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PN
1995.9
.A837
A98
2008
 Auteurs and Authorship

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
To Norty, a special uncle for who1n this should have come sooner

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Auteurs and Authorship
A Film Reader

Edited by Barry Keith Grant

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
© 2008 by Blackwell Publishing
Editorial content and org:inization 10 2008 by Barry Keith Grant

BLACKWELL PUBLISHING
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 Contents

..
List of Illustrations VII P art II: The Contexts of
.
Preface: How to Use This Book XI Authorship 95
Acknowledgrnents XIII
10 The Death of the Author (1968)
Roland &rthes 97
Introduction 1
1 1 The English Cine-Structuralists (1973)
Charles W . Eckert 101
Part I: Classic Auteur Theory 7
12 Alternatives to Auteurs ( 1973)
1 A Certain Tendency of the French
Graham Petrie 110
Cinema (1954)
Fra11(ois Trnffa11t 9 13 Women's Cinen1a as Counter-Cine111a
(1973)
2 De la Politique des Auteurs (1957)
Claire Johnston 119
Andre &zin 19
14 Refocusing Authorship in Women's
3 Films, Directors and Critics ( 1962)
Filmmaking (2003)
Ian Cameron 29
Angela Martin 127
4 Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962
15 The Men with the Movie Can1eras ( 1972)
(1962)
Richard Koszarski 135
A 11drew Sarris 35
16 Notes on a Screen writer's Theory
5 Circles and Squares (1963) (excerpt)
1973 (1974)
Pauline Kael 46
Richard Corliss 140
6 The Auteur Theory ( 1969) (excerpt)
17 Who Makes the Movies? (1976)
Peter Wollen 55
Gore Vidal 148
7 l)irection and Authorship (1972) (excerpt)
18 Script/Performance/Text: Perfonnance
V. F. Perkins 65
Theory and Auteur Theory ( 1978)
8 Ideas of Authorship (1973) Peter Lehman 158
Edward Buscombe 76
19 Studio Authorship. Corporate Art (200())
9 Ideology, Genre, Auteur (1977) /cn,,11e Christe11sc11 167
Robin Wtlod 84
20 The Producer as Auteur (200(,)
Further Reading 93 :\'1,111/,c11• Bcr11stci11 180

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VI Contents

21 Authorship, Design, and Execution 27 The Place of Women in the Cine111a of

(1987) Raoul Walsh (1974)
Broce Kawin 190 Pam Cook and Claire Johnston 255

Further Reading 200 28 Female Authorship Reconsidered

(The Case of Dorothy Arzner) (1990)
Part III: Close Readings 201 (excerpt}
22 Hitchcock's In1agery and Art (1977) Judith Mayne 263
Maurice Yacowar 203 29 Man's Favorite Sport?: The Action Fihns
23 John Ford's Young A1r U11coln (1970) of Kathryn Bigelow (2004)
(excerpt) Barry Keith Grant 280
Editors of Cahiers du Cinema 212
30 Authorship and New Queer Cinema:
24 Towards an Analysis of the Sirkian The Case of Todd Haynes (2006)
System (1972) Michael DeAngelis 292
Paul Willemen 228
31 Twoness and the Fihn Style of Oscar
25 My Nan1e is Joseph H . Lewis (1983) Micheaux (1993)
Paul Ke" 234 J. Ronald Green 304
26 Authorship as a Commodity: The Art
32 Spike's Joint (1998) (excerpt)
Cinema and The Cabinet o_f Dr Calwari
S. Craig Watkins 317
(1984)
Michael Budd 249 Further Reading 323

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1.1 Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows)(Cine-
Alliance, 1938): A masterpiece of the
Tradition of Quality, directed by Marcel
Came and written by Jacques Prevert.
Produced by Gregor Rabinovitch 10
2.1 Lust for Life (MGM, 1956), by Vincente
Minnelli, "a director of filmed ballets."
Produced by John H ouseman 20
2 .2 Deep focus cinematography by Gregg
Toland in Citizen Kane (RKO, 1941).
Produced, directed, and co-written by
Orson Welles 24
2.3 Howard Hawks's Monkey Business
(Twentieth Century Fox, 1952):
Authorship as self-evident genius.
Produced by Sol C. Siegel 27
3.1 Misc-en-scene in Vincente Minnelli's
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
(MGM, 1962). Produced by Julian
Blaustein 30
3 .2 Steve McQueen in Don Siegel's Hell ls
for Heroes (Paramount, 1962). Produced
by Henry Blanke 34
4 .1 Gregory Peck as Ahab in Moby Dirk
(Warner Bros, 1956). Produced and
directed by John Huston 38
4 .2 Saul Bass designed the advertising for
The Man with the Golden Arm (United
Artists, 1955). Produced and directed by
Otto Preminger 41
4.3 High Sierra (Warner Bros, 1941) reveals
a "crucial link" to Raoul Walsh's other
films. Produced by Mark Hellinger 44
5.1 "Interior meaning " in Whatever Happened
to Baby Jane? (Warner Bros/Seven Arts,
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111 ustrations
1962). Produced and directed by
Robert Aldrich 48
5.2 Ingmar Bergnun's "abstract" technique
in The Seventh Seal (Svensk Filmindustri,
1957). Produced by Allan Ekelund 52
6.1 Group can1araderie and the problem of
heroism in Only Angels Have Wings
(Columbia, 1939). Produced and
directed by Howard Hawks 58
6.2 Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) progresses
fron1 nature to culture in John Ford's
My Darling Clementi,ie (Twentieth
Century Fox, 1946). Produced by
San1uel G. Engel 62
7. 1 Vincente Minnelli's King of Kings
(MGM, 1961): A victim of executive
interference. Produced by Samuel
Bronston 66
7.2 The undermining of rationality in
Jacques Toumeur's Night of the Demon
(Colun1bia/Sabre Film Productions,
1957). Produced by Frank Bevis 69
8.1 John Huston's The Red Badge '!,{
Courage (MGM, 195 1): An example of
adaptation rather than creative
transformation. Produced by Gottfreid
Reinhardt 77
8.2 The,nes of subjectivity and guilt infonn
The Wron.~ Man (Warner Bros, 1956).
Produced and directed by Alfred
H itchcock 82
9.1 It's a Wondeifi1/ Life (RKO, 1946)
affim1s the values of bourgeois family
life. Produced and directed by Frank
Capra 8')
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VIII Illustrations

