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[1]
Marc Le Bot, "L'auteur anonyme ou l'état
d'imposteur", Hors cadre 8 (1990): 11. My
translation. E. Elias
Merhige's Shadow of the vampire (US 2000) stages an
elaborate conceit from an imaginary or speculative history
of film. Nosferatu (Germany 1922) is being shot, and
no one except the director knows that the actor playing the
title role, Max Schreck (Willem Dafoe), is really a vampire.
With a gleeful disregard for the chronology of global art
movements, Merhige and writer Steven Katz present this
fiendish pact as Method acting gone mad - their recreated
Nosferatu, in its process of 'unbecoming',
anticipates postwar psychodrama, a confusion art and life,
performance and reality. On this surface level, Shadow of
the vampire has more in common with contemporary movies
about the filming of violence (like Man bites dog
[Belgium 1992]) or sex (Boogie nights [US
1997]) than with the heyday of German
expressionism. But Merhige's
fantasia becomes more resonant when considered as being
primarily about its director figure, Friedrich Wilhelm
Murnau (1888-1931). For the purposes of this movie, who is
Murnau - or, more precisely, what image of the auteur does
he allow us to entertain? Merhige and Katz seamlessly layer
several such images. Murnau the great artist, the
'visionary', painstakingly talking his actors through each
scene. Murnau the dandy-eccentric. Murnau the on-set tyrant.
Murnau the international man of mystery and myth - a media
celebrity of his day, whose guarding of privacy led to the
proliferation of rumours about his spiritualist and occult
practices, his Eastern philosophical beliefs, and his mooted
bisexuality. John Malkovich - an actor who increasingly
gravitates towards non-psychological modes of performance in
films by Raul Ruiz, Michelangelo Antonioni, Manoel de
Oliveira and the like - projects with unerring accuracy the
pure presence of a tabula rasa upon which this
palimpsest of marks identifying 'Murnau' can be
inscribed. So we have the
fiction of Murnau - like Alfred Hitchcock or Fritz Lang, a
filmmaker whose life easily transmits itself to contemporary
biographers as a juicy roman full of intrigue (the
original title of a splendid book by Bernard Eisenschitz is
Roman Américain: les vies de Nicholas
Ray).[2]
But there is a deeper, almost allegorical level to this
tale, since the contemplation of Murnau - again like
Hitchcock or Lang - inevitably generates a meditation upon
the cinematic apparatus itself, in the terms sketched by
Thomas Elsaesser: [2]
English translation by Tom Milne: Bernard Eisenschitz,
Nicholas Ray: an American journey (London: Faber and
Faber, 1993). [3]
Thomas Elsaesser, "Vincente Minnelli", in Rick Altman (ed.),
Genre: the musical (London: British Film Institute,
1981), 10. Further references parenthesised in main
text. In this light,
Shadow of the vampire is a particular variant of the
films-about-filmmaking genre - it is a tale of the
irrevocably 'haunted screen' (the title of Lotte Eisner's
book on German expressionist cinema), [4]
cinema as through and through the medium of the uncanny and
the undead, like Vernon Zimmerman's Fade to black (US
1980) or Abel Ferrara's The addiction (US 1995). This
is what the fictive Murnau's 'realism' - or, more
authentically, the real Murnau's aesthetic theories of
'animism' ("What I refer to is the fluid architecture of
bodies with blood in their veins [...] the formation
and destruction of a hitherto unsuspected life")
[5]
- trigger: an allegory of the cinema as vampiric, that which
