ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

etween chapters and volumes (just as the original) to tell these period-drama fragments.
As in the novel, Tristram cuts scenes short because he “keeps getting ahead of [himself].”
But, these first 26 minutes are a deceptive foil, since, at this point, the only clues that the
film will not be a “heritage film” are Brydon’s “barley meadow” teeth. Instead, this
segment primarily violates “heritage film” conventions. Coogan flips between Coogan-
as-Tristram and Coogan-as-Coogan, which disrupts the coherence of the literary
adaptation. During the window sash scene, Coogan interrupts and stops the action to
comment that the child actor is the “best of a bad bunch,” and then instructs the child how
to best capture the pain of the scene; the child runs back onto spot and the scene resumes.
At another point, Coogan freezes a scene in which he plays Walter Shandy, and he (as
Tristram) is superimposed in the foreground to narrate. What at first appears to be a
“heritage film” adaptation is really a set-up for the remediation of the hypermedial and
multimodal themes of the novel. Winterbottom uses the “heritage film” backdrop to
experiment with the Shandean style of narrative in the novel: Coogan-as-Tristram
controls the visual action in a way that mimics the intrusive and direct control Tristram
asserts over the novel. A Cock and Bull Storyat first anticipates but then violates the
conventions of “heritage films,” just like the novel.
The Documentary/Mockumentary
Despite arguments that deny A Cock and Bull Story's use of documentary and
mockumentary conventions, there is enough evidence to suggest that the film borrows
from this film-narrative style. In his review, Ebert claims that A Cock and Bull
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