American SF Comics
Boris Eizykman and Daniel Riche. La Bande dessinée de science-fiction américaine.
Paris: Albin-Michel, 1976. 128p., illus
One of the authors of this monograph on American S-F comics, Dr B. Eizykman, is also
the author of two other studies on SF, SF et Capitalisme (1972; see SFS No. 6)
and Inconscience-fiction (reviewed in SFS No. 21). On the other hand, he has also
recently published a remarkable study on one of the 19th century precursors of
"didactic" comic strips, "Der Strawwelpeter". un analogue
graphique et narratif des machines de tortures et de persécution pédagogiques au XlXe
siècle (Paris: Phot-Oeil, 1979).
Eizykman and Riche set forth in this well-documented monograph a rather critical and
provocative theory of US comics. They reject offhand the type of nostalgic "history
of comics" too frequently made of a finicky chronology of names and dates, mimicking
canonic "literary histories." For the authors, SF and comic strips are to be
seen as "blown up nebulas," expanding structures that should be investigated
with an eye to their centrifugal vectors rather than their "stable" nuclei. One
of the authors' theses is that 20th-century US comics, in their most inventive (and
peripheral) output, escape linear chronology of "plastic progress." Some
cartoonists early in the century already display a bold iconic inventiveness comparable to
contemporary "underground" production and seem to anticipate our
"schizophrenic" post-modernistic world rather than mirror a quiet post-Victorian
society. The authors are therefore unwilling to believe in any "unity" of SF
comics production, although they find a common denominator in its mirroring "a
totalitarian police society, repudiating every utopian desire, a production whose function
is to reinforce an established system drifting from one crisis to another." But this
function has been constantly counterbalanced by an opposite critical and satirical
tendency, from W. McCay in the early 1910s to the contemporary underground cartoonists,
and through the whole production runs a "multidimensional plastic invention."
Such a subversive convention is already at work in Gustav Verbeek's cartoons early in the
century. "In its reversible plates and its upset space he already experiments with
alien spatial and emotional configurations--a marvelous SF that makes preposterous any
figuration of a `future world' closely copied from the most abominable aspects of our
totalitarian society" (p. 7--a good sample of the somewhat frantic style used by E.
and R.). SF comics are therefore the scene of a struggle between a "literature of
reduplication" repeating ad nauseam the paranoid axioms of industrial societies, a
lethal apparatus absorbing every trace of fantasy into the "already-known" of
hegemonic ideologies, and a utopian output which rebels against any attempt at
"normalization," unbinds desires and subverts conventional codes, be they
aesthetic or political. Some classics among the US "funnies" are analyzed in
detail, such as Buck Rogers, Brick Bradford, Flash Gordon, and Connie. A study of Superman
and several other superhero strips illustrates the axiomatic conflict between idiotic
political indoctrination and factors of "polymorphic perversion" and irony.
This monograph, rather untidy (probably an influence of the topic on its criticism), is
also constantly interesting and. to my mind, represents the first serious attempt at
taking into consideration S-F comics without collector's infantilism and lenient
nostalgia.
For the benefit of the reader, I append to this review a select bibliography of French
research in SF comics (or in comics in general, with a section on, or relevant to, SF):
Adhémar, Jean, et al. L'Aventure et l'image. Paris: Gallimard. 1974.
"La Bande dessinée et son discours": [special issue of] Communications,
24:1976 "La Bande dessinée kébécoise." La Barre du Jour, 46-49: 1975.
Benayoun, Robert. Le Ballon dans la bande dessinée. Vroom. Tchach. Zowie.
Paris: Balland, 1968.
Blanchard, G., ed. See: Sternberg, J. et al.
Bremond, Claude. "Pour une gestuaire de la B.D.," Langages, 10:1968,
pp. 94ff.
Carpentier, André, ed. See: "La Bande dessinée kébécoise."
"Les Comics," La Méthode. 10:1963.
Convard, Didier. Le Français et la bande dessinée. Paris: Nathan, 1973.
