Writing the Endings of Cinema:

Evocations of authorial absence and the saving of film authorship in the

cinematic paratext

of Prospero’s Books, The Tempest, and The Secret of Kells

Richard Burt

My essay chapter examines the appearance of writing books and illuminated

manuscripts being written/produced, in the closing end title sequences 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 Secret

of Kells (dir. Tomm Moore, 2009), the animated feature film about The Book of

Kells. 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 credit 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 neo-

apocalyptic or neo-evangelist 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 i) why cinema

turns to textual media for the paratext and ii) why books remain ideal filmic multi-

media referents in digital cinema, particularly in animated feature films, as much

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as they have been in 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 paratextual 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 in the credits 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 in a book

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

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

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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 A

viewer of a DVD or blu-ray edition of such a film will therefore ‘read’ the entire

paratext. The peritext of a book may be said to have been written in a kind of

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

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

pp. 411, 422. For more on 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

Tom Conley, Film Hieroglyphs (Second edition; U of Minnesota P, 2006), pp.

xxv-xxvii.

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 were 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

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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 appear, and

often has appeared, through the analogy of turning the pages of a book.

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

analogy, to major questions of film authorship (Do films have authors? yes they

do. Who is the ‘writer’ of the film? 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 outsourced agency such as Pacific Title Company gets a corporate

the film. See also the parody of the rolling end titles during the epilogue of

Strange Brew (Bob and Doug Mckenzie, 1983).

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). [Cut to avoid duplication: also discussed in

a note below.]

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credit. The writer design of the very sequence (the vehicle for the credits) that

guarantees the film’s authorship is, therefore, most often done by an anonymous,

corporate agent, and thereby re-inscribes, 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) that 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 the film paratext tends to default to the

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 in a way that creates an a

mutually legitimating relation between writer and publisher:

[W]ith 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 a book’s 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 to give the author the opportunity to officially claim (or deny)

authorship of his text’ (46). I consider this supplement to the publisher’s

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‘introduction’ to be a way of saving not only the writer of the book but the book

itself: it serves as a paratextual back-up loosely analogous to auto-recovered

‘saved’ digital documents.

William H. Sherman has usefully offered a corrective to Genette’s work on

the paratext as focused almost entirely on the introduction of the book.4

Sherman explores how the paratext shapes the ways in which we finish reading

books. Work on the cinematic paratext has followed Genette in focusing on

opening title sequences and ignoring the endings and end credit title sequences

of films.5 The analogy between of front and back book covers and with opening

and closing film title sequences, or the ending of a film (an analogy specifically

evoked by film endings in which the book that opened the film closes just before

‘The End’ appears), has further broken down or been reworked in ways that turn

the closing credit end title sequence into multiple, individuated stories about the

main characters. As I will show at the end of this chapter, the present essay, 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). [Please insert page numbers.] 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). [Please

insert page numbers.]

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

credit title sequences and endings.

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Disney’s hybrid animated and cinematic feature film Enchanted (dir. Kevin Lime,

2008) begins with a book much as Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

(David Hand, 1937) and Sleeping Beauty (dir. Clyde Geronimi, 1959) do but ends

with a 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. (Figs X.1, X.2, X.3, X.4.)

(Figs X.1, X.2, X.3, X.4)

With predictable symmetry, the film reverses this transition at its close, showing

the ends with an inverse passage form from an animated image to that image on

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

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the page. (Figs X.1, X.2.)

Figure 17

Yet, quite impossibly, the book does not 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 upon which ‘The End’

and ‘A Walt Disney Production’ are then 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, therefore, 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 or a DVD, viewers see several minutes of carefully prepared closing credits presented in the same

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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 closing credits end titles differs completely from 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 memorably inventive, 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 were

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I now turn to the endings of Taymor, Greenaway, and Moore’s films. Here I in

order to examine specific ways in which the closing endings and end title

sequences adapt the book written and the book being written in ways that both

unify the film and yet also complicate our a sense of the ending of film, of how

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

paratext begins, and so of when one can legitimately exit the cinema or turn off

the disc. 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’? Such announcements of

seeming completion can sometimes, of course, be duplicitous, acting as teasing

herald to further potentially reentering the film from the moments in the textual /

paratextual endings beyond 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 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 disintegrating the book

used back as far as 1930s Universal 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.

