No Start, No End: Auteurism and the auteur theory

7/25/2019 No Start, No End: Auteurism and the auteur theory

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Articles

NoStart, No End

B e l o w Weekend (1967

No Start, No End:

Auteurism and the

auteur theory

By David Andrews

Keywords:auteur ism,

la politique des auteurs,

autho rship, ar t cinema,

cult cinem a, film genre,

The attempt to move beyondauteurism has to

recognize the place whichauteurismoccupies,

and the influence wh ich it brings to bear.

John Caughie

1988[1981]:

15)

In a June 2009 lette r to th e editor, Michel

Cime nt argued t ha t Sight Sound's celebration

of the French New Wave in its May 2009 issue


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low

Alfred Hitchco

Ciment did not have a problem with th is idea of

authorship. But he did have a problem with the

belief tha t the N ew Wave had inaug urated it.

In his eyes, Ingmar Bergman, Luehino Viseonti,

Robert Bresson, Jaequ es Tati, and Andrzej Wajda

had all become 'cultural heroes' years before

Jean-Luc G odard, Claude C habrol, ric Rohm er,

Franois TVuffaut, Jacques Rivette, and Agns

Varda achieved sim ilar stature . Indeed, as 'early

as the 1920s', the director stood ou t as th e

'auteur' and 'central creative role' across cin-

ema (Ciment

2009:

96). 'M urnau , Lang, S jstrm,

Lubitsch, Chaplin, Stroheim, Sternberg, Eisen-

stein, DeMille,Vidor Gance et al were lauded

and commented upon lengthily'.

Film scholars have made the same point

m any tim es. Tho m as Schatz, writing in 1981,

argued tha t anyone 'who discussed the

Lubitsch touc h in the '30s or antic ipate d th e

nex t Hitchcock thriller in the '40s wa s, in fact,

practicing this critical approach'

(15).

There is,

then, a distinction to be mad e between auteur-

theory is a specific articulation of the auteuris

attitude that was first put forth by Alexandre

Astruc in 1948 and that was over the follow-

ing decade re fined as a politique des uteursby

the auteur critics of Cahiers du

Cinma

Then, i

the 1960s, Andrew Sarris translated this auteu

policy into the auteur theory as it is known toda

to English-speaking audiences.^ As scholars lik

John Caughie, Edward Buseombe, David Gerst-

ner, Janet Staiger, James Naremore, Pam Cook,

and Barry Keith Grant have each documented,

this brand of auteurism was over the coming

decades subjected to relentless attack by crit-

ics,historians, structuralists, post-structural-

ists,fem inists, sociologists, etc. Indeed, entire

anthologies were compiled in film studies tha

reflected the belief that the auteur theory was

somehow deficient. (To cite one, see Caughie's

Theories o/Authorship [1988(1981)].) But if, unde

the guise of its theory, auteurism was brutal-

ized and left for dead, academically speaking,

auteurism as a practical phenomenon never


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Top Left An dre Bazin

Bottom Left Franois Truffaut Right Jean-Luc Godard

i

Auteurism has turned attention away from the political,

econom ic, collaborative, and biological con texts of the film

industry ...

insofar as they did not exactly invent auteur-

ism, this is all that the auteur critics did, too:

they retrofitted an existing attitude, one th at

was far too useful and far toohum nto ever be

eliminated by rational argument.

In this article, I revisit au teur ism , think -

ing about its influence, its shortcomings, and

its persistence. In tandem with its signature

theory, auteu rism h as mad e many things go ,

but th is functionality has come at a steep cost.

Auteurism has turned attention away from the

political, econo mic, collaborative, and biological

contexts of the film industry, its roman tic stress

on the individual artist obscuring many reali-

ties. But as I have im plied, academ ics shou ld

recognize tha t this m m e will not be gotten

rid of simply by critiquing its epistemo logi-

cal defects. Auteurism accesses som ethin g too

basic in h um an natu re for this to be possible. It

simplifies in a way th at is too con venien t, too

malleab le. And it is curren tly th e basis of too

mu ch infrastructure. As scholars, we sho uld

its best academic u ses, which are in my view

rarely evaluative an d never celebratory. In

keeping with these ideas, I defend in my finale

one modest use of auteurism that extends the

auteur critics application of the auteur theory

to Holl3rwood ins iders prod ucing genre vehicles

Because aute uris m is one of art cinem a s basic

building blocks, scholars may use its biases and

its rhetorics as ways of identifying art-cinema

vehicles even within cult areas, wh ere auteu rs

are just as plentiful as in more traditional art-

cinema contex ts. In other w ords, by lending

nuan ce to our unde rstanding of auteurism, we

can broaden our understan ding of art c inema.

ultural impact of

the auteur theory

I m French. We respe ct d irectors in

our country.

Inglourious Basterds (2009)


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W ith Hollywood in steep decline just then the Am erican

industry was uniquely susceptible to French ideas.

influential, effectively stalling film history

and criticism in a prolonged stage of adoles-

cent romanticism (1988:5). If anyth ing, Schatz

underest im ates auteurism s mid-twentieth-

century im pact here. Auteurism did not just

stall film history and criticism; it re-m ade thos e

fields. What is more, the formalist tendencies

linked to the auteur theory lent film studies

some of its most productive m ethod s. Thus,

Caughie has argued that the auteu r theory

encouraged film scholars to attend mise-en-

scne with newfound rigour.* But auteu rism ha s

also had bro ader cultural effects. I agree with

Caughie that scholars m ust com e to terms with

these effects, including its most significant

cultural, institutional, and biological roles, if we

hope to transcend its ma ny defects.

Au teurism s effects have, it seem s, been

legion. In the post-war period, auteurism

helped push the Sexual Revolution forward

through the assau lts on censorship it inspired.

