Faulkner and Film ed. by Peter Lurie and Ann J. Abadie (review)

The essay discusses the stasis and motion that exists in the characterization of Joe Christmas and in film in general, but the words sometimes betray an artful expression that does not seem genuine in insight: “so characterization, and in particular the spatial manipulation of character locomotion, presents a powerful literary automatism with which Faulkner confronts the mechanical reproduction of the moving image and acknowledges its relationship to the fixity of its photogrammatic substrate. The forty or so film projects that Faulkner worked on, suggest that Faulkner’s screen plays suggest that his fiction appropriated new ways of looking at modernisms of the time, “as a different mode of writing fiction—a shift, by the way, that is altogether consistent with an author who puts a premium on experimentation and uniqueness.” [...]Hamblin discusses A Fable in terms of how the narrative structure resembles a scriptwriter’s approach to scene and setting, and shows how “Faulkner strategically places individual characters within the larger context of the sweeping movements of both the anonymous crowd and this historical and military forces that threaten to overwhelm them.” Murphet suggests that Faulkner’s appropriation and response to Hollywood—a “prostitution of talent to the dictates of the profit motive”—“functions in a openly Freudian economy of repression, slippage, and return, as a chiasmic transfer of cultural energies and logics from one set of cultural-industrial coordinates to another.”