Authorship in Hollywood
Agents who impact the authorship of a motion picture:
- Director
- Screenwriters
- Editors
--------------------------- ^ Above and below the line
- Producers
- Composers
- Actors
- Visual FX supervisor
Motion pictures are collaborative projects with many professional working together.
Authors - Do they have a creative or business impact to the product?
There are corporate and legal concepts to the author of a motion picture.
Auteurism
A critical position which view the director as the key creative figure and 'author' of the film - drawing on traditional notions of the writer/artist
- Emerged in France in the 50s at Cahiers du Cinema.
- Directors such as Hitchcock and Howard Hawks are seen to have developed a signature style while working within the constraints of the studio system.
- Also closely associated with postwar European art cinema (e.g. Rossellini, Bergman) and was the driving force behind the French New Wave Goddard, Truffaut, et al)
- Auteurist criticism identifies themes and elements of style that recur across a director's body of work.
Auteurism in the US
- The director was not the most important or powerful figure in the studio production process is the classical era (producer-unit system)
- Auteurism popularized in the US by critics such as Andrew Sarris in the 60s
- It became an important part of New Hollywood - often described as the 'Auteurist Renaissance' directors such as Penn, Coppola, Altman, Scorsese are given more creative control in the late 60s/70s
- Studio system declined as the name of the directors became widely associated with their films.
Critiques of Auteurism
- Often, there are many professionals marginalized from the auteur theory. The director is not the only creative voice and misunderstands the nature of studio filmmaking
- Liable to understand films as products of the director's individual 'vision' rather than shaped by broader contexts - industrial, economic, socio-cultural
- Other ways of organising films into groups - e.g. by genre, national cinemas and approaches
- Philosophical critique - Influence of post-structuralism - idea from literary theory in film studies
- Ideas of studio authorship.
Studio Authorship
- Hollywood motion pictures are 'corporate art' (Christensen) and constitute acts of corporate speech - i.e. its the studio that is the primary author of the film
- Studio films are frequent allegories about the corporation and the industry.
Roland Barthes The Death of the Author 1967
Barthes attacks Romantic notion of the author as the originator of meaning.
"We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single meaning 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture."
"The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior. Nothing is original."
- Author as a bourgeois ideological construct - the writer does not exist outside of language.
"The birth of a reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author"
Michael Foucault What is an Author 1969
The idea of the author function:
- The author is a construction - but one that nevertheless has a discursive function (authors matter because readers think they matter
Jonathan Grey When is the Author
No text has a single author
- Texts are always in the process of becoming - their meaning is not fixed at the moment of creation/origin - but a continuing process
- Multiple version of the text over time (e.g. several cuts of Blade Runner)
- The role of the audience in creating meaning and changing texts over time.
(Gray and Johnson, A Companion to Media Authorship, 2013)
Timothy Corrigan
- Places auteurs with the context of post-classical Hollywood - i.e. we must still think about the 'auteur' because it is an important part of the ways films are discussed, sold and consumed.
- Idea of the 'auteur' as commercial strategy in the 60s - wanning of the studio system
- The auteur as brand and marketing strategy.
- The auteur as a celebrity star
"In today's commerce we want to know what our authors and auteurs look like and how they act, it is the text and not its author that now may be dead."
- The blockbuster (auteur part of the 'high concept' package) mini Majors and home viewing.
Elsasser The Mind Game
Mind game films cross boundaries between mainstream Hollywood, auteur film and international art cinema.
- Tend to attract a cult following and create a fan base community
Often a main character's mental state is extreme/unstable/pathological. The films plays with character's and audience's perception of reality.
- It's a new form of spectator engagement
- They deal with epistemological problems (how do we know what we know) onto ontological doubts
Cinematic has become more intricate
- Mind game films feature multiple diegesis, unreliable narration, missing shots and POVs which can, in turn, make the audience feel cheated.
- These films make you work for their enjoyment and become a far more inclusive experience for the viewer.
Discipline, Control, Touch and Train?
Walter Benjamin's theory:
"'training the senses' for modernity and urban life, it also provides a bridging argument to an apparently quite different school of thinking about ordering and realigining out somatic responses...."
Stephen Johnson's Theory
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