9.2 Alfred Hitchcock's Sl,ado1v of a Doubt 11,e Big Sleep (Warner Bros. 1946).
(Universal, 1943) reveals the oppression Produced by Howard Hawks 143
of dontinant ideology. Produced by 16.2 Apple-pie-in-the-face Americana in Hail
Jack H. Skirball 91 tl,e Co11querin~ Hero (Paramount, 1944).
11 . I The Hollywood image of the hired Produced, written, and directed by
killer in Fran~ois Truffaut's Tircz s11r II' Preston Sturges 144
pia11iste (Shoot tl,e Piano Player) 17.1 MGM's ren1ake of Be11-H11r, directed by
(Cocinor, 1960). Produced by Pierre William Wyler (1959), V1•as the product
Braunberger I 06 of several collaborators. Produced by
I 1.2 Jane Darwell as Ma Joad with Sam Zin1balist and William Wyler 153
Henry Fonda and Russell Simpson in 17.2 Les E11fa11ts du paradis (1945): A fihn
John Ford's 77,c Crapes of Wrath where the director (Marcel Came) was
(Twentieth Century Fox, 1940). clearly inferior to the writer (Jacques
Produced by Darryl F. Zanuck and Prevert). Produced by Rayn1ond
Nunnally Johnson I 08 Borderie and Fred Orain I 56
12. I Charlie Chaplin (with Paulette 18.1 Natalie Wood, John Wayne, and Jeffrey
Goddard) wrote, produced, directed, Hunter in John Ford's TI11• Sl'archl'rs
scored and starred in J\1oden, Tin,cs (Wan1er Bros, I 956). Produced by
(United Artists, 1936) 115 C. V. Whitney I6 I
13.1 Marlene [)ietric h's masculine clothing 19.I Mervyn LeRoy's Cold Di~l!ers ,if 1933:
in Josef von Sternberg·s Mor,1cc,, A definitive Warner Bros filn1 with
(Paran1ount, 1930). Produced by nn1sical sequences directed by Busby
Hector Turnbull 121 Berkeley. Produced by Robert Ward
13.2 C ary Grant and H.osalind [~usseU ,1s and Jack L. Wan1er 1711
the "traumatic presence" in His c;;r1 19.2 Edward G. Robinson in Mervyn
Friday (Colu,nbia. 1940). Produced LeRoy's Litrlt• Cae.<,,r (Wanter Bros/
and directed by Ho,vard Ha,vks 123 First National. I 931 ): A tiln1 that
14.1 Kate Winslett and Harvev, Keitel MGM never could have 1nadc.
ernbody the dyna111ics of gender Produced by Hal ll. Wallis and
politics in Jane Ca111pion ·s H,1/)• S111<1kc I )arryl F. Zanuck 171
(Miran1ax. 1999). Produced by Jan 20. I Cat Pl',,plc ( I 9 42). directed by Jacques
Chap1nan 131 Toun1eur, \Va~ one of producer-auteur
14.2 R.epress<·d ho111ot·roticisn1 in tht· action Val Le,vton's lo,\·-bud~et •
horror fihns
fil111: Kathryn Bigt·l1nv 's P,,i11t Bren/.: 111ade for llKC) IH.1
(T,ventieth (:entury Fox, 1991) . 20.?. Walter W angc·r ,vith cinen1aH11-,.,-;1pher
Product·d by Ja1 nes c:an1ero11 132 Russell H arlan on loc.ttion at San
15. 1 Uilly Uitzt'r provided the bravura Quentin durin~ production of ))on
r ;1111t·r.1,vork in Birr/, ,f ,, ,,:ati.111 Sit·gl'I's Ri<1t i11 <,'d/ Rh•,·k I I (Allied
(Eporh Fil111s, 19 I 5). Produced and Artists, I 'J"-1) . Produced by W.1ltt·r
directed bv , l).W. (; riflith 1.17 W angt'r. Photo c·olirtes,·. Wi,consin
'
15.2 C: hark·, Ro~her a nd Karl Stn1ss ( ~enter for Filn1 and l 'hcatcr llt'St'an:h I 87
c o ntributed the expre~~ionist 21. I c;rc·ta (;,1rbo \\Taring .. ht·r cro,vn in
rint·1n.1togr.1phy 1<1r F. W . Murnau 's ll oubt·n M.1111oulian 's ()11cr11 (J1n·"1i1111
S1111ri,r ( rox Fihn c:orp .. I 'J-:!.7). (M(; M , I '1.'\J) . l'rodu,<'d hY Waltt·r
Produced bv. Willia111 Fox I J•J W.lllf,:t'r 192
I(). I H1nvard Ha,\·ks dirt·cting H11n1phrt·y 21.2 /'er.,,,,,,, (Svt·1tsk riln1industri. l '16(,). a
Uo~.1rc
.. and Lau rt'n Uac1ll on the st·t of pt'r~on.11 tilin ,,-ritt,·11. produ ct'd. and

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directed by lngrnar Bergman that
nonetheless reveals the contributions of
the actresses (Bibi Andemon and Liv
Ullman) and cinematographer (Sven
Nykvist)
21 .3 The geranium n1etaphor in Grand
lllusion (1936) was the result of
collaboration between director Jean
Renoir and art director Eugene
Lourie. Produced by Alben Pinkovitch
and Frank Rollrner
22.1 The individual's private life is shattered
in Alfred Hitchcock's TI,e I.Ady Vanishes
(Gaumont British, 1938). Produced by
Edward Black
22.2 The Man Who Knew Too Much
(Gaumont British, 1934): The villain
(Peter Lorre) as the anarchic hean of
the universe. Produced by Michael
Balcon
22.3 Structure is theme in Alfred
Hitchcock's Psycho (Paramount, 1960).
Produced by Hitchcock and Alma
Reville
23.1 Fordian An1ericana with Will Rogers
in Judge Priest (Fox Film, 1934).
Produced by Sol Wurtzel
23.2 The lawyer and future president
(Henry Fonda) defends the family
and the Law in John Ford's Yo1111g Mr
Lincoln (Twentieth Century Fox,
1939). Produced by
Darryl F. Zanuck
24. 1 Written on the Wind (Universal-
International, 1956): Douglas Sirk's
melodramas are the opposite of a
distorting rnirror. Produced by Alben
Zugsmith
25.1 The Big Combo (Allied Artists, 1955)
was Joseph H . Lewis' last film in black
and white and his last .film noir.
Produced by Sidney Harmon
25.2 Peggy Cummins and John Dall as the
outlaw couple in Lewis' Gun Crazy
(King Bros/United Artists, 1949).
Produced by Frank King and Maurice
King
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Illustrations ix
26.1 Rohen Wiene's 11,e Cabinet of Dr
Caligari (Decla-Fihn, 1920): An early
exan1ple of authorship understood
within the Ron1antic category of art
194 cinema. Produced by Erich Ponuner 251
27. 1 Marlene Dietrich in Manpo1ver (Warner
Bros, 1941): Raoul Walsh's filnJS explore
the problem of the independent won1an.
Produced by Hal B. Wallis 257
27.2 Jane Russell with Agnes Moorhead in
195 Raoul Walsh's The Revolt of Mamie
Stover (Twentieth Century Fox, 1956).
Produced by Buddy Adler 259
28.1 A double site of female objectification
205 and bonding: Bubbles (Lucille Ball) and
Judy (Maureen O'Hara) in Dorothy
Arzner's Dance, Girl, Dance (RKO,
1940). Produced by Erich Ponuner and
Harry E . Edington 271
208 28.2 Studio ponrait of Dorothy Arzner 274
29.1 Kathryn Bigelow's The Loveless (Atlantic
FilnJS/ Pioneer Releasing, 1982) displays
the bikers in Brechtian tableau.
209 Produced by A. 1Gtn1an Ho and
Grafton Nunes 283
29.2 In Bigelow's Blue Steel (MGM, 1990).
217 Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis)
attempts to enter the phallic domain.
Produced by Lawrence Kasanotf 287
30. 1 Anhur Stuart (Christian Bale) and
glam rock friends in Todd Haynes's
Velvet Goldmine (Miramax, 1998).
224 Produced by Christine Vachon. Photo
counesy Photofest 296
30.2 In Far From Heaven (Focus Features,
2002) Haynes updates Douglas Sirk's
melodrarnas to address issues of race
230 and sexuality. Produced by Jody Patton
and Christine Vachon 300
31.1 White oppression is addressed in Withi11
011r Gates (Micheaux Fihn Corp.,
238 1920), produced and directed by Oscar
Micheaux 308
31.2 111e Girl from Chicago (Micheaux Fihn
Corp., 1932) is an example of
Micheaux's "crooked stick" stvle.
,
241 Produced by Oscar Micheaux 3 11
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X Illustrations

32.1 Spike Lee's Malcolm X (Warner Bros,
1992): Self-conscious authorship
within conventional narrative form.
Produced by Marvin Worth and
Spike Lee
32.2 Do the Right Thing (Universal, 1989):
Individual actions cannot solve complex
social issues. Written, produced, and
directed by Spike Lee 320
318

