 Henry James and Early Film

 Jonathan Freedman
Abstract

Although Henry James was alert to contemporary culture and media in the years when
film was invented and institutionalized, he attended few early films and mentioned them
infrequently in his work. James's work parallels many of the most salient features of this
rapidly developing new form. Comparing his works with the films of G.A. Smith, this
article argues that the two share a remarkably similar set of techniques and thematic
obsessions and helps us to understand both the dynamics of early film and the relentless
experimentation of the high cultural Master of the Art of Fiction.

As part of an ongoing project on Henry James and the new media, I've been
asking myself these questions: What did Henry James have to do with early film?
And what does early film have to do with Henry James?

The easiest answer is: astonishingly little. To be sure, Henry James went to the
movies—occasionally. According to the late Adeline Tintner, he attended a
screening of the famed seventy-minute-long film of the James J. Corbett-Bob
Fitzsimmons fight of 1897 (189ff). In his letters, he mentions taking his niece in
1900 to a variety show in London, which included an "Actuality"—a scene from
the Boer War (LE 138). In his 1909 story "Crapy Cornelia," he compares the
approach of the title character's hat to a cinematic close-up: it "grew nearer and
nearer, while it met his eyes, after the manner of images in the cinematograph"
(CS2 825). Rosella Mamoli Zorzi has brought to my attention a letter of 1912 in
which James twits a friend for wanting to see her grandchild in another
"actuality," this one recording the ceremony by which King George V was greeted
in India (LMA 118). And that, as far as I can tell, is it.

Although critics like David Trotter (20-21) and Joseph Rosenberg have made a
good deal out of these intersections—especially the "Crapy Cornelia" reference—
surely the point here is that out of all the possible conjunctures between James and
film, there are so very few. This dearth is striking, given James's persistent
interest, in both life and art, in new media and communications technologies—art-
photography (evidenced by Alvin Coburn's frontispieces to the New York
Edition), the telegraph (thematized in "In the Cage"), the telephone (James an
early adopter), and the typewriter (James famously dictated most of his major
works to a series of amanuenses, the most important of whom, Theodora
Bosanquet, recorded that he could only compose to the accompaniment of a
Remington). And he could hardly have missed film. Not only were cinematic
venues popping up all over London and smaller towns like Brighton, the industry
was developing in close physical proximity to James: Biograph built a big studio
in 1907 on 14th Street and 5th Avenue, six blocks up from [End Page 255]
James's beloved Washington Square; a number of filmmakers gathered in Hove
and Brighton, not forty miles from James's Lamb House in Rye, essentially to
found the British film industry.

Finally, I want to argue, this apparent lack of interest conceals a deeper relation
between James and this emerging form: their mutual exploration of the nature and
possibilities of the new species of visuality that was emerging in precisely this
period, and of which film was just one piece—the phantasmagoric new worlds
being delineated by photography, X-ray machines, magic-lanterns, spectacles,
trompe-l'oeil painting, set and special effects in the increasingly elaborate stage
spectacles—all disseminated in media like popular melodrama, music halls,
nickelodeons, mass-illustrated magazines, and the like. This new visual culture
made film possible but also achieved its apotheosis in that form. What Walter
Benjamin famously says of film is true, mutatis mutandis, of virtually all species
of visuality opening up in the long fin-de-siécle (roughly 1870-1910):
Our bars and city streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations
and our factories all seemed to close relentlessly around us. Then came film and
exploded this prison world with the dynamite of the split-second so that now we
can set off calmly on journeys of adventure among its far-flung debris. With the
close-up, space expands; with slow-motion, movement is extended. And just as
enlargement not merely clarifies what we see indistinctly . . . but brings to light
entirely new structures of matter, slow motion not only reveals familiar aspects
of movements, but discloses quite unknown aspects within them. . . . Clearly it is
another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye.

(236)

Not only this "other nature" (which Benjamin was famously to call "the optical
unconscious") but, perhaps more radically, the perceiving eye itself became
subjects for James and early filmmakers alike. Both frequently deployed or
thematized new visual technologies to interrogate the nature and possibilities of
vision itself—not only to explore the new worlds opened up by lenses and other
aspects of the cinematic apparatus but also to interrogate the properties and
limitations of the organ that perceives them and to limn the psychic projects with
which they're associated. To underline this point, I want to compare briefly
James's endeavor of the period between 1898 and 1905 with one of the most
interesting of the Brighton filmmakers—indeed, one of the most interesting early
filmmakers tout court—G. A. Smith.

