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Auditory Exposures: Faulkner, Eisenstein, and Film Sound

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Sarah Gleeson-White
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Abstract

In identifying cinematic qualities—including Eisensteinian montage—in Faulkner's major fiction, scholars have conceived of film as an exclusively visual medium. This essay provides evidence of Faulkner's familiarity with Eisenstein's cinematic praxis by examining the similarities between the novelist's 1934 film treatment of Blaise Cendrars's Sutter's Gold and one that Eisenstein produced in 1930. It then argues that there is a striking continuity between the two treatments in the realm of sound—in particular, the imagining and inscription of film sound. Most surprising is the manner in which Faulkner's sonic experimentalism, clearly influenced by Eisenstein, works its way into the novel on which he was working at the time, Absalom, Absalom!. Informed by screen writing and film-sound technology, Faulkner's high-modernist novel contributes to emerging scholarly interest in the auditory culture of modernism.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 128 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 87 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by The Modern Language Association of America

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