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Do we still need the Auteurism? Does it still have any practical application to contemporary global cinema? Furthermore, does auteurism have any relevance in the major mode of global film production, the blockbuster or more generally, mainstream cinema?

This is going to be a multipart series in which I give a brief summary of the auteur theory as it developed, express my horror at a newer development, and make some suggestions about how useful the theory is for contemporary thinking about film.

A (Very Brief) History of the Auteur Theory

Though Auteurism is likely the first concept to grasped by students in film, it does not present a monolithic theory for film studies. Peter Wollen writes:

“The auteur theory grew up rather haphazardly; it was never elaborated in programmatic terms, in a manifesto or collective statement. As a result, it could be interpreted and applied on rather broad lines; different critics developed somewhat different methods within a loose framework of common attitudes.”

When André Bazin, François Truffaut and company at Cahiers du Cinema first formulated the concept, the Auteur Theory or la politque des auteurs was less a theory and more a policy in the reading of film that privileged the position of the film’s director as the author of a film. The phrase was first used in France in Cahiers du Cinema to describe the policy of reading a film in dialogue with other works in the same director’s oeuvre. This policy was in place in part to elevate film from mere escapism to the level of art. A chief need in the minds of these writers such as Truffaut, Goddard, and Bazin was to identify an artistic genius, or author behind the film, the director. The concept owes much to Alexandre Astruc’s concept of la camera-stylo, the camera pen. The idea came about, thanks in part to the invention of 16mm cameras that were lightweight and more mobile, like a pen, and metaphorically their expert use in the hand of an artist. Astruc longed for artists to take up the camera-stylo and compose works of cinematic art with every bit as much elevation and popular respect as the modern novelist.

Goddard, Truffaut and company at Cahiers “discovered” such artists in American popular cinema. Their cinematic pantheon included Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Alfred Hitchcock. These filmmakers and their status as mainstream filmmakers will be very important to our discussion later. Not every director, however would qualify in their minds as an auteur, however. Another term is the metter-en-scene, the competent or journeyman director. These critics were in search of masters of the mise-en-scene and over time the policy began to develop criteria for the title of Auteur. Notably, these filmmakers were highly commercial in their productions but were able to work within the Hollywood industrial system to create what could be considered cinematic art in spite of its industrial origins. These criteria eventually could be enumerated as: 1) Technical Competence (the only criterion also met by the metter-en-scene) 2) Distinguishable Personality/Style and 3) Consistent Internal Meaning within the films of a particular director. Bazin would latter criticize a negative development of this policy in that it begins to create a “cult of the director” to such an extent that he would make the humorous jab at his young colleagues, naming them “Hitchcocko-Hawksians”.

The two important developments that we see here at the outset of the development of auteurism are an elevation of certain directors as the film’s author or artist with distinction from the journeyman filmmaker and also that this elevation is applied to mainstream filmmakers. Truffaut and Goddard will not only find popular film and filmmakers who are discovered to be far more intellectual upon a second viewing such as an Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). They will also elevate more low-brow filmmakers such as Samuel Fuller and poverty row studios such as Monogram. At its outset auteurism was both high-brow and low-brow, though the low-brow will receive less attention over time.

One important French theorist worthy of mention for out purposes is Gilles Deleuze. He contributes to the discussion by raising the profile of spectatorship in auteurist readings of film. For Deleuze, the filmmaker creates a world that is marked by her signature which creates a temporal dimension in the act of watching the film. This temporal dimension is filled with images and signs that can be interpreted or ignored by the spectator, granting the viewing greater independence in interpreting the text. “The auteur marks the presence of temporality and creativity in the text, including the the creativity of emergent thought contributed by the spectator”. Thus an auteurist approach becomes a creative act of interpretation less enthralled to the cult of the director feared by Bazin. Furthermore greater importance is laid upon the “world” created by the filmmaker as seen through multiple films.

A great advocate and developer of the theory was its American popularizer, Andrew Sarris. Sarris helps us to see this concept of auteurism is more of a conversation starter and a way of presenting a set of questions to film rather than an ending place for conversation surrounding cinema. Acknowledging the collaborative nature of filmmaking which problematizes auteurism, he writes “auteurism has less to do with the way movies are made than with the way they are elucidated and evaluated”. Sarris makes it clear that “auteurism and Sarrisism are not identical. Sarris’ auteurism at the time of his “revisit” has much more to do with a taxonomy for films and stylistic (as opposed to thematic?) consistencies between films. He seems to consider this to be a move away from the cult of the director.

Peter Wollen makes a “structuralist move” in auteurism. Wollen’s finds the term useful to analyze a film by analyzing a corpus of films with all their consistencies and inconsistencies only then to return to the individual film. Another key movement in Wollen’s application of the theory is a qualitative one. He seeks to create a greater gap between the auteur and the metter-en-scene, that does not discount the latter from further study while still elevating the auteur.

Timothy Corrigan further expands the concept to include the new term, the commerce of auteurism. For Corrigan, the concept explains how studios and their marketing departments have brought the notion of auteurism to bear in their sales strategies. In the same way star personas were developed at the beginning of the classical period of cinema and beyond, the director serves as a classificatory shorthand to generate fans to follow the films of the director in question or to suggest that if a previous film was successful a new release from the same director will provide an equally satisfactory viewing experience. A germ of this commercial notion is present even before auteurism became a prevalent methodology in the phenomenon of the “name above the title” making the director into a star through top billing as well as making connections with earlier films to gain a greater viewing audience.

The general result of all this theorization from Deleuze, Sarris, and Wollen (with the exception of Corrigan) is a more elitist application of auteurism in terms of style and thematics. Writing of auteurism in France, Michael Fox observers,

“Auteur cinema is usually associated with artistic, pretentensions, small budgets, intimism, a preoccupation with psychology, sexuality, intimate relations (especially love affairs), the search for identity, characters that are adrift, family dysfunctions and frequently a pessimistic outlook. Sometimes, it is denounced as being obsessed with the perverse, criminal or sordid, and frequently it is identified with a realist aesthetic and “academic” style associated with the Young French Cinema.”

This has not always been the case and there have been some (unnecessary) interventions to bring auteurism back to low-brow film. Next week we will look at the state of auteurism as it relates to Good Trash cinema.