Theories of Authorship

John Caughie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136102769
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Literature

The film director or `auteur' has been central in film theory and criticism over the past thirty years. Theories of Authorship documents the major stages in the debate about film authorship, and introduces recent writing on film to suggest important ways in which the debate might be reconsidered.

Part One

Auteurism

1 · Introduction

the cinema is quite simply becoming a means of expression, just as all the arts have been before it, and in particular painting and the novel. After having been successfully a fairground attraction, an amusement analogous to boulevard theatre, or a means of preserving the images of an era, it is gradually becoming a language. By language, I mean a form in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel. That is why I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of caméra-stylo.

Alexandre Astruc (1948)¹

The politique des auteurs has had its day: it was only a stage on the way to a new criticism.

Fereydoun Hoveyda (1961)²

As a term, Astruc’s caméra-stylo (camera-pen) failed to take root, but the association of the film artist with the ‘serious’ writer, and the insistence on film as individual self-expression, had a considerable polemical importance, forming the basis of the cinéma d’auteurs constructed in the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s. Traditionally, the reference to the auteur in French film criticism had identified either the author who wrote the script, or, in the more general sense of the term, the artist who created the film. In the work of Cahiers the latter sense came to replace the former, and the auteur was the artist whose personality was ‘written’ in the film.

Within its distinguishable currents – Cahiers in France, Movie in Britain, Andrew Sarris in America – auteurism shares certain basic assumptions: notably, that a film, though produced collectively, is most likely to be valuable when it is essentially the product of its director (‘meaningful coherence is more likely when the director dominates the proceedings’: Sarris³); that in the presence of a director who is genuinely an artist (an auteur) a film is more than likely to be the expression of his individual personality; and that this personality can be traced in a thematic and/or stylistic consistency over all (or almost all) the director’s films. Most auteurist critics made a distinction between the auteur and the (mere) metteur en scène: the one consistently expressing his own unique obsessions, the other a competent, even highly competent, film-maker, but lacking the consistency which betrayed the profound involvement of a personality. The distinction opened out energetic controversies along the borderline between the two: over Minnelli, for example, or Huston. Each of the currents had its own set of values and its own areas of privilege, and within the currents there were differences; but each seemed to assume that, if film were to be considered an art, as it quite generally was, then what they were urging inevitably followed: film is an art, and art is the expression of the emotions, experience and ‘world-view’ of an individual artist.

The business of introducing this section on auteurism is made considerably easier by the presence of Edward Buscombe’s article, ‘Ideas of Authorship’. Simply to repeat the points of Buscombe’s critique would be redundant, and it seems more useful here to fill out something of the place of auteurism within the history of film criticism and theory, giving an indication of the history into which auteurism intervened, and the history which it initiated: the history, that is, of the before and after which is implied by the two quotations which head this introduction, and which finds a starting point in the extract from Abrams which follows.

Ironically, the intervention of auteurism, its critical revolution, was simply the installation in the cinema of the figure who had dominated the other arts for over a century: the romantic artist, individual and self-expressive. Established film criticism had long ago accepted that film was an art (it was the necessary justification for its own discourse), but it had meant it at the most general level, at which art has something to do with truth and beauty. Film theory had concerned itself almost exclusively with the relation between the representation and the real thing, and had not developed an aesthetic to explain the place of the artist in film art. Since the cinema which was predominantly valorized was the less apparently industrial cinema of Europe and Asia, the problem of the apparent contradiction between a commercial industry and an art was not fully confronted, and where it arose (as in the films of Ford, Welles or Griffith) it tended to be dealt with either in terms of overriding genius, or by a compromise position in which, by a combination of exceptional circumstances (a good subject, a good script, a good cast, an artist and freedom), a work of art which was personal might be produced despite the constraints of the industry. Established criticism valued as artists a small number of directors, predominantly European, who produced work which had a certain highly variable quality of ‘greatness’ (which was typically either a moral quality or a social penetration) and a certain ‘seriousness’ (which involved the apparent commitment of the artist to his theme). Art was simply a value term, and the theoretical questions which it begged went largely unanswered. Auteur criticism, on the other hand, proposed as artists a much larger number of directors whose work, viewed over a number of films, displayed a consistency of underlying theme and style which was surprising in the industrial and commercial system in which they worked, and which therefore, it seemed, could be ascribed to the force of the director’s personality and unique obsessions expressing themselves through the film despite the constraints. In fact, the struggle between the desire for self-expression and the constraints of the industry could produce a tension in the films of the commercial cinema which was lacking in the ‘art’ cinema, encouraging the auteurist critics to valorize Hollywood cinema above all else, finding there a treasure-trove of buried personalities, and, in the process, scandalizing established criticism. Uniqueness of personality, brash individuality, persistence of obsession and originality were given an evaluative power above that of stylistic smoothness or social seriousness.

