Harold Pinter’s The Go-Between (1971) is his third screenplay for the collaborative works with Joseph Losey. His adaptation is regarded as an unfaithful cinematic treatment of L. P. Hartley’s novel (1953), with his own choice of subject matter to emphasize, i.e., with the focus on the subject of time rather than the original subject of class problem. Because of his shifting of the thematic emphasis, the film version of The Go-Between is evaluated not as cinematically successful as Pinter and Losey’s former collaborative film, Accident (1967). This evaluation assumes that Pinter’s concerns with time and politics contradict each other. However, this paper argues that his concerns with time and politics are not mutually exclusive. That is, he comes to have concomitant passions for time and politics, apprehending interconnections between time and politics in adapting Hartley’s novel for the cinema. Thus, this paper attempts to re-evaluate Accident in terms of Pinter’s simultaneous pursuit for the themes of time and politics in his adaptation for the cinema.
The Go-Between proves that time and the time-image no longer can be judged in opposition to our political real world. On the contrary, it makes us search for our lost time, i.e., search for truth, just like Leo Colston who comes to restore his belief in life by returning to his past in search for his lost time. This paper argues that Pinter’s concomitant concerns with time and politics and especially Losey and Pinter’s experiments with time provide him with an opportunity to deal with his political concerns on the higher level than in their second collaborative film, Accident. Thus, it examines Pinter’s cinematic strategies used for the emergence of time-images which can reveal multi-layered sheets of time where Leo Colston can find a line of flight from the closed spectacle of aristocratic world. This paper concludes that with The Go-Between Pinter comes to recognize that a modern cinema is a political cinema in time-images.