Film Writing
摘要
This chapter focuses on Graham Greene’s writings about cinema, and on the shaping presence of cinema in his literary fiction. The 1930s were the great decade of cinema-going in Britain, and Greene’s interest in cinema, as David Trotter observes, was arguably “more extensive than that of any other writer” of the interwar period. Greene’s most obvious contribution to the period’s film culture is the regular film column he wrote for the Spectator between 1935 and 1940. This chapter also considers Greene’s earlier writings on cinema from the late 1920s and early 1930s, which trace the medium’s evolution as a new art form, and the parallel establishment of film criticism—at a time when the terms of description and evaluation were still taking shape—as a recognised mode of writing. It argues that whereas other writers such as Virginia Woolf were initially hostile towards film for encroaching on the perceived terrain of literature, Greene acknowledged the possibilities for cross-fertilisation between the two media. The chapter concludes by exploring Greene’s experimentation with cinematic techniques in his novels and stories, underlining the extent to which literary fiction was actively responding to the new medium of film, and asserting its own image-making powers.