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Critics have limited the appreciation and understanding of recent cinematic adaptations of Jane Austen by emphasizing primarily the "literary" aspects of adaptation and narrowing the genre of these works to the so called "heritage film." This is a premise that when not qualified or carefully applied, echoes a tradition of oversimplifying Austen's novels, and may have the same effect on film adaptations of those novels.

Critics have limited our appreciation and understanding of recent cinematic adaptations of Jane Austen by emphasizing primarily the "literary" aspects of adaptation (e.g., examining what was left in, taken out, and added, the handling of dialogue, drama, and characterization, and so on) and narrowing the genre of these works to the socalled "heritage film," defined largely as a picturesque amalgam of "Grand homes, furnishings, costumes, and hairstyles" (Ross), productions reducible basically to what Jonathan Miller describes as "our longing for 'a golden age of propriety, decency, courtesy and a highly constituted behaviour which is a sort of sanctuary from the chaos and depression and pessimism of modern life'" (qtd. in Bennett). This is a premise that when not qualified or carefully applied, echoes a firmly entrenched tradition of oversimplifying, even trivializing, Austen's novels, and may have the same effect on films of those novels.

Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the often remarkably inventive cinematographic styles of these films. I have looked over scores of reviews, particularly of various versions of Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, and Pride and Prejudice, and while some are deeply insightful about what Jocelyn Harris rightly calls these "new readings of Jane Austen" (427), only a handful make as much as passing reference to cinematic techniques other than lighting, set design, and casting. Surprisingly, some reviews in film journals seem inattentive to cinematic details. The reviewer of Emma for Sight and Sound, for example, talks about Austen's worldview without taking the time to discuss the visual details of Douglas McGrath's film-presumably a large part of how such a worldview is conveyed in this medium-and only a complete disregard of the cinematography of the film allows him to claim, even in the midst of a generally positive review, that early on "the movie seems stiff and lifeless" (Matthews 9). The reviewer claims that, on the whole, it is not "as truly adapted-that is, pared down and reshaped for the camera" as the Ang Lee/ Emma Thompson Sense and Sensibility, and that in general McGrath's "less than adventurous idea is to have the actors recite great wodges [sic?] of the original dialogue at a succession of dinner tables" (9).

Even detailed academic criticism on Austen adaptations veers from the cinematic. The recent collection of essays, Jane Austen in Hollywood, edited by Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield, contains much interesting work on the production and reception of some recent adaptations, their ideological inflections, and their reshaping of Austen's texts. But the almost unwavering methodology from beginning to end is what we might call straightforward lit-crit, which works wonderfully with, say, Jane Austen's Persuasion, but less well with Roger Michell's. The title of the introduction announces one of the main intentions of the book, "Watching Ourselves Watching," but what is practiced throughout is a somewhat circumscribed "literary" watching that generates some fine critical commentary but also some remarkable blind spots-including almost no consideration of the films as filmsand an astonishing admission by the editors that "The films are, by necessity, 'E-Z' Austen" (9).

No matter how sophisticated the critic or viewer, a non-cinematic approach to Austen films is, to coin a phrase, clueless-but remediable. We need to supplement and complement the literary approach to Austen films by focusing on how they create powerful visual and emotional effects, establish complex structural and formal patterns, and evoke cinematic codes and contexts that take us far away from the realm of the "authentic literary adaptation." To this end, in what follows I concentrate specifically on a few key cinematic aspects of Roger Michell's Persuasion, I identify a particular repertoire of visual techniques that add up to what might be called the film's spatial strategy,1 a carefully articulated ensemble of repeated devices and effects. Out of many such elements worth discussing, I focus here primarily on various types of camera motion, and also comment briefly on the position of characters in the film frame and a few assorted special effects. When possible and relevant, I consider ways in which these techniques are visual equivalents or transformations of the novel's themes and style. But if we are to properly understand the film text at hand, I believe that cinematic allusions embedded in the style are equally as important to notice as literary ones. The basic script (plot, dialogue, characters, and so on) may be from Jane Austen but the enunciated and embodied shooting script-the film as we see it-owes much to the traditions and techniques of a host of auteurs and visual contexts that I attempt to identify.

