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1 INTRODUCTION The Screen Author—Wanted: Dead or Alive I was sorry to have my name mentioned among the great authors because they have a sad habit of dying off. —Mark Twain Authorship in the Age of Digital Reproduction In 1968, the year of so many other cultural and political declarations, French critic Roland Barthes provocatively proclaimed “The Death of the Author” in an essay bearing that title. Privileging the text over its creator, Barthes saw the literary work as a place “where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.”1 As he stated: “It is language which speaks, not the author.” Thus, as the act of writing begins, “the author enters into his own death.” Taking his place is the “scriptor,” who “is born simultaneously with the text,” neither “preceding nor exceeding the writing.”2 What Barthes actually sought to bury here were traditional notions of authorship that treated the writer as the godlike authority on his work. As he observed: “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (and, moreover, the reading).3 Barthes also decried approaches that assumed a rather transparent relationship between the poet and his creation; he questioned biographical studies, which sought seamlessly to link the author’s life to the fates of his characters, or naively to equate the work’s narrator with its creator. Thus for Barthes, as Colin MacCabe has noted, the concept of the author “obscured the form of the work at every level.”4 T. S. Eliot apparently agreed, once having said, “Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.”5 Finally, Barthes’s revision of the author concept sought to eradicate notions of pure originality, seeing the literary text as primarily “a tissue of quotations” from preexisting sources. As though to render Barthes’s theoretical work (and its themes of authorial erasure, plagiarism, and stylistic conventionality) in fiction, one chapter of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler takes the perspective of novelist Silas Flannery, who muses upon his craft: “How well I would write if I were not here! 2 Introduction If between the white page and the writing of words and stories . . . there were not interposed that uncomfortable partition which is my person!”6 Rather than describe his composition process in the first person (“I write”), he wishes he could say, “It writes” (my emphasis). This is because “the author of every book is a fictitious character whom the existent author invents to make him the author of his fictions.” One day, Flannery’s translator warns him of unauthorized editions of his work circulating in Japan. In fact, the volumes in question are not even his. As he learns: “A firm in Osaka has managed to get hold of the formula of [his] novels, and . . . to produce absolutely new ones.” Curiously, Flannery “feel[s] . . . a timid attraction for these fakes, for the extension of [him]self that has blossomed from the terrain of another civilization.” Dupery is taken even one step further when a reader complains of having purchased two copies of his book “identical on the outside but containing two different novels.” Flannery responds with a witticism: “The only books I recognize as mine are those I must still write.’”7 Despite such fantasies of self-annihilation, reports of the author’s death have been greatly exaggerated, and the topic has done anything but expire. As Sean Burke has noted (in The Death and Return of the Author), “Like cosmology [authorship ] remains a source of fascination for believers and non-believers alike.”8 This continued interest has also marked the field of cinema, as evidenced by the recent spate of books on the topic: some twelve volumes since the year 2000, not to mention the horde of monographs released on individual directors.9 But film studies has always had an ambivalent relationship to claims of the author’s erasure , since the idea that a film might have an author at all was largely contested in the first half of the medium’s existence—when movies were often known by their producers, studios, or stars. It was not, in fact, until the late 1950s that the so-called “auteur” theory of cinema gained credence in France (asserting the director as a film’s creative force)—and not until the 1970s that this notion...

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