Abstract
The relationship between the visual and the verbal, image and word, has been the ground of longstanding aesthetic debate. The representation of literary authorship in film bears on this in close and complex ways. This chapter considers a number of films and texts in which the transition between book and film, word and image, is foregrounded both thematically and through formal strategies. The focus of the chapter will be on recent film and literature, though there will also be some discussion of the ways in which authorship is represented in earlier cinema. One significant contrast to which this discussion will point is early film’s use of the dissolve, or similar modes of signalling transition, to represent the move from the authorial mind/hand to his or her created world, actualized in film. In recent cinema, by contrast, there has been a tendency to break down the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ worlds, so that ‘the author’ becomes part of, and subject to, the dimensions of the fictional world.
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Notes
See Robert Hamilton Ball, Shakespeare on Silent Film: A Strange Eventful History (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1968), pp. 36–7.
Hamilton Ball, pp. 36–7. The presentation of authorship in this scene is discussed in the Introduction to this volume and the flag-waving in Judith Buchanan, Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 119.
Guerric DeBona, ‘Dickens, the Depression, and MGM’s David Copperfield’, in James Naremore (ed.) Film Adaptation (NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), pp. 106–128 (117).
DeBona (2000), p. 115. It even perhaps, in Grahame Smith’s terms, gestures at Dickens as the dreamer of cinema. G. Smith, Dickens and the Dream of Cinema (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003).
Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1915/1922), (New York: Random House, 2000), pp. 118–9.
Paul Auster, The Book of Illusions (London: Faber, 2002), p. 15.
Boris Eikhenbaum, ‘Problems of Film Stylistics’ (1927), Screen 15.3 (1974): 7–34.
Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language (1936) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962), p. 2.
Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 4–5.
Rudyard Kipling, ‘Mrs Bathurst’ (1904), Collected Stories (London: Everyman, 1994), pp. 577–597 (591).
Paul Auster/Sam Messer, The Story of My Typewriter (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2002), p. 10.
Darren Wershler-Henry, The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 110.
William S. Burroughs, ‘Technology of Writing’, in The Adding Machine: Collected Essays (London: John Calder, 1985), p. 37. Quoted in D. Werschler-Henry, The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2005), p. 110.
Quoted in Jonah Raskin, American Screen: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 167.
‘Notes Written on Finally Recording Howl’, in Bill Morgan (ed.) Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952–1995 (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 229.
Daniel Kane, We Saw the Light: Conversations between the New American Cinema and Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), p. 20.
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2006), p. xvi.
‘Sir, you can’t translate poetry into prose; that’s why it is poetry’. The line is taken verbatim from the trial transcript. See Bill Morgan and Nancy Peters (eds.), ‘Howl’ on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2006), pp. 125–199 (138).
See Virginia Woolf, ‘The Cinema’ (1926): ‘But obviously the poet’s images are not to be cast in bronze or traced with pencil and paint. They are compact of a thousand suggestions, of which the visual is only the most obvious or the uppermost … All this, which is accessible to words and to words alone, the cinema must avoid’. Collected Essays, vol. 4, Andrew McNeillie (ed.) (London: The Hogarth Press, 1994), pp. 348–354 (351). See also W.H. Auden’s essay ‘Poetry and Film’ (1936).
For a discussion of this process, see Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
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© 2013 Judith Buchanan
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Marcus, L. (2013). The writer in film: authorship and imagination. In: Buchanan, J. (eds) The Writer on Film. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137317230_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137317230_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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