Filming History and The Spanish Earth

Dos Passos was instrumental in initiating The Spanish Earth, a 1937 documentary film relief effort for the Republican fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, although he likely did not contribute to its writing. Yet the dangerous, divisive circumstances surrounding the film’s creation and his collaboration with its Communist director Joris Ivens and with colleague Ernest Hemingway during its production in Spain challenged Dos Passos’s beliefs about the relationship between politics and art and profoundly affected his subsequent career. The execution of a Spanish friend, José Robles, at the hands of Russian military personnel who were ostensibly Republican allies, and a subsequent coverup, led Dos Passos to re-evaluate his leftist political positions, his professional alliance with Ivens, and his longtime friendship with Hemingway. The film and its circumstances raised complex questions about the dynamics between fact and fictionalization in documentary and the artist’s ethical and aesthetic responsibilities. Dos Passos’s choices to report fully on the repercussions of factionalization in the Spanish anti-fascist cause, to represent multiple perspectives of the looming greater European conflict, and to articulate unequivocally his conviction that Communism was compromising both European and U.S. leftist movements earned opprobrium from literary critics who had theretofore lionized him.

“The world’s greatest center of … propaganda”

The years 1934-37, during which Dos Passos undertook three film projects, were critical in Dos Passos’s literary career and political thought. He believed that capitalism was another of the monolithic forces of the machine age, like the military, that could eradicate individual self-determination. But he saw increasing danger in Stalin’s repressive regime and what he considered American Communists’ subordination of workers’ interests to Party ideology. His nascent political ambivalence emerges in the first two volumes of U.S.A., The 42nd Parallel (1930) and 1919 (1932). By 1934, when he accepted a short-term contract as screenwriter for Paramount, he was engaged in work on the third volume, The Big Money (1936), and his experiences while working on a film vehicle for Marlene Dietrich, The Devil Is a Woman (1935, dir. Josef von Sternberg), solidified his conviction of the complicity between the Hollywood “dreamfactory” and capitalism to stoke American consumer culture. While the manuscript of the Paramount film shows signs of Dos Passos’s aesthetics, it is The Big Money’s film-inflected narrative representation of the corruption of the industry that articulates the impact of both the formal and the cultural dynamics of film on his work.

Soviet Film

Dos Passos’s adaptation of cinematic methods to literary style beginning in the mid-1920s emerged further in his work after he visited Russia in 1928. Tepid public and critical response to New Playwrights dramas motivated Dos Passos to explore how the revolutionary state-supported Russian theater and film productions had engaged the masses, united them politically, and produced groundbreaking artists. In dramatist Meyerhold’s avant-garde theater, Constructivist industrial sets and “biomechanical” acting techniques created successful dramas about and for workers. Dos Passos observed that cinematic innovations emerged from the Soviet-controlled studios despite the state’s use of film as its primary tool of mass ideological education. Though Lenin, then Stalin increasingly controlled film productions and artists, Soviet filmmakers nonetheless evolved theories of montage that became foundational in filmmaking and informed Dos Passos’s modernist novels and his 1936 independent film treatment “Dreamfactory,” with its meta-filmic exposé of the Hollywood film industry. In particular, these works registered the formal and conceptual innovations of two directors: Eisenstein, whose films combined fiction and history to effect political action through art; and Vertov, whose films acknowledged the artist’s vision as controlling the camera “eye” and who embedded in one short film an auto-critique of movie-making.

The Birth of an Industry

Film emerged rapidly both as an art and as an industry during the same years Dos Passos was maturing as an artist and absorbing the boundary-breaking creative potentials wrought by modernist innovations in all the arts. The process by which film achieved its privileged status as an engine of change was both cultural and aesthetic; as film developed this agency, it was driven by and in turn drove economic systems that were in flux during the decades before the economic Crash of 1929. These systems and this process fashioned film into the kind of potent political force that Dos Passos sought for his own art. The revolutionary interchange among the arts that transformed them in the 1920s galvanized Dos Passos’s practice in each discipline he was undertaking in that period—painting and set design, and writing plays and novels. Critics have long recognized the impact of the visual arts and particularly of moving pictures on the stylistic innovations that characterized his modernist novels. Dos Passos acknowledged that both Manhattan Transfer (1925) and U.S.A. (1938) were built on montage, and he specifically credited the impact of individual film pioneers such as D.W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein on his narrative style.

Introduction

In 1930, Time magazine’s cover proclaimed John Dos Passos the most important writer on the Left in the U.S., and classified him along with Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner as one of the most important of the “Lost Generation” writers for his innovative modernist novels of the 1920s and 1930s. But by 1938 he had cut ties with leftist organizations in the U.S., begun publishing in anti-Communist journals, become estranged from leftist friends such as Hemingway and playwright John Howard Lawson, and was ostracized by leftist critics for expressing his conviction that Communism was the paramount threat to individual liberties and democracy. Thereafter, his books were often criticized as ideologically doctrinaire, their style as falling far short of his earlier achievements, which had adapted into dynamic narrative the visual devices of cinema. John Dos Passos and Cinema explores these political and critical transitions through the lens of the writer’s little-known work, much of it archival, in the medium of film itself. As a novelist, he had used film as a subject and stylistic source; as screen writer, he evolved his methods directly from the cinema’s visual language, demonstrating how potently the medium could be manipulated for political and commercial profit.

