Gertrude Stein considered herself an experimental writer and wrote what The Poetry Foundation calls “dense poems and fictions, often devoid of plot or dialogue,” with the result being that “commercial publishers slighted her experimental writings and critics dismissed them as incomprehensible.” Take, for example, what happened when Stein sent a manuscript to Alfred C. Fifield, a London-based publisher, and received a rejection letter mocking her prose in return. According to Letters of Note, the manuscript in question was published many years later as her modernist novel,The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress (1925). You can hear Stein reading a selection from the novel below.
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“We can say of Shakespeare,” wrote T.S. Eliot—in what may sound like the most backhanded of compliments from one writer to another—“that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account.” Eliot, it’s true, was not overawed by the Shakespearean canon; he pronouncedHamlet “most certainly an artistic failure,” though he did love Coriolanus. Whatever we make of his ambivalent, contrarian opinions of the most famous author in the English language, we can credit Eliot for keen observation: Shakespeare’s universe, which can seem so sprawlingly vast, is actually surprisingly spare given the kinds of things it mostly contains.
This is due in large part to the visual limitations of the stage, but perhaps it also points toward an author who made great works of art from humble materials. Look, for example, at a search cloud of the Bard’s plays.
You’ll find one the front page of the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive, created by Michael John Goodman, an independent researcher, writer, educator, curator and image-maker. The cloud on the left features a galaxy composed mainly of elemental and archetypal beings: “Animals,” “Castles and Palaces,” “Crowns,” “Flora and Fauna,” “Swords,” “Spears,” “Trees,” “Water,” “Woods,” “Death.” One thinks of the Zodiac or Tarot.
This particular search cloud, however, does not represent the most prominent terms in the text, but rather the most prominent images in four collections of illustrated Shakespeare plays from the Victorian period. Goodman’s site hosts over 3000 of these illustrations, taken from four major UK editions of Shakespeare’s Complete Works published in the mid-19th century. The first, published by editor Charles Knight, appeared in several volumes between 1838 and 1841, illustrated with conservative engravings by various artists. Knight’s edition introduced the trend of spelling Shakespeare’s name as “Shakspere,” as you can see in the title page to the “Comedies, Volume I,” at the top of the post. Further down, see two representative illustrations from the plays, the first of Hamlet’s Ophelia and second Coriolanus’ Roman Forum, above.
Part of a wave of “early Victorian populism” in Shakespeare publishing, Knight’s edition is joined by one from Kenny Meadows, who contributed some very different illustrations to an 1854 edition. Just above, see a Goya-like illustration from The Tempest. Later came an edition illustrated by H.C. Selous in 1864, which returned to the formal, faithful realism of the Knight edition (see a rendering of Henry V, below), and includes photograuvure plates of famed actors of the time in costume and an appendix of “Special Wood Engraved Illustrations by Various Artists.”
The final edition whose illustrations Goodman has digitized and catalogued on his site features engravings by artist John Gilbert. Also published in 1864, the Gilbert may be the most expressive of the four, retaining realist proportions and mise-en-scène, yet also rendering the characters with a psychological realism that is at times unsettling—as in his fierce portrait of Lear, below. Gilbert’s illustration of The Taming of the Shrew’s Katherina and Petruchio, further down, shows his skill for creating believable individuals, rather than broad archetypes. The same skill for which the playwright has so often been given credit.
But Shakespeare worked both with rich, individual character studies and broader, archetypal, material: psychological realism and mythological classicism. What I think these illustrated editions show us is that Shakespeare, whoever he (or she) may have been, did indeed have a keen sense of what Eliot called the “objective correlative,” able to communicate complex emotions through “a skillful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions” that have impressed us as much on the canvas, stage, and screen as they do on the page. The emotional expressiveness of Shakespeare’s plays comes to us not only through eloquent verse speeches, but through images of both the starkly elemental and the uniquely personal.
Spend some time with the illustrated editions on Goodman’s site, and you will develop an appreciation for how the plays communicate differently to the different artists. In addition to the search clouds, the site has a header at the top for each of the four editions. Click on the name and you will see front and back matter and title pages. In the pull-down menus, you can access each individual play’s digitized illustrations by type—“Histories,” “Comedies,” and “Tragedies.” All of the content on the site, Goodman writes, “is free through a CC license: users can share on social media, remix, research, create and just do whatever they want really!”
