The sto­ry of humans cre­at­ing mon­strous beings in their image may have peren­ni­al rel­e­vance, even if it seems spe­cif­ic to our con­tem­po­rary cul­tur­al moment. What, after all, is Oscar Isaac’s AI inven­tor in Ex Machi­na but a 21st cen­tu­ry update of Vic­tor Franken­stein? And what is Frankenstein’s mon­ster but a Goth­ic recre­ation of the Golem, or any num­ber of folk­loric automa­tons in cul­tures far and wide? It’s an age-old arche­typ­al sto­ry that seems to get an update every year.

Peo­ple have imag­ined mak­ing arti­fi­cial peo­ple, per­haps for as long as peo­ple have told sto­ries. But each iter­a­tion of that sto­ry emerges from a his­tor­i­cal matrix of par­tic­u­lar tech­no­log­i­cal, philo­soph­i­cal, and meta­phys­i­cal anx­i­eties. In the case of Ex Machi­na, we have not only a think­ing, feel­ing humanoid, but one cre­at­ed out of mass data col­lec­tion and designed to serve the pruri­ent inter­ests of a Niet­zschean ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist engi­neer. How very 2015, no?

In the orig­i­nal Franken­stein, a nov­el writ­ten by a woman, Mary Shel­ley, we have a very dif­fer­ent kind of mon­ster, born out of a Roman­tic con­ver­gence of inter­est in alche­my and the occult—the orig­i­nal domains of ear­ly mod­ern sci­en­tists like Isaac Newton—and more mod­ern, indus­tri­al sci­en­tif­ic meth­ods (hence the novel’s sub­ti­tle, The Mod­ern Prometheus). Many crit­ics have called the nov­el the first work of sci­ence fic­tion, and many, like Mau­rice Hin­dle in the intro­duc­tion to the Pen­guin Clas­sics edi­tion, have described its main theme as “the aspi­ra­tion of mod­ern mas­culin­ist sci­en­tists to be tech­ni­cal­ly cre­ative divini­ties.”

And yet, writes Ruth Franklin at the New Repub­lic—draw­ing con­vinc­ing­ly on Shelley’s own trau­mat­ic expe­ri­ences with birth, includ­ing her own—Franken­stein might “also be a sto­ry about preg­nan­cy.” Intrigu­ing as this pos­si­bil­i­ty may be, most inter­pre­ta­tions of the nov­el have seen it as “a fable of mas­cu­line repro­duc­tion, in which a man cre­ates life asex­u­al­ly.” That tra­di­tion con­tin­ues in the movies with the first film adap­ta­tion of Franken­stein, made by Edi­son stu­dios just over 100 years after the novel’s 1818 pub­li­ca­tion.

The 1910 short silent film, which you can watch above, bills itself as “a lib­er­al adap­ta­tion from Mrs. Shel­ley’s famous sto­ry,” and opens in its first scene with Vic­tor Franken­stein leav­ing home for col­lege. Two years lat­er, the Faus­t­ian mad sci­en­tist dis­cov­ers the mys­tery of life, uses the knowl­edge to make his “creature”—a sur­pris­ing­ly grotesque scene—and, appalled at the sight of it, rejects the thing in hor­ror. The rest of the sto­ry pro­ceeds along the usu­al lines, as the mon­ster, in rags and fright wig, seeks recog­ni­tion from his creator/parent and wreaks hav­oc when he does not receive it.

This first Franken­stein film, direct­ed by J. Sear­le Daw­ley, arrived two years after Edis­on’s Bronx, New York stu­dios began full and very lucra­tive oper­a­tions, and, by this time, writes Rich Drees, motion pic­tures had begun to receive unwel­come atten­tion from “moral cru­saders and reform groups, who decried the new medi­um as being dan­ger­ous and encour­ag­ing of immoral­i­ty.” Edi­son respond­ed quick­ly, fear­ing “a seri­ous threat to his bot­tom line,” and ordered that his films’ pro­duc­tion qual­i­ty and “moral tone” be improved.

