First-time film directing

Ted Hope, film producer and author of Truly Free Film, a fabulous blog about very indie film-making, has just posted nine videos to YouTube (all accessible above) which capture the conversations that he and Christine Vachon had, at the beginning of this year, with Alan Cumming, Jeff Lipsky, and Lee Daniels to talk with them about what it was like to sit in the director's chair after being established in other roles within the industry.

María Luisa Bemberg: online resources

Miss Mary, (María Luisa Bemberg, 1986) starring Julie Christie, Nacha Guevara, Eduardo Pavlovsky, and Luisina Brando.

Following up my last blog entry on theories of women's film authorship, I have just posted a pre-publication version of a chapter on the early films of Argentine film director María Luisa Bemberg that I finally published in An Argentine Passion: The Films of María Luisa Bemberg edited by John King, Sheila Whittaker and Rosa Bosch (London: Verso, 2000).

Bemberg was an early favourite director of mine; I loved teaching about her films which were produced against the kind of political and economic backdrop that would dissuade (and did dissuade) many from attempting to make any kind of cinema, let alone the kind of feminist cinema that Bemberg launched herself into making later in life, at the still tender age of 58. I learned an awful lot about filmmaking just by studying her films, as well as the work of other filmmakers in whose films she had professed an interest (including, especially, Ingmar Bergman, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson). In turn, of course, Bemberg has been an important influence on a number of young filmmakers, most notably another favourite of mine, Lucrecia Martel (see HERE). Martel's films have been produced by Bemberg's legendary producer Lita Stantic.

My chapter looks in quite a lot of detail at her decision to become a director following frustrations with the work of other filmmakers who directed her scripts. As she declared in 1989, "I had to stand behind a camera in order to be true to my own script and to unravel the common thread to all my transgressing characters".

In honour of Bemberg and her films, below is a list of high-quality and freely-accessible online studies of her work:

In English:

• Caleb Bach, 'Maria Luisa Bemberg tells the untold,' Americas 46 (Mar/Apr 1994): 20-7
• Michael Chanan, 'Latin American Cinema in the 90's: Representational Space in Recent Latin American Cinema,' Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe 9:1 (enero-junio 1998)
• Catherine Grant, 'Intimista transformations: María Luisa Bemberg's First Feature Films,' in An Argentine Passion: María Luisa Bemberg and Her Films, John King, Sheila Whitaker and Rosa Bosch, eds. (London: Verso, 2000), 73-109
• Bernard McGuirk, 'Review of An Argentine Passion: María Luisa Bemberg and her Films, by John King, Sheila Whitaker and Rosa Bosch (eds.), London & New York: Verso, 2000,' Scope, May 2003
• Hugo Salas, 'Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others: María Luisa Bemberg,' Senses of Cinema 22 (September-October 2002)
• Cynthia L. Stone, 'Beyond the Female Gaze: María Luisa Bemberg's Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz,' Ciberletras, Number 13, July 2005
• Fernanda Vitor Bueno,'The Myth of Camila O'Gorman in the Works of Juana Manuela Gorriti, María Luisa Bemberg and Enrique Molina', PhD e-thesis, The University of Texas at Austin, December 2007
• Bruce Williams, 'Bemberg’s Third Sex: Argentine Mothers at the Dawn of Democracy', Cinémas/Cinémas, Volume 15, numéro 1, Automne 2004, p. 125-144
  

In Spanish:

• Mary Elizabeth Barnard, 'Nietzsche y el cine latinoamericano: un estudio de tres obras,' Espéculo: Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos (marzo-julio 2006)
• Anke van Haastrecht, 'Mujeres en rebelión: el discurso cinematográfico de María Luisa Bemberg', (date unknown)
• Clara Kuschnir, 'La narrativa, el cine y las mujeres,' Estudios feministas = Etudés feministes (agosto-diciembre 2005)
• Jane Mooney, 'Directoras latinoamericanas: Susana Amaral, María Luisa Bemberg, Viviana Cordero y María Novaro', La Tatuana number 3, (Cinenavaja), 2005
• Lourdes Vázquez, 'De identidades: María Luisa Bemberg, filmografía y bibliografía, 1967-2006 [Segunda edición],' SALALM Latin American Information series, no. 6a, edited by Laura D. Shedenhelm, University of Georgia Libraries, 2007
• Guillermina Walas, 'María Luisa frente al espejo: la (auto)_reflexión en María Luisa Bemberg', La Tatuana number 3, (Cinenavaja), 2005
  

In Italian:

• Raffaella Bassetti, et al., María Luisa Bemberg: la passionaria . Italy: Associazione L'Occhio delle donne, 2004.

