the italianist 32 · 2012 · 285-291
MISE - EN - SCÈNE
DVD commentaries: Three points of view
Notes on DVD commentaries Robert S. C. Gordon
The experience of recording a DVD or Blu-ray Disc (BD) commentary as an academic specialist has a strange feel to it, at once cutting-edge and antique. The contemporary feel comes from various intersecting and unusual forms of contact. There’s the studio technology; there’s the sense of direct participation in the digitalization of film as a medium and of its proliferating paraphernalia, of which DVD extras were one of the relatively early manifestations. And there’s contact with the distinctly commercial drive behind film distribution in the commissioning of such material (driven largely by a loss-leading principle, though, since the academic commentator accrues prestige and forms of seriousness and cultural capital to a given product, but is hardly likely to boost sales). In academic terms, narrowly speaking, the experience talks also to very contemporary issues and anxieties (certainly in the UK) about scholarly research in the humanities needing to justify its on-going existence by reaching out to and having ‘impact’ upon audiences, well beyond the ideal community of scholars, studying collectively, in dialogue with each other and refining knowledge as they go. All this can make for a slightly disconcerting encounter between industry and academia. From my own experience, a first inkling of this came in a simple difference in conceptions of time and money: when first asked if I would be interested in doing a commentary – requiring a body of closely detailed material the equivalent of, say, two academic articles – I was told there was no particular hurry for the production team, they could give me anything up to four-to-six weeks to prepare. I had recently made a grant application to research and produce two articles over a period of nine months.
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For all its contemporary feel, though, there is also something rather oldworld and literary about the film commentary, with both positive and negative consequences. The work of preparing a voiced reading of an entire, single film text – perhaps especially one whose packaging and branding, with academic commentary included, is firmly attached to arthouse or auteuriste traditions1 – is somewhat akin to the work of ‘close reading’ or ‘practical criticism’ that comes down to us from the history of literary criticism, from figures such as I. A. Richards and the New Critics, who shored up the academic legitimacy of the modern academic study of post-classical literature in the early 20th century, by way of devoted attention to the inner workings of a single text. There is certainly an argument to be made that the academic audio commentary, the ‘close reading’ or explication de texte share analogous functions with respect to the positioning of their specialist disciplines within a shifting field of cultural hierarchy. (Richards was also famously devoted, in his way, to forms of what we might call impact with his work on Basic English.) Travelling still further backwards in this notional genealogy, both audio commentary and close reading are calques on the ancient traditions of Biblical or Talmudic commentary or, say, in the Italian tradition, of Dante glosses and commentaries. This is evident first of all in terms of the material text itself: all these commentary practices are remarkable for offering the simultaneous presence, on the page or on the audio-visual track, of the text and the gloss, the work and the commentary together. Crucially, this means the commentaries are forced to follow the rigid straight-jacket of the line-by-line or shot-by-shot linear sequence of the text, which determines and constrains the scope and nature of what the commentator can say. There’s a deep heuristic question at stake here, about how commentaries of all kinds can and must ‘fit’ their texts, and whether and in what ways ‘mere’ description can become interpretation. At an extreme, it becomes a question of whether or not the most profound engagement with a text would be to transcribe it, redescribe and ultimately to write it again in perfect replica (Pierre Menard docet). Film commentators are typically instructed not just to describe what they see happening on screen, as the viewer can see that for themselves, but rather to supplement and complement the image (particularly the image, as the sound is either muted or turned down when the commentary track is activated). And yet, there comes a point when commentaries seem to do little but that – describe or re-describe – and are no less illuminating as a result. The demonstrative ‘here we can see that…’, or some variant on it, is an unavoidable commonplace for the glossator of texts and films. The best analogies for this thread of commentary practice based in re-description lie somewhere between the tradition of ekphrasis and the commentary-by-segmentation method of Dante’s Vita nova (although there, Dante is his own scribe, editing and commenting on his own earlier work: we’re closer to the Director’s Cut and auto-commentary of, say, Ridley Scott and his multiple celluloid and digital versions of Blade Runner).2
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There is a small niche of critical work on DVD technology and its contents, commentaries included. In this field, however, academic commentary is, broadly speaking, ignored in favour of discussion of the director or ‘auteur’ commentary such as Scott’s. Deborah and Mark Parker use the director commentary to probe away at forms and theories of authorial intention in film, which they argue is extended in what they call a ‘reorientation’ of a film in its DVD packaging, amounting to something like a new edition.3 Their article includes only one footnote on scholar commentaries, citing cases such as Laura Mulvey’s commentary on Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960; Criterion DVD, 1999) for its development and application of Mulvey’s well known theoretical work on the gaze and the female subject in film (pp. 21-22). One principle they raise, which we can apply as much to scholar as to director commentaries, is their positioning of such work ‘at the margins of technological advance and the market’ (p. 15). The space for commentaries was opened up by evolutionary accident, as it were – a by-product of the digital storage space available on disc and the perceived need to be seen to be offering ‘extras’ in this reoriented republication. For similar reasons, as Bertellini and Reich note, it is more than likely that this incidental space will disappear as quickly and as accidentally as it appeared, by way of unconnected changes in market and technology.4 An analogous case is made by Matt Hills in his analysis of the role of DVDs in so-called ‘TVIII’ (post-analogue, multiplatform television), particularly TV box sets and their ‘infotainment extras’, of which ‘writer-director-performer DVD commentary’ is just one part.5 Hills warns that we should, however, be cautious of overstating the changes brought about by new media and DVD culture to the reception of television. He notes that, although box-set commentaries clearly stake a claim to higher cultural prestige and to a greater sense of intimacy with and insider knowledge of the makers of the programme, designed to appeal to fan culture in particular, this relation is in the end not so different from older forms of ‘insider’ or ‘extra’ knowledge, such as author interviews or fanzines. All these extras, for Hills, are elaborations of Genette’s category of ‘paratexts’ (p. 53). He also makes an interesting distinction between multi-voice commentaries, which make for natural informality and so encourage that sense of intimacy and insider knowledge, and more formal, stilted single-voice commentaries (the norm for scholar commentaries, although there are exceptions). Hills hardly mentions scholar commentaries at all in his article, but one feature of his analysis applies rather well to this other form and it is a feature noted above that sets commentary apart from other pre-digital film ‘paratexts’: this is their ‘synchronised’ nature (p. 53). Through what he also labels ‘co-watching or para-watching’ rhythm of the commentary track, a shared experience of film reception and response is created. Co-watching with a scholar is in part an experience of acquiring expertise, insider production knowledge and knowledge of the film’s genesis and history, in line
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with the secret insight that only a filmmaker can provide, but it is perhaps more than this, a ‘thick’ articulation of the viewing experience, staged in time with the film track. Bertellini and Reich offer a rare, brief example of analysis focussed on academic commentary. They point to the crucial importance for the scholar commentary – a small niche within a niche – of the US Criterion series, not only credited with the launch of the form with Ronald Haver’s laser disc commentary on King Kong (1933; Criterion, 1984), but also with a major role in sustaining the marketing of foreign-language, arthouse, ‘luxury’ DVD products in the American market, through its extensive and ‘ever-growing menu of special features – including entire director’s cuts, deleted scenes, making-of documentaries, exclusive or vintage interviews with the film’s makers or celebrated critics, video essays, professional biographies, and photographic essays’.6 In the UK context, perhaps the most pioneering and most influential analogous example has been the British Film Institute (BFI) DVD series. An interesting set of reflections on BFI commentary policy and practice is found in a published dialogue between a BFI commentator and film critic, Ginette Vincendeau, and a BFI commissioner, Caroline Millar.7 The dialogue touches on a wide range of issues, from the BFI’s charter as a state-sponsored public body (quite unlike Criterion, but in some ways akin to the UK university system, whence most scholar commentators are drawn), on the economics of DVD production, on questions of canon and auteurism, and on the link to both pedagogy and print scholarship. Vincendeau also talks of the practical problems of writing and then reciting an audio commentary, problems of articulation, of words and silence, and of communication that I recognised from my own attempts at the format. My own experience between the sound booth and the scribal tradition comes from recording two full-length audio film commentaries, in 2007 and 2011: the first, on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema; and the second, on Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini’s 1948 neorealist classic, Ladri di biciclette. Both films are broadly comparable in kind – they are major works in the conventional canon of postwar European ‘art’ cinema (and marketable in a niche market as a result) – although the experience of producing a commentary was distinct in each case in a number of ways. Both commissions came about as a direct result of academic research I had carried out on these films, or at least on their makers. I had published an academic monograph on Pasolini, which however only dealt with Teorema briefly as part of a general analysis of Pasolini’s large and varied oeuvre, in literature, journalism and film; and a BFI Film Classics volume entirely devoted to Ladri di biciclette.8 Before attempting the first, I researched as thoroughly as I could the production and reception of the film, but also made a point of dipping into examples of director or performer commentary. Such material, as we have seen, moves us
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from the field of cinephilia and film study, whose serious attention to foreign art films makes for some interest in sober and sustained commentary analysis, to fan sub-cultures; but, as we saw above, filmmaker-commentary material is also far more cited and analysed in academic work than are academic commentaries. Aside from the postmodern and self-consciously auteurist commentaries of Ridley Scott mentioned above, I looked at some of Jerry Seinfeld’s and Larry David’s commentaries on episodes of the TV comedy show Seinfeld. Taking forward the guiding concept of the show itself as a ‘show about nothing’, the commentaries were a further performance of chat ‘about nothing’, with random riffs on the day a scene was filmed, the bit-part actor in the background, or even not remembering the first thing about what was happening on screen. Although no academic commentary has the license to come up with ‘nothing’ to say, in a sense this was a case analogous to the phenomenon noted above of commentaries extending and repeating in parallel (re-decribing) the primary text. Conversely, I also looked at two commentaries for a 2006 Sony release of the DVD of Antonioni’s 1975 The Passenger/Professione: Reporter, one by screenwriter Mark Peploe (with Aurora Irvine) and another by star Jack Nicholson, each in their way as precise, analytical and informative – in snatches at least – and as technically alert as any close reading commentary. My commentary on Teorema was commissioned by the BFI for a new DVD transfer of a recently restored print of the film prepared in Italy, to be included in its prestigious in-house list of mostly ‘arthouse’ DVDs.9 The BFI offered a flat fee for the commentary, to be prepared within six weeks and recorded over one full day at a Soho studio in London, with a team of producer and sound recordist. The producer was nervously waiting on the arrival, in another nearby studio, of the star of the film, Terence Stamp, who had agreed to an interview about his memories of working with Pasolini on Teorema. Stamp’s interview was later included as a fascinating thirty-minute film extra on the DVD and was far more of a unique selling-point than a dry academic commentary. (Stamp was famously baffled and at times offended by Pasolini’s odd demands.) The BFI requested submission of a full and closely time-coded script for the commentary in advance of recording, which made for a demanding and intensive kind of preparatory work. They provided as a model an example of a previous coded script they had worked on, David Forgacs and Rossana Capitano’s excellent commentary on the restored version of Luchino Visconti’s 1963 Il gattopardo for a BFI DVD (2004). The Il gattopardo commentary did a superb job of combining close, technical analysis of mise en scene, cinematography, sound and editing with extensive fragments of contextualization, which meant in that film everything from Risorgimento historical and Lampedusa-related literary background, to aspects of actors’ careers as well as the director’s, extensive comment on production and the contributions of different members of the crew, and material on the distribution
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and reception of the film also. In other words, far from being an introverted, self-sufficient close reading, as the form might demand, this was commentary as a mosaic of multiple levels of reading. The sequential tyranny of the film itself created constraints, for sure, but also opportunities for rhythms of digression and speculation in the commentary, as well as for disciplined focus on the specifity of the audio-visual phenomenon on show at any one moment. The challenge, as I would find with Teorema, was to select the right moments to digress from the scene at hand to fill in any contextual material: I was keen, for example, to give a couple of minutes over to the extraordinary story of Teorema’s involvement in protests at the 1968 Venice Film Festival and the condemnation of the film by no less a figure than Pope Paul vi. But to leave off at any point the relentless symmetries of structure and sequence, perhaps especially of a film like Teorema, was to risk losing the rhythm of the commentary as a complement to the rhythm of the film. Finally, the model of the Il gattopardo commentary underlined the performative nature of the commentary, literally in its recital in a certain register in the sound studio, but also in its demonstrative and experiential rhetoric (deictic phrases such as ‘this is...’, ‘we...’, ‘now...’ abound), reminding us that the commentator is in a sense a voice of and for the viewer as s/he ‘co-watches’ the film (and listens to the commentary): this works its way out at the level of syntax and speech act quite apart from the level content. In itself, it makes for a hybrid kind of voice, somewhere between the academic register of authority and the sense of the shared experience of viewing. My second commentary was commissioned by Arrow Films, a film distribution company based in Hertfordshire, UK. Arrow owns rights to niche films in arthouse, but also horror, adult and other genres. Bicycle Thieves appeared in an Arrow Academy strand in dual Blu-ray or BD and DVD format. The Academy strand is currently made up predominantly of Italian classic films (five at the time of writing: Bicycle Thieves, The Conformist, The Garden of the Finzi-Contini, General Della Rovere, Miracle in Milan) and a few other European canonical classics. For this commentary, I was also offered a flat fee (smaller than the BFI’s, to my and the commissioner’s surprise). Recording took place in a Covent Garden studio. Unlike with Teorema, I was left free to prepare as I thought best, and no script was required. The recording took place in one continuous take, whereas Teorema had taken six hours of recording, re-recording and re-synchronising. Having recently written a detailed study of the film, I decided to improvise from notes and to aim for a more responsive, but also more relaxed kind of commentary. Where the book required a short plot summary – something of an unwritten rule in the Film Classics genre and one tellingly hard to write for a famously plot-thinned work like Bicycle Thieves – talking in response to the film imposed a tyranny of sequence but not one of plot, in ways which underscored the web-like subtlety of a film of only apparent simplicity.
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Recording a DVD or BD commentary is, then, not only awkward, but also intensely rewarding, something like an ideal of sustained engagement with our object of research and study, and one easily transferable and reproducible in the seminar room (by asking students to record their own segments of commentary, for example). As Penny Marcus describes so well in her reflections, it is closely entwined with our own sense of audiences’ and our students’ ‘enchantment’ with the medium and with the particular films we are commenting upon. We should not kid ourselves, however: if video killed the radio star, it is more than likely that the internet, with its fluid and open exchanges of online response and interactivity, is already in the process of killing this once-glamorous new tool.10
Notes 1
Catherine Grant has referred to DVDs of this kind as
‘auteur machines’ (‘Auteur Machines? Auteurism and the
6
Bertellini and Reich, pp. 104.
7
James Bennett and Tom Brown, ‘The Place, Purpose, and
DVD’, in James Bennett and Tom Brown (eds.), Film and
Practice of the BFI’s DVD collection and the Academic Film
Television after DVD (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 101-
Commentary: An Interview with Caroline Millar and Ginette
15).
Vincendeau’, in Bennett and Brown, pp. 116-27.
2
See, for example, the 2007 Warner Blu-ray five-disc
8
Robert S. C. Gordon, Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity
edition of Blade Runner (1982), which includes four full
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Bicycle Thieves
commentaries (one by Scott, two by groups of technicians
(London: Palgrave/BFI Film Classics, 2008).
and one by an academic), and five different full-length cuts of the film, as well as numerous documentaries and featurettes.
9
It is telling that, recently, the BFI has increasingly shifted
its DVD/BD niche from arthouse film to take in also archive and documentary material repackaged for a curious new
Deborah Parker and Mark Parker, ‘Directors and DVD
audience (see, e.g., The Great White Silence on Captain
Commentary: The Specifics of Intention’, The Journal of
Scott’s expedition; or Here’s a Health to the Barley Mow:
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 62: 1 (2004), 13-22 (p.14).
A Century of Folk Customs and Ancient Rural Games, both
3
4
Giorgio Bertellini and Jacqueline Reich, ‘DVD
Supplements: A Commentary on Commentaries, Cinema Journal, 49: 3 (2010), 103-5. 5
Matt Hills, ‘From the Box in the Corner to the Box Set on
the Shelf’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 5: 1
BFI, 2011). 10
For a characteristically trenchant on-line declaration of
the death of DVD commentaries, see: [accessed 15 February 2012].
(2007), 41-60 (on commentaries, pp. 45, 52-8).
Robert S. C. Gordon, University of Cambridge, UK (
[email protected]) © Department of Italian Studies, University of Reading, Department of Italian, University of Cambridge and Italian Studies, University of Leeds
10.1179/026143412X13442661823773
