Victorian Literature and Film Adaptation By Abigail Burnham Bloo ...

in a different direction” (3). Tom Gunning, proposing a very different narrative of cinema’s origins, contends that many early films were based on “an aesthetic of astonishment” whose audience “does not get lost in a fictional world and its drama, but remains aware of the act of looking, the excitement of curiosity and its fulfillment” (736, 743).

Gunning’s “cinema of attractions” (742), which emphasizes the carnival appeal of powerful individual images and sequences over sustained narrative, goes a long way toward explaining why, despite the alleged influence of the nineteenth-century English novel on early film, there is no silent Barchester Towers,no silent Middlemarch,and no silent Pride and Prejudice. Early cinema drew on Victorian fiction very selectively. The Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com) lists seventy-nine silent adaptations of Charles Dickens (from the 1897 Death of Nancy Sikes to fourteen other adaptations of Oliver Twist), sixteen of George Eliot (including six of Silas Marner), seven of William Makepeace Thackeray (four of Vanity Fair), four of Thomas Hardy (two of Tess of the D’Urbervilles), one of George Meredith (Diana of the Crossways), and none of Anthony Trollope. Not one of these writers’ novels was adapted as often by silent filmmakers as East Lynne,which was filmed sixteen times between 1902 and 1925. And, none of these authors could match the cumulative record of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who leads the field with eighty silent adaptations, seventy-five of them chronicling the adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

The forms and themes of Victorian novels certainly had a pronounced impact on early cinema. But the case of Dickens suggests that their most immediate contributions were quite different from the ones Eisensteinassumes. Victorian novels provided attractions, to use Gunning’s term, that could be readily excerpted for anthology films such as Tense Moments with Great Authors (1922). Tense Moments includes four scenes from Dickens along with episodes from Thackeray, George du Maurier, Victor Hugo, Alphonse Daudet, and Mrs. Henry Wood (East Lynne,of course). It also features strong, larger-than-life figures such as Becky Sharp and Sherlock Holmes, pathetic victims such as Nancy Sikes and Tiny Tim, and the sentimentally moralizing melodrama that