Just as Mr. Hu also mentioned a popular theory about the transformation and alternation of the functions of novels and movies in the first class of his funny "World Literature in Film" this semester. Teacher Hu believes that because of the rise of the controversial "art" of film, the narrative function of traditional classical novels can be easily replaced by the narrative of films. And twentieth-century novels need to find another way out, get rid of the traditional classic narrative mode and transfer the narrative to the art of cinema. And this theory may also be used as a reference to measure whether a literary work can be adapted into a movie, or whether it is easy to be adapted into a movie. (Although this theory is not applicable to all films and literary works, at least it can reflect the general creative laws. And we can see that so many great film works also come from "minor plot" or "antiplot"
From this point of view, most of Woolf's novels do not belong to the traditional classic narrative, but the well-known "stream-of-consciousness" style of writing, which is far beyond the narrative skills of the time . conventional. Therefore, Woolf's novels are themselves rich texts for narratological research, which in itself brings great difficulty to film adaptation. In other words, such literary works are actually not suitable, or not easily adapted into film works.
Of course, the huge difficulty is not impossible to adapt. As mentioned earlier, there are always exceptions to the general rules of creation. Most Woolf fans, or most movie fans, can't ignore the recognition of "The Hours" adapted from "Mrs. Dalloway". But the film's problem is that it doesn't take advantage of the film's language itself, leaving audiences drowsy amid the long, messy story. (Of course, we can't rule out that there are people who have a special fondness for this lengthy, messy, and lethargic feel, and they can say they love the movie because it's "incredibly beautiful." There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not My general attitude in judging works, although I sometimes judge other works.)
Since the receptive ability and feeling ability of visual images far exceed the traditional language medium of words, this has even become a reason for some students to think that movies are based on novels. one. According to their reasoning: because the film can give me more (visual) impact, so that I can really remember the story. (rather than the painful word-for-word reading of novels, often the pain of getting completely lost in paragraphs). Of course, this cannot be said to be the reason why movies are superior to novels, nor can it be regarded as the reason for judging the merits of a work. Actually they think the plot that is handled well in the movie, (such as many details that reflect the androgyny theme of the novel) is actually something in the novel that they ignore, and fundamentally, the movie basically follows the novel in terms of plot, That is, there is no originality and it fails to fill the connotation of the original book (of course, it is mainly aimed at the audience who have read the novel).
There is a widely debated place here, that is, about the costume of the protagonist Orlando in the film. Some people think that the actors have neutral characteristics, and they allude to the theme of hermaphroditism before and after transgender, and express Woolf's concept of two different character symbols, male and female, in human nature. theme. However, this is entirely a retrospective interpretive reading. When the film began, when we first saw the appearance of the protagonist Orlando, in fact, everyone's first reaction was: which looks like a man? Completely incapable of expressing his reflections on his masculine character. And then throughout the film, this problem has been bothering the audience. A very neutral dress very vaguely confuses the audience's gender identification. In addition, the strong impact of visual images acts as interference, and the closedness completely kills the audience's imagination. . So, as soon as it came out from Orlando, it was actually very difficult for the film to succeed.
In addition, it was felt that the pattern of the film's chapter divisions was very clear. That's because the film sacrifices the fluidity of Woolf's original book's tact of failure at the expense of the fluidity of the original story. Because the film omits a lot of story details, the opening of some chapters has to be blunt, especially this chapter of "Poetry" is especially funny.
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