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jacquelinemerritt · 9 years

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On Auteur Theory

Originally posted April 20th, 2015

This is a paper I wrote for my Film Criticism class, and I feel it deserves a place on this blog as well.

From the 1920s to the end of the 1940s, the American film industry was dominated by the Hollywood studio system, which churned out popular films one after the other as if it was a factory. The films released varied in quality; some were classics that persist to this day, but the majority were forgettable, catering primarily to popular tastes rather than to any sort of artistic integrity or vision. It is these (ultimately disposable) films that auteur theory seeks to justify the existence of, and it does so by elevating the director above the faults of his work, attempting to use “tension” between the director and his script as the primary metric by which any film must be judged.

Andrew Sarris, in attempting to define auteur theory, is engaging in a fairly noble goal; he is attempting to shift the popular discussion of film away from the actors and the spectacle of their celebrity, and towards the efforts of the director, who working behind-the-scenes, shapes the film in ways the actors do not. He is also attempting to turn the conversation on popular films away from snobbish dismissal and towards appreciation by focusing less on the quality of the story and its characters, and focusing more on the use of film as a visual storytelling mechanism, which, regardless of the quality of the films he’s defending, is also a noble goal (especially given just how dismissive the majority of critics were towards American popular cinema). But Sarris, in defining auteur theory as simultaneously narrowly and universally as he does, fails to provide us with a useful lens through which to analyze film.

Sarris begins by claiming that there are three levels of skill a director must have in order to be an auteur, describing these levels as concentric circles, with true auteurs falling into the innermost circle, and most directors falling into either the middle or outermost circle. The outermost circle and first requirement of any auteur is that they be technically competent; i.e., they know how to frame a shot, block actors, and follow the rules of cinematography. Pauline Kael responded aptly with the following: “Sometimes the greatest artists in a medium bypass or violate the simple technical competence that is so necessary for hacks. … The greatness of a director … has nothing to do with technical competence: his greatness is in being able to achieve his own personal expression and style.”

Sarris’ middle circle and second requirement of an auteur is “the distinguishable personality of the director … [exhibiting] certain recurrent characteristics of style [that serve] as his signature.” An auteur must have specific stylistic techniques that are present in any of their films, regardless of the content of the film being made. Kael again dismantles Sarris’ argument, writing that “in every art form, critics traditionally notice and point out the way artists borrow from themselves (as well as others). … In listening to music, seeing plays, reading novels, [and] watching actors, we take it for granted that this is how we perceive the development or decline of an artist (and it may be necessary to point out to auteur critics that repetition without development is decline).”

The innermost and last requirement of an auteur is that their work contain “interior meaning,” which Sarris defines as “the tension between a director’s personality and his material.” So, to Sarris, a director must be working with low quality material that has little to no inherent value in order to be an auteur. Thankfully, Kael yet again provides the perfect criticism of this proposition: “This … formulation … is the opposite of what we have always taken for granted in the arts; that the artist expresses himself in the unity of form and content. What Sarris believes to be ‘the ultimate glory of the cinema as an art’ is what has generally been considered the frustrations of a man working against the given material.”

She even goes on to say that “this formulation .. [shows] something that the first two [requirements] didn’t: it clarifies the interests of the auteur critics. If we have been puzzled because the auteur critics seemed so deeply involved, even dedicated, in becoming connoisseurs of trash, now we can see by this theoretical formulation that trash is indeed their chosen province of film.”

As harsh as Kael’s critiques of auteur theory may be, they are by no means inaccurate. Sarris was primarily interested in justifying the value of film as an art form, but his lack of either experience or care for film outside the popular cinema released by Hollywood meant that he was limited in his ability to defend film, and as a result, he latched on to a dying theory of film propagated by the critics in Cahiers du Cinema, and used that theory to justify his love of popular cinema. And the worst and most unbearable part of Sarris’ theories is that with some more thought, it wouldn’t be difficult for him to defend the idea of the auteur, or the popular cinema that he loved.

