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This essay examines how Joyce’s 1922 novel extends the classical principle of ekphrasis – verbal imitation of visual representations – into the age of moving images. In turn, it considers in what ways this literary ‘cinematicity ’ is engaged with in the film adaptations of Ulysses. More broadly, cinematicity has come to denote the tendency in late Victorian culture to conceptualise and represent the world in terms of moving, photographic images which culminated in the Lumières’ cinematograph apparatus in 1895. Recent studies suggest, moreover, that such movement was emergent in many forms of representation and that this would have profound effects on literature.1 Joyce’s method was thus not solely a response to the cinematograph. It was imaginatively nourished through the connective tissue of an already sophisticated ‘moving image’ and projection culture in its diverse forms. This comprised, among other things, Victorian optical toys, the magic lantern and shadowgraphy, rapid photographic studies and peepshows based on Edison’s kinetoscope. Many of these influenced, overlapped and co-existed with cinema for some time. Virtually all of their visual attractions and anatomisations of phenomena are referenced in Joyce’s writing.2 Their effects are also imitated, or even elaborated, in his pages, with an ekphrastic cinematicity surpassing other modernists. With the publication of Ulysses, the intermediality of Joyce’s style with evolving cinematic techniques and narrative procedures was so synergetically innovative and pervasive as to attract enthusiastic attention from avant-garde filmmakers. Most famously, in the late 1920s Soviet montagist Sergei Eisenstein became convinced that the ‘stretch of tension’ (to borrow Dennis Potter’s phrase)3 between words and images in Ulysses’ interior monologues might serve as a template for creative use of the newly perfected soundtrack.4 By this time mainstream and especially Hollywood features had largely moved from a self-consciously exploratory 158 11. Odysseys of Sound and Image ‘Cinematicity’ and the Ulysses Adaptations KEITH WILLIAMS ‘cinema of attractions’ (in Tom Gunning’s terms)5 to one of ‘narrative integration’, which appeared to present a diegetic reality unmediated, as if it were indeed narrating itself, through seamless ‘continuity editing’ and storytelling drive. Alternatively, following the Joycean lead, as Eisenstein urged most famously in his essay ‘A Course in Treatment’ (1932), would help filmmakers evade the further constraints of naturalistic dialogue imposed by the soundtrack, which now threatened to return film to outdated theatrical unities. Joyce’s example would thus preserve film’s modernistic spatio-temporal dynamism through a-synchronous relations between sound and picture, based on the creative differential between diegetic present and the multivalent tenses and moods of subjective consciousness , especially in involuntary memory, thus allowing filmmakers to present ‘the whole course of thought’.6 Eisenstein believed Joyce anticipated the properly creative combination of images and soundtrack: ‘What wonderful sketches those montage lists were!’ They included ‘polyphonic ’ visual and aural effects, ‘synchronized or non-synchronized’. Their apparent disjunctiveness was justified by movement from the rational to the unconscious, often foregoing syntax solely for nouns or verbs. They alternated between direct intelligibility and apparently adventitious detail: ‘With zigzags of aimless shapes, whirling along.’7 The effect was of continuous and reciprocal interaction between the empirical present and the characters’ introspections and inner conflicts: ‘The syntax of inner speech as distinct from outer speech. The quivering inner words that correspond with visual images.’8 This led Eisenstein to conclude that the sound film’s ‘true’ material was not dialogue, but monologue in this specifically Joycean sense.9 From 1928, Eisenstein frequently referred to Ulysses ‘as a particularly suitable basis for training visual consciousness’, as Marie M. Seton puts it, in articles and in lectures , especially those delivered at the London Film Society, in November 1929, and at Cambridge in December.10 He returned to the same theme at the Moscow Film School, an important forum for his ideas, established in 1931.11 In the autumn of 1934, students under his tutelage at the State Institute of Cinematography ‘translated’ parts of Ulysses, breaking them down ‘into a rough shooting script’, an exercise already conducted on his own copy, by means of marginal notes.12 It was doubtful, given the opposition building against modernism under Stalinist cultural policy (which would eventually subject Ulysses to a notorious literary ‘show trial’ justifying socialist realism at the 1934 Soviet Writers’ Union Congress), that Eisenstein would have got Russian state backing to film Joyce’s novel. Similarly, he experienced an object lesson that showed there was scarcely more room for his plans in Hollywood ’s commercial system...

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