From Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side to Rituparno Ghosh’s Shubho Muharat: Film Authorship and Transcultural Adaptation

In her book A Theory of Adaptation Linda Hutcheon uses the term “transcultural adaptation” to illustrate different context in which literary or other cultural texts are adapted. This relocation of text through adaptation often adds multiple interpretations or alters textual politics. Hutcheon further argues that transcultural adaptation can transform the text in unpredictable direction. The paper seeks to explicate eminent Bengali film director Rituparno Ghosh’s (1961-2013) Shubho Muharat (The First Day of the Shoot, 2003) which is influenced by Agatha Christie’s (1890-1976) novel The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962). The essay untangles Ghosh’s strategy to add Indian socio-cultural background in the western text. He expresses authorial intensions when he re-narrates of the novel on screen. The paper argues that the transcultural adaptation creates a “Third Space of enunciation” where the auteur uses the traits of detective film and repeats authorial intention. Following Janet Staiger’s reinterpretation of auteurism the essay argues that duplication of authorial impulse is Ghosh’s “technique of the self”.

Trying to Sell Ketchup in a Salsa Bottle

Conceptualized as a comedy that would explore culturally specific experiences of three Latina characters, the screenplay Papi Chulo underwent a tumultuous development process before becoming what audiences know as Chasing Papi (2003). Midway through development, changes in studio management led to significant changes in their approach to the project. Rather than depict cultural nuances of the U.S. Latina/o experience, an unusually large number of writers transformed the script to appeal to a panethnic form of Latina/o identity and a broader audience. Marketed as “the first major studio comedy to reflect the Hispanic cultural experience in America,” the film’s credits include writer/producer Laura Angélica Simón, director Linda Mendoza, and associate producer Christy Haubegger. The film was a critical and financial disappointment, and this study illustrates the detrimental effects studio regime changes can have on the creative process, and the negative effects misunderstanding film authorship can have for Latina/os in the industry.

Directing

The third chapter explains how directors came to be associated with film authorship. Filmmakers were indeed accorded a level of autonomy and responsibility that was unique in industry terms. This autonomy, however, was limited to the shooting portion of the production process. In other words, directors, even so-called auteurs like George Cukor or William Wyler, had no say over scriptwriting or the editing of the picture. Furthermore, directorial autonomy, the chapter argues, was the product of economic expediency rather than of respect for artistic freedom. In fact, in order to maintain a studio career, directors had to prove they were worthy of this autonomy. They had to demonstrate their conformity and commitment to the studio’s material concerns.

Genre on the Surface: Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette

Sofia Coppola, one of the most visible indie directors in recent years, is clearly embedded in the ‘commerce of auteurism’ (Corrigan 1991), as she actively participates in constructing her public image. Building on existing scholarship on the filmmaker as illustrative of the new critical paradigm in studies of women’s film authorship, the first section of this chapter looks at the promotional and critical discourses surrounding her films to trace the various processes of authentication and de-authentication of Coppola as an auteur (family connections, the privileged position in the American film industry, her filmmaking style marked by a focus on flat affects and the mise-en-scène’s surface details, as well as her interest in postfeminist/neoliberal femininity which has divided critics, especially with her 2013 feature film, The Bling Ring). In the exploration of Coppola’s authorial status, the chapter sheds light on the issue of genre, arguing that her engagement with familiar conventions is far more complex than current analysis of her work has acknowledged. This is particularly evident in the case of Marie Antoinette (2006), a film which has been read variably as a costume drama and/or as a historical biopic. In establishing a dialogical relationship between biopic and costume drama scholarship, the chapter centres on self-conscious devices deployed in Coppola’s film, which are mobilised not against but through a logic of a feminised consumerist culture. The aim is not to reject the supposed ‘feminising’ aspects of the costume drama or to masculinise them in framing the film as a ‘self-conscious’ biopic, but rather to investigate the gender anxieties that underlay the labelling of genres by film criticism.

Subversive Auteur, Subversive Genre

This chapter offers a theoretical revision of auteur theory as a gendered concept, as well as reconceptualisation of women’s cinema and film authorship in relation to genre theory. It starts by raising several questions: is the much-debated concept of auteur equally applicable to female filmmakers, and if so, how, and in what cultural and industrial contexts? Does the female director working in genre film ‘transcend’ the industrial form in the way that the male auteur is said to ‘transcend’ genre? The first section of this chapter briefly explores the gendering of the politique des auteurs and discusses the implications of the ‘death of the author’ for feminist criticism. It then goes on to consider new approaches to film authorship, which offer a more dialogical, ‘interactive’ relationship to wider film cultures than the previously discussed perspectives. The remainder of the chapter builds on Jane Gaines’s (2012) argument on the interchangeability of the critical categories ‘women’ and ‘genre’, and the problematic question of feminist/authorial subversion of mainstream forms. The chapter’s central argument is that rather than subverting genres, some women directors explore their aesthetic and imaginative power.

Impossible Liaisons? Genre and Feminist Film Criticism

This chapter traces how, traditionally, feminist analyses of films authored by women tended to centre on experimental or art-house cinema and, subsequently, on genres culturally codified as ‘female’. It then goes on to engage with the most important debates around the concept of ‘women’s cinema’ and their significance in relation to genre theory. In particular, Alison Butler’s insights into women’s cinema as ‘minor cinema’, adapted from Deleuze and Guattari’s (1975) concept of the minor – as an alternative to the negative aesthetics of counter-cinema – is particularly apt here, as it allows for a reconsideration of women’s film authorship in mainstream productions and the ‘major’ language of film genres. Following and expanding this concept, it is argued that genres can be particularly productive spaces from which to think about female filmmakers, film authorship and the cultural politics of gender (especially in terms of the status of the woman author or her lack of status), as will be explored in the following chapters. Finally, instead of locking women filmmakers into a segregated gender sphere defined by ‘women’s culture’, the chapter argues for the mutability of gendered identities and questions the oversimplified notion of gender-to-gender cinematic identification – a typical assumption underpinning the categorisation of genres by gender – and suggests that ‘opportunities for resistance are more available than the opposition between “dominant cinema” and “counter-cinema” allows’ (Cook 2012: 33).