“the choices made here aren’t so much about the politics of the movie-makers, they’re about the technical limits of film− a medium that can also give us something quite devastating by saying less. Anthony, obviously, was very aware of this and he took some of the stuff that he couldn’t put in and worked it into the fabric of the other characters…What Anthony did was incredible. He had to make it completely differently, but it seems to be the same.” (Ondaatje, 1996)
Born to Italian parents on the Isle of Wight, Anthony Minghella started as a playwright because he wanted to write music but the only way to get into the theatre writing music was to write plays which had music in them. He is a very English film-maker with an intriguing touch of the exotic and known for his theme of love.
Minghella cuts to the love affair at the heart of the book and trims back the parallel plots, he lessens the mystery element and skilfully reduces the book’s endless, ever-tightening flashbacks. Finally, he makes cautious but astute use of Ondaatje’s glorious language, avoiding the excessively external and ‘literary’ device of voiceover by turning some of the novel’s most lyrical lines into dialogue. Minghella on film authorship;
“the process of writing in cinema is in three stages I think. You write material on the page and then the camera takes over and becomes another kind of pen and then there is another extremely significant process of writing which happens in the editing room”
On making the movie, Minghella comments;
“The bits I thought were going to be hard in the film, the big bits in the film, were the most fun to do and the hardest thing in the film to do was how to energise and then, to be stuck in a bed unable to move…the axis of the camera was always fixed, you can’t refresh those scenes.”
We do not know if the literary text is in temporal order due to the nature of the way the novel has been structured, although it is a lot clearer in the film text. I have identified 16 sections of which the chapter has been divided into, 11 of which are situated within the monastery and are between 1 and 6 paragraphs long. I will not be analysing all 11 sections as they do not all feature in the film version. (Please look at fig. 1) However, I have found scenes in the film text that are similar in editorial intention as some sections of the literary narrative so I will be mentioning those too.
In the first section, also the opening paragraph to the novel, the female protagonist is in the garden of the monastery before continuing into the house and through to the bedroom. It is here that we are introduced to Almasy. However, this scene does not appear as this ordered sequence in the film narration, instead in parallel to it at 14 minutes into the film text, Hana discovers the monastery (as captured through her point-of-view, low angle-shot) and goes to explore the ruined building first from the garden, then in through the wrecked library and up the stairs to the bedroom. During this scene, other facets of information in the chapter are revealed such as the ‘piano covered in a grey sheet’ and the ‘high walls of books’. These two examples are not in section 1 but in section 6 of the chapter. In contrast to the novel, the film’s opening scene is of Katherine’s hand painting the swimmers in the cave. This is a very subtle introduction, the hand belonging to Katherine painting swimming figures on the paper. The drawing of those pictographs was the beginning of the love affair that was to end with her alone, in darkness, in the very cave where those ancient figures were inscribed.
The use of sound as narrative in The English Patient.
The soundtrack is composed by Lebanese Gabriel Yared who in 1973 began a career as a composer/orchestrator and has produced a steady stream of soundtracks, several of which have earned film industry awards.
Minghella wanted the film to sound as interesting as it looked. “…the story telling texture in sound was very critical to me…I believe in the power of sound. If you look at the sandstorm in the film, actually if you took the sound away the sandstorm diminishes to almost nothing it’s a sound sandstorm as much as a visual one”
The first appearance of the Herodotus in the literary discourse occurs in the 10th section of the chapter. It is only one paragraph long before descending into a flashback.
‘She picks up the notebook that lies on the small table beside his bed. It is the book he brought with him through the fire – a copy of The Histories by Herodotus that he has added to, cutting and gluing in pages from other books or writing in his own observations – so they are all cradled within the text of Herodotus.’ (Ondaatje, 1992; 16)
Around 19 minutes into the film, just after the outdoor shower scene, a straight-cut leads to a close-focus shot of Almasy lying on his bed looking at the copy of Herodotus. As this is the first time we see it since the brief introduction a couple of scenes earlier, non-contrapuntal sound is used to convey the heightened emotions of Almasy as the book contains the memories of his past. As his frail arm reaches up for the book, the tempo of the classical music also rises and although there is no climax, we know that this scene marks the beginning of the importance of this book’s role in providing information into his history. This piece of music is titled ‘Herodotus’ in the soundtrack to The English Patient. Although Minghella lost a lot of the flashbacks in the movie, he still felt there were too many uses of flashbacks. He says;
“When the film was in document rather than a celluloid it looked very, very choppy, it looked as though the audience might be walked backwards and forwards and the thing I was most frightened of was the sense of irritation of being jogged back between the story in North Africa and the story in Italy and I thought one way to soften this transition was with sound as much as with image and with dissolves” (Minghella)
An example of how he used sound to soften the transitions was displayed in what I have called The Hopscotch Scene (situated in section 8 of chapter One and occurs at 24 minutes into the movie). Right after Hana plays hopscotch by herself, when the patient is lying in bed listening to the thuds, in the literary text, the paragraph which follows is a flashback. However, in the film text, the scene shows a close-up of Almasy listening to the thuds of which they then change to another type of thudding, this time of drums, which, along with the dissolve, transports Almasy into a flashback.
Having raised the above points up in my argument, questions posed include whether I believe in the significance of the image of Katherine’s hand used in the opening scenes of the film text of which I say ‘yes’ as I think it is central to the main crux of the movie, the love story and the locale in which it is set and also the significance of the cave and the touch of the exotic presented also.
Bibliography
J. Dudley Andrew. 1976. The Major Film Theories: An Introduction. Oxford University Press.
Kamiya, Gary, 1996, ‘An Interview with Michael Ondaatje’, Salon.com, [WWW] http://www.salon.com/nov96/ondaatje961118.html (2nd December 2002)
Lothe, Jokob. 2000. Narrative in Fiction and Film: An Introduction. Oxford
Ondaatje, Michael. 1992. The English Patient. Picador
Power, Carla, 1997, ‘The English Patient’s author is the movie’s biggest fan’, Newsweek.
The Internet Movie Database, 1991-2003, ‘English Patient, The’ (1996), [WWW] http://us.imdb.com/Title?0116209 (2nd December 2002)
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