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 8]ca^SdRcX^] A Postmodern Auteur? Approaches to the Unfinished Wellesian Works In 1999 a group of scholars gathered in Málaga, Spain, for the centenary Shakespeare on Screen conference. The shadow of Orson Welles loomed large over the meeting, since no other American director has experimented with adapting the Bard as often or as interestingly as Welles. As scholars, we dissected the work of Welles with typical rational distance and discernment. Then we boarded a bus for Ronda, where Welles is buried, and proceeded to unravel into a hoard of camera-clicking tourists, jockeying for position around Welles’s grave on a private estate, agog at our own disheveled, sweaty proximity to an American Bard. Our behavior points out a countermovement, or perhaps really a crosscurrent , to the recent antiauteurist vein of cinema and media studies, articulated by Krin Gabbard as “a centrifugal force away from canonical directors and the old Hollywood.”1 For although academe can proclaim the decline of the auteur, star directors like Steven Spielberg still dominate commercial cinema, as well as generating course enrollment and textbook sales. The capitalist structure of commercial film demands a “star” to be recognized as author or key performer within what are undeniably collective works in order for the mechanisms of commercial promotion and payment to function smoothly. As cinema and media studies scholars, we must continue to consider the role of the star persona even while we look through poststructural lenses. Star director has a slightly different nuance than auteur in that the former term emphasizes the financial importance of the director over the artistic power, and thinking in terms of moviemaking as an industry as well as an art acknowledges the role of directors without overly privileging their roles in production. INTRODUCTION  Part of the goal of this book is to reconcile what have traditionally been labeled opposing strands of cinema and media studies: auteur theory on the one hand and the “post” theory approaches like feminism, identity theory, critical race theory, and narrative deconstruction on the other. As cinema and media studies matures, we need to integrate the study of canonical auteurs like Welles into the posttheory world, and when we do, we are likely to find that they are not as autocratic as we once thought; that it was, in fact, our way of studying their bodies of work and modes of production that were restrictive. This is particularly true of Welles, who seduces us into studying of the cult of personality—and while this danger exists to an extent in the study of any artist, there are few artists who engage so actively, charmingly, and effectively in the production (and deconstruction) of their own public personas. Welles is often regarded as a quintessential modernist auteur, but his working process fits just as comfortably within what are often labeled postmodern modes of production—pastiche, collage, incompletion, selfreferentiality , and multimedia experimentation. In fact, as new media forms such as YouTube and the DVD “extra” emerge, Welles’s “unfinished” works and media ephemera become increasingly accessible to mainstream viewers, who can get to know him both from his YouTube outtakes and from films like Citizen Kane. As these media forms evolve, we are better able to see Welles in his full complexity, to integrate his commercial personality and his art with their contexts, and to see his work as a process, rather than as the fragmentary bits and pieces of commercially released products. Welles produced more “unfinished” than finished works, and these works are equal in complexity to his commercially marketed products in film and radio; in fact, they call into question the very category of “finished” performances. There are so many of these “unfinished” works that I found it necessary to limit my field of study to only the first phase of Welles’s cinema career, his years with RKO. Looking at Welles’s “unfinished” RKO projects rather than just at the distributed films helps to contextualize not only Welles’s work but also the evolution of mass media performance within mid-twentieth-century American culture. Ultimately, this book aims to establish that these projects were neither “failed” nor “unfinished” other than in the eyes of commercial expectations of their era. The RKO projects that were shelved by the studio or by Welles himself demand an approach that embraces rather than resists textual ambiguity, an alternative to the two dominant approaches to the study of American film directors, auteurism and...

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