As part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research project on 'The Cinema Authorship of Lindsay Anderson' (see detailed project outline), a conference on Archives and Auteurs was held at the University of Stirling from 2nd - 4th September 2009. The conference brought archivists, academics, curators and researchers together to discuss the ways in which the study of the archives of filmmakers and the film industry can provide new perspectives and insights into the history of cinema.
Via Hot Splice and The Auteurs Daily / Ekkehard Knörer came news of these two (only in Spanish) videos on Argentine director Lisandro Alonso's method of working. As that's just what I'm working on at this precise moment, I thought I'd embed them here. More on Alonso soon.
Below, I've pasted the introductory section of the article which contains a useful summary of early mainstream academic conceptualizations of film authorship. (To follow up on the bibliographical references given in the author-date format, click HERE and scroll down)
Authorial Directions Virtually all feminist critics who argue in defence of female authorship as a useful and necessary category assume the political necessity for doing so. (Mayne, 1990: 97).
It’s already clear that the old categories and ways of thinking will not work well enough for us. (Rich, 1998: 83)
Unlike many other words referring to the activities of particular kinds of cultural producers (‘writer’, ‘painter’, ‘dramatist’), the term ‘author’ raises intrinsic questions about authority and about whether the individual is the source or the effect of that authority. Despite the deconstruction of traditional understandings of the ‘author-as-subject’, the ‘author-as-source-of-meaning’, and of individualist ideologies in general, especially during the latter part of the twentieth century (Barthes, 1968; Foucault, 1969), these kinds of questions concerning authorial authority, as well as the institution of authorship, have remained fairly central ones for feminists in theorizing and teaching about women’s activities in the field of cultural production, because of their connections with broader feminist debates about different kinds of subjectivity and agency under patriarchy (Miller, 1986; Watts, 1992). In this paper, I will present an overview of feminist theoretical debate, from the early 1970s to the present, on the subject of women’s film authorship. Given that my tour will be, of necessity, highly selective, I have opted to concentrate here on feminist theorizations of women’s agency in film authorship. While in early contributions to feminist film theory, this concept was frequently implied but did not always dare to speak its name openly, for reasons I shall go on to explore, more recent theoretical studies almost invariably reveal explicit explorations of agency and agent-hood. I will attempt to analyse these developments primarily by revisiting key overviews of this field, ones which not only recapitulated on the issues around film authorship but also attempted to move the debate on in new ways, an objective I share.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the benefits for feminist theory of asking authorial questions of women’s interventions into filmmaking have never seemed as self-evident as they have with literary authorship; nor have they proved quite as resistant to post-structural critique. By contrast with most literary and artistic endeavours, film production is, of course, usually understood to be collective, collaborative, even ‘industrial’, especially in its dominant commercial modes. By no means has it been taken for granted, then, that ‘authorship’ can or should be attributed to an analogous, solitary ‘artist-figure’ in the film production process (cf. Gaut, 1997). The routine ascription of ‘authoritative’ creative agency in filmmaking may actually vary between, or be shared among a number of potential ‘actors’ in the filmmaking process (for instance, the scriptwriter, the producer, the studio, or any star performers). Nonetheless, the idea or ‘function’ of the author (Foucault, 1969) has emerged and persisted as a discursive category in film culture largely in the person of the film director who, in conventional narrative cinema, normally ‘puts the script on film by co-ordinating the various aspects of the film medium’ (Bordwell and Thompson, 1993:13).
It is important to note that the birth of this idea of the director as film author, or auteur, has been traced back by most cultural historians to the late 1940s and early 1950s, and to the debates which took place in French, British and US film magazines about the relative artistic value of cinema, compared with the much longer-established arts. As John Caughie writes: Within its distinguishable currents [...] auteurism shares certain basic assumptions: notably, that a film, though produced collectively, is most likely to be valuable when it is essentially the product of its director [...]; that in the presence of a director who is genuinely an artist (an auteur) a film is more than likely to be an expression of his individual personality; and that this personality can be traced in a thematic and/or stylistic consistency over all (or almost all) of his films. (Caughie, 1981: 9)
This kind of voluntarist and Romantic understanding of the agency of film authorship as encapsulating the possibilities for expression of an (especially male) artist’s ‘personality’ was immediately co-opted by film commerce, for the purposes of which the name of the author came in the post-war period, outside and inside Hollywood, to ‘function as a “brand name”, a means of labelling and selling a film and of orienting expectations and channelling meaning and pleasure in the absence of generic boundaries and categories’ (Neale, 1981: 36). Yet, while commercial and socio-historical aspects of the emergence of the author-function in film have usually been set aside by film theorists, the formal or textual assumptions of early auteurism have continued to provide an important critical focus. From the 1950s onwards, academic and non-academic film studies often concentrated on expertly teasing out the putative traces of authorial subjectivity in film texts. In this way, an implied or imagined ‘textual’ author/director (Caughie, 1981, following Booth, 1961), gradually began to be foregrounded, often unconsciously or inadvertently, on the basis of ‘a textual indeterminacy which [took] shape in the reading [or critical] process’ (Stoddart, 1995: 47).
