The film “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittmann,” just as the novel written by Ernest Gaines, depicts the struggles the African Americans faced after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. Throughout the movie, Jane narrates her life story, although some of the events mentioned in the book were not incorporated into the movie. Despite many differences, both the movie and the book maintained the use of autobiographical techniques that considered Jane’s experiences throughout her life and her personal growth.
In comparison to the novel, the movie’s sequence of events was different as it began with Book 4. Specifically, the motion picture starts with Jimmy asking an almost 110 years old Miss Jane to become part of the Civil Rights movement. In contrast, the novel starts with young Ticey watching the Secesh Army arrive at the first plantation she lived in. In other words, the book was a linear sequence of events while the movie was a retrospection of Jane’s life. In addition, the person that interviews Ms. Pittmann in the film is white, while in the novel his race is never mentioned. In fact, in the book, the interviewer becomes irrelevant as the story progresses; meaning that he is not mentioned as part of the story line. The work of literature focuses completely in Jane’s retelling, making the reader feel as if everything was happening in the present. On the other hand, the movie emphasizes that these were events of the past by presenting various flashbacks of the interviewer during his drafting process.
Furthermore, one of the biggest moments in Jane’s life was altered in the film. This is when she gets her own name. The book details how a Yankee soldier fighting to free colored people gives Ticey a name because he thought her birth name was that of a slave’s. After telling her he hated slavery, he said to her: “Well, from now on your name is Jane…Jane Brown” (Gaines 9). In comparison, the motion picture presents how the soldier starts listing names and she is the one to select “Jane”. Certainly, this changed the emotion of the occasion. When reading this scene, I was moved in an indescribable way because the autobiographical aspect of the novel made me feel an emotional connection that I would not be able to experience if it were someone else telling her story. It was not often that a slave encountered someone that cared for them deeply or that wanted to protect their well-deserved rights. Moreover, I felt how Ticey was transformed from a young girl to a stronger and brave woman.
Both the movie and the book were good at capturing the way of life of the black people around such an important time in history. Some of the events presented in Gaines’ work was not included in the film, but nevertheless, the two of them were able to capture the essence of this time frame. The movie was a good resource to concretely see the representation of the plot events and relate the characters introduced in Ernest’s work to a face, but the novel was more efficient in conveying Jane’s feelings. Through text, the reader goes through the process of abstractly picturing everything and get into the story while the movie leaves nothing to our imagination and as a result has less effect on us.
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