The limitations on the comparative analysis of literary fiction and the feature film are dominated by the socio-political situation of the two forms and the disciplines which examine them. Literary fiction is an elite, privileged form,—one which is legitimated by its commitment to an objective of excellence, however that is defined; while the feature film is produced by a commercial industry which is unable to survive without creating a popular audience. Although there is government support for both forms, only with film is commercial success a major consideration. The discomfort of the literary critic with popular cultural forms has a long and distinguished history, where all sorts of arguments have been advanced about the survival of ‘minority culture’ against the threats of ‘mass civilisation’ right from Matthew Arnold, through Leavis and Eliot,1 to the pundits of today. Similarly, film studies’ recognition of its situation as an area which has to establish its respectability has produced a jealous wariness of the imperialism of other disciplines—the literary appropriation of auteurs, for instance—as well as a dominant interest in theorising the medium in order to establish both its essential nature and the discipline’s academic rigour. So the limited degree of intercourse that occurs between the two disciplines has to deal with suspicions of elitism and imperialism on the one hand, and accusations of ‘trendiness’ on the other.
As pointed out in the introduction, film criticism does largely originate in the extension of English studies into mass cultural forms, even though this was often (and paradoxically) accompanied by an elitist rhetoric which denied sympathy with such forms. The increasing interest in film which occurred during the 1960s is traceable to the expansion of the concern of literary critics with the modernist narratives of film-makers such as Godard, Fellini and Bergman. The trend has generally been one way, that of literary critics moving into film. It is still the norm for film theorists to possess a strong literary background, while the reverse is not generally true. This has a number of consequences not only on the kind of interrelationships that are usually examined—the establishment of the study of the ‘novel into film’,2 for instance—but also on the kinds of analysis to which film is normally subjected by people from outside film studies. Usually dominated by essentially literary assumptions, film analyses which arise from outside the discipline often substantiate the film theorists’ case for the special nature of their area. (It should be noted that there are cases, although more rare, of film theorists crossing into literary areas. The results there are similar. For example, Colin McCabe’s discussion of realist cinema, for all its importance, contains an argument about the typicality of Middlemarch as a classic realist text and about George Eliot as an acceptable voice for bourgeois nineteenth-century ‘truths’ about reality that many literary critics would find hard to accept. Eagleton’s account of Eliot in Criticism and Ideology reveals, by comparison, the unexamined nature of McCabe’s view.3) Analyses of film made by literary critics, and by psychologists or sociologists, often see film as an unproblematic medium. They ignore the necessity of enquiring very deeply into its structures in order to understand what a specific film, or film generally, might do.
The problem of making links between film and fiction, then, is not usually that of persuading film theorists to take literary fictions seriously as a separate narrative form. Not only do film theorists usually tend to have a literary background; but also they are inevitably involved either in problems of language and communication (problems which take all communicative acts seriously) or in areas of film theory which bear some direct philosophical relation to literary theory (for instance, the area of characterisation). Rather, the problem lies in the fact that, historically, film has been ‘systematically mistaken for literature’, and that it has been treated as a literary text.4 Arguments about translations of novels into film, for instance, usually examine the two formulations of the ‘same’ narrative for differences of quality and effect.5 This type of approach intuits an ‘ideal’ version of the literary source, a narrative which is independent of its medium and which it is (a) film’s task to materialise. It therefore tends to privilege the literary text—by valorising those of its functions which are difficult to duplicate on the screen. Consequently, we cannot address this particular problem and introduce the theoretical connections between film and fiction before first looking at the difficulties inherent in the application of literary criticism to the analysis of film. Only then can we suggest ways in which film and fiction can be interrelated without overlooking their formal differences; and only then can we go on to discuss the formal and ideological determinants of Australian film and fiction as products of a specific national culture.
