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table of contents
  1. Cover
  2. Half Title Page
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Epigraph
  7. Contents
  8. Acknowledgments
  9. Introduction: Without a You, No I: Cinematic Self-Projection
  10. 1. The Director’s Body
  11. 2. The Director Plays Director
  12. 3. Actor, Avatar
  13. 4. Self-Projection and the Cinematic Apparatus
  14. Conclusion: The Eye/I of the Auteur
  15. Notes
  16. Bibliography
  17. Filmography
  18. Index
  19. Author Biography

Notes

Introduction

  1. 1. Truffaut, The Films of My Life, 19.
  2. 2. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 142-48.
  3. 3. There are also films based on the autobiographies of individuals who are not involved in the filmmaking projects; my discussion does not include such films, but it would be interesting to consider what kind of self-constructions they become through the filmmaking process.
  4. 4. Genette actually distinguishes between accompanying materials, such as a book’s title, foreword, notes, and dedication, and surrounding materials such as reviews and criticism. The former he calls “péritexte,” while the latter is “épitexte.” Genette, Paratexts.
  5. 5. Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut, 127.
  6. 6. Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique; English translation, On Autobiography.
  7. 7. Lejeune, “Cinéma et autobiographie.”
  8. 8. Lane, The Autobiographical Documentary in America from the 1960s to the Present.
  9. 9. Rugg, Picturing Ourselves.
  10. 10. Eakin, Touching the World, is perhaps the most pointed study on the problem of referentialty in self-writing.
  11. 11. See Egan, Mirror Talk; Couser, Signifying Bodies; Smith, Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body; Whitlock, Intimate Empire.
  12. 12. See Barthes, Camera Lucida, and Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs.
  13. 13. Bruss, “Eye for Eye.”
  14. 14. Susanna Egan gives her book Mirror Talk the subtitle Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography, which further underscores the sense that self-representation, transforming through the centuries alongside changing notions of selfhood, authorship, and history, also expresses and experiences crisis through developments in the various media employed. The book includes a chapter on documentary autobiographical cinema. Susanna Egan, Mirror Talk.
  15. 15. See Lejeune, “Cinema et autobiographie.”
  16. 16. Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror.
  17. 17. In the wake of the film’s release, Almodóvar scholar Paul Julian Smith noted that in the film “Spanish critics have gleefully called attention to the autobiographical touches,” including the fact that one of the director’s first creative works was an unpublished short story with the same title as the story submitted for consideration to the film director within the film: “The Visit.” Paul Julian Smith, https://sites.google.com/site/pauljuliansmithfilmreviews/Home/la-mala-educacion-bad-education-june-2004.
  18. 18. “‘La mala educación’” es una película muy íntima, pero no exactamente autobiográfica, quiero decir que no cuento mi vida en el colegio” and “Todo lo que no es autobiografía es plagio. . . . La película es autobiográfica pero en un sentido más hondo, yo estoy detrás de los personajes, pero no cuento mi vida” (original text). Almodóvar, http://www.clubcultura.com/clubcine/clubcineastas/almodovar/malaeducacion/comentarios.htm.
  19. 19. Haverty [Rugg], “Strindbergman.”
  20. 20. Truffaut makes less-veiled references to his debt to Bergman in The 400 Blows (when Antoine Doinel and his friend René pilfer a poster advertising Bergman’s Summer with Monika) and in La nuit américaine, when, playing a director in the film, he receives a shipment of books about other directors, with a book about Bergman prominent among them.
  21. 21. Bergman, Fanny and Alexander.
  22. 22. Here I would like to cite Tom Gunning: “It is theoretically important to avoid identifying a narrator with a biological person such as the author. . . . Narrative discourse is made up of words and images, not flesh and blood. . . . Such theoretical precisions are necessary to maintain the integrity of the esthetic text. . . . However, the depersonalization of narrative discourse brings its own theoretical blindspot that distorts the way films are received by spectators, and the way they function within history and society. . . . The alert and active spectator . . . must realize that these images come from somewhere.” Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film.
  23. 23. Miller, “Hitchcock’s Hidden Pictures.”
  24. 24. Johnson, “Bringing Out D.A. Miller.”
  25. 25. Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 60.
  26. 26. Synessios, Mirror, 3.
  27. 27. Ibid.
  28. 28. Widdicombe, “The Contemporary Auteur,” http://www.bfi.org.uk/filmtvinfo/publications/16+/potter.xhtml.
  29. 29. In making this point, Grant cites Susan Martin-Márquez (1999), who in her turn cites Carol Watts (1992). Catherine Grant, “Secret Agents,” 120.
  30. 30. Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole, 6.
  31. 31. Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, 218.

