邵崇忠on Dickens and Film

邵崇忠

Dickens and Film

Joss Marsh argues that film inherited its mass audience, its social function, its plots, and its techniques of narration from fiction; and it inherited more from Charles Dickens than it did from any other Victorian writer. In filming Dickens, film returned to its origins in Victorian spectacle: in Dickens one could find such imaginative entrammelment in the panorama or the magic lantern; in Dickens one could find such dreams of time travel and materialization so sugggestive for the film image; in Dickens one could find a more striking affinity between its mode of narration and film’s developed techinques of story-telling than in any other author.

This is no exaggeration. In history more films have been made of works by Dickens than of any other author’s. Marsh lists some reasons for Dickens’s popularity in the cinema:

First, Dickens’s fiction is full of childhood appeal. Directors like Thomas Bentley were fans of Dickens since childhood. Their fascination led to their discovery of his cinematic quality of his fiction.

Second, it was familiar to the audience because it had been frequently adapted onto the stage. For instance, David Lean was inspired by the 1939 stage adaptation of Great Expectations. Then Great Expectations (1946) was a rarity among screen adaptations in satisfying both literary purists and the mass audience; Oliver Twist (1948) was a more controversial masterpiece. And the two films’ aesthetic success has a great deal to do with the director Lean’s respect for the inherently cinematic qualities of Dickens’s texts.

Third, its mythic characters seem larger than the stories that contain them. A perfect example: Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities offered obvious possibilities for a handsome matinee-idol, and the story was a template for every Hollywood history-drama in which a single man’s love “challenged the flames of revolution!” from Gone with the Wind to Dr. Zhivago.

Besides influencing British and American directors like Chaplin, Lean, Griffith, and Hitchcock, Dickens also conquered the Soviet director and author Eisenstein who pronouned Dickens “the father of fathers” of cinema.