Becoming “Arturo Ripstein”? On collaboration and the “author function” in the transnational film adaptation of El lugar sin límites

The article sets out a detailed case study of Mexican director Arturo Ripstein’s film adaptation of Chilean writer José Donoso’s 1966 short novel El lugar sin límites (‘The Place without Limits’, aka ‘Hell Has No Limits’), which featured a significant, though uncredited, contribution from the exiled Argentine author Manuel Puig. Non-mainstream and oppositional filmmakers and critics in Latin America — for example, Grupo Cine Liberación with their late 1960s formulation of ‘Second Cinema’ in ‘Hacia un tercer cine’/’Towards a Third Cinema’ (Solanas and Getino) — have often attacked, as ‘ideologically limited’, ‘ extranjerizante’ or ‘Eurocentric,’ and ‘literary’ or ‘individualistic,’ the kind of film auteurism in which Ripstein has engaged over four decades. Despite these and other similar attacks, it seems clear that this model of film production (along with Ripstein’s ‘brand’ of it) has been particularly resilient in the face of the political, economic and cultural vicissitudes of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s in a number of countries in the continent. Few sustained studies of auteurism as an internationally successful mode of production in Latin America exist, however. In this article, then, rather than focusing solely on the similarities and differences between the homonymous film and literary texts (the p rincipal critical activity in which studies of the adaptation process engage [Grant 2002]), I propose to use the transnational story of the adaptation of El lugar sin límites — as told from the point of view of its diverse ‘authors’ (Donoso, Puig and Ripstein) — to explore some questions concerning collaborative authorship across film and literary culture in Latin America after the end of the period of the literary ‘Boom’. I focus on the differences in the accounts that I reproduce here not in order to discover, or distil, a ‘true story’, but instead to show, and to work with, the diversity of authorial discourse about the adaptation of Donoso’s novel. While this particular case of transnational auteurist adaptation is a compelling anecdote in its own right, my examination of it will move beyond the biographical. As my title suggests, the discussion here is underwritten throughout by an interest in Michel Foucault’s concept of the ‘author function.

Notes on mirror visions in 'Modesty Blaise'

Modesty Blaise (Joseph Losey, 1966) travels the cinematic distance between an opening shot of the seemingly contented sleeping face of its star Monica Vitti and an extreme close-up of her eponymous character’s over-stimulated, rapacious look directly at the camera in the film’s final frames. This is a deceptively simple journey, perhaps. But, while making it, what she and certainly we do with our eyes repeatedly involves mirrors, as is so often the case in Losey’s looking-glass cinema. What Losey and his cinematographer Jack Hildyard achieve with reflective surfaces in this pop and op art spy film, a ‘remediation’ of Peter O’Donnell’s much loved comic strip (1963-1986), however, has not been nearly as well received as the director’s earlier signature experiments with those forms, for example in The Servant (1963), or in Eve (1962), another of his ‘cosmopolitan’ films. In the latter work, locations in Venice afforded him the challenge of photographing, for the first time, ‘reflected surfaces: mirrors – one of his most cherished symbols – and water, in baths, fountains, canals and the sea’ [Edith de Rham, Joseph Losey (London: André Deutsch, 1991), p. 133]. Are Modesty Blaise’s multiple mirrorings a symptom of unrestrained and muddled fetishism, or, integral to what Durgnat takes as Losey’s film poetry? The following notes, and an accompanying video essay, offer some specular reflections

Deja viewing?: videographic experiments in intertextual film studies

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Film and moving image studies: re-born digital? Some participant observations

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The shudder of a cinephiliac idea? Videographic film studies practice as material thinking

Long after the advent of the digital era, while most university-based film studies academics still choose to publish their critical, theoretical and historical research in conventional written formats, a small but growing number of scholars working on the moving image have begun to explore the online publication possibilities of the digital video essay. This multimedia form has come to prominence in recent years in much Internet-based cinephile and film critical culture. In this article, I will consider, above all from a personal perspective looking back at two of the sixty or so videos that I have made, some of the possibilities that these processes offer for the production of new knowledge, forged out of the conjunction of the film object(s) to be studied, digital technologies of reproduction and editing tools, and the facticity of the researcher(s). I will argue that digital video is usefully seen not only as a promising communicative tool with different affordances than those of written text, but also as an important emergent cultural and phenomenological field for the creative practice of our work as film scholars

Interplay: (Re)finding and (Re)framing cinematic experience, film space, and the child's world

Video (also online here: https://vimeo.com/133572645) plus research statement

Deja-viewing

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The marriages of Laurel Dallas. Or, the maternal melodrama of the unknown feminist film spectator

Videographic comparison of the final scenes of two cinematic ‘Maternal Melodrama’ adaptations of Olive Higgins Prouty's 1922 novel Stella Dallas: the 1925 version directed by Henry King, starring Belle Bennett as Stella Dallas, Lois Moran as Laurel Dallas, Alice Joyce as Helen Morrison and Ronald Colman as Stephen Dallas; and King Vidor's 1937 version starring Barbara Stanwyck as Stella (Martin) Dallas, John Boles as Stephen Dallas, Anne Shirley as Laurel Dallas and Barbara O'Neil as Helen Morrison. The video is also online here: https://vimeo.com/95910530). The publication also includes an accompanying research statement

Film studies in the groove? Rhythmising perception in Carnal Locomotive

VIDEO (also online at https://vimeo.com/119051190) and accompanying research statement