Ulysses is too huge a book to make a film with. Not unless you make an 18-hour film. Some epipsodes lose all sense of form if dramatized (notably the Ithaca episode)
What I want to see is a 1-hour film of the Circe episode - since that was written in a dramatic form to begin with.
Mark
I have not yet seen Mr. Walsh's adaptation of Joyce's masterpiece, but from the reviews and the subject material I am confident that it is a very worthwhile film indeed. That said: Joyce can not be adapted. The difficulty in reading Joyce proposes a difficulty in our notions of reading itself. With Joyce, passive consumption becomes active metamorphosis... Joyce has always said that he chose each word, each manipulation of syntax, to evoke the EXACT feeling on his reader that he had intended. Obviously, one cannot translate this, one can only re-interpret it. Although, Naoki seems to have done a pretty decent job with his Japanese version Finnegans Wake...
Hats off to Mr. Walsh for setting his sites on Mt. Everest!
thom
Thom, thank you for your insightful comments.
All the very best, Sean
Sean Walsh
Yes I think a director can't really 'adapt' Ulysses, but could use it as a springboard for their own film, in which they would have to make the minute considerations that Joyce made with language, with images + sounds. I think the director should introduce new things into the film, making it as much a reaction to Ulysses as a filming of it - but that would limit it's audience likely, to those who've read the book.
shareI very much agree about Nighttown. The thing is written as a screenplay! There really is no issue about can it be translated into film or can it not be.
Besides, I think the very end, where Bloom has a vision of his dead son, is one of the most moving things Joyce ever wrote.
Even that may very well be impossible because much of the stage direction Joyce appropriates is impossible to produce not just physically (for that could be solved by CGI) but in some sequences it is flat-out logically contradictory. He was very much writing a book for people who wanted to read something unique about writing itself, for people who enjoy (or are at least interested in) the way words used by characters and used to describe characters affect how we think of them, even how we think period.
share