The auteur debate
5.8 The auteur debate
The nature of both film and television demands a corporate activity; however, since the earliest days of film there has been a tendency to define the authorship of a particular text. To some extent this still applies to television productions. The aim of this section is to indicate the range of the various discussions of the auteur theory within film criticism, and in
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particular to specify the various concepts used in such criticism. Auteur theory undoubtedly exists in the sense that critics, reviewers, film theorists and students of film continually refer to it, and the ordinary cinemagoer uses it as a rough classification system. The question, however, is, what is the critical significance of the term? Is it effective? Does it do more than simply refer to a rough rule of form and consistency within a canon of individual films? Does the theory do more than simply establish a set of arbitrary taxonomies within the general concept of film? Film criticism and theory has
a number of systems with which to substantiate the value of a film or group of films. The term ‘theory’ is in general applied to the more abstract analysis of film, and the term ‘criticism’ has a more practical application. All systems are either descriptive or prescriptive, the prescriptive critic/theorist being concerned with what film should be and the descriptive critic/theorist with film as it is. A critic/theorist taking an aesthetic perspective would simply imply a prescriptive set of values, as would a theorist taking a semiotic view, whereas a theorist applying psychoanalytical or infrastructural viewpoints would use descriptive values. In 1931, Paul Rotha wrote that editing was
‘The intrinsic essence of filmic creation’ 17 . Although Rotha praised it in an extreme way, such a view was usual amongst formalist film theorists. Before Andr´e Bazin’s dissent in the 1950s, the cinematic became featured as the prime criterion of excelling the purity that could align film with music, visual arts and literature. Mainstream film theorists, led by Rudolf Arnheim, distrusted any technical development in film production. This view crystallised into a particular reverence of silent film, with all its shortcomings, as a recorder of reality. With the advent of sound, colour, improved film stock and lenses, orthodox film theory became more and more remote from the cinema as it operated, and from the needs and methods of criticism. Bazin’s response to two decades of obscure film theory and criticism was to apply aspects of phenomenology to the theory of realism. For Bazin, realism was more a matter of psychology than of aesthetics. He was more concerned with the significance of film not for what it was, but for what it could do. James Monaco suggests that what Bazin was after in his
criticism was ‘functionalism’ 18 rather than simple realism. In 1951, Bazin, with Doniol-Valcroze and Loduca, founded Cahiers du Cinema. This magazine published articles by Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Goddard, Claude Chabol, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette, amongst others. These cineastes used the journal to express their views and policies, and developed concepts of film history, which they were to implement in their work as directors. The major theoretical principle proposed in Cahiers du Cinema (January 1954) was expressed by Truffaut in the article Une certain tendence du cinema Francais, in which he described the ‘politique des auteur theory’. However, he
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explained that he was not expressing a theory to be proved, but rather a policy to be achieved. Some years later, he defended the concept of the auteur as merely being a polemical weapon for a given time and place. The American theorist Andrew Sarris has stated that there is no definition of the auteur theory in the English language – that is, by any American or British critic. It is apparent that the theory does not make any claim of prophecy, nor the possibility of any extra cinematic perspective – e.g. a bad director will not always make a bad film, but almost always; a bad director is a director who has made many bad films. The major premise of the auteur theory is the perception of the distinguishable personality of the director as
a criterion of value 19 :
He must exhibit certain recurrent characteristics of style over a group of films which serve as his signature; the way a film looks and moves should have some relationship to the way the director thinks or feels.
