Film Authorship Research Articles

Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (review)

Reviewed by: Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan Melinda C. Finberg Tiffany Stern , Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, issued as paperback, 2007). Pp. x, 337. $45.00. While deeply engrossed in Tiffany Stern's fascinating study Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, I was also preparing to teach Sydney Pollack's film Tootsie and began reading Susan Dworkin's Making Tootsie. Murray Schisgall and Larry Gelbart are listed as the film's authors, but Dworkin reveals the inaccuracy of this ascription. The film is actually the work of a series of successive writers, including Bob Kaufman, Robert Garland, and Elaine May, and additionally includes improvisational contributions by the actors—as permitted, even encouraged, by director Pollack. This collaborative authorship is typical of the way films are made in Hollywood today and raises questions about our concept of authorship. Stern's comprehensive history of how theatrical productions emerged from scripts during the rehearsal process makes it clear that during the two hundred years between the ages of William Shakespeare and Richard Brinsley Sheridan such collaborative authorship was the norm. As Stern investigates the rehearsal process, she goes beyond the detailed examination of how actors learned their lines and developed their roles and delves into the question of "whose play is it anyway?" Her book explores and raises questions about how theater is made and what the role and power of the author is and has been. As Stern explains, "In writing about rehearsal, it has been necessary to write about the relationship of actors to plays, and plays to actors, and the relationship of the audience to both. Rehearsal extends beyond the way in which plays are prepared for performance into the process of textual change itself" (290). Stern explodes myths about how the English theater operated in the early modern era. She notes the fallacy, common even among today's literary critics and theater historians, of universalizing our current view of rehearsal practice: that of an ensemble of actors working together with a director and/or author to unlock the psychological truth of the scene or character. Instead, true ensemble rehearsal was a rarity—even the notion of an ensemble is historically inaccurate. Stern meticulously documents how actors received their parts, studied them, and came together with other actors to prepare the works for the stage. She has consulted prompters' notes, marked copies of manuscripts, contemporary biographies, pamphlets, as well as other contemporary commentaries. (Even if her book were not so well written, it would be of immense value simply for its encyclopedic bibliography.) Stern examines changes in rehearsal process over the course of the two centuries between Shakespeare and Sheridan, but she asserts that, despite variations over that time period, theater professionals during that era would have had a sense of familiarity with each other's approaches, but would find how we conceive of the rehearsal process today utterly alien. In general, in the early modern theater, actors were presented with "sides," manuscripts containing only their own parts and their cue lines. Actors studied their parts privately; the more important the actor, the more prestigious his or her tutor. Roles "belonged" to their creating actor, and subsequent players of roles were taught to "re-create" every nuance of the original actor's performance. Often such interpretations were handed down for generations—David Garrick was revolutionary in reinterpreting other actors' roles. Actors were often not familiar with the whole play; nor were they interested in what other actors did. When not [End Page 140] performing, an actor might not hold character and might even spend his or her time on stage while waiting for a cue acknowledging the audience. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, authors and actors, as well as one actor and another, were antagonists with completely different agendas. Although authors wrote the scripts, they were probably the least respected among theater professionals. Managers, prompters, and actors felt free to revise scripts to suit themselves. Actors were known for playing particular kinds of roles, and the audience held them responsible for what they delivered; therefore actors could not afford to tolerate lines or plots they felt unbecoming to them. Clowns, from Shakespeare on, were expected...

Notas sobre a noção de autoria no cinema

This article discusses ways of thinking about the issue of authorship in film, going beyond the notion of collective art, but stopping short of the notion based on the idea of an individual’s intentional and sovereign activity. At the outset, I situate historically the problem of authorship in the realm of film discussions. Then, by confronting those with the analysis of different works, I propose other ways to reflect on the concept. I do that through Foucaudean readings, but based particularly on the concept of creation developed by George Steiner in his work Grammars of Creation (2003). I start from the denial of the fixed unit of authorship and go through to the creation of personae: pulsating lives in the materiality of filmic images, beyond the limits of the “real”.

'New' Latin American Cinema and Authorship: Old Wine in New Bottles?

