Released in 1979, and based on Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Tess was directed by Roman Polanski, written by Polanski, Gérard Brach, and John Brownjohn, and starred Nastassja Kinski, Peter Firth, and Leigh Lawson. Low-resolution stills from a freely available Youtube airing of the film are shown here on the principle of fair use, solely for purposes of cinematography research. — JB

Decorated initial R

oman Polanski’s Tess (1979) was a critical and popular success, and was widely regarded, in the words of Scott McEathron, as a ‘effective reading’ (111) of Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). Responses were nevertheless ambiguous. Some commentators were surprised by what they saw as an uncharacteristic choice of subject for a director who was best known as the creator of supernatural and psychological thrillers such as Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Repulsion (1965); Tess it seemed, was at odds with this type of material. But more problematic was the question of Tess’s particular strengths as an interpretation of a canonical Victorian text. For many critics, Polanski’s success lay in what they saw as his faithful representation of Hardy’s characters and settings while preserving ‘quaint’ details such as the Dorset dialect, the fashions, and technologies of the time.

Such evaluations suggest that the film is an interesting, but somewhat pedestrian visualization, a cinematic version of the ‘Illustrated Classic’ and an essentially impersonal piece in which Polanski’s role extended no further than transposing the novel to the screen. According to James Morrison, Tess, and all of Polanski’s literary adaptations are marked by such ‘literalness’ (111), and for Christopher Sandford the film is little more than a re-imagining of Hardy’s landscapes and ‘resembles nothing so much as a long series of colour-supplement photographs’ (338). Viewed in these terms, Tess is repeatedly described as a piece of conservative adaptation, and not as a work characterized by the ‘auteur’s transformation or conquest of [the source material]’ (Morrison 111).

Yet this view of Polanski is highly misleading and misunderstands the ways in which he approaches Hardy’s text. Indeed, rather than being ‘literal,’ the director shapes his telling into a subtle adaptation that is both highly respectful of its literary source and an interpretation which privileges some elements of Hardy’s text and mediates them through his own vocabulary of cinematic structures and motifs. In this sense, Polanski’s Tess is very much in line with François Truffaut’s claim that filmic adaptations should never be a ‘slavish translation’ (qtd. McCabe 186) of the original writing but should use the resources of the photoplay to tell the story in a purely visual way. In this article I consider Polanski’s manipulation of his material, the significance of those manipulations and how they enable us to read Hardy in particular and interesting ways. As Roger Egbert remarks, Tess ‘isn’t a devout reading’ – but it is a dynamic and revealing one.

Adapting Narrative

Polanski’s treatment of Hardy’s novel was based on a thorough understanding of the text. The screenplay was written by the director and his collaborators Gérard Brach and John Brownjohn; Brownjohn wrote some of the dialogue, making use of many direct quotations from the text, and Bach and Polanski refigured the narrative and characterization. The script was written in French and Polanski had it translated into English for benefit of the British crew and actors who constituted the majority of the Anglo-French production. The end result was a highly respectful version which preserves the essentials of Hardy’s tale, including its regional dialect, with the added qualities of numerous inflections and changes, some of them considerable.

It is noticeable, first of all, that Polanski simplifies and streamlines the narrative in order to make it possible to encompass its events within the temporal confines of a film which, even pared down, runs to over three hours. Three important storylines are removed: Alec’s conversion to religious fanaticism, which occupies a significant portion of the book; the death of the Durbyfields’ horse; and the scene where Tess baptizes her child. These pieces of information, Polanski judged, were needless complications within an already complicated and tortuous plot. Conversely, the director expanded other scenes in order to provide the sort of cinematic effects that were needed to build theme and characterization.

A prime example of this reorientation is the sequence representing Tess’s arrival at the estate of the D’Urberville/Stokes. Hardy describes her arrival in terse and purely narrative terms: ‘She alighted from the van at Trantbridge Cross,’ walks up a hill, and eventually comes to the (alarmingly) new house (Hardy 38). In the film, however, Tess is shown walking up a lengthy avenue, essentially a huge arbour of trees, and Polanski takes this moment as an opportunity to symbolize her status as a child of nature, enwrapped in glittering light within a palette of greens, and placed against a soundtrack of birdsong; the sequence is an epiphany of Romantic communion with the natural world, and the effect is heightened by Geoffrey Unsworth’s luxurious colour cinematography and Phillipe Sarde’s soaring pastoral score. An event that is unelaborated in the novel is thus expanded to give it a special prominence as the last moment when Tess is uncorrupted – as soon as she meets Alec, her destiny is decided.

