Joycean Frames

Film and the Fiction of James Joyce

Thomas Burkdall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780815339281
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136712180
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Employing concepts from film theory, this much-needed study explores in-depth the "cinematic" quality of James Joyce's fiction from Dubliners to Finnegan's Wake.

CHAPTER ONE
The Unknown Art

Joyce and Cinema

I see a cinematograph going on and on …

— Letters, 27 June 1924

A substantial amount of biographical evidence confirms Joyce’s interest in the cinema and encourages further investigation of his aesthetic affinities with film. A review of his connections with the movies throughout his life reveal both his opinions about films and his relationship to them—not only as spectator and artist, but also as entrepreneur and negotiator.

Two of Joyce’s earliest writings suggest film technique. In these juvenilia, a cinematic means of representation is evident. One of the adolescent’s Silhouettes, composed while Joyce attended Belvedere College, and recalled by Stanislaus Joyce in his reminiscence, My Brother’s Keeper, is particularly evocative. Related in the first person, the narrator’s

attention is attracted by two figures in violent agitation on a lowered window-blind illuminated from within, the burly figure of a man, staggering and threatening with upraised fist, and the smaller sharp-faced figure of a nagging woman. A blow is struck and the light goes out. The narrator waits to see if anything happens afterwards. Yes, the window-blind is illuminated again dimly, by a candle no doubt, and the woman’s sharp profile appears accompanied by two small heads, just above the window-ledge, of children wakened by the noise. The woman’s finger is pointed in warning. She is saying, ‘Don’t waken Pa’. (90)

The domestic violence and mundane trauma of this early sketch presage the development of similar themes in Dubliners. But as Austin Briggs notes with respect to this piece, “even in his teens Joyce demonstrated an interest in projections upon screens” (145). And Homer Obed Brown points out that “a ‘silhouette’ emphasizes the externality of the description, frames the scene as if on a stage, and exaggerates its distance from the narrator. It presents the voyeuristic aspect of the detached observer in its simplest form” (21). But this narrator represents the voyeur within the film, coupled with the spectator of the movie house—the narrator looks on at the event related, while the audience identifies with this protagonist/teller whom we observe as he watches.¹

In Joyce’s first attempt at self-portraiture on January 7, 1904, he describes memory and the mind’s images of the past in almost cinematic terms.² The opening paragraph of his essay, “A Portrait of the Artist,” contains some language suggestive of film:

The features of infancy are not commonly reproduced in the adolescent portrait for, so capricious are we, that we cannot or will not conceive the past in any other than its iron memorial aspect. Yet the past assuredly implies a fluid succession of presents, the development of an entity of which our actual present is a phase only. Our world, again, recognises its acquaintance chiefly by the characters of beard and inches and is, for the most part, estranged from those of its members who seek through some art, by some process of the mind yet untabulated, to liberate from the personalised lumps of matter that which is their individuating rhythm, the first or formal relation of their parts. But for such as these a portrait is not an identificative paper but rather the curve of an emotion. (Emphasis added, 257–58)

The “fluid succession of presents” describes aptly both the process and the product of the cinema, while the “individuating rhythm” reminds one not only of Stephen Dedalus’s later Thomistic pronouncements, but also of the rhythm of montage. It resembles the sort of phrase that Sergei Eisenstein might have written to describe how montage captures the essence of an image through the relation of its parts. In rendering the “curve of an emotion” and by envisioning a calculus of affect, Joyce presages a literature analogous to Eisenstein’s cinema of an “inner monologue,” a form that the Russian director admires in prose fiction but which he believes “finds full expression … only in the cinema” (Film Form, 104–05).

Two of Joyce’s early explicit references to film suggest the impression it made upon him. Writing from Pola, in 1904 Joyce observed the power of the medium to enthrall audiences. He describes a memorable night at the cinema: “The other evening we went to a bioscope. There were a series of pictures about betrayed Gretchen. In the third last [act] Lothario throws her into the river and rushes off, followed by rabble. Nora said, ‘O, policeman, catch him’” (Letters 2: 75). Two years later, in a letter to Stanislaus, Joyce compares the cinematograph with the mind’s processes; at the end of a missive that changes topics so swiftly it might have been a futurist piece celebrating dynamism and Filippo Marinetti’s god of speed, Joyce declares, “the Italian imagination is like a cinematograph, observe the style of my letter” (2: 203).

