Film Culture and Modernism

Posted: January 4th, 2023

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Film Culture and Modernism

Introduction

The Western world’s future was uncertain at the turn of the 20^th Century. However, it appeared to filmic and literary artists that one could turn to pictorial space and literature to counter the slippage of ethical norms, religion, and culture.  Modernists innovated in cinema, literature, and in visual arts to break away from conformist form and language. With the advent of the new film medium, a concern arose in regards to montage, impressions impacts, time, directing gaze, imaginary space, and stream of consciousness (Levenson 219). Some images created by modernists are thrilling and draw people’s attention to the visual world. Modernism focused on daily life, time, perception, as well as the fractured and kaleidoscope experience of urban areas. This essay discusses the influence of cinema on modernist literature. Cinema and film with its close up, montage, flashbacks, and panning methods assisted in moulding works like Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway. 

Discussion

The complex and close connections between cinema and modernist literature have become key topics of discussion in the past few decades, compelled to some extent by a concern in the relations between the arts and technology. From the beginning of the twentieth century onwards, theorists and critics have set to understand the important of cinema’s identity, especially through its relationships of time and space and how it blended art and technology. They have sought to define mimesis which in this case refers to the life’s imitation in literature and art, and montage defined as techniques adopted in editing of films whereby artists sequence short shots to condense information, time, and space (McParland 8). Additionally, there has been a rising interest to comprehend how film or cinema as it arose at the end of the 19^th Century, played a role in modeling modernist literature. To understand this, this part of the essay explores some of the cinematic works of modernists.  

Ulysses by James Joyce

James Joyce (1882-1941), was a poet, novelist, short story writer and a teacher whose works contributed to the modernist era. Joyce is noted to be among the most important and influential authors of the twentieth century.  His relationship to the cinema according to Marcus is more diffuse compared to that of authors like Virginia Woolf.  Explorations of Joyce’s influence on cinema have focused on the effects of his writing, particularly Ulysses, of pre-cinematic expertise like the Mutoscope and early cinema (Marcus). Joyce’s encounter with Russian film director book-ends this history, whereby the director described Ulysses as a remarkable event in cinematic account rather than literature. Montage form was adopted in filming the story and became connected to the diffusion of interior vision that intimately described the life in Ulysses with the help of astounding technique of interior prologue. In 1909, Joyce and three other businessmen found Dublin’s Volta cinema. The three had experience in running cinemas. The films that these partners shot within the six months stretch of the business were nearly Italian and French and required theatrical and art films modifications together with non-fiction and comedy programs.

The modernist cinematic works embraced a fantastical and a playful features which were powerful. The concentration with animation of objects and with alterations central to George Méliès’s films and Leopoldi Fregoli’s quick-change artistry were creating forces on one of Ulysses chapters named the “Night-town”. Metamorphoses, in this case, included a change of bodies between species and sexes “women became men, anybody could disappear in a smoke puff, heads and limbs became detached” among other cinematic tricks were used in Georges Méliès’s films (Marcus). It is certain that Joyce drew upon the above mentioned cinematic effects in creating his animations in Ulysses.

A unit in the book- The Wandering Rocks’ conjures a distinct cinematic dimension, especially in the way it constitutes transport and motion in Dublin. In watching the film, one notes how the city brings Dublin residents together by losing two major protagonists in the crowd (Ellmann, Hussey, and Whitmore 157). The argument in this case is that montage should be seen as the main mediating term between cinema and modern literature.

The fragmentation of objects and bodies appears connected to other cinematic works that came after Ulysses. Looking at the important of Joyce’s work Ulysses and the role it played in the history of cinema, one can conclude that the link between cinema and Joyce’s writing had a mutual impact, exemplified in, and reconciled by contemporary urban experience. A book Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin influenced by Ulysses shows the degree at which cinema speared the world of literature.

The Cinema”essay by Virginia Woolf

The Cinema is among the most important meditations on cinema to have been fashioned by a modernist author.Victoria Woolf’s essay appeared first in New York arts in June 1926. The essay shows the writer’s sense of the fundamentally theoretical nature of any commentary made in cinema, in regards to the unpredictability of the medium’s future development, as well as her interest in film (Marcus). Woolf in her essay does not tell much about films. She only mentions one film and glances at the conceptions or contents of a few other movies. However, with characteristics of indirection and shrewdness, she succeeds to conjure an important aspect of the cinema, which is the lack of mimetic sensitive possibility, that the movie industry both before and after 1926 dedicated significant amounts of money and time denying.

