ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

fucking camera! He can be emotional.” This comment overtly recognizes the play with
conventions in the “heritage film” part of the adaptation. Even within the adaptation's
parameters, the narrative nature of Tristram Shandy permits Walter, Tristram, and
Coogan (all Coogan) to directly address the audience, which consistently draws the
attention to the film's status as an adaptation, the conventions of which Coogan here
mocks.
Another hypermedial moment is when the crew discusses the black page. The
scene cuts to a black screen for five silent seconds, until the screenwriter remarks in
voice-over, “I don't know how interesting a black screen is going to be for an audience.”
The black screen functions as a moment of awareness for the audience; a black screen is
the direct transfer, or remediation, of the black page. Unlike the textual document, the
black page fills the entire screen, which amplifies the page's meaning as a complete
(instead of marginal) black-out. Voigts-Virchow remarks that the black screen is “a
negation of film's mediality,” because the medium is “defined by its ability to show
something” (146). With the black screen, we become aware of the technical aspects of the
adaptation. Some elements of the novel cannot be transferred successfully, even though
they, in fact, are (portraits, for example). Indeed, after the first 26 minutes, the film is a
series of moments of narrative stasis: we are just there with the cast and crew as they
discuss the production of the film and its various complications. The adaptation becomes
a “metadaptation” because of this stasis. But the spirit of this narrative style is an attempt
to stay true to Sterne. “A fidelity critic,” Voigts- Virchow writes, might “point out that
[these] scene[s] cannot be found in Tristram Shandy,” which would then constitute a
fundamental flaw with the film (143), but the film is not concerned with replication. It
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