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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: First Name: Carmen, Jean-Luc Godard
Cecilia Sayad is lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Kent. She has taught film at the University of Chicago, Vassar College, and the New York University, where she received her PhD. Her most recent publication is a book on Charlie Kaufman that appeared in Brazil (O jogo da reinvenção). Her essays have appeared in the Brazilian journals Significação and Socine and in the collection From Camera Lens to Critical Lens, edited by Rebecca Housel (Cambridge Scholars Press). She has a forthcoming essay in the Spring issue of Framework titled “Flesh for the Author: Filmic Presence in the Documentaries of Eduardo Coutinho”.
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