Auteur Studies

A tutti noi è capitato e capita di considerare l'autore come criterio di scelta e di valutazione, come una garanzia di qualità e di corrispondenza ai nostri gusti cinematografici. Tutto questo ci appare naturale, parte integrante del modo con cui andiamo a vedere un film. Tuttavia, se volgessimo
lo sguardo alla storia del cinema, alla critica e al dibattito teorico troveremmo ben presto indizi significativi pronti a indicarci quanto di costruito, di culturalmente determinato ci sia dietro la nozione di autore e quanto essa stessa sia suscettibile di analisi storica, critica e teorica.
È quanto il volume si propone di fare, ricostruendo un percorso tutt'altro che lineare in un secolo di cinema. Soffermandosi su alcuni snodi che ne hanno segnato la definizione e le modificazioni, analizzandone alcuni casi esemplari (Ford, Hitchcock, Leone), l'autore cinematografico viene indagato per mostrarne lo statuto mutevole, contraddittorio e alle volte paradossale. Il libro fa dunque scoprire come alla fine, nel panorama contemporaneo, questo alter ego, che dietro le immagini ha accompagnato la nostra esperienza di spettatori cinematografici, forse ha irrimediabilmente perso il suo ruolo e la sua posizione.

Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini (1920-1993) is one of the most renowned figures in world cinema. Director of a long list of critically acclaimed motion pictures, including La strada, La dolce vita, 8½, and Amarcord, Fellini's success helped strengthen the international prestige of Italian cinema from the 1950s onward. Often remembered as an eccentric auteur with a vivid imagination and a penchant for quasi-autobiographical works, the carnivalesque, and Rubenesque women, Fellini's inimitable films celebrate the creative potential of cinema as a medium and also provide thought-provoking evocations of various periods in Italian history, from the years of fascism to the age of Silvio Berlusconi's media empire.

In Making a Film Fellini discusses his childhood and adolescence in the coastal town of Rimini, the time he spent as a cartoonist, journalist, and screenwriter in Rome, his decisive encounter with Roberto Rossellini, and his own movies, from Variety Lights to Casanova. The director explains the importance of drawing to his creative process, the mysterious ways in which ideas for films arise, his collaborations with his wife, Giulietta Masina, his thoughts on fascism, Jung, and the relationship between cinema and television. Often comic, sometimes tragic, and rife with insightful comments on his craft, Making a Film sheds light on Fellini's life and reveals the motivations behind many of his most fascinating movies.

Available in its entirety for the first time in English, this volume contains the complete translation of Fare un film, the authoritative collection of writings edited and reworked by Fellini and initially published by Giulio Einaudi in 1980. The text includes a new translation of the Italo Calvino essay "A Spectator's Autobiography," an introduction by Italian film scholar Christopher B. White, and an afterword by Fellini's longtime friend and collaborator Liliana Betti.

This article argues that, propaedeutic to the construction of an Objectivist aesthetics, scholars must refute the irrational/immoral philosophical premises that have been destroying the philosophy of art. Due to the troubling combination of its contemporaneity, extremism, and considerable influence, poststructuralism, which, since the 1960s, has served as the default philosophical foundation for philosophers of art, is the target of this article.

This essay characterizes the cinema of Lino Brocka as principally realist by (1) underscoring his consistent use of realistic material; (2) highlighting pronouncements by various film scholars on the realist aspects of the Brocka film; (3) identifying realist film tropes distilled from the preceding step; and finally, (4) putting forward the Brocka film's engagement with the life-world as a way to understand the auteur's brand of cinematic realism.

In this article we introduce the queer Bengali auteur Rituparno Ghosh (1961–2013),who had a significant role in reviving the Bengali film industry that was going through a dark phase for a little more than a decade. As an iconic feminist film-maker and
queer cultural figure, Ghosh has been an influential icon within Bengal and more widely in India and the diasporas. In seeking to examine his vast oeuvre of work we focus on its various elements. First, we examine Ghosh’s feminist position, and how he shocked his middle-class audience through his transgressive discourses. Second, we investigate the influence and inspiration he received from figures such as Satyajit Ray and Rabindranath Tagore. We argue that Tagore’s sensibility and philosophy imbued all his films. In doing this he was also uncritically referencing the other great Bengali film-maker Satyajit Ray. Third, an examination of Ghosh is incomplete without referencing his uninhibited performance of queerness both in his films and in the public domain. Over here we look at his final queer film trilogy but also the impact he left on Calcutta’s LGBT community. Finally, this article ends by focusing on Ghosh’s legacy on other Bengali film-makers.

