Inimitable Double Vision: Dickens, Little Dorrit, Photography, Film
[In the following essay, Marsh discusses the 1987 film adaptation of Little Dorrit.]
1: INTERPRETATION AND ADAPTATION
In 1987, working from a converted warehouse in London's run-down Docklands by the Dickensian name of Grice's Wharf, the little-known director Christine Edzard and Sands Films released an adaptation of Dickens's 1855-57 novel Little Dorrit that rivaled as few had thought film could do the convolutions and sheer length of its “un-cinematic” and sociocritical original. Her two-part film of Little Dorrit runs six hours—four times as long as a standard Hollywood movie. Part 1, Nobody's Fault, views the action from the point of view of diffident, middle-aged Arthur Clennam, just returned from twenty years' service to the family firm in China; part 2 is Little Dorrit's Story—the action retold from the perspective of the retiring seamstress he first glimpses in the shadows of his mother's crumbling house, the child of the Marshalsea debtors' prison.
Perhaps the first thing one needs to grasp about this gargantuan cinematic oddity is what Alec Guinness (who plays William Dorrit, her father and the “Father of the Marshalsea”) calls the “ramshackle oddity” of the place the film was made (Malcolm 22), and the budget it was made on—only $9 million, about a tenth of the money Hollywood spent on Robocop II (1990). Sands Films' studio is almost as small as the budget, and it is unique. Cobbled together out of two warren-like warehouses, it houses a picture library, a model-shop for making miniature sets, a small pottery (which made all the pink Sèvres china that loads the speculator Mr. Merdle's dinner-table, too expensive to buy or rent), production offices (where a visitor finds herself sitting on Mrs. Merdle's chaise-longue—everything gets recycled here), two sound stages, a canteen, a dressmaker's shop, and editing and projection suites. Everything, in fact, down to the only bricklayer employed full time by any studio in the world: Sands Films is a complete cottage industry. It is wholly owned by Edzard and her husband, Richard Goodwin, co-producer of Little Dorrit. They set up here fifteen years ago, and live over the shop: “Good films,” says Goodwin, “are made because people are poor,” and prepared to live “on the precipice of some dreadful financial abyss.”1
Edzard was born in Paris in 1945 of a German painter father and a Polish-born painter mother. She studied economics in Paris, but gradually drifted toward theater. She served a kind of film apprenticeship as Franco Zeffirelli's assistant on Romeo and Juliet (1968), and created stage sets for the Hamburg and Welsh national operas before designing and co-scripting the ballet film Tales of Beatrix Potter (1971).
On one of my visits to Sands Films, in March 1990, I spent two hours watching Edzard shoot a one-minute breakfast-table scene for her latest film. She is a perfectionist, and the peculiar set-up of Sands Films allows her absolute artistic control over her films, as editor, designer, and sound person, and also director: it was easy to see why Little Dorrit took nine months to shoot (most films take two or three), let alone two and a half years for preproduction, and another nine months in the editing room. On that Monday morning, I saw her constructing a natural “opening” to her scene, placing a small girl so that for a second her shape would fall across the foreground, as she leaned forward, and then fall back to disclose the family at table. “Right—shall we?” she says quietly, to commence the next take. The dialogue is tightly timed, orchestrated. “Jonathan,” she says to one actor, “I'm just wondering about your laugh at Derek's joke—perhaps too big?” “Well, I want to ingratiate myself,” says Jonathan, “Does it sound false?” “Just titter a bit,” she decides, “and leave the jam business until a little later.” Derek Jacobi listens intently as she asks him to alter the inflection of his voice, or the precise moment at which to raise a morsel of congealing “prop” sausage to his mouth.
In Edzard's film of Little Dorrit, you will not find the moustachioed villain Rigaud-Blandois (whose sole act in the novel is to poison the dilettante artist Henry Gowan's dog, though he appears in no fewer than seven of the original illustrations, hovering vulture-like over the body of the story after his dramatic take-over of the opening chapter). Mrs. Clennam's twisted henchman, Flintwinch, not undeservedly, suffers his death-by-crushing instead; and his unwilling Italian sidekick Cavaletto, alias Mr. Baptist, remains trapped in the novel's pages. Nor will you find Flintwinch's twin brother. They have been swept away, like the melodramatic superstructure of which they were a part, and along with most of the overcrowded, “overdetermined” ending, with its multiple tentacles in the past (Dickens had to write it all down to help himself wrap up the novel). “I wanted to avoid the exaggerative, the melodramatic, and the sentimental,” Edzard contends, “because they put a distance between the subject and the spectator.” Thus the feeble flute-player Frederick Dorrit, too, fails to enjoy his moment center-stage, dying of grief by his brother William's deathbed: insignificant to the last in Edzard's film, he fades away offscreen, unseen. We don't see anybody meet anybody else in the Great St. Bernard Monastery or Marseilles, which provide Dickens with atmospheric settings for mid-action and opening tableaux; Gowan disappears with Minnie, the picture-perfect beauty whom Clennam imagines himself in love with for much of the novel, after their ill-starred marriage; the Dorrit family's peregrinations across Europe upon their sudden accession to wealth are cut down, lest we get lost among the multiple locations; Clennam first bumps into Meagles the businessman and Daniel Doyce the inventor in the hallway of the Circumlocution Office—reasonable chance, not narrative machinations, engenders friendship.
Edzard's film, then, seeks to clarify the main romantic storyline, throws more emphasis on the Marshalsea and its “Father” (who gets a much more impressive death scene), roots itself in the “roaring streets” of Dickens' London—at about the time Dickens was writing the novel, not at the time he sets it, a generation before—and embraces what has been called the stationary or plot-less quality of Little Dorrit: “plot” does not have for modern European filmmakers the overwhelming importance it once had for Classical Hollywood Cinema. The self-tormentor Miss Wade too has vanished, with her story-within-a-story, obliquely and analogically related to the novel's central story, and difficult to film; with her departs the Meagles' maid, Tattycoram, whose predisposition to passion she inflames. Innocuous Mrs. Meagles, Edzard's assistant Olivier Stockman told me, was killed off to throw a greater emphasis on the father-daughter relationship of Meagles and Minnie (“Pet”), which now more closely parallels that between Dorrit and his daughter. Minnie's dead twin sister suffered a second death in a general reaction against siblings and doublings. The varnishing services of Mrs. General, whose favors as a chaperone and social secretary Dorrit thinks himself lucky to overpay, are dispensed with. A somewhat brutal decision to kill Daniel Doyce, Clennam's partner, meanwhile, was taken, Olivier Stockman remarked, to make his sense of irretrievable betrayal more cruelly final.
Only a very few changes were made late in the day, after shooting. Edzard found the scene between Mrs. Clennam and Pancks, the big-hearted rent-collector whose persistence uncovers Dorrit's inheritance and unbars his prison, played like a “monosyllabic stand-off”—and cut it. Then, feeling there was “too much of the Circumlocution Office” in the second half of part 1, Edzard moved back Pancks's showdown with his proprietor, Mr. Casby, a wolf in philantropist's clothing (it would otherwise have occurred even earlier than it does).
Inevitably, these changes were not to every critic's taste, particularly the academic critic with a vested interest in the Dickens text: Gary Wills's review in the New York Review of Books is one long academic lament for murdered characters, Grahame Smith's article in Yearbook of English Studies an excellent hatchet job driven by the author's urge himself to (re)film the novel. But changes had, no less inevitably, to be made. To translate from one medium to another is not as simple as translating from English to French (and even that is far from “simple”). Doting fidelity to a novel or a play is an overvalued virtue: at worst it produces unfilmic and frigidly respectful films. Besides, what does “faithfulness” mean? Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) is perhaps a better “translation” of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness even than Orson Welles's once-planned adaptation might have been.
Film must substitute for much of the indirect narration of the novel the direct narration of action and dialogue: Dickens' introduction of the newly imprisoned Dorrit as “a very amiable and very helpless middle-aged gentleman, who was going out again directly” (Dickens 98) must become a scene in which he demonstrates his limpness, and Bob the turnkey delivers the judgment “He'll never get out.” And film must therefore somehow “settle,” although Dickens tells us this “would be very hard to [do],” the question of “At what period in her early life the little creature began to perceive that it was not the habit of all the world to live locked up” (108). We cannot be told about an atmosphere: so, to express the distance that opens up between Little Dorrit and her father in their Italian days of riches, we must see her glide into his room and perch upon his bed, in Edzard's film, only to be told to move, because “someone might come in.”
Film can be intolerant of ambiguity and disorder, and Edzard's film in particular often seems intent on smoothing out every fascinating deviance in Dickens' text, or turning the exultantly chaotic—at worst—into the tamed, the near complacent. This is one critical charge against her adaptation that sticks. The letters “D.N.F.”—engraved in Clennam's father's watch—mean only one thing in Edzard's Little Dorrit; Arthur becomes less of the father-replacement who magically materializes in the same old Marshalsea prison room, upon his own financial collapse, and Little Dorrit much less “little,” much less “my child”—the disturbing confusion of sexual and familial affection in Dickens' text diminishes. More importantly, what Elaine Showalter has identified as the doubling of characters by dark “shadows” who voice and act out their thwarted desires—Rigaud-Blandois Clennam's urge to turn on his mother, Mr. F's Aunt (whose aggressive non sequiturs pepper the dialogue) fat Flora Finching's impulse to fight her rejection by her one-time suitor, Clennam—is lost in Edzard's film, partly because she strips the novel of its melodramatic superstructure, partly because her personal emphasis is on the subtly naturalistic revelation of character across the six hours of her film—a type of psychologizing fundamentally different in kind to Dickens' which works through twinnings and displacements. (Film, which in its early years thrived on the doppelgängers of The Student of Prague [1913, remade 1925] or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [1886], the most-filmed novel in cinema history, has stumbled over Dickens' dark doublings: David Lean similarly cut Pip's murderous double Orlick out of his Great Expectations [1946].) Edzard's Little Dorrit is dark enough, but not so dark as Dickens'.
2: “MAGIC DEMOCRACY”: THE DICKENS CHARACTER AND DICKENSIAN DIALOGUE
Yet much remains unaltered. Edzard's leisurely pacing and breadth of canvas were hailed by David Robinson in The Times as pioneering an “original” cinematic form that works through small incidents rather than suspense and surprise. But if Dickens is the most cinematic of novelists, Edzard is the most writerly of filmmakers. As Robinson himself added, her Little Dorrit has the “patient episodic flow of a novel” (Fuller 28). What is least changed in this film, as in any Dickens film, are the characters that seem to enjoy, like the gods and goblins of mythology, a life independent of their creator or the texts that contain them (they hang over the edges of the plots, you might say). One testimonial to the impact of Edzard's Little Dorrit on its first release was the Royal photographer Lord Snowdon's production of a series of twenty postcard-portraits of characters from the film: these in their turn testify to the existence of Dickens' creations in a manner curiously detached even from the newest film in which they have been incarnated—the captions at bottom of each card, we notice, give the characters' but not the actors' names (“Frederick Dorrit in Little Dorrit,” and so on). His cards take their place in a long line. Every major Victorian illustrator at one time turned his hand to Dickens, and every one inflected each character anew: the Punch contributor Frederick Barnard infuses into his portrait of Little Dorrit the romanticism of late century, and draws liberally on the stylistic conventions that governed innumerable Victorian representations of the toiling, reflective seamstress …. Leading late Victorian actors, in the first days of the postcard, liked to have themselves taken in costume as every conceivable Dickens character—with Fagin, and the opportunity he offered for hamming, perhaps the favorite. The great Beerbohm Tree had himself taken in the role, while the ambitious thespian Bransby Williams posed for his portrait in costume as both Fagin and Bill Sykes …. Dickens' characteristic association of people with objects is a mode of characterization that translates smoothly into film, with its (necessary) reliance on the visual motif, the symbol that is also part of the physical reality of the film: in Edzard's adaptation, Little Dorrit's “tunnel-vision” bonnet, as one reviewer dubbed it (Winn 27); or the quill that inks bespectacled Arthur Clennam's fingers …. Early films were often nothing but such character-vignettes as Dickens offered in abundance: one of the earliest preserved by the British National Film Library is R. W. Paul's Mr. Pecksniff Fetches the Doctor (1903). Dickens characters were addictive, like nicotine: smokers could collect a series of Dickens cigarette cards—Arthur Rowe, the reclusive hero of Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear, has a “complete set” (Greene 14). They prominently featured precisely the characters a melodramatic and “stagey” adaptation would pull from the pack: Little Dorrit's chosen representatives in a Player's card-series of 1912, for example, were the pompous grotesque Tite Barnacle and “Patriarch” Casby …, together, inevitably, with the moustachioed villain Rigaud-Blandois.