Persuasion, originally made for British television in 1995 but then released theatrically, nicely lends itself to and rewards close cinematic analysis. An experienced play writer and director, Michell relished the opportunity to vary and expand his work beyond the stage. He told an interviewer, "I've got away from doing just theatre, and spent more time behind a camera, which I like-film gives you a huge toyshop of gear with which to tell a story" (Gritten). That "toyshop" is much in evidence and used to great advantage in Persuasion. Critics have focused on the rumpled realism of the film and its engaging effect: "If you can see a dress is wrinkled at the back," Michell points out, "it makes the shot a Vermeer rather than a Gainsborough. That detail gives you a feeling of being in a room with someone" (Gritten). Michell's penchant for "clothes not costumes" (Gritten), very little prettifying makeup and hair styling, and an abundance of candles, providing light that generates a melancholy warmth, flickering motion, and shadows, all contribute to the "look" and effect of the film, and embody his revisionary aesthetic: one of his most well-known statements is "I'm trying to trash the hotel room of the BBC classic" (qtd. in Tristan Davies). But he also uses the "gear" of cinema adventurously in other ways and for other purposes. As Caryn James notes, in Persuasion "The camera becomes the visual equivalent of Austen's rich, commenting voice, and though it cannot be a complete replacement, it is a more than serviceable one." Part of what makes Persuasion such an intriguing and powerful film is that Michell's remarkably effective and evocative camera work evokes not only Austen's "rich, commenting voice" but rich cinematic traditions as well.

The presentation of the main character, Anne Elliot, is of course crucial, and despite the often-claimed "advantages" of novel over film in descriptive nuances and so on, pictorial representation works extremely well in conveying Anne's initial plainness, distress, and enervation, and the gradual process of the recovery of her "bloom." Close-ups are, not surprisingly, prominent, although often as part of camera movements in rather than as simple cuts. Visual details, not words, disclose the various pressures-and the effects of those pressures-on Anne. Throughout nearly the first half of the film, she is characteristically shown with her head tilted downward, a posture of worry, weight, and perhaps even submissiveness. And she is repeatedly positioned off-center in the film frame. Sometimes this kind of positioning is conventional-and not always to be taken as an index of disharmony-but the cumulative effect here is to associate Anne with a kind of unbalance, tension, and distress. These, coupled with frequent shots of her looking "elsewhere," away from characters, out doors, and especially out windows, help create a portrait of a lady who is distracted, uneasy, preoccupied, uncomfortable in the here and now before her, and desirous of relief and escape.

The camera effectively registers the many stresses on Anne, in one notable instance by a special effect. The only reviewer I came across that commented on the shot I have in mind was horrified. Thomas Sutcliffe in general praises Michell's reserve and his ability to "trust the acuity of the audience's emotional eyesight," and is therefore all the more shocked by "one of his rare lapses into cinematic magnification. When Anne first sees Wentworth, a moment in which she has to reconcile huge internal shock with external equanimity, he employed one of those Hitchcock zooms, in which the perspective skews queasily as you close in on a face. This is a degraded idiom, a stock shot from horror movies, and it was as jarring here as if Captain Wentworth had stuck his head round the door and said, 'Yo, babe"' (Sutcliffe 14).

The shot in question does allude to the justly famous track out-zoom in shots in Hitchcock's much more edgy, overwrought film, Vertigo, but despite Sutcliffe's dramatic and somewhat misleading description, it functions here subtly, effectively, and appropriately, conveying a momentary surge of emotion-one that arguably has textual license in the novel, if such is needed. This first meeting of Anne and Wentworth after eight years' separation is handled by Austen via one of her characteristic anti-climactic de-dramatizations, hinting at Anne's deep disorientation but here and gone in a moment:

. . . a thousand feelings rushed on Anne, of which this was the most consoling, that it would soon be over. And it was soon over... Her eye half met Captain Wentworth's; a bow, a curtsey passed; she heard his voice-he talked to Mary, said all that was right; said something to the Miss Musgroves, enough to mark an easy footing: the room seemed full-full of persons and voices-but a few minutes ended it....

"It is over! it is over!" she repeated to herself again, and again, in nervous gratitude. "The worst is over." (84-85)

In the screenplay, Nick Dear spells out some of these "thousand feelings" specifically: as Wentworth enters, "Anne sits open-mouthed in terror and surprise, as if struck by lightning. ... The room seems to close in around her, and the sound becomes a babble of words. Outwardly, she remains composed; but inside, she's spinning" (27, 28). Michell conveys these feelings visually, using the special effect described above as the culmination of a series of close shots of Anne momentarily unmoored, lost in a space charged with memory and emotion, tightly gripping the back of a chair for support.

