Border crossing, corporality and
performance: a study of authorial selfinscription in the cinema
Cecilia Sayad – University of Kent
‘The fact is (or, it follows) that writing can no
longer designate an operation of recording,
notation, representation, “depiction” (as the
Classics would say); rather, it designates exactly
what linguists […] call a performative, a rare
verbal form (exclusively given in the first person
and in the present tense) in which the
enunciation has no other content (contains no
other proposition) than the act by which it is
uttered’
- Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’
• Jean-Luc Godard: voice-over narration, essay
film (Two or Three Things I Know About Her,
1967)
• Woody Allen: screen performance,
fool/standup comic, fictional narrative (Annie
Hall, 1977)
• Roland Barthes:
– ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968)
– The Pleasure of the Text (1973)
• Mikhail Bakhtin
– ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the
Novel’ (1937-1938)
‘For example: the author may appear in his
text (Genet, Proust), but not in the guise of
direct biography (which would exceed the
body, give a meaning to life, forge a destiny)’
– Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text
‘Figuration is the way in which the erotic body
appears (to whatever degree and in whatever
form it may be) in the profile of the text … Or
finally: the text itself, a diagrammatic and nonimitative structure, can reveal itself in the
form of a body’
– Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text
• Diegetic / non-diegetic
• Fiction / real
• Filmic / extrafilmic
authorial assertion and divestiture,
palpability and disappearance,
exposure and masking
‘… it is Godard’s very phenomenological idea
that the artist is not properly a creator, but
rather the site where words and visual forms
inscribe or install themselves’
– Kaja Silverman, ‘The Author as Receiver’ (on
JLG/JLG: Self-Portrait in December)
‘I look at myself filming, and people hear me
think. Put shortly, this is not a film, it’s an
attempt to film’
– Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc
Godard
‘The death of the author is thus better
understood as an ongoing process than as a
realisable event. Once we make this semantic
adjustment, the crucial question to ask
Godard is no longer whether he succeeds in
laying his ghost definitively to rest in JLG/JLG.
It is, instead, whether he is able to sustain
himself there and elsewhere in the mode of
dying’
– Kaja Silverman, ‘The Author as Receiver’
‘Essential to these three figures [the rogue, the clown
and the fool] is a distinctive feature that is as well a
privilege—the right to be ‘other’ in this world…’
‘They grant the right not to understand, the right to
confuse, to tease, to hyperbolize life; the right to
parody others while talking, the right not to be taken
literally, not “to be oneself”’
– Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and of the
Chronotope in the Novel’
‘At last a form was found to portray the mode
of existence of a man who is in life, but not of
it, life’s perpetual spy and reflector; at last
specific forms had been found to reflect
private life and make it public’
– Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in
the Novel’
‘“The ‘Now’ agenda defines standup comedy”.
Straight drama shows events from another
place and another time, but with standup the
events happen right here in the venue’
– Oliver Double, Getting the Joke
‘… author’s metalepsis, which consists of
pretending that the poet “himself brings about
the effects he celebrates”’
‘…any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or
narratee into the diegetic universe (or by the
diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe,
etc.), or the inverse (as in Cortázar) produces an
effect of strangeness that is either comical … or
fantastic’
– Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse