Architectures of Accreditation

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Proof 11 Architectures of Accreditation ‘Writing the endings of cinema: Saving film authorship in the cinematic paratexts of Prospero’s Books, Taymor’s The Tempest and The Secret of Kells’ Richard Burt In this chapter I examine the appearance of books and illuminated manuscripts being written/produced in the closing sequences of two adapta- tions of Shakespeare’s The Tempest – Julie Taymor’s Tempest (2010) and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991) – and of The Secret of Kells (dir. Tomm Moore, 2009), the animated feature film about The Book of Kells. I analyse these films, all three of which are concerned with the process of writing medieval and early modern books, in relation to two developments in the history of the cinematic paratext: first, opening and end sequences that show the credits printed on turning pages of a book; and, second, the increasing expansion and development of end credit sequences since 1980.1 I take note of some specific developments that increasingly both co- ordinate and diffe rentiate the opening and end title sequences to shed light on two principal questions: (i) why cinema turns to textual media for the paratext and (ii) why books remain, in the age of digital cinema as much as of cellu- loid cinema, ideal filmic multimedia referents – and particularly in animated feature films. Before discussing these three films, let me make some preliminary remarks on the ways in which the cinematic paratext and the medium of the book bear on writing in film. Why has the book become such a commonly used medium for opening title sequences? In large part, I suggest, because it provides a solution to an authorship problem specific to film. Because ‘film- making involves a comparatively large division of labor’, observes Georg Stanitzek: a film cannot be attributed to one author … the opening credits (or génerique) constitute a paratext that uses a number of the paratextual forms found in books – as a kind of imprint for film – but so in a specifically filmic way … Just as the book has two covers, a title, an imprint, and so on, a film …. has opening and closing credits, and so on. A book can function 178 99780230313842_13_cha11.indd780230313842_13_cha11.indd 117878 11/18/2013/18/2013 99:01:37:01:37 PPMM Proof Cinematic Paratexts 179 as a filmic organizer of communication, as a kind of natural delineation of the entire work.2 The homology Stanitzek finds between book and film paratexts allows, I maintain, for a typographical regularization of film authorship by singling out the director in the credits as author, or auteur, in a number of ways. Whereas, for example, the name of the screenwriter(s) often appears in a frame alongside others who have worked on the film, the director’s name is typically given a frame to itself, a large font size and the significance of being positioned as the final credit of the opening title sequence. As a result of these multiple privileging strategies, one might conclude that film author and film are more strongly connected paratextually than are book author and book.3 As ‘a kind of imprint’, the film paratext defaults clearly to an auteur, director- as- writer notion of film authorship. Equally, though, opening title sequences of films begin (and sometimes end) with the studio logo in a more prominent display of institutional authorship than is typically afforded to a publisher in a book’s paratextual apparatus. Whereas a publisher’s ‘introduction’ of a book is usually overlooked by readers, the cinematic equivalent cannot be skipped over or fast- forwarded by film viewers as projected in movie theatres or watched on DVD/ Blu- ray players. A viewer of a DVD or Blu- ray edition of a film will therefore be forced to ‘read’ the entire paratext. The peritext of a book (that part of the paratext included in the work’s contents) may be said to have been written in a kind of invisible ink; the peritext of a film, the alphabetic text of titles and credits, however, is engraved, as it were, on the image. No wonder, then, that, since the 1950s (when credits first started to be system- atically integrated into the film as prologue material to the story itself), the succession of credits has often appeared through the analogy of the turning pages of a book. Yet if the medium of the opened bound book proposes answers, by way of analogy, to major questions of film authorship (Do films have authors? Yes they do. Who is the ‘writer’ of the film? The director), it also opens up new questions about film authorship. Title sequences are almost always outsourced, and their ‘authors’ are frequently not credited. In some exceptional cases, the designer of the opening title sequence is credited, two famous examples of this being Saul Bass in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Kyle Cooper in David Fincher’s Se7en (1995). More often, the outsourced agency gets a corporate credit (for example, ‘Titles: Pacific Title Company’). The design of the very sequence that asserts the film’s authorship is, therefore, frequently undertaken by an anonymous, corporate agent, thereby reinscribing in the film, albeit in a barely noticeable way, the problem of authorial determination (a film being the product of a collaborative team) that the imprint of the book (with the author on the furthest margin of the peritext, the book’s spine) would otherwise appear to have resolved. 99780230313842_13_cha11.indd780230313842_13_cha11.indd 117979 11/18/2013/18/2013 99:01:37:01:37 PPMM Proof 180 Cinema’s Authorial Proxies and Fictional Authors Stanizeks’s important insight that the film paratext tends to default to the medium of the book misses the way a bibliocentric notion of film authorship depends on a spectralization of the writer of the cinematic paratext, a spectralization already happening in books: as Gérard Genette points out, ‘the author’s name is not necessarily always the author himself’.4 The author’s name is put on the title page and cover outside the main body of the text in a way that creates a mutually legitimating relation between writer and publisher: [W]ith respect to the cover and title page, it is the publisher who presents the author, somewhat as certain film producers present both the film and its director. If the author is the guarantor of the text (auctor), this guarantor himself has a guarantor – the publisher – who ‘introduces’ him and names him.5 This ‘introduction’ provides for an opening, but not necessarily for a smooth entry into the book. The most exterior parts of a book’s paratext – the cover and title page – paradoxically unify writer and publisher by splitting the author from himself. The publisher’s ‘introduction’ is often followed by another paratext, namely, the author’s preface. As Genette notes, ‘one of the normal functions of the preface is to give the author the opportunity to offi- cially claim (or deny) authorship of his text’ (49). I consider this supplement to the publisher’s ‘introduction’ to be a way of saving not only the writer of the book but the book itself: the supplement serves as a paratextual back- up loosely analogous to an auto- recovered ‘saved’ digital document. William H. Sherman has offered a useful corrective to Genette’s con- ceptualization of the paratext that focuses almost entirely on a book’s introduction.6 Sherman explores how the paratext significantly shapes the ways in which we finish reading books. Work on the cinematic paratext, however, has followed Genette in focusing on opening title sequences and ignoring the endings and end credit sequences of films.7 The analogy of front and back book covers with opening and closing film sequences (an analogy specifically evoked by film endings in which the book that opened the film closes just before ‘The End’ appears), has further broken down or been reworked in ways that turn the closing credit sequence into multiple, individuated stories about the main characters. As I will show at the end of this chapter, Disney’s hybrid animated and cinematic feature film Enchanted (dir. Kevin Lima, 2007) begins with a book much as Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (dir. David Hand, 1937) and Sleeping Beauty (dir. Clyde Geronimi, 1959) do, but ends with a sequence that serves as a mini- sequel. For the moment, let me note the impossible way in which the ending of Sleeping Beauty recalls the beginning. After the opening title sequence, the film begins conventionally enough with a copy of a book entitled Sleeping Beauty, its illustrated pages turning automatically with writing that is also heard in voice- over. The camera 99780230313842_13_cha11.indd780230313842_13_cha11.indd 118080 11/18/2013/18/2013 99:01:38:01:38 PPMM Proof Cinematic Paratexts 181 (a) (b) (c) (d) Figure 11.1 a–d The architecture of a book frames the narrative of Sleeping Beauty (dir. Clyde Geronimi, 1959). At its opening, the book opens onto the action (a and b); at its close the action is then re- enclosed within the book’s covers (c and d) zooms in on a particular image of the book and passes into the narrative of the animated film.

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