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The television program Camera Three
started in the early 1950’s as a collaboration between WCBS and the
University of the State of New York’s Education Department.[1] The
host, James Macandrew, believed strongly in using
television as a means of cultural education.
"If the airwaves can tempt us to laugh and to dance," Mr. Macandrew once
said, "they can also tempt us to think."[2]
Over the years the program came to
include such topics as discussions of Robinson
Jeffers’ poetry and interviews with John Cage. By the time of the
Mary Ellen Bute interview in 1965 the show was well entrenched
nationally as a
Sunday morning cultural affairs program on CBS. Professor William
York Tindall, the noted Joyce scholar and author of A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake,
was
invited to participate in the discussion.
The Camera Three interview provides
a rare opportunity to hear Mary Ellen Bute discuss her film,
so in that
alone it’s a welcome piece of film history. According to
film historian Cecile Starr (who was also the Finnegans Wake film’s distributor),
Mary Ellen Bute was a “friendly, energetic & enthusiatic”
person. Those qualities come through clearly in her appearance on
this tape. Though Passages from
Finnegans Wake was in preparation for seven years (though
with only 32 days of actual filming), she maintains her delight
in the project and in the Joycean language that inspired her.
Bute was an abstract film pioneer,
putting abstract shapes & music together on film starting in the
1930’s. She admired the modernist aesthetic & was
a fervent fan of James Joyce & of Finnegans
Wake in
particular. She was a long-standing member of
the James Joyce Society and
did much of her research
for the film from the Society’s archives. Founded in 1947,
the Society met
regularly at the celebrated Gotham Book Mart in New York City.
Frances Steloff of Gotham Book
Mart had been an early & ardent promoter of Joyce’s work, selling
serializations of “Work in Progress” and later hosting a Wake
publication party with Viking in 1939 (The
Dead Come to Life at Finnegans Wake) in which “scores of
literary
celebrities participated as mourners
and Frances herself as the bereaved widow.”[4] Word
from Eugene Jolas was that Joyce was “amused
at the unique wake and pleased with the photographs.”
Gotham Book Mart became a central clearinghouse for writings by and
about Joyce,
with the Society forming in 1947 as a method of bringing together
anyone with a passionate interest in Joyce, from the neophyte to the
experts.[5]
In his Joyce Society memoir, Zack Bowen recalls that:
“For ten years or more, avant garde
film maker Mary Ellen Bute sat on
the front row of Society meetings. Her full-length film, Passages
from
‘Finnegans Wake,’ was adapted from the Barnard College production
of
Mary Manning’s work by the same name. Conceived and carried on in
concert with Frances Steloff, Padraic Colum, and other Joyce Society
members, it remains the most innovative cinematic interpretation of the
spirit of Joyce ‘s last work ever attempted. “[6]
Bute
addressed her response to those who
questioned her apparent shift from abstract film to Joyce in the biographical note for
the New York Film Association:
“I am
often asked how I moved from abstract films to Finnegan’s Wake?
It’s plausible…Joyce’s premise: ‘One
great part of
every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered
sensible by the use of wide-awake language, cut-and-dry grammar and
go-ahead plot’ is, like abstract films, about our ‘inner’ landscape.
Joyce, like Whitman, and much Art, is about the essence of our Being;
so, we’re traveling on the same terrain.”
— ( notes written by Bute), n.d.
And in an interview about the film with
Gretchen Weinberg for Film Culture in 1964 she described
herself as:
“a
Finnegans Wake girl . . . I may never do another Joyce
work but I would
like
to make several films on
different aspects of Finnegans Wake, . . Several people
have already prepared
treatments which could easily be adapted for this , . . Joyce
loved the movies and hoped
his works would be filmed.” (Weinberg 1964, 26-9) [7]
In the Camera Three interview we have the
opportunity to hear Bute recount
her interest in the Wake directly. She explains that
she was “first exposed” to the Wake
at a friend’s ranch in Texas
and was immediately drawn to the singular response each reader could
bring to the work, and that she was
immediately
struck by its visual potential.
“The whole
feeling that you were on your own in Finnegans
Wake was very encouraging,” she says.
She took
Professor Tindall’s course and eventually saw the Barnard production of
Mary Manning’s play “Passages from Finnegans Wake“.
Manning, a childhood friend of Samuel Beckett’s, was a founder of The
Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge. Bute was attracted to the humor of
the play & realized that, for copyright reasons, it would be easier
to produce her film from the play than from the original Wake. Eventually Manning
helped co-write the film treatment and the script.
The interview
also affords a chance to see the noted scholar Tindall discuss Finnegans Wake as well as his
reactions to Bute’s film. Before the start of the Joyce
Society, Frances Steloff had arranged for Tindall and noted book
collector
James Gilvarry to
offer unofficial instruction to those who were new to Joyce’s work.
When host
Macandrew asks him to describe Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake to the t.v. audience, Tindall replies that:
“Nothing could be easier to describe.
It’s about everything and everybody at all times…
Read it closely, scratch your head, and there it is.”
Bute
the Joyce aficianado comes through clearly as she discusses not only
the time commitment to completing the film but the nuances of Joyce’s
text. When Tindall discusses Finnegans
Wake as being a story about a family she explains
that:
“We did take this family story
that Mr.
Tindall spoke of just now. . .You see, Shem and Shaun, as well as being
Finnegans sons, are also
conflicting parts of himself. He has to come to terms with these
parts–realize the excesses–in order to wake up. I was very eager to
do the waking up part of Finnegans Wake–you know, the part
where Joyce
says ‘it’s the problem passion play of the millentary going strong
since creation.'”
Tindall is complimentary about
Bute’s film and explains that even though Finnegans Wake “appeals to the
ear,”
Bute has “translated, transformed and transfigured it into visual
form.” And that the problem of “selection and condensing
the material took
fortitude.”
But in spite of this “fortitude,”
one later senses that Tindall can’t dismiss his respect for the written
text so easily. In a particularly compelling part of the
interview, Macandrew asks Bute if the language used in the film was a
problem, because the actors were essentially ‘speaking words that had
never existed before.’
Bute replies that she was delighted
with the cast:
“You
see it’s an Irish cast. Most had had great
experience. And you know how Joyce, among other things, wrote the Irish
dialect into many of the words. If they’re pronounced the way they’re
spelt they come out with a bit of an Irish brogue with a Dublin lilt.
And this cast was theater trained–none of them had been
under the camera before and that was very nice. We took the shooting
script and rehearsed it like a play from start to finish and for quite
a while til they got the rhythm and the whole thing going. Then I broke
it down into sequences and shots and put it under the camera.
By that time they were ordering coffee and discussing
groceries in Joycean.”
When John Macandrew comments that
he feels that the use of subtitles is
a “tremendous bridge” for the audience, Bute pleasantly responds with:
“It makes it
so much more entertaining when you see..if one of
the celebrants says ’tis
really
the truth’ and you see ‘Tis (she spells out)
‘R,’ ‘A,’ ‘R,’ ‘E,’ ‘L,’ ‘Y’ the truth.’
It’s much funnier than if you just think it’s a British pronunciation
of ‘really.’ You see?
And
throughout if it’s a ‘wallstrait oldparr’[8] then
you know
that the actors are saying what you think
they’re saying.”
Bute laughs delightfully, but at
this point the discussion becomes a bit energized as
Tindall the literary scholar objects and we perhaps get a sense of the
mentor the Joyce initiates experienced at the Gotham Book Mart: “But
how are you going to understand what
‘oldparr’ means? That takes 15 minutes of contemplation and this goes
right by….”
Bute interrupts: “But now you know
how we do that–we have him
falling out of bed so it’s visual, it’s being said….”
Tindall interrupts: “Wall
Street…..falling off a
wall…..wall street crash….par value stocks….’oldparr?'”
Bute shakes her head: “Oh now
please, we had to simplify it a
little. But we did have a montage of all that.”
Tindall still objects that the
viewer “cannot get more than a
little fleeting part of this tremendous whole and that’s the problem.”
At this point Mary Ellen Bute
concurs, but we know from watching the film with its energized editing
techniques & inclusions of such modern day images as television
screens & rockets that she took seriously her belief that one could
come to Finnegans Wake on their own terms. In her
1964 Film
Culture interview with Gretchen Weinberg she pointed out that “the
film
is not a translation of the book but a reaction to it.”
The interview contains other tales
of her experiences with the film. She
says she had one typical “Joycean” calamity after another, and
describes calling Erik Barnouw of Columbia University to come down for
a screening. She apologized that the film took so long to
make–after all it was in preparation for 7 years. But she
is obviously delighted in relating Barnouw’s response that “it would be
presumptious to do Joyce too
fast!”.
