Mightier Than the Pen
Parsing the Language of Film

When she was a junior at Cornell in the late 60s, Professor Millicent Marcus spent a semester studying abroad in Florence, Italy. An English major, she didn’t speak a word of Italian. "I went because my friends were going," she chuckles. Her eyes crinkle in smiles through oversized glasses that extend past her face like the cross of a letter t.

She lived with a "very bohemian" family: he was a painter; she was a cultured woman."I just adored them," effuses Marcus. "I didn’t know any Italian but learned it in three months because I just had to talk to them."

During her stay, the Arno River overflowed its banks and raged through Florence. After the flood, groups of American students volunteered to help restore the devastated city. "It was the most amazing experience of my life," she recalls. "There I was, sweeping up the church of Santa Croce, helping clean up a hospital and the Biblioteca Nazionale. We lived without electricity or running water for six weeks, and it was great." The press gave voice to the sentiments of a grateful city, calling the American students "angeli del fango"—angels of the mud.

Marcus has since cleaned up and gone on to earn a doctorate in medieval Italian literature at Yale. She taught at the University of Texas at Austin for 24 years and is now the Mariano DiVito Professor of Italian Studies at Penn. She is also director of the School’s budding Film Studies Program.

The focus of her research began shifting toward film while she was a new faculty member at Texas. The Department of French and Italian was planning to offer a course on Italian cinema. Relates Marcus, "We all looked at each other and said, ‘Who’s going to teach this course?’" The matter was decided in the usual way: the senior faculty turned to the less senior, who assigned the task to their juniors. "I was the new arrival, and I didn’t have anybody to turn to and say, ‘You do it.’ I just sort of invented the course and stayed five minutes ahead of the students—if that."

Besides having expertise in medieval Italian literature, Marcus specializes in modern Italian culture, using an interdisciplinary approach that includes literature, history, and film. A former Guggenheim and Fulbright fellow, she has written scholarly articles, reviews, and encyclopedia entries on Italian cinema and on the intersection of literature and film. Of her three books, two have been on film: Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation (1993) and Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (1986). She is at work on another, which will take a look at Italian cinema of the 80s and 90s.

An important focus of her work has been on how filmmakers adapt the written word to a medium that works primarily with "a language of images and sounds." Readers create their own film in their heads as they progress through the scenes, characters, and action of a book, says Marcus, and they become very jealous of their own personal film. "It’s our creation, and we’re very angry when we compare it to someone else’s film that’s actually projected onto a screen and their version doesn’t live up to our ideal film."

That anger, she believes, comes out in the moralizing tone of "fidelity criticism," a way of thinking about film that sets up the literary text as the standard against which the film is to be judged. In their reviews, fidelity critics inevitably make lists of a film’s sins against its literary source. "It does violence to the text" and "It’s a gross injustice to the writer" are typical reproaches. The emotionally charged milieu that results makes it harder to probe with a scholarly passion a filmmaker’s creative slant on the story. Marcus notes pointedly that composers of "high" art forms such as opera and ballet are not held to the fidelity standard when they take inspiration from literary works.

Film adaptation, turning the written word into a movie, is interpretation, she asserts. It’s one reading among many possible readings of a book, and it would be unreasonable to expect any two films about that book—whether in an individual’s mind or on the screen—to be the same. Moreover, says Marcus, adaptation is essentially a translation of a story from one "language" into another. A good translation does not—and cannot—reproduce the source text element for element; it recasts the original, using all the quirks and shortcomings and uniquely expressive powers of the new language to produce, in some sense, a new text.

"All the nuances and richness you can get spread over 300 pages of a novel are going to get lost in a film," states Marcus. "But the film, with its economy of means, its compression, can have a different kind of power. It can explode meaning at you; it can bombard you with the richness of the visual images. The filmmaker must be granted a wide margin of creative freedom to re-invent the text in an audio-visual language. . . . The resulting infidelities can be considered fidelity to a higher, more vital principle—the impulse to creative freedom that lies at the heart of all cultural renewal."

The new Film Studies Program that Marcus directs is a first step toward helping undergraduates to think more deeply and more critically about what scholars have come to call visual culture. The program is currently an interdisciplinary minor for students interested in the history and interpretation of film. The minor requires a minimum of seven courses, including two introductory Film Studies classes, each of which involves the screening of about one film a week. One course analyzes films in the context of film history; the other takes a more critical or theoretical approach. At least three "cinema studies courses" that explore a national cinema, a genre, or a theme are needed, and at least one must focus on non-American cinema. The remaining electives may be film courses or courses related to film.

English professor Rebecca Bushnell, associate dean for arts and letters in SAS, has been one of the driving forces behind the new program. She envisions the Film Studies Program developing into an interdepartmental and interschool major, which could include internships with production companies. A graduate certificate is also being considered. The School hopes to hire a senior scholar who will take over leadership of the program in the fall. Marcus’ appointment is primarily in Italian studies, although she came to SAS in 1998 with the understanding that she would help launch and direct the fledgling Film Studies Program until a permanent director could be found.

In SAS, nurturing certain critical skills is one of the chief goals of a liberal arts education. The School of Arts and Sciences has set up curricular requirements that help develop competencies in writing and in understanding and manipulating quantitative information. A requirement for developing oral presentation skills is being weighed. It’s just as crucial, says Bushnell, for students embarking on life in the twenty-first century to be visually literate. "We live in such an intensely visual world with television and advertising and the Internet. We’re constantly having to interpret and understand visual messages. What we want to develop is a liberal arts approach to the understanding of this world of images." That approach will emphasize theory and criticism but will also incorporate some vocational elements of filmmaking such as screenwriting, shooting, editing, and other technical facets of the craft.

"When we talk to people who are in the film business," notes Bushnell, "they all say, ‘We don’t want people from film school. We can teach them how to operate a camera. We want people who can read and can write and who know something about the history and the aesthetics and the practice of film.’"

Marcus believes an educated person should be "cinemate," a term that implies more than knowledge about movies. With the saturation of daily life in visual images, understanding how visual culture affects us has important political implications. "Film studies teaches our students to think critically about all the visual media that pervade and invade our life so that they become critical receivers of media," she says. "My students say, after they have taken a film course, that they can never look at a film in the same way again. They are much more analytical. They don’t simply accept it; they are aware of how the film is working on them—and not just film but television and advertising. And this is another reason I think film studies is so important: to free us from this kind of power so that we are aware of the hold images can have on us."