The definition of what constitutes cinematic writing is elusive. Cinema itself is a fluid medium, being as it is reliant on and defined by the technology available to film-makers. Establishing and defining a “cinematic” genre within literature firstly requires an exploration and definition of what constitutes cinema, as opposed to similar visual mediums such as television and, increasingly, video games. Is montage at the heart of cinema, or mise-en-scene? Is adaptability a marker of cinematic literature, or is it based on something more technical, such as structure or the usage of techniques common to both mediums, such as prolepsis? “Cinematic” writing, which by definition must be uniquely differentiated from “normal”, non-cinematic writing, has a dependence on what is defined as the essence of cinema. By first defining what constitutes cinema we thus have a framework from which we can examine whether or not Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood or Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead have within them facets that are equivalents to the fundamental essences of the cinema. Despite being a problematic term, both Wise Blood and The Fountainhead can be described as inhabiting a cinematic style of writing.
Andre Bazin argues that, during the early twentieth century, “expressionism of montage and image [constituted] the essence of the cinema.”1 Kellman, in his essay The Cinematic Novel: Tracking a Concept, elaborates on this idea further:
Eisenstein and other Russian theorists like Pudovkin, Kuleshov, and Vertov infectiously argued that the essence of cinematic art is montage: the arrangement of discrete frames to create a visual rhythm. A cinematic novel, then, would be one that is organized as if separate chapters, paragraphs, or sentences were written and then edited into nonlinear patterns.2
Taking Bazin’s and Kellman’s positions that montage was indeed the essence of cinema, at least for a time, as our starting point, the question is raised of whether or not The Fountainhead and Wise Blood contain, at least in some equivalent sense, a similar “expressionism”. Technically they do: the language throughout both texts is not particularly metaphorical, or when it is the meanings are almost transparent and everything is written clearly and precisely, particularly in terms of the imagery created. Flannery O’Connor for instance makes sparse use of adjectives, which makes Wise Blood, to borrow a term from filmic lexicon, seem almost like a novel in black and white. Both novels make use of the temporal techniques which translate easily between the mediums of film and writing, such as prolepsis.3 The Fountainhead reads in parts like a montage, demonstrated in the following passage. Gail Wynand, in some kind of self-amelioration, decides to use his media empire to influence public opinion towards Roark, defending him publicly in all his newspapers. Wynand however is rebuffed as such:
Wynand began to argue the case - with the prominent men he met at business lunches and dinners.... He heard a few answers:
“Yes, Gail, yes, sure. But on the other hand I think it was damn selfish of the man....That’s what Lancelot Clokey said in his book....he knows what he’s talking about....”
“Yes, Gail, but aren’t you kind of old-fashioned about it....We’re all just a lot of glands and chemicals and whatever we ate for breakfast....”
“But look, Gail, he should’ve thought of other people before he thought of himself. I think if a man’s got no love in his heart he can’t be much good. I heard that in a play last night...you own Joules Fougler said it’s a brave and tender stage poem.”
“You make out a good case, Gail, and I wouldn’t know what to say against it, I don’t know where you’re wrong, but it doesn’t sound right to me because Ellsworth Toohey....”4
This rapid juxtaposition of separate conversations next to each other constitutes a kind of verbal montage effect. Importantly, despite nearly being a page of dialogue, each separate paragraph is spatially and temporally isolated from the last - the only things connecting them are thematic. With no intermediary statements in-between the speech, the effect is thus similar to how we view montage in film; our experience as the reader is to follow each conversation not in isolation as they would have occurred in reality, but as dialogues bleeding into a singular speech. Important as well is Rand’s use of parallelism, which conveys a sense of Wynand’s isolation with regards to Roark. Rand here is not concerned with temporal or spatial dimensions but rather with dimensions of dramatic space.
