authorship seminar: the signature

The SignatureCCR 747 ::: S13

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What is the role of the signature?

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When is the signature needed?

Krista adds:

When does it matter?

Theresa asks:

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Foucault:

The Author function is linked to the juridical and institutional system that encompasses, determines, and articulates the universe of discourses.

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... As a result of the success of auteurism, the apparatus that surrounds a film’s reception apparently cannot support the total omission of a directorial credit, and so the creation of the fictive director Allen Smithee has become a necessity.

Braddock & Hock, 7

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Seth:

On the other hand, that very assumption about the demand of filmic authorship, the necessary signature for a film—an assumption which seems to underlie this collection of essays—is a bit problematic. There are, of course, a few rare directors who command some kind of celebrity ‘signature’ status: Steven Spielberg and George Lucas come immediately to mind. However, the reality is that the vast majority of directors do not have celebrity status, and their ‘signature’ plays practically no part in the marketing of a film. Why? Because they aren’t important in the public’s mind.

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popular

juridical

economic(and always rhetorical)

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...the ... Cahiers du cinema critics who pioneered the concept of auteur could not have foreseen the ease with which auteurism was to be appropriated as a marketing strategy by the machinery of corporate Hollywood (7)

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auteur v

director

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directoras

author-construct

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Smithee has thus become Hollywood’s secret shame, the all-purpose sign that adopts those films that can claim an embarrassingly plural parentage, a mixed parentage that would put the lie to the Guild’s official position that the director is the film’s sole author, or, since paternity is the central metaphor employed in the Creative Rights Handbook, a film’s sole and rightful father.

(9-10)

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Because “the cinema is an art which is both popular and industrial,” Bazin stressed, the subject of analysis should be “not only the talent of this or that film-maker, but also the genius of the system.”

(13-15)

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Elmyr de Hory

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what is fake?what is a good fake?

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Modigliani by ModiglianiModigliani by Elmir

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Do you think I should confess? To what? Committing masterpieces?

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who or what is the author

of a fake?

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What does expertise have to do with this?

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Lindsey:

How does the concept of an expert bind authenticity to authorship?

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Theresa:

F is for Fake really made me think about how the expert in some fields needs the author construct, or, to remove it from their understandings would have them totally reimagine the work they do.

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is the master’s signaturerequired for amasterpiece?

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Theresa:(1) what authors have already been erased by the workings of "civilization" and so can they afford to lose the empowerment (cultural capital) of an author construct and then the signature?

(2) Does it matter little who is empowered by the author construct if, as Welles kind of morbidly puts it, in the end all is erased? --all authors, whether positioned in the privilege to erase him/herself from the text without erasing him/herself from the recognition of culture, and those non-privileged who might rely on the cultural capital of authorship for more than the economical capital that might afford them- -does it matter who gains cultural capital if culture is erased in the end?

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