Roman Polanski’s Tess – Analysis: Dissonance, Simulacra

Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) contains vivid, detailed representations of scene, action, and speech, but it does not fit comfortably into the tradition of realism that Oscar Wilde decries in ‘The Decay of Lying’, which appeared in his Intentions in the same year as Hardy’s novel. In Tess, and generally in his novels from The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) onwards, Hardy deserves the exemption that Wilde grants to Hardy’s friend and early mentor George Meredith, who, according to Wilde’s Vivian, ‘is not a realist’, but rather ‘a child of realism who is not on speaking terms with his father’.¹ In his third-person autobiography, Hardy himself claims that ‘realism’ is not Art’.² Hardy’s Tess is a book of displacements and dislocations in style as well as narrative. Roman Polanski includes both kinds of dislocation in his film adaptation of the novel, Tess (1979), an adaptation that has sometimes been misunderstood as a realistic work, as has Hardy’s novel.³

1 – Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’, in Isobel Murray (ed.), The Writings of Oscar Wilde, (Oxford University Press, 1989), p.221. I discuss Hardy’s relation to realism in the biographical and historical introduction to my edition of Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Boston and New York: Bedford/St Martin’s, 1998), pp. 9-10 and in the essay ‘Echoic Language, Uncertainty, and Freedom in Tess of the D’Urbervilles’, ibid., pp. 506-20.

2 – Thomas Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985) p. 239.

3 – Virginia Wright Wexman in Roman Polanski (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985) pronounces Tess Polanski’s ‘most ‘realistic’ film’ (p.110), though her use of quotation marks around the term is a telling, but unexplained, qualification. Niemeyer, by contrast, emphasises the film’s anti-realism generated by the sound track’s sometimes discordant details (such as the loud ticking of a clock while Tess and Angel sit in silence at table) and by the viewer’s puzzled engagement with enigmatic aspects of the narrative caused by Polanski’s omission of elements in the novel and by Kinski’s impenetrably blank, ambiguous portrayal of Tess (Paul Niemeyer, Seeing Hardy: Film and Television Adaptations of the Fiction of Thomas Hardy (Jefferson, N. C.: McFarland, 2003), pp. 132-43). Niemeyer does not discuss the cinematography. Wexman reduces the implications of Polanski’s use of rack focus to psychological realism (p.114).

Extending the assertion by Stendhal’s narrator in The Red and the Black – ‘a novel is a mirror being carried down a highway’¹ – we could describe a film with sound as an ‘acoustic mirror’ that travels.² But Polanski’s acoustic mirror is obviously constituted by a variety of lenses whose recorded images have been edited. Sometimes the editing creates the illusion of realism, the impression of a mirror, a surface that passively reflects. That realistic impression is not the exclusive or even the dominant effect of camera work, editing, spaces, or sound in Polanski’s film. Instead, because of various kinds of dissonance we recognise the world of the film’s narrative as a simulacrum comprised of many component simulacra, large and small. The dissonant and simulacral effects make it difficult for the viewer to forget that what might be understood as a moving mirror is the edited result of work, of camera work and editing, that is, of acts of construction. The effects allow us to perceive what Roland Barthes called ‘the grain of the voice’,³ the process, including the labour, by which the work of art comes into being. That evocation of the grain, which gives us access to the origin of the work of art, takes Polanski’s film beyond realism in a way that expresses Hardy’s modernity as well as Polanski’s, a modernity that has a surprisingly Beckettian tinge.’⁴

1 – Stendhal, The Red and the Black, trans. Lloyd C. Parks (New York: New American Library, 1970). The statement occurs twice in the novel, first as the epigraph to book 1, chapter thirteen, p. 85, where it is attributed to ‘Saint-Réal’, and later in elaborated form in book 2, chapter nineteen, p. 359.

2 – Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988)

3 – Roland Barthes, ‘The Grain of the Voice’, in his Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 179-89

4 – I suggest the relevance of Beckett to understanding Hardy’s poetry, especially his late poetry, in my essay on Hardy’s poetic modernity (John Paul Riquelme, ‘The Modernity of Thomas Hardy’s Poetry’, in Dale Kramer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 221-2.

