Performing-Authorship: Self-Inscription and Corporeality in the Cinema 9780755693399, 9781780760063

Citation preview

List of Illustrations

1.1, 1.2 Two or Three Things I Know about Her: Characters look at the camera as they talk to an off-screen interviewer we know to be Godard (p. 17). 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 Paper Landscape: Guy Sherwin (live) paints a framed polythene surface on which emerges an image of the artist shot in 1975. Photo credits: John Suldholm (Photos 3 and 4) and Lynn Loo (from video documentation) (Photo 5) (p. 26). 2.1 JLG/JLG: For the most part we see Godard looking (p. 41). 2.2, 2.3 JLG/JLG: Frames break the space down into several planes, distancing viewers from both the author and the world (p. 42). 2.4 The Beaches of Agnès: The superimposition of shots of director (Varda in Beaches) walking backwards and actor (Corinne Marchand in Cléo) walking forwards creates a vertiginous effect (p. 50). 2.5, 2.6 The Beaches of Agnès: Embedded frames, zoom outs and jump cuts moving away from Varda remove us from the author’s image and produce a dizzying effect (p. 52). 2.7 The Beaches of Agnès: Mirrors on the beach intersperse the landscape with fragments of the whole, sometimes in distorting angles (p. 54). 2.8 The Beaches of Agnès: A framed mirror mounted on an easel evokes a painting (p. 55). 2.9 Perestroika: The reflected image of Sarah Turner briefly flashes before our eyes (p. 59). 2.10, 2.11 F for Fake: Orson Welles portrays the author as trickster and magician (p. 64). 2.12, 2.13 F for Fake: Elmyr forges Welles’s signature onto a portrait of Michaelangelo (p. 67). vii

performing authorship

3.1 The Human Pyramid: Jean Rouch explains the rules of the game to a group of teenagers (p. 82). 3.2 Chronicle of a Summer: Morin and Rouch in the feedback session after the screening of the shot material to the documentary subjects (p. 84). 3.3, 3.4 Chronicle of a Summer: Rouch and Morin discuss the received feedback as they stroll through the Musée de l’Homme (p. 86) 3.5 Playing: The stage of an empty theatre constitutes the space of the interview, with the subjects sitting with their backs to the stalls (p. 97). 3.6, 3.7 Whereas in Edifício Master Coutinho and his crew go to the subjects, in Playing it is the subjects that go to the filmmakers (p. 99). 3.8, 3.9 Playing: Actress Andréa Beltrão wipes her tears as she reproduces the testimony given by Gisele, who had not cried (pp.100–1). 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 Allen’s eyeglasses stand out and do not allow for the actor– director’s full submersion into the characters he interprets in Sleeper, Love and Death and Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex… But Were Afraid to Ask (p. 113). 4.4 First Name: Carmen: Godard’s character refuses to engage with the conversation (and the narrative), remaining at the margins (p. 117). 4.5 Soigne ta droite: The Prince/the Idiot is banned from a world that cannot accommodate the innocent and pure (p. 118). 4.6, 4.7 Meetin’ WA: Godard’s image dissolves into a portrait of Woody Allen (p. 123). 4.8 Annie Hall: The real irrupts within the fiction when Allen ‘produces’ Marshal McLuhan from behind a board to support his character’s arguments against an arrogant professor (p. 130).

viii

For João and Beatriz. In memory of Lúcia.

Acknowledgements

I started research on authorship for my PhD dissertation at New York University. The thesis focused on the trajectory of the auteur in three different nations – France, the United States and Brazil. Though this book is a very different project (and expands both the corpus and the methodology to include performance theory and phenomenology), it owes much to the advice and feedback given by my dissertation committee: Richard Allen, Tom Gunning, William Simon, Ismail Xavier and most importantly Robert Stam, who was my main advisor. Stam has taught me not only how to think, but also how to write; he does, in addition, continue to give me support in my academic enterprises. For this I am for ever indebted. Special acknowledgement is due to Lúcia Nagib, the series editor of Tauris World Cinema Series, for her valuable comments and for believing in my project, which she helped me shape. This book would not have happened without her support. I am also grateful to Ismail for his generous comments on the genesis of this study, and for remaining a mentor for longer than I can remember. Thanks also to I.B.Tauris senior editor Philippa Brewster for the opportunity and advice, and to Alex Middleton and Alex Billington for the care and thoughtfulness they put into my work, and also for their patience. I am equally indebted to the academic staff of the School of Arts at the University of Kent for accommodating my needs towards the completion of this book: especially Jonathan Friday, Peter Stanfield, Elizabeth Cowie, Murray Smith and Frances Guerin. Peter and Elizabeth have been instrumental to my writing, reading chapters and offering inestimable guidance. Their patience has been monumental; xi

performing authorship

their friendship and generosity as mentors and colleagues was more important to me than I can express. Thanks also to Thomas Baldwin for generously reading my work and directing me to valuable sources, and to Jinhee Choi for her advice on book publishing. I am thankful to artist–filmmaker Sarah Turner for making Perestroika, which perfectly encapsulates the idea of performing authorship, and for letting me see the film before its public release – and in addition for making me a DVD copy of it. Thanks also to Guy Sherwin for kindly providing me with images of his Paper Landscape, in which I found an inspiring illustration of the ideas put forth in this book, and to Heather Green for offering her technical expertise to guarantee the images are suitable for publication. My father João and my sister Beatriz have offered me their unconditional support throughout the writing of this monograph; their insatiable curiosity has always inspired me. I’m most appreciative to them. This book owes much to the memory of my mother, Lúcia, whose words of encouragement I would remember in moments of crisis. No parts of this book have been previously published, except for portions from Chapter Four, which appeared as ‘The auteur as fool: Bakhtin, Barthes, and the screen performances of Woody Allen and Jean-Luc Godard’, Journal of Film and Video lxiii/4 (Winter 2011), pp. 21–34. The themes of stand-up comedy and topicality discussed in the same chapter were approached under a different light in ‘The stand-up auteur’, in A Companion to Woody Allen, eds Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 15–34, and Chapter Three’s discussion of Eduardo Coutinho’s style is examined from another angle (and through different films) in ‘Flesh for the author: filmic presence in the documentaries of Eduardo Coutinho’, Framework li/1 (Spring 2010), pp. 134–50. Two or Three Things I Know about Her (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967), discussed in Chapter One, was analysed from a completely different perspective in an article published in Portuguese (‘Um cinema desenquadrado: a política da linguagem e a linguagem da política em Duas ou três coisas que eu sei dela’, in Estudos de Cinema – Socine IX, eds Esther Hamburger, Gustavo Souza, Leandro Mendonça and Tunico Amancio (São Paulo: Annablume, 2008), pp. 227–33).

xii

Introduction

The general idea of the author relies on a set of conditions that prove unrealisable in practice. In its so-called romantic form, authorship refers to the effective communication of an individual’s inner state; an individual that is moreover perceived as unique and capable of speaking directly and relaying life experiences. This presumably traditional (and to many, unviable) conception of the author presupposes control, authority, originality and self-expression. Needless to say, such an understanding presupposes also the ‘metaphysics of substance’ discussed by Judith Butler1 – the idea of a subject bearing an essence that pre-dates its insertion in society; in Jacques Lacan’s terms, a subject’s transition from ‘nature’ into the ‘Symbolic’ (the realm of culture). This essentialisable authorial subject has been criticised by both structuralists, who, roughly put, see the author as determined by a set of structures (chief among them language), and poststructuralists, for whom binaries such as nature and culture are in themselves linguistic constructs. For the latter, the idea of a subject’s stifled or culturally domesticated essence would be nothing but a fantasy, and the said author a myth that could never come true. For the sake of argument, let us momentarily leave aside structuralist and poststructuralist charges and suppose that the assignment of authorship depends upon the realisation of those presumably romantic requirements for control, authority, originality and self-expression, however unattainable these requirements may be. When conditioned upon the aforementioned elements, and especially when collaboration comes into play, authorship becomes something to be earned. The obstacles are many: the possible mismatch between intention and xiii

performing authorship

interpretation, the circumstantial lack of control over the work’s form and content (which can result from a struggle for power, conflicting interests or the author’s inability to communicate or find a voice), the impossibility of assessing the author’s true self and the uncertain connections between the author’s life and work – all of which are contemplated in Roland Barthes’s seminal ‘The death of the author’ (1968), and have likewise shaped subsequent approaches. In time, and as a result of these numerous challenges, the traditionally conceived model of what an author should be became uneven ground for the founding of a methodology that could properly account for the complexity of the creative, social, political and economic forces behind the production and reception of cultural artefacts. One of the effects of Barthes’s scepticism towards the aforementioned attributes was the debunking of authorial control with the transference of power from author to reader,2 in a theatrical coup that, much in line with 1968’s antiauthoritarian rhetoric, divested the former of a purported tyrannical power over textual meaning. But equally transformative of our understanding of authorship was Barthes’s privileging of process over product – in his terms, the emphasis on ‘text’ to the detriment of ‘work’. Following Barthes’s path, this book understands film authorship not as a condition to be either reached or missed, but as a journey – thus the idea of performing authorship, of emphasising the dramatic rendition of the struggle to communicate, in a process that values the ephemeral, exterior and erratic aspects of artistic expression. This is of course also in line both with poststructuralist approaches, which made obsolete the so-called romantic dreams of timelessness, essence and control, and with the historical turn in auteur studies, which chose to contextualise the author, rather than do away with such a figure. Butler incidentally claims that the transposition of poststructuralist thought into historically grounded discussions of gender or racial identity replaced its presumably universal ‘formalism’ with cultural variants that, if not simply historicising theory, have at least brought an element of ‘impurity’ to what was mistakenly considered a ‘unified, pure and monolithic’ intellectual tradition.3 Though partly attuned to both poststructuralism and the historicisation of auteurism, Performing Authorship nonetheless proposes a different direction, as I later discuss in more detail. For now it is important to say that where xiv

introduction

the poststructuralist revision of the romantic model defines the author as absent, as a lack, this book emphasises the cinematic author’s presence; and while considerations about the historical circumstances that produce both works and their authors privilege the extrafilmic, I here investigate the construction of auteurs in the film, focusing not on the stylistic and thematic consistency that guided early auteurism, but on the director’s screen appearances. Furthermore, this book’s emphasis on the author’s corporeality draws both from performance theory and phenomenology, as I explain in the next section. Performing Authorship examines films by Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Sarah Turner, Orson Welles, Jean Rouch, Eduardo Coutinho and Woody Allen, looking also, though in less detail, at works by Guy Sherwin, Michael Moore, Wes Craven and Takeshi Kitano, among others. The book’s main case studies feature their directors in roles that either evoke or directly address their authorial function. But it is not simply because they perform in the studied films that these directors serve as paradigms for a discussion of authorship as performance. The selected case studies dramatise the very familiar tropes of recycling works by other authors, the struggle to communicate inner life and the inability to fix meaning, but with a phenomenological inflection that considers the implications of the sense of an author’s corporeality for the general question of cinematic authorship. It is these directors’ particular ways of displaying their creative processes in the film that allow for the emphasis on the gesture towards expression, while their bodies contribute to our sense that the amalgam of sounds and images that we see on the screen can be traced back to a locatable human source.

The author in the cinema The medium of film offers further complications to the discussion of authorship that takes place in the domains of literary criticism and philosophy, as in addition to constituting a collective practice (raising the problem of attribution), film has seen the transference of the author title from the screenwriter, or the producer of a text, to the director – the orchestrator of the contributions from actors, cinematographers, artistic directors, composers, editors and so on. It is true xv

performing authorship

that many filmmakers write their own scripts, but behind the Cahiers du cinéma critics’ election of the director as the chief film artist in the mid 1950s was the project to de-emphasise the screenplay, to divest the written word of a central position in the production of meaning. Whereas in 1948 Alexandre Astruc’s idea of a camera-pen had already suggested directors could write with their cameras, thereby ‘authoring’ their films, this book’s preferred (and admittedly Bakhtinian) image of the orchestrator, which perhaps illustrates a different, less romantic aspect of Cahiers auteurism, evokes both physical gesticulation and the stage, which for our purposes turns the cinema into a privileged space for discussing authorship as performance. In turn, the problem of attribution in what is a heterogeneous medium with competing voices underscores the idea that the authorship of a film is often imagined as something to be earned. In order to illustrate the examined authorial processes with concrete examples I look at films featuring their directors in roles that either represent or allude to their authorial function, thereby asserting their authorial voice. The articulation of authorship in the cinema is tied to the desire to affirm the artistic status of film, usually through models found in the realm of ‘high culture’, especially writing and painting. Even if both literature and the fine arts have their share of massified, ‘low culture’ products, it is the likes of Dickens, Tolstoy, Picasso and Renoir who have offered the parameters for the definition of film directors as artists. Film’s associations with literature and painting also have historical roots worth delineating here, however briefly. The literary model is obviously more prominent, as not only is the term ‘author’ closely associated with the act of writing, it is also in this domain that it has been most deeply scrutinised. The connection between writing and filmmaking, furthermore, has had a profound impact on some cinematic traditions – notably the French, which after all articulated the strongest and most controversial notion of film authorship in the figure of the auteur. An examination of the activities of Frenchcinema intellectuals in the twentieth century shows that many of them combined filmmaking with film writing, the latter in the form of manifestos, theoretical essays and criticism. Jean Epstein, Louis Delluc and Germaine Dulac were film directors and theorists; Roger Leenhardt was both a critic and a filmmaker; Jean Cocteau was also a xvi

introduction

poet, novelist and playwright; Astruc and Pierre Kast were novelists, critics and directors. The combination of film criticism and practice displayed by the Cahiers bastions of the politique des auteurs in the 1950s was hence embedded in a cultural milieu largely defined by the dialogue between the literary and the filmic – the very intellectual environment which positioned writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and André Malraux at the core of the debates involving cinema in the 1940s through their assiduous collaboration with L’écran français. In spite of François Truffaut’s famous attack on the ‘literariness’ of France’s mainstream productions in ‘A certain tendency in French cinema’ (1954), the French tradition that conceived of the auteur, as Robert Stam pointed out, was very keen on ‘graphological’ metaphors (Astruc’s camera-pen; Agnès Varda’s cinécriture) and linguistic analogies (most notably in Christian Metz’s semiotics).4 This is far from suggesting that the connection between filmmaking and writing is exclusive to the French. The United States abounds in examples of film critics turned film writers and makers. Frank E. Woods, who co-signs the script of The Birth of a Nation (1915), began his career in the film industry as a critic, as did Life and New York Herald critic Robert Sherwood, author of the screenplays for Rebecca (1940) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and New York Times critic Frank Nugent, screenwriter of Fort Apache (1948), The Quiet Man (1952) and The Searchers (1956), among others. Film critic Dwight Macdonald published essays and books on literature and politics; James Agee was also the author of poems, novels, screenplays and short films. Agee’s comparison between a newsreel’s attention to detail and the ‘physical absoluteness of Tolstoy’s writing’5 and Sergei Eisenstein’s essay ‘Dickens, Griffith, and the film today’, for example, constitute only a few indicators of the force of the literary analogy across different national frameworks – from French to American and Soviet. The literary dominant should not, however, detract from another, equally potent, analogy with painting. The relationship between cinema and painting is just as ingrained in film theory as the study of the literary in the filmic, as attests the classical and contemporary essays collected in Angela Dalle Vacche’s The Visual Turn (2003). A far from exhaustive list might range from writings by Rudolf Arnheim, Eisenstein and André Bazin to more contemporary studies by Pascal Bonitzer (Décadrages: xvii

performing authorship

peinture et cinéma, 1987), Jacques Aumont (L’oeil interminable, 1989), Raymond Bellour (Cinéma et peinture: approches, 1990) and Dalle Vacche (Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used in Film, 1996). The relationship between film and the fine arts also has roots in film direction and criticism – from artist filmmakers like Fernand Léger, Man Ray or Andy Warhol, to Salvador Dalí’s collaboration with Luis Buñuel and the art background of critics like Manny Farber and Lawrence Alloway, to name only a few. The film analogies with literature and painting are further explored in the essayistic works contemplated in Chapter Two (see breakdown at the end of this Introduction). Incidentally, the controversy surrounding the auteur was due largely, though not exclusively, to the audacity of elevating popular genre films to the status of great art. The radicalism of the Young Turks led by Truffaut’s manifesto-like ‘A certain tendency in French cinema’ lay not in acknowledging the expressive potential of film (and by extension the medium’s artistic value), which was a given for the likes of Robert Bresson or Jean Renoir, but in the attribution of this expressiveness to Hollywood filmmakers, irrespective of their contribution to the screenplay (which in many cases was none). This critical ascription of authorship proceeded by detecting stylistic and/or thematic consistency in the director’s work – what auteurism searched for was a directorial signature. If on the one hand this critical approach ‘constructed’ the auteur through the close examination of a set of films, on the other the Young Turks sought confirmation of the auteur’s intentions in what historian Antoine de Baecque called a politique des interviews, where Cahiers writers tried to access both directors and their methods intimately,6 often to confirm what they envisioned in their reviews. Truffaut’s satisfaction in seeing his ideas realised in Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956) manifests this belief, epitomised, at once naively and provocatively, by the then young critic’s words to Hitchcock in the journal’s 70th issue: ‘The Cahiers du cinéma thanks Alfred Hitchcock, who shot The Wrong Man exclusively to make us happy and prove to the world the truth of our exegesis.’7 Part of the debate around the auteur in the 1950s focused on the aesthetic tastes of Cahiers writers – the celebration of the energy and inventiveness they found in American popular cinema split French xviii

introduction

critics between the Hollywood factionalism of the politique and the supporters of the so-called ‘cinéma à thèse’. Heading the second group was Georges Sadoul, who subscribed to a leftist–progressive agenda, as de Baecque explains in both Cahiers du cinéma: histoire d’une revue (1991) and La cinéphilie (2003). Sadoul held what he believed to be the profound themes that marked national cinemas such as the French and the Soviet against the supposedly superfluous and conservative Hollywood productions favoured by the Young Turks, radical in their dismissal of a film’s political ‘message’ as an evaluative criterion. But it is the contentions that enveloped the auteur in the 1960s that inform the core of this book’s discussion. That decade saw two related events in the study and criticism of cinematic works: the predominance of structuralist and poststructuralist approaches resulting largely from the linguistic turn in philosophy and cultural criticism on the one hand, and the challenging of the film author as a figure of authority on the other. Concomitant with the appearance of a film semiotics developed by Metz was the revisionist take on authorship, especially as it had been conceived in France – from the subjectivism of impressionists in the 1920s to Astruc’s camera-pen in the 1940s (‘The birth of a new avant-garde: la caméra-stylo’, 1948), culminating with the politique des auteurs in the 1950s. Not unlike with the reception to the newly conceived auteur among critics during that decade, it was mainly the ascription of authorial self-expression to Hollywood directors that was targeted in the 1960s, but this time in the light of structuralism and among scholars such as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Stephen Heath, Ben Brewster, Peter Wollen (who coined the phrase ‘auteur structuralism’) and Jean-Pierre Oudart, among others. Theirs, however, was not a rejection of a specific pantheon (which they actually embraced), but a revision of the understanding of what actually constituted the auteur. Where the French critics of Cahiers sought the real man behind the film, auteur structuralism replaced the biographical auteur with a set of ‘structures’. In ‘The unauthorised auteur today’ (1993) Dudley Andrew explains that with this shift to structuralism directors became ‘names for certain regularities in textual organisation’.8 ‘Auteur analysis,’ Wollen states in the foundational Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (first published 1969), xix

performing authorship

does not consist of retracing a film to its origins, to its creative source. It consists of tracing a structure (not a message) within the work, which can then post factum be assigned to an individual, the director, on empirical grounds.9

Andrew’s later rendition of Wollen’s theory draws attention to the fact that, according to that view, the critic’s mission was to isolate ‘the auteur’s voice within the noise of the text’.10 Turned into a critical construct, the author also sees the very possibility of controlling the production of meaning put into question. As Barthes stated in relation to the more general question of authorship, by divorcing the enunciator from an ontological ‘I’, as ‘language knows a “subject”, not a “person”,’ linguistics had showed that ‘it is language which speaks, not the author.’11 Taking this further, Jacques Derrida described the production of meaning as an endless flux of dislocations, combining the notions of ‘difference’ (otherness) and ‘deferral’ in the concept of différance. In Colin MacCabe’s rendition of Derrida’s theories about the ‘symbolic structures of matter and meaning’, he says that ‘The new model was of writing – the subject working on the structures that constituted him and the world, the aim being to produce a more fluid subject open to the most basic processes of signification.’12 Though accounting for authorship as a coming into being, différance signalled authorial absence. This book, on the contrary, looks at the authors’ impulses to assert not only their views but also their corporeality, always in the act of trying to express feelings and ideas, or at least register the impact of their presence on the surrounding world. In other words, Performing Authorship examines the authors’ desire to become physically present, and for the most part as self-expressing figures. But how can we conceive of presence when recycling supposedly leads to the author’s disappearance behind the endlessly proliferating version of what Barthes, referring to texts, called a ‘tissue of quotations’,13 and when electronic media can hardly admit the existence of an ‘original’, whose aura had in any case been lost over a century ago, ever since ‘mechanical reproduction’, to evoke Walter Benjamin, redefined our relation to artistic objects? Well, ours is at the same time an era marked by the desire to make oneself present, and often xx

introduction

audiovisually, something that has been further facilitated by digital technology. The widely disseminated amateur videos on the Web (from sites like YouTube to social networks like Facebook and Twitter and blogs which display not only their makers’ thoughts but also clips from favourite films, television programmes and music videos) highlight the very gestural, immediate, ephemeral and unfinished aspects of communication I wish to emphasise in the realm of cinema. Though not exactly analogous with the self-reflexive meditations on authorship by the studied professional filmmakers, these amateur practices, many of which are not conceived for artistic expression, constitute the everyday manifestation of a phenomenon that in the domain of film competes with the traditional attributes of control, authority and permanence expected from ‘legitimate’ artists. Auteur studies have also seen an opposite movement away from abstraction and towards the material conditions determining authorial processes since the late 1980s. Perhaps in view of the need to locate the source of the film’s meaning in an individual, which Dana Polan discusses in ‘Auteur desire’, film scholars have chosen to historicise, rather than bury, the controversial auteur.14 David Bordwell’s historical poetics called precisely for interpretative methods including ‘a study of how, in determinate circumstances, films are put together, serve specific functions and achieve specific effects’.15 Bordwell’s Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (1988), Timothy Corrigan’s A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam (1991), Jon Lewis’s Whom God Wishes to Destroy: Francis Ford Coppola and the New Hollywood (1995), Tom Gunning’s The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (2000) and Rosanna Maule’s Beyond Auteurism: New Directions in Authorial Film Practices in France, Italy and Spain since the 1980s (2008), among others, discuss the economic structures determining both the conditions for the production of films and the strategic branding of auteurs for marketing purposes. Some of these works propose an understanding of authorship as ‘a commercial performance of “the business of being an auteur”’,16 or as ‘a form of cultural production and as a discursive approach to film that mediates among different aspects and levels of the cinema’, which in Maule’s case leads to the stress on ‘the cultural specificity of film authorship’.17 This reaction to poststructuralist accounts of xxi

performing authorship

authorship can also be found in approaches inscribed within the tradition of analytical philosophy that bring intention back into the picture, all the while acknowledging the complexities of film production’s collaborative practices. Berys Gaut, for one, refutes the ‘single authorship’ thesis, proposing instead that films are better described as the product of multiple authorship, especially in mainstream practices not unlike the ones described in the aforementioned books, where film is understood as the battleground for different creative agents.18 Similarly, Performing Authorship seeks to flesh out, rather than dissipate, the figure of the film author. However, I shift the focus from the extrafilmic (the realm of the production, promotion and commercialisation of films) to the filmic (authorial self-inscription), moving from auteurs as ‘constructed, called into being, by institutional forces’, thereby constituting a function ‘generated by that system’,19 to auteurs asserting their identities through the textual representation of their artistic processes. It is of course not just the inscription but also the nature of the represented processes that shows what the discussion of authorship has to gain from notions of ephemerality, imitation, exteriority and masking. The filmmakers contemplated in this book assert their authorial presence in the film and somehow reclaim a voice in the critical discourses on cinematic authorship, repossessing a title relegated to abstraction. Indeed, except for Sarah Turner, who belongs to a younger generation, the careers of Godard, Varda, Welles, Rouch, Coutinho and Allen developed, at least in part, during these challenges to auteurism, and their modes of self-inscription constitute more or less conscious meditations on their authorial roles, and by extension on the communicative potential of film. The studied directors offer not only self-conscious commentaries on the relationship between artists and their works, but also an understanding of the perception of authors by audiences and critics alike. They reclaim a voice in the theoretical articulations of cinematic authorship by inviting us to think of it not as critical construction, but as self-construction – not as an artificial attempt to humanise the source of the film’s discourse through a reading practice, but as the filmmaker’s performance of the processes that lead to the fabrication of meaning. xxii

introduction

The various modes of performing authorship The staging of authorship normally shifts between assertion and divestiture, palpability and disappearance, exposure and masking. Performance, after all, can involve the use of a mask – this book’s case studies address precisely the acting out of authorial questions or processes by filmmakers. However, the concept of performing authorship is equally informed by performance theory, which extends beyond the theatre to describe an economy of repetition (of exterior models) and fluidity (of identity) in various sectors of human activity – from politics, gender and life rituals to writing. The kindred notion of presence, in turn, draws from both performance theory and phenomenology. Chapter One (‘Performance, Corporeality and the Borders of the Film’) is quite central to this study, as it explores the potential contribution of these theoretical frameworks to the discussion of authorship that took place in the realms of literary and film criticism, revisiting the ideas of Wayne Booth, Barthes and Michel Foucault in light of discussions of performance by Judith Butler, Janet Staiger and Richard Schechner, as well as of Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenological take on cinematic presence. This chapter also discusses theories of the frame in both literature and painting (via Bazin and Aumont), which provide useful metaphors to articulate the authors’ relationship with the surrounding world on the one hand and with their work on the other. Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know about Her (1967) and a video performance by Guy Sherwin titled Paper Landscape (first staged in 1975) provide material for an investigation of how artists situate themselves not just in the world, but also in the delimited space of the work. Chapters Two, Three and Four offer meditations on the author’s place (in relation to the frame in Chapter Two, the surrounding world in Chapter Three and the narrative in Chapter Four); these spatial metaphors, in turn, speak to the trope of border-crossing, which is essential to the understanding of my proposed approach. In addition, these chapters locate instances of performing authorship in a vast array of self-inscribing modes pertaining to the domains of essay, documentary and fiction films, respectively. I should point out, nevertheless, that my goal is less to map out an extended corpus of cinematic works xxiii

performing authorship

displaying examples of authorial self-inscription than to account for modalities that are diverse enough to allow for a broader conceptualisation of this practice. As the analysis of specific films demonstrates, the author in the text can evoke autobiographical facts (as in works by Godard, Varda, Turner, Welles and Allen) or become the model for filmic self-portraits (Godard’s JLG/JLG: Self-Portrait in December, 1994; Varda’s The Beaches of Agnès, 2008). The author may turn into the very focus of essayistic impulses (Turner’s Perestroika, 2009; Welles’s F for Fake, 1972) or act as a catalyst for the filmed events (as in documentaries by Rouch and Coutinho). Chapter Two (‘The Author and the Frame: Writing, Painting and the Essay Film’) discusses the filmic self-portrait and the essay film, where by nature authors are fully implicated as objects of their investigation. The frame becomes the metaphor demarcating both the authors’ place in the world they film and the impossibility of containing themselves within a rigid narrative or image. JLG/JLG, The Beaches of Agnès, Perestroika and F for Fake depict the author’s body as both a site for self-scrutiny and a path towards authorial divestiture (to use Kaja Silverman’s phrase).20 The author’s centrality, in turn, is discussed through self-expressive models borrowed from the fine arts (in painterly metaphors) and the essay – the literary genre defined by the openly personal treatment of one or multiple topics. The analysed films indicate the author’s impulse to cross the borders of their individual identities: self-portraits require that the painters step outside themselves in order to produce an exterior image, while the essay tends to stretch its frontiers beyond the personal, reaching out to larger questions (global warming in Perestroika, the arts market in F for Fake). While Chapter Two consists of individual case studies by four directors, Chapters Three and Four address the filmmakers’ careers more broadly. Titled ‘The Author in the World: Trance, Presence and Documentary Filmmaking’, the third chapter discusses the documentarian as motor for the events captured by the camera. Audiences are very familiar with the on-screen director in documentaries, where authorship often raises the problem of mediation. The documentary puts ideas of subjectivity, partiality, constructedness and fictionality in tension with notions of objectivity, impartiality, faithfulness and truth. The documentary may also be a vehicle for self-investigation – in xxiv

introduction

this case, the director’s authorial identity need not be critically ‘constructed’, being instead self-fashioned. Documentary necessarily has greater contiguity with the surrounding world than fiction does – the same applies to the two genres’ respective makers, with the filmic and real existences of documentarians being more intricately related than those of directors who play fictional characters. Chapter Three discusses the effects produced by the documentarian’s physical presence in films shot in the mode of vérité, with a focus on the works of Jean Rouch and Brazilian director Eduardo Coutinho. Cinéma-vérité’s intention of reminding viewers that filmmakers generate (rather than capture) the reality they record poses the director as a central actor in the documentary; the physical presences of Rouch and Coutinho shape the interviewees’ behaviour and speech, even if their modes of self-display are rather self-effacing: they are rarely positioned at the centre of the frame, and for the most part stay offscreen. Here, incidentally, the question of performance extends to the documentary subjects. The appearances of Rouch and Coutinho allow for the investigation of an under-explored authorial role – that of giving voice to the other, which, in turn, defines the authors as dissipated (in their various subjects) and decentred. The emphasis on the other, furthermore, sets these directors apart from more theatrical and assertive documentarians like Werner Herzog, Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock, who offer contrasting examples. In the films by Rouch and Coutinho the authors function as catalysts triggering the others’ impulses to express feelings and worldviews. Chapter Four (‘The Author In-Between: Fools, Stand-Ups and Fictional Narratives’) examines directors performing roles that evoke the figure of the fool in works by Godard and Woody Allen, with references to Wes Craven, Larry David, Nanni Moretti and Takeshi Kitano, among others. Bakhtin’s discussion of the ancient and medieval fool in the novel provides a useful model; for the Russian theorist this figure constitutes an invasive presence that challenges traditional conceptions of the novel as a clearly demarcated genre. The fool contaminates this literary mode with the logic of the public square that he traditionally inhabited. Endowed with the ‘right to be “other”’, ‘the right not to understand, the right to confuse’,21 this figure functions as the author’s mask, providing this investigation with the literary counterpart of xxv

performing authorship

the trespassing author that I explore in the domain of film. In the analysed case studies the fools invoke autobiographical events, which in the examples provided by Godard refer to his professional trajectory towards an increasingly marginal position in the market of cinema, something the director stages, however indirectly, in First Name: Carmen (1983), Soigne ta droite (1987) and King Lear (1987). In the case of Allen’s films, autobiographical elements are both integrated in a supposedly personal narrative (as in Annie Hall, 1977) and evocative of a recurring character (the lower-middle-class Jewish man raised in Brooklyn who is so familiar to audiences). Allen’s performances are examined also in light of the tradition of stand-up comedy, which, like the fool, bridges the filmic and the extrafilmic through topical references to current events. Connecting the studied works is the fact that the characters played by both directors are perceived as being somewhat foreign to the diegesis. The notion of performing authorship may derive from, and be more clearly dramatised in films displaying images of the directors’ bodies or the sounds of their voices, but its dynamics can be expanded into a larger understanding of authorial practices – as shown by the brief mention of Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (1983) in this book’s Conclusion. Performing authorship describes precisely the impulse to push borders – of the self, of narrative, of the frame. It may likewise extend beyond film and apply to other media. Here, however, it refers to the ways in which the filmmaker’s physical presence challenges the understanding that the charges of lack of control, unoriginality and ephemerality point to the author’s absence. The director’s corporeality, on the contrary, gives substance to the author, situating this author in the space of the work and, consequently, in the world that surrounds it.

xxvi

1

Performance, Corporeality and the Borders of the Film

Do authors express their real selves? Do they tell the truth? Can language communicate inner life? Is textual meaning fixed or unstable, and who controls it? Who is the real author of a text? What makes it original? These questions, which have pervaded the study of authorship ever since texts and artworks came to be understood as the expression of individual minds, are equally pertinent to the notion of performing authorship. The attention to the creative agent’s presence and performance should evidently not come at the price of undermining the communication and the content of a ‘message’. Rather, the highlighting of process, gesture and exteriority aims to problematise the definition of authors in terms of the successful fulfilment of certain conditions: control, authority, stability of identity, the matching of intention and interpretation. But these conditions are not simply pushed aside – they constitute the very fabric of the author’s drama. What this book proposes is that we privilege the authors’ actions over their achievements. The focus on process, in turn, complicates also the understanding, on the part of both poststructuralist theories and reception studies, that the film’s human source is untraceable, its author reduced to an abstract, mainly constructed and often absent subject. On the contrary; the explanation of authorship in terms of performance fleshes out, thickens the ever-fading figure of the author, without nevertheless resorting to the resuscitation of models deemed outmoded. Before proceeding to the case studies that inform this book’s arguments in the next three chapters, I here outline some of the 1

performing authorship

transformations undergone by the author since the 1960s. This overview paves the way for a discussion of how performance theory, phenomenology and the spatial metaphor of the frame can further illuminate the question of cinematic authorship, which, much like the artistic processes here described, resists closure. Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know about Her (1967) and Guy Sherwin’s Paper Landscape (a video performance first staged in 1975) anchor this chapter’s theories in concrete examples, and foreshadow the investigation of presence and the frame that is central in Chapter Two’s study of essay films. Far from wishing to put an end to the persistent debate around the author, the proposed approach will hopefully open new avenues. The concept of performing authorship inevitably involves a certain amount of self-fictionalisation; performance, as we know, evokes primarily masquerading, acting. The very distinction between author and narrator in literature indicates that the effort to communicate has an ambivalent nature that can extend to other forms of artistic expression, with the revelation of the writer’s subjectivity proving an insurmountable task, a goal that is at once desirable and unachievable. Self-expression thus constitutes a communicative impulse but also something to be done under a mask; it may become the key to the success of artistic endeavours, but its genuineness is to be cautiously distrusted. In this context, the idea of performance suggests, firstly, the impulse to hide behind a fictional entity, even if only to expose oneself further. Secondly, performance refers to the repetitive, sometimes automatic nature of creative and communicative acts, which as I explain later evoke the notion of performativity in other spheres of human existence (linguistics, sociology, philosophy, psychoanalysis), often in a system where repetition would either preclude the manifestation of that which is essential and unique or simply draw attention to the constructed, or to use Judith Butler’s term, ‘phantasmatic’ (rather than ontological), nature of an individual’s ‘essence’. Thirdly, performance describes a conception of identity as fluid, unfinished, in the making, thus offering yet another set of terms with which to understand authorship. Lastly, performance provides us with a model with which to articulate the benefits of thinking in terms not only of a subject’s expression, but also of presence (in this lies the phenomenological component of this 2

performance, corporeality and the borders of the film

study). It is precisely in relation to the authors’ stress on their corporeality that the frame offers a theoretical paradigm – as the boundary between self and other, fiction and reality, the film and the extrafilmic.

Performance as masquerade: Booth, Barthes and Foucault Authorial processes encompass an economy of revelation and concealment of true emotions and worldviews that may be conscious or involuntary. Wayne Booth’s conception of the implied author, which played a central role in the revisionism of the author figure in literary criticism of the 1960s, pointed precisely to the fact that the work’s manifest ideology could not be taken as that of its creator. In other words, the implied author indicated that the text was not necessarily the expression of the writer’s true self. If on the one hand this figure divorced the producer’s intention from the text’s meaning, on the other it revived the idea that behind every utterance lies an intending addresser – even if one who does not expose her true views. According to Booth, authors fabricate a ‘second self’ to avoid the confusion between their own individual perspectives and those manifested in the text.1 ‘This implied author,’ says Booth, ‘is always distinct from the “real man” – whatever we may take him to be – who creates a superior version of himself, a “second self”, as he creates his work.’2 This fabricated entity embodies the work’s artistic designs, including decisions concerning narrative structure, plot, characters and the very narrator – the omniscient, partial or multiple perspectives this narrator assumes in relation to the narrative, whether this perspective is neutral or committed to a certain viewpoint, and so on. In Booth’s words, Our sense of the implied author includes not only the extractable meanings but also the moral and emotional content of each bit of action and suffering of all of the characters. It includes, in short, the intuitive apprehension of a completed artistic whole; the chief value to which this implied author is committed, regardless of what party his creator belongs to in real life, is that which is expressed by the total form.3 3

performing authorship

It follows that the implied author restores unity to the dispersed, untraceable authorial voice – a voice that to structuralists had limited control over meaning, as in their views authors struggle with a language system that is not only autonomous but also precludes (as much as it allows for) the communication of intended ideas. To quote Barthes, linguistics had provided the destruction of the Author with a valuable analytical tool by showing that the whole of the enunciation is an empty process, functioning perfectly without there being any need for it to be filled with the person of the interlocutor.4

But for Booth, on the contrary, the implied author ‘chooses, consciously or unconsciously, what we read; we infer him as an ideal, literary, created version of the real man; he is the sum of his own choices.’5 It is by incarnating the text’s artistic designs that this entity reinstates the notion of a thinking human being behind a supposedly autonomous text, calling attention to that work ‘as the product of a choosing, evaluating person rather than a self-existing thing’.6 Thus conceived, the implied author is detected in the text’s form – not unlike the cinematic author envisioned by the politique des auteurs, whose expression was to be found in the mise en scène – even if, unlike Booth, the Cahiers critics equated the style with the real person. (In his auteurist tribute to Hitchcock in part 4A of Histoire(s) du cinéma, 1998, Godard asks, perhaps provocatively, ‘but what is style, if not the man?’) The distinction between the real artist and the implied author betrays the desire to remind readers that the ideas conveyed in a text may not correspond to those of the writer – that rather than express the real self of the author, the text might convey an altogether fabricated point of view. The implied author thus embodies one of the performative qualities of authorship: the conscious or involuntary impulse to masquerade. Standing between the biographical writer and the narrator, this abstract agency becomes a ‘character’ behind which the writer may hide, always keeping in mind that the mask can both disguise and reveal, for costumes and role play often allow for the uncensored manifestation of the self.7 What is more, Booth anticipates the doing away with a supposedly naive approach to the unique, original and self-revealing attributes of authors by Foucault in ‘What is an author?’ 4

performance, corporeality and the borders of the film

(1969) and by Barthes in ‘The death of the author’ (1968), both of which establish some of the principles that I borrow for my proposed concept of performing authorship, even if this concept is in some ways also a reaction to these early articulations. Still, it is in the writings of Foucault and Barthes that we find some of the most persuasive (although not always explicit) articulations of the performative component of authorship,8 even though the poststructuralist tradition pointed rather to the waning of the author, as this brief overview describes. But for now let us say that the idea of performing authorship can be partly enunciated in terms of Foucault’s approach to authorial processes: namely, the freeing of writing ‘from the necessity of “expression”’, the conception of writing as both something that refers only to itself and an activity ‘not restricted to the confines of interiority’. Says Foucault, Thus, the essential basis of this writing is not the exalted emotions related to the act of composition or the insertion of a subject into language. Rather, it is primarily concerned with creating an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears.9

For Booth, Foucault and Barthes, the ‘mask’ (the implied author) and the sometimes non-expressive or automatic nature of writing lead to disappearance (the author’s ‘death’). The notion of écriture, explains Foucault, ‘should allow us not only to circumvent references to an author, but to situate his recent absence.’10 However, as Foucault aptly points out, the idea of disappearance all but reinforces the transcendental, sacred attributes of the author discredited by the French philosopher’s contemporaries. The sense of the author’s disappearance also refers us back to the metaphysics of substance – the presupposition of a subject’s essence longing for expression, waiting to resurface. It is to avoid falling back onto archaic models that Foucault arrives at the concept of the ‘author function’, which provides him with a paradigm to ‘characterise the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society’,11 thus allowing for a more accurate (because historically grounded) description of the phenomenon of authorship. In Janet Staiger’s rendition of Foucault’s theory we find four author functions, which are useful because: 5

performing authorship

(1) pointing by name to a person creates a designation; (2) the designation permits categorising (a method by which to group texts and hence useful to criticism or to capitalist profit-making); (3) the categorising may (and likely will) produce status in our culture; and (4) the categorising infers meaning on the texts.12

The author’s name thus assigns value to a given work. But the author attribute needs to be culturally, socially and politically endorsed; what is more, authorship refers not to the mere act of writing, but to writing that is meant to be expressive, address an audience and endure the passing of time, even if these qualities are not necessarily conditional, and may not always coexist. In Foucault’s words, the name of an author is a variable that accompanies only certain texts to the exclusion of others: a private letter may have a signatory, but it does not have an author; a contract can have an underwriter, but not an author; and, similarly, an anonymous poster attached to a wall may have a writer, but he cannot be an author.13

One of the author function’s most important features is that it is largely the territory of criticism – the phrase defines the attribution of texts to authors according to legal and institutionalised systems of copyright property based on the isolation of recurring thematic and stylistic traits, as well as on the selection of works displaying characteristics sanctioned by a system of cultural validation. I depart from Foucault in particular, and from authorship studies in general, in my emphasis on authorial self-construction, rather than critical construction. Similarly, where earlier studies turned the author into an abstraction – perhaps as a result of the discrediting of stable identities (to be discussed later) – this book proposes the privileging of the author’s corporeality. Foucault’s rupture with the romantic conception of a confiding author who may disappear behind language, but whose ‘soul’ haunts the work, comes at the cost of turning this figure into a sociocultural function. Evoking Booth’s implied author, Foucault says, ‘It would be as false to seek the author in relation to the actual writer as to the fictional narrator; the “author function” arises out of their scission.’14 Similarly, the idea of performing 6

performance, corporeality and the borders of the film

authorship presupposes a certain distance between the real subject and its authorial self, as indeed a subject’s authorial role constitutes only one of its identities – we often have more than two (class, racial, gender, religious, etc.). But unlike Booth or Foucault, my proposed approach dismisses intermediary categories. Rather than speak of implied authors or authorial functions, I take for granted that the directors here analysed eventually perform the roles of authors in their films, rendering these abstractions superfluous. The concept of performing authorship, on the contrary, emphasises the author’s physical presence as much as a ‘spiritual’ one. In Butler’s view performance in fact challenges, through parody, binary oppositions such as male and female, nature and culture and, most importantly for this book, body and soul. Further, performing authorship stresses the author’s presence in the text, and not outside it – not, for example, as a categorising function. If like Barthes, Booth and Foucault I take into account the exterior and gestural dimensions of ‘authoring’ a work, unlike them I do not understand these elements, which I attribute to the author’s performance, as symptoms of the disappearance (Barthes) or absence (Foucault) of a real subject behind the author function. It is worth remembering that in ‘The death of the author’ Barthes did not simply condemn this figure, but replaced the controlling, selfexpressing writer with the ‘scriptor’, an entity that does not precede the writing, existing instead in the here and now of the enunciation. Writing, said Barthes, should be understood no longer as the ‘operation of recording, notation, representation, “depiction”’, but as a ‘performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given in the first person and in the present tense) in which the enunciation has no other content […] than the act by which it is uttered’.15 We learned from Booth, Foucault and Barthes that the act of authoring is in itself indicative of a specific function that cannot encompass the author’s whole being, essence or biography – all of which came into crisis in poststructuralist thought. In the end, the idea of performing authorship both borrows and diverts from these valuable theories: where the exterior and gestural aspects of writing were seen as elements emptying the text of an authorial essence, I study the ways in which they are, instead, turned into traces of an authorial presence. 7

performing authorship

Performance as repetition and process It is actually curious that in spite of the implications of an element of performance in authorial processes, film theorists of the 1960s and 1970s seem to have been more affected by the author’s death (perhaps influenced by the subject crisis brought about with poststructuralism). Janet Staiger notes that critics ultimately regretted the void left by the author’s disappearance – and so did gender, sexual and racial minorities wishing to voice their minds on film or video.16 As mentioned in the Introduction, in her 1999 preface to the second edition of Gender Trouble Butler notes that the appropriation of poststructuralist thought by feminist and postcolonial theorists signalled a shift from a supposed ‘formalism, aloof from questions of social context and political aim’ to a ‘new and transplanted’ form ‘in the domain of cultural theory’.17 It is hence that in ‘Authorship approaches’ (2003) Staiger revises the poststructuralist conceptualisation of the author, reconstituting this longed-for figure in the light of cultural contexts, and ‘without reproducing humanist and capitalist author functions’ previously rejected by Foucault.18 Arguing for an understanding of authorship that would restore a degree of agency to authors ‘muted’ by the emptying of their expressive capabilities, Staiger discusses a series of historical approaches worth summarising. In the first, most romantic model (authorship as origin), texts reproduce the intentions of a self-expressing agent. Authorship as personality, in turn, implies that the author may not have control over meaning, but is a coherent human being who can be assessed through the work. When seen as sociology of production, authorship needs to account for the ways in which specific contexts shape the author’s work (this is the approach that characterises the aforementioned historical turn in auteur studies). Authorship as signature constitutes a step towards early poststructuralist thought’s discrediting of authorial agency, focusing on the detection of recurring tropes that are not necessarily intended. Authorship as reading strategy sees the author as construct, as ‘imagined’ by readers – an instance perhaps of what in ‘Auteur desire’ (2001) Dana Polan described as ‘the obsession of the cinephile or the film scholar to understand films as having an originary instance in the person who signs them’.19 Authorship as site of discourses describes an author devoid of agency and coherence, 8

performance, corporeality and the borders of the film

an author that is instead ‘a textual “subcode” to be decoded’.20 Finally, authorship as technique of the self includes the performative component of authorship explored in this book, restoring agency but carefully limiting it to a set of structures, where ‘Individuals author by duplicating recipes and exercises of authorship.’21 This description of authorship processes sees the author, in Staiger’s words, ‘creating and recreating the individual as an acting subject within history’, through a process that is in turn legitimised because ‘the discursive structure (our culture) in which the individual acts also believes in it.’22 Staiger’s approach to authorship as technique of the self draws both from Foucault’s understanding that sexual identity results from a ‘fashioning of the self’ that follows ‘recipes’ and ‘codified exercises’23 and from Butler’s discussion of the performative. Foucault is obviously central to Butler’s theories; his investigation, in her words, of ‘the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin’ is fundamental for her project to ‘expose the foundational categories of sex, gender, and desire as effects of a specific formulation of power’.24 Butler’s theory of gender performativity explains ‘the way in which the anticipation of a gendered essence produces that which it posits as outside itself’.25 In her discussion of the performative Elizabeth Cowie explains that the ‘interiority’ of subjectivity is displaced to be an effect of the performativity that is undertaken without any ‘inward act’, that is, in doing this I do not think or reflect that I am doing something that ‘makes’ me; I just do it, but in doing it I become ‘made’.26

Indeed, Butler’s revision of various gender-identity theories within the realms of philosophy, psychoanalysis and feminist thought critiques the presupposition of an essential, ‘substantive’, ontological being that pre-exists the shaping of the subject by ‘culture’ – in the case of Gender Trouble, a normative heterosexual economy. Gender identity would originate not in the individual subject – it is a model imposed from the outside, but it tells you that it constitutes your substance. In Butler’s view, however, the very notion of a subject’s essence is, instead, a fabrication; furthermore, a fabrication of the very culture that supposedly shapes 9

performing authorship

(and often suffocates) this essence. In that scenario, performance becomes the means by which, often through repetition and exaggeration, the subject reveals this essence as construct. In Butler’s words, Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggest that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality.27

Butler claims, further, that ‘performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual.’28 Staiger notes that a performative statement (such as ‘I pronounce you man and wife’), ‘repeats statements in the discursive system that previously have produced’ a specific effect.29 Before them, and perhaps drawing from J.L. Austin’s linguistic theory of speech acts, Barthes had found an instance of the performative in utterances such as ‘the I declare of kings or the I sing of ancient poets’.30 It follows that the performative may free the author from the burden of originality, but it also offers constraints. Staiger defines the act of authoring films as a type of performative, but ‘only as it is given that directors may make a choice. A performative statement works because it is a citation of authoring by an individual having the authority to make an authoring statement.’31 In ‘Believing in fairies: the author and the homosexual’ (1991), Richard Dyer defines ‘both authorship and being lesbian/gay’ as ‘a kind of performance, something we all do but only with the terms, the discourses, available to us, and whose relation to any imputed self doing the performing cannot be taken as read’.32 The consequent understanding of agency as ‘reiterative or rearticulatory practice’33 evokes both the exterior and citational aspects of authorship that this book equally emphasises – repetition and automatism constitute the second quality of performance I listed earlier. But where Staiger addresses the constraining forces behind performatives – ‘What an author is, is the repetition of statements’34 – I seek to explore how, always through performance, film authors consciously address and try to break off from such demarcations (the frame, as I will further explore, becomes an important rhetorical tool in this 10

performance, corporeality and the borders of the film

process). For, as in Butler’s reassessment of her discussion in light of the critical reception of her work, ‘The iterability of performativity is a theory of agency, one that cannot disavow power as the condition of its own possibility.’35 What the understanding of gender as performative seeks to debunk is the naturalisation of identity based on notions of essence. In Butler’s words, ‘what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts,’ so that ‘what we take to be an “internal” feature of ourselves is one that we anticipate and produce through certain bodily acts, at an extreme, an hallucinatory effect of naturalised gestures.’36 In this context, agency is found in the subject’s consciousness of the structures and apparatuses that surround it – in Butler’s considerations about a ‘parodic repetition’ of heterosexual models37 or in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of the ‘line of flight’, which as Vikki Bell explains constitutes ‘a movement of creativity’38 amidst the ‘lines of visibility and enunciation, lines of force, lines of subjectification, lines of splitting, breakage, and fracture’39 that compose the social apparatus. In Bell’s words, for Deleuze and Guattari following movements of becoming – or, to use the Bergson-inflected language, attempting to trace the path by which a differing, a specific becoming is actualised – is also to trace the path of a creative relationship to self which, insofar as it is posited as a relationship of the thing to itself, implies a version of interiority and a critique of the mantra ‘no interiority, only co-extensivity’.40

Irrespective of whether or not authors succeed in subverting codes or breaking off from structures, it is their very interactions with these codes and structures that define them as authors – their presence in the more or less dramatic struggle with language on the one hand, and with the idea of an inner essence waiting to be revealed on the other, a struggle that is in addition continuous, constituting an endless battle. With no end in sight, authorial processes are better defined as journeys, bringing us to the third dimension of performance explored in this book – the focus on process. To be sure, repetition and process go hand in hand. Performance has become a key concept in the discussion of identity as both fluid and, as seen in Butler’s theory, imitative – and furthermore in a discussion that ranges from gender to national, religious or ethnic 11

performing authorship

identities. Homi Bhabha, for one, saw in the writing of a nation a split between ‘the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical’ which presupposes a ‘pregiven or constituted historical origin or event’ and the ‘repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative’,41 thereby stressing identity as continuous movement, as unstable, and also as repetition. Richard Schechner also stresses this economy of repetition. ‘Restored behaviours’ or ‘twice-behaved behaviours’, which he extends from the realm of the performing arts to everyday life, are ‘performed actions that people train for and rehearse’.42 The very idea of everydayness, he states, lies precisely in ‘familiarity, its being built from known bits of behaviour rearranged and shaped in order to suit specific circumstances’,43 and stands in tension with the originality principle, with the sense of uniqueness prevailing in traditional conceptions of authorship. However challenged, originality and uniqueness seem to constitute a goal, an end to the journey of authoring texts (filmic or otherwise) that I mentioned in the Introduction. And since journeys suggest a trajectory across space, Schechner’s ‘location’ of performance is also evocative of what in many cases constitutes authorship as a trajectory rather than a ‘place’ to arrive at – ‘Performance isn’t “in” anything, but “between”,’ because performances ‘take place as action, interaction, and relation.’44 Finally, to quote Schechner again, performance involves also ‘showing doing’: ‘pointing to, understanding, and displaying doing’.45 This rendering explicit of a process is the focus of this study, and is nowhere clearer than in Godard’s definition of his own practices: to film, says Godard, is ‘to show and to show myself showing’.46 It follows that, rather than a title to be earned, the term ‘author’ designates a subject performing creative processes in accordance with pre-existing models for the production of texts. On the other hand performance frees authors, allowing them to explore rather than achieve, to recycle rather than innovate. The extent to which the emphasis on performance supplies a more positive or liberating model of authorship is a question the case studies featured in the following chapters might be able to answer. Rather than assess how much cultural, social or political power authors actually have, this book investigates the ways in which the dramatic rendition of the attempt to express oneself, the search for the right word or image and the desire to be heard or seen, impacts our perception of an authorial voice in films. 12

performance, corporeality and the borders of the film

Performance and presence As we have seen, performance comes to signify identity as fluid, unfinished, in the making. Yet it also betrays the post-poststructuralist longing for filling a vacuum – if identity is to a degree acted out, and if the subject who speaks from the standpoint of a minority hopes to be seen and heard, performance becomes a way to assert an individual’s presence in the world. In Dyer’s opposition to the traditional model presupposing the author as male, white and heterosexual, he notes that authorship as performance anchors the production of specific texts in specific contexts, understanding ‘the author as a real, material person, but in what Janet Wolff terms a “decentred” way’.47 The perception of the individual as ‘material’ but ‘decentred’ is as prevalent in this book as the idea of authorship as journey, as process. Essential to the idea of performing authorship, as stated earlier, is the filmmaker’s body as an instrument for the assertion not only of a personal point of view, but also, and sometimes most importantly, of an authorial presence. Indeed, the studied directors register their image and/or voice in the film. This does not suffice to define an authorial presence – directors like Clint Eastwood, Roman Polanski or John Cassavetes may also feature as actors in their films, without necessarily evoking their authorial function. Nor does the filmic image of directors or the recording of their voices become mandatory for the concept of authorial presence, which to auteurists can be detected in the incorporeal modes of recurring themes and stylistic tropes. The importance of authorial self-inscription to this study is that it at once renders creative processes in dramatic form and allows for the emphasis on the director’s body – on its presence. Speaking generally, the most immediate idea associated with self-inscription is that the image of the author anchors a dispersed, abstract and untraceable source of meaning in a unified entity. However, this does not automatically bring cohesion to the selfrepresented author, nor does it close the film to multiple interpretations. The filmmaker’s presence on the screen or through voice-over narration may instead act as an element of disruption, which in some cases points not to the unification, but to the dispersion of meaning. The author’s physical presence may thus constitute an obstacle to closure. Cowie reminds us that, for Derrida, representation ‘makes 13

performing authorship

absent as it makes present, and it makes nonsense as it makes sense, or meaning, in differing and deferring.’48 The same applies to both inferred and self-inscribed authors – in the case of the latter, their presence points also to those aspects that are absent from the text, which in turn renders the authors diffused. As Lacan taught us through his discussion of the mirror stage, the toddler’s perception of itself as unified through the reflection of its body is only partial, as with this recognition comes the effort to conciliate this cohesive exterior image with the chaotic inner realm of thoughts, emotions and sensations it experiences. In Cowie’s rendition of Lacan’s theory, In identifying, the child is constituted as a subject and as a body with boundaries. Yet this also involves a misrecognition, Lacan argues, for the image identified with is the child as a whole, a unity that contrasts with the child’s experience of itself as uncoordinated and a series of parts. The image is an ideal, but in the process of identifying, the child is alienated from this ideal self, as an other it seeks to be, and Lacan calls this relation to a unified and whole ideal ‘the imaginary’.49

Cowie goes on to explain Louis Althusser’s take on miscognition as the process by which subjects identify with a ‘false image of unified subjectivity, but one that can be rectified’, whereas For Lacan, on the contrary, it is neither a matter of perceptual error nor a matter of a false image but of a splitting that accompanies the very possibility of imagining, that is, of having an image of one’s sense of embodiment. This splitting immediately divides the human animal in its bodily experience from its image of itself, split between an imagined and idealised unity and an experienced incompletion.50

Similarly, the director’s self-inscribed body neither resolves nor avoids dissonances; instead, it offers them a counterpoint. The filmic record of the author’s body cannot encompass the whole of the ideas and emotions the author tries to communicate – this record exists merely as one ‘voice’ in an uncoordinated and contradictory entity, which 14

performance, corporeality and the borders of the film

in turn produces a polyphonic text – heterogeneous also in that it normally gathers the contributions of several artists, producers and in many cases studio executives. This negotiation between unification and dispersion, showing and hiding, turns instability and movement into an essential component of performing authorship; performance, in Henry Bial’s words, is necessarily ‘contingent, contested, hard to pin down’.51 The author is therefore neither absent nor authoritative; on the contrary, this figure is certainly present as a protagonist in the drama of communication. Barthes’s conception of the ‘text’ as a ‘methodological field’52 distinct from the ‘work’ (a closed, material object) turns the former into privileged territory for this book. In Barthes’s view, The difference is this: the work is a fragment of substance, occupying a part of the space of books (in a library for example), the Text is a methodological field. The opposition may recall (without at all reproducing term for term) Lacan’s distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘the real’: the one is displayed, the other demonstrated; likewise, the work can be seen (in bookshops, in catalogues, in exam syllabuses), the text is a process of demonstration, speaks according to certain rules (or against certain rules); the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language, only exists in the movement of a discourse (or rather, it is Text for the very reason that it knows itself as text); the Text is not the decomposition of the work, it is the work that is the imaginary tail of the Text; or again, the Text is experienced only in an activity of production.53

Performing authorship can thus be defined as the production of ‘texts’ in the Barthesian sense, as the site of ‘playing’, as ‘deferred action’, as unfinished and as a movement ‘cutting across’ several works54 – again stressing the journey rather than the destination. The more or less direct depiction of this journey provides us with the material to study the effects that the image of the director’s body and the sound of the director’s voice may produce on the viewer’s perception of a palpable authorial agency in the film. Phenomenology’s grounding on ‘the carnal, fleshy, objective foundations of subjective consciousness’, to quote Vivian Sobchack,55 constitutes a necessary reference 15

performing authorship

for my emphasis on the author’s physical presence, and indeed on our sense of the author’s corporeality. Without completely shunning the expression of inner life, the stress on the means to achieve this expression or the attention to the exterior, performative dimension of the act of authoring a (cinematic) text is in tune with existential phenomenology’s shifting away from essences and turning, instead, to ‘the meaning of experience as it is embodied and lived in context’.56 To be clear, I am less inclined to produce a phenomenological account of film authorship than I am to borrow the philosophical understanding of the body as site of ‘divergence or non-coincidence’57 in order to flesh out the ephemeral, unstable and historically determined aspects of authorship. In World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism, Lúcia Nagib notes that phenomenology-informed approaches to the body in film studies tend to focus on reception.58 Like Nagib, who discusses realism in the context of the confrontation between the act of filming and the reality filmed, I privilege modes of address – here, the ways in which directors make themselves present in the films. Sobchack’s notion of embodiment constitutes a useful theoretical reference for my study, understood as it is as ‘a radically material condition of human being that necessarily entails both the body and consciousness, objectivity and subjectivity, in an irreducible ensemble’.59

Godard’s invisible presence Godard’s whispered voice-over narration in Two or Three Things I Know about Her perfectly incarnates the dynamics explained so far: from the relationship between real and implied authors to authorship as performance and embodiment’s conciliation of binary oppositions. A prototypical exemplar of the essay film (further explored in the next chapter), Two or Three Things blends subjective impressions and objective data, featuring a voice-over by the director that is at once lyrical and scientific, its whispered delivery signalling the author as absent while its constant interruptions impose Godard as ubiquitous. Two or Three Things is also symptomatic of the reconfigurations of authorship by Foucault and Barthes that would appear soon after the film’s release in 1967, and indeed of the concurrent theoretical shifts in 1960s French 16

performance, corporeality and the borders of the film

Figures 1.1, 1.2 Two or Three Things I Know about Her: Characters look at the camera as they talk to an off-screen interviewer we know to be Godard.

film criticism in light of the influence of Brecht’s aesthetics, semiotics and Marxism (which Godard trades for Maoism). Contrary to what its title might suggest, Two or Three Things is as much about the film’s voice-over narrator (Godard), whom, as will later become clear, we may equate with the director himself, as it is about ‘her’. In addition, Godard’s mode of self-inscription is marked by the absence or elusiveness of his body: his narration is whispered, and his presence in the profilmic is at best hinted at when actors answer questions he poses from off-screen, questions we can only infer from the characters’ responses, in interview style (1.1, 1.2). Most importantly, Godard’s presence is perceived as disruptive, a result both 17

performing authorship

of the director’s incessant questioning of modes of representation in voice-over and of the film’s sound design – with the interferences of Godard’s whispers suddenly effacing all diegetic sounds. Equally important is the fact that the ‘her’ of the title refuses to find a centre, referring to Paris and its suburbs, to the fictional female protagonist, Juliette, and to Marina Vlady, the actress who plays her. Two or Three Things was based on a news article about prostitution among middle-class women wishing to increase their acquisitive power, and accounts for a day in the life of Juliette. The presence of fictional characters, which includes Juliette’s family and friends, and the fact that they take part in a series of events, hints at a narrative structure – even more so because these events are presented in chronological order: Juliette goes to bed, wakes up, has a manicure, meets a client, joins her husband, goes home, helps her son with his homework, goes to bed again. However, though characters follow their routines, the actors who play them hardly incarnate the roles they are assigned; it is as if they stroll around. Rather than give life to their parts, the actors of Two or Three Things voice the philosophical or political texts that compose, along with Godard’s voice-over, a meditation on the urbanisation of Paris, consumerism, American and French politics, language, philosophy and film – and for that matter a meditation constructed out of quotes. The characters are thus reduced to giving different voices and faces both to the director’s concerns and to the texts he cites, while the linearity of the action is disrupted by the digressions produced by their voicing of metaphysical and metalinguistic enquiries. The characters of Two or Three Things are by no means consolidated entities, for they lack both psychology and consistency. The film’s texts float among them without any concern with plausibility, regardless of discrepancies between subject and discourse, as when Juliette’s little son describes his improbably philosophical dream about Vietnam, where two twins (the two Vietnams) become one when faced with the edge of a cliff. The lack of solid characters approximates the film to Dostoevsky’s novel of ideas, where, according to Robert Stam, rather than psychic integrity, what is emphasised is ‘the diverse discourses assumed, relayed, refuted, resisted, or internalised by a character or a narrator’.60 Further weakening the grip of classical narrative conventions is the presence of secondary figures with no relevance to the plot (a hairdresser, a 18

performance, corporeality and the borders of the film

woman in a café, an overqualified secretary), but whose presence and testimonies compose the portrait of the city. After all, the ‘her’ of the film’s title refers also to Paris and its environs. The title’s ‘I’, on the other hand, is indisputably Godard: the essayistic quality of the voice-over resists the designation of a fictional standpoint that would typically justify the separation between narrator and author. But the equation between narrator and author in Two or Three Things only partially unifies the speaking subject. First, the difficulty in distinguishing quoted from original texts disperses the source of the film’s discourse. Second, Godard’s whispered narration provides the film with a disembodied authorial presence. Speaking of JLG/JLG: Self-Portrait in December (analysed in Chapter Two), Kaja Silverman noted that, for Godard, ‘the artist is not properly a creator, but rather the site where words and visual forms inscribe or install themselves.’61 In Two or Three Things, however, this site does not rest in a locatable body. While incontestably personal, Godard’s discourse might evoke an originating subject, but it also displaces this subject. The director’s whispers suggest at once intimacy and elusiveness, the latter stressed by the fact that Godard’s thoughts are voiced also by other bodies: those of his actors. It is as if the film’s characters give different voices and faces to the director’s concerns, as attests the association between auteur and female protagonist by means of poetic parallels. The film’s legendary zoom into a coffee cup is mirrored in a 360-degree pan that moves away from Vlady’s body to the urban landscape that surrounds her. While the extreme close-up on the coffee turns the galaxy-like swirling bubbles into a vision of the cosmos, suggesting the cup can contain the universe, the circular pan that both originates in and ends on Juliette visually translates her identification with the world that surrounds her. Male author and female character are thus brought together in their romantic longing for feeling one with the universe, as well as in their concern with whether language can describe their experiences. Blending ideas extracted from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) with the last verse from Baudelaire’s ‘To the Reader’ (1857), Godard’s voice-over meditates on how language accounts for the individual’s understanding of the world, and thereby on her existence within it:

19

performing authorship

Maybe an object is what serves as a link between subjects, allowing us to live in society, to be together. But since social relations are always ambiguous, since my thoughts divide as much as unite, and my words unite by what they express and isolate by what they omit, since a wide gulf separates my subjective certainty of myself from the objective truth others have of me, since I constantly end up guilty, even though I feel innocent, since every event changes my daily life, since I always fail to communicate, to understand, to love and be loved, and every failure deepens my solitude, since I cannot escape the objectivity crushing me nor the subjectivity expelling me, since I cannot rise to a state of being nor collapse into nothingness, I have to listen, more than ever, I have to look around me at the world, my fellow creature, my brother.

This narration is then echoed in Juliette’s description of her ties with the world, which cues the aforementioned 360-degree pan, as well as the following monologue: Suddenly I felt I was the world and the world was me. It would take pages and pages to describe it. Volumes and volumes. A landscape is like a face. We’re tempted to say, ‘I just see a face with a certain expression.’ But that doesn’t mean it’s an extraordinary expression, nor that you’ll try to describe it. We may feel like saying that it’s this or that. ‘She looks like Chekhov’s Natasha.’ ‘Or the sister of Flaherty’s Nanook.’ But you’d be right to say that you can’t describe that with words. Still, it seems to me that the expression on my face must mean something. Something that stands out from the general design. I mean from the sort of form outlined. Yes, it’s as if you could say that this face has a certain expression. And then… And then? Actually, it’s this one. For instance, exhaustion.

Although projected onto other characters and therefore dissipated in different bodies, Godard’s presence is felt through a play with absence – of his voice’s ‘texture’, of which the whisper is but a phantom, and of his very body, hinted at as the performers answer unheard questions posed by the director from an elusive off-screen space, as it is at the camera that the actors look, rather than the presumed author–interviewer. 20

performance, corporeality and the borders of the film

Godard’s invisibility in Two or Three Things is matched by the monotonic, non-dramatic quality of the voice-over discourse. The interfering characteristic of Godard’s narration and the actors’ reactions to his interpellations refer us to an author who may be omnipresent but is physically intangible, and who, though self-expressive, is not perceived as a biographical artist. Describing Two or Three Things in 1967, Godard said: ‘I look at myself filming, and people hear me think. Put shortly, this is not a film, it’s an attempt to film.’62 The famous garage scene is exemplary of a cinematic strategy that Bruce Kawin defined as ‘think[ing] with images and sounds, rather than simply recording [the author’s] fantasies’.63 In it Godard articulates his battle with language, with the relation between language and image, with what to tell or show, and how to tell or show, as when he states, ‘How do you render events, how to say or show that at 4:10 that afternoon, Juliette and Marianne came to a garage where Juliette’s husband works?’ Put shortly, the author admits to being overwhelmed by signs, which stand between him and the world he tries to describe. The author is also overwhelmed by the world itself, as he claims to be unable to choose whether to speak of Juliette, an unknown woman, the sky, the signs or the leaves of a tree: Sure, there’s Juliette, her husband, the garage. But are these the right words and images to use? Aren’t there other possibilities? Am I speaking too loud? Am I too close or too far? For example, there is foliage, and though Juliette is no Faulkner heroine, couldn’t it be as dramatically valid as the foliage in Wild Palms? There is also another woman we will learn nothing about. We won’t even know how to say that with total honesty. There’s also a cloudy sky, provided that I turn my head and don’t stare straight ahead, and words on the walls.

The necessity of choosing what to show, and through which images and words, is rendered as central but limiting. It is worth remembering that, also in reference to Two or Three Things, Godard rebelled against the need to select – as he states in ‘One must put everything into a film’, published in L’avant-scène cinéma.64 This battle with, or resistance to the idea of leaving things out is one of the ways in which 21

performing authorship

we perceive Godard as a presence, however emptied of emotion and body his whispered narration may be. The question of presence obviously extends far beyond the image of the authors’ bodies or the sound of their voices. For Sobchack, cinematic presence refers to the medium’s performance of its own processes, to the ways in which film not only represents but offers an ‘animated presentation of representation’, being ‘always presently engaged in the experiential process of coming into being and signifying’.65 Speaking of the ways in which ‘technologies of perception and representation’66 shape our understanding of our temporal and spatial existences, Sobchack relates photography, cinema and electronic media to Fredric Jameson’s definition of realism, modernity and postmodernity according to the cultural logic of capitalism. Photography’s fixation of ‘a “being-that-has-been” (a presence in a present that is always past)’,67 what in ‘The ontology of the photographic image’ (1945) Bazin described as the mummification of a moment past, enables a distinction between past and present that presents time as linear, and which in turn defines realism. Cinema, however, replaces the linear logic of realism with the experience of fragmentation, multidirectionality and simultaneity that defines modernism. In Sobchack’s words, unlike photography, cinema is intimately bound to a structure not of possession, loss, pastness, and nostalgia but of accumulation, ephemerality, presentness, and anticipation – to a presence in the present informed by its connection to a collective past and an expansive future. Visually (and aurally) presenting the subjective temporality of memory, desire, and mood through the editorial expansion and contraction of experience, as well as through flashbacks, flash-forwards, freeze-framing, pixilation, reverse motion, slow motion, and fast motion, the cinema’s visible (and audible) activity of retention and protension constructs a subjective temporality other than – yet simultaneous with – the irreversible direction and forward momentum of objective time.68

It is this simultaneity between subjective and objective time, between representing experience and visually presenting its own modes of representation, that for Sobchack constitutes cinematic presence. 22

performance, corporeality and the borders of the film

The same dynamics are at stake in Two or Three Things. In both cases, presence is defined by the uncovering of process. What is more, for Sobchack this simultaneity anthropomorphises the cinema, turning the camera into its ‘perceptive organ, the projector its expressive organ, the screen its discrete and material centre of meaningful experience’,69 in a movement that at once includes the viewing experience and crosses the temporal and spatial boundaries between shoot, projection and viewing. The transposition of the experience of presence that results from the medium’s performance to the sense of an authorial presence springing from the director’s performance might appear simplistic, but it is actually when presence comes to determine the spatial relations between the image and the viewer that Sobchack’s analogy proves productive. This book’s discussion of authorial performances suggests that directors resist confinement to the space of the frame. On the contrary, the studied filmmakers render the frame malleable, expandable and sometimes breakable. But before exploring the frame in the next section, and because performance indicates movement, it is worth addressing the space occupied by Godard in Two or Three Things. As Kawin states, Godard thinks with images and sounds: we do not perceive them as being inside the author’s mind. Rather than illustrate Godard’s discourse the filmed world seems to respond to it. Images and sounds appear to interact with the narrator, rather than reflect his state of mind. Godard positions himself as an observer – his conflict about how to talk about Juliette or the sky or an unknown woman places these elements at the outside. But it is not just the world that Godard observes – he contemplates his own creative processes, being, for that reason, also a confider. He is a heterodiegetic narrator who makes himself as central to the film as the female protagonist, who as stated earlier is also his double. It follows that we are pulled towards Godard, but not towards the diegesis, as he positions himself outside the diegetic images and sounds. Indeed, the alternation between voice-over and diegetic sound, or the fact that the diegetic sounds have to disappear when the voice-over irrupts, suggest the narrator’s refusal to blend in with the world he presents to us; resulting also in a split within the film that challenges the work’s unity, its wholeness. On the one hand, Godard’s nearly inaudible voice-over is inviting and comforting: it calls for physical proximity in 23

performing authorship

order to share the director’s thoughts; it offers a desirable break from the film’s noisy soundtrack. At the same time, Godard’s whispers bear a disruptive quality, as not only do they contrast with the rumblings of suburban Paris; we must, in addition, make the effort to discern the director’s words – unsurprisingly for a filmmaker forever questioning our passivity, Godard makes us work. Most importantly, by eliminating all diegetic noise Godard’s voice-over breaks with the unity and continuity of sound, as well as with the continuity of sound and image. His voice-over adds an element of dissonance to the already discrepant soundtrack – a dissonance that lies both in its aural characteristics and in the narrator’s restlessness, as it opposes whispers to strident urban noise and constantly enquires how to show figures and events. It is in fact difficult to decide whether it is Godard’s self-reflexive questions that interrupt the narrative flow or if it is the narrative events that cut us off from his meditations. Thus Godard positions himself on the border separating the film from the outside world, and functions as the link between the two. Godard’s place on the threshold challenges the delimitations not only of the diegesis, but also of the frame; his presence demolishes the fourth wall – actors look back at the audience. Godard’s presence creates fissures in the form, it destabilises the world of the film by connecting it with the surrounding world. Needless to say, Brecht is one of Godard’s most acknowledged masters. However elusive, the author deconstructs the film, acting as a trespasser, one whose exteriority to the filmed world is established every time the soundtrack is muted or an action interrupted. In this lies the disruptive quality of Godard’s presence in Two or Three Things, as he refuses to be internal not only to the depicted world but also to the filmic text. He resists absorption by this world, standing, instead, between film and audience, thereby imposing himself as mediator. More than a narrator, Godard is a commentator.

The author and the frame The complex positioning of Godard in relation to the diegesis in Two or Three Things I Know about Her shows that the question of cinematic 24

performance, corporeality and the borders of the film

authorship can be articulated also in terms of spatial metaphors. The public projection of moving images has often incorporated live performers in the guise of authors, from the lecturers of early cinema to contemporary video performance artists. It is true that in these two examples surrogate or real authors exist outside the film; their live performances complement the projection, and consequently expand the cinematic event beyond the screen. But the practices of early lecturers, Japanese benshi narrators or contemporary artists also evoke filmic performances that, though confined to the framed image, suggest the director can potentially be perceived as leaping outside it, as argued through most of this book’s case studies. It is in fact in Guy Sherwin’s Paper Landscape that we find the clearest illustration of the discussion of cinematic works in the chapters that follow. Combining 8-mm film, painting and live performance, Paper Landscape encapsulates much of this book’s proposed approach to authorial presence. In this performance, Sherwin stands behind a framed polythene surface positioned between the artist and a film projector.70 The polythene surface is initially used as a canvas that Sherwin slowly covers in white paint (1.3, 1.4, 1.5). Each brushstroke gradually turns the canvas into a film screen, as the white patches become the surface for the projection of a soundless 8-mm image showing a younger Sherwin tearing off a paper wall that slowly reveals both his body and the surrounding landscape. The emergence of this image fuses the act of painting with the act of projecting, thereby conflating the figures of artist and filmmaker, Sherwin’s existence in real life and in the film, in the present of the live performance and in the past of the filmed image. Concurrently, the synchronicity between the paintbrushes (seen live) and the tearing off of the paper (seen on film) superimposes the creative impulse with self-exposure – while the painting constitutes an instance of self-portraiture, the resulting image of Sherwin slitting a paper surface that had initially blocked him from view gestures towards revelation. Fully covered in white, the canvas-turned-screen shows the 1975 image of Sherwin crossing the now empty frame to move closer to the camera, then walk away from it, until his body disappears into the landscape. The canvas/screen holds the image of the empty landscape for a few seconds, only to be torn apart by the live artist with a pair of scissors. Having stripped the 25

performing authorship

Figures 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 Paper Landscape: Guy Sherwin (live) paints a framed polythene surface on which emerges an image of the artist shot in 1975.

frame at once from the paper wall separating artist and camera in the projected image and the polythene surface standing between artist and audience in the present time of the performance, Sherwin crosses over its borders in order to switch off the projector. Paper Landscape materialises the juxtaposition of the director’s filmic and extrafilmic existences contemplated in this book’s case studies, as if, like Sherwin, 26

performance, corporeality and the borders of the film

the directors wanted to leap out of the frame. Sherwin’s work thus constitutes at once the instantiation and the poetic articulation of the idea of performing authorship. The metaphor defining the frame as border evidently refers to the idea of the film as an isolated object depicting a world sealed off from reality, a conception of cinematic classicism that Jacques Aumont relates to classical painting. Aumont’s study of the relationship between film and painting in L’oeil interminable draws attention also to the opposite view championed by Bazin, which describes the cinema as existing in a contiguous relationship with the real. For both Aumont and Bazin the film frame is not solely the physical demarcation of a limited visual field, but a reminder of what lies beyond: both the off-screen, which constitutes a diegetic space (which Aumont calls hors-champs, or offfield) and the non-diegetic, extrafilmic space of production (described as hors-cadre, or off-frame). The next chapter discusses precisely the frame’s delimiting function, as well as its potential permeability. But if films are to be seen as demarcated territories, what interests us here are those scenarios, exemplified by both Two or Three Things I Know about Her and Paper Landscape, where the author’s name, voice or recognisable face become indices of the extrafilmic – the realms of production, biography or other works. The author’s presence sometimes prevents the film’s existence as autonomous and self-contained universe; the author’s body potentially extends the boundaries of the diegesis, of mode and of the frame itself. Put shortly, the object of this book is also the tension between the author and the film, where, rather than being absorbed by the cinematic text, reduced to an effect, the creator is perceived as a foreign element, as a trespasser and exterior to the film, acting as a linkage positioning film and outside world in a relation of contiguity. I examine situations in which the mixture of film and author produces the chemical precipitation rather than the dissolution of the author component. It is therefore worth exploring the frame metaphor further, as it articulates a general conception of the relationship between the world and its representation. The idea of the frame as both spatial and metaphorical delimitation was deployed also in the realm of literary studies – most pertinently for our purposes by Barthes, who speaks of an imaginary frame to differentiate between authorial representation 27

performing authorship

and authorial figuration, a crucial distinction for the conceptualisation of performing authorship. Barthes’s discussion of the reader’s experience of jouissance (translated as ‘bliss’) in The Pleasure of the Text (1975) includes the articulation of our sense of the author’s physical presence, and furthermore of our desire for this presence. When applied to the writer, figuration replaces the idea of authorship as origin with the concept of authorship as process, whereby the author ceases to be anterior to the text to become either a scriptor, a weaver of pre-existing discourses71 or a voice relevant not as the conveyor of a message, but as a corporeal presence in a ‘tissue’ that is ‘worked out in a perpetual interweaving’.72 Stressing the act of writing over the finished product, thus privileging the imperfection of unfinished processes over completed ‘texts’, authorial figuration evokes also another modality described by Barthes – that of writing aloud, which for the French theorist, is not expressive; it leaves expression to the pheno-text, to the regular code of communication; it belongs to the geno-text, to significance; it is carried not by dramatic inflections, subtle stresses, sympathetic accents, but by the grain of the voice, which is an erotic mixture of timbre and language […] Due allowance being made for the sounds of the language, writing aloud is not phonological but phonetic; its aim is not the clarity of messages, the theatre of emotions; what it searches for (in a perspective of bliss) are the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.73

Similarly, figuration is the way in which ‘the author may appear in his text (Genet, Proust), but not in the guise of direct biography (which would exceed the body, give a meaning to life, forge a destiny)’. Says Barthes, ‘Figuration is the way in which the erotic body appears (to whatever degree and in whatever form it may be) in the profile of the text.’74 When applied to the author, figuration evokes at once the exhibitionist component of performance found in Schechner’s stress on ‘showing doing’75 and the attention to the mechanisms 28

performance, corporeality and the borders of the film

of filmic representation that to Sobchack defines presence in the cinema – illustrated, in different ways, by both Godard and Sherwin. Always contesting the text’s ability to assess the author’s biography, and by extension the reader’s admission to a narrative that ‘explains’ the writer, Barthes opposes figuration to representation. The latter, he suggests, constitutes ‘a space of alibis’, where the text is judged against criteria such as ‘reality, morality, likelihood, readability, truth, etc.’ Representation, in turn, imprisons the desire that emerges from figuration; it is ‘embarrassed figuration’. Representation may well involve an element of desire, but then ‘such desire never leaves the frame, the picture,’ its ‘recipient remains interior to the fiction.’ As Barthes states, ‘That is what representation is: when nothing emerges, when nothing leaps out of the frame: of the picture, the book, the screen.’76 Thus conceived, the frame becomes a spatial metaphor delimiting an autonomous (in this case, literary) territory disconnected from the real – just as in classical cinema and painting. The idea of the frame as limit, as border, is again evoked in Barthes’s discussion of the tableau in ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’ (1977). Though Barthes never really uses the word ‘frame’, its function is strongly suggested in his discussion of the demarcation (sometimes real, sometimes imagined) of the space of representation, which detaches it from the ‘real’ that surrounds it: Representation is not defined directly by imitation: even if one gets rid of notions of the ‘real’, of the ‘vraisemblable’, of the ‘copy’, there will still be representation for so long as a subject (author, reader, spectator or voyeur) casts his gaze towards a horizon on which he cuts out the base of a triangle, his eye (or his mind) forming the apex.77

This visual metaphor is further explored in Barthes’s conception of ‘dioptric arts’, according to which the screen and the classical Italian stage turn theatre and cinema into ‘direct expressions of geometry’.78 However, explains Barthes, classic (readable) literary discourse, which has for such a long time now abandoned prosody, music, is also a representational, geometrical 29

performing authorship

discourse in that it cuts out segments in order to depict them: to discourse (the classics would have said) is simply to ‘depict the tableau one has in one’s mind’.79

It is in this context that the ‘figuring’ author is seen as the one who trespasses the borders of the tableau, who ‘leaps out of the frame’.80 For the tableau, in Barthes’s words, ‘is a pure cut-out segment with clearly defined edges, irreversible and incorruptible; everything that surrounds it is banished into nothingness, remains unnamed, while everything that it admits within its field is promoted into essence, into light, into view.’81 We have seen that the scepticism about the text’s ability to express the author’s real mind, emotions and experiences divorces work from creator. This is precisely the reason that for poststructuralists the author ‘represented’ in the text can be conceived only as a construct, as ‘implied’ and as a ‘function’. The visual metaphor demarcating the realm of representation banishes the real human being from the text – only a fabricated author could emerge from such an autonomous structure, for representation ‘cuts out, marks off’ and ‘discontinues the overall totality’.82 Thus the usefulness of the distinction between authorial representation and authorial figuration, or the perception of an authorial presence suggested through the cracks and irregularities found in the text, which in turn become symptoms of the struggle to communicate. We can infer that the author ‘figures’ in the noises, the very traces of the processes leading to the creation of a work. But what happens in the cinema? Though Barthes’s understanding of Eisenstein’s structuring of his films as ‘a summation of perfect instants’83 implies an understanding of the frame as a border that spatially isolates the image from the real, the cinematic frame has not always been perceived as the element fencing off the depicted object from the surrounding world. Barthes’s tableau certainly echoes Bazin’s definition of the frame in painting, whose function is ‘to emphasise the difference between the microcosm of the picture and the macrocosm of the natural world in which the painting has come to take its place’.84 However, the presence of movement and photography in film complicates the analogy between the frame in painting and in the cinema, to the point that Bazin proposes that ‘the outer edges 30

performance, corporeality and the borders of the film

of the screen are not […] the frame of the film image.’85 For if the frame traditionally designates the borders separating the image from its surrounding space, what the screen shows, to quote Bazin again, is perceived as ‘part of something prolonged indefinitely into the universe’.86 Indeed, cinema’s constant reframings render the borders of the image permeable – what is off-screen in one moment may be onscreen in the next, as the camera moves or we cut to a different shot. For Bazin, the painting’s frame is centripetal (it isolates the depicted space from the surrounding reality), while the film’s is centrifugal (inviting us to conceive of the off-screen, to imagine what goes on beyond the edges of the image).87 Following up on Bazin’s theories, Aumont elaborates on the concept of the frame, distinguishing between the frame-object (cadre-objet), the frame-limit (cadre-limite) and the frame-window (cadre-fenêtre).88 The frame-object defines the material quality of a picture’s frame – the material of which it is made, its colour, etc.89 – while in the cinema, where the identification of the frame-object is as problematic as it is variable, it may be conceived of as either the curtains masking the screen or the darkness of the auditorium that surrounds it.90 In turn, the frame-limit describes the visual field of the painting, as well as the ways in which composition directs our gaze, while the frame-window, which is more abstract, isolates the diegetic space from the real – it disconnects the filmic from the extrafilmic.91 By the same token, Aumont differentiates the hors-champ (what lies beyond the visual field, which in English is usually referred to as the ‘off-screen’ space) from the hors-cadre (the space of discourse, of the non-diegetic).92 The studies that follow explore the ways in which authorial self-inscription dilutes the boundaries between the filmic and the extrafilmic. Generally speaking, performing authorship involves also the interplay between the fictional and documentary dimensions of the authors’ depictions both of their own selves and of their creative processes. The essay film (discussed in the next chapter) turns the frame into the signifier of the authors’ dubious impulse at once to reveal and conceal their inner selves, bringing together this spatial metaphor and the trope of the mask.

31

2



The Author and the Frame: Writing, Painting and the Essay Film

The idea of a cinematic author has been historically tied to the conceptualisation of film as art. The auteur both offers film production a personal dimension that counterbalances its industrial modes and asserts film’s ability to transform or fabricate the real, rather than passively document it. The figure of the author points precisely to the possibility of deploying film as a vehicle for self-expression – however problematic the literary analogy in the designation of the director as the key artist, for the term ‘author’ usually describes the creator of a written text (the domain of screenwriters) and presupposes control of production and meaning (a task that directors often share with producers, editors, actors, cinematographers and so on). Since film theory has constantly drawn both its descriptions and prescriptions from other arts, it is only natural that film authorship should be modelled after other media – chief among them literature and painting, as has been the case. This book’s Introduction and Chapter One briefly discuss how the analogies with writing and painting that have informed the figure of the film author are essential to the directors’ fashioning of themselves as artists. Here these analogies are examined in relation to a variety of essay films, whose self-reflexive natures establish them as privileged territory for the investigation of how directors perform their authorial function in the text. What is more, the essay film both evokes a mode of writing and encompasses a painterly subgenre: the self-portrait. This chapter’s case studies, however, are as varied as the 33

performing authorship

works usually grouped under the essay-film umbrella, ranging from the self-portrait (JLG/JLG, The Beaches of Agnès) to the diary/travel film (Perestroika) and the essayistic documentary (F for Fake). What these works share is a relatively dramatic meditation both on the medium and on the filming act. The authors, and for our purposes their performances, are therefore crucial – further, their centrality constitutes a defining feature of the genre. The sixteenth-century conception of the literary essay by Michel de Montaigne, as Colin MacCabe reminds us, involved precisely ‘a personal perspective’ over ‘general topics’.1 Indeed, the essayistic mode usually reflects on the enunciators’ position in the world they comment upon, as we can see in the studies by Laura Rascaroli and Timothy Corrigan, which inform the bulk of this chapter’s arguments. This reflection involves questions of mediation, the nature of the medium and the examination of the essayist’s own practices. Rascaroli’s approach to the essay film stresses the coexistence of a markedly subjective perspective and a ‘thesis’, which she traces back to the literary tradition – such films often give the impression that ‘we are viewing an essay, quite the cinematic version of a literary one.’2 ‘Metalinguistic, autobiographical and reflective’, Rascaroli says, essay films ‘posit a well-defined, extra-textual authorial figure as their point of origin and of constant reference.’3 Similarly, Corrigan elects ‘the encounter between the self and the public domain’ as one of this mode’s essential features.4 ‘From its literary origins to its cinematic revisions,’ he claims, ‘the essayistic describes the many-layered activities of a personal point of view as a public experience.’5 Unlike what we have come to know as mainstream narrative cinema, the essay film may posit an identifiable, even palpable authorial subject; yet this subject is not perceived as unified or stable. In Corrigan’s words, the essayistic ‘continually tests and undoes the limits and capacities of that self through that experience’.6 It follows that this filmic mode bears an element of performance; Corrigan actually speaks of ‘a performative presentation of self as a kind of self-negation in which narrative or experimental structures are subsumed within the process of thinking through a public experience’.7 In sum, essay films provide the ideal terrain for the idea of performing authorship, which in the end describes the author’s 34

the author and the frame: writing, painting and the essay film

constant negotiation with the notion of a subject that may or may not be manifestable, reachable, expressible; and by extension with those principles of origin, uniqueness, authority, control and stability of identity that define the traditional model of what an author should achieve. Essay films display, in addition, production processes, the sense of activities in the making and the approach to both the work and the subject as unfinalisable, all of which are equally implicated in the idea of performing authorship. Essays, Corrigan explains, have a ‘provisional and explorative nature as “attempts”, “tries”, or “tests”’.8 What they portray, always self-reflexively, is the author’s experience of, and meditations on, the world. Explaining Montaigne’s approach, Corrigan observes that the French essayist’s writings are views of, comments on, and judgements of his faltering memory, kidney stones, love, friendship, sex in marriage, lying, a ‘monstrous childe’, and a plethora of other common and uncommon questions picked almost haphazardly from a mind observing the world passing before and through it.9

The essay is thus at once confessional and investigative of both the world and the enunciating self. In fact, as argued in Chapter One’s analysis of Two or Three Things I Know about Her, the essay film often contemplates the author’s place in the surrounding world. This relationship between the subject and the world has been defined by Aldous Huxley in terms of a ‘three-poled frame of reference’, which Corrigan explores in his book: the pole of the ‘personal and the autobiographical’, the pole of the ‘objective, the factual, the concrete–particular’, and the pole of ‘the abstract–universal’.10 Each of these poles defines the subject’s position in relation to a purported reality: the autobiographical narrates the author’s personal experience ‘through the keyhole of anecdote and description’; the objective accounts for experiences not necessarily shared by the author, who turns her ‘attention outward to some literary or scientific or political theme’; and the abstract–universal defines the author’s ability to extract theories from concrete experiences of witnessed events. Corrigan sums up the last of these as ‘the process of thinking’.11 35

performing authorship

The question of mediation that arises from the relation between author and world brings the cinematic essay close to the documentary (as discussed in Chapter Three), a mode that, like Huxley’s envisioning of the ideal essay, may present a selection (or indeed all) of these poles. But most importantly for our purposes, the essay film draws also from analogous genres in literature (Rascaroli mentions the diary and the notebook, to which Corrigan adds the editorial film) and painting (the self-portrait).12 This chapter’s case studies in fact evoke primarily painterly metaphors through their conceptual use of the frame (of artworks, the filmic image, windows) and the idea of forgery (F for Fake’s main theme). This is not to dismiss the literary reference – especially in Welles’s film, which tackles fakes in the realms of both painting and biographies. For the self-portrait, as we know, constitutes also a literary mode (found in texts of St Augustine, Rousseau, Barthes); it is indeed a sibling genre to the autobiography. Discussing the relationship between these two modalities, Rascaroli observes that what separates them is primarily the degree to which they each rely on narrative construction. The lack of a clear sense of linearity and progression, for example, designates rather a ‘written self-portrait’ than an autobiography.13 So the self-portrait’s distinctive feature, be it pictorial or written, is the absence of the chronology and closure characteristic of classical narratives. Instead, the self-portrait constitutes what Raymond Bellour describes as ‘a system of remembrances, afterthoughts, superimpositions, correspondences’ that ‘takes on the appearance of discontinuity, of anachronistic juxtaposition, of montage’.14 In Rascaroli’s view, film’s ability to produce a system of ‘substitution, juxtaposition and superimposition’ through ‘framing, camera movement and montage’ turns it into a perfectly suitable medium for the genre.15 Though the reflexive prefix ‘self’ emphasises the portrayed artist’s centrality (and agency), the self-portrait does not necessarily guarantee full admission into the author’s subjectivity – on the contrary, the genre carries with it a strong sense of mediation. Rascaroli notes that the ‘self-portrait’s gaze is a mise en abyme – the spectator looks, through the eyes of the author, at the author.’16 The access to this artist (painter, writer, filmmaker) is therefore strongly controlled by the selfsame artist, whose activity involves equal shares of self-scrutiny 36

the author and the frame: writing, painting and the essay film

and self-construction. Rascaroli’s account of the context for the production of painterly self-portraits identifies some of the features that the genre carries on across different media: All art historians who have studied self-portraiture in painting, for instance, point to the fact that it is an eminently narcissistic genre, as well as the epitome of self-analysis and intimate dissection. At the same time, the self-portrait was traditionally used as a tool to present and demonstrate one’s skills to potential patrons; to ensure one’s artistic survival and recognition; and to indicate one’s perception of his or her position in society. Hence, the self-portrait is a contradictory genre, which merges the most intimate artistic gesture with the most public display of image-management.17

In self-portrait films, performing authorship combines disparate impulses towards exposure and masking, seeking a balance between painful self-analysis and studious self-fashioning – all of which take place in what Corrigan defined as ‘thinking out loud’.18 The frame, as the following case studies attest, becomes the visual expression of the aforementioned mise en abyme – not so much in the sense that we see the authors through their own eyes, even because it would be difficult to speak of the camera’s eye as surrogate for specific individuals. What the frame actually does is multiply the degrees of separation between portrayed and biographical authors; the frame stretches the distance between authors and audience, widening the gap between the performing authors and their innermost selves. This is not to say that we lose sight of the author, but it is undeniable that the perception of an authorial presence in the self-portrait is counterbalanced by what Rascaroli describes as a sense of the author’s imminent death. So if on the one hand the self-portrait aims for immortality, which in turn hints at an inflated ego, on the other it presents the author as vulnerable, as subject to expiration. Rascaroli says: ‘Each self-portrait freezes a moment in time, hence capturing the work of death; and each is, potentially, the last one; and, therefore, a memento mori – the reminder of the transient nature of vanity, and the meaninglessness of earthly life.’19 37

performing authorship

It follows that while the self-portrait acknowledges the inevitability of death, it at the same time constitutes a form of resistance to the passing of time, the promise of eternity in the form of a material legacy – a publication, a painting, a photograph, a film. Memory, death and the alternation between exposure and concealment permeate three of the films contemplated in this chapter: JLG/JLG: Self-Portrait in December (Jean-Luc Godard, 1994), The Beaches of Agnès (Agnès Varda, 2008) and Perestroika (Sarah Turner, 2009). While the last of these sits more comfortably with the diary and the travel film, it shares with the other two the self-reflexive meditation on the frame and the prominence of landscape, which on the one hand reflects the authors’ inner lives (a romantic trope) and on the other anchors both their narrated experiences and the self-portraying act in an identifiable topography. As stated earlier, the essay film examines its creator’s place in the world, even if the focus on the artist may at the same time single that figure out, isolate it from its environment. Finally, F for Fake (Orson Welles, 1972), which concludes this chapter, offers a similar economy of movements towards and away from the idea of a subject waiting to be exposed. Welles’s film, however, adopts a humorous tone that finds an instance of authorial death in the instability of both its name and its signature – in the very instability of identity that results from fakery and theft.

Mourning the author in JLG/JLG: Self-Portrait in December One of the phenomena that performing authorship describes is precisely the author’s anxiety about either exposing or concealing a purported subjectivity; indeed the opposite (and in the case of JLG/JLG, coexistent) movements towards the construction and deconstruction of a self-expressing subject. The self-portrait’s potential to explore the contrast between the artist’s exhibitionist self-display and our perception of him as impenetrable offers fertile ground for the articulation of the subject crisis in terms not of authorial elusiveness and absence, but of authorial presence. Godard’s decision to make a filmic self-portrait when Gaumont had actually commissioned an autobiography was in any case dictated 38

the author and the frame: writing, painting and the essay film

not only by the former’s suitability to the director’s style – considering that the self-portrait’s lack of temporal linearity and narrative causality befits Godard’s penchant for anachronisms and associational reasoning. It may have been also the self-portrait’s more immediate association with the pictorial (in spite of its existence within the literary) that appealed to a filmmaker constantly preoccupied with the extent to which images can reveal the world, as well as the degree to which they give us access to the artist who produces them. If in his militant period with the Dziga Vertov group Godard temporarily privileged sound over images, his cinema could be largely defined by the concern with what images can and cannot show, as well as with what they should show but choose instead to conceal. These concerns become evident in several aspects of Godard’s trajectory, from the teachings of Brecht that inspired his obsession with exposing filmic mechanisms to ethical considerations about the depiction of war horrors: Palestine in Here and Elsewhere (1976), the Holocaust in both Histoire(s) du cinéma and In Praise of Love (2001) or the Balkans in Je vous salue, Sarajevo (1993), to name but a few examples. Godard’s scrutiny of the pictorial becomes evident in the director’s longstanding and publicly declared frustration about a presumed inability to look.20 This frustration is constantly articulated in Histoire(s), completed a few years after JLG/ JLG. The series translates the Godard motto addressed in Chapter One, ‘to show myself showing’,21 into his own version of Descartes’s ‘cogito ergo sum’, which the director rephrases as ‘cogito ergo video’ (‘I think, therefore I see’).22 Seeing is certainly a recurring trope in JLG/JLG, and it translates into images of Godard looking at paintings, photographs, films, television programmes and books (2.1). This plethora of citations, in turn, points to the fact that seeing is always mediated – what JLG/JLG emphasises is seeing through, or accessing the world through other works, and by extension through other eyes. What is more, this self-portrait at first abstains from providing us with a full view of the artist; the only clear image we have of Godard in the opening sequence is a blown-up photograph of the director as a young boy. Images of the filmmaker in the present, on the other hand, are not revealed until some six minutes into the film – backlit at first, thus giving us only Godard’s silhouette. Prior to that, our visual access to Godard, as Kaja Silverman suggested, 39

performing authorship

is primarily given through what he sees:23 in addition to the photograph, which rests in a picture frame, objects and corners of the director’s home in Rolle, the Swiss landscape (Lake Geneva, mountains, forests), a camera’s viewfinder and television screens. Seeing is also the precondition for painting and filming – Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), one of the most cited examples of self-reflexivity in the fine arts, represents the artist in the act of painting and looking. Since what Godard portrays is an author who perceives and absorbs the world, as I explore later, looking and seeing become a central motif further emphasised in the numerous images of the director’s recognisable glasses (which he both wears, ‘framing’ his eyes, and leaves lying on desks) and through constant references to blindness, the reverse of sight. To be sure, in JLG/JLG the idea of blindness is engaged in order to challenge the importance of seeing, or at least of seeing as a precondition for apprehending the world. This interrogation takes place through a meditative reading out loud of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty (1969) – the questioning of one’s reliance on one’s eyes – and Diderot’s Letter on the Blind (1749) – ‘a geometrician spends most of his life with his eyes closed’ – as well as through a rather comical fictional sequence where Godard hires a blind editor who, rather than look at, needs to touch the film strip to understand where to cut it.24 Irrespective of the certitude of seeing, or the centrality of the eye, Godard’s decision to portray himself in the act of looking reveals, firstly, his conception of himself as consumer, in addition to producer, of images; secondly, his belief in the inevitability of mediation, which applies to how he (and we) perceive both the world and Godard himself; and thirdly, a version of his aforementioned project to ‘show and show [him]self showing’,25 which could here be translated as ‘seeing and showing himself seeing’. In her study of JLG/JLG Kaja Silverman defined Godard as ‘receiver’, claiming, furthermore, that the film can be seen as the maturation of a Godardian move towards authorial divestiture that can be traced back to the late 1960s. It is well known that Godard has frequently tried to disappear as one type of author so as to be reborn in a different guise. The famous titles ‘End of the Cinema’, which closed Weekend in 1967, signalled a radical change in the director’s career. Weekend passed on to history as Godard’s first last film, announcing his shift 40

the author and the frame: writing, painting and the essay film

Figure 2.1 JLG/JLG: For the most part we see Godard looking.

from romantic cinephilia to political militancy, soon to be followed by the transition from auteurism to collective authorship in his collaborations with the Dziga Vertov group. On the other hand, Godard has a number of first films: following Breathless (1960), his first feature, Tout va bien, which in 1972 marked his failed attempt to come back to mainstream cinema after the Dziga Vertov enterprise, Numéro deux (1975), deemed Godard’s second first film, and Slow Motion (1980), which brought the director back to the cinema after the video and television experiments with Anne-Marie Miéville. Godard has a trajectory characterised by departures and comebacks, and though the consistency of his pursuits and meditations makes of him an auteur par excellence, Silverman is right to define his constant questioning and reshaping of his practices as a form of dying, as an altruistic impulse to define the author as receptacle. Yet this authorial divestiture, in Silverman’s words, ‘is better understood as an ongoing process than 41

Figures 2.2, 2.3 JLG/JLG: Frames break the space down into several planes, distancing viewers from both the author and the world.

the author and the frame: writing, painting and the essay film

as a realisable event.’ ‘The crucial question to ask Godard,’ she goes on to say, ‘is whether he is able to sustain himself there and elsewhere in the mode of dying.’26 JLG/JLG indeed points to Godard’s disappearance, articulated both visually and discursively. Though the director is often in the image, a significant share of screen time is given to the champs vides that reveal objects (in the painterly mode of still natures), corners of his house, landscapes. In addition, the proliferation of embedded images – in takes showing a television screen framed by a window, a lamp doubled by its framed reflection on a mirror, a window doubled by its image in a camera monitor and Godard through a window frame – constitute the visual rendition of the existence of several planes separating camera (and viewer) from author, as well as camera from world (2.2, 2.3). The multiplication of frames suggests that, rather than reveal a subject, the self-portrait multiplies the degrees of separation between author and viewer. These frames evoke, furthermore, the filmmaker’s concern with how to frame the world in order better to see it. Silverman’s conceptualisation of Godard as receiver matches also the director’s definition of himself as antenna of the world. In 1981, Godard stated on French television that he saw himself as a ‘cable’, as a ‘vehicle for transmission’;27 at Cannes 1997, he declared that directors do not choose the cinema; it is the cinema that chooses them.28 It is true that both statements betray a romantic approach to the artist as elected, as the bearer of a mission, as the subject of fate. But rather than indulge in narcissism, JLG/JLG seems to suggest, this artist should sacrifice herself to the world, perhaps disappear within it. Silverman articulates the notion of the author as receiver through Mallarmé’s concept of possession, which dissolves the ‘I’ of the artist into the universal ‘we’.29 The authorial ‘I’ in Two or Three Things I Know about Her was, by the way, equally dissipated, but as Chapter One’s analysis of that film shows, there it is as if the characters were possessed by the author, who by having them mouth concerns that are clearly his own prevents their constitution as individual characters – and, why not say, as individuated subjects. Two or Three Things thus multiplies the authorial voice. The author indeed makes others speak for himself: in addition to speaking through the mouths of actors, Godard absorbs the discourses of the authors he cites – their voices disintegrate into 43

performing authorship

the incorporeal matrix of his whispered narration. JLG/JLG, Silverman suggests, displays a similar mechanism. In it Godard states, in what she suggests is a dialogue with Mallarmé: When we express ourselves, we say more than we want to. We express the individual, but we speak the universal. I am cold. It is I who says: ‘I am cold.’ But it is not I who am heard. I disappear between these two moments of speech. All that remains of me is the man who is cold, and this man is everyone […] In speaking, I throw myself into an unknown, foreign land, and become responsible for it. I have to become universal.30

As Silverman goes on to say, Godard ‘represents himself not as the possessor, but rather as the possessed.’31 Authorial divestiture, in this case, finds its way in the artist’s dissolution into a greater whole, into the works that precede Godard and from which he borrows, in the act of consuming, or receiving, other works, and through these works the world itself. Naturally, the move towards disappearance is rendered also through the idea of death, which haunts the film in images of a grave covered in snow, the voices of dead artists (filmmakers that I list below), and a voice-over narration (by Godard) that often adopts a mystical tone, as if coming from the beyond. JLG/JLG is undoubtedly mournful, elegiac; it can be read as a premature obituary, albeit one lacking the narrative structure of the genre; what its images rehearse is the posthumous portrait of a living artist. When playing tennis, Godard, who is ‘passed’ in the match, exclaims, ‘I am as happy to be passed as not to be passed.’ As Bamchade Pourvali notes in his analysis of the film, these lines echo another, more sombre thought, when the director quotes William Faulkner: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’32 To Godard, the cinema constitutes a type of mourning and a recovery of life.33 Emphasising his isolation in scenes showing him alone or interacting with employees (a housekeeper, crew members), Godard places himself in this past that has not yet died, announcing that he ‘first put on mourning, but death never came, neither in the streets of Paris nor in the lake of Geneva’, even if he still grieves for his dying self –‘I was mourning myself, my sole companion.’ 44

the author and the frame: writing, painting and the essay film

As is typical of Godard’s films, chronology is sacrificed not only in the lack of a clear sense of narrative, but also in the director’s refusal to confine the dead to the past, thereby conflating past and present. Dead artists, the filmmakers Godard appreciated as a young critic, live on in his self-portrait: Jacques Rozier, Boris Barnet, Roberto Rossellini and Nicholas Ray are invoked by sound excerpts from their films (respectively, Adieu Philippine, By the Bluest of Seas, Paisà and Johnny Guitar), introduced by the image of their first names handwritten on a piece of paper.34 Godard hence becomes the living testimony to a dead cinema – in fact, Godard becomes the incarnation of the cinema that once defined the tastes of the politique des auteurs, and which he constantly resuscitates both through film excerpts and through direct references to their directors. This life/death ambivalence is reflected in the film’s title, which through the slash splits the figure of Godard, and doubles it, by means of a mirror analogy: JLG/JLG. What Douglas Morrey considers a graphic reference to the self-portrait, with the mirror effect created by the slash evoking the very act of painting one’s reflected image,35 Pourvali reads as Godard’s doubling himself into an author/actor,36 or into a performing author. For that matter, Godard opens the film addressing the works of directors (‘start rehearsals, solve the problems of mise en scène, carefully orchestrate entrances and exits’) and actors (‘memorise a role, work to improve an interpretation, get under the skin of a character’). JLG/JLG thus presents us, from the start, with Godard the filmmaker directing Godard the performer, as in an interior monologue. Godard’s performance evokes also the Brechtian conception of the artist as producer, which somehow collides with the idea of the artist as receiver – the latter, according to Silverman, ‘seems not to do much of anything.’37 However, JLG/JLG includes a number of scenes showing Godard at work: reading, writing, handling telephone calls, hiring crew members, assigning them tasks. It is remarkable that the space of domesticity (Godard’s Rolle home) is completely taken over by work – in JLG/JLG Godard’s house is also his studio. The comparison between the artist and the worker betrays Godard’s affinity with the Soviets – his belief in art as a vehicle for politics, his tribute to Vertov in the years devoted to collectives, his faith in the centrality of editing. For the Russian Constructivists who inspired the Soviet analogy between film 45

performing authorship

montage and ‘machine assembly’, the artist was not simply a visionary, but a hard-working artisan who, through a rational, almost scientific approach, could be compared to an engineer. Indeed, Eisenstein’s explanation of montage as ‘the process of constructing with prepared fragments’38 evokes also Godard’s intertextual appropriations, where fragments are often ‘prepared’, or authored, by other artists (filmmakers, painters, writers, musicians). Romantic, producer, receiver – Godard’s fragmentary self-portrait encompasses a number of authorial models. But more important than asking which of these authors JLG/JLG actually mourns is the understanding that it is through his move towards death, disappearance and divestiture that Godard makes himself present – not so much as an artist capable of communicating his worldview, but as a protagonist in the saga involving author, images, sound and language. ‘Essayistic expression’, as Corrigan points out, demands ‘a loss of self’ but also, and concomitantly, ‘a rethinking and remaking of the self’.39 If Godard, like Silverman argues, is a receiver, he constitutes a centre for the reception of ideas, words and images anterior to the creation of the work – in Catherine Grant’s terms, he would be the ‘embodied sit[e] where words and audiovisual forms inscribe or install themselves’.40 Silverman actually establishes an insightful analogy between the receptive properties of film emulsion and the silver screen to articulate Godard’s desire to become ‘the reflecting surface that allows others to see what has been written’.41 This surface, however, is not unified. Godard does not blend the material he apprehends in a homogeneous product. The components of his discourse are not seamlessly integrated. Godard presents us, instead, with a collage of words and images that are resignified, and sometimes disconnected from their original source (when, as is often the case, they remain unnamed). The director’s appropriation of other works (his ‘possession’ by other authors) results in a fragmented discourse that extends to the conception of the author scattered in the objects and landscapes that compose JLG/JLG’s numerous champs vides. The citations hence refuse to be absorbed in a homogenising mass; they stand in confrontation with one another (just like the references to blindness confront as much as they complement the seeing motif). Godard has always been interested in relations – relations between 46

the author and the frame: writing, painting and the essay film

ideas, between image and word, image and its referent, between the particular and the universal.42 If language fails to communicate one’s inner life, as Barthes suggested, it is through the struggle with language that the author is rendered present. The battle involving author and language in Godard’s works becomes the theatre of his creative anxieties, where the author figures as a central character – as painter, as writer, as filmmaker. And indeed we see images of Godard writing and speaking as he writes, as he tries to find the best way to articulate his own ideas; hesitating, for example, between the use of the French ‘ça’ or ‘cela’ when reciting what he writes, and as he writes. This instance of authorial figuration, which is perfectly exemplified by Godard’s preference for relations and confrontations, is part of what for Barthes constitutes a form of bliss – for the ‘absolutely new’43 that he had nonetheless discredited in ‘The death of the author’ can only come at the end of a struggle with signs. As Barthes states in The Pleasure of the Text, ‘I write because I do not want the words I find – by subtraction.’44 This is one of the things that performing authorship explains: the battleground of authorial processes, where authors come to life through the rehearsal of their own deaths.

The frame and the past: The Beaches of Agnès and Perestroika The various attempts by critics and academics to resuscitate the author in some form attest to the power of this figure, but these theoretical articulations shy away from the romantic version of the unique selfexpressing subject. Still, these refashionings of the author usually construct it against, or in reference to, that romantic model – just as unessentialising theories of identity, as Butler suggests, are nonetheless haunted by the metaphysics of substance.45 The conception of a selfexpressing subject as the originating centre of ideas whose meanings it can control is therefore central to the concept of performing authorship – even if the idea is to move away from traditional prerequisites for the constitution of an author, performing authorship describes also how creators articulate or interact with this set of conditions. But what the takes on subjectivity of both The Beaches of Agnès and Perestroika 47

performing authorship

evoke most strongly is the romantic understanding of the outside world as mirror of the author’s inner life. Where JLG/JLG’s landscapes posit the author as the receiver of images (they reveal to us what Godard sees, as well as the place where he lives), Beaches and Perestroika comment on the connection between the author and the world via the film-as-the-author’s-universe trope, for both Varda and Turner refer us to landscapes when expressing inner experiences, however distorted and, in the case of Perestroika, fictional these experiences may be. But to be sure, the landscapes they offer are fragmented, unreachable, unfixable. And so are the films’ performing authors, who like Godard are, in addition, confronting death. ‘If we opened people up,’ Varda states at the beginning of The Beaches of Agnès, ‘we’d find landscapes. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches.’ With this promise to ‘open’ and fully reveal herself, which Varda tries to meet through the organisation of her life in a more or less chronological narrative, the director hints at the elements that JLG/ JLG lacks: personal biography and full access to the author’s subjectivity. Simply put, the director gestures towards the key attributes of a confiding author. The film’s emphasis, however, is less on the events of Varda’s life than on the construction of her story. New York Times critic A.O. Scott rightly noted that ‘the tone of the film is personal, but not confessional. It is more of an essay in memory than a memoir.’46 The film’s essayistic discourse, not unlike that of JLG/JLG, relies heavily on pictorial references, especially in its use of the frame. Varda’s selfportrait is in fact punctuated by motifs that evoke many of Godard’s themes: the frame that mediates our access to the author, the inextricability between the artist and her work, the emphasis on landscape, the concern with memory, the mourning of the dead. Memory and mourning, which comes with the sense of the artist’s imminent death, are as prominent in Beaches as they are in JLG/JLG, as both films are made by ageing artists – furthermore, artists who stand for the long-gone era of cinematic new waves. Both the Godard of JLG/JLG and Varda portray themselves as instilled with nostalgia, even though Beaches bears a much lighter, often comical tone, revealing accomplishments that counterbalance the sense of an end, as well as the sadness about the dead. The longstanding careers of these directors, in turn, naturally call for the recycling and revisiting of previous 48

the author and the frame: writing, painting and the essay film

works. JLG/JLG quotes, for example, from Nouvelle vague (1990) – Silverman notes the prominence of Lake Geneva in both films47 – and Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (1991), and later reuses some scenes from JLG/JLG in Histoire(s) du cinéma. Varda’s recycling of her own images and themes, on the other hand, is often more linear and didactic, as her previous works are for the most part enlisted to illustrate the production histories of her films: they provide narrative matter for the career revisitation promoted in Beaches. At other times images of the films she directed serve as illustration of events in her personal life: the director’s investigation of her father’s past, for instance, includes sequences from Oncle Yanco (1967), a short she made about her uncle. Varda’s narrative revolves mainly around her career. Unsurprisingly for a self-portrait, which despite its openly autobiographical narrative is how both Varda and critics have described this film, life and art appear to be inseparable. If Varda promises us access to her inner self (her ‘beaches’, as she suggests), it is principally through her work that admission is granted. For example, the sense of an imminent death that transpires from Beaches finds expression through one of Varda’s early films – to be exact, the two hours in the life of the heroine of Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), haunted by the prospect of cancer. The Beaches of Agnès translates the journey into Varda’s subjectivity in terms of the recurring motif of the director walking backwards, as if into her past. But this journey acquires a more dramatic, and certainly vertiginous, quality when the film superimposes the opposing movements of character (Cléo walking forwards in a backward tracking shot) and director (Varda walking backwards in a forward tracking shot). The conflict of direction produced both through figures (character walks towards the camera, director walks away from it) and camera (tracking backwards in Cléo and forwards in Beaches) is further intensified as the superimposed images conflate different temporalities, dissolving 2008 into 1962, thus breaching a 46-year gap to bring different eras together in a single, dizzying image (2.4). Varda’s backward walking constitutes the physical expression of the author’s journey into the past – her walk externalises, renders as action and indeed performs her mental processes. Similarly to JLG/JLG, Varda performs herself at work. But where Godard chose to represent himself as a reader, writer, boss and spectator in the act of seeing, Varda stages herself at work. She appears as 49

performing authorship

Figure 2.4 The Beaches of Agnès: The superimposition of shots of director (Varda in Beaches) walking backwards and actor (Corinne Marchand in Cléo) walking forwards creates a vertiginous effect.

a photographer (an early activity she carried on to her films), filmmaker (sitting in a director’s chair displaying her name) and metteuse en scène, showing herself on the set of her films, instructing the crew about where to place mirrors and constantly deploying these objects to frame her own image, in gestures that bring to mind takes of her hands framing passing trucks in The Gleaners and I (2000), which Beaches actually recycles. To be sure, writing has been an equally strong reference for Varda, who after all coined the term cinécriture. As she states in Beaches, it was because she needed words that Varda joined the world of cinema. It is nonetheless the pictorial that prevails in her self-portrait: after the opening credits, Varda walks to the centre of an empty frame, placed on a beach, and points a picture camera at the film camera. As we know, the director has never really traded photography for the cinema; on the contrary, she has often combined the two. Snapshots have constantly provided both the fabric and the material of many of Varda’s films, especially in the stills that inform Salut les cubains (1963) and in the meditations on photography in Ulysse (1982) and Ydessa, les ours et etc. (2004). 50

the author and the frame: writing, painting and the essay film

It is therefore not surprising that the frame constitutes another recurring motif in The Beaches of Agnès. Like in JLG/JLG, the frame is deployed to stage the mise en abyme effect discussed by Rascaroli via a screen-within-the-screen pattern that increases the distance between the viewer and the object of the gaze. Godard uses this strategy to frame both the author and what he sees, but Varda uses it mainly to picture her own self – as well as the beaches, which, much like in the romantic movement of the nineteenth century, are turned into an extension of the artist’s subjectivity. The film’s last sequence shows Varda sitting among brooms and holding a picture frame on which is projected the image of herself holding another picture frame, this one of a photograph of the brooms (2.5, 2.6). While this doubling embeds one image into the other, a combination of jump cuts (moving away from the framing image) and zoom outs (moving away from the framed image) reproduces the same vertiginous experience that the superimposition with Cléo had evoked in Varda’s journey down memory lane. Summing up the film’s project, this last shot’s accompanying voice-over states, ‘While I live, I remember.’ These forward and backward movements suggest that, like Godard, Varda also hesitates between exposure and withdrawal. It is significant that in the aforementioned opening image of Varda walking into an empty frame the director can only capture the upper part of her own body. The frame, as this sequence suggests, cannot fully contain the author – part of her image is bound to bleed over and traverse its borders. But most importantly, in The Beaches of Agnès the frame is frequently combined with mirrors used to render visually the themes of self-reflection, projection and fragmentation. Self-reflection is suggested, first, through the author’s resort to others in order to construct her image. Where Godard’s performance at once aggregates other discourses and scatters his authorial voice (uttered by different voices), Varda’s construction of herself as authorial subject relies on the testimonies of others, as well as on her memories of others. Personal life, in Beaches, emerges from images of other people, spaces and films. The film features images and references to old friends – among others, teenage companion Andrée Vilar, actors Jean Vilar, Gérard Philipe and Michel Piccoli, and New Wave colleagues Alain Resnais, Godard, Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and Chris Marker, the last of 51

performing authorship

Figures 2.5, 2.6 The Beaches of Agnès: Embedded frames, zoom outs and jump cuts moving away from Varda remove us from the author’s image and produce a dizzying effect.

these as a rudimentary cartoon of a cat, Marker’s favourite surrogate. Beaches features also Varda’s family (children, grandchildren and most notably late husband Jacques Demy), the domestic space of her childhood, the seaside and her current home. It is as if Varda existed both through others and in others. 52

the author and the frame: writing, painting and the essay film

Reflection is evoked, secondly, when the director uses opposing mirrors to capture (to frame) her face, as if seeking her best angle. In an excerpt borrowed from The Gleaners and I, the director flips a mirror blocking her face from view to reflect a painting, thereby projecting her conception of herself as an ‘old woman’, as she tells us, onto the painted figure. Thirdly, the idea of reflection, here combined with projection, articulates also Varda’s approach to the spectator’s relation to the image. ‘If you want to look at the spectator,’ she states, ‘you have to look into the camera.’ These lines are uttered as a shot of Varda’s face, framed by a round mirror, gives way to a reverse shot of the director turning the same mirror to the camera, thereby substituting the image of her face with the reflected image of the apparatus. The selfportrait, as Rascaroli noted, shows the artist through her own eyes.48 Here Varda uses the mirror to throw her own gaze, represented by the camera, back at us – in other words, to return the gaze. As the director openly states, this camera stands also for the spectator: again, to look into the lens is to look at the audience. If camera equals viewer, the reflected camera also confronts the spectators with their own image. The mediating roles of both the camera and the mirror are further dramatised in earlier shots of Varda using mirrors to capture her crew members’ faces, thus stressing the reflective surface as converging point, as well as the (framed) space where spectator and subject meet – for the mirror’s correct position, as per the laws of physics, is determined by the angle allowing for the subject to see the camera’s reflection. Indeed, when crew members, answering to Varda’s question (‘Do you see the camera?’), acknowledge its presence, they are by extension acknowledging the presence of the spectator. The last function of Beaches’s mirrors is to fragment the image – of the author’s body, of the landscape that stands for her inner self and of what Varda sees. This fragmentation splits the author, doubling her image into her present and past existences when Varda removes a photo of herself as a child from a picture frame, uncovering a mirror that immediately reveals the Varda of today. This split acquires a theatrical quality in scenes showing Varda passing by an actress playing the director in her youth, as Varda’s sharing of the frame with a performer doubles her also into real and fictional existences. In addition, fragmentation creates a cubist effect when large mirrors are spread out 53

performing authorship

Figure 2.7 The Beaches of Agnès: Mirrors on the beach intersperse the landscape with fragments of the whole, sometimes in distorting angles.

along the beach, producing the image of a landscape interspersed with its own fragments, as the mirrors at once multiply and reflect details of this landscape in distorting angles (2.7). The frame in Beaches has yet another function – it evokes Varda’s background in the arts and in photography. Their placement on easels make them look like canvases (2.8), while the positioning of childhood pictures along the beach both cites a visual pattern found in Varda’s Ulysse (where the blown-up detail of a photo placed on the original landscape reproduces the aforementioned cubist effect) and establishes the analogy between the mirror and the photograph mentioned before. These mirrors evoke also the idea of film projection: the reflected image of a surfer walking by, echoed soon after in a group of surfers passing behind an empty frame, brings to mind a film screen. In line with Bazin’s theories, Varda consciously deploys both photo­ graphy and film to preserve the dead. In one of Beaches’s most emotional 54

the author and the frame: writing, painting and the essay film

Figure 2.8 The Beaches of Agnès: A framed mirror mounted on an easel evokes a painting.

and private moments, the director stands in front of photographs she took of actors like Jean Vilar and Gérard Philipe on stage, stating, in tears, I cry for them from my heart. I expose them as an artist who is proud of what she can do, proud to be invited, and proud when people say, ‘What beautiful photos!’ […] All the dead lead me back to Jacques.

It is hence primarily as an artist that Varda portrays herself. Her life with Demy, for example, is told exclusively through accounts about the making of films she devoted to him, and which followed his death in 1990: Jacquot de Nantes (1991), The Young Girls Turn 25 (1993) and The World of Jacques Demy (1995). The self-portrait that is offered in Beaches comes to us mainly as a compilation of Varda’s works, both filmic and photographic. To be an author is also to be a collector, as Varda suggests, for example, in Ydessa, les ours et etc., a filmic essay about 55

performing authorship

an exhibition of teddy-bear photos by artist–curator Ydessa Hendeles, as well as in The Gleaners and I’s analogy between garbage collection and filmmaking. In The Beaches of Agnès Varda stages the production as much as the recollection of old images, performing authorship as the act of remembering. After all, as she suggests in the closing shot, to remember is to live. The performative quality of Varda’s self-portrait is stressed from the start; Beaches opens with the director walking backwards, saying: ‘I’m playing the role of a little old lady, pleasantly plump and talkative, telling her life story,’ just as Godard had opened JLG/JLG with descriptions of the roles of director and actor which, we presume, referred to Godard himself. JLG/JLG’s references to orchestrating entrances and exits (quoted in the previous section) also evoke the theatre. In Beaches, likewise, the theatre is as strong a reference as painting and photography, coming to life in the staging both of absurd situations (Varda in a whale’s belly, office desks on the beach, conversations with Marker’s speaking-cat surrogate) and of events in her life, and most strikingly in the image of a puppet theatre that interrupts the final credits, as a child’s voice-over claims: ‘It’s not over. Sometimes the curtain opens again.’ The cinema, in any case, is acknowledged as artifice. ‘I don’t know what it means to recreate a scene like this,’ Varda admits while showing us actresses dressed in the swimsuits she wore in her childhood. ‘Do we relive the moment? For me it’s cinema, it’s a game.’ The mirrors, the embedded frames and the stress on the theatre and the ludic betray, again, the director’s impulse to withdraw from exposure, to masquerade. The Beaches of Agnès may depict Varda’s search for her most accurate or revealing image, but it stages this process as a constant retreat from view. If the essayistic, as Corrigan stated, exposes thought processes, turning the articulation of a ‘personal point of view’ into ‘a public experience’,49 Beaches offers equal amounts of exhibitionism and reserve. Like JLG/JLG, Varda’s film contemplates not only her artistic methods, but also her place in the world. While revealing the artist interacting with her surroundings, the film at the same time indulges in the romantic impulse to present the world as the projection of the author’s inner life – beaches, as Varda tells us, are what we would find if we opened her up.

56

the author and the frame: writing, painting and the essay film

Where Varda gives us the seaside, artist–filmmaker Sarah Turner offers us the snowy landscape of Siberia. Echoing the meaning of the Russian word used in its title, Perestroika ‘reconstructs’, in the transition from 2007 to 2008, a train journey the director undertook between December 1987 and January 1988, during which she shot images of what was then Soviet Russia. This reconstruction, however, is as much about the mechanisms of memory and of filming as it is about the experience of twenty years before. Present and past alternate in the selection of footage, in the use of sound, in Turner’s younger and present selves and in the contrasting landscapes of Siberia, where snow becomes scarcer, and the steam coming off Lake Baikal signals the devastating effects of global warming. Like Varda, Turner projects her inner self onto the landscape, producing what Chris Darke called ‘extreme psychogeography’.50 Indeed, as the camera reveals a region on the verge of extinction, the film’s narrator, a semi-fictionalised version of the director, tells us about what at first appears to be her own death in a cycling accident. Perestroika might recount a real train journey, but its recounting is framed as fiction by an author in the guise of a narrator who is at once visionary and helplessly troubled. If every narration involves a degree of reimagination of the past, Perestroika’s dreamy voice-over puts equal emphasis on the fictionality of the very act of narrating it. In an interview with Sight and Sound, Turner declared, ‘There are real facts of life within a fictional structure, but what is evidence, fact, and what is affect?’51 Similarly to Godard and Varda, Turner openly performs an authorial impulse; and like the other two, she places herself in fictional situations: ‘I needed to believe in my stomach that that fictional character “Sarah Turner” believed that the water was on fire,’ she told the same magazine.52 Further stressing the fictional dimension of Perestroika in relation to JLG/JLG and Beaches is its temporal determinacy: not so much the time of the events narrated (which in the non-narrative JLG/JLG is unspecified, and in Beaches surpasses the 20-year gap separating Perestroika’s events and their recollection), but of the process itself, which is unclear both in Godard’s and Varda’s films. Perestroika, on the other hand, tells us that the train journey that exposes us to Turner’s memory saga takes place between 29 December 2007 and 1 January 2008. The emphasis on temporality in all three films, at any rate, points to the author’s imminent death. Like in JLG/JLG and The 57

performing authorship

Beaches of Agnès, Perestroika’s elegiac tone springs also from the deaths of others – in the case of Turner’s film, Sîan Thomas, a friend of the director who travelled with her in 1987 and died in a traffic accident a few years later (like in Turner’s vision of her own demise, narrated in voice-over, Thomas was also on a bike). Perestroika’s mirroring of inner life and landscape translates also into the relationship between image and sound: the Russian topography, captured mainly from a moving train, and which dominates the visual track, is played to Turner’s voice-over narration, for the most part in a relationship of complementariness. ‘I was burning up,’ Turner says towards the end, as we look at images of steam coming off Lake Baikal. The parity between subjectivity and landscape is then translated into the confusion between inside and outside. Turner’s narrator continues: I stepped onto the balcony: my body was on fire! And so was the lake, I could see it. For a while I just watched it, taking in the heat. Then I needed to step in, move away from it. But there was no, absolutely no, no difference, no separation between outside and inside, and then I knew what was happening. A light was going out. I’ve been here before, and I knew that I was watching it all over again, and I knew that I needed to feel it. I had to get down there, because no one would believe me. And I’m speaking this over it, because I’m fixing the evidence.

The desire to fix, for that matter, is the motor for Perestroika’s journey towards understanding. Preparing us for the reading of a newspaper report written by the late Thomas, which is then followed by the letter that brought Turner the news of her friend’s death, the narrator says, ‘I’m going to read this out loud, because I need to speak it; because speaking somehow fixes things.’ And later: This is the same journey, at the same time, but there’s no evidence of that. Everything is different, and it all looks the same; I’d like to say that, fix it, but everything is different, and nothing looks the same.

The images that run in front of our eyes, however, seem unfixable – except for a few sequences to be discussed later, we are offered a landscape shot from a moving train; a landscape that becomes barely 58

the author and the frame: writing, painting and the essay film

discernible when speed (both real and manipulated) imprints on the images an abstract quality, dissolving the shapes of both industrial and rural settings into either blurs or bursts of flickering lights and colours. Turner’s interlocutor, likewise, shifts identities, the insistent use of ‘you’ sometimes addressing an accompanying partner, sometimes Thomas, sometimes Russia, sometimes the viewer.53 The self-inscribed author is equally elusive: real and fictional experiences blend seamlessly; her thoughts and sensations, as she admits in voice-over, are disturbed by drinking and sleep deprivation (and the consequent intake of strong pills). Echoing the resulting dreamlike, drifting state of mind of the narrator, Turner’s persistent absence from the image prevents the anchoring of the voice-over in a concrete body. The author’s acousmatic voice lends her a ubiquitous, yet ghostly presence that is actually reinforced by the rare images that Perestroika bestows of her creator: two photographs (of Turner holding a video camera, taken by Thomas in 1987, and at the restaurant carriage in December 2007), a 1987 video showing her in a church, and her image reflected on the train window, which at specific points flashes in and out of sight, according to variations in light (2.9). The filmic and the photographic records

Figure 2.9 Perestroika: The reflected image of Sarah Turner briefly flashes before our eyes.

59

performing authorship

are meant to fix the author, as Turner suggests in the narration she gives over the photograph that Thomas took of her: She fixes me, then walks away. She photographs me filming her, and I have that image framed on my wall, but I have no idea how I came to have it, or when she gave it to me, if I framed it, or she framed it for me. I’m framed; she’s leaving the frame. I’m fixed, and she walks away. I understand that here. All of us are ghosts, some of us are singing.

