Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 ‘I Bar the Magic Lantern’: Dubliners and Pre-filmic Cinematicity
- 2 An Individuating Rhythm: Picturing Time in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- 3 ‘Building-Vision-Machine’: Ulysses as Moving Panorama
- Coda: The Media-Cultural Imaginary of Finnegans Wake
- Conclusion: Before and After Film
- Select Visiography
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 ‘I Bar the Magic Lantern’: Dubliners and Pre-filmic Cinematicity
- 2 An Individuating Rhythm: Picturing Time in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- 3 ‘Building-Vision-Machine’: Ulysses as Moving Panorama
- Coda: The Media-Cultural Imaginary of Finnegans Wake
- Conclusion: Before and After Film
- Select Visiography
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The way things are, it would seem as if cinema was fifty years behind the novel.
André Bazin in 1961JOYCEAN ‘CINEMATICITY’
James Joyce is widely recognised as the most cinematic of Modernist writers. At the conclusion of the 1933 Ulysses obscenity trial in the US, this virtually acquired the status of a legal judgement by the Honourable John M. Woolsey:
Joyce has attempted—it seems to me, with astonishing success—to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man's observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbra zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious. He shows how each of these impressions affects the life and behaviour of the character which he is describing.
What he seeks is not unlike the result of a double or, if that is possible, a multiple exposure on a cinema film which would give a clear foreground with a background visible but somewhat blurred and out of focus in varying degrees.
Woolsey not only compared Ulysses’ ‘screening’ of consciousness to moving multiple exposures on film, but also invoked an optical toy – the kaleidoscope – a predecessor to film's dynamically protean imagery. Following Soviet director Sergei M. Eisenstein's view in the early 1930s, André Bazin equated Joyce with the future of cinema, by arguing that he achieved ‘ultracinematographic’ things on the page which film had still to catch up with in the 1960s. Both deemed Joyce ‘ahead of the game’ because he seemed to emulate or even outdo what screen techniques achieved both during his lifetime and long after he died in 1941.
However, born in 1882, Joyce's eye and imagination were in fact trained by the rich optical culture of the late Victorian era. Its highly developed and interdependent ‘visual literacy’ and ‘literary visuality’ help to explain Joyce's creative receptiveness to film when it arrived in the mid-1890s.
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- James Joyce and CinematicityBefore and After Film, pp. 1 - 34Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020