19/07/08
A book about a writer overlooking the shooting of the movie adaption of one of his novels.
He comments intelligently about the ontology of adapting a novel for the screen. He comments thoroughly on the validity of the director’s cinematic interpretation of his novel. At the same time, he comments on his novel and on the ontology of the novel, of language, of writing.
Basically, he outlines his novel’s characteristics, he witnesses the shooting of the director’s interpretation, and as he witnesses he narrates along the accuracy of the interpretation.
A novel about novels, about the filming of a novel.
The coup de theatre is that the account of the filming is the story (so what can they be filming?).
The other coup de theatre would be if Fincher decided to adapt it!
23/07/08
…And the third coup de theatre would be if there was a film about Fincher’s adaptation.
One question might be…What is the story of the novel they are adapting?
This is a problem that must be solved because
If there is an actual story: everything becomes allegorical because by introducing a proper story the audience can clearly make out the seams of the levels being overlayed. There is a writer. A novel he wrote that is being adapted. He is at the shooting of this adaptation and he will walk us throughout the story, commenting on the director’s interpretation. The fact that there is a story seduces the viewer into an immersive state (the urge to experience the story of the novel being mounted in a hopefully compelling film). The real question would become: how do we make this metanovel be as compelling as the story. A weak solution in the past has been to simply have a compelling inner story…and to have the outer story not be an actual story but only a mere framework. Weak.
The challenge is to make the outerstory as compelling as the inner one.
But the initial problems are these:
1. What is it they are shooting?
In order to answer that question, the narrator would have to reveal the story of the novel they are adapting. Yet, there is not supposed to be a novel. The only novel is the one about the novel being made into a film.
The reader wants to know the story of what is being filmed. But the narrator is only giving the story of the shooting, not the story of what’s being shot.
(That is because there is nothing being shot. It is only an excuse to wax philosophically about the nature of writing, the nature of filming, the nature of filming writing, and the nature of self-refexive art.)
So what to do? How to reveal a story that does not exist?
… … …
July 24, 2008 at 10:44 am
ontological reflections themselves require images (Lang, statues in Contempt)
but
if I were adapting this novel to the screen, this novel about the adaption of a novel into film (where the novel is reflexively double), wouldn’t the film also be reflexively double? i would not show anything being shot; i’d show, rather, the process of shooting in a way which ignores that which is being shot, skirts around the edges of the process of filming/adapting - but nothing more.
in the creation of such a novel, interiority seems a key stance, and the dilemma is how to adapt interiority to an exterior medium reliant on the image. I cite Contempt because it is nothing if not interior in its adaptation of an interior novel and in its representation of the filmmaking process.