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Silent Films, Hollywood Genres, and William Faulkner

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Silent Films, Hollywood Genres, and William Faulkner SILENT FILMS, HOLLYWOOD GENRES, AND WILLIAM FAULKNER -Somdatta Mandal Much of the research concerning William Faulkner’s relationship to film focuses on the writer’s experience as a scriptwriter during the 1930s and 1940s, perhaps assuming that Faulkner’s serious interest in film began only with his arrival in Hollywood in 1932. But as Jeffrey J. Folks1 has pointed out, silent film had comprised a significant part of available popular entertainment in Oxford during Faulkner’s youth and according to Murray Falkner, Faulkner is said to have attended silent films regularly, as often as twice a week. John Faulkner says that after movies came to Oxford, which would have been about 1913, he and ‘Bill’ went every Friday - and would have gone oftener had they been allowed to.2 Though it is not possible to determine exactly what films Faulkner might have seen in the first years of film showings, the standard features certainly consisted, to a large extent of Westerns, melodramas and comedies. One may assume that among performers featured were Mary Pickford, Lilian Gish, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon and Fatty Arbuckle. The many Westerns that Murray Falkner recalled having seen with his brother William, may well have featured Tom Mix, William S. Hart, and Broncho Billy (G.M.Anderson) as well as many lesser known performers. Faulkner seems to have had the normal introduction to this aspect of American culture, though as an adult he may have had less contact with it. As mentioned earlier, Faulkner’s extensive knowledge of the silent film is evident from the many references to it in his fiction. As D. M. Murray3 informs us, certain conventions of visual humor found in the Southwestern tradition were carried on, with distinct stylization and acceleration, in the arts of the silent film comedy and the animated cartoon, arts that were being developed during the time that Faulkner was writing some of his greatest humorous stories. The way Faulkner uses these conventions often seems to have more affinity with the films than with literary antecedents. Though there is no evidence that the novelist was consciously influenced by comic films, or that, conversely, his farcical humor influenced them, but “recognition of the similarities between his humor and that of Sennett and Disney should add another dimension to our appreciation of his great art. His early novels contain some shrewd criticism, much of it centering on the story treatments of contemporary film. In Mosquitoes Jenny makes a wry comment that likens the rich, idle passengers of the Nausikaa to the characters in a film: “This is kind of funny, ain’t it? They are not going anywhere, and they don’t do anything….. kind of like a movie or something.”4 This comment indicates Faulkner’s awareness of film as a narrative medium, but also reveals his consistent practice of comparing film to literary methods and standards. This practice of examining film for narrative structures did, in fact, leave its mark on his fiction. Also, the distinctive characteristics of several individuals in Mosquitoes almost certainly derive from particular traits popularized by film comics. In fact, the very mode of comedy that Faulkner attempts in his second novel owes much to the structure of silent film, as Jenny suggested in the above comment. Even the character or Popeye, in Sanctuary, antedates the appearance of that comic-strip personage in Max Fleisher’s animated cartoon. Sanctuary is not only Hollywood material in its cinematographic technique and in its contents - that mixture of lurid sex and hopped-up physical violence that has always been the staple of the Hollywood film ever since the days of the nickelodeon – but in its very mode of expression: melodramatic, typological, hyperbolic, a bold and brilliant way in which both formula and abstraction were depicted. These elements, of course, not only constitute the mode of expression of the basic Hollywood genre film – the gangster, the Western, the thriller – but they also appear in many forms of popular art and entertainment, all of which the contemporary American Gothic has adopted and transformed in developing its own special world view; for instance, the comic strip (Miss Lonelyhearts, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest), the vaudeville revue ( Malcolm, Catch 22), and the pulp novel ( A Cool Million). During the early and middle twenties, Faulkner frequently spoke of his characters and of himself as “the little man” or “the tramp,” a reference to the persona made famous in Chaplin’s films. In Mosquitoes, the aesthetic discussion criticizes art which is “too engrossed in trying to create great living characters….and overlooked the possibilities of the little man.”5 Earlier, in “Out of Nazareth,” Faulkner had used the word “tramp” to refer to his character David, a young