The Cinematic Mode in Fiction

Cinema has influenced modern and contemporary culture in many ways, for example by contributing to reshaping language, reinforcing or dismantling sexual biases, addressing politics and family order, fostering fashion trends, and triggering new aspirations or frustrations. It has also greatly fascinated writers. More specifically, what impact did film form have on writers throughout the twentieth century? This question has repeatedly been addressed by academics and critics over the years, but the answer has remained ill-defined for a long time before finding a suitable theoretical framework recently, thanks to studies in intermediality. In my doctoral research (‘The Cinematic Mode in Twentieth-Century Fiction. A Comparative Approach”) I dealt with the influence and re-use of filmic suggestions in terms of remediation (Bolter and Grusin) of medial characteristics and cinematic techniques in novels and short stories. I focused on the general paradigm, not on the imitation of filmmakers’ specific styles.

One particularly significative aspect of this remediation has to do with the implicit imitation (Rajewsky) of the cinematic medium within the structures of literary fiction. Much criticism has delved into the power of cinema of creating a vivid, faithful representation of reality thanks to its inherent photographic quality. Consequently, scholars have analysed the affinity between the visual elements of cinema and the descriptive quality of certain literary fiction. The issue was to find an equivalence between the flow of cinematic images and the cinema-like, objective quality of literary pages that allegedly replicate such detail. The metaphor of the cinematic ‘eye’ has been key since the early studies on the topic; the concepts of ‘behaviourism’ (Magny) and, in narratology, that of ‘camera-eye’ (Stanzel) were put forth to describe the cinematic style in literature.

However, I contend that a likewise important effect has concerned the remediation of cinematic temporality and rhythm; in particular, the articulation of ‘foreground’ and ‘background’ narrative passages and the so-called ‘narrative relief’ (Weinrich) in fiction. In fact, thanks to its inherent power to show, film form is capable of surcharging whatever is placed in front of the camera of an unprecedented amount of interest. Taken as a whole, the flow of cinematic images and the amount of detailed information which is conveyed through the cinematic semiosis imply that film form tends to reduce the range between background and foreground narrative moments; this means that both key and irrelevant scenic passages are comparatively pushed to the narrative foreground.

This is why films seem to unfold in an illusive and immersive ‘present tense’, as has repeatedly been claimed. In my research I have framed this aspect in terms of a flattening of the ‘narrative relief’ of film as a medium, which is remediated in cinematic fiction. Accordingly, cinematic novels and short stories are enacted by para-cinematic narrators who tend to convey the narrative as cinematic narrators do. Such literary narrators tend to funnel narrative and descriptive information through a ‘foreground’ style. It follows that a camera-eye style need not be deployed necessarily, i.e. external focalisation is not the main requisite of cinematic fiction, as was argued in the past.

Literary fiction integrates the cinematic ‘mode’ when imitating the rhythm of narrative films, their ‘narrative pressure’ (Chatman). Thus, building further on insights such as Alastair Fowler’s, intertextual and intermedial phenomena can also be framed within the theory of genres. The concept of mode refers to a ‘distillation’ of salient characteristics of the medium of film that come to be included in another medium or genre. The cinematic mode interacts in literary fiction with disparate genres and subgenres and establishes a further set of aesthetic coordinates in the narrative contract with the reader.

References

Bolter, J.D. and Grusin, R. (1999), Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Massachussets: The MIT Press.

Chatman, S. (1990), Coming to Terms. The Rethoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca-London: Cornell University Press.

Fowler, A. (2002) [1982], Kinds of Literature. An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Magny, C.-E. (1948), L’Âge du roman américain. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Rajewsky, I.O. (2005), “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality”, Intermédialités. Histoire et Théorie Des Arts, Des Lettres et Des Techniques, Vol. 6, pp. 43–64.

Stanzel, F.K. (1971), Narrative Situations in the Novel: Tom Jones, Moby Dick, The Ambassadors, Ulysses. Translated by J.P. Pusack. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Weinrich, H. (1978) [1964, 1971], Tempus. Le funzioni dei tempi nel testo, translated by La Valva, M.P., Bologna: Il Mulino.