Sarris’ flaw in attempting to defend popular cinema is in his lack of an actual defense for it. He openly acknowledges the repetitive storytelling and the typical lack of variation in visual storytelling as flaws in the films he is attempting to defend. This honesty is fine in and of itself, but it Sarris takes it a step farther than he should by refusing to acknowledge the inherent value in such repetitive stories. Rather than acknowledging that the reasons these stories are repeated and retold are because of the resonance they have with the ordinary viewer, as he should, Sarris attempts to justify the existence of such repetitive stories not by their repetition, but in the ways they lack repetition. He justifies the, by his own admission, repetitive films Every Night at Eight and High Sierra by their shared use of the same type of scene; a scene in which the protagonist’s weaknesses and insecurities are displayed in a “feminine” way by showing him thrashing in his sleep at night while being comforted by the love interest of the film (which Kael mercilessly lambasts him for, questioning how such a scene is inherently “feminine”). While this device is potentially subversive, and has the potential for starting an interesting discussion on the typical presentation of the strong and infallible male protagonist popular in early Hollywood films, Sarris ignores this discussion point in favor of reveling in the joys of finding such a connection between these two films that he does not believe he could have made without auteur theory.

Sarris’ version of auteur theory is also weak; there is certainly merit to the concept of a film having a singular auteur, but Sarris, in attempting to create a universal model where there is an auteur for every film, fails to define the auteur in a way that expands the possibilities for the discussion of a film. Sarris’ auteur is a director working with subpar material; his auteur is a contractually bound artist forced to work on films they do not necessarily believe in. This immediately excludes any director who fights for good material or writes their own material, all while Sarris touts this model of the auteur as being universal. Sarris’ model also fails to recognize the collaboration that often takes place in film, and is even more common in the popular cinema he is arguing for than the obscure cinema he seems to ignore (he mentions a number of foreign directors as being auteurs, but he refuses to go into detail as to why they are auteurs, even when directors like Abel Gance, Vittorio de Sica, and Federico Fellini directly contradict his model).

While the influence of the director can certainly be seen in the way the subject matter of a film is handled, given that directors unquestionably have patterns and techniques that they typically use, the same can be said of any artist working on a film. The composer has specific motifs, instruments, and styles that are present throughout their work; the cinematographer has specific types of shots, preferences for lenses, and lighting techniques that are present throughout their work; the writer has specific types of characters, dialects, and phrases that are present throughout their work. The existence of repetition and development of technique is not unique to the director, and so this auteur model touted by Sarris can be applied to anyone who works on more than one work of art in their chosen medium. The director can only be the sole auteur of a film in a scenario where they have the final say on all content, and are ultimately in control of the entire film.

But while the director can almost never be the sole auteur of a film, they can certainly be the primary auteur. There is a uniqueness to the way a director like Alfonso Cuarón uses Emmanuel Lubezki, who was the cinematographer for both Children of Men and Gravity, and Cuarón uses Lubezki’s incredible ability to design long tracking shots to create suspense, tension, and unease. Christopher Nolan uses Hans Zimmer’s ability to create massive, bombastic scores to give the events of Inception and The Dark Knight incredible weight, working in tandem with the emphasis and weight Nolan feels his stories deserve.

David Fincher frequently works with writers whose works deal heavily with pop psychology, and exploits society’s obsession with the deranged to draw in audiences; Gone Girl, Se7en, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and House of Cards all deal with either psychopathic or borderline-psychopathic characters, with Fincher casting these psychopathic characters as both unsympathetic antagonists, as in Gone Girl and Se7en, and highly sympathetic protagonists, as in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, House of Cards, and Gone Girl (in which he maintains a meticulous balance of allowing us to sympathize with Amy’s plight, allowing us to revel in her psychopathy, and allowing us to be disgusted by her manipulative behavior).

If Sarris had been willing to acknowledge how this collaboration can still be a part of an auteur model, then perhaps he would’ve given us a more realistic model, where the responsibility for the entire film still rest on the director, but it rests on the director knowing when to inject themselves into a work, and knowing when to step back, and allow another auteur of a different field shine.

Reference

Andrew Sarris: Notes on Auteur Theory

Pauline Kael: Circles and Squares

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