The ultimate claim of the theory is concerned with the interior meaning, the ultimate glory of the cinema as art. Interior meaning is extrapolated from the tension between a director’s personality and his or her material. Many of the choices that the director of a film has to make are matters of craft; the aim is to make the scenes vivid and varied so as to present an interesting combination of the characters and the narrative. The director’s basic task is to disguise poor casting, dull writing and poor sets. Even a good script and competent actors are not enough to prevent a film falling flat; often the fault lies in the director’s inability to bring the material convincingly to life. Bazin’s reaction to the formalists’ emphasis on montage as an essential element of cinema was to denote mise en scene as the crux of realist film (by the term mise en scene
he means particularly deep focus and sequence shots). However, subsequent critics and theorists have redefined and elaborated the concept to include a wide range of techniques and effects. These include (from theatre) the staging of action, the plastics (e.g. sets, props, make up, lighting etc.), and the centre of action, the animate objects (e.g. people and animals). The nature of the frame, its static state and its movement dimensions, lens, angle of view and perspective have become the other governing factor of mise en scene. The length of time that a shot appears on the screen also has a profound effect on the concept. A director who shows competence in using these factors obtains the status of metteur en scene, a director who demonstrates total responsibility for the pace, rhythm, timing structure and assumes the transcendent theme values and ideologies of raw materials of film-making is acclaimed an auteur. The argument for opposing the auteur theory was largely based upon the concept of form. Fereydoun
Hoveyda takes an extreme attitude when he states that 20 :
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The story in no way constitutes the underlying significance of the film. Indeed, in the hands of a great director, even the most insignificant detective story can be transformed into a work of art.
He believed that it is form, rather than content, that offers cinema its specificity. Hoveyda focuses on what he calls ‘the essential importance of the concept of mise en scene’ to substantiate the policy of the auteur, but claims that it is not a pure artistic form but, on the contrary, a form with a meaning.
Opposing this position were many of the contributors to the British film journal Sight and Sound. These articles took the view that it is content (expressions of the human situation) that is significant in film. Penelope Houston criticised the Cahiers du Cinema group for ‘barely admitting to experiences which do not take place in the cinema’. She stated that the Cahiers debate had become no more than ‘an insular shop talk’, and that
cinema is about human relationships 21 : If cinema is the art we think it is, then it is entitled to the kind of critical
analysis that has traditionally been devoted to the theatre and the novel.
This criticism, to be useful, is likely to be liberal. The major criticism of the auteur theory was that it had become exclusive and arbitrary. Once a director had been accepted by the Cahiers du Cinema as an auteur, it automatically followed that all the subsequent (and even previous) works were ipso facto excellent. It was felt that it took a long time and some very poor films before the Cahiers team changed their mind about a director once he or she had been admitted to this pantheon. ‘To Hoveyda, as to
many French critics, x number of beautiful shots = a great film’ 22 . Pauline Keal states that 23 :
The director should be in control not because he is the sole creative intelligence but because only if he is in control can he liberate and utilise the talents of his co-workers who languish, as directors do, in studio production.
She believes that the most applicable interpretation of a director’s claim to authorship is not that he did it all himself, but that he suffered from a minimum of interference with the choices and ultimate decisions.
Peter Wollen offered the director Howard Hawks as a test case for the auteur theory. He explains that Hawks had worked for many years within the Hollywood system and to the format of the classic Hollywood text. He also made films in almost all genres, which exhibit the same thematic
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preoccupations, the same motifs and incidents, the same style and tempo. It is not difficult to appreciate the appeal of a Hawks film to two types of people. First, the supporters of the Cahiers group would feel gratified that Hawks shared their tastes for the shock effect, the classy pulp thriller and a teenager’s perception of human relationships operating in a male-dominated society. His low regards for social and psychological influences, combined with the absence of a big subject in his work, appears attractive to them. Second, the ex-Cahiers film-maker would be intrigued by Hawks’ mainly anonymous career – one of the problems of an inspired, honest craftsman of the comparatively unimportant. But why should we recognise Hawks’ films as being more significant than the ordinary? John Ford is by far a better director of the western, Sturges has directed more passionate comedies, and Huston’s Maltese Falcon is a more significant thriller than The Big Sleep. It is the overt enthusiasm and all round expertise that attracts us (the audience) to Hawks’ work. It is his respect for an intelligent non-expert viewing public who will recognise his work for interesting non-art (even anti- art) dextrous narrative content. Hawks is a romantic; men of action facing danger and death fascinate him, and these fill his outdoor films. His indoor films utilise urbane, eccentric women, whose role is to play upon the vulnerability of gullible, eccentric males who, often, are usually of professional status and show the reverse of those qualities much admired and used by Hawks in the adventure films. Within each genre, says Robin Wood, Hawks does not merely improve on its predecessor in technical proficiency and general know how; it is inevitably a ‘richer and denser and
more personal work’ 24 . Two films particularly characterise Hawks’ stylistic pattern. In Only Angels Have Wings (1939) the action takes place in South America, in a community filled mostly by men and isolated, geographically, from the rest of the world. The major characters operate in this foreign environment, in an environment that is completed ignored for the rest of the film. The male lead, Cary Grant (Geoff Carter), is a cynical professional pilot running a company delivering the mail across the Andes. He is surrounded by a set of competent and loyal men, each of who has a specific role within the narrative. The female lead, Jean Arthur (Bonnie Lee), arrives on the scene from the outside, and immediately presents the possibility of
a difficult romantic invasion of the all-male group. However, as the plot deepens and develops she becomes accepted because of her own level of competence – in the case of Bonnie, her abilities as a performer at the piano. These characteristics are repeated in most of Hawks’ adventure films. In To Have and to Have Not (1944), Bogart plays the competent cynic and Bacall the talented performer. In Rio Bravo, Wayne and Angie Dickinson play the parts. The supporting cast is made up of stock types, such as the loyal
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sidekick with a physical or psychological problem. In Angels, Thomas Mitchell plays Kid Dabb, who is losing his sight; in To Have, Walter Brennan plays Eddy the Rummie, an alcoholic; and in Rio Bravo he plays the disabled Stumpy. All these characters ‘used to be good’. Another set of characters have ‘let the side down’, and their function in the plot is to achieve redemption through the committing of a brave if foolhardy act. Hawks’ use of these familiar types doing and saying similar things could prove tedious in the hands of a lesser director. It is Hawks’ mastery of mise en scene and his apparent rapport with actors and writers that enhances the production to the extent of offering few barriers to the audience suspending their disbelief.
The other picture that typifies Hawks’ output is the comedy Bringing Up Baby (1938). In this film Cary Grant again stars, but at first sight his character appears to be ineffectual. It is not until the film has progressed that it becomes clear that in the face of the manic character played by Katherine Hepburn, no one would appear to be effective. The zanyness and apparent lack of logic on the part of Hepburn’s character, Susan, overpowers Grant’s academic character, palaeontologist David Huxley. The outcome is a
retardation of man’s behaviour that Andrew Sarris describes thus 25 :
This film passes beyond the customary lunacy of the period into the bestial walpurgisnasht during which man, dog and leopard pursue each other over the Connecticut countryside until the behaviour patterns of men and animals become indistinguishable.
Hawks’ films not only exhibit a thematic and character consistency; they also demonstrate the advantage of the Hollywood studio system when used by
a director/producer of Hawks’ quality. His ability to operate within the economic constraints of the system enabled him to benefit from a level of personal freedom that many other directors fail to achieve. The success of most of his films made him a safe and profitable bet, which meant he could cultivate a style, unaffected by the interference of studio bosses. He built up groups of stars, writers, cinematographers and composers who he used in groups of films at different periods of his career. With Hitchcock, Ford and von Sternberg, Hawks and a few others were able to build up a recognisable personal signature from film to film during the great age of Hollywood. However, for the main part Hollywood productions were the joint effort of groups of craftspeople, directors, actors, cinematographers, writers, designers and producers.