recreates the life of the world by, at the outset, capturing
and draining it. This is the true 'vampire's shadow' cast in
the title. And, in its apocalyptic ending, this fantasia
joins up with at least one other biographical testament to
filmmaking as inexorable, immoral tragedy - Clint Eastwood's
White hunter, black heart (US 1990): both films end
with the solemn ritual of the director-figure as dark
demiurge intoning 'action' or 'cut', as if that unreeling of
celluloid within a camera was driven less by mechanics than
by the Faustian pact secured by the compulsive vision or
Will of an auteur. [4]
Lotte Eisner, The haunted screen (Berkely: University
of California Press, 1969). [5]
Quoted in Scott Eyman, "Sunrise in Bora Bora", Film
Comment (November-December 1990): 79. There is one
further layer to this game of mirrors, since Merhige, as
director of the film we are watching, can hardly avoid
entering into a simultaneously delighted and troubled
relationship of identification with his seductive, demonic,
driven hero. Merhige wisely does not attempt a too-close
mimicry of Murnau's style for the presentation of his own
tale (as distinct from the carefully mocked-up bits of
Nosferatu, reminiscent in their hyperreality of Tim
Burton's A-movie pastiches of Z-movie style in Ed
Wood [US 1994]). But, all the same, his sense of
rhythm, of staging action, and especially of framing - for
the fictive Murnau and perhaps also for his real model, only
that which comes inside the force-field of the static,
immaculately worked frame is truly alive - owes a lot to the
Master. Merhige - whose gruelling experimental feature
Begotten (US 1991) conjured an obscure, primal,
mythic violence and resembled (as the director put it) a
piece of refuse dug up from deep below the earth - has found
a path to fiction, character and the cool, thoughtful
layering of subjective and objective perspectives through
his disquieting 'exchange' with the spirit of an imagined
Murnau. - Jonathan
Rosenbaum to Jim Jarmusch[6] [6]
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Dead man (London: British Film
Institute, 2000), 84. There is
invariably a strange and charming 'alienation effect' when
one revisits the hot polemics of an earlier period. In 1974,
American scholar Charles Eckert, noting "the disintegration
of the whole formalist-idealist endeavour" in cinema
studies, dramatically observed that "there is a stiff, cold
wind blowing against partial, outmoded, or theoretically
unsound forms of film criticism - and it might just blow
many of them away".[7]
This was an early bulletin in the Anglo-American 'film
theory' revolution. Eckert's prognosis about the state of
his field already equivocated between a sense of
intellectual euphoria and a dread of professional fatigue;
between the thrill of a terrorism that one might be in a
position to inflict and the fear of terrorism that one might
too easily end up in a position to suffer: [7]
Charles W. Eckert, "Shall we deport Levi-Strauss?", Film
quarterly 27.3 (Spring 1974): 65. Further references
parenthesised in main text. It has become a
standard editorial move for any positively inflected
collection on an 'old' theme - such as style, aesthetics,
genre or auteurism - to herald itself as part of the heroic
'return' of that particular, unfairly forgotten or
suppressed topic to the agenda of professional cinema
studies. While I would like to cloak this collection with
the paradoxical glamour of an old-but-new wave, I am not
sure that this description would be exactly apt or true.
