Michael Winterbottom, Adaptation, and Intertextuality

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Michael Winterbottom, Adaptation and Intertextuality

We are all mediators, translators.

— Jacques Derrida

…films are, in the end, just a collection of details.

— Michael Winterbottom

Described as an ‘anti-auteur’, the British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom (b.1961) has frequently

butted away attempts to tie his work to the ‘conservative’ constraints of auteur-criticism: ‘…a film

isn’t a film by one person, it’s a film by a hundred people’ (Smith, 2011: xviii; Winterbottom in

Gilbey, 2004:31; Winterbottom in Smith, 2000:47). Winterbottom’s distaste with the ‘bourgeois,

liberal romantic idea of the creator’ has even made its way into his work (Gilbey, 2004). Jennie

(Naomie Harris), the ‘film nut’ production assistant in A Cock and Bull Story (2004), waxes lyrical

on her favourite battle scene from French New Wave auteur Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac

(1974) in front of a bemused group of actors and crew, becoming emotional at the thought of

Bresson’s single-handed creation of a ‘metaphor for life’. She leaves the room, and the film’s star,

Steve Coogan (played by Steve Coogan), comments: ‘What was all that about?’ (c.46:48-47:45).

Jennie is later revealed to be, and referred to as, ‘a bit odd… a bit intense’, her character therefore

adjudged by the frame of the film to represent a somewhat lunatic pretension in the lionising of

director-as-auteur (c.79:48).

Despite his own active repudiation of the auteur tag, Winterbottom happily claims to have

taken inspiration from the usual suspects of Bergman, Truffaut, Godard and Fassbinder, as well as

British filmmakers of unique vision such as Karel Reisz, Nic Roeg and Ken Loach (McFarlane and

Williams, 2009: 12). Scenes from 2004’s 9 Songs affectionately echo the work of cinematic

‘creators’. McFarlane and Williams consider the similarities of the bedroom interactions of Matt

(Keiran O’Brien) and Lisa (Margo Stilley) to those of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in the

‘hallmark of the French New Wave’, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) (2009:27). Furthermore,

in one of the final episodes of their relationship, Lisa, soon to depart London ‘just for a year’ to her

native America, reassures Matt with ‘Sometimes you have to have faith in people’(c.57:19). This

line is seemingly paraphrased from a similar scene at the end of Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979),

in which Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), about to leave America for study in London, reassures an

equally forlorn Isaac (Allen) with ‘You have to have a little faith in people’ (c.89:27). Indeed, the

inverted trajectories of the lovers, from London to America, seems all the more to indicate that

Winterbottom is both homaging and riffing on the work of a director he admires.


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Winterbottom’s acknowledgement of the influence of auteurship in these examples implies

less a participation in the same authorial primacy as those he homages, and more the responses of a

sensitive and reflective fan. Apart from a rejection of the auteur label, the ‘overwhelming

commonality when discussing’ Winterbottom’s oeuvre ‘is variety’ (Fraser, 2009:136). He refuses to

be held down, conform to any ‘pattern’ (Winterbottom in Smith, 2000:47). Yet arguably this

chameleonic can be attributed to a consistent instinct to collage multiple references to films he has

seen and admired, treating filmic discourse as a text to be quoted, pasted together. Naomie Harris’s

‘odd’ character exemplifies this instinct. Although something of a pretentious bore, her referencing

of other films, like the scattergun celebrity impressions and movie quotations volleyed between

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in the equally metatextual The Trip (2010), shores up A Cock and

Bull Story’s own status as an intertextual exercise.

Some deny the appropriateness of labelling Michael Winterbottom ‘as a ‘literary director’’

(McFarlane & Williams, 2009: 48). However, I would argue in this essay that it is exactly

Winterbottom’s preoccupation with text, and his keen sense of antecedent influences, that seems to

posit the director not as an auteur, but instead a littérateur, or a ‘literary man.’1 Therefore,

Winterbottom exemplifies the use of cinema as ‘quite simply… a means of expression… a form in

which… an artist can… translate his obsessions’ using La Caméra-Stylo (‘the camera-pen’) (Astruc,

1948). Winterbottom is the consummate reader who in his own ‘literary’ enterprises of filmmaking

continuously expresses himself through deliberate ‘written’ responses to texts both read and viewed.

Through a brief but close investigation into some of his works, I wish to argue that it is Michael

Winterbottom’s status as littérateur which makes him such a stylistically enigmatic but ultimately

compelling filmmaker. Further, I will explore how his films expose the redundancy of traditional

notions of adaptation and the original text; instead demonstrating the felicitous textual experience

notable in ‘reading’ the works of such a voracious reader, and ultimately exploring how such a view

of filmmaking can illuminate our understanding of how and of what ‘texts’, both written and

screened, are constituted.

