<i>H. G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies</i> (review)

Abstract

Keith Williams, H. G. Wells, Modernity and Movies. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2007. 279pp. £16.95 (pbk)/£50 (hbk).Simon J. JamesThe late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writer H. G. Wells is often cited as not only most significant of parents of sf genres, but also as prophet of numerous other actual technologies foreseen by his work: tank, nuclear bomb, spacecraft and Internet. Visionary as he was then, Wells also both anticipated and responded to technology of cinema, as discussed strikingly and eruditely in Keith Williams' H. G. Wells, Modernity and Movies.The movie camera is itself a kind of time machine, a cybernetic device that compensates for insufficiencies of human biological eye by transfiguring ways both time and space might be perceived. Williams writes in detail about kinds of transformations in vision wrought by speeded-up and slowed-down film (foreshadowed in Wells' The Time Machine (1895) and 'The New Accelerator' (1901)), and on other new perspectives in early cinema that were contemporaneous with Wells' formal innovations in fiction. Williams takes his cue from Ian Christie's notion that cinema not only altered nature of aesthetic 'seeing', but also ways in which its audiences perceived real world. Naturally, writer of scientific romances was strongly drawn to a mode of representation so strongly marked by both modernity and by supernatural, carrying marks of hallucinatory mimesis of photography' alongside fantastic realism of a waking dream' (15).The early chapters discuss ways in which Wells' books prefigure cinema, discussing ekphrastic nature of Wells' mimesis of real world, his words seeking to frame an imaginary picture in his reader's mind. (The actual illustrations included in book are put to splendid use.) Williams is particularly adroit in noticing topoi of looking and spectacular within Wells' texts and their screen descendants; an examination of medium is a part of message of such post-Wellsian experiments as Orson Welles' radio play The War of Worlds (1939) or Nigel Kneale's television Quatermass (UK 1958-9) television serials. Television playwright Dennis Potter praised Wells for this metafictional quality, for showing 'the frame in picture, not just the picture in frame' (7), and technology is frequently subject of Wells' selfconscious early work. The dystopian romance When Sleeper Wakes (1899) shows modernity accelerating towards hyperreality; Williams' stylish reading of The Invisible Man (1897) sees both book and film as proto-Derridean play on presence and absence, capitalism's reification of property given literal life in film's special effects animation of clothes and objects. Making telling references to Wells texts beyond early scientific romances, such as Kipps (1905) or late Star-Begotten (1937), and moving fluidly between historical, poststructuralist, Marxist and psychoanalytical theoretical models, Williams on whole wears his learning lightly. While book's apparatus criticus is both scrupulous and generous - footnotes and bibliography occupy 86 of book's 279 pages - constant breaking-in of other voices can sometimes make reading H. G. Wells, Modernity and Movies itself a little like a journey in a Time Machine, as a sentence spins dizzily from citing a critic or theorist, thence to an aspect of early cinematic history, then back to a Wells text. …