FILM FILM - University of Macau Library

68 Transition and Transformation
Brouwers makes this scene at the beginning of film the starting point for her
argument “that their [Sjöström’s and Marion’s] interpretation of Hester is somewhat
different – freer, less restrained – from the heroine of Hawthorne’s novel”.
15 However, the fact that several aspects of the scene seem to be well
grounded in passages from the novel, though they then appear in different contexts,
must also be taken into consideration, and this provides a counter-argument
to Brouwers’ somewhat too simplistic dichotomy between novel and
script. After having described Hester’s physical appearance in detail in the novel,
as she is about to step onto the scaffold, Hawthorne immediately goes on to
discuss her ladylike posture and her radiance:
Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured
by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her
beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was
enveloped. It may be true, that, to a sensitive observer, there was something exquisitely
painful in it. Her attire, which, indeed, she had wrought for the occasion, in
prison, and had modelled much after her own fancy, seemed to express the attitude
of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque peculiarity.
But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer, –
so that both men and women, who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester
Prynne, were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time, – was that SCAR-
LET LETTER, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had
the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and inclosing
her in a sphere by herself. 16
To endure the long hours on the scaffold, in her “intense consciousness of being
the object of severe and universal observation”, Hester seeks refuge in “memory’s
picture-gallery”, where “the whole scene [...] seemed to vanish from her
eyes or at least, glimmered indistinctly before them, like a mass of imperfectly
shaped and spectral images”; “the scaffold of the pillory was a point of view
that revealed to Hester Prynne the entire track along which she had been treading”,
and she is relieved by these recollections from “her subsequent life; one
picture precisely as vivid as another; [...] by the exhibition of these phantasmagoric
forms”. 17 Hester’s experience on the scaffold is close to that of the spectator
of magic lantern shows, or of the later cinemagoer, as she sees her own life
pass by in tableauesque pictures. Moreover, they seem to appear in a montagelike
succession, or even in superimposition, with the dim images from the present
overlapping with a series of inner pictures from her past, one emanating
from the other.
But if Hawthorne’s novel, as we have seen, is imbued with references to visuality
and the gaze through the intermediary of the characters, it could also be
argued that Sjöström’s film – based as it is on Marion’s script, “all about seeing