ANDRÉ LOISELLE
Depuis 1992, de nombreuses adaptations cinématographiques de pièces de théâtre canadiennes ont produites. A tel point que certains critiques parlent d'un nouveau phénomène "de la scène à l'écran" au Canada. Ceci contraste de façon marquée avec la période précédente. Avant 1992, peu d'adaptations avaient été réalisées et, en général, ces oeuvres n'avaient pas attiré l'attention des critiques ou du public. Cependant, si l'on considère l'histoire de ce corpus peu apprécié, on se rend compte que, malgré son manque de succès, la ciné-médiatisation des dramaturgies canadienne et québécoise présente une cohérence digne d'intérêt. Cet article se propose de tracer l'évolution du "mariage manqué" entre le théâtre et le cinéma au Québec et au Canada depuis les débuts de cette pratique en 1942, pour montrer que la transposition de pièces au grand écran s'est fait à partir d'un parallélisme entre la structure dialectique des textes adaptés, la composition médiatique des films et, ultimement, l'expression typique de l'imaginaire canadien et québécois tel que décrit par Simon Harel, Northrop Frye, Gaile McGregor et plusieurs autres. Peut-être qu'à la lumière de cet historique, le renouveau dont nous sommes présentement témoins prendra un sens Plus marqué.
Since 1992, a great number of Canadian plays have been made into feature films. Certain critics even suggest that we are presently witnessing a "stage-to-screen phenomenon" in this country. This differs markedly from the previous situation. Indeed, prior to 1992, very few plays had been adapted and most of these works did not attract much attention from either critics or the general public. However, a brief look at the history of this little-appreciated corpus reveals that in spite of its lack of critical and popular success the corpus of Canadian and Québécois film-mediated drama exhibits an intriguing coherence. This article traces the evolution of the 'failed marriage" of theatre and film in Canada since 1942 in an attempt to demonstrate that the cinematization of drama operates on the basis of an intricate symmetry between the dialectical composition of the plays adapted, a tension at the core of the transpositional process, and a conflict often interpreted as a paradigm of Canadian/Québécois culture.
For a hundred years, theatre and cinema have co-existed in Canada and, as in most countries, several artists (from Gratien Gélinas in the 1940s and 1950s to Robert Lepage in 1995) have successfully moved from one form to the other. Unlike most other national cinemas, however, the Canadian canon counts remarkably few actual feature-film adaptations of theatrical pieces. Browsing through Tom Costello's International Guide to Literature on Film (1994), one notices that while the author itemizes literally hundreds of adapted plays from around the world, there is not a single reference to a Canadian drama having been made into a film. If nothing else, Costello's "omission" suggests that Canadian cinema has never produced an adaptation of a play worthy of mention in an international survey.
The absence of notable adaptations in Canada contrasts markedly with cinematic practices in other nations. In the United States, the tradition has long been to transpose any play that has enjoyed popular and/or critical success on stage. Besides the obligatory masterpieces of Eugene O'Neill (The Iceman Cometh [play: 1946/film: 1973]; Long Day's Journey Into Night [1956/1962]), Arthur Miller (All My Sons [1947/1948]; Death of a Salesman [1949/1951]) and Tennessee Williams (The Glass Menagerie [ 1945/1950]; A Streetcar Named Desire [1947/1951]; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof [1955/1958]; Orpheus Descending [1958/1959] etc.), which have all been made into movies (more than once in certain cases), hundreds of other Broadway plays have been adapted by Hollywood. Ranging from 1960s classics like Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962/1966), Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band (1967/1970) and several comedies by Neil Simon (The Odd Couple [1965/1968] being only the best-known among them) to 1980s and 1990s hits like Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart (1981/1986), Marsha Norman's 'Night Mother (1983/1986), Sam Shepard's Fool for Love (1984/1985) and David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross (1984/1992) and Oleanna (1992/1995), the list of works that comprise the corpus of American cinematized drama is overwhelming.
Other countries also rely heavily on their dramaturgies for inspiration. For instance, in addition to the many adaptations of Shakespeare's, Oscar Wilde's and George Bernard Shaw's plays, British filmmakers have also filmed landmarks of their contemporary repertory such as John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956/1958), Harold Pinter's The Caretaker (1960/1963) and The Homecoming (1965/1973), Peter Shaffer's Equus (1973/1977) and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967/1990). Similarly, French cinéastes have adapted both the classics of their theatre, such as Molière's Tartuffe (1669/1963), Racine's Phèdre (1677/1968) and Victor Hugo's Ruy Blas (1838/1948), and twentieth century works like Frangoise Sagan's Château de Suède (1960/1963), Jean-Paul Sartre's Les Mains sales (1948/1951) and several comedies by André Roussin including his popular Lorsque l'enfant paraît (1952/1956). And of course, Marcel Pagnol has adapted several of his own plays for the cinema (ex: Marius [1931/1931]; Topaze [1930/1951], etc.). The Germans have cinematized Romantic plays by J.W. Goethe (Faust [1808/1960]; Götz von Berlichingen [1773/1979]) and Heinrich von Kleist (Penthesilea [1808/1983]), as well as modem dramas by Friedrich Dürrenmatt (Der Besuch der alten Dame [ 1956/1964]), F.X. Kroetz (Wildwechsel [1968/1972]) and Botho Strauss (Gross und Klein [1980/1980]). Japanese directors have brought to the big screen the plays of Chikamatsu Monzaemon (Sonezaki shinju [ 1703/1978]) as well as those of Mishima Yukio (Kurotokage [1962/1968]). Younger nations have also transposed their theatrical traditions onto the screen. Athol Fugard's well-known Boesman and Lena (1969/1973) was made into a film in South Africa. Brazilian playwright Nelson Rodrigues has seen seven or eight of his texts filmed since the 1960s (Bôca de ouro [1959/1962]; Obeijo no asfalto [1961/1981]; Bonitinha, mas ordinária [1961/1981] etc.). And half a dozen plays by Australian dramatist David Williamson have been cinematized (ex. The Club [1978/1980]; Don's Party [1973/1976] etc.) (See Costello).
