Search Results

Cynthia Felando demonstrates the relevance and significance of Jonze’s narrative shorts in his larger filmography. Felando argues that these short films both reflect and enrich our understanding of Jonze’s auteurist preoccupations. The short film is treated as its own genre with important specificities, including several related to storytelling, narrative, character, and genre conventions that differentiate it from the feature-length film. The chapter’s aim is to establish the viability of contextualizing Jonze’s narrative shorts as shorts, and to demonstrate the value of an analytical approach that addresses their continuities with and differences from his feature-length films. Felando considers his narrative shorts in relation to discourses in the emergent area of short form media studies. The primary analytical focus is on Jonze’s fiction shorts, although his other shorts-related titles are cited to demonstrate the persistence of several of his recurring storytelling, character, and thematic strategies.

This chapter presents a critical examination of the wider context of the film industry using Ginger & Rosa as a lens through which to examine the three main professional working frameworks that film industry professionals operate within - the network, the department and the project itself, the film. Drawing on interviews with established film professionals, the chapter examines these three distinctive, yet overlapping spheres, their intersections, their challenges and their moments of contradiction. The chapter extrapolates the organisational structure as specific to the Ginger & Rosa ‘project’ and examines in detail the structures and working relationships of three different departments–Camera/Electrical, Assistant Director (AD), Production and Post-production. These discussions draw out the complex interplay between, on the one side, a highly craft-based, traditional classical narrative film production, and, on the other, a production shaped by new digital technologies and interstitial work specific to the film-to-data moment. Through the mapping of a Personnel Structure and Working Relations model, the chapter examines how Sally Potter manages to nurture innovation and experimentalism within these seemingly inflexible structures through ‘collaborative’ and ‘transitional’ auteurism.’

This is a study about Tony Garnett, forty-year actor, story editor and then producer, within the context of British television, film and Hollywood cinema. This chapter attempts to describe, explicate and analyse Garnett's work. Garnett has been responsible for a considerable variety of work, including some of the most influential plays and films in British television history. Garnett is one of a small group of television producers who have helped to define what being a television producer is. He is particularly hostile to ‘auteurism’, insisting that drama production is a collective practice, artistically and socially. Auteurism in its crudest form explains the creation of ‘significant’ drama as the product of a single, authorial consciousness. Garnett has worked in a variety of production contexts across the decades, and his role as producer has altered in the process. Garnett's authorial signature is intimately connected to a realist politics and aesthetics, which is still the best way of describing the spine that runs though his work. Realism, with its various qualifiers— social, magical, hyper—and its near-synonyms (notably naturalism), is a much-debated term in cultural criticism.

Twin Peaks was a pioneering television series created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, aired on ABC from April 1990 to June 1991. The oft-repeated adjective ‘quirky’ has become almost a synonym for Twin Peaks, though the series is as genuinely grief- and horror-driven as it is humour-laced. Viewers did not know whether to laugh or cry, but usually did both. Yet Twin Peaks' tears and fears were predicated on its deployment of two of television's most predictable formats: soap opera and the crime/investigative thriller. Often read as the perfect hybrid of Lynch's cinematic strangeness and Frost's respectable televisual pedigree, Twin Peaks posed a series of questions about genre, seriality and auteurism for television studies. It was a mix of tears and sex, investigation and secrets. The series' twin obsessions with weeping and the unknown/unknowable were indicators of genre, and agents in the confusions bound up with the series' format. Twin Peaks first promised the resolutions of an episodic series, but unfolded as an irresolvable continuous serial.

This chapter discusses the films of Frank Capra, including Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and It's a Wonderful Life (1946); how Capra appeared to realize the long-term significance of television sooner than many directors of his generation; the preoccupation with the Capraesque in the cinema of the 1990s; the publication in 1971 of Capra's autobiography, The Name above the Title; and the link between Capra's claim to auteurism and the issue of his sentimentality.

This chapter focuses on Terence Fisher, Hammer Films' most celebrated director. Fisher directed twenty-eight Hammer films between 1952 and 1974 and vehemently refused to be considered an auteur for his work at the studio. Despite his distaste for the idea, and the disputed relevance of auteur theory, auteurism offers a useful framework for interrogating the impact of this particular director within a studio which was renowned for its collaborative family-like team. The foregrounding of moral ambiguity and the human condition, and panache for suspenseful editing distinguish Fisher's work from that of many of Hammer's other directors. While some of his techniques were adopted in later films, Fisher was much responsible for creating this specific, colourful style of Gothic film-making. While Fisher worked as part of a close-knit collaborative, his style was clearly recognised by Anthony Hinds as appropriate for the Hammer brand and his involvement with the studio identifies him as one of the most important directors in the history of British horror.

This chapter examines Wong’s engagement with musical style, considering the functions and effects of music in Chungking Express in particular. It explores Wong’s selection and deployment of highly eclectic music cues; it outlines his practice of musical scoring and spotting, illuminating the extent to which his musical engagement typifies Hong Kong practice; and it investigates the utility of concepts such as postmodernism, nostalgia, MTV stylistics, hybridity, and Deleuze’s movement-image and time-image in elucidating Wong’s sound tracks. Most broadly, the chapter examines the music track’s relation to character subjectivity, emotional meaning and response (e.g. sentimentality), and audio-visual sensuousness.

This chapter conducts a reading of Preston Sturges’s 1941 film Sullivan’s Travels that focuses on its discourses about film authorship. While the auteurism that drives much film criticism today routinely approaches directors as authors, in 1941 the case for directors had yet to be made in unequivocal terms. Drawing on archival materials housed at UCLA, including unproduced scripts and correspondence, the chapter argues that Sturges used the vehicle of Sullivan’s Travels to argue that neither producers nor stars like Veronica Lake can be taken seriously as authors. However, the film remains ambivalent about the rival claims to authorship mounted by screenwriters and directors. The reasons that lay behind this ambivalence arose from Sturges’s belief that, while screenwriters were the most important authors, directors were the ones who held the power in Hollywood.

This chapter compares three Sturges-authored films, The Good Fairy (Wyler, 1935), Easy Living (Leisen, 1937) and Remember the Night (Leisen, 1940), against Sturges’s scripts. Sturges, who started in Hollywood as a script doctor and scriptwriter, complained bitterly about how other directors treated his screenplays. Yet this chapter argues that adaptations made by the directors and the studios generally improved upon his original vision, sometimes by heightening the comedy, but mostly by intensifying viewer connection to characters and emphasizing the romance. Sometimes the studio system, which kept auteurism in check, worked to a film’s advantage.

This chapter closes the book with a look back at 2012 through the contemporary moment of 2017 reflecting upon recent changes and innovations in the film industry. Five years on from the temporal origin of the book’s focus of study, the film industry and film production has continued to be impacted by digital interventions in innumerable ways. Since 2012, new creative and logistical responses to technological innovations have proliferated, resulting in new types of film production and new exhibition practices. This chapter summarises the key concepts of the book - Production Aesthetic; collaborative auteurism; transitional auteurship; and workflow-warp and weft. The chapter looks forwards to the future of digital film studies–approaches and methods through a summary of the analytical framework developed within the book: through the unification and cross-analyses of the tripartite of text, production aesthetics and representational text(s) and their subsequent mobilization and dissemination.

If, as Jane Gaines (2012) suggests, instead of ‘transgressing’ the formal dictates of the industrial genre (that is, instead of ‘going against genre’), some women filmmakers ‘go with genre’, this might be particularly so in the case of horror cinema. The analysis of the much-maligned Jennifer’s Body (2009), written by Diablo Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama, demonstrates precisely this point. The chapter begins by discussing the marketing of Jennifer’s Body, in order to show how those in charge of film distribution and publicity used the director’s and writer’s gender as a promotional tool, and how the filmmakers themselves might have determined certain feminist and postfeminist readings of their film. These readings are contextualised within Diablo Cody’s broader self-promotional activities and her “commercial auteurism” (Corrigan 1991) and raise several questions about what is at stake when women practitioners make horror films and the implications should a filmmaker self-identify as a feminist filmmaker. The chapter then offers a close examination of Jennifer’s Body by rethinking the theories of Barbara Creed (1993) and Carol J. Clover (1992) and by inscribing the film within the wider context of teen movies and postfeminist media culture, making room for reflection on female spectatorial pleasures. It concludes that rather than undoing the horror genre, Jennifer’s Body explores its productive potential, participating in its continuous re-inscription of the relationship between women and violence.

