It took the movies to make me start reading Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. My shrinking Day attention span told me to save it for a long convalescence, but when I heard that Jane ‘The Piano’ Campion was to adapt it for the cinema, I bought a brand-new hardback. By halfway through, I was bemused. I wondered how any film director – even the hugely talented Campion – could turn this brilliant but subtle book, with its psychological construction, into a film. 

According to the great and wise American B-movie director Sam Fuller, cinema is all about ‘action and emotion’. Jane Campion knows this and her literary adaptation manqué, The Piano, took the generic elements of ‘literary’ cinema – stiff costumes, rigid social cues, disagreeable domestic arrangements and great locations – and used them to frame an original story full of dramatic action.

So dominant was the mood of passive bourgeois intellectual disaffection during the heyday of the classic novel that proper adaptations – the Merchant Ivory versions of Forster and James for example – are more often about inaction. 

Portrait of a Lady strikes me as typically constrained, more so even than Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, which Martin Scorsese seemed to treat as a challenge to his ability as a film-maker to keep the audience watching. He brought it off only by using every technical sleight of hand he could think of to enliven the ossified world he was describing. Campion is nowhere near as coldly proficient a film-maker and I’m left wondering if her Portrait will leave her open to the most damning accusations in the film critics’ lexicon. Will her film be described as uncinematic? 

If you’re mad enough to read a lot of film criticism you’ll soon come across the word cinematic. It’s mostly misused as a way of saying that a film has visual impact – its real meaning is as the adjectival form of cinema, and surely any part of a film must be of the cinema. Yet the misuse has become like a badge worn by cinema purists in an ongoing secret war against those who like their movies to be as much like filmed plays as possible (stand up you TV drama commissioning editors). Purists argue that cinema has its own underused, highly visual (‘cinematic’) language that fits in with Fuller’s notions of action and emotion.

Among the more persuasive purists are such literary figures as Graham Greene and David Mamet. Greene was a film critic from 1935 to 1940 for the Spectator and Night and Day. He had grown up loving the silent and was dismayed by the way the ‘talkies’ had taken the fluid associative poetry out of cinema imagery and let it anchored to the sound stages. He therefore lambasted most of the Hollywood products of the Thirties and saved his praise for documentaries and Soviet cinema, which he felt made better use of the medium. When Greene turned to screenwriting, he ended up collaborating with the director Carol Reed, who had similar ideas. The Third Man is a superb example of the kind of cinema they dreamed of. 

Mamet’s approach to filming is described with typical pugnacity in his excellent book On Directing Film. He argues that most Hollywood films use the camera to follow the actors around, whereas the more effective and correct use of cinema is to ‘tell the story in cuts’ from one image to another, because otherwise ‘you have not got dramatic action, you have narration’. This is a much simplified version of Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage which was also a major influence on Greene. But Mamet also puts the finger on the great fear associated with adapting fiction – that the director will simply end up illustrating a narration of the text – and what genre is more prone to following the actors around than the literary adaptation?

Again, you can see a story told in cuts to beautiful effect in Mamet’s House of Games. Yet when purist critics describe a film as cinematic, this is not usually the kind of filming they have in mind. Far more often they are thinking in terms of impressive camera movements such as crane shots or smooth steadicam manoeuvres through a crowd – paradoxically the exact methods used by Scorsese to enliven The Age of Innocence. 

This confusion about what constitutes an ideal use of the camera beleaguers the debate about how best to adapt novels for the cinema. Film purists argue that movies should never try too hard to be faithful to the texts they are drawn from, whereas novel readers want to see what they’ve read on screen. The purists’ assumption is that literary means loquacious: long explanatory speeches to camera; voice-over narration telling you what you’re seeing while you’re seeing it, etc. Eisenstein, the god of montage, would never have taken such a reductionist view. In his essay ‘Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today’, Eisenstein describes how the great silent-era director D W Griffith, while inventing most of the techniques of narrative film-making, consciously was inspired by Dickens. 

The uncomfortable fact for film purists is that what audiences want to see on screen is pretty much the same as what they want to read, whether it be costume drama or the megabuck lawyer thrillers. We are in the middle of a period of literary dominance in Hollywood, and massively successful courtroom dramas such as Presumed Innocent, A Few Good Men and The Pelican Brief represent everything purists despise – they’re static, talky and audiences love them. Those who would point to the violent, visceral movies of Quentin Tarantino as an antidote should note his penchant for long inconsequential speeches. There are simple reasons why the pure cinema espoused by Eisenstein, Greene and Mamet will never catch on in Hollywood – it’s too difficult to do well and the studio executives would never get it. How much easier to continue to give audiences what they clearly enjoy: a good narrative without the effort of reading.

With The Piano Campion showed that she can go one better and please both camps (although not those who dislike flagrant mannerism). Whether she’ll build her own action content into Portrait of a Lady or concentrate on a language of small gesture remains a matter of guesswork. Either way, it’s clear that when the world’s finest visual film-makers, such as Scorsese and Campion, are turning to literary adaptation, the film purist has nothing to do but read on.