Richard Burt

Writing the Endings of Cinema:

Saving Film Authorship in the Cinematic Paratext of Prospero’s Books, The

Tempest, and The Secret of Kells

My essay examines the appearance of writing books, and illuminated

manuscripts in the end title sequence of two adaptations of Shakespeare’s The

Tempest, Julie Taymor’s Tempest (2010) and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s

Books (1995), and the ending of the animated feature film about The Book of

Kells, The Secret of Kells (dir. Tomm Moore, 2009). I analyze these films, all

three of which are concerned with the process of writing medieval and early

modern books, in relation to two developments in the history of the cinematic

paratext: first, opening and end title sequences that show the credits printed on

turning pages of a book; and, second, the increasing expansion and

development of end title sequences since 1980.1 Rather than postulate some

large generalization about media transitions (analogue to digital cinema) or

announce yet another death of cinema, I want to forego all neoapocalyptic or

neoevangelist narratives of first things and last things. I take note of some

specific developments that increasingly both co-ordinate and differentiate the

opening and end title sequences to shed light on why cinema turns to textual

media for the paratext and why books remain ideal filmic multi-media in digital

cinema, particularly animated feature films, as much as they have been in

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celluloid cinema.

Before proceeding to discussing these three films, then, let me make some

preliminary remarks on the ways in which the cinematic paratext and the medium

of the book bear on writing in film. Why has the book become such a commonly

used medium for opening title sequences? In large part, I suggest, because it

provides a solution to a problem of authorship specific to film. As Georg

Stanitzek observes, because “filmmaking involves a comparatively large division

of labor, a film cannot be attributed to one author . . . the opening credits (or

génerique) constitute a paratext that uses a number of the paratextutal forms

found in books—as a kind of imprint for film—but so in a specifically filmic way. . .

. Just as the book has two covers, a title, an imprint, and so on, a film . . . has

opening and closing credits, and so on. A book can function as a filmic organizer

of communication, as a kind of natural delineation of the entire work.”2 The

homology Stanitzek finds between book and film paratexts allows, I will maintain,

for a typographical regularization of film authorship by singling out the director as

author, or auteur, in a number of ways: the director gets an entire frame

(whereas the screenwriter(s) tend to share a frame with other people who have

worked on the film); a large size font, and is usually the last credit of the opening

title sequence. As “a kind of imprint,” the film paratext defaults to an “auteur,”

director as writer notion of film authorship.

Because opening title sequences of films begin (and sometimes end) with the

studio logo (much more prominent than the publisher of a book ins a book

paratext) and end with the director, one might conclude that the use of books in

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cinematic peritexts, that part of the paratext that is included in the book or film’s

contents, emblematizes a much stronger connection between film author and

film.3 The publisher’s “introduction” of a book, which is usually overlooked by

readers, cannot be skipped over or fast-forwarded by film viewers when

projected in movie theaters. Moreover, by the 1950s, credits began to be

integrated into the film, often as a prologue. The “imprint” of the credits is a

1 The date 1980 has to do with the legal history of film production as it turns on

union negotiated contracts over title sequences. Dating in this manner is

somewhat artificial, however, since graphic design developments in the cinematic

paratext are never fully standardized and innovations can be dropped or become

the norm decades later. For examples of innovations in opening title sequences

that we’re never adopted elsewhere, see the opening titles of BBS films from the

1970s such as The King of Marvin Gardens (dir. Bob Rafelson, 1972) and A Safe

Place (dir. Jack Nicholson, 1971). For a similarly exceptional innovation, see the

last shot of Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971), after the below the line credits

have finished, which returns the viewer to the beginning of the film. See also the

parody of the rolling end titles during the epilogue of Strange Brew (Bob and

Doug Mckenzie, 1983).

