The literary canvas

Hollywood has always been hunting for bookshelves. Now Norwegian filmmakers are coming. The latest shrimp act has a movie premiere on Friday 29. August, and was also the opening film at the Haugesund Film Festival last week.

Producer Synnøve Hørsdal gave a speech to those present, and pointed out, among other things, that it has taken a long time to turn a book into a film. Doing such work is demanding. The friendship between the two main characters, which is central to Ingvar Ambjørnsen's literary universe, has been emphasized in the adaptation. Hørdal thus puts his finger on the challenge by filming books – namely that film has a more defined "to the point" action, while the novel gives greater room for complexity and nuance. But is the book necessarily better than the movie for that reason?

Different about insanity

Director Eva Isaksen has taken on the demanding task of creating vivid images from Karin Fossum's book De gales hus.
– I have a number of friends who have been admitted to a psychiatric clinic, and am therefore very interested in this topic, says Isaksen to Ny Tid.
– One goal has been to show that the mentally ill are also individuals with their own dreams, thoughts and reflections. I wanted to avoid the typical "There are holes in the fence at Gaustad" approach, she continues.

Isaac has previously made several well-known books for film, with varying degrees of success. These include, among others, Death on Oslo S, Homo Falsus (filmed as The Perfect Murder), Mors Elling and a number of Fossum's crime stories for television.
– I like to adapt crime stories, she states.

- It is usually an exciting and straightforward genre to adapt. The House of the Mad is perhaps the most demanding adaptation I have made, and it was also a struggle for the screenwriter to find a proper way to present it to the film medium. The focus is mostly on the characters, and not so much on the external circumstances. But I hope that we have succeeded, says Isaksen about the drama which has its cinema premiere on 12 September.

In the autumn, several Norwegian adaptations will also be released in cinema. Both Jostein Gaarders In A Mirror, In A Puzzle and Lars Ramlies Fatso, as well as Erlend Lo's children's book Kurt becomes cruel, which interestingly is an animated film, high expectations are attached. The Varg Veum movie The Woman in the Refrigerator, based on Gunnar Staalesen's book, comes straight on DVD in mid-September.

From Frankenstein to Forrest Gump

Associate professor and author Arne Engelstad has thoroughly studied the adaptation phenomenon, and has written two books on the subject; The Seductive Movie and From Book to Movie. About adaptations of literary texts.
– Ever since the feature film's childhood, films have allied themselves with literature, for several reasons, he says to Ny Tid.
– In the very first decades, the alliance could probably give some welcome status to a new art form that for a long time struggled with a stamp of superficial entertainment.

The big amusement park is descriptively called a book about Norwegian film history from the 1960s. It is written by Sigurd Evensmo, who was also the author of the filmed success novel Englandsfarere (1945) and also editor of Ny Tids forløper Orientering.

Hollywood was early on in dealing with literature. As early as 1910 came an adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Literary adaptations make up a large part of the films that have received the Oscar for best film over the years. This year's big Oscar winner, No Country for Old Men, is in a long tradition of film adaptations based on best-selling novels. Nothing new from the western front (1930), The mutiny on Bounty (1935), Taken by the wind (1939), Around the world in 80 days (1956), The bridge over Kwai (1957), The godfather 2 (1974), The cuckoo's nest (1975), The night warmer (1991), Forrest Gump (1994) and The English Patient (1996) are all well-known books, but even more well-known films.

In this country, the adaptations began in earnest in the 1920s with successful film adaptations of Hamsun's books. As early as 1916, however, the Swedish director Victor Sjöström made a film of Ibsen's epic poem Terje Vigen (which is still one of the few good
Ibsen adaptations).

New lighting of old material

- In recent times we see an almost explosive interest in Norway to make films based on best-selling contemporary novels by, for example, Loe and Renberg, Ragde and Lindell, Ambjørnsen and Gaarder – and soon hopefully Per Petterson and Gert Nygaardshaug, Engelstad adds.

The film scientist, who teaches at Vestfold University College on a daily basis, believes that there are three important reasons why it is tempting filmmakers to adapt.
First and foremost, it's the bestseller effect.
– Adapting a novel that has already proven that it has a captivating story, and which a good number of people have at least heard of or connected with, gives a certain security to an expensive and risky film production, says Engelstad.

