In 'The Crypt, the Haunted House of Cinema', Cholodenko argues that film is,
metaphorically speaking, a haunted house: an instance of the uncanny. This raises the
possibility the film script is also uncanny, from the Freudian notion of das Unheimliche,
the strangely familiar and familiarly strange - and thus also a haunted house. This
proposition engenders a search as self-reflexive practice for that which haunts the script'
an uncanny process to explore the uncanny. The search requires drawing on Barthes,
acting 'as dead' with that process' attendant contradictions and problematics' the most
likely ghost in the script being the writing self.
Establishing the characteristics of the writing self involves distinguishing that figure from
the author. This requires outlining the development of theories of the author from the
concept of authorial will, as per the argument of Hirsch, to the abnegation of the author as
a philosophical certainty. Barthes and Foucault call this abnegation the death of the
author. Rather than that marking the end of a particular branch of analysis, the death of
the author can be considered an opening to the writing practice. From this perspective,
the death of the author becomes a strategy in Foucault's game of writing, effecting the
obfuscation of the writing self, by placing a figure as dead, the author figure, within the
metaphorical topography of the text. Indeed, the author as dead is akin to a character in
the narrative but at a substratum level of the text. What places this dead figure within the
text is an uncanny writing self, a figure of transgression, brought into being in the
experience of Blanchot's essential solitude.
'The Seaborne' written by Matt Marshall, provides an example of a film script that
constitutes a haunted house, a site of the uncanny. In terms of the generic characteristics
of the film script as text type, its relative unimportance in relation to any subsequent film
based on the script becomes of itself a feature of the film script. This makes the film
script a site of negotiation and contestation between the implied author as hidden director
on the one hand and the implied reader as implied director on the other. This confirms
the film script as, using Sternberg's terminology, a blueprint text type. Examples of the
negotiation and relationship between hidden director and implied director are found in
analysis of 'The Seaborne' as are the tensions in the relationship between the
individualistic impulses of the hidden director and the mechanistic, formal requirements
of the text type as blueprint. These tensions are ameliorated by the hidden director who
is then effaced within the constructed layers of the film script text to allow interpretive
space for the implied director.
'The Seaborne' as representative of the film script text becomes the after-image of a
written text and the foreshadowing of a future filmic one. It therefore never finds
completion within its own construction process and its formation begins in templates that
accord with the Bakhtin's description of the epic, as is shown by comparing the
construction notes for 'The Seaborne' with Aristotlean dramatic requirements. But at the
same time there is present in 'The Seaborne' a Bakhtinian dialogism that points towards
the individual markers of a writing self. This writing self, referring to Kristeva, is a
figure of abjection. It transgresses itself and transgresses its own transgressions. It is a
ghost in a ghost story without ghosts.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/203502 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Marshall, Matt, n/a |
| Publisher | University of Canberra. n/a |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | ), Copyright Matt Marshall |
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