Into Africa

think I'm made for Orson Welles told Peter Bogdanovich about his 1939 unproduced adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. My script was terribly loyal to Conrad. And I think that, minute anybody does that, they're going to have a smash on their hands.' RKO studio chief George Schaefer must have agreed. To Schaefer, who first enticed Welles with an amazing guarantee of artistic freedom and perhaps even to Nelson Rockefeller, who by 1938 controlled that studio Welles's cinematic rendition of Conrad seemed like ideal project. Welles had already successfully adapted Heart of Darkness as a radio drama in 1938 for Mercury Theater. Captivated by Welles's dazzling New York theatrical reputation and infamous War of Worlds broadcast, Schaefer was insistent on retaining well-known literary people for studio. But, as is well known, Welles's version of Conrad's famous 1899 novella never made it into production. Despite arrival of celebrated Wunderkind in Hollywood, Heart of Darkness got discard and was, according to Hollywood Variety (January 9, 1940) overboard for RKO. Yet Heart of Darkness is exemplary precisely because of its failure to become a Hollywood movie. Indeed, we might say that Welles's first film project remains a fascinating case for both study of literary and film history because it looks back to a founding moment of modernist literature, bringing it into a new context. Welles's adaptation of Heart of Darkness would include a radically subjective narrative technique, a cast of character types foreshadowing style of 1940s film noir, a naturalistic African setting, and an unorthodox introduction that instructed audience on how to view film. In adapting Conrad, Welles would draw from a discourse of what has become one of most infamous examples of modernist experiment with primitive while inflecting it with his own unique style. I will suggest here that Welles's Heart of Darkness treats Conrad's theme of primitivism self-consciously, revealing its underlying racism and miscegenation. In essence, Welles exposes darker, ambivalent side of itself, disclosing what Fredric Jameson has called Conrad's schizophrenic writing or the preconditions of Conrad's modernism which is found in increasing fragmentation both of rationalized external world and of colonized psyche alike.2 Welles's Heart of Darkness, then, works to problematize invisible classical Hollywood narrative, blurring traditional, bifurcating paradigm of what Robert B

Art · Biology · Botany · Darkness · Humanities · Joseph Conrad and Literature · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · South Asian Cinema and Culture

• To Prevent the Prevalent Type of Book

  Open Access•Richard Maltby•American Quarterly•1992

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