Film is a visual medium. This may be the most misleading maxim of cinema studies, a maxim that prioritizes the specifically cinematic element of film, the moving image. The aphorism falls short however, in overlooking everything cinema offers in addition to illumined pleasure, the things film can do for the mind that go beyond what it can do for the mind’s eye. Films are not simply photographs strung together in succession; they are not simply streams of visual stimulation. Film is a visual medium in form, that is, it communicates through primarily visual means. But, in content, film is storytelling. Films are stories, stories told through images. There is no visual aspect of film that doesn’t serve a narrative purpose. There is nothing in film that doesn’t signify in some thematic or expository fashion. Thus, film may indeed be a visual means of expression, but the object of that expression, is story. The object of film is something told.
If all films are indeed stories at heart, then literature may be one of cinema’s most natural allies. Film has drawn on literature from its inception. In fact, Shakespeare appeared on the silver screen in as early as 1899 with King John (British Mutoscope & Biograph Company). In the 1960s, film and literature professor Harry Geduld estimated that nearly forty percent of Hollywood films were literary adaptations. But literature is not merely the source material of cinema. And film is not merely literature through a lens. Both are storytellers in their own right. Both are aesthetically devoted to the revelation of plot and character. It is only natural therefore, to consider the interchange between both media, the way literature and film have been artistically intertwined. So many of literature’s most prominent figures have delved into the art filmmaking: F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Bernard Shaw, Norman Mailer, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Chandler, to name a few. But beyond the cheap thrill of celebrity, the author-film association points toward what can be most fruitful in examining the literature-film connection: the synergy of aesthetic cooperation, the way film can be literary, and literature, cinematic. If Birth of A Nation (David W. Griffith Corp, 1915) can be Dickensonian in its use of parallel editing, if Ulysses can be Eisensteinian in its use of montage, if The Maltese Falcon (Warner Bros. Pictures, 1941) can be Chandleresque in its use of narrative surprise, then the literature-film connection deserves protracted consideration.
At the center of this consideration stands William Faulkner, one of America’s greatest men of letters. Faulkner wrote extensively for Hollywood and most famously for Howard Hawks with productions like The Big Sleep (Warner Bros. Pictures, 1946) and To Have and Have Not (Warner Bros. Pictures, 1944). Ironically enough, Faulkner’s greatest contributions to screenplay structure had already been made before his move to California in 1932. Faulkner’s work as a screenwriter was emphatically conventional: linear, plot driven, cause and effect narratives that enticed audiences with the thrills of sex and violence. It was Faulkner’s literature that made the real waves, that helped revolutionize the screenplay and novel alike. Faulkner’s modernism, his subjective, fragmented prose ushered in an entirely new form of expression, a sort of kaleidoscope world that had begun with Joyce and his Portrait of the Artist. The Sound and the Fury, widely considered Faulkner’s magnum opus, sold poorly when it was first published in 1929, though it received considerable attention from the literary elite. Years later it would be remembered as a turning point in American literature, a touchstone for the medium. American film too would soon have its touchstone, a masterpiece of modernist proportions that would forever change the face of cinema. In 1941, Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz would piece together a fragmented, subjective narrative, a kaleidoscope world that ushered in an entirely new form of cinematic expression. In 1941 came Citizen Kane, (Mercury Productions, RKO Radio Pictures) and with it, the dawn of modern cinema.
To cite the influence of one artist’s work upon another’s is almost always an uphill battle. Artists don’t generally append bibliographies to their oeuvre, nor do they record their every encounter with world culture. The skeptic would have an easy time of debunking the Fury-Kane parallel, of demanding proof that Welles and Mankiewicz had indeed read the novel I have claimed they had in mind. I believe the Sound and the Fury to have been a signal influence on Citizen Kane. But I do not have proof of this influence, at least in the empirical sense of the word. I will endeavor to substantiate this influence nonetheless through specific references to both works and the striking similarities that exist between them. But first a word to the skeptics, even if I should fail to convince you of the Fury-Kane parallel insofar as it pertains to the novel of which I have made specific mention, do not dismiss the undeniable parallel between Faulkner’s modernism and Kane’s. The two are so overwhelmingly akin, that corroborative evidence becomes almost irrelevant. Whether or not Welles and Mankiewicz actually leafed through the saga of Compson despair, both were certainly acquainted with the kind of project Faulkner had undertaken, both would have been unable to escape or ignore the zeitgeist of their time. In short, Faulkner and Modernism: the winds of American culture were blowing so strongly that Welles and Mankiewicz could have heard nothing but subjectivity and fragmentation amid all the sound and fury.
