David Seed is Professor of English at the University of Liverpool.
Cinematic Fictions is an exhaustively researched account of the way cinema shaped the conception and production of American fiction in the first half of the twentieth century (the main text includes detailed analysis of seventeen major American novelists over twelve chapters and includes 1031footnotes). The objective of the book is explicit: besides the information in the subtitle, the opening sentence asks, 'given their fascination with the new medium of film, did American novelists attempt to apply cinematic methods in their own writings?' (p. 1). However, the scope of the task is given a further dimension by Seed's additional aim of arguing for 'an interchange between the media', which is his 'main subject of methodological influence and congruence' (p. 1). Additionally, and necessarily, Cinematic Fictions also pays much attention to biographical detail, telling the stories of relationships between writers, film-makers, and studios. For the most part this ambitious, engaging study succeeds in demonstrating the extensive range of influences that cinema had on American fiction of this era, and often goes beyond this, elucidating some of the tensions and nuances between the cinema, popular culture and Hollywood, and American literary modernism. Chapters are loosely chronological and laid out by theme-some looking at three or more authors and others focusing on one individual. The latter, including chapters on William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, and Nathaniel West, are some of the stronger sections of the book, successfully combining film and literary history, textual analysis, and literary biography. These are also the chapters that make the strongest case for 'interchange', mostly on account of the detail they enter into. For example, in Chapter 6 Seed examines some of the cinematic techniques evident in Faulkner's fiction, such as 'close-ups', 'point of view', or 'rendering movement in relation to a fixed point' (p. 113). Seed also, however, discusses and analyses Faulkner's relationship to Hollywood, building a convincing story from the assertion that 'like Dreiser and other novelists discussed in this volume, Faulkner disliked the way in which a writer's work was swallowed up by the Hollywood system, but revealed his enthusiasm for the film medium by incorporating cinematic allusions and techniques in his fiction' (p. 108). Cinematic Fictions has an important international aspect in that Seed identifies the impact on American authors of cinema from around the world. Sergei Eisenstein appears as an important influence on several of the authors, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's cinematic style is traced back to his appreciation of Joseph Conrad's famous preface to the Nigger of Narcisuss (1897), which emphasized the need 'before all, to make you see'. Seed's ambition and scope cause parts of some chapters to feel somewhat like sections of a reference book, in that there is only limited space for each text, author, or anecdote. However, Cinematic Fictions is superbly written throughout, and carries a distinct passion for its subject. This is an extremely valuable contribution to the scholarship of early twentieth-century American literature, early cinema, and American literary modernism. Cinematic Fictions is superbly written throughout, and carries a distinct passion for its subject. This is an extremely valuable contribution to the scholarship of early twentieth-century American literature, early cinema, and American literary modernism. David Seed's Cinematic Fictions is a study of the influence of film on the American novel from the 1910s until the advent of the Second World War. Given the extraordinary cultural influence the cinema gained within American society during this period, it should not come as a surprise that many of America's popular novelists were drawn towards the new medium, and in fact employed some of its innovations in their writings. While there have been several studies on the interaction between film and the novel-Alan Spiegel's Fiction and the Camera Eye (1976), Keith Cohen's Film and Fiction (1979) and, more recently, Susan McCabe's Cinematic Modernism (2005)-Seed is right to note that previously the emphasis has mostly been on the role modernism played in transforming both writing and the cinema simultaneously. This reveals a niche for Cinematic Fictions, which discusses film's, and more particularly Hollywood's, entire formative period, in which the studio system rose to prominence, and illustrates the constant cross-pollination between the two media. Cinematic Fictions is divided into thirteen chronologically ordered chapters, each of which is devoted to a single author, movement or genre. While some of these authors are regularly associated with the cinema (John Dos Passos and NathanaelWest), others had complicated relationships with the film industry (Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald) or frequently voiced their displeasure with the way film influenced writing (William Carlos Williams). Seed shows that there was a wide spectrum of reactions to the growing influence of film on American cultural production. Thus, while Dos Passos openly embraced Eisenstein's montage technique and West spent part of his career writing screenplays for various Hollywood studios, Williams consistently opposed the cinema, lamenting "how much we are losing in the movies". While American writers were widely divergent in their individual responses to film, Seed still identifies three dominant strands in the way they used film in their work. Authors such as John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser and John Steinbeck saw film as a novel way to record reality-a modern, mechanized way to represent an increasingly modern, mechanized America. Others, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Richard Wright, turned to filmic techniques to "[create] fantasies which repeatedly collide[d] with actuality", thereby subverting the notion of the real. Lastly, Seed identifies writers for whom film represented a new way to record interiority, although it must be noted that this category mostly remains limited to Henry Miller and Anais Nin. One of the strengths of this study lies in its attention to authors once successful but now marginalized. The last chapter of Seed's study serves as a good example here. While partly devoted to Nathanael West's success as a Hollywood novelist, Seed also devotes space to Harry Leon Wilson's 1922 novel Merton of the Movies, which at the time was held in high regard by Gertrude Stein. Seed here also revisits the writing of Carl Van Vechten-nowadays mostly known for his photography-particularly Spider Boy (1928), the story of a playwright's many mishaps in Hollywood. Lastly, this chapter also includes a detailed study of Carroll and Garrett Graham's Queer People (1930), which provides the reader with a wide-angle shot of the Hollywood phenomenon as a whole. Clearly, a book which encompasses both such a wide variety of authors and such an extensive time frame cannot be all-inclusive. In this sense, one of the deficiencies of this study is that while it tends to include lesser-known authors, it hardly focuses on smaller, more experimental film-makers and their interaction with the novel. Of course, Hollywood and film came to be synonymous to a large extent in the years leading up to the First World War, but one still feels that the voice of such early experimentalists as Joseph Cornell and Man Ray would have added to the discussion. In this sense, the book is a little too quick in equating American cinema with Hollywood. In conclusion, Cinematic Fictions is a well-researched study which shows that film, far from heralding the imminent death of the novel, in fact contributed considerably to the narrative techniques employed by American authors of the period. For most readers it will be particularly valuable for the light it sheds on lesser-known authors and their connection to film, a quality which clearly outweighs the book's neglect of film outside of Hollywood. Cinematic Fictions is a well-researched study which shows that film, far from heralding the imminent death of the novel, in fact contributed considerably to the narrative techniques employed by American authors of the period. For most readers it will be particularly valuable for the light it sheds on lesser-known authors and their connection to film, a quality which clearly outweighs the book's neglect of film outside of Hollywood.
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