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Remake: Appropriating Film in Tanguy Viel's Cinéma

2005; Routledge; Volume: 9; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17409290500242498

1740-9306

Ari J. Blatt,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Abstract An exemplary illustration of the postmodern logic of “postproduction,” in which cultural artifacts are not simply recycled but reinvented and re-consumed (Bourriaud), Tanguy Viel's 1999 novel Cinéma delves into the infinite archive of popular images and appropriates a film that it remakes in words. Turning the tradition of adaptation from text to film inside out, Viel's contemporary take on the avant-garde practice of the “readymade” projects a series of images and sounds from the screen onto the page. This innovative recasting of the picture not only engages our understanding of cinematic spectatorship and how we make sense of film (or more importantly, do not), it also makes a potent postmodern critique of the cult of originality and the quest for the “new” in (modern) art.Footnote1 Perhaps most importantly, however, Cinéma's rewriting of the film maps the complex relationship between literature and cinema today, and, as I argue in what follows, ultimately suggests why the status of that relationship might matter in an age characterized by an unheralded propagation of commodified visual forms. Acknowledgments Ari J. Blatt recently completed his Ph.D. in the department of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently Assistant Professor of French at Montana State University–Bozeman, and is at work on a study of the visual arts in contemporary French fiction. Notes Notes Viel's novel is clearly conditioned by a certain set of [art-] historically determined concerns, and might be considered in light of work not merely by the inventor of the readymade, Marcel Duchamp, but also by a not altogether disparate group of contemporary visual artists. These artists—including such innovators as Mike Bidlo, Richard Prince, Pierre Huyghe, Douglas Gordon, and Sherrie Levine—deploy a similar logic of image appropriation, re-presenting pre-existing representations (paintings, popular icons, motion pictures, “art” photographs, etc.) in order to challenge and undermine, as Viel's novel does, more traditional (and traditionally modernist) conceptions of originality, authenticity, and, more generally, representation itself. Quite fittingly, while Michael Caine, an actor with working class roots, plays the role of Milo Tindle, a decidedly regal Laurence Olivier incarnates Wyke's more patrician pedigree. The narrative makes no attempt to transcribe the film's musical score. The textual screen upon which Sleuth is projected occasionally hides more than it reveals. The narrator's seeming fidelity to the original—“tout est vrai, je ne change pas une image” (67)—masks several inconspicuous absences. Take, for example, the film's title-sequence, which the narrator simply overlooks. On screen, the opening credits are superimposed over a series of theatrical dioramas that enact some of the most legendary moments from Andrew Wyke's popular series of detective novels. A variety of ornately decorated proscenium arches frame these static, intricately crafted scenes, and the painted curtains are unfurled to reveal the stage and the tiny figurines that inhabit its space as if in mid-act. The film's explicit reference to the dramatic arts serves a number of functions. If, in its almost faultless adherence to the classic unities of place, of action, and of time Sleuth seems like it would be perfectly tailored for the theater, that is because it is: Sleuth was initially produced for the stage, opening in London in 1970 to rave reviews. A year later it was awarded the Tony for best play. The opening sequence therefore acknowledges the original generic status of the story and allows the film to credit its author—who also happens to be the film's screenwriter—Anthony Shaffer. Although the narrator of Cinéma invokes “le grand metteur en scène, Joseph L. Mankiewicz” (107), the novel ultimately stages the “death of the author” by making no mention of Shaffer (nor of the play) whatsoever. That the narrator chooses to cite Wyke's menacing approach in English lends an air of authenticity to the enunciation without hindering the comprehension of his Francophone narrates. Of course, some critics have claimed that Diderot's way of seeing in the salons is, precisely, proto-cinematic. For Brigitte Peucker, for example, the philosophe's descriptions of the paintings in the salon “evoke the myth of total cinema” (109). The exception to this rule becomes evident when one considers those instances in which the object of verbal description is already verbal. When a text describes a film's (spoken) dialogue, it “cites” as well as “sights” (or makes visible) the objects to which it refers (i.e. words). This curious conflation of the “real” with the “reel” occurs elsewhere near the end of the novel. See, for example, page 96: “Quelquefois je sors de chez moi et je m’excuse auprès de Sleuth parce que je le laisse seul, et je fais très attention où je l’entrepose, loin du froid, loin de la chaleur, et je le salue quand je rentre.” One still wonders if the latent denigration of the seductive nature of the spectacular in Cinéma—reminiscent of Guy Debord's own militant critique—is perhaps more ironic than not; invoking the novel's title, could we not be prompted to question the narrator's eccentric behavior and ask “mais qu’est-ce que c’est que ce cinéma?” In France, although recent studies have shown a slight increase in the number of “petits lecteurs” (those who read fewer than ten books a year), the number of “gros lecteurs” (those who read more than twenty-five books a year) has been declining steadily (Prolongeau 28-29). The number of people who read literature in America is diminishing as well, as the findings of a 2002 survey, conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts and entitled “Reading at Risk,” have shown (Weber E1). Cinéma suggests that film, in particular, has superseded literature as the dominant cultural form, and reinforces the primacy of that medium in contemporary culture even further on its front cover, as the novel's title quite tellingly eclipses the diminutive generic marker to read : “Cinéma, roman.”