'Auteurism', although it has been strongly challenged in
theory, has never really gone away in practice. And it
proceeds in a largely unsystematic and impulsive way, from
one manifestation to the next, because cinema studies, if we
can even meaningfully cohere it as a 'field', seems to me
more ad hoc, less programmatic and agenda-driven, than is
sometimes assumed (or wished). Cinema studies, taken
globally and in all its forms (including those that go on
outside universities) is not one 'mind' with a Will and a
single direction; nor can its manifestations be exhausted in
the image of the bloody clash by night of a number of major
'schools' of thought. This project for
Screening the past began with an unpolemical aim: to
survey what is going on at present in the domain of what
could be called auteurism or (less colourfully) 'director
studies' - those critical, historical and theoretical works
which, in whatever way, take the film director as the
organising centre of their analyses. As it organically
unfolded into something more than an impartial map of
current work, this collection formed itself into an
obsessive investigation of often obscure impulses: those of
auteurs, and those of auteurists. And, given the
open-endedness of these impulses, plus the multiple uses to
which they can be put, mightn't the statement "I want to
write about Delbert Mann" be a valid starting point (as
valid as any other, at any rate), after all? Boiled down to
its essentials, classical auteurism is a quite simple
principle, with two emphases. Firstly, it is a proposition
about the making of films: that a film's director can be
rightly pinpointed as the one most responsible for its art
and craft. Secondly, it is a statement about understanding
films: that one good way to explore and interpret films is
through focusing on the 'signature' or traces of the
director's style, 'vision' and recurring concerns. Not
necessarily the best or only way - although it may have
sometimes and in some places seemed so during the 1950s or
'60s - but an enabling way, nonetheless. As Tag Gallagher
suggests in this issue ("Reading, culture, and auteurs"),
the "utility for regarding a director as auteur is the
richness of experience that may result". Such passionate
engagement with an auteur - by whatever means we construe
him or her in our minds - can be about something grander
than simply 'getting results'. Of course
auteurism, like any method or theory whatsoever, has indeed
produced many rote analyses and responses - dry
structuralist tabulations of motifs, banal notations of
recurring material, unimaginative interrelations of style to
content. What auteurism sometimes 'discovered', in its most
naive moments, and attributed to the one-and-only genius of
a director, was often in fact more readily derived from
convention, genre or the wider culture. This is why
auteurism, at the points where it eroded and got swept under
a carpet, easily gave way to 'historical poetics of cinema',
to cultural studies, and to the sociological analysis of
studios, eras and 'national imaginaries'. This was the
programmatic 'move' announced by Peter Wollen in the
revised, 1972 edition of Signs and meaning in the
cinema, in terms that were both theoretically driven and
pragmatic: "I do not believe that development of auteur
analyses of Hollywood films is any longer a first
priority".[8] [8]
Peter Wollen, Signs and meaning in the cinema, second
edition (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972), 173. But personally,
taking the long view of global cinema criticism, I cannot
doubt that writing about directors has been, and continues
to be, among the most searching and satisfying approaches to
this medium. Something more than a mere 'principle' - and
something other than an expedient defense for a method of
study which 'gets results' - has to be at stake here. I am
reminded again of Elsaesser's reflection (cited above) on
the past, present and future of auteurism: In fact, one way
to schematise the current range of director studies - and to
map the diverse impulses underlying it - is to imagine the
auteur in two quite different forms: as a real, historically
determinate individual; and as an abstraction, a 'fiction',
an image. Neither approach is necessarily more 'true' than
the other; both are enabling mechanisms for serious,
detailed work. And we do not need to set these conceptions
up in polemical opposition to each other; they are often
intertwined. Many attacks on
auteurism inflated the perceived 'enemy' created by its
"formalist-idealist" methodology into something truly
fantastic: the director/auteur not as worker or artisan or
wily operator, but a dreaded 'romantic individual' of the
kind that can only exist in myth. In practice, even those
who launched the missiles of anti-auteurist rhetoric tended
to proceed with critical business as usual: few ever stopped
speaking of Jean-Luc Godard, Jane Campion, Hitchcock or John
Cassavetes as if they were no longer in charge of the movies
they signed. This is also the case, more recently, with the
flamboyant gestures of anti-auteurism issuing from directors
themselves - as in the Danish 'Dogme' manifesto, which
decrees that films made under its aegis be anonymous -
instantly reassigned by popular journalism and criticism
alike as quirky directorial statements. Emerging from
this fog, some now seek to understand the materiality of
creative and industrial processes: how a director's 'vision'
is formed in collaboration with others, and how it is
subject to many kinds of decisively constraining and shaping
influences. This is the domain of "explaining how they're
made", what William Routt has recently labelled a
"cine-pragmatics" reflected in Stephen Frears' credo as a
filmmaker: "all problems are technical". [9]
Thus, in this instalment of Auteurism 2001, Roger
Hillman explores the collaboration between Rainer Werner
Fassbinder and his regular composer, Peer Raben; while, in
the next instalment (issue 13, June 2001), Chika Kinoshita
proposes a new way of understanding the working relationship
between Kenji Mizoguchi and his favourite actress, Kinuyo
Tanaka. The question of influence - and the recasting of
'sources' from art, literature, music and philosophy - is
taken up by Gino Moliterno in his treatment of Andrei
Tarkovsky's The sacrifice (Sweden 1985). [9]
William D. Routt, "Misprision", forthcoming in an anthology
on the films of Fritz Lang edited by Douglas Pye for Cameron
Books (UK); Stephen Frears, "Alexander MacKendrick", in John
Boorman and Walter Donohoue (eds), Projections
(London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 68. By the same
token, a number of the analyses showcased here - such as
Brad Stevens on James Toback and Sue Gillett on Campion -
for the most part invoke, in that 'old fashioned' way, only
the name of the central auteur. And why not? Support for
such an invocation comes from Gilles Deleuze, who (in the
following assemblage of three separate quotations) offers an
intriguing defense of a history of philosophy - or cinema -
based on a parade of 'proper names': If concepts
are the object of a creation, then one must say that
these concepts are signed. There is a signature, not that
the signature establishes a link between the concept and
the philosopher who created it. Rather the concepts
themselves are signatures. The great
directors 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. (...) [the
cinema] forms part of art and part of thought, in the
irreplaceable, autonomous forms which these directors
were able to invent and get screened, in spite of
everything. [10] [10]
Gilles Deleuze, "Vincennes session of April 15, 1980,
Leibniz seminar", Discourse 20.3 (Fall 1998): 79; "Vincennes
session of April 22, 1980", http://www.imaginet.fr/deleuze/TXT/ENG/220480.htm;
Cinema 1: the image-movement (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1996), xiv. Auteurist
criticism has long spoken of the 'personal visions' and
'world views' of directors, and this noble tradition is
continued here in the work of Gallagher on Edgar Ulmer and
(in issue 13) George Kouvaros on Cassavetes and Fiona
Villella on Jarmusch. Deleuze's approach strengthens this
apprehension: the concepts which an artist thinks with and
through are creative, they conjure and constitute entire,
unique, self-contained worlds that run on distinct, at times
surreal logics. Such an entering into 'personal worlds'
inevitably leads writers into excavating long ignored
aspects of aesthetics, stylistics and mise en
scène: Ulmer's incandescent lighting; Cassavetes'
volatile framing of human gesture; or Jacques Becker's ear
for sounds and rhythms, as explored by Jodi Brooks in her
analysis of Le trou (France 1960). The happy
inclusion here of these less-written-about figures indicates
another drive of contemporary auteurism: to get past the
constrictions of earnest canons and unbending mantra
enumerating a mere handful of 'greats' (a constriction to
which even the works of Wollen and Deleuze are sometimes
prone), and refind the vital energy and exploratory drive of
the auteurist endeavour before it ossified into its
'classic' manifestation. Issue 14 (September 2001) will
showcase a prominent aspect of this revitalisation of
auteurism: the study of contemporary directors who
themselves cagily gleefully 'intervene' into given forms and
genres. This section features Rose Capp on Chantal Akerman;
Angela Ndalianis on Paul Verhoeven; and Philippa Hawker on
Kathryn Bigelow. Deleuze chooses
to sever the link between 'signature' and 'person' in
invoking an auteur's creation. This, too, is familiar from a
tradition in film theory and criticism. It signals that line
of thinking which derives from Michel Foucault's meditation
on the 'author function', the circulation of an author not
as biographical entity but as 'name' or commodity. One kind
of work that has branched out from this insight is
historical and materialist: analyses of the 'making of
reputations', the 'subject of history' or celebrity
images.[11]
Tim Groves' essay here studies a case in which the popular
and critical conflation of an auteur with his literal screen
'image' becomes especially sticky: Clint
Eastwood. [11]
See, for a range of examples, Thomas Elsaesser,
Fassbinder's Germany: history identity subject
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996); Dugald
Williamson, Authorship and criticism (Sydney: Local
Consumption, 1986); and Hors cadre 8 (1990), devoted
to "the state of the auteur". Another kind of
work on signature is post-structuralist: the signature
floating free, borne on the waves of image, sound and
'writing', that last word understood in its most forceful
and active sense. Tom Gunning's recent book on Fritz Lang
(which deftly mixes historical-materialist and
post-structuralist modes) begins with the paradox of this
'emblem' of the auteur's signature - Lang often used inserts
of his own, writing hand in his films - in order to trace
the 'loss' of the auteur (and his megalomanical, enunciative
control) in the worldly eventuality of the work it
produces.[12]
William
Routt's essay here further explores this paradox by
examining the legacy of Lois Weber through the concepts
offered by Maurice Blanchot on the 'exigency of
writing'. [12]
Tom Gunning, The films of Fritz Lang: allegories of
vision and modernity (London: British Film Institute,
2000). Dana Polan, in
his contribution, directs our attention to the doubleness of
'desire' in auteurism: there is desire of the auteur,
and desire for the auteur. And thus, if the director
is at one level a fiction or phantasm, we inevitably and
necessarily come to examine the critic and the various,
complex 'investments' that are made by him or her in the
desiring creation of auteurs. Auteurism 2001 proposes
a range of responses to the question of what this desire
might entail. Ken Mogg's piece on The birds (US 1963)
and recent commentary upon it looks for a way of grounding
discussion of Hitchcock in a method that is not merely
piecemeal or opportunistic - Eckert's blast at "self-serving
narrowings of the field of inquiry" finally comes home to
roost - but apt, exact, encompassing, and existentially
truthful, including being as true as possible to what
we know of the work practices and sensibility of the
director. Mogg thus finds his most faithful 'mirror' in the
philosphical writings of Arthur Schopenhauer. Groves, for his
part, looks to Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic theory of
forgiveness to understand the 'affective investments' of a
critic in a work. Stevens offers a distinctive twist in this
labyrinth of desire when he suggests that "we cinephiles are
nothing more than the wandering ghosts of those mythical
popular audiences who once visited the cinema regularly" -
implying again, like Elsaesser, that the auteur may be the
"name of a pleasure" rather than the name of a person. And,
in this light, we can equally understand the practice of
other writers, no less on the track of understanding this
enigmatic and elusive pleasure of the movies, wanting to
displace the name of the author, which they envisage as a
blockage of critical flow: "My own analyses nowadays almost
always place 'the film' where the name of the director used
to be placed (...) The author is the identity we can do
without" (Routt).[13]
Or consider this statement by Philip Brophy, one of the most
thoroughly 'intertextual' (and least auteurist) of major
critics: [13]
William D. Routt, "Pieces", Screening the past 10
(July 2000). http://www.latrobe.edu.au/www/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr0600/brfr10a/Pieces/preface.htm [14]
Philip Brophy, Restuff: horror, gore, exploitation
(Melbourne: Stuff, 1988), 3. Experiments in
intertextual auteurism - based on generative comparisons
between directors - are the basis of a section in
Issue 14, including pieces by Bill Krohn on Alain Resnais,
Gallagher on McCarey, and myself on Abel Ferrara. But even
these mappings hold firm to a 'personal' orientation. For
persons - individuals - will never be absent from auteurism.