Camila (María Luisa Bemberg, 1984) starring Susú Pecoraro , Imanol Arias, and Héctor Alterio

On feminist theories of women's film authorship

I just 'self-archived' a pre-publication version of an article of mine finally published as '‘Secret Agents: Feminist Theories of Women’s Film Authorship’, Feminist Theory Vol. 2, No. 1, April 2001, pp. 113-130.

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?

[Article continues HERE.]

© Catherine Grant 2001

Links to Auteurism and Film Authorship Resources

Director Jane Campion (right) and cinematographer Laurie Mcinnes on the set of After Hours (1984). Photograph (1981) by Gayle Pigalle

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.

• Eduardo Abrantes, ''The Principle of Revelation (review of Catherine Lupton (2005) Chris Marker: Memories of the Future London: Reaktion Books)', Film-Philosophy 10.1, 2006
• Richard Armstrong, 'They Lost It at the Movies: Film Culture in the Age of Positif and Cineaste', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 40, May 2003
• Karyn Ball, 'Hitchcock's 'Material Whirl (Review of Tom Cohen, Hitchcock's Cryptonomies. Volume 1: Secret Agents; Volume II: War Machines. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005)', Culture Machine, 2006
• Charles Bane, 'Viewing Novels, Reading Films: Stanley Kubrick and the art of adaptation as interpretation, PhD e-thesis, Louisiana State University 2006
• Shyon Baumann, Intellectualization and Art World Devlopment: Film in the United States', American Sociological Review 66:3 (June 2001) pp. 404-426
• Jack Boozer, 'Introduction: The Screenplay and Authorship in Adaptation', Authorship in Film Adaptation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007)
• David Bordwell, Ozu and the poetics of cinema, e-book, originally published by London: British Film Institute; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988
• Peter Brunette, 'Nowell-Smith Meets Visconti, Redux: The Old and the New,', Film-Philosophy, vol. 9, no. 16, March 2005 (See also Geoffrey Nowell- Smith, “It Ain’t Me Babe: A Response to Brunette,' Film-Philosophy, vol. 9, no. 17, March 2005)
• Alan Cholodenko - '(The) Death (of) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix1, Part II', Animation Studies, December 9, 2007
• David Church, 'The "Cult" of Kubrick', Offscreen Journal, May 31, 2006
• Paul Coughlin, 'The Mark of Cain: Blood Simple and The Man Who Wasn't There', Scope 3, November 2005
• David Clarke, 'Welcome to Tykwer-World: Tom Tykwer as Auteur', Welcome to Tykwer-World: Tom Tykwer as Auteur', gfl-journal, No. 3/2006
• James A. Davidson, 'Some Thoughts on Alfred Hitchcock and Vladimir Nabokov', Images Journal, Issue 3, 1997
• Alexander Dhoest, 'How queer is L'Air de Paris? -- Marcel Carné and Queer Authorship', Scope, May 2003
• Lucy Fife, 'Review of Joe McElhaney, The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli. (New York; State University of New York Press, 2006)', Film-Philosophy 11.3, December 2007
• Richard Franklin, “What I Really Want to do is Direct”: (1) Directors as Depicted on Film and Television', Senses of Cinema, Issue 42, Jan-Mar 2007
• Jane Gaines, 'Dorothy Arzner's trousers', from Jump Cut, no. 37, July 1992, pp. 88-98
• Tag Gallagher, 'Reading, Culture, and Auteurs' , Screening the Past, March 1, 2001
• Tag Gallagher, 'American Triptych: Vidor, Hawks and Ford', Senses of Cinema, Issue 42, Jan-Mar 2007
• David Gerstner, 'Queer Modernism: The Cinematic Aesthetics of Vincente Minnelli', Modernity, Vol 2 2000
• Barry Keith Grant, 'Theories of Authorship: Rethinking authorship', from Jump Cut, no. 31, March 1986, pp. 14-16
• Catherine Grant, ‘www.auteur.com?’, originally published in Screen, Vol. 41:1, 2000, 101-108
• Catherine Grant, ‘Secret Agents: Feminist Theories of Women’s Film Authorship’, originally published in Feminist Theory 2:1, 2001, 113-130
• Catherine Grant, '‘Intimista Transformations: María Luisa Bemberg’s First Feature Films’, originally published in An Argentine Passion: The Films of María Luisa Bemberg ed. John King, Sheila Whittaker and Rosa Bosch (London: Verso, 2000)
• Catherine Grant, ‘Recognizing Billy Budd in Beau Travail: Epistemology and Hermeneutics of an Auteurist “Free” Adaptation’, originally published in Screen 43:1, 2002: 57-73
• Catherine Grant, 'The "Author Function" in Transnational Film Adaptation: The case of El lugar sin límites / The Place Without Limits / Hell Has No Limits (Arturo Ripstein, Manuel Puig, José Donoso)', originally published as '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
• Asbjørn Grønstad, 'Coppola's Exhausted Eschatology: Apocalypse Now Reconsidered', Nordic Journal of English Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2005
• Andrew Grossman, 'The Belated Auteurism of Johnnie To', Senses of Cinema, January 2001
• Fiona Handyside, 'The Auteur as Imposter', Film-Philosophy, 10.1, 2006
• John Hess, 'La politique des auteurs (part one) World view as aesthetics', from Jump Cut, no. 1, 1974, pp. 19-22
• John Hess, 'La politique des auteurs (part two) Truffaut's manifesto', from Jump Cut, no. 2 (1974), pp. 20-22
• Roger Hillman, 'Fassbinder, and Fassbinder/Peer Raben', Screening the Past, March 1, 2001
• Brian Hu, 'Neither Personal nor Political (review of John Anderson (2005) Edward Yang (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press)', Film-Philosophy 10.1, 2006
• Noel King, 'Changing the Curriculum: The Place of Film in an English Department', Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1983
• Donald F. Larsson, 'Every Picture Tells A Story: Agency And Narration In Film', Panel: Movies as Paradigmatic Narratives, Modern Language Association Annual Conference, Washington, D.C., December, 2000
• Katerina Loukopoulou , 'Godard Alone? (review of Michael Temple, James S.Williams and Michael Witt (eds) (2004) For Ever Godard (London: Black Dog Publishing)', Film-Philosophy, 10. 1, 2006
• Harriet Margolis, 'Introduction: "A Strange Heritage" - from Colonization to Transfor,ation?', in Margolis (ed.), Jane Campion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
  
• Adrian Martin, 'Sign your name across my heart, or:"I want to write about Delbert Mann" ', Screening the Past, March 1, 2001
• Tony McKibbin, 'Art Variables and Life Variables in La Belle noiseuse', Senses of Cinema, Issue 42, Jan-Mar 2007
• Andrew Neal, 'Review of Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers, edited by Yvonne Tasker (London: Routledge, 2002) and Contemporary North American Filmmakers: A Wallflower Critical Guide (Second Edition), edited by Yoram Allon, Del Cullen and Hannah Patterson (London: Wallflower, 2002), Scope, May 2004
• Dan North, 'Review of Directed by Allen Smithee, edited by Jeremy Braddock and Stephen Hock (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), Scope, May 2004
• Karla Oeler, 'Signs of the Times: The thirty year trajectory of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema', Film-Philosophy, Volume 3 Number 25, June 1999
• Matt Pearson, Authorship and the Films of David Lynch, e-book, BritishFilm.org.uk, 1997
• VF Perkins, 'Moments of Choice', first published in The Movie, no. 58 (Orbis Publishing, 1981), Rouge 9, 2006
• Dana Polan, 'Auteur Desire', Screening the Past, March 1, 2001
• Trevor Ponech, 'Authorship and Authorial Autonomy: The Personal Factor in the Cinematic Work of Art', Æ Canadian Aesthetics Journal / Revue canadienne d'esthétique, Volume 4 Summer/Été 1999
• Lauren Rabinovitz, 'Past Imperfect: Feminism and Social Histories of Silent Film', Cinémas/Cinémas, Volume 16, numéro 1, Automne 2005, p. 21-34
• Nicholas Rombes, 'The Rebirth of the Author, CTheory, June 2005
• Holger Römers, '“The Moral of the Auteur Theory”: Frank Borzage’s Moonrise (and Theodore Strauss’ Source Novel)', Senses of Cinema, Issue 42, Jan-March 2007
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Potential Perils of the Director’s Cut', originally published in French as Le Mythe du Director’s cut (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2008), JonathanRosenbaum.com, August 6, 2008
• William D. Routt, 'Lois Weber, or the exigency of writing', Screening the Past, March 1, 2001
  
