Joyce and the cinema

On 18 April 1910 Joyce was contacted about closing the Volta cinema.

The Volta was the first cinema in Dublin, opened in December 1909 by Joyce with the backing of a group of Triestine businessmen. But, by April 1910, Joyce’s partners felt the enterprise had failed and they wrote to say they wanted to sell the cinema.

The idea for a cinema in Dublin came from Eva Joyce when she arrived in Trieste with Joyce in September 1909. At that time there were twenty-one cinemas in Trieste and none in Dublin, and Eva thought a Dublin cinema would be a successful venture. Joyce mentioned it to his friend, the lawyer Niccolò Vidacovich, who seemed taken with the idea.

Vidacovich introduced Joyce to a group of Triestine businessmen who had already opened a cinema – the Volta – in Budapest. Giuseppe Caris had opened the first cinema in Trieste – Il Cine Americano – in 1905 and owned a textiles shop; Antonio Machnich ran a few cinemas and a carpet shop; and Giovanni Rebez ran the Salone Edison cinema and sold tanned hides.

The partners agreed to put up the money for cinemas in Dublin, Belfast and Cork, though in the end nothing came of the cinemas in Belfast or Cork. For his part, Joyce agreed to provide his knowledge and to do the work of establishing and launching the cinemas. A contract was signed between Joyce, Caris, Rebez, and Machnich’s wife Caterina on 16 October 1909, and with money supplied by the partners Joyce set off for Dublin on 18 October.

He found a suitable location on Mary Street and the partners arrived in Dublin in November to be joined later by a new partner, Francesco Novak, a bicycle shop owner, who was to manage the cinema, and Guido Lenardon, the projectionist. The cinema opened on 20 December 1909 and had an audience capacity of 420.

Despite its novelty, the venture seems to have been failing from the start, possibly because Dublin audiences were not interested in the Italian and European films that were shown. By April 1910 the partners wrote to Joyce to see if he could find a buyer for it. He asked his father to contact the British Provincial Cinema Company, but John Joyce did nothing about it. Eventually, the cinema was sold in June 1910 at a loss for all the partners involved.

His involvment with cinema is subject to a movie and a a book.

"The Cracked Looking Glass" Of Cinema: James Joyce, John Huston, and the Memory of "The Dead"

From: The Yale Journal of Criticism
Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2002
pp. 127-148 | 10.1353/yale.2002.0007

. whenever I am obliged to lie with my eyes closed I see a cinematograph going on and on and it brings back to my memory things I had almost forgotten.
—James Joyce

The quivering inner words that correspond with the visual images. Contrasts with outer circumstances, How they work reciprocally. . .
—Sergei Eisenstein

If, as has been often proclaimed, the twentieth century was pre-eminently the society of the spectacle, the language of modern fiction has been similarly characterized by its address to the eye, whether through graphic realism, cinematic techniques of narration, "spatial form," or other modes of pictorial representation. Not least of the ensuing paradoxes where the relationship between film and literature is concerned is that the more the language of a novel aspired to the condition of the image, the greater its seeming resistance to film adaptation, or other translations into visual form. As Edward Murray wrote of Joseph Strick's film version of Ulysses (1967), summarizing a widely held view among critics as to the impossibility of filming great literature:

The attempt to make a movie version of Ulysses was doomed to failure. Although Joyce's novel is full of techniques comparable those employed on the screen, the techniques are verbalized in the book or exercised at a linguistic-intellectual level beyond the capacity of a movie camera to record. Unless we get inside the mind—deep inside the mind—of Joyce's characters, we do not know them. Cinema is unsurpassed at rendering the surfaces of things; when required to penetrate the complex psyche of a character, however, it is sadly inferior to what can be done by the stream-of-consciousness novelist.
The difficulty with this critical condescension towards film is that it was precisely Joyce's use of "stream of consciousness" which many commentators considered to be the most cinematic aspect of his style, images cascading after one another in a manner akin to the incessant flow of montage: "In its intimacy and in its continuity," wrote Harry Levin, "Ulysses has more in common with the cinema than with other fiction. The movement of Joyce's style, the thought of his characters, is like unreeling film." For Levin, it was by virtue of its simulation of cinematic montage that interior monologue was suited to explore the psychic life of characters, capturing the cadences of inner speech and the most subtle intonations of story-telling. This is as Joyce himself saw it, the very form of cinema acting as kind of archive of the unconscious. Recovering from one of his many painful eye operations, he lamented the years of penury and neglect which "poisoned" his health and well-being "in more ways than one": "I mention this because whenever I am obliged to lie with my eyes closed I see a cinematograph going on and on and it brings back to my memory things I had almost forgotten." Cinema, though an exemplary vehicle of modernity, is also a means of opening up the past, bringing to mind things that are "almost forgotten"—like the memory of the dead perhaps, or, in the case to hand of adaptations from novels, traces of the words that are absent on the screen.

This suggests that, contrary to Murray's argument, film may often be at its most visual when images carry the intonations of the voice, allowing us to read between the lines of the script. So far from the image achieving its effects in film at the expense of the "complex psyche of a character," moreover, it may be the camera's very ability to attend to throwaway details, and to "the surfaces of things," that captures the resonances of the voice in an adaptation—often, indeed, while departing from a literal or pedantic fidelity to the original work. This is of interest not just for literary narration, but for cinema itself, as it suggests that the ultimate test of an adaptation of a literary work lies not in a scrupulous adherence to the "letter" of the original, but more to it's "spirit," or spirits—if by that we mean the colloquy...