The Modernist Screenplay: Experimental Writing for Silent Film [1st ed.] 9783030505882, 9783030505899

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xi
Introduction (Alexandra Ksenofontova)....Pages 1-24
Reconciling the Functional with the Literary (Alexandra Ksenofontova)....Pages 25-44
Early Script Publications: Make It Look Like “Literature” (Alexandra Ksenofontova)....Pages 45-64
The French Poetic Screenplay: Surrealism and Other Transformations (Alexandra Ksenofontova)....Pages 65-90
Silent Screenwriting in Russia: For and Against the Orthodoxy (Alexandra Ksenofontova)....Pages 91-110
The Weimar Screenplay: “Expressionism” and Literary Adaptations (Alexandra Ksenofontova)....Pages 111-130
Modernist Screenwriting and the Crisis of Reason (Alexandra Ksenofontova)....Pages 131-157
Anti-mimetic Screenwriting (Alexandra Ksenofontova)....Pages 159-191
The Crisis of Language and the Rhythmic Screenplay (Alexandra Ksenofontova)....Pages 193-221
Conclusion (Alexandra Ksenofontova)....Pages 223-234
Back Matter ....Pages 235-241

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN SCREENWRITING

The Modernist Screenplay Experimental Writing for Silent Film

Alexandra Ksenofontova

Palgrave Studies in Screenwriting

Series Editors Steven Maras Media and Communication The University of Western Australia Perth, WA, Australia J. J. Murphy New York, NY, USA Eva Novrup Redvall Department of Media, Cognition and Communication University of Copenhagen Copenhagen, Denmark

Palgrave Studies in Screenwriting is the first book series committed to the academic study of screenwriting. It seeks to promote an informed and critical account of screenwriting and of the screenplay with a view to understanding more about the diversity of screenwriting practice and the texts produced. The scope of the series encompasses a range of approaches and topics from the creation and recording of the screen idea, to the processes of production, to the structure that form and inform those processes, to the agents and their discourses that create those texts.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14590

Alexandra Ksenofontova

The Modernist Screenplay Experimental Writing for Silent Film

Alexandra Ksenofontova Freie Universität Berlin Berlin, Germany

This project was funded by the Excellence Initiative of the German Federal and State Governments, and completed at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Palgrave Studies in Screenwriting ISBN 978-3-030-50588-2 ISBN 978-3-030-50589-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50589-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Alexandra Ksenofontova Cover design by eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

The first time I read a screenplay was in 2010; ever since, I have talked about screenplays with many scholars, students, colleagues, and friends. All of them showed genuine interest in the subject, and this interest made this book possible. Each and every one of you has my deepest gratitude. Having read that screenplay in 2010—it was the book publication of the script by Wim Wenders and Peter Handke for the film Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin, 1987)—I thought it would be interesting to write a term paper about it. My advisor professor Maya Volodina was so supportive of the idea that I ended up writing not only a term paper but also my diploma about the screenplays for the films directed by Wenders. I am extremely grateful to professor Volodina for her encouragement, without which the rest would not have happened. Incidentally, I then moved to the city where the action of the script by Wenders and Handke takes place—to Berlin. Here, I dived into the history of screenwriting thanks to the wonderful library collection of Die Deutsche Kinemathek and their extremely helpful and friendly staff, especially Michael Skowronski. The result of my research at Die Deutsche Kinemathek was a master’s thesis about German silent screenplays. Writing that thesis was only possible because during my studies, I was once again lucky to encounter amazing scholars who understood and encouraged my interest in the subject: Professor Melanie Sehgal and Dr. Andree Michaelis-König. They not only advised and supported me throughout my studies, but also wrote incredibly thoughtful reviews of v

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my thesis, which made me realise that there was much more to explore in the domain of screenwriting history. Professor Sehgal and Dr. MichaelisKönig seemed to share my opinion: they both also wrote me positive letters of recommendation when I decided to apply for a Ph.D. programme with a project on silent screenwriting. For this, and for their reassuring guidance, I am immensely grateful. This book grew from the Ph.D. thesis I wrote in the following years at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies; the incredible people who work, teach, and study at the FSGS helped me conduct my research and start writing this book. Before the interview for the Ph.D. position, I had to approach the professors whom I wanted to be my advisors in case I got accepted, and that was when I first felt the exceptionally friendly and supportive atmosphere of the FSGS. PD Dr. Irina Rajewsky and Professor Georg Witte were both enthusiastic about my project proposal, and fortunately agreed to be my advisors. After I was accepted, they guided me for the entire duration of the programme with patience and care; I shall always be indebted to them for it. An important part of the Ph.D. programme were weekly meetings with my fellow Ph.D. candidates, where we discussed each other’s projects and gave and received feedback on our writing. Anna Luhn, Simon Godart, Daniel Zimmermann, Eva Murasov, Jennifer Bode, Milena Rolka, Laura Gagliardi, and Kurstin Gatt—I could never image a better group to spend three years with than you guys, and I am very thankful for your thoughts and comments on my project. The chairpersons of our weekly meetings also gave vital feedback on my research; for it, I am especially grateful to Professor Jutta Müller-Tamm, Professor Irmela Krüger-Fürhoff, and Professor Cordula Lemke. I could have never enjoyed the unique climate of the FSGS and the full scholarship it offered to its Ph.D. candidates without the support of: the School’s managing director Dr. Rebecca Mac; the research coordinator Dr. Jeanette Kördel; the administrators Nina Maßek, Claudia Ziegler, and Anita Alimadadi; and many others. Their help in all organisational matters and beyond was invaluable. When one deals with a previously neglected genre such as the screenplay, there is much material to dig up. On this quest, I got help from the staff of the Deutsche Kinemathek; from Timothy Shipe at the International Dada Archive; and from Yana Igdal who photographed for me the book I almost lost hope of finding. Many thanks to all of you! My language editor Jaclyn Arndt did an outstanding job proofreading my

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thesis; working with her was by far the most rewarding editing experience I have ever had. The members of the Reading Committee made my thesis defense a truly enjoyable event; for this, I thank Professor Jutta Müller-Tamm, Professor Elisabeth K. Paefgen, Leonie Achtnich, and my advisors PD Dr. Irina Rajewsky and Professor Georg Witte. During the three years that I spent working on the project, I had the chance to present my research at several conferences; three of them were the yearly conferences of the Screenwriting Research Network. I am deeply grateful to the members of the SRN for showing keen interest in my work. It was also at one of the SRN conferences that Steven Maras brought the book series Palgrave Studies in Screenwriting to my attention. Without Steven, this book would not exist. He supported me with constructive, indispensable feedback throughout the entire process of writing and rewriting the book and preparing it for publication; I am greatly indebted to him for all his help. Eva Novrup Redvall and J. J. Murphy also gave reassuring and helpful assessments of the project, as did anonymous reviewers from Palgrave; I sincerely thank them for their input. The work of the editorial team from Palgrave—Julia Brockley, Emily Wood, and Lina Aboujieb—is beyond any praise. My last word of gratitude goes to my family, who has been there for me at all times, and especially to my partner Alex Battaglia for being the first, exceptionally thoughtful and caring reader of this book.

Contents

1

1

Introduction

2

Reconciling the Functional with the Literary

25

3

Early Script Publications: Make It Look Like “Literature”

45

The French Poetic Screenplay: Surrealism and Other Transformations

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Silent Screenwriting in Russia: For and Against the Orthodoxy

91

4

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6

The Weimar Screenplay: “Expressionism” and Literary Adaptations

111

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Modernist Screenwriting and the Crisis of Reason

131

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Anti-mimetic Screenwriting

159

9

The Crisis of Language and the Rhythmic Screenplay

193

ix

x

10

CONTENTS

Conclusion

Index

223 235

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2

Fig. 8.1

Fig. 8.2

Fig. 8.3

Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2

Beginning of the script Administrative Ecstasy (Administrativnyy vostorg ) by Leonid Andreyev, published in his complete works in 1913 Beginning of the script Love of the State Counselor (Lyubov’ statskogo sovetnika) by Yevgeni Chirikov, published in the journal Pegas in December 1915 Fragment of the script Dynamic of the Metropolis (Filmváz. A nagyváros dinamikája) by László Moholy-Nagy, published in the journal MA in 1924 Beginning of the script Dynamic of the Metropolis (Dynamik der Gross-stadt ) by László Moholy-Nagy, published in the Bauhaus book Malerei. Fotografie. Film in 1927. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg Fragment of the script Dynamic of the Metropolis (Dynamik der Gross-stadt ) by László Moholy-Nagy, published in the Bauhaus book Malerei. Fotografie. Film in 1927. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg Scenes 2 and 3 of the script New Year’s Eve (Sylvester) by Carl Mayer, published as a separate book in 1924 Fragment of the script October (Oktyabr’ ) by Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov, published in Eisenstein’s collected works in 1971

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175 196

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This book is about film screenplays and about one of the most exceptional epochs in the history of literature—the epoch of modernism. In particular, this book is about the connection between the two. It gives the screenplay a place in literary history that is rightfully its own, and highlights the role literary context played in the history of screenwriting. In doing so, the book aims to restore the possibility of reading screenplays as literary works in their own right. This possibility has been repeatedly compromised in the course of a century-long debate on whether the screenplay is a functional or a literary genre. I do not hope to end this debate, but to give it a new direction by showing that the question asked has been the wrong one: What matters is not whether the screenplay is a functional or a literary genre, but how and why we read screenplays. In fact, what matters even more, is that we read screenplays. But wait, “we” who? This book is meant primarily for screenwriting researchers—a growing international community that exists at least since the Screenwriting Research Network was established in 2006. At the same time, it is meant for non-academic and academic readers, especially for scholars of modernism, who may have never read a screenplay or have stumbled upon one and are not sure how to approach it. Should one compare the screenplay to the film made on its basis? Or should one imagine themselves in the shoes of a filmmaker? Or should one try and read the film script as one reads a novel or a play—and what does this mean exactly? © The Author(s) 2020 A. Ksenofontova, The Modernist Screenplay, Palgrave Studies in Screenwriting, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50589-9_1

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A. KSENOFONTOVA

These are the questions guiding the first two chapters of this book—how we can read screenplays and why it matters. I propose an approach to reading film scripts that regards them both as texts embedded in film production and as potential literary works. The rest of the book puts this approach into practice. Exploring modernist screenplays from the 1920s, I show that film scripts require different kinds of attention, but also that they are worthy of attention in the first place. Across the pages of this book, the reader will encounter many new names but also many familiar ones: Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, Sergei Eisenstein, Abel Gance, Maxim Gorki, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Romain Rolland, Viktor Shklovsky—the list could go on and on. All these authors wrote fascinating screenplays that you can borrow from a library, buy at a book shop, or read in digital editions; this book will show how and why you can read them.1

Reading Film Scripts So what sort of a thing is a screenplay? On the most general level, screenplays belong to the ever-growing category of scripts that serve as a model or prototype for something. A manuscript—the original sense of the word “script”—is the basis for a printed publication; a call centre script is the prototype of a conversation; a behavioural script is the model of a social situation; a programming script is the basis for operations of computer; in the psychological theory of Eric Berne, a script is roughly the scheme of an individual’s life formed in their childhood; and in the novel The Bone Clocks (2014) by the British writer David Mitchell the Script is the model of the entire human history. A separate category of scripts, which includes screenplays, can be subsumed under the term “notations”; such scripts serve as prototypes for artworks—comics, theatrical performances, operas, video games, TV shows, films, and so on. All scripts respond to the need of planning or preparing something else—an artwork, a conversation, a life, etc.; this is their primary function and their only common feature. Scripts can assume different forms— material or immaterial, textual or non-textual; they are embedded in different sociocultural contexts and involve a different number of agents, 1 Those readers who would like to (re)read some of these film scripts right away can find a full list of published silent screenplays in English, French, German, Italian, and Russian in Ksenofontova (2020).

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from one to hundreds. I take film scripts to be material and predominantly textual artefacts, by contrast to other materials used in film production such as storyboards, mood boards, etc. Although all film scripts are texts, there is no formal textual feature common to all film scripts ever written: Some of them are written like short stories, others look more like theatrical plays, and others are indistinguishable from lyric poetry. Common to all film scripts is only the fact that they respond to the situation of film production, to use the terminology common among scholars of rhetoric, to which I return below. Because screenplays are written in response to the situation of film production, they can be used in this situation in certain ways. In particular, the screenplay allows for streamlined planning of production in terms of finances, logistics, and equipment; it serves as a guideline for actors, camera operators, editors, and other members of the film crew and optimises communication between them; and it outlines the idea of the film, towards which the collaborative effort is directed. Of course, not all film scripts are actually used in film production. Moreover, film scripts can respond to the potential situation of film production in different ways: some scripts anticipate it, and others reject it—they are called closet screenplays. In some historical cases, we do not even know for sure if a text relates to the situation of film production or not: we cannot ask the author, we have little or no contextual information, and as I mentioned earlier, there are no formal features that could definitely indicate if a text is a film script or not. In such cases, the fourth member of the quartet that defines the textual meanings—the author, the context, the text itself, and the reader—plays solo: It is the reader who decides, whether or not they read the text as a response to the situation of film production. To give this statement more substance, let us conduct a thought experiment. Let us imagine an unpublished manuscript of a short story that we know nothing about—neither who wrote it, nor under what circumstances it ended up in our possession. It is written in present tense (as screenplays often are) and describes only visually conceivable events (as screenplays often do). We have the ability to decide whether we read it as a film script or as a short story; the essential question is, what does our decision change? If we decide to read the manuscript as a short story, we would try to experience it—emotionally, in our mind’s eye, or even physically, depending on the reading practices we have learned and prefer. At the same time as we experience it through reading, we would ask the question of what the story means. The question of meanings

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and/or the question of how texts enable certain experiences constitute the core of literary reading and of literary criticism in general; contemporary literary criticism usually presumes a pluralism of possible meanings and experiences that a text can enable. If we read the manuscript in our possession as a film script, we would probably ask the same questions; at the same time, we would additionally read the manuscript as a response to the situation of film production. Our focus would therefore shift to other kinds of questions: Can we plan a film production based on this text? What kind of production does the text envisage? Does the text convey a clear idea of the film we want to make? Can other participants of the production form an idea of their contributions based on what the text describes? The type of reading that focuses on such questions can be called rhetorical or pragmatic reading, because the questions of how a text works in a certain situation preoccupy the disciplines of pragmatics and rhetorical criticism. However, for the purpose of this book I choose the term “functional reading,” as it is broader and not bound to any specific field of knowledge (though it is, of course, problematic in its own ways, which I discuss at the end of this chapter). It seems logical to assume, as Ted Nannicelli does, that “reading the screenplay qua literary work and reading the screenplay qua production plan are mutually compatible” (2013, 192); moreover, “one’s reading (and successful use) of a screenplay in the production process actually requires one to read it as a literary work” (201). If we do not understand the meaning of the script—why characters act in certain ways, why events happen the way they do, why it describes certain details and leaves out others—it would perhaps be difficult to turn the script into a film. Or would it? One of the most famous (and fictitious) anecdotes in the history of screenwriting asserts that Thomas H. Ince, father of the Hollywood studio system and the pioneer behind “assembly-line” filmmaking, would stamp the screenplays he approved for production with the instruction “shoot as written.”2 This instruction implies that the readers of the screenplay—directors, actors, camera people, and other members of the

2 Like much other anecdotal evidence originating from an early book on the history of US cinema, Lewis Jacobs’s The Rise of the American Film (1939), the existence of Ince’s stamp is unverifiable and has long been considered a mythical exaggeration (Azlant 1980, 166–67).

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film crew—should not question the meaning of the script, but read it only in regard to what it says about film production. The anecdote about Ince’s stamp encapsulates the limitations that can be imposed on the reading of film scripts in film production, especially in studio productions with a strict separation of conception and execution (see Maras 2009, 21–23). At the stage of execution, the script is not to be read as a literary work, because such reading would presume a multiplicity of possible meanings and the power of the reader to interpret the script in their own way. Moreover, in commercial studio productions screenplays are usually written so as to minimise the ambiguity of meaning and eliminate the need for interpretation; screenwriting conventions ensure that the screenplay is univocal and cannot be misread. The pervasive separation of conception and execution in film production and the dominance of screenwriting conventions are the reasons why I contend that most readers of screenplays today prioritise the functional reading over the literary. In theory, readers may consider experiencing and interpreting screenplays in their own right just as important as reading them in regard to film production, but in today’s practice they rarely do. Our readerly expectations and reading strategies, in turn, influence how publishing, teaching, awards, and other cultural institutions treat screenplays. Take, for instance, the fact that the juries of many prestigious awards for the best screenplay are not obliged to actually read screenplays; it suffices if they have seen the film. To consider whether and how this imbalance of reading practices can be approached, we can think of different readings in terms of interpretive communities.

Interpretive Communities The idea of interpretive communities has been famously introduced by the scholar of law and literature Stanley Fish. In different books Fish gives slightly different definitions of what interpretive communities are, but the general idea remains more or less stable: interpretive communities are not simply groups of people, but sets of reading expectations, principles, strategies, and practices, with which we approach texts (Fish 1980, 171). One and the same person can belong to several interpretive communities and approach one text in different ways; at the same time, multiple readers can belong to the same interpretive community

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and practice similar readings. Manfred Jahn (2001) provides a great illustration of this idea, applying the notion of interpretive communities to drama studies. Jahn distinguishes three “schools” of drama theory: they privilege, respectively, the dramatic text over its production, the production over the text, and neither. The focus of the first school is on the aesthetic qualities of the play text—the qualities that interpreters foreground in close readings and describe using expressions such as “‘poetic drama,’ ‘dramatic poetry,’ ‘drama as literature,’ ‘theatre in the mind’,” and so on (2001, 661). By contrast, the second school of thought sees as the main feature of a theatrical play not its aesthetic or sociocultural self-sufficiency but rather its potential realisation as a theatrical production. Consequently, such interpreters emphasise the intention of production inscribed in the play and its collaborative authorship; they see the interpretation of plays as defined primarily by contextual rather than text-immanent factors. Other “points on the agenda” for this second interpretive community are “establishing a distinctive discipline” and attacking text-centred theories for their “academic isolatedness” (661). Finally, the third line of thought promotes the appreciation of both the play text and the theatrical performance in their own right; in other words, this third interpretive community reads the play both as a guide for production and as on par with other literary genres. Correspondingly, “points on [this] agenda include the rehabilitation of the text as a piece of literature, and the promotion of a cross-disciplinary exchange between critics, theorists, and theatre practitioners” (662). This cross-disciplinary exchange and the fact that the third interpretive community is “the most circumspect of the three schools” (662) are the most significant advantages of this middle-ground line of thought. Jahn describes how a new interpretive community emerged on the crossroads of two others: it combined the principles of the two existing interpretive communities, without regarding them as contradictory or mutually exclusive. Even though their historical and conceptual “weight” is distributed differently, the various interpretive communities in screenwriting research are strikingly similar to those Jahn describes for drama theory. Just like Jahn presents the third interpretive community in drama studies as the one enabling the most adequate and in-depth understanding of plays, I submit that screenwriting research could benefit from developing a third interpretive community that could combine the approach

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to screenplay as a functional response to the situation of film production with the idea of screenplay as a literary genre. The benefit of such middle-ground interpretive community goes far beyond a more profound reading of screenplays and even beyond the field of screenwriting studies. After all, the subheading of Fish’s most famous book reads The Authority of Interpretive Communities —according to Fish (1980, 171), interpretive communities have significant authority and power, in particular the power to decide what counts as a text worthy of interpretation and what does not. For instance, if the screenplay’s layout, typeface, and format do not fit the contemporary standards, chances are that today’s film producers will not read the script as such (or at all). Another great example of the power interpretive communities have is the historical emergence of the interpretive community that reads theatrical plays as literary works. Before the seventeenth-century Elizabethan theatre, theatrical plays were mostly considered auxiliary texts without any distinct literary value; they were meant to be read primarily by the actors involved in theatrical productions. In other words, the dominant interpretive community prioritised the functional reading of theatrical plays over the literary. For the purpose of being enjoyed as “post-production” material, plays were occasionally published as “playbooks” in the comparatively cheap and small quarto format; it wasn’t until the folio editions of Ben Jonson’s and William Shakespeare’s works were published in 1616 and 1623, respectively, that the precedent for “drama as literature” was set (see Wall 2006). These publications indicated a shift towards, and gave power to, the interpretive community that reads and appreciates theatrical plays in their own right, detached from their productions. Reinstating the balance between functional and literary reading of film scripts and empowering a middle-ground interpretive community is thus not only about interpreting scripts from different perspectives but also about appreciating the work of screenwriters, making it visible, and challenging the power of various cultural institutions to decide what counts as a screenplay and/or literature and what does not. The example of Jonson and Shakespeare also illustrates that in regard to notations—the scripts that respond to the situation of producing another artwork—publication can be a game changer: Because publishing as cultural institution possesses considerable authority, it has the power to challenge the interpretive communities that see notations as purely functional artefacts.

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Published Film Scripts The argument of publication has been repeatedly voiced in screenwriting research; problematically, it is often applied in an undifferentiated way. Barbara Korte and Ralf Schneider argue, for instance, that “as a published text […] the screenplay definitely seems to have gained foothold within the literary system” (2000, 104). Nannicelli (2013, 155–57) even connects the publication of screenplays to the idea that they can be seen as “completed” literary works. Miguel Mota contends, in a more circumspect manner, that “the published screenplay may be more than merely a ‘blueprint’ for another text; it may be viewed more productively instead as a separate material and cultural entity” (2005, 217). As a matter of fact, publication as such neither presents a work as completed or incomplete, nor does it define readerly expectations and interpretive principles—but the specific context of publication does. To take a famous example: An ad in a sports newspaper listing the lineup of a football team for an upcoming match has a functional purpose—to inform the readers about the lineup—and is likely to be read as a functional text; the very same text published in Peter Handke’s collection of poems The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld (Die Innenwelt der Außenwelt der Innenwelt, 1969, 59) encourages and even requires us to read it as a literary work. Handke’s text is a poem called “The Formation of FC Nürnberg’s First Team of 27.1.1968” (Die Aufstellung des 1. FC Nürnberg vom 27.1.1968). This poem is an example of a literary ready-made—a text that requires different reading strategies and offers different meanings depending on the context. The same is valid, to a certain extent, for screenplays. They can be published in a variety of different contexts: as separate books, in edited collections, in literary journals, in film magazines, in newspapers, and in other kinds of press, as examples in screenwriting manuals, as a merchandise to advertise a film before its premiere (a rare case today, but common in the silent film era), as a merchandise after the film’s premiere, on the Internet, officially or unofficially, by publishing houses that specialise in literature and those that don’t, and so on. The kinds of publication that highlight the functionality of the screenplay in film production are likely to encourage a functional reading; other kinds of publication invite the readers to approach the published film script as a literary work. The entire institution of literary publication is, as Jonathan Culler (2000, 26–27) remarks, meant to communicate to the readers that the published texts

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are “worth it”—that is, they can and should be approached with specific questions and a special kind of attention that a literary reading requires. This is not to suggest that the screenplays published as books are aesthetically more valuable or in any other way “better” than those published, for instance, in screenwriting manuals, or entirely unpublished. On the contrary, in screenwriting as in literary studies, it is essential to engage critically with the tendency to canonise already published works and neglect those that have not been published, a situation frequently related to gender, racial, and other forms of discrimination. The fact of publication in a literary rather than industrially defined context simply indicates that such works already participate in the sociocultural system of literature. These screenplays have already passed the process of literary selection—they have been published, translated, republished, and so on. The published film script is thus a good starting point for a new interpretive community that wants to reinstall the possibility of literary reading of screenplays on par with functional reading. The literary context of publication increases the chances that the respective published script is “worth of” a literary reading, meaning that the script will demonstrate a pluralism, ambiguity, and complexity of possible meanings. Publication is, of course, just one of many factors that define what we expect of the texts and how we read them. Other factors include the statements of the authors, further contextual details (e.g. whether a screenplay was actually used in film production), the text itself, the paratexts (titles, subtitles, prefatory comments, etc.), and our personal reading background. There is obviously no universal feature valid for all kinds of literary works ever written that would amount to the sign saying “read this as literature!”. However, among all the listed factors, publication has been paramount for the Western modern literature. This is why, to support my argument that the screenplay has always been both a functional and a literary genre, I explored only the scripts published in certain contexts: as separate books, in literary journals, or as part of the collected works of specific authors. These scripts demonstrate that already in the 1910s, and especially in the 1920s, the film scripts already made an appearance on the European literary arena. One glance at the published film scripts from the silent film era in Europe suffices to recognise that most of them resemble neither contemporary conventional screenplays, nor the conventional screenplays from the 1920s, such as we know them from the surviving manuscripts and the research (e.g. Schwarz 1994). The published scripts demonstrate a great

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variety of different formats, styles, narrative techniques, and layouts. Some of these scripts challenge the ideas about what counts as a screenplay and what does not, foregrounding their distinction from conventional screenplays. Other scripts challenge the common ideas about what counts as literature and what does not, parading their distinction from other literary publications. Some scripts do both. The works that commit “to raising fundamental questions about the very nature and being of […] art itself” (Bray et al. 2015, 1)—be it the art of filmmaking, the art of screenwriting, or the art of literature—can be described as experimental.

Experimental Film Scripts: The How and What of Screenwriting In the intuitive meaning of the term, an experimental screenplay is one that opposes the norms and conventions of screenwriting, which Ian W. Macdonald (2013, 10) prominently termed “the screenwriting orthodoxy.” Macdonald derived this term from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological concept of “doxa” (23–25), and it immediately caught on in research. In simple terms, screenwriting orthodoxy codifies the “rights” and “wrongs” of writing a screenplay, determining its appearance, style, and narrative structure. Incidentally, Fish’s idea of interpretive communities is also parallel to, and perhaps informed by, Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and doxa (Buchanan 2010, 252). If readerly expectations and practices define interpretive communities, then the dominant expectations and practices determine the doxa—the dominant interpretive community. Saying that experimental screenplays challenge the dominant interpretive communities thus amounts to saying that they challenge a significant part of the screenwriting orthodoxy—the part that defines how we read screenplays. Compared to the well-established terms “experimental film” and “experimental literature,” the term “experimental screenplay” has not yet been widely used in research—for instance, film scholar Scott Macdonald uses it only once in the collection of experimental screenplays he edited, Screen Writings: Texts and Scripts by Independent Filmmakers (1995). Instead, he writes of “inventive texts and scripts independent filmmakers have written” (11); J. J. Murphy (2019) and Steven Maras (2009) use the terms “alternative scripting” and “alternative approaches” to screenwriting; so do Ken Dancyger and Jeff Rush in their practice-oriented manual Alternative Scriptwriting: Writing Beyond the Rules (1991). All these terms are sound: Experimental film scripts are always inventive, they

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are today usually written by independent filmmakers, and they certainly present an alternative to mainstream and conventional film scripting. However, I prefer the term “experimental screenplay” for several reasons. Firstly, it parallels the terms “experimental literature” and “experimental film,” signalling that “experimental screenplay” may be just as worthy of scholarly and public attention. Secondly, some of the screenplays I examine throughout this book were not written as an alternative to orthodox screenwriting: their authors were either unaware of the orthodoxy of the time, or this orthodoxy simply did not yet exist in the strict form that it has today. Lastly, in regard to the scripts that were written against the dominant norms of screenwriting, the term “experimental” emphasises that these scripts do not simply present an alternative choice; they actively “demonstrate the limitations of conventional industry screenplays” (Macdonald 1995, 10–11), undermining and subverting the existing orthodoxy. Moreover, they can “provide different ways of thinking about [film] production” (Maras 2009, 129). While the history of screenwriting orthodoxy draws attention to the industry’s pursuit of optimisation, experimental screenplays tell a history of misunderstandings, conflicts, errors, and inefficacies in film production, which are paramount in appreciating and studying film as an artistic practice. In short, experimental screenplays are active agents in the rivalry between different interpretive communities in screenwriting and filmmaking. When being challenged, the dominant interpretive communities often resist and try to discredit the texts and agents that do not fit into their interpretive framework. In regard to screenplays, this resistance manifests itself, among other things, in the attribute “unshootable,” which is often applied to screenplays or single elements of the scripts. Symptomatically, different interpretive communities use the term “unshootable” with different purposes. Screenwriting manuals and “how-to” books, which focus on the production-related side of screenwriting, call “unshootable” the elements of screenplays that cannot be immediately visualised and “executed” in film production. By contrast, literary scholars tend to call film scripts “unshootable” to highlight their aesthetic self-sufficiency and “free” the texts in question from any hint at a utilitarian purpose (e.g. Wall-Romana 2013, 177–204). Adopting the term “experimental screenplay” is paramount for research, if we accept the possibility that a text can require a functional and a literary reading at the same time. By using “unshootable” as the default term for any kind of screenplay that transcends the normative poetics of screenwriting in a radical way,

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we marginalise such screenplays and thereby reinforce the unchallenged dominance of screenwriting orthodoxy and the existing interpretive communities. As literary scholar Martin Puchner (2002, 13–14) demonstrated for theatrical plays, a text’s quality of being “unstageable” is a matter of historical contingency rather than a textual feature. “What today is considered a closet drama because it does not correspond to the general use, the aesthetic, technical, dramaturgical, and moral possibilities and customs of theatre or theatrical text, can tomorrow be brought on stage with great success” (Marx 2012, 293); the logic of this quote is fully applicable to screenplays and film production. To be clear, I do not deny the existence of the so-called closet screenplays, i.e. deliberately unshootable scripts; rather, I argue that both practitioners and researchers tend to ascribe the quality of being “unshootable” to screenplays arbitrarily, based on the respective individual’s ideas about what is “shootable” and what is not. Instead, I propose preserving the label “unshootable screenplays” for those texts that explicitly identify themselves as such. For example, only one author from all French surrealist screenwriting I discuss in Chapter 4, Benjamin Fondane, explicitly characterises his screenplays as unshootable (Fr. intournable); other surrealist authors composed, in my terminology, experimental scripts. Experimental screenplays do even more than question the dominant ideas about what screenplays are and how they should (not) be written; they also draw attention to a widespread, historically persisting misconception about screenwriting, namely that the format and the style of screenplays are somehow separate from the kinds of stories that screenplays tell. Manuals and handbooks on screenwriting tend to give separate advice on how to write screenplays and what to write about, but hardly ever reflect on the connection between the two. Some few chapters cover the style, layout, and formatting commonly used in screenwriting, and other chapters teach (aspiring) screenwriters how to structure the story, develop the characters, choose a perspective on the events, etc. As a result, practitioners, theorists, and even scholars of screenwriting often seem to be under the impression that these two aspects are not immediately connected; or, that how the screenplay tells a story is less important than what it tells. By “how” I mean not only the structure of the story—its arrangement of time and space, the narrative perspective, and so on— but also the choice of words, the length and complexity of the sentences, the way the text is arranged on the page, the way it sounds when read

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out loud—all those and many other things that constitute the notion of style. Screenwriting orthodoxy often makes the style and formatting of the screenplay appear as a container waiting to be “filled” with content, to the extent that today, some of the rights and wrongs of screenwriting related to its style and format are simply built into screenwriting software. Developing unusual writing styles, formats, and narrative techniques, experimental screenplays show that no story exists as an abstract entity, transferrable from one medium to another; rather, a story is constituted by the specific choices made within a certain medium—for instance, a verbal story is always the words it is told with (as well as many other choices that come with the medium of verbal communication, written or oral).3 We may become aware of this fact in everyday communication, when we are offended by purely chosen words or rightfully insist on using politically correct terms, as this word choice constitutes the respective story; critics are always aware of this fact when analysing functional and literary texts. Yet because screenplays have for so long remained disregarded, “invisible” texts, both writers and readers seem to have forgotten that same rule applies to film scripts as to any other written, especially narrative, documents: What they tell is how they tell it. Or, in narratological terms: The “story” of a script is nothing more than a construct that we, the readers, abstract from the “discourse” of a given text, from the totality of words and structural choices.4 More often than not, how a text is written is exactly what it is written about; and consequently, how the screenplays are written practically amounts to what kinds of stories they can and cannot tell. Scholars of screenwriting have repeatedly voiced concerns that regarding the screenplay from a literary perspective “takes the script out of its production context and potentially reinforces a fracture between conception and execution that impacts on the way we might imagine creativity and expression, and think about the [film] medium” (Maras 3 In this context, the materiality of the medium can also play an important role; taking it into account is the next step towards a deeper understanding of how screenwriting works, both in pragmatic and literary terms. Simon Bovey (2018) has gathered some highly interesting material on how such factors as paragraph length, page design, graphic and pictorial elements, and formatting can play a significant role in the ways we read contemporary screenplays. 4 On the history of and the differences between the two-tiered models of narrative constitution, including that of story and discourse, see, for instance, Bode (2011, 64–75) and Scheffel (2014, 509–13).

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2009, 5; see also Macdonald 2013, 175; Price 2010, 27–31). However, an equally important concern is, in my view, that reading the screenplay only in regard to the situation of film production reduces screenwriting to the creation of a narrative carcass and separates how something is being told from what is being told. As a result, the impression may arise that those aspects of screenwriting orthodoxy that concern, for example, the style and layout of the screenplay do not also define the screenplay’s potential of storytelling. Experimental screenplays show that the screenwriting orthodoxy, especially its rights and wrongs related to style, cannot and should not be taken for granted, because new ways of storytelling are impossible without new ways of writing. Experimentation in screenwriting (as well as in other literary genres) is thus not only about deviating from the “norm” and challenging the latter, but rather about drawing attention to the text itself—to the ways it constitutes meanings, to the process of writing, to its possibilities and limitations. The subject of experimental screenplays is always the screenplay itself, and only occasionally and as a result—the screenwriting orthodoxy. It is therefore hardly surprising that experimental screenwriting flourished at the time when the screenplay had just appeared as a genre: that time—the 1920s—encouraged the authors to reflect on what the screenplay is and can be.

The Modernist Screenplay In the terminology I propose, an experimental screenplay is a specific kind of film script, and a modernist screenplay—a specific kind of experimental screenplay. While literary modernism is usually dated from approximately 1885 to 1945, I focus mostly on modernist scripts written in the 1920s. There are very few published scripts prior to 1917, and the advent of sound cinema in 1930 introduced a major break in the consistency of screenplay as a genre. Moreover, no other epoch produced such a multitude of published experimental scripts as the Roaring Twenties. This study alone, which explores only screenplays published in book form or literary journals, mentions over one hundred experimental screenplays composed between 1917 and 1930 by more than fifty different authors in French, German, and Russian. The epoch of modernism is commonly linked to the revolt of art and the artistic individual against the constraints of the everyday, the

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mercantile, the reason(able), and, most notably, against mimetic representation: of mimetic representation. The results of these revolts are well known: expressionism, Dada, surrealism, cubism, to name only a few. In this context, the idea of modernist authors composing screenplays—texts with a practical purpose, potentially useful to the capitalist, rationalised, profit-oriented film studios, texts that need to represent in order to be useful—can be met with scepticism. Consequently, the two main strategies of dealing with modernist screenwriting have so far been to ignore or to deny it. The strategy of ignoring modernist screenplays does not need much commenting: The almost complete absence of research on the screenwriting of most authors whose work I tackle in this book speaks for itself. Equally telling is the fact that screenplays are hardly ever mentioned in the numerous studies that explore interactions between modernist film and literature. By failing to mention screenplays among modernist literary works dealing with film, the research implicitly places screenwriting as a craft or simply a way of earning money in opposition to literary writing and art making. However, this opposition has little foundation. Prose, lyric poetry, and plays are not entirely free from mercantile concerns, since they are embedded in the literary market and theatre industry. Being embedded in the film industry, screenplays can require the same interpretative effort and grant the same aesthetic and cognitive pleasure as other literary works. Moreover, as I show throughout the book, many authors took up screenwriting precisely because it is a practical activity and as such it opposes the idea that writing has no impact on the “real world.” As the products of practical engagement with the film industry, screenplays composed by literary authors clearly testify to these writers’ fight against artistic and intellectual elitism. This is why, when sending a screenplay to a journal for publication in 1921, Alfred Döblin emphasised it was “a thing that I sign with my name” (1970, 116)5 —as many other authors of the time, Döblin took a stand against the ignoble status screenwriting had compared to other kinds of literary writing. Another strategy of dealing with modernist screenwriting is to deny it by explaining away modernist screenplays as “unshootable,” that is, not meant to be realised as films, but written only for reading. A major

5 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

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task of this book is to show that modernist aesthetics is, in fact, compatible with the idea of the screenplay as a functional document potentially useful in film production. Precisely because screenplay is a document deeply embedded in the film industry, modernist authors could employ screenwriting to undermine what they saw as a rationalised and mercantile industry “from the inside.” In this way, the modernist screenplay became a kind of double agent—potentially serving the industry, yet simultaneously sabotaging it with challenging, seemingly “unshootable” ideas. I thus suggest abandoning the view on modernist literature as intertwined with film as a new medium but distanced from the mundane, commercial concerns of the film industry. Instead, I propose acknowledging that modernists willingly got their hands “dirty” in the film industry, exploring the subversive potential of screenplay as a simultaneously functional and literary genre. This is why I argue that both a functional and literary reading is indispensable for understanding and appreciating modernist screenplays. To provide a first impression of how such a combined reading could work, let us consider the blooming of modernist screenwriting from two perspectives. Firstly, it can be seen as a consequence of writing in the absence of screenwriting orthodoxy. The European film industries started developing their normative poetics of screenwriting even before World War I, but at the time it was not nearly as widespread as in the second half of the twentieth century. In the United States, the more or less standardised “continuity script appears to have functioned […] from around 1913 to the end of the silent era,” whereas in Europe only “the later 1920s saw a movement towards greater industrial stabilization, associated with both post-war reconstruction and envious glances towards the industrial efficiency of Hollywood” (Price 2013, 103). In other words, the screenwriting orthodoxy started developing in Europe only at the end of the 1920s together with the assembly-line model of film production. From the perspective of historical production studies, experimental screenwriting proliferated in Europe in the 1920s because, in the absence of a strict orthodoxy, writing any screenplay was by itself an experiment. A different way of looking at the same phenomenon can be found in a 1925 special issue of the French literary review Les Cahiers du Mois . The editors André and François Berge explain their decision to dedicate an entire special issue to screenplays as follows: “It seemed to us in some ways that a precise and rapid literary genre (as this one can be) corresponded to a desire of modern thought; and we were not the

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only ones to have this opinion” (1925, 131). Extending the logic of this passage to the entire 1920s, one can say that the screenplay answered some specific interests of modernist thought. Viewing modernist screenwriting as enabled by the loose conditions within the film industry and as encouraged by modernist literature, art, and philosophy are two mutually complementing perspectives. The same double perspective applies if we consider why so many experimental screenplays were published in literary journals or in book form during the 1920s. On the one hand, the European film industries went through a deep financial crisis after WWI, and the resources for film production were extremely scarce. Since many experimental scripts may seem “unshootable,” go outside the mainstream genres, and are politically challenging, it is hardly surprising that they never went into production; the authors of these scripts then “compensated” for their failure in the film industry by publishing the screenplays on the blooming literary market. At the same time, it can be argued that, precisely because the correspondences between experimental screenwriting and some modernist literary experiments were so evident, the literary market was genuinely interested in this emerging genre, and this interest resulted in a proliferation of publication. Just like the modernist screenplay itself, this study attempts to balance between various methodological poles, taking into account both the context of the film industry and of literary movements, various modernist concepts of film and literature, and the materiality of both media. The present book thus understands itself as a contribution to a middle-ground interpretive community in screenwriting studies, which builds upon the methods and knowledge of the existing communities, showing that their approaches are not mutually exclusive but rather complementary.

The Scope and Structure of This Study This book explores published modernist screenplays written in French, German, and Russian; these languages demarcate only the limits of the study’s scope and corpus, but not of experimental screenwriting. For instance, the research of Silvio Alovisio (2005) shows that experimental silent screenwriting also flourished in Italy. It is possible that further European and non-European cultures did not lack their own share of modernist screenwriting—exploring it is a task for further research. Even so, this study does not suggest that experimental screenwriting is universal

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to all modernisms, but sees it as a practice conspicuously present across some of them. As keen as I was to highlight the experimental screenplays of female authors, too few are available in published form to provide a focus; the few texts that I have discovered are discussed in Chapters 3–6. It is my hope that, by contributing to the general visibility of screenwriting and particularly its historiography, this study might encourage further publication of screenplays by female authors and fill this existing gap. In this chapter I have argued that screenplays can be read from two different but complementing perspectives: in regard to how they respond to the situation of film production and in regard to what they mean as autonomous literary works. I have opted for a middle-ground interpretive community that could combine these perspectives and approach the screenplay as a simultaneously functional and literary genre. The publication context and the issues of convention and experimentation are the key factors that define how readers approach screenplays. This is why I have contended that published modernist screenplays make the need for a double, functional-literary reading especially evident. In Chapter 2 I address two reasons why a middle-ground interpretive community is reluctant to emerge in screenwriting studies: the seemingly problematic implications of the term “literature” and the so-called incompleteness problem. I show that the historical “screenplay as literature” debate implies at least three different concepts of literature, all of which are normative and have little relation to contemporary literary criticism. Similarly, the idea of the screenplay as essentially incomplete implies at least three different understandings of incompleteness, none of which precludes a literary reading of screenplays. The chapter then shows how a double perspective on screenplays works in practice—the practice of reading screenplays and the practice of writing the history of screenplay as a genre. The Following Chapters 3–6 construct the main historical narrative of the book. It details the cultural contexts in which modernist screenwriting flourished and the literary publications of screenplays emerged. These chapters are deliberately opposed to the Chapters 7–9, which are structured according to overarching modernist concerns rather than cultural-linguistic boundaries. This structure reflects the fact that both the context of national literatures and the transcultural aesthetic contexts are defining for the history of screenwriting.

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Chapter 3 surveys the earliest publications of screenplays in Europe, discovering their place in the literary field of the 1910s. It argues that those early publications justified the idea of publishing screenplays by adjusting their layout and style to those of drama or short prose, thus highlighting the affinities between screenplays and other literary genres. Chapter 4 explores the blooming of poetic screenwriting in 1920s France. I argue that the screenplay became a popular genre among the poets because the possible transformation of poetic scripts into film opposed the idea that literature generates no material change in the world. The desired prospect of the screenplay becoming a film manifested itself in the motif of fiction turning into reality, ubiquitous in French modernist scripts. Chapter 5 explores how the screenplay became an important agent of renewal in post-revolutionary Russian literature. The laconic, nonfigurative language of conventional screenwriting corresponded to the idea of a “literature of fact,” popular among the Russian avant-gardes. At the same time, conventional screenplay style brought out the irony in the politically subversive scripts of the authors who were critical of the new Soviet regime. Chapter 6 focuses on silent screenwriting in the Weimar Republic and in Austria. It debunks the myth of so-called expressionist screenplays, and highlights instead literary adaptations and popular neo-romantic fiction as key literary contexts for German screenwriting. Even though modernist screenplays developed in very different cultural contexts, they feature many correspondences, which stem from their common modernist concerns. This argument is developed in detail in Chapters 7–9; each takes five published screenplays as case studies. I single out three overarching phenomena that shaped the screenplay as part of modernist literature: the crisis of reason (Chapter 7), the crisis of mimetic representation (Chapter 8), and the crisis of language (Chapter 9). These common modernist concerns do not neutralise the national specifics but rather coexist with them, just like the national specifics in turn coexist with literary programmes of single authors or authorial collectives. The premise of this book is therefore a plurality of modernisms, which is on a par with modernism as a distinctive historical epoch. The distinction between the three crises is admittedly somewhat artificial and serves primarily the purpose of maintaining the structure of the book. In fact, all three crises are inextricably linked between themselves and to the political crisis of liberalism, which is equally central to my argument. Although the crisis of language is often regarded as part of the crisis of mimetic representation, I separate them as relating to literature

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and visual arts, respectively, because of the distinct implications they had for screenwriting. Chapter 7 considers how silent screenwriting responded to the modernist crisis of reason. It examines screenplays by Philippe Soupault, Pierre Albert-Birot, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Benjamin Péret, and Bertolt Brecht. These screenplays refute a purely rational understanding of the everyday, labour, the body, and human relations, aiming to re-enchant the overly technical and rationalised world. To this end, the screenplays draw inspiration and borrow techniques from contemporaneous literature—from a first-person narrator to free indirect discourse. Employing unusual writing techniques, these modernist screenplays undermine the rational practices of film production and with them, the excessive rationalism of capitalist societies. Chapter 8 examines screenplays that react to the modernist crisis of mimetic representation, challenging the idea that art and literature are confined to representing reality. These screenplays include works by Fernand Léger, Dziga Vertov, Antonin Artaud, and László Moholy-Nagy. To put the ideas for their anti-mimetic film projects into words, these authors came up with unusual aesthetic decisions, such as elliptical writing or an experimental layout. As a result, their scripts reveal complex and ambiguous meanings, are open to various interpretations, and are inscribed into the realm of anti-mimetic modernist literature. Chapter 9 argues that a number of modernist screenplays reacted to the crisis of language by means of rhythmic screenwriting. Multiple authors, including Carl Mayer, Louis Delluc, Sergei Eisenstein, and Isaac Babel, held that verbal language could adequately convey neither individual traumatic experiences, nor the complex concepts such as time or history, nor the specifics of other media, including film. Their rhythmic screenwriting attempts to overcome these deficiencies of verbal communication by approximating the various rhythms they discovered in film and in different facets of human life. Chapter 10 recapitulates the main arguments of the book, considering why both screenwriting studies and literary criticism could benefit from viewing the screenplay as a simultaneously functional and literary work. I argue that such view amounts to a pluralist approach to scripts—an approach that recognises different formats and forms of screenwriting and literary writing. I conclude by casting a brief look at experimental screenwriting after the transition to sound film.

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Three Key Terms Screenplay and script. Screenwriting researchers have been disputing whether the term “screenplay” can be used as a general designation of the genre. Maras (2009, 79–81) has criticised the generic use of the term, emphasising that “screenplay” refers to a specific script format; this term became established in the United States only in the 1940s (86). Instead, Maras uses the more general terms “script” and “scenario,” which imply neither a specific format nor a specific type of film production. “Screenplay” is a narrower term than “script” or “scenario.” It emphasises the connection of the respective text to film or “screen”; more importantly, the term “screenplay” highlights the importance and the value of the text, placing it alongside theatrical play as literary genre. The question of terminology depends, then, on the approach we adopt: in relation to production context, the terms “script,” “scripting,” and “scenario” are more accurate as generic terms; in regard to the questions of aesthetics, literary reading, and the text’s autonomous value, the terms “screenplay” and “screenwriting” are more advantageous. In accordance with the middle-ground approach I promote, I use both “screenplay” and “script” as synonymous generic terms throughout the book. None of the scripts I discuss feature these terms in their (sub)headings, simply because none of them were originally written in English. I therefore try to translate the original (sub)headings of the screenplays as accurately as possible, following two principles. Firstly, literal translation is not always the most suitable. Even the term “scenario,” which seems to have direct equivalents in French, German, and Russian (scénario; Szenarium; ccenapi), has in fact a different history and different implications in each of the languages. Secondly, (sub)headings do not always reflect the format and the specifics of the text; their meaning can be deduced only on a case-by-case basis. For example, the screenplay to the famous film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 1920) features the subheading “Fantasy film novel in 6 acts” (Mayer et al. 1995, 47), even though it is what we would today call a master scene script. (Sub)headings can be very important for interpretation but must be treated with caution. Functional and literary reading. The term “functional” is problematic in several regards. My biggest concern as a literary scholar is that the distinction between functional and literary reading makes it look like literature has no functions. This is of course not the case. Literary genres can,

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in fact, be seen as reactions to specific sociocultural needs; their function is, then, to articulate these needs and offer solutions to them. Another major issue is that the screenplay does not only function in the situation of film production, but it also defines and shapes this situation in turn. I discuss these two matters at length in Chapter 2. The reason why I use the expressions “functional reading” and “functional purpose” despite these concerns is this: These expressions describe not what the screenplay is or does but how we read it. We can read even the most poetic screenplay focusing only on how the poetic elements can be interpreted and implemented in a film production—I call this a functional reading. At the same time, we can read a screenplay filled with technical indications as a literary work, exploring the aesthetics of technical indications and their significance in relation to the story (e.g. is it a story about technology? or perhaps about film production?). I hold that we can and often should perform both readings at the same time, regardless of how the screenplay is written; the functional and the literary therefore do not form an opposition but are scalable constructs that describe how we approach texts. This book is about reading screenplays and not about what screenplay or some parts of it are essentially. Modernist and modernisms. The term “modernist” comes from the anglophone tradition; therefore, most authors whose work I discuss throughout the book did not identify themselves as modernists. Subsuming different movements and “isms” under the term “modernisms,” I highlight the common concerns of the authors and texts I discuss, such as the crisis of reason and the mistrust of language, and the common solutions they develop in response to these concerns. These shared features coexist with specific cultural contexts and with individual views and practices of the authors. The plural form of the noun—“modernisms”—emphasises this variety of contexts and embodiments of modernist thought. Beside the shared concerns with modernity, common to modernist writings is experimentation in the sense I have discussed above—they are conspicuously self-referential, insofar as they question the nature of writing, reading, and the ways in which the texts produce meaning. For the purpose of this book, I do not distinguish between modernisms and the avant-gardes, since the grounds on which these terms could be distinguished are irrelevant for the scripts I consider. They are all equally politicised; they are all embedded in the mass culture of film, as most modernists celebrated film precisely for its popular, “lowbrow” origins; and they were all written in Europe during the 1920s. The

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term “modernist” also underscores this common historical framework, in contrast to the terms “experimental” and “avant-garde,” which can be applied to contemporary art and literature, too. ∗ ∗ ∗ I italicise all script titles regardless of whether they have been published or not, and regardless of the context in which they have been published. This editorial decision reflects the approach to screenplays this book proposes. Titles of novels, plays, and poems are commonly italicised, especially in studies where many of them are mentioned; because I argue that screenplays deserve the same kind of attention as other literary genres, treating their titles as we treat the titles of other literary works is the logical first step on the way towards a literary reading of screenplays.

References Alovisio, Silvio. 2005. Voci del silenzio: La sceneggiatura nel cinema muto italiano. Milan: Editrice Il Castoro. Azlant, Edward. 1980. “The Theory, History and Practice of Screenwriting, 1897–1920.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison. Berge, André, and François Berge, eds. 1925. “Scénarios.” Special issue, Les Cahiers du Mois 12. Bode, Christoph. 2011. The Novel: An Introduction. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell. Bovey, Simon. 2018. “SHOW BUSINESS: The Development of a Language for the Screenplay.” Paper presented at the 11th International Conference of the Screenwriting Research Network (SRN), Milan, Italy, September 14. Bray, Joe, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale. 2015. Introduction to The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, edited by Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons and Brian McHale, 1–18. London: Routledge. Buchanan, Ian. 2010. A Dictionary of Critical Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Culler, Jonathan. 2000. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Döblin, Alfred. 1970. Briefe. Edited by Walter Muschg and Heinz Graber. [Vol. 13 of] Ausgewählte Werke in Einzelbänden. Olten, Switzerland: Walter. Fish, Stanley. 1980. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Handke, Peter. 1969. Die Innenwelt der Außenwelt der Innenwelt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

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Jahn, Manfred. 2001. “Narrative Voice and Agency in Drama: Aspects of a Narratology of Drama.” New Literary History 32: 659–79. Korte, Barbara, and Ralf Schneider. 2000. “The Published Screenplay—A New ‘Literary’ Genre?” AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 25 (1): 89–105. Ksenofontova, Alexandra. 2020. “Drehbuch im Stummfilm: Eine Bibliographie [Silent Film Screenplay: A Bibliography].” Medienwissenschaft: Berichte und Papiere 188. http://berichte.derwulff.de/0188_20.pdf. Macdonald, Ian W. 2013. Screenwriting Poetics and the Screen Idea. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Macdonald, Scott, ed. 1995. Screen Writings: Texts and Scripts by Independent Filmmakers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Maras, Steven. 2009. Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice. London: Wallflower. Marx, Peter W. 2012. “Lesedrama.” In Handbuch Drama, edited by Peter W. Marx, 293–95. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler Verlag. Mayer, Carl, Hans Janowitz, and Robert Wiene. 1995. Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari: Drehbuch von Carl Mayer und Hans Janowitz zu Robert Wienes Film von 1919/20. FILMtext. Munich: Edition Text + Kritik. Mota, Miguel. 2005. “Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio: ‘The Screenplay as Book’.” Criticism 47 (2): 215–31. Murphy, J. J. 2019. Rewriting Indie Cinema: Improvisation, Psychodrama, and the Screenplay. New York: Columbia University Press. Nannicelli, Ted. 2013. A Philosophy of the Screenplay. New York: Routledge. Price, Steven. 2010. The Screenplay: Authorship, Theory and Criticism. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2013. A History of the Screenplay. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Puchner, Martin. 2002. Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-theatricality, and Drama. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Scheffel, Michael. 2014. “Narrative Constitution.” In Vol. 2 of Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid, 507–20. Berlin: De Gruyter. Schwarz, Alexander. 1994. Der geschriebene Film: Drehbücher des deutschen und russischen Stummfilms. Munich: Diskurs Film. Wall, Wendy. 2006. “Dramatic Authorship and Print.” In Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, edited by Garrett A. Sullivan Jr., Patrick Cheney, and Andrew Hadfield, 1–11. New York: Oxford University Press. Wall-Romana, Christophe. 2013. Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry. New York: Fordham University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Reconciling the Functional with the Literary

In the previous chapter, I have argued for an interpretive community that reads screenplays from both functional and literary perspective. There are two main reasons why such an interpretive community has not yet emerged in screenwriting research. The first reason is the reservations as to what the term “literature” implies: researchers worry that applying this term to screenplays will entail particular ideas of authorship, canon, work, and so on. Or, to put it simply, there is a concern that “literature” will define what the screenplay is and should be. I start this chapter by showing that the “screenplay as literature” debate has indeed so far been mostly confined to normative notions of literature. “Normative” means that these notions establish certain qualities as defining all kinds of literature, whereas they are actually valid only for a (usually small) part of it. I argue that contributors to the “screenplay as literature” debate have largely ignored the role of the readers, and consequently of different interpretive communities, in defining what counts as literature and what does not. Bringing the readership back into focus allows avoiding too narrow ideas about what literature is—the ideas that the screenwriting research worries about. What can and should be criticised, then, is not the term “literature” itself, but normative ideas of literature. A second concern for many screenwriting researchers is the idea of a literary reading: even if we agree that screenplays belong to the broad

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Ksenofontova, The Modernist Screenplay, Palgrave Studies in Screenwriting, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50589-9_2

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and malleable category of literature, there still remains a sense that screenplays cannot be read in the same way as we read novels or plays. This idea basically comes down to the so-called incompleteness problem: Screenplays, so this idea goes, are constantly being re-written and do not exist in a final, completed version; therefore, they cannot be read as literary works. Ted Nannicelli (2013, 159–61) attempted to do away with this objection by showing that many famous literary works are also literally incomplete and do not have a definitive version; however, this is not enough. As I show further in the chapter, there are actually at least three different understandings of the screenplay’s incompleteness, each implying a different reading focus. I argue that none of these ideas precludes a literary reading of screenplays—a reading that, as I have established in the previous chapter, asks how the screenplay constructs experiences and meanings beyond the situation of film production. Having addressed these two possible objections against film scripts as both functional and literary works, I set out to explore how such a double perspective actually works in practice. I give an example of how a passage from a contemporary script can be read from both functional and literary perspective, and analyse in detail what it means to write the history of the screenplay as simultaneously functional and literary genre.

“Screenplay as Literature”: The Wrong Debate The idea to recognise screenplays as literature had a noble and reasonable origin—it was primarily about appreciating the work of screenwriters. One of the first people to voice this idea was vaudeville critic and screenwriter Epes Winthrop Sargent, who wrote in his Technique of the Photoplay in 1912, “conditions move rapidly to the recognition of the scenario writer as a contributor to dramatic literature” (1912, 3). In the second edition of his how-to book, Sargent restated, “the Photoplay is by no means the least of the branches of literary work” (1913, 6). The focus of Sargent’s statements is on the screenwriter and their labour; his characterisation of the screenplay as literature implies that the work of screenwriters should be credited, appreciated, and legally protected in the same ways as the work of literary authors. Similarly, German writer-director Ewald André Dupont (1925, 17) characterised the screenplay as “a new literary form” in the second edition of his screenwriting manual, as he was concerned with the lack of copyright laws protecting screenwriters (40).