Yet what Perestroika attempts to frame visually is less the author’s body than the landscape that mirrors her subjectivity. In both JLG/JLG and The Beaches of Agnès the embedding of frames within frames removes us respectively from what the artist sees and from the artist’s body. In Godard’s film the director’s barely seen body eludes the frame, while in Varda’s the frame both fragments and fails to contain the image of the on-screen author. Similarly, Turner’s frame cannot contain the landscape, and by extension, we can presume, it cannot contain her inner life. Her use of this motif achieves the opposite of the control she longs for: the aforementioned movement of the train for the most part produces passing, ungraspable, unfixable, sometimes undistinguishable images. Thus the window frame cannot fix the landscape, frustrating the author’s desire, declared in her performative voice-over, to capture things on film and use them as ‘evidence’. Like in JLG/JLG, what the frame shows in Perestroika is not so much its performing author as what she sees. If the landscape allegorises Turner’s interior journey, what it reveals of it is for the most part uncontainable, as even the shots taken from a stationary train are soon left behind once the train leaves the station. Bazin’s conception of the film frame as centripetal comes to mind,54 for the concept’s implication that films exist in a contiguous relation to the surrounding world suggests the instability of the framed universe, for what is on screen in one moment may be left out if the camera moves away, and vice versa. The frame’s inability to hold, fix or contain also places Perestroika within the train-film tradition initiated with Louis and Auguste Lumière’s Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895), where both the locomotive that runs towards the camera and the passengers that move in and out of shot, as Aumont notes,55 leak out of the frame, refusing to 60

the author and the frame: writing, painting and the essay film

stay within the borders of the image.56 The voice-over narrator’s longing for holding still, for understanding, emerges precisely from the dizziness produced by the frantic images that run in front of her (and our) eyes. The advent of trains, Aumont explains, brought with it not only a new perception of the relationship between time and space, but also a ‘desire for acceleration’, for losing roots.57 Train and cinema are associated not only as great inventions of the nineteenth century, but also through analogies between their mechanisms: in Aumont’s words, through the ways that train and (traditional) film cameras led to the ‘transformation of a circular movement into a longitudinal movement, of a movement in space into a displacement (no more gyratory organs in video cameras, contemporary of computers)’.58 Turner hints at an analogy not only between train and cinema, but between train and photography, the clicking of a camera shutter at once mimicking the sounds of old locomotives and setting the images to a regular tempo (even if the clicking rhythms actually vary throughout the film). Furthermore, both the train and the cinema rest on the idea of the ‘immobile traveller’59 that brings to mind the passive, voyeuristic spectator of classical cinema conceived by psychoanalytical film theory; as Sara Danius points out, in Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema Lynne Kirby ‘goes as far as to suggest that the railway paved the way for the specifically cinematic construction of the spectator’.60 In Aumont’s words, ‘Seated, passive, transported, the train passenger learns quickly to see the passing of a framed spectacle, see the landscape go by.’61 Turner may well be a passenger on the Trans-Siberian Express, but she is also the producer of the images that pass by the lenses of her camera. So this narrating passenger is not passive; neither is she simply a spectator. But is she mobile? As viewers, we see what Turner sees from a moving train. Her discourse about the need to fix past events contrasts with the ephemeral quality of the images that run past the window frame, and which as discussed earlier resist confinement. Still, we know that it is not the landscape that moves; the camera may for the most part be static when placed in front of the window,62 but it rests on a fast-moving support, the Trans-Siberian that carries the film’s author–narrator. Likewise, as a passenger the narrator can be presumed to be either seated or lying down. However, as attests her restless voice-over speech, she is 61

performing authorship

obviously in a state of agitation – are the running images not, after all, the mirror of her subjectivity? The author’s physical shifting in space (she covers a long distance from Moscow to Irkutsk), moreover, is matched by displacements in time – the images that we see through the window alternate between footage from the 1987 and the 2007 journeys; Turner’s travel in space leads to a zigzag movement in time. The shifts between past and present images are marked by the change in sharpness, colour and the landscape – global warming appears to have melted much of the snow that covered the same places of twenty years ago. The inclusion of more ambient noise to the old footage, as well as the voices of the 1980s crew (including that of Thomas) and the music of Erik Satie render this transition all the more dramatic. Every insertion of images and sounds from the past injects us with the uncanny impression that we are ‘passengers on a ghost train’, as Darke noted in his review of the film.63 The performed author’s unseen, ghostly and sleep-deprived body thus becomes the repository of tensions between stasis and movement, fixity and transience, turmoil and drowsiness, the cold of the snowy landscape she looks at and the burning of the overheated train she travels in, life and death. These conflicts somehow find a graphic translation in the markedly directional camera movements. Perestroika has a dominant pattern of lateral travelling shots from left to right, broken by a few instances of movements from right to left, a forward-moving shot from the back seat of a car and three recurring forward-moving handheld shots of the train corridors, which, like in the cyclic structures of dreams, repeatedly take us to the same restaurant. The camerawork is more varied in the images shot outside the train, where we find more pans (very economically used on the Trans-Siberian) and handheld shots. There is also an inner circular movement suggested both by the recurrence of Turner’s concerns (her inability to sleep, the heat, the desire to fix) and the cyclical return to the past (illustrated, among other things, in the repeated returns to the restaurant carriage). This circularity is further suggested by the reappearance, near the end, of the images of the ‘steaming’ lake that had opened it; images that at the beginning of the film are captured by a camera that tilts and pans in motions that gesture towards, but never complete, the drawing of imaginary 62

the author and the frame: writing, painting and the essay film

frames. Far from closing a cycle, the narrator’s retaking of the same journey cannot fix events past or present; just as the window frames fail to contain both the transformed landscape and her blend of fictional and real experiences. It is as if the insistent horizontality of the travelling shots ended up stretching the frame, ripping apart its lateral walls, tearing the frame open.

Orson Welles and the artist as fake The authorial elusiveness of JLG/JLG, The Beaches of Agnès and Perestroika finds an equivalent in the figure of the impostor in Orson Welles’s F for Fake. Where the analysed films by Godard, Varda and Turner stage, respectively, authorial divestiture, reflection and physical dissolution, with all three placing the authors in the imminence of death, Welles fabricates an authorial demise that is as conceptual as it is personal; in short, F for Fake sentences the author’s name, signature and public identity to death, all the while portraying its own director as fake – as ‘charlatan’, in Welles’s words. The director devotes this film to the unmasking of the figure of the author, and being a man of the stage he does so through the usual theatrics – through masquerade. Though appearing under his own name, the director presents himself in the guise of a magician, thereby also portraying the author as trickster (2.10, 2.11). Performing authorship, in F for Fake, encompasses disguise, transference and theft, tackling authorial processes in the realms of painting, biographical literature and cinema. The film’s premise is a documentary on art faker Elmyr de Hory by François Reichenbach that Welles shamelessly appropriates with the help of Reichenbach himself, who signs as executive producer and provides the director with testimonies. F for Fake edits footage of that documentary and intersperses it with images and stills from other films, audio recordings, newly shot material (largely featuring Welles himself) and Welles’s voice-over narration. The film’s focus, however, frequently shifts between Hory and his biographer, Clifford Irving, who was also behind the hoax autobiography of Howard Hughes, which he claimed to have ghost-written, only to be publicly unmasked in 1972 and sentenced to two and a half years in prison, a 63

performing authorship

Figures 2.10, 2.11 F for Fake: Orson Welles portrays the author as trickster and magician.

story that was incidentally fictionalised in Lasse Hallström’s The Hoax (2006). Welles eventually uses the practices of Hory and Irving to offer a view of his own public persona as impostor, first admitting to passing for a famous New York stage actor in Ireland during his adolescence, and then staging a flashback of the event that inaugurated a career 64

the author and the frame: writing, painting and the essay film

marked by controversy – the fabricated reports about alien invasions in the 1938 radio broadcast War of the Worlds. F for Fake is thus as much about Welles himself as it is about Hory and Irving. These figures’ expertise in lying is echoed in both the film’s English and original titles (the latter being Vérités et mensonges, or ‘Truth and Lies’). Art, Welles tells us towards the end of his account, is just a ‘pompous’ word for truth. But art could not be further from the truth; art is actually ‘a lie that makes us realise the truth’, as the director points out, supposedly quoting Picasso. Welles goes as far as to admit to be lying his ‘head off’ during a segment of the film describing a model–artist relationship involving Oja Kodar (Welles’s wife) and the cubist painter. F for Fake thus promotes an examination of the director’s career through the discussion of a topic that had been obsessing Welles since the production of his infamous radio show: the instability of truth. This, we all know, is a prominent feature in Citizen Kane’s multiple perspectives and self-conscious adoption of a documentary style (the reconstruction of its protagonist’s past in the talking-head interviews with characters; the News on the March newsreel). What is more, Kane was a fictional and unauthorised portrait of media mogul William Randolph Hearst equally inspired by Hollywood producer Howard Hughes’s mysterious trajectory from golden boy to recluse, as suggests F for Fake’s interview with Joseph Cotten, who played the character of Leland in Kane. Just as in Welles’s break into the film industry, the truth that F for Fake questions refers largely to biographical facts. The events in the life of Hory are as uncertain as the authenticity of Irving’s claims over Hughes’s life story or Welles’s statements about both the faker and the biographer. Was Hory really a Hungarian aristocrat, or a middle-class man? Was he in a concentration camp? Was he really arrested for forgery? The uncertainties about Hory’s past are attributed as much to his compulsive lying as to the inaccuracy of Irving’s biography of the faker – and to be sure, Irving’s inauthentic autobiography of Hughes certainly challenges his authorial reliability. Irrespective of the authenticity of the narrative of Hory’s and Hughes’s lives, the film endorses the old saying that biography does not explain the work – as Barthes argues in ‘The death of the author’. To recall Barthes’s words: 65

performing authorship

The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’. It is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author. The author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines, as in the very consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their person and their work through diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh’s his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice. The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us.64

Citizen Kane’s thesis on the instability of biographical truth and the unaccountability of a man’s deeds on the one hand echo Marcel Proust’s denunciation of the relevance of authorial biography for criticism in ‘Against Sainte-Beuve’ (1895–1900),65 and on the other anticipate Barthes’s 1968 follow-up, which as the above excerpt shows constitutes, likewise, a critique of teleology. So the events in the life of a human being cannot necessary explain that person’s feats, let alone that person’s work – authors do not confide in readers, as noted by both Barthes and Wayne Booth, who saw in the category of implied authors a more accurate means of addressing the creator of a text. What is more, Welles seems to argue that the very events in the lives of artists are likely to be completely fabricated, both by biographers and by the artists themselves. F for Fake’s thesis is that the difficulty in assessing authors through their work resides not only in language’s inability to express the subject, as we learned from structuralism, but in the undeniable fact that individuals can blatantly lie both about themselves (Hory, Welles) and about others (Irving about Hughes, Welles about Picasso). 66

the author and the frame: writing, painting and the essay film

Figures 2.12, 2.13 F for Fake: Elmyr forges Welles’s signature onto a portrait of Michaelangelo.

But more than the uncertainty of facts, it is the uncertainty of authorial identity that F for Fake exposes, deploying an economy of transferences and appropriations where, via Reichenbach, both Hory and Irving are turned into springboards for Welles’s meditations on his 67

performing authorship

own practices; and where Welles, in turn, lends his own trajectory to the general questioning of authorship in several media – from publishing, painting, radio and film to the anonymous architectural design of the Chartres cathedral. In addition to tackling the possibility of either disguising or substituting the real man behind a consecrated signature, F for Fake shows us the instability of this very man’s identity – Hory not only ‘steals’ the identities of Modigliani or Matisse, but goes by several other last names: Heury, Bory, Sury, Kury, Bury, Dury. F for Fake in fact targets precisely that which for Foucault turned into a tool for culturally and historically legitimising certain texts: the author’s name. Hory’s forgeries of paintings by Matisse or Modigliani at once illustrate and expose the idea of the ‘author function’, the faking of a signature (2.12, 2.13) giving the painting a market value (the author as ‘a standard level of quality’), and the reproduction of a painter’s thematic and stylistic universes evoking the legitimisation of specific works (the author as ‘a certain field of conceptual or theoretical coherence’; the author as ‘stylistic uniformity’).66 This questioning of authority inevitably results in iconoclastic impulses, with repeated scenes of Hory burning his fakes of paintings attributed to great artists or unashamedly claiming that Matisse’s drawing of lines was not ‘as flowing’ and ‘as sure’ as his own, or saying, this time about a different host to his supposedly parasitic abuses, ‘I don’t feel bad for Modigliani; I feel good for me.’ In turn, an interview with Irving’s wife (herself an identity forger and an artist) shows that the public may not really care about the authenticity of a painting – sometimes, she claims, ‘fakes are as good as the real ones, and there is a market and there is a demand’ for them. Equally questioned is the authority of experts; here again F for Fake echoes Barthes. These experts have so much power that, in Welles’s words, uttered in voice-over to the images of burning canvases, it is enough to have ‘one nod from an expert’ for a ‘piece of canvas’ to be ‘worth maybe a couple of hundred thousand dollars’. As Hory rightly states, the authenticity of a work of art – indeed its artistic value – is determined as much by exhibition and marketing practices as by the ability to trace the work back to a recognised artist. ‘If you hang [fakes] in a museum or your collection of great paintings,’ says Hory, ‘and if they hang long enough there, they become real.’ The acquiescence of 68

the author and the frame: writing, painting and the essay film

collectors is equally important to the question of authorial attribution, for market dynamics turn the acquirement of fakes into a convenience, as Welles suggests through the anecdote of a man who knowingly purchased a fake Toulouse-Lautrec, benefiting, as a collector, from the same lie that befitted the painting’s faker (this time not Hory, but Hungarian artist Vertès). The uncertainty of attribution in the realm of art is so common that both the National Gallery in London and the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris devoted exhibitions to the topic in 2010.67 In turn, fakers like Hory and Irving can be turned into celebrities – not only do they get exposure in F for Fake, but Hory is shown as a well-known public figure in Ibiza, where he was living at the time (Welles eventually speaks of people buying ‘an Elmyr’), and Irving enjoyed some celebrity status when the Hughes hoax came to light and was predictably exploited by the media. The expert and the critic are hence treated as both abusive (arbitrarily assigning value to works) and unreliable (unable or unwilling to attribute authorship). Needless to say, F for Fake places equal emphasis on the lack of control on the part of artists. Welles’s filmmaking career, for that matter, was marked by constant struggles with producers or financiers, the most infamous examples being the conflicted completion of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) – taken over by producers while the director was shooting images for never-released documentaries on Mexico and Brazil that were later compiled in It’s All True (1993) – and the re-editing of Touch of Evil (1958). Welles’s losses of authorial control somehow foreshadowed a series of incomplete projects (among others, Don Quixote and The Other Side of the Wind – the latter supposedly also involving a dispute over the project’s ownership with its Iranian backers). Under the mask of the magician, and in the guise of a master of ceremonies, Welles manipulates the trajectories of Hory and Irving so as to accommodate his own. The director might have enjoyed more prestige than the other two, but he was also, perhaps accidentally, romanticised as a maverick – only a lucky one, as he suggests when he tells us that, while in South America a man went to jail for lying on the radio, War of the Worlds, much to the contrary, opened for him the doors to Hollywood. The lie in any case becomes the trope through which the film explores the author’s hesitation between revelation and concealment 69

performing authorship

explored in relation to the self-portrait. Indeed, though autobiography is a central theme, F for Fake bears similarities with the painterly genre – the picture of Welles that we are offered is rather fragmentary, and certainly non-linear. In turn, the theatricality of the magician’s mask attaches an element of grandiosity to the author, despite the concurrent sense of demise intrinsic to the self-portrait’s freezing of ‘a moment in time’.68 Yet, though ironically this was the last feature film Welles completed before his passing in 1985, it is not the author, but only a certain conception of that figure, that F for Fake claims to be dead. Where Godard, Varda and Turner lend the imminent disappearance of their own physical beings to an authorial decease that is at once metaphorical and biographical, Welles adopts a humorous tone to challenge authorial uniqueness, authority and control – the loss of which he had actually experienced in ways that, unlike with the other three, have been documented and made public. Welles furthermore replaces the access to the artist’s soul with a strong sense of presence, which like in JLG/JLG and Beaches is physical, but in Perestroika is more strongly asserted through the author’s voice. Silverman’s statement that JLG/JLG represents authorial death as an ongoing process69 applies to all of the films studied here. Cinematic presence, again to evoke Sobchack’s phenomenology, lies in the medium’s production of an ‘animated presentation of representation’ through the audiovisual display of ‘the subjective temporality of memory, desire, and mood’.70 The performative, we have seen, is partly defined by the exposure of process. Through the performance of authorship, the studied directors might move towards divestiture, shielding their subjectivities, but they at the same time figure in their films, using not so much the expression of interiority as their physical presence to assert themselves as authors – for what is the staging of one’s disappearance if not the reminder of one’s existence?

70

3

The Author in the World: Trance, Presence and Documentary Filmmaking

Irrespective of how much emphasis documentarians may place on the tenuous line separating the real from their filmic renditions of it, the documentary mode inevitably addresses the tension between subjectivity and objectivity. The presence of an authorial point of view is thus a sensitive question in documentaries – something to be either downplayed or made explicit, even if only for the sake of honestly admitting to the limitations of film’s ability to reveal (rather than forge) a reality, not to mention the deeper metaphysical question of whether it is at all possible to speak of an objective reality. This contentious place of the authorial voice in documentaries adds a new dimension to the general question of cinematic authorship – in the realm of fiction, the human being behind the work is usually sought after, whereas in documentaries we often interrogate whether the author’s perspective should not, instead, be minimised or relativised. Now that hybrids such as docudramas and mockumentaries have been easily assimilated by audiences, that the porous boundaries separating reality from artifice have become a trope even in admittedly fantastic genres (as in mock found-footage horror films such as The Blair Witch Project, [Rec] or the Paranormal Activity movies), the quest for objectivity, when not openly dismissed, has been put under serious scrutiny. Not only has the distinction between the world ‘revealed’ and the world shaped by the director’s perspective become more 71

performing authorship

tenuous; the very possibility of documenting the real, or what reality the documentary can possibly access, is in many cases precisely what the film investigates. The very movement to narrativise – to establish causal connections between events, forge linearity or create a chain of associations for comparison and analogy – impinges an element of fiction on the documentary, as Hayden White famously discussed in relation to historiographic practices in Metahistory. In her analysis of the factual and the nonfactual in documentaries, Elizabeth Cowie traces the genealogy of ‘fiction’ to note that the term does not simply denote imagined rather than actual events; it also denotes a mode of telling. From the eighteenth century on, Cowie tells us, fiction came to define a genre, a body of works different from the ‘romance’, ‘in that they were, in the words of the nineteenth-century critic Edmund Gosse, “a sustained story which is, indeed, not historically true, but might very easily be so,” involving as a genre the analysis and criticism of contemporary life’.1 Fiction came to designate the organisation, narrativisation and imagination of the real, and in addition nonfactual events that nonetheless resemble real life – in Cowie’s terms, ‘a hybrid of the nonreal and the real, as an imagining of the actual’.2 To produce a discourse about something is indeed either to construct or to reconstruct it; any discourse about a purported reality carries with it an element of fiction. The question of self-expression in documentaries carries all the tensions that permeate this filmic modality – those between subjectivity and objectivity, partiality and impartiality, constructed and faithful realities, fiction and truth. The films analysed in this chapter contemplate these binaries while offering a meditation on the relationship between directors and the worlds they film, both in essayistic and straightforwardly documentary fashion. Here performing authorship is discussed not exclusively as the negotiation between the directors’ subjectivity and the supposedly objective world they depict, but also in terms of the author’s role as catalyst triggering events and reactions on the filmed individuals. The interactive mode, so termed by Bill Nichols,3 will hence be my object of study, with a focus on the works of Jean Rouch, father figure of the complicated concept of cinéma-vérité, and Eduardo Coutinho, a Brazilian filmmaker who offers a different approach to the very idea of an ‘other’ that is so central in Rouch’s studies of African 72

the author in the world: trance, presence and documentary filmmaking

communities. Both directors operate in a documentary style that, in Erik Barnouw’s account, precipitates events, rather than wait for them to take place in front of the camera.4 Most importantly, these directors’ different yet complementary takes on documentary filmmaking allow for the investigation of an under-explored authorial function: that of giving voice, or listening to, the other.5 The conception of otherness obviously defines the strategies of both Rouch and Coutinho, and consequently these directors’ understanding of their roles as documentarians. Rouch’s lasting contribution to both documentary and fiction films lies precisely in the awareness of the transformations that filmmakers and their cameras bring about to the reality they shoot, as well as in the understanding that the directors are equally transformed by this reality. Also important for Rouch was to register the impact that the completed film would in turn have on the represented community. The French ethnographer’s methodology involved the screening of the shot footage to the filmed subjects, for different purposes and to different effects: to compose the soundtrack, as in the voicing of lines and commentaries by actors/subjects in Moi, un noir (1958), The Human Pyramid (1961) and Jaguar (1967), or to simply register the subjects’ reactions to their own ‘performances’, as in The Human Pyramid and Chronicle of a Summer (1961). For that matter, while Chronicle originated the term cinéma-vérité, coined by sociologist and co-director Edgar Morin, Rouch, in fact, preferred ‘direct cinema’, which in the American tradition came to define quite the opposite methodology – the capturing of reality in the making in a non-interfering, fly-on-the-wall style. For Rouch, on the contrary, cinéma direct translated the catalytic role of the director; in Steven Feld’s words, Rouch was aware that the ethnographer ‘stimulates, modifies, accelerates, catalyses, opens a window’, and that ‘people respond by revealing themselves, and meanings emerge in that revelation.’6 Conceived as ‘a cinema that records directly in the field, not the studio, words and gestures through the use of synchronous camera and tape recorder that is lightweight and flexible to handle’7 – characteristics it clearly shares with the American movement of the late 1950s – Rouch’s cinéma direct nonetheless highlighted, rather than effaced, the presence of the film author. Meaning, for Rouch, could only spring from the collision between the director and the real. The 73

performing authorship

truth that he sought was not a positivist conception of a reality independent of the camera, but the truth emerging from the encounter between the real and the apparatus. In this lies the similarity between Rouch and Coutinho: what Coutinho’s films document is primarily the impact of the filmmaker on the subject’s behaviour, which elicits a performance, the product of what Ismail Xavier calls the ‘camera effect’.8 This approach to filmmaking as the production rather than the reproduction of the real corresponds in part to what Lúcia Nagib defines as the ethics of realism. Nagib’s take somehow describes the performances of both Rouch and Coutinho; speaking of directors whose faith in the ‘profilmic phenomenon’ reveals a commitment to ‘the truth of the unpredictable event’,9 she states that: Theirs is an eminently physical, therefore expositional and exhibitionist cinema, which rejects a priori truths in order to make room for risk, chance, the historical contingent and the unpredictable real, regardless of whether they are popular or art, fiction or documentary, narrative or avant-garde films.10

Rouch and Coutinho are equally interested in the performances of both the documentarian and the filmed subjects. Yet, though Coutinho’s debt to Rouch’s cinema is unquestionable, it is rather the different contexts that produced their works and the diverse ways in which these directors catalyse events and reactions that illuminate the notion of performing authorship in documentaries. Firstly, the most debated productions by Rouch (who passed away in 2004) were made from the 1950s through the 1970s, while Coutinho’s most significant documentaries were produced from 1999 to the present – with the exception of Twenty Years Later: A Man Labeled to Die (1984),11 certainly his most well-known film outside Brazil. Coutinho has thus benefited from certain developments in ethnographic and anthropological studies (i.e. the relationship between filmmaker and subjects) that owe much to Rouch, even if his approach also differs from that of his French counterpart. Secondly, with a few exceptions, Rouch’s career was more prominently devoted to the study of foreign (African) communities, whereas Coutinho makes films that are exclusively about his Brazilian compatriots. Thirdly, Rouch constantly performed voice-over narrations 74

the author in the world: trance, presence and documentary filmmaking

in his films, while Coutinho avoids this device (except for Twenty Years Later, which makes profuse use of it, as do some of his institutional videos from the eighties and nineties). Fourthly, Rouch did not appear in all of his works, and when he did he frequently functioned as a group therapist, whereas Coutinho features in all of his documentaries, acting as an interviewer (it is worth noting that the appearances of both Rouch and Coutinho constitute examples of ‘showing doing’, to use Schechner’s phrase).12 Finally, and most importantly, Rouch presents himself as a self-expressing ethnographer (theorising even on the ‘ethnography in the first person’), offering theories and conclusions about the filmed communities, however self-reflexively, while Coutinho systematically avoids theoretical elaborations, summaries and most of all diagnoses. Performing authorship, in this chapter’s case studies, involves the directors’ physical interaction with the world that surrounds them, a sense of their corporeal presence and the extent to which this presence shapes the realities they film.

The authorial imprints of Jean Rouch As with the essay films discussed in Chapter Two, it is through the emphasis on the director’s body that the documentaries here analysed engender an authorial presence. In the case of Rouch, the author’s presence may dominate the soundtrack in voice-over narrations, extend to the camera when he is the one handling it and be registered in the image – the director as an ‘actor’ instigating behaviours through questions or the proposition of artificial (or semi-artificial) situations. Rouch’s combinations of analysis and lyricism, disembodied voice-over narrations and on-screen presence, the interpretation of the documented world and the staging of his interference within this world, define him as at once scientist and poet,13 master of ceremonies and actor, mediator and catalyst. As a general rule, much like Godard in Two or Three Things I Know about Her, Rouch is also always other to the world and subjects he films – a foreign body, a noise, an interference, an element of disruption, even if one that hopes to illuminate, understand and harmonise his world, background and perspective with those of the subjects he investigates, sometimes longing to become one with them. 75

performing authorship

As stated earlier, the real object of Rouch’s documentaries is the encounter between the director and the world he films – thus the centrality of his performance, either in the more traditional role of mediator or as the trigger for the actions that develop in front of the camera. If an element of truth is to transpire from a film by Rouch, this should happen only upon the acknowledgement of the inevitably self-expressive quality of his authorial performance. Even when producing a supposedly ‘scientific’ account, Rouch tends to highlight, rather than restrain, his authorial voice; and it is in the exposition of the documentary’s project, which the director shares with both his subjects and his audience, that his voice is more clearly heard. It is actually the degree to which Rouch privileges the filmed subjects over his own processes that aligns his works with the documentary rather than the essay film – modes that, as we have seen, are separated by a very thin line. For that matter, Rouch’s combination of ethnographic interest and lyrical self-expression makes it difficult to fix him on either side of the equation. The coexistence, in Rouch’s cinema, of the scientific and the poetic, of analysis and performance, and of the director as mediator and the director as catalyst is nowhere more evident than in the comparison between two of his films about possession ceremonies – namely Les maîtres fous (1955), about the ‘incarnation’ of colonial masters by Hauka sect members living in Ghana, and Tourou et Bitti (1972), which documents ten minutes of a crop-protection ritual in Niger. The ceremonies depicted in both films are framed by explanatory titles and voice-over narrations preparing the viewers for what they are about to see. But as Rouch subsequently remarked, the tone of his films differs as the director moves from ‘an impersonal ethnographic narration that tries to explain the ritual’ in Les maîtres fous to a discourse inflected by a ‘sort of trance’, ‘the creative state’ that prevails in Tourou, shot almost twenty years later, and where Rouch, in his words, ‘follow[s] very closely the person who was about to be initiated.’14 The opening of Les maîtres fous sets the ground for the director’s ‘thesis’ (discussed later) and warns the audience about the ‘violence’ and ‘cruelty’ of the filmed ceremony, explaining also its historical context and religious meaning. We learn that the ritual was performed by men moving from rural areas to big cities (this one taking place in Accra, Ghana) and that it consisted 76

the author in the world: trance, presence and documentary filmmaking

of the enactment of the relations between their colonial masters. Similarly, Rouch’s narration in Tourou et Bitti situates the ritual in time (15 March 1971) and space (Niger) – but where the introduction to Maîtres is primarily expository, the opening of Tourou et Bitti sets the director’s project as personal, focusing as much on the context of the shoot (the fourth day of the ceremony) as on Rouch’s own desire to record the event in real time. A ten-minute-long, handheld sequence shot follows – and so does a possession trance. Les maîtres fous and Tourou et Bitti are exemplary of Rouch’s combination of the roles of mediator and catalyst. In addition to situating and explaining the rituals, the director’s narration translates between the filmed cultures and the viewers, whom he knows are likely to share his own background. This awareness is betrayed in Rouch’s constant use of the first-person plural – a common rhetorical tool, but one presupposing a specific audience nonetheless. Les maîtres fous opens with the statement of the director’s thesis, which is to claim that the violence of the ritual is a ‘reflex of our civilisation’, and closes saying that for the Africans violence works as a ‘remedy’ that ‘we still do not know’. As the events unfold Rouch explains the actions performed by the ceremony participants – from the sacrifice of a dog to the theatrical interchanges between the possessed subjects, who behave as actors playing characters on stage. The director goes so far as to describe what goes on in the image (saying, for example, that one of the possessed men greets the others as we see this action on the screen) and actually to reproduce the conversations between the ritual participants in both films – sometimes voicing their lines (often as a way of translating them into French), sometimes summarising them through the use of the indirect speech (‘then he asks for fire’). Instead of downplaying or disguising his mediation in order to produce, in Rouch’s words, a ‘scientific exposition’,15 his voice-over narration gives open access to the author’s meditations. Images of the ritual members going back to their everyday jobs in Les maîtres fous, for instance, are played to Rouch’s voice-over asking, When seeing these smiles, when learning that these men might be the best employees of the waterworks crew, when comparing these faces with the horrible ones of yesterday, we can’t help asking ourselves 77

performing authorship

if these African people do not know some remedies allowing them not to be abnormal, but to be perfectly integrated in their environment – some remedies that we still do not know.

Rouch, after all, openly admits that if he takes ‘the camera among mankind’ it is to satisfy his own needs. ‘Film,’ he goes on to say, ‘is the only means I have to show someone else how I see him.’ This use of film to communicate with the other – ‘my first public is the other, those whom I’ve filmed’16 – imprints a self-expressive element on the documentaries, which are turned into personal letters from the director to the communities he studies. Objectivity, in turn, may actually preclude rather than grant access to the filmed reality; Rouch suggests that the supposedly descriptive, expositional and neutral tone of the traditional voice-over narration does not clarify images, but ‘obscures them, masking them until it finally substitutes itself for them. And so the film ceases to be a film and becomes a lecture, a demonstration.’17 The primary purpose of film, as we can infer from Rouch’s statements, is therefore to allow the reality to speak, rather than imprison it in a predetermined theoretical grid. However, this reality can only emerge through its encounter with the director’s worldview. Rouch’s struggle is not to avoid mediation altogether, but to find the right kind – one defined by subjective self-expression rather than scientific analysis. The encounter between author and real is again more important than each of these terms taken in isolation. It follows that what gives legitimacy to documentaries, for Rouch, is their commitment to revealing the worlds their directors chose to investigate; which in turn require the acknowledgement of the filmmaker’s mediation. Rouch in fact stated that he preferred to voice for himself the narrations of foreign versions of his films, even if ‘in bad English’, to avoid the remoteness that in his view resulted from the reciting of his thoughts by actors not involved in the shoot.18 It is thus both the presence in the act of filming and the openly self-expressive quality of this mediation that grants an element of ‘truth’ to the documentary. In that scenario the director acts as a guide to the viewer – and to be sure, a provocative one. For if on the one hand Rouch’s rhetoric betrays the dichotomy ‘us/other’ that opposes Western European to African culture, on the other this opposition paves the way to self-examination. 78

the author in the world: trance, presence and documentary filmmaking

Key to that process is Rouch’s theorisation of the director’s physical presence as an element that shapes, and indeed produces, the events he films – the notion of the filmmaker as catalyst. Rouch’s writings manifest the belief that the presence of the director (along with his camera) launches the possession trance. In ‘On the vicissitudes of the self: the possessed dancer, the magician, the sorcerer, the filmmaker, and the ethnographer’ (1973), the documentarian notes that the investigator who films a ritual performs an ‘active’, albeit often ‘involuntary’, role.19 Meditating on Tourou et Bitti, Rouch conjectures that ‘the shooting itself was what unlatched and sped up the possession process’ captured on film.20 Tourou started with an invitation by a Sorko fisherman, who asked the filmmaker to document the ritual for the protection of a crop. Rouch saw three days go by without any possessions. As he explains, on the fourth day he turned on his camera to record the music produced by the ceremonial drums (named Tourou and Bitti), and to his satisfaction the trance finally took place.21 Rouch’s experience while shooting Tourou supported his theory that the director’s physical presence exerts a strong impact on the community he studies. There is indeed a causal relationship between the filmmaker’s body and the world he films, which in Rouch’s cinema is further emphasised by the influence of Dziga Vertov – more exactly, of the utopian merging between man and technology envisioned by the Soviet director in the 1920s. As Rouch explains in ‘The camera and man’, Vertov’s theories and films inspired his own take on the physicality that underlies his conception of direct cinema, as shown by the following passage by the theorist of the ‘kino-eye’, quoted in the aforementioned essay: I am the cine-eye, I am the mechanical eye, I am the machine that shows you the world as only a machine can see it. From now on, I will be liberated from immobility. I am in perpetual movement. I draw near to things, I move myself away from them, I enter into them, I travel towards the snout of a racing horse. I move through crowds at top speed, I precede soldiers on attack, I take off with airplanes, I flip over on my back, I fall down and stand back up as bodies fall down and stand back up.22

79

performing authorship

In Rouch’s cinema, the merging between the director and the camera led to a series of compound verbs that describe his experiences as inextricable from the act of shooting: to film-see, film-hear, film-move, film-edit, film-think, film-observe.23 Rouch celebrates the light equipment that allows documentarians to get closer to the filmed subjects, for example, by physically approaching them with a handheld camera, rather than zooming in to them.24 The apparatus becomes the director’s ‘mechanical eye’ and ‘electronic ear’,25 and the filmmaker metamorphoses into the cinema itself. In turn, this convergence between the author and the camera embodies the aforementioned coexistence between the scientist and the poet. As Barbara Bruni notes, Rouch’s idea was to ‘unite the main characteristics of the camera and the human eye, objectivity and subjectivity respectively, and to find a new meaning in their relation.’26 The director thus becomes possessed by the apparatus, in what Rouch calls ciné-trance.27 Says Rouch, ‘it is due to this equipment and the new behaviour (which has nothing to do with the observable behaviour of the same person when he is not filming) that the filmmaker can throw himself into a ritual, integrate himself with it, and follow it step-by-step,’ in ‘a strange kind of choreography’.28 The ciné-trance is a ‘transformation’ that takes place when the director and his camera are in close proximity to the filmed subjects, with the filmmaker acting both as a ‘gymnast’ and as a ‘bullfighter in front of the bull’.29 This sense of the author’s physical presence is clearly experienced in the anthropomorphised movements of the handheld camera during the ten-minute sequence shot that composes the whole of Tourou et Bitti. It follows that Rouch articulates the synchronicity between the director and the filmed world suggested by Vertov (‘I precede soldiers on attack, I take off with airplanes’) in terms of the phenomenon of possession. In fact, Rouch’s metaphorical use of the concept of trance seems to take on several dimensions of the word’s meaning. Nagib reminds us that whereas in English ‘trance’ suggests mainly ‘a sleeplike state’ in which ‘one concentrates on one’s thoughts remaining oblivious of the world around’, in Portuguese, where ‘trance’ came to define film practices via the aesthetics of Cinema Novo director Glauber Rocha, it connotes also ‘struggle’, ‘fight’, ‘passage’ and ‘death’.30 Ivana Bentes, who drew attention to the ideas of ‘transition, 80

the author in the world: trance, presence and documentary filmmaking

passage, possession, the process of becoming’ suggested by ‘trance’, claims that for Rocha ‘to fall into a trance is to be in phase with an object or situation, to experience from inside’31 – ideas anticipated by Rouch’s take on the relationship between filmmaker and camera. In turn, Cowie associates the possession trance with the automatic writing of surrealists, which like ‘hypnosis and suggestion, opens the person to forces she is not self-consciously directing’.32 Rouch’s cinétrance in any case suggests the permeability between the film and the world, in a process in which the director relinquishes control, loses consciousness, lets himself be ‘possessed’ by the reality he films. In ‘Vicissitudes’ Rouch claims that his ‘“self” is altered in the same way as is the “self” of the possession dancers,’33 and, as mentioned before, that in Tourou et Bitti his own ciné-trance acted as catalyst for the Sorko possession. Rouch’s voice-over narrations and lyrical articulation of the merging of man and camera indicate that the director is as affected by the act of filming as his subjects – he reacts to as much as he catalyses the filmed events. Ciné-trance indeed leads to what the director termed ‘ethnodialogue’.34 Scenes of Rouch discussing his documentary project with subjects in The Human Pyramid and Chronicle of a Summer, for example, constitute the dramatic rendition of ‘shared anthropology’,35 which involves not only ethnodialogue, but also a collaborative practice including members of the studied cultures among the crew and, most importantly for our purposes, the principle of feedback, where the filmed subjects comment on the shot images.36 Here Rouch acknowledges his debt to Robert Flaherty’s pioneering use of ‘participant observation’ when screening the footage of Nanook of the North (1922) to the documentary’s title character.37 Flaherty’s influence is felt also in Rouch’s understanding of the ways in which artifice can extract reality from the filmed world – as Feld points out, ‘Flaherty was able to teach Nanook that in order to make a film, actions could not take place as they normally do,’38 soliciting ‘Nanook’s help to get people to enact themselves’, in a practice that Rouch identified as the ‘“staging” of reality’.39 Rouch, as we know, went further, proposing fabricated situations that would reveal a certain aspect of reality to the subjects of The Human Pyramid and, to a lesser extent, Chronicle of a Summer (among others). 81

performing authorship

Figure 3.1 The Human Pyramid: Jean Rouch explains the rules of the game to a group of teenagers.

Self-analysis and temporal splits The Human Pyramid and Chronicle of a Summer, shot in the same period, constitute examples of shared anthropology involving a mixed group of European and African subjects – respectively, lycée students in Abidjan and a varied group of young adults in Paris. As usual, Rouch opens the films with a statement about his goals and methodology. The Human Pyramid’s introductory titles describe it as ‘an experiment the author provoked among a group of white and black teenagers’, explaining that, ‘Once the project started, the author simply filmed it.’ Some of the film’s first scenes display Rouch in separate conversations with groups of French and African teenagers (3.1), proposing a fictional situation: the arrival of a lycée French girl recently relocated to the Ivory Coast and her desire to mingle with her African classmates. This premise then leads to the teenagers’ free improvisations. While keeping their first names, they take up fictional roles – some being assigned the mission of acting like racists, thus constituting necessary ‘victims’ to the director, as we see Rouch explaining to the European youths. Their African counterparts are likewise split into groups of sceptics about and believers in the possibility of friendship between what the film refers to as ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’. The improvised narrative involves interracial relations, but also romance and the tragic 82

the author in the world: trance, presence and documentary filmmaking

and abrupt disappearance (probably from drowning) of Alain, one of the French students. Chronicle proceeds similarly – in voice-over, Rouch states that the film features not actors, but men and women who ‘devoted that moment of their existence to a new experience of cinéma-vérité’. The discussion of the project with co-director Edgar Morin at the opening and closing of the film frames the events and becomes an instance of shared anthropology, as the questioning of the directors’ own methodologies includes Rouch and Morin among the objects of investigation. Rouch’s shared anthropology, we should remember, involves also giving the documentary’s subjects a voice both in the film’s intellectual project and in the production process. Accordingly, the first conversation with Morin includes Holocaust survivor Marceline discussing Rouch’s signature concern: the impact that the camera will have on her attitude – which in this case translates into the question of whether she will feel sufficiently at ease to speak frankly. Further involving the subject in the process, Rouch and Morin ask Marceline to conduct interviews for them. Alongside Nadine, who had featured as one of the protagonists in The Human Pyramid, Marceline follows a cameraman to the streets in order to question Parisians on the topic of happiness. Shared anthropology in Chronicle works also through the inversion of roles, when the documentary takes us on an anthropological study of St Tropez through the eyes of Landry, an Ivory Coast student discovering the life and costumes of France. Chronicle’s subjects – the population of Paris – are both closer to the investigators and more varied than the group of teenagers scrutinised in The Human Pyramid, as they include students, workers, employees and artists. Before tackling the issue of happiness, Rouch and Morin ask this heterogeneous group how they get on with their lives. The shift to the issue of happiness then produces a move from the concreteness of everyday life to the abstraction of metaphysics, even if for the majority happiness is defined in terms of work and daily routines. Halfway into the film Rouch and Morin propose a discussion about the Algerian war and the Congo to different groups; likewise, politics and experiences of World War II enter the picture when, in a rather intimidating attitude that Rouch later came to regret,40 he challenges 83

performing authorship

Figure 3.2 Chronicle of a Summer: Morin (left) and Rouch (right) in the feedback session after the screening of the shot material to the documentary subjects.

