Paper No - 9 Pinter's " The Birthday Party" : The Film and the Play by Harriet Deer and Irving Deer
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Roll No : 18
Paper – 9 : The Modernist Literature
M.A. ( English) : Sem – 3
Batch : 2016 – 18
Email : meghatrivedi666@gmail.com
Submitted to : Smt. S. B. Gardi, Department of English MK Bhavnagar University
Topic : Pinter's “ The Birthday Party” : The Film and the Play
By Harriet Deer and IrvinDeer
Introduction about Harold Pinter :-
Harold Pinter , born in 1930, English playwright, known for his so- called Comedies of Menace . He is also noted for his unique use of dialogue, which exposes his characters’' alienation from each other and explores the layers of meaning produced by pauses and silence. In 2005 pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. He is an English playwright who achieved international success as one of the most complex post world war II dramatists. Pinter's plays are note their use of silence to increase tension, understatement, and cryptic small talk. Equally recognizable are the ' Pinteresque' themes nameless menace, erotic fantasy, obsession and jealousy, family hatred and mental disturbance.
Harold Pinter was born in Hackney, a working class neighborhood in London's East End, the son of a tailor. Both of his parents were Jewish, born in England. As a child pinter got on well with his mother, but he didn't get on well his father, who was a strong disciplinarian. On the outbreak of World War II Pinter was evacuated from the city to Cornwall; to be wrenched from his parents was a traumatic event for Pinter. Pinter was educated at Hackney Downs Grammar School, where he acted in school productions. At school one of Pinter's main intellectual interests was English literature, particularly poetry. He also works of Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway. After two unhappy years Pinter left his studies at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. In 1950 pinter started to publish poems in Poetry under the name Harold Pinta. He worked as a bit-part actor on a BBC Radio program, focus on Football Pools. He also studied for a short time at the central school of speech and drama and toured from 1951 to 1952 with a Shakespearean troupe. In 1953 he appeared during Donald Wolfit's 1953 season at the King's theater in Hammersmith.
Pinter was married from 1956 to the actress Vivien merchant. After his first marriage dissolved in 1980, pinter married the biographer Lady Antonia Fraser. In January 2002nPinter was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus, he died in 24 December 2008. (wikipedia)
Pinter's major plays originate often from a single, powerful visual image. They are usually set in a single room, whose occupants are threatened by forces or people whose precise intentions neither the characters nor the audience can define. The struggle for survival or identity dominates the action of his characters. Language is not only used as a means of communication but as a weapon. Beneath the words. There is a silence of fear, rage and domination, fear of intimacy.
Pinteresque :-
Susan Harris smith observes: “ The term ' Pinteresque' has had an established place in the English language for almost thirty years. The OED defines it as ' of or relating to the British playwright, Harold Pinter, or his works'; thus , like a snake swallowing its own tail the definition forms the impenetrable logic of a closed circle and begs the tricky question of what the word specifically means. Pinter's plays are typically characterized by implications of threat and strong feeling produced through colloquial language, apparent triviality, and long pauses. (wekipedia)
Comedy of menace : -
Comedy of menace is a term used to describe the plays of David Campton and Harold pinter by drama critic Irving Wardle, borrowed from the subtitle of Campton's play The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace, in reviewing their plays in Encore in 1958. “ Comedy of Menace” and “ A Comedies Of Menace” caught on and have been used generally in advertisements an in critical accounts, notices and reviews to describe Pinter's early plays and some of his later work as well.
The Birthday party – the comedy of menace – is a tragedy with a number of comic elements- it is a comedy, which also produces an overwhelming tragic effect. Throughout the play we are kept amused and yet throughout the play we find ourselves also on the brink of terror. Some indefinable and vague fear keeps our nerves on an edge. We feel uneasy all the time even when we are laughing or smiling with amusement. This dual quality gives to the play a unique character.
·Menace evolves from actual violence in the play or from an underlying sense of violence throughout the play.
·It may develop from of feeling of uncertainty and insecurity. Create danger or fear.
