ABSTRACT
Jane Campion's film The Piano (1993) poses some interesting problems in terms of the relationship between literature and cinema. We can begin by noting that the film itself attracted the kind of sustained analytical criticism which worked to designate it as literary’, even though it was not actually an adaptation. This meant that when the novel-of-the-film appeared a year later-co-written by Jane Campion and Kate Pullinger — it could only be identified as somehow less literary than the film: as if the film was more of a novel than the novel itself. The novel-of-the-film in fact answered some of the film's overhanging enigmas and resolved some of its ambiguities. In other words, it clarified (even simplified) the film, and no doubt for these as well as other reasons it received almost no critical attention as a literary text. Certainly it is unusual to come across a case where a film is seen as more complex, nuanced and worthy of sustained ‘literary’ critique than the novel to which it is attached. In Campion's next project, a 1996 adaptation of Henry James's novel The Portrait of a Lady (1881), quite the opposite would seem to be true: that such a great novel would inevitably remain more complex and nuanced than the film. On the other hand, Campion's reputation by this time was secure enough for her scriptwriter, Laura Jones, to restructure this conventional view of novel-to-film adaptation by imagining Henry James to be ‘turning [in his grave] with pleasure’ at the film version (see Jones 1996: x). For Jones, novel-to-film adaptation involves an initial loss and a subsequent gain: ‘you empty out in order to fill up’ (Jones 1996: vi). Indeed, her screenplay even ‘widens James's circle a little, stretches it a fraction’ (Jones 1996: viii), returning us to the sense provided by The Piano that — those initial losses in an adaptation notwithstanding — a film can actually become something more than a novel. At the very least, then, a certain kind of productive entanglement occurs between the ‘literary’ and the ‘cinematic’; let us also note that this entanglement works to limit possibilities, too, as the following discussions hope to show.
