The Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism by Andrew Shail (review)

There has always been something distinctively “cinematic” about modernist fiction, but what exactly that something is has proven, more often than not, elusive. Despite strong recent works on cinema and modernism by Laura Marcus, David Trotter, and others, too many studies still rely on attempts to draw inexact connections between literary and filmic techniques, finding examples of “montage” or “close-ups” in fiction, for example.¹ Andrew Shail largely avoids this trap in his fascinating new study of film and high modernism, which brings a refreshing precision and an innovative focus to the juxtaposition of the cinema and the novel. Shail remains committed to cinema’s primary role in encouraging innovation in the modern novel, as opposed simply to being one manifestation of larger cultural shifts in understandings of time, space, and media. But his focus is on the larger institutions of cinema rather than on individual films. Shail uses the term “cinema’s image-regime” (34) to focus on larger trends in film content, production, distribution, and reception, particularly in the early 1910s. In so doing, he is not as concerned with individual moments of influence, with specific allusions on the part of the modernists to cinema. Rather, he takes for granted that, given the dominance of film as a cultural force in the teens and twenties, modernist writers would inevitably have been reacting to it. As he states, the book “tackles cinema as a popular experience rather than as a stylistic toolkit to be sampled and emulated” (3). Shail thus strives to show how “cinema exercised an extensive unconscious influence on modernist writing” (36), and, given the difficulty of that task, the connections between film and writing can occasionally get a bit lost. Shail’s comprehensive engagement with other critics and theorists also at times threatens to eclipse his own original approaches and arguments, but throughout, his ambitions, historical depth, and innovative readings of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Joseph Conrad make The Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism a vital contribution to the study of film and modernism.

Shail’s study is particularly useful in moving the moment of cinema’s influence back from the 1920s to the 1910s. While most previous works have looked at the mid-to-late twenties, which saw the founding of the journal Close-Up and Woolf’s publication of her essay “The Cinema,”² Shail concentrates on the transformation of film technique and exhibition from 1908-1911. Building from Tom Gunning’s work on the “cinema of attractions,” Shail reminds readers of how that period saw the development of the stylistic hallmarks of classical cinema—cross-cutting, match cuts, eyeline matches, and the like—that formed the “cinema of narrative integration” (41).³ But he also points to the way film first emerged as a distinct medium during the period. Before this, film was still often seen as a part of penny arcades or music-hall performances, with movies being presented alongside live theater or lectures. Only from 1908 to 1911 did the film-only exhibition become the dominant mode in which the public viewed them.

For Shail, this shift to the “cinema of narrative integration” instigated the later stylistic innovations of high modernism, as he traces in his most compelling and convincing chapter on Joyce and Woolf. He argues, fundamentally, that cinema and high modernism should be characterized not by fragmentation but by continuity. Thus in making the often-discussed comparison between “Wandering Rocks” and film techniques, Shail asserts that the real link between the two is cross-cutting rather than montage. Montage—a concept that postdates Ulysses—emphasizes conflict or disruption, while cross-cutting involves the establishment of temporal continuity across space. As Shail writes, D. W. Griffith’s cross-cutting is “a structure of alternation between multiple simultaneous streams of actions, in which time always passes in stream A while the narrative is showing stream B” (108). Unlike previous works by Edwin Porter, in which the narrative jumps...