Re: multiple versions (3 responses)

From: Billy Vermillion <[email protected]>

Did anybody mention this one, yet?

http://variety.com/2013/film/news/buster-keaton-the-blacksmith-video-1200563581/

-Billy Vermillion

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From: "DiCandeloro, Zachariah Joseph" <[email protected]>

Re: a [subversive] question

For better or worse, the answer will be at least as subversive as the question itself. And the discussion which follows, I think, points toward larger questions about narrative, representation, and projection...

I. Multiple endings (or multiple versions) may be created for the following reasons:

1) To maximize the interest level of different (or separate) audiences
2) To control content within a discrete context of political or cultural messaging
3) To express some type of compliance on the part of the subject(s) responsible for the production

II. It has long been said that both publication and interpretive reception of Grimm's Fairy Tales, Irish Fairy Tales, Hellenic and Roman texts, as well as the world's great holy books, have featured the same kind of multiplicity and for the same reasons. 

III. New Historicism follows the same trajectory in reverse: As opposed to multiple endings, it seeks to provide multiple accounts of beginnings. The logic of induction starts with some historical event treated as a conclusion from which a multiplicity of real or imagined premises may be claimed as historical. 

IV. So which representation of a topic is the best, the most useful, the most true, the most valuable, the most important, the most authentic? Such judgments are very, very hard to articulate, and almost impossible to deliver without arousing legitimate opposition.

Thanks for your time.

Joseph DiCandeloro
IPhD student, U of Missouri-Kansas City
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