TY  - CHAP
A1  - Coelen, Marcus
T1  - An eclipse of the screen : Jorge Semprún's scripts for Alain Resnais
T2  - De/constituting wholes : towards partiality without parts / edited by Manuele Gragnolati and Christoph F.E. Holzhey ; Cultural inquiry ; vol. 11
N2  - Marcus Coelen's essay 'An Eclipse of the Screen: Jorge Semprún's Scripts for Alain Resnais' starts from the assumption that the peculiar status of film scripts (not written to be read as such) can be illustrated by the figure of their eclipse. For they are, in inverting the very logic of the figure they invite, eclipsed for the sake of and by the fractured light on the screen they help to produce. Yet just as the sun, obscured by the 'black writing' of the moon, leaves an ephemeral contour in the skies - a spectacle to many when happening - so too can the script that is made to disappear by the screen be assumed to draw its own particular and even more vanishing traits into the movie that is given not only to sight but also to thought. The analyses and critical constructions proposed by Coelen try to detect such traits in the work of Jorge Semprún the screen writer. Writing not only for movies by Alain Resnais - most notably "La guerre est finie" (1966) and "Stavisky" (1974) - but also publishing versions of them after their release and calling those versions 'scénarios' despite various divergences and subtly violent inversions of the movies' images, the screenwriter's figure describes yet another twist of the eclipse. It can be assumed not only that Semprún strongly resisted the influence of the constellation formed by writing and cinematographic shooting, as well as projecting, but furthermore that this writing was almost imperceptibly yet essentially directed against the eclipse it was drawn into. No minor forces are conjured up in this enterprise. Driven by the desire to re-appropriate cinema's a-personal and anti-psychological movement, to domesticate the images of scribbling lights drifting away from the mental and into thought - as well as into a history not mastered -, Semprún attempted to shape mastery itself and most traditional forms of authorship, along with memory and agency, in order to cloud the eclipse of script - that is, we might add, to conjure up a ghost recovering the trace of what has been eclipsed so that it may continue to haunt.
KW  - Semprún, Jorge
KW  - Resnais, Alain
KW  - Eclipses
KW  - Film scripts
KW  - Screen writing
KW  - Scenarios
KW  - Cinematography
KW  - Wholeness
KW  - Drehbuch
KW  - Szenarium
KW  - Film
KW  - Ganzheit
Y1  - 2020
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/55268
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-552682
UR  - https://www.ici-berlin.org/oa/ci-11/coelen_eclipse-of-the-screen.pdf
SN  - 978-3-85132-854-7
SN  - 2627-731X
SP  - 215
EP  - 237
PB  - Turia + Kant
CY  - Wien ; Berlin
ER  -