3 - “Propaganda for peace”: Film and Narrative in One Man's Initiation: 1917 (1920), Three Soldiers (1921), and D.W. Griffith's Hearts of the World (1918)

Summary

The narrativization of early film during its transition from one-reel nickelodeon attraction to dream palace full-length feature incorporated the story-telling devices and perspectival conventions of the novel. Dos Passos had a firm grasp of these narrative forms: by the late 1920s, he had published four novels and begun the U.S.A. trilogy. But, in addition, he had already registered in novel form his realizations about the dramatic emotional and behavioral impact film can have on the spectator. In Three Soldiers (1921), the second novel he published, Dos Passos demonstrates what film is capable of doing; and the method of interweaving narratives that structures his novel shows the young writer beginning to explore how film achieves its power. The military experiences that shaped the novel, and his consciousness of the development of film as a cultural force even before 1920, had impressed upon the young writer that movies could be exploited as a powerful instrument to incite aggression, compel conformity, and overwhelm individual thinking.

Three Soldiers shows Dos Passos laying the methodological foundation for his foray into screen writing, and for his fully realized modernist style, by exploring the ways film does its work. By beginning to incorporate into his style the strategies of film editing, Dos Passos implicitly began to seek a way to harness the power of film to involve the viewer in creative individual thought and democratic activism. He pursued that search further in his 1928 visit to the Russian revolutionary filmmakers who were creating and defining ways to make film a potent ideological tool. The quest to combine the visual and the narrative, the spectacle and the story, into a totally immersive art form—like film—that could both engage its participants and achieve a political purpose had been frustrated in the disillusioning culmination of the New Playwrights’ drama experiment in 1928. But exploring the potentials of film more fully by writing for the first time about it, and by writing, for the first time, with its tools, equipped him to utilize what he learned about the mechanics of film from the Soviet pioneers: he would bring these foundational experiences and tools to the search he would soon undertake in screen writing, as he had to drama and to his groundbreaking novels, for a way to make the narrative “stand up off the page.”