Contributing to the comparative silence among critics concerning Tess is the difficulty of rendering discursively its richly paradoxical virtues, virtues that translate Hardy’s arresting changes of register in style and his memorable mixture of realistic and anti-realistic elements into vivid cinematic forms. Both Hardy’s Tess and Polanski’s contain strongly realistic scenes, but the texture of the scenes and their structural relations to other portions of the narrative frequently do not contribute to realistic illusion. In the novel, the anti-realistic elements are evident in Angel’s allegorical name and in the fluctuations of the style from reported dialogue to reported thoughts and to commentary by the narrator that is by turns ironic and learned. The narration regularly breaks the illusion of realism that it also fosters. In considering Polanski’s relationship to realism, it is worth remembering that he had made a strange, at times surrealistic, film, The Tenant (Le locataire, 1976), just prior to filming Tess. The comparatively more realistic texture of his Tess appears to be a turn away from the dominantly expressionistic character of much of his earlier work. But the apparent realism of his Tess is combined, as in Hardy’s novel, with its own apparent opposite, an assault on the limits of realism from within a veneer that invites us to understand it at times in realistic terms as part of a process of overturning the effects and implications of realism.

The opening of Polanski’s film presents briefly the ensemble musical procession of the club-walking in which Tess participates as part of the May Day celebration. She is not singled out for the viewer as she later is after the procession has reached its destination, when Angel happens on the dancing and impulsively joins in. As in Hardy’s narrative, the first individualized characters to whom we are introduced are John Durbeyfield (Tess’s father) on foot and Parson Tringham on horseback, who patronisingly tells Durbeyfield about his defunct ancestral line. Unlike the procession with its horizontal movement and engaging music, the scene with the Parson and the one that follows involving Angel and his disparaging brothers project hierarchical relations and class distinctions. These are reflected in the Parson’s elevated position on horseback and in the distance he and then Angel’s brothers dismissively put between themselves and the peasants by literally turning their backs on them and moving away. Hardy glosses the Parson’s elevation and irony in a bitterly ironic way when his narrator returns to the D’Urberville aristocratic past in the book’s closing paragraph. There the narrator evokes the hierarchical world of Greek tragedy by alluding to Aeschylus and the ‘sport’ (T, lix, 384) of the gods, who toy with humans. Not a god but a man of God, the Parson is toying with an uneducated member of the agricultural labouring class, someone whose life is almost beneath his notice.

The Parson and the ragged peasant inhabit different worlds socially. Durbeyfield in the film, however, occupies a different world from the Parson in a surprising aesthetic way. He does so because Polanski creates a double temporal perspective by bridging Hardy’s late-nineteenth-century English text and post-WWII European perspectives. Rather than linking the English narrative with an ancient Greek dramatist, as Hardy does, Polanski links it implicitly with a post-war dramatist, Samuel Beckett. Polanski makes no attempt to render the novel’s closing passage, with its mention of Aeschylus, choosing instead to conclude the film visually with Tess and Angel’s departure from Stonehenge in police custody. This crucial strategic decision to focus on Stonehenge in the film’s closing is as important as opening with Durbeyfield, as I suggest later.