But in Canada, unlike in these other countries, most of our best dramatists have never seen their plays brought to the big screen and, to date, not a single playwright has had more than one feature film made from her or his work. Since the 1940s, when the first sound fiction films were produced in Canada, the marriage of drama and cinema has produced less than thirty feature films, most of which are of a marginal nature and have rarely been examined by film and theatre critics and historians. Admittedly, since the early 1990s, Canadian filmmakers seem to have finally discovered the stage. In an article published in Theatrum in 1994, Angela Baldassdarre remarks that, over the last few years, there has been a tremendous increase in the number of Canadian feature films based on theatrical pieces, which leads her to suggest that we are presently witnessing the birth of a new "stage-to-screen phenomenon" in Canada (Baldassdarre 18). Indeed, plays like Brad Fraser's Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love (1989; film by Denys Arcand as Love and Human Remains, 1993), Daniel MacIvor's House (1992; film by Laurie Lynd, 1995), Linda Griffiths's The Darling Family (1991; film by Alan Zweig, 1994), and Hillar Liitoja's The Last Supper (1993; film by Cynthia Roberts, 1994) have all recently been made into feature films. And movie versions of Fraser's musical Prom Night of the Living Dead (1991) and Marie Brassard and Robert Lepage's Polygraphe (1988) are apparently in preparation.
This renewed interest in drama on the part of Canadian filmmakers can be dated to 1992, when the considerable success of Jean Beaudin's adaptation of René-Daniel Dubois's Being at Home with Claude (1985) demonstrated the artistic and commercial potential of film-mediated drama. 1 Since Being at Home with Claude, Canadian cinema seems to have finally figured out the logic that has guided the transpositional practices of other national cinemas-- i.e. that a commercial hit on stage might very well translate into a hit on screen. Prior to Beaudin's film, however, the corpus of cinematized plays apparently lacked such logic. Most of the adapted plays were neither popular nor critical successes, and the films that they inspired generally did rather poorly with audiences. The question is thus: why were those plays adapted? In this article, I propose to trace a brief analytical history of the troubled union of theatre and film in this country from the 1940s to 1992, in an attempt to reveal the obscured coherence that unifies the corpus. This coherence rests not in the success of the works (or lack thereof) but in an intricate symmetry between the dialectical composition of the dramas, a tension at the core of the transpositional process, and a conflict often interpreted as a paradigm of Canadian/Québécois culture.
Before proceeding, it is important to set this issue in the context of television, which has more regularly looked to the stage for inspiration. Acknowledged master works such as Marcel Dubd's Au retour des oies blanches (1966), Françoise Loranger's Encore cinq minutes (1967), Michel Tremblay's Les Belles-soeurs (1968), David French's Leaving Home (1972), John Murrell's Waiting for the Parade (1977) and David Fennario's Balconville (1979) have all been turned into television shows rather than feature films (Benson 519-24, Miller). Distinguishing between TV versions and feature-film adaptations might appear superfluous since, one might suggest, the primary purpose of both types of adaptation is basically to bring drama to a wider audience. Given Canada's small movie market, one could contend that television broadcast simply provides a more convenient means of reaching people than cinema. However, this argument ignores the fact that television and the cinematic apparatus provide radically different viewing experiences.
While television spectatorship is essentially a discontinuous and domestic activity (except perhaps for the projection of televised sporting events in bars and arenas), which favours short attention span and cocooning, cinema remains a public event that involves the gathering of large groups of people and necessitates sustained attention throughout the duration of the screening. As such, cinema spectatorship is much closer to the experience of attending live theatre than watching a TV programme. Therefore, whereas feature-film adaptations can potentially recreate for the viewer circumstances akin to those associated with stage performances, and consequently can at least approximate the sense of theatrical "happening" of the original, television drama evacuates all sense of communal event and shatters the element of focused reception common to both theatre and cinema. Not surprisingly, critic Martin Knelman writes with his usual dose of irony:
Canadian playwrights have generally fared even worse on the screen than Canadian actors. Among those who might have expected to make a mark in films, but haven't, are John Murrell, David French, George F. Walker, Michel Tremblay, Sharon Pollock, Erika Ritter and Larry Fineberg. How many times have memorable evenings of Canadian theatre been turned into dead, well-meaning TV events? (Knelman 172-3)
That Canadian producers and directors have elected to concentrate on "dead" TV adaptations rather than film versions of plays cannot be fully explained by economic and demographic arguments, for smaller and less wealthy nations than Canada, such as Australia, have long recognized and exploited the cinematic potential of stage drama (Costello 62-63, 120-121, 152-153, 250-251, 290-291). One explanation for the "unique" Canadian predicament is that, since Canadian cinéastes have traditionally been influenced by documentary and auteurist practices, they are naturally drawn away from pre-existing texts, especially drama which imposes a rigid structure on the adaptor (Véronneau "Du théâtre au cinéma," 31). Of course, being an auteur does not necessarily preclude producing adaptations, as could be evidenced by numerous examples ranging from Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948, from Patrick Hamilton's play) to Robert Altman's Streamers (1983, from David Rabe's play). But the type of auteurism that has developed in Canada is different from the auteurism of Hitchcock, Altman and other comparable cinéastes. While filmmakers working within the American system express their auteurist vision by apposing their filmic signature on pre-existing scripts more or less adamantly imposed on them by an organized industry, Canadian auteurs, from Jean-Pierre Lefebvre and Micheline Lanctôt to Atom Egoyan and Mina Shum, have emerged from a tradition which lacks a solidly established industrial structure and favours, instead, personal projects generated by writers-cum-producers-cum-directors who manage to realize their films only through their unshakable determination and the benevolent condescension of Telefilm bureaucrats.