Landry into explaining the concentration-camp number tattooed on Marceline’s arm, unmasking the Ivorian’s relative lack of awareness about the Holocaust. Like The Human Pyramid and, as we will see, Moi, un noir and Jaguar, Chronicle shows some of Rouch’s subjects enacting situations – for example, in scenes depicting Renault factory worker Angelo waking up, going back home, exercising in his backyard, going to bed; secretary Marilou typing in her office or getting dressed after spending the night with a man; and the infamous sequence shot following Marceline to the Parisian boulevards and then the Halles neighbourhood to the sound of her interior monologue about survival, in which she addresses her dead father. But, unlike the other films mentioned, Chronicle is constituted mainly of a series of interviews intercalated with scenes showing Rouch and Morin interacting with their subjects through questions and self-reflexive comments on the process – the most significant of which depicts the feedback they receive after the screening held for the documentary figures (3.2). 84

the author in the world: trance, presence and documentary filmmaking

Not surprisingly, the subjects’ observations about the footage often revolve around the question of authenticity – Angelo’s eloquence and the intimate confessions of Marceline and Marilou constituting the main objects of contention. As Morin sums up to Rouch in the final conversation between the two (3.3, 3.4), the subjects either disapprove of their fellows’ supposed exhibitionism or accuse them of camouflaging themselves; the interviewees are equally criticised for being too sincere and not sincere enough. Marceline actually admits to her own ‘performance’ in her interior monologue, even if in a dialogue between the two directors Rouch claims that he and Morin knew ‘she was not acting’. The documentary thus prompts the subjects to reinterpret their own behaviours in a new light – in The Human Pyramid’s feedback scene, Rouch, in voice-over, notes that the film (shot soon before Chronicle) becomes an opportunity for the subjects to discover ‘an unknown image’ of themselves – and the same could be said of his Parisian project. At any rate, when the subjects of both The Human Pyramid and Chronicle of a Summer comment on their own images and behaviours they make a contribution to what is also a form of authorial self-examination – their observations, after all, turn into a tool for the authors’ reflections on their own documentary practices. For Rouch, however, the reality captured in his films cannot be defined in terms of the authenticity of a subject’s discourse or behaviour. As we have seen, if the director instigates the filmed subjects to act out events or perform rituals it is because he believes that the masks of a fictional character or an invoked spirit allow for the revelation of an aspect of the subjects’ lives or beliefs. The enacting of fictional versions of themselves by young Nigerians immigrating to the Ivory Coast in Moi, un noir and to Ghana in Jaguar, for instance, say as much about these subjects’ experiences as a more traditional interview format would. Edward G. Robinson’s fantasies about being a boxer in Moi, un noir, the disillusionment of Illo, Damouré and Lam in Jaguar and Nadine’s seductive powers in The Human Pyramid prove as relevant to the films’ themes as the difficulties faced by the rural populations of Africa in the big city or the young woman’s take on interracial relationships. The proposed games attests to Cowie’s assertion that, for Rouch,

85

Figures 3.3, 3.4 Chronicle of a Summer: Rouch and Morin discuss the received feedback as they stroll through the Musée de l’Homme.

the author in the world: trance, presence and documentary filmmaking

thinking is an act of progressive imagining in relation to observed phenomena (the documentary, whether written or filmed) that is not simply and conventionally logical. It is a kind of thinking that is of the same order as poetry in making leaps of association.41

The resort to artifice in Rouch’s films is not, however, determined only by a belief in fiction’s revelatory potential. The fictional mask in Moi, un noir, Jaguar and The Human Pyramid grants the actors the power of analysis, thereby configuring another means of achieving the ideal of shared anthropology – rather than themselves, it is film characters that they comment upon. Yet fiction alone would not accomplish this project, whose realisation owes much to the temporal gap between visual and aural material resulting from the use of post-synchronous sound in Moi, un noir, Jaguar and parts of The Human Pyramid – a gap that allows for a critical distantiation between the performance and the performer. Brecht, the inevitable reference when it comes to alienating strategies, wished precisely to endow actors with the ability to step aside from their characters, placing their parts in a specific moment in history, thereby creating the temporal interval that is necessary for analysis. Speaking about how alienation should transform the audience’s experience in ‘Theater for pleasure or theater for instruction’, Brecht proposed the substitution of the relation defined by the expression ‘I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh’ by one to be articulated in the opposite way: ‘I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh.’42 This inversion could also be applied to actors, who for Brecht should maintain an analytical distance from their characters, instead of simply disappearing behind them; a distance these films by Rouch achieve when subjects, stepping out of character, introduce their parts in voiceover, even addressing the audience as ‘Mesdames’ and ‘Messieurs’ in Moi, un noir. Further dramatising the actor’s alienation from character is the gap between image and sound – a gap that is both temporal, for voices are added in post-production, and perceptual, when the sound volume does not match the actor’s distance from the camera. Both in Moi, un noir and in passages from The Human Pyramid the voices are pushed to the foreground, radically isolated from noise, as if existing in a space of their own – in a space that is different from that of the 87

performing authorship

diegetic images. Moreover, the lack of synchronicity between the lips and the voices indicates that the actors either ‘rewrite’ or subsequently improvise some of their lines, replacing the original dialogue with one generated in post-production, when not simply commenting on or explaining the actions we see on the screen. When Robinson (Moi, un noir) clarifies that he goes to a dance club not to dance, but to practise boxing, or Denise and Nadine (The Human Pyramid) provide voice-over commentary on the actions performed by the girls and their classmates, they realise Brecht’s project to grant authority to the actors’ voices, endowing them with authorial agency; they again corroborate Rouch’s promotion of shared anthropology – where the investigator both lends his project to scrutiny and shares the power of analysis with the subjects of his investigation. Here performing authorship involves not just the exposition of the author’s struggle to communicate, but also Rouch’s interaction with those who constitute both the origin of, and partly the vehicle for his ideas. Rouch may well function as a researcher presenting the results of his experiments with non-professional actors or documentary subjects, but when he lends them the space either to rewrite or to comment on their own performances (and by extension on Rouch’s project), he stages authorship as dialogue.

The author’s silence and the centrality of speech Eduardo Coutinho’s documentaries are equally concerned with the impact of the director’s presence on the filmed reality; like Rouch, the Brazilian filmmaker functions as both mediator and catalyst. But where Rouch ‘shares’ anthropological impulses, Coutinho shuns analysis altogether. While Rouch’s interferences take different forms (his handling of the camera, voice-over narrations and on-screen appearances), Coutinho’s are for the most part confined to the profilmic, where he is seen (and mostly heard) interviewing his subjects. What is more, Coutinho’s interactions with the documentaries’ subjects tend to be limited to questions that are both open and very simple in nature, enquiring about the interviewees’ origins, work, civil status, children. The simplicity of the questions endows them with a repetitive quality that evokes the restored or twice-behaved behaviours discussed 88

the author in the world: trance, presence and documentary filmmaking

by Schechner, as explained in Chapter One – indeed the questions’ intended mundaneness suggests that the uniqueness of the interview must lie with the documentary subject, not maker. Coutinho’s style is in addition more contained than that of his French counterpart – whereas Rouch allows for enactments and role play, adorned by beautifully composed frames, vivid colours and spontaneous camera movements, the majority of Coutinho’s documentaries are structured as talking heads, with direct sound and a predominance of straight-on medium close-ups, in spite of the occasional resort to handheld cameras and the dramatic use of low angles and extreme close-ups. We could even say that Coutinho’s minimalist style radicalises Rouch’s project – where the French director believes he abdicates from directorial authority by opening his projects to scrutiny, Coutinho completely renounces the authorial ‘right’ to self-expression, his silence having the effect of also divesting the films of the need to generate conclusions. Notwithstanding his stylistic sobriety and rigorous avoidance of ‘representational’ scenes (more on this later), Coutinho entrusts fiction with the same revelatory potential that Rouch explored through the artificial situations proposed to subjects in Moi, un noir, Jaguar and The Human Pyramid. Finally, the Brazilian director investigates the shaping of the real by the author with the same intensity seen in Rouch’s trance-inducing presence in Tourou et Bitti. Though Coutinho may well fashion himself as self-effacing, he nevertheless stresses the transformative power of his presence, performing authorship as the catalyst that provokes a chemical reaction. The director for example foregoes attempts to erase his privileged socio-economic status – on the contrary, Coutinho makes strategic use of it in order to remain foreign, other to the universe he explores. It is important to point out that, though the films by Coutinho that are significant to this study were for the most part produced between the turn of the millennium and the present (The Mighty Spirit, the first of a series of regularly released documentaries, is from 1999), he started making films in the 1960s, initially as a screenwriter and then as a director of fictional narratives. Coutinho’s cinematic trajectory was nonetheless interrupted with the halting, as a result of the 1964 military coup d’état, of Cabra Marcado para Morrer, a fictional reconstitution of the events that led to the assassination of peasant 89

performing authorship

leader João Pedro Teixeira in the state of Paraíba, Brazil. Cabra was shot in Italian-neorealism style, with real peasants as actors (including Teixeira’s widow), on location (though in Galiléia rather than Sapé, where the real event took place) and with a political verve. Coutinho then switched to television, working for the Globo Repórter series from 1976 to 1980, until the idea to make a documentary tracking Cabra’s confiscated footage and the destinies of both the peasants involved and Teixeira’s children brought the director back to the cinema. The resulting documentary, released in 1984 and appropriately titled Twenty Years Later in its English version, did not, however, mark a cinematic comeback, being instead followed by a long interval during which Coutinho produced and directed institutional videos. The style that has prevailed in Coutinho’s documentaries from 1999 to the present is therefore the product of diverse experiences in audiovisual media – and the director indeed acknowledges his films’ debt to his work in both television- and video-making. It was while shooting medium-length documentaries for Globo Repórter that Coutinho claims to have learned, for example, how to ‘talk to people’, to ‘shoot as [one] arrives [on location], to shoot under any circumstances’.43 Scenes of the crew and the director arriving at specific locations in films like Twenty Years Later, Santa Marta: Two Weeks in the Slums (1987), The Mighty Spirit, Babilônia 2000 (2001), Edifício Master (2002), Peões (2004) and O Fim e o Princípio (2005) actually do characterise Coutinho as a reporter of sorts climbing the hills of Rio de Janeiro slums (globally known as favelas) and knocking at people’s doors. But most importantly, the subjects’ reactions to the crew’s arrival foreground the social, economic and cultural gap between the director and his subjects – most of whom, aware of this gap, address him as ‘sir’. This imbalance often takes centre stage.44 Scavengers (1992), which is about a garbage dump in São Gonçalo (Rio de Janeiro), uses a boy’s cynical remark on the director’s aims (‘What do you gain from that?’) and a woman’s weariness of his presence (‘Go ahead and film, be my guest’) to comment on Coutinho’s interest in the lives of garbage collectors – suggesting it is typical of the intellectual upper class. In Babilônia 2000 a very young boy jumps in when his grandfather is asked about whether he likes the favela, screaming, ‘It is bad, we run out of water every day,’ knowing that these sorts of complaints are expected, and 90

the author in the world: trance, presence and documentary filmmaking

taking advantage of the rare opportunity to denounce their precarious conditions. The highlighting of the economic gap posits director and crew as ‘actors’ in the cultural mechanisms launched by their ‘invasion’, with camera in hand, of a social space they do not belong to. Coutinho’s presence in the image thus draws attention to class contrasts. It is through his interactions with the subjects that their awareness of the media’s desire to reveal and denounce the country’s miseries becomes apparent; it is from their reactions to Coutinho’s presence that we learn how conscious these subjects are of their roles as exotic, as other. Coutinho’s productive use both of these media-savvy comments and of the socio-economic gap separating director and subject illustrates what Paul Willemen, discussing Bakhtin’s modes of interpretation, defined as ‘creative understanding’ – the kind that ‘does not renounce itself, its own place and time, its own culture.’45 Bakhtin refutes the idea that ‘to better understand a foreign culture, one must enter into it, forgetting one’s own, and view the world through the eyes of this culture,’ a type of identification he termed ‘ventriloquist’. The creative understanding he advocates, on the contrary, ‘forgets nothing’, granting the investigator a desirable ‘outsideness’ that in the case of documentaries stresses the interaction between filmmaker and subject.46 It is interesting that while Rouch’s ciné-trance may point towards the ‘possession’ of the researcher by its subject, the uncanny quality of trance at the same time stresses their existence as separate entities. And while in Rouch’s works elements such as the rhetorical use of the first-person plural ‘we’, ‘translations’ of rituals and considerations about what Westerners could learn from Africans place the reflection on otherness in the hands of the filmmaker, Coutinho’s films leave the voicing of the gap to the subject, as in the aforementioned examples. As we have seen in the study of The Human Pyramid and Chronicle of a Summer, Rouch mixes the views of his subjects with those of the director, who nonetheless has the last word, articulated either in voice-over or to the camera (as in the dialogue with Morin that closes Chronicle). Coutinho, on the other hand, does not offer a verbal meditation on the gap, exposing it in dramatic mode, through the subject’s reactions to their encounter with the director, the crew and the camera. 91

performing authorship

The Mighty Spirit, which like Les maîtres fous and Tourou et Bitti focuses on religion, makes for an interesting comparison between the different strategies deployed by Rouch and Coutinho in their projects both to access the other and to position themselves as catalysts. A close look at this film illuminates also the directors’ respective understandings that their documentaries’ main interest lies in the interactions between crew and subjects. Structured as a series of talking-head testimonies, The Mighty Spirit accounts for the religious and mystical experiences of the residents of Vila Parque da Cidade, a Rio de Janeiro favela. The documentary draws attention to the ease with which people embrace more than one religion, as Carlos Alberto Mattos has noted.47 Unlike Rouch’s films on possession rituals, The Mighty Spirit relies almost exclusively on interviews, with a few exceptions that I address below. The most striking difference between the two directors, however, is that while Rouch openly meditated on the African rituals portrayed, Coutinho simply abstains from verbal commentary. As far as selfinscription is concerned, Coutinho’s mode of performing authorship is usually restricted to his interactions with the subjects. When asked by the director about their beliefs, most of The Mighty Spirit’s subjects declare themselves to be primarily Catholic, in addition to having affiliations with the Spiritism of Allan Kardec, Evangelism, Candomblé or Umbanda. A predominantly Catholic country, Brazil displays complex examples of religious syncretism. It is not uncommon to find Catholics who are regulars in the terreiros of the African Candomblé or of the more syncretic Umbanda (which combines African and indigenous Brazilian rituals and entities). The Catholic Church in Salvador, Bahia, allows for a typical Candomblé ceremony in one of its premises (Igreja do Bonfim), where the church’s stairs are ritualistically washed every year. The Mighty Spirit thus gathers a series of examples of the loose boundaries separating different faiths in Brazil. Alex, for example, tells Coutinho that the holy water used in his daughter’s initiation in Umbanda was kindly given to him by a Christian priest, who agreed to it because the baby had been appropriately baptised as a Catholic first. In addition to this religious heterodoxy, the documentary reveals the incorporation of spirituality into daily routines, to the point that, for Coutinho, The Mighty Spirit concerns mainly the concreteness 92

the author in the world: trance, presence and documentary filmmaking

of everyday life.48 The director’s standpoint is in tune with Glauber Rocha’s understanding that religion helps make sense of the unacceptable – Coutinho too sees religion as inevitable, rather than as the people’s opium. Speaking of The Mighty Spirit to newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, the director (who is admittedly not a religious man) stated that to see religion in Brazil as escapist is actually ‘naive’.49 Jean-Claude Bernardet had noted that ‘the relation between religion and alienation is, in Brazilian cinema, an invention of the 1960s,’50 something absent from the production that preceded that markedly political period, and which in the 1970s was reversed by the representation of Candomblé and Umbanda as forms of cultural resistance, as we can see in films like Iaô (Geraldo Sarno, 1974) and The Amulet of Ogum (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1975).51 Though avoiding direct commentary, The Mighty Spirit aligns itself with this approach to religion as both a legitimate worldview and a concrete aspect of everyday life – hence the naturalness with which the subjects describe trances, physical beatings performed by spiritual entities, conversations with the dead and past lives, all narrated as if they constituted more or less ordinary events. The predominance of the talking head endorses this casual approach to the extraordinary, as it dismisses both the dramatic appeal and the support of the illustrative image – even because no illustration can serve as proof in such circumstances. The film’s refusal to show signals the resistance to question the reality of the testimonies – as discussed earlier, Coutinho is concerned with the performance that results from the encounter between the subject and the camera, not with the accuracy of the stories that are told. The interviews, shot straight on, in medium close-ups or closeups, constitute what Coutinho calls ‘pure images’, which simply show a subject talking.52 These images are intercalated with insert shots of empty rooms or backyards, close-ups of statues of Umbanda and Candomblé deities, an Umbanda baptism, Pope John Paul II’s Mass in Rio de Janeiro (shown through a TV broadcast), shots of the favela landscape and the crew climbing the favela hills, a scene in a dance club and a long take of a subject’s bedroom. Consuelo Lins notes that, altogether, these ‘impure images’ amount to less than five minutes of film, out of a total of 80.53 Given that the Umbanda baptism was 93

performing authorship

shot by an amateur cameraman and that the Pope’s Mass appears on a woman’s television set, the only openly illustrative scene shot by Coutinho himself, as he points out in the interview to Mattos, is the depiction of a dancer (Carla) in a Copacabana club. The equivalent of what Rouch called the legitimate ‘staging of reality’,54 Carla’s dance number constitutes what Coutinho defined as a ‘transgression’ of his ‘rules’,55 which dictate that the documentary should rely mainly on interviews – the verbal account of experiences. The nightclub scene reveals also that what little authorial commentary there is in The Mighty Spirit lies rather in what the images show than in what the director says. However, though absent from the authorial discourse, words are central to Coutinho’s documentaries, which again rely almost exclusively on talking-head testimonies. The focus on orality actually turns the films into the mise en scène of what Bakhtin called ‘speech situations’, which account for the context and circumstances of the speech,56 and obviously include the director’s presence. Coutinho’s definition of the subject’s verbal testimony as the ‘pure image’ (which interestingly describes not the absence, but the total reliance on speech) also finds echo in Xavier’s discussion of the interview as the exclusive dramatic form in the director’s films. The interview constitutes the vehicle for what Cowie called the ‘selving’ of a subject, the emergence of ‘a “true” self […] from the performance’.57 As mentioned earlier, Coutinho shares with Rouch the scepticism towards the documentary’s ability to assess an objective reality independent of the act of filming. Like Rouch, Coutinho also believes in the fiction as a path for truth – as manifested in his relative lack of concern for the authenticity of the accounts relayed to him. On the contrary, he turns the film into a space for the subjects to imagine themselves as characters, something that is taken to extremes in Playing (2007), Moscou (2009) and As Canções (2011) – all of which use the theatrical stage as the space for the interview. Coutinho’s avoidance of shooting events, actions or re-enactments turns the interview into the subjects’ sole vehicle for imagining themselves as ‘characters’.58 This process of self-construction, Xavier notes, shows a tension between the interviewees’ conflicting desires: to be perceived as unique or special and yet to counter the stereotype of the social ‘other’ by presenting themselves as ‘normal’. On the one hand, 94

the author in the world: trance, presence and documentary filmmaking

the subjects try to appear interesting and original.59 In The Mighty Spirit, this desire can be detected in André’s account of his wife’s possession by the spirit of his dead mother, as well as in Carla’s description of beatings by incorporeal entities – events that belong to the domain of the extraordinary, and therefore set these interviewees apart (even if the tone of their speech, as well as their trust in the director, indicates that for these subjects the supernatural experiences are quite frequent and normal). On the other hand, says Xavier, the subjects also long for understanding, imagining themselves as ‘classical’ characters, aiming for universality rather than distinctiveness.60 Imbued in the idea of classical narratives is psychological consistency – the presence of a clear trajectory that ‘explains’ the character, rendering it accessible to audiences of all backgrounds; as when Carla or Vera describe how and why they decided to embark on specific religious practices. In the two instances, the subject’s performance, instigated by the ‘camera effect’, becomes a means for them to reinvent themselves as characters with both a real and an imaginary dimension. Coutinho, however, does not put editing at the service of linearity where it does not spontaneously occur – the only causality that interests him is the one establishing his presence as the detonator of behaviours, or performances, staged for the camera. The same applies to principles of narrative clarity and economy – Coutinho’s editing tends to dramatise, rather than efface, discontinuities or fragmentations in the subjects’ speeches. On the one hand Coutinho uses the long take to retain uncomfortable silences. When Thereza (The Mighty Spirit) and João Chapéu (Peões), for example, try to hold back their tears, real duration is turned into a device to enhance the drama. On the other hand, Coutinho’s jump cuts occasionally mimic and emphasise truncated sentences or eventual ellipses. While supposedly omitting chunks of the subject’s speech, these cuts at the same time transfer to the image the expressive discontinuity of some discourses. As Xavier puts it, the incorporation of the ‘accident’, introduced by the modernist fiction, allows for the ‘irruption of “something” (unconscious?) that reveals the subject’s truth’,61 which as Cowie reminds us bears an element of surrealist writing.62 In any case, the ‘accident’ captured in long takes results in an encounter that somehow accomplishes Bazin’s ontology, revealing the world in its spatiotemporal integrity; 95

performing authorship

but it also constitutes pure theatre.63 Indeed, the subjects’ speeches – their main tool for expressing and construing themselves – are in some instances complemented by sequences in which characters sing to the camera. These songs constitute the only open ‘act’ that Coutinho’s talking-head documentaries allow for; their recurrence, in turn, transforms them into the director’s signature. But singing is as much a discursive as a representational practice, staying in line with Coutinho’s project of avoiding the depiction of subjects engaged in activities other than the conversation with the director. The musical numbers in Santa Marta, Scavengers, The Mighty Spirit, Babilônia 2000, Edifício Master and As Canções (Portuguese for ‘the songs’, and consisting almost entirely of such acts) represent rare opportunities for the interviewees to express themselves through melodies that somehow tell their stories. For the most part these open acts respect the duration of the songs; they evoke, in addition, Deleuze’s description of the vérité depiction of rituals. For the French philosopher, one of the lessons of cinémavérité is that history would not be told: it would be revealed, and all the more so for being less shown; the only thing to be shown would be the way the attitudes of the body are coordinated in the ceremony, so as to reveal what did not allow itself to be shown.64

It follows that the emphasis on the body replaces the organisation of experience as a causally linked progression of events. Clearly, the songs turn into the mask that reveals as much as it disguises. Coutinho’s trust in artifice as a path for truth, for that matter, is signalled in the director’s declared influences, most of which work within the confines of fiction – he has told Mattos that the cinematic figures he has learned most from are Luis Buñuel, Erich von Stroheim, Fritz Lang, Roberto Rossellini, Jean Renoir, John Cassavetes, Jean-Marie Straub and Jean-Luc Godard.65 But unlike his ‘models’, Coutinho obviously does not ‘write’ his characters – he functions as a catalyst that launches self-writing processes in the documentaries’ subjects, delivered both through speech and songs.

96

the author in the world: trance, presence and documentary filmmaking

The theatre of interviews The convergence of the talking head and the theatrical finds its most productive articulation in Coutinho’s Playing, Moscou and As Canções. Moscou blends the staging of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters (1900) by the renowned theatre group Galpão with interviews with the actors; As Canções, similarly, mixes interviews with singing acts. But it is the complete absence of any representational enactments in Playing, the first of Coutinho’s ‘stage films’, that best encapsulates the director’s use of the interview as the exclusive dramatic form described by Xavier. Playing’s choice of an empty theatre as sole location (3.5) frees the subjects from designated social spaces like the favelas, specific neighbourhoods, countryside or cities, and therefore from the mission to represent a social group – something the earlier films also attempted to do, but through the focus on each of the individuals as unique, rather than as belonging to a category. Along with the lack of a thematic agenda (subjects were simply asked to tell stories), the designation of the stage as the space for the interview in Playing led to a kind of self-fashioning

Figure 3.5 Playing: The stage of an empty theatre constitutes the space of the interview, with the subjects sitting with their backs to the stalls.

97

performing authorship

that, though pertaining to the interviewees, calls for an analogy with performing authorship. The making of the film, which borders on the essayistic, involved actresses restaging interviews the director conducted with women who responded to an advert inviting people ‘with stories to tell’ to audition for a documentary – Playing actually opens with a news­paper clip showing the published note. The very idea of a documentary audition attests to the importance of performance in this film. Given that, unlike Coutinho’s other documentaries, Playing does not go to the subjects (instead asking the subjects to come to it), it is the individual, rather than their spatial location, that determines the director’s choices (3.6, 3.7). The resulting documentary combines the real interviews with the staged versions that followed, the latter of which include Coutinho literally performing, as the director asks questions in what is a fictional context, with actresses taking over someone else’s identity.66 The boundaries between real and fictional, however, are just as porous as in his other films, and the reality that prevails is that of the act of staging. The women we can identify as actresses sometimes modify the original testimonies, and other times step out of character to raise issues leading to a dialogue about process. This, in turn, opens way to narrations of the actresses’ own life experiences, all of which involve either the relationship between parents and children or the death of one of the parties – topics that prevail in the real interviews. As we can see, the aforementioned lack of a thematic agenda did not prevent the spontaneous generation of one. The real or fictional status of Playing’s accounts is not always evident; to put it another way, we are not always aware of whose experiences a specific individual voices. It is never clear whether the story being told belongs to the person who narrates it to the camera or to another who may in turn be temporarily, if not permanently, off-screen. When actress Fernanda Torres tells Coutinho about a Candomblé ritual of isolation and liberation undergone after a miscarriage, it is only at the very end of her narrative, after she describes being addressed as Nanda (the short form of her first name), that we understand the story is about her real self. It is true that Brazilian audiences can easily identify Torres as an actress, but the film’s structure, which alternates the images of famous actors like Andréa Beltrão and Marília Pêra with 98

the author in the world: trance, presence and documentary filmmaking

Figures 3.6, 3.7 Whereas in Edifício Master (left) Coutinho and his crew go to the subjects, in Playing (below) it is the subjects that go to the filmmakers.

the subjects they interpret, invites the viewer to question the ownership of the stories that are told – the actresses, we soon find out, voice both the testimonies given by other people and their own. The boundaries of identity thus become as tenuous as the ones separating the factual from the nonfactual; in the conversation that features in the audio commentary for the Brazilian DVD, Coutinho tells producer João Moreira Salles and journalist Carlos Alberto Mattos that Playing shows that ‘one person can appropriate herself from the story of another and be more truthful than the other.’67 These porous identities, in turn, evoke the possession trances of Rouch’s subjects and of Rouch himself. Cowie’s discussion of the Hauka ceremonies as a space where the ‘boundary of self and other is permeated as meaning and identity slip between’68 could very well apply to the ways in which real subjects and actors end up sharing the same stories in Playing. 99

performing authorship

Clarity about the ownership of specific experiences is nonetheless evident when the actresses tackle their own performances. Beltrão, for instance, explains how she gave a far too emotional rendition of Gisele’s account of the death of her baby boy, wishing that she could have avoided tears, just as the real Gisele had (3.8, 3.9). Pêra, on the other hand, offers a more contained performance than that of her subject, Sarita, whose dramatic testimony about motherhood was intended, so she tells us, as a message to her estranged daughter, with all of the eloquence required by such a cry for forgiveness. On the other hand, self-reflexivity is by no means the exclusive domain of professional actors; the same Sarita constantly comments on her own crying, if only as a way to apologise indirectly for it or make it stop, as when, laughing among tears, she says, ‘Oh, I have to stop crying. You’re laughing and I’m crying.’ (In the DVD commentary Coutinho claims not to have been laughing.) At any rate, the alternated cutting across real subject and actor in the interviews with Gisele and Beltrão, Sarita and Pêra and Aleta and Torres is, again, better understood as a strategy to challenge the borders of identity and of the distinction between reality and fiction than as a comparison between the interpretations of two individuals, even because this apparently ‘comparative’ structure does not define the film as a whole. Far from being schematic in form, Playing includes also testimonies by single individuals whose status is forever left unclear 100

the author in the world: trance, presence and documentary filmmaking

Figures 3.8, 3.9 Playing: Actress Andréa Beltrão (above) wipes her tears as she reproduces the testimony given by Gisele (left), who had not cried.

(two young actresses who appear to be telling their real life stories, a female rapper), and a nanny whose identity is revealed only at the end, when she turns to the camera to state, ‘That is what she said,’ thereby revealing herself as an actress interpreting a real subject whom we actually never see. Even more intriguing is the repeated testimony by two different women presented apart from each other about the loss of a teenage son assassinated in an armed robbery. Separated by six interviews with other women, this testimony leaves the audience in suspense about the subjects’ identities (the film, it should be said, includes also unknown actresses). Coutinho’s declared goal, however, was not to play with the real and fictional status of each of the interviews, but to address the fact that the documentary’s interest lies not with the accurate description of real events, but with a subject’s behaviour in the presence of the director and the camera. Playing’s blending of performers with real subjects places it alongside hybrid films like Jia Zhangke’s 24 City (2008), which includes actors among the real workers of a factory in Chengdu (China), and Clio Barnard’s The Arbor (2010), where actors lip-synch to the audio interviews of the real family and friends of British playwright Andrea 101

performing authorship

Dunbar, among many others. Whereas in Rouch’s post-synched films the past lies with the image, with the soundtrack subsequently signifying, analysing or commenting on the visual, The Arbor reverses this dynamic, placing the audio in the past, with the image track (the staging of the audio interviews) playing it out, giving it meaning, perhaps even analysing or reinventing the testimonies that we hear. The Arbor offers an audiovisual rendition of what in Playing actress Fernanda Torres claims to find difficult: the separation between the individual and her speech. Coutinho’s film indeed usurps individuals from their stories, giving these stories to others. These individuals, in turn, reveal themselves through the verbal articulation of an experience that was never their own. Rouch splits the subjects’ visual and aural existence in the film; in The Arbor and Playing the split is between the subjects and their stories. In the end, the importance of Playing for this discussion goes beyond the director as the catalyst of more or less genuine testimonies, or as the orchestrator of different sorts of performances; the film’s greatest contribution to my proposed approach resides in its dramatic rendition of the concept of performing authorship. The subjects in Playing are decentred, and they seize both the words and the life experiences of others; like in performing authorship the emphasis is not only on the story being told, but also on the act of telling. Earlier in this chapter I stated that, contrary to Rouch, who exposes his own perspectives, Coutinho wishes to evade self-expression altogether – he defers it to his subjects, functioning primarily as the detonator of other speeches. In an interview with Mattos, Coutinho explains that he prefers to film the different;69 in the audio commentary for Playing, a film whose exclusive focus is on women, the director reminds his interlocutors that he is only interested in filming those who are other to him. Coutinho’s documentaries actually benefit from the director’s otherness to the universe of the filmed subjects, as demonstrated in the questions posed to him in Scavengers and Babilônia 2000, where Coutinho’s social status becomes evident in the subjects’ perception of his interest in ‘poverty’. The same dynamic is found in Playing: when discussing her love for the animation Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton, Lee Unkrich, 2003), Sarita tells Coutinho, ‘You’re prejudiced, you don’t like Americans,’ presuming the director’s dismissal of the animation. In her voicing of 102

the author in the world: trance, presence and documentary filmmaking

Sarita’s discourse Pêra goes as far as to say, ‘You’re a bit of a communist,’ typically categorising the director as a left-leaning intellectual. Yet the focus on difference and the absence of voiced opinions and commentary, again, turn Coutinho into another manifestation of performing authorship – though apparently self-effacing, the emphasis on the transformative effect that his presence brings to the filmed reality transfers his authorial identity from the inner to the outer self. It is not what Coutinho says that characterises his screen presence – the director’s São Paulo accent and raspy, cigarette-smoker’s voice are arguably more distinguishable than the questions he actually asks. Coutinho’s mode of self-inscription unintentionally stresses the materiality of his body and voice – which allows for a corporeal, rather than abstract, sense of an authorial presence. Perhaps like Playing’s female subjects, Coutinho appropriates the experiences and discourses of others; it is thus that he finds his expression – in the narratives prompted by his physical presence, always with the help of a camera.

The Impact of Documentary authors Like Rouch, Coutinho produces a disruption – attesting to the inev­itable disturbance brought about on the real by the presence of a camera. If many documentarians seek an objective reality waiting to be unveiled, self-reflexive approaches present the director as the agent interfering with a purported reality, rather than simply revealing it. The directors analysed here expand the concept of performing authorship beyond self-expression and the consolidation of a subject. The trance, in the case of Rouch, and the catalyst trope, in the case of both, transfer the authors’ input from the inside to the outside – from communicating a worldview (which Rouch nonetheless does quite openly) to registering the reactions the filmmaker’s body might ignite. What is more, these directors’ modes of self-inscription are far less performative than in the examples of Chapter Two. But while Rouch’s provocations are limited to group conversations where he functions as a therapist of sorts proposing ‘exercises’, and while Coutinho instigates by creating the appropriate context and then being merely present, documentarians like Werner Herzog, Morgan Spurlock or Michael Moore, among 103

performing authorship

many, are far more theatrical in their interventions – and are worth a brief examination by way of conclusion. In Grizzly Man (2005) we experience the killing of bear aficionado Timothy Treadwell exclusively through a close-up of Herzog’s distressed face as he listens to the audio recording of Treadwell being dilacerated by a bear – a horrific incident unintentionally captured by the latter’s video camera – the sound of which Herzog mercifully spares us. Spurlock, in turn, lends his own body to an experiment to prove the pernicious effects of fast food in Supersize Me (2004), where we follow him through a McDonald’s diet and a series of doctor’s appointments for a whole month, witnessing the decay of both his physical and mental health. In these films, the directors’ bodies function not as catalysts, but as mirror in the case of Herzog, and as symptom and stage in Spurlock’s at once altruistic and sensationalist gesture. Equally theatrical are Michael Moore’s performances in Roger & Me (1989), The Big One (1998), Bowling for Columbine (2002), Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), Sicko (2007) and Capitalism: A Love Story (2009). Moore uses humour, sarcasm, irony and defiance to extract testimonies that usually corroborate a pre-existing thesis. The American director’s screen presence is far more imposing than those of Rouch and Coutinho; a rather tall and large man, Moore often towers over his interviewees, while his recognisable baseball cap and baggy jeans turn him into an emblematic figure, not unlike Jean-Luc Godard and Woody Allen, as I discuss in Chapter Four. Moore also shares the anarchic and provocative qualities of these figures when he takes us into his unsuccessful pursuit of General Motors chairman Roger Smith in Roger & Me to confront him about the closing of the company’s Flint factory, or in a trip to the K-Mart store with two of the victims of the high-school shooting discussed in Bowling for Columbine, the idea being to return the bullets they still carried in their bodies. In Sicko’s relentless attack on the American private health system, Moore travels to Cuba with chronically ill 9/11 volunteer rescuers for free medical treatment. Moore’s documentaries may have an investigative vein, but their flamboyance turns them into the staging of events that subscribe to a pre-existing agenda. The director deploys an equally dramatic use of editing, for example, to associate the arbitrary killing of Columbine’s students with violent US foreign policy in a montage showing its 104

the author in the world: trance, presence and documentary filmmaking

devastating effects on Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Chile, Nicaragua and Sudan, played to the sound of Louis Armstrong’s recording of ‘What a Wonderful World’. Editing is as powerful and prominent a tool as Moore’s imposing screen presence – juxtaposing Roger Smith’s Christmas speech about jingle bells, the smell of pine and turkey and humanity to images of a laid-off GM worker being evicted from her home, or cutting between Charlton Heston’s pro-gun discourse at the National Rifle Association and the anti-gun speech by the father of a deceased Columbine victim. Though Moore is always shown asking questions, both his sensationalist appeal to emotions and taut narrative leave little room for doubt or disagreement. On the other hand, their exaggeration and sense of humour highlight, rather than disguise, the director’s manipulative strategies and incendiary behaviour. Moore’s vanity and militancy are so blatant that, rather than convince us, his strategies become an exhibitionist display of his craft. Moore’s sense of humour, likewise, raises serious questions about his reliability. Finding out that the French government provides housekeeping services to mothers of young children, he closes Sicko taking his laundry basket to the White House, in a gesture that is as ludicrous as it is funny. On the other hand, his revelation, in the same film, that he anonymously sent a 12,000-dollar cheque to the creator of a website devoted to attacking his films, whose wife was seriously ill, is both vain (the cheque prevented the shutting down of the website) and vengeful, as this public revelation of Moore as donor was probably humiliating to the receiver; indeed, it could be perceived as a prank. However persuasive Moore’s manipulations may be, their theatricality often turns them into farce. As a result, the represented reality is not just affected by the director’s interventions – it actually seems to be fabricated by him. What distinguishes Moore from Rouch and Coutinho is not only the style of their performances (overblown in the first, minimalist in the other two) or the staging of artificial situations (which we also find in Moi, un noir, Jaguar, The Human Pyramid, Playing, Moscou and As Canções). There is an essential difference of goals – Moore forces answers upon the viewer; Rouch and Coutinho formulate questions. Most significantly, though unreliable in his cynicism or cruelty, Moore presents himself as a consistent character, never missing an opportunity 105

performing authorship

to remind us of his working-class, Midwestern background, which in turn gives legitimacy to his political stance: he might be a liberal, but he comes from a family of factory workers and speaks also for rednecks. In other words, Moore wants to be seen as a man of the people. Rouch and Coutinho, on the other hand, do not disguise their privileged backgrounds. Most importantly, they constitute decentred subjects, with Rouch’s self-expression being mediated by the trance, and Coutinho finding his expression in the voice of others. Unlike Moore, they both relinquish control, letting themselves be led (in the case of Rouch, ‘possessed’) by the realities they film, even if they subsequently organise the material to specific ends. In their own ways, the films by Rouch and Coutinho also show us the directors’ views of the world; their main goal, however, is to present themselves in the world.

106

4



The Author In-Between: Fools, Stand-Ups and Fictional Narratives

The idea of performing authorship takes a different form in the realm of fictional narratives featuring directors in roles that evoke their public personas. Contrary to essay and documentary films, here the dramatisation of the director’s authorial function is more evoked than it is openly staged. Fiction, after all, tends to constitute a self-enclosed universe, even if to varying degrees – being higher in classical Hollywood’s respect for the imaginary fourth wall than in silent comedies’ direct address to the camera. The very designation of a universe as fictional, in any case, defines every participant as more or less artificial, including the self-inscribed author. So whereas in the case studies contemplated in Chapters Two and Three performing authorship involved mainly what Schechner termed ‘showing doing’,1 or the varyingly theatricalised renditions of the author’s artistic processes, here it concerns the filmmaker as actor. But as we can see from the analysis of works by Jean-Luc Godard and Woody Allen, these directors do not simply disappear behind the masks provided by the characters they play. On the contrary, their images strongly evoke their authorial roles. This chapter explores how Godard and Allen achieve this effect through appearances informed by the fool and the stand-up comedian – figures that are somewhat external to the worlds they inhabit and comment upon, refusing to merge with it fully. It is precisely these filmmakers’ way of remaining foreign to the diegesis that sets their comical performances apart from those of other comedian–directors like 107

performing authorship

Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, Jerry Lewis or Mel Brooks – as I explain later. Estrangement is one of comedy’s main strategies, and the ancient figure of the fool is key to the achievement of this effect in the films by Godard and Allen. The fool’s odd behaviour draws attention to the absurdities of life – what characterises it, in Bakhtin’s words, are ‘unselfish simplicity’ and ‘healthy failure to understand’.2 In ‘Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel’, Bakhtin discusses narrative disruptions brought about by rogues, clowns and fools, bringing the last two together as figures ‘opposed to everything that is conventional and false […] a synthetic form for the (parodied) exposure of others’, while for him the rogue exerts a similar function, but is usually ‘a villain, a petty townsman–apprentice, a young itinerant cleric, a tramp belonging to no class’.3 These figures’ inability to adjust turns them into transgressors of societal norms, but also into society’s mirror – albeit a distorting one. They behave in ways that deform, via exaggeration, that which they critique – the rogue, clown and fool challenge our conceptions of normality and ordinariness through their inability or refusal to partake in commonly accepted modus operandi. They are ‘the mode of existence of a man who is in life, but not of it, life’s perpetual spy and reflector’.4 In the cinema, this refusal to belong, conform or blend in takes different forms – from the clownish adaptation of objects’ ordinary functions to a character’s needs (Chaplin making a meal out of a shoe in The Gold Rush, 1925) to its reverse in the body’s incapacity to adjust to space or objects (Monsieur Hulot’s struggle with modern architecture in Tati’s Mon oncle, 1958, and Playtime, 1967). The sense of a character’s foreignness is also translated into opposite patterns of motor abilities, displaying either an element of awkwardness (the uncoordinated movements of Jerry Lewis) or an extraordinary aptitude (Sherlock Jr leaving unharmed after a driverless motorcycle ride in Keaton’s homonymous 1924 classic). The body’s relation to space places clowns and fools at the outside – of society, of natural laws, of norms of plausibility. This crossing of borders extends to the narrative, as the estrangement created by these figures acquires a self-reflexive quality which may result from the exhibitionist display of an actor’s physical skills, the typical gag structure (often privileged over the causal concatenation 108

the author in-between: fools, stand-ups and fictional narratives

of events), repetition and self-reference (Keaton and Lewis play very similar characters in each of their films; Chaplin and Tati usually play the same). Clowns and fools also coexist with illusion-suspending strategies such as the direct address to the camera, the highlighting of low production values (as in the scarcely choreographed battle sequences of Woody Allen’s Love and Death, 1975), or the comical use of the grotesque (the smeared make-up in Lewis’s impersonation of three different backing singers in The Patsy, 1964). Though Bakhtin finds similarities between rogues, clowns and fools, it is his theorisation of the last mentioned’s ‘time-honoured privilege not to participate in life’ and ‘bluntness’ of language5 that best describes the performances of Godard and Allen; accordingly, I will henceforth refer exclusively to the fool. It is furthermore in relation to the idea of crossing narrative borders that this figure is particularly illuminating. The fool’s ‘misplacement’ or inappropriateness can be traced back to its origins in the performing arts. Some traditions in popular theatre featured fools in intermittent appearances, their role limited to providing comic relief or commentary on the main action. The fool also used to bridge different acts in the circus or in variety shows.6 Therefore, this figure has often been perceived as a temporary visitor, as an outsider to the diegesis, existing between the staged numbers and the audience. Bakhtin reminds us that the fool belongs to the entr’acte, the intermission, the interval between two acts in a play.7 In fact, his discussion of the rogue, clown and fool takes place in the context of the definition of the novel as a literary genre. It follows that in addition to existing in between stage numbers or acts, the fool becomes an intruder to the novel, contaminating it with elements from the public square and the theatre, which gave birth to this figure. It is thus in the nature of the fool not to entirely belong, to stay at the margins. I here argue that when incarnated by Godard and Allen the fool sometimes sidesteps the narrative and stands between the filmic and the extrafilmic. These directors refuse fully to disappear behind a ‘mask’, either failing to inhabit the diegetic world sufficiently to interact appropriately with other characters (Godard) or constantly tainting the fictional plot with topical references to real life (Godard and Allen). Performing authorship, here, consists of turning the author into a strange, unassimilable body. 109

performing authorship

Most significantly for our discussion, Bakhtin argues that in the realm of the novel the fool bears the authorial point of view.8 In Bakhtin’s words, fools are endowed with the ‘right to be “other”’, ‘the right not to understand, the right to confuse’,9 thereby becoming the mask that the author wears in order to question the world freely, to denaturalise it. That, as said earlier, is the function of all comedians – from royal court jesters to contemporary stand-up artists. Their specificities put aside, stand-up comics produce a similarly alienating effect when they draw attention to the absurdities of what they present as ‘real’ life, however fictional their stories may be (as I discuss later). The modes of self-inscription of Godard and Allen also turn the author’s image into the textual manifestation of the tension between their biographical existence and their screen personas – between their fictional and real selves. It is precisely the ways in which Godard and Allen bring in the extrafilmic that sets them apart from Chaplin, Tati, Keaton, Lewis or Brooks, all of whom play similar characters across a vast array of films, and in addition direct many (when not all) of the pictures they perform in. Though the characters they play may be perceived as outsiders, and in spite of their comedies’ self-reflexivity, the Tramp, Monsieur Hulot and their variously named counterparts blend in more easily with the fiction, which stays sealed off from reality. Moreover, it is especially in the films by Godard and Allen that the fool’s foreignness has repercussions on the question of authorship – if only because these directors promote a self-reflexive meditation that dialogues with the challenges to the auteur brought about with the structuralist turn in film studies. In fact, though Allen’s trajectory naturally positions him alongside the aforementioned comedians, some of the effects produced by his screen performances beg comparison with Godard, whose career parallels the theoretical foundations of film studies, from auteurism to its total dismissal, culminating with the film collectives of the late 1960s, and also the influence of semiotics, Marxism, feminism and psychoanalysis. Conversely, Godard is far less renowned for his comical talents than for his systematic questioning of the language and institutions of film. But here the terms of comparison with Allen lie with Godard’s appearances as a fool in some of his 1980s 110

the author in-between: fools, stand-ups and fictional narratives

work, particularly as Uncle Jean/Monsieur Godard in First Name: Carmen (1983), the Prince/the Idiot in Soigne ta droite (1987) and Professor Pluggy/Monsieur Godard in King Lear (1987) – which incidentally features a Woody Allen cameo – all of whom embody the director’s understanding of his authorial identity, as discussed in the next section.10 While Godard’s screen presence changes in quality and degree (from cameos to voice-over narration, and from appearances as commentator or interviewer to the stylised performances of the 1980s), Allen always plays a fictional character. Nonetheless, even if the American director is more straightforwardly an actor than Godard, he typecasts himself – his image brings to mind his inability to change, even if he plays characters bearing different names and existing in various backdrops. Furthermore, where Godard’s deconstructionism dissipates any sense of a narrative structure, Allen operates within a more traditional approach to plot and character. Yet, irrespective of the different degrees to which each of these directors revises classical forms, their modes of self-display produce a similar tension between a fixed identity and the playful crossing of the boundaries separating the diegetic from the non-diegetic, the fictional from the real, and the film from the extrafilmic. What is more, the alien, foreign qualities of the characters played by Godard and Allen acquire both a graphic and a narrative dimension – the former defined by the effects of their emblematic figures, and the latter by their position in relation to the diegesis. The two directors share a similar silhouette, characterised by a balding and rather dishevelled head, and both wear recognisable eyeglasses. Godard’s 1986 video interview with Woody Allen, which produced the mediumlength Meetin’ WA (discussed later), explicitly explores this similarity of contours. During the prologue to the interview, a dissolve fuses the outline of Godard’s body into a portrait of Allen, in a graphic match that creates a mirroring effect, echoing Godard’s desire, revealed in voice-over, to meet his long-missed ‘friend’. The directors’ silhouettes, which reappear in many of their respective films, have the branding quality of a logo not unlike that of Hitchcock’s cameos, something that adds a non-diegetic dimension to their outlines, and in addition opens the films to the outside world. 111

performing authorship

In Allen’s narratives the director’s emblematic image merges his public persona with his screen roles. The incongruity of his large-framed eyeglasses in Sleeper (1973), where the action takes place in the year 2173, Love and Death, situated in nineteenth-century Russia, or in the episode about medieval England in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex… But Were Afraid to Ask (1972) prevents the actor’s complete immersion in the diegetic world (4.1, 4.2, 4.3). Thus, Allen’s image refuses to be completely absorbed in the fictional illusion; it chemically precipitates, evoking both the real man and his other pictures. The same holds true for Godard: his eyeglasses, dishevelled hair and cigarette (later replaced by a cigar) attach an emblematic dimension to his screen persona – one that extends to the fools he plays in some of his 1980s films. On the narrative level, the persistence of Allen’s visual style attests to his inability to be other than the one character he incessantly incarnates: the nervous middle-class Jewish man from Brooklyn with a strong artistic vein and a domineering mother, hopelessly urban, a film and jazz lover, sceptical about religion and psychoanalysis, and fearful of diseases, death, nature and California. All such traits have their share of biographical truth, to varying degrees. For our purposes, they associate Allen with the parts he has played throughout his career. Although obviously not identical to the real man, Allen’s characters function as reminders of his biographical self and, consequently, of Allen as the author of those films in which he appears. Likewise, Godard’s fools either refer to the director’s autobiography or become vehicles for meditations on the medium and on the commerce of cinema. But most significantly, as with his American counterpart, Godard’s fools constitute ‘licensed destroyer[s] of convention and ceremony’, as Colin MacCabe pertinently observes,11 traits which do not really contrast with the director’s other, restless, questioning, devil’s-advocate-like appearances as Jean-Luc Godard, the auteur, both on- and off-screen. It is by the way as an outsider that the fool becomes the author’s mask, representing the author’s point of view and positioning this figure as marginal to the narrated world. It follows that the images of Godard and Allen do not fully merge with the films; instead, they evoke the extrafilmic (sometimes through biographical references). The filmmaker’s presence on the 112

the author in-between: fools, stand-ups and fictional narratives

screen then acts as an element of disruption, both on the level of plot and on the level of the viewer’s engagement with individual works, for the author’s presence draws attention to process and establishes the film as artifice.