The short films from the 1960s concerned with the social effects of power that I have already mentioned, The Fat and the Lean and Mammals, were unquestionably influenced by Lucky’s part in Waiting for Godot. In them, the exploitative relations between master and servant are presented by means of a chain used to restrict movement and the pulling of a heavy load. Polanski also cast Jack MacGowan, the Irish stage actor who was a primary interpreter of Beckett, in two of his most successful films, Cul-de-Sac (1966) and Dance of the Vampires (1967). In a prominent French television version of Waiting for Godot directed by Walter Asmus in the year of Beckett’s death (1989), Polanski played Lucky. It is worth remembering that Lucky’s dance in scene two of Godot is called ‘The Net’ and that the dance’s name evokes Aeschylus. Like Agamemnon in the Oresteia and like Tess in Hardy, Lucky is entangled, but his entanglement is part of a staging of being in the net. Although disturbing, Lucky’s performance-within-the-play is not tragic in the mode of Aeschylus, because it is laughable and obviously a matter of performance. Something similar is true of John Durbeyfield as played by John Collin. However well he fulfills within a realistic frame our expectations for the character in Hardy’s narrative, he is also a player in a post-Beckettian staging that, when he is on camera, can be laughable (as in the scene in which he offers to sell the right to his name for ever smaller sums of money, which drop from £1,000 to £20 with hardly a pause for a breath). The laughter, of course, disappears by the time Durbeyfield refuses to allow Tess’s baby to be baptised. We recognise Durbeyfield as contributing to a simulacrum, one that has been produced with painstaking labour to give the look of Hardy’s world. But this world looks back at us and reveals our implication in it because of various dissonances and crossovers that invoke the ostensibly much different world we share with the director.

The crossovers include many aspects of the production and its result. The most evident of these for the viewer is the casting of a German actress as Tess. Nastassja Kinski, however, is only one element in an international artistic situation of Beckettian proportions, especially in the crossover between French and English. As with Beckett’s work, which he often self-translated between English and French, it is impossible to characterise Polanski’s Tess as anything but a hybrid, an anomalous result that emerges through the interaction of elements that are often kept separate. It is a French film by a Polish filmmaker, first released in France, but made jointly through French and British collaboration, that represents English locales using locations and a studio in France and that stars a German actress portraying an English country girl. The agricultural action on the land set in England would seem to be far removed from the experience of a Polish filmmaker, but in fact after leaving Cracow as a child to escape Nazi persecution, Polanski lived in the Polish countryside, where he learned about agricultural life, including how to milk cows. The type of farming he encountered in Poland must have been much closer to the sort presented in Hardy’s novel than the more modern agricultural techniques that had already become established by 1900 in England and in Western Europe.

The production company was a joint venture, a Franco-British co-production between Renn Productions in France and Burrill in England. Although based on Hardy’s English, the first version of the screenplay was written in French by Polanski and his long-time screenwriting partner, Gerard Brach. In order to put the screenplay in its ultimate form, however, John Brownjohn, an English writer from Dorset, joined the team and helped invent English dialogue for scenes in which Hardy had provided none. These scenes are of particular interest in the film because of their central placement and distinctive camera work, as I suggest below. The cinematography was initially the responsibility of Geoffrey Unsworth, the famous British cinematographer, but Unsworth died while the film was still being shot. He was replaced by Ghislain Cloquet, a French cinematographer, who simulated Unsworth’s style for the remainder of the shooting. Costumes were designed by Anthony Powell, who is British, but he worked, necessarily, in collaboration with Pierre Guffroy, the French production designer, and Jack Strange, the British art director. The film’s three academy awards, then, went jointly to a British and a French cinematographer, jointly to the British art director and the French production designer, and to the British costume designer.

It is easy to imagine someone dismissing the boundary-crossing that characterises the film’s production as aesthetically insignificant for viewers, as simply one of those oddities of the modern world. But culturally and aesthetically the boundary crossing is no more irrelevant than Beckett’s situation in-between with regard to France and Ireland, the French language and the English language. The implications concerning the mixed national character of the artist’s working methods and context have an aesthetic dimension with regard to language for both Polanski and Beckett, well beyond the quandary that French bookshops and libraries face when they try to identify these artists as French or as foreign. Their language is pervasively inflected in ways that militate against our reducing their works to responses appropriate to realistic art emerging from a single national origin. The perceptible, unavoidable trace of the heterogeneous origins of Polanski’s Tess is evident whenever Nastassja Kinski speaks as Tess.

