Ten percent of adults suffer from a phobia – that is, “an uncontrollable, irrational and persistent fear of a specific object, situation or activity”. This is hardly surprising given the extensive and eclectic number of phobias on offer. These range from the fear of enclosed spaces (claustrophobia) to fear of bald people (peladophobia) to fear of long words (hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia – certainly long enough to give anyone a fright). Indeed, any Oxford student has a good chance of developing ergophobia, the fear of work, or at the very least, bibliophobia, the fear of books.

The question of why we have phobias has frustrated psychologists for centuries. Freudians detect a causal link between a child’s relationship with his parents and his behaviour in his later years. For example, adult agoraphobics (those who fear open spaces) may have once feared abandonment by a cold and unaffectionate mother, which has led to a fear of rejection or helplessness in adulthood. Alternatively, agoraphobia may develop in people seeking to avoid situations they have found painful or embarrassing in the past.
Others posit the theory that phobias are socially transmittable. Research suggests that half of all people with phobias have never had a painful experience with the object of their fears. It is therefore possible that, having heard of an injury inflicted on another person by a specific thing,  for this reason, someone has developed a vicarious fear of that  thing.

But do phobias develop over time or are they within us innately, from time immemorial? It is suggested that humans have acquired fears of certain animals and situations that, in our evolutionary history, threatened our survival, thereby explaining why snakes and spiders are the top two creature phobias. Our ancestors spent much time on the savannas in Africa, the women gathering food on their knees with their infants close by. Whereas lions could be seen from a distance and therefore avoided, spiders and snakes were concealed and so posed a more threatening ‘invisible’ danger.

Another factor to consider is whether or not phobias are culture-specific. Agoraphobia for example, is much more common in the US and Europe than in other areas of the world, while a phobia common in Japan, but almost nonexistent in the West, is taijin kyofusho, an incapacitating fear of offending others through one's own awkward social behaviour. Since modesty and a sensitive regard for others is strongly entrenched in Japanese society, tajin kyofusho can be seen as a product of Japan’s distinctive value system.

Katie Duval goes jolly hockey sticks for leaving home early
Perhaps for you ‘boarding school’ inspires the image of eccentric young Englishmen with wing collars eating scones for tea, living in an exclusive world of rugby matches and subjected to all that is “good for the soul” – iron bedsteads, wooden floors and cold showers. If we were still living in the 1850s this description might well be accurate. But I’m not here to defend the boarding schools of our  national history. In fact, quite the opposite. As is the case with so many of our historical institutions, the old has become obsolete. It is time to throw out anachronistic sterotypes and embrace the present.

Let’s keep it modern then. True to Blairite doctrine, boarding school places emphasis on ‘independence independence independence’. Living away from home forces you to care for yourself, managing your own affairs while learning how to cook, clean and sort your own laundry. This is perhaps not an immediately appealing idea in view of the more lazy comforts of home life and the attractions of motherly pampering, but surely one steeped in valuable lessons for the future. University is much less of a culture shock when you already know how to use the washing machine. Furthermore, thrown together with all ages, students cannot fail to reap the benefits of friendships with older boys/girls. Boarding school eases the transition from childhood into adulthood.
Then there are the friendships to be made. It cannot be denied that living alongside your friends, seeing them at both the worst and best of times, makes for closer and stronger relationships. Nothing beats the boarding school in fostering a spirit of comradeship, for where else do you develop a range of ridiculous nicknames for those close to you and paint yourself hair to toe in the colour of your house to support your housemates on the sports pitch?

And finally how can one fail to appreciate the idiosyncrasies which accompany boarding school life? Dorm feasts, carol singing by candlelight under the Christmas trees, or ‘muck up’ night…the list is endless. Indeed, if you have ever romanticised about how great it would be to attend Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, think of the boarding school as a ‘muggle’ version. That said, how can you have any doubts?

Leah Hyslop recounts the evils of boarding school 
Flicking through an Enid Blyton, one might be forgiven for thinking that boarding school is an enticing prospect. Boarding stories from Malory Towers to Harry Potter have offered children a fantasy of refuge from the family home.