The lingering problem with auteurism is not some residual
'romanticism' but the question mark it raises about the -
undoubtedly 'humanist' - category of the individual. In this
sense, battles over auteurism may be an expression of a
greater cultural war, rarely named and hashed out as such:
the contemporary struggle between humanism and
anti-humanism. Polan's meditation arrives at a suspended
conclusion: "There is no need to study the film director but
there is also no need not to study the film director". Why
this ambivalence about the centring of film analysis on
individuals? Polan's doubts are political: the study of
individuals may more easily lead us away from thinking about
social, intersubjective and collective processes than
towards it (even though many conceptual tools for the latter
task are already available). Again, it is a matter of
circumnavigating critical blockage, wherever and however it
looms. But can we be so blasé, so fickle, about the
'call' of the individual auteur and its siren-like effects
upon us? Cinema studies as
a 'field' also has a problem with individualism or, more
plainly, good old individuality - by which I mean the
indviduality of critics or theorists, the potential,
powerful singularity of their personal visions and unique
voices. For film theory must also be, applying Deleuze's
terms, an act of creation, an invention of a 'virtual
cinema' - and this invention can be radically different for
each person who writes and speaks. The surrealist credo of
the "indestructible nature of the interior poetic
voice"[15]
(so richly embodied by Petr Král and testified to in
his tribute, translated and reprinted here, to Tarkovsky)
might help film theory, as a collective endeavour, to fully
reclaim and embrace its many 'eccentrics' (from Vachel
Lindsay to Stanley Cavell via Pier Paolo Pasolini). This
might also help it to reach beyond the boundaries of the
academy, since those critics who mostly toil in journalistic
fields can, of necessity, more easily and readily lay claim
to their 'voice', and to the auto-didactic sophistry of
'inventing cinema' for their readers or
listeners. [15]
Jean Schuster interviewed by Paul Hammond, "Specialists in
Revolt", New Statesman 2958 (4 December 1987):
23. The individual,
these days, marks an excess in the system - every kind of
system, political, intellectual, economic. And the
particular kind of cultural economy which binds the
individual who is an auteur to the individual who is a
filmgoer remains charged with a magical, primitive,
old-fashioned energy that is forever bound up with but also
forever outside the social contract: an economy of the
gift, which is also (at least potentially) an economy
of excess and surplus. Every cinephile knows this thrill: a
film which strikes us a gift, a gift from someone,
somewhere, however tantalisingly clouded and mysterious in
origin. Auteurism taps
into the doubleness not only of desire but of art itself:
art which is simultaneously rooted in a specific place and
time (as political materialism teaches us) and gloriously
detached from any place and time, floating in the cultural
ether until it reaches us like a lightning bolt. Cinephilia
would not exist without this kind of revelatory experience:
the mad but certain thought that Sergei Paradjanov (for
example) speaks to me, that he might have made his
films for me, even as I understand so little of what
formed his life as a 'historical subject'; and then the
compelling conviction that, thus 'summoned', I must bear
witness to this revelation, tell its story in the words of
the critical act. For the economy of the gift is also an
economy of (phantom) friendship, and of quasi-divine
'election'. The best
criticism, I believe, goes on to explore the 'otherness' of
the art-object in two directions at once: it tracks mystery
to its real-world source in history, nation and culture - a
speciality of Screening the Past, reflected here
again in Sian Reynold's presentation of Germaine Dulac - but
also expands it to a virtual infinity. This is how we can
encounter the auteur as simultaneously a real artisan and a
fantastic apparition. I am listening to
a gift - the boxed CD set of Jean-Luc Godard's
Histoire(s) du cinéma (France 1988-1999) - and
trying hard to follow its text, laid out as blank verse, in
the accompanying book. It is a mysterious, disorienting and
somewhat spooky way to experience this monumental 4 hour
work, without the slightest indication of what is in the
image-track and the intertitles, or any identification of
the various actors and speakers. At the end chapter 3 (b),
