Performing Authorship

Self-Inscription and Corporeality in the Cinema

Cecilia Sayad

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857734303
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The figure of the auteur continues to haunt the study of film, resisting both the poststructuralist charges that pointed to its absence and the histories of production that have described its pitfalls. In an era defined by the instability of identities and the recycling of works, Performing Authorship offers a refreshingly new take on the cinematic auteur, proposing that the challenges that once accelerated this figure's critical demise should instead pump new life into it. This book is about the drama of creative processes in essay, documentary and fiction films, with particular emphasis on the effects that the filmmaker's body exerts on our sense of an authorial presence. It is an illuminating analysis of films by Jean-Luc Godard, Woody Allen, Agnes Varda, Orson Welles, Jean Rouch, Eduardo Coutinho and Sarah Turner that shows directors shifting between opposite movements towards exposure and masking, oscillating between the assertion and divestiture of their authorial control. In the process, Cecilia Sayad argues, the film author is not necessarily at the work's origin, nor does it constitute the end product.
What this new concept of performing authorship describes is the making and unmaking of a subject.

‌

CECILIA SAYAD is a lecturer in Film at the University of Kent. She is the author of a book on Charlie Kaufman published in Portuguese (O jogo da reinvenção: Charlie Kaufman e o lugar do autor no cinema), as well as of articles in a number of journals, including Framework and The Journal of Film and Video.

*

‘Can a filmmaker be an author, or is the concept a relic of a old-fashioned ideology unsuitable for a technological and industrial medium? And what about filmmakers who actually perform in their films, as characters, narrators or even appear as filmmakers? Drawing on a range of genres, from fiction film to documentary, and on filmmakers well-known and more obscure, Cecilia Sayad’s work illuminates this issues with a range of careful readings and insights. This book puts film authorship in a new light.’

TOM GUNNING, Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Art History, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, and the College, The University of Chicago (US)

Published in 2013 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
www.ibtauris.com

Distributed in the United States and Canada
Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010

Copyright © 2013 Cecilia Sayad

The right of Cecilia Sayad to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978 1 78076 005 6 (HB)
978 1 78076 006 3 (PB)
eISBN: 978 0 85773 430 3

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

Text design, typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London

‌

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Performance, Corporeality and the Borders of the Film
• 2 The Author and the Frame: Writing, Painting and the Essay Film
• 3 The Author in the World: Trance, Presence and Documentary Filmmaking
• 4 The Author In-Between: Fools, Stand-Ups and Fictional Narratives
• Conclusion
• Filmography
• Notes
• Bibliography

‌

‌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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3.2 Chronicle of a Summer: Morin and Rouch in the feedback session after the screening of the shot material to the documentary subjects

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

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

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

3.8, 3.9 Playing: Actress Andréa Beltrão wipes her tears as she reproduces the testimony given by Gisele, who had not cried

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

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

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

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

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

‌

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 p...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements