Fernando Canet
Translated by Paula Saiz Hontangas
METACINEMA AS
CINEMATIC PRACTICE:
A PROPOSAL FOR
CLASSIFICATION*
Introduction
It is an established fact that cinema
is capable of vampirism. An example
of this can be found in Rapture (Arrebato, Iván Zulueta, 1979), in which
the protagonist, filmmaker José Sirgado, is ultimately vampirised by the
camera. This fate is foreshadowed at
the beginning of the film: after the
opening credits, Sirgado and his film
editor debate on how their film should
end. The Moviola shows a vampiress
coming out of her coffin. Her gaze
directly at the camera is turned on
her next victim, who is none other
than the filmmaker himself. Sirgado
says goodbye to his film editor joking
with a false set of vampire teeth and
a blood-stained neck to the music of
Richard Wagner –which we will also
hear at the end of the film, when the
filmmaker is carried off by the camera.
For Juan Miguel Company and Javier
Marzal (1999: 72), the inclusion of the
subject in the “photochemical nature”
of cinema may be “the most amazing
cinematic fantasy of all” [Figure 1].
Rapture is one of those films that
have been able to portray how addictive cinema can be for those
cinephilic filmmakers who, as Martin
Scorsese says, consider their medium
of expression, rather than a passion,
an obsession (MICHAEL HENRY WILSON, 2011: 285). It is no accident that
this US filmmaker with Italian roots
should start his personal journey
through American film history1 with
a quote from Frank Capra comparing
cinema with heroin2. Zulueta does the
same in Rapture, in which Sirgado is
hooked not only on cinema but also
on the aforementioned morphine derivative.
Cinema also flows through the
veins of the Spanish filmmaker Lorenzo Llobet-Gràcia. In his only film,
Vida en sombras (1948), his alter ego
in the film, Carlos Durán, is born
into a world of cinema, raised as a
cinephile and ends up becoming a
filmmaker. It is the same path taken
by most cinephilic filmmakers who,
rather than considering filmmaking a
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Figure 1. Vampirism process in Rapture (Arrebato, Iván
Zulueta, 1979)
trade, perceive it as a way of life, and
show this through constant study of
their medium of expression. The purpose of this article is to explore how
these filmmakers think about filmmaking by making films.
Metacinema is the cinematic exercise that allows filmmakers to reflect on their medium of expression
through the practice of filmmaking, whereby cinema looks at itself
in the mirror in an effort to get to
know itself better. This practice is
not exclusive to cinema; other arts,
such as painting and especially literature, have engaged in it previously. In a literary context, Brian Ott
and Cameron Walter (2000: 438) describe it as “a mode of writing that
deliberately draws attention to its
fictional nature by commenting on
its own activities”. Indeed, many of
the points of reference for this prac-
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tice are taken from literature, along
with other terms such as metalanguage, metadiscourse or metafiction,
which have emerged to define the
meta-practices in this medium. All
the definitions made in this regard
can be extrapolated to the cinematic
field, such as the definition that Patricia Waugh (1988: 6) suggests for
metafiction: “the lowest common
denominator of metafiction is simultaneously to create a fiction and
to make a statement about the creation of that fiction”. In addition to
offering this definition, Waugh also
suggests an idea that may prove revealing, which is the fact that there
are two coexisting processes in this
activity: on one hand, creation, and
on the other, criticism.
Although it may seem that metacinema was born with the rise of
cinematic post-modernity, it is actually a tendency that has been present
throughout the history of film. It has
been practised since its origins, possibly due, as mentioned above, to
the influence of the literary medium.
Nevertheless, it is true that it has become more popular in the post-modern era, to such an extent that it can
asserted that metacinematic practice
is one of the symptoms of post-modernism. Specifically, for Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy (2009: 70),
“self-reference” is the third process
that defines the hypermodern image,
while for Manfred Pfister (1991: 215)
“the ideal-type postmodernist text is,
therefore, a ‘metatext’, that is, a text
about texts or textuality, an autoreflective and auto-referential text”.
However, we cannot forget that before postmodernity came modernity,
and with it, an openly critical stance
on what a certain type of filmmaking –the excessively mannered and
industrialised variety– meant and entailed. Thus, this criticism on paper
was transferred to the screen with the
purpose of refuting those excesses,
proposing an alternative and defending auteur filmmaking against standardization.
