9781474402491 James Joyce
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JAMES JOYCE AND CINEMATICITY 66315_Williams.indd315_Williams.indd i 009/03/209/03/20 11:59:59 PPMM To my parents’ memories of Rhondda chapel lantern shows, and my long-suffering wife and children 66315_Williams.indd315_Williams.indd iiii 009/03/209/03/20 11:59:59 PPMM JAMES JOYCE AND CINEMATICITY Before and After Film Keith Williams 66315_Williams.indd315_Williams.indd iiiiii 009/03/209/03/20 11:59:59 PPMM Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Keith Williams, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10/12.5 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 0248 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0249 1 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 6385 0 (epub) The right of Keith Williams to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). 66315_Williams.indd315_Williams.indd iivv 009/03/209/03/20 11:59:59 PPMM CONTENTS Acknowledgements vi List of Abbreviations viii List of Figures ix Introduction 1 1 ‘I Bar the Magic Lantern’: Dubliners and Pre-fi lmic Cinematicity 35 2 An Individuating Rhythm: Picturing Time in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 106 3 ‘Building-Vision-Machine’: Ulysses as Moving Panorama 174 Coda: The Media-Cultural Imaginary of Finnegans Wake 244 Conclusion: Before and After Film 256 Select Visiography 260 Select Bibliography 267 Index 283 66315_Williams.indd315_Williams.indd v 009/03/209/03/20 11:59:59 PPMM ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply grateful to everyone who helped with this project, especially the anonymous readers of the original proposal and sample chapters; Jeremy Brooker, chair of the MLS for reading drafts and for the privilege of seeing him and Carolyn working their magic live; Mary Cahill and colleagues at the National Museum of Ireland for letting me examine the ash pit slides; Ian Christie who said it sounded like the kind of book he would like to read; Richard Crangle (of the MLS and LUCERNA), for assistance with images; Stephen D’Arcy for kindly inviting me to view the ash pit itself; Sarah Dellmann of the ‘One Million Pictures’ project; Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau, who starting me thinking about cinematicity; the late Mervyn Heard, whose work and performances inspired so many; Onno Kosters and Katherina Hagena for sharing many symposium panels; Matthew Jarron and Steven Gellatly for insights into silent fi lms, Victorian culture and musical accompaniment; John McCourt, for observing that some things are so obvi- ous no one can see them; Luke McKernan, from whom I have learned much in so many ways; Katie Mullin, Cleo Hanaway and the Joyceans at Leeds, for wonderful inputs, academic and sociable; Deac Rossell who probably does not realise yet how a chance conversation would prove so infl uential on me; Neil Sinyard for unstinting faith and kindness; Nick Wade for enlighten- ing conversations about optical toys and stereoscopy; cohorts of Joyce and cinema students past and future, who provide new ways of thinking about this topic; and colleagues in English, Film, Comics and Art, who listened vi 66315_Williams.indd315_Williams.indd vvii 009/03/209/03/20 11:59:59 PPMM ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS to my ideas developing with patience and perspicacity; lastly, Dean of Humanities Jim Livesey, for locking me in the writing bunker over the sum- mer until it was fi nished. Recent research on Irish visual culture and early fi lm by Kevin and Emer Rockett and Denis Condon has been invaluable, as was the media archaeology of Erkki Huhtamo and Stephen Herbert. vii 66315_Williams.indd315_Williams.indd vviiii 009/03/209/03/20 11:59:59 PPMM ABBREVIATIONS EIC Denis Condon, Early Irish Cinema, 1895–1921 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2008) EML Encyclopaedia of the Magic Lantern, ed. David Robertson, Stephen Herbert and Richard Crangle (London: MLS, 2001) EPVC Early Popular Visual Culture IiM Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013) JJQ James Joyce Quarterly MiTD Olive Cook, Movement in Two Dimensions: A Study of the Animated and Projected Pictures which Preceded the Inven- tion of Cinematography (London: Hutchinson, 1963); repr. as vol. 3 of Stephen Herbert (ed.), A History of Pre-Cinema (London: Routledge, 2000) MLP&MPS Kevin Rockett and Emer Rockett, Magic Lantern, Panorama and Moving Picture Shows in Ireland, 1786–1909 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011) MLS Magic Lantern Society 66315_Williams.indd315_Williams.indd vviiiiii 009/03/209/03/20 11:59:59 PPMM FIGURES I.1 Still from Arthur Robison’s Schatten: eine Nächtliche Halluzination (1923). Courtesy of BFI National Archive. © absolut Medien GmbH 14 1.1 ‘Dissolving views apparatus’, illustration from Gaston Tissandier, Popular Scientifi c Recreations in Natural Philosophy, Astronomy, Geology, Chemistry, etc. etc. (London: Ward, Lock, 1885), p. 159. Jeremy Brooker’s personal collection 37 1.2 Slide from What are the Wild Waves Saying? Ian and Daphne Mackley Collection, digital image by David Elsbury 46 1.3 ‘He sleeps! he sleeps!’. Slide 6 from Dan Dabberton’s Dream (York and Son, Bridgewater, c. 1887). From the illuminago collection, by kind permission of Ludwig Vogl-Bienek 81 1.4 ‘On one of the beds lies the body of a middle-aged Woman’. Slide 16 from Dan Dabberton’s Dream (York and Son, Bridgewater, c. 1887). From the illuminago collection, by kind permission of Ludwig Vogl-Bienek 82 1.5 ‘Spectre Drama at the Polytechnic Institution’, Illustrated London News 42, 2 May 1863, p. 486. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland 87 66315_Williams.indd315_Williams.indd iixx 009/03/209/03/20 11:59:59 PPMM FIGURES 2.1 ‘Horses, gallop; thoroughbred bay mare; Annie G’. Plate 626 from Edweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion (1872–85). Science Museum/Science and Society Picture Library (no. 10667598) 110 2.2 ‘Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope, 1880’. Science Museum/Science and Society Picture Library (no. 10318976) 111 2.3 ‘Homme vêtu de noir avec des points blancs et des bandes blanches pour l’analyse chronophotographique de la locomotion’. Bibliothèque nationale de France 116 2.4 ‘Analyse chronophotographique de la marche’. Bibliothèque nationale de France 116 2.5 ‘Lucien Bull with his high-speed camera, Paris, 1904’. Science Museum/Science and Society Picture Library (no. 10306330) 119 2.6 Still from F. W. Murnau (dir.), Der letzte Mann (1924). Courtesy of BFI National Archive, reproduced by kind permission of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Stiftung, Wiesbaden, Germany 129 3.1 ‘A Section of the Rotunda, Leicester Square, in Which Is Exhibited the Panorama’, in Robert Mitchell, Plans and Views in Perspective, With Descriptions of Buildings Erected in England and Scotland (London: Printed at the Oriental Press, by Wilson & Co. for the author, 1801). Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland 180 3.2 Poster for ‘Chas W. Poole’s New Myriorama and Trips Abroad’. © The British Library Board c01517-01 Evan.2475 194 3.3 Screengrab from Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon, Trade Procession at Opening of Cork Exhibition (1902). Reproduced by kind permission of the BFI 219 3.4 Still from Walther Ruttmann (dir.), Berlin: Sinfonie einer Großstadt (1927). Courtesy of BFI National Archive, reproduced by kind permission of Eva Riehl 225 x 66315_Williams.indd315_Williams.indd x 009/03/209/03/20 11:59:59 PPMM INTRODUCTION The way things are, it would seem as if cinema was fi fty years behind the novel. André Bazin in 19611 Joycean ‘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 pos- sible, a multiple exposure on a cinema fi lm which would give a clear foreground with a background visible but somewhat blurred and out of focus in varying degrees.2 Woolsey not only compared Ulysses’ ‘screening’ of consciousness to moving multiple exposures on fi lm, but also invoked an optical toy – the kaleidoscope – 1 66315_Williams.indd315_Williams.indd 1 009/03/209/03/20 11:59:59 PPMM JAMES JOYCE AND CINEMATICITY a predecessor to fi lm’s dynamically protean imagery. Following Soviet direc- tor Sergei M. Eisenstein’s view in the early 1930s,3 André Bazin equated Joyce with the future of cinema, by arguing that he achieved ‘ultracinematographic’ things on the page which fi lm 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.