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Unreliable Authors, Unreliable History: Opera in Joe Wright’s Adaptation of Atonement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 July 2015

Alexandra Wilson
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Abstract

Music is frequently overlooked by scholars of adaptation, who concentrate primarily on questions of literary and visual transformation. Undertaking a close reading of a pivotal scene in Joe Wright’s Atonement, this article demonstrates the vital contribution music can make to the adaptation process. Wright uses music, and Puccini’s in particular, in ways that are both narrative and reflexive, creating shifts of emphasis, deliberate ambiguities and intertextual allusions. Opera becomes a tool that allows the film-maker to interrogate notions of authorial and historical reliability, themes that lie at the heart of Ian McEwan’s highly self-aware novel.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , July 2015 , pp. 155 - 174
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Alexandra Wilson, Oxford Brookes University; alexandra.wilson@brookes.ac.uk. I am grateful to Carlo Cenciarelli, Barbara Eichner, Clair Rowden, Andrew Timms and Ben Winters for their comments on earlier drafts, and to my editors and my anonymous readers. Generous funding from the Music & Letters Trust allowed me to present this research at the 79th Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society (Pittsburgh, 2013).

References

1 The film’s composer Dario Marianelli recalled that ‘Joe started talking about the sound of the typewriter before I even read the script … I went off and sampled every single keystroke, space bar, carriage return from a 1930s Corona typewriter … Then I wrote five or six pieces for solo typewriter and I played them on my keyboard.’ Scott Macauly, ‘Dario Marianelli. Playing to Type: Scoring Atonement’, www.focusfeatures.com/article/dario_marianelli (accessed 18 August 2014).

2 On definitions of reflexivity, see Stam, Robert, Burgoyne, Robert and Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond (New York, 1992), 200–203 Google Scholar.

3 See, for example, Yvonne Griggs, ‘Writing for the Movies: Writing and Screening Atonement (2007)’, and Geraghty, Christine, ‘Foregrounding the Media: Atonement (2007)Google Scholar as an Adaptation’, both in A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation, ed. Deborah Cartmell (Chichester, 2012), 345–58 and 359–73.

4 A rare adaptation scholar who does pay attention to music is Linda Hutcheon: see Hutcheon, , with Siobhan O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd edn (New York, 2013)Google Scholar. For a brief consideration of music in the adaptation process, see Davison, Annette, ‘High Fidelity: Music in Screen Adaptations’, in The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, ed. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (Cambridge, 2007), 212–225 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Macauly, ‘Dario Marianelli’.

6 This is explored in Wilson, Alexandra, ‘Golden-Age Thinking: Recent Productions of Gianni Schicchi and the Popular Historical Imagination’, Cambridge Opera Journal 25 (2013), 185–201 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 See Levinson, Jerrold, ‘Film Music and Narrative Agency’, in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison, 1996), 248–282 Google Scholar.

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19 For a detailed discussion, see Alden, Reading Behind the Lines.

20 Geraghty interprets the adaptation as being structured in three sections, which explore the authority of writing, film and television. Geraghty, , ‘Foregrounding the Media’, 365 Google Scholar.

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26 For example: ‘Then he paused. Was he going to make any show of feeling at all, and if so, at what level?’ McEwan, Ian, Atonement (London, 2002), 85 Google Scholar.

27 McEwan, , Atonement, 80 Google Scholar, 81, 85.

28 The letter-writing scene can be found at 00.20.09–00.23.44. The duration of the film as a whole is 01.57.52.

29 This technique is also used in The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010), in which King George VI’s wartime speech is choreographed onto the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. Marc A. Weiner has written about the way in which opera specifically is often used as ‘an interpretive key, and sometimes even as the central, culminating moment in so-called blockbusters’. Weiner, , ‘Why does Hollywood like Opera?’, in Between Opera and Cinema, ed. Jeongwon Joe and Rose Theresa (New York, 2002), 75 Google Scholar.

30 Puccini’s music has often been critiqued in similar terms. See, for instance, Specht, Richard, Giacomo Puccini: The Man, his Life, his Work, trans. Catherine Alison Philips (New York, 1933)Google Scholar.

31 Christopher Hampton, who wrote the Atonement screenplay, discussed his desire to create linguistic authenticity in a radio documentary: Presenting the Past – How the Media Changes History, BBC Radio 4 (9 November 2013).

32 See Guffey, Elizabeth E., Retro: The Culture of Revival (London, 2006), 10 Google Scholar.

33 Raykoff, Ivan, ‘Piano, Telegraph, Typewriter: Listening to the Language of Touch’, in Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century: Image, Sound, Touch, ed. Colette Colligan and Margaret Linley (Farnham, 2011), 173 Google Scholar.

34 See, most famously, Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Boston, 2006), 101–133 Google Scholar.

35 Raykoff, , ‘Piano, Telegraph, Typewriter’, 175–176 Google Scholar.

36 McEwan writes that Robbie ‘wrote his letter out in longhand, confident that the personal touch fitted the occasion’. McEwan, , Atonement, 86 Google Scholar.

37 Christine Geraghty identifies references to, amongst others, Brief Encounter, The Third Man, Millions Like Us, It Always Rains on Sunday and Dance Hall (‘Foregrounding the Media’, 366–8).

38 The advertisement can be viewed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfjlb5BRdBA (accessed 18 August 2014). The shots between 0.08 and 0.15 are particularly reminiscent of hazy shots of Knightley in Atonement (see for instance at 21.11–21.18 and at 22.05–22.11).

39 Marianelli has stated that he and Wright ‘talked about Brief Encounter and about the idea that a love that doesn’t find its expression in the story could instead find it in the music. There is a wonderful contrast between the story’s repressed, unfulfilled love and the expansiveness of the romantic music in that film, and that idea was probably one of the inspirations for the more romantic parts of the score [of Atonement]’. Macauly, ‘Dario Marianelli’.

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41 Citron, , When Opera Meets Film, 173–211 Google Scholar.

42 Winters advocates that we challenge the notion of film as inherently ‘realistic’ and explore ways in which film functions in a way closer to opera: music is essential to recreating the substance of a film scene in one’s mind, just as it is when recalling a scene from an opera. Winters, Ben, ‘The Non-Diegetic Fallacy: Film, Music, and Narrative Space’, Music & Letters 91 (2010), 230 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the shortcomings of received wisdom regarding ‘diegetic music’, see also Winters, , ‘Musical Wallpaper? Towards an Appreciation of Non-narrating Music in Film’, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 6 (2012), 39–54 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Long, Michael, Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media (Berkeley, 2008), 20–21 Google Scholar.

43 At the film’s end, we hear ‘O mio babbino caro’ as Miss Bartlett reads a letter from Lucy. Although it is Lucy’s voice we hear, Puccini’s music is Miss Bartlett’s imagined ‘soundtrack’ to Lucy’s account of her Florentine honeymoon.

44 Forster, E.M., A Room with a View (London, 1988), 69–70 Google Scholar.

45 Operatic Leonoras include the heroines of Il trovatore, La forza del destino and La favorita, signalling Lucy’s sensationalist construction in the eyes of Misses Lavish and Bartlett as an Italianate operatic heroine of a brand Forster (whose taste was for German opera) would have considered frivolous.

46 ‘He stepped quickly forward and kissed her. Before she could speak, almost before she could feel, a voice called “Lucy! Lucy! Lucy!”. The silence of life had been broken by Miss Bartlett, who stood brown against the view.’ Forster, A Room with a View, 89.

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49 Finney, Brian, ‘Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: The Making of Fiction in Ian McEwan’s Atonement ’, Journal of Modern Literature 27 (2004), 79 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.