Indeed, if we look back on film history we will find that metacinema
has been practised in many different
ways at different times. This diverse
quality forces us, if we want to decipher its complexity, to posit a classification of the different strategies that
have been proposed in the past and
how they continue to be used in the
cinema of the present. In other words,
the objective of this paper is to support a typology of the different ways
Although it may seem
that metacinema
was born with the
rise of cinematic
post-modernity, it is
actually a tendency
that has been present
throughout the history
of film
of approaching metacinematic practice and explore how they are being
updated in contemporary filmmaking. To this end, my starting point
is the proposition made by Jacques
Gerstenkorn in 1987, updated in
2008 by Jean-Marc Limoges, suggesting that metacinema can be split into
two generic categories that describe
the two basic practices that define
it: “cinematic reflexivity” and “filmic
reflexivity” (GERSTENKORN, 1987: 7-8).
Whereas the first focuses on the processes and mechanisms of film creation and reception, the second turns
its attention towards film history.
While directors most often choose
one or another, sometimes both forms
appear in the same film. In fact, two
very early examples illustrate this
combination perfectly: on one hand,
the film directed by Robert W. Paul
in 1901 titled The Countryman and
the Cinematograph, and on the other,
METACINEMA AS CINEMATIC PRACTICE: A PROPOSAL FOR CLASSIFICATION
Figure 2. Reflexivity in early films
Edwin S. Porter’s 1902 film Uncle Josh
at the Moving Picture Show [Figure 2].
In terms of cinematic reflexivity,
both films focus specifically on the
process of reception. This is not at all
surprising since the most striking aspect of that era was, precisely, how the
viewer reacted to the new medium.
Thus, both films feature a viewer
who, amazed by what he is watching,
leaves his seat to move closer to the
film screen, allowing the projection
and his reactions to be seen simultaneously in the same frame. It is significant that in both films one of the
scenes watched by this spontaneous
viewer should be the recreation of Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (L’arrivée
d’un train à La Ciotat, Lumière, 1896).
The well-known reaction that such
images incited among viewers of the
time turned the film, within a few
years, into a benchmark for both exercises in reflexivity. This referentiality
to a previous film is what makes these
films examples of the second practice
of the suggested typology: filmic reflexivity.
Cinematic reflexivity
In addition to the reception process,
the shooting process was also of interest at the dawn of cinema. It was
the presence of the camera what fascinated the most the contemporaries
of the era, and its central role can be
seen in How It feels to be Run Over (Cecil M. Hepworth, 1900) and The Big
Swallow (James Williamson, 1901). In
both cases, the camera doesn’t escape
unscathed: in the first it is run over
film in this respect, Sunset Blvd (Billy
Wilder, 1950). It was followed by other
emblematic examples, such as Singin’
in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene
Kelly, 1952), The Bad and the Beautiful
(Vincente Minnelli, 1952) and A Star
is Born (George Cukor, 1954). This last
director had already made a foray into
this category (which we might define
as “metahollywood”) in 1932 with his
film What Price Hollywood?. A recurrent theme of this type of film is the
transition from silent films to talking movies and its consequences for
the industry. A recent return to this
theme was made in the film The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius, 2011), in
which the French director of Lithuanian origin recreates the atmosphere
and style of those films by returning
to black and white, the 4:3 format and
the silent soundtrack. The disappearance of one system (the silent film)
and the appearance of a new one (the
talking movie) resulted in changes to
production procedures but, above all,
it had consequences for the actors:
old stars vanished while others were
born. In The Artist, the first group is
represented by George Valentin, evidently based on Rudolph Valentino,
while the second is represented by
Peppy Miller, possibly inspired by
Peggy Pepper, the star of Show People
(King Vidor, 1928).
This, ascent and decline intersect
in The Artist as the result of one of
the most important changes in film
by a vehicle, and in the second it is
swallowed by a character. A few years
later, in 1914, the moment of shooting would resume its leading role
in the film Kid Auto Races at Venice
(Henry Lehrman). In this case, the
focus of interest is how the presence
of the camera affects the behaviour
of those being filmed. Charles Chaplin, playing his best-known character,
Charlot, attends a race and, when he
sees the camera, he can’t help but
being the centre of the shooting, unleashing a conflict between him and
the film director, who clearly sees
him as a nuisance [Figure 3].
