This chapter discusses the porous and intertwining borders between two different and yet complementary forms of narrative those represented by the flickering images of the early cinema and those represented by the challenging fiction of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939). Although the relation between cinema and modernism has been variously explored, Joyce’s peculiar use of proto as well as futuristic cinematic devices engages the reader on a deeper level in his last novel. The life of the Porter family narrated in III.4 offers a fascinating cinematic treatment of memory, thought and speech, not only for the peculiar interpolation of images, which reminds one of Eisenstein’s intellectual montage, but also for the objectification/mechanisation of the gaze, whereby the human eye turns into a camera eye and subjectivity yields into objectivity. Even the Porters’ final sexual intercourse becomes material for a cinemtagraphic performace: the parody of an erotic movie to be offered to an audience with a voyeur-like perspective.
Sound-image-action: James Joyce and the “moving pictures”
VOLPONE, Annalisa
2019
Abstract
This chapter discusses the porous and intertwining borders between two different and yet complementary forms of narrative those represented by the flickering images of the early cinema and those represented by the challenging fiction of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939). Although the relation between cinema and modernism has been variously explored, Joyce’s peculiar use of proto as well as futuristic cinematic devices engages the reader on a deeper level in his last novel. The life of the Porter family narrated in III.4 offers a fascinating cinematic treatment of memory, thought and speech, not only for the peculiar interpolation of images, which reminds one of Eisenstein’s intellectual montage, but also for the objectification/mechanisation of the gaze, whereby the human eye turns into a camera eye and subjectivity yields into objectivity. Even the Porters’ final sexual intercourse becomes material for a cinemtagraphic performace: the parody of an erotic movie to be offered to an audience with a voyeur-like perspective.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