Within the einema, the auteur theory has been

given eredit for helping to eonseerate film as

one ofthe sanctified Arts (Gerstner

2003:

5),^

spreading cinephilia far and wide and spurring

new waves and national cinemas across several

continents. It did this in part by temporarily

settling the debate over film authorship. After

1970,even if a director s p roduction role w as

qualified by collaboration, he or she was rou-

tinely credited as the film s prim e m over , the

figure mo st respon sible for the w ork s effects.

w corollaries of this new production central-

ity were, first, the assumption that a personal

vision eould be traeed across the curve of an

auteur s oeuure and, secondly, the belief that the

best directors generally make the best films

(Sarris 1985[1968]: 35). If the se pos t-w ar no tion s

had a huge effect on film studies, they also had

a hierarchizing effect on film produc tion, w here

even in Hollywood they offered a ratio nale for

subordinating the above-the-line talent, the

erews,and the studios them selves to star

auteurs.

their policies, we will begin, but only begin, to

understand what i t was about the auteur crit-

ics and their ideas that made them influential.

These d ocum ents include A Certain Tendency

of the French C inem a (1954), by Truffaut; Six

Ch arae ters in Seareh of A uteu rs (1957), by

And r Bazin, Jaeq ues Doniol-Valeroze, Pierre

Kast, Roger Lee nhar dt, Jacqu es Rivette and ric

Rohmer; The Face of the French Cinema Has

Changed (1959), by Godard; and The Oberhau

sen M anifesto (1962), by 26 Germ an sig ner s.

To this list of docu m ents , we might add oth-

ers,

including The First Statement ofthe New

American Cinema Group (1962), by Jonas Mek

and the New York Film-Maker s Coop, and vari

ous writings by Sarris, espeeially Notes on the

Auteur Theory in 1962 (1962). These docu-

ments evince the frustration of directors and

critics irritated by literary traditions, conom ie

constraints, and industrial hierarchies. Such

burde ns becam e especially onerous once the

success of the French New Wave beca m e clear

Thus the insouciance of Godard in 1959 grows

into the intemperance and outright entit lemen

expressed by the G erman and American direc-

tors of the ye ars to follow. The latter dem and ed

mo re freedom, calling for open, artist-ba sed

experimentation where the early Godard

focused primarily on realistic experimentation

in the co ntext of feature-film m ark ets w ith all

their commercial expectations.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the

early auteurs and auteur erities were respond-

ing in the m ain to their loeal eond itions. The

Cahiers critics, for example, clearly used la

politique des auteurs to promote their favourite

directors in a way that served their personal

and professional priorities. For instan ce, in A

Certain Tendeney , Truffaut deploys his conser-

vative brand of auteurism to praise his favou-

rite French directors against the establishmen

directors assoeiated with Freneh einema s

tradition of quality - and, in Six Chara eters ,

Rivette deploys la politique des auteurs in a simi


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Below Breathless (1950

These quintessentially French skirmishes had

an impact on the studio organization of many

different film industries all over the world as a

result of the publicity machine that heralded

the French New Wave, wh ich w as so tightly

linked w ith a politique des auteurs. With Holly-

wood in steep decline Just then, the American

industry was uniquely susceptible to French

ideas. As a result, it is possible to see people

like Rivette, who were shaped by local French

conditions, as having an outsize impact on

the local conditions of many different milieus

through the intercession of crucial transla-

tors and amplifiers like Sarris. One reason this

occurred w as tha t film directors were in conflict

with writers and producers all over the world,

including H ollywood. This indus trial correspon -

dence gave la politique des auteurs resonance in

many labour contexts. In the studio organiza-

tion of classical Hollywood and classical French

cinema, the director was a supervisor, not a

visionary, while the writer might have control

over what a film said and some control over

its mise-en-scne. But the idea of authorship

that im pelled auteurism wa s a li terary anal-

ogy tha t hand ed the director a more thorough

control. The early auteu rists thou ght it crucial

that directors work with writers, as the lat-

ter could rarely be fully supplanted for practi-

cal rea son s. Th us Rivette argues that the great

American directors were artists - not, as Bazin

put i t, because of the genius of the system , but

because they worked with the w riter, whom

they treated not as an artist so much as a tech-

Mann rather than Zinnemann, because they are

directors who actually work on their scenarios

(Bazin et al. 2002[1957]: 69).

Many wrinkles were added to these prescrip-

tions. But the basic fact that many Americans

took from this newly global taste warfare was

that the French had accepted Hollywood direc-

tors of genre vehicles - including westerns,

com edies, and m usicals - as serious artists . This

was a staggering development, for Americans

had no t been trained to take their own cine ma s

seriously but had been trained to take the aes-

thetic de clarations of the French critics seri-

ously. Of course, the French context, bound as it

was to some very specific conditions of labour,

was lost in translation . And wh at h as never, in

my view, been adequately considered is that it

is the job of mai nstr eam movie critics to evalu-

ate movies, lauding some while denigrating

others - which is one practical description of

what the Cahiers critics were up to, despite all

the breath and ferment. La politique des auteurs

helped them do their jobs more effectively, and

this utility was adaptable to so many situations

across the world that it was exported to mar-

kets where it thrived not just on its own merits

but on the credentials it gained in passage.

Complaints about

auteurism and its theory

Part of w hat m ade this new sup ercharged ver-


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Below On the set of The 400 louJS (195

decad es of indus trial an d ac adem ic conflict, it

is possible to differentiate narrowly epistem o-

logical critiques of auteur ism (and its signa ture

theory) from political critiques of the same.

Epistemological critiques of auteurism gener-

ally condemn it for the false picture it provides

of cinematic activity, which it simplifies at

best and badly distorts at worst. By contrast,

broadly political critiques condemn auteurism

for the ine quities it ha s fostered. These ineq-

uities arguably distribute credit, control, and

money unfairly among different labour factions;

worsen the plight of wo me n and minorities

in the film industry; and promote the pursuit

of individual good at the expense of collec-

tive good. These critiques m ay be reduce d to

issues of honesty and accuracy on one hand

and issues of social justice on the other. Such

issue s, which usually overlap, provide the basic

ingredients for the academic complaints about

auteurism that have accumulated through his-

tory. Such complaints may be divided into six

very rough categories: the industrial complaint,

the New Critical complaint, the structuralist

and post-structuralist com plaints, the feminist

and multiculturalist complaints, the sociologi-

cal complaint, a nd finally the biocultural com -

plaint.

cinem a. Thu s, one of auteur ism s first crit-

ics,Pauline Kael, dev oted The Citizen Kane Book

(1971) to the refutation of [Sarris s] the ory th at

the director alone was the author of the film

(quo ted in Cook 2007[1985]:

410).

