Fiction and the Camera Eye: Visual Consciousness in Film and the Modern Novel by Alan

Spiegel
Review by: Bruce Kawin
Film Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 4, Special Book Issue (Summer, 1977), pp. 44-46
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1211585 .
Accessed: 29/05/2014 09:43
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film
Quarterly.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 153.1.23.45 on Thu, 29 May 2014 09:43:29 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

44

BOOKS

later age, should be able to tell a Howard Hawks

from a Hands of Orloc. There exist, I think, no
special "methodologies" or recipes for writing intelligently about film or about film and literature.
As Appel recognizes, at some level everything
counts, but along with that recognition must come
a sense, especially when dealing with the interchanges between literature and the more popular
forms, that the popular forms are there to be taken
seriously, not debased by being drooled over and
fondled. To write about film means we have to
think about it at least as imaginatively and in as
sustained a way as we have learned to think about
the poems of Keats or the novels of anybody. This
also means that techniques developed for reading
literature must contribute to and not interfere with
our search for ways of reading film.
-STEFAN FLEISCHER

FICTION
ANDTHE
EYE
CAMERA
VisualConsciousness
in Film
andthe ModernNovel
By Alan Spiegel. Charlottesville:Universityof VirginiaPress, 1976.
$12.00.

Alan Spiegel's book is difficult to evaluate. On the

one hand, it performs a serious, responsible, and
interesting analysis of an important topic: the cinematic aspects of what Spiegel calls the post-Flaubertian novel. On the other hand, the book is not
overwhelmingly original (most people who have
thought hard about the subject would not have to
read this book) and contains several factual errors.
This is a book that needed to be brilliant, and is
not. It is also, however, a book that needed to get
written, and one can be grateful that Spiegel has
done such a workmanlike job on what is essentially the obverse of John Fell's Film and the Narrative Tradition (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press,
1974). (Both books explore the relations between
narrativemodes in literature and film, and demonstrate that much nineteenth-century fiction was
working in ways that either influenced or simply
anticipated the basic narrative structures of cinema. Fell emphasizes the growth of film, while Spiegel traces the development of the novel.)

Spiegel's project here is to categorize a vast

range of novels (from the work of Cervantesto that
of Robbe-Grillet, with emphasis on Flaubert and
Joyce) in terms of the ways things are seen in them:
the relation between the seer (whether character or
narrator) and the things he sees. Where the primary means of exposition in Don Quixote is conceptual, emphasizing the essential (character, motive, etc.) rather than the fortuitous (visual detail),
a novel like Madame Bovary makes many of its
points in terms of how things look and the order in
which they are seen. Flaubert's method reflects a
new orientation to the world, a new way of knowing-or not knowing, because one is confined to
the surfaces of reality. What for Kracauer constitutes "the redemption of physical reality" is, in a
novelistic context, a possible indicator of alienation and interiority-or, put another way, a postEdenic acknowledgement that to look at something is not necessarily to know it, and certainly
not to be or possess it.
Once Flaubert established the primacy of visual
perspective, Spiegel argues, two categories of fiction grew from his achievement. In the first, the
novelist's emphasis is "away from the object and
toward the eye of the observer"'-a mode Spiegel
considers "interior" and anti-cinematic, particularly as practiced by Virginia Woolf and Samuel
Beckett. In the second, the novelist focuses more
on the object (not in vacuo but as something seen,
so that the observer is not lost); this line develops
from the "scenographic"-where the field of view
takes in most of the important elements of a scene
at once, as in an Edison-era full shot-to the "cinematographic" presentation; his remarks on James,
Hemingway, Sartre, and especially Joyce are genuinely distinguished, and provide what is probably
the main incentive for purchasing this volume. (I
must point out, however, that $12 is a lot to spend
for a book that has been so atrociously proofread.
The average reader will not be misled by a name
like "Robert-Grillet," and will doubtless be able to
fill in or take out commas and key words when necessary, or to transpose lines and even paragraphs
[see pp. 164-5, for instance], but how many people
will realize that 1945 [on p. 117] should read 1954?)
Although this is not a book about film, Spiegel
clearly has done his homework in film criticismeven if he does refer to tilts as pans-and is es-

This content downloaded from 153.1.23.45 on Thu, 29 May 2014 09:43:29 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