1. The Director’s Body

  1. 1. Bruss, “An Eye for Eye,” 309.
  2. 2. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer. The use of “noise” as a metaphor for the affect of the body’s presence seems placed particularly aptly here, for this is part of her discussion of analog versus digital subjects, and one of the features of analog versus digital sound recording is indeed the “noise” of the material, the “body,” that distinguishes analog vinyl from digital CD.
  3. 3. Ibid., 145.
  4. 4. I acknowledge that there were other technologies that could reproduce an author’s face for a large audience before the invention and proliferation of photography, but as I argue in Picturing Ourselves: Autobiography and Photography, the ontology of photographic representation implies the actual presence of the photographed person in a way that earlier media did not.
  5. 5. Here it is useful to remember Roland Barthes’s use of the term “analog” in association with photography in Camera Lucida.
  6. 6. Sobchak, Carnal Thoughts.
  7. 7. Quoted in Hansen, “‘With Skin and Hair,’” 458.
  8. 8. Levasseur, “Film and Video Self-Biographies.”
  9. 9. One can find historical use of caricatures that Allen’s case closely parallels; a striking one is Mark Twain. A similar type of pseudonymous play with celebrity caricature occurs memorably already in the late nineteenth century when Samuel Langhorne Clemens took on the pen-name Mark Twain, proceeded to identify that name with an impressive array of cartoon caricatures, and then carefully posed in photographs of himself, photographs in which certain signal characteristics—a shock of white hair, a moustache, beetling brows, and a pipe—contribute to one of the nation’s most easily recognized author images. Like Twain, Woody Allen performed first as a stand-up comic, a profession that demands self-caricature and (at least pretended) autobiographical underpinnings. Like Twain, Allen moves his comedy over into another medium, and like Twain’s, his comedy then undergoes a transformation, though it is important to note that in moving to film, Allen kept a number of the one-liners he used as a stand-up comic, thus further obscuring the distinction between on-screen and off-screen personae and throwing the confusion between on-stage and off-stage personae into the mix. For more on Twain, see Rugg, Picturing Ourselves.
  10. 10. The figures played by Woody Allen in his films go by various names—Alvy Singer, Sandy Bates, Cliff Stern, Harry Block, Kleinman—but the names, while diverse, tend to cluster around Jewish identity.
  11. 11. In her article on Celebrity, Beatriz Oria Gómez sees the Kenneth Branagh figure as performing aspects of Allen’s argument for the narrative, but she does not seem to notice that Branagh “plays” Allen in a physical way. Oria Gómez, “The Importance of Being Famous.”
  12. 12. While Play It Again, Sam was in fact directed by Herbert Ross, Allen wrote the script and appears in his usual persona, so that retrospectively the film takes on the air of part of his oeuvre as an auteur.
  13. 13. Lax, Woody Allen, 10.
  14. 14. Thanks for this observation goes to Mark Sandberg.
  15. 15. Truffaut in an interview with Aline Desjardins on Radio-Canada, 1971, quoted in Truffaut, Truffaut by Truffaut, 115.
  16. 16. Ibid.
  17. 17. Codell, “Playing Doctor,” 109, 117.
  18. 18. Truffaut, Truffaut by Truffaut, 116.
  19. 19. Ibid., 115.
  20. 20. I am leaving aside one of Truffaut’s minor but more popular performances—that of the French scientist in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)—in part because it is a role in which he is directed by someone else. But one can certainly look at this performance as typical of Truffaut’s cinematic persona: grave, almost awestruck or worshipful in the presence of something extraordinary, whether it be Victor in The Wild Child, extraterrestrials in Close Encounters, the altar of the dead in The Green Room, or cinema itself in Day for Night. And it is more than likely that Spielberg “recognized” Truffaut’s self-image in the part.
  21. 21. See Koskinen, Spel och speglingar.
  22. 22. Livingston, Ingmar Bergman and the Rituals of Art, 52.
  23. 23. To cite an example of an invalid ritual speech act, in Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education, one of the protagonists, Paca, enters a church during a mass conducted by a priest who raped Paca’s friend when he was a boy. The priest leads the congregation in the general confession, which is recited in unison: “I confess before Almighty God and you, my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do. And I ask the blessed Mary, ever virgin, and all the angels and saints, and you, my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord, our God.” [Yo confieso ante Dios todopoderoso y ante vosotros hermanos, que he pecado mucho de pensamiento, palabra, obra y omisión. Por mi culpa, por mi culpa, por mi gran culpa. Por eso ruego a Santa María, siempre Virgen, a los ángeles, a los santos y a vosotros, hermanos, que intercedáis por mí ante Dios nuestro Señor.] Paca utters the phrase “through my fault, through my fault, through my great fault,” which does not occur in precisely the same form in the English-language version, while striking his chest. As the priest says those words, Paca follows the priest’s words but whispers angrily, directing himself to the unhearing priest, “por tu culpa, por tu culpa, por tu gran culpa” (“through your fault, through your fault, through your great fault”). Here is an illustration of how the ritual can become a “mere” performance, or a false speech act; the priest, while mouthing these lines rather mechanically, is probably not focused on the sins of his distant past, which Paca then confesses for him. Subsequent events will show that the priest has not allowed himself to be conscious of having sinned at all.
  24. 24. See Kawin, Mindscreen. A similar voice-over intervention occurs briefly in Cries and Whispers. The implications for gender studies are especially striking in this case; see Blackwell, Gender and Representation in the Films of Ingmar Bergman, chapter on Cries and Whispers.
  25. 25. D. A. Miller provides a fine account of Hitchcock’s cameo strategy in “Hitchcock’s Hidden Pictures.”

2. The Director Plays Director

  1. 1. See Godard, “Bergmanorama.”
  2. 2. Scholars such as Corrigan and Maule have pointed out that the “making of” documentary is a commercial strategy, and the auteur created in and through such featurettes has the primary function of making money. I do not discount the economic aspect of the featurette’s role in shaping the auteur as product, but I do not think that my argument is in conflict with the commercial one. In fact, the need for money points to the embodied nature of filmmaking; without bodies, there is no need for cash, and if there is a body, there is an auteur as body.
  3. 3. The making of film functions as well as an explicit or implicit “director’s commentary.” The “director’s commentary” has become a genre of its own, marketed with the film version released in theaters (in various ratio formats), but also sometimes the “director’s cut,” deleted scenes, trailers, actors’ interviews, scholarly commentary—all part of a “bonus package” that ostensibly increases the value and authenticity of the viewing experience. The mere inclusion of such items as “director’s commentary” and “director’s cut” points toward a continued allegiance to the idea of the director’s imprimatur as ultimate arbiter of authenticity, though as we will see below, the implied power of such additions can instead be turned against the auteurist director by the auteur himself, employed to interrogate or even mock the claim of such authenticity. And it is certainly also the case that in such instances, the director performs a role, creates a self-projection that offers another type of commentary: a self-reflexive commentary on the image of the auteur, even if the commentary is as simple an action as donning a beret or studiously ignoring a camera.
  4. 4. Just a word here on titles: first, “Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie” strikes a more popular note than “Ingmar Bergman Makes a Film,” which begs the question of why the English-language distributors decided that the proper translation of the Swedish word “film” (there is no Swedish equivalent of “movie”—“film” means either film or movie) in this case ought to be “movie.” For the alliterative effect with “makes,” perhaps? Or to undermine a bit the high-art sensibility of the documentary, to push it harder toward the category of hands-on, practical advice about filmmaking? Given the rather arbitrary nature of title translation, it is difficult to guess. The title Nattvardsgästerna is rendered most accurately in the British version of the film as The Communicants. American distributors opted for the more poetic and widely understandable Winter Light, “communicant” being an obscure word for many Americans.
  5. 5. Aside from Sjöman’s film, Bergman customarily kept a kind of visual record of the making of his films, though these were casual, journalistic efforts, without sound, shot both on-set and off, more like home movies than documentaries. Some of these have been gathered and edited by Bergman scholar Stig Björkman in a compilation titled Images from the Playground (2008), with the support of Martin Scorcese’s World Cinema Foundation. This production, put together after Bergman’s death in 2006, makes clear how invested both scholars (like Björkman) and auteurs (like Scorcese) and institutions (like the Cannes Festival, which screened the film’s international premiere, the World Cinema Foundation, which funded it, Sweden’s National Theater, which screened it first in Sweden, and the Ingmar Bergman Foundation) can be in the continued production and maintenance of an auteur’s image. See also my discussion of The Making of Fanny and Alexander.
  6. 6. As others have noted, this is a constantly recurring theme in Herzog’s films from the beginning, expressed in various ways. The phrase “burden of dreams” appears in Herzog’s journal of the filmmaking experience: “Es ist schwer, sich an diese Arbeit, an diese groée Last der Tràume heranzuwagen” [“It is difficult to dare to take up this work, this great burden of dreams,” my translation], Herzog, Eroberung des Nutzlosen [Conquering the Useless], 8.
  7. 7. Ibid., 10 [“ich sagte, die nicht diskutierbare Selbstverständlichkeit müsse ein wirklicher Dampfer über einen wirklichen Berg, aber nicht um des Realismus Willen, sondern wegen der Stilisierung eines grossen Operereignisses”].
  8. 8. As Brad Prager succinctly expresses it, “Precisely because [Herzog] actually was having the boat pulled over the mountain, the production of the film and the production in the film overlap. The two are inextricably entwined: both the director and the visionary entrepreneur evince the desire to stage a massive production in the name of aesthetics.” Prager, The Cinema of Werner Herzog, 39.
  9. 9. Ibid., 16, 101.
  10. 10. See Roscoe and Hight, Faking It.
  11. 11. Penn reported that he received a significant amount of criticism for his role in the film; viewers were unable to perceive that he was playing a role, and they assumed that he was indeed the Philistine Hollywood producer whose degraded values threatened the purity of Herzog’s art. In an interview, Penn remarked: “In retrospect, I might have changed my name for the movie. Really. I mean, I know it seems crazy, but when it started I felt like, ‘Somebody’s got to play this part. It might as well be me. And since we’re all using our real names, I’ve got to also.’ I didn’t really think about the fact. . . . I guess I might have thought that people wouldn’t really believe the movie and so that wouldn’t be such an issue, you know? But we strove for reality and I think people, because it seems kind of real, it does create a disturbing, odd situation for me. In some ways it’s also flattering. If people get so angry at me, I’m proud that at least I was able to evoke that reaction.” See Murray, “Screenwriter Zak Penn Makes His Directorial Debut in Incident at Loch Ness.” http://movies.about.com/od/directorinterviews/a/lochness102404.htm.
  12. 12. Fellini’s 8½ (1963) stands as his first serious parody of auteurism. Though Fellini does not play himself, a number of clues point to Marcello Mastroianni as a stand-in for the director. For instance, D. A. Miller, in his book-length essay on 8·, exhibits on its cover a tournage photograph of Fellini standing in for Mastroianni in a particular scene. In the scene, Mastroianni is confronted with his reflection in a mirror, but the tournage photograph shows Fellini inspecting himself in the mirror. For Miller, this image is an emblem of the sleight-of-hand performed in the film that turns Mastroianni into Fellini’s self-projection and a site for Fellini’s self-contemplative critique of auteurism. See Miller, 8½, BFI Film Classics.
  13. 13. David Bordwell sketches the narrative characteristics of art cinema: ambiguous plot, an attempt to engage the viewer on an intellectual level rather than simply entertaining, nongeneric, self-referential, psychological rather than plot-driven, and auteurist. See Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film.
  14. 14. Bergman writes of his demand for order and calm on the set as well in The Magic Lantern, and Sjöman’s film reflects that sensibility. There is none of the directorial screaming that Fellini highlights in Intervista or the rages (mostly Kinski’s) captured in Herzog’s My Best Fiend, or the underlying moody tension that defines Tarkovsky’s Voyage in Time. Instead, Bergman’s control is exercised most frequently in his confident voice clipping off a take with the Swedish equivalent of “cut!’: “tack!” (“thanks!”). Thus the prevailing mood is . . . politeness.
  15. 15. This is not quite accurate, of course; memorable traffic jams occur in quite a number of films, including the one I have already mentioned in 8½, but also in Swedish director Roy Andersson’s Sånger från andra våningen (Songs from the Second Floor, 2000). It is interesting to consider that one of the most impressive traffic jams in film history occurs in a film by Truffaut’s rival, Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967).
  16. 16. In a filmed interview projected during the Bergman Symposium held in June 2005 in Stockholm, the ordinarily curmudgeonly Lars von Trier surprised the interviewer with his uncharacteristic praise of the older auteur. “Don’t you find any fault with Bergman at all?” asked the perplexed interviewer. The Danish director smiled and countered dryly, “Yes. He refuses to die.”

3. Actor, Avatar

  1. 1. Wollen, Signs and Meanings in the Cinema, 104. See also Arnheim, Film; Balázs, Theory of the Film; Braudy, “Acting: Stage vs. Screen,” in The World in a Frame; Bresson, Notes sur la cinematographie; DeCordova, Picture Personalities.
  2. 2. Baron, Carson, and Tomasulo, More Than a Method, 11.
  3. 3. Kuleshov, “The Principles of Montage [1935],” in Kuleshov on Film, 192.
  4. 4. Naremore, Acting in the Cinema, 24.
  5. 5. Dyer, Stars.
  6. 6. Baron, Carson, and Tomasulo, More Than a Method, 1.
  7. 7. In this case, the idea of auteurism is projected back on a silent-era director by Merhige.
  8. 8. Bruss, “An Eye for I”; Egan, Mirror Talk.
  9. 9. Kinski, All I Need Is Love, 196.
  10. 10. Ninka, 33 Portrætter, cited in Amanda Doxtater, “Perilous Performance: Dreyer’s Unity of Danger and Beauty,” http://english.carlthdreyer.dk/AboutDreyer/Working-method/Perilous-Performance.aspx.
  11. 11. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 139.
  12. 12. Truffaut, with Hitchcock and Hunt, Hitchcock, 8.
  13. 13. Bresson, Notes sur la cinématographie.
  14. 14. Almodóvar, Almodóvar on Almodóvar, 20.
  15. 15. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 139.
  16. 16. Vroman, Lavender, “Tippi Hedren Airs Out Her Early Acting Days, Wildlife Preservation,” A6. Hedren varies in her account of her relationship to Hitchcock; at times she emphasizes his controlling nature, at others she references his “kindness” in not telling her that the birds used in a particular scene of The Birds would be live rather than mechanical; see Hedren, interview televised by Santa Clarita Valley television, March 6, 2005: http://www.scvtv.com/html/sg030605-nm.xhtml.
  17. 17. See Kinder, “Reinventing the Fatherland.” She treats the question of brain death and transplantation in social and historical terms; her concern with his work is “the presentation of new forms of using the body as a representation of social, political, and general transformation,” but here I would see this near-obsession of Almodóvar’s as a sign of his interest in the body and identity.
  18. 18. Truffaut, The Adventures of Antoine Doinel.
  19. 19. Almodóvar, Almodóvar on Almodóvar, 110.
  20. 20. Bird, Andrei Tarkovsky, 85.
  21. 21. Pedro Almodóvar depicts one such power exchange in Bad Education; the director/protagonist seduces an actor/screenwriter who desperately wants to work with him. In an ironic twist, we find out that the actor is a con artist, bent on scamming the director. The question of power relations, then, becomes more complex than one would initially imagine.
  22. 22. Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut, 178.
  23. 23. Ibid., 285.
  24. 24. See Truffaut, The Adventures of Antoine Doinel; Gillain, “The Script of Delinquency”; and Codell, “Playing Doctor.”
  25. 25. Truffaut, The Adventures of Antoine Doinel, 5-6.
  26. 26. Truffaut died of a brain tumor in 1984 at the age of fifty-two. Léaud, born in 1944, has now surpassed Truffaut in age.
  27. 27. See Gillain, “The Script of Delinquency,” for a discussion of the importance of deliquency in Truffaut’s self-construction.
  28. 28. Baecque and Toubiana, Truffaut, 146-47.
  29. 29. Durovicová, “Biograph as Biography,” 130. Though Godard’s project professes to undermine the auteur’s authority, he stands in fact as one of the more prominent authorial presences of his period, and he expresses strong support in his writing for the auteurist work of directors such as Ingmar Bergman.
  30. 30. Emanuel Laurent’s 2010 film Deux de la vague examines the relationship between Truffaut and Godard, and their relationships with Jean-Pierre Léaud in light of the films of the French New Wave.
  31. 31. I was unfortunately unable to reproduce the image here, but readers can view the portrait, owned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, at http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=128634.
  32. 32. A blogger comments on the photograph: “They look incredibly alike. In fact, to me it looks like it might be a portrait from Avedon’s In the American West of prosperous father-son ranchers from Wyoming or Colorado.” His remark brings another important point to the fore, namely, that the photograph represents yet another artistic vision, that of Richard Avedon, which makes a singular kind of impression and, via his own photographic aesthetic, moves the pair into a cultural milieu remote from the site of Truffaut’s filmmaking (http://jdcopp.blogspot.com/2007/04/avedon-truffaut-leaud-portrait.xhtml).
  33. 33. Truffaut, Truffaut by Truffaut, 116.
  34. 34. Bergman’s films throughout his career obsess about diseased mother-child relationships, from The Devil’s Wanton to Brink of Life to Summer with Monica to Wild Strawberries to The Silence to Persona to Cries and Whispers—the concern with childbirth and abortion and child abandonment and child abuse permeates his work. See Blackwell, Gender and Representation in the Films of Ingmar Bergman.
  35. 35. For a detailed discussion of the production of the film and the detailed oversight of the authorities, see Synessios, Mirror.
  36. 36. Bird, Andrei Tarkovsky, 110.
  37. 37. Quoted in Synessios, Mirror, 96.
  38. 38. Seguin, “El espacio-cuerpo en el cine: Pedro Almodóvar o la modification,” 237.
  39. 39. According to Almodóvar, the actress Chus Lampreave, who plays a mother in What Have I Done to Deserve This?, is supposed to represent his mother (even as his real mother has a small role in the same film). Almodóvar calls Lampreave “a kind of female Buster Keaton,” in reference to her straight-faced comedic genius, but also with an eye toward describing the way in which she maintains her position when buffeted by the alien forces of the modern world in which she finds herself (Almodóvar on Almodóvar, 38). For Almodóvar, the mother figure embodies something of himself—the place he comes from, the culture against which he has reacted so strongly and yet carries within him and reproduces in various forms throughout his cinematic oeuvre.
  40. 40. In the credits, Almodóvar’s mother is always listed under her maiden name, Francisca Caballero. While it is common in Spanish-speaking countries for women to retain use of their maiden names, and for their children to carry their maiden name as part of a hyphenated surname, Almodóvar drops his mother’s name from his own in film credits, making it more difficult for spectators to guess at the relationship.
  41. 41. Basoli, “The Wrath of Klaus Kinski,” 32.
  42. 42. Bush, “The Enigma of Werner Herzog,” http://www.moviemaker.com/issues/16/herzog/16_herzog.xhtml.
  43. 43. Kinski, All I Need Is Love, 204.
  44. 44. Merkin, “An Independent Woman,” 34.
  45. 45. Ullmann, Changing, 112.
  46. 46. Bergman, The Magic Lantern, 244.
  47. 47. Bergman, Bergman on Bergman, 196.

