Table Of ContentJOHN DOS&
PASSOS
Cinema
L I S A N A N N E Y
JOHN DOS&
PASSOS
Cinema
L I S A N A N N E Y
© 2019 Clemson University
All rights reserved
First Edition, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-942954-87-3 (print)
eISBN: 978-1-942954-88-0 (e-book)
Published by Clemson University Press
in association with Liverpool University Press
For information about Clemson University Press,
please visit our website at www.clemson.edu/press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Nanney, Lisa, author.
Title: John Dos Passos and cinema / Lisa Nanney.
Description: First edition. | [Clemson, South Carolina] : Clemson University
Press in association with Liverpool University Press, 2019. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019004202 (print) | LCCN 2019011303 (ebook) | ISBN
9781942954880 (e-book) | ISBN 9781942954873 | ISBN
9781942954873 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781942954880 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Dos Passos, John, 1896-1970--Motion picture plays. | Dos
Passos, John, 1896-1970--Political and social views.
Classification: LCC PS3507.O743 (ebook) | LCC PS3507.O743 Z773 2019 (print) |
DDC 812/.52--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004202
Typeset in Minion Pro by Carnegie Book Production.
Contents
John Dos Passos and Cinema
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Part I (1917–1928)
From the Stage to the Screen: “Goin’ to the Movies…”
in the Great War and the 1920s
1 Experimental Drama and Soviet Constructivist Theater 11
2 The Birth of an Industry: Setting the Stage for the Screen 25
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) 37
4 Soviet Film: Montage, the Camera Eye, and Ideology 63
Part II (1934–1937)
From Paramount Studios to the Spanish Front:
Writing Hollywood, Filming History
5 “The world’s greatest center of … propaganda”: Hollywood,
The Devil Is a Woman, and The Big Money 77
6 Film Writing: “Dreamfactory,” Metafilm, and the Politics
of Form 101
7 Filming History and The Spanish Earth: “what a man and a
comrade has to do in … wartimes” 127
Part III (1937–1970)
From Page to Stage to Screens: Adapting U.S.A.
and “the truth as I see it”
8 Filmic Narrative into Narrative Film: “politics and the
silver screen” 159
Conclusion 183
Appendix 195
Notes 217
Index 243
Acknowledgments
Many thanks go to the individuals and institutions who assisted
in this work. Lucy Dos Passos Coggin and John Dos Passos
Coggin have been most generous in providing me with
insights and encouragement as well as permissions to publish and quote
from materials that form the foundation of this study. In particular I
appreciate their willingness to respond to questions about Dos Passos’s
involvement in film and to search their own collection of photographs for
images and grant permission to use them. The book would not have been
possible without their generosity.
I appreciate also the help of the librarians and photographic techni-
cians in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections at the University
of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, where the John Dos Passos Collec-
tion is located. All manuscripts and letters in this book are quoted and
appear with permission from the Dos Passos family and the University of
Virginia Special Collections library.
For access to images and permissions to publish them I thank the
European Foundation Joris Ivens, administrator for the Joris Ivens
archive, and the Nederlands Fotomuseum, which handles the archive
of photographer John Fernhout. In particular I appreciate the assistance
and insights of André Stufkens of the European Foundation Joris Ivens,
who provided new information about Ivens and The Spanish Earth, and
vii
viii John Dos Passos and Cinema
Carolien Provaas of the Nederlands Fotomuseum, who graciously took
the time to answer questions about the Fernhout archive.
The insights and images afforded by two recent documentaries and
their makers were instrumental for the information they provided about
the complexities surrounding the making of The Spanish Earth and the
circumstances of the fate of José Robles. Sonia Tercero Ramiro, creator
and director of Robles, duelo al sol (2015), patiently helped locate infor-
mation about images and answered questions related to Dos Passos’s
involvement in The Spanish Earth and his own search into the circum-
stances surrounding the death of Robles. Robles, duelo al sol and the
research that informs it provide a thorough and engrossing investigation
into this episode and its impact on the lives of those affected by it. Peter
Davis, creator and director of Digging The Spanish Earth (2017), took time
to answers questions, generously provided access to his film incorporating
unpublished interviews with Joris Ivens, Helen van Dongen, Martha Gell-
horn, and others, and facilitated contacts with the Ivens Foundation.
