ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

also goes beyond modernization because it is concerned with re-creating the Shandean
spirit through adaptation, an awareness of the process, and “the process may be more
important than the final product” (Voigts-Virchow 146). And thus the process of making
the film adaptation, just like the concept of writing a novel in Tristram Shandy, is
constantly harpooned in A Cock and Bull Story.
The Realist Film
Sharing many qualities with the biopic and biography, the realist film, as Colin
MacCabe defines it, is a cinematic representation of many narratives held together by a
central privileged character, and the genre is interested in true and accurate representation
(Montgomery 263). Interestingly, the conventions of realist films are adopted from the
conventions of realist novels (Montgomery 263); retrospectively, Tristram Shandy’s
realist elements (in terms of the eighteenth-century novel) have been considerably
acknowledged. 101 “Trivial events,” “everyday life,” and “psychological realism” are
elements of this film genre (Hallam 16-17), and all three qualities are ripe in A Cock and
Bull Story, just as they are in Tristram Shandy. Indeed, literary adaptations of realist texts
obviously replicate this experience. But the film, of course, also mocks these
conventions. Coogan walks on-set to find a prop of a man-sized uterus with a glass
window (“a womb with a view”) from which he will narrate the adaptation. 102 When
Coogan has trouble being held upside down, he asks a crewmember if they can film the
scene right-side-up. The crewmember replies that it would disrupt the director’s attempt
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