Like most fantasies however, this image of boarding schools is intrinsically flawed. The boarding school fails to provide a sense of the realities of everyday life. Sent away at a vulnerable age to a place in which everything – from food, to cleaning arrangements, to after school activities – is largely provided for them, the boarding school is an enclosed environment where students have little independence. Encouraged to follow a set of pre-established rules, the students of Britain’s 700 boarding schools today live in a rigid social environment which the more flexible external world they will one day live in can never provide.

Distasteful as the fact is, the majority of boarding school students will be drawn from the same upper middle class sphere, and the average student’s opportunities to meet new people and forge new friendships are sharply neutralized by the fact the boarding school student spends his time socializing with the same people he has been taught with for six years.

Conducive to isolation and exclusivity, boarding schools are liable to breed a sense of superiority in their students. That a boarding school can offer the same nurture and guidance to a child as the familial home is a myth. The interaction between child and parent is one of the formative experiences of growing up, and whilst boarding schools can, and these days often do, provide emotional guidance, such relationships never provide the same level of intimacy as the parental bond. Moving as they do between school and home, boarding school’s student’s relationship with his parents is a part-time affair and family stability is difficult to achieve.
Though teachers can help with homesick students, the teacher’s role as both distant authoritarian and out-of-school support system is too ambiguously defined for young children to be comfortable with. Happy as they might be to be part of a community, it is this same sense of community which can often smother a student’s sense of individual worth. This can have the unfortunate results that their products feel less a person than part of an institution.

You might not immediately be able to put a face to the name ‘Laura Linney’. And you wouldn’t be the only one, since despite a prolific film career spanning over a decade, and a wide range of prestigious award nominations, she rarely appears in the press unless in connection with her latest film or character. You’ll have a hard time trying to find Linney gracing the gossip pages of Heat magazine. Perhaps this is why I don’t instantly recognise her when introduced to her amongst a small group of people having a civilised cup of tea at the Randolph. Those who are unfamiliar with Linney’s filmography will most likely recognise her as “that American one from Love Actually”, or as Frasier Crane’s girlfriend, if you were still watching Frasier by 2004.

Linney’s career thus far has seen her working with some of the most well-respected artists in Hollywood, in a host of highly influential films, and yet she remains surprisingly level-headed and approachable. Interviewers in the past have noted how Linney frequently makes sure to introduce herself personally to everyone present, and our interview does not prove an exception. Standing to shake hands with each flustered student that arrives to meet her, she remains unwaveringly friendly and, much to my relief, wholly unpatronising. We begin with small talk about malfunctioning Dictaphones, as I attempt to set mine up, before I enquire whether she’s managed to visit some of the more picturesque Oxford Colleges – ‘I would have’, she says sadly, ‘but they’re closed to the public, so I sort of peeked in through the gate and tried to get a sneak look in’. I consider pointing out that she’d find it relatively easy to use her celebrity status to get a private tour, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that such antics wouldn’t be her style.

A brief glance at the films Linney has featured in over the last decade reveals real variation in the projects she chooses to take on. From the unnerving thriller ‘The Mothman Prophecies’, to quirky blockbuster ‘The Truman Show’, or even the Edith Wharton classic ‘The House of Mirth’, Linney refuses to restrict herself to one genre, no matter how successful she may prove to be within it. She denies sticking to any sort of overall ‘game plan’ when selecting roles, believing that having such a fixed career path and setting out to prove oneself to the public is often counterproductive. ‘When actors choose their own material, I think it’s a little dangerous because there’s some personal agenda there that’s at work that isn’t necessarily very good for the material’. She may well have a point. It’s often painfully obvious when actors take on a particularly controversial role merely for the sake of publicity (‘Eyes Wide Shut’ anyone?), or veer towards films they believe have ‘Oscar winning potential’ (think gay cowboy dramas and the like). This is a technique which can go horribly wrong, with actors choosing parts which they simply can’t pull off. ‘You can see some people choosing something that just doesn’t work, and you can tell they did it because they wanted to be sexier, or there was some need to prove a side of their personality…’

Yet Linney seems to avoid falling into this trap, genuinely choosing projects based on their artistic worth, or how much they interest her. Such an attitude certainly involves making sacrifices – for her role in the low-budget film You Can Count On Me, released in 2000, she received the union minimum wage of $10,000, but was rewarded in return with her first Academy Award Nomination for Best Actress. She received a second nomination a few years later, this time for Best Supporting Actress, for her role in Kinsey, in which she played the eponymous sex psychologist’s wife, opposite Liam Neeson. This approach to her career may explain why she’s been involved in such a wide range of different films, and successfully avoided being typecast.

