The Future Revisited: Jules Verne on Screen in 1950s America

By Francoise Schiltz

The Future Revisited examines Hollywood adaptations of Jules Verne stories and is an interdisciplinary study that offers a fresh perspective on film history, French literature, science fiction and America in the 1950s. It is a fascinating and authoritative account of how the stories of Jules Verne, a distinguished French novelist better known around the world as the father of science fiction and an accurate predictor of much of the twentieth century, found particular resonance with US filmmakers in the 1950s. Schiltz looks at four of the most popular films - Around the World in 80 Days, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth and Mysterious Island - and argues that there were many parallels between Verne’s technological adventures and postwar America, with its themeparks, shopping malls, Levittowns and plethora of consumer goods. Just as nineteenth-century readers of Verne’s books could experience travel from the comfort of their seats, viewers of these films could be swept away on an imaginary flight, a voyage in a submarine, or a trek to the earth’s core, all in spectacular widescreen and with ground-breaking special effects. Yet the pleasures offered were ambivalent: encounters with exotic places and cultures might have led the audience to question common assumptions such as gender roles; seeing futuristic domestic spaces could highlight the confusion of attitudes to private and public life in suburbia, and the films’ blending of nostalgia and progress might draw attention to society’s tug-of-war between innovation and conformity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chaplin Books
• Release date: May 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9780957112841

Book preview

contents.

Introduction: Jules Verne and the Cinema

‘So you’ve crossed this country?’

‘Of course!’ Paganel replied severely.

‘By pack-mule?’

‘No, in an armchair.’

Jules Verne’s Les Enfants du capitaine Grant (1867)

In a 2005 commercial for the Renault Clio on British television, Sophie, a French woman (played by actress Annelise Hesme) and Ben, a British man (played by actor Jeremy Sheffield), list various objects and names symbolising their respective countries in an attempt to market the car as their own national product. Hence, while Ben counters Sophie’s mention of the ‘Eiffel tower’ with ‘Blackpool tower’ and she replies to his ‘1815, Waterloo’ with ‘18.15 from Waterloo’, they also try to outdo each other by naming well-known and widely acclaimed native writers. So, while Ben whispers ‘Shakespeare’, Sophie cites ‘Jules Verne, Jean-Paul Sartre’ and ‘Baudelaire’ as her markers of French cultural life.

According to the commercial, the name ‘Jules Verne’ not only embodies Frenchness and stands for an important, celebrated French writer inside France but also is known and recognised as such by British audiences. This is somewhat surprising: Verne (1828-1905) was accepted as a distinguished novelist, poet and playwright by the French literary establishment in the second half of the twentieth century and remains popular with the public in his native country today (he was widely celebrated in France in 2005 to mark the hundredth anniversary of his death), but his renown outside France, as William Butcher remarks, ‘often has little to do with his writing’. Instead, he is admired as the inventor of science fiction and the man ‘who predicted much of the twentieth century’.[1] Moreover, rather than being perceived as a specifically French phenomenon, ‘the Italians have their Giulio Verne, the Spanish, Julio Verne’ and the Americans, ‘Djools Vurn’, ‘exactly as if he were a native son of the whole world’.[2] Like one of his most famous characters, Verne seems to be a passe-partout, someone who passes through everywhere and easily adapts to new surroundings. Although many British TV viewers may be familiar with Verne’s works, the reference to him in the commercial could be seen in this context as an attempt by the French to call attention to his nationality and reclaim the writer as one of their own. It is this paradox between being universally known on the one hand, and elusive on the other, that attracted me to Verne and motivated my search for the author’s place in the adaptation process. By analysing the transfer from novel to screen, the aim of this book is to look at the transformation of the Voyages extraordinaires on screen and to re-establish Verne’s importance for our understanding of the films.

Since the beginnings of cinema, over 300 film adaptations of Verne novels, short stories and plays, known as Voyages extraordinaires (Extraordinary Voyages, 1863-1919), have been produced in more than 15 countries, from Mexico to Romania to the former USSR. They include shorts, live-action feature films, documentaries, television shows, series, mini series and animation films[3], all of which helped to fashion the creative identity of Verne and construct meanings for his works. The practice of rewriting popular and classical fiction for the screen is a commonplace phenomenon in film history[4], but what drew me to Verne was the large number of films made from the Voyages extraordinaires and the appeal they continue to have for filmmakers and audiences from around the world: they show his impact on cinema and give him an important place in cinematic culture.

