The Adaptation of Ryunosuke Akutagawa “The Faith of Wei Sheng”
Loaded with metaphors and symbols, the short novel is poetic. The adaptation to visual form must use poetic film language as well.
1993, Toronto. Taking Film Studies, night classes, homework to do is a short film script. Adapting Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s “The Faith of Wei Sheng,” I read way back in 1970.
Prisoner of my engineering mind, I wonder how the river could flow in the same direction as the ocean tide increases and decreases. Ryunosuke Akutagawa did not need to worry about it since the story’s spiritual, philosophical, and poetic dimensions were far more important. In the film, though, this is something that I have to show. Thus I’m adding a waterfall to the script; the waterfall feeds the river and keeps it moving toward the ocean, albeit slower, despite the increasing tide. But does the tide go up and down within the afternoon and night time frame of the short story? Yes, it does, says Mother Internet. Fast forward.
2016, Los Angeles. Writing movie scripts and adaptations lately, flirting with the idea of graphic novels. Meeting with peers in script writing, taking Wei’s script out of the attic and giving it a new shine.
I am writing a trilogy nowadays, but I’d rather read something shorter at the writers’ meetups. So, I am dusting off and giving a new shine to “The Faith of Wei Sheng”. The shine benefits from a fiction writing course taken online (about the time) and reading Will Eisner’s “Comics and Sequential Art”.
The course taught me that the writer should not describe everything. Some obvious descriptions should be omitted because the reader fills up the “gaps”, and thus stays engaged. When properly used by the writer, gaps may be a good way of creating a bit of a mystery or drama. Interestingly enough, the demonstration of this concept is made by reference to comics where the “gaps” between the frames do not affect the reader’s understanding of the action.
Another concept I’ve found worth noting is the author’s and the character’s relationship. If the narration is written at the first person, the author and the character are the same; in film, this would be like you never see the character (unless he looks in the mirror :-), but you see what he sees, i.e. the effects of what he does. If the narration is in the third person, the narrator and character are different: you have someone telling the character’s story. In film language, the first corresponds to a POV, and the second to a tracking shot following the character. So, I used both shots in my script.
Will Eisner remarkably asserts that comics is a language on its own. For example, an illustration without borders suggests a larger time-space dimension, while those bound to a frame set a precise sequence of events and their pace. Add to it the close-ups of people’s heads, the writing in the bubbles for us to “hear” what’s in somebody’s mind, or what’s being said, the rendering of the various angles and perspectives of the illustrated action and…He’s right, it is a language. Not surprisingly, he comments on the similarities and differences between comics books and film storyboards.
And finally, I am getting closer to Wei Sheng’s story. Ryunosuke writes it in a highly poetic language with the refrain “But the Lady did not come,” pacing the transcendence of Wei’s soul as it is carried away by the river to the sea and future times. My second problem (see Toronto for the first) with the adaptation was that I wanted to keep some of his paragraphs as Voice Over. Is it OK to both “show” what happens and “tell” it with these paragraphs? No, it doesn’t seem right, said the right side of my brain! But it is, said the other half, just choose the key paragraphs, create picturesque film images and use all that film language could offer. And so it was written. What was the film language that I used? Let’s see: for any shots that required drama and pace, I used close-ups and medium shots with cuts between them; when I needed to suggest time passing or show a large perspective over the area, I used dissolves and aerial shots; when I needed to suggest the transcendence, I used special visual effects, among other a transition from the darkness on the night lit by the moon (dominantly black) to a negative image (dominantly white) and further dissolving into a real image of a winter landscape also dominantly white.
The poetry of a film then could be asserted if the literary language is properly integrated with the ample means of the film language.