est associée au spectral et au vampirique. La mort de la jeune femme semble causée
par la dispute avec Roderick alors que dans la nouvelle sa mort est annoncée
brutalement sans cause apparente. La lettre amicale de Roderick à son ami est
supprimée du fait du caractère intrusif de Philip. Cependant, le contenu de la lettre qui
traite de la maladie de Roderick est oralisé par lui-même. En ce qui concerne le portrait
ovale, le processus de créativité est supprimé, mais l’absorption de la vie par l’art est
non seulement transférée à travers le portrait de Madeline, mais aussi amplifiée par les
tableaux des ancêtres. Le film est aussi structuré par la répétition du plan du mur
extérieur de la maison, mettant en relief par une contre-plongée verticale la lézarde
qui s’agrandit graduellement.
34 Corman et Matheson respectent une certaine progression du récit qui aboutit à la mort
d’Usher et Mad(e?)line alors que Winthrop parvient à échapper à l’incendie final.
L’intrigue est cependant profondément modifiée. La narrateur presque identifié à un
homme rationnel, pourvu de connaissances médicales et féru d’art et de littérature est
remplacé par un jeune premier romantique, fiancé de Madeline, qui reste la sœur
d’Usher et non sa femme comme chez Epstein. L’accent se déplace partiellement (au
plan du récit) sur le fiancé, qui d’abord tente d’imposer sa volonté, de résister au
pouvoir d’Usher, puis se montre incapable de maîtriser la situation au fil des péripéties
nombreuses et de plus en plus dramatiques. La séquence onirique cauchemardesque
illustre cette incapacité du héros à rétablir son ordre, à aller contre l’héritage ancestral.
De ce fait, celui qui joue le rôle du narrateur n’est plus un ami d’Usher mais un
antagoniste. Les liens d’amitié sont remplacés par des rapports de force qui sont
illustrés dans toute la première partie du film.
II.2. Décor et ambiance
35 La dimension gothique est reprise principalement par les décors extérieurs. L’arrivée
de Winthrop met en exergue les arbres morts, les zones de brouillard, les nuages gris et

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bas qui évoquent l’oppression présente dans la nouvelle. L’exploitation du motif du

labyrinthe et le manque de lumière participent à la claustrophobie. La musique évoque
le côté étrange et fantastique, en particulier les voix associées aux tableaux des
ancêtres qui soulignent le pouvoir de la maison, idée renforcée par la reprise de plans
en extérieurs de la bâtisse. Le poids d’une Histoire traumatique, héritée du vieux
continent, est amplifié au plan diégétique par le caveau familial dans la maison même.
Les portraits des ancêtres filmés en contre plongée oblique renforcent la lourdeur de
l’hérédité violente et criminelle signifiée aussi par des couleurs vives, voire criardes qui
dominent dans ces tableaux de facture nettement expressionniste.
36 A la différence d’Epstein, l’inscription littéraire chez Corman est minimale. Seuls
quelques plans se focalisent sur un livre, sans doute un ouvrage sur le magnétisme,
dont les pages sont tournées par le vent violent qui s’engouffre dans la maison.
Cependant Corman reprend et amplifie le poème « Le palais hanté » par la
transformation du décor. Le plan des arbres en fleurs est encadré par un fondu
enchaîné et un fondu au noir, et s’accompagne de la voix off de Roderick qui raconte
l’histoire. Corman rend visible le poème.
37 Usher est superbement incarné par Vincent Price qui reste clairement le point focal du
film, en dépit de son relatif effacement narratif, et semble assez conforme au
personnage décrit par Poe. Dès la première confrontation, Corman met en évidence sa
réaction excessive aux bruits. Quand Winthrop élève la voix, Price se bouche les oreilles
et grimace de douleur. A plusieurs reprises, le récit fait référence à cette sensibilité
exacerbée du frère mais aussi de la sœur concernant la lumière, les tissus et la
nourriture. Ainsi Madeline comme son frère ne peut absorber que les aliments les plus
fades et semble plutôt anorexique.
38 Usher est comme chez Poe une figure d’artiste, à la fois musicien et peintre. Au début
du film, Winthrop admire une de ses œuvres, un tableau expressionniste où se
mélangent des formes architecturales distordues et des visages informes. Plus tard,
Usher joue quelques accords, un peu discordants, de guitare. L’instrument à cordes qui
l’apaise est le luth, manière de référer à l’épigraphe de Béranger dans la nouvelle.
Contrairement au texte de Poe où Usher écrit au narrateur et lui demande son aide, le
visiteur est clairement indésirable dans la mesure où il signifie l’intrusion d’un élément
perturbateur dans un ordre défini. Cet ordre est précaire comme en témoigne l’état de
décrépitude de la demeure, souligné par la référence insistante à la lézarde et les divers
accidents (chute du lustre, effondrement soudain de la balustrade, tremblements
divers). Cependant il semble encore solidement assuré et le décor intérieur ne
manifeste en rien le désordre décrit par Poe dans la nouvelle qui évoque les livres et
instruments épars.
39 Usher est présenté comme une figure d’autorité. Il donne des ordres à sa sœur, la
subjugue par son regard impérieux à plusieurs reprises quand elle fait mine de se
rebeller, et lui dicte son destin en lui refusant de quitter la maison, exerçant clairement
un chantage. A l’occasion de la visite organisée par Madeline à l’intention de son fiancé
et au cours de laquelle elle fait l’inventaire des ancêtres défunts, le jeune homme
horrifié découvre qu’elle a déjà une place assignée dans le caveau familial. L’autorité
d’Usher se manifeste aussi par une résistance active à l’encontre du visiteur. Il essaie de
le faire partir et exerce une forte pression psychologique sur Madeline. Cette stratégie
est illustrée dans la scène où Usher explique l’origine de la malédiction qui affecte le
paysage. Le film montre alors des images rétrospectives d’une nature vivante et

87
harmonieuse qui s’oppose au paysage actuel, désolé et mortifère. Usher souligne la