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 Preface: How to Use This Book
Today cnucs, while acknowledging the collabora-
tive nature of the ftlmmaking process, still discuss
directors - and occasionally producers, screenwriters,
cinematographers, and actors - as auteurs, although
such discussions are more grounded in historical,
industrial, and ideological contexts than in the past.
Despite the common view that its emphasis on indi-
vidual creative genius is an outdated concept,
auteurism and questions of authorship remain central
to much published filn1 scholarship as well as popular
writing. Books and articles on individual filmmakers
and actors continue to be published with undimin-
ished enthusiasm.
Similarly, in academic film studies, auteurism
remains a standard approach. First year survey courses
often contain a unit on auteur theory and criticism,
and more advanced undergraduate (as well as graduate
level) courses are taught under a variety of auteurist
rubrics. Film studies programs (or other programs
featuring some film courses) typically offer such
courses as "Authorship in the Cinema," "The Auteur
Director," "Film Authors," "Directors," "Major
Auteurs," "Great Filn1 Directors," and "The Film Art
,,
0f . . . .
This reader is designed to offer students in such
courses a comprehensive view of auteurism and
authorship in the cinema by addressing both the aes-
thetic and historical debates that these concepts have
generated, as well as by providing examples of auteur
criticism and analysis in practice. Some of the selec-
tions have been chosen for their historical significance,
for the influence they have had; others provide acces-
sible overviews or critiques of developn1ents in
auteurism; and still others (primarily those in the third
section) present a series of case studies of individual
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directors that discuss them from a range of critical and
theoretical perspectives. A short preface for each
reading contextualizes it within the evolving debate
about authorship in the cinenu. A select bibliography
at the end of each section provides further references
for those readers who wish to pursue the topics taken
up in the sections they conclude.
Part I, "Classic Auteur Theory," covers the begin-
nings of auteurism in France and its extension to
Britain and the US as well as the theoretical debates
that quickly ensued. Foundational polentical pieces by
Truffaut, Bazin, Sarris, and Kael set the terms of the
debate, while the others essays in the section place
the rise of classic auteurism within wider historical
and critical contexts. The essays in Part II, "The Con-
textS of Authorship," consider the limitations of
regarding the director as auteur given the collaborative
practicalities of the film making process, as well as the
creative role of others involved in film production.
Scriptwriters, producers, cinen1atographers, actors, and
studios are discussed in relation to auteurism. Part 111,
"Close Readings," addresses a range of theoretical
contexts involving authorship in the cinen1a such as
genre, the studio system, ideology, and issues of
gender, sexuality, and race. Together, these selections
offer a number of model readings by treating the
work of mainstream directors (John Ford, Alfred
Hitchcock, Howard H awks, Douglas Sirk, Frank
Capra, Kathryn Bigelow) whose films are likely to be
screened in a course on auteurism and authorship in
the cinema.
Each of the readings collected in this book engages
with others, whether to question or endorse, elaborate
or move beyond ideas they offer. Together, then, they
gather more meaning, providing readers with a n1ore
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
xii Preface

con1plete understanding of the complexities of the
idea of authorship in the cinema than in any of them
alone. In other words, collectively these essays become
more than n1erely the sun1 of them individually. While
this should be true of any good reader, it is particularly
appropriate for this one because the most important
lesson of auteurism has been to show us how to
understand individual films within the larger context
of a body of work.

