- Title
- Auteur is French for Author, too: Translating Other Afterthoughts Inspired by King Vidor's Duel in the Sun into French Literature
- Creator
- Hamilton, Emma L.; Rolls, Alistair; Sitbon, Clara
- Relation
- Unbridling the Western Film Auteur: Contemporary, Transnational and Intertextual Explorations p. 165-182
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.3726/b13339
- Publisher
- Peter Lang
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- In 1946, King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun saw a variously hybrid woman refuse to choose between two cowboys. Laura Mulvey’s famous reaction to this film would later become a seminal moment in film criticism, causing us to question the hegemony of the male gaze and the privileged, neutral position of (white) male spectatorship. Less well known is that Duel in the Sun was seen by French author Boris Vian sometime between its launch in the United States and its official screening in Paris in 1948. Vian’s own afterthoughts on the film have left their mark, in the form of his novel L’Automne à Pékin, or Autumn in Peking; they also, we argue, mark the reaction of a male spectator primed to reject the hegemonic viewing position of a French cinema-goer in a country dominated by American cultural products, including the cinema. Vian critiques the simple pleasures of American movies, and America at the movies, just as Mulvey would react to, and see in the film a reaction to, that other dominant cultural position. Vian, in short, saw in the film, and translated the film as, a French story. This is a story of the Western mapped onto France and of Paris mapped onto the Western. And above all, it is a story of critical spectatorship and the potential of the classic Western always to be something, somewhere else.
- Subject
- cinema; french literature; film; author; SDG 5; Sustainable Development Goals
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1446823
- Identifier
- uon:42979
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781787071551
- Language
- eng
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