Screening Woolf Hardcover 1

Earl G. Ingersoll

As the subtitle indicates, this book has three majors concerns. The first and most important concern is an examination of the film adaptations of Woolf's novels-To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and Mrs. Dalloway-in the order the films were released. This is the heart of the matter, a fairly conventional effort to acknowledge film reviews as well as the criticism of academicians in film or literature as a starting point for a fresh view of these three film adaptations. Since many film specialists prefer that no film ever be adapted from literary fiction and many literature specialists have similarly wished that their favorite novels had never been filmed, the effort to mediate the two sides can be challenging. Of the three films, To the Lighthouse is the least successful, tending toward the old Masterpiece Theater mode of attempting to be faithful to the "source text," to use the term of the film theorist Robert Stam, but missing the essence of the novel. Director Sally Potter's Orlando is cinematically the most venturesome and attractive, although some Woolf readers condemn Potter's erasure of Woolf's intent to celebrate her affair with Vita Sackville-West (whose son Nigel Nicolson called Woolf's Orlando "the longest and most charming love-letter in literature"). Mrs. Dalloway tends toward the MerchantIvory style of treating literary masterworks-indeed, the film credits include a debt of gratitude to the producerdirector partnership-and is generally carried by the star power of Vanessa Redgrave, although it is difficult to imagine her having a crush on another young woman, even at eighteen. The book's second concern is Woolf's interest in what she would call "the cinema.

9781611479706

English

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

42710

198

Earl G. Ingersoll is emeritus distinguished teaching professor and distinguished professor of English at the State University of New York, College at Brockport.

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