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First and foren1ost I wish to extend n1y deep gratitude
to Jayne Fargnoli, Executive Editor at Blackwell
Publishing, for her unwavering support of and enthu-
siasm for this book from the outset. I am also indebted
to Ken Provencher, Senior Development Editor at
Blackwell, my point man for everything practical. His
calm demeanor and professional advice was indis-
pensable throughout the production process. Louise
Spencely was outstanding as project 1nanager, as was
copy-editor Mervyn Thomas.
My graduate student research assistant, Curtis
Maloley, did much of the preparatory legwork for the
n1anuscript even as he was loaded with students as a
teaching assistant.
I also owe thanks to the anonymous readers who
offered very helpful suggestions for in1proving the
reader as I originally proposed it. I'm sure they will sec
son1e of their comments reftected in its final form.
The editor and publisher gratefully acknowledge the
permission granted to reproduce the copyright mate-
rial in this book:
1 Fran~ois Truffaut, "A Certain Tendency of the
French Cinema," fron1 C ahiers d11 C it1e111a
in English 1. Originally published in French in
Cahiers du Cinema 31 (1954). © 1954. Reprinted
by pemussion of Cahiers du Cinema.
2 Andre Bazin, "De la politique des a11te11rs," pp. 137-
55 from Peter Graham (ed.), 11,e Nt:1v Wa,,c
(London: BFI/New York: Doubleday, 1968).
© 1968 by Peter Graham. lleprinted by pennis-
sion of BFI Publishing.
3 Ian Cameron, "Filn1s, Oirectors and Critics."
pp. 4--7 fron1 MCJvie 2 (I 962). © 1962.
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Acknowledgments
4 Andrew Sarris, "Notes on the Auteur Theory in
1962,'' pp. 1-8 from Film Culture 29 (Winter
1962/1963). © 1962 by Andrew Sarris. Reprinted
by pem1ission of the author.
5 Pauline Kael, "Circles and Squares," pp. 12- 26
from Film Quarterly 16, no. 3 (Spring, 1963).
6 Peter Wollen, "The Auteur Theory" (excerpt),
pp. 74--105 from Signs and Meaning i11 the Cinema,
3rd ed. (Bloonungton: Indiana University Press,
1972). © 1969, 1972 by Peter Wollen. Reprinted
by pennission of BF! Publishing.
7 V. F. Perkins, "Directions and Authorship"
(excerpt), pp. 167-86 fron1 Film as Film : Under-
standing and Judging Movies (Harmondsworth,
Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1972). © V . F. Perkins,
1972. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books
Ltd.
8 Edward Buscombe, "Ideas of Authorship,"
pp. 75-85 fron1 Scree11 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1973).
© 1973 by Edward Buscombe. Reprinted by
permission of the author and Screen.
9 Robin Wood, "Ideology, Genre, Auteur," pp. 1,
16, 18 fron1 Film Comment 13, no. 1 (January-
February 1977). © 1977 by The Film Society of
Lincoln Center. All rights reserved. Reprinted
by permission of the Film Society of Lincoln
Center.
10 Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author,"
pp. 142-8 from lmage!M11sic!Text, ed. and trans.
Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang,
1977). Originally published in French (1968).
C opyright © 1977 by Stephen Heath. Reprinted
by pemussion of H ill and Wang, a division of
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC and Editions du
Seu ii.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
XIV Acknowledgments
11 Charles W. Eckert, " The English Cine-
Structuralists," pp. 46-51 from Film Comment 9,
no. 3 (May-June 1973). © 1973 by Filn1
Comn1ent Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by
perm1ss1on of the Film Society of Lincoln
Center.
12 Graham Petrie, "Alternatives to Auteurs,"
pp. 27- 35 from Film Quarterly 26, no. 3 (Spring
1973) . © 1973. Reprinted by pernussion of The
Copyright Clearance Center, on behalf of Film
Quarterly.
13 Claire Johnston, "Women's Cinema as Counter-
Cinenia," from Notes on Women's Cinema (London:
Society for Education in Film and Television.
1973). © 1973.
14 Angela Manin, " Refocusing Authorship 1n
Women's Cinema," pp. 29-37 from Jacqueline
Levitin, Judith Plessis, and Valerie Raoul (eds.),
Women Filmmakers: Refocusing (Vancouver:
University of British Columbia Press, 2003).
© 2003 by University of British Columbia Press.
All rights reserved by the publisher. Reprinted
by pern1ission of UBC Press.
15 Richard Koszarski, "The Men with the Movie
Cameras," pp. 27-9 fron1 Film Comment 8,
no. 2 (Summer 1972) . © 1972 by Film Com-
ment Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by
permission of the Film Society of Lincoln
Center.
16 Richard Corliss, "Notes on a Screenwriter's
Theory. 1973," pp. xvii-x.xviii from Talki11~
Pictures: Screenwriters in the American Cinema 1927-
1973 (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1974).
© 1974 by Richard Corliss. Reprinted by per-
nussion of The Overlook Press.
17 Gore Vidal, "Who Makes the Movies?" pp. 35-9
from Nn11 York Review of Books (November 25,
1976). © 1976 by Gore Vidal. Reprinted by
permission of the author.
18 Peter Lehman, "Script/Perforn1ance/Text: Per-
formance Theory and Auteur Theory." pp. 197-
206 from Film Reader3 (Northwestern University).
© 1978 by Peter Lehrnan. Reprinted by perrt1is-
sion of the author.
19 Jerorne Christensen, "Studio Authorship."
Adapted fron1 "Studio Authorship, W ,1n1er 13ros
and 1111· Fo1111tai11/ic.id." pp. 17- 21 fron1 11,c
Velvrt Li~III Trap 57 (Sprin!:{ 200(,). :i.,'., 2007 by
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Jero111e Christensen. Used by pernussion of the
author.
20 Matthew Bernstein, "The Producer as Auteur.·•
New contribution.
21 Bruce Kawin, "Authorship, Design and Execu-
tion," pp. 291-301 fron1 Ho111 Movies Work (The
University of California Press 1992). Copyright
© 1992 by The Regents of The University of
California. Reprinted by permission of The
Copyright Clearance Center, on behalf of
The University of California Press.
22 Maurice Yacowar, "Hitchcock's ln1agery and
An," pp. 256-69 from Hitchcock's British Films
(Hamden, CT: Archon Books [Shoestring Press].
1977). © 1977 by Maurice Yacowar. Reprinted
by permission of the author.
23 Editors of Cahiers du Cinema, "John Ford's You11.11
Mr Lincoln" (excerpt). from Cahiers du Cinbna
223 (1970). Reprinted in Screen 13, no. 3 (1972).
•© 1970. Reprinted by permission of Cahiers du
Cinema.
24 Paul Willemen, "Towards an Analysis of the
Sirkian Systen1," pp. 128-34 from Screen 13,
no. 4 (Winter 197211973). © 1972 by Paul
Willemen. Reprinted by permission of the author
and Screen.
25 Paul Kerr, "My Name is Joseph H. Lewis."
pp. 48-67 fron1 Screen 24, nos. 4-5 Uuly/October
1983). © 1983 by Paul Kerr. Reprinted by per-
nussion of the author and Screen.
26 Michael Budd, "Authorship as a Con1modiry:
The Art Cinen1a and 11,e Cabinet of Dr Caligari,"
pp. 12-19 fron1 Wide A11~le 6. no. 1 (1984).
:fJ 1984 by Michael Budd. Reprinted by pemus-
sion of the author.
27 Pan1 Cook and Claire Johnston, "The Place of
Won1an in the Cinen1a of Raoul Walsh,"
pp. 93-109 front Phil Hardy (ed.). Raoul Walsh
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh Filn1 Festival, 1974).
,f; 1974 by Pan1 Cook and Claire Johnston.
Rt:printed by pen1ussion of Pam Cook.
28 Judith Mayne. "Ft:n1ale Authorship Reconsidered
(The Case of Dorothy Arzner)." pp. 89-105, 110--
15 fron1 ch. 5 of ·r1,c J,V,,111a11 at tl,e Keyhole:
l'l'111i11is111 ,111d H'i,111c11 's (.'i11r111a (Uloonungton and
lndi.111apolis: Indiana University Press, 1990).
•t', IIJ!JO by Judith Mayne. Reprinted by permis-
sion of the author and Indiana University Press.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Acknowledgments
29 Barry Keith Grant, "Man's Favorite Spon?: The
Action Films of Kathryn Bigelow," pp. 371- 84
from Yvonne Tasker (ed.), Action and Adventure
Cinema (London and New York: Routledge,
2004). © 2004 by Barry Keith Grant. Reprinted
by pemussion of the author.
30 Michael DeAngelis, "Authorship and New Queer
Cinema: The Case of Todd Haynes." Revised
version of "The Characteristics of New Queer
Filnunaking: Case Study - Todd Haynes,"
pp. 42-51 from Michele Aaron (ed.), Nnv Queer
Cinema: A Critical Reader (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2004). © 2004 by
Michael DeAngelis. Used by pemussion of the
author.
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xv
31 J. Ronald Green, "Twoness and the Filn1 Style
of Oscar Micheaux." Chapter 3 from Sraight hick:
The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux (Bloonungton and
London: Indiana University Press, 2007. © 2000
by J . Ronald Green. Reprinted by pemussion of
the author and publisher.
32 S. Craig Watkins, "Spike's Joint" (excerpt),
pp. 15~6 from ch. 5 of Representin~ Hip Hop
Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
© 1998 by S. Craig Watkins. Reprinted by per-
mission of the author and The University of
Chicago Press.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Original from
Digitized by Google -tfNNERSITY OF MICHlGAN
•

