Since cinema began, its similarities with live theatre have been quite obvious; however, film adaptations of theatrical works demonstrate that the two mediums are often difficult to reconcile because of their different relationships to audience and the presence or absence of the single most important force in cinema - the camera.
THEATRE AND CINEMA
It is sometimes useful to consider cinema as a kind of hybrid art, its characteristics a fusion of other art forms. This approach to thinking about movies can reveal some of its storytelling traits, but also invite comparison with the other art forms that may be embedded within it. It can also suggest how cinema functions as an adaptive medium—not only may films adapt stories from other sources, it also adapts storytelling techniques and conventions.
There is a strong argument to think about film as a hybrid of numerous other art forms, but two in particular stand out: still photography and live theatre. Cinema’s debt to photography is obvious. The infrastructure and technological innovations that brought us still cameras eventually paved the way for cinema, which began life as a series of photographs taken in rapid succession, which produced the illusion of movement. Theatre’s influence on cinema may also be quite apparent. Like theatre, cinema uses actors to embody drama. Cinema adopts a similar, self-contained approach to escalation of drama in a relatively tight time frame, with running times varying, but generally remaining within 90 to 150 minutes or so. However, the image itself may demonstrate the legacy of theatre. According to David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, “the film frame is analogous to the proscenium of a stage.” If you’ve been to a theatrical production at your high school or elsewhere, you’ve likely sat in an auditorium and looked towards the front of the room at the stage before you. The action plays out in a kind of frame made by the stage floor, the vertical walls, and the line of the ceiling, which stretches down to hide the curtain rigging and lighting equipment from clear view. It creates a rectangular box—you view the action inside the box. That, at a basic level, is also the case with cinema. You see what’s inside the box, and the people inside don’t know you’re looking at them. The images below from John Cassavetes's Opening Night (1978), which is about the theatre, illustrate the phenomenon.
There are some major differences, however. Chief among them is that in a theatre, you are rooted to your seat, and the rectangular box of the stage floor and walls does not move; the actors and set pieces within it move, but the frame itself remains still. In cinema, the frame can move wherever it likes. It constantly asks you to readjust your perspective as you watch, considering the relationship between the camera and the subjects it captures. French film critic Andre Bazin, praising the director Jean Renoir, argues that the frame’s ability to shift its perspective was the thing that distinguished film from theatre: “Renoir is the director who has best grasped the true nature of the screen and freed it from dubious analogies with painting and the theatre. In visual terms the screen is habitually equated with a picture-frame and, dramatically, with the proscenium. These parallels result in an organization of visual material whereby the image is composed in relation to the sides of the rectangle…But Renoir saw clearly that the screen was simply the counterpart of the camera’s viewfinder and therefore not a frame [which would enclose all that exists to be seen] but its opposite: a mask whose function is as much to exclude reality as to reveal it [because it enforces selection from a scene which exists outside the camera’s range of vision]; what it shows draws its value from what it conceals.” Bazin makes a helpful point; in cinema, it doesn’t just matter what we see inside the frame, but our awareness of what exists outside of it also matters. In the live theatre, everything happens inside the frame, which merely creates a space for us to view the story and watch the characters. In cinema, the movement of the frame shapes our perception of it.
And yet, theatrical performance has been a valuable tool for filmmakers looking not only to bring works of theatre to the screen as adaptations, but also as an instructive metric for considering how to stage and photograph their films. As in theatre, actors must be blocked and placed in the frame, their movements choreographed for maximum effect on the story. One such technique is deep focus cinematography, which creates a large depth of field. Basically, this means that everything is in focus at the same time—actors in the foreground close to the camera, and actors in the background far away from the camera. All of it can be seen simultaneously. Here are some examples of deep focus cinematography from a few films made in the 1940s, when many filmmakers were innovating around this particular technique. William Wyler’s The Little Foxes (1941) appears on the left, while Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) appears on the right. Take note of the framing (almost identical in each shot, in fact), but also that each subject is in focus, and so is the background of the set. It is just as easy to pick out details on the actors’ faces as it is on the curtains in the distance.
