This entire presentation is copyright © 1968 and © 1999 by William Allin Storrer. Phd. For permission to quote, contact Dr. Storrer at mindalive@storrer.com
Comparing the movie with the play of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, critic James Price notes
<There was nothing in the least real about the conventional set which was the background for the play on the stage, but a theatre audience deals in psychological realities and such things don't matter. In the cinema, on the other hand, they matter very much indeed: a book must be a book, a wall must be a wall, a campus must be a campus.>1
In Cinewoolf a book is a book, a wall is a wall, and a campus is a campus, or so it appears. Cinewoolf director Mike Nichols, believing that "a movie is accretion of detail,"2 asked for a number of magazines and books to be present in Martha and George's house, including "old copies of Mercury, Partisan Review, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, the London Observer--'open it to the puzzles'--The Realist, The Noble Savage, some Thomas Mann novels, Paris posters, Grove Press books."3 The detail did not go unnoticed, for Edith Oliver, writing in the New Yorker, was sufficiently impressed to call attention to several items:
<There is a picture of Marianne Moore on the mantelpiece in the living room. Nick leafs through a copy of the Paris Review, which he picks up from a coffee table, and Günter Grass's "The Tin Drum" is on display in the bookcase.>4
The detail seen in sequence one,5 before the drama really gets under way with the dialogue of sequence two, is extensive. The opening shot frames a college tower and classroom building, then pans to the quadrangle, revealing another campus building at the end of a long sidewalk. A couple emerges from this building, and the camera, following them in their journey across the campus, reveals other elements of the college setting. Bicycles and the pipe racks that hold them upright, and a greenhouse, appear. Then we see a house, an old, typically New England frame house of two stories, covered with white clapboard. With only nine lines of dialogue spoken to this point four minutes into Cinewoolf, it is possible to say that in all likelihood, the film takes place in a New England town and on a college campus.
Sequence two takes us into the house to the darkened living room, then quickly on through the hallway to the kitchen. Only after nearly eight minutes of Cinewoolf have passed our eyes is a second glimpse of the living room presented the living room in which Albee sets the entire action of Stagwoolf. And we are allowed to pause here only a few seconds, without having time to absorb the surroundings, before Martha takes her drink from George and heads up the stairs into a bedroom and into a bathroom that opens into the master bedroom. For nearly seven minutes Martha and George cavort in the bedroom and on the bed. Then, and only after having spent nearly a quarter of an hour on the campus and in various rooms of Martha and George's house, does the action settle into the living room for any lengthy stay. From 14:12 to 44:12 the action, with two short exceptions, takes place in the living room. The exceptions are the entrance of the guests, and George's departure to get the Japanese parasol gun.
At 44:12, the beginning of sequence eight, the action moves out of the living room, not to return until the beginning of sequence eighteen, 57:54 later. The action to the end of Cinewoolf from this point remains in the living room. In a film over two hours in length, only fifty-five minutes are spent in the living room specified by Edward Albee.
Not only does the action move out of the living room, but out of the houses into the yard, and through the town to a roadhouse. In sequence nine the action takes place far out in the yard in front of Martha and George's house. In sequence eleven, the action takes place in a station wagon moving through the town, but none of the town is shown except the roadhouse. In sequence twelve, the action moves into the roadhouses and in sequence thirteen, out into the adjacent parking lot. Sequence fourteen is back in the yard, and on the porch at Martha and George's. This same yard, and the house hallway, comprise the space of the next two sequences. In sequence seventeen Martha and Nick go into the kitchen, and only when George returns with flowers does the action move to the hallways and into the living room.
This extensive movement in space is accompanied by such detail, as evidenced by Edith Oliver earlier, as suits the college atmosphere and the "sloppy intellectual world in which George and Martha live."6 Most every realistic detail specified in Stagwoolf appears visualized in Cinewoolf, as a comparison with Chapter II will attest.
