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An anecdote... In
the 1980s, the film study program I was teaching in received
authorization to make a new hire. One of the candidates we
brought in, an expert in film genre theory, was a recent
Ph.D. student from one of the major film schools in the US.
During the interview period, she was asked, "If you could do
a director's course, what director would you choose?" The
candidate took umbrage at the very premise of the question
(that it was worthwhile to study directors) and, with 1980s
post-structural, Screen-theory confidence and even
brashness, proceeded to explain that the Author was an
outmoded romantic notion, one that deferred attention from
the signifying structures of filmic discourse, and so on.
After explaining for about five minutes how auteur study was
a retrograde approach, she paused and then said, "But if I
had the chance, I'd love to do a course on
Hitchcock." As this
candidate's simultaneous expression of disdain for auteurism
and lingering investment in the auteur suggests, fascination
for the director just doesn't seem to go away. It is the
endurance of such fascination that I will explore in the
following pages. When I offered an earlier version of this
essay in a seminar in France, I entitled my presentation,
"Le désir de l'auteur," playing on a double meaning
of the phrase. On the one hand, in auteur theory, there is a
drive to outline the desire of the director, his or
her (but usually his) recourse to filmmaking as a way to
express personal vision. The concern in auteur studies to
pinpoint the primary obsessions and thematic preoccupations
of this or that creator is thus an attempt to outline the
director's desire. On the other hand, there is also desire
for the director - the obsession of the cinephile or
the film scholar to understand films as having an originary
instance in the person who signs them. Here, it is important
to look less at what the director wants than what the
analyzing auteurist wants - namely, to classify and give
distinction to films according to their directors and to
master their corpuses. It seems in
recent years that there is a vibrant resuscitation of
auteurist approaches.[1]
Some of this involves a reinvigoration of some of the very
aspects of auteurism that often fell under discredit in the
structural and poststructural moments of film study. To take
just one example, Tom Gunning's recent massive study of
Fritz Lang may exhibit the influence of new theory in a
variety of ways - for example, it is quite inspired by
Walter Benjamin in its analysis of Lang's films as
allegorical works - but it also adheres to traditional
auteurist premises about the dialectics of freedom and
constraint in the Hollywood system. For instance, but for
their use of certain words from high theory, phrases such as
the following from Gunning could have come from the classic
auteurism of the French in the 1950s: [1]
For a useful survey of the new directions in auteurism, see
Toby Miller and Noel King, "Auteurism in the 1990s", The
cinema book, 2nd Edition, eds. Pam Cook and Mieke
Bernink (London: BFI Publishing, 1999), 311-14. [2]
Tom Gunning, The films of Fritz Lang: allegories of
vision and modernity (London: British Film Institute,
2000), 204, 206. Here, we see a
clear replay of that belief in conventional auteurism that
it is precisely because the pressures of the system so weigh
down on the auteur that he/she (but usually he in the canons
of such criticism) is forced to creativity as a veritable
survival tactic. A related aspect
of auteurism today has to do not simply with the
reincarnation of older auteurist methods but their
refinement or even transformation. In particular, where
classic auteurism relied on intuitions about the ways in
which the director works to author a film and posited above
all that personal artistic expression emerged in mysterious
ways from ineffable deep wells of creativity, new advances
in historiography (for example, the potentials that gritty
archival work offers) have led, in contrast, to a greater
concreteness and detail in the examination of just what the
work of the director involves. Gunning, for example, is
explicit in his understanding of Lang not as a romantic
genius drawing inspiration intuitively from hidden depths of
insight but as a veritable pragmatist who directly labors on
the materials of the world: "I would maintain that the
director as enunciator need not be thought of as a
Judaeo-Christian creator ex nihilo, but as an Aristotelian
demi-urge who works with pre-existent material, and the
nature of that material will always function as one of the
causes of the creation."[3] [3]
Gunning, 416. Likewise, the
historical poetics of David Bordwell focuses attention on
the immediate craft of the filmmaker - how he/she works in
precise material ways with the tools and materials of
his/her trade. For example, to take a typical statement, in
describing the experiments in the films of Hong Kong action
filmmakers - and putting them on virtually the same plane as
canonic directors - Bordwell declares that: In passing, I
should note that there are antecedents for an auteurism that
looks at the director as a crafter of techniques rather than
as a purveyor of deep concepts. For example, in the work of
the critics at the British journal Movie in the 1960s
and 1970s - V. F. Perkins, especially, there was already a
strong model of mise-en-scène criticism that eschewed
