Border crossing, corporality and performance: a study of authorial self-inscription in the cinema

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Border crossing, corporality and performance a
study of authorial self-inscription in the cinema

• Cecilia Sayad University of Kent

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• The fact is (or, it follows) that writing can
  no longer designate an operation of recording,
  notation, representation, depiction (as the
  Classics would say) rather, it designates
  exactly what linguists call a performative, a
  rare verbal form (exclusively given in the first
  person and in the present tense) in which the
  enunciation has no other content (contains no
  other proposition) than the act by which it is
  uttered
• - Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author

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• Jean-Luc Godard voice-over narration, essay film
  (Two or Three Things I Know About Her, 1967)
• Woody Allen screen performance, fool/standup
  comic, fictional narrative (Annie Hall, 1977)

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• Roland Barthes
• The Death of the Author (1968)
• The Pleasure of the Text (1973)
• Mikhail Bakhtin
• Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the
  Novel (1937-1938)

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• For example the author may appear in his text
  (Genet, Proust), but not in the guise of direct
  biography (which would exceed the body, give a
  meaning to life, forge a destiny)
• Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

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• Figuration is the way in which the erotic body
  appears (to whatever degree and in whatever form
  it may be) in the profile of the text Or
  finally the text itself, a diagrammatic and
  non-imitative structure, can reveal itself in the
  form of a body
• Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

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• Diegetic / non-diegetic
• Fiction / real
• Filmic / extrafilmic

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• authorial assertion and divestiture,
• palpability and disappearance,
• exposure and masking

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• it is Godards very phenomenological idea
  that the artist is not properly a creator, but
  rather the site where words and visual forms
  inscribe or install themselves
• Kaja Silverman, The Author as Receiver (on
  JLG/JLG Self-Portrait in December)

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• I look at myself filming, and people hear me
  think. Put shortly, this is not a film, its an
  attempt to film
• Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc
  Godard

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• The death of the author is thus better
  understood as an ongoing process than as a
  realisable event. Once we make this semantic
  adjustment, the crucial question to ask Godard is
  no longer whether he succeeds in laying his ghost
  definitively to rest in JLG/JLG. It is, instead,
  whether he is able to sustain himself there and
  elsewhere in the mode of dying
• Kaja Silverman, The Author as Receiver

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• Essential to these three figures the rogue, the
  clown and the fool is a distinctive feature that
  is as well a privilegethe right to be other in
  this world
• They grant the right not to understand, the
  right to confuse, to tease, to hyperbolize life
  the right to parody others while talking, the
  right not to be taken literally, not to be
  oneself
• Mikhail Bakhtin, Forms of Time and of the
  Chronotope in the Novel

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• At last a form was found to portray the mode of
  existence of a man who is in life, but not of it,
  lifes perpetual spy and reflector at last
  specific forms had been found to reflect private
  life and make it public
• Bakhtin, Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in
  the Novel

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• The Now agenda defines standup comedy.
  Straight drama shows events from another place
  and another time, but with standup the events
  happen right here in the venue
• Oliver Double, Getting the Joke

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• authors metalepsis, which consists of
  pretending that the poet himself brings about
  the effects he celebrates
• any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or
  narratee into the diegetic universe (or by the
  diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe,
  etc.), or the inverse (as in Cortázar) produces
  an effect of strangeness that is either comical
  or fantastic
• Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse