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IMAGINARY CO-SIGNATURES: COLLABORATION, AUTHORSHIP, AND STAR PERSONAE IN FILMS BY MARCEL CARN6 WITH ARLETTY AND BY JEAN COCTEAU WITH JEAN MARAIS DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By David Aldstadt, B.S., M.A. The Ohio State University 2002 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Judith Mayne, Adviser Dr. Charles D. Minahen Dr. Juditn Mayne, Adviser Dr. Karlis Racevskis Department of French and Italian Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMl Number 3048992 UMT UMl Microform3048992 Copyright 2002 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17. United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor. MI 48106-1346 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Copyright by David Aldstadt 2002 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT 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 C a m e and starring Arletty, Hotel du Hord (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 ii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. (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 siqnifiant imaginaire and to accepted notions of the signature as a discursive marker of persona. iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my adviser, Professor Judith Mayne, for the intellectual support, encouragement, and enthusiasm that made this dissertation possible. Her scholarship has been a great inspiration to me. And, her assistance and feedback with composition and editing have been invaluable. I also wish to thank the Faculty members of the Department of French and Italian for their guidance and support. Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends for their encouragement, patience, and assistance throughout this project. iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. VITA September 17, 1968..... Born - Barberton, OH, USA 1990................... B.S., Summa cum Laude, French and Spanish Education The Ohio State University 1991-1992.............. Assistant d'anglais, Lycee Brequigny, Rennes, France 1995................... M.A. French, The Ohio State University 1998 and 1999.......... English Teacher, Lucent Technologies, Rouen, France 1990-present........... Graduate Teaching Associate, Peer Supervisor and Course Coordinator, Department of French and Italian, The Ohio State University PUBLICATIONS Aldstadt, David. "Arletty, Star Image, and the Return of the Gaze: Gazing Back from Marcel Came's Les Enfants du paradis." West Virginia University Philological Papers 48 (2002): 67-70. Aldstadt, David, Linda L. Harlow, and Judith A. Muyskens. Bravo! Computerized Test Bank. 4th Ed. CD-ROM. Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 2002. Bravo! Website. Ed. David Aldstadt, et al. 2002. Heinle and Heinle. <http://heinle.bravo.com>. v Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Aldstadt, David. "Verlaine." The Encyclopedia of Lesbian and Gay Histories and Cultures. Volume II. Ed. George E. Haggerty. 2 vols. New York: Garland, 2000. Aldstadt, David, Linda L. Harlow, and Judith A. Muyskens. Bravo! Computerized Test Bank. 3rd Ed. CD-ROM. Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 1998. Aldstadt, David, E., Jr., Linda L. Harlow, and Judith A. Muyskens. Bravo! Testing Program. 2nd Ed. Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 1993. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: French and Italian Minor Fields: French Cinema, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century French Literature, Critical Theory and Gender Studies, Language Pedagogy and Technology Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract................................................ ii Acknowledgments......................................... iv Vita..................................................... v Chapters: 1. Introduction...................... 1 2. Cinematic Authorship, Star Personae, and Collaboration...................................... 24 3. The "Atmosphere" of Hotel du Nordi Articulating Narrative Space and Star Space..................... 64 4. The Characterization of Clara: Poetic Realism and Sexuality in Le Jour se leve....................... 86 5. Looking at Garance Looking-At: Star Persona and Authorship in Les Enfants du paradis..............110 6. Les Parents ter rib lest Figuring A Coctelian Star.............................................. 143 7. Crossing Boundaries in La Belle et la Bete........ 176 8. The Self-Reflective Mirror in Orphee.............. 200 9. Conclusions: imaginary Co-signatures............ 233 Bibliography........................................... 246 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 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 such as Andre Bazin and Alexandre Astruc, in the forties and fifties, helped institute a mode of criticism that tends to consider a film’s director as the sole auteur, responsible for virtually every aspect, from mise-en-scene to photography to editing, of the finished product. The director, much like a poet in relation to a poem, or the painter in relation to a painting, becomes the ultimate authority over his or her artistic expression. Consequently, auteurist criticism then reduces the role of a film'' s cast and production crew to a function of the director's orders, decisions, blocking, and so forth. On the