Although film critics have continued to use directors’ known biographies to produce authoritative interpretations or to detect consistent ‘signatures’ across a body of work, many post-1970s film theorists have been ‘at pains to distinguish cinema’s enunciating agency from the figure of the director or scriptwriter’ (Silverman, 1988: 11), as they took up the challenges set by anti-humanist critiques of the concept of authorial intentionality (following Wimsatt and Beardsley, 1946). Structuralist film theorists ‘recast’ for their own purposes (Bordwell, 1985: 23) Benveniste’s (1971) linguistic theories of ‘enunciation’, thus evacuating cultural agency of individual human origins; it was the system which ‘spoke’, and not the author (Barthes, 1968; Metz, 1981). From the late 1970s onwards, post-structuralist film theory largely moved away from questions of directorial authorship to pay greater attention to other aspects of cinematic enunciation. In particular, it set about investigating ‘the way [the film text] says “you”’ (Casetti, 1998: 15), by focusing on the productivity of spectating, or film ‘reading’, an agency which provides the ‘one place where [textual] multiplicity is focused’ but, once again, usually to be examined ‘without history, biography, psychology’ (Barthes, 1968: 148).
The reason why I have felt it important to sketch out the development of mainstream academic conceptualizations of film authorship up to the 1980s is that these have been highly formative of key aspects of the feminist theoretical work which I shall now move on to examine in detail (for example, their routine conflation of, and sometimes confusion between ‘real’ and ‘implied’ directorial and spectatorial agencies in the processes of meaning production, as well as the preference for explorations of various kinds of authorial and spectatorial avatars in the film text). Until quite recently, as I shall attempt to show, feminists’ reluctance to move beyond the film text in their explorations of women’s authorial agency left many of them ill-equipped to answer convincingly at least one simple question: what exactly were the feminist objectives of studying women’s cinema within the conceptual frameworks they inherited?
For your general delectation and educational delight, here's a whole shiny host of links devoted to film authorship and auteur theory. These resources are all Open Access (freely accessible to all on the internet). The list has consequently been cross-posted at my Open Access-campaigning blog Film Studies For Free. The list will be kept updated at FSFF, so do feel encouraged to bookmark the post there.
Hello again. I'm finally getting around to posting some more things on this blog. Apologies for the long wait...
As I reported elsewhere a while back, on May 2, 2009 I gave a presentation on Claire Denis's film Vendredi soir at the 'Drifting: The films of Claire Denis' symposium at the University of Sussex. Thanks to the organisers (Rosalind Galt and Michael Lawrence), the other speakers (Sarah Cooper and Laura McMahon), and others present (in particular John David Rhodes and Adrian Goycoolea) for their own contributions to the event as well as for their questions and comments about my paper. It was a really stimulating day. Great food, too...
I am writing up the paper for publication but I wanted, in the meantime, to post the Powerpoint slides from my talk here. Any comments are very welcome.
For further extensive Claire Denis resources, check out the links-list at Film Studies For Free
My weakest work is when I try to discuss an idea without paying attention to the form. I don’t see the two as separate. Formalism for me is someone like Bordwell, who really is describing a shot; he’s so good at what he does, and it’s helpful. I’m not putting it down at all, but formalism ends there. You can’t be halfway. If you’re fully a formalist, you’re not just a formalist. There’s a way in which you need to return to the filmmaker, to what she is doing, and to be particular. I’m an auteurist in that sense; I think that people have their signature and that it cannot be forged. And that comes back to the idea of the long take, and questioning why are there people that are weaker at using it than others. And Akerman, too, is not always good. There are points where she seems almost Mannerist.
While I concur with Margulies' background point, here, about the particularity of individual human experience, and thus of biography (cf.J. P. Sartre's '"Valéry is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valéry '), I am not sure I agree with her about the resistance to forgery of auteurist signatures.
If 'signature' is what is repeatedly recognisable as such by a critic, then it is difficult to argue, in broad terms, that it could not be copied or appropriated by others. But is there a part of 'signature' - some deep mark of authenticity, some very particular aspect of the film artist's handling - that cannot be 'captured' or reproduced?
Sorry it's been a little too quiet round here again, this month. Next Tuesday (nasty cold permitting) I am due to give a paper at a Screen Medias and Cultures Research seminar in Cambridge, and I've been hard at work on it beyond cyberspace, along with fulfilling some other commitments (book reviews and suchlike; plus other blogging, of course).
I will be talking about the 'experience of auteurism' in contemporary film culture, and Pedro Almodóvar will be my principal example. In this paper, it's important to talk about a director I love, as experiences of 'director love' (alongside auteur desire, as Dana Polan so wonderfully called it) are precisely what I am looking at. I am sure to write more about this topic here, after the talk.
Martel's latest film has inspired both utter devotion and ridicule (see Peter Bradshaw's article on it for today's Guardian Film Blog: 'How I lost my head for The Headless Woman'). It also seems to have provoked, albeit on a much smaller scale, the kind of polite but frenzied attempts to nail down its central enigmas unwitnessed since Michael Haneke'sCaché deliberately foxed many a metropolitan-elite film audience a few years ago.