So what persuades her to take on a new project? Unsurprisingly, ‘nine times out of ten it’s the script and what potential the script holds. Then there’s director or actors. There has to be one of those three elements. If there are two of the three then that’s pretty good…’ So has she ever been involved in something with all three elements? The response is instantaneous – ‘Yes. Mystic River, because that had a great script, Clint Eastwood and Sean Penn. Didn’t take long to figure that one out.’

Her immense enthusiasm for these films, evident in the warmth with which she talks about them, undoubtedly results in intense dedication to the project in hand. Listening to Linney describe how she manages to cope with the disjointed way of filming a movie, out of chronological order, gives you a particularly clear insight into her approach to acting. ‘A lot of times, I’ll take a big piece of cardboard and I’ll make charts and lists and graphs, and I do all sorts of “mad scientist” things so if I do a scene, I can see where it falls in sequence.’ This science metaphor seems appropriate here, since Linney’s approach to the development of her character seems almost mathematical – ‘if I know something in scene five has to hit in scene sixty, I need to set it up properly. If I’m, doing scene 59 and there was something that I did in scene 7 that relates to that, I have to remember what happened.’ Award shows and glamour aside, Linney clearly takes each role very seriously.

As an actress, she doesn’t like to anticipate, in the long term, where her career might take her, preferring, as she puts it, ‘the unexpected things in life – that’s just the life of an actor.’ As such, when I enquire as to what her dream role would be, she is adamant that she can’t bring herself to try and imagine it. ‘You know, I can’t answer that, because I don’t think that way. I wish I did. I really wish I could think that way. It would make my life, and probably my agent’s life much easier, but part of the fun for me is not knowing what’s around the corner’.

Indeed, her career has been far from one-track, with Linney eager to switch, at least temporarily, from film to television when given the opportunity, most notably in a recurring role on Frasier, for which she won her second Emmy award. ‘The thing that was so interesting, and the reason I did it, was that I know absolutely nothing about the sitcom’. The experience, she says, was completely different to any of her previous projects, and highly liberating – ‘you have to be willing to be very flexible, because things change constantly… you really have to be as free and as easy as you possibly can be, and not let yourself be thrown by anything. You have to go into sitcoms with a real sense of joy.’

On the other end of the spectrum, Linney’s appearances on Broadway have seen her tackle highly serious dramas, most noticeably Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, in which she and Liam Neeson, in their roles as Elizabeth and John Proctor, created an “emotional temperature that leaves you weak”, as one enthralled critic put it. When asked whether she’ll be gracing the boards of London’s West End in the near future, she insists that ‘anywhere I’m invited to in theatre I would pretty much show up’, (take note, budding student directors) and admits that she’s hoping to make a return to the stage before long.

Linney genuinely seems to revel working within a large cast of characters, be it on the stage or in front of the camera. Speaking about ‘Love Actually’ she admits to finding the experience a hugely positive one – ‘I loved being around all those people, I loved the ensemble feel, that one producer would do something and then pass the baton to the next producer. It was this sort of collage of little things, and you were just a small part of something much bigger.’

As the interview draws to a close, I ask her what she’s going to be talking about at the Union, and the reply is unsurprisingly modest – ‘mostly it’ll probably be more Q & A, just where I think I can be more helpful… just seeing what students are wondering about’.

At this she stands once more to greet her next eager visitor. One presumes she must get rather tired of this process, after a decade in the spotlight, but if she does then she certainly doesn’t let it show.

By Daisy Johnson 
The word ‘fuck’ retains its official status as one of the foremost ‘taboo words’ in the English language, ranking third after those real stinkers that you aren’t allowed to have in print. However, since making its debut on BBC television in 1965 the word ‘fuck’ has become so popular that you wouldn’t bat an eyelid at its use. Having said that, I did recently hear a girl say to her friend in a scandalised whisper, “You can’t say ‘fuck’ in the British Museum!”, but really, even recourse to it in a tutorial would not cause much of a stir. What explanation can be given for ‘fuck’s’ paradoxical position between profanity and popularity?