This falsehoo

was most apparent in heavily commercialized

spheres, where cinema s collaborative natur e

should ha ve been obvious but wa s often over-

shadowed by the bright aura that enshrou ded

prom n nt arthouse directors. (Consider that

directors like Alain Resnais, Luis Bunuel, and

Peter Creenaway drew on Sacha Vierney s c am-

erawork in becoming auteurs while Vierney

himself rem ained a director of photography. W

might ask whe ther cinem atographers like Creg

Toland, Sven Nykvist, and William Lubtchan-

sky or editors like Dede Allen and Walter Murc

have played similar roles in the construction

of auteur celebrity.) In general, the industrial

com plaint considers the au teur s industrial

status tantamount to a production credit that

is negotiated, contracted, and created and that

is as m uch a result of studio prom otion as it is

of direct creative activity. Critics who take the

theory seriously, then, come off as nave in this

reading of the auteur tradition.

Then again, depending on one s point of

view, ant i-au teur critics can be guilty of som e-


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eftThe

Big Combo (1955)

RightThe

Birds (1963)

such as the performer, the einematographer,

the writer, the editor, the producer, or the studio

as a whole (Ptrie 1973:110-12). Through such

arguments, analysts have taken part in the

wrangling over credit rather than stepping back

to theorize the collective processes that have

shaped that wrangling. On the other hand, this

oddly auteurist brand of anti-auteurism has

had academic benefits when it has led back to

more modest claims of multiple authorship (as

among crucial industrial figures, like directors

andwriters) or, similarly, of corporate author-

ship (as credited to a studio or a collective).

This trend in the scholarship has seemed most

reasonable when it has culminated, as in Bruce

Kawin s essay Authorship, Design, and Execu-

tion (1992), in the belief that the shared vision

of the entire collaborative system is the author

ofthe film (199).

By contrast, the New Critical complaint

contends that unitary film authors really do

exist, just as single literary authors exist, but

that these film authors do not secure the value

of film art, as the auteur critics would sug-

gest, but are instead irrelevant to that kind of

value, which exists apart from extrinsic fac-

tors such as authorial and industrial activity

they would have been galled by this particular

complaint, which lumps auteurism with literar

biography and other old-fashioned methods.

But in the end, the New Critical complaint

was less dismissive of auteurism than were the

structuralist and post-structuralist complaints.

Of course, these critiques were too diverse and

complicated to submit to efficient paraphrase

here.

What we can say, though, is that many

theorists, especially those aligned with the

post-1968 editions of Cahiers and the 1970s edi-

tions of Screen, were discomfited by the conser-

vative drift of auteur theory.^To counter this

trend, they drew on continental theorists like

Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Christian

Metz and the reigning contempt for authority

to treat the auteur as a kind of epiphenomenon

which was an ideological product of our shared

history, our shared language, and our film-mak

ing apparatus (Naremore 2004:19). Peter Wolle

made compromises with this new manner of

theorizing the cinema by inventing in Signs and

Meaning in the inema(1973 [1969]) the field of

auteur structuralism , which submitted films t

semiotic critiques and treated the auteur as an

unconscious catalyst for forces and meanings

that the auteur neither created nor controlled

(113).

If auteur structuralists continued to talk


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authorship serves partly as a m ea ns by which to avoid

coming to terms with the concept of film as social practice

demystifying approaches to the auteur drew on

the death-of-the-a uthor ideas popularized in

this period by postmodern theorists like Fou-

cault and Roland Barthes.^

The feminist and multiculturalist complaints

about auteurism resembled the post-structur-

alist complaint in their attention to history,

ideology, and the film-m aking 'ap pa ratu s'. Yet

these complaints were far more overt in their

insistenc e on political concern s, wh ich often

resulted in a polemical ac adem ic style. This

tendency is typified by Laura Mulvey's famous

reen essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative

Cinema' (1975). Here, the visual pleasure nor-

malized by the cinem a, especially H ollywood

cinema and the commercial art cinema, was

assumed to be informed by an array of preju-

dices that seemed to encourage mass audiences

to overlook their own traditions, including their

own auteurs, in identifying with hegemonic

tradition s. In its Great W hite Man appro ach to

the cinem atic tradition, the auteu r theory was

deem ed complicit with the hegem onic power;

it was also seen as encouraging lazy critical

habits that often neglected auteur traditions

outside the dominant Euro-American purview.^

The next dmystification of auteurism, the

sociological complaint, has framed the auteur

as an institutional status achieved through cul-

tural and subcultural m ean s. Drawing on theo-

rists like Pierre Bourdieu and Howard Becker,

sociologists have confirmed that cultural cat-

egories like 'art ', 'auteur', and 'art cinema' have

been created within specific socio-historical

contexts that were shaped by consumerist taste

competitions and governed by institutional

stan dar ds of value (Baumann 2001 and 2007;

Ramey2002;Tudor2005;and H eise and Tudor

2007). Like the industrial complaint,th esocio-

logical complaint sees auteurs in terms of the

credit that they accrue through personal ambi-

tion, skill, and luck; but unlike that critique,

the sociological complaint does not necessarily

perceive such status as an unrealistic response

to collaborative p roduction. Indeed, however

forces that have shaped the forms and func-

tions of the cinem a in weste rn c ulture. Thu s,

in Hollyiuood Highbrou; (2007), Shyon Bau m an n

offers an exacting account of how Hollywood

directors began to think of themselves as fine

artists during the 1960s and 1970s, when Hol-

lywood cinema's 'opportunity space' came to

accommodate such perceptions (61-66; see

14-15). Of the specific critiques of the auteur

theory mention ed thus far, the two that re main

most convincing today are the industrial com-

plaint and the sociological complaint, which

have departed from grand theory long enough

to sample realities on the ground, putting them

squarely in line with what is today the domi-

nant trend in film studies, historicism.