One could respond to this assertion by arguing that, given the endemic difficulties of getting film projects off the ground in Canada, independent cinéastes should be all the more attracted to popular play scripts which, having proven their potential on stage, might lure investors with the promise of a similar success on screen. This has indeed happened on a few occasions, as in the case of Richard Martin's 1974 version of Marcel Dubé's Les Beaux Dimanches (1965), to which I will return shortly. But by and large, successful Canadian and Québécois plays have not been brought to the big screen. This might result from the fact that the best plays of the repertoire, from Tremblay's A toi, pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou (1971) to Judith Thompson's Lion in the Streets (1990), adopt theatrical styles that do not translate very well into cinematic terms. But this hypothesis does not explain why dramatic pieces as "cinematic" as George F. Walker's "Power Plays," which explicitly borrow the codes and conventions of detective movies and film noir, have never been adapted.
I have argued elsewhere (André Loiselle 1995) that rather than the style of a play, it is its particular structure that determines its suitability for adaptation, a structure that must be understood in the light of a specific tension at the core of film-mediated drama. Adaptations of plays, by merging drama and film, combine two forms that essentially move in opposite directions; as André Bazin suggests, drama is centripetal while film is centrifugal (Bazin 104-107, Andrew 149). This fundamental distinction between drama, centring on a confined locus dramaticus closed off from the reality that it reproduces, and film, which can capture the wide vistas of actual landscapes, results, according to David Lodge, in drama seeming "ill-at-ease in the film medium, and most obviously so when it deserts the economical single setting for which it was originally designed, to take advantage of the freedom of location afforded by film. The two media seem to pull against each other" [emphasis added] (Lodge 86-87).
If, as Lodge suggests, film exerts an outward pull on centripetal drama when the two media are brought together, plays that reproduce this very tension should offer a germane structure for adaptation. In other words, the plays which correspond best to the demands of the hybrid medium that cinematized drama constitutes are those which present a dialectical composition that pits coercive, centripetal pressures against explosive, centrifugal forces. This hypothesis explains, at least in part, the composition of the corpus of Canadian film-mediated drama. In other countries, critical and/or popular success seems to determine which stage pieces are to be brought to the big screen. In Canada, where success is always at best improbable, the structural symmetry between the content of the plays and the diametric pull between film and theatre may motivate the cinéastes' decision to film certain dramas rather than others.
As will be shown below, the great majority of the plays that were adapted prior to 1992 revolve around characters who are torn between a desire to stay within a safe but confining, claustrophobic milieu and a wish to achieve greater freedom at the expense of security and human contacts. This structure, which is the one recurrent element that establishes a degree of coherence among the Canadian plays that have been cinematized since the 1940s, clearly parallels the antithetical pressures that drama and film exert on each other. Interestingly, this tension between claustrophobic safety (drama) and threatening freedom (film) recalls a defining feature of the Canadian imagination, which has been variously labelled "Wacousta syndrome" (McGregor), "pulsion d'agrippement" (Harel 257) and "garrison mentality" (Frye 225). These terms refer to the seemingly prototypical Canadian condition that Margaret Atwood described in her widely read Survival (1972):
Families in Canadian fiction huddle together like sheep in a storm or chickens in a coop: miserable and crowded, but unwilling to leave because the alternative is seen as cold empty space. I'd say that this pattern is as true, if not truer, in the literature of French Canada as it is in that of English Canada, though it is more likely there to be symbolized by blocked incestuous love [ ... ] The plight of English Canadian characters trapped by their family ties seems mild compared with that of the French Canadian ones: in Québec, it seems, you can't leave home at all, and if you do you'll want to go back, no matter how miserable home was when you actually lived there (Atwood 132, 226-7).
If there is any truth (and I think there is) to these speculations on the Canadian's tendency to seek refuge in a "garrison" from which she or he paradoxically wishes to escape, then the composition of the corpus of Canadian/Québécois film-mediated drama might find a cogent rationale in the parallel that exists between the dialectical structure of the works adapted, the diametric pull that drama and film exert on each other and this paradigmatic reading of Canadian/Québécois culture. The following history of film-mediated drama will bear witness to the validity of this rationale.
One of the best-known works in which this recursive symmetry can be found is Gratien Gélinas's adaptation of his own play, Tit-Coq (1948). Universally recognized as the first major work of the French-Canadian national dramaturgy, Tit-Coq focuses on an orphan soldier, Tit-Coq, who is torn between the desire to settle down with a nice woman and have a normal family, and the burden of having to live a life of lonely wandering because of the stigma attached to his "bastardly" origins. Wishing to fit in but constantly persecuted by oppressive societal forces epitomized by the Church, Tit-Coq eventually elects to leave his girlfriend and go on living his rootless and aimless, but free existence.