When I first saw Tess in the cinema twenty-five years ago, I disliked it intensely because my realistic expectations for the film were disappointed by what I heard and saw. My reaction was so strong that I left at the intermission. My main disappointment concerned the casting of Kinski in the lead. I probably could have accepted the delicacy of her features and her ethereal looks (in comparison with the other country girls), but I could not accept her voice. Kinski’s English was without doubt fluent, but every word she spoke made it evident that she was a European actress playing a young rural woman from the south of England. Rather than being a flaw in the movie, however, her spoken performance is a brilliantly dissonant feature, one that makes it impossible for the spectator to mistake Tess for realism. The bold, unconventional casting of Kinski is comparable to Oscar Wilde’s decision to cast Sarah Bernhardt as the first Salomé in the production that the English censor refused to license. Bernhardt at the time was in her forties, while her character was a nubile teenager. Both casting decisions have the effect of keeping the audience off balance through a refusal to fulfil expectations concerning details that are essential for realistic portrayal: age and voice.

That refusal puts Wilde’s projected staging of his own play and Polanski’s cinematic response to Hardy in an aesthetic space that Samuel Beckett identifies in ‘Three Dialogues’ as beyond ‘the plane of the feasible’.¹ He means that the work of art cannot be mistaken for something that we have encountered before and have learned to accept as if it were natural and inevitable. Our spoken language is never natural, though we tend to behave as though it were. In Hardy’s narrative, Tess herself asserts the often suppressed difference between the socially constructed and the natural when she says to Angel, ‘I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!’ (T, xxxv, 236). When a language is spoken with foreign inflections, even slight ones, its learned quality becomes perceptible to the listener, as does the physical, material process by which our vocal cords produce the apparently natural sounds of the languages that we acquire. Polanski’s film as acoustic mirror respeaks Hardy’s English and his narrative with a European accent and reflects a landscape that is not English, whose features are and are not real.

1 – Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: John Calder, 1987), p. 103

Polanski also makes changes in Hardy’s narrative, mostly excisions, such as the dropping of Angel’s sleepwalking. But there are also additions and shifts in emphasis, notably ones that give Tess more to say and that emphasise her acts of writing. Together with Tess’s letter-writing, her confession to Angel, which Polanski renders in detail even though Hardy does not, adds to our sense of her strength of will. The elaborated confession scene in the film and the scenes that immediately precede and follow it constitute a significant, centrally placed sequence not only in the screenplay but in the camera work. Tess’s confession is literally in the centre of the film; as it is divided into scenes on the 2004 DVD, the scene is fourteenth of twenty-eight. In his use of both a shallow space and rack focus, Polanski brings the film’s expressionistic tendencies sharply to the fore.¹

1 – The association of shallow space and rack focus with expressionism and of deep focus with realism is widely accepted in film studies. See James Monaco, How to Read a Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.86. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982) informs my own discussion of cinematic mirroring and voyeurism.

The focus changes several times between the two characters, until finally the scene ends with Angel walking out of focus deeper and deeper into the space of the rooms, through two doorways until he is out of sight. The camera work is memorably effective in displacing the realism of deep focus (which presents the whole of a scene’s action in sharp focus) by the expressionism of shifting focus. Deep focus is usually taken to contribute to the impression of realism because the camera work does not draw attention to itself. Our eye is supposedly free to roam where it will. Rack focus, by contrast, makes the effects of lenses and angles insistently evident. It is as though Tess’s insistence on attention is matched by the director’s camera. Rack focus often shifts our attention from one character or object in a scene to another, but as Polanski uses it multiply during the confession, the redirecting of our vision is ambiguous, aleatory, and potentially quite active. We are as likely to be drawn to the character in sharp focus as we are to the character who is out of focus. Or we might be looking back and forth between them in an energetically shifting way that resembles the effect of the ambiguous geometry of Las Meninas on the eye. The shifting intensifies the oscillation of the spectator’s wandering vision created by the multiple changes in focus. As with Kinski’s out-of-tune English voice, the in-and-out-of-focus, ambiguously directive camera work makes us aware of the process by which the work has been created.

By the time the second act of repetition occurs, at the parting, Tess has accepted Angel’s decision to live separately from her. But her glancing away from Angel during the second echoing and the measured character of the repetition indicate that Tess’s passion and determination, exhibited in the earlier scenes, have not been extinguished. They are merely being held temporarily in check.

