The Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism

Andrew Shail

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136455155
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Modernist writing has always been linked with cinema. The recent renaissance in early British film studies has allowed cinema to emerge as a major historical context for literary practice. Treating cinema as a historical rather than an aesthetic influence, this book analyzes the role of early British film culture in literature, thus providing the first account of cinema as a cause for modernism.

Shail's study draws on little-known sources to create a detailed picture of cinema following its 'second birth' as both institution and medium. The book presents a comprehensive account of how UK-based modernism originated as a consequence of—rather than a conscious aesthetic response to—this new component of the cultural landscape. Film's new accounts of language, endeavor, time, collectivity and political change are first considered, then related to the patterns that comprised modernist texts. Authors discussed include Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, H.D., James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson.

1
The Cinema of Narrative Integration, the Demise of Impressionism and the Rise of Modernism

There has been a systematic failure, in discussions of early cinema and literary modernism, to take proper account either of films made before the First World War, or of films made after it for a mass audience.

—David Trotter, Cinema and Modernism, 8.

In charting how the turn to a “cinema of narrative integration” at cinema’s ‘second birth’ expunged the attractionist aesthetics that, he argues, fascinated several early modernists,¹ Tom Gunning’s seminal 1986 article suggested not that disappointed fascination constituted the totality of the cinema/modernism relationship, but that it is crucial to notice in retrospect that attractionist cinema confronted aesthetic thought with a presence very different from later formal delineations of the photo-chemically-based moving image. His work is nonetheless often used to imply that cinema after 1908 was subsumed by pre-existing and familiar bourgeois narrative protocols. Mary Ann Doane’s 2002 book, for example (to which I will return in Chapter 2), summarises pre-1908 cinema as liberatory, using such terms as “contingency”, “chance”, “reversibility” and “interactivity” to describe the alternative possibilities offered by 1895–1908 cinema. By contrast, for her, “inevitability”, “irreversibility”, “dominance” and “control” describe the behaviour of film after 1908. “Unabashedly exhibitionistic,” Doane comments of the films of the cinema of attractions, “they differ from the classical cinema”.² She issues the common warning against understanding early cinema as merely an immature version of later cinema, but in doing so is as reductive of the post-1908 cinema as she hopes to avoid being about pre-1908 cinema, defining it solely as a later norm from which early cinema differed, as a closing down of possibilities. Under the influence of Gunning’s otherwise very useful paradigm, studies linking modernism with cinema have focused almost exclusively on cinema before 1908 and the underground persistence of its modes of operation in later cinema.³ While the new institution cinema between 1908 and 1920 did depart from attractionist aesthetics, it was just as novel a cultural arrival as the cinema of attractions had been (not because of any subterranean persistence of the attractionist dynamic of early cinema). The ‘transitional’⁴ decade of the 1910s by no means merely anticipated the ensuing ‘classical’ cinema, nor did it merely (as Bazin and Wood have both argued) appear to its contemporaries as a new constituent of the range of bourgeois cultural forms with which they were familiar, even though it newly sought to emulate such forms.⁵ This chapter will examine the four-year period from 1911 to 1915, relating the changes in modernist prose during this period to the particularities of the two major new features of cinema’s image-regime during this period: narrativity and a discourse of realism.

“[N]ew Rules for Developing the Plot and Revealing Character Without the Aid of Words”⁶: Narrative Integration

In 1908, the system of meaning behind films released in the UK was still based on the idea that a cut from one shot the next was the same as a set change. For example, Hepworth’s That Fatal Sneeze (1907) and Edison’s Jack the Kisser (1907), both examples of the common ‘chase’ sub-genre of the comic genre that, at the time, was the primary fictional genre, were comprised of a series of episodes where the culprit (the sneezer and the kisser) causes mischief to bystanders and passers-by and so attracts a growing group of pursuers. In each mischief scene, the shot begins before the culprit appears, then the culprit enters and the mischief occurs, causing people nearby to become pursuers, then the culprit flees into off-screen space, the pursuers follow, and then the shot ends. Interspersed are further scenes of simple pursuit: the shot begins on an empty scene, the culprit enters from off-screen space and crosses the shot, and either before or after he leaves the shot the pursuers enter from off-screen space, then both leave the shot in turn, and then the shot ends. Each film is rounded off by a concluding scene: the sneezer explodes and the kisser is caught. The story was based on the principle of allowing all action occurring in one location to play out before permitting the shot to end.