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At the same time, both Sargent and Dupont also speak of literature in a very normative way. Dupont holds that there are separate “laws” of construction for every literary genre, including the film script (1925, 17); by contrast, Sargent believes that “there are, of course, the broad basic rules of literary construction and dramatic development, applicable to all forms of literature” (1913, 7). This idea of a typical literary form or literary “laws” very soon came to dominate the “screenplay as literature” discourse in all cultures and languages. In 1921, the French newspaper Le Figaro introduced the screenplay Scheherazade (Schahrazade) by the writer and critic Ricciotto Canudo as a “new literary genre, made up of simple and expressive phrases, in which our readers will rediscover the evocative skills of the author of”— then follow the better-known works of Canudo (1921, 4). The newspaper thus advertises the script to the readers by promising a supposedly “literary” writing—expressive, evocative, by a famous author. Another example: in 1925, six screenplays appeared in the special issue of the review Les Cahiers du Mois ; in the next issue of the journal, the editors quote three positive reviews of the published scripts. These reviews speak of “literary scenarios” and “a literary genre”; one critic, specifically, calls the screenplay a “new literary technique,” specifying that “just like internal monologue, it [the screenplay] constitutes a new special technique [of writing]” (Berge and Berge 1925, 250). The emphasis here is also on the unusual ways of writing supposedly specific to literature. In 1923, Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky—he soon also became a prolific screenwriter—published a short article entitled “New Literary Form” that characterises the “scenario” as an emerging autonomous form of literature. Shklovsky understands scenario broadly, as any “description of the characters’ movement, their moods and feelings” (1923, 8); examples are theatrical plays, a music libretto, a film script, and even a few novel fragments. All these genres, Shklovsky argues, do away with the “dry stage remarks” (8)—a word combination he repeats twice in his short article—and thereby become literary. He accordingly emphasises that the film script Donogoo-Tonka by French writer Jules Romains is an “expressive” or “vivid” (Rus. yarkiy) literary work (8). Once again, literary writing is seen as a matter of a certain style and expressivity. Another interesting example of this kind: in 1929, German writerdirector Hans Kyser called the screenplay “the least known and the least literary form of literature” (1928–1929, 629). Kyser seems to refer both to the concept of “literary form” as certain ways of writing and to the

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concept of “literature” as independent from “literary form.” In reality, however, Kyser’s following argument operates exclusively with normative concepts: a screenplay is a “naked transcript of portrayable visuals,” it “alludes to nothing and leaves nothing out” (629), which supposedly makes it unliterary. In this, Kyser’s actual goal turns out to be to criticise the manner in which literary authors write screenplays as opposed to professional screenwriters. As any normative characterisation of literary writing such as “expressive,” “evocative,” allusive, etc., is a purely arbitrary matter, it can be used to argue both for and against screenplay as literature. For instance, in 1936 Russian literary critic and screenwriter Osip Brik adamantly denied that “the script [is] a literary work, let alone an autonomous one,” because saw literary writing as a specific way of treating words: It would be odd for instance to ascribe an architectural plan sketched out in water colours to the products of fine art. Although there have been architects who drew their projects with particular care on the assumption that their pictures would make a good impression on a client poorly-versed in questions of construction. Just as there are script writers who lavish particular attention on the elaboration of the literary texture of their scripts and clearly stake something on “the magic of the word.” But such architects and script writers are not among the best of their profession. ([1936] 1974, 96)

Brik’s ideas about screenwriting, art, and literature are both very restricted and restrictive. Neither “the magic of the word” nor “the literary texture” constitutes the whole of literature. To become literature, words require the specific attention of the readers to the meanings and experiences they enable. Style is just one of many textual and contextual factors that define whether the readers are willing to give the text this specific literary attention. Brik and other authors who write of a literary “texture,” “form,” or style merely project their own perception of the scripts and literary works they have read onto the whole of screenwriting and literature, which is why their arguments are so poorly founded. There is, of course, no reason to deny that an architectural plan can be considered an artwork, or say that architects “who drew their projects with particular care” are bad architects; the same applies, by extension, to screenplays and screenwriters. It is worth mentioning that Brik himself did not stick to the

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principles he promoted: His own silent film scripts feature a particular attention to words and stake a lot on their “magic” (see chapter 5). A screenwriting manual by Brik’s fellow countryman A. G. Chirkov (1939) suggests that the “screenplay as literature” debate took a decisive turn after the advent of sound film; yet in reality Chirkov’s manual illustrates that the logic of the debate remained exactly the same. In the short chapter on the “screenplay as a literary genre,” Chirkov writes: In the epoch of silent film, the screenplay was denied the right to be called a special, full-fledged literary genre, because literature is the art of words, and the screenplay featured no work on words. Even if this objection had the appearance of being convincing in regard to the silent film script, it is no longer valid in regard to the sound film script. Words, the dialogue in the script […] is no less important than the dialogue in a novel or even in a play. (1939, 36)

Chirkov’s claim that the silent screenplay features “no work on words” by contrast to literature echoes Brik’s idea that literature has something to do with attention to words. After the transition from silent to sound film, this idea was reapplied to dialogue in screenplays. Consequently, screenplays were more and more often compared to theatrical plays based on the supposed importance of dialogue in both genres. For instance, the comparison to theatrical plays is key to the famous 1939 article of Hungarian screenwriter and film critic Béla Balázs, where he states that only in the 1930s—that is, after the advent of sound film—did the screenplay become “a specific and independent literary genre” (1939, 113, original emphasis). His logic: “The film scenario is today a literary genre just like novel or drama, because it depicts human figures and destinies in words, in a chronological sequence” (116). Again we find an emphasis on “words,” even though it remains unclear, why the words of a sound film script are supposed to be more “literary” than those of a silent film script. Unfortunately, the idea that the quality of being literature has to do with a certain kind of writing seems to have never entirely left the stage. This idea as at the core of the essay “The Screenplay as Literature,” written by theatre critic John Gassner in 1943 as the introduction to the Twenty Best Film Plays collection. Gassner admits to have heavily edited the screenplays for publication “to assure gratification to the reader, and to enable us to realise the literary qualities of the text” (1943, vii).

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Gassner’s example illustrates that the “screenplay as literature” discourse gradually became relevant for publishers and editors.1 The practice of editing screenplays to make them look like other literary genres, such as that of Gassner, also stems from the idea that literature is bound up with specific ways of writing. Later the “screenplay as literature” debate also came into the academic spotlight as a result of the cultural turn in the humanities. In particular, the study The Screenplay as Literature by Douglas Garrett Winston (1973) seemed to provide a new push to the discussion. I say “seemed,” because despite its title, Winston’s study discusses almost exclusively films and uses the word “screenplay” as a synonym for the narrative of a film. While it started to develop in the 1970s, overall the academic “screenplay as literature” debate was limited to a few scattered articles until the 1990s, at which point it started to gather momentum, particularly in Germany. Even then, most academic contributions continued operating with normative ideas of literature. “As a literary form, the screenplay is distinguished […] by a certain ‘poeticism,’ a specifically ‘poetic’ use of language,” writes literary and theatre scholar Jürgen Kühnel (2001, 17); similarly, literary scholar Arno Rußegger focuses on “literary techniques” (1995, 196) and “literary means” (200) in screenplays. The result of this focus is an increased attention of German-speaking scholars to one single author: Carl Mayer. Because his screenplays are usually perceived as highly poetic, multiple scholars (Faber 1978; Paech 1988; Kasten 1994; Rußegger 1995) quote his screenplays as examples of literary writing, thus strengthening the misconception that literature is necessarily bound to “poeticism.” To summarise, the “screenplay as literature” debate has been largely based on very limited ideas about what literature is; the mere formulation “screenplay as literature” seems to imply that we first have to define literature in order to decide, whether screenplay can count as literature or not. Barbara Korte and Ralf Schneider seem to be the only proponents of screenplay as literature who explicitly state that “the ‘literariness’ of a text 1 Film critic Ernest Betts also called the screenplay a new form of literature in his introduction to the publication of the script The Private Life of Henry VIII in 1934 (see Price 2010, 24–25). This strategy of prefacing or post-facing publications with “screenplay as literature” statements continued to be relevant even later—examples are Sam Thomas’s introduction to Best American Screenplays (1986) and the back cover of the 1989 Film Scripts collection edited by George P. Garrett, O. B. Hardison Jr., and Jane R. Gelfman (see Maras 2009, 44).

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type is constructed through how it is ‘treated’ by the literary community and the institutions of literature: publishers, booksellers, reviewers, along with academic and general readers” (2000, 92). Readers and cultural institutions (which, in the end, also consist of readers) play a decisive role in defining what literature is, a role that screenwriting researchers often overlook. If we recognise this role, it becomes clear that “literature” is neither a matter of writing style nor a deductible theoretical construct, but a product of reading practices and principles, which I previously termed “interpretive communities.” Reading different screenplays—poetic and not poetic, expressive and “dry,” published and unpublished, with or without dialogue—as literary works, the readers can redefine the cultural and malleable concept of literature. The productive and necessary debate is therefore the debate on the pros and cons, on the practice and theory of reading screenplays as literature. Such literary reading of screenplays has been a matter of concern for contemporary screenwriting research primarily due to the so-called incompleteness issue. Researchers worry that a literary reading presumes the completion and/or completeness of the text in question, and therefore argue that screenplays therefore cannot be read in the same way as literary works (Sternberg 1997, 27; Price 2013, 91; Macdonald 2013, 175). I address this concern in detail below.

The Incompleteness Problem The screenplay’s incompleteness can be thought of in three interconnected but distinct ways: the incompleteness of the screenplay as part of a film project; the incompleteness of the screenplay’s meaning; and what I later term the “institutional” incompleteness of the screenplay as opposed to literary works “completed” in the act of publication. Looking into the exact nature of these versions of the so-called incompleteness problem, I argue that none of them precludes us from reading screenplays as literary works. One of the first writings that introduces the idea of a certain incompleteness being inscribed in screenplays is at the same time one of the most quoted articles in screenwriting research: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “The Screenplay as a ‘Structure That Wants to Be Another Structure.’” Pasolini wrote this article in 1965; by that time, his passionate interest in semiotics already made him an active participant in the 1960s turn towards reader-response criticism. Consequently, the article aims to show that

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textual interpretation is not about the author or the authorial intention, but (also) about the meaning-constitutive activity of the reader: the author of the screenplay asks his addressee for a particular collaboration: namely, that of lending to the text a “visual” completeness which it does not have, but at which it hints. […] The technique of screenwriting is predicated above all on this collaboration of the reader. ([1965] 1988, 189)

What Pasolini considers to be “incomplete” and “processual” about the screenplay—the two qualities being mutually conditioning—is its meaning. This assessment of incompleteness becomes clear when he compares the screenplay to the novel: The imagination of a screenplay reader, Pasolini writes, “enters into a creative phase mechanically much higher and more intense than when he [sic] reads a novel” (189). Whether the screenplay facilitates, as Pasolini holds, a more active visualisation for the reader than the novel and other literary works, is a question for scholars of empirical aesthetics. On a theoretical level though, Pasolini’s comparison between a screenplay and a novel implies that the active role of the reader in constituting meaning generally applies— supposedly to a greater or lesser extent—to all kinds of literary texts. In other words, the screenplay is, in regard to how its meaning is produced, not essentially different from other literary genres. The reader-orientated approach has long been embraced by literary theory; today’s literary criticism reduces the meanings of a text neither to the intentions of a single author nor to the arbitrariness of a single reader. Instead, various forms of literary criticism take both the historical production and reception of a given text as a basis on which they construct the text’s meaning. The scholarly consensus thus presumes a more complex mechanism of meaning constitution than that implied by the crude opposition of authorial intention and readerly visualisation. The semantic incompleteness of the screenplay as conceptualised by Pasolini thus does not preclude us from reading screenplays as we read other literary works—on the contrary, it confirms the importance of such reading. Almost forty years after Pasolini’s article, Ian W. Macdonald (2004, 90) introduced a different understanding of the screenplay’s incompleteness, suggesting that the screenplay “is not a finished piece of work (in relation to the screenwork—the finished film).” Implicit in this version

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of the incompleteness problem is the denial of the separation between the conception and execution as two distinct stages of film production (see Maras 2009, 21–23). Instead, the screenplay is seen as participating in the collaborative, integrated work in progress, directed towards the realisation of what Macdonald terms the “screen idea.” This term has been widely accepted in screenwriting research and is defined in Macdonald’s later study as “any notion held by one or more people of a singular concept (however complex), which may have conventional shape or not, intended to become a screenwork” (2013, 4–5). The screen work is thus, in Macdonald’s terms, the “completion” of the screen idea; the screen idea is always incomplete, and so is the screenplay as a documentation of the screen idea. From the perspective of production studies, Macdonald’s approach has multiple merits. The screen idea offers common ground for talking about social and economic processes, institutions, and “orthodoxies and common norms” involved in film production (6–7). The screen idea approach also accounts for non-written and non-verbal contributions to script development, such as storyboards, pre-visualisations, “graphic novels, short trailers, animations and websites” (Millard 2010, 147). Finally, the screen idea concept draws attention to the fact that the “final” version of a film is always constructed from multiple, overlaying, and mutually transforming readings of development materials—readings that are performed by different members of the film crew and contribute new meanings in the process. However, precisely this strength of the screen idea approach poses a problem from the perspectives of media theory and literary criticism. By grouping the screenplay with other materials and technologies used in film development, the screen idea approach neutralises the media-related specifics of the screenplay—most importantly, the connection between what the screenplay tells and how it tells it with the specific means of written communication. As a result, the screenplay is reduced to a “document that outlines the proposed screen narrative” (Macdonald 2013, 10)—in other words, the verbal form of the screenplay is seen as a mere container for the narrative, which is then transformed in the course of film development and finally “completed” in another medium, film. Studying the screenplay with the framework of the screen idea is helpful, if the goal is to gain knowledge about the genesis of a film project; yet if we want to read screenplays with view to their own, media-specific aesthetics, materiality, and processes of meaning production, then seeing the screenplay

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only as a documentation of the screen idea is scarcely beneficial; any given script version also allows a literary reading. “Any given script version” means that the screenplay does not have to be published to be read as a literary work. However, there is a strong concern in screenwriting research that it does, and that publication somehow makes the published script version “fixed” and “complete.” This is the third sense of the incompleteness problem, which I suggest characterising as institutional incompleteness, because it presumes that the cultural institution of publication makes literary works “complete.” Today, the practice of publishing screenplays still remains minor in comparison to larger genres such as the novel or lyric poetry. Instead, screenplays today are usually archived in multiple versions, which belong to various stages of the project development, and bear traces of (re)writing by different members of the film crew. Scholars tracing the development of a film project over time and working with multiple script versions for this purpose thus tend to oppose the “incomplete” screenplay to a published literary work. The supposed institutional incompleteness of the screenplay originates from two misconceptions: first, that publication makes the published text “complete” or “definitive”; second, that a text has to be published to be read as literature. Nannicelli’s study (2013, 148–61) unfortunately reinforced both these misconceptions: Trying to show that screenplays can be read as literary works, Nannicelli argues that publication of a screenplay “can be a good indication that its writer intends it to be [the definitive version of the script]” (158). His work implies that a text usually has to be “completed” through publication to be read as literature, listing several well-known unfinished literary works as exceptions (159). To recuperate the argument I made in Chapter 1, literary publication is a cultural institution that helps readers cope with the complexity and variety of literature. All literary works are semantically incomplete (in Pasolini’s sense) and require the interpretive activity of readers to produce meanings; publication is merely a promise from some readers—editors, publishers, etc.—to others “that the results of our reading efforts will be ‘worth it’” (Culler 2000, 27). Does this mean that unpublished texts cannot be read as literature? Of course not. On the contrary, for a text to be published in a literary context, certain readers first have to read the text as a literary work. This is why it sometimes takes a while for a new genre or a new name to enter the realm of literary publication—remember the ground-breaking folio editions of Jonson’s and Shakespeare’s plays, or the

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countless examples of famous authors being rejected by publishers in the beginning of their career or throughout it. The same applies to screenplays: The interpretive community that reads screenplays as literary works has to start somewhere. This book aims to show that such community already existed a century ago, and has not disappeared since. Now that we’ve established that reading a text as literature does not require it to be published, there still remains the idea that publication gives more weight and authority to the published script version compared to the multiple unpublished ones. Objecting against the primacy of the published script version, Price writes: Publication represents merely one more transformation, and the copy text chosen for publication may be derived from any of the stages [of work] […] or be a new construction compiled with the needs of another target audience in mind. The “real” or “authentic” screenplay is a chimera. (Price 2010, 49)

What Price posits in regard to screenplays, is in fact valid for all literary works. Literary publication usually includes only one version of the respective text, but this is precisely what it is—only one version. Scholars of Renaissance drama are especially aware of this fact, to go back once again to this useful example. In fact, drama scholars face issues strikingly similar to those occupying screenwriting research today, including collaborative authorship, lack of “authorised” published versions, and so on. Contemporary screenwriting research emphasises the collaborative nature of screenwriting and the often uncredited collaboration as features unique to screenplays, which make them distinct from literature. Compare, however, the following characterisation of early modern plays: Instead of enduring monuments, plays were seen as provisional scripts for performance, subjected to numerous creative forces—annotators, actors, revisers, copyists, censors, compositors, later adapters, and publishers. (Wall 2006, 1)

Just as today, screenplays are often institutionally incomplete, in the seventeenth-century English drama “no single ‘original’ play existed at all, since the text materialized in a constantly evolving state” (Wall 2006, 3, original emphasis). We will never know, which of the surviving versions of Hamlet is the most “authentic” one, because our notion of authenticity

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did not yet exist at Shakespeare’s time; nevertheless, both academic and non-academic audiences have read and will be reading different versions of Shakespeare’s plays as works of literature. When discussing the institutional incompleteness of the screenplay, one should thus be cautious of generalisations. In contrast to the semantic incompleteness or incompleteness as part of the film project, the specific materiality of the screenplay and the ways it is embedded into various cultural institutions is a purely historical matter, because publication practices vary greatly depending on the historical and cultural context. Just as drama scholars, then, screenwriting researchers may profit greatly from historicising both the production and the reception of screenplays, especially in regard to the notions of authorship and work. The necessity to historicise the production and reception of screenplays in no way leads to a denial of close reading, narratological analysis, and other practices of literary interpretation. On the contrary, as the example of drama studies shows, literary criticism can and should coexist with studying production practices and the genesis of single productions. Only a combination of different approaches—of functional and literary readings—allows an in-depth understanding and appreciation of both theatrical plays and screenplays.

Functional and Literary Reading in Practice So how can this double—functional and literary—reading of screenplays work in practice? As a first example, I would like to offer two possible readings of a short passage from the beginning of the script The Matrix by Lana and Lilly Wachowski: FADE IN: ON COMPUTER SCREEN so close it has no boundaries. A blinding cursor pulses in the electric darkness like a heart coursing with phosphorous light, burning beneath the derma of black-neon glass. (Wachowski et al. 2000, 273)

We can assume that these lines propose a film fragment, including certain objects (computer screen, cursor), action (pulsing, burning), effects (fade in), and a specific type of shot (close-up on a computer screen). The text further uses various stylistic devices, including expressive attributes

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(blinding cursor, electric darkness), simile (like a heart), and metaphors (derma of glass, heart coursing with light). The question of what this figurative language means, or what it is used for, can have two disparate sets of answers. On the one hand, one can assume that the metaphors and other tropes describe how the screenwriters imagine the future film to be, or perhaps they anticipate the impression it should make on the future viewers, or maybe they convey some additional information for those involved in film production such as the emotional atmosphere of the action. All three explanations are arguable, and all three imply a purpose in the situation of film production—the purpose of describing how a film could or should be made. On the other hand, the analogies between computer screen and skin and between cursor and heart can be seen as referring to the dangerous connection between the machine and the human, the digital and the analogue world, which is one of the central motifs in the dystopian world of The Matrix. In this context, the “blinding cursor” can be read as a metaphor for the entire Matrix—the illusory world created by machines to make people blind to the dreadful reality of their existence—and the comparison to “a heart coursing with phosphorous light” can equally be seen as a reference to the poisoning effect of the digital world. We do not need to have seen the film to perform this reading; we do not need to know whether and how the text was used in production; all that matters for a literary reading is that we have one version of the script and can construct meanings based on how this version is written. According to the common cultural practice, we read a functional text as referring to entities and situations of the real world, and a literary text— as primarily self-referential or, to use a Greek term, autotelic. This term means that the text is not referring to anything outside of itself, but has its purpose in itself: it constructs meanings for the sake of constructing meanings and exists only to offer us some kind of experience. Asking about the meanings of a functional text such as a cooking recipe is not impossible, but usually pointless, because it would mean exactly what it says, according to the general mechanisms of how meaning is produced in a language; asking whether and how a literary text is informative and useful in the real world is usually also pointless, because a literary text presumes a different kind of interaction.2 The interesting thing about 2 For more on the specific mechanisms of meaning production in literature, see, for instance, Bode (2011, 228–35) and Culler (2000, 61–68).

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screenplays, as well as several other genres, is that they allow asking both kinds of questions at the same time: we can explore both what they mean and what they are used for.3 Now that we’ve looked at how the double perspective on screenplays can be applied when reading a specific text, we can consider what this double perspective means when we analyse the screenplay as genre. The term “genre” comprises both literary genres and what is commonly called “rhetorical” or “communicative” genres; in the context of this book, I call the latter “functional” genres. Genres are based on the shared features of certain texts. I have previously claimed that the screenplay responds to a certain situation—the situation of film production, and that this is the only feature common to all film scripts; now it is time to substantiate this statement. The intuitive idea that the screenplay’s functions are constituted by its relation to film production is, unsurprisingly, shared by all screenwriting scholars. Yet if we look at exact descriptions of this relation, we will see that they revolve around two connected, but not entirely equivalent, factors: the intention of making a film and the situation of film production. For example, Claus Tieber argues that a screenplay is “an agreement of those participating […] in a film production about that which is to be shot ” (2008, 18, emphasis added). Similarly, Macdonald sees the screenplay as “a framework within which others will work” in the situation of film production (2013, 5), but also as “a document describing intention” (174). (Obvious but worth confirming is that the research always

3 In German-speaking academia, such texts have been tentatively subsumed under the roof of Gebrauchsliteratur. This untranslatable term, coined in the late 1960s, is a composite of “use” (Gebrauch) and “literature” (Literatur) and means literally “useoriented literature.” All attempts to define Gebrauchsliteratur and make the term useful in research have so far remained largely futile, mainly because there are just too many different kinds of texts that can be read both in regard to their purpose in the empirical world and as self-referential entities. The reason for this is that, as most descriptions of Gebrauchsliteratur agree, the potential use of a text is not an absolute feature, but a scalable notion. “There are many gradations between a complete instrumentalisation of the representation for a purpose (e.g. instruction manual or recipe) and its almost complete independence (for example, in some essays). These are the poles; for G[ebrauchsliteratur], a tension between the two poles is constitutive” (Müller 1996, 588). Moreover, the poles of instrumentalisation and literary independence are themselves theoretical constructs, and in reality “no concrete text can be assigned exclusively to one pole” (Schnyder 2015, 150–51).

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considers the function of the screenplay in film production to be a potential rather than an actual one: the screenplay does not need to be realised as a film to be a screenplay, and, conversely, use in film production does not automatically make any text a screenplay.) These two aspects—the intention of making a film and the situation of film production—correspond to two slightly different but complementary foci on the nature of genres. Ever since classical rhetoric, genres have been defined based on their intention (function, purpose, or telos) on the one hand and the situation they are used in on the other. Contemporary rhetorical scholarship and other disciplines that deal with human communication tend to focus on the latter—on the so-called recurring situation that genres answer or react to.4 Explaining the concept of the recurring situation, rhetorical scholar Carolyn Miller argues that “what recurs is not a material situation […] but our construal of a type” (1984, 157). The material components of a recurring situation are never the same—in fact, her colleague Amy Devitt contends, “each individual’s situation is unique and uniquely perceived” (2004, 184), and yet the users of a text construct situations as recurring based on their recognition of relevant similarities. These constructions are formed from typifications already at hand when the existing typifications are not adequate to determine a new situation. If a new typification proves continually useful for mastering states of affairs, it enters the stock of knowledge and its application becomes routine (Miller 1984, 156–57). This theoretical model can be used, in particular, to describe the emergence of screenwriting: while in the earliest years, theatrical plays were occasionally used as the basis for large film productions (see, for instance, Loughney 1997), soon the discrepancy between the older genre and the new situation of film production became evident. So, partially based on the genre of theatrical play as well as other genres at hand, including film catalogue descriptions, short stories, and novels, the new genre of the screenplay developed. While the above-quoted definitions of the screenplay from the studies by Tieber and Macdonald implicitly and correctly combine the concepts

4 The term “recurring situation” goes back to the work of Lloyd F. Bitzer, who originally defined it as “a complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence” (Bitzer 1968, 6).

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of intention and the recurring situation to which the script responds, generally screenwriting research tends to focus more on the former. For instance, Nannicelli bases his definition of the screenplay on its categorical intention to suggest elements of a film (2013, 31, 199–200); for Macdonald, “screenwriting, even as a planning process, is about the intentions behind a screenwork” (2013, 16). Although the two perspectives on genres—to emphasise it once again—are in no way mutually exclusive, an advantage occurs in shifting the focus away from the intention towards the recurring situation of film production, to which the screenplay answers. Namely, this approach foregrounds the power of screenwriting to shape this situation in turn. In reality, neither genres nor situations are completely “routine” or fixed, but in constant mutual interaction: “people construct genre through situation and situation through genre” (Devitt 2004, 21). On the one hand, the screenplay depends on the various tasks, stages, technical devices, and other aspects of film production, and usually answers the needs of planning these aspects. Yet at the same time, the screenplay shapes film production in return by enabling its participants to act in certain ways; moreover, the screenplay is sometimes even necessary for the participants of the situation to recognise it as such. The mutual dependence between a genre and a recurring situation is one of the reasons why “the formal characteristics of genres change over time but the users’ labels of the genres do not necessarily change” (Devitt 2004, 11). For instance, the advent of sound introduced major changes into film production, but other aspects of the situation remained similar, so that the participants could still recognise it as the same situation, and the screenplay was still used in it, albeit in an accordingly changed form. This change, it is important to stress, was reciprocal: the screenplay had to “adjust” to the sound film, but the production of sound films was, in turn, shaped by the ways in which screenplays were written. According to Devitt, “Such cases where writers and readers are violating, challenging, or changing the connection of a genre to a situation can be most revealing of their integration and interdependence” (2004, 22)—the advent of sound is one such case, and experimental screenplays are another. This is why an important task of the historiography of screenwriting is to foreground how the screenplay not only answers the situation of film production or is intended for it, but also shapes this situation in return.

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The history of the screenplay is not limited to the history of mutual interaction between genre and the situation film production: the screenplay is also shaped by the contemporaneous literary field and shapes it in turn. This reciprocal dynamic characterises both functional and literary genres. The view on literary genres as “syntheses of needs,” in which “certain historical problems or solutions to problems or social contradictions are articulated and preserved” has been famously promoted by Wilhelm Voßkamp (1977, 32). This view features multiple parallels to the perspective on rhetorical genres discussed above: literary genres are seen as sociocultural institutions, which “react” or “answer” to certain historical contexts in ways that are neither historically constant nor can be reduced to one single function (see Devitt 2004, 163–90). Just as the recurring situation and genre enable and shape one another, so literary genres respond to certain historical constellations, but also “set free” and make visible new sociocultural needs (Voßkamp 1997, 655). In this way, the idea of literary functions counters the prejudice that literature does not “do” things in the world. The historical dynamics of literary genres can be described in terms of “institutionalisation” and “deinstitutionalisation” (Voßkamp 1977, 30). To put it simply, literary genres are constantly “clenched” between their social conditioning and their relative autonomy; they oscillate between fulfilling and challenging social expectations and needs. To give an example of how these needs can be described, Voßkamp suggests that the function of the nineteenth-century German Bildungsroman was to offer its bourgeois readers possibilities of “identity formation based on the patterns of the represented, gradually self-perfecting individuality” (1992, 261). Writing a history of the screenplay from the perspective of its literary functions means, first and foremost, identifying the specific sociocultural “needs” within a given epoch—in this case, the modernist—that the genre makes visible and reacts to. This book thus explores what kind of modernist constellations the screenplay articulated and answered, and how these answers were different from those of other literary genres. ∗ ∗ ∗ To conclude, I do not imply any of the normative definitions of literature that have been common in the “screenplay as literature” debate when I speak of screenplays as literary works; rather, I mean that screenplays can and should be read and experienced in roughly the same way

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as poetry, novels, or drama. Screenplays have to be neither poetic nor published to be read like other literary genres, as these qualities have never been essentially defining for literature. Just like other literary texts, screenplays require a certain kind of interaction: they require asking the questions about what they mean and what experiences they allow based on how they are written. Since literature depends on this specific kind of cultural interaction, it is for the readers and for the different interpretive communities to decide what counts as literature and what does not. This is why an interpretive community that reads screenplays as both functional and literary texts could have a great impact on how both screenplays and literature are commonly thought of. On a broader scale, such a double, functional and literary, view on screenplays means paying attention to two historical contexts: the situation of film production and the literary field. Screenplay as a genre is defined by both these contexts and shapes them in turn.

References Balázs, Béla. 1939. “Das Filmszenarium, eine neue literarische Gattung.” Internationale Literatur 9 (11): 113–22. Berge, André, and François Berge, eds. 1925. “Cinéma.” Special issue, Les Cahiers du Mois, nos. 16–17. Bitzer, Lloyd F. 1968. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 (1): 1–14. Bode, Christoph. 2011. The Novel: An Introduction. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell. Brik, Osip. (1936) 1974. “From the Theory and Practice of the Screenwriter.” Translated by Diana Matias. Screen: The Journal of the Society for Education in Film and Television, 15 (3): 95–103. Canudo, Ricciotto. 1921. Schahrazade: La fille de la cité: Graphique de poème visuel. Le Figaro, July 19, 4. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k2929 14r/f4.item. Chirkov, A. G. 1939. Ocherki dramaturgii filma. Moscow: Goskinoizdat. Culler, Jonathan. 2000. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Devitt, Amy. 2004. Writing Genres. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dupont, Ewald André. 1925. Wie ein Film geschrieben wird und wie man ihn verwertet. 2nd rev. ed. Berlin: Kühn.

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Faber, Marion. 1978. “Carl Mayer’s ‘Sylvester’: The Screenplay as Literature.” Monatshefte für deutschen Unterricht, deutsche Sprache und Literatur 70 (2): 159–70. Gassner, John. 1943. “The Screenplay as Literature.” In Twenty Best Film Plays, edited by John Gassner and Dudley Nichols, vii–xxx. New York: Crown Publishers. Kasten, Jürgen. 1994. Carl Mayer: Filmpoet: Ein Drehbuchautor schreibt Filmgeschichte. Berlin: Vistas. Korte, Barbara, and Ralf Schneider. 2000. “The Published Screenplay—A New ‘Literary’ Genre?” AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 25 (1): 89–105. Kühnel, Jürgen. 2001. “Das literarische Drehbuch.” Mediazine 7: 14–21. Kyser, Hans. 1928–1929. “Das Filmmanuskript.” Die Literatur 31: 629. Loughney, Patrick. 1997. “From ‘Rip Van Winkle’ to ‘Jesus of Nazareth’: Thoughts on the Origins of the American Screenplay.” Film History 9 (3): 277–89. Macdonald, Ian W. 2004. “Disentangling the Screen Idea.” Journal of Media Practice 5 (2): 89–99. ———. 2013. Screenwriting Poetics and the Screen Idea. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Maras, Steven. 2009. Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice. London: Wallflower. Millard, Kathryn. 2010. “The Screenplay as Prototype.” In Analysing the Screenplay, edited by Jill Nelmes, 142–57. London: Routledge. Miller, Carolyn R. 1984. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (2): 151–67. Müller, Jan-Dirk. 1996. “Gebrauchsliteratur.” In Eup–Hör, edited by Gert Ueding, Vol. 3 of Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, 587–605. Tübingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Nannicelli, Ted. 2013. A Philosophy of the Screenplay. New York: Routledge. Paech, Joachim. 1988. “Eine neue Literatur?” In Literatur und Film, edited by Joachim Paech, 104–21. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler Verlag. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. (1965) 1988. “The Screenplay as a ‘Structure That Wants to Be Another Structure.’” In Heretical Empiricism, edited by Louise K. Barnett, translated by Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett, 187–96. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Price, Steven. 2010. The Screenplay: Authorship, Theory and Criticism. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2013. “The Screenplay: An Accelerated Critical History.” Journal of Screenwriting 4 (1): 87–97. Rußegger, Arno. 1995. “Das Drehbuch als Literatur.” Linguistica 35 (1): 189– 202.

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Sargent, Epes Winthrop. 1912. The Technique of the Photoplay. New York: Motion Picture World. ———. 1913. The Technique of the Photoplay. 2nd ed. New York: Moving Picture World. Schnyder, Peter. 2015. “Gebrauchsliteraturforschung.” In Handbuch Literarische Rhetorik, edited by Rüdiger Zymner, 149–72. Berlin: De Gruyter. Shklovsky, Viktor. 1923. “Novaya literaturnaya forma.” Zhizn’ iskusstva, no. 28: 8. Sternberg, Claudia. 1997. Written for the Screen: The American Motion-Picture Screenplay as Text. Tübingen, Germany: Stauffenberg. Tieber, Claus. 2008. Schreiben für Hollywood: Das Drehbuch im Studiosystem. Vienna: Lit. Voßkamp, Wilhelm. 1977. “Gattungen als literarisch-soziale Institutionen.” In Textsortenlehre, Gattungsgeschichte, edited by Walter Hinck, 27–44. Heidelberg, Germany: Quelle & Meyer. ———. 1992. “Gattungen.” In Literaturwissenschaft: Ein Grundkurs, edited by Helmut Brackert und Jörn Stückrath, 253–69. Hamburg: Rowohlt. ———. 1997. “Gattungsgeschichte.” In Reallexikon der Deutschen Literaturwissenschaft, vol. 1, edited by Klaus Weimar, 655–58. Berlin: de Gruyter. Wall, Wendy. 2006. “Dramatic Authorship and Print.” In Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, edited by Garrett A. Sullivan Jr., Patrick Cheney and Andrew Hadfield, 1–11. New York: Oxford University Press. Wachowski, Lana, Lilly Wachowski, Steve Skroce, Tani Kunitake, Geof Darrow, Warren Manser, and Collin Grant. 2000. The Art of the Matrix. Edited by Spencer Lamm, with Introduction by Zach Staenberg, Afterword by William Gibson and scene notes by Phil Oosterhouse. New York: Newmarket.

CHAPTER 3

Early Script Publications: Make It Look Like “Literature”

The previous chapters have established a framework for discussing the history of the modernist screenplay; now, we can dive into this history, starting with the earliest script publications from the 1910s. Screenwriting scholars are often wary of the pre-war film scripts, because it is difficult to prove whether the texts in question were indeed screenplays or summaries of the completed films; I detail this problem in the beginning of the chapter. By contrast to archive materials, published screenplays I discuss here are contextualised: They are provided with subheadings, prefatory notes, introductions, and so on. Having this contextual evidence, we do not need to prove that the respective texts are screenplays; rather, the publication context provides us with a probable cause to read these texts as screenplays. Reading published scripts from the time between 1908 and 1916, I show that each publication aims to highlight the affinity between the screenplay and other literary genres in order to “justify” itself. In this way, these early script publications spearheaded the entrance of the screenplay into the literary field.

The Problem of Film Catalogues Any attempt to trace the history of the screenplay back to the earliest specimen faces the dead end when confronted with the texts published in film company catalogues. Film catalogues were issued starting from the first © The Author(s) 2020 A. Ksenofontova, The Modernist Screenplay, Palgrave Studies in Screenwriting, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50589-9_3

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years of film production and contained descriptions of films available for sale. These descriptions are formally indistinguishable from screenplays. To give just one example: in the Pathé catalogue for March 1902, the description of a seven-minute film called The History of a Crime (Histoire d’un crime, 1901) begins: 1. Murder. A burglar broke into a bank at night. Surprised by the man guarding the cashier’s desk, he has only one way out: to kill to save himself. He arms himself with a knife that he plunges into the heart of the unfortunate boy, and prepares to break the safe. (Bousquet 1996, 859)

The description continues in a similar manner for this and six further parts, each part probably corresponding to one film reel. Such texts served multiple purposes: they advertised the films for sale to the projectionists, who could buy them in full or sometimes reel by reel; they enabled the projectionists to (re-)edit the films and compose a programme from them; and they allowed the “lecturers” (Fr. bonimenteurs ) to explain the action of the films to the audience and, if necessary, to read out the dialogue. According to widespread consensus, catalogue descriptions of this kind were composed after the film had been completed. An alternative view promoted by Isabelle Raynauld (2005) holds that “it was a common practice to print the screenplays in full (long mistakenly considered to be merely summaries) in company catalogues” (2005, 577, emphasis added).1 An oft-mentioned example illustrating the difference between the two positions is the catalogue entry for A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune, 1902) by the French cinema pioneer Georges Méliès. Several researchers consider this entry to be a screenplay written before film production and others a description made after the completed film. Until today, there remains no way to prove whether Méliès’s and other texts printed in company catalogues are screenplays, post-production film summaries, or a little bit of both.2 1 Raynauld makes a similar claim in regard to the screenplays deposited between 1907 and 1923 at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, convincingly “establish[ing] the status of these texts [as screenplays], which have for too long been considered as mere advertisements” (1997, 257). 2 The confusion around Méliès’s text stems from the fact that his “list of tableaux,” that is, his list of headings for single scenes, has long been mistakenly considered the full catalogue text of A Trip to the Moon. This confusion goes back to Lewis Jacobs

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Directly opposed to this archaeology of early screenplays are the theories that completely deny the existence of screenwriting in the early years of cinema. For instance, Jürgen Kasten suggests that “films made between 1895 and 1905 were mostly shot without clearly fixed instructions” (1990, 12).3 “The rudimentary simplicity” of the earliest films led JeanPaul Török and many other researchers to believe that producers “did not have to worry about fixing and developing them [the themes and stories of the early films] on paper” (1986, 25). Such conclusions mostly rely on the testimonies of directors, actors, and other workers in the early film industry—“indeed, anecdotal evidence for the general absence of writing in the early years of film is strong” (Price 2013, 23). The idea that early filmmaking relied on improvisation and the idea of early screenwriting as promoted by Raynauld (2005) may seem contradictory; in reality, they are most likely both true with certain limitations. In particular, comedy films, which often did not exceed one reel of film in length, seem to have been mostly “improvised”—that is, based on a rehearsed routine of a comic artist rather than on a written script. This practice remained valid at least until and including the slapstick comedy films by Charlie Chaplin, who is known to have made most of his silent films without a screenplay (see Robinson 1985, 137; Chaplin 1966, 143, 154). At the same time, Raynauld demonstrates, based on archival material, that screenplays “in the contemporary definition of the term” were already used in production of longer feature films in France by 1907 (1997, 264), and it cannot be excluded that this was also the case with even earlier features. To put it simply, the longer and more complex the narrative of the film, and the higher the potential production costs, the more likely it is that there was a written document involved in planning and shooting, even in the earliest cinema years. It should be noted, however, that the texts used as screenplays in early film production were not necessarily screenplays. According to (1939, 38), who implies, though does not explicitly state, that Méliès’s “list” was used as a screenplay in film production. Edward Azlant (1980, 73–75), Isabelle Raynauld (2005, 576), and Kevin Boon (2008, 4–5) have repeated Jacobs’s assumption. However, the “list of tableaux” was in fact derived from the full catalogue text, which can be found, together with many further texts of a similar nature, in L’œuvre de George Méliès (Malthête and Mannoni 2008). The status of these texts is indeed debatable (see, for instance, Price 2013, 28–35). 3 Kasten repeats his claim in a more recent publication: “For about the first ten years cinematography […] usually does without a screenplay” (2000, 242).

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Patrick Loughney (1997, 279–80), among the earliest surviving documents related to US film production are the theatrical plays Rip Van Winkle and The Passion Play of Oberammergau, which were used for film productions in 1895 and 1898, respectively. The former film was “a Mutoscope version of the famed actor’s [Joseph Jefferson] stage production,” based on his play published in 1895 (Loughney 1997, 278). Edited down to a series of eight scenes, the play was put into images printed on the Mutoscope device’s flip cards. The latter film production was an even more peculiar case, since the text by “a small-time California playwright named Salmi Morse” must have actually “served as a ready blueprint” for an almost twenty minutes long film (280)—indeed an extraordinary length for a 1898 film. Rip Van Winkle and The Passion Play of Oberammergau exemplify how theatrical texts, published or not, could be used as a screenplay avant la lettre in early film productions. That said, my focus here is not the origins of the screenplay within the practices of writing for stage (be it theatre, vaudeville, or variety) or the practice of describing films for company catalogues, but rather the moment when the screenplay started penetrating into the system of literary genres and being published among other literary works. This moment varies, of course, depending on the respective cultural context: in Russia, it was not until the appearance of the journal Pegas at the end of 1915 that the screenplay was recognised as a potential literary genre; in Germany, the precedent was prominently set by the publication of Das Kinobuch in 1913; in France, the first waves were made as early as 1908, when the newspaper L’illustration published two original screenplays by Henri Lavedan, a member of the Académie française.

Film d’Art and the Theatrical Screenplay: The Assassination of the Duke of Guise The publication of the screenplay The Assassination of the Duke of Guise (henceforth Assassination of Guise) in the weekly newspaper L’illustration on 21 November 1908, is significant for several reasons.4 Firstly, it is probably the first screenplay published in full in non-specialised press. 4 The comparison of the published screenplay with the original manuscript made by François Albera (2008, 101) shows that the manuscript was edited for publication, but the changes mostly affected the first scene, which was conformed to the film, while the style and the narrative of the rest of the script were left almost unaltered. The later

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Secondly, it was written by a literary author—certainly not the most distinguished playwright of the time, yet nevertheless “the most prominent columnist” of L’illustration and holder of the fifteenth chair in the Académie française (Sadoul 1973, 500).5 Finally, the film produced on the basis of the Assassination of Guise screenplay was so successful that its premiere on 17 November 1908, is considered to be “the most important cinema event since Lumière’s first public screening in December 1895” (Abel 1994, 246). With Assassination of Guise and similar productions, the film company Film d’Art attempted to deal with the financial and artistic crisis in the French cinema industry of 1907–1908 (Sadoul 1973, 439–47). Lavedan was the “literary director” of the enterprise, his title pointing to one of the two genres Film d’Art focused on: literary adaptations, the other being historical films. With these “noble” genres, Film d’Art aimed to develop products that could compete with theatrical performances and “attract […] the public of the theatres, the elite, the snobs, educated people, the bourgeoisie, and not only the popular audience” (539). Consequently, Lavedan started performing his duties as the literary director of Film d’Art by recruiting historians and literary authors, both dramaturges and novelists, to compose scenarios (Carou 2008, 19). Film d’Art was betting on the screenplay and screenwriter to perform functions analogous to those of a theatrical play and playwright, respectively; both the playwright’s name and the publication of the script served as the core of advertising campaigns for Film d’Art films. Lavedan’s own screenplay Assassination of Guise describes how, in the sixteenth century, the opponent of the ruling dynasty Duke of Guise was murdered by the order of King Henry III. The text is divided into six “tableaux”—an initially theatrical term, which in this context means a scene demarcated by a change of setting (see Brewster and Jacobs 1997, 37–38). Most tableaux start with an indication of the time and place of

publication in La revue du cinéma in 1948, which I quote from, was more faithful to Lavedan’s original manuscript than the version published in L’illustration in 1908 (102). 5 Alain Carou describes Lavedan as “a leading figure in dramatic art, whose work presents two facets. First facet: an author of boulevard literature celebrated for cruel plays on the aristocratic society of his time. Second facet: a member of the Académie française, elected young (1898), and therefore eager to forge an image of a ‘classic’ to legitimise his position” (2008, 14–15).

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action; additionally, several tableaux feature detailed descriptions of the proposed decorations, for example: III Meeting room Large room, three windows to the right. In the background, in the right corner, a winding staircase. In the background on the left, in the other corner, a door leading to the king’s room. In the middle, large table, seats. In the middle of the rear wall, a chimney where the fire is dying. Above, a large full-length portrait of the king. (Lavedan [1908] 1948, 22)

Judging by this description, the scene was to be shot by a static camera located in front of the set, without any changes of perspective and shot size—a filmmaking practice that originates from the frontal perspective on a theatrical stage. Similarly, the idea of starting the scene description with a meticulous account of decorations originates from playwriting; abundant dialogue and detailed indications of the characters’ emotional states in Lavedan’s script are also reminiscent of theatrical stage directions. To give only one example: King Henry III appears, within a single scene, “very worried and trembling” (Lavedan [1908] 1948, 19), then “deeply frustrated” (20), again “worried, suddenly agitated,” then “dismayed,” “scared,” “almost happy,” and so on (21). One detail gives away the “theatricality” of the Assassination of Guise script even clearer than the setting and the action description: the mise en abyme or, simply put, scenes mirroring other scenes. In the first scene, Guise’s lover warns him that his drink may be poisoned, but Guise mocks her by emptying the glass and pretending that he is dying: “—Ah! my God! for a minute [he] does the farce of being poisoned, hand to the chest, face convulsed. ‘What a terrible pain’, then he bursts out laughing …” (Lavedan [1908] 1948, 18). This “farce” becomes diegetic reality in the finale, when Guise is indeed murdered, albeit stabbed rather than poisoned. An even more illustrative example is the episode in which the king is rehearsing the murder of Guise by assuming the role of the latter: “The king, continuing his comedy, starts walking from the door […], changing his gait, haughty, glorious, copying the Duke of Guise, a light satire” (22); the performance continues until the king playfully stabs himself in the end. Remarkable about both episodes is not only that they anticipate the further development of the narrative (Albera 2008, 108), but also that they do so with genuinely theatrical rather than cinematic

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means—the artistic play, facial expressions, and gestures. Even the terms used in the quoted phrases to characterise the action—farce, satire (Fr. charge)—describe theatrical rather than cinematic genres. As miniature reflections of the entire story, these two episodes characterise Assassination of Guise as a quasi-theatrical work, and also as a work that continues the traditions of writing for the theatre. This similarity to drama was meant to “elevate” Assassination of Guise to the more established literary genre of theatrical play. At the same time as Lavedan’s script demonstrates multiple connections to drama, it is also based on historical sources. In particular, Bruno Grimm (2016, 61–71) has recently demonstrated that many details and even entire scenes in Assassination of Guise were borrowed from the third volume of François Guizot’s monumental history of France.6 This “extreme concern with [historical] accuracy” (Carou 2008, 21) stems primarily from the mission of Film d’Art “to restore the history of France in a form immediately accessible to the public” (22). The publication of Assassination of Guise thus not only attempts to “elevate” the screenplay, both stylistically and in terms of sociocultural status, to the level of theatrical play; it also makes the screenplay visible as a potentially complex text that can reflect on other texts (in this case, historical sources) and on itself (through elements such as mise en abyme). Film d’Art did not develop a consistent practice of publishing screenplays—another script by Lavedan published in the same L’illustration just a month later, The Kiss of Judas (Le baiser de Judas ), never attracted much attention. However, Assassination of Guise marks an important milestone in the history of screenwriting, because it first transferred the screenplay from the specialised into the public press and made it accessible to a broad audience as an entertaining reading.

6 It seems that Lavedan might have used other sources as well, including Les états de Blois, ou, la mort de MM. de Guise: Scènes historiques, décembre 1588 by Ludovic Vitet (1827) and Histoire de Blois et de son territoire: Depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’à nos jours by Georges Touchard-Lafosse (1846). Whether Lavedan based his script on these sources or the intertextual connections are rather instanced by Guizot’s L’histoire de France is a question that requires a careful textual analysis that is beyond the scope of this study.

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Literature in the Era of Film: Das Kinobuch Film d’Art became a model for numerous similar companies in and outside France. In particular, film producer Heinrich Bolten-Baeckers attempted transferring the Film d’Art model to the German film market in 1908, but his partners from Pathé pulled out of the project before it could bear any results, and it had to be put on ice (see Scholz 2016, 76). At the time, film distribution in the German market was still organised as renting entire sets or “programmes” of short films rather than single feature films, which is why it was difficult to market high-budget productions such as those of Film d’Art (see Müller 1994, 105–8). Moreover, the German bourgeoisie was far less benevolent towards the new entertainment of film than its French counterpart. It wasn’t therefore until five years later that the biggest German production companies, BioskopFilm and the PAGU (Projektions-AG Union), returned to the idea of a German auteur film or Kunstfilm. By then, renting single films became an established distribution method and more comfortable and even luxurious cinema halls were built. As a result, in 1913 German cinemas were flooded with both home and foreign literary adaptations.7 Fourteen young literary authors immediately took a stand against such “literarisation” of film, publishing a collection of scripts called Das Kinobuch—literally, the cinema book (1913, post-dated 1914). Das Kinobuch was meant to illustrate the difference between literary writing and the art of writing “cinematically,” yet the critics and researchers unanimously note that the scripts do not hold what they promise and fall into the same “literary” patterns as the films they reject. Below I submit that two factors defined this perceived literariness of Das Kinobuch: Firstly, the deliberate attempt of the editor Kurth Pinthus to make the scripts look like literary prose, and secondly, the genuine concern of the young authors with the future of literary writing.

7 The most famous examples of the pre-war auteur film include the Danish Elskovsleg (1913), based on Arthur Schnitzler’s play Flirtation (Liebelei); the Swedish The Girl from Abroad; or, The Great Underworld (Den okända, 1913), based on Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s pantomime The Foreign Girl (Das fremde Mädchen) (the screenplays for both films were also written by the respective literary author); the Italian epos Quo Vadis? (1913), based on the novel of the same name by Henryk Sienkiewicz; and the German hit The Student of Prague (Der Student von Prag, 1913), not based on any well-known literary work but written by the popular German novelist Hanns Heinz Ewers.

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The idea of Das Kinobuch belongs to Pinthus, who worked as an editor at the Kurt Wolff publishing house—one of the most important publishers of expressionist literature. Correspondingly, among those who contributed to Das Kinobuch were multiple authors associated with literary expressionism, including Albert Ehrenstein, Walter Hasenclever, Else Lasker-Schüler, Ludwig Rubiner, and Paul Zech. Further contributors to Das Kinobuch were Elsa Asenijef, Richard Arnold Bermann, Franz Blei, Max Brod, Julie Jolowicz, Philipp Keller, František Langer, Heinrich Lautensack, and Otto Pick—almost all of them literary authors. Describing the genesis of the book in his foreword to its new edition in 1963, Pinthus recalls a visit to the movies during which he and his friends discussed “the false ambition of the then young silent film to imitate the theatre bound to words and the static stage, or the novel picturing in words, instead of using the new, infinite possibilities […] of film” (1963, 9–10). By contrast, the authors of Das Kinobuch attempted—or so Pinthus insists—“to see cinematically, to make every situation shootable” (28). According to both contemporaneous critics and later research, this attempt failed unconditionally. Most critics identify “a contradiction between the predominantly ‘literary’ presentation of the scripts and the clearly emphasised intention of the authors to let the ‘main idea and the action’ appear as ‘cinematically conceived and seen’” (Heller 1985, 75; see also Kasten 1990, 40; Schwarz 1994, 116). This failure of the literary authors to think and write “cinematically” is commonly explained away by their lacking awareness of the film medium or the absent experience in screenwriting. Alexander Schwarz, author of an extensive monograph on German and Russian screenwriting, was the first researcher to offer a more profound explanation. Schwarz (1994, 115–24) compared the surviving original manuscripts of the scripts collected in Das Kinobuch to their published versions and came to the conclusion that the editor Pinthus deliberately made the scripts look like the more established literary genres—the short story and the theatrical play. In particular, Pinthus made the graphic variety and segmentation of the scripts less conspicuous by eliminating line breaks that marked the beginning of a new shot or scene (121); in some scripts, Pinthus also erased indications and comments on the shot size, point of view, and other “technical” issues related to film production (119–20). By adjusting the layout and vocabulary of the screenplays to those of prose and theatrical plays, Pinthus thus undermined his own programme of screenplay’s liberation from literature.

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However, Pinthus’s editorial decisions alone cannot account for the perceived literariness of Das Kinobuch. Stefanie Harris put forward an additional explanation: “This book whose stated goal was to show how film could be freed from the influence of literature was, at the same time, very much concerned with the current state of writing” (2009, 65). What the critics and research condemned as the “literariness” of Das Kinobuch stemmed, according to Harris, not only (or not at all) from the authors’ lacking experience as screenwriters or their limited understanding of the new medium. Rather, their hope was that their screenplays were able “not only to impact the film medium but also the literary medium, and to change fundamental aesthetic assumptions about literature” (65). To substantiate her claim, Harris analyses three scripts from Das Kinobuch that explicitly “construct their scenarios around scenes of writing and reading” (66). These scripts emphasise the materiality of writing and reading, exploring the position or status of the literary author who is situated in a world in which aesthetic reception is increasingly programmed by mechanical forms of recording and representation such as film […]. What we notice most often in these and other brief scenarios […] is the breakdown of the writer’s artistic production. (66–67)

Harris foregrounds how the scripts in Das Kinobuch play out the confrontation between the new film medium and the anachronistically romantic understanding of literary creativity and reading. In this confrontation, the screenplay takes the intermediate position of an “interface between the author and technology” that brings on reconciliation, mutual enrichment, or the submission of one to the other (Harris 2009, 72). This mediating position, it should be stressed in support of Harris’s argument, is the reason why so many scripts in Das Kinobuch feature transformations between diegetic reality and diegetic fiction or dream s. In Walter Hasenclever’s The Wedding Night (Die Hochzeitsnacht ), a prophetic dream is revealed as reality; in the finale of Plumm-Pasha by Else Lasker-Schüler, the protagonist awakens from what he thinks was a dream, yet in fact the adventures he experienced are real in the world of the script. The whole screenplay by Max Brod, One Day in the Life of Kühnebeck, the Young Idealist (Ein Tag aus dem Leben Kühnebecks, des jungen Idealisten) is dedicated to the convergences between dream and

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reality, as the author himself states in a preface: “An almost unexplored technical possibility lies in the fact that in film, even mere fantasies can have their own peculiar existence” ([1914] 1963, 71). Finally, both scripts by Richard Bermann—Lyre and Typewriter (Leier und Schreibmaschine) and Galeotto (published under the pseudonym Arnold Höllriegel) centre on the interaction between the diegetic reality and a film the characters of the story are watching. Galeotto is especially interesting in this regard: the title alludes to a famous quotation from Dante’s Divine Comedy— “Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it”—and to the corresponding episode, in which two characters fall in love while reading a romance; in the script, the love affair is made possible not by a book, but by a romantic film. As the protagonist writes to her lover at the end, “Galeotto was the film and he who made it” ([1914] 1963, 131). Reflecting on the transformations between dreams or fiction and the diegetic reality, the scripts thus anticipate their own transformation from a piece of writing into a film. This potential transformation opened new possibilities for literary writing that the authors of Das Kinobuch were the first to recognise. The aspiring poets and writers that they were, many authors of Das Kinobuch attempted to challenge the common notions of literature with the help of the screenplay, because the screenplay was embedded both in the “old” medium of literature and the “new” medium of film. Some five or six years later, French and Russian literary authors recognised precisely this potential of the screenplay—to destabilise normative ideas about what literary writing and reading is (see Chapters 4 and 5). However, the editor Pinthus partially obscured this potential of Das Kinobuch by adjusting the appearance of the scripts to that of the established literary genres. Nevertheless, Das Kinobuch became a widely discussed precedent for the publication of film scripts and for the interest of literary authors in this new genre.

The Importance of the Intertitles: Leonid Andreyev’s Administrative Ecstasy In that same year as Das Kinobuch came out in Germany—1913—a remarkable event marked the onset of the screenplay’s institutionalisation as a literary genre in Russia. A screenplay of the famous writer Leonid Andreyev was included into the lifetime edition of his complete works

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under the title Administrative Ecstasy: A Cinematic Story about the Talentless Vasen’ka (Administrativnyy vostorg: Kinematograficheskiy rasskaz o beztalannom Vasen’ke). Below I show that with this script, Andreyev aimed to overcome what he saw as a weakness of film in comparison to theatre, namely the lack of words. As early as 1909, Andreyev signed up to write screenplays for a major Russian film producer Aleksander Khanzhonkov, pioneering cooperation between literary authors and the film industry in Russia. Between 1911 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, “various film studios made a whole series of films based on the scripts by Andreyev and his [other] works” (Babicheva et al. 2012, 153), though Andreyev’s full filmography still remains to be written. By the time his complete works appeared in 1913, his engagement with film was already widely known and discussed in the press. For instance, the journal Sine-Fono wrote in 1912, “What used to be some kind of heresy has now come true. L. Andreyev is writing a special script for the cinema, adapting his own play for it” (1912, 14). The script Administrative Ecstasy included in Andreyev’s complete works is not an adaptation but an original screenplay. It tells a comic story about the good-for-nothing young Vasen’ka, who, on the eve of taking up his new post as policeman—a job obtained by his mother—abuses the power he does not yet have and violates the rule of sobriety specifically stressed by his boss. Unlike the scripts Andreyev wrote based on his plays, Administrative Ecstasy was never made into film.8 Speculating about why Administrative Ecstasy was included into Andreyev’s collected works, one cannot but note the peculiar place of the script in the edition—it is set at the very end of the last (eighth) volume. This position is due to the chronological arrangement of the volumes, yet it probably also expresses the doubts of the author and/or the editors regarding the literary value of the script. The script is placed in a separate section after short stories and plays; the only other text in this last section besides the script is Andreyev’s essay “Letter on the Theatre.” This essay is dedicated just as much to film as it is to theatre: It explores the changing conditions of the modern theatre in the new era of film. In short, Andreyev holds that the cinematic spectacle surpasses theatre in all regards except one: the use of words. Film “will prevail, it 8 At least three plays Andreyev adapted into screenplays were made into films by the Thiemann & Reinhardt studio: Anfisa (1912), Days of Our Life (Dni nashei zhizni, 1914), and Ekaterina Ivanovna (1915), all three today lost.

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will conquer everything, it will give everything. It will not give just one thing—words, and that is the end of its power, the limit of its might” (Andreyev 1913, 316). Andreyev’s screenplay immediately follows this bold statement, which is all the more significant given that the words to be used in film—that is, the intertitles—are the most remarkable feature of Andreyev’s script. The few researchers who mention Administrative Ecstasy specifically note the expressivity of the intertitles and their importance for the development of the narrative (Belova 1978, 19; Kryuchechnikov 1971, 37). Indeed, while the action description is held in a rather neutral, matter-offact tone, the intertitles are often ironic, supporting both the comic mode and the moral message of the story. For instance, the script opens with an intertitle: 1. Someone pointing, guiding, and warning. On the screen, taking its entire size, appears a huge hand with extended index finger. Slowly moving up and down, this adamant finger makes a paternal pointing gesture. (Andreyev 1913, 317)

The opening intertitle marks this scene as a symbolic moral introduction to the following story. At the same time, the intertitle sets an ironic tone: the uncertainty as to who makes the gesture—the “someone”— undermines the authority of the moral guidance and warning. Most intertitles in Andreyev’s script are equally ironic. For example, when the drunk Vasen’ka is “practising” his future job as policeman by intimidating innocent people, the intertitle ironically comments: “Vasen’ka becomes engrossed in administrative activities” (Andreyev 1913, 321). While the action description in the script is a continuous prose narrative, the intertitles are graphically highlighted and even numbered (see Fig. 3.1); this visual presentation emphasises their utmost importance. Andreyev’s attention to the intertitles corresponds to the notion of intertitles as the only “literary” component of film—this notion was widespread and actively discussed among Russian authors during the 1920s (see Broudeur-Kogan 2000). Rather than regarding the entire screenplay as a literary work, only the words that remain visible on screen—analogous to the words spoken by the actors in theatre—were seen as belonging to the domain of literary writing. This is why Andreyev deplored the lack of words in film and attempted to compensate for this

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Fig. 3.1 Beginning of the script Administrative Ecstasy (Administrativnyy vostorg ) by Leonid Andreyev, published in his complete works in 1913

“flaw” of film with the help of intertitles. Just like Lavedan’s Assassination of Guise, Administrative Ecstasy is thus an attempt to “raise” the published script to the level of theatrical play. Regardless of the motivation, however, the inclusion of Andreyev’s script into his collected works was a ground-breaking event on the book market—to my knowledge, the next precedent of this kind was set only in 1936 by the posthumous edition of Mayakovsky’s collected works.

