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Assignment 8: Who’s Responsible?

Posted by Austin Cinephile

Every week, we will be posting a prompt related to cinephilia, and some of our founding members will contribute a short response. Hopefully you, our dear readers, will feel compelled to respond in our comment section as well. This week’s prompt was:

What do you think about the auteur theory?

Although the auteur theory (the belief that the director is the “author” of a film and the critical stance associated with it) is out of fashion within the academic and certain enthusiast circles, it is still the most dominant method of understanding film production and organization currently employed by moviegoers. More often than not, a question like, “What films do you like?” results in a list of filmmakers (directors) rather than genres, actors, screenwriters, cinematographers, or any other classification. Further, video stores, newspaper listings, and most other modes of extra-industrial film promotion uses a film’s director as a primary classification marker. Most film reviews, likewise, rely exclusively on a reading of the director’s assumed role in film construction.

While we try not to lean too much on the director’s ivory tower. We attempt to acknowledge the role of editors, cinematographers, screenwriters, producers, and actors/stars in film production. That said, we are certainly guilty of auterist criticism at times. For instance, we recently published a list of our favorite “auteur films.” We also classify/identify films by director in our under-poster text.

This week, we probe our assumptions about the auteur theory and see if we can explain/excuse our behavior.

Michael

This is a tricky question. What do you think of the auteur theory? We here at Austin Cinephile have already declared our love for auteur cinema. But, this question speaks not only to auteurs and their films, but rather to the auteur theory conceptually established by François Truffaut, applied by the other Cahiers du Cinéma critics, and then organized into a theoretical framework and cinematic hierarchy by Andrew Sarris in his essay “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962” (which he later expanded into the book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968).

Sarris’s application of the auteur theory praises directors that are well versed in all aspects of film production and who have distinct visual and thematic styles. This initial essay received backlash from famed New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, who, in her retaliatory essay “Circles and Squares,” belittles the theory from a number of approaches, not least of which arguing that praising a director’s unchanging style is to praise her/his decline. While many of Kael’s claims are sound and convincing, and while there are surely reasons to reject the auteur theory—particularly Sarris’s application of it—in this regard, Kael misinterprets the point of analyzing and enjoying an auteur’s signature. To seek out an auteur’s signature traits is not solely an act of repetition recognition. Rather it is an attempt, on the one hand, to bask in the familiarity of the auteur’s touch, and, on the other, relish the alteration—and thus the evolution—of that filmmaker’s style.

So, let me conclude with these thoughts. While I tend to use directors as a convenient categorical device, I acknowledge that not all directors are auteurs and that in some instances a film’s auteur may not be the film’s director. Films are a collaborative art, but some filmmaker’s visions and wills are so strong that they are able to harness that collaborative force, shaping it into a recurring cinematic signature. I like the signatures of directors like Woody Allen, David Cronenberg, Akira Kurosawa, and Sergio Leone. I find myself drawn to these auteur filmmakers, knowing that not all of their films are gems and also that there are great films made by filmmakers that are not auteurs. Ultimately, though, the draw of the auteur is the appeal of a unique filmic style, something that is not typical fare. And, while I tend towards auteurs that are good filmmakers in my book (acknowledging that not all auteurs are “good” filmmakers), it is the deviation from that greater cinematic norm that keeps me coming back, even if that deviation falls within a recurring stream of that auteur’s signature. Ultimately, these auteurs that I admire are great filmmakers. Their unique touches are just proof of their original approaches to cinema.

Stephen

I have always struggled with the concept of the auteur theory. Even as a teenage film buff, when the occasional debate would arise over the “A Film by…” phrase that often appears at the beginning for a Scorsese or Tarantino movie, I felt that there were too many other names in the opening credits (and even more in the closing credits) to designate any one person as the author of the film. Now that I have spent time studying with Tom Schatz, whose book Genius of the System points out that the classical Hollywood studio system produced masterpieces of cinema that were “co-authored” by directors, moguls, producers, and crew members galore, I remain resolute in my belief that the concept of the auteur is suspect as a credible theory and more useful as a point of reference and conversation for film lovers.

