Cecilia Sayad - Performing Authorship: Self-Inscription and Corporeality in the Cinema

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Two or Three Things I Know about Her: Characters look at the camera as they talk to an off-screen interviewer we know to be Godard

Paper Landscape: Guy Sherwin (live) paints a framed polythene surface on which emerges an image of the artist shot in 1975. Photo credits: John Suldholm (Photos 3 and 4) and Lynn Loo (from video documentation) (Photo 5)

JLG/JLG: For the most part we see Godard looking

JLG/JLG: Frames break the space down into several planes, distancing viewers from both the author and the world

The Beaches of Agns: The superimposition of shots of director (Varda in Beaches ) walking backwards and actor (Corinne Marchand in Clo ) walking forwards creates a vertiginous effect

The Beaches of Agns: Embedded frames, zoom outs and jump cuts moving away from Varda remove us from the authors image and produce a dizzying effect

The Beaches of Agns: Mirrors on the beach intersperse the landscape with fragments of the whole, sometimes in distorting angles

The Beaches of Agns: A framed mirror mounted on an easel evokes a painting

Perestroika: The reflected image of Sarah Turner briefly flashes before our eyes

F for Fake: Orson Welles portrays the author as trickster and magician

F for Fake: Elmyr forges Welless signature onto a portrait of Michaelangelo

The Human Pyramid: Jean Rouch explains the rules of the game to a group of teenagers

Chronicle of a Summer: Morin and Rouch in the feedback session after the screening of the shot material to the documentary subjects

Chronicle of a Summer: Rouch and Morin discuss the received feedback as they stroll through the Muse de lHomme

Playing: The stage of an empty theatre constitutes the space of the interview, with the subjects sitting with their backs to the stalls

Whereas in Edifcio Master Coutinho and his crew go to the subjects, in Playing it is the subjects that go to the filmmakers

Playing: Actress Andra Beltro wipes her tears as she reproduces the testimony given by Gisele, who had not cried

Allens eyeglasses stand out and do not allow for the actordirectors full submersion into the characters he interprets in Sleeper , Love and Death and Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex But Were Afraid to Ask

First Name: Carmen: Godards character refuses to engage with the conversation (and the narrative), remaining at the margins

Soigne ta droite: The Prince/the Idiot is banned from a world that cannot accommodate the innocent and pure

Meetin WA: Godards image dissolves into a portrait of Woody Allen

Annie Hall: The real irrupts within the fiction when Allen produces Marshal McLuhan from behind a board to support his characters arguments against an arrogant professor

I started research on authorship for my PhD dissertation at New York University. The thesis focused on the trajectory of the auteur in three different nations France, the United States and Brazil. Though this book is a very different project (and expands both the corpus and the methodology to include performance theory and phenomenology), it owes much to the advice and feedback given by my dissertation committee: Richard Allen, Tom Gunning, William Simon, Ismail Xavier and most importantly Robert Stam, who was my main advisor. Stam has taught me not only how to think, but also how to write; he does, in addition, continue to give me support in my academic enterprises. For this I am for ever indebted.

Special acknowledgement is due to Lcia Nagib, the series editor of Tauris World Cinema Series, for her valuable comments and for believing in my project, which she helped me shape. This book would not have happened without her support. I am also grateful to Ismail for his generous comments on the genesis of this study, and for remaining a mentor for longer than I can remember. Thanks also to I.B.Tauris senior editor Philippa Brewster for the opportunity and advice, and to Alex Middleton and Alex Billington for the care and thoughtfulness they put into my work, and also for their patience.

I am equally indebted to the academic staff of the School of Arts at the University of Kent for accommodating my needs towards the completion of this book: especially Jonathan Friday, Peter Stanfield, Elizabeth Cowie, Murray Smith and Frances Guerin. Peter and Elizabeth have been instrumental to my writing, reading chapters and offering inestimable guidance. Their patience has been monumental; their friendship and generosity as mentors and colleagues was more important to me than I can express. Thanks also to Thomas Baldwin for generously reading my work and directing me to valuable sources, and to Jinhee Choi for her advice on book publishing.

I am thankful to artistfilmmaker Sarah Turner for making Perestroika , which perfectly encapsulates the idea of performing authorship, and for letting me see the film before its public release and in addition for making me a DVD copy of it. Thanks also to Guy Sherwin for kindly providing me with images of his Paper Landscape , in which I found an inspiring illustration of the ideas put forth in this book, and to Heather Green for offering her technical expertise to guarantee the images are suitable for publication.