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Overview
Significantly expanded from a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (Spring 1989), these essays confront the extent to which formalism has continued to dominate film theory, reexamine the role of melodrama in cinematic development, revise notions of "patriarchal cinema," and assert the importance of television and video to cinema studies. A range of topics are discussed, from the films of D. W. Griffith to sexuality in avant-garde film to television's Dynasty.
Contributors. Rick Altman, Richard Dienst, Jane Feuer, Jane Gaines, Christine Gledhill, Miriam Hansen, Norman N. Holland, Fredric Jameson, Bill Nichols, Janey Staiger, Chris Straayer, John O. Thompson
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822396345 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/21/1992 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 360 |
| Lexile: | 1510L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Jane Gaines is Associate Professor of English and Literature and Director of the Film and Video Program at Duke University. She is the author of Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law.
Read an Excerpt
Classical Hollywood Narrative
The Paradigm Wars
By Jane Gaines
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1992 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9634-5
CHAPTER 1
Dickens, Griffith, and Film Theory Today
Rick Altman
Thus Sergei Eisenstein opens his classic essay on "Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today":
"The kettle began it...."
Thus Dickens opens his Cricket on the Hearth.
"The kettle began it...."
What could be further from films! Trains, cowboys, chases.... And The Cricket on the Hearth? "The kettle began it!" But, strange as it may seem, movies also were boiling in that kettle. From here, from Dickens, from the Victorian novel, stem the first shoots of American film esthetic, forever linked with the name of David Wark Griffith.
Item: The Cricket on the Hearth. Charles Dickens, 1845. Theatrical adaptations: Albert Smith, 1845, in three parts; Edward Stirling, 1845, in two acts; W. T. Townsend, early 1846, in three chirps (!); Ben Webster, early 1846, four versions (straight play, pantomime, burlesque, and extravaganza); Dion Boucicault, 1862, three acts entitled Dot, A Fairy Tale of Home; the Pinkerton translation, in 1900, of Goldmark's German three-act opera; H. Jackson, 1906, a burlesque called What Women Will Do; N. Lambelet, 1906, a drama; W. T. Shore, 1908, an adaptation simply named Dot. Griffith is known to have based his version on the Albert Smith adaptation.
Eisenstein again, later in the same essay:
When Griffith proposed to his employers the novelty of a parallel "cut-back" for his first version of Enoch Arden (After Many Years, 1908), this is the discussion that took place, as recorded by Linda Arvidson Griffith in her reminiscences of Biograph days:
When Mr. Griffith suggested a scene showing Annie Lee waiting for her husband's return to be followed by a scene of Enoch cast away on a desert island, it was altogether too distracting. "How can you tell a story jumping about like that? The people won't know what it's about."
"Well," said Mr. Griffith, "doesn't Dickens write that way?"
"Yes, but that's Dickens; that's novel writing; that's different."
"Oh, not so much, these are picture stories; not so different."
But, to speak quite frankly, all astonishment on this subject and the apparent unexpectedness of such statements can be ascribed only to our—ignorance of Dickens.
Item: Enoch Arden. Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1864. First theatrical adaptation: Arthur Mathison, 1869, Booth's Theatre, New York. Felix A. Vincent's manuscript promptbook indicates a pictorial, episodic construction with crosscutting between simultaneous lines of action. In the third act, as Annie Lee waits for Enoch to return, she opens the Bible, asking, "Enoch, where art thou?" Choosing a random passage to guide her, she reads, "Under a palm tree." Suddenly the flats are drawn and Annie disappears, revealing a firelit tropical vision scene, with Enoch sitting under a palm tree. The fourth act then follows Enoch, while the fifth cuts back to Annie. Subsequent stage adaptation: Newton Beers, 1889, expanded to seven acts and thirty episodes. "A complete denial," according to A. Nicholas Vardac, "of the manner of the well-made play." Act 5: "The ghostly walls of England, a line of gruesome, shadowy cliffs, rising abruptly from the sea.... Afterward comes the return of Annie to her cottage, where she invokes heaven to give her some token of Enoch's fate.... [T]he wondrous vision of the Isle of Palms is disclosed; the humble cottage disappears, and a transformation unfolds itself to the audience. Opening with the tropical night, scene follows scene, light gradually growing, until a glorious burst of sunlight reveals Enoch under a palm tree, upon which beams the blazing light of day."