Franken­stein, writes Drees, “was the per­fect choice to kick off pro­duc­tion under this new moral ban­ner. It’s a sto­ry that deals with the extremes of the human con­di­tion, life and death, and the dan­gers of tam­per­ing in God’s realm.” Edi­son released the film with the fol­low­ing dis­claimer:

To those famil­iar with Mrs. Shelly’s sto­ry it will be evi­dent that we have care­ful­ly omit­ted any­thing which might be any pos­si­bil­i­ty shock any por­tion of the audi­ence. In mak­ing the film the Edi­son Co. has care­ful­ly tried to elim­i­nate all actu­al repul­sive sit­u­a­tions and to con­cen­trate its endeav­ors upon the mys­tic and psy­cho­log­i­cal prob­lems that are to be found in this weird tale. Wher­ev­er, there­fore, the film dif­fers from the orig­i­nal sto­ry it is pure­ly with the idea of elim­i­nat­ing what would be repul­sive to a mov­ing pic­ture audi­ence. 

Five years after the Edi­son stu­dio’s short, anoth­er silent adap­ta­tion, Life With­out Soul, appeared. Made by the Ocean Film Cor­po­ra­tion, this film is now lost to his­to­ry, but it qual­i­fies as the first fea­ture-length adap­ta­tion at 70 min­utes. A review of the film, writes the blog Franken­steinia, “reveals a sto­ry that hews fair­ly close to Mary Shel­ley’s nov­el,” mak­ing a “bold attempt at cap­tur­ing the world-span­ning sweep of the tale.”

Sev­er­al dozen film adap­ta­tions in the ensu­ing years have tracked more or less close­ly to Shel­ley’s narrative—giving Franken­stein’s mon­ster a bride and hav­ing Vic­tor Franken­stein rean­i­mate his dead lover with the mind of a wrong­ly-exe­cut­ed man. But none of these films, so far as I know, has drawn out the sub­text of Franken­stein as a nov­el about preg­nan­cy and child­birth. Such an adap­ta­tion remains to be made, per­haps by the first woman direc­tor to take on a Franken­stein film.

You can find Mary Shel­ley’s Franken­stein in our col­lec­tions of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.

The film above will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Hor­ror Film, George Méliès’ The Manor of the Dev­il (1896)

Franken­wee­nie: Tim Bur­ton Turns Franken­stein Tale into Dis­ney Kids Film (1984)

Mary Shelley’s Hand­writ­ten Man­u­scripts of Franken­stein Now Online for the First Time

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Two rad­i­cal mod­ernists, James Joyce and Sergei Eisen­stein, once met in Paris in 1929 and, “depend­ing on who you read,” writes Dan McGinn, “are pur­port­ed to have dis­cussed a film ver­sion of ‘Ulysses’ and how Karl Marx’s ‘Das Kap­i­tal’ could be depict­ed onscreen.” For many years, an adap­ta­tion of Marx’s dense polit­i­cal-eco­nom­ic cri­tique seemed about as plau­si­ble as a film ver­sion of Joyce’s famous­ly dense nov­el, which takes place on a sin­gle day, June 16th—forever after known as Blooms­day.

A great admir­er of Joyce’s cin­e­mat­ic imag­i­na­tion, Eisen­stein once remarked that “for­mal­ly Joyce went as far as lit­er­a­ture could go.” Giv­en the con­ven­tion­al­ly nar­ra­tive, real­ist route film even­tu­al­ly trav­eled, Ulysses, with its recur­sive digres­sions and hyper­al­lu­sive inte­ri­or­i­ty, seemed unfilmable until Joseph Strick’s admirable effort in 1967.

Just as Eisen­stein admired Joyce’s lit­er­ary exper­i­men­ta­tion, Joyce was a lover of Eisen­stein’s exper­i­ments in film. He found­ed Ireland’s first movie house, the Vol­ta, in 1909, and though the ven­ture flopped a year lat­er, Joyce’s invest­ment in the aes­thet­ics of film sur­vived. Colm McAu­li­ffe observes that Ulysses “deployed a whole range of tech­niques such as mon­tage and rapid scene dis­solves which are more com­mon­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the cin­e­ma.” Eisen­stein “raved about the way Joyce had adopt­ed a sci­en­tif­ic approach to the sto­ry of a day in the life of one man,” writes McGinn, “putting almost every aspect of that day under the micro­scope.” After Joyce, Eisen­stein said, “the next leap is to film.”

