The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62:1 Winter 2004
DEBORAH PARKER AND MARK PARKER
Directors and DVD Commentary:
The Specifics of Intention
Midway through the commentary track to the
DVD of Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog reveals
that the Amazonian Indians offered to kill his
star Klaus Kinski.1
Herzog jokingly adds that he
wanted to kill the actor himself while working
on an earlier movie with Kinski, whose manic
tirades were famous in the industry, and that he
briefly considered the present offer.2
This is an
amusing and memorable anecdote, told with
great brio by Herzog. However, it adds another
layer to the film itself, as Herzog, moving from
raconteur to director, explains how he took
artistic advantage of the situation. The smoldering
hostility registered on the faces of the Indians as
they surround Fitzcarraldo and his remaining
crew during a meal on the ship provides a
powerful expression--perhaps a culmination--
of the menace with which Herzog tried to imbue
his film. The anecdote also reveals the compli-
cations in Herzog's stated project of recording
the faces of the Peruvian Indians, whom he well
knew would be changed forever by the incur-
sion of other cultures and modernity. To render
a reality and to create an artistic object are not
so easily separable.
Herzog's story about the trials of working
with Klaus Kinski is but one example of the
kind of information that emerges in discussions
of film on digital video discs (DVDs). Such
an anecdote, drawn from a printed book, would
be suggestive, but in this particular form, as
part of the commentary track to the scene that
it describes, it has an unusual immediacy. It
becomes another text, intimately related to
the film, complicating the experience of the
film, but nevertheless not quite the film. With
it come considerations barely discernible in the
film, more abstract, but just as compelling, as
Herzog reorients the viewer's relation to the
material.
Such moments will soon be much more com-
mon in the study and appreciation of film, as the
DVD medium permeates the market. Boasting
the same high visual and sound quality as laser
discs, but more practical, DVDs are rapidly
becoming a household staple. Recent statistics
show that between 16% and 25% of U.S. homes
have a DVD player, and as of August 28, 2001,
DVD sales in the United States had jumped to
$127.7 million, more than double the previous
year's $58.8 million.3
The advantages of the
format--durability, compactness, cost--have
driven the switch from videotape to digital
media, but with the new format have come
other opportunities. The storage capacity of the
DVD (an astonishing 8.5 gigabytes achieved by
a remarkable combination of compression and
the addition of a second layer of data)4
allows
for much more than a copy of the film, and a
host of supplementary materials now accompan-
ies each title. The medium, as in other cases of
technological transformation, may well be the
message. However, what we wish to address
here is the way this new medium allows for cer-
tain new messages and new approaches not only
in the formal study of film but in the experience
of film more generally.
The first DVDs, introduced in March 1997,
contained just the film and subtitled versions in
French or Spanish. Current special edition
DVDs brim with supplementary materials. The
two-disc set of The Fight Club contains four
14 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
audio commentary tracks, three theatrical trailers,
twelve American TV spots, seven deleted/
alternate scenes, a behind-the-scenes featurette,
fourteen segments on production and video
effects with alternate video and audio tracks,
storyboards, the film's press kit, the transcript
of an interview with Edward Norton, and cast
and crew bios--and this is just a partial list. The
time required for taking in these materials far
exceeds the viewing time of the film.
Some of this supplementary material is simply
recycled, such as electronic press kits, trailers
from theatrical release, or deleted scenes. Other
features are specifically commissioned for the
DVD release. The production and packaging of
these extra features have become an industry in
itself. Larger studios such as Paramount and
DreamWorks have been producing documentary-
style behind-the-scenes features during the
shooting of a film for at least three years.5
Other
supplementary material is created by smaller,
independent film companies after the film is
shot and edited. Once a film is "locked" or
given its final edit, such companies make
requests for deleted scenes. Their staffs then
convene to determine further packaging details,
which can vary widely from creative re-editing
of materials to imaginative extensions of the
film. For the Gladiator DVD film editor Pietro
Scalia produced a montage from footage
excluded from the final cut. In the case of David
Fincher's thriller Se7en, Mike Mulvihill, vice-
president of content development at New Line
Home Entertainment, explains that the company
decided to "make the disc as if it had been cre-
ated by serial killer John Doe himself."6
Other
companies produce more overtly critical and
scholarly supplementary materials. Procedures
differ considerably at independent companies such
as Anchor Bay and the Criterion collection,
which produce DVDs of older as well as recent
films. Criterion collection's producers, who aim
to produce an anthology, spend months research-
ing a film and checking archives worldwide for
additional materials. Most interesting for stu-
dents of film, however, is the production of a
commentary track, an audio track that runs
the length of the film. Typically the director,
writer, or sundry crew members assemble to
record the commentary track, but some editions
of DVDs--often re-releases of older films--
provide critical and scholarly analysis.7
It would be easy to dismiss much of this
supplementary material as superfluous, as sec-
ond-rate entertainment, or simply as redundant
promotional materials. Somewhat obscured in
this rush of additional material and the marketing
hype that surrounds it, however, is the trans-
formative nature of this change in format. One
index of this change is the bibliographic termi-
nology newly appropriated for DVDs, which
present themselves as "special editions" or
"anthologies," and that generally divide the film
not into "scenes" but into "chapters." Films, even
as they have increasingly taken the place of
books in culture, have routinely adopted, some-
what anxiously, the trappings of literature and
the book, and the application of this vocabulary
to DVDs extends this familiar practice. But
these bibliographic terms are worth pondering
in another sense as well, one in which the appli-
cability of such a description should be care-
fully considered. DVDs are no longer simply
copies of films, like videotapes; they have been
physically changed by the process of digitiza-
tion. There is an obvious sense in which this is
so. Digitization affords the opportunity of
cleaning up scratches and blots in the visual
track as well as sonic imperfections. The color
is routinely enhanced as well, especially in the
case of digitization of older prints. All this
comes, however, with some loss of data during
compression.8
Hence, in the most rudimentary,
physical sense, the DVD version is a recon-
struction. Even more transformative, however,
is the new relation between film and audience
offered by the DVD. The effect of the film is
now, at least potentially, intensely mediated by
"supplementary materials," which include
extensive commentary by directors and writers,
the reminiscence of actors, the technical remarks
of cameramen and set designers, and the critical
remarks of scholars. The DVD edition is essen-
tially a reorientation of the film, often carried
out by a variety of agents, and subject to a wide
variety of choices made by the eventual view-
ers. Consciously or not, the DVD constitutes a
new edition, and it should be seen in these
terms.
