Introduction

Volker Schlöndorff’s Death of a Salesman is based on a 1949 play by Arthur Miller with hundreds of performances across the globe. In 1985, Schlöndorff transfers a 1984 Broadway performance of the play into screen using the same crew, which included such celebrated actors as Dustin Hoffman and a then still very young John Malkovich. Despite the ostensible fidelity of the film to the original text, when it comes to ocularization or visual focalization—which has to do with the relation between “what the camera shows and what the characters are presumed to be seeing” (Jost 74)--Schlöndorff’s Death of a Salesman takes on an experimental visual modality. Indeed, the audience of Schlöndorff’s film is caught up in a rather unreliable ocularization which is pretty much contaminated by the troubled mind of Willy Loman (Dustin Hoffman), the protagonist of the story. In this film, the visual and aural presentation of information occasionally deviates from the film’s fictional truth (i.e., what is considered as reality on the level of the fictional utterance) to such an extent that the viewer starts questioning the ontological standing of the visual representations; thus, increasingly doubting the reliability of what they are watching.  In Schlöndorff’s film, it often becomes difficult to figure out whether the actions or events seen on screen are actually happening in the diegetic world; hence, our interaction with the film’s narrative becomes very complex and dynamic. The inaccessibility of objective truth that Schlöndorff presents to us is concretized through an untrustworthy and contaminated ocularizer. The scenes from the past, which are mostly presented as Willy’s memories, are particularly contaminated. Thus, the representation of the accurate event which we would ordinarily expect from the normative film’s eye, is undermined by the contaminated adoption of muddled memories of Willy into the film’s ocularization. Besides Willy’s splintered mind, the theatricality of the original source also infiltrates the discourse-vision. In fact, Schlöndorff’s film both as a page-to-screen (as an adaptation of Miller’s play) as well as a stage-to-screen adaption (as an adaptation of the Broadway performance) renders a special treatment of space, décor, mise en scène, costume, and acting style, which appears to be contaminated by the theatricality of the original sources, hence creating a hybrid aesthetic. After elucidating the concepts of contamination and ocularization, we will investigate the contaminated film’s eye in Schlöndorff’s Death of a Salesman.

Contamination

This paper has borrowed the concept of “contamination” from Gilles Deleuze and his conceptualization of free indirect discourse in Cinema 2. Deleuze uses the concept to describe the “free indirect discourse,”1 which is an important trait of the minor cinema (Cinema 2 148) that “contaminates” the demarcation between the objective, direct style of narrator and the subjective indirect style of the character. That is, free indirect discourse goes beyond the two elements of the traditional story i.e., “the objective, indirect story from the camera’s point of view and the subjective, direct story from the character’s point of view” and achieves a special form of free indirect discourse (Cinema 2 148).  Deleuze states,

The story no longer refers to an ideal of the true which constitutes its veracity, but becomes a ‘pseudo-story,’ a poem, a story which simulates or rather a simulation of the story. Objective and subjective images lose their distinction, but also their identification, in favour of a new circuit where they are wholly replaced, or contaminate each other, or are decomposed and recomposed. To the extent that the characters, classes and genres form the free indirect discourse of the author, as much as the author forms their free indirect vision (what they see, what they know or do not know). Or rather the characters express themselves freely in the author’s discourse-vision, and the author, indirectly, in that of the characters. (Cinema 2 187, emphasis added)

In this contamination, the relationship between the narrator who is narrating and the character who is being narrated gets indefinite. That is, the line of demarcation between them becomes undecided. This contamination or what Deleuze calls “double becoming” which happens between the subjectivity of the character and the objectivity of the camera eye is crucial to the art of cinema from his perspective. As Deleuze puts it elsewhere in Cinema 2, [changed for variation; see previous block quote]

In the cinema of poetry the distinction between what the character saw subjectively and what the camera saw objectively vanished, not in favor of one or the other, but because the camera assumed a subjective presence, acquired an internal vision, which entered into a relation of simulation with the character’s way of seeing . . . The author takes a step towards his characters, but the characters take a step towards the author: double becoming. (Cinema 2 222)

Similarly, as this paper argues, Schlöndorff’s Death of a Salesman allows for the penetration of an internal vision, hence the interferences from the protagonist’s/character’s voice and focalization into that of the film. Indeed, in a dialogic manner, the character’s discourse-vision infiltrates into the external ocularizer’s vision and the audience cannot say where one begins and the other ends. This dialogic manner not only resists interpretation but also resists and problematizes the concept of subject and identity and practices polyphony and difference. Hence, as in free-indirect discourse which uses third person narration, Schlöndorff’s film uses external ocularization, “but speaks in the received, common or clichéd style of the characters described, so it is neither the author or the character who is speaking” (Colebrook 109).2 