The significance of the auteur theory is not only its application as a sys- tem of criticism, but also the result of the tensions it has created with the other systems of theory and criticism, i.e. genre, semiotics, formalism,
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expressionism, realism etc. These tensions have produced a profound dialectic, which has initiated a dialogue that is far more wide-ranging than would be possible using any one of the systems alone. The implication of the auteur theory has contributed a great deal to this debate, because by nature it offers a dichotomy between production and meaning, i.e. the system demands a close scrutiny of both production techniques and implied meaning. Through auteur theory we do not only seek to analyse a director’s film by form and style, we are also constantly seeking those clues to the essence of creativity within the human spirit. The theory also has the potential for both descriptive and prescriptive use. It can present a set of predetermined values, which have been empirically justified by studying a group of films by a director and applying these values to subsequent products in expectation of a continuing policy. Briefly, the fruits of the descriptive process become the tools of a prescriptive application. Criticism of the theory has effectively taken the edge off the extreme and often suspect claims made for the system by critics such as Hoveyda, and at the same time established its prime role amongst the other methods of critical
analysis. Monaco expresses his view of the current position 26 :
What seems clear in general about the present course of film theory is that description as an attitude which reached its apex in the early days of film semiotics has in a sense merged with the prescription that characterised the early film theorist.
He makes the point that film theory today should take the far-reaching and inter-related oppositions involved in film, and use them as a never-ending set of codes and sub-codes that raise fundamental questions about the relationships of life, art, reality and language. The desire on the part of film theorists and critics to put film into context with the other visual and narrative arts has led to a confusion of the complex issues involved. Of course there is a need to put film in its correct place, but there has been too much effort to relate to and compare with these other forms. The growth of the influence of cultural studies has clarified some of the confusion about the nature of film as art and an artefact of popular culture, and is enabling film to achieve its true status in the spectrum of cultural experiences. The development of film theory during the last three decades has been greatly influenced by the work carried out by literary theorists, many of whom were reaching towards the policies proposed by F. R. Leavis, in which he posited the concept of a canon of excellence. This canon of work, he insisted, ‘was ultimately the product of individual human beings, and there is
a measure of spiritual autonomy in human affairs’ 27 . This idea was in direct opposition to most views held by Marxist critics, who proposed that the
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driving forces in literature (as in all things) were materialism and production. George Lukacs and Lucien Goldman felt that, in the last resort, it is the group and not the individual that is the ‘true author of the work, i.e. the
expression of the work is trans-individual’ 28 . It would at first sight appear that Leavis’ concept and the auteur theory in film have a good deal in common; however, Leavis viewed the work of the cinema as the model for mass vulgarity, and he tested the popular novelist as a cynical technician working to a formula to produce a saleable work. Leavis saw any popular cultural product as a means of undermining the concept of a good work – that is, a work from the canon of high culture, which sets the standard of excellence. The Marxist dialectic of criticism would naturally dismiss the auteur theory.
There is a third proposition, which is a result of this development of cultural studies in the 1960s. Raymond Williams drew on the philosophy of European Marxists which, combined with the liberal tradition of literary criticism, stressed the value of cultural materialism (which holds that the super-structural activities we call culture have as good a claim to form the basis on which social relations depend as do the forces of production). Williams asserts that production includes social production, one aspect of which is art – including popular art. Thus, while Marxism does not admit the concept of the auteur, when used in conjunction with the liberal tradition of literary criticism it can produce a suitable cultural philosophy for film. The other factor in his case uses Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. This suggests that the ruling class exerts control over other social groups in ways other than crude political economic pressures. This is in effect the hearts and minds method, which is rarely understood as a conscious strategy, even by members of the ruling class. It is perhaps in this area that the investigation of the auteur, particularly as it operates in the Hollywood system, should take place. The contribution of the auteur theory to film criticism and theory during the last 40 years has been significant, if sometimes uneven. Many of the factors originally used to quantify the status of the auteur no longer operate in the way they did in the Hollywood system of production – the power of the studio system has declined, the star system no longer operates, the economics of film production have changed, and so has the audience. Cinema is no longer the prime product of the popular culture. Is it possible for the system to be current, or is it now an historical phenomenon? Is it possible to assess the work of Scorcese, Stone, Scott, Greenaway, Lynch or even Spielberg in the same way we have Hawks, Hitchcock, Ford, Huston et al.? Perhaps the time has come to reassess the system in the light of the present situation, and not only attempt to quantify
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the work of modern directors but also to apply similar criteria to the other contributors to the creative process in an attempt to widen the debate.