lourde hérédité de la famille dans la scène où il présente les portraits des ancêtres, tous
déviants et criminels. L’emprise se manifeste par la violence verbale exercée à
l’encontre de Madeline dans une scène de violente dispute entendue (mais non vue) par
le fiancé derrière la porte de la chambre et qui se termine par un hurlement déchirant.
Quand Winthrop se penche sur Madeline inerte, il ne peut que constater les signes
d’une mort apparente. La confrontation entre frère et sœur est soigneusement occultée
à l’image par Corman, ce qui laisse planer le doute quant aux circonstances du décès.
40 Toutes les péripéties liées à l’enterrement précipité et prématuré d’une Madeline en
état de catalepsie montrent le caractère manipulateur d’Usher, aux antipodes du
personnage poesque. Le corps de Madeline est déplacé d’un cercueil lourdement
enchaîné pour suggérer une présence mais en fait vide, à un autre soigneusement
caché, stratagème qui fonctionne comme leurre à l’intention de Winthrop. Cette
autorité, cette force agissante d’Usher, trouve sa justification, non sans quelque
ambivalence, dans l’idée centrale pour le film d’une hérédité du mal qui condamne la
famille et en particulier Madeline à la folie. Dans la scène où les protagonistes veillent
devant le corps encore visible, un plan en plongée montre la défunte qui agite
légèrement les doigts de sa main. Ce plan alterne avec un gros plan de Roderick, le
regard orienté sur cette main, suivi d’un autre où Price semble épier Winthrop. Usher
sait qu’elle est vivante, ce qui ne l’empêchera pas de fermer le cercueil, en dépit des
supplications de Winthrop, accablé et en larmes. Le caractère tyrannique et cynique du
frère est ainsi mis en lumière. Cette thématique patriarcale, implicite chez Poe, est
explicitée chez Corman qui donne du récit poesque une lecture inspirée de la
psychanalyse freudienne. La jalousie maladive du frère est aussi suggérée par les plans
où il surveille les jeunes gens et interrompt leur intimité. Ainsi, un bruit de porte
annonce son entrée dans la chambre de Madeline, un panoramique filé partant du lit où
Winthrop est au chevet de sa fiancée, jusqu’à le cadrer en plan taille, le regard
réprobateur fixé sur le couple.
41 L’explication fournie par Usher pour justifier l’enterrement prématuré n’est cependant
pas tout à fait convaincante. En effet, contrairement à ce que laisse entendre son frère,
Madeline a pendant toute la première partie du film un comportement tout à fait
normal, notamment vis-à-vis de Winthrop. Son anémie (en partie démentie par le
physique de la comédienne) semble liée à la claustration forcée et son obsession envers
la mort, motivée par la mise en condition psychologique de Roderick. Elle n’aspire qu’à
fuir et se révolte contre l’autoritarisme d’Usher, défiant sa volonté, d’où la réaction
perverse et démente de celui-ci.
42 Le spectateur ne peut ainsi s’empêcher de penser que c’est Usher qui provoque la folie
de Madeline en l’enfermant vivante, qu’il fait donc advenir par sa propre volonté ce
qu’il affirme être déterminé par la lourde hérédité familiale. Madeline n’est pas folle,
elle le devient en raison des sévices infligés à son esprit mais aussi à son corps
cataleptique. Ce que Corman retient par contre de Poe, c’est l’extraordinaire volonté de
Madeline, qui même ayant perdu la raison, revient pour accomplir sa vengeance. De
nouveau l’antagonisme domine : il s’agit d’une lutte à mort entre la sœur et le frère et
non pas comme chez Poe d’une union dans une mort cathartique, prélude à la fusion
des éléments quand la maison s’effondre dans l’étang, selon la loi d’attraction définie
par l’écrivain dans Eureka. L’incendie final de la maison est un véritable contre-sens par
rapport à la nouvelle, sans doute motivé par la nécessité d’assurer un moment

88
spectaculaire (et peu coûteux) que l’on retrouve d’ailleurs dans de nombreux films de la
période (notamment ceux du studio Hammer).
43 Le décor est résolument artificiel, souligné par une brume de studio (qui sert à masquer
l’indigence du décor extérieur), ensuite par la mise en évidence systématique du
caractère factice, carton-pâte (le gros plan de la fissure). Les taches de sang sont peu
réalistes et le maquillage blafard lourdement souligné du visage de Madeline devenue
folle (inserts sur ses yeux exorbités) souligne une théâtralité à la limite du grand
guignol. Par contre, le travail plastique de la couleur suggère, en-dehors de ses effets
atmosphériques et décoratifs, une approche psychologique et symbolique des
personnages. Usher porte un habit rouge vif lors de sa première (et soudaine)
apparition. Sa chambre, tapissée de rouge est ornée de tentures et de candélabres
rouges, les fauteuils sont recouverts de tissus écarlate. Le tableau qu’admire son
visiteur est essentiellement composé de nuances de rouge. Ces objets sont filmés dans
des plans construits en profondeur, avec une caméra sans cesse en mouvement, ce qui
donne un grand dynamisme à la mise en scène. Plus tard Price arbore un habit noir (qui
contraste avec la robe rouge de sa sœur) puis de nouveau une redingote rouge. Le rouge
dominant connote à la fois la passion exacerbée de Roderick envers sa sœur et la folie
meurtrière de celle-ci, soulignant la thématique du sang, sang corrompu (« tainted ») et
sang sacrificiel. Le noir atteste l’obsession de la mort, le comportement mortifère de
Roderick qui étouffe toute tentative vitale chez Madeline et signifie aussi le travail du
deuil.
44 Cette dualité chromatique renforce l’ambivalence et souligne la double nature de
Roderick qui affirme son autorité inflexible, mais révèle aussi sa monomanie et ses
faiblesses. Madeline est d’abord vêtue de blanc (rappel du stéréotype de l’héroïne
gothique, innocente victime) puis d’une robe rouge (lorsqu’elle manifeste sa crainte
d’être atteinte de la folie héréditaire des Usher), ensuite d’une robe bleue (en accord
avec les motifs dominants de sa chemise) semblable au costume bleu arboré par
Winthrop au moment où convaincue par son fiancé, elle manifeste le désir de quitter la
maison. Le bleu marial devient ainsi le symbole de la normalité, de l’équilibre et du
« bien ». Winthrop est graduellement contaminé par l’ambiance, au point de perdre son
attitude policée et de se montrer agressif et violent, son subconscient étant également
affecté, traduction assez juste du processus de contamination qui transforme le
narrateur poesque et lui fait perdre, en partie, son attitude analytique et rationaliste.
Cette dégradation est traduite aussi par son allure vestimentaire, de plus en plus
débraillée. A la fin du film, Madeline est à nouveau vêtue de blanc, mais cette fois d’un
blanc maculé de rouge, indice de la folie et de la violence homicide qu’elle entraîne
alors qu’elle se précipite sur son frère pour se venger.
45 Corman utilise une rhétorique assez classique à base de champs contre-champs, et d’un
jeu sur l’échelle de plan qui utilise les gros plans de visages, voire l’insert à des fins
dramatiques. Il joue essentiellement d’une stratégie de la tension qui se manifeste de
plusieurs manières : d’abord par certains effets chocs, comme par exemple la première
apparition de Price qui ouvre brutalement une porte et s’inscrit dans le cadre alors
qu’on ne l’attendait pas, ou comme l’effondrement partiel de la balustrade ou la chute
du cercueil (par contre la chute du chandelier est annoncée par un plan préalable).
L’entrée brutale dans le cadre de la main sanglante de Madeline devenue folle crée un
autre choc visuel tout comme le moment où elle surgit dans la chambre, filmée en plan
taille, semblant se confondre avec le décor rouge feu.

