Sunday 6 May 2012

Virginia Woolf, 'Mrs Dalloway', film adaptation by Marleen Gorris, 1997. on screen (posted on 6/5/12)

Mrs Dalloway, 1997. Directed by Marleen Gorris. Print screen.
















Recently, I have been doing some research on the Stream-of-Consciousness writing for my project at Camberwell. In literary criticism, Stream-of-Consciousness is used as a method to portray an individual’s point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character’s thought processes, either in a loose interior monologue, or in connection to his or her actions. But how is it translated when integrates into visual culture?

I discovered that one of the most important novels that use the Stream-of-Consciousness writing, Virginia Woolf's 'Mrs Dalloway'(1925) was adapted into a film by director Marleen Gorris in 1997. The whole movie was characterised by flash backs, parallel narratives, voice superpositions etc. I must admit that, even though Vanessa Redgrave was excellent as Mrs Dalloway, and the film was good and strong as well, its direction was a bit looser than I would have expected it to be. It wasn't clear enough some times and some times it was very coherent and therefore, the movie developed some sort of inconsistency.

In my view, the context of the film should be much more edited in a much more experimental way; not noisy, nor deconstructed. It could be as minimal as a very show, whitish single shot minimalistic video. It needed a little bit of Martin Arnold's approach. Other than that, as a film it was very much enjoyable.

Nikos Georgopoulos
London,
May 2012



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