The Emergence of a Genre: Screenplays in the Journal Pegas Another milestone in the history of screenplay publications was set by the same Khanzhonkov studio, who was the first film company to sign up literary authors, including Andreyev, as screenwriters. Pegas, published by the Khanzhonkov company between 1915 and 1917, was most likely the

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first journal to print screenplays in full on a regular basis. The journal’s editorial policy focused on establishing the screenplay as a literary genre on par with short prose, drama, and poetry. Screenplays must have occasionally been published in the Russian trade press of the time, such as Sine-Fono and Vestnik Kinematografii, but Pegas made screenplays the core of its editorial policy. Around twenty screenplays were published in the nine issues of the journal between November 1915 and October 1916, half of them by female authors. In fact, apart from Das Kinobuch and the 1925 book by the little-known Soviet screenwriter and poet Lyubov’ Belkina, Pegas contains the only published scripts by female authors I was able to discover from before 1930. Their authors are Anna Mar (pseudonym of Anna Lenshina), best known for her 1916 novel Woman on the Cross (Zhenshchina na kreste), which provoked a storm of criticism for its lesbian and sadomasochistic motifs (see Mikhailova 1996, 145–46); the otherwise unknown authors E. Romanova and Ekaterina Tissova; and finally Zoya Barantsevich, the only figure still known today, as an actress and screenwriter (see Leigh 2015, 146–50). Pegas is further a unique occurrence in the pre-war history of screenwriting because, despite being dedicated primarily to film and publishing between thirty and fifty screenplay pages in every issue, it was not, strictly speaking, a trade magazine: Specialised journals dedicated to film sometimes consisted of up to 95 percent advertising by film companies, and were meant for a narrow circle of professionals, primarily distributors and cinema owners. […] By contrast, Pegas was addressed to cinema audiences and printed almost no ads. (Chernyshev 1985, 33)

In reality, Pegas did contain a section with ads, located at the very end of the journal, and the articles on film were not without direct or hidden advertisement (see Chernyshev 1985, 33–36)—especially since most scripts published in the journal were realised by the Khanzhonkov studio. Nevertheless, the quoted passage correctly stresses that the editorial policy of Pegas was different from that of the trade press, such as Khanzhonkov’s other journal, Vestnik Kinematografii. Khanzhonkov started the latter as early as 1910, and in 1915–1916 its issues appeared parallel to those of Pegas, which also confirms the conceptual difference between the two. Further, Pegas must have had a circulation of about

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three to four thousand copies, which was “twice as much as the circulation of large trade magazines” (34). That the scope of Pegas was much broader than the promotion of films by the Khanzhonkov company is also evident its subheading—“The journal of arts”—and reflected in its thematic structure. Screenplay publications, which take up the first quarter to half of every issue, are followed by articles on literature and cinema, as well as, varying from issue to issue, theatre, painting, and ballet.9 Occasionally, the journal includes “chronicle,” “portraits and drawings,” and other smaller sections. Some issues also published lyric poetry, plays, or short prose. Pegas thus not only programmatically placed film among other arts, but also the screenplay among other established literary genres. Most scripts from Pegas describe the action concisely in the present tense (with occasional slips into the past tense), are divided into numbered scenes, and include film stills as illustrations. These features distinguish film scripts from other literary works published in Pegas. By contrast, short stories featured in Pegas are written in the past tense and not divided into single scenes; the theatrical plays published in Pegas consist, by tradition, mostly of dialogue. These textual differences notwithstanding, the layout and certain text elements of the scripts make them look like short stories or theatrical plays (Fig. 3.2 shows a typical script layout from Pegas ). For instance, some screenplays are divided into “acts” in addition to scenes, begin with a list of characters, and feature subheadings such as “drama,” “film-play,” “play-film,” and “dramatic etudes,” suggesting a connection to theatrical plays. In other scripts, the scenes are grouped into “chapters,” and the subheadings read “novella,” “novel,” “a tragic story,” and “a tragic short story.” Some scripts mix the structure typical of plays with the subheadings typical of prose, and vice versa. In other words, the main purpose of these genre indicators is to lend the film scripts the attributes of other literary genres, without altering the specific style and writing techniques of the scripts. In this way, the editors of Pegas integrated the screenplay into the literary system while preserving certain specifics of the genre. Interestingly, Pegas never downplayed the connection between the published film scripts and the films made on their basis, but rather highlighted 9 It is interesting that the bulk of the articles in Pegas on both film and other topics was composed by just a few authors, in particular Nikandr Turkin and his nephew Valentin Turkin (see Chernyshev 1985, 34–35).

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Fig. 3.2 Beginning of the script Love of the State Counselor (Lyubov’ statskogo sovetnika) by Yevgeni Chirikov, published in the journal Pegas in December 1915

this connection, for instance, through the inclusion of film stills. Pegas was thus not only the first journal to bring screenplays to the attention of the broader public as works of a separate literary genre; the journal was also far ahead of its time in recognising that the functional aspect of screenwriting in no way precludes it from being a literary practice. ∗ ∗ ∗ The earliest script publications in press and in book form surveyed in this chapter shed light on how the literary community perceived the screenplay as an emerging genre. All script publications I have discussed demonstrate the attempt to fit the screenplay into the established patterns of literary writing, reading, and publishing. For this purpose, the link to theatrical plays proved to be especially fruitful: Lavedan’s Assassination of Guise, a few scripts from Das Kinobuch, Andreyev’s Administrative

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Ecstasy, and some scripts published in Pegas all establish a connection to playwriting. Other screenplays from Das Kinobuch and Pegas highlight their affinities to short prose. Although some of the earliest published screenplays already reflect on the possible differences between playwriting, prose writing, and screenwriting, the general impulse in the 1910s is to neutralise rather than to highlight these differences. Authors and publishers thus attempted to situate the screenplay in the existing system of literary genres rather than challenge the latter with the help of the screenplay; that situation was to change drastically after World War I.

References Abel, Richard. 1994. The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema 1896–1914. Berkeley: University of California Press. Albera, François. 2008. “L’Assassinat du duc de Guise, produit ‘semi-fini’?” 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze 56: 94–122. Andreyev, Leonid. 1913. Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy Leonida Andreyeva: S portretom avtora. Vol. 8. St. Petersburg: Marks. Azlant, Edward. 1980. “The Theory, History and Practice of Screenwriting, 1897–1920.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison. Babicheva, Yuliya, Anna Kovalova, and Mikhail Koz’menko. 2012. “L. N. Andreyev i russkiy kinematograf 1900–1910–kh godov.” Vestnik SanktPeterburgskogo Universiteta. Seriya 15. Iskusstvovedeniye 2 (4): 149–63. Belova, Lyudmila. 1978. Skvoz’ vremia. Ocherki istorii sovetskoi dramaturgii. Moscow: Iskusstvo. Bermann, Richard. (1914) 1963. Galeotto. In Das Kinobuch, edited by Kurt Pinthus, 127–31. Zürich: Verlag der Arche. Boon, Kevin. 2008. Script Culture and the American Screenplay. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Bousquet, Henri. 1996. 1896 à 1906. Vol. 1 of Catalogue Pathé des anneés 1896 à 1914. [Bures-sur-Yvette]: Bousquet. Brewster, Ben, and Lea Jacobs. 1997. Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film. New York: Oxford University Press. Brod, Max. (1914) 1963. Ein Tag aus dem Leben Kühnebecks, des jungen Idealisten. In Das Kinobuch, edited by Kurt Pinthus, 71–75. Zürich: Verlag der Arche. Broudeur-Kogan, Mireille. 2000. “Polemika ob intertitrakh voobshche i ob intertitrakh v ‘Evreiskom schast’e’—v chastnosti.” Translated by Natal’ia Nusinova. Kinovedcheskie Zapiski 48: 81–93. Carou, Alain. 2008. “Le Film d’Art ou la difficile invention d’une littérature pour l’écran (1908–1909).” 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze 56: 9–38.

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Chaplin, Charles. 1966. My Autobiography. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. Chernyshev, Aleksandr. 1985. “Iz istorii dooktyabr’skoy kinozhurnalistiki. Zhurnal iskusstv ‘Pegas.’” Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta. Seriya 10. Zhurnalistika 6: 31–41. Grimm, Bruno. 2016. Tableaus im Film—Film als Tableau: Der italienische Stummfilm und Bildtraditionen des 19. Jahrhunderts. Paderborn, Germany: Fink. Harris, Stefanie. 2009. Mediating Modernity: German Literature and the “New” Media, 1895–1930. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Heller, Heinz-Bernd. 1985. Literarische Intelligenz und Film: Zu Veränderungen der ästhetischen Theorie und Praxis unter dem Eindruck des Films 1910–1930 in Deutschland. Tübingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Jacobs, Lewis. 1939. The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Kasten, Jürgen. 1990. Film schreiben: Eine Geschichte des Drehbuches. Vienna: Hora Verlag. ———. 2000. “Literatur im Zeitalter des Kinos I: Zur Theorie und Geschichte des Drehbuchs im Stummfilm.” In Die Perfektionierung des Scheins: Das Kino der Weimarer Republik im Kontext der Künste, edited by Harro Segeberg, 241–75. Munich: Fink (Mediengeschichte des Films, vol. 3.). Kryuchechnikov, Nikolai V. 1971. Stsenarii i stsenaristy dorevolyutsionnogo kino. Moscow: n.p. Lavedan, Henri. (1908) 1948. L’assasinat du duc de Guise. La revue du cinema 3 (15): 16–32. A facsimile reprint of the slightly different version published in 1908 can be found in: 1994. Les grands dossiers de L’Illustration. Le cinéma: Histoire d’un siècle 1843–1944, 36–39. Paris: Le Livre de Paris. Leigh, Michele. 2015. “Zoia Barantsevich and the Khanzhonkov Studios 1913– 17.” In Women Screenwriters: An International Guide, edited by Jill Nelmes and Jule Selbo, 146–50. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Loughney, Patrick. 1997. “From ‘Rip Van Winkle’ to ‘Jesus of Nazareth’: Thoughts on the Origins of the American Screenplay.” Film History 9 (3): 277–89. Malthête, Jacques, and Laurent Mannoni, eds. 2008. L’œuvre de Georges Méliès. Paris: Éditions de la Martinière. Mikhailova, Mariia. 1996. “The Fate of Women Writers in Literature at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: ‘A. Mirè’, Anna Mar, Lidiia Zinov’evaAnnibal.” In Gender and Russian Literature: New Perspectives, edited by Rosalind Marsh, 141–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. M¨uller, Corinna. 1994. Frühe deutsche Kinematographie: Formale, wirtschaftliche und kulturelle Entwicklungen 1907–1912. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler Verlag.

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Pinthus, Kurt, ed. 1963. Das Kinobuch: Kinostücke von Bermann, Hasenclever, Langer, Lasker-Schüler; Keller; Asenijeff, Brod, Pinthus, Jolowicz, Ehrenstein, Pick, Rubiner, Zech, Höllriegel, Lautensack und ein Brief von Franz Blei. Numbered Anniversary Edition. Zürich: Verlag der Arche. Price, Steven. 2013. A History of the Screenplay. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Raynauld, Isabelle. 1997. “Written Scenarios of Early French Cinema: Screenwriting Practices in the First Twenty Years.” Film History 9 (3): 257–68. ———. 2005. “Screenwriting.” In Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, edited by Richard Abel, 576–79. London: Routledge. Robinson, David. 1985. Chaplin: His Life and Art. London: Collins. Sadoul, Georges. 1973. Les pionniers du cinéma 1897–1909. Vol. 2 of Histoire générale du cinéma. Paris: Denoel. Scholz, Juliane. 2016. Der Drehbuchautor: USA—Deutschland. Ein historischer Vergleich. Bielefeld, Germany: Tanscript. Schwarz, Alexander. 1994. Der geschriebene Film: Drehbücher des deutschen und russischen Stummfilms. Munich: Diskurs Film. Sine-Fono. 1912. “Sredi Novinok.” 7: 14. Török, Jean-Paul. 1986. Le scénario: Histoire, théorie, practique. Paris: Veyrier.

CHAPTER 4

The French Poetic Screenplay: Surrealism and Other Transformations

In the previous chapter, I have shown that the path of the screenplay into the system of literary genres started with a sort of mimicry, as early screenplay publications amplified and showcased the affinities between the screenplay and other literary genres. After this common beginning, the events took different turns in French, Russian, and German screenwriting. In France, various poetic forms of screenwriting emerged. With the poetic screenplay, French authors created a genre that could challenge routine ideas about literature; in particular, the functional purpose of the poetic screenplay and its potential transformation into a film opposed the notion that literature generates no material change in the world. The prospect of the screenplay becoming a film manifested itself in the ubiquitous motif of mutual transformation between fiction and reality; this motif runs through almost all French screenplays I discuss in this chapter. I start with the screenplays that focus on the transformations in the human psyche enabled by writing, reading, and filming screenplays; then I discuss the transformation of the system of literary genres heralded by published screenplays. In the end, I consider a separate movement within the French poetic screenwriting, namely the scripts that opposed the anti-screenwriting discourses of the avant-garde filmmakers.

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Post-war Screenwriting World War I threw into crisis all European film industries and literary markets; consequently, hardly any published screenplays from between 1914 and 1918 survive (with the exception of the few discussed in the previous chapter). Both in Germany and Russia, the revival of the industry took several years, and screenplays started appearing in print only in the early 1920s; by contrast, in France screenplay publications exploded right after the end of the war.1 The experience of World War I was perhaps the most significant context for any kind of creative writing in the early 1920s. In his historical study of various “cinepoetic” texts, Christophe Wall-Romana suggests that screenplays of the interwar period also “explored cinema as a temporal and sensorial apparatus for diffracting [the war] trauma” (2013, 50). To support his argument, Wall-Romana analyses six film scripts that develop this “countertraumatic aesthetics” (181). Problematically, he also insists—without convincing textual or contextual evidence—that these six scripts were never meant to be made into films; they are, in his view, deliberately “unshootable.” Taking Wall-Romana’s argument as a point of departure, I argue that the counter-traumatic aesthetics is indeed central to French post-war screenwriting, but that this aesthetics is inseparable from the embedment of the screenplay in film production. “The first [French] poet paid to write movie scenarios […] around 1910” (Wall-Romana 2013, 184) was probably Ricciotto Canudo. Canudo is mostly known today as the first person to call film “the sixth art” (Canudo [1911] 1988, 59). During his lifetime, he published two film scripts: Scheherazade (Schahrazade) appeared in the renowned newspaper Le Figaro, and Dantis Amor was published in the literary journal La Revue de l’époque; both appeared in 1921 and remain almost unknown to scholars. The one better-known script by Canudo, The Other Wing (L’autre aile), was published posthumously in 1924; despite its subheading “A visual novel,” The Other Wing is what we would today call a master scene script. It tells the story of a woman, Hélène, who is traumatised by the death of her beloved in a plane crash and becomes an 1 Even in the last year of the war, poet Blaise Cendrars was already planning to publish with Éditions de la Sirène a collection of screenplays preliminary titled The Book of Cinema (Livre du cinéma). Although the project never saw the light of day, the list of proposed contributors alone is impressive: Jean Cocteau, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jules Romains, François Porché, Abel Gance, Max Linder, and Charlie Chaplin.

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aviatrix to overcome the trauma. The impact of shocking images on the (sub)consciousness and the ways of dealing with them is the screenplay’s main subject; in this context, Hélène’s suffering stands for the collective trauma of World War I. Wall-Romana convincingly argues that The Other Wing “enacts a cinematic imagery that is meant to be of the same order as Hélène’s counter-traumatic working-through” (2013, 188). In other words, the script draws a parallel between Hélène’s psychological recovery and the process of reading the screenplay, suggesting that in both cases a therapeutic effect results from mental visualisation. This is why WallRomana holds that the screenplay itself has the utmost importance for Canudo regardless of its potential cinematic realisation. (Canudo’s script was, in fact, realised in 1923 by Henri Andréani, but the film is lost.) However, nothing in the text actually points to Canudo’s neglect for film production; his writing is mostly indistinguishable from contemporary screenwriting and plays at being a popular melodrama: “298. [Hélène] bends down and kisses the man on the forehead. Robert makes an effort to get up. She supports him in her arms, and they kiss, lips against lips, flooded with sun” (Canudo 1924, 80). The Other Wing in fact anticipates a cinematic realisation as the crucial final step in the process of healing, as envisioned by Canudo: to overcome the War trauma, one may start with mental images, but only their materialisation in film gives substance to a new, anti-traumatic reality. Just like The Other Wing, the only screenplay by the novelist and playwright Romain Rolland concerns itself with the life of the subconscious (variations of Freudian psychoanalysis were at the time very popular among French modernists, and Rolland even entered into personal correspondence with Sigmund Freud). Rolland, by then already awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, published his screenplay The Revolt of the Machines; or, Invention Run Wild (La révolte des machines ou la pensée déchainée) as a separate book in 1921, with woodcuts by the graphic artist Frans Masereel. The script revolves around the Master of Machines, whose subconscious causes the machines under his control to revolt against humanity; machine-like, mindless humans are confronted with anthropomorphic and canny machines. Again, “World War I is clearly the context: Europe’s mindless political class controlled by the militaryindustrial complex” (Wall-Romana 2013, 202). The script ironically exposes the dullness and vanity of both machines and human characters, especially the political elite: “the President, full of the written eloquence

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of his speech (which he reads with all the more interest since, no doubt, it is not his), sees nothing—he never sees anything” (Rolland and Masereel 1921, 19). The Revolt of the Machines is evidently critical of the controlling political power and of the mainstream film industry as an ally of the military-industrial complex. This is why Wall-Romana (203) holds that Rolland’s script offers an “alternative to film industry products”—a product meant only for reading, which does not participate in the “malicious” film industry. However, Rolland’s critique of the film industry in no way precludes that his screenplay was meant to be realised; on the contrary, the script suggests that political critique can be most effective in the mass spectacle of cinema. The story about the revolt of the machines actually starts when a machine resembling a cinematic projector reveals that the Master of Machines secretly despises the ruling political elite. This allegory suggests that the true subversive power of cinema can be realised only if it articulates critical narratives, such as the one Rolland’s script develops. If we recognise that post-war experimental screenplays, such as the ones by Canudo and Rolland, are not deliberately “unshootable,” but in fact anticipate cinematic realisation, we can also see that they have a lot in common with the screenplays written by industry professionals around the same time. In particular, the screenplays of the writer-director Louis Delluc are equally concerned with the post-war trauma. Delluc published his scripts in 1923 in the volume Cinema Dramas (Drames du cinéma), which contained screenplays for four of the seven films he had produced by then. Delluc’s screenplays deal with traumatic memory and its intrusion into the present: “That confrontation between the present and the past, between reality and memory, articulated in images” (Delluc 1990, 21). The most notable feature of Delluc’s scripts is an abundance of flashbacks, flash-forwards, and parallel storylines. Memories and visions often constitute the outset of the action, indicating the inner conflict of the characters. All four screenplays published in Cinema Dramas suggest extensive parallel editing, and the density of intercuts grows as the stories approach their climaxes. The resulting rhythmic storytelling corresponds to Delluc’s rhythmic style of writing (I analyse an example of it in Chapter 9). In this way, his scripts experiment with conveying the rhythms of human life both by means of narrative techniques and style. Delluc’s scripts exemplify that, to function as a tool of sense-making and healing in the post-war epoch, the screenplay does not have to be “unshootable,” as

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in Wall-Romana’s approach; on the contrary, the function in film production arguably reinforces the screenplay’s anti-traumatic potential by letting a new, tangible work emerge from the healing processes of writing and reading—the film. The scripts by Delluc, Rolland, and Canudo illustrate the argument I advance in this chapter, namely that the new genre of screenplay attracted French modernists precisely because of its embedment in film production. On the one hand, the screenplay could become a material artefact—a film, which had a broad reach across various audiences; on the other hand, as part of the film industry, screenwriting could be used to criticise and undermine this industry from the inside. These two factors—the transformation of the script into film and its role in the film business—gave literary authors the possibility to challenge the idea of literature as an immaterial practice sequestered to the realm of aesthetic and philosophical games. To realise this possibility, the screenplay had to be recognisable as literature and integrated into the literary system. This is why Canudo, Rolland, Delluc, and many other authors published their scripts in literary journals and in book form; this is also why they often foregrounded the poetic qualities of their scripts, which ranged from the poetics of popular melodrama (Canudo) to the poetics of irony (Rolland), to the poetics of rhythm (Delluc), to other literary experiments I explore below. The possibility of a literary text—the screenplay—turning into a film was both paramount and new to literary authors; consequently, their scripts constantly reflect on this possibility, featuring the motif of transformation: memory or imagination turning into reality and vice versa. When I say “real” here and below, I mean, of course, the diegetic reality— what is considered real in the respective story, and not the reality of the empirical world. The motif of mutual transformation between memory or imagination and reality is apparent in the scripts I discussed above. In Canudo’s The Other Wing, a plane crash creates a traumatic memory, which then turns back into reality when another plane crashes in front of Hélène (but this time, the pilot survives, so both memory and reality are recreated); in Delluc’s scripts, too, memories have the power to define reality (see Chapter 9). In the finale of Rolland’s The Revolt of the Machines, the Master dreams of making new machines, and “the finished cycle begins again”—the cycle of creation, revolt, and destruction (Rolland and Masereel 1921, 71); in other words, the Master’s dreams transform the reality of his world. While the scripts by Canudo, Delluc, and Rolland express enthusiasm about the transformative powers

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of imagination, other screenplays from the same time are wary of the interpenetration between fiction and reality. I explore these latter scripts below.

The Trepidatious Screenplay: Against the Fiction-Reality Amalgam Just like Canudo, Guillaume Apollinaire—one of the most influential Parisian modernists—pioneered the involvement of French literary authors in the film industry. As early as 1917, he and his friend André Billy co-wrote a film script called La Bréhatine, this title referring to a female inhabitant of the French island Brehat. La Bréhatine describes how the life story of a woman is written down as a popular novel, and the novel in turn changes the woman’s life. This mutual transformation between fiction and reality ends tragically: both the female protagonist Aline and her beloved die in the finale. La Bréhatine presents this tragic ending as a direct consequence of the character’s inability to distinguish between her reality and the literary fiction: 98. And that is how, having believed in the realness of a story that was only half truthful, died Aline Le Briant, a victim of her imagination and her heart. (Apollinaire and Billy 1971, 83)

The script presents a doom story of full conflation between fiction and the quotidian; in the story of La Bréhatine, this conflation results from reading, but the storytelling devices Apollinaire and Billy use suggest that their actual concern was with film watching rather than reading. When the writer Raymond Breteuil is composing his novel and when Aline is reading it, “the image—of events both remembered and imagined—appears as a vignette superimposed on a corner of the screen, with no visual differentiation within vignettes between what is real and what is imagined” (Williams 1981, 8). For example: The hand writes: Upon leaving Bréhat, Yves went to Nantes. Superimposition: the port of Nantes. Yves wanders on the docks. He is approached by two nasty-looking sailors. (Apollinaire and Billy 1971, 57)

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La Bréhatine is, in fact, a warning against the ability of film to make the recording of fictional and real events indistinguishable from each other.2 This warning is meant primarily for the potential viewers of La Bréhatine, who would be able to perceive the equal verisimilitude of the scenes that the novelist imagines and those that are real in the world of the script. However, the script itself adds even more weight to the warning message: the transformation between the popular novel and reality in the world of La Bréhatine parallels the potential transformation of the film script into a film (which, in case of La Bréhatine, never happened). A story in many regards similar to La Bréhatine is at the core of the comedy screenplay Donogoo-Tonka; or, The Miracles of Science (DonogooTonka ou les miracles de la science) by the writer Jules Romains, published as a separate book in 1920. In this “cinematographic tale,” as the subheading calls it, the public takes a staged film about a non-existent city named Donogoo-Tonka for the footage of a real gold-bearing city, and adventurers set out in search of it. Unable to find the imaginary city, they found one themselves and name it Donogoo-Tonka, which is how diegetic fiction ends up mutating into reality. Again, just like in La Bréhatine, the central theme of Donogoo-Tonka is the deceivingly truthful cinematic image and its potential to literally transform reality; and again, the potential transformation of the script into a film parallels and exposes these transformative powers of film. At the same time, Donogoo-Tonka introduces textual elements or techniques that deliberately complicate a cinematic realisation of the script. In particular, the style of Romains’s screenplay ranges from slightly ironic to explicitly satirical. To give just one example: after a series of misfortunes, the protagonist manages to get a loan for his expedition to Donogoo-Tonka at the bank where “everything from the [errand] boy’s cap to the director’s jacket betrays the uncertainty of the balance sheets and the cramps of the safe” (Romains 2009, 42). Besides the world of bankers, the script similarly ridicules psychiatrists, geographers, 2 A similar constellation is at the core of another piece Apollinaire wrote ten years prior to La Bréhatine—the short story “A Great Film” (“Un beau film,” Apollinaire 1971, 238–41). In it, a real murder is committed and captured on camera to produce a sensational film, which is perceived by the public as a carefully staged fiction. Claude Tournadre (1971, 7) suggests that Apollinaire’s initial conception for La Bréhatine goes back to “A Great Film.” A comparison between the script and the short story confirms their common critical impetus: both texts are apprehensive about the full amalgamation of the imaginary and the real that the film medium makes possible.

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academics in general, the film industry, and cinemagoers. In addition to multiple figurative passages the script features excessively long intertitles, sometimes spreading across multiple pages in the published version. This abundance of elements that can only be perceived in the process of reading becomes an obstacle for the transformation of the script into a film (which, in fact, never took place)3 ; Donogoo-Tonka thus identifies language as a possible remedy against the full conflation of fiction and reality in film. The transformations between cinematic fiction and reality are also the theme of the screenplay by doctor, psychoanalyst, and writer André Berge entitled The Reader of Souls (Le liseur d’âmes ). In 1924, Berge and his brother François Berge founded the literary journal Les Cahiers du Mois , which published many avant-garde writers of the time. One of the special issues of Les Cahiers du Mois from 1925 entitled “Scénarios” contains six screenplays, among which is André Berge’s The Reader of Souls. It is a story of a woman who comes to possess first a magical mirror that shows the events happening elsewhere, and then magical glasses that show their owner the true nature of people’s souls. The entire narrative is replete with free indirect discourse, mostly in the form of questions: “The count is fascinated by a memory. [Tournadre, Claude. 1971. Foreword to La Bréhatine: Cinéma-drame, by Guillaume Apollinaire and André Billy, 5– 27. Paris: Lettres Modernes] He wants, he wants … (his eyebrows frown) …he wants, but what?” (Berge 1925, 11); “a hand, the hand of Ines (yes, without a doubt) brandishes a dagger. […] Is it possible that this jewel could be used to kill?” (15); “she dares not look at them through her glasses. What would she see?” (24). The free indirect discourse is a type of writing that blurs the border between the voice of the narrator and the voices of the characters; as a result, we are able to penetrate the mind of every character in the same way as the magical devices allow the characters to see beyond what is immediately visible. If we conceive of these magical devices as metaphors for film, then The Reader of Souls is essentially a story about the capacity of film to reveal the hidden nature of things and people; the use of the free indirect discourse in Berge’s scenario anticipates this unique penetrating perspective.

3 The German sound film Donogoo-Tonka (1936) is based not on Romain’s film script, but on his theatrical play of the same name. For a detailed discussion of Romain’s screenplay and its genesis, see Ockman (2009).

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At the same time as it celebrates the revelatory capacities of film, The Reader of Souls is also wary of the conflation between fiction and reality that film enables. In the finale of the script, the prophetic dream of the main female character, Inès, ends up fusing with diegetic reality: “The scene that is being lived, and the scene of the nightmare alternate and become more and more similar. They are transforming each other by the desire to coincide” (Berge 1925, 25). This scene illustrates the idea that film can not only offer the spectators a truthful view of the world, but also present imagined events as real. The script opposes such amalgamation of fiction and reality in the finale, exposing the artificiality of the suggested film: “The houses collapse like card castles, without leaving any rubble. /The sky itself is falling, like a piece of blue canvas that has been detached” (26). Unlike the characters of the story, the spectators should not confuse their reality with that of film—or so The Reader of Souls suggests. At first glance, it may seem that this abundance of narratives questioning or openly mocking the borders between film and reality stems only from the fascination with, or the apprehension about the cinematic capacity to record and present with equal verisimilitude real and staged events. However, the idea of transformations between fiction and reality was hardly new to literary authors; the film may have merely revived the interest in this idea and consequently in some older narratives that evoke it. For instance, in the script The Horoscope; or, Nobody Avoids Their Destiny (L’oroscope ou nul n’évite sa destinée) written by another Nobel laureate in literature André Gide in 1928, the motif of mutual penetrability between fiction and reality goes back as far as the narratives of One Thousand and One Nights. Although Gide only mentions the entire collection and not the title of the story he based his script on, it is not hard to guess that it is an episode from “The Third Kalandar’s Tale.” Having suffered a shipwreck, the protagonist hides on an island and sees a newly arrived cortège lock a young woman (in the original tale, a young man) in a secret cave. He sneaks inside and finds that the voluntarily imprisoned woman is hiding there to avoid the fulfilment of a death prophecy, which nevertheless is fulfilled at the end, when the protagonist accidentally stabs the woman. Gide wrote The Horoscope for his lover Marc Allégret to support the beginning of the latter’s cinematographic career; the script survives as part of a letter from Gide to Allégret and, although separated from the body

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of the letter, it preserves the intimate epistolary style. Gide addresses Allégret in numerous comments, mostly concerning scenes that need further elaboration and possibilities for cinematographic realisation. This style of screenwriting indicates that, while the idea of mutual transformations between fiction and reality was hardly novel to modernist writers, the fact that written fiction could materialise in the empirical world as film was certainly a twentieth-century innovation. This is why the screenplays that reflected on the materiality of imagination and cinema almost always reflected, implicitly or explicitly, on their own possible transformation from a piece of writing into a visual artefact. For instance, when Gide interrupts the process of writing to “take a nap” ([1928] 1995, 280), he not only informs the reader about it, but also marks and numbers it as a separate scene in his script. In doing so, he alludes to the constellation of One Thousand and One Nights, whereby Scheherazade interrupts her narrative every night to postpone her execution, but also links the materiality of the writing process to the materiality of the potential film outlined in the screenplay. Ultimately, the interest in the materiality of writing and the material impact of literature on the world in the screenplays I have so far discussed has a double provenance. On the one hand, this interest is connected to the newly discovered possibility of literary writing being literally transformed into a visual artefact—a film. On the other hand, the idea of the materiality of writing was inextricably linked to the motifs of imagination, memory, psychological trauma, dreaming, and other mental processes. Film could expose the easiness with which the human perception of reality could be manipulated, and highlight the great impact of fiction on human psyche. A number of screenplays written in the 1920s bring the interest in the cinematic disorientation of the human psyche to a whole new level. They are often referred to in the research as “surrealist” screenplays, since most (though not all) of them were written by authors associated, at different times, with the surrealist movement.

The Surrealist Screenplay The surrealist strand of screenwriting was, in a way, also initiated by Apollinaire. While the screenplay La Bréhatine he co-wrote with André Billy remained unproduced and comparatively unknown until its publication in 1971, Apollinaire’s lecture “The New Spirit and the Poets,” read in

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November 1917, made waves—not least in the domain of screenwriting. Among other things, the talk encouraged contemporary poets “to be the first to provide a totally new lyricism for these new means of expression which are giving impetus to art—the phonograph and the cinema” (Apollinaire 1971, 237). This call was immediately answered by Philippe Soupault, not yet the famous surrealist poet he would soon become. Shortly after Apollinaire’s talk, Soupault wrote his first Cinematographic Poem, entitled Indifference (Indifférence: Poème cinématographique), and published it in January 1918 in the avant-garde journal SIC. The prefatory note to the publication suggested to “those, who have the material means, to realise this first endeavour,” that is, to make this poetic script into a film (Soupault 1979, 23). In his famous study on surrealism and film, Ado Kyrou calls Indifference “the first consciously surrealist scenario” (1953, 191, original emphasis). Soon after Soupault published Indifference in SIC, the editor of the journal Pierre Albert-Birot composed his own mini film scripts, Poems in Space (Poèmes dans l’espace), in a style very similar to that of Soupault’s cinematographic poem. Chapter 7 offers a close reading of Indifference and some of Albert-Birot’s scripts and argues that these were the first experiments in using the genre specifics of the screenplay to recreate the dreamlike and disorienting effects of attending the cinema. Starting with Soupault’s and Albert-Birot’s scripts, the motif of dreams— subversive dreams that have the power to re-enchant and transform the everyday—becomes the central poetic principle of surrealist screenwriting. The possibilities for experimentation opened by the dream motif were so vast that the subject retained its popularity until the end of the 1920s. An illustrative example of this trend is the screenplay The Pearl (La perle), composed around 1928 by the writer and graphic artist Georges Hugnet.4 The screenplay revolves around a pearl that the protagonist first buys for his fiancée, but, after a series of thefts, ends up giving to the thief, having fallen in love with her. Not only do all major events of the story take place while the characters are asleep, but also, echoing the scripts discussed above, the dream of the protagonist becomes diegetic reality: his beloved dies in the end for no apparent reason on the exact spot where she had been killed in his dream. Although written ten years 4 The script was realised in 1928–1929 by Henri d’Ursel (under the pseudonym Henri d’Arche), with Hugnet and Kissa Kouprine, the daughter of the Russian writer Alexander Kuprin, in the main roles.

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after Soupault’s Indifference, The Pearl pursues the same ambition, which Hugnet formulates as “adhering to a realism that joins poetry through dreams” ([1928] 1972, 17)—a little-known but concise description of surrealism. In the entire tradition of surrealist screenplays and screenplay-poems, only one author insisted on the “unshootability” of his scripts—the poet Benjamin Fondane, whose book Three Scenarios: Cinepoems (Trois scenarii: Cinépoèmes ) appeared in 1928. Fondane’s “découpages,” as he writes in the introduction, “shall not be mistaken for distant allusions to cinematographic realisation; they have only been intended to collaborate in the creation of a provisional state of mind that memory consumes with the act of reading” (2007, 26). By contrast, the absolute majority of literary authors sought to realise their surrealist screenplays, even though they were often very close to Fondane’s closet scripts in terms of the (lacking) narrative, motifs, and style. A famous example is the poem-scenario by the poet Robert Desnos called The Starfish (L’étoile de mer), which served as the basis for the eponymous 1928 film by the painter, photographer, and filmmaker Man Ray. The mysterious starfish mentioned in the title is in no way connected to the dramatic love triangle vaguely outlined in the short poetic script; it inexplicably reappears eight times throughout the action in the most unexpected locations. The script tempts the reader to interpret the starfish as an incorporation of the characters’ passions, and simultaneously transgresses this straightforward symbolism by preserving the principal inexplicability of this mysterious object. In this regard, The Starfish is a direct continuation of Desnos’s earlier script, Midnight at Two O’Clock (Minuit à quatorze heures ), first published in the 1925 special issue of Les Cahiers du Mois . Midnight at Two O’Clock, which is elaborately scripted in 161 shots in a similar rhythmic manner as The Starfish, tells the story of a sphere that materialises from the imagination of two lovers and ends up literally consuming them. The direct interpretation of the sphere as a materialisation of the couple’s guilt is undermined by several absurd details, for example, the paradoxical title of the script, the anthropomorphic need of the sphere to consume human food, and the musical accompaniment the script suggests: “Whenever the ball appears, the music plays La Carmagnole” (Desnos 1992, 212). This sarcastic popular song from the time of the French Revolution is also among the music suggested for The

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Starfish. In this way, the scripts by Desnos mock the simplifying psychoanalytical misreadings of surrealist texts (already common among their contemporaries) and reinstall the mystery at the core of the everyday. In 1930, the journal La Revue du cinéma published some of the last silent surrealist screenplays, among them another script by Desnos, The Reefs of Love (Les récifs de l’amour), and a screenplay by the writer and artist Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, The Eighth Day of the Week (Le huitième jour de la semaine). Although by that time Ribemont-Dessaignes had already broken with Breton’s surrealist group, his screenplay takes up—and, in a way, even summarises—many ideas and motifs that previously appeared in surrealist screenwriting. Like many other surrealist screenplays, The Eighth Day of the Week oscillates between a vague narrative and unconnected surrealist episodes. The script features a demonic image of God (capitalised in the script) who, in accordance with the Western pictorial tradition of demonic characters, is hunchbacked. God brings to life a mannequin at the outset of the story and murders her in the finale, having realised that the mannequin turned out to be more human than the initially human characters. All of these motifs—the satiric image of God, the hunchbacked protagonist, the human mannequins, etc.—also appear in other published scripts of the time. But perhaps the most conspicuous commonality between The Eighth Day of the Week and other scripts of the time is the “materialised dream” motif. The mannequin Sadie is, in fact, brought to life as a result of God’s dream: A compartment in the cabin of an airplane. […] In the compartment, a berth. A head sticking out from the covers. We hardly see it. Outside, the clouds. Crows in the distance. On the berth, the sleeper makes a movement, turns around. Goes back to sleep. A part of a female face is superimposed, overruns the entire screen: it’s a quick laugh. A crazy laugh. (Ribemont-Dessaignes 1930, 13)

The script is a continuous narrative in prose, not divided into scenes. Like his fellow surrealists, Ribemont-Dessaignes writes in a laconic style, replete with syntactic and lexical repetitions. Occasionally, his screenplay features indications of cinematic techniques, such as superimposition and close-up—a shot type that appears constantly in surrealist scripts. Like most other surrealist screenplays, The Eighth Day of the Week avoids figurative language and any other writing techniques that could obscure or

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impede the screenplay’s potential function in film production. In this regard, the work of Ribemont-Dessaignes illustrates that the surrealist screenwriting largely continued the “tradition” of poetic scripts initiated by Soupault, remaining on the border between surrealist poetry and screenwriting. Not all surrealist screenplays were written by those associated with the surrealist group, and not all screenplays written by the surrealists feature the motifs, storytelling techniques, and style characteristic of the surrealist scripts. Examples of the former are the previously mentioned The Pearl by Hugnet and the 1929 book Dramas on Celluloid (Drames sur celluloïd) by Pierre Chenal. Although Chenal never participated in the surrealist movement, his Dramas on Celluloid reads as a direct descendant of Soupault’s and Albert-Birot’s scripts: Its “programme” of twenty-four mini film scripts is set as continuous poem and features numerous magical transformations and tricks. At the same time, most scripts by Chenal reflect ironically on the film industry, which he was well acquainted with as an emerging director. The book concludes “with an ultimate scenariotext about [Pierre Chenal as] a scriptwriter looking—not surprisingly, in vain—for an actual producer” (Wall-Romana 2013, 309), thus simultaneously reinforcing the potential function of the scripts and doubting the possibility of their realisation in the existing film industry. As to the screenplays of the surrealists that can hardly be characterised as surrealist, examples vary from commercially or genre-oriented projects, such as Desnos’s melodramatic The Reefs of Love, to scripts by the (ex-)surrealists who distanced themselves from political and/or aesthetic programme of surrealism. One remarkable example of the latter is the screenwriting of Antonin Artaud. Scholars tend to regard Artaud’s scripts as deeply indebted to surrealism, but from my point of view, which I detail in Chapter 8, Artaud’s screenwriting is quite distinct from that of most surrealists. Even though the film made from Artaud’s script The Seashell and the Clergyman (La coquille et le clergyman) is often named as the first in the very limited canon of surrealist films, I argue that Artaud was largely disinterested in the surrealist convergences between cinema, dreams, and lyric poetry. His experimental scripts devise instead films that cannot be deciphered and interpreted as dreams, but which the audience can only experience through their bodies. Surrealist scripts thus take up the motif of transformation between fiction and reality, which was pervasive in French modernist screenwriting, and reshape it in accordance with the surrealist programme. The resulting

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scripts explore the materiality of the human psyche and of dreams in particular, exposing reality as a product of conscious and subconscious desires. The potential transformation of the scripts—the products of imagination—into “real” films echoes this postulated malleability of reality. At the same time, both poetic scripts and the films they devise were meant to induce the psychological state praised by the surrealists—the state that Breton described in his “Manifesto of Surrealism” as “the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality” ([1924] 1972, 15). For the surrealists, then, the poetic scripts literally transformed reality by transforming the psychological states of the readers and potential viewers. Besides dreaming, there is one further motif so central to French experimental screenwriting that is deserves a separate mention: Charlot, which is at the same time the French name of Chaplin’s character the Tramp and a conceptual blend of this character with Chaplin’s historical persona. The popularity of Charlot among the French modernists is also inextricably linked to their interest in (re)shaping reality with the powers of imagination.

Charlot and Genre Hybridity Chaplin’s shorts were among the US films that flooded French cinemas around 1916, while the French film industry was in a deep war-inflicted crisis. The avant-garde, especially the surrealists, were immediately fascinated with Charlot (see Abel 1975, 23–5) and integrated their film experiences into their screenwriting. Below I argue that Charlot appears in the French modernist scripts as a beacon of transformation, undermining the old system of literary genres and pathing the way for new ideas about the purpose of literature. One of the earliest examples of Charlot-inspired scripts is The Chaplinade (La chaplinade ou Charlot poète), by the French–German poet Yvan Goll, which came out in book form no later than 1920.5 The

5 The publication history of Goll’s work is somewhat unclear. It certainly appeared in two languages, German and French, and the German book was printed by the Rudolf Kaemmerer publishing house in Dresden in 1920. Regarding the French version, however, secondary literature provides contradictory evidence: while most sources list it as part of the Le nouvel Orphée book, which comprised several works by Goll and appeared in 1923,

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Chaplinade features six distinct episodes, in which the character Charlot descends from a poster; decides to become a poet and departs on a train to Mount Parnassus; dines with the owners of a train station buffet; digs in a desert to burrow through the earth; is crowned “Charlot-Christ”; and finds his true sad self in a forest, losing a doe that has accompanied him most of the way, only to return to the poster he materialised from. Beside these surrealist episodes, an interesting particularity of the script is that in terms of genre, it is a mélange of screenplay, drama, and poetry. It repeatedly refers to a potential cinematic realisation—for instance, the intertitles are marked as appearing “on the screen” four times throughout the script. On the other hand, in a manner similar to a theatrical play, it features longer lines of dialogue and, in the German version before the beginning of the text, a legal notice saying: “To the theatres, this work is printed as a manuscript, the rights for staging and filming can be acquired only through the stage distribution [department] of the Rudolf Kaemmerer publishing house in Dresden” (1920, 4). Implying that the script was meant for both film and theatre, this legal notice connects to Goll’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, or total art: “In Kinodram [literally, film drama] all arts will be involved: it will not be just poetry, but painting, music, sculpture, dance” (Goll [1920] 1978, 138, original emphasis). The Chaplinade is, perhaps, an attempt at a script that fulfils this idea of Gesamtkunstwerk. In other words, Goll deliberately blurs the border between screenwriting and playwriting to challenge the notion of these two genres as distinct. But what does this have to do with Charlot? In Mark Winokur’s seminal work on the American comedy of the 1920s and 1930s, the chapter on Chaplin is entitled “The Comedy of Transformation” (1996, 75). Winokur contends that what distinguishes Chaplineque comedy is a certain transformative ability: whether the ability to transform objects into other objects, himself into an object, pathos into comedy (or vice versa) or the tramp into a gentleman. (1996, 75)

some researchers, including Albersmeier (1985, 472), indicate that it was published as a separate book in 1919 by Éditions de la Sirène, under the title La Chaplinade ou Charlot poète. While I was unable to discover the latter publication, it is very likely it existed, because the comparison of the French and German version of the texts shows that, in the latter, some passages are truncated or left out.

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Building on Winokur’s argument, I contend that French literary authors recognised this transformative ability as a key feature of Chaplinesque comedy and used it in their own specific interest, namely the interest of transforming literature. This is why Goll’s script revolves around the Charlot figure: The Chaplinade heralds the breakdown of borders between literary genres and the advent of a new, transformed literature as part of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Another author who made Charlot the pivot of a new hybrid genre was Benjamin Péret—one of the most long-standing members of the surrealist movement. In 1923, the review Littérature, edited by the “three surrealist musketeers” Breton, Aragon, and Soupault, published Péret’s first screenplay, Pulchérie Wants a Car (Pulchérie veut une auto). In Chapter 7 I explore this script in detail, arguing that it promotes an anti-rationalist understanding of the body, drawing on the Chaplinesque ability to transform one’s own body into a machine-like object. Here, I am interested in another feature of Péret’s script, namely its affinity to the style of Péret’s film critique. Between 1925 and 1926, Péret wrote for the cinema column of the newspaper L’Humanité, severely criticising commercial cinema, with the notable exception of Chaplin films. Péret’s film scripts—Pulchérie and the later script Let’s Have Luncheon on the Grass! (Allons déjeuner sur l’herbe!)—and his articles on Chaplin films are for the most part virtually indistinguishable. They both present meticulous, stylistically neutral accounts of gags and tricks, either those Péret saw in a Chaplin film, or those he envisaged in his own film scripts. Here is, for example, an episode from the Pulchérie script: A gust of wind sweeps away Pulchérie’s hat, which passes in front of the car. Glouglou rushes [out of the car to get it]. A gust of wind blows the hat a little further. The car, capricious, leaves at full speed, Pulchérie at the wheel, and runs into Glouglou. (Péret [1923] 1978, 17)

Compare this scene to Péret’s account of Chaplin’s film The Pilgrim (1923): Charlot goes to the kitchen to find the girl of the house busy preparing a huge pudding. The child arrives and covers the cake with his father’s hat. Charlot pours some cream on it and covers it up completely, and when the cake is served, he cannot cut it, and only with the help of a fork does he realise what has happened. (Péret 1992, 240)

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Both Péret’s film script and his film critique are continuous and remarkably scrupulous descriptions of the gags the characters perform. In both cases, Péret’s writing is stripped of all figurative poeticism, laying bare the Chaplinesque poetry of transformations. Péret thus develops a kind of writing that oscillates between anticipating a film and accounting the impressions from cinemagoing. This hybrid of screenwriting and film criticism suggests that experiencing and creating art are, for Péret, inextricably linked activities, as poetic production and reception are equally powerful in their capacity for transformation. Around the same time as Péret wrote and published Pulchérie, Swiss novelist Albert Cohen undertook a very similar genre experiment, albeit with a slightly different focus. In 1923, the literary journal Nouvelle Revue Française published Cohen’s script Death of Charlot (Mort de Charlot ), which recounts a day from Charlot’s life; the script ends with Charlot’s death at the hand of his boss, Jéroboam, whose niece Charlot had seduced. The script is divided into fourteen numbered episodes: the first nine are loosely based on the Chaplin film Sunnyside (1919), four further episodes seem to borrow gags from A Day’s Pleasure (1919) and A Dog’s Life (1918), and only one is completely authentic, wherein Charlot goes to the movies himself (Jiménez 2008, 216–17). Just like Péret, Cohen also combines screenwriting with film criticism; however, the result is nothing like Péret’s neutral account of the film’s action. Instead, Cohen writes in a manner close to a poetic form of film criticism popular among the surrealists—critique synthetique, or “synthetic criticism.” This mélange of lyric poetry and film critique focused on personal impressions and feelings of the viewer, aiming to dissolve the border between creative and critical writing. Eroding this border is exactly what Cohen’s script sets out to do: Moved by this flowery morning, Charlot dances. What a charming prince he is with this rose between his fine teeth! More graceful than 600 rhythmicians, he dances, nervous king whom society condemns to [wear] clodhoppers. From one girl to another, from rose to rosebud, he goes, he flies, black mechanical sylph. (Cohen 1923, 13)

For Cohen as for Péret and many other francophone modernists, Charlot is the ultimate poet, who aims to undermine the familiar and/or dominant worldview by means of poetry, and is therefore condemned to clodhoppers as a symbol of social rejection and punishment. This is also

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why Charlot dies at the end of Cohen’s script—he is captured by the “defendants of the Rules” and sentenced to death by the “Committee of Bourgeois Salvation.” Developing a hybrid genre on the border between poetry, screenwriting, and film criticism, Cohen thus aims to break the “clodhoppers” of genres in the same way as his character Charlot breaks the rules of bourgeois aesthetics and moral. Taken together, the screenplays by Goll, Péret, and Cohen illustrate that Charlot was a major driving force in the experimental fusion of screenwriting with other genres, be it film critique, poetry, or drama. This hybridity of genre stood for the transformation of the established system of literary genres, and with it—the transformation of ideas about what literature can and cannot do. In this regard, Charlot-admirers followed the same path as the surrealists and many other literary authors of the time: By writing scripts in ways commonly perceived as poetic or associated with other literary genres, the authors endowed the resulting texts with transformative potential: the potential to transform themselves into films, to transform mass audiences through these potential films, and to transform the ideas about the purpose and the form of literature. Incidentally, a puppet of Charlot also appears in the beginning of the famous short film Ballet mécanique (1924), made by graphic artist Fernand Léger and film director Dudley Murphy. Léger probably constructed this puppet even before his work on Ballet mécanique, at the time when he wrote the film script Cubist Charlot (Charlot cubiste), which I discuss in Chapter 7. In Léger’s script as in Ballet mécanique, Charlot also stands for a radical transformation of art; yet unlike in the scripts I have discussed so far, this desired transformation of art and art making stems from a rejection of screenwriting. While many literary authors celebrated the screenplay as a new poetic genre, many avant-garde artists considered screenwriting an obstacle to their filmmaking practices; the following section explores their points of view.

Against Screenwriting: Abstract, Dada, and Documentary Film The opening titles of Ballet mécanique proclaim it the first film without a scenario. A similar claim appears in the opening titles of two films by Soviet documentarist Dziga Vertov: Kino-Eye (Kino-glaz, 1924), which premiered the same year as Ballet mécanique, and Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino-apparatom, 1929). The ambition to

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make films without screenplays was shared, at the same time, by works of abstract or absolute film, cinéma pur, Dada film, and the emergent documentary cinema (note the absence of surrealist film in this list). Without downplaying the differences between these avant-garde cinemas, I explore below some common reasons for their negation of screenwriting, arguing that in each case, this negation can and should be relativised by comparison to similar avant-garde film projects that actually use screenplays. Several experimental film projects of the time propagated a radical denial of mimetic representation in film, and with it—a complete denial of screenwriting. For instance, cubist painter Léopold Survage famously advocated for abstract film in his manifesto “Coloured Rhythm” (“Le Rhythme Coloré”), which was printed in the last number of Apollinaire‘s journal Les Soirées de Paris in the summer of 1914: [Colored Rhythm] is the mode of succession in time which establishes the analogy between sound rhythm in music, and colored rhythm—the fulfillment of which I advocate by cinematographic means. […] The fundamental element in my dynamic art is colored visual form, which plays a part analogous to that of sound in music. This element is determined by three factors: 1. Visual form, to give it its proper term (abstract); 2. Rhythm, that is to say movement and the changes visual form undergoes; 3. Color. (Survage [1914] 1993, 90–91)

Like many other artists of the time, Survage opposes mimetic representation in film and instead promotes an abstract play with cinematic means—shape, rhythm, and colour. This project of liberating film from mimetic representation was incompatible with screenwriting for at least two reasons. Firstly, screenwriting can, from the perspective of abstract filmmaking, mislead readers into regarding the film as the representation of a verbal outline. Secondly, screenwriting itself participates in the “faulty” practice of verbal representation: the words of a screenplay represent by virtue of referring to the real-world situation of film production. Hence there is no mention of writing an abstract film in Survage’s manifesto. However, the idea of the incompatibility of abstract film and screenwriting did not remain unchallenged. In particular, a unique perspective

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on it is offered in the screenplay For an Abstract Film (Pour le film abstrait ) by the poet Jan Brz˛ekowski. The journal of the group Circle and Square (Cercle et carré), which united several abstract painters, published Brz˛ekowski’s script in 1930. In homage to the group, the script starts by suggesting transformations of circles and squares in halves of the separated screen, which then give way to further mutations of shapes, colours, and characters. In the preface to his script, Brz˛ekowski contrasts the “anarchy” and “randomness” of the surrealist and Dada screenplays with the idea of a “solidly constructed abstract film,” subsequently offering “some possibilities, which can be used to realise an abstract scenario in a principle of order” ([1930] 1995, 91). Remarkably, the preface reveals no concern that the screenplay may undermine the anti-representational character of the film. The modernist aversion to mimetic representation often went hand in hand with a denial of a coherent, causally linked storyline. In particular, for Léger narrative was almost synonymous with the hegemony of the human subject, whereas his primary interest was “objects freed from all atmosphere, put in new relationships to each other” (1973, 50, original emphasis). Similarly, Dada film problematises the relationship between the perceiving subject and the object of perception, undermining coherent narratives in which the subject is in control. In addition, an identification of the viewer with the characters and their stories posed what many avantgarde artists saw as the danger of uncritical immersion into the illusory world of film. Therefore, “the incoherent, non-narrative, illogical nature of Dada films […] never let[s] the viewer enter the world of the film” (Kuenzli 1987, 10). The connection between the rejection of narrative and the screenplay seems almost linguistically preconditioned. Similar to the English word “scenario,” in French “scénario” means (and meant at the time) both a sequence of events—that is, a story—and the written script that details it for film, variety shows, or similar productions. Unlike English, however, French did not develop another general term such as “screenplay,” and “scénario” remains the main term used in the film industry (“découpage” and “continuité dialoguée” being later and more specific terms). When denying a coherent narrative, the francophone authors were thus predisposed to deny the “scenario.” In this context, it is hardly surprising that Dada painter Francis Picabia called his notes for the famous short film Entr’acte (1924), which played between the two acts of his ballet Relâche, “the cinematographic score

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[portée] of the ballet” (Picabia [1924] 1968, 11), rather than title it a “scenario,” as it could otherwise be identified. Here is what that score—a term Picabia borrows from the domain of music—contains: Curtain raiser: Slow-motion loading of a cannon by Satie and Picabia; the shot must make as much noise as possible. Total length: 1 minute. During the interval: 1. Boxing attack by white gloves, on a black screen. Length: 15 seconds. Written explanatory titles: 10 seconds. 2. Game of chess between Duchamp and Man Ray. Jet of water handled by Picabia sweeping away the game. Length: 30 seconds. […] 6. Dancer on a transparent mirror, filmed from beneath. Length: 1 minute Written titles: 5 seconds. […] 8. A funeral: hearse drawn by a camel, etc. Length: 6 minute Written titles: 1 minute (Picabia [1924] 1970, 113)

Picabia’s “score” not only provides quite detailed information for the situation of film production (with the exception of the intertitles, which are not elaborated upon), but even indicates the length of every sequence, while at the same time avoiding a coherent narrative. Just like Léger’s scattered pre-production notes for Ballet mécanique, which include four sheets with notes and drawings (see Lawder 1975, 120–27), Picabia’s “ideas” for Entr’acte demonstrate that, more often than not, the “complete rejection” of screenwriting in experimental filmmaking has to be put into perspective. In the case of Picabia, this rejection hardly applies at all, since a few years after Entr’acte, he published in book form the screenplay The Law of Accommodation among the One-Eyed (La loi d’accommodation chez les borgnes ). As Picabia puts it in the preface to the script, The Law of Accommodation is all about “absurd little conventions that shift [se déplacent ] by hopping on one leg” (Picabia [1928] 1995, 476). Indeed, the script equally subverts political and cinematic conventions, ridiculing characters from all social classes while the action moves from the ground floor of a building up to its top floor and as such from the top of the social ladder to the bottom. In this way, Picabia’s script avoids chronological, linear

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storytelling and finds a way to practice screenwriting despite the rejection of a coherent narrative. Besides the trends towards non-mimetic and non-narrative art, the rejection of screenwriting among avant-garde filmmakers was connected to the idea that the process of filmmaking has to remain contingent. Some artists understood contingency as a consequence or condition of improvisation—among them Man Ray, who claimed, “All the films I made were improvisations. I did not write scenarios. It was automatic cinema” (1965, 43). Yet, again, the idea of an artist single-handedly improvising a film has to be relativised. Man Ray must indeed have made his first film, Return to Reason (Le Retour à la raison, 1923), without a script. However, his later famous work, The Starfish (L’Étoile de mer, 1928), was based on the above-mentioned script of the same name by Desnos. Documentary cinema offered a similar reasoning for the importance of contingency in filmmaking and the subsequent rejection of screenwriting. While several fiction filmmakers celebrated the unpredictability of artistic improvisation, the documentarists highlighted the unpredictability of “life as it is,” to use the famous formulation of Vertov. In particular, the first film of Jean Vigo, À propos de Nice (1930), made in collaboration with Vertov’s younger brother Boris Kaufman, was clearly inspired by Man with a Movie Camera and continues the string of so-called city symphony films made without an elaborated screenplay. The “preparatory notes and screenplay drafts” to À propos de Nice, published among Vigo’s other writings on and for film (1985, 69–79), are strongly reminiscent of Vertov’s notes for his 1924 Kino-Eye (Kino-glaz) film project (2004, 79–88). Both are, in fact, lists of objects, places, and people of different professions to be filmed. In this way, both filmmakers seem to have found a compromise between scripting their films and preserving an element of contingency in their work. Ultimately, the scripts by Brz˛ekowski, Léger, Picabia, and Vigo suggest that neither non-mimetic nor non-narrative or contingency-oriented conceptions of film were necessarily synonymous with a total rejection of screenwriting. On the contrary, these ideas encouraged experimentations with the screenplay that allowed reconciling avant-garde filmmaking practices with realities of filmmaking such as production planning and communication among the members of the film crew. ∗ ∗ ∗

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The publication of numerous experimental scripts in book form and literary journals discussed in this chapter demonstrates that, during the 1920s, French literary institutions started recognising the screenplay as a literary genre in its own right. That shift was one of the main reasons why literary authors turned to screenwriting in the first place—to destabilise and transform the established system of literary genres. In this context, the embedment of the screenplay in film production played a decisive role. Literary authors projected the screenplay’s potential transformation into a film on other literary genres, endowing them with the potential to transform traumatic memory and other aspects of the human psyche; the system of literary genres; the process of artistic creation; sociocultural norms and conventions; and so on. All these ways in which literature could change the quotidian became tangible through the analogy of the screenplay’s transformation into a film. In addition, the potential of becoming a film—that is, a mass spectacle—also made the script a potentially wide-reaching form of literary writing. This was another reason why French literary authors promoted the poetic screenplay as a new powerful genre in the domain of literary writing.

