See the Amazing Cinematograph
by Richard Combs
This was the year that the Charles Dickens bicentenary swept through the culture
industry, and left behind – as such events will in our media-centric age – a sense of
overload and Dickens exhaustion. “Please, sir, can I have some less?”, as one cartoon
memorably rephrased Oliver Twist to signal the bicentennial after-mood. The many
movie adaptations of Dickens were given an airing, and we were reminded of cinema’s
overriding debt to the master of the realistic 19th century novel. D.W. Griffith, the cinema
pioneer who has also been dubbed – because of his social and cultural attitudes – the last
Victorian, credited Dickens for such storytelling techniques as cross-cutting between
different events to create tension and excitement. Sergei Eisenstein gave this authorial
union his intellectual blessing in an essay, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today”.
It’s an unavoidable contradiction that the cinema, which was soon proclaimed the
modern medium for a new century and a new age, should remain so entangled with the
century before. When the earliest theorists of cinema tried to isolate what made it
specifically itself, they declared that to be truly filmic it should jettison 19th century
dramatic and narrative conventions, and the first experimental films set about doing just
that. At the same time, of course, literature was in the throes of creating the modern –
and deciding that 19th century realism should go, largely because the arrival of
photography and then film had made it redundant for literature to compete in realistic
representation.
So, in order to be modern, literature bequeathed to the more modern medium of cinema
the techniques of 19th century dramatic fiction – a bequest scorned by radical cinéastes
but which most film-makers felt was an offer they couldn’t refuse. It is – to borrow from
Laurel and Hardy – another fine mess that cultural history has got us into. Which brings
us to our current season, in which we look at what cinema has actually made of 19th
century literature – excluding Charles Dickens, to avoid that bicentennial hangover –
and discover that the ‘modern’ lurks in the strangest places, and that in converting oldfashioned realistic fiction cinema has revealed some of the truest and most radical things
about itself.
“Farewell Zola, goodbye Flaubert”. This is how Irish scholar Declan Kiberd, in his
introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, sums up
Joyce’s declaration of war on realistic fiction. Unfortunately, we don’t have the prints
that would enable us to welcome Flaubert back, but we do have Zola (the same work, in
two different versions), along with Guy de Maupassant, who helped classic narrative
cinema to define itself through the Western Stagecoach (see accompanying article),
Herman Melville (the basis of two works of French ‘art’ cinema), and such socially
critical authors as Octave Mirbeau and Theodor Fontane, who have been adapted by two
directors of the European avant garde: respectively, Luis Buñuel and Rainer Werner
Fassbinder.
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In fact, as we work our way through the literature of the 19th century, it becomes clear
that it was never just one thing – or rather, that as it went on it acquired different
colourings, attitudes, and (in the latter part of the century) a quite subversive approach
to literature itself. The ‘modern’ may have come most starkly into being with Joyce and
Ulysses, but it had been a long time a-borning. In some ways, cinema has been the more
conservative medium in adapting this material, and in others its most subversive talents
have found congenial ground here.
The Octave Mirbeau who supplied Buñuel with a characteristically disturbing tale (The
Diary of a Chambermaid) of murder, madness and sexual fetishism himself disturbed
literary convention with fantastic plots and a collage technique: his last novels were
published at the time Joyce was writing Ulysses. Arthur Schnitzler considered his play La
Ronde, written in 1897 and depicting the intersection of class prejudice and sexual
mores, to be too explosive for his time, and so it proved. At first printed only for private
circulation, it was not performed until 1920, when the outcry against it resulted in a trial
for immorality. It is elegantly but incisively rendered in Max Ophuls’1950 adaptation.
At the other end of our period, the earliest adapted work is Sense and Sensibility, Jane
Austen’s first novel, published in 1811 under the decorous authorial cover, “by a lady”.
Austen has now been as much-adapted – despite her smaller output – as Dickens, and
the result often shelters under the decorous umbrella of “heritage cinema”. TaiwaneseAmerican director Ang Lee may not have been the obvious choice for Sense and
Sensibility – he had not even heard of Jane Austen at that point – but he brings subtlety
as well as cinematic bravura to Austen’s world, revealing the paradox at the heart of the
novel: that grand romantic sensibility can be evanescent while passion may lurk beneath
rationality and restraint.
By the century’s mid-point, however, the novel about the lives and loves of well-off
country folk – or at least, of those trying to square social and economic need with their
romantic inclinations – was about to take a turn for the more quixotically and
existentially strange. After Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s next novel was called Pierre or
the Ambiguities, in which the hero, the scion of a landed American family, whose
acreage extends to romantic revolutionary legend, comes to doubt his heritage, his world,
his very identity. Hamlet is a text that figures in his sense of the whirling instability of life
– as it does, interestingly enough, in Ulysses – and for his updated version of Pierre, Pola
X, Leos Carax opens with a Hamlet line: “The time is out of joint/O cursed spite that ever
I was born to set it right”.
Carax shifts Melville’s metaphysics, his hero’s crumbling sense of self – “He felt that
what he had always before considered the solid land of veritable reality, was now being
audaciously encroached upon by bannered armies of hooded phantoms, disembarking in
his soul” – on to the new ground of contemporary sex and politics. (The enigmatic title
represents the initial letter of the French translation of Melville’s title – Pola – with X for
the 10th version of the script that was filmed.) Just a few years before Melville’s Pierre,
William Makepeace Thackeray had published The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., which
made a roistering braggart’s adventure out of a similar sense of the mutability of reality
and the indeterminacy (not to say the sport) of personality. Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (see
accompanying article) treats his hero’s life as a riddle of the alienated self.
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By another of those peculiar twists of cultural history, we might see these two works of
mid-19th century literature as looking forward to a modern, or modernist, cinema where
human motivation – even the very foundations of personality – are impossible to pin
down and the world seems to be so many fictions dissolving into one another. Could the
tortured philosophical musings of Pierre be recast as the glacial mysteries of
Michelangelo Antonioni?
But it wasn’t so much philosophical musing as an attempt to describe concretely the
foundations of personality, and the reasons for its breakdown or degeneration, that
explain the late 19th century movement of ‘naturalism’. This was a post-Darwinian
phenomenon, a literary movement that saw itself as a kind of science, realistic in detail
but going beyond to analyse the roots of human behaviour, particularly as shaped by
environment and heredity. This has perhaps found its way indirectly into cinema,
through the doom-laden view of human nature in the varieties of expressionism and film
noir. Emile Zola was the movement’s most famous literary exponent, and we have two
adaptations of his novel La Bête humaine, one made by Jean Renoir in 1938 and one in
the U.S. (as Human Desire) by Fritz Lang in 1954.
A similar translation of the literary into the cinematic happens with the most ambitious
attempt to adapt a naturalistic novel: Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, taken from the novel
McTeague by Frank Norris, who was called “the American Zola”. Stroheim set out not
only to respect Norris’s naturalism – the picture of characters degenerating through inbred weakness – but to expand his realistic attention to physical detail. Stroheim created
a vast canvas of life in a lower-class district in turn-of-the century San Francisco (much,
and famously, cut by MGM), with the contrasting fates of several couples in one rooming
house. The irony is that this extreme realism led to more extreme forms of cinematic
expression than realism could contain, and Greed often tends towards surrealism
So the cinema duplicated and transformed much from 19th century literature – more than
is contained in the Dickens-to-Griffith formula. And the picture is complicated by the
way that literature was evolving towards what we might recognise as a modern view of
human complexity. We’ve said that Zola and the naturalists were post-Darwin in their
insistence on our divided nature, on how the ‘beast within’ links us to earlier stages of
development (hence Victorian fears that this ‘lower half’ could re-emerge, which was the
basis of theories of criminal behaviour.) But Melville’s Pierre is pre-Darwin, and its
speculations on the fragile construct of identity (“It is all a dream – we dream that we
dreamed we dream”) probably strike us as more suggestive, and realistic about our
existential doubts, than the theories of Zola and the naturalists.
In fact, many of the terms employed in the scientific enterprise of naturalism turn up in
its fantastic cousin – the horror stories, ghost stories and vampire legends with an older
19th century pedigree. The theme of how the good is indissolubly wedded to the bad is
particularly persistent. “What was this perverse, vicious thing that lived within him,
knitted to his flesh?”, is how Frank Norris treats the theme in McTeague. Which echoes
Robert Louis Stevenson’s description of the beast within in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde: “…that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an
eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born”. Or as
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Henry James described his sense of the otherworldly: “The strange and sinister
embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy”.
Our 19th century season covers the full extent of the fantastic literature of the period,
because so much of it has found its way into film. The earliest is the Polish novel, The
Manuscript Found in Saragossa, which was still unfinished when the author, Jan Potocki,
died in 1815. Filmed by Wojciech Has in 1965, then restored in the 1990s, this is a series
of interrelated tales of the supernatural, the occult and the marvellous. Then the
supernatural, and the riddle of the divided self, emerges in a world more like our own in
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray (see accompanying article), and
through the possibly distorting mind of the observer in The Innocents, an adaptation of
Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.
When Francis Ford Coppola undertook his adaptation of 19th century horror – Bram
Stoker’s Dracula – he not only reminted a movie favourite but envisaged the cinema
emerging from its late 19th century world. “See the amazing Cinematograph”, shouts a
street hawker in London about the latest sideshow attraction. Dracula (Gary Oldman),
who has come to town in search of real estate and a more populous setting than
Transylvania for his kingdom of the undead, encounters Mina Murray (Winona Ryder),
who seems the reincarnation of his lost love from some four centuries ago. To get
reacquainted, he takes her to the Cinematograph, on what may be the first movie date.
Doubts about who we are crowd into late Victorian literature. And they weren’t only
thinking of personal breakdown and degeneracy, but of what was happening abroad, to
the empire, with concomitant fears of contagion (immigration?) from ‘over there’. This
produced something called “invasion literature”, of which the original Dracula is an
example (think of Pierre’s “bannered armies of hooded phantoms, disembarking in his
soul” projected on a national plane). We have two ‘crisis of empire’ examples, in John
Huston’s matter-of-fact adaptation of Kipling, The Man Who Would be King (see
accompanying article), and Coppola’s phantasmagoric take on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness in Apocalypse Now. In 19th century literature they dreamed of a coming
apocalypse; in the 20th, in film and reality, we acted it out.
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