Update: This post originally appeared on our site in 2016. Since then, Goodman has been regularly updating the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive with more editions, giving it more richness and depth. These editions include “one published by John Tallis, which features famous actors of the time in character.” This also includes “the first ever comprehensive full-colour treatment of Shakespeare’s plays with the John Murdoch edition.” The archive, Goodman tells us, “now contains ten editions of Shakespeare’s plays and is fairly comprehensive in how people were experiencing Shakespeare, visually, in book form in the 19th Century.”
The protagonist of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a “fireman” tasked with incinerating what few books remain in a domestic-screen-dominated future society forced into illiteracy. Late in life, Ray Bradbury declared that he wrote the novel because he was “worried about people being turned into morons by TV.” This tinges with a certain irony given that the latest adaptation was made for HBO (2018). That project, which one critic likened it to “a GlaxoSmithKline production of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World,” will probably not be the last Fahrenheit 451 movie. Nor was it the first: that title goes to the one Nouvelle Vague auteur François Truffaut’s film directed in 1966, though many count that as a dubious honor.
A contemporary review in Time magazine memorably called Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 a “weirdly gay little picture that assails with both horror and humor all forms of tyranny over the mind of man,” albeit one that “strongly supports the widely held suspicion that Julie Christie cannot actually act.”
Truffaut boldly cast Christie in a dual role, as both protagonist Guy Montag’s TV-and-pill-addicted wife and the young rebel who eventually lures him over to the pro-book liberation movement. Though some viewers see it as the picture’s fatal flaw, Scott Tobias, writing at The Dissolve, calls it a “masterstroke” that renders the nearly identical characters “the abstract representatives of conformity and non-conformity they had always been in the book.”
It’s easy to imagine what appeal the source material would have held for Truffaut, the most literary-minded leader of the French New Wave; recall the shrine to Balzac kept by young Antoine Doinel in Truffaut’s autobiographical debut The 400 Blows. By the time he went to work on Fahrenheit 451, his sixth feature, he’d become what the American behind-the-scenes trailer calls an “internationally famous French director.” But this time, circumstances conspired against him: his increasingly fractious relationship with Jules and Jim star Oskar Werner did the latter’s performance as Montag no favors, and the money having come from the U.K. forced him to work in English, a language of which he had scant command at the time.
Truffaut himself enumerates these and other difficulties in a production diary published over several issues of Cahiers du Cinéma (beginning with number 175). Yet nearly six decades later, his troubled interpretation of Fahrenheit 451 still fascinates. New Yorker critic Richard Brody calls it “one of Truffaut’s wildest films, a coldly flamboyant outpouring of visual invention in the service of literary passion and artistic memory as well as a repudiation of a world of uniform convenience and comfortable conformity.” Today we may wonder why the parasocial relationship Montag’s wife anxiously maintains with her television, which must have seemed fantastical in the mid-sixties, feels discomfitingly familiar — and how long it will be before Fahrenheit 451 gets re-adapted as a binge-ready prestige TV drama.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Sergei Bondarchuk directed an 8‑hour film adaptation of War and Peace (1966–67), which ended up winning an Oscar for Best Foreign Picture. When he was in Los Angeles as a guest of honor at a party, Hollywood royalty like John Wayne, John Ford, and Billy Wilder lined up to meet the Russian filmmaker. But the only person that Bondarchuk was truly excited to meet was Ray Bradbury. Bondarchuk introduced the author to the crowd of bemused A‑listers as “your greatest genius, your greatest writer!”
Ray Bradbury spent a lifetime crafting stories about robots, Martians, space travel and nuclear doom and, in the process, turned the formerly disreputable genre of Sci-Fi/Fantasy into something respectable. He influenced legions of writers and filmmakers on both sides of the Atlantic from Stephen King to Neil Gaiman to Francois Truffaut, who adapted his most famous novel, Fahrenheit 451, into a movie.
That film wasn’t the only adaptation of Bradbury’s work, of course. His writings have been turned into feature films, TV movies, radio shows and even a video game for the Commodore 64. During the waning days of the Cold War, a handful of Soviet animators demonstrated their esteem for the author by adapting his short stories.
Vladimir Samsonov directed Bradbury’s Here There Be Tygers, which you can see above. A spaceship lands on an Eden-like planet. The humans inside are on a mission to extract all the natural resources possible from the planet, but they quickly realize that this isn’t your ordinary rock. “This planet is alive,” declares one of the characters. Indeed, not only is it alive but it also has the ability to grant wishes. Want to fly? Fine. Want to make streams flow with wine? Sure. Want to summon a nubile maiden from the earth? No problem. Everyone seems enchanted by the planet except one dark-hearted jerk who seems hell-bent on completing the mission.