2 Georg Stanitzek, “Texts and Paratexts in Media,” Critical Inquiry (Autumn 2005,

37; 38). On the book and film, see Gerard Blanchard, “Le Scriptovisuel ou

Cinemato-Graphe,” in L’Espace et la lettre: Écritures, typographies (Paris, 1977),

411; 422. For more the cinematic paratext and the book, see Richard Burt,

Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media (New York: Palgrave, 2008; rev.

2010). On opening title sequences as text to be read in relation to the film, see

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viewer of a DVD of blu-ray edition of a film will therefore read the entire paratext.

The peritext of a book may be said to have been written in a kind of invisible ink,

the peritext of a film, the alphabetic text, is engraved, as it were, on the image.

No wonder then that the succession of credits could be appear through the

analogy of turning the pages of a book.

Yet if the medium of the opened bound book answers, by way of analogy,

major questions of film authorship (Do films have authors? who is the “writer” of

the film? Yes, they do: the director) it also opens up new questions about film

authorship. Title sequences are almost always outsourced, and their “authors”

are frequently not credited. In some exceptional cases, the opening title designer

is credited (Saul Bass in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1955) and Kyle Cooper in

David Fincher’s Se7en (1995), to note two famous examples). More often, the

Tom Conley, Film Hieroglyphs (Second edition; U of Minnesota P, 2006), xxv-

xxvii.

3 The introduction of The Girl Can’t Help It (dir. Frank Taschlin, 1956) is an

exception to the rule. Lead actor Tom Ewell talks to the audience out of

character before the film begins and seems to enlarge the aspect ratio of the film

from Academy ratio (33.1) to Cinemascope (widescreen aspect ratio) by pushing

on the left and right sides of the film image. Similarly Cecil B. Demille comes out

from behind a curtain as himself and speaks into a microphone to introduce the

Ten Commandments (1956). Pixar Studios has developed unusually extensive

logo and end title sequences in its animated feature films. See, for example, the

face-off between the Pixar and Disney logos at the end of the end title sequence

of Wall-E (dir. Andrew Stanton, 2008).

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outsourced agency such as Pacific Title Company gets a credit. The writer that

guarantees the authorship is most often done by an anonymous, corporate

agent, and thereby reinscribes, albeit in a barely noticeable way, the problem of

determining who is the film’s author authorship (a film being the product of a

collaborative team) the imprint of the book (with the author on the furthest margin

of the peritext, the book’s spine) would otherwise appear to have resolved.

Stanizeks’s important insight that film paratext tends to default to medium of

the book misses the way a bibliocentric notion of film authorship depends on a

spectralization of the writer of the cinematic paratext, a spectralization already

happening in books: as Gérard Genette points out, “the author’s name is not

necessarily always the author himself” (46). The author’s name is put on the title

page and cover outside the text a way that creates an mutually legitimating

relation between writer and publisher: “with respect to the cover and title page, it

is the publisher who presents the author, somewhat as certain film producers

present both the film and its director. If the author is the guarantor of the text

(auctor), this guarantor himself has a guarantor—the publisher—who “introduces”

him and names him” (46). This “introduction” provides for an opening, but not

necessarily for a smooth entry into the book. The most exterior parts of the

paratext—the cover and title page--paradoxically unify writer and publisher by

splitting the author from himself. The publisher’s “introduction” is often followed

by another paratext, namely, the author’s preface. As Genette notes, “one of the

normal functions of the preface is give the author the opportunity to officially

claim (or deny) authorship of his text” (46). I consider this supplement to the

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publisher’s “introduction” to be a way of saving not only the writer of the book but

the book itself, a paratextual back up loosely analogous to autorecovered “saved”

digital documents.

In an essay William Sherman has usefully offered a corrective to observed

that Genette’s work on the paratext as focused almost entirely on the introduction

of the book.4 Sherman explores how we get out a book. Work on the cinematic

paratext has followed Genette in focusing on opening title sequences and

ignoring the endings and end title sequences of films.5 The analogy between

book covers and opening and end title sequences or the ending of a film in which

the book that opened the film closes just before “The End” appears, has further

broken down or reworked in ways that turn the end title sequence into multiple,

individuated stories about the main characters. As I will show at the end of the

present essay, Disney’s hybrid animated and cinematic feature film Enchanted

(dir. Kevin Lime, 2008) begins with a book much as Disney’s Snow White and

Sleeping Beauty do but ends with an end title sequence that serves as a mini-

sequel. For the moment, let me note the impossible way in which the ending of

Sleeping Beauty recalls the beginning. After the opening title sequence, the film

begins conventionally enough with a copy of a book entitled Sleeping Beauty, its

illustrated pages turning automatically with writing that is also heard in voice-over. The

camera zooms in on a particular image of the book and passes into the narrative of the

animated film. (See Figures 0, 0, 0, 0.)

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(Figures 0, 0, 0, 0)

The film ends with an inverse passage form an animated image to that image on

the last page of the book, with ”And they lived happily ever after” at the bottom of

the page. (See figures 17-20.)

Figure 17

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Figure 19 Figure 20

Yet, quite impossibly, the book does close from right to left to arrive at the back

cover of the book, as one would expect. No, instead, the book closes from left to

right so that we return to the front cover and then “The End” and “A Walt Disney

Production” superimposed, or “written” over it. Even the most conventional

manner of using the medium of the book to frame and shape the film’s narrative

could produce bizarre results.

Since the 1990s, end title sequences have expanded beyond rolling credits in

a markedly wide variety of ways that include epilogues, interviews with

characters in the film while still in character, experimental “aftershots” that some

viewers will undoubtedly miss since most viewers leave the theater or turn off the

DVD or blu-ray when the end credits begin.6 The end of the film does not

bookend the opening so much as it opens new pages of a new book. The

differences between the writing of the opening and end title sequences are also

formal. Stanitzek writes that “when watching the film at a the cinema or on video

6 As a central, perhaps inaugural example, see the end title sequence of Se7en

(1995). It is now possible to see road show exhibitions of films released from the

1930s to the 1980s with overture, entr-acte or intermission, and exit music on

DVDs.

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or a DVD, viewers see several minutes of carefully prepared closing credits

presented in the same typography as that found in the opening credits, and

music is provided to help viewers exit the film narrative.” Yet Stanitzek is hardly

describing the norm. To be sure, Universal shows the exact same cast members

in Frankenstein (dir. James Whale, 1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (dir. James

Whale, 1935), headed the end with the line “A good cast bears repeating,” but

even in the end credits of The Bride of Frankenstein, a question mark appeared

after Bride instead of Elsa Lanchester, the actress who played (and Mary Shelley

in the film’s prologue). More often than not, the typography of the end titles differs

completely the font of the opening titles. So does the music. The studio logo did

appear in the same way at the beginning and end of the film for a long period of

time, but more recently, logos have become film sequences in themselves

(Dreamworks is a good example). The animated logos typically play at the start

of the film but not at the end, whereas matte painted logos of films made from the

1930s on often appeared both at the very beginning and very end of the film.7

7 Even logos have sometimes become brief narratives. For example, the

Dreamworks logo sequence shows, in various ways, a boy fishing while sitting on

a crescent moon. The animated logo sequences of Pixar animated feature films

are also notable. For example, in the extended animated logo sequence at the

end of Wall-E (dir. Andrew Stanton, 2008), Wall-E replaces the burnt out bulb in

the lamp that always turns itself into the letter “i” in “Pixar” after pushing it down.

