Highlights include an audio excerpt of Faulkner reading from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
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In American literature, three authors "owned" the first half of the Twentieth Century: Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and William Faulkner, who each won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
This well-written documentary gives a nice but brief overview of the life of William Faulkner, emphasizing the relationship between the biographical and historical facts of his life and the novels that resulted. Faulkner was the least accessible of the Big Three, both in terms of interviews given and the writing itself. His style was convoluted and complex--the antithesis of the simple and visceral storytelling practiced by Hemingway and Steinbeck. In this brief bio you won't get much help in trying to determine which of Faulkner's difficult texts are worth reading and why, and you won't get much in the way of research minutia. But this volume in Kultur's "Great Writers" series does provide a decent, if superficial summary of the author's life and works.
In academic circles, The Sound and the Fury is widely considered Faulkner's masterwork, but it merits no more space here than the rest of his books. Faulkner's other lauded novels--As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and The Unvanquished--also get surprisingly little play here, with the books treated almost neutrally with other less successful novels as mere stepping stones in an author's career.
Still, the narrative features some nice insights, such as the contention that Faulkner (who changed the spelling of his name from Falkner to appear more British) claimed to have had the same sort of wounding and military service as his rival, Hemingway, but was in fact "his first Faulknerian character" because of the fabricated image.
What's more, there's some nice footage here--some of it historical, others historical-by-proxy, as with very early footage from Hollywood. As the voiceover describes certain conditions of the South in which Faulkner lived, we see wonderful footage of field hands picking cotton. Sometimes there's a disjunction between image and narrative, as when we're told Faulkner met Sherwood Anderson in Paris and the image we're shown isn't Anderson, but a black woman wearing a bandana on her head who's bellied up to the bar. Anderson comes a few frames later. Very few contemporary color shots are blended artfully, for the most part, into the visual narrative. The only failure, I think, comes when we're given a reading of Faulkner's own explanation for how he conceived of "The Sound and the Fury" and the "idiot" whom he first wanted to use to tell the story, and we see blurred color staged shots of the same young boy over and over again.
This documentary takes introduces audiences to the South in which Faulkner was raised, his enlistment (too late) in the Royal Air Force, the sudden discrepancy between the Old South and the New South that would fuel his fiction, the way that Faulkner turned Lafayette County and his city of Oxford into Yoknapatawpha County and Jefferson and relied on two families to tell the story of the split South, Faulkner's work in Hollywood, and his rapid decline due to tension in his marriage and alcoholism. Along the way, we get discussions of the books and a few interesting items. In the Hollywood section, which includes a long clip of behind-the-scenes back lot footage from the Golden Era, we learn that in a month and a half Faulkner earned more as a screenwriter than he did in 10 years writing novels and short stories, but that he quickly regretted signing on with Warner Brothers for a seven-year commitment.
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