The book does not seek to provide an extensive or specific list of Verne films but to analyse the ‘losses’ and ‘gains’ involved in the transition from novel to screen, identifying the meanings and implications of the adaptation process and the critical discourse that surrounds it. Whereas I was keen to deconstruct the original/copy debate that traditionally favours the novel over its resulting film version(s), I spent so much of my initial research exploring Verne’s stories and the original context in which they were produced that I began finding it increasingly difficult to separate them from analysis of the films. I would, for instance, try to explain a filmmaker’s particular choice of scene by pointing at the reasons for Verne’s choice of the equivalent scene in the book, thus confusing novel and film and ignoring the film’s specific historical and aesthetic context. Without wishing to disregard the significance of the study of literary adaptations on film and television, I soon realised that by paying too much attention to Verne and his novels, I was overlooking the films’ own identity. In an attempt to define Verne’s place within the films adapted from his works, I thus needed to re-evaluate his importance to the novels’ screen versions.

In his introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen Robert Mayer writes that the very word ‘adaptation’ ‘suggests alteration or adjustment in order to make something fit its new context or environment without changing that something into something else - one adapts, that is, one does not transform or metamorphose’.[5] Although there is in my view no real distinction between the terms ‘adaptation’ and ‘transformation’ and texts inevitably change into something else once they are transposed into images, I do agree with Mayer that an adaptation still has a relationship, however intangible, to its original source. In other words, although film and literature are two distinct art forms, a filmic adaptation of, in this case, a book by Verne, must keep a connection to the written text. This means that the author does not completely disappear (being an intrinsic part of the novel), but it does imply that they lose hold of their authorship position and are no longer an active agent in the filmmaking process (provided they are not involved in the making of the film in some other way, of course). The importance of Verne, though not entirely gone, has definitely shifted, and must now be searched for in the films and the context of their production. Similarly, as a text automatically changes when appearing on screen and viewed in a different context, the question should not be so much ‘how’ it is adapted but ‘why’. What, in other words, is it about the Voyages extraordinaires that makes them relevant to a specific period in time, and what in turn does this tell us about the time in which the adaptation was made?

As the form of every adaptation is conditioned by social and historical circumstances and by the adaptor’s individual choices, critics should, according to Ginette Vincendeau, ‘judge on the basis of the kind of adaptation the film aims to be rather than on the assumption that there is only one way to adapt a book’.[6] Hence, for example, Dudley Andrew identifies the relationship between the film and the text as being marked by either the ‘borrowing’, ‘intersection’ or ‘fidelity’ modes of transformation[7], whereas Geoffrey Wagner uses the terms ‘transposition’, ‘commentary’ and ‘analogy’ to describe three types of adaptation.[8] In very simple terms these various concepts posit that an adaptation either tries to stay as faithful as possible to the source text, alters it in some respects, or changes it so that little of the original is left. Similarly, Brian McFarlane wants to set up ‘procedures for distinguishing between that which can be transferred from one medium to another (essentially, narrative) and that which, being dependent on different signifying systems, cannot be transferred (essentially, enunciation)’.[9] While these different modes of adaptation are subjective and serve only as an example among others, they underline the limitless possibilities of the rewriting process and emphasise the complex relationship between a literary text and its film version. Although Andrew, Wagner and McFarlane use their own method to establish the kind of relation a film might bear to the novel, they concentrate on the formal issues of each art form and as a result their discussions tend to remain bound, however unwillingly, to the issue of ‘fidelity’.

Too much critical discourse surrounding the adaptation process and other forms of translation has been centred on questions of fidelity and authenticity, investing the ‘original’ text with a sacred value and reducing the translation it inspired to an unfaithful ‘copy’. Here the film’s success is measured against its capacity to render the ‘spirit’ of the source book, as though the meaning of a text could reside outside a social, historical and aesthetic context and be transferred as a homogeneous whole from one medium to another. Indeed, how can a text claim to be authentic if it can be transmuted into another form? This view clearly posits a distinction between production and reproduction and ignores the fact that every source text is always already the product of a multitude of different texts and impressions. As Robert Stam points out in ‘Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation’, ‘both novel and film have consistently cannibalized other genres and media’ and ‘their essence is to have no essence, to be open to all cultural forms’.[10] As a result, every text always generates an infinite number of readings and is interpreted differently by different people. By insisting on the question of fidelity and maintaining that strict fidelity is possible, many critics and viewers fail to agree on what exactly it is a film should be ‘faithful’ to: more importantly, they automatically assign a low status to adaptations without analysing them and the medium of film in their own right.