Our extensive review of the literature indicates that, so far, no studies have attempted to systematically apply the concept of contamination to the study of cinema or film. Arguably, in the light of the Deleuzian concept of “contamination,” Schlöndorff’s distinct method of adaptation could be appreciated better. In addition to the penetration of the protagonist’s internal vision, the theatricality Schlöndorff incorporates into the film creates a hybrid aesthetic and a cinema in the process of becoming; hence, the film, contaminated by theater, becomes a creative and accommodating site for a dialectic between the two media. It is worth mentioning, Death of a Salesman is very interesting as an adaptation because not only is it considered as an adaptation of a dramatic text but also a theatrical adaptation being adapted from the Broadway production directed by Michael Rudman in 1984. Thus, the film as a stage-to-screen adaptation is in a sense an adaptation from adaptation which, aided by the theatricality, gives it a sense of self-reflexivity. As Victoria Lowe would put it, the film functions like “a collective theatrical encounter” which “reflect(s) on its [...] status as a medium” (2).

Ocularization

The concept of ocularization in film is derived from that of focalization in the narrative.The French narratologist Gerard Genette introduced the concept of focalization in Narrative Discourse. The question of focalization is the question of “regulation of narrative information” (162); the question of “who sees?” and “who is the character whose point of view orients the narrative perspective?” (186). When the narrative information is filtered through a character, the character is our focalizer. Genette distinguishes between extradiegetic narrators, who narrate from outside the story, and intradiegetic narrators, who narrate from within the story, in which they appear as characters. Films typically do not have a narrator. Instead of being told by a narrator, the story is shown through ocularizer/ocularizers, or sequences of edited shots taken from various points of view. Still, one could say that the film’s eye or eyes predominantly function very similarly to an extradiegetic narrator, as the camera’s position only by marked exceptions implies a perspective from a character within the diegetic world. Moreover, Genette’s “zero focalization” or “non-focalized” narrator is close to when the film’s eye freely and objectively reflects or shows things in an uncontaminated manner. Nonetheless, one can claim that, on some level, there is no pure objectivity, and even the most fixed, unbiased film’s eye is contaminated as, after all, it is inevitably contaminated by director’s choice of angle, distance, lightning, mise en scène, etc. Thus, objectivity or impartiality is not feasible in its pure sense. Drawing on Genette’s narrative theories, the film theorist François Jost (who coined the term ocularization in “The Look: From Film to Novel An Essay in Comparative Narratology”) finds the idea of the camera’s neutrality all the more surprising: given that the camera does not merely copy reality without altering it, he denies the “automatic filmic transparency” (72) as formulated by realist critics.

Focalization is contingent on the cognitive plane; when a narrative has access to the inner thoughts and memories of a character, we will have internal focalization at work, and when we infer the character’s thoughts and feeling from his actions and words, we will have the external focalization. But other than the cognitive focalization, there are also aural focalization as well as visual focalization which Jost calls ocularization in his “comparative narratology” (79). Ocularization “has to do with the relation between what the camera shows and what the characters are presumed to be seeing” (Jost 74) and can be internal or external. In the external ocularization, the focalizing character is seen from the outside, and his visual field and experience are not reconstructed. Jost divides internal ocularization into primary and secondary; in the primary ocularization, the image “allows us, without relying on context, to identify a character not present in the image” (75). On the other hand, in the secondary internal ocularization, the subjective image is constructed through “a contextualization of an image” (75) with a shot anchored in the visual subjectivity of a person looking.

Jost states that “Depending on the context, every photograph can be called objective or subjective. A photograph of a landscape can be related to the landscape itself (the referential function) or to the photographer (expressive function)” (74). On a similar note, it seems that Schlöndorff’s film, despite being usually described as a highly faithful adaptation, cannot be reduced to the referential function, and adopts an aesthetically very creative, expressive function.

In fact, the film’s faithful mode of borrowing in which the uniqueness of the original text is replicated, seems to be --as Andre Bazin would call it-- a “refraction” of the original work which functions like a crystal chandelier (quoted in Andrew 99) for the film’s light, hence producing a faithful marriage between cinema and theatre and a happy intersection. Schlöndorff’s adaptation brings to light and accentuates the psychological nuances and intricacies of the character of Willy in the original fabula,3 which infiltrate into all aspects of Schlöndorff’s adaptation including the film’s eye.

Therefore, Schlöndorff dexterously appeals to the artistic principal and fidelity principal at the same time. He generates what Gaudreault and Marion call “an intervention at the level of expression” (64) and rearranges the fabula into a creative “syuzhet-text”4 with unradical yet significant adjustments on the plane of expression that mobilizes the aesthetic soul of the fabula. Hence, he remains true both to the form and the spirit of the fabula.

Contaminated Film’s Eye in Schlöndorff’s Death of a Salesman

Schlöndorff’s Death of a Salesman appears to have a fixed ocularization limited to only one character or entity i.e., an exterior grand imagier or monstrateur. Apparently, we will not experience high degrees of variable ocularization in the film; that is, ocularization does not completely shift (even if it does, it is not often) between characters/entities. Arguably, in Schlöndorff’s film, we are watching the actions from an external place, or, in Jost’s terminology, the shots of the movie are (predominantly) not “anchored in the regard of an instance internal to the diegesis” (74); therefore, it is a case of “zero ocularization.”

It is worth mentioning that when we attribute “zero” to the method of Schlöndorff’s ocularization, we are using it as a descriptive rather than judgmental word; Jost says,

The “zero” here is not pejorative but technical; it simply signifies seen by no one, “nobody’s shot,” or, as Eisenstein puts it: “the action which would be depicted without any author’s relation to it (the subject) of any kind.” In our modern terminology, we would say that this kind of ocularization has to do with the narrator […]. “Zero,” then, simply means that it is not possible to assign an image to any specific gaze. (76)

Jost also argues that “Most shots of most films use zero ocularization, even in the case of characters or narrators telling their own stories in flashback” (76), which appear to be the case of Willy’s downfall story too. Nevertheless, we can never fully guarantee what type of ocularization shots have as “nothing allows us to make an absolute distinction” (Jost 75). We need to rely heavily on the contextual cues; for instance, in case of Schlöndorff’s film the fact that “a normal angle seems transparent” and the audience observes less of “a bizarre or surprising angle” denotes “a narrating presence organizing the fiction” (76); thus, we can “more or less” (76) mark zero ocularization in the movie.5

The image the audience observes in Schlöndorff’s film does not equate the perspective of any character within the frame of diegesis; nonetheless, from the contextual cues, one can claim that very few shots which can be ascribed to primary or secondary internal ocularization, such as, Willy’s look at young Biff in the film’s first analepsis and the fascinating spiral ocularization of the restaurant scene. Other than these few instances, the shots are almost completely externally ocularized, yet there is an experimental ocularizing strategy at work in the evidently external ocularization scenes supposedly independent of the character’s point of view.  

It is worth mentioning that this rather consistently fixed external ocularization could be associated with the influence of Bertolt Brecht on Schlöndorff’s technique of filmmaking. Brecht’s “Epic theatre” employed techniques such as distancing effect (Verfremdungseffekt) that tended to prevent the spectator from identifying and emotionally engaging with the fictional characters, hence underscoring the constructedness of the story and avoiding the complacency on the part of the audiences that could result from their climactic catharsis of emotion. Arguably, picking the predominantly external ocularization, for Schlöndorff’s film has to do with Brechtian distancing effect;6 moreover, the obvious theatricality of the film which is apparent in the setting and the character’s manner of acting seems to add to this influence. Interestingly, at times, some over-shoulder shots (as in the initial Happy and Biff conversation) hint at the interiorizing of the film’s eye, but without cutting to another shot, the ocularization usually shifts to an external mood making the viewers conclude that the initial cues of interiority were all to mislead them.

Nevertheless, Schlöndorff is not a very obedient and submissive student at the Brechtian school. Though his film’s eye looks at things from the standpoint of an exterior onlooker, this grand imagier is oftentimes contaminated by the state of mind of the film’s protagonist while maintaining its exteriority. Over the course of Schlöndorff’s Death of a Salesman, there are zero-ocularized shots seem to be colored by the internal mentality of the main character. There are a number of times when we realize from contextual indices and clues that the depiction of the past though might be real on the diegetic level is inseparably contaminated by Willy’s hallucinatory state, leaving us unsure to what extent the shots we are observing through film’s eye are reliable, so we have to only make inferences as to which parts are contaminated, which are real, and where the boundary between the two actually lies.

Mostly in the film’s prolepses, the information outside the frame ocularization contaminate the film’s eye i.e., the internal thoughts of the character infiltrating from the reservoir of his perception, memories, free-association, knowledge. This tainted ocularization is first sensed in a relatively tangible and striking fashion when for the first time we are witness to the past event of the visit of Uncle Ben where the other family members are also involved, and the audiences get a hunch that the ocularization of this scene might be partially unreliable, and that what they are shown might not be what has exactly happened when Uncle Ben visited. The audience will realize that the recurring scenes about Uncle Ben’s visit become more and more unreliable and distorted by the on-the-decline travelling salesman. Indeed, each time Ben’s visit recures, it is being extended and embellished being progressively tainted by Willy’s psychotic state. There are several of these moments of undecidability where the film’s eye is rendered untrustworthy, and the viewer is left in a state of perplexity whether he is perceiving the diegetic present, the past, the altered past, or a pure fantasy. Sometimes, these undecidabilities are solved before long later on, but at times the audience can only make conjectures based on various cues.  