The assumption and underlying premise behind labelling Rand as a cinematic writer because of her use of montage, or at least a literary equivalent, is problematic. Firstly, cinema does not have a monopoly on the practice of montage. Arguably it popularised it, but for centuries in literature there has been montage, in its simplest definition as a collection of images occurring consecutively. Again it is also a reductive measure, confused more so by the fact that Rand’s passage is not a visual or pictorial montage described in words, but actually a verbal and in some sense philosophical one. However, The Fountainhead does conform to Bazin’s montage of attraction5, a term coined by Sergio Eisenstein and which Bazin defines as “the reinforcing of the meaning of one image by association with another image not necessarily part of the same episode.”6 Within The Fountainhead Rand employs a kind of montage aesthetics, both visual and verbal, but we can extrapolate this reading even further and describe The Fountainhead as a consistent exploration of montage in several forms. Bazin elaborates even further, stating “montage as used by Kuleshov, Eisenstein or Gance did not give us the event, it alluded to it.”7 The demolition of Cortlandt House is firstly given to the reader by allusion, by montage. The image is focalized around Dominique Francon huddling and then cutting herself, before we are told several pages later that a police officer heads to the scene and discovers Howard Roark next to a dynamite plunger, before being told by him that “You’d better arrest me”8.
If we accept the idea that cinema has as its essence the practice of montage, then perhaps all writing which has some kind of deliberately ordered sequence of images and events could be described as cinematic. This is problematic for the fundamental reason that if all writing, or a large bulk of writing, is cinematic, then cinematic as a generic adjective has no value and there is no specific point of differentiation between cinematic writing and writing in general. Montage however is not all there is to the cinema, as argued by Kellman:
In place of montage, the basis of a free, imaginative cinema was proclaimed to be mise-en-scene—design within each individual frame, long takes, and deep focus. However, it is a curious fact that, though the early Russians' exclusive preoccupation with montage as the foundation of film art has long since been abandoned, discussions of the cinematic novel persist in taking montage as the model for what novels constructed like movies should be like.9
The same problems that arise from adopting montage as an essence of cinema, and thus cinematic writing, apply equally to mise-en-scene. Mise-en-scene, even more so than montage, is fluidly - or perhaps more cynically, uncertainly – defined. Taken at its most basic though, as a consistent application of a signature style, then again it is reductive to describe a genre of writing which has any kind of verbal equivalent, such as Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness, or the minimalist declarative sentences of Cormac McCarthy, as cinematic. However, this does provide a framework with which it is possible to define what could constitute cinematic writing, one which is, at least in a technical sense, useful. In this case, mise-en-scene can be applied very readily to reading Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. Although Wise Blood has elements of both a literary mise-en-scene and the use of verbal montages, just as The Fountainhead has its own mise-en-scene10, the novel lends itself more readily to classification as cinematic through its style. Wise Blood is narrated in a third-person omniscient style, but still has a clear and strong voice, which unlike The Fountainhead keeps a neutral focalization at all times. The narrator’s timbre is measured, without over-elaboration, and keeps a consistent rhythm throughout the novel. For example: “That morning Enoch Emory knew when he woke up that today the person he could show it to was going to come. He knew it by his blood. He had wise blood like his daddy.”11 This line is typical of the prose style employed throughout Wise Blood by O’Connor. More specifically, Rand’s employment of short, tempered but extremely precise sentences and her sparse use of adjectives is the essence of her narrative style. What makes this cinematic though is the consistency with which O’Connor’s style is employed. If we accept that mise en scene is the essence of cinema, Wise Blood too has a signature equivalent to mise en scene through this dominant narrative style, in a similar way to how Welles’ use of deep focus in Citizen Kane or Ozu’s low shots in Tokyo Story or Eames’ usage of the “doll’s eye view” are the signature modes used when describing their respective mise-en-scenes.