The obstacle which lies before literary critics who want to respond to their interest in film is that film and fiction are two different forms. The temptation is to ignore this by articulating film’s structures and language in terms of those of fiction. Noel King has argued that most treatment of film in English departments in Australia simply substitutes the film text for the literary text without altering the critical practice at all; as he puts it, ‘new object, same old discourse’.6 Implicit in King’s criticisms is the proposition that literary training provides one with a set of assumptions and techniques which are exactly wrong for the study of film. Gerald Mast has talked about this in a useful and argumentative study where he develops a critique of the literary response as one inimical to film studies.7 First, he says, film is a new art form and one to which the more traditional modes of high art criticism are not always applicable. The nomination of a text as high art places it within particular cultural contexts, within particular audiences, and within particular conditions of production and reception—most of which are not those of the feature film. John Tulloch broaches this in his opening to Legends on the Screen, and uses it as an argument for the category of narrative within which discussions of popular culture can be usefully framed.8 The problem of the popularity of the form, the subsequent expansion of the role of genre and convention, and the manner in which the success of a popular art is (or is not) determined, are all aspects of film criticism which both Mast and Tulloch maintain are not easily addressed through a high art model. Further, the socio-economic placement of film is different from literary fiction; there is some truth in the proposition that those who spend their leisure time watching films occupy a different class position to those who spend their leisure time reading novels.
Both Mast and Chatman9 have suggested that there are assumptions absorbed with a literary training that need to be recognised, because they are there and because they often operate unconsciously—as prejudice rather than judgement. For instance, literary training creates a respect for the integrity of the text that motivates resistance to translations of a text from one medium to another. In their dealing with texts, literary critics also develop a preference for the reflective, contemplative and intellectual pleasures over the more passionate, sensual and stimulating ones. This can take the form of a somewhat puritanical distrust of the senses. Film takes words out of narrative and replaces them with sights and sounds, appealing directly to the senses; in Mast’s words, film offers us a ‘sensuous metaphor for the experience of an event’10 rather than an ironic or reflective understanding of its significance. An important and debilitating consequence of this preference for intellectual pleasure is the common disregard for films which are clearly conventional and which operate comfortably within the boundaries of their genre—such as virtually the entire output of Hollywood. It is this disregard for genre that prompted in the 1960s the modernist preferences of early film criticism, which was attracted to European films while American films simply attracted audiences.11 There was a sense that genre films (such as westerns, thrillers, detective films and so on) were inherently inconsiderable because they made so few claims for their own uniqueness; and this was part of a range of attitudes which accompany a respect for the literary and a discomfort with the popular. As we shall see in a later chapter, the gulf which divides the critical responses on the one hand and the popular responses on the other hand to such films as The Man From Snowy River and Gallipoli is comprehensible within this framework. In many cases, the discomfort with the popular is a theoretical blind spot: the distinction between the literary and the popular is invoked rather than analysed, and there is little understanding of the different ways in which the various modes construct their meanings. So the literary preference for a greater illusion of ambiguity and a multiplicity of reading positions, and its valorisation of the idiosyncrasies of the individual text is used to privilege the literary form over that of film.