deep interpretation for a careful stylistics. Likewise, the
writing on action directors by Manny Farber in the 1950s
focussed closely on their visuality - what we might call an
auteurism of energetics rather than metaphysics or
thematics. [4]
Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong: popular cinema and the art of
entertainment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2000), 262-63. In addition to
the emphasis on directorial work as material activity, a new
industrial history of film looks not so much at the
director's "art" but at his success (or not) at dealing with
the business of filmmaking, with the forces of authority
that govern the political economy of film production. Here,
we can cite Jon Lewis's volume on Coppola, Whom God
wishes to destroy: Francis Ford Coppola and the new
Hollywood.[5]
While Lewis does from time to time offer artistic judgments
like those of classic auteurism, the bulk of his study is
not aesthetically oriented, preferring instead to offer a
careful and patient delineation of the economic structures
within which Coppola tries to work (hence, the importance of
the subtitle which ties an individual person to a larger
system). [5]
Jon Lewis, Whom God wishes to destroy: Francis Coppola
and the new Hollywood (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1995). At the same time,
many cases of the new auteurism work to displace classic
auteurism's emphasis on an uncovering of the creative
figure's solitary voice as a Truth that battles for
expression. First, there has been attention to the ways
"auteurs" are often constructed, called into being, by
institutional forces and discourses and according to precise
institutional needs. That is, instead of the director being
opposed to the system, he is now seen as a function - a
marketable commodity, for example - generated by that
system. Central here has been the concern to study the
construction of a "biographical legend" (a term Bordwell
uses in his study of Ozu's stylistics), the building up of a
useable image of the director.[6]
Thus,
for instance, Tim Corrigan and others have looked at the
emphasis on the auteur as a potential form of marketing: for
example, with the art-film market, the director's name is
useful for its investment in high-art aesthetic ideologies
of personal vision.[7]
And this marketing is not only imposed on the director by
external forces in the business but can come from his own
savvy self-promotional tactics. [6]
David Bordwell, Ozu and the poetics of cinema
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1988). [7]
Tim Corrigan, A cinema without walls: movies and culture
after Vietnam (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1991). For example, to
cite again his recent book on Fritz Lang, Gunning makes use
of biography of the director to examine how Lang in his
American career quite consciously tried to market himself as
prestigious saleable commodity: [8]
Gunning, 343. Additionally,
there has been a move to look for authorial voice in regions
other than that of the traditional Hollywood directors. In
some cases, this means attending to other sources of
creativity than the director. There has been, for instance,
a growing body of work on the producer as a sort of auteur:
where director auteurism often saw the producer as the
impediment to artistry, he is now imagined to be a source of
creative achievement.[9]
In the revealing title of Tom Schatz's The genius of the
system, there has even been an anthropomorphization of
the studio system itself as if the anonymous rules of that
system themselves constitute a creative force and
vision.[10]
Auteurs are now everywhere, not just in the stratum of
directors. [9]
For a symptomatic example of the new authorial study of the
producer, see George Custen, Twentieth Century's Fox:
Darryl F. Zanuck and the culture of Hollywood (New York:
Basic Books, 1997). [10]
Thomas Schatz, The genius of the system: Hollywood
filmmaking in the studio era (New York: Henry Holt and
Co., 1996). A related gesture
has to do with an extension of auteur principles to types of
directors that classical auteurism, in its fascination above
all with the Hollywood studio system, ignored. This new
application of auteur principles frequently has a political
edge to it and manifests a concern to uncover voices that,
to quote a famous title of feminist historiography, have
been "hidden from history." Thus, we see a concern with
female authorship (Annette Kuhn's anthology on Ida
Lupino)[11]
and even with specifically lesbian expression (Judith
Mayne's study of Dorothy Arzner)[12];
with racially inflected identities (for example, the flurry
of recent work on Oscar Micheaux); with queer identity; and
so on. Even as it appears to follow traditional notions of
individual creativity, such revamped auteurism can
deconstruct some of those notions from within insofar as
many of the original auteurist myths of strong creativity
have an intimate connection to norms of masculine
heterosexuality. [11]
Annette Kuhn, ed., Queen of the B's: Ida Lupino behind
the camera (Wiltshire, England: Flick Books,
1995) [12]
Judith Mayne, Directed by Dorothy Arzner
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1994). We can debate,
then, the extent to which director study now is essentially
the same practice as in the classic days or, rather, is a
transformation of original premises. For example, the
Bordwellian emphasis on craft that I mentioned above still