The predicament that afflicts Tit-Coq echoes a marked contrast between theatre and film that Bazin evocatively expressed in these terms:
"The Theatre," says Baudelaire, "is a crystal chandelier." If one were called upon to offer in comparison a symbol other than this artificial crystal-like object, brilliant, intricate, and circular, which refracts the light which plays around its center and holds us prisoners of its aureole, we might say of the cinema that it is the little flashlight of the usher, moving like an uncertain comet across the night of our waking dream, the diffuse space without shape or frontiers that surrounds the screen. [emphasis added] (Bazin 107)
Tit-Coq, like the theatre spectator, is attracted by the chandelier of the legitimate family unit, but is forced by 1940s French Canadian society to assume the role of the cinema usher, walking alone in the limitless and diffuse space of the great darkness. Similarly, as a film adaptation of a play, Tit-Coq incarnates the conflict between, on the one hand, a closed dramatic composition based on dialogue and embodied presence and, on the other hand, an open world of shadow and light based on motion and absence.
Whether or not Gélinas was aware of the parallel between his play and film-mediated drama is debatable. It is worth noting, however, that Tit-Coq was initially conceived, in fact, as a screenplay. This might explain, in part, Gélinas's awareness of the inherent conflict between film and theatre. Following a suggestion from film producer Paul L'Anglais to develop a full-fledged screenplay based on the 1946 revue sketch Le Retour du conscrit, Gélinas created the character of the orphan soldier Tit-Coq. After a few weeks of work, however, Gélinas decided to write a play on this subject rather than a film-script (Bonneville 107). The tremendous popular and critical success that the play enjoyed in the late 1940s and early 1950s, not only in Québec but across Canada, convinced L'Anglais and producer Alexandre De Sève of the cinematic potential of Tit-Coq. Thus, in the fall of 1952, Gélinas and co-director René Lacroix commenced work on "une adaptation quasi intégrale de la pièce â succès" (Tremblay-Daviault 246), and the film opened to rave reviews in February, 1953 (Véronneau Cinéma de l'epoque duplessiste, 117). One of the most enthusiastic responses to the film came from René Lévesque who declared, years before becoming Premier of Québec, that with the production of Tit-Coq "le cinéma canadien sort de l'âge des cavernes" (Cinéma de l'époque duplessiste, 120).
Ten years before creating his landmark film, Gélinas had made the short movie La Dame aux camélias, la vraie (1942), which is not only singled out by Ginette Major as the film that marks the inception of "Faventure du cinéma québécois de fiction" (13), but also represents the first attempt to use theatrical material as a source for a talking motion picture. 2 This parody of the well-known Dumas play, which criticizes the cultural hegemony that France exerts over Québec, was presented as part of Gélinas's famous annual theatre revue, "Les Fridolinades" in 1942.
Between La Dame aux camélias, la vraie and Tit-Coq, the marriage of theatre and cinema produced a few other memorable works that also display a structural tension between centripetal dramatic pull and centrifugal filmic drive. The first feature-length sound fiction film made in Québec, Jean-Marie Poitevin's A la croisée des chemins (1943), was adapted from Guy Stein's religious drama, La Folle Aventure, which had been staged in 1942 as part of the 300th anniversary of the foundation of Montréal. Not unlike in Tit-Coq, the centrifugal/centripetal dialectic in À la croisée des chemins centres on a young man who must choose between the stability and limitations of marriage or the "crazy adventure" of missionary life in China. The film being the work of a priest, the young man obviously decides on the latter. Although À la croisée des chemins was not distributed commercially, its edifying content made it a great favourite in the parallel network of seminarian ciné-clubs, church halls and school auditoria (Tremblay-Daviault, 89-101).
The most successful commercial feature film of the time, La petite Aurore, l'enfant martyre (1951) (Lever 107, 114), is also an adaptation of a play that deals with the opposition mentioned above. But in this work, the closed, centripetal milieu is even more oppressive than in Tit-Coq. Aurore, l'enfant martyre, an enormously popular melodrama written by Léon Petitjean and Henri Rollin and premiered in January of 1921, presents a dramatized version of the life and death of Aurore Gagnon, a ten year old child who died in 1920 following the grave physical abuse inflicted upon her by her father and step-mother (Le Blanc, 15-23, 51-66). In 1951, Alexandre De Sève asked Emile Asselin (a.k.a. Marc Forrez) to write a screenplay on the basis of both the play and the actual events, and hired Jean-Yves Bigras to direct the film. La petite Aurore l'enfant martyre opened to great popular success in April of 1952. It is the only film of that period that remained on the commercial circuit over the years, and actually had an international career. It was shown, apparently, even in Japan (Le Blanc 87-95).
Throughout the play, as in the film, little Aurore is constantly subjected to horrible tortures, and threats of worse punishment if she tries to talk to or seek refuge with other people. The strong melodramatic quality of the play and the film insured immediate and lasting success. 3 What is most significant for our purpose, however, is that as a drama La petite Aurore achieves its power through the strong sense of claustrophobia and entrapment that it creates. Not surprisingly, the film version remains quite "theatrical" in its depiction of Aurore's plight to retain the impression of sequestration. Significantly, the only moment of liberation that the girl enjoys-her confession to a priest-is a highly cinematic sequence with numerous dissolves and flashbacks. This scene allows both Aurore to break free, momentarily, from the oppression of her step-mother, and cinema to break free from theatre. But in this melodrama, the potentially liberating force of cinema loses the battle against the imprisoning character of theatre (see Bazin above), and poor Aurore is eventually killed.
Shortly after the release of La petite Aurore, and about a year before the premiere of another adaptation of a melodramatic play, Coeur de maman (1953), based on Henri Deyglun's La Mère abandonnée (1925), television came to Québec and gave the final blow to an industry that had already started to falter in spite of the local success of several productions (Clandfield 61). It would take ten years for Québécois cinéastes to take up fiction filmmaking again, and yet another decade to see the first instance of film-mediated drama. Never again, at least not until the 1990s, would theatre and cinema merge with such tremendous success as during that golden age of the "Canadien-français" film industry. But the centrifugal/centripetal structure would remain.