Ilobin Wood began his 1965 landmark auteurist
book Hitchcock's Films by pointedly asking "Why
should we take Hitchcock seriously?" Although no
one needs to ask this question today, with Hitchcock's
critical reputation well established, it was crucial at the
time, when auteurisn1 was just beginning to take root
in America. Noting that if the cinema was regarded
as an art like the other arts, then the question would
be unnecessary, Wood proceeded in his book to answer
it by offering an extended and convincing analogy
between the films of this popular Hollywood director
and the Elizabethan plays of William Shakespeare, and
proposing a consistent theme in the films whereby
spectators are forced to confront their own unac-
knowledged darker in1pulses and thus come to tem1s
with them (Wood, 1965: 9 ff.). The proposition that
a popular filmmaker, an entertainer, might express a
personal vision, explore ethical and n1etaphysical issues
as the best artists in the traditional arts do, was at the
time almost heretical in the context of traditional
aesthetics. Such views were reserved for canonical
writers like Shakespeare or Wordsworth or George
Eliot, but certainly not appropriate for popular n1ovies
and their makers. Hollywood cinenu was generally
thought of not as art but as mass entertainment
produced by an industry that anthropologist
Hortense Powdem1aker fan1ously called "the dream
.
,actory. ''
Yet despite the seis1nic changes in critical fashion
during the past half century, auteurisn1 - at its n1ost
basic, the idea that there is an author to a fihn - has
been central to the historical development of both
popular film culture and serious filn1 criticisrn and
theory. Aspects of auteurism have overlapped with
vinually every subsequent critical theory and para-
Digitized by Google
Introduction
digin. Considered radical when it was first introduced,
the claim that some directors may express an individ-
ual vision, a worldview, over a series of filnJS with
stylistic and thematic consistency is now simply
common wisdon1 in everyone's understanding not
only of cinema, but also of other forms of popular
culture, fron1 music to sports to comic books. The
concept of authorship has been seized upon by
the culture industry ("from the producer who brought
you xxx") as a marketing tool. Seeping into common
consciousness and discourse as a way of understanding
popular art, auteurism has had enormous influence on
culture as well as criticisn1.
While it may be difficult for readers today to
imagine, the debate generated by what Penelope
Houston, editor of the venerable British film maga-
zine Sight and Sound, in the heat of the fray called " the
rather repellent title" of the auteur theory (Houston,
1963: 159) was once intense and passionate. C ritical
barbs went back and forth in the pages of film jour-
nals, cultural periodicals, and the popular press. As
Charles Eckert writes in his overview of the later
debate involving auteur-structuralisrn, reprinted in
this collection: "There is so much oversimplification.
obtuseness, and downright unfairness running through
the whole debate that one must resist the ten1ptation
to leap in." Several public feuds ensued, the most
celebrated of which was the ongoing war of words
between Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, two influ-
ential critics who developed wide, devoted readerships
largely through their colurnns in New York's Vil/axe
Voice and Ne1v Yorker rnagazine, respectively. Arthur
Knight. filn1 reviewer for Saturday Review, put it rather
delicately when he said that auteurisrn was "currently
stirring in the teacups of our n1ore recondite filrn
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
2 Introduction
critics" (Knight, 1963). It surely was n1ore than a
tempest in a teapot when Dwight Macdonald, a well-
known cultural voice of the day and author of an
in1portant critical attack on the debasing nature of
popular culture, parted ways with Film Quarterly
because he refused to be associated with a magazine
that included a critic (Sarris) who could be of the
opinion that Hitchcock in Tire Birds (1962) was "at
the summit of his artistic powers" (Magid, 1964: 70).
It all began with Francois Truffaut's manifesto, "A
Certain Tendency of the French Cinema," which
appeared in the January 1954 issue (no. 31) of Cahiers
du Cinema, a major French film journal founded in
1951 , and also reprinted here. In the article Truffaut
attacked French cinen1a's "Tradition of Quality," a
cycle of literate films that were considered among the
nation's best cinema, and called for an alternative
"cinema des auteurs" of n1ore personal directors who
also write their own scripts. The idea began to char-
acterize the writings and reviews of the magazine
through the 1950s and developed into a critical
practice for such critics and soon-to-be New Wave
directors as Truffaut,Jean-Luc Godard.Jacques Rivette,
Eric Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol, who discussed
movies as an expression of the director. In French
culture, cinema had been taken seriously as an art
form almost fron1 its inception, and even before
Truffaut, in 1948, Alexandre Astruc published an
essay entitled "The Birth of the Avant Garde: Le
Camera Stylo," in which he imagined cinema devel-
oping as an art to the point that the camera would
function like a pen for a writer and the in1age would
"become a n1eans of writing just as flexible and subtle
as written language" (Astruc, 1968: 18). So Truffaut's
use of the French term "auteur" to ,nean "author" in
regard to film was perhaps less provocative than apply-
ing it in the Hollywood context, where, as studio
mogul Samuel Goldwyn was reputed to have said. if
you have to send a n1cssage use Westt·rn Un.ion. The
Calriers critics had a more in1mediate pragrnatic goal
inforn1ing their aesthetic. as the y \Vere looking to
break into the filn1 industry bv creating the conditions
that were 111ore hospitable co the production of less
expensive, n1ore personal filn1s. The banner of auteur-
i~n1 co ntributt·d significantly to that ai1n in large part
by providing a distinct identity tor the rnagazine and
its conuibutors. But its legacy has had considerably
widt•r i111pact.
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Many were shocked by these critics• serious embrace
of Hollywood filn1s, and the mention of names like
Frank Tashlin, Vincente Minnelli, and Samuel Fuller
alongside such sacrosanct figures as D.W. Griffith.
Carl Dreyer, and Sergei Eisenstein. After all, during
the studio era directors were contract employees, like
actors, electricians. and editors, assigned to projects by
the head office. Even those few directors who wielded
so,ne degree of clout ("the name above the title") in
Hollywood, like Hitchcock or Frank Capra, had to
work within the parameters of the producing studio's
dominant style or genre. Rarely did they have the
right to final cut. But the young critics of Cahiers,
taken with the kinetic, robust appeal of the
Hollywood genre movies they discovered after World
War 2, doggedly proceeded to look for film authors in
this least likely of places. If they could find an author,
an artist, even in n1ovies from Hollywood, which was
based on a Fordist, assembly line model, men surely
cinema was an art and filn1makers were artists.
Cahiers' embrace of Hollywood cine1na was shared
by the British film journal Movie, which began publi-
cation in 1962. As its nan1e implies, tile magazine
championed popular film, devoting much of its content
to auteurist discussions of and interviews with such
directors as Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, and
such in1portant postwar Hollywood directors as
Nicholas Ray and Otto Prenunger. In the magazine's
first issue that Spring, its writers deliberately set out to
provoke established critical orthodoxy by including a
chart ranking n1ajor directors of the day. In the top
category of "Great" there were only two names -
Hawks and Hitchcock (John Ford only made it to tile
third level, "Very Talented") - while most of the
British filn1makers were lun1ped into the bottom two
categories, "Con1pctent or Ambitious" and the igno-
1ninious "The Rest." The magazine·s contributors,
such as V.F. Perkins, Charles Barr, and, most impor-
tantly, Robin Wood, elicited the ire of established
British critics such as Houston, who regarded auteur-
is,n as abandoning traditional hu,nanist values. But the
writing ot these critics ofi:en cen1pered the more exces-
sive clairns and abstractions of the Cal,it·rs group with
textual evidence, that is. discussion of specific shots
and carncra 111ove1nents. Wood published a series of
bnok-len1-,>th auteur studies. including Hitclrcock 's Films
( I 965). n1t·ntiont'd above. ;111d H,111•ard Hc111,ks (1972).
that ~vcrc ext'n1plary (and for that reason widely
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Introduction
influential) in providing close textual analysis with
elegantly reasoned arguments about the director's
vision and the moral value to which it speaks.
In the US Andrew Sarris opened the floodgates of
critical scorn in 1962 by calling the approach "the
auteur theory." In that classic essay, also reprinted here,
Sarris offers a questionable but nonetheless influential
theoretical framework, conceived as three concentric
circles with the innerntost, "interior meaning,"
achieved only by the few true auteurs, somewhat anti-
climactically concluding with the admission that the
best he could do was merely to point to interior
meaning when he saw it. Sarris seems in the end to
wind up no further ahead than Jacques Rivette a
decade earlier who, in reviewing Hawks' Monkey
Business (1952), had mystically declared that "The
evidence on the screen is proof of Hawks's genius:
you only have to watch Monkey Business to know that
it is a brilliant film. Some people refuse to admit this,
however; they refuse to be satisfied by proo( There
can't be any other reason why they don't recognize
it" (Rivette, 1962: 19). Such a tautological statement
seems fundamentally opposed to the very idea of criti-
cism, which is to present an aesthetic argument about
a work. Sarris' description of the distinguishing quality
of the auteur as an "elan of the soul" (a ternt he bor-
rowed from Astruc) was both mystical, as he himself
explicitly feared, and mystifying.
Sarris continued the trend established by both
Cahiers and Movie of ranking directors in auteurist
terms by presenting his "pantheon" of great auteurs
and then, in his major and groundbreaking work, The
American Cinema, published in 1968, ranking every
imponant director in the history of Hollywood. Sub-
sequently every aspiring auteurist had his or her own
pantheon, whether orthodox or quirky. In his book
on American screenwriters, which explicitly acknowl-
edges its indebtedness to Sarris' work, Richard Corliss
even included with his introduction, also reprinted
here, an Acropolis chart in which he ranked the 40
screenwriters he goes on to discuss. Sarris repeatedly
argued that the least satisfying film of an auteur is
better than the most interesting work by a director
who isn't, a view that seemed for some to foster the
very cult of personality about which French critic and
editor of Caliiers in its peak auteurist days, Andre
Bazin, warned in his own discussion of the auteur
theory, reprinted here as well. As Sam Rhodie opined:
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3
"The best, the select, sit in state, enthroned on Mt.
Olympus, a theological, near transcendent classical
pantheon of creators" (Rhodie, 1971: 10).
If such rankings rank.led, so did the auteurists'
grand claims regarding the relationship between
the auteur and his material. In Cahiers, writing on
Nicholas Ray's Party Girl (1958), Fereydoun Hoveyda
adntitted that the film's subject is "idiotic," but
nevertheless followed with the challenge "So what?''
(Hoveyda, 198 I: 42). Hoveyda 's rhetorical question
assun1es that content is only ntinimally related to style,
and that the true meaning of an auteur's film lies
below the surface content. Chabrol went so far as to
offer the outrageous proposition in Cahiers that the
more trivial the narrative (surface level) of a film,
the more room there is for the director to express
his vision through sty.le (Chabrol, 1968: 77). Such a
concept was opposite to the traditional values of unity
in art, where ideally artists use all the elements of
their medium harmoniously for an expressive purpose.
Once auteurism caught on, there was a rush to erect
new auteurs out of previously unacknowledged Hol-
lywood stalwarts like Raoul Walsh, Frank Tashlin,
Don Siegel, and Edgar G. Ulmer and interesting
postwar directors like Delmer Daves. For a rime, it
seemed enough to find a "personality" in a given
director's films, regardless of the actual qualities of
that personality. As Truffaut later remarked, while he
and the Cahiers group had discovered auteurs, his
successors invented them.
But as criticism and cultural theory grew more
aware of and concerned with issues of ideology in the
1970s, the concept of the author changed from
the comparatively nai've and intpressionistic romanti-
cism of classic auteurism, in which the director's world
view was inscribed into the film by force of his (rarely
her) personality, to a more rigorous, even "scientific"
consideration of the film text. Embracing the new
n1ethodologies of sentiotics and structuralism, critics
becan1e more concerned with how films signified
their meaning than with what they signified. In 1958
Godard had boasted of auteurism's romantic basis,
declaring in a piece on Swedish director lngn1ar
Berginan that "The cinema is not a craft. It is an art.
It does not mean teamwork. One is always alone; on
the set as before the blank page," adding that "Nothing
could be n1ore classically ron1antic" (Godard, 1972:
77). For this reason auteurs such as Fritz Lang. Orson
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
4 Introduction
Welles, and Erich von Stroheim gained additional
status, their compromised careers casting then1 as
visionaries victimized by the systen1. Yet now Roland
Barthes and others were clain1ing that the author no
longer carried authority over the meaning of the text,
and that auteurs were defined apart from their cultural
contexts. As San1 Rhodie put it, "Auteurs are out of
ti1ne. The theory which makes them sacred makes
no inroad on vulgar history, has no concepts for the
social or the collective, or the national" (Rhodie,
1971: 10).
Influenced by Barthes and British theorist Stuart
Hall, the newly emerging approach of reception
studies suggested that textual meaning was not inher-
ent in the text and could be appropriated by readers.
Thus the author, in John Caughie's words, n1oved
frorn "standing behind the text as a source (to becon1e]
a term in the process of reading and spectating"
(Caughie, 1981: 200). In 1972, Peter Wollen rnade a
crucial distinction between Howard Hawks, an actual
biological person and an authorial source, and " Howard
Hawks," a critical concept that serves as one of many
codes that organize the discourse of the fihns which
bear his name. Thus the director was no longer an
artist but a conceptual construct that linked a series
of film texts, no longer an individual genius but a
reading strategy. Ironically, Robin W ood, once criti-
cized for writing so seriously about Hitchcock and
Hawks, now was singled out for attack as an "unre-
constructed humanist." Influenced by structuralis1n,
film theorist Geoffrey Nowell-S1nith argued that the
aim of the auteur approach was to uncover behind
"the superficial contrasts of subject and treatn1ent a
structural hard core of basic and often recondite
111otifs" (Nowell-Smith, 1968: I 0), although politi-
cally oriented critical theory now sa,v the auteur's
personality as itself shaped by the ideolot-,'Y his filn1s
embodied. In France, in the wake of the events of
May 1968, a new editorial board for Ct1liicrs du (~i11h1111
grew more political and theoretical. T aking a position
opposed to classic auteurisn1, they published a collec-
tively written article on John Ford's Y,11111.l.' ,\:Ir Li11n,/11
(1939), exn:rpted in this volun1e, that oHi.-red an
exha ustively detailed analysis o f the tilrn shov,ing hov.·
it ,v:1s affi.· cted by studio politics, thl· I )l'pression, and
cultural code~ of repn·~entation, all of ,vhich art· Sl't'II
.1s inAnencing thl· filrn as n1uch a~ th e director·~ per-
sonal artistrv.
'
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Hitchcock and his filn1s becan1e "the Hitchcock
text" and Lang and his movies "the Lang text." Writ-
ing specifically on Lang, Stephen Jenkins struggled to
resolve the new theoretical paradigrns with already
old- fashioned auteurism: writing a book on Lang's
films, he offers as justification the fact that "'Lang' here
is a space where a multiplicity of discourses intersect,
an unstable, shifting configuration of discourses pro-
duced by the interaction of a specific group of films
(Lang's filmography) with particular, historically and
socially locatable ways of reading/ viewing those films ..
(Jenkins, 1981: 7). As one critic now defined the
concept of the author, pushing it to the point that it
see111S to disappear entirely within a chorus of dis-
courses, he:
is a juncture of rnultiple codes (representational, narrativ<·.
iconographic, cincn1atic, cultural) and multiple practic<'>
(production. prornotion, reading. critical reading, theo-
retical analysis). The collc:ctivt' voic.:. generated by this
nexus of codes and practices and rnanifc:sted as the
author-function, is ultiniately a cultural voice imbued
,vith a culturally defined world view that invades every
aspect of the fihn's representation. (Sa.'<ton, 1986: 29)
Ultin1ately, however, the death of the author, like that
of Mark Twain, was gready exaggerated. Already in
1988 fil111 scholars were noticing "a renewed auteur
interest" and opining that the "poststructuralist period
of 'the death of the author' " was waning (Telotte,
1988: 42). For despite the 111ost excessive clai111S of its
adherents, auteurisn1 in fact never entirely ignored the
historical contexts in which directors worked. It is
for this reason that Wollen famously concludes that
Ford is a better director than Hawks, because whereas
Hawks was ren1arkably consistent throughout his
career, it is the "richness of the shifting relations
between antinornies in Ford's \vork that n1akes him a
great artist." By the I 980s 111ost adherents of auteurisn1
\vould agree ,vith llayn1ond Durgnat's sensible obser-
v.1tion that "Kiss A-1c Dc:adly isn't i111portant because it
tells us anything about an individual called Robert
Aldrich. Aldrich is in1portanr l-iec1use Kiss Mt Deadly
r<•veals ~0111ething about A111t·ric;1. and about us all"
(l)urgnat, 19(,7: 7(,).
Sarris va!-,'1.lely dl•finl·d interior 111c:J11ing as "extra-
polated frorn the tension b<·n.veen a director's
pc:rson:1lity and his rnatt·rial." .111d although he fails to
l'Xpl,1in ,vh.1t thi~ 111c:ins, it 111.1y be understood. at least
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Introduction
within the context of classic Hollywood cinema, as
the way a director mobilizes, inflects, or deploys the
elements of genre he was obliged to use. Genre pro-
vides a frame within which auteurs can animate
conventions and iconography to their own purpose.
While of course some directors floundered against the
pressures of the studio system, many in fact flourished,
using the rules of genre as convenience rather than
constraint, as guidelines front which to deviate rather
than blueprints to follow . As Robin Wood explains in
his comparison of films by Hitchcock and Capra
in this collection, the received framework of
Hollywood's genre systen1 gave filmmakers a flexible
tradition within which to work. Clearly, son1e direc-
tors developed their vision within particular genres,
such as Ford with the western, Fuller with the war
fihn, and Douglas Sirk with melodrama. In short, the
auteur approach provides a way of looking at directors'
sryle foregrounded against the background of genre.
As Lawrence Alloway notes, "the personal contribu-
tion of many directors can only be seen fully after
typical iconographical elen1ents have been identified"
(Alloway, 1971: 41). And genres, of course, are inti-
mately connected to social and historical forces.
Beginning with Cahicrs' practice of assigning
reviews to writers who already admired the work of
that director, a filn1 was implicitly if not forthrightly
regarded as good if one could find son1ething of the
director in it. And, of course, if the director was an
auteur, one always could. As a result, auteurisn1 lost its
abiliry to function as an evaluative tool. But there is
no doubt that auteurism's great legacy is that it
encouraged a n1ore serious exanunation of the movies
beyond mere "entertainn1ent" and helped move the
nascent field of film studies beyond its literary begin-
nings to a consideration of film's visual qualities. While
structuralism and sentiotics ultimately seem lintited in
References
Allow2y, Lawrence. Vii>lrnl Amrrirn : 77,r ;\1<>11ies. t 94(,- I 964. New
York: Museun1 of Modem An. I ')71.
Astruc. Alcnndre. '"The Uinh of a New Av,nt-Garde: La Cam,·ra-
Stylo ... In 71,r Nnv ~Vav,·, ed. Peter Graham . Garden City. NY :
Doubleday. 1968: 17-2.3. . Lon.Ion: F,bcr and FJb<r. 1967.
Caughie, John, ed. J7,r,,rir.c ,f .-!111/1o•r.<l1il'. l.o ndo n ,nd Boston :
Roudcdrcc & Ke!{"' Paul/ 13riush Filn, ln~titute. I' ll! I.
Digitized by Google
5
film analysis, in part because they tend to en1phasize
narrative over the visual aspects of texts, auteurisn1 was
in fact responsible for shifting critical focus from story
to sryle, from content to fonn, and for showing how
form was crucial in shaping content. Already in 1960
Richard Roud, in his attack on auteurisn1, was forced
to concede that the n1ain thing we might gain &0111
the auteurists is to accept that "form is at least as
in1portant as content" (Roud, 1960: 171). To appreci-
ate the extent to which auteuris1n has filtered through
popular culture, we need only note how John Ford's
reputation has been reversed, so that now his major
works are seen to be such westerns as Stagecoach
(1939), TI,e Searchers (1956), and TI,e Man Hl/10 Shot
LJberty Valance (1962) rather than the overtly socially
conscious prestige pictures such as 11,e Informer (1935)
and 11,e Grapes of Wrath (1940), once touted as his
most in1portant works. Auteurism's reassessment of
An1erican film history, which Sarris clai1ned was its
most important function, has had profound impact on
cultural ta~te.
Because of its usefulness in understanding and
appreciating the role and function of artistic expres-
sion in contemporary mass n1edia, the auteur approach
has also been applied convincingly to artists in other
fonm of popular culture such as television and popular
music, and it has become one of the paradigms for
how consumers think about works of popular culture
in all n1edia. Auteurisn1 has become con1mon dis-
course in popular culture, and, indeed, a vital part of
popular culture as an institution. As Sarris observed
in 1993, thirty years after he announced that hence-
forth la politique des a11te11rs (an argument for auteurs)
would be called the auteur theory, its "ultimate vin-
dication" is that MTV was including the director's
na1ne at the beginning and end of every 1nusic video
(Grimes, I 993: 9).
Ch,hrol. Claude. .. Little Them<s."· In 7711· ,'\/,-,,, II ·, ,,,·. ed.
Peter Graham. G,rd<n City. NY: L>oubled,y. l '11.!l:
73-9.
Duri.m2t. Raymond. Fi/rm a11d F.·d i,~s. C,mhridi:<. MA: MIT Press/
Godard. Jt.~:.1 11-luc. "Ot"rgruanoranu:• In G(,c/ard ,,,r (~,,fo,d. l'd. and
trans. Tom Miln<·. New York : Vikin~. 197::!.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
6 Introduction
Grinies. Williwi. "The Auteur Theory of Filni: Holy or Just Full of
Holes?" New York Timts (20 February 1993): C9, CIS.
Houston, Penelope. "The Figure in the Carpet." Sight and Sound 32,
no. 4 (Autumn 1963): 159--64.
Hoveycb. Fereydoun. "la rcponse de Nicholas Ray." In Thtorirs of
Authorship, ed. John Caughie. London and Boston: Routledge &
Kegan Paul/ British Film lrutirute, 1981 : 42-3.
Jenkins. Stephen, ed. Fritz Lang: 11tt /mag, and tht Loolt. London:
British Film Institute. 1981.
Macdonald, Dwight. "A Theory of Mass Culrurc." In Mass Culturr:
Tht Popular Arts in Amtrita. ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David
Manning White. New York: Free Press/London: Collier
Macmillan. 1964: 59-73.
Magid, Marion. "Auteur! Auteur!" Comn1tt11ary 37. no. 3 (March
1964): 7<>-4.
Knight, Arthur. "The Auteur Theory." Saturday Rtvin,• (May 4 1%3):
22.
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. Visconti. Garden City. NY: Doublecby /
London: British Film Institute. 1968.
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Rhodie, Sam. "Education and Criticism: Notes on Work 10 Be
Done." &run 12, no. I (Spring 1971): '>-13.
Rivette. Jacques. "The Genius of Howard Hawks." Movie 5 (Decem-
ber 1962): 1'>-20. The article originally appeared in Cahirr.< du
Cinlma 23 (May 1953).
Roud, Richard. "The French line." Sight and Sound 29. no. 4
(Aurumn 1960): 166-71.
Sarris. Andrew. Tht Amtritan Cinmra: Dirtdors and Dirr<tions, 1929-
1968. New York: Dunon, 1968.
Saxton, Christine. "The Collective Voice a.s C ultural Voice." Ci11rma
Journal 26. no. I (Fall 1986): 19-30.
Tclone, J.P. "Introduction" to Annual Bibliography of Film
Studies, Post Script 7: 3 (Summer 1988): 42.
Wood. Robin. Hitchcock's Films. London: Zwemmer/ New York:
A.S. Barnes, 1965.
Wood. Robin. Hitchcock's Films Rn•isittd. revised ed. New York:
Columbia University Press. 2002
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Part I
Classic Auteur Theory

