



Throughout their histories, film theory and analytical aesthetics have rarely shown points of contact. This paper attempts to overcome this impasse by showing the suitability of Genette’s aesthetics to film studies while tracing a broader reconnaissance of these misconnections. This essay is divided into two parts. First, it identifies the reasons that have hindered the inter- actions between analytic aesthetics and film studies. Second, it addresses the compatibility of some of the concepts Genette presents in his magnum opus The Aesthetic Relation to con- temporary film studies.




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Cinema within the Aesthetic Relation: Film Studies and Gérard Genette’s Art Theory
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           CINEMA WITHIN THE AESTHETIC RELATION: FILM STUDIES
           AND GÉRARD GENETTE’S ART THEORY
           Claudio Bisoni, Università degli Studi di Bologna




             Abstract
             Throughout their histories, film theory and analytical aesthetics have rarely shown points of
             contact. This paper attempts to overcome this impasse by showing the suitability of Genette’s
             aesthetics to film studies while tracing a broader reconnaissance of these misconnections.
             This essay is divided into two parts. First, it identifies the reasons that have hindered the inter-
             actions between analytic aesthetics and film studies. Second, it addresses the compatibility of
             some of the concepts Genette presents in his magnum opus The Aesthetic Relation to con-
             temporary film studies.



           The reasons for a misconnection

              Few scholars have embarked on the study of both film theory and aesthetics, for example Nöel
           Carroll, among the analytical philosophers, and Dominique Chateau, as a representative of conti-
           nental philosophy. Despite a few efforts, today film studies and analytical aesthetics hardly dis-
           play structural points of contact.
              In this essay I would like to show how such a shortcoming can be overcome by looking at
           Gérard Genette’s aesthetics, a theory in which film studies have traditionally shown little interest.
           Such detachment is, however, part of a larger historical phenomenon, and as a way of introduc-
           tion, I intend to address the three main reasons behind the traditionally weak links of film studies
           and analytical aesthetics.
              First, analytical aesthetics usually addresses the issue of the definition of art, presenting it
           through limit cases, such as the couples of materially indiscernible objects.1 In this instance, even
           if art objects x and y present the same properties, they are not necessarily the same thing. Such a
           patent violation of a key ontological principle – the so-called Principle of the Identity of
           Indiscernibles – implies that there are things that the eye cannot grasp. It also assumes that art is
           not necessarily a matter of perception and as a result that aesthetic properties do not prompt its
           definition. This reasoning is largely unappealing to film scholars, who are well aware of the
           expressivity of the materials involved in the filmic experience and thus instinctually distrustful of
           the anti-phenomenological approach that underpins analytical aesthetics.
              Second, analytical philosophers work on a general definition of art, as it is not oriented to the

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         CLAUDIO BISONI

         specificities of the medium. In Italy the idea of a comprehensive aesthetics, unbound to the issue
         of empirical differences between the arts (both in medium and language), dates back to Benedetto
         Croce’s idealism. Yet, this tradition is rejected by Italian film scholars, trained according to a
         structuralist and post-structuralist curriculum. In an international context the contemporary
         debates on the post-medium condition of cinema and visual arts have instead produced stances
         that emphasize the discrete specificities of each medium. Rosalind Krauss, for instance, talks of
         physical properties, supporting structures, expressive possibilities and conventions. These speci-
         ficities also define the aesthetic field pertaining to each medium,2 which explains why film aes-
         thetics focuses on the study of cinema’s own devices (whether technological, expressive or per-
         taining to the apparatus) as well as those borrowed from the other arts, but readapted to cinema’s
         specificities. Film aesthetics does hardly revolve around the role that cinema occupies in a gen-
         eral system of the arts.
            Third, analytical aesthetics is not text-oriented. Rather, it deliberately defies textual analyses to
         produce meta-interpretations circa the status of certain texts as artworks. On the contrary, to film
         theorists, especially those writing in the 1960s and 1970s, a

           concept like intertextuality is understood only as an “aesthetic” figure, rather than the
           acknowledgment by criticism and theory that meaning is not a function of textual interiority,
           but is constituted in a complex web of different practices and institutions. […] The “theory”
           presupposed by the discourse of political modernism is precisely an immanent one.3

            In 1984, Dudley Andrew went against an approach to film theory that he saw as excessively
         influenced by the “cultural philosophy” of Foucault and Derrida. He motivated his opposition by
         invoking the necessity to develop a closer “interplay between theory and criticism.” “This inter-
         play […] has at least the form of a dialogue in which the films have the first word and, frequent-
         ly, the last.”4 This paradigm, which has dominated most of the traditional discourses on film aes-
         thetics, is far from the investigations of analytical aesthetics which usually focus on artistic iden-
         tity, leaving aside discussions on the creative aspects of art making or critical interpretations. The
         sole interpretations analytical aesthetics has put forward are those concerning the transformation
         of material objects into works of art.5


         The reasons for a possible encounter

            Such an impasse can be avoided if we look at Genette’s theory of the aesthetic relation, in which
         I identify four aspects of particular relevance to contemporary film theory.
            1) The relation. Genette does not believe in an objectifying aesthetics. He, for instance, dis-
         tances himself from Nelson Goodman, for whom the question to ask is not “What is art?” but
         “When is art?” As it is well known, Goodman answers the latter by stating that art occurs when-
         ever we face symptoms of the aesthetic (that is syntactic density, semantic density, relative
         repleteness, exemplification, multiple and complex reference).6 For Genette, however, only a par-
         ticular type of attention can produce an aesthetic object. For him, the relevant question is “When
         is an object received as an artwork?”7 Consequently, Goodman’s list of symptoms needs to be

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           conceived as a list of symptoms of the aesthetic relation. Yet, in accordance to such a relabeling,
           Genette finds Goodman’s list lacking in one item: appreciation. “Appreciation,” for Genette, is a
           process of objectification of judgment, or in other words: “The natural tendency to ascribe to an
           object, as one of its objective properties, the ‘value’ that derives from the way one feels about it.”8
           Still, the aesthetic relation is a necessary, yet not sufficient condition to define a work of art. To
           speak of art, we then need a certain type of attention as well as the conviction that the work was
           intentionally created as such. To articulate his ideas about intentionality, Genette draws from
           George Dickie’s definition of art as a concept necessarily implying intentionality. This intention-
           ality should not have been present only in the act of creation, but also in the moment of reception,

             whether an object attains the status of a work basically depends, then, on whether its receiv-
             er considers the possibility that aesthetic intention is present within it. [...] Just as, for me, an
             object is an aesthetic object when I enter into a relation of an aesthetic type with it, so it is a
             work of art for me when, rightly or wrongly, I decide that this relation can be traced to an
             authorial intention.9

              After activating the aesthetic relation, the receiver “fulfills” it when s/he recognizes that the
           object of the relation is a human manufacture intentionally meant to be received as a work of art.
           Only in this way do we experience an artistic relation that is “the ascription of the status of art-
           work to an aesthetic object.”10
              In order to improve our understanding of the implications of this curious form of aesthetic sub-
           jectivism, we need to understand what it is not. We live in an epoch full of impulses to end post-
           modern rhetoric. It is also an era where facts are taking reprisals for the attention previously ded-
           icated to interpretations and, even in Europe, an increased energy is allocated to analytical phi-
           losophy.11 In this context, it is important not to mistake Genette’s aesthetics for a form of post-
           modern relativism. For example, it is crucial to stress that Genette describes the attribution of an
           authorial intention as a decision that can be taken rightly or wrongly (“à tort ou à raison”).12 A
           few sentences later he explains “a belief does not have to be articulated to be active,”13 a sentence
           in which “articulated” should be read as “justified”. In short, Genette here states that what deter-
           mines the intensity and the form of the aesthetic experience of a work of art depends on the degree
           of our belief. Any subjective belief does not require any justification. It needs to be neither justi-
           fied nor true to exist and to function (and this is valid for any of the meanings of both “justified”
           and “true”), as no subjective belief has any implications as to the truth of its content. Genette’s
           theory is then epistemologically neutral. It is not relativistic, as epistemological relativism does
           not simply defend the idea that there are several criteria to judge the truth of something. Rather,
           it claims that “there are no, and there cannot be, meta-criteria when judging criteria of truth, that
           is, there are no meta-criteria to evaluate whether some criteria of truth are better than others.”14
           Genette never steps towards this direction even if he does not exclude that some criteria and
           symptoms on which we base our belief that something is a work of art can be better than others.
           Indeed, he spends much of his writing to produce a rigorous evaluation of many of these cases.
              2) Aesthetics and the end of art. Contrary to Goodman, who believes that a description of the
           aesthetic always depends on the presence of art, Genette does not imply that every aesthetic object
           is also ipso facto a work of art. His differentiation between the aesthetic relation and the artistic