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46 L’exploration d’un espace labyrinthique et truffé de passages secrets se fait par le

truchement de plans subjectifs qui facilitent les processus d’identification avec le
protagoniste et donc communiquent au spectateur le sentiment de peur éprouvé dans
la diégèse. Les lents travellings dans les couloirs vides (mais où peut surgir une
présence invisible) traduisent assez bien l’obsession des passages et des seuils exprimée
dans les contes de Poe. Corman a aussi recours à des cadrages serrés afin d’attirer
l’attention du spectateur. Ces plans sont illustratifs ou servent la dramatisation. Ainsi,
les très gros plans de portraits des ancêtres démoniaques entrecoupent la scène où
Winthrop accuse Usher d’être la seule influence maléfique et perverse de la maison. Les
inserts des yeux de Madeline à la fin du film traduit sa transformation de manière un
peu appuyée mais efficace. La répétition insistante de ce plan est un peu maladroite.
Passé l’effet de surprise, il semble moins efficace et presque parodique. La séquence du
rêve de Winthrop constitue un morceau de bravoure qui associe horreur
cauchemardesque et parodie. La scène est nimbée de brume et le décor est déréalisé par
des filtres bleu et violet. Le rêveur descend l’escalier qui conduit à une sorte de chapelle
où sont réunis tous les ancêtres qui lui font signe. Les visages grotesques, grimaçants
sont saisis en plan subjectif, à la limite du flou (sur un fond musical dominé par des
chœurs de femme). Winthrop tente de se frayer un chemin dans cette foule et de
rejoindre Madeline, emportée par un Usher ricanant, traduction transparente de la
réalité diégétique. Un plan de Madeline hurlant dans son cercueil clôt le rêve, mais ce
cri se prolonge sur le plan suivant au moment où le jeune homme se réveille en sursaut,
signe que Madeline est encore vivante. Usher le confirme un peu plus tard quand il
avoue, le visage empli de terreur, continuer à entendre (le film est alors très proche du
récit) les bruits produits par sa sœur qui tente de sortir du cercueil : « I heard her
breathe in her casket, I heard the scratching of her fingernails on her casket lid, even
now I hear her, alive, deranged ». On verra peu après les doigts sanglants de Madeline
s’insinuer hors du cercueil, puis celui-ci vide…
47 La picturalité est aussi très présente et vise à renforcer, par le style expressionniste des
tableaux, la charge affective du film. La représentation du visage s’exprime par des
traits noirs grossiers qui soulignent les yeux, le nez et le menton et se fondent dans les
aplats de couleurs vives qui occupent la toile. L’absorption de la vie par l’art est bien
rendue par cette peinture qui peut être aussi perçue comme illustration des
abstractions pures peintes par Roderick dans la nouvelle. La dimension picturale est
amplifiée par Corman non seulement par le truchement des portraits des ancêtres,
mais aussi celui de la maison. Une même manière picturale est utilisée avec des aplats
de couleurs, rouges, bleus et noirs, figuration de l’esprit tourmenté de l’artiste mais
aussi de ses ancêtres criminels. A la fin du film, c’est le portrait de Madeline qui est
filmé à plusieurs reprises, comme pour signifier son emprise sur le personnage et
confirmer aussi qu’elle participe de la lignée des Usher. Alors qu’Epstein privilégie le
gros plan affectif en particulier lors des séances de pose, Corman utilise une rhétorique
plus classique, varie les cadrages et n’a recours au gros plan que pour les moments
paroxystiques, comme celui où Madeline, sortie de son cercueil grâce à sa volonté et la
force surhumaine que lui confère la folie, effectue son « revenir » spectaculaire.
Lorsqu’elle s’avance vers l’objectif de la caméra, son visage envahit le cadre et devient
flou alors qu’elle se jette sur son fiancé. Le plan met en valeur son visage blanc, ses
cheveux libres en désordre, sa main ensanglantée et surtout ses yeux injectés de sang,
autant de signes qui confirment sa folie. Un peu plus tard les deux plans serrés de son
faciès en furie, montés en alternance avec des plans de Winthrop, témoin impuissant du

90
drame, correspondent à la vision subjective de Roderick au moment où sa sœur tente

de l’étrangler, puis s’effondre avec lui sur le sol. Le cadrage oblique accentué laisse un
œil hors champ et rend le visage monstrueux. Tandis que les portraits démoniaques se
consument dans la maison en flammes, filmée en une série de plans rapides, Winthrop
parvient à s’échapper et contemple à distance la destruction de la maison alors que
s’inscrit à l’écran la dernière phrase du récit de Poe : « And the deep and dank tarn
closed silently over the fragments of the House of Usher ».
48 Même s’il reprend la trame narrative globale du récit poesque, Roger Corman opère des
modifications considérables et ne rend pas vraiment compte de la complexité de
l’œuvre qu’il aplatit sensiblement, amplifiant la touche gothique et mélodramatique.
Cependant, si on laisse de côté la question de la lettre du texte, on constate que, en
dépit ou à cause des déplacements opérés, Corman traduit bien certains aspects du
conte, en particulier l’obsession morbide de Roderick Usher et son génie artistique
dévoyé. L’œuvre trouve malgré tout ses limites en raison de son budget modeste, de
trucages trop rudimentaires, du manque relatif de charisme de l’acteur incarnant
Winthrop, et de ses excès graphiques trop tributaires d’une esthétique de l’horreur et
du grotesque.
49 Epstein et Poe ont en commun, nous l’avons vu, une vision poétique et métaphysique
du monde, ce qui explique aussi pourquoi le cinéaste, peu soucieux de « fidélité »
littérale, parvient le plus souvent à trouver des équivalences visuelles (rythmiques et
plastiques) au texte de l’écrivain américain. En adaptant le récit de Poe, Epstein fait de
son film un véritable manifeste esthétique et un terrain d’expérimentation pour l’art
cinématographique.
BIBLIOGRAPHIE
AUMONT, Jacques, Du visage au cinéma, Editions de l’Etoile/Cahiers du cinéma, 1992.
DELEUZE, Gilles, Cinéma 1, L’image-mouvement, Editions de Minuit, 1983.
EPSTEIN, Jean, Ecrits sur le cinéma, Seghers, 1962.
POE, Edgar Allan, « The Fall of the House of Usher », Tales of Mystery and Imagination, London,
Everyman, 1994
Revue Belge du cinéma n° 10, Gros plan, Hiver 1984-1985.
NOTES
1. Jean Epstein, Ecrits sur le cinéma, Seghers, 1962, vol. 1, p. 188.
2. E. A. Poe, « The Fall of the House of Usher », Tales of Mystery and Imagination, London,
Everyman, 1994 (1st edition, 1908), p. 137.
3. Cette référence au magnétisme est fortement accentuée dans le scénario du film parlant où
Usher utilise son savoir pour exercer un pouvoir sur Madeline mais aussi sur Allan.

91
4. Même si on a souvent signalé son rôle d’initiateur par rapport au narrateur.

5. En particulier « Le cinéma du diable », « L’intelligence d’une machine », « Le Cinématographe
vu de l’Etna ».
6. Ce débat est au centre des préoccupations esthétiques à l’époque d’Epstein comme en
témoignent les écrits de Bela Balazs, Eisenstein et bien d’autres. Voir à ce sujet les pages
consacrées à Epstein dans l’ouvrage de Jacques Aumont Du visage au cinéma, Editions de l’Etoile/
Cahiers du cinéma, 1992.
7. Ecrits sur le cinéma, op.cit., vol. 1, p. 98. Voir aussi le numéro 10 de La revue Belge du cinéma
consacré au gros plan en 1984.
8. Ce portrait est rarement figuré comme tableau peint. En général, c’est l’actrice vivante qui
s’inscrit dans le cadre comme pour suggérer le transfert d’énergie du modèle au portrait.
9. Ces gros plans expressifs s’opposent aux portraits plus réalistes des habitants de l’auberge.
10. Gilles Deleuze,cinéma 1, L’image-mouvement, Editions de Minuit, 1983, p.141.
11. Il n’y a pas de flash-back contrairement au scénario ultérieur qui évoque la jeunesse d’Usher
et Madeline et signale l’origine ancienne du désir obsessionnel d’Usher.
AUTEURS
GILLES MENEGALDO
Gilles Menegaldo is a full professor of American literature and film studies at the University of
Poitiers. He has set up and run the Film Studies Department for 6 years and has been from 2002
till September 2008 president of SERCIA, a European research association on film studies. He has
co-written Dracula, la noirceur et la grâce (with A.-M. Paquet-Deyris, Atlande, 2006) and published
many articles on gothic literature and film. He has edited several collections of essays among
which: Frankenstein (Autrement, 1999), HP Lovecraft (Dervy, 2002), R. L. Stevenson et A. Conan Doyle,
Aventures de la fiction, (Terre de brume, 2003, with JP Naugrette), Dracula (Ellipses, Sept. 2005),
Jacques Tourneur (CinémAction, 2006), Film and History, (2008, Michel Houdiard). Latest books as
editor: Manières de Noir (On Contemporary Crime Fiction), PU Rennes, July 2010. Gothic NEWS,
Studies in Classic and Contemporary Gothic Cinema, Michel Houdiard, January 2011, Persistances
gothiques dans la littérature et les arts de l’image, (avec Lauric Guillaud, Bragelonne, January 2012),
European and Hollywood Cinema: Cultural Exchanges (Michel Houdiard, October 2012).

