Representations of Criminality in the Opening Mise-en-Scenes of Great Expectations : Its Novel and Films

Abstract

This paper attempts to compare and contrast the opening chapters of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) with the mise-en-scènes of its recent film adaptations, Mike Newell’s BBC version (2012) and Alfonso Cuarón’s American version (1998). The paper chooses the opening scenes, assuming that Pip’s encounter with Magwitch in these scenes reveal crime and criminality as an inevitable condition for human existence. Because of this encounter, Pip is forced not only to commit misdemeanors that continually rouse his feeling of guilt, but also to accept Magwitch as his father figure. Against his or her intention or will, Dickens seems to suggest, one cannot avoid being criminalized as long as one is born and lives. However, this idea is lost in adapting the novel into both films. In order to understand how the idea is vanished and what its consequence are, this paper attempts to take a close look at the mise-en-scènes of each work. Mise-en-scène, signifying anything put into a camera frame to produce particular impressions, is a useful means to trace the differences the films make. The combined use of Dickens’s autodiegetic and heterodiegetic narratives in the early chapters is reformulated in the cinematic techniques the directors employ: while Newell’s film restrains itself adopting Pip’s autodiegetic view and tries to establish its own heterodiegetic one, Cuarón’s film makes it explicit that the audience sees the world through Finn’s subjective viewpoint. Paying attention to such difference helps us see how the directors builds their works upon the original or diverts from it. The comparison of the mise-en-scènes produces a new perspective from which we can appreciate Dickens’s novel and re-evaluate the adaptations.