Indeed, by demanding fidelity and asking how or to what extent a film manages or fails to render the novel’s essence (which is a highly subjective notion) or the writer’s intentions (which are often masked by, or even unknown to, the author), critics tend to ignore the cinema as an autonomous art form and overlook the actual processes of making a film. An over-emphasis on the fidelity issue also detracts from the more pertinent questions as to why certain novels are adapted at particular points in time and how they change, not only through their transference into another medium but also through their re-interpretation according to specific cultural needs and historical contexts.

This book will focus on the films and investigate why Verne’s stories proved so popular with American filmmakers during the 1950s and early 1960s, for what purposes they were taken up and how they were modified to fit the cultural and cinematic codes of the time. By focusing on filmic transformations of literary texts, across almost a century of history, and from France to the United States, it shows how cultural and industrial circumstances in postwar America worked together with the filmmaking process to produce new meanings for, and to construct and circulate particular images of, Verne and his oeuvre. It examines the relation of historical context to film meaning and looks at how the films were shaped by and participated in the cultural environment in which they appeared. As Verne has been adapted by different filmmakers in different countries and at different periods in time, the interaction between film versions of his texts and their context helps reveal the ideologies with which his stories were identified and the uses to which they were put at that particular time.

To look at how specific social, historical and aesthetic factors and modes of reception create new and sometimes contradictory meanings for a text is to reject the idea that a novel or film is a hermetic whole and to argue against the existence of a single textual ‘truth’ or ‘essence’. Indeed, if texts had an intrinsic meaning, they would resist adaptation into another form and make the adaptation process redundant. Sharing a materialist assertion held by theorists such as Janet Staiger, Tony Bennett and Barbara Klinger that ‘there is nothing sacred about textual boundaries’[11] and that a text’s ideological function changes over time, I argue that the meaning of Verne’s novels is continuously created and transformed by particular cultural preoccupations before and after they are adapted to the screen. As Klinger observes, contextual factors ‘are not just out there, external to the text and viewer; they actively intersect the text/viewer relation, producing interpretative frames that influence the public consumption of cultural artifacts’.[12]

In contrast to Klinger’s diachronic approach, which tries to demonstrate how different historical, cultural, and institutional contexts added new dimensions to the ideological significance of Douglas Sirk’s melodramas from the 1950s to the 1990s, this is a synchronic study that supplies historical information about the context in which the Verne films were originally received. In the same way that that text and context are inextricably linked, there is a connection between Verne’s books and the period in which they are adapted: my contention is that Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires found cultural resonance in 1950s America by articulating a series of ideological and cultural concerns that responded to American needs after the war.

Rather than focusing on a contextual approach alone, the book uses textual analysis to examine the relationship between the films’ narrative and stylistic traits, and the social space in which they exist: a film’s identity and our viewing of it are always negotiated by an interaction between formal characteristics and contextual principles. Although certain narrative and stylistic devices may have fulfilled a precise purpose at a specific moment in time, images are not fixed but attain new functions through time. In placing and analysing the films in the social and historical context of their production, I am aware that my own interpretation is not objective but conditioned by retrospective writings of the period and by the social universe in which I exist. This does not, however, mean that my understanding of the films is completely arbitrary or that ‘any meaning goes at any time’.[13] As Klinger notes of her own study, it suggests on the contrary, ‘that we attempt to specify the particular ideological functions of a film by examining key moments within its historical transit’[14], or in this case, within its period of conception.

I decided to focus on the 1950s for a number of reasons. In building a Verne filmography, I was struck by the number of American adaptations that were released during the 1950s and 1960s. The so-called Jules Verne boom that started with the Columbia serial Mysterious Island (dir. Spencer Gordon Bennet) in 1951 and carried on throughout the decade with films like 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days (dir. Michael Anderson 1956), continued into the 1960s: in 1961 alone, three Hollywood Verne films were released on the screen: Master of the World (dir. William Witney 1961), Mysterious Island (dir. Cy Endfield, US/UK 1961) and Valley of the Dragons (dir. Edward Bernds 1961).[15] The same year also saw two television adaptations of Verne’s Maître Zacharius (1854): Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Changing Heart, directed by Robert Florey, and The Terrible Clockman, a one-hour show for the series The Shirley Temple Theater, directed by Allen Reisner and starring the actress as Zacharius’ daughter.[16]

The large number of films made during this period and their success at the box office immediately begs the question as to why Verne proved so popular with filmmakers and audiences at this time. As the French writer was (and still is) largely known in the Anglo-American world as the ‘father of science fiction’, the rise of Verne films during this era also opens up an interesting link between his novels and the proliferation of the American science fiction genre after the war and shows how Verne’s creative identity was forged and consolidated outside France. The 1950s and 1960s were not the only decades in which American filmmakers looked for inspiration to the Voyages extraordinaires, which have functioned as the bearer of different meanings at different points in time, but the films released in the 1950s have become the best-known Verne adaptations in and outside the United States. More importantly, they have managed to supplant the original novels in many people’s minds and strengthened the link between Verne and science fiction.