But more, just as Edzard asks of her cinema audience the right of directorial interpretation that the director of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Nicholas Nickleby enjoyed, or that Verdi exploited when he turned Othello into opera, so each member of her cast prefers his right to “his” Dorrit, or “her” Flora Finching. The casting of every role in a film affects the inflection of that role, above all when the actor is a star. The inspired choice of W. C. Fields, in the splendid 1935 Hollywood production of David Copperfield, laid down a foundation of irony under Mr. Micawber's whimsical optimism. But the traditions and signifying properties of stage stars are a little different. The challenge for stage acting has always been to assume the role—to become Fagin, say, to create Bill Sykes. This was the challenge for Dickens himself, whether acting out a scene before the mirror, as he used to do while he was writing, or impersonating his own characters (above all, Fagin, Bill, and Nancy) on stage toward the end of his life …. And it is out of these stage traditions that Christine Edzard and a great many of her cast come: the Shakespearean actor Derek Jacobi as Arthur Clennam, for example, or the chameleon Alec Guinness as William Dorrit …, who followed his screen debut as Herbert Pocket in David Lean's Great Expectations (1946) with a controversial portrayal of Fagin in the same director's Oliver Twist two years later, and (courtesy of trick photography) undertook no fewer than eight roles in the British comedy classic of 1949, Kind Hearts and Coronets. “The characters in Dickens are not so much caricatures as distoritions of reality,” Edzard told a British interviewer, “real [human] life compressed” in journalistic shorthand (Fuller 30): she took pains in this film to avoid what has become almost a film and stage tradition of over-acting up to their larger-than-life quality. Her actors wear no makeup. They are not allowed to buttonhole the camera in close-up. Most drifted in to talk about being in the film with no particular parts in mind, and slipped into place. The children came from local East End schools (the little girl who plays Amy Dorrit as a small child, yearning to unlock the mysteries of print, really couldn't read or write).
What also is least touched by the translation from page to screen are the words in these characters' mouths. Dickens, said all the filmmakers I talked to, “is a gift to actors.”2 His dialogue loses its linguistic context—the financial grounding of Dorrit's euphemistic promise, in his riches, say, to “remember” everyone (the term is changed, to my regret, to “reward” in Edzard's film)—but it gains the resonance of performance: Pip Torrens as Henry Gowan calling himself, to his rival Arthur's face, at his wedding, a “disappointed man”; Joan Greenwood as Mrs. Clennam reciting the horrors of Biblical plagues in a voice in which one can almost hear a hungry mouth salivating. It would be worth sitting through six hours of positive tedium to hear Alec Guinness as Dorrit Frenchifying his genteel thanks as he pockets another handout—“much obleeged”—or delivering his verdict upon Old Nandy the workhouse pensioner—“Spirit broken and gone”—and turning back upon the threshold to enunciate with relish a revising afterthought—“pulverised.”
3: FILMING TONE: THE “SLAPBANG RESTAURANT” SCENE
Toward the end of part 1 of Edzard's film occurs a two-and-a-half-minute scene between Clennam and Pancks, set in the “Slapbang” restaurant. It has several functions to serve. In it, Edzard must convey story information—that time has passed, that the Dorrits are still in Italy; she must provide a natural means of introducing the subject in Italy; she must provide a natural means of introducing the subject of Merdle and money-mania; she must forward the characterization of Pancks and Clennam, and keep before us the one's building obsession with Casby, his “Proprietor,” and the other's much more unconscious concern with Little Dorrit; and she wants to realize a fragment of forgotten history and expose her audience to the experience of a Victorian chop-shop in all its steamy, bustling actuality. The marvelous economy of film, when all four of its dimensions—camerawork, mise en scène, editing, and sound—come together in a unified whole yet can each further a different end, allows her, I think, to do all of this at once. This is the scene as it is transcribed in Edzard's post-production Release Script:
| ACTION | DIALOGUE |
| DOYCE AND CLENNAM OFFICE ARTHUR puts on his coat | ARTHUR: |
| Come, come, Mr Pancks. Come and dine with me. My partner's working late tonight. We'll go to the slap-bang place round the corner, eh? Come on, Mr Pancks. | |
| The two exit R | |
| INTERIOR RESTAURANT | |
| CLOSE-UP Plate of food being placed on table | WAITRESS: |
| Two nice slices … | |
| CLOSE-UP Plate of food being placed on table | WAITRESS: |
| … from the joint … | |
| MEDIUM CLOSE SHOT WAITRESS AND PANCKS | WAITRESS: |
| … of beef and gravy. | |
| MEDIUM SHOT PANCKS and ARTHUR seated opposite each other | PANCKS: |
| He says to me … you must squeeze them, … squeeze them. | |
| MEDIUM CLOSE SHOT over PANCKS favouring ARTHUR | PANCKS: |
| Don't I squeeze them, says I? What else am I made for? | |
| MEDIUM SHOT over ARTHUR favouring PANCKS | PANCKS (imitating Casby): |
| You're made for nothing else, Mr Pancks, … you're paid to do your duty. You're paid to squeeze and you must squeeze to pay. | |
| WIDE ANGLE across crowded restaurant. PANCKS and ARTHUR seated centre | MALE DINER: |
| And more portions of cabbage … | |
| WAITRESS: | |
| Yes, Mr Poppedou. | |
| MEDIUM SHOT Two male diners | MAN # 1: |
| Yes, and just as he was about to mount the steps, the doorman greeted him, and shouted in his loudest voice: “Twopence, please!” | |
| MEDIUM SHOT over ARTHUR favouring PANCKS | PANCKS: |
| How can I squeeze them, Mr Clennam, if they're dry? They haven't got any money! | |
| MALE VOICE (out of shot): | |
| Hey, more wine, Polly! | |
| PANCKS: | |
| They say to me they haven't got it. | |
| MEDIUM CLOSE SHOT over PANCKS favouring ARTHUR | PANCKS: |
| They say to me, if we had it, we'd gladly pay. If they had it … | |
| ARTHUR notices something | |
| WIDE ANGLE across restaurant to kitchen area, | PANCKS (out of shot): |
| LITTLE GIRL at servery | If they were Merdle … |
| MEDIUM CLOSE SHOT | PANCKS (out of shot): |
| LITTLE GIRL at the servery. She places her change in her purse | … they's pay of course … |
| MUSIC | |
| WIDE ANGLE across restaurant, past men at bar, to LITTLE GIRL taking dinner outside R | |
| MUSIC continues and fades | |
| MEDIUM CLOSE SHOT over PANCKS favouring ARTHUR | PANCKS: |
| They say to me … | |
| MEDIUM SHOT over ARTHUR favouring PANCKS | PANCKS: |
| … if you were Mr Merdle, it would be better still … for all parties. You wouldn't have to worry at all. You'd be easier in your mind. That's what they say. Maybe. | |
| MALE DINER (out of shot): | |
| Polly, more wine, please! | |
| PANCKS: | |
| I'm looking into it. | |
| I say, Mr. Clennam … | |
| MEDIUM CLOSE SHOT over ARTHUR favouring PANCKS | PANCKS: |
| … you aren't listening. | |
| ARTHUR: | |
| Oh, I … I do beg your pardon, Mr Pancks. I was … thinking about Little—about Miss Dorrit. | |
| PANCKS: | |
| Little Miss Dorrit? | |
| ARTHUR: | |
| I was wondering how she is in her new life. | |
| PANCKS: | |
| You know, I've heard … her sister's quite often … | |
| MEDIUM CLOSE SHOT over ARTHUR favouring PANCKS | PANCKS: |
| … to be seen with the great Merdle's stepson. Isn't it curious how this Merdle turns up everywhere? | |
| WIDE ANGLE across restaurant—general activity | WOMAN'S VOICE OVER: |
| I've heard it reported, Ma'am, that it was Mr Merdle that took it and it's not to be expected that he should lose by it, … | |
| EXTERIOR GROCER'S SHOP WIDE ANGLE DOYCE and WOMEN outside shop | WOMAN'S VOICE OVER: |
| … his ways being, as you might say, paved with gold. (Continues unintelligibly.) I was just saying to Mrs Kidgerbury here that according to what we was told … | |
| BLEEDING HEART YARD MEDIUM SHOT ARTHUR entering yard |
Small actions are film's primary mode of creating character: the bit-player Mr. Wobbler and his fellow clerk at the Circumlocution Office, for example, who are summed up in the one's dribbling marmalade on to the documents on his desk and the other's mindless poking of holes in a piece of paper (inspired refinements on the “stage business” they're given in the text … ). What most characterizes Pancks in this scene is what is not recorded in the script's dry record—his eating habits: he stabs his food, jerks his knife and fork with prickly precision. It is interesting to see how large his role looms here, and in the film as a whole—as opposed, say, to Mrs. Clennam's nervous old maid-servant Affery, once the raison d'être for her “dreams” (actually not dreams at all), Flintwinch's twin, is gone. Pancks, however, remains responsible for what now become the main actions of the film's plot: the retrieval of Dorrit's fortunes (he hunts down the inheritance), and the collapse of Arthur's (he gives him the fatal speculator's tip that leads to his ruin during the Merdle crash). He is necessary to the plot, and so Edzard can allow him to develop into still more of a friend to a lonely man than the Pancks of the text. His roles in the Slapbang Restaurant scene are to supply the necessary story information—which also locates us in time—and to trigger the Merdle theme: money “grubber” that he is, he is the natural choice of character to do it.
In terms of mise en scène, Edzard's restaurant is a feast of accurate period detail … —sputtering gas-lighting, brown settles, hats on the hooks, dish covers, clay pipes, steam in the atmosphere, and bulbous-bottomed wine bottles (our Victorian ancestors regularly tossed off a bottle of claret with dinner: they needed bottles that didn't fall over as easily as ours do).
But there is, of course, no “Slapbang Restaurant” in Little Dorrit as Dickens wrote it, any more than there exists the dingy chop house in which we meet Arthur in the first scene of Edzard's film …. Nevertheless, it exists in other Dickens novels, if not in name: there Mr. Guppy entertains his friends (and Phiz depicts him doing so) in Bleak House, for example … ; and it is in the Slapbang Restaurant that “Boz” and Cruikshank picture the thin man (in “Thoughts about People” in the Sketches) reading the communal newspaper over supper (balancing it against the water-bottle), as we see the diner next to Pancks do in Edzard's scene …. Her restaurant is suggested, too, in the shop with steamed-up windows to which feeble Frederick Dorrit slopes off at dinner-time (283). The needs of Edzard's plot determine the need for this “inauthentic” scene, but the materials she quarries for it are all authentic: not only does one suspect, watching this film, that every bit player has read the novel, but that Edzard has read all of Dickens' novels. From Pickwick, for example, she snaps up the name of “Dobson and Fogg, Solicitors,” and from The Old Curiosity Shop the law firm “Samson and Samson,” all members of which descend like vultures when Arthur goes bust.
