by William S. E. Coleman
As Academy Award time nears, I’ve ratcheted up my moviegoing. There are some good things out there, but there are a lot of over-inflated messes, too. The messes are mainly due to the auteur theory running amuck.
“Okay,” someone may ask, “what is the auteur theory?”
More correctly it should be called politique des auteurs, a concept advocated in the French magazine, Les Cahiers du Cinéma and the great French critic, André Bazin. It was popularized in the United States in the 1960s by the Village Voice critic, Andrew Sarris. It is the concept that the director was the sole author of a film. Thus the credit, “a film by ____.”
However, there is a catch. Critics of the time believed that the word auteur should be awarded to directors only after they developed a thematically related body of work and a unique aesthetic. Arguments raged in the critical establishment as to who these directors were. Many major directors of the time refused to apply the term to themselves. Sam Peckinpah, who certainly is an auteur in a small core of his work, put it bluntly when he said, “I’m a good whore. I go where I am kicked.”
One director that certainly attained a level of authorship was Federico Fellini, whose work traced his own life as a man and as an artist. That brilliant artistic journey culminated in 8 1/2, a stunning film of almost Joycean magnitude. If you rearrange the sequence of his films you will have his autobiography. While this may seem to be an act of supreme ego, Fellini had a huge world following and can be said to be the first star director.
Nevertheless, Fellini was not entirely alone in his creative work. He worked with the same screenwriters through most of his career. His films showed a decline in quality after the death of his composer, Nino Rota, whose music tied the great films together stylistically.
The same can be said for another true auteur, Alfred Hitchcock. His golden era of maturity in the 1950s was propelled by the music of Bernard Herrmann. When they broke off their collaboration, Hitchcock’s decline was precipitous.
By taking away one element from these two directors’ films we see that they were not alone the author of their work. They may have selected the music they used, but someone had to get it right on the page before it was recorded. This, to me, is the Achilles heel in the auteur theory.
Others who entered that highest of pantheons for directors were Michelangelo Antonini, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, and Alain Resnais. Bergman comes closest to standing on his own. He wrote, directed, and picked classical music to fit his films. However, he had Sven Nykvist as his cinematographer. Bergman’s “look” comes from Nykvist’s bleak Nordic look even though his bleak vision of the human condition is Bergman’s.
Orson Welles is revered by all of the above, but he is a tragic figure. He left us less than a handful of fully realized films. The best were accompanied by the music of Bernard Herrmann! Even those films that were mutilated or only partially finished bear a unique stamp, a world vision that is the artist. In Raising Kane, Pauline Kael argues against Welles being the sole creator of his masterpiece. Joseph Mackiewicz, she claims, laid down all the themes and the structure in his original screenplay.
Even so, all these directors had a unique film aesthetic and something to say on screen. With great directors you can walk into a theater, sit down, and know who made the film without any titles. The style, the attitude, and look was there.
But now, anyone who makes a film—including those who make the tackiest horror films—tacks on the credit, “a film by ____.” Few deserve that credit. Martin Scorsese took years before he used it; and John Huston, a true auteur, never used it at all.
Most directors now working who see themselves as that sole creator are arrogant and usually overestimate their abilities and creative intelligence. They forget that their storyboards were done by a production designer and a cinematographer. Many only watch the editing process. Most would benefit from the supervision of a strong producer or a studio head. Too many films now are self-indulgent. They lack focus and structure.
I could offer several examples, but let me use one, Signs. Its director, M. Night Shyamalan, was propelled to a “final cut” status with The Sixth Sense. Its kick at the end made audiences forget just how slow and boring this film was until we realized what was happening—that is, those who hadn’t suspected it all along.
In the old studio days, the producer or a studio head would have brought in an editor like Don Seigel (see his 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers) to tighten the first hour and a half of this glacial film and cut out the extraneous junk. If The Sixth Sense had come in at a clean ninety minutes, it would have scared the hell out of us instead of giving us one cheap thrill at the end.
With Signs, Shyamalan got complete control of just about everything. The film stumbles more often than The Sixth Sense did. Stylistically, it is a mess. Joaquin Phoenix as the brother has an IQ that drifts from near moronic to quite sensitive. His character has no center. The film itself ambles along until it begins to find moments of terror. They are just that—moments. There is no structure to the build of the film; and the ending, as one critic puts it, doesn’t hold water.
Shyamalan is no auteur. His sole interest is in finding adolescent occult themes that barely approach the content of a comic book or a cheap paperback novel. He has nothing to say, and he doesn’t say it particularly well. However, he is in vogue at the moment, so he has complete control of his work. That complete control will eventually slow his career and perhaps end it.
Few directors have much to say now. Most are too busy quoting older masters—or even mediocrities—from the past. In doing so, they sidestep that hardest of artistic tasks, finding your own voice. They are not unlike Mel Brooks who exists mainly at a level just a notch above that of a high school assembly skit. Sid Caesar did it much better on the old Show of Shows in ten-minute skits.
Film, in its mainstream, is a collaborative art form. We should leave the auteur theory to a handful of geniuses who can pull a film together into a work of art through their single vision. The rest of us should work with the combined talents of those about us and out of that collaboration perhaps—just perhaps—arrive at something really important, and original.
Everyone knows that the brilliant editor Verna Fields babysat Steven Spielberg through Jaws. As for another auteur wannabe, George Lucas, check out the bad acting and dull set-ups in his newest Star Wars films.