Authorship and Film
2004; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-6018
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoAUTHORSHIP AND FILM David A. Gerstner and Janet Staiger, eds. New York: Routledge, 2003, 328 pp. cover photo for this book could not be more appropriate: Tod Browning directing a scene from Unholy Three, with Browning and Lon Chaney intently listening to a ventriloquist. As scene suggests, we might be tempted to think of vent figure as of his words. dummy is expressing a text, and indeed and reception of that text are conditioned by environment in which it is being produced. Authorship and Film, one of AFI Film Readers series, brings together fourteen original essays on current state of studies. But why another study of (and auteurship) now? Coeditor Janet Staiger writes, authorship . . . matters especially to those in nondominant positions in which asserting even a partial agency may seem to be important for day-to-day survival or where locating moments of alternative practice takes away naturalized privileges of normativity (27). volume's main strength is that essays are current, unique to volume, and come from such disciplines as political science, rhetoric, Asian American studies, women's and gender studies, and media and communication studies, offering a disparity of ideological views. Gerstner and Staiger conceived this collection for purpose of exploring both ideal and real-world consequences of criticism. Staiger writes that the point is to rescue expression of self as a viable, if contingent act-a potent one with real effects (49). Generally speaking, studies has its roots in auteurtheories of French New Wave critics. Alexandre Astruc's 1948 article, The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo, challenged perceived banality of French cinema. Astruc called for a break from literature as model for cinematic narrative, demanding a conception of camera as a unique means of creating text, with special emphasis on mise-en-scene. Francois Truffaut and Cahiers due Cinema critics answered Astruc, echoing his condemnation of French cinema's Tradition of Quality. This theorizing was put into practice during annis mirabilis 1959, with Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups, Godard's A Bout de Souffle, and Resnais' Hiroshima, Mon Amour. These and other inspired films insisted on cinema's expression through mise-en-scene, as opposed to literary word. However, Andre Bazin (at Positif) challenged Cahiers critics on grounds that la politiques des auteurs faced danger of becoming an aesthetic personality cult (7); this challenge set up seminal dialectic of studies. Soon afterward, Andrew Sarris imported auteurism to America with his 1968 book, American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968. Gerstner accurately notes that In America, England, and France a cottage industry developed around auteurship and was successfully marketed in both academy and Hollywood (9). Thus was critical concept of director-as-author formalized in America. However, opposition arose from likes of Pauline Kael and V. F. Perkins. Likewise, British journals Movie, Sequence, and Sight and Sound debated both persona-taste determinations of criticism as well as emerging Marxist social criticism (9). Louis Althusser's work on structuralism and political ideology contributed significantly to this new direction of studies. And, influenced by anthropology and semiotics, Peter Wollen argued that director is not necessarily main of film, and that semiotic considerations of text reveal multiple authors not originally perceived. As studies moved into 1970s, attention to ideology and cultural production intensified. But what of nominal (or auteur) of a text? Michel Foucault's essay What is an Author? posits concept of author as an ideological discourse produced by specific cultural practices. …
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