In English Canada, film-mediated drama never experienced such triumphs. The first Canadian play to be made into a motion picture was Hilda Mary Hooke Smith's Here Will I Nest (Turner 24). Although not nearly as influential as Tit-Coq, this play focuses also on the opposition between a centripetal desire for stability and a centrifugal resistance to entrapment. But as a dramatized celebration of the life of Colonel Thomas Talbot, who established a settlement in Western Ontario in the early nineteenth century, Here Will I Nest obviously champions the centripetal inclination. The play seems to have been a small local hit at the London (Ont.) Little Theatre, where it opened on 14 November, 1938. (Curtain Call). The film version of the play, also known as Talbot of Canada, was directed by Melburn E. Turner around 1940, and is most notable, according to Peter Morris, "as the first Canadian dramatic feature in colour" (Morris 187). It received a private screening in 1942 at the Elsie Perrin Williams Memorial Library, in London. A rhapsodic local reviewer announced at the time that "cultural history was made in London last night when the private premiere of the all-talking motion picture Here Will I Nest was presented" (F.B.T.). But this was the film's only moment of glory. Here Will I Nest was never released commercially, and only fifteen of the original ninety minutes of the movie have survived (Turner 24). For the next thirty years, Here Will I Nest would remain the only instance of an original English Canadian play made into a feature film.
The renaissance of Canadian and Québécois cinema, in the 1960s, coincided with the emergence of the notion of auteurship in filmmaking and the first TV versions of plays. This resulted in the complete disappearance of film-mediated drama during the 1960s. Only at the beginning of the 1970s were the first attempts made to adapt Canadian and Québécois plays for the cinema. The first feature film adapted from a Canadian play to be completed and released after 1960, in either English or French, was Fortune and Men's Eyes (1971), based on John Herbert's famous prison drama, and directed by Harvey Hart. By focusing on the conflict between oppressive imprisonment and the violently explosive behaviour that results from incarceration, Fortune and Men's Eyes clearly reproduces the centripetal/centrifulgal dialectic talked about earlier.
Ironically, the project to adapt Herbert's play was initiated by an American filmmaker, Jules Schwerin. Schwerin had acquired the screen rights to Herbert's Fortune and Men's Eyes (1967) after seeing its 1967 world premiere in New York. After having been turned down by most Hollywood studios, he finally secured the financial support of the American major Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Hofsess). Although the producers, Lester Persky and Lewis Allen, eventually fired Schwerin and hired Canadian filmmaker Hart to finish the project, the movie remained for many very much an example of "entertainment à l'américaine" (Gay). The fact that the premiere of the film, on 15 June 1971, was in New York, rather than in Toronto or Montréal, attests to the pertinence of this criticism (Turner 115-116).
Given the mitigating circumstances that surrounded the production and release of Fortune and Men's Eyes, the first post-1960 adaptation of a Canadian play that can unquestionably be called "genuinely Canadian" is William Fruet's version of his own play Wedding in White (film and play, 1972). Although the film features two foreign actors in leading roles, Donald Pleasence and Carol Kane, the content and production history of Wedding in White make it an unmistakenly Canadian work. The plot, based on Fruet's memories of his childhood in Alberta (Koller 45-46), is set during World War II and depicts a dismal English Canadian milieu, in which women are the silent victims of cowardly men who vainly imagine themselves as courageous British loyalists while finding refuge from the mediocrity and uselessness of their displaced existences in the drunken bravado of Legion halls. Unlike Fortune and Men's Eyes, Wedding in White had both its stage and screen premieres in Toronto: the former in February of 1972, and the latter in October of the same year. And also unlike Fortune and Men's Eyes, Wedding in White was filmed without the support of foreign investors (Turner 136).
Like the other plays treated here, the structure of Wedding in White revolves around a character situated at the threshold between remaining within or escaping. In this case, the character is a teenage girl, Jeannie, who is threatened with eviction by her father because of her dishonourable pregnancy. Her only other option is to marry Sandy, an alcoholic friend of her father's, twice her age. Wishing to escape her father's house but unable to confront the dark emptiness of the world out there, Jeannie agrees to wed Sandy and thus sentences herself to perpetual confinement in the prison of an unhappy marriage. The problematic marriage of theatre and film is perfectly suited to depict the tension that besets this ironic wedding in white. Not unlike La Petite Aurore, Fruet's film provides a few moments of cinematic escape from theatrical confinement. By showing Jeannie and her buxom friend Dolly in a dance hall, a restaurant and a grocery store- all scenes that are mentioned but not shown in the play- Fruet shows that there is a world outside of Jeannie's father's house. However, in all these exclusively cinematic scenes, Fruet always frames the shots so as to remind the viewer that Jeannie is ultimately trapped, not only by her miserable condition, but also by the pre-determined ending of the play (André Loiselle 1995, 296-315). So as in Aurore, theatre in Wedding in White wins the centripetal/centrifugal battle against cinema. Not surprisingly the last third of the film takes place exclusively in the father's house; cinema is as trapped as Jeannie in the situation imposed by theatre.
