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

Keith Williams's H.G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies, like Laura Marcus's recent The Tenth Muse: Writing on Cinema During the Modernist Period (2008), is comprised of studies of several conceptually discrete relationships between writing and cinema. The first chapter looks at cinema and Wells's writing as twin children of the late-Victorian cultural milieu, arguing that the optical bent of the science-fictional scenarios of his earliest works played out debates that would later be focused on cinema. The second and third chapters show how works produced after the arrival of cinema—The Invisible Man (1897) and When the Sleeper Wakes (1899)—both continued the tradition of "optical speculations" and bore the discernible impact of cinema itself. Even in these two chapters, however, Williams is already beginning to move on to a study of adaptation, encompassing James Whale's The Invisible Man (1933) and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) as, respectively, direct and indirect adaptations of these two novels. The fourth chapter exhaustively examines Wells's own writings on film and his involvement with film production, from the discussion of cinema's capacities in his introduction to his film-script and novel The King Who Was a King (1929) to his screenwriting work for two landmarks in British science-fiction film, Things to Come (1936) and The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1937), both self-adaptations. The last chapter examines a wide range of direct adaptations of Wells's works, up to Spielberg's War of the Worlds (2005), and surveys Wellsian themes across a number of science-fiction traditions in both film and television.

The "and" of the title denotes Wells's status as "a principal pioneer of the media-determined parameters of modern subjectivity" (1). The idea that cinema was latent in late-Victorian culture before it was even invented is useful for Williams in that it allows him to resurrect the idea of Wells's prescience as the argument that Wells was merely working out, more expertly than others, the consequences of this latency. When cinema emerged, Wells could easily envision its much later self, as in the media mass-manipulation of When the Sleeper Wakes that was, arguably, not achieved in reality until midway through the First World War. The cinematicity of Wells's works follows from such factors as the vernacular relativity theory that was circulated even before Albert Einstein formalised it in 1905, and the segmenting of time by the ascendency of time-oriented labour over work-oriented labour in the factory.

Yet Williams's work is, alongside a range of conceptual problems, hampered by his tendency to concentrate on the notion that cinema was anticipated before it was invented, and to ignore the flipside of this notion as it is currently emphasised in studies of early cinema: the thesis that the technology of cinema continued cultural traditions that were alien to the media institution that it became only fifteen years after its birth. In these "forgotten futures" cinema was to become, for example, a supplement to the range of apparatuses employed in stage illusionism, a way of enhancing the audience capacities of penny-in-the-slot vending and of examining streams of sense data without having to rely on human mediation, and an educator of ergonomics. Instead Williams regards Wells as possessing insight into futures that were, at the time, alien. Thus in the first and third chapters, the "cinematic" versions of vision experienced by characters in some of Wells's early works posit cinema, ahistorically, as possessing a future as an art form and as a medium. Only in the second chapter does he examine one of these forgotten futures, looking at the "photography of the invisible" of which cinema was perceived...