This piece functions primarily as an auteur study of Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, dubbed "the Other Kurosawa" or "Kurosawa the Younger" by many American film critics. Kurosawa has made a name for himself in the last two decades by crafting a series of existential horror films (grouped problematically within "J-Horror"), beginning with Cure [Kyua] in 1997, and continuing with Charisma [Karisuma] (1999), Pulse [Kairo] (2001), Bright Future [Akarui Mirai] (2004), Loft [Shi no otome], and Retribution [Sakebi] in 2006.

Tese em Filosofia defendida na UFMG em 27 de janeiro de 2014. Menção honrosa no Prêmio CAPES de Tese 2015. Prêmio UFMG de Tese 2015.
O autor e sua obra são muito mais contingentes e instáveis do que parecem. Convém se perguntar: quando emergiu a figura do autor e como ela funciona? Como o sujeito se relaciona com o discurso, conferindo a este uma unidade autoral? E desde quando passou a ser concebível que um discurso pudesse ser atribuído a um indivíduo e apropriado por alguém? Em certa medida, pretendo responder essas perguntas nesta tese, partindo de uma perspectiva foucaultiana, segundo a qual o autor moderno é concebido como uma maneira de organizar o discurso, uma determinada especificação da função-sujeito e um complexo mecanismo de poder. A tese pretende ser um trabalho histórico-filosófico que assume uma postura propriamente crítica, como um exercício de transformação, de mudança de nosso modo de ser, que nos permite pensar e agir diferentemente.

This polemical article objects to the pervasive use of realism as a value or prescriptive term in the writing of Italian cinema history. It also offers a dissenting appraisal of the ‘institution’ of neorealism: the body of critical work and discourse that constructs neorealism as the ethical and aesthetic centre of Italian cinema. The discursive recourse to neorealism has become the essential authoritative gesture: to fail to refer to it is to risk seeming ignorant, philistine and most of all politically suspect. We contest this insidious common sense of Italian cinema studies, a common sense that is underpinned by a notion of auteurist ‘paternity’ as the default explanatory metaphor of Italian film history, and which leads to a dismissive tone in the discussion of genre films, not to mention a disdain for the audience for such films. We critique the idea of cinema as a ‘mirror’ of the nation found in some of the pre-eminent scholars of Italian cinema, and we finish by recommending a moratorium on the mention of neorealism for at least five years. What would a silence on realism allow us to reveal about other modes and genres?

The article is followed by replies from Giulia Fanara (Rome), Millicent Marcus (Yale) and Robert Gordon (Cambridge), and then the authors’ own short response to the replies.

Agnes Varda's Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000) was made by a film-maker with a history of engagement with political issues and a powerful aesthetic fascination. Reading the film in both the context of Varda's oeuvre and of its production during a period of political reawakening in France, this article suggests that despite its apparent disorder, Les Glaneurs is rigorously structured according to a principle of digression and return. This dialectic is mediated through the theme of gleaning, which serves as a bridge between the film's principal concerns: the requirements of survival and of artistic expression. Varda's technique recalls her previous films such as La Pointe Courte (1956) and Sans toit ni loi (1985) and it is in fact the autobiographical dimension of Les Glaneurs that constitutes its greatest digression from the project of social documentary. Crucially, Varda's visual curiosity allows the film to avoid didacticism or utopianism; it tacitly raises political questions but offers few answers. Les Glaneurs operates within the context of a new political cinema dissatisfied with the post-1968 narrative; however, it is not limited to a single discourse. Les Glaneurs is a plurivocal and broadly humanitarian ‘subjective documentary’ and its over-riding principle is Varda herself.

