Faulkner and Film (Ungar Film Library)

'The most cinematic of novelists...' That is an apt description of William Faulkner after the publication in 1929 of his Sartoris and The Sound and the Fury. Bruce F. Kawin suggests that the dramatic transformation in the author of two earlier conventionally structured novels had its roots in Faulkner's exposure to new film techniques and to modernist writers like Joyce and Eliot, who in the words of Gertrude Stein were 'doing what cinema was doing.' Using Faulkner as a test case, this study explores the interaction between literature and film. It focuses on both the screen versions of Faulkner's major novels and on the undeservedly dismissed screenplays he wrote during more than two decades. A work of original scholarship, Faulkner and Film is based on interviews with those who knew the novelist in Hollywood, including his mentor Howard Hawks, and on Bruce Kawin's first-hand analysis of Faulkner's screenplays with their penciled marginal notes. Kawin also examined treatments and first drafts by Faulkner long forgotten in studio vaults.