Smith is an amazing character, one of those homespun geniuses who turn up

with some regularity in the early history of film. A magic-lantern operator,
lecturer, and hypnotist, located in Brighton, Smith first invented a camera, then
turned to writing and directing a number of short films between 1898 and 1903.
According to film historian John Barnes "the number of technical innovations
Smith introduced . . . from 1897 to 1903 is truly remarkable. He can be credited
with the first close-up, the superimposed inset, the practice of dividing a scene up
into a number of shots, the point of view shot, the focus pull, the panning shots,
and even special lighting effects" (40). Barnes goes on to sniff that Smith "was the
equal of Melies as far as technical matters were concerned, but it would be foolish
to equate his artistry with the French master. . . . Smith was little more than a
clever innovator." Perhaps, but I [End Page 256] think George Sadoul is closer to
the mark when he writes in his magisterial Histoire Générale du Cinéma that
Smith
fait accompli une evolution decisive au cinema. Il a dépassé l'optique du Edison,
qui est celle de Zootrope ou de theatre de marionettes, celle de Lumiere, qui est
celle d'un phographe amateur . . . celle de Melies qui est celle du 'monsieur de
l'orchestre.' La camera est devenue mobile comme l'oeil humain, comme l'oeil du
spectateur ou comme l'oeil du héros du film. . . . [Smith brought about a decisive
revolution in film. He went beyond the optical perspective of Edison, which was
that of the Zootrope or the puppet-show, that of Lumiere, which is that of the
amateur photographer, that of Melies, which is that of the audience in the
orchestra seats. The camera becomes mobile like the human eye, like the eye of
the spectator or that of the hero of the film.]

(57)

We can see these qualities on display in Grandma's Reading Glass (1900) in

which a boy puttering with his grandmother picks up her reading glass and
explores her room. Intercut are insets of the things he is peering at (Smith, it might
be added parenthetically, seems to have invented here montage and the point-of-
view shot): a parakeet, a kitten. But in the very middle of the film, the boy turns
his lens to his grandmother's eyes, twitching and revolving in anatomically
impossible ways, making them visibly grotesque (see Fig. 1, Fig. 2, and Fig. 3).

I find these shots provoking. It is not just that, as Sadoul says, in its self-
referential play with lenses the eye becomes "a moving creature" but also that the
iris shot doubles back on the spectator perceiving the shot, rendering not only the
grandmother's eyesight grotesque but also questioning that of the spectator at
whom she is gazing within the film—and the spectator who is gazing at her gazing
at him, i.e., us. The shot, in other words, proposes a mise-en-âbyme that questions
the very possibilities of visual perception even as it indulges in them. (Not for
nothing does Sadoul classify Smith as one of the first modernists—it's not a very
long step from rendering the eye grotesque to slitting the eyeball open, as Bunuel
and Dali famously were to do in Un Chien Andalou.) The process thus anticipates
but reverses the position Benjamin is going to take by turning the focus back on
the perceiving eye from the "second nature" that film records—and by making its
operations profoundly, and magnificently, unnatural.

James seizes on lens technology to similar ends in a story of precisely the same
period. I am thinking here of a moment in "Glasses" (1896). There, you will
remember, a woman named Flora Saunt fears that her extraordinary beauty will be
marred by her wearing a pair of glasses necessary for the preservation of her sight.
She reluctantly does so, only to find her fears confirmed as her aristocratic
intended, Lord Iffield, dumps her when he sees a pair of grotesque "nippers" on
her nose. The penultimate scene of the book offers an inset sequence of
remarkable complexity, a symphony of lens-mediated glances. At the theater,
Flora appears in her seat as the "aim of fifty tentative glasses" to which is
promptly added a fifty-first, that of the narrator, who, when he gazes at her
through his opera-glass, sees hers trained back at him—and hence infers that she
has escaped the curse of her progressive disease (CS1 565). But when he rushes
into the box to greet her (and perhaps declare his all-too-obvious [End Page 257]

[End Page 258]

affection), he finds that she has indeed lost her sight, is putting on a show by
means of her public demonstration of the opera-glass, and that she has found and
affianced herself to a truly ugly man, with whom she lives happily ever after—
covering up, with his aid, her now totally irreversible blindness.

