File spoon-archives/film-theory.archive/film-theory_1995/film-theory_Feb.95, message 23


Date: Tue, 7 Feb 1995 08:50:31 -0500 (EST)
From: James Douglas Penney <jdp10-AT-acpub.duke.edu>
Subject: Re: Point-of-view, primary id and all that jazz



Pedro Almodovar does very much the same thing with both his company cast 
and an identifyable camera style and mise-en-scene from film to film (one 
just knows, for example, doesn't one, that no one else would want that 
furniture).  But, I'm now wondering, does all of this imply a kind of 
"auteurism's revenge"?  If we accept that a film, through its various 
strategies of interpellation, constructs a subject, and that, among 
certain filmmakers, there are noticeable similarities between the 
subjects constructed from film to film, does this mean that, at least in 
these cases, film is a "work," in the old-fashioned pre-Barthesian sense, 
and no longer, a la postmodernism, a "text"?  Shouldn't we be making a 
distinction, nevertheless, between certain enunciative "markers" left by 
a filmmaker to signify his/her artistic persona, and the manner in which the 
film constructs a subject to which no individual viewer will actually 
perfectly correspond?  But, then again, are these two processes/ 
phenomena all that distinct?  Can one really speak of the director's 
"stamp" on his film and the identifications structured by its mechanisms 
of suture as two different phenomena?  Could one say, perhaps, that the 
"subject" constructed by the film is the filmmaker him/ herself?  That 
whatever is actually "communicated" by the film is precisely the 
director's fantasy, the very projection through which s/he becomes "subject"?

(My answer, as you've probably guessed, is YES!)

Thinking out loud (but not really)

James.

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