More than a century after his death Jules Verne remains one of the world’s most famous authors, recognized even by people who have never read a single word from his stories. The reason, as Brian Taves explains in Hollywood Presents Jules Verne: The Father of Science Fiction on Screen, is because Verne’s characters and ideas continue to circulate through visual media, especially movies and television but also video games. Moreover, from early in the last century, filmmakers have borrowed Verne’s concepts and protagonists without acknowledgment. Captain Nemo, under any name, is part of our cultural DNA.
Hollywood Presents Jules Verne, the latest installment in the University Press of Kentucky’s Screen Classics series, is an illuminating exposition of how that author’s words have been brought to life in moving pictures from the earliest days of cinema. Verne’s enormous popularity insured that his novels would be adapted for the screen, beginning with short films in the silent, pre-World War I era. His oeuvre was especially appropriate source material, given its frequent themes of advanced technology. Nemo’s submarine from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was not the author’s only invention ahead of its time. In his 1892 novel, The Castle in the Carpathians, Verne described a baron who listened to recordings of his departed love and projected her ethereal image in his chamber. Sound and visual recording were in their infancy when Verne imagined this home theater.
As film archivist at the Library of Congress as well as coauthor of The Jules Verne Encyclopedia and editor of a series of previously untranslated plays and stories by Verne, Taves is uniquely situated for undertaking Hollywood Presents. He is aware of film studies without descending into the bad prose and constipated thought processes of many academic film theorists. Taves focuses on intertextuality, especially the unique ways in which perception and reception of Verne’s writings have evolved through adaptation in other media. During Verne’s own lifetime his stories were fodder for stage productions, which then influenced the earliest movies, which in turn inspired the comic books that influenced later movies and television before finding their way into video games. And yes, how many 19th century authors have been honored in a Disney theme park? Has there ever been a Dickensland?
Taves’ enthusiasm for Verne is palpable, yet he writes with sharp critical analysis about the movies and other productions taken from the author’s work. He builds his narrative from solid historical research, writes entertainingly and provides insight into the mechanisms of popular culture in the 20th century and beyond.