As cinema began taking shape as
an industry, the attention moved
away from film mechanisms themselves towards the characteristics that
began defining the flourishing industry. Thus, at the end of the twenties, King Vidor, with his film Show
People (1928), created a new category
of cinematic reflexivity, a category
essentially focused on
revealing the inner Figure 3. Charlot is unwilling to stop being the centre of the regard
of the camera
workings of Hollywood.
As Robert Stam argues,
these are “Hollywood
films [which] treat Hollywood itself as milieu,
and focus, accurately or
inaccurately, critically
or uncritically, on the
process of film production” (1992: 77).
The fifties turned out
to be especially fruitful
for this type of film, beginning with a mythic
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history. This transformation initially
sparked a revolution within the industry, but as time passed the conflicts
between the old system and the new
one dissipated; hence the triumphant
ending of the movie with the dance
number between George and Peppy
[Figure 4]. The Artist could therefore
be considered a contemporary example of that discussed above, i.e.,
the mixture of cinematic reflexivity,
focused in this case on the changes
that took place in the industry as the
result of the arrival of sound, and
filmic reflexivity, here exemplified by
the referentiality to the films that had
tackled this theme in their time.
However, reflection on the production models and Hollywood methods
of representation has not only been
performed from within, but also from
the margins, especially from the perspective of modernity, which arose
precisely as an alternative to film
classicism. In this case, the reflexivity
proposed is not so amenable; on the
contrary, it is conceived as a criticism
of the prevailing status quo. One of
the main exponents of this practice
is Jean-Luc Godard, who through his
filmmaking has sought to vindicate
the work of the auteur while dismissing the industrial methods that restrict creative freedom and impose a
standardised approach to filmmaking. For instance, in the opening
scene of his film East Wind (Le vent
d´est, 1970), Godard rails against Hollywood’s aim to convince the viewer
that the image shown is real and not
the result of a discursive construct,
in other words, as Don Fredericksen
(1979: 315)3 puts it, Godard questions
Hollywood’s desire to “hide this apparatus, to guard the impression of
reality through a strong impression
of reality”4. Stam refers to this modernist stance —following Mikhail
Bakhtin— as “carnivalesque”, an “aggressive antiillusionism… which explodes and transcends conventional
narrative categories” (1992: 167).
***
Another category that can be identified within cinematic reflexivity is
the one made up of those films that
narrate the difficulties that have to
be overcome for a filmmaking project to succeed. The most common
formula features a director who has
to struggle against the troubles that
arise during the film shooting. This
plot is the perfect excuse for the filmmaker, through an alter ego, to air
his thoughts on cinema. For instance,
in the case of Day for Night (La nuit
américaine, François Truffaut, 1973),
Truffaut plays his own alter ego in the
role of the filmmaker Ferrand. A contemporary example of this category
is Road to Nowhere (Monte Hellman,
2010).
While the challenges might be of
a very different nature, there is one
that proves constant in most of these
films: the presence of the figure of
the producer, the director’s antagonist and the person responsible for
his biggest setbacks. An outstanding
example of this is the film The State
of Things (Der Stand der Dinge), directed by Wim Wenders in 1982
Left. Figure 4. The triunphant dance in The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius, 2011) / Courtesy of Cameo
Right. Figure 5. The State of Things (Der Stand der Dinge, Wim Wenders, 1982)
[Figure 5]. Its protagonist, a German
director, Friedrich Munro, has to stop
the shooting of his film The Survivors
—his version of the science fiction/
horror film Day the World Ended (Roger Corman, 1955)— to travel to the
United States in search of the producer to get him to continue funding
the film. The producer, already deep
in trouble, refuses to do so and in fact
regrets having partly funded a black
and white film with no possibility
of commercial success. The conversation between them ends with the
producer making a declaration in defence of Hollywood. In short, the two
characters represent two completely
opposed ways of conceiving cinema:
on one hand, that of the producer,
who defends the commercial machinery by placing the profitability of
the project above all else; and, on the
other, that of the director, who seeks
creative freedom and views the quality of his film as paramount.