The dichotomy between entertainment and
critical apparatus is evident to the participants
themselves. DVD producers, at least publicly, are
unanimous in claiming that the extra features
are intended to enhance viewers' appreciation
Parker and Parker Directors and DVD Commentary: The Specifics of Intention 15
and understanding of a film. As Jay Douglas,
vice-president of Anchor Bay Entertainment,
observes, the special features "open up contact"
with the talent behind a film, enabling viewers
to "hear the enthusiasm of the directors" and to
learn "the story of how the film got made."9
Yet
Tim Allen, who has edited many commentary
tracks, reports that directors routinely quip,
"Who is going to listen to this except a bunch of
film students?"10
In his commentary to Out of
Sight Steven Soderbergh seems even more
doubtful about the audience, wondering aloud
"Do people actually listen to this stuff?"11
While the sales figures for DVDs show that pur-
chasers extend far beyond the world of film
buffs, determining the audience for the extra
materials is not easy. According to a recent
Wall Street Journal article, viewers are just as
likely to claim that they are "disappointed" if a
disc contains no bonus materials as to admit
they watch them "very rarely."12
In the face of
uncertainty about the audience for these mater-
ials, many studios are simply piling on the
extras. The result, as Guido Henkel, editor of
DVD Review wryly observes, can resemble "a
landfill in which everything is dumped in with-
out any sort of vision, simply to create selling
points on the back of the packaging."13
One might note the precarious nature of the
anthologizing venture. It emerges as a kind of
fold in the film market, a space created by tech-
nological innovation and the ambiguities of an
emerging market. What drives the market for
DVDs, clearly, is improved image and sound
quality, both immediately and over repeated
viewings, as well as economies of manufacture
and distribution.14
Increased capacity, in excess
of what is necessary to present the film itself, is
a secondary benefit of digitization, not the goal
that drove development of the medium. In itself,
the opportunity provided by such an increase is
a spare one. It affords space for certain mater-
ials, but it cannot, in itself, provide a rationale
for creating them. One expects market demand
to do that. But in this case, as the comments of
various producers and performers suggest, there
is no clearly articulated demand. Consumers
expect these "bonus" features, although it is not
clear that the absence of such features would
cause them not to buy digitized versions of a
film, and larger studios, almost defensively,
provide them.15
This structures the product,
and the volume of mass market DVDs, chock full
of supplementary materials, reinforces this partic-
ular format. This structure enables the produc-
tion of more serious or scholarly supplementary
materials.
As is often the case in the history of criticism
and art in the last 200 years, the space for this
kind of cultural life is found on the margins of
technological advance and the market. At its
best, commentary by directors and screen
writers can afford a glimpse of the care and
deliberation behind the production of movies:
how details are carefully weighed for signifi-
cance, how patterns of meaning are built up and
maintained, and how the editing process shapes
meaning out of conflicting visions. It also shows
the limits of intention, that is, the ways in which
contingency and chance in shooting a film can
become part of meaning. For those unaccus-
tomed to thinking in terms of the deliberate
processes of construction, selection, and con-
centration crucial to art, these commentaries,
delivered by authoritative figures such as direc-
tors, writers, and set designers, can be a valu-
able, pragmatic introduction to the study and
enjoyment of film.16
A complete study of the DVD as a form for
film would require a more extensive review of
the history of the transmission of film than is
possible here; one in which different kinds of
projection, different kinds of reconstruction,
and the videotape format would only be the
most obvious--and perhaps not the most import-
ant--topics. That study would surely demon-
strate a point made eloquently and forcefully by
D. F. McKenzie in Bibliography and the Sociol-
ogy of Texts: "not only is any recorded text
bound to be deformed by the processes of its
transmission, but even the form it does have is
shown to be less an embodiment of past mean-
ing than a pretext for present meaning."17
In the
remainder of this essay, we would like to examine
one facet of the DVD's reorientation of film,
the new prominence it gives to questions of
intention, both directorial and cinematographical,
and to speculate on the curious fitness of this
recrudescence for the present moment.18
Intention is as vexed a concept in film studies
as it has been in the study of literary texts.
