ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

the narratives we receive are the dialogues between the text and the adaptation, between
textual conventions and cinematic conventions, and between the interpretation and the
creation of a new Shandean text. Winterbottom employs the conventions of the heritage
film, the documentary/mockumentary, the historical re-creation film, the biopic-drama,
the ‘movie’ movie, and the realist film, which relate to specific elements of the Shandean
method, especially the play with conventions that Tristram Shandy exemplifies.
The Heritage Film
Just as Tristram Shandy’s initial readers likely expected a fictionalized
autobiography of an eighteenth-century gentleman, Winterbottom misleads the
audience’s expectations for the direct text-to-screen transfer adaptation. Amidst the
opening credits, we see Coogan and Brydon improvising wit about the colour of
Brydon’s teeth while in make-up chairs. 93 This introduction precedes the “heritage film”
literary adaptation, which we then receive somewhat earnestly for the first 26 minutes. In
a mix between voice-over and direct-address, Coogan as Tristram talks and walks us
through scenes mostly from the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy: Tristram's
conception, Dr. Slop's forceps, the Battle of Namur, the window circumcision, the
mistaken christening, his mother's labour(s), and Tristram’s birth. The “heritage film”
feel is reinforced by elaborate eighteenth-century-era sets (much grander than the real
Shandy Hall), 94 and detailed period costuming, with the dialogue taken directly from the
text. The scenes are carried out as though the movie will be a conventional heritage film,
as much as the text itself allows this kind of re-creation. That is, the story jumps around
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