Which brings us back to characters. The Dickens world bursts with them. It is, Vladimir Nabokov once said, a “magic democracy”—one fundamental reason, some would argue, for the popularity of Dickens in a Western cinema tradition that itself “extoll[s] the importance of individuals within a massive society” (Caramagno 96). Every one you meet could at some point step center-stage and do his “turn.” This is evident in Phiz's illustration of the Dorrit brothers in the Marshalsea Yard …. We notice at once the seedy types to the far left, the more upper-class “Collegian” in his “dressing gown” (270), and the anxious lower-class family group on the right. It is equally evident in this scene: as she hands Pancks and Clennam their “Two nice slices from the joint” the face of the chirpy waitress (Polly) dominates the frame; and the voice in which she delivers her one line rings with self-assured relish. It is evident most of all in each of the faces we see in the crowded restaurant, as we repeatedly survey it in wide-angle shot, or glimpse bits of the bodies crammed in to the settles next to Pancks and Arthur Clennam. The faces of anonymous men and women at home in their own worlds people the film, because Edzard took the unprecedented steps not merely of persuading well-respected actors to undertake small roles for small fees in the cause of Dickens and British cinema (there are 242 speaking parts in the film—“such a nonchalant array of the cream of British actors as to verge on the indecent” [Benson 1]), but also of personally casting every one of the extras—the directorial equivalent of granting life, as Dickens does, to everyone from the spider-like doorman at the theater where Fanny works (278), to the dancing master from whom she learned her trade. And Edzard allows—even foregrounds—exactly the kind of flavorful Dickensian excess that gets cut in films that run the prescribed ninety minutes of commercial cinema. For the Dickens world is a world in which stories, as much as characters, multiply and proliferate—“a crowded, many-voiced, anonymous world,” as Raymond Williams puts it, “of jokes, stories, rumours, songs, shouts, banners, greetings, idioms, addresses” (15). Hence here the first diner's story about the doorman and his “twopence, please!” which we half-hear in this scene, or the Circumlocution Office clerk's story of the “inestimable” dog.
But to appreciate fully the artistry of the Slapbang Restaurant scene, and the problematics of film adaptation, we should consider this question: How can you say in film—“he is thinking of Little Dorrit”? It is difficult. Film imagery works differently to the metaphor and simile of the novel because film itself is not a figurative but an actual language—if we can consider it a “language” at all. So it has been said that if novelists sometimes face the problem of making the significant somehow visible, filmmakers often find themselves trying to make the visible significant. Which is where the little girl in this scene comes in, collecting her father's dinner, and carefully drawing the strings of her purse. We do not have the Marseilles Gaoler's songbird daughter in Edzard's film (we cannot, since she has thrown out the first chapter and torn down the prison), but we do have this other child-woman, to bring Little Dorrit to mind, so that we do not even need Arthur to tell us, as he tells Pancks, “I'm thinking about Little Dorrit.” And the intensity of his thoughts is signaled in the jump from long shot to medium close-up as he (and we) look at the child—camera distance is determined not by his distance from her (he does not move) but by the emotional attention with which he regards her.
What is passing in Clennam's mind is clear also from the subjective use of sound in this scene. We can hear Pancks getting more and more steamed up about Casby, as he rattles through his complaints, but—like Arthur—we don't really hear the words (and we don't need to, since Pancks is repeating himself); nor do we catch the punchline to the anonymous diner's story about the doorman—all we get is the laughter that follows it. As Arthur slips into reverie of Little Dorrit, the purely emotive strains of Verdi, entering from outside the world of the action, drown the sounds of the restaurant, creating a privacy of intimacy in his thoughts. Interiority in this scene is a function of sound as well as image.
In short, the Slapbang Restaurant scene demonstrates, I think, that what matters most in adaptation is the tone of the work: if that is lost, if the novelist's viewpoint has not been absorbed into the emotional blood of the film, then the work is lost. In this scene that Dickens never wrote, Edzard finds visual and aural equivalents for words he did write and she had to cut: its apparent distance from Dickens' Little Dorrit actually conceals an extraordinary sensitivity to the text.
4: POINT OF VIEW AND THE TWO-PART FILM
The overwhelming question about Edzard's Little Dorrit, of course, is why she chose to make two three-hour feature films, and at what stage in the production process that decision was made. The New York Times declared the two-part format “maddening,” burdensome, and “exhausting”—a modernist distortion of Dickens' novel (Canby 11). Another American reviewer, like many of his countrymen frazzled beyond endurance by the leisurely pacing of part 1 (the British, by contrast, preferred its long-drawn-out miseries and reflective gloom to the brisker storytelling of part 2), called it a “leaden” and “comatose” “behemoth” of a production (Edelstein 29). We need to consider point of view, and the sheer length of the film.
Edzard's Little Dorrit was conceived, from the start, for theatrical distribution, not for television: the unwary viewer does not find himself watching eight or thirteen episodes revamped into two gargantuan portions. In opting for treating that part of the novel that she films at comfortable length, she was gambling on a change in our tastes. TV mini-series and phenomena like the Royal Shakespeare Company's eight-hour Nicholas Nickleby have accustomed us to getting as near … the whole novel, not condensed versions or slices …. When Little Dorrit is the novel in question, that means a lot of novel—a veritable “Dickensathon.” Yet in any adaptation, some things have to go. The director Ross Devenish grieved, he told me, over cutting Mrs. Jellaby from his Bleak House (1985) for the BBC, but his eight hours of television time were just not enough. Once the subplots and melodramatic superstructure of Little Dorrit were dropped, her six hours of film allow Edzard to retain instead Dickens' proliferating minor characters and their multiplying stories, and with them the flavor of his world: one can imagine her seconding George Orwell's verdict on Dickens—“rotten architecture, but wonderful gargoyles”—and scripting accordingly (Orwell 447). Whether her gamble works I think remains a matter of taste, and of our ability to override our Hollywood-bred predilections for fast action and plot interest.
Edzard's Little Dorrit was also, most importantly, from the first conceived as a two-part film. (At one point she even considered a third part: it takes a reader with a strong sense of structure to guess that it would have adopted the point of view of Young John Chivery, but the guess once hazarded seems well justified.) What determined Edzard's decision was her feeling that the difference in point of view between Arthur Clennam and Amy Dorrit was sufficiently meaningful to demand such a structuring, that the material could tolerate it, and that it would allow for effects and explorations worth making both for the sake of the book and for the sake of film art: to those critics who charged that part 2 simply “retold” the story Edzard even retorts—“It's not the same story at all. It's two stories which cross each other at certain points.” A very few films have experimented with the retelling of the action from another character's point of view—Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) is one famous case, Alain Resnais' Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961) a moving second and a mysterious third—but none ever to this degree, and at this sustained length. (In 1991 Paramount Pictures attempted to cash in on the success of Edzard's two-part Dorrit with He Said, She Said—“the true story of love … both versions”—adding, as an extra novelty, two directors, a he and a she.)
Of course, these two perspectives, and many others, are there in the text; and only a few years before, in Bleak House, Dickens had experimented with interweaving two completely separate narratives. To talk about Little Dorrit and film is inevitably also to talk about point of view and structure in Dickens' work. Edzard's decision on a two-part film to some degree reflects his efforts, in a medium that was a long way from moving narrative forward upon the waves of stream-of-consciousness, at crucial moments to share the emotions and viewpoint of, say, Arthur Clennam (who is obliged instead to soliloquize), or Mrs. Clennam (who “expresses herself” at interminable length), Young John Chivery (the composer of epitaphs), Affery the dreamer, even Merdle's Physician, and—of course—Little Dorrit herself (whose curious letters to Arthur occupy two whole chapters of book 2). Miss Wade (who conveniently hands over her manuscript “History of a Self-Tormentor”) is the vehicle of Dickens' exploration of the paranoid limits of subjective perception; Ferdinand, the “sprightly Barnacle” of the Circumlocution Office, is the unwitting spokesman of an officialdom adrift from reality: “‘Regard our place from the point of view that we only ask you to leave us alone,’” he tells Clennam, “‘and we are as capital a Department as you'll find anywhere’” (804).
But while Dickens was clearly much concerned with subjective experience and its limits, he kept some distance from the position that writers like Robert Browning took a decade later: in his great twelve-part poem The Ring and the Book nine characters tell and retell the same story of a love-death triangle. Point of view stops short of being the dominant structural principle in Little Dorrit, even though it interplays with what Dickens calls “the destined interweaving” of the parallel stories of Clennam and Little Dorrit (140)—a process which plays off, for example, treatment of Arthur's infatuation with Pet Meagles against seriocomic handling of John Chivery's adoration of Little Dorrit, switching back and forth from one to the other, in time honored multiplot-novel fashion.
Rather, Dickens' chosen structuring device in Little Dorrit was determined by thematics. Late in the day he made the decision to “overwhelm the [Dorrit] family with wealth,” and from this sprang his division of the novel into its two books, “Poverty” and “Riches.”3 But for Edzard the practical filmmaker, there were problems with this thematic division: in terms of scenes, locations, and character, “the novel falls in half in the middle,” she said. Dickens' structure would not work on film, any more than would, say, the whole chapters of Little Dorrit that are controlled by metaphors, like that in which Arthur catches Merdle-speculation disease. What Edzard wants to deliver is the interior Dickens (“Dickens as Chekhov,” sniffed Richard Corliss in Time magazine [92]), and the romantic Dickens. Her part 1 poses questions, and leaves Arthur Clennam in the lurch: part 2 offers answers, above all to Arthur.
How does this work, in practical terms? Partly it is a question of angling and balancing the two parts: in Edzard's film, not only does Arthur Clennam's story become the detective investigation into Little Dorrit's story that Dickens suggests, but part 2 becomes also her journey into his life. It is a matter of distributing material: the Merdles are only mentioned in part 1, because Clennam has no direct contact with them; Mr. Meagles fades out of part 2, because Little Dorrit has hardly heard of him; the Pancks-Casby showdown and Arthur's bankruptcy are the climaxes of part 1; Dorrit's accession to fortune and his breakdown at the Merdles' dinner table the high spots of part 2. A few scenes occur in their entirety in both parts of the film: the tea party in Dorrit's Marshalsea room, for example.
The question of point of view is for another thing a matter of camera placement and angle: Clennam watches the Dorrit Processional departing from the Marshalsea from the Yard …, for example, whereas Little Dorrit looks down upon it from her room above the lock, necessitating a high-angle shot …. It is also a question of whether certain shots are taken at all: in part 2 of the film, we see Little Dorrit blench when Clennam tells her how he has loved Minnie Meagles; in part 1, so oblivious to her pain is unwary Arthur, that no reaction shot lets us see how she takes the news at all. But there are far more subtle and unusual techniques afoot in this film: Edzard's film moves far beyond the crudity of the unremitting subjective “camera eye” technique that turned the 1946 detective thriller The Lady in the Lake into a stillborn curiosity, for example, and only once has recourse to film's point-of-view technique of last resource, the voice-over, and that briefly, when Arthur “hears” a fragment of her letter to him read in Little Dorrit's voice (the same letter that we see her sitting down to write in part 2, when the opening formula, “Dear Mr Clennam,” turns into a subdued litany of affection).
Most importantly, there is the almost subliminal effect of adjustments to the mise en scène. The Marshalsea room we see in Little Dorrit's Story is literally bigger and brighter than the room we saw in Nobody's Fault—it has contained more experience, it is viewed with affection: the walls of the set have been bodily moved out by several feet; the set has been repainted and redressed in slightly brighter colors; potted plants blossom … ; Dorrit's bare chair grows a cover, and his dressing gown sprouts tendrils of embroidery; and when Little Dorrit stands up and moves around in it, the ceiling is not visible in the frame only six inches above her head (whereas it bears down upon Clennam as if about to crush him). The film animates and illustrates Dorrit's hopeful words of welcome to new inmates of the Marshalsea: “The space is limited, … but you will find it apparently grow larger after a time” (708). The two points of view produce an image of a place and a time in 3-D depth—curiously like the Victorian stereoscope.
