Prof. Larry Engel
Film W3001 – Intro to Film Studies
April 27, 1999
For more than three decades, the film industry in America and elsewhere has been plagued with the flawed concept of auteurism. Auteur is the French word for author; in cinema parlance, it refers to the idea that there is a single, visionary creator of a film, just as there is for a painting, a novel, or a musical score. Auteur theory is an attempt by film critics to identify the author of a film. Anytime an author is identified, it is virtually always the director. In addition to identifying the auteur of a film, the theory also seeks to study the body of work by a particular auteur, such as all the films directed by Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford. The fundamental problem with this theory is that films are not like paintings or novels or any other art form. They are collaborative efforts that require the coordinated artistic input of many individuals; there is no one person who is so influential and important that he deserves sole authorship recognition. Furthermore, even if there was such a person, there would be no way for the film critics to know who it was. Each production is so unique that unless a critic is part of the entire development from story to premiere, his assessment of the film’s auteur is just a guess. This is why people in Hollywood often say that while auteur theory may be an interesting way to study films, it has nothing at all to do with production or how films are actually made. The only impact auteur theory does seem to have on actual filmmaking is inflating some directors’ already bloated egos while decreasing the public’s appreciation of everyone else who works on a film.
As the name suggests, auteur theory began in France. In a 1969 essay, Peter Wollen traces the rise of auteurism:
The auteur theory … was developed by a loosely knit group of critics who wrote for [the French periodical] Cahiers du Cinéma and made it the leading film magazine in the world… There were special conditions in Paris which made [the rise of auteur theory] possible. First, there was the fact that American films were banned from France under the Vichy government and the German Occupation. Consequently, when they reappeared after the Liberation they came with a force—and an emotional impact—which was necessarily missing in the Anglo-Saxon countries themselves… [This] gave French cinéphiles an unmatched perception of the historical dimensions of Hollywood and the careers of individual directors. (Wollen 519)
But this historical perspective cuts right to the basic problem of auteurism. The French had been inundated with hundreds of films all at once, without knowing anything about how they were made. French critics claimed that because they saw these films for the first time all at once, they were able to recognize recurring themes and motifs of certain directors (Engel). Since directors in Europe historically had “open artistic aspiration and full control over [their] films” (Wollen 520), most French critics assumed that American films were made the same way. Furthermore, anyone examining a group of films by the same director could have found or imagined similarities that led him to believe the films all had a common author. But this was forensic guess work at best.
The film critic most often credited with the development of auteur theory in the United States is Andrew Sarris. In a 1962 essay, he gave “Cahiers critics full credit for the original formulation of [the] idea that reshaped [his] thinking on the cinema.” He quoted critic Ian Cameron as saying that “the director is the author of a film, the person who gives it any distinctive quality.” While he acknowledged that movies without any noteworthy direction such as One-Eyed Jacks can be very entertaining, they “have no importance in the critical scale of values.” After all, “the first premise of the auteur theory is the technical competence of a director as a criterion of value” (Sarris 515-516).
Sarris continues that “the second premise of the auteur theory is the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value. Over a group of films, a director must exhibit certain recurrent characteristics of style, which serve as his signature” (516). Apparently, Sarris is not too interested in the “signature” of the actors, writer, cinematographer, or editors. Wollen even suggests that these other signatures can get in the way; “a great many features of films analyzed have to be dismissed as indecipherable because of ‘noise’ from the producer, the cameraman, or even the actors” (Wollen 530). Sarris declares that the way a director thinks and feels should determine how a film looks and moves. He even states that directors who are not at all involved with the film’s writing, such as Cukor or Preminger, are more distinctive auteurs than writer-directors such as Bergman or Wilder. Directors who are free to develop their own scripts lack the “adequate technical mastery” and “stylistic consistency” that commissioned directors develop because they are “forced to express [their] personality [purely] through the visual treatment of material.” This is why the work of a filmmaker like Bergman “declined with the depletion of his ideas largely because his technique never equaled his sensibility” (Sarris 516). Ironically, many modern film critics would only be willing to consider the hybrid writer-director-producers, such as Ed Burns or Kevin Smith, as possibly being auteurs.
