Intermediality in Alasdair Gray’s "Lanark" Film Storyboard

Abstract

This article analyses Alasdair Gray’s storyboard for a never made film adaptation of the novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) as a self-standing intermedial artwork. It presents an argument that the specificities of the nested graphic narrative medium, or “graphicality”, can be used not only for the reading of the storyboard’s text/image/space convergence, but for a better understanding of the textual and visual elements of the source novel as well. Gray’s autoreferential process, recognized in previous analyses of his literary work, is thus approached through the optics of his foregrounded media materiality. What takes centre position is the process of realising the story, and of the new artistic object made in the process. Such an object questions the reading and viewing regimes reproduced and displaced by every artwork. The analysis of the Lanark storyboard, which is an artwork “between” literature, graphic arts, and film, is a contribution to a rising body of scholarly work that uses a comprehensive theoretical approach to gain a better understanding of such syncretic artworks.