Nel 1985 Federico Fellini si liberava dell'ossessione della memoria di un viaggio fatto nello Yucatan con lo scrittore Andrea De Carlo e l'antropologo-esoterico Carlo Castaneda, scrivendo (con Tullio Pinelli) il soggetto del "Viaggio a Tulun", che sarà pubblicato a puntate sul «Corriere della sera» nel 1986. Le matite di Milo Manara trasformeranno il soggetto che non poteva diventare un film in un fumetto sceneggiato dallo stesso regista riminese. Dapprima pubblicato a puntate sulla rivista «Corto Maltese», il fumetto di Fellini e Manara, "Viaggio a Tulum, da un soggetto di Federico Fellini, per un film da fare", ebbe un grande successo sancito dalle numerose edizioni che seguirono. "Approdo a Tulum. Le Neverland a fumetti di Fellini e Manara" è il saggio che intende analizzare il denominatore comune che ha legato i due artisti. Il testo ricostruisce, con attenzione alla storia e al costume, il rapporto che Fellini ebbe con il fumetto, da quando, prima di divenire regista, fu autore di vignette e storielle su periodici satirici, fino all'incontro fatale con il disegnatore Manara, la cui carriera attraversa un pezzo significativo di storia del fumetto italiano, anche questa ricostruita per il lettore con accurata dovizia.

The article provides a critical look at some of the recent academic literature (in English) on the New Romanian Cinema (NRC). It mainly engages with three texts: a book-length appreciative introduction (by Monica Filimon) to the work of writer-director Cristi Puiu: a highly ambitious attempt (by László Strausz) to trace, within Romanian culture, the tradition that the NRC could be said to belong to; and a harsh ideological critique of the NRC (by Bogdan Popa).

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This article assesses the predominant ways in which critics and historians have traditionally understood the career of Humphrey Jennings, long considered the British documentary movement's leading film-maker. The terms in which we have previously understood Jennings' career form part and parcel of how we have hitherto narrated British documentary film history, as a 'rise and fall' story that ends around the time of his death. The assumptions underlying this story are now up for debate. This article is therefore an exercise in positive historical revisionism. It is not an attempt to diminish Jennings' reputation.

This thesis is dedicated to the cinema art of Kira Muratova with the focus on the theme of grotesque. Kira Muratova shot films of different genres; mixing styles, creating a new reality of cinema, mixing audio-visualization of people with animals, classical literature with slang, including photography and pornography, installation, performance, opera and ballet. Due to this fact, her films provide rich objects of research in Visual Culture Studies. This study is concerned with the audio-visual effects, images and scenes connected to the theme of grotesque in the auteur cinema of Kira Muratova.

Deliberately departing from the possible socio-historical context, the author of the project presents intertextuality of Muratova's film.This thesis includes a detailed analysis of images and shots of several films with a focus on grotesque and along with general description of the director’s main devices. It searches for meanings, denotations and connotations in the films’ images as the essential elements of the films. In addition to an overview of the whole art of director and auteur features, the project deals in more details with two recent films by Muratova— Two in One (2006) and Melody for a Street Organ (2009). Both films are examples of post-modern cinema, and represent ironically, controversially, abruptly, painfully, but truthfully, many important cultural and philosophical issues and essences: arts, man and his place in the world, his relation to other living beings. Semiotics, auteur theory, other theories of film studies, linguistics and psychoanalysis in their postmodern appearances have been applied to the analysis of Kira Muratova's film.

The critical consensus that Rebecca is a faithful adaptation stems from ignorance of the du Maurier novel and a simplistic interpretation of Hitchcock’s complex, nuanced remarks about the film’s production. He radically departed from the mediocre source to explore those themes of unstable identity, male anxiety and sexual repression, which also permeate The 39 Steps, Strangers on a Train, Vertigo and Marnie.  Rebecca, the character, is a synecdoche of Rebecca, the film.  She offered to play the part of a devoted wife to deceive Max’s family and friends; the film pretended to be a faithful adaptation to deceive Selznick, du Maurier, the critics, perhaps even Hitchcock himself.  While the newly arrived director can be identified with the nameless displaced feminine protagonist, Manderley and Monte Carlo symbolise the artificiality of Hollywood.  Mrs Van Hopper’s retort that “most girls would give their eyes for a chance to see Monte”, trumped by Max’s “Wouldn’t that rather defeat the purpose?”,  invites reflection on how many directors have given their eyes to work in Hollywood, only to have their personal purposes defeated.  In Hitchcock’s case, the motifs of artificiality and reality, blindness and sight, and defeated purpose resonate throughout his films.