 Woolf saw in the cinema a way of capturing emotions and sensations too abstract, fleeting, or indirect to be the themes of the recognized arts. One of her earliest drafts refers to the sensations people experience- that is excitement or fear. Film would therefore seem to be more close to nature compared to art, and Woolf discovered in it the capacity to create an understanding of a primitive and archaic reality (Levenson 218). Whereas several commentators have construed this to be Woolf’s negative reaction to film, reading the essay simplifies the complexity of her reaction. Woolf in her essay tried to understand film as a modern medium that drew back at earliest human expression forms and the essentials of human emotions like anger, fear, joy, rage, and pain. Woolf’s response to some of the literary works is entirely negative. She notes in the essay that film makers had ignored actualities or early documentary films, and by doing so had ignored the most powerful cinematic dimension which is to represent the world as it actually is (Woolf and McNeillie). The future film that Woolf envisioned would epitomize both the present reality and dreams in its modernity, detail, and contingency.

Mrs Dalloway by Victoria Woolf

The depiction of the city was a vital scene for the encounter between film and literature in modernist world.  Victoria Woolf’s novel MrsDallowaypublished , just like Ulysses by James Joyce, is strongly connected to the filmic 1920 city masterpieces, which epitomize living a day in the city. In Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway, there is a key focus on movement and tour around town stress. While writing this novel, Woolf wrote about how enchanting London was in a way that she got carried out by its beauty (Woolf and McNeillie). In the book, she denotes passages through the squares and streets which set the city in motion.  

The novels written during Woolf’s era and the filmic symphonies of the city open the debate on modernist dayliness, which is the obsession with daily life coupled with the allusion that much countless spans of culture and time are confined within a 24-hour round. Time is basically the main aspect depicted in Mrs Dalloway. Woolf in the novel uses the church bells sound and clock-faces to segment time. She deploys what she defines as the tunneling process to move her characters around London city while timing how they move in a manner that creates the notion of different occurrences happening simultaneously (Marcus). The tunneling process played part in shaping many films of the modernist period.

The topic on the manner in which novelistic techniques adopted by modernists authors altered and changed as a reaction to film is a vexed and a complex one. It is not easy to understand how Woolf’s writings or those of any other modernist writer may have advanced without a sentience of cinema and cinema techniques. However, it is easy to speculate, with a high confidence level, that film played a role on both Woolf’s formal explanations to matters of narrative constructions and her approaches to aesthetic issues (Marcus). Therefore, her manner of demonstrating simultaneity in her works was practically modified by an understanding of cinematic strategies. Such tactics include cross-cutting which means parallel editing as a way to show events occurring simultaneously but in distinct areas, and the short-reverse-shot that shows a character moving from one place to another.

Conclusion

The subject of the connection between modernist film and literature remains active and one. One can never fully understand the effects of the new channel of film on its early commentators and viewers. This essay looked back from the perceptions of the people who grew in the film age, and in the digital epoch.  Understandings into the ways in which film had an influence on literary representations continue to emerge. Presently, these insights run in several strong directions like the significant work on film culture and film history as well as an increased awareness of the film specificities that were viewed and left a substantial mark. The other direction that modern scholars take to understand modernist cinema is the modes of reading of both literary and film texts as well as their differing and shared engagements with space, time, and narrative forms.  The last understanding is a broader comprehension of media ecologies whereby film shares one platform with other modern communication forms, including literary texts.  Understanding these issues remains as complex and alive today as they were in the 20^th Century.

Works Cited

Ellmann, Richard, Mark Hussey, and George Whitmore. James Joyce. Sussex Publications, 1982. https://books.google.co.ke/books?hl=en&lr=&id=E70hAwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA326&dq=ulysses+by+james+joyce&ots=CsXYF0W9Ds&sig=jMXtgHWIBCV2vSV4nm3wVaBmxEU&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=ulysses%20by%20james%20joyce&f=false

Levenson, Michael, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Cambridge University Press, 2011, http://yunus.hacettepe.edu.tr/~jason.ward/ied388novel3/woodmodernismandfilm.pdf

Marcus, Laura. “Cinema and Modernism”. The British Library, 2016, https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/cinema-and-modernism.

McParland, Robert.  Film and Literary Modernism. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2013,https://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/58800

Woolf, Virginia, and Andrew McNeillie. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Harcourt, 1994.