Couperie, P., et al. Bande dessinée et figuration narrative. Paris: Musée
des Arts décoratifs, 1967.
Covin, Michel. "La bande dessinée psychélédique," Critique
[Paris], 294:1971. pp. 1018-1025.
Eizykman, Boris. "Pseudo-synthèse des penchants science-fictifs de la bande
dessinée," Inconscience fiction. n.p.: Kesselring, 1979. pp. 13-32 [and
other chapters in the same book]
François, Edouard. L Age d'or de la bande dessinée. Paris: SERG, 1974.
Frère, C., and N. Phelouzat, edd. "Les Bandes dessinées," Mass-media,
1. Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1966.
Fresnault-Deruelle, Pierre. La Bande dessinée, essai d'analyse sémiologique.
Paris: Hachette, 1972.
------------------------. Récit et discours par la bande. Paris: Hachette,
1977.
------------------------. "Le verbal dans les bandes dessinées," and other
contributions in L'Analyse des Images [=special issue of Communications. 15:
1970].
Gagnon, Claude-Marie, and Sylvie Provost. "Bande dessinée," Bibliographie
sélective et indicative de la paralittérature [=Cahiers de L'ISSH, 24 1978].
Québec: Université Laval, 1978. pp. 71-79.
Lacassin, Francis. "Etude comparative des archétypes de la littérature.
populaire et de la bande dessinée," Entretiens sur la paralittérature.
Paris: Plon, 1970, pp. 201-228.
------------------------. Pour un neuvième Art. Ia bande dessinée. Paris:
U.G.E., 1971.
------------------------. Tarzan ou le chevalier crispé. Paris: U.G.E.,
Christian Bourgois Dominique de Roux, 1971. Partim.
Larochelle, Réal. La Bande dessinée ("Pour l'enseignement du français
au secondaire"). Montréal: Hurtubise/H.M.H., 1972.
Marny, Jacques. Le Monde étonnant des bandes dessinées. Paris: Centurion,
1968.
Martinez, Lea. "L'Analyse structurale des bandes dessinées," in A.-M.
Thibault-Laulan. Image et communication. Paris: Editions universitaires, 1972.
pp. 171-182.
Moliterni, Claude, et al. Histoire de la bande dessinée d'expression française.
Paris: SERG, [1972?].
Pernin, Georges. Un Monde étrange: la bande dessinée. Paris: Cledor, 1974.
Pierre, Michel. La Bande dessinée. ("Idéologies et société")
Paris: Larousse, 1976.
Rey, Alain. Les Spectres de la bande. Essai sur la B.D. Paris: Editions de
Minuit, 1978.
Robin, Christian. Travaux dirigés et bande dessinée (...) J. Paris:
S.U.D.E.L., 1974 (and additional booklet Livret du professeur. Paris: S.U.D.E.L., 1974).
Sadoul, Jacques. L'Enfer des bulles. Paris: Pauvert, 1968.
------------------------. Panorama de la bande dessinée. Paris: J'ai Lu, 1976.
Siclier, J., and A.S. Labarthe. Images de la science-fiction. Paris: Ed. du
Cerf, 1958.
Sternberg, J., et al. Les chefs-d'oeuvre de la bande dessinée. n.p.:
Planète, 1967.
Sullerot, Evelyne. Bandes dessinées et culture. n.p.: Opera Mundi, n.d.
Van hamme, Jean. Introduction à la bande dessinée beige. Bruxelles:
Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, 1968.
Verbruggen, Pierre. ed. "La Bande dessinée." [special issue of] Le
Bibliothécaire. 11 :1972.
Versins, Pierre. "Bandes dessinées," Encyclopédie de l'utopie et de la
science-fiction. Lausanne: L'Age d'homme, 1972. pp. 93ff. et passim.
Journals dealing, exclusively or not, with comics:
Désiré. Bulletin d'étude des illustrés, fascicules et livres populaires.
Paris, 1966
Giff-Wiff. Paris, 20:1966- [Mimeographed from No. 1:1962 to No. 19:1966].