If you've seen the film, or if, like me, you are impatient to experience it, then you might like to read by far the best English language film review of The Headless Woman of the many I've read: that by Michael J. Anderson for his great weblog Tativille (one of the best websites out there for elegantly written and judicious film criticism, by Anderson and his partner Lisa K. Broad - thanks to Sergio Dias-Branco for his original tip, way back when, to check Tativille out).
If you are just regularly curious, below is the trailer for the film (sorry not to have been able to locate a version with English subtitles). Hasta la vista.
I'll return very soon to The Dark Knight, but a little narcissistic 'aside' first: isn't it always the way that, when you are very near to finally 'pronouncing' on a topic, in print, you discover that someone else has just pipped you to it... The good thing about this, almost inevitable, pre-completion phenomenon is that the researcher who publishes the later tome will have the undoubted benefit of being able to bounce off the work and the insights that others have laboured long and hard over. In my previous experience, it's usually been a highly productive authorial circumstance, as I'm sure it will be in the instance of it I'm about to describe.
My own book on contemporary global film directing practices and auteurism (Directing Cinema: The New Auteurism, for Manchester University Press) should come out next year. This project, which is obviously very closely connected in its topic to the Directing Cinema weblog, builds on my already published work on this topic over the last ten years, in particular my article for the millennial issue of the journal Screen (2000 41 (1). pp. 101-108), called 'www.auteur.com' (links to some online versions of this earlier work can be found HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE).
Anyway, all of this is why I was probably more interested than many film researchers -- not to say more anxious than most! -- to hear of one new academic book, and one new, peer-reviewed article, which focus, respectively, on Western European and Spanish forms of auteurism. I look forward to reviewing both these items, on this blog and elsewhere, in due course, once I've studied them properly (Maule's book is hopefully on its way to me in the post), but they both look excellent, so I wanted to publish some information about them, and their authors' other related work, immediately.
The publisher's blurb for Maule's new book reads as follows:
Beyond Auteurism is a comprehensive study of nine film authors from France, Italy and Spain who since the 1980s have blurred the boundaries between art-house and mainstream, and national and transnational film production. Maule examines how the individuals have maintained a dialectical relationship with the authorial tradition of the national cinema to which each belongs. In considering this tradition, Maule seeks to illustrate that the film author is not only the most important symbol of European cinema’s cultural tradition and commitment, but is also a crucial part of Europe’s efforts to develop its cinema within domestic and international film industries. The book studies the work, practices and styles of European film-makers including Luc Besson, Claire Denis, Gabriele Salvatores and Alejandro Amenábar. Beyond Auteurism offers an important contribution to a historicized and contextualized view of film authorship from a theoretical framework that rejects Western-centred and essentialist views of cinematic practices and contexts.
The new article on some aspects of Spanish auteurism is by Núria Triana-Toribio, author of the classic study Spanish National Cinema (Routledge, 2003). Triana-Toribio has also published other influential work on film authorship, including a co-authored article (written with Peter Buse and Andy Willis): on Spanish filmmaker Alex de la Iglesia 'The Spanish "popular auteur": Alex de la Iglesia as polemical tool', New Cinemas, 2: 3 (2004), pp.139-48., which was followed up by a co-authored book on that filmmaker. The article and the book helped to further establish in academic discourse the notion of 'popular auteurism' (following on from the foundational work on contemporary film auteurism by Timothy Corrigan, which began with his 1990 essay 'The Commerce of Auteurism' [JSTOR linkHERE]), and usefully focused study on the seeming migration of previously 'highbrow' and 'middlebrow' artistic concepts into areas of popular cultural commerce.
Triana-Toribio's new article on auteurism appears in the new issue of Screen (2008 49: pp. 259-276). It is entitled 'Auteurism and commerce in contemporary Spanish cinema: directores mediáticos' (restricted Screen Online link HERE). Here's the abstract:
This article studies the evolution of auteurism and commerce in Spain using technologies such as the Internet. Spanish directors are becoming mediáticos (media friendly and using media as marketing tools) in response to the new conditions in which the national cinema is immersed among them the saturation in European screens and the ever-present competition with Hollywood. Those directors who can claim the status of auteur do so as part of their commercial strategies. In this analysis of the present-day conditions in the commerce of Spanish cinema, the focus is on two case studies of media-friendly and established auteurs, Isabel Coixet and Álex de la Iglesia who have and manage homepages where information about their work, their careers and other aspects of their authorial personas. Both auteurs can be considered to be at opposite ends of the spectrum genre cinema/art cinema within the Spanish cinema traditions. The questions that inspire this exploration deal with the functions of these homepages and what they can tell us about the present and future of film commerce and auteurism in Spain.
So, lots of reading to do of Maule and Triana-Toribio's studies of aspects of 'new auteurism'. I'll post again on what I find.
Back from my holiday, and in the middle of moving house (nearly done...), I chose a fine time to post the first entry to my new blog: Film Studies For Free, but that's the way things often are. The description of the new blog reads as follows:
Film Studies For Free actively espouses the ethos of Open Access to digital scholarly material. It aims to promote good quality, online, film and moving-image studies resources by commenting on them, and by linking to them. These resources will include published scholarship or research in various forms: from film and media weblogs, through online peer-reviewed journals, to other forms of web-based scholarly writing, as well as online works of film/moving-image research by practice.
I won't cross-post between different blogs normally (my vanity-publishing does have some limits...), but the content of the first post to FSFF could have happily resided on Directing Cinema, so here's the full text:
"Three very worthwhile items on the concept of the Director's Cut, of clear interest (inter alia) to researchers of film authorship like me, have appeared recently, in two regularly excellent online resources. First, Jonathan Rosenbaum's increasingly unmissable website carried an article of his on 'The Perils of the Director's Cut' that recently appeared in French translation in Le Mythe du Director’s cut (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2008), a collection coedited by Michel Marie and François Thomas, and was also adapted from a lecture he gave at a conference about 'Directors’ cuts' that was held at the Toulouse Cinémathèque in early 2007.
Rosenbaum attempts to distinguish between 'aesthetic and business ways' of dealing with Director's Cuts, and in so doing he also broaches some useful ontological questions more generally. He concludes the bulk of his discussion with Ridley Scott's comment about the 1992 'director's cut' version of his film Blade Runner: “The so-called Director’s Cut isn’t, really. But it’s close. And at least I got my unicorn.” To this, Rosenbaum adds:
Scott’s philosophical acceptance of this version as “close” significantly resembles the usual position of publicists regarding such matters–which is that in the final analysis, chaque film a deux versions, une version correcte et une version plus correcte [each film has two versions: a correct one and a more correct one]. The notion that any version might be incorrect is one that belongs to history and aesthetics, but not to business.
Rosenbaum notes, in his online introductory blurb, that while his article examines the first two versions of Blade Runner (1982 and 1992), it was written prior to the release of Blade Runner: The Final Cut. Ridley Scott's multiple versions are the subject of another useful and provocative meditation on the Director's Cut (published by the online Bright Lights Film Journal) by Erich Kuersten. In his article, Kuersten alights upon what may become quite common forms of film 'replicanting' in this age of exaggerated hypertextuality and concludes thus:
If Orson Welles was working today, I wonder how many different versions of Touch of Evil or Citizen Kanethere would be? Perhaps what was once considered indecision and fussiness will soon be a strength — as hypertextuality and increased bandwidth continue to dissolve the boundaries between memory and "reality," the finished and the forever open, the retro and the futuristic, and the impossibility of a cut ever being truly "final."
In the same issue of Bright Lights (no.61), in which a number of other pieces on film remaking and revisioning appear (incuding an interesting look at Michael Haneke's two versions of Funny Games, 1997 and 2007-8), Jason Martin Scott discusses John Cassavetes re-editing of his 1976 film The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and the release of his new version two years later. In his article, 'A Real Director's Cut', Scott argues that the fact that Cassavetes was prepared, very unusually for the time, to re-edit an already released film is indicative of his determination to change direction at this point in his work:
the re-edited Bookie is the most fully realized of all Cassavetes' films, and a viewing of both it and its prototype provides a rare opportunity to witness a great director's substantive and formal evolution in the making.
I'd be very interested to hear of any more useful online references to the director's cut and to film 'revisionings' and 're-versionings' more generally."
Although the original Dogme ’95 Brothers agree wholeheartedly with the anti-bourgeois impulse of the 1950s and 1960s directors of the French New Wave, the Dogme manifesto makes it clear that the ‘means’ of those directors – the creation of a cinema based on auteurist ‘personal expression’ – were flawed. I quote their tongue-in-cheek condemnation: ‘The auteur concept was bourgeois romanticism from the very start and thereby… false! […] Predictability (dramaturgy) has become the golden calf around which we dance’ (ref. HERE) To correct these and other flaws, the Vow of Chastity intends its participating directors to forswear their role as film artists, to ‘refrain from personal taste’ and, importantly, to regard the film instant as more important than ‘creating a “work”.’
The Dogme ‘movement’, however, remains a remarkably auteurist enterprise, on the whole, with its highly visible and audible interventions -- in advertising, review snippeting, and newspaper, magazine and documentary profiles -- by filmmakers whose names may not appear in their film credits, as the manifesto requires, but whose names and ‘personas’ clearly help to provide an extra brand label (alongside that of ‘Dogme’) with which to sell their films, to orient audience expectations, and to channel meaning and pleasure.
These realities of the contemporary independent film market aside there is, nonetheless, a great deal of variety in directorial practice among Dogme films. In a later, full length version of my work for publication, I shall examine three different versions of authorship among Dogme filmmakers, by comparing the case of Lars von Trier, moving from relatively high budget ‘art’ filmmaking to the ‘artisanal’ practices of Dogme in Idioterne/The Idiots (Denmark, 1998), Harmony Korine’s relative consistency from Gummo (USA, 1997) to Julien Donkey-Boy (USA, 1999), and the case of the Argentine first-time filmmaker José Luis Marqués and his very low budget film Fuckland (Argentina, 1999; I will henceforth try to avoid use of the profane title), passed as Dogme #8. In this much shorter version of my work, however, I will be focusing just on the latter film, since it offers a particularly interesting case study of the claims around the ‘instant’ and the ‘work’ that the original manifesto raises. I shall examine these claims not only in the light of the film’s aesthetics but also, more briefly, in the light of the publicity surrounding Marqués’s film. While it may not surprise us that the semi-humorous ‘intentions’ of Dogme directors are much more complicated than they might at first seem, the ways in which they ‘work’ in the circulation of films in an inescapably auteurist independent cinema culture prove to be important ones to consider in the context of contemporary film authorship more generally.
[Note: Much of the following information about the film was taken from its original website between 2000-2001, originally HERE – at a URL long since taken over by a different film company, who promote, inter alia, Argentine porn films]. The film was shot in one week in December 1999, when its Argentine director José Luis Marqués took three digital video cameras, two actors (one British and one Argentine), and three other technicians and production assistants to the British-occupied Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic Ocean. The title of the film comes in part from a common mispronunciation of the British/colonial name of the islands by non-native English speakers. The Falklands, or Malvinas as they are known by much of the rest of the world, continue to be the subject of the historical Argentine claim for sovereignty that had led, in 1982, to the war between Britain and the South American nation.
Marqués and his team were among the first Argentine citizens to land on the islands since the war, taking advantage of their opening up to Argentine tourism. They did not inform anyone that their intention was to make a film, and much of the film they made was shot clandestinely, with one camera adapted to look like a still camera, and the others either fixed so that they appeared to be switched ‘off’ when they were actually recording, or hidden in bags and coats. The crew and the actors pretended not to know one another. And in addition to this general secrecy, the British actor Camilla Heaney was not told what the idea for the film was. She was just instructed about her character (an Islander born and bred, working as a nurse) and was told to improvise as situations unfolded. None of the many islanders who appear in Marqués’s film knew that they were ‘performing in a film.’ So the film is a very interesting experiment in mixing fiction and documentary.
The finished seventy-minute long film tells the story of Fabián Stratas, played by an actor of the same name, an underemployed magician who travels on his own to Port Stanley, the islands’ capital, on a mission to impregnate a Falklands inhabitant. He explains his preposterous motives in a speech in Spanish at the end of the film, which I translate here: ‘If other Argentine patriots follow my example, in a few years the islands will be full of Argies. And if this place were full of Argies, it would change. You know how? They want to be English people. Let them. But the next generation will be the one to make decisions. Then we’ll talk.’ The film’s premise, which many spectators in Argentina and elsewhere found offensive especially in the light of the protagonist’s constant expression of racist, xenophobic and misogynist views, is actually a humorous interpretation of the indiscreet comment by an Argentine government minister some years ago that the best way to re-conquer the islands would be to buy up all the land bit by bit. Rather than by capitalist stealth, or again by war, the film suggests that any future ‘re-conquest’ lies (not entirely consensually) in making love.
Fabián succeeds in seducing an islander, played by Heaney, and leaves the island in triumph, unaware that she has recorded a message for him on his video camera. This reveals that she was aware of his falsity, if not the real reason for it, and was sickened by his cavalier treatment of her. The proto-feminist message does not arrive at its intended destination, however. It is played back only to a non-diegetic audience, while the blissfully unaware protagonist takes a shower and sings along a rock version of the Argentine national anthem, while the final credits roll.
Rolling final credits? Surely not - this is a Dogme film. But, of course, like the other certificated films, it breaks a number of the manifesto’s rules: non-diegetic scored music and sound, most notably the protagonist’s voiceover; the digital video shooting, although the film was transferred to Academy 35mm; and José Luis Marqués’s name as director is the first to appear in the final credits. Nonetheless it seems clear that for the Dogme brothers, the improvised spirit of the film (and its to-the-letter adherence to all other rules) deserved to be rewarded with the label Dogme #8. As for the director, he disingenuously remarks in a number of interviews and statements that he can’t remember which came first – the idea for the film or the idea that it should be filmed according to the Dogme Vows of Chastity. Interestingly, on the website originally devoted to the film, to which I will come back later, the director reproduces nine of his own Vows, which in some ways add to the Dogme manifesto’s constraints, but which were produced after making the film. The vows that concern my central question in this paper about the privileging of the ‘film instant’ over the ‘directorial work’ read as follows:
3. Each actor will operate his own camera.
7. The director will not participate in the moment of filming.
9. The mise-en-scène will depend exclusively on the circumstances of each moment.
Let me offer up for your contemplation a clip [posted on YouTube on May 11, 2008, by leosargento] which exemplifies the role of the protagonist’s voiceover, and his typically clandestine mode of filming (although there is plenty of English-language dialogue, apologies for the lack of subtitling for the dialogue in Spanish):
On the film’s original website, just before the director goes on to list his extra Vows of Chastity, Marqués makes the following observations:
Some time after making the film, a few people confessed to me that at certain moments they couldn’t tell what nationality the film was. This game that I had set up, mixing action with reality, ended up confusing the film crew, and caused a lot of uncertainty and suspicion. In practice, we all became actors because each of us had a role to play. At the same time, it was a very interesting inversion that occurred: the actor acted as director, and the director had to become an actor.
