1,721,002 research outputs found
Critics Through Authors: Dialogues, Similarities, and the Sense of a Crisis
No full textThis chapter discusses how the figures of film critic and film author have historically informed each other, and how the digital age affects the relationship between the two
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Film Criticism in the Digital Age
No full textOver the past decade, as digital media has expanded and print outlets have declined, pundits have bemoaned a “crisis of criticism” and mourned the “death of the critic.” Now that well-paying jobs in film criticism have largely evaporated, while blogs, message boards, and social media have given new meaning to the saying that “everyone’s a critic,” urgent questions have emerged about the status and purpose of film criticism in the twenty-first century.
In Film Criticism in the Digital Age, ten scholars from across the globe come together to consider whether we are witnessing the extinction of serious film criticism or seeing the start of its rebirth in a new form. Drawing from a wide variety of case studies and methodological perspectives, the book’s contributors find many signs of the film critic’s declining clout, but they also locate surprising examples of how critics—whether moonlighting bloggers or salaried writers—have been able to intervene in current popular discourse about arts and culture.
In addition to collecting a plethora of scholarly perspectives, Film Criticism in the Digital Age includes statements from key bloggers and print critics, like Armond White and Nick James. Neither an uncritical celebration of digital culture nor a jeremiad against it, this anthology offers a comprehensive look at the challenges and possibilities that the Internet brings to the evaluation, promotion, and explanation of artistic works.
"This is a great and highly important volume for film studies as a discipline and cultural and media studies more generally."
—Dana Polan, New York Universit
The Price of Conservation. Online Video Criticism of Film in Italy
No full textDrawing on historical specificities and conditions of film criticism in Italy, the chapter analyzes a new form, online video reviews of film and evaluate their supposed innovation. It concludes that the new medium is applied to familiar ends, as the will to preserve the alleged function and the distinctive jargon of traditional film criticism prevents vlog-critics from taking advantage of technological possibilities
Playing and the Loose Boundaries Between Inner and Outer Selves
No full textThis paper discusses Eduardo Coutinho’s unique mode of stressing authorial presence rather than expression, and explores the essayistic Jogo the Cena (Playing, 2009) as the culmination of a separation between the author’s inner and outer selves that has been underlying the Brazilian director’s career since Santo Forte (The Mighty Spirit, 1999).
If the essayistic mode usually reflects on the enunciator’s position in the world it comments upon (the conception of the literary essay by Michel de Montaigne, as Colin MacCabe reminds us, involves precisely ‘a personal perspective’ over ‘general topics’) , Coutinho records the filmed world’s response to his presence. His essayistic documentaries have always highlighted the subjects’ reactions to the director’s interest in their lives; Coutinho’s presence in the image presents him not as a self-expressing figure, but as a catalyst for the subject’s ‘performance’ to the camera. It is furthermore not what Coutinho says that characterises his authorial persona—the director’s São Paulo accent and raspy, cigarette-smoker’s voice are arguably more distinguishable than the questions he actually asks, which are very simple and quite repetitive (enquiring about the subject’s work and family). Coutinho’s mode of self-inscription unintentionally stresses the materiality of his body and voice—which allows for a corporeal, rather than abstract, sense of an authorial presence. Combined with the director’s refusal to openly interpret and analyse (discussed by Consuelo Lins and Ismail Xavier, among others), the transformative effect of the director’s presence on the filmed reality transfers his authorial identity from the inner to the outer self. Coutinho is a perfect example of what I have termed ‘performing authorship’, a reassessment of the film author that privileges masquerade over exposure, physical presence over inner expression, process over product, repetition over uniqueness.
The focus on the director’s outer self invokes the structuralist (and in some cases poststructuralist) dissociation between subject and expressive discourse that is perfectly dramatized in Jogo de Cena. The film features actresses (some of them unknown) re-staging interviews Coutinho carried with women who responded to an advert inviting people ‘with stories to tell’ to audition for a documentary. It is never clear whether the relayed story belongs to the person who narrates it to the camera or to another who may in turn be temporarily, when not permanently, off-screen. Like Jogo de Cena’s actresses, Coutinho appropriates himself of the experiences and discourses of others; it is thus that he finds his expression—in the narratives prompted by his physical presence. Rather than the author’s world, Coutinho’s films reveal the author in the world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York and London : Routledge, 2008.