Verne’s stories also seemed to facilitate talking about 1950s American cinema by sharing a similar preoccupation with new technologies and fresh forms of sensory and visual excitement. Various articles have drawn attention to film’s indebtedness to particular nineteenth century and early twentieth century novelists and in the 1970s American critics Alan Spiegel and Keith Cohen wrote books arguing that ‘modernist literature as a whole - especially the writings of Flaubert, Proust, James, Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf - is fundamentally cinematic in its form’.[17] In ‘Le Cinéma à la Recherche du temps perdu’, for example, Jacques Bourgeois points out how Proust (who never set foot in a cinema) anticipated the cinematic practices of slow zooming, lighting, framing and cutting in his work.[18] Similarly, Sergei Eisenstein has suggested that the idea of the cinematic narrative structure predates the actual invention of the cinematic apparatus by showing how Charles Dickens’ device of parallel action inspired D.W. Griffith’s technique of montage.[19] Like them, Ian Christie noted that Verne’s subject matter and graphic language created a cinematic vision before the invention of the cinema. In The Last Machine: Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World, he remarked that Verne and Rider Haggard joined

Dickens, Tolstoy, Turner, Degas, Wagner and those others who also anticipated the aesthetics of cinema (f)or they were the first to use the close-up, slow-motion, a moving viewpoint, cross-cutting, the physical sensation of speed and the drama of darkness and light.[20]

Hence, for instance, discussing Verne’s descriptions within the text, André Winandy explains how he ‘dramatizes landscape by transforming it into a magic lantern of color and shapes which unfold before the traveler’s and reader-spectator’s enthralled eyes’ and underscores his ‘three-dimensional vision’ with ‘various lighting effects’ to turn his images into ‘a well-composed life-like tableau’.[21] In addition to the writer’s style, the inclusion of a vast number of illustrations in the Voyages extraordinaires, fittingly described by Daniel Compère as ‘lateral windows’[22], further served to intersect textual and graphic imaginaries and add a sense of faraway exoticism to the books.

On the other hand, Cohen maintained in Film and Fiction that the cinema ‘represents not simply another element in the turn-of-the-century Zeitgeist but a privileged precedent, aesthetically and epistemologically, to the experiments carried out by the classic modern novel.’[23] Rather than trying to trace back an author’s influence to a specific filmmaker or film, his aim is to illustrate how writers’ and filmmakers’ similar perception and handling of external reality resulted in their similar use of cinematic techniques such as ‘simultaneity’, ‘multiperspectivism’ and ‘montage’.[24] These comments illustrate that the nineteenth century novel has influenced the work of early filmmakers and that the cinema in turn has become a unique source of inspiration in the modern novelist’s quest for new literary forms. The examples above also show that word and image are not distinct cultural forms but easily co-exist in both novels and films. Just as separate art forms borrow from and affect each other in different ways, they are both a product and an expression of the cultural and aesthetic movements of the times.

Although it would be interesting to look closer at the formal similarities between Verne’s fiction and the cinema, and compare the style of the Voyages extraordinaires to aesthetics later employed in film, it is more intriguing to see the way his most famous novels - like the nineteenth century faits divers press, panoramic displays, public exhibitions and later the cinema - fuse technology, movement and vision to present everyday life as a spectacle. Vanessa R. Schwartz argues in Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in fin-de-siècle Paris that the ‘cinema emerged as a part of a broader visual culture yet found its audience ready-made by virtue of their previous experience as patrons of and participants in those other activities’.[25] Whereas many writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries both consciously and unconsciously used a ‘cinematic’ style to express themselves, the Voyages extraordinaires, perhaps more vividly than other novels of the period, emphasise visual pleasure by exploring the era’s possibilities through travel and the imagination.

This book focuses on Around the World in 80 Days, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth and Mysterious Island not only because they are the best known and most successful Verne adaptations of the period and are still regularly shown on TV today but also because they, in their own way, used Verne and his stories to stage a spectacular event. 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth and Around the World in 80 Days were filmed in the innovative widescreen processes CinemaScope and Todd-AO, and feature picturesque scenes and famous stars; Mysterious Island, though shot on a lower budget and starring lesser known actors, boasts stop-motion animation and other visual effects by Ray Harryhausen. By foregrounding their own status as cinematic entertainment, the films invite the spectators on a visionary excursion into a world that matches historical accuracy with theme-park aesthetics. Unlike other ‘period’ films, in which ‘one often senses exhaustive attempts to create an impression of fidelity to, say Dickens’s London or to Jane Austen’s village life’[26], these cinematic responses to Verne lack cultural credibility and manage to reach a broad audience by celebrating visual excess and encouraging communication across the boundaries of gender, nationality and age.