Christian Metz theorises a different take on the essence of cinema, describing the “Image Track”, which he defines “as the visual portion of a synchronized sound film (or the totality of a silent film).”12 There already exists a boundary between film and novels, just as there is with all mediums. Film is comprised of moving images, text, and sound, whereas for novels their primary elements are words. Importantly though, both Wise Blood and The Fountainhead are eidetic novels, and as such could be described as Metz’s image-tracks. Both novels, but especially Wise Blood, are quiet novels. There is a distinctive lack of aural imagery in either novel; O’Connor in particular leaves out details of sound. In fact the only aural clues she gives are through dialogue and are mainly exclamation marks to denote shouting. Rand’s style is more direct. For example, she will include snippets of overheard conversations to convey noisiness, rather than use a simple declarative sentence stating so. But Rand’s dedication to the image can be seen during the collapse of the Cortlandt House. Dominique Francon, having been sent to Cortlandt House to distract the night watchmen, gets caught up in an explosion whose “sound was the crack of a fist on the back of her head.”13 Tellingly, Rand uses a visual, or maybe visceral, kinetic, metaphor to describe the sound of the explosion. Important to both texts and related to their eidetic qualities is their presentation of movement. D.N. Rodowick explains the significance of movement to cinema thus:
On the one hand, the Barthesian notion of the text seems to be literally achieved by conventional processes of cinematic signification. The cinematic text is irreducibly plural: it resists characterization as a univocal sign because it conjoins five distinct matters of expression-phonetic sound, music, noise or sound effects, written inscriptions, photographic registration - and because its processes of signification, its textuality, are constituted irreversibly and ineluctably by the code of movement.14
Due to their character as eidetic, visual novels, movement is prominently presented in both The Fountainhead and Wise Blood. When not presenting counterpoising philosophies, Rand’s descriptions are visual, based on form and movement of people, with small splashes of plain colours and image based metaphors. For example:
In ... 1936 Roark moved his office to the top floor of the Cord Building....When he saw the inscription, ‘Howard Roark, Architect,’ on his new door, he stopped for a moment; then he walked into the office. His own room, at the end of a long suite, had three walls of glass...[through] the broad planes, he could see the Fargo Store, the Enright House, the Aquitania Hotel....At the tip of Manhattan...he could see the Dana Building by Henry Cameron.15
The physical movement of Roark in this passage is easy to visualise, as are the spatial dimensions of his office. That his office has three walls of glass, a transparent material and one with strong primacy as a symbol of modernity, is telling. The Fountainhead switches between two dominant stylistic modes; one of filmic montage and one of rhetoric and invective. However, it is the montage, the visual, which we can understand to lend it cinematic qualities. To give another example of The Fountainhead’s eidetic qualities and Rand’s description of movement:
There were many comfortable chairs around him, but Toohey preferred to remain on the floor. He rolled over to his stomach, propping his torso upright on his elbows, and he lolled pleasurably, switching his weight from elbow to elbow, his legs spread out in a wide fork on the carpet.16
Compare this with the following:
[Peter Keating] left the door to the hall open...throwing a muffler around his throat, with the gesture of flinging a cape over his shoulder. He stepped to the door of the living room, hat in hand, and invited her to go, with a silent movement of his head. In the hall he pressed the button of the elevator and he stepped back to let her enter first.17
Within both passages it is very easy for the reader to visualise the movement of the characters, the language is readable and understandable, plain, not overwrought. Compare this to O’Connor’s description of Hazel’s walk through Taulkinham:
His second night in Taulkinham, Hazel Motes walked along down town close to the store fronts but not looking in them. The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying any attention to the sky...Haze’s shadow was now behind him and now before him and now and then broken up by other people’s shadows....His neck was thrust forward....The glary light from the store windows made his blue suit look purple.18
Again, the movement here is clearly defined. Unlike Rand however, this is a very visually abstracted passage, not limited merely to the presentation of movement. O’Connor is careful to show the dimensions of light and shade, as well as the movement of Hazel’s shadows. Tellingly, he is not looking at the stores, and the description of the “depth on depth” sky connotes a perceptive type experience linked to sight. In other words, O’Connor uses a visual metaphor, we don’t really hear depths of sound of taste depths of flavour, and combines it with visual imagery, using simple colours to describe what Motes sees. The “look” of the passage is also important, the suit looks purple but is blue, the clouds look like scaffolding and it is easy to imagine the sightlines as well of the indiscriminate other people whose shadows are interfering with Hazel’s own. In contrast to Rand, O’Connor employs a more poetic, or even painterly, tone of voice. To simplify, we can read movement in The Fountainhead as framed through montage, whereas in Wise Blood it is the mise-en-scene that dominates how movement is presented.