The interview concludes with a few
segments from the film. Mary Ellen Bute must have been satisfied
with the outcome of the film, because in that same year it won a prize
at Cannes for best feature film debut.
FOOTNOTES
1. from
TV Obscurities:
http://www.tvobscurities.com/category/television-shows/camera-three/
Initially a local
New York City program, Camera
Three
premiered on Saturday, May 16th, 1953 as a co-production between
WCBS-TV and the State Education Department of the University of the
State of New York, with James Macandrew as moderator/host[4]. At
first, the series ran from 2-2:45PM. Its panel of experts covered all
manner of topics, from Shakespeare to economics and everything in
between. In April of 1954 it won a Peabody Award in the Television
Education category, shared with with station KNXT in Los Angeles for
its Cavalcade of Books series [5].
The
series also dramatized classic works of literature, including Herman
Melville’s Moby Dick, Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and over
the course of eight weeks in November and December of 1955,
Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. On December 18th, 1955, The
New York
Times reported that CBS had decided to broadcast Camera Three
nationally beginning Sunday, January 22nd, 1956 at 11AM
2. James
Macandrew Leader in New York In Educational TV
By WOLFGANG SAXON, Published:
Monday, January 18, 1988, The New
York Times.
3. Southern
Illinois University Carbondale has 17 production still
images in their Morris Library online digital collection. Search
String “finnegans wake”.
4. Wise Men Fish Here, The Story of
Frances Steloff and the
Gotham Book Mart
W.G. Rogers, Harcourt Brace, NY 1965 as quoted online in Zack Bowen’s
memoirs, The New York
James Joyce Society by Zack Bowen. Frances Steloff compiled a
scrapbook of the Wake event, The Dead Come to Life at Finnegans Wake,
which is now
archived as part of the Gotham Book Mart
papers at the New York Public Library.
5. CHAPTER
FIVE: FRANCES STELOFF REMINISCES:
from www.anaisnin.com: “I never said no to anything”
One
day, one of my nice
customers who was a lawyer, a very fatherly sort of person, said, ‘How
are things and what are your problems?’
‘I’ve always had problems’, I
said chuckling, ‘Well you know, there ought to be a study group for
Joyce because all these young ones come in and ask questions and we
ought to find answers for them.’
He said, ‘Well do you know
anybody?’
‘Yes, I’ve asked them but
they’re not willing to take it on.’
He said, ‘Give me their names
and telephone numbers.’ And I did. In a week he called up and asked,
‘Would it be all right to come over this evening?’ ‘Why yes of course.’
After
conferring with Steloff they
asked if they could return on February 3rd, 1947, which was the day
after Joyce’s birthday. She concurred and the James Joyce Society had
officially begun.
6. The New York
James Joyce Society
by Zack Bowen Joyce Studies Annual, Volume 12, Summer 2001
© 2001 the University of Texas Press, P. O. Box 7819, Austin,
Texas
78713-7819
Posted to The James Joyce Society webpage (joycesociety.org) by
permission of the author.
7. Weinberg,
Gretchen. “An Interview with Mary Ellen Bute on the Filming of
Finnegans Wake.” Film Culture 35 (1964-1965).
8. Finnegans
Wake, by James Joyce Page 1, lines 15 through 24, from Finnegans Web:
The
fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-
ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-
nuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled
early in bed and later
on life down through all christian
minstrelsy. The great fall of the
offwall entailed at such short notice
the pftjschute of Finnegan,
erse solid man, that the
humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends
an unquiring one well to the west in
quest of his tumptytumtoes:
and their upturnpikepointandplace is
at the knock out in the park
where oranges have been laid to rust
upon the green since dev-
linsfirst loved livvy.
Title:
Mary Ellen Bute films “Finnegans Wake”, Reference: 651128
“A portion of the
feature film “Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans
Wake” is shown, with discussion by its producer-director Mary Ellen
Bute and William Tindall, Professor of English at Columbia University,
New York City, author of “The Reader’s Guide to James Joyce.” 1965.” As
a side note, Creative Arts also offers Anthony
Burgess explains Joyce’s
“Finnegans Wake”.
For
further information on
“Passages From
Finnegans Wake”
see
Kit Basquin
Introductory Notes on
the Screening
& our
Special Mary Ellen
Bute feature in FlashPoint12
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