Pynchon & Film

[LOT64 at aol.com]

Thomas Pynchon often deals with form and chaos.  The influence of  film
grammar on his literary form reflects a reversal of the past.  Narrative
cinema has been strongly influenced by the novel. "...from Dickens, from the
Victorian novel, stem the first shoots of American film esthetic, forever
linked with the name of David Wark Griffith."  (Sergei Eisenstein,  FILM
FORM).  Eisenstein goes on to demonstrate how Griffith, accepted as the key
codifier of narrative film form, pioneered cinematic techniques such as
montage, the close-up, displacement of temporal continuity and the dissolve.
 These all find their inspiration in the work of Charles Dickens.  Pynchon,
in an example of an older form feeding back on itself, adapts literary
strategies that are directly influenced by film grammar.

In Pynchon's novels scenes shift with a cinematic rapidity (Jacobean England
to the Wild West of the Pony Express to California in the sixties; Beat era
Greenwich Village to turn of the century Florence to South Africa between the
wars; etc).  He is always restructuring temporal continuity and linking
episodes in a montage-like structure. The impact of his writing resides as
much in the collisions of  the different episodes as in the mise-en-scene of
each individual episode.  

V. is a novel developed in a montage style comparable to DW Griffith's film
INTOLERANCE.  Griffith intercuts four stories taking place in four different
time/spaces.  These are contemporary USA (the film was released in 1916),
16th century France, the Holy Land at the time of Jesus, and ancient Babylon.
 Griffith's stories depict contemporary social injustice, the persecution of
the Huguenots, the crucifiction of Jesus, and the destruction of Babylon.  V.
interweaves a continuing story taking place in contemporary America (the late
fifties) with episodes proceeding chronologically from just before the turn of
 the century onwards.  As in INTOLERANCE, each historical episode in V. is
one of crisis, the breakdown of order, and the advance of entropy.
 Griffith's structure differs in that his four stories are interwoven in a
fugue like fashion.  They all start together and continue in shorter and
shorter episodes till a final rapid intermingling climax.  V. only has one
continuing story interrupted by different non-continuous threads.

Anyway, I'm sure there are lots of other examples.  I'd be interested in
other comparisons.  Not to mention any discussion of Pynchon's use of film as
a metaphor for the twentieth century's destroying the wholeness,or oneness,
of life by analysing it into discrete frames at 24 times per second.  "film
and calculus, both pornographies of flight" 

"...Come-on!  Start-the-show!  Come-on! Start-the-show!  The screen is a dim
page spread before us, white and silent."  From Mallarme's sheet of paper to
Night Manager Richard M. Zhlubb's Orpheus Theatre movie screen.  "Now everybod
y---"     
                                              
                                              Ron Churgin