The literature of the auteur theory often focuses on the vague idea of artistic “vision.” Hitchcock is labeled an auteur because his vision is supposedly apparent from film to film. The auteur theorist would argue that one who is familiar with Hitchcock’s work could easily pick one of his films out of a lineup simply by recognizing certain camera angles, narrative elements, or character traits that the director seems to favor. For me, though, those familiar names in the credits are also important to note. What would so many of Hitchcock’s great films be without the music of Bernard Hermann or the graphics work of Saul Bass? (One need only have seen Frenzy at the Paramount last week to see how a limp score and ordinary opening credit sequence can fail to inspire the viewer in the opening minutes.) Would Scorsese’s Raging Bull or Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction be the revolutionary films they are without the directors’ frequent editing partners Thelma Schoonmaker and Sally Menke working alongside them? Would we have grown tired of looking at a new Woody Allen film every year if not for the revolving door of talented cinematographers that worked on his films, varying the visual appeal of each one?

Certainly, I cannot argue that it is important for any work of art to have a firm vision guiding the artistic process to its conclusion, especially in filmmaking where hundreds of people can generate thousands of ideas, and that, for the most part, this initial guiding vision comes from the director. However, I also cannot believe that any finished film is “by” any one person, nor can I agree that a filmmaker’s recurring signature was entirely his or hers to begin with.

It seems that I agree with Pauline Kael’s counter-argument from “Circles and Squares” more than Michael does when it comes to supporting new and original ideas from filmmakers instead of hoping for repeated ones. I’m not sure Scorsese would want his career defined in terms of evolution but instead as a series of attempts to breach unfamiliar cinematic territory and make films that cannot be easily compared. A film like Casino met with several critical shrugs not because it was a bad film but because it seemed like just another Goodfellas, with its Rolling Stones songs and adventurous cameras. When talking about a filmmaker who made a film like Raging Bull a mere four years after making a film like Taxi Driver, familiarity can be a bit of a let-down.

Daniel

My partners have done a very fine job of highlighting the key points and counterarguments associated with the auteur theory and its application, so I will not waste my time in discussing them. Instead, I will try to provide some balanced ideas.

1. Auteur theory works for auteur films. I certainly am not the first person to think of films with this classification system, but I want to put it forward as a very usable plan: there are auteur films and genre films, and we should apply different lenses and critical stances to them. For genre films, we should study the construction of tropes and how certain films deviate from them.

For auteur films, we should consider, as Stephen and Michael have implied, how the film speaks to a filmmaker’s body of work/life’s artistic message. Seeing, for instance, Woody Allen’s constant retelling of a failed relationship with a frigid intellectual and the variations on it help us to understand what poor Woody has been trying to say all these years. The way that changes over the years or in different situations can tell us a good deal about that particular filmmaker’s evolution or style.

2. An auteur cannot make a bad film. This is something that I think is attributed to Truffaut himself. A filmmaker who is able to convey his personal philosophy through both influence on story/scenario and visual style is only capable of producing great works. As such, if we acknowledge that a filmmaker is an auteur (a designation we can determine after seeing the control she or he has over the cinema in just a single work), we must always view their work from the perspective that it is the outcome of a creative artist who is trying to express herself/himself, and necessarily give it higher critical attention and consideration.

3. A director is not the only filmmaker who can be an auteur. While director is the most frequent and most apparent auteur in contemporary and historic cinema, it is not the only job that should be seen as author. There are other positions that can overwhelm the production to the extent of control. Actors can often achieve this; my example here is the Marx Brothers, who are firmly in control of the anarchy that is their thirteen films. Producers can be auteurs, as was Roger Corman. Screenwriters, like Charlie Kaufman, can also take over a film.

The same can be said, although less often, about other roles, and often films can be dually or multi-authored, as the case in films like His Girl Friday (Ben Hecht and Howard Hawks) or Contempt (Godard and Brigitte Bardot)

We should look for creativity and brilliance in all aspects of the cinema, and celebrate them. Because we find authorship from a single source within a text does not mean we cannot see other sources of influence and control.