Although our wonderful host at the Rome conference, Donatella Izzo, quite
properly links what she calls this "mise-en-âbyme" of vision to Poe's story
"Spectacles" and Hoffmann's "Sandman," placing "Glasses" alongside Smith's
film makes it look quite different (124ff). It becomes a story about lenses and the
things that lenses can do to transform our understanding of vision. For as lens
encounters lens, rather than enhancing vision, the opera-glasses negate it,
rendering the central assumption of visual culture—that there is some link
between appearance and something we can call real, genuine, or authentic—
risible. For both of the spectators here are blind, albeit in two different ways.
Flora's blindness is a kind of Dantesque contrapasso, a punishment linked to her
focus on appearance rather than essence, but it is mirrored and even exceeded by
that of the artist/observer, who is equally blind to his own visually mediated desire
—I believe he paints her no fewer than four times—and blind as well to the
motivation for her willed blindness. Her vanity, after all, is shown to be grounded
in a realistic assessment of her place in the marriage market, and her blindness,
rather than serving as a punishment, proves to be her saving grace—not being able
to witness the physical ugliness of her husband, she can accept his worship of her
appearance freely and turn to him for affection, support, even love. (As a devotee,
elsewhere, of the role of touching in James, I might add here that the most moving
moment in the story for me is when Flora reaches up in her opera-box to touch her
beloved and recoils instead from the facial hair of the narrator—touching, as it
frequently does in the late James, trumps and redeems a rampant visuality.) James
uses the technology of lenses, as does Smith, to question visuality itself, and in his
inset scene, he does so to suggest how in a culture organized by ocularcentrism—
we have quite literally here a society of spectacles—the nexus between seeing and
desire pushes us to demand forms of intimacy that transcend the visual faculty that
seems to facilitate them.

My point here isn't to equate James and Smith, much less than to suggest that
there's a direct influence going from one to the other. Rather, it is to place them on
a common plane, to understand both as figures fascinated with the new
possibilities opened up by transforming technologies of visuality on offer in the
fin-de-siècle. And both were interested as well, I want to show in my second
example, in what another contemporary, Freud, would call the libidinal dimension
of visuality and the theatrics it generates. I'm thinking here of the novella James
was finishing when he took his niece Alice to the movies, The Sacred Fount
(1901). Read in isolation, The Sacred Fount is a comic meta-commentary on
Jamesian fiction, a monitory parable about over-interpretation, a self-indictment
of someone who was, after all, a fussy, celibate bachelor. Read in the context of
James's moment, it portrays a nightmarish version of the world governed by the
logic of visual apprehension. Amidst social ambiguity, the narrator, for whose
"mind . . . the vision of life is an obsession" attempts to perceive the
configurations of desire through their effect on human appearances, i.e., visually
(SF 22). Despite the explicit warning of the figure who should know best, the
painter Ford Obert (one consonant away from "overt"), the narrator's fervent
theorization based on direct observation becomes increasingly ludicrous, making
him seem less [End Page 259] the curious gentleman and more the prurient
voyeur. In the end, he is left in this very position, reduced to helplessly
"watching" his interlocutor, who has just told him that he is crazy, "though the
lighted rooms, retreat and disappear": as his speculations fold in on themselves,
the narrator is left in a visual void, denied the very visual means upon which his
obsession has depended and by which it has been fed (316).

There's a direct analogue to this movement from visual pleasure to visual

punishment in a short film of Smith's, shot on a public street in Brighton that
James might well have walked on. Called As Seen Through a Telescope (1900), it
shows a middle-aged gentleman dressed in a morning coat and top hat gazing
through a telescope while a young couple walks a bicycle behind him. As they
pause, he points the telescope directly at them, crouching as if he were stalking
wild game, and we see as if through his lens a close-up of the young man
adjusting the young woman's ankle-sock, then caressing her ankle (twice!—and
once touching her calf) in gestures at once furtive and public. The film then cuts
back to the gentleman gleefully putting down his telescope—he all but rubs his
hands in pleasure—convinced that he has scoped unobserved. But his
complacency is undone when, while passing behind him, the male bicyclist
knocks him over and departs, leaving the middle-aged voyeur flat on his rump
(see Fig. 4, Fig. 5, and Fig. 6).
 The similarity between James's novella and Smith's film lies in the narrative
patterns traced in both. In each case, everyone—viewer and viewed, spectator and
object of action—is involved in some form of transgressive behavior, the activities
of [End Page 260]

the observed framed by their respective media. The furtive public lovers in the
former are isolated by the shot that appears to be taken from the telescope; the
hyperactive couples in James's novel foregrounded by the speculative
observations of the first-person narrator. But in each case, the dynamics of viewer
and the viewed also mirror each other: the telescopist thinks he can spy
unobserved just as the bicyclist thinks he can safely fondle his sweetheart in
public; the married and unmarried lovers' relations with each other are mimicked
by the narrator's discursive word-flow, which establishes his own relation to Lady
Brissenden, who, after all, is one of those whose intimacy he is observing. Both
texts, moreover, are involved with the power, real or assumed, of their eye- or
insight, whether augmented by the apparatus of the telescope or through the
process of discussion, interpretation, narration. In each case, the pleasure of the
observer lies in the ability to peer beneath the surface to the facts of erotic
connection, whether the surreptitious but thrilling ankle-pat rendered visible
through the lens or the "facts" of intimacy discerned by the narrator. Finally, in
both cases those pleasures are offered to us, the spectator or reader, as well: as we
experience the telescope shot (which occupies roughly two-thirds of the film) or
hear the narrator's fervid observations, we are led to share their joy at their
penetrative vision—and then, comically in both cases, we are deflated along with
them as they are physically or verbally cuffed for their overweening pride in their
own powers. [End Page 262]