The scene much earlier between Tess and Alec, in which he insists that she allow him to put a strawberry in her mouth, provides a figure for understanding Tess’s relation to Echo. For a time, she reluctantly accepts having things put in her mouth, strawberries and words, but ultimately she, like the German actress who plays her, has a voice of her own, and a will that refuses to accept.

The refusal comes out visually in Sandbourne near the movie’s conclusion in the scene that precedes Tess’s taking her revenge on Alec. That scene sends us back to Tess’s determination to confess and to tell her own story because the camera work again involves prominent use of rack focus. Tess’s agitated will to act and to speak parallels the camera work’s energetic, paradoxical expressive movements. As with the earlier scene involving the mirror, the position of the observer contributes to breaking the illusion. We initially observe the scene between Tess and Alec from outside the room through the keyhole with the landlady, but in mid-scene the viewing direction is abruptly reversed. We now look from inside the room directly towards the door behind which the landlady peeps as Tess walks towards it, inadvertently scaring the observer away. In effect, the change of direction asks us to look at our own obscured point of vantage, at our participation in the act of looking and our engagement with the scene.

As Angel did earlier, Alec first stands and then sits, but Tess goes blurrily out of focus with her head on the table. When she stands, however, and the direction of observation is reversed, she is silent but in focus while Alec, now gone fuzzy, continues to speak words that are not in Hardy’s narrative. Hardy’s Tess reports that Alec called Angel ‘by a foul name’ (T, lvii, 372), but we witness Polanski’s Tess experiencing Alec’s attempt to put words in her mouth by suggesting an answer for his question about why she is upset. No longer willing to be ventriloquised, this now silent Echo acts.

The dissonance in Polanski’s film is a matter of contradictions, including especially ones that involve the spectator’s eyes and ears. The dissonance emerges as well through the linking of apparently incommensurate aspects of human experience in Hardy’s narrative. Polanski replicates that linking in a way that enables the viewer to recognise the constructed quality of the human world by experiencing the act of aesthetic construction in the grain of the voice and in simulacra. Polanski expresses the humanly created quality of our world by labour inscribed in the film’s techniques and by representations of labour, but also by the prominence he gives to non-representational constructions. We see the contrasting elements, representations of labour and the centrality of non-representational creations, in quite different moments of Hardy’s narrative that Polanski retained. These include the scene involving Mercy Chant’s taking of Tess’s boots (at the conclusion of Tess’s thwarted attempt to visit Angel’s parents in Emminster) and the closing scene at Stonehenge.

The shots in the earlier scene give us first a view of Tess from behind walking out of the village space, then a contrasting shot of Mercy’s back as she walks away at the same moment with Tess’s boots.

Without transition, Polanski cuts to Alec on horseback riding directly towards the camera. We know that he is headed towards Tess. By contrast, in the closing scene, the police on horseback move towards Tess, but they do so in a slow, steady motion that puts Tess under arrest and takes her up into a final movement out of the scene. The pace and the aggressive shifts into and out of the village space, with the virtual ejection of Tess while an important part of her is confiscated, have been displaced by a contrasting continuity of movement that has the feel of a cortège.

At the end of Hardy’s novel, his narrator famously evokes the situation of humans as the playthings of the gods. But his own narrative combines the antithetical aspects of the work of art that Heidegger implies enable us to recognise ourselves not as playthings but as human agents who play and create in a double contradictory situation. Having meditated on the utilitarian, referential aspect of art and on its equal, opposite, and connected non-representational aspect, Heidegger suggests that we encounter in art its ‘createdness’,¹ its having come into being. The created, generating quality that we encounter is the grain of the voice. We recognise and experience our engagement with the act of creation in Nastassja Kinski’s voice, in Roman Polanski’s expressionist camera work, in boots that Vincent van Gogh painted and that Tess Durbeyfield walks in and then away from, and in the simulacrum of a temple as the film’s dissonant, contradictory, genuinely illusory space. Our directions through that space take us not only to Tess’s death but to recognitions of ourselves in the shifting, dissonant echoes and reflections of an acoustic mirror.

1 – Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in his Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 181