At a recent book sharing meeting in the Republic of China, when Teacher Kong Yalei and Wu Qi, editor-in-chief of Single Reading, talked about the relationship between literature and film, Teacher Kong ruthlessly pointed out that one of the major symbols of excellent literary works is that it is difficult to be adapted into movies.
Visconti filmed Lampeducse's novel "Leopard", the most famous thing in the film history is the 50-minute dance scene in it, which is actually the weakest part of the original novel. But through Visconti's audiovisual language, this passage is reborn in a form of imagery that is enduring in its magnificence. It seems that the poor text makes the image rejuvenate because the literary retreat of the text makes the director's creation grow into a space for re-imagination.
Through the example of "Leopard", Teacher Kong fiercely pits film and literature: a good film adaptation must be because the text is poor, and a good text into a movie must be a bad movie. Regardless of whether this absolute statement is necessary or not, the adaptation attempt of "Out to Steal Horses" was in his words.
Stills from the movie "Out and Steal a Horse"
So what exactly can't good literature be adapted for? It is the ability of the written word as a language to be narrated in any other way, as Tarkovsky exerts, the characteristics of the image as a language that cannot be presented in any other way. The respective characteristics of the media determine their irreplaceability. Good directors understand this, and they work deeply and even expand on the medium character of images; good writers validate this with intuitive, life-experience writing, such as Pelle Patterson's "Out and Steal a Horse."
In the face of a strong and irresistible sense of literature, the director has two choices: one is to follow it realistically, and the other is to build his own sense of literature as a creator. The latter requires digestion of the original text before the output of self-experience, the former is easy to fall into the middle of the river of feelings, completely swayed by the literary sense saturated by the novel, so the re-imaginary space of the image is squeezed to the end - the movie "Out to Steal a Horse" fails here.
Born in 1952, Per Petterson really started writing full-time at the age of thirty-five. Most of his works are based on ordinary small people, focusing on the loneliness of people or the departure of juvenile friendship. "Out and Steal a Horse" is Patterson's masterpiece. In 2007, it was with this novel that the middle-aged writer, who was silent and unknown in the European and American literary circles, defeated nobel laureate J.M Coetzee, three-time Booker Literature Prize winner Russie and Julian Enbas, pulitzer prize winner Cork McCarthy, and won the international IMPAC Dublin Literature Prize, shocking four. Reading Norse literature today, Patterson is a writer who can't get around.
Patterson
In 2019, Norwegian film director Hans Petter Moland, who was nominated for best picture at the Berlin Golden Bear three times, adapted Patterson's masterpiece and won the Berlin Silver Bear's Outstanding Artistic Achievement Award. As an exhibited film at this year's EU Film Festival, "Going Out to Steal a Horse" has entered the big screen of 7 cities in China. This time the Norwegian filmmaker changed to a Norwegian writer, and the unique warmth and cold atmosphere of Northern Europe is probably the only thing that is accurately preserved by the film.
A fifteen-year-old boy followed his father into the forest for the summer, where they logged, bathed, and stole other people's horses with friends. During this time, the boy discovers a secret affair between his father and his friend's mother, who is also the object of the boy's ignorant lust. At the end of the summer, the boy returned to the city, and the father who promised to return home afterwards never returned, and summer was their last face. Fifty years later, the old boy returned to the forest to live alone, remembered the past, and realized that these fifty years of life had actually changed since that summer.
Of course, the source of change is far from a matter of lust. The novel presents the many scars of life - manslaughter, betrayal, jealousy, depression, World War II... But the past has been regurgitated for fifty years, and when it is told by Patterson's words, it has become a lightness. From the comparison between novels and movies, it is not difficult to see that literature has more advantages in dealing with such a reconciliation of the past.
The film begins with a cool view of the Norwegian forest. The old man who lived alone stood in front of the wooden house, wrinkled and tired, and the snow was flying. He walked forward, peeing, and looking at the dead leaves on the side, and the picture suddenly cut to the extremely warm summer, and the same scenery and composition were replaced by green young leaves, and then quickly returned to winter. The picture only flashed for a moment, and we began to imagine the summer in his memory.
Flashbacks are the most convenient way for a movie to intervene in memories, as the film repeats. It is sharp and direct enough, but it also cuts out the most ambiguous psychological consciousness in literary descriptions, leaving only cold character information.
The old man then went back to the house, changed clothes, washed, went to bed, and was awakened by the sound of neighbors looking for dogs in the middle of the night. Then the two talk in the snow, and this conversation brings out the old man's important interpersonal connections about that summer fifty years ago. Everything is honest and presents the facts written in the novel in the most effective way according to the original context. The above content, the film took two minutes, the novel spent more than ten pages. The corresponding information can be found from these two minutes of images, which is only about two pages.
When showing the old man living alone, there is a narration that sounds:
In less than two months, the millennium will be over. There would be fireworks parties in the village, but I wouldn't go on a fight. I'm going to stay at home, drink heavily at the bottle, and when the record is finished, I'll go to bed and it's dark.