Although Joyce only occasionally writes of the cinema in his correspondence, he does reveal that he turned to the new medium for solace at a critical moment in his life. A troubled exile in Rome in 1907, Joyce confessed to his brother Stanislaus that:

I have gradually slid down until I have ceased to take any interest in any subject. I look at God and his theatre through the eyes of my fellow-clerks so that nothing surprises, moves, excites or disgusts me. Nothing of my former mind seems to have remained except a heightened emotiveness which satisfies itself in the sixty-miles-an-hour pathos of some cinematograph or before some crude Italian gazette-picture.

But the cinema represented more than a place for Joyce to recapture his former mental and emotional state. In this particular epistle, he describes a writer’s crisis of faith, a situation that serves to underscore the restorative powers of the cinematograph’s emotional carousel. Joyce understands that he must decide now: “it is about time I made up my mind whether I am to become a writer or a patient Cousins.” He suffers from “mental extinction” and “indifference,” while lamenting the cultural and mental bankruptcy of his employers, the Roman bankers, and his fellow employees, tellers and clerks. Even the romanticism of Wagner’s Dusk of the Gods, as Joyce refers to the opera, fails to cheer him. Discouraged by the problems of publishing Dubliners, even the proofs of Chamber Music cannot comfort him for long. By the end of the letter, he even suggests that “the verses are not worth talking about: and I begin to think neither are the stories.” Alongside the temporary relief of his poems, the cinematograph is an unequivocal positive. (See Letters, 2: 217.)

However, the most obvious of the early connections between Joyce and the cinema may be more commercial than emotional or aesthetic. In one of his early business ventures, he attempted to establish the first movie-house in all of Ireland. The tenure of Ireland’s first cinematograph manager was, fortunately for modern letters, both short and unsuccessful, lasting less than three months. Yet, this incident should not be dismissed as simply another of Joyce’s entrepreneurial failures; while his plans to import fireworks or Irish tweed to Italy were soon forgotten (Ellmann, 303), Joyce retained an interest in film throughout his life. As Gösta Werner indicates, some of the mainly Italian films shown at the Volta Cinematograph reappear in Joyce’s writings, especially in Finnegans Wake (132).

By the early 1920s Joyce clearly recognized the parallels between his own writing and the cinematic medium. As Ellmann notes, the author “at first … had thought, as he told [his friend] Daniel Hummel, that the book [Ulysses] could not be translated into another language, but might be translated into another medium, that of the film” (561). And, a little later, Joyce clarified the analogy between the mind and the cinema. Those “prolonged cinema nights” which Joyce mentioned to Harriet Shaw Weaver refer, as Ellmann remarks, to an earlier letter in which Joyce suggested how he viewed films in relation to consciousness and recollection (3: 112). “Whenever I am obliged to lie with my eyes closed,” he writes, “I see a cinematograph going on and on and it brings back to my memory things I had almost forgotten,” showing the link that Joyce discerned between his own stream-of-consciousness and the rapidly moving images of the cinema (1: 216).

In their reminiscences, his friends and acquaintances also document the author’s interest in the movies; he attended the cinema often in Paris in the twenties. In an article in Sight and Sound, Patricia Hutchins describes his movie-going habits:

In spite of increasing difficulties with his eyes, he appears to have gone fairly frequently to the movies, usually between dusk and dinner time when he could no longer work. Paul Léon or Joyce’s son and daughter-in-law usually accompanied him. (11)

Joyce, the tired craftsman, relaxed in the darkness of the theater. But were these evening sojourns more than a pleasant pastime? Morley Callaghan, a Canadian novelist and acquaintance of Joyce in Paris, certainly thought so. He recalls one evening in his memoir of 1929, That Summer in Paris:

Joyce got talking about the movies. A number of times a week he went to the movies. Movies interested him. As he talked, I seemed to see him in a darkened theatre, the great prose master absorbed in camera technique, so like the dream technique, one picture then another flashing in the mind. Did it all add to his knowledge of the dream world? (142–43)

In a section of “Further Notes” to her study, James Joyce’s World, Hutchins adds a few more pieces of information concerning Joyce and the cinema. Apparently Joyce told Harriet Shaw Weaver that he found the inspiration for the rhythm of Molly’s soliloquy in “a film on astronomy, in particular some sequences dealing with the moon” (245). Eugene and Maria Jolas also tell of attending the cinema with Joyce, remembering that they had seen Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran, William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights, and an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau with the author. They reportedly discussed the Flaherty film at length, not surprising when one considers Joyce’s affection for Galway and the Ireland of his Nora. The other films, as the Jolas stated, “should not be quoted as Joyce’s decided preferences,” but simply as the films that they recall seeing with him (Hutchins, 245). Nino Frank, a journalist acquainted with the author, also mentions films that he attended with Joyce:

Sometimes we talked about the cinema; James Joyce was interested in the cinema and asked me to take him two or three times.