One can argue that the film is generally contaminated by the protagonist’s manic-depressive moods. In the diegetic present time, he is a fragile pitiful aging man, he considers himself a failure, and he is mostly in a depressive phase. The diegetic present is thus colored by his gloominess and bitterness, both on the level of narrative and ocularization; for instance, the background of the present time is (supposedly) actual apartments. One the other hand, the past, or the imagined past, mostly corresponds to his manic phase wherein he is jolly, funny, optimistic, and the pertinent shots seem to be more unrealistic both visually--for example the painted backdrops--and on the narrative level (see Figures 1 and 2).Nonetheless, in the past, there are always clues, though passing or minor, to foreshadow the gloominess or belie the rosy atmosphere, such as: the cemetery that peeks through the fences (Figure 3) while Willy is apparently living the best of his life; Biff’s failures at school, his thefts, his behaviors with girls, etc.; Willy’s less than mediocre professional accomplishment which he tends to exaggerate; his extramarital affair that is out of “loneliness” and his “fakeness,” which are always outshined by the upbeat mood of Willy contaminating the past. These subtle contaminations dynamize the diegetic space-time of the film in an entropic manner, which leads to the final explosion of the ending while creating a realm of “time-in-flux” (53) or what Panofsky calls “the dynamic action of space and spatialization of time” (qtd. in Bluestone 52) towards the ending of the film.

Further, the diverse elements of artificiality and theatricality seen in the film could also contribute to unreliable ocularization, an ocularization that does not care about verisimilitude and providing the audience with realistic and believable atmosphere. For instance, backdrops, especially those we see in the good-old-days scenes, could contribute to the unreliability of ocularization for the viewer. From the beginning, we are exposed to this confusing theatricality; Willy is supposedly driving his car, but the car’s moving forward is deliberately artificial; it is quite evident that the car is being rocked to and fro, up and down to create an illusion of the car moving; even the image of passing lights is not natural either.

At 00:10:55, the film’s eye shifts from the boxed frame of Willy and Linda into inside, which is ironically not actually inside as the walls are obviously not connected; that is, the outside and inside are merged and amalgamated just as is the unreliable exterior grand imagier, contaminated (see Figures 4-6). This is the same in the boys’ room in which with the help of diagonal lines a visible illusion of interiority is created (in many instances radiators [such as 00:17:04] are also used to create the same illusion), and the audience are distracted from the gaps deliberately in a tentative fashion, hence further unreliability of the film’s eye which tells us blatant lies even on the diegetic level. This absence of interiority and exteriority could also metaphorically disclose the dissolution of boundaries in the mind of Willy. Afterwards, in the scene, Willy starts shouting, saying, “competition is maddening. Smell the stink from that apartment houses and another on the other side,” as though scaring the camera away which divulges the rooflessness of the building too. Indeed, the reality presented in front of the apparent unbiased lens of the camera is as ruptured as the theatrical mise en scene representing the delusional state of Willy which infiltrates the narrative. Schlöndorff’s theatrical approach to space, time, and other aspects of the film also resonates with Victoria Lowe’s invitation in Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen to integrate the spatial and temporal reconfigurations in the adaptation of play into screen: “Adaptation between theatre and cinema […] involves not just the textual but the spatial and temporal reconfiguration of a previously given work” (2).

Interestingly, later, in the Happy and Biff’s bedroom scene in which the two are conversing, we do not know if the two boys are hearing Willy’s voice too who is talking about Biff’s childhood, or if it is like an aside that is audible only to the audience. So, we wonder if the audience is privy to what Willy is saying; this is one of the first points of uncertainty where the audience is confused by the ocularization, or better, aural focalization. It is also possible that in this scene, Happy is the aural focalizer, and the speech is overheard by him while approaching the open window which is across their parent’s bedroom (see Figure 7). Besides, when Happy goes away, we do not hear them anymore while it appears that the discussion between Linda and Willy is still going on. Hence, the external aural focalizer seems to be contaminated by that of Happy for a short while.

Another great contamination is exposed at 00:18:55 of the film. Up to this moment, we had been familiarized with Biff as having apparently irretrievable anger and spite towards his dad, but at this moment, out of blue, we hear him talking to his dad with a gentle, happy sound, saying “what you got dad?” Initially, we get a bit bewildered, but since Biff sounds happy, this helps us conjecture that this part must be either not real or not related to the present tense. We start to realize that Willy’s mind is adulterating the exterior aural and visual focalization (ocularization). Initially, it is a dark night and the zero-focalizer is showing the gloomy present of Willy talking to himself and wandering around, then, Willy sits down, and we hear happy Biff and see a shot of his joyful face across the eyeline of Willy (referenced in Figures 8 and 9). However, it seems to be day there; even the daylight from the side of Biff seems to be reflected from the windowpanes on Willy’s face which had been sitting there at night.