·This feeling of menace establishes a strong connection between character’s predicament and audience's personal anxieties. (study materials)
Pinter Pause : -
One of the “ two silences”- when Pinter's stage direction indicate pause and silence when his characters are not speaking at all – has become a “ trademark” of pinter's dialogue and known as the “ Pinter Pause”. This type of pause Pinter used well in the play, because some time “ Silence speaks louder than words”. He used two types of silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. This speech is speaking of a language locked beneath it. That is its continual reference. The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its place. When true silence falls we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness. So these pause and silence played a very vital role in his play. (wekipedia)
Pinter's The Birthday Party; The Film and the play
Pinter wrote both the play and the film of The Birthday Party. But when we read the play and watch the film at that time we find such a different between both. Because in writing this kind of effect we can't felt but in movie we find the various effects and we can feel also. Because in movie camera played a very vital role. Through the camera language here pinter also present many aspects very clear. The play was first produced in 1958 and published in 1959. The film was produced and released in 1968. The play Birthday party written in 3 act. Movie start with the teaser sound and car scene. It is very close up scene. He knows the expressive means available in each medium. A comparison of the film and play versions of the Birthday party therefore affords us a rare opportunity to gain insight into how a reconception of a play into film may affect the dramatic experience it communicates. (Deer)
Texture of the play : -
pinter portray the Texture. So texture means absurdist idea. He changes in the film have to do essentially not with the sequence of events or the dialogue but with the way Pinter treats the texture of play. In a sense, all he gives us is texture – the sounds and sights of a world without structure; a world , as we are shown clearly in the opening outdoor sequence of the film, which seems to be all meaningless action filled with swirling visuals and inchoate sound. The car scene shot through the side view mirror, mirror image represents the eternity of life and the world. It's represent the reality of life. The loud noises also shows absurdity of life. (Deer)
Cinematic language :-
Subject – Trivia in film as well as in play
The subject, in fact both the play and the film seems to be trivia. In the play Pinter establishes this subject as central to the action with the opening conversation between Meg and Petey. She asks him to read meaningless “ bits” form the newspaper, which he does intermittently. She engages in meaningless things. Both discussed on the subject of baby. Whole breakfast scene also seems like trivia, it is serial episode. In both the play and the film the atmosphere is also reminiscent of those scenes in Ionesco where husbands and wives talk to one another as if they were total strangers. In pinter's stage play this atmosphere stems the tension between the tenacity with which Meg makes conversation and the inanity of her comments. (Deer)
Magnification techniques :-
This magnification techniques used well in film by Pinter not in play. The sense of emptiness and menace comes primarily from the way the camera records and magnifies the trivia and sloth of Meg's world rather than from the dialogue between Meg and petey. Through the extreme close up scene Pinter gave the important of Cornflakes. Meg sloppily pouring the cornflakes into a bowl, spilling half of them onto a filthy newspaper, picking them up off the newspaper, putting them back into the bowl, and then handing them to petey. Later we find that her burn his fried bread, try to scrape off the burnt part, and then present it to him as if it were a gourmet dish, a sequence she repeats when stanley finally comes down for breakfast.
It is Pinter's purpose in both the play and the film to magnify trivia to a state of grotesquerie. But where, in the play , the trivia resides primarily in the language, the film presents a genuine, almost literal magnification, both in terms of its amount and size. Even sound seem threatening. Loud ripping sounds of McCann tearing his meaningless strips of newspaper, Stanley beating his toy drum, it is like aspects of the surreal.
Example of surreal quality is the camera takes a close up of Stanely washing his face in the dirty kitchen sink. The net effect of pinter's magnification of trivia in the film is to create a greater sympathy for stanley in the film viewer than in the theater audience. So the camera angles also work well in the scene of McCann and Goldberg. Stanley's weakness in the face of the threats against him is also emphasized through camera angles. The camera angle shows him jammed against the wall or sitting down with his two assailants clearly in command pressing him from front and side. The close ups of his filthy clothing, of his unshaven face these all expressing the weak, slovenly, ineffectual resistance he puts up. (Deer)
Mise-en-scene :-
Mise-en-scene meance arrangement of actors and scenery. The birthday party sequence, where the most trivial objects, the environment, the mise-en-scene itself. From the very high shots before the party in which we see the room as a cage in which Stanley paces like a trapped animal through to the game of blind- man's bluff at the end of the party. Moving unevenly from close up to extreme close up on such trivia as chair and table legs, Stanley's shoes and the toy drum, the camera gives us more than a sense of the threat they suddenly pose to the blindfolded Stanly; it creates the sense of these objects are moving against Stanely, not simply lurking in wait for him. Beyond that the violent lurching of the camera gives us both Stanley's experience and a wider, more objective view of him, identification and objectivity at once.
Pinter used the blackout different in the play and the film. Through visual treatment of trivial objects. In film he used blackout but is filled with unmotivated, erratic traces of colored lights and animal sounds. It is a visualization of Stanley's descent into madness which, as the camera has already suggested, stems not only from the terror incluced by McCann and Goldberg but from the world he lives and which he has helped to create through his own slovenliness, cowardice and violence. The contradictories of sympathy and disgust which the stage blackout and rape achieve. Stanley's efforts to find order within the chaos both of the external world and of his own soul. Stanley's struggle to give meaningful shape to the reality of his situation. At the end Stanley represented ironically clean shaven and well dressed for the first time, looking much more than ever the gentleman in control of his own destiny, is less able than ever to seek that control. He is a creature capable at best of grunts, essentially an object, empty, without human identity, meaning or will, a man in appearance only. It is like rebirth of him. At the end Stanley is being taken away by McCann and Goldberg in the same black car which we find at the binging. This time all the chaotic visual and sound impressions are absent.
Pinter's shift from an emphasis on people in the play to an emphasis on things in the film is at the least a preconception of the play's conflict which takes into account film's capacity to make objects volitional. World moving toward dehumanization, a world of terror. It is to Pinter's credit as a film artist that he can exploit the capacities of his medium to dramatize that inevitability. (Deer, The Birthday Party: The Film and the Play)
Works Cited
Deer, Harriet Deer and Irving. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/3199140?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents>.
—. "The Birthday Party: The Film and the Play." jstor (n.d.).
"study materials."
wekipedia. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristics_of_Harold_Pinter%27s_work>.
wekipedia. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristics_of_Harold_Pinter%27s_work>.
wikipedia. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Pinter>.
Prepared by : Megha Trived
very well organized one.
ReplyDeleteHow far do you think that movie is adapted from book or is there any changes?
Thanks.
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