> On the other hand I have over
>the years tried to follow academic cinema studies, which among other
>points emphasized the "death of the author."

You know much more about the history of academic fashion then I do.
Personally, I bet the farm that 30 years from now, cineastes will still
be interested in Eisenstein and _Jules and Jim_ and _Violence at
Noon_ -- long after the "death of the author" theory itself is dead
and buried.

>There's an interesting quotation from Godard's
>_ Histoire(s) du cinema _ in an article by Adrian Martin,
>http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/editorials/amed12a.htm.

Thanks -- looks interesting, although I'm not a fan of Martin's.

> Susan Sontag wrote in _ Against Interpretation _: "In most
>modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal
>to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make
>us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then
>interpreting _that_, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes
>art manageable, conformable." Raymond Bellour commented in "The Analysis
>of Film": the politique des auteurs limits "a meticulous approach
>to film... through a kind of manifest circularity that tries to make
>the singularity of the filmic text coincide with what the auteur thinks
>or says about it..." I can't say I agree with these statements, but I 
>don't completely disagree either...

I would think the reverse is true.  Philistines are those who are
content to leave art alone, who don't *need* to interpret.  Art to them is
just a thing, a status symbol, much like a Lexus or a country club
membership.  The idea of *interpreting* art is what make them nervous.  Sad
to say, I've come to think the same of Barthes.  I've come to think of him
as another status symbol, or worse yet, the excuse to treat art as status
symbol.  (This obviously doesn't refer to you, Paul.)

Make no mistake about it.  I need to make films that I like manageable.
I need to be able to interpret it.  And I spend a ridiculous amount of
time and effort doing that.  I take these films as challenges from the
director, something that come with a sign: "interpret me."  Regardless
of whether I am right or wrong in the end, I feel I learn a great deal
more about these films than if I had just let them be "unmanaged."

>http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/20/durgnat_rosenbaum.html
>Rosenbaum may be unfair to Wood, but it makes for a sharp contrast:
>on one hand Wood reducing films to their moral messages; on the
>other, Barthes at al. rejecting the idea that there the critic should
>look "behind" the text.


Looks interesting -- will check that out.

>	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x

>Well, Barthes saw the reader as being potentially just as much the 
>author of the text as the "author" who signed his name to it. He 
>distinguished the "readerly" text, in which the reader is a mere
>consumer, and the "writerly text" in which the reader plays an active
>role in producing meaning. Also, he thought various codes are at work 
>in the text, and they exist independently of the author,
>and in this way they are similar to myths or dreams, which according
>to structuralist anthropologists and psychoanalysts are also governed
>by certain codes or rules independent of individuals. So I think what 
>Comolli wrote is similar to Barthes' criticism.

This confirms my worst fears: Comolli indeed lives in the Dark Ages :)
But this also shows you why I have such low opinion of the Comolli
paragraph you quoted: it is "academic" in the worst possible way,