• William D Routt, 'L'Evidence', Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, vol. 5 no 2 (1990)
• Girish Shambu, 'On Auteurism', girish, March 30, 2008
• David Sorfa, 'Introduction: Reanimating the Auteur', Film-Philosophy , 10.1, 2006
• David Sterritt, Introduction', The Films of Alfred Hitchcock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
• Tony Todd, 'Meanings and Authorships in Dune', Film-Philosophy 13.1, 2009
• Kristof Van Den Troost, « Stephen Teo, Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film », China perspectives, n°2009/1, 2009
• Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, 'Peter Greenaway: A User's Manual', Film-Philosophy, Volume 2, 1998
• Brenda Wilson, 'Blurring the Boundaries: Auteurism & Kathryn Bigelow', UBCinephile, Vol. 1, 2005
• Ronald W. Wilson, 'Review of Chris Fujiwara, The Auteur of Darkness: Jacques Tourneur', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7 No. 2, January 2003
• Daniel Yacavone, 'Towards a Theory of Film Worlds', Film-Philosophy 12.2, September 2008

On Claire Denis's Vendredi soir

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

Copy protection? Margulies on forging auteurism

Chantal Akerman oversees a vocal recording for a musical in Les Années 80 (The Eighties, Akerman, 1983).

An interesting observation about auteurism by Ivone Margulies, author of the great book Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday, in an interview by Ricky D Ambrose posted on the Tisch Film Review website (my emphasis):

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?

Yet another definition

“Auteur…it’s a word halfway between amateur and autocrat.”

from Overheard at The Auteurs

Viral replication: Virgil Widrich's Copy Shop

I spent some of my happiest hours in some of my most formative years working in a photocopy and print shop, at the same time as pondering questions of originality and copying as part of PhD research into notions of authorship. So, for me, a truly must-see film was Austrian filmmaker Virgil Widrich 's dizzyingly virtuosic Copy Shop (2001). This film 'consists of nearly 18,000 photocopied digital frames, which are animated and filmed with a 35mm camera' (see the 'Making of Copy Shop' HERE). Its full-length version is quite widely available as part of the Cinema 16: European Short Films (2006) DVD.

Below is the little essay about Copy Shop reproduced on its website. Along with the video interview with Widrich embedded beneath it, it's an interesting example of what I call (following Timothy Corrigan's conceptualisation of the extra-textual notion of cinematic authorship - 'the commerce of auteurism') 'Directing Cinema' discourse, the phenomenon by which the director (or the 'ghost director' - i.e. a film marketing department) attempts to 'direct' (us) before, during, and (as here) after the film's production.

Identity and the cinema
Cinema enables the viewer to adopt an "alter-ago" for a while, safe in the knowledge that, no matter what happens, the film will be over at some point. This alter-ego can "slip into" one or more of the characters on the screen. In movies, identification is usually achieved by using "subjective shots" so that the viewer sees what the character "sees", thus merging with the character. A sequence of this kind usually looks like this:
A) Objective shot: The character looks past the camera

B) Subjective shot: The camera shows what the character sees

C) Objective shot: The character reacts to what he/she has seen

"Copy Shop" takes this a step further: the viewer is identified with a character, who then proceeds to lose his own identity.

