LITERARY CRITICISM: Roll Away the Reel World: James Joyce and CinemaEdited by John McCourt Cork University Press
ONE WOULD BE forgiven for feeling that the famous image of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysseshas been rather overexposed on book covers, but there is a very valid and very obvious reason for placing it on the cover of a book devoted to Joyce's connection with the cinema. This volume is the product of a conference on the topic held in Trieste early last year. Trieste is of course a very appropriate place to host such a forum: it is likely that Joyce's own first experience of the cinema took place there, given the dearth of cinema in his native Dublin. Later, in 1909, Joyce was instrumental in bringing cinema to Ireland, opening and briefly managing what was possibly the first dedicated cinema in Dublin, the Volta.
It is fitting that Joyce should have been involved in the promotion of film in his life, for its relevance to his work could not be more clear. The Nighttown episode of Ulysses, though presented as a kind of drama, is obviously totally cinematic in its technique, with its quick dissolves from one scene to another, the absence of distinction between fantasy and reality, and the use of montage throughout, as has been noted long ago. And the first chapter of Finnegans Wakecarries the same procedure even further, an endlessly rippling, wave-like text that swoops above and goes close-up at will.
In this technique Joyce is developing a key aspect of modernism, which as a movement and a method is hugely influenced by cinematic techniques. Several of the essays in this volume explore this matter from different perspectives, some factual, others more theoretical. Carla Marengo Vaglio and Marco Camerani discuss the effect of "Futurist Music Hall" and early Italian cinema, respectively, on Joyce's writing. The book as a whole is a thorough charting of Joyce's cinematic connections, beginning with a highly informative account of the early programming of the Volta cinema venture by Luke McKernan and continuing with a detailed account (the most detailed yet) of the entire Volta by that fine researcher Erik Schneider.
One direction of research here is, as mentioned, the influence of the cinema on Joyce; another, equally interesting one, is the influence of Joyce on the cinema, particularly in adaptations of his own work. Oddly enough, an oeuvre that is so emphatically cinematic does not always lend itself very well to the screen: both adaptations of Ulysses, that by Joseph Strick ( Ulysses, 1967) and that by Sean Walsh ( Bloom, 2003), are problematic in different ways. In this volume Keith Williams, while recognising the difficulties both directors faced, and acknowledging their achievements, points up some paths not taken, such as Joyce's own references, in the text, to early forms of cinema, such as the Mutoscope, which might have given a useful link between book and screen.
The one Joyce adaptation, which, it is generally agreed, is an unqualified success is of course John Huston's The Dead(1987). This is a real masterwork, worthy of its mighty source. Kevin Barry, in this collection, performs a signal service by drawing attention to an earlier "version" of the story, Voyage in Italy(1953), directed by Roberto Rossellini. This film, which I have not seen, apparently takes many liberties with the text and in many ways transposes its terms into a different emotional register. Yet it remains tied to The Deadin more than just superficial ways. Barry also points up some of the particular slants that Huston himself put on his far more faithful adaptation. The essay testifies, as Barry says, to the ability of The Dead, as of any classic, perhaps, to be "transposable across cultures". Coming up to our own time, Louis Armand traces Joyce's considerable influence on a still-contemporary film-maker, Jean-Luc Godard.
This collection is a thorough, in-depth contribution to a topic that is often approached more sketchily, more theoretically, in the bad sense of the word. The only slight disappointment is the absence of a contribution from Elisabetta d'Erme, who knows (at least) as much about this topic as anyone else (she is acknowledged as "the principal architect of the entire event"). Its title, Roll Away the Reel World(of course from Finnegans Wake), includes a reference to "rolls" of film, which are unrolled as a film is shown. This book also unrolls the fascinating, complicated relations between its two subjects.
Terence Killeen is a director of the James Joyce Centre, Dublin, and the author of Ulysses Unbound: A Reader's Companion to Ulysses
