Literature, Film and Disaffection (Behluli)

Question 1

What is Film?

Answer 1

• Simply speaking, film can be understood as a “motion picture” and as an “audio-visual narrative” (Schwanecke) that is today shown in the cinema, on TV, or on Streaming Platforms
• The standard frame rate for movies (and more and more now also TV) is the use of 24 frames per second (fps) –> film is an illusion of movement created by images that are too quickly replaced to be perceived individually –> film thus “remediates” photography (Bolter and Grusin 1999)

Question 2

The Birth of Cinema

Answer 2

• Eadweard Muybridge wanted to prove that galloping horses “fly” through the use of chronophotography. In 1879, Muybridge invented the zoopraxiscope –> precursor of the invention of cinema
• 1895: French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière invented the cinématographe and screened one of the earliest films
  –> 1896: first silent film screened in Paris in. The film, recorded and projected with a cinématographe, is said to have terrified its first audiences.
• Cinema began in wonder, the wonder that reality can be transcribed with such immediacy –> affects of Banality and Wonder!

Question 3

Literature and Film

Answer 3

• Although film emerged in the late nineteenth century, the vibrant research field on film & literature was born in the 1960s and 70s (Schwanecke)
• This is perhaps due to the emergence of television (TV) in the 1940s and its proliferation during the 1950s –> moving images enter the domestic sphere, become part of everyday life
• Initial wave of research was split into three camps (Schwanecke):
  1. Led by anxieties about film overpowering literature
  2. Interested in the mutual exchanges between film and literature
  3. Conceptualize literary studies within a larger field of media studies and cultural studies –> roots of contemporary intermediality studies

Question 4

Filmic Modes in Literature: what changes since the 80s/90s?

Answer 4

• research has been less concerned with such paragonal discourses (who is more dominant and influential: film or literature?) and has been more concerned with transmedial, analogous developments that are influenced by these modern changes of modes of perception (Schwanecke).
• the invention of the camera, photography, and film have altered modern modes of perception
• In spite of the negative consequences of these technological inventions, new modes of perception can be harbored to educate a more critical public

Question 5

Four Sub-Categories of Intermediality: Literature and Film (specific by Wolf)

Answer 5

1. transmediality: both films and literary texts can have motifs, be narrative, use imagery, etc.
   Example: “Streetcar Named Desire” & “Titantic” share themes of class
2. intermedial transposition: film adaptations, e.g. from novel to movie; novelizations of films, from screen to text; etc. —> massive field of adaptation studies!
   Example: The Great Gatsby has been adapted 5 times, GoT books —> series —> influences the rest of the book? Star Wars started as a movie —> became comics
3. intermedial relations and references: the literary in film; literary evocation of formal features of film, e.g. through ekphrasis, scene setting, “zooming in”, monatage, etc.
   Ottessa Moshfegh “My Year of Rest and Relxation”, Don DeLillo “Point Omega”
4. multi- or plurimediality: film already combines multiple media (images, bodies, music, etc.) and can explicitly show characters reading books; literature is not inherently multimedial
   Example: End of “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” by Jonathan Safran Foer

Question 6

Filmic Modes in Literature: Equivalent terminology

Answer 6

• “filmic modes in literature” / “filmic writing” / “cinematic techniques”
• Filmic modes “trigger the actualization of the ‘filmic medium’ in a reader’s mind while s/he is actually reading and processing nothing but words. Filmic modes can establish the illusion of the filmic medium being (materially) present in the literary text even though it is not.”
• intermedial references

Question 7

Schwanecke’s critical toolkit to analyze three variables, which ultimately determine the filmic modes in literature

Answer 7

• What? (Which filmic features are imitated through the filmic mode?)
• How? (What does the mode look like?)
• Where? (On which textual level does the mode occur?)

Question 8

Irina Rajewsky’s broad distinction of the filmic mode

Answer 8

a. can make textual “references to film as a single product”, e.g. Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch (2013) references the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz (cf. Tartt 155); or the filmic mode
b. can make textual “references to film as a system”, e.g. Mark Danielewski’s novel “House of Leaves” (2000), references the workings of film to create suspense, confusion, and illusion

Question 9

Schwanecke’s four different conceptual categories (Filmic Modes in Literature: What?)

Answer 9

1. Technologies and materiality (cameras, projectors, film screens, film reels, pyrotechnics)
2. Semiotic systems (moving pictures, verbal language, sound and music, jumps and cuts, camera work, symbols established in post-producion)
3. Social factors and institutions (contexts of film production, practices of reception, and movie institutions)
4. Specific media products (Includes specific films such as Casablanca (1942), specific genres like ‘horror movies’ or ‘romantic comedies;’ and even particular plots, such as the marriage plot or the whodunit.)

Question 10

Filmic Modes in Literature: Where?

Answer 10

On which textual levels do filmic modes appear?
A non-exhaustive list:
* Grammatical levels –> tense, phonemes, morphemes, lexemes
* syntactic level
* formal levels
* compositional levels –> overall structure, imagery, plot design, or character constellation
* diegetic levels, extra-diegetically, paratextually –> titles of plays, poems, novels, or short stories, chapter headings, tables of contents
* material level –> film clip that can be played by using smartphone app while one reads Marisha Pessl’s Night Film (Pessl 2014)

Question 11

David Foster Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (1990)

Answer 11

• Wallace is interested in irony and other structures that create distancing affects, repress ‘sincere emotions’, and flatten out the affective spectrum that contemporary media can represent and evoke.
• Guiding Question: How has the proliferation of T.V. impacted contemporary fiction writers?
• Answer: it has institutionalized irony and turned something that was originally norm- disruptive into something normative. Hence, authors have to turn their backs on irony!