Perhaps for this moment in the film Michell and Dear borrowed some of the charge from Anne's later surprise glance of Wentworth in the street at Bath, which she is completely unprepared for. Here is Austen's description:

Her start was perceptible only to herself; but she instantly felt that she was the greatest simpleton in the world, the most unaccountable and absurd! For a few minutes she saw nothing before her. It was all confusion. She was lost ... (185)

Michell and Dear take off from such moments in the novel in portraying Anne throughout the screenplay and film as emotionally volatile, particularly when she meets Wentworth (e.g., unable to speak at dinner until Wentworth leaves, 34; "inwardly reeling" and experiencing "a maelstrom of emotions" as he helps her to a seat in the Crofts's carriage; and later described as feeling her heart thumping, pulse racing, and faint, 70, 73, 87). Sutcliffe's derisive term "cinematic magnification" should perhaps be used as a term of praise, calling attention to Michell's extremely skillful use of visual techniques and special effects that have powerful physical and emotional effects, relevant and useful cinematic associations, and are integrated into the deep structure, the spatial strategy of the film.

Persuasion is filled with camera movement, and the particular special effect I have just described is only a slightly exaggerated form of a much more common camera treatment of Anne, the slow pull-in, often to a close-up or extreme close-up. For example, the camera pulls in to Anne as she overhears and watches Wentworth and Louisa walking and talking, and perhaps heading toward an engagement. Later, when Anne and Wentworth talk about Benwick, who has overcome his deep sense of loss over the death of his beloved and now plans to marry Louisa, the camera closes in intimately on this discussion of intimacy and recovery. And, not surprisingly, when Anne reads Wentworth's letter, announcing his love for her, the camera moves from close-up to extreme close-up-not only bringing us closer to her, but also visually separating her from the background of the public world as she becomes immersed in another more private one.

The motion of the camera inward to a close shot serves several functions. It of course allows for a close inspection of Anne, but also dramatizes the process of this examination. A simple cut to a close-up would not accomplish the latter function so powerfully. As the camera moves in, the spectator becomes engaged in a complex dynamic: examining Anne, which requires a certain amount of distance and separation; establishing a kind of intimacy with her, which requires proximity and identification; and adding an element of disturbance to the scene by breaching the borders of "safe" personal distance as the camera moves in too close for comfort. The examples cited above are only a few of many that illustrate Michell's ability to vary the tone by visual means and move the viewer through a range of positions: alternately dispassionate, affectionate, and borderline indiscreet if not invasive. Perhaps I need only mention briefly that such precise authorial control, exercised through stylistic nuance and subtle shifts in voice, is often taken as a sign of Austen's mastery of her art-a mastery which we should recognize in Michell also.

Finally, the action of the camera moving in effectively displays Anne experiencing stress and excitement, and in registering, however implicitly, Anne's reactions, emotions, thoughts, and desires, exposes a kind of inferiority often thought to be the province of the novel and inaccessible to film. The triumph of intimacy is the demonstration that inferiority is accessible, perhaps resistant, but at least semi-permeable: that is my somewhat abstract and technical way of describing what happens at the end of Persuasion-it trivializes it to speak of it only as a romance or love-story! This triumph is captured wonderfully in the last of the examples mentioned above, as Anne reads Wentworth's letter, underscored by the camera pull-in and the fluid mixing of silence (Anne's lips do not move), written text, and the voices of Anne and Wentworth.

The counterpart of the camera pull-in, which allows for a complex psychological inspection, is the broad circling movement of the camera that dominates the latter part of the film especially, and affords a view of and offers a commentary on society at large, the highly symbolic material spaces, the geography of power, and the choreography of social, familial, and personal relations.

The most distinctive and readily identifiable aspect of the visual strategy of Persuasion is its constantly roving camera. The film is filled with panning and tracking shots, eye-level, jerky hand-held shots, and circling or otherwise wandering camera movements through a room, perhaps accomplished by using one of the most important technical innovations in recent years, the Steadicam, a device that allows for wide-ranging camera mobility and precise control over the steadiness or unsteadiness of the resulting image. This visual strategy accounts for several key elements of the film's meaning and effect.

First, the roving camera in Persuasion heightens our sense of critical spectatorship: the characters portrayed herein are constantly inspected, observed, analyzed, interrogated, and, in many instances, mocked as they display their foibles, inadequacies, and vulnerabilities to a camera that dispels privacy, turns all backstages into visible front stages, and moves with a freedom denied to them.

Second, the camera work in Persuasion dynamizes the visual image. One of the foundational axioms of filmmaking is that moving pictures should move, a principle applied with increasing vigor in our contemporary media world that gravitates toward kinetic subjects, shaky cams, and projectile editing. MTV stylistics, NYPD Blue-type tele-cinema verite, and the mass audience created by and accustomed to these and other such spectacles are, I think, very much on the mind of Douglas McGrath in his adaptation of Emma, and his use of a constantly moving camera is, at least in part, a very creative response to the challenge of staging a witty but wordy classic in a short-attention span theater. Michell, aiming primarily for a somewhat different BBC television and art-house audience, perhaps did not feel the same pressures, and that leads me to concentrate on his dynamization of the image less as an aspect of appealing to an impatient audience and creating a certain kind of visual pleasure than as one of his primary means for conveying the precariousness of his characters and the fluidity and instability of the world that they inhabit.

Further comparisons to McGrath's Emma may be helpful. There is a lot of motion here, but it is typically orderly and smooth: the spinning of the globe at the beginning and end of the film is harmonious, not disruptive, and the characteristic panning and tracking shots often survey a natural and social landscape that one feels is there to be mastered, possessed, and controlled. The constantly moving camera in Persuasion, though, asserts a fundamental instability. Fluidity-in a literal and metaphorical sense: water is a key element and symbol in both the novel and film-can be promising. It offers the possibility of change, improvement, recovery, release from the hardening that turns character into caricature, as Anne grows beyond her early passivity; it offers upward and outward mobility, as Wentworth makes his fortune and confirms his marriage on the rocking seas, shots of which open and close the film. But so much of the motion in the film is unsettling, reinforced at the opening of the film by the hand-held camera as Kellynch-hall is in the process of being dismantled as the home of the Elliots. Even more consistently, the mobile camera that repeatedly circles the Elliots throughout the film creates what I would call dis-establishing shots: the family loses its position, what remains of its position that they cling to or vainly assert is shown to be laughable, and, most important, Anne's emotional world is shown to be one of flux, desire, and tension.

Finally, the prominence of the mobile, circling camera announces a generic link between Persuasion and other films of social analysis and critique, dramatized instability, and thwarted self-determination. I do not have the time to do a thorough history of the stylistics of the moving camera. I am not even sure that I can completely sort out the complex and overdetermined allusions in and influences on Persuasion, and I want to avoid the suspicion that by dropping a few names and impressionistically allying Persuasion with some cinema classics that I am pushing it down the easy road to masterwork status: gilt by association, as it were. Still, I think that it is important to recognize and identify the extent to which Persuasion is an intertextually enriched film, and examine how some of its characteristic techniques have both immediate and resonant effect.

Several directors come immediately to mind as most relevant. First, some of the cinematic vocabulary and syntax used by Michell echoes Orson Welles, particularly The Magnificent Ambersons. Its pivotal ballroom scene, envisioned as one continuous shot by Welles (though re-edited by the studio) recorded by a freely moving camera weaving in and out of the guests and hosts, is in the very least a reference point for similar moments in Persuasion: long sequence shots at a dance, various dinner tables, a concert, and the concluding evening party. Ambersons shares some key themes with Persuasion-for example, it chronicles, in an often comical but ultimately somber way, the disestablishment of a family and the instability of the contemporary world, and, on a personal level, is in a large part the tale of a refusal of love and marriage (Isabel refusing Eugene) caused by (in this case her son's) misguided persuasion, never fully acknowledged as such by the person misled. It should not surprise us that stylistic similarities between Ambersons and Persuasion underscore thematic similarities.

An even more striking example of the moving camera used for social analysis and choreographing personal and social relations is Renoir's Rules of the Game. Renoir is not unaware of the cataclysmic direct oppositions and collisions of life, and the sometimes crushing effect of directly applied linear power, but he focuses largely on the complex interplay of multiple subtly countervailing forces and resistances, resulting not so much in head-on confrontations as in twists, turns, constantly refracting, generally eccentric motion, charted and wonderfully embodied by the eccentric motion of his camera. And as if building a cinematic aesthetic as well as an ethics on his premise that "everyone has his reasons," his moving camera is multi-perspectival and, if not completely free, then at least flexible and relatively unbound. Like Renoir. Michell uses a moving camera to portray a giddy world and, as I hope to show in a moment, to dramatize and assert the ideal of personal freedom.

The moving camera in Persuasion, though, is not always an emblem of achievable personal freedom and witty "authorial" observation and commentary. Sometimes the commentary is a bit more cynical or dispirited, and the motion more clearly circumscribed and less liberating or liberated. This is part of the legacy of the cinema of Max Ophuls, whose films use what is often described as a"freely" moving camera to portray a world of inescapable social entrapment and thwarted self-determination, particularly of women. For example, La Ronde figures social and erotic life (and the structural pattern of any narrative that would do justice to them) as a circle, sets its characters in the midst of circular figures, has them move in circular patterns, and traces their actions with a circling camera. And Letter from an Unknown Woman conveys the vulnerability, loneliness, but also quiet strength and dignity of its main character by a camera that dollies and cranes, in, up, and around, Robin Wood nicely distinguishes between the moving camera of Renoir, emblematizing freedom of characters, directors, and spectators, and that of Ophuls, similarly swirling and graceful but emblematizing metaphysical predestination and social restriction (66). Michell borrows from both Renoir and Ophuls, in part because the story he wants to tell moves from entrapment and threatening instability to some kind of release, fulfilled love, and self-assertion.