Put thus, the critical shift which auteurism effected within the history of film criticism can be seen as a step backwards to a romantic conception of the artist as it is described by Abrams: a regressive step precisely at the moment at which romanticism was becoming less secure in other branches of criticism, and in a medium in which an aesthetic of individual self-expression seemed least appropriate. This regression can be explained partly by the lack of definition which had been given to the notion of film art in traditional criticism, a lack of definition which allowed auteurism to pour cinema into the mould which was already provided by the romantic aesthetic. The relation between auteurism and romanticism also helps to explain the process by which, after the initial scandal, auteurism was easily assimilated into the dominant aesthetic mode.

But if this succeeds in explaining away Astruc’s ‘new age of cinema’ as nothing more than the old age of romanticism, it fails to explain the relation of auteurism to the ‘new criticism’ which Hoveyda invokes. If we describe auteurism as nothing more than an escape into the romantic aesthetic of bourgeois criticism, away from the actual conditions of production, we pose it as simply a dead end of history, albeit one which is still with us. My argument would be that auteurism did in fact produce a radical dislocation in the development of film theory, which has exposed it progressively to the pressures of alternative aesthetics and ‘new criticisms’. This dislocation cannot be attributed easily to a single cause, but can be associated with a number of impulses, shifts of emphasis and contradictions which were central to auteur criticism.

In the first place, the shift which auteurism effected was a shift in the way in which films were conceived and grasped within film criticism. The personality of the director, and the consistency within his films, were not, like the explicit subject matter which tended to preoccupy established criticism, simply there as a ‘given’. They had to be sought out, discovered, by a process of analysis and attention to a number of films. The recognition that the director was not always able to choose the best subject matter for his own self-expression was the concession which auteurism made to the conditions of production. Subject matter, the story, what the film was explicitly about, could in most instances be posed as a frame work given to the director by the studio, and not necessarily of his choosing. The business of the critic was to discover the director within the given framework, to find the traces of the submerged personality, to find the ways in which the auteur had transformed the material so that the explicit subject matter was no longer what the film was really about – ‘The story of The Criminal centres on a race-track robbery, but this is certainly not the subject of the film.’⁴ Film criticism became a process of discovery, a process which, while it remained firmly within the hermeneutics of romantic criticism, forced a more precise attention to what was actually happening within the film than had been customary for a traditional criticism which tended to be satisfied with the surfaces of popular films, assuming that the conditions of their production prevented them from having depths. More than this, auteurism forced an attention to what was actually happening in a lot of films. New auteurs were discovered like new stars in the sky; and Andrew Sarris, in particular, insisted on a rigorous and comprehensive knowledge not only of each putative auteur’s output, but also of as much of the total output of all cinema, and particularly of the undiscovered Hollywood, as it was physically possible to see. This attention to individual films, to groups of films, and to the whole of cinema was, of course, necessary, beneficial and, in the context of the history of film theory, progressive.

In one form, the attention involved simply a discovery of recurrent underlying themes, giving to the critic the role of interpreter, separating the true from the apparent, finding the depth below the surface, easing the object into consumption. While the awareness of recurrent themes is clearly useful, there is a continual danger in predominantly thematic approaches that they will lend themselves to a critical reductiveness: a ‘eureka syndrome’ in which the aim is to ‘crack the code’, to liberate the theme and the values from the film which contains (and conceals) them. Because of the fundamental and perpetual difficulty of quotation in film criticism (of quotation from a visual discourse in a verbal discourse) thematic analysis (which verbal discourse copes with by repressing the visual) tended more and more to establish itself in many of the currents of auteurism, emerging clearly in ‘auteur-structuralism’.

Elsewhere, however, auteur critics avoid reductiveness by a close attention to mise en scène, and much of the best auteurist criticism (Barry Boys on Minnelli,⁵ Hoveyda or V. F. Perkins on Ray⁶) focuses on mise en scène as the stylistic ‘signature’ of the director, complicating a simple elaboration of themes with a constant return to the way in which they appear on the screen. The logic of this attention is clear within the auteurist project – given the conditions of production in which subject matter and script are likely to be in the control of the studio, style at least has the possibility of being under the control of the director, and it is there that his personality may be the most legible. Mise en scène has a transformative effect. It is with the mise en scène that the auteur transforms the material which has been given to him; so it is in the mise en scène – in the disposition of the scene, in the camera movement, in the camera placement, in the movement from shot to shot – that the auteur writes his individuality into the film.