We can best see how Edzard's point-of-view structuring works by looking in a little more detail at one of the few scenes that occur in their entirety in both parts of the film. Let us take Little Dorrit's midnight visit to Clennam's lodgings, chapter 14 of book 1 in the novel, which Dickens prefaces with a sentence that testifies even in its slight awkwardness to the newness of what he is doing, and which Edzard uses to close part 1 and open part 2 of her film: “This history must sometimes see with Little Dorrit's eyes” (208).
Like all the scenes that occur twice in the two parts of the film, these two different versions of Little Dorrit's visit were shot on consecutive days, to help the actors. But no two shots are exactly the same between the two versions: part 2 dwells more, with Little Dorrit, on Arthur's face; part 1 seeks less intimacy. But it is the differences in script and mise en scène that strike one most. The next sentence of chapter 14 gives us our clue: “Little Dorrit looked … timidly … into a dim room, which seemed a spacious one to her, and grandly furnished” (208). So in Edzard's part 2 she perceives a huge room illuminated by comfortable firelight. But in her part 1, Clennam had poked, embarrassed, at his feeble fire, in a smaller room, holding a newspaper over the fireplace to help it draw, in time-honored makeshift British fashion. The concern with the fire was a cloak for his concern that Little Dorrit should be out alone late on a cold night. She, meanwhile, in part 2 is wary not to make herself seem pitiful, and thereby throw on her father any suspicion of neglect: in her half of the film, she hastily draws in her feet to hide her shoes when Clennam remarks “And your shoes are so thin!”
Just before Little Dorrit arrived, in part 1, Clennam had been struggling clumsily to open a wine-bottle, and sprayed himself in the face; in part 2, Little Dorrit finds him not mopping his cheeks but reading in his chair, the picture of a gentleman at his ease. Each of these two shy people remembers different embarrassments and inadequacies. For the Arthur of part 1 this scene is his first meeting with Maggy, Little Dorrit's oversized retarded friend: in part 1, he stands by disconcertedly as she stuffs her basket with every cake on the plate he holds out; Little Dorrit, who is accustomed to her, notices only that she accepts one slice of bread (not cake)—in part 2, we do not even cut to a shot of Maggy when Little Dorrit introduces her. And each recalls different moments of tenderness or pleasantness—Arthur, his wonder that Little Dorrit seems to appear at his uttering of her name (as she does in the novel, and as she will do at the very end of the film), as if summoned from the disturbed dream her knock interrupts; Little Dorrit his gentleness, and her own excitement at her first night away from “home.” She recalls, too, in part 2, that she told him one of the truths of her existence—“I could never have been of any use, if I had not pretended a little” (211)—and told it, too, in a voice that is perceptibly louder and more merry than the voice Clennam heard in part 1. The two versions of the scene, then, contradict and complement each other, each trading on the illusions of “presence” and veracity that film creates (and we shall discuss later): the allotting of different scraps of dialogue exclusively to one or the other makes not only for a sharpening of point of view, and the minimalizing of repetition, but for a more dynamic interchange between the two parts of the film. Edzard's “twice-told tale,” as one reviewer remarked, “becomes an open-ended investigation of ambiguity, the relative authority of memory and experience” (Winn 27), an exploration on its own filmic terms of the “ambiguous edge,” as Edzard puts it, “to [Dickens'] own view of the people he invents.”
5: DICKENS IN THE FOUR DIMENSIONS OF FILM
Of the dimensions of film that create the whole—mise en scène, camerawork, editing, sound—sound is perhaps the most critically neglected. It would be a great mistake to ignore it in the case of Edzard's Little Dorrit. On the soundtrack we hear multiple layers of noise—dialogue, birdsong, buzzing flies, distant dog barks, the hiss of steam machinery at the Doyce and Clennam works, the ticking of clocks, the sounding of bells, the over-loud chink-chink-chink of money, scuffling footsteps, the roar of traffic, street-vendors' cries, the rustle of leaves, the rustle of bedclothes, sounds of neighbors seeping through thin partition walls, the haunting restless noises that echo through the Marshalsea, the sound of a bottle smashing in the Yard as Clennam takes in the truth John Chivery tells him, that Little Dorrit has loved him all along. The film relies for much of its emotional impact on sound: our sense of finality after the wedding of Minnie Meagles to Gowan, for example, is signaled in the abrupt cutting off of a song; the emotional burden of Mrs. Clennam's fierce religion is captured in the sound of her monstrous dusty tome of a Bible thudding on her lap. Dickens' use of the folk song “Compagnon de la Majolaine” as a recurring aural motif helps pave the way for the expressive use of snatches of music in Edzard's film, or the repetition of key phrases, like Casby's bon mot, “you are paid to squeeze, and must squeeze to pay” (866).
Above all the film relies on music—Minnie Meagles playing the piano, Frederick Dorrit his doleful clarinet, a violin striking up in Bleeding Heart Yard, but above all the music of Giuseppe Verdi. The film theorist Christian Metz has said that the role of music in film is “to make more explicit, not a dramatic fact, but an audio-visual rhythm” (Metz 55); as the great pre-talkies melodramas like Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919) can still demonstrate, in the teeth of our “modern” resistance to the genre, accompanying music can have a visceral, emotional impact that meshes us into the film. Edzard's script sticks remarkably close to Dickens' dialogue. But one element is noticeably absent: coy beatings about the bush, proliferating sentimental tags like “my poor child,” tearful prayers and thanks that to our ears smack of religiosity. Yet Edzard's Little Dorrit feels very much still like a romantic and emotional story. The reason why is that the sentiment has not evaporated: the cut words have been replaced in spirit by the music of Verdi—swelling, as it does in the Slapbang restaurant scene, with the swell of Clennam's emotion, as his attention is caught by the child who reminds him of Little Dorrit, or setting the rhythm of the bustling streets. Edzard's opera background suggested Verdi: his popularity, she remarks, had very similar roots to Dickens', and they were exact contemporaries.
Predictably, while many loved the music, some critics hated the unconventional visual rhetoric of Edzard's film. Static and theatrical, playing into a proscenium mise en scène, was the verdict. But a more complex camera-style might well have undermined the two-part structure of the film, cluttering up what is already complicated.
What you lose when you film Dickens is considerable. How could you film his asides, or his description of Arthur's bedstead at his mother's, with its four posts, “each terminating in a spike, … for the dismal accommodation of lodgers who might prefer to impale themselves” (77-78)? His voice and his narratorial presence cannot be filmed: yet for most of us the interest of a Dickens novel lies as much in the teller as in the tale. Some filmmakers have attempted, filming other novelists' works, to translate a particular verbal into a particular visual style: Tony Richardson's 1963 version of Fielding's picaresque Tom Jones, for example, unfolds at breakneck speed, replete with joke shots through keyholes and stylized old-fashioned wipes and dissolves.4 Working closely with the veteran French cinematographer Bruno Keyser, Edzard decided, wisely in my view, not to try any visual tricks with Dickens. She is careful to avoid any sense of the camera knowing and intruding (“we didn't want another narrator,” her assistant Olivier Stockman recalled). The camera never preempts a character's action, and only occasionally follows it, so that what little camera movement there is has considerable impact: most movingly, there is the painfully slow pan around the enormous Merdle table to catch the last of the outraged upper-crust guests abandoning Dorrit to the society of the new inmates he imagines he is welcoming to the Marshalsea, in part 2. Less usual camera angles are motivated by a character's point of view, literal or emotional: high angle shots in the Circumlocution Office scenes intensify their alienating and weirdly comic quality—as if the Monty Python team had turned its attention to Kafka. These are moments which make us aware of the agency of narration, and they are rare. More generally, Edzard and Keyser work primarily to capture the performances of the actors, as if indeed they were recording a theater performance: “she took the camera,” Miriam Margoyles (Flora Finching) told me, “and shone it like a light at the actors' vulnerabilities as people.” This partly accounts, I think, for the scarcity of long shots in the film—overviews of the streets, and the like: we are immersed instead, in medium shots and occasional close-ups, in the human comedy the camera witnesses.
The film excels in its lighting effects, often “naturalizing” its light sources by grouping characters near windows and in doorways, and never using spots to pick out principal characters, as classical Hollywood style once would have dictated, or filters to soften or glamorize. But Edzard chose not to reproduce the famous lighting effects of “Phiz” 's frontispiece to the novel (in which the light source, we notice, is inside the prison … ): instead, she develops her visual imagery of frames and bars, which links her Marshalsea prison to the Clennam house (first seen through the bars of its wrought iron gate), and even the rustic haven of the Meagles (first seen through the white bars of its wooden garden gate). This confining imagery is associated most of all with Little Dorrit herself, particularly in part 2 of the film, in which Edzard's priority is to lay down the psychological foundation of her character. We see her again and again “framed” by the window in which she sits sewing …, or by a doorway at which she hesitates, or by the bars of the Marshalsea Gate ….
It is perhaps when we consider editing, and the manner of storytelling in each part of the film, that we come to understand more deeply how the interiority of Arthur Clennam and Little Dorrit that Dickens conveys through soliloquy, speech, imagery, and indirect narration is differently conveyed in the two different parts of Edzard's film. We come to understand Little Dorrit, in part 2, through a biographical format that recovers from the retrospective summary of Dickens' text the immediacy and the shaping impact of small Amy's experiences as the “Child of the Marshalsea.” Edzard's film explanation of how Dorrit learned to find “testimonials” “acceptable” is succinctly interwoven with telling us how his daughter came to work for him: a visitor to the goal gives the child a sixpence, and she in her turn hands it to her father, who quietly pockets it. The growth from small child to girl and to woman is smoothed over by a simple continuity of costume (Little Dorrit is always in blue), and an economical trick cut that asserts continuity over a leap of time: in one shot, small Amy looks at her sewing and says, “This won't do, my dear” and in the next, the grown-up Little Dorrit, sitting in the same window in the same room, answers herself, with “no, that's better.” We feel close to her because we see her grow.
Arthur, however, we encounter over a much shorter stretch of time. “Nobody”'s Story, as it is in the novel, is not a story of progression but a story about remembering—of return to a home where time has stood still, to a youthful sweetheart whom the years have ravaged, and to an obsessive injunction “not to forget.”5 (Early in preproduction, Edzard cut a sequence between young Arthur and young Flora that would have paralleled the childhood sequences of Little Dorrit's Story, partly to make the stylistic and experiential differences between the two parts of the film more sharp.) Near the very close of part 1, Arthur finally returns in memory to the first image his mind registered of Little Dorrit at his mother's house—an image skimmed over and suppressed in its proper chronological place, but finally remembered: one is tempted to call it the film's primal image, the visual equivalent of his final realization in the novel that if Little Dorrit's “deep, timid earnestness” had any “new meaning …, the change was in his perception, not in her” (826). The editing style of part 1 is designedly different: its characteristic device is montage, the quick editing together of disparate images to convey a sensation, an emotion, a dream, a sense of time past and present jumbled together, and it takes its cue from the quasi-flashback to the long childhood “train” of his “miserable Sundays” triggered by the sound of bells in Dickens' novel (69). Time and again, in Edzard's film—when Arthur is in his bed (at his mother's, in the “snuggery” of the Marshalsea), or dozing in his chair at his lodgings—he dreams a dream, a montage of past and present images, accompanied by fragmentary sentences and haunting sounds. So, for example, the night after Affery reminds Arthur of his long-lost love, Flora, and again in the instant before he sees her again, there flashes through his mind a sequence that succinctly signifies young Flora—a china bowl of rose leaves; lace gloves; silk slippers; a pile of chocolate bonbons; her quick step as she is glimpsed across a passageway; and the sound of her laughter. Little Dorrit's Story, in sharp contrast, is as linear and goal-oriented as her life.
Of the four dimensions of film mise en scène plays the largest role in Edzard's Little Dorrit, as we might expect from a writer-director who started her professional career as a theater and opera designer. Edzard built eighty-nine separate sets for the film—an enormous number by any filmmaker's standards—and started building while she was still working on the script, since what she could build would affect what she would write. Her camera was overloaded, too, with the front-projection equipment needed to merge together in the frame painted backings of London skylines and miniature sets of house tops and roofs with real-size sets of house fronts, and the characters.