In terms of profanity, ‘fuck’ is one of the oldest words, maintaining the vulgar meaning of its earliest usage. The OED holds that its roots are Anglo-Saxon, though its first identified written use in English was by the Scottish poet William Dunbar. In his delightful poem, “In Secreit Place”, a real love story about a liaison between a kitchen maid and a smooth-talking city boy. In the line “Yit be his feiris he wald haif fukkit”, ‘fuck’ is used in an almost identical context to its primary meaning today. Not to spell it out too explicitly, the kitchen maid has thus far withheld her favours from the city boy, and he’s getting a bit impatient, because “by his fire, he’d like to…” etc. Earlier even than this, the bastardised Latin ‘fuccant’ appears in a coded poem written in Latin and English some time before 1500. Attempts to translate the code have yielded “non sunt in coeli, quia fuccant wivys of heli”, which is “[the monks] are not in heaven, because they fuck the wives of Ely”. Notably, even in these very early uses of the word, ‘fuck’ is associated with severe impiety and bawdy behaviour, and was regarded even then as a taboo word.

So what typically constitutes taboo words? And why does ‘fuck’ remain one of them? Swear words, which exist in almost all languages and cultures, are certain words considered to be vulgar, usually because of their association with a corresponding social taboo. In English, swear words are largely related either to blasphemy, and particularly the defaming of Christianity, or, as in the case of ‘fuck’, related to obscenity. Quite logically, the more improper the action associated with a swear word, the greater the impropriety of uttering it. Lesser taboo actions, such as burping and swearing which, whilst considered generally impolite behaviour in public, and thus linguistically unsophisticated rude, are not actively offensive, and so do not rank as ‘swear words’. One might imagine the consequences, however, of performing ‘fuck’s’ associated action in public. This comparison is sufficient to explain ‘fuck’s’ classification as a swear word.

Of course, references to the naughty and socially inappropriate things we do are frequent and sometimes unavoidable, but a separate language exists for describing sex (‘sex’ itself being an example). Words such as this are hardly considered swear words. It must be concluded then that ‘fuck’ is so offensive not because of the physical action it describes, but because of the intent with which it is spoken. It is certainly the case that the word is rarely said without an indication of contempt and crudity. In fact, there is almost an element of self-aggrandisement about the use of ‘fuck’ – swearing, after all, is cool. There’s no denying it. Using ‘fuck’ suggests promotion of free speech and sexual liberation, which places you in the camp of ‘fuck’ pioneers like D.H. Lawrence, whose battle in Lady Chatterley’s Lover to use ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’ as parts of every day speech was finally won when the novel was published in 1960, three decades after its completion. In fact, the sixties saw the real beginnings of the widespread use of ‘fuck’ in the public and media spheres. It is certainly appropriate that the first man to say it on television, the critic Kenneth Tynan, became a pornographer in the ‘70s. The use of ‘fuck’ finds you upholding trendy sixties principles of freedom and radical thought. Super cool, right?

Right. Except it would be foolish to suggest, in 2007, that every person who utters ‘fuck’ as the Tesco carrier bag on their handlebars swings dangerously close to the spokes of their bike wheel is demonstrating their support for the free love movement. Realistically the reason that ‘fuck’ is becoming more common has little to do with its role as a symbol of anti-establishment subversiveness. In fact, it is mainly because ‘fuck’ is being progressively dissociated from its literal meaning and finding a place as a mere linguistic expletive. ‘Fuck’ and its associated parts of speech are rarely now used to really swear. Instead it is most commonly either a descriptive word, or an interjection of anger, surprise or even delight.

