Does the image have the last word?

WITH the titles of 19th century novels blazoned across every cinema foyer this autumn, we could be forgiven for thinking that…

WITH the titles of 19th century novels blazoned across every cinema foyer this autumn, we could be forgiven for thinking that going to the pictures has become a good opportunity to catch up on some reading. While there is nothing new about the adaptation of literature for the screen, the present glut prompts speculation about the strange death of the original screenplay.

Following Emma, Jane Eyre, The Wind in the Willows and Jude, film audiences are promised Portrait of a Lady, Lolita, Moll Flanders, Nostromo, Cry the Beloved Country, The English Patient and The Butcher Boy in the next few months.

The 10th Foyle Film Festival in Derry, which ran for nine days and ended last Saturday, took as its theme the relationship between literature and film, which it explored through a varied and broad ranging programme, with screenings of classics such as Gone With the Wind and The Big Sleep, as well as the recent batch of literary adaptations. The festival's opening film was the premiere of Jane Campion's adaptation of Henry James's masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady, which will be reviewed here when it goes on general release. In addition, there was a chance for Derry audiences to see recent Irish films, including Sue Clayton's The Disappearance of Finbar, Brendan Burke's Fishing the Sloe black River and John T. Davis's The Uncle Jack.

An imaginative educational programme offered screenings of Shakespeare adaptations, with discussions and workshops as well as workpacks for teachers, examining the process of transformation from play or novel to screen. Bernard McLaverty gave an entertaining presentation about the differences between writing for the page, radio, TV and cinema, using excerpts from Lamb and Cal to illustrate the "things you can show visually that you can't convey on paper."

READ MORE

An audience of school students was particularly thrilled to have Julie Christie answer their questions about the role of Gertrude, which she plays in Kenneth Branagh's new four hour, 70 mm version of Hamlet, of which a promotional clip was screened. Set in the late 19th century, with lavish sets and an emphasis on spectacle, it features an international cast including Derek Jacobi, Kate Winslet, Gerard Depardieu and Branagh himself as the troubled prince, and goes on release in January.

THE Foyle Film Festival is distinguished by its policy of low admission prices, encourages young people, in particular, to attend screenings, while admission to the workshops and lectures is free. Taking place in the Orchard and Strand cinemas, the festival is a small scale event with the atmosphere of a film club, orientated towards serving the local audience as well as possible, rather than establishing itself on the international festival circuit and functioning as a market place where producers and film makers can make contacts. And, in this city, with its political and social divisions, where there is little visible activity after dark and few alternatives to the pubs, it is an admirable endeavour, which receives support from local business interests and sponsors, as well as funding from the Northern Irish Arts Council.

Attendance at this year's festival was up by 50 per cent to 9,632, which the festival director Shona McCarthy attributes to the strength of the programme, with its "populist edge", and better distribution of advance publicity material. "Derry is so small," she says, "that it is quite easy to find out what people here want to see. You just have to go around the bars and restaurants and chat to them. There is no arthouse cinema in Derry, no venue for showing non mainstream film, so you owe it to the community to give them a chance to catch up on what's being shown elsewhere.

While the presence of Julie Christie and the star of Jude, Chris Eccleston, brought a touch of glamour to the proceedings, it was the forum on Saturday that attracted the most interest. A team of screenwriters and producers, chaired by Margo Harkin, gathered to discuss whether Irish cinema is too dependent on literature for its inspiration, a question which the panellists threw out to the floor after a few brief introductory words.

Roddy Doyle described cinema and literature as "two ways of telling stories", refusing to "get bogged down in the notion that great literature doesn't make great film". Referring to his development of the character of Paula from his TV drama, Family, into novel form in The Woman who Walked Into Doors, he said that "the camera is a witness on the screen, but in writing you get into the character. I wrote the book because I felt that there was so much more that Paula could tell the screenplay wouldn't have allowed me to go so deeply into her character.

For novelist and screenwriter Ronan Bennet, the screenplay is "a pared down medium", which can never convey the complexity of a book. All you can do is pick an aspect of the book and develop that." Robert Cooper, the Head of Drama at BBC Northern Ireland, emphasised the importance of the telling of stories, which are "basic to the human condition". "While film is a collaborative process, the most fundamental part of the process is the writer - and the most underrated." He also emphasised the difficulty of writing well for the screen, and the need for narratives to appeal to a wide, often international, audience.

Robert Cooper's reference to the lack of rigour and coherence in the scripts of recent Irish films confirmed the impression given by the previous day's screenings of new Irish short films, which, like the Short Cuts programme, highlight the need for more training for young film makers in the craft of scriptwriting.

LEHA Doolan, Chair of the Irish Film Board, was reluctant to generalise a bout the standard of screenwriting, saying that the quality of writing and directing was variable, but that there was an excess of dialogue in recent Irish films. The important reminder that film is a visual medium came belatedly from the audience, raising the question of whether Irish writers for the screen are sufficiently visually aware. "This is not just a question of presenting beautiful pictures," Robert Cooper said. "The screenplay has to offer the possibility of strong emotional images."

While some novels are arguably unfilmable (Jane Eyre, with its extended interior monologues, comes to mind) the challenge for those adapting novels and short stories for the screen is not to strive for a literal fidelity to the text, which can only be restricting and lead to reliance on the voice over (as in Scorsese's static version of The Age of Innocence), but to use the language of film to find visual analogues for the writer's verbal imagery and metaphors. In the end, as the cultural critic Jacques Derrida says, "the image has the last word."