In one of the reviews that Fruet's film received when it came out at the end of 1972, Nat Shuster writes:
The trouble with Wedding in White is in its inability to get away from the conventions of the theatre where it found its original beginnings [ ... ] What Fruet has forgotten, in his effort to present a piece of realistic drama, is that the first rule of motion pictures is motion and action. Because of this oversight, the film remains, in spite of many good things, essentially a static record of a stage production nailed down to its immobile origins. Whereas a certain quality of the confined feeling, created by the proximity of the camera to its subject, works in achieving a mood of entrapment and hopelessness suffered by the heroine, Jeannie (Carol Kane), the continuing and unrelenting claustrophobia becomes, in the end, counter productive. (Shuster)
In this passage, Shuster makes several discerning observations on Wedding in White. He recognizes, for instance, that the film has difficulty escaping its theatrical roots and that an impression of confinement pervades the work. But whereas the critic perceives these aspects of the movie as flaws, I would argue that they represent a coherent cinematic extension of the dramatic structure discussed previously. The apparent contradiction at the core of Fruet's transposition of his play duplicates, indeed, the central centrifugal/centripetal conflict of the text which parallels both the tension inherent to the transposition of drama on film as well as the paradigmatic "Wacousta syndrome." The fact that Shuster acknowledges the film's unachieved demand for motion and emancipation from theatrical stasis suggests that the tension involved in the cinematization of the play is not merely an abstract notion, but a phenomenon readily perceivable in the make-up of the adaptation.
The first feature film to be adapted from a significant play following the release of Wedding in White, 4 and the first cinematization of a dramatic piece from Québec in over twenty years, displays a very similar tension. The film is Richard Martin's "big-budget" version of Marcel Dubé's Les Beaux Dimanches, starring such celebrated actors as Jean Duceppe of Mon Oncle Antoine (1971) fame and Denise Filiatrault, who had recently given a flamboyant performance in Andrd Brassard and Michel Tremblay's film Il était une fois dans I'Est (1973).5
The central character of the play is Hé1ène, the wife of Victor, a rich entrepreneur, who is bored with her husband's endless parties with his bourgeois friends. The climax of the drama occurs when she leaves Victor and his guests in the hope of finding happiness with another man. At the end of the play, however, she returns to her husband and the comfortable prison he has built for her. Exactly like Jeannie, Hé1ène wishes to escape a confining situation but lacks the courage to face the unknown world out there. And exactly like Fruet, Martin uses cinema to suggest possibilities of escape by showing the world outside the theatrical setting. But also like Fruet, Martin always reminds the viewer of the ultimate confinement of the characters by enclosing them within small spaces (for example, a small car in the middle of an open landscape) or by using objects (fences) to limit depth of field. Quite skilfully, Martin emphasizes the difficulties intrinsic to the marriage of drama and film to represent the troubled marriage of Hé1ène and Victor.
But perhaps because Martin, like Fruet, chose to emphasize the tension between drama and cinema rather than simply ignoring the theatrical origins of the text, the film was not well-received at all. Jean-Pierre Tadros, who had been a strong advocate of Martin's project in the early stages of production, expressing great confidence in the ability of the all-star cast to convey Dubé's meaning (Tadros "Sous la direction de Richard Martin"), had to concede that the final product was a failure. "The film is exceedingly uneven," he stated. "There are moments when the essence of the Dubé play comes to the fore [ . ] But these moments are few, and what is in between is a futile effort to render the play modem" (Tadros "Les Beaux Dimanches"). Similarly, Séquences reviewer Janick Beaulieu left the screening of "Les Beaux Dimanches (1974) avec l'impression d'un film peu réussi" (Beaulieu 1975, 30). All cinematic versions of Québécois plays produced between Les Beaux Dimanches and Being at Home With Claude would receive the same kind of negative responses.
Almost simultaneously with the production of Les Beaux Dimanches, John Palmer brought to the screen Martin Kinch's first play, Me? (1973). Palmer, co-founder with Kinch and Tom Hendry of the controversial Toronto Free Theatre, had already directed the play on stage in the spring of 1973. Me? focuses on a promising young writer named Terry, who is thwarted in his efforts to complete his latest novel by the sexual demands of his zestful mistress, his estranged wife who returns to reclaim him, and his gay friend who happens to be in love with him. No one who saw the premiere of the play missed the fact that Terry bore a strong resemblance to the playwright and that all the secondary characters had real-life counter-parts in Kinch's entourage (Lane 7). Perhaps because of this element of self-referentiality, the play raised a lot of interest among TFT regulars, and was described by Herbert Whittaker as "a startling success." What matters to us, however, is less the play's autobiographical quality than its reliance on the structure noted in the previous works. Here again, the drama revolves around a conflict between a desire for enclosure, manifested by Terry's attempt to isolate himself in his apartment to write his novel, and forces that challenge containment, personified by the mistress, the ex-wife and the gay friend who all seek to draw Terry away from his solipsistic existence. Terry's obsession with seclusion in a closed space clearly echoes Frye's garrison metaphor, which would suggest that Me? expresses a typically Canadian concern. Not surprisingly, Palmer and his cast and crew had the feeling that they were working on a film "that will really have some meaning for Canadian audiences" (McCaughna 1974). Unfortunately, only a handful of Canadians saw the final product when it had a single showing at the Stratford (Ont.) Film Festival in September, 1975 (Adilman). It failed to find a distributor. Me? (1974) has since been relegated to oblivion, from which it emerges from time to time for television broadcast.