1. Objective = Subjective
In the cinema, one important rule must be adhered to so that the viewer registers the change from an objective to a subjective angle, at least subconsciously: the difference between objective and subjective angles is that the one watching must never be directly visible in a subjective shot. In "Copy Shop" this rule is deliberately broken. The same shot is used first as an objective angle, and again later as a subjective angle, i.e. the same perspective can be perceived by different observers. For example: At the beginning of the story "we" (objective shot) see Alfred Kager wake up and go into the bathroom.

In a later scene "we" (objective shot) see Alfred Kager standing in the bathroom looking into the bedroom. "We" see what Alfred Kager "sees", and for this exactly the same shot is used as was used at the beginning: a doppelgänger, who looks like Alfred Kager, is lying in bed (subjective shot), wakes up and goes into the bathroom.

In a still later scene, when there are already three Alfred Kagers, the objective view of Kager standing in the bathroom and looking, which has already been seen, becomes the subjective view of Kager observing a doppelgänger standing in the bathroom, who is in turn watching, in a kind of subordinate subjective shot, as a further doppelgänger lies in bed, wakes up and goes into the bathroom. The first two thirds of the film give the viewer time to come to grips with the game. As long as the viewer knows who is "who", it is also perfectly clear to him/her which of the identical characters is the real Alfred Kager. It is not until the final third that the film gathers speed to such a degree that the identifications become confused.

2. The frame as a copy of the original
"Copy Shop" shows a protagonist fighting for his originality as an individual. But in "Copy Shop" not even the frames are originals; they are only copies. This is done not only to express the fact that the cinema copy is the usual kind of copy for movie theatres, but also that the frames are really and truly "copies" in the literal sense of the word. The technical realization of "Copy Shop" involved the transfer of every single frame from the digital video tape into the computer once the shooting had been finished, from where the frames were printed out on a black and white laser printer and then filmed again with a 35mm animation camera. Thus video becomes paper, paper becomes film and the story of "Copy Shop" is brought to life again "copy by copy".

3. Cinema as a copier
"Copy Shop" is about a copy centre, in other words about the duplication of single pictures which are whisked through machines (in this case copiers) at ever increasing speed. The speed of this duplication, which rises to 24 frames a second in the course of the story, represents an acoustic and optical correlation to the related process of a film projector’s operation. Kager, the hero of "Copy Shop", fights not only against his doppelgängers, but above all against the pictures that they copy and thus against the film in which he is forever entrapped.

Thanks a lot to Joanna Kerr for telling me about this film. And thanks to Virgil Widrich, its brilliant director.

Incidentally, the new Cinema 16 - World Short Films (2008) has just been released.

Headless auteurism! Lucrecia Martel in London

La mujer sin cabeza/The Headless Woman director Lucretia Martel and producers Pedro and Agustín Almodóvar at the film's North American premiere at the 46th New York Film Festival, October 6, 2008

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.

Next to Almodóvar, the other director whose work I love -- more than most others, at any rate -- is the Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, and next week I will finally get to see her new film La mujer sin cabeza/The Headless Woman which will have its UK premiere as part of the seventh annual Discovering Latin America Film Festival. Martel will be at the screening at the Tate Modern's Starr Auditorium (or 'the filmwomb', as I like to think of it).

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's Caché 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.

'Antonioni: Extreme Aesthete of the Real'

A quiet month at Directing Cinema draws to a close (quiet here at the blog at least; noisier with the book, thankfully). But I wanted mark a chilly, damp beginning to Autumn in East Sussex with a warm and sunny recommendation for an article by a friend and former colleague of mine: James S. Williams, Professor of Modern French Literature and Film at Royal Holloway, University of London. James Williams has written on major authors and filmmakers such as Marguerite Duras, Albert Camus, Jean-Luc Godard, Roland Barthes, Jean Cocteau, Cyril Collard and Claire Denis.

Williams has just had an article on a non-francophone director published in the 50th anniversary issue of the journal Film Quarterly (Fall Issue 2008, Vol. 62, No. 1, pp. 46-57). It's available online if you have a subscription or JSTOR (etc) access. The article is entitled 'The Rhythms of Life: An Appreciation of Michelangelo Antonioni, Extreme Aesthete of the Real'. The abstract reads as follows:

This essay assesses Antonioni’s oeuvre in its totality, focusing in particular on its constant negotiation of two extremes: documentary and melodrama. The essay argues that Antonioni’s is a visionary project which, by achieving a genuine encounter between art and technology, extends an earlier tradition of the European avant-garde. [hyperlinks added]

What I think is especially valuable about this essay is that it treats Antonioni's film techniques, across all of his work, in much more detail than most other studies (and, certainly, than all other studies I have read of academic article length). It manages to make, as many other works do, plenty of interesting observations about Antonioni's themes, but it does not subordinate an exploration of formal aesthetics in the process: its focus remains assuredly and insightfully on how Antonioni’s techniques 'resensitize us to the world' [p. 53]

Williams notes that Antonioni's 'highly ambivalent aesthetic attitude to documentary reality was already visible at the beginning of his career':

Despite Antonioni’s deep concerns about scientific logic and any objective representation of reality, in purely formal terms his work is always defined by a clear tension between what I would call on the one hand a documentary impulse, and on the other a drive towards fiction pushed at times to the level of melodrama.

[...] however hollowed-out and experimental Antonioni’s works become, they always constitute fictions since they present characters in artificial situations. As Antonioni himself put it, his primary interest lies in the moment when the context or environment suddenly takes on “relief.” Which is to say, his hybrid narratives marked by temporal disjunction, disorientation, black holes, ellipses, and a lack of resolution serve to provide just enough justification for human figuration, however “unnaturally” heightened and stylized, to take hold. This recourse to melodrama, broadly defined, offered Antonioni a means of shortcircuiting and sculpting the Real in slowed-down, distended form in order to capture it as a series of tableaux vivants. [p. 50]

Williams' article is especially good, I feel, on Antonioni's deployment of melodrama in the interests of 'an exploration of the processes of human perception and modern subjectivity':

Alert to the tensions in the spatiotemporal relations between people, objects, and events, the director must, according to Antonioni, engage with a “special reality” and be “committed morally in some way.” What this means in practice is dedramatizing the narrative event in order to focus attention on the physical context that both makes it possible but also eludes it. Antonioni propels his protagonists into new or alien environments, and we follow them almost ethnographically as they develop new perceptual powers in order to negotiate their changed conditions'. [p. 52]

In a section of the article entitled 'A New Techno-Aesthetic?', an insightful connection is made between Antonioni's melodramatic techniques and what fellow Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, in his famous essay, 'Cinema of Poetry', called Antonioni's free indirect subjective [p. 55 - see Patrick Keating's useful article online HERE for a good discussion of Pasolini's essay).

I'm not teaching about Antonioni's films to students at the moment, but, if I were, Williams' beautifully written and gloriously illustrated essay would be top of the class-reading list. Please don't just take my inevitably biased word for it: take a proper look at it yourselves.

Other online resources I have used previously in teaching about this Italian director are given below.

HERE's a link to the excellent bibliography of materials on Michelangelo Antonioni provided by the UC Berkeley Library.

And below are some links to other, good, online articles:

• James Brown, "Michelangelo Antonioni." (profile and film survey) Senses of Cinema
• James Brown, "Il Grido: Modernising the Po." Senses of Cinema
• Gregory Solman, "L'Avventura." Senses of Cinema
• Absjørn Grønstad, "Anatomy of a Murder: Bazin, Barthes, Blow-Up." Film Journal
• Jack Turner, "Antonioni's The Passenger as Lacanian Text." Other Voices
• Fiona A.Villella, "Here Comes the Sun: New Ways of Seeing In Antonioni's Zabriskie Point." Senses of Cinema
• Ian Johnston, 'We’re Not Happy and We Never Will Be: On Cronaca di un amore', Bright Lights Film Journal