But if Ulysses went as far as the nov­el could go, Finnegans Wake explod­ed the form alto­geth­er, dis­solv­ing the bound­aries between prose and poet­ry, sub­ject and object, his­to­ry and myth. Ulysses employed the tech­niques of film; Finnegans Wake imag­ined tech­nol­o­gy which did not even exist. It is a novel—if we are to call it such—written for the 21st cen­tu­ry, and per­haps the only way it can be adapt­ed in oth­er media is through the internet’s non­lin­ear, labyrinthine struc­tures; the online project First We Feel Then We Fall does just that, cre­at­ing a mul­ti­me­dia adap­ta­tion of Finnegans Wake that “trans­fers” the nov­el “to audio­vi­su­al lan­guage,” and demon­strates the nov­el as—in the words of The Guardian’s Bil­ly Mills—“the book the web was invent­ed for.”

Con­ceived and exe­cut­ed by Pol­ish artist Jakub Wróblews­ki and schol­ar Katarzy­na Bazarnik, the project’s “main goal,” its press release announces, “is to show com­plex­i­ty of nar­ra­tion, lan­guage and mean­ings includ­ed in this mas­ter­piece. Based on an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary analy­sis, the work trans­lates the text into the cin­e­mat­ic form.” As you can see in the short clips here, it’s a form much like we might imag­ine Eisen­stein adopt­ing to film Finnegans Wake, had Eisen­stein had access to web tech­nol­o­gy. Cen­tral to the project is “an inter­ac­tive video app… designed in order to enhance an expe­ri­ence of Joycean stream of con­scious­ness.”

Select­ed pas­sages and with­in them spe­cif­ic words, phras­es or sen­tences serve as the basis for video sequences. Shots illus­trat­ing a pas­sage are divid­ed into four sep­a­rate chan­nels. The view­ers have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to choose in real time which chan­nel they would like to watch…. This sys­tem is sup­posed to reflect the tenets of Joyce’s fic­tion: that the book can be read in dif­fer­ent ways, while the read­ers can solve its ver­bal puz­zles, yield to the melo­di­ous rhythm or look for hid­den mean­ings.

The project’s cre­ators base their adap­ta­tion on the novel’s con­cep­tu­al prin­ci­ples: “Based on a cycli­cal vision of his­to­ry, the book is a tex­tu­al mer­ry-go-round, too: it begins mid sen­tence and ends with anoth­er one bro­ken in the mid­dle, which finds it con­tin­u­a­tion on the first page: the same anew.” And although they don’t say so explic­it­ly, they also employ Eisen­stein’s the­o­ret­i­cal prin­ci­ples of mon­tage: “Pri­mo: pho­to-frag­ments of nature are record­ed; secun­do: these frag­ments are com­bined in var­i­ous ways.”

In addi­tion to a jum­ble of abstract images, the project’s short videos—as you can see in these excerpts—incorporate a wide range of voic­es, accents, and musi­cal and son­ic accom­pa­ni­ment. The only way to expe­ri­ence the full effect of First We Feel Then We Fall is to vis­it the site’s play­er and spend some time cycling through its dizzy­ing col­lec­tion of images and voic­es read­ing from the text, using the up and down arrows on your key­board to move from video to video. As a key to under­stand­ing Joyce’s work and their own adap­ta­tion, the project’s artists chose the Joycean words “Mean­der­tale” and “Meanderthalltale,”—“two of innu­mer­able puns mak­ing up the tex­tu­al labyrinth of Finnegans Wake,” neol­o­gisms that nudge us to read the book “as a ‘tall tale” wan­der­ing way­ward­ly, loop­ing back­ward and flash­ing for­ward, into the pre-his­toric past, and the ori­gins of the human species.”

If Ulysses seemed unfilmable, Finnegans Wake tru­ly is—at least in the con­ven­tion­al nar­ra­tive lan­guage film has set­tled into since Eisenstein’s time. But in using the abstract vocab­u­lary of avant-garde film and the post-mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy of the inter­net, First We Feel Then We Fall has cre­at­ed an adap­ta­tion that seems wor­thy of the book’s inno­va­tions, and that authen­ti­cal­ly trans­lates its ver­tig­i­nous­ly play­ful poet­ic strange­ness to the screen. Enter First We Feel Then We Fall here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Read Unabridged & Set to Music By 17 Dif­fer­ent Artists

Sci­en­tists Dis­cov­er That James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Has an Amaz­ing­ly Math­e­mat­i­cal “Mul­ti­frac­tal” Struc­ture

James Joyce Reads From Ulysses and Finnegans Wake In His Only Two Record­ings (1924/1929)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness