Imagery

There is very little dialogue in the first half an hour of the film, which I think is a conscious choice. In the original story Proulx spends much of the beginning of the story describing the landscape of Brokeback Mountain. Two days ago when we were discussing aspects of the story that we thought would be hard to translate to film. One thing I was worried about was if there would be any way to keep the power of the descriptions. In many ways the shots of the mountain in the movie serve the same role as the descriptions in the story. However at the same time, I feel that the lack of conversation and the long shots of the sheep changes the pacing of the plot. In Proulx’s original story the background descriptions are only a paragraph at a time, or woven throughout dialogue and do not take away from the plot of the story. However, in the movie almost all of the first half hour is scenery rather than plot, which slows down the story. I think overall this is an accurate way to preserve the feeling of the original text. Just like descriptions like “the sooty bulk of the mountain paled slowly until it was the same color as Ennis’ breakfast fire” add imagery to the story. The shots of thousands of sheep traveling up the mountain creates the same visual imagery. Although the images are different and the pacing of the story is slightly altered the visual images of Brokeback Mountain are important to the narrative of the story because of the important role it plays for Ennis and Jack.