Film and Authorship / Edition 1

by Virginia Wright Wexman

Overview

During the 1960s, when cinema first entered the academy as a serious object of study, the primary focus was on auteurism, or on films authorship. Burgeoning cinema studies courses demonstrated how directors were the authors of work that undermined (or succeeded in spite of) all the constraints that Hollywood threw at them. New critical methods were introduced as the field matured, and studies of the author/director, for the most part, were considered obsolete.

Virginia Wright Wexman has pulled together some of the freshest writing available on the topic of film authorship. Spanning approaches including poststructuralism, feminism, queer theory, postcolonialism, and cultural studies, the contributors ask, what does auteurship look like today in light of all these developments? The contents of the volume are divided into three major sections: Theoretical Statements, Historical and Institutional Contexts, and Case Studies. Wexmans comprehensive introduction contextualizes the selections and summarizes the scholarly methods through which auteurism has been addressed in the past; it also provides a sketch of the history of media authorship. An extensive bibliography rounds off the volume.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813531939
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	11/12/2002
Series:	Rutgers Depth of Field Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Virginia Wright Wexman, past president of the Society for Cinema Studies, is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance and other books and articles on film.

Table of Contents

The auteur theory revisited / Andrew Sarris
The revenge of the author / Colin MacCabe
Authorship and narration in art cinema / David Bordwell
The female authorial voice / Kaja Silverman
A parallax view of lesbian authorship / Judith Mayne
"The whole equation of pictures" / Thomas Schatz
The commerce of auteurism / Timothy Corrigan
Transnational film authors and the state of Latin American cinema / Marvin D'Lugo
"Our own institutions": the geopolitics of chicano professionalism / Chon A. Noriega
Cinema in search of its authors: on the notion of film authorship in legal discourse / Marjut Salokannel
D.W. Griffith: historical figure, film director, and ideological shadow / Tom Gunning
Cecil B. Demille and highbrow culture: authorship versus intertextuality / Sumiko Higashi
Writing himself into history: Oscar Micheaux / Pearl Bowser, Louise Spence
The filmmaker as poet: Stan Brakhage / David E. James