(no subject)
Thank you to everyone who helped me think of movies about female writers. If you didn't know, my dissertation is going to be about cultural representation of writing (esp. in visual media). This includes wacky stuff like fonts, writing machines, author photos on the back of books, movies/TV shows about writers, computer interface design, the politics of literacy, etc. So your suggestions are going to be helpful in the future.
This is an excerpt of how I was using them yesterday:
Novels and films are not the same. This is a truism from those versions of adaptation studies invested in countering what Robert Stam calls the “unstated doxa” that “constructs the subaltern status of adaptation (and the filmic image) vis-a-vis novels (and the literary word).” We can not expect the same things from a film as from a book: a preliminary apologia that makes way for serious consideration of the novel-to-film adaptation. According to Paul Arthur in his essay, “The Written Scene: Writers as Figures of Cinematic Redemption,” the “writer's film” is a counter-response to tired the-book-was-(always)-better assumptions so generally a priori accorded to adaptations. Films with writer-protagonists, he suggests, though not a cohesive generic category, are very often “legible as allegories on the status of movies in contemporary literature, and the position of literature in contemporary cinema.” This is a relationship that is becoming increasingly “synergistic” in Arthur's view, “a cozy alliance” in which literature lends its established cultural capital in exchange for mass cultural validation of its continued relevance. For the most part, the films Arthur analyzes all emphasize the subjective creative process of literary authorship-on the level of narrative (content) as well as structural composition, i.e. voice-overs from intra-diegetic narrators (characters), very often revealed to be manuscript fragments, thereby framing the film's storytelling process as a “literary work-in-progress.”
For the most part also, the films Arthur cites (all released between 1997 and 2000, almost all English language) feature male writer-protagonists: eighteen out of the nineteen. He acknowledges this in a single sentence: “writing would appear to be a tumultuous calling pursued predominantly by unmarried, mature men for whom romantic passion is a drive shared, or reciprocated, between written text and extra-textual entanglements (only Girl, Interrupted is focused on a female writer).” (Indeed, it would appear that way if one doesn't consider any alternative representations.) Furthermore, none of his sample films are directed by a woman; only two of the screenplays were co-written by women; and Girl, Interrupted is the only one based on a book written by a woman (it is only mentioned, not analyzed). He also doesn't mention that almost all of his examples are of white men.
Although almost certainly far fewer films about female writers than those about men were made during Arthur's chosen time period (even by 2008 only twelve of the 100 top grossing Hollywood films about anything starred or were focused on women), others were released during that time, before then, and since. One of these in particular is the 1999 adaptation of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park written and directed by Patricia Rozema, which avowedly (in the opening credits) merges Austen's novel with “her letters and early journals,” thereby turning protagonist Fanny into a writer. Five years earlier, Gillian Armstrong's adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (screenplay by Robin Swicord) reframed that story, already loosely based on Alcott's life, as far more overtly biographical than the source text. As contemporary filmic “readings” (image-ings) of the work and existence of historical female writers, these films retrospectively filter both through the successive waves of Western feminism since the nineteenth century. As such, I would propose that they are “legible as allegories” of a contemporary longing for origins with regard to cinematic female authorship.
I agree with Arthur that films with writer-protagonists comment on the complicated cultural interplay between cinema and literature; I also agree that a representation of creative subjectivity is a ubiquitous aspect of such films. But along with his omission of films about female writers, Arthur also avoids the material and theoretical gendering of film authorship, which is already intimately bound up with constructions of literary authorship [...]
The other paper I was writing ALL LAST WEEK (last year) about Atonement (and Derrida and Paul de Man's relationship? and typewriters? and my friends' 'zines in the nineties?) is far more insane. It may be the craziest thing I've ever written--even more than that paper I wrote about how I love my cat using Barthes's A Lover's Discourse that was half fiction!
This is an excerpt of how I was using them yesterday:
Novels and films are not the same. This is a truism from those versions of adaptation studies invested in countering what Robert Stam calls the “unstated doxa” that “constructs the subaltern status of adaptation (and the filmic image) vis-a-vis novels (and the literary word).” We can not expect the same things from a film as from a book: a preliminary apologia that makes way for serious consideration of the novel-to-film adaptation. According to Paul Arthur in his essay, “The Written Scene: Writers as Figures of Cinematic Redemption,” the “writer's film” is a counter-response to tired the-book-was-(always)-better assumptions so generally a priori accorded to adaptations. Films with writer-protagonists, he suggests, though not a cohesive generic category, are very often “legible as allegories on the status of movies in contemporary literature, and the position of literature in contemporary cinema.” This is a relationship that is becoming increasingly “synergistic” in Arthur's view, “a cozy alliance” in which literature lends its established cultural capital in exchange for mass cultural validation of its continued relevance. For the most part, the films Arthur analyzes all emphasize the subjective creative process of literary authorship-on the level of narrative (content) as well as structural composition, i.e. voice-overs from intra-diegetic narrators (characters), very often revealed to be manuscript fragments, thereby framing the film's storytelling process as a “literary work-in-progress.”
For the most part also, the films Arthur cites (all released between 1997 and 2000, almost all English language) feature male writer-protagonists: eighteen out of the nineteen. He acknowledges this in a single sentence: “writing would appear to be a tumultuous calling pursued predominantly by unmarried, mature men for whom romantic passion is a drive shared, or reciprocated, between written text and extra-textual entanglements (only Girl, Interrupted is focused on a female writer).” (Indeed, it would appear that way if one doesn't consider any alternative representations.) Furthermore, none of his sample films are directed by a woman; only two of the screenplays were co-written by women; and Girl, Interrupted is the only one based on a book written by a woman (it is only mentioned, not analyzed). He also doesn't mention that almost all of his examples are of white men.
Although almost certainly far fewer films about female writers than those about men were made during Arthur's chosen time period (even by 2008 only twelve of the 100 top grossing Hollywood films about anything starred or were focused on women), others were released during that time, before then, and since. One of these in particular is the 1999 adaptation of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park written and directed by Patricia Rozema, which avowedly (in the opening credits) merges Austen's novel with “her letters and early journals,” thereby turning protagonist Fanny into a writer. Five years earlier, Gillian Armstrong's adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (screenplay by Robin Swicord) reframed that story, already loosely based on Alcott's life, as far more overtly biographical than the source text. As contemporary filmic “readings” (image-ings) of the work and existence of historical female writers, these films retrospectively filter both through the successive waves of Western feminism since the nineteenth century. As such, I would propose that they are “legible as allegories” of a contemporary longing for origins with regard to cinematic female authorship.
I agree with Arthur that films with writer-protagonists comment on the complicated cultural interplay between cinema and literature; I also agree that a representation of creative subjectivity is a ubiquitous aspect of such films. But along with his omission of films about female writers, Arthur also avoids the material and theoretical gendering of film authorship, which is already intimately bound up with constructions of literary authorship [...]
The other paper I was writing ALL LAST WEEK (last year) about Atonement (and Derrida and Paul de Man's relationship? and typewriters? and my friends' 'zines in the nineties?) is far more insane. It may be the craziest thing I've ever written--even more than that paper I wrote about how I love my cat using Barthes's A Lover's Discourse that was half fiction!