Nevertheless, in both fields the last twenty to
thirty years have seen a decided retreat from
authorial or directorial intention toward analysis
16 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
of interpretive conventions. Meaning is not
inherent to a text, but something a community
of readers or viewers, acting in loose accord
with various interpretive protocols, agree to
infer. More recent scholarly turns to history,
while applying specific historical contexts, have
at the same time conceded that these very
contexts are multiple, if not endless. Such
reflexivity, which brings with it a plurality of
meanings, is the hallmark of poststructuralist
interpretation. Directorial commentary tracks
have a peculiar salience at such a moment.
While directors, like authors, are not always the
most accurate or reliable commentators on their
own work, many directors provide a consistent
set of protocols for their films and display a
self-consciousness at least as well-developed as
that of most critics.
In addition to providing a splendid enhance-
ment of Bertrand Tavernier's 1988 Coup de
Torchon, the Criterion Collection's 2001 edition
of the film offers a series of interviews with the
director that incorporates and comments upon
specific scenes.19
In his adaptation to film of
Jim Thompson's novel Pop. 1280,20
Tavernier
lucidly sets out some of his intentions in
abstract terms as well as in terms of the minute
particularities of production. He speaks compel-
lingly of the relation of Coup de Torchon to the
genre of French film noir ("a film noir which
refuses the conventions of the film noir") as
well as his reliance on the steady cam (and com-
plete avoidance of tracking shots) in order to
create a thematically central "slight feeling of
unbalance" and instability. His commentary on
specific scenes insistently links his intention to
formal features. For instance, his remarks on a
scene in which the protagonist, a seemingly
dimwitted policeman (Philippe Noiret), discusses
his difficulties with the local priest, clearly set
out the means by which the film makes its cri-
tique of the French presence in Africa. As the
priest puts the last touches on the task of replac-
ing a termite-infested cross, carefully hammer-
ing nails through Christ's feet, his advice ("all
in good time, each thing in turn, and one thing
after the other") combines with the rich irony of
his action to show at once the stupid, redundant,
and complicit posture of the clergy. In discus-
sing (in fact, defending) a troubling scene in
which the sheriff murders a black man who has
witnessed another of his murders, Tavernier not
only outlines his intentions but links them to
Thompson's aims in Pop. 1280.21
Tavernier's
intentions in the film are sharply delimited and
clearly articulated throughout the commentary.
Much less pointed are the intentions that
emerge in Alexander Payne's commentary to
Election.22
Payne's discussion of the film pre-
supposes a different notion of intention, one
far more open in application. A comparison to
Tavernier is revealing. Payne notes, for instance,
the persistence of certain visual cues in the
film--Jim McAllister's (Matthew Broderick)
repeated frustration as he walks through circular
enclosures, the appearance of garbage trucks
behind the main action--which function less as
determinate objective correlatives than indica-
tions of atmosphere. The circles traced by the
protagonist culminate in his return, at the end of
the film, to something of his original, frustrated
position, and the garbage motif slyly prefigures
McAllister's ultimate demise, when the ballot
he has stolen to change the outcome of the
school election is found in the trash can near his
desk by a janitor he had earlier annoyed by
carelessly littering. Payne's intentions are more
suggestive, that a kind of rubbish persists in our
lives, our attempts to beautify them notwith-
standing, and that something of a trashy dark
nemesis stalks McAllister in his pathetic
attempts to transcend his mundane life. Inten-
tion, for these two directors, means quite differ-
ent things.
These two ways of talking about intention are
far different from that of Paul Verhoeven,
whose commentary to the restored director's cut
of RoboCop promulgates an entirely different
set of interpretive protocols.23
Verhoeven's
analysis of various images requires a much
more energetic viewer, one thoroughly versed
in what often goes without saying in a culture.24
For instance, the commentary on the introduc-
tion of the ED 209--a policing robot built for
what one of the executives terms "urban pacific-
ation"--at a corporate meeting, connects the
ED 209 with Vietnam, first by the term "urban
pacification" itself, then by the shape of the
robot--which recalls a Bell Huey helicopter--
and finally by the name of the presiding scien-
tist, McNamara. Robert McNamara was Secre-
tary of Defense (1961­1981 under presidents
Kennedy and Johnson. Edward Neumeier, one
of the film's co-writers, describes the scene as
Parker and Parker Directors and DVD Commentary: The Specifics of Intention 17
"the American attitude in Vietnam brought to
an urban situation" and notes that he was read-
ing The Best and the Brightest as he conceived
it. David Halberstram's The Best and the
Brightest is an account of governmental hudris
in the Kennedy and Johnson administrators.
