A Case Study of the Auteur of Globalization

As we discussed last week, vulgar auteurism is giving way too much ground to those who would fossilize a canon of important films and directors. It concedes defeat and then moves its discourse to a self-created ghetto. There is a need to move the conversation of auteurism forward in a way that engages the sort of cinema the vulgar auteurists tend to champion. The place to frame this conversation is not with the high to low brow continuum but rather in the industrial conditions in which these films are made. I am going to use the French filmmaker, Luc Besson as my case study to develop the concept of the auteur of globalization.

Besson is unapologetically popular. This however is no reason to disqualify him from the title of auteur. At the outset it should be repeated that the first American auteurs were popular filmmakers as well. Furthermore, Besson certainly would meet the requirements for auteurism following any of the theorists already examined.

What I would call the Cahiers critieria for autuerism, all certainly apply to Besson (you can refresh on the criteria here). He is most certainly a technically competent director with the proven ability to work across genres. This is the point of evaluation that even the metteur-en-scéne meets. Perhaps this competence is most evident in his blended live action and animation features in the Arthur and the Invisibles series. Most assuredly we see a distinct style in his films as well. Much has been written about him in terms of style as his initial breakout in French cinema was labeled cinema du look pointing to a transition in French cinematic style. Raphäel Bassan has termed his style, along with that of his cinema du look cohorts, as neo-baroque, with Besson setting himself apart as a director with the most surface ephemerality. Susan Hayward writes of  Besson only a few years later in his career that “stylisation [sic] and excess are hallmarks of Besson’s work. Characters are larger than life, décors are in excess of their referent in their hyper-realism. And yet both are less than the signs to which they refer.”

The final aspect of our Cahiers criteria is also of the greatest concern to Sarris, Deleuze and Wollen, a consistent internal meaning/worldview between films. One example should suffice. I will focus on his choice to confound genre expectations by focusing on female heroines in the action film genre. As Wollen points out,

we will not find perfect symmetry…some antimonies are completely reversed. Instead, there will be a kind of exploration of certain possibilities, in which some antimonies are foregrounded, discarded or even inverted, whereas others remain stable and constant.

It is not a consistent use of female characters that we see in his films per se, but a consistent playfulness with the tropes of the female lead in an action film. La Femme Nikita presents the first example here in which a fairly standard tale of a man in trouble with the law is seen to have some potential for military service and is therefore trained into competent fighting machine, is transposed onto a female character. Léon: The Professional takes a much more standard approach to the role of the female lead as a plot motivation (usually romantic) for a male counterpart to protect, except a woman age-appropriate for Jean Reno is not chosen, rather it is Natalie Portman playing a twelve year-old-girl, problematizing the sexual politics of standard action fare.The Fifth Element (1997), The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999) The Lady (2011) and Lucy (2014) are all films fundamentally about a strong woman acting heroically in what would typically be considered male ways. This is tempered in The Fifth Element by the role of Bruce Willis, transposed to the biopic in The Lady and hybridized between the tropes of the historical epic and the French genre of the heritage film in The Messenger. Lucy presents the most realized female action hero in his work in which men are merely tools to help her accomplish goals or obstacles (barely!) to her achieving them.

The conversation may be consistently about gender, but the message as received by the spectator also proves to be wildly rich and variable. Besson has frequently been lauded as a feminist and demonized as a misogynist. His films have equally been described as acts of female liberation and exploitation. Some viewers make much more of latent and sometimes, not-so-latent queer characters than others. This demonstrates that Besson manages to create a consistent thematic world that is so sign and image rich (following Deleuze) that his texts provide an extraordinarily fruitful context for critical conversation.

This is all the relatively standard application of the policy of auteurism (again with no need to add the descriptor “vulgar”) as an interpretive framework. Despite the fact Besson himself and some critics might quibble on the label metteur versus auteur, Besson’s oeuvre certainly presents well-made films of enough stylistic consistency and thematic continuity within a matrix of possibilities that it is not immediately out-of-bounds to consider his work in terms of auteurism. However this is not the most interesting aspect of Besson’s auteurism nor does an examination of his directorial work come close to exhausting his output when one considers his screenwriting (sometimes contributing a story, scenario, or full script) and production work. Certainly a case could be made for Besson as a traditional auteur, but it is more interesting to move the conversation beyond readings like those given to Hitchcock or Hawks.