Taking her cue perhaps from such brief passages as Dickens' description of Mrs. General's cavernous room, a third the size of the whole Marshalsea (524), Edzard took the crucial decision to reduce the quantity of furniture Victorians actually stuffed into their rooms not only in all the Italian scenes, but also in the opulent Merdle house, to increase our sense of the luxury of space the rich enjoy, while the poor are crammed into their hovels and into the very frame of the film (in one scene we see Mrs. Plornish reduced to putting the baby in the chest of drawers). The endlessly repeating identical doors of the Circumlocution Office, meanwhile, speak as loudly as the “sprightly Barnacle”'s surreal nonsense monologue about how to apply for a patent of the mindless circularity and frustration that awaits all those who enter here.
Individual pieces of furniture tell us of the frigid emotional climate in which the rich of the novel and the film live: the alienating back-to-back sofa on which Frederick and William Dorrit sit, in an enormous empty Italian salon; the social gradations of chair styles, from the humble style of the secondhand cast-offs we see in the Marshalsea room, to the old-fashioned chairs with backs carved like funerary urns in the Clennam house, to the Regency chairs in Casby's substantial home, to the fake Louis Quinze gilt-and-red-velvet pieces of the Merdles; their enormous dinner table, enlarged still further by the angle at which it is shot, groaning under its load of grotesque fruit centerpieces and gilt dishes of food (all the courses were put on the table at once in this period … ). The dressing of each set counts towards the total effect: there is a dead pot plant on the window-ledge in the Marshalsea room, when Arthur Clennam comes to inhabit it—a legacy from the days of Little Dorrit; posters on the wall outside the Marshalsea Gate where Frederick Dorrit first meets Arthur Clennam shriekingly advertise a popular Bulwer-Lytton drama called MONEY! …. Even the mere placement of characters within the mise-en-scène can have an almost subliminal emotional and thematic impact: Little Dorrit's discomfort in her days of wealth, for example, is encapsulated by her placing outside the salon door during the musical evening in Italy. And these Italian settings literally “pale” by comparison with the London she yearns for: faded pastel colors are the cause.
6: THE FILM AND THE “PHIZ” ILLUSTRATIONS
One source for Edzard's expressive mise en scène was, of course, the original illustrations to the novel by Hablot K. Browne (“Phiz”), all minutely overseen by Dickens. From the first, filmmakers have invoked the aid of his illustrators in revisualizing Dickens—costumes for George Cukor's Copperfield, for example, were cut with Phiz's portrait of Micawber et al. as patterns, in the mistaken belief that this would also guarantee historical accuracy; more generally, Victorian illustrators influenced the visual style of many early films. (Advertisements for a sixteen-scene Alice in Wonderland by the pioneer English filmmaker Cecil Hepworth in 1903 proudly proclaimed that it “reproduced in animated form with remarkable fidelity” John Tenniel's original illustrations [Low and Manvell 1:83]). Furthermore, as Paul Davis has suggested, the picture narratives of Hogarth, The Rake's Progress for example, which were a powerful influence on Victorian book illustration (explicitly cited not only as ancestors of the visual style of Dickens and of his first illustrator, Cruikshank, but as guarantors of Dickens' moral intent in his preface to his “Parish Boy's Progress,” Oliver Twist), “became the technical and philosophical bridge between the visual narratives of the graphic satire tradition and those of the cinema,” and thus Dickens himself became the mediator and hinge between cartoon and screen (158).
Edzard's Little Dorrit draws most heavily on Phiz's illustrations in its creation of Dorrit's room in the Marshalsea, the Clennam house, and the Doyce-Clennam workshop. Indeed, it reproduces almost exactly Phiz's illustration of Dorrit's room, the central location …. There are a few interesting differences, however: the door moves from the right to the left-hand corner in the film—making the room more photogenic; the table-cloth shrinks to cover only half the table.
The painterly “Rembrandt” effect of chiaroscuro that Dickens wanted was achieved by Phiz in the “dark plate” technique he first used when he was illustrating Dombey and Son, to complement Dickens' increasingly dark vision of his society. There are eight “dark plates” in Little Dorrit. Edzard moves toward some filmic realization of the same effects that Phiz achieves in, say, “The Room with the Portrait” (Arthur's father's study … ) and “Damocles” (the exterior of the Clennam house, with Rigaud-Blandois perched smoking in the window, one of the best known and most reproduced of the Dorrit illustrations) through low-key lighting and a predominance of browns in the settings: the sober effect she achieves goes a long way toward deflecting these scenes' potential for B-movie ham. There is a striking resemblance between her shot of Flintwinch at Mrs. Clennam's shoulder and Phiz's illustration “Mr. Flintwinch, mediates as a friend of the Family”: the variety artist Wax Wall, a master of contorted “body language,” brings the novel's Flintwinch to scuttling, crab-like larger than life.
For her rustic scenes, however, Edzard draws not on Phiz's very unusual “dark plate” “Floating Away” …, in which Clennam watches the roses Pet gave him drift away upon the river, but on the favorite Victorian genre of the rustic vignette, exemplified, say, by Phiz's own Pickwick Papers illustration of a comic tryst: the joke-romantic scene, we notice, is artfully “framed” by foliage …. This seems to me appropriate, on one level, given the quality of fakery in the pastoral and rustic scenes of Little Dorrit—Young John Chivery wandering among his mother's washing lines “as if it was groves,” and so forth. A similar principle governs Edzard's visual handling of Bob the turnkey and Little Dorrit on their afternoon jaunt …, and Clennam's and Pet Meagles' walk in the woods. But there is no question that it also lightens the look and mood of the film, as compared to the novel Dickens wrote, and whose illustrations he oversaw with extreme care. Edzard's vision is less dark, and her shadows less deep, and this is not merely a matter of a design decision on Edzard's part.
Another of Phiz's “dark plates” perhaps gives us a first clue to some of the reasons for this lightening. It also illustrates the ideal of interdependence between Dickens' text and Phiz's engravings. Dickens chose each of the scenes to be illustrated: one, of Flora and Mr. F's aunt's visit to the Doyce and Clennam workshop, gives us a far closer view than his text of the works and the machines …, and the inspiration for Edzard's much-expanded work scenes …. And it can serve to suggest to us Edzard's drive to ascertain who is at “fault” for at least some of the ills of the novel's world. Dickens sees no solutions to the questions he asks in Little Dorrit; Christine Edzard is driven to provide a few answers, and so to lighten the Dickensian darkness. She does so partly by importing from Our Mutual Friend a character Dickens calls Sloppy and she calls Smiles, a “wonderful reader of a newspaper” who “do the police in different voices” (the famous line T. S. Eliot chose as the original title of his multivocal, modernist Wasteland). His arm—picking up on a scene Dickens reluctantly canceled from Hard Times—gets caught in the bands that dominate almost every shot of her workshop.6 Whereupon Daniel Doyce has a rather un-Dickensian outburst of faith in technological progress: “The belts are to be blamed,” he says, “and I am to be blamed because I knew of it.”
Some effects possible for Dickens and Phiz are not possible in film. The illustrations frequently underline the self-seeking theatricality of the Dorrit family by arranging groups left to right across the page, as if posed on a stage. Edzard's film is unable to “cheat” in the fashion that Phiz does, say, in his illustration “The Marshalsea becomes an Orphan”—melting away the prison walls in order to allow a “long shot,” as it were, of the departing Processional …. A film audience's sense of the continuity and reality of space is very finely tuned: had she similarly melted away the walls to allow such a shot, we would have felt disoriented. But the potential of film, unlike theater, for offering a multiplicity of points of view is considerable compensation.
7: THE “ROARING” STREETS OF LONDON
“Little Dorrit is unique,” writes F. S. Schwarzbach in his Dickens and the City, “in its insistence upon London” (151). The Phiz illustrations were one first step toward creating the world of the film. Another was to visit what remains of the locations today: little more than the gates of the Marshalsea Prison, letting on to a cramped lozenge of land thinly carpeted with fish-and-chip wrappers. And a most important step was picture research, in the rich field of Victorian illustration. The mid-nineteenth century was the golden age of black-and-white boxwood book engravings, and saw both the rise of photography and the spread of illustrated papers using newly patented reproduction processes. Picture research starts to bring Little Dorrit's London to life: a later nineteenth-century etching uncovers the lost courtyard of the Marshalsea Prison … ; the uneven paving and disconsolate pump figure large in Edzard's reconstruction ….
But central to Dickens' vision, to Edzard's film, and to any sense of London as it was then, are “the roaring streets” (136). The opening sequences of Cukor's David Copperfield and of David Lean's Great Expectations show the pages of Dickens' novel rustling open to begin the story: the very opening credits of Edzard's part 1 plunge us into “streets, streets, streets.” At the very end of her film, during the marriage of Arthur and Amy, her camera circles back to those streets, “wandering and searching and marvelling” (Winn 27) at all it sees (figs. 32, 33, 34).7 The film's final image is a freeze frame of Borough High Street that aims to give us the “feel” of its higgledy-piggledy architecture, evident in period photographs, or in the changing panorama meticulously recorded by the watercolorist and pencil artist George Scharf during the building of London Bridge railway station in 1843, Edzard's primary pictorial source for her street sets and models ….7 She heightens the sense of bustling commercial traffic and teeming London crowds by shooting, say, Arthur Clennam following Little Dorrit to the Marshalsea from behind passing carts and pedestrians, and in constricting medium shots.
Another source for the novel's swarming streets might be Phiz's illustration for Martin Chuzzlewit of that same scene filmed by the pioneer English filmmaker R. W. Paul as Mr Pecksniff Fetches the Doctor at the turn of the century …, or Cruikshank's for Sketches by Boz …. The upstairs offices of Sands Films, which incorporate a picture library, bulge with source-books. The Victorian photographic record (exemplified by a very early sepia photograph of tottering sixteenth- and seventeenth-century houses in Cloth Fair Slum … ) reminds us that early-to-mid Victorian London was an assortment of buildings of all periods, the older the slummier: the skyline on which Clennam looks out from his mother's house in Edzard's film captures this effect of historical layering, as does the maze-like appearance of close, “crooked and descending” London streets (70) seen in almost every photographic cityscape of the 1850s and '60s.
Besides Scharf, one invaluable pictorial source was certainly the French artist Gustave Doré's 1872 London: A Pilgrimage. This represents not only the pinnacle of achievement for Victorian book illustration, but also (in the days before the mechanical mass reproduction of photographs became possible) a kind of Victorian “documentary.” It has perhaps been the single most important influence on the design of all Dickens films: the bridge between warehouses he drew in the brewery area south of St. Paul's turns up both in David Lean's 1948 Oliver Twist and in the 1968 musical Oliver!, which thematizes its relationship to Victorian black-and-white illustration in an opening-credits sequence that ends with a picture of boys on a treadmill “coming alive,” on film … ; Doré's full-page illustrations—of London Bridge swamped with traffic, or Fleet Street in rush hour, say, crammed with figures to the very borders of the page—audibly suggest the “roar” of Dickens' and Edzard's streets.
Their Borough High Street is thronged, too, with the characters Doré drew—the Apple Woman, the street-butcher and his poor customers …, the ballad seller … ; and the street-people recorded by such early masters of the camera as the anonymous photographer employed by Charles Spurgeon, a Greenwich clergyman—the match-seller …, the window-mender …. Spurgeon had W. Thompson, “Champion Pie Maker” …, photographed outside one of the many print shops that prospered in England from the turn of the century, retailing the first wave of products of the age of mechanical picture reproduction that would eventually spawn the photograph and the film. Appropriately, the print shop is a location with symbolic resonance in Edzard's Little Dorrit … : she places one along her Gray's Inn Road, and we see Mr. Merdle going into it, customers window-shopping, and passers-by bumping into Arthur Clennam outside it (“Sorry!” and “My fault!” they say, underlining in passing the theme and title of part 1). Fanny Dorrit's lodgings and Dorrit's Marshalsea room have cheap prints and play-bills pinned on the walls, like patchy wallpaper.
London shopped, worked, lived on the streets. The Cheap Fish Stall holder photographed by John Thomson … for his pioneering documentary collection Street Life in London (1877) would keep his wares out without ice until well past midnight, the only time when poor folk could get out to market—hence the activity among the Borough High Street traders the night Little Dorrit and Maggy get locked out in Edzard's film. Their reek would add to the general stench of the streets, through which animals were driven to market, and horses toiled with carts and carriages of every description, as in George Scharf's lightning sketches of Covent Garden and its market folk ….
London slept on the streets, too. When they cannot get into Maggy's lodging, she and Little Dorrit figuratively join the enormous numbers of homeless Londoners …. Railway and bridge arches and doorways were favorite places to “doss down.” Thomson titled his photograph of a down-trodden baby-minder, with her charge wrapped in her shawl like Mrs. Plornish's baby in Edzard's film, “The Crawlers”: all day long they would “move on” from doorway to doorway, seeking shelter ….
The old slums of London began to be demolished in the decades after Little Dorrit was written. Bleeding Heart Yard (figs. 50, 51) had ten thousand reeking relatives, where washing, chickens, dirt, and sewage shared the space with people whose rooms were too close and smelly for them to sit indoors …. As Ross Devenish, director of BBC TV's Bleak House series told me, what is “normally lost” in adaptations of Dickens is “the fact that London at that period was like a third world city … [with] none of the modern support systems like drainage, sewerage, and so on.” “People get befuddled,” he added, “by the costumes and the Christmas card image”—which Dickens himself, ironically, also helped to create. The novelist had only to reach into his memories of childhood to remember what it felt like to be cooped up in houses hardly much more respectable, and Edzard needed only to refer to this photograph of the staircase of the house in Camden Town where Dickens' family lived before his father was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea to get a sense of just how cramped and dingy she should make the staircase up to Dorrit's room …. All these sources, and many more like them, went to her reconstruction of the historical background of Little Dorrit: it remains to consider exactly what her film's relationship with history is.
8: FILMING HISTORY, FILMING TIME
The camera obscura and the camera lucida shaped early Victorian perception, ordering the eye's fluid experience of the world into series of views that the hand could trace on paper.8 It was only a matter of time until (in Fox Talbot's phrase) these “fairy pictures, creatures of a moment” were chemically fixed, and photography was born (Gifford 23). Much of the visual imagery that has attracted commentators on Little Dorrit (most memorably, Clennam's final realization of Little Dorrit as the perspectival “vanishing point” of his own story [801]) seems to me to demand a specifically photographic frame of reference if we are to appreciate it to the full. The novel's constant play on the imagery of sun and shade partly suggests the highlights and contrasts of black-and-white book illustration, but it suggests too the dual negative-positive quality of the daguerreotype or ambrotype, or such latticework of sunlight and shadow as one sees in the very first paper negative, made by Henry Fox Talbot at Lacock Abbey in 1835 ….9 Some early Victorian photographers called their images “sun pictures” or “heliographs” (the term “photography,” after all, means “light-writing”): fixing the photographic image, meanwhile, in the terms of Fox Talbot's 1839 Report to the Royal Society, was “fixing the shadow” (quoted by Pollack 32). The words brings vividly to mind the “shadow” of her loved one that the tiny woman keeps in a cupboard, in Little Dorrit's story of the Princess (341).
Photography was, as Terry Castle puts it, “the ultimate ghost-producing technology of the nineteenth century” (64);10 Dickens had very mixed feelings about his own photographic replication—“haunt[ing] mankind with my countenance,” as he put it (quoted by Ackroyd 853), through the medium of the mass-produced portraits of the great turned out in the 1850s and '60s. More, in uncanny play with notions of presence and absence, the new technology profoundly queried the Victorians' sense of the one-way onward flow of time. It is an index of the speed with which Dickens absorbed its imaginative possibilities (as he did too those of the railway, for example), and of the depth of his engagement, from childhood, with one of the camera's primary ancestors, the magic lantern …, that his imagery of “sun” and “shadow” pictures in Little Dorrit allowed a striking refocusing of his novel's anxiety about Time, (mis)representation, and that “marking time” which is mere animal existence. Oliver Wendell Holmes dubbed the daguerreotype “the mirror with a memory”: it had turned moments into eerie eternities (quoted by Pollack 28).11 Lengthy exposures—up to eight hours in the 1820s—meant that busy thoroughfares were imaged as empty streets in the City of the Dead, since figures moved too quickly to be registered. The very physical process by which the mind marked the passing of time—the movement of the sun—was obliterated in the first images, in which buildings were shaded by both morning and afternoon shadows. Thus, time and light converge in the image of feeble Frederick Dorrit “‘merely passing on, like the shadow over the sun-dial’” (120), and while sinister shadows “hover” on the wall of the her house “like shadows from a great magic lantern” (221), for Dickens' Mrs. Clennam, fifteen years a prisoner in one room, the natural progression of the seasons has been suspended, and (in most suggestive phrase) memories and imaginings of the world outside have become “controllable pictures” that deny “the rush of reality” (856).
Film went still further than photography, abolishing time. When D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation premiered in 1915, Woodrow Wilson hailed its ability, as he put it, to “write history in lightning” (quoted by Carter 9). No other medium, save perhaps the three-dimensional holograph, has such a power of reconstructing history: the eternal present tense of film, as theorists have called it, denies the very pastness of the past. So it was that a reverent (if risible) review in the influential trade paper The Bioscope of a 1912 Eastertide release, piously entitled From Manger to Cross, celebrated cinema's ability to carry us “back through the countless ages to the time when Christ himself trod this earth,” and restore to us even “the Divine presence” (quoted by Low 2:185). In exploiting her medium's capacities—indeed, its very nature—Edzard sensitively connects with the imagistic heritage and legacy of the novel itself. One need only think of the sudden flashback, during the scene between Clennam and his mother in part 1 of her film, which presents before us, “present” now, in a shot not visually distinguishable from those that precede it or come after it, and in all the sharpness of agonized memory, young Arthur as he was then, in his painful childhood days, a mute and pale-faced boy in a sailor suit. The double narrative of her Little Dorrit, too, intensifies our sense of film's suspension of time, rendering it as lived experience rather than historical progression or (to use William Dorrit's term for his self-pitying petitioning of the authorities) mere “memorialization.”12
Not only in terms of their (re)registering of time did the two technologies of photography and moving pictures trace parallel parabolas of development. The early filmmakers, like the early photographers before them, first exploited film's apparent “guarantee” and “transcription” of reality: each responded in turn to the craving for total realism that clinched the success, in turn, of the magic lantern, the diorama, the stereoscope, the “dissolving views” of the popular melodrama, and then—at last, from 1895—the “Animated Photographs, the First and Finest in London”—prominently of the “Picture Palaces” of the twenties ….13 The attraction of the very first book of photographs ever published, Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature (1844-46), as its title indicates, was the same which drew audiences to the “actuality” and educational nature films made in Britain from as early as 1900 (so potent a draw was film's ultrarealism that a 1907 “kinematic” production of The Pied Piper of Hamelin proudly announced “absolute fidelity to detail—real rats”).14 Photographers and filmmakers after them turned next to providing “reliable records” of the historical events of the day.15 Mathew B. Brady's photographic record of the Civil War finds its parallels and descendants in films of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee of 1897, her funeral in 1901, the Boer War, Scott's Antarctic Expedition of 1912. Then came the day, not long after, when photographer and filmmaker each in turn realized the potentials of his medium for restaging—and even rewriting—history. Early admirers of photography lapped up Oscar G. Rejlander's composite “art” pictures (perhaps his most famous showed John the Baptist's head on the notorious platter), and film audiences were similarly untroubled by latter-day notions of historical authenticity. The English Precision Film Company openly advertised its film of the notorious Tottenham shooting affray, which dominated news headlines in 1909, as a “reproduction” (the term is intriguing) without its losing any of its attraction as a “documentary” item (see Low and Manvell 2:148). As the photographer Edward Steichen remarked in the first issue of Camera Work, in January 1903, all artists—and all photographers, and all cinematographers—“fake” and take liberties with reality. The angle of vision, the type of lens, the progression of images—all inflect the actual; even unmediated technological “objectivity” is an illusion; realism is a style (see Pollack 84). Griffith's revisionist epic of the Confederacy and what it stood for is a case in print. And Christine Edzard's version of Dickens' Little Dorrit is another. On the one hand her film reconstructs the lost world of early Victorian London with a concern for historical accuracy that is almost obsessive—“for this director there is no such thing as background, only detail at a distance,” as one reviewer rightly remarked (Mars-Jones 16 … ). “I wanted it to be as real … as … what you see on the London Underground,” she added. But on the other hand, her film bends some of the facts about Victorian sex roles and society in the interests not only of accommodating a modern audience which might be alienated by them, but also of satisfying personal desires.
Nowhere is the concern for historical accuracy more apparent than in the film's costumes. Edzard and her team visited museums to learn exactly how clothes were made in the mid-nineteenth century. And they found, for example, that shirts were very wide and very long, because people did not wear underclothes, and that the fabrics were of a different quality, no longer produced in the West (so they shipped muslins and hand-woven cottons from India, instead). Modern dyes were not right either: cheap aniline dyes had just been invented when Little Dorrit was written, and when Edzard sets her film. So aniline dyes were used—hence the rather luridly bright costumes of the Bleeding Heart Yard folk. Every single shirt Dorrit wears till his accession to fortune in the novel is made by Little Dorrit, every shirt every earlier Victorian wore was made by hand, and so was every single costume for Edzard's film. It took twenty-five people two full years to cut and sew these costumes, using only original patterns. “The purpose,” Edzard says, “is to re-create from inside the reality of Dickens's time”: people stand and walk differently in authentic clothes. Once made, they were not chemically “aged,” but washed with soap and water, dozens of times, to break them in. The straw bonnets were plaited by hand; the fabrics were hand-printed; collars and waistcoasts were hand-embroidered. Edzard was personally involved with every step of the process: she cut many of the clothes herself, and gave cast members their first fittings in person. She herself designed and made some of the replicas of the accoutrements and heavy jewelry of the period that even such minor characters as Mrs. Gowan and Mrs. Barnacle display in her film. Each costume has thematic and psychological import as well: Fanny Dorrit's relish of her accession to wealth, for example, is written in the six flounces of the fashionable dress she parades in at Mrs. Merdle's; “conspicuous consumption” was not just a modern-day American phenomenon. The “presence” in Edzard's film of a world past and gone had ramifications that might make some historians reel: forty of the costumes had an afterlife as a “hands-on” exhibit of “historical” artifacts at the Museum of London.
Edzard's passion for history took her from the filming of Dickens to the adaptation for the screen of what seems virtually unadaptable, Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, another of her source-books for Little Dorrit (The Fool, released in Europe 1991). But in the end, just as Dickens wrote for his own time, so Edzard must film for hers, lest her Dorrit end up crushed beneath the weight of the period cobblestones shipped in to pave her “roaring” streets. What most astonishes about her historical passion is that it does not dim her sense of narrative or soften her emotional focus on her characters. Nothing is dwelt on with an eye to social history: everything is simply, casually there, and it becomes easier, not more difficult, for a modern audience to make the connections Edzard invites us to make between one compartmentalized society driven by money-mania for Merdle's “junk bonds,” and encumbered with parasites and hangers-on, and another—ours.
9: LITTLE DORRIT'S HERSTORY
Of the several adjustments of historical emphasis that Edzard makes, her handling of Little Dorrit herself asks most attention.
