Three’s a trend. Based on an essay in the current issue of the magazine and two pieces recently published by The Atlantic, it seems like it’s time to pile on the idea of the auteur—of the director as creator—and it’s worth considering why.
In an essay about John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “The Power of Two,” in the latest issue of The Atlantic, Joshua Wolf Shenk writes, “For centuries, the myth of the lone genius has towered over us, its shadow obscuring the way creative work really gets done.” Online, in “Michael Bay: A New Kind of Director,” Katie Kilkenny denies that Bay is an auteur and contends that “the term usually implies a style at odds with profit-minded Hollywood formulas.” In Le Monde, Jean-François Rauger highlights and challenges the increasingly common separation of “genre films” from “auteur films.” And, closer to home, my friendly debate partner Emily Nussbaum, in her piece in the current issue about “Louie,” refers to “the bear trap of Golden Age rhetoric, in which respect for an auteur equates with worship.”
The backlash seems inevitable, inasmuch as the auteur has never been celebrated more liberally, even profligately, than now. This is a time of retrospectives often rummaging to gather films by directors of some discernible personality but only modest artistic inspiration, and of boxed sets celebrating similarly undistinguished names, but names nonetheless. Among the names put in lights are those of filmmakers who launched long and middling careers on the basis of heralded débuts decades ago, and directors from the high-studio era whose acclaim bespeaks a nostalgic fetish for old Hollywood stars and styles. When, in the game of auteur limbo, the bar is set progressively higher, the very concept elicits increasing skepticism.
On the other hand, the debunking doesn’t stop at the marginal directors of borderline recognizability but advances to the very idea of auteuristic creation. The total-publicity machine has pulled away any vestige of a curtain between the cinematic factory and the results on-screen. The endemic digital effects in live-action features (such as “The Wolf of Wall Street”) are unmasked in videos that reveal their sleight of hand, and every step of the moviemaking process, from negotiations with stars to battles over editing, is on display. As the process has lost its mystery, the director’s personal imprint has been diluted into the throng of collaborators, on set and off, who make a movie’s recognition possible. Under the circumstances, the auteur’s name seems more like a marketing strategy, the selling of a brand, than the reflection of an artistic practice—and a director’s claim to autonomy comes off as vanity and arrogance.
Yet that’s how it seemed from the start. The archetypal auteurs are Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, directors who worked within the mainstream of the movie business, seeking and often achieving the commercial successes that rendered their work artistically dubious to critics who looked askance at precisely such Hollywood commercialism and the constraints that studio formats entailed. The young critics at Cahiers du Cinéma who formulated the concept of the director as author were even called the Hitchcocko-Hawksians. Those original auteurists weren’t solely obsessed with American filmmakers; they championed the work of such directors as Roberto Rossellini, Max Ophüls, and Jean Renoir at a time when their films were widely derided. But they also made no distinction between directors who worked with big stars on prestigious productions, such as Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Vincente Minnelli, and those who worked on genre films on low budgets, such as Samuel Fuller and Edgar G. Ulmer. Their point was simply that the incidentals of production and marketing ultimately didn’t matter in the face of the transformative power of artistic vision.
They called their idea the “politique des auteurs,” the “author policy,” but it’s neither a policy nor, as its American acolyte Andrew Sarris said, a theory. It’s an account of an experience. Whether Hawks made a Western or a screwball comedy, whether Hitchcock made a glossily romantic thriller or a gritty true-crime drama, whether Minnelli made a backstage musical or a melodrama involving a mental institution, the critics recognized something more important than patterns of images or habits of performance; they recognized a detailed, complex, and original worldview, along with the integrated style of images, acting, dialogue, and tone that embodied it. They got the same kind of experience watching a movie such as “Strangers on a Train,” “The Big Sleep,” or “Voyage to Italy” as they got from reading a classic novel or listening to classical music or modern jazz. The filmed images were of the visible world, but they conveyed, as if through secret codes, the fullness of inner worlds.
Their critical methods weren’t machines for discerning and exalting any perceptible tendency, for categorizing and systematizing. Rather, they were poetic evocations of spiritual communion, and that’s what seems weird about it now. The early auteurists didn’t look at movies as sociological or political documents. They didn’t ponder the place of Hollywood movies as a mode of ideological transmission, or worry whether the gangster was a figure of revolt or conformity. The polemical side of their “policy” is that, at a time when movies they loved were considered either meretricious junk or capitalist propaganda, they made the effort, like moral scientists, to see style in isolation and creation in its pure state.
That polemical side of auteurism is what fell away as the idea spread widely. Movies also have a role in civic life, and directors’ political ideas are inextricable from their worldviews (and careful viewing entails distinguishing the orthodoxies of a studio or a government from a director’s inflection of, or departure from, the official line). Yet politics and sociology have come to the fore again in the discussion of movies, for the very reason that auteurism has run rampant: the empiricism of critical discourse. Social trends and ideological casts are easy to talk about, as are the diverse traits of habit or style that render a formerly overlooked filmmaker distinguishable. But what makes a movie—and a filmmaker—great is something that veers toward the ineffable.
I’m unironically grateful to Emily for a line in her piece on “Louie”; she captures more fully and more clearly in four words than I could in a lengthy diatribe about what I find inimical about much of what I’ve seen of quality television: “TV is a conversation.” Movies, if they’re very good, aren’t a conversation; they’re an exaltation, a shuddering of one’s being, something deeply personal yet awesomely vast. That’s what criticism exists to capture. And it’s exactly what’s hard to talk about, what’s embarrassingly rhapsodic, what runs the risk of seeming odd, pretentious, or gaseous at a time of exacting intellectual discourse.
If criticism is a matter of the future, it’s in large part because every great movie changes the world and the viewer, and opens new possibilities for the art form and for life itself. Most movies aren’t at that level of achievement. The notion of the auteur, of the director as creator, isn’t the universal state of the art; it’s an exceptional achievement. The vast fund of information and analysis that invigorates the study of movies, and the increasingly rich critical discussion that’s fostered online and carries over into public events, propels directors to the fore but also obscures their individual visions. In the process, it risks undermining the conditions for their appreciation.
Photograph: Silver Screen Collection/Archive Photos/Getty.