"A new wave", a dialogue takes place between Godard and a
woman. I see a setting: the 'imaginary museum' constructed
by Godard himself in his speculative and very personal
cinema history. The auteur - casting himself with typical
self-lacerating irony as a raving curator or maybe just a
clownish janitor - fields a complaint from a
spectator: but never of
people that's what it
was, the nouvelle vague the auteurs'
policy not auteurs,
works Godard
replies: the works
first then the
men Then the
sophistic dialogue takes a number of successive sharp turns,
whereby this distinction - between individuals and works -
is quickly morphed into a duality of heart (which the
curator/filmmaker is accused of lacking) and
labour. not
hearts But - in the next
conceptual twist - what if we live in "a time of
unemployment"? Now hands (performing the labour that
produces works) are opposed to hearts in Godard's spiel. He
turns the tables on his interlocutor: unemployment
(worklessness) means too many idle hands, but that's not
where the real challenge lies: Having found
herself back to her own initial affirmation of heart, the
woman then anchors the debate in an irrefutably personal
reference. And Godard
replies not merely for himself but also, in a sense, for all
impassioned auteurists: My thanks go
to everyone who has worked so tirelessly on this project for
Screening the past: Peter Hughes, Ina Bertrand,
Caroline Kruger, Sam Hinton and Val Forbes; plus all the
contributors, translators and referees. Auteurism
2001 is dedicated to the memory of Stanley Kubrick
(1928-1999). [16]
Jean Luc-Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma
(Germany: ECM, 1999), 69-70. Note:
Auteurism 2001 will be continued in two separate
supplements over the next two issues of Screening the
past. Issue 13 (June 2001) contains: a focus on Kenji
Mizoguchi, with essays by Chika Kinoshita and Tag Gallagher;
and a section on "Personal visions", with George Kouvaros on
John Cassavetes, Fiona A. Villella on Jim Jarmusch, and Anna
Dzenis on Michael Mann. Issue 14 (September 2001) comprises
essays by Rose Capp on Chantal Akerman; Angela Ndalianis on
Paul Verhoeven; Bill Krohn on Alain Resnais; Tag Gallagher
on Leo McCarey; Philippa Hawker on Kathryn Bigelow; and
Adrian Martin on Abel Ferrara.
4987 words
Printer
version
I am
speaking of the auteur in a strict sense of the term: the
auteur of literary or artistic works. Not the auteur of a
crime, nor a theorem, nor even the Universe.
-
Marc Le Bot[1]
... the
act of seeing, the constraints and power-relations it
gave rise to, appeared so uncannily foregrounded that the
action always tended to become an adumbration or metaphor
of the more fundamental relation between spectator and
mise en scène, audience and (invisible,
because reified) director.[3]
...
auteurism exists largely for the convenience of critics
and other packagers. It's mainly a way of reading movies,
not of explaining how they're made.
[F]ilm
study is becoming increasingly demanding, just in terms
of the organisation of one's work, since everything needs
to be pursued at once, presented at once, theoretically
validated as it is presented, and subjected to scrutiny
in terms of one's motivations for establishing categories
and arriving at solutions (which in turn, in the interest
of truth, must be converted into problems of a new
order). But maybe this is where film study is, since we
are increasingly intolerant of self-serving narrowings of
the field of inquiry ("I want to write about Delbert
Mann") and expedient defenses for methods of study which
"get results". (65)
The
auteur is the fiction, the necessary fiction one might
add, become flesh and historical in the director, for the
name of a pleasure that seems to have no substitute in
the sobered-up deconstructions of the authorless voice of
ideology. (11)
I
recognise the name of Kant not in his life, but in a
certain type of concepts signed Kant. Henceforth, one can
very well conceive of being the disciple of a
philosopher. If you are situated so that you say that
such and such a philosopher signed the concepts for which
you feel a need, then you can become Kantian, Leibnizian,
etc.
I prefer
to treat the movies as though they have lives of their
own; as though they are working together, talking and
referring to one another, reworking each others' forms,
styles, contents and themes. That's why I'll always enjoy
writing about a group of movies rather than a single
film. [14]
we saw
endless photos of works
your
friend is right, mademoiselle
you can
film labour, mademoiselle
yes,
they were my friends[16]
