Sentimental Modernity in Literature and Film

This fascinating and brilliantly conceived book locates the roots of classical Hollywood cinema in the “sentimental revolution in literature” in mid eighteenth-century Britain (xiv). Chandler shuttles across and between these contexts with quicksilver ease, displaying both deep learning and a light touch as he reassembles the links in the “chain of sentimental modernity” (143). The marquee players in his story are Frank Capra and Laurence Sterne, joined by a large and eclectic supporting cast, including Adam Smith, Friedrich Schiller, William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, D. W. Griffith, James Joyce, and Sergei Eisenstein. What is most distinctive and valuable about An Archaeology of Sympathy is the way it elucidates “the mutual possibilities opened up by the encounter” between film and literature, something Chandler interprets in productively formalist terms (xxi). His specific aims are twofold: on the one hand, he seeks to demonstrate how “literary sentimentalism shaped cinematic practice” (above all for Capra), thereby enriching our understanding of the “origins” of classical Hollywood cinema; on the other hand, and just as importantly, he intends for his analysis of the Capraesque to stimulate a “critical reframing” of this earlier literature, allowing us to read it in new ways (140). To this end, Chandler presents his study not as history but as archaeology: it begins with Capra, the great avatar of cinematic sentiment, in whose films he finds “clues for where to dig deeper” into the cultural past (xvii). Endlessly illuminating, this is first-rate scholarship by a critic in virtuosic command of his material.

In part 1, “The Capraesque,” after a sweeping look at Capra’s career and reception history, Chandler focuses on “three moments or phases of recursivity” (41), which, according to Chandler, is both “what makes Capra sentimental” and “what makes Capra” (62). The first has to do with his propensity for cinematic remaking. Chandler demonstrates that between 1928 and 1948, Capra “repeatedly and increasingly” fashioned each new film as “a return to one or more of his own prior achievements in cinema” (42). It Happened One Night (1934), for example, revisits the “Walls of Jericho” trope from Capra’s silent film The Strong Man (1926); Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) “remakes” Platinum Blonde (1931), and in turn is remade in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939); and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) is “a kind of recapitulation of Capra’s entire career to that point” (60). This “pattern of recapitulation, remaking, and self-allegorization” lends Capra’s work a “sense of reflexive coherence,” bolstering his efforts to establish himself as an early auteur, a director, as Capra himself put it in the title of his autobiography, with his “name above the title” (42).

As he self-consciously remade his own films, Chandler posits, Capra also grew more self-conscious about the medium of film itself. In treating this second phase of Capra’s recursivity, Chandler makes superb use of Jacques Aumont’s conception of the “ordinary face of cinema,” which Aumont characterizes as the “systematic exploration of camera angles and distances in relation to the looking and speaking face” that came to dominate Hollywood films of the twenties and thirties (43). Central to this cinema—and central to Chandler’s study of fictional representations of sympathy in general—is a concern with “sight lines,” the managing of eye-line matches, facial close-ups and face-to-face-exchanges, particularly through the use of shot/reverse shots. Capra, of course, did not invent these techniques, many of which were instituted by his predecessor D. W. Griffith. In fact, the Capraesque was not “a contribution to classical Hollywood style at all,” Chandler persuasively argues, but rather a “reflection or second-order thematization of it,” a “metastyle” (59) that was increasingly tuned to cinema as a “medium of sentiment.” Mr. Deeds is the pivotal film in this development, marking the moment when “recursive self-remaking turns into something pointedly associated with sentimental reflexivity” (100). Chandler elaborates this argument in a dazzling reading of the film...