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

Se7en (1995). It is now often possible to see road show exhibitions of [can this

be omitted?] films released from the 1930s to the 1980s on DVD/blu-ray,

released with overture, entr-acte or intermission, and exit music on DVDs.

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(auteur, you will recall, means ‘author’ in French and has a much higher cultural

status than does the more everyday écrivain, or writer).

Prospero’s books do not need to exist materially in The Tempest. There are

references in Shakespeare’s text to his staff and to his cloak as required stage

props, but not to what is sometimes his ‘book’ or to his ‘books’ as necessary

stage presences: these exist exclusively through references to a significant but

unseen elsewhere. We never The Shakespeare text therefore makes no

provision, for example, for us to see Prospero drown his books.8 The seven-

minute-long end title sequence of Taymor’s Tempest, designed by Kyle Cooper,

however, transposes gives expressive form to the moment when Prospero

‘drowns’ his books: as the credits roll and the camera is submerged under water,

we watch Prospera’s books (in plural form) fall slowly through the ocean heading

toward the bottom musically accompanied by a haunting version of

Shakespeare’s epilogue scored by Elliot Goldenthal. Taymor originally cut

Prospero’s epilogue from the film script but ended up restoring it. In her book

The Tempest, the book published as a companion piece to the film, Taymor

writes:

The film’s last image of Prospera 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 beyond the individual in the ‘Rough Magic’

preface to the her book, entitled ‘Rough Magic’, writing that ‘we drowned the

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books of Prospera’ (my emphasis). Yet this enlargement of cinematic authorship

depends on the expansive, leisurely condensation of Prospera’s transposed and

visualized declaration of intent to ‘drown’ her ‘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 a readerly and spectatorial desire for an authorial force by

encrypting and spectralizing the absent writer of the book. She accompanies this

allegorical depiction of displaced authorship with accompanied by a speech-

turned-requiem sung by a female extra-diegetic voice identified only in the end

credit sequence rather than spoken by Helen Mirren (Prospera). The authorial

film’s specters of the film are re/called at the end of the tie-in screenplay book.

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

credit 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. (Figures X.1 and X.2

(the verso and recto pages).)

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

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

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

drowning books are absent all apparently lack paratextual apparatus (no titles or

authors are visible on the covers), the book as a medium, in its paratextually

near-blank form as configured here, 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 facing page opposite, the film credits for the director and

actors are printed just to the left of an ‘uncredited’ book falling though water, little

bubbles surrounding it. , the author listed as ‘Julie Taymor Adapted from the Play

by William Shakespeare’. The book of the film thus showcases a nameless book

displaying neither title nor author while simultaneously also recording Taymor as

the film’s ‘author’ (asserted via her writer, director and producer multiple credits

here in combination with the ‘Julie Taymor Adapted from the Play by William

Shakespeare’ authorial designation on the volume’s front cover): the weirdly

double move in which Taymor claims a kind of hybrid authorship - crediting

Shakespeare as her source - appears and disappears in the fold of the of the

book as one turns the page and then, presumably, closes the book. By focusing

on the books opening as they fall underwater, Taymor invites us to ask a new

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question no one has thought to ask, namely, what does it means to ‘drown a

book’? Phrased another way, we might ask: Why does Prospero not follow

Caliban’s instructions to Stephano and Trinculo - ‘burn but his books’ - in order to

destroy them? Taymor quietly insists on the drowning Prospera’s unidentifiable

books makes them unreadable even though the pages are open.

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

Books. Cataloguing and displaying all thirty-five books of Prospero’s library in

separate sequences, the film has an epilogue but not an end title no closing

sequence beyond that. In the final shot, ‘The End’ appears at the bottom of the

screen and remains there 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 a steady the same pace as in it moves

tracks right in lone one 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

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

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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 the 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.” (Figures X.1-X.4.)

