A splice of reel life in Virginia Woolf's "Time Passes": censorship, cinema and "the usual battlefield of emotions."

Criticism, Wntr, 1993 by Leslie Kathleen Hankins

Moving Pictures

Yet if so much of our thinking and feeling is connected with seeing, some residue of visual emotion which is of no use either to painter or to poet may still await the cinema. That such symbols will be quite unlike the real objects which we see before us seems highly probable. Something abstract, something which moves with controlled and conscious art, something which calls for the very slightest help from words or music to make itself intelligible, yet justly uses them subserviently - of such movements and abstractions the films may in time to come be composed. Then indeed when some new symbol for expressing thought is found, the film-maker has enormous riches at his command.... If into this reality he could breathe emotion, could animate the perfect form with thought, then his booty could be hauled in hand over hand. Then, as smoke pours from Vesuvius, we should be able to see thought in its wildness, in its beauty, in its oddity, pouring from men with their elbows on a table; from women with their little handbags slipping to the floor. We should see these emotions mingling together and affecting each other.

We should see violent changes of emotion produced by their collision. The most fantastic contrasts could be flashed before us with a speed which the writer can only toil after in vain; the dream architecture of arches and battlements, of cascades falling and fountains rising, which sometimes visits us in sleep or shapes itself in half-darkened rooms, could be realized before our waking eyes. No fantasy could be too far-fetched or insubstantial. The past could be unrolled, distances annihilated, and the gulfs which dislocate novels (when, for instance, Tolstoy has to pass from Levin to Anna and in doing so jars his story and wrenches and arrests our sympathies) could be by the sameness of the background, by the repetition of some scene, be smoothed away.(19)

The role of cinema in Woolf's sentimental journey was vital. If Lubbock's omissions in his book on literary form spurred her to take up emotion, in 1926 she found a more positive incentive to redeem feeling for art in models of cinema theory which celebrated the cinema's innovative and compelling emotional and spatial languages. In her essay, "The Cinema" (1926), Woolf explored the potential of the new medium, focusing on emotional aesthetics:(20) "... it seems plain that the cinema has within its grasp innumerable symbols for emotions that have so far failed to find expression" (CDB 184-5). Her hypothetical projection of cinema futures opened up new aesthetic roles for emotion which she could explore in literature as well. Conceiving of "visual emotion" and spatial movement as catalysts for deep feeling enabled Woolf to link emotion with the forms of spatial discourse she had mastered in other essays. The aesthetic project to "animate the perfect form with thought" and to explore the emotional dynamics created by "emotions mingling together and affecting each other" offered challenges for the writer much more intriguing than the rather negative challenge of avoiding sentimentality.