encourages one to look at directors and to valorize ones who
do their work well, but it does so outside of mythologies of
creativity as a mysterious force that wells up from some
sort of primal artistic vision. Creativity now comes from
concrete (and therefore, analyzable) patient application of
rules, tools, and conventions - what Bordwell treats as
filmmaking as "problem-solving" - rather than ineffable
genius. And the very concern with craft as applied technique
leads away from classic auteurist concerns with theme (the
content of a personal vision) to the study of poetics or
stylistics, the material engagement with filmic form on the
part of the director. No doubt there is
an extent to which many of the works of auteurism from the
1960s or 1970s on simply continue the older tradition
uncritically: one can cite any number of studies that
proceed as if structuralism, Marxist theory of ideology,
post-structuralism, postmodernism, and so on, never existed.
But it is also necessary to note how much of the new
auteurism is being undertaken by scholars and writers who
are aware of the theoretical critique of authorship, voice
and identity and have taken that critique to heart. In other
words, as much as theory modified auteurism (even to the
degree of making it an embarrassment for some scholars), it
is also the case that auteurism today has the potential to
modify theoretical precepts, obliged as they may become to
be aware of new ways of understanding desire and identity in
the contemporary moment. We might note
that desire itself has become an ever more important part of
today's cultural study. For instance, if the cold analytical
stance of semiotics seemed to eschew attention to desire
(except perhaps in the work of Roland Barthes where dry
science was itself imagined to be a source of euphoria), it
is now the case that desire and related topics such as
feeling, emotion and bodily sensation have gained a place on
the critical agenda. How social subjects are invested in the
practices that surround them (including cultural practices)
is an issue that encourages a psychoanalysis as much as a
socio-analysis. But to put it
more strongly, we might note that, in fact, critical theory
over the last few decades has made the case that
psychoanalysis is a form of socio-analysis. That is, the
study of the formation of the individual and his/her desire
is also inevitably the study of structures that are assumed
to contribute to this formation. When, for instance, Raymond
Williams treats societal meanings as "structures of
feeling," both nouns are important: cultural study has to
attend to individual feelings - to personal desires - but it
has to see the ways in which these are given shape by
objective historical processes. The rewriting of traditional
auteurism within the new industrial history that sets out to
pinpoint concretely just what the individual director did
(and didn't do) within the studio system is thus in keeping
with a theorisation that simultaneously studies
persons and social processes. After a
structuralist moment which disavowed agency, there has been
a new concern to examine when and how agency might be
possible. For example, there has been a resurgence of
interest in Sartrean versions of materialism where
individuals are treated as what Sartre terms "universal
singulars" - singular in that each person lives his/her life
in existentially irreducible ways, universal in that each
individual life is finally a way of living collective
history, of making that history one's own. As I've argued
elsewhere, Sartre's massive authorial study of Gustave
Flaubert, L'Idiot de la famille (The family
idiot), is a fully materialist work, arguing
simultaneously and necessarily that Flaubert's life was
irreducibly his own even as it stands as only one of the
ways writers made it through the Nineteenth
Century.[13]
In Sartre's hands, biography becomes a study of permutation:
there is a general structure to history but there are fully
singular ways that individuals live that structure. And, as
The critique of dialectical reason[14],
the more abstractly philosophical work that Sartre claims
establishes the framework for The family idiot's
approach to biography, bears out, central to Sartre's
existential Marxism is the supposition that a coalition
politics has to give attention to individuals. [13]
See Polan, "A vertigo of displacement: the Sartrean
spectacle of L'Idiot de la famille", Dalhousie
review, 64, No. 2 (Summer 1984): 354-75. [14]
Satre, Jean - Paul, The critique of dialectical
reason. (london, New York, Verso: 1991). For Sartre, a
coalition politics needs to examine the desires that move
social subjects toward or way from politics, to the ways in
which they assume agency and share it - if it is to
understand how and why - and most important,
whether--political change occurs. Sartre has been criticized
for "romanticism" - as has auteurism - but we might want to
argue in this respect that romanticism can have its place in
politics. Politics itself is in large part about desire -
what do we want? why do we often invest in social practices
contrary to our real needs - and a romantic theory can help
us understand how people operate when they interact with
social systems. It's revealing that in the moment after
structuralism and its critique of agency, there is the
possibility for a new reception of a political biography by
cultural studies pioneer E. P. Thompson with a quite apt
subtitle: William Morris: romantic to revolutionary.
In Thompson's argument, Morris's move to an explicit
socialist politics can happen only because he starts his
artistic career in romantic discontent matched by vague
utopian desires for something better.[15] [15]
E. P. Thompson, William Morris: romantic to
revolutionary (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977
[original publication: 1955]). But even with all
these new ways in which auteur study has been reinvigorated,
it is still necessary to interrogate the very need to look
at film production in terms of individuals. No matter how
sophisticated auteurism becomes under the influence of new
approaches from theory and history, it is still about
persons and their fates and destinies. Perhaps we can get at
this issue by asking why auteurism attracts critical desire.
Why, even in so many modified forms, is there this desire,
why has it endured in the face of ostensibly theoretically
trenchant critiques of individuality? We need to
recognize, for instance, the extent to which even in the new
auteurism there is a frequent temptation to fall back into
older models in which emotional appreciation rather than dry
analysis predominates. So often there's a moment in auteur
analyses where one can witness the auteurist slide from
social theorisation to enthusiastic admiration. Yes, we
admit that directors take up their place in larger
structures of meaning-production, but still, in the long
run, we want to imagine that auteurs are of interest
independent of all that context - of interest as
captivating, creative visionaries in their own
right. Look, as a
typical example of this slide, at a recent director study by
Susan Hayward of Luc Besson. The volume is part of a series
on French directors that certainly promises to move in new
directions by situating the directors in context: as the
series editors' foreword announces, [16]
Foreword to Susan Hayward, Luc Besson (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1998). Further references to
this text appear as page numbers in brackets. And Hayward
certainly presents her study as in line with this
approach: (Note, however,
how the language here implies that the decision as to
whether he is an auteur or not is left up to Besson
himself.) It is important
to see that already from the start, intimations of the
motifs and strategies of an older auteurism insinuate their
way into Hayward's study. First, there is the sense that
auteurs work in reaction or opposition to resistance on the
part of those in cultural power: "Besson's work (...) has
been acclaimed by the popular journals [but]
excoriated by the more serious ones." (1) Second, there is
the supposition that the director works by intuition and in
ignorance of his place in film's history: "Besson makes his
position quite clear: he has never sought to be a cinephile,
he has never set foot in the Cinémathèque."
(9) Most of all, even as the director is examined in
relation to a larger context of industry and society, there
is the lingering need to imagine that the director is an
irreducible fount of personal vision and that he/she works
by finding (however intuitively) visual equivalents for that
vision. Take, for instance, Hayward's discussion of Besson's
use of CinemaScope. More than a defining stylistic trait,
shooting in Scope is assumed by Hayward to allow Besson to
find an objective correlative for personal thematic
preoccupations. On the one hand, for Hayward, the way in
which Scope composition focuses on the space around
characters as much as on the characters themselves fits a
Bessonian concern with constraint and even imprisonment for
his protagonists: "[I]n a full or general shot, the
setting can seem to overpower or crush the characters." (17)
On the other hand, the fact that there is space around
characters also means that Bessonian composition thematizes
freedom, the possibility for characters to move beyond the
immediate givens of their fixedness in situations: "But his
use of scope also widens the frame, broadens the picture and
so it hints at the possibility of escape, of finding a way
out." (17) It is worth
pointing out that these two interpretations of the meaning
of Scope framing are contradictory to one another. Here, we
have an example of that non-falsifiability that Bordwell in
Making meaning has so trenchantly pinpointed as
endemic to an interpretative approach in the arts:
nothing, except the will of the auteurist to see things this
way, guarantees the reading of scope thematically and
nothing eventually enables one to decide if it's really
freedom or constraint that should be taken to be the meaning
of the stylistic marker.[17] [17]
See Bordwell, Making meaning: inference and rhetoric in
the interpretation of cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1989). I have just
referred to the "will of the auteurist" and I would like to
posit that an analysis of the operations of this will might
help us in understanding the fascination for auteurism. What
does the auteurist want? In large part, I would suggest, the
auteurist wants to create meaning by an imposition of
will. To clarify this,
we might note the extent to which auteurism proceeds by
means of collection. Think, for instance, of the
effect Andrew Sarris's The American cinema: directors and
directions had on a whole generation of cinephiles.