But there is one further critique of au teurism

the biocultural complaint, which has yet to pen

etrate film stu dies. Unlike cognitive appro aches

to film, which often focus on the individual

perception of individual works, the biocu ltural

complaint is more invested in evolutionary psy

chology and cultural evolution. In the humani-

ties,

its closest ties are to evolutionary literary

criticism, as prom oted by literary scholars like

Joseph Carroll, and evolutionary aesthetics,

as promoted by philosophers of art such as

the late Denis Dutton. These fields take it for

granted tha t the hum an species has evolved

a common human nature through prehistoric

processes of natural selection and sexual selec-

tion. Though w e have individual an d cultural

differences, these differences are limited by our

fundamental material constraints - including

our most essential functions, such as eating,

sleeping, and reproducing, and our most com-

mon traditions and practices, many of which

have evolved culturally. Due to these con-

straints, which inescapably bind us as a species

we cannot in any absolute sense describe our

differences through ideas of'free will', which

have been so crucial to the fetishization of the

director. In the end , the biocultural com plaint is

tha t auteurism unduly elevates the individual


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elowAMan Escaped (1956

ture.Like authorship in the broad sense, auteur-

ism is in this framework a mme that has

evolved through cultural means and that some

evolutionists believe is a byproduct of adaptive

processes.

Over thirty years ago, Steve Neale noted in

the pages of Screen tha t au tho rsh ip serves

partly as a means by which to avoid coming to

term s w ith the concept of film as social prac-

tice (1981: 37).

This criticism holds true today,

for it is the thread that runs through all the

critiques noted above except for the New Criti-

cal complaint, which is even more veh em ent

than auteurism in its rejection of the human

Indeed, in film stu dies, aute uris m is one of

the major ways that humanities scholars have

avoided co ming to ter m s w ith th e idea of film

as a human practice, one th at is constrained not

just by our shared social dynamics but by our

biological natu res as well.

Why auteurism has

remained dominant

Naremore has reported that the ultimate

answ er to the que stion posed recently by

ever as an indus trial role and as a comp lex

ins titut ion (Narem ore 2004: 21). Given th at the

attacks on auteurism have proved so credible

and long-lived, we might wonder why, then,

auteurism has remained so dominant in the

marketplace and in many sectors of film stud-

ies, from crossover journals like Film Comment,

Positi/, and Sight Sound to the little books th

Mark Betz sees as perpetuating auteur tradi-

tions within the academy (Betz 2008). In my

view, the thr ee m ost likely expla nation s for this

persistence may be grouped under three over-

lappin g h eadin gs : the irrational hypothesis, the

pragmatic hypothesis, and the institutional argu-

ment.

The irrational hypothesis stresses that the

belief in the auteur, like our idea of the author

mo re generally, has never been subject to ratio

nal hum an control, w hethe r inside or outside

academ ia. For exam ple, one way in which the

auteurist argument has always gripped us

is through the irrational strength of its liter-

ary analogy. As m ode rn m ass arts, the m ovie

and the novel resemble one another in their

narrative structures and in their modes of

distribution and consu mp tion. It has seemed

com mon sensical, then, to extend this analogy


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... even if

we

succeeded in critiquing and demystifying

these ideas and tendencies, our hu m an attachm ent to

single historical au thors would in the end lead us back to

them.

has everywhere depended on ideas of individual

creation and personal expression. But if this

analysis provides insights into how auteur-

ism initially gripped u s, it doe sn t explain w hy

auteurism has continued to grip us long after

this romantic analogy has been relentlessly

exploded by film scholar after film scholar.

To gain a fuller explana tion, we m ay ne ed

to look to new sources of know ledge, includ-

ing biocultural sources. For exam ple, D utton

has explained the pe rsistence of authorsh ip in

the face of pos t-struc turalist critique by talking

about the emotional tug exerted by the pre-

histor ic functions of langua ge (2009: 172-76).

He hypothesizes th at our languages, including

our arts, evolved three functions in the Pleis-

tocene, with the idea of authorship furthering

each of them .

Two

of these evolved adaptations,

the narrative function and the communicative

function, are fairly straightforward and can be

clearly shown to develop spontaneously dur-

ing the course of normal childhood develop-

m ent. Thus, people find it easier to engage in

the didactic and the imaginary elements of a

film if they can im agine tha t it wa s created by

a single artist, not by a collaborative band. But

I think tha t Du tton s third linguistic function,

the fitness evaluation, is even more relevant to

our discussion of auteur ism s sta tus . Accord-

ing to Dutton, the idea of the fitness test looms

beh ind every act of speaking, descriptive or

artistic :

Human beings are continuously judging their

fellows in terms of the cleverness or the banal-

ity of their language use . Skillful em ploym ent

of large vocabulary, complicated grammatical

constructions, wit, surprise, stylishness, coher-

ence, and lucidity all have bearing on how we

assess other human beings. Intentionally artis-

tic uses of language are particularly liable to

Dutton thus speculates that it is from an evo-

lutionary standpoint psychologically impos-

sible to ignore the potential skill, craft, talent,

or genius revealed in speech and w riting , for

our inten se inter est in artistic skill, as well

as the ple asur e tha t it gives us, will not be

denied: it is an extension of innate, spontane-

ous Pleistocene values, feelings, and attitu des

(2009:175-76). For the se linguistic fun ctions to

work efficiently in film contexts, people must

see a single historical figure as the creator of a

film. What is more, people have an ingrained

inclination toward cinephilia that makes them

believe in some absolute sense that some direc-

tors are better than others and thus that they

deserve their semi-sacred s tatus as auteurs in

some absolute sense.^^ Of course, even if we

succeeded in critiquing and demystifying these

ideas and tendencies, our hum an at tachm ent

to single historical authors would in the end

lead us back to them (Dutton 2009:176). As a

result, the ideas of unconscious agency found

in auteur structuralism and the theories of the

postulated-author found in post-structuralist

theo ry are in D utton s view bou nd to fail (2009

176).They simply cannot co mp ete with our

ingrained preference for attributin g artistry to a

historical person, a preference that is an adap-

tation derived from sexual selection off the back

of na tu ra l sel ec tion (Du tton 2009: 175). ^

Here the irrational explanation of the persis-

tence of auteurism fades into more pragmatic

conc erns. As I see it, the pragm atic hyp othes is

has two major parts, the first of which empha-

sizes the convenience of using auteurism. This

convenienc e is both cognitive an d linguistic,

since it is easier for our limited human brains

to ima gine an d d iscuss a movie if we ima gine it

as belonging to a person rather than a collec-

tive,

which would include the crew as well as

the above-the-line ta lent. This cognitive con-


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Especially at festivals, auteur status is the fuel in the

workings, the clearest power source for the entire

machinery.

movie even within articles in which we ques-

tion the validity of aute ur conc epts. The other

major component of the pragmatic hypoth-

esis is the potential benefits of auteur status,

which often accrue even to those who seem to

reject it. number of anti-auteurist figures have

made this dynamic especially clear, as when

Dogme d irectors Lars von Trier and T hom as

Vinterberg refused directorial credit in their

Vow of Cha stity but co ntinued to function as

auteurs (2002(1995]: 83). Such a dynamic is fur-

ther complicated in feminist and multicultural

contexts, where critics often view the auteur

as a white, male, heterosexu al m istake while

others seek to confer auteur status on black

directors, female directors, gay-and-lesbian

directors, etc., re-distributing that status more

equitably (see Crant 2001: 113-30). ^ Th oug h th e

second group of critics agrees with the former

regarding au teurism s biases, they part ways

on auteur status, which the latter believe has

no colour, sex or identity. Indeed, the poten tial

new auteurs from untraditional backgrounds,

including dclass cult contexts.

Closely related to the pragmatic hypothesis is

the institutional hypothesis. Most generally, thi

argum ent posits that au teurism is not going

anywhere because it is integral to the many cul

tural and subcultural institutions tha t em erged

amid the post-war explosion of art cinema.

Today, m ain stre am com me rcial cinem as - from

Hollywood cinemas and cult cinemas to the

global festival cinem as - o perate according

to auteurist principles. Especially at festivals,

auteur status is the fuel in the workings, the

clearest power source for the entire machinery.

We see a similar pheno m eno n within art-cin-

ema distribution, where individual distributors

have traditionally relied on auteur prestige to

expand the circulation of art movies - and have

gone so far as to deploy anecdotes that make

themselves look bad so as to acc om plish thi s

feat.^* Auteur statu s also structu res how art

cinem a s niche stars relate to their directors -


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ArticlesNoSta rt, No End

... film scholars have had many reliable incentives for

thinking in auteurist terms in their teaching and their

research.

gious crossover journ als rely on auteu rist prin-

ciples, as do festival juries, granting agencies,

and m any award bodies. Through the se a nd

other value-oriented insti tutions, auteur s tatus

provides directors and their communities with

social prestige, which th ey in turn exchan ge

for production funds, distribution deals, and

cash in the form of opportunities for grants,

stip en ds, or writing. This stat us is also useful

in the academy, where avant-garde auteurs or

ar t isans have mad e and taught exper imental

films, and w here sch olars have long used the

auteur theory to their own ends. What is more,

as Naremore (2004: 20) and others have noted,

even wh en radical young scholars like Wollen

were dismantling the auteur theory, they were

often focusing on establishment directors like

Hitchcock or Welles as they did so. Like au teur-

ism

itself

these auteurs were so culturally

entrenched that the attempt to dis lodge them

only pushed them deeper into their classic

status - and further reinforced the utility of

auteurism as a proper lens for imagining the

entire tradition.

All of wh ich is to say tha t film sc holars have

had ma ny reliable incentives for thinking in

auteurist terms in their teaching and their

research. These incentives have served m any

roles. For one th ing, they have reinforced the

sense that it is normal for scholars to endorse

auteurs even when dismantling auteuris t ideas.

These incentives h ave also created the illu-

sion that academ ic auteurism and the cin-

phile brand of auteurism that is associated

with mainstream film criticism are one and the

same. For this reason, auteurism in mainstream

criticism often seems authorized by academic

authority despite the fact that ma instream

critics regularly cast asp ersions on academ ic

sectors of film studies, which may seem inac-

cessible or ju st flaky. On the oth er h an d, if

film-theory monographs have on occasion been

pushed toward the imbecilic by the pressures

have been anchored by marke t necessit ies to

auteur biases that are usually unexam ined and

almost always inadequa te.

Using auteurism modestly

A"personal" horror film? How d oes that ha p-

pen?'

'When you put your heart and genitals

into something, it always gets personal.'

Tie

Me

plTie

Me

Down (tame , 1990)

Given tha t aute urism is not going anywhere, w

should look for uses of it that might eoalesee

with a elear analysis of cinema and especiaily

of art cinema, which in the popu lar im aginatio

is the aute ur category. Ideally, the se use s w ould

be demystified - th at is, they would be ho n-

est about th e irrational, pragm atic, and insti-

tutional appeals of auteurism - meaning that

they would be overflowing with disclaimers an

qualifications warning readers against these

appe als. Why is this so very necessary? Becaus

if scholars do not approach auteurism in an

explicitly ho ne st way, they are liable to slide

back into nave celebrations of the a uteu r and

the auteur vehicle - or, even if they avoid such

an outcome, they may encourage such backslid

ing in othe rs.

Consider Authorship and Film (2003), a volume

edited by David Gerstne r and Jan et Staiger. This

collection ha s bee n acknow ledged as one of the

most substantial on auteurism in years (Sca-

lia 2004). And it is a disting uishe d anthology.

Unfortunately, the chapters that follow Gerst-

ner an d S taiger s excellent introductory essays

do not always measure up

to

their s tandard s.

The reason for this is th at tho se cha pters often

focus on individual auteurs and films, whether

by looking at the tra dition al (as in W ollen s The

AuteurTheory: Michael C urtiz, and Casablanca )

or the untraditional (as in Sarah Projansky


13/20

AnielesNoStart, No End

Below It Rains on

urLoue

(194

can a single auteur tell us about the cinema?

This question recalls Schatz s point abo ut th e

cinema s collaborative hierarchies: the more

sense we m ake of them the less sense it ma kes

to assess filmmaking or film style in terms of

the individual director - or any individual, for

that matter (Schatz 1988: 5).

One way to avoid backsliding is to begin with

an acknow ledgment of auteurism s m ost basic

contradiction: the fact that auteur status is hard

and real while the authorsh ip to which th at sta-

tus refers is subjective, negotiable, and marked

by mu ltiple con texts. From the re, we may avoid

backsliding by restricting our investigations to

the specifics of mid-level questions only.Towit,

we might want to know how to identify auteur

works without devolving into nave celebrations

of the a uth or The short answ er to this ques-

tion is that it may be safest to conce ntrate on

cult auteu rs. This answ er may seem on its face

coun terintuitive. After all, scholars have tradi-

tionally been interested in the untraditional

aut eur as a by-prod uct of their interest in the

avant-garde or a by-product of their interest in

social justi ce. Ergo, they ha ve often focused on

neglected directors in experimental art cinemas

or on marginalized directors in more traditional

art cine m as w hose sex, sexual identity, class, or

But because m any scholars have wanted to

redress such im balances, they have also w anted

to depict avant-garde, female, or minority direc

tors as deseruing their status - even though no

film-m aker may be said to deserve his or he r

status absolutely. An understandable desire

to level the playing field thus discourages film

theorists from creating the scholarship that

describes how a director s au teur statu s flows

out of a production context or how that same

status is formed through compromises with

specific distribution constraints.

But when scholars look for auteurs among

the creators of classic B-movies - or am ong the

creators of contemporary splatter movies or

the past decad e s torture-p orn movies - they

are much less likely to elevate those aute urs

or to separate them from their contexts. After

all,such movies are culturally illegitimate. Any

form-based argument that ignores their social

and industrial contexts will not be convinc-

ing in a legitimate sphere such as the academy.

Though the dynamic at work here is unfair to

cult auteurs, given that there is no absolute

sense in which they deserve their status any

less than traditional auteurs, the fact remains

that the detailed contextualization that results

from this biased dyn am ic benefits film scholar-


14/20


being labelled au teu rs and their movies being

labelled art movies .

We can see this contextualization emerging

from old and new scholarship on cult auteurs.

Consider, e.g., the 1983 Screen article My Name

is Joseph H. Lewis , in w hieh Paul Kerr offers a

detailed por trait of Joseph H. Lewis, the diree-

tor of B-movies like Gun Crazy (1949) and The

Big Combo (1955). This artiele aecents the formal

details tha t m ade Lewis s thrillers and noirs

exciting to audien ces even as it calls into que s-

tion the predictable - if problematic promotion

of Lewis to the aute ur p an the on (Kerr 1983:

247).W hat I consider so academ ically prog res-

sive about this artiele is that it ends by insisting

that the eonstraints imposed by the Hollywood

B-system on wou ld-be-auteurs were not merely

negative in their operation but were in a sense

responsible for whatever exeellenee was later

ing eult auteurs seems biased when compared

to the rom antic scholarship that has often

constructed the genius of traditional auteurs

from Orson Welles and Robert Bresson to Claire

Denis and Apichatpong Weerasethekul, this bia

has also led to a realistic perception of these

cult aute urs . For in a sense, it ha s helped situat

them as one complex element in a more com-

plex collective context that remains the true

author ofth e ma sterpieces tha t he or she has

directed. All of wh ich is, I think , as it sho uld be.

Let m e provide a different exam ple of wha t I

me an. W hen I was researching oft inthe Middle

(2006), m y book on A me rican softcore, I noticed

that Seduction Cinema was bent on reinforcing

the cinphile discourse around a director who

w ent by the nam e Tony Marsiglia (Andrews

2006: 246-49). Marsiglia w as often show n in the

DVD extras for movies likeDr.JekyllandM istres

Marsiglia s role at Seduction w as to raise the studio s

subcultural status by making low -cost softcore art m ovies ...

perceived in the m ovies they influenced. As

Kerr puts it, working in the

B Jilm

noir m ea nt

simply that the opportunities for commer-

cial and critical success lay in eertain (indus-

trial, generie) direetions rather than in others

(1983:247). Sha ron Hay ashi s 2010 artiele, The

Fan tastic Trajectory of Pink Art Cinem a from

Stalin to Bush , m ake s a similar point about

Koji W akam atsu. H ayashi describes the process

by which Wakamatsu - a director of Japanese

ero duc tions or pink skin flicks such as Secrets

Behind the Wall (1965) - c on struc ted him self as

an auteur within the confines of the pink film

industry. According to Hayashi, W akam atsu

wa s successful in this beca use of the desires

of an interna tiona l a rt film circuit eager to read

Japanese film in art cinematic terms (2010:

48).As a result of the alm ost a ccidental global

success of this Pink Akira Kurosawa , sub se-

quent producers began the stratgie market-

ing and distribution of some pink films as art

ein em a (Hayashi 2010: 48). Once again, th e

achievement of the cult auteur is seen not as a

Hyde (2003), Lust/or

racula

(2004),

Sinful

(2006

and Chantal (2007) shooting scenes over and

over, perform ing the sam e perfectionism tha t

cinphiles have grown used to in promotions

for W elles, Kubrick, or Hal Hartley. Later, I real-

ized th at M arsiglia s role at Seduc tion w as to

raise the studio s subc ultural sta tus by mak ing

low-cost softcore art movies that benefited from

his technique, his creativity, and his overall

know ledge of film history. These factors m ade

it possible for Se duction to bund le Marsiglia s

movies with extras that testified to his control

and his freedom as an experimentalist - and

they also made it plausible for Marsiglia to

claim that his interest in softcore was abstract

and aesthetic, not commercial and certainly no

pru rien t. Th ese, it seem ed, were difficult claims

to support in this distribution context, whieh,

beeause it was dedieated to making softeore

porn, was shot through w ith the eomm ereial.