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Critics often treat Wes Anderson’s films as the highly original creations of a distinctive auteur. While Anderson’s films have an aesthetic that appears to be wholly his own, his work also reveals the clear influence of filmmakers from around the world as well as Anderson’s close network of collaborators. In this course, we will examine film authorship through a close study of Anderson’s oeuvre. From auteur theory through recent studies of below-the-line labor, we will discuss creativity and influence
in film production. Students will understand the history and limitations of such studies for analyzing and evaluating cinema as an artform.

The book series Transmedia: Participatory Culture and Media Convergence provides a platform for cutting-edge research in the field of media studies, with a strong focus on the impact of digitization, globalization, and fan culture. The series is dedicated to publishing the highest-quality monographs (and exceptional edited collections) on the developing social, cultural, and economic practices surrounding media convergence and audience participation. The term 'media convergence' relates to the complex ways in which the production, distribution, and consumption of contemporary media are affected by digitization, while 'participatory culture' refers to the changing relationship between media producers and their audiences.

Each time they kissed, there was the thrill of love ... The threat of murder! --poster for Suspicion (1941) The anatomy of metaskepticism In a significant revisionist work of recent years that runs decidedly counter to the dominant stream of Hitchcock scholarship that links Hitchcockian artifice to irony, Lesley Brill has argued that Hitchcock's stylistic self-consciousness contributes to rather than subverts the romance narratives that are his central preoccupation. For Brill, Hitchcock s insistence on artifice, surface and masquerade are part and parcel of the fairy-tale romance 'where the ordinary constraints of rational law are loosened in plots characterised by 'lucky co-incidence', a 'high degree of conventionality' and 'artifidality'.1

Cinquante ans après « La mort de l’auteur » de Roland Barthes qui proclamait une symétrique « naissance du lecteur », ce sont aux morts réelles et non métaphoriques des auteurs et autrices (tous arts confondus : bande dessinée, beaux-arts, chanson, cinéma, littérature, performance, télévision, théâtre, etc.), et à leurs conséquences sur la création et la réception des œuvres qu’entend s’intéresser ce numéro de Fabula-LhT.

Les propositions de contributions (qui devront consister en une ébauche de l'article de 4 à 5 pages rédigées, accompagnées d'une bibliographie indicative) sont à envoyer avant le 15 septembre 2018 à Romain Bionda et Jean-Louis Jeannelle (romain.bionda@fabula.org et jeannelle@fabula.org).

This course will examine films of director Alfred Hitchcock and various filmmakers he has influenced, including Brian DePalma, Paul Verhoeven, Jonathan Demme, Roman Polanski, Chan-wook Park, Gus Van Sant, Pedro Almodovar, and David Lynch. On a deeper level, however, this is a class about intertextuality. Using Hitchcock as a case study, we will define and sometimes trouble the boundaries between remake, parody, imitation, influence, homage, allusion, and pastiche.

ccupying the place of the sacred victim, his very being is stigmatised and the more he roclaims his innocence, the more he is guilty -since guilt resides in his very resistance to e assumption of 'guilt; i.e., the symbolic mandate of the victim conferred on him by e community. What the victim has to do in order to be 'equal to his task' is therefore assume the burden of guilt in full consciousness of his innocence: the more he is nocent, the greater is the weight of his sacrifice. (2007: 84-5; emphasis added)

È indubbio che la nozione di autore sia, nella storia come nella teoria del cinema, una tra quelle più largamente sottoposte ad un'ampia revisione critica. Sia che si pensi agli approcci di ispirazione semiotica, alla ricerca filologica, alla storia e all'analisi dei modi di produzione o ai contributi della teoria della ricezione, della nozione d'autore intesa come nozione forte, unitaria, fondata, resta ben poco. E del resto basta scorrere un po' di bibliografia per rendersi conto di come essa tenda ad esplodere, di come la figura dell'autore possa frammentarsi e disperdersi in mille rivoli, destrutturata a partire da paradigmi diversi che comunque ne ribadiscono la sostanziale labilità.