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         relation (itself a product of the ascription of intentionality) is susceptible to many attacks, most
         importantly perhaps to those ensuing from Monroe Beardsley’s well-known concept of “inten-
         tional fallacy.” Genette is aware of the vulnerability of his argument, but he does not deal with it.
         Rather, his preoccupations seem to be directed to presenting an operative criterion that reasonably
         distinguishes not between what art is and what art is not, but between an experience of works of
         art and the ways in which we “aestheticize” every-day objects. This can also be taken as a varia-
         tion on the theme of “the end of art.” Genette does not explicitly refer to it, yet the theme has
         received much commentary by the philosophers with whom Genette directly engages, especially
         by Danto.15
            To state that art occurs only insofar as someone intended to make it and somebody else is ready
         to recognize this intention can be accepted only if we assume that the word “art” does not con-
         note qualitatively different practices and entities. But then, what remains of art? If we subscribe
         to Genette’s definition, art is not an autonomous entity with the power of defining Beauty and/or
         “an immanent production of truths.”16 Rather, it becomes the prosaic effect of a specific form of
         attention and categorization. One circumstance that is worth remarking at this point is that those
         who lament the death of art, as well as the end of its production of truths, are usually the same
         people that fear that art may dissolve “in a competitive relation with the instruments of mass com-
         munication, information and fashion.”17
            I think that film scholars can share this concern in ideal terms, but I do not believe that it deeply
         affects their case. Indeed, throughout the 20th century, cinema has been the very device that
         blurred the distinctions between art, cultural industry and mass communication. By doing so, it
         has forced the expansion of the aesthetic beyond its original boundaries. In this lies its identity as
         popular art. Cinema has undermined the categories of taste and aesthetic judgment or in Genette’s
         words, we could say that it has led to the transformation of aesthetics from a system based on
         “internal criteria,” to a system defined by “external,” “institutional” and “socio-cultural” ones.18
            Film scholars can find themselves in a privileged position to appreciate Genette’s description
         of the functioning of the aesthetic relation in every-day life, as well as the advantages of the aes-
         thetic/artistic divide. Cinema was quickly recognized as an art form, but this status has ever since
         remained intermittent. Cinema, Genette would argue, does not belong to “constitutive
         artistries,”19 it belongs to “occasional, or ‘conditional,’ […] attentional”20 artistries. The filmic
         canon is, for instance, different from the literary one: it is more open and always negotiable. Many
         films confirm this point as they have dramatically changed their status, quickly passing from
         forms of popular entertainment to publicly recognized artworks. Many of the films that in the
         1940s Adorno and Horkheimer considered at the same level of Chrysler and General Motors mass
         products are today studied as part of the university curriculum.21 Such shifts in status have usu-
         ally occurred because of a transformation in the type of aesthetic attention activated by different
         “reading communities” (and which, we should also note, often include the so-called “artists in the
         audience”).22 At the same time, reception theory has demonstrated how aestheticizing processes
         (the symptoms of aesthetic attention) play a major role in many phenomena of cinema’s cultural
         history and today’s landscape of new media (i.e. fandom and cult criticism).
            3) Artistic intention and the author’s “Long Shadow.” We said that the way in which Genette
         reintroduces the concept of intentionality into the theoretical debate is exposed to the attacks of
         intentional fallacy. Further, it also opposes a key notion of political modernism, namely the notion

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           of the “death of the author.” Literary theorist Carla Benedetti has noticed that Michel Foucault’s
           essay What Is an Author? has often been misunderstood.23 By revealing the function of the author
           as a historical product bound to the artistic system of modernity, Foucault only aimed at present-
           ing the author as a contingent figure. According to this stance, the art world has then passed over
           the author theories put forward by both the political modernism and the postmodern period:

