Review: Film and Literature

Reviewed Work(s): Telling It Again and Again: Repetition in Literature and Film by Bruce
F. Kawin; The Age of the American Novel: The Film Aesthetic of Fiction between the Two
Wars by Claude-Edmonde Magny and Eleanor Hochman; The Cinematic Imagination:
Writers and the Motion Pictures by Edward Murray
Review by: Carolyn Geduld
Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Winter, 1974), pp. 123-130
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207713
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Contemporary Literature

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FILM AND LITERATURE*

Now that film-going has become not only as fas

ble as reading, but also just as expensive (as th
surge toward the price of hardbacked books
scholarship is moving in the direction of both lit
literary-film criticism. The distinction is import
those studies of film written by critics who u
literary criticism, such as Birgitta Steene's I
York: Twayne Publishers, 1968). The secon
describes those studies which suggest a kinship b
ture. These are often undertaken as a tricky kind
literary critic who has been forced by the curren
studies somehow to take film into account; possi
a ruse of film-loving academics bidding for
departments in which pure film criticism is not
ous form of publication. The three books rev
this second category of literary-film criticism:
The Cinematic Imagination: Writers and the
Claude-Edmonde Magny's The Age of the A
Film Aesthetic of Fiction Between the Two W
of books on movies and movies on books, and

* Bruce F. Kawin, Telling It Again and Again: Repe

Film. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1972. 197 pp. $6.95.
Claude-Edmonde Magny, The Age of the Ameri
Aesthetic of Fiction Between the Two Wars. Trans. Eleanor Hochman. New
York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1972. 239 pp. $7.50.
Edward Murray, The Cinematic Imagination: Writers and the Motion Pic-
tures. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1972. 330 pp. $9.00.

CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE XV, 1

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ing It Again and Again: Repetition in Literature and Film finds a
central theme common to both. All three books are valuable contribu-
tions to the field, even granted that they are more or less colored by
the special ambivalence this kind of criticism exhibits toward film.
Edward Murray's The Cinematic Imagination is the least special-
ized and most ambitious book of the three, and because of the broad
ground it covers (seventeen writers and dozens of film-makers), it is
probably a book with an appeal to everyone interested in contempo-
rary culture, especially contemporary American culture. Murray's
thesis is that virtually all of the twentieth-century writers who were
less than five years of age in 1903 when Edwin S. Porter made The
Great Train Robbery have been consciously or unconsciously over-
whelmed by film technique and that film technique has thus changed
and even defined all of modern literature since. Murray develops new
aesthetic standards that measure the quality of a writer's "cinematic
imagination." He advises novelists and playwrights to avoid "two
extremes: the aping of cinematic techniques to the detriment of their
own art; and the futile effort to purge from their work every trace
of a cinematic imagination." As a rule, he believes that too many
writers have suffered and declined under the influence of film, espe-
cially when their books have been adapted into film scripts and when
they have worked in Hollywood, and he ends his study with a pessimis-
tic reference to the prediction that literature might disappear
altogether while film continues to assert itself into areas and traditions
that once belonged exclusively to the writer.
Above all, Murray is a purist who is basically quite unhappy
about what he sees as the merging, or "confusion," as he puts it, of
the film and literary arts. He insists, rightly, that a great work of art
is irreducible. While film and literature have some things in common,
they "remain basically different modes of apprehending experience."
When put to the test, he finds wanting both the film industry's attempts
to adapt great novels and plays to the screen and the writer's "cine-
matic imagination."
In his analysis, Murray treats those writers who have had ac-
knowledged relationships with both film and the film industry. His dis-
cussion includes the techniques they may have borrowed from cinema,
their autobiographical accounts of movie-going, their experiences in
Hollywood, and-most extensively-an examination of exactly how
their work has been adapted to screen. The first part of his study deals
with dramatists: O'Neill, Brecht, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller,
Ionesco, and Beckett; the second part, with novelists: Dreiser, Joyce,