Both The Sound and the Fury and Citizen Kane are organized around subjective narration; both worlds are created by the characters that move within them. What distinguishes these works from first person art of the past is the extent to which readers and audiences move within the characters themselves, rather than within the worlds those characters inhabit. There is something shockingly absorptive about Fury and Kane, a way in which we live and breathe through the protagonists. Both the novel and the film are uniquely telepathic; both are, in essence, projections of the mind. There is no remove in Fury-Kane narration, no bird’s-eye view, no space for air separate from the speaker. You must see through Benjy and his retarded haze, Thatcher and his fastidious commercialism, you must observe the world through another’s observation.
The Sound and the Fury begins with the observations of one of literature’s most famous narrators: “Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. They took the flag out and they were hitting.” Benjy is a profoundly retarded adult. His world is composed of color and form, but nothing more. Benjy paints a purely sensible picture, an impression apprehended more by the body than by the mind. He is incapable of intellectualizing experience, of imposing order upon the things he sees and hears. He does not know to say golf, all he knows is hitting. Benjy bears closest resemblance to the novel’s title. It is his jumbled collision with reality, his world of waves crashing upon the shore, that reflects the cacophony of living, the “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”[1] Benjy presents us with one of the most dramatically distorted views in all of literature. His profound confusion may well serve as a model for one of modernism’s most penetrating insights, that the subjectivity of human experience abolishes any hope for objective truth. Thus, we can never fully comprehend the Compsons and their story because we have gotten it through three glasses darkly.
Citizen Kane too wrestles with the cloud of subjectivity, giving us the man of the title through several of his associates, each with a different version of the truth. The first witness called to the stand is the March of Time newsreel, offering an account of Kane’s life that underlines the central problem of testimony: Kane's empire, in its glory held dominion over thirty-seven newspapers, two syndicates, a radio network. An empire upon an empire. The first of grocery stores, paper mills, apartment buildings, factories, forests, ocean liners. An empire through which for fifty years flowed, in an unending stream, the wealth of the earth's third richest gold mine.
Herein lie the first signs of subjectivity, the deep booming voice of god announcing the monumentality of its subject. The news must approach Kane from low angles, as it does his Xanadu pleasure dome, to attract its viewership. Kane must be a big man who has done big things in order to interest a big audience. He must also be something of an enigma, something good journalism can unravel for its readership. Thus, the newsreel encourages a degree of confusion over Kane’s visage, cutting between three perspectives that contradict one another in succession. First P. Thatcher declares, “Mr. Charles Foster Kane…is in fact nothing more or less than a Communist!” Then a rabble-rouser checks in insisting, “He is today what he has always been and always will be a Fascist!” And lastly, Mr. Kane assures us that he is only, “one thing - An American.” The March of Time then goes on to prove its worth, slicing Kane into thematic chunks so that we may emerge with a neatly packaged understanding of the man and his life. To wit, Kane held many conflicting opinions, went through two wives, petered out of politics and withered away in solitude. The March of Time is, above all, a self-serving version of citizen Kane. The man’s struggles with love and vulnerability are never touched upon, making it the film’s most superficial stab at truth. Here again we encounter Faulkner and the observer effect, albeit from an obverse angle. Here, it is the lucidity of experience that does us in. For its every attempt at organization, the March of Time falls into distortion. There is an inevitable oversimplification in the way we make sense of experience, a tragic obscurity to human understanding. Thus, to tame the world of its sound and fury is to lose the world entirely.
Fury and Kane, both tell the meat of their stories in flashback, flitting across time and space like a bird wanders across the sky. The odysseys of Compson and Kane are assembled more then they are constructed, glued together from shards of memory, rather than built from the ground up. There is a dynamism to this sort of temporal fragmentation, a reason behind the bucking of Aristotelian unities. Faulkner and Welles tell their stories dialectically, through the dynamic contrast of opposites. There is a richness in Fury and Kane that only this sort of juxtaposition could have achieved, a way in which the past and present merge with one another to form the kind of synthesis Hegel would have appreciated and Eisenstein may have admired.