             In the same context in which the aestheticization of the living world has dissolved the tradi-
             tional confines of the aesthetic, the survival of art as a specific institution is more than ever
             guaranteed by the author-function. Thus we have on the one side authored merchandise [merci
             d’autore], such as a leather jacket, a purse, or even a coffee-maker bearing the signature of
             world-renowned designers like Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Giorgio Armani and therefore val-
             ued, while on the other we have fetishized authors and their fetishized works [feticci d’autore],
             like the latest book to hit the bestseller list due to the name-recognition of the author rather
             than the intrinsic value of the work itself. 24

              The author of whom both Genette and Benedetti speak of is not the author evoked by the semi-
           otic theory of textual cooperation.25 It also differs from the author for whose death Roland Barthes
           hoped.26 “Author” here should neither be understood as a function of the text, nor as the inten-
           tional subject that guarantees meaning. Rather, this author is the trigger that guarantees the artis-
           tic processes: “The processes through which a modern work of art is ‘constructed’ require
           processes of attribution to an author: attribution of an artistic intention, of a choice, of a project,
           conscious or unconscious, of a poetics.”27 This is valid for both literary and filmic authors. It is
           after all well known that the notion of authorship had an important role in producing a perception
           of cinema as art. It would be useful, in this case, to then trace its artistic functions through the his-
           tory of cinema considering Genette’s aesthetics: to expose the “aestheticizing thresholds” that
           authorship has contributed to generate. This research has already, if partially, been exposed by
           scholars who presented the authorship of past directors such as Kurosawa, Sirk, Chaplin and
           Hitchcock as a “reputation building effect.”28 This approach could also be applied to present film
           making, in which we are witnessing an evolution of authorship towards both a “signature
           effect,”29 as evidenced by the works of directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Pedro Almodovar,
           to phenomena of “distributed authorship,” typical of new media.
              4) An integrative theory. Since Genette’s art theory is epistemologically neutral, it does not
           oppose studies that investigate the presence of the aesthetic and the artistic on a textual level.
           Rather, it is an addition to them. For this reason I sketch a model for an integrated study of the
           artistic profile of cinema by articulating it on three levels:
              a) First is the level in which the specific textual and formal features of a film work triggers both
           the aesthetic and artistic statuses of the film. This is also the level in which aesthetics corresponds
           to the analysis of the expressive potentialities of the medium and of the artistic canons. Most of
           traditional film aesthetics belongs here, as do most of comparative studies between cinema and
           other arts.
              b) At this second stage interpretation oscillates between the text and the context. The textual
           features of a film are here studied as triggers of aesthetic attention or, as Danto would say, as
           extra-textual and trans-figurative markers.30 On this level we can include all studies aiming at
           capturing the aesthetic value of inter-textual practices, such as quotations, plagiarism, remakes

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         CLAUDIO BISONI

         and stylistic retro-dating. (This is the case, for instance, of Gus van Sant’s Psycho [1998], a film
         that forces us to reflect on aesthetics rather than film criticism).
           c) The third level deals with the artistic function. The history of cinema as art is also the histo-
         ry of a series of attributions of the art status. These attributions, however, largely depend on inter-
         pretations that have shaped the art world, thus we need to ask ourselves what are the great trans-
         formations that led interpreters to think of films as rich in meaning and operating according to the
         symbolic mode of exemplification, the “exemplificational mode”31 (the aesthetic symptom par
         excellence). We also need to identify the relationships between an author’s intention (here seen
         as attribution of the aesthetic intention) and the construction of the discursive status of the “ciné-
         ma d’auteur.” At this stage we should also include the study of the connections between the aes-
         thetic relation and derivative phenomena, such as the authentication and canonization of cultural
         objects.32 Some studies have already undertaken these streams of investigations. To conclude I
         would like to recall three of them.