While the motivation for this attention to mise en scène may be within the project of discovering and celebrating auteurs, it also raises questions of the effectivity of the visual discourse. In auteurist criticism mise en scène begins to be conceived as an effectivity, producing meanings and relating spectators to meanings, rather than as a transparency, allowing them to be seen. Luc Moullet’s notorious ‘Morality is a question of tracking shots’⁷ appears less scandalous than it did to the critics of Sight & Sound⁸ if it is construed to indicate an awareness of the relationship between strategies of mise en scène and the production of ideologies. More than that, the attention to mise en scène gives criticism a way of accounting for the text as pleasurable, pointing to its fascination as well as to its meaning. An almost hedonistic pleasure in visual delights is a feature of much of the writing in Cahiers in the mid-1950s (Hoveyda on Ray: ‘if one insists on thinking that Party Girl is rubbish, then I proclaim: “Long live this rubbish which so pleases my eyes, fascinates my heart, and gives me a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven.”’⁹), and it frequently lapses into mere formalism; but when one places Cahiers’ development alongside that of the more soberly traditional journals, it is hard not to sympathize with Bazin when he says, ‘at least in Cahiers we prefer this prejudice to its opposite’.¹⁰ In many respects, the attention to mise en scène, even to the extent of a certain historically necessary formalism, is probably the most important positive contribution of auteurism to the development of a precise and detailed film criticism, engaging with the specific mechanisms of visual discourse, freeing it from literary models, and from the liberal commitments which were prepared to validate films on the basis of their themes alone.

If this is the positive contribution of auteurism to film criticism, the eventual theoretical dislocation which it produced is more accurately attributed to the contradictions which it exposed within the aesthetics of film. Auteurism was not itself a theory: Cahiers proposed it as a policy; Sarris was prepared to admit it was more of an attitude than a theory; and Movie refused theoretical elaboration. But by adopting a fairly consistent romantic position in relation to creativity, it exposed film aesthetics to the contradictions of those romantic principles of individual creativity which formed the basis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century criticism, when applied to an expressive form which was collective, commercial, industrial and popular. The contradictions of a resolutely romantic aesthetic in relation to cinema came to be generally recognized, and two modes of coping with them were developed. On the one hand, a certain inappropriateness was recognized, and the rules were relaxed to allow creativity – even creative dominance – to enter at other levels (a Paddy Chayefsky film, a James Cagney film). This approach characterized the later work of the writers associated with Movie. On the same level, the critical approach could be given a greater adequacy and flexibility by introducing principles of genre and industry, situating the auteur, or author, as one level ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Epigraph
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• acknowledgement
• Preface
• Auteurism
• 1 Intoduction
• A Auteurism in theory
• 2 M. H. Abrams: ‘Literature as a revelation of personality' (extract)
• 3 Edward Buscombe: ‘Ideas of authorship'
• B The theory in practice
• 4 Cahiers du Cinéma
• 5 Movie
• 6 Andrew Sarris
• C Dossier on John Ford
• 7 Louis Marcorelles: ‘Ford of the movies'
• 8 Lindsay Anderson: ‘The Searchers'
• 9 Andrew Sarris: ‘The Searchers'
• 10 Robin Wood: ‘Shall we gather at the river?; the late films of John Ford'
• 11 Peter Wollen (Lee Russell): ‘John Ford'
• 12 Jean-Louis Comolli: ‘Signposts on the trail'
• 13 Jean Narboni: ‘Casting out the eights: John Ford's Seven Women'
• Part Two Auteur - structuralism
• 14 Intoduction
• 15 Claude Lévi-Strauss: ‘The structural study of myth' (extract)
• 16 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith: Visconti(extract)
• 17 Peter Wollen: ‘The auteur theory' (extract)
• 18 Charles Eckert: ‘The English cine-structuralists'
• 19 Brain Henderson: ‘Critique of cine-structuralism' (part I)
• 20 Jean-Pierre Oudart: ‘Conclusion to Cahiers du Cinéma editors' “John Ford's Young Mr Lincoln”’ (extract)
• 21 Pierre Macherey: ‘Literary analysis: the tomb of structures' (extract)
• Part Three Fiction of the author/author of the fiction
• 22 Intoduction
• 23 Roland Barthes: ‘The death of the author'
• 24 Stephen Heath: ‘Comment on, “The idea of authorship”'
• 25 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith: ‘Six authors in pursuit of The Searchers' (extract)
• 26 Christian Metz: ‘History/discourse: a note on two voyeurisms'
• 27 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith: ‘A note on “history/discourse”'
• 28 Sandy Flitterman: ‘Woman, desire, and the look: feminism and the enunciative apparatus in cinema'
• 29 Nick Browne: ‘The rhetoric of the specular text with reference to Stagecoach'
• 30 Jean-Pierre Oudart: ‘The absent held of the Author'
• 31 Pam Cook: ‘The point of self-expression in avant-garde film'
• 32 Michel Foucault: ‘What is an author?' (extract)
• Notes on terms
• Bibliography
• Index of names and titles
• Index of subjects