In a sequence roughly halfway through the film, though, this inversion is fleetingly stalled, as the director, (or one of the technicians under his direction) picks up the camera and engages in handheld shooting of a love scene involving the main actor (as in the screenshot below).
Although it is very likely that quite a lot of the ‘disembodied’, moving footage for the film was shot by people other than the main actor, this sequence is one of only two in the film where we can clearly see that it cannot be the actor holding the moving camera. The other sequence is at the end of the film, set back in Buenos Aires, when a moving camera closes in on the tiny screen of a digital video camera to take in the message that Camilla has left for Fabián, and then there is a parallel edit to a shot of Fabián in the shower. In both of these sequences, an invisible but detectable ‘Hand of God’ moves the camera, and risks breaking the film’s illusion, or ‘game’ as the director puts it.
The director’s brief comment about the confusion over the film’s nationality also raises the question of directorial control, and the issue of whether or not it is ‘his’ film, and therefore an ‘Argentine’ film, displaying a discrete point of view about the events it narrates which might be ‘knowable’ in advance. Obviously, his method of filming means that in many key ways, Marqués cedes conventional directorial control. This clearly enhances the element of ‘unpredictability’ so cherished by Dogme filmmakers in their attack on the sensibilities of bourgeois cinema. Even as he had a loose objective or story, Marqués could not know at all in advance exactly what form the ‘instants’ in his film would take: as they happen, then, these ‘instants’ are, in a very clear sense, directorially ‘uninflected,’ to use term much beloved of David Mamet in his book On Directing Film.
To use the Dogme manifesto expression, they are lacking in ‘dramaturgy’. This makes Marqués’s film, rather more like a ‘documentary’ than even the other Dogme films. While most of these films use improvisation to a greater or lesser extent, and also borrow many of their practices from documentary and news filming (the use of multiple, handheld cameras, for instance), their greater reliance on pre-planning, the relatively conventional location set up of their film crews, and the knowledge of most of their ‘actors’ that they are appearing in a film (even if they don’t know exactly what will happen) results in a much greater amount of directorial ‘inflection’ during the filming process.
But a strange disavowal about other forms of directorial control has occurred in discourse on this film and on Dogme more generally. For example, no mention is made in any of the publicity on Marqués’s film that I’ve seen of the post-shooting assembly of the film, and its relation to aesthetic choices that were clearly made during the pre-production process. In any film, editing is obviously where the ‘instants’ are selected and finally juxtaposed to form the ‘work’, and is a process usually overseen by the director, especially in independent film practice. An analysis of the aesthetic organisation of Marqués’s film reveals it, like all the other Dogme films, to be a remarkably ‘motif-ridden’ work. Its non-diegetic music and post-dubbed sound effects draw on allusions to horror cinema sound design, and serve to underscore the film’s expression of anxiety surrounding the clandestinity of its filming. This aural manifestation of uncanniness is matched in the film’s visual style by the preference for strange camera angles, lens distortion and unusual variation in focus, all of which, admittedly, emerged organically from the mode of filming. There is also the ‘less organic’ insertion of progressively more anxious montage sequences of curious images from around the islands, representing the protagonist’s increasing nightmare about discovery and the consequences of his actions.
The film’s general atmosphere of stealth, magic and ghostliness, (strikingly similar to motifs in other Dogme films, such as Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen [Denmark, 1998] and Kristian Levring’s The King is Alive [Sweden, Denmark, USA, 2000]), is clearly connected, consciously or unconsciously, to the casting of a well-known magician for the part of Fabián, and we see him performing several sleight of hand tricks to entertain the people he meets. But, in the case of Marqués’s film, as we have seen, this kind of directorial ‘inflection’ has not only taken place during pre- or post-production. In its duration, the film draws attention to the ongoing process of its formation as a ‘work’ precisely on those occasions where it chooses visibly to break its own narrational rules. In Marqués’s film, the ‘Hand of God’ has to intervene to enhance the ‘strangeness’ of the ‘instant’ in ways that a static camera could not capture.
Finally, I would briefly like to consider the matter of directorial inflection and the display of auteurist agency in relation to the role of marketing and publicity of this film. José Luis Marqués’s job in an advertising agency made him well placed to emulate the low budget marketing strategy of The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, USA, 1999). A cinema trailer was launched not directly to advertise the forthcoming film (which had not then secured a release date) but to draw public attention to the film’s website, where the ‘character’ of Fabián presents his experiences as a ‘true story’ and a ‘how to’ manual, putatively in order to encourage other Argentines to visit the islands to continue his ‘mission’. The website also prominently displays the director’s rationale, and the film’s status as a Dogme product. When the film was distributed to 60 cinemas across Argentina on 21 September 2000, and was subsequently shown at film festivals around the world, the director appeared at premieres and screenings, often accompanied by his main actor, to ‘tell the story’ of the film’s unusual production. Press interest in the film has been very high wherever it has been shown. By the time they got to the cinema to watch this film, then, the audience was rather more aware of what was going to happen in Marqués’s film than most of the people who actually appear in it.
[In the cinema] Auteurism as agency […] becomes a place for encountering not so much a transcending meaning […] but the different conditions through which expressive meaning is made by an auteur and reconstructed by an audience […] the commercial status of [the director] now necessarily becomes part of an agency that culturally and socially monitors identification and critical reception. [p 105]
Corrigan examines the role of directorial publicity in contemporary filmmaking, and concentrating on a ‘“semi-textual” strategy that is often taken for granted in the relation between a filmmaker, the films, and an audience’ (p. 107), he argues that
The interview […] is one of the few documentable extra-textual spaces where the auteur, in addressing cults of fans and critical viewers, can engage and disperse his or her own organizing agency as auteur. Here, the standard directorial interview might be described according to the action of promotion and explanation: it is the writing and explaining of a certain intentional self; it is frequently the commercial dramatization of self as the motivating agent of textuality. (pp. 107-108).
While we learn very little about his ‘self’ from first-time director Marqués’s many multimedia interventions in the promotion of his film, we can certainly bear witness to numerous examples of the commercial dramatization of his story of the film production. These stories, as well as directly informing us of what to expect from his film, also tell us more indirectly of his undoubted ingenuity, skill and bravura – the stories generations of filmgoers have wanted to hear from many other ‘New Wave’ film pioneers.
In conclusion, it should not surprise us that ‘Dogme’ claims about auteurism and ‘uncredited’ directorial authorship turn out to be false, or at least to be overstating their case. Indeed, this is typical of the entertaining sleight of hand characterising the whole enterprise of this film ‘movement’. But it is important to remember that the Dogme manifesto has not generated an avant-garde filmmaking practice, but a variety of ‘art’ filmmaking, especially in terms of distribution and reception. The generic issues of diversity within standardization are of paramount importance, therefore. It is hard, if not impossible to imagine a form of commercially viable filmmaking that could be truly ‘unpredictable’, and while the films of Dogme ’95 make an extremely good stab at this, their necessary immersion in the practices and discourses of auteurist film distribution and exhibition means that their ability truly to shock us is attenuated by the otherwise rather conventional ways in which they have reached us.
I am resurfacing after a bit of a break; it's been the examination and grading season in recent weeks, though it's also true that my other blog has been a little more active...
Anyway, I wanted to post a link to a newly online, English-language version of an article of mine previously only published in Spanish: 'La función de "los autores": la adaptación cinematográfica transnacional de El lugar sin límites', Revista Iberoamericana, Vol. LXVIII, Núm, 199, Abril-Junio 2002, pp. 253-268. The new version is entitled 'The "Author Function" in Transnational Film Adaptation: The case of El lugar sin límites / Place Without Limits / Hell Has No Limits (Arturo Ripstein, Manuel Puig, José Donoso)' and is available as an .html download HERE.
Here's the first paragraph as an inducement:
Despite being the most distinctive film auteur in Latin America since the late 1960s, Mexican director Arturo Ripstein has almost exclusively chosen to adapt existing, and usually well-known, literary works by writers from that continent and beyond.[[2]] Before he teamed up with his current scriptwriter Paz Alicia Garciadiego in 1986 for an adaptation of Juan Rulfo's El imperio de la fortuna, he also frequently co-authored his scripts with a number of highly distinguished Latin American writers. In 1978, Ripstein released his film adaptation of Chilean writer José Donoso's 1966 short novel El lugar sin límites (‘The Place without Limits’, aka ‘Hell Has No Limits’ ’). Set in a decrepit bordello cum nightclub, this queer family melodrama, which culminates in the homophobic murder of its drag-artist protagonist, had an extraordinary international impact.[[3]] The film eclipsed the success of Donoso’s novella, at the same time as reawakening an interest in his text that had earlier circulated internationally as part of the Latin American literary ‘Boom.’[[4]] While Ripstein took the only screenwriting credit for El lugar sin límites, he worked on the script with Donoso (whose novel is, of course, credited as the film’s ‘source’), with the Argentine novelist, playwright and screenwriter Manuel Puig, as well as with a number of other, uncredited Mexican writers including José Emilio Pacheco, Cristina Pacheco and Carlos Castañón. Puig and Ripstein famously fell out over Puig’s contribution and his name does not appear in the credits. While each of Ripstein’s films prompts interesting questions about collaborative authorship, few of them do so as compellingly as El lugar sin límites.
