Literature, Cinema and Politics, 1930-1945: Reading Between the Frames (review)

Enter the dream-house, brothers and sisters, leavingYour debts asleep, your history at the door:This is a home for heroes, and this lovingDarkness a fur you can afford.Fish in their tank electrically heatedNose without envy the glass wall: for themClerk, spy, nurse, killer, prince, the great and the defeated,Move in a mute day-dream.

So begins Cecil Day-Lewis's "Newsreel" (1938), a poem concerned—in both senses—with the mendaciously soporific power of cinema, the slow-dissolve of revolutionary potential into mediated torpor. But this rejectionist cynicism is atypical—literary engagement with the filmic defined interwar British writing. For here was a medium that embodied modernity both in its deceptive verisimilitude and in its potential to display effects not previously possible.

Lara Feigel's insightful Literature, Cinema and Politics takes six chapters to move, in a largely chronological order, over its modest focus of 1930-1945. The first chapter—on technique and the revolutionary potential of film—stretches the time-limit backwards and ranges through the useful suspects: Ruttmann, Vertov, Eisenstein, Charlie Chaplin. Its internationalism both shows the possibilities of cinematic techniques and introduces some of the films that inspired British writers; in charting these links Feigel's work emerges from the nexus of writing on cinema and 1920s modernism over the past few years, notably Laura Marcus's The Tenth Muse (2007) and Trotter in his Cinema And Modernism (2007).

In building on these foundations but applying her gaze to the 1930s Literature, Cinema and Politics works well. It is a careful and comprehensive book, which ranges from Mass Observation to haptic identification with characters, and it refuses prejudices or easy evaluative judgements. There are moments of lightness—such as the constellation of various bodily desires on screen: "the hearty working class appetite stodge is matched by a wholesome appetite for sex" (116)—but there is also much that is serious, such as her analysis of why literature nearly always engaged through time-lag with the films of a previous decade; and how photographs morphed into cinema for writers.

Indeed the boundary between the different kinds of images is a debateable zone, as Feigel herself writes: "cinematic documentary writing in the 1930s often bears more resemblance to serial photography than film" (89). Building on this observation, Literature, Cinema and Politics does not flinch from other awkward aspects that could disrupt the totemic significance of the filmic. For Feigel identifies Auden's mockery of ersatz totality in aerial views; and the mise-en-abyme problems of film and knowingness, typified in Stephen Spender's queasiness at a Berlin party at which he watches another Berlin party, with many of the same people, projected before him:

The camera passed through moving figures, surveying the room, occasionally pausing as if to examine someone's dress or figure. Boys and girls were lying on the ground embracing and then rolling away from one another to turn their faces towards the camera's lens. Willi lay stroking the head of a girl beside him. He turned, his face white in the light, and then kissed her, the shadow first, and then the head, covering the light on her lips. I heard Willi laugh beside me.

(132)

In this scene, as well as the vertigo-play of life as art, the cuts between shots move the viewer as well as the participants in and out of shadow. Here the juxtapositions unsettle, but in other works, and especially with the use of montage, this becomes explicitly political—particularly in literature that took up filmic techniques with alacrity. Major Operation (1936), James Barke's masterpiece of parallel lives in Glasgow (which should rank alongside Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz) typifies what can be done. Alongside John Sommerfield's May Day (1936) it shows the possibilities of a political artwork, one that uses the template given by city symphony films to animate the intermeshing of lives and power structures...