Welcome to "Cinema's Unstable Texts" (CUTs)
Articles on the history of textual variation in the film industry
Preface
Like many cinephiles that grew up watching movies on home video, I often collected films in multiple versions. Once I became a PhD Student in media studies at Brown University, I decided to study the subject of film versions more in depth.
Gradually, however, I realized that there was relatively little academic writing on the topic, which led me to make it the subject of my dissertation. The completed work, “Cinema’s Unstable Texts: A Historical Analysis of Textual Variation in the Film Industry,” ended being around 300 pages long upon its completion in May 2020.
It was a long and complex work that I could not have possibly completed without the feedback and aid of my dissertation committee members Phil Rosen, Lynne Joyrich, and Ariella Azoulay, as well as the emotional and psychological support of my parents.
The following series of articles is an adaptation of this dissertation and, appropriately enough, is titled “Cinema’s Unstable Texts,” or CUTs for short.
Film History And Textual Variation
The CUTs series focuses on the role of textual variation within the American film industry. Combining historical research with textual analysis, it examines why the same film texts circulate in multiple versions throughout their lifetimes in reaction to greater historical and cultural changes. In particular, it emphasizes how versioning tends to occur during periods of major technological transition, helping to instill new standards of industrial film production, distribution, or exhibition.
In connection with this, it seeks to address many questions that arise from the very fact that a film can exist in multiple variations, such as: “How does the release of a new version impact a film’s reception and its status as a work of art? Who has the right – moral, legal, artistic, etc. – to create different versions of a picture and why? What does the existence of different versions signify for a film as a historical object?”
These are important questions to think about, as there is arguably a general tendency in academic, industrial, and cultural discourses to treat pictures produced within the American film industry as stable or fixed texts. Compare, for instance, how the accuracy required in the scholarly citation of a film as opposed to that of a print work.
As archivist Ray Edmondson aptly puts it, citations
“for books, articles, and dissertations routinely include sufficient details to identify the actual copy… by date, edition, publisher, page numbers and so on.... But in the case of an audiovisual work, it’s often just the title.”
Because a printed text may circulate in different editions or under different publishing companies, and so have differences in content or page count, providing detailed information is necessary as references based on one edition may be inaccurate in relation to another.
That in the case of film such acknowledgement is not the norm reflects the general perception of films as uniform products of mass reproduction. Arguably, one of the most influential proponents of this view is Walter Benjamin, who defined film as an art form “whose artistic character is entirely determined by its reproducibility” in his seminal thesis about the effects of reproductive technologies on the nature and reception of art within the 20th century.1
He posits that acts of reproduction, as a rule, diminish an artwork’s authenticity and its “aura,” which one can understand to be its uniqueness in time and space, by making it accessible en masse. So, the copy can usually be differentiated from the original by these losses.2 But when it comes to film, there’s no distinction between an original work and its copies, for only the finished form of a film text, a “final cut,” is accessible to the masses.3 Unlike many other forms then, such as painting, film is able to naturally foster “simultaneous collective reception” by mass audiences.4
In that sense, there is no “original” or “authentic” version of a film text and, in turn, no variation. All mass-produced copies of a film then should be identical and simultaneously accessible.
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Film History and The Destruction of Moving Images
Such a perception of a film text, however, overlooks what scholar and archivist Paolo Cherchi Usai terms in his study of silent cinema as “the ‘internal history’ of the copy, that is to say, the alterations which the print has undergone over the years.”5 In contrast to the view of film texts being defined by pure reproduction, he suggests that every single copy constitutes a unique variation that is not identical to another and that transforms over time. As it circulates via physical carriers that can naturally decay, accumulate damage during exhibition, and undergo intenti-onal alteration or outright destruction for commercial, political, and other reasons, the copy gives rise to new variations of the same picture.
So, the existence of multiple versions attests to the changes a film text undergoes during its lifetime, as it is copied and transmitted across different time periods, cultural contexts, exhibition platforms, markets, and so forth. The normalized treatment of a motion picture as a stable text thus unconsciously effaces its internal history and so promotes the idea that films are never affected by the passage of time.
One could say that this adheres to what Usai terms as the “Model Image,” a cultural ideal, according to which films consist of moving images that are “immune from decay” and so “can have no history.”6 It is central to his claim in The Death of Cinema that “it is the destruction of moving images that makes film history possible.”7
The author points to how all celluloid films exist in a constant state of transformation, inevitably moving towards their destruction, and that the resulting loss evinces the passage of time, providing one with fragments on which to build a notion of the past. So, if films consisted of model images, meaning if they did not decay or be subject to variation, then there would be no film history as a whole. That is, there would be no means of temporally distinguishing between cinema’s past and its present.8
Usai’s theorization of moving image destruction evidently approaches “film history” as being comprised of the internal histories of all film texts. Effacing the internal history of an individual text by ignoring the existence of different versions from this standpoint risks effacing film history as a whole.
The Goals of CUTs
Building on these ideas, I would claim that the proliferation of different versions of the same films can be seen as the natural result of the film industry constantly undergoing changes. The variation of film texts in this regard signifies that the American film industry has a history and that films could only be stable texts if the industry itself remained stable and unchanging. As my work will show, the emergence of new technology in particular tends to directly prompt film variation, but this does not occur in isolation from various economic, political, and other factors.
