Eisenstein

Sergei Eisenstein’s “Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today” raises, in my opinion, some central questions in our understanding of the relation of film and literature. First it stresses the fact that film did not spring out of a cultural void, untouched by previous narrative genres. In addition to Dickens’s influence on D. W. Griffith, the main topic of the essay, Eisenstein notes the manner in which late nineteenth and early twentieth century melodrama played a role in the development of film. (In fact, the importance of “special effects” in the success of the theatre version of Way Down East noted by the Russian filmmaker can be seen as predicting the growing dependence of film on these, not only in its early stages, but also today). His reference to “montage,” for him the central and defining element of filmmaking, as being present in 19th century humor writing and even caricatures serves to stress the manner in which film is a product of a specific cultural moment in US and Western culture.

If film has not only a genetic but a structural relation with Dickens and, one can add, the realist novel as a genre, is that a reason why the most successful and popular adaptations are precisely of those type of novels? Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice has, according to imdb.com, been adapted 9 times, even if a couple of these film versions seem unusually free. (I am counting TV adaptations). Dickens’s David Copperfield has been adapted 17 times. James Joyce’s Ulysses, the best-known of the modernist master’s novels, and one of Eisenstein’s favorites, has been adapted 3 times, with two additional films made out of specific sections of the novel. (In reality, 5 adaptations for such a difficult work is a surprisingly high number).

However, without having seen the Ulysses adaptations, one can safely assume that these films are significantly different from the more mainstream films made from novels by Dickens or Austen. They are almost by necessity art films. (And one can also safely bet that any of the Austen adaptations has had more viewers than all the versions of Ulysses put together). Does the adaptation of modernist narrative lead to modernist art film? Can one trace a similar line of descent from modernist novel (in addition to Joyce, Proust, Kafka, etc.) to art film? This is a difficult question which I am not prepared to answer. However, it is probable that the formal narrative innovations of Cortázar’s modernist story was one of the factors that led Antonioni, another modernist master, to become interested in adapting it into film.

Image is of Eisenstein with a Mexican candy skull