Clearly, the difficulty associated
with pursuing a risky project that
doesn’t conform to the standardised
formulae is another constant that
defines this type of film. Another
example is the 1996 film Irma Vep
by Oliver Assayas. In this case, the
project, unfeasible from a commercial perspective, is a remake of Les
vampires, a French silent cult series
filmed by Louis Feuillade in 1915. In
Contempt (Le mépris, 1963), Godard
offers another example of this constant; specifically, the impossible task
of adapting Homer’s Odyssey within
the usual parameters of film production5. Nor is it easy to adapt the com-
METACINEMA AS CINEMATIC PRACTICE: A PROPOSAL FOR CLASSIFICATION
plex work The Life and Opinions of
Tristram Shandy, written by Laurence
Sterne in 1759, and it is precisely this
difficulty that drives the plot developed by Michael Winterbottom in his
film Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull
Story (2005).
***
Adaptation is the title of
the film directed by Spike
Jonze in 2002, based on the
difficulties that his screenwriter Charlie Kaufman
had in real life to adapt
the novel The Orchid Thief,
written by the American
journalist and novelist Susan Orlean. In contrast with the previous examples, we are not shown how
a movie is filmed, as the images seen
by the viewer are those which the
screenwriter in the story, also called
Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) creates as he writes. Thus, it is not so
much about the production process
of a film as about how the film takes
shape. In this sense, we could distinguish two practices: on one hand, the
practice that renders visible the process of creation of a film (the creation
of a statement) and, on the other, the
practice of the film itself, that is, its
own statement.
For Gesternkorn (1987: 7-9) this
second practice deploys the “game of
mirrors that a film engages in with
itself”, which makes it possible to
speak of its self-reflective character.
This feature associates the film with
the idea of a reflecting structure and
in turn with the idea of mirror construction, from the French term mise
en abyme, a commonly used term to
describe this type of practice which,
as Christian Metz (1978: 130-136)
suggests: “lends itself quite well to
that structure permitting all the effects of a mirror” (METZ, 1978: 130).
Metz considers Eight and a Half (8½)
(Otto e mezzo [8½]) directed by Federico Fellini in 1963 to be one of the
exemplary films of this exercise, as it
is not only a film about films, or a film
about a filmmaker, “but a film about
a director who is reflecting himself
onto his film” (METZ, 1978: 131). In
doing so, Fellini not only addresses
the external demands of producers
or the pressures of the critics, but
also the internal demands emanating
from the filmmaker himself, in this
theme, the style of a filmmaker, one
of his works, a famous scene, a shot,
a legendary character or even one of
that character’s actions. Regardless of
the reason behind it, whenever it is
done, according to Vera Dika (2003),
it is an exercise in recycling the past
in the present.
Filmic reflexivity thus invariably
leads us to the concept
of intertextuality, a term
coined by Julia Kristeva
in 19666 in response to
Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories
on literary dialogism. For
Kristeva (1980: 66), “any
text is constructed as a
mosaic of quotations; any
text is the absorption and
transformation of another.” This initial meaning of the term developed
over the years into a different one
posited by advocates of structuralism
and hermeneutics, led by Michael Riffaterre and Gérard Genette, among
others, whereby intertextuality ceases
to be an inherent characteristic of any
text to instead become a voluntary act
of referencing the texts that have preceded it. In this case, intertextuality is
understood as a clearly deliberate exercise in referentiality, a reference between quotation marks that the filmmaker expects to be recognised by,
at least, one part of his audience and
whose aim is to provide the text with
additional layers full of meaning.
According to Paul Willemen, there is a
certain quality of necrophilia inherent
to this tendency of cinema to turn its
gaze on its past: “something that is
dead, past, but alive in memory”
case, creative doubts or fear of failure, which become his worst enemy,
to such an extent that they may even
paralyse his creative process.
Filmic reflexivity
Filmic reflexivity does not focus so
much creation as on the appropriation of film history; hence, unlike
cinematic reflexivity, the attention
is not directed on the process of construction of a film or on the film itself, but, again following Gerstenkorn
(1987: 7-9), on “the game of mirrors
that one film plays with other films.”
As Lipovetsky and Serroy (2009: 70)
suggest, “cinema is not just ‘art without culture’ as described by Roger
Pouivet, but an art that creates its
own culture and is nourished by it
[…]”. In this sense, according to Paul
Willemen, there is a certain quality of
necrophilia inherent to this tendency
of cinema to turn its gaze on its past:
“something that is dead, past, but
alive in memory” (WILLEMEN, 1994,
227).
Thus, one of the characteristics that
define this second approach to metacinema is the constant interpretation
of film history, what was defined by
Noël Carroll (1982: 52) as “allusion
to film history”, whether to a genre,
a specific era, a particular movement
in film history, the plot of a film, its
***
The retrospective gaze at film history
can be articulated through two strategies: one is the “restaging”, as defined
by Antonio Weinrichter (2009: 32), of
that filmic past into the diegetic present, and the other is the appropriation
of the past and the establishment of
a dialogue between it and the nonappropriated material. I’ll call the first
“restaged allusion” and the second
“appropriationism”. The well-known
sequence on the stairway in Odessa
in Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin, Sergei M. Eisenstein,
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1925)7 can serve as an example to distinguish the two practices.
On one hand, the aforementioned
sequence was partially reproduced
by Brian De Palma8 in The Untouchables (1987) and by Terry Gilliam in
Brazil (1985), and was even parodied
in Naked Gun 33 ⅓: The Final Insult
(Peter Segal, 1994), within the game
of intertextual excesses to which the
contemporary image has accustomed
us. As Weinrichter (2998:32) points
out, “Segal’s is a revised and expanded
version of the variation created by De
Palma seven years earlier [...]; the sequence is ultimately revealed to be a
nightmare of the protagonist.” Thus,
as is frequently the case in commercial
cinema, any strange events must be
diegetically justified; in this case, the
parodic allusion is normalised through
the inner world of the character.
On the other hand, the images of
the stairway in Odessa have been appropriated by (among others) Chris
Marker in The Base of the Air Is Red
(Le fond de l’air est rouge, 1977) and
Zbigniew Rybczyński in Steps (1987).
In both examples, what is interesting
is how the old images engage in a dialogue with the newer ones: whereas
in Marker’s film past and present interact through the shot-reverse shot
[Figure 6], in Rybczyński’s the images
interact in the same shot through an
early example of multi-layer composition [Figure 7]. While in Marker’s
film the relationship between these
two different materials is established
in the sequentiality, in Rybczyński’s it
is articulated through collage, by selfconsciously juxtaposing different layers in one shot and thus achieving the
simultaneous materialization of the
dialogue in the discourse.
***
Both in Marker’s film and in
Rybczyński’s, the appropriation is not
diegetically justified, but simply forms
part of the discursive strategy articulated in the film. This is quite different
in more commercial fiction films, in
which the recycling previous material
is articulated as part of the diegetic
world, most commonly through its
projection onto a film screen.
Left, top. Figure 6. Odessa and The Base of the Air is Red (Le fond de l'air est rouge, Chris Marker, 1977)
Left, bottom. Figure 7. Steps (Zbigniew Rybczyński, 1987) in Odessa
Right. Figure 8. Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924)
Unlike Porter’s film, mentioned at
the beginning of this paper, in which
the protagonist, that spontaneous
viewer, is denied entrance into the
film being projected (as when he tries
to do so he pulls the screen down,
thereby revealing the filmic mechanism), in Sherlock Jr., directed by Buster Keaton in 1924, the protagonist
is given that privilege. Nevertheless,
entry into the screen is only possible
in a dream: the projectionist, played
by Keaton, falls asleep while the images of the film Hearts and Pearls flicker on the screen [Figure 8]. It is no
surprise that the way into the projected diegesis should be by means of a
dream; cinema has been repeatedly
compared to the act of dreaming. Furthermore, the story unfolding on the
screen turns out to be an idealised depiction of the life of the projectionist,
clearly a metaphor for the relationship established between the typical
viewer and the idea of cinema as a
dream factory9.
The process of “systematic idealization”, as Stam has called it (1992: 38),
which is established through the dialogue with a film screen
is taken up again later by
Woody Allen in his film
The Purple Rose of Cairo
(1985). Here, the one
who crosses through the
screen is not the protagonist of the main plot, Celia (Mia Farrow), but one
of the characters in the
film on the screen. Both
Celia and the projectionist in Keaton’s film are
humble people who find
in cinema a means of escape; in the first case, a
way out of her humdrum
life, and in the second, a
solution to his problems.
In essence, Sherlock Jr.
and The Purple Rose of
Cairo can be considered
paradigmatic examples
of this category which, as
Xosé Nogueira (1994:48)
METACINEMA AS CINEMATIC PRACTICE: A PROPOSAL FOR CLASSIFICATION
suggests, was accurately defined by
Jordi Costa (1993:24) as the “permeable screen” or, according to Nogueira
himself, “from one side of the screen
to the other”.
