Title of project: Burying the Author: To what extent is authorial effacement possible in an 'authored' piece of work?
What is your theoretical concept and how does it relate to your chosen area of contemporary media practice?
I will be exploring theories of authorship, specifically Barthes ‘Death of the Author’ and the notion of readerly and writerly texts. What I want to explore is how conscious an author should be of that process of distancing – whether the author can truly bury herself and create a purely ‘writerly’ text by using collaboration from focus groups and enigma codes to create an ambiguous text. I will aim to create something that is not of my creation but purely intended as a canvas on which the reader can project their own meaning or opt for one of the meanings suggested by the focus groups. I will also establish how far the focus groups feel that they have in any way created the text that they see.
Describe your artefact and explain how it will explore the concept described above
There will be two artefacts – the first will be a short video of a character (probably non-descript, white teenage boy) walking. This will be boring and nothing will happen, I will make very few creative decisions – the actor will choose his own costume and location and the footage will be shot from a number of angles. Only ambient sound will be used. I will show the video to different focus groups (probably some students, some family, friends … anyone) who will be asked to create a narrative around this character; to make suggestions about who he is, where he is going, what is going on in his life and how this could be signified to the viewer; to decide ultimately what the conclusion of this narrative is. These discussions will be filmed.
I will then reshoot the video incorporating as many ideas from the focus groups as possible but keeping it semiotically ambiguous. My role as the “author” at this stage will not be to come up with ideas but to accurately represent the ideas suggested to me by the audience and craft them into a way that will look good and make sense. I will then edit together a film using the original ‘boring’ footage, the new footage and the focus group discussions to create an ambiguous and writerly narrative. The audience (hopefully, when presented with the many options suggested by the focus group) will be forced to determine which version is the true narrative and in essence there won’t be any “true” narrative because I will be making it and I won’t commit myself to one. The challenge will be to make something that is still successful and watchable as a narrative film and something that an audience feel they can connect with.
I will gather responses from the focus groups once they have seen the finished product as to whether they feel it follows the narrative they suggested and responses from an audience who have had no involvement in the “authoring” process to see whether they find it successful as a narrative film.
What is the audience for your artefact and how will this be evident?
My audience will be students at A2 or Undergraduate level studying Film, Media or Literature who are interested in questions around the role and significance of the author in modern storytelling. The film will hopefully be an interesting starting point to discuss authorship, collaboration, negative capability and authenticity.
What, ultimately, do you want your artefact to ‘say’ or achieve?
That an author can consciously give control to the readers or viewers and act only as a vessel through which other people’s lives, experiences and ideas pass and take shape as an narrative. Also that there isn’t always a fixed meaning intended by the author that needs to be deciphered but that texts are to be decoded by the reader/viewer in any way they choose. Or not.
What will your final submission consist of? (Describe what you anticipate handing in)
- The film (the finished version with the focus groups ideas included.
- Audience responses and a evaluative reflection (by me) on how far the film has successfully achieved what I wanted it to achieve (this will be submitted as a podcast or video)
- A written document that outlines the theories that inspired the project and the arguments and debates around authorship. This aim of this document will be to raise a series of questions that I will seek to answer in the video and evaluation.