References Abel, Richard. 1975. “The Contribution of the French Literary Avant-Garde to Film Theory and Criticism (1907–1924).” Cinema Journal 14 (3): 18–40. Albersmeier, Franz-Josef. 1985. Die Epoche des Stummfilms (1895–1930). Vol. 1 of Die Herausforderung des Films an die Französische Literatur: Entwurf einer “Literaturgeschichte des Films”. Heidelberg, Germany: Winter. Apollinaire, Guillaume. 1971. Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire. Translated with a critical introduction by Roger Shattuck. New York: New Directions. Apollinaire, Guillaume, and André Billy. 1971. La Bréhatine: Cinéma-drame. Edited by Claude Tournadre. Paris: Lettres Modernes. Berge, André. 1925. “Le liseur d’âmes.” In “Scénarios,” special issue, Les Cahiers du Mois, no. 12, edited by André Berge and François Berge, 7–26. Breton, André. (1924) 1972. “Manifesto of Surrealism.” In Manifestoes of Surrealism, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, 1–47. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Brz˛ekowski, Jan. (1930) 1995. “Pour le film abstrait.” In Anthologie du cinéma invisible: 100 scénarios pour 100 ans de cinema, edited by Christian Janicot, 91–93. Paris: Place.

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Canudo, Ricciotto. 1924. L’autre aile: Roman visuel suivi du roman original. Paris: Eugène Fasquelle Éditeur. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k9 6088631. ———. (1911) 1988. “The Birth of the Sixth Art.” In 1907–1929, edited by Richard Abel, Vol. 1 of French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939, 58–66. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cohen, Albert. 1923. “Mort de Charlot.” Nouvelle Revue Française 117: 883– 89. Delluc, Louis. 1990. Drames de cinéma: Scénarios et projets de films. Vol. 3 of Écrits cinématographiques. Paris: Cinémathèque Française. Desnos, Robert. 1992. Les rayons et les ombres: Cinéma. Paris: Gallimard. Fondane, Benjamin. 2007. Écrits pour le cinéma: Le muet et le parlant. Edited by Michel Carassou. Lagrasse, France: Verdier. Gide, André. (1928) 1995. “L’oroscope ou nul n’évite sa destinée.” In Anthologie du cinéma invisible: 100 scénarios pour 100 ans de cinema, edited by Christian Janicot, 279–81. Paris: Place. Goll, [Yvan]. 1920. Die Chapliniade: Eine Kinodichtung von Iwan Goll; mit vier Zeichnungen von Fernand Léger. Dresden: Rudolf Kaemmerer Verlag. ———. (1920) 1978. “Das Kinodram.” In Kino-Debatte: Texte zum Verhältnis von Literatur und Film 1909–1929, edited by Anton Kaes, 136–39. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag. Hugnet, George. (1928) 1972. “La perle.” In Pleins et déliés: Souvenirs et témoignages 1926–1972, by George Hugnet, 17–27. [La Chapelle-sur-Loire, France]: Guy Authier. Jiménez, Pedro Pardo. 2008. “Albert Cohen: Variations sur un thème de Chaplin.” French Forum 33 (1–2): 215–26. Kuenzli, Rudolf E. 1987. Introduction to Dada and Surrealist Film, edited by Rudolf E. Kuenzli, 1–12. New York: Willis, Locker & Owens. Kyrou, Ado. 1953. Le surréalisme au cinéma. Paris: Ramsay. Lawder, Standish D. 1975. The Cubist Cinema. New York: New York University Press. Léger, Fernand. 1973. Functions of Painting. Edited by Edward F. Fry. Translated by Alexandra Anderson. New York: Viking. Man Ray. 1965. “Témoignages: Man Ray.” In Surréalisme et cinéma (I), edited by Yves Kovacs, 43–46. Études cinématographiques. Paris: Minard. Ockman, Joan. 2009. “Donogoo-Tonka and the Unanimist Adventure of Jules Romains.” Afterword to Donogoo-Tonka; or, The Miracles of Science: A Cinematographic Tale, by Jules Romains, 97–135. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, Buell Center/FORuM Project.

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Péret, Benjamin. (1923) 1978. “Pulchérie veut une auto. Film.” In Nouvelle Série: Nos 1 à 13, 1er mars 1922 à juin 1924, vol. 2 of Littérature: réproduction anastaltique de la collection complète de la revue “Littérature”, 17–23. Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel Place. ———. 1992. Les Amériques … et autres lieux. Le cinématographe. Les arts plastiques. Vol. 6 of Œuvres complètes. Paris: Losfeld. Picabia, Francis. (1924) 1968. [“La portée cinématographique du ballet Relâche”]. L’Avant-scène cinema 86: 11. ———. (1924) 1970. “Francis Picabia’s Original Notes for ‘Entr’acte’.” In A nous la liberté and Entr’acte: Films, by René Clair, translated by Richard Jacques and Nicola Hayden, 113. London: Lorrimer. ———. (1928) 1995. “La loi d’accommodation chez les borgnes ‘sursum corda’: Film en 3 parties.” In Anthologie du cinéma invisible: 100 scénarios pour 100 ans de cinema, edited by Christian Janicot, 475–83. Paris: Place. Ribemont-Dessaignes, Georges. 1930. “Le huitième jour de la semaine (scénario).” Revue du cinema 7: 13–27. Rolland, Romain, and Frans Masereel. 1921. La révolte des machines ou la pensée déchainée. Paris: Éditions du Sablier. Romains, Jules. 2009. Donogoo-Tonka, Or, the Miracles of Science: A Cinematographic Tale. Translated by Brian Evenson. With afterword by Joan Ockman. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, Buell Center/FORuM Project. Soupault, Philippe. 1979. 1918–1931. Vol. 1 of Écrits de cinema, edited by Alain Virmaux and Odette Virmaux. Paris: Plon. Survage, Léopold. (1914) 1993. “Colored Rhythm.” In 1907–1929, edited by Richard Abel, vol. 1 of French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939, 90–92. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tournadre, Claude. 1971. Foreword to La Bréhatine: Cinéma-drame, by Guillaume Apollinaire and André Billy, 5–27. Paris: Lettres Modernes. Vertov, Dziga. 2004. Dramaturgicheskiye opyty. Vol. 1 of Iz naslediya. Moscow: Eisenstein-Tsentr. Vigo, Jean. 1985. Œuvre de cinéma: Films, scénarios, projets de films, textes sur le cinéma. Edited by Pierre Lherminier. Paris: L’Herminier. Wall-Romana, Christophe. 2013. Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry. New York: Fordham University Press. Williams, Linda. 1981. Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film. Berkeley: University of California Press. Winokur, Mark. 1996. American Laughter: Immigrants, Ethnicity and 1930s Hollywood Film Comedy. New York: St. Martin’s.

CHAPTER 5

Silent Screenwriting in Russia: For and Against the Orthodoxy

The previous chapter showed that the screenplay made its way into French literature by developing various poetic forms and by merging with other literary genres such as lyric poetry and surrealist writing; the path of the screenplay into Russian literature was quite different. As the Soviets tried optimising and mathematising all kinds of industrial production, the nationalised film industry developed a screenwriting orthodoxy already in the early 1920s (Schwarz 1994, 130–55). In this chapter, I argue that many Russian-speaking literary authors recognised the simple, matter-offact style of orthodox screenwriting as corresponding to their ideas about the renewal of literature. Subsequently, the screenplay did not have to mimic other literary genres to become one of them—rather, in Russia the orthodox screenplay was the new modernist genre par excellence. I start by looking at the reasons Russian literary authors had for preferring conventional screenwriting. It radically broke with the style of the pre-revolutionary nineteenth-century literature; it corresponded to the new literary movement called “literature of fact”; and for some authors, conventional screenwriting style brought out the irony of their politically critical narratives. I then discuss a directly opposite view on the orthodox screenwriting—the view of the industry practitioners. Dissatisfied with the existing screenplay formats and style, professional screenwriters argued for the so-called literary screenplay.

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Ksenofontova, The Modernist Screenplay, Palgrave Studies in Screenwriting, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50589-9_5

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From “Psychologism” to “Facticity” While the Great War was a decisive context for experimentation with the screenplay in France, in Russia it was overshadowed by the two revolutions of 1917, the February Bourgeois Democratic Revolution and the October Socialist Revolution (collectively, the Russian Revolution), as well as the Russian Civil War that followed the latter. However, in both the French and the Russian historical contexts the ability of film to create alternate realities and manipulate traumatic memory turned out to be crucial. In the wake of drastic political and social changes in Russia, “the role of film as the most objective guardian and evoker of historical memory” came to light (Yangirov 2000, 66); yet what memory was being stored by film was the subject of a continuous power struggle. For those regretting the direction Russian history was taking, the film medium offered a way “to correct its course, stop the apparent […] movement ‘in the wrong direction’ and return to better times” (Lur’ye 1983, 287; see also Yangirov 2000, 61–68). Other authors used film to make visible some previously neglected or suppressed aspects of pre-revolutionary history or even to rewrite the latter as a teleological development towards the Russian Revolution. However, with the resources for film production drastically limited both in post-WWI Russia and for the Russian émigrés elsewhere in Europe, the film medium as a tool of storytelling was available only to the very few. Consequently, the screenplay became an important tool in the struggle for the right to narrate the Russian past and future on a par with film. This is why so many screenplays from the 1920s tell stories of historical revolutionary events. In particular, Maxim Gorki chose for his first screenplay, written in 1921, the story of one of the most famous uprisings against the tsarist regime—the Cossack uprising of 1670–1671, led by Stepan Razin.1 The script Stepan Razin pictures the eponymous protagonist as an unambiguously “positive” fighter for freedom with a strong sense of justice. Commenting on the script in a letter, Gorki writes that he had deliberately “softened Razin’s character,” “emphasised the figure of [Razin’s] mother,” and introduced the blind singer Boris, who “is a kind of guardian of Razin’s goodness” (1952, 437). Overall, the ennobled story of Razin’s deeds presents the Cossack uprising as a prototype of the

1 For some reason, Gorki (1952, 239) dates this uprising in his script 1666–1668.

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October Revolution and Gorki’s script—as an allegorical celebration thereof. Gorki’s choice of story is especially significant, given that it was also the subject of one of the first (or perhaps even the first) Russian film ever made—Sten’ka Razin, released in 1908 (Leyda 1960, 35).2 The latter, by contrast, “water[s] down the hero of the Volga to the dimensions of a gay, singing, drunken brigand who meets a sad end” (35). By literally rewriting the first Russian film, Gorki not only offered a different view on the given historical event but also symbolically reclaimed the film medium born in tsarist Russia for the new revolutionary society. Yet this gesture remained invisible for a long time—the screenplay was never realised and was first published only in 1941. Featuring an idealised, almost superhuman protagonist, Gorki’s Stepan Razin is character-centred and focused on the impact and limits of individual human effort. To picture the motivation of the characters and the complex sociopolitical circumstances, the script features numerous longer blocks of dialogue—perhaps a trace of Gorki’s career as a playwright. Such abundance of dialogue is atypical for silent screenwriting in Russia not only because it is problematic to render in a silent film; many Soviet authors saw the idea of character development as such—be it with the help of dialogue or not—as characteristic of older literary forms, in particular the nineteenth-century psychological novel. In fact, most Russian modernist authors of the 1920s were so radical in their denial of “psychologism” that character-focused screenplays such as Gorki’s Stepan Razin are quite rare. The only further exception from this anti-psychological trend I was able to discover is the work of the science fiction writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. Zamyatin wrote his first screenplay in 1927, and only two from his twenty surviving and recently published film projects are for silent film (see Zamyatin 2010). But even these two short scripts—or treatments,

2 One of the earliest Russian film historians, Boris Likhachov, discovered and reprinted in his 1927 study what he and later researchers consider to be the original screenplay for Sten’ka Razin, entitled Stenka Razin; or, The Rebels from the Lower Reaches of the Volga (Sten’ka Razin ili ponizovaya vol’nitsa), written by Vasili Goncharov. This script accompanied Goncharov’s letter to the Union of Playwrights and Composers, where he asked for copyright protection for his work (see Kryuchechnikov 1971, 11). There is, however, no conclusive evidence that this document was indeed the original screenplay and not the description of the completed film.

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as we would call them today—illustrate the distinctiveness of Zamyatin’s screenwriting. By contrast to Gorki’s screenplay about a strong, heroic individual, Zamyatin’s scripts tell stories of vulnerable outsiders and dreamers and their personal tragedies. Zamyatin’s first screenplay is based on and named after his novella The North (Sever); the script was realised in 1928 as Northern Love (Severnaya Lyubov’ ), but the film appears lost. Zamyatin’s screenplay tells the story of a romance between the fisherman Marei, “a giant with the primitive soul of an unbridled dreamer” (2010, 7), and a woman named Pelka. The action is set in a fishing village in northwestern Russia. The couple’s blooming love is irreparably damaged when Marei undertakes the project of building a street lamp to light the endless polar night. It seems, for a moment, that the lamp—perhaps a synecdoche for the revolution and/or for the cinema—is a realisation of Marei’s dream, but when he attempts to strengthen the “blinking” light, it explodes into pieces (9). When the project fails and the romance is clouded by infidelity, the despairing Pelka initiates what turns out to be a suicidal hunting trip and is buried alive with her lover by a bear. Zamyatin’s second silent script, Eleven and One (Odinnadtsat’ i odna), also features an isolated polar setting and a melodramatic story with a tragic ending (at least in the original version of the script, see Zamyatin 2010, 456). Zamyatin’s screenplays thus point to a cinema that most Soviet authors were completely disinterested in: the cinema of psychologisation and melodrama in isolated settings, the cinema concerned with questions of individual freedom, the mechanisms of unrealised dreams and desire. Character-centred scripts stood in contrast to post-revolutionary literary forms as well as to the ideals and values that came to light in the wake of the Russian Revolution. The individual and their complex motivation gave way to the needs of the collective; individual heroic deeds—to the collective effort and everyday labour (though stories of individual heroism were to return in the 1930s with the art of socialist realism); subjective experiences and perspective—to the pursuit of objectivity and the so-called literature of fact.

Screenwriting and the “Literature of Fact” Literature trying to imitate the objectivity of the film camera is perhaps the most widespread topos in studies exploring the literature-film interactions in modernism. This topos comes from the idea that the film

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camera is able “merely to record” without representing (Trotter 2007, 3). André Bazin famously described this quality of the camera as “the instrumentality of a nonliving agent” (1960, 7). This perceived objectivity, neutrality, or “facticity” of the film camera was widely discussed among the members of the avant-garde group LEF (Levyy Front Iskusstv, translated as the Left Front of the Arts). In 1927, one of the most active LEF members literary critic Osip Brik wrote that the primary task of film is to “record real events” (46), as well as to put out of use the futile plot schemes […], to accumulate as many real facts and details as possible, and […] to find a new plotless method of linking individual facts and details into one picturesque whole. I repeat, this task is not purely cinematic, it is more general and stands wherever we have to deal with conveying and recording the real facts of the living world. This is the struggle of fact against creative fiction. (1927, 50)

As the last paragraph makes clear, Brik’s programme of facticity was meant not only for film, but also for what later became known as the “literature of fact.” The proponents of the literature of fact—Brik, Sergei Tretyakov, Nikolay Chuzhak, Boris Arvatov—radically opposed literary and cinematic fiction in favour of what they perceived as factual narratives: memoirs, biographies, letters, travel accounts, historiographies, and so on. Decisive for the theoreticians of the literature of fact was that these genres were usually, as we would say today, based on a true story, rather than on completely imaginary narratives. Furthermore, to be “factual,” these “true stories” could not be centred on single characters and their psychology, but had to be told in some other way, which Brik calls “a new plotless method.” This understanding of “facticity” appears, of course, highly questionable; what’s more, the mentioned authors also wanted the “facts” to transmit a certain ideological position, so as to serve the establishment of a socialist commune. To put it simply, the literature of fact had to serve as Bolshevik propaganda—a contradiction perceived, but not resolved by the LEF members (see Hansen-Löve 1978, 503–4). Along with this programme of propagandistic facticity came a certain notion of “factual” writing style, which corresponded in many ways to the style the screenwriting orthodoxy has promoted since at least the 1920s until today. All scripts I discuss below feature almost no figurative

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devices; the presence of a narrator is minimal due to the lack of commentary or evaluative statements. The scripts tend to use simple, paratactic syntax and avoid complex combinations of subordinate clauses, preferring instead short, plain sentences. Alexander Schwarz (1994, 258–87) demonstrates that this stylistic uniformity of the Soviet screenplay served, first and foremost, a Taylorist organisation of film production and the economic distribution of financial resources. Yet for those associated with the LEF movement and other like-minded advocates of the literature of fact, such style had a programmatic rather than pragmatic meaning. Firstly, it reflects the ambition to document the historical events as they “really” happened; it denies not only all that was typical of nineteenthcentury literature but also all that could make a literary work appear as if it had an individual style; it also makes the writing accessible to the broadest audience possible. The ideal style of LEF was the “operational,” matter-of-fact language of contemporaneous Bolshevik newspapers, and several authors discovered that the screenplay style in use by practitioners of the Soviet film industry was fully consistent with this “factual” form of writing. The screenplay thus started to enter the Russian literary arena as a genre that incorporated the new literature of fact. An early example is the screenplay The Summoning Dawns (Zovushchiye zori), co-authored in 1918 by four poets: Mikhail Gerasimov, Sergei Yesenin, Sergei Klychkov, and Nadezhda Pavlovich (Yesenin 1979, 237–51). Although this script was written before the LEF group and the “literature of fact” emerged, it prefigures some of their key ideas. The Summoning Dawns pictures the destinies of a revolutionary activist and two couples against the backdrop of the October Revolution. The script is divided into four larger parts and has a total of 89 scenes, each described in a short paragraph. The script’s four parts correspond to phases of personal and historical change. Together they form a before-during-after narrative: the eve of the revolution, the “transfiguration,” the birth of a new proletarian art, and the culminating departure of all surviving characters to the front of the World Revolution. Looking back at the process of composing the script almost forty years later, Pavlovich remarked that it was based on both the “fresh memories” of the recent revolutionary events and the “utopian dreams” of its authors (Yesenin 1979, 371). This remark aptly describes The Summoning Dawns as an attempt to combine a “factual” documentation of the past (such as archival footage, which the script suggests using on two occasions) with a visionary project of the future. The rhetorically plain style of the script holds these two

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layers together, suggesting that the utopian future is just as certain as the “objective” documentation of the past. The LEF writer Sergei Tretyakov also structured his first larger film project in a way similar to the before-during-after structure of The Summoning Dawns. In this case, the place of action is China, and Tretyakov conceived each part as a separate treatment. The first part pictures imperialist China before that country’s own revolutions, the second part describes the first rebellions, and the last part portrays the revolutionaries leading “an organised fight against imperialism” (Tretyakov 2010, 215). The scripts were written in 1925 for Sergei Eisenstein, whom Tretyakov knew from their earlier collaboration in the Proletkult theatre, but the project was never realised (Leyda 1960, 220– 21). Together, these three short scripts form the project Zhongguo, that is, China. Inspired by Tretyakov’s visit to China in 1925, the treatments propagate the collective heroism of Chinese revolutionaries and, en passant, of the Soviet sailors supporting the revolutions. Yet regardless of what Tretyakov describes—the intrigues of the senior officials, the personal tragedies of the future revolutionaries, or their long-awaited victories, he never deviates from the conspicuously uniform style: very short, plain sentences that list the events and actions without going into any details, no evaluative comments or even attributes. Again, the aim is the illusion of objectivity or neutral recording despite the obvious ideological bias of the author. Finally, three further scripts should be mentioned in this group of propagandistic-“factual” writings, all three published as separate books and written by revolutionary activists: The Bolshevik Mamed (Bol’shevik Mamed, 1925) and Judas (Iuda, 1929) by Pavel Blyakhin, and On the Great Path (Na velikom puti, 1925) by Lyubov’ Belkina. All three scripts aggrandise the heroism of the Bolsheviks and their supporters during the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War. For instance, Belkina’s On the Great Path pictures the plight of Russian villages during the Civil War; its propagandistic pathos culminates in the fraternising of workers and peasants in the face of common enemies—“the enemies of the revolution and the Soviet authorities” (1925, 46). The characters of the script are thus all black and white—either plainly good or evil, either for the revolution or against it. The style of the script matches this simplified world picture: In the preface, the author specifically writes that “the script is written in a simple and concise language that has a single purpose: simplicity and clarity” (5). The logic of this quote is in line with the

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literature of fact movement: The more simple and concise the language, the clearer it transmits the “right” ideological position. This is why the simplicity of the orthodox screenwriting style was perfectly suitable to serve ideological propaganda. Paradoxically, the “simplification” of style could eventually make it appear as fragmented and poetic: that was the case of the screenplay written by one of the most active proponents of the literature of fact, Osip Brik.

“Factual” Screenwriting Turns Against Itself Brik’s earliest screenplays—The Adventures of Elvist (Priklyucheniya Elvista, 1923), co-authored with the later famous film director Sergei Yutkevich, and Cleopatra (Kleopatra, 1927)—offer variations of slapstick comedy and happy-ending melodrama. However, in 1928 Brik leaves behind these entertaining genres and attempts realising the programme of facticity with his script The Heir to Genghis Khan (Potomok ChingisKhana). It recounts an open-ended, quasi-historical episode from the conflict between the Soviet partisans and the “occupying” British forces in contemporaneous Mongolia. In reality, there was never any British occupation in Mongolia; whether this neglect for historical facticity is deliberate is hard to determine. In his 1936 article on screenwriting, Brik recalls that The Heir to Genghis Khan was based on a story related to him by the writer Ivan Novokshonov from his personal experience on the Far Eastern Front during the Russian Civil War (Brik [1936] 1974, 99–100). It is therefore possible that Brik simply did not fact-check Novokshonov’s story.3 In accordance with the programmatic struggle “against creative fiction” (Brik 1927, 50), Genghis Khan paints a black-and-white picture of resistance between the “righteous” Soviet partisans and the “occupant” British bourgeoisie. A young man named Sulim has to flee into the steppe after a conflict with a British merchant, joins a group of Soviet partisans, and is later discovered to be a direct heir of Genghis Khan. Unwilling to become a puppet in the hands of the British administration, Sulim flees to Moscow. This is where the script ends; the readers never learn 3 Contrary to what Brik further asserts in the article, Novokshonov later wrote a novel based on the same story, which has been repeatedly mistaken as the basis for Brik’s script. For a more detailed clarification of the script’s genesis, see Valyuzhenich (1993).

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what happens to Sulim afterwards. While Brik’s earlier scripts remained unrealised, Genghis Khan was directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin, and even became known internationally, as Storm over Asia (Potomok Chingiskhana, 1928). Genghis Khan is written in very short sentences—most are no longer than four words, every sentence starting with a new line. Longer sentences are graphically separated into smaller units with line breaks. Here is an example from the end of the script, the scene in which Sulim escapes from under arrest: - Over the sofas - Ripping off shawls - Knocking over trinkets - Past scared ladies - Onto the windowsill - Out of the window - Sulim jumped - Jumped on a horse - Galloped into town […] - Sulim rushes around the city - Appealing to the Mongols - Behind him galloping chase - Shots - Sulim reared his horse - And rode out of town. (Brik [1928] 1993, 73)

This style seems in accordance with Brik’s above-quoted idea of finding “a new plotless method of linking individual facts and details into one picturesque whole” (1927, 50). The dashes in the beginning of each line make the script appear like a list of facts, and the lack of punctuation mirrors the replacement of a linear narrative with a “plotless” structure. The initial purpose of this optical and syntactic organisation must have been to support the “facticity” of the story. However, taken to an extreme, Brik’s writing strategy ends up subverting the factual intent of his script. Rather than consistently describing the story, the script provides only glimpses of the action—single details portrayed in one or two words. As a result, Brik’s script is reminiscent of elliptical, rhythmic screenplays by Carl Mayer and other modernist screenwriters, whose work I discuss in Chapter 9. In other words, Brik’s factual screenwriting turns against itself:

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Genghis Khan resembles a list of fleeting, subjective impressions rather than a list of facts; instead of a consistent, “factual” story it presents a row of disjointed images. Consequently, the style of Brik’s screenplay challenges its ideological conformism, uncovering the lack of unity behind a seemingly simple, black-and-white world picture. Paradoxically, Brik’s Genghis Khan script turns out to be highly poetic and ambiguous in terms of its meaning, while at the same time following the major principles of the screenwriting orthodoxy of the time—to use simple syntax and avoid rhetorical ornamentation, to describe only the visible action, etc. Brik’s Genghis Khan is not the only case where the writing style subverts the script’s intended “facticity”; a similar example is the screenplay The Captain’s Daughter (Kapitanskaya dochka) by the literary critic and writer Viktor Shklovsky. Shklovsky was a great supporter of the orthodox screenwriting style; in the preface to his other script, Two Armoured Cars (Dva bronevika), Shklovsky wrote: A new art form may appear due to the aesthetisation of a semi-finished product […]. Our literature suffers from eloquence. The rigidity of the cinematic forms [of writing], their honesty, can contribute to changing the outdated techniques of fiction. (1928, 102)

For Shklovsky, the screenplay was thus a new, stylistically “rigid” genre that had the potential of defamiliarising and renewing the existing literary genres. This is probably why he decided to publish his film script The Captain’s Daughter as a separate book in 1929—most of the screenplay indeed exemplifies the uniform, simple language of the orthodox screenwriting. The Captain’s Daughter is loosely based on the historical novel of the same name by Alexander Pushkin. In this case, “loosely based” means that the characters and even parts of the story are completely reworked depending on the class identity of the characters. For instance, the young officer Pyotr Grinyov is described, in contrast to Pushkin’s kind and noble-minded protagonist, as “neither an evil nor a good man. […] Not so much a coward, but protecting himself”; conversely, his servant Savel’ich is “smart, [and] loves and pities his protégé Grinyov” (Shklovsky 1929, 14). The finale of the story is also altered for the sake of ridiculing the monarchy: In Pushkin’s original, the empress Catherine the Great frees Grinyov as a gesture of justice, and in Shklovsky’s script—only to make Grinyov her lover; however, she lets him go after a failed “trial

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night” with a lady-in-waiting. Overall, Shklovsky’s goal is not only to reevaluate the historical events, highlighting the goodness of the “common people” and ridiculing the nobility, but also to shift the interest from the psychological motivation of single individuals to the socioeconomic motivation of classes. This is why Shklovsky’s script does not have a clear protagonist who dominates the narrative. In accordance with the programme of “facticity,” Shklovsky replaces the character-centred plot with a “plotless” montage of single episodes and constantly shifts the narrative focus, spatially or temporally. To hold the disparate episodes together, Shklovsky introduces a narrator—not the kind of narrator who recounts the action as a voiceover or with the help of intertitles, but a narrator visible only to the readers of the script. For instance, when the action in the script switches between different locations, the narrator comments: “We fly into the steppe, breaking the unity of the place of action” (Shklovsky 1929, 21). This form of interaction with the reader in the first-person plural is typical of the entire screenplay. The first half of the script includes suggestions and appeals such as: “Let us follow the camera into the steppe” (Shklovsky 1929, 19); “Let us rather observe the cupid, which decorates the palace beds” (20); “Look closely at this face” (23); “Now imagine Mironov, shot from below” (29); “But perhaps you are interested in the high society? Then watch [what is happening in] the Tsarskoye Selo” (31). These narratorial remarks foreground the act of narration and thereby remind readers of the artificiality or “constructedness” of what they are reading. As a result, the conspicuously present narrator reveals that Shklovsky’s version of The Captain’s Daughter offers a subjective perspective on the historical events rather than their “factual” account. In this way, the need to hold the “plotless” structure together with the help of the narrator undermines the primate of facticity. Just as in the case of Brik’s script, an overemphasis on the idea of “factual” screenwriting turns against itself, endowing the screenplay with a subversive potential. The examples of Brik’s Genghis Khan and Shklosvky’s The Captain’s Daughter show that even the slightest stylistic variations become especially visible and meaningful against the backdrop of the normative poetics of screenwriting. This is why the “factual” screenwriting could so easily subvert itself: Its plain, “rigid” syntax and rhetoric makes any individual writing strategy all the more conspicuous. The proponents of the “literature of fact” and, by extension, of factual screenwriting thus made their programme of facticity vulnerable by linking it to a specific style of (screen)writing.

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The Ironic Anti-Soviet Screenplay There was at least one further reason why some Russian literary authors willingly followed the screenwriting orthodoxy of the time. Below I show that authors who were critical of the Soviet regime, such as Andrei Platonov, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, and Isaac Babel, used the normative poetics of screenwriting to “smuggle in” satire on the Soviet lifestyle and authorities into their screenplays. The work of the famous novelist Andrei Platonov is well known for its unique style and for being continuously prohibited by the Soviet censors; in particular, his most famous, dystopian novel The Foundation Pit (Kotlovan) was finished in 1930, but was not published until 1968. By way of historical anecdote, the only surviving silent screenplay of Platonov, The Machinist (Mashinist, 1929), is tangibly connected to The Foundation Pit. Platonov wrote parts of the novel on the reverse side of his letters to the film studio Sovkino concerning The Machinist, and several motifs and settings also migrated from the screenplay directly into the novel (Korniyenko 1994, 229–30). In this context, it may come as a surprise that Platonov’s screenplay is written in short simple sentences and has almost no detailed descriptions or figurative devices, which is the exact opposite of the style of The Foundation Pit. Moreover, the screenplay features a utopian happy ending—the exact opposite of the dark world and finale of the novel. However, the overall plain style and formulaic narrative of the script draw all the more attention to the few ironic details scattered throughout The Machinist. Platonov’s script follows quite closely the narrative of Eisenstein’s film The General Line, a.k.a. Old and New (General’naya liniya, a.k.a. Staroye i novoye, 1929), which premiered the same year the script was written. A poverty-stricken Soviet village is transformed into a blooming collective farm by force of agricultural machinery in both Platonov’s script and Eisenstein’s film. Yet some significant details differ. In Eisenstein’s film, the troubles in the village are caused by the short-sighted individualism of its inhabitants, the dominance of the Orthodox Church, and the greed of the kulaks —prosperous independent farmers, who were persecuted by the Soviet regime. By contrast, in Platonov’s screenplay, at the outset of the story the village is already collectivised, “freed” from the kulaks, and renamed, with reference to Eisenstein, as a “Kolkhoz of the General Line” (Platonov [1929] 1994, 234). Its poverty and moral decline, so the story goes, is caused by the tyranny of the Activist—a representative of

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the Communist Party. So, while both Eisenstein’s and Platonov’s utopic stories picture the emergence of a “collective soul” (241) following the establishment of the collective property, in Platonov’s script the happy ending equals the liberation from the power-abusing Soviet authority. The few figurative devices used in the script reinforce its critical stance, creating a contrast between the dull, animal-like villagers and their smart, anthropomorphised machines. For instance, the excavator that ensures the prosperity of the village “raises up bouquets of tender underwater plants with an iron hand” (Platonov [1929] 1994, 240), and its movements “are complex and conscious” (241). By contrast, the villagers move “automatically” (234) and are repeatedly compared to, or grouped with, the kolkhoz animals: “Near the dam stands the entire population of the kolkhoz: peasants, horses, a rooster, sparrows, old men, several women, etc.” (239). The human–machine contrast brings to light the subtle and bitter irony of Platonov’s script: it questions the very possibility of a utopian Soviet state in the face of human idleness. Both the happy ending and the deliberately plain style conceal Platonov’s pointed criticism under the mask of conventional screenwriting. It is hardly a coincidence that the equally famous and equally persecuted writer Isaac Babel chose a very similar screenwriting strategy for his silent film scripts. His The Chinese Mill (Kitayskaya Mel’nitsa), written a few years before Platonov’s script, paints a very similar bitter-ironic picture of the apathetic, backward village on the one hand, and the Soviet politico-economic programme on the other. Like Platonov, Babel masks the deep critical stance of his script with a happy finale and conceals the irony, which questions the possibility of sociopolitical change, in the details and figurative devices. In Chapter 9, I analyse Babel’s script Benya Krik (1925)—one of the first screenplays published in Russia in book form, developing the idea that the combination of a seemingly conformist story and ironic details was the cornerstone of Babel’s screenwriting. A final example worth mentioning in this context is the 1929 comedy screenplay Barack (Barak) by the famous writing duo Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov. Ilf and Petrov earned their fame with satirical novels, most notably The Twelve Chairs (Dvenadtsat’ stul’yev, 1928); their screenplay, too, is full of irony, which is hidden behind a propagandistic story and seemingly “neutral” writing style. The screenplay tells the story of two teams working at the construction site of a factory, the team with the highest production rate and the one with the lowest. When their working processes cross, the leader of the former team is challenged to

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“re-educate” the latter, in which task he succeeds after a series of comical misfortunes. However, several details undermine this heroic pathos of the script. The script starts with a series of slapstick-like gags that have no immediate connection to the main narrative. These opening scenes feature an unlucky photojournalist: He is first trying to photograph a bear while running away from it, then he has to escape a truck “in the same way he was running from the bear” (Ilf and Petrov [1929] 1963, 40). He then arrives at the award ceremony of the construction team with the highest production rate: 16. The photojournalist is taking off his coat by the hanger. He is incredibly Americanised. He has zippers everywhere. His fur coat, pockets, the hat with earmuffs, the jacket, trousers, his sweater, just about his mouth—everything has zippers. (Ilf and Petrov [1929] 1963, 40)

The only detail of this ironic description that is not immediately visualisable—“just about his mouth”—is also the most telling one: The metaphorical zipper on the mouth of the photojournalist evokes the Soviet censorship and its ability to “zip up” unwanted mouths. This detail alone makes the beginning of the script highly ambiguous; but the satire does not stop at this. Shooting the award ceremony, the photojournalist burns so much magnesium for flashes that the smoke from it “covers the stage, and in its dense clouds disappear [the protagonist] Bityugov, the presidium, and everything else” (Ilf and Petrov [1929] 1963, 40– 41). The process of photographic recording is thus ridiculed as concealing rather than unveiling the events it captures and for drawing more attention to the process of photography than to its object. Expanding this interpretation to film, one could read these opening scenes as a selfreversal of the suggested film project: it is arguably not so much about foregrounding the achievements of the Soviet builders as it is about the absurdity of making a film on this subject, which will inevitably be “clouded” by clichés and propagandistic stamps. In this way, the pathos of the entire script is subverted even before the actual story has begun. Just as the “literature of fact,” the scripts by Platonov, Babel, and Ilf and Petrov defy “psychologisation” and character-centred stories, instead focusing on the collective, the everyday, and manual labour. However, the aim of these ironic screenplays was not propagandistic “facticity” but exposing the deficiencies of the emerging Soviet society. This is why the

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irony of these scripts had to be hidden between the lines and behind the orthodox ways of writing and storytelling. Some literary authors discovered that the orthodox screenplay style answered their notion of a new “factual” literature, and others used it as a mask for their critical, ironic screenplays. At the same time, several writerdirectors seemed interested in exactly the opposite, namely, replacing the orthodox screenplay with a looser, rhetorically diversified form of writing. To better understand these two opposing movements, it is necessary to look at three concepts that dominated the Soviet screenwriting discourse of the late 1920s.

“Literary,” “Director’s,” and “Iron” Scripts Throughout the 1920s, three specific terms were in use in the Soviet film industry: the literary screenplay, the director’s screenplay, and the iron script. The significance of these terms is most evident if one considers them in the chronological order of their emergence. “Director’s script” (rezhissoyrskiy stsenariy, sometimes also called “numbered script,” nomernoy stsenariy) seems to be the oldest of the three terms. The director’s script could be composed even after the shooting had begun and was a new rendition of some previously existing material: The director’s scenario, as the term itself makes explicit, was the time and place where the director could interpret the screenwriter’s material and assert his or her own authorship. The director was not creating a technical write-up, […] but his [or her] own, new treatment of the […] material. (Belodubrovskaya 2016, 254)

The director’s script could significantly differ from the “screenwriter’s material,” even though the approval of film production and its financial planning were based on the latter. Because of this discrepancy between the screenplay approved for production and the director’s script used in production, film companies could never estimate the exact cost of the final film. Additionally, the Soviet censors had to review at least two versions of the screenplay as well as the completed film (Belodubrovskaya 2016, 255). Consequently, both the film industry and the censorship apparatus became very interested in establishing an “iron script,” especially with the beginning of the Stalin period in 1927–1928. The term “iron script”

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(zheleznyy stsenariy, sometimes also called “steel screenplay,” stal’noy stsenariy) describes the controlling function the screenplay assumed in film production starting from the late 1920s. The metaphor of “iron script” can be considered a stronger version of the well-known “screenplay as blueprint” metaphor. While the iron script can arguably be compared to the Hollywood shooting and/or continuity script (Price 2013, 115; Belodubrovskaya 2016, 253), this may cause confusion, because the Soviet film industry operated with different criteria for defining scripts. Common to the Soviet iron script and the Hollywood shooting script is the fact that both were approved before shooting and had to be followed closely by the film crew. A major difference between these screenplay types consists in how the texts are structured: the Hollywood shooting script provides a highly detailed description of the action divided into numbered shots, whereas in the Soviet practice, the quality of being “iron” usually applied to the so-called literary screenplay—a prose narrative not divided into numbered shots—rather than to the numbered director’s script. The term “literary script” must have emerged in the Soviet film industry in the very end of the 1920s. For instance, Brik chose “A literary script” as the subheading for his 1928 Genghis Khan screenplay, and the 1929 manual What a Film Director Should Know by Soviet director Semen Timoshenko describes the process of screenplay development as starting with an elaborated literary screenplay (see Schwarz 1994, 277). While a director’s script was always written by the director, the literary script could be written by anyone—a screenwriter, a literary author, or the director (in the case of writer-directors). “Literary” initially meant that the screenplay is not divided into numbered shots and is devoid of the technical indications that a director’s script might have. There was no separate term for such screenplays prior to the emergence of the term “literary script.” After the advent of sound film, and consequently the appearance of dialogue in screenplays, the term “literary script” acquired an additional meaning: it implied that the screenplay was analogous to the theatrical play in terms of aesthetic autonomy and authority in relation to the production (see Belodubrovskaya 2016, 256–61). Thus, by the tail end of the 1920s, the Soviet film industry used three terms—the “literary,” “director’s,” and “iron” screenplay (see Table 5.1). It is important to note that, apart from the lack of technical indications and of division into numbered shots, the term “literary script” has nothing to do with style. The 1928 literary script Zvenigora by the

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Table 5.1 Comparison of types of scripts in use in the Hollywood and Soviet film industries Hollywood shooting and continuity script Approved before production and followed closely by the film crew

•

Soviet iron and literary script

•

Written at any point before or during production shot-by-shot numbered description of the action

•

•

Description of the action in prose, not divided into numbered units Written by the screenwriter(s) Written by the screenwriter(s) or the director Written by the director

Soviet director’s and numbered script

•

•

•

• •

writer-director Alexander Dovzhenko, available in print today as part of his collected works, is stylistically just as minimalist as the above-discussed screenplays by the proponents of the literature of fact. The same can be said about the literary scripts composed by Lev Kuleshov (1988, 182–85) and Vsevolod Pudovkin (1974, 361–412): They differ from the director’s scripts of the same authors due to the absent division into numbered shots and the missing technical indications, but not in terms of style. It was precisely this lacking stylistic difference between the literary and director’s scripts that several writer-directors saw as problematic, including the documentarist Dziga Vertov, and the famous duo of Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov. For these authors, the “rigid” style of

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the literary screenplay amounted to the lack of creative freedom, while screenplays featuring figurative language and unusual narrative techniques allowed a looser and more inventive interpretation of the screenplay in the process of filming. I examine the work of Vertov, Eisenstein, and Aleksandrov in Chapters 8 and 9, as their problematisation of the orthodox screenplay style gave rise to unique modernist screenwriting practices. Beside industry professionals, only very few literary authors radically distanced themselves from the conventional screenplay. Among them was one of the most well-known Russian futurist poets: Vladimir Mayakovsky. Vladimir Mayakovsky composed a total of ten elaborate comedy screenplays within just two years, 1926–1927. Mayakovsky’s scripts openly attack the new Soviet bourgeoisie and elite with sarcasm, conglomerations of neologisms, and puns that his lyric poetry is also known for. At the same time, as I argue in Chapter 7, Mayakovsky’s screenplays participate in the “facticity” discussion by combining elements of fantasy with story structures inspired by Vertov’s documentaries, and thus make the resistance between fantasy: between fiction and reality and facts the cornerstone of their aesthetic. ∗ ∗ ∗ To summarise, the modernist screenwriting in Russia did not oppose but rather built upon the orthodox screenwriting practices of the film industry. Literary authors discovered that the orthodox screenplay corresponded to their ideas about the renewal of literature, in particular in regard to the movement away from “psychologisation” and towards “facticity” (in the various understandings of this term). Others realised that the conventional screenplay was a way of smuggling in satire and political criticism under the nose of the Soviet censors. While in Russia there developed no consistent practice of screenplay publication such as in France, almost all screenplays that did get published in book form or in literary journals during the 1920s bear evidence of this correspondence between the developing stylistic conventions of the industry and the search for new literary forms.

References Bazin, André. 1960. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” Translated by Hugh Gray. Film Quarterly 13 (4): 4–9.

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Belkina, Lyubov’. 1925. Na velikom puti (kino-drama): Stsenariy. Tula, Russia: Kino-sektsiya Tulgubono. Belodubrovskaya, Maria. 2016. “The Literary Scenario and the Soviet Screenwriting Tradition.” In A Companion to Russian Cinema, edited by Birgit Beumers, 251–69. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell. Brik, Osip. 1927. “Fiksatsiya fakta.” Novyy LEF: Zhurnal levogo fronta iskusstv (11–12): 44–50. ———. (1928) 1993. Potomok Chingis-Khana. In Osip Maksimovich Brik: Materialy k biografii, edited by Anatoliy Valyuzhenich, 63–73. Akmola: Niva. ———. (1936) 1974. “From the Theory and Practice of the Screenwriter.” Translated by Diana Matias. Screen: The Journal of the Society for Education in Film and Television 15 (3): 95–103. Gorki, Maxim. 1952. P’yesy, stsenarii, instsenirovki: 1921–1935. Vol. 18 of Sobraniye sochineniy v tridtsati tomakh. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoye Izdatel’stvo Khudozhestvennoy Literatury. Hansen-Löve, Aage A. 1978. Der russische Formalismus: Methodologische Rekonstruktion seiner Entwicklung aus dem Prinzip der Verfremdung. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Ilf, Ilya, and Evgeny Petrov. (1929) 1963. Barak. Iskusstvo Kino 7: 39–56. Korniyenko, N. V. 1994. Introduction to Mashinist. Libretto, by Andrei Platonov. In Andrey Platonov: Vospominaniya sovremennikov: Materialy k biografii, edited by N. V. Korniyenko and Ye. D. Shubina, 229–30. Moscow: Sovremennyy pisatel. Kryuchechnikov, Nikolai V. 1971. Stsenarii i stsenaristy dorevolyutsionnogo kino. Moscow: n.p. Kuleshov, Lev. 1988. Vospominaniya. Rezhissura. Dramaturgiya. Vol. 2 of Sobraniye sochineniy: V 3–kh tomakh. Moscow: Iskusstvo. Leyda, Jay. 1960. Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film. London: Allen & Unwin. Lur’ye, Yakov S. [Avel’ A. Kurdyumov]. 1983. V krayu nepuganykh idiotov: Kniga ob Il’fe i Petrove. Paris: La Presse Libre. Platonov, Andrei. (1929) 1994. Mashinist. Libretto. In Andrey Platonov: Vospominaniya sovremennikov: Materialy k biografii, edited by N. V. Korniyenko and Ye. D. Shubina, 231–43. Moscow: Sovremennyy pisatel’. Price, Steven. 2013. A History of the Screenplay. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Pudovkin, Vsevolod. 1974. O kinostsenarii. Kinorezhissura. Masterstvo kinoaktera. Vol. 1 of Sobraniye sochineniy v trekh tomakh. Moscow: Iskusstvo. Schwarz, Alexander. 1994. Der geschriebene Film: Drehbücher des deutschen und russischen Stummfilms. Munich: Diskurs Film. Shklovsky, Viktor. 1928. Dva bronevika. Sibirskiye Ogni 5: 102–16. http://poisk. ngonb.ru/flip/periodika/sibogni/1928/5/#102.

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———. 1929. Kapitanskaya dochka. Moscow: Tea-kino-peˇcat’. Tretyakov, Sergei. 2010. Sergey Mikhaylovich Tret’yakov: Kinematograficheskoye naslediye; stat’i, ocherki, stenogrammy vystupleniy, doklady, stsenarii. Edited by Irina I. Ratiani. St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriya. Trotter, David. 2007. Cinema and Modernism. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Valyuzhenich, Anatoliy. 1993. “Kto zhe vse-taki avtor?” In Osip Maksimovich Brik: Materialy k biografii, edited by Anatoliy Valyuzhenich, 230–34. Akmola, Kazakhstan: Niva. Yangirov, Rashit. 2000. “Spetsifika kinematograficheskogo konteksta v russkoy literature 1910–kh—1920–kh godov.” PhD diss., Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow. Yesenin, Sergei. 1979. Proza. Stat’i i zametki. Avtobiografii. Vol. 5 of Sobraniye sochineniy v shesti tomakh. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya Literatura. Zamyatin, Yevgeny. 2010. Besedy yeretika. Edited by S. Nikonenko and A. Tyurina. Vol. 4 of Sobraniye sochineniy v 5 tomakh. Moscow: Respublika.

CHAPTER 6

The Weimar Screenplay: “Expressionism” and Literary Adaptations

The previous chapters have shown that during the 1920s the screenplay entered the literary arena both in France and in Russia, albeit in different ways. In France, it happened through a process of interaction with other literary genres, and in Russia, by virtue of an orthodoxy that matched the literary movements of the time. In this chapter, I argue that no comparable development took place in Germany. Apart from a few notable exceptions, the literary community did not recognise the literary potential of the new genre, treating it as a purely utilitarian document. This argument may seem counter-intuitive given the prominence of expressionism as a force in German modernism—one may expect a strand of expressionist screenwriting in Germany by analogy with surrealist screenwriting in France. Several researchers indeed tried to introduce the concept of expressionist screenwriting (Price 2013, 105; Schwarz 1994, 304; Eisner 1973, 28); however, such concept establishes a wishful symmetry between the European modernisms that historical texts do not confirm. I start by debunking the idea of expressionist screenwriting by showing that the screenplays written for canonical expressionist films mostly adhered to the screenwriting orthodoxy of the time. The chapter then proceeds to discuss the screenplays that were literary adaptations, arguing that they were the most common way for literary authors to enter the domain of screenwriting in Weimar Germany and in Austria. Unlike in France or Russia, the screenplays composed by German-speaking literary © The Author(s) 2020 A. Ksenofontova, The Modernist Screenplay, Palgrave Studies in Screenwriting, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50589-9_6

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authors were often heavily dominated by theatrical tradition. These two factors are the reason why I argue that no separate strand of modernist screenwriting developed in Germany, apart from the few exceptions I mention at the end of the chapter.

Conventional Screenwriting for the “Expressionist” Film While in France and in Russia modernist screenwriting and filmmaking were partially co-dependent phenomena, the film movement that might be expected to rely on modernist screenwriting in Germany—“expressionist” film—was based, in fact, on conventional writing practices. Among examples are the screenplays for the films The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 1920) by Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz, Nosferatu (Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, 1922) by Henrik Galeen, and Phantom (1922) by Thea von Harbou. All these screenplays were composed in accordance with the screenwriting orthodoxy of the time: very few figurative devices, paratactic syntax, an almost effaced narrator. Occasionally, this “telegram style” (Schwarz 1994, 136) was enriched by expressive descriptions and indications of camera angles, shot types, cuts, and so on. This observation corresponds to the argument film historian Thomas Elsaesser (2000) puts forth in his Weimar Cinema and After, namely that “expressionist” film can be more precisely described as industrial design or even kitsch rather than as an authentic artistic movement: If kitsch applies to a mass-produced object that disguises its technologicalindustrial origin by reproducing meticulously the forms, textures and attributes of value associated with a unique, hand-crafted or cult object, then Weimar cinema was by definition kitsch. (2000, 43)

Expressionist films were a product of the booming post-war industry, disguised—or, to use Elsaesser’s term, designed—as auteur film, even though they feature specific cinematic techniques, decorations, makeup, actors’ gestures, and other such elements that make the expressionist films appear as a single auteur film movement (Elsaesser 2000, 36–40, 64–71). The main purpose of this masquerade was to win over the bourgeois audience, which in Germany was quite reluctant to accept film even as a form of entertainment, not to speak of accepting it as a new form of art. And

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so while on the surface, the expressionist film demonstrates a successful “mimicry of stylistic authenticity” (70), at the core and behind the scenes it was a product of industrial design, which is why it is only consistent that the screenplays for it were written according to the emerging standards of the industry. The ambition of the expressionist film to pass for an auteur film movement was the main reason why the film studios encouraged screenwriters to draw from the contemporary neo-romantic literature. By reviving [neo-romantic] motifs, […] the fantastic film achieved a double aim: it militated for the cinema’s legitimacy […] by borrowing from middlebrow Wilhelmine “culture.” Yet it also countered the “international” tendency of early cinema, offering instead nationally identifiable German films. (Elsaesser 2000, 65)

While the popular German fiction of the time is usually called “neoromantic,” the films based on these popular novels were marketed as “expressionist,” implying a connection to expressionist literature. However, expressionist films and especially the screenplays for these films usually lack this connection to literary expressionism. The most famous example of this terminological confusion is probably Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz’s screenplay The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It has been repeatedly pointed out that the famous expressionist set design of the Caligari film was in no way preconceived in the screenplay (Robinson 2003, 5; Budd 1990, 12); the Caligari manuscript itself can also “hardly be described as an expressionist text” (Becker 1997, 52). The script instead reproduces numerous motifs from neo-romantic literature, in particular from the fantasy novel The Other Side (Die andere Seite, 1909) by the Austrian graphic artist Alfred Kubin (Ksenofontova 2019). Because professional screenwriters of the Weimar cinema—Hans Janowitz, Henrik Galeen, Thea von Harbou, and others—drew inspiration from neo-romantic literature, but also followed the screenwriting orthodoxy of the time, the style of their scripts often appears eclectic. On the one hand, their screenplays stick to the orthodox “telegram style,” but on the other, they occasionally introduce “picturesque” descriptions, such as the following scene from the Nosferatu screenplay written by Henrik Galeen:

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A black carriage. No wheels? Two black horses—griffins? Their legs are invisible, covered by a black funeral cloth. Their eyes like pointed stars. Puffs of steam from their open mouths, revealing white teeth. The coachman is wrapped up in black cloth. His face pale as death. His eyes are staring at [the protagonist] Hutter. Raising his whip he makes an inviting, almost commanding gesture. He waits. Hutter cannot rally enough strength to follow the invitation. Yet those eyes assert their power. Step by step, as if pulled by invisible threads, Hutter approaches the uncanny. (Galeen [1922] 1973, 242)

This passage is an exception from the mostly laconic style of the Nosferatu script, and is but one example of the stylistic imprint that neo-romantic literature left on the work of contemporaneous screenwriters. This imprint includes the somewhat clichéd comparisons—“eyes like pointed stars,” “pale as death,” “as if pulled by invisible threads”; the occasional free indirect discourse—“No wheels? Two black horses—griffins?”; the motif of the “uncanny”; and some fairy-tale elements—griffins, the enchanted forest where the carriage takes Hutter in the following scene, etc. This is not to suggest that the Nosferatu script lacks technical indications, especially in regard to shot transitions such as “fade in” and “fade out,” and field sizes such as “close-up” and “full shot.” Kasten (1990, 113) suggests that the separation into single “shots” as well as technical indications only became common in German screenwriting in the late 1920s, yet they can be found already in the screenplays by Galeen, Mayer, and Harbou from the first half of the 1920s. Being thus a mélange of laconic action descriptions, technical terms, and occasional ornate passages, Nosferatu and most other scripts for expressionist films had little to no points of convergence with the expressionist literature, such as it is exemplified in the lyric anthology Die Menschheitsdämmerung edited by Kurt Pinthus, or in the dramas of Georg Kaiser and Walter Hasenclever. If the screenplays for expressionist films were, as a rule, written in accordance with the orthodoxy of the time, how can one account for the persistence both the critics and the research have had in writing about “expressionist screenplays”? One of the main reasons for this seems to originate from the advertising policy of the film industry. To recuperate the argument of Elsaesser, the German film industry exploited the label “expressionist film” for marketing purposes: It made the films that were mass-produced in the wake of Caligari’s success look like an auteur film movement. Correspondingly, film studios were also the first to promote the idea of expressionist screenwriting.

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Before the premiere of one of the last “expressionist” films, Metropolis (1927), the production company UFA launched a large advertising campaign (which did not save the film from critical and commercial failure). As part of this campaign, the newspaper Berliner Tageblatt published a few scenes from Thea von Harbou’s original screenplay for Metropolis : Circling Sparks buzzing glass and metal Brass Copper Porcelain Glass tubes glowing light. POWER STATION CARRIER OF ENERGIES […] Men, ant-men at the machine. Themselves machines. Jerky movements like connecting rods Meat joints connecting steel and iron. (Harbou 1926a)

The passage pictures a human–machine hybrid, simultaneously fascinating and horrifying, and features an unusual optical layout, assonances, accumulations of nouns and technological terms; as such the fragment seems to evoke expressionist lyric poetry (see Schwarz 1994, 299–301). However, part of the marketing campaign for Metropolis was also a special issue of the UFA-Magazin entirely dedicated to the film, which also contained an excerpt from Harbou’s screenplay. This published fragment was of an entirely different nature: Single shot: Grot working on the machine, suddenly looks up. Long shot: Flush-mounted into the wall, box with glass screen. On the screen, flashing in constant rhythm, the word DANGER. Detail: Grot. Jumps with a single leap towards a giant lever, turns it with enormous exertion of all his muscles. (Harbou [1926b] 2000, 63)1 1 A comparison I conducted between the published excerpts and Harbou’s original manuscript available at the archive of Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin shows that they are indeed authentic.

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Unlike the previous passage, this one is written in a comparatively neutral manner. It is worth noting though, that in Harbou’s original manuscript this and most other scenes have a different layout than in the publication. Rather than being set in longer lines, the text is actually set in narrow columns, each line consisting of just a few words; most sentences break across the lines (they are not centred as in the previously quoted scene). By altering the layout, the magazine concealed the only feature of Harbou’s script that set it apart from the orthodox screenwriting of the time. The UFA-Magazin thus advertised Metropolis to its professional readers using a longer excerpt written in a near-orthodox manner. At the same time, the Berliner Tageblatt appealed to a much broader, general audience by providing them with a shorter “expressionist” passage (the minority of the scenes in the screenplay are written in this poetic way). I therefore propose that the application of the label “expressionist” in regard to screenplays for expressionist films is just as much a product of the marketing strategy of the German film industry as is the term “expressionist film” itself. This does not exclude, of course, that in case of Metropolis there was also an affinity between the style of Harbou’s screenplay and that of her novel Metropolis (1926a), on which the screenplay and subsequently the film were based. In fact, many of Harbou’s screenplays were based on her novels and vice versa. The connection between these two strands of her writing has been characterised in terms of a “strong visual style” (Scholz 2015, 377); to put it simply, Harbou wrote her novels like screenplays and her screenplays like novels. However, only Harbou’s novels and novelisations were extensively published, whereas her screenplays remain available only as archive materials. In other words, her novels completely “suppressed” her screenplays on the market of popular fiction.2 Another reason for the persistence of the discourse on expressionist screenwriting is the work of Carl Mayer, in particular, his screenplays New Year’s Eve (Sylvester, 1924) and Sunrise (Sonnenaufgang, [1927] 1971). Several scholars have suggested that the style of Mayer’s screenplays is related to literary expressionism (Faber 1978, 169; Kasten 1994, 278–89; Schwarz 1994, 304–11). In doing so, the literary research reinforces the 2 The reluctance of publishers and researchers to rediscover Harbou’s work today primarily has to do with her compliance with the Nazi authorities: “Harbou, like [Leni] Riefenstahl, refused to explain her involvement in the Nazi regime and went on making movies in the Federal Republic of Germany in the early 1950s” (Scholz 2015, 377).

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very same fallacy as the screenwriting research does when it presumes that the orthodox style and format of screenwriting can be considered separately from the narratives of the scripts. Mayer’s style, I propose, cannot relate to literary expressionism, if the motifs and themes of his screenplays do not. As I detail in Chapter 9, Mayer’s scripts construct melodramatic narratives that play out in intimate settings and are guided by the nineteenth-century bourgeois values; the meaning of Mayer’s unique screenwriting style is predicated, among other things, upon these narratives, which have as good as no connection to literary expressionism. By contrast, there exist one or two film scripts that feature not only the style but also the motifs characteristic of literary expressionism: apocalypse, war, urbanism, technology, dissolution of the individual, mental disorders, and so on. I examine these few scripts below.

