Film Theory: Rational Reconstructions

Warren Buckland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415590976
• eBook ISBN: 9781136501111
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

In Film Theory: Rational Reconstructions, Warren Buckland asks a series of questions about how film theory gets written in the first place:

• How does it select its objects of study and its methods of inquiry?
• How does it make discoveries and explain filmic phenomena? And,
• How does it formulate and solve theoretical problems?

He asks these questions of film theory through a rational reconstruction and a classical commentary. Both frameworks clarify and reformulate vague and inexact expressions, redefine obscure concepts, and examine the underlying logic of film theory arguments. This not only subjects film theory to rigorous examination; it also teaches students how to write theory, by enabling them to question and critically interrogate the logic of previous film theory arguments.

The book consists of nine chapters that closely examine a series of canonical film books and essays in great detail, by Peter Wollen, Laura Mulvey, Thomas Elsaesser, Stephen Heath, and Slavoj Žižek, among others.

1

An Improbable Alliance

Peter Wollen’s ‘The Auteur Theory’

[T]he ‘politique des auteurs’: the theory, which underlies all Cahiers criticism, that the director of a film is its author, that he gives it any distinctive quality it has and that his personal themes and style can be traced throughout his career, so that the corpus of his work can be discussed as a whole.

(Lee Russell 1964, 82)

[B]y a process of comparison with other films, it is possible to decipher, not a coherent message or world-view, but a structure which underlies the film and shapes it, gives it a certain pattern of energy cathexis. It is this structure which auteur analysis disengages from the film.

(Peter Wollen 1972 ‘Postscript’, 167)

The Problem-Situation

Peter Wollen’s Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969; 1970; 1972; 1998)¹ is a canonical text in the history of film theory. Even Wollen’s critics note that Signs and Meaning ‘must be, after Film Form [Eisenstein] and What is Cinema? [Bazin], the most widely read work of film theory among present-day film students’ (Eckert 1973, 47). Its stature has increased exponentially since Eckert made this statement in 1973.

In the book’s opening sentence, Wollen indicates that he will address the ‘outstanding problems’ (7) of film aesthetics by incorporating new theories into film studies. Wollen is notable for ‘being there first’: he presented the first sophisticated, theoretical exposition in English of Eisenstein (Chapter 1) and of Film Semiology (Chapter 3); plus he presented a structuralist reconfiguration of impressionistic, Romantic-laden Auteur Criticism (Chapter 2). In this chapter I will carry out a commentary on and rational reconstruction of Wollen’s auteur-structuralist theory, its metaphors (such as ‘decipherment’ and ‘catalyst’), and trace its roots back to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology – particularly its classification of themes into binary oppositions. Lévi-Strauss argues that his structural method ‘not only has the advantage of bringing some kind of order to what was previously chaos; it also enables us to perceive some basic logical processes which are at the root of mythical thought’ (1963, 224). I will ask whether Wollen’s theory brings order to the ‘chaotic’ auteur criticism, and determine if it helps us perceive some basic logical processes at the root of a director’s corpus of films.

Auteur criticism, Wollen reminds us, is based on the background assumption that Hollywood films are not all alike, for ‘masterpieces’ can be found in the films of a small group of talented Hollywood directors ‘whose work had previously been dismissed and consigned to oblivion’ (74). Auteur criticism is evaluative criticism that transformed the critical climate towards popular American cinema, for it promoted the serious study of Hollywood films: it analysed Hollywood films with the same care and attention that critics used to praise European art films.

John Caughie (1981, 127) identifies a tension between Wollen’s original 1969 chapter on auteurism and his 1972 postscript to Signs and Meaning. Whereas the 1969 chapter describes John Ford as a ‘great artist’ (102) and uses the term ‘masterpiece’ in relation to the films of great auteurs (77), in the postscript Ford (along with all auteurs) is reduced to a name in quotation marks – a semantic label naming a structure, an implied author, not the flesh and blood director. What we witness in the 1969 chapter is a hybrid text – one looking back to the auteurism of Cahiers du cinéma and Andrew Sarris, and one breaking out of its traditional aesthetics to forge a new theory based on structuralism. (We see a similar hybridity in Thomas Elsaesser’s auteur essays written at the same time; see Chapter 3.) Bill Nichols said that Wollen ‘wants his structuralism but he wants his proven method (auteur criticism) even more’ (1976b, 616). The 1972 postscript reverses this priority: it presents a maturation of auteur structuralism, an explicit reformulation of its structural premises, together with its consequences. We can, in fact, identify three phases of auteurism in Wollen’s work. First, the pre-structuralist auteurism of his New Left Review essays (1964–67; many reprinted in Wollen 1998); second, the initial structuralist phase (1969); and, third, the completion of that phase (the 1972 postscript).

Wollen’s title raises its own problems. The original Cahiers position was called the politiques des auteurs; a policy. Sarris translated this (quite literally, as editor of Cahiers du cinéma in English) into the ‘auteur theory’, conferring upon it the status of a deductive series of propositions, rather than a series of inductive generalizations about a director’s films. Wollen has decided to adopt Sarris’s nomenclature, perhaps in the hope of moving auteurism away from the inductive to the properly theoretical (deductive).

Analysing the Problematic State of Affairs

Identifying What is Problematic

The popular perception of Hollywood cinema as a mass of impersonal films lacking artistry constitutes the problematic data for Peter Wollen’s chapter on the auteur theory. The auteur critic’s attempt to ‘save’ a handful of Hollywood directors from oblivion designates the problematic state of affairs that Wollen addresses. This ‘saving’ process assumes that seeing a film with a recognized name attached confers added value upon that film.² This was not a new problematic in film studies when Wollen wrote his chapter in the late 1960s. But the way he address it is innovative – a risky, improbable alliance between auteurism and structuralism. The structuralism was innovative because it introduced a new (underlying) level of reality to study, together with rigorous and sophisticated methods to analyse that new reality.

Background Assumptions

Combining auteurism with structuralism creates a clash between two modes of causality and two philosophical systems. For the traditional auteur critics, the director is a specific, purely subjective psychological cause, whose free will, desires, beliefs, and intentions consciously structure a film. Traditional auteurism is therefore based on the Romantic notion of a subjective, pre-rational authentic intuition, on spontaneous creativity, and individual expression, where film is seen to express what the director experiences. The distinctive properties that define an auteurist’s films are thought to be located in a purely personal or subjective vision, ineffable ‘sensibility’ or obscure ‘interior’ meaning.³

Structuralists replaced individual expression, personal psychology and subjective vision with the Enlightenment’s emphasis on rational knowledge – an impersonal system of underlying codes and structures. They replaced individual free will with general causes that determine the meaning of individual utterances, artworks, or films. When speaking or when making a film, the individual simply actualizes one possible combination of codes from the underlying system. His or her consciousness does not spontaneously create, for consciousness is determined and controlled by underlying structures: ‘the apparent arbitrariness of the mind, its supposedly spontaneous flow of inspiration, and its seemingly uncontrolled inventiveness imply the existence of laws operating at a deeper level’ (Lévi-Strauss 1970, 10). The primary aim of structuralism (and its close ally, semiotics, as we shall see in Chapter 4) is to study this underlying system. In terms of recounting a myth, Lévi-Strauss indicated that the individual may not even realize the significance of the stories they tell, for the meaning of a story or a sentence exists prior to its utterance, in the underlying system of codes from which it is generated.

What are the implications of structuralism for auteurism? For Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ‘when what one is looking for is a set of objective structures, the role of the author as subjectivity becomes almost peripheral’ (1970, 133). Bill Nichols agrees: ‘for Lévi-Strauss myths have no subject-author, no origin, no center, no specific causative links with the society that produces them. These all present difficulties when structuralism is linked to auteur study’ (1976a, 462). It is within this structuralist framework that the director is no longer conceived as a creative, free-acting individual (the director making decisions on the set), but becomes a semantic label. The structuralist method of analysis entails deciphering – that is, abstracting or disengaging – from the experience of an auteur’s films an underlying, elementary latent structure that confers upon the films their shape and identity. This is based on the background assumption that an auteur’s films are unified, that they all manifest the same latent structure.

In summary, Wollen’s version of the auteur theory posits the existence of a hypothetical object, a specific, objective thematic structure underlying all the films of the same auteur but not found in the films of other auteurs. Each of these italicized terms raises its own problems, some of which we shall encounter in the following pages.

In his critique of Wollen, Brian Henderson identified additional problematic states of affairs that auteur structuralism must address: ‘The fundamental questions – whether films are like myths, whether modes of myth study are applicable to film study, and whether the auteur theory is compatible with Lévi-Straussian structuralism – are avoided by Wollen, elided by a skillful rhetoric which seems to answer them’ (1973, 28). Towards the end of this chapter we shall determine if Henderson’s ‘fundamental questions’ are in fact insignificant problems.

Describing the Problematic State of Affairs

Collecting Data

In terms of data collection, the auteur theory functions as ‘an operation of decipherment; it reveals authors where none had been seen before’ (Wollen, 77). The theory collects data from American-born directors (Hawks, Ford, Ray), as well as from the Hollywood films of European directors (Hitchcock, Lang, Renoir), who were regarded as losing their identity when they entered Hollywood. (Compare this to the critical reception of directors today who move from the independent sector to Hollywood.) Auteur critics therefore discovered ‘masterpieces’ in the work of American-born directors as well as in the Hollywood work of European directors. Films we now take for granted as auteur ‘masterpieces’ – Ford’s The Searchers (1956); Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958); Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944) and The Big Heat (1953) – were, in the 1950s, classified as anonymous genre movies. Similarly, in a reverse move, auteur theory downplayed the European work of former American directors (such as Joseph Losey).

However, Wollen plays it safe by focusing his chapter on two well-known directors already confirmed as auteurs by the Cahiers critics and by Sarris – Howard Hawks and John Ford. One advantage of using these directors is that they each have a comprehensive corpus the auteur critic can work with. Wollen collects data from the films that constitute the core of Ford’s corpus – his Westerns (My Darling Clementine [1946], The Searchers, Rio Bravo [1959], The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence [1962], Cheyenne Autumn [1964]) – and notes that Hawks worked in almost every genre in Hollywood (81). Wollen’s working hypothesis is that the films of these two wellknown directors will yield fruitful results in his auteur-structuralism. This problematic state of affairs not only involves looking for distinctive traits across a series of films made within the impersonal Hollywood studio system; a second – opposite – problem emerges from the sheer diversity of Hawks’s films: can the auteur critic identify the same distinctive properties in all of a director’s films?

The type of data relevant to the auteur critic therefore needs to be clearly spelled out: not the general properties found in all classical Hollywood studio films (i.e. cinematic concepts); not the common features found in all films of the same genre (generic traits); nor is the auteur critic looking for the distinctive properties of an individual film (what Metz called a ‘singular textual system’; see Chapter 4). Instead, the auteur critic seeks to identify throughout the same director’s corpus (whatever genre they are) a pattern of thematic preoccupations and similarities in visual style. One of the most important aspects of an auteur analysis therefore involves analysing individual films within the context of a director’s entire output. In Wollen’s terms, ‘the analysis of the whole corpus … permits the moment of synthesis when the critic returns to the individual film’ (104).

Wollen first collected data from Hawks’s and Ford’s films in his New Left Review essays ‘Howard Hawks’ (1964) and ‘John Ford’ (1965), written under the pseudonym Lee Russell.⁴ Both are written in the vein of Andrew Sarris, that is, they are pre-structuralist and discuss themes informally. The Hawks essay focuses almost exclusively on Hawks’s action adventures, devoting only a few lines to the comedies. The Ford essay contains passages later excised from the Ford section of the auteur chapter of Signs and Meaning: a discussion of the influence of Andrew Jackson’s populism on Ford; the role of the military (and the theme of defeat); plus a short stylistic analysis of Ford’s films. Russell concludes by noting that:

Alongside the themes of tradition and defeat are those of ‘belongingness’, of the search for a home, of community, of Irishness, of honour, etc. Often these elements are not consistently related; they are merely the arbitrary facets of what is nonetheless recognizably Ford’s world.

(1965, 73)

After discovering structuralism, Wollen revised his opinion on the recognizable Ford world – it was no longer full of inconsistent, arbitrary thematic elements. Instead, it consisted of a rigorous set of binary oppositions that gradually evolved as Ford’s career progressed. (See ‘filmic concepts’, below.)

In his auteur chapter Wollen did not, therefore, ‘try out’ the auteur theory on unknown directors; he did not attempt to reveal authors where none had existed before, but limited himself to the established auteurs Hawks and Ford. Nor did he examine in any detail the peripheral films of these directors – such as Ford’s Donovan’s Reef (1963) (which Wollen only mentions briefly [102]) or Hawks’s The Land of the Pharaohs (1955) (he simply points out in passing that this film does not share the same thematic preoccupations as Hawks’s other films [81]).⁵

Systematizing Data (Classifying, Correlating, Ordering, Measuring)

The strength and purpose of auteur theory lies in the way it systematizes its data, as Andrew Sarris recognized: ‘the auteur habit of collecting random films in directorial bundles will serve posterity with at least a tentative classification’ (1962, 8). We shall therefore examine this activity in some detail. Auteur theory systematizes its data primarily through classification and ordering.

Classifying Objects

Classifying ‘comprises the grouping together of objects, phenomena, events, etc. with one or more common properties’ (Botha 1981, 75). Auteur critics classify a group of films according to the properties (or invariant traits) that only they have in common. Wollen uses three mutually exclusive oppositions to classify a director’s films:

• theme/style (mise en scène)
• auteur/metteur en scène
• a posteriori/a priori.

He identifies the two main schools of auteur criticism: ‘those who insisted on revealing a core of meanings, of thematic motifs, and those...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Rationally reconstructing film theory
• 1. An improbable alliance: Peter Wollen’s ‘The Auteur Theory’
• 2. Visual stylometry: Barry Salt’s ‘Statistical Style Analysis of Motion Pictures’
• 3. Between Shakespeare and Sirk: Thomas Elsaesser’s ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama’
• 4. From iconicity to semiotic articulation: Christian Metz’s ‘Cinema: Language or Language System?’ and Language and Cinema
• 5. Film as a specific signifying practice: Stephen Heath’s ‘On Screen, In Frame: Film and Ideology’
• 6. Against theories of reflection: Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’
• 7. Early cinema spectatorship: Tom Gunning’s ‘The Cinema of Attraction(s): Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde’
• 8. Another Lacan: Slavoj Žižek’s ‘The Universal: Suture Revisited’
• 9. The death of the camera: Edward Branigan’s ‘What is a Camera?’
• Conclusion: Teaching theory
• Bibliography
• Index