Through such commentary, what appears to be
an extreme parody takes on a more discursive
form. We perceive an argument, a method,
beneath the apparent mayhem and madness. In
fact, the speed and ubiquity of such allusions to
contemporary events and culture make even
humorous commentary seem more plausible.
Neumeier's comments on a part of a scene in
which Emile, a member of the murderous gang
that tortures and murders Murphy (the police-
man who later becomes RoboCop), watches
television through a store window, links Emile's
actions to contemporary debates on the effect of
television on criminality. As Emile, surrounded
by rampaging gangs along the street, rises to
throw his half-finished bottle of whiskey
through the glass, the debate is rehearsed and
satirized. Neumeier may well be joking here--
the comment is very funny in context--but the
structure of the parodic reading is really no dif-
ferent from the more serious reading of parody
encouraged at other moments in the commen-
tary. The movie is flooded with such lightning
references--linking the decline in the quality
of manufactures to the military-industrial com-
plex; translating the warrior ethos of corporate
boardrooms to an execution of a rival co-worker,
a ghastly accidental murder of an employee dur-
ing the demonstration of the ED 209, and a cli-
mactic shootout between RoboCop and a
particularly villainous executive; and repeatedly
conflating persons with products.
The discussions of intention that emerge in
these three commentaries are notable for their
avoidance of abstraction. In each case, the
director lays out a set of consistent and coherent
protocols for working through his film, but in
each case intention is invoked only in terms of
specific situations. These accounts of intent are
more pragmatic than those in most critical dis-
cussions--less rigid, more descriptive of certain
choices made within specific contexts, and per-
haps more thoughtful about how an audience
might actually perceive a given sequence and
the objects that make it up. In a sense, it is not
so much that each director talks about intention
itself than that the commentary track provides
us with an opportunity to follow the director's
application of such a concept to his work.
Payne, one might note, is not nearly so purpose-
ful in his selection of objects and in his recollec-
tion of past films as Tavernier. Tavernier is
more likely to articulate more fully the context
for some of his ideas than Verhoeven, who
expects the reader to bring more of a contempor-
ary sense of history and popular culture to his
suggestive images.25
Payne's material, being
less complicated than that of Tavernier and less
time-bound than that of Verhoeven, is more
likely to reach a larger audience. We can, through
these commentaries, begin to think of intention
as denoting a wide variety of practices, and to
see that there are several kinds of intention. One
might, over time, develop an effective typology
of interpretive protocols.
Other commentary tracks complicate this
picture of intention in productive ways. Tracks
with multiple commentators often prompt a
consideration of instances in which intention
becomes collaborative--sometimes happily, as
in the RoboCop commentary track, and some-
times with a residue of conflict. The Limey fea-
tures an animated debate between director
Steven Soderbergh and the screenwriter Lem
Dobbs over the eventual shape of the film.26
Their two competing visions of the material as
conceived and shot are resolved only, and then
not fully, by the editing process. Dobbs, at
times showing some exasperation, laments the
excision of material that would have made the
film a meditation on the spirit of the 1960s--
long sequences that would not only have devel-
oped the characters more fully, but would have
articulated something about the legacy of this
era. Clearly the film was planned around such
ideas, as the casting of such diverse 1960s icons
as Peter Fonda, Barry Newman, and Terence
Stamp suggests. In critical terms, the dispute
between Soderbergh and Dobbs could be
described as rival plottings of the same story,
that is, a question of narration. Certainly Soder-
bergh's ultimate decision in the editing process,
that a film incorporating the 1960s material
would be less successful than one cast more in
the mode of a stylish thriller, supports such a read-
ing. But some vestiges of the suppressed inten-
tions persist in the film. When Terry Valentine
(Peter Fonda) muses expansively about the
18 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
essence of the 1960s ("when you were there
though, you knew the language, you knew your
way around") and then severely delimits the era
("it wasn't that either, it was just 1966 and early
1967, that's all it was"), the effect in terms of
the final cut is whimsical, a kind of quirky
break in the action. The immediate context of
the speech, which he delivers while picking his
teeth as his very young mistress listens in the
bathtub, becomes prominent, as does her
amused response. The exchange between Dobbs
and Soderbergh asks that we distinguish domin-
ant, suppressed, and residual intentions, that we
perform an act of recovery that is less critical
than historical or archaeological.
Such discussions need not have the tension
Dobbs and Soderbergh display. The supplemen-
tary materials to the DVD of American Beauty
include a pleasant exchange between director Sam
Mendes and cinematographer Conrad L. Hall
that illuminates a complicated play of intention
and chance in the production of the film.27
The
conversation is efficiently realized throughout
by the use of storyboards and frames from the
movie. The mood is justifiably congratulatory
and amiable, but as the conversation develops, a
certain gap emerges between the stated inten-
tions of each party. Hall often deflates the very
intention that Mendes praises in Hall's realiza-
tion of the storyboards, offering purely visual
pleasure or expedience as motivation for what
Mendes infers as thematic. For example, com-
menting on an early scene in which Lester
(Kevin Spacey) meets with the outside consult-
ant who has been called in to downsize the
workforce, Mendes praises Hall's improvement
on the storyboard: "Conrad's added something
so beautiful to the shot . .. the way the light hits
Lester. .. it pulls him down away from the
wall." Mendes eloquently sketches the effect
here, that of isolating and diminishing Lester,
which dominates the first sequences of the film.