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Rêve et fantasme dans Traumnovelle

et Eyes Wide Shut
Jocelyn Dupont
1 A la mort de Stanley Kubrick le 7 mars 1999, quelques jours seulement après avoir
visionné la première version « définitive » d’Eyes Wide Shut – qui le deviendra ensuite
par nécessité – les hommages n’ont eu de cesse qu’ils soulignent la farouche
indépendance du créateur, auteur de films « fracassants, tous formidablement
personnels, qui marquent leur époque et l’histoire du cinéma, dynamitent les règles, les
canons des genres, les conventions narratives». 1 Pourtant, en dépit de ce cinéma si
« formidablement personnel », Kubrick fut toujours un cinéaste en quête d’histoire, un
auteur-adaptateur dont le recours à des hypotextes littéraires fut systématique.
2 Le premier support littéraire transposé par Kubrick est un obscur roman noir datant de
1955 intitulé Clean Break, aujourd’hui quasiment introuvable, écrit par Lionel White,
dont un autre titre servira quelques années plus tard d’inspiration à l’écriture de Pierrot
le fou. La structure narrative éclatée de ce roman, que l’on retrouve dans The Killing
(L’Ultime Razzia), son hypertexte filmique, rappelle aussi bien Rashômon que Pulp Fiction.
Le texte de Lionel White fut trouvé presque « par hasard » par James B. Harris, associé
de Kubrick, à la recherche d’un scénario pour la balbutiante compagnie de production
Harris-Kubrick.2 Si le choix d’une source littéraire pour la réalisation d’un film n’avait
rien d’original, la mise à l’écran de ce roman fut une étape décisive dans la manière
dont Kubrick allait désormais envisager son travail de créateur cinématographique
après Killer’s Kiss (Le Baiser du tueur), à la ligne scénaristique plutôt malingre. En effet, de
The Killing à Eyes Wide Shut, tous les films de Stanley Kubrick puisent leur source dans un
texte littéraire, roman ou nouvelle. Il est toutefois malaisé de trouver une ligne
directrice à la démarche de Kubrick dans son rapport avec l’origine littéraire de ses
sources. Les choix de ses lectures transposées est à l’image de sa première adaptation,
le plus souvent guidés par le hasard d’une rencontre avec un texte, un certain
opportunisme et une grande curiosité intellectuelle :
It was Kubrick’s continuing pattern to develop screen stories from previously
published material. Throughout his career he was never able to generate an

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original story out of his own experience [...]. His endless curiosity attracted him to
worlds outside his experience. (LoBrutto 384)
3 Le recours systématique à des sources littéraires n’est nullement un obstacle à
l’affirmation d’un talent créateur; on sait qu’en littérature, l’intertextualité peut être
considérée comme une modalité de la fonction-auteur. Il est donc évident que dans le
cadre de la réécriture transmédiale qu’est la pratique de l’adaptation
cinématographique de textes littéraires, et une fois balayée d’un revers de la main
l’horizon fallacieux de la fidélité comme critère qualitatif, cette « illusoire fidélité de
décalcomanie » comme l’écrivait Bazin, le cinéaste a tout loisir de s’imposer dans sa
singularité créatrice, et ce sans nécessairement avoir à déclarer la guerre aux écrivains,
comme le suggère Thomas Leitch dans son récent ouvrage Film Adaptation and Its
Discontents en écrivant que « Kubrick earned auteur status the old-fashioned way: by
taking on authors directly in open warfare » (240). Si cette remarque est assez valide en
ce qui concerne les rapports parfois houleux que Kubrick put entretenir avec, dans
l’ordre, Vladimir Nabokov, Anthony Burgess, et Arthur C. Clarke, ainsi que Thackeray
(in absentia) pour sa réécriture filmique de Barry Lyndon, elle l’est beaucoup moins pour
la nouvelle de Schnitzler qui allait servir d’hypotexte à Eyes Wide Shut.
4 Traumnovelle d’Arthur Schnitzler hantait Kubrick depuis plus de vingt-cinq ans avant
qu’il ne mette à exécution son projet, puisqu’il en avait acquis les droits dès le début
des années 70, juste après avoir tourné 2001: A Space Odyssey. A ce qu’on peut en lire, il
semblait trouver dans cette nouvelle une certaine résonance de « vérité » sur la vie
psychique de l’individu moderne et sur les rapports entre intimité et honnêteté dans
les rapports du couple, rapports d’ailleurs traités avec justesse et un supplément de
vraisemblance par le couple Kidman-Cruise, dont les rapports iréniques avec un
réalisateur pourtant réputé pour son exigence quasi-tyrannique sont restés célèbres,
attestant ainsi peut-être le rapport singulier qu’Eyes Wide Shut entretient avec une
certaine authenticité de l’expérience.
5 Traumnovelle, datant de 1925, est la seule nouvelle à avoir été adaptée à l’écran par le
réalisateur sans modification majeure de la structure originale de l’hypotexte. En
revanche, il ne s’agit pas du seul récit court à avoir été à l’origine d’un long-métrage
kubrickien, puisque 2001: A Space Odyssey, a son origine première dans « The Sentinel of
Eternity» d’Arthur C. Clarke, nouvelle publiée en 1951, qui finit par devenir 2001: A Space
Odyssey. Il s’agit là d’un exemple tout à fait intéressant d’expansion textuelle
simultanée par impulsion cinématographique. En effet, les versions filmique et
romanesque de 2001 se développèrent de manière concomitante mais aussi
relativement indépendante à partir de cette nouvelle et de la collaboration
intellectuelle des deux hommes, qui allaient finir par se brouiller définitivement par la
suite.
6 Pour réécrire Traumnovelle, Kubrick fit appel au scénariste chevronné Frederic Raphael,
écrivain et homme de lettres classiques, à qui il envoya tout d’abord le texte de la
nouvelle sans en préciser l’auteur. On peut s’étonner du choix de Kubrick (Raphael, qui
sut tirer profit de cette collaboration, en fut le premier surpris) quand on sait à quel
point le réalisateur aimait travailler « en famille » plus encore qu’en équipe. Diane
Johnson, avec qui la collaboration sur The Shining avait été un succès, aurait pu être
pressentie, d’autant plus que Kubrick et elle avaient pensé, avant le tournage de ce film,
à adapter un des romans de Johnson intitulé The Shadow Knows, dont elle confia à
Michel Ciment qu’il s’agit d’un texte « qui a certaines caractéristiques du court roman

