Stage-Bound: Feature Film Adaptations of Canadian and Québécois Drama

STAGE-BOUND: FEATURE FILM ADAPTATIONS OF CANADIAN AND QUEBECOIS DRAMA Andre Loiselle Montreal & Kingston, ON: McCill-Queen's University Press, 2003, 260 pp. Andre Loiselle's Stage-Bound: Feature Film Maptations of Canadian and Quebecois Drama is an ambitious, near-comprehensive, and meticulously analyzed study. Beginning with Melburn E. Turner's treatment of Hilda Mary Hooke's Here Will I Nest (play, 1938; film, 1942) and concluding with JeanPhilippe Duval's version of Alexis Martin's Matroni et moi (play, 1995; film, 1999), Loiselle offers an extensive survey of English- and French-language film adaptations of original stage plays Canada. Through application of a wide and eclectic array of theoretical approaches, he constructs an elaborate and persuasive (if, at times, overly restrictive) analytical frame, discovering a high degree of commonality amongst works discussed, terms of both preoccupation and strategy. If Loiselle's analysis occasionally strains beneath strong determination of book's global thesis, results are nonetheless consistently insightful, evocative, and illuminating. Loiselle's study is divided into chronological sections, beginning with Stage-Bound since 1942, which lays out structure for rest of book. This section also provides theoretical basis upon which Loiselle builds comparative analysis that follows, and, despite my considerable admiration for accomplishments of Stage-Bound, I feel compelled to note two reservations about author's approach to his material. Relying on a century of solid, but distinctly essentialist media theory, Loiselle proposes a distinction between drama, which centres on a confined locus dramaticus closed off from reality that it reproduces, and film, which can capture wide vistas of actual landscapes.... Loiselle draws on Neil Sinyard's contention that in some ways, two forms are antithetical: theatre is artificial lighting and illusion, and cinema is open-air and realism; theatre is verbal, cinema visual; theatre is stasis, cinema is movement. By extension, Loiselle argues, [T]he plays best corresponding to demands of hybrid medium that drama constitutes are those presenting a dialectical composition that pits coercive, centripetal pressures against explosive, centrifugal forces. The essentialist constraints of such an argument-manifested concept of cinematized drama-are clear here, and they occasionally lead Loiselle into apparent assumptions of fundamental properties, media characteristics, and related issues of aesthetic convention. For example, Loiselle contends, [A]lthough Being At Home with Claude and Possible Worlds are not as conspicuous their references to theatricality, both films are intensely their reliance on rather than on more ostentatiously cinematic effects. Beyond prologue former and a few external scenes last section of latter, both films remain anchored to stage their on character and rather than on natural environment. Arguably, however, a focus on character and dialogue does not exclude (or even discourage) equal attention to the natural environment, and neither of these conventional preferences are necessarily inherent to one or another medium. Loiselle's study is extremely valuable as an index to specific conventions of recent Canadian works that have proven particularly conducive and/or susceptible to cinematic translation. But grounds for assertion of fixed and unquestionable ontological media distinctions are not to be discovered here. A related point of complication is also to be found quotation cited above. Within a single sentence terms theatricality and dramatic are presented as being virtually synonymous. And, indeed, perhaps pursuit of relative degree of signifying stability afforded by cinematic texts (the analysis of which Loiselle navigates with agility), a large proportion of author's references to original stage works are textual rather than being based on performances. …

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