Few articles in the history of cinema theory have had the lasting impact of Eisenstein's treatise on "Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today." Though the Soviet filmmaker and theoretician was hardly the first to connect American cinema to the nineteenth-century novel, his essay now serves as the locus classicus of an important strain of criticism stressing direct ties between film and the novel. Eisenstein clearly knew that the ties were not as direct as he made them seem. Indeed, there are passages later in the essay that fully recognize the importance of theatrical texts in setting the pattern for cinema. Still, what is consistently remembered from Eisenstein's juxtaposition of the British novelist and the American filmmaker is a clear statement of influence: Griffith learned important aspects of his craft by paying close attention to the technique of Dickens. What Eisenstein claimed in a limited context, others have raised to the level of general pronouncement: a fundamental continuity connects the narrative technique of the nineteenth-century realist novel and the dominant style of Hollywood cinema.
By and large, critics have ignored the influence of theatrical adaptations. Eisenstein provides information on the stage source of Griffith's Cricket on the Hearth, yet he never attributes any importance to the existence of a theatrical intermediary. Many other critics follow precisely the same logic; they identify the dramatic version from which the film author directly borrowed, but assume that little is to be gained by comparing the film to an ephemeral and undistinguished stage adaptation. More often, critics blithely postulate a direct connection between a film and the novel from which it is ostensibly drawn, when even minimal research clearly identifies a dramatic adaptation as an important direct source for the film. This approach is especially visible in the numerous checklists that cite well-known novels and the films apparently made from them, or well-known films and the novels that seemingly serve as their models.
It is easy enough to demonstrate the debt that early cinema owes to theatrical adaptations. Robert M. Henderson identifies many of Griffith's Biograph films as coming from novelistic originals, as do Richard Schickel, Elaine Mancini, and most other critics. Ramona (1910), for example, is said to derive from Helen Hunt Jackson's celebrated novel of the same name, but what of Virginia Calhoun's successful 1905 stage adaptation, in which Griffith himself had played the part of Alessandro? Two of Griffith's Biograph films, Pippa Passes (1909) and The Wanderer (1913) are regularly traced to Browning's narrative poem, "Pippa Passes," yet this poem was regularly produced in a stage version. On 13 November 1906, for example, the New York Times singled out Henry B. Walthall for "a word of mention for intelligent acting" in an otherwise long and gloomy production of "Pippa Passes" at the Majestic. This is the same Henry B. Walthall who came to Biograph just two months before Griffith's version of Pippa Passes and who starred in The Wanderer. Cinema histories generally identify the Apocrypha as the source for Griffith's Judith of Bethulia. Yet Blanche Sweet notes that a copy of Thomas Bailey Aldrich's 1904 theatrical adaptation (a play well known to Griffith through Nance O'Neil's production) was present on the set during filming.
Griffith is not alone in his dependence on stage versions of well-known novels. In 1917, a "tie-in" edition of Frank Norris's novel The Pit reinforced spectators' impressions that the film was directly adapted from the novel. Yet the film's director, William A. Brady, had produced Channing Pollock's 1904 dramatic adaptation of Norris's novel, while the star of the film, Wilton Lackaye, played the role of Jadwin, as he had done on stage in 1904. Newspaper advertisements in 1932 proudly announced "Ernest Hemingway's A FAREWELL TO ARMS, A Paramount Picture adapted from the novel of the same name," yet Paramount hired Lawrence Stallings to write the script, based on his 1930 stage production. Stallings may have been paid just as much as Hemingway for the rights to his adaptation, but the resulting film has nonetheless always been presented as a direct adaptation of the Hemingway novel.
