The Modernist Screenplay explores the film screenplay as a genre of modernist literature. It connects the history of screenwriting for silent film to the history of literary modernism in France, Germany, and Russia. At the same time, the book considers how the screenplay responded to the modernist crisis of reason, confronted mimetic representation, and sought to overcome the modernist mistrust of language with the help of rhythm. From the silent film projects of Bertolt Brecht, to the screenwriting of Sergei Eisenstein and the poetic scripts of the surrealists, The Modernist Screenplay offers a new angle on the relationship between film and literature. Based on the example of modernist screenwriting, the book proposes a pluralistic approach to screenplays, an approach that sees film scripts both as texts embedded in film production and as literary works in their own right. As a result, the sheer variety of different and experimental ways to tell stories in screenplays comes to light. The Modernist Screenplay explores how the earliest kind of experimental screenplays—the modernist screenplays—challenged normative ideas about the nature of filmmaking, the nature of literary writing, and the borders between the two.
The Modernist Screenplay explores the film screenplay as a genre of modernist literature. It connects the history of screenwriting for silent film to the history of literary modernism in France, Germany, and Russia. At the same time, the book considers how the screenplay responded to the modernist crisis of reason, confronted mimetic representation, and sought to overcome the modernist mistrust of language with the help of rhythm. From the silent film projects of Bertolt Brecht, to the screenwriting of Sergei Eisenstein and the poetic scripts of the surrealists, The Modernist Screenplay offers a new angle on the relationship between film and literature. Based on the example of modernist screenwriting, the book proposes a pluralistic approach to screenplays, an approach that sees film scripts both as texts embedded in film production and as literary works in their own right. As a result, the sheer variety of different and experimental ways to tell stories in screenplays comes to light. The Modernist Screenplay explores how the earliest kind of experimental screenplays—the modernist screenplays—challenged normative ideas about the nature of filmmaking, the nature of literary writing, and the borders between the two.
Many readers may know that such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence used their marriages for literary inspiration and material. In Russian literary marriages, these women did not resent taking a secondary position, although to call their position secondary does not do justice to the vital role these women played in the creation of some of the greatest literary works in history. From Sofia Tolstoy to Vera Nabokov and Elena Mandelshtam and Natalya Solzhenitsyn, these women ranged from stenographers and typists to editors, researchers, translators, and even publishers. Living under restrictive regimes, many of these women battled censorship and preserved the writers’ illicit archives, often risking their own lives to do so. They established a tradition all their own, unmatched in the West. Many of these women, like Vera and Sofia, were the writers’ intellectual companions and willingly contributed to the creative process—they commonly used the word “we” to describe the progress of their husbands’ work. And their husbands knew it too. Leo Tolstoy made no secret of Sofia’s involvement in War and Peace, and Vladimir Nabokov referred to Vera as his own “single shadow.”
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