Friday Lots of Fun LInk: Someday There Will Be A Movie Version of the Dictionary
If your love of stage Irish performances is strong, your interest in forgotten relics of the psychedelic age is acute, your curiosity about the secret history of women artists is piqued, and your tolerance for very lame puns is high, be aware that for more than 40 years, in almost total obscurity, a feature length movie of Finnegans Wake has existed. And all I can say is: David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, you no longer have the Best Attempted Feature Adaptation of Plotless Literary Collage Oscar category all to yourself.
I'm humbled and amazed that until today I had never heard of this movie. Even more stunning: The film was directed by a woman (experimental filmmaker Mary Ellen Bute) and written by another woman (playwright Mary Manning, adapting her stage version of Passages From Finnegans Wake); a 35mm negative of it exists at Yale; it received some honor at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival; and it offers freak appeal in the form of far-out imagery and production value that is at least as good as what you'll find in The Trip, the video for "Proud Mary" or any given episode of The Monkees. It is a testament to James Joyce's incredible negative charisma that a work with so many areas of interest remains virtually unknown. The nature of the movie sort of defies any judgment of success or failure, and in this case you can truly say it is surprising that it was done at all. [As is usually the case with non-YouTube embeds, I can't get this one to work, so you can see the film here.]
Vermont-based Cecile Starr, 88, has distributed Passages From Finnegans Wake since the 1970s. She says the film played in New York, Boston and a few other cities, but never got much attention even from art house exhibitors. (Starr herself only agreed to handle the movie when Bute also gave her distribution of her short animated films, a sample of which you can see here.) "[Mary Ellen Bute] made it on her own with her own money and some money she was able to raise," Starr says. "She had a low budget. In independent films in those days it was things like Woodstock and Don't Look Back, the Bob Dylan film. For an independent film this just had a very different pace and a different idea. We just assumed it was a very offbeat film that wouldn't have an audience. Why she chose to do it nobody knows."
Obscurity has also brought benefits: Starr says she has never been approached by Stephen Joyce, the writer's famously litigious grandson, who has made a career of stamping out adaptations like Bute's. If you want to rent a 16mm print for your next party, you can contact Starr here. (And don't invite me to your next party.)