BOOKS

45

pecially good at discussing, for instance, dialectical montage in Joyce and additive montage in Dos
Passos. His basic conclusion about Joyce-that his
work is cinematic but not influenced by cinema-strikes me as definitive, and the process by which
he arrives at this conclusion exemplary. His work
on Faulkner is often interesting too: there is a good
discussion of slow motion in The Hamlet and
depthlessness in Sanctuary. On the other hand,
Spiegel emphasizes the (unfootnoted and, as far as
I can determine, entirely untrue) "fact" that
Faulkner himself adapted Sanctuary for the
screen; he even implies that Tony Richardson's
Sanctuary is a remake of The Story of Temple
Drake, when it is clearly an original adaptation of
Requiem for a Nun (with cut-ins from the novel
Sanctuary and not from Temple Drake, which has
a wildly different plot). Taken on its own terms,
the only place Spiegel's larger argument really falters, I think, is in its suggestion that Robbe-Grillet's seer-oriented fiction is-because it sometimes
presents the reader with difficulties in visualizing
just what is happening and why that is being observed-anti-cinematic; I can't think of a novel
that is more cinematic than Jealousy, and would
suggest that the two lines of development Spiegel
traces in the post-Flaubertian novel (interior and
visual) do in fact converge in Robbe-Grillet'swork.
But it may not be possible to take Spiegel on his
own terms. What is for me the nadir of his argument proceeds from a conflation of Arnheim and
Camus: ". .. it cannot be stressed too strongly at

the outset that all of the components of a cinematized narrative derive specifically from what I have
called a passive, affectless way of seeing which in
itself represents the effects of a broken circuit between the seer and the contents of his visual landscape; that is, a sense that the visible world is
something other than, remote from and resistant
to, the human mind" (p. 82). Such an assertion
implicitly denies the possibility of accurate visual
thought, or dynamic visual engagement, and renders the work of film-makers as diverse as Brakhage (Text of Light, The Act of Seeing With One's
Own Eyes) and Kurosawa (Ikiru, Dodeskaden) virtually pointless-the act of straining to see truly,
and to integrate what one sees, inappropriate and
anticinematic. The dialectic between subjective
and objective vision strikes me as basic to the whole

cinematic enterprise, as well as to much of modern

politics, and Spiegel's emphasis on the passive eye
makes a point not about "the ontology of the camera" (which may well involve disengagement) but
about his own viewing habits. It also suggests the
reason for what I take to be his misreading of
Madame Bovary. Spiegel is all too ready to defend
the received truths about Flaubert's affectless objectivity as a narrator, and misses the crucial point
that Madame Bovary is narrated by one of
Charles'sformer classmates-that its first sentence
is in the first person; that there are several indications that this unnamed narrator has been stirred
to his project by the ironies of the pharmacist's
receiving the Legion of Honor; and that the battle
between sympathy and irony, evident throughout
the novel, may be part of the narrator's personal
response to the characters, their fates, and the
limits of his own mode of discourse. Passion and
objectivity, engagement and distance, continually
interact--whether in the act of seeing or in the fiction of Flaubert, Joyce, Faulkner, or Robbe-Grillet-and Spiegel's clear, schematic intelligence has
to some extent impoverished his treatment of what
constitutes the cinematic. For the sake of neatness,
he cuts out too much.
Nevertheless, the book is full of excellent insights
and engaging passages. It is useful, for instance,
to be able to point to Spiegel's discussion of the
montage aesthetic in modernist literature, painting, film, and philosophy the next time one is involved in an argument about the legitimacy of
cross-media analysis or interdisciplinary historiography. It is good that such a fine job has been
done on the visual component of prose narrative,
and that the passages Spiegel so scrupulously
analyses are very well chosen. It is good, too, that
the relations between literature and film are coming under such responsible scrutiny; Spiegel's book
is certainly better than Murray's The Cinematic
Imagination (New York: Ungar, 1972) or Richardson's Literature and Film (Bloomington: Indiana
Univ. Press, 1969), for instance, even if it is nowhere near the equal of Eisenstein's "Dickens,
Griffith, and the Film Today" or even of Gertrude
Stein's "Portraits and Repetition" (Stein, by the
way, is one of Spiegel's crucial gaps). In the Introduction to Understanding Media, McLuhan
quotes his editor's comment that "A successful

This content downloaded from 153.1.23.45 on Thu, 29 May 2014 09:43:29 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

46

BOOKS

book cannot venture to be more than ten per cent

new"; on those grounds, Fiction and Camera Eye
is likely to be successful, and will perhaps pave the
way for the successful publication of more revolutionary work, some of which I hope will be written
by Spiegel himself, and by those who will learn
from him.
-BRUCE KAWIN

EALING
STUDIOS
By Charles Barr. London: Cameron and Tayleur, 1977. &6.95.