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 Original from
Digitized by Google UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 1
A Certain Tendency of
the French Cinema
Fran~ois Truffaut

Francois Truffaut began his career as a film critic writing for Cahiers du Cinema beginning in
1953. He went on to become one of the most celebrated and popular directors of the French
New Wave, beginning with his first feature film, Les Ouatre cents coup ( The Four Hundred
Blows, 1959). Other notable films written and directed by Truffaut include Jules et Jim (1962),
The Sfoly of Adele H. (1975), and L'Argent de Poche (Small Change, 1976). He also acted
in some of his own films, including L'Enfant Sauvage (The Wild Child, 1970) and La Nult
Americain (Day for Night, 1973). He appeared as the scientist Lacombe in Steven Spielberg's
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Truffaut's controversial essay, originally published
in Cahiers du Cinema in January 1954, helped launch the development of the magazine's
auteurist practice by rejecting the literary films of the "Tradition of Quality" in favor of a cinema
des auteurs in which filmmakers like Jean Renoir and Jean Cocteau express a more personal
vision. Truffaut claims to see no ·peaceful co-existence between this 'Tradition of Quality' and
an 'auteur's cinema.'· Although its tone is provocative, perhaps even sarcastic, the article
served as a touchstone for Cahiers, giving the magazine's various writers a collective identity
as championing certain filmmakers and dismissing others.

These notes have no other object than to atte111pt to These ten or t\velve filnis constitute what has been
define a certain tendency of the French cine111a - a prettily na111ed the ·'Tradition of Quality"; they force. by
tendency called "psychological realisn1" - and to their an1bitiousness, the ad1niration of the foreign press,
sketch its lin1its. defend the French flag twice a year at Cannes and at
Venice where, since 1946, they regularly carry otr
n1edals, golden lions and grands prix.
Ten or Twelve Films With the advent of"talkies," the French cinen1a \Vas
a frank plagiaris1n of the An1erican cinema. Under the
If the French cine111a exists by n1eans of about a influence of Scarface, we 1nade the an1using Le Pepe
hundred filrns a year, it is we-II understood that only l\4oko. Then the French scenario is n1ost clearly obliged
ten or twelve n1erit the attention of critics and cine- to Prcvert for it~ evolution: Q11ai Des Bn1111es (!'(>rt () (
philes. the attention, therefore of (:ahit'rs. Sh,1do11•s) rcn1ains the 111asterpiece of pot'lic rca/i.;111.