The corresponding original text of the novel is as follows:
In less than two months, the millennium will be over. There would be fireworks parties in the village, but I wouldn't go on a fight. I'm going to stay at home with Lyra, maybe I'm going to go down the lake and see if the ice can handle my weight. I guess there would be minus ten degrees Celsius and moonlight, and then I'd make a fire and put a record on that old record player so that Billie Halledai's voice would be almost whispering, just as I had listened to her sing in the Oslo Cinema in the 1950s, and I would stand by the cupboard and drink heavily at the bottle. When the record was finished, I went to bed and it was dark. Waking up to a brand new millennium and not taking it seriously at all. That's what I want.
Movies can only choose facts, choose actions, choose objects and scenes. In the face of "waking up to a new millennium and not taking it seriously at all", the conventional cinematic language is incompetent, let alone to present the sense of great history that is lightly embedded in this passage. It's literary. Although history is grand, "I" have always been in it by some kind of obsession. Just like when the old man lived alone to cut wood, the news and advertisements kept telling him how automatic the tools had been updated, but he still used the methods taught by his father, working primitively, trying to understand his father's choices in the same way fifty years later.
"Out and Steal a Horse"
The old man met, flashed back to the past, and returned to the present, and every character did not fall. The director eagerly and faithfully confessed the information. The fatal thing about the whole movie is that the film does not make an authorial deletion or selection of the content of the novel, and the plot and characters on this basis are more or less vain. For example, the interpolation of the father who helped people smuggle to Sweden at the end of World War II, the account of the friend's manslaughter of his brother, the impatient roar of the boy to passers-by when he went to get money... Therefore, those secret past events that have been digested in the heart only appear in the movie as the original appearance that has not been digested in time.
So we only see the characters in action, we see the most direct anger, sadness, and loss of the characters— all the emotions are clear to an almost monotonous degree, and we don't see the acceptance and fermentation of these fierce emotions by words. However, this is the most memorable taste of the text of "Out and Steal a Horse".
In the story, the father said that he would come back, but in fact he made a decision to betray. The boy went to the station every day to wait until he was sure that his father would not return. At this time, he looked back on his mood and felt that "all the houses and buildings are grayer than the original... I had no eyes, no ears, and finally nothing could be heard or seen. So I stopped and didn't go. One day not to go, two days not to go, three days not to go. It was as if a curtain had descended, almost as if it had been reborn. Different colors. The smell is different. It feels different to see things. It's not just the difference between cold and heat, between light and dark, between purple and gray, but my feelings of fear and happiness are different. ”
He knew it was a big change, but there was no criticism of the past. His words affirm the richness contained in this change, without intensity or pain. Everything just changed.
The novel has a lot of precise metaphors, each of which is the product of the fermentation of the strong heart of the teenager. Such language blunts all direct pain and makes image adaptation extremely difficult, because images are a weapon for expressing sharp emotions. You can shoot a boy yelling or sobbing into the camera, but it's hard to visualize the boy's disappointed expectations, the kind of expansive mood he felt when he looked back fifty years later.
For example, in the end, my father wrote a letter thanking him for the time he had spent with everyone, but said that he would not come back. The boy knew that his father was going to live with another woman, and knew that he might always have to grow a seed of doubtful happiness and affection in his heart. The father kept some money in the bank for him and his mother to withdraw.
On the way to the bank to withdraw money, he looked out the car window at the river outside, probably remembering that he often helped his father work in the river in the summer, remembering the lust of ignorance by the river, remembering to rush into the rain with his father to take a bath, and remembering to learn to balance on the driftwood floating in the river like flying. Remembering everything about the river.
"I'm very close to the water, very close to the rushing water. We are now heading north, and the cities along the river to the south are as wide and wide as all the great rivers. ”
If it is not an adaptation, there are many directors in the history of film that have achieved a vast presentation of the once strong heart, and Hou Xiaoxian's "Love wind and dust" is an excellent example. In the story, the boy who returned home from military service found that his first love was married to the postman who had delivered the letter to his first love. In the final scene of the movie, he crouches in the ground and watches the old man weigh the potatoes in his hand, and the past rises and falls, and finally he can only sigh that the potatoes are ripe again. Then the camera turns to the distant mountains and water, and the past affection is filtered through.
From Pelle Patterson's writing, we see his very fluid acceptance of the reality of life: man is an attempt, a process, a constant demand on the inside, a distant possibility.
In the novel "Going Out to Steal Horses", there is a repeat sentence: Whether it hurts or not, we can decide for ourselves. The director approaches this lightness and forbearance, but he takes the wrong strategy: since he chooses a very literary text- a gentle, still-water psychological backtracking, the film tries to construct a fragmented time and space based on the turn of events and drama. This is the most contradictory point between literature and film, and it is also the most regrettable point of the "Out and Steal a Horse" movie.