6 - Film Writing: “Dreamfactory,” Metafilm, and the Politics of Form

Summary

Scholars have noted from the earliest publication of the novels of U.S.A. how important cinematic techniques were in its structural elements and dynamics, insights proceeding from Dos Passos's own acknowledgement of how powerfully affected he was by D.W. Griffith’s revolutionary use of montage to impel the viewer to interact creatively with the work. As Chapter 4 has explored, perhaps more influential still were the films and editing dynamics of the Russian filmmakers Eisenstein and Vertov. From a host of perspectives, criticism of U.S.A. has effectively and inventively tracked filmic elements in the work, registered the interaction of its narrative elements, and theorized about the cumulative effect of its structure and how its treatment of the film industry itself figures into the dynamics of the work. Indeed, some critics regard The Big Money as Dos Passos's “Hollywood novel” in the vein of Nathanel West's The Day of the Locust or Fitzgerald's unfinished The Last Tycoon, and many more agree it constitutes the closest he came to that genre. But the only work Dos Passos wrote that was not only about but actually of Hollywood, the only work he wrote solely focused on its mechanisms, is, fittingly, not a novel but a treatment and sample scenes for a film, “Dreamfactory.” Created in 1936, while he was finishing and proofing The Big Money, the film work imagines visually what The Big Money communicates by adapting and flattening montage to the page: the complicit relationship between film and the creation of material desire that feeds capitalism. Using processes and a thematic focus none of the rest of his work manifests, the screen treatment shows Dos Passos translating into a visual language his understanding of the emotional power inherent in film and editing techniques in particular, employing the dynamics of montage and editing he had earlier translated onto the page in his modernist novels—but this time to create a visual product.