Winterbottom’s apprehension of film-as-text can be counterpoised and complemented by the

commitment he has demonstrated to the process of literary adaptation. Most significantly,

Winterbottom’s career can be charted with reference to three adaptations of novels by Thomas

Hardy. These will act as the point of embarkation for this essay. Hardy’s novels, sitting as they do

on the cusp of Victorian and Edwardian England, superficially lend themselves to the kind of

‘massage by film’ approach emblematic of the British heritage cinema of the 80s and 90s, made

1 “littérateur, n.”. OED Online. December 2013. Oxford University Press. 29 January 2014

<http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/109241?redirectedFrom=litterateur&>


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(in)famous by Merchant-Ivory(Winterbottom, quoted by Stuart, 1996:6). However, Winterbottom’s

Hardy adaptations, Jude (1996), The Claim (2000), and Trishna (2011), illustrate rather neatly the

developing critical tensions at work when transferring the text of one medium to another.

One of Winterbottom’s earliest features, Jude (adapting Jude the Obscure, 1895), with its

relatively ‘faithful’ aesthetic recreation of Hardy’s period setting, would ‘seem to suggest a film

entrenched in the traditions of British costume drama’ (Stuart, 1996: 5; Allison, 2005). This film

perhaps most appeals to the ‘straw man’ of fidelity criticism, evoking the early critical battleground

of literary adaptation: the ‘impossible venture’ of approximating a literary audience’s ‘own vision of

the literary text’ (Voights-Virchow, 2007: 123; McFarlane, 2007:15). Fidelity criticism has been

frequently rubbished, yet as Stam observes, ‘fidelity discourse asks important questions about the

filmic recreation of the setting, plot, characters, themes and the style of the novel’ (2005b:14).

Moreover, by working outwards in our interpretation of Winterbottom’s Hardy adaptations, from

fidelity to the more diffuse engagements with the source texts of later works, we may narrativise the

director’s adaptational development.

Certainly, Jude very quickly moves away from the slavishly redundant echo; highlighting

the fact that in adaptation, as Robert Stam remarks, ‘change is presumed to be the point… simply

adapting a novel without changing it, suggested Alain Resnais, is like reheating a meal’ (Stam,

2005b:16). One of Winterbottom’s most striking decisions in his intelligent and detailed evocation

of 1888 is to locate the film ‘hundreds of miles beyond Wessex’, the traditionally South-Western,

semi-fictionalised region of England in which Hardy set all of his major novels, choosing the

‘ponderous and dark neoclassicism of regency Edinburgh’ to represent the university town of

‘Christminster’, intended by Hardy as an analogue for Oxford (Gatrell, 2005:46). The transposition

visually refigures the elitist intimidation of the fictive university town, but also marks

Winterbottom’s film as a deliberately iconoclastic ‘take’ on Hardy.

Moreover, Winterbottom effectively focalizes the story through Jude (Christopher

Eccleston), placing him ‘at once at the centre of the narrative’ (McFarlane & Williams, 2009: 49).

Jude is inserted into episodes which the novel’s omniscient narrator does not require him to attend,

realizing Sue Bridehead (Kate Winslet) through a classic iteration of the male gaze (See Figs. 1-2).

Therefore, the ‘afternoon’s holiday’ that the lone Sue embarks upon in the novel, encountering the

‘foreigner with black hair’ who sells her the plaster statuettes of Venus and Apollo, is transformed

by Winterbottom into an extended ‘date’ sequence, in which the infatuated Jude comes to realise the

potency of his affection for his alluring, and smoking, cousin (Hardy, 1895: II-iii; Winterbottom,

1996: 26:20- 29:03). This cinematic departure prefigures the even more trope-like ‘romance

montage’ of later in the film, when ‘At Aldbrickham and Elsewhere’, the couple are shown


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engaging in the stereotypical ‘rom-com’ activities of playing on the beach, cycling, and laughing

together, which is only vaguely approximated in the novel with ‘That the twain were happy-

between their times of sadness-was indubitable’ (71:40-72:55, See Figs.3-5; Hardy, V-v).

Winterbottom seems determined to portray many essential aspects of the novel and its

characters ‘as it would have been’ in action, leading to touches which initially seem manneredly

postmodern, but ultimately support Stuart’s view of his adaptation being ‘immediate without

stooping to anachronism’ (Stuart, 1996: 5). Thus, as well as smoking, Sue, the New Woman, is

shown consorting with the working class Jude and his colleagues over a pint (Fig. 6). Moreover, a

later scene shows Sue unclothing and submitting to Jude despite not knowing what ‘I’m doing, I

only pretend’ (c.78:20). The obligatory ‘sex scene’ calls attention to its difference from the late

Victorian novel, though its presentation in the period setting retrospectively highlights subtextual

elements at work in Hardy. The equivalent episode in the novel certainly doesn’t seem to depict a

sexual encounter, but the allusion to Jude kissing Sue ‘on one side, and on the other, and in the

middle’, before a paragraph break instigates ‘The next morning,’ which was ‘wet’, arguably lays the

groundwork for a more expansive interpretation (Hardy, 1895: V.-ii). Such expansive interpretation

when adapting novels affirms the view that Winterbottom’s approach is ‘to remain faithful to the

spirit, rather than the letter’ (Smith, 2011: xviii). This exposes the fine line between aesthetic

fidelity and a necessary process of re-creation, or what Geoffrey Wagner described in his definition

of ‘analogy’ as ‘a fairly considerable departure [from its source text] for the purpose of making

another work of art’ (Wagner, 1975, in Mitchell, 2005:85).

