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. -------- from list film-theory-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ------- ------------------
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