Writing the Endings of Cinema:
Evocations of authorial absence and the saving of film authorship in the cinematic paratext
of Prospero’s Books, The Tempest, and The Secret of Kells
Richard Burt
My essay chapter examines the appearance of writing books and illuminated manuscripts being written/produced, in the closing end title sequences of two adaptations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, - Julie Taymor’s Tempest (2010) and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1995), - and the ending of The Secret of Kells (dir. Tomm Moore, 2009), the animated feature film about The Book of Kells. I analyze these films, all three of which are concerned with the process of writing medieval and early modern books, in relation to two developments in the history of the cinematic paratext: first, opening and end title sequences that show the credits printed on turning pages of a book; and, second, the increasing expansion and development of end credit title sequences since 1980.[1] Rather than postulate some large generalization about media transitions (analogue to digital cinema) or announce yet another death of cinema, I want to forego all neo-apocalyptic or neo-evangelist narratives of first things and last things. I take note of some specific developments that increasingly both co-ordinate and differentiate the opening and end title sequences to shed light on i) why cinema turns to textual media for the paratext and ii) why books remain ideal filmic multi-media referents in digital cinema, particularly in animated feature films, as much as they have been in celluloid cinema.
Before proceeding to discussing these three films, then, let me make some preliminary remarks on the ways in which the cinematic paratext and the medium of the book bear on writing in film. Why has the book become such a commonly used medium for opening title sequences? In large part, I suggest, because it provides a solution to a problem of authorship specific to film. As Georg Stanitzek observes, because
filmmaking involves a comparatively large division of labor, a film cannot be attributed to one author . . . the opening credits (or génerique) constitute a paratext that uses a number of the paratextual forms found in books - as a kind of imprint for film - but so in a specifically filmic way. . . . Just as the book has two covers, a title, an imprint, and so on, a film . . . has opening and closing credits, and so on. A book can function as a filmic organizer of communication, as a kind of natural delineation of the entire work.[2]
The homology Stanitzek finds between book and film paratexts allows, I will maintain, for a typographical regularization of film authorship by singling out the director in the credits as author, or auteur, in a number of ways: the director gets an entire frame (whereas the screenwriter(s) tend to share a frame with other people who have worked on the film); a large size font, and is usually the last credit of the opening title sequence. As ‘a kind of imprint’, the film paratext defaults to an auteur, director-as-writer notion of film authorship.
Because opening title sequences of films begin (and sometimes end) with the studio logo (much more prominent than the publisher of a book in a book paratext) and end with the director, one might conclude that the use of books in cinematic peritexts (that part of the paratext that is included in the book or film’s contents) emblematizes a much stronger connection between film author and film.[3] The publisher’s ‘introduction’ of a book, which is usually overlooked by readers, cannot be skipped over or fast-forwarded by film viewers when projected in movie theaters. Moreover, by the 1950s, credits began to be integrated into the film, often as a prologue. The ‘imprint’ of the credits is a A viewer of a DVD or blu-ray edition of such a film will therefore ‘read’ the entire paratext. The peritext of a book may be said to have been written in a kind of invisible ink; the peritext of a film, the alphabetic text, is engraved, as it were, on the image. No wonder, then, that the succession of credits could appear, and often has appeared, through the analogy of turning the pages of a book.
Yet if the medium of the opened bound book proposes answers, by way of analogy, to major questions of film authorship (Do films have authors? yes they do. Who is the ‘writer’ of the film? the director), it also opens up new questions about film authorship. Title sequences are almost always outsourced, and their ‘authors’ are frequently not credited. In some exceptional cases, the opening title designer is credited (Saul Bass in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1955) and Kyle Cooper in David Fincher’s Se7en (1995), to note two famous examples). More often, the outsourced agency such as Pacific Title Company gets a corporate credit. The writer design of the very sequence (the vehicle for the credits) that guarantees the film’s authorship is, therefore, most often done by an anonymous, corporate agent, and thereby re-inscribes, albeit in a barely noticeable way, the problem of determining who is the film’s author authorship (a film being the product of a collaborative team) that the imprint of the book (with the author on the furthest margin of the peritext, the book’s spine) would otherwise appear to have resolved.
Stanizeks’s important insight that the film paratext tends to default to the medium of the book misses the way a bibliocentric notion of film authorship depends on a spectralization of the writer of the cinematic paratext, a spectralization already happening in books: as Gérard Genette points out, ‘the author’s name is not necessarily always the author himself’ (46). The author’s name is put on the title page and cover outside the text in a way that creates an a mutually legitimating relation between writer and publisher:
[W]ith respect to the cover and title page, it is the publisher who presents the author, somewhat as certain film producers present both the film and its director. If the author is the guarantor of the text (auctor), this guarantor himself has a guarantor - the publisher - who ‘introduces’ him and names him. (46)
This ‘introduction’ provides for an opening, but not necessarily for a smooth entry into the book. The most exterior parts of a book’s paratext - the cover and title page - paradoxically unify writer and publisher by splitting the author from himself. The publisher’s ‘introduction’ is often followed by another paratext, namely, the author’s preface. As Genette notes, ‘one of the normal functions of the preface is to give the author the opportunity to officially claim (or deny) authorship of his text’ (46). I consider this supplement to the publisher’s ‘introduction’ to be a way of saving not only the writer of the book but the book itself: it serves as a paratextual back-up loosely analogous to auto-recovered ‘saved’ digital documents.
William H. Sherman has usefully offered a corrective to Genette’s work on the paratext as focused almost entirely on the introduction of the book.[4] Sherman explores how the paratext shapes the ways in which we finish reading books . Work on the cinematic paratext has followed Genette in focusing on opening title sequences and ignoring the endings and end credit title sequences of films.[5] The analogy between of front and back book covers and with opening and closing film title sequences, or the ending of a film (an analogy specifically evoked by film endings in which the book that opened the film closes just before ‘The End’ appears), has further broken down or been reworked in ways that turn the closing credit end title sequence into multiple, individuated stories about the main characters. As I will show at the end of this chapter, the present essay, Disney’s hybrid animated and cinematic feature film Enchanted (dir. Kevin Lime, 2008) begins with a book much as Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937) and Sleeping Beauty (dir. Clyde Geronimi, 1959) do but ends with a an end title sequence that serves as a mini-sequel. For the moment, let me note the impossible way in which the ending of Sleeping Beauty recalls the beginning. After the opening title sequence, the film begins conventionally enough with a copy of a book entitled Sleeping Beauty, its illustrated pages turning automatically with writing that is also heard in voice-over. The camera zooms in on a particular image of the book and passes into the narrative of the animated film. (Figs X.1, X.2, X.3, X.4.)
(Figs X.1, X.2, X.3, X.4)
With predictable symmetry, the film reverses this transition at its close, showing the ends with an inverse passage form from an animated image to that image on the last page of the book, with ‘And they lived happily ever after’ at the bottom of the page. (Figs X.1, X.2.)
Figure 17 / /Yet, quite impossibly, the book does not close from right to left to arrive at the back cover of the book, as one would expect. No, instead, the book closes from left to right so that we return to the front cover and then upon which ‘The End’ and ‘A Walt Disney Production’ are then superimposed, or ‘written’, over it. Even the most conventional manner of using the medium of the book to frame and shape the film’s narrative could, therefore, produce bizarre results.
Since the 1990s, end title sequences have expanded beyond rolling credits in a markedly wide variety of ways that include epilogues, interviews with characters in the film while still in character, experimental ‘aftershots’ that some viewers will undoubtedly miss since most viewers leave the theater or turn off the DVD or blu-ray when the end credits begin.[6] The end of the film does not bookend the opening so much as it opens new pages of a new book. The differences between the writing of the opening and end title sequences are also formal. Stanitzek writes: that
when watching the film at a the cinema or on video or a DVD, viewers see several minutes of carefully prepared closing credits presented in the same typography as that found in the opening credits, and music is provided to help viewers exit the film narrative.
Yet Stanitzek is hardly describing the norm. To be sure, Universal shows the exact same cast members in Frankenstein (dir. James Whale, 1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (dir. James Whale, 1935), headed the end with the line ‘a good cast bears repeating’, but even in the end credits of The Bride of Frankenstein, a question mark appeared after Bride instead of Elsa Lanchester, the actress who played (and Mary Shelley in the film’s prologue). More often than not, the typography of the closing credits end titles differs completely from the font of the opening titles. So does the music. The studio logo did appear in the same way at the beginning and end of the film for a long period of time, but more recently, logos have become film sequences in themselves (Dreamworks is a good example). The animated logos typically play at the start of the film but not at the end, whereas matte painted logos of films made from the 1930s on often appeared both at the very beginning and very end of the film.[7]
I now turn to the endings of Taymor, Greenaway, and Moore’s films. Here I in order to examine specific ways in which the closing endings and end title sequences adapt the book written and the book being written in ways that both unify the film and yet also complicate our a sense of the ending of film, of how the complete a narrative film is, of when the narrative stops and the closing paratext begins, and so of when one can legitimately exit the cinema or turn off the disc. DVD or blu-ray. Can one still afford to write off the end of film when the end credits begin? Or is one compelled, for fearing of missing something, to stay seated and keep watching even after ‘The End’? Such announcements of seeming completion can sometimes, of course, be duplicitous, acting as teasing herald to further potentially reentering the film from the moments in the textual / paratextual endings beyond after ‘The End’ that loop back the closing paratext to the earlier text of the film. I address these questions and others in a necessarily tentative manner by discussing the extent to which the endings and end title sequences of Taymor, Greenaway, and Moore’s films paradoxically save the film author as a writer in the fullest sense by destroying or disintegrating the book (auteur, you will recall, means ‘author’ in French and has a much higher cultural status than does the more everyday écrivain, or writer).
Prospero’s books do not need to exist materially in The Tempest. There are references in Shakespeare’s text to his staff and to his cloak as required stage props, but not to what is sometimes his ‘book’ or to his ‘books’ as necessary stage presences: these exist exclusively through references to a significant but unseen elsewhere. We never The Shakespeare text therefore makes no provision, for example, for us to see Prospero drown his books.[8] The seven-minute-long end title sequence of Taymor’s Tempest, designed by Kyle Cooper, however, transposes gives expressive form to the moment when Prospero ‘drowns’ his books: as the credits roll and the camera is submerged under water, we watch Prospera’s books (in plural form) fall slowly through the ocean heading toward the bottom musically accompanied by a haunting version of Shakespeare’s epilogue scored by Elliot Goldenthal. Taymor originally cut Prospero’s epilogue from the film script but ended up restoring it. In her book The Tempest, the book published as a companion piece to the film, Taymor writes:
The film’s last image of Prospera on the ocean cliff, her back to the camera, tossing her magic staff to the dark rocks below, and the staff’s subsequent shattering, is the ending. But when all was cut and timed and scored and mixed, the rhythm of the end of the film felt truncated, incomplete. I asked Elliott [Goldenthal] to take these last great words [the epilogue] and set them to music for the seven-minute-long end-title sequence. And to that haunting female vocal, sung by Beth Gibbons. The credits rolled and we drowned the books of Prospera in the deep dark sea. (21)[9]