Moreover, there is a desire to say something new about a classic literary work, see it in the light of the filmmaker's contemporaries. For example, Emma Thompson wrote the script based on Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice in the mid – 1990s, and stated that this time the film would be a feminist retelling of the classic.
– The third main reason is the lack of good original scripts for films. The best trout are often found in the books. These are some of the reasons why well over a third of all Norwegian feature films are based on books, and the relationship is similar in many other film-producing countries, says Engelstad.
An additional benefit is that film adaptations generate interest in the book it is based on.

It is enough to look at the large, new editions of the novel presentations that follow in the wake of adaptations such as the Varg Veum series, Gymnaslærer Pedersen, Tatt av kvinnen and Mannen som elsket Yngve.

"Mediocre" pearls

The author Anthony Burgess, who among other things wrote A Clockwork Orange, is said to have said that first-class adaptations are almost always based on second- or third-class literature.
– I think it can be a lot right in that, Engelstad admits.
– The reason is that the filmmaker in such cases more easily dares to free himself from the fine and focus on the film medium's specific narrative method, he says.

A frequently used example of this is Hitchcock. In his best films he often used fines from mediocre literature, as in Rebecca and the Birds.
– Too much respect for the fine can also bind the filmmaker to a misunderstood loyalty to the book, and it can seem inhibiting.
A good example of such a creative lack of respect is Henning Carlsen's bold move during the film adaptation of Hamsun's Hunger from 1966, where he set out to find visual equivalents to reproduce the novel's depictions of spiritual sensations. A less creative director would probably choose the narrator's voice on the soundtrack, which would certainly make the film more literary than cinematic – and not at all an immortal film classic.

Book vs. film

"The book is better" you often hear people say, after seeing a famous book filmed.
– A disadvantage of making too many visual choices is of course that many with a close relationship to the book are disappointed with the film adaptation. The audience expects to have their own pictures reproduced on the screen, the pictures they saw for themselves during the reading, Engelstad says.

"Edvarda does not look like that then!" shouted an indignant student Engelstad once taught a course on Norwegian novel classics and the film adaptations of them.
– The strong, inner image of Edvarda that the student had built up during the reading, did not correspond in any way with Sofie Gråbøl who appeared in the role in Henning Carlsen's in my opinion successful adaptation of Hamsun's Pan
from 1995, says Engelstad.

He believes one must realize that book and film cannot be compared in such a direct way.
– It's like asking what is best, red wine or white wine. The crucial thing, of course, is to assess whether the wine is good and tastes good, regardless of type. Or, transferred to film, to ask the question like this: Has this become a good film, on the film media's premises?

"Show do not tell"

This, of course, leads to the idea that certain literary works are simply unfilmable. Engelstad partly agrees with this, but believes that the filmmakers have very rarely been intimidated.
– Even Ulysses by James Joyce, with its endless inner monologues, has been adapted – albeit without much success. But it is clear that some literary works place great demands on the filmmaker's creativity and originality. For example, the words are better than the images of generalizations and abstractions.

In a book one can talk about "a bird" in general, while the film, tied to the direct photographic representation of reality, must show a very concrete specimen of the species – a ragged sparrow or a fluttering crow. The film can not problematize concepts such as love and death, said Virginia Woolf, who had little sense of vivid images. The film, she said, can only show a kiss and a hearse, quite simply.

Films that adapt novels with a lot of reflection also have a problem, Engelstad believes.
– The essence of the film is "Show, do not tell" and reflections are basically unfilmable. But in such cases, the creative filmmaker can again come up with cinematic analogies or equivalents. Sandemose's novel A Sailor Goes ashore describes in many words how the main character, Espen Arnakke, is plagued by half-repressed memories of past actions. In Nils Gaup's far too little known film adaptation of the book, Misery Harbor, an excellent and film-relevant solution is chosen. Instead of reproducing Espen's thoughts on past events in voiceover, the film shows us the dream images directly.

There is no reason to believe that the increase in adapted works will decrease in the future.
– In any case, it seems that we are in a wave, where the interest in recent literary works is extra strong, Engelstad says.

An interesting question that arises here is whether newer novels appeal more to cinematic realization, as the younger writers are people who grew up with film as the dominant medium, and thus have the film's narrative style virtually "under the skin".
By extension, by the way, there is an interesting field of research that has been little researched both in Norway and in other countries, namely to what extent and in what ways the modern novel is influenced by the narrative style of the vivid images, concludes Arne Engelstad.