Wall-E then turns himself into the letter “r” after it falls down as he rushes by it. A

faux logo for the Wall-Mart like chain seen in the film, B-n-L, then appears alone

in the film’s final shot. Animated studio logos back as far as 1930s Universal

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I now turn to Taymor, Greenaway, and Moore’s films in order to examine

specific ways in which the endings and end title sequences adapt the book in in

ways that both unify the film and yet also complicate our sense of the ending of

film, of how the complete a narrative film is, of when the narrative stops and the

closing paratext begins, of when one can exit the cinema or turn off the DVD or

blu-ray. Can one still afford to write off the end of film when the end credits

begin? Or is one compelled for fearing of missing something to stay seated and

keep watching even after “The End,” potentially reentering the film from the

moments in the textual / paratextual endings after “The End” that loop back the

closing paratext to the earlier text of the film? I address these questions and

others in a necessarily tentative manner by discussing the extent to which the

films with a scale model of the earth being circled by an airplane (not built to the

same scale). Clint Eastwood uses this now old logo at the beginning of his

Changeling (2008) in order to make it consistent with the historical period of the

film’s narrative.

4 William H. Sherman, “The Beginning of 'The End': terminal paratext and the

birth of print culture, in Renaissance Paratexts Ed. Helen Smith. (Cambridge UP,

2011). See also Sherman’s essay "On the Threshold: Architecture, Paratext, and

Early Print Culture," in Sabrina A. Baron, Eric Lindquist, and Eleanor Shevlin

(eds.), Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies and the Legacy of Eisenstein

(Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2007)

5 In his brilliant essay, “Upon Leaving the Movie Theater,” in the Rustle of

Language (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), 345-46, Roland Barthes ignores end

title sequences and endings.

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endings and end title sequences of Taymor, Greenaway, and Moore’s films

paradoxically save the film author as a writer in the fullest sense by destroying or

distintegrating the book (“auteur,” you will recall, means “author” in French and

has a much higher cultural status than does the everyday “ecrivain,” or writer).

Prospero’s books do not exist in The Tempest. There are references to his

staff and to his cloak as prop, but not to what is sometimes his “book” or to his

“books.” We never see Prospero drown his books.8 The seven minute long end

title sequence of Taymor’s Tempest, designed by Kyle Cooper, transposes the

moment when Prospero “drowns” his books: as the credits roll and the camera is

submerged under water, we watch Propsero’s books fall slowly through the

ocean heading toward the bottom. Taymor originally cut Prospero’s epilogue

from the film script but ended up restoring it. In her book The Tempest, Taymor

writes: “The film’s last image of Prosperaa on the ocean cliff, her back to the

camera, tossing her magic staff to the dark rocks below, and the staff’s

subsequent shattering, is the ending. But when all was cut and timed and scored

and mixed, the rhythm of the end of the film felt truncated, incomplete. I asked

Elliott [Goldenthal] to take these last great words [the epilogue] and set them to

music for the seven-minute-long end-title sequence. And to that haunting female

vocal, sung by Beth Gibbons. The credits rolled and we drowned the books of

Prospera in the deep dark sea” (21).9 Taymor enlarges authorial agency in the

preface to her book, entitled “Rough Magic,” writing that “we drowned the books of

Prospera.” Yet this enlargement of cinematic authorship depends on the expansive,

leisurely condensation of Prospera’s transposed and visualized declaration to “drown” her

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“books” and Prospera’s ventriloquized epilogue. I read Taymor’s film as an allegory of

the immersion of the book into a residual paratexual storage space, sending off her film

and accommodating readerly and spectatorial desire for an authorial force by encrypting

and spectralizing the absent writer of the book accompanied by a speech turned requiem

sung by a female extra-diegetic voice identified only in the end title sequence rather than

spoken by Helen Mirren (Prospera). The film’s specters are re/called at the end of tie-in

screenplay book. The last two pages of the book show a still taken from the film’s end

title sequence of a book opening up after it has been plunged into the water with the

production and cast credits superimposed over the left-hand page. See Figures 0 and 0.0,

the verso and recto pages).

Figure 0 (verso page) Figure 0.0 (recto page)

Filming an adaptation of The Tempest allows Taymor to perform a paradoxical

salvage operation of the book which is not salvific: precisely because the

dorowning books are absent all paratext (no titles or authors are visible on the

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covers), the book as a medium serves as a metaphorical storage unit for film, a

book cover like the metal canisters used to house rolls of film that contain, as it

were the author. This paradox may be vividly grasped in the book of the film The

tempest, with the author listed as “Julie Taymor Adapted from the Play by William

Shakespeare”: in a paratextual space usually left blank, namely, the inside back

cover and page opposite, the film credits for the director and actors are printed

just to left of an “uncredited” book falling though water, little bubbles surrounding

it. The book of the film shows a nameless book while also recording Taymor as

the film’s author: the weirdly hybrid double author in which Taymor claims

authorship while crediting Shakespeare as her source disappears in the fold of

the of the book.

Greenaway performs a very different kind of salvage operation in Prospero’s

Books. The film has an epilogue but not an end title sequence. “The End”

appears at the bottom of the screen and remains with additional logo information

as the shot fades to black. The opening title sequence consists of one of

Greenaway’s characteristic tracking shots, the camera moving at the same pace

as in it moves right in lone long take. The sequence unfolds much like a scroll; a

huge book being turned by a naked man in the opening title sequence is just one

of many bizarre and heterogeneous scenes. By contrast, the interpolated serial

book sequences that interrupt the dialogue from The Tempest are all set up and

set off with the use of a digital paint box. Greenaway visualizes the (never

theatrically staged) book drowning in the film's final tour de force montage which

ends with the two final and book sequences. Prospero’s last books prove to be

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exceptions: Shakespeare’s yet to be completed First Folio and The Tempest. All

of the plays have been printed in the Folio, the narrator tell us, except for The

Tempest, which is written in a bound book of the same size as the Folio. The first

page we saw Prospero writing on in the film’s prologue returns first as a blank

space in what is a facsimile of the Folio and then as a film prop, a bound,

completed manuscript of The Tempest we saw Prospero begin to write in the

prologue.

The permanently blank pages of Folio becomes an empty yet potentially redemptive

allegorical space. “There are thirty five plays in the book and room for one more,” the

narrator says; “nineteen pages have been left for its inclusion right at the front of the

book, just after the preface” as the camera shows the First Folio page with the poem

entitled “To the Reader.” (See figures 1-4)

Figure 1 Figure 2

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Figure 3 Figure 4

As Caliban surfaces from the water and recovers the floating books, the narrator

offers the ostensibly reassuring comment that “We still have these two books,

safely fished from the sea.”

Of course copies of these two books are extant, but the two books in the film

exist only as props, as referent effects. Shakespeare’s safely fished books both

expand and diminish Shakespeare’s authorial presence: On the one hand, the

collected works are completed; on the author, their completion means splitting

the manuscript of The Tempest from the printed thirty four works (and implicitly

superimposing Prospero on Shakespeare as authors of The Tempest). In any

case, the drowning of Prospero’s books but not Shakespeare’s is only part of

Greenaway’s rewriting of the play. Prospero ends by liberating Ariel and

delivering the epilogue, his close up talking head shot increasingly shrinking into

a smaller frame until it occupies only its center and is surrounded by black. In an

extratexutal epilogue, Prospero’s image then becomes a photograph of Gielgud

on a stage set, and as the camera dollies back at a smooth pace in what

Greenaway “a single, bravura take” (163), we see Ariel (played by three different

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actors) running towards the camera as a text begins to be superimposed over the

applauding audience of courtiers. This last shot of the film ends as Ariel is shot in

slow motion and then jumps off the screen and over the camera.

In a moment of “iconoclash,” or uncertainty about whether this liberation from

the page is creative or destructive, the manuscript of The Tempest and of the

First Folio are is saved only insofar as the collected works are split into different

print media (handwriting and print). 10 It differs markedly form the more

symmetrical ending in the screenplay.11 In Greenaways’s extratexutal epilogue,

the book returns as an unreadable work of art: a single page an unbound page

looks like an abstract multi-media painting (See figure 7). The sequences with

“Prospero / Shakespeare’s” (164) books had already begun to make them

partially unreadable. The Folio is submerged even before it is drowned so that

the date cannot be read on the bottom of the page. Similarly, the shot of the page

with Ben Jonson’s dedicatory poem in the first Folio omits “To the memory of my

beloved” at the top of the page, showing just “The Author MR. W I L L I A M S H

A K E S P E A R E : A N D what he hath left us.” The Tempest is similarly

defaced: the manuscript is shot in such extreme close up that the film frame cuts

off he top and bottom parts of the page. (See figure 7). Writing becomes

automatic. A close up of the word “boatswain” we saw Prospero write in the

prologue returns in the First Folio sequence, along with Gielgud’s voice

pronouncing it (and “master”) off screen. But this time an exclamation mark is

added after “boatswain” by animation. (See figures 5-6).

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Figure 5 Figure 6

Figure 7 Figure 8

Similarly, in the final shot, unreadable letters are written backwards in the upper

right of the screen through animation and run right to left, some letters disappear

as others appear in a recursive cycle. (See figure 7.) “The End,” the date of

Prospero’s Books, and the film’s production companies appear first on bottom of

the final page but then only on the otherwise black screen. (See figure 8.)

Genette’s account of the publisher’s introduction of the author on the book cover

and title page is transformed by Greenaway into an “extroduction,” as it were.

My essay ends with a discussion of the completion of an illuminated

manuscript at the end of The Secret of Kells. Lev Manovich observes that

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animation, marginalized when cinema became primarily narrative cinema, has

returned to the center in the wake of digital film.12 Yet animation has also

occupied a new margin: the animated feature film end title sequence, noticeably

expanded in animated films like A Bug’s Life (dir. Dave Foley, 1998). Every Pixar

feature animated film ends with an integrated epilogue and end title sequence.

Writing in 2002, Manovich could not foresee new developments in immersive

cinema that introduce new kinds of books in the cinematic paratext and new uses

of the book as a cinematic medium: the return and continued run of 3D cinema,

the 3D effect of LCD flatscreen computers and television sets, 3D television sets,

and moving holographs.13 The end titles of Kung Fu Panda (dir. Mark Osborne,

2008), for example, continuously unfold horizontally as a remarkably long

Chinese scroll, recalling the scroll that is central to the plot of the film.

The Secret of Kells combines 2D and 3D animation and is explicitly about

saving the book, with the book in need of being finished and also made

analogous to film--the illuminated manuscript projects light, and the Book of Kells

is reduced to one final page, the Chi-ro page. (See Figure 15.) The book

appears neither in the opening or end title sequences, but it is does appear at the

end of the film. Brendon (Michael McGrath), one of the two illuminators and now

grown up, returns to the Abbey of Kells where he had apparently been killed long

ago by Viking invaders and his book destroyed by them along with the

Scriptorium. Abbot Cellach (Brandon Gleason) tells Brendon that all Cellach has

is a fragment of the manuscript on a single page he unfolds and shows to

Brendon. (See figure 9). Brendon consoles him by giving him the complete book

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and giving a new title: the Book of Kells instead of the Book of Ioana.

Figure 9 Figure 10

Figure 11 Figure 12

This sequence follows a previous sequence in which we see the book’s master

illuminator, Brother Aidan, hand the completed book to his adult assistant Brendon and

tells Brendon to bring it “to the people.” Brendon’s return to the Abbey is followed by

Cellach’s vision of the blindingly illuminated and momentarily animated book. (See

figures 11 and 12) Seven shots of close ups of details from the book punctuated by a

blinding white light are followed by the complete Chi-ro page (See figures 13-15).

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Figure 13 Figure 14

Figure 15 Figure 16

The Chi-ro page (figure 15) then becomes three-dimensional as the camera

begins to pass through it (See figure 16). The end title sequence follows as the

aftermath of this unreadable vision.

The Secret of Kells saves The Book of Kells insofar as he book is retitled,

fragmented into animated close ups which freeze on the page, then condensed

to a single page, which is then dismantled as the camera moves though it. The

canniness of The Secrets of Kells’ quasi-mystical salvage operation (derived

from Celtic mythology rather than Christian mythology) may be grasped more

fully if we compare the film to two animated films made the same year also

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related to medieval books. We see pages of two different books in the opening

title sequence of The Tale of Desperaux (dir. Sam Fell, 2008), but the dominant

metaphor is an animated thread that makes its way through various surfaces.

The film title appears for a final time at the end of a long paper for the “scrolling”

credits, only this time next to a needle and thread.14 Disney’s hybrid animated

and filmic Enchanted (dir. Kevin Lime, 2008), begins by recalling the use of

books at the beginning of the earlier Disney that it parodies such as Sleeping

Beauty and Snow White. We see a book on stand, but Enchanted immediately

departs from the earlier films as the book opens up as a series of three pop-up

book pages before entering the animated prologue of the film. The film ends with

a series of happy endings alternately in live cinema and in animation all held

together through pop up pages that serve as wipes from one scene to the next,

the pop up pages providing a kind of 3D effect in 2D cinema. “The End”

becomes the final pop up page, folds it up, and when it closes we the Enchanted

book just where we saw at the beginning of the film.15 Happy endings can be

evenly distributed through a 3D effect that (un)folds live action into animation and

blurring the line between the end of the film and the beginning of the paratextual

scrolling title sequence follows the shot of the book of Enchanted closing itself

up. Rather than have pages of an ordinary printed book being turned over to

open and close the film, as in Sleeping Beauty, the pop-up book in Enchanted

affords a closing and reopening of the ending into multiple endings. 16 Through

its idiosyncratic animation style, the ending of Secret of Kells provides a very

different complete 3D effect “vision” of the illuminated book as animated filmic

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medium. The completion of the book in the film and its completion of the film’s

narrative in the book’s visualization depends both on rendering the book as

unreadable vision and on the complete elimination the book from the opening

and end title sequences.17

In different ways, then, the endings of Taymor’s, Greenaway’s, and Moore’s

films save film authorship while showing the book disappearing at the very limits

of film. Through its absence or its placement, the ordinarily unwatched end title

sequence becomes readable as a kind of double writing, an epilogue in the form

of a reprieve that at the same time is a kind of unrecognized mourning that

follows the ending of a film. Film authorship is saved, but the in the crypt provide

by images of another medium, the book, and another kind of writing.

Questions:

Love this as a placeholder for WWTYCDTS—what does it mean in the play to

“drown a book”; anyone ever asked that? Seems like a fascinating catechresis to

explore…and really interesting for us (drown history of the book???)—history

gets drowned—this is coming off the way Taymor’s virtuoso camera underwater

recasts sea as storage unit vs the whitewashing / explosion of white space /

disappearance of ink (temporal games) of Greenaway…how stands the drowning

(futural, unseen, projective) in the play with the Gonzalo / Prospero

(humanist???) link keyed to the boat in which M and P are set adrift—which we

are led to infer is provided with necessaries—such as books, and the library in

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which Prospero lost himself or his state in the pre-world of the play? The

Tempest as a parody / inversion of Darnton’s Communication Circuit???? Could

we end by undoing or introducing un-reading into the circuit---messing with the

obligatory starting point of H of B???? Much as I’d like to do with De Certeau’s

“reading as poaching” (poaching is non/t reading)….

