Film’s rise to dominance did not displace literature’s ideological authority

Evidence

For some seventy years the cleverest prophets have warned us regularly that the dominant art form of the twentieth century was not literature at all — nor even painting or theater or the symphony — but rather the one new and historically unique art invented in the contemporary period, namely film; that is to say, the first distinctively mediatic art form. What is strange about this prognosis -whose unassailable validity has with time become a commonplace — is that it should have had so little practical effect. Indeed, literature, sometimes intelligently and opportunistically absorbing the techniques of film back into its own substance, remained throughout the modern period the ideologically dominant paradigm of the aesthetic and continued to hold open a space in which the richest varieties of innovation were pursued. … Film, however, whatever its deeper consonance with twentieth-century realities, entertained a merely fitful relationship to the modern in that sense, owing, no doubt, to the two distinct lives or identities through which, successively (like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando), it was destined to pass: the first, the silent period, in which some lateral fusion of the mass audience and the formal or modernist proved viable (in ways and resolutions we can no longer grasp, owing to our peculiar historical amnesia); the second, the sound period, then coming as the dominance of masscultural (and commercial) forms through which the medium must toil until again reinventing the forms of the modern in a new way in the great auteurs of the 1950s (Hitchcock, Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 205

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in actual periodization claims — offers a concrete historical fact (literature stayed dominant through the modern period despite film’s invention) useful for testing the falsifiability of the cultural-dominant thesis.