In Cinewoolf we are allowed to enter far more of the world of Martha and George than are we in Stagwoolf, and the opening out into the outside world hardly reduces the effect of containment, isolation, and claustrophobia that is implied in the one-set interior of Stagwoolf. When the camera looks down on Martha from its great distance, revealing her calling into the night for the others to come out of their hiding places,(185) her loneliness, her isolation from everyone, is revealed completely realistically and with considerable pathos. The roadhouse, attended only by one waiter and one waitress, and otherwise empty save the four principals, isolates them from the world. The two attendants are the only other humans the four principals contact while talking or shouting in the yard or in the parking lot. Their isolation is even more complete in this stark contrast with a world that should answer back to their noisemaking.
The emphasis on reality of this world in which Martha and George live should not be surprising in view of many of the production elements applied to its creation. The Director of Photography was not schooled in story films, but was Haskell Wexler, whose "forte is the documentary film and its second cousin, cinema verité."7 Wexler shot many of the outdoor scenes in Northampton on and near the campus of Smith College. Most of sequence eleven, the station wagon moving through the town, had been planned for shooting in an actual "stretchout" limousine moving on location. Crowds of celebrity seekers and inclement weather forced the shelving of this plan, and the shooting of the sequence before process screen.8
<The fronts of actual buildings, including George and Martha's residence and the roadhouse were filmed for establishing shots on location. Back at the studios segments of these exteriors plus full interiors were constructed on the sound stage.>9
Even in Martha and George's house,
<The dimensions were literally those of an actual house and the hallways were extremely narrow. Realism extended even to the use of warped boards in constructing the floor--an almost too authentic touch which precluded the use of a crab dolly and made it necessary for tracks to be laid for all moving camera shots.>10
In order to move within this "almost too authentic" realistic space, it was even necessary to have a special movable platform built so that when the platform, which substituted for a standard dolly, could move no further, the cameraman could step off easily without having to adjust the height of camera to new conditions.11 This also necessitated use of a hand-held camera. A lens of relatively short focal length helped minimize the effect of camera bobbing while the cameraman was walking with it.12 "In fact, the average viewer would never be aware that a hand-held camera was being used," writes Herb A. Lightman about the filming.13 And this writer would tend to agree, suggesting only that where the camera does bob, the bobbing is still less than that widely accepted in much newsreel filming. The bobbing might even suggest to more sophisticated viewers a documentary or cinema verité quality, as if the camera had just dropped in on Martha and George who remain as oblivious to it as does a crowd remain unaware of many a camera filming a riot scene for the evening's TV news. This may not be the most suitable comparisons but the point is that the roughness in camera techniques where perceptible to the individual viewer, can have the effect of increasing the reality of the film as can the use of black and white, rather than color film which many still associate with typical Hollywood romances and musical comedies, and which perhaps only a color-TV watcher has yet come to associate with newsreel documentary.
The element of time is a major factor in one's response to Stagwoolf, whose dramatic time equals its chronological time, intermissions included.14 In the first sequence of Cinewoolf the time is stated as "two o'clock in the morning"(3) and just under twenty-nine minutes later in the film Nick tells Honey the time is "Two-thirty."(46) Chronological time is thus maintained up to that point, and the visual presentation of Cinewoolf has in no way denied that chronological time progression. Once it is established that chronological time is being maintained for those perceptive enough to check out the point, the film takes liberties with that time element, though not big ones. The only other time checking point is at "four o'clock in the morning,"(169) but this has been conveniently cut from Cinewoolf. This mentioning of four o'clock would occur after two major jumps in chronological time between sequences eleven and twelve} and in sequence fourteen. There is a jump cut from the screeching of the station wagon to a stop outside the roadhouse to the interior of the roadhouse. Realistically, the car had to be parked and the passengers walk into the roadhouse. Both time and space have been changed from that experienced in real life. The dissolve from George in the parking lot to the station wagon with its blinking tall light allows neither enough time for the station wagon to have returned from the roadhouse to Martha and George's nor enough time for George to walk the distance and enter the shot at his later arrival time. To show the car being parked or George walking home, might impede the dramatic action. Accordingly, chronological time is no longer observed, and the visual violation of this chronological time is never given the lie by the dialogue.
In many ways, then, the world of Martha and George appears to us as we form the audience of Cinewoolf. It is a college campus and town, one world of a college professor and his wife, George and Martha.