            In Roger Odin’s well-known semio-pragmatic approach to fiction film, films are always seen
         within a social space.33 Such a space gives shape to the film spectator’s cognitive activity as well
         as his/her competence. In other words, it gives a role to the film spectator. Odin does not employ
         Genette’s terminology, but his description of the spectator’s role comes close to Genette’s con-
         ceptualization of “modes of attention.” Odin describes eight different operational modes in the
         space of filmic communication. Among these, two are worth mentioning. According to the first
         (the artistic mode), a film is connected to an author, a connection that is usually made by a
         cinephile. According to the second (the aesthetic mode), the spectator focuses “on the technical
         work that has gone into the creation of the images and sounds,”34 Genette’s and Odin’s definitions
         of the artistic and the aesthetic are not the same. Still, in order to speak of “aesthetic mode” both
         of them imply the presence of an aesthetic symptom or in Goodman’s words of “relative syntac-
         tic repletensess, that is, the fact that relatively many syntactical features are semantically rele-
         vant.”35 To this we must add that we need someone – in our case an actant-spectator – who
         decides which properties a film “does or does not single out for attention.”36 (This is part of the
         “exemplificational mode”).
            François Jost, too, would agree with Genette on an important point, namely that a double pre-
         cariousness affects cinema as art. Such a precarious state concerns films as uncertain objects,
         since they “do not have a manifest, determinate generic affiliation.”37 It also depends on the space
         in which films are seen. A film after all does not claim the same type of reception as a painting in
         a museum. Still, the film’s precariousness can be avoided by making gestures that identify the
         film as an artwork. To do so, however, it is necessary that the film be interpreted as the effect of
         an artistic intention. In other words, we must understand in what way we can confidently say that
         an artist stands at its origin. For Jost, understanding how a film functions as an art work means to
         operate on the plane of enunciation or, better, on the multiple and complex planes encompassed
         by filmic enunciation. The study of the functioning of a film as an artwork must figure the tasks
         of a polyphonic theory of enunciation, as well as of a narratology that deals with the concept of
         artistic intention.
            The identity of a film as art depends on something that deals with the text and its thresholds.
         However, for Janet Staiger, it depends on the complexity of historically determined reading strate-

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           gies. In Genette and Danto’s terms, Staiger’s materialistic history of filmic interpretation con-
           tributes to our understanding of the relationship between “simple” interpretations and transfigu-
           rative interpretations, a theoretical key point of analytical aesthetics. At the same time, the notion
           of transfigurative interpretation can conversely serve to clarify many aspects of Staiger’s theory.
           For instance, in her analysis of the American reviews of Open City (Roma città aperta, Roberto
           Rossellini, 1945) – which premiered in New York in the Spring of 1946 –, Staiger demonstrates
           that what she calls the “Rossellini signature” depended on specific strategies of reading and eval-
           uation. In sum, for the American critics of the time “the film was frank; it was serious; it had a
           message. It was different from Hollywood. […]. Messages […] imply senders. And for educated
           Americans, that means authorship.”38
              Staiger is here proposing a thesis that deals with the history of film criticism: “Authorship as a
           reading strategy was common prior the introduction of auteurism by the scholarly community.”39
           In return, such a historical consideration produces a theoretical effect. Carla Benedetti and
           Genette are right in separating the author as guarantor of artistic intention from the author as the
           intentional subject who guarantees meaning (and authorship, here intended as the one thing that
           “unifies the text”).40 Still, their separation is valid only theoretically, since historically the two
           roles have frayed borders and cannot be defined so clearly. This can be observed already in the
           1920s, when “a common interpretative strategy among the cultural elite and ‘better educated’
           audiences was attributing the origin of filmic meaning to the director.”41 Such attribution of mean-
           ing has an important role in the historical definition of cinema as art. For this reason I think that,
           alongside Genette’s theory of artistic intention, a study of Staiger’s materialistic history of filmic
           interpretation may greatly improve our understanding of the relationships between the theory of
           authorship, aesthetics and the history of “film as art.”42