Tess on her way to meet Alec. The sequence is an fluid travelling shot in which the camera lingers on the pastoral effects of the light breaking through the trees and Tess is positioned as an element of nature.

Polanski’s treatment of narrative is otherwise a matter of compression and contrast in which the main sections are registered in a compound visual style that varies its palette according to the principal events. Most marked are the contrasts between the period at Talbothays where Tess and Angel’s courtship is placed, and Tess’s misfortune and misery when she works at the farm at the symbolically named Flintcomb-Ash. In the first of these the couple’s happiness is exemplified in a arcadian, summer-time imagery of green tones and shimmering light, while in the second Tess’s despair is signalled by dull greens and browns, vast open perspectives, empty space and the light effects of winter. These chromatic contrasts are deployed to recreate Hardy’s descriptive style, which was commonly described in the late nineteenth century as ‘painting in words.’ Polanski further extends that metaphor by making explicit connections between the film, the text, and painterly exemplars. Philip French notes how analogies can be drawn with the work of Corot, Millet and Monet rather than Turner and Constable (‘Tess’), but Polanski’s montage of narrative tableaux is better understood as a series of oppositions between the Romanticism of Samuel Palmer and Edward Calvert, and the harsh picturing of rural suffering in the realist paintings of Jules Bastien-Lepage and Hubert Herkomer. A further opposition, to measure the change in Tess’s circumstances, is also presented in terms of the difference between the Claudian imagery of her time at Talbothays – with Angel and Tess being figured as idealized swains in a landscape – and the focus on contemporary costumes and interiors when she is Alec’s ‘kept woman,’ and resembles one of James Tissot’s society hostesses.

Nature as an index of the change in circumstance. Left: Tess and Angel, gambolling like lambs, in the rural idyll; and Right: Tess and Marian toil to ‘pull the mangolds’ at Flintcomb-Ash in an open landscape of mud and freezing cold.

At the same time, Polanski stresses the physical geography of Wessex and, in strict accordance with Hardy’s writing, provides a clear sense of remoteness. This effect is achieved by emphasising travel, with many sequences mapping Tess’s journeys as she walks to Alec’s, to Talbothay’s Dairy, to Flintcomb-Ash and finally, as she and Angel try to escape, to Stonehenge. The central image here is the road: Hardy usually places Tess walking across fields, but Polanski privileges roadways which are by turns fearful (when Alec takes her on his speeding carriage) and frigidly cold (when she walks to Flintcomb). An integral part of the narrative, roadways also function (as we shall see) in metaphorical terms, as the director offers his own version of Hardyean fate.

Tess, Landscape and Nature

Hardy describes Tess in generic terms as ‘a fine and handsome girl – not handsomer than some others, possibly – but her mobile peony mouth and large innocent eyes added eloquence to colour and shape’ (Hardy 14). His vagueness is intended to identify Tess as a universal type, unremarkable and far from a conventional beauty within the aesthetics of Hardy’s time. Polanski, however, changes that formulation to make his heroine (the German actor Natassja Kinski), into a beautiful woman in line with European aesthetics of the later twentieth century. That modification has drawn negative comment, with some insisting that Polanski’s Tess diverges too widely from the likely appearance of an English peasant and over-emphasises her glamour and sexual allure. In a hostile critique, Dianne Sadoff argues that the director presents his character in stereotypically sexualized terms, partaking in Hollywood culture’s emphasis on the ‘selling … of female flesh on the screen,’ where it is ‘consumed’ by the male gaze (87). It is worth noting, however, that in many ways Polanski avoids the conventions of representing a conventionally beautiful woman and de-sexualizes his protagonist. In the novel she is described by Alec as a ‘a Big Beauty’ (Hardy 40), a vulgar Victorian euphemism for having a voluptuous figure and large breasts; the film’s Tess, by contrast, and as played by a 19 year old Kinski, is an adolescent, slim, perhaps even thin, and girl-like.

Indeed, Polanski’s characterization emphasizes not her sexuality but her virginal innocence, and it is not accurate to say, as Morrison does, that the director’s Tess is ‘far less pure’ (118) than Hardy’s. Rather, Polanski stresses the fact that the character does not progress beyond girlishness; though she has given birth to a child and has some sexual experience, latterly becoming Alec’s mistress, she remains a ‘maid’ and a ‘pure’ rather than a ‘fallen woman.’ Polanski includes several scenes in the Durbeyfield household where Tess is framed by her siblings and in so doing highlights the notion of her status as a child in the company of children, an effect continued by emphasising her limited vocabulary and sometimes childish behaviour and limited understanding.

