Whats in a name

I have been in dispute with a copy editor. I am a great admirer of the keen-eyed and patient people who find amendments to be made in a text the author could have sworn was perfect. But in the case of Dont Look Back (1967) I had to defend my corner. The said copy editor had changed the title of D.A. Pennebaker’s riveting documentary about Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England from what I had written to the grammatically ‘correct’ Don’t Look Back, with the assumption made that I had made a simple mistake.

Not so. Dont Look Back should be spelled that was because that is now it appears on the screen. It is a golden rule of film cataloguing that the title of a film, for cataloguing purposes, shall be the title as it appears on the screen. In the 2016 FIAF Moving Image Cataloguing Manual, produced at the behest of the Cataloguing and Documentation Commission of the Federation of International Film Archive, it states:

Information entered in a record must be derived from a source. Acceptable sources of information for moving image Works, Variants, Manifestations and Items include primary and secondary sources.

Primary sources include information on the actual Item itself. For example, for film materials, titles and main production credits are transcribed from the frames usually in the opening credits. Secondary sources include information written on containers and reference materials.

Thus Dont Look Back is Dont Look Back because there is no comma between the n and t on the film, and only if there were no prints of the film available would a dutiful cataloguer consider any secondary source, such as a script or the book of the film (which has no apostrophe on the front cover but does on the back cover, by the way), as a guide to the desirable orthography. Hence it is Sunset Blvd., not Sunset Boulevard, and The 39 Steps, not The Thirty-Nine Steps – for the 1935 and 1959 versions, that is, as 1978 version has the numbers given as words. The print is the original publication, and is therefore sacrosanct.

This has led to some problems that have long been cherished, as well as puzzled over, by film cataloguing pedants. Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film Henry V does not feature the words ‘Henry V’; instead, the on-screen title is The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fift with his battell fought at Agincourt in France, taken from the 1600 quarto edition of the play. Some reference sources – including, I believe, the Internet Movie Database for a short while some years ago, have given the latter as the preferred title, but it is clearly an absurdity. Trailers and posters for the film call it Henry V, because trailers and posters have only the one thing to do, which is the burn the title of a film into the mind of an audience. The producers of such products are not purists, and they are not cataloguers. They are realists.

Another favourite is Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), which has no on-screen title at all. All that you see as the film begins is a succession of shots of the New York skyline, set to George Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’. A night-time array of skyscrapers lit up by fireworks as the music reaches its crescendo occurs at the specific point where one might have expected the title to be. The pictures speak for themselves (in one fleeting opening sequence shot the word ‘Manahattan’ does appears in lights on the side of the building, but its appearance is incidental). As with Henry V, the title nevertheless appears on the theatrical trailer, and on posters and other publicity materials, in the form of a logo spelling out the word ‘Manhattan’ with skyscrapers. Authorial pretension can only be taken so far.

There are many other such quirks that the pedants relish. Lindsay Anderson’s If…. (1968) has to have four dots after the word, not three, because that it what appears on the screen. 8½ (196£) is expressed as a number, not as words. Se7en (1995) has that annoying tricksy 7 where a v should be. The heart logo in i ♥ huckabees (2004) seems designed to laugh at typesetters, while also demanding that it be recorded in lower case. And there is finicky issue when it comes to including or not the name of an author or a filmmaker important enough to have their name appear on the title screen. Should it be Casanova or Fellini’s Casanova (1976), as the on-screen title has it? It’s the latter, in most sources. But Mario Puzo’s The Godfather is known to all as The Godfather (1972) (Mario Puzo, author of the original book, is similarly part of the title for The Godfather II and The Godfather III). It’s the contradictions that help create the rules.

The FIAF Moving Image Cataloguing Manual is an amazingly thorough document, a monument to the virtual impossibility of tying down the wriggling, contrary medium of film. Appendix A, on Titles and Title Types, goes into every permutation and variation you can think of, not just for feature films, but but serials and series, the complex field of newsreels and cinemagazines (with item titles, series titles, series numbers, item numbers, places of location named that might or might not be part of the title, and so on), on to those films (and television programmes) that lack titles, or have supplied titles. They must all have a name, even those that try hard not to have one.

The identification and cataloguing of film titles is no more difficult than it is for books, manuscripts, journals or paintings. Each medium rebels against those that would pin it down. Film is a special case, however. Its titles do not merely express the subject, as with a book. They are a part of the image. They signify through how they relate to the imagery around them. Moreover, they are always individual. There will hundreds of ways in which Great Expectations is printed on the title page of different editions of Dickens’ novel, but David Lean’s 1946 film version will only ever have the one title, its design never to be changed (occasionally, and annoyingly, a film title can be changed, so that Star Wars (1977) is now Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, or so the producer pretends).

Film titles are therefore not graphics, even if most may appear so, but images within the image. Cataloguers of film works have worked hard to fit film into conventions established for print works, which has been part of a relatively young medium’s way to cultural respectability. To have a name, an author, a publisher, a date, a record of publication, is to look like a book and therefore to earn the respect that is paid to a book. But the film title is, by inclination, rebellious.

The film title is an artform in itself. While book title pages and music sheets may have graphic design that is pleasing to the eye, it is not the same as the image world unto itself that is the film title. Paintings, having relegated their titles to descriptive labels, have more or less admitted that titles are irrelevant to their purpose. Film titles, by contrast, express the magical sense of the medium they serve (television titles, being confined to the smaller screen, do not have the same cultural cachet as film titles). Hence the several websites and video channels dedicated to the film title. Sites such as The Art of the Title, Movie Title Screens, Steven Hill’s Movie Title Screens Page, and especially Movie Title Stills Collection with its accompanying YouTube channel document that catch of the breath the audience must have when the titles appears and the entertainment is both announced and expressed. The film title is words made fantastical. It tells you what only film can do and why you have done well in choosing to see what you are about to see. The title is the film in itself.

The title of Dont Look Back is as cool as the film it introduces is cool. Blending with the restless, enigmatic musician preparing himself for his next public appearance, its three defiant words hit you with the film’s attitude and style. Here is what you will remember before you have had the chance to remember it. This is what a film is. It is the epitome of memory. Apostrophes have got nothing to do with it.

Links

• The FIAF Moving Image Cataloguing Manual was published in 2016 by the FIAF Cataloguing and Documentation Commission, and can be downloaded in PDF format from the FIAF website
• I wrote previously on the complexities of titles and paintings in Names and Labels