This approach resembles theatre because it allows you as a viewer to look where you want to look, more or less. When you sit in the audience at a theatrical production, the director can suggest where you should look through placement of the actors, set design, dialogue, and movement—the director constructs these elements to guide your focus to specific elements according to the story’s needs. However, the director is not grabbing your face and making you look at anything in particular. If you want to focus on just one character, or just one doorway, you can do that. In cinema, the frame dictates where you look. If the film director wants you to notice a specific detail, he or she will cut to a close-up of that thing. You have little choice but to see it. Deep focus cinematography shifts some of the responsibility back to you, so you can make your own choice about where to look and when. According to Patrick Ogle, “In one way then, the deep focus aesthetic was an attempt to achieve a simulation of certain effects of theatre performance both by the elimination of certain film characteristics that pointed up the fact of there being an intermediary between viewer and performance, and by the employment of other inherently filmic characteristics that enhanced the theatrical sense of presence while simultaneously preventing any occurrence of the wretched ‘canned theatre’ effects of some early sound films.”
Ogle gets at something crucial about cinema and theatre that makes film directors nervous: that movies could take on the appearance of a filmed theatrical production rather than a film with its own unique storytelling style more suited to its medium. This tension illustrates something we’ve seen throughout our study of adaptation thus far: when filmmakers consider how to adapt any work for the screen, they not only have to consider the story and characters, but also the demands and possibilities of the medium in which they work. Cinema requires certain stylistic and storytelling conventions, but it also affords tremendous opportunities to express ideas visually and sonically that theatrical productions may not.
In order to see this dynamic in action, I want you to watch the video commentary at right on director Elia Kazan’s film version of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), which is based on the famous play by Tennessee Williams. It is the rare film that reunites all three of the major collaborators who worked on the play: Williams adapted his own script for the film’s screenplay, Kazan had also directed the original production, and Marlon Brando originated the role of Stanley Kowalski before playing it in the film. The scene discussed in the video illustrates how Kazan brings the play to the screen.
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Kazan’s cinematic approach to the material that he is already familiar with indicates how a director who has worked in both theatre and film knows the different requirements and advantages of each medium. Kazan leans on the expressiveness of the camera, avoiding a ‘filmed theatre’ approach to his adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. In it, he demonstrates how filmmakers approach moving from theatre to film.
clip quiz - Theatre
Review the following clips and answer the questions in Blackboard.
DETECTIVE STORY (1951, Wyler)
The film Detective Story, like the play that it is based on, largely takes place in one setting. How does this clip try to simulate the experience of watching a play within that single setting? Pay attention to the staging of the actors and the use of the camera. |
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DOUBT (2008, Shanley)
The biggest difference between the frame that allows us to see a play’s dramatic action and the frame that allows us to see the cinema’s dramatic action is that in the movies, the frame can move, repositioning itself to offer a new shot through editing. What are the most significant moments of that moving frame in this clip from Doubt? Where does the filmmaker force us to see something, and why at that moment? |
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FOOL FOR LOVE (1985, Altman)
Plays depend heavily on dialogue, and cinema tends to do that less so, instead telling the story visually. In this clip from the film adaptation of Fool For Love, how does the movie give space to the dialogue? On the other hand, how does it express its ideas through the visuals? When is the language important and when is the camera important? |
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GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992, Foley)
In the play version of Glengarry Glen Ross, the scene in this clip from the film version takes place in a Chinese restaurant; the filmmakers decide to “open the play up,” staging it in several different settings. What different locations do you see represented here, and what effect do those changes have on the scene? |
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theatre on screen - Marjorie prime
From the opening shot of the film Marjorie Prime (2017), director Michael Almereyda’s adaptation of the play by the same name written by author Jordan Harrison, the theme of permanence comes to the forefront; the ocean rolls in, an acknowledgement of the vastness of the earth’s ecosystem, and a reminder of the individual human being’s relatively small place against it.
