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Visual Aspects of the Story.
To give intense and original life to a poetic world, enlivening it with the breath of imagination and descriptive faculty, such is the task of the regisseur.
It is truly with the eye of a regisseur that Ariosto saw the violent reverses of fortune that form the groundwork of his poem.
If one wished to give it a complete cinematic treatment, it would have to be done in several episodes and several days would be required for its projection, so plentiful is the subject matter.
It would certainly be no light work to garner from " Orlando " all its visual elements in order to construct a scenario. All is action in this poem, which means to say that all in Cinema. If a daring scenarist were to undertake to extract from " Orlando " the continuity of a film, he would run into a regular wasps nest.
In any case such a task would require an intelligent scenarist and one with literally a strong heart, a real cineist who would cut and hack at the story to stop it lingering and to make it keep up a racing pace. If one were to use all the cinematic material that there is to be found in the story one would never get to the end of it.
However, the film in several episodes is no longer a la mode, and the maximun projection time should not exceed three hours. The most gifted scenarist would therefore have to be careful over this question of length. It is supposed to be easy to make one film out of ten others, but no one takes the trouble to say at what point one is most likely to go wrong.
I found myself in just this sort of difficulty when I was adapting Don Quixote for the theatre, for the particular kind of theatre which interests me, twenty or thirty little scenes following one another, differing as regards both time and place, scenery that is changed rapidly in full view of the audience as in films.
This extract from the life of the Sad-faced Knight for marionette theatres was judged to be full of action and amusing but for me it was a kind of via Crucis in tewenty-two Stations. And how difficult it was to have to leave out many fine scenes.
In order to adapt " Orlando " for the screen one would have to become quite resigned in this matter. It is definitely there, the mediaeval representational technique, the technique which I have examined on various occasions in my books on the art of the theatre and cinegraphic character. And what better technique have we invented since ?