저자가 본 소설의 영화화: 그레이엄 스위프트의 『워터랜드』와 『마지막 여정』

Abstract

Literature in the massive and popular culture cannot belittle the influence of films and often depends upon the filming power. This paper examines the author’s eyes on filming with regard to the adaptation of Graham Swift’s two novels, Waterland and Last Orders,. and considers the value of two novels’ cinematograph. In Waterland, Graham Swift, with his lyrical, intelligent, and thoughtful style, works out Tom Crick’s narrative into simultaneously the history of England, the document of Norfolk Fenland, and the narrator’s fictional autobiography. The precise evocation of landscape and the serious contemplation on history, saturated with the very mood of Englishness, are paralleled to both personal and collective history. In adapting a novel, there is either something essential to choose or what they can get away with. American director Stephen Gyllenhaal, who unfortunately Americanised Waterland, did not represent the original mood and English virtue of the novel which were something essential to choose. Fred Schepisi’s filming of Last Orders, which revitalised the novel’s substantial story and its vivid/brilliant language, was an excellent “borrowing” of literature. The scripter/director Schepisi kept scrupulously the novel’s topography and its impact with his cinematic artistry, so the movie realised the impression and mood of the original text unimpeachably. The film’s wonderful cast, powerful one of mostly mature, much-admired British performers, well cast depicted the dramatic intensity and the emotional depth of the novel in a harmonic ensemble of well-paced action. In the whole enterprise of adapting his novel, Swift felt like ‘a visiting ghost’, who is both vital and redundant to the happenings. In a sense, the ghost is the very spirit of the novel and preserves its identity. The filming of novels transforms the active experience of readers into the passive role of audience. It is a re-creating endeavour of literature into a different genre through the dressing operation for imaginative images with the visible and the audible. The best way in which films might relate to their literary sources would be “borrowing,” but a film cannot replace its literary counterpart because even the best “borrowing” is no more than parts of the life represented in a novel.