The last half of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth were so fertile in theatrical adaptations that it is not safe to bet against the existence of an adaptation of any novel, however unlikely. In fact, at one point in his famous essay on "Theater and Cinema" André Bazin assumes with a great deal of assurance that no theatrical adaptation has ever been made out of Madame Bovary or The Brothers Karamazov. Bazin's assurance piqued my curiosity.
Item: Madame Bovary. Gustave Flaubert, 1857. Theatrical adaptation: William Busnach, 1906. The Brothers Karamazov. Fyodor Dos-toyevski, 1879–80. Theatrical adaptation: anonymously published in volume 2 of the Moscow Art Theatre Series of Russian Plays (1923).
Take any list of silent films apparently derived from novels, submit it to a few hours of research in a serious library, and you will have little trouble discovering that a very high proportion of the novels were turned into extremely popular stage shows in the years preceding the film. Yet, systematically, it is the novel that gets the attention, the novel that is mentioned in the ad, the novel that draws the screen credit. For by the turn of the century novels were clearly a drawing card, cinema's tenuous connection to culture. There is, then, a community of interest between early filmmakers and today's critics: both prefer to stress the printed word and its cultural status rather than the ephemeral popular spectacle. To critique the ideological investment apparent in preference for the novel is not, however, my purpose here.
Frankly, what difference does it make whether Vitagraph's 1911 version of The Tale of Two Cities derives directly from Dickens's novel or from one of the dozen or so dramatic adaptations that had held the stage continually for the half-century since the novel's publication? Not simply to contribute yet another footnote to film history, but to question a certain tendency of today's cinema theory—that is what interests me. To put it bluntly, just what has Eisenstein's insistence on connecting Griffith to Dickens rather than to theatrical adaptations cost today's film theory? What difference does it make to our theoretical practice that generations of film producers and scholars have repressed film's debt to popular melodrama in favor of the more durable, more culturally acceptable novel or well-made play? Or, to formulate the question in a more provocative and productive way, of what current tendencies and stresses within film theory is the neglect of cinema's debt to melodramatic stage adaptations symptomatic?
How classical was classical narrative? Eisenstein's essay on "Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today," written during the war and published in English in 1949, inaugurated a long period of careful attention to filmic adaptations of well-known novels. Under the structuralist influence of the late 1960s, however, and especially after the publication of Roland Barthes's S/Z in 1970, a new approach to novel/film relationships prevailed. Abandoning the specific analyses by which earlier critics had attempted to establish localized novelistic contributions to the cinema, the new theorists sought instead to discover a broad set of traits shared by the realist novel and the dominant mode of commercial cinema. Already in 1953, Barthes's Le degré zéro de l'écriture had set up Balzac as the official representative of a mythically pure "straight" narration. In the same period, André Bazin publicly recognized in Hollywood cinema all the maturity of a classical art. With S/Z the term "classical" was finally fully stripped of its traditional historical reference to seventeenth-century French literature and associated with a specific type of narration exemplified by Balzac. "Classical," says Barthes at the outset of S/Z, "is the term we use to designate the readerly text." Throughout the early 1970s the importance of Barthes's terminology was reinforced by a series of paired terms that appeared to parallel his classical/modernist opposition. Barthes himself contributed the readerly/writerly (lisible/scriptible) distinction, as well as the related opposition between pleasure and bliss (plaisir/jouissance). Structuralist critics of film and literature alike repeatedly referred to Benveniste's distinction between story and discourse (histoirel discours). Film theorists often opposed Hollywood cinema to alternative cinema or countercinema.
Conceived from the start as part of a binary opposition, the notion of classical narrative necessarily involved concentration on a narrow range of targeted features, with a consequent leveling of all butcertain key differences among texts. With the Balzacian model as a guide, theorists of the past two decades have built a coherent but limited model of classical narrative. With few exceptions they have stressed omniscient narration, linear presentation, character-centered causality, and psychological motivation. In addition, film theorists have pointed out the importance of invisible editing, verisimilitude of space, and various devices designed to assure continuity.
