The Author Figured in Film

Abstract

For all the critical attention paid to the author in literary theory and criticism, there has been no study of the film medium’s fascination with authors and authorship. Every year, Hollywood produces numerous films about poets, playwrights, novelists, and screenwriters. This thesis explores the narrative and cinematic potential of the author. In broad terms, it is an exercise in genre criticism, establishing the defining characteristics of films characterising authors. It is also a very specific type of genre criticism, taking a cognitivist approach that defines the author as a set of historically and socially established expectations and characteristics against which the characters in these films are measured. After establishing the phenomenological parameters and critical value of the cognitivist approach in Chapter 1,1 then take up Andrew Bennett’s outline of the author as a cultural concept, discussing its utility in dealing with films figuring authors and authorship. Chapters 3 to 8 explore a selection of the sub-genres of films containing authors, starting with characterisations of the author as a detective, then moving to films using and depicting writer’s.block, horrific characterisations of the author, characterisations of female authors, the biopic, and films characterising screenwriters in Hollywood. The work concludes with an analysis of Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002), whose broad exploration of authorship traverses more of these sub-genres than any other film, offering an opportunity to bring together the findings of Chapters 1 to 8. I focus on English language, feature length, narrative films released between 1927 and 2007. Rather than taking a chronological approach and tracing the history of the medium’s treatment of the author, I select films from various periods, identifying in them the defining characteristics of the genre. But more than this, the genre and its characteristics represent the persistent interpretive function of the author in face of the critical trend away from biographically based interpretation towards textual and semiotic analysis.