ULYSSES
UK/USA, 1967, 140 minutes, Black and white.
Barbara Jefford, Milo O' Shea, Maurice Roeves, T.P.Mc Kenna, Fionnula Flanagan, Anna Manahen.
Directed by Joseph Strick.
Ulysses is a cinematic attempt by writer-director Joseph Strick to transfer James Joyce’s celebrated novel to the screen. This was a very difficult feat because Ulysses is so strongly verbal, stream-of-consciousness language in the Irish vein.
The action takes place in Dublin on June 16, 1904. Stephen Dedalus (the subject of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) is a poet who wanders Dublin. He encounters Leopold and Molly Bloom, played by Milo O’ Shea and Barbara Jefford. Barbara Jefford received a number of award nominations for her role. The film also gained an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay for Joseph Strick and co-writer Fred Haines.
The film offers an opportunity mainly to listen to Joyce’s prose – with some visuals on the screen, the embodiment of the characters, suggestions of action. The film explores human nature, relationships, love, sexuality and betrayal.
Maurice Roeves is Stephen Dedalus.
Joseph Strick attempted film versions of a number of classic literary pieces of theatre and novels: Jean Jenet’s The Balcony, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
There was another version of Ulysses made for the screen in 2004, Bloom, starring Stephen Ray as Leopold Bloom, Angeline Ball as Molly Bloom and Hugh O’ Conor as Stephen Dedalus. It is considered a much more accessible version of Joyce’s novel.
1. The importance of James Joyce's novel and this version as a satisfying interpretation of the novel? The significance of Ulysses himself as a wanderer home, in an epic with all the adventures on the way? Ulysses as a model for modern men in his wandering? The relationship of this title and all its overtones to Leopold Bloom? The film retains, much of Joyce's dialogue. How well does this come across to give an impression of Joyce's scope of language and imagination? The film was updated to the sixties. Does this matter for the impact of the film? The similarities between Dublin 1906 and Dublin 1966?
2 The novel had three main parts: Dublin, the wanderings of Leopold Bloom and his fantasies, the soliloquy of Molly Bloom. How well did the film retain this structure and present it visually? Comment on the black and white photography, Panavision, the composition of the images, the use of reality and fantasy, the editing into a harmonious film?
3. What was the final impact of the film? What was it trying to communicate to its audience? About men, about people, being alive in a fallible world? what response did it try to elicit from the audience? In terms of humanity, sympathy, sharing the problems and yearnings and failures of another person?
4. Why did the novel have such an impact? Why did the film have its own impact?
5. Did the film have much to offer on insight into Ireland? The emphasis that the film gave to Ireland as the location, to Dublin as the city, to the inheritance of Ireland and its frame of mind? The Irish and their attitudes towards life, fate, God, sin, interrelationships?
6. What were the basic insights into people that the film gave? Leopold Bloom as a human being, as a Jew, his work, his relationship with his wife, his relationships with his friends, to Stephen Daedalus? How did Stephen represent people in his searching, poetry, bitterness? Mulligan as an ordinary man? How did Molly Bloom represent people, as being a woman? Her relationship to her husband, her attitude towards herself, her beliefs, her sensuality, the importance of sensuality and sexuality for her? The way that this was highlighted and emphasised? Did the film offer an adequate view of people? Was it aiming at this?
7. Did the film give any insight into Ireland and its being inhabited by Catholics, the Jews? The Catholic atmosphere of the film? The initial parody on the Eucharist? Mulligan and his attitudes towards God and the Church? Stephen and his Jesuit background and his obsession with religion? How did this contrast with the Jews and Leopold Bloom as a Jew? And his religion?
8. The importance of racial attitudes in the film? The attitudes of Catholics to the Jews? Insight into the attitudes towards the Jews in the modern world in this film?
9. What did the character of Mulligan add to the film? His easy-going nature, friendship, Stephen, attitude towards Bloom?
10. What did Stephen add to the film? His seriousness, morality, attitude toward Mulligan, his meanderings on the seashore and reflections, in school, facing the ordinary Irish day, his relationship to his family, to women, sexuality, drink, ambitions in life, the younger version and more intellectual of Bloom?
11. The importance of his role in the film? The picture of family life in Dublin? Joyce's outlook on the family and its importance?
12. The role of death? Specially the sequences of the funeral?
13. The ordinary way of life and the significance that Joyce and the film have given it?
14. The impact of the central section of the film and its interpretations of fact and fantasy? Bella Cowen and her prostitutes and what they stood for? the symbolic nature of sexuality? Comment on the success of the visual images of fantasy and their effect on Bloom? How important was this segment of the film? What insight into humanity did it give?
15. How successful was the presentation of Molly Bloom's soliloquy? Barbara Jeffords' performance and enunciation of the soliloquy? the way she was visualised on the bed? The visualising of her fantasies? were they too realistic or did they blend with the soliloquy? the languid use of language and stream of consciousness? The content of the soliloquy and its insight into the deeper dreams and yearnings of a human being? The fact that the film finished with this?
16. Is this a great film of James Joyce's work? Is it a good and adequate film?