Horizons du fantastique. Asnières s.S.: 1966
Phénix. Paris. 1966
See also sections or chapters on SF comics in the yearbook L'Année 1977-1978
de la science-fiction et du fantastique, and following years [Paris:
Julliard].
--MA
What's Wrong with SF Film Criticism
J. P. Bouyxou (in collaboration with
Roland Lethem). La Science-fiction au cinéma. Paris:
Union Générale d'Éditions (Collection 10/18) 1971. 514p
While film studies as a discipline has perhaps shown a greater interest in popular
generic forms than has literary scholarship, the position of SF within the latter is in
many ways the more respectable one. Within the developing domain of paraliterary studies,
SF has been granted a certain prominence; it figures importantly in debates concerning
genre, and an increasing number of university literature courses are devoted to it.
However, the extensive re-evaluation of popular cinema within film criticism of the 1950s
and '60s, particularly in France and the US, directed the most serious attention to such
forms as the western, the melodrama, or the gangster film, which have come to be regarded
as the canonic, and, in some cases, "classical" film genres. Writing on SF films
has been ghettoized within specialized, usually buff-oriented publications, and is usually
marked by an isolation from the central currents of film theory and a high concern with
such aspects of film production as special effects.
J. P. Bouyxou's La science-fiction au cinéma manifests and suffers from this
ghettoization. Though presented as "une remise en cause de la
science-fiction"--the back cover promises this, and one chapter bears it as a
title--the book does not question or seek to replace existing definitions of SF so much as
it simply offers a number of idiosyncratic judgments and observations about specific SF
films. Bouyxou is especially condemnatory, both of those films which evince an interest in
scientific progress (Marooned) and of those suspected of subordinating the SF to
the political (Dr Strangelove). However, these tendencies are not argued to be
outside the generic boundaries of SF; rather, they are regarded as betraying what Bouyxou
advances as the potentiality of cinema in general: an evocation of the fantastic and the
oneiric. The book thus examines those films commonly accepted as SF in terms of their
contributions to this wider objective, without the latter contributing in any way to a
reformulation of SF as a generic category.
Most of the book's 514 pages are taken up by rather pedestrian chronological histories
of SF cinema, organized by country of origin, and further according to "Les grands
themes de la SF" (space-opera, human metamorphosis, etc.). These are in themselves of
less historiographical value than the briefer chronologies to be found in the special
issues of Cinéma d'Aujourd'hui and l'Avant-Scène reviewed elsewhere in
this issue. The critical evaluation of individual films is weakened by Bouyxou's off-hand
and gratuitious pronouncements upon those filmmakers and films associated with literary or
high-brow cinema and criticism: Bunuel is dismissed as "senile," Robbe-Grillet
as "petit-bourgeois," and Hawks, Ford, and Walsh as "old reactionary
western-makers." The anti-intellectualism which is regrettably frequent within
writing by SF enthusiasts takes the form here of a rejection of those directors and films
having any stature within mainstream film criticism.
The treatment of such films as l'Année dernière à Marienbad and Weekend
is especially marked by such anti-intellectualism, and by a tendency to subsume these
films under the rubric of "the fantastic" or suggest that they partake of the
SF. Bouyxou seeks to include l'Année dernière à Marienbad within SF on the
assumption that it deals with "parallel universes," and Weekend because
of the unworldly non-versimilitude of the well-known lengthy pan across a series of
wrecked cars. These aspects are regarded as compensating, through their
"fantastic" qualities, for the dry academicism of their directors, though, I
would argue, they are at the heart of the formal experimentation with narrative chronology
which renders such films important. Bouyxou insists that they are radical in the sense of
a liberation from the ordinary, and that "academic" accounts of these sequences
in a formalist vocabulary are recuperative.