Finally, the influence of Welles, Renoir, and Ophuls may have come to Michell directly but also in mediated form, through the work of other directors. It would be well worth pursuing Fay Weldon's brief suggestion that part of what allows Michell to make a "Radical break with cossy [cozy?] drama tradition" is the stylistic influence of Jane Campion's The Piano. But perhaps an even more compelling analog, if not influence, is Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence, a compendium of many of the above-mentioned techniques used by Michell and perhaps a particularly important model in helping him "trash the hotel room of the BBC classic." Both Scorsese and Michell reinvigorate the genre of the cinematic adaptation of the literary classic, and do so with a remarkably similar ensemble of camera movements. I may be guessing about possible cinematic allusions and influences for Michell, but Scorsese offers direct evidence about his models in visualizing The Age of Innocence. The last chapter in the published screenplay of the film briefly describes twenty-two films that Scorsese and co-scriptwriter Jay Cocks point out as having "some bearing on The Age of Innocence: as an inspiration, as a source of stylistic or spiritual nourishment, even as a temporary tool" (127). Most of these films feature camera motion, and not surprisingly, The Magnificent Ambersons, Letter From an Unknown Woman, and Lola Montes are mentioned specifically (132-33). For both Scorsese and Michell, the mobile camera in general portrays, in the words spoken in voiceover in The Age of Innocence, "a world balanced so precariously that its harmony could be shattered by a whisper"; the circling camera is a vehicle of ironic commentary; and a slow pull-in can assert the pathos and mystery of interiority and the profound sense of loss that is the primary fact of life for both Newland Archer and Anne Elliot.

The carefully articulated pattern of moving camera shots builds to a much different and more positive conclusion in Persuasion than in The Age of Innocence, and asserts Anne's achieved mobility and self-determination. She circulates freely among the crowd gathered at the party at the end-a warm but dimly lit, somewhat claustrophobic setting which, as we see in the concluding shots of the film, she will ultimately escape altogether by sailing off to sea with Wentworth. Throughout Persuasion, Michell is remarkably successful in portraying, as he described his intentions, a vibrant life "full of surprises, and full of anxieties and full of change" (qtd. in Bennett), and the film ends as a muted comedy of remarriage, without the screwball elements and frantic mobility common to that sub-genre. The emphasis is on patience, flexibility, and sensitivity as the key elements that allow for endurance, reconciliation, and confidence in the possibility of remaking one's self as well as remaking the couple-all of this embodied and conveyed, not just underscored, by carefully planned and executed cinematographic techniques and allusions.

Careful attention to and respect for these techniques and allusions rebuts John Simon's claim that "From the standpoint of cinema, in any case, the authorial voice is a major problem. . . . Even the most scrupulously scrutinizing camera cannot catalogue as many details-or catalog them as stylishly and wittily-as Jane Austen's prose can," and that as a result, "a film adaptation of an Austen novel must reconcile itself in advance to a substantial amount of loss" (58). Such a statement issues from a radical distrust of the auteurial presence and the film medium-surprising from such a shrewd film critic as Simon. On the contrary, Michell's Persuasion reminds us that we need not look at cinematic adaptations apologetically. But to escape this trap we need to accept the advice of Fay Weldon, a particularly astute reader and adapter of Austen, who suggests that "reading" is not under all circumstances "superior to viewing," and that "'Viewing' has developed its own resource, its own history" (Weldon). With this advice in mind, we become more aware that Persuasion is a "heritage" film of a different sort than usually noticed, reaching back of course to Austen and the traditions of literary expression, but also relying on an increasingly rich tradition of cinematic techniques and texts. We sacrifice too much if we neglect this dual heritage of Persuasion.

[Reference]

Harris, Jocelyn. rev. of Sense and Sensibility. Persuasion. Pride and Prejudice, and Clueless. Eighteenth-Century Fiction 8:3 (1996): 427-30.

James, Caryn. "Austen Tale of Lost Love Refound." New York Times 27 Sept. 1995 (online).

Matthews, Peter. rev. of Emma. Sight and Sound 40 (1996): 9.

Ross, Alex. rev. of "period pictures." New York Times 31 March 1996 (online).