Quentin, the second of the Compson narrators, is particularly suited for this temporal dialectic. For his relation to the past is defined by conflict. Quentin is haunted by the memories he cannot change and the march of time he cannot halt. Time is Quentin’s greatest foe, the arbiter of his ultimate undoing. Thus, Quentin’s memories rise up without warning, creeping away as suddenly as they arrive:
The shadow hadn’t quite cleared the stoop. I stopped inside the door, watching the shadow move. It moved almost perceptibly, creeping back inside the door, driving the shadow back into the door. Only she was running already when I heard it…She ran out of her dress, clutching her bridal, running into the bellowing where T.P. in the dew Whooey Sassprilluh Benjy under the box bellowing…I stepped into sunlight, finding my shadow again. I walked down the steps just ahead of it. The half hour went. Then the chimes ceased and died away.
Here Quentin flashes back to the day of his sister’s shotgun wedding. For Quentin, this event encapsulates the Compson decline. Caddy has lost her maidenhood, and with it, the badge of Compson propriety. Thus, for Quentin, Benjy bellows to particularly startling effect, mourning Caddy’s fall from grace. The memory is bookended by two mentions of shadow and one mention of a faraway clock. For Quentin, both things serve as symbols of temporal preoccupation, the shadow reminding Quentin of the sun and its daily march across the sky. Quentin can’t stay firmly rooted in the present for he is constantly swept up in the pain of the past. Quentin can’t reverse or repair the damage time has wrought upon the Compson name, nor can he escape his awareness of a losing battle. Thus, it is the constant oscillation, the flickering from present to past, from the haunting to the ghost itself, that gives Fury its dialectic dynamism.
For Walter P. Thatcher, the electric contrast between past and present proves equally revealing. Thompson, the sleuthing reporter assigned to Kane’s case, travels to the Thatcher Memorial Library for a look at the collection’s memoirs. The library is pristine and imposing, a study in dark, gleaming surfaces carved out in the neoclassical vein. A sculpture of Mr. Thatcher himself sits stiffly atop a marble podium as we tilt from a low angle toward the floor. Thatcher wears an appropriately stony grimace, his eyes frozen in a penetrating stare. The librarian, Ms. Anderson, with hair stretched tightly over her skull, makes for an amusingly anal caricature, pointedly reminding Mr. Thompson of the strict “conditions under which [he] may inspect certain portions of Mr. Thatcher's unpublished memoirs.”
The setting seems to resemble some version of the Thatcher afterlife, a severely controlled, impossibly immaculate environment in which to wile away eternity. But of course, the elephant of irony remains: Mr. Thatcher is dead, and all his earthly attempts at control have been ceded in the face of some unknown chaos. Thatcher’s memories too are laughably systematized: a stiffly written, categorized account. The "grand old man of Wall Street" has conquered time in a way Quentin would have appreciated, stuffing impressions into words, words into books and books into gigantic metal vaults. Naturally enough, Mr. Thatcher’s memories revolve around Kane’s lack of fiscal responsibility and general irreverence.
But again, it is the discord between present and past, between the reality of Thatcher’s death and his lifelong pursuit of control, that lends itself to profundity. Thatcher, because of his obsession with “proper order,” bridled Kane in a way that would forever sour the relationship between the two. Thus, Thatcher’s past bridling is rendered tragically frivolous by the frigidity of his present death, and the inevitable disorder therein. Thus, it is once again the dialectic of Faulknerian fragmentation that gives both past and present a mutually informative resonance.
The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner’s modernist masterpiece, forever changed the face of American literature, using subjectivity and temporal fragmentation to unprecedented expressive effect. The novel also changed the Hollywood screenplay lending Citizen Kane the most innovative elements of its narrative design. Without Kane there would be no Hiroshima Mon Amour (Pathé Entertainment, 1959), no Last Year at Mareinbad (Terra Film Produktion, 1961), no Rashomon (Daiei Motion Picture Company, 1950), and without Faulkner, there would be no Kane.
[1] Shakespeare, William. Macbeth Act V, Scene V ( 25-27)
Bibliography
Harrington, Evans, and Ann J. Abadie. Faulkner, Modernism, and Film: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1978. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1979.
Kawin, Bruce F. Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978.
Ross, Harris. Film as Literature, Literature as Film :An Introduction to and Bibliography of Film's Relationship to Literature. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987.
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