Abstract

The main thrust of this study was to make evident the one-sidedness of the commonly held view that cinema is nothing more than a recorder of external reality. Thus, the primary problem addressed was to determine the means by which stream of consciousness, a convention of twentieth-century fiction, can be expressed in the medium of narrative film. The strategy was to review the scholarly literature that has determined the ways in which stream of consciousness has been expressed in narrative fiction, especially in the works of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and William Faulkner; then to examine three films--- The Conformist, by Bernardo Bertolucci , Providence , by Alain Resnais , and Requiem for a Dream by Darren Aronofsky ---by exploring the strategies employed by each filmmaker to take the journey beyond the surface of things and into the deeper regions of a character's psyche; and, finally, to establish the existence of equivalent strategies between fiction and film in rendering stream of consciousness. The findings have led the researcher to the following conclusion: Not only is film particularly well-suited to determining the new forms adopted by the twentieth-century novel, but the elements that are intrinsic to film make it an ideal medium for rendering a character's internal reality