Comparing a scene from Stephen Daldry's drama film to the same scene from its source material.
I will analyse a scene from Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader and compare it to a scene from the film adaption by Stephen Daldry. The scene I am analysing shows Hanna falsely admitting to giving the orders to not save the Jewish people from burning church because it would expose her illiteracy.
The scene in both the book and the film opens with the line “Why did you not unlock the doors?” However, in the film we get a sound bridge with narration over the previous scene where Michael had visited Auschwitz, filmed on location to add authenticity to Hanna’s actions. Directly linking the two scenes also makes it harder to forgive Hanna as what we saw before is still fresh in our mind.
In this scene, we can see Stephen Daldry and David Hare’s theatre background in the staging. This uses the visual medium of the film to full effect and the layout of this scene is not mentioned in the chapter. In the staging Hanna is in the middle with a small table and looking small herself. She has judgement coming at her from all side, the judges who will decide her fate, the former SS guards who want to see her fall and Michael. Everyone but her sits in a group, showing how isolated she is from everyone and the audience may sympathise with Hanna because of this. When everyone around her reads their copies of the report we see, through performance, distress on Hanna’s face, we feel how marginalised illiterate people are, literally being separated from those who read.
When Hanna describes her reasoning for not unlocking the door, there is no non-diegetic music, and she is framed in a mid-shot. This distances the audience from Hanna as a person and does not try to make her sympathetic as there is no attempt at suturing. However, again partly because there is no soundtrack, the film does not villainise Hanna for her actions. Instead, it presents it plainly, much like how Hanna speaks of the events herself. This is also how it is portrayed in the book, for most of this section we just get dialogue between Hanna and the guard and we never read Michael’s opinion in this scene, despite him being the narrator.
We do eventually see Michael, and his reaction to what Hanna is saying, in the film but it is a full minute before we see Michael. This reminds us that the film is not just from Michael’s perspective and that it is a Hollywood production, with Kate Winslet as the bigger star than David Kross. This scene is clearly Hanna’s in the book as well, despite Michael’s narration, as Michael never refers to his own feelings or opinions in this chapter. Along with this David Kross performs similarly to how he did in the films opening, hunched over. This shows how sick he is, at Hanna for what she had done and described in such a nonchalant way but also sick at himself for loving a woman who had committed such evil acts. The fact that he is in the same position that he is in when he first meets Hanna directly links him to his past, a key theme in the story.s
Comments