Corrigan, Timothy. The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.
Lins, Consuelo. O Documentário de Eduardo Coutinho. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2004.
MacCabe, Colin. Godard: a Portrait of the Artist at Seventy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
Rascaroli, Laura. The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film. London: Wallflower, 2009.
Sayad, Cecilia. Performing Authorship: Self-Inscription and Corporeality in the Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013.
Xavier, Ismail. ‘Indagações em torno de Eduardo Coutinho e seu diálogo com a tradição moderna.’ Eduardo Coutinho: Cinema do Encontro, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, 51–9. Rio de Janeiro: Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, 2003
Flesh for the Author: Filmic Presence in the Documentaries of Eduardo Coutinho
Full text linkThis essay examines the questions of authorship and national cinema through the concept of filmic presence. Drawing from Tom Gunning’s valorization of “instants” and “presentation” in the cinema of attractions and from Deleuze’s “cinema of bodies,” the essay studies self-inscription through the director’s photographic image. Key to this analysis is Barthes’s idea of authorial figuration, which privileges physical presence over self-expression.
The object of this investigation is the work of Brazilian documentarian Eduardo Coutinho, who in the past decade has revised the role of sociologist that once defined Latin American filmmakers by shunning interpretation and analysis. Coutinho stresses the encounter between camera and subject, structuring his documentaries as talking heads. In this scenario, the author functions as a catalyst inspiring specific “performances” and narratives. By the same token, Coutinho’s documentaries emphasise the subjects’ body language, syntax and accent. Narrative and self-expression are thus replaced by process and presence
Authorship in the Interstices of History, Biography, Reality and Memory: Histoire(s) du cinéma and Cabra Marcado para Morrer
Full text linkEste artigo contrasta Histoire(s) du cinéma de Jean-Luc Godard e Cabra Marcado Para Morrer de Eduardo Coutinho, estão engajadas com a questão da autoria no cinema. Enquanto a imagem de Godard enfatiza a capacidade que tem um filme de transmitir a visão de mundo pessoal de um artista, a presença de Coutinho na tela funciona menos como um meio de subjetivar a obra do que como um catalizador instigando cetas reações nos "atores" filmados
Do Critics Need Authors?
Full text linkThe history of film criticism has been partly informed by considerations about cinematic authorship. The current crisis in criticism may result from the proliferation of new forms of critical writing and venues for movie reviews, but the challenges posed by the transformations that came with the digital era do nothing but recontextualize a “crisis” we can trace back to the early to mid-20th century. Concerns about the effects of a presumed democratization of film criticism raise the same issues about the critic’s authority, reach and function that the category confronted when debating the figure of the film author.
While the politique des auteurs used the idea of filmmakers as self-expressing artists to legitimize the aesthetic value of film, by extension validating the cultural status of the critic, the general skepticism about authorship impacted the critic in two ways. On the one hand, it gave him or her more authority, taking the attribution of meaning away from the author and assigning it to the critic. In that sense, the transition to auteur structuralism in the late sixties and the subsequent poststructuralist approaches replaced the authority of the director with that of the critic, who had in any case always been responsible for discovering, electing or constructing the author. In other words, where before the critic was supposed to bring to the surface a creator who preceded the text, subsequent movements turned the author into a critical construct. On the other hand, the philosophical disavowing of authorship applies as much to the author as to the critic: both parties are equally affected by the skepticism about agency, language’s ability to express a worldview, the control over the meaning and the final version of an authored work.
The persistence of both the critic and the author in the contemporary experience of film calls for an examination of how these two figures have informed each other in the past decades. The current rhetoric of crisis in criticism posits not the director, but the non-specialized critic as threat. Yet the filmmaker’s discourse is also a competing voice, now that it is made more easily available through Twitter, DVD commentary, and films’ dedicated webpages. This paper considers the extent to which critic and author at once validate and challenge each other
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