However, this is not the usual way
of representing the relationship between the main story and the story on
the screen; the most common cases
are those where the threshold of the
screen is not crossed. A good example of this is Targets, directed by Peter Bogdanovich in 1968, which begins with the projection of the last sequence of the film The Terror (1963),
directed by Roger Corman five years
earlier10. After approximately three
minutes of the projected film, which
coincides with the opening credits,
we are shown the reverse shot of
these images, an establishing shot
revealing a projection room with the
characters of the main plot. This strategy is relatively common in this kind
of practice. The film begins with a series of images only to reveal, that they
are merely images being projected on
a screen or filmed, as happens, for
example, in Wenders’ film The State
of Things.
Returning to the film Targets, the
producer’s only concern is the promotion of the movie; the only concern of
the director (Sammy Michaels, played
by Bogdanovich himself) is its final
product, and the actor, Byron Orlok
—an ageing horror star who plays Baron Victor Frederick Von Leppe— is
only concerned with his archaic interpretation. Byron, in a move obviously
fraught by mixed emotions, announces his decision to retire from films,
which triggers a conflict with the
producer. Outside, on the street, the
director tries to dissuade him. At that
moment, Byron is seen through the
sight of a rifle; the person aiming at
him is young Bobby Thompson (Tim
O´Kelly), who is in a gun shop right
in front of the place where the actor
and the director are talking, testing
the rifle that he finally decides to buy.
The two lines of action featuring
Byron and Bobby intersect once again
right at the climax of the film, when
Bobby —up on a platform behind the
screen of a drive-in— shoots with
that same rifle at the viewers who,
comfortably seated in their cars, are
watching the premiere of The Terror.
This scene ends with the confrontation between them, in which Bobby,
presentations will be fused in a mise
en abyme” (CASTRO DE PAZ, 1994: 36).
This type of raccord can also be
useful for explaining other types of
relexivity, such as that found in the
film Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (Carl
Reiner, 1982), a film which, both for
its aesthetics and for its plot, as well
Figure 9. Transfictional raccords in Targets (Peter Bogdanovich, 1968) /
Courtesy of Paramount Home Media Distribution Spain
now at ground level, continues to instil panic in the audience. He looks to
his right, and the obligatory reverse
shot shows Baron Victor Frederick
on the screen, moving towards him;
again we return to the shot of Bobby,
who looks now to his left, where in
this case it is Byron who is moving
towards him [Figure 9]. To Bobby’s
disbelief, this series of shots is repeated, and ends with him shooting both
at Byron and Baron Victor Frederick.
For Bobby, for a few seconds, fiction
and reality —both represented by Boris Karloff, a legendary figure of the
horror genre— are one. In this montage of images, the continuity between the two stories, the main plot
and the one on the screen, is established through what José Luis Castro de
Paz defines in his analysis of the film
Saboteur (Alfred Hitchcock, 1942) as
transfictional raccords: “the role of
the film projected in the theatre will
be decisive throughout the staging
process [...] through a complex game
of double angles in which the two re-
as its clichéd characters and typical
situations, exemplifies an obvious
parody of the film noir genre. In this
case, the articulation of shot (main
plot) and reverse shot (appropriated
story) does not require justification
through the projection on a screen of
the latter, as it is articulated directly
in the montage. For example, the
film’s protagonist, detective Rigby
Reardon (Steve Martin), in a moment
of difficulty, telephones detective Philip Marlowe; the shot of Reardon is
followed by a shot from The Big Sleep
(Howard Hawks, 1946), where we see
Marlowe, played by Humphrey Bogart, answering the phone [Figure 10].
***
In this case, the genre is what is
being alluded to, which leads us to
the idea of “architextuality”, a category proposed by Genette in his book
Palimpsests. In his book, the French
theoretician introduces the term
“transtextuality” to refer to “all that
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Figure 10. Reardon needs Marlowe's help
sets the text in relationship, whether
obvious or concealed, with other
texts” (GENETTE, 1997: 1). He then proposes a classification in order to better define this idea, outlining five categories, including “architextuality”,
which serves to define the adherence
of a text to a genre.