This analysis, and the author's assertion that the cinema is an inherently oneiric
medium, lead me to suspect his affinities with the diluted surrealist aesthetic which has
long existed as a minor current within French film criticism. (It is frequently associated
with the magazine Positif.) Bouyxou finds the fullest expression of the cinematic
fantastic in such films as Feuillade's serialization of Fantomas and the
surrealist shorts of the 1920s, and, like the Positif critics, is at his weakest
in coming to terms with the modernism of European cinema of the 1960s. The attempt to
situate both the origins and the highestachievements of a fantastic cinema in the early
years of surrealism and the underworld adventure film is consistent with this aesthetic,
but prevents his book from addressing itself in any meaningful way to contemporary
discussion of SF and the cinema.
--Will Straw
Two Special Issues on SF and the
Cinema
Alain Schlockoff, ed. Cinema
D'Aujourd'hui(1 rue Metz, 75010 Paris) No. 7 (New series: Spring,
1976). Special issue: "Demain la science-fiction."
Though never at the center of critical controversy, in the manner of Cahiers du
Cinéma or Cinéthique, Cinéma d Aujourd'hui regularly publishes
issues which are of value as works of reference because they are devoted in toto to
specific subjects. (Previous issues of this sort have concentrated on Jean Renoir and on
eroticism in the cinema.) The magazine's stated purpose is one of combining basic
documentation on a subject with a representative and foundational range of articles about
it; these articles are usually equidistant between essayistic criticism of a journalistic
variety and academic work. This issue's reference material includes: a listing, with
capsule reviews, of 50 "films-clés" of SF cinema; a description of some 35 SF
films in preparation at the time of publication; a satisfactorily complete chronology of
SF films made between 1898 and 1975; the choices of six critics as to the ten best SF
films of all time; and a regularly comprehensive bibliography (with scaled reviews) of
books and magazines devoted to SF in the cinema.
Jacques Goimard's introductory article, "La science-fiction telle qu'en elle-même enfin..." represents the almost obligatory effort to define SF generically.
Nevertheless, Goimard's proposed definition--"La science-fiction est un genre comportant un changement de vraisemblable et remplissant une function mythique"--whatever its subsequent longevity, is arrived at through a detailed
discussion of Todorov's treatment of the fantastic, and avoids the tendency of similar
attempts in film criticism to simply cover with an all-inclusive definitional web a given
corpus of films. Goimard is cognizant of the necessity for a definition capable of
accounting for the differentia specifica of SF within a generic typology.
Jean-Pierre Andrevon's "Répères idéologiques pour une chronologie de la
science-fiction au cinéma" is briefer than its objective--an account of the links
between SF films and ideological contexts--would require, but is suggestive nevertheless.
The remaining articles have the limitations of encyclopedia entries: one on SF literature
and cinema, another on special effects in the films of Fritz Lang, and a rather
unnecessary discussion of neglected SF films. Goimard's introduction and the bibliographic
and filmographic materials constitute the central sources of interest in this special
issue.
L'Avant-scène du cinéma (27 rue
St.-André-des-Arts, 75006 Paris) Nos. 231/32. 1st-15th July, 1979.--L'Avant-scène du
cinéma is highly regarded within film studies circles for its regular (at least one per
issue) publication of film scripts which are frequently based upon transcriptions from
actual prints, and thus more reliable than working screenplays. The issue under review
contains the scripts for 2001: A Space Odyssey and Don Siegel's 1956 version of Invasion
of the Body Snatchers, and is presented as a special issue on SF. The script for 2001
is particularly valuable, with exhaustive descriptions of camera positions and detailed
credits. (Though it is not stated, I assume dialogue for both films is based upon the
dubbed versions released in France.)
Jacques Goimard prefaces the script to 2001 with a step-by-step account of its
conception and production, drawing primarily on material published in English, but from a
sufficiently large number of sources for his synthesis to be of value in itself. Goimard
further contributes a list of the 80 SF films he regards as most important, with capsule
reviews for the first 32, and many illustrations. While his selection is no more debatable
than others, the continuing tendency to rely on such lists as filler material within
publications devoted to SF cinema is itself of questionable value.