vagabond whom Faulkner and Spratling admire.6 Furthermore, Dorothy Oldham recalls that, predicting his future success, Faulkner told her around 1920: “Who knows, someday you may see a headline in the newspapers, ‘Tramp Becomes Famous.’”7 Faulkner also referred to himself as a “tramp” in the semi- autobiographical essay “Mississippi,” which he wrote in the early fifties, describing “the young man’s attitude of mind” in April 1917 as adopting “the avocation he was coming more and more to know would be forever his true one: to be a tramp, a harmless possessionless vagabond.”8 In Mosquitoes, Pete seems also to refer to Buster Keaton. He wears a stiff straw hat with which he refuses to part. Julius and Fairchild remark the appropriateness of the hat to Pete’s face. Fairchild says: Pete has a kind of humorless reckless face that a stiff straw hat just suits. A man with a humorless face should never wear a stiff straw hat. But then, only a humorless man would dare buy one.”9 Likewise, Buster Keaton wore a stiff straw hat as a mark of identification in his films, and Keaton’s humorless, nearly expressionless attitude earned him the name “the Great Stone Face.” The word ‘reckless’ could also be identified with Keaton’s acting, as the numerous injuries he suffered in performing would attest to. A critic, D. M. Murray, finds that some of Faulkner’s works like “Spotted Horses” (1931) and other narrative material used in The Hamlet (1940); “Mule in the Yard” (1934) “Was,” in Go Down Moses (1942); and “Shingles For the Lord”(1943)-- the years of their composition ranging between 1926 and 1943--coincide with the golden age of the silent comedies - the Keystone Kops, Charlie Chaplin, as well as the most productive years of Disney humor.10 In The Hamlet, for instance, the scene where Ratliff, pants-less and sock in hand, suddenly finds a great banjo-faced horse in his bedroom, jumps out of the window, runs around the house and in through the front door again, reminds the reader instantly of a common comic episode in silent film comedy. Faulkner’s depiction of female characters often conformed to film stereotypes too. The presentation of antithetical women in film has, in fact, been examined by critics who note the tendency to stereotype women by setting the roles of all-American girl and mother against the femme fatale, vamp, and prostitute. Unlike the male actor who retained a creditable position as the kind-hearted, ordinary Joe, women were typed as entirely virginal and pure-hearted or immensely evil and corrupt. The public’s adulation of Mary Pickford in the role of ingenué (“the all-American golden girl,”) alongside the simultaneous popularity of Theda Bara’s vamp in A Fool There Was and Camille in the mid-teens attests to this cultural polarization in the presentation of women in film. The mother figure, who exemplified self-sacrifice, rectitude, and authority, was also widely popular. A survey of film history shows that in spite of such polar roles of women, a growing cultural change was also emerging. The drama of a mother deserting a family was not unheard of, too. The artistic tension resulting from such cultural ambivalence towards women comprises an interesting element in the depiction of women in Faulkner’s fiction. It is the underlying cultural motif behind the drama, often the melodrama, of several of his major novels. While no specific silent film “source” can be assigned as the “influence,” the significance of early films in defining the dramatic situation of women seems incontestable, since it could scarcely have arisen from the highly traditional culture of provincial Mississippi. Similar to the attitude towards women in the early films, Faulkner’s portrayal is neither traditional nor radically modern. Rather, it is dramatic. Women in traditional roles -- Miss Jenny in Sartoris, Rosa Millard in The Unvanquished, Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury inspire respect and warmth, yet they act primarily as observers of the emerging future, into which they are incapable of projecting their stable sense of order and value. Faulkner’s modern heroines, like Caddy Compson in The Sound and the Fury, also inspire admiration and warmth, yet they are equally doomed by motion and time. Even in the small Southern town of Charlestown, Georgia, the locale for the novel, Soldier’s Pay, one community member after another is unmasked as flapper, social climber, gossip or lecher. In the novel The Wild Palms, Faulkner even makes a direct reference to Joan Crawford (who had starred in Today We Live). Apart from prominent film stars becoming the personae of Faulkner’s writing, more general cinematic conventions of plot and action were accepted and repeated. The episodic plots of his novels can easily be modified to fit the screen; his boldly drawn central characters are generally caught in an emotional crisis with which filmgoers can readily identify; and his stories are, more often than not, melodramatic enough to grip a movie audience’s attention.
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