A contemporary example of this is
the film The Conjuring (James Wan,
2013), where horror is the genre alluded to. In his adaptation of a true
story, Wan appropriates the conventions, basic ideas and aesthetics that
characterise this genre and proposes
his updating through the repetition
of the strategies that describe it. Furthermore, the film makes allusions to
the most significant films of the horror genre, such as Poltergeist (Tobe
Hooper, 1982) and The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), as well as motifs which over time have become
iconic elements of the genre, such as
the haunted house in The Amityville
Horror (Stuart Rosenberg, 1979)11 and
Chucky, the diabolical doll in Child´s
Play (Tom Holland, 1988).
Thus, The Conjuring is a clear contemporary example not only of a
tribute to the horror genre but of a
pastiche replete with references to
representative films of that genre. In
many cases, these allusions, like the
tribute to The Birds (Hitchcock, 1963),
are justified not so much by the plot
as by the discursive strategy that the
film itself constructs. Post-modernity
has made this practice both common-
24
L’ ATALANTE
JULY-DECEMBER 2014
place and excessive, to such an extent
that many of these films are the result
of a Frankensteinian construction
of allusions. Fredric Jameson warns
against these excesses, criticising this
practice of “postmodern pastiche”,
which he defines as a “blank parody”
(1985: 114), in recognition of their
tendency towards mere copy with no
apparent reflexive intention. For instance, Jameson (1985: 117) considers
Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981) a
mere “allusive and elusive plagiarism
of older plots”, a description that can
easily be extended to the case of The
Conjuring12.
Moreover, we have seen that, in
both types of reflexivity, this practice may or may not be diegetically
justified. In the first case, the metacinematic act is encompassed in
a plot construction that renders it
transparent; in the second, it is rendered self-conscious by revealing the
discursive mechanism or the referent
that is the object of the allusion or
appropriation. It is obvious that the
first practice is much more common
in commercial films, whereas the second is more common in auteur or
essay types of films.
In short, there are many forms of
metacinema. In this paper I have
proposed a basic typology to serve as
a baseline for future research. I have
defined or characterised this complex phenomenon in more detail and
have offered keys to enable a better
understanding of its use in contemporary cinema. To this end, I have
drawn on both early and contemporary examples while focusing on
the most emblematic films that have
made referentiality a core element in
the history of cinema.
Notes
* The research for this article was enabled
Conclusion
Although the degree of its importance may vary depending on the
case, reflexivity is one of the defining features of metacinema, whether
focused on the creative process itself
(“cinematic reflexivity”) or on film
history (“filmic reflexivity”). In the
latter case, intertextuality is a key factor for its configuration. However, an
abuse of this referentiality may lead
to the kind of products condemned
by Jameson, as noted above, where
other sources are not only alluded to
but serve as the foundations of the
film’s discursive scaffolding. Some
years ago Waugh coined the term
“intertextual overkill” to refer to, according to Stephen Mamber (1990:
29), “the wholesale incorporation of
source materials from outside the created fictional work”.
with the support of the Research Project
“Study and analysis for the development
of a Research Network on Film Studies
through Web 2.0 platforms”, financed by
the National Plan for R&D&i of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiviness (code HAR2010-18648).
** L’Atalante thanks Cameo, Paramount Home
Media Distribution Spain and Warner
Bros Pictures España the licensing of the
images illustrating this essay. The copyright holders of the stills of the films are
not referenced in the footnote since the
films are currently discontinued in Spain,
the images have come into the public domain and no distribution company has
purchased its license to commercialise
them in our country. In any case, the inclusion of images in the texts of L’Atalante is
always done as a quotation, for its analysis,
commentary and critical judgement. (Edition note).
METACINEMA AS CINEMATIC PRACTICE: A PROPOSAL FOR CLASSIFICATION
1 I refer here to the documentary that Martin
of recognizable scenes from
Scorsese himself directed together with
film history. In the first of
Michael Henry Wilson, titled A Personal
Journey with Martin Scorsese through Ame-
these examples, Don Pablo
(José Isbert), the mayor of the
rican Movies (1995).
small town of Villar del Río,
2 The quote is as follows: “Film is a disease.
When it infects your bloodstream, it takes
dreams of being a fearsome
sheriff who imposes law and
over as the Number One hormone; it
bosses the enzymes; directs your pineal
order in the saloon of a town
in the Old West, whereas in
gland; plays Iago to your psyche. As with
the second, the protagonist,
Heroin, the antidote for film is more film”
(CAPRA, 1971: 223).
