![]() ![]() as examples of paratexts, which influence our reading of a given film or TV program. Jonathan Gray suggests that we can view all DVD special features, such as commentary tracks, documentaries, etc. ![]() They form, he notes, the “threshold” between the inside and the outside of the text.” 1 In essence, a paratext is a subordinate text to the main text. In this case, the scene consists of both footage that is already available to audiences in the film proper and footage that is not.īy virtue of their relation to film texts, deleted scenes may be classified as “paratexts,” a term initially used by Gerard Genette to designate texts that “prepare us for other texts. The term, however, is often also applied to longer or extended versions of scenes present in the theatrical cut. The events it depicts can be considered in that regard “non-canon” in relation to the story the picture is telling. We were still very much VCR and VHS folks and hadn’t yet made the transition to the new platform.Ī “deleted scene” is basically any scene that has been cut from a theatrical film in the course of post-production.* Absent from the theatrical cut of the picture, it is not a part of the causal chain of narrative events that compose it. * At the time, if I recall correctly, this was the only DVD player we had. ![]() I will reference this text later in this article. ![]() Later, as a film and media scholar, I wanted to study and analyze deleted scenes, but sadly never found any pre-existing scholarly writing on this subject, with the exception of Brian Hu’s “ Deleted Scenes and the Recovery of the Invisible,” which looks primarily at the ideological implications of a deleted scene’s accessibility. Whether or not this was my introduction to deleted scenes as a concept, I’d say the Austin Powers DVD certainly made me more interested in seeing deleted scenes in general and actively seeking them out whenever I acquired a new DVD. One selection was a montage of random, disconnected bits of scenes set to music. Some of them were very good full scenes, others were extensions of existing ones. I think it might’ve been around 1999-2000, when I was browsing the DVD of Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me on my father’s laptop.* That disc had 20 minutes or so of scenes that were never in the film proper and I became quite intrigued. I’m not sure when exactly I first became aware of such a feature. I love watching deleted scenes, which tend to appear in the “special features” or “bonus materials” section of a movie or TV show’s home video release. ![]()
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