She wanted a complete newcomer for Little Dorrit, someone “dry and unexpansive,” she says, and after interviewing hundreds of girls under five feet tall, chose the twenty-year-old drama student Sarah Pickering (quoted by McAsh 18). If Pickering does finally reveal what one reviewer called a “gosling beauty” by the end of the film, it is in the teeth of Edzard's direction (Corliss 93). There is no concession in Edzard's portrait of Little Dorrit to modern ideals of female attractiveness, not much to Victorian (the tightly scraped-back hair gives her the look of a skinned rabbit), and little to conventional standards of film acting … : Pickering is a “drip,” moaned the film's American reviewers, “a humorless, brooding pill” (Vineberg 10). She wins through the film, in the end, on her own terms—Edzard's terms.
Dickens himself foregrounds—unusually for Victorian fiction—a man's emotional needs and dependencies in the person of Arthur Clennam. And he paints a picture of a “strong” Little Dorrit. But she is strong in the Victorian ways of female strength, which to our eyes sometimes look more like “weakness.” In Dickens's novel, tears—virtuous, sympathetic tears—well in her eyes at the drop of a hat—when she visits Clennam at his rooms, when Tip becomes a prison “regular,” when the news of her father's fortune is broken to her, and so on. We see her on her knees to her father, uplifting her arms to heaven, preaching charity to Mrs. Clennam, kissing Clennam's hand in gratitude: the Victorian woman as humble Angel. In Edzard's film, she weeps only once—when her father tells her she has humiliated him by walking through the public streets arm in arm with Old Nandy, the pauper. The reasons for this change do not only lie in the fact that the film (unlike a TV soap, or a novel issued in monthly parts) cannot bear too many emotional climaxes, nor in Edzard's eschewing of sentimentality and in changes in public taste, nor in the need that her two-part structure creates for a strongly characterized and convincing Arthur and Amy (“it says something about the peculiar nature of Dickens's genius,” wrote John Gross in the London Sunday Times, “that … their inadequacies don't prevent the book from being a major masterpiece” [Gross 22]).
No. This is a very personal film: it must be, to be a good film. It understands that film must interpret, not “adapt” Dickens; and that such interpretation is always a form of (literary) criticism. Christine Edzard is a painfully thin woman so extremely shy as at times to appear withdrawn, a woman director who has risen to prominence in a profession dominated by men, and a mother whose own daughter has carried cans of film around Grice's wharf since she was knee-high, like the “Child of the Studio.” Her Little Dorrit is the first “woman's film” ever made of a Dickens novel. One reviewer may have dubbed Miriam Margoyles's fat widow “a human Miss Piggy” (Edelstein 29), but her Flora is also granted vulnerability and kindness (she caresses Arthur's hat); Minnie Meagles is shorn of her “Pet” name and most of her pettishness; Mrs. Tickit, the Meagles' housekeeper, gets promoted to full status as family friend; Affery remains Arthur's ally—but in the film gets his help making his bed; the balance of factors in Edzard's Mrs. Clennam between melodramatic villainy, perverted religiosity, and thwarted motherhood is shifted (it is she, not Doyce, who springs Arthur from the Marshalsea in the film): the women of this production more than hold their own. Edzard adds innumerable details to Dickens' portrait of Little Dorrit, “like her constantly busying herself about.” In a sense, she solves the perennial problem of the vague, flat, and virtuous Dickensian child-heroine simply by showing her to us; the details of themselves grant her a kind of gritty life. “Dickens didn't go close enough,” she says: “People weren't expected to take much notice of women in his day. He hardly knew what the women who looked after him were doing most of the time” (quoted by Malcolm 22). What drew her to this novel, of all the novels, she says, was partly its qualities of compilation and panorama (“cramming everything in,” as she puts it), partly the directorial freedom it offered precisely because it is imperfect, but most of all the strength of the heroine: to prove that strength, her film goes beyond mere emphasis—like the frequent repetition of a line Little Dorrit speaks only once in the novel, “I have always been strong enough to do what I want to do” (333), or her dressing in a blue that stands out against her dingy background, or increasing Arthur's ineffectualness so that her capability looms larger. More, Edzard's film refashions Dickens' text and his times. When images and judgments delivered by the novel in indirect speech survive translation into film, it is often because Little Dorrit inherits them. She has an answer to the question that rattled around part 1—“Who's to blame?”: not “nobody” but “everyone who was at Mr. Merdle's feasts was a sharer of the plunder,” she says—a line of impersonal narration recontextualized and immeasurably strengthened (776). She turns Arthur's reflective murmur, “Do Not Forget,” into only the first half of her own sentence, “I love you.” And she takes from him the first gentle breaking of the great news to her father: “The wall … is down, melted away.” Masculine ventriloquism, Arthur's services as mouthpiece, is no longer required, just as she no longer ascribes to her love for him (as she does in her curious letters from Italy) her ability to penetrate character or weigh judgments (608): those faculties are not borrowed from love, or from men, in Edzard's film.
This Little Dorrit's desire for Clennam is clear from the very beginning of her Story, when the camera lingers with her eyes on the oblivious Arthur passing her in the doorway of the Clennam house (in Arthur's half of the film, and in the novel, Little Dorrit doesn't even come into focus in the background). She arranges the first meeting on the Iron Bridge, which in the novel is accidental. She faints in the Marshalsea room, the day the family leave, because Clennam has asked her to look out for Minnie Gowan in Italy: two scenes from the novel are here fruitfully collapsed upon one another. And while she may lose consciousness at this climactic moment, for the Little Dorrit of the film loving Arthur Clennam certainly does not mean what it means in the novel—“los[ing] and forget[ting] herself” (648). The kiss with which in the film she answers the protestations of “honor” and “too late!” that threaten to abort the romance in the novel is a real woman's kiss. Such an awakening and consummating kiss may accord with the fairy-tale element in Dickens; it is also well-nigh impossible to imagine a Victorian woman bestowing it, even upon a despondent Clennam.
9: DICKENS, CINEMA, AND THE CULTURE OF THE COUNTRY
It is a cliché of cinema history that when the great Soviet silent filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein came to reach back into the history of narrative for the roots of his own experimental style, he reached back directly to Dickens, to proclaim him the conceptual “father” of the film. The “Inimitable” was, said Lillian Gish, the “idol” of D. W. Griffith, the ancestor (and respectable guarantor) of the technique of “parallel editing” that made his first feature films possible.16 Dickens' concern for locating us in space and time might have made him as natural a film director as he was a theatrical producer (the same concern brings both novel and film time and again to the Iron Bridge). His visual sensibility “invents” the close-up and the motif. He anticipates Edzard in the use of subjective sound and what we might call sound “fade-ins” and “fade-outs”: we hear only what Arthur can catch, for example, of Miss Wade's conversation with Rigaud (Dickens 587). It is a naive critic who would deliver the blanket statement that Dickens is “inherently cinematic” (though many have delivered it); and only the unwary theorist would trace an unbroken line and an unmediated link between the nineteenth-century novel and film (thought several have done so, “repressing,” as Rick Altman persuasively writes, cinema's—and indeed Dickens'—disreputable inheritance from popular melodrama).17 Yet while Victorian fiction is not film's sole parent, and Dickens is not cinema, it is clear that there are profound similarities between these two narrative media that (like dreams) engage their mass audiences on the most private and interior levels, and that Dickens' novels were seedbeds for cinema's techniques.
But to look at Dickens and film, particularly English film (curiously neglected by the commentators), is not only to engage crucial issues in film and narrative theory but also to understand better the culture of the country and Dickens' role in both—and even the very Englishness of England. The history of the perennially struggling English film industry has as much to teach as the well-known stories of Grifith, Eisenstein, and stars from Fields to Guinness. The filmmakers of earlier times quarried and paid homage to Dickens' novels for entirely different reasons from those that brought Christine Edzard to Little Dorrit in the 1980s, and English film production has been tied up, from the very first, with their adaptation.
The first multi-scene film of the English film innovator R. W. Paul in 1901, was, as we might have suspected, a thirteen-scene thriller somewhat confusingly called Scrooge: Or, Marley's Ghost—an artistic advance, at a time when Gaumont (France) were still offering up their “Novel in a Nutshell” series for the public's edification.18 In these uncertain early days of the cinema, Dickens was English filmmakers' most bankable commodity. The first feature-length film by Cecil Hepworth, one of the originators of continuity editing (in his 1905 Rescued by Rover), who dominated English filmmaking for the first thirty years—and only the second feature-length film made in England (the first was Shakespeare's Henry VIII)—was, no less inevitably, an adaptation of a Dickens novel: his rousingly melodramatic Oliver Twist … was “rapturously” received in 1912 (it is listed in his catalogue as a “crime story” [Low 2:190]).19 As films got longer and subjects more ambitious (though not, alas, more hard-hitting in their social criticism—Dickens, like others, was tamed) filmmakers across the world were drawn to the English Victorian novelists like wasps to a honey pot. And no novelist tasted sweeter than Dickens, and no filmmakers (or audiences) became so addicted, for good or ill, as the English, for whom by mid-1916, claimed the Bioscope trade magazine, adaptation counted for all but 5٪ of output.
Oliver Twist started Hepworth (and others) on a successful chain of adaptations.20 In 1913 he delegated direction to Thomas Bentley—and a Dickensian character actor and well-known Dickens impersonator became one of the driving forces of English filmmaking. Bentley's ambitious David Copperfield (1913), over two hours long, primitively edited and dependent for story development on pretentious “literary” intertitles, nevertheless represented a major aesthetic advance and a brief renaissance for British cinema after the doldrums of 1906 and after: his eye for composition within the frame and innovative camera placement and movement make for a distinctive visual style …. Above all, the film comes alive in its location scenes, praised for their Englishness …. Hepworth's publicists claimed they were the actual places “immortalized by Dickens” (quoted by Low 2:293)—exactly the point sold hard in publicity for Disney's 1989 Great Expectations: across the twentieth century, and on both sides of the Atlantic, it is the Englishness of the “real” Dickens that sells.21 Bentley's restraint drew plaudits, too: the “distorting mirror” of Dickensian characterization, wrote one overenthusiastic reviewer, had been eliminated by dignified acting (quoted by Low and Manvell 2:191).
Nevertheless, the early silent cinema, even in more decorous England, was a proletarian entertainment, addicted to sudden reversals, romantic sacrifices, violent action: what attracted early filmmakers was often precisely that melodrama that Edzard excises. Typical of his breed, like the great D. W. Griffith in America, the artistic Bentley also combined a taste for “blood and thunder” with a Victorian penchant for the sentimental, perhaps believing, with the Kinematograph Monthly Film Record, that the public “likes its melodrama mellowed by a little literary tradition” (quoted by Low and Manvell 3:204): his 1914 version of The Old Curiosity Shop was considered the best of his Dickens adaptations, better even than the historical spectacle he made of Barnaby Rudge later in the same year; he liked the novel so much that he filmed it again in 1921 …, and yet again in 1935 ….22 Nell's story vies with David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and A Christmas Carol for the greatest number of screen adaptations of a Dickens novel. These last two turn up in versions called Nancy, Fagin, and Scrooge, outnumbering even the thirty-plus adaptations of David Copperfield, and forcing our attention again to the independent extratextual existence of the Dickens character. (In sharp contrast, there have been only four films of Little Dorrit: a 1933 German talkie, and silent versions made in America, England—with the stately Lady Tree as Mrs. Clennam dominating the action—and Denmark, whose film-makers, driven by the dictates of the text in an age and a climate less kind to location shooting and large sets, seem nevertheless to have shared Edzard's fascination with street scenes.)23
As early as 1906 the British film industry suffered from: foreign penetration of a home market smaller than America's (which in turn restricted profits and reinvestment); the lack of language barriers across the Atlantic; amateurish business methods and under-capitalization of production (the profits lay in distribution and exhibition, especially of American films, and no British companies were vertically integrated); questionable practices like block and blind-booking (which often left no space in screening schedules for home-grown products); institutional indifference to the idea of a national cinema; the dead-weight of tradition, and artistic and social snobbery; and plain bad weather, which made a mockery of shooting schedules in the open-air days before arc lights and covered stages (see Chanan 39-58).24 By the mid-twenties, Hollywood had taken 95٪ of the British market. Some thought Dickens was the answer, and rushed to make no fewer than five adaptations in a single year, 1922; others thought high “art” held the key. Herbert Wilcox (with his splendid designer, Norman Arnold) tried both remedies at once, borrowing prestige from the stage for good measure, in his costly 1925 adaptation of Sir John Martin Harvey's much-revived theatrical version of A Tale of Two Cities, The Only Way, first staged in 1899 (figs. 64, 65). But foreign companies responded to Dickens with more Dickens. As early as 1913, for the American comedian John Bunny this meant making a four-part Pickwick Papers series for Vitagraph UK, which had tackled Oliver Twist three years before Hepworth; for the English wing of the French company Pathé it meant making David Copperfield the first in its “Britannia” series; for Americans at home in Hollywood it was progressively to mean “lessen[ing] sales resistance” in foreign markets, as a producer was to tell a class of Harvard business students in 1927, by “drawing on their literary talent, taking their choicest stories[,] … and sending them back into the countries where they are famous” (Chanan 56). And so (to think only of more benign cultural-imperialist implications) W. C. Fields came to play Micawber.