This ‘expansive interpretation’ was even more freely engaged in for Winterbottom’s

adaptation of The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886). Beyond the expansions made in Jude, where that

adaptation ‘generally hew[ed] close to the novel’s sombre trajectory’, The Claim (2000) instead

marks a ‘radical departure’, reimagining the tragic contours of Hardy’s ‘Life and Death of a Man of

Character’ in the idiom of the Western (McFarlane & Williams, 2009: 51,55). The snowy frontier of

Gold-Rush America in fact compliments the analogue of Hardy’s Henchard, ‘Dillon’ (Peter

Mullan), as Winterbottom’s protagonist is also an outsider: an Irish immigrant who is able to create

a new life, in a new place, following a catastrophic error of judgement.

The Claim does not simply transpose the setting of the main plot thread of The Mayor of

Casterbridge, however. The film also brings other textual material to bear on Hardy’s base

elements, creating a rich interlacing of sources and media, of which ‘the Western’ setting is just one.

It is at this point that we may begin to see Winterbottom moving from the fidelity-aligned practices

of Jude to a process that can be better understood in terms of intertextuality. The most fertile

diegetic location for the confluence of texts in The Claim is the saloon stage: a platform of


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performance used throughout the film to comment on the broad themes of expatriate nationhood

and regret, while also illuminating the social cross-section of prostitutes, drifters, and opportunists,

here convened on the fringes of the Western frontier. The brothel-keeper Lucia (Milla Jovovich), is

twice shown singing versions of a fado, or Portugese song of longing (‘Se Velha’ and ‘Menina E

Moca’, at c.04:39 and c.30:50, respectively – See Fig.7). Lucia’s songs concretize her identity as the

exotic-but-authoritative hostess, and depict a world-weary survivor who knows her position as

Dillon’s lover is tenuous. Her lamentations also reflect back upon the melancholia of Dillon, for

whom the past is irretrievable, except in memory.

It is this memory that is instigated by another performance on the saloon stage; that of Hope

(Sarah Polley), Dillon’s jettisoned daughter, grown and returned to remind her father inadvertently

of his terrible mistake. Her recital of ‘There’s a grave in old Kirkconnell’ again affirms the fugitive

sensibility of the inhabitants of the saloon, but also invokes in Dillon the young Irish man who

traded his wife and baby daughter for gold (c.32:33, See Fig. 8). Hope’s ballad bookends a lengthy

flashback to this very event, the cautionary message of her final line, ‘When you think of

emigrating, then remember Noreen Bawn’ inscribing the crime for which Dillon ultimately dies

trying to atone. Two other performances on the stage also draw attention to the cultural dialogue of

Winterbottom’s adaptation.

The performance of Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ (1818) (Fig. 9) anticipates the

peripatetic fall of Dillon, from de facto kingpin of the town of Kingdom Come to a forsaken corpse,

presiding over the charred, useless remains of his kingdom. The inclusion of Shelley’s poem also

indicates the extent of Winterbottom’s textual facility as littérateur, its ‘high’ cultural freight

serving to arbitrate the new creative enterprise Winterbottom is undertaking. This ‘high’ cultural

element is upheld in cinematic terms by Winterbottom’s well-documented homage to the New

German Cinema in referencing Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982), itself an intertextual echo of

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). Like the movement of the steam-ship over a mountain in

Herzog’s masterpiece, Dillon has his home moved to ‘presumably a better location’ as a gesture

towards his new/old wife Elena (Nastassja Kinski) (McFarlane & Williams, 2009: 16; Smith, 2000:

48). However, the egalitarian nature of Winterbottom’s intertextuality can be seen as Dalglish (Wes

Bentley) sings the American folk song ‘Shenandoah’ to the saloon’s audience (c.35:58- See Fig.

10). This pointing towards the younger textual-cultural milieu of America counterbalances

Winterbottom’s references to traditionally ‘high’ European art forms.