‘Fuck’, and particularly ‘fucking’, has considerable power as descriptive speech. ‘Fucking’ with its freedom to be classified as an adjective or adverb depending on context, can be used as an intensifier with a greater force than a simple ‘very’ or ‘really’. Consider the difference between saying “not fucking likely” and “not very likely”. The two are going to get very different reactions, and certainly have different meanings. The former is much more forcerful and negative, thanks to the power and shock-factor still associated with ‘fuck’ Also, as an interjection, ‘fuck’ is a surprisingly meaty and satisfying utterance. It opens with a fricative consonant, ‘f’, which is formed by forcing air through the channel made when the lower lip and the upper teeth come together, and closes with an aggressive ‘ck’, formed by stopping airflow in the vocal tract. This combination works to create a very definite and harsh sound, which can alter in tone to deliver a strong impression of a particular emotion. For example, the typical loud use of ‘fuck’ to express anger or frustration comes out like a verbal punch; it is a cathartic utterance which embodies and goes some way to exorcising the anger of the speaker. Alternatively, a ‘fu-uck!’ which goes down at the end and has a drawn out vowel is a verbal image of surprise or disbelief. ‘Fuck’ with a smile is a kind of happy, feelgood expression. A recent survey by a professor of management at the University of East Anglia has found that swearing in the workplace as a means of diffusing tension and high emotion in fact boosts team spirit and morale, so long as it remains in the form of interjection and not personal insult, because it can foster solidarity amongst employees and encourage them to share their feelings. The professor, Yehuda Baruch, hopes the survey will encourage people to re-evaluate the role swearing can play in our lives.

In an attempt to do that, then, it should be acknowledged that ‘fuck’ may have lost some of the taboo present in its literal use as it has become more prominently employed as a simple space-filling interjection or useful intensifier. The danger now, perhaps, is that linguistically it will move the other way, and become a clichéd form of speech, requiring us to formulate new taboos for our own time. Since I am rather fond of it in speech, I would counsel avoidance of excessive over-use of the F-word, for fear it will diminish even further in impact. For tips and tricks in this matter, perhaps consult the wiki – ‘How to stop swearing’, which demands that you punish yourself for excessive swearing, and reward yourself each time you manage to substitute ‘flip’ for ‘fuck’. “Don’t think you’re not cool when you don’t swear! You’re cooler!” On second thoughts though – fuck it.

While you are gently sleeping on a Saturday night in late October (OK, fine, while your feet are sticking to the floor in The Bridge), a college somewhere in Oxford dresses up in sub-fusc, stocks up on port and walks backwards around a quad, spinning at the corners. For an hour.

Yes, it’s the (in)famous Time Ceremony that has been part of Merton’s history since 1971. It seems the college that apparently never leaves the library has gone loopy. The ‘official’ website that you can find on Google doesn’t help much either – it describes the ceremony as “designed to remedy the ill effects of man’s abrupt interference with the diurnal cycle”. But let’s just think about it for a second. A Saturday doing something that is quirky, eccentric and quintessentially Oxfordian? Plus a chance to quaff stupid amounts of fortified wine? Surely it is better than yet another stale night dancing to the same old tunes in the same old place with the same old drinks on offer. Plus it gives you an interesting story for friends from other colleges and universities, or even ultimately the grandchildren. Provided that the port hasn’t messed with your brain’s memory stores by then, of course.

The ceremony itself is notoriously difficult to get into. The late gates of the College are locked and entry is only through the lodge, with a Bod card and provided no non-Mertonians accompany you. It seems that akin to the Freemasons, we think that we are the only ones able to save the world – in this case from the rupture in the space-time continuum that the putting back of the clocks inevitably leads to. Two toasts are held at the Sundial Lawn, a self-proclaimed centre of the universe – including a call for “Viva la counter-revolution”. The self-professed reactionaries then walk backwards for an hour, drinking vast quantities of port, making fools of themselves and generally trying not to fall on the grass. In the name of the universe of course.

Walking forwards doesn’t feel quite natural for some time afterwards, and you are reminded why port is in the same group as morris-dancing and Harry Hill: it’s an acquired taste. But the ceremony is an amazing experience in an all-Oxford way. Merton is often thought of as the ‘work hard’ college – and whilst that might be true, people shouldn’t forget that the phrase also contains a ‘play hard’ part. When we’re not walking around backwards at least.