“The third and ultimate premise of the auteur theory,” writes Sarris, “is concerned with interior meaning, the ultimate glory of the cinema as an art. Interior meaning is extrapolated from the tension between a director’s personality and his material.” He described this inner meaning as being the result of a combination of the director’s vision of the world, his attitude toward life, and his temperature on set (516-517). In Bordwell and Thompson’s book Film Art, their primary justification for why the director should be considered the author of a film is that “the director’s role provides the closest thing to a grasp of the totality of the shooting and assembly phases… [The role is] a synthetic one, combining the participants’ contributions into a whole” (Bordwell 38). Wollen succinctly stated that while a director may be inspired or influenced by the original screenplay or novel, he “does not subordinate himself to another author” (Wollen 530). Apparently the director is the be-all-end-all of filmmaking.
In a typically absurd example of auteur theory, Wollen tries to prove that Howard Hawks was an auteur. He observes that Hawks directed films from nearly every genre, but all of his films (except, of course, for the films that do not fit into this theory) “exhibit the same thematic preoccupations, the same recurring motifs and incidents, the same visual style and tempo.” Thus, any good critic should be able to identify the prototypical “protagonist of Hawksian values in the problematic Hawksian world” (521). This may be true for visual style and tempo. After all, these are among the primary domains of the director. Of course, looking at all the films edited by a particular editor, or photographed by the same cinematographer, or decorated by the same production designer might reveal that the same “visual style and tempo” exist among that person’s films too. But the theme, the incidents, the values, and the “problematic world” are not determined by the director, unless he also happens to be the writer (which Hawks rarely was). In another bizarre example, Wollen claims that John Ford answers the question of how individual action can be heroic “by placing and situating the individual within society and within history, specifically within American history” (521). How does Ford, who is assigned to direct a certain script for a certain producer with a certain cast and crew have any say in placing his protagonist within American history? Wollen goes on to credit the stories’ characters, plots, and dialogue as being the creations of Hawks or Ford, even when the movie is a remake of an earlier movie written by a prominent screenwriter (e.g. His Girl Friday by Ben Hecht) (523-529). Do these auteurists not understand that Ford, like every other studio director, was given a script and told to report to the set on Monday morning? Do they not recognize that much of the similarities among Hawks’ films or Ford’s films must have come from the studio boss capitalizing on their talents by assigning them certain scripts or crews to work with? (Bach)
So why does this silly theory remain popular? One reason may simply be practicality. It is convenient to reduce a film’s creation to one person rather than the 200+ names that usually appear in a film’s credits. The advantages of crediting one person are that journalists and talk-show hosts only have to interview one person in order to critique all aspects of the film. Furthermore, this gives the movie-going public a single person that they can assign credit or blame to, depending on whether they like the film. Since most people don’t really understand what a production designer or anyone else in the crew does, it is much simpler if they can simply attribute all aspects of filmmaking to one person. This way they can think about movies the same way they think about songs and novels, with one consistent, creative force. The legendary French filmmaker Jean Renoir reportedly once complained that a filmmaker could never be a true artist like his father (the painter Augouste Renoir). Because even if he wrote the story, designed and lit the set, operated the camera, and starred in and edited the film, he still could not run the projector in every theater. This desire to have one person responsible is at the heart of the director-worship that has existed in the film industry for more than thirty years, and even longer in Europe. Many directors today are celebrities, but few people outside the film industry can name any film editors or cinematographers.
Screenwriter William Goldman states that while auteur theory may have some applicability in foreign filmmaking, though probably not, it certainly has no relationship to American cinema. Goldman claims that even Godard, one of the originators of auteur theory, said in an interview “that the whole thing was patent bullshit from the beginning, an idea devised by the then young scufflers to draw some attention to themselves” (Goldman 100). What perpetuates the ridiculous concept is “the media. Every time a piece of criticism or interview refers to a movie as ‘Francis Coppola’s One from the Heart’ or ‘Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York,’ the auteur notion is prolonged.” Obviously, argues Goldman, the director is not the sole creator of a film or it would not be necessary for the studio executives to pay more than $10,000 a week for top editors, production designers, or cinematographers. All the top technicians, including the director, are both crucial and creative (101). Goldman offers a classic example of the preposterousness of auteurism:
Peter Benchley reads an article in a newspaper about a fisherman who captures a forty-five-hundred-pound shark off the coast of Long Island and he thinks, “What if the shark became territorial, what if it wouldn’t go away?” And eventually he writes a novel on that notion and Zanuck-Brown buy the movie rights, and Benchley and Carl Gottlieb write a screenplay, and Bill Butler is hired to shoot the movie, and Joseph Alves, Jr. designs it, and Verna Fields is brought in to edit, and maybe most importantly of all, Bob Mattey is brought out of retirement to make the monster. And John Williams composes perhaps his most memorable score. How in the world is Steven Spielberg the “author” of that? Why is it often referred to today as “Steven Spielberg’s Jaws”?… There’s no author to that movie that I can see. (Goldman 101)
Goldman further argues that there are at least seven roles that are equally crucial to a film, all of whom must be at their best for a movie to have a shot at quality. In alphabetical order, the seven are: the actor, the cameraman, the director, the editor, the producer, the production designer, and the writer. In addition, on certain movies, the composer, make-up artist, or special-effects engineers are as important as any other element (Goldman 102).
Therefore, it makes as much sense to study all the films of a certain screenwriter, or producer, or cinematographer, or set designer, or actor, as it does to study the films of a certain director. For example, all the movies written by Ben Hecht or scored by James Horner may have more in common than all the films directed by Peter Bogdanovich. If you decide that writers can sometimes be auteurs too, then what happens if an auteur director directs a screenplay of an auteur writer, such as Alfred Hitchcock and Ernest Lehman on North by Northwest. Obviously the media has determined who to consider the auteur in that case. In France, it is essentially unheard of for the author to be anyone other than the director. The 1972 film Play It Again, Sam is a classic example. The screenplay was written by Woody Allen, from his original play which he produced, and the film starred Woody Allen. However, at the Cannes Film Festival that year, the only person acclaimed for it was director Herbert Ross.
Besides being false and demeaning, Goldman even suggests that auteur theory is dangerous to the director. He believes “that the auteur theory was responsible … for the collapse of the career of one of [his] favorite directors: Alfred Hitchcock.” He argues that Truffaut and the other auteurists deified him to the point that he became “encased in praise [and] inured to any criticism.” This “peaked in the mid-sixties with the publication of one of the genuinely ego-ridden books of the postwar world, the Truffaut/Hitchcock interview.” After Hitchcock’s incredible streak of movies lasting until 1960’s Psycho, he spent the last twenty years of his life making five “awful, awful films.” But the auteur critics continued to praise them, because once the auteurist “surrenders himself to an idol,” he cannot admit that the idol could make a bad film. Hitchcock’s belief in the auteur theory ruined him, and that “belief is dangerous to any director” (Goldman 103-105).
Auteur theory affected several other star directors after 1960, many of whom subsequently demanded to become their own producers. Directors like Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Coppola, William Friedkin, and Michael Cimino all began thinking of themselves as auteurs, sometimes only after one successful movie. The problem was that not only did they develop tremendous confidence in themselves, auteur theory encouraged the studios to be equally confident and give them carte blanche. This led to disastrously long and over-budget productions like Apocalypse Now and Heaven’s Gate. Steven Bach’s book Final Cut is a chronicle of how auteurism helped bring about the end of United Artists. Bolstered only by the success of The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino developed a “maniacal megalomania” which the studio executives foolishly submitted to because on some level they believed that Cimino the auteur could not fail (Bach).
In a subtler way, the ego-impacts of auteur theory continue today with the all-too-common “A Film By” credit that appears at the beginning of many movies. This credit is virtually never given to anyone other than the director, regardless of how spectacular other aspects of the film are. Unless the filmmaker conceived of the original story, wrote it, directed it, and produced it, this credit is an insult to everyone else who created the film. Since a directing credit is possibly the most respected credit on a film, there is no reason for a director to usurp the credit of everyone else. For example, even though Ron Howard has written only four films, many more of the movies he has directed have the tagline “A Film By Ron Howard.” What about Brian Grazer? Grazer not only produced most of Ron Howard’s films, but over forty other impressive films that were not directed by Howard (IMDb). Screenwriting guru Robert McKee says, “A certain director may be the difference between a good film and a great film, but a writer is the difference between a good film and no film” (McKee). This is certainly also true for producers, editors, and actors.