The Expressionist Screenplay: It’s Not All About Style If there exists a truly expressionist script, then it is perhaps The Plague by poet and playwright Walter Hasenclever. Hasenclever was among those who submitted their short scripts to Das Kinobuch (1914) compendium, which I discussed in Chapter 3; The Plague is therefore Hasenclever’s second film script. It was published in 1920 and claims to be “the first film text printed in book form” (Hasenclever 1920, 55).3 The prologue of the script is set in the year 2000 in the United States of Europe, where poverty has been eradicated thanks to the invention of artificial bread; the rest of the script, however, pictures the gradual spread of a plague throughout the world, as the character Death prevents any attempts to stop it or find an antidote. The apocalyptic story starts with a “masquerade” and “bacchanal” (1920, 12) and ends with “the dance of death” (53)—these are only a few examples of many motifs in the script that allow situating it within the tradition of literary expressionism. In his brief but convincing reading of the script, writer and literary scholar Michael Lentz suggests that the plague ultimately becomes “an allegory of the modern experiences of mental, political, and social

3 A somewhat loose English translation of The Plague appeared in January 1923 in the New York magazine the Smart Set.

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dissociation” (2013, 23). The style of the screenplay supports this interpretation. Characteristic of The Plague is a “nominal style intensified to an extreme, parallelisms, and paratactic structures” (Schwarz 1994, 191). For example: PICTURE 149 Dance of Death Masked ball. Dancer is dancing. Naked. Staring at the door. Door opens. Mask enters. Banker threatens. Mask approaches. Banker falls over. Dancer screams. Mask touches her hand, they dance. Mask turns. Everyone freezes. Mask opens visor: Death. (Hasenclever 1920, 53)

The sentences are not only stripped down to only the subject and the action, but even the articles are omitted for the sake of rhythm. When the outdoor or indoor settings are mentioned in the main text, the sentences are often reduced to just one noun each, as in the very first image the script describes: “Tower. City. River. Bright sunshine. Ships. Flags” (Hasenclever 1920, 11). This style indeed creates an aesthetic of dissociation, an image of the world consisting of single, unconnected pieces. Moreover, the script presents the inability to connect these pieces into a holistic picture as the ultimate modern experience, in which film plays a decisive role. In particular, The Plague allegorically connects film and the epidemic through their capacities to overcome temporal and spatial boundaries by presenting the spread of the plague over the world in a series of “jumps” through time and space. In this regard, the script echoes Hasenclever’s view on cinema as “reproducing” the chaos of existence: “The film is, so to speak, the ultimate consequence of human expansions, and the monstrousness of existence can appear only in it” ([1913] 1978, 48). For Hasenclever, the film is complicit in initiating the chaos of dissociation, but it is also the only suitable medium for representing it. The genre of screenplay, the allegorical narrative, and the distinctive style thus all work together in Hasenclever’s text, proclaiming the modernist epoch of detachment and disconnection. That the language of The Plague is reminiscent of expressionist lyric poetry was already apparent for Hasenclever’s contemporaries; one of them wrote in his review of the screenplay that its style “would mean [literary] progress if it was newer than the manner of expression which is so common among the expressionists” (Podehl 1920, 11). However, to emphasise it once again, it is not the style alone that situates Hasenclever’s

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script in the tradition of literary expressionism, but rather its combination with an expressionist pathos that celebrates passion and vitality in the face of an all-encompassing epidemic of dissociation. In this regard, Hasenclever’s script is a unique occurrence. No other scripts that concur with the expressionist programme were published during the 1920s. One short script or treatment that can be called expressionist was written in the 1920s but published only in the 1970s—The Man We (Der Mann Wir) by one of the most famous expressionist playwrights, Georg Kaiser. Stylistically, The Man We shows little similarity to Hasenclever’s The Plague, but the motivic parallels are hard to overlook. Just like The Plague starts with the invention of artificial bread, the nameless protagonist of The Man We is “about to complete an invention that allows the transformation of one substance into another (mud into coal)” (Kaiser 1971, 11). In both cases, the invention is accompanied by an apocalypse—the end of humanity in The Plague and the complete dissolution of the protagonist’s “I” in The Man We. In Kaiser’s script, the protagonist is confused for his dead brother and pursued for his brother’s crimes. Thus “brought, due to the accidental confusion with his brother, onto the path of exchanging his personality with another,” the pursued man flees from his “I” by assuming the identities of multiple dead people: his brother, a chauffeur who dies in a car accident, a doctor, a sportsman. Like Hasenclever, Kaiser places in the centre of his script a series of transformations and masquerades. Eventually, the protagonist of The Man We realises he has completely lost his identity and is nothing but a mask: Increasingly insane, he forges a plot against himself: Participants of the plot are all those figures whose shape he assumed. In confusing images they all reappear before him and conspire: to shoot down the MAN—the I. (Kaiser 1971, 13)

The protagonist tries to shoot down these figures but the shot hits him instead and strikes him down. While Hasenclever’s screenplay allegorically presents the experience of dissociation as a plague, Kaiser’s outline is more straightforward: It pictures a gradual loss of identity in a world where personalities are exchangeable, and where the “I” ceases to exist and is replaced by a uniform “we.” Hasenclever’s view on film as “reproducing” the chaos of existence and engulfing the spectator in it is also valid for Kaiser’s script; only here the chaos stems not from the disruption of time and space,

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but from the vanishing borders between the “I” and the collective as a feature of cinematic experience. As Kaiser puts it in the preface to the script, “The I becomes a We, which confuses the I and forces the viewers to participate in this confusion” (1971, 11). This focus on the cinematic experience explains the concise, near-orthodox style of Kaiser’s script: While in Hasenclever’s The Plague, the screenplay becomes an accomplice of the cinematic chaos by virtue of using “dissociating” expressionist writing, in Kaiser’s The Man We the screenplay stands aside as a “neutral” planning document. Incidentally, neither Hasenclever’s nor Kaiser’s scripts were ever realised. By contrast to surrealist screenwriting, which played a major role in the emergence of surrealist film, the very few expressionist screenplays I discussed above have a very minor if any connection to the expressionist films produced in the 1920s. The majority of the screenplays to expressionist films, as I showed in the beginning of the chapter, were written in according with the screenwriting orthodoxy of the time; they were also often based on literary sources and occasionally borrowed elements of style from these sources. In the next section I explore the popularity of literary adaptations in the Weimar cinema and the impact of this trend on screenwriting, especially the screenwriting of literary authors.

“Ennobling” Film: Literary Self-Adaptations and Theatrical Tradition The idea of making film more attractive for the bourgeois audiences by means of literary adaptations and the engagement of famous literary authors goes back to the pre-war years (Heller 1985, 39–53). Because the German bourgeoisie was especially wary of film as a new art form, literary adaptations remained in high demand in Germany and Austria after the World War I. During the 1920s, a large number of well-known German and Austrian playwrights and writers derived film projects either from their own works or from works by other literary authors. Writers such as Thomas Mann, Alfred Döblin, and Gerhart Hauptmann in Germany and Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler in Austria all participated in this project of “nobilitating” film as an art form with the help of literature. Specific to the German and Austrian contexts was the fact that most of these authors either had a strong background in theatre or derived their screenplays from theatrical plays. This situation was conspicuously

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different from France, where screenwriting was especially popular among poets, and from Russia, where screenwriting of literary authors did not tend to one particular genre. I contend that the strong connection to theatre was the reason why most screenplays of German-speaking literary authors never saw the light of day. Just as their plays, their screenplays focus on character psychology and intricate character relations, relying mostly on theatrical means of representation—gesticulation and dialogue. As a result, these scripts were not only derivative in regard to the respective literary originals, but they also directly contradicted the screenwriting orthodoxy and the filmmaking practices of the time. Two silent screenplays by the writer Alfred Döblin provide perhaps the most representative example of the discrepancy between the complex characters’ motivation and the limited means suggested to depict it. Döblin was not only a literary author but also a psychiatrist and therefore particularly interested in different possibilities of representing the human psyche. In particular, Döblin’s most famous novel Berlin, Alexanderplatz (1929) realises his programme of letting the characters’ psychology appear not “like it is told, but like it is present” (1989, 122)—a variation of the “show, don’t tell” formula common to many screenwriting orthodoxies. However, Döblin based his silent screenplays not on his prose, but on his theatre work, specifically on his one-act play Comteß Mizzi (1908). The play revolves around the provocative idea of “sacred prostitution”—a cult Döblin invented to expose the bourgeois morale on the one hand and the splitting of sexual desire from emotional bounds on the other (see Büchel 2016, 215–16). This theme was probably the reason why the play was not published during Döblin’s lifetime; with the play’s adaptation for the screen, Döblin must have attempted to make public his Mizzi-story. The 1920s offered a suitable opportunity: After the film censorship was lifted in the Weimar Republic in 1918, a new genre became popular on the German cinema screens: Aufklärungsfilm, translated as “social hygiene film” or “sex education film.” Prostitutes were frequent characters in these films, since they were officially meant to raise awareness of the dangers of venereal diseases. Thus in 1920 Döblin returned to his play about “sacred prostitution” and composed first a short film “prequel” to it called Siddi, and then a full screen adaptation of the play entitled The Consecrated Daughters (Die geweihten Töchter). The basic story of The Consecrated Daughters is this: Left with an illegitimate daughter after her mother’s suicide, a retired count dedicates himself to fighting the devil who seduces men and women into a

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“demonic momentary sensuality” (Döblin 1983, 326). Together with a nun, Clarissa, the count organises a cult of the goddess Demeter, which is supposed to fight the devil with the means of sacred prostitution. Eventually Mizzi, the count’s daughter, also joins the cult. When the bourgeoisie alerts the police to the brothel, Mizzi attempts to seduce the head of police Baron Neustätter, but falls in love with him. As the police are storming the count’s house, Mizzi kills the Baron and then herself. In order to explicate the complex motivation of his characters without the help of intertitles, Döblin develops a whole system of visual symbols and special effects. The figures occasionally appear accompanied by their animal avatars that mirror their characters—a white cat for the nun Clarissa, “pecking pigeons” for Mizzi and her beloved, etc. To depict the characters’ feelings, Döblin suggests using common visual symbols such as flames bursting out of the count’s chest when he falls in love. The most significant novelty Döblin introduces into his script are the “inter-pictures,” for example: picture 54 A cart in front of the country house, Mizzi with the suitcase and a lot of flowers. Farewell to the owners; departure. Inter-picture: two searching arms, a luring other arm. (Döblin 1983, 348)

It is not clear, to whom these arms belong; in this way, the inter-picture is separated from the main narrative and becomes an abstract representation of an emotion or a psychological constellation. Many similar inter-pictures represent the feelings of the characters throughout the script with the help of arms and hands, which express desire, threat, and so on. In this case, the “inter-picture” depicts Mizzi’s anxiety when leaving the house of her adoptive parents to meet her father the count. By completely eliminating dialogue from his screenplay, Döblin thus shifted almost the entire psychological weight of the story onto an equally theatrical device—gesticulation. However, the inter-pictures do not make up for the vital information contained in the dialogue of the original play—the information about the characters’ motivation. It is hardly a coincidence that, when publishing a fragment of The Consecrated Daughters in 1924, Döblin prefaced it with a synopsis, explaining the motifs of the main characters; without this synopsis, the entire script is also scarcely intelligible. Paradoxically, Döblin’s attempt to “free” screenwriting from the theatrical

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dialogue resulted in a screenplay bound to another theatrical means of expression—gesticulation. The same is valid, to an even greater extent, for several silent screenplays written by the Nobel laureate Gerhart Hauptmann: his original screenplay Phantom, written around 1920,4 and two further screenplays, both derived from Hauptmann’s projects for theatre. The script Apollonius of Tyre (Apollonius von Tyrus ) adapts an eponymous dramatic fragment and is, as the title suggests, a variation of the ancient novel about the adventures of king Apollonius (Hoefert 1996, 29–30). Three versions of the screenplay The New World (Die neue Welt ) are derived from Hauptmann’s unfinished stage project The Cathedral (Der Dom) and tell the parallel stories of the monk Franziskus and the nun Barbara, until their lives cross, become a love story, and end with a common expedition to South America—the “new world” from the title.5 All of Hauptmann’s screenplays are character-centred, and their stories are fuelled by the development of the complex relations between the characters and the shifts in their mindset. For instance, as the editor of Hauptmann’s scripts Sigfrid Hoefert (1996, 33) remarks, the title The New World relates not only to South America but also to a radical change in human thought that is the actual subject of the script. However, most of the time Hauptmann simply catalogues the characters’ thoughts and feelings in laconic lists: “His surprise, his regret, his shock” ([1923a] 1996, 129); “Her scorn. Her redemption. Her relief.” (131); “his fright, his fear, his helplessness, and his passion must be shown” (134). A typical scene reads like this: 21. The abbess’s consulting room in the Ursuline convent. Barbara is introduced to her. Barbara wants to be a nun. Examination by the abbess, serious dissuasion, etc. Barbara begs on her knees, desperately and pleading. (Hauptmann [1923b] 1996, 117)

This passage demonstrates that Hauptmann’s scripts, just as those of Döblin, do not suggest any intertitles and instead rely heavily on gesticulation and facial expressions of the actors. Döblin describes the gestures 4 Hauptmann’s screenplay Phantom served as the basis for his novel of the same name, which in turned served as the basis for Harbou’s screenplay Phantom, which Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau realised in 1922 as the film Phantom. 5 On the differences between the versions of the script, see Hoefert (1996, 32).

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as a potential viewer would see them, without indicating the emotions behind the gestures; Hauptmann does the exact opposite—he lists the feelings of the characters, but hardly describes how exactly they could appear on screen. Both writing strategies can be connected to the practice of giving stage directions: In theatrical plays, a few words in parentheses before or after a piece of dialogue typically indicate either the emotional tone or the gesture accompanying the character’s words. Slightly exaggerating, one could say that the screenplays by Döblin and Hauptmann build on what is left of theatrical plays if one eliminates all dialogue—namely, the stage directions. Yet not all authors were aware, as Döblin and Hauptmann were, that an adaptation of a stage project for silent film may require reducing or even eliminating the dialogue. In particular, film scripts by the famous Austrian playwright, writer, and physician Arthur Schnitzler demonstrate that he was not ready to give up the dialogue as the main means of character development when adapting his plays into screenplays. Over the course of his life Schnitzler wrote a total of eight screenplays, all of them adaptations of his own literary works.6 Only one of his eight scripts was produced as a film—Flirtation (Liebelei), directed by August Blom and Holger-Madsen and produced in Denmark in 1913. One of the reasons for the minimal success of Schnitzler’s screenplays must have been his neglect for the representational possibilities and limitations of silent film; this neglect is especially evident in two features of his screenwriting. Firstly, in an example of telling rather than showing, Schnitzler’s scripts tend to compress large amounts of narrative information in just one or two sentences, for example: [Marie] no longer sees him after the ball, but her passion grows ever greater in the loneliness and sadness of her existence. Rumours of war have been spreading more and more recently. (Schnitzler 2015, 346)

This fragment from Schnitzler’s script The Call of Life (Der Ruf des Lebens, 1920) is typical of his screenwriting insofar as it covers indefinite time spans and refers to repeated or long-lasting events (not to mention 6 All Schnitzler’s film projects were meticulously documented in a recently published volume (Schnitzler 2015), which includes texts from different stages of work, comparisons between them, extensive commentary, and bibliographies.

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the remark about the character’s complex motivation). Such passages are especially frequent in scripts that are adaptations of Schnitzler’s own plays—The Call of Life, The Young Medardus (Der junge Medardus ), and The Big Scene (Die große Szene). Incidentally, the same feature can be found in several screenplays of Schnitzler’s fellow countryman, acclaimed playwright and writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal.7 Their scripts provide no thoughts on how such concentrated narrative information could be rendered or reworked in film production. Furthermore, Schnitzler’s adaptations of his own plays contain a significant amount of dialogue—a kind of leftovers from the respective original sources. Occasionally, Schnitzler’s scripts simply summarise the dialogue from the original play, as in the following example from The Call of Life: In this conversation Marie learns that the platoon of Albrecht and Max does not leave until the next morning, meaning that Max is still here. So there is another opportunity to see him. In this conversation she also learns that there is a relationship between Max and the colonel’s wife. (Schnitzler 2015, 347)

Again, the script provides no indications as to how the given information could be used in a film production. In a comment to another script, The Big Scene, Schnitzler clarifies that the “dialogue does not always mean the so-called ‘intertitles.’ As far as possible, it is to be understood only as indications of facial gestures” (2015, 429). However, his scripts are hardly comprehensible without the information contained in the dialogue, and it remains unclear how it could be rendered solely through gesticulation and the facial expressions of the actors. (The same can be said about Hofmannsthal’s unfinished screenplay adaptation of his opera libretto The Knight of the Rose [Der Rosenkavalier].) Schnitzler repeatedly used film adaptations as a pretext to rework the original narratives—for instance, for The Call of Life he invented a different ending than that of the original play—but he neglected to revise the genre particularities of his works. As a result, his film scripts mostly just summarise his theatrical plays. For Schnitzler as for Hofmannsthal and

7 In particular, Hofmannsthal’s two original screenplays from the 1920s, [Daniel Defoe] and Film for Lillian Gish (Film für Lillian Gish), often present in one sentence information about multiple events that occur over a significant time span. The history of Hofmannstahl’s film projects is traced in great detail in the 2003 study by Heinz Hiebler.

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Hauptmann, their background in theatre seems to have largely defined the particularities of their screenwriting and the inability of their scripts to function in both mainstream and experimental silent film production. It is remarkable that the vast majority of scripts written by literary authors in Germany and Austria in the 1920s stem from the years 1920– 1923.8 It wasn’t until the very end of the 1920s that a new wave of film projects by literary authors emerged; this second wave very soon turned into an exploration of the new possibilities opened up by sound film. In this later period, a background in theatre and the adaptation of theatrical plays became an asset rather than an obstacle for screenwriters. Yet during the silent film era, the fashion for literary adaptations and the ensuing “theatrical” screenplays were one of the main reasons why the screenplay did not become a significant feature of German-speaking modernist literature.

A Few Exceptions; or, the German Modernist Screenwriting Only a few German-speaking authors recognised a need to radically separate screenwriting from playwriting. Two of them were also men of theatre, like most other authors mentioned in this chapter: Carl Mayer, who started his career in a small theatre in Berlin, and Bertolt Brecht. Mayer succeeded exactly where most playwrights failed: he developed a style and narrative techniques that allowed writing character-centred scripts and exploring the characters’ psychology with the means of silent film (Mayer’s work is examined in detail in Chapter 9). By contrast, Bertolt Brecht is generally known to have been interested in the exact opposite of psychologisation, that is in the alienating or distancing effect (Ger. Verfremdungseffekt ) that his epic theatre is famous for. In particular, Brecht scholar Marc Silberman contends that the various representational innovations he [Brecht] devised in the theatre and the cinema […] served as means of Verfremdung that aimed at disrupting the identification between the audience and the reality represented. (1997, 214) 8 For that reason, Heinz-Bernd Heller’s (1985) influential study of film-literature interactions in Germany, which explores the period between 1910 and 1930, hardly moves beyond the year 1923.

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However, in Chapter 7, I argue against such a harmonising view on the correlations between Brecht’s theatre and his film projects. I suggest that, in fact, his scripts reveal both germs of his later distancing techniques and a genuine interest in the representation of psychological processes, which stands in contrast to Brecht’s later views on film and theatre. The scripts by both Brecht and Mayer show that character-centred screenwriting for silent film was possible without any recourse to theatrical means of expression, playwriting, or to other literary sources. Directly opposed to the widespread interest in psychological narratives is the work of the Berlin-based avant-garde filmmakers: Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, and Oskar Fischinger. As abstract filmmakers, they seem to have worked without screenplays: No drafts, scripts, or any other verbal production documents for their films are available in print, by contrast to the French scripts for abstract and Dada films I discussed in Chapter 4. As a rule, abstract cinema of the 1920s did without screenwriting, relying on various forms of improvisation and experimentation with materials. The only German-speaking author who combined an interest in radically experimental cinema with an interest in screenwriting was visual artist László Moholy-Nagy. As he took up screenwriting and filmmaking shortly before the transition to sound film, Moholy-Nagy published only one silent screenplay, Dynamic of the Metropolis (Dynamik der Grossstadt ). He designed this script as a work at the crossroads of graphic art, literature, and functional writing. In Chapter 8, I explore how Moholy-Nagy’s script reconciles anti-mimetic filmmaking with screenwriting, uniting them in the face of a common goal: to educate the visual perception of modern urban citizens. ∗ ∗ ∗ Ultimately, German-speaking screenwriters from the most diverse of literary movements, ranging from neo-romanticism (Harbou and Galeen) to expressionism (Hasenclever and Kaiser), from the New Objectivity movement (Döblin) to naturalism (Hauptmann), to the Young Vienna group (Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal), all brought to their film projects a strong emphasis on the representation of the characters’ psychology. This forms a conspicuous contrast to the work of the German avantgarde filmmakers of the time and to the screenwriting experiments of the French and Russian modernists, who sought in film and screenwriting an

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escape from psychologisation. Precisely in the domain of representing the characters’ thoughts and feelings, the silent film and the silent screenwriting could scarcely compete with other literary genres. Consequently, in Germany and Austria the screenplay made no grand entrance into the literary field as it did in France and Russia. Instead, (fragments of) screenplays were occasionally made available to the public as parts of the advertising campaigns for the respective films; the screenplay was recognised—not as literature, but as merchandise.

References Becker, Jörg. 1997. “Wortsetzung als Bilderführung in den StummfilmDrehbüchern Carl Mayers.” In Carl Mayer: Im Spiegelkabinett des Dr. Caligari: Der Kampf zwischen Licht und Dunkel, edited by Bernhard Frankfurter, 52–63. Vienna: Promedia. Büchel, Johanna. 2016. “Comteß Mizzi (1909).” In Döblin-Handbuch: Leben— Werk—Wirkung, edited by Sabina Becker, 214–16. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler Verlag. Budd, Mike. 1990. “The Moments of Caligari.” In The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Texts, Contexts, Histories, edited by Mike Budd, 7–119. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Döblin, Alfred. 1983. Drama, Hörspiel, Film. Edited by Erich Kleinschmidt. Vol. 22 of Ausgewählte Werke in Einzelbänden. Olten, Switzerland: Walter. ———. 1989. Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik und Literatur. Edited by Erich Kleinschmidt. Vol. 29 of Ausgewählte Werke in Einzelbänden. Olten, Switzerland: Walter. Eisner, Lotte H. 1973. Murnau. London: Secker & Warburg. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2000. Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary. London: Routledge. Faber, Marion. 1978. “Carl Mayer’s ‘Sylvester’: The Screenplay as Literature.” Monatshefte für deutschen Unterricht, deutsche Sprache und Literatur 70 (2): 159–70. Galeen, Henrik. (1922) 1973. Nosferatu: Murnau’s Own Copy of the Script. Translated by Gertrud Mander. In Murnau, by Lotte H. Eisner, 227–72. London: Secker & Warburg. Harbou, Thea von. 1926a. “Der Anfang eines Films. Die ersten Bilder von ‘Metropolis’.” Berliner Tageblatt, no. 489, October 16, 1st supplement. n.p. ———. (1926b) 2000. “The Novel and the Screenplay.” In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear, edited by Michael Minden and Holger Bachmann, 59–71.

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Hasenclever, Walter. (1913) 1978. “Der Kintopp als Erzieher: Eine Apologie.” In Kino-Debatte: Texte zum Verhältnis von Literatur und Film 1909–1929, edited by Anton Kaes, 47–49. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag. ———. 1920. Die Pest: Ein Film. Berlin: Cassirer. Hauptmann, Gerhart. (1923a) 1996. “Apollonius von Tyrus.” In Gerhart Hauptmann und der Film: Mit unveröffentlichten Filmentwürfen des Dichters, edited by Sigfrid Hoefert, 128–40. Berlin: Schmidt. ———. (1923b) 1996. “Die neue Welt [II].” In Gerhart Hauptmann und der Film: Mit unveröffentlichten Filmentwürfen des Dichters, edited by Sigfrid Hoefert, 116–27. Berlin: Schmidt. Heller, Heinz-Bernd. 1985. Literarische Intelligenz und Film: Zu Veränderungen der ästhetischen Theorie und Praxis unter dem Eindruck des Films 1910–1930 in Deutschland. Tübingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Hiebler, Heinz. 2003. Hugo von Hofmannsthal und die Medienkultur der Moderne. Würzburg, Germany: Königshausen & Neumann. Hoefert, Sigfrid. 1996. Gerhart Hauptmann und der Film: Mit unveröffentlichten Filmentwürfen des Dichters. Berlin: Schmidt. Kaiser, Georg. 1971. Filme. Romane. Erzählungen. Aufsätze. Gedichte. Edited by Walther Huder. Vol. 4 of Werke. Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen Verlag. Kasten, Jürgen. 1990. Film schreiben: Eine Geschichte des Drehbuches. Vienna: Hora Verlag. ———. 1994. Carl Mayer: Filmpoet: Ein Drehbuchautor schreibt Filmgeschichte. Berlin: Vistas. Ksenofontova, Alexandra. 2019. “Once Again into the Cabinets of Dr. Caligari: Evil Spaces and Hidden Sources of the Caligari Screenplay.” Journal of Screenwriting 10 (3): 261–77. Lentz, Michael. 2013. “‘Auf einmal wird es menschenleer.’ Dankrede anlässlich der Verleihung des Walter-Hasenclever-Literaturpreises der Stadt Aachen.” In Literatur der Moderne. Jahrbuch der Walter-Hasenclever-Gesellschaft: Band 8 (2012/2013), edited by Jürgen Egyptien, 9–23. Göttingen, Germany: V-&R-Unipress. Mayer, Carl. 1924. Sylvester: Ein Lichtspiel. Potsdam, Germany: Kiepenheuer Verlag. ———. 1971. Sunrise (Sonnenaufgang): Ein Drehbuch von Carl Mayer mit handschriftlichen Bemerkungen von Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau. Wiesbaden, Germany: Deutsches Institut für Filmkunde. Podehl, F. 1920. “Ein Film von Walter Hasenclever [Zur Veröffentlichung von Die Pest ].” Der Film 37: 11. Price, Steven. 2013. A History of the Screenplay. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Robinson, David. 2003. “Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari.” In British Film Institute Film Classics, vol. 1, edited by Edward Buscombe and Rob White, 1–28. London: Fitzroy Dearborn. Schnitzler, Arthur. 2015. Filmarbeiten: Drehbücher, Entwürfe, Skizzen. Edited by Achim Aurnhammer, Hans Peter Buohler, Philipp Gresser, Julia Ilgner, Carolin Maikler, and Lea Marquart. Würzburg, Germany: Ergon Verlag. Scholz, Juliane. 2015. “Thea von Harbou (1888–1954).” In Women Screenwriters: An International Guide, edited by Jill Nelmes and Jule Selbo, 376–80. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Schwarz, Alexander. 1994. Der geschriebene Film: Drehbücher des deutschen und russischen Stummfilms. Munich: Diskurs Film. Silberman, Marc. 1997. “Brecht and Film.” In A Bertolt Brecht Reference Companion, edited by Siegfried Mews, 197–219. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

CHAPTER 7

Modernist Screenwriting and the Crisis of Reason

The previous chapters situated screenwriting in the histories of, respectively, French, Russian, and German literature; yet these culturally specific histories also had many common pages. Starting from this chapter, I look at some modernist ideas and contexts that were defining for screenwriting in all three cultural areas (and beyond). The first of these transcultural contexts to take into account is the so-called crisis of reason. At the turn of the twentieth century, the positivist line of thought that had been popular among many nineteenth century philosophers, artists, and literary authors was about to falter. Positivist thinking promoted the idea that societies and cultures are governed by laws analogues to those governing nature, most notably by the Darwinist theory of evolution. The positivist project saw reason and scientific thought as the only valuable sources of knowledge in all spheres of human life and expected them to replace metaphysical and religious thought. Countless thinkers, including, for instance, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud, challenged these ideas already during the nineteenth century (see Burrow 2000); then, World War I came as the decisive blow to the evolutionary theory of social and cultural progress and the idea of humans as essentially rational beings. In this chapter I bring together screenplays from France, Russia, and Germany that take a stand against a purely rational understanding of the everyday, labour, the body, and human relations. In doing so, they aim to © The Author(s) 2020 A. Ksenofontova, The Modernist Screenplay, Palgrave Studies in Screenwriting, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50589-9_7

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re-enchant the overly technical and rationalised world, revive excitement with the spectacle of cinema, and rediscover the unknown and the magical under the surface of the familiar and the quotidian. Reading the screenplays by Philippe Soupault, Pierre Albert-Birot, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Benjamin Péret, and Bertolt Brecht and Caspar Neher, I explore why and how the screenplay could become a means of reacting to the modernist crisis of reason—along with, or even more effectively than other literary genres.

Philippe Soupault and Pierre Albert-Birot: Re-enchanting the Everyday The scripts by Philippe Soupault and Pierre Albert-Birot stand at the beginning of an entire strand of surrealist screenwriting. Apart from this pioneering work, Soupault is renowned for his collaboration with André Breton on the first surrealist book The Magnetic Fields (Les champs magnetiques ) as well as for his own surrealist prose and poetry. By contrast, Albert-Birot’s work in literature, painting, and sculpture “remains largely unknown by the general reading public” (Kelly 1997, 9); however, he is well known as the founder and editor of the avant-garde journal SIC (1916–1919). This journal is where it all began: In 1918, it published the first of Soupault’s six Cinematographic Poems (Poèmes cinématographiques ),1 and soon after—Albert-Birot’s own screenwriting experiment called 2 + 1 = 2 (1919). Because the latter attracted attention, Albert-Birot soon composed his Poems in Space (Poèmes dans l’espace, 1920). What reasons do I and other researchers have (Cohen 2013; Albersmeier 1985; Williams 1981; Virmaux and Virmaux 1976; Matthews 1971, back to Kyrou 1953) to read these “poems” of Soupault and Albert-Birot as screenplays? (To recuperate my argument from Capter 2, there is no need to prove that these texts are screenplays, as long as there is enough textual and/or contextual evidence that they can be read as such.) The main reason to consider Soupault’s Cinematographic Poems as screenplays is his own prefatory note to the publication of the first of 1 The other five Cinematographic Poems were not published until 1925, in the special number of Les Cahiers du Mois dedicated to cinema. However, according to the conclusion of Virmaux and Virmaux, the poems were composed in early 1918, soon after Indifference (see Soupault 1979, 28).

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these poems, Indifference (Indifférence), in SIC: “I propose to those, who have the material means, to realise this first endeavour” (1979, 23). The journal Le Film reiterated this suggestion a month later, republishing Soupault’s script: “If some director would like to shoot Indifference, we encourage him to write to us immediately” (Soupault 1918, 18–19). As Ado Kyrou (1953, 192) has claimed, and many others have repeated, some of the Cinematographic Poems must have indeed been realised by Walter Ruttmann in 1922.2 The contextual reasons to regard Albert-Birot’s film scripts as such is also provided by the author himself. Shortly after Albert-Birot’s script 2 + 1 = 2 was published in SIC, his fellow painter and sculptor Francis Picabia approached Albert-Birot to suggest realising the 2 + 1 = 2 script with the help of the director Robert Dattard. However, after estimating the time and cost requirements of the project, Dattard asked Albert-Birot to write “something simpler and very short” (Albert-Birot 1995, 25), within a hundred metres of film and a budget of 5,000 francs. AlbertBirot subsequently composed six Poems in Space. Yet the director never showed up for the next meeting, remarking in a letter, “It is very unlikely that I could realise cinematographically the idea you have submitted,” and so the project was abandoned (26). There is indeed little in the works by Soupault and Albert-Birot that prevents one from reading them as screenplays or, to suggest a more genre specific term, as screenplay-poems. They are very short narratives in prose (those of Soupault between 100 and 200 words, those of AlbertBirot somewhat longer), written in the present tense and a laconic style and almost completely devoid of figurative devices. Each screenplay-poem by Soupault is entitled with a single word: Indifference, Rage, Force, Farewell, Glory, and Regret; those by Albert-Birot have no titles and are simply numbered. The stories they tell are neither causally nor logically coherent, but seem at first glance to be a collection of random events and actions, replete with tricks and cinematic special effects (which must have scared away the film producers of the time).

2 In particular, Kyrou claims that one poem was shot; in an interview in 1965, Soupault

talked of two poems realised by Ruttmann; asked again by Virmaux and Virmaux in 1979, Soupault could remember two or three films made from the Cinematographic Poems (1979, 28–29). Today, the existence of these films seems impossible to (dis)prove, since not a single one of them was ever screened in France, and they were all presumably lost during the bombings of Berlin in World War II.

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The only feature of the screenplay-poems by Soupault that is unusual for a screenplay (and, conversely, their only feature that is rather common for lyric poetry) is their use of the first-person narrator. For example, Indifference starts as follows: I am climbing a vertical road. At the top lies a plain where a strong wind is blowing. […] I lean my head and go across. I arrive in a garden with monstrously large flowers and herbs. I sit down on a bench. (Soupault 1979, 24)

Interpreting this “I” in regard to film production, Nadja Cohen (2013, 397) suggests that it could mean a “subjective camera” or first-person intertitles (or, anticipating the sound film, a first-person voice-over); she further proposes that the use of the “I” could imply Soupault’s ambition to act in the films himself or, on the contrary, his indifference towards the “technical problems” of a filmic realisation. However, the most plausible explanation for Soupault’s choice of the first person (which Cohen also prefers) can be inferred from his preliminary note to the publication of the poems in 1925: “I wanted, by virtue of the film, to give an impression, neither clear nor precise, but similar to a dream” (Soupault 1979, 25). The aim of creating a dreamlike effect explains not only the use of the “I,” but also the shortness of the screenplay-poems, which reflects the fragmentary nature of dreaming, and the abundance of sudden chases and stops. In Rage, the protagonist is following a stranger, then stops suddenly to close his jacket, starts pursuing a car, only to come to a halt before the bar he left from. In Glory, a statue tries to escape from a crowd, which in the end hunts it down and puts it back on its pedestal. This latter script also captures the dreamlike uncertainty of one’s own identity: It first refers to the protagonist as “a statue,” but then immediately reveals it as the homodiegetic narrator: “The crowd cheers a statue, I get down from the plinth” (Soupault 1979, 27). In this context, it is also interesting to note that, of the six Cinematographic Poems, three have a circular structure: Events and actions reoccur in the beginning and at the end of their narratives, creating a kind of déjà vu experience. For instance, Regret starts with the protagonist sitting in a rocking chair and slowly smoking; he then goes outside, experiences all the objects around him disappearing one by one, embarks on a transatlantic journey, upon arrival enters a hotel, and, in the end, we read: “I find another rocking chair and sit down smoking slowly” (Soupault 1979, 28).

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Rage and Glory feature a similar structure: the former starts and finishes with the protagonist watching a patron at a bar, “his arm, then his hand and finally his fingers closing on his glass” (26); the latter features as its protagonist the statue that comes to life but returns in the end to its pedestal and the cheering crowd (27–28). This circular structure can also be seen as a device approximating dreamlike experiences. The reference to dream also explains the abundance of special effects we find in both Soupault’s and Albert-Birot’s scripts. They include objects growing and diminishing in size, transformations, appearances, and disappearances.3 Albert-Birot’s screenplay-poems additionally experiment with colour and abstract shapes, projection speed, transformations of objects into people and vice versa. This is, for example, how Soupault’s Indifference suggests using the special effects: Before me rocks swell and become enormous. […] Suddenly at my side appears a man who changes into a woman, then into an old man. […] I get up and they all disappear […]. The trees lower their branches, the trams, the cars pass at full speed, I soar and jump over the houses. I am on a roof in front of a clock that grows, grows as the hands turn faster and faster. (Soupault 1979, 24)

None of these techniques seems to exceed the technical capacities of the silent film. On the contrary, as the research (Cohen 2013, 395; Albersmeier 1985, 56) has noted, these effects go back to the magical films or féeries of the film pioneer Georges Méliès, which also employ tricks with object size, transformations, (dis)appearances, and so on. In other words, the special effects suggested in Soupault’s and Albert-Birot’s scripts are reminiscent of what Tom Gunning famously terms “the cinema of attractions” ([1986] 2006). “The cinema of attractions” fascinated the early film viewers with the discontinuous display of cinema’s possibilities, including those “powers” of film that captivated Soupault: “it overthrows all natural laws: it ignores space, time, reverses gravity, ballistics, biology, etc.” (1979, 23). These features made cinematic images dissimilar to reality, and thereby ensured that the viewer would not perceive them

3 Many of these special effects suggested in the Cinematographic Poems reappear an entire decade later, in Soupault’s 1934 script written for Jean Vigo, The Stolen Heart (Le cœur volé).

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rationally—in other words, the anti-mimetic nature of cinematic tricks made them most fruitful for encouraging the free play of imagination. Moreover, the numerous special effects in the screenplay-poems ensure the effect of surprise—a central element of surrealist poetics. As the surrealists’ predecessor Guillaume Apollinaire put it in 1917, “the unexpected, the surprising, is one of the principal sources of poetry today” (1971, 234); in any commentary on Indifference, we can read that this screenplay-poem was a direct answer to Apollinaire’s talk, from which this quote stems (Cohen 2013, 393; Virmaux and Virmaux 1976, 17; Albersmeier 1985, 57). However, in Soupault’s and Albert-Birot’s screenplay-poems the surprising “attractions” stem not from fantasy worlds, the mystical, and the otherworldly, as is often the case in the féeries of Méliès, but from the re-poeticising of the everyday—the rediscovery of the magical in quotidian objects and routines. This is why most of Soupault’s screenplay-poems have remarkably unspectacular beginnings and endings; instead of culminating in fantasy “apotheoses,” as the films of Méliès, they emphasise everyday actions, such as contemplative smoking and observing regular people doing routine things. For instance, in the finale of Indifference the protagonist magically survives a suicidal jump, but then makes a surprisingly quotidian gesture that concludes the story: “I throw myself from the roof and on the pavement I light a cigarette” (Soupault 1979, 24). Overall, the elements of fantasy such as transformations, (dis)appearances, and movements that defy gravity are integrated into an everyday canvas— the first-person protagonists mostly wander around cities, talk to other people, write, and smoke. The focus on the everyday is also the reason why Albert-Birot’s screenplay-poems suggest multiple tricks with animated objects. Already in Soupault’s Indifference we read: “I settle down on the terrace of a cafe, but all the objects, chairs, tables, charcoal in the barrels, group around me and annoy me” (1979, 24). Several of Albert-Birot’s screenplay-poems take this tactic further, to where the living objects become the cornerstone of the action. This is why Cohen (2013, 383) even compares AlbertBirot’s scripts to the “cinematographic dramas of objects” proclaimed by the Italian futurists in their 1916 manifesto “The Futurist Cinema.”4 4 The manifesto of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and other Italian futurists ([1916] 2014, 18) entitled “The Futurist Cinema” (“Il manifesto della cinematografia futurista”) lists fourteen descriptions of possible futurist films, and the seventh among them indeed

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For instance, in the beginning of Albert-Birot’s screenplay-poem number three, “The poet is sitting in a large chair. He is smoking a cigarette” (Albert-Birot 1995, 31)—a constellation very similar to that of Soupault’s Regret: “Sitting in a rocking chair, I am slowly smoking” (1979, 28). The poet’s body then separates into several parts, which penetrate into pieces of furniture and animate them; but when the poet’s friend knocks at the door, everything returns into its place. An opposite story is told in Albert-Birot’s screenplay-poem Still Life: a painter is trying to arrange objects for a still life, but they are resisting and moving more and more actively, until finally they attack the painter and, “during a frenetic dance, all suddenly fall dead, in a pile” (1995, 37). In his essay on surrealism, Walter Benjamin (1977, 299–300) suggests an explanation of why the world of obsolete and older everyday objects was so attractive to the surrealists. Having lost their immediate use, these objects were no longer perceived as capitalist goods, but instead could figure in new and unexpected constellations and thereby acquire a subversive, even revolutionary, potential. By becoming objects of contemplation, “enslaved and enslaving objects suddenly turn into revolutionary nihilism” (299); instead of pragmatic use and monetary value the objects acquire the potential of “profane illumination.” Benjamin links this “profane illumination” precisely to the practices Soupault and Albert-Birot celebrate in their scripts: reading, contemplating, wandering around cities. “The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flaneur” are the types of profane illuminati Benjamin puts even above the dreamer and the hallucinator, because “we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world” (307–08). I, therefore, propose that the screenplays of Soupault and Albert-Birot picture how the everyday is transformed through the practices of contemplation and poetic creation. This is why Soupault’s screenplay-poems feature the lyrical subject— the “I”—as their protagonist, and why the main characters in the scripts of Albert-Birot are “the author” and “the poet”: The poets are endowed with the power to reveal truths about the world by transforming and

describes rather precisely some of Albert-Birot’s Poems in Space: “7. Filmed dramas of objects . (Objects animated, humanized, baffled, dressed up, impassioned, civilized, dancing—objects removed from their normal surroundings and put into an abnormal state that, by contrast, throws into relief their amazing construction and nonhuman life).”

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re-enchanting the everyday. Rather than only creating dreamlike experiences, the screenplay-poems thus reinstall the mystery at the heart of the rationalised, routine reality. In this context, the screenplay itself also falls into the category of “enslaved and enslaving objects,” which the commercial film industry of the time regarded as a capitalist good and valued only according to its potential usefulness. Freeing the screenplay from this perception can be seen as part of the surrealist programme of re-enchanting the everyday. The exuberant complexity of tricks, the lack of discernible narratives, and the genre hybridity of the screenplay-poems all aim, I submit, at undermining the overly rationalised practices of the mainstream commercial film industry. In this way, the modernist screenplay turned from a capitalist object into a poetic “weapon” and opposed the industry by eroding it from the inside. Finally, the screenplay-poems also make possible the situation where poetry is used for film production. In this way, they challenge the separation between the aesthetic and the functional, art and the everyday. The hybridity of the screenplay-poems is thus mutually enriching for both components of the genre: the “screenplay” undermines the idea that the “poem” has no connection to, or no use in the everyday world, while the “poem” provides new artistic impulses for the de-rationalised and de-rationalising “screenplay.”

Vladimir Mayakovsky: The Hard Labour of Making Poetry The idea of fusing lyric poetry and screenwriting was, of course, exclusive neither to the surrealists nor to francophone writers. For instance, in his recent monumental work on Vladimir Mayakovsky, Dmitry Bykov (2016, 503) remarks that Mayakovsky’s silent screenplay How Are You? (Kak pozhivayete?) is “not a screenplay, but a cinepoem [Rus. kinopoema].” Reading this screenplay closely below, I show that Mayakovsky’s goal of integrating screenwriting and poetry was similar to, but at the same time distinct from that of the surrealists. While the surrealists were on a quest for the truths hidden by reason in the depth of the human psyche, Mayakovsky was more interested in the truths of the empirical world hidden under the surface of automated, habitual gaze. His combination of cinema and poetry was thus to grant access not to the magic of the subconscious, but to the real world as seen through the eyes of a poet.

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How Are You? was written at the end of 1926 and meant to be directed by Lev Kuleshov (Mayakovsky 1959, 131), but the project was never realised, unlike many other screenplays Mayakovsky composed. Six of the at least fourteen screenplays he wrote between 1918 and 1928 were realised as films. Mayakovsky’s scripts were thus undoubtedly fit for use in the situation of film production; at the same time, they feature conspicuous correspondences to his work in other literary genres, especially lyric poetry. Mayakovsky himself claims that, for instance, his screenplay The Heart of Film (Serdtse kino) “could stand beside our work in literary innovation” (126). In 1926, he was preparing this and one further screenplay for publication as a separate book, which never came out (126–27). Subsequently, his surviving scripts were included in the first (posthumous) edition of his collected works in 1936—a very uncommon editorial decision at the time, which presents Mayakovsky’s screenplays as part of his literary oeuvre. Indeed, How Are You? is inextricably linked to Mayakovsky’s lyric poetry. Just as in the scripts of the surrealists, the protagonist of How Are You? is the lyrical subject—a character called Mayakovsky.5 The script consists of five narrative fragments that together, as the subheading announces, picture “A day in five film details” from the life of the protagonist. Formally, the disparate “details” are held together by the morning newspaper the protagonist reads in the first episode. In the course of reading, multiple events from the newspaper materialise in front of him: the room starts shaking when he reads about an earthquake in the city of Leninakan (today Gyumri, Armenia), then the newspaper turns into a screen on which an attempted suicide is projected, and so on. After reading the advertisement column, the protagonist decides he needs to earn money for a new coat; consequently, he writes a poem, sells it to an editor, gets a paycheque, and buys groceries. He then gets angry about the stale bread he has bought, but the same morning newspaper changes his attitude by presenting him a backwards-running film on the process of bread production—a scene borrowed from Dziga Vertov’s famous documentary Kino-Eye (Kino-glaz, 1924). A separate episode tells the story of romance between the protagonist and the woman whose suicide he earlier “saw” in the newspaper, from their accidental first encounter to 5 Mayakovsky’s biographer Bengt Jangfeldt (2014, 373–76) also points out several details in How Are You? that are reminiscent of Mayakovsky’s lyric poems “Man” (“Chelovek,” 1917) and “About This” (“Pro eto,” 1923).

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the decline of romantic feelings. Finally, in the evening, the protagonist has to endure the visit of a family he obviously despises. He scares them away with an earthquake warning (an idea inspired by the newspaper) and rushes off to a poetry reading, which happily concludes his day. In an article where Mayakovsky (1959, 130–33) documents the reasons why the Soviet film industry rejected How Are You? (“does not uphold the [Soviet] ideology,” “does not reflect life,” “is incomprehensible to the masses,” etc.), he also details the conceptual genesis of the screenplay. According to Mayakovsky’s own account, How Are You? was meant to combine a documentary approach to filmmaking with emotional “saturation,” i.e. with a narrative structure that could engage the audience emotionally. The beginning of the script illustrates this dual conception: In the prologue, the protagonist Mayakovsky meets his double and they ask each other the question from the title: “How are you?”. In this way, the prologue frames the following action as a “newsreel” answering this everyday question. At the same time, it is a poet who answers this question, which has likewise been asked by a poet —in other words, How Are You? is an imaginary dialogue of a poet with himself. This is why Vera Kuznetsova (1988, 91) aptly describes the script as the “documentation of one’s own creative process” or “documentary fantasy.” Indeed, what really holds the fragmentary narrative of How Are You? together is the imagination of the protagonist Mayakovsky. Every ad in the morning newspaper comes alive in front of him because of his poetic perceptibility; we then witness the work of his imagination as he composes poetry, and observe his editor, supported by philistines, reject his work— all from the protagonist’s perspective. Mayakovsky (the character) learns to value a piece of bread when his imagination animates the morning newspaper and he discovers how much work it requires to produce the bread. It is also “in his eyes” (Mayakovsky 1958, 144) that the woman he encounters turns into the one mentioned in the morning newspaper, and with him, we observe the entire world change into a blooming garden and back to a gloomy winter, following the curve of the romance between him and the woman. In the finale, Mayakovsky adopts the stance of a satiric poet, when he comes up with the idea to dress up as policeman and use the earthquake warning to expose the cowardice of the petty bourgeois family and chase them out. Overall, it is the poet’s creative process and his emotional response to the everyday events that How Are You? details. The script thus programmatically presents the everyday “facts” as truly visible only through the lens of poetic imagination and, conversely, shows

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how poetic fantasy is inspired by everyday events. Ultimately, How Are You? is a screenplay about what a poet and lyric poetry do in the everyday world—namely, they expose the hidden truths about the world by means of fantasy and poetic imagination. How Are You? thus radically opposes a rationalised world view, insisting that the only true world view can be that of a poet, and consequently no documentary cinema is possible without elements of poetry.6 This is why How Are You? continuously emphasises the materiality of writing and creative labour. For instance, when the character Mayakovsky faces a writing block, an intertitle describes him as “a factory without smoke and pipes” (Mayakovsky 1958, 138). The following scenes present the process of composing poetry as a physical struggle with resistant, materialised letters: 16. Letters start flying out of his head and soaring around the room. 17. Mayakovsky jumps about, catching the letters on his pencil. 18. Mayakovsky spills the letters off the pencil, like pretzels off a pole, and with difficulty fastens them to the paper. 19. The flying letters form into hackneyed phrases and fly apart again. (Mayakovsky 1958, 138)7

The last step in this material process of poetry writing also comes from the image of a working factory: “The ventilation pipe sucks out the overworked rhymes” (Mayakovsky 1958, 138), and only then does the protagonist finish the poem. This episode opposes the idea of creative writing as detached from the everyday labour: only a physical struggle can give birth to the true image of the world, as it appears in lyric poetry. If How Are You is so focused on lyric poetry, why is it a film script in the first place? Because it is not only a story about poetry defamiliarising the habitual world picture, but also a story about cinema defamiliarising the habitual view on language. For instance, right after the protagonist 6 The worlds of other scripts by Mayakovsky are also filled with elements of fantasy and grotesque that amplify the inconspicuous, reveal the invisible, distort the habitual, and expose truths about these worlds that are not perceptible to the rational gaze. This is why most Mayakovsky’s surviving film projects from the years 1926–1927 are satirical comedies: They all implement the strategy of exposing and ridiculing the new Soviet realities by letting fantasy intrude into the everyday. 7 My translation of this and further passages from How Are You? rely on the English translations by Henderson (see Mayakovsky 1971).

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finishes the poem as described in the above-quoted scene, signs it, and gets up from his table, we read: Happiness “swept him off his feet,” as they say. 31. Glowing with hope, Mayakovsky rolled what he had written into a cylinder, tied it with a ribbon and 32. goes down the stairs, without touching the steps with his feet. 33–35. He goes along the street making huge leaps, his legs bent and motionless. He is two heads higher than the other people on the street. (Mayakovsky 1958, 139, emphases added)

In this passage, the script suggests visualising a very common metaphorical expression—to be swept off one’s feet or, in Russian, literally “to not feel one’s feet from joy” (ne chuvstvovat’ pod soboy nog ot radosti). By combining an intertitle featuring this expression with a precise visual image of it, the screenplay lets the readers rediscover the saying anew. In another episode, the same technique is used for the expression “the wings of love” (Rus. na kryl’yakh lyubvi), which in Russian is a commonplace metaphor for the state of being inspired by love: [Title] On the wings of love. 70.–72. The young woman and Mayakovsky grow airplane wings. 73.–74. The young woman and the man flutter up the stairs. (Mayakovsky 1958, 144)

The kitsch verbal metaphor regains its cognitive and aesthetic newness when confronted with its visual equivalent. Other scripts by Mayakovsky also suggest this kind of visualised verbal expressions; in some cases, two different visual equivalents of one word are suggested, revealing a multiplicity or ambiguity of meanings. For instance, the opening scene of the script The Heart of Film features an “American-looking fellow (Edison)” who “[Title] took a fancy to setting ruins spinning.” (Mayakovsky 1958, 136); following this intertitle, Edison spins the camera handle, and thereby “sets spinning,” that is, transforms (Rus. zavertet’ ), the old objects he is filming. This scene distils Mayakovsky’s fascination with film: for him, film has the capacity to transform both language and reality by offering a radically new view on them. In this way, Mayakovsky’s screenwriting participates in the futurist programme of de-automating language perception and language use (see Hansen-Löve 1978, 68–71).

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Correspondingly, the action description in How Are You? (as well as in other Mayakovsky’s scripts) occasionally features puns, neologisms, and other rhetorical devices, which Mayakovsky’s lyric poetry is famous for. Right in the prologue, the protagonist is “walking down the street, waving his windmill arm”—a metaphor of rotating movement which is later contrasted with stillness “like in a provincial photograph” (1958, 131). Later in the script, a man who rejects lyric poetry is “orangutanging before our eyes”—a neologism Mayakovsky invents to describe a person turning into an orangutang (137); people standing in line are described as “one-faced”—a clearly negative mix of “one-sided” and “double-faced” (139); and so on. The figurative devices encourage and even require the readers to engage with the screenplay emotionally, undermining the idea of a purely rational reading of the script. The language of How Are You? highlights that it is both a work of literature and a functional document that responds to the situation of film production. In this way, the screenplay performatively challenges the borders between functional and literary writing, between everyday labour and art. Mayakovsky’s script thus works as a tool of de-rationalisation on multiple levels. It celebrates the power of poets and poetry readers to recognise and reveal the true face of things and people; it illustrates the potential of film to “revive” automated, rationalised language use; and, just like the screenplay-poems of the surrealists, How Are You? reveals the potential of experimental screenwriting to de-rationalise the practices of mainstream film production.

Benjamin Péret: Automatically Writing Automated Bodies The aim of the screenwriting experiments of Soupault, Albert-Birot, and Mayakovsky was a fresh look on the everyday (and, for Mayakovsky, specifically on creative labour) through the lens of fantasy, cinema, and poetry. Such view could reveal the truths hidden by the bourgeois morality and the dominant political forces, which for the modernists amounted to a purely rational, utilitarian world view. In this context, a de-rationalised view of the human body also gained special importance, as it allowed envisaging the body as free from exploitation and the outdated morality. Below I argue that such perspective on the body is found in

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the screenplays by Benjamin Péret. Furthermore, Péret’s scripts transplant the de-rationalised view of the body onto writing and conceive of screenwriting, filmmaking, and experiencing art as corporeal activities. Unlike most members of the surrealist movement, Péret neither left the movement nor was he expelled from it by André Breton; he is, in fact, considered the surrealist poet par excellence. His first screenplay, Pulchérie Wants a Car (Pulchérie veut une auto), is also embedded in the context of surrealist literature: It was written just a year after Péret’s literary debut in 1921 and published in the review Littérature edited by the “three surrealist musketeers” Breton, Aragon, and Soupault in 1923. Yet unlike the surrealist scripts I have previously discussed, Pulchérie Wants a Car features a coherent narrative in the genre of slapstick comedy. Its main characters are the babysitter Pulchérie, who is fascinated by cars, and the young man Glouglou, who drives an old beat-up rattletrap. When the children entrusted to Pulchérie are kidnapped, Glouglou embarks on an adventurous search for them, which culminates in a fight with the malevolent character Pandanleuil. While escaping, Glouglou and one of the children are killed, but immediately resurrected with the help of fish glue and giant nails. The happy parents reward Glouglou with a new car, in which he drives off with Pulchérie. Although Pulchérie was originally published in Littérature with the subheading “Film,” in the edition of Péret’s complete works it was deprived of the subheading and placed among other “tales,” rather than among writings for and on film. However, Pulchérie is written in a different manner than Péret’s “tales”: “The author uses the present indicative tense. He does not insert any dialogue. He employs a style marked by the absence of [rhetorical] figures” (Aurouet 2014, 14). Furthermore, a comparison with Péret’s second screenplay, Let’s Have Luncheon on the Grass! (Allons déjeuner sur l’herbe!), also shows that Pulchérie’s original subheading “Film” was not an accident. The genre of Let’s Have Luncheon on the Grass! raises no doubts: it is a film script written towards the end of the 1920s and later found in the São Paulo archives of Péret’s friend, the Brazilian journalist and translator Lívio Xavier. It is supposedly this very scenario that French actor, director, and screenwriter Marcel Duhamel refers to in his autobiographical Don’t Tell Your Life (Raconte pas ta vie).8 Despite the more than five years between 8 Duhamel’s story (1972, 278–82) goes as follows: After co-producing the film Memories of Paris (Souvenirs de Paris, a.k.a. Paris-Express ), which allows dating the events to 1928,

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their genesis, Let’s Have Luncheon’s similarity to Pulchérie is striking, which is why I consider both texts to be screenplays. Not only are they stylistically identical, but Let’s Have Luncheon, just as Pulchérie, features a story consisting entirely of gags involving children and animals as well as a violent finale: A family of four goes out for a picnic, a cat destroys their provisions and the children steal a piglet from a neighbouring farmer, prompting him to call the police. Meanwhile, the father, who has been fishing, pulls out a box of dynamite from the lake. Seeing the police arrive, the family flees, leaving the dynamite to explode in front of the police and the farmer. Apparently, both Pulchérie and Let’s Have Luncheon draw upon American slapstick comedies and pre-war French comic films. In particular, researchers mention as possible sources the films of Mack Sennett, Harold Lloyd, and the “French burlesque school” (Servel 2017, 31–34; Virmaux and Virmaux 1976, 71; Matthews 1971, 54). Surprisingly, the films of Charlie Chaplin are not mentioned as a point of reference for Péret’s scripts, even though Péret’s admiration of Chaplin’s films is clearly manifested in the texts he wrote as a film columnist for the newspaper L’Humanité in 1925–1926. Pulchérie, written a number of years before the film columns, seems an antecedent of those critiques, particularly because of its conspicuous link to Chaplin’s first feature-length film, The Kid (1921). To begin with, the title Pulchérie Wants a Car conceals the fact that the actual protagonist of the script is not the babysitter Pulchérie, who completely disappears from the story after a few episodes and reappears only in the last line, but rather her admirer Glouglou. On his quest for the lost children, Glouglou attracts all kinds of misfortunes, which serve as pretext for various comic situations and gags. In this regard alone, Glouglou belongs to the tradition of tricksters, among whom the Tramp, or Charlot, is certainly the closest. Furthermore, the core narrative elements of The Kid and Pulchérie are also quite similar. In The Kid, a lonely mother leaves her baby in a car to Duhamel decided to found a screenplay agency, together with his friends Max Morise, Jacques Prévert, Raymond Queneau, Robert Desnos, and Benjamin Péret. Having heard about “the lack of brains in this particular domain in Germany” (278), Duhamel took off to Berlin and submitted nine film scripts to a producer from the UFA Tempelhof Studios. From the screenplays, the producer must have chosen two—one by Prévert and one by Péret. Yet he could not agree with Duhamel on the conditions of the deal, and so the scripts remained unsold.

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be found by a wealthy couple, but the car is instead stolen by two bandits. The Tramp finds the baby and raises it, until the two are parted by social workers. In the end, the boy is happily reunited with both his mother and the Tramp. Thus, The Kid contains many core elements also found in Pulchérie: abandoned children, a turning point in the story involving a car, a kidnapping, reunion of the children with their parents after a series of adventures, and a reward for the trickster in the happy finale. It was precisely The Kid that ended the first wave of the surrealists’ fascination with Charlot. Soupault was disappointed with the film’s sentimentality (1979, 54), Desnos disliked its artificiality (1992, 52), and Péret held that The Kid caused the audience to lose sight of “Charlot’s true physiognomy” (1992, 242). By preserving the important story elements and motifs from The Kid, but completely transforming the tone of the story and filling it with brutal gags, Péret symbolically rewrote the first film by Chaplin that disappointed his surrealist admirers. By replacing all sentimentality in the story about lost child(ren) with carnivalesque gags, Péret returns Glouglou-Charlot to his origins in the early French comic movies and restores his disruptive, anarchist potential. This is why Pulchérie is especially keen to transcend The Kid in the violence and absurdity of its gags. The finale of the script is most illustrative in this regard: having killed the main villain Pandanleuil, Glouglou is looking for means to save himself and the children from a fire. In the rush, he falls on the corpse of Pandanleuil: “Under the influence of the heat, his belly has swollen, and when Glouglou falls down, it bursts open. The intestines come out” (Péret [1923] 1978, 22). Glouglou then uses the intestines as a rope to lower the children from the balcony, but when the fire burns his hands, he let go of the intestines and the child falls and sinks into the ground. Only the head is sticking out. Two men start pulling the child by the head. They tear off the head and fall backwards. Piece by piece, they extract the child, then glue it back together with fish glue. […] The intestine goes up again. Glouglou ties up the other child and wants to lower it. The firemen have arrived and the hoses are working. Glouglou lets the child slide; it is caught by the jet from a hose and oscillates in the jet of water like eggs at a fairground shooting gallery. (Péret [1923] 1978, 22–23)

Finally, Glouglou himself is torn in half while escaping from the fire. But the firemen

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gather the two parts and fix them with gigantic nails, which stick out from the other side of his body. Glouglou, who has just come to himself, cuts them off with his penknife. Then he pulls out the nails, breaks and sucks them like candies. (Péret [1923] 1978, 23)

These passages exemplify the multiple subversive aspects of the gags suggested in Péret’s script. Firstly, in accordance with the surrealist programme and Péret’s own “vituperative anticlericalism,” the text disrupts several bourgeois values and symbols, including, most notably, the sanctity of children and family (Aurouet 2014, 146). Further, the bodies of the characters are provocatively violated: torn apart, burst open, and tossed around by a water jet. However, objectification makes them immune to violence. The bodies of the characters in Pulchérie function like objects that can be reused, restored, and reconstructed, just like the re-enchanted everyday objects in the scripts by Soupault and Albert-Birot. In the words of Mark Winokur, Chaplin’s comedy “insists on the intelligence of the body in avoiding insult (successfully or otherwise). The body becomes other than itself in order to evade punishment by some authority” (1996, 104, original emphasis). Further research repeatedly points out that Tramp comedy thereby promotes the idea of an objectified, automated, and mechanised body. Chaplinesque gags reveal a “will-to-automatism [that] should be understood as at once a concession of human self-presence to the machine, and a refusal to recognize the machine as […] the non-human” (Trotter 2007, 182). This understanding of a human body is also directed against the positivist thought, bourgeois morality, and religious ideas of a hermetic body being essentially natural and governed by natural laws. In other words, the body acquires regenerative and transformative powers well beyond its natural limits and comes closer to the greatest marvel of modernity— the machine. In this way, the body becomes unnatural, machine-like, and magical, as well as integrated with its surroundings.9

9 In this context, it is interesting that the title Allons déjeuner sur l’herbe! can be seen as an allusion to the famous painting of Édouard Manet The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1862–1863), which originally produced a controversial reaction from the public precisely due to its provocative depiction of female bodies. Although the provocation Péret has in mind is undoubtedly of a different nature, the title of the script arguably situates it in the “tradition” of subverting bourgeois morality by virtue of blasphemous bodily depictions.

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The mechanisation of the body as depicted in Péret’s scripts also brings about the mechanisation of writing: the writing becomes a mere registration, a neutral recording of the transformations of bodies and objects. Péret’s scripts contain neither technical indications nor explanatory comments, nor are they separated into scenes; most of Pulchérie is not even separated into paragraphs. Instead, Péret wrote his screenplays as continuous narratives, providing a detailed description of every gag the protagonists perform and accounting for every element involved in a comic scene with unusual scrupulosity. Ultimately, then, Péret promotes an automatism of writing—not the surrealist psychic automatism, but one modelled after Charlot’s bodily automatism, which in turn reflects the automatism of the cinematic technology. The screenwriter becomes a kind of writing machine, a machine that scripts the transformations of the actors’ machine-like bodies, which are to be registered by the machinery of the camera. In this way, the body of the writer, the bodies of the actors, and the “body” of the film camera and/or projector become parts of poetic machinery that is immune to capitalist exploitation. Péret’s screenwriting automatism thus allows him to oppose bourgeois morality and rationalism by conceding the “human presence to the machine” (Trotter 2007, 182). Unlike the screenplay-poems of Soupault and other surrealists, Péret’s film scripts feature little connection to lyric poetry and avoid writing techniques that could compromise the functional purpose of his screenplays. So even if most gags suggested in Péret’s scripts transcend the popular comic films of the time in terms of violence and subversion of social norms, this does not mean that they were not meant for the screen. Just like the screenplay-poems of Soupault and Albert-Birot, Péret’s scripts were meant for a different screen—a screen not constrained by a bourgeois morality or the commercial interests of the mainstream film industry. Péret’s screenwriting envisages a film industry where both screenwriting and filmmaking are conceived as subversive activities, inseparable from their main goal—to criticise the capitalist exploitation of the body.

Bertolt Brecht and Caspar Neher: Rationalising Fear, De-rationalising Romance The authors discussed so far reacted to the modernist crisis of reason by celebrating the poets and the tricksters—those who are able to transform the outdated epistemological, linguistic, and narrative conventions,

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revealing the truths these conventions conceal. An emotional engagement with writing and reading plays a central role in this work of derationalising and de-automating the interaction with the world. Similarly, the oeuvre of Bertolt Brecht battles against bourgeois rationalism, and with it—against social and political injustice with the help of emotions. Not any emotions though, but only the “right” emotions, most importantly love and compassion. Brecht’s famous epic theatre and distancing effect (Ger. Verfremdungseffekt ) have often been misunderstood as an attempt to enable a critical view on the story without the biased emotional attachment; in reality, emotions play a key role in Brecht’s theatre, because without emotions, the audience cannot fulfil their potential for revolutionary action. The question of how we can differentiate between the “right” and “wrong” emotions and control the latter therefore permeates most of Brecht’s work. While in Brecht’s famous plays, this question has direct political implications, in Brecht’s earlier, less-known work the very same question relates to personal dilemmas. As Ronald Speirs (1982, 32) writes in his book on early Brecht, “if politics did not fire his heart in those days, love did.” Brecht’s early screenplays provide an even clearer illustration of his early interest in the private rather than the public sphere of life, most notably the script Three in the Tower (Drei im Turm) he co-wrote with his friend and scenographer Caspar Neher in July of 1921. Analysing this screenplay below, I argue that it focuses on the psychological conflict between the fear of the incomprehensible on the one hand, and the vitality of love on the other. The representation of this emotional conflict with the means of silent cinema turns out to be so complex that Brecht and Neher introduce free indirect discourse into their screenplay. Only this literary device allows them shaping the screenplay so as to parody and rationalise fear on the one hand and preserve the mystery of love on the other. At the time when Brecht first took up screenwriting in 1921, he was awaiting the production of his play Drums in the Night (Trommeln in der Nacht, 1919). Several central motifs and techniques of the screenplay Three in the Tower originate from this play. Firstly, in his reading of Drums in the Night, Speirs (1982, 34) argues that the play is modelled after (neo-)romantic ghost stories, which typically tell “of the return from the wars of a ghostly soldier to claim his faithless bride.” Three in the Tower, too, is a straightforward ghost story: The screenplay revolves around the mysterious disappearance of the tower’s Captain, whose wife continues

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her love affair with a Lieutenant while repeatedly seeing the Captain as a ghost. Both she and the soldiers stationed at the tower come to believe that the Captain was murdered by the Lieutenant. Only in the very end it turns out that the Captain committed suicide and, while dying, hid in a closet in his sleeping room. In regard to Drums in the Night, Speirs argues that the ghost motif articulates the conflict between emotion and control. The characters of the play, especially its protagonist, are constantly struggling to gain control over their emotions in the face of various “ghosts”—the unfamiliar, the unidentifiable, the romantic, and so on. The same can be said about Three in the Tower, with one important specification: Both in the theatrical play and in the screenplay, the characters strive to control specific emotions—not love or empathy, but mostly fear and anger. In Brecht’s work, the characters guided purely by reason tend to be the most devious ones, for example, the protagonist Latte from another silent script, The Diamond Eater (Der Brilliantenfresser), Macheath from The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper), and so on. The central conflict of Three in the Tower is not a clash between reason and emotions, but between the “right” and “wrong” emotions, that is between love and fear. Such psychological conflict is very untypical for Brecht’s later work; however, the questions of psychology and emotions are key to Brecht’s early views on film. In his short note from 1924, “The German Kammerfilm” (“Der deutsche Kammerfilm”), Brecht celebrates the films that are able “to relate to people and to understand something about psychology”: We must try to exploit the qualities of German actors in film. We must use internal motivation, be oriented to visual effects, compose every millimetre of the screen, and give the screenplay an individual tone. (Brecht 2000, 5)

Brecht also brings up the issue of “internal motivation” in the afterword to the script Robinsonade on Asuncion (Robinsonade auf Assuncion), which he co-wrote with Arnolt Bronnen in 1922: “Some selected shots have to stand in for the inner, psychological, story” (Brecht 1997, 173). Contrary to what Brecht-scholar Wolfgang Gersch (1975, 27) suggests, Brecht’s silent scripts and Three in the Tower in particular do not parody the psychological Kammerspiel film of the time but rather take it as a model.

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What Three in the Tower does parody is the German expressionist film “that transposed the discomfort with reality into the irrational” (Gersch 1975, 26). Expressionist film dwells on hysteria and fears, which Brecht refutes as paralysing and taming forces. This is why Three in the Tower subverts the ghost story in the finale: it turns out that the Captain is not a ghost, but merely a corpse decaying in the closet. The fear of the irrational is also undermined throughout the story with the help of act headings. Each act of Three in the Tower features three headings.10 For instance, the first act is entitled “‘Last supper of the crocodiles’ or ‘3–1 = 2’ or ‘What’s biting me?’” (Brecht 2000, 101), and the last act—“‘The evil child digs up a corpse’ or ‘The flesh-eating plant’ or ‘Through the broken defence the black waters break’” (122). In a letter to Marianne Zoff, for whom he composed the script, Brecht also provides four titles for the screenplay at large: “The Two in the Tower or The Indigestible Corpse or Stronger Than Alive or The Fabulous Animal Nothingbutair” (1998, 120).11 All these headings summarise the melodramatic story in an explicitly ironic mode. Three in the Tower thus continuously balances between an ironically distancing mode directed against the expressionist pathos and a serious interest in the characters’ psychology; or, between ridiculing the “wrong” and highlighting the “right” emotions, between rationalising fear and anger and de-rationalising love. This mixed tone originates not only from Drums in the Night but also from the other source of the screenplay, August Strindberg’s drama The Dance of Death (Dödsdansen, 1900). Strindberg’s play also explores the relationships between three characters—a married couple and a newcomer—within the claustrophobically limited space of a tower. The interplay of seriousness and laughter is one of the central motifs of the play and essential to the medieval idea of “the danse macabre”: the tragic inescapability of death emphasises both the value and the vanity of life. Three in the Tower adopts this tragicomic

10 We do not know the headings of the fourth act, since they must have been on a page of the manuscript that has been lost. 11 The idea of multiple ironic titles is, incidentally, also borrowed from Drums in the Night, as Brecht specialist John Willett (1998, 125) accurately notes. In the finale of Drums in the Night, its protagonist Kragler recites possible titles for the play he is performing and that is about to be finished, some of which are strongly reminiscent of the act headings of Three in the Tower: “[The Half-Dead Suitor] or The Power of Love; Bloodbath round the Newspaper Offices, or [A Man Works His Passage; The Thorn in the Flesh or A Tiger at Dawn]” (Brecht 1985, 114).

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mode, articulating it both with the help of suggested cinematic techniques and with textual means. In particular, the first act of the script features constant intercuts between different settings, often contrasting action happening at different locations. For instance, as the dying Captain is making his way into his bedroom, the action switches between his route, the dining room where his wife is enjoying the company of her lover the Lieutenant, and the guard room where a boy who mistook the dying Captain for a ghost is drinking himself into oblivion. These three parallel actions stand in ironic contrast to one another: The agony of the Captain darkens the love affair, while the shambling of the drunk boy parodies the staggering steps of the dying Captain. Such frequent intercuts between different actions are also typical of the second act of the script. Yet in the third and fourth acts, the intercuts give way to “dream-like, almost surreal transformations of the space and the characters” (Silberman 2002, 429). Here is, for example, how the third act begins: Shot 1, Night. Two paper lanterns (attached to the front of the carriage) emerge from the background. The woman is sitting in the carriage. […] The woman descends, one of the paper lanterns changes into a chandelier and illuminates a small marble table in a Shot 2, restaurant private booth. The woman joins the cavaliers at the table. The carriage has disappeared. (Brecht 2000, 114)

This passage connects two disparate scenes without intercuts: The characters remain, but the milieu changes.12 Similarly, rather than contrasting the action simultaneously happening at different locations with the help of intercuts, the script suggests melting it into one picture: She [the Woman] is lying on a Shot 7, white ottoman, and the man moves behind her. He disappears. But the corner of the room changes into Shot 8, the corner of the tower courtyard,

12 A very similar technique is suggested in Alfred Döblin’s screenplay The Consecrated Daughters (Die Geweihten Töchter; see Chapter 6).

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and under the trees the lieutenant is walking alone. […] The lieutenant is still standing at the gate, the leaves fall on him, he is completely covered by wilted leaves. Now he disappears. Shot 9, At the canal. The leaves continue to fall, the woman walks among them towards a canal. (Brecht 2000, 115)

While the previous scene connects different locations by preserving the characters, here the opposite is the case: distant characters are connected through a persisting detail of the milieu—the falling leaves. A third kind of transformation appears in the same act, when the gentlemen courting the Woman (dis)appear and mutate one into the other. These transformations completely change the pace and the tone of the story: the abrupt intercuts between tragic and tragicomic scenes give way to a seamless narrative, focused on the growing confusion and misery of the Woman outside the Tower. In the last two acts, the action again mixes melodramatic and tragicomic elements. Just like the suggested cinematic techniques, the writing style of Three in the Tower also oscillates between irony and a serious interest in psychological drama. While featuring ironic act headings, the screenplay also employs an unusual textual device for action description— free indirect discourse. Free indirect discourse is the rendition of someone’s speech without introductory or explanatory words such as “she said (that)”; this narrative technique blurs the border between the voice of the narrator and the voices of the characters. For instance, in the second act, when the Lieutenant and the Woman are about to go for a walk, the reader is confronted with a question: “Both are strangely aloof. Why?” (Brecht 2000, 108). This question may be taken for a remark of the narrator, but later, in the fourth act, another question appears: “She [the Woman] looks at him [the Lieutenant] with an unfriendly stare. Why?” (118). Here, it is more difficult to distinguish between the voice of the narrator and that of the character, as the “why?” could also be ascribed to the Lieutenant. In the last act, the use of free indirect discourse eliminates the narratorcharacter border: “The lieutenant is uneasy, why does she smile that way? No, this is unbearable” (124–25); “She waltzes as well and watches the lieutenant constantly and it goes well, the lieutenant even tries to smile at her. But why does she get that small crease on her forehead?” (126). Free indirect speech also precedes the culmination of the story, when the

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Lieutenant discovers the body of the Captain in the closet: “He [the Lieutenant] is at his wits’ end. Then he shakes the clothes cupboard. Nothing, it does not move. The devil take it, that too!” (128). Overall, the final act of the script features just one short intertitle and about ten cases of free indirect speech. The reader is finally able to penetrate into the thoughts of the characters, yet these thoughts are not rendered as such—as completely subjective experiences, separated from the rest of the action with quotation marks. Instead, through the use of the free indirect discourse the thoughts of the characters are objectified, integrated into the action description, and given at least the same importance as the rest of the action. More than any other feature of the script, the free indirect discourse foregrounds the utmost importance of the inner, psychological conflict, which plays out both in the consciousness of the Woman and of the Lieutenant. (If and how the free indirect speech in Three in the Tower was supposed to be rendered in film remains unclear.) A positivist, rationalised worldview was just as alien to Brecht and Neher as it was to their French and Russian colleagues. However, equally unsatisfactory for them was the fantasy of expressionist film that promoted fear rather than celebration of the unknown. Brecht and Neher therefore reacted to the modernist crisis of reason with a differentiated psychological narrative, rather than with magical fantasy stories, such as those we find in the scripts by Soupault, Albert-Birot, Mayakovsky, and Péret. Three in the Tower opposes both the escapist fantasy of the expressionist film and a rationalised world picture by praising the mystery of love. This mystery is rooted not only in romance itself, but also in the biological character of passion: in the final scene, the Lieutenant and the Woman are about to have sex next to the corpse of the Captain. This provocative finale reinforces the parody of the ghost story, but also celebrates the victory of the irrational over the reasonable and of the corporeal over the sterile bourgeois morality. ∗ ∗ ∗ One of the major transcultural features of modernist screenwriting was its reaction to the crisis of reason, which equally came to light in the screenwriting experiments of French, Russian, and German authors. There were several reasons why the screenplay turned out to be a genre specifically suitable for dealing with the crisis of rational worldview. The first reason

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was the screenplay’s connection to the film medium, which can represent with equal verisimilitude reality and fiction, eroding the border between the two. This capacity of film inspired the authors to compose stories where realistic everyday events harmonically co-existed with elements of fantasy. Secondly, the screenplay’s ability to blend with other genres— be it lyric poetry, drama, or prose—turned out crucial as the authors activated the literary means of de-rationalising perception: the distorted perspective of the lyrical subject, the emotionally engaging figurative language, the free indirect discourse, etc. Thirdly and most importantly, the screenplay itself could be regarded as an agent of reason—a pragmatically useful document bound to the rational mechanisms of the industry and the market. Consequently, turning a screenplay into a tool of derationalisation had a performative aspect: The modernist screenplay had the potential of undermining the rational processes of the mainstream film industry, reviving the wonder and the mystery of cinema.

References Albersmeier, Franz-Josef. 1985. Die Epoche des Stummfilms (1895–1930). Vol. 1 of Die Herausforderung des Films an die Französische Literatur: Entwurf einer “Literaturgeschichte des Films”. Heidelberg, Germany: Winter. Albert-Birot, Pierre. 1995. Cinémas. Paris: Place. Aurouet, Carole. 2014. Le cinéma des poètes: De la critique au ciné-texte. Lormont, France: Le Bord de l’eau. Benjamin, Walter. 1977. Aufsätze, Essays, Vorträge. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Vol 2.1 of Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Brecht, Bertolt. 1985. Drums in the Night. Edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim. Translated by John Willett. Vol. 1.3 of Collected Plays. London: Methuen. ———. 1997. Prosa 4: Geschichten, Filmgeschichten, Drehbücher 1913–1939. Edited by Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei and Klaus-Detlef Müller. Vol. 19 of Werke: Große Kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag. ———. 1998. Briefe 1. Edited by Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei and Klaus-Detlef Müller. Vol. 28 of Werke: Große Kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag. ———. 2000. Brecht on Film and Radio. Translated and edited by Marc Silberman. London: Methuen. Burrow, J. W. 2000. The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–1914. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Bykov, Dmitry. 2016. Mayakovsky: Tragediya-buff v shesti deystviyakh. Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya. Cohen, Nadja. 2013. Les poètes modernes et le cinéma (1910–1930). Paris: Classiques Garnier. Desnos, Robert. 1992. Les rayons et les ombres: Sinéma. Paris: Gallimard. Duhamel, Marcel. 1972. Raconte pas ta vie. Paris: Mercure de France. Gersch, Wolfgang. 1975. Film bei Brecht: Bertolt Brechts praktische und theoretische Auseinandersetzung mit dem Film. Berlin: Henschelverlag. Gunning, Tom. (1986) 2006. “The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.” In The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, edited by Wanda Strauven, 381–88. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Hansen-Löve, Aage A. 1978. Der russische Formalismus: Methodologische Rekonstruktion seiner Entwicklung aus dem Prinzip der Verfremdung. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Jangfeldt, Bengt. 2014. Mayakovsky: A Biography. Translated by Harry D. Watson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kelly, Debra. 1997. Pierre Albert-Birot: A Poetics in Movement, a Poetics of Movement. Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Kuznetsova, Vera. 1988. “U kino byl drug… (Mayakovskiy i sovr. kino).” In Klassicheskoye naslediye i sovremennyy kinematograf , edited by M. L. Zhezhelenko, 83–100. Leningrad: LGITMIK. Kyrou, Ado. 1953. Le surréalisme au cinéma. Paris: Ramsay. Marinetti, F. T., Bruno Corra, Emilio Settimelli, Arnaldo Ginna, Giacomo Balla, and Remo Chiti. (1916) 2014. “The Futurist Cinema (Italy, 1916).” In Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology, edited by Scott MacKenzie, 15–18. Berkeley: University of California Press. Matthews, J. H. 1971. Surrealism and Film. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mayakovsky, Vladimir. 1958. Kinostsenarii i p’yesy 1926–1930. Vol. 11 of Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy v 13 tomakh. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoye Izdatel’stvo Khudozhestvennoy Literatury. ———. 1959. Stat i, zametki i vystupleniya. Noyabr’ 1917–1930. Vol. 12 of Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy v 13 tomakh. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoye Izdatel’stvo Khudozhestvennoy Literatury. ———. 1971. “Two Mayakovsky Scenarios: How Are You? Heart of the Screen.” Translated by Elizabeth Henderson, with an introduction by Peter Wollen. Screen 12 (4): 122–51. Péret, Benjamin. (1923) 1978. Pulchérie veut une auto. Film. In Nouvelle Série: Nos 1 à 13, 1er mars 1922 à juin 1924. Vol. 2 of Littérature: réproduction anastaltique de la collection complète de la revue “Littérature”, 17–23. Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel Place.

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———. 1992. Les Amériques … et autres lieux. Le cinématographe. Les arts plastiques. Vol. 6 of Œuvres complètes. Paris: Losfeld. Servel, Charlotte. 2017. “Les scénarios des poètes d’avant-garde dans les années 1920: Des films morts nés?” Kiné Traces 2: 28–40. Silberman, Marc. 2002. “Die frühen Drehbücher.” In Prosa, Filme, Drehbücher, edited by Jan Knopf, vol. 3 of Brecht Handbuch, 421–32. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler Verlag. Soupault, Philippe. 1918. Indifférence. Le Film 101: 18–19. ———. 1979. 1918–1931. Vol. 1 of Écrits de cinema, edited by Alain Virmaux and Odette Virmaux. Paris: Plon. Speirs, Ronald. 1982. Brechts Early Plays. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Trotter, David. 2007. Cinema and Modernism. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Virmaux, Alain, and Odette Virmaux. 1976. Les surréalistes et le cinéma. Paris: Seghers. Willett, John. 1998. Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches. London: Methuen. Williams, Linda. 1981. Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film. Berkeley: University of California Press. Winokur, Mark. 1996. American Laughter: Immigrants, Ethnicity and 1930s Hollywood Film Comedy. New York: St. Martin’s.

CHAPTER 8

Anti-mimetic Screenwriting

Perhaps the most well-known and widely discussed feature of modernism as a cultural epoch is the crisis of the idea that arts and literature can and should represent reality; it was accompanied by the rejection of the conventional means of such representation, whether these means be labelled realistic, naturalistic, illusionistic, or mimetic. The degree to which different authors opposed mimetic representation differed, of course, depending on their individual understanding of the issue and on the respective domain of art or literature. In visual art, for instance, anti-mimetic works range from paintings that depict recognisable human figures and objects to completely abstract art. In literature, the antirepresentational or anti-mimetic trend—I use the terms as synonymous— manifested itself most radically in sound poetry and concrete poetry, which sought to dissolve all habitual ways of meaning production in languages. To many modernists words seemed to mimic reality simply by virtue of signifying the entities of the real world. Since screenwriting depends on verbal language at least to the same extent as literature does, the idea of anti-mimetic screenwriting may seem counterintuitive at first. As I have mentioned in Chapter 4, several antimimetic modernist film movements indeed completely rejected screenwriting, not only because it relied on language but also because it could make film appear as a representation of a screenplay. However, just as literature also responded to the crisis of representation with forms less © The Author(s) 2020 A. Ksenofontova, The Modernist Screenplay, Palgrave Studies in Screenwriting, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50589-9_8

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radical than sound poetry, such as the stream-of-consciousness novel, so did modernist authors invent ways of composing screenplays that defy mimetic representation without completely abandoning language. In this chapter, I explore four different approaches to composing screenplays that challenge cinematic representation; and in turn, these screenplays take issue with representation in literary writing. In all four cases, the rejection of mimesis coincides with the rejection of narrative in the sense of (at least two) causally linked events. These are, of course, two different things: we can recognise a narrative even in a sentence that consists of non-existing, made-up words (see Herman 2003, 100–105), and we can consider any unconnected events as mimetic representations of reality. However, for the authors I consider here (as for many others), narrative and mimesis are inextricably linked—even though, as the readings will show, their respective understanding of these concepts differ significantly. The chapter thus explores how the modernist screenplay evolved at the crossroads of anti-mimetic trends in visual arts and anti-representational trends in literature.

Fernand Léger’s Cubist Charlot: The End of Representation Well known as a cubist painter and director of the famous avant-garde short film Ballet mécanique (1924), Fernand Léger was also involved in several further film projects in various capacities. Among other things, he illustrated two experimental screenplays: The End of the World Filmed by the Angel Notre-Dame (La fin du monde filmée par l’Ange N.-D., 1919) by Blaise Cendrars and The Chaplinade (Die Chapliniade, 1920) by Yvan Goll. Both scripts appeared as separate books with Léger’s cubist illustrations. Possibly inspired by this work, Léger also composed his own silent screenplay, Cubist Charlot: Scenario for animated cartoon (Charlot Cubiste: Scénario pour un dessin animé). The mere existence of the script Cubist Charlot is surprising in the light of Léger’s explicit aversion to screenwriting. For the famous Ballet mécanique, Léger made only some preparatory notes and sketches (see Lawder 1975, 120–29), but he did not write an elaborated script. The intertitle card at the beginning of the film boldly states that Ballet mécanique “is the first film without scenario.” Léger emphasised this aspect on several occasions—for instance, in his article that came out

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the same year as Ballet mécanique Léger declares: “The story of avantgarde films […] is a direct reaction against the films that have scenarios and stars” (1973, 49). Did Léger then go against his own critique of screenwriting by composing Cubist Charlot ? Léger’s letters indicate that he needed Charlie Chaplin’s copyright permission in order to realise Cubist Charlot. Léger applied for this permission by submitting a scenario for the proposed cartoon: Léger also asked [the painter and acquaintance of Chaplin Galka] Scheyer if she could help him get Charlie Chaplin’s permission to produce an animated color film, to be called Charlot Cubiste, which he had been working on for the last two years. […] She dispatched Léger’s Charlot Cubiste scenario to Chaplin with the request that he authorize its realization. […] When Léger heard that Chaplin’s reply was […] unenthusiastic, he wrote Scheyer that he had suspected the possibility of a refusal and, verbally shrugging his shoulders, said, “Let’s not talk about it any further.” (Lanchner 1998, 45)

The described events took place around 1935, and there indeed survives a draft of Cubist Charlot from the 1930s; however, Léger first took up the project in the early 1920s, and the script version I examine below dates back to this time.1 So while the need to present the project to Chaplin might have been the main reason why Léger updated the screenplay draft in the 1930s, there are likely to be other reasons why he composed Cubist Charlot in the first place. These reasons come to light in the story of Cubist Charlot—the story about the end of representation and language, and about the triumph of abstract art. Cubist Charlot starts with Charlot—that is, the French hybrid of Charlie Chaplin and his character the Tramp—“in bed. Close-up. He is sleeping. Pieces of Charlot dispersed in the room” (Léger 1955, 17). Charlot then wakes up and discovers cubism—first in a cubist review, then at a cubist academy. Little by little, he learns to see and understand the cubist transformations of objects. Charlot’s own body consists of geometric forms, which assemble and reassemble themselves; his hat 1 Several drafts of the script were found in Léger’s archives: Sadoul (1959, 74) mentions three versions of the script and Freeman (1987, 36) writes of “at least five lengthy drafts.” Besides the script that I examine in this section, two further versions were recently published in the journal 1895, one dating from 1923 and the other presumably written after 1933 (Albera 2017, 124).

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and feet occasionally turn into squares, causing him inconvenience; “the houses, cars, people,” and all objects around Charlot undergo “cubist deformations” (17). This first part of the script demonstrates that for Léger, “the cinema could replace the stars and actors with objects, and thus create a new form of plastic arts” (Sadoul 1959, 75). Léger opposes representation as a mere copying of reality, with its existing sociopolitical relations and the dominant position of the human subject, instead pronouncing objects the self-sufficient agents and the purpose of the new, modern art. In this regard, Léger’s artistic programme is comparable to those of Philippe Soupault or Vladimir Mayakovsky, who sought to transform the perception of everyday objects by endowing them with magical qualities. Léger also made objects the cornerstone of his art, creating “the extraordinary spectacle of the material quotidian” (Affron 1998, 121). In this context, the interaction of the character Charlot with cubist painting in Cubist Charlot is hardly surprising. As the previous chapter showed, an essential feature of Tramp comedy is the transformation of bodies into mechanisms that can be de- and reconstructed so as to be completely integrated with the environment. Charlot’s geometic body therefore corresponds to the focus of cubist painting on denaturalised, de-individualised, and de-personified bodies. This focus also explains Léger’s preference for animation as opposed to film. As Paul Wells points out, the medium of animated cartoon allows visualising the transformations of objects and bodies literally, while Tramp comedy “can only ultimately achieve metaphorical change” by changing the function and meaning of objects, but not their material properties (2011, 19, original emphasis). By choosing the medium of animated cartoon Léger’s script thus promotes not simply a change in perspective on the environment and the body but a material change in our interaction with them. This is why the first half of Léger’s script pictures how Charlot interacts with his environment and his own body in a creative way. Having visited the cubist academy, the enthusiastic Charlot goes on, in the second half of Léger’s script, to visit the Louvre Museum. There, he “disdains the representational paintings”2 and observes with pleasure the

2 Despite the fact that the French adjective “représentatif” used in this quote actually means “representative,” the translation “representational” seems more in accordance with the context here, especially given that the French equivalent of “representational”— “représentationnel”—seems to have been barely used in the first half of the twentieth century.

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objects from ancient cultures—the Egyptian, Aztec, African, and medieval art (Léger 1955, 18). Charlot’s preference for these artistic traditions mirrors Léger’s own views: for him, the art of these cultures rejects “the imitation of a subject that contain[s] an absolute value in itself” (1973, 4) and instead foregrounds the intrinsic value of the object and the conceptual, rather than representational procedures. As a result, art is freed from the controlling dominance of the human subject and is instead based on aesthetic inventiveness and imagination. Such art included, in Léger’s view, “primitive” and archaic art of all kinds, popular art, Romanesque and Gothic art […]. The logic of this category, as Léger defined it, lay in its opposition to the art of the Italian Renaissance, personified by Raphael and Leonardo [da Vinci], and to the academic teaching of École des Beaux-Arts. (Affron 1998, 124)

Léger’s contempt for Renaissance art and its praise of representation finds its expression in a scene where Charlot encounters the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. The Mona Lisa immediately falls in love with Charlot, but he “looks at her and creates some cubist deformations of her face. They do not hold. […] Disdainful, Charlot goes away” (Léger 1955, 18). The Mona Lisa is, the scene seems to imply, resistant to the de-individualising practices of cubism; however, 30. The Mona Lisa in love, her frame under her arms, follows Charlot and declares that she is burning with love for him. 31. He turns around and warms his hands with her flame. 32. She declares her fire [of love] to him. He wants to extinguish it and blows on it. 33. The flames become square. 34. Charlot goes away. 35. Furious, the Mona Lisa swallows her flame and kills herself. (Léger 1955, 18)

This episode is interesting not only as a suggested visualisation of Charlot’s subversive power, which literally materialises in the flames that burn the Mona Lisa, but also because it is based on the transformation of a verbal metaphor into a visual one. This verbal-visual play occurs only once in Cubist Charlot, yet its singularity makes it all the more meaningful. It

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is, in fact, a linguistic metaphor—burn with love (Fr. brûler d’amour)— that destroys the authoritarian subject that Léger was so averse to. The Mona Lisa repeatedly verbalises her burning love (she “declares that she is burning with love,” “she declares her fire [of love]”), while Charlot answers her both times with actions that treat the flame as a material substance—he “warms his hands” with the flame and “blows on it.” As a result, the flame indeed materialises and consumes the Mona Lisa—in other words, Charlot endows language with physical power by virtue of treating the verbal expression as a material and visible substance. This scene captures the script’s general impulse—namely, to let the subject and its clichéd language dissolve in the world of visual objects. Léger’s script relates the entire story in very short sentences, often consisting of just one word—the noun that names the central action or object of the scene. Writing in such nominal sentences seems to correspond directly to Léger’s focus on objects as the main protagonists of the cinema he was envisioning: His language is reduced almost exclusively to the enumeration of objects. This reduction reaches its peak towards the end of the script, at which point the funeral of the Mona Lisa is described, and the suggested images gradually lose any causal relations. The further Léger steps away from the story, the more elliptical and obscure his writing becomes. The last scene, picturing Charlot’s nightmare after he returns from the funeral, reads as follows: 51. He is the emperor of cubism. 52. He works furiously. Delirium of curves, lines, fragments. Infernal orchestra. The fight against curves and curved objects. Apparitions of the Mona Lisa. Disappearances. Haunting. Little by little everything calms down. Charlot’s awakening. He falls asleep again. (Léger 1955, 18)

In this final dream, the story gives way to abstract transformations and a play of forms, which would later become the essence of Ballet mécanique. The funeral of the subject—the Mona Lisa—thus marks the end of storytelling and the transition to the actual focus of cinema: the objects in the moving images and the moving image as object. In other words, Cubist Charlot tells a story similar to the narratives found in Léger’s theoretical writings—a story about the end of the subject, storytelling, and mimetic representation, and about the triumph of abstract art.

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Correspondingly, the final episode of Cubist Charlot is not elaborated in detail, since the cinema of abstract shapes and movement transgresses, for Léger, the capacities of verbal expression. To put it concisely, in the finale of Cubist Charlot, language performatively self-destructs, enacting the apocalypse of the subject and mimesis. This is also why in his Ballet méchanique Léger almost completely abandons the verbal tools of preproduction, replacing them with sketches and drawings. Language was only meaningful as a tool for telling the main story of Léger’s oeuvre— the story about the end of the subject. That of all possible genres, Léger chose to tell this story in the genre of screenplay, adds a final twist to Cubist Charlot. Just as the script suggests transforming a linguistic expression into the image of destructive flame, which eventually consumes the subject and language itself, so was the script supposed to be transformed into, and consumed by the film. Léger’s Cubist Charlot thus opposes mimetic representation of the existing subject-object relations by teaching its readers (and the potential viewers) to interact with the environment and the body in an inventive way; language supports this teaching process, but only until the moment when the freedom of artistic inventiveness leads to the downfall of the authoritative subject. Then, the struggle against representation is won; having fulfilled this purpose, verbal language and screenwriting withdraw and give way to abstract art.

Dziga Vertov and the Kinoks: Scripting the Absence of a Script Just like there seems to be a contradiction between Léger’s rejection of screenwriting and the existence of his Cubist Charlot script, there seems to be an even more pronounced discrepancy between the denial of screenwriting in the film theory of Dziga Vertov and his filmmaking practice. The first volume of Vertov’s writings (2004) contains almost five hundred pages of his scripts, pitches, plans, and so-called themes for both his realised and unrealised film projects. And yet in his articles and manifestos Vertov repeatedly stated that documentary film had to be made without a screenplay. The opening credits of Vertov’s most famous documentaries, Kino-Eye (Kino-glaz, 1924) and Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino-apparatom, 1929), also claim that those films were made without screenplays. Despite these claims, there survive pre-production notes for Kino-Eye (Vertov 2004, 79–88) and an entire screenplay for Man with a

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Movie Camera. I examine the latter below, showing how it summarises and performatively reinforces Vertov’s anti-mimetic filmmaking method. By the time Vertov wrote the script Man with a Movie Camera in 1928, he was already a widely famous and relentlessly persecuted filmmaker. Famous—for producing countless newsreels together with the Kinoks group, which included Vertov’s wife and lifelong associate Elena Svilova, his brother Mikhail Kaufman, and several temporary participants; persecuted—for being one of the most uncompromising directors in the Soviet film industry, who repeatedly refused to make ideological concessions in his films and opposed the state control of art (Petri´c 1993, 52–53). In 1927, Vertov was fired from the central Soviet film company Sovkino. The formal reason for his dismissal was Vertov’s failure to present a script for the planned film Man with a Movie Camera; the actual reasons must have been his uncompromising stance and, perhaps even more importantly, his general insistence on working without a script (Deryabin 2004, 16). In particular, the only surviving pre-production document for Vertov’s last film at Sovkino, A Sixth Part of the World (Shestaya chast mira, 1926), lays out on a few pages what became a seventy-three-minute film. After the film was completed, it transpired that Vertov used only four per cent of the recorded footage (16). He was subsequently dismissed from Sovkino and moved to Ukraine. In 1928, Vertov pitched to the Ukrainian state cinema trust VUFKU (AllUkrainian Photo Cinema Administration) the script Man with a Movie Camera. It begins: You find yourself in a small but extraordinary land where all human experiences, behaviour, and even natural phenomena are strictly controlled and occur at precisely determined times. At your command and whenever you wish, rain may fall, a thunderstorm or tempest arise. If you like, the downpour will stop. […] If you wish, day will turn into night. […] You can, if you choose, sink or save ships at sea. (Vertov 1984, 283)

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Accompanying the script is Vertov’s letter to the VUFKU board, which explicitly calls Man with a Movie Camera a “libretto” and “‘screenplay’plan” (Rus. libretto, “stsenariy”-plan; Vertov 2004, 123).3 If not for this letter, the entire first part of the screenplay would hardly be recognisable as such. It addresses the reader in the second person and describes further hypothetical situations in the same manner as the quoted passage. Only at the end of the first part do the readers learn that the “imaginary land” is nothing but a film studio, and the conjured omnipotence is that of a film director. This revelation immediately devalues the fantastic land: it is only a “little fake world with its mercury lamps and electric suns” (Vertov 1984, 284). This pejorative description exemplifies Vertov’s radical rejection of fiction films produced at film studios; for him, a film about made-up events has no value compared to a documentary film shot on location, where “high in the real sky burns a real sun over real life” (284). This is why the beginning of the script is written in such an unusual style: By adopting a writing manner that makes the screenplay useless in a conventional studio film production, Man with a Movie Camera performatively rejects such production and the fiction films that result from it. The opposition between fiction or “staged” (Rus. igrovoy) films and those portraying “real life” was key to the discussion on cinema that unfolded at the time in the Russian avant-garde circles—most notably, in the LEF group. Arguing for the primacy of documentary film, Vertov writes that his work does not “command life to live according to the script of a writer, but observes and records life as it is” (2008, 51). In other words, Vertov opposes fiction film as a representation of a made-up story to documentary film as a recording or reproduction of real life. The formula “life as it is,” together with the subheading given to Vertov’s film Kino-Eye—“Life [caught] unawares”—became the most famous principles of the Kinoks group. The second half of the Man with a Movie Camera script develops Vertov’s programme of anti-mimetic filmmaking by offering an insight into these and other working principles of the Kinoks.

3 This note is missing from the 1984 translation of Vertov’s writings. In place of the missing note, the translation contains three paragraphs that largely correspond to the opening titles of the film Man with a Movie Camera. These titles are not part of the original script.

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Having exposed the filmmaking at a film studio as a meaningless “play,” the script immediately introduces a contrasting description of real life: Streets and streetcars intersect. And buildings and buses. Legs and smiling faces. Hands and mouths. Shoulders and eyes. Steering wheels and tires turn. Carousels and organ-grinders’ hands. Seamstresses’ hands and a lottery wheel. The hands of women winding skeins and cyclists’ shoes. [Pistons of a locomotive, flywheels, and all kinds of machine parts.] (Vertov 1984, 285)4

The difference between the description of real life and the life at a film studio is remarkable: While the latter is under full control of an omnipotent agent, the former is a “stormy sea of life” that overwhelms with diversity and unpredictability (Vertov 1984, 284). The change in style foregrounds this difference: While the “fake” staged action at the film studio is described as a continuous or repeating (and therefore predictable) actions, the picture of real life is related primarily with pairs of nouns. The contrast is especially conspicuous if one compares two parallel passages from the first and fourth parts of the script: At the imaginary film studio, “people fight and embrace. Marry and divorce. Are born and die. Die and come to life” (283); by contrast, the “real life” setting features “birth and death. Divorce and marriage. Slaps and handshakes” (285). This elliptical nominal style indicates that we tend to perceive our environment in a fragmentary and disorganised way—the script explicitly characterises the real-life sequence as a “whirlpool” or the “visual chaos of fleeting life” (285). According to Vertov’s concept of filmmaking, only the combination of human effort and the camera’s mechanical capacities can “make sense of this visual chaos” (285). This is why the script foregrounds the common rotating motion of machines and people at work: “Steering wheels and tires turn. Carousels and organ-grinders’ hands,” etc. (285). The labour of humans and machines is united by the common rhythm of rotating movement, which is also characteristic of the film camera. The rotation of the wheels responsible for the tape transport was 4 I quote the script Man with a Movie Camera in the translation made by Kevin O’Brien (Vertov 1984). Because this translation was apparently based on the incomplete and somewhat inaccurate 1966 Russian edition of Vertov’s writings, I occasionally amend or expand the quotes based on the newer edition of Vertov’s work (2004). All changes are marked with brackets.

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especially conspicuous in 1920s film cameras, since these wheels had to be set in motion manually, by turning the handle of the camera. The aim of documentary filmmaking à la Vertov is thus to disentangle the visual chaos of modernity through the common effort of the camera (that records “life as it is”) and the camera’s “engineer”—the filmmaker. The script further indicates that the main effort of the filmmaker consists in choosing what the camera shall record in the “stormy sea of life” and how. As an example, the script singles out certain details— “streets and streetcars,” “shoulders and eyes”—that may imply certain cinematic techniques such as the bird’s-eye view and a close-up. The use of these and other techniques (contrasting change in field size, slow and accelerated motion, extreme angles, and so on) was as central to the work of Kinoks as capturing “life as it is.” The camera or “the kino-eye,” writes Vertov in one of his manifestoes, “gathers and records impressions in a manner wholly different from that of the human eye” (1984, 15). The goal of the Kinoks was therefore not simply to record reality but also to provide a new vision of it.5 These “two essentially disparate goals […] inevitably produced a dialectical contradiction” (Petri´c 1993, 4), yet for Vertov, there seemed to be no paradox in his approach: The Kinoks relied on the recording capacity of the film camera to preserve “life as it is,” and on the specific cinematic techniques—to provide a new perspective on the world. Another major feature of the Kinoks’ approach was to draw attention to the film camera itself and to the process of filmmaking. According to a note accompanying the screenplay, the motif of filmmaking was to frame the entire script: A small, secondary production theme—the film’s passage from camera through laboratory and editing room to screen—will be included, by montage, in the film’s beginning, middle, and end. (Vertov 1984, 289)

5 This is why, as Hansen-Löve (1978, 508) has demonstrated, contemporaneous critics,

in particular Viktor Shklovsky and Sergei Tretyakov, interpreted Vertov’s films and the manifesto “Kinoks” in two completely different ways: “The LEF theorists saw in the theory of ‘kino-eye’ […] the possibility of a factual reportage film. […] Shklovsky had to recognise in Vertov’s appeal […] a clear correspondence to his own theory of defamiliarisation, to the concept of a disillusioning, sensual new vision.”

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Although Vertov calls the motif of filmmaking “small” and “secondary,” he places it at the most emphatic points of the proposed film—the beginning, the middle, and the end. Evidently, this self-reflexive motif is key to Man with a Movie Camera and to Vertov’s work in general. In particular, Yuri Tsivian (2006, 90–93) argues that this motif corresponds to the programmes of contemporary avant-garde movements: Exposing the process of filmmaking, Vertov shifts the focus from the aesthetic product to the process of production, from “the works of art” to “the art of work” (92). Similarly, Vlada Petri´c (1993, 9) contends that Vertov’s goal consisted in “increasing the [potential] spectator’s awareness of the cinematic devices being employed” and leading them “to acknowledge the motion picture as reconstructed reality rather than its representational reflection.” By exposing filmmaking as aesthetic labour and film as an artefact, the Kinoks encouraged an active participation of the audience in making sense of life’s visual chaos. To recap, the second half of the script foregrounds the central working principles of the Kinoks: the recording of “life as it is,” the use of experimental cinematic techniques, and the exposing of the filmmaking as labour and of film as an artefact. In this way, the script presents documentary filmmaking as a balance between reproducing reality and aesthetically reconstructing it, both approaches being opposed to mere representation of fictional stories. Vertov’s script can thus be read as a guide to the documentary filmmaking methods of the Kinoks. The Man with a Movie Camera script responds to the situation of film production in a different way than scripts usually do: Instead of offering a narrative outline of the film, it describes how the filmmakers should work to construct a film. And yet, the script is not entirely devoid of narrative elements. After providing a glimpse into the “visual chaos” of life, the script reminds the readers that the descriptions it offers are not to be misread as a narrative template. In real life, “thunderstorms, rain, tempests, snow do not obey any script. Fires, weddings, funerals, anniversaries—all occur in their own time; they cannot be changed to fit a calendar invented by [a literary author (screenwriter)]” (Vertov 1984, 287). According to Vertov, to make a documentary film one first has to accept the unpredictability of real life that does not allow for a screenplay; this is Man with a Movie Camera restates its own futility as a narrative outline. Paradoxically, this is exactly the moment when the script actually starts telling a story:

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A little man, armed with a movie camera, leaves the little fake world of the film-factory and heads for life. […] The first steps of the man with the movie camera end in failure. He is not upset. […] He becomes accustomed to the situation, assumes the [offensive], begins to employ a whole series of special techniques (candid camera; sudden, surprise filming; distraction of the subject; etc.). (Vertov 1984, 286–87)

Just as in case of Léger’s Cubist Charlot, Vertov’s script introduces a narrative only to tell the main (or perhaps even the only) story of Vertov’s oeuvre: the story about the man with the movie camera learning to see, record, and make sense of the chaos of real life. Eventually, this narrative turns into a story about the emancipation of the film camera. After the script has detailed the learning process of the man with the movie camera, in the final section the camera alone becomes the protagonist. The script emphatically repeats that “the camera is present at the great battle” (Vertov 1984, 288 and 289)—the battle between the old and the new, between the revolution and the pre- and anti-revolutionary life. As soon as the film camera has taken its “socialist post” (289), the script ends, as it has fulfilled its function: to accompany the reader through the process of learning the principles of the Kinoks, from rejecting the fiction studio-produced films, to seeing the world “as it is” and simultaneously from a fresh perspective, to learning to make sense of life’s visual chaos. Vertov’s manifestoes and the opening titles of the films he directed create the impression that screenwriting had very little significance in his filmmaking practice. However, a close reading of Man with a Movie Camera suggests otherwise: The script supports the Kinok’s programme of anti-mimetic documentary filmmaking in several different ways. Its opening part rejects the cinematic representation of fictional dramatic stories; the rest of the script promotes a truthful recording of reality with the help of the film camera and the subsequent aesthetic reconstruction of it. At the same time, the narrative of the script reminds the readers that a documentary film cannot have a pre-scripted narrative and it should not be mistaken for a representation of a screenplay. Although Vertov does not view it as possible to script a documentary film, his Man with a Movie Camera comprehensively scripts the method of documentary filmmaking.

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László Moholy-Nagy: (Un)Learning to Read Screenplays Several researchers have noted conspicuous parallels between the work of Vertov and that of László Moholy-Nagy (Haus 2011, 88; Petri´c 1993, 10; Michelson 1984, xli–xlii), which is surprising given that film was only a minor occupation of Moholy-Nagy compared to other media and art forms—“painting, sculpture, graphics, typography, industrial design, set design, photogram, photography” (Sahli 2006, 9). In fact, Moholy-Nagy didn’t make his first film until 1929. One of the reasons for this was his professorship at the Bauhaus school in Weimar (1923–1928), which never had a film workshop. Even photography, which was a major focus of both Moholy-Nagy and his wife, Lucia Moholy, was officially integrated into the programme of the Bauhaus only after they had left the school, in 1929. The only evidence of Moholy-Nagy’s engagement with film before and during his years at the Bauhaus is his script Dynamic of the Metropolis (Dynamik der Gross-stadt ); researchers derived most parallels between Moholy-Nagy’s and Vertov’s work precisely from this script. Dynamic of the Metropolis is indeed close to Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera in that it undertakes a similar project—the project of educating the vision of modern citizens by teaching them to perceive their urban surroundings in all their complexity. Film plays, of course, a major part in this project; but so does the script itself. It aims to educate the vision of its readers by radically challenging the common reading practices with experimental stylistic and graphic means. Dynamic of the Metropolis has a rather complex publication history, which includes four different versions. According to Moholy-Nagy, he originally wrote the screenplay in 1921–1922 and planned to realise it in collaboration with his friend, film director Carl Koch, but the idea had to be abandoned for financial reasons. The script was first published in Hungarian in the avant-garde magazine MA in September 1924, under the title Film Script: Dynamics of the Big City (Filmváz. A nagyváros dinamikája). This first version has small linocut illustrations, and its text is very similar to the later German versions (see Fig. 8.1). In May 1925, the first German version of the script was published in the journal Film-Kurier under the heading Dynamik der Großstadt, containing no images at all. The same year, the Bauhaus book Painting, Photography, Film (Malerei, Photografie, Film) came out, containing the most famous version of the script, with photographs, black separating bars, and varying

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Fig. 8.1 Fragment of the script Dynamic of the Metropolis (Filmváz. A nagyváros dinamikája) by László Moholy-Nagy, published in the journal MA in 1924

page layouts, entitled Dynamik der Gross-stadt. The book was reprinted in 1927 with minimal typographic changes (see Figs. 8.2 and 8.3). The only textual differences between the three German versions concern the preface of the script, and even they are quite insignificant. Here, I focus on the latest German version of the screenplay, but also take into account its difference to the other versions concerning the illustrations, the text design, and the layout.

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Fig. 8.2 Beginning of the script Dynamic of the Metropolis (Dynamik der Gross-stadt ) by László Moholy-Nagy, published in the Bauhaus book Malerei. Fotografie. Film in 1927. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg

In the preface to the 1927 version of the script, Moholy-Nagy quotes, without indicating the source, what looks like a comment of the film producers on the proposed project: “Despite the good idea,” they “could not find there any action” (1927, 120, original emphasis). Indeed, the screenplay does not feature a clear narrative but rather is built as a network of recurring motifs that all relate to the main subject, that is, the metropolis. The motifs are constituted by typographically varying text, photographs, and signs such as arrows and circles. The main groups of motifs are: horizontal motion and transport (cars, trains, planes, etc.); vertical motion (elevators, a high jumper, a diver); circular motion (crane during house construction, wheels, a plane in a spiral dive, an artist in a somersault); and high and deep urban structures (a radio tower, the metro, sewers). Further groups feature human masses (audience of children, sports audience, variety show, football game, military parade); entertainment (jazz band, theatre, variety show, circus); sport (boxing,

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Fig. 8.3 Fragment of the script Dynamic of the Metropolis (Dynamik der Gross-stadt ) by László Moholy-Nagy, published in the Bauhaus book Malerei. Fotografie. Film in 1927. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg

football, athletics); light (lights in puddles, car’s headlights, light advertising, fireworks, and the contrasting dark screen); and death or decay (morgue, slaughterhouse, garbage). This list of motifs alone indicates that the script indeed belongs among the “city symphonies” of the 1920s, the most prominent of these being Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera and Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of the Metropolis (Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, 1927). Although Moholy-Nagy’s view of the city may have a lot in common with those of Ruttmann and Vertov—to the extent that he even anticipated some original shots and techniques used in their later films6 —his Dynamic of the Metropolis pursues a distinct goal. As art historian Andreas Haus argues: “Vertov’s truly powerful intervention in real life is alien to him [Moholy-Nagy]. […] He is not concerned with the lofty goal of real

6 For instance, Moholy-Nagy suggests shooting a passing train from underneath (1927, 124–25)—an angle that Vertov introduced in Man with a Movie Camera—and to let the film run backwards (132), a technique also used by Vertov, in Kino-Eye.

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life, but with feelings and experiences” (2011, 90–91). Moholy-Nagy’s larger aesthetic project consists in training the vision of urban citizens, so that they can perceive their living environment in all its complexity. For Moholy-Nagy, “cinema [could] assume the project of fine-tuning the human sensorium to respond to the new perceptual realities of technological urban civilization” (Dimendberg 2003, 119). Haus makes an even bolder claim: “All of Moholy-Nagy’s artistic work had a strong educational component: educating the human senses—above all vision—for a fulfilling life” (2011, 79). This pursuit of vision education can be divided into several strands. First, Moholy-Nagy’s film project seeks to make the spectator accustomed to “speed, rapid change, simultaneous experiences, mechanical rhythms, and contrasts” (Haus 2011, 86–87)—that is, to the dynamic of the metropolis. At the same time, film is “preserving th[e] freshness of perception” (Dimendberg 2003, 116) by presenting the usual elements of the city in an unusual way, such as a train shot from underneath or a bird’s-eye view of street intersections. These two aspects—familiarising the unfamiliar and defamiliarising the familiar—are complementary and form an endless cycle of visual training, echoing Vertov’s idea of recording “life as it is” and offering a fresh perspective on it. For example, the beginning of Moholy-Nagy’s script suggests the images of cars rushing in opposite directions and houses flying by; these images serve as a “brutal introduction to the breathless race, the chaos of the city” (1927, 123). “This hard rhythm,” the script continues, “slowly loosens in the course of the play” (123), until the rotating movement of the machines and the city parallels human movement, just like in Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera: “Large factory. / Rotation of a wheel. / Rotation of an artist fading in. / salto mortale” (128). However, in Moholy-Nagy’s script the human–machine parallels not only humanise the city but also dehumanise the human masses, calling to mind the horrors of World War I (Haus 2011, 80). For instance, the automatic movement of machines is put side by side with the strict pace of a military march: “right-right / right-right / march-march- / march-march-right / left-left-left” (Moholy-Nagy 1927, 132). The military parade is in turn linked to the descriptions of a slaughterhouse and police forces, evoking anxiety and pressure: Slaughterhouse. Animals. Oxen raging.

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The machines of the cold room. Lion. Sausage machine. Thousands of sausages. Lion’s head baring teeth (close up) […] Police with truncheons on Potsdamer Platz. The TRUNCHEON (close-up). (Moholy-Nagy 1927, 133)

The suggested images of the slaughterhouse and the sausage machine allude to processes of depersonalisation, which dissolve the individual into a faceless crowd; the following mention of police forces unambiguously indicates that this de-individualised human mass is easily controlled by a superior authority. As Haus has observed, Moholy-Nagy’s script takes a clear position “against the dominance of supra-individual functional authorities or collective visions” (2011, 86) and instead aims “to guide and activate the individual, sensual ability of man to actively participate in the life of modernity” (93). Herein lies another major difference between the work of Vertov and Moholy-Nagy: while the former focused on the creation of a collective identity and collective perception, the latter was primarily concerned with the “liberation of the individual” (80). Art historian Joyce Tsai has noted an important psychological aspect of this liberation: “The camera permits the capture not only of images that are too fleeting for the body to perceive, but also of images we refuse to see out of fear” (2018, 38). In one of the many self-reflexive comments scattered over the script and printed in a smaller typeface, Moholy-Nagy elaborates: “On the loop track, almost everyone closes their eyes during the big tumble. The movie machine does not. In general, we can hardly observe little babies, wild animals, etc. objectively […]. In the film it is different” (1927, 128). Educated vision thus requires not only eliminating the “technical” flaws of the human visual faculty, but also overcoming “existential fear,” “blinding affective associations,” and other “physical and psychical limits of the biological body” (Tsai 2018, 40). The main means of teaching the potential viewer such objective vision is, according to the screenplay, repetition or rote training. For example, the script repeatedly suggests reproducing the perspective of a falling person or object: “The apparatus is quickly turned upside down, creating the feeling of a deep fall” (Moholy-Nagy 1927, 127); “From [a chimney], a DIVER […] sinks into the water, head first” (131); “Pole vaulting. Fall. Ten times in a row” (128). By virtue of repetition the suggested film

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hopes to accustom the potential viewers to the visual challenge of quick vertical motion. Moholy-Nagy’s film project thus aims to train the vision of the potential audience by reproducing the dynamic of the city in a number of different ways. Firstly, the script suggests images from the life of the city that focus on dynamic objects; these objects are then grouped into motifs, and their reappearance creates a separate dynamic—the rhythm of the recurring images. These rhythms of the moving objects and of the reappearing images are further enhanced by the rhythm of writing, for example: CURVED HEADLIGHTS, spraying sparks. Road smooth as mirror. Light puddles. From above and oblique angle with cars rushing by. (Moholy-Nagy 1927, 127)

Both the Hungarian and German versions of Dynamic of the Metropolis trend towards short, elliptical, mostly nominal sentences, even though their rhythm is arguably not as conspicuous as that of the screenplays I discuss in chapter 9. The reasons for this are the additional graphical means that Moholy-Nagy employs: To realise its programme of visual education, Dynamic of the Metropolis relies not so much on the rhythm of writing as on the design of the text, in particular on the typographic rhythm. For instance, in both the earlier Hungarian and the later German versions, the typography highlights the letter “O” in several words, e.g. “fortissimo” and “kör” (Hungarian for “disease”), and most notably in the word “tempo,” which reappears in different typographic variations over twenty times throughout the script. These letters, the numeral “0,” circles, and other typographic round figures spread across the script form a pattern of recurring round shapes, which alternates with a pattern of sharp arrows pointing in different directions. Other examples of typographic rhythm include full words and parts of words printed in capital letters. Though sometimes capitalisation can be taken for an indication of a closeup—for example, “A LYNX FURIOUS,” “The FACE of the person on the phone” (Moholy-Nagy 1927, 125)—other cases, where only a part of word is capitalised, contradict this interpretation: “VaRIETé” (129), “JazzBAND,” “FortiSSimO” (130), and so on. Such capitalisation, just

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as the play with the letter “O,” draws attention to the visual appearance of certain words, which subsequently transcend their potential pragmatic purpose in film production and acquire an independent material value. The typographic rhythm does not simply parallel the verbal or the suggested pictorial rhythms, but also blurs the border between the two. For instance, in the lines “Electric sign with vanishing / and reappearing light up letters / YMOHOLYMOH” (Moholy-Nagy 1927, 127), the last word, printed in a typeface that imitates neon signs, can be seen as a visual suggestion of a potential shot (see Fig. 8.3). In other words, the script invites the reader to regard as visual entities not only the photographs, graphic shapes, and symbols but also the text itself. The layout of the script makes it especially evident that Dynamic of the Metropolis aims to challenge habitual ways of engaging with text and conventional reading practices. Even the Hungarian version, which is printed in three columns according to the standard page structure of the journal MA, playfully undermines the idea of linear reading. To this end, the script introduces linocuts and typographic variations of single words: “Images, signs, and words offer the eye different points of attention and connection, so that an overarching […] visual rhythm is generated, which the viewer can control to a certain extent depending on their visual interest” (Haus 2011, 85). In the later versions from 1925 and 1927, the linocuts are replaced with photographs, and the vertical structure gives way to loosely arranged blocks separated by thick, black bars. Here, the text and images are designed to be read not only vertically and horizontally but also jumping from block to block or sometimes even diagonally, as guided by the oblique arrows (Moholy-Nagy 1927, 122; see also Fig. 8.2). The habitual linear organisation of reading is disrupted and replaced by the possibility of free, multidirectional movement across the pages. Moreover, the script also allows the reader to vary the focus of reading, alternating between a close and distant view. In particular, the black bars, which make the pages of the script appear like the paintings of Piet Mondrian (Dimendberg 2003, 114; Haus 2008, 346), call for a more distant observation: every page or even every two-page spread can be regarded as a single graphic composition. By contrast, the text and the photographs encourage a close reading. Based on this design of the later script versions, Jan Sahli (2006, 120) argues that Dynamic of the Metropolis was not meant to be filmed. The unusual layout may indeed raise doubts as to the script’s potential functionality, because the succession of images in a film is, after all, linear.

