Multiple versions--a moderatorial summary, or what we talk about when we talk about film

This might be a useful time summarize some of this thread, since it has
become a kind of baggy monster, and sometimes it seems as if people are
talking past each other because various contexts of the discussion have
been lost.  I offer this as one humble attempt to summarize and account for
the variety of a thread that might still have some vitality, but that might
also benefit from a reminder about it's origins.

The original inquiry came from Leen Engelen, who was wondering how
pervasive the practice might be of releasing varied versions of a single
film for different (often national) audiences.  Fairly quickly, that
discussion began to embrace multiple endings as well as multiple versions,
particularly since dvd releases of "director's  cuts" became profitably
fashionable.

While a number of films got mentioned (some of which dealt more with
different endings that the multiple versions for multiple audiences), Leo
Enticknap's comment that there must be an enormous number of these seems
likely.  If that is so, the number's mentioned thus far can hardly begin to
exhaust the possibilities here.

As the discussion moved on, though it took a more theoretical turn,
provoked by the suggestion that perhaps one needed to consider which
version was of the highest value, suggesting several metrics for such
evaluation.  But Leo's comment and Henry Taylor's reference of Ricouer and
Hayden White are there to remind us that the direction of theory in the
last 40 or 50 years has overwhelmingly been to undermine the unquestioned
authority of any particular metric of value; one might move through
alphabet of such writers, from Bakhtin, Barthes, and Benjamin in cataloging
those who have raised these kinds of questions.

Those of us who have heard these voices and their arguments might, of
course, decide simply to let sleeping dogs lie and let every audience
member make their own value judgements for themselves.  Perhaps on one
level, there is nothing else one can do but let those judgments take place.

But taking a page from Leo's suggestion about the canonization of Hitchcock
and *Vertigo*, one might also try to understand better how and why such
value judgments take hold and have currency at any particular time.  In
this sense, the German Studies CFP about adaptation today comes along at a
fortuitous time, simply because these precise questions are being examined
and discussed with some vigor now among critics concerned with the practice
of filming adaptations of literary texts.  For years, the dominant
scholarly view, held in opposition to industry practice and popular taste,
was that no adaptation could be so good as the original, at least in the
case of "great' literary works by "great" authors.

Exceptions to that state of affairs emerged without challenging the basis
of such judgments when some filmmakers like Hitchcock became "great"
artists.  As Tom L\eitch has pointed out, it was fashionable to suggest
that Hitchcock's version of *Rebecca* was better than du Maurier's original
because Hitchcock was the "greater" artist.  That view probably was the
reason that there was such an outcry on H-Film back in 1998 when van Sant's
nearly shot-by-shot remake of *Psycho *was so treated with such distaste.
But such positions seem to stand in opposition to the main thrust of that
theoretical tradition that Henry invoked.

Moving from the concrete question of how prevalent multiple versions of
films for multiple audiences might be to a much more abstract question of
how and whether it matters that how such differences are accounted
for--this discussion has, as has been observed, covered a lot of ground.

I welcome more responses to any portion of the discussion thus far, though
I also wonder whether particularly anyone has more to offer directly in
response to Leen's initial question.

k
-- 
Ken Nolley
Professor of English and Film Studies
Willamette University
Salem, OR 97301
Phone:  503-370-6280
Fax:  503-370-6944

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