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and being-seen” –takes the relationship to the visual to the next level, as it also
makes explicit the spectatorial position as such. The gaze construed by the film
does convey a message of its own, in particular in its including of the spectator’s
point of view, as it is built up through gestures directed towards the film spectator
(as when Dimmesdale reveals the A on his own chest and rips off Hester’s
A). So does Sjöström’s particular cinematic language, which will be discussed in
the following, with its superimpositions and the associative quality they bring,
or with the use of off-screen space, which all seem to emphasize the presence of
the spectator.
An Aesthetics of Light
A for Adultery – The Scarlet Letter 69
As should have become obvious, the novel already includes a visual dimension
to which Sjöström adds his specific cinematographic quality. This is true also of
the instructions for lighting, the optical scenography, which may be discerned
already in the novel as ideas or conceptions in the text. In discussing the relationship
between Hawthorne’s novel and Sjöström’s film, Swedish film historian
Örjan Roth-Lindberg argues that the cinematic version of the story is carefully
construed through what he calls “an aesthetics of light”, grounded in the metaphorical
use of light in the novel so dear to Romanticism and Symbolism, operating
through analogies with nature, expressing a mental or spiritual cause of
events through dualist images of light and dark. Roth-Lindberg also notes that
the reader, if taking the film as the point of departure and looking at the novel
from this point of view – much in the same way that I have done in discussing
the visual cues above – may actually make “the amazing discovery that the
whole direction of light is already there in the narration”. 18 He therefore makes
an inverted comparison from film to novel in order to uncover Sjöström’s miseen-scène
as “a hermeneutic approach to the original text, a sensitive reading of
its visual potential”. In the film version, these literary conceptions are concretely
represented in cinematic space as a presence of light. It might, therefore, be productive
to extend Roth-Lindberg’s analysis to an examination of the film as a
whole.
Reverend Dimmesdale’s head is surrounded by light, like a halo, the first time
he is presented in profile against the church wall. He is also brightly lit as he
stands in the pulpit during his sermon, where he reproaches Hester for having
profaned the Lord’s day, and behind his head, there seem to be white clouds in
motion, so that his sermon acquires an almost prophetic quality as he says: “If
ye sin, ye must pay – there is no escape”; indeed a prophecy loaded with significance.