Filmic Narrative into Narrative Film

After 1937 and the Spanish Civil War, although Dos Passos remained concerned with the individual’s struggle for self-determination, his work now focused on his conviction that the paramount monolithic force threatening personal liberties was Communism. That concern likewise shaped his attempts in the 1950s and 1960s to adapt U.S.A. into film. A dramatic revue of U.S.A., by Paul Shyre with Dos Passos, was staged between 1953 and 1960. NBC scheduled but never produced a television adaptation of The Big Money in 1957, and a lawyer, Nick Spanos, held a film option on U.S.A. during the 1950s and early 1960s but never secured a production deal. In 1956, however, Dos Passos undertook the project himself, creating a full screen treatment of U.S.A. that he titled “One Life Is Not Enough.” Never produced, its manuscript focuses on just a few characters, narrative arcs, and modal segments, but does retain his critique of the film industry. Its attempt to translate the trilogy’s film-inflected style into cinematic form lacks the novels’ innovative dynamic, however. Nor does this treatment allow form to articulate ideas as had the also-unproduced “Dreamfactory.” Overt anti-Communism drives the later treatment; its ideological agenda simplifies its aesthetics.

Conclusion

Though The Spanish Earth (1937) is likely the only film most readers will associate with the novelist Dos Passos, the other three film projects he undertook, both produced and unproduced, provide new insight into the cinematic aesthetics that inform the methods of his ground-breaking modernist novels. Although his later fiction incorporated fewer innovative adaptations of film devices into their styles, in novels such as Most Likely to Succeed (1954) he continued to address what he saw as the failure of the film industry to fulfil its artistic and cultural potential. But innovative filmmakers in the twenty-first century have frequently cited Dos Passos’s narrative devices and preoccupations as central influences, and current films exploring the power of monopolistic corporations and consumerism and blurring distinctions among genres echo the writer’s modernist themes and methods. The diverse range of Dos Passos’s own cinematic viewing throughout his life reflects his lifelong interest in new ways of telling a story.

Film Writing

In 1936, his politics still leftist but increasingly apprehensive about Communism, Dos Passos used his exposure to the Hollywood film industry to create his only independent film treatment, “Dreamfactory.” This manuscript, though never produced as a film, is the only film project he undertook consisting entirely of his own concepts and his own writing. “Dreamfactory” imagines visually what The Big Money communicates by adapting montage to the page: the complicit relationship between film and the creation of material desire that fuels capitalism. Using the techniques of montage Dos Passos had absorbed from early U.S. and Soviet film, the treatment employs the tools of its own making to critique itself as a product. This innovative work presaged the political and professional crisis that would emerge from Dos Passos’s next film project, the documentary The Spanish Earth (1937): though Dos Passos wrote the “Dreamfactory” treatment, its ideological direction was the subject of correspondence between him and the Dutch Communist filmmaker, Joris Ivens, who would direct the Spanish film. Ivens’ conception of his art as a vehicle to be shaped by the ideological demands of the Party would conflict with Dos Passos’s belief that art should evoke creative engagement and individual choice.

“Propaganda for peace”

The narrativization of early film during its transition from one-reel nickelodeon attraction to full-length multi-reel feature incorporated the story-telling devices and perspectival conventions of the novel. Dos Passos’ firm grasp of these conventions is evident from his novels of that period, including Manhattan Transfer (1925) and the beginnings of U.S.A. His earlier war novels One Man’s Initiation: 1917 and Three Soldiers (1921), drawing from his own military experiences, demonstrate his understanding also of the emotional and behavioral impact of film and the beginnings of his exploration of how film achieves its power. His military training showed him how movies could be exploited to incite aggression, compel conformity, and overwhelm individual thinking. But by incorporating into his early novels the strategies of film editing developed by pioneers such as D.W. Griffith, Dos Passos was attempting to recreate film’s powerful potentials as a means to elicit individual thought and democratic activism. His use of film as subject and signifier in his modernist novels and his adaptation of cinematic technique in their forms are central to their response to the possibilities and the threats of the machine age that fostered the rise of cinema.

Experimental Drama and Soviet Constructivist Theater

By the time he served in World War I, Dos Passos was well-versed in classical and contemporary visual art and a practiced painter. The war revealed to him how organizations and forces—such as governments, corporations, the press, and the military—could subvert individual self-determination, so he brought his visual aesthetics to bear on his early writing to seek artistic methods that could combine non-verbal aesthetics with political ideas, could transcend current literary forms, and could move readers to engaged interaction and activism. Like his early anti-war novels One Man’s Initiation: 1917 (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921), his experimental plays and set designing with the New Playwrights Theatre group, which he co-founded in New York in the mid-1920s, responded to the expanded aesthetic potentials of modernism. His early dramas, such as The Garbage Man (1927), reflect his increasing awareness that the theater had to create an innovative, immersive experience to compete as a cultural and political force with film, which was rapidly assuming unparalleled power as public entertainment both in the U.S. and Russia.