Last night I went to see the film BABEL with some friends and first of all, I would recommend it to anyone with a spare $10 and a couple of hours of free time. The film is beautiful, with magnificent scenes from various continents and it is visually magnificent. The music is wonderful and the cast is great (I've never really been a Brad Pitt fan before, but his short amount of screen time in this film is actually really good). I love Gael Garcia Bernal and was pleased with his performance, but saddened by his small amount of screen time. The cast as a whole is great, even the kids.

Anyway, I wanted to discuss this type of movie. I'll try to not spoil it for those of you who want to see it. The film is constructed like Crash. The film has storylines that connect at the end, despite all the major characters being on different continents and living very different lives. I find this very interesting in terms of the narrative. Jumping between all the plots leaves the audience in suspense about one plot, then creates suspense for them in the next one. I love this style of filmmaking. Films that have a straight-forward, linear narrative often have scenes that are slow, or not as enticing and I often lose interest. This choppy, non-linear style keeps drawing the audience back into the film and with this film, the variety of characters and scenes is amazing. Offering this wide range is beneficial, as it gives a wide variety of scenes, a wonderful ensemble cast (much like Crash), and different aspects for audience members to relate to. I find it very interesting that this type of film has gained such popularity and prestige.

Personally, I think you should all go out and rent Who Killed the Electric Car? (or put it in your Netflix queue). I was bummed when we had class and it was showing at Scripps, but it just released on DVD yesterday and I watched it this afternoon instead of writing a Spanish essay and I could not be more pleased with my decision. It is an extremely well-put together documentary that kept my attention and gave me a massive amount of information about something that I had little or no knowledge about before.
Just a bit about authorship before my verdict in the murder case and other rantings. The film brought me back to issues that we discussed about Authorship and Film. This film was written and directed by the same guy, who clearly has a passion for the topic, but he use of other materials (clips from movies, television broadcasts, etc) add a lot to the film and make it much better, so there is a blurring of authorship, like there is with many documentaries. Also, I expected the narrator to be the voice of the director/writer and was a bit surprised when the credits rolled around to see that the voice was actually that of.... Martin Sheen. Interesting. It is also quite clear that it took a lot of people to make this film work and the authorship was a collaborative effort, rather than just the director.

I came across an interesting article today that brought me back to our discussions on Authorship and Film. The Onion AV Club had an article called “Do Screenwriters Really Matter?” in which two columnists debate about the role of screenwriter vs. the role of directors in film authorship. The piece uses a recent writer/director conflict as a jumping off point. Recently, director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (who have collaborated on three films, Amores Perros, 21 Grams and now Babel) decided to part ways, largely due to conflicts over authorship of their films. Arriaga has been quoted as saying, "When they say it's an auteur film, I say auteurs film. I have always been against the 'film by' credit on a movie. It's a collaborative process and it deserves several authors." However, since mainstream conceptions of film authorship center around the director, its easy to see how Arriaga’s view might have put him into conflict with Iñárritu.

In the first paragraph of the article, “making films asian american” Projasky and Ono state, “few continue to write of the auteur as the originary and privileged location of a text’s meaning.” They continue, saying that, “film studies scholars now avoid modernist auteurship studies”. I had not previously connected the idea of the death of the author to films before, but looking back, it seems odd I took an entire class on the autuer and not once did the problem of the author arise. The class was titled “American Film Directors: Kubrick, Cassavetes, and Altman” and revered the three.

I particulary enjoyed Walter Metz's John Waters goes to Hollywood article both because John Waters was my first favorite director (I think this was 1997?), and because of the revelation of Metz's critic/human complex which surfaces at the end of the essay.

I know this is sort of beside the point of the article, but bear with me... The instruction Metz leaves the reader with in the end ("...we also need to emphasize the ways in which we willingly and usefully participate in the romanticization of particular figures, especially of ourselves as critics with the authority to speak, as well as of hte directors about whom we speak") really, I think, succinctly illumes the poststructuralist notion of the critic.

The part of this article that interested me most was the role of genre. Is a director more credible if he can successfully make films in multiple genres? Or is it better to focus on one genre and add a unique twist to this genre?? Bazin's arguments about genres throughout the article were quite interesting. While Bazin argues that "the skill of the popular artist consists of fulfilling predictable expectations while introducing a renovatory degree of variation", it can also noted that maybe directors of these genre films simply know how to read the formula that genre typically follows and fit the script into the formula.

It has come to my attention while reading Authorship and Film that I too am in the habbit of ignoring authorship in film. While I would never read a book without knowing the author, I consistently watch movies without having any idea who directed the film. While I think this phenomenon can be attributed to the fact that we more often than not associate a film with its actors because of their star power, it is interesting to consider the many other factors that facilitate the routine dismissal of cinematic authorship.

I think a large part of the lack of directorial recognition has to do with the fact that the mainstream population has very little knowledge of the production process for example what exactly goes into lighting, staging, and set design.

I'm too tired to come up with a witty title...or even a relevant one.
So I'll progress directly to my response to the reading.

I feel like there was a lot going on here, a lot being said, and a lot of different angles being taken on the same basic question. However, very little of it stood out to me. Maybe I read the wrong chapters, sadly I did not have the time to read every chapter in the book. However, the one thing that did really grab my eye (maybe because it occurred early in the book before my mind became completely oversaturated with endless permutations of author and auteur) was Janet Staiger's discussion of the "issue of agency in authorship" (51). Questions of agency are among the most interesting to me. I've gotten the impression that I give a lot more thought to my own personal agency and the ways in which it is affected in social interactions and the ways in which I can preserve a sense of it, even in the face of disempowering situations.

I took a class while studying abroad about cinema and literature and we devoted a large part of our time to the analysis of cinematic adaptations of literary works. Since then I have been very interested in the comparison of the two mediums and this dichotomy between the written and the visual modes of story telling. While reading one of the essays in Authorship and Film, I was reminded of that class and this discussion of cinema vs. literature. Janet Staiger in her essay "Authorship Approaches," quotes Astruc as saying "cinema is becoming a language, which allows it to break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake...to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language."

Hey Everybody,

I'm from the group that's presenting this week and we have a quick announcement for you. Because "Authorship and Film" covers such a wide variety of content, we have decided that it would be best to focus our presentation on a few of the essays. They are:

Introduction
"The Auteur Theory: Michael Curtiz, and Casablanca"
"John Waters Goes to Hollywood: A Poststructuralist Authorship Study"
"Making Films Asian American: Shopping for Fangs and the Discursive Auteur"

Please make sure you read these pieces for Wednesday's class. Thanks everyone!