Samsonov’s movie is stylized, spooky and rather beautiful – a bit like as if Andrei Tarkovsky had directed Avatar.
Another one of Bradbury’s shorts, There Will Come Soft Rain, has been adapted by Uzbek director Nazim Tyuhladziev (also spelled Nozim To’laho’jayev). The story is about an automated house that continues to cook and clean for a family of four unaware that they all perished in a nuclear explosion. While Bradbury’s version works as a comment on both American consumerism and general Cold War dread, Tyuhladziev’s version goes for a more religious tact. The robot that runs the house looks like a mechanical snake (Garden of Eden, anyone?). The robot and the house become undone by an errant white dove. The animation might not have the polish of a Disney movie, but it is surprisingly creepy and poignant.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
Dune: Part Two has been playing in theaters for less than a week, but that’s more than enough time for its viewers to joke about the aptness of its title. For while it comes, of course, as the second half of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s influential sci-fi novel, it also contains a great many heaps of sand. Such visuals honor not just the story’s setting, but also the form of Herbert’s inspiration to write Dune and its sequels in the first place. The idea for the whole saga came about, he says in the 1969 interview above, because he’d wanted to write an article “about the control of sand dunes.”
“I’m always fascinated by the idea of something that is either seen in miniature and that can be expanded to the macrocosm or which, but for the difference in time, in the flow rate, and the entropy rate, is similar to other features which we wouldn’t think were similar,” he goes on to explain. When viewed the right way, sand dunes turn out to behave “like waves in a large body of water; they just are slower. And the people treating them as fluid learn to control them.” After enough research on this subject, “I had something enormously interesting going for me about the ecology of deserts, and it was — for a science fiction writer, anyway — it was an easy step from that to think: What if I had an entire planet that was a desert?”
That may have turned out to be one of the defining ideas of Dune, but there are plenty of others in there with it. “We all know that many religions began in a desert atmosphere,” Herbert says, “so I decided to put the two together because I don’t think that any one story should have any one thread. I build on a layer technique, and of course putting in religion and religious ideas you can play one against the other.” And “of course, in studying sand dunes, you immediately get into not just the Arabian mystique but the Navajo mystique and the mystique of the Kalahari primitives and all.” From his technical curiosity about sand, the story’s host of ecological, religious, linguistic, political, and indeed civilizational themes emerged.
Conducted in Herbert’s Fairfax, California home in 1969 by literature professor and science-fiction enthusiast Willis E. McNelly (who would later compile The Dune Encyclopedia), the interview goes down a number of intellectual byways that will be fascinating to curious fans. In its eighty minutes, Herbert reflects on everything from corporations to hippies, the tarot to Zen, and Lawrence of Arabia to John F. Kennedy. The late president’s then-just-beginning sanctification in America gets him talking about one of Dune’s threads in particular, about the “way a messiah is created in our society.” The elevation of a messiah is an act of myth-making, after all, and “man must recognize the myth he is living in.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Though Jane Austen hasn’t published a novel since 1817 — with her death that same year being a reasonable excuse — her appeal as a literary brand remains practically unparalleled in its class. This century has offered its own film and television versions of all her major novels from Sense and Sensibility to Persuasion, and even minor ones like Sandition and Lady Susan. As for the looser adaptations and Austen-inspired works in other media, it would be difficult even to count them. But to understand why Austen endures, we must go back to Austen herself: to novels, that is, and to the entertainingly innovative manner in which she wrote them.
At the beginning of her very first book says Evan Puschak, Austen “did something that changed fiction forever.” Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, has in his latest video chosen Sense and Sensibility as an example with which to explain the key technique that set its author’s work apart. When, in the scene in question, the dying Henry Dashwood makes his son John promise to take care of his three half-sisters, the younger man inwardly resolves to himself to give them a thousand pounds each. “Yes, he would give them three thousand pounds,” Austen writes. “It would be liberal and handsome! It would be enough to make them completely easy. Three thousand pounds! He could spare so little a sum with a little inconvenience.”