The major development in narrative cinema in the period from 1908 was the development of new ways of connecting shots and so moving beyond this linked-episode principle. Cutting as the transition from one scene to the next gradually came to be replaced by the editing together of shots of the same action taken from different positions, either in multiple simultaneous scenes (cross-cutting) or in the same scene (scene dissection). As these methods came into common use in North America and Europe, editing shifted away from following action and towards articulating the dramatic links involved in complex narrative. Even in February 1909 a writer in the US trade magazine Moving Picture World described the linked-episode films still being made in the vein of That Fatal Sneeze as afflicted with an “obvious disconnectedness in action”⁷.

This transition was particularly acute in the American films beginning to flood into the US in 1911 (though European producers were by no means excluded from these developments). With its pool of patents, exclusive contract with Eastman Kodak for use of film stock, its exchange licences, release and pricing schedules, distribution agreements and control of projection equipment, the MPPC created, from its inception on 1 January 1909, a centralised, permanent and stable US film industry out of previously artisanal and ad-hoc film production methods. The industry-wide drive to generate a product type that was amenable to industrial mass production prompted producers further towards narrative cinema, which could be produced on a production-line basis as the raw material was hypothetically infinite and did not involve depending for product on intermittent and unpredictable real-world events, and also concentrated their attention on a search for ways of disposing of the need for external narration (and so eliminate variations at the site of exhibition and limit exhibitors’ abilities to manipulate the product). Constructing editing structures around plot structures offered one method of achieving this enhanced control over the product, a method that seemed particularly attractive in the US given that, as the major producers knew, the immigrant populations of America’s major cities constituted a significant part of their audience (almost a majority in Chicago), meaning that they could not expect film spectators to comprehend films on the basis of recognising the narrative events of adapted pre-texts. American cinema in particular thus began to explore editing structures that could explain any sequence of events (and to make use of images and narratives that did not draw on culturally specific structures).

The films released in Britain in the 1911–1914 period under consideration here began to draw UK filmgoers away from a conception of cinema in which edits were markers of the beginning and end of scenes. Such films were not solely American. Pathé Frèrés’s Le Médecin du château (1908) employed the technique of cross-cutting between a distress scene and those contacted for help as they raced to the rescue, the point of view transferring freely between the two spheres of action while action is ongoing to generate suspense and dramatise the nearing of a deadline. As with most race-to-the-rescue films, Le Médecin du château used a physical connection between the two spheres of action—the telephone line—to initiate and rationalise what was widely seen at the time as the viewpoint ‘jumping’ from place to place.⁸ Cross-cutting had appeared in race-against-time situations as early as Vitagraph’s The Hundred-to-One Shot (1906) and Pathé’s The Runaway Horse (1907), but 1908 was the year of its wide-scale inception in the films issued in the UK. Gunning points out that the race-to-the-rescue film would come to entirely displace the linked-episode chase film from American cinema by 1909. Based on a story-space event linking two locales (usually a telegram or a telephone call, but also emotional or economic connections between individuals), the technique of cross-cutting between these locales began to establish cinema as a “specification of temporal and spatial relations between shots.”⁹ Charles Musser argues that it was from D.W. Griffith’s The Fatal Hour (1908), the first film in which he used extensive cross-cutting between multiple parallel actions, that action began to exist across shots in a larger story-space, not just within shots (shots that could, consequently, be conscribed as ‘scenes’).¹⁰ Gunning refers to a sequence in Griffith’s 1908 A Salvation Army Lass where a tough, having just scorned his girlfriend to take part in a burglary, stops and looks off screen. Two edits, first a cut to a shot of his girlfriend and then a cut back to him as he hands a gun back to his companions, insist that the tough’s actions are to be understood in terms of his motives, thereby dramatising the shown action in relation to changes in a larger story-space.¹¹ Although the dramatising of action across a larger story-space was by no means a Griffithian, American or late-Edwardian invention, notably featuring in several British films of the early Edwardian period, Griffith’s films can be regarded as a useful example of the narrative, and narrational, status of cinema at the point in 1911 when ‘the cinema’ presented as a distinct medium, because his innovatory status derives from his collecting and collating multiple techniques in general (though less frequent) use. His films will feature in the following analysis not because they were exceptional but because they were a concentration of a more general landscape of narrativity in film. Griffith was one of the many film production personnel who were moving away from identifying shots with scenes during the turn to dramatic narrative cinema after 1907, and one of the many American directors concentrating his efforts on techniques for lengthening narrative after the loosening of film length standardisation in the US in 1910;¹² the “cinema of narrative integration” of the post-1908 period derived as much from George Loane Tucker’s use of point-of-view structure as it did from Griffith’s ‘innovation’ of cross-cutting.