As dossiers, these treatments of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Invasion of the
Body Snatchers are exhaustive. L'Avant-scène regularly includes passages
from reviews contemporary with the release of each film, director filmographies,
production notes, and detailed information on remakes. The script for Invasion of the
Body Snatchers is well illustrated with frame enlargements suitable for
stylistic analysis. While L'Avant-scène's writing is characterized by the
absence of an editorial style or an engagement with developments in film study or
criticism, it fulfills its encyclopedic project satisfactorily.
--Will Straw
SF in Scandanavia
Cay Dollerup ed.
Volve: Scandinavian Views on Science Fiction:Selected Papers From the Scandinavian Science-Fiction Festival 1977.
Anglica et Americana, vol.4. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen.1978. 123p. DKr.10.
(Available from Dept. of English, Univ. of Copenhagen, 84-96 Njalsgade. DK-2300
Copenhagen, Denmark.)
Volve is the old Nordic goddess of fate, and this book is a selection of papers from
the Scandinavian SF Festival jointly organized by the Danish SF Cirklen (SF Association)
and the Department of English at the University of Copenhagen in 1977--with one
unidentified article added later. The authors comprise the Norwegian critics and authors
Oe. Muhre and Jon Bing, the Swedes S.J. Lundwall and J.H. Holmberg, the SF writers Brian Aldiss and P.J. Farmer, and 11 Danish critics. The editor defines the volume's aims as
"(a) to present outsiders with some important aspects of SF; (b) to describe the
Danish SF scene: and (c) to present some Scandinavian papers on SF, the standard of which
is comparable to those written in other countries"; he also points out that most
contributions stress the difference between the US and the European views of SF. This
brief introduction is followed by "SF and the Mainstream," a brief edited
discussion between Dollerup, Muhre, Lundwall, and Farmer, where the three Scandinavians
identify the hostility of the "mainstream" to SF as stemming from mutual
ignorance and inflexibility, the conflict of the "two cultures," and the US
inventions of the SF ghetto and a style conditioned by payment per word. In the next
article, Professor B. Nordhjem claims The Lord of the Rings for SF and analyzes
some of its aspects, including a discussion of Old English and archaic words in it.
A section of the book is called "The Danish Scene" and is composed of five
articles. E. Swiatek, editor of the SF critical journal Proximal discusses the
introduction of English-language SF into a small country with a very high proportion of
"bilingual" readers, in several waves starting in 1957, and the authors'
publishing houses, magazines, and fans involved; the latter are organized from 1973, and
engage in some book publishing (SFS readers will want to know that this includes
bibliographies of SF and of SF criticism in Danish) C. Schioler, electrician and
secretary of the SFC, surveys a Danish tradition of SF from Falster's (Voyage to the Moon,
1731) and Holmberg's satires through several other names such as H.C. Andersen's in the
19th and J.V. Jensen's in the early 20th century to the first technological SF (14 works
by Niels Meyn in 1911-57), scattered efforts between the World Wars including notably
Mogens Klitgaard's anti-Nazi The Planet of the Insane (1933) and the postwar works of 17
"mainstream" writers, of whom N.E. Nielsen and T. Eskestad are singled out. This
Danish SF concentrates on social issues and eschatology at the expense of facile adventure
and aliens. Its average hardcover printings are 3-4,000 copies, and paperback 6-8,000. The
opus of Niels E. Nielsen is then given a separate brief "introduction" by the
statisticians S. Kreiner Moller and J. Pedersen, who summarizes three novels of his,
though we are told that more than half of his 17 books--including ca. 50 short
stories--are SF. A second "introduction," by editor P. Toft, is devoted to Erwin
Neutzsky-Wulff, whose half a dozen works in the 1970s seem, from the description given, to
be religious fantasies or science-fantasy. The section on Danish SF concludes with a few
pages on critical works about it written by J. Guld, who refers to his Bibliograti over litteratur pa dansk om science fiction indtil 1976 and C. Schioler-E. Swiatek's Dansk
science fiction index 1741-1976 (both 1977), which I take to be the two bibliographies
mentioned by Swiatek, as well as to P. Rasmussen, Science Fiction (1974) a teaching guide
prophylactic against SF, and to two anthologies edited by Tage la Cour and Jannick Storm.