124 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

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Virginia Woolf, Faulkner, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Nathanael West,
Hemingway, Graham Greene, Steinbeck, and Robbe-Grillet.
My main argument with Murray concerns his general approach
to film. He seems to agree with such film critics as Pauline Kael and
John Simon (both of whom he is fond of quoting) who contend that
film only rises to a "real" art on rare occasions-and usually those
occasions occur far from Hollywood. (See, for instance, Kael's "Trash,
Art, and the Movies" in Going Steady [Boston: Little, Brown & Co.,
1970].) Murray coins a term like "Hollywooden" and creates fan-
tasies about Bergman directing Hemingway and Antonioni directing
Fitzgerald because-evidence in his study suggests-he actually dis-
likes film and Hollywood film in particular. In his discussion of scores
of film adaptations, he can only confess to a lukewarm admiration for
two or three, including Joseph L. Mankiewicz's film treatment of
Graham Greene's The Quiet American and John Ford's treatment of
Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. One of Murray's central points, which
he explains at length, is that good books make bad movies. And while
this is no doubt generally true both because of the technical dissimi-
larities between film and prose and because of box-office timidity,
Murray does not have the courage to admit the exceptions. Sometimes
a director's vision, although very different from the vision expressed
in the original literary work, can be as compelling. Not even mentioned
in Murray's book are such satisfying (as distinct from faithful) adapta-
tions as Tony Richardson's Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer,
Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons, Joseph Losey's Accident
and The Go-Between, Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western
Front, Archie L. Mayo's The Petrified Forest, and Stanley Kubrick's
Lolita and A Clockwork Orange.
Anyone with auteurist interests will be deeply disappointed by
(for instance) the chapter on Hemingway, in which a recognized fail-
ure like Henry King's The Sun Also Rises is criticized for more than
four pages, while Robert Siodmak's 1946 masterpiece, The Killers, is
passed over in a page, Don Siegel's 1964 version of The Killers is dis-
carded in a footnote as "beneath contempt," Howard Hawks's classic
To Have and Have Not is brushed off in a paragraph as "no more
than a good action story" and Michael Curtiz's version of the same
novel, entitled The Breaking Point, is cast aside in a single sentence as
"merely effective melodrama." A major gap in Murray's study is the
complete exclusion of a chapter on D.H. Lawrence, who has been
better served than most by the film versions of The Fox and Women
in Love.

FILM AND LITERATURE 125

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 However, the ultimate validity of The Cinematic Imagination
must rest with its demonstration of the influence of film technique on
contemporary literature. Murray tries to prove that montage, cross-
cutting, flashbacks, fade-outs, focusing, and all the paraphernalia of
camera technique have exact equivalents in modern prose. Sometimes,
his argument seems specious-although never quite as specious as it
seems in Magny's study. In his investigation of the stream-of-con-
sciousness novel, for instance, he writes that Joyce "approximates the
slow-motion effects in Ulysses... as well as fast-motion effects (as in
the expressionistic Nighttown sequence). Almost every interior mono-
logue in the book could qualify as a novelistic equivalent of a close-up,
with flashbacks of varying length . . . introduced . . . by cuts, fades,
and dissolves." This kind of comparison is not always convincing.
Could film technique just be providing a convenient semantics for dis-
cussion of prose style? Are we in the realm of metaphor or simile? The
most damaging point that could be made against Murray's thesis is
that in an essay called "Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today" in Film
Form: Essays in Film Theory (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
1949), Eisenstein made the very same kind of analysis of Dickens'
prose, discovering-well before the Film Age-long shots and close-
ups in the Victorian writer's every sentence. The question is, therefore,
what kind of descriptive writing would not be comparable to film
technique? Where does the cinematic imagination begin?
The French literary critic Claude-Edmonde Magny, who died in
1966, had an answer of sorts for both questions as far back as 1948,
when her first book, The Age of the American Novel: The Film
Aesthetic of Fiction Between the Two Wars was originally published
in France. She, too, believed that novelists were consciously or uncon-
sciously imitating cinema technique, and she traced the beginnings
of this tendency directly to the "objective" novels that appeared in
America after World War I: the works of Dos Passos, Hemingway,
Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hammett, Caldwell, James M. Cain.
Magny began writing her study immediately after the liberation
of France, when the attention and curiosity of Europe were turned
toward the Americans, the liberators. The intellectuals who once had
snubbed American books and films now found inspiration in a culture
that seemed new, energetic, even avant-garde. Although the reputa-
tions of many of the writers who affected them have since declined,
their enthusiasm for American film of the 1940s remains remarkably
current. Magny's classic study does much to reveal the roots of critical
attitudes that are still being thrashed out today (in film journals, at