Both James and Smith explore the extensive and ramifying dynamics of
pleasure and punishment that open up in ocularcentric culture; indeed, text itself
in both cases becomes something of a machine designed to produce these mingled
effects in us, the reader or the viewer. And with prescient results. If, as I have
argued elsewhere, a novel like The Portrait of a Lady anticipates modernist
narrative experiments, The Sacred Fount anticipates the postmodern, in its
exploration of limited point-of-view, narrative monomania, and, most particularly,
in its radical undecidability. As for Smith's film, it's prescient too. Its voyeuristic
iris shot is proleptic of a number of early silent films in which people look through
a keyhole at sexual shenanigans, usually with the result that they get physically
punished for their voyeuristic activities. This latter tendency is central to films like
Rear Window (1954), in which the voyeuristic Jeff (Jimmy Stewart) is attacked by
the object of his lens-mediated visual obsession Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr),
breaking a leg in the process, not to mention (even) less highbrow fare, like
Porky's (1982), in which voyeurism is punished as women discern and taunt the
men who are staring at them through a peephole—and a female gym teacher
 painfully tugs on a boy's penis that has somehow wandered there, literalizing as it
legitimates the suspicions of generations of feminist film criticism (see Fig. 7).

At the point of Porky's, we seem to be a long way from Smith—and farther

from James. But this node of narrative possibilities is the logical culmination of
their shared sense of the alluring possibilities opened up—and the punitive
consequences experienced within—the emerging visual culture of the twentieth
century. Placing James alongside Smith at the beginning of the process that
culminates in Rear Window, Porky's, and other mainstream interrogations of
visuality and its vicissitudes is a way of recasting the James-and-film discourse in
a new key—away from the concern with adaptation or parallel concern or even
direct influence that to date has dominated the field of film-and-literature studies
and toward a shared interrogation of the new modes of apperception that emerged
in the fin-de-siécle and augment throughout the twentieth century. It's also
therefore a way of underlining, as if we needed any underlining for this audience,
the multiple filiations and amazing prescience of a writer too often seen as a
modernist Master avant la lettre, too little understood as a maker and interrogator
of the ontologies and epistemologies of the new media opening at his own
moment, and hence serving as a guide and a goad to us as we encounter the new
forms opening at our own.
Jonathan Freedman
University of Michigan

Works by Henry James

CS1—Complete Stories, 1892-1898. New York: Library of America, 1996.

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CS2—Complete Stories, 1898-1910. New York: Library of America, 1996.

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LE—Letters. Ed. Leon Edel. Vol. 4. Cambridge: Belknap, 1974.

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LMA—Lettere a Miss Allen/Letters to Miss Allen. Ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi. Milano: Archinto, 1993.

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SF—The Sacred Fount. London: Methuen, 1901.

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Other Works Cited

Barnes, John. The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 1894-1901. Vol. 5. Exeter: U of Exeter P, 2007.

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Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1971.

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Freedman, Jonathan. "Hands, Objects, and Love in James and Hitchcock: Reading the Touch in The Golden Bowl and
Notorious." The Men Who Knew Too Much: Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock. Ed. Susan M. Griffin and Alan Nadel.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. 124-41.

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Izzo, Donatella. Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James. Lincoln: U of Nebraska
P, 2002. [End Page 263]

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Rosenberg, Joseph. "James and the Moving Image." Fifth International Conference of the Henry James Society. Rome. 8 Jul.
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Sadoul, George. Histoire Générale du Cinéma. Paris: Éditions Denôel, 1947. Vol. 2. of Les pionniers du cinéma 1897-1909.

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Tintner, Adeline. The Museum World of Henry James. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1986.

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Trotter, David. Cinema and Modernism. Oxford: Blackwell's, 2007.

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Filmography
Grandma's Reading Glass. Dir. G. A. Smith. Brighton, 1900.

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Porky's. Dir. Bob Clark. Los Angeles: Twentieth-Century Fox, 1982.

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Rear Window. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Los Angeles: Paramount, 1954.

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As Seen Through a Telescope. Dir. G. A. Smith. Brighton, 1900. [End Page 264]

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