On the other ha nd , such difficulties have not

usually been that difficult for auteurs to negoti-

ate - for regardless of how or where an auteur

has established himself or

herself

the auteur


15/20

Articles No Start, No End

of course, there are reasons to pursue auteur-

ism into cult contexts other than the fact that

doing so helps us avoid decontextualizing the

auteur. The auteur is a traditional emblem of art

cinema, so finding high-art auteurs in cult cin-

em as co ntributes nuan ce and unity to a revised

and expanded concept of art cinema. Given that

anti-essentialist ways of treating art cinema

rely on inclusive neutra l metho ds to identify

art movies, it seems only reasonable to deploy

objective signs of auteur rhetoric as one of the

main criteria (though not a necessary-and-

sufficient one) for membership in expanded

notions of the category. The point of identify-

ing aute ur veh icles in this way is not to prove

that a cult art movie is authentic art cinema or

that its director is authentically aspirational.

Instead, th e poin t is to create a credible art-h is-

cases, we m ight rely on formal evidence alone

when such evidence is strong. Hence, despite

my inability to locate informa tion on the late -

nigh t-cab le mo vie Anthony s Desire (1993) or its

writer-director, Tom Boka, I could make a strong

case for positioning this pr oduction as a cult-

art movie and Boka as a cult auteur by devis-

ing an art-historical narrative that relates the

movie s i l legitimate narra tive-num ber struc-

ture, a hallm ark of porn, to its mo re accredited

motifs. Such an argument is possible because

Boka s movie use s m any of the art film s m ost

acclaimed techniques. For example, it focuses

its plot on art, foregrounds the act of film-mak-

ing, and makes frequent mention of Godard. It

also uses open, elliptical tactics in its develop-

m ent of characters; contains a disinterested

sexual vision and an orchestral score; and

... the auteur aura has always been capable of obscuring

the commercialism evident in tha t au teur s distribution

context.

torical narrative that relates potential art mov-

ies to established art movies through obvious

similarities in the auteu r rhetorics enm eshin g

traditional and u ntraditional w orks. Adapted

from Nol Carroll s idea of identifying artw orks

thro ug h histo rical n arra tives (Carroll 1999: 260-

66),

this tool could w ork in various w ays, but its

point would usually be the same: to bridge the

divide between traditional art movies and less

traditional ones in the most reasonable manner

available.

I take it forgranted t h a t the best evidence

of auteurism is historical. However, if we did

not have much historical evidence to go on, we

could still arrive at a reason able argu m ent for

labelling a cult director an au teur and a cult

film an art mov ie by pointing to his or her u se

of motifs and tools consecrated by gatekeep-

ers like Bazin, Truffaut, Sarr is, or David Bor-

dwell or influential aute urs like Godard, Andrei

Tarkovsky, Mikls Jancs, or Ch anta l Aker-

m a n .

e

should, of course, be judicious w ith

this m etho d, using it only if we have no b et-

ter options.- But in th e e nd, we can no t over-

relies on long takes, long sho ts, and relent-

lessly moving cam eras . Still, w hen we us e th is

sort of reason ing, we should avoid reducing

cult auteurism to the mimicry of prominent

art-film traditions as if to imply tha t the latter

are somehow special or autonomous. Instead,

we should stress that a cult-art movie such

as Anthony s Desire integr ates legitim ate art-

film motifs with an illegitimate pornographic

structure, consequently yielding the conflicted

aspirationalism that is so characteristic of cult-

art movies and cult auteurism generally. Clearly

to make this case, we would need a grasp of the

illegitimate subcultural traditions of the cult

movie as well as a know ledge of the legitim ate

cultural traditions of the art film. Such bre adth

is typically hard to attain, especially given the

multiplicity, instability, and cultural debase-

ment of cult conventions.

The unexpected inclusiveness of auteurism

proves, I think, that aute urism can be useful to

film theorists who w ant to formulate a more

inclusive approach to art cinema, a cinematic

category formerly assumed to be exclusive. Crit


16/20

Articles

No

Star t, No End

(1995) has pointed out, auteurism is already in

that place, and it is functioning very well there.

We need to unders tand why.

In the end, Michel Ciment was correct:

neither the auteur critics nor the New Wave

phenomena they spawned may be cited as the

origin of auteurism. Auteurism does not have

a single origin. It is, instead, rooted in ideas

of authorship borrowed from other forms of

art and communication, whose roots extend

back beyond the historical record. But the fact

th at there is no real start for aute urism offers

one explanation as to why it has not ended

but is instead flourishing today despite all

the complaints about its signature articula-

tion, the aute ur theory. Auteurism , it seem s, is

still flourishing because it is ingrained in our

psyches and our institutions, where it enables

all kind s of activity. But as scho lars ha ve also

realized, auteurism shuts down many other

kinds of activity - for

in the academy, it

often

substitutes aestheticist myths for more rational

t ru ths .My opinion is that we can neith er ignore

nor dismiss auteurism, for it is an atavistic, rev-

enant mme that will not stay dead. In view of

this fact, we should contrive rational methods

for d ealing w ith it and usin g it. In this article, I

have offered an example of one such method

tha t allows us to flesh out a more inclusive idea

of art cinema.

