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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Films, cinema > Film theory & criticism
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Screening Woolf - Virginia Woolf on/and/in Film (Paperback)
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Screening Woolf - Virginia Woolf on/and/in Film (Paperback)
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As the subtitle indicates, this book has three majors concerns. The
first and most important concern is an examination of the film
adaptations of Woolf's novels-To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and Mrs.
Dalloway-in the order the films were released. This is the heart of
the matter, a fairly conventional effort to acknowledge film
reviews as well as the criticism of academicians in film or
literature as a starting point for a fresh view of these three film
adaptations. Since many film specialists prefer that no film ever
be adapted from literary fiction and many literature specialists
have similarly wished that their favorite novels had never been
filmed, the effort to mediate the two sides can be challenging. Of
the three films, To the Lighthouse is the least successful, tending
toward the old Masterpiece Theater mode of attempting to be
faithful to the "source text," to use the term of the film theorist
Robert Stam, but missing the essence of the novel. Director Sally
Potter's Orlando is cinematically the most venturesome and
attractive, although some Woolf readers condemn Potter's erasure of
Woolf's intent to celebrate her affair with Vita Sackville-West
(whose son Nigel Nicolson called Woolf's Orlando "the longest and
most charming love-letter in literature"). Mrs. Dalloway tends
toward the Merchant/Ivory style of treating literary
masterworks-indeed, the film credits include a debt of gratitude to
the producer/director partnership-and is generally carried by the
star power of Vanessa Redgrave, although it is difficult to imagine
her having a crush on another young woman, even at eighteen. The
book's second concern is Woolf's interest in what she would call
"the cinema." As a member of Bloomsbury, she saw and participated
in the discussion of the cinema, especially avant-garde films,
which she considered to be more the future of cinema than film
adaptations, upon which she heaped great scorn for their ravenous,
if not rapacious, consumption of vulnerable literary fiction such
as Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Woolf specialists such as Leslie
Hankins proclaim her one of the earliest and most significant
British film theorists for the brilliant essay "The Cinema" (1925),
as film was just beginning to establish itself as art and not
merely popular entertainment. The third concern is a complex effort
to explore the David Hare/Stephen Daldry film adaptation of Michael
Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours, an homage to
Mrs. Dalloway in which Virginia Woolf has a starring role, as
portrayed by Oscar winner Nicole Kidman. The film and Kidman's
prosthetic nose produced a violent division among the Woolfians who
either commended its bringing legions of new readers to Mrs.
Dalloway and potentially to "Woolf"-Mrs. Dalloway becoming the
best-seller it could not have been in her lifetime-or were outraged
by the film's diminishment of probably the most important female
British novelist of the 20th century. Even Nobel Laureate Doris
Lessing spoke out against the travesty of a novelist she considered
a foremother of later 20th-century writers.
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