Despite The Claim’s more casual relationship with Hardy’s work – ‘we were just using the

story’– and the previously described textual layering found in the adaptation, the film still ‘seems

enthralled by the central concept of Hardy’s novel’ (Winterbottom in D’Arcy, 2006:96; McFarlane


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& Williams, 2009:60). Thus, the adaptation maintains a certain fidelity towards Hardy’s writing:

Henchard and Farfrae are still there, albeit altered for the transatlantic context: ‘here is the Age of

Technology supplanting the ethics of entrepreneurs of the previous era, as surely as Donald

Farfrae’s knowledge of modern business practises and farm machinery counterposes Michael

Henchard’s less formal knowledge’ (Allingham, 2005:134, see also McFarlane & Williams,

2009:58). But this central similarity is in fact foregrounded by Winterbottom’s decision to impose

upon his source material what Patricia Ingham calls ‘a process of recontextualising’, transforming

the ‘significance’ of the ‘bones of the story’ with ‘the dynamics of the society in which they are

found’- in this case the American West of the 1860s (Ingham, 2003:224,226).

Perhaps this is the key to the process of expansive adaptation notable in The Claim,

compared to Jude. Winterbottom has stated the difficulty in making the essential feel of a period

novel ‘as fresh as it would have been to people at the time, while still retaining a sense of the

specific historical context’. He explains that in fact, it is ‘difficult to communicate’ the type of

‘social change’ remarkable in Hardy’s extremely socially conscious works, because often a too-

slavishly recreated past ‘just looks like a nostalgic time capsule’, rendering the exercise artistically

redundant (Winterbottom, in Porton, 2006:101; Winterbottom, 2013).

One may therefore argue, that instead of being overly interested ‘in fripperies and details’,

for Winterbottom, from The Claim onwards, it was this process of geographical and cultural

‘recontextualisation’ which offered the possibility of a revivification of the core elements that made

Hardy ‘the recorder of… truths about human nature, giving his work relevance to all periods’

(Winterbottom in Stuart, 1996:7; Ingham, 2003:213). Adaptation in this case enacts a making

strange. This instructive recontextualisation may be found in extremis with his latest Hardy-related

project: Trishna (2011), a film which riffs on Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) by transplanting the

essential action and heroine to modern-day India. The confluence of the modern-day temporal

location and sub-continental setting means that Trishna (Freida Pinto) is still subject to a ‘society

that practises a double standard concerning the behaviour of men and women similar to that of the

Victorians’, therefore paradoxically achieving a ‘more immediate’ Hardyesque ‘potency’ than the

process of recontextualisation would imply (French, 2012; Woodward, 2012). The film is thus

allowed to remain true to Hardy’s social comment by the act of cultural revision itself. The ‘rickety’

family horse, ‘Prince’, upon whom the d’Urbervilles depend for their livelihood, becomes a battered

old Jeep used to sell produce around neighbouring villages. The piercing of Prince’s breast ‘like a

sword’ by the ‘morning mail-cart’ becomes an automobile crash, with the horse’s ‘crimson drops’ of

blood represented by the strewn innards of watermelons (c.12:24- See Fig. 11; Hardy, 1891: I -iv).

Freida Pinto, as Trishna, channels Tess’s doleful movement from misery to misery with an


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accuracy largely missed by critics, with one noting that the actress was stuck in some sort of

‘passive victim mode’ (Woodward, 2012). Yet Pinto’s relatively vacant performance underlines the

irresistible social pressures that work upon her character in an extremely Hardyesque fashion.

Certainly, Trishna is able to have an abortion due to the wonders of modern medicine and changing

attitudes to gynaecology, but it is the very absence of a pregnancy which subsequently causes her

lover, Jai, to leave her in disillusionment, rather than the existence of one at all, as in the novel. Jai

(Riz Ahmed) is perhaps the most interesting aspect of Winterbottom’s reimagining of Tess. Jai

represents the dual, and dualistic, suitors of the novel: the nouveau riche wastrel Alec D’Urberville

on the one hand, and the naïve romantic Angel Clare on the other. The alternating depiction of Jai as

the traditional ‘hero’ (observe his arrival on the white steed motorcycle at c.39:40) and finally as the

dissolute rapist, using Trishna as some sort of reliable sex slave, neatly reconciles a thematic

question that Winterbottom felt was ‘crudely’ handled in Hardy’s novel (Roddick, 2012). But this

composite Jai also draws attention to how recontextualisation may, paradoxically, produce a more

visceral, ‘true’ adaptation of Hardy than the source novel itself: ‘I just thought, ‘That might be all

right in a Victorian context, but for a modern British guy, I just don’t think it will resonate.’ Most

people are a mixture of both’ (Roddick, Ibid.).