There are, of course, real differences between the forms—they are not all the perjorative inventions of the literati: film does not use narrative point of view in the same way that fiction does. Visually, irony is difficult to achieve while symbol is difficult to avoid. The clearly asserted description of scene and of setting which is customary in the novel gives way to a more generalised depiction in the cinema: the camera’s proliferation of information creates a problem of focus as a result of highlighting those aspects of setting which are crucial to the film’s meaning. Moreover, character in film is radically different in its construction; while some may deplore the star syndrome, film stars do have an important ontological function in film. As Richard Dyer points out, stars are semiotic systems—signs—and carry a detailed and precise range of meanings with them.12 They present an important advantage to the film-maker in that they provide a reservoir of significances which can be drawn upon in the representation of particular types and values. Further, the film-maker has the advantage of presenting a concrete, physical presence which can then be overlaid with nuances and accretions of meaning—whereas the novelist starts in the reverse position, building collections of traits, features and values in the hope of eventually establishing a concrete-like physical presence for the character. Even if this is achieved, there is not in fiction that physical particularity in our reception of character; hence the disagreements in translations of novels into films which occur about the casting, disagreements where the choice of actor or actress fails to mesh with our mental image of the character as drawn from the prose. This disagreement is a legitimate one, because the face of the star is part of the characterisation and not separable from it: the Phillip Marlowe played by Humphrey Bogart is not the same character as the Phillip Marlowe played by James Garner or Robert Mitchum.13
The genuine problem of formal comparisons is often exacerbated by discussions of film as possessing a visual ‘language’ which is more or less comparable to verbal language. Unfortunately, while this is a helpful metaphor in explaining the way film communicates in a general way, film language is not analogous in any detailed way to verbal language. Despite Eisenstein’s assertion that the shot is equivalent to the word, it is not. There have been films compiled with as few as twelve shots, and some shots in conventional films can last for many minutes; this suggests that shots relate more accurately to the sentence or paragraph rather than the word. The most we can say with any certainty about the grammar of film language is that two successive shots are clearly related in some way. And the understanding of this connection—which can be various—is more akin to understanding a poetic trope than understanding a word or a sentence of prose.14 Some attributes of verbal language—metaphor, irony—seem to be intrinsically literary and are difficult to reproduce in film, certainly within the dominant mode of realism. Metaphor in film becomes symbol or convention, and filmic irony tends to occur through dialogue or dramatic structure rather than in the manipulation of the camera’s narrative point of view. The effects of verbal irony can be duplicated by visual means—by the manipulation of identification through close-ups and reaction shots, for instance—but the verbal complexity of an ironised narrative voice in the novel would be almost impossible to achieve by other than verbal means in film without departing from the realist mode.
This brief glossing of some of the differences between film and fiction is partly to shoot down some fallacies still airborne, but primarily it is to establish the inadequacy of regarding film innocently as fiction with pictures. The relation between literary fiction and film is interesting but not uncomplicated, and we are not justified in feeling that we can move easily between the two forms without making some adjustments to our approach. In other words, we need to make the connection between film and fiction a theoretical as well as a practical one.
To start at the most rudimentary level, what film and fiction have in common is that they both tell stories—they are narrative forms. And developments in the study of narrative provide us with a rich body of theory that can assist us in our attempts to explore the interrelation between film and fiction. The work of the Russian Formalists and of various structuralists and structural anthropologists such as Claude Levi-Strauss provide us with ways of reading narrative that do not depend entirely upon a literary or visual orientation. To simplify a very disparate group of theories (and for essentially introductory purposes at this point) the salient feature common to all these schools is the examination of narrative through its most primitive forms as a particular use of language; simply, narrative as a culture’s way of making sense of itself. Narrative is argued to serve the same functions in all cultures; the studies of folk tales, of myths and legends in Propp and in Levi-Strauss15 lead towards the articulation of a universal grammar of narrative that structures all story. Levi-Strauss underlines the universality of narrative structures, but he also insists on the cultural specificity of this or that particular structure in each culture. While narrative may perform the same function in all cultures, the specific manner in which any one narrative is articulated is determined by its particular culture. Since the role of narrative in primitive cultures is to resolve contradictions within experience, to explain the apparently inexplicable, and to justify the inevitable,16 and since there are many different manifestations of contradiction, inexplicability and inevitability, there is always the need for the culture’s narrative to deal explicitly with those specific aspects of experience which are meaningful to that culture.