At the heart of every evocation of classical narrative lies a textbook assumption about the meaning of the term "classical." For Bazin the term implies maturity, ripeness, harmony, perfect balance, and ideal form. For Barthes it refers to a text whose integrity and order provide assurance and comfort for the reader. In David Bordwell's use, "classical" means harmony, unity, tradition, rule-governed craftsmanship, standardization, and control. All three critics, it seems quite clear, ultimately owe their definition of the classical in large part to the neoclassical French literary theorists of the seventeenth century. Borrowing from Boileau and his contemporaries not only a general sense of harmony and order, but also numerous specific tenets (the central importance of the unity of action, concentration on human psychology, preference for mimetic forms), critics have found in a broadly shared notion of classicism a ready-made theory. But is that theory built strongly enough to carry the weight of the novel and cinema as well?
Was classicism classical? The century of Corneille and Racine apparently provides an important model for the concept of classical narrative. According to the familiar account, French writers of the second quarter of the seventeenth century, under the tutelage of Malherbe and the Academie Francaise, and with the guidance of Aristotelian principles, subordinated their creative genius to a series of rules for proper literary production, resulting in works of a more ordered and pleasurable nature. During the latter half of the century, these rational rules came to be second nature to a growing group of writers, including Moliere, Racine, Boileau, La Fontaine, La Rochefoucauld, La Fayette, and La Bruyére, all gathered around the Sun King, Louis XIV. The good taste of these writers permitted them to reflect through the harmony of their writings the social stability of the era as well as the overall unity of the court and its regal master.
Today this traditional view of French classicism no longer counts many supporters. Inspired by the methods of the Annales School, historians have increasingly challenged the assumptions of social unity that once appeared to undergird classical doctrine. Little by little, literary scholars have revised their model of classical unity. Before World War II, Thierry Maulnier provided perhaps the strongest challenge to the traditional static conception of classicism. Where other critics stress the delicacy and order of Racine's language, Maulnier points instead to the strong opposition between the refined dignity of Racine's language and the savage emotions that it often expresses. Maulnier reveals Racine's tendency to stretch a civilized, finely crafted surface over the chaotic energy of a smoldering volcano.
Maulnier's reading echoes the intriguing formula of French novelist Andre Gide: "A classical work is strong and beautiful only through its ability to tame its own romanticism." Whereas dictionary definitions always define classicism as opposed to romanticism, Gide recognizes that the classic always includes the romantic. Classicism for Gide is thus not a stable style but a constant effort to corral, tame, and harness the chaotic forces that give classicism its particular power. "The more rebellious the thing mastered," says Gide, "the more beautiful the work." Gide invites us to read the order of classicism as the result of tension. For him, the renowned balance characteristic of classical works is not the permanently secure balance of a symmetrical drawing, but the unstable equilibrium of a ballet dancer on point, straining her muscles to the utmost in order to appear motionless and calm.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Classical Hollywood Narrative by Jane Gaines. Copyright © 1992 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: The Family Melodrama of Classical Narrative Cinema/ Jane M. Gaines 1Dickens, Griffith, and Film Theory Today/ Rick Altman 9
Form Wars: The Political Unconscious of Formalist Theory/ Bill Nichols 49
Film Response from Eye to I: The Kuleshov Experiement/ Norman N. Holland 79
Securing the Fictional Narrative as a Tale of the Historical Real: The Return of Martin Guerre/ Janet Staiger 107
Between Melodrama and Realism: Anthony Asquith's Underground and King Vidor's The Crowd/ Christine Gledhill 129
The Hieroglyph and the Whore: D.W. Griffith's Intolerance/ Miriam Hansen 169
The She-Man: Postmodern Bi-Sexed Performance in Film and Video/ Chris Straayer 203
Dead Ringer: Jacqueline Onassis and the Look-Alike/ Jane Gaines 227
Nostalgia for the Present/ Fredric Jameson 253
Reading Dynasty: Television and Reception Theory/ Jane Feuer 275
Dialogues of the Living Dead/ John O. Thompson 295
Image/ Machine/ Image: On the Use and Abuse of Marx and Metaphor in Television Theory/ Richard Dienst 313
Notes on Contributors 341
Index 345