That the expediency of presenting an Alec/Angel composite causes the viewer to re-examine

and appreciate anew the symbolic functions of the novel’s characters implies that adaptation can in

fact inform or affect our perceptions of the so-called ‘source text’. This retro-protean view of

adaptation recalls Derrida’s dismantling of the ‘original’ and ‘copy’ (Stam, 2005b:8). According to

this view, ‘the auratic prestige of the original does not run counter to the copy; rather, the prestige of

the original is created by the copies…’If ‘adaptation’ is taken as an equable term to ‘copy’, one may

argue that Winterbottom’s making strange through adaptation instigates a reappraisal of the vital

elements of the source he is adapting, and so the likes of Trishna can be seen to exist on an equal

Hardyesque plane with Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Moreover, the existence of a previous Hindi

transplantation of the Tess story (Prem Granth, 1996, dir. Rajiv Kapoor (Ingham, 2003:223)), as

well as the knowing casting of Frieda Pinto, who previously starred in the Mumbai-set Slumdog

Millionaire (2008, dir. Danny Boyle), places Trishna not only in a matrix of Hardyesque adaptation,

but also a wider matrix of Eastern cultural commodification.

Therefore it seems that with Trishna, Winterbottom is responding to the ineffably

postmodern dialogue of the materiality of filmmaking, as he places in interaction not only his film

and its adaptational source, but also the film business itself, and the canny audience. Robert Stam

argues that postmodern adaptation exhibits an ‘intertextual dialogism’ which creates an ‘endless

permutation of textual traces… [working] both within and across cultures’ (Stam, 2005a:4,15). It is


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on this consciousness of intertextual materiality that we will now focus, with an examination of

Winterbottom’s ‘reading’ of Tristram Shandy (1759-1767).

About half an hour into A Cock and Bull Story (2006), ‘Steve Coogan’ (the actor portraying

both Tristram Shandy, and his bewigged father, Walter) is shown being interviewed by journalist

Anthony Wilson2. Addressing the purportedly ‘unfilmable’ nature of the novel he is participating in

the adaptation of, Coogan responds with the trite, seemingly rehearsed line, ‘Tristram Shandy was a

postmodern classic written before there was any modernism to be post about’ (c.36:58). The

glibness of the fictive-Coogan’s ‘soundbite’ captures the literarily self-reflexive nature of A Cock

and Bull Story, drawing attention to how redundant an attempt at a serious, or scholastically po-

faced, adaptation of Sterne’s work would be (Davies, 2006: 14).

Winterbottom’s treatment of his antecedent text in this adaptation recalls Linda Hutcheon’s

description of the strange contingencies at work in the production of postmodern literature:

‘Postmodernism signals its dependence by its use of the canon, but reveals its rebellion through

ironic abuse of it’ (Hutcheon, 1988: 130). Therefore, as a modern-day television crew interviews a

cast member within an adaptation of an eighteenth century novel, with a voice-over narration

promising that the ‘interview… will be part of the DVD package’ (c.37:28), we may see that

Winterbottom is no longer simply engaged with what Genette broadly defined as ‘a relationship of

co-presence between two texts’ (Genette, 1982:1). Rather, to use another term from Genette’s

revised intertextual taxonomy, by making a ‘film about making a film’ in an attempt to ‘make a film

of a book about writing a book’, Winterbottom actually engages in ‘metatextuality’, evoking

through his enterprise ‘the critical relation between one text and another’ (Sandiford, 2006; Genette,

1982:4; Stam, 2005b:28). However, Genette’s classification of metatextuality was more specifically

a description of the implicit interrogation of one text by another, as a result of the ‘textual

transcendence of the text’, with one speaking of another ‘without necessarily citing it…sometimes

without even naming it’ (1982:1, 4). Perhaps a better description of the self-conscious commentary

of one discourse upon another (film and novel) in A Cock and Bull Story would be the concept

Genette described in Narrative Discourse: ‘metadiegesis’, or ‘the events told [within a narrative] in

the second degree’ (1980: 228). This metadiegesis allows an Authentic-Looking Costume Drama,

depicting Elizabeth Shandy’s painful Georgian obstetrics, to be suddenly undermined at c.27:43, as

the camera pans beyond the edge of the diegetic frame to take in the Authentic-Looking Costume

Drama’s ‘Director’ Mark (Jeremy Northam) and fellow production staff, causing the eighteenth

century to coalesce with the twenty-first (See Figs. 12-13).

2 Wilson himself was subject to the Winterbottom treatment in Twenty Four Hour Party People (2002). Aptly, he was

portrayed by Coogan in a biopic which wore its Shandyan playfulness on its sleeve: ‘…I agree with John Ford.