After the Second World War, in the “golden decade” of native film production, before Hollywood reestablished its grip, and while English people (after their close shave) still felt the need to celebrate their Englishness, it was again to Dickens that they turned, and one adaptation succeeded another to the screen. In them we can chart—almost scientifically, since Dickens provides the “control” in the experiment—the artistic fortunes of film in Britain. David Lean's 1946 Great Expectations (figs. 66, 67) and 1948 Oliver Twist … excelled in their evocation of atmosphere through the contrasts and highlights of black-and-white stock, and a suggestiveness of style that their director rarely again achieved (the murder of Nancy, for example, happens off-screen while Bill Sikes's dog scrabbles frantically at the door);25 Cavalcanti's 1947 Nicholas Nickleby had a lighter touch …. The fifties, decade of the “angry young man” and the new realism, wanted a more gritty Dickens, but plenty of production value: exteriors for the 1958 Rank film of A Tale of Two Cities were shot on location in France …. The sixties returned to Dickens-as-play, and in turning his murderous melodrama into musical turned us back with gusto to the fabulous quality of his art … : for the price of a massive semistylized street set for one of the production numbers in Lionel Bart's Oliver! …, Christine Edzard could have built half her studio, not only made her film. And now there is her Little Dorrit: not, in my opinion, the “part Marxist, part deconstructionist” and all-“sterile” intellectual-academic's film that its most hostile critics dubbed it (“about as subtle as Monarch's Notes” jeered one [Sragow C3-7]), but perhaps the “first postmodern Dickens film” (Kroll 118), certainly a feminist's, and without question the most personal re-vision of Dickens ever to reach the screen. It is a most honorable addition to the family. There never can be a “perfect” Dickens film, or even a “whole” Dickens film: Oliver Twist's peregrinations through cinema history, its transformations from 1912 “crime story” to authority-mocking sixties musical—with chameleon Fagin, that extraordinary focus of the novel's creative energy, casting off the demonic treacherous Jew for the role of benign Pied Piper—perhaps best exemplify how making a Dickens film means making a choice between the modes and genres that compete for dominance within each Dickens text. Edzard's Little Dorrit, for me, comes close to perfection—but so do films as different from it as chalk is from cheese, above all David Lean's taut, class-conscious Great Expectations: just as every stage director assumes the right to “his” or “her” Macbeth or Lear, so every film director has the right to his or her Dorrit or Twist. The Dickens who endorsed stage productions and reprocessed his novels as dramatic readings, the literary entrepreneur who invented Christmas (the Carol is surely the direct ancestor of every Yuletide movie release in America), the novelist bred on folk-tale, magic lantern shows, and popular art, would surely not have been surprised at his own cultural reproduction. “Dickens,” as Mike Poole writes, “has always been a mass media phenomenon” with a “massive cultural profile” and “extra-literary” identity (148).26 What delights always is the fertility of the Dickens who inspires, the abundance and textual excess that keeps the cameras (and the critical industry) turning.
Notes
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Sands Films press release. All unattributed quotations in this essay come either from press releases or from the author's interviews with the filmmakers in March and November 1990.
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Miriam Margoyles (Flora Finching in Little Dorrit) and Ross Devenish (director of BBC TV's 1985 series Bleak House) interviewed by the author, June 1990.
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Letter of 16 September 1855, quoted by Stone 267. Dickens reinforced the division into two books by numbering the chapters of each separately, and insisting upon it on the very title page of the first edition; it is reflected in such factors as the careful mirror-effect of the distant and designedly “objective” openings of each book—one in Marseilles, one at the Great St. Bernard.
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Both editing devices associated with the Hollywood cinema. During a wipe, one shot progressively replaces another on the screen, sometimes from left to right, sometimes from one corner diagonally to another, and so on, with a sharp demarcating border always visible between shot A and shot B. The dissolve superimposes one shot over another for a varying amount of time (hence brisk and slow dissolves): in the “grammar” of classical Hollywood cinema, it came to signify the passage of time.
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Little Dorrit's very first line in the film, by way of sharp contrast to the emphasis on memory in Nobody's Fault, is “I don't remember.”
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I am indebted for this observation to Professor George Ford, whose edition of Hard Times gives details of a “gruesome” Household Words article, “Ground in the Mill” (278), which stirred Dickens' indignation and inspired a scene, not finally included in the novel, in which Stephen Blackpool bitterly recalls “how Rachel's angelic little sister had suffered when her arm had been torn off by a factory-machine” (279).
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For more on George Scharf, see Jackson, and Nadel and Schwarzbach.
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For a full discussion of technology-assisted shifts in our mode of perceiving the world, see Gifford 17-47.
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The daguerreotype process produced a single image, reversed, as in a mirror—a positive in certain lights, and a negative in others: “in direct rays of the sun it became a shiny sheet of metal” (Pollack 20). Not until Fox Talbot invented the negative-positive principle was modern photography made possible, with its potential for multiple reproduction, enlargement, and reduction. Ambrotypes (from the Greek for “imperishable”) were cheaper, newer substitutes for the daguerreotype: “negative portraits on glass deliberately underexposed to make a faint image,” and then “backed up with black paper or velvet or sometimes painted black” (Pollack 38).
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Castle notes: “Wraithlike actors and actresses, reflected [by a series of mirrors] from below the stage, mingled with onstage counterparts in a phantasmagorical version of Dickens's ‘The Haunted Man’ on Christmas Eve, 1862” (39-40).
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For a full discussion of this subject, see Thomas.
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I have been encouraged to expand these notes on time, film, and the photographic imagery of Little Dorrit by conversation with Diane Elam of Bryn Mawr College. See her “Another Day Done and I'm Deeper in Debt: Dickens and the Debt of the Everyday,” a paper given at the Dickens Project Summer Conference in Santa Cruz, California, 1990. Dickens, she argues, is most interested in Little Dorrit in “exploring the debt of the past within everyday life: exploring the condition and function of memory.” For Elam, the novel makes a sharp distinction “between what time it is and what time is, the difference between ‘time for what?’ and ‘what is time?’”
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Magic-lantern slide shows first became popular at the end of the eighteenth century, and enjoyed a renaissance during Dickens' childhood. The diorama, invented in 1822 by the father of the daguerreotype, Louis Daguerre, offered sweeping semi-animated prospects on history and the Orient. One of cinema's several ancestors, it used a series of paintings, some opaque, some transparent, seen from a distance through a series of movable screens and shutters, to create an illusion of perspective and movement. Miniature cardboard versions on the English market—of the great gallery of the Crystal Palace, for example—were known as “perspectives.” The “left” and “right” “eye” images of the stereoscope, viewed simultaneously, created an illusion of 3-D depth: few middle-class homes were without one by the time Little Dorrit was written.
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See Low and Manvell; and Low 2:185.
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The press's high term of praise for Brady's photographs (Pollack 59). As early as 1839, when François Arago reported his experiments and achievements to the Academy of Sciences, France signalized its recognition of the importance for the future and for the recording of history of Daguerre's invention by “adopting” it and awarding large state pensions to him and the heir of his co-inventor, Joseph Nicephore Niepce, who had taken the world's first photographic image, on pewter, in 1826 (Pollack 21).
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For more on Griffith's debt to Dickens, see Zambrano 148-204. Zambrano exemplifies the “repression” against which Altman argues, but is nevertheless a useful resource.
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In their anxiety to establish film's credentials, Altman writes, both the filmmakers of the preclassic silent years, when the “movies” played cultural second fiddle to the respectable stage, and the classier critics of today (to their cost, and film theory's) have “repressed” early cinema's inheritance from its prime rival, popular melodrama (the disreputable stage), with its spectacle, larger-than life “mythic” characters, and episodic multifocus plots (utterly unlike the well-made play's). Sensational theatrical adaptations from Balzac, Zola, and (of course) Dickens very often “mediated” film's experience of the texts; but it was the novels and the novelists who were mentioned on the posters outside the picture-houses.
Indeed, Altman argues, it is the very fact that of all “highly respected nineteenth-century novelists,” the “most closely allied to popular sensibility and the melodrama is surely Charles Dickens,” that both guaranteed his novels' cannibalization by the popular theater and ensured they would be more filmed in more countries than any other novelist's—a fact which in turn, as cinema studies have gained respectability and Dickens' postwar reputation has continued to rise, has given his works a “spuriously pivotal function” in “arguments about the relationship between novel and cinema.” By investigating the “repressed” melodramatic mode and appeal of Dickens, Balzac, and other canonized “classical” novelists—always returned to center-stage by now equally “repressed” stage versions—Altman arrives at a suggestive reformulation of classical Hollywood narrative's “linear causality” and character motivation as (in Freudian terms) the “secondary elaboration” of filmic (dream) work: underneath, like bedrock, is the melodramatic content (329, 330, 348).
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Not surprisingly, writes Rachel Low, the novels were “mercilessly condensed”—mere illustrations (2:184).
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Also see Denis Gifford, The British Film Catalogue 1895-1970: A Reference Guide (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), and Ivan Butler, Cinema in Britain: An Illustrated Survey (London: Tantivy, 1973).
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“[Dickens'] works occupied a particularly important position in the British revival, for Hepworth, seeking to keep pace with the great world producers and at the same time retain his reputation for a characteristically English atmosphere, found in the novels of Dickens and the services of … Bentley, the ideal channel for his desired development” (Low 2:190).
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Publicity releases for Disney's Great Expectations read: “Many of the scenes were filmed in England at the locations described in the novel.”
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Bentley left Hepworth in 1915 for Trans-Atlantic, the European representative of the Universal Film Company of America, which then opened its operations in style with his Hard Times (Low 3:80). This appears to have been one of the tamest of Dickens adaptations. As the Kinematograph Monthly Film Record for October 1915 put it: “the sense of bitterness and indignation and biting satire left by the book has almost entirely disappeared” (quoted by Low 3:196-97).
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An incomplete copy of the Danish Little Dorrit is held by the British Film Institute.
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In “Black November,” 1924, not a single foot of film was exposed in British studios (Chanan 52-53).
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For a comparison of Dickens' 1868 dramatic-reading “Sikes and Nancy” to David Lean's version of the scene, see Manning 99-108.
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Poole's is an excellent short survey of the subject; although sketchy on pre-war film history, it is particularly incisive on British television's involvement with Dickens (to its detriment as well as its benefit) and on Dickens as an easily packaged, if not pre-chewed, international media product. “In [the] kind of climate,” he concludes, “where an economic drive towards globalizing the television product meets a socially-led boom in nostalgia generated by recession, it seems safe to predict that … future Dickens adaptations … will be heavily weighted towards the picturesque, the reassuring and the traditional” (159).
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