This course will examine the surreal, whimsical, grotesque, and weird films of director Tim Burton. We will come to know his body of work as a series of narrative, visual, and thematic preoccupations that have influenced a variety of film artists. Students can expect to examine a varied body of work from a mix of critical lenses, including class, race, gender, sexuality, and disability.

The legacy of Charlie Chaplin is immeasurable and deeply woven into the history of cinema. At his height, he was the highest-paid and most recognizable star in the world, founded an independent studio with fellow industry titans, released continuous box-office smashes, rubbed elbows with some of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century, and changed the language and shape of American cinema. Even later on in his life, as scandal plagued his career, as he was exiled from the country, as he grew more fearful of the world, he produced visions of deeply emotional comedy that still resonate with us today. Chaplin consistently drew on his early vaudeville and silent film era's limitations throughout his career in his distinctly visual and physical storytelling. Partially drawing on that era, Chaplin also returned to a contentious relationship with authority throughout his career, mainly through the Tramp's oblivious antics

In the 1950s Nehru preached the doctrine that factories and dam s were the new tem ples of India. And if the base was to be an industrialised econom y the superstructure m ust be a secular, dem ocratic and urbanised society established on enlightened hum anism . If the tem ples stood for the old feudal or colonised order then the factories were to stand for m odern India 1 . The 1950s was a decade of transition from the old to the new. Ray's early realism reflects this transition of Indian society. In m ost of Ray's film s up to the m id-l960s we find the tension of the old and the new social orders, and this is m ost pronounced in the father figures. In Apu Trilogy, Harihar is a village priest representing the old, agrarian order. Apu has to transcend that stage to becom e a bourgeois intellectual. He knows the world, he reads and writes novels, he is rom antic and enlightened, he is an individual -the citizen of m odern India 2 . A sim ilar project can be traced through Devi, Kan ch en jun gh a and Mah an agar. In Devi there is a feudal, authoritarian and superstitious father. His son, who studies in Calcutta, is his rational foil. The son believes in 'Reason' m ore than in the sanctity of beliefs. He supports his friend's m arriage to a widow; prom ises to follow the legacy of Ram m ohun Roy, and m usters up the courage to protest against his father's superstitions. He provides a m odel of the em erging individual 3 . In Kan ch en jun gh a, Manisha breaks out of the dom inance of her colonial patriarch of a father and finds her own independent voice. In Mah an agar the father is a retired, old school teacher living in a world of values under attack. He believes that a wom an should not go out to work. Arati, his daughterin-law, and then Subrata, his son, have to transcend this barrier of ideas. The father keeps posing the lim it against which the protagonists in these early film s have to struggle.

This paper will use a theoretical framework derived from Mikhail Bakhtin to explore the process by which Hispanic-American film director Robert Rodriguez ensured his place within the Hollywood studio mainstream. In the transposition of his low-budget action movie El Mariachi (1992), originally conceived for the Spanish-speaking straight-to-video market, into Desperado (1995), a studio vehicle for Antonio Banderas, Rodriguez faced some of the aesthetic and ideological challenges that attend Hollywood's assimilation of other film-making cultures into its body of conventions. Bakhtin's theories on genre will be used to explore how the low-budget aesthetic of El Mariachi (famously made for the privately-raised sum of $7,000 before it was picked up at the Sundance film festival and polished for release by Columbia Pictures) is replaced by the glossy, cine-literate stylistics of Desperado. The realistic visual palette of the original film mutates into the panoramic, dusty mise-en-scéne familiar from Sergio Leone's "spaghetti westerns", while self-conscious cameos from cult figures of American cinema like Steve Buscemi and Quentin Tarantino firmly place Desperado within a well-defined generic and industrial canon. The relocation of the narrative to Leone's mythical and timeless west, populated by untrustworthy bartenders and vengeance-seeking killers, eradicates the sense of social critique implicit in the contemporary Mexico of El Mariachi (the hero is forced into battle