James Joyce’s interest in film has been a critical commonplace for decades. A number of scholars, quite logically, have explored how this affinity for the cinema shaped both Joyce’s creative impulses and the way readers understand much of his writing, including a number of documentaries specifically dealing with Ulysses that complement these creative efforts. The documentary that I examine in this essay, Hilary Fennell’s Imagining Ulysses, takes an approach heretofore ignored by filmmakers. It highlights the subjectivity of the experience of Ulysses by using each of the novel’s eighteen chapters as a starting point for a meditation on different responses to the work. The pattern of varied themes followed up by the film mimics the novel’s diverse styles, but it addresses something important that previous documentaries have ignored, attempting to capture a range of diverse response provoked by that novel. My essay examines that process, and critiques what can be learned from its approach.
