Roll Away the Reel World

ONE WOULD BE forgiven for feeling that the famous image of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses has 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 Wake carries 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 Dead in 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 James Joyce Centre Irish Times

IT has often been noted that James Joyce s only significant return to Dublin after he left it for good was in 1909 when he attempted to run a Volta cinema there as a kind of by product of the astonishingly prolific film showing world in Trieste where Joyce was living at the time there were twenty one cinemas in Trieste by 1909 only fourteen years after the Lumi res? start of the industry . Joyce s hope was that he could establish a happy arrangement whereby he could return to Dublin for two months every summer for a kind of paid vacation escaping the Italian damn silly sun that turns men into butter. The venture had foundered by April 1910 leaving Joyce feeling embittered and impoverished neither a rare condition in him and determined never to return to Ireland. But of course it casts a different light on Joyce s grand artistic self imposed exile; if the Volta enterprise had worked out he would have cheerfully returned to Dublin every year or at least that was the plan. This intriguing episode and Joyce s general relations with cinematic matters in his writing have their ideal chronicler in the editor here John McCourt who is the principal authority on Joyce in Trieste on the basis of his greatly admired 2000 book The Years of Bloom: Joyce in Trieste 1904 1920. This new book takes its Wake derived title from a conference which was one of a series of anniversary events in Trieste in 2009 including an exhibition about cinema there in Joyce s time curated by Eric Schneider who has a chapter in the book on Joyce s collaborators on the Volta project and a film retrospective mounted by the admirable Elisabetta d Erme featuring several of the short films shown in Dublin by Joyce. Of course many of them have not survived: this book ends with a Volta Filmography by Luke McKernan a list of all the films shown at the Volta between December 1909 and mid April 1910. The fetching title had already proved too good to resist in Austin Briggs s essay on Circe and Cinema in the 1989 Beja Benstock essay collection. McCourt s riveting and well conceived book is made up of three sections; the first after the editor s lively and elegant introduction is made up of two short essays by Schneider on Joyce s collaborators following McKernan s account of the project s history. The second section has six essays on the most crucial and interesting matter the reflection of cinematic techniques and themes in Joyce s writings linked to McKernan s wondering whether he would have been drawn by subject matter or technique. One answer to this is given by Louis Armand in his essay on Jean Luc Godard the first of the four pieces in the third section which deals with ways that modern film makers have drawn on Joyce. Armand suggests it is both subject matter and technique: that Joyce and Godard are the two major inventors of the modern vernacular artistic creators who like Homer give us a world in a particular wholeness; a wholeness that exceeds the conventions of literature and cinema. It is striking and unsurprising that the texts of Joyce that are most discussed here include two of the chapters of Ulysses Circe and Wandering Rocks which are made most difficult by a shifting of consciousness something which is described aptly in terms of the cinematic. As a crude indication of their centrality drawn from the Index here Circe occurs on forty six pages and Wandering Rocks on eighteen. For comparison Finnegans Wake occurs on fourteen. Nausicaa is the next commonest subject with twelve largely because of Katherine Mullin s excellent essay on the cinematic nature of the chapter s Erotics. Cleo Hanaway s chapter on Nausicaa is also fascinating arguing that Ulysses is better read retrospectively in terms of Merleau Ponty s Phenomenology than in Benjaminian terms. Hanaway s argument that the chapter is a parody of voyeurism rather than the thing itself is intriguing if not wholly persuasive. Other readings of Ulysses here are equally compelling. Carla Marengo Vaglio examines Wandering Rocks in the light of Futurist Music Hall and Cinema both things for which Joyce had huge enthusiasm and in relation to Futurism s call that cinema should be a joyful deformation of the universe. Her description of the adventurous juxtaposition of genres and styles in Futurist cinema and music hall fits perfectly Joyce s chapter s representation of the two complementary poles of the abstract and the concrete. She takes as an example Leopoldo Fregoli the quick change artist whose changes of dress and appearance were an end in themselves rather than part of a narrative and he is the central parallel in the following totally convincing chapter by Marco Camerani on Circe s Costume Changes. The most immediately accessible chapters are comparisons of cinematic versions of Joyce texts: Kevin Barry s consideration of the two versions of The Dead by Rossellini in 1953 as Voyage in Italy and by John Huston under the story s own name in 1987; and Keith Williams s exploration of the two major films based on Ulysses: again one under its own title by Joseph Strick in 1967 and Sean Walsh s ambitious and lurid film Bloom in 2003. The most compelling possibility Sergei Eisenstein s repeated declaration of his wish to use Joyce s experimental novel as the perfect text for a film maker anxious to resist the backward drag into naturalism threatened by the emergence of the soundtrack sadly remained only a possibility perhaps because of the impossibility of Soviet state backing for such an effete venture. Barry concludes that Rossellini s film which left the debt to The Dead unacknowledged wrestled the story back to Italy where it was written in the first place while Huston s great black and white film was an eastern western one of Huston s own stories of male failure and social unease: a brilliant suggestion. What this book demonstrates most illuminatingly is that criticism has often been looking in the wrong place in trying to locate the modernism of Ulysses in particular. We are reminded of Beckett s observation about Finnegans Wake that it is not about something: it is that thing itself. The form that the most technically challenging sections of Ulysses take is better seen in the context of cinematic futurism than in the history of the realist novel: it is not possible to extricate in McKernan s terms the matter of Circe from its technique. This book will remain an indispensible reminder of that fact: a major contribution to the understanding of Joyce. ~Bernard O Donoghue Notes and Queries

In the early 2000s Cork University Press launched a series of small books in collaboration with the Irish Film Institute to explore Irish films defined as movies made in or about Ireland. This volume on Joyce and cinema is an ambitious echo of that project although its immediate impetus was actually a conference held in Trieste Italy in January 2009 in connection with the Annual Trieste Film Festival. Indeed as John McCourt s Introduction explains Joyce s interest in film is grounded historically in a connection between Dublin and Trieste between Ireland and Italy. There was no exclusive movie theatre in Dublin when James Joyce and Nora Barnacle moved to Trieste in 1904. The popularity of film there later inspired the writer to launch an ill fated enterprise backed by Italian investors to open a movie house the Volta Theatre on Mary Street in Dublin. It is this biographical experience and its historical context that shapes the opening studies in Part I of this fascinating book. Part II turns to the varied influence of early cinema on Joyce s thematic interests and stylistic techniques. Part III focuses on cinematic adaptations of Joyce s fiction and on Joyce s influence on modern film makers. Taken together the essays in the volume offer a treasure trove of comprehensive research and sophisticated discussion on the important role of this aspect of popular culture in Joyce s history work and influence. The two essays that comprise Part I split the story of Joyce s Volta Theatre project with Luke McKernan describing its operation and programming in Dublin and Erik Schneider researching the Triestine impetus that prompted Joyce s Italian partners to support the project. This material is intriguing not only as background to an important moment in the Joyce biography but also for its vivid evocation of the nature of early twentieth century cinema in general. Part II offers six essays by Katherine Mullen Maria DiBattista Philip Sicker Carla Marengo Vaglio Marco Camerani and Cleo Hanaway. Mullen traces a series of early actualities ostensibly films of everyday life with moments of exposure of female ankles and legs of the kind that fascinate Bloom on Sandymount Strand and elsewhere in Ulysses. In contrast to actualities DiBattista and Sicker look at early cinema s ability to present ghosts magic tricks illusions and other phantasmagoric effects particularly memorable in the films of Georges Me lie s. These cinematic transgressions of reality are reflective of the theatrical effects in the Circe episode. Camerani s essay also looks at Circe but specifically relates the costume changes in that episode to the shows of an Italian quick change artist named Leopoldo Fregoli whose name appears in Joyce s Circe note sheets. Carla Marengo Vaglia relates clownish and theatrical effects in Ulysses and particularly in Wandering Rocks to the music hall antics celebrated by Marinetti and other futurists. And in the last essay of Part II Cleo Hanaway returns to the voyeuristic penchant of the actualities discussed earlier but now examines the larger phenomenology of seeing and being seen through the philosophical lens of Merleau Ponty in three episodes: Nausicaa Circe and Wandering Rocks . Part III focused on films inspired by Joyce s work and on his influence on filmmakers consists of four essays by Louis Armand Kevin Barry Keith Williams and Jesse Meyers. John McCourt s Introduction does point out in a footnote 206 that not all of the film adaptations of Joyce s works are considered here with Joseph Strick s adaptation of Portrait and the brilliant Mary Ellen Bute s foray into Finnegans Wake notably omitted. In the first essay Louis Armand discusses the legendary film maker Sergei Eisenstein who visited Joyce in Paris in 1929 and referred to Joyce frequently in his subsequent writings. Yet Armand argues that it is not Eisenstein but rather Jean Luc Godard whose sophisticated understanding and use of montage may more faithfully have cited Joyce s inventions if not in direct allusion then nonetheless in his art. Kevin Berry turns to two other film directors Roberto Rossellini and John Huston to explore their very different ways of revisiting Joyce s The Dead in their films. Once again Joyce is repositioned in Italy by Rossellini s Voyage to Italy whose protagonists are named Mr and Mrs Joyce and in Ireland by Huston who became an Irish citizen before the end of his life and used Joyce s story to redress negative images of Ireland. Keith Williams offers a relatively straightforward comparison of the cinematic strategies used to address Joyce s literary experiments in the 1967 black and white film adaptation of Ulysses by Joseph Strick and the 2003 version in colour by Sean Walsh titled Bloom. In the end Williams considers Werner Nekes film Uliisses the most avant garde cinematic response to Joyce s Ulysses. The final essay by Jesse Meyers James Joyce Subliminal Screenwriter? offers a list of films with allusions to Joyce before focusing on Mel Brooks 1968 The Producers Sam Mendes 1999 American Beauty and Martin Scorsese s 2006 The Departed. Some references to Joyce and his work are explicit in these works the accountant Leo Bloom in The Producers for example while those in the Mendes and Scorsese films tend to be largely coded. But they nonetheless persuade Meyers that Joyce is the originating screenwriter in each of these films 185 . The book ends with an appendix and a bibliography that round out the valuable research and information this volume offers. Luke McKernan s Volta Filmography provides a list of the films that were shown at the Dublin Volta Theatre between December 1909 and April 1910 the period of Joyce s involvement with the management there. The listing includes the dates of available reviews of the films in the British trade paper The Bioscope as well as the archives where some of the films may be found. The bibliography offers a compendium of extant research on Joyce s relation to cinema and on early film in general. This caps the marvellous research and analysis that make this the most exciting work on Joyce and cinema to date. ~Margot Norris Irish Studies Review