In both the original play and the film, a small group of characters wrestles with the impact of artificial intelligence on their memories of their loved ones. In the first scenes, the elderly Marjorie (Lois Smith), herself slipping into memory loss as she ages, converses with a young man named Walter (Jon Hamm), who dialogue reveals to be a holographic representation of her husband in the prime of his life. Walter Prime only knows what he has been told about their lives and relationship, and his dialogue with her is occasionally stilted and marked by inconsistencies. He is lifelike, but he is not life.
In the Harrison play, the household that Marjorie shares with her daughter Tess (played here by Geena Davis) and her husband Jon (played by Tim Robbins) is the major setting, as is often the case in theatre, which frequently confines its action to a single location to facilitate the ease of dramatic storytelling. Almereyda’s film ventures outside the house while still retaining the play’s emphasis on dialogue that reveals the complex histories and memories that bind these characters together, in all their pain and tragedy.
The use of extensive scenes of dialogue marks the theatrical adaptation, of course; theatre is often heavily driven by dialogue. At the same time, Almereyda navigates the tension between theatrical representation of his characters and the possibilities afforded to him by the cinematic medium in which he is working. In some scenes, he relies on traditional two shots between characters who speak to one another just as they would during the play. In other moments, he uses a standard strategy for covering dialogue in cinema, which is shot/reverse shot editing, wherein the film cuts to the person who is talking to the exclusion of the person listening. This is effortlessly done in cinema, and a convention that we are used to all the time, but it represents a directorial choice not really available to someone staging theatre; in the theatre, the audience can decide whether to look at the character speaking or the one reacting. In cinema, you have to look at the image the film gives you.
At other moments, Almereyda uses cinematic devices to shape your point of view as an audience member through other means. Theatrical directors suggest what you should look at through their staging of the actors, but filmmakers have more tools available to do that. In the shots below, Almereyda uses focal depth to guide your eyes. Based on what you see in these images, some subjects are in focus while others are out of focus, giving you a clear indication of where you are supposed to look.
The film’s director Michael Almereyda is interested in the theatrical form; working with frequent collaborator, actor Ethan Hawke, Almereyda made film versions of the Shakespeare plays Hamlet (2000) and Cymbeline (2014), both of which star Hawke and merge the theatrical stories of Shakespeare with cinematic techniques and attention to craft.
Likewise, Almereyda’s documentary This So-Called Disaster (2006) chronicles the production of the play The Late Henry Moss, written by the legendary playwright and actor Sam Shepard, who appears in the film as an interview subject alongside the play’s stars, actors Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, and Woody Harrelson.
Just because Almereyda is interested in theatre, though, doesn’t mean he’s not a film director first. In Marjorie Prime, though he pays tribute to the production by casting Lois Smith as the title character, who had played the role on stage, he fractures time and space in a variety of ways that go far beyond what theatre is typically capable of. While some scene transitions use fades to black, which simulate the similar approach of using a blackout to communicate the end of one scene and the start of another to the audience (not to mention allowing the actors to move on and off in darkness, as well as any changes to the set that need to be made), far more often, the film version cuts to places far beyond the house where the majority of the narrative takes place, jumping both into the past and to other locations.
Above all, this film version of Marjorie Prime is able to collapse time in a way that allows the characters and audience both to slip in and out of the present moment and memories, offering brief glimpses of the lives of the Primes before they became digital creations. The biggest question is whose memories these are. Are the Primes starting to actually remember their human lives, or are they manufacturing memories for themselves? Through this approach to associative editing (something that theatre really can’t do), the movie can achieve this kind of temporal confusion deliberately. Just as the human characters (who dwindle considerably as the film goes on and more of them die) lose their sense of where and when they are, so do we as an audience.
Marjorie Prime is a fascinating cinematic adaptation of a theatrical work that both retains some of the original’s essential properties and interprets those ideas through film style. It offers a strong example of an inventive filmmaker’s efforts to take the perceived limitations of a story enforced by narrative and medium convention, and turn them into strengths by filtering them through cinema.