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However, a footnote in the 1927 edition of the script indicates that it was meant to be used in film production, albeit in a somewhat unusual form While reading the correction for the second edition, I have received news of two newly released films that seek to realise similar aspirations as suggested here and in the chapter on simultaneous cinema. […] In his film Napoléon, Abel Gance uses three filmstrips running simultaneously next to each other. (Moholy-Nagy 1927, 121)

This remark allows regarding the layout of the script as evoking “simultaneous cinema,” a type of experimental film where “separate characters and events simultaneously appear on a single film screen at different chronological stages and overlap and coincide” (Dimendberg 2003, 118).7 For instance, the beginning of the 1925–1927 script versions features three columns, the first containing a photograph of a tiger in a cage and an accompanying caption; the second, a piece of text describing opposite movements of house rows and cars; and the third, the following comment: “The Tiger: / Contrast of the open, unobstructed race to oppression, confinement” (Moholy-Nagy 1927, 123; see Fig. 8.2). In this case, the script seems to anticipate a simultaneous projection by placing the image descriptions in two parallel columns and the comments on the desired effect in the third. However, how to read this page—in vertical columns, or across them in lines, or in some other order—is for the reader to decide. In other words, the reader is asked to participate in recreating “simultaneous cinema,” which by definition transcends the capacities of linear writing and reading. Not unlike Vertov, Moholy-Nagy created a film project for an active viewer who is not only capable of “objective” perception but can also “come to a possible subjective opinion” on what they have seen (MoholyNagy 1927, 26). This is why the design of the script develops a kind of interactivity, letting the reader engage with the text as both a verbal and a graphic entity, decide on the direction and order of reading, and fill in the multiple blank spaces spread across the pages of the later script versions. 7 Gance indeed used this technique, which received the name “triptych” or “polyvision,” for the final reel in the original cut of his Napoléon (1927). A similar suggestion—“divide the screen into equal sections, and project the same picture […] in different rhythms”— can be found in Léger’s notes for his film Ballet mécanique (Lawder 1975, 123), but this idea remained unrealised.

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This interactivity indicates that besides challenging and educating our practices of vision and reading, the script also “engages the reader in a theoretical discussion about vision, a discussion that not only acknowledges but also demands the attention and participation of an individual reader” (Nelson 2006, 259). The finale of the script leaves this discussion of the new vision on a provocative note: “Read through the whole thing again quickly,” says the vertically printed remark in the German versions (Moholy-Nagy 1927, 135). This indication diverts attention away from the functional purpose of the script to the practice of reading and to the materiality of the book. In this way, the screenplay playfully suggests that the education of vision may be most effectively accomplished by film, but it starts with the book. All in all, Dynamic of the Metropolis defies representation as the copying of the existing power relations by educating the vision of urban citizens; it realises this project of visual education by reproducing movement, and it reproduces movement by demanding unorthodox reading strategies. In this way, Moholy-Nagy’s script presents the crisis of representation as rooted not only in artistic production and but also in reception, asking the readers to unlearn viewing art and language as tied to reality and its mimetic representation.

Antonin Artaud: Scripting a Corporeal Experience For one of the most famous figures in modernist theatre, Antonin Artaud, the fallacy of representation was proper not only to mimetic art, but to life itself. Reality that we deal with in our everyday life was, for Artaud, only a pale imitation or representation of a transcendent phenomenon, which Artaud referred to as “the real” (Fr. le réel, henceforth “the Real,” as it is sometimes capitalised in the research on Artaud). This invisible but sensible Real can only be experienced, according to Artaud, through art. True “art is not an imitation of life,” writes Artaud, “but life is an imitation of a transcenden[t] principle with which art restores communication” (1999, 180). Ros Murray (2014, 29–30) argues that “for Artaud, this Real would be precisely the material world which we ignore” and only perceive through the distorting lens of language, culture, religion, and so on. Because the Real is, according to Artaud, emphatically material, it cannot be represented but can only be accessed through corporeal experiencing of art. Exploring Artaud’s screenplay The Seashell and the

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Clergyman (La coquille et le clergyman, 1927) below, I argue that it anticipates such corporeal experiencing and is not a representation of mental processes, which is how it has previously been approached. I show that, in fact, the carefully chosen vocabulary of Artaud’s screenplay undermines representational artistic practices while simultaneously hinting at the presence of the Real behind the surface of representation. The Seashell and the Clergyman was Artaud’s second screenplay and the only one that was ever made into a film. It was written in 1927 and published in November of the same year; the film of the same name realised by the filmmaker Germaine Dulac premiered in February 1928. The making of the film The Seashell and the Clergyman has been extensively studied (e.g. Virmaux and Virmaux 1999), especially in regard to the nature of disagreements between Artaud and Dulac, which eventually lead to the scandal that interrupted the first public screening of The Seashell at the Studio des Ursulines in Paris. The scandal provoked by the surrealists (rather than by Artaud) has been the reason for continuous misogynist misjudgements of Dulac and her work, which historians of cinema have started to refute only in the last few decades (Virmaux and Virmaux 1999, 87; Murray 2014, 100). The clash between Artaud and Dulac essentially boils down to just one word—“dream.” The opening credits of Dulac’s film initially described it as a “Dream of Antonin Artaud.” Having seen this formulation in the pre-premiere version of the film, Artaud disliked it and asked Dulac to replace it with the more neutral “screenplay by Antonin Artaud”; Dulac granted his request (Artaud 1978, 325). Nevertheless, Artaud continued attacking the “dream”-credit, among other things in his article “Cinema and Reality” that he published together with his screenplay in Cahiers de Belgique a few months before the premiere of The Seashell. Why was Artaud so zealous in rejecting the “dream”-credit? None of the answers to this question offered so far seems satisfactory, as they either ascribe Artaud a surrealist concept of dreams (Lemke 2004, 121–28; FlittermanLewis 1987, 117) or present the linguistic disagreement over the word “dream” as a cover-up of a personal quarrel (Virmaux and Virmaux 1999, 103–13). Here, I wish to argue that Artaud conceived of dreams in a very specific manner distinct from that of the surrealists, namely not only as mental but primarily as corporeal processes. All of Artaud’s early work, to which The Seashell belongs, “deals with an incessant struggle to attempt to express his bodily and psychic experience through text” (Murray 2014, 11, emphasis added). At the beginning of

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his article “Cinema and Reality,” which prefaced the publication of The Seashell, Artaud writes: However deep we may look into the mind we find, at the bottom of every emotion, even if it be intellectual, an [a]ffective sensation of a nervous order. This contains the susceptible, even if elementary recognition of something substantial, of a certain vibration which invariably recalls states […] clothed in one of the multiple forces of nature, in real life or in dreams. (1972, 19)

One paragraph can hardly emphasise the embodiment of thought more clearly: Artaud describes emotions and thoughts as “vibrations,” as substantial, i.e. tangible products of the nervous system. In a later text, he puts it even bolder: “The soul can be physiologically summarised as a maze of vibrations” (1999, 101). Artaud’s concept of physical thinking is a reaction to both the crisis of representation and that of reason: “This was a way of engaging with the audience on a physical and spiritual level rather than appealing to their intellect or rational capabilities” (Murray 2014, 92). For Artaud, a cinematic performance is not to be understood rationally, but experienced through the body. Or, using Artaud’s own metaphor, “the human skin of things, the derm of reality—this is the cinema’s first toy” (1972, 21, emphasis added). This is why Artaud rejects the notion of “dream” as a characterisation of The Seashell: He protests against a specific understanding of dreams, widespread among the surrealists and in psychoanalysis of the time, namely the notion of dreams as spontaneous manifestations of a latent meaning hidden in the depths of the unconscious. For Artaud, there is no hidden meaning that can be extracted from dreams and put into words; dreams, just like thoughts and emotions, cannot be interpreted but only experienced, and their only “logic” (Artaud 1972, 20) consists in their immediate connection to the body and to the embodied consciousness. Artaud’s film projects, most notably The Seashell, seek to activate this connection by creating a corporeal experience for the audience. In accordance with Artaud’s anti-mimetic programme, The Seashell script features no coherent story that can be retold or represented. It revolves around three characters: a clergyman, a woman with blonde hair, and a decorated officer. These three characters appear in about a dozen different settings, sometimes assuming different appearances. For

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instance, the officer and the woman appear as “a royal couple” in a ballroom (Artaud 1972, 23), in a church the officer becomes a priest (22), and later the woman appears as “a sort of stiff governess,” before she and the clergyman turn into young people playing tennis (25). The relationships among the characters remain unclear, but most of their (often absurd) interactions are marked with violence or violent sexuality. Overall, the script can be characterised with the summary Artaud later gave of his later screenplay The Butcher’s Revolt (La révolte du boucher): “eroticism, cruelty, thirst for blood, violence, obsession with horror, dissolution of moral values, social hypocrisy, lies, false witnesses, sadism, perversity, etc., etc.” (38). If we focus not on what The Seashell describes but on how the script describes it, the connection to Artaud’s theory of art and his focus on corporeal experiences are hard to overlook. For instance, in the very beginning of The Seashell, we observe an officer take “a sort of oyster shell” from the clergyman: The officer goes round the room a few times with the shell, then, suddenly drawing his sword from its scabbard, he shatters the shell with a gigantic blow. The whole room trembles. The lamps flicker and in each trembling reflection gleams a sabre point. (Artaud 1972, 21–22)

This scene clearly places “an emphasis on vibration and ‘tremblements ’”— the same emphasis we find in Artaud’s later writings on theatre (Murray 2014, 31); this opening piece is meant to make the spectators experience precisely those “vibrations” of emotions and thoughts that Artaud mentions in “Cinema and Reality.” To this end, the script appeals to the presumed ability of the viewer’s bodies to respond physically to the suggested images of the trembling lamps and the trembling reflections of the sabre. In other words, Artaud expects the bodies of the viewers to mirror the vibrations they observe in a film. In his short essay on The Seashell script from 1928, Artaud ascribes to cinema the capacity of featuring the same “vibrations” as mental processes do: When writing the scenario of The Shell and the Clergyman, I considered that the cinema possessed an element of its own, a truly magic and truly cinematographic element, which nobody had ever thought of isolating. This element, which differs from every sort of representation attached

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to images, has the characteristics of the very vibration, the profound, unconscious source of thought. (Artaud 1972, 63)

Commenting on this quote, Murray (2014, 92) remarks that it is not quite clear what feature of cinema Artaud saw as enabling a direct interaction with the spectators’ bodies—montage, or the movement of light within the images, or the movement of the images themselves. Based on the screenplay, we can assume that all of these factors most likely played a role, as the script repeatedly highlights the connections between different kinds of movements and vibrations: The trembling reflections of the sabre are intertwined with the trembling lamps and the room; similarly, in a later scene, “the candelabra seem to follow the movements of the couples” (Artaud 1972, 23). While at the outset of the action the clergyman is spending his time breaking glasses, the office enters the scene, and “with each new broken flask the officer makes another hop” (21). The bodies of the characters and their environment feature the same kind of physical connection as the one Artaud presumes between the bodies of the viewers and the proposed film. This direct physical mode of communication is defining not only for all further scenes of The Seashell, but also for the language used throughout the script. For example, after a series of violent interactions between the three main characters, the clergyman finds himself in a corridor: The clergyman is seen walking backwards and calling someone in front of him who does not come. […] We feel that the figure is close to him. He raises his hands in the air, as though he were embracing the body of a woman. Then, when he is sure of holding that shadow, this sort of invisible double, he pounces on her […]. And we have the impression that he is putting [her] severed head into the bowl. (Artaud 1972, 23–24, emphases added)

Not only is the description of what one would see in the film replaced with an account of what one would feel, but those feelings would be triggered, the passage suggests, by what is absent in the image and by the gestures indicating this absence. Gestures are, for Artaud, “the most privileged form of expression” (Murray 2014, 32), because they can render the invisible visible or, to be more precise, can reveal the physical presence of the Real that we cannot see. This is why there is a deliberate lack of certainty in how the script describes the actions of the clergyman: The

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future audience can only “feel” that he is doing something but they can never be logically sure; his actions can never acquire a certain meaning. In fact, the entire script is full of similar “seeming” actions: The clergyman “tears off her [the woman’s] bodice as though he wanted to lacerate her bosom”; the clergyman raises his breastplate “in the air as though he wanted to slap a couple with it”; “the clergyman seems to collect his thoughts and pray”; “the fingers of both his hands seem to be groping for a neck,” and so on (Artaud 1972, 22–24, emphases added). These comparisons and “seeming” gestures remind the reader that any visible and seemingly meaningful action is only an imprint of the invisible Real, and that it is only possible to come into contact with the Real through experiencing the gesture. This function of bodily gestures in Artaud’s concept of art is also the reason why the descriptions of gestures in the screenplay are deliberately exaggerated. To add a few examples to the ones mentioned earlier, the clergyman “opens the door like a fanatic” (Artaud 1972, 22); he plays with the woman’s breastplate “frantically” (22, 23); he strangles the woman “with expressions of incredible sadism” (24). The hyperbolic vocabulary of the screenplay makes sure the readers realise the power and the violence of the gestures, without ascribing a certain meaning to them. This emphasis on violence and eroticism in The Seashell and other screenplays by Artaud also stems from his belief in corporeal experiencing of art and cinema in particular. The effect of shock was meant to enhance the physical experience of the viewers; as Artaud writes in “Cinema and Reality,” “we must find a film with purely visual sensations the dramatic force of which springs from a shock on the eyes” (1972, 20). At the same time, the violence in Artaud’s cinema (just as later in his famous Theatre of Cruelty) also had a strong moral component: It was meant to serve as an antidote to the violent thoughts that “obsess the mentality of the times” (1999, 62). This must have been another reason why Artaud opposed the “dream”-credit Dulac initially suggested: Presenting the violent and erotic scenes as a dream would neutralise them as mere fantasies. By contrast, for Artaud it was paramount that the future audience experience these scenes as real—this was his measure against indulgence: “I defy any spectator infused with the blood of violent scenes, who has felt higher action pass through him […] to indulge in thoughts of war, riot or motiveless murder” (62). Constructing a corporeal experience for the audience as conceived by Artaud was thus an incredibly complex task. The cinematic realisation of

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The Seashell had to be different from both “pure or absolute cinema,” which in Artaud’s view is too abstract to evoke a physical-emotional response in the viewers, and from psychological film, which merely represents reality (Artaud 1972, 19). It further had to be distinct from the dreamlike cinema envisioned by the surrealists, so that the violent gestures of Artaud’s cinema are mistaken neither for a representation nor for a reproduction of a dream. The proposed film further had to make tangible the presence of the invisible Real behind the surface of reality, and it had to “vaccinate” the viewers against violence by exposing them to the world of cruelty. Most importantly, Artaud’s cinema had to “produce vibrations in the brain that do not lead to concrete thoughts but physically move the spectator, having direct contact with his or her nervous system” (Murray 2014, 99). A screenplay was indispensable for constructing a film that would realise all these principles. However, in Artaud’s system of thought, the screenplay is a problematic device as it is “contaminated” by the doubly deceitful linguistic representation: In virtue of using words, the screenplay can only represent reality, which is itself a mere representation of the Real. For Artaud, screenplays could therefore never become more than “merely” functional texts that allow the passage to the non-verbal, physical language. This is why in one of his letters, Artaud emphasises that he removed from The Seashell “everything that has a poetic or somewhat literary character” (1978, 130). Dulac, too, seems to have approached Artaud’s script as a purely functional document and followed his script down to the smallest detail during the production of her film (Virmaux and Virmaux 1999, 105–106). Paradoxically, Artaud’s concept of cinema only comes to light if one reads his script as a literary work—that is, as a work whose ideas are inseparable from the narrative and writing techniques used to express these ideas. By denying the literary aspect of his screenplay, namely the connection between what and how it communicates, Artaud therefore paved the way for a continuous misreading of his text. Artaud’s screenplay is thus essentially paradoxical: It presumes the impossibility of words to communicate meaningful bodily experiences, but at the same time it relies on a very meticulous choice of words to express this idea and the embodiment of thought. In this way, The Seashell is trapped in one of the most profound modernist dilemmas: between the complete denial of verbal representation and the desire to communicate a complex concept and be understood.

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∗ ∗ ∗ The example of Artaud’s The Seashell shows that the screenplay was perhaps not as ideal a tool for dealing with the crisis of representation as it was for reacting to the crisis of reason. To be pragmatically useful in film production, the screenplay had to represent—or, at the very least, it had to use language that represents by virtue of referring to the real world. For the modernist authors concerned with the crisis of representation the screenplay was therefore often a compromise or a necessary concession to the common practices of filmmaking: Léger used his Cubist Charlot script to apply for a copyright permission, Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera script was a means of getting financing, and Artaud’s The Seashell was, among other things, a consequence of the separation of conception and execution in film production—unlike in theatre, in cinema Artaud did not have the means or the skills to realise his scripts himself. At the same time as they are compromises with the realities of film production, the scripts to anti-mimetic films also challenge representation with their own, specifically verbal means. In particular, the “telegram style,” that is the nominal elliptic writing of the scripts by Léger, Vertov, and Moholy-Nagy reminds their readers that any description made with the means of language is bound to remain partial and fragmentary; the vocabulary of Artaud’s script, too, continuously points to the realm beyond the limits of linguistic representation. By refusing to give a detailed linguistic account of the proposed film, the screenplays I examined in this chapter indicate that the truly anti-representational film lies beyond that which is scripted. Moholy-Nagy was perhaps one of the few modernist authors who adhered to radically anti-mimetic filmmaking and at the same time did not give up on verbal communication, but instead promoted a change of mentality in regard to language. Rather than regarding language as merely a tool of representation, MoholyNagy’s screenplay presents words as material entities, offering the readers a chance of a different engagement with text and developing a uniquely profound approach to the crisis of representation.

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References Affron, Matthew. 1998. “Léger’s Modernism: Subjects and Objects.” In Fernand Léger, edited by Carolyn Lanchner, 121–48. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 15–May 12, 1998. Albera, François. 2017. “Deux scénarios inédits de Fernand Léger.” 1895. Revue de l’association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinema 81: 123–31. Artaud, Antonin. 1972. Scenarios. On the Cinema. Interviews. Letters. Translated by Alastair Hamilton. Vol. 3 of Collected Works. London: Calder & Boyars. ———. 1978. Scenari. A propos du cinéma. Lettres. Interviews. Rev. and expanded ed. Vol. 3 of Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1999. The Theatre and Its Double. Seraphim’s Theatre. The Cenci. Documents on “The Theatre And Its Double”. Documents on “The Cenci”. Translated by Victor Corti. Vol. 4 of Collected Works. Reprint. London: John Calder. Deryabin, Aleksandr. 2004. Introduction to Dramaturgicheskie opyty, vol. 1 of Iz naslediia, edited by Dziga Vertov, 12–28. Moscow: Eisenstein-Tsentr. Dimendberg, Edward. 2003. “Transfiguring the Urban Gray: László MoholyNagy’s Film Scenario ‘Dynamic of the Metropolis.’” In Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, edited by Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey, 109–26. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. 1987. “The Image and the Spark: Dulac and Artaud Reviewed.” In Dada and Surrealist Film, edited by Rudolf E. Kuenzli, 110– 27. New York: Willis, Locker & Owens. Freeman, Judi. 1987. “Léger’s Ballet Mécanique.” In Dada and Surrealist Film, edited by Rudolf E. Kuenzli, 28–45. New York: Willis, Locker & Owens. Hansen-Löve, Aage A. 1978. Der russische Formalismus: Methodologische Rekonstruktion seiner Entwicklung aus dem Prinzip der Verfremdung. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Haus, Andreas. 2008. “László Moholy-Nagy, Dynamik der Groß-Stadt: Film. Skizze. Manuskript. Typophoto.” In Notation. Kalkül und Form in den Künsten, edited by Hubertus von Amelunxen, Dieter Appelt and Peter Weibel, in cooperation with Angela Lammert, 343–47. Berlin: Akademie der Künste. ———. 2011. “László Moholy-Nagys ‘Dynamik der Groß-Stadt’ und die City-Symphonien der zwanziger Jahre.” Maske und Kothurn. Internationale Beiträge zur Theater-, Film- und Medienwissenschaft 57 (1–2): 75–94. Herman, David. 2003. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Lanchner, Carolyn. 1998. “Fernand Léger: American Connections.” In Fernand Léger, edited by Carolyn Lanchner, 15–72. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 15–May 12, 1998.

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Lawder, Standish D. 1975. The Cubist Cinema. New York: New York University Press. Léger, Fernand. 1955. Charlot cubiste: Scénario pour un dessin animé. In Fernand Léger, edited by Pierre Descargues, 17–18. Paris: Éditions Cercle d’Art. ———. 1973. Functions of Painting. Edited by Edward F. Fry. Translated by Alexandra Anderson. New York: Viking. Lemke, Inga. 2004. “Theater/Film—der Konflikt Artaud/Dulac als Paradigma.” In Französische Theaterfilme—zwischen Surrealismus und Existentialismus, edited by Michael Lommel, Isabel Maurer Queipo, Nanette Rißler-Pipka, and Volker Roloff, 109–32. Bielefeld, Germany: transcript. Michelson, Annette. 1984. Introduction to Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, edited by Dziga Vertov, xv–lxi. Berkeley: University of California Press. Moholy-Nagy, László. 1924. Filmváz. A nagyváros dinamikája. Ma 9: n.p. ———. 1925a. Dynamik der Großstadt. In “Der Film von Morgen.” Supplement, Film-Kurier 109: n.p. ———. 1925b. Malerei. Fotografie. Film. Munich: Langen. ———. 1927. Malerei. Fotografie. Film. Munich: Langen. https://doi.org/10. 11588/diglit.29205. Murray, Ros. 2014. Antonin Artaud: The Scum of the Soul. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Nelson, Andrea. 2006. “László Moholy-Nagy and Painting Photography Film: A Guide to Narrative Montage.” History of Photography 30 (3): 258–69. Petri´c, Vlada. 1993. Constructivism in Film: The Man with the Movie Camera, a Cinematic Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sadoul, Georges. 1959. “Fernand Léger, ou la Cinéplastique.” Cinéma 35: 73– 82. Sahli, Jan. 2006. Filmische Sinneserweiterung—László Moholy-Nagys Filmwerk und Theorie. Marburg, Germany: Schüren. Tsai, Joyce. 2018. László Moholy-Nagy: Painting After Photography. Phillips Collection Book Prize Series. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Tsivian, Yuri. 2006. “Man with a Movie Camera—Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties.” In Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema, edited by Ted Perry, 85–110. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Vertov, Dziga. 1984. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Edited by Annette Michelson. Translated by Kevin O’Brien. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2004. Dramaturgicheskiye opyty. Vol. 1 of Iz naslediya. Moscow: Eisenstein-Tsentr. ———. 2008. Stat’i i vystupleniya. Vol. 2 of Iz nasledyia. Moscow: EisensteinTsentr.

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Virmaux, Alain, and Odette Virmaux. 1999. Artaud: La coquille et le clergyman. Essai d’elucidation d’une querelle mythique / The Seashell and the Clergyman: An Attempt to Shed Light on a Mythic Incident. Paris: Paris Experimental. Wells, Paul. 2011. “The Chaplin Effect: Ghosts in the Machine and Animated Gags.” In Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-Era Hollywood, edited by Daniel Goldmark and Charlie Keil, 15–28. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 9

The Crisis of Language and the Rhythmic Screenplay

Most screenplays I have discussed in the previous chapters question, explicitly or implicitly, the adequacy of language as a tool for communicating and understanding feelings, thoughts, and experiences. Some modernists deplore the conventions and platitudes of the everyday use of language; others see language as too logical or rational to convey emotions or bodily experiences; and others lament the representational tie of language to reality. These perceived deficiencies of language, sometimes referred to as the crisis of language, also preoccupy the authors I consider in this chapter. At the same time, their modernist screenwriting takes a distinct approach: Their screenplays feature rhythmic narrative structures and rhythmic writing styles, which reinvent language as an expressive and epistemological tool. In the previous chapter I characterised some screenplays as rhythmic because of their elliptical, short nominal sentences: “CURVED HEADLIGHTS, spraying sparks. / Road smooth as mirror. / Light puddles. From above and / oblique angle / with cars rushing by” (Moholy-Nagy 1927, 127); or “Streets and streetcars intersect. And buildings and buses. Legs and smiling faces. Hands and mouths. Shoulders and eyes” (Vertov 1984, 285). If we read these passages out loud, we will notice that the shortness of the sentences creates an acoustic repetition: the silence of pauses and the sounds of words reappear at approximately the same intervals. The rhythm of these quotes is also evident on a graphic level: in © The Author(s) 2020 A. Ksenofontova, The Modernist Screenplay, Palgrave Studies in Screenwriting, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50589-9_9

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Vertov’s script, every few words are followed by a full stop and a capital letter, and in Moholy-Nagy’s script—by a line break. Such acoustic and visual repetitions can be called rhythmic because they feature a certain repetitive order of how they are organised in time and space. In the broadest sense, the term “rhythm” is used today to describe all processes that involve periodically repeating units: rhythm manifests itself in “poetic foot, beats, motifs, metres, phrases, periods, etc.” (Seidel 2003, 295). A rhythmic pattern always consists of at least two phases—a principle that can be traced back to the emergence of rhythm from the human step, that is, the lifting and lowering of the foot, or to other biological cycles such as breathing in and out and the diastole and systole phases of the heartbeat (296). This biological provenance of rhythm is the reason why humans are extremely perceptible to such organised repetitions: in most cases, we immediately notice the rhythm in music, in visual patterns, or in a piece of writing. In screenplays, rhythmic writing is especially conspicuous, because it is untypical for this genre. By contrast, rhythm is characteristic of many (though not all!) kinds of lyric poetry. Examples of rhythm in lyric poetry include a repeating number of syllables per line called “metric foot,” or repeating sounds in stressed syllables we call “rhyme.” Because these repetitions have been historically common to most types of lyric poetry, we tend to perceive rhythmic writing, including rhythmic screenwriting, as related to lyric poetry. However, as the following readings will show, modernist rhythmic screenplays do not simply align themselves with modernist lyric poetry, but develop their own poetics. In this chapter, I explore this poetics of rhythmic screenwriting, showing how modernist authors discovered the rhythmic screenplay as a unique means of reflecting on the crisis of language.

Carl Mayer: All the Rhythms of Film1 Carl Mayer remains by far the most researched German-speaking professional screenwriter of the 1920s, if not of all time. There are several reasons for Mayer’s lasting fame. Firstly, he was a very prolific author for his time. Over the course of his career, Mayer (co-)wrote twenty-two screenplays that were realised by acclaimed directors such as Friedrich 1 This chapter borrows some ideas from the author’s paper previously published elsewhere (Ksenofontova 2018).

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Wilhelm Murnau, Robert Wiene, Lupu Pick, and Paul Leni. He also wrote an estimated dozen unrealised projects and worked as script consultant on another dozen films (Kasten 1994, 294–302). Furthermore, Mayer’s very first screenplay, which he co-authored with the screenwriter Hans Janowitz, was made into one of the most important films in the history of German cinema, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 1920). Soon after Caligari, Mayer developed a unique screenwriting style that fascinated both contemporaneous critics and later research. A passage from New Year’s Eve (Sylvester) can provide a first impression of this style: INTERIOR TEA SHOP WIDE SHOT: Small. Low. Filled with smoke. And! In flickering light: Tables! Already occupied densely. Men. Women. Yawning children, too. And! In a corner: A pianist. An old piano plonking. And! While new guests keep arriving: Two waiters run! As many scream their orders. Noisily! Laughing! Impatiently! Drunk! (Mayer 1924, 20; see Fig. 9.1)

Single lines and larger pieces of text in Mayer’s script are always connected (or separated?) with “And,” “But,” “Because,” and other connectors. The sentences are very short and elliptical, mostly lacking a verb. Within a single line, the sentences are almost never connected by conjunctions. Full stops often break up what could have been a coherent sentence into several pieces, while commas are almost completely unused. Exclamation marks and colons, by contrast, are ubiquitous, and the latter are mostly used against the rules of punctuation. The word order is often changed (also against grammatical norms) in a way that seems to have a purely metric rather than semantic purpose. Occasionally the rhythm is enhanced through metrical patterns (most often a trisyllabic foot), repetitions of single words, phrases, and sometimes even whole sentences. One feature that does not stand out in the English translation as much as in the German original is the overuse of the active present participle—“flickering” (erflackernd), “yawning” (gähnend), “plonking” (beklimpernd), etc. For a German-speaking researcher such as Alexander Schwarz (1994, 306), Mayer’s scripts have an “enormous accumulation of participles.”

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Fig. 9.1 Scenes 2 and 3 of the script New Year’s Eve (Sylvester) by Carl Mayer, published as a separate book in 1924

Integrated into this particular style are continual indications of shot types and camera angles and movements, placed in a separate column on the left; locations are defined in slug lines before every scene. To describe Mayer’s style, scholars have offered several terms including paratactic style (Kasten 1994, 281), Reihungsstil —literally, “stringing style” (Becker 1997, 57), and staccato style (Eisner 1973, 35; Scheunemann 2003, 143–44). “Paratactic” is perhaps the least accurate description, because it refers to the lack of subordinate clauses, yet Mayer’s unusual punctuation makes the difference between main and subordinate clauses quite blurry. The term “ReihungsstiI ” comes from the German word for “row” and usually alludes to the row of separate images that a poem conjures up; however, applied to a screenplay, this term loses its sharpness, as most screenplays evoke a row of separate images regardless of their specific style. “Staccato style” is probably the most apt characterisation of Mayer’s preference for short elliptical sentences. This musical term may, however, also imply a certain mood, which is far from constant in Mayer’s script—a reading of New Year’s Eve shows that many of its scenes can hardly be read or performed “staccato.” I therefore avoid using any

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of these terms and propose speaking instead of Mayer’s rhythmic style. Mayer adhered to this style in almost all of his screenplays, including the only script published in full during his lifetime, New Year’s Eve (Sylvester). Based on this script, I argue below that the purpose of this style was to reflect the repeating alternation of light and darkness—a rhythmic pattern that Mayer saw as defining both for the film medium and for human lives. The New Year’s Eve script was realised by Lupu Pick; the film premiered in 1924, and the screenplay appeared in print simultaneously with the film’s premiere.2 The story of New Year’s Eve takes place at a tea shop (Konditorei),3 a few hours before the start of the year 1924. The three characters in the script are called simply the Man, the Wife, and the Mother. The Man and his Wife, who own the tea shop, are surprised by a sudden visit of the Man’s Mother. The initial tension between the two women is relieved during a family dinner, but then starts gathering strength again. Finally, a fight explodes, and the Man is faced with the choice of either chasing his Mother out on to the street, or parting with his Wife and their baby. Unable to stop the fighting between the women, the Man locks himself in another room. When his merry and well-lubricated customers from the tea shop barge into his quarters and break down the door to the room where the Man has taken refuge, he is found dead, just as the clock strikes midnight. This narrative illustrates that, as I have argued in Chapter 6, Mayer’s scripts have very little in common with the agenda of expressionist literature. His work is disinterested in the themes central to expressionist lyric poetry: urbanism and metropolises, madness and obsession, apocalypse and war, decay of the subject, spiritual renewal, and so on. Instead, Mayer’s scripts focus on the everyday conflicts of a few characters, whose namelessness emphasises that those conflicts are, for Mayer, the most universal and archetypal ones. He explores deficient communication, petit bourgeois families, repressed sexuality, and gender roles (of which Mayer 2 The script’s publication was meant to become the first book in a series entitled The Screenplay: A Collection of Selected Film Manuscripts (Das Drehbuch: Eine Sammlung ausgewählter Film-Manuskripte) planned by the Potsdam publishing house Gustav Kiepenheuer, but remained the only book in the series due to the lack of financing. 3 The German Konditorei can be equally translated as “pastry-shop” or “café.” However, throughout Mayer’s script this location functions as a bar, which may be confusing, as the common meaning of Konditorei does not imply alcohol consumption. Mayer’s story thus seems to imply a conversion of a tea shop into a bar on the occasion of the New Year’s celebrations.

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had quite a conservative, not to say misogynist ideas, as the summary of New Year’s Eve demonstrates). In particular, the key theme of New Year’s Eve is miscommunication between family members—a theme that, according to Mayer specialist Jürgen Kasten (1994, 264–68), interested Mayer throughout his entire career. New Year’s Eve introduces this theme in the epigraph, a quotation from the Tower of Babel narrative: “Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech” (Mayer 1924, 13). The inability of the characters to understand each other and communicate their feelings is marked by continual silences. For example, the script repeatedly speaks of a “terribly silent room” (59) and gives other indications of silence, which are especially conspicuous in a script for a silent film. Mayer’s focus on deficient verbal communication is also the reason why the script does not contain a single intertitle: The feelings of the characters literally cannot be put into words. For the same reason, the script avoids any diegetic verbal sources such as letters or newspaper ads, often used in silent films as auxiliary sources of storytelling. This “ambition […] to tell a story without inter-titles or explanatory comment” (Elsaesser 2000, 232) is characteristic of most Mayer’s scripts. Several researchers suggest that Mayer’s script replaces the “deficient” verbal language with a language of objects, gazes, and gestures (e.g. Kasten 1994, 166; Becker 1997, 58). This visual language is indeed a significant means of (re)constructing the narrative: simply put, it helps the readers of the script (and the potential film viewers) understand the development of the story. However, in the narrative, this non-verbal language does not resolve the family conflict but only exacerbates it. In other words, the language of objects, gazes, and gestures is not the solution but the symptom of the language crisis. An illustrative example is the first scene in the private quarters of the Man and the Woman: At first, their festive table is set only for two people, but then the Woman sees her Mother-in-law through the window: She goes. Steps. To a corner. Because: There: A stroller. She moves it away. So that it doesn’t stand in the light. Then: […]

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She takes another plate. And! Now: She goes. Steps. Back. To the table. Because: There: She puts down the plate. All this gloomily somehow. So that there are three place settings now. (Mayer 1924, 23–24)

The first actions of the Woman after seeing her Mother-in-law are to move the pushchair with the baby (the living evidence of the pair’s sexual life) to the side and put a third plate on the table to observe table etiquette. This scene illustrates that the language of gestures and objects is subject to the same social conventions that cause the conflict in the first place— gender roles, family roles, repressed sexuality, and so on. This is why such language cannot replace verbal language as a tool of interpersonal communication. Mayer’s answer to the crisis of language has to be sought elsewhere—namely, in the rhythms of the narrative. The narrative of New Year’s Eve can be described not only as a dramatic triangle but also as a cyclic structure. The relationship between the two female characters is a circle of repeated fights and reconciliations; they attempt to win over the Man alternating active persuasion and manipulative humbleness. The hesitating Man first takes the side of the Mother, then the side of the Wife. In other words, the narrative is a succession of “light” and “dark” communicative or psychological phases, and the inability of the characters to recognise this repetitive pattern brings the conflict to a climax, which breaks the circle with the death of the male protagonist. Director Lupu Pick comments on this narrative structure in his preface to the script, proposing that Mayer “wanted to show the light and darkness in men, in their souls; the eternal alternation of light and shadow in human relations” (1924, 9). This is one of the reasons why Mayer used as the subheading of his screenplay the somewhat outdated term for film—“Ein Lichtspiel,” meaning literally “A play of light.”4 The other reason for this choice of subheading was, according to Pick, Mayer’s 4 According to Schwarz (1994, 71), the term “Lichtspiel ” was used in Germany as a synonym for “film” in the 1910s, but became less common in the 1920s. However, Kasten (1990, 105–6) quotes several theoretical writings from the 1920s that use this term: Walter Bloem’s 1922 Seele des Lichtspiels and Georg Otto Stindt’s 1924 Das Lichtspiel als Kunstform.

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interest in the “technical process of the change and movements of lights” (9). Celluloid, with is succession of light and dark, seems to correspond to Mayer’s view on the alternation of light and darkness in human lives and relations. I propose that Mayer saw the succession of light and dark parts of the film stock, resulting from the play of the shutter, as the main rhythm of film; Mayer’s style originates from the attempt to convey this rhythm. This style cannot be pinned down to just one specific function in film production such as editing (Kasten 1994, 280), the tempo of the camera movement (Faber 1978, 163), the tempo of the action (Eisner 2008, 192), or the atmosphere of the story (Price 2013, 105). Rather, it allows (though does not require) all of these interpretations, because all these rhythms stem, in Mayer’s view, from the inherent rhythm of the film medium. Mayer’s specific concept of cinematic rhythm is also the reason why we find similar stylistic features in most of his screenplays, regardless of their narrative or genesis—the main reference point of their rhythmic writing is not so much the respective story, but the film medium itself. That said, in New Year’s Eve the story itself is also characterised by rhythmic repetitions. In particular, it reveals a distinct rhythm of alternating locations, which are narratively unrelated to the family conflict: two socially distinct celebration scenes—a luxurious ballroom and a tea shop—and various exterior locations such as a heath, a forest, a seacoast, and a churchyard. Every ten scenes of the script contain two closely placed scenes of nature (namely, scenes 14 and 18, 23 and 25, 33 and 35, 46 and 48–49). The recurring images from the different locations introduce into the story the contrast between, on the one hand, different social groups (see Kasten 1994, 164), and, on the other, between the majestic pictures of nature and the noise of celebrations in the city. While the scenes in the tea shop and ballroom feature loud, joyful, and hectic New Year’s celebrations, the exterior scenes represent, by contrast, vast and empty landscapes, and later a storm and a raging sea, which calm down in the final scene: the words “Clear is the night. The moon is out” conclude the script (Mayer 1924, 96). By setting the rhythms of human lives side by side with the rhythms of nature, Mayer’s script seems to suggest that the two are inextricably linked despite the conspicuous contrast between them. Especially surprising in a screenplay from 1924 is the fact that the rhythm of the suggested images is enhanced by the rhythm of the camera movements. While the scenes representing the family triangle indicate

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only interchanges between full shots and close-ups, other scenes suggest camera movements forwards and backwards, up and down, and from side to side. For example: “slowly zooming in,” “slowly zooming out in an arc shot to the right” (Mayer 1924, 37); “panoramic [movement] from bottom left to the upper right” (53); “panoramic [movement] from the head height downwards” (54), etc. According to Kasten (1994, 165), “panning” was occasionally used in the 1920s for establishing shots, but Mayer gives meticulous instructions concerning the camera movements throughout the whole script. Because there are only two types of camera movements—zooming and the panoramic movement—they cannot help but repeat themselves and thus also create a rhythmic pattern, rooted in the mechanisms of the film camera. Finally, Mayer’s screenplay is filled with remarks on lighting that also contribute to the rhythmicity of the script. The tea shop has “dim light” (indicated on nine occasions), the luxurious hotel has “bright lights,” and the square between them is “submerged in lights and shadows” (Mayer 1924, 15), while all other exterior locations are in the dark. Moreover, the climax of the story—the suicide of the protagonist—coincides with the New Year’s Eve fireworks, while in the finale all the lights in the houses go out one by one, until “only the face of the street clock is lit” (94). The alternating locations thus also create a conspicuous rhythm of lighting, which literally matches “the eternal alteration of light and shadow in human relations” (Pick 1924, 9). Mayer activates all means at his disposal—the narrative structure, the narrative settings, the camera movement, the lighting, and the writing style—to help his readers and the potential viewers recognise and embrace the rhythms that, in his view, guide their lives and communication. By contrast, verbal language was, in Mayer’s view, subject to social conventions and as such it could only conceal but not relate or explain these universal anthropological rhythms. The rhythm of Mayer’s writing thus also aimed to shift attention from what is being told to how it is being told, because precisely this shift was Mayer’s answer to the crisis of language: Only if the screenplay makes language visible as an evocative but unreliable tool of communication—only then can the screenplay point towards that which lies beyond language. Louis Delluc: The Rhythms of Desire The work of the writer-director Louis Delluc is in many ways similar to the German Kammerspiel film, in particular to the classics of this genre

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written by Mayer such as New Year’s Eve (Sadoul 1975, 71; Abel 1984, 317). Delluc’s screenplays also take place in a limited space, centre on personal conflicts of a few characters, and convey a certain rhythm of action though the writing style. At the same time, the work of Delluc is commonly subsumed under the label of “film impressionism” alongside the films of Marcel L’Herbier, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, and Abel Gance (Sadoul 1975, 51). The works of these famous filmmakers, and of Delluc in particular, focus on “the expression or representation of subjectivity or subjective experience” (Abel 1984, 287). Both the Kammerspiel and impressionist aesthetics link Delluc’s work to the crisis of language: His scripts explore personal dramas of miscommunication, which result from the inability of the characters to come in contact with their own feelings or with the feelings of others. An indicative example is Delluc’s screenplay The Silence (Le Silence). The film (1920) Delluc made based on this screenplay does not survive; the script was published together with three other screenplays by Delluc in his 1923 volume Cinema Dramas (Drames de cinéma). Just like Mayer’s New Year’s Eve, Delluc’s The Silence revolves around just three characters: Pierre, his lover Suzie, and his late wife Aimée. At the outset of the story, Pierre and Suzie are each at their own homes, getting ready to spend the evening together. While Pierre is dressing and killing time before the date, different objects at his apartment awake memories of Aimée’s recent death. He remembers the events leading to her death: Her persistent admirer Jean; an anonymous letter insinuating a love affair between Jean and Aimée; Pierre shooting at Jean but wounding Aimée; Pierre’s arrest; Aimée’s letter to the court freeing Pierre of any charges; her death on the consequences of the shot; and Pierre’s ensuing mental distress. Carried away by memories, Pierre retrieves the anonymous letter that accused Aimée of betrayal and suddenly realises that its handwriting is the same as in a note he has just received from Suzie. He then breaks the seal of a letter Aimée wrote to him shortly before her death. In the letter, she claims to be innocent and a victim of a fraud. While Suzie is on her way to pick up Pierre, he decides to shoot her, but then changes his mind and shoots himself, leaving Suzie to discover his body. In his brief reading of the screenplay, Abel notes the astonishingly complex and modern narrative organisation of The Silence: “The eight flashbacks […] are organized in an achronological order that withholds the key revelatory moments from the past until the end” (1984, 315). To hold this disjunctive narrative together, the script introduces several key

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objects that reappear in all time layers of the story: a bed (the starting point of Pierre’s memories), the photographs of Aimée and Suzie, their letters, and the revolver. Like Mayer, Delluc radically rejects explanatory intertitles as a means of storytelling—the only intertitles in the screenplay introduce, each with a single word, the names of the main characters: Pierre, Suzie, and Aimée. As a replacement of the intertitles, Delluc develops, also in the same way as Mayer, a language of objects; these objects (the photographs, the bed, the revolver) help the audience follow the development of the conflict. While Mayer bases the conflict of New Year’s Eve on social conventions, Delluc is more interested in the issues of subjective perception, most notably the perception of verbal objects—the letters. At first, the protagonist approaches the letters he had received as sources of verbal information: he is trying to understand what they tell him with the means of language. As a result, he is not able to tell apart the false anonymous letter (in fact written by Suzie) and the true deathbed letter of his wife. The story takes a decisive turn only when Pierre discovers the similarity of handwriting in the two letters—the anonymous letter incriminating Aimée and a note from Suzie announcing the plans for the evening. In other words, Pierre is able to uncover the truth only when he approaches the letters as sources of visual information; he sees beyond the meaning of the words and recognises their material, visual properties—the shape of handwriting. In this way, the truthful visual perception is set against the unreliable perception of the world through language. This reconceptualisation of letters as visual rather than linguistic objects is central to The Silence, because it both stages the crisis of verbal communication and indicates a possible answer to this crisis: a turn from linguistic to visual perception. The story that in the beginning seems to be a love triangle turns out to be a tragic search for the truth beyond linguistic communication. In this context, the title The Silence is perhaps the most telling element of the screenplay: It proclaims silence as the main theme, idea, and narrative tool of the story. Silence as the key theme of the script refers to the crisis of language or the inadequacy of language as an epistemological tool; the idea of silence implies the shift of focus from verbal to visual perception; the silence as a narrative means refers to the rejection of intertitles, which is also characteristic of other scripts by Delluc. In the narrative present, the protagonist Pierre literally does not pronounce a single word; as Delluc puts it in a post-premiere comment to his film,

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“we witness the eloquent silence of this man face to face with his thought or his memories” (1990, 43). The repeated indications of silence, which may seem superfluous in a script for silent film, are also central to Mayer’s New Year’s Eve. In both Mayer’s and Delluc’s stories, the motif of silence ultimately evokes silent film as the unique medium for exploring the crisis of verbal communication.5 How, then, does the articulated crisis of language affect the screenplay as a verbal object? Delluc clearly attached much importance to screenwriting, as evidenced by the publication of his book Cinema Dramas, which contained scripts for four of the seven films he had produced by then. So perhaps, for Delluc as for Mayer, the crisis of language did not irredeemably compromise screenwriting at large, but rather provided reasons to approach it in an experimental way. Here is, for instance, how The Silence begins: 1. Pierre alone, at home. Under the lamp. Dressing gown. Book or evening newspaper. Cigar. Rest. 2. The table in front of which he is seated. 3. A photo of a woman. It’s Suzie. Young, elegant, harmonious. Next to the photo, a letter. 4. Pierre’s hand. Well cared for. Three or four rings of perfect taste. 5. The hand reaches to take the letter, it takes the photo. (Delluc 1990, 45)

The rest of The Silence is also written in short, telegraphic sentences, lacking connectives and separated by full stops. Delluc does not enforce a nominal style as consistently as Mayer, but he uses a lot of sentences consisting only of one noun. His text is divided into numbered shots, and most shot descriptions consist of only one or two shorter sentences. As a result, a distinctive rhythm emerges—a rhythm based on the repeating syntactic structures of the sentences, frequent enumerations of the type “young, elegant, harmonious,” and the repetitions of single words. This rhythm becomes especially conspicuous in the moments of narrative tension, for example:

5 Film historians have long shown that the silent film wasn’t actually silent: It could be accompanied by live or recorded music, commentary of a “lecturer,” conversations in the audience, and other sounds. So the scripts of Mayer and Delluc perhaps also aim to highlight the possibility of a meaningful silence in a silent film.

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55. Smoke. 56. A revolver. 57. Pierre’s hand (the same rings) holds the revolver. 58. Aimée lying on the carpet. 59. Pierre standing in front of her. He throws the revolver. (Delluc 1990, 47)

Delluc’s fragmented writing style corresponds to the fragmentary nature of Pierre’s traumatic memories. At the same time, this rhythmic style performs the same function as the handwriting in Suzie’s letter: it allows the readers to alter their perception of writing. Rather than focusing solely on the events the script describes, the readers are invited to perceive the rhythm of Delluc’s writing visually and acoustically. Just like Pierre had to change his perception of the letters from linguistic to visual to discover the truth about his past, the readers are encouraged to activate their visual and acoustic imagination to perceive the emotional information the script conveys. In this way, rhythm points to the meaning beyond that which is articulated in words; just like in Mayer’s script, rhythm responds to the crisis of language by shifting the weight of the meaning from the story to discourse, from what is told to how it is told. Rhythm also has another dimension in Delluc’s script: The sentence structures and words repeat themselves in the same way as the events and, in particular, as passions do. Abel (1984, 322) describes this repetitive narrative structure (also characteristic of Delluc’s other stories) as “the circle of desire”: the absence of the desired object produces an evergrowing desire, and the eruption of desire produces loss and eventually the absence of the desired object. The Silence also exemplifies this cycle: Pierre’s jealous desire literally destroys the object of his love, and her absence produces only more desire, concentrated in his memories and visions. This circle of desire further corresponds to a cyclic understanding of time. For Delluc, memory is so inextricably linked to desire that memories and imaginary visions are almost the same thing. For instance, reading The Silence, it is not always possible to distinguish between the descriptions of Pierre’s memories and those of his daydreams: Delluc refers to both in the same way, using the French word “vision.” This is why Abel writes, in his analysis, of “flashbacks or imaginary scenes” (1984, 315, emphasis added). The past and the present are for Delluc inextricably linked into one circle, together with absence and desire. The narrative rhythms and

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the rhythm of writing in Delluc’s scripts foreground his idea of cyclic time and desire. The Silence thus connects the crisis of language not only to the essential unreliability of words but also to the impossibility of conveying this philosophy of eternal cycles in words; only visual perception of the past and present can demonstrate their uncanny resemblance and repetitiveness. For Delluc, rhythm is the only means that allows to partially overcome these deficiencies of language, because rhythm enforces mental visualisation rather than a purely linguistic perception of his cinema dramas, while at the same time pointing to the source of drama—the cycles of time and desire. Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov: The Rhythm of History Several researchers, most recently Elena Vogman (2018), have noted that rhythm takes a prominent place in the cinema of Sergei Eisenstein. While Mayer saw the inherent rhythm of film as a succession of light and darkness, for Eisenstein the most basic rhythm of film is the rhythm of the “still images passing at regular jolts before our eyes” (Eisenstein 2002, 188, original emphasis). In other words, the rhythmic pace of film images allows the human psyche to perceive them as moving despite their actual stillness and physical separation. From this ur-rhythm of film, Eisenstein derives the rhythm of cinematic montage, basing it on the same principle as the rhythm of images: a series of sequences organised and linked through montage produces meaning that exceeds the sum of single elements (Vogman 2018, 342). Montage further governs the physiological rhythms of the viewer’s body, enabling a turn from limited logical thinking to sensual perception (342). As a result, in Eisenstein’s films rhythm is a global “medium of change” and “a vehicle of revolution” (Vogman and Rebecchi 2017, 9)—most notably, a revolution in perception and in thought. Rhythm is also proper to some of Eisenstein’s screenplays, in particular to the script October (Oktyabr’ ) Eisenstein co-wrote with his longstanding collaborator, actor, and later director Grigori Aleksandrov. October presents rhythm quite literally as a condition and “a vehicle of revolution”—in this case, of the historical revolutions in Russia. The script October covers the events between the Russian February Bourgeois Revolution in 1917, which marked the end of the monarchy, and the October Socialist Revolution of the same year. Its story is not

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character-focused but pictures mostly mass events: the February Revolution in Petrograd and the following instalment of the Provisional Government; a Bolshevik revolt against the Provisional Government and the imprisonment of the Bolsheviks. Then follows a military coup, which is only defeated when the Bolsheviks are released from prison and take up arms. They subsequently organise another uprising on October 25, in the course of which the revolutionaries capture the seat of the Provisional Government—the Winter Palace. The script ends with Lenin proclaiming the success of the revolution. Departing from the orthodox style of his previous screenplay, Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin), Eisenstein and his co-author Aleksandrov open the script October in an unusual manner, which both Lyudmila Belova (1978, 58) and Steven Price (2013, 116–17) consider strikingly poetic: 1. Gold, 2. precious stones, 3. shimmering lights covered the tsarist crown[,] the imperial sceptre[,] the autocratic orb. 4. The gold glittered, 5. the lights shone, 6. the gems sparkled, 7. until … until women’s bony fists rose out of the queues of the hungry. (Eisenstein 1974, 49)

This passage indeed stands out due to its rhythm and because it uses the past and not the present tense, opposing the normative poetics of the time. Price (2013, 116–17) suggests that both rhythm and the use of the past tense emphasise the literary value of the script as opposed to its functional purpose. “Such a literary form of a scenario,” Price argues, “is a statement of a kind of artistic authority over the whole production” (118), as such a script could not be adequately used in a production with a strict division of labour. To expand Price’s plausible reading, I submit that the unique style of October was also a way of overcoming the censorship imposed on the film industry by the Soviet authorities. The script October is, in fact, a very late document, composed probably during the editing of the respective film (Eisenstein 1971, 529). Yuri Tsivian remarks that this screenplay “was not meant to be used during the actual shooting […], but to be read

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by other people: after all, the Party’s Anniversary Committee did exercise tight control over the production [of the film October]” (1993, 80).6 This means that the distinct style of the script may also have had a political implication: the less technically exact and the more figurative the language of October was, the easier it was to justify the discrepancies between the script and the final film in face of the censors. This does not mean that Eisenstein’s and Aleksandrov’s work was ideologically unbiased (not to mention subversive); rather, their script helped them overcome the artistic limitations resulting from the tight state control over production. Along with these interpretations focused on production context, I propose that the style of the October script also introduces a specific concept of temporality, characterised by a tension between repetition and change. To begin, the opening scene of the script may create the impression that the entire script is written in the past tense; in reality, however, October features a constant alteration of grammatical tenses. While the first three acts are written predominantly in the past tense with several short and two longer insertions of the present, in the last two acts, which picture the eve of the uprising and the events of October 25, the two tenses alternate at least seven times, and the narration in the present tense tends to prevail over that in the past. This alteration of grammatical tenses correlates to the ambiguous narrative time and space of the script. In continuation of the above-quoted passage, the glistening of the imperial regalia dims and reveals 17. The idol of autocracy, standing 18. on a massive, polished stone […]. […] 23. And on the crest of this general surge of exultation, a small, living, working man set his foot on a huge imperial crown. 24. On the cast-iron crown of the statue of Alexander III. 25. A [statue] which stood in the shelter of the golden cupolas of “Christ the Saviour” near the tramway line A. (Eisenstein 1974, 50)

6 Instead of, or along with, the literary script, Eisenstein must have used notes elaborating single episodes, a shooting plan, and an editing script during the production of October (Schwarz 1994, 325; Tsivian 1993, 80). In his analysis of the archive materials related to October, Schwarz comes to the conclusion that the numbering of the literary script was used to synchronise it with the shot-by-shot plan (1994, 325).

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These very particular indications—the monument to Alexander III standing next to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour close to the tramway line A—situate the action in Moscow. This is a remarkable beginning given that the rest of the story takes place in St. Petersburg. Furthermore, the monument to Alexander III was torn down in 1918, almost a year after the events described in October. However, in the script this episode clearly takes place in February 1917, as it seamlessly passes into the celebration of the Provisional Government, which was installed in Russia after the February revolution. The October script thus starts with a double—spatial and temporal—narrative confusion: it melts together different places and times of action. This confusion alone undermines the idea of linear temporality and linear storytelling; but the script does not stop at this. This very same episode is also, as Tsivian points out, a direct reference to the play The King in the Square (Korol’ na ploshchadi, 1906) by Alexander Blok, “written soon after, and under the impact of, the revolution of 1905” (Tsivian 1993, 81). At the very end of Blok’s play, the King, who is present on stage throughout the entire action, turns out to be a stone statue: The infuriated crowd pours out on to the steps behind the Poet. The columns shatter from below. Wailing and shouting. The terrace caves in, taking the King with it. […] In the red glow of the torches you can clearly see people down below scouring around searching for bodies, holding up a stone splinter of a cloak, a stone fragment of a torso, a stone hand. (Blok 1961, 59)

This passage indeed resembles the scene in the October script where the statue of Alexander III is demolished: “30. Swaying, the doll toppled from its tall pedestal, / 31. and fell to the ground, shattering into fragments” (Eisenstein 1974, 50). The parallel is based not only on the image of the falling and dismantled royal statue of stone but also on the audience’s revelation. In Blok’s play, the reader comprehends that they were reading about a king’s statue rather than a living person only when the monument had already fallen; in the script, the abstract stone idol is gradually revealed as a well-known historical monument of an actual person (Alexander III) at an actual location (Moscow). The final line of Blok’s play—“The murmur of the crowd grows and merges with the murmur of the sea” (1961, 60)—is also echoed in the script as a repeating metaphor: “wave after wave of the workers’ masses” (Eisenstein 1974,

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50). Both historically and in terms of imagery, the beginning of Eisenstein and Aleksandrov’s script thus “continues” the finale of Blok’s play, thereby presenting the revolutions of 1917 as a direct continuation of the anti-monarchist rebellions of 1905. These multiple temporal and spatial interconnections in the beginning of the October script exemplify the non-linearity of the entire project: confusing the historical past, present, and anticipated future, October takes the moments of revolutions “out of ordinary, serial, experientiallymotivated time […] and project[s] them, as it were, into eternity” (Tsivian 1993, 92). Rhythmic writing underscores precisely this idea of non-linear historical time. Together with the alternation of grammatical tenses and the historical and literary references, rhythm presents the revolutionary events as eternal or ever-recurring. For instance, in the above-quoted lines describing the statue of Alexander III, we find a kind of rhetorical repetition called anadiplosis, where the beginning of each sentence repeats the words concluding the previous sentence: “set his foot on a […] crown. / 24. On the cast-iron crown of the statue […]. / 25. A [statue] which stood,” etc. (Eisenstein 1974, 50). Price also notes another kind of repetition in the opening “shots” of October, called anaphora: “successive shots begin with the same word or phrase” (2013, 117). In fact, such repetitions can be found on almost every page of the published script. They vary from repetitions of single words to entire phrases; for instance, the sentence “the second hand ticks on [and on]” is repeated three times in different scenes (Eisenstein 1974, 68, 70, 72). Almost as frequent as the lexical repetitions are repeating sentence structures, for example: “59. A kiss for whiskery lips. / 60. A hug from powerful paws” (52), or: 249. [Unit after unit] leave for the city. 250. [Order after order] fly along the telegraph wires from a small room. 251. [Regiment after regiment] occupy the city gates. (Eisenstein 1974, 63)7

The rhythm created by such repetitions conveys the anxious atmosphere of the described events, suspending the development of the action. At

7 These repetitions in the Russian original are not rendered in the translation of October by Diana Matias (Eisenstein 1974), which is why I insert them into the quote in brackets.

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the same time, it reinforces the unusual temporality of the script, blurring the borders between the past, present, and future and creating instead a continuum of repetitions. This circle of repetitions culminates in the final intertitles, which proclaim the success of the revolutions in Russia and immediately announce the beginning of the world revolution: “THE WORKERS’ AND PEASANTS’ REVOLUTION HAS BEEN ACCOMPLISHED! / LONG LIVE THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST REVOLUTION!” (Eisenstein 1974, 84). Incidentally, repetitions in the intertitles also take a prominent place in the script. For instance, the intertitle “TO ALL!” is repeated seventeen times throughout the first act, and the words “SOCIALIST” and “FOR THE SOVIET” four times each. These reoccurring intertitles organise the narrative not only by virtue of repetition, but also by interrupting the action at more or less regular intervals, which is occasionally even optically perceptible in the printed text (see Fig. 9.2). Furthermore, the intertitles also place clear political and ideological accents by mimicking or directly reproducing revolutionary political slogans: “TO THE DEFENSE OF PETROGRAD” (58), “BREAD! PEACE! LAND! POWER TO THE WORKERS!” (59), and “IMMEDIATE PEACE WITHOUT ANNEXATION!” (81). In other words, the story structure of October is organised through the repetition or rhythm of political slogans. This key role of political slogans in the October script is no accident: In his article on the respective film, Eisenstein explicitly argues for “the art of the direct cinematic communication of a slogan. […] The epoch of the direct materialization of a slogan takes over from the epoch of a slogan about material” (1988, 105). In accordance with this idea, the October script puts slogans at the beginning of social change, but also presents them as something to be overcome—the slogans have to give way to the “materialization of a slogan.” The main means of this revolutionary transformation is rhythm. Just as Eisenstein saw the perception of film as a qualitative jump from rhythmically repeating still images to perceived movement, so the October script presents political change as transition from rhythmically repeating slogans to action, and from repeating actions to a global uprising. As a result, “we perceive the emerging relations of history poised between repetition and irruption, return and revolt ” (Vogman and Rebecchi 2017, 10, original emphasis). Even though the crisis of language was not the main focus of Eisenstein and Aleksandrov, October articulates this crisis by highlighting rhythm as a means of overcoming “mere” words and passing on to political action.

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Fig. 9.2 Fragment of the script October (Oktyabr’ ) by Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov, published in Eisenstein’s collected works in 1971

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Words stand at the beginning of change, but they have given way to their “materialization”—this concept of Eisenstein is applicable not only to historical processes, but also to the process of filmmaking. It is perhaps no accident that Eisenstein describes screenwriting in his famous article “The Form of the Script” as “the presentation of the […] rhythms of captivation and excitement with which it [the film] is to ‘capture’ the audience” (Eisenstein 1988, 135, emphasis added). In Eisenstein’s film philosophy, only organised repetition or rhythm can guarantee change, be it a transition from still to moving images or from the words of a screenplay to film images. The role of the script October thus surpasses both the instrumental functioning in film production and the need to justify the discrepancies between the censored material and the final film. In fact, the October script is a statement on the concepts of history and film: both are based on overcoming verbal language (of politics and scripting, respectively) with the help of rhythm. Just as the rhythm of the screenplay is meant to anticipate the rhythms of film and thereby enable the qualitative jump from “mere” words to the moving images of film, so does the rhythm of political slogans in October anticipate political change and enables the transition from “mere” slogans to a revolution. For Eisenstein and Aleksandrov, rhythm was a means of provoking a revolt against the eternal return of the same; in their view, the crisis of language, just like a political crisis, could only be solved through a revolution. Isaac Babel: The Disguise of Rhythm The scripts I have so far discussed in this chapter—those of Mayer, Delluc, Eisenstein and Aleksandrov—may create the illusion that the rhythmic screenplay is primarily an “invention” of professional screenwriters or writer-directors. But of course, literary authors also used rhythm in their scripts. In particular, the screenplays of the writer Isaac Babel feature a rhythm partially similar to the rhythm his prose is famous for. Below I argue that in Babel’s script Benya Krik, just like in his prose, rhythm creates the poetics of unspeakable, taking the place of explicit verbal communication. There survive four screenplays written by Babel, three for silent and one for sound film. In reality, Babel worked on many more film projects, but the surviving evidence on them is very scarce (Heil 1984, 138–41). The reason for this is that Babel and his entire unpublished and unfinished legacy fell victim to the political repressions of Joseph Stalin. After Babel

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was arrested by the NKVD secret police and executed by firing squad in 1939, his name was thoroughly removed from all sources, and his confiscated manuscripts never again saw the light of day (Krumm 2004, 187–201). Babel’s silent screenplay Benya Krik, which I discuss below, therefore survives only thanks to its publication in book form in 1925, and is only available in its published version. The persecution by the Soviet authorities is a central context for understanding Babel’s film work. By the time he started his career as screenwriter around 1924, the thirty-year-old Babel was already one of the most controversial authors in Russia. The reasons for this were his short stories dedicated to the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922, which formed the cycle Red Cavalry (Konarmiya). The stories openly questioned “not only the consequences of the revolution, but also its morality and legitimacy” (Krumm 2004, 90). Red Cavalry was celebrated in the press as vehemently as it was criticised—mostly, of course, for ideological reasons (91–92). In this context, it is hardly surprising that Babel also encountered difficulties when dealing with the censorship of his film projects. In particular, he describes the work on the script Benya Krik in one of his letters as follows: I think I already wrote to you that three-quarters of the script are written, but the last quarter is not getting on […]. The ending is not getting on, because they force me to work falsely, that is, to attach ideology without rhyme or reason, but this morning I seem to have come up with a good idea and, perhaps, I will overcome this painful situation without moral damage. (Babel 2005b, 33)

That the screenplay was a “compromise” between Babel’s ideas and the Soviet censorship can indeed be induced from its narrative. Half of the screenplay Benya Krik is based on two short stories from Babel’s short stories cycle Odessa Stories (Odesskiye rasskazy); the “king” of gangsters Benya Krik from these stories is, as Dmitri Bykov (2018, 147–48) aptly notes, a typical pícaro or trickster. As such, he exposes and punishes injustice and brings reconciliation, all this—in a playful and often comical way. In the screenplay, however, the wise pícaro Benya meets his antagonist— the serious and naïve revolutionary Sobkov. The story proceeds from the pre-revolutionary adventures of Benya to the time between the February and the October Revolutions, when Sobkov turns from a dough kneader into a Bolshevik activist. Then the action jumps to the year 1919, when

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Sobkov, now a newly minted military commissar, defeats and executes Benya and his gang. On the surface, Benya Krik thus seems to tell the story of revolutionary progress: the rule of gangsters and their king Benya is besieged by the newly installed Soviet regime. However, the actual story of the script is the exact opposite of this ideologically conformist narrative—it is a story about the tragic impossibility of change. To urge the readers to read the script between the lines, Babel introduces into his screenplay an unusual rhythm. For example, the first scene of the screenplay pictures a broker, Marantz, visiting the chief of police Sokovich in his home to set the police after Benya: The chief of police plays [the piano] with unusual pathos—he moves his lips, lifts his shoulders, opens his mouth. The keyboard. Sokovich’s fingers are racing over the keys; the fingers are covered with rings in the shape of skulls, hooves, Assyrian seals. […] From the depths of the room emerges the Jew Marantz in a tattered suit. He coughs, shuffles, scrapes his feet, but the enraptured chief of police doesn’t hear him. (Babel 2005a, 393)8

This excerpt stands out due to its unusual syntax: on three occasions, it introduces enumerations of actions or objects without any connectives— “moves his lips, lifts his shoulders, opens his mouth”; “skulls, hooves, Assyrian seals”; and “coughs, shuffles, scrapes his feet.” Such enumerations, mostly consisting of three or four elements, are found throughout Babel’s entire script. In fact, most characters are described with similar lists of features: Marantz’s head is “the depository of little hair, a few ink stains, and pillow feathers” (Babel 2005a, 398); Benya’s father Mendel Krik is “tall, stout, drunk, jolly” (395). Even episodic characters such as a nameless woman at a restaurant get conspicuously detailed portraits: “from enthusiasm, from spring, from fervor, her long nose is covered with delicate pearls of sweat” (417). Such enumerations are mostly ironic, and their irony is often concealed in a detail that does not fit into the list, as in the description of Mendel Krik: being tall, stout, and jolly describes him as a person, but the adjacent adjective “drunk” becomes Mendel’s most distinctive “trait of character”

8 Here and further, my translation is based on, but not equivalent to, the English translation of Babel’s complete works by Peter Constantine (Babel 2002).

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precisely because it seems to be out of place in the list. In other cases, the enumerations create ironic hyperbolas, as in the portrait of the chief of police playing the piano—his feelings find their expression in the comically exaggerated bodily gestures. But the most important function of such enumerations is that their syntactic repetitiveness, i.e. their rhythm, constantly singles out separate objects or actions, disrupting flow of the story. In this way, the rhythm of enumerations shifts the accent from the main narrative to single details, signalling the readers that these details may tell a different story than the surface narrative of Benya Krik. So what could this different story be? In the first two parts of the script, united under the subheading “The King,” Benya murders the informer Marantz and organises arson at the police station in order to prevent the police from storming the wedding of his sister. However, the screenplay does not actually “show” Benya kill Marantz or give the order to set fire to the police station. Instead, these events are related, just like in Babel’s short stories, through a trace of details: “The event is not actually being told. […] The event is indicated in the text only in a few strokes, […] as a dotted line, which the reader has to prolong” (Schmid 1992, 139). Here is, for instance, how the murder episode is told: Benya comes to visit Marantz and invites him for a walk in his carriage; Marantz accepts, and his wife brings him “a coat, a chocolate-brown bowler hat, a canvas umbrella” (Babel 2005a, 399). When the carriage drives off, “we see the coachman’s burly, reassuring back, Marantz’s bowler, Benya’s panama” (399). In the following scene, Benya accuses Marantz of betrayal, and the coachman takes the bowler off Marantz’s head; the bowler then lands in the water and is “floating on the broad, blue, melting waves” (400). Only in the last scene of the first part we get a glimpse of Marantz’s corpse. So the murder is neither told nor “shown”; it is related though just one detail—Marantz’s hat—and through repeating three-part enumerations that all draw attention to this telling detail. In this way, the beginning of the script develops the same poetics of the unspeakable as Babel’s prose: violence and death (even in the picaresque world of gangsters) by far surpass the expressive capacities of language and even those of film, and can only be related through the rhythm of reoccurring details. Similarly, in the third and fourth parts of the script, we witness a member of Benya’s gang accidentally kill an office clerk during a robbery, but we do not “see” Benya punish him for this misdeed, until at the funeral of the clerk another coffin appears—the coffin of his murderer. Again, the pícaro Benya enforces (his own, specific kind of) justice, but

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the cruel means of this justice remain out of sight; instead, the readers are presented with a trace of picturesque enumerations and repeating details. By contrast, the last two parts of the script present a new world—the post-revolutionary world of 1919. In this world, the violent methods of gangsters are no longer a taboo—they have become the official methods of the new authorities. Correspondingly, when in the finale Benya is murdered by his adversary, the revolutionary Sobkov, the script pictures his death with provocative vividness: “The back of Benya’s shaved neck. There appears a spot, a gaping wound, blood spurting in all directions” (Babel 2005a, 448). This graphic description (ironically, also a three-point list, but a list of explicit rather than euphemistic details) is not a victory over unspeakability and over the crisis of language, but its exact opposite. In the moment when death, murder, and suffering become utterable in words, they also become, the script seems to suggest, accepted as part of the everyday. The transition from pre- to post-revolutionary world coincides in the script with the transition from the poetics of unspeakable or “unshowable” violence to that of full visibility; murder has become ordinary in the blood of the revolutions and is no longer an unrepresentable experience. In other words, for Babel (as later for many post-WW II writers) the crisis of language is the only possible, necessary reaction to trauma; as soon as the unspeakable horrors are articulated directly, they are thereby accepted as normal—or so Babel’s writing implies. This uncanny acceptance of violence culminates in the last scene of the script: In the study of the chairman of the Odessa Executive Committee. A kerosene lamp is burning beneath a sumptuous dead chandelier. The chairman, a drowsy man wearing a loose-hanging white shirt, a scarf around his neck, and a tall sheepskin hat, is leaning over a diagram. […] The telephone rings and the chairman lifts the receiver. In the field by the campfire. Sobkov, lying on the ground, is speaking into the telephone. The bodies of Benya and Froim lie next to him […]. Their bare feet are jutting out from under the mat. The chairman listens to the report and puts the receiver back on the hook. He raises his sleepy eyes to the engineer. PLEASE CONTINUE, COMRADE. (Babel 2002, 939–40)

The chairman makes no response to the message about Benya’s death— so unimportant are he, his gang, and even the ex-revolutionary Sobkov in the new Soviet reality. This final scene thus suggests that, even though the ubiquity of violence may have made it utterable in words, speaking about

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the reasons of violence is still impossible—not because this task exceeds the capacities of language, but because it exceeds that which is allowed by the censors. This is why the nameless chairman does not respond to the message about Benya’s death: his silence is, in fact, the official politics of the authorities he incorporates. Ultimately, the new Soviet apparatus in Babel’s script turns out to be just as indifferent to the value of human life as the tsarist regime it came to replace. At the same time, this denouement corresponds to the tradition of the picaresque novel: Benya as the pícaro, Bykov (2018, 148) holds, is unable to fundamentally change the world around him through laughter, and is therefore doomed to lose; after his adventures, events resume their “normal” course. This is precisely what happens in the finale of the screenplay: although the “setting,” that is, the state system, has supposedly changed, the death of the pícaro Benya signals the impossibility of more fundamental anthropological changes. Although the final scene does not feature a conspicuous rhythm of writing, it alludes to the inescapability of historical cycles with the help of recurring details. The “kerosene lamp” in the quoted passage echoes the kerosene lamps that lit the “foul-smelling cellar” where the activists used to work before the revolutions (Babel 2002, 913). The recurring motif of bare feet is another token of the never-ending economic and sociopolitical misery: the bandits and the Red Army soldiers, who surround Benya in the finale, are equally barefooted, the shoes of Sobkov’s assistant are constantly falling apart (927, 933), and only Benya Krik has, as befits the pícaro, “slick, lacquered shoes” (899). His bare feet in the final episode thus signal, more than anything, the ironic equality of gangsters and revolutionaries alike in the face of a state system indifferent to individual human lives. In this way, the rhythm of recurring details constitutes the actual narrative of Benya Krik, one about the eternal recurrence of poverty and oppression and the tragic impossibility of change. The rhythm of enumerations in Babel’s screenplay is not as conspicuous as the rhythm of Mayer’s scripts, because it is based on only one kind of syntactic repetition and the reoccurrence of single details, sometimes with significant intervals between the reoccurrences. Nevertheless, it creates a separate layer of meaning that is much more important than the overarching narrative. The fact that this meaning cannot be communicated directly but only related through the details and the rhythm of writing has a double significance: It indicates the impossibility of representing traumatic events directly, be it with the means of language or

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with those of film; at the same time, it points to the politics of silencing any attempt to speak about the violence and death that accompanied the historical revolutions. In this way, the rhythm of Babel’s screenwriting defies both the representational and the political crisis of language. ∗ ∗ ∗ The screenplays I have discussed in this chapter problematise language both as a tool of communication—interpersonal or political—and as a tool of screenwriting. They devise stories of personal misunderstandings, such as those by Mayer and Delluc, or stories of sociopolitical conflicts, such as those by Eisenstein and Aleksandrov and Babel; at the same time, they draw attention to the medium gap that separates a verbal script from the visual film. As a means of bridging this gap and as a possible solution to the outlined conflicts the scripts suggest a change in perception, made possible by rhythm. Mayer develops a rhythmic style to sensitise his readers to both the inherent rhythm of the film medium and the repeating ups and downs of human life; Delluc uses rhythm to enhance the mental visualisation in the process of reading and to reflect the destructive cyclic nature of desire. Eisenstein and Aleksandrov, like Mayer, introduce rhythm into their script to anticipate the specifically cinematic rhythms, but also to present repetition as the base of political change; Babel employs rhythm so that his script can be read between the lines and at the same time alludes to the tragic recurrence of historicopolitical cycles. Despite the differences in the concepts of rhythm and their linguistic realisation, common to the scripts I have looked at in this chapter is their use of rhythm to overcome the inability of language to convey certain experiences, be it the experience of cinematic images, the experience of traumatic events, or the experience of time as essentially cyclic.

References Abel, Richard. 1984. French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915–1929. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Babel, Isaak. 2002. The Complete Works of Isaac Babel. Edited by Nathalie Babel. Translated by Peter Constantine. New York: Norton.

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———. 2005a. Listki ob Odesse. Odesskiye rasskazy. Istoriya moyey golubyatni. Peterburgskiy dnevnik. Zakat. Benya Krik. Bluzhdayushchiye zvezdy. Vol. 1 of Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh. Moscow: Vremya. ———. 2005b. Pis’ma. A. N. Pirozhkova. Sem’ let s Babelem. Edited by I. N. Sukhikh. Vol. 4 of Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh. Moscow: Vremya. Becker, Jörg. 1997. “Wortsetzung als Bilderführung in den StummfilmDrehbüchern Carl Mayers.” In Carl Mayer: Im Spiegelkabinett des Dr. Caligari: Der Kampf zwischen Licht und Dunkel, edited by Bernhard Frankfurter, 52–63. Vienna: Promedia. Belova, Lyudmila. 1978. Skvoz’ vremia. Ocherki istorii sovetskoi dramaturgii. Moscow: Iskusstvo. Blok, Aleksandr. 1961. Teatr. Vol. 4 of Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh. Moscow. Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Khudozhestvennoi Literatury. Bykov, Dmitry. 2018. 100 lektsiy o russkoy literature XX veka. Vremya potryaseniy 1900–1950 gg. Moscow: Eksmo. Delluc, Louis. 1990. Drames de cinéma: Scénarios et projets de films. Vol. 3 of Écrits cinématographiques. Paris: Cinémathèque Française. Eisenstein, Sergei. 1971. Izbrannye proizvedeniia v shesti tomakh, vol. 6. Moscow: Iskusstvo. ———. 1974. Eisenstein: Three Films. Edited by Jay Leyda. Translated by Diana Matias. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1988. Writings: 1922–1934. Translated by Richard Taylor. Vol. 1 of Selected Works. London: British Film Institute. ———. 2002. Grundproblem. Edited by Naum Kleiman. Vol. 1 of Metod. Moscow: Muzey Kino, Eisenstein-Tsentr. Eisner, Lotte H. 1973. Murnau. London: Secker & Warburg. ———. 2008. The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt. Berkeley: University of California Press. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2000. Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary. London: Routledge. Faber, Marion. 1978. “Carl Mayer’s ‘Sylvester’: The Screenplay as Literature.” Monatshefte für deutschen Unterricht, deutsche Sprache und Literatur 70 (2): 159–70. Heil, Jerry. 1984. “The Russian Literary Avant-Garde and the Cinema (1920s and 1930s): The Film-Work of Isaak Babel’ and Jurij Tynjanov.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley. Kasten, Jürgen. 1990. Film schreiben: Eine Geschichte des Drehbuches. Vienna: Hora Verlag. ———. 1994. Carl Mayer: Filmpoet: Ein Drehbuchautor schreibt Filmgeschichte. Berlin: Vistas.

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Krumm, Reinhard. 2004. Isaak Babel: Schreiben unter Stalin: Eine Biographie. Norderstedt, Germany: Books on Demand. Ksenofontova, Alexandra. 2018. “The Screenplay/Film Relationship Bifurcated: Reading Carl Mayer’s Sylvester (1924).” Journal of Screenwriting 9 (1): 25– 39. https://doi.org/10.1386/josc.9.1.25_1. Mayer, Carl. 1924. Sylvester: Ein Lichtspiel. Potsdam, Germany: Kiepenheuer Verlag. Moholy-Nagy, László. 1927. Malerei. Fotografie. Film. Munich: Langen. https:// doi.org/10.11588/diglit.29205. Pick, Lupu. 1924. Preface to Sylvester: Ein Lichtspiel, by Carl Mayer, 9–11. Potsdam, Germany: Kiepenheuer Verlag. Price, Steven. 2013. A History of the Screenplay. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Sadoul, Georges. 1975. L’art muet 1919–1929: L’après-guerre en Europe. Vol. 5 of Histoire générale du cinéma. Paris: Denoel. Scheunemann, Dietrich. 2003. “Once More on Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” In Expressionist Film: New Perspectives, edited by Dietrich Scheunemann, 125–56. New York: Camden House. ˇ Schmid, Wolf. 1992. Ornamentales Erzählen in der russischen Moderne. Cechov Babel’—Zamjatin. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Schwarz, Alexander. 1994. Der geschriebene Film: Drehbücher des deutschen und russischen Stummfilms. Munich: Diskurs Film. Seidel, Wilhelm. 2003. “Rhythmus.” In Postmoderne—Synästhesie, edited by Karlheinz Barck and Martin Fontius, vol. 5 of Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, 291–314. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler Verlag. Tsivian, Yuri. 1993. “Eisenstein and Russian Symbolist Culture: An Unknown Script of October.” In Eisenstein Rediscovered, edited by Ian Christie and Richard Taylor, 79–109. London: Routledge. Vertov, Dziga. 1984. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Edited by Annette Michelson. Translated by Kevin O’Brien. Berkeley: University of California Press. Vogman, Elena. 2018. Sinnliches Denken: Eisensteins exzentrische Methode. Zürich: Diaphanes. Vogman, Elena, and Marie Rebecchi. 2017. “The Anthropology of Rhythm.” In Sergei Eisenstein and the Anthropology of Rhythm, edited by Marie Rebecchi and Elena Vogman in collaboration with Till Gathmann, 9–20. Rome: Nero.

CHAPTER 10

Conclusion

So why did the screenplay captivate so many modernists? Or, what made the film script a key participant in all those culturally specific and transcultural modernist constellations I have discussed throughout the book? The answer emerging from the readings is this: Firstly, the screenplay’s embedment in two different cultural institutions—literature and film, and secondly, the fact that the screenplay can be read as both a functional and a literary text. The first factor is historically specific: After the 1920s, the screenplay was gradually pushed to the margins in the institution of literature and has not yet fully regained its initial place (the worldwide dominance of the Hollywood screenwriting orthodoxy played a major part in this development). As for the second factor, the possibility of reading screenplays as both functional and literary works applies to all and any scripts ever written; it is up to the readers to decide whether or not they want to realise this possibility. This readerly decision depends to a great extent on the potential phenomenological gain from such a reading: Will the effort of approaching a given screenplay as a literary work be worth it? Will it grant the reader a unique experience, an aesthetic and cognitive pleasure? The aim of this book has been to show that in the case of modernist screenplays, the answer to these questions is very often positive. Reading screenplays does not simply confirm the existing paradigms of literary history but also provides a fresh perspective on some aspects of modernist © The Author(s) 2020 A. Ksenofontova, The Modernist Screenplay, Palgrave Studies in Screenwriting, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50589-9_10

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literatures. Rather than being uniformly self-directed and self-contained, as modernist literature is routinely thought to be, it seeks to reconnect to functional language use through screenwriting. In other words, the screenplay undermines the idea of modernist literature as essentially detached from pragmatic concerns and everyday communication and reveals instead the desire of literature to participate in modernity by integrating itself into the film industry and into its functional communication. To this end, different literatures and individual authors highlighted different aspects of the screenplay’s embedment in film production.

The Modernist Screenplay Revisited For many French authors, the key asset of the screenplay turned out to be the transformation it undergoes in production—from a verbal artefact into a film. French modernists extrapolated this transformative potential of the screenplay onto other areas. With the help of the screenplay, they showed that literature as a whole is also constantly transforming itself and thereby has a material, transformative impact on the world. Similarly, Russian modernists discovered the screenplay as a means of renewing the established system of literary genres; however, driving this renewal was the functional, matter-of-fact language of the orthodox screenplay rather than the poetic idea of the screenplay’s transformation. The particular style of orthodox screenwriting turned out to be in accordance with the “needs” articulated in the Russian literature of the 1920s—in particular, with the need to abandon the ways of writing typical of the nineteenth century literature and develop instead an informative, “factual,” and accessible literary style. By contrast, German and Austrian focused mainly on fitting the screenplay into the existing genres and conditions of literary writing, rather than using the screenplay to undermine the latter. In doing so, they continued the tendencies of the pre-World War I screenplay publications, which highlighted the affinities between the screenplay and other literary genres while downplaying the screenplay’s embedment in film production. Only a few German-speaking authors went against this trend, discovering the screenplay as a means of reacting to the modernist crises along with their French and Russian colleagues. The unique ways in which their screenwriting answered the modernist crises also originated from the screenplay’s place in film production. As the belief in the primacy of reason over intuitive and emotional knowledge was experiencing a crisis at the turn of the twentieth century,

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multiple authors turned to the screenplay as a vehicle for anti-rationalist thinking and disruption to logical perception. At first glance, it may seem that writing a screenplay was not a suitable form of response to the crisis of reason because many readers expect the screenplay to be a text of practical use. However, precisely because the screenplay is key to a rational organisation of film production, modernist authors used it to undermine rationalist practices of making and perceiving art. Their screenplays envisage various kinds of reading that presume an emotional, corporeal, and imaginative engagement with the screenplay. These antirationalist ways of interacting with screenplays were meant to challenge not only the practices of mainstream filmmaking but also the automatised everyday language use. The modernist screenplays of Philippe Soupault and Pierre Albert-Birot, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and others aim to reenchant language while at the same time preserving its communicative function in film production. For other modernists, the fact that screenwriting relied on verbal language was problematic in its own way: Many authors saw language as inextricably tied to mimetic representation of reality. However, just like with the “rational” role of the screenplay in film production, the modernists managed to turn the tie of the screenplay to language around and make it productive in deconstructing mimesis. To this end, the authors re-functionalised the language in their screenplays, letting it serve some other purposes rather than representation. Most authors including Fernand Léger, Dziga Vertov, and Antonin Artaud used their scripts to outline the basic principles of their experimental filmmaking practices without offering detailed and comprehensive accounts of the action. Language in their scripts performatively refuses to represent, hinting at meanings and experiences that lie beyond mimetic representation. László Moholy-Nagy developed a different approach: His screenwriting goes beyond the view on words as abstract representations of meanings by drawing attention to the visual and material properties of linguistic signs. Although the ultimate purpose of these authors was detaching film from mimetic representation of reality, their screenplays also loosen the constraints of representation for language, endowing it with new aesthetic and practical functions. The practical need of communicating information about the visual film medium in the verbal text of screenplay encouraged many authors to look for a remedy against the deficiencies and pitfalls of verbal communication in rhythmic screenwriting. Rhythmic screenwriting approximates the

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specific rhythm of the film medium, such as different authors conceived of it—Carl Mayer, Louis Delluc, the duo of Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov, and others. At the same time, rhythm in their scripts was also a means of conveying feelings, experiences, and subjective perceptions despite the perceived unreliability of language. Rather than attempting to represent subjective experiences of time, memory, cinema, etc., the modernist screenplays created the subjective experience of repetition with the help of rhythm. In this way, rhythm both underscored the aesthetic potential of modernist screenplays and enhanced their functionality in film production, enabling the scripts to communicate that what seemed unspeakable. To put it simply, the modernist screenplay could challenge and renew the practices of literary writing and the institution of literature because of its embedment in film production; at the same time, it could challenge and renew the practices of filmmaking and the institution of film production because of its embedment in literature. This is why we can recognise the role that the screenplay played in the history of modernisms only in reading it as both a functional and a literary work. Using this approach in my readings of modernist screenplays, I hope to have demonstrated the possibility of an interpretive community that is cognisant of both the literary and the production contexts of screenwriting. Let us now return to the question of why such a community is needed in screenwriting studies.

A Pluralistic Approach to Screenwriting Steven Maras concludes his seminal work on the history, theory, and practice of screenwriting with an appeal for a pluralistic approach to screenwriting—an approach that embraces the “many ways of making films and ‘doing’ screenwriting” (2009, 171). This remains one of the most important tasks of screenwriting research until today. The terms and approaches I have proposed in this book—experimental screenwriting, interpretive communities, a combination of functional and literary reading—are all meant to make visible and appreciate precisely this pluralism of screenwriting practices. One obstacle to such a pluralistic approach is the common division of screenwriting into normative practices and “the alternative.” For instance, Maras criticises this division into norm and counter-norm implicit in the manual of Ken Dancynger and Jeff Rush Alternative Scriptwriting:

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Writing Beyond the Rules (1995). Instead of focusing on the pluralism of screenwriting practices, Dancynger and Rush emphasise the idea of mainstream screenwriting and present the alternative practices as deviations from the mainstream. The focus on the deviation from the norm is indeed problematic in several regards: It reinforces the dominance of the normative poetics and practices, marginalises the “alternatives,” and puts a black-and-white picture in place of a pluralistic view. To distance ourselves from the “’normal/dissident’ discourse” (Macdonald 2013, 175), it suffices to shift the focus from what screenplay or screenwriting is essentially to how screenplays prompt their readers to construct meanings. By focusing on the questions of meaning production in screenplays, we automatically foreground the screenplays that are meant to question and broaden the established ideas about what “doing” screenwriting means. These self-reflexive screenplays tell stories about storytelling and meaning production in screenplays; I have suggested calling such screenplays experimental. Experimental screenwriting does not necessarily define itself in opposition to mainstream filmmaking; rather, it encourages the readers to consider what kind of film production a given script envisages. Experimental scripts raise questions such as: (how) should film production be organised? Who is in control of it? What is the role of a verbal text in the emergence of a visual artefact? In other words, experimental screenwriting draws attention precisely to the variety of possible “ways of making films and ‘doing’ screenwriting” (Maras 2009, 171). At the same time as it raises questions related to film production, experimental screenwriting also invites the readers to consider the nature of reading. Who decides what the text means? What defines how we experience a text? What textual features do we tend to perceive as “literary” and why? In this way, experimental screenwriting draws attention to the ways of reading and appreciating screenplays (and not only to the ways of “doing ” screenwriting). By recognising the various functional and literary mechanisms of meaning production in screenplays and the different ways of reading them, we broaden our ideas of what counts as screenwriting and what doesn’t. In doing so, we are building an interpretive community that practices a pluralistic approach to screenwriting. The idea of interpretive communities has been criticised on several accounts, most notably for its insufficient theoretical elaboration (see Lindlof 2009, 556). Nevertheless, it has been successfully used in media, religion, journalism, and other studies as a heuristic tool: the notion of

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interpretive communities emphasises the malleability of cultural concepts and the social processes involved in defining these concepts. It is precisely in this heuristic way that I suggest using the term in screenwriting studies, to promote the understanding of “screenplay,” “literature,” and other key terms as malleable concepts that are defined by the readers. Although interpretive communities are, in fact, interpretive strategies, repertoires, and practices, the term “community” underscores the power of the readers in defining which texts are marginalised and which are included into the field of interest. This is not to say that the texts themselves do not participate in the process of meaning production. On the contrary, as any other texts, screenplays also prompt the readers to read them in certain ways; these ways may or may not correspond to the existing interpretive communities, creating tension between the power of texts and the power of the readers. When I say that a screenplay “prompts” the readers to read it in certain ways, it is not to be understood as a hidden recourse to some specific ways of writing, such as they are commonly evoked in the “screenplay as literature” debate. Rather, I refer to the totality of all possible contextual and textual factors that can impact how readers approach a given film script. Among the factors I have taken into account in my readings are: style and narrative structure; textual layout and typeface; textual elements such as headings, subheadings, and epigraphs; deviation from the mainstream screenwriting practices or conformity with them; various kinds of publication; accompanying texts such as prefaces and introductions; interviews with the authors and authorial comments in other sources; and so on and so forth. The more factors the readers of screenplays take into consideration, the more likely they are to account for the different ways in which scripts can construct their meanings, which amounts to a pluralistic approach to screenwriting. The benefit of such a pluralistic approach is not only a more inclusive and in-depth view on screenwriting but also a more differentiated understanding of its main contexts, namely of film production and literature. In focusing on silent film scripts in French, German, and Russian, I have only started to explore the sheer variety of formats and styles of experimental screenwriting; its history in other European and nonEuropean cultures remains to be written, as does the history of experimental screenwriting after the advent of sound film. Even though the rise of the sound film starting from the 1930s brought about dramatic changes for screenwriting, experimental screenwriting for sound film did

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not start from scratch. Below I show, based on one example from French, German, and Russian screenwriting each, that the experimentation after the advent of sound continued some of the ways paved by the silent modernist screenplay. With these readings, I aim to demonstrate that reading post-1920s screenplays as both functional and literary texts can also be “worth it”: they are just as much part of the respective literatures as the modernist screenplay.

To Be Continued: Experimental Screenwriting After the Advent of Sound Many authors who started their experiments in screenwriting during the silent film era continued these experiments or took them up again after the transition to sound film. Examples include Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, Benjamin Péret, Antonin Artaud, Dziga Vertov, Isaac Babel, and others. Rather than exploring the continuity of their work in screenwriting, I would like to focus here instead on authors whose work I have not yet had the opportunity to discuss. The first of them is Alexandr Rzheshevsky. Rzheshevsky composed his first screenplays at the end of the silent film era in a style that later became known as the “emotional scenario.” This term had no clear-cut definition and was often used to refer to the perceived “literariness” of film scripts.1 Rzheshevsky’s style was widely criticised in the Soviet press for being imprecise and difficult to work with, while Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin praised it as conveying the emotional atmosphere of the proposed narrative (see Belodubrovskaya 2016, 256–57). Rzheshevsky’s screenwriting is indeed invested in evoking the atmosphere of the action, first and foremost with the help of rhythm. Rhythmic passages are equally characteristic of Rzheshevsky’s scripts written at the end of the silent film era, and of his post-1930 scripts. 1 The provenance of the term “emotional scenario” remains unclear. It is usually ascribed to Sergei Eisenstein with reference to his article “On Screenplay Form” (1928); however, Eisenstein does not use the word combination “emotional scenario” in the article. He writes that the screenplay “is merely a shorthand record of an emotional outburst” (1988, 134) and that it “sets out the emotional requirements” (135), but no word of an “emotional scenario.” By contrast, Viktor Shklovsky uses this exact word combination in his 1931 book How to Write Screenplays (Shklovsky 1931, 23). Thus the term most likely emerged somewhere between 1928 and 1931, but when and where exactly, I was not able to clarify.

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Here is, for instance, a scene from the beginning of his screenplay Bezhin Meadow (Bezhin lug ) that was published as a separate book in 1936: Some old woman pounds in an old mortar, in which, as fairy tales say, witches used to fly at night. Some girl embroiders on a hoop. Some woman sifts the grain through a sieve, lifting it high and slamming a hand on it, like on a tambourine… (Rzheshevsky 1982, 216)

This scene pictures a fragment of rural life in the village where the action of the script takes place; the repetitive pace of writing parallels the slow, never-changing way of rural life. In the second half of the script though, the pro-Soviet villagers get the upper hand over their devious neighbours, and the backward village transforms itself into an energetic collective farm—a kolkhoz. The changing pace of life is reflected in a different rhythm of writing—shorter sentences with a simpler syntax: Here is a kolkhoz before you. What a movement! People do not shamble, but go. Horses do not drag, but run. The cart does not crawl, but rushes. (Rzheshevsky 1982, 236)

The tale of successful collectivisation of Russian farming villages was a typical narrative in the Soviet art and literature since the late 1920s; it was also the basis of Andrei Platonov’s critical script Mashinist (see Chapter 5), and of the screenplay The General Line (General’naya liniya) by Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov. It was also Eisenstein who took up the project of realising Rzheshevsky’s script; the ensuing history of shooting, censorship, rewrites in collaboration with Isaac Babel, new shooting, new censorship, prohibition, and the destruction of the unfinished film has been extensively discussed in research (see, for example, Kenez 2001; Stirk and Pinto Simon 2005). Interestingly, the script Eisenstein and Babel co-wrote based on Rzheshevsky’s initial screenplay also features a distinct rhythm of extremely short, telegraphic sentences (see Eisenstein 1971, 129–52). Rhythm thus continued to be a key means of experimental screenwriting in Russia after the transition to sound film; in particular, Rzheshevsky, Eisenstein, and Babel continued using rhythm in their screenwriting to reflect on the historical processes, conceptualising history in terms of repetition and change.

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Compared to Russian writers and filmmakers, the French avant-garde was more hostile towards the arrival of sound film, especially to the newly opened possibility of spoken dialogue in film. Film projects of Philippe Soupault, Antonin Artaud, and Robert Desnos from the 1930s demonstrate very little to no interest in the use of dialogue; so do the canonical surrealist films Un chien Andalou (1929) and L’âge d’or (1930). Dialogue threatened to limit the free play of signifiers in film and tie the film back to mimetic representation, since dialogue in film appeared to the modernists as a mimetic equivalent of dialogue in real life. This is why Artaud envisioned a sound film where the “voices and sounds [are] taken for themselves and not as the physical result of a movement or an action” (Artaud 1972, 39)—Artaud wanted to free both the image and the sound of film from the constraints of mimesis. Other artists and writers, too, looked for possibilities of writing antimimetic sound films. For instance, painter and poet José Viola Gamón, also known under his pseudonyms Manuel Viola or, in this case, J.-V. Manuel, published his “Synopsis for a Surrealist Film” in the French surrealist journal La main à plume in 1943. The synopsis is entitled The One Who Has No Name (Celui qui n’a pas de nom) and devises a series of unconnected surrealist scenes revolving around the character Guitrial. Manuel’s script resembles the surrealist scripts from the 1920s in several regards. Its key motif is the motif of doubles, which manifests itself in the uncanny conflation between the “real” Guitrial and his copy. On multiple occasions, the script suggests using close-ups—the favourite cinematic technique of the surrealists. It contains no dialogue and almost no diegetic text, with only one exception: “A very young couple in bed, the girl gets up and, with her lipstick, writes on the glass of the wardrobe: ‘A suicide is more beautiful than a peace treaty’” (Manuel 1943, [3]). In a footnote, Manuel identifies this sentence as a quote from none other than Benjamin Péret (indeed, it is a quote from Péret’s 1928 poem “Ace of Spades” [“As de pique”]). In this way, the only textual element in the script pays tribute to the surrealist programme and to the ultimate surrealist poet Péret. The finale of the script also evokes the surrealist movement. In the last scene, one of the two Guitrials opens the door that leads to a plain. Lying on the ground, half covered with mud and vegetation, sleeps an army in formation. In the middle, a large mast. The figure goes to the mast, ties the bed sheet to it with a rope and hoists it slowly. The bed sheet, with the cut out silhouette of the

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woman, waves like a flag. The cut-out, silhouetted against the starry sky, reveals a constellation. (Manuel 1943, [5])

This last scene of the script can be seen as an allegory of the surrealist programme: Just like the emptiness of the cut-out reveals a constellation behind it, so does the absence of logical meaning and coherence of the story reveal the actual goal of the surrealist (screen)writing. This goal is a psychic experience beyond the constraints of reason and sociocultural norms; an experience that could present a radically different picture of the world and thereby undermine the dominant moral, ideological, and political powers. The One Who Has No Name demonstrates that surrealist screenwriting continued pursuing these goals after the advent of sound film. The very last screenplay I would like to discuss in this book is one of the screenplays that started my interest in screenwriting—Wrong Move (Falsche Bewegung ) by Peter Handke, published as a separate book in 1975; the film based on this script was directed by Wim Wenders and premiered the same year. Handke’s script tells the story of a young man Wilhelm who dreams of becoming a writer and goes on a travel in the search for inspiration. Like several German-speaking authors from the 1920s—Walter Hasenclever, Carl Mayer, László Moholy-Nagy, and others—Handke prefers a nominal style, which describes the action in nouns instead of in full verbal sentences: Wilhelm in the compartment, still combing his hair. The opposite seat with a large brown stain. In another corner of the compartment: a dark-haired girl of about fourteen staring at Wilhelm. The landscape with the gently swinging wires in front of the window. Close-up of the girl who is staring at Wilhelm. The landscape of Schleswig-Holstein: a pony gallops alongside the train for a while. Waving children. A street where cars are driving parallel to the train. (Handke 1975, 17)

In the 1920s, such style of writing often (though not always) conveyed the modernist experience of dissociation—the perception of the new modern reality as disjointed, lacking coherence and sense. Handke’s script, too, conjures up a series of fleeting impressions of modern life that the protagonist Wilhelm collects on his journey. At the same time,

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the disconnection between separate images and experiences highlights the work that Wilhelm dreams of doing—the work of the writer who puts these disjointed fragments together. In an interview he gave in 1975, Handke recounts that he was interested in showing someone who “wants to become something, an artist, […] who wants to do something that is at the same time a work” (Handke 1988, 18). Just like the scripts of many modernist writers, Handke’s Wrong Move foregrounds the material labour of writing. In the finale of the script, the protagonist Wilhelm takes up the task of connecting his impressions into the whole of a story and writing it down; this is also the task that the readers of the script, including the director and other members of the film crew, have to face— they have to put together their own version of Wilhelm’s story from the scenes and descriptions the script provides. In this way, the script shows that the processes of creative perception and production are inseparable: One is impossible without the other, as both the story of Wilhelm and the specific experience of reading offered by Handke’s script demonstrate. The scripts by Rzheshevsky, Manuel, and Handke are just a few examples from the vast field of the post-1930 experimental screenwriting that remains to be explored. I hope to have demonstrated that this field is worth exploring, as experimental screenplays have their own specific means of storytelling, and with these means, they tell stories differently than other literary genres, but also differently than film. By choosing to explore only the film scripts that are available in print today, I aimed to show that reading and studying screenplays is neither the privilege of film industry professionals, nor does it necessarily amount to archival research. We can all read screenplays, and this book was meant to demonstrate that such reading can be worth the effort. This also applies to silent screenplays, and to modernist screenplays in particular; some of the questions they raise and the means they employ have not lost their relevance today. Ultimately, this book is not only about how the screenplays can and should be read, but also about the fact that screenplays can and should be read by anyone interested in storytelling—that is, perhaps, by anyone.

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References Artaud, Antonin. 1972. Scenarios. On the Cinema. Interviews. Letters. Translated by Alastair Hamilton. Vol. 3 of Collected Works. London: Calder & Boyars. Belodubrovskaya, Maria. 2016. “The Literary Scenario and the Soviet Screenwriting Tradition.” In A Companion to Russian Cinema, edited by Birgit Beumers, 251–69. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell. Eisenstein, Sergei. 1971. Izbrannye proizvedeniia v shesti tomakh. Vol. 6. Moscow: Iskusstvo. ———. 1988. Writings: 1922–1934. Translated by Richard Taylor. Vol. 1 of Selected Works. London: British Film Institute. Handke, Peter. 1975. Falsche Bewegung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1988. “Die Helden sind die andern. Joachim von Mengerhausen spricht mit Peter Handke und Wim Wenders.” In Die Logik der Bilder: Essays und Gespräche, by Wim Wenders, edited by Michael Töteberg, 18–22. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren. Kenez, Peter. 2001. “A History of Bezhin Meadow.” In Eisenstein at 100: A Reconsideration, edited by Albert J. LaValley and Barry P. Scherr, 193–206. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Lindlof, Thomas R. 2009. “Interpretive Communities Theory.” In [J - Y, index], Vol. 2 of Encyclopedia of Communication Theory, edited by Stephen W. Littlejohn and Karen A. Foss, 554–56. Los Angeles: Sage. Macdonald, Ian W. 2013. Screenwriting Poetics and the Screen Idea. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Manuel, J.-V. [José Viola Gamón]. 1943. Celui qui n’a pas de nom. Les pages libres de la main à plume, no. 7: n.p. Maras, Steven. 2009. Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice. London: Wallflower. Rzheshevsky, Alexandr. 1982. Zhizn, kino. Moscow: Iskusstvo. Shklovsky, Viktor. 1931. Kak pisat’ stsenarii: Posobiye dlya nachinayushchikh stsenaristov s obraztsami stsenariyev raznogo tipa. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Khudozhestvennoi Literatury. Stirk, David, and Elena Pinto Simon. 2005. “Jay Leyda and Bezhin Meadow.” In Eisenstein Rediscovered, edited by Ian Christie and Richard Taylor, 40–51. London: Routledge.

Index

A abstract film, 84, 127, 164 adaptation, literary, 49, 52, 56, 120–126, 214 aesthetics of screenwriting. See literary reading Albert-Birot, Pierre, 75, 132–133, 135–138, 225 alternative screenwriting, 10–11, 226, 227 Andreyev, Leonid, 55–58, 61 animals in screenplays, 103, 122, 145, 176 animation, screenwriting for, 160–165 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 70–71, 74, 84, 136 Artaud, Antonin, 78, 181–187, 188, 225, 229, 231 Assassination of the Duke of Guise, The (L’assassinat du duc de Guise), 48–51, 61 Austria, screenwriting in, 120, 124–126, 128, 224, 232–233

automatisation of writing, 148 autonomy of screenplay. See literary reading avant-garde, 22 B Babel, Isaac, 102–104, 213–219, 229, 230 Balázs, Béla, 29 Berge, André, 16, 27, 72–73 blueprint, screenplay as, 8, 106 body in screenwriting, 143, 146–148, 161–162, 165, 182–187 Brecht, Bertolt, 126, 148–154, 229 Breton, André, 77, 79, 81, 132, 144 Brik, Osip, 28–29, 95, 98–100, 101, 106 C Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari), 21, 112, 113, 195

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Ksenofontova, The Modernist Screenplay, Palgrave Studies in Screenwriting, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50589-9

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INDEX

Cahiers du Mois, Les , 16, 27, 72, 76, 132 Canudo, Ricciotto, 27, 66–67, 69–70 capitalism, 15, 20, 137, 138, 148 cartoon. See animation, screenwriting for Cendrars, Blaise, 66, 160 censorship, 102, 104, 105, 108, 121, 207, 208, 213, 214, 218, 230 Chaplin, Charlie, 47, 66, 79–83, 145–146, 147, 160–165 character-centred screenwriting, 93, 94, 101, 104, 123, 126, 127 Charlot. See Chaplin, Charlie Chenal, Pierre, 78 cinema of attractions, 135–136 circular narratives, 134, 135 city symphony, 87, 175. See also urbanism closet drama, 12 closet screenplay, 3, 11–12, 15, 16, 66, 76 close-up, 36, 77, 114, 169, 177, 178, 231, 232 Cohen, Albert, 82–83 collective authorship, 6, 35, 36 comedy screenplay, 47, 55–58, 71, 103–104, 143–148 conception and execution, the separation of, 5, 13, 33, 188, 207 conventional screenwriting. See orthodoxy, screenwriting copyright, 26, 161, 188 corporeal experience. See body in screenwriting crisis of language, 19, 20, 193, 219, 225 of mimetic representation, 19, 20, 159, 188, 225, 231 of reason, 19, 20, 131, 132, 148, 154, 183, 224

cyclic narratives, 69, 199, 205–206, 210, 218, 219

D Dada, 83–85 Delluc, Louis, 68–70, 202–206, 219, 226 Desnos, Robert, 76–78, 87, 145, 146, 231 director’s script, 105–108 discourse and story, 12–14, 33, 117, 205 distancing effect, 126, 127, 149 Döblin, Alfred, 15, 120, 121–123, 127, 152, 229 documentary screenplay, 83, 84, 87, 140, 141, 165–171. See also fact, literature of drama. See theatre dream motif, 54, 55, 69, 73, 74, 75–79, 94, 134–136, 137, 152, 182–183, 186, 187, 206 Dulac, Germaine, 182, 186, 187, 202

E early film, 93, 113, 135, 146 early screenwriting, 19, 39, 45–48, 93 Eisenstein, Sergei, 97, 102, 103, 107, 206–213, 219, 226, 229, 230 emotional screenplay, 229 experimental screenwriting, 10–14, 17, 226, 227 expressionist film, 151, 154 expressionist literature, 53, 111–120, 127, 197

F fact, literature of, 91, 94–101, 104, 107

INDEX

fantasy screenplay, 108, 136, 140, 141, 154, 155. See also transformation: between fiction and reality female screenwriters. See women screenwriters fiction. See under transformation: between fiction and reality figurative language, 37, 72, 103, 108, 143, 155, 208. See also irony; metaphor; non-figurative language film catalogue, 39, 45–46, 47 Film d’Art, 48–51, 52 film production, situation of, 3, 38–40 film review, 81–82, 83, 145 Fish, Stanley, 5, 7, 10 Fondane, Benjamin, 12, 76 format, screenplay, 7, 12, 13, 21, 60, 91 France, screenwriting in, 16, 19, 27, 46, 48–51, 65–88, 132–138, 143–148, 160–165, 181–187, 202–206, 224, 231–232 free indirect discourse, 20, 72, 114, 149, 153–154, 155 functional reading, 4, 5, 7–9, 16, 21–22, 36–38, 223 futurism, 108, 136, 142 G Galeen, Henrik, 112, 113, 127 Gassner, John, 29 genre functional, 1, 37, 38–40 hybridity, 79–83, 138 literary, 1, 6, 7, 16, 41 Germany, screenwriting in, 19, 26, 27, 52–55, 79, 80, 128, 148–154, 172–181, 194–201, 224 Gesamtkunstwerk, 80, 81 Gide, André, 69–74

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Goll, Yvan, 79–81, 83, 160 Gorki, Maxim, 92–93, 94

H Handke, Peter, 8, 232–233 Harbou, Thea von, 112, 115–116, 127 Hasenclever, Walter, 53, 54, 114, 117–119, 120, 127 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 123–124 historical screenplay, 48–51, 92–93, 100–101, 206–213 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 125 Hollywood screenwriting, 16, 106, 107, 223 Hugnet, Georges, 75, 78

I Ilf, Ilya, and Evgeny Petrov, 102, 103–104 illustrated screenplays, 60, 67, 160, 172–181 improvisation, 47, 87, 127. See also rejection of screenwriting incompleteness of the screenplay, 8, 18, 26, 31–36 intention, 32, 38–40 interpretive community, 5–7, 9–12, 17, 25, 31, 35, 42, 226–228 intertitles, 55–58, 72, 80, 125, 142, 211 rejection of, 122, 123, 198, 203 iron script, 105–108 irony, 19, 57, 67, 69, 71, 78, 91, 102–105, 151–153, 215, 218 Italy, screenwriting in, 17, 52, 136

K Kaiser, Georg, 114, 119–120, 127 Kammerspiel film, 150, 201, 202

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INDEX

Kinobuch, Das , 48, 52–55, 59, 61, 62 Kuleshov, Lev, 107, 139 L layout of screenplays, 7, 12, 14, 53, 60, 115, 179–181 lecturer, film, 46, 204 LEF (Levy Front Iskusstv), 95–97, 167 Léger, Fernand, 83, 85–87, 160–165, 171, 180, 188, 225 literary criticism, 4, 18, 32, 33, 36 literary reading, 4, 5, 7, 9, 16, 21–22, 23, 25, 26, 31, 34, 36–38, 42, 223 literary script, 105–108 literature as cultural institution, 8, 31, 34, 41, 223, 226 as malleable concept, 7, 10, 30–31, 228 screenplay as, 25, 26–31, 41 M Macdonald, Ian W., 10, 32–34, 38–40 manuals, screenwriting, 8–12, 26, 29, 106 Manuel, Viola (pseud. José Viola Gamón), 231–232, 233 Maras, Steven, 10, 21, 226 materiality of screenplay, 13, 33, 36, 179, 181 of writing, 54, 74, 141, 164, 203, 225 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 58, 108, 138–143, 162, 225 Mayer, Carl, 30, 99, 112, 113, 116, 117, 126, 127, 194–201, 202–205, 219, 226 meaning production, 3, 8, 14, 31–32, 33, 37, 42, 227, 228 medium, 13, 33, 219

film, 13, 17, 53, 54, 92, 93, 155, 197, 200, 204, 226 literature, 17, 54 Méliès, Georges, 46, 135, 136 melodrama, 67, 78, 94, 98, 117, 151, 153 memory in screenwriting, 68, 69, 88, 92, 202–206. See also trauma metanarrative. See self-reflexive screenplay metaphor, 37, 72, 104, 142, 143, 163, 164, 209 mimesis. See crisis: of mimetic representation modernisms, 14, 18, 19, 22–23, 111, 224 modernist screenplay, 14–17, 22–23, 41 Moholy-Nagy, László, 127, 172–181, 188, 193, 194, 225 montage, 169, 185, 206 multiple versions of the screenplay. See incompleteness of the screenplay N narrative. See discourse and story narratology, 13, 36 narrator in screenplays, 20, 96, 101, 112, 134 neo-romanticism, 19, 113–114, 127, 149 nominal style, 118, 164, 168, 178, 188, 193, 204, 232 non-figurative language, 77, 82, 94–101, 102, 112, 133, 144 non-linear narratives, 85–87, 95, 99, 179, 180, 209, 210. See also circular narratives; cyclic narratives non-narrative screenwriting, 85– 87, 174. See also surrealist screenwriting

INDEX

normative concept of literature, 18, 25, 26–31, 55 normative poetics of screenwriting. See orthodoxy, screenwriting notations, 2, 7 numbered script. See director’s script O objects as characters, 76, 80, 85, 134, 136, 137, 147, 162–164, 178, 198, 202, 203 orthodoxy, screenwriting, 5, 9–11, 13, 14, 16, 121, 223 in Germany, 111–113 in Russia, 91, 95, 98, 100, 102, 103, 105, 108, 207, 224 P Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 31–32, 34 past tense in screenplays, 60, 207, 208 Pegas (the journal), 48, 58–61, 62 Péret, Benjamin, 81–82, 83, 143–148, 229, 231 performativity, 143, 155, 165–167, 225 Picabia, Francis, 85–87, 133 Pinthus, Kurt, 52–55, 114 Platonov, Andrei, 102–103, 104, 230 playwrighting. See theatre pluralism of screenwriting practices, 20, 226–228 poetic screenwriting, 22, 98. See also literature: screenplay as in France, 65–88 rhythmic screenwriting, 193–219 screenplay-poem, 76, 132–138, 148 politics and screenwriting, 17, 67–68, 86, 91, 92, 102–105, 108, 117, 177, 208, 211, 213, 214, 219. See also censorship post-production, 7, 46

239

production studies, 16, 33 psychoanalysis, 67, 72, 77, 79, 183 psychological experience, 65, 74, 79, 148, 177, 182, 206, 232 psychology of characters, 67, 72, 93, 94, 101, 121, 122, 126, 127, 149–151, 154, 199 publication of screenplays, 2, 7–10, 14, 17, 18, 30, 34–36 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 99, 107, 229 R re-enchantment of cinema, 132–138 of language, 138–143, 225 of the everyday, 20, 75, 77, 132–138, 147, 162 rejection of screenwriting, 83–87, 127, 159–161, 165–171 representation. See crisis: of mimetic representation rhetoric, 3, 4, 38, 39 rhythm, 84, 168, 176, 178, 193, 194 rhythmic screenwriting, 20, 68, 69, 76, 99, 115, 118, 178, 179, 193–219, 225, 229–230 Ribemont-Dessaignes, Georges, 77, 78 Rolland, Romain, 67–68, 69 Romains, Jules, 27, 66, 71–72 Russia, screenwriting in, 19, 27, 28–29, 55–61, 91–108, 138– 143, 165–171, 206–219, 224, 229–230 Ruttmann, Walter, 127, 133, 175 Rzheshevsky, Alexandr, 229–230, 233 S scenario. See screenplay Schnitzler, Arthur, 52, 120, 124–126, 127

240

INDEX

screen idea, 32–34 screenplay as genre, 16, 38–41, 42 as literature, 25, 26–31, 41, 228 as merchandise, 8, 115, 128 as verbal text, 3, 13, 33 term, 2–3, 21 screenplay-poem, 76, 132–138, 148 Screenwriting Research Network, 1 script. See screenplay self-reflexive screenplay, 14, 22, 170, 177, 227 Shklovsky, Viktor, 27, 100–101, 169, 229 situation of film production, recurring, 39 sound film, screenwriting for, 14, 20, 29, 40, 106, 126, 228–233 Soupault, Philippe, 75, 78, 81, 132–138, 144, 146, 162, 225, 231 Soviet regime, 91, 96, 98, 102– 105, 140, 166, 207, 214. See also censorship; politics and screenwriting style, screenplay, 13, 14, 28, 91, 95, 98, 100, 106, 108, 112, 113, 117, 168, 195. See also figurative language; non-figurative language; nominal style; rhythmic screenwriting surrealist film, 78, 120, 231 surrealist screenwriting, 12, 74–79, 79–83, 84, 85, 120, 132–138, 143–148, 182, 231–232 Survage, Léopold, 84 syntax in screenplays, 77, 96, 99–101, 112, 118, 196, 204, 215 T technical indications, 22, 106, 114, 196

technology, 22, 37, 54, 115, 117, 148, 176 theatre and cinema, 56 and screenwriting history, 27, 39, 48–51, 53, 57, 58, 60, 61, 80, 112, 120–126, 127, 149 and screenwriting theory, 12, 15, 21, 29, 36, 106 Elizabethan, 7, 35, 36 epic, 126, 149 of Cruelty, 184, 186 studies and drama studies, 6–7, 35 trade press, film, 59, 60 tragicomic screenplay, 151, 153 transformation between fiction and reality, 19, 54, 55, 65, 69, 70–74, 78 of literature through the screenplay, 10, 65, 79–83, 88, 224 of screenplay into film, 19, 55, 65, 69, 79, 83, 88, 165, 213, 224 trauma, 66–69, 74, 88, 92, 205, 217, 218 Tretyakov, Sergei, 95, 97 typeface in screenplays, 7, 177, 178–179 U unshootable screenplay. See closet screenplay urbanism, 115, 117, 127, 172, 176, 197 V Verfremdungseffekt . See distancing effect Vertov, Dziga, 83, 87, 107, 108, 139, 165–171, 172, 175–177, 180, 188, 194, 225, 229 Vigo, Jean, 87, 135

INDEX

241

visualisation, readerly, 32, 67, 206, 219

World War I, 16, 17, 66, 67, 92, 131, 176 writing as labour, 26, 138–143, 233

W Wachowski, Lana and Lilly, 36 Weimar cinema. See expressionist film; Germany, screenwriting in women screenwriters, 18, 53, 54, 59, 96, 97, 115

Y Yesenin, Sergei, 96 Z Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 93–94