Charles Barr's critical history of Ealing is a doubleedged triumph of organization and clarity. Michael
Balcon's Ealing Studios, based on the London borough of Ealing, produced 95 features between
1938 and 1959, usually releasing at least four films
a year, never more than seven, and is best known
for its quintet of classic comedies of the 1949-1951
period: Passport to Pimlico, Tight Little Island (or
Whisky Galore), Kind Hearts and Coronets, The
Lavender Hill Mob and The Man in the White
Suit. Ealing was a small company, somewhat of a
family affair, comparable perhaps not to an American studio like RKO, but to, say, the Val Lewton
unit at RKO in the forties. One of Balcon's expressed aims was to "project" British character to
the world, or at least to project the character of a
certain segment of British society-roughly, the
"benignly liberal" segment. To accomplish this he
had to keep his studio independent, free from outside pressure, and he succeeded. He kept Ealing
"small and stable" to the end. But as Barr shows,
stability can mean stagnation as well as continuity.
Limiting itself in subject matter as well as size,
Ealing is, by the mid-fifties, stifled by its own good
taste, by the "distaste for commerce," "horror of
violence," "emotional inhibition," and "deference
to age and authority" reflected in its films.
Is it a coincidence that the "liberating" Hammer
horror movies come in just as Ealing comedies and
dramas go out in the late fifties? To Barr it isn't,
and he's probably right. But this changing of the
guard seems almost too suggestively and schematically good to be true. Barr (who is also the author
of Laurel and Hardy, 1967) is deft at orchestrating

such social, historical, and cultural movements.

He fits Ealing's wartime dramas into their historical context and into the context of the studio's
history. For instance, the casting of Basil Sydney
and Leslie Banks as villains (Nazi officer and British traitor) in the 1943 Went the Day Well? (or
48 Hours) is to Barr "like an exorcising of the kind
of 'thirties leadership they represent" (pompous,
authoritarian) as British officers in earlier Ealing
war dramas like Ships with Wings. At the same
time Barr is careful not to try "to fit every film into
too neat a pattern of development," in part one
senses because he's aware of a multiplicity of such
patterns, inside and outside Ealing, personal and
historical, conflicting as well as synching. Barr is
sensibly (rather than torturously) self-conscious.
Yet his version of Ealing is finally too neat, too
symmetrical. He (neatly) divides Ealing product
into "mainstream" Ealing and "subversive" Ealing, or films which are an expression of the Ealing
community ethos and films which are an examination of it. Thus the "villain": scriptwriterT. E. B.
Clarke. And the "hero": director Alexander Mackendrick. Minor villains: directors Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Charles Frend. Co-heroes:
directors Robert Hamer, Harry Watt. The supposedly self-satisfied company men vs. the restless
individualists, who soon take off on their own.
At one point Barr perceptively diagnoses an unnatural, but apparently very English/Ealing polarization of the world into "innocence and worldliness." But his own description of Ealing is in fact a
polarization, and a perhaps unnatural one. Thus
he finds not one, but two "definitive" Ealing comedies: Passport to Pimlico, definitive of the "soft"/
Clarke branch of Ealing, the "romanticists"; and
The Man in the White suit, definitive of the
"hard"/Mackendrick branch, the "realists," who
acknowledge human passion and ruthlessness. I
say "perhaps" unnatural because Barr's case for
the centrality of the two films is stunningly wellargued. The chapters on Passport to Pimlico and
The Man in the White Suit-easily the best in the
book-are almost breathtakingly assured, brilliant. Barr has an acute, imaginative grasp of the
ideas in, and the implications of, these two comedies. Whether they're "right" readings of them or
not is less important than the fact that Barr illuminates so many of their possible readings, that he

This content downloaded from 153.1.23.45 on Thu, 29 May 2014 09:43:29 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions