Well, it took me a week, but I did read Scott Foundas's mash note to Brett Ratner that Paul so kindly posted about. It was about what one would expect from the Weekly in general these days and from Foundas in particular, a kind of incoherent populism that wants to elevate a lack of any meaningful critical perspective into a serious riposte to Film Criticism. In defense of Ratner, Foundas dismisses Ratner's critics as snoots who want their films to be Art, and even invokes the doyenne of movie reviewing, Pauline Kael, to defend his position that the best movies are the merely entertaining ones.
This, of course, is folderol. I've never been a fan of Pauline Kael or any of the major critics of that generation (although Richard Schickel's recent eulogy to 60s European art cinema was quietly heartfelt, a nice counterpart to his usually smug thoughts); she has always struck me as someone more concerned with being right about a film than offering any insight into it -- narcissism was her guiding critical principle. She was certainly prolific and insistent, which has helped her become influential. However, her insistence (echoed in Foundas and many others) that a good film is one that we simply "enjoy" -- that is, that it somehow addresses our emotions -- overlooks the possibility that enjoyment might arise from intellectual stimulation as much as emotional. It's the obverse of what Linda Williams and others have noted about the tendency of cinephiles (academic or otherwise) to favor intellectually challenging films over "body genres," those that make us laugh, cry, feel patriotic, orgasm, etc. As Williams and others' work in this field suggests, intellectual stimulation can be just as meaningful or enjoyable as emotional stimulation -- or more to the point, one can cry or laugh while also realizing the intellectual questions raised.
Foundas's defense of Ratner doesn't recognize that possibility. I don't need a film to be High Art, whatever that would be, but a measure of competence isn't so much to ask, is it? Ratner might be a nice mensch and he might even have some vague personal sense of aesthetics (oddly enough, I agree that many modern comedies ruin the joke by moving in too close; a case in point is the overrated Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which blows a quite funny line delivered by Tom Wilkinson with a close-up of Jim Carrey), but his films are sloppy and deliberately puerile. Defamer prints every little detail about his public shenanigans because his films are at about that intellectual and emotional level.
That the Weekly published its fan piece in the same week that icons of the 60s European art movement died is quite telling. Although challenging directors continue to produce challenging work -- Wong Kar Wai, Michael Haneke, Alejandro Inarritu, Alfonso Cuaron, Guillermo del Toro, probably some American director -- few in the media are interested in giving them the kind of critical attention that was bestowed on Antonioni, Bergman, Godard or even Woody Allen in his heyday. Instead, we have a lot of ink devoted to Quentin Tarantino and his latest riff on some obscure action or kung fu film from the 1970s or to M. Night Shyamalan or whoever is to be the Next Spielberg or to the studiously pedestrian Ron Howard's attempts to make something that could at least pass for thoughtful... or to Brett Ratner and his frat boy aesthetic. The at least surface meaning of these directors and their films is their referentiality, their ability to evoke directors and films that have already traveled the same paths, hit the same beats, tugged the same heart strings.
Auteurism is a dicey theory at its best; it all too easily permits reduction to "Stanley Kubrick is a singular genius responsible for everything in his films!" But it offered a certain comfort, a legibility and legitimacy that made analyzing films easier and more noble. Like most everything, however, its become a way of marketing a film -- a grasp at attracting some other audience that accepts that Robert Rodriguez's attention deficit disorder constitutes style or that Michael Bay's shameless pandering represents a personal vision.
If it ever did, does auteurism still have any critical value, any analytical meaning? Or is the fauxteur its necessary and irreducible mode for the postmodern/post-capitalist era?
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18 comments:
Foundas's notion that Ratner is important because he makes "highly enjoyable, wholly unpretentious entertainment," bypasses the idea of the auteur or the fauxteur entirely and assigns filmmaking a more medicinal purpose, such as a mind-numbing antidepressant.
Perhaps this wide acceptance of tripe for "art" is just an extension of our same acceptance of the post-capitalist, consumer-based soul-numbing society in which we live.
Just for the record: In my tenure as film editor at the Weekly, we have published lengthy interviews and/or career surveys on directors including (but certainly not limited to) Chantal Akerman, Woody Allen, Thom Andersen, Noah Baumbach, Andrew Bujalski, Charles Burnett, David Cronenberg, Claire Denis, Clint Eastwood, Jia Zhangke, David Lynch, Michael Mann, Cristi Puiu, George A. Romero, Michael Snow and Lars Von Trier--most of them written by me, with some contributions from our team of other staffers and freelancers. (Which is to make no mention of my own previous life as a regular Indiewire contributor, where my "incoherent populism" prompted me to write similar pieces on Abbas Kiarostami, the late Ousmane Sembene and, since you mention him, Michael Haneke--at a time, I should add, when almost none of his work had been commercially distributed in the U.S.) You're entitled to your opinion of Brett Ratner, of course, but if you intend to make sweeping generalizations about the Weekly's film coverage--or me personally--you could at least get your facts straight.
I don't think there's anything wrong with Mookie's facts here, Scott. His criticism was not that you have never written on "art" filmmakers (which he didn't say), but that you "lack any meaningful critical perspective." To respond by listing off a hodge-podge of directors doesn't really work in your defense.
The point at issue, I suppose, is whether good film criticism should establish criteria for making qualitative claims about this or that film. I feel that it should (which is not to say (i) that a monolithic editorial policty is needed nor (ii) that these criteria would have to be in any sense "objective"). Still, on this single basis, the LA Weekly appears to fall short: just look at the enormous number of films to which we are advised to "GO!" every week. What is the principle of differentiation at work here? (The Roger Ebert "thumbs" system is more refined, since it at least allows for three possibilities.) One should - at the very least - keep in mind Kael's comment about the smell of a skunk, especially when dealing with popcorn salesmen like Ratner ...
As for the matter of "incoherent populism," I'm a little puzzled. It seems that it was the accusation of "populism" that most stirred your ire (given that you point to your writing on Sembene, etc.). But there is nothing wrong with populism, and everything the matter with incoherence.
Anyway, my beef's not entirely with Scott. What the hell is all this about living in a post-capitalist world, Mookie and Lori?
Like RK, I don't see much in Scott Foundas's post that counters what I wrote. I do see both the Weekly in general, with its recent affection for true crime cover stories over political coverage (something that my perhaps spotty recent memory tells me was not true of the newspaper when I moved here; maybe I'm wrong, but the Weekly doesn't seem to be the important read that it used to be), and the film reviews in particular to be dull and slipshod. If Scott would like examples of what I find incoherent about his work, he might look to his review of Revenge of the Sith, which championed George Lucas's emotionally embarassed, digital effects-driven bit of pulp mythology as a breakthrough in film language: "Lucas has labored for decades to create a new digital language for cinema — his own powerful Force, if you will — and when he is at the top of his game, it’s hard not to be impressed by what he achieves, by way of manipulating that language into a weirdly beautiful, mechanized poetry that exposes the computer-generated imagery in most other movies as little more than expensive white noise. So Lucas is a major figure, and Revenge of the Sith may be some kind of historic achievement — the first movie in which it is fully impossible to tell where flesh ends and digital paint begins." ( http://www.laweekly.com/film+tv/film/seems-like-old-times/629/ ) and compare it to his review of Peter Jackson's far more emotionally resonant if digital effects-happy King Kong which Foundas worried presaged "the end of cinema, the final obfuscation between movies made by men and those made by machines. Perhaps I’m hopelessly out of touch, but I remain steadfast in my belief that size does matter, and that the best things in life come in small packages." So Lucas is to be lauded for blurring the lines between human and effect, but Jackson is to be condemned for it. That seems like incoherence to me.
I would also state for the record that I have been far less than impressed by some of the stories that Foundas has done on the directors he lists, though oddly it seems to be his pieces on American directors that cross the line from journalism into adoration. The Brett Ratner piece is the latest in a series of articles that treat their subjects as just the best darn directors around, usually when they are about to release some expensive works that turns out to be far less impressive than Foundas is excited to believe they are: Michael Mann and Miami Vice, Bryan Singer and Superman Returns (wherein he gives credit to Singer for the amazing detail of the metal on a plane rippling as Superman catches it, when the digital effects wizard is more likely the "author" of that idea) and Romero and Land of the Dead, which article fails to notice that Romero has pretty much painted himself into an intellectual corner.
So while I appreciate Scott's interest in Retinal Damage, I must say that I still don't think much of him as a critic.
RK, by post-capitalism I mean an economy in which the creation and distribution of material goods has become less important (or is becoming less important) than the creation of wealth through the manipulation of intangible goods, such as information or other sources of capital. It's an economy that, though tied to capitalism, rests more on the exploitation of unproductive labor than of productive labor. But I'm no economic theorist, so maybe I'm just talking shit.
I'll just chime in to suggest that from the vantage point of a sweatshop worker, whether in Malaysia or California, the economy still turns decidedly on the exploitation of productive labor.
Basic human misery is still very much a hallmark of capitalism, late or otherwise.
As for the auteurist fight that Mookie has been trying to pick for a month now - ;) - I'd say that while the author may still be dead from a theoretical vantage point, I've found that on the set, in actual film production, the director still holds total sway over the creative decision making
It is firmly ingrained in below-the-line production culture that access to the director is access to the story and how it is told. In the traditional hierarchy of film production, the chain of command beginning at the top goes from the producer to the director with the cinematographer and production designer, sharing the next rung down.
More recently, as visual effects have taken on a greater role, not simply in effects driven films but in almost all Hollywood production, the visual effects supervisor has moved from being a subordinate of production designer to a leading collaborator with the director, alongside the cinematographer and art director.
This has caused all kinds of new craft tensions on the set as the rise of the visual effects supe has been viewed, in some craft quarters, as the elevation of technicians over artists as vfx are seen now as the product of programming computer code rather than any kind of aesthetic training or vision.
Digital technologies, along with economic demands, have played a significant role in the rise of the vfx supe as linear production models have broken down. Typically, pre-production was the domain of the art director, production the domain of the cinematographer and post-production the domain of the visual effects guys.
Digital vfx technology, however, has totally disrupted this linear model as a lot of design decisions are frequently left to be made in post-production, long after the production designer has left for another project. And don't even get a cinematographer started on DI and color correction in VFX shots ...
VFX supervisors now increasingly come on board in pre-production because of the frequently daunting amount of vfx work that needs to be done in more and more productions, stay on set to advise on green screen work and then dominate the post-production phase.
The technology committees of the ASC and ADG, representing the cinematographers and production designers, respectively, have spent the last two years working together to re-assert their proper place at the director's side, essentially in direct response to the rise of VFX work and VFX supervisors.
The point of bringing all this up is that riding on top of the chaos of the new digital production paradigm are the producers and directors, the two positions who are still most likely to be with a project, consulting with every department, from beginning to end.
What holds the director in place, both practically and discursively, while below the line crafts are still wrestling to restore traditional authorities and hierarchies in a new production paradigm, is the whole concept of narrative or story, which exerts a kind of Foucaultian control over film production cultures.
Within that discourse the director, over the producer, is seen as the "keeper of the vision" on a film set. Below-the-line artists have completely internalized the idea that the closer one is to the director's ear (or eye), the closer one is seen to be to having creative input on the final film.
Story holds such sway because over a century ago, the industry asserted narrative as a corporate value to be internalized by its work force and passed down from one generation to the next by the work force itself.
Anyway, that's a lot of rambling to say that Bryan Singer probably did have a lot of say in the rippling metal of that plane because the VFX supervisor was consulting with him at every step of the way because that's what a good vfx supervisor beleives he (or she) has to do in order to be a good vfx supervisor.
They don't act independently of the director, or without the director's input, because it isn't a value of their production culture.
Paul, I don't dispute that the director remains the decision maker on the set of the film, or that any number of talented individuals vie for his/her ear. And I found your explanation of relationships between the director, DP, production designer, special effects supervisors, et al., informative and fascinating. How films get made remains an almost mysterious process to me -- even after knowing about the territorial issues you outline here!
That said, I don't think the synonimization of author/auteur and decision maker is fair. The former, to me, implies that the film is a singular work, one that can completely be attributed to the genius of the director. Yet, as you point out, many persons work with the director, providing ideas or problematizing others. They give the director the options from which he can make a decision. To say that Bryan Singer is the "author" of the rippling metal CGI in Superman Returns misses the point of all that interaction. The VFX supervisor might have designed the effect with the intent of impressing Singer and might have had the idea supplied to him by Singer. In either case, I don't see Singer as the author, in any meaningful sense, of that effect because either he didn't devise it on his own or he didn't have any direct role in its creation -- it was handled by computer programmers and computer artists in some laboratory and not on the set on which Singer and his crews worked. If anything, CGI should be seen as yet another nail in the concept of the director-as-auteur, or of anyone as auteur.
And your point about sweatshop labor is well taken.
... but no work of art could be said to be the work of a singular person. This is a point repeatedly underlined by Howard Becker in his sociology of artistic production, Art Worlds, which I am half way through and highly recommend.
Becker argues that the degree to which an artist must depend upon cooperative relationships to produce his or her work depends upon the medium, from poetry to grand opera. But even a poet must depend on a printer to produce readable versions of their work, or else, in oral traditions the abilities of someone to remember the damn thing once its been recited. Every artist is both constrained and challenged by the limits these cooperative networks place on their work.
Given that, it seems a touch unfair to deny film directors the status of auteur/author because they work collaboratively with others. Every artist does.
I also think that CGI actually gives a director more control than ever over the film image, right down to individual pixels. One complaint I have heard repeatedly from the VFX guys I've talked to is that directors can now tweak so much, repeatedly, without fearing any loss of image quality (as was true in the optical effects days as every new iteration of an effect shot added more and more grain into the image as original elements degraded with each new pass) that final decisions are often left until the very last minute which apparently makes for some insane post-production schedules.
At the same time, pre-viz technologies are so sophisticated now that everything can be worked out in such detail in pre-production -- including exact camera angles, color schemes etc. etc. -- that the director can be assured everything will be exactly as he wanted once he hits the set. Guys like David Fincher use pre-viz extensively to ensure that they have a maximum amount of control over what gets shot and how.
The point being is that Singer had to sign off on all the FX shots in Superman Returns and could have requested minute changes in the image if he had wanted to. But in this context, the VFX supervisor is part of Singer's collaborative network, an artist hired by Singer to help him achieve his vision.
The VFX supervisor plays the same kind of roll that say, a printer plays in the work of ee cummings. The printer being an artist or crafts person in his own right working in support of the poet who makes serious demands on a printer's ability to layout crazy typographical forms. Who knows, if the printer suggested the font, does that diminish ee cumming's status as author of the poem?
At the risk of prolonging an unwinnable argument, I nevertheless feel compelled to point out the following: It was stated that my "mash note" to Ratner "was about what one would expect from the Weekly in general these days," and so I responded with an inventory of just what we have been writing about in the Weekly "these days," with the precise intention of pointing out that there is no standard m.o. at work, except that we tend to write about the filmmakers that interest us, whether they're great, terrible or somewhere in between.
One of the things I have found particularly interesting about the responses to my Ratner story--and there have been many--are the number of people who have suggested that it makes a case for Ratner as "the best darn director out there" (your words) or "a master filmmaker" (to quote another blogger), when in fact I expressly state in the piece that I am making no such claims for Ratner and that I do not feel he has yet produced a single work that will leave a lasting impact on the medium. That also doesn't mean I think he's a bad director. But as I also clearly state in the same article, Ratner is someone about whom people hold such unwavering opinions--which is partly what makes him an interesting subject--that no matter what one says about him, or what he says himself, people will twist it to mean whatever they want it to mean. Thanks for helping me to prove my point.
As for some of the other points you raise, I'm sorry that you fail to recognize MIAMI VICE as a modernist masterpiece, and that I'm more moved by the digital effects wizardry in George Lucas and Bryan Singer's films than in Peter Jackson's fatuous KING KONG redo. But as I have said many times in print over the years, that's part of the beauty of film criticism--it should beginning of a discussion between the critic and the reader, rather than the end of one. Or as Manny Farber put it more eloquently: “The last thing I want to know is whether you like it or not...I don’t think it has any importance; it’s one of those derelict appendages of criticism. Criticism has nothing to do with hierarchies.”
In that respect, I agree that the "GO" designations in the Weekly can be misleading, since they're applied to any film that gets a positive review, whether it's a rave or only grudgingly so. The system is nothing new, however; it's merely a reconfiguration of the "Also recommended" list that appeared for years at the bottom of the weekly Film Pick of the Week column, and also comparable to the starred reviews or "Critics Picks" that appear in almost every major daily and weekly newspaper. So, why the Weekly would be singled out for that is a bit mysterious to me (as is the suggestion that Roger Ebert's thumb can be in more than two positions).
As for Wong Kar Wai, Alejandro Inarritu, Alfonso Cuaron, Guillermo del Toro--well, let's just say that if I were to make a list of the great contemporary filmmakers who have been slighted for attention by the mainstream media, Wong (who not too long ago graced the cover of the New York Times Sunday magazine) and the "three amigos" (who, between them, have directed a HARRY POTTER movie and been nominated for a boatload of Oscars) wouldn't be anywhere near the top of the list. Who would? A lot of the people we've profiled in the Weekly, for starters (Akerman, Denis, Jia, et al.), and a few more we're working on pieces about at present, including the great Portuguese director Pedro Costa, whose films will be the subject of a Los Angeles retrospective at REDCAT in the fall.
If you want to prolong the argument...
My remark about the "best darn directors" [not director -- I didn't say that you felt that Ratner was the best darn director] was a reference about what I perceive as the fannish tone to your cover stories. Your article is an attempt to rehabilitate Ratner into something other than a joke when his films don't warrant that rehabilitation. As for the other directors, Michael Mann has produced some quite interesting films, but the bloated Miami Vice isn't one of them in my opinion; ditto for Bryan Singer and Superman Returns. Perhaps this is simply what the reader brings to the articles, but all of them smelt a bit of desperation to me.
As to my critique of your reviews of Sith and King Kong, my point isn't that we disagree about each film, it's that your standards are incoherent -- or at best inconsistent. Reread the parts I quoted: You promote the inability to distinguish between human and machine in cinema in the bloated Sith as a breakthrough in film language, and castigate King Kong for its blurring of the line between man and machine in cinema. What was a laudable attribute in one was exactly the despicable one in another -- so despicable, in fact, that you despaired of the entire art form. In your reviews you even admit that Jackson is far defter at human interaction than Lucas. I've no interest in hierarchies, and if you had offered some coherent vision about the role of special effects in cinema, then I wouldn't have given much thought about your reviews.* But as they stand now, they're ill-defended personal opinions. In other words, I would argue that Manny Farber's comment is far more applicable to you than it is to me or anyone else here.
As to your personal list of overlooked filmmakers -- I'll cop to my list being wan. I had been working on that post for awhile, procrastinating on other work, and those were the names that for whatever reason popped into my head as I rushed to complete the post. They are filmmakers who do challenging work (and Cuaron's ability to modulate between Y tu mama tambien, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Children of Men should put to rest any notion of Brett Ratner as anything more than a barely competent journeyman). But many other filmmakers are toiling with far less recognition, you are right.
Which of course brings us back to the more general thrust of my post, which was actually not to bag on you. It was more about the usefulness of the concept of the auteur. If Ratner can be considered a talented director who is here to stay -- even if you don't think he's yet made a lasting work -- then perhaps the term is too elastic; what value is a term that could encompass Antonioni, Bergman, Pasolini and Ratner? Or for that matter, what value is it if it can encompass Ratner and anyone north of Ed Wood?
So, if you're still around and don't mind participating, Scott, what exactly do you consider to be an auteur? Do you think the term has value, and if so, what?
*For the record, I found more than a few parts of King Kong bloated. The insect sequence did little more than demonstrate that Cooper's belief that the similar sequence slowed the 1933 version to a halt was correct. And Jack Black was an embarrassment. But Naomi Watts performance, the way the CGI was used to help create Kong as a character and not a neat gizmo (a la General Grievous in Sith), the sense of mourning that permeated the entire film once Kong appeared, the deftly choreographed and animated dinosaur chases and battles, the heartwrenching climax on top of the Empire State Building as Kong feels his life slipping away and has a tender moment with a friend before being shot in the back... any one of those demonstrates to my mind that CGI can be used for far more than gee-whiz gimmickry and manipulation than any number of Star Wars films. It's CGI used in the service of telling a story with recognizable human emotions beyond an apparent case of (very lucrative) arrested development.
oh and, hi Scott! Welcome to the blog ... just me and my fellow UCLA grads and post-docs shooting the shit about movies ... (it's me, paul!)
Paul, I ran out time yesterday to respond to your post. It was, as ever, informative. New technology might indeed allow the director a greater ability to plan everything ahead of time and ensure that those plans are carried out... but the passive voice here is the key to me.
The director does not carry out most of these tasks himself. He directs others to do them, and has such adds a level of collaboration that poetry and fiction-writing rarely if ever have. Fincher might browbeat his actors into giving certain kinds of performances, but those performances are still the product of those actors -- Fincher himself doesn't play the roles in his films. And Bryan Singer might very well have been exacting in how he guided the special effects artists -- but he still guided them, he didn't do the visual work himself.
On the other hand, ee cummings might not have had a role in the typesetting of his poems, but nor did he have someone directing him to use certain words, write in a certain tone of voice, etc. I'm not at all opposed to histories or theories that outline how even solitary authors rely on others, but I don't believe those theories should result in a flattening of the concept of author so much that anyone could be assigned the title. Filmmaking is a far more collaborative activity/art than writing is, no matter how you define them. For that reason, I am reluctant to assign authorial status on filmmakers, at least wholecloth (and I say that as someone who had hoped to write his dissertation on Pasolini).
I also wanted to say that in retrospect my last e-mail to Scott, asking him how he conceived of the auteur in the midst of a critique of his film criticism, might have seemed condescending or goading.
It wasn't intended to be. None of what I have said was intended personally (I deleted an earlier post where I did get personal) and any language that seems that way is misspoken and is apologized for. It would be interesting and enlightening to have a discussion with a practicing film critic about how he understands the role of the director in the seventh art.
But if the auteur is dead, then what should replace him/her? For 70s structuralism, the answer was "the text." But the result was an unacknowledged elitism that approached film and literary texts as though they existed outside the web of social relations that made them possible. (This was really a case of "emperor has no clothes" leftism; can one imagine, as an analogy, a Marxist analysis of any other kind of commodity that did the same, as though, rather than explore the social system hidden behind a pair Gap jeans, you just waxed lyrical about their metaphysical subtleties?) Which is a way of saying: you can dismiss the auteur if you like, but be careful about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Films should not be reified as "texts," but as constituent elements of a social process; and this means thinking about the people that made them.
In fact, I'm tempted to posit here (simply by way of thinking in silly paradoxes) that the lasting legacy of auteurism has been to goad serious research into the production of films, originally as part of an impulse to figure out "who did what," eventually as a broader project of understanding cinematic modes of production. The ambiguous result of which is that art is demystified into labor and auteurism disappears up its own arsehole.
Perhaps we can also think about the kind of ideological work that a "fauxteur" like Ratner accomplishes. What is at stake, I think, is the underlying conflict by which auteurism is defined. In the case of "classic" (50s/60s) auteurism, that conflict was, in effect, the individual vs. the system, the director able to transcend the limitations of formula product. In the case of Ratner, his auteurism does not seem to be defined through this kind of tension. For Ratner does not transcend the limitations of his formulas; he, supposedly, reveals the real riches of those formulas (the "real riches" being that they are "fun"). Which is, of course, simply one way of justifying shit as roses, and implies that the "fauxteur" is simply a strategy of capitulation, as Lori said at the very beginning.
As a guy who enjoys waxing lyrical about the "metaphysical subtleties" of just about everything from gap jeans to movies to myspace, i still couldn't agree with Rob more. I'm not about to join Metaphysical Anonymous anytime soon but separating our experience of texts out from the social-cultural-economic systems that produce and bind them, both text and their experience, seems to lose out, not only on half the fun, so to speak, but also to limit the efficacy of criticism to impact those systems. I mean I got into this game to change the world, an idealism i learned from and through my love of movies. Who's with me?
I think it's important then to recognize also how the term auteur, as an honorific, is mobilized within the production world, as well as, the critical world and how the two interact.
If you refuse to assign the term "author" to a director because of the collaborative nature of the film medium, that doesn't negate the fact that the perception of auteur status plays a role in shaping the dynamics of film production as it confers a degree of cultural capital on its bearer that holds particular sway over the decision-making process of any production.
The image of the director as the author of a film begins, really with Griffith, perhaps, but it doesn't really gain real institutional force until guys like Frank Capra, through the DGA, begin to argue for that status in the 30s. The auteurist criticism of Cahiers du Cinema and the Sarris variant, in other words, only served to reinforce an institutional discourse in Hollywood already well under way by the time they came along to champion their fave directors. If auteurism was presented as a challenge to or critique of the Hollywood studio system which constrained the artist, it actually served to reinforce an institutional hierarchy already well established that actually sustained and supported the managerial strategies of the studios themselves which were and are centered around the primacy of story.
... and entertainment, i should add.
I agree that cinema -- specific films and the medium in general -- need to be understood as the result of a complex social, cultural and personal interactions. But just as structuralism focused more on the sytemic similarities supporting all texts and thus rejected any study of film in a specific network, auteurism seems to do the same thing: By priviliging one individual, regardless of title that s/he holds on a film, as the guarantor of its worth -- of its authenticity as a text -- society, culture and audience are elided.
I understand Paul's point that the director holds such an important place in the production hierarchy in Hollywood that some title, even if only an honorific, is warranted. But auteur seems to me to be too honorific a title, I guess. Yes a director can shape a production, but so can an editor of a novel or the conductor of a symphony. Yet we don't consider them to be the authors of those works because we recognize that someone else (singly or aggregately) do much of if not all of the actual creative work. The writer might follow the editor's guidelines but rarely uses specific language as dictated by the editor to any great extent (I assume), and the conductor works from music written by a composer and guides dozens (or more) musicians who actually make the beautiful sounds. If anything, the director of a film sounds more akin to the conductor of the symphony than the author of a novel.
I guess my main beef here is that I don't see what the director does (at least in mainstream film production) as an authorial act, no matter what the consistency across work. The director might very well deserve some honorific title but that doesn't mean s/he deserves any honorific act. Short of tradition, no reason seems to exist to continue to use the term to identify or honor most directors. In this sense, then, regardless of capability, the majority of directors in Hollywood are fauxteurs -- individuals who have been assigned a singular status in a collective art more through the weight of lobbying and tradition than anything else.
Thus, even the Cahiers concept of the term is suspect because it presumes that directing is akin to writing than to conducting. Certainly those critics were theorizing and writing under the influence of Astruc and others but that doesn't necessarily mean Astruc was right. Even the identification of common themes across a director's work isn't enough to guarantee authorship. The director might simply be drawn to projects with these themes (possible in the case of directors who work from scripts written by others); but even if s/he requests changes in the script to reflect pet themes, the actual creation of the scenes and characters to reflect those themes rests with the screenwriter. In other words, to know if these common elements are born of the director, we need to see the project at its earliest stages to determine where those elements were introduced to the project.
This, of course, raises the question of directors who also write their films. Indeed, my fella Pasolini wrote and directed his films, did most of the research for costumes, blocking, scenery, etc., himself and in some cases operated the camera (keeping the DP and camera operators handy for meter readings and lens changes). Do directors who fall in this category deserve the term auteur? If one person aggrandizes creative tasks to him/herself, does that bring him/her closer to deserving this title?
And, of course, what of directors who one can fairly well look at the film and recognize who it is the work of -- the Hitchcocks, the Fellinis, the Ozus? Can certain directors, regardless of how collaborative the process, somehow imbue a film with their "personality" for want of a better term, that they must be thought of as auteurs?
Just asking. Cause I really like Pasolini.
The "conductor" analogy is a familiar one - V. F. Perkins actually uses it in SUPPORT of the concept of auteur in his book "Film as Film" - but, I feel, rather inapplicable to a film director.
In the case of the conductor - also a book editor - we are talking about a much more straightforward process: Mahler writes a symphony; a hundred years later Simon Rattle conducts it, shaping a particular texture out of the music. There are essentially two creative acts here: that of the composer (who creates a "total" text, any variation of which is basically a matter of emphasis) and that of the conducter (who supplies the emphasis).
This has nothing to do with the situation in film because no one person creates a "total text" that everyone else then follows. The situation in film involvess a far different kind of orchestration (forgive the pun) of creative elements; and it seems to me that the theoretical possibility of the auteur is premised upon such a situation.
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