Authorship and Film

David A. Gerstner, Janet Staiger, David A. Gerstner, Janet Staiger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415939942
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135225483
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Authorship in film has been a persistent theme in the field of cinema studies. This volume of new work revitalizes the question of authorship by connecting it to larger issues of identity--in film, in the marketplace, in society, in culture. Essays range from the auteur theory and Casablanca to Oscar Micheaux, from the American avant-garde to community video, all illuminating how "authorship" is a complex idea with far-reaching implications. This ambitious and wide-ranging book will be essential reading for anyone concerned with film studies and the concept of the author.

Authorship studies in review

DOI: 10.4324/9780203698976-1

1 The practices of authorship

David A. Gerstner

DOI: 10.4324/9780203698976-2

Finally, in constructing alternatives to Hollywood, we must recognize that the historical centrality of that mode creates a constant and complex interchange with other modes. No absolute, pure alternative to Hollywood exists. … You can trace a Hollywood technical process such as back projection from its classical use to its cubistic possibilities in films like The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968). Likewise, Hollywood’s mode of production continues to exert a power that can be opposed only by a knowledge of its past and its functions. The historical and aesthetic importance of the classical Hollywood cinema lies in the fact that to go beyond it we must go through it.

—David Bordwell, The Classical Hollywood Cinema

David Bordwell’s provocative suggestion that the production of cinema—from Hollywood itself to national and avant-garde cinemas—has no ideological recourse other than to respond to the terms established by the classical Hollywood mode of production frames the discussion of cultural production as one that is contained by ideological repetition operating through dominant institutional practices. ¹ Bordwell’s claims recall, yet not so pessimistically, Theodor Adorno’s axiom (a writer who is, however, never far behind Bordwell’s thoughts ² ) that “Whenever Orson Welles offends against the tricks of the trade, he is forgiven because his departures from the norm are regarded as calculated mutations which serve all the more strongly to confirm the validity of the system.” ³ The move toward radical difference (and certainly a radical cinema) in twentieth-century culture-industry practices is, in other words, always already hegemonically inscribed from within.

But if the terms of the dominant mode of film production preclude cultural production from without, what possibilities exist for the cultural producer, or as Walter Benjamin terms it, “author as producer,” ⁴ to intervene and resist the larger institutional framework? Is it critically true to say that when Welles “offends against the tricks of the trade,” he is simply affirming the “validity of the system”? In what ways might the filmmaker-as-film author challenge rather than submit to the ideological saturation of Hollywood production? Is the film author merely an ideological tool of a corporatized, homogeneous culture? What critical purpose might the function of the author serve in critical theory against, on the one hand, theories that support a culture of containment or, on the other hand, the bourgeois enterprise that reifies the author position?

This anthology does not claim to rescue, resuscitate, or reclaim “the author” as the raison d’être of film studies. Rather, these chapters explore the above questions and put into practice methodologies of film authorship that intervene in the landscape of theoretical and historical possibilities associated with critical cinema studies (and, perhaps, in other fields of media as well). At the outset, this collection of writings initially seeks to address the pivotal placement of the film author or auteur in film and other media studies. ⁵ From what theoretical models does film scholarship draw to develop this area of study? Why and how does auteur studies take on such a significant role in film scholarship? How has this concept been worked and reworked in different historical periods for different ideological reasons? Within the strong current toward interdisciplinary study in the academy, film studies finds itself hard pressed to identify itself as an isolationist discipline. In what relationship, then, does film studies sit with other disciplines concerned with issues of authorship?

Identifying the singular and great author of the text is indeed not reserved for film studies. The long-standing tradition of the sole artist as creative force has evolved for centuries and can be traced from the arts’ relationship to the sacral through our contemporary period of late capitalism. ⁶ The privileged station of the author/artist solidified the abstract qualities of both meaning and exchange value for particular historical economies. During the era of mass-produced art (late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) where the purity of art was perceived as threatened by loss of original value, the art-critical and market-emphasized focus of one great man and his masterwork of art neatly packaged the illusion of artist and masterpiece.