Sarris's hierarchies of value but also the sheer massiveness
of his lists became a clarion call for viewers to turn
passive reception into active investigation. No doubt, there
are many copies of The American cinema like mine with
its pencil lines crossing out the films viewed, offering
thereby a veritable score card of viewing accomplishments
and future screening goals. In passing, I would note the
curious sense of empowerment a number of us felt when we
realized that the titles that Sarris had not italicized as
being of special interest were in some cases films that he
simply had not seen and could not therefore "collect." For
auteurists, caught up in a feverish agon to see more films,
accumulate more listings, this sense of incompletion in an
established and reputed compendium seemed to open up
possibility, to imply that there was still new collecting to
be done. There is frequently competition among collectors, a
will to accumulate more examples and to master them better
than others have. I think we can
add to the understanding of the dynamics of such activity by
referring to the thoughts on collection set out by Susan
Stewart in her On longing: narratives of the miniature,
the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection. For Stewart,
collection is not a neutral activity in which the collector
sets out to mime the disposition of objects in their
original context. That is, collecting is not about letting
the objects speak their "Truth." Rather, it has to do with
an imposition of new truths, those operative for the
collector in his own present context. In Stewart's
words, [18]
Susan Stewart, On longing: narratives of the miniature,
the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 151. For Stewart,
there is competition not only between different collectors
(out-Sarrising Sarris), but also between the collector and
the world of objects he collects. Whatever those objects
might have meant in their original context matters less than
the new meaning that can be created for them in the act of
collection. As Stewart puts it, "Once the object is
completely severed from its origin, it is possible to
generate a new series, to start again within a context that
is framed by the selectivity of the collector. (...)
[T]he point of the collection is
forgetting."[19] [19]
Stewart, 152. In other words,
as an activity of creative collection, auteurism involves
more than just a neutral making up of lists. The creativity
of auteurism bases itself in strategies that construct its
objects in value-laden ways. First, as the pivotal role
played by Sarris suggests, auteurism is a process of
isolation (some directors are auteurs, some aren't) and of
valorization (some auteurs are higher in the constellation
of quality than others). Second, there is an activity of
meaning-making: not merely are certain directors declared to
be auteurs but specific significations are assigned to them
(the thematics of this or that auteur). Again, Hayward's
discussion of Luc Besson's use of CinemaScope exemplifies
this practice. After having differentiated Besson from other
directors by noting his mass popularity (unlike art-cinema
directors whose individuality seems to go hand-in-hand with
specialty audiences) and his disinterest in cinema history
(unlike many French directors whose films reflexively
comment on other works) which gives him a supposedly
refreshing innocence in cinematic approach, Hayward then
proceeds to fill out Besson's distinction with a positive
thematic content (the interplay of freedom and necessity,
seen to arise even in the way shots are
composed). Such attribution
of meanings slides into a third aspect of auteurism.
