What makes a novel unfilmable?

 

Hollywood occasionally attempts to turn supposedly ‘unfilmable’ novels into blockbusters. The Hours, Fight Club, American Psycho, and even Adaptation, were all based on what were said to be unfilmable books; although all were adapted into critically-acclaimed films.

Greencine reports on a flurry of posts relating to the supposed unfilmability of certain novels, some of them prompted by the release of Tom Tykwer’s 2006 Perfume:

There’s Will Gore [With the recent arrival of ‘Perfume: The Story of a Murderer’ in cinemas, perhaps the myth of the ‘unfilmable’ novel can finally be laid to rest] on the concept of the “unfilmable novel” and “The Unfilmables: A List of the Hardest Novels to Film” at Screenhead [including James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye].

In 2005 John Patterson already reported on film adaptations of ‘unwieldy’ novels in the Guardian:

“There is,” Norman Mailer once wrote, “a particular type of really bad novel that makes for a really great motion picture.” He might have been referring to such superselling potboilers as Mario Puzo’s The Godfather or Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind or, indeed, any number of middlebrow literary atrocities whose cinematic adaptations have entirely transcended their trashy sources.

In answer to my question ‘What makes a novel unfilmable?’, if I had to make a checklist of what makes novels unfilmable:

  1. plotlessness
  2. philosophical introspection (can be solved with voice-over)
  3. experimental fiction
  4. …………….

More on this later… In the meantime, if you feel like completing the list, please be my guest.

P. S. 1: now is a good time to reread Fuchsia’s comment on the ‘Nature of the 20th century reading experience’ where I asked: can one measure a book’s success by counting the number of film adaptations?

P. S. 2: My entry in the top ten of unfilmable novels:

  1. Time’s Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offense (1991)
  2. Do please submit your candidates in the comments …

P. S. 3: And maybe one last question: which films would resist successful novelization?

8 thoughts on “What makes a novel unfilmable?”

  1. suburbanlife

    I think Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” would be my vote for one of the top ten unfilmable novels. But boy, would I love to see any results of attempts to make a film of this. My vote would be for Fellini to do this, but sadly, that is not possible.
    Thanks for the heads up on the Amis novel, “Time’s Arrow: or the Nature of….”. Think I’ll tackle it:-)

  2. jahsonic

    Suburbanlife,

    Thanks for your suggestion. Since I’ve just written some disparaging comments on the films of Fellini (largely on the basis of some visceral dislike and a recent viewing of his segment in Boccaccio 70), may I ask you what it is that you like so much in Fellini’s films?

    I’ve just discovered that Topor has collaborated on Fellini’s Casanova, so maybe that is a good place for me to start appreciating Fellini?

    If anyone else wants to suggest a novel for the top ten unfilmable novels, please be my guest.

    Jan

  3. suburbanlife

    Jan – my idea is difficult to express. My reactions to Fellini films have vaccillated on the cusp of pleasurable fascination/squirming disgust. They are compelling in the same way as is a hallucination.
    G

  4. HarryTuttle

    I’m surprised you list “plotlessness” as a film deterrent, Jan, as The Contemplative Cinema Blogathon precisely celebrates the wonders of plotless films.

    I’d say what makes a novel unfilmmable are characteristics that inherently pertain to the nature of litterture and inexistant in cinema. And vice-versa. Both are narrative media, so narration (or lack thereof) is part of the gameplay.
    What is untranslatable in film is idiosyncratic literary style, non-oral ones that can only be read. James Joyce was a good pick. Georges Perec’s “La Disparition” (entirely written without the letter E), and its counterpart “La Revenente” (no vowels but E’s I think).
    Poetry too, it’s all about rhetorical metaphors that aren’t meant to be shown for real.
    Boris Vian’s surrealism and wordplay. Ionesco?
    There are others aspects than sytle to consider. Descriptions that work better as mental images than visual show off. I don’t know… It’s about the exclusivity of wordly imaginary.

    Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” (I love it!) would make a great animation (Miyazaki would be a good choice).

  5. jahsonic

    Harry,

    Some thoughts with regards to your comment:
    With regards to plotlessness, I guess the keyword is ‘supposedly’ unfilmable, because I realize that you can make a film out of any story or novel, and I agree that “narration (or lack thereof) is part of the gameplay”.

    I think that anything can serve as an inspiration to a film and in the words of Fuchsia:

    “I tend to think that when a novel has an extremely distinctive style, the film version is a distinct work, a parallel one if you will, that is good or bad completely on its own merits, more an “inspired by” than an actual adaptation.”

    On Perec and company: yes, I agree that all of experimental literature is difficult to put into film. (which brings to mind the films of Peter Greenaway who has invented his own sort of “constrained filming”, for example that a room is filled with objects that all start with the same letter from the alphabet).

    An excerpt on constraints from an interview with Peter Greenaway:

    Graphis: Constraints help people. This is one of the reasons that your four tyrannies aren’t resisted more often. You playfully reference these tyrannies, with a camera pointing at a Kabuki stage in 8 1/2 Women, for example, or the constant sight of the artist’s framing device in The Draughtsman’s Contract. So you draw attention to these tyrannies, but you also impose new ones of your own which become your own trademarks or mannerisms—lists, documentary narration, bilateral symmetry, colour symbolism and so on. Why do you do that?

    Greenaway: It’s to demonstrate artificiality. Cinema is a deeply artificial medium, and there’s a way in which I want to show that when you watch a film of mine you are only watching a film, hence not just the bilateral symmetry but other ideas such as a self-consciously shallow stage depth and the deliberate use of perspective devices. I think there’s always something to learn by looking over your shoulder at the hypotheses which supposedly are no longer relevant to 20th century life. I’m fascinated, for example, by Renaissance paintings, such as the Sacra Conversazione by Piero della Francesca, where the Virgin Mary, as the centre of the world, appears in the middle, and the saints are all arranged like characters. Those ideas of bilateral symmetry are fascinating in their own right, but let’s see if we can use them—in a good postmodernist sense—to re-enliven and re-excite the sheer phenomenon of looking, looking, looking. —source

    Conclusion: The poetics of literature are different from the poetics of film.

  6. Mike

    I’m not sure how I feel about that article; I think it’s problematic in the sense that all of the directors that it assigns to the “if it could be done…” blurbs are fairly “hip” directors with rarely more than a film or two under their belts (with exceptions of course), and there are very obvious other directors that aren’t in their early 30s who would suit most of the jobs just fine…

    Also, dismissing Weiss’s adaptation of The Atrocity Circle and suggesting Aronofsky (when exactly has he “proven his ability to create ponderous cinema”?) is somewhat of an atrocious idea in itself.

  8. jahsonic

    Richard at the Existence Machine and Steve at This Space (A novel should be a novel because it cannot be anything else.) comment on their own blogs.

    Richard’s most interesting comment in which he explains what makes a novel unfilmable (These narratives must be read):

    Experimental fiction. Formally inventive fiction. I’m thinking of the recent work of David Markson (what would be the point of a movie of This Is Not A Novel?). Or Gilbert Sorrentino. Or, imagine the “stories” in Stanley Elkin’s novels without his wondrously inventive prose. Unthinkable. These narratives must be read. I think these books and many others highlight what is finally unfilmable about even more conventional novels. If too often novels are reduced to what they’re “about”, formally experimental novels draw our attention to how they are made, to how they achieve their effects, which might remind us to think more about how the others are made. I think that any book or story or whatever can be the source material for a film, but that which is literary about a novel–that which makes it a novel–cannot be transmitted to film, because reading is the whole point.

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