How can I forget these occasions, painful for me because his poor vision compelled us to sit in the first row? They allowed me to discover his esteem for “grand drama,” where, as they say, there is something to sink your teeth into, and for a film of Jean Choux’s about Paris, where Harry Baur’s well-measured tremolos triumphed. I also remember another time when, with a young admirer who had come from Ireland to see him, we went to a local theater in the outer boulevards: they were showing some western or other inspired by Fenimore Cooper, and it seems to me someone had assured Joyce that he would find in it some plays on words to please him. Such was not the case. (Potts, 99)

No matter what movies Joyce saw, a number of film allusions and cinematic references find their way into Finnegans Wake, at times in curious ways. As he looked for ideas to layer the references in the Wake, Joyce consulted the magazine Boy’s Cinema for material for Book II, the children’s book (Ellmann, 616). The cinema even receives a brief mention in the “Circe” section of Scribbledehobble, Joyce’s notebook for the Wake: “cinema fakes, drown, state of sea, tank, steeplejack, steeple on floor, camera above; jumps 10 feet, 1 foot camera in 6 foot pit” (119).

Joyce was not, however, above using the cinema to satisfy interests other than literary. Lucie Noel, Paul Léon’s wife, relates a revealing tale:

I was his “seeing eye” … when he took me to see a film in the Rue de Clichy which had been causing some comment. He had tried to get Paul to go, but my husband said the idea bored him. The movie was Extase, in which Hedy Lamarr ran around the countryside perfectly beautiful and quite nude. There was also a very realistic love scene between horses. The picture was quite erotic and I was quite embarrassed, because I had to explain much of the action to Joyce…. At that time his eyesight was really bad, and every few minutes he would ask, “What are they doing now?” I would try to tell him in as general a way as I could, and he would say “I see”, obviously amused by my fumbling explanation. But we both thought it was a very fine picture. (19)

In this unconventional manner (and perhaps in other ways-see Chapter VI), the author explored the erotic potential of the movies.

Nor was Joyce above being star-struck by a beautiful actress, even in his later years. Mary Colum tells of an evening in which the Joyces met Marlene Dietrich, whom Nora recognized. The two cultural giants were intrigued by one another:

The effect was electrical. I had not imagined that such a writer would be of interest to a movie star, but both Miss Dietrich and, more naturally, the novelist with her [Erich Maria Remarque] were excited at the encounter…. [T]he conversation was continued for a time. “I saw you,” Joyce said to the star, as if he were speaking of some event far back in history, “in L’Ange bleu.” “Then, monsieur,” Miss Dietrich replied, “you saw the best of me.”

Joyce was amused by it all. “I thought the years when I was a lion were over,” he said, smiling, but with a kind of melancholy. (229)

Undoubtedly, however, his most significant encounters with a cinéaste were his meetings with Eisenstein in Paris in 1929. In her biography of the Russian, Marie Seton describes the scene:

So in Paris Sergei Mikhailovich [Eisenstein] went to the home of James Joyce. Though he had already read and re-read Ulysses, and thought he had grasped its subtle nuances, he found he had only begun to understand the book on an elementary level. Only when Joyce read passages to Sergei Mikhailovich (who had never before felt himself to be sitting at the feet of any living master) did its words and images take on their full significance…. Despite his near blindness, Joyce wanted to see those sections of Potemkin and October in which Sergei Mikhailovich had tried to reveal the inner core of man and, thus, convey reality to the spectator. (149)

In his autobiography, Immoral Memories, Eisenstein expresses the relationship between the two artists as more equal, although his respect for Joyce is still evident: “With great sincerity, Joyce asks me to show him my films, since he has become interested in the experiments in the language of cinema that I am carrying out on the screen (just as I am fascinated by his kindred researches in literature)” (214). Joyce, not to be outdone technologically, cranked the gramophone so that Eisenstein could hear his recent recording of “Anna Livia Plurabelle....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• The Direct Attack: An Introduction
• Chapter One—The Unknown Art: Joyce and Cinema
• Chapter Two—The New Fashionable Kinematographic Vein
• Chapter Three—Bioscope: Portraits of Reality
• Chapter Four—In the Linguistic Kitchen: Joyce, Eisenstein and Cinema Language
• Chapter Five—Cinema Fakes: Film and Joycean Fantasy
• Chapter Six—A Look Between: A Cinematic Analysis of “Nausicaa”
• Conclusion: From Film and Literature to Movies and Modernism
• Bibliography
• Index