Contributor s details

David Andrews is an independent scholar

who has published widely on cinema,

pornography, and literature. His third book.

Theorizing Art Cinemas (forthcoming from

the University of Texas P ress in 2013), tak es

a subculturally inclusive look at a c inem atic

category traditionally valued for its cultural

exclusiveness. Please visit his hom e page at

https://sites.google.com/site/

dar thurc inemal /home.

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(Endnotes)

1. This article has been ad apte d from the

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of Tex as Press boo k Theorizing Art Cinemas,

wh ich w ill be relea sed in 2013.

2 Edward Buscombe argues that Sarris

tra ns lat ed a set of critical policies into a

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3 This particular ob servatio n w as obvious to

sch ola rs as early as 1983, w he n Paul Kerr,

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Caughie 's anthology, noted in the pages of

Screen that 'auteurism refuses to go away', for

it is 'difficult - if not altogether impossible - to

entirely dispense with it ' (234).

4 Caughie conten ds th a t ' the a t ten t ion to mise

en scne, even to the extent of a certain

historically necessary formalism, is probably

the most important pos i t ive contr ibut ion of

auteurism to the development of a precise and

detailed fi lm crit icism, engaging with the

specific mechanisms of visual discourse,

freeing it from literary m ode ls , and from the

l ibera l commitments which were prepared to

validate fi lms on the basis of their themes

al on e' (1988 [1981]: 13). Barry Ke ith G ran t

agrees , a rguing tha t auteurism 'encouraged a

more ser ious examinat ion of the movies

beyond mere ' en te r ta inment ' and he lped

move the nascent field of fi lm studies beyond

its l i terary beginnings to a consideration of

film's visual qualities (2008: 5).

5 The mo st nuan ced sociologica l t rea tm ent of

this theme comes from Shyon Baumann, who

argues tha t the dis t r ibut ion of auteur-driven

art fi lms across the globe in the post-war

period led to new cinphi le mark ets and

indirectly created 'a pathway for the

consecration of Hollywood films as art ' (2007:

149).

6 This is one reason tha t John Hess lau nche d


19/20

A rticles No S tart, No End

Truffaut s essays a narrow worldview typified

by the cultural and political conservatism of

a critic mainly interested in the turf wars of

his own time and place (Hess 1974: 22). One

thing Hess explained in the first installment of

his essay was his belief that the auteur critics

were rebelling against th e very idea of

a

political cinema. Cinema in France after the

Liberation was typically po litical, reflecting a

range of post-war concerns that privileged the

collective over the individual. Hess saw critics

likeTruffaut reversing tha t tren d. But in this

regard time was not on Truffaut s side, as

reflected by the increasing radicalism of

Godard s output, by the growing leftism of

Am erican auteur critics like Susan Sontag, and

by the conflicts evident in period dram as like

Bernardo Bertolucci s The Dreamers (2003).

Today, the auteur critics initial quest for

apolitical autonomy seems likeabrief idyll

between the heavily politicized storm s of 1945

and 1968.

7 In Auteurs and Authorship (2008), Barry Keith

Grant includes many pieces that reflect this

anti-auteurist gambit in that they promote the

alternative auteurism of camera operators

(135-39), screenwriters (140^7,148-57), and

even studios and producers (180-89). But as

Giaime Along has noted, this alternative

auteurism simply shifts the myth of the

author to a different

role.

Ananalysis th at

seems to predict and apply this insight is

available in Bruce Kawin s brilliant piece

Authorship, Design, and E xecution (2008

(1992]), which breaks with convention by

arguing for a truly collective authorship.

8 H ere Caughie s Theorieso Authorship(2008) is

especially helpful, for it contains essays and

excerpts from the most relevant contributors

to Cahiers and Screen, including the original

auteur critics as weU as Buscombe, Peter

Wollen, Jean-Louis Comolli, Geoffrey Nowell-

Smith, Stephen H eath, and o thers.

9 For more on structuralist and post-

structuralist com plaints, see G erstner

(2003:

10-17) and Staiger

(2003:

43-^9).

If, as Caughie avers, it is crucial that

scholars who are intent on transcending

auteurism under stand the fascination of the

figure of the auteur, and the way he is used in

the cinphile s pleasure , it is also crucial that

these scholars consider that such pleasure

may be par t of the cinphile s biological

inheritance - and that it would not be that

pleasure if the cinphile construed the auteur

as a constructed gure rather than as a real

historical person (Caughie 1988 (1981]: 15).

2

For more on the biocultural mech anisms

interlinking Darwinian processes with artistic

and authorial processes, see Brian Boyd,

Joseph Carroll, and Jonathan Gottsehall s

edition of Evolution, Literature, and Film:A

Reader (2010), especially the contributions of

Geoffrey Miller and David Buss.

13 See Gerstner2003:17-21; Staiger

2003:

49-52;and Cook 2007 (1985]: 468-73. Feminists

who have argued against applying a classic

idea of auteurism to female directors include

Angela M artin (2003:130-31), who, in

discussing Kathryn Bigelow, has suggested

that auteurism ean benefit some wom en w hile

still hurting all wom en, since a particularly

restrictive idea of auteurism is often applied to

wom en. See also Grant 2001:113-30.

14 See Art Cinema, the Distribution Theory ,

which is the concluding chapter of my

forthcoming bookTheorizingArt Cinemas (2013).

5

For example, such an approach would not

be necessary in the ease of

a

low-budget

horror

flick

ike Nacho Cerd sTheAbandoned

(2006).

In this film, Cerd s m imicry of Andrei

Tarkovsky s tec hnique is clear, making it

tempting to formulate an art-historical

narrative that culminates in labelling his

movie a cult-art movie based on form alone.

But even a cursory Internet seareh turns up

evidence that Cerd s m imicry of Tarkovsky

was fully intentional (Lamkin

n.d.).This

so rt of

historical evidence should, in my opinion, be

the primary basis for any narrative tying

one auteur to the other.


20/20

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No Start, No End: Auteurism and the auteur theory

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