The collection continues with two discussions, one on SF and politics between Aldiss,
Bing, and Holmberg, the other on SF, computers, and reality between Farmer, Pedersen, and
two computer specialists, and a brief article on legal systems in utopia by Bing. But it
culminates in articles by two academics. Bent Sunesen, who teaches at the Danish School of
Educational Studies, argues--to my mind quite persuasively--that utopian fiction is part
of SF, that SF in general is primarily literature but with the added quality of displaying
openly and intensely the "speculative model" character of all literature, and
that for all these reasons it is well suited to discussing educational issues. The
volume's editor, who teaches in the Department of English at the University of Copenhagen,
concludes with two contributions. In the first, "Science (?) Fiction in the
Classroom," he usefully distinguishes among several pedagogical uses of SF: (1)
stimulating discussion, where the SF is only a pretext--possibly a legitimate objective
but not to be called "teaching SF"; (2)"push[ing] a point" for
ulterior motives--where he suggests foregrounding these motives without employing SF might
be more honest and possibly even more useful (and where, though I would agree to the
extent that counter-arguments must also be presented, I am a bit dubious that the most
intrinsic approach to SF as literature can be simon-pure, divorced from issues and points
it autonomously carries--the necessary balance is discussed at greater length in Charles
Elkins's and my article in SFS No. 19): (3) promoting science, where Dollerup--in a
polemic with Patrick Moore's appendix in Science and Fiction (London, 1957) and
some pronouncements in Scholes-Rabkin's Science Fiction--quite correctly points
out that there are "severe limitations" in the possible uses of SF as
introduction to "science fact," and furthermore that even when those limitations
do not prevail a good initial grounding in science is necessary (so that it is a useful
tool only for the science teacher). Dollerup nonetheless concludes--and I will not be the
one to quarrel with that either--that SF has a "symbiotic relationship" with
science as (1) a document of beliefs about science; (2) a cumulative system of ideas; and
(3) (I presume most importantly) a literature adopting what I would call the estranged
worldview of science. It can therefore be used in studying fiction, in studying
"how we
are made to accept the 'truth of fiction,'" and--with due caution--in studying the
above-mentioned three modes of imaginative participation in some aspects of science. The
volume closes with Dollerup's "On the Criticism of SF--Caveats and Trends,"
which presents a somewhat brief survey of general books about modern SF, concentrating on
their weaknesses; the "parochial circuit of mutual congratulation" which Amis
had previously complained about; the necessity of plugging SF; uncriticalness and lack of
selectivity (his cases in point are some items in Clareson's checklist Science Fiction
Criticism and in the histories by Aldiss and Gunn; the errors in the popular books by
Ash and Kyle are surely not worth pointing out separately--one should simply say that such
books are not to be taken seriously). Dollerup also complains about bias, and ends with a
broadside against the "truly incredible amount of glib critical nonsense" in
Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin's Science Fiction, while praising two European
books, Lundwall's Science Fiction and Rottensteiner's The Science Fiction
Book as the only ones presenting a good overview of the field, both American and
European. I find some judgments in this part of his article disputable (e.g.: can there be
criticism which does not "press a point"?), and some omissions from both English
and other languages regrettable. But surely Dollerup is right when he complains of the
ill-defined implicit reader in much SF criticism and of the lack of guidance through the
proliferating secondary literature on SF.
In the light of his criticalness, one could conclude that the volume edited by him has
fulfilled his aims under (a) and (b) (the data on Denmark being very interesting but
appetite-whetting, so that we expect more, longer, and more sustained discussions of this
kind), whereas the aim (c) would be ambiguous if achieved (to present papers comparable to
standards he has just complained about). But on the strength of the two or three best
papers, the book is recommended not only to Scandinavists but also to all those interest
in SF teaching and the meta-discussions on SF. Most laudably, the volume has a
comprehensive index.
--DS
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