Mendes also notes one decided departure from
the storyboard: "he's also done something very
crucial, you've cut his feet off at the bottom of
the frame." This angle effectively diminishes
Lester both by cropping him and pushing him
down the frame, making him even less author-
itative in the face of Brad, the consultant, who is
consistently shot from below. Hall confesses,
however, that his intentions lay elsewhere:
"I needed that lamp up there, above the
picture.. .that's why his feet are cut off." Here
decisions about the set, lighting, and camera
angle appear overdetermined, and the process of
decision seemingly a felicitous conjunction of
purposes (which Mendes terms "happy acci-
dents") that need never intersect and, happily,
never become cross. In this case, intention
appears fully determinate, as each speaker
clearly articulates the effect he desired, yet
strangely anamorphic, as these effects are
arrived at independently.
The commentary tracks to American Beauty
and to The Limey, unlike those to Coup de Tor-
chon, Election, and RoboCop, do more than
provide a set of coherent interpretive protocols.
They provide a vivid picture of the complica-
tions that collaboration inevitably imposes upon
the application of the concept of intention. The
problems do not, however, disrupt or preclude
the discussion of intention so much as require,
at least for critics and scholars, a self-consciousness
about the discursive use of the term. Other
commentary tracks, however, do explore such
contradictions and inconsistencies. Neverthe-
less, they pose these questions in pragmatic
rather than theoretical terms, as a special kind
of discourse on intention.
In his commentary to Dead Ringers, David
Cronenberg provides a most consistent and
well-delimited discussion of intention, meticul-
ously setting out not only his specific intentions,
but the means by which he sought to communicate
them.28
One considerable challenge in filming
the movie was to find a way of showing the psy-
chological deterioration of the protagonists
(identical twin gynecologists Beverly and Elliot
Mantle, played by Jeremy Irons in a virtuosic
display of craft). Cronenberg's solution is a ver-
sion of what T. S. Eliot famously termed the
"objective correlative," that is, "a set of objects,
a situation, a chain of events which shall be the
formula for that particular emotion."29
Cronen-
berg, through a series of shots, very deliberately
emphasizes a "set of objects" in the film, the
twins' strikingly modern apartment and offices,
and he painstakingly follows the degradation of
these environments through the film. The cold,
"bruised" color of the rooms, the austerity of
the modernist furniture, and the precise ordering
of the objects, all become readable signs of the
twins' state of mind and their gradual deterior-
ation. Cronenberg sets out a kind of grammar for
Parker and Parker Directors and DVD Commentary: The Specifics of Intention 19
the film, authorizing a coherent and deliberate
approach to reading the psychology of his char-
acters. For example, just as the twins' rationalist
bias is challenged by the warmer, emotional Claire
Niveau (Genevive Bujold), so does her apart-
ment present a far more complex play of textures,
colors, and curved lines. Hence as Beverly falls
in love with Claire we have more than a simple
love story; we are also aware of this attachment
as the eruption of Beverly's emotional life, a
movement from an ordered, objective viewpoint
to the messier world of subjectivity and affect.
(The pattern is made emphatic by Claire's
occupation as an actress, which clashes with the
scientific work done by the twins.) Cronenberg's
analysis of the famous operating room sequences
has the same lucidity. Invested in his gown with
his hands folded calmly, dressed in a magnifi-
cent (if unreal) red, wielding instruments that
look hieractic, his mask and glasses suggesting
a cool removal from the visceral task at hand,
Beverly is a modern high priest, presiding over
the mysteries of creation as he brings fertility to
his female patients. "You have to find physical
representations of inner states of mind to convey
what is going on inside your characters,"
Cronenberg explains.
Most evocative, however, are the tools
designed by Beverly, the famous "Mantle
Retractor" he builds while a medical student and
the frightening set of "Instruments for Operating
on Mutant Women" he designs and commissions
later. These objects, examined in sequence,
encapsulate the film's main themes. As Cronen-
berg explains, the first of these inventions
expresses the twins' deepest desire, to analyze
and to master nature: "I felt that I needed a
physical symbol of the twins' efforts to deal with
reality by their own version of creativity, by their
own attempt to create something that could
modify the human body and control it." The
"Mantle Retractor" earns the twins professional
accolade and prestige, which the "gold-plated"
trophy they receive embodies; the latter tools
bespeak "a man whose rationality is failing but in
its failing is producing these strange kind[s] of
works of art, horrific works of art." On one level,
this sequence, like the gradual deterioration of the
apartment, seems to reveal Beverly's disorienta-
tion and madness clearly. Cronenberg's commen-
tary paradoxically invests the irrationality of this
sequence with an airtight, Cartesian logic. The
objects speak clearly and compellingly of
Beverly's descent into a pitiable madness, one that
fulfills all the tragic depths of Aristotle's famous
formulation of "fear and pity." Yet, on another
level, this sequence of objects, which embody
the thematic core of the film, is disrupted by the
director's commentary. Cronenberg opens the
discussion of these objects by revealing that,
while working as an artist in France years before
the film was conceived, he had created, in cast
aluminum, an "Instrument for Operating on
Mutants." Hence the well-delimited sequence of
the film, with its clear implications and intentions,
is extended by an autobiographical revelation.