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[sic] de Schnitzler Traumnovelle […] en particulier par son aspect freudien » (cité par
Ciment 291). Pour notre part, nous pensons que le rapport d’intimité que Kubrick
entretenait avec ce texte aurait pu donner lieu à une réécriture scénaristique
personnelle comme ce fut le cas avec Barry Lyndon. Mais le cinéma est un art protéen, et
tout démiurgique qu’il fût, Kubrick choisit de faire appel à un tiers pour échafauder cet
intertexte3 fondamental qu’est le scénario.
7 Kubrick et Raphael se penchèrent donc sur la longue nouvelle de Schnitzler, qui
comportait un certain nombre de difficultés narratives qu’il allait falloir trouver les
moyens de transposer ou traduire en langage cinématographique. Ces difficultés ont
trait d’une part à l’économie générale de la forme courte, comme sa capacité à se
dispenser d’informations narratives, et de l’autre à la nature spécifique de ce récit
onirique, hésitant, fluctuant, résolument moderniste.
8 La nouvelle comportait aussi quelques contraintes structurelles, à l’instar du chapitre
d’ouverture qui commence le lendemain du bal, sur lequel les protagonistes, Albertine
et Fridolin, reviennent rétrospectivement. C’est la raison pour laquelle Kubrick et
Raphael choisirent de matérialiser ce bal pour en faire une séquence magistrale au
début du film, d’une durée d’environ quinze minutes. Cette séquence mémorable est un
exemple notoire d’expansion textuelle analeptique, procédé assez inhabituel d’écriture
filmique dans le cadre d’un transcodage cinématographique, mais bien évidemment
plus fréquent quand l’hypotexte est une nouvelle, et a fortiori nécessaire quand le
cinéaste aux commandes n’était guère enclin au format standard du long métrage
hollywoodien4. Autre phénomène intéressant de composition du scénario : l’adjonction
d’un incipit domestique qui précède immédiatement la séquence du bal et dans lequel
Michel Chion voit un guide de lecture programmatique du reste du film (483-4). On
peut enfin ajouter à ces deux séquences le plan inséré dans le générique dans lequel on
voit Alice/Kidman se déshabiller. Il s’agit d’un plan étrange et « flottant » dans la
diégèse. Il fait nuit noire à l’extérieur, et Alice quitte une robe noire échancrée. Est-ce
la même robe que celle qu’elle portait au bal, sommes-nous déjà de retour ? Est-ce une
manière pour Kubrick de jouer avec la chronologie du récit en ramenant les
personnages à la maison avant de les en faire partir ?
9 Le texte s’étoffe donc en amont, procédé qui s’inverse souvent dans la transposition
cinématographique de romans, où la suppression d’éléments diégétiques est souvent
une nécessité quantitative et chronologique, le film n’ayant dans la plupart des cas tout
simplement pas le temps d’en dire autant que le roman. Notons qu’Eyes Wide Shut
s’étoffe également en aval, avec la dernière séquence au magasin de jouets, épilogue qui
ne trouve pas d’équivalent dans le texte de Schnitzler où le récit s’achève dans la
chambre, après le récit de Fridolin à Albertine. La séquence du bal est également celle
où l’on rencontre le personnage de Ziegler (Sydney Pollack), clé de voûte du récit
kubrickien, totalement absent du texte de Schnitzler. Ziegler est un personnage
inquiétant, dont la bonhommie paternaliste contraste avec une toute-puissance
démesurée où loge un Ça débridé. Il est d’ailleurs fort probable que Ziegler soit
l’homme au masque vénitien qui échange un regard avec Bill depuis le balcon dans la
séquence de l’orgie, mais, comme pour beaucoup de choses dans ce film, nous ne
pouvons jamais en être sûrs.
10 On peut également relever quelques translations de signifiants qui accompagnent la
transformation du texte littéraire en texte cinématographique, comme le prénom de la
prostituée, « Domino », que va voir Bill, qui fait écho au bal masqué chez Schnitzler, au

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cours duquel Bill se retrouve flanqué de « deux personnes revêtues d’un domino
rouge »5 que l’on retrouve chez Kubrick sous la forme des deux jeunes aguicheuses qui
promettent d’emmener Bill « where the rainbow ends » avant qu’il soit appelé par Ziegler.
Autre translation sémiotique, le mot de passe pour pénétrer dans la réunion secrète est
devenu « Fidelio » dans le film alors qu’il s’agit de « Danemark » dans la nouvelle de
chez Schnitzler en écho ironique au lieu où Albertine croisa le jeune officier pour lequel
elle était prête à tout quitter.
11 Ces quelques manipulations structurelles, ainsi que les évidentes transpositions spatio-
temporelles (du Vienne des années 1920 au New York des années 1990) ne doivent
cependant pas masquer ce qui constitue l’enjeu majeur de Traumnovelle et sa réécriture
cinématographique, à savoir la plongée au plus profond de l’intériorité du sujet,
mystère de la psyché que le modernisme littéraire de Schnitzler ou la psychanalyse
coïncidente de Freud commençaient alors à percer et pour lequel le cinéma entretient,
depuis son origine, une fascination quasi-obsessionnelle. C’est en partie ce qui
rapproche Eyes Wide Shut du The Dead (Gens de Dublin, 1987) de John Huston. Comme
pour ce qui fut l’ultime opus de Huston, le dernier film de Kubrick s’attaque à un texte
réputé « inadaptable » car entièrement braqué sur l’aventure intrapsychique de son
protagoniste, Gabriel Conroy pour Joyce/ Huston, Fridolin/ Bill Hartford pour
Schnitzler/ Kubrick. Pourtant les deux films sont bien loin de se ressembler. Tandis que
Huston opte pour un film où priment une exigence de reconstitution historique et une
démarche presque naturaliste, Kubrick s’embarque sur les territoires plus incertains du
fantasme et du rêve éveillé.
12 Le rêve est à fois la pierre d’angle et le point de fuite de Traumnovelle, un récit dont le
titre pose problème dans sa traduction en français. Le substantif composé allemand
inscrit bien au cœur de sa morphologie le rêve et son récit dans une association dont la
résonance freudienne est immanquable.6 En anglais, cette traduction est littérale et
Traumnovelle devient Dreamstory. Bien qu’il soit plus que probable que Kubrick ait
travaillé à partir de la version anglaise du texte de Schnitzler 7, ce titre n’est pourtant
pas celui que retiendra le cinéaste pour son film. Avec Eyes Wide Shut, il fit le choix d’un
oxymore dont la dimension visuelle nous renvoie à l’ambiguïté de notre regard
intérieur. Les traductions françaises ont hésité, au fil des éditions, entre « La Nouvelle
rêvée » ou « Rien qu’un rêve », deux choix contraints par l’incapacité de la langue
française à restituer le nouage sémantique que permettent l’allemand et l’anglais par
composition. La récente traduction de Pierre Deshusses pour les éditions Payot sous le
titre « Double rêve » nous semble louable car elle restitue justement au texte de
Schnitzler sa nature fluctuante, où rêve et fantasme circulent d’un protagoniste à
l’autre ; en effet « dans Traumnovelle, le rêve d’Albertine et le « vécu » pulsionnel de
Fridolin se répondent et se redoublent, fragment par fragment, comme dans un
kaléidoscope […] ».8 Il est intéressant de noter qu’à l’origine le titre envisagé par
Schnitzler était Doppelnovelle, soit « La nouvelle du double », ce qui ne fait que
confirmer la pertinence de la plus récente traduction, qui est celle que nous avons
choisi d’utiliser dans ces pages.
13 Une des questions les plus récurrentes entourant Eyes Wide Shut est celle du rapport
très ambigu que le film entretient avec la réalité et le rêve. Cette fluctuation, liée à la
nature même du médium cinématographique, est également au centre du projet
d’écriture de Schnitzler, tout particulièrement pour Traumnovelle. Les personnages de la
nouvelle évoluent sans cesse entre ces deux états de conscience qui les rapprochent et

