Toward a Cinematic O'Neill

Abstract

ABSTRACT:While other modernist luminaries of his generation entertained very direct, even if often troubled, relationships with the cinema, O'Neill's relationships were more indirect, even subterranean, but perhaps more interesting for being that. From the mid-1910s until the late 1920s, O'Neill's work, which included photoplays, was very much in conversation with the cinema and the modernity it metaphorized. This conversation reached its apex with the 1926 photoplays of The Hairy Ape and Desire Under the Elms. Although never realized as films, the adaptations reveal the structural and visual analyses O'Neill brought to bear on his plays in order to liberate and enhance what were already latent cinematic energies at work in the originals. The photoplays reveal just how much of O'Neill's work contained a kind of enacted theorization of modern bodies possessed by and of images.