           1  See Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. A Philosophy of Art, Harvard University
              Press, Cambridge-London 1981.
           2 Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-medium Condition, Thames and
              Huston, London 2000; Ji-Hoon Kim, “The Post-medium Condition and the Explosion of Cinema,” in
              Screen, vol. 50, no. 1, Spring 2009, pp. 114-123.
           3 David Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism. Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film
              Theory, University of Illinois Press, Urbana-Chicago 1988, pp. 277, 280.
           4 Dudley Andrew, Film in the Aura of Art, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1984, p. XI.
           5 Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, Columbia University Press, New York
              1986, p. 39. A few pages earlier (at p. 23) Danto makes a distinction worth quoting, as it is relevant to
              this point: “My view, historically, is that interpretations are discovered and that interpretations constitute
              works of art and that interpretative statements are true or false. My view, philosophically, is that inter-
              pretations constitute works of art, so that you do not, as it were, have the artwork on one side and inter-
              pretations on the other.”
           6 Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, Hackett, Indianapolis 1978, pp. 67-68.
           7 Gérard Genette, L’Œuvre de l’art. La relation esthétique, Seuil, Paris 1997 (eng. ed. The Aesthetic
              Relation, Cornell University Press, Ithaca-London 1999, p. 214).
           8 Idem, p. 68.
           9 Idem, p. 139.
           10 Idem, p. 203.

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         11 Cfr., Maurizio Ferraris, “Perseverare è diabolico”, in Alfabeta2, Tramonto del postmoderno, no. 14,
            November 2011. See also On the Ashes of Post-Modernism: A New Realism (Conference, New York,
            November 2011).
         12 Gérard Genette, L’Œuvre de l’art. La relation esthétique, cit., p. 172.
         13 Gérard Genette, The Aesthetic Relation, cit., p. 217.
         14 Diego Marconi, Per la verità. Relativismo e filosofia, Einaudi, Torino 2011, p. 52 (my translation).
         15 Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, cit.; Id., After the End of Art.
            Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1997.
         16 Alain Badiou, Petit manuel d’inesthetique, Seuil, Paris 1998 (eng. ed. Handbook of Inaesthetics,
            Stanford University Press, Stanford 2005, p. 10).
         17 Mario Perniola, L’arte e la sua ombra, Einaudi, Torino 2000 (eng. ed., Art and Its Shadow, Continuum,
            New York-London 2004, p. XV). The same criticism was directed towards Genette in Riccardo Campi,
            “L’opera dell’estetica fra soggetto e storia. Ricognizioni intorno a Gérard Genette,” in Studi di estetica,
            no. 20, 1999, pp. 55-83.
         18 Gérard Genette, The Aesthetic Relation, cit., p. 170.
         19 Idem, p. 215.
         20 Idem, p. 216.
         21 See Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer. Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente,
            Querido, Amsterdam 1947 (eng. ed. Dialectic of Enlightenment, Stanford University Press, Stanford
            2002).
         22 Greg Taylor, Artists in the Audience. Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism, Princeton University
            Press, Princeton 1999. According to Noël Carroll, interpreters have recurred to critical interpretations,
            historical and identifying narratives (not to definitions) in order to decide whether a film is artistic or
            not. See Noël Carroll, Philosophy of Art. A Contemporary Introduction, Routledge, London-New York
            1999, p. 260.
         23 Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?,” in Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie, no. 3,
            1969 (eng. ed. What Is an Author?, in M. Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Cornell,
            University Press, Ithaca, NY 1977).
         24 Carla Benedetti, L’ombra lunga dell’autore: indagine su una figura cancellata, Feltrinelli, Milano 1999
            (eng. ed. The Empty Cage. Inquiry into the Mysterious Disappearance of the Author, Cornell University
            Press, Ithaca-London 2005, p. 25).
         25 Umberto Eco, Lector in fabula. La cooperazione interpretativa nei testi narrativi, Bompiani, Milano
            1979. The studies by Iser and Jauss, conceptually aligned with Eco’s interpretation theory, were also
            important in shaping reception studies in film and television. See Hans Robert Jaus, Toward an Aesthetic
            of Reception, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1987; Wolfang Iser, The Implied Reader.
            Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett, The Johns Hopkins University
            Press, Baltimore 1974. For Iser, the literary work emerges in the confluence of writing and an experi-
            ence of reading. Jauss has also famously insisted on the historical dimension of the aesthetic experience:
            “The successive interpretations through which a text has been perceived becomes a ‘horizon’ or back-
            ground that sets up assumptions about a text’s meaning and thus influences its current interpretations;”
            Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films. Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema, Princeton
            University press, Princeton 1992, p. 46. Nevertheless, the type of author-reader/spectator relationship of
            which Genette and Benedetti speak is different from that put forward by Iser and Jauss. Genette and
            Benedetti think such a relationship does not concern the understanding of the textual meaning of a work,
            but its meta-textual identity (that is, its status as work of art).
         26 Roland Barthes, La Mort de l’Auteur, in Id., Le Bruissement de la langue, Seuil, Paris 1984 (eng. ed.
            The Death of the Author, in Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, Fontana, London 1977).
         27 Carla Benedetti, The Empty Cage, cit., p. 14. Interestingly, Carla Benedetti is among the few italian lit-
            erary theorists that openly quote André Bazin, Cahiers du cinéma and the “politique des auteurs.”
            According to her, the “politique des auteurs” is among the first moments of the second half of the 20th
            century in which we witness to a difficulty in separating between the artistic value of an object and the