Initially, Willy’s look at Biff’s face seems to be a secondary internal ocularization (inside the zero ocularization, without shifting the shot) wherein according to Jost, “the subjective image is constructed through editing (as in shot/counter-shot); that is, through a contextualization of an image;” he adds,  “any image that is edited together with a shot of a person looking, within the rules of cinematic ‘syntax,’ will be ‘anchored’ in the visual subjectivity of that person or character” (Jost 75). Thus, even though the shot does not shift, we might conclude that the camera’s look is anchored in Willy.

Also, the scene’s light and color shift are indicative of a shift in perception and subjectivity. Besides, the exaggeration of a foreground person or object as well as “an out-of-focus background” that we see in the shot of Biff’s face--with the out of focus rosy hues—suggest “the presence of a regarding look” (Jost 75). But, when Willy stands up and walks to the door we realize that the eyeline of Biff’s image does not match that of sitting Willy; besides, the distance between Willy and Biff is much more than expected as we perceive that Biff is standing behind the window at a rather long distance (depicted in Figure 10), hence the closeup-shot of Biff does not seem to be a secondary internal ocularization, but rather a an ocularizer contaminated by the mind’s eye of Willy. Nonetheless, one can never say positively whether the scene is portraying the actual diegetic-past of the narrative; an adapted, re-imagined, and audio-visually contaminated memory of Willy; or solely his delirium.  Moreover, we cannot decide the interval between the time Willy is sitting in the gloomy present and when he enters the past, i.e., the period when Willy moves towards the door and opens it, is a part of the past memory or not. In other words, it gets baffling whether the transition between the present and the past which features Willy’s movement toward the door and opening it with Biff standing behind the door, has happened in the present, the past, or even both.

Another significant scene with a very artistic ocularization is the mirror scene. Willy is standing in front of the mirror, and the wall behind him reflected in the mirror is red. His wife Linda tells him, “You are the best that there is,” and he replies “You know that you are a pal,” adding, “on the road I want to grab you sometimes and just kiss the life out of you,” then he starts mumbling how lonely he gets when business is bad. At this point, his statements are getting mildly contaminated by something else which we will later realize is the memory of the woman with whom he was having an affair in the past. Yet, his mind turns to Linda again, and he says, “I want to make a living for you” as if trying to justify his affair which occupies his mind by saying that he has to travel for making a living, and that he feels lonely while he is away especially when “businesses is bad,” and he is not living up to his high ambitions. Afterwards, he gets uplifted again talking about the great prospect of creating business for his sons. This excitement takes him back to the happy moments of his affair (at times, his feelings in the present time seem to ignite his bittersweet memories with the woman) and, abracadabra, there emerges the chortling woman into the magic mirror. Indeed, this contamination of Willy’s mind that we mentioned earlier, gets so intense here that the woman’s laughter penetrates first the aural and then the visual focalization of the film in a very enchanting manner.

Meanwhile, the red walls in the background of the reflection image turn darker and darker with the change of lighting, and the reflection image of the subject (Willy), which is part of a prolepsis as such, is turned into the subject himself in a yet farther past scene (an embedded prolepsis) in a dexterous way and without shifting the shot. So, the present Willy disappears as we jump into his memories which keeps contaminating the film’s eye. The only thing that remains uncontaminated is the rim of the mirror which remains as a token of the frame prolepsis (see Figure 11). Indeed, the mirror scene could be considered as having a “hypodiegetic” aural and visual focalization. To Genette, in the novel, the “hypodiegetic” narrator narrates from within the frame narrative of an intradiegetic narrator. In the mirror scene, the film’s eye portraying the past jumps into yet another interior layer of the narrative creating a sensational mis en abyme in the mirror. 