One can clearly see that there is a marked prejudice against Besson, especially in the French press. Furthermore it appears to because of his success commercially with international (especially) American audiences. Charlie Michael identifies three types of French blockbuster, two of which clearly have been embraced by Besson. First there is is the unapologetically commercial film which also has a tendency to cover up any reference to its country of origin. In Besson’s case they hide their French-ness. This would include films directed by Besson such as The Fifth Element or some of his recent producing credits such as the Taken and Transporter franchises. Second are Hollywood-style productions in terms of their look and editing, but marketed to a regional audience. An example here would be District B-13 (2004). These films according to Charlie Michael are “French-language confections of commercial polish and saturation ad campaigns” .

These developments in the French film industry embraced by Besson have become a source of debate and, more often, consternation for many French critics. Some tend to extol these films a national alternatives to Hollywood while others fear that this trend is merely the result of Hollywood homogenizing the national cinema. Besson flies in the face of the notion of a “cultural exception” for French cinema. Luc Besson argues in an interview:

There is not cultural exception. We have to keep the word ‘culture’. That’s all. The culture is the identity card of a country. Period. We don’t say ‘the passport exception’. We say ‘passport’. With culture it’s the same, we don’t even have to fight over this. They can’t take out an organ from us. The culture is in us, is our heart. It won’t be possible to to take it out from us. Or it will be necessary to kill us all.

His point is that cinematic participation in a global culture instead of a celebration of French diversity will not be the death of distinctly French cinema. It is at this interface between artistic and industrial concerns that makes him a more interesting auteur despite the critical allergy to applying the term to his work.

Timothy Corrigan’s concept of the auteur of commerce is perhaps more easily applicable to Besson than any other filmmaker currently working in France. The function of this sort of auteur to Corrigan is “to monitor or rework the institutional manipulations of the auteurist position within the commerce of the contemporary movie industry”. For Corrigan, auteurism is much more robust than simply a tool for textual analysis through the identification of an author in a particular film. Additionally, the auteur can be a lens through which one can examine the industry itself. Besson provides precisely that sort of lens. Certainly textual analysis is vital to any use of the theory, but the agency of a filmmaker to create those texts is also predicated on their ability creatively market films through popular appeal and also the creation of star persona. This is part functions to create an audience. Though less so in the United States, Besson (perhaps akin to a Michael Bay) is a household name in France whose persona creates a brand by which audiences can make their cinematic choices. Furthermore, Besson with the success of the Taken and Transporter franchises, is becoming more and more an international brand. In fact, Besson has extended his region specific marketed filmmaking from his native France to include Asian efforts to reach both regional and international audiences. Specifically I am referring to his production work on films such as Ong-Bak: Muay Thai Warrior (2003), which holds international appeal for martial arts film fans as well as regional appeal in Thailand. He has become an auteur of globalization. This in my sense is precisely the reason for the auteurist embargo levied against him.

I would only apply this term to directors who do not work exclusively in America. These directors also produce films and market their films to multiple international audiences. They are able to create massive films for the broadest of audiences (The Fifth Element) and regional films with all the gloss and polish of a mid-budget Hollywood feature (District B-13). These directors are equally able to exploit national distinctions as to hide them based on the best way to market each specific film. Another example of this sort of auteur might be the Guillermo del Toro of the late 1990’s to early 2000’s. Del Toro has had a less difficult time with critics because of his slightly more intellectual posture than Besson and a much more generous critical community in Mexico and Spain.

The problem with Besson for French critics appears to have little to do with his auteurist credentials. Goddard and Truffaut and the rest of the staff a Cahiers often embraced highly commercial directors as well as filmmakers who clearly were more interesting in terms of style than substance. It does not take a high degree of effort to see a distinct personality in Besson’s directorial efforts. His personality is of so high a level of distinction his presence can be detected in films in which he is only the screenwriter or producer! It appears that the problem with Besson in France is that he is simply not French enough, a standard which does seem to be applied to Americans. This is unfortunate for French criticism. In Besson not only do we find a body of work that would benefit from textual scholarly inquiry, but also his career provide an important case study in the development of the role of the auteur filmmaker in an increasingly globalized world.