Specifically, auteurism frequently bases its
differentiations among directors on a notion of complexity
of meaning. Hence, in Peter Wollen's breakthrough
"structuralist" re-writing of auteurism in his vastly
influential Signs and meanings in the cinema, both
John Ford and Howard Hawks are distinguished as auteurs, but
clearly Wollen's preference goes to the former for the
manner in which the original binary oppositions of the
Western ostensibly are modified, and thereby supposedly are
enriched, as Ford's career develops.[20] [20]
Peter Wollen, Signs and meaning in the cinema
(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1972
[1969]). But, in what
might at first seem a paradox, complexification is
accompanied by an activity of purification. That is, each
auteur must be seen to possess a vision and a thematics
irreducible to, and unshareable with, others (whether they
be the other workers on the film to be treated as what
Wollen refers to as a "noise" beneath which the director's
voice must be distinguished - or other directors who are to
be situated elsewhere in the meaning-making constellation of
auteurs).[21] [21]
Dudley Andrew also explicitly analyzes the "purity" of
auteurism in his "The unauthorized auteur today" in Stam and
Miller, eds., Film theory: an anthology (New York
& London: Blackwell, 2000). We might take
Gilles Deleuze's famous two-volume typology of the signs of
cinema in terms of the "great auteurs" as an extreme
manifestation of this philosophy of purity. As he puts it in
a frequently cited declaration, "The great auteurs of the
cinema may be compared, in our view, not merely with
painters, architects and musicians, but also with thinkers.
They think with movement-images and time-images instead of
concepts."[22]
Not for nothing does Deleuze announce that his study is not
a "history" for what he is presenting is a classification in
which each director is associated in irreducible purity with
a specific sign and in which any succession between
directors is taken to result from a logic of signs
themselves rather than from the pressures of material
history. (Undoubtedly, I am simplifying aspects of Deleuze's
approach. For example, he does acknowledge the role of
history in moving cinema in the postwar period from a
confident rendition of movement to a questioning and
questioned experimentation with temporality. And in the
transition from image-movement to image-time, as
commentators point out, Deleuze's model appears to allow for
impurity through the case of certain directors - Hitchcock,
in particular - who mix modes and deal creatively with both
time and movement. Nonetheless, it still seems to me to be
the case that Deleuze's taxonomy is finally a logic, and not
a history: there are a limited array of inviolate elements
(each director and the sign-function--or, in rare cases,
functions--he is associated with) and then a placing of
those elements into a table (a tableau) where the fact that
the organization is historical is only
incidental.) [22]
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: the movement-image, trans.
Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988), xiv. I take my
understanding of such process of purification from cultural
theorist James Clifford who in a discussion of collection in
anthropology inspired in large part by Susan Stewart notes
how traditionally this field's rummaging for objects in
"primitive" cultures concentrated on those items felt to be
free of contamination from other cultures, even when it
might have been apparent that many cultures frequently are
based on exchange, trade, and infiltration between cultures.
As Clifford puts it, [23]
James Clifford, The predicament of culture:
twentieth-century ethnography, literature, and art
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988),
231. In auteurism, the
wish for that which, to use Clifford's terms, "is opposed to
modernity," manifests itself in a desire to see the auteur
as creatively ignorant of the cultural history of his art.
Auteurs must be non-intellectuals, visionaries who operate
in freedom and purity to give their inviolate world
philosophy an arena of expression but doing so in an
intuitive, unreflected manner. In this respect, it might not
be too extreme to suggest that in the auteur theory, the
real auteurs turn out to be the auteurists rather than the
directors they study. Faced with the vast anonymity and
ordinariness of the mass of films that have ever been made -
and in contrast to the anonymous, ordinary manner in which
many people see films (the LA times reports that many
average spectators go to the multiplex not having a specific
film title in mind and choose once they confront the array
of offerings) - the auteurist quests to have his personal
vision of cinema emerge from obscurity. He struggles to
impose his vision on a system of indifference (which can
include, as we have seen, the indifference of the directors
themselves). In this respect,
we might note the extent to which auteurism frequently
depends on the assumption that cultural workers don't always
understand the meanings of their own creations. An infamous
example of this is Bogdanovich's documentary, Directed by
John Ford (US 1971), where Ford notoriously refuses to
understand even that his films can have meaning, can be more
than just the entertaining result of a job. Intriguingly,
the question that most ticks Ford off - isn't there an
evolution in his image of the Indian? - doesn't seem
particularly academic or intellectualizing or even
difficult, and Ford's harshness seems only the more to
confirm that artists don't always have the best insights
into their work. The widespread infusion of the notion that