In order to illustrate this, the four main chapters composing this newsletter series all engage with established academic, industrial, and cultural discourses that are tied directly or indirectly to a specific historical period of the industry’s technological change. Each chapter, which will consist of smaller sub-chapters/issues, critiques and challenges these discourses by establishing a complex interrelationship between the diffusion of new technology and the production, distribution, and exhibition of multiple versions of the same picture. A specific film will serve as a case study to help better illustrate the role technological change can play in a text’s variability.
Such an approach will serve several purposes.
It will show how the notion that films constitute stable, perfectly reproducible texts directly informs and is informed in turn by not only the analysis and theorization, but also the reception and historicization of moving images.
It will offer an example of an alternative historical account that considers the role of textual variation in one major film industry’s technological transitions. Versions, after all, are just as crucial to the standardization and acceptance of new technology, as the technology is to the circulation of versions.
Finally, it will promote close comparative analysis between two or more versions of the same film, which can have complex relationships fraught with ideological contradictions and tensions, by showing that textual differences between them can reflect larger distinctions between the various contexts, historic periods, or markets through which they circulate.
Altogether, CUTs hopes to inspire a redefinition of films as inherently variable texts rather than ahistorical model images, and so promote a conception of American film history as a history of how and why film texts collectively change over time. This can potentially lead to better insight into both the past and present of cinema, as well as suggest possibilities of future developments for film as a medium and art form.
Naturally, this work carries certain limitations. Though it makes references to film scholarship, textual analysis, or criticism, it does not attempt to conduct a systematic study of these fields. It would also be outside the scope of this series to look at all of film history and attempt to chronicle every single variation practice known to exist.* Instead, it will attempt to hone in on a few key points in the history of the American film industry and the textual variation practices that emerged during them.**
*The Textual Variations publication, as a whole, however, may expand on the ideas examined in the dissertation and tackle related topics and practices not covered by CUTs.
**Because of this specific emphasis, its findings will primarily apply to mainstream American feature films. Where relevant, however, the dissertation will also discuss non-mainstream and foreign titles in the course of their theatrical or non-theatrical distribution in the US.
Chapter Outline
Each chapter of CUTs will be comprised of approximately 10-13 issues.
The opening chapter, “Sound On: The Standardization of Variation,” revolves around cinema’s transition to sound (1926-1931), which is widely believed to have standardized film production, distribution, and exhibition, thereby bringing to an end the variability inherent to silent films.
Challenging these perspectives, the chapter establishes that the adoption of new synch sound technologies by studios and exhibitors actually increased the number of potential different types of versions it could appear in, with some playing within silent theaters and others in those wired for sound. So, rather than fully transitioning to reproduction, the film industry ended up standardizing variation.
The second chapter, “Screen Size Matters: Broadcast Versions, Ratio Variation, and the Widescreen,” then shifts focus to the 1950s, positioning the mass circulation of feature films on television in broadcast versions as a consequence of the emergence of theatrical ratio variation practices during the film industry’s transition to widescreen. In the process, it offers an alternative to the popular historical narrative, according to which studios adopted wide-screen primarily to distinguish film from TV.
Chapter Three, “Art vs. Commerce: Alternate Cuts and the New Technologies of the 80s” will move on to reassess the impact of Cable TV and Home Video on the film industry between approximately 1983 and 1989. The mass dissemination of cable and video ‘reproductions’ ostensibly resulted in the rampant commercialization of Ame-rican cinema, which corresponded to an artistic devaluation of theatrical features.
The chapter makes evident that this assessment completely disregards the role such ancillary markets played in the production and distribution of alternate cuts, such as the director’s cut, the unrated cut, and the restoration. Defined by their editorial differences from a theatrical “cut” of the same picture, these versions commonly helped artistically elevate certain Hollywood pictures and and so establish their directors as ‘‘auteurs.”
The final chapter, “Lost in (Digital) Transition: Modernization and the Replacement of Film Versions” focuses on the video market’s transition from analog to digital video between 1997 and 2005, during which the production of digitally modernized and/or remastered video versions contributed to the replacement of VHS by DVDs.
It aims to demonstrate digital modernization has long been a habitual, imperceptible activity that went in hand with the gradual obsolescence of older video versions, redefining what passes for as an accurate video “reproduction” of the theatrical film. Doing this will disprove the popular perception that digital technologies always perfectly reproduce theatrical films and so effectively immortalize moving images by allowing them to transcend the physical carriers used to store and transmit them.
This article is the very first entry in an ongoing series called Cinema’s Unstable Texts (CUTs). If you like it, then please, by all means, share it!
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I must note that my interpretation of Benjamin’s thesis is based on the 1936 version of his essay, which may contains some differences from the earlier published iteration known as “The Work of Art in the Age of Me-chanical Reproduction.” See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (Second Version), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935-1938, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, transl. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and others (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 109.
Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 103-105.
Ibid., 109.
Ibid., 116.
Paolo Cherchi Usai, Silent Cinema. An Introduction (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 156.
Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age (London: British Film Institute, 2001; Reprint, London: Palgrave McMillan, 2012), 41.
Usai, The Death of Cinema, 18.
Ibid., 6-21.