H.G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies (review)

H.G. Wells may be the most neglected major writer of the twentieth century among academic critics. Keith Williams sets out to make a case for his importance by studying the numerous ways he anticipated, inspired, and reflected on the movies, one of the century’s defining modes of expression. Williams takes Wells seriously: as a thinker who understood the social significance of the new technology of film; as a writer whose prose itself invented cinematic devices such as frame, juxtaposition, and point of view; as a storyteller whose fantastic narratives explored issues and situations that would concern film; and finally as a prophet who foresaw the political and economic possibilities and dangers of the moving image. The ambitious book gives us a new perspective on Wells in which movies constitute a central interest and a developing technology which Wells, in works of many forms, repeatedly investigated and encouraged.

Williams argues that Wells’ description of time travel in 1895 invented cinematic illusion before cinema had been truly invented, “While voyaging, the Time Traveler, like a filmgoer, is paradoxically static, invisible, sitting in the dark, watching things happening outside his own time but proximate in space” (25). He tells how R. W. Paul, the “most important film–maker in Britain” in the last years of the nineteenth century (28), was inspired by The Time Machine to invent an exhibit in which the spectator, seated in a chair that pitched and yawed, watched a film that gave the illusion of traveling in time. Many of early film’s most striking techniques, such as speeded up pictures or time-lapse photography, are anticipated in the Time Traveler’s journey. The first chapter goes on to show how Wells’ short stories describe visual anomalies that film would soon learn to display.

Throughout early Wells, Williams finds him thinking about the voyeuristic situation of people being mysteriously seen without their knowledge. He is particularly interested in The Invisible Man (1898), in which “Wells both came closest to the editorial basis of film narrative and, in turn, created one of his most intriguing commentaries on, and opportunities for, cinema itself” (49). He interprets James Whale’s film realization of the novel, in which Griffin’s presence is made evident only by his garments and his effects and in which the actor (Claude Raines) is never actually seen until the final shots, an “assault on the concept of ‘objective’ social identity” (49). The novel’s theme of surveillance has its analogue in the situation of the film viewer; Griffin is terrifying in large part because he can know and see when his subject is not even aware of his presence. Williams also studies the implications of the changes Whale made in Wells’ tale, making Griffin a more sympathetic character, “no longer a sociopathic genius with a grudge, but an Everyman, punished for breaking traditional injunctions against forbidden knowledge” (66). Finally, he links Whale’s film allegorically with the rise of dictators in Europe, the Nazi Terror that would just begin, and the fascist style of Mussolini’s voice and gestures.

The third chapter focuses on Wells’ anticipation of the modern city and the political implications of its technology. Williams studies When the Sleeper Wakes (1901) as a rendering in prose of a movie camera’s perspective. He is excellent on the cinematic quality of Wells’ prose in this novel, especially the crowd scenes, pointing to the shifts of view, the rapid cutting, the close-ups and long shots, the patterns of movement. He goes on to consider how cinema and television are used in this dystopia to monitor and instruct a mob. He points out how other important early futuristic films build on Wells’ novel and considers in detail Fritz Lang’s debt to Wells in Metropolis (1926).

The final two chapters discuss Wells’ own film scripts—The King Who Was a King, Things to Come, and The Man Who Could Work Miracles—and what later film owes to Wells. Here Williams becomes more conventional, discussing themes, recounting...