Abstract
In chapter 2, we clarified the process by which different components of special edition DVDs are produced. Particular attention was accorded to the commentary track since this is one feature specifically enabled by the format itself. At its best, commentary by directors and screenwriters can afford a glimpse of the care and deliberation behind the production of movies: how details are carefully weighed for significance, how patterns of meaning are built up and maintained, and how the editing process shapes meaning out of conflicting visions. It also shows the limits of intention, that is, the ways in which contingency and chance in shooting a film can become part of meaning. For those unaccustomed to thinking in terms of the deliberate processes of construction, selection, and concentration crucial to art, these commentaries—delivered by authoritative figures such as directors, writers, and set designers—can be a valuable, pragmatic introduction to the study and enjoyment of film. In this chapter, we would like to examine one facet of the DVD’s reorientation of film, the new prominence it gives to questions of intention, both directorial and cinematographical, and to speculate on the curious fitness of this recrudescence for the present moment.1
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Notes
Intention in film study is bound up with the concept of the “auteur” (which is itself a troubled critical concept). It is remarkable how debates on auteurs and auteurism restage literary debates on intention, arguing by turns for an intention that resides in authors, in patterns found in films, and then in viewers, and specifying sometimes overt and sometimes symptomatic articulation. Remarkable too is the tendency of commentators to disregard the qualifications made by others in the debate; the self-conscious intervention implicit in “la politique des auteurs” becomes a cruder, more programmatic application—however many times commentators recall Bazin’s original formulation. On different views of authorship in film, see the various essays in Theories of Authorship: A Reader, ed. John Caughie (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).
Especially those by Edward Buscombe and Peter Wollen as well as those by Colin MacCabe and Timothy Corrigan in Film and Authorship, ed. Virginia Wright Wexman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003).
The return of the author, or the desire for such a return, has recently become something of a familiar topic. See Colin MacCabe, “The Revenge of the Author,” in Wexman, Film and Authorship, 30–41, and more recently Dana Polan, “Auteur Desire,” Screening the Past 12 (2001), http://www.latrobe.edu.au/www/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr0301/dpfrl2a.htm. The concern for authorial agency has also become prominent among critics with commitments to identity politics, queer theory, or feminism.
(See Janet Staiger’s “Authorship Approaches,” in Authorship and Film, ed. David Gerstner and Janet Staiger (New York: Routledge, 2003), 49–52.)
See Ginette Vincendeau’s comment in an interview published in Film and Television After DVD (New York: Routledge, 2008): “The academic community should be able to situate the author’s positions and situate one’s voice in relation to other critical material” (127).
This account of collaboration, one might note, offers a purely empirical assault on the idea of a single, originary author in film as well as any real theory of auteurism. It accords with the equally empirical approach taken by Jack Stillinger, and it reminds us that a practice can lead us as far as a theory in such destructive work and that experience can prove as disruptive to critical orthodoxies as theory. See Stillinger’s chapter on film, “Plays and Film: Authors, Auteurs, Autres,” in Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” Athenaeum, September 26, 1919, as reprinted in Critiques and Essays, ed. Stallman (New York: Ronald Press, 1949), 387.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1968), 48.
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© 2011 Mark Parker and Deborah Parker
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Parker, M., Parker, D. (2011). Directors and DVD Commentary: The Specifics of Intention. In: The DVD and the Study of Film. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119130_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119130_4
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