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  • Essay / From Biblio to Sinny: The Fidelity of an Adaptation of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange

    John Huston's 1941 version of the classic private eye tale The Maltese Falcon remains one of Kubrick's most faithful film adaptations a novel never made into a film in Hollywood History. Entire chunks of dialogue from not only the main character Sam Space, but every other major character, are taken directly from Dashiell Hammett's novel and placed verbatim in the mouths of actors recreating scenes as they are found within the pages of the novel. Dialogue, however, is only one element of a work of literary fiction that can determine the fidelity of a film adaptation. In the case of A Clockwork Orange, creating a faithful film adaptation in the style of The Maltese Falcon was made virtually impossible by author Anthony Burgess. His invented language which mixes slang, Russian and certain elements of gypsy for his character - a language he called Nadsat - densely populates the descriptive elements of the book as well as its dialogues to the point that a glossary must be consulted every the few scenes. no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Trying to transfer such incomprehensibility intact to the screen would prove not only impossible, but pointless since Nadsat's primary goal is to allow the reader to disengage from the endlessly dark and violent narrative. Why make it virtually impossible for viewers without a handy glossary nearby to understand the dialogue when the novel could remain faithful to the myriad of other equally important literary elements while manipulating the visual power of cinema to remain true to the distancing aspect of Nadsat? Stanley Kubrick's use of multiple cinematic techniques that correspond to the literary devices employed by Burgess, even if they do not actually reproduce them, serves to make A Clockwork Orange one of the most faithful cinematic adaptations of a novel in choosing to focus on loyalty to other elements. than dialogue. Aside from its decision to equate fidelity to the attempted scene-by-scene transformation that characterizes The Maltese Falcon, the film departs from its source material in other significant ways. For example, the choice of Malcolm McDowell to play the novel's protagonist, Alex, could be considered irrefutably unfaithful. The only way to stay true to the casting of the character who inhabits virtually every second of screen time would have been to find an extraordinary teenage actor and then convince a movie studio in 1970 to allow this young man to play scenes from movie. he would be prohibited from actually attending due to age restrictions. A film perfectly faithful to the novel certainly could not be made today; to have attempted it at the time would have been unthinkable if it were not in fact a criminal offense. Casting has the power to make or break a film and it is probably true that if Kubrick had attempted to transfer Alex intact as Burgess describes him in the novel, the film would have been a huge failure. Alex is not only the most extreme version of the type of character known as a juvenile delinquent ever depicted on screen, the story is told from his point of view. Alex would have been the villain in any other major feature film of the time and so the audience is invited throughout the film to look at the world he inhabits from his point of view. This point of view, for at least half of the film, essentially asks the audience to see the world from the perspective of a psychopath. And then for the second half of the film to change theirpoint of view so that their point of view is now that of a psychopath to be pitied. All it takes is a slight change in the character's age and an actor of McDowell's ability to project menace, childishness and pathos in equal and equally realistic measure can allow the audience to respond to this truly indulgent request .Orange succeeds in asking the audience to see the world through such an objectionable main character. This is how Kubrick uses cinematic techniques to transfer from page to screen literary techniques that allowed readers to do the same thing, but to an even more extreme degree. Nadsat insinuates himself into the storyline to a much less significant degree than in the book, but more as a recurring motif to alienate viewers by situating the narrative as taking place at some point in the future. The novel's use of the often inscrutable slang used by its characters is for purposes of constant distraction, capable of distancing the reader from Alex just enough so that he or she does not fall victim to too close an identification with him and thus fails to grasp the author's ultimate message. . Stanley Kubrick manages to achieve the same effect while avoiding alienating the viewer by presenting dialogue that they must work hard to understand or by treating Nadsat like a foreign language by translating the meaning through subtitles. The necessary distance between the audience and Alex so that they can simultaneously be forced into his point of view to understand him while being forcibly alienated in order to gain objective critical engagement is achieved through non-diegetic sound during some of the most violent sequences in the film, the use of low-angle close-ups of Alex to convey malevolence and film editing that reverses the natural movement of the camera towards the protagonist as a means of forcing identification through the use repetitive of reverse zooms in which the distance of the camera from Alex has the effect of detaching the identification from the audience. Through these and various other cinematic effects, Kubrick manages to retain Nadsat's distancing purpose while avoiding the irritating aspects of constantly consulting the glossary while reading the book, allowing the film to not only remain faithful to the spirit of the novel, but also to be truly realistic. a more pleasant aesthetic experience. The film also manages to stay true to the novel's vision of a nightmarish, yet strangely alluring, near future, while simultaneously managing to replicate the distancing effect on the reader of such an innovative yet disorienting environment. The world in which 15-year-old Alex and his droogs operate in the novel is clearly established not as a completely fantastical fantasy world, divorced from the concepts of realism as a science fiction novel set hundreds of years in the future, but as a logically possible outcome. of today's society just a few decades later. At the same time, the reader experiences a sense of dislocation from his or her time while reading the book due to the more bizarre outcomes of this very future predicted by the book. The film uses all the visual power of cinema to bring this vision of a future that is entirely possible while being far enough from the contemporary setting to fully experience it. The decor is in garish colors and populated with immediately identifiable objects which nevertheless reinforce this feeling of disorientation because they are too large or too smooth or too rounded or simply too out of place. If the decor of ridiculously large penis sculptures is disorienting by being recognizable enough, but not quite right, then the costume choices can be said to bring.