Ultimately though, the question of what makes cinematic writing comes down to one of representation. Cinema is able to offer experiential relations which are in some sense impossible with words, for various reasons, such as the inherent ambiguity of words. Cinematic writing then could perhaps be understood as the attempt by writers to try and capture with words the qualities of cinema that set it apart from other mediums. That is, cinematic writing seeks to imitate through writing the affective qualities of cinema. In other words, as Wise Blood and The Fountainhead are primarily eidetic novels, then they can be read as having cinematographic qualities. Not only this, but because both texts make use of literary equivalents of filmic techniques, the case can be made that they are indeed cinematic. To draw on Kellman in conclusion:
The existence of a cinematic novel demands delicate equilibrium. If too much weight is placed on the first term, the adjective becomes a substantive, and the pen is supplanted by a camera... Perhaps the most fundamental issue in likening novel to film is an ontological one. Is cinema the child of Lumiere or of Melies, a recording device or a vehicle of fantasy? To begin with Siegfried Kracauer's premise that film is most instinctively a ”redemption of physical reality" is to raise very different expectations of a cinematic novel than to begin with Suzanne Langer's notion that film is "the mode of dream"19
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema” in A Gazetas (ed.) An Introduction to World Cinema, McFarland, Jefferson, 2008.
S Kellman, “The Cinematic Novel: Tracking a Concept” IN Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33, no. 3, 1987, pp.467-477
C Metz & F Meltzer(trans.) “Trucage and the Film” in Critical Inquiry, vol. 3, no. 4, 1977 pp. 657-675
F O’Connor, Wise Blood, Faber & Faber, London, 1968
A Rand, The Fountainhead, 9th edn, Penguin Books, London, 2007
D.N. Rodowick, “The Figure and the Text” in Diacritics, vol. 15, no. 1, 1985, pp. 32-50
1 A Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema” in A Gazetas (ed.) An Introduction to World Cinema, McFarland, Jefferson, 2008, p. 121.
2 S Kellman, “The Cinematic Novel: Tracking a Concept”, Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33, no. 3, 1987, p. 473
3 Interestingly, prolepsis is never used in Vidor’s film adaptation of The Fountainhead, but cinematic writing is perhaps more about how films inform novels, rather than the other way around.
4 A Rand, The Fountainhead, 9th edn, Penguin Books, London, 2007, p. 657-658
5 Bazin, op. cit., p. 120
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Rand, op. cit., p 648
9 Kellman, op. cit., p. 473
10 Again though, The Fountainhead’s primary facet with which to describe it as cinematic comes from Rand’s employment of montage. In other words, its mise-en-scene is montage, which differentiates it from Wise Blood.
11 F O’Connor, Wise Blood, Faber & Faber, London, 1968, p. 52
12 C Metz & F Meltzer(trans.) “Trucage and the Film” in Critical Inquiry, vol. 3, no. 4, 1977 p. 657
13 Rand, op. cit., p. 644
14 D.N. Rodowick, “The Figure and the Text” in Diacritics, vol. 15, no. 1, 1985, p. 35
15 Rand, op. cit., p. 538
16 Rand, op. cit., p. 489
17 Rand, op. cit., p. 382
18 O’Connor, op. cit., p. 23
19 Kellman, op. cit., p 474-475