Paprika, among other characters, takes a journey through
3 See Fredericksen (1979) for a more in-
film history in her dreams,
depth study of the reflective features of
this sequence.
turning into Peter Pan or running away from a red tide, a
4 In this respect, Lipovetsky and Serroy
suggest that: “[a]t this moment, cinema,
clear reference to the wellknown scene in The Shining
which is questioning its own illusionist ca-
by Kubrick (1980).
pacity, is entering a new modernity, a modernity of reflexivity and deconstruction,
10 Once again, the referent is a
film of Corman’s, which was
with the appearance of an auteur cinema
also a referent for Wim Wen-
that claims its classification as a work of
art in opposition against the disposable
ders in The State of Things, as
noted in the previous section.
products of commercial cinema. At this
11 Among the reports studied
by Ed and Lorraine Warren, a
point it gives rise to its own religion: cinephilia” (2009:48).
5 See Laura Mulvey’s detailed study on this
film in this same monograph issue.
real couple of demonologists,
was the house that inspired
Amityville Horror.
Figure 11. More horror with The Conjuring (James Wan, 2013) /
Courtesy of Warner Bros Pictures España
6 The term appears in print in the essay tit-
12 The allusion to the genre is not only arti-
—(1998) Interpreting the moving images.
led Bakhtin, le mot, le dialogue et le roman
(Word, Dialogue and Novel, 1966).
culated through a new contextualization
that repeats its basic rules, as in the case
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
CASTRO DE PAZ, José Luis (1994). ¿Pero… qué
7 For an in-depth study of this question, see
of The Conjuring, but may also undergo
espacio clásico? Hitchcock-Saboteur. Vér-
Weinrichter (2009: El reciclaje en el cine
comercial).
a process of rewriting with variations,
as Godard, Altman and Truffaut, among
8 Brian De Palma is probably one of the film
directors who have used “restaged allu-
others, did in their day with Alphaville
(1965), McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971)
tigo, Ateneo da Coruña, 10, 32-39.
COSTA, Jordi (1993). Fantastic magazine, 16
(June), 24.
COMPANY, Juan Miguel, MARZAL, Javier (1999). La
sion” with a parodic tone the most in their
and Confidentially Yours (Vivement di-
mirada cautiva. Formas de ver en el cine con-
careers. He has been doing it since his first
short film, Woton’s Wake (1962), in which
manche!, 1983), respectively. The genre
may also be parodied, as discussed pre-
temporáneo. Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana.
DIKA, Vera (2003). Recycled Culture in Con-
the references range from The Phantom
viously; in this case, its essential features
temporary Art and Film. Cambridge, MA:
of the Opera (Elliott J. Clawson, 1925) to
The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet, Ing-
are taken to the extreme. And, finally, the
notion of genre may undergo a process
Cambridge University Press.
FREDERICKSEN, Don (1979). Modes of Reflexive
mar Bergman, 1957). According to Carroll,
Woton’s Wake “culminates in what in 1962
of hybridisation, as we find in contemporary cinema, where the boundaries bet-
Film. Quarterly review of film studies, 4(3),
299-320.
was a hilariously awkward and intentiona-
ween genres are blurred through trans-
GENETTE, Gérard (1997). Palimpsests. Lincoln :
lly tacky allusion to the last scene in King
Kong” (CARROLL, 1998, 255).
9 In this context, two films as different and
fers of their features from one to another.
University of Nebraska Press.
GERSTENKORN, Jacques (1987). À travers le mi-
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L’ ATALANTE
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26
L’ ATALANTE
JULY-DECEMBER 2014
Dr. Fernando Canet (Valencia, 1969)
is Associate Professor in Film Studies
at the Fine Arts College (Universitat
Politècnica de València, Spain). He
has been a visiting research fellow
at Goldsmiths College University of
London and at New York University. He
has taken part in several national and
international research projects. He is
the author of the book 2002: Narración
cinematográfica [2002: Narrative
Cinematic], co-author of other
Narrativa audiovisual: Estrategias
y recursos [Audiovisual Narrative:
Strategies and Resources], and he is
currently working in the co-edition
of the third book titled (Re)viewing
Creative, Critical and Commercial
Practices in Contemporary Spanish
Cinema for Intellect Ltd. Bristol. He
is also author of various chapters of
the collective works as well as several
peer-reviewed articles mainly on
cinema, and he has been the editor
guest of special issue for Hispanic
Research Journal about Contemporary
Spanish Cinema.