Or is it instead the world of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor? Arlene Croce suggests that "The Burtons aren't real, they are rococo spirits out of eighteenth century boudoir drama,"15 while James Price thinks that "the audience is bound to wonder what in hell's name Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton are doing there."16 Perhaps they will wonder,and after viewing Cinewoolf they may decide like Mr. Price that Cinewoolf "is there for its principal actors, and the camera is there to record their performances."17 Maybe they will not find them out of place, but will, like Life critic Richard Schickel, find these two parts have a reality, a depth and a humanity that were not present on the stage "18 One view on this problem is given by Film Quarterly critic Ernest Callenbach:
<Unfortunately for us, though perhaps not for future viewers, the casting does create difficulties. This is not, as is too sadly usual because the star performers are not up to the roles; quite the reverse . . . . . . . inevitably . . . the casting of these two excessively well-known performers . . . colors the whole effect of the movie.
<Stage audiences have sometimes found the play literally unbearable; at its heights of ferocity, such as the reduction of Honey, people have run out of the theatres. A skillful film version with unknown players would likely have sent whole audiences howling into the streets. Because of the casting game within the games within the play, however, nobody is going to get too anguished over Taylor and Burton. Their nerves may frazzle, they may score pulverizing hits on one another's vulnerable spots; no matter, we can always reflect comfortably that they are, after all, that famous pair, carrying on. While their fame lasts, this kind of emotional escape hatch can be fatal to the film; added to the undeniable comedy of many scenes, it provides audiences with a convenient way to detach themselves.>19
James Price concurs in thinking others might have been a better choice for the principals, suggesting that had Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill (of the original New York production) starred, we would have viewed Cinewoolf quite differently. Certainly it would be "different,"20 but in what manner?
On the stage an actor must project to everyone in the auditorium, whatever its size. Physical action must often be "bigger than life" to reach the back row of a large auditorium. A film actor, however is projected vocally to the auditorium through loudspeakers. Visually he may be thrust towards the audience in "close-up." The film actor need not concern himself with projecting vocally or visually to the back row, for the camera can place him close to or far away from the audience, and the sound track can make his whisper or shout as loud or as soft as is necessary to its being heard in the desired perspective.
The close-up is used often in Cinewoolf, and with considerable success on Richard Burton as George and Elizabeth Taylor as Martha, to reveal more than the words of the script can say. "A new level of anguish" is added in the Bergin speech of sequence nine when the camera moves "in tight and make[s] us watch the man George (and/or the man Burton) who is telling a story that may or may not be true, and may or may not apply to himself."21 Whether or not it is the star, Richard Burton, or the character, George, who is drawing us into the anguish of the tale becomes irrelevant at such a moment. If we are truly drawn in, the truth of the presentation becomes part of our aesthetic experience.
Another moment of revelation through use of the closeup is in sequence seventeen as "Elizabeth Taylor through the flyproof kitchen door, upon which a few flies have left their traces . . . discloses to Segal the fundamentals of her attitude toward her husband."22 Whether it is Elizabeth Taylor to George Segal about Richard Burton, or Martha to Nick about George, or both of these, there is a pathos and humanity that is projected through the screen to the viewer. Stagwoolf projects only the latter relationship, yet a stage performance, with stars of the Burtons, renown, might achieve a similar double level of meaning.
The close-up is also used at Martha's telling of the story of "Our son"(217) in sequence twenty where, for two minutes, the camera holds close in on Martha to reveal, as with George in the Bergin story the true anguish of the situation. The pathos, humanity or anguish of such moments, revealed in close-up seem no less valid than the pathos, humanity or anguish revealed by Uta Hagen or countless other actresses who have performed the role from the greater aesthetic distance or the stage.
Though "who" the actor is has an effect upon the viewer, this effect is part of either medium, film or the stage. More important is the different means of projecting pathos, humanity and anguish that are offered by each medium, and the actor's ability to work within those avenues of projection made available to him by the specific medium.
