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Saturday, 21 January 2012
Kim Novak defies intertextuality
Follow this link to an extract from the BBC Radio 4 programme PM 11th January 2012 where the actress Kim Novak who starred in Alfred Hitchcock's film 'Vertigo' complains that the exact score from the film was used in the 2012 film 'The Artist'. The use of the music was credited in the film and represents what Media academics describe as 'intertextuality' - where a borrowed reference to another text can mean different things to those who don't recognise it from those who do. Unusually and controversially Kim Novak objects strongly to this piece of intertextually and has taken out a full page advert in the actors' magazine 'Variety' describing the intertextual use of music from her famous scene in Vertigo as a'rape'. She goes on to describe herself as an 'original' artist. How do you feel about this use of the word rape? How would structuralist theorists like Barthes view her opinion?
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Don't care much about Barthes, Novak was a bit silly to use the word 'rape' though one can understand the strength of her feeling given that the hotel room scene in Vertigo was the best scene in the best film she ever made. As regards the Artist, my reaction was that the Vertigo theme was absurdly inappropriate, pretentious and distracting, introducing music of depth and shadows into a film that otherwise was (to its credit, on its own faux-naif terms) entirely obvious and without ambiguity. A stupid tasteless error on the part of the director, showing that even in the postmodern age it's not true that 'anything goes'. Taste and discretion are still needed.
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