4. Self-Projection and the Cinematic Apparatus

  1. 1. The penis image was excised from censored prints of the film distributed in the United States until a re-release in 2004.
  2. 2. Turvey, “Vertov,” 5-18.
  3. 3. Vertov, We, 70.
  4. 4. Kinder, “Designing a Database Cinema.”
  5. 5. English speakers will note the cognate relationship between the Danish word for “boss”—direktør—and our word for film director. Unfortunately “film director” is not direktør in Danish, but since von Trier and many of his compatriots speak fluent English, one can imagine that the Danish title does involve a play on words.
  6. 6. Many of the students I now teach are as unfamiliar with the countdown filmstrip as they are with the interior of an old film projector.
  7. 7. A similar association between biological, sexual origins, and cinematic history occurs in Almodóvar’s Talk to Her. The critical moment at which, we must assume from subsequent events, a nurse impregnates his comatose patient is narrated obliquely through an interjected silent film.
  8. 8. Bruss, “An Eye for I,” 319.
  9. 9. Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World, 18.
  10. 10. Strindberg, A Dream Play, in Five Plays.
  11. 11. Koskinen, Mirrors and Mirroring.
  12. 12. Bergman, Best Intentions, 6.
  13. 13. Here one can refer to André Bazin’s writing on the ontology of photography for a greater understanding of how photographs are perceived as real. In reading Bazin, Daniel Morgan asks, “What does it mean for an object in a photograph to be identical (ontologically, not just visually) to the object photographed?” And I believe that it is this question that the films I am studying here seek to answer at some moments, particularly when meditating on the relationship of screen to body. See Morgan, “Rethinking Bazin,” 450.
  14. 14. Marks, The Skin of the Film, xi.
  15. 15. Gorky, “In the Kingdom of the Shadows,” 407.
  16. 16. Bergman, The Magic Lantern, 89.
  17. 17. Stewart, Between Film and Screen, 1.
  18. 18. Blackwell, Gender and Representation in the Films of Ingmar Bergman, 8.
  19. 19. Numerous examples can be cited of Bergman’s interest in archaic forms; one subtle instance occurs in the opening of Sawdust and Tinsel (Gycklarnas afton, 1953). As the credits roll we see a series of woodcuts depicting the film’s circus troupe, headed with the subtitle “A Broadside.” The style of the drawings and the content of the film both points to the characteristics of the broadside or dreadful penny genre, a kind of early tabloid writing that in an earlier era occupied the approximate social status of popular film. First the circus caravan appears motionless as an illustration on the chapbook page (actually, of course, dozens of photographs of that page running through a projector); then the film picks up and the caravan begins to move, another iteration of the closet scene. Bergman’s attitude here toward the illusory nature of his chosen medium is humorously ironic; this is my art, he seems to say, the stuff of tabloid fiction. On the other hand, his hyper-awareness of cinematic prehistory and technology endows the joke with a high seriousness; once again he elects to allude to his function as illusionist.
  20. 20. This little vignette, like the clip from Fanny and Alexander, can be indexed directly to a story from Bergman’s autobiography: “Uncle Carl bought filmstrips for a penny a meter and placed them in heated soda water to dissolve the emulsion. When the strip had cooled, he drew moving pictures directly onto the film with a felt-tip pen. . . . I stared intently at the little figures that appeared swiftly and without hesitation on the frames” (Bergman, The Magic Lantern, 37).
  21. 21. Herzog, Vom Gehen im Eis [Of Walking in Ice], 10.
  22. 22. Described in Morgan, “‘A Presence . . . called Germany.’”
  23. 23. Björkman, Manns, and Jonas, Bergman on Bergman.

Conclusion

  1. 1. See, for instance, Flanagan, “Mobile Identities, Digital Stars, and Post-Cinematic Selves,” or Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect.
  2. 2. Flanagan, “Mobile Identities,” 78.
  3. 3. Klinger, “The DVD Cinephile.”
  4. 4. Miller, “Hitchcock’s Hidden Pictures.”

Annotate

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Self-Projection: The Director’s Image in Art Cinema is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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