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SUBSTANCE INTO SHADOW 197
Lucas Beauchamp for the first time that he remembered or rather for the first time because you didn't forget Lucas Beauchamp ... he looked up at the face that was just watching him without pity commiseration or anything else, not even surprise : just watching him, whose owner had made no effort whatever to help him up out of the creek ... a face which in his estimation might have been under fifty or even forty except for the hat and the eyes, and inside a Negro's skin but that was all even to a boy of twelve shaking with cold and still panting from shock and exertion. ...
This is the kind of situation that the camera can capture with a precision which the novel cannot match. The various strands of thought which Faulkner interweaves in his elaborate twisting prose somehow destroy the illusion of time and one loses the sense of their simultaneity. The many thoughts and associations have to be written down on the page one by one, and give the effect of a catalogue rather than of a comprehensive description of simultaneous emotions. On the screen, though perhaps some of the depth is lost, the scene reaches the spectator with a less artificial impact. Lucas's voice is heard at the same time as Chick begins to climb the bank. His first appearance is shown as it is described in the book in a slow upward tilting of the camera. The image is held for some time and embraces the whole complex impression ' the legs, the overalls rising out of them' ; 'a broad pale felt hat' ; 'a face which in his estimation might have been under fifty or even forty' and so on which the novelist has laboriously had to reconstruct.
This ability of the cinema to capture a complex visual effect in a single image is worth dwelling on, for it points to one way in which a film can legitimately extend and sharpen the impact of a novel. Where Faulkner's descriptions are capable of direct translation to the screen, Clarence Brown's deliberate, unspectacular direction underlines the events in the manner the above excerpt shows. Where a direct translation is not possible, the success of his direction varies. When