It is a sad fact that Oxford is not known for its raving. Books, yes. Archaic traditions, yes. Grimy drug-fuelled hedonism, no. We simply don’t have the time, even if we had the inclination in the first place. Several hours frenzied dancing, and an exhaustion that can last for days are not conducive to essay deadlines. Thus raving has been something of a minority pursuit, with only a hard core of committed individuals bravely setting forth into their sweJames Kingstonaty basements on a regular basis. No longer. Experts have observed the rise and rise of a new breed of raver across the land, a breed particularly suited to Oxford; the Rahver. You may have seen them; you may even be one of them already. One thing is for certain: they are inescapable. Glow-sticked and glow-painted, the hordes are here to stay.
Luckily, they are easy to spot, even when not wearing their standard uniforms of retro Adidas track jackets, aviators, coloured leggings or, for the more daring, a mild gurn. The average rahver is convinced he is a bit of raver, and this is how we can catch him out. Central to this self-identification is a professed love of drum and bass. (though even this is not always essential – last night at the Coven ‘Halloween Rave’, all the glammed-up rahvers, perhaps confused, danced to 50 Cent and YMCA. Fools.) For those of us unversed in the ways of the rave, drum and bass is, as defined by Wikipedia, a type of music “characterised by fast tempo broken beat drums (generally between 160–180 beats per minute) with heavy, often intricate basslines”. It being a well established genre, there are many different DJs (“disk jockeys” to those OUCA members out there), mixes, mixers, labels, etc, to be listened to. The Rahver, rather sadly given their occasional attempts at authenticity, knows only one group, a group taken as representative of all dnb – Pendulum, the knowledge of whom is used thus in conversation, perhaps as one meets another cool looking kid.

“So what sort of music are you into mate?”
“I’m big into my Drum and Bass, actually – I really like Pendulum”
“Oh cool. What else are you into then?”
“Well I really like seeing Pendulum live”

To be a true rahver you must know this group, know every track name (“Put Slam on! Put Slam on!”), and talk about Pendulum every time raving comes up in conversation. The true raver, however, is not fooled – Pendulum are but one group, and one that may even be (whisper it) a bit…mainstream. Of course, this being Oxford and us students a canny lot, some more dedicated rahvers are aware of this, and despise Pendulum, whilst pretending to know of ever more obscure music. Each preciously aims to go to more and more events, so that he can appear more and more hardcore. Each jealously accumulates a knowledge of increasingly esoteric sub-genres – ‘psy-trance’, ‘liquid jungle’, ’scouse house’ ‘happy hardcore’, ‘raga drum dub’, ‘euphoric trance’, ‘hardcore gabba’ and, of course, ‘drum dub raga scouse’. After all, if you can’t be a bit edgy and feel yourself superior to others, then what is the point of adopting a subculture in the first place? One-upmanship is the essence of true rahving.  

So why ‘Rah’ver? And how can we become them, aside from adopting a Pendulum obsession? A Rahver is ‘rah’ because he or she is essentially not a part of the grimy drum and bass scene. Often private schooled, a rahver feels equally at home at a cocktail party, or assaulting a pile of books in preparation for an essay. The true drum and bass fanatic, gurning his way through life in a constant cycle of pill induced ups and downs, most certainly is not.  Rahving allows us clean kids to get a delightful frisson of underground cool – and of, course, display our creative side. The rahver, instead of the grimy T-shirt favoured by the other inhabitants of raves, will dress up in fabulously bright clothing. Strange headgear, funky trousers and leggings, brightly patterned shirts, and an improbable amount of glowsticks are key to the rahve uniform.

For it is a uniform. Finding conformity in their non-conformity (exactly like the indie kids they sneer at) rahvers daub themselves in fluorescent paint, just so that under the UV lights they stand out as all the more crazy and unique – though compared to the poor drug-addled wrecks who can occasionally be glimpsed at dnb events (at whom the rahvers cast disapproving glares, shocked by the obvious naughtyness), the rahvers, despite all their attempts, are neither. So, if you too wish to be a rahver, remain sure of two things – your own vibrant superiority, and that it’s only for the weekend. 

No matter how much you rave about how good – or bad – an adaptation is, you can almost always expect the same response: Yes, but is it faithful to the book?

Fidelity to the original, popular wisdom tells us, is all that matters. Look at the 11,000+ people on Facebook who believe that ‘Harry Potter 7 Better Be 7 Hours Long’. Adaptations should, apparently, behave towards the books they’re based on like clingy lovers, doing everything their partners do and never falling out. They should be considerate, reliable and above all else faithful.

Or, to put it another way, unoriginal, uninspired and uninspiring.