The audio commentary track, with its insistent
immediacy, distends the precise formulations of a
formal reading of the film to include the impreci-
sion, silences, and ambiguities of an auto-
biographical approach. Viewed in these terms,
Cronenberg's opening words on the commentary
track take on much greater implication: "This is
gonna be maybe a lot more traumatic for me than
for you, reliving the film." As we have seen in the
instance of Herzog's commentary on Fitzcar-
raldo, the commentary track allows Cronenberg
to create another, and perhaps a more compli-
cated, text, one that even as it resolutely pursues a
formal reading of Dead Ringers, unsettles that
reading with an equally powerful, if sketchier,
autobiographical one. Cronenberg's audio com-
mentary retraces and transposes the movie's cen-
tral conflict, as formal analysis (cold, detached,
technical) is opposed yet again to the ambiguities,
subjectivities, and perhaps ineffabilities, of affect.
The question of intention might again be pur-
sued in a critical reading of Bill Condon's inci-
sive commentary to Gods and Monsters.30
Condon's remarks suggest great deliberation
and care on the part of this director. His analysis
of the opening sequence examines different
kinds of intention, from deliberate and planned
to the "happy accidents" of Mendes. Condon
begins by sketching the relation that structures
the thematics of the entire film: that the story of
Clay the gardener (Brendan Fraser) and James
Whale, director of Frankenstein (Ian McKellan),
will roughly recapitulate the Frankenstein story,
Clay taking the part of the monster, and Whale
the godlike scientist. Condon trenchantly
analyzes the presentation of Clay as he begins
his day: a series of shots of parts of Fraser's
body is both suggestive of Clay's incomplete or
20 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
fragmented character as well as the homage to
the assembly of the monster from body parts.
His analysis of the next sequence, in which
Clay drives uphill toward Whale's house,
begins the commentary track's meditation on
the tension between intention and meaning.
Condon notes that some viewers saw Clay's
uphill drive in terms of the "Gods" of the title,
as a kind of ascent. "People start to see things
that you never really intended," notes Condon.
However, Condon does not discard this kind of
meaning, as his comments on a scene in which
Whale and Clay go to a reception for the globe-
trotting Princess Margaret at George Cukor's
mansion demonstrate. This scene, the most lav-
ish of the film, is full of allusions. Condon notes
that a pair of swans, which dominate a few
frames, form a reference to Hollywood's pen-
chant for wide-screen films in the era, to
Vincent Minnelli-like productions: "that's what
I had in mind," he muses. Yet Condon informs
the viewer that McKellan understood the swans
in terms of the Princess's visit; in Britain swans
are protected animals owned by the Queen.
Condon seems to acquiesce, "that was another
nice little meaning to that." Most interesting
here is the clarity with which Condon separates
different types of signification. Some interpret-
ations are planned, executed, and intended; some
are accidental, incorporated, and intended;
others are simply attached after (or in the case
of McKellan's remark, alongside) the fact. Ultim-
ately the tension between more and less open
interpretive protocols is wound into the movie
itself, when the characters of Gods and Mon-
sters watch Whale's Frankenstein at the same
time at two locales. Clay, a former girlfriend
(Lolita Davidovich), and a bartender watch at a
bar; Whale and his housekeeper Hannah (Lynn
Redgrave) watch at home. Here we see an audi-
ence with a variety of reactions: Clay, intrigued
by his relation with Whale, responds to the
monster and begins to see a poetry in the movie;
his former girlfriend, who exudes a kind of
up-to-date cool, derides what she can only see as
the old-fashioned techniques of the film; Whale
recalls the touches he put in and the pleasures of
being on the set; and Hannah, watching through
the eyes of a child, is pleasantly frightened.
Hence the commentary and film work together
to examine some of the intricate problematics of
interpretation.
This selection--by no means an exhaustive
one--of commentary tracks amply demon-
strates the pervasive recourse to intention when
directors explain or analyze film. The means of
recovering or ascertaining intention may vary,
intention may involve accident or seem
curiously after the fact, and intentions may be
multiple, but, just as there are no atheists in
foxholes, there seems to be no doubt about the
utility of intentionality among the producers of
film. Each director wields the term with a canny
sense of its potential for analysis and criticism
as well as a sharply defined awareness of its
limitations, as Condon's precise contrast of
"intention" and "meaning" or Cronenberg's
reluctance to pursue the intention implicit in his
autobiographical reminiscences show clearly.
