Links to Auteurism and Film Authorship Resources

Director Jane Campion (right) and cinematographer Laurie Mcinnes on the set of After Hours (1984). Photograph (1981) by Gayle Pigalle

For your general delectation and educational delight, here's a whole shiny host of links devoted to film authorship and auteur theory. These resources are all Open Access (freely accessible to all on the internet). The list has consequently been cross-posted at my Open Access-campaigning blog Film Studies For Free. The list will be kept updated at FSFF, so do feel encouraged to bookmark the post there.

• Eduardo Abrantes, ''The Principle of Revelation (review of Catherine Lupton (2005) Chris Marker: Memories of the Future London: Reaktion Books)', Film-Philosophy 10.1, 2006
• Richard Armstrong, 'They Lost It at the Movies: Film Culture in the Age of Positif and Cineaste', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 40, May 2003
• Karyn Ball, 'Hitchcock's 'Material Whirl (Review of Tom Cohen, Hitchcock's Cryptonomies. Volume 1: Secret Agents; Volume II: War Machines. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005)', Culture Machine, 2006
• Charles Bane, 'Viewing Novels, Reading Films: Stanley Kubrick and the art of adaptation as interpretation, PhD e-thesis, Louisiana State University 2006
• Shyon Baumann, Intellectualization and Art World Devlopment: Film in the United States', American Sociological Review 66:3 (June 2001) pp. 404-426
• Jack Boozer, 'Introduction: The Screenplay and Authorship in Adaptation', Authorship in Film Adaptation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007)
• David Bordwell, Ozu and the poetics of cinema, e-book, originally published by London: British Film Institute; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988
• Peter Brunette, 'Nowell-Smith Meets Visconti, Redux: The Old and the New,', Film-Philosophy, vol. 9, no. 16, March 2005 (See also Geoffrey Nowell- Smith, “It Ain’t Me Babe: A Response to Brunette,' Film-Philosophy, vol. 9, no. 17, March 2005)
• Alan Cholodenko - '(The) Death (of) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix1, Part II', Animation Studies, December 9, 2007
• David Church, 'The "Cult" of Kubrick', Offscreen Journal, May 31, 2006
• Paul Coughlin, 'The Mark of Cain: Blood Simple and The Man Who Wasn't There', Scope 3, November 2005
• David Clarke, 'Welcome to Tykwer-World: Tom Tykwer as Auteur', Welcome to Tykwer-World: Tom Tykwer as Auteur', gfl-journal, No. 3/2006
• James A. Davidson, 'Some Thoughts on Alfred Hitchcock and Vladimir Nabokov', Images Journal, Issue 3, 1997
• Alexander Dhoest, 'How queer is L'Air de Paris? -- Marcel Carné and Queer Authorship', Scope, May 2003
• Lucy Fife, 'Review of Joe McElhaney, The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli. (New York; State University of New York Press, 2006)', Film-Philosophy 11.3, December 2007
• Richard Franklin, “What I Really Want to do is Direct”: (1) Directors as Depicted on Film and Television', Senses of Cinema, Issue 42, Jan-Mar 2007
• Jane Gaines, 'Dorothy Arzner's trousers', from Jump Cut, no. 37, July 1992, pp. 88-98
• Tag Gallagher, 'Reading, Culture, and Auteurs' , Screening the Past, March 1, 2001
• Tag Gallagher, 'American Triptych: Vidor, Hawks and Ford', Senses of Cinema, Issue 42, Jan-Mar 2007
• David Gerstner, 'Queer Modernism: The Cinematic Aesthetics of Vincente Minnelli', Modernity, Vol 2 2000
• Barry Keith Grant, 'Theories of Authorship: Rethinking authorship', from Jump Cut, no. 31, March 1986, pp. 14-16
• Catherine Grant, ‘www.auteur.com?’, originally published in Screen, Vol. 41:1, 2000, 101-108
• Catherine Grant, ‘Secret Agents: Feminist Theories of Women’s Film Authorship’, originally published in Feminist Theory 2:1, 2001, 113-130
• Catherine Grant, '‘Intimista Transformations: María Luisa Bemberg’s First Feature Films’, originally published in An Argentine Passion: The Films of María Luisa Bemberg ed. John King, Sheila Whittaker and Rosa Bosch (London: Verso, 2000)
• Catherine Grant, ‘Recognizing Billy Budd in Beau Travail: Epistemology and Hermeneutics of an Auteurist “Free” Adaptation’, originally published in Screen 43:1, 2002: 57-73
• Catherine Grant, 'The "Author Function" in Transnational Film Adaptation: The case of El lugar sin límites / The Place Without Limits / Hell Has No Limits (Arturo Ripstein, Manuel Puig, José Donoso)', originally published as 'La función de "los autores": la adaptación cinematográfica transnacional de El lugar sin límites', Revista Iberoamericana, Vol. LXVIII, Núm, 199, Abril-Junio 2002, pp. 253-268
• Asbjørn Grønstad, 'Coppola's Exhausted Eschatology: Apocalypse Now Reconsidered', Nordic Journal of English Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2005
• Andrew Grossman, 'The Belated Auteurism of Johnnie To', Senses of Cinema, January 2001
• Fiona Handyside, 'The Auteur as Imposter', Film-Philosophy, 10.1, 2006
• John Hess, 'La politique des auteurs (part one) World view as aesthetics', from Jump Cut, no. 1, 1974, pp. 19-22
• John Hess, 'La politique des auteurs (part two) Truffaut's manifesto', from Jump Cut, no. 2 (1974), pp. 20-22
• Roger Hillman, 'Fassbinder, and Fassbinder/Peer Raben', Screening the Past, March 1, 2001
• Brian Hu, 'Neither Personal nor Political (review of John Anderson (2005) Edward Yang (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press)', Film-Philosophy 10.1, 2006
• Noel King, 'Changing the Curriculum: The Place of Film in an English Department', Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1983
• Donald F. Larsson, 'Every Picture Tells A Story: Agency And Narration In Film', Panel: Movies as Paradigmatic Narratives, Modern Language Association Annual Conference, Washington, D.C., December, 2000
• Katerina Loukopoulou , 'Godard Alone? (review of Michael Temple, James S.Williams and Michael Witt (eds) (2004) For Ever Godard (London: Black Dog Publishing)', Film-Philosophy, 10. 1, 2006
• Harriet Margolis, 'Introduction: "A Strange Heritage" - from Colonization to Transfor,ation?', in Margolis (ed.), Jane Campion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
  
