Auteur Theory: What Makes the Director the ‘Author’ of the Film?

 

What Truffaut meant by cinema d’auteur is what constituted the foundation for AUTEUR THEORY: the idea that the ‘author’ of the film is the director who creates or should be able to create his proper visual style, and a consistent theme and tone for their films so that the films reflect their directors’ creative and artistic vision, the directors’ mean of achieving this differs from one to the other, because the multifaceted nature of cinema allows many ways to develop one’s approach, either through style, story, subject matter, etc., and this is how you can instantly spot a Wes Anderson film, from a Tarantino, a Kar-wai, a Burton, a Lynch, a Kiarostami, if you watch a sample of their films, because a skilled director is one that manipulates the camera the same way a novelist uses a pen, an idea put forward by film critic Alexandre Astruc through his notion of the ‘caméra-stylo’ in his 1948 article ‘The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo’, and granted that auteurism originated in French film criticism in the late 40’s and Bazin and Astruc, it wasn’t until 1962 that we first heard of the term ‘auteur theory’ in its full-fledged form in Andrew Sarris’ essay ‘Notes on the Auteur Theory’, which was inspired by Cahiers du Cinéma’s critics, such as Truffaut and Godard who were longtime friends of Sarris, this essay popularized the auteur notion in the United States, which is somewhat different to what Truffaut first suggested through his idea of ‘politique des auteurs’ in his review of Jacques Becker’s ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ (1954) that suggests seeing the film director as the whole catalogue and not through each individual film, just like in theatre with the likes of Molière, Chekhov, Wilde, and Bernard Shaw. Sarris’ auteur theory went further than that, it stated that there is a key difference between directors who are auteurs and ones who are straightforward, likening the auteurs to the great painters and composers, also limiting the number of auteurs in a select few, as he proposes that there are 3 criteria to spot an auteur: (1) technical competence, meaning that director should possess actual craftsmanship when making a film, one example can be David Fincher who uses extreme close-ups with such fluidity and subtlety but with a lasting impact as well; (2) stylistic consistency, which stands for shared characteristics in a director’s oeuvre, Paul Thomas Anderson is a case in point, most of PTA’s films include dysfunctional families, alienation, repeated sentences, biblical references, whip pans, memorable needle drops, and San Fernando Valley; (3) interior meaning, the essential criterion, which Sarris describes as “extrapolated from the tension between the director and their material”, in short, the influence of the director’s psychology and personality on the final output, you can see De Palma and Hitchcock’s voyeurism in their own films, Spielberg’s childhood still living in his films, Nolan making films that are representative of his filmmaking process, Johnny Depp plays a facet of Tim Burton in all of their collaborations, and Woody Allen is Woody Allen. Sarris elaborated on the subject even more in his book ‘The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968’, and he gave credit to directors who didn’t write their films but managed to make them their own, like George Cukor and William Wellman, and giving them the edge over writer-directors such as Ingmar Bergman and Billy Wilder because they get to express themselves through their literary content rather than the visual treatment of material alone, basically that for every Kurosawa, Kubrick, Nolan or Leone who are instantly recognizable and critically acclaimed, there are lesser known directors who don’t write their own films and don’t get renowned as much as the aforementioned directors, people like Michael Curtiz, Anthony Mann, Mitchell Leisen, and other Classic Hollywood directors who were trapped in the constrictions of the Hays Code and the studio system but managed to have their respective artistic voices even if their films are not necessarily of good quality, that makes the auteur theory a very vague subject to get into and one that doesn’t offer any objective answers, as detractors of this theory, like Pauline Kael, claimed that this idea disfavors the work of the screenwriter, the cinematographer, the editor, etc., Kael even added that questioning the director’s competence is pointless and films should be judged on their own merit, also that making assessments based on a film’s authorship is a sign of intellectual incompetency, dismissing it as a praxis that glorifies trash, some others however, essentially David Kipen, went on to single out the screenwriter as the main force behind the film’s quality and finished product, coining the term ‘Schreiber theory’, so is an auteur required to be a good filmmaker? or just one that has a specific filmmaking modus operandi? and how much credit should a film director get in the first place?

The way I see it, the idea of an auteur progressed from when Sarris wrote his 1962 essay, something he himself acknowledged in 1998 when he spoke in favor of Billy Wilder, so while I excuse Sarris and other pro-auteurism film critics for not fully grasping the scope of the theory, and while I recognize their input for shaping film history, which is what this article is partially about, I find that a lot of their beliefs are just not in line with how cinema works since they made their statements, yes, the director is the main force behind the film, because they encapsulate many different roles at once, they direct the entire crew, but ultimately, it’s still the cinematographer who does the shooting, and the editor who does the cutting, and the actors who do the acting, so the director’s vision is not the only one that you see on screen, for instance, Spielberg films, e.g. Jaws, Jurassic Park, and Schindler’s List, aren’t really what they are without their composer John Williams, and editor Thelma Schoonmaker is considered the backbone of Martin Scorsese’s success, similar standards apply to cinematographers like Roger Deakins and Emmanuel Lubezki, and for screenwriters such as Aaron Sorkin and Charlie Kaufman, and even franchises such as Marvel and Star Wars rarely change their characteristic styles despite the constant change of directors, respectively, a film doesn’t secure its quality just because of who directs it, and while I respect filmmakers who have their personal distinctive credos, it’s not always an indicator of quality, this is where the concept of ‘vulgar auteurism’ comes into play, which is a term used to describe filmmakers who are auteurs in their own right, but whose films are considered to be shallow and lacking in substance, it’s the low-brow side of auteur theory, which takes the original premise and turns it on its head, often considered a subgenre of “popcorn” cinema, Michael Bay is a name that comes into mind when discussing vulgar auteurism, because despite the fact that he has many auteurist qualities, his authorship consists of over-the-top action sequences and explosive VFX, which in my view, sometimes work in his favor, with films like ‘Pain & Gain’ (2013) and ‘The Rock’ (1996), championing a larger-than-life aesthetic that fits within the overindulgent nature of these films, but most of the time, his films are nothing more than style-over-substance extravaganzas, which isn’t bad per se, but they don’t scratch beneath the surface of recreation cinema, all of that makes auteur theory, at the end of the day, merely a theory, and not a rule that we should abide by, it’s still however a staple in the way movies are discussed, as even people who’ve never heard of this somewhat niche term acknowledge that it is the director who makes the movie, and we’ll get to explore even further to which length it affected our understanding of cinematic when we discuss what is arguably the best era of American cinema: New Hollywood.

Taha Louafi