The Contaminated Film’s Eye Schlöndorff’s Death of a Salesman
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Fall 2024
Abstract
Volker Schlöndorff’s Death of a Salesman is based on a 1949 play by Arthur Miller with hundreds of performances across the globe. In 1985, Schlöndorff transfers a 1984 Broadway performance of the play into screen using the same crew, which included such celebrated actors as Dustin Hoffman and a then still very young John Malkovich. Despite the ostensible fidelity of the film to the original text, when it comes to ocularization or visual focalization—which has to do with the relation between “what the camera shows and what the characters are presumed to be seeing” (Jost 74)--Schlöndorff’s Death of a Salesman takes on an experimental visual modality. Indeed, the audience of Schlöndorff’s film is caught up in a rather unreliable ocularization which is pretty much contaminated by the troubled mind of Willy Loman (Dustin Hoffman), the protagonist of the story. In this film, the visual and aural presentation of information occasionally deviates from the film’s fictional truth (i.e., what is considered as reality on the level of the fictional utterance) to such an extent that the viewer starts questioning the ontological standing of the visual representations; thus, increasingly doubting the reliability of what they are watching. In Schlöndorff’s film, it often becomes difficult to figure out whether the actions or events seen on screen are actually happening in the diegetic world; hence, our interaction with the film’s narrative becomes very complex and dynamic. The inaccessibility of objective truth that Schlöndorff presents to us is concretized through an untrustworthy and contaminated ocularizer. The scenes from the past, which are mostly presented as Willy’s memories, are particularly contaminated. Thus, the representation of the accurate event which we would ordinarily expect from the normative film’s eye, is undermined by the contaminated adoption of muddled memories of Willy into the film’s ocularization. Besides Willy’s splintered mind, the theatricality of the original source also infiltrates the discourse-vision. In fact, Schlöndorff’s film both as a page-to-screen (as an adaptation of Miller’s play) as well as a stage-to-screen adaption (as an adaptation of the Broadway performance) renders a special treatment of space, décor, mise en scène, costume, and acting style, which appears to be contaminated by the theatricality of the original sources, hence creating a hybrid aesthetic. After elucidating the concepts of contamination and ocularization, we will investigate the contaminated film’s eye in Schlöndorff’s Death of a Salesman.
Publisher Attribution
Published in Volume 52, Number 4 in Literature/Film Quarterly in Fall 2024.
Recommended Citation
Rahmani, Razieh and Gerrits, Jeroen, "The Contaminated Film’s Eye Schlöndorff’s Death of a Salesman" (2024). Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship. 63.
https://orb.binghamton.edu/comparative_literature_fac/63