Sofia Coppola, one of the most visible indie directors in recent years, is clearly embedded in the ‘commerce of auteurism’ (Corrigan 1991), as she actively participates in constructing her public image. Building on existing scholarship on the filmmaker as illustrative of the new critical paradigm in studies of women’s film authorship, the first section of this chapter looks at the promotional and critical discourses surrounding her films to trace the various processes of authentication and de-authentication of Coppola as an auteur (family connections, the privileged position in the American film industry, her filmmaking style marked by a focus on flat affects and the mise-en-scène’s surface details, as well as her interest in postfeminist/neoliberal femininity which has divided critics, especially with her 2013 feature film, The Bling Ring). In the exploration of Coppola’s authorial status, the chapter sheds light on the issue of genre, arguing that her engagement with familiar conventions is far more complex than current analysis of her work has acknowledged. This is particularly evident in the case of Marie Antoinette (2006), a film which has been read variably as a costume drama and/or as a historical biopic. In establishing a dialogical relationship between biopic and costume drama scholarship, the chapter centres on self-conscious devices deployed in Coppola’s film, which are mobilised not against but through a logic of a feminised consumerist culture. The aim is not to reject the supposed ‘feminising’ aspects of the costume drama or to masculinise them in framing the film as a ‘self-conscious’ biopic, but rather to investigate the gender anxieties that underlay the labelling of genres by film criticism.

This Afterword summarizes the arguments made throughout the book, underscoring the variety of ways in which women filmmakers draw on generic conventions. It focuses on the benefits of considering the mode of generic production not as an obstacle, but as a resource for creative imagining. It highlights that the constructed opposition between women’s culture and men’s culture has a profound impact on critical reception and discursive circulation of films, and details several critical strategies employed to make sense of particular examples of women’s cinema. The central argument is that the discourses around “exceptionality” (and in some cases “masculinity”) that surround women filmmakers tend to marginalize their genre film production as a rare anomaly and obscure other possible dimensions of their films: the popularity among a wide range of audiences, engagement with feminism filtered through the generic, intertextual connections with other women’s work, to give only some examples. Rather than being rare examples of a subversive ‘counter-cinema’, all of the films under discussion show the potential advantages of conceptualising women’s cinema as genre cinema – understood as a ‘constellation’ of cultural, aesthetic and ideological materials – which facilitates a more inclusive range of possibilities than those allowed by the traditional auteurist readings.

This chapter examines auteurism and special effects-driven blockbuster filmmaking. Auteurism, an approach to mid-century filmmaking in which a film reflects the director's personal creative vision, was initiated by French critics and filmmakers such as André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc, François Truffault and Jean-Luc Godard. George Lucas's and Steven Spielberg's investment in visual filmmaking and graphic dynamics places them among the critically embraced auteurs of the New Hollywood generation, including Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Terrence Malick, and Francis Ford Coppola. Lucas's and Spielberg's 1977 films, Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, transformed the parameters of cinematic diegesis in portraying intricately realized fantasy environments rather than fictional settings that simply stage a fantasy narrative. The success of these films initiated a shift toward more special effects-driven filmmaking and had economic outgrowth well beyond the effects business.

This chapter continues to look into the specificity of Agnès Varda's films within its historical context and also uses a revisionist perspective concerning hardcore auteurism. It revisits the idea of the filmmaker as the all-mighty single auteur of her films by focusing on the collaborative nature of filmmaking, by reassessing the role of other contributors like the editor and the composer, and by looking at Varda's own performances of authorship. Taking La Pointe Courte and Agnès de ci de là Varda as examples, this chapter aims to reconsider some of the filmmaker's preoccupations across time and to evaluate what sort of contribution other artists and collaborators have made to Varda's cinema. This in-depth analysis shows how each of these projects is the result of a complex amalgam of efforts, encounters and influences.