By analysing the recent work of three of the mainstays of the New Latin American Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s — the Argentine Fernando Solanas, the Cuban Julio García Espinosa, and the Bolivian Jorge Sanjinés —, this article focuses on the notion of film authorship to question these filmmakers' uses of it as a means of lending historical depth and narrative continuity to their careers, which are indissolubly linked to their respective political and ideological agendas. In parallel, and given the persistence of a socially committed Latin American cinema that is manifest not just in the films of such 'classic' directors but also in those of a new generation of Latin American filmmakers, this paper ponders the possibilities and the reach of reading such a cinema from an auteur-oriented critical perspective. Furthermore, given the prominence and importance of film authorship throughout the history of Latin American cinema, the article asks to what extent these directors' recent productions — and indeed the whole 'New Latin American Cinema' project itself — really do constitute a clean break with their previous work, or whether they are simply recycling tried-and-tested strategies.

Notas sobre a noção de autoria no cinema

This article discusses ways of thinking about the issue of authorship in film, going beyond the notion of collective art, but stopping short of the notion based on the idea of an individual’s intentional and sovereign activity. At the outset, I situate historically the problem of authorship in the realm of film discussions. Then, by confronting those with the analysis of different works, I propose other ways to reflect on the concept. I do that through Foucaudean readings, but based particularly on the concept of creation developed by George Steiner in his work Grammars of Creation (2003). I start from the denial of the fixed unit of authorship and go through to the creation of personae: pulsating lives in the materiality of filmic images, beyond the limits of the “real”.

ANALYSING MURIEL'S WEDDING WITH REFERENCE TO THE STORY OF ‘CINDERELLA’

abstract This paper analyses Muriel's Wedding, a film based on and inspired by the story of ‘Cinderella’. Beginning with a discussion of fairy tales, it argues that interpretations of them are theoretically and culturally specific. Bearing this point in mind, Bettelheim's oedipal analysis of ‘Cinderella’ is compared with an alternative view developed in Muriel's Wedding. Hogan, the film's author and director, posits a different perspective; one where female friendship becomes integral to the psychological development of Muriel. The iconic significance of weddings is also discussed in relation to this. The paper draws on the pre‐oedipal theories of Winnicott, and the more recent contributions of analytic feminist and relational theorists. Implicit in this is the contribution that can be made to clinical practice, and the notion there is a dialectical relationship between the fantasies of the inner world and the lived experience of the cultural world.

Collective Authorship in Film

Collective Authorship in Film

Agency in Adaptation

Agency in Adaptation

Participatory Cultural Production and the Diy Internet: From Theory to Practice and Back Again

The free and open source software movements have inspired a new mode of participatory cultural production. The early hacker communities elaborated a sophisticated socio-technical system of network-enabled collaboration culminating in the GNU-Linux operating system. More recently, a range of do-it-yourself (DIY) media technologies have given any user with internet access the ability to become a producer in a variety of social fields. This has spawned an entirely new understanding of authorship and content production in film (machinima), games (player-producers), journalism (blogs), radio (podcasting) and knowledge production (Wikipedia). A number of social science epistemologies embrace ‘practice’ as a representational category to explain the relationship between structure and agency, such as Giddens' (1984) and Bourdieu's (1977) theories of structuration. Missing from most of these accounts is any engagement in practice-based research to construct knowledge about their domains. It will be shown that action research provides an important empirical method capable of extending the field of knowledge about user-led innovation. Action research provides a practice-based method to explore how social shaping occurs in the development of participatory cultural production systems.

Marketing David Mamet: Institutionally Assigned Film Authorship in Contemporary American Cinema

