in general could not agree with tony williams more when he says that the issue of authorship needs lots of careful discussion in what he calls the "post barthes" era . . . and my own posting was not at all aimed at authorship [or even at such notions as "the cinema of nicholas ray"--a notion that seems to me very serviceable] . . . it was aimed ONLY at authors understood as persons as opposed to authors [or authorship] understood as something inferred from texts . . . . . . this is hardly a post-structuralist, or post-modern, or post-anything else notion . . . it goes back at least to lawrence's "trust the tale, not the teller" and proabably a good deal before, although no earlier example comes to mind just now . . . if you wanna know what nick ray had to say in his movies, watch the movies . . . and if you wanna know what he had to say in his life read about his life, but then you're not doing cinema-studies/criticism/textual-analysis or anything like it anymore mike frank ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]