Over the three years following the production of Les Beaux Dimanches and Me?, not a single Canadian or Québécois play of importance was made into a feature film. In 1977, the Canadian and Québécois film industries entered a period of crisis, resulting in great part from the CFDC's ill-conceived tax-shelter policy (Lever 313), which sold out the industry to sophomoric entrepreneurs. Two plays were adapted for the screen that same year: Carol Bolt's One Night Stand (1977), and Louise Roy and Louis Saia's Une amie d'enfance (1977). These two works, either as plays or as movies, bear witness to the creative exhaustion that afflicted the whole field of artistic production in Canada at the time. Carol Bolt once divulged that in One Night Stand "there is no issue." She wrote it "as a technical exercise, to see if [she] could write a play about nothing" (Lester 151). True enough, this thriller about a lonely woman, Daisy, who unwittingly picks up a murderer in a bar and ends up killing him in self-defence, lacks the political import of Bolt's earlier Buffalo Jump (1972), Gabe (1973) and Red Emma (1974). Yet in spite of its superficiality, One Night Stand still displays the recurrent centrifugal/centripetal tension identified above, as it focuses on Daisy's conflicting desires. On the one hand, she wishes to experience the dangers of the outside world by getting involved with a stranger, Rafe. But on the other hand, she insists on maintaining the safety of the closed space by bringing her date to her apartment.
In the film version (1978) cinéaste Allan King, who decided to adapt the play after seeing its first production at Tarragon Theatre (McCaughna 1978), stresses the dialectical opposition by associating the repressed Daisy with the locus dramaticus that her bachelor suite comprises and the psychotic Rafe with the cinematic external world. Throughout the film, Rafe's centrifugal impulse translates into frequent motions towards the purely cinematic spaces added by King (for example, a neighbour's apartment, a bar, downtown streets), while Daisy, even when she is positioned in public, open spaces, remains separated, withdrawn from the territory originated in the process of adaptation. She commands full authority over her surroundings only when the film submits to the narrow perimeter dictated by drama.
Although this approach to Bolt's text allows King to establish a subtle affinity between the play's structure and the process of film-mediation, the response to the movie was at best lukewarm. J. Hoberman from The Village Voice found the plot wanting in originality. He wrote: "en route to its predictable denouement, One Night Standoffers a few wan reversals." As for Janet Maslin of The New York Times, she dismissed King's film as "an unpleasant Canadian romance-cum-thriller." Such negative criticism might very well ensue from the fact that King, not unlike Martin and Fruet, introduces cinematic elements only to undercut them with the constant reminder that the statism of the pre-existing drama resists filmic movement.
Francis Mankiewicz's film version of Une amie d'enfance (1978) met with similar responses perhaps for the same reason since it too, rather than offering a complete cinematization of the original, emphasizes the parallel tensions of content and media. The play takes place in the backyard of a middleclass home in Duvernay, a dormitory town near Montréal, where Angèle and Gaston entertain Angèle's childhood friend Solange and her boyfriend Coco at dinner. The gathering is a pretext for Louise Roy and Louis Saia to expose the campiness, the "kétainerie" of suburbia. By juxtaposing the universe of plastic palm trees and the artificial standard French of Angèle and Gaston to Solange's and Coco's happy Bohemian life-style, the authors caustically denounce the narrow-mindedness and comfortable hypocrisy of the middle-class. In his adaptation, Mankiewicz limits his cinematic additions to a strict minimum so as to magnify the confining pressures that the middle-class setting exerts on the unruly guests. Unfortunately, Mankiewicz's effort was deemed a failure. Janick Beaulieu even suggested, sarcastically, "on pourrait passer le film tel quel à la radio!" (Beaulieu 1979).
Two other adaptations from Francophone Canada made shortly after Une amie d'enfance adopt the same strategy and were similarly dismissed. Yves Simoneau's 1979 rendition of Michel Garneau's Les Cé1ébrations (1976), shot for $20,000,6 retains the play's structure as a collection of vignettes from the life of Margo, a psychologist, and her long-time partner Paultmile, a professor of philosophy obsessed with death. Most of the film takes place in the couple's house, with the exception of a very few scenes in which Margo expresses and actually fulfils her desire to escape their relationship, albeit temporarily. As in Les Beaux Dimanches, the troubled marriage of two individuals is paralleled by the troubled marriage of theatre and film. But although, once again, the filmmaker's emphasis on the tension between the theatrical locus dramaticus and cinematic open space skilfully echoes the conflict between the characters, the film received rather tepid reviews when it opened in Montréal in June 1979. For Robert-Claude Bérubé, "ce portrait d'un couple dans le vent, faux intellectuels à l'affût des tendances à la vogue, n'apporte guère que du bruit sur du vide."
Paul Blouin's 1981 film of Antonine Maillet's Gapi (1976) is yet another example of the same predicament. A spin-off from Maillet's tremendously successful one-woman play La Sagouine (1971), Gapi shows the solitary life of La Sagouine's husband. After his wife's death, Gapi has become a recluse, living alone on a dune, keeping a lighthouse on the coast of Acadia. One day, his old friend, Sullivan, the globe-trotting sailor, drops by for a visit. Gapi would like his friend to stay with him, and Sullivan would like to bring Gapi along on his trips around the world. But Gapi cannot leave his lighthouse any more than Sullivan can relinquish the sea. Blouin, like the other filmmakers mentioned here, chooses not to overlook the original statism of the play, and uses it instead to accentuate the dilemma that Gapi is facing: movement versus stasis. Again the tension between the media is in perfect symmetry with the dialectical structure of the drama. This film was, like the others, received negatively. L. Klady's comment on the movie's screening at the 1982 Festival des Films du Monde is telling: "the inclusion of the film in Montréal's competition section is puzzling for even the partisan audience found the stagebound offering uncompelling." Klady fails to see that the film is as stagebound as Gapi is dune-bound.
