Roll Away the Reel World: James Joyce and Cinema

2. Dedalus Among the Film Folk

The following article is based on my research for the exhibition entitled James Joyce, Trieste and Cinema: A History of Possible Worlds, held at the Palazzo Costanzi, Trieste, in January and February 2009, which was one of a series of events commemorating the centenary of Joyce and the cinema Volta during the 2009 Alpe Adria Trieste Film Festival. The purpose of the research was to explore and document the Triestine backgrounds to the Volta venture, both with respect to the history of cinema in Trieste from its origins in 1896 until the First World War and in terms of providing a more complete and accurate profile of Joyce’s partners and collaborators in this venture, the local Triestine ‘film folk’ Giuseppe Caris, Giovanni Rebez, Antonio Machnich and Lorenzo Novak. As is so often the case in Joyce biography, our knowledge of the Cinema Volta is largely based on Richard Ellmann’s account in his celebrated biography (JJ, 300ff), which relied for the most part on interviews conducted by Ellmann with Joyce’s brother, Stanislaus, in 1953, and thus on the selective memory of someone recalling the events of nearly fortyfive years before, further coloured by a number of personal biases. While much new information and research regarding the Volta in Dublin has appeared in recent years, the Triestine side of the story largely remained in need of revision. The research was thus an attempt to set the record straight regarding Joyce’s partners and collaborators in the Volta, who, in this writer’s view, have often received short shrift and even disparaging treatment at the hands of some of Joyce’s biographers, and to see what further light, if any, could be cast on this episode in Joyce’s life, curious as it is fascinating, which over the years has assumed almost legendary status among Joyce and film scholars alike. The research lasted about a year and was based mostly on local Triestine archival material (especially in the vast collections of the Trieste State Archives, hereinafter cited as AST), with significant contributions by living descendants of Joyce’s partners, 2. Dedalus Among the Film Folk Joyce and the Cinema Volta ERIK SCHNEIDER 28 who responded generously with information and documentary materials, including the first known images of two of the partners, Giovanni Rebez and Antonio Machnich. Origins of cinema in Trieste1 The first cinematographic showings in Trieste took place in the foyer of the Teatro Fenice in July–August 1896, just a few months after the Lumière brothers had first presented their invention at the Salon Indien in Paris. The ‘animated pictures’ enjoyed immediate success and the coming years would see a rapid expansion of this new medium in Trieste, first with numerous temporary and itinerant cinemas, and then with an ever-increasing number of permanent cinemas beginning in July 1905. By 1909, Trieste counted no less than twenty-one cinemas, with dozens of new films being shown every week. It is beyond the scope of this article to analyse this phenomenon and its rapid development in Trieste, but we can cite as contributing factors Trieste’s entrepreneurial spirit, a solid, burgeoning middle class attentive to technical innovation together with an enormous underclass in search of cheap diversion and, in a city of the uprooted and displaced, of the collective moment, or what Henry James once called the ‘momentary gregarious emphasis’.2 But these were also the years of Svevo’s Senilità (1898), of Viennese modernism and the so-called Dedalus Among the Film Folk 29 Fig. 2.1. The ‘cine music hall mondial’ in via dell’Istria, Trieste c. 1908 (Courtesy Trieste Joyce Museum). Central European crisis, which would produce phenomena as varied and significant as Schoenberg and Klimt, Kafka and Rilke, Musil and psychoanalysis . In a city like Trieste, divided or fragmented along virtually all cultural, religious, linguistic and political lines, the breakdown and conflation of cultures and ideologies was already a reality. One can hypothesise cinema and the compelling ‘optic urge’ which accompanied it as both agent and symptom of that deconstruction of Self, reality and representation that would soon be theorised in futurist manifestos, and find expression in all areas of the visual, literary and performance arts. The Partners Vincenzo (Giuseppe) Caris (1872–1945) Giuseppe Caris (who despite his given name always signed himself and was referred to as Giuseppe) was born in Monfalcone, a small town on the coast near Trieste, on...