When you have to choose between the truth and the legend... print the legend.’ (c. 25:38)


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Winterbottom’s metatext does not function solely as a ‘film à clef’, observing that Sterne

‘played with exactly the same things’ the director ‘plays with’, swapping ‘cinematic form’ for the

novelist’s discursive ‘literary form’ (Porton, 2006:101; Winterbottom, quoted in D’Arcy, 2006:95;

Davies, 2006b). Instead, Winterbottom turns the screw tighter, doubling Genette’s second degree of

narrative by observing the exigencies of the ‘actual shoot’, be they budget cuts (‘The original

people who agreed to finance it backed out before shooting began’) or the difficulties of not

including everything that the book contains (‘Hardly anybody’s in the film’ –c.59:39) only to

‘incorporate them into the script’ of the faux-film-shoot (Winterbottom, in Porton, 2006:102). This

folding of real life contingencies into artistic enterprise further captures the spirit, if not the letter, of

Sterne’s work. To wit, during the course of Tristram Shandy’s composition, the ‘vile influenza’

which struck Sterne filtered into Shandy’s discourse (Keymer,1994: xvii). At one point, Sterne-as-

Tristram must ‘take my leave’ of his readers for a ‘twelve-month’, after which he promises to

return, ‘unless this vile cough kills me in the meantime’. It would appear that the inconvenient

reality of ill-health, which Tristram (and Sterne) dread ‘worse than the devil’, affected Sterne’s

composition to such a degree that he had no recourse but to include it in his narrative (Sterne,

Tristram Shandy, IV.xxxii.270; VII.i.385).

These convening metatextual pressures recall Stam’s ‘endless permutations of textual

traces’, creating a strangely recursive tension between realities adapted into the film, and the

elements of adaptation that simply ‘extend ideas that were in the book’ (Winterbottom, in D’Arcy,

2006:94). To wit, the scene in which the creative team (actors Jeremy Northam, James Fleet and Ian

Hart playing thinly-veiled analogues of Winterbottom, Andrew Eaton and Frank Cottrell Boyce

respectively, in a further metatextual mirroring), meet in the hotel to discuss late script changes,

while deciding whether to have the ‘chicken or the beef’ (c.58:30). The interspersing of script-

wrangling with mundane chatter about food and Kevin Costner grounds the scene in a colloquial

‘reality’, as well as nodding towards the digressive chaos of Shandy’s Life and Opinions. As the

group discusses the developing iterations of the script—

MARK:

Yorick isn’t even in the film…

JOE:

He used to be.

— the narrativisation of Tristram Shandy is itself narrativised, and the ‘version of the book’

that Winterbottom has chosen to put onto film is versioned before our eyes (Winterbottom, in

Nayman, 2006:85).


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Despite the intricate ‘millefeuille of truth, fiction and self-referentiality’ that Winterbottom

builds in his adaptation-as-metatext, the film still exhibits numerous interesting instances of

intertextual ‘quotation’, ‘focussing and crystallizing’ the self-consciousness of the whole exercise

(Orr, 2003:17). Thus the film’s soundtrack, ‘most of it old and borrowed,’ samples the ‘rich movie

themes’ of Nino Rota (French: 2006). All four of the themes sampled originally featured in 8½

(1963). 8½ is a film itself preoccupied with the process of filmmaking, and the play of

autobiography in the relationship between the film’s protagonist, famous director Guido Anselmi

(Marcello Mastroiani), and the film’s real-life director, Federico Fellini. Furthermore, A Cock and

Bull Story recycles ‘Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds’ and ‘An Eye for Optical Theory’ by

Michael Nyman, another frequent collaborator with Winterbottom3. Nyman’s appearance on the

soundtrack of 9 Songs is metadiegetically referenced when the central couple are shown attending

‘Michael Nyman’s 60th

birthday concert’ within the film itself (c.55.55). His use in A Cock and Bull

Story, therefore, catalyses the filmic intertextuality of Winterbottom’s musical references to 8½, and

specifically turns the emphasis back upon Winterbottom’s own career. That is, the metadiegesis of A

Cock and Bull Story spills out into a metatextual symphony.

In the film’s final scenes, however, Winterbottom grasps for an even more dense textual

complexity, as his pitched play of art-as-life-as-art is skewed by a scene in a cinema (c.86:36). The

scene depicts the viewing of the final scene of the film-within-a-film, suitably with Tristram Shandy

finally born, and as the lights come up, we appear to be viewing the same meta-cast and crew as

that seen ‘behind the scenes’ throughout. However, as the group spills into the foyer for a drink and

discussion, the film’s carefully balanced distance from reality seems to dissolve, with various

performers apparently breaking character, the camera simply recording ‘real’ conversation. Kelly

McDonald, who played Steve Coogan’s girlfriend ‘off-camera’ queries her own performance in a

film that her character couldn’t have possibly appeared in: ‘I always forget how short I am’

(c.87:53). Similarly, Gillian Anderson, who as ‘Gillian Anderson’ was involved in a wry satire on

the necessity of American ‘star names’ in precariously financed pictures, bemoans how perfunctory

her appearance in the film actually amounts to be: ‘I can’t believe that was the whole fucking

movie’ (c.87:53). Of course, intercut amongst these moments, some of the contrivances of the film’s

conceit are still maintained, as the analogues for the heads of production are shown tussling with

two financiers (Ronni Ancona and Greg Wise) over a promised battle scene, scrapped because it

‘wasn’t funny’(c.88:06).