Figures 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 Allen’s eyeglasses stand out and do not allow for the actor–director’s full submersion into the characters he interprets in Sleeper, Love and Death and Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex… But Were Afraid to Ask.

113

performing authorship

The displaced author We have seen that performing authorship may involve different degrees of masquerade. In this book’s study of the essay film, masking was found less in the incarnation of a character than in the author’s impulse to evade exposure, even if the desire to disappear came as a collateral effect in films devoted to portraying their directors while meditating on their experiences (Perestroika) and careers (JLG/JLG, The Beaches of Agnès, F for Fake). In fact, the concept of performing authorship finds its clearest manifestation in the drama of authorial processes, in the idea of the author as a principal actor in the battle for expression and communication. Godard’s fools, for that matter, caricature on the one hand the director’s conception of his own authorial self as dispersed, as a patchwork of influences, rather than as a fixed identity, and on the other his trajectory towards an increasingly marginal position in the film market. The characteristic lack of motor coordination in slapstick comedy, for example, points to an understanding of boundaries separating body from mind, movement from intention, thus constituting the individual not as unified, but as uncoordinated – the fool is constantly faced with the challenge of orchestrating his own body parts, as well as his movements. Godard’s fools are hence the embodiment of this disjointed self; they are, in addition, the corporeal manifestation of the director’s much-discussed aesthetics of collage and citation. Furthermore, Godard’s fools dramatise the director’s public casting of himself as a maverick, as if marginality defined not only his particular place in the world of cinema, but the necessary condition of a true artist. As we move between the concept of the author as receiver in JLG/JLG and Godard’s comical performances in Carmen, Soigne ta droite and King Lear, we find a contrast between elusiveness and exaggeration, disembodiment and the bodily lower stratum (to use another Bakhtinian concept), sublimation and caricature, introspection and externalisation. Carmen, for example, transfers to the level of plot Godard’s struggle against the film system, mirrored in the filmmaker’s relative foreignness to the story. The director appears as Carmen’s Uncle Jean, also known as Monsieur Godard, who confines himself in a clinic so as to avoid contact with the real 114

the author in-between: fools, stand-ups and fictional narratives

world. Loosely based on Prosper Mérimée’s novel about a Spanish soldier who embarks on a life of crime for the love of a young Gypsy, Carmen tells a story of deception. The film’s heroine belongs to a criminal gang that ‘fools’ the character of Godard into helping them shoot a documentary that is nothing but a ploy, for their real intention is to rob the rich. The central plot involves Carmen’s relationship with a policeman, Joseph, whom she seduces during a robbery. Further setting Godard’s character apart is the generational gap between the director and his young cast – the designations ‘Uncle’ and ‘Monsieur’ indeed accentuate Godard’s relative seniority, forging (however prematurely) his character’s senility, and by extension his isolation. Godard’s fool actually bears traits associated with buffoons, as Uncle Jean, the Prince/the Idiot and Professor Pluggy are characterised by grotesque behaviour and vulgar language: for instance, hoping that a fever will allow him to stay indefinitely in the clinic, Carmen’s uncle tells a young and attractive female nurse that the fever will come if he sticks his fingers ‘up her ass’. The grotesque then turns into awkwardness when Uncle Jean proves incapable of fitting into the narrative – Godard’s foreignness to the plot comes as a result of his way of disrupting narrative progression in each of his appearances. Like the traditional fool, the director behaves in unusual, anarchic ways that caricature his perceived otherness to real and fictional worlds alike. This disruptive quality is partly due to buffooneries that bring comic relief to the drama between Carmen and Joseph, as when in their first romantic encounter (at her uncle’s house) she bursts out laughing at Monsieur Godard’s madness: upon opening his refrigerator she realises he keeps a tape recorder in it. But this fool’s inappropriateness can also be attributed to the fact that his marginality functions as a reminder of Godard’s biography, or of the realm of the extrafilmic. Bakhtin stated that fools’ actions ‘do not have a direct, but rather a metaphorical, significance’12 – something that transpires from Uncle Jean’s absurd dialogues. Most of this character’s lines make allusions to the author’s biography – but in the world of the story they make no sense. In one of the sequences mostly charged with self-references, Uncle Jean meets with the leader of Carmen’s gang, who poses as a film producer trying to con Godard’s character into helping them 115

performing authorship

with what he believes is a documentary, but which is actually a plan to kidnap a big manufacturer (4.4). During this meeting, which takes place in a Parisian café, Uncle Jean and the ‘producer’ conduct a conversation marked by a lack of communication to be blamed on the old man’s elusive and nonsensical discourse, as well as on his inability to engage with plot elements – the details about the supposed shoot and Monsieur Godard’s official agreement. Concurrently, the lack of chemistry between the characters echoes Godard’s feelings of isolation in the world of cinema, the director’s own battle to make himself understood. Uncle Jean’s abrupt and narratively unmotivated references to Van Gogh’s search for the right tone of yellow, for example, and his insistence that one must always keep searching, contributes nothing to the plot, but evokes Godard’s own effort to find the ‘just image’ – they are also a reminder of the recurrence of Van Gogh’s paintings in his films. By the same token, the description of Mao as a great cook (who ‘fed all of China’) brings to mind Godard’s flirtation with Maoism in 1968. There is also, of course, the questioning of the boundaries between documentary and fiction when Uncle Jean asks an obviously alarmed gang leader if the documentary is really ‘true’, only to drop the issue, showing that, rather than suspect the other character’s real intentions, this fool is indulging in a theoretical question (all documentaries are fiction). Most importantly, Uncle Jean evokes Godard’s directorial role in the very film we watch when, clapping his hands, he provides us with scene and take numbers at the beginning of the sequence, as well as when he reprimands his actor for not finishing his dialogue, stopping the fake producer as he gets ready to leave the table. Finally, Godard’s most clearly autobiographical statement is to explain, under the mask of his fool, that he had been ‘banished’ from the ‘cinematographer’ (in a typical tribute to Robert Bresson’s preferred term for the cinema) – even though his temporary exile was voluntary. This sense of isolation, in turn, counterbalances Uncle Jean’s vulgarity with an element of fragility. Soigne ta droite shows Godard as equally foreign, this time as a character inspired by the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1868). Introduced by a voice-over narrator as the Idiot, but addressed as Prince by the film’s characters, Godard’s fool is assigned the absurd mission of writing, shooting and releasing a film in one day in order 116

the author in-between: fools, stand-ups and fictional narratives

Figure 4.4 First Name: Carmen: Godard’s character (left) refuses to engage with the conversation (and the narrative), remaining at the margins.

to be ‘forgiven’ for an unnamed sin. The Idiot’s task, however, is not exactly central – though apparently setting a goal for the narrative, this mission is dislodged by the appearance of ‘the Man’ (played by comic actor Jacques Villeret), who takes up more screen time than Godard’s fool, and by scenes of the musical group Les Rita Mitsouko rehearsing and recording songs in a studio. Much like Uncle Jean and Dostoevsky’s hero, the Idiot is sometimes grotesque; yet he is also simple and innocent in an unjust world that condemns the generous and pure to exclusion (4.5). Like Myshkin, the part played by Godard constitutes a positive ‘other’, calling attention to complexities overlooked by the rather absurd figures that populate the universe of the film. Citing Baudelaire, the Idiot theorises, for example, on ‘the smiling regret’ to an incredulous grandmother sitting next to him on a plane.13 Godard’s character is also fond of wordplay, which the director has always deployed as an alienating device. In step with 117

performing authorship

Figure 4.5 Soigne ta droite: The Prince/the Idiot is banned from a world that cannot accommodate the innocent and pure.

Godard’s penchant for both puns and translation, the Idiot conflates, for example, an airline’s ‘manager’ (which the French designate by the English word) with the French ménagère (housewife). The generational gap featured in Carmen is also hinted at in this sequence – after addressing the airline employee as ‘Mademoiselle’ the Idiot is told that this title is no longer in use. Douglas Morrey reads this dialogue as a symptom of Godard’s alleged remarks about the post-feminist ‘discomfiture of the male’,14 which again attests to the director’s (and his character’s) sense of exclusion. Most significantly to this feeling of estrangement, the Idiot also enacts slapstick routines, creating chaos from actions as simple as getting into a car, thereby giving life to the fool’s uncoordinated, dispersed body. The same sense of alienation that involves Uncle Jean is also manifested in Soigne ta droite, this time through the use of titles and in the absence of forenames. The film’s opening credits give us only surnames, 118

the author in-between: fools, stand-ups and fictional narratives

and in addition group male and female crew members under the categories of ‘Messieurs’ and ‘Mesdemoiselles’, instituting a ceremonial, formal element to credit sequences, and perhaps unintentionally associating the director (singled out as ‘Monsieur Godard’) with his homonymous roles in Carmen, Soigne ta droite and King Lear. This humorous formality reverberates in the lack of character names in the narrative, where individuals are designated by general categories such as the Man, the American, the Passenger, the Golfer. The emptying of identities that comes with this lack of individuation attests to the binary reasoning that opposes essence and surface, inner and outer selves, soul and body – the very same reasoning which is behind the challenges to self-expression and sincerity as the author’s defining features. Referring to the Man, whose centrality to the narrative and sense of inadequacy turn him into the Idiot’s double, the voice-over narrator describes this character’s ‘last creative effort to get outside the dream, outside of fate, outside of chance, outside of form, outside of himself’. This sense of imprisonment that calls for a desire to exceed one’s body is what unites the Man and the Idiot – or, better still, what creates them as two manifestations of the same human essence. Indeed, this yearning for extrapolating boundaries extends to the relation between the character and the film; it brings together Godard’s fools in Carmen, Soigne ta droite and King Lear, who exceed the boundaries of the narrative, as if wanting to lie outside it, or at least stand between the film and the real world. Not coincidentally, the main space occupied by the Idiot is the aeroplane he takes in order to deliver the finished film, which confines the fool to a site of transition – one that may be claustrophobic in its tightness, but which is nonetheless conveniently removed, literally unanchored and certainly unstable. Like the Idiot, the rather grotesque Professor Pluggy of King Lear bears the burden of setting the goal for the film’s narrative. But here Godard is turned into the object of desire for the real protagonist, William Shakespeare Jr the Fifth (played by Peter Sellars), who while trying to write a new version of Shakespeare’s play goes into a journey to find Pluggy; his purpose: to learn the secret of montage. But just as with the other Godardian fools, Pluggy takes up little screen time, remaining at the periphery both of the narrative and of mainstream cinema. Woody Allen, who had been the focus of the aforementioned 119

performing authorship

Meetin’ WA, makes a cameo as an editor who, as Timothy Murray points out, represents a cinematic ‘other’.15 Allen’s character, appropriately named Mr Alien, enters the picture after the closing credits, saying, as he handles the celluloid, that he holds the future, the present and the past in his hands. As Murray states, ‘The place of cinematic thought here again lies anew on the frontier, on the border, on the margin, on the horizon of history and its cinematic passing: Look there, look there.’16 Godard, as the analysis of Meetin’ WA that follows shows, seems to find an equivalent in Allen – here, he places the American director literally on the edge of the film – after the ‘The End’ which, unsurprisingly for a director forever questioning the conventions of narrative order and structure, does not work as a full stop, allowing for the film to linger a little longer. King Lear, after all, presents us with a somewhat apocalyptic scenario – in voice-over, William Shakespeare Jr the Fifth tells us that what we see takes place ‘after Chernobyl’. As he goes on to say, ‘We’re in a time now when films and more generally art have been lost, do not exist, and they have to somehow be reinvented.’17 Godard’s character thus lives in a ‘post-’ scenario. Further emphasising his marginality is the fact that, as with Uncle Jean, Pluggy has also been locked away from the world, this time in an editing studio. In King Lear the disjointed quality of Godard’s fool is epitomised by his character’s untidy dreadlocks, made of wires and cables. In turn, Godard’s authorial presence is felt in spite of his peripheral position and the lack of clarity about his narrative function; after all, the mad editing guru is a constant reminder of the director’s existence. In fact, Godard evokes the author’s separate identity when at the beginning of the film he gives away some production notes as a narrator named Godard, but who nonetheless speaks in the foolish, buffoon-like voice of Pluggy. Later in the film Godard and Pluggy are once again conflated by William Shakespeare Jr the Fifth, who refers to the guru as a man named ‘Godard, Pluggy or something’. While William Shakespeare Jr the Fifth’s indifferent confusion signals Pluggy’s presumed irrelevance, it also equates artist and character, thereby revealing the latter as artifice. Finally, like Uncle Jean, Pluggy eventually voices Godard’s famous takes on the cinema, such as the concern with the primacy of the image over the word and the meditations on the revelatory potential of film. Godard goes as far as to establish a connection between 120

the author in-between: fools, stand-ups and fictional narratives

Pluggy and the revealing power that, in the director’s view, constitutes one of cinema’s greatest predicaments. At the end of the film Godard sacrifices his fool, repeating another recurring aphorism, this one borrowed from St Paul, which says, ‘the image will reappear in the time of resurrection.’18 Pluggy’s sacrifice echoes the near death of the Idiot in a fall from the aircraft’s open door and Uncle Jean’s declared desire to go to the moon in order to finance his own movie. Godard’s fools thus lend their awkward bodies to what appears to be a lost cause – the production of films at the margins of society. In the end, these fools become vehicles for the author’s enquiries about his own place. When Carmen first visits Uncle Jean in the clinic, he starts as she knocks on his door, asking, ‘Where am I?’ only promptly to rephrase his question, saying, ‘I mean, who is it?’ However brief, this Freudian slip encapsulates Godard’s self-conscious questioning of his position in the world of cinema – and why not, in the world of the very film he chooses to act in. It is this sense of not belonging, which lends an estranged, alien and foreign quality to Godard’s fools, that calls for the analogy with Bakhtin’s theories – these fools’ otherness lies not only in their anarchic behaviour, but also in both the invocation of the world that originated them (which in Bakhtin’s study is the public square) and in the fact that they belong to the entr’acte. The clinic, the aeroplane and the editing suite (as well as the coda where Godard positions Mr Alien) function as allegories for this space of transition, including the one between Godard’s real and screen images. But these spaces are also allegories of Godard’s self-imposed exile, the equivalent of the Swiss town of Rolle, the place where the director retreated when he refused to participate in the commerce of films, and where to this day he indulges in his right not to understand. We find also a carnivalesque inversion in which the work’s creator figures as marginal, and costumes and role-playing become vehicles for the uncensored expression of the self. Carmen, Soigne ta droite and King Lear dramatise the tension between exposure and masking. To be sure, the mask typically allows for the full expression of the artist who wears it – here it allows for the expression of Godard’s frustrations. Nevertheless, even if these fools evoke the author’s biography, they are far from finalising, from organising the author’s life in a logical series of causally linked events. The biographical author in Godard’s 121

performing authorship

films could not be more removed from Barthes’s worst fear, stated in The Pleasure of the Text, that biography ‘would exceed the body, give a meaning to life, forge a destiny’.19 Quite the opposite – Godard’s fools might evoke autobiography, but they do not narrate the man. They become, instead, the very instrument for the negation of closure. For that matter, the fact that these fools’ designations bear slashes, some embedding the director’s name, gives a graphic expression to their instability as independent entities. Godard’s mode of self-inscription questions his own authority, as well as the autonomy of the texts he produces. To borrow Jacques Rivette’s expression in his call for a move away from a supposedly self-involved and introspective cinephilia in the early 1960s, the self-inscribed author may very well ‘unframe’ the film, opening it up to the outside world. Far from emptying the author’s role – far from rendering it abstract – this disjointed body gives it a corporeal existence. In what follows we shall see how Allen achieves a similar effect through dynamics evocative of both the fool and the stand-up comic. But first it is worth examining Godard’s staging of a conversation with the American director in Meetin’ WA – if the author’s marginal position to the diegesis is partly what allows for the sense that that figure intermittently steps outside the film, this video interview sees Godard at once sidestepping the dialogue and pushing Allen away from it. Godard’s video constitutes an instance of performing authorship as the two directors’ opposing movements towards and away from an imaginary centre.

Godard meets Woody Allen – or does he? Meetin’ WA features a conversation between Godard and Allen shot on video and edited into a 26-minute-long interchange punctuated by images of paintings, film pictures (both by Allen and other directors) and jazz tunes. Contrary to what the film’s title might suggest, in Meetin’ WA Godard and Allen miss, rather than find, each other. This difficulty in establishing a dialogue is treated in a spirit that is at once melancholy and sarcastic. The abrupt, digressive editing gives the interchanges between filmmakers the form of improvisational jazz, with unfinished sentences (a trademark in Godard’s own discourse) 122

the author in-between: fools, stand-ups and fictional narratives

Figures 4.6, 4.7 Meetin’ WA: Godard’s image dissolves into a portrait of Woody Allen.

standing for open-ended musical phrases and ideas by one director resonating with the other in completely different ways, achieving dissonance rather than harmony – in typically Godardian fashion. The tone set at the beginning of the video is harmonious, nonetheless. Indeed the interview is interspersed with images of Godard in fool mode, linking the two directors in their marginal position – even if they meet at the height of Allen’s success with Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). Meetin’ opens with Godard, his back to the camera, against a huge window looking out on Central Park, while in voice-over we hear him say how he ended up missing his ‘friend’ (‘on s’est perdu’), as communication is ‘difficult’. Godard’s silhouette then dissolves into a portrait of Allen – balding heads and glasses joining the filmmakers in a similar profile – establishing a mirror effect (4.6, 4.7). A montage juxtaposes the excerpts of Gershwin tunes that set the mood of Allen’s films to images of his works, evoking primarily a longing for harmony, or communication. Once the conversation begins, however, it is dissonance that takes over; the truncated dialogue quickly contaminates the editing, which mirrors also the syncopated rhythm of the jazz tunes invoking Allen’s universe on the soundtrack. The video’s digressive structure, which often leaves Allen when he is halfway into his sentences, mimics both the improvisational quality of the musical score and Allen’s own staccato, stuttering way of speaking. This dissonance does not derive exclusively from the film’s form. Regardless of the diplomatic and polite tone that marks their 123

performing authorship

interchanges, Godard and Allen seem set apart by their different backgrounds and languages – the latter constituting a Godardian obsession. Evoking situations from Pierrot le fou (1965) where an interpreter loosely translates a conversation between Jean-Paul Belmondo and Samuel Fuller, and Contempt (1963), featuring a female translator mediating (sometimes inaccurately) between the multinational staff shooting a film at Cinecittà, Godard’s interview relies largely on an off-screen female interpreter (Annette Insdorf)20 – this time a competent one. However, despite the interpreter’s efforts, the dialogue between directors is truncated, partly because of Godard’s own incursions into English, which disorientate an often puzzled Allen, unsure whether to look at his French colleague or the translator; and partly because of the very idiosyncrasies in Godard’s own speech, which contrast with Allen’s clarity, emphasised, in turn, by the American filmmaker’s concentrated, focused attitude towards his restless host. Framing Allen in single takes (the camera usually behind Godard’s neck) and in long medium close-ups, Godard’s interview tackles Allen’s relationship with the press, Hannah and Her Sisters, the love of cinema and the damaging influence of television. Though not set apart in time (Allen is only five years younger than Godard), and in spite of sharing a cinephilic past and a resentment of the malefic impact of TV, the directors evidently lack affinity; a communication ‘noise’ adds to the dissonance of their interchanges. What Godard sees as a silent-cinema device so cherished by the French New Wave (namely, the use of intertitles in Hannah and Her Sisters) is, to Allen, an intentionally literary device. Hannah’s Stanislavski Catering Company strikes Godard as a reference to the actor as worker, while for Allen it is just a joke referring to a New York reality: some actors resort to catering jobs to make a living. At other moments Godard’s metaphors produce down-to-earth statements on the part of Allen. Conjecturing on the harmful effects of television’s ‘radiation’ on the filmmakers’ creativity, and hoping to establish a connection (Godard asks about an experience that affects him personally), the director first mystifies Allen, only to get a simple joke from him – Allen responds by commenting on how in the long run television can hurt our eyes. In all fairness, Allen soon proceeds to answer the question properly (minutes before, he had laid down 124

the author in-between: fools, stand-ups and fictional narratives

his own theories by quoting Renata Adler, who sees television as an appliance), but Godard’s editing moves away from his interlocutor, stealing Allen’s answer from the spectator. As is often the case with Godard, Meetin’ is ultimately a film of unfinished sentences. One of the traits shared by the two directors is a speech often marked by hesitations, which appear in the form of stuttering in Allen and in the form of pauses and word repetitions in the Godard of Lettre à Freddy Buache (1982) or Scénario de ‘Sauve qui peut (la vie)’ (1979). Godard’s argument with the producers of One Plus One (1968) was incidentally motivated by the fact that in his version of the film the scenes depicting the Rolling Stones recording ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ never amount to the completion of the song, which he believed should never be heard in its entirety (staying in tune with the privileging of process over finished product).21 In The Pleasure of the Text Barthes stated that, ‘The Sentence is hierarchical: it implies subjections, subordinations, internal reactions.’ According to Barthes, theorists like Chomsky suggest that ‘the sentence is potentially infinite (infinitely catalysable), but practice always obliges the sentence to end.’22 Barthes dreamed about a speech with ‘no sentence formed’, a ‘lexical’, ‘sporadic’, discontinuous speech ‘outside the sentence’,23 and Godard reproduces such a dream in the free-associational, digressive and erratic principles that govern the editing of some of his films.24 Godard gives audiovisual form to the stereophony Barthes imagines one may experience while sitting in a bar – one in which ‘music, conversations, the sounds of chairs, glasses’ could compose a speech outside the sentence, ‘at once very cultural and very savage’.25 As usual, Godard constantly disrupts the integrity of his colleague’s discourse. He predictably does not abstain from challenging his guest, questioning, for example, whether Allen’s shots of Manhattan buildings in Hannah would have been different had he never been exposed to television. Allen’s answer evades Godard’s provocation – ‘I don’t know’ and ‘It’s possible’ is all that Godard gets from a question that the American filmmaker deems ‘too hypothetical’. Adding to Godard’s anarchical behaviour, and contrasting with his politeness and conciliatory tone are insert shots of himself as a Pluggy-esque, nasty-looking fool grimacing, impatiently piling up videotapes of films and angrily puffing on his cigar, or with his buffoonish and impatient gathering of 125

performing authorship

photographs while saying, in a sarcastically infantile tone, ‘Lucky Luc, Lucky Jean-Luc’, while the titles read ‘Lucky I ran into you’, quoting a chapter heading from Hannah. Meetin’, which also features Godard as fool, brothers him with Allen: both directors use comedy to comment on life and society, and they both refuse to belong, preferring to stay at the margins. On the one hand their lack of synchrony and agreement places Godard as marginal to a Woody Allen then enjoying the glories of Hannah’s critical acclaim.26 On the other, the editing’s distortion and deconstruction of Allen’s discourse renders him alien to the setting established by the French director – indeed, it is hard to decide which of the two actually deserves the title of Mr Alien, which Godard had given to Woody Allen in King Lear. Godard’s interviewing methods show he is not as interested in what Allen has to say as in finding an interlocutor for him to stage, in the form of an interrupted and awkward dialogue, some of the questions that have haunted him over the years (chief among them, the cinematic image and television). More than uniting the directors in their marginality, Meetin’ allows for an instance of performing authorship in the drama of non-communication.

Allen the trespasser At the beginning of this chapter I referred to the emblematic quality of the authors’ silhouettes, which inevitably brings to mind Hitchcock’s cameo appearances. Hitchcock’s cameos also produce a momentary alienation; they are a textual reminder of the real human being behind the film, but one that soon withdraws from the frame and allows for the viewer’s full submersion in the world of the story. Likewise, the appearances by Godard and Woody Allen brand the films they direct with their signature. In the case of Allen, his body and his physical traits are as constitutive of an authorial mark as his films’ recognisable plots, character types and visual design – much like the equally emblematic figures of the characters played by Chaplin, Keaton, Tati and Lewis. The director’s recurring physical presence impersonates his aesthetics; the emblematic body, again, links author and style. Yet if in the case of Hitchcock we are only momentarily cued to the auteur 126

the author in-between: fools, stand-ups and fictional narratives

existing outside the film, Allen’s presence is a constant reminder of the biographical artist. And while Godard’s fools are peripheral to the narrative, Allen is for the most part the very star of his movies – which leads to the question of whether his image is, like those of Hitchcock and Godard, perceived as foreign to the diegesis, producing alienation, or if, on the contrary, when playing a character in the story the author’s image is inevitably swallowed by text, reduced to an effect, thereby losing its indexical property. The latter may be true for other actor–directors – Clint Eastwood, Roman Polanski, John Cassavetes or George Clooney, whose performances do not evoke their authorial function. But Allen belongs to a much more self-reflexive universe, appearing in the guise of unreliable narrators, distancing us from the narrative by means of citations and parody, metalepses (discussed later) and direct address. Allen is obviously closer to Lewis or Brooks, to stay with American comedian– directors working from the 1960s onwards, and who, in addition, share with him a background in stand-up comedy. But unlike these two, Allen scatters his narratives with verbal jokes that evoke both events external to the plot and autobiographical references to his lower-middle-class background, his Jewishness and his Brooklyn childhood. This combination of alienation and autobiography causes Allen to personify the film’s element of disruption – just like Godard, he prevents the work’s closure, destabilising its autonomy. Early movies like Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex… But Were Afraid to Ask, Sleeper, Love and Death, Annie Hall (1977), Stardust Memories (1980), Zelig (1983), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) or Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), as well as later works like Hollywood Ending (2002), Anything Else (2003) or Scoop (2006), to name but a few, incorporate actualities, subscribing to the aforementioned impulse to unframe the film, opening it up for dialogue with real-life events.27 The medieval fool played by Allen in the first episode of Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex, for example, is akin to Godard’s characters in that he simply does not fit into the story world. When seeking a sorcerer’s advice on aphrodisiacs, Allen’s fool declares his preference for anything he could get ‘without a prescription’, eliciting a comic effect from an anachronism that is typical of both the avantgarde (as in Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi) and vaudeville acts.28 By invoking 127

performing authorship

a current dynamic that reminds the spectator of the present and of ‘real life’, Allen breaks with the illusion of the narrative as autonomous and self-enclosed, taking us away from the medieval tale. This anachronism configures an estrangement on the level of the plot that does not allow for the consolidation of the medieval universe – it constitutes an instance of the irruption of everyday life in the domain of fiction. Similar dynamics abound in Allen’s filmography, and are obviously found in period movies such as Love and Death, where in nineteenthcentury Russia his character mentions, for example, tips and extras as he confabulates on Napoleon’s earnings, or in the time-travel plot of Sleeper, where after waking up some 200 years into the future the protagonist makes references to Greenwich Village and vegetarian restaurants perceived as just as alienating, as they refer the viewer back to the everydayness of present time. This sense of presentness, in turn, evokes the mode of stand-up comedy. Thus, where in Bakhtin the fool brings the theatricality of the public square into the novel, in Allen it is the stand-up performance that invades the fiction – the acting style that is at the origin of the director’s career as a comic artist. It follows that Allen’s nearly immutable form of self-display and his incessant joke-telling evoke also his stand-up persona, further referring us to the author’s biography. After all, for the most part stand-up comics do not present themselves as fictional figures, appearing, instead, under their own identity. However performative, and however fictive their stories, such comedians do not usually incarnate characters in the strict sense; whether exaggerating real facts for comic purposes or describing imagined situations, their job is to tell jokes and comment on current events, and not to consolidate an altogether fictional world. On the contrary, they tell anecdotes as if they had happened in the real world – or at least in the world experienced by their audiences, irrespective of how implausible their stories may be.29 Indeed, more often than not these comics bear their own (artistic) names on stage, appearing as Woody Allen, Chris Rock, Jo Brand, Jerry Seinfeld or Larry David. Their tales may be fictive, but they are conveyed to us as if they had been experienced by the artists themselves; the stand-up comic supposedly offers us anecdotes about their daily lives. The contrast between the fictional and factual nature of the events relayed becomes more 128

the author in-between: fools, stand-ups and fictional narratives

apparent when the comedian is also a film or sitcom actor (as with the aforementioned examples), as by contrast their stage appearances may be perceived as more ‘real’ than the events they experience in film or television programmes. What is more, stand-up comedy is largely a vehicle for sociopolitical and cultural commentary – from jokes about current events, politicians and celebrities to comments on the mores of everyday life (traffic, public toilets, eating habits, etc.). Some of Allen’s jokes have an element of topicality that brings a sense of immediacy to the comedy. Explaining the importance of being alert to how the audience in a theatre reacts, Oliver Double notes that, ‘straight drama shows events from another place and another time, but with stand-up the events happen right here in the venue’ – requiring what Tony Allen termed the ‘now’ agenda.30 This connection with the here and now for the audience calls for an analogy with the topicality of the gags we see in Allen’s movies. Annie Hall features jokes about politicians (‘Lyndon Johnson is a politician. You know the ethics those guys have. It’s a notch underneath child molester’), JFK’s assassination (Alvy uses the conspiracy theory to avoid having sex with Allison Portchnik) and contemporary culture (‘I’m here with the Godfather cast’; ‘I heard Commentary and Dissent had merged and formed Dysentery’). Topical jokes about New York real estate in Manhattan (1979), where Isaac says, ‘I’m paying 700 dollars a month, I got rats with bongos and a frog, and I got brown water here,’ or about Bill Clinton in Deconstructing Harry (1997), with the title character asking, ‘Do you think the president of the United States wants to fuck every woman he meets? Oh sorry, bad example,’ are likewise constant reminders of the world that surrounds us. In Crimes and Misdemeanors Cliff says he remembers the date his wife stopped sleeping with him because it was Hitler’s birthday; Manhattan Murder Mystery’s Larry warns his wife, who has just broken into a neighbour’s apartment, that she ‘will end up rooming with [American mobster] John Gotti’; Sid, of Scoop, sceptically claims that aristocrat Peter Lyman ‘is a serial killer like I play for the New York Jets.’ The oft-quoted Marshall McLuhan scene in Annie Hall constitutes the dramatic rendition of the intrusion of the narrative by the topical. Allen’s character simply ‘produces’ the then-fashionable intellectual, taking him by the arm and bringing him 129

performing authorship

Figure 4.8 Annie Hall: The real irrupts within the fiction when Allen ‘produces’ Marshal McLuhan (right) from behind a board to support his character’s arguments against an arrogant professor.

into the plot so as to prove wrong an arrogant Columbia University professor pontificating about McLuhan’s theories in a cinema (4.8). McLuhan’s appearance anticipates the more systematic incorporation of real-life figures into the fiction in Zelig’s mock interviews with intellectuals like Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Bruno Bettelheim and John Morton Blum (who is fictionally credited as the author of Interpreting Zelig).31 The references to topical issues define the characters played by Allen as commentators who express their views through jokes and one-liners, sometimes preventing their closure as psychologically consistent figures enclosed within the diegesis. It is through the mode of stand-up comedy that Allen becomes an outsider to his fictional worlds, breaking with the classical conception of a self-enclosed narrative. The stand-up serves as the extrafilmic’s entry into the film; it momentarily causes what Vivian Sobchack, speaking of the presence of documentary elements in fictional narratives in Carnal Thoughts, calls the restructuring of the fiction as the space of the real;32 even if the ‘charge of the real’ depends on the spectator’s awareness of the 130

the author in-between: fools, stand-ups and fictional narratives

referred events.33 The viewer’s background notwithstanding, Allen’s comments on current affairs contaminate the main plot with elements that are in any case perceived as exterior to it. For the spectator who can identify the references, Allen’s films become topical, rather than autonomous (however recognisable their consistency in style allows them to be). Annie Hall, for that matter, opens with a prologue structured as a stand-up routine – the first line delivered by Allen’s hero is a joke about elderly women at a Catskills resort that simply serves the purpose of analogy, furthering no narrative information. Soon Alvy becomes an on-screen, confiding narrator explaining his personal project – to examine his relationship with Annie. Set against a blank wall, the character–narrator’s first image isolates him from context – the neutrality of the set places him outside a specified narrative space; indeed, it evokes Bakhtin’s notion of the entr’acte. Allen having started as a stand-up comic, such a space also invites identification between author and character. Further linking the director and his protagonist is the recycling of jokes Allen used in his 1960s stand-up routines in Alvy’s own numbers and a Woody Allen appearance in The Dick Cavett Show standing for his character in the film34 – all of which colour the fiction with biographical elements, rendering the diegesis vulnerable to the domain of the real. In what Nancy Pogel suggests is a post-modern impulse, the director also casts actors according to their past films or personal stories.35 Paul Simon plays a music producer in Annie Hall, Diane Keaton plays a photographer/singer in the same film (activities she undertook in real life) and Mia Farrow was assigned the various roles of repressed Catholic (Alice, 1990), giving mother (Alice ; Hannah and Her Sisters) and the daughter of famous and strong women (Hannah; September, 1987; Alice), bringing to mind the actress’s own origins (she is of Irish ancestry) and family (Farrow is the mother of 15 children and the daughter of actress Maureen O’Sullivan). The interplay between fiction and real events has incidentally always provided material for Allen’s films, which often contemplate the relations between life and art. In Annie Hall, Alvy writes a play about his relationship with the title character, and the film was actually seen as a fictional account of Allen’s own relationship with Keaton. Manhattan’s Isaac is exposed to public scrutiny when his ex-wife publishes an 131

performing authorship

autobiography about their disastrous marriage – prefiguring, as Peter J. Bailey suggests, Farrow’s memoir, What Falls Away, published after the couple’s break-up in real life.36 Stardust Memories is about a director longing to have his movies express the anguish he experiences in life, and follows Allen’s first dramatic film, Interiors (1978). In Hannah and Her Sisters, Holly (Dianne Wiest) finally launches her writing career with a script based on her sister’s domestic life. Alice sells autobiographical facts as ideas for television shows. In September the writer played by Sam Waterston moves between two book projects: the biographies of his father and his friend’s mother. Deconstructing Harry punishes its protagonist (an author played by Allen) for exposing the intimacy of friends, relatives and lovers. Gabe, Allen’s character in Husbands and Wives (1992), writes a novel that ridicules his first encounter with his wife. These plots actually dramatise the perception of Allen’s films as autobiographical – as attest the biographies by John Baxter and Eric Lax,37 which draw comparisons between Allen’s real life and fictional plots, and, in a more critical fashion, the study of the director’s oeuvre by Bailey, who analyses those narratives discussing life as material for art. In his review of Husbands and Wives David Denby confesses his embarrassment in the face of what he believed to be Allen’s exposure of his relationship with Farrow,38 who plays the role of Gabe’s wife, Judy. Sobchack, in turn, discusses how the timing of the film’s release, which briefly followed Allen and Farrow’s scandalous breakup, foregrounded ‘the dynamic and mutable relationship that exists between fiction and documentary within the context of a single film’:39 During a bedtime conversation in which the couple discusses the sudden marital separation of close friends, Judy asks Gabe, ‘Do you ever hide things from me?’ With those words she was suddenly transformed for most contemporaneous viewers into Farrow – and the space ethically charged with Allen’s (not Gabe’s) hesitant response, ‘Of course not.’ Most of us in the audience knew this response to be a lie insofar as Allen was concerned – and our comprehension and judgement of his documented on-screen lie to Farrow far outweighed our interest in the fictional response of a character named Gabe (not Allen), whose veracity we were not yet able to judge for lack of fictive information either about him or his marriage.40 132

the author in-between: fools, stand-ups and fictional narratives

The figure of the stand-up, as we have seen, further contributes to this invasion of the fiction by the real resulting from elements that evoke Allen’s biography. Though in Allen’s films self-reflexivity is translated into narratives that are more plot-driven than Godard’s essayistic works, the characters he plays do not really constitute psychological beings enclosed within the diegesis, but stand-up figures visiting scenarios which they comment upon by means of jokes. This characterisation of Allen as alien to the plot is more evident in narratives bearing an ensemble structure (Hannah and Her Sisters; Crimes and Misdemeanors; Shadows and Fog, 1991; Husbands and Wives ; Everyone Says I Love You, 1996), when Allen shares the centrality of the narrative with female partners (Love and Death; Annie Hall ; Manhattan Murder Mystery; Small Time Crooks, 2000; The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, 2001) or when he simply plays a secondary role (Anything Else ; Scoop). But even when incarnating the protagonist, Allen often bears an outsider’s look. Incorporating the right to confuse and to parody41 characteristic of both the fool and the stand-up comic, the director undertakes the role of a commentator who sometimes sets himself apart from the narrative – a trait he shares with Godard. Also similar to Godard is the aesthetics of collage resulting from the profusion of citations: tributes to 8½ (1963) in Stardust Memories, Amarcord (1973) in Radio Days (1987), Autumn Sonata (1978) in September, Rear Window (1954) in Manhattan Murder Mystery, Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), Dostoevsky in Crimes and Misdemeanors, the futuristic scenario of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the orgasm machine of THX 1138 (1971) in Sleeper, the raising lion of Battleship Potemkin (1925) in Love and Death, the mirror sequence of The Lady from Shanghai (1947) in Manhattan Murder Mystery. This pastiche effect sometimes results in an aesthetics that extends to the image of the author – the patchwork of quotes that destabilises traditional conceptions of the author as unique and consistent. In the case of Allen, the sense of a citing and fragmented authorial identity is matched also by the fragmentation that the one-liners bring to Allen’s discourse, which constantly alienates us from the plots with stand-up-like references to everyday life events. Even if the jokes are not always exclusive to the characters played by the director, when voiced by other actors they come across as a ventriloquism of sorts, as if Allen sometimes 133

performing authorship

chose to express himself through characters other than the ones he plays. In any case, though integrating the director’s fools with other characters, thereby lending a degree of uniformity to the universe of Allen’s films, the instances in which actors mimic the director’s gag style do not undermine the author’s impulse to supersede boundaries. On the contrary, it is as if Allen bled into other characters, refusing to stay within the boundaries of his own body – much like Godard in Two or Three Things I Know about Her (discussed in Chapter One). Allen’s refusal to stay within the confines of the diegesis, his need constantly to surpass, in addition, the borders of the frame and look at the extrafilmic, also take the form of self-conscious references to the workings of the apparatus. Brecht, of course, is as important a link between Godard and Allen as the Bakhtinian fool – both directors translate the teachings of the German dramatist into the use of the direct address and the deconstructionist approach to the medium. Godard and Allen create as much tension as harmony between image and soundtracks – but whereas the former proceeds by dissonance and asynchrony, Allen contrasts the contents of each track so as to create contradictions, irony and unreliable narrations. Alvy’s voiceover discourse at the opening of Annie Hall calls attention both to his account’s untrustworthiness and to the support of visual and verbal material in the making of films. Alvy openly states his ‘trouble between reality and fantasy’ while also addressing the coexistence of image and soundtracks – ‘showing’ us his father (‘There he is, and there I am’), thus assuming our viewing of the image. By the same token, in Radio Days Allen’s voice-over narration alerts us that Rockaway, which he also admits romanticising, ‘wasn’t always as stormy and rain-swept like this,’ confident that we see the neighbourhood in the visual track. This form of direct address typically adopted by voice-over narrators constitutes the cinematic version of what in literature Gérard Genette calls the author’s metalepsis, ‘which consists of pretending that the poet [the narrator] “himself brings about the effects he celebrates”’ through phrases indicating the author’s control over the narrative.42 In fact, the metalepsis grants such narrators the right to transition across diverse narrative levels. In the words of Genette,

134

the author in-between: fools, stand-ups and fictional narratives

any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse […] produces an effect of strangeness that is either comical (when, as in Sterne or Diderot, it is presented in a joking tone) or fantastic.43

It is through the comic use of such a device that Allen’s fools are given free access to the different spaces and the different temporalities separating the act of narrating from the narrative itself – as a result, the author’s image crosses also the borders between narrative levels. For that matter, the conflation of temporalities in scenes depicting Alvy as an adult (played by Allen) physically revisiting the space of his childhood (where Alvy is played by Jonathan Munk) constitutes the visual rendition of metalepsis.