In general these are useful concepts, although in my opinion there is a limit to the applicability of such theories—about the function of myth, legend and folk tale in primitive societies—to mass-produced filmed and printed narrative in developed industrialised societies. The fairy tale and the film, for instance, enjoy a different status as texts. The fairy tale’s plot is primary—the story itself is central and will survive a number of different storytellers. In film and in prose fiction, however, the way in which the story is told (point of view, setting, characterisation, lighting, form in general) or its range of discourses becomes more important. We do not think of the film or of the novel as simply plot; and the total conjunction of plot with other formal characteristics in the novel has become one of the most widely held dicta among those who deal with the more sophisticated narrative forms. Reducing the novel or the film to its most basic plot structure does establish the universality of that structure and does tell us something about the work accomplished by narrative. But it will not necessarily help us in the work which we are preparing to do in this study. And the reason for this is that the analysis of a nation’s film and fiction inevitably interests itself also in the features of individual texts, considered as culturally specific transformations of universal structures. The cultural specificity, the Australian-ness, of Australian texts lives in the recurring principles of organisation and selection as applied to the universal narrative structures. Australian texts employ a particular language in that they draw on those myths, connotations and symbols which have currency in the Australian culture; and they also reveal what formal preferences—the encouragement of certain genres, conventions, and modes of production—are exercised in that culture. In the patterning of such influences, then, we can see which meanings are most easily articulated within the culture, which meanings are preferred by it, and which are seen to be the most significant for it.
One of the most useful propositions deriving from post-Saussurean linguistics is that we do not make our meanings by inventing fresh concepts as the need arises (by inventing names as new objects materialise) but by making new constructions out of material already provided for us by the culture. Levi-Strauss’ concept of the bricoleur17 (one who makes the best he can out of the materials at hand) is one that still fits the role of the storyteller even in such potentially idiosyncratic forms as the novel. The materials for the story, its detailed and individualised representation of life, are drawn from the narrative langue of the culture. (Here I am making metaphoric use of Saussure’s distinction between langue, the system of forms that is the language, and parole, the speech acts made possible by selection and combination within the language.)18 This langue is not only linguistic in the narrow sense, but also ideological. The nation’s narratives are defined not so much by factors such as the birthplace of the author or whether a text was written in Sydney or London, but rather by the bank of ideologically framed myths, symbols, connotations and contextual associations upon which they draw. The Australian, for instance, ‘sunbakes’, while the English ‘sunbathes’: this difference does not simply imply that you are more likely to be rained on at an English beach; it invokes instead a whole battery of ideological positions towards nature that is inscribed into the language of the two cultures. English nature is under control; it is orderly, and one may abandon oneself to it. Australian nature, on the other hand, is harsh, hostile; and the enjoyment of it depends on proving that one can survive its worst excesses (just as one can prove one’s Australian-ness by having a bronze tan during the summer). The language of narrative is ‘bathed in ideology’, in Althusser’s phrase, and the formal and thematic structures of narrative seem to be too. The way in which a culture’s narratives represent the type of the hero, for example, reveals much about the ideology of the individual and his or her place in the society. A comparison between Australian and American heroes would surely highlight important variants in the values and beliefs governing individual behaviour in the two countries as well as variants in their traditional representations.
So far, we have briefly considered two broad ways of looking at narrative. The first approach depends on the argument that all narratives possess a deep structure which is independent of their medium and ultimately universal. It stresses the similarities between narratives, the lack of individuation at this deep structural level. The second approach is the one we are most interested in here and the one in which we find the greatest possibilities for a study of film and fiction within Australian culture. This second approach focusses on the specifically Australian articulation of these universal structures. It examines what is ‘national’ about the narratives by tracing the activity of the culture’s own sets of values and beliefs and the ways in which it reproduces these values and beliefs in the individual text. The texts examined are not then seen simply as the natural and organic products of our emerging national character—but rather as cultural constructions, as ‘national fictions’.