Winterbottom owned up to this strange unravelling, ‘I kind of liked the idea that there would

3 Nyman’s work has featured in three Winterbottom features apart from Cock and Bull: Wonderland, The Claim, and 9

Songs, although he only officially composed and performed music for Wonderland and The Claim (See McFarlane

and Williams, 2009: 11).


11

be slightly more of that pulling back, away from the fictional crew’, as if just another experiment in

self-consciousness (Winterbottom, in Nayman, 2006:87). Yet his intermingling of conspicuous

fiction with possible shafts of ‘reality’ discomforts the audience, drawing attention once more to the

codes we use to comprehend a text, and highlighting the innate materiality of such textuality. By

problematizing this materiality, presenting an involuted fictive text only to subvert said text with

codes apparently aligned to the ‘reality’ of documentary, Winterbottom’s work begins to question

the generally accepted limits of textuality itself, recalling Vincent B. Leitch: ‘The world is text.

Nothing stands behind. There is no escape’ (1982:58). It is to this deconstruction of the boundaries

of world and text, and their ramifications on our idea of Winterbottom’s intertextuality, which we

will now turn.

In an interview regarding his myth-making depiction of the 1980s Manchester music scene

in 24 Hour Party People (2002), Winterbottom plainly states, ‘I don’t think there’s a border

between fiction and reality’, and in his appropriation of the ‘documentary technique adopted in the

services of downplaying narrative’ one immediately notes a fascination with blurring the conceptual

boundaries of ‘real life’ and fictional construct (Winterbottom in Charles, 2002: c.7:30; Brown,

2008: 413). The previously mentioned 9 Songs is an object exercise in this blurring. Interspersed

amongst the cinéma vérité filming of nine live rock concerts, Winterbottom charts a relationship

between two people, mainly through the depiction of multiple acts of unsimulated sex, captured

comprehensively on film. Of course, despite the ‘real’ sex Matt and Lisa have on the screen, what

we are in fact viewing are actors Kieran O’Brien and Margo Stilley engaging in perfunctory

intercourse for the edification of an (albeit small) film crew, therefore undermining ultimate

verisimilitude (Rodrick, 2005: 75). An element of ‘reality’ is distilled, but it is still encased within

the fictive world of Matt, Lisa, and the music.

The fusion of this qualified ‘reality’ with cinematic narrative can be traced to the

fundamental importance Winterbottom places upon story in developing his projects – ‘they’re just

stories that interest me… I look for the logic of the story to point the way toward how the film

should be made’ (Smith, 2000: 46-47). Story acts to structure even some of his ‘most confusing’

films in terms of the authenticity of scenario depicted, as with In This World (2002), in which two

Afghani youths leave their Pakistan refugee camp for a perilous journey to a better life in London

(Bennett, 2007: 294). Both Jamal and Enayat were non-professional actors, real-life Afghani

refugees ‘from the real world that the film seeks to represent’, therein exemplifying Eisenstein’s

technique of typage, or the ‘substitution of “naturally expressive” types for actors’ (McFarlane and

Williams, 2009:34; Eisenstein, 1977:8). Despite our awareness that we are watching ‘real people’,

taking a treacherous path on which many desperate individuals truly have fallen, ‘we never lose


12

sight’ that the journey they are participating in is ultimately ‘staged’, an innately textual exercise,

and one Winterbottom deliberately engages in (Loshitzky, 2010: 121). The realism that such a film

reaches for does however provide an important mirror, through which Winterbottom can increase

the resonance of his story. Indeed, the recursive mirroring at work in A Cock and Bull Story is

complemented by Winterbottom and his screenwriter Toni Grisoni’s use of ‘real-life [incidents] as a

precursor’ to scripted events, as with the scene when Jamal effectively bribes a customs officer with

a Walkman (McFarlane and Williams, 2009: 33; c.20:43). The recursive mirror reflected another

dimension in the story of Jamal and Enayat when the ‘actor’ who portrayed ‘Jamal’, Jamal Udin

Torabi, ‘turned up in London and claimed asylum’ days after shooting ended (Gibbons, 2002).

Regardless of the frame a film inevitably imposes upon any depicted event, examining

another of Winterbottom’s so-called ‘docu-dramas’, Everyday (2012), further complicates the

elements of constructed text and ‘reality’ which the director places in dialogue (Bedell, 2004). Here

four real-life siblings play the children of Karen (Shirley Henderson) and the incarcerated Ian (John

Simm). The four ‘grow and age’ in real time, a dramatic process ‘that could never be realistically

achieved by clever casting or special effects’ and which resulted from Winterbottom revisiting the

children twice a year for half a decade (Mullen, 2013; See Figs. 14-15)4. By recording, rather than

depicting, time ‘passing in the real world’, Winterbottom captures an unassailably authentic aspect

of life which subordinates even the fictive frame placed over it (Winterbottom in Barton, 2012).