Tess as a child among children, with her father, a domestic tyrant, idling in his chair.

However, it is precisely this immaturity, according to Polanski, that constitutes her appeal to both of her ‘lovers’ – an emphasis, as some critics have observed, that invokes the charge of paedophilia and resonates troublingly with the director’s personal history. Yet Polanski does not celebrate her status, and presents his protagonist (as we shall see later in this article) as a victim of exploitation by misogynistic men: in this reading, Alec – who is described by Hardy as 24 but played by 34 year old Leigh Lawson – wants her purely because she is not like a mature woman, and so very easy to manipulate; and Angel wants to marry her because she seems to embody a notion of innocence which he has constructed in his own terms as he coerces Tess into becoming an equivalent of David Copperfield’s Dora, the ‘child-wife’ in Dickens’s novel (David Copperfield, 1850).

In this treatment Tess is a child and specifically a ‘child of nature,’ and the director constantly stresses the connection between his character and the natural world of what is presented as rural Dorset (actually northern France). Some critics have read the film’s emphasis on landscape in purely ornamental terms – dismissing its focus as being ‘too scenic’ (Ford and Hammond 163) – but in reality Tess’s connection with the nature is a calculated privileging of Hardy’s emphasis on the pathetic fallacy. Both Hardy and Polanski treat the rural in animistic terms as a ‘projection or reflection’ (Webster 28) of the heroine’s psyche, but Polanski develops the synergy of nature and human nature, structurally embodying that linkage in a rhythm of ‘alternate long shots’ of landscape and close-ups of his protagonist (Sadoff 85). That process of connection and amplification can be traced in the differing treatment of some key scenes.

Notable among these are the sequences encompassing Tess’s arrival at the Stoke-D’Urbervilles’ house, and the first meeting with Alec. As noted earlier, Polanski makes her arrival into a crucial dramatic pinch-point, but he greatly develops Hardy’s description of the encounter. In the novel, Hardy stresses Alec’s impatience and Tess’s unease; both elements are preserved in the film – which reproduces much of the dialogue – but Polanski re-focuses on the lush natural imagery in dazzling and luxurious colour that encloses the two characters, making a special point of associating Tess with the blossoming flowers and fruits. In the film, Alec cuts roses and entwines them in her hat, and she is repeatedly framed by floral compositions. In this reading, in other words, Tess is defined as an extension of the natural world – a flower whose unknowing beauty and guilelessness are an exact equivalence of the flowers and vines. Most troubling, though, is Alec’s offering of temptation in the form of the strawberry he holds to her mouth (Hardy 42). In the text this is a moment of further embarrassment for Tess (‘I would rather take it in my own hand,’ 42), but in the film the action is loaded with salacious sexual significance, anticipating the rape as Alec forces her to take the fruit. She may still be in paradise, but Alec makes her recognize that her sexuality is part of ‘nature,’ making her, in a biblical echo, to eat of the fruit of knowledge.

Tess and Alec: a symmetrical composition that stresses their relative place in two different worlds, divided by class and circumstance, with Alec representing the modern world and Tess the world of timeless nature.

Tess takes the fatal strawberry into her mouth – a visual proxy for the forthcoming rape.

Polanski similarly develops other important sequences to emphasise the interconnectedness of mood and nature. In the rape-scene, for example, the director highlights the notion of Tess’s confusion by exemplifying her state of mind in the fog surrounding the characters. In Hardy’s text this ‘darkness’ and ‘blackness’ suggests the ‘obscurity’ (73) of timeless ritual as the ‘same wrong’ (73) has been perpetually enacted on the weak by the powerful; in the film, however, it is an index of Tess’s sense of hopelessness and despair. Hardy does not describe the assault, but Polanski shows Tess’s struggle as the darkness presses in on her both literally and metaphorically.