Put as baldly as this, the practical application of this theory may seem obscure or undetermined. But before moving from theory to practice, there are a number of theoretical assumptions which this approach challenges and which need to be nominated. There is, to begin with, the preference for the individual perceptions of the novelist or film-maker as being intrinsically more interesting and important than those cultural perceptions which transmit themselves through the novelist or film-maker—a preference which here is clearly discounted. The balance of power between the text and context is reorganised in this study in ways that reduce the valorising of the individual text. (There are many strands of pure literary theory which do this too.) The role of the author therefore becomes much less important here; and although this does not imply a denial that there are individuals who write or make films, it does deny that the character of their writing or their films is entirely determined by the subjectivity of these individuals. The high art preference for the ‘novel’ (the unconventional) discriminates constantly against film by precluding the recognition that narratives working within conventional boundaries may still retain significance. And also, the assumption that literature is prior to and therefore superior to film as an art form is deliberately dismissed. This assumption inevitably distorts comparisons and is an obstacle to the analysis of film’s contribution to the theory of narrative.
There are more positive ways than these of describing the opportunities offered by the study of narrative, however. Laurie Hergenhan in Unnatural Lives, for instance, gently castigates our unnecessarily prescriptive use of value judgements so as to articulate our literary tradition around only those works which are seen to be ‘the best’. The regrettable result has been the excision of the typical, the simply realist, the political and the conventional as lacking in any cultural or contextual importance for creating the conditions in which all our fiction—good, bad or indifferent—is written. This has created an impression of Australian literary traditions as consisting of a ‘broken chain of waterholes’.19 John Docker’s attack on the exclusion of a rich and important body of Australian writing from critical consideration is relevant here too.20 From what we know of the ways in which a culture produces its stories, the intertextual links between fictions on the one hand and the conditions of production on the other hand are not proscribed solely by distinctions of quality—any more than they are proscribed solely by the national culture, as if it operates in isolation from any wider narrative traditions. Dorothy Green quotes Patrick White’s observation that he owed a great deal to the Anthony Horderns catalogue and to the novels of Ethel M. Dell. As Green says, ‘readers who have only a moderate enthusiasm for White may well imagine that; but if you are an enthusiast, the point remains the same’.21 Any comparative study of Australian narrative must have the objective of widening the field of enquiry onto the study of culture. Unlike the parodical critic Simon Lascerous in his article The Pooh Perplex (entitled ‘Another Book to Cross off Your List’) I endeavour here to enlarge the sense of context and to widen the scope of the interrelations which we can trace between national fictions and national culture.
This larger sense of context is immediately appreciable to anyone who has applied themselves to either Australian fiction or film—or both—and their respective bodies of criticism. The multiplicity of connections in both areas is illuminating. The same arguments go on, the same perceptions circulate in Australian film studies as in Australian literary studies. At all levels of critical discussion, students of Australian literature can find accounts of the film tradition which immediately strike familiar notes. An example would be the orthodox account of the plight of the individual in Australian narrative. This is articulated in our literary criticism by way of the story of the battler trying to survive ‘life’s grim hardships’ which are ‘met by a stoic invincibility of character’, in one formulation; or of the post-romantic nihilist stranded between the opposing poles of a Society which is ‘dehumanising in its demands’ and a ‘Nature that offers no refuge for the solitary’, in another.22 But so it is in the Australian film. Tom Ryan, in Scott Murray’s The New Australian Cinema, compares Australian and American cinema:
[Australian films] are far more modest, preferring to define the individual as a battler against overwhelming odds which cannot be defeated even if they are confronted head-on, but which will allow survival if he/she suffers the indignities without asserting resentment. This individual is a victim, a consumer of history, rather than a participant in its course.23
Again, in Australian fiction there is the widespread use of the fact, theme, and metaphor of imprisonment (the subject of Chapter 3), and this has already been noticed by Reid, Hergenhan and Kiernan. The metaphor surfaces once more in Australian film—hence Bob Ellis’s description of the Australian star in the movies: ‘while American stars look as if they are Superman on furlough, our actors look like crims on parole.’24 This particular metaphor, with its sardonic suggestion of the precariousness of freedom, is quite familiar to students of Australian literature—where the ‘double aspect’ of freedom and exile has considerably helped shape the representation of the possibilities of the land. At times, the use of such essentially literary terms as the quest motif (in Susan Dermody’s discussion of Australian cinema)25 immediately reveals the need for an acquaintance with media other than film. This clearly indicates the usefulness for both disciplines to visit each other’s bibliographies from time to time, but the more important point is that many of the patterns found in our fiction recur, or are seen to recur, in precisely analogous ways in our films.