8 See Barbara Mowat, “Prospero’s Book,” Shakespeare Quarterly 52.1 (2001), 1-

33. The Tempest refers, Mowat notes, both to a singular book (“I'll to my book”;

“I'll drown my book”) and to plural books (“books I priz'd above my dukedom”;

“burn but his books”).  Mowat insists that Prospero’s book is present even though

there is no stage direction for it in the text: “Prospero's always-offstage book” is

the “one book essential to his magic, the one that he goes offstage to consult

before the series of spirit spectacles begins in Act 3, the same one that near the

end of the play he promises to drown as he abjures his magic.” Prospero’s

strangely singular and clearly spectral singular plural book/s “appear” only as

phantom referents in the printed script of the play. It makes no sense at all to

make a prop for the actor playing Prospero to consult off-stage (Prospero and the

actor playing him are somewhat psychotically conflated through a psychologistic

reading of the play as literature and performance equated). What are we to

make of a phantom prop that is referenced both in the singular and the plural

without ever be shown on stage? What is the relation between the book/s and

the spirits Prospero commands? Greenaway and Taymor address these

questions in very different ways by materializing what is missing.

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9 Julie Taymor, The Tempest, Adapted From the Play by William Shakespeare

(New York: Abrams, 2010). Peter Greenaway’s tie-in book, Prospero's Books: A

Film of the Shakespeare's The Tempest (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1991)

serves as a paratextual commentary on the film, providing information about the

sources of each the twenty-seven books shown in the films and giving their titles

once again as they are drowned (see p. 161-62). The Secret of Kells blu-ray

edition includes a comic booklet version of the film.

10 Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds. Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in

Science, Religion and Art (2002). Latour and Wiebel write: “Iconoclasm is when

we know what is happening in the act of breaking and what the motivations are

for what appears as a clear project of destruction of art; iconoclash, on the other

hand, is when one does not know, one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for

which there is no way to now, without further inquiry, whether it is destructive or

constructive” (14).

11 In the screenplay, the film’s ending loops back to the beginning: “A series of

ever decreasing splashes drip and plop into the black water . . . thus the

beginning of the film is reprised. A final splash plops . . . all water-movement

ceases and the screen is a black velvet void” (Prospero's Books: A Film of the

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NOTES

Shakespeare's The Tempest, 164).

12 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002)

13 On immersive cinema, see Allison Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine:

Cinema, Musuems, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia UP, 2008).

Griffiths focuses on IMAX cinema, not 3D. See also the motionless 3D hologram

of the Fabarge egg sequences in Ocean’s Twelve (dr. Steven Soderberg, 2004)

and Anne Eisenberg, “Holograms Deliver 3-D, Without the Goofy Glasses,” New

York Times, December 4, 2010.

14 The Tale of Despareux includes sequences in which Despareux reads a

manuscript and in which a cook named Arcimboldo made of vegetables comes to

life that create something approaching 3D effects in the 2D cinema. Vegetables

(recalling Arcimboldo) are drawn on the margins of the unscrolling distressed

parchment that provides the backing for the end title credits.

15 Pages from the book that opens Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (dir. Clyde

Geronimi, 1959) return to reorient the viewer, like a voice-over narrator.

In Taymor’s films, books are never seen without paratexts but they are all bound.

No covers, no tiles and author’s names. Prospero’s books are bound, with

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paratexts, but without covers. They have peritexts inside, but they are now

identified by tile and author when they are destroyed except for Shakespeare’s

First Folio. The cover shows the initials “W.S.” goes between unbound books,

sometimes damaged, sometimes disintegrating, sometimes burning both in the

diegesis and in the interpolated sequences as opposed to bound books of

Shakespeare. Complete versus incomplete.

16 The ending of Enchanted develops the practice of earlier, much briefer

epilogues in films such as American Graffiti (dir. George Lucas, 1973) and

already parodied in Animal House (dir. John Landis, 1978) in which a shot of a

character is matched to written text about what became of him or her later in life.

For an ending similar to Enchanted’s that uses pop-up book pages as a book

medium for film, see Baby Moma (dir. Michael McCullers, 2008).

17 Both the opening and end title sequences have voice-overs. Asiling (Christen

Mooney), a fairy who resides near Kells and who helps Brendon find berries to

make ink for what will become the Book of Kells, gives a voice-over prologue,

Band well into the scrolling credits, an unidentified and uncredited voice-over

speaks briefly in Latin (the Latin text is presumably to be found in the Book of

Kells).

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