Marketing David Mamet:Institutionally Assigned Film Authorship in Contemporary American Cinema Yannis Tzioumakis (bio) This essay addresses questions of authorship in David Mamet's cinema as these arise in the textual organization of promotional material that accompanies the release of a feature film in contemporary American cinema. The main focal point here is the film trailer as a representative sample of an increasingly large number of marketing strategies that also include film posters, television and radio spots, publicity stills, press kits, cast and crew interviews, behind-the-scenes documentaries, "making of" featurettes, and, more recently, web pages devoted to individual films. Specifically, this essay will discuss Mamet as an auteur by examining trailers for the films he has scripted and directed.1 This approach commences from the position that distribution companies use film authorship as an industrial category to increase the market value of individual filmmakers in a largely undifferentiated media marketplace. In this light, promotional material and marketing strategies become extremely significant texts in the production of the author.2 Consequently, this means that authorship here is not sought in the film text; instead, it is negotiated through intertext, regardless of whether a filmmaker could be constructed as an auteur through more traditional, textually determined processes. As a result, this strand of auteur criticism, which is labeled "industrial auteurism," could potentially reveal "a different author," an author whose presence is assigned institutionally, which often makes sense only in light of distributors' attempts to market a specific product to a particular audience. This essay will demonstrate the distinct ways film distributors mobilized Mamet's authorship. It will argue that the use of film authorship in contemporary American cinema marketing depends on the nature and extent of a filmmaker's association with particular institutional apparatuses, such as mainstream (cinema financed by the majors) and independent American cinema, which are organized in different ways and which assign authorship for different reasons. Industrial Auteurism: The Debate The discourse of industrial auteurism has been shaped mainly by the work of Timothy Corrigan, Jon Lewis, and Justin Wyatt ("Economic Restraints"). Corrigan and Lewis, in particular, attempted to construct a critical argument that located questions of film authorship strictly within the industrial-economic context of what film critics have called the New Hollywood. Despite their different approaches to the area, which, interestingly, are marked by an examination of the discourses surrounding Coppola's work, they nevertheless advanced a similar argument that advocates the significance of the film director as an extratextual agency with the power to anchor the critical reception of a film.3 The concept of the extratextual authorial agency is fundamentally different from the textual ones advanced in earlier phases of auteur criticism. Consequently, it produces different kinds of arguments that take into consideration the increasingly complicated relation between audiences and film-related forms of media (magazines, interviews, on-location reports, reviews, and the making-of featurette), through which a celebrity director is aggressively (self)-promoted. As a result, various new forms of entry to a discussion about a film's reception are created. In the process this new approach to cinematic authorship also examines economic and industrial parameters in film production, distribution, and even exhibition (the size of the budget, the number of screens that the film is released on, box-office figures, the salaries of the key players, etc.) as these become influential in the ways audiences consume films. [End Page 60] The strength of both Lewis's and, especially, Corrigan's arguments stems from their understanding that the filmic text can no longer be examined independently from the commercial and economic imperatives that characterize contemporary Hollywood cinema. These imperatives include contractual obligations of a film's key players (director and stars) to promote the film through an increasingly large number of media outlets. Through the filmmaker's engagement in public relations, audiences become familiar with the individual's background, interests, personal life, position in the film industry, and, finally, comments on the film itself. This extratextual entity consciously guides the audiences' reception of the film to such an extent that, as Corrigan argues, the film does not even need to be seen (106). In other words, the "industrial auteur" assumes the...

Film and Authorship (review)

Film and Authorship David Gurney (bio) Wexman, Virginia Wright, ed. Film and Authorship. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2003. 270 pages, $22.00 paper. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. In film studies the concept of the author has experienced various degrees of acceptance, ranging from full incorporation to vehement repudiation. As a result, whether lauding or denying thepresence of the film author, questions of authorship are inextricably woven into the fabric of film studies. Now that the topic is viewed more affably than it has been in the past, it is truly apropos that Film and Authorship, an anthology of essays working with the idea of authorship in film, has been assembled by editor Virginia Wright Wexman. Acting as both a recapitulation and revaluation of topic, this collection works as an introduction to the debates while focusing on the assertion of the viability of the author as a framework within which to better understand film. Wexman's introduction sets the stage rather nicely by offering an overview of the topic without getting mired in minutiae. Examining such a seminal strand of film theory could be rather intimidating, but Wexman gives the reader a succinct grounding in the history of approaches to authorship in film. Appropriately, she begins with an excavation of the construction of authorial prominence, which is rooted in "the Romantic notion of the creative genius nurtured by an inner spark of inspiration" (9). Building off Helen Kritch Chinoy's claim that, in the nineteenth century, theater directors gained status as authors, Wexman suggests that this forged a template for film directors to be viewed likewise. However, the director has not been the only position of authority to emerge in film. The collective quality of filmmaking is acknowledged, as well as the focus of poststructurally minded filmmaking, which foregrounds cultural contributions to the filmic text over any concept of individual authorship. Citing the 1981 British Film Institute anthology Theories of Authorship as a milestone in authorship studies embracing both structural and poststructural approaches to the topic, Wexman asserts that she sees her collection as pulling together the finest examples of post-1981 scholarship, and, aside from the opening piece by Andrew Sarris, first published in 1977, she is largely correct. The fourteen essays contained within the collection are divided into three sections: theoretical statements, historical and institutional contexts, and case studies. These section titles are apt descriptions of the pieces contained within them, and this review will look at two pieces from each of the sections to consider their value. Colin MacCabe's "The Revenge of the Author" operates as a self-inflicted mediation between his appreciation of the Barthesian opposition to the concept of the author and his competing aversion to the deconstruction of authorship arising from his personal experiences with filmmaking. Struggling with Barthes's view of sociality as author, MacCabe concedes that filmmaking is far too collective a process to claim any single author as a film's total creative force. Recognizing that any text is essentially [End Page 101] cultural putty for audiences to decode as they wish, he laments the inability to capture all of the varied readings and responses produced. In lieu of a totalized understanding, he suggests that "any future audience can be approached only through the first audience for the film—the cast and crew who produced it." Threading this concept of the cast and crew as the origin of meaning through the needle of Walter Benjamin's work, MacCabe suggests that there exists no true totalized meaning, and thus no totalized author, for any text. Benjamin attempted to foreground his own subjective perspective of history in his writing by employing techniques of montage and in doing this made it clear that there can exist no complete understanding of any social phenomena, only an understanding of the here-and-now interpretations. MacCabe uses this to force the point that the best approximation to a text's origination of meaning is through examination of the initial audience of cast and crew but that it is still only one approach to understanding and should not be taken as the final assessment of a film. Through its dialogue with Barthes...

A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema

Feminist Reader in Cinema Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra, Editors. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. This omnibus collection of twenty essays offers many things to a variety of readers, especially those with interests in the history and theory of film, feminism, race, sexuality, technology, and the material cultures of the fin de siecle and World War I periods. project evolved from Early Women Stars, a special issue of Camera Obscura (January 2002). Bean and Negra arranged this more broadly defined collection into five cinematic categories, though the purpose is as often to challenge and reconceive as simply to employ these terms: Reflecting Film Authorship (authorship), Ways of Looking (spectatorship), Cultural Inversions (historical topicality), Performing Bodies, (stardom) and The Problem with Periodization (periodicity). authors undertake their anti-essentialist film archeological project from an intentionally feminist and predominantly New Historical and thus self-reflective perspective, a stance meant to historicize gaze theory as well as to complicate what they see as the ahistorical, abstracted female of earlier scholarship. This premise, of course, distorts the breadth of second wave film criticism. authors do succeed, however, in creating a richly detailed and kaleidoscopic vision of gender as filtered through the lens of the early film industry of the United States, Europe, and China, a period of approximately three-plus decades. complex range of accepted and newly considered categories, subjects, and evidence are thoughtfully and usefully interrogated-from vampires to flappers, from America's sweetheart Mary Pickford to China's Xuan Jinglin, from documentaries to narratives, from footnotes to fan magazines. Alice Guy-Blache, for example, is the subject of Amelie Hastie's Circuits of Memory and History-as read through the director's memoirs and her films. Siobhan B. Sommerville resituates the gay classic A Florida Enchantment within the film's intersecting forces of race, sexuality, and gender. And the iconographie stature of Garbo is deepened by Lucy Fisher's reading of the seamlessly integrated Art Deco material culture that enveloped her. As with many historical and theoretical narratives based on newly excavated sites, these essays sometimes offer fascinating glimpses rather than fully satisfying arguments, providing the shining moments of insight that Virginia Woolf rightly termed diamonds in the dustheaps. …

Secret agents

Secret agents

The Moral Burden of Authorship In Ethnographic Film

The Moral Burden of Authorship In Ethnographic Film

THE BIG SLEEP: PRODUCTION HISTORY AND AUTHORSHIP

Studies of authorship in cinema have largely ignored questions of production history, of exactly how individual films are made. The authorship debate has focused on other issues: the definition of an author, the description of personal style, the placement of an author code in relation to other semiotic codes.1 Nevertheless, authorship is clearly an historical, as well as a critical and theoreti- cal, problem. Any reasonable account of creative responsibility for a particular film must investigate the history of that film's production. What is the division of labor between producer, director, writer, actor, cinematographer, and so on? Which collaborators strongly influence a film, and at what stages of production? What are the institutional structures that shape a filmmaking project? Such questions are vital to an understanding of film authorship, but they are rarely asked.2