And as these patterns—thematic, formal and ideological—surface in both media, this provokes questions about their currency within the culture as a whole. The fact is that the meanings formulated in both media are enclosed within a still larger system of meanings and signification. Consequently the generation of meaning in film and fiction does not take place within an exclusively literary or filmic context; rather, the narratives are particular transformations of the myths of the culture. The discussion of the bush legend, for instance, has largely been confined to a literary context, even by historians. Yet the bush legend operates in advertising, sport, television, and a multitude of other contexts; and it also dominates in early Australian film in the same ways that it did in early Australian fiction—something which is made clear in Legends on the Screen. While there are separate studies of particular aspects of the legend which are carried out in each discipline, the separation of approach has so far prevented us asking if the different formulations of the legend might not be produced by the same cultural forces.
In asking such questions we go beyond our goal of widening the context for either literary or film studies; we establish in fact a new area of study, one which simply draws upon these two disciplines for its material. In short we begin, through our analysis of the common properties of narrative in film and in fiction as well as in their respective critical literature, to arrive at a definition of the character and function of narrative in Australia. We have seen that any correspondence between the work done by narrative in both forms will not be accidental. So the way in which they perform their similar functions—the area of representation—and the end to which those functions are aimed—the work of ideology—is what the following chapters will go on to examine. Our aim is to expand and illustrate the interrelationships which we have introduced in this chapter so as to reach the dominant and defining structures of Australian narrative. We begin by examining the framing of the Australian context, natural and social, within narrative.
1 There are numerous accounts of the ‘high culture’ argument; one of the most recent occurs in the opening chapter of Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983).
2 George Bluestone’s Novels into Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) is still the major example of this.
3 ‘Realism and the Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian Theses’; Terry Eagleton, (London: Verso, 1978), pp. 110-29.
4 Noel King, ‘Changing the Curriculum’, p.49.
5 Brian McFarlane’s Words and Images falls into this category.
6 p.48.
7 ‘Literature and Film’ in Jean-Pierre Barricelli and Joseph Gibaldi (eds) Interrelations of Literature (New York: MLA, 1982), pp.278–306.
8 p.19.
9 Seymour Chatman. ‘What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (And Vice Versa)’ in W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.) On Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 117-35.
10 p.281.
11 The present generation of critics has reversed this, to some extent. Genre is now a key concept in film criticism. See, for example, Stephen Neale’s Genre (London: BFI, 1980) and Thomas Schatz’ Hollywood Genres (New York: Random House, 1981).
12 ‘Stars as Signs’ in Bennett et al. Popular Film and Television, pp.236–69.
13 Mast, p.292.
14 ibid. p.299.
15 Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folk Tale, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975); Claude Levi-Strauss, ‘The Structural Study of Myth’. The benefits of this approach have influenced studies of literary narrative (Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse, for example) as well as accounts of popular film—see William Wright’s Six Guns and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).
16 Levi-Strauss, ibid.
17 The Savage Mind (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicholson, 1966), pp. 17-33.
18 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics trans. Wade Baskin, (London: Peter Owen, 1960), pp.13-14.
19 (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1983), p. 13.
20 In a Critical Condition.
21 The Music of Love: Essays on Literature and Life (Ringwood: Penguin, 1984), p. 149.
22 A. A. Phillips, The Australian Tradition (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1958), p.61; Brian Kiernan, Images of Society and Nature, p. 181.
23 p.125.
24 Quoted in Sue Matthews 35MM Dreams (Ringwood: Penguin, 1984), p.268.
25 ‘Action and Adventure’ in The New Australian Cinema, pp.79—80.