Art’s acquiescence in the face of ‘reality’ here in fact emphasises the emotive effect of

Winterbottom’s larger textualisation in crafting a family drama. This recalls how the unblinking

documentation of the butchering of a cow in In This World reminds the audience that the story they

are viewing is one of real-world consequence (c.07:40 – See Fig. 16).

Ultimately, as with In This World, in which Winterbottom accommodated real and staged

events by presenting the film as ‘a documentary of the journey we organized for Jamal and

Enayatullah’, Everyday demonstrates that even Winterbottom’s docu-dramas can be considered in

the light of adaptation (Winterbottom in Bennett, 2007: 294 – my italics). Using ‘reality’ as a tool,

Winterbottom takes the world and again versions it, ‘adapting’ the source material of life in a

similar way to the aforementioned process of Wagner’s ‘analogy’, departing just enough from the

‘source text’ for the ‘purpose of making… [a] work of art’ (Wagner, 1975, in Mitchell, 2005:85).

But in a manner somewhat akin to Brecht’s ‘alienation effect’, this versioning also draws attention

to the essentially mediated nature of reality and its fundamental kinship with textuality. After all,

‘reality’ is always ‘something… partially created by the media through which it is presented’

4 In this respect, Winterbottom’s film echoes the temporal-realist tradition of Michael Apted’s popular Up Series, in

which fourteen individuals are revisited on film every seven years, having first been depicted in 1964, at seven years

old.


13

(Brecht, 1961:130; Allen, 2000:182).

The ‘bare essentials’ of life lend themselves to this type of adaptation because alone, as Lisa

Mullen remarks, they are ‘just not that interesting – if they were, we wouldn’t need cinema’

(Mullen, 2013). In the adaptation of real-life, as compared to a pre-existing textual apparatus,

however, the adaptation process inscribes a non-textual phenomena into a specifically textual

medium. Effectively, even in Winterbottom’s least ostensibly text-centric or literary works, the

‘cinematization’ process, in which the transferral of source text to screen is ‘automatically different

and original due to the change of medium’, acts to create an undeniable textuality (Stam, 2005b:

17). The very textualisation process at work in films such as Everyday and In This World is

analogous to a form of writing. Therefore, when Winterbottom turns the world into a text,

reconstituting the amorphous nature of life into a semiotically comprehendable form, he again

demonstrates Astruc’s idea of La Caméra-Stylo, rendering the generic differences between

‘documentary film’ and ‘literary adaptation’ essentially redundant. His versioning of the lives of the

four Kirk siblings as they grow up in Everyday is therefore akin to his versioning of antecedent

literary texts into narrative feature films. But this writing process is itself contingent upon a

complex and assimilated process of reading. Thus, these films can all be seen within a larger

context of literary dexterity, encoding Winterbottom as the littérateur film-maker par excellence.


14

References

Filmography:

9 Songs. Dir. Michael Winterbottom. Perf. Kieran O'Brien and Margo Stilley. Optimum, 2004.

The Claim. Dir. Michael. Winterbottom. Perf. Wes Bentley, Peter Mullan and Sarah Polley. Pathé,

2000.

A Cock and Bull Story. Dir. Michael Winterbottom. Perf. Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon. Lions Gate,

2005.

Everyday. Dir. Michael Winterbottom. Perf. John Simm and Shirley Henderson. Soda Pictures,

2013.

In This World. Dir. Michael Winterbottom. Perf. Jamal Udin Torabi and Enayatullah. BBC, 2002.

Jude. Dir. Michael Winterbottom. Perf. Christopher Eccleston, Kate Winslet, and Liam

Cunningham. PolyGram, 1996.

Trishna. Dir. Michael Winterbottom. Perf. Freida Pinto and Riz Ahmed. Artificial Eye, 2011.

Twenty Four Hour Party People. Dir. Michael Winterbottom. Perf. Steve Coogan, Shirley

Henderson, John Simm. Pathe, 2002.

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19

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20

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21

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22

Figures:

Figs. 3-5: Thomas Hardy’s Rom-Com Montage.

Figs. 1-2: Jude’s ‘Male Gaze’: The idealisation of Sue Bridehead in Jude (1996)


23

Figs. 7-10: Staged Performances in The Claim (2000).

Fig. 6: She drinks, too: Sue Bridehead the New Woman in Jude (1996).


24

Figs. 12-13: The heritage cinema spills out of its frame in A Cock

and Bull Story (2006).

Fig. 11: The Beginning of tragedy: Visual metaphor in Trishna (2011).


25

Figs. 14-15: From infant to schoolboy: The ‘real-time’ growth of Shaun

(Shaun Kirk) in Everyday (2013).

Fig. 16: ‘Real-world consequence’: A cow slaughtered on-camera in In This World (2002).

Documents

Michael Winterbottom, Adaptation, and Intertextuality