Figure 1 Figure 2

Figure 3 Figure 4

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

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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 other author (!), their completion means

splitting the manuscript of The Tempest from the printed thirty four plays 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 centre and is surrounded

by black. In an 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 calls “a single, bravura take” (163), we see Ariel (played by three

different 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 what Latour and Wiebel term ‘iconoclash’, or uncertainty about

whether this liberation from the page is creative or destructive, the manuscripts 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 This differs

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markedly from form the more symmetrical ending in the screenplay.11 In

Greenaway’s unscripted film epilogue to the book of the film, the book returns as

an unreadable work of art: a single, page, an unbound page looking like an

abstract multi-media painting (fig X.3). The film 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 the top and bottom parts of the page (fig X.3). 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’

not by the hand of a visible writer which we by now know well, but rather through

the apparently agent-less processes of animation (figs X.1-2).

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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 (fig X.3). ‘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 (fig X.4). Genette’s account of

the publisher’s introduction (consisting chiefly of the author’s name on the book

cover and title page) is transformed by Greenaway into an ‘exit’ that involves

reading one’s way out of his film.

In order to explore briefly the ways in which the book plays new roles in ending

cinematic paratext as cinema has shifted from analogue to digital, I close my

essay with a discussion of the completion of an illuminated manuscript at the

end of The Secret of Kells. Lev Manovich observes that animation, marginalized

when cinema became primarily narrative cinema, has returned to the centre in

the wake of digital film.12 Yet animation has also occupied a new paratextual

margin: the animated feature film end title sequence, noticeably expanded in

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

feature film ends with an integrated epilogue and end credit 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,

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.’ [Please insert

page numbers.] 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 being 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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the 3D effect of LCD flat-screen 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, in an act of

synecdoche, The Book of Kells is reduced to one final page, the Chi-ro page (fig

X). The book appears neither in the opening or closing end title sequences, but it

is does appear at the end of the film. Brendan (Michael McGrath), one of the

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 pp. 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 know, without further inquiry, whether it is destructive or

constructive’ (14).

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story’s two monkish illuminators and now grown up, returns as an adult to the

Abbey of Kells where he was thought to have had apparently been killed long

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

Scriptorium. Abbot Cellach (Brandon GleasonBrendan Gleeson) tells Brendan

that all Cellach has left is a fragment of the manuscript on a single page he

unfolds and shows to Brendan (fig. X). Brendan consoles him by giving him the

now completed book and giving it a new title: The Book of Kells instead of The

Book of Iona.

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

Shakespeare's The Tempest, 164).

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

particular page numbers?]

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 Fabargé egg sequences in Ocean’s Twelve (dr. Steven Soderberg, 2004)

and Anne Eisenberg, ‘Holograms Deliver 3-D, Without the Goofy Glasses’, New

York Times (4 December, 2010). [page number?]

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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

Brendan, and tells Brendon telling him to bring take it ‘to the people’. Brendan’s

return to the Abbey is followed by Cellach’s vision of the blindingly illuminated and

momentarily animated book (figs X.1 and X.2). Seven shots of close ups of details from

the book punctuated by a blinding white light are followed by the complete Chi-ro page

(figs X.1-3).

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Figure 13 Figure 14

Figure 15 Figure 16

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

to pass through it (fig 16). The end title credit sequence follows as the aftermath

of this unreadable vision.

The Secret of Kells saves The Book of Kells insofar as he the book is re-titled,

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 live action 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 a 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 see

the Enchanted book just where we saw it at the beginning of the film.15 Happy

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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 The

Secret of Kells provides a very different complete 3D effect ‘vision’ of the

illuminated book as animated filmic 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

of 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 credit

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

14 The Tale of Despereaux Despareux includes sequences in which Despereaux

Despareux reads a manuscript and in which a cook named ArcimBoldo made of

vegetables comes to life, sequences 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.

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follows the ending of a film. Film authorship is saved, but the crypt within which it

may be preserved is provided by images of another medium, the book, and

another kind of writing that paradoxically becomes largely unreadable.

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 titles, and no author’s names. Prospero’s books are bound, with

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

identified by title 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).

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NOTES

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

(Christen Mooney), a fairy who resides near Kells and who helps Brendan find

berries to make ink for what will become The Book of Kells, gives a voice-over

prologue Band well [what does this mean?] 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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