The indissoluble presence of dissipated identities Despite Allen’s refusal to stay within fixed territories, his creative processes are more comfortably placed in the realm of plot than in the Godard examples. The American director narrativises the struggles that define the author as a protagonist in the saga to communicate inner feelings and worldview, while Godard’s fools persistently sidestep the narrative grid.44 In other words, Allen transfers his artistic concerns to the story, experiencing them through his characters – in The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (2001) Bailey discusses these characters’ struggle to maintain some artistic integrity. But most importantly, Allen’s characters blend more easily with his co-stars and with the overall narrative than Godard’s unadjusted buffoons – what is more, Allen’s resistance to stay within boundaries is intermittent. His fools seem to visit the entr’acte only once in a while, while Godard’s characters never leave this transitory space – there are variations in quality and degree separating the American and the French filmmakers, just as the degrees of assimilation of Allen into the fiction change across different films (Crimes and Misdemeanors is less self-reflexive than Stardust Memories, for example). At any rate, in Allen’s films author and diegesis do not entirely (and not always) mix in a seamless way. 135

performing authorship

But what happens in films that proceed similarly but where onscreen authors never ‘precipitate’, being instead fully absorbed into the narrative? Clearly, references to the author’s real identities do not in themselves render their presence disruptive; neither do they necessarily give us a sense of the author’s corporeal presence. This becomes more evident in narrative works displaying their directors not as characters with separate identities, but as fictionalised versions of themselves. Two different examples come to mind: Wes Craven as the writer–director of the very film we see in New Nightmare (1994) and Larry David’s incarnation of his own self in fictional situations in the Curb Your Enthusiasm television sitcom (2000–). If David’s performance is closer in style to those of Godard and Allen (if only because he is a comic actor), Craven’s, which takes place in the context of a horror film, offers a nonetheless illuminating contrast. In fact, New Nightmare presents us with a supernatural and darker version of the tension between reality and fiction explored by both Godard and Allen. Craven’s film features him as a director bearing his own name and writing the screenplay for the sixth sequel to the A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) franchise, New Nightmare. His dreams provide the material for the screenplay, which slowly reveals itself as the source for the very film we watch. But these dreams are also experienced as events in the life of the actress who will star in the film within the film, Heather Langenkamp, and to a lesser degree in that of Robert Englund, both of whom appear under their own identities (though in obviously fictionalised versions). These actors had respectively played the roles of surviving girl Nancy Thompson and monster Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare series. The idea of the screenplay as the repository of the director’s dreams emphasises the author as origin, whereas the extension of the dreams into the lives of actors toys with the conception of the author as possessing godlike powers, as well as with the fear that the events seen in a horror film might bleed into real life – something Craven further explores in the figures of his Scream movies’ serial killers, horror film buffs whose terrifying strategies include quizzing their victims on classics such as Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) and Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980). The interplay between reality and fiction is actually a central trope in New Nightmare, and the confusion between dream and reality that 136

the author in-between: fools, stand-ups and fictional narratives

pervades all the films in the series (and constitutes a typical horror trope) dramatises the viewer’s greatest fear – that the monster may cross the threshold into reality. The fictional and the real inter­mingle also in the identities of other professionals involved – in addition to Langenkamp, Englund and Craven, New Nightmare features other personalities from the world of entertainment as fictional versions of themselves, among whom are New Line Cinema CEO Robert Shaye, producer Sara Risher and actor John Saxon. Yet, in spite of the interplay between the ontological and artificial existences of some figures, and even though Craven’s first appearance in a sequence depicting a shoot works as if the film had turned briefly into its own ‘making of’ documentary, New Nightmare’s commitments to narrative progression, character transformation and generic conventions (i.e. the need for suspense and scares) reduce these self-reflexive elements to gimmicks. In a fictional dialogue between director and actress, Craven tells Langenkamp that only storytelling can control evil, thus the need to keep making Nightmare films – Freddy Krueger needs to inhabit their narratives if he is not to be set free into the real world. The subconscious origin of the story (Craven dreams it), with its chaotic structure, stands in contrast with the supposedly taming potentials of tightly structured plots. If the difficulty of distinguishing between ‘film’ and ‘reality’ is what constitutes Craven’s nightmare (and for that matter all of the films in the series), here the location of this tension in the figure of the director posits him as at once helpless (he cannot control his subconscious) and all-powerful (he is the unquestionable origin of the filmic events). Craven, nonetheless, is enveloped in the fiction. With the transference of experiences from parent to child as the series’s central theme, the character of the director appears simply to replace that of Nancy’s mother in A Nightmare on Elm Street, whose violence towards former criminal Krueger (she and others had lynched him in the past) is charged to her daughter from beyond the grave (Nancy now experiences nightmares that may actually kill her). Similarly, Langenkamp’s son inherits hallucinatory visions of Freddy in New Nightmare. It follows that while Craven’s character attaches a self-reflexive component to the film, he also fulfils a function originally assigned to parental figures in the series. Rather than bridge the film and the extrafilmic, the director’s performance is fully assimilated into the fiction. 137

performing authorship

Though belonging to a completely different universe, Curb Your Enthusiasm works in comparable fashion. David (the sitcom’s creator and writer) plays himself and keeps some, but not all elements of his biographical existence – his character lives from the glories of his work as co-creator and writer of Seinfeld (1989–98), is a Jewish man from Brooklyn living in Los Angeles (the main target of his cynical humour), and used to be a stand-up comic, all of which are true of the writer–director. But David also recreates his life as childless, when in reality he is the father of two daughters, and gives new identities to his wife (whom later in the series he divorces) and agent. Some of the cast members play fictional versions of themselves (Jerry Seinfeld, Jason Alexander, Michael Richards, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Richard Lewis, among others), while characters such as David’s wife (Cheryl Hines), agent (Jeff Garlin) and agent’s wife (Susie Essman) bear the real first names of the actors who play them. But even if David’s Los Angeles experiences constitute commentaries on celebrity life, and even if the series displays the topicality that is typical of both stand-up comedy and sitcoms – references to existing restaurants, TV studios, events (Katrina, terrorism), etc. – the episodes’ self-reflexivity is tamed by the constraints of narrative progression, much like in New Nightmare. To be sure, David is as much an outsider to the world he inhabits as the characters played by Godard and Allen; yet his centrality to the narrative and the seamless incorporation of the real into the fictional distinguishes him from the two directors, whose marginality to the plot (in the case of Godard) and incorporation of either biography or topical references are perceived as disruptive. It follows that the performance of authorship and the use of biographical events and identities do not in themselves render the creator either external to the narrative or disruptive. As this chapter’s main case studies have shown, it is the understanding of the directors’ authorial status as unstable (as marginal, in crisis, or reliant on other authors), further dramatised through Godard’s grotesque behaviour and Allen’s sense of inadequacy, that evokes a sense of authorial presence – one which, in turn, dissipates in the fictional worlds of New Nightmare and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Directors like Nanni Moretti and Takeshi Kitano, on the other hand, produce a similar effect when appearing in the films they direct: 138

the author in-between: fools, stand-ups and fictional narratives

their presence bleeds into the extrafilmic. Moretti’s Caro diario (1993) and Aprile (1998) are similar to the examples by Allen and Godard in that the perception of the director’s authorial presence is achieved both through biographical references and a blatant mediation of the narrated events – Moretti is indeed a master of ceremonies of sorts, taking us through his experiences during a summer vacation in Caro diario and through the Italian federal elections and the birth of his first child in Aprile. However, these films offer episodic narratives that, albeit comical and fictionalised, border with the essayistic – in films whose typical references to a number of real events, in turn, lends them the topicality of Allen’s plots. Kitano’s Glory to the Filmmaker! (2007) is equally episodic, but here the film’s fragmented structure, which mirrors a medical diagnosis of the director’s brain as ‘fragmented’ (positing him as origin, like in New Nightmare), results from Kitano’s failed attempts to abandon the gangster genre in his next project. Glory begins with a Kitano inflatable doll having an MRI – the fragmented brain diagnosis in fact results from that procedure, which later in the film is endured by Kitano himself. In between these two medical sessions we see a series of aborted movies, whose styles parody everything from Yasujiro- Ozu to J-horror, including melodrama and sci-fi narratives, finally leading to a plot centred on two women. The emphasis on process and on the director’s identity crisis turn Glory into Kitano’s 8½, evoking also the meditations of Godard and Allen about their place in the world of cinema – as with the other two directors, Glory presents us Kitano as marginal and in the process of reinventing himself. Furthermore, the gangsters he has incarnated on the screen share the humour and the otherness characteristic of the fool, and the traits he carries across different films – an expressionless face, a nervous twitching of the eye, a funny walk – bear the emblematic quality of the images of Godard, Allen and comical actor–directors like Chaplin, Keaton, Tati and Lewis. The contrasting examples provided by Craven and David make it possible to suggest that, like Godard, Moretti and Kitano, Allen reconnects the film author’s textual and phenomenological beings; that the dynamics akin both to the Bakhtinian fool and the mode of stand-up comedy are deployed in a way that restores indexicality to his authorial figure on the screen. However, though by connecting the film with 139

performing authorship

the real artist these directors may establish the author as origin, and however consistent their understanding of film as a legitimate tool for individual self-expression, the dramatisation of their creative and identity crisis shuns traditional conceptions of control and authority. In fact, Godard and Allen use their ‘foolish’ bodies as instruments for the disruption of closure, as they disturb any sense of completeness and fixedness. This openness, in turn, seals the connection between the film and the outside world; the authors’ bodies become agents allowing for the interpenetration between the image and the real. The spatial in-betweenness characteristic of the fool suggests his refusal to let himself be framed, contained by the fiction, to belong fully to the depicted universe, as happens with Craven (who does not play a fool) and David, but also with Chaplin, Keaton, Tati or Lewis, despite the self-reflexive qualities of their films. It is our main directors’ constant evocation of biographical elements, historical events, the present time and other films that makes them function as the Bakhtinian fool and, in the case of Allen, as a stand-up comic, both of which are ‘other’ to the universes they comment upon, but whose marginality and disruptions make them external also to the realm of classical film narrative. Standing as elements foreign to the depicted world, and figuring as unstable identities, the self-inscribed directors open this world up to what lies beyond the diegesis; they transgress the borders of the screen and unframe the film. The fools played by Godard and Allen can neither contain nor be contained by the film – here performing authorship designates the process by which the author positions himself not so much (or not solely) as source for the film, but as a body in search of a place in the film.

140

Conclusion

The trajectory of the film author can be defined as a series of endless yet opposing attempts to flesh this figure out and empty it of identity, give it life and inter it. The need to reconceptualise the author will exist for as long as the subject remains in crisis – and in the specific case of cinema, for as long as viewers keep seeking a meaning or a message in the film and presupposing a human source behind it. Titles such as ‘The unauthorised auteur today’ (Dudley Andrew) and ‘Auteur desire’ (Dana Polan) call for a revival of the author, betraying also a longing that Andrew playfully addresses as guilty pleasure. ‘Breathe easily,’ he states at the beginning of his essay. ‘After a dozen years of clandestine whispering we are permitted to mention, even to discuss, the auteur again.’1 The past sixty years or so have shown that the author has never ceased to haunt the study of film, whether as an impalpable ghost or conspicuously undead. This long-missed author, in Andrew’s concluding words, ‘can thicken a text with duration, with the past of its coming into being and with the future of our being with it.’2 The invoked idea of temporality has been usually associated with the focus both on the author’s anteriority and interiority. By proposing a scriptor ‘born simultaneously with the text’,3 Barthes challenged the sense of a linear trajectory from the author as origin to the text as depository of that figure’s experiences and ideas. It is precisely the transition from ideas of temporality and interiority to what Andrew describes as the spatiality and externality of post-modern times4 that has turned the author into a void. Authorship studies have been evidently responding to the view that the subject, understood as a reservoir of an individual essence waiting to be freed, expressed 141

performing authorship

or re-encountered, is itself a cultural construct. This questioning of a metaphysics of substance, however, is not born with poststructuralism – as Butler points out, it can be traced back to Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), which states that ‘there is no “being” behind doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything.’5 Given that the author insists on coming back to life, we must move beyond the problem of this figure’s legitimacy; we must cease to want to verify the plausibility of an authorial essence; we must, as this book suggests, conceptualise authorship in terms of how it enacts the deed, not as whether the doers are what we think they should be, or who we think they are. The concept of performing authorship shifts the focus from essence to process, presupposing an author who is neither a unified subject behind a discourse nor a vacuum waiting to be filled with multiple meanings, but instead a palpable human being entertaining (but not necessarily confirming) the notion of a definable identity, which this author may seek to reveal or mask, and which is in any case forever under construction. In spite of the gestural, external qualities that inform the notion of performing authorship, and with it the presumed loss of the temporal narrative establishing the author as the text’s only source, this book does not refute the idea of the essential subject. But neither does it advocate it. In fact, the emphasis on the directors’ corporeality is as much about substantiating an impalpable or decentred subject as it is about stressing the directors’ use of their bodies to assert their presence in the struggle to communicate – in other words, in the process of either constructing, refashioning, masking or destroying the notion of themselves as specifically constituted subjects. Thus the focus on presence – self-expression may be a goal, an end point to the journey, but what defines performing authorship is precisely the journey; not so much the subject that may be either produced or dissolved, but the very processes of production or dissolution. One of the main objects of contention in the critique of traditional models of authorial subjects is the mismatch between work and creator, which films by Godard and Woody Allen have dramatised in similar ways. Two or Three Things I Know about Her features a conversation between a fictional Nobel Prize writer (Ivanov) and a young reader frustrated in her attempt to find in the real man the sympathy that 142

conclusion

transpires from his work. ‘Why me?’ is the author’s response to the girl’s desire to confide in him. ‘Don’t you have friends, teachers, parents?’ Likewise, Stardust Memories’s Sandy Bates cannot appropriately respond to his fans’ impulse to share personal details: ‘I was a caesarean,’ an admirer tells the famous director, to which he awkwardly replies, ‘Oh, that’s great.’ Both scenes suggest that though the work speaks to the audience, the author may not. They address, furthermore, the notion that the author imagined (constructed) by a reader may not correspond to the real person who signs the work – these fictional dialogues written by Godard and Allen indeed corroborate Booth’s notion of the implied author. Yet again, the idea of performing authorship does not require an implied author, which by conceiving of an entity behind textual designs that would stand between the real person and the narrator further abstracts the figure of the author, multiplying its modes of existence. Among other things, performance designates masquerade; the notion of performing authorship accounts for the distinction between the real person and the views expressed in a text (in the broader sense of the term). Instead of condemning the author to abstraction, performing authorship fleshes that figure out – it describes the indices of the author’s presence in the act of creating, in the movement towards or away from exposure, and in any case in the disruptions that the author’s voice or the image of her body bring to the text, opening it up, unframing the film. The concept of the frame expresses these authorial movements through spatial metaphors: from its inability to contain the author (Perestroika, JLG/JLG, F for Fake, the fools by Godard and Allen) to its potential to multiply the degrees of separation between author and viewer (JLG/JLG, The Beaches of Agnès, F for Fake) and its permeability to the outside world (Sherwin’s Paper Landscape, Two or Three Things I Know about Her, documentaries by Rouch and Coutinho, Godard’s fool narratives and Allen’s topical films). Where the director’s image or voice is perceived as disruptive the author ceases to be the unifying force behind the film. In his account of the auteur’s trajectory Andrew recalls a time when critics would speak of ‘Fellini’s “world”, or Ingmar Bergman’s or John Ford’s, indicating thereby an abstract set of elements systematically interrelated in a structure to be projected on a screen somewhere to the side of the daily life from which those 143

performing authorship

elements were culled’.6 Andrew argues that the sense of a filmic world detached from the surrounding reality gets lost with the easy access to directors and their works. In Andrew’s view, Corrigan’s approach to the director interacting with a studio system indicates a cinema spilling out into the world – that is precisely what A Cinema without Walls describes.7 Likewise, the authorial self-inscriptions analysed in films by Godard, Varda, Turner, Welles, Rouch, Coutinho and Allen open the film up to the world surrounding it, establishing the author as the connection between the filmic and the extrafilmic. In this book, however, this connection is not examined through the history of production practices; instead, I look at the filmic inscription of the relation between director and the outside world. Chapter Four investigates this relation in the intermediary space inhabited by the fool and the stand-up comedian, whose marginality to the narrative, as well as their references to biographical information and to topical events, place them between acts, between real and fictional existences, between the filmic and the extrafilmic. We have seen, in addition, that it is not just the film that is unframed: performing authorship refers also to the sense of borderless subjects, or in any case to subjects so permeable to the world and to other works that they blur the distinction between outside and inside, at once absorbing what is external to them and failing to contain what lies within. The image of the author as trespasser incidentally describes the ways in which directors unframe both their films and their own authorial identities. Any sense of a unified and consistent subject is disturbed by the practices of quotation and self-fictionalisation, as well as by these instances in which authors simply lie. Chapter Two’s analysis of self-portrait and essay films contemplates inward and outward movements of authors through analogies with modes of painting and writing – the self-portrait calls for the artists to temporarily step outside themselves, while the essay explores the tensions between meditations on the individual and on general topics. This crossing of borders of the self is manifested in the portrayal of the objects, spaces and works surrounding the author in JLG/JLG, in Varda’s desire at once to expose and to hide behind frames in The Beaches of Agnès, in the movements of the train graphically translating the author’s refusal to be fixed as either real or fictional in Perestroika, and in Welles’s discussion of the 144

conclusion

instability of the author’s name and identity in F for Fake. Furthering the idea of borderless subjects is the presence of characters lacking individuation or psychological consistency: the free crossing of words from narrator to characters in Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know about Her, the exchange of life experiences among real subjects and actors in Coutinho’s Playing, the trance that allows for the incarnation of past entities and the communion between documentarian and subject in Rouch’s films. Almost in the opposite direction, the borderless subject becomes apparent also in Woody Allen’s many fictional incarnations, in the perception of his characters as variations of one and the same identity; one that is, in addition, often (and problematically) conflated with the director himself. As mentioned before, performing authorship also involves a certain amount of divestiture. The trance addresses Rouch’s desire to merge with the documentary subjects on the one hand and with the camera on the other, while the notion of shared anthropology expands the authorial discourse to accommodate the views of the people he films – all the while Rouch’s concluding meditations keep his authorial identity intact. In turn, Coutinho’s absolute reliance on the other, to the point that he systematically rejects authorial diagnosis and analysis, radicalises the move towards divestiture more hesitantly undertaken by Rouch and, to an extent, by Godard in JLG/JLG. But when speaking of authorial divestiture, it is impossible not to think of Chris Marker. It is true that this book’s case studies concern the imprint of the author’s body and/or voice in the film, but the dramatic rendition of authorial processes can equally be detected in the works of a director who, on the contrary, persistently avoided showing his face not only in his films, but also in public. In an interview about Sans soleil (1983), Jean-Pierre Gorin stated that Marker ‘work[ed] very hard at creating a kind of fictional machine, fictional persona.’8 The director replaced images of himself with those of cats (his favourite surrogates). These felines populate his films, functioning as an authorial signature – to the extent that journalists who asked for the director’s photograph were supposedly sent pictures of cats. Marker’s authorial persona, as we can easily deduce, is constituted via deferral and transference. Sans soleil features a female voice-over narrator reading letters that, as we later learn, were sent by freelance cameraman Sandor Krasna. 145

performing authorship

So, neither the images of Japan, Iceland, Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde Islands, nor the words that meditate on them seem to originate in the author – many are in fact credited as being ‘borrowed from’ a variety of sources at the end of the film. Yet we feel Marker’s presence behind them, especially in passages where, reproducing the male cameraman’s written words, the female voice-over notes that some of the images that were, in turn, filmed by others, ‘kindly’ include cats – hinting at the fact that the words delivered in voice-over might come from Marker. Indeed, both Sandor Krasna and his fictional brother Michel Krasna, who signs the film’s music, are pseudonyms for Marker himself. This endless process of authorial transference corroborates the aforementioned sense of a borderless self. Describing Marker the man, Gorin says: He will start talking, and the talk will always do what his films do, you don’t exactly know when it starts and where it ends, and you don’t exactly know why it starts and why it ends, and you will be travelling.

Much in the mode of Barthes’s detection of an authorial presence in the fissures of a text, the presence of Marker is felt in the shifts from images of foreign countries to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and tributes to Tarkovsky, as well as in the interplay of genders in the film’s authorial matrix; in other words, Marker-the-author is found in the uncertainty of where the film comes from, and whom it speaks for. We can conclude that divestiture and the sense of borderless selves express the aforementioned understanding that films do not fully or exclusively represent the artist’s inner life – no longer ‘Fellini’s “world”’.9 The tension between the inside and the outside is central to performance’s highlighting of exteriority, of the gestural and of the mask. Butler is careful to point out that even though she would ‘deny that all of the internal world of the psyche is but an effect of a stylised set of acts’, she also ‘continue[s] to think that it is a significant theoretical mistake to take the “internality” of the psychic world for granted’.10 Performativity, for Butler, refers to the incorporation of gender identities that originate outside the subject.11 The applicability of her theories to authorial processes is inevitably limited by the fact that gender identities refer to real life, whereas authorial ones pertain 146

conclusion

to the realm of fabrications. When aiming for the constitution of themselves as subjects, film authors resort to a set not just of acts, but of techniques known to generate specific effects – which directors can nonetheless reinvent. What performance theories contribute to this study of authorship is first and foremost this relentless flux from inside to outside and back again. Gorin’s summation of the authorial mechanisms found in Sans soleil offers an exact description of the proposed idea of performing authorship: ‘You don’t learn something specific about the author; you learn something about the act of authorship itself.’ That is what performing authorship describes: the individual’s acknowledgement of, and interaction with, the idea of authors as origin, as unique, as forces that control texts and their meanings. Selfexpression, intention and authority matter insofar as they constitute important ingredients in the mix resulting from the authors’ efforts to constitute themselves as subjects, to communicate, as well as their sometimes playful, sometimes experimental entertainment of these ideas. This is why performing authorship constitutes not just a mode of expression, but a way of looking.

147

Filmography 8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963) 24 City (Jia Zhangke, 2008) 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) Adieu Philippine (Jacques Rozier, 1962) Alice (Woody Allen, 1990) Amarcord (Federico Fellini, 1973) The Amulet of Ogum (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1975) Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977) Anything Else (Woody Allen, 2003) Aprile (Nanni Moretti, 1998) The Arbor (Clio Barnard, 2010) Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (Louis and Auguste Lumière, 1895) As Canções (Eduardo Coutinho, 2011) Autumn Sonata (Ingmar Bergman, 1978) Babilônia 2000 (Eduardo Coutinho, 2001) Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) The Beaches of Agnès (Agnès Varda, 2008) The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946) The Big One (Michael Moore, 1998) The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915) The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez, 1999) Bowling for Columbine (Michael Moore, 2002) Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960) By the Bluest of Seas (Boris Barnet, 1936) Capitalism: A Love Story (Michael Moore, 2009) Caro diario (Nanni Moretti, 1993) Chronicle of a Summer (Jean Rouch, 1961) Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) Cléo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962) Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963) Crimes and Misdemeanors (Woody Allen, 1989) 149

performing authorship

Curb Your Enthusiasm – television sitcom (HBO, 2000–) The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (Woody Allen, 2001) Deconstructing Harry (Woody Allen, 1997) Don Quixote (Orson Welles, unfinished) Edifício Master (Eduardo Coutinho, 2002) Everyone Says I Love You (Woody Allen, 1996) Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex… But Were Afraid to Ask (Woody Allen, 1972) F for Fake (Orson Welles, 1972) Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore, 2004) Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton, Lee Unkrich, 2003) First Name: Carmen (Jean-Luc Godard, 1983) Fort Apache (John Ford, 1948) Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980) Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (Jean-Luc Godard, 1991) The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, 2000) Glory to the Filmmaker! (Takeshi Kitano, 2007) The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) The Gold Rush (Charles Chaplin, 1925) Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005) Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen, 1986) Here and Elsewhere (Jean-Luc Godard, 1976) Histoire(s) du cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, 1998) The Hoax (Lasse Hallström, 2006) Hollywood Ending (Woody Allen, 2002) The Human Pyramid (Jean Rouch, 1961) Husbands and Wives (Woody Allen, 1992) Iaô (Geraldo Sarno, 1974) In Praise of Love (Jean-Luc Godard, 2001) Interiors (Woody Allen, 1978) It’s All True (Bill Krohn, Myron Meisel, Orson Welles, Richard Wilson, Norman Foster, 1993) Jacquot de Nantes (Agnès Varda, 1991) Jaguar (Jean Rouch, 1967) Je vous salue, Sarajevo (Jean-Luc Godard, 1993) JLG/JLG: Self-Portrait in December (Jean-Luc Godard, 1994) Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954) King Lear (Jean-Luc Godard, 1987) The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947) Lettre à Freddy Buache (Jean-Luc Godard, 1982) Love and Death (Woody Allen, 1975) The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942) 150

filmography

Les maîtres fous (Jean Rouch, 1955) Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979) Manhattan Murder Mystery (Woody Allen, 1993) Meetin’ WA (Jean-Luc Godard, 1986) A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (Woody Allen, 1982) The Mighty Spirit (Eduardo Coutinho, 1999) Moi, un noir (Jean Rouch, 1958) Mon oncle (Jacques Tati, 1958) Moscou (Eduardo Coutinho, 2009) Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922) New Nightmare (Wes Craven, 1994) A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984) Nouvelle vague (Jean-Luc Godard, 1990) Numéro deux (Jean-Luc Godard, 1975) O Fim e o Princípio (Eduardo Coutinho, 2005) Oncle Yanco (Agnès Varda, 1967) One A.M. (Jean-Luc Godard, unfinished) One Plus One (also known as Sympathy for the Devil) (Jean-Luc Godard, 1968) The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, unfinished) Paisà (Roberto Rossellini, 1946) Paper Landscape – video performance (Guy Sherwin, 1975) Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007) Passion (Jean-Luc Godard, 1982) The Patsy (Jerry Lewis, 1964) Peões (Eduardo Coutinho, 2004) Perestroika (Sarah Turner, 2009) Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965) Playing (Eduardo Coutinho, 2007) Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967) The Quiet Man (John Ford, 1952) Radio Days (Woody Allen, 1987) Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940) [Rec] (Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza, 2007) Roger & Me (Michael Moore, 1989) Salut les cubains (Agnès Varda, 1963) Sans soleil (Chris Marker, 1983) Santa Marta: Two Weeks in the Slums (Eduardo Coutinho, 1987) Scavengers (Eduardo Coutinho, 1992) Scénario de ‘Sauve qui peut (la vie)’ (Jean-Luc Godard, 1979) Scoop (Woody Allen, 2006) Scream (Wes Craven, 1996) The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) 151

performing authorship

Seinfeld – television sitcom (NBC, 1989–98) September (Woody Allen, 1987) Shadows and Fog (Woody Allen, 1991) Sherlock Jr (Buster Keaton, 1924) Sicko (Michael Moore, 2007) Sleeper (Woody Allen, 1973) Slow Motion (Jean-Luc Godard, 1980) Small Time Crooks (Woody Allen, 2000) Soigne ta droite (Jean-Luc Godard, 1987) Stardust Memories (Woody Allen, 1980) Supersize Me (Morgan Spurlock, 2004) THX 1138 (George Lucas, 1971) Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958) Tourou et Bitti (Jean Rouch, 1972) Tout va bien (Jean-Luc Godard, 1972) Twenty Years Later (Eduardo Coutinho, 1984) Two or Three Things I Know about Her (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) Ulysse (Agnès Varda, 1982) Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) Vladimir et Rosa (Dziga Vertov group, 1971) Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) The World of Jacques Demy (Agnès Varda, 1995) The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956) Ydessa, les ours et etc. (Agnès Varda, 2004) The Young Girls Turn 25 (Agnès Varda, 1993) Zelig (Woody Allen, 1983)

152

Notes Introduction 1 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York, NY, and London: Routledge,

2008), pp. 13–14. 2 Roland Barthes, ‘The death of the author’, in Theories of Authorship: A

Reader, ed. John Caughie (London and Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul in association with the BFI, 1981), pp. 212–13. 3 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. ix. 4 Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), p. 86. 5 James Agee, Agee on Film, Vol. 1 (New York, NY: Perigee Books, 1958), p. 149. 6 Antoine de Baecque, Cahiers du cinéma: histoire d’une revue, Vol. 1 (Paris: Éditions Cahiers du Cinéma, 1991), p. 128. 7 Ibid., p. 87. Translation mine in all passages quoted from texts published in French and Portuguese. 8 Dudley Andrew, ‘The unauthorized auteur today’, in Film and Theory: An Anthology, eds Robert Stam and Toby Miller (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 21. 9 Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1972), pp. 167–68. Unless otherwise stated, all emphasis in quoted passages is present in the original. 10 Andrew, ‘Unauthorized auteur today’, p. 21. 11 Barthes, ‘Death’, pp. 209–10. 12 Colin MacCabe, Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 206. 13 Barthes, ‘Death’, p. 211. 14 Dana Polan, ‘Auteur desire’, Screening the Past, 1 March 2001, par. 2. Available at http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/ fr0301/dpfr12a.htm (accessed 22 May 2012). 15 David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 266–67. 153

performing authorship

16 Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam

(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), p. 104, quoted in Rosanna Maule, Beyond Auteurism: New Directions in Authorial Film Practices in France, Italy and Spain since the 1980s (London: Intellect, 2008), p. 23. 17 Maule, Beyond Auteurism, p. 25. 18 Berys Gaut, ‘Film authorship and collaboration’, in Film Theory and Philosophy, eds Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 161. 19 Polan, ‘Auteur desire’, par. 11. 20 See Kaja Silverman, ‘The author as receiver’, October xcvi (Spring 2001), pp. 17–34. 21 M.M. Bakhtin, ‘Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001), pp. 159, 163.

Chapter One 1 Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago

Press, 1983), p. 71. 2 Ibid., p. 151. 3 Ibid., pp. 73–74. 4 Roland Barthes, ‘The death of the author’, in Theories of Authorship: A

Reader, ed. John Caughie (London and Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul in association with the BFI, 1981), p. 210. 5 Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 75. 6 Ibid., p. 74. 7 Incidentally, Chapter Four explores Bakhtin’s very suggestive idea that the figures of rogues, clowns and fools represent the authorial point of view in the novel. 8 Also in the realm of literature, the University of Ghent in Belgium has a research project devoted entirely to the notion of authorship as performance, focusing on the period ranging from the mid sixteenth century to the early twentieth century. See http://www.rap.ugent.be/ node/1. 9 Michel Foucault, ‘What is an author?’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. and trans. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 116. 10 Ibid., p. 119. 11 Ibid., p. 124. 12 Janet Staiger, ‘Authorship approaches’, in Authorship and Film, eds David A. Gerstner and Janet Staiger (New York, NY, and London: Routledge, 2003), p. 28.

154

notes

13 14 15 16 17

Foucault, ‘What is an author?’, p. 124. Ibid., p. 129. Barthes, ‘Death’, p. 211. Staiger, ‘Authorship approaches’, p. 29. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York, NY, and London: Routledge, 2008), p. ix. 18 Staiger, ‘Authorship approaches’, p. 30. 19 Dana Polan, ‘Auteur desire’, Screening the Past, 1 March 2001, par. 2. Available at http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/ fr0301/dpfr12a.htm (accessed 22 May 2012). 20 Staiger, ‘Authorship approaches’, p. 47. 21 Ibid., p. 50. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. xxxi. 25 Ibid., p. xv. 26 Elizabeth Cowie, Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 58. 27 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 185. 28 Ibid., p. xv. 29 Staiger, ‘Authorship Approaches’, p. 50. 30 Barthes, ‘Death’, p. 211. 31 Staiger, ‘Authorship approaches’, p. 51. 32 Richard Dyer, ‘Believing in fairies: the author and the homosexual’, in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York, NY: Routledge, 1991), pp. 187–88. 33 Staiger, ‘Authorship approaches’, p. 51. 34 Ibid. 35 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. xxv. 36 Ibid., pp. xv–xvi. 37 Ibid., p. 43. 38 Vikki Bell, ‘Performative knowledge’, Theory, Culture & Society xxiii/2–3 (2006), p. 217. 39 Gilles Deleuze, ‘What is a dispositif?’, in Michel Foucault: Philosopher, ed. Timothy J. Armstrong (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 159–68, quoted in Vikki Bell, ‘Performative knowledge’, Theory, Culture & Society xxiii/2–3 (2006), p. 217. 40 Bell, ‘Performative knowledge’, p. 217. 41 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation’, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2002), p. 297. 42 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 2nd edition (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), p. 28. 155

performing authorship

43 Ibid., p. 29. 44 Ibid., p. 30. 45 Ibid., p. 28. 46 Quoted in Colin MacCabe, Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (New

York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 241. 47 Dyer, ‘Believing in fairies’, p. 188. 48 Cowie, Recording Reality, p. 135. 49 Ibid., p. 22. 50 Ibid. 51 Henry Bial, ‘Introduction’, in The Performance Studies Reader, 2nd edition,

ed. Henry Bial (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2010), p. 1. 52 Roland Barthes, ‘From work to text’, in Image Music Text, ed. and trans.

Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), p. 157. 53 Ibid., pp. 156–57. The inconsistent capitalisation of ‘text’ in this quotation

is faithful to the source. 54 Ibid., pp. 157–58. 55 Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture

(Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2004), p. 2. 56 Ibid. 57 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 100. 58 Lúcia Nagib, World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (New York, NY: Continuum, 2011), pp. 24–26. 59 Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, p. 4. 60 Robert Stam, Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), p. 192. 61 Kaja Silverman, ‘The author as receiver’, October xcvi (Spring 2001), p. 24. 62 Quoted in Alain Bergala, ed., Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, Vol. 1 (Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile – Cahiers du Cinéma, 1985), p. 296. 63 Bruce Kawin, Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 170. 64 Jean-Luc Godard, ‘On doit tout mettre dans un film’, L’avant-scène cinéma 70 (May 1967), in Bergala, Jean-Luc Godard, p. 296. 65 Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, p. 151. 66 Ibid., p. 139. 67 Ibid., p. 146. 68 Ibid., p. 151. 69 Ibid., p. 152. 70 This description is based mainly on a performance I saw at the Courtisane Festival: Film, Video en Mediakunst at Gent in April 2009, but also on videos available on the Web (at vimeo.com). 156

notes

71 Barthes, ‘Death’, p. 211. 72 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York,

NY: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 64. 73 Ibid., pp. 66–67. 74 Ibid., pp. 55–56. 75 Schechner, Performance Studies, p. 28. 76 Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, pp. 56–57. 77 Roland Barthes, ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’, in Image Music Text, ed.

and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), p. 69. 78 Ibid., p. 70. 79 Ibid. 80 Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, p. 57. 81 Barthes, ‘Diderot’, p. 70. 82 Ibid., p. 74. 83 Ibid., p. 73. 84 André Bazin, ‘Painting and cinema’, in What Is Cinema?, Vol. 1, ed. and

trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA, and London: University of California Press, 1984), p. 165. 85 Ibid., p. 166. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid. 88 My translation of the French terms. 89 Jacques Aumont, L’oeil interminable (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 2007), p. 123. 90 Ibid., p. 131. 91 Ibid., pp. 124, 126. 92 Ibid., p. 125.

Chapter Two 1 Colin MacCabe, Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (New York, NY:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 241. 2 Laura Rascaroli, The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film

(London: Wallflower, 2009), p. 2. 3 Ibid., p. 3. 4 Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, after Marker (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 6. 5 Ibid., p. 13. 6 Ibid., p. 17. 7 Ibid., p. 6. 8 Ibid., p. 13. 9 Ibid. 10 Huxley quoted in Ibid., p. 14.

157

performing authorship

11 Ibid. 12 Corrigan’s history of essayistic practices draws attention to their

manifestation in other media as well; namely photography (photoessays), music and electronic media. See ibid. 13 Rascaroli, Personal Camera, p. 170. 14 Raymond Bellour, ‘Eye for I: video self-portraits’, in Eye for I: Video Self-Portraits, ed. Raymond Bellour, trans. Lynne Kirby (New York, NY: Independent Curators Incorporated, 1989), pp. 7–20, quoted in ibid., p. 171. 15 Rascaroli, Personal Camera, p. 171. 16 Ibid., p. 173. 17 Ibid., p. 176. 18 Corrigan, The Essay Film, p. 15. 19 Rascaroli, Personal Camera, p. 177. 20 Godard’s inclination towards the pictorial arts is also manifested in his abundant references to painting: from the mix of impressionism, graphic novels and op art in films like Pierrot le fou (1965) to the reconstitution of classics by Rembrandt in Passion (1982), among many others. 21 MacCabe, Godard, p. 241. 22 Céline Scemama, Histoire(s) du cinéma de Jean-Luc Godard: la force faible d’un art (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006), p. 135. 23 Kaja Silverman, ‘The author as receiver’, October xcvi (Spring 2001), p. 25. 24 Woody Allen comically explores a similar trope in the filmmaker-goneblind of Hollywood Ending (2002). 25 Quoted in MacCabe, Godard, p. 241. My emphasis. 26 Silverman, ‘The author as receiver’, p. 34. 27 From a documentary entitled L’invité du jeudi: Jean-Luc Godard et Antoine Vitez, which aired on French television (A2) on 17 September 1981. 28 Press conference included in the French DVD set of Histoire(s) du cinéma (Gaumont, 2007). 29 Silverman, ‘The author as receiver’, p. 24. 30 Quoted in ibid. 31 Ibid. The idea of possession will be further explored in Chapter Three through the concept of trance. 32 Bamchade Pourvali, Godard neuf zéro: les films des années 90 de Jean-Luc Godard (Paris and Biarritz: Séguier/Archimbaud, 2006), p. 61. 33 Frédéric Bonnaud and Serge Kaganski, ‘Le petit soldat’, Les Inrockuptibles hors-série Jean-Luc Godard (special magazine edition, 2006), p. 40. 34 I’m indebted to the analysis of this sequence in Douglas Morrey, Jean-Luc Godard (Manchester and New York, NY: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 205, and Pourvali, Godard neuf zero, p. 57. 35 Morrey, Jean-Luc Godard, p. 204. 158

notes

36 Pourvali, Godard neuf zero, p. 55. 37 Silverman, ‘The author as receiver’, p. 27. 38 Quoted in David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 121. 39 Corrigan, The Essay Film, p. 17. 40 Catherine Grant, ‘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 Publishing, 2004), p. 117. 41 Silverman, ‘The author as receiver’, p. 30. 42 Deleuze discusses this aspect of Godard’s work in Cinema 2: The TimeImage (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 43 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 40. 44 Ibid. 45 For a discussion of Butler and the metaphysics of substance refer to Chapter One. 46 Quoted in Adrian Danks, ‘Living cinema: the “Demy films” of Agnès Varda’, Studies in Documentary Film iv/2 (2010), p. 166. 47 Silverman, ‘The author as receiver’, p. 19. 48 Rascaroli, Personal Camera, p. 173. 49 Corrigan, The Essay Film, p. 13. 50 Chris Darke, ‘Film of the month: Perestroika’, Sight and Sound (October 2010), par. 6. Available at http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/ review/5637 (accessed 11 June 2011). 51 Sophie Mayer, ‘The tracks of time: Sarah Turner’s Perestroika’, Sight and Sound (August 2010), par. 9. Available at http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/ exclusive/sarah-turner-perestroika.php (accessed 11 June 2011). 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., par. 16. Darke also addresses an ‘elusive you’ in his review. See Darke, ‘Film of the month’, par. 5. 54 André Bazin, ‘Painting and cinema’, in What Is Cinema?, Vol. 1, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA, and London: University of California Press, 1984), p. 166. 55 Jacques Aumont, L’oeil interminable (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 2007), p. 40. 56 In her review of the film, Frances Guerin places Perestroika within the history of train journeys. See Frances Guerin, ‘Perestroika’. Available at http://fxreflects.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/perestroika-dir-sarahturner-2009.html (accessed 11 June 2011). 57 Aumont, Oeil interminable (2007), p. 58. 58 Ibid., p. 59. 59 Ibid. 159

performing authorship

60 Sara Danius, ‘The aesthetics of the windshield: Proust and the modernist

rhetoric of speed’, Modernism/Modernity viii/1 (January 2001), p. 111. 61 Aumont, Oeil interminable (2007), p. 59. 62 Except for a few instances in which the camera pans and zooms. 63 Darke, ‘Film of the month’, par. 7. 64 Roland Barthes, ‘The death of the author’, in Theories of Authorship: A

Reader, ed. John Caughie (London and Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul in association with the BFI, 1981), p. 209. 65 See Marcel Proust, ‘Against Sainte-Beuve’, in Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays, trans. John Sturrock (London and New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1988). I would like to thank Thomas Baldwin for referring me to Proust’s text. 66 Michel Foucault, ‘What is an author?’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. and trans. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 128. For a more detailed discussion of Foucault’s ‘What is an author?’ see Chapter One. 67 These exhibitions were titled ‘Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries’ (National Gallery) and ‘Second Hand’ (Musée d’Art Moderne). 68 Rascaroli, Personal Camera, p. 177. 69 Silverman, ‘The author as receiver’, p. 34. 70 Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2004), p. 151.

Chapter Three 1 Elizabeth Cowie, Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (Minneapolis, MN:

University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 23. 2 Ibid., p. 24. 3 Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary

(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 34. 4 Quoted in Nichols, Representing Reality, p. 39. 5 Felipe Ribeiro called my attention to Coutinho’s ability to ‘listen’, rather

than ‘give voice’, in his feedback on an essay I published in Framework. The act of listening implies a passive attitude that befits the description of the director as the trigger for the subjects’ behaviours. See Cecilia Sayad, ‘Flesh for the author: filmic presence in the documentaries of Eduardo Coutinho’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media li/1 (Spring 2010), pp. 134–50. 6 Feld in Jean Rouch, Ciné-Ethnography, ed. and trans. Steven Feld (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 16.