Defenders of auteur theory claim that it allows people to finally see films as something more than entertainment, that is, as art (Engel). Others too claim that the auteur theory “made a major step toward our understanding of film as art” (Bordwell 38). This was the same rationale for creating the Academy Awards several decades earlier. But the Academy Awards acknowledge a number of different awards for the many collaborative roles in filmmaking. Can’t a film have more than one author and still be considered art?
This question led some critics to develop a revised form of auteurism which is somewhat popular today. These auteurists “regard the idea of ‘author’ as simply a critical construct… On this account, the critic would group films by signature of director, producer, screenwriter, or whatever. Thus Citizen Kane would belong to the ‘Orson Welles’ group and to the ‘Herman Mankiewicz’ group and to the ‘Gregg Toland’ group, and so on… The ‘author’ is no longer a person, but, for the sake of analysis, a system of relations among several films bearing the same signature” (Bordwell 39). This application of auteurism is less egregious than the traditional one, but it still tries to relegate filmmaking to a handful of elite roles. All too often, the only signatures deemed worth studying are those of the director and occasionally the screenwriter.
Not only does auteur theory distort and insult filmmaking today, it also maligns film history by presenting a fraudulent and revisionist view of the American studio system. Film historian Thomas Schatz describes the situation in his book The Genius of the System:
As the New Hollywood emerged from the ashes of the studio era, proponents of the auteur theory proclaimed that what the Old Hollywood had been was a director’s cinema. They proclaimed, too, that the only film directors worthy of canonization as author-artists were those whose personal style emerged from a certain antagonism toward the studio system at large… Andrew Sarris … cast the studio boss as the heavy in Hollywood’s epic struggle and reduced American film history to the careers of a few dozen heroic directors… Sarris developed a simplistic theory of his own, celebrating the director as the sole purveyor of Film Art in an industry overrun with hacks and profitmongers… Auteurism itself would not be worth bothering with if it hadn’t been so influential, effectively stalling film history and criticism in a prolonged stage of adolescent romanticism. (Schatz 5)
The more one understands the studio system, continues Schatz, the “less sense it makes to assess filmmaking or film style in terms of the individual director—or any individual, for that matter.” A number of directors, including Ford, Hawks, Capra, and Hitchcock, did have “an unusual degree of authority and a certain style.” However, “it’s worth noting that their privileged status—particularly their control over script development, casting, and editing—was more a function of their role as producers than as directors.” This authority was only gradually won by filmmakers who proved not only that they had talent, but that they could work profitably within the system (Schatz 5-6).
Unfortunately, in the new auteur-obsessed Hollywood, this level of authority is regularly demanded by directors with even fewer film credits than Michael Cimino had. First time directors often feel that they are the artists and authors of their films, usually to the detriment of the film and the other filmmakers. Critics continue to perpetuate the myth that the director is the sole creator of the film, and they continue to pretend to know who did what on a given film production. Films made today are no better than the ones made during the golden age of the studio system, and our understanding of how the studio films were made is no better off because of auteur theory. Essentially, auteur theory has had only a negative impact on both our study of film and on the film industry today.
Bach, Steven. Final Cut. New York: William Morrow, 1985.
Bach, Steven. Notes from class lectures. Columbia University, Spring 1999.
Bordwell, David & Kristin Thompson. Film Art. New York: McGraw-Hill Co. 1997
Engel, Larry. Notes from class lectures. Columbia University, Spring 1999.
Goldman, William. Adventures in the Screen Trade. New York: Warner Books, 1983
IMDb. Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com, April 1999.
McKee, Robert. Notes from screenwriting seminar. Los Angeles, March 1998.
Sarris, Andrew. “Notes on the Auteur Theory of 1962.” Film Theory and Criticism,
Fifth Edition. Ed. Leo Braudy. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 515-518.
Schatz, Thomas. The Genius of the System. New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1988
Wollen, Peter. “The Auteur Theory.” Film Theory and Criticism,
Fifth Edition. Ed. Leo Braudy. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 519-535.