James Joyce, Walther Ruttmann, and City Symphonies

One of Ulysses’ earliest reviewers, in the Evening Standard of 1922, briskly consigned the novel to “the new fashionable kinematographic vein,” and then in plain-man-in-the-street tones called that vein “very jerky and elliptical.”¹ Since then, critic after critic of Joyce’s novel has sensed something in it analogous to film technique, perhaps “the close-ups and fade-outs of flickering emotions” or “the angles of observation and the flashbacks of reminiscence” which Harry Levin detected in his 1941 study of Joyce.² Vaguely cinematic passages in Ulysses are, in fact, easy to find, especially in the early chapters of the novel, with their close-ups on items of Dublin actuality followed by Dedalian or Bloomian flashbacks:

Fingering still the letter in his pocket he drew the pin out of it. Common pin, eh? He threw it on the road. Out of her clothes somewhere: pinned together. Queer the number of pins they always have. No roses without thorns.

Flat Dublin voices bawled in his head. Those two sluts that night in the Coombe, linked together in the rain…(5.275-280)³