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Issue 14. Painting / portrait

Cinematic Modernism. Modernist Poetry and Film by Susan McCabe

Author: Jan Baetens
Published: July 2006

Susan McCabe, Cinematic Modernism. Modernist Poetry and Film.
Cambridge, UK, & New York, US, Cambridge University Press, 2005, 284 p., ISBN 0-521-84621-8 (hardback)

Susan McCabe's study on the relationships between the Anglo-Saxon modernist canon (Eliot, Pound, on the one hand, Stein, Williams, H.D., and Moore on the other hand) and cinema is a very innovative exploration of a field until now dramatically underemphasized. After the reading of this book, one can only wonder what has prevented us from seeing what McCabe makes so blatantly clear: the strong and direct influence of cinema on modernist writing. Of course, there have been good reasons to keep these influences out of focus: the gap (Andreas Huyssen's "great divide") between Anglo-Saxon High Modernism and popular culture (in French surrealism, the mutual shaping of writing and filming seem to have been much easier to practice and to detect); the well-documented and self-consciously elaborated relationships between writing and painting (and, to a lesser degree, photography), as in the often debated hypothesis of Gertrud Stein's cubism; the relative ignorance, for strictly material and archival reasons, of the cinematographic culture and works of the era, and so on. Yet the material gathered by McCabe and her extremely careful and convincing close readings of it can no longer justify this neglect. After Cinematic Modernism, it should no longer be allowed to think of Modernism without stressing the major influences of the cinematographic paradigm.

What makes this study so interesting is that it proposes a new way of considering the impact of the image on writing. Contrary to most studies in the field, whose main scope is to revivify, even when criticizing it, the age-old tradition of ut pictura poesis, McCabe does not simply explore a set of thematic convergences between the two media: at this level, the result of the analysis would be very disappointing: Modernist poetry does not become a kind of screenwriting in verse, as happened in some types of popular fiction such as the detective novel, where the boundaries between novel, script, and movie became very thin. Nor does she focus exclusively on technical changes at the level of, for instance, point of view, montage or the metaphor: at this level too, the very originality of McCabe's approach is not immediately visible: many of the technical or semiotic features of Modernist poetry might be explained also, at least partially, by other influences of relationships). What Cinematic Modernism tackles is on the contrary a much broader and deeper convergence, at psychic and historic level, between filmmaking and writing.

In this respect, the two key issues are no longer movies and literature, but psychoanalysis and feminism. Taking as its starting point the traumatic experiences of World War I and its impact on the masculine subject (i.e. the subject that defined 'normality' until then), McCabe's argumentation rightly starts by insisting on the initial tension between film and writing. The
movies were considered more appropriate then literature to represent the shock experience of the war and the loss of mastery by the traditional subject. Hence the attempts by Modernist writers (Stein, Williams, H.D., Moore) to compete with film by copying some of its distinctive features
(montage, speed, changes of scale and distance, etc.). As a corollary, there
also existed a wide-spread fear of cinema, since the screen was not only the place where the shock experience was represented, but also and maybe even more the place where this experience was really taking place, where the spectator's traditional subject-stance was being questioned and even destroyed when looking at the images. Hence the attempts by some of the Modernists (Eliot and Pound) to keep the cinema at a certain distance, as if they were afraid of being contaminated by its feminine and 'third sex' (we would say 'queer' today) challenges of masculinity. Yet in both cases, that of the Modernists trying to write cinematographically in order to express and explore their own feelings of non-patriarchal subjectivity as well as in that of the Modernists eagerness to 'save' in a certain sense a more conservative position, the literary practice was full of ambivalences and contradictions.

McCabe studies the word and image interaction in a very specific way. What she is interested in is the influence of film on writing, not the other way round. This approach is of course perfectly legitimate, given, first, the longtime neglect of this type of interaction and, second, the accompanying over-accentuation of the cinematographic influence on popular, i.e. non High-Modernist writing, as in the hard-boiled novel or the documentary style of Hemingway, for instance. Moreover, she studies the interaction by way of interart close reading: concrete works of the four major artists are confronted with one or more Modernist movies of the period: Stein and Chaplin, Williams and surrealist film (primarily Un Chien andalou), H.D. and Joan of Arc (as antimodel) and Borderline (as a model), and finally Marianne Moore and Ballet mécanique as well as Maedchen in Uniform. In each case, the selection of these pictures is not made for argument's sake, but as a result of strong historical evidence of contact and influence.

If the reading of the interart relationships is both detailed and very convincing, one should remark also that McCabe's interpretive line is not without a double danger. On the one hand, the discussion of artistic expression tends sometimes to be dominated by psychoanalytic and feminist theory, and some readers might get tired of the repetitive emphasis on this layer of the works (I haven't counted the Freudo-phallocratic knives and sticks or the feminine/feminist détournement of the same objects, but there are many, too many). On the other hand, McCabe does not sufficiently discuss the possible impact of competing models and influences, such as for instance photography and painting (the fact that they have documented already should not prevent us from rereading them afresh in the light of new theories and new insights). What, for instance, is paramount for Williams: surrealist film, the experience of car driving, or the role of photography? The aesthetics of speed and visual montage may be more closely knitted to other than strictly cinematographic models, whose importance may be overstressed in the case of Williams. This is the more regrettable, since McCabe is often very good when establishing relationships with other fields. Cinematic Modernism underlines in a very illuminating way the importance of scientific thinking, experiments, and visuality (several of the authors discussed had a scientific training).

In short, McCabe's book is a timely and important piece of the ongoing discussion on interart relationships in High Modernism. The very careful readings of first rate material, the new emphasis on film rather than on painting or photography, and the broad interdisciplinary perspective make it also a very innovative piece of scholarly work that will prove extremely helpful to all further research in the field.

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