that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself” (25).
Greenberg’s essay was written in 1939, when Fascism had overtaken Europe, when modern art, which had already been assimilated into bourgeois culture, was being assailed from both the left and the right for its decadence and elitism, and when aestheticism seemed caught in a struggle to survive capitalism and Stalinism. For Greenberg, the only refuge for “authentic” art lay in the realm of the “merely artistic,” or in the radically formal exploration of artistic media. The artistic imitation of the natural or social world, he argued, needed to be replaced by the study of “the disciplines and processes of art and literature themselves” (23). Unfortunately, as Juan A. Suarez has observed, the result of this policy was “an exacerbation of formalism and a sort of art in exile from the values of audiences; that is, an art which seeks to remain untainted by reigning mercantilism and instrumental rationality” (6–7).
The capitalist movie industry, especially in Hollywood, operated by a dialectically opposite logic. It recognized from the beginning that it could gain a sort of legitimacy among middle-class viewers by reproducing facsimiles of more respectable art or by adapting literature to another medium. Film scholars William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson have demonstrated that as early as 1908, at the height of the nickelodeon boom and partly in response to the Reform movement in American politics, the Vitagraph film company in New York engaged in an aggressive, concentrated effort to appeal to the middle class by making one-reel adaptions of Shakespeare and Dante. At virtually the same moment, Parisian financiers established the Société Film d’Art, which made quite profitable feature-length films based on the dramas of Rostand and Sardou, as well as silent versions of Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. Historian David Cook remarks, “For a while it seemed as if everything written, sung, or danced (for photographed ballet and opera formed a large part of the film d’art corpus) in Western Europe between 1900 and the Renaissance, and Greek tragedy as well, found its way into one of these stage-bound and pretentious productions” (53). But uncinematic as the early adaptations may seem today, they were among the first feature films, and their drive for respectability pointed toward the development of the star system, the picture palace, and in one sense Hollywood itself. Equally important were the hugely successful Italian historical pictures of the same period, especially Enrico Guazzoni’s Quo Vadis? (1912), a nine-reel spectacular based on a novel by Nobel laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz, which established the market for “blockbuster” movies such as Birth of a Nation (1915), also an adaptation.
The advent of the talkies and the Fordist organization of the major film studios produced a great appetite for literature among Hollywood moguls, who provided a source of major income, if not artistic satisfaction, for every important playwright and author in the United States, including Eugene O’Neill, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and William Faulkner. But here we encounter an important historical irony. At the same time that modernity and capitalism were bringing the movies, the legitimate theater, and the book publishing industry closer together, sophisticated literary artists in general were in active rebellion against bourgeois culture and were intentionally producing work that could not be easily assimilated into mainstream adaptations. Modernism was not only willfully difficult and formally “experimental,” it was also sexually scandalous, critical of progress, and offensive to the Babbitts and the Bovarys who supposedly made up the viewing audience. Thus, at the height of the classic studio system, when Hollywood was absorbing every kind of artistic talent and establishing itself as the very emblem of modernity, the Production Code Administration (PCA) began to engage in what Richard Maltby calls “a conscious ideological project” aimed at preventing what one of its leaders described as “the prevalent type of book and play” from becoming “the prevalent type of movie” (Maltby, “To Prevent the Prevalent Type of Book,” 81). This did not mean that modern literature was no longer adapted. Classic Hollywood wanted to acquire every sort of cultural capital, but it was especially interested in source material that could easily be recuperated into an aesthetically and morally conservative form of entertainment. Even after the qualified relaxation of censorship restrictions in the 1950s, the most adaptable sources for movies were the “readerly” texts of the nineteenth century rather than the “writerly” texts of high modernism, which were explicitly designed to resist being reduced” to anything not themselves.
Meanwhile, in still another historical irony, film was being regarded in some quarters as the quintessential medium for modernist and avant-garde art. Some of the most talented movie directors in the first half of the century approached the problem of literary adaptation in the spirit of intense aestheticism, as in Erich von Stroheim’s version of Greed (1924) or Eisenstein’s abortive attempt to film An American Tragedy. Modern experimental fiction was sometimes directly influenced by cinema, as when John Dos Passos began his USA trilogy shortly after meeting Eisenstein and reading the Soviet theories of montage. Eventually, the cinema was theorized as the dominant “way of seeing” in the modern world and as a condition toward which most of the visual and literary arts aspired. Cultural critic Arnold Hauser placed the whole of twentieth-century art, including such things as Cubist paintings and poems like The Waste Land, under the evocative rubric of “the film age.” French critic Claude-Edmonde Magny proposed that the period between the two world wars should be called “the age of the American novel” and that the leading American writers, especially Hemingway and Faulkner, were guided by a “film aesthetic.” American critics Alan Spiegel and Keith Cohen each wrote books arguing that modern Anglo/European literature, including Flaubert, Proust, James, Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf, was fundamentally “cinematic” in form.
It was not until 1957 that the movies seemed to have matured enough to produce the first full-scale academic analysis of film adaptation in America: George Bluestone’s Novels into Film: The Metamorphosis of Fiction into Cinema. In this book Bluestone argues that certain movies (his examples are all from Hollywood, including The Informer, Wuthering Heights, and The Grapes of Wrath) do not debase their literary sources; instead, they “metamorphose” novels into another medium that has its own formal or narratological possibilities. Such an argument seems unlikely to provoke controversy; one of its difficulties, at least insofar as Bluestone’s general aim of giving movies artistic respectability is concerned, is that it takes place entirely on the grounds of modernist aestheticism. Given Bluestone’s thesis, film can’t acquire true cultural capital unless it first theorizes its own media-specific form. Hence Bluestone argues that “the end products of novel and film represent different aesthetic genera, as different from each other as ballet is from architecture” (5). At the same time, however, he tends to confirm the artistic priority and superiority of canonical novels, if only because they provide the films he discusses with their sources and artistic standards.
When we start from Bluestone’s position, the only way to avoid making film seem belated, middlebrow, or culturally inferior is to devalue adaptation altogether. That’s more or less what happened in Europe at almost the same moment when Bluestone’s book was published. The central importance of the French New Wave in the history of worldwide taste and opinion was that it was able to break with traditional movie criticism and establish a truly modernist (as well as somewhat Arnoldian) film criticism by launching an attack on what Truffaut called a “tradition of quality” made up of respectable literary adaptations. One of the best-kept secrets of the New Wave was that many of their own films were based on books; the sources they chose, however, were often lowbrow, and when they closely adapted “serious” works or wrote essays about film adaptations (such as Bazin’s essay on Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest), they made sure that the auteur would seem at least as important as the author. Along similar lines, they gave legitimacy to art-film directors who were less interested in adapting literature than in interrogating or “reading” it. One of the many who followed in their wake was Rainer Werner Fassbinder, an explosively antibourgeois filmmaker who once argued that cinematic transformation of a literary work should never assume its purpose is to realize the images that literature evokes in the minds of its readers. Such a goal is preposterous, Fassbinder wrote, because there are so many different readers with different fantasies. His own aim, as he described it in relation to Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) and Querelle (1982), was to avoid a