The few other films based on plays that were produced before 1992 all display a similar connection between form and content, as they use the film/drama opposition to show characters torn between stasis in closed quarters and movement in open space.7 Described by Reg Skene as a "cartoonlike political allegory" about "Free Trade anxiety," Kelly Rebar's Bordertown Café (1987), adapted by Norma Bailey in 1991, examines the predicament of a young man, Jimmy, who must choose between staying with his mother in their small Alberta café, or following his teamster father to the U.S. As in the other films, the opposition between staying and leaving is translated in Bailey's version by a strong emphasis on the dichotomy between the claustrophobic café and the wide territory covered by the truck-driving dad and the camera. Yet again, the film was criticized for being little more than a "potted TV drama" (Godwin).
Vic Sarin's 1989 film version of Jim Garrard's Cold Comfort (1981) deals in the same fashion with the same issue. Perceived as either "a fascinating exercise in bizarre naturalism" (Rubin 9), or a "Gothic horror tale" (Weatherbe), Cold Comfort relates the story of a travelling salesman who falls prey to a deranged tow-truck driver and his backward teenage daughter. Throughout the play and the film, the travelling salesman tries to convince the daughter to leave with him, but she is reluctant to break free from her oppressive father. At the end of the play, father and daughter leave their home permanently, abandoning the salesman chained to a pipe inside the house. Although Cold Comfort, the movie, was something of a sleeper at the 1989 Festival of Festivals in Toronto, the critics were not impressed by Sarin's effort. Most revealing is Martin Girard's remark that, even if Sarin shows several shots of landscapes, "le film souffre de n'être au fond qu'une adaptation d'un texte écrit pour la scène." Again, by having the insight to capitalize on the mediatic conflict to mirror the characters' drama, the filmmaker only exposed himself to the recurrent criticism of being too theatrical.
This trail of negative critical response to film-mediated drama was finally disrupted in 1992 with the release of Beaudin's adaptation of Dubois's Being at Home with Claude, which consists in a long interrogation by a police inspector who tries to extract an explanation from a young homosexual prostitute who has confessed to killing his lover, but refuses to say why. Beaudin's film was the first widely acclaimed cinematic treatment of a play since the relative success of Wedding in Whitein 1972. For instance, Séquences critics Janick Beaulieu and Léo Bonneville both voted Being at Home with Claude one of the ten best movies of 1992, alongside such international hits as James Ivory's Howards End (1992) and Billy August's The Best Intentions (1992) ("Dix meilleurs films de 1992").
Released exactly fifty years after Here Will I Nest and La Dame aux camélias, la vraie, Beaudin's version of Being at Home with Claude might very well mark a turning point in the history of Canadian and Québécois film-mediated drama, as it puts much more emphasis on trendy cinematic techniques than on the recursive symmetry found in the previous films. With Being at Home with Claude, we might have entered a period in our cinema when, as elsewhere in the world, adaptations of plays will become a common practice in which efforts will be made to erase the tension between the two media so as to please critics and public alike. Ironically, one critic actually saw Beaudin's use of sexy music-video aesthetics in "coïncidence avec le goût du jour," as one of the film's main flaws (Marie-Claude Loiselle). It is to be hoped that those contemporary filmmakers who have recently rediscovered drama will not reject entirely the "logic" of the preceding corpus, and manage to find a balance between meeting the demands of the audience and acknowledging the rich potential offered by the difficult marriage of theatre and film.8
NOTES
1. I use the term "film-mediated drama" to account for the fact that even though many of the
adaptations realized in Canada do not effect significant changes on the original, the minimal
transformations that result from the very passage of the work from one medium to the other
has an impact on the meaning of the final product.
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2. Here, I stipulate "talking" motion picture, because certain sources suggest that as early as
1907, French Canadian dramatist Julien Daoust combined theatre and silent film for the
production of his stage play La Fin du monde (Lacasse 58).
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3. For an analysis of the sado-masochistic structure of the film, and its relation to the collective
unconscious prevalent in Québec during the Duplessist "grande noirceur," see Tremblay-Daviault (222-4).
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4. For reasons of space, I must omit a small film that was made immediately after Wedding in
White, Jack Cunningham's version of his own drama See No Evil, Hear ... (1972), entitled Peep
(1973), which remained on the shelves until 1984, when it was shown in a French translation
on Radio-Canada television. For the same reason, I must also omit other obscure, unpublished
plays that were made into equally obscure films: Stephen Zoller's Metal Messiah (1975; film by
Tibor Takacs, 1978); Maynard Collins's Hank Williams: "The Show He Never Gave" (1979;
film by David Acomba, 1981), John Beckett Wimbs's Memoirs of Johnny Daze (?; film by
Bachar Shbib as Memoirs, 1984); Peter Colley's The Mark of Cain (1984; film by Bruce
Pittman, 1985); and Layne Coleman's Blue City Slammers (1985; film by Peter Shatalow,
1987). (André Loiselle 1995, 48-9)
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5. I purposefully exclude from this survey Brassard's Il était une fois dans l'Est, which borrows
much material from Tremblay's dramaturgy without transposing systematically any of his
original texts onto the screen. (André Loiselle 1992)
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6. Information provided in a personal letter from Yves Simoneau, 24 June, 1991.
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7. 1 purposefully omit Tom Shandel's Walls (1984), written by Christian Bruyere who also wrote
a play by the same title (1978). There are so many discrepancies between the stage-play and
the screenplay that the two works should be considered as two completely distinct fictional
versions of the same factual material. Significantly, the opening credits of the film do not refer
to the play at all, indicating only that the film is based upon real events and that Bruyere wrote
the screenplay.
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8. The author wishes to acknowledge the valuable help of Dr. Sheila Petty, University of Regina,
Professor Jerry Wasserman, Dr. Brian McIlroy and Dr. Alain-Michel Rocheleau, University of
British Columbia.
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