Obviously, extending the film into a three- or four-hour stint on architecture would ask an awful lot of one's audience (then again, I thought that nine hours was an inappropriate stretch of time for Peter Jackson to devote to the complex subject of geothermal jewellery disposal, but both the critics and the box office seemed to disagree). I have no objection to abridging or overhauling a plot for the sake of preserving the "essence" or whatever of a text (in fact there's a far more severe cut of the film that is at least as faithful), but Rand and Vidor have opted for a rushed summary rather than a balanced trade of information, length, and pace, preserving instead only the “gist” of the novel. This hastiness is evident from the first ninety seconds of dialogue, which skims over half as many pages and concludes with a suggestion of further omissions:
I admired the book most for its structural ingenuity – each character and action being crafted in a way that best articulates the story’s philosophy – but a film calls for a different structure that Vidor does not deliver. This unwillingness to fit content to form runs contrary to Howard Roark’s many spiels about the importance of artistic integrity and that “what can be done with one substance must never be done with another”. However, some of you essayists looking at “cinematic writing” may justifiably disagree, and say that the film completes what the novel compromises.
Certainly, many of the cinematic cues in the novel were transferred beautifully to the film through lighting, costume, and other mise en scènery; but it was The Fountainhead’s characters that posed an interesting challenge. The novel had this interesting (at first, then annoying) habit of describing the volumes of information communicated by facial expressions and stances. The film version puts these countless Romantic elevations of what can be perceived in seemingly banal gestures to the test, and as it turns out, Roark’s gaze does not “ma[k]e people feel as if they did not exist” (p9); nor does Toohey's smile “[mock] himself and his boss, but with a delicate sense of balance, sixty percent of the mockery directed at himself” (p344).
Gary Cooper, not quite convincing me that I don't exist.
I do not mean to deride the cast’s talent (since gestures of existential impugnment or just-asymmetrical mockery are pretty demanding directions for any actor), but the notion that the body is transparent of the ego. Of “the style of the soul”, Rand tells us that “years of studying a man won’t show it to you. His face will. You’d have to write volumes to describe a person. Think of his face. You need nothing else” (p229). And yet Vidor et al fail to uphold this when verbal descriptions of faces are substituted by the faces themselves. Hence, if I were to judge the medium by this film alone, I’d say that cinema is better suited to Realism than Romanticism.
This is what I meant when I initially said that much of The Fountainhead’s potential for sublimity lies in its extremities: the written word, which obeys no laws of temporality, is permitted all the elaboration of detail and spitshine of the doors of perception that it wants. Tedious but transcendent guys like Melville and Milton were expert in amplifying banality into sublimity in this way. Achieving the same effect cinematically requires patience in storytelling, allowing the details time to breathe and develop – usually at the expense of their number. To wit: a Romantic film must have more zoom and less pan.
Oh well, let’s just see how the adaptation of Rand’s 'titanic' magnum opus turns out.
"The novel had this interesting (at first, then annoying) habit of describing the volumes of information communicated by facial expressions and stances."
I totally agree. Imagine if we all had Rand's powers of perception to discern egos in faces...the casual house party full of near-strangers would be a much more emotionally draining affair.
alix
June 8, 2009 at 4:07 AM