While Verne’s stories lent themselves well to expressing the 1950s film industry’s concern with spectacle there are other, perhaps less straightforward, tendencies and preoccupations that bind the novels and films together: a concern with travel, mobility, privacy, comfort and the past. More particularly, Verne’s stories functioned as a ‘sign of the times’[27] because the context in which the Voyages extraordinaires were produced was marked by similar upheavals to the cultural landscape of the 1950s and so created similar desires and needs.

As neither cultural nor social history is organised in neat decades, I want to argue that it is possible to posit a ‘long 1950s’ from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. Moreover, I should caution the reader that the book does not treat 1950s and early 1960s Verne adaptations as a straightforward representation of postwar America or seek to provide a comprehensive account of 1950s cultural developments. The specific discourses I am evoking do not exhaust the meanings embodied and generated by the texts and contexts, or indeed determine audiences’ perception of them. Rather, they are only one among many discourses created by the interplay between text, history and interpretation and offer a glimpse of the diversity and fluidity of every work of art.

1 Butcher ‘Verne, Jules-Gabriel, 1828-1905’. If the publication date [and, occasionally, page numbers] of an article or book is not given, the source material is taken from a website, whose address is referenced in full in the bibliography.

2 Butcher ‘Verne, Jules-Gabriel, 1828-1905’.

3 Taves in Taves and Michaluk, Jr (eds) 1996 p.205.

4 In the postwar era, for instance, Thomas M. Pryor noted in the New York Times that the frequency of the original screenplay, reaching a new low in Hollywood, ‘represented only 51.8 per cent of the source material of the 305 pictures reviewed by the Production Code in 1955.’ (Bluestone 1957 p.3).

5 Mayer in Mayer (ed.) 2002 p.5.

6 Vincendeau in Vincendeau (ed.) 2001 p.xii.

7 Andrew in Naremore (ed.) 2000 p.29.

8 Wagner 1975 pp.222-223.

9 McFarlane 1996 p.vii. (Brackets in original).

10 Stam in Naremore (ed.) 2000 p.61.

11 Klinger 1994 p.160. For a more detailed account of Staiger’s and Bennett’s individual approach see Staiger 1992 and Bennett and Woollacott 1987 for instance.

12 Klinger 1994 p.xvi. The same applies to the reader as well, of course.

13 Klinger 1994 p.xx.

14 Klinger 1994 p.xx.

15 The screenwriter of Master of the World, Richard Matheson, successfully combined characters and episodes from Verne’s Robur-le-Conquérant (1886) and Maître du monde (1904) for Witney’s film. Valley of the Dragons, a black and white and low budget production, was advertised as based on a novel by Verne entitled Career of a Comet, a story that is better known and has been widely reprinted under the original title Hector Servadac (1877), and Off on a Comet.

16 Taves in Taves and Michaluk, Jr (eds) 1996 pp.227-228, 230-231.

17 Spiegel 1976 and Cohen 1979. I am indebted to James Naremore for this information. Naremore in Naremore (ed.) 2000 pp.5-6.

18 Bourgeois in Revue du cinéma 1946 pp.18-38.

19 Eisenstein in Film Form 1949 pp.195-255.

20 Christie 1994 pp.27-28. (Brackets mine).

21 Winandy in Yale French Studies 1969 pp.106, 108.

22 Compère in Raymond (ed.) 1983 pp.55-71.

23 Cohen 1979 p.x.

24 Cohen 1979 pp.207-210. Explaining cinema’s status as ‘privileged precedent’, Cohen writes that the cinema was ‘an art technologically ahead of its time that shocked another art into the realization of how it could align itself with the times.’ (p.210).

25 Schwartz 1999 p.203.

26 McFarlane 1996 p.9.

27 I borrowed this term from Bennett and Woollacott. (Bennett and Woollacott 1987 p. 19.)

Chapter One: From Novel to Film:

The Making and Transformations of Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires

During the last 40 years, French and English language criticism has tried to dismantle the many embedded myths surrounding the figure of the French novelist, poet and playwright Jules Gabriel Verne and to establish the author of the Voyages extraordinaires as a writer