Viewed solely in these terms, the evidence from
DVD commentaries by directors seems simply
to support conventional and pluralistic notions
of intention employed by critics and scholars of
film, who have typically had recourse in their
analyses to commentary by directors and others
involved in production. DVD commentaries
would thus seem to offer more evidence of the
same kind--richer, perhaps, but no more con-
clusive or compelling.
To view DVD commentary in this way, how-
ever, is to mistake the particular virtues of this
form. By its very nature, the DVD commentary
track enforces a heightened attention to intrica-
cies of intention as it plays out over the course
of the film. Directorial comment returns again
and again to questions of intention that are local
and technical, and the discussion has an unusual
immediacy and density. Intention in these tracks
is not used in the abstract and broadly thematic
sense in which it is invoked in other forms, such
as interviews, manifesti, or more general state-
ments by directors. Rather, what emerges in this
form is the intentional practice carried out by a
particular director from scene to scene, what we
might call the specifics of intention. The infor-
mal and at times desultory quality of the com-
mentary allows us to see how each director uses
the concept, not so much how he might wish to
use it, and it allows us, if we wish, to address
other moments in the film in terms of the particu-
lar use of intention practiced by its director.
Taken altogether, commentary tracks exem-
plify a practice urged by Wittgenstein in Philo-
sophical Investigations: "to bring back words
Parker and Parker Directors and DVD Commentary: The Specifics of Intention 21
from their metaphysical to their everyday
use."31
These discussions treat intention as a
particularly useful kind of language game, one
that organizes the production and experience of
film, but which is capable of transformation as
interpreters adopt different roles in the game,
such as director, writer, cinematographer, critic,
or fan. Their commentary sketches what
Wittgenstein calls the "original home" in which
the language game of intention abides. Commen-
tary tracks create another text, one overrun with
intentions, and one that, as it maps coherent and
recoverable intention according to consistent and
seemingly authoritative protocols, may bring the
pragmatics of intention into renewed prominence.
DEBORAH PARKER
University of Virginia
Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese
Charlottesville, Virginia 22904-4777
INTERNET: dwp7k@virginia.edu
MARK PARKER
Randolph-Macon College
English Department
Ashland, Virginia 23005-5505
INTERNET: mparker@rmc.edu
1. We would like to thank the following people for their
kind willingness to provide us with information for this arti-
cle: Bertrand Tavernier, Mark Atkinson at DreamWorks,
Brian Ellenberg at Paramount Studies, Jay Douglas at
Anchor Bay Entertainment, Mike Mulvihill at New Line
Cinema, Zachary Hunchar at Lions Gate Productions, and
Norman Hill at Scarecrow Video. We are especially
indebted to Peter Becker at the Criterion Collection. We
would also like to thank Paul Barolsky, Johanna Drucker,
Geoffrey Rockwell, Mitch Green, and Kelley Conway for
their comments on an earlier version of this study. Mark
Parker, who wrote his part of this essay while a fellow at the
National Humanities Center, would also like to thank the
Jessie Ball DuPont Foundation.
2. Werner Herzog, commentary, Fitzcarraldo, DVD.
Directed by Werner Herzog 1982 (Anchor Bay Entertain-
ment, 2001).
3. For recent sales figures on DVDs, see Martin Peers,
"For Now, at Least, DVD Sales Are Soaring as Prices
Drop," published in the Wall Street Journal, September 11,
2001, sec. B, p. 4. On sales figures and the decision of some
Hollywood studios to resist making certain films available
on DVD, see Michael Speier and Scott Hettrick, "DVD
Disc Jockeying: Hollywood Hoards High-Tech Treasures,"
published in Variety, September 3­9, 2001, pp. 1 and 56.
4. Matt Lake, "Cram Sessions: The Evolution of an Even
Deeper Disc," New York Times, January 31, 2002, sec. D, p. 7.
5. For example, Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of
the Rings, handpicked DVD producer David Prior to shoot a
featurette on the making of the film.
6. Mike Mulvihill in an email communication, September
14, 2001. This presentation is pervasive: even the menu of
features resembles John Doe's notebooks. This in itself con-
stitutes an interesting reorientation of the film away from
leads Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman. Their relation as part-
ners and their ultimate torment, around which the film is
arguably built, give way to a focus on the world of the
crazed maniac who builds his seven murders around the
seven deadly sins.
7. Not all directors are articulate: some seem to have lit-
tle understanding of the commentary track as medium; at
times the remarks have no relation to the scenes themselves.
Mediocre commentary tracks abound in which directors and
other discussants do little aside from rambling aimlessly,
recounting anecdotes, effusively lauding everyone involved
in the film, or pointing out the obvious. Comments from
actors can be even more unfocused, producing a vagueness
that has prompted one DVD producer, who would prefer to
remain anonymous, to designate their participation on com-
mentary tracks as a "serious DVD misdemeanor."
8. See "Cram Sessions" for a brief discussion of com-
pression. Some parts of a film compress well, some require
adjustment of audio quality.
