Imaginary co-signatures: collaboration, authorship, and star personae in films by Marcel Carne with Arletty and by Jean Cocteau with Jean Marais

Imaginary co-signatures: collaboration, authorship, and star personae in films by Marcel Carne with Arletty and by Jean Cocteau with Jean Marais

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Aldstadt, David
Language:English
Published: The Ohio State University / OhioLINK 2002
Subjects:
Film Studies
Online Access:http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1371473066
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spelling ndltd-OhioLink-oai-etd.ohiolink.edu-osu13714730662021-08-03T05:24:02Z Imaginary co-signatures: collaboration, authorship, and star personae in films by Marcel Carne with Arletty and by Jean Cocteau with Jean Marais Aldstadt, David Film Studies Cinematic authorship has become, over the past half-century, more and more of a paradoxical notion within French film studies. On the one hand, critics like Andre Bazin and Alexandre Astruc helped institute a mode of criticism that tends to consider a film's director as its sole auteur. On the other hand, given a necessarily collaborative medium like film, criticism also constantly recognizes the roles of writers, technicians, and performers. Often directors with the strongest auteurist reputations also, over the course of their careers, tend to collaborate with the same crews and casts on many different projects. In light of this paradox of authorship, this study considers films from two such collaborations—specifically between famous, auteurist directors and their respective acteurs fetiches—through textual readings of three films directed by Marcel Carne and starring Arletty, Hotel du Nord (1938), Le Jour se leve (1939), and Les Enfants du paradis (1945), alongside three films by Jean Cocteau starring Jean Marais, La Belle et la Bete (1946), Les Parents terribles (1948), and Orphee (1949). Moreover, since these films date from the tumultuous decade surrounding World War II, the political meaning of collaboration contributes to an intriguing historical backdrop for aspects of the (star) personae of the personalities in question.After reviewing the somewhat inconsistent theoretical and critical treatments of collaborative authorship in traditional approaches to cinema studies, i.e. textual, psychoanalytical, empirical, and star theory, the discussions of the two sets of films follow similar patterns by tracing the inception, elaboration, and pinnacle of each famous partnership from their early films to their respective master works. Moreover, as this study contends, these interdependent filmic articulations of authorship and star personae engage with classic tropes of the cinema in a self-referential manner through visual and historical allusions to the collaborations themselves. The study concludes by defining the imaginary co-signatures, or contributions to a film, here, by both auteurist director and star actor, with reference to Christian Metz's signifiant imaginaire and to accepted notions of the signature as a discursive marker of persona. 2002 English text The Ohio State University / OhioLINK http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1371473066 http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1371473066 unrestricted This thesis or dissertation is protected by copyright: all rights reserved. It may not be copied or redistributed beyond the terms of applicable copyright laws.
collection NDLTD
language English
sources NDLTD
topic Film Studies
spellingShingle Film Studies
Aldstadt, David
Imaginary co-signatures: collaboration, authorship, and star personae in films by Marcel Carne with Arletty and by Jean Cocteau with Jean Marais
author Aldstadt, David
author_facet Aldstadt, David
author_sort Aldstadt, David
title Imaginary co-signatures: collaboration, authorship, and star personae in films by Marcel Carne with Arletty and by Jean Cocteau with Jean Marais
title_short Imaginary co-signatures: collaboration, authorship, and star personae in films by Marcel Carne with Arletty and by Jean Cocteau with Jean Marais
title_full Imaginary co-signatures: collaboration, authorship, and star personae in films by Marcel Carne with Arletty and by Jean Cocteau with Jean Marais
title_fullStr Imaginary co-signatures: collaboration, authorship, and star personae in films by Marcel Carne with Arletty and by Jean Cocteau with Jean Marais
title_full_unstemmed Imaginary co-signatures: collaboration, authorship, and star personae in films by Marcel Carne with Arletty and by Jean Cocteau with Jean Marais
title_sort imaginary co-signatures: collaboration, authorship, and star personae in films by marcel carne with arletty and by jean cocteau with jean marais
publisher The Ohio State University / OhioLINK
publishDate 2002
url http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1371473066
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