Liam Trim with the latest edition of ‘Page and Screen’…
In 1966 England won the World Cup. And firemen stopped putting out flames with water, to start them with kerosene to burn books.
Francois Truffaut’s film version of Ray Bradbury’s classic 20th century novel Fahrenheit 451 was released in 1966. It starred Julie Christie in a dual role and Oskar Werner as main character Montag. According to IMDb, Truffaut wanted Terence Stamp for the lead role but the British screen legend was uneasy about being overshadowed by his former lover Christie. Truffaut and Werner, with his thick Austrian accent on an English production, had fiery differences about the film’s interpretation of Montag’s character. It’s not surprising that there was passion on set because there was a great deal within the pages of the book.
Bradbury’s book is the tale of Montag, a fireman whose job it is to burn books. In the world of Fahrenheit 451 (the temperature at which book paper catches fire) the state has banned the owning and reading of books. Indeed in the film Werner is shown “reading” a newspaper or story consisting entirely of images, without even speech bubbles. Why the ban? Books are “the source of all discord and unhappiness”. Materialism, based on equality, is encouraged, as opposed to the competing lies and raised expectations sold by authors. Montag’s wife is reliant on state sponsored drugs and spends her days in front of state television. She barely speaks to him and all are ignorant of impending war.
Bradbury was a master of science fiction and he churned out volumes of beautiful and imaginative short stories, as part of collections like The Martian Chronicles. But Fahrenheit 451 merely has elements of sci-fi. For the most part its world is uncomfortably close to our own.
Truffaut’s adaptation has a fairy tale quality, and indeed the novel is somehow magical. It is an incredibly intelligent book, packed with literary references and joining the likes of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, as one of the great prophetic dystopias with powerful warnings about society. But it is not at all patronising and far more uplifting than both of these books. It lays out its moral arguments more passionately and poetically and tells a breathtakingly absorbing and thrilling tale, laced with beautiful metaphors. Orwell and Huxley’s books were urgent and thought provoking but lack the vibrant colour given by Bradbury’s imagery of flames. Bradbury could also be funny rather than drab and his ideas were grounded in the realities of modern culture.
In short then, Truffaut had an enormous task to match a book which simultaneously had pace, power, poetry and passion. I was therefore surprised by how much I enjoyed his adaptation. It lacks the book’s excitement and indeed many of its qualities but its opening scene, six minutes uninterrupted by dialogue, is suitably atmospheric. The film as a whole evokes the experience of reading and the worth of literature through the relatively new medium of cinema: not an easy achievement. By quoting from great works as Bradbury often does the film benefits from some of the novel’s rhythm and can show the mesmerising effects of fire, leaving pages “blackened and changed”, shrivelling up like dying flowers.
All in all it was an entertaining watch, faithful to the book’s message, even if it was not “the most skilfully drawn of all science fiction’s conformist hells”, as Kingsley Amis described the novel. It was inventively shot and hauntingly scored. And its wonderful final scene got me thinking.
In it the “book people” are wandering in the woods by a lake. They are all reciting or learning a book. The book people commit a book to memory and become that book. So when Montag meets a pair of brothers, one is introduced as Pride and Prejudice Part 1 and the other as Part 2, a woman is Plato’s Republic and a shabbily dressed man Machiavelli’s Prince and so on. In effect the community of peaceful outsiders are a human library.
But aren’t we all libraries really? We may not have devoted our lives to the word for word memorisation of our favourite books but our opinions and outlook on the world are shaped by them. The impressions and traces of good and great books we read can truly change us, inform us and enlighten us, as well as entertain us.
Equally us film lovers are archives of all the movies we’ve ever seen. Some of them will be forgettable but should we get a jolt to remind us memories of even the poorest film will come flooding back. Others made us stretch new emotional muscles or were so terrifically dramatic we had never felt so alive and full of possibility.
The copy of Fahrenheit 451 that I own contains an introduction written by Ray Bradbury for the 50th anniversary edition in 2003. He describes how he wrote the novel on a typewriter in the basement of a library, darting up the stairs now and then to do rapid research and pick randomly inspirational quotes to sprinkle into the narrative. His love of libraries is evident and he calls himself a lifelong “library person”. I couldn’t help but think that a cinema or movie theatre could never give birth to a work of art or vital piece of culture in quite the same diverse and autonomous way.
Of course some fantastic films have their beginnings in great directors being inspired by other great directors in a darkened cinema. Last year Christopher Nolan’s Inception was seen and adored by millions, with the director freely admitting influences as varied as James Bond, Stanley Kubrick and the Matrix trilogy. There’s no doubt that I would prefer to spend an afternoon in my local cinema than my local library. Both are arenas of escapism but both are changing.
At the cinema 3D may or may not breakthrough as the next big wow factor for audiences. Box office figures continue to remain high and records were broken throughout the global recession. People will always flock to the multiplex to give themselves up to the immediacy of film. They want to be transported to another world in moments.
Libraries are undoubtedly in decline. In the UK local libraries are understaffed, underfunded and short on stock. The coalition government is happy to snatch away even more support for them for tiny savings, despite promises about getting more children to read from Education Secretary Michael Gove. Children’s author Patrick Ness used his Carnegie medal acceptance speech to launch a stinging attack on the policy.
As a child I got into reading because of the ease and assistance of a library. Its poor range of choice wasn’t good enough as I got older but I might still use it now if it were better equipped. In any case libraries are a vital stepping stone into independent reading and education for youngsters. The grander buildings full of history and knowledge have the potential to be truly magical gateways to new novels, screenplays, election campaigns or God knows what. Libraries empower the imagination and the intellect. But so do cinemas, just in a different way. Both can keep us entertained and thinking, as Fahrenheit 451 proves. Both deserve to thrive.
Liam Trim (follow me on Twitter)
Originally published July 14, 2011. Updated April 10, 2018.