160

notes

7 Gilles Marsolais quoted in ibid., p. 15. 8 Ismail Xavier, ‘Indagações em torno de Eduardo Coutinho e seu diálogo

com a tradição moderna’, in Eduardo Coutinho: Cinema do Encontro (Rio de Janeiro: Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, 2003), p. 52. 9 Lúcia Nagib, World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (New York, NY: Continuum, 2011), p. 11. 10 Ibid., p. 8. 11 The film’s title is sometimes translated as Twenty Years After; I am using the title adopted by New York’s Museum of Modern Art in a retrospective of eight of Coutinho’s films that took place in 2009 and was part of the ‘Premiere Brazil!’ programme. 12 See Chapter One for a discussion of ‘showing doing’. 13 Barbara Bruni, ‘Jean Rouch: Cinéma-vérité, Chronicle of a Summer and The Human Pyramid’, Senses of Cinema 19 (March–April 2002), par. 15. Available at http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/feature-articles/ rouch/ (accessed 13 April 2012). 14 Interview with Enrico Fulchignoni in Rouch, Ciné-Ethnography, p. 182. 15 Rouch, Ciné-Ethnography, p. 40. 16 Ibid., pp. 42–43. 17 Ibid., p. 40. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., p. 87. 20 Ibid., p. 101. 21 Ibid. 22 Vertov quoted in Ibid., p. 32. 23 Ibid., p. 98. 24 Ibid., p. 38. 25 Ibid., p. 39. 26 Bruni, ‘Jean Rouch’, par. 11. 27 Rouch, Ciné-Ethnography, p. 39. 28 Ibid., p. 99. 29 Ibid., p. 38. 30 Nagib, World Cinema, p. 139. 31 Quoted in ibid. 32 Cowie, Recording Reality, p. 151. 33 Rouch, Ciné-Ethnography, p. 99. 34 Feld in ibid., p. 19. 35 Feld in ibid. 36 Ibid., pp. 18–20. 37 Ibid., p. 31. 38 Ibid., p. 12. 39 Ibid., p. 13. 40 Bruni, ‘Jean Rouch’, par. 20. 161

performing authorship

41 Cowie, Recording Reality, p. 140. 42 Bertolt Brecht, ‘Theater for pleasure or theater for instruction’, in Brecht

on Theater: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1964), p. 71. 43 Consuelo Lins, O Documentário de Eduardo Coutinho (Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2004), p. 20. 44 Consuelo Lins and Ismail Xavier have also discussed these dynamics. See Lins, O Documentário, p. 90, and Xavier, ‘Indagações’, p. 55. 45 Bakhtin quoted in Paul Willemen, ‘The national revisited’, in Theorising National Cinema, eds Paul Willemen and Valentina Vitali (London: BFI, 2006), p. 37. 46 Ibid. 47 Carlos Alberto Mattos, Eduardo Coutinho: O Homem que Caiu na Real (Santa Maria da Feira: Festival de Cinema de Santa Maria da Feira, 2004), p. 110. 48 Mattos, Eduardo Coutinho, p. 110. 49 Leonardo Cruz, ‘Eduardo Coutinho fala de novo filme’, Folha de S. Paulo, 18 November 2005, par. 17. Available at http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ folha/ilustrada/ult90u55261.shtml (accessed 18 July 2007). 50 Quoted in Lins, O Documentário, p. 99. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., p. 116. 53 Ibid. 54 Feld in Rouch, Ciné-Ethnography, p. 13. 55 Mattos, Eduardo Coutinho, p. 111. 56 See, for example, M.M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, eds Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002). 57 Cowie, Recording Reality, p. 17. 58 Xavier, ‘Indagações’, p. 51. 59 Ibid., p. 58. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., p. 55. 62 Cowie, Recording Reality, p. 151. 63 Xavier, ‘Indagações’, p. 55. 64 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 197. 65 Mattos, Eduardo Coutinho, p. 117. 66 Curiously, for the unfinished One A.M. (which stands for ‘One American Movie’), conceived as an essayistic portrait of the United States in the late 1960s, Godard wanted to have every interviewee’s word said twice, with the second utterance coming from an actor (see Colin MacCabe, Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 215). Though the non-completion of the film allows 162

notes

for little more than speculation, the principle behind it seems to be similar to that of Coutinho’s Playing. 67 Videofilmes, 2008. 68 Cowie, Recording Reality, p. 149. 69 Mattos, Eduardo Coutinho, p. 106.

Chapter Four 1 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 2nd edition (New

York, NY: Routledge, 2006), p. 28. 2 M.M. Bakhtin, ‘Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel’, in

The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001), p. 162. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., p. 161. 5 Ibid. 6 For an account of the origins of fools and stand-up comedy (also studied here), see Lawrence E. Mintz, ‘Standup comedy as social and cultural mediation’, American Quarterly xxxvii/1 (Spring 1985), pp. 71–80. 7 Bakhtin, ‘Forms of time’, p. 163. 8 Ibid., p. 160. 9 Ibid., pp. 159, 163. 10 I should note that we can find versions of Godard’s fools in Vladimir et Rosa, which he directed with the Dziga Vertov group in 1971, and in other interventions (sometimes very brief) throughout his career. 11 Colin MacCabe, Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 256. 12 Bakhtin, ‘Forms of time’, p. 159. 13 Douglas Morrey, Jean-Luc Godard (Manchester and New York, NY: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 167. 14 Ibid., p. 166. 15 Timothy Murray, ‘The crisis of cinema in the age of new world memory: the baroque performance of King Lear’, in The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard 1985–2000, eds Michael Temple and James S. Williams (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000), p. 170. 16 Ibid., p. 171. 17 Quoted in Murray, ‘The crisis of cinema’, p. 171. 18 This sentence appears also in Histoire(s) du cinéma. 19 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 56. 20 The Pompidou catalogue for the 2006 retrospective is one of the few sources that credits Insdorf. See Brenez, Nicole, David Faroult, Michael Temple, James Williams and Michael Witt, eds Jean-Luc Godard: Documents

163

performing authorship

(Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2006). Published in association with Jean-Luc Godard’s exhibition ‘Voyage(s) en utopie, Jean-Luc Godard 1946-2006’, Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, MayAugust 2006. 21 Producer Iain Quarrier re-edited the film with the concluded song and rebaptised the picture Sympathy for the Devil, much to Godard’s discontent, according to a filmic preface to the French DVD featuring both versions (Carlotta, 2006). At the occasion of the screening of the film at the London Film Festival (1968), Godard invited the audience to watch his version in a private session. His proposition being rejected, Godard slapped Quarrier as he left the theatre, screaming ‘To fascism’. 22 Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, p. 50. The inconsistent capitalisation of ‘sentence’ in these quotations is faithful to the source. 23 Ibid., p. 49. 24 Godard’s erratic editing is marked by the articulation of different sources and sometimes by a camera that digresses from central to secondary characters, moving away from protagonists to register, for example, the conversations of people in cafés, as in Masculine Feminine (1966) or Two or Three Things I Know about Her. 25 Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, p. 49. 26 Hannah and Her Sisters won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture (Comedy or Musical), the BAFTA for Best Direction and Original Screenplay, and the French César for Best Foreign Film. 27 In ‘The unauthorized auteur today’ Dudley Andrew refers to the impli­ cation of a ‘spilling out’ of the cinema into the world in Timothy Corrigan’s A Cinema without Walls. Andrew is referring to a change in perception whereby the author’s world, the product of an artistic vision, is no longer a sacred realm isolated from the world that surrounds it, especially with the turning of films into commodities to be owned and the strategic use of the author’s name as a marketing tool. The idea behind ‘unframing’ the film describes a similar connection between the film and the real, where the film ceases to constitute a cut-out universe. But rather than seeing this ‘new’ author as a ‘dispersed, multi-masked, or empty name’, the concept of performing authorship refers to the perception of the author’s presence in the ‘noise’ that results from its struggle at once to flesh out and to mask a subject behind the signature. See Dudley Andrew, ‘The unauthorized auteur today’, in Film and Theory: An Anthology, eds Robert Stam and Toby Miller (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 23. 28 Thanks to Robert Stam for pointing this out in relation to an earlier version of this chapter. 29 Allen’s 1960s stand-up routines, by the way, used to include tales that bordered on the absurd. 164

notes

30 Oliver Double, Getting the Joke: The Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy

(London: Methuen, 2005), p. 173. 31 In Subversive Pleasures Stam describes Blum’s association with the fictional

book a type of ‘erroneous attribution’. See Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 203. 32 Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2004), p. 277. 33 Ibid., p. 279. 34 See Peter J. Bailey, The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), p. 59. 35 Nancy Pogel, Woody Allen (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1987), p. 12. 36 Bailey, Reluctant Film Art, p. 185. 37 See John Baxter, Woody Allen: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 1998) and Eric Lax, Woody Allen: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). 38 David Denby, ‘Imitation of life’, New York (21 September 1992), p. 60. 39 Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, p. 277. 40 Ibid. 41 Bakhtin, ‘Forms of time’, p. 163. 42 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 234. Genette lists a number of examples, including Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste (1796), where the narrator enquires, ‘What would prevent me from getting the Master married and making him a cuckold?’ and, addressing the reader, says, ‘If it gives you pleasure, let us set the peasant girl back in the saddle behind her escort, let us let them go and let us come back to our two travellers.’ 43 Ibid., p. 235. 44 Speaking of framing in L’oeil interminable, Jacques Aumont notes: ‘In his recent films, Godard figures on the board, at the margins, sometimes only through his name: as the painter used to figure in his art, facing the spectator, modest and proud, at the corner of the canvas’ (Jacques Aumont, L’oeil interminable (Paris: Librairie Séguier, 1989), p. 246).

Conclusion 1 Dudley Andrew, ‘The unauthorized auteur today’, in Film and Theory: An

Anthology, eds Robert Stam and Toby Miller (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 20. 2 Ibid., p. 27. 3 Roland Barthes, ‘The death of the author’, in Theories of Authorship: A Reader, ed. John Caughie (London and Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul in association with the BFI, 1981), p. 211.

165

performing authorship

4 Andrew, ‘Unauthorized auteur today’, p. 26. 5 Quoted in Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York, NY, and London:

Routledge, 2008), p. 34. 6 Andrew, ‘Unauthorized auteur today’, p. 24. 7 Ibid., p. 23. 8 All quotes by Gorin refer to the interview featured in the Criterion

Collection release of La jetée (1962) and Sans soleil (New York: The Criterion Collection, 2007). 9 Andrew, ‘Unauthorized auteur today’, p. 24. 10 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. xvi. 11 Ibid., p. xv.

166

Bibliography Agee, James, Agee on Film, Vol. 1 (New York, NY: Perigee Books, 1958). Andrew, Dudley, ‘The unauthorized auteur today’, in Film and Theory: An Anthology, eds Robert Stam and Toby Miller (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 20–29. Astruc, Alexandre, ‘The birth of a new avant-garde: la caméra-stylo’, in The New Wave: Critical Landmarks, ed. Peter Graham (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1968), pp. 17–23. Aumont, Jacques, L’oeil interminable (Paris: Librairie Séguier, 1989). ——— L’oeil interminable (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 2007). Bailey, Peter J., The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001). Bakhtin, M.M., ‘Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001), pp. 84–258. ——— Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, eds Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002). Barthes, Roland, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1975). ——— ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’, in Image Music Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 69–78. ——— ‘From work to text’, in Image Music Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 155–64. ——— ‘The death of the author’, in Theories of Authorship: A Reader, ed. John Caughie (London and Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul in association with the BFI, 1981), pp. 208–13. Baxter, John, Woody Allen: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 1998). Bazin, André, ‘Painting and cinema’, in What Is Cinema?, Vol. 1, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA, and London: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 164–69. 167

performing authorship

——— ‘The ontology of the photographic image’, in What Is Cinema?, Vol. 1, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA, and London: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 9–16. Bell, Vikki, ‘Performative knowledge’, Theory, Culture & Society xxiii/2–3 (2006), pp. 214–17. Bellour, Raymond, ‘Eye for I: video self-portraits’, in Eye for I: Video SelfPortraits, ed. Raymond Bellour, trans. Lynne Kirby (New York, NY: Independent Curators Incorporated, 1989), pp. 7–20. ——— Cinéma et peinture: approches (Paris: Coliartco – PUF, 1990). Bergala, Alain, ed., Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, Vol. 1 (Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile – Cahiers du Cinéma, 1985). Bhabha, Homi K., ‘DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation’, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2002), pp. 291–322. Bial, Henry, ‘Introduction’, in The Performance Studies Reader, 2nd edition, ed. Henry Bial (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2010). Bonitzer, Pascal, Décadrages: peinture et cinéma (Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile, 1987). Bonnaud, Frédéric, and Kaganski, Serge, ‘Le petit soldat’, Les Inrockuptibles hors-série Jean-Luc Godard (special magazine edition, 2006), pp. 36–41. Booth, Wayne, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Bordwell, David, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (London: BFI, 1988). ——— Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). ——— The Cinema of Eisenstein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Brecht, Bertolt, ‘Theater for pleasure or theater for instruction’, in Brecht on Theater: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1964), pp. 69–77. Bruni, Barbara, ‘Jean Rouch: Cinéma-vérité, Chronicle of a Summer and The Human Pyramid’, Senses of Cinema 19 (March–April 2002). Available at http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/feature-articles/rouch/ (accessed 13 April 2012). Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble (New York, NY, and London: Routledge, 2008). Brenez, Nicole, David Faroult, Michael Temple, James Williams and Michael Witt, eds Jean-Luc Godard: Documents (Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2006). Published in association with Jean-Luc Godard’s exhibition ‘Voyage(s) en utopie, Jean-Luc Godard 1946–2006’, Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, May– August 2006. Corrigan, Timothy, A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991). 168

bibliography

——— The Essay Film: From Montaigne, after Marker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Cowie, Elizabeth, Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Cruz, Leonardo, ‘Eduardo Coutinho fala de novo filme’, Folha de S. Paulo, 18 November 2005. Available at http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/ ilustrada/ult90u55261.shtml (accessed 18 July 2007). Dalle Vacche, Angela, Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used in Film (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1996). ——— The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003). Danius, Sara, ‘The aesthetics of the windshield: Proust and the modernist rhetoric of speed’, Modernism/Modernity viii/1 (January 2001), pp. 99–126. Danks, Adrian, ‘Living cinema: the “Demy films” of Agnès Varda’, Studies in Documentary Film iv/2 (2010), pp. 159–72. Darke, Chris, ‘Film of the month: Perestroika’, Sight and Sound (October 2010). Available at http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/5637 (accessed 11 June 2011). de Baecque, Antoine, Cahiers du cinéma: histoire d’une revue, Vols 1 and 2 (Paris: Éditions Cahiers du Cinéma, 1991). ——— La cinéphilie: invention d’un regard, histoire d’une culture 1944–1968 (Paris: Fayard, 2003). Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). ——— ‘What is a dispositif?’, in Michel Foucault: Philosopher, ed. Timothy J. Armstrong (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 159–68. Denby, David, ‘Imitation of life’, New York (21 September 1992), p. 60. Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, trans. and notes Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 1–27. Double, Oliver, Getting the Joke: The Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy (London: Methuen, 2005). Dyer, Richard, ‘Believing in fairies: the author and the homosexual’, in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York, NY: Routledge, 1991), pp. 185–204. Eisenstein, Sergei, ‘Dickens, Griffith, and the film today’, in Film Form, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (San Diego, CA, New York, NY, and London: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1977), pp. 195–255. Foucault, Michel, ‘What is an author?’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. and trans. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 113–38. 169

performing authorship

Gaut, Berys, ‘Film authorship and collaboration’, in Film Theory and Philosophy, eds Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 149–72. Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980). Godard, Jean-Luc, ‘On doit tout mettre dans un film’, L’avant-scène cinéma 70 (May 1967), rpt in Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, Vol. 1, ed. Alain Bergala (Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile – Cahiers du Cinéma, 1985), p. 296. Grant, Catherine, ‘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 Publishing, 2004), pp. 100–17. Grosz, Elizabeth, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994). Guerin, Frances, ‘Perestroika’. Available at http://fxreflects.blogspot. co.uk/2010/10/perestroika-dir-sarah-turner-2009.html (accessed 11 June 2011). Gunning, Tom, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: BFI, 2000). Kawin, Bruce, Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). Lax, Eric, Woody Allen: A Biography (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). Lewis, Jon, Whom God Wishes to Destroy: Francis Ford Coppola and the New Hollywood (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). Lins, Consuelo, O Documentário de Eduardo Coutinho (Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2004). MacCabe, Colin, Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). Mattos, Carlos Alberto, Eduardo Coutinho: O Homem que Caiu na Real (Santa Maria da Feira: Festival de Cinema de Santa Maria da Feira, 2004). Maule, Rosanna, Beyond Auteurism: New Directions in Authorial Film Practices in France, Italy and Spain since the 1980s (London: Intellect, 2008). Mayer, Sophie, ‘The tracks of time: Sarah Turner’s Perestroika’, Sight and Sound (August 2010). Available at http://old.bfi.org.uk/ sightandsound/exclusive/sarah-turner-perestroika.php (accessed 11 June 2011). Mintz, Lawrence E., ‘Standup comedy as social and cultural mediation’, American Quarterly xxxvii/1 (Spring 1985), pp. 71–80. Morrey, Douglas, Jean-Luc Godard (Manchester and New York, NY: Manchester University Press, 2005). Murray, Timothy, ‘The crisis of cinema in the age of new world memory: the baroque performance of King Lear’, in The Cinema Alone: Essays 170

bibliography

on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard 1985–2000, eds Michael Temple and James S. Williams (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000), pp. 159–78. Nagib, Lúcia, World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (New York, NY: Continuum, 2011). Nichols, Bill, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991). Pogel, Nancy, Woody Allen (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1987). Polan, Dana, ‘Auteur desire’, Screening the Past, 1 March 2001. Available at http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr0301/ dpfr12a.htm (accessed 22 May 2012). Pourvali, Bamchade, Godard neuf zéro: les films des années 90 de Jean-Luc Godard (Paris and Biarritz: Séguier/Archimbaud, 2006). Proust, Marcel, ‘Against Sainte-Beuve’, in Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays, trans. John Sturrock (London and New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1988). Rascaroli, Laura, The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (London: Wallflower, 2009). Rouch, Jean, Ciné-Ethnography, ed. and trans. Steven Feld (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Sayad, Cecilia, ‘Flesh for the author: filmic presence in the documentaries of Eduardo Coutinho’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media li/1 (Spring 2010), pp. 134–50. Scemama, Céline, Histoire(s) du cinéma de Jean-Luc Godard: la force faible d’un art (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006). Schechner, Richard, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 2nd edition (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006). Silverman, Kaja, ‘The author as receiver’, October xcvi (Spring 2001), pp. 17–34. Sobchack, Vivian, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2004). Staiger, Janet, ‘Authorship approaches’, in Authorship and Film, eds David A. Gerstner and Janet Staiger (New York, NY, and London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 27–57. Stam, Robert, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). ——— Film Theory: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000). ——— Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005). Truffaut, François, ‘A certain tendency in French cinema’, Cahiers du cinéma 31 (January 1954), rpt in Movies and Methods, Vol. 1, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 224–37. 171

performing authorship

White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). Willemen, Paul, ‘The national revisited’, in Theorising National Cinema, eds Paul Willemen and Valentina Vitali (London: BFI, 2006), pp. 36–37. Wollen, Peter, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1972). Xavier, Ismail, ‘Indagações em torno de Eduardo Coutinho e seu diálogo com a tradição moderna’, in Eduardo Coutinho: Cinema do Encontro (Rio de Janeiro: Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, 2003), pp. 51–59.

172

Index

8½ (Fellini) 133, 139, 149 24 City (Zhangke) 101, 149 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick) 133, 149 Adieu Philippine (Rozier) 45, 149 Adler, Renata 125 Agee, James xvii Alexander, Jason 138 Alice (Allen) 131, 149 Allen, Tony 129 Allen, Woody viii, xii, xv, xxii, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, 104, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 119–20, 122–36, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145, 149, 150, 151, 152 Alloway, Lawrence xviii Althusser, Louis 14 Amarcord (Fellini) 133, 149 Amulet of Ogum, The (dos Santos) 93, 149 Andrew, Dudley xix, xx, 141, 143–4 ‘The unauthorised auteur today’ xix, 141 Annie Hall (Allen) viii, xxvi, 127, 129–30, 131, 133, 134, 149 Anything Else (Allen) 127, 133, 149 Aprile (Moretti) 139, 149 Arnheim, Rudolf xvii

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (Louis and Auguste Lumière) 60, 149 As Canções (Coutinho) 94, 96, 97, 105, 149 Astruc, Alexandre xvi, xvii, xix Aumont, Jacques xviii, xxiii, 27, 31, 60–1 L’oeil interminable xviii, 27 Austin, J.L. 10 auteurism xiv–xxii, 4, 8, 13, 19, 41, 110, 141 authorship absence xv, xx, xxvi, 1, 5, 7, 13–14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 38 author as catalyst xxiv, xxv, 72, 75, 76, 77, 79, 81, 88, 89, 92, 96, 102, 103, 104 author as fool xxv–xxvi, 107, 108–11, 112, 114–18, 119, 120–2, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128, 133, 134, 135, 139, 140, 143, 144 author as trespasser xxvi, 24, 27, 30, 126–35, 144 ‘author function’ 5, 6, 7, 8, 30, 68 and the frame xxiii, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, 2, 3, 10, 23, 24–31, 36, 37, 38, 43, 47, 48, 50, 51, 53, 173

performing authorship

54, 55, 60, 63, 122, 127, 134, 140 implied author 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 16, 30, 66, 143 presence xx, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, 1, 2, 7, 11, 13–24, 25, 27, 28–30, 37, 38, 39, 46, 47, 59, 70, 73, 75, 79, 80, 88, 89, 91, 94, 95, 103, 104, 111, 112–13, 120, 126, 127, 136, 138, 139, 142, 143, 146 traditional/romantic model xiii–xiv, xv, xxi, 6, 8, 12, 13, 35, 43, 47, 133, 140, 142 Autumn Sonata (Bergman) 133, 149 L’avant-scène cinéma 21 Babilônia 2000 (Coutinho) 90, 96, 102, 149 Baecque, Antoine de xviii, xix Cahiers du cinéma: histoire d’une revue xix La cinéphilie xix Bailey, Peter J. xii, 132, 135 The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen 135 Bakhtin, Mikhail xii, xvi, xxv, 91, 94, 108, 109, 110, 114, 115, 121, 128, 131, 134, 139, 140 ‘Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel’ 108 Barnard, Clio 101, 149 The Arbor 101–2, 149 Barnet, Boris 45, 149 Barnouw, Erik 73 Barthes, Roland xii, xiv, xx, xxiii, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 15, 16, 27, 28, 29–30, 36, 47, 65–6, 68, 122, 125, 141, 146 ‘The death of the author’ xiv, 5, 7, 47, 65 174

The Pleasure of the Text 28, 47, 122, 125 Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein) 133, 149 Baudelaire, Charles 19, 66, 117 ‘To the Reader’ 19 Baxter, John 132 Bazin, André xvii, xxiii, 22, 27, 30–1, 54, 60, 95 ‘The ontology of the photographic image’ 22 Beaches of Agnès, The (Varda) vii, xxiv, 34, 38, 47–56, 57, 58, 60, 63, 70, 114, 143, 144, 149 Bell, Vikki 11 Bellour, Raymond xviii, 36 Cinéma et peinture: approaches xviii Bellow, Saul 130 Belmondo, Jean-Paul 124 Beltrão, Andréa viii, 98, 100, 101 Benjamin, Walter xx Bentes, Ivana 80–1 Bergman, Ingmar 143, 149 Bergson, Henri-Louis 11 Bernardet, Jean-Claude 93 Best Years of Our Lives, The (Wyler) xvii, 149 Bettelheim, Bruno 130 Bhabha, Homi K. 12 Bial, Henry 15 Big One, The (Moore) 104, 149 Birth of a Nation, The (Griffith) xvii, 149 Blair Witch Project, The (Myrick and Sánchez) 71, 149 Blum, John Morton 130 Bonitzer, Pascal xvii Décadrages: peinture et cinéma xvii–xviii Booth, Wayne xxiii, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 66, 143 Bordwell, David xxi

index

Bowling for Columbine (Moore) 104, 149 Brand, Jo 128 Breathless (Godard) 41, 149 Brecht, Bertolt 17, 24, 29, 39, 45, 87, 88, 134 Bresson, Robert xviii, 116 Brewster, Ben xix Brooks, Mel 108, 110, 127 Bruni, Barbara 80 Buñuel, Luis xviii, 96 Butler, Judith xiii, xiv, xxiii, 2, 7, 8, 9–10, 11, 47, 142, 146 Gender Trouble 8, 9 By the Bluest of Seas (Barnet) 45, 149 Cabra Marcado para Morrer (Coutinho) 89–90 Cahiers du cinéma xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, 4 Camus, Albert xvii Candomblé (Afro-Brazilian religion) 92, 93, 98 Capitalism: A Love Story (Moore) 104, 149 Caro diario (Moretti) 139, 149 Carpenter, John 136, 150 Cavett, Dick 131 Chabrol, Claude 51 Chaplin, Charles 108, 109, 110, 126, 139, 140, 150 Chekhov, Anton 20, 97 Chomsky, Noam 125 Chronicle of a Summer (Rouch) viii, 73, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 91, 149 Cinecittà (Italian film studio) 124 cinécriture xvii, 50 cinéma à these xix Cinema Novo 80 cinéma-vérité xxv, 72, 73, 83, 96 Citizen Kane (Welles) 65, 66, 149

Cléo from 5 to 7 (Varda) vii, 49, 50, 51, 149 Clooney, George 127 Cocteau, Jean xvi comedy xii, xxvi, 107–8, 110, 114, 126, 127, 128–9, 130, 138, 139, 144 Constructivism 45 Contempt (Godard) 124, 149 Coppola, Francis Ford xxi, 150 corporeality xv, xx, xxv, xxvi, 6, 7, 13–16, 17, 27, 28, 59, 60, 70, 75, 79, 80, 96, 103, 109, 114, 122, 126, 136, 142 Corrigan, Timothy xxi, 34, 35, 36, 37, 46, 56, 144 A Cinema without Walls xxi, 144 Cotten, Joseph 65 Coutinho, Eduardo viii, xii, xv, xxii, xxiv, xxv, 72, 73, 74–5, 88–96, 97–103, 104, 105, 106, 143, 144, 145, 149, 150, 151, 152 Cowie, Elizabeth xi, 9, 13–14, 72, 81, 85, 94, 95, 99 Craven, Wes xv, xxv, 136, 137, 139, 140, 151 Crimes and Misdemeanors (Allen) 127, 129, 133, 135, 149 Cunningham, Sean S. 136, 150 Curse of the Jade Scorpion, The (Allen) 133, 150 Dalí, Salvador xviii Dalle Vacche, Angela xvii, xviii Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used in Film xviii The Visual Turn xvii Danius, Sara 61 Darke, Chris 57, 62 David, Larry xxv, 128, 136, 138, 139, 140 Curb Your Enthusiasm 136, 138, 150 175

performing authorship

Deconstructing Harry (Allen) 129, 132, 150 Deleuze, Gilles 11, 96 Delluc, Louis xvi Demy, Jacques 52, 55, 152 Denby, David 132 Derrida, Jacques xx, 13 Dickens, Charles xvi, xvii Diderot, Denis 29, 40, 135 différance xx documentary xxiv, xxiv–xxv, 31, 34, 36, 63, 65, 69, 71–106, 107, 115, 116, 130, 132, 137, 143, 145 Don Quixote (Welles) 69, 150 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 18, 116, 117, 133 Double, Oliver 129 Dulac, Germaine xvi Dunbar, Andrea 101–2 Dyer, Richard 10, 13 ‘Believing in fairies: the author and the homosexual’ 10

F for Fake (Welles) vii, xxiv, 34, 36, 38, 63–70, 114, 143, 145, 150 Fahrenheit 9/11 (Moore) 104, 150 Farber, Manny xviii Farrow, Mia 131, 132 Faulkner, William 21, 44 Feld, Steven 73, 81 Fellini, Federico 143, 146, 149 Finding Nemo (Stanton and Unkrich) 102, 150 First Name: Carmen (Godard) viii, xxvi, 111, 117, 150 Flaherty, Robert 20, 81, 151 Ford, John xxi, 143, 150, 151 Fort Apache (Ford) xvii, 150 Foucault, Michel xxiii, 3, 4, 5–7, 8, 9, 16, 68 ‘What is an author?’ 4 Friday the 13th (Cunningham) 136, 150 Fuller, Samuel 124

Eastwood, Clint 13, 127 L’écran français xvii Edifício Master (Coutinho) viii, 90, 96, 99, 150 Eisenstein, Sergei xvii, 29, 30, 46, 149 Englund, Robert 136, 137 Epstein, Jean xvi essay film xviii, xxiv, 2, 16, 19, 31, 33–6, 38, 46, 48, 55, 56, 72, 75, 76, 98, 107, 114, 133, 139, 144 Essman, Susie 138 Everyone Says I Love You (Allen) 133, 150 Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex... But Were Afraid to Ask (Allen) viii, 112, 113, 127, 150

Galpão (Brazilian theatre company) 97 Garlin, Jeff 138 Gaumont Film Company 38 Gaut, Berys xxii Genet, Jean 28 Genette, Gérard 134–5 Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (Godard) 49, 150 Gershwin, George 123 Gleaners and I, The (Varda) 50, 53, 56, 150 Globo Repórter (Brazilian current-affairs television programme) 90 Glory to the Filmmaker! (Kitano) 139, 150 Godard, Jean-Luc vii, viii, xii, xv, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, 2, 4, 12, 16–22, 23–4, 29, 38–47,

176

index

48, 49, 51, 56, 57, 60, 63, 70, 75, 96, 104, 107, 108, 109, 110–12, 114–26, 127, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145, 149, 150, 151, 152 ‘One must put everything into a film’ 21 Gold Rush, The (Chaplin) 108, 150 Gorin, Jean-Pierre 145, 146, 147 Gosse, Edmund 72 Gotti, John 129 Grant, Catherine 46 Griffith, D.W. xvii, 149 Grizzly Man (Herzog) 104, 150 Guattari, Félix 11 Gunning, Tom xi, xxi The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity xxi Halloween (Carpenter) 136, 150 Hallström, Lasse 64, 150 Hannah and Her Sisters (Allen) 123, 124, 131, 132, 133, 150 Hauka (religious movement) 76, 99 Hearst, William Randolph 65 Heath, Stephen xix Hendeles, Ydessa 56 Here and Elsewhere (Godard) 39, 150 Herzog, Werner xxv, 103, 104, 150 Heston, Charlton 105 Hines, Cheryl 138 Histoire(s) du cinéma (Godard) 4, 39, 49, 150 Hitchcock, Alfred xviii, 4, 111, 126, 127, 146, 151, 152 Hoax, The (Hallström) 64, 150 Hollywood Ending (Allen) 127, 150 Hory, Elmyr de 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69 Howe, Irving 130 Hughes, Howard 63, 65, 66, 69

Human Pyramid, The (Rouch) viii, 73, 81, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 91, 105, 150 Husbands and Wives (Allen) 132, 133, 150 Huxley, Aldous 35, 36 Iaô (Sarno) 93, 150 In Praise of Love (Godard) 39, 150 Insdorf, Annette 124 Interiors (Allen) 132, 150 Irving, Clifford 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69 It’s All True (Welles) 69, 150 J-horror 139 Jacquot de Nantes (Varda) 55, 150 Jaguar (Rouch) 73, 84, 85, 87, 89, 105, 150 Jameson, Fredric 22 Jarry, Alfred 127 Je vous salue, Sarajevo (Godard) 39, 150 JLG/JLG: Self-Portrait in December (Godard) vii, xxiv, 19, 34, 38– 46, 48, 49, 51, 56, 57, 60, 63, 70, 114, 143, 144, 145, 150 Kardec, Allan 92 Kast, Pierre xvii Kawin, Bruce 21, 23 Keaton, Buster 108, 109, 110, 126, 139, 140, 152 Keaton, Diane 131 Kennedy, John F. 129 King Lear (Godard) xxvi, 111, 114, 119, 120, 121, 126, 150 Kirby, Lynne 61 Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema 61 Kitano, Takeshi xv, xxv, 138, 139, 150 Kodar, Oja 65 177

performing authorship

Lacan, Jacques xiii, 14, 15 Lady from Shanghai, The (Welles) 133, 150 Lang, Fritz xxi, 96 Langenkamp, Heather 136, 137 Lax, Eric 132 Leenhardt, Roger xvi Léger, Fernand xviii Les Rita Mitsouko (French pop group) 117 Lettre à Freddy Buache (Godard) 125, 150 Lewis, Jerry 108, 109, 110, 126, 127, 139, 140, 151 Lewis, Jon xxi Whom God Wishes to Destroy: Francis Ford Coppola and the New Hollywood xxi Lewis, Richard 138 Lins, Consuelo 93 Louis-Dreyfus, Julia 138 Love and Death (Allen) viii, 109, 112, 113, 127, 128, 133, 150 Lumière, Louis and Auguste 60, 149 MacCabe, Colin xx, 34, 112 Macdonald, Dwight xvii Magnificent Ambersons, The (Welles) 69, 150 Les maîtres fous (Rouch) 76, 77, 92, 151 Mallarmé, Stéphane 43, 44 Malraux, André xvii Manhattan (Allen) 129, 131, 151 Manhattan Murder Mystery (Allen) 127, 129, 133, 151 Marchand, Corinne vii, 50 Marker, Chris xxvi, 51, 52, 56, 145–6, 151 Matisse, Henri 68 Mattos, Carlos Alberto 92, 94, 96, 99, 102 178

Maule, Rosanna xxi Beyond Auteurism: New Directions in Authorial Film Practices in France, Italy and Spain since the 1980s xxi McLuhan, Marshall viii, 129–30 Meetin’ WA (Godard) viii, 111, 120, 122–3, 151 Mérimée, Prosper 115 Metz, Christian xvii, xix Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, A (Allen) 133, 151 Miéville, Anne-Marie 41 Mighty Spirit, The (Coutinho) 89, 90, 92–3, 94, 95, 96, 151 mise en abyme 36, 37, 51 mise en scène 4, 45, 94 Modigliani, Amedeo 68 Moi, un noir (Rouch) 73, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 105, 151 Mon oncle (Tati) 108, 151 Montaigne, Michel de 34, 35 Moore, Michael xv, xxv, 103, 104–6, 149, 150, 151, 152 Moretti, Nanni xxv, 138, 139, 149 Morin, Edgar viii, 73, 83, 84, 85, 86, 91 Morrey, Douglas 45, 118 Moscou (Coutinho) 94, 97, 105, 151 Munk, Jonathan 135 Murray, Timothy 120 Nagib, Lúcia xi, 16, 74, 80 World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism 16 Nanook of the North (Flaherty) 20, 81, 151 New Line Cinema 137 New Nightmare (Craven) 136–7, 138, 139, 151 New Wave 51, 124 Nichols, Bill 72

index

Nietzsche, Friedrich 142 Nightmare on Elm Street, A (Craven) 136, 137, 151 Nouvelle vague (Godard) 49, 151 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey xix Nugent, Frank xvii Numéro deux (Godard) 41, 151 O Fim e o Princípio (Coutinho) 90, 151 O’Sullivan, Maureen 131 Oncle Yanco (Varda) 49, 151 One Plus One (Godard) 125, 151 Other Side of the Wind, The (Welles) 69, 151 Oudart, Jean-Pierre xix Ozu, Yasujiro- xxi, 139 painting and film xvi, xvii–xviii, xxiii, xxiv, 27, 29, 30, 31, 33, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 47, 53, 55, 56, 63, 68, 70, 116, 122, 144 Paisà (Rossellini) 45, 151 Paper Landscape (Sherwin) vii, xii, xxiii, 2, 25–7, 143, 151 Paranormal Activity (Peli) 71, 151 Patsy, The (Lewis) 109, 151 Peões (Coutinho) 90, 95, 151 Pêra, Marília 98, 100, 103 Perestroika (Turner) vii, xii, xxiv, 34, 38, 47, 48, 57–63, 70, 114, 143, 144, 151 performance as fluidity of identity xxiii, 2, 11, 13 as masquerade xxii, xxiii, xxv, 3–7, 31, 37, 56, 63, 87, 96, 107, 109, 110, 112, 114, 121, 142, 143, 146 performance theory xi, xv, xxiii, 2 performativity 2, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 34, 56, 60, 70, 103, 128, 146

phenomenology xi, xv, xxiii, 2, 15, 16, 70, 139 Philipe, Gérard 51, 55 Picasso, Pablo xvi, 65, 66 Piccoli, Michel 51 Pierrot le fou (Godard) 124, 151 Playing (Coutinho) viii, 94, 97– 101, 102, 103, 105, 145, 151 Playtime (Tati) 108, 151 Pogel, Nancy 131 Polan, Dana xxi, 8, 141 ‘Auteur desire’ xxi, 8, 141 Polanski, Roman 13, 127 politique des auteurs, la xvii, xix, 4, 45 poststructuralism xiii, xiv, xv, xix, xxi, 1, 5, 7, 8, 13, 30, 142 Pourvali, Bamchade 44, 45 Proust, Marcel 28, 66 Quiet Man, The (Ford) xvii, 151 Radio Days (Allen) 133, 134, 151 Rascaroli, Laura 34, 36–7, 51, 53 Ray, Man xviii Ray, Nicholas 45, 150 Rear Window (Hitchcock) 133, 151 Rebecca (Hitchcock) xvii, 151 [Rec] (Balagueró and Plaza) 71, 151 Reichenbach, François 63, 67 Renoir, Jean xviii, 96 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste xvi Resnais, Alain 51 Richards, Michael 138 Risher, Sara 137 Rivette, Jacques 51, 122 Robinson, Edward G. 85 Rocha, Glauber 80, 81, 93 Rock, Chris 128 Roger & Me (Moore) 104, 151 Rolling Stones, the 125 Rossellini, Roberto 45, 96, 151 179

performing authorship

Rouch, Jean viii, xv, xxii, xxiv, xxv, 72–88, 89, 91, 92, 94, 99, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 143, 144, 145, 149, 150, 151, 152 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 36 Rozier, Jacques 45, 149 Sadoul, Georges xix Salles, João Moreira 99 Salut les cubains (Varda) 50, 151 Sans soleil (Marker) xxvi, 145, 147, 151 Santa Marta: Two Weeks in the Slums (Coutinho) 90, 96, 151 Santos, Nelson Pereira dos 93, 149 Sarno, Geraldo 93, 150 Sartre, Jean-Paul xvii, 19 Being and Nothingness 19 Satie, Erik 62 Saxon, John 137 Scavengers (Coutinho) 90, 96, 102, 151 Scénario de ‘Sauve qui peut (la vie)’ (Godard) 125, 151 Schechner, Richard xxiii, 12, 28, 75, 89, 107 Scoop (Allen) 127, 129, 133, 151 Scott, A.O. 48 Scream (Craven) 136, 151 Searchers, The (Ford) xvii, 151 Seinfeld, Jerry 128, 138, 152 self-portrait, the xxiv, 25, 33, 34, 36–56, 70, 144 Sellars, Peter 119 semiotics xvii, xix, 17, 110 September (Allen) 131, 132, 133, 152 Shadows and Fog (Allen) 133, 152 Shaye, Robert 137 Sherlock Jr (Keaton) 108, 152 Sherwin, Guy vii, xii, xv, xxiii, 2, 25–7, 29, 143, 151 Sherwood, Robert xvii 180

Sicko (Moore) 104, 105, 152 Sight and Sound 57 Silverman, Kaja xxiv, 19, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 49, 70 Simon, Paul 131 Sleeper (Allen) viii, 112, 113, 127, 128, 133, 152 Slow Motion (Godard) 41, 152 Small Time Crooks (Allen) 133, 152 Smith, Roger 104, 105 Sobchack, Vivian xxiii, 15, 16, 22–3, 29, 70, 130, 132 Carnal Thoughts 130 Soigne ta droite (Godard) viii, xxvi, 111, 114, 116, 118, 119, 121, 152 Sontag, Susan 130 Sorko people, the 79, 81 Spurlock, Morgan xxv, 103, 104, 152 Staiger, Janet xxiii, 5, 8, 9, 10 Stam, Robert xi, xvii, 18 stand-up comedy xii, xxvi, 107, 110, 122, 127, 128–9, 130, 131, 133, 138, 139, 140, 144 Stanton, Andrew 102, 150 Stardust Memories (Allen) 127, 132, 133, 135, 143, 152 Sterne, Laurence 135 Straub, Jean-Marie 96 structuralism xiii, xix, 4, 66, 110 Supersize Me (Spurlock) 104, 152 Tarkovsky, Andrei 146 Tati, Jacques 108, 109, 110, 126, 139, 140, 151 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich 66 Teixeira, João Pedro 90 Thomas, Sîan 58, 59, 60, 62 THX 1138 (Lucas) 133, 152 Tolstoy, Leo xvi, xvii Torres, Fernanda 98, 100, 102 Touch of Evil (Welles) 69, 152

index

Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 69 Tourou et Bitti (Rouch) 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 89, 92, 152 Tout va bien (Godard) 41, 152 Treadwell, Timothy 104 Truffaut, François xvii, xviii, 51 ‘A certain tendency in French cinema’ xvii, xviii Turner, Sarah vii, xii, xv, xxii, xxiv, 38, 48, 57–63, 70, 144, 151 Twenty Years Later: A Man Labeled to Die (Coutinho) 74, 75, 90, 152 Two or Three Things I Know about Her (Godard) vii, xii, xxiii, 2, 16–19, 21, 23, 24, 27, 35, 43, 75, 134, 142, 143, 145, 152 Ulysse (Varda) 50, 54, 152 Umbanda (Brazilian religion) 92, 93 Unkrich, Lee 102, 150 Van Gogh, Vincent 66, 116 Varda, Agnès vii, xv, xvii, xxii, xxiv, 38, 48, 49–56, 57, 60, 63, 70, 144, 149, 150, 151, 152 Velázquez, Diego 40 Vérités et mensonges (Welles) (see F for Fake) Vertès, Marcel 69 Vertigo (Hitchcock) 146, 152 Vertov, Dziga 39, 41, 45, 79, 80, 152 Vilar, Andrée 51 Vilar, Jean 51, 55 Villeret, Jacques 117 Vlady, Marina 18, 19 voice-over narration 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 24, 44, 51, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 68, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 81, 83, 85, 88, 91, 111, 116, 119, 120, 123, 134, 145, 146

Von Stroheim, Erich 96 Warhol, Andy xviii Waterston, Sam 132 Weekend (Godard) 40, 152 Welles, Orson vii, xv, xxii, xxiv, 36, 38, 63–70, 144, 149, 150, 151, 152 War of the Worlds 65, 69 White, Hayden 72 Metahistory 72 Wiest, Dianne 132 Willemen, Paul 91 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 40 On Certainty 40 Wolff, Janet 13 Wollen, Peter xix–xx Signs and Meaning in the Cinema xix Woods, Frank E. xvii World of Jacques Demy, The (Varda) 55, 152 writing and film xvi–xvii, xviii, xx, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, 2, 5, 6, 7, 27, 28, 33–6, 39, 50, 144 Wrong Man, The (Hitchcock) xviii, 152 Xavier, Ismail xi, 74, 94, 95, 97 Ydessa, les ours et etc. (Varda) 50, 55, 152 Young Girls Turn 25, The (Varda) 55, 152 Young Turks, the xviii, xix Zelig (Allen) 127, 130, 152 Zhangke, Jia 101, 149

181