That’s not to say that faithfulness is in itself a bad thing. It’s the commonly-held misapprehension that faithfulness matters more than anything else that’s the problem. If this were true then adaptation would be a pointless art-form: why adapt, if you’re just treating a film like a dot-to-dot or paint-by-numbers, lazily transferring the black and white of the printed page to the moving pictures of the cinema screen?

Why adapt if you accept the popular belief that the book will always be better?

The truth is that just as novels and short stories can achieve things which film can’t mimic, filmmakers can do things which writers can only dream of. Every art form has its limits – and its potential. The best adaptations are those which pretend they’re not adaptations at all: those which don’t try to repeat what the book has already done, but focus on what the film can do instead.

The opening sequence of The Exorcist is a case in point, nine and a half minutes in the Iraqi desert which prove that the difference between reading and seeing can, quite literally, be believing.
The film vacillates obsessively between loud, rhythmic noises – the call to prayer, pickaxes on rock, hammers on anvils – and periods of near silence. And then there are the faces, a series of unsettling close-ups punctuating the wider shots. The one-eyed blacksmith. The increasingly anxious Father Merrin. And, most disturbingly of all, the barely-glimpsed, utterly malevolent visage of the old woman in the carriage which nearly kills him – so blurred and so quickly gone that we are left wondering if it was even human.

The effect is lost in writing about it. But when watching the film, the presence of evil is utterly palpable; our reaction to it, visceral. All this before we have any plot – before the conventional work of adapting a book begins.

The recent adaptation Children of Men succeeds for similar reasons. Unlike The Exorcist it bears no resemblance at all to the original novel, other than its use of the book’s dystopian premise of worldwide infertility. Uncomplicated by plot and character, the film hangs on a series of action set-pieces conveyed to us through unbelievably long and highly-choreographed tracking shots. It’s what the film can do, not what the book did, which matters.

The filmmakers behind both films realised that whereas our response to a book is ultimately linguistic – we process the words, then respond – our response to film can be sensual and more direct. Overemphasizing the value of faithfulness to plot and character ignores what gives film its distinctive power, namely the hypnotic interweaving of sound and image which transports the viewer to another place.

But adaptation, of course, is more than simply a synonym for filmmaking. It’s about grasping the power and potential of cinema, but it’s about grasping the power and potential of a book as well. Ultimately an adaptation’s success (or lack of) depends on how it uses its source material. The problem for filmmakers is that the all-important balance between faithfulness and unfaithfulness, borrowing and originality is unique to every film.

Just compare Brokeback Mountain and M*A*S*H – the former so clingy in its relationship with the story on which it’s based that they could get married (or at least get a civil partnership), the latter so sluttish in its use of improvisation that it bares little resemblance to its script, let alone the original novel. That both are excellent films has both nothing and everything to do with how faithful or unfaithful they are. They’re excellent because they strike near-perfect – though completely different – balances between use of their source material and original input. Ang Lee’s unobtrusive style is exactly what Brokeback required – just as the episodic anarchy of M*A*S*H reflects the film’s focus, the madness of war.

Once we get over the tendency to condemn filmmakers for the sort of creative freedom which we celebrate in authors, it’s difficult to say definitively that any book is unfilmable. Certainly, the more stylised the writing, the trickier the process of adaptation becomes. Billy Bob Thornton’s All the Pretty Horses is disappointingly flaccid compared to Cormac McCarthy’s brilliantly idiosyncratic prose style.
But then Hubert Selby Jr’s equally unconventional portrayal of addiction in Requiem for a Dream has more than met its match in Darren Aronofsky’s disorienting adaptation, a film not unlikely to induce seizures – and in that respect, it does complete justice to the book.

When adaptations are at their best – when they surpass the original – the book versus film debate can be settled with a simple analogy: it’s the difference between inhaling a drug and injecting it, as the characters in Aronofsky’s film find out to their peril.

by Laura WilliamsFrom the 1930s until as late as the mid-’60s, American movies were subject to a production code that imposed massive restrictions upon what they could and could not show on the screen. The list of rules included regulations banning portrayals of ‘vulgarity’, ‘excessive or lustful kissing’, ‘sex perversion’ (homosexuality), and forbidding the villain from ever being allowed to get away with his crimes. The resulting films portrayed an idealised America, a reassuring social morality and an optimism about everyday life which was lacking in the decade following the Wall Street Crash.

