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A Comparative History of the Literary Draft in Europe
Edited by Olga Beloborodova and Dirk Van Hulle
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXV] 2024
► pp. 458–472

2.3.1
Film

Authorship, versions and revisions

This chapter aims to test the saliency of textual or genetic criticism for film studies. My suggestions take two directions: on the one hand, I propose that the philological task of the genetic critic to compare different versions of a literary text, finds an equivalent in the job of the film preservationist. In a second move, I look at the problematic of creative control in an art rooted from the beginning in an industrial model. Considering the American “auteur” cinema of the 1970s, I argue that the filmmaker’s newly-won right of “final cut” led to endless revisions and the “modernist” sense that the “text” can never be finished.
Keywords: Film as ontological and material object, film authorship, film distribution and recutting
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