The history of film criticism and scholarship that emerged during the early years of the twentieth century fits into this historical discourse that stitches together artist-and-masterpiece theories in order to signal film’s stake in the realm of the so-called high arts. Like literature before it, film went through the hoops and hurdles of art criticism so as to overcome its vulgar associations with and reputation as mere popular entertainment. ⁷ Once consecrated by the likes of art historians and critics Sadakichi Hartmann, Vachel Lyndsay, Erwin Panofsky, and Rudolf Arnheim, the role of the filmmaker served as a conduit that raised film into the paean of the sanctified Arts.

A second area this book considers is the ongoing fascination with and interest in the auteur specifically in film studies (or what Dana Polan has recently called “Auteur Desire”). ⁸ Although film, for the most part, is produced as a collaborative medium, the urge and desire to discuss theoretically and market film in relation to the auteur are striking. Years of film criticism have drawn upon issues of authorship and theoretical models of the auteur to explore an array of cinematic topics; the interest has simply not waned. Yet, if such inquiries still find momentum in film scholarship, the critical tools for analyzing the author’s body of work (if not the body of the author) have undergone important and significant rethinking throughout these periods.

Against the backdrop of poststructuralist strategies that unraveled the traditionally established place of the author, a new critical position surfaced in which the reader of the text became its writer (note: the author position was not necessarily removed here; its position was reconsidered albeit with varying theoretical implications). Thus, the third interest in my reevaluation of film authorship is the way in which a text is consumed, appropriated, and reproduced given the complicated relationships of production, reception, and spectatorship. Seen this way, the reader/consumer of texts is also the writer/producer of texts. How might authorship be understood in light of this critical shift that initially positioned the author’s vision as unique and the mark of Truth to one that privileged authorship as an act of interpretive and, to be sure, culturally productive possibilities? Reception studies as well as deconstruction with its emphasis on écriture have challenged old-guard theories of both the intentional fallacy and the affective fallacy. In doing so, these critical theories have opened new territory upon which to rethink the terms of authorship and cultural production.

The final area explored in this book is the state of contemporary political and ideological relevance accorded the film author. With the emergence of cultural studies in academia the interface of race, class, and gender with the production of art took on a particular urgency. As these fields of political and ideological import open around theories of intersectionality, the position of the author takes on new force. This is not to say that the question of the author has not historically carried political concerns and relevance (see my discussion below). But the sometimes overdetermined backlash against author studies in film scholarship has sharpened the focus around just why such a backlash occurs. In feminist-, queer-, and race-film studies, for example, the rethinking of the work by filmmakers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Lois Weber, Dorothy Arzner, Maya Deren, Derek Jarman, Isaac Julien, Marlon Riggs, Oscar Micheaux, Julie Dash, Kenneth Anger, and Andy Warhol indicates what Pam Cook describes as the continuing “pleasures” and “transformations” made available through film-author studies particularly in the struggles over ideological, cultural, and political relations (Cook, 114). ⁹ The abrasive and hasty dismissal of the auteur or author studies begs the question that perhaps the lady doth protest too much.

The politics of authorship

The auteur theory in cinema is rooted in the theatrics of a political gesture. The theory and its critical champions emerged in postwar France when a group of young cinéastes encountered a deluge of Hollywood cinema (embargoed under the Occupation) and expressed dissatisfaction with the production of what they and other left intellectuals saw as a banal “tradition of quality” in French cinema. Alexandre Astruc’s article, “The Birth of a New Avant-garde: La Caméra-stylo,” in 1948 acted as an agent provocateur that challenged a “tendency” or what was sardonically perceived by François Truffaut and his cinéaste compatriots at Cahiers du Cinéma as “a certain tendency” of the French Cinema. ¹⁰

Astruc’s emphasis on la caméra-stylo functioned as a critical intervention to break the then current model of cinema’s reliance on literature as its primary source of storytelling. La caméra-stylo should not merely be understood in direct correlation to the literary author’s pen but as a metaphor for grasping the cinema as a “means of expression, just as all the other arts have been before it” (17). It was more than the equivalent between pen and camera as a strict translation might suggest. La caméra-stylo indicated the director’s creative ability to “translate his obsessions” (18) and “write ideas” (19) so as to reach the profound achievements that exist in great literature and painting. As Astruc would have it, cinema, like the other arts, is its own creative medium with discrete creative properties that when fully realized through the authorial hand of the film’s maker the critic may distinguish “between the man who conceives the work and the man who writes it” (22).