The camera's ability to move in close-up allows it to reveal detail that cannot be perceived from the greater distance of the audience in a stage production:
<And it is the peculiar nature of the camera, when it is pointed at persons (be they actors or not), to convey their physicality: the texture of skin, the pressure of muscle and bone, the sag of flesh, the things no words can change.>23
Yet certain words that the camera seems well-equipped to reveal have been eliminated from Cinewoolf, in particular all reference to the age of Martha and the fact that she is six years older than George. Great care was taken to transform
<. . . the beauteous violet-eyed Elizabeth Taylor into the character called for in the script: a sloppy, fading voluptuary her disheveled hair streaked with gray, her eyes pouchy and her face bearing the ravages of too much alcohol and too little sleep.
<Makeup helped somewhat, as did a salt-and-pepper wig and weight purposely gained for the role. But even so, the natural radiance of "the most beautiful woman in the world" was difficult to diffuse. Wexler studied the famous face for characteristics that could be exaggerated and distorted with light. He shot one day of tests substituting for the normal high-keg "glamour" light a lower, flatter light which could get in under the chin area to create an illusion of roundness and flabbiness. It was only after he had pulled out all the stops with this "wrong" kind of lighting that Director Nichols was satisfied that Martha looked "baggy" enough.>24
Instead of Edward Albee's fifty-two year old Martha,25 there is Ernest Lehman's "fading, somewhat sloppy woman of about 45."26 "Thirty years ago"(96) the Bergin story happened when George was "sixteen,"(94) so he remains forty-six. Nick and Honey remain twenty-eight and twenty-six respectively. It does not seem unreasonable to expect that, had Wexler chosen to show Elizabeth Taylor as in her early fifties rather than mid-forties, he could have effected that transformation. Or maybe Miss Taylor is too "beauteous" to transform more than ten years from her actual age under the detailed inspection of the camera.
A further change of age is that of the son who never appears before the camera. Honey announces that "tomorrow's his birthday. He will be sixteen," where the original text calls for "Twenty-one . . . twenty-one tomorrow . . . tomorrow's his birthday."(44)
References to how long Martha and George have been married are also changed. "Oh, Lord, twenty years ago" is excised just before "a couple of years after we were married,"(22) "For twenty-three years" becomes "year after year,"(153) and "twenty-three years of you" becomes the more general "a thousand years of you."(158) Instead of hearing how old Martha is, or how long she and George have been married, we see the ravages the years have worn on them in close up.
So it is in Cinewoolf that the camera allows us to "peep through the blinds at the doings next door,"27 and perhaps we may come away reacting as did one observer "heard on the Grand Staircase at Toronto's Imperial Theatre: 'I wouldn't mind their behavior so much, if they weren't supposed to be teachers'!"28
1. James Price, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Sight and Sound, XXXV (Autumn, 1966), p. 198.
2. C. Robert Jennings, "All for the love of Mike," Saturday Evening Post, CCXXXVIII (October 9, 1965), p. 86. Jennings is quoting Nichols.
3. Ibid.
4. Edith Oliver, "The Current Cinema," The New Yorker, XLII (July 2, 1966), p. 65.
5. See Appendix B for identification of sequences.
6. Herb A. Lightman, "The Dramatic Photography of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'," The American Cinematographer, XLVII (August, 1966), p. 532.
7. Ibid., p. 530.
8. Ibid., p. 559.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., p. 532.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. See Chapter II (Footnote 13 and related text).
15. Ibid., p. 945.
16. Price, loc. cit.
17. Ibid. p. 199.
18. Richard Schickel, "What Film Has Done for Virginia," Life, LXI (July 22, 1966), p. 8.
19. Ernest Callenbach, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Film Quarterly, XX (Fall, 1966), pp. 47-48.
20. Price, op. cit., p. 198.
21. Callenbach, op. cit., p. 46.
22. Gordon Gow, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Films and Filming, XII (September, 1966), p. 6.
23. Callenbach, op. cit., p. 46.
24. Lightman, op cit., p. 532.
25. Stagwoolf, unnumbered introductory material.
26. Ernest Lehman, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Unpublished film script, Burbank, California: Warner Bros-Seven Arts, 1965), unnumbered introductory material.
27. Arlene Croce, "Staying Up Late, Talking Dirty, and All That," National Review, XVIII (September 20, 1966).
28. Clive Denton, "On Film," Take One, I (June, 1967), p. 38.