Revisiting locations where The Spanish Earth was filmed and commenting
on the process of Ivens’s work, Digging The Spanish Earth insightfully
traces the ongoing impact of the Spanish Civil War on the Spanish people
and land.
Thanks go also to Prof. Alex Vernon, who contributed to the making
of Davis’s documentary and who wrote Hemingway’s Second War (2011),
not only for that book’s invaluable research into the political and military
history of the Spanish Civil War and the particular circumstances that
involved Hemingway, Ivens, and Dos Passos during the conflict but also
for correspondence about research and for facilitating contacts with the
Ivens Foundation.
Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to John Morgenstern,
Director of Clemson University Press, for making this project possible,
and to Alison Mero, Managing Editor of the Press, for her patience and
assistance throughout the production of this book.
Introduction
In the April 2015 premiere episode of the final half season of the hit
HBO series Mad Men, successful Manhattan advertising executives
Don Draper and Roger Sterling, slumming in a diner, have their order
taken by a dignified but downtrodden waitress into whose apron pocket is
wedged a battered copy of The 42nd Parallel (1930), the first novel of Dos
Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, which chronicles the American nation as it emerged
as a superpower in the early twentieth century. Flirtatiously teasing her,
Roger asks, “Do you have anything by John Dos Passos?” By calling atten-
tion to the incongruity of the appearance of this novel of the 1930s in the
possession of a working woman of 1970, when the episode takes place,
screenwriter Matthew Weiner tacitly underscores the economic and class
dynamics that underlie the critique of capitalism the series shares with
U.S.A. Likewise recalling the novel’s representation of the stark economic
inequities that ensue when corporate greed precipitates a boom and bust
cycle, in his 2016 Academy Award-winning screenplay adaptation of
Michael Lewis’s 2010 novel The Big Short Adam McKay drew not only
substance but style from U.S.A., using joltingly juxtaposed fragments of
popular culture to propel his revelatory film. In the Daniel Espinosa film
Child 44 (2015), adapted from the 2008 Man Booker prize contender by
Tom Rob Smith, a single shot of The Big Money (1936), the trilogy’s third
novel, serves as a signifier for a character’s dangerous and covert oppo-
sition to the suppression of speech and thought in the work’s Stalinist
1
2 John Dos Passos and Cinema
Russian 1950s setting. Acclaimed documentarist Adam Curtis, whose
work in films such as HyperNormalisation (2012) and The Century of the
Self (2002) explores the intersections of global forces such as consum-
erism and social media, credits Dos Passos as the primary aesthetic and
ideological influence on his own work. Curtis insightfully asserts that in
U.S.A. Dos Passos “prefigures everything” by creating, through his frag-
mented compositional technique, “the great dialectic of our time, which
is between individual experiences and how those fragments get turned
into stories, both by individuals themselves, and then, by those in power
above them.”1 Here Curtis acknowledges the revolutionary nature and
impact of the trilogy’s four interactive narrative devices—the Newsreels
of current events of its day; the biographies of history makers; the stories
of fictional characters whose lives are molded by social and historical
forces; and the stream-of-consciousness Camera Eye segments from the
point of view of an anonymous observer in the novels’ times. By means of
the dynamic juxtapositions and parallels among them, the devices create
a simultaneous portrait of the United States in the first three decades of
the twentieth century, from war to boom to crash. Little wonder that the
potential of such Cubist, cinematic narrative structure, functioning as it
does like montage, should be recognized by filmmakers in a hyper-visual
age nearly a century later.
Such examples in current cinema of the resonant influence and visual
use of Dos Passos’s modernist American chronicle suggest its persistence
into the twenty-first century as an icon of proletarian democratic political
and economic ideals, despite the relative infrequency of its invocation even
during years spanning the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, a decade when
youthful protest over social and economic injustice might usefully have
appropriated the novels’ messages into their rhetoric. Yet for all its early
and perhaps returning status as a work that grasped in its vast expanse the
complex character of American identity, and articulated it in the multiple
genres it incorporated and the revolutionary structure it devised, most
U.S. high school and college students today will graduate never having
been introduced to this trilogy or its writer, both of which seem to have
been lost to the canon between the era of its publication and the present.
Both call for renewed attention in an era of hyper-visual culture, when