the Intentional Fallacy is a bad approach in the
understanding of art - "the design or intention of the
author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for
juding the success of a work of literary art," in Beardsley
and Wimsatt's famous phrase[24]
- no doubt had as its salutary effect to focus attention
more on textual poetics themselves. But it also has had the
effect of empowering the critic or commentator to create
meanings that may in fact be as fanciful an interpretation
of the text as was intentionalism. [24]
William K. Wimsatt and
Monroe
Beardsley, "The intentional fallacy," in Wimsatt, The
verbal icon: studies in the meaning of poetry
(Louisville, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1954),
3. In passing,
though, we might note the possibility that not all cases of
auteurism involve the passivity of the director and the
activity of the auteurist. The director still can impose on
the auteurist's construction of him. Given that auteurism
involves a future-oriented quest to see ever more films and
to find ways to classify and master them, there is always
the risk for the auteurist of the discovery of a work that
refuses to fit the model, that refuses to conform to the
world-view auteurists has constructed for the director. Like
the possibility of counter-transference that some
philosophers of history have suggested allows the past to
speak back to the historian in the present, even the
deceased director can have some tricks up his
sleeve.[25]
A newly discovered film or a restored "director's cut" can
come along to confound the auteurist's model. What happens,
for instance, to our long-standing image of Robert Aldrich
when we discover that he in fact disliked the famously
cynical ending of Kiss me deadly [US 1955] -
which film historiography has bequeathed as one of the key
moments in postwar apocalyptic imagining - and preferred
having Mike Hammer and Velma escape ill-fated destiny? Of
course, the resourceful auteurist can always modify his
system in ways that account for - or discount - the seeming
exception to the rule. [25]
An amusing discussion of the revenge of the past is Martin
Jay's "The ungrateful dead," Salmagundi, 123 (Summer
1999): 22-31. Jay recounts how years after interviewing
various members of the Frankfurt School for his famous book
on the School, he discovered nasty comments on him in
journals and private letters by those members. A more
general discussion of history as composed of transference
and counter-transference (the past speaking back to the
historian in the present) occurs in Dominick La Capra,
"History and psychoanalysis," Soundings in critical
theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1989). Earlier, I quoted
Susan Stewart on collecting as a kind of forgetting, and
much of the anti-intentionalism of auteurism sets out to
forget the director's thoughts. In a sense, to go back to
our guiding question of what the auteurist desires, he
desires in larger part that directors themselves don't
desire, that they do nothing but create with pure and full
unconsciousness of their creative process, that they create
works that auteur-collectors can interpret to their own
ends. This is what Stewart describes as the collector's
"replacement of the narrative of production [in
auteurism's case, the production of the films themselves by
their directors] by the narrative of the collection, the
replacement of the narrative of history with the narrative
of the individual subject - that is, the collector
himself."[26] [26]
Stewart, 156. Note that Stewart
isn't suggesting a converse and corrective replacing of the
individual subject of the collector by some individual
subject responsible for the original production. What the
collector's subjectivity has replaced is the sweep of
history itself and its modes of production, not some realm
of lone creative individuals. The alternative to
anti-intentionalism doesn't have to be a return to
intentionalism. For instance, the new industrial history of
film that I discussed at the beginning of this essay can
deal with the work of the director, but it does so outside
of a quest for directorial intentionality. The point, then,
wouldn't be to no longer do auteurism, but to imagine ways
to do it differently. Perhaps auteurism needs more of that
self-reflexivity that James Clifford calls for in the
activity of anthropological collection: [27]
Clifford, 229. We could, for
instance, imagine auteurism as itself a historical activity
- arising in particular social and cultural situations as a
way of responding to them. For example, in an excellent
study of auteurism, Jim Naremore employs Raymond Williams's
notion of a "cultural formation" - in Naremore's words, "a
loose confederation of intellectuals and critics (...) who
had roughly similar objectives, and who developed a body of
polemical writings to justify their position" - to analyze
as fully historical the postwar emergence of French
auteurism. As Naremore puts it, In conclusion,
there are many ways in which auteurism might be revitalized
for our future (and we would then need self-reflexively to
investigate why we might want to do so). There is no need to
study the film director but there is also no need not to
study the film director. Indeed, to look at what happens to
individuals as they attempt to negotiate the space of
society is one way to enrich social theory and, in this
respect, we can push for a study of the work of directors
that is fully and finally historical in the richest sense of
that term. [28]
Jim Naremore, "Authorship," in Bob Stam and Toby Miller,
eds., A companion to film theory (New York &
London: Blackwell, 1999), 10.
