Theories of Authorship by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-136-10276-9
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Notes

1 Screen has recently published a translation of Cahiers’ very important collective analysis of Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln. In the introductory remarks Cahiers characterizes structural analysis as the ‘dissection of an object conceived of as a closed structure, the cataloguing of progressively smaller and more “discreet” units,’ ignoring their use by the filmmaker and ‘the dynamic of the inscription’ (Screen, 13, no. 3, p. 6). This reflects early attitudes of Althusser, Cahiers’ principal mentor, toward all forms of intellectual effort conceived within bourgeois ideologies which show little or no consciousness of their own premises and restrictions. But in his 1968 essay, ‘Lenin and Philosophy,’ Althusser acknowledged that philosophy in the future has a true object – ‘pure thought,’ and then added: ‘what else is Lévi-Strauss up to today, on his own admission, and by appeal to Engels’ authority? He, too, is studying the laws, let us say the structures of thought’ (Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, London, New Left Books, 1971, p. 59). I interpret this as a validation of Lévi-Strauss’s objectives and his method: a Marxist reading of myth must also comprehend the structures that the mind creates and imposes upon all art; it will simply see more and different structures (see Althusser’s reading of the temporal structures of Bertolazzi and Brecht in For Marx).

2 G. Nowell-Smith, Luchino Visconti (1967), New York, Doubleday, 1968, p. 10. [See above, p. 137]

3 P. Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, Indiana University Press, 1969, p. 81.

4 J. Kitses, Horizons West (1969), Indiana University Press, 1970, p. 7.

5 A. Lovell, ‘Robin Wood – a dissenting view,’ Screen, 10, no. 2, March/April 1969, pp. 47–8.

6 Robin Wood, ‘Ghostly paradigm and H.C.F.: an answer to Alan Lovell,’ Screen, 10, no. 3, May/June 1969, pp. 35–47; Alan Lovell, ‘The common pursuit of true judgement,’ Screen, 11, no. 4/5, August/September, 1970, pp. 76–88; John C. Murray, ‘Robin Wood and the structural critics,’ Screen 12, no. 3, Summer 1971, pp. 101–10; Ben Brewster, ‘Structuralism in film criticism,’ Screen, 12, no. 1, Spring, 1971, pp. 49–58.

7 ‘The structural study of myth’, in Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brook Schoepf (1958), New York, Doubleday, 1963. See extract above.

8 ‘Overture’ to The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (1964), New York, Harper and Row, 1970, pp. 1–32.

9 ‘Structural study,’ p. 207.

10 See Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of the Oedipus and ‘Zuni emergence’ myths in ‘Structural study,’ and his article ‘Le Triangle culinaire,’ L’ Arc, no. 26, Aix-en-Provence, 1965, pp. 19–29. The latter serves as an introduction to the analysis employed throughout the three published volumes of Mythologiques. The best interpretation is that of Edmund Leach, Claude Lévi-Strauss, New York, Viking Press, 1970.

11 ‘Structural study,’ p. 221.

12 ‘Overture,’ p. 8.

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