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The Age of Innocence

The translation of a book into a motion picture can be a difficult process and is made all the more difficult when the screenwriters feel the need to maintain respect for the structure of the book, for its characterizations, and for its themes. This is why it is usually believed that less literary works are more easily translated, while well-respected literary works present many problems because the author has already presented his or her story in a dense and complex way that marries form and content. The form of a film is quite different from that of a novel, utilizing images rather than imagery, pictures instead of words, actions instead of descriptions, and so on. the recent film production of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence is an example in which the filmmakers--director Martin Scorsese and screenwriters Martin Scorsese and Jay Cocks--hew very closely to the original book and find ways to use the language of film as a shorthand to convey the time and place of the novel, to telescope sequences, to illuminate characterizations without altering them, and generally to produce a visual representation of the book. At the same tim, though, the two experiences are very different, and the film cannot by any means supplant the book or its literary effects, nor does it try to do so.

The fact that the film will follow the book closely is indicated in the opening sequence, which in both book and film is a singing concert at the Academy of Music in New York in the 1870s. The book begins by stating that this is what is taking place, while the film shows it, with some narration indicating time and place and offering details of the people present and the nature of the evening in a very literary voice. Both the novelist and the "voice" on the soundtrack indicate the importance of such a social evening to the people present and the ways in which they used clothing, carriages, and the social amenities to prove that they were worthy and...

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The Age of Innocence. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 11:14, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681451.html