6753 words
Abstract
| Printer
version
[T]he
issue of authorship becomes that much more intense in
Lang's Hollywood oeuvre, precisely because it cannot
assert itself as directly (...) Lang in Hollywood made
films that do not immediately call attention to
themselves and whose signs of authorship are often
hidden. As an enunciatory force, Lang begins to bore from
within. For the most part, beneath an apparent conformity
to Hollywood modes and genres and ideology, Lang fashions
extremely personal and often experimental
works.[2]
In
commercial film, experimentation is usually not anarchic
messing about but self-conscious craftsmanship. It is
hard to argue that the devious use of point of view in
Hitchcock, the stylistic surprises in Yasujiro Ozu, and
the flamboyant montage opening What price
survival? [Hong Kong 1994] come straight from
the id. These innovations are the result of patient care.
Driven by competition, contrariness, or just the urge not
to repeat oneself, the ambitious artisan presses against
tradition, testing how far one can go while still playing
by the rules of the game.[4]
Besides
producing 'Fritz Lang' films, this office [of Diana
Productions, Lang's production company] was dedicated
to manufacturing Fritz Lang as a signature, not only
putting him before the public eye but defining who he was
for the public as a film-maker. Thus, Lang and his office
(and Universal's publicity office) tried to come up with
a catch-phrase that could identify Lang for audiences and
critics. (...) But Lang seemed uncertain how to do this.
(...) 'Realism' (a term he was always attached to) was
one aspect of his films he wanted stressed. Another was
targeting an adult audience, with culture and
intellect.[8]
[t]he
auteur perspective on film (...) will be interrogated in
certain volumes of the series, and throughout the
director will be treated as one highly significant
element in a complex process of film production and
reception which includes socioeconomic and political
determinants, the work of a large and highly skilled team
of artists and technicians, the mechanisms of production
and distribution, and the complex and multiply determined
responses of spectators.[16]
This
romantic aesthetic [of auteurism] is quite
narcissistic . . . Although Besson scripts and produces
his films as well as directs them, he does not see
himself as an auteur but as a metteur-en-scène -
that is, as part of the production practice. Besson works
with a fairly constant crew of technicians and group of
actors and readily acknowledges their role in the
production of meanings in his films.(10)
The
collection does not displace attention to the past;
rather, the past is at the service of the collection . .
. The collection seeks a form of self-enclosure which is
possible because of its ahistoricism. The collection
replaces history with classification, with order beyond
the realm of temporality. In the collection, time is not
something to be restored to an origin; rather, all time
is made simultaneous or synchronous with the collection's
world.[18]
Artifacts
and customs are saved out of time. Anthropological
culture collectors have typically gathered what seems
'traditional' - what by definition is opposed to
modernity. From a complex historical reality (which
includes current ethnographic encounters) they select
what gives form, structure, and continuity to a world.
What is hybrid or 'historical' in an emergent sense has
been less commonly collected and presented as a system of
authenticity.[23]
The
categories of the beautiful, the cultural, and the
authentic have changed and are changing. Thus it is
important to resist the tendency of collections to be
self-sufficient, to suppress their own historical,
economic, and political processes of production. (...)
More historical self-consciousness in the display and
viewing of non-Western objects can at least jostle and
set in motion the ways in which anthropologists, artists,
and their publics collect themselves and the
world.[27]
Auteurism
fits the profile of a modern cultural formation almost
perfectly. It originated in Paris during the 1950s, at a
moment when France was becoming increasingly
Americanized, and in many respects it imitated what Peter
Burger and other writers have called the "historical"
avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s. Like the old
avant-garde, it possessed an intellectual or 'left bank'
aura; it made iconoclastic or shocking value judgments;
it was articulated in specialized magazines (the most
famous of which was Cahiers du cinéma); it
embraced certain elements of pop culture and used them as
a weapon to attack bourgeois values; it published
manifestos . . . ; and it served as a kind of banner to
help publicize the early work of its own
adherents.[28]
