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Why did it become
fashionable to say we are "reading" a film? One reads a
score; one hears music. One may read a score while hearing,
but these are distinguishable activities. There is no way to
read a movie; one sees and hears it. Reading and
seeing/hearing are almost contraries. "Le roman est un
récit qui s'organise en monde, le film un monde qui
s'organise en récit," declared Jean Mitry. ("The
novel is a narrative that constructs a world; film is a
world that constructs a narrative.") [1]
Ingestion of cinema and music is aesthetic, with a fugitive
character that, in contrast, is never a problem in reading.
It is not possible to read a film. [1]
Jean Mitry, Esthétique et pyschologie du
cinéma, Vol II (Paris: Editions Universitaire,
1965), 354. "Reading" films
became fashionable thirty years ago, nonetheless, when
semiotics declared that everything is a sign signifying
something it itself is not. Everything, thus defined,
acquired eluctability. In compensation semiology turned to
genres, conventions and ideologies, to systems of signs, to
"language." To this tendency
one of the founders of historicism, Benedetto Croce, said no
a century ago. True language or "poetry," he said (meaning
Art in general), has no signs. A sign is a sign because it
stands for something other than itself; but poetry stands
only for itself. Signs are found in prose-the impoverished
pseudo language of convention, the language of
science. Conventions have
nothing to do with art, directly. Art is authentic,
original, individual. Conventions are collective-what
everyone already knows. Thus studying genres means paying
attention to the prose of a work, not its poetry. When we
spot similarities between westerns, we are considering the
prose aspect of cinema, not its poetry; indeed, we
risk distracting ourselves from art. For prose is poetry's
antithesis. What is stunningly original to an art student
may be a worn cliché to a culture-studies student.
One deals with the individual, the other with the general.
The former is an artistic activity, the latter
scientific. Artistically, we
do not learn to "appreciate" a pietà by Michelangelo
by asking ourselves how it differs scientifically from other
pietàs. We need to experience Michelangelo's
pietà as though it is the only object of its kind.
Like experiencing a person. Do I experience my wife Phoebe
because she is Phoebe? or because of the ways she is or
isn't like all the other human beings in the world? The
former is her poetry; the latter is her prose. The former is
her art; the latter is her science. I can experience Phoebe
or I can theorize her. So too with a movie. We need both,
surely. But what use is science without art? Theory without
experience? A theory of Phoebe without Phoebe? Alas,
academic film study today, too often arrogated by
sociologists with scant emotional commitment to art,
self-destructs in theoretical, linguistical and
psychoanalytical detours because it lacks realities other
than itself. Like semiology, which could never find the
sems, it lacks knowledge of what data to collect and
classify, or even of what might constitute data, because the
data is poetry, not prose-unique, not common. Culture
studies necessarily treats movies (and persons) as
propaganda, a choice which annihilates the experience needed
to ground science. Life is reduced to Narcissus'
reflection. Yet in life, we
do know persons: family, friends, strangers met by
chance-even though we cannot theorize them! Indeed, we take
it for granted that experience surpasses science. We
recognize, even if we cannot explain it scientifically, that
I-thou relationships are different than I-it relationships,
and that our relationships with artworks fall oddly between
the two. I have no need of
cinema to capture reality. There is more reality outside my
window than in all the films ever made. What art provides is
a sensibility toward reality. What is called Realism in
cinema is not reality captured but the felt presence of the
moviemaker, the dialectic between the subjective and the
objective. A stone in a river has as much reality as the
Parthenon in Athens. But what astonished me when I saw the
Parthenon, what no picture of it had led me to expect, was
the direct experience I felt of what is was like to be an
Athenian in Pericles's day. Was I experiencing a genus-Greek
art of this period? Or was I experiencing a
person-Callicrates or Ictinus, the architects? Obviously, no
such things as Greek art or culture ever existed other than
as theory, unless as sensibilities in individual persons
("authors"). Neither ideology nor culture can be transmitted
save by individuals. Some of us experience such
sensibilities in a book, painting, building, opera or movie;
some of us do not. It is a matter of choice: to experience
poetry or prose. There are many
objections to this "auteurism" and all of them are valid,
insofar as they start out defining "auteurism" in terms of
the objection. But one ought not to climb up on an academic
chair and proclaim to the paying masses that auteurs,
anymore than persons, do not exist because we cannot account
for them scientifically or because some professor has never
turned on to them. If you can walk into a museum and
recognize a Van Gogh before reading the plaque, you are an
auteurist. Yet auteurism embarrasses academe, because it is
a question of experience, not of theory, not of anything
that can be put into a textbook-except in its
manifestations. Auteurism is a formidable approach for
comprehending style, technique and expression. Even those who
admit that some movies have an "author" disagree about what
the term means. Rightly so. Auteurs are as diverse as
humans, and the tools appropriate for analysing Ford are not
those for Rossellini. A theory valid for all auteurs is as
useless as one for all cinema - whose definition changes
with every good movie, if it is art, if it is human. Should
not a theory be derived from a delimited set of experiences
(so that, for example, from analysing Ford we arrive at a
theory of Fordian cinema), rather than imposed a priori by
an academy? André Bazin announced that editing is
invisible in Hollywood cinema and ever since people have
assumed that they are not supposed to pay attention to it,
and so do not. If one starts out from theoretical positions,
all hope at arriving at a viable experience of auteur in the
context of Hollywood cinema 1930-60 is hopeless, like
setting out to meet music determined to ignore rhythm. For
it is the distinction of an auteur that no suture is
required between the regarded and the regarder, anymore than
between my fingers and my arm. Van Gogh's painting of the
mail man is Van Gogh's looking, his angle, his sensibility;
some call it "distance." But there are as
many definitions of auteurism as there are auteurs. "People
are incorrect to compare a director to an author. If he's a
creator, he's more like an architect," said John Ford. A
movie has as many auteurs as those who left their mark:
actors, photographers, designers, producers, writers. The
utility for regarding a director as auteur is the richness
of experience that may result.
1197 words
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