Film, Media and Music
Nothing in recent film theory has excited more controversy than its rulings on authorship. Saussure's theory of signification, with its emphasis on the purely differential nature of signifier and signified, was seen to have profound implications for the notion of language as communication. By extension, its implications for authorship were equally far-reaching. Authorship was incompatible with the investigation of particular modes of subjectivity, whether from an Althusserian standpoint in terms of how positions were imposed on the subject, or from a Lacanian one in terms of texts as 'the space of the process of sense and subject'. Moreover authorship is something that is historically variable. Authorship is one way, but not the only way, of finding answers to the question, 'Who is speaking and to whom?' Its survival may be explained by this provision, but it is not guaranteed.
The alliance of cinema and politics was by no means novel - the surrealist movement and post-war Italian realism are two examples - but the resolute commitment to theory marked the post-1968 alliance as distinctive. The broad shift of film theory from structuralism to post-structuralism occasioned fewer differences and discontinuities than might be supposed. Despite the shift in conceptual terminology, the emphasis remained theoretical; and despite the eclipse of Marxism and the rise of the new politics, there was a continued commitment to oppositional politics. What did change was the attitude towards 'grand theory', which was now held to be inappropriate to the strategic requirements of the new politics. During the past decade the politics of gender has effectively displaced the politics of class within film theory. The early 1970s saw a number of developments around women's engagement with cinema that heralded the coming hegemony of feminism in film studies.
The decade immediately following the introduction of sound at the end of the 1920s brought with it an epidemic of Dickens adaptations. In a critical biography of 1934, Hugh Kingsmill criticised Dickens' sentimentality as an aspect of Victorian hypocrisy. In a discussion of The Old Curiosity Shop, Aldous Huxley suggested that it is 'distressing indeed, but not as Dickens presumably meant it to be distressing; it is distressing in its ineptitude and vulgar sentimentality. He judged Dickens guilty, in all his books, and particularly in The Old Curiosity Shop, of 'really monstrous emotional vulgarity'. Sadism plays a key role in The Old Curiosity Shop. Many of Dickens's male - and even a few female - characters are sadists, and most of his women are masochists. Peter Ackroyd defines The Old Curiosity Shop as a novel 'where sexuality is everywhere apparent but nowhere stated'.
This chapter gives a brief explanation of what is meant by the Gothic in literature, and then focuses on Bram Stoker's Dracula and adaptations of the novel in TV and especially film. It briefly describes the extent of Dracula's penetration into the film and TV media, to account for the fascination of this character and story. While it is certainly true that many more people today experience Dracula primarily through visual representations, the fortunes of Stoker's novel and other written reworkings have been significantly and positively affected by the circulation of Dracula films and television adaptations. Today, the Dracula myth offers an appealing mixture of nostalgia, eroticism and a sense of literary seriousness not generally available in contemporary popular culture. It is easy to argue that the novel, film and TV versions of Dracula and other Gothic novels represent anxieties about gender and sexuality.
Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage was the big-screen adaptation of Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent. It is a film which suggests the broad boundaries surrounding the notion of adaptation. Indeed, as the inclusion of Conrad's name in the title sequence of Sabotage demonstrates, the marketing of adaptations at times exploits those cultural links that its own narratological process has ignored. In this way, adaptations of the kind undertaken by Hitchcock make use of structuralism's disregard for anything outside of textual organisation. What this suggests is that one way of identifying how texts have been adapted to fit such new conditions is by undertaking a textual dissection akin to that performed by both structuralist theorists and screenwriters. The approach adopted in this chapter involves the identification and examination, in both Conrad's novel and Hitchcock's film, of some of the narrative components identified by French structuralist Gerard Genette in his study Narrative Discourse.
This chapter begins by taking a look at the similarities between many of the aspects of socialist realism and the folk tale genre as a whole. It demonstrates that the two genres had a great deal in common, not only in terms of their shared themes, but also in their practical applications for Soviet society of the 1930s: this may account for the privileging of the fairy tale form most clearly represented in cinema by the musical genre. The chapter offers analyses of Aleksandrov's city-based musical comedies not only as fairy tales, but also as buttresses for the political and discursive centralisation, and by comparison with the conventions of inter-war Hollywood musicals, which have attracted critical attention not only for their utopian topography, but also their sexual politics. The genre of socialist realism, and particularly its musical comedies, are characterised by absent parents and orphan protagonists.
As in the United States, British popular music also developed in collaboration with the broadcasting and film industries. This chapter undertakes an analysis of the British contribution to popular music and moving image culture through an examination of British film musicals from the 1930s to the 1960s. The relationship between British and American popular culture is shown to be both competitive and complex. British rock'n'roll singers initially modelled themselves on the American stars, with Bill Haley and the Comets leading the way. Haley's popularity was greater and longer-lasting in Britain than it was in the United States, and his music was central to the development of a new youth-orientated phase in British popular music. The chapter examines the reasons for serious and unjustified neglect of British musicals within the overall context of British film production and the influence of class-based social attitudes towards popular culture.
With Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence, the author of this chapter wanted to find a way of making something literary and also filmic. Martin Scorsese himself looks back on his own ambition in adapting the novel. In part, he goes on to explain the technical difficulty of making complex period film in America. Wharton's novel at its centre turns on a human equation both older and richer: that of the heart's affections, desire in all its contradictory pulls of dream and sublimation, resolve and evasion. The film, like Wharton's novel, would show, or watch, 'feeling' as an unfolding rhythm, each exterior locale correlated to a locale deep within. It can little be said not to have delivered on that promise. Scorsese's The Age of Innocence will not likely be judged his best film. That rarely occurs for a director who achieves auteur status.
The concept of faithfulness has signifiance within the transmission of an adaptation, not just significance within the analysis of it as a text. This chapter suggests that the measure of the change in the institutional function of the classic serial across the 1980s into the 1990s can be taken by monitoring the way this notion of fidelity continues to perform. The BBC's wildly successful 1995 Pride and Prejudice provided an excellent opportunity to undertake such a monitoring process. As an institution, cinema is predicated on an identification with its apparatus, but broadcasting has effectively naturalised its apparatus within 'the home'. The question of faithfulness to the text reproduces the concerns of those critics and filmmakers of the 1920s and 1930s, including Eisenstein, who saw synchronous sound as a limitation of film's artistic potential.
In his survey of post-revolutionary and Stalinist cinema, Peter Kenez goes as far as to suggest that the Soviet authorities in fact placed too much faith in the power of propaganda, a situation which left them in a seemingly constant state of frustration at the unwillingness of the Soviet people to swallow their messages and reform their behaviour to conform with a more properly 'socialist' model of humanity. Stalin's personal and abiding interest in the cinema has been more than adequately documented elsewhere. As the 'Kremlin Censor' - to borrow Mar'iamov's title - he would organise private screenings on a regular basis, and technically had 'final cut' on all films produced during his lengthy period in office. The issue of repression, and what cannot be formulated within existing discursive frameworks, is obviously of primary concern to a study of Soviet cinema under the 'Kremlin censor'.