The article is on 1970s auteurist filmmaking, so not exactly 'contemporary world cinema, which is supposed to be the main focus of 'Directing Cinema'. I will return to that focus very soon, I promise. 'The "Author Function" in Transnational Film Adaptation' does, however, deal, in detail, with an aspect of auteurism which has always interested me, and about which I have written before: namely issues of collaboration and 'multiple authorship' in so-called auteurist cinema.
It also looks in great detail at a very much under-explored aspect of Arturo Ripstein's filmmaking, notably the use in his films of popular, and popular-classical, Latin-American and Spanish music, so if you like boleros, mambos; ranchera culture and norteña music, and also zarzuela (all the later terrain of some of Almodóvar's aesthetic choices), you should check it out.
Note: My other relevant work on collaboration and multiple authorship is as follows:
Recognizing Billy Budd in Beau Travail: Epistemology and Hermeneutics of an Auteurist "Free" Adaptation', Screen Vol. 43, No. 1, 2002, pp. 57-73 - available online HERE;
'Home Movies: The Curious Cinematic Collaboration of Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean-Luc Godard', in For Ever Godard (eds) Michael Temple, James S. Williams, and Michael Witt (London: Black Dog Press, 2004), pp. 100-117. For Ever Godard is a wonderful collection that all cinephiles should explore.
A lot of what I'll be writing about in this blog will concern film directing and the concept of auteurism. Some of what I will write will be a little (too) 'academic'; some of it a lot less so. But, in any case, it probably makes sense for this first post to set out what I mean by the term 'auteurism'.
Here's a definition that begins a book chapter I've written called 'Auteur Machines: Auteurism and the DVD'. The chapter will be published shortly in a great book called Film and Television After DVD, edited by James Bennett and Tom Brown, for Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies series:
Auteurism, like many other features of cinema, is a matter of supply and demand. It is a way of both making and experiencing films, and increasingly of selling them, in which the largest part of the control of the intellectual and creative work involved in the filmmaking process, or of the responsibility and credit for this, is actively taken up by or ascribed to the film’s director. Contemporary auteurism comprises a complex series of interrelated film production, marketing, and reception practices and discourses which are all underpinned by a shared belief in the specific capability of an individual agent – the director – to marshal and synthesize the multiple, and usually collective, elements of filmmaking for the purposes of individual expression, or to convey in some way a personal or, at least, “personalized” vision.
A much longer exploration of contemporary auteurist film culture will be appearing in the book I intend finally to be finishing over the summer. That's when I will voluntarily cease, for a while, to be a well-paid Film Studies lecturer, after eighteen long but good years in academia (at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, then at the University of Kent, Canterbury), and will hopefully get to spend some more time writing about film.
This book, to be called Directing Cinema: The New Auteurism, is one I've been working on for Manchester University Press for the last few years. It attempts an in-depth investigation of the ways in which contemporary film directors, their discourse, and discourse about them act in the contemporary global practices of film production, distribution and exhibition, and in contemporary film cultures more widely. Commercial developments in film production and marketing, especially since the 1970s (Neale 1981; Caughie 1981; Corrigan 1991), and geo-cultural, technological and structural developments since the 1990s have meant that a much larger number and a wider variety of directors than ever before acquire a public prominence that was once the preserve of established “auteurs” (Grant, 2000).
I consider film directors as agents, or subjects, who have direct, intentional and reflexive, if obviously not completely all determining, relationships to the cultural products they help to produce, as well as to their reception (Grant 2001). Following Judith Butler, I see agency as a “reiterative or re-articulatory practice, immanent to power and not as a relation of external opposition to power” (Butler 1993: 15). This means that, for me, while directors (as agents) make or direct films, by choosing, doing and saying (sometimes) original things, as individuals what they cannot make or “direct” is the discursive or conceptual framework of “directing” itself. In order to be seen as directors (and as particular kinds of directors), they can therefore only “re-make” or “re-direct,” or, cite or repeatedly perform, the kind of work that is socially constructed as being that of a “director,” the kind of work that we, the audience, want from directors (see also Grant 2002, for further theorizations of contemporary auteurism).
Circular, huh? It is, sort of, but it will hopefully also be productive and a take which may help to get discussions of film directing out of all sorts of historical, problematic, Film-Studies' impasses.
Anyway... I aim to unpack and unpick a lot of the above in future posts as I get to grips with finishing the book. But I will also be jotting down other less dense thoughts (!) about what film directors, nowadays, do and say.
Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter, London and New York: Routledge.
Caughie, J. (ed) (1981) Theories of Authorship, London: British Film Institute.
Corrigan, T. (1991) A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Grant, C. (2000) ‘www.auteur.com?’, Screen, Vol. 41:1: 101-108 _______(2001) ‘Secret Agents: Feminist Theories of Women’s Film Authorship’, Feminist Theory 2:1: 113-130. _______(2002) ‘Recognizing Billy Budd in Beau Travail: Epistemology and Hermeneutics of an Auteurist “Free” Adaptation’, Screen 43:1: 57-73.
A Film Studies blog by Catherine Grant, exploring issues of film authorship, auteurism, and film directing, in world cinema and in audiovisual culture more generally
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