When the present Willy (of the frame prolepsis) comes back in the scene, Linda is still finishing her statement, “you are Willy, the handsomest.” Here, the difference between the psychological time and the chronological diegetic-time that Bluestone has put forth in his book Novels into Film becomes evident. Thus, the revisited memory in the past has taken longer in the mind of Willy as well as to the audience as though the objective time of present has been distended and contaminated by Willy’s psychological time. As Bluestone says, 

We speak of psychological time here in at least two roughly defined ways. The first suggests that the human mind is capable of accelerating and collapsing the “feel” of time to the point where each individual may be said to possess his own “time-system.” The second suggests, beyond this variability in rate, the kind of flux which, being fluid and interpenetrable, and lacking in sharp boundaries, can scarcely be measured at all. (51)

Returning from the memory of his sexual escapade, Willy’s smile peters away, and he says with a guilty face and tone, “I’ll make it up to you,” coming out of his manic phase which had contaminated the film. Then, for the first time, things in the past are not that rosy. Willy is entering a depressive mood; for instance, seeing his wife mending her stocking makes him angry, and he is told of Biff’s inappropriate behavior with girls, his failure at math, etc. and gets irritated. This shot is cut to a normal over-shoulder shot of Happy in the present time watching his grumpy father muttering words to himself, and we realize that we have deviated from of the viewpoint contaminated by Willy’s misshapen psyche. Willy also comes out of his trance when he notices Happy’s gaze.

Uncle Ben, though absent in the diegetic present of the film, is one of the main preoccupations of Willy, and we see him both in his memories and his hallucinations, the boundary between which becomes ever blurrier. Rather akin to the theatrical practices, Ben’s presence intrudes into the scenes, and Schlöndorff does not use filmic techniques like flashback, dissolve, or special effects (neither does he for other memory scenes of the film) even in scenes wherein he is only a phantasm. We see Ben’s intrusion into diegetic reality for the first time when Willy is talking to Charley whom he addresses as Ben, as though Ben’s memory has already started preoccupying his mind unbeknownst to us. Then, like with the laughter scene, the illusory figure starts to infiltrate into the zero ocularizer increasingly so much so that with Willy alternating between the real and fantastical plane and talking to both Charley and Ben at the same time, the audience is left bewildered as to which of Willy’s words are addressed to whom. Thus, Willy has a back and forth between Charley and Ben as well as between reality and fantasy.

Ben: I must make a train, William. There are several properties I’m looking at in Alaska.
Willy: Sure, sure! If I’d gone with him to Alaska that time, everything would’ve been totally different.
Charley: Go on, you’d froze to death up there.
Willy: What’re you talking about?
Ben: Opportunity is tremendous in Alaska, William. Surprised you’re not up there.
Willy: Sure, tremendous.
Charley: Heh?
Willy: There was the only man I ever met who knew the answers.
Charley: Who? [..]
Charley: What’re you talkin’ about?
Ben: William, it’s half past eight!
Willy: That’s my build!
Charley: I put the ace—
Willy: If you don’t know how to play the game, I’m not gonna throw my money away on you! […]
Ben: When did Mother die?
Willy: Long ago. Since the beginning you never knew how to play cards.

Then, older Charlie goes away, and younger Linda joins Ben and Willie. Indeed, while Ben is talking to the present-time Willie inside the house saying that instead of Alaska, he has gone to Africa, when suddenly, the past intervenes in the present and younger Linda inquires from the middle of the yard, “Africa?” (refer to Figures 12 and 13), very similar to the sham P.O.V scene with Biff standing behind the door. From the contextual clues we know that Ben’s visit is diegetically factual, but again the audience remains with an indecision whether what he/she is watching is entirely related to the past or is contaminated by the all-pervading reveries of Willy.

After this scene, the older Linda comes in worried about Willy who is talking to himself; Biff and Happy also enter and they talk about Willy’s immersion into his fantasies. Here, the external ocularization is back to normal, i.e., unaffected and unadulterated.

Uncle Ben comes in again at the office when Willy has lost his job. Behind him, there is a dazzling light, and he opens the office door to the fall trees that lead to Willy’s former yard. Younger Linda and the boys enter this time too, but we have more doubt than the previous visits about the factuality of the events we are witnessing.8  Here, the audience might speculate that Willy’s recollection does not have to do with the past, rather it is part of or merely in response to the present experience he is undergoing. Willy is rehashing the visit because he has lost his job, and he has regretted not going with him to Alaska. Hence, the recollection is contaminated by the present experience. In fact, a segment of the actual event of the past becomes merely an “instigator;” as Freud says, in dreams as a rule, an insignificant event from the actual life acts as the instigator of the dream (155). Furthermore, the recurring meme of Uncle Ben becomes a catalyst which each time deforms the reality in a new way, with itself remaining more or less intact. 