126 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

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least). It should be read as a companion piece, for instance, to articles
like Dudley Andrew's "Andre Bazin" (Film Comment, 9 [March-
April 1973], 64-68) which notes the influence of contemporary
French existentialists on Bazin-the "father of modern film theory."
Magny is enough of an existentialist to make a point of indicating
every disagreement she has with Sartre, yet she is also enough of a
Jungian to dot her work with frequent allusions to a "collective con-
sciousness." Although The Age of the American Novel does not docu-
ment it, it makes it easy to imagine Sartre's crowd and Bazin's crowd
rubbing shoulders at the cinema, watching the American films that
they had missed during the war, and working out the rudiments of the
auteur theory afterwards in nearby cafes.
As is almost always true of criticism from another age, what is
between the lines in Magny's work is as fascinating as what is printed
on the page. Some of her thought has become hilariously dated, like
her fear that Hollywood was going to go through a "star crisis" because
of fluctuations in Lana Turner's career. Some of her ideas seem reflec-
tions of curious anxieties of her time, like her fear that deep-focus
photography would fail because the audience, forced, in a sense, to
observe a long shot and a close-up at the same time, would suffer
"extreme fatigue." And some of her attitudes seem to indicate bizarre
directions that criticism has not followed, like her opinion that the
obscurities of Faulkner's style would produce "a truly 'Marxist' and
cooperative literature in which no one will be able to be a consumer
if he is not willing at the same time to be a producer."
The central thesis of her study, however, remains a plausible out-
growth of the cinema of the 1940s and the novels of the 1930s. The
first half of The Age of the American Novel, subtitled "The American
Novel and the Movies," traces the convergence of both arts through
an "objective technique" that consists of two major innovations: in
the novel, an "objective narration" in which the narrator acts as a jour-
nalist who reports only what he sees, with little or no introspection,
and in film, the rejection of Eisenstein's montage for the noneditorial,
nonselective deep-focus photography developed in Welles's Citizen
Kane. "Objective narration," as Magny sees it, means the elimination
of a god's-eye vision in which the narrative records "the things no con-
sciousness could be aware of, the things no lens could have recorded."
It represents the existentialist's favoring of behaviorism, the theory that
reality is confined to what an external observer can perceive. The other
major innovation Magny describes is the varying of points of view in
the American novel, related to the practice of changing the camera

FILM AND LITERATURE 127

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position in film. This gives the reader and viewer the broadest possible
choice in the observation of reality. The ideal book or film using these
two "objective techniques" replaces the nineteenth-century belief in
a universal or absolute truth with a "committed narrative . . . always
told from someone's point-of-view."
The second half of her study, subtitled "Time and Impersonalism
in the American Novel," abandons film altogether for a discussion of
both the specific use of objective techniques and the mechanics of time
in the works of Dos Passos, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Faulkner.
Particularly interesting is her chapter on Faulkner, whom she claims
to be the best of the American novelists because only he creates a
"mystical, noncausal, nonpsychological participation in one commu-
nity, the community of Sin." (This section of the book was written
shortly after the publication in France of Malcolm Cowley's The
Portable Faulkner with its map of Yoknapatowpha county, when such
"signifiers" as the double use of the name Quentin were still news.)
The jump from the enthusiasm among French intellectuals in the
late 1940s for American film and novels to the French New Wave
films and novels that gained ascendency in the early 1960s is a forese
able taking of objective techniques to their logical extreme: in
novels of Robbe-Grillet and the films of Resnais, the surface of thin
in the immediate present is the only reality there is. In her bo
Magny tempers her admiration for American literature and film
suggesting that they are, after all, only precursors of the presumabl
greater age of the French novel to come.
Bruce F. Kawin would probably agree. His interesting them
study, Telling It Again and Again: Repetition in Literature and Fi
concentrates (although not exclusively) on modern French and ex
tential novelists like Genet, Robbe-Grillet, Beckett, Gertrude Ste
and film-makers like Alain Resnais. His examination of repetiti
which-for him-is the truest measure of reality, springs from Wi
genstein's Tractatus, Kierkegaard's Repetition, Eliade's The Myth
Eternal Return, and Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and
this good company he discusses repetition as an aesthetic device
beginning with a contrast between Allen Funt and Dickens, work
up through an analysis of pornography and Proust, to his longest, fi
chapters on Stein, Beckett, and Robbe-Grillet's New Novel.
In his opening remarks, Kawin distinguishes between two kin
of repetition: the "repetitious," which is boring, habituous, and e
destructive when it descends into compulsive or neurotic behavior; an
the "repetitive," a positive and constructive cycle that reoccurs w

128 1 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

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greater and greater impact. Drawing on both, Hemingway, like
Beckett, managed to create (typically of Kawin's involuted way of
expressing it) "a constructively repetitive novel about destructive repe-
tition" in The Sun Also Rises. Because the "repetitive" occurs in time,
the remainder of Kawin's book continues with the aesthetics of the
three different kinds of time in which the "repetitive" repeats. First,
there are the vast majority of novels and films in which time flows
from past to future, in which repetition depends on remembering.
Second, there are works in which time begins to gel, in which char-
acters with a past and future become stuck in a memory or an eter-
nally present moment, as in Buiiuel's Exterminating Angel, Faulkner's
Light in August, or Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Third,
there is the art of "the continuous present" in which past and future
disappear altogether while the instant is eternally frozen, as in the work
of Resnais and the New Wave novelists.
This is one of those books that cries out for the return of the
pamphlet. In what is probably no more than thirty-five or forty thou-
sand words, Kawin's study is both too long and too short. The works
he chooses to discuss seem at once too randomly drawn (Why two
films directed by William Dieterle? Why King Lear?) and too deliber-
ately selected-is it not cheating to focus on those existential novelists
who self-consciously use time and repetition both as the content as
well as the major theme of their work? Do such examples beg the
question? Kawin's case might be stronger if he either stripped his
theory down to an outline in a few thousand words or if he expanded
his book to include a greater number of less obviously "suitable"
examples. As it stands, his book's real worth remains as a key to
unravelling a handful of existential artists whose work is so compara-
ble that it is difficult to resist saying that he tells it again and again.
Kawin's film criticism is suspect for the same reasons. He general-
izes from the example of Resnais, while Resnais remains a very special
case among film-makers. It would perhaps be equally enlightening to
apply his theories to, say, a Busby Berkeley musical (200 girls and
200 pianos) or to Citizen Kane's mess of flashbacks and changing
points of view or to Kurosawa's Rashomon. There is a fleeting attempt
to distinguish Hollywood formula films (the apocryphal studio com-
mand, "Make me No Highway in the Sky in a submarine!") from
sequels involving what Kawin calls "genuine repetition," but why the
Frankenstein films would belong to the former category and the
mummy films to the latter escapes me. Significantly, in a brief section
on Russian film theory, Kawin discusses Pudovkin's associative cut-

FILM AND LITERATURE 129

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ting-which fits right into the book's thesis-while ignoring the central
meaning of Eisenstein's montage: a synthesis of different images
implying transformation-perhaps the very antithesis of repetition.
Kawin continually urges his readers to think of repetition as more
than an aesthetic device, as a philosophy and as a state of mind as
well. The first sentence in his book claims, "Life takes its tone and
character from repetition." The structure of his study moves (quite
arbitrarily) through an ever-limiting concept of time until it can step
right outside of time and into the "continuous present." The last sen-
tence in the book thus concludes, "The present is eternal, and eternity
is repetition." It could be inferred from this that Kawin's secret con-
cern is a desperate attempt to escape death-the one thing that cuts
repetition short, that keeps repetition from being eternal. The illusion
of halting time by telling it (in any form) again and again actually
represents both a life-wish and a death-wish. Preserving the present
moment forever may avoid the future moment of death, but at the
price of the very feel of life that can only exist in the normal flow of
time. If the present is eternal, we might as well be dead.
By its very nature, film exists in the perpetual present because
the spectator is able to feel as fast as he can see. By its very nature,
literature exists in the perpetual past because the reader cannot think
as fast as he can read. The theorist has yet to come along who can
begin to deal with such complexities of film and literature as they
approach each other. Kawin, Murray, and Magny have each attempted
to investigate the possibilities and problems of the relationship of the
two arts, an investigation that still calls for an immense amount of
scholarship. Peter Wollen has asserted in Signs and Meaning in the
Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1969) that we need more
and more comparisons between authors and auteurs. Certainly this is
necessary before the questions raised by the three books reviewed here
can be resolved.

Carolyn Geduld
Bloomington, Indiana

130 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

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