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                                                                               CINEMA WITHIN THE AESTHETIC RELATION

                presumption that the same object is an author’s product. In other words, the author has taken on him/her-
                self the artistic function. This way, we then return to the distinction between artistic intention and poet-
                ics, on which we have already commented. Actually, theoretically speaking, it is possible to introduce
                two interconnected distinctions. The first one separates artistic intention (i.e. the will to candidate an
                object to be experienced as an art work) from poetics (that is, author’s intention, stilystics, textual poet-
                ics, etc.). The second instead distinguishes between artistic identity (the logic according to which a work
                is socially identified as an artwork) and critical interpretation (the way in which the work and its poetic
                are interpreted). For an analysis of this second distinction, see Luciano Nanni, Tesi di estetica, Book
                Editore, Bologna-Ferrara-Milano 1991.
           28   Charles J. Maland, Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image, Princeton University
                Press, Princeton 1989; Robert E. Kapsis, Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation, University of Chicago
                Press, Chicago 1992; Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema, Duke
                University Press, Durham 2000; Barbara Klinger, Melodrama & Meaning, History, Culture, and the
                Films of Douglas Sirk, Indiana University Press, Bloomington-Indianapolis 1994.
           29   Guglielmo Pescatore, L’ombra dell’autore. Teoria e storia dell’autore cinematografico, Carocci, Roma
                2006, p. 155 (my translation).
           30   “Transfigurative” is applied by Danto to “interpretation,” not directly to markers. See The Philosophical
                Disenfranchisement of Art, cit., p. 44.
           31   Gérard Genette, The Aesthetic Relation, cit., p. 41.
           32   On authentication and cultural hierarchies see Sarah Thornton, Club Culture: Music, Media, and
                Subcultural Capital, Policy Press, Cambridge 1996. On canonization and film see Pietro Bianchi, Giulio
                Bursi, Simone Venturini (eds.), Il canone cinematografico/The Film Canon, Proceedings of the 17th
                International Film Studies Conference (Udine, 16-18 March 2010), Forum, Udine 2011.
           33   Roger Odin, De la fiction, De Boeck Université, Bruxelles 2000.
           34   Warren Buckland, The Cognitive Semiotics of Film, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2000, p.
                89.
           35   Gérard Genette, The Aesthetic Relation, cit., p. 33.
           36   Idem, p. 43.
           37   Idem, p. 216. See François Jost, Un monde à notre image. Enonciation, cinéma, télévision, Klincksieck,
                Paris 1992.
           38   Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films, cit., p. 187.
           39   Idem, p. 181.
           40   Idem, p. 180.
           41   Idem, p. 188.
           42   Besides the works by Odin, Staiger and Jost, besides the works on “reputation building strategies” which
                I have already mentioned, I would also like to mention Janet Harbord’s publication on the spaces of the
                cinematographic experience and the studies on the relocation of the filmic experience. Janet Harbord,
                Film Cultures, Sage, London 2002; Francesco Casetti, “Relocation,” in Cinéma & Cie, no. 11, Fall 2008.
                Indeed, studies on the new spaces of filmic experience may reveal as important as those concerning the
                symbolic and material spaces for defining film’s aesthetic experience. I think that Genette’s aesthetic can
                turn out to be extremely helpful in this stream of research.




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