Henry James Goes to the Movies

• Published in: Film quarterly 2003, Vol.56 (4), p.55
• Main Author: Chatman, Seymour
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adaptation; Anthologies; Attitudes; Essays; Ideology; James, Henry (1843-1916); Motion picture directors & producers; Motion pictures; Novels; Postmodernism; Psychology; Television; Theater
• ISSN: 0015-1386; 1533-8630

Professor Griffin's volume, organized in the chronological order in which the films appeared, illustrates at least three reasons why academics write about film adaptations: 1 to show how or whether a filmmaker has offered an acceptable visual equivalent of the novel; 2 to theorize about the narratological and technical problems facing adaptors; and 3 to use the adaptation as a "site" for ideological inquiry, especially to satisfy that postmodern appetite for subversive readings. How can what is central to James's art - the internal views of characters, the "dilations of psychological nuance," only realizable by the most subtle narratorial indirection, what James himself called "a certain indirect and oblique view of my presented action" - be captured by a medium so absorbed in surface appearances and so reluctant to use voice-over to convey narrators' attitudes and characters' inner lives? I agree with Mitchell's view that the 1973 Masterpiece Theatre TV version, directed by Jack Pulman, achieves more of the effect of James's drama of "pure thought" by providing an intradiegetic voice-over narrator (Bob Assingham), and having him ponder what the other characters might or might not be thinking.