Astruc’s notion of the cinematic auteur resonated soundly with the upstart Truffaut who argued for a new French cinema that was grounded in radical and political impulses that only a true auteur could provide. In his 1953 manifesto for a new French cinema, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” Truffaut railed against “psychological realism” and the “Tradition of Quality” (nothing more than a filmed novel) in the national cinema that, as he saw it, denigrated the spirit toward a pure cinema (232). French filmmakers’ reliance on literary adaptation for their cinematic narrative “destroyed the audience’s ability to comprehend a cinema of difference” because to rely on literary form lacked the essence of cinema.

Written in polemic form, Truffaut called for filmmakers to strip away their literary sensibilities. True filmmakers are those who produce cinema from scenario to mise-en-scène. In this way, Truffaut reiterated Astruc’s stylistic concern and assertion: The cinematic is expressed by the visual (mise-en-scène), not the literary word. The emphasis on mise-en-scène has since had a long-standing and substantial impact on auteur studies. John Caughie argues that “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.” ¹¹ Who were the great French cinematic auteurs according to Truffaut that successfully broke from the bondage of the literary word? Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Abel Gance, Max Ophuls, and Jacques Tati were les auteurs du cinéma who ultimately created a cinematic transformation couched in the spirit of the other arts yet pure in its own specific properties.

The effect of Truffaut’s la politiques des auteurs was profound particularly on fellow cinéastes Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jean Domarchi who favored an auteur approach for film criticism. These auteurists would later write for the influential Cahiers du Cinéma while several of them fancied themselves auteurs and made films under the aegis of the nouvelle vague. ¹² Yet for all the bravado attending Truffaut’s political edge of the auteur, the theory, as Jim Hillier explains, was underlined by “an essentially romantic conception of art and the artist” in which “art transcended history” (6). ¹³ André Bazin, arguably Truffaut’s surrogate father figure, challenged his colleagues at Cahiers “who are most firmly convinced that the politique des auteurs is well founded.” ¹⁴ For Bazin, the genius-artist is no simple matter and should not and must not be hastily determined. Indeed, Bazin does not relinquish the genius-artist in the other arts. The “danger” in which his cinéaste comrades partook was their polemic discharge on the auteur that slid suspiciously into “an aesthetic personality cult” (257).

What about Hollywood? If the auteur in European cinema was readily identifiable as an artist of integrity and therefore produced a complete work of art, it was because (especially in the cases of those filmmakers held in high regard by the Cahiers) these directors were afforded the opportunity to work outside a strict studio environment. Is it possible for the auteur to be identified in the great factory-produced art of America? As far as American film critic Andrew Sarris was concerned, the answer was yes! If the French recognized the importance of Hollywood directors why were American critics unable to see their contribution to the cinema? Yet, to make the case that popular culture and mass-produced art was worthy of critical discussion was no easy matter. Aside from a handful of writers such as artists and critics James Agee and Parker Tyler or anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood film was not even a gleam in the eye of most American art critics and historians. In 1968, Sarris published his own manifesto, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968, in which he critiqued the “snobberies” of art criticism in order to explore the “twilight periods of [Hollywood’s] greatest artists.” ¹⁵

Sarris sought to bring critical analysis to Hollywood cinema against ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• acknowledgments
• introduction
• part one. authorship studies in review
• part two. authorship and identity in hollywood
• part three. authorship and identity near and far from hollywood
• part four. the author-function
• Bibliography
• Biographies
• Indexes