Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Spiegel
Review by: Bruce Kawin
Film Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 4, Special Book Issue (Summer, 1977), pp. 44-46
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1211585 .
Accessed: 29/05/2014 09:43
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film
Quarterly.
http://www.jstor.org
44
BOOKS
FICTION
ANDTHE
EYE
CAMERA
VisualConsciousness
in Film
andthe ModernNovel
By Alan Spiegel. Charlottesville:Universityof VirginiaPress, 1976.
$12.00.
BOOKS
45
pecially good at discussing, for instance, dialectical montage in Joyce and additive montage in Dos
Passos. His basic conclusion about Joyce-that his
work is cinematic but not influenced by cinema-strikes me as definitive, and the process by which
he arrives at this conclusion exemplary. His work
on Faulkner is often interesting too: there is a good
discussion of slow motion in The Hamlet and
depthlessness in Sanctuary. On the other hand,
Spiegel emphasizes the (unfootnoted and, as far as
I can determine, entirely untrue) "fact" that
Faulkner himself adapted Sanctuary for the
screen; he even implies that Tony Richardson's
Sanctuary is a remake of The Story of Temple
Drake, when it is clearly an original adaptation of
Requiem for a Nun (with cut-ins from the novel
Sanctuary and not from Temple Drake, which has
a wildly different plot). Taken on its own terms,
the only place Spiegel's larger argument really falters, I think, is in its suggestion that Robbe-Grillet's seer-oriented fiction is-because it sometimes
presents the reader with difficulties in visualizing
just what is happening and why that is being observed-anti-cinematic; I can't think of a novel
that is more cinematic than Jealousy, and would
suggest that the two lines of development Spiegel
traces in the post-Flaubertian novel (interior and
visual) do in fact converge in Robbe-Grillet'swork.
But it may not be possible to take Spiegel on his
own terms. What is for me the nadir of his argument proceeds from a conflation of Arnheim and
Camus: ". .. it cannot be stressed too strongly at
the outset that all of the components of a cinematized narrative derive specifically from what I have
called a passive, affectless way of seeing which in
itself represents the effects of a broken circuit between the seer and the contents of his visual landscape; that is, a sense that the visible world is
something other than, remote from and resistant
to, the human mind" (p. 82). Such an assertion
implicitly denies the possibility of accurate visual
thought, or dynamic visual engagement, and renders the work of film-makers as diverse as Brakhage (Text of Light, The Act of Seeing With One's
Own Eyes) and Kurosawa (Ikiru, Dodeskaden) virtually pointless-the act of straining to see truly,
and to integrate what one sees, inappropriate and
anticinematic. The dialectic between subjective
and objective vision strikes me as basic to the whole
46
BOOKS
EALING
STUDIOS
By Charles Barr. London: Cameron and Tayleur, 1977. &6.95.
Charles Barr's critical history of Ealing is a doubleedged triumph of organization and clarity. Michael
Balcon's Ealing Studios, based on the London borough of Ealing, produced 95 features between
1938 and 1959, usually releasing at least four films
a year, never more than seven, and is best known
for its quintet of classic comedies of the 1949-1951
period: Passport to Pimlico, Tight Little Island (or
Whisky Galore), Kind Hearts and Coronets, The
Lavender Hill Mob and The Man in the White
Suit. Ealing was a small company, somewhat of a
family affair, comparable perhaps not to an American studio like RKO, but to, say, the Val Lewton
unit at RKO in the forties. One of Balcon's expressed aims was to "project" British character to
the world, or at least to project the character of a
certain segment of British society-roughly, the
"benignly liberal" segment. To accomplish this he
had to keep his studio independent, free from outside pressure, and he succeeded. He kept Ealing
"small and stable" to the end. But as Barr shows,
stability can mean stagnation as well as continuity.
Limiting itself in subject matter as well as size,
Ealing is, by the mid-fifties, stifled by its own good
taste, by the "distaste for commerce," "horror of
violence," "emotional inhibition," and "deference
to age and authority" reflected in its films.
Is it a coincidence that the "liberating" Hammer
horror movies come in just as Ealing comedies and
dramas go out in the late fifties? To Barr it isn't,
and he's probably right. But this changing of the
guard seems almost too suggestively and schematically good to be true. Barr (who is also the author
of Laurel and Hardy, 1967) is deft at orchestrating