9. Jay Douglas in a telephone communication, September
10, 2001.
10. Tim Allen in a telephone communication, September
17, 2001.
11. Steven Soderbergh, commentary, Out of Sight, DVD.
Directed by Steven Soderbergh (Universal Pictures, 1998).
12. Peers, "For Now, at Least, DVD Sales are Soaring,"
sec. B, p. 4.
13. Guido Henkel in an email communication, September
14, 2001.
14. The introduction of the DVD format has been a
windfall for movie rental chains, which take advantage of
the much lower price of the DVD and its durability, yet
charge the same fee for DVD and video rentals. See "Disc
Jockeying," the Wall Street Journal, February 5, 2002, sec.
A, p. 1.
15. See "For Now, at Least, DVD Sales Are Soaring as
Prices Drop."
16. Although this study focuses on directorial commen-
tary, film scholars have also made commentary tracks. The
Criterion Collection, a company known for the high quality
of their editions, frequently invites film scholars to do com-
mentary tracks, especially for older films. Several scholars
have managed to fit their remarks exceptionally well to this
demanding and novel format. Laura Mulvey provides a
dense commentary for the Criterion edition of Michael
Powell's Peeping Tom (The Criterion Collection, 1999).
Combining her own work on the "look" or "gaze" of the
camera with much historical and sociological detail, her
visual essay bristles with erudition and sharp insight. While
Mulvey follows her thesis through the film, noting the pre-
cision with which Powell and his writer Leo Marks examine
the roles of camera and subject and ultimately providing a
detailed close reading of the film, she also manages to
incorporate suggestive remarks on class and on the work of
22 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
Powell more generally. David Bordwell, in another Cri-
terion edition, discusses Eisenstein's use of montage, music,
and imagery in Alexander Nevsky (Commentary, Eisenstein
the Sound Years [Ivan the Terrible, parts 1 & 2 and
Alexander Nevsky], DVD. Directed by Serges Eisenstein [The
Criterion Collection, 2001]). His essay serves as a brief for the
value of Eisenstein's formal experiments, even as they serve
the ends of blatant propaganda. Finally, Yuri Tsivian's
elliptical but engaging commentary on Dziga Vertov's The
Man with the Movie Camera (Image Entertainment, 1999)
cleverly demonstrates how Vertov's hostility toward fiction
films informs and animates his work. The utility of this
material for the classroom is obvious. Apart from their
purely descriptive or informative value, such essays as those
of Mulvay, Bordwell, and Tsivian provide clear examples
of how one might discuss film, and their insights are readily
applicable to other films.
17. D. F. McKenzie, "The Book as Expressive Form,"
in Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts: The Panizzi
Lectures 1985 (London: British Library, 1986), p. 33.
"Deform" is a strong word, and, although the history of the
book clearly supports McKenzie's use of it, we prefer to use
"reorient."
18. It is worth noting that some laser discs were pro-
duced with supplementary materials. Because this format
did not achieve the penetration that DVDs have, they do not
affect the present argument. On different views of author-
ship in film, see the various essays in Theories of Author-
ship: A Reader, ed. John Caughie (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1981).
19. Bertrand Tavernier, commentary, Coup de Torchon,
DVD. Directed by Bertrand Tavernier, 1981 (The Criterion
Collection, 2001).
20. Jim Thompson, Pop. 1280 (Berkeley, CA: Creative
Arts, 1984).
21. In an email communication, October 13, 2001,
Bertrand Tavernier further adds: "I wanted to say a few
things, to speak of Jim Thompson, of the metaphysical and
political implications avoided by the American directors
who have adapted his books."
22. Aaron Payne, commentary, Election, DVD. Directed
by Aaron Payne (Paramount, 1999).
23. Paul Verhoehen, commentary, RoboCop, restored
director's cut DVD. Directed by Paul Verhoehen, 1987
(The Criterion Collection, 1998).
24. The RoboCop commentary track features three
speakers--the director Verhoeven, one of the co- writers Ed
Neumeier, and executive producer Jon Davison. As they
appear to agree, we treat their intentions as identical.
25. Of course there is an irony here in the fact that
Tavernier's literary bias is built partly around the recuperation
of pulp fiction like Pop. 1280.
26. Lem Dobbs and Steven Soderbergh, commentary,
The Limey, DVD. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, 1999
(Artisan Home Entertainment, 2000).
27. Conrad L. Hall and Sam Mendes, commentary,
American Beauty, DVD. Directed by Sam Mendes, 1999
(DreamWorks, 2000).
28. David Cronenberg, commentary, Dead Ringers,
DVD. Directed by David Cronenberg, 1988 (Anchor Bay
Entertainment and The Criterion Collection, 1998).
29. T. S. Eliot, "Hamlet and His Problems," Athenaeum,
September 26, 1919, as reprinted in Selected Essays (New
York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1932, rpt. 1964).
30. Bill Condon, commentary, Gods and Monsters,
DVD. Directed by Bill Condon, 1998 (Lions Gate Films,
1998).
31. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations,
trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: MacMillan, 1968),
p. 48.