Fr.mr o1, Tn,ffauc. .. A c ..-n.un T ..-ndvnr y (),. tht· rr~·o,·h C111n u.1, .. t'rt\111 C.1111,·r; du Cw, m ,I Ill Fll!,,:li,h I. (.)n~1u.1lly 5,111'h,ht"d IU Fr("lll'h Ill C.\iJ,,.,,> du Cw, Jll,I ·' 1
(1 '>5 -t). i_·· 1954. Rcrnmc:d hy pt:n111i.thm 1\f C,,lun., .Ju C 111m1J.

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 • •

10 Fran~ois Truffaut

Figure 1. I Quai dr1 Brrm1r1 (Port ~( S ha1/,,w1) (Ciru'-Alli2ncr. 1938): A m.istrrpiccc of Lhe TrJdtt,on of Quality.
dircctlCd by Marcd Carne and written by Jacqu,·< Pn;vcn. Produced by Gregor R abmovnch

The war and the post- v.rar period renewed our
cinen1a. It evolved under the effect of an internal
pressure and for poetic realis111 - about which one
might say chat it died closing Les Portes De La N 11i1
behind it - was substi tuted psyd,ologiral realis,11 , illus-
trated by Claude Autant- Lara. Jean Delan noy. Ren e
C le1ncnc, Yves Aliegrec and Marcel PagJiero.
Scenarists' Films
If one is -.villing co ren1 en1bcr chat not so lo ng ago
Oelannoy filmed Le & ss11 and La Parr De L'0111brr,
C laude Autanc- Lara Lt· P/0111bier A111011re11x and Lcuri·s
D'A111011r, Yves Aliegret La &ire A 11x Rc,,cs and Les
Dt 111011s De L 'A u/11·. that all these filn1s :ire j ustly recog-
nized as strictl y co111111ercial en1erprist·s. one ,vill adn1it
that. the successes o r failures of these ci neastes bei ng a
function of the scrnarios the y chose, La Sr111pl1ll11ie
l'astorah•, Le Diab/I' A 11 C,,,,,,s (Devil In 11,e Flesh), Jc11.--.:
lnterdirs (Forbidden Ca111es), /l'/1111~1!,<'S. Un Hon1111r Marc/re
Dans La Ville are essentially sce11arists ' .fil11is.
Today No One is Ignorant Any Longer .. .
After having sounded o ut directing by 1nakmg t\vo
forgotten shorts, Jean Aurenche becan1e a specialist in
adaptation. In 1936. he was credited. -.vith Anouilh,
with th e dialogue for l,011s N'Ave.;: Rie11 A Declarer
and Les De~o11rdis Dt· La I le.
At the san,e time Pierre Bost \ Vas publishing excel-
lent little novels at the N .R..F.
Aurenche and Do,t -.vorked together fo r the fint
ti1ne while :idapting and ,..,ricing dialogue for D011rc,
directed by C laude Autant-L1ra.
T od:iy, no one is ignorant any lo nger of the fuct
that Aurenche and Bost rehabilitated adaptation by
upsetting old preconceptio ns of being faithful to
the letter and ~ubstiruting tor it the co ntrary idea of

Digitized by Google Orig in al from

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema
being faithful to the sp1nt to the point that this
audacious aphorism has been written: "An honest
adaptation is a betrayal" (Carlo Rim, " Traveling and
Sex-Appeal").
In adaptation there exists ftlmable scenes and unfilm-
able scenes, and that instead of omitting the latter (as
was done not long ago) it is necessary to invent equiva-
lent scenes, that is to say, scenes as the novel's author
would have written them for the cinema.
" Invention without betrayal" is the watchword
Aurenche and Bost like to cite, forgetting that one
can also betray by omission.
The system of Aurenche and Bost is so seductive,
even in the enunciation of its principles, that nobody
even dreamed of verifying its functioning close-at-
hand. I propose to do a little of this here.
The entire reputation of Aurenche and Bost is
built on two precise points: 1. Faithfulness to the spirit
of the works they adapt: 2. The talent they use.
That Famous Faithfulness ...
Since 1943 Aurenche and Bost have adapted and
written dialogue for: Douce by Michel Davet, LA
Symphonie Pastorale by Gide, Le Diable Au Corps by
Radiguet, Un Recteur A L'lle De Sein (Dieu A Besoin
Des Hommes - God Needs Men) by Queffelec, Les Jeux
lnconnus aeux Interdits) by Fran~ois Boyer, Le Blc En
Herbe by Colette.
In addition, they wrote an adaptation of Journal
D'Un Cure De Campagne that was never filmed, a
scenario on Jeanne D'Arc of which only one part has
been made (by Jean Delannoy) and, lastly, scenario and
dialogue for L'Auberge Rouge (The Red Inn) (directed
by Claude Autant-Lara).
You will have noticed the profound diversity of
inspiration of the works and authors adapted. In order
to accomplish this tour de force which consists of
remaining faithful to the spirit of Michel Davet, Gide,
Radiguet, Queffelec, Fran~ois Boyer, Colette and
Bernanos, one must oneself possess, I imagine, a sup-
pleness of spirit, a habitually geared-down personality
as well as singular eclecticism.
You must also consider that Aurenche and Bost are
led to collaborate with the most diverse directors: J ean
Delannoy, for exan1ple, sees himself as a n1ystical n1or-
alist. But the petty n1eanness of G ar(<'tl Sa11PaJ/e (Savage
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11
Triangle), the shabbiness of LA Minute De Verite, the
insignificance of LA Route Napoleon show rather clearly
the intermittent character of that vocation.
Claude Autant-Lara, on the contrary, is well known
for his non-conformity, his "advanced" ideas, his wild
anti-clericalism; let us recognize in this cineaste the
virtue of always remaining, in his films, honest with
himself.
Pierre Bost being the technician in tanden1, the
spiritual element in this communal work seen1S to
come from Jean Aurenche.
Educated by the Jesuits, Jean Aurenche has held on
to nostalgia and rebellion, both at the same time. His
flirtation with surrealism seemed to be out of sympa-
thy for the anarchists of the thirties. This tells how
strong his personality is, also how apparently incom-
patible it was with the personalities of Gide, Bernanos,
Queffelec, Radiguet. But an examination of the works
will doubtless give us more information.
Abbot Amdee Ayffre knew very well how to analyse
LA Symphonie Pastorale and how to define the relation-
ship between the written work and the filmed work:
"Reduction of Faith to religious psychology in the
hands of Gide, now becomes a reduction to psychology,
plain and simple . . . with this qualitative abasement we
will now have, according to a law well- known to aes-
theticians, a corresponding quantitative augmentation.
New characters are added: Piette and Casteran, charged
with representing certain sentiments. Tragedy becomes
drama, melodrama" (Dieu Au Cinema, p. 131).
What Annoys Me .. .
What annoys me about this famous process of equiva-
lence is that I'm not at all certain that a novel contains
unfilmable scenes, and even less certain that these
scenes, decreed unftlmable, would be so for everyone.
Praising Robert Bresson for his faithfulness to
Ben1anos, Andre Bazin ended his excellent article "La
Stylistique de Robert Bresson" with these words.
"After The Diary Of A Country Priest, Aurenche an d
Bost are no longer anything but the Viollet- Leduc of
adaptation."
All those who adn1ire and know Bresson's filn1 well
will remernber the admirable scen e in the confessional
when Chantal's face "began to appear little by little,
by degrees" (Ben1anos).
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
12 Franc;ois Truffaut
When, several years before Bresson, Jean Aurenche
wrote an adaptation of Diary, refused by Bernanos, he
judged this scene to be unfilmable and substituted for
it the one we reproduce here.
"Do