The Awful Truth is one such film, but it deserves to be remembered as more than just another 1930s slapstick comedy. Cary Grant and Irene Dunne star as a newly separated couple, who spend the ninety days before their divorce is finalised sabotaging each other’s new romances, obviously still crazy about each other. The witty dialogue and physical humour creates a hugely underrated comedy film of a quality rarely seen since.

The couple’s misadventures culminate with Grant arriving at Dunne’s singing teacher’s house, suspecting the two are having an affair, and he tries to barge in. During a tussle with the doorman, Grant does a hilarious pratfall – almost his trademark in his early films, a talent from his vaudeville days – he lands almost entirely on his face. Eventually bursting through to the living room, he find his wife singing to a crowded room, with her teacher accompanying her on the piano. Astonished, Grant slowly takes off his hat, listening to his wife sing, then sits down awkwardly on a chair at the back, while Dunne glares at him, still singing. It’s not over yet, as Grant leans back on his chair and falls again, and the fall just keeps on going.

Eventually, he rights himself and looks over to his wife with an expression of endearing helplessness. As Dunne catches her husband’s eye in the last phrase of the piece, she laughs a little out loud – perfectly on key – and then ends the song. She’s not only realised that her husband has shown up because he’s still in love with her, but also that she’s still in love with him, and all she can do is laugh. The scene is a perfect moment in life and cinema, showing love, huge and simple, in that instant – and it gets me every time.

What makes this film even more enchanting is that much of the script was improvised. When shooting began, director Leo McCarey only had a very sketchy script for the cast to work with, and both the leads, convinced that without a script the film would be a flop, tried to walk out. (Cary Grant allegedly wrote an eight-page letter to the film studio entitled ‘Things that are wrong with this picture’.) As it turned out, Grant was the one who was wrong. Irene Dunne was nominated for an Oscar for her performance, and Grant was rocketed into super stardom, becoming one of the most sought after leading men for the next three decades.

by Mary WaireriThe Times BFI London Film Festival is by far and away Britain’s biggest public film event. The Festival is known for providing a platform for a vast range of innovative, exciting films catering to a broad audience. This year, 185 feature films and 133 short films from 43 different countries were premiered at the Festival. The festival also attracted a record number of accredited press delegates from 52 countries as well as the highest ever audience attendance – a mark of its increasing popularity and success.  Suffice to say, the Times BFI London Film Festival is a big deal.

The London Film Festival is also a good place to get a sense of the films that we can expect to see over the coming weeks and months. In short; the good, the spectacular, the bad and the incredibly bad are all available here. David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises  quickly found a place on the more positive side of the fence and has already attracted rave reviews from such unforgiving critics as Mark Kermode. Written by Steve Knight (who also wrote the screenplay for Dirty Pretty Things), Eastern Promises stars Viggo Mortensen and Naomi Watts and explores the dark sub-cultures of London within the context of thriving immigrant communities; organised crime, people-trafficking and other similarly jolly themes. Interview starring Steve Buschemi and Sienna Miller has also garnered positive responses. The film explores the relationship between a world-weary ‘serious’ journalist and the soap-star he’s forced to interview.

From the mainstream to the downright weird, quality documentaries from around the world also emerged at this year’s festival. One of the most interesting was In the Shadow of the Moon, which is based on the Apollo missions and features commentary from Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and other survivors of the Apollo missions. In the Shadow of the Moon features stunning photography and is all the more interesting because it is largely based on previously unseen or long abandoned footage.
Amidst all the quirky but glittering gems to premiere at the London Film Festival there were of course some lumps of coal. Luckily I was only exposed to one of these; Closing the Ring. Starring Shirley MacLaine, Pete Poselthwaite and Mischa Barton, Closing the Ring is the story of a young woman whose fiance – a pilot in the Air Force – crashes his plane in Northern Ireland during World War II leaving her embittered and unable to love again. The most distinguishing thing about this film is that the wooden performances given by the leads are very well disguised by the plethora of clichés in the script and direction – I found myself looking around to see if anyone else was cringing as much as I was. However, all in all, the Festival seems to have gone off with all the usual glamour, flair and just the right touch of the bizarre.