The ontology and literary status of the screenplay: the case of "Scriptfic"

Are screenplays - or at least some screenplays - works of literature? Until relatively recently, very few theorists had addressed this question. Thanks to recent work by scholars such as Ian W. Macdonald, Steven Maras, and Steven Price, theorizing the nature of the screenplay is back on the agenda after years of neglect (albeit with a few important exceptions) by film studies and literary studies (Macdonald 2004; Maras 2009; Price 2010). What has emerged from this work, however, is a general acceptance that the screenplay is ontologically peculiar and, as a result, a divergence of opinion about whether or not it is the kind of thing that can be literature.Specifically, recent discussion about the nature of the screenplay has tended to emphasize its putative lack of ontological autonomy from the film, its supposed inherent incompleteness, or both (Carroll 2008, 68-69; Maras 2009, 48; Price 2010, 38-42). Moreover, these sorts of claims about the screenplay's ontology - its essential nature - are often hitched to broader arguments. According to one such argument, a screenplay's supposed ontological tie to the production of a film is said to vitiate the possibility of it being a work of literature in its own right (Carroll 2008, 68-69; Maras 2009, 48). According to another, the screenplay's tenuous literary status is putatively explained by the idea that it is perpetually unfinished, akin to a Barthesian >> writerly text > Yes > Yes > No > scriptfic > scriptfic > scriptfic Scriptfics > series > virtual series air

Animals, ethics, and the art world

This paper argues that debates over art exhibitions that make use of live animals, such as the Guggenheim Museum's 2017 Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World, are reflective of a schism between two general approaches to the ethico-political criticism of art. One of these approaches, the interpretation-oriented approach, is dominant in the art world and its adjacent institutions. The other, the production-oriented approach, is tacitly adopted by art-interested non-specialists. This rift explains why the use of animals in contemporary art—a practice that many art-interested people outside of the art world find bizarre and prima facie unethical—is so rarely discussed critically within art world institutions such as museums and journals. In an attempt to redress this oversight, the paper argues that the production-oriented approach is not only conceptually sound, but rationally preferable to the interpretation-oriented approach in many such cases

Instances of cinema

This article sketches a commonplace yet neglected epistemic puzzle raised by the diversity of our film-viewing practices. Because our appreciative practices allow for variability in the "instances" of cinematic works we engage, many of our experiential encounters with those works are flawed or impoverished in a number of ways. The article outlines a number of ways in which instances of cinema can vary-including, for example, in terms of color, score, and aspect ratio. This variability of instances of cinema and, hence, the variability in our experiences of a cinematic work raise potential problems around normative questions of interpretation and evaluation

Luis Bunuel's Land Without Bread: the critics and the contexts

In this article, I attempt to reconcile surrealist and Leftist readings of Land Without Bread by grounding the more germane points of each in a historical context. In the first half of the article, I outline and critique the ways in which the film has been claimed both as ‘documentary surrealism’ and ‘a fleeting incitement for revolutionary change’. In the second half of the article, I detail the film’s production history and conclude that both the historical record and the film’s form suggest that Buñuel’s project cannot be neatly categorized as either ‘surrealist’ or ‘political’. Rather, Land Without Bread subverts the form of the ethnographic documentary and the travelogue film in order to disrupt attempts to account for and rehabilitate the Hurdanos – but not simply because Buñuel believes that the Hurdanos, as a particular group of people, lie beyond recuperation. The problem they pose is not specific to their race, culture or nationality; it is the problem of the human condition, which in Buñuel’s estimation defies conclusive explanation

In defence of the objectivity of evaluative television criticism

The prevailing view in television studies is that evaluative criticism involves the expression of wholly subjective tastes or attitudes. Moreover, the idea that evaluative judgements could be in any way objective or truthful tends to be greeted with deep scepticism and suspicion. This essay argues that the prevailing view - 'expressivism' - is unsatisfactory and unsustainable, and it advances a moderate version of objectivism

Screenplays

A number of contemporary theorists have reiterated Osip Brik and Béla Balazs's claims that the screenplay is not an autonomous literary work, not an "independent object". Echoing Balazs's remarks on the relationship between screenplay and film, Barbara Korte and Ralf Schneider suggest, "a screenplay is 'absorbed' into one film only", that it is "entirely 'burnt up' in the production process". Like the ingredient hypothesis, the incompleteness hypothesis makes a claimabout the ontology of the screenplay that may or may not be harnessed in support of an argument against the screenplay as literature. Roughly, the thought is that rather than endorsing a particular definition of literature that will includescreenplays, the proponent of the screenplay as literature can proceed by showing that on any number of a variety of extant definitions at least some screenplays will count as literature. Of the various extant definitions of literature, perhaps the only one that may give screenplays trouble is an institutional definition

Ethical criticism and the interpretation of art

This article brings together two prominent topics in the literature over the past few decades—the ethical criticism of art and art interpretation. The article argues that debates about the ethical criticism of art have not acknowledged the fact that they are tacitly underpinned by a number of assumptions about art interpretation. I argue that the picture of interpretation that emerges from the analysis of these assumptions is best captured by moderate actual intentionalism. Reflection upon the nature of ethical criticism, I argue, offers new reasons to prefer moderate actual intentionalism to hypothetical intentionalism. I conclude by arguing for the necessity of broadening our conception of ethical criticism