Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Wells's Prescience
- 1 Optical Speculations in the Early Writings: The Time Machine and the Short Stories
- 2 The Dis/Appearance of the Subject: Wells, Whale and The Invisible Man
- 3 ‘Seeing the Future’: Visual Technology in When the Sleeper Wakes and Fritz Lang's Metropolis
- 4 The ‘Broadbrow’ and the Big Screen: Wells's Film Writing
- 5 Afterimages: Adaptations and Influences
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - The ‘Broadbrow’ and the Big Screen: Wells's Film Writing
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Wells's Prescience
- 1 Optical Speculations in the Early Writings: The Time Machine and the Short Stories
- 2 The Dis/Appearance of the Subject: Wells, Whale and The Invisible Man
- 3 ‘Seeing the Future’: Visual Technology in When the Sleeper Wakes and Fritz Lang's Metropolis
- 4 The ‘Broadbrow’ and the Big Screen: Wells's Film Writing
- 5 Afterimages: Adaptations and Influences
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Silent Wells
Sylvia Hardy argues that Wells is a kind of paradigm of literary involvement in cinema's first decades because he simultaneously reflected and contributed to how film made use of and saw itself as relating to fiction. Demographic, cultural and class parallels between the new mass audiences for both cinema and the kind of fiction that Wells practised are manifold. In his 1929 introduction to KWWAK, he noted with satisfaction the pressure that cinema put on the traditional bastions of art, both challenging their social exclusiveness and raising alternative aesthetic possibilities:
It has been interesting to watch the elegant and dignified traditions of the world of literature and cultivated appreciation, under the stresses and thrusts produced by the development of rapid photography during the past half-century. Fifty years ago not the most penetrating of prophets could have detected in the Zoetrope and the dry-plate camera the intimations of a means of expression, exceeding in force, beauty and universality any that have hitherto been available for mankind. Now that advent becomes the most obvious of probabilities. (KWWAK, p. 8)
The early industry resorted to literature to stake its own claims for aesthetic respectability and prestige, mostly through adaptations rather than commissioning original scripts. However, according to Wells, the indiscriminate appetite for scenarios didn't necessarily either enhance the texts it devoured or progress its own technical evolution:
It bought right and left; it bought high and low; it was so opulent it could buy with its eyes shut. It did. Its methods were simple and direct. It took all the stories it could get, and changed all that were not absolutely intractable into one old, old story, with variations of costume, scenery and social position. (KWWAK, p. 11)
Although the screening of Wellsian themes and motifs (if not whole narratives as such) goes back as far as Méliès, and invisible men were rife in the late 1900s, it is unlikely that they were legally sourced, copyright law lagging behind the new medium. Sometimes Wellsian material was mixed in with others, as in Walter Booth's The Airship Destroyer (1909), publicised as ‘War In The Air! Possibilities Of The Future! An actual motion picture prediction of the ideas of Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells and Jules Verne.’
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- H. G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies , pp. 94 - 129Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2007