A Faulkner Double Feature

TheCanadian Review of American Studies, Volume 11,No. 1, Spring 1980 AFaulknerDouble Feature 0. S. Mitchell Regina K. Fadiman. Faulkner's "Intruder in the Dust": Novel into Film. Knoxville: The Universityof Tennessee Press, 1978. 329 + xiv pp. Bruce F. Kawin. Faulkner and Film. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1977. 194 +xni pp. Writers and moviemakers have had a longstanding mutual interdependence (and suspicion). Moviemakers have always looked to literature for material, and writers have looked to the movie industry for money and new challenges . Their collaborative efforts have proved endlessly fascinating, particulary in two areas. The first is the writer's experiences in working for both the print and the film media, the effect of his novel writing on his film writing and vice versa. The second is the relationship, in a broad aesthetic context, between fiction and film and more specifkally the process through which word, character, action, theme and structure are translated from one form to another. The similarities and dissimilarities between a novel and its film adaptation can be extremely helpful in discovering the mtrinsic characteristics of each medium-each form can act as an effective vantage point from which to explore the other. Bruce Kawin's Faulkner and Film deals mainly with the first of these areas in an examination of Faulkner's career as a screenwriter. Regina Fadiman's Faulkner's "Intruder m the Dust": Novel into Film addresses itself to the second. Hers is a close examination of Faulkner's novel, Ben Maddow's screenplay (which forms the second part of the book) and Clarence Brown's film adaptation. Kawin's book is rich in interesting factual material on Faulkner's connections with film. It covers adaptations of his novels and short stories, his screenplays (particularly his work with Howard Hawks), and his influence 110 0. S. Mitchell on such filmmakers as Resnais and Godard. The annotated Faulkner filmography at the end of the study is particularly useful. The book, however, is very superficial although Kawin does cover a lot of ground. He had access to a great deal of potentially rich research material, but he appears to have lacked either the time or the scholarly thoroughness and imagination to use this material as the basis for a rigorous exploration of the points he raises. Not enough time was spent substantiating and exploring in depth his general points on montage, and too much time on the endless plot summaries of the novels, adaptations, screenplays and films. In his opening chapter, "Faulkner, Hawks, and Montage," Kawin says, this is not simply a study of Faulkner's career as a screenwriter. Rather it is an attempt to explore the interactions between literature and film, using Faulkner as a test case-not only because he worked in both media ... but also because he is the most cinematic of novelists. Such techniques as montage, freeze-frame, slow motion, and visual metaphor abound in his fiction. Moreover, he is a novelist read by filmmakers from Howard Hav,l'i to Jean-Luc Godard ... one who is demonstrably an influence on the resurgence of personal, experimental film in France in the late 1950s (the New Wave), and who therefore ha~ an important place in film history. It is even arguable that Faulkner picked up these techniques from film itself, or from writers who were, as Gertrude Stein put it, "domg what the cinema was doing." (pp. 4-5) One of the major points Kawin attempts to develop is that Faulkner's use of montage makes him the most "cinematic of novelists" (he does not pursue Faulkner's use of"freeze-frame, slow motion, and visual metaphor"). The next seven pages of this chapter give a cursory summary of "how the writers and filmmakers of the 1920s used and thought about montage" (p. 6) and their probable influence on Faulkner. The last two pages point out Hawks' and Faulkner's diametrically opposed approaches to montage -that is, Faulkner uses it continually in his fiction, and Hawks rigorously avoids it in his films. Kawin concludes that, paradoxically, "Faulkner's novels are cinematic, and his screenplays are novelistic" (p. 13). Kawin broaches some interesting points here. His assumption, however, that montage is...