What, exactly, is going on here? Before this passage, Puschak explains, “the narrator is describing the thoughts and feelings of John Dashwood.” But then, “something changes: it’s suddenly as if we’re inside John’s mind. And yet, the point of view doesn’t change: we’re still in the third person.” This is a notable early example of what’s called “free indirect style,” which literary critic D. A. Miller describes as a “technique of close writing that Austen more or less invented for the English novel.” When she employs it, “the narration’s way of saying is constantly both mimicking, and distancing itself from, the character’s way of seeing.”
In his book Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style, Miller pays a good deal of attention to the later Emma, with its “unprecedented prominence of free indirect style.” When, in Austen’s hand, that style “mimics Emma’s thoughts and feelings, it simultaneously inflects them into keener observations of its own; for our benefit, if never for hers, it identifies, ridicules, corrects all the secret vanities and self-deceptions of which Emma, pleased as Punch, remains comically unconscious. And this is generally what being a character in Austen means: to be slapped silly by a narration whose constant battering; however satisfying — or terrifying — to readers, its recipient is kept from even noticing.” Austen may have been a novelist of great technical proficiency and social acuity, but she also understood the eternal human pleasure of sharing a laugh at the delusional behind their back.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland predates the invention of cinema by a couple of decades. Nevertheless, much like the “Drink me” bottle and “Eat me” presented to its young protagonist, Lewis Carroll’s fantastical tale has called out the same message to generations of filmmakers around the world: “Adapt me.” This century, though not even a quarter of the way over, has already brought us full-length Alice movies (to say nothing of television productions) from Europe, South America, and of course the United States. Those last include separate adaptations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Alice Through the Looking Glass by no less an auteur than Tim Burton.
Both of those books were also taken on by a writer-director named W. W. Young more than a century ago, though he simply combined portions of both novels into a single feature. You can watch this silent Alice in Wonderland from 1915 above, in a version its uploader calls “by far the highest quality version of this film on the internet,” assembled “primarily from two prints scanned by the Library of Congress, along with a few other sources.
Enhanced with “scene-by-scene image stabilization,” it also excises “many title cards which were not part of the original film” added to subsequent versions, “and which slowed down the film considerably.”
Running just under an hour, this reconstruction includes scenes with such widely known characters as the Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, the Mock Turtle and the Queen of Hearts. Young’s footage of such figures as Tweedledee and Tweedledum and Humpty Dumpty has, alas, been lost to time. Still, unusually for a film adaptation, this version includes much of Carroll’s parodic poem “You Are Old, Father William” — more, even, than made it into Disney’s beloved animated feature of 1951. With its stiff costumes (based on the original illustrations by Sir John Tenniel) and Long Island backdrops, Alice in Wonderland may not boast quite the same production value, but watching it now, long after the silent era, one can’t help but feel transported to another reality altogether.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
“Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov have all had their moments of irrational insight which simultaneously blurred the sentence and disclosed a secret meaning worth the sudden focal shift,” writes Vladimir Nabokov in his Lectures on Russian Literature. “But with Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art.” When, “as in the immortal ‘The Overcoat,’ he really let himself go and pottered on the brink of his private abyss, he became the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced.” Tough though that act is to follow, generations of filmmakers around the world have attempted to adapt for the screen that masterwork of a short story about the outerwear-related struggles of an impoverished bureaucrat.
One particular pair of Russian filmmakers has actually spent a generation or two making their own version of “The Overcoat”: the married couple Yuri Norstein and Francheska Yarbusova, who began the project back in 1981.
Their nineteen-seventies short films Hedgehog in the Fog and Tale of Tales had already received international acclaim from both fans and fellow creators of animation (their champions include no less an auteur than Hayao Miyazaki), with distinctively captivating effects achieved through a distinctively painstaking process. Wholly analog, it has grown only more labor-intensive as digital technology has advanced so rapidly over the past few decades — decades that have also brought about great social, political, and economic changes in their homeland.
The Atrocity Guide video above offers a glimpse into Norstein and Yarbusova’s lives and work on the “The Overcoat” — to the extent that the two can even be separated at this point. Once, they were victims of Soviet censorship and suspicion, given the ambiguous morals of their visually lavish productions. Now, in their eighties and with this 65-minute-film nowhere near completion (but five minutes of which you can see in the video above), the problem seems to have more to do with their own artistically commendable but wholly impractical creative ethos. They work to “sadistically high” standards on a film that, as Norstein believes, “should be constantly changing” — while also properly expressing the Gogolian themes of struggle, privation, and futility that can “only be created amid feelings of discomfort and uncertainty” — hence their insistence on staying in Russia.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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