10 - Fiction and Film, 1980–2018

Summary

The most common interpretation of the conjunction ‘and’ in the phrase ‘fiction and film’ is to silently convert it into a preposition; to think of adaptation of novels and short stories into film and TV. Given how many books have served as source texts for visual media, this is hardly surprising. The Russian director Sergei Eisenstein also noted that many of the narrative strategies of nineteenth-century popular novelists had inspired innovative directors such as D. W. Griffith or King Vidor in their development of cinematic techniques such as the close-up, the dissolve, the superimposed shot or montage. In turn, modernist writers learnt from cinematography: think of the scene from Mrs Dalloway (1925) in which the point of view shifts back and forth between the advertising slogan being puffed into the sky by an aeroplane and different individuals on the ground: this is classic intercutting.