• Adrian Martin, 'Sign your name across my heart, or:"I want to write about Delbert Mann" ', Screening the Past, March 1, 2001
• Tony McKibbin, 'Art Variables and Life Variables in La Belle noiseuse', Senses of Cinema, Issue 42, Jan-Mar 2007
• Andrew Neal, 'Review of Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers, edited by Yvonne Tasker (London: Routledge, 2002) and Contemporary North American Filmmakers: A Wallflower Critical Guide (Second Edition), edited by Yoram Allon, Del Cullen and Hannah Patterson (London: Wallflower, 2002), Scope, May 2004
• Dan North, 'Review of Directed by Allen Smithee, edited by Jeremy Braddock and Stephen Hock (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), Scope, May 2004
• Karla Oeler, 'Signs of the Times: The thirty year trajectory of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema', Film-Philosophy, Volume 3 Number 25, June 1999
• Matt Pearson, Authorship and the Films of David Lynch, e-book, BritishFilm.org.uk, 1997
• VF Perkins, 'Moments of Choice', first published in The Movie, no. 58 (Orbis Publishing, 1981), Rouge 9, 2006
• Dana Polan, 'Auteur Desire', Screening the Past, March 1, 2001
• Trevor Ponech, 'Authorship and Authorial Autonomy: The Personal Factor in the Cinematic Work of Art', Æ Canadian Aesthetics Journal / Revue canadienne d'esthétique, Volume 4 Summer/Été 1999
• Lauren Rabinovitz, 'Past Imperfect: Feminism and Social Histories of Silent Film', Cinémas/Cinémas, Volume 16, numéro 1, Automne 2005, p. 21-34
• Nicholas Rombes, 'The Rebirth of the Author, CTheory, June 2005
• Holger Römers, '“The Moral of the Auteur Theory”: Frank Borzage’s Moonrise (and Theodore Strauss’ Source Novel)', Senses of Cinema, Issue 42, Jan-March 2007
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Potential Perils of the Director’s Cut', originally published in French as Le Mythe du Director’s cut (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2008), JonathanRosenbaum.com, August 6, 2008
• William D. Routt, 'Lois Weber, or the exigency of writing', Screening the Past, March 1, 2001
  