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les désunissent au rythme d’un récit qui semble parfois imiter la respiration du
dormeur. Ce rythme serein est aussi celui du film de Kubrick : plans longs, mouvements
de caméra calmes et fluides, fondus enchaînés, pas de précipitation dans les cadres,
tout semble aller au ralenti, y compris les ébats orgiaques et les poursuites dans les rues
de Greenwich Village.
14 Ce décrochage de la réalité est le fil rouge des deux textes, mais peut-être plus encore
celui de Schnitzler. Il est ainsi tout à fait significatif que lorsqu’Albertine raconte pour
la première fois à Fridolin son attraction irrésistible pour l’officier danois, elle se
décrive perdue dans ses rêves :
J’ai passé toute la journée allongée sur la plage, perdue dans mes rêves. 9 S’il m’avait
appelée – telle était ma pensée – je n’aurais pu résister. Je me sentais prête à tout,
résolue à tout abandonner, toi, l’enfant, mon avenir, (…). (26)
15 Perdue dans ses rêves, elle le sera à nouveau plus tard lors du retour de Fridolin après
l’aventure nocturne de ce dernier, elle aussi aux contours fortement oniriques, un
aspect d’ailleurs fort bien rendu dans le film par l’utilisation de lents travelling avants
dans un décor aussi splendide que labyrinthique en steadycam quasi-subjective. Au
cours de la séquence de l’orgie chez Schnitzler, on note toutefois une variation
surprenante par rapport au ton solennel du film lorsque Fridolin rit de la mise en garde
de la femme mystérieuse qui tente de le protéger. Mais le rêve n’est jamais bien loin :
Elle dit encore dans un murmure presque désespéré : « Va-t’en ! »
Il éclata de rire et s’entendit rire comme dans un rêve. « Je sais bien où je suis. Vous
n’êtes quand même pas tous là pour qu’on hallucine rien qu’à vous regarder ! Tu te
moques simplement de moi pour me rendre complètement fou. » (91)
16 Cet étrange rire, qui sera répété – « il se mit de nouveau à rire et ne reconnut pas son
rire » (92) – anticipe ainsi celui d’Albertine dans son rêve, quelques heures plus tard.
Pourtant, Fridolin résiste au rêve. Cette traversée du fantasme, pour lui, doit se faire les
yeux grands ouverts. Le rêveur doit être réveillé:
Fridolin ouvrit les yeux aussi grand que possible, passa la main sur son front et sa
joue, prit son pouls. A peine plus rapide que d’habitude. Tout allait bien. Il était
parfaitement éveillé. (107)
17 Des yeux grands ouverts qui pourtant, insiste Kubrick, sont grands fermés : Eyes Wide
Shut.
18 Dans son essai Eyes Wide Shut ou l’étrange labyrinthe, Diane Morel pose la question
suivante : « Sommes-nous dans le rêve ou la réalité, la réalité qui nous est présentée
est-elle crédible, vraisemblable ? » (58). A ses yeux, le film a surtout la texture d’un rêve
et sa lecture tendrait plutôt à attirer le récit du côté onirique. A l’inverse, Michel Chion,
au terme d’une analyse fouillée et à de maints égards très convaincante, déclare d’Eyes
Wide Shut qu’il est « un film sur le quotidien, pas sur le monde du rêve » (478), aspect
dont il fait sa thèse centrale. Pour nous, cette alternative est fallacieuse et la question
de Morel peut-être assez mal posée. Car après tout, nous ne sommes ni dans la réalité,
ni dans un rêve. Nous sommes au cinéma, art fantasmagorique 10 par définition,
dispositif élaboré visant à imprimer sur un écran devant nos yeux une réalité
fictionnelle durant un certain temps, soit ici cent cinquante-neuf minutes, ce qui
correspond mutatis mutandis au temps qu’il faut pour lire le texte de Schnitzler. Tandis
que nous regardons ce film, ou que nous lisons le texte, nous ne dormons pas et donc
nous ne rêvons pas non plus. Si la salle est suffisamment obscure et les conditions
suffisamment bonnes, nous sortons également de notre quotidienne « réalité ». Nous
ouvrons grands les yeux. Tout va bien. Nous sommes parfaitement réveillés. Outre les

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résonances immanquables avec le passage de la nouvelle de Schnitzler cité plus haut,

nous sommes aussi très proches d’une situation d’hypnose, 11 de rêve éveillé, c’est-à-dire
dans une situation fantasmagorique virant au fantasmatique, qui est précisément celle
du focalisateur principal du film et de la nouvelle : Bill/ Fridolin.
19 « Les désirs se reproduisent par leurs images », écrivait en 1777 Dominique Vivant-
Denon dans son récit court – une nouvelle avant l’heure ? – à la fois libertin et onirique
Point de Lendemain,12 qui servit d’hypotexte au film de Louis Malle Les amants de 1958
avec Jeanne Moreau et Jean-Marc Bory. Ce texte comporte des similarités étonnantes
avec la nouvelle de Schnitzler.13 Les images dont nous parle le narrateur ont un nom
qui échappa peut-être à l’auteur de ce conte pré-cinématographique et pré-
psychanalytique et qui pourtant s’en rapproche tant : celui de fantasme, qui vient du
grec φάντασμα signifiant « apparition, image offerte à l’esprit par un objet », objet qui
pourrait bien être, en l’occurrence, une caméra de cinéma.
20 C’est le principe fantasmatique qui constitue la matrice diégétique des textes de
Schnitzler et de Kubrick. Et peu importe, en effet, que l’officier ait existé ou pas. Le
fantasme écrit son scénario et se manifeste dans sa matérialité verbale (dans les récits
d’Albertine/ Alice) mais surtout iconique. Ainsi, dans Eyes Wide Shut, les seules scènes
« non réelles » matérialisées iconiquement ne sont pas les rêves mais le fantasme de
Bill qui voit Alice en train de faire l’amour à l’officier. Notons qu’il s’agit alors d’un
fantasme de fantasme, offert qui plus est à l’imaginaire du spectateur, libre lui aussi de
l’investir de ses propres fantasmes. Eyes Wide Shut, film paradoxal dans lequel « le
réalisme minutieux côtoie une ambiance fantasmatique » (Ciment 257) devient donc un
exercice de mise en scène du désir, ces désirs secrets qui habitent chacun d’entre nous
au moyen d’une puissante illusion de réalité qui est l’apanage du cinéma et qui semble
ainsi véritablement faire de Traumnovelle la nouvelle rêvée pour une réécriture
cinématographique du fantasme.
21 Au-delà du fantasme d’Alice/ Albertine avec l’officier sans nom, il en est un autre qui
habite le texte de Traumnovelle mais qui ne trouve pas droit de cité dans sa réécriture
cinématographique. Si la plupart des commentateurs ont souligné le respect presque
scrupuleux par Kubrick de la trame narrative originale, peu ont mentionné
l’oblitération pure et simple du fantasme que Fridolin oppose à celui Albertine dans le
premier chapitre, à l’issue du duel de l’imaginaire transgressif avec son épouse, qu’il
remporte, contrairement à ce qui se passe dans le film. Il s’agit de la rencontre avec une
jeune nymphe – une nymphette ? – sur un ponton, suivi d’un échange de regards
ardents dont la mise en texte n’est ni plus ni moins que la description à peine voilée
d’un rapport sexuel :
C’était une toute jeune fille, peut-être âgée de quinze ans, avec des cheveux blonds
défaits qui tombaient sur ses épaules et recouvraient d’un côté sa poitrine délicate.
La jeune fille regardait devant elle, fixant la surface de l’eau, avançant lentement le
long du mur, les yeux baissés, progressant vers l’autre coin, et soudain elle s’est
retrouvée devant moi: elle avait les bras rejetés en arrière, comme si elle voulait se
tenir plus solidement, et levant les yeux elle m’a soudain aperçu. […] Et tout d’un
coup elle s’est mise à sourire, un sourire merveilleux, c’était une façon de me dire
bonjour, il y avait là comme un signe dans ses yeux – et en même temps une légère
moquerie dans ce regard glissant sur l’eau qui me séparait d’elle. Puis elle a étiré
son jeune corps svelte, comme ravie de sa beauté, mais aussi fière et suavement
frémissante; il était facile de s’en rendre compte, sous l’éclat de mon regard qu’elle
sentait posé sur elle. Nous sommes restés ainsi face à face peut-être une dizaine de

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secondes, les lèvres entrouvertes et les yeux étincelants. Je lui ai tendu les bras
malgré moi, il y avait dans son regard de l’abandon et de la joie. (29-30)
22 De manière significative, cette nymphette fait retour à deux reprises dans le texte de la
nouvelle. Elle réapparaît tout d’abord sous les traits de la jeune Pierrette, aux prises
avec deux juges lubriques surpris dans des ébats interdits. Il s’agit en fait de la fille du
costumier Gibisier :
[…] une gracieuse jeune fille, presque encore une enfant et habillée d’un costume de
Pierrette, avec des bas de soie blancs, courut dans le long corridor en direction de
Fridolin qui ne put faire autrement que de la prendre entre ses bras. […] La fille se
blottit contre Fridolin, comme s’il était là pour la protéger. Son petit visage poudré
de blanc était orné de quelques mouches; de sa poitrine délicate s’exhalait un
parfum de roses et de fard; -- ses yeux avaient un éclat fripon et guilleret. […] Elle
leva vers lui des yeux aguichants et enfantins, comme captivée. (77,78)
23 Si on retrouve cette dernière scène dans le film à travers le personnage de la fille de
Milich (Leelee Sobiseki), le spectateur n’a aucun moyen de la rattacher à un élément
textuel précédent. Elle demeure à ses yeux une adolescente sans doute un peu vicieuse,
au père proxénète, alors que dans la nouvelle, la reprise d’éléments textuels tels que la
mention de sa poitrine « délicate » ainsi que ses yeux à l’« éclat fripon et guilleret » ne
peut manquer d’établir la connexion entre la mystérieuse Pierrette qui reviendra
hanter Fridolin et la jeune fille aperçue sur la plage. Plus déterminant encore est la
réapparition de la jeune nymphe dans le rêve d’Albertine, où elle joue un rôle-clé,
puisqu’elle devient la mystérieuse princesse désireuse de faire de Fridolin son époux
tandis que ce dernier est martyrisé :
Le sang coulait à flots sur ton corps, je le voyais couler, consciente de ma cruauté,
sans pour autant m’en étonner. A ce moment la princesse s’est dirigée vers toi. Ses
cheveux étaient défaits et se répandaient autour de son corps nu, elle tenait son
diadème à deux mains et te le tendait – et je savais que c’était la jeune fille que tu
avais rencontrée sur la plage au Danemark, celle que tu avais vue un matin, nue, sur
la terrasse d’une cabine de bain. (120)
24 Ainsi dans l’original de Schnitzler, la transmission des fantasmes s’effectue dans les
deux sens, devenant circulation, alors que le film de Kubrick semble plus centré sur
l’imaginaire de Bill aux prises avec le fantasme d’Alice. En outre, alors que chez
Schnitzler, on navigue librement entre rêve et fantasme, le parti-pris de Kubrick
semble avoir été de laisser Bill seul avec des fantasmes inassouvis ou morbides, et pour
finir littéralement terrassé par la réalité du récit du rêve d’Alice, choix qui permet au
réalisateur de retrouver une structure narrative binaire, plus commune à son art du
récit, de l’ascension à la chute, telle qu’on la retrouve notamment dans A Clockwork
Orange, Barry Lyndon ou Shining.
25 Pour conclure, revenons très brièvement sur la fonction du rêve dans son rapport au
réel, et au traitement qui en est fait dans Eyes Wide Shut. Si, comme l’explique Jacques
Lacan commentant Die Traumdeutung de Freud dans le séminaire XI de 1964, l’une des
fonctions du rêve est de nous réveiller pour nous confronter à une réalité intolérable 14
– dans le cas de Bill ou Fridolin, l’acceptation du désir féminin terrassant la structure
symbolique du mariage – alors on peut se demander si Kubrick, à travers les fantasmes
de Bill qui, au mieux, ne sont que des rêves éveillés, ne cherche justement pas à
empêcher l’effondrement de ladite structure, choisissant plutôt de laisser tourner cette
merveilleuse machine hypnagogique qu’est le cinéma, renouant ainsi subrepticement
avec un discours phallocratique pour lequel le cinéaste est resté célèbre, et pas toujours
illégitimement critiqué.

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BIBLIOGRAPHIE
Chion, Michel. Stanley Kubrick. L’humain, ni plus ni moins. Paris : Cahiers du cinéma, 2005.
Ciment, Michel. Stanley Kubrick. Paris : Calmann-Lévy, 2004.
Leitch, Thomas. Film Adaptation and its Discontents. Baltimore : John Hopkins University Press,
2007.
LoBrutto, Vincent. Stanley Kubrick. Londres : Faber & Faber, 1997.
Morel, Diane. Eyes Wide Shut ou l’étrange labyrinthe. Paris : PUF, collection “recto-verso”, 2002.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. 1955. Londres : Penguin, 2006.
Schnitzler, Arthur. Double rêve (Traumnovelle). 1925. Traduit de l’allemand par Pierre Deshusses.
Paris : Payot, 2010.
---. « La Nouvelle rêvée » dans Romans et nouvelles Tome 2, 1909-1931. Edition présentée et annotée
par Brigitte Vergne-Cain et Gérard Rudent. Paris : Le livre de Poche, 1996. 597-667.
---. Dreamstory (Traumnovelle). 1925. Traduit de l’allemand par J.Q. Davies. Londres : Penguin, 1999.
Vivant-Denon, Dominique. Point de Lendemain. 1777. Paris : Arte France Développement, 2005.
ANNEXES
Liste des films cités :
Les amants. Réal. Louis Malle. Nouvelles éditions du film, 1958.
The Dead (Gens de Dublin). Réal. John Huston. Channel 4, Delta Films, 1987.
Eyes Wide Shut. Réal. Stanley Kubrick. Warner Bros, 1999.
The Killing (L’ultime Razzia); Réal. Stanley Kubrick. United Artists, 1956.
2001: A Space Odyssey. Réal. Stanley Kubrick. Warner Bros, 1968.
NOTES
1. Bertrand Tavernier. « Le tombeau de Stanley Kubrick », Positif octobre 1999: 45.
2. Pour plus d’informations sur la genèse de The Killing, on consultera avec profit la biographie de
Vincent LoBrutto Stanley Kubrick (Londres : Faber & Faber, 1997), notamment le chapitre 7
« Harris-Kubrick ».
3. Au sens ici très littéral d’un texte chaînon, situé entre deux textes.
4. Avec ses 159 minutes, Eyes Wide Shut est un film long, le troisième plus long métrage de Kubrick
après 2001 (160 minutes) dans la director’s cut et Barry Lyndon (187 min).
5. Arthur Schnitzler, Traumnovelle. Traduit de l’allemand par Pierre Deshusses (Paris : Payot,
2010) p. 22.
6. Difficile en effet, à la lecture du titre de la nouvelle, de ne pas songer à Die Traumdeutung
(L’interprétation des rêves), dont la structure morphologique est la même. Le texte de Freud fut
publié en 1900 mais il serait erroné de voir dans le récit de Schnitzler, publié presque un quart de

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siècle plus tard, quelque tentative d’illustrer les thèses freudiennes. Le rapport des deux hommes
était complexe, teinté d’admiration et de rivalité polie, ainsi que l’attestent leurs
correspondances.
7. Kubrick n’était pas germanophone, et tout laisse à croire que le manuscrit anonymé envoyé à
Frederic Raphael lui a été adressé dans sa traduction anglaise. Pour plus d’informations à ce
propos, cf. Ciment, 267-269. Pour une lecture en anglais du texte de Schnitzler, on pourra se
reporter à l’excellente traduction de J.Q. Davies pour les Editions Penguin (1999), préfacée par le
même Frederic Raphael. Pour des raisons de cohérence linguistique, le choix a été fait de citer le
texte de Schnitzler en français dans cet article.
8. Brigitte Vergne-Cain et Gérard Rudent, Introduction à « La Nouvelle rêvée » dans Arthur
Schnitzler, Romans et nouvelles Tome 2, 1909-1931 (Paris, Le livre de Poche, 1996), p. 595.
9. Je souligne.
10. La fantasmagorie n’étant d’autre, nous dit le Littré, que « l’art de faire paraître des figures
lumineuses au sein d’une obscurité profonde ». N’est-ce pas là la meilleure définition du cinéma ?
11. Nous reprenons ici la thèse centrale de Raymond Bellour telle qu’elle est très savamment
exposée dans son ouvrage Le corps du cinéma (Paris : P.O.L., 2009).
12. « Point de Lendemain », Dominique Vivant-Denon, 1777. Arte France Développement, 2005.
13. Récit à la première personne du jeune narrateur anonyme qui se retrouve pris dans une nuit
étourdissante, faite de confidences, de baisers et d’étreintes avec Madame de T***. Conte libertin
philosophique sur la nature éphémère du désir dont certains passages pourraient être
directement transposés chez Schnitzler :
« Quelle aventure ! Quelle nuit ! Je ne savais si je ne rêvais pas encore ; je doutais, puis j’étais
persuadé, convaincu, et puis je ne croyais plus rien. Tandis que je flottais dans les incertitudes,
j’entendis du bruit près de moi : je levai les yeux, me les frottai, je ne pouvais croire…c’était…
qui ? » (36)
14. Pour plus de développements concernant le rapport du rêve à l’éthique, on consultera avec
profit le commentaire en miroir que fait Cathy Caruth de ces textes de Freud et de Lacan dans son
ouvrage Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative and History. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press, 1996), 92-106.
RÉSUMÉS
The aim of this article is to cast a fresh look at Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) as a cinematographic
vehicle for a journey through dreams, fantasy and desire. The main argument that is developed in these
pages stems from a close reading of the film’s literary hypotext, namely Arthur Schnitzler’s 1925
Traumnovelle, and more particularly from the observation of a symmetrical pattern in the objects of
fantasy that the two protagonists, as husband and wife in the midst of domestic turmoil and erotic
reminiscences, oppose each other in their initial dueling. Taking up on a number of critical discussions on
the film’s relationship with the mechanics of desire and dreams as well as the original short story (Morel,
2002, Ciment, 2004 and Chion, 2005), I argue that Kubrick’s choice to place Schnitzler’s Fridolin’s – Bill
Hartford in the film version – original object of desire under erasure leads to a significant modification of
the story’s libidinal economy. By so altering the male gaze in its struggle to cope with the alterity of
feminine desire, Kubrick turns his film into a gendered phantasmagorical experience, suggesting that, for

101
his male protagonist and viewers, it may ultimately be more sensible to keep one’s eyes shut than to wake
up to the intolerable nature of the real.
AUTEURS
JOCELYN DUPONT
Jocelyn Dupont is Senior Lecturer in contemporary American literature and film at the
University of Perpignan and General Secretary of the French Association for American Studies
(AFEA). He has published extensively on contemporary American fiction and film, with a
particular emphasis on the issue of “textual pathology,” both filmic and literary. He is also the
author of several articles on Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and Lolita. In 2012, he edited the
volume Patrick McGrath: Directions and Transgressions for Cambridge Scholars Publishers. He also
co-edited two collective volumes for Perpignan University Press; “A Myriad of Literary
Impressions”. L’intertextualité dans le roman contemporain de langue anglaise (2010) and Ni Ange, ni
Démon. Figures de la Nymphette dans la littérature et dans les arts (2011). His current research focuses
on the aesthetic representation of psychopathology in the American feature film from 1945 to
the present day.

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Journal of the Short Story in English

Les Cahiers de la nouvelle

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Introduction to Robert Olen Butler

Cinema of the Mind

Reveal to Reel: Short Fiction’s ‘Special Relationship’ with Cinema

Faulkner’s Modernist Short Story in the Age of the Silent Movie

The Intermedial Trajectories of Angela Carter’s Wolf Tales

The Aesthetics of Revealing/Concealing in “The Killers” by Ernest Hemingway and in its

Du texte à l’écran, deux avatars de la Maison Usher au cinéma

Rêve et fantasme dans Traumnovelle et Eyes Wide Shut

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. London, New York: Routledge, 2006.

--“Korea”. The Collected Stories. London: Faber and Faber, 1992.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Introduction to Robert Olen Butler

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Cinema of the Mind

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Reveal to Reel: Short Fiction’s

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

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two structures. In the Classic Three-Act Structure, the protagonist is a self-determining

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

regarding plot events, and/or another character’s true nature/identity), as well as

28 So why the crash-course in short story structure? Precisely so as to limit my claims

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

text ‘ Letters Home’ is a third-person narrative which describes the protagonist

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

réconcilie une tension profondément enracinée dans la narration cinématographique : le besoin

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Faulkner’s Modernist Short Story in

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

I. Montage in Short Stories

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

II. Silent Movies in Faulkner

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

III. Literary incipits as establishing shots

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012

Liénard-Yeterian, Marie. Faulkner et le cinéma. Michel Houdiard, 2010.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 59 | Autumn 2012