I was asked this when near the final year of my PhD. As sharp as my critical faculties were that year, I could produce no good answer. Later I realised the answer, which is unexpected, debatable, almost unpalatable - certainly factual. On 15 July 1819 Lord Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ cantos I and II was published, and this first edition was a large and very expensive volume priced at £1 15s 6d. By this time, Byron was already notorious (‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’) and had a cult following. The edition sold out many thousands of copies, and went into its second print run on the same day – pirated copies were everywhere (Byron, get one free?). ‘Don Juan’ marks a shift in mass print culture. More importantly, it amplified the incipient cult of the dark, smouldering, gothic hero, pitted against the world; the brooding, aggressive individualist who allowed other writers to release their imaginations to spawn his Byronic descents: Dracula, Heathcliff, Rochester… and later still, it has been argued, our modern, materialistic, secular selves.

Such was the power of literature to propel a paradigm shift in the way we see the world, and in the days before the screen.

I was asked recently: what is your favourite film? Again, it took me a little time to think but I said The Shooting Party. I love its 1913 setting, its elegance, and the underlying tension as a party of Edwardian elite indulge in the well-organised shooting of animals, just before the war will see the well-organised shooting of them. It is about the end of an era and age of innocence, and the traumatic shift into modernity. It is resonant for me too, because it was the last film for a handful of great English actors who were happy to work together in an ensemble piece. It could never have been made by Hollywood.

Better to promote a culture of reading, where these days we are all advertising what we are reading just now. Mine is The Stations of the Sun by Ronald Hutton, which is about the ritual history and festivals of the British Isles. I have also recently re-read the first ‘adult’ book I ever read, Richard Llewelyn’s How Green Was My Valley (1939). My sons and I spoke about it recently and I had been disappointed with the film version. That Hollywood version won Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 1942. It pipped Citizen Kane to be the ‘Best.’  In my humble opinion, Citizen Kane is historically and cinematographically important, and the much superior film. How Green Was My Valley in contrast takes a great novel and makes it sickly sweet and over-sentimental. Starting to watch it when younger, I realised too, that much though I liked the actor, I could not allow Roddy McDowall’s face to become synonymous in my imagination with that of the main character and narrator of the novel – Huw – and I stopped watching. The film’s stereotyped, rather maudlin characters are a poor reflection of Llewellyn’s attractively flawed and therefore ineluctably realistic characters. (It is also true that Llewellyn uses a lot of literary licence and that it was probably not really his own experience of which he writes. Then again – it is fiction.)

I suppose that we all struggle with the way that films and screens can fix images in our minds which we do not want to be there. Worse still is that if we are not alert and discriminating enough, they can get lodged there without our being aware. My message to our students: read the book first and build your own world from that, rather than watching a film and reading what then forever will be for you ‘the book of the film.’  My broader message again – books, first. And yet another way that I said that was to ask them to be careful and discriminating about what they watch via the internet.

Are there exceptions to my filmic spoiler theory? Yes. Ridley Scott’s Gladiator is stirring but in spite of comparisons made by critics between the films it is missing something that Ben Hur has got. Lew Wallace had written his novel Ben Hur to try to find, again, his faith. I think it a good book. The film (1959) though, is superb and maintains that complexity which is generated in the parallels between its eponymous hero and the other spiritual hero in the film, but whose face we never see. All about Juda Ben Hur it might be at a story–telling level, but its clever subtitle A Tale of the Christ should alert us to the fact that while we follow Juda’s fortunes and misfortunes, we are always just aware that there is an altogether bigger story parallel to Juda’s, which is going on at exactly the same time, and which occasionally touches Juda’s world. We are not explicitly shown the bigger picture which is changing the universe; we are never shown the face of the hero making that change – ‘the Christ’ is a space always just beyond the angle of our vision in the film. This is all the more powerful for being a space which we are allowed to fill ourselves.

Dr David Moses, Assistant Head (6th Form)