• William D Routt, 'L'Evidence', Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, vol. 5 no 2 (1990)
• Girish Shambu, 'On Auteurism', girish, March 30, 2008
• David Sorfa, 'Introduction: Reanimating the Auteur', Film-Philosophy , 10.1, 2006
• David Sterritt, Introduction', The Films of Alfred Hitchcock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
• Tony Todd, 'Meanings and Authorships in Dune', Film-Philosophy 13.1, 2009
• Kristof Van Den Troost, « Stephen Teo, Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film », China perspectives, n°2009/1, 2009
• Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, 'Peter Greenaway: A User's Manual', Film-Philosophy, Volume 2, 1998
• Brenda Wilson, 'Blurring the Boundaries: Auteurism & Kathryn Bigelow', UBCinephile, Vol. 1, 2005
• Ronald W. Wilson, 'Review of Chris Fujiwara, The Auteur of Darkness: Jacques Tourneur', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7 No. 2, January 2003
• Daniel Yacavone, 'Towards a Theory of Film Worlds', Film-Philosophy 12.2, September 2008

Headless auteurism! Lucrecia Martel in London

La mujer sin cabeza/The Headless Woman director Lucretia Martel and producers Pedro and Agustín Almodóvar at the film's North American premiere at the 46th New York Film Festival, October 6, 2008

Sorry it's been a little too quiet round here again, this month. Next Tuesday (nasty cold permitting) I am due to give a paper at a Screen Medias and Cultures Research seminar in Cambridge, and I've been hard at work on it beyond cyberspace, along with fulfilling some other commitments (book reviews and suchlike; plus other blogging, of course).

I will be talking about the 'experience of auteurism' in contemporary film culture, and Pedro Almodóvar will be my principal example. In this paper, it's important to talk about a director I love, as experiences of 'director love' (alongside auteur desire, as Dana Polan so wonderfully called it) are precisely what I am looking at. I am sure to write more about this topic here, after the talk.

Next to Almodóvar, the other director whose work I love -- more than most others, at any rate -- is the Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, and next week I will finally get to see her new film La mujer sin cabeza/The Headless Woman which will have its UK premiere as part of the seventh annual Discovering Latin America Film Festival. Martel will be at the screening at the Tate Modern's Starr Auditorium (or 'the filmwomb', as I like to think of it).

Martel's latest film has inspired both utter devotion and ridicule (see Peter Bradshaw's article on it for today's Guardian Film Blog: 'How I lost my head for The Headless Woman'). It also seems to have provoked, albeit on a much smaller scale, the kind of polite but frenzied attempts to nail down its central enigmas unwitnessed since Michael Haneke's Caché deliberately foxed many a metropolitan-elite film audience a few years ago.

If you've seen the film, or if, like me, you are impatient to experience it, then you might like to read by far the best English language film review of The Headless Woman of the many I've read: that by Michael J. Anderson for his great weblog Tativille (one of the best websites out there for elegantly written and judicious film criticism, by Anderson and his partner Lisa K. Broad - thanks to Sergio Dias-Branco for his original tip, way back when, to check Tativille out).

If you are just regularly curious, below is the trailer for the film (sorry not to have been able to locate a version with English subtitles). Hasta la vista.