As several film historians have recently pointed out, even the earliest 50-second single-shot films made by the Lumière brothers in the first five months of 1895 for their cinématographe projector were constructed along narrative lines. It is difficult, Gunning indicates, “to find moments even in early [i.e. pre-1908] cinema that are totally bereft of narrative development”.¹³ The Lumières’ Demolition of a Wall (1896) incorporates pick-axing of the wall to weaken it before the jacks are brought into use to generate gradual suspense over whether the wall will be successfully demolished and, when it is demolished (at roughly the mid-point of the film), enacts a transition from equilibrium, via percussive disequilibrium, to a new equilibrium. But even in work where he highlights narrative conventions in even the earliest Lumière films that have gone unobserved by Barry Salt,¹⁴ Gaudreault nevertheless comments that “[i]n my view, the narrative of, for example, [The]Birth of a Nation [1915] is of a quite different order from that of L’Arroseur Arrosé (The Waterer Watered) [1896] and the relationship between these two orders of narrative is far from being merely quantitative.”¹⁵ Gunning, Gaudreault, Richard deCordova, Noël Burch, Charles Musser and Stephen Bottomore have all emphasised that the transition to the cinema of narrative integration was based not on cinema ‘discovering’ narrative but on the promotion of narrative from a secondary to a primary function via the unification of two levels of narrativity: narrativity within shots and narrativity across shots,¹⁶ what Christian Metz calls “a second complex of codified instructions”.¹⁷ For Gaudreault, the editing structure of cross-cutting, originating as a narrational technique around 1908, represents “[t]he genesis of filmic expression” because it occasioned “the convergence of narrativity and cinema.”¹⁸

At the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century, existing editing conventions with previously disparate and often exhibitionist functions were being integrated into a primarily narrative system: hence Gunning’s term ‘narrative integration’ to distinguish cinema after 1908 from pre-1908 fictional narrative films. By 1912, for example, facial close-ups were being revived, reinventing a ‘technique’ that, in G.A. Smith’s Grandma’s Reading Glass (1900) and James Williamson’s The Big Swallow (1901) had served to render the everyday risible and, at the beginning/end of Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), absented a character from a narrative context, turning it into a method of uttering emotional depth or, when used to match with the eyeline of a previous s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note on Presentation
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: From ‘The Cinematograph’ to ‘The Pictures’
• 1 The Cinema of Narrative Integration, the Demise of Impressionism and the Rise of Modernism
• 2 Cinema’s Continuous Present and Modernist Temporality
• 3 Mass Consciousness and Mass Cinema
• Afterword: ‘a picture feverishly turned’
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index