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Back to modernity: thoughts on reality, narrative, cinema from
another technological age
Prof Laura Mulvey, Birkbeck, University of London
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Abstract
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This talk is part of an investigation of film authorship that stresses its performative dimension, shifting the focus from authorial self-expression to authorial self-inscription. I argue that the presence of the director in the image creates a certain tension between author and film. In this scenario, the creator is perceived as a foreign element, as trespasser and exterior to the film, all the while acting as a linkage, positioning the film and the outside world in a relation of contiguity. As a consequence, the film opens itself to the extrafilmic, loses its autonomy and is contaminated by autobiographical, historical and cultural elements. This discussion draws mainly from Roland Barthes’s idea of authorial figuration and Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of the fool as the author’s mask in the novel. In Barthes, figuration replaces the narrative of the self with a sense of the author’s physical presence. Bakhtin’s theories about the fool’s relative “exteriority” to the novel provides my study with the literary equivalent of the author as trespasser that I wish to explore in the domain of cinema. Grounding this discussion are the analyses of authorial self-inscription in the works of Jean-Luc Godard, Woody Allen and Brazilian documentarian Eduardo Coutinho.
Film: tba
Laura Mulvey is professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London. Her current research interests are: rethinking feminist film theory; theories of technology and aspects of technological change in film and television; the aesthetics of stillness in the moving image: avant-garde and fiction; the 'new woman' and the cinema in the late 1920s; melodrama and world cinema. Books: Visual and Other Pleasures (Palgrave Macmillan), Fetishism and Curiosity (Indiana University Press), Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Reaktion Books).
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