In some instances, such as the restaurant scene,9 Schlöndorff makes use of film’s idiosyncratic principles, i.e., principles of movement, to contribute to his film’s experimental ocularization. He transmits the movement of characters to the movement of camera in a unique way, and as a result “the screen dance like a witches’ Sabbath” (Bluestone 49) creating a certain graphic effect that dynamizes space and time. Bluestone states that the “principles of movement seem to collect around centers of gravity dictated by the film’s persistent and almost willful self-assertion,” and he sees it as a pivotal element in the structure of film (48). This constant motion especially when transferred to the movement of the film’s eye, as what we see in Schlöndorff’s restaurant scene, can in Bluestone’s terms create “a new kind of artistic reality, what Pudovkin calls filmic time and filmic space; what Panofsky calls the Dynamization of Space, and the Spatialization of Time” (48). On the other hand, in the restaurant scene, the circular movement of the film’s eye accompanied by the circular movement of the characters, the topsy-turvy mentality of Willy, and the confusion of audience seem to approach what Jost describes as the secondary internal ocularization wherein there is “the deformation of the image in relation to what cinematic convention regards as normal in a given period (superimposed double images, out-of-focus effects) which suggest conditions such as drunkenness, strabismus, myopia, and so forth)” (75). Before the entrance of Willy, however, when the boys are talking, the positioning of the camera reveals the presence of the cinematic narrator only, and there is a zero ocularization. But after Willy arrives, and things get messy (when Willy realizes that like himself, his son has failed at getting a job), he stands up and starts spinning around (followed by his sons), and his physical movements as well as his mental instability impinge on the film’s eye, hence in Bluestone’s terms, “the moving spaces […] explode against each other, movement itself pours over from shot to shot, binding as it blurs them, reinforcing the relentless unrolling of the celluloid” (Bluestone 49).10

Conclusion

Indeed, in Death of Salesman, there are many instances in which viewers may doubt whether the scene they are being exposed to through the lenses of the multiple cameras has truly happened in the diegetic reality the way it is portrayed via the camera; there are many moments when they are left with this unreliable ocularizer. This is especially true when the analepses happen in the movie: the Woman’s laughter scene where another scene originating from Willy’s memory whose audible traces overrides the present scene suddenly opens in the heart of the frame scene; the bathroom scene in which again we are exposed to the outburst of the mnemic residues of Willy’s muddled mind; and the scenes with a rosy ambience tainted with the over-optimism of Willy when everybody seems gleeful, and the focus of the story of the film is on the positive events featuring a pastoral mood and idyllic atmosphere.

It is noteworthy that the past and subjective memories of Willy contaminating the present also exist in the original play by Miller which he describes as the structural pattern of “the past meeting the present dilemma” (Conversations 386). The play seems to be filtered through the perceptions of Willy reliving his past. In “Point of View in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman,” Brian Parker points out that “the play’s technique of presenting all events and characters as though strained through Willy’s mind resembles the Morality technique in which characters and events are allegories of the central character’s psychomachia” (159). Miller, referring to the fact that the original title of the play was “The Inside of His Head,” states that “The first image that occurred to me which was to result in Death was of an enormous face the height of the proscenium arch which would appear and then open up, and we would see the inside of a man’s head” (quoted in Hoeveler 636).

Hence, the film rather than being a stylistic intervention is being true to the spirit of Miller’s play. To achieve that, arguably, the theatrical quality of the original play infiltrates into the neutral voyeuristic filmic eye of Schlöndorff’s Death of a Salesman, and this medial contamination affects all aspects of what we see as a viewer such as the space, design, and acting. For instance, reconfiguring the scenes and mise en scènes in order to create and divulge the fragmented space of the film shatters the assumed continuous space of the cinema and cinematic realism, and this shattering echoes the contamination of the voyeuristic film’s eye which is expected to be reflecting the image of the outside world realistically. One can argue that the static quality of theater infiltrates into this film’s cinematography; for example, there are less shifts of mise en scène, minimal cuts, slight transpositions, long scenes which create a sense of theatrical unities of time and place. Moeller and Lellis argue that Schlöndorff opts for a “dramatically oriented mode of expression” with extended scenes which are “deliberately begun, developed, modulated, and brought to a theatrical climax” featuring actor-centered mise en scène that represents “a pulling away from the more detached, emotionally cold ambience” of his earlier works as well as his other adaption which comes later, The Handmaid’s Tale (221).11 In designing the set, Schlöndorff uses a cinematographer and a Broadway designer creating a theatrical décor being artificial, minimal, and abstract; “In the kitchen, the only furniture is a refrigerator–there’s not a plate, no shelves. It’s like an exhibit of Americana,” as Schlöndorff puts it (quoted in Shewwy). Indeed, the setting along with the non-naturalistic lighting is not designed to seem realistic and self-consciously calls attention to itself as a set. In fact, just like in the original play, the film’s setting contributes greatly to the import of the narrative; Edward Murray states that in Miller’s play, the setting, the “solid vault of apartment houses,” “provides a flexible medium in which to enact the process of Willy Loman’s way of mind” (23). Further, the theatrical and painted backdrop (that in a sense brings to the mind The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’s painted backdrops) resonates with expressionist ambience which Miller has approved in Schlöndorff’s adaptation that, according to Miller, echoes the drama’s roots in the German expressionism (Shewwy). To Miller, the earlier adaptations of Death of a Salesman were unsatisfying and he believed that the greatest difficulty in filming the play “is that it’s not, strictly speaking, a realistic play.” He says, “In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks, […] On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera” (quoted in Shewwy), and Schlöndorff appears to be trying to reintegrate the quotation marks. In Schlöndorff’s adaptation, the cinematographic frame which supposedly represents the “realistic” environment seems to get contaminated by dramaturgical plane, and rather than a natural setting, we have a setting which becomes a site for the reconciliation of the two media of film and theatre.

Moreover, the choice of Hoffman by Schlöndorff due to his petit physicality, that insinuates his ironical delusions of greatness, seems to be giving the film a more dramatic effect. Vineberg proposes that casting choices of Rudman (which are the same as those of Schlöndorff), especially Dustin Hoffman, is true to the Miller’s characterization (though “violates Miller’s idea of the play as a tragedy”) owing to Hoffman’s physique as “Everyone else in the production towers above him” and he “is certainly Miller’s small man” (159). Indeed, this persona with his special physique, postures, and acting that in Vineberg’s words is “Lear’s Fool mimicking Lear” exaggerates the delusional greatness and adds to theatrical quality of the film. Hoffman’s voice and accent also underscore the theatricality of the film, as Vineberg states, Hoffman “accentuates his New York accent as if he were playing vaudeville” (158). Additionally, Schlöndorff’s abundant close-up shots from Hoffman and other actors also contributes to the dramatic effect by capturing and underscoring the actors’ emotions.

Schlöndorff’s accentuation of emotions as well as his concentration on performance, as a crucial dimension of theatre, further develops the theatrical quality of the film. Lowe states, the “theatricality” of actors’ performances is “misunderstood by critics as ‘holding back’ cinema” (4),12 but the way acting is accentuated in this film translates what Lowe calls the “liveness” of theater into the cinematic realm. Moeller and Lellis also maintain that, in this film, performance is central, and the Schlöndorff’s taking a “backseat” “intentionally showcases Hoffman’s performance to maximum degrees” (224). They point out that “Schlöndorff deliberately stylizes the production so that one is always conscious of the movie as a filmed theatrical presentation even while one is caught up emotionally in its dramatic action” (225). Schlöndorff by adapting the element of the dramatic performance into screen expose the realm of cinematic realism to the otherness of theatre, and the film’s actors with their theatrical liveliness and emotionally laden performances seem to hint at their being aware of their positions as the performers. This self-reflexive quality of the film as Lowe would say, can reflect “self-consciously upon [the] medium’s potentialities or limitations” (2). 

Arguably, the film’s theatricality challenging the essentialist concept of film13 creates a hybrid aesthetic and a cinema in the process of becoming. The film undermines the traditional tendencies to dispose of the theatrical elements in film; as Susan Sontag also urges to deviate from the essentialist tendency that approaches the history of cinema “as the history of its emancipation from theatrical models” (24). Moeller and Lellis argue that Schlöndorff has perfectly followed Bazin’s prescription in “Theater and Cinema” for “successful filming of a theater piece” which calls on the director “not to digress from the theatrical origins of the adapted play but rather to emphasize them—to let the preexisting text, with all its inherent theatricality, dictate the style of the production” (225). In fact, the film’s being adapted from a Broadway production and marrying the “events” of theater and cinema creates a special filmic medium which was rarely investigated but might be in a sense similar to the live casting (where “the performance event itself is adapted for the cinema audience”) Lowe investigates in her book, in that both result “in a blurring of the boundaries between cinematic and theatrical viewing conventions” (2).  

Despite the fact that the actors are repeating their performances they had at the Broadway, Schlöndorff offers a unique adaptation of Death of a Salesman through his unique film’s eye and creative cinematography. Schlöndorff with all the contaminated visual modalities and techniques not only projects Willy’s looming dementia into the film’s grand imagier but also creates a fine, contaminated cinema. According to some film theorists, the external features of film would essentially manifest themselves as definitive and reliable, as “film can show them with sovereign conviction” (Lothe 86); therefore, “facts of the fictional universe” are experienced by the film-viewers as autonomous and reliable (Burgoyne 9). Nonetheless, in Schlöndorff’s Death of a Salesman,we are not sure if we are shown the truths of the fictional world in some of the shots we see. The film’s confusing perceptual prompts and its lack of perceptual immediacy create an occasion for Schlöndorff to redefine media specificity which is aided also by his contaminating cinema with theatre. Schlöndorff’s way of dealing with space, design, acting which integrates the theatrical qualities of the original source pushes the medium-specificity of film to its limits.