In fact, the crepuscular signifies throughout the film as a sign of Tess’s mental darkness: when she is rejected by Angel and journeys to Flintcomb-Ash she sleeps in the woods surrounded by exactly the same oppressive light; and when she puts a cross on her child’s grave (a nocturnal scene missing from the novel), the darkness again exemplifies her mental condition. Conversely, the bright light that suffuses her time at Talbothay’s Diary is a symbol of her happiness, and this opposition of light/dark is one of film’s organizing principles. But even the light can be oppressive, and can harbour pain, a point teased out when Tess discovers that her letter confessing to Angel has been pushed under the mat. At this agonizing moment the camera cuts from a close-up of her face to the dazzling light of the sun, so representing her blinding instant of understanding. Alec’s mother is blind and Polanski emphasizes the concept of not-seeing throughout the film; as Tess comments to Angel in trying to explain how she came to be seduced by Alec, she simply remarks that she was ‘blinded.’ In this world, the director insists, the main character is rendered sightless by fate and never able to envisage a better world.

Gender, Class, Society and Fate

Polanski’s treatment of Tess’s life is a close equivalence to Hardy’s, and like the author he shows her as a passive victim of her circumstances and of the society in which she operates. In fact, Polanski simplifies Hardy’s novel so as to stress its mythopoeic nature: if Hardy focuses on the injustices of his time Polanski refigures the narrative to present a timeless parable of innocence and experience, with the innocent always becoming the victims of destructive forces and individuals. In this sense Tess is very much in line with the director’s thematic concerns in his other films: in Macbeth (1971) he stresses the role of the witches, who are shown to entrap Shakespeare’s character, and in Chinatown (1974) the detective Gittes, a fundamentally straightforward character, is entangled in corporate corruption. More especially, Polanski uses Tess as another opportunity to explore his fascination with the ways in which women are destroyed by men who exploit their victims’ sexuality, an interest that he otherwise examined in Repulsion (1965), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and Chinatown (1974), his horrifying reflection on incest. It is interesting to note that the director has been accused of misogyny, but in most of his films he offers not a celebration but a critique of misogyny.

Tess is a variation on this theme, and Polanski nuances Hardy’s writing of men to expand the author’s writing of Victorian patriarchy. While this approach does not apply to the film’s treatment of Alec – who is presented by Hardy as a caddish seducer and appears as such on the screen – the director is interested in showing how respectable or conventional men are the agents of a destructive power. Foremost among these is Tess’s father, a part extremely well played by John Collin. In Hardy’s text, Durbeyfield is a peasant, as stupid as he is idle, and Polanski stresses his greed. In the fateful encounter with Parson Tringham, notably, the director focuses on Durbeyfield’s calculating nature in a series of close-ups on Collin’s face, revealing the workings of his mind in his narrow-eyed facial expressions. Polanski also privileges the moment when he says he will sell Alec the D’Urberville title for a thousand pounds – or at least for not less than twenty (Hardy 51). In the novel this moment is comedic and pathetic; in the film, by contrast, it is a moment when Tess is essentially sold to Alec, given over into danger for the sake of financial gain. Again, Collin’s facial expressions are telling: distorted by avarice, his gaze as he contemplates his future riches stand in ironic juxtaposition to his claim of not wanting to send his daughter to unknown kin.

Tess’s father is just the first of several men who rule Tess’s life, disempower her, and, despite their weakness, have authority over her. Angel, especially, is depicted by Polanski as ineffectual, an adaptation that stands in marked opposition to the source material. Hardy endows him with a physiognomy which, in the context of Victorian culture, suggests a moral and psychological ambivalence: his mouth is ‘rather too small and delicately lined for a man’s’ although his lip is firm enough to ‘do away with any suggestion of indecision’ (113) – the very indecision, we might add, that leads to his precipitate breaking of his marriage. In the film, however, the character is simply weak and lacking in integrity, a failing registered, with great effectiveness, by Peter Firth’s performance. Polanski emphasises his quietude and creates a pronounced visual contrast between Firth’s colouring – light hair and blue eyes, the physiognomical signs of an unmasculine malleability – and Lawson’s (Alec’s) black hair, moustache, and brown eyes (the signs of strength); Firth’s small stature and delicate movements are similarly placed in opposition to Lawson's tallness and swaggering gait.

But it is not only the men in Tess’s immediate circle who have a negative impact. She is treated with parallel cruelty by the Parson who declines to bury her dead child because she baptized him, creating a ‘liturgical’ problem (Hardy 97). The film preserves the painful dialogue between Tess and the priest and further suggests the priest’s lack of compassion by showing him as a beekeeper attending to his hives, a detail absent from the book; he can look after the bees, but not, ironically, after his flock, just as Durbeyfield is incapable of looking after his family. Polanski adds another, personal inflection in stressing the bees’ buzzing – a sound that is always associated in his films with the rottenness of flies, as in Repulsion, and is earlier featured in Alec’s first encounter with Tess. Moreover, such non-diagetic sounds, which are presented as diagetic naturalism and amplified as ‘Foley effects,’ are elsewhere presented to point to such moral decay: Alec’s assault on Tess is accentuated by the bestial sounds of cattle lowing, and on Tess’s arrival at Alec’s house the cuckoo sings loudly – an auditory sign that signals the seducer’s appropriation of the D’Urberville nest.

All such men – Alec, Angel, the Parson, Durbeyfield – are corrupt, the director insists, in various ways. They are also part of institutional and societal hypocrisy in which class is a key element within an oppressive society. Hardy’s novel is of course centrally concerned with the machinations of the class structure, and Polanski makes that theme even more explicit, visualizing the chaos of social difference in purely visual terms in the blocking and spatial organization of the characters, in the costumes, and in the rhythms of the camera movements.

A prime example of the distance created by ‘rank’ is in the positioning of Angel when he is in the company of the farm hands, his social inferiors, at Talbothays, and here Polanski and Hardy clearly diverge. Hardy notes how he seems to overcome his ‘objection’ to this social mixing, noting especially how he takes his meals with his co-workers as a ‘level’ (114) member who eats his meals with the household. In the film, however, this is not what happens: rather, Angel’s superiority is signalled by placing him away from the table, sitting on his own, reading, and, most tellingly of all, being served by one of staff. Polanski likewise accentuates the physical difference between Angel’s accommodation in the loft and the accommodation of the workers: Tess’s climb up the ladder is pronounced, and the room itself is visually differentiated from the rooms of the others by showing it as a sort of sunlit paradise, the very epitome of comfort and privilege, a gentleman’s home from home.

Parallel differences of class are signalled in the costumes, with Alec’s gaudily extravagant clothes being measured against the mundane clothes worn by Tess, and in the difference between the sinuous tracking shots that are used to describe the action of the farm workers and the stiff immobility of the interiors which show the Clares at the table in their home. One is a site of emotional freedom, the other the epitome of sterile repression; the camera’s visual style makes that distinction clear.

These elements are combined to suggest that Tess’s tragedy is a tragedy of class, with the ‘natural’ predatoriness of the male characters operating within a strictly defined social system. Patriarchy, class, and the exploitation of the poor by the rich, are all part of Tess’s doomed progress through a constrained life. Polanski adds another inflection by representing a copy of Marx’s Capital (first English edition 1887), on Angel’s writing desk; one would expect this reading to make him more sympathetic to the rural proletariat, but his reading only points to his grotesque accusation, which is emphasised in the film, that she is the ‘exhausted seedling of an effete aristocracy’ (Hardy 232). It is ironic, Polanski insists, that he rejects her not because she behaved like a vulnerable member of the lower classes, but because of the supposed weakness that she inherited from her noble ancestry, so demonstrating the sort of prejudice that was commonplace within the late Victorian middle classes. Tess, in this formulation, is caught by class prejudice that reveals, once again, the bourgeois shallowness and hypocrisy of both of Tess’s lovers.

This is a narrative of class that has a deterministic fatality about it and is pre-programmed, the novelist and film maker persuade us, to have the worst possible outcome. Hardy and Polanski are united on this idea, and there is a remarkable alignment of the writer’s and film-maker’s outlook. All of Hardy’s novels present a fatalistic worldview that goes beyond the traditional wheel of fortune – which must surely produce some positive outcomes – and always results in a tragic doom; and the same is true of all of Polanski’s films as each of his characters – Macbeth, Rosemary, the narrator in The Tenant – are trapped by malign fate. For both figures, the world is ‘full of conflict and cruelty,’ and is ultimately ‘absurd’ (Mazierska 141). In fact, Polanski ‘s focus on the entrapment and destruction of the innocent, as they struggle with impersonal forces, makes him an ideal interpreter of Hardy’s existential despair.

Hardy’s focus on impending doom is represented in his many predictive clues as to what might ultimately happen, and Polanski pictures the closing trap in his own terms in the form of visual rhymes and proleptic imagery. One of these motifs is the road, or, more specifically, the cross-roads. John Durbeyfield’s chance encounter with Parson Tringham is set on either side of a junction, embodying the idea that the Tringham’s information might have had another outcome but happens to encourage Tess’s father to point her towards a fatal destiny. Indeed, Polanski uses this physical and metaphorical pathway to prefigure the one moment in the novel when Tess decides to kill Alec – choosing a destination, to take up with Angel, which, like her father’s choice of ‘directions,’ is disastrous. Caught in a network, essentially a net, Tess’s life is tied up in a tightening web, which in itself prefigures the strangling noose around her neck. That concept is stressed by the final sequences in the film where Tess and Alec are forever on the road as they try to escape, but seem to converge in an ever-narrowing circle, a closing of rope-like lanes, which leads to her apprehension at Stonehenge.

Going in circles: the Wheel of Fortune that closes like a trap. Left: the dance where Tess meets Angel; and Right: Angel and Tess at Stonehenge, the pagan circle of fate, as reconstructed for the film.

The circular is Polanski’s central symbol of inescapable death, and Tess’s arrest in the roundness of Stonehenge is prefigured throughout the film. The dance sequence, when she first encounters Angel, focuses on the opening and closing circles of traditional choreographies, and the same pattern is revisited on the evening when Alec takes her from another dance and rapes her; and there are several shots at Talbothays where tethered animals walk around a cider-press. This imagery is subsumed into the film’s naturalistic surface but is unmistakeably a version of the closing circle that features elsewhere in the director’s films – particularly in The Tenant (1976), where the doomed character’s destiny, to kill himself just as the previous tenant killed herself, is symbolized by the circular building in which he lives and by the auditorium-like space where he tries to kill himself; in Macbeth, likewise, the lives of the entrapped characters are bounded by a series of closing circles that includes the circular courtyard in Macbeth’s castle.

In Polanski’s Tess, as in Hardy’s Tess of the U’Urbervilles, Tess is on a fatal rein that draws her inward to destruction, a motif riffed upon in the images of caged birds in the Stoke household. Indeed, there are several other signs that reinforce her inescapable destiny, endowing the film with a sense of uncanniness and déjà vu. Notably, Alec’s carving of a leg of ham to feed Tess when he first meets her is exactly reproduced in the final moments in their apartment, immediately before he is killed; and a pattern of knives and the cutting of food features in numerous sequences. All of these prefigure Tess’s stabbing of Alec – an event graphically foreshadowed by the apparently innocent detail of a man cutting the hedge, with the soundtrack registering accentuated snips, in the front garden of their lodgings.

We can see, in conclusion, that Polanski conceives his film as a dense semiotic of visual signs, realized in dazzling cinematography and supported by a musical score of great beauty, which enshrines the essential features of Hardy’s pessimistic text. It is, more than this, a remarkable convergence of thematic interests. Polanski’s interpretation is a natural continuation of his artistic concerns, but it interestingly provides a reading of Hardy which elucidates the writer’s emphasis on the vulnerability of women, the cruelties of an unequal society, and the workings of chance and destiny. Polanski spoke of the film as dealing with profound emotion, and in this respect, above all others, he produces a work of art which is a personal and moving treatment of a deeply moving narrative.

Filmography

Polanski, Roman. Chinatown. Paramount Pictures, 1974.

Polanski, Roman. Macbeth. Columbia Pictures, 1971.

Polanski, Roman. Repulsion. Compton Films, 1965.

Polanski, Roman. Rosemary’s Baby. Paramount Pictures, 1968.

Polanski, Roman. The Tenant. Columbia Pictures, 1976.

Polanski, Roman. Tess. Columbia–Emi–Warner, 1979.

Bibliography

Primary

Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. 1891; rpt. London: Penguin Classics, 2008.

Secondary

Egbert, Roger. ‘Review: Tess. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/tess-1980

Ford, Charles, and Hammond, Robert. Polish Film. Jefferson: McFarland, 2005.

French, Philip. ‘TessThe Guardian (24/5/2013).

MacCabe, Colin. Roman Polanski: The Cinema of a Cultural Traveller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Mazierska, Ewa. Roman Polanski: The Cinema of a Cultural Traveller. London: Taurus, 2007.

McEathron, Scott. Thomas Hardy’s ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Sourcebook. London: Routledge, 2005.

Morrison, James. Roman Polanski. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007.

Sandford, Christopher. Polanski. London: Century, 2007.

Sadoff, Dianne F. Victorian Vogue: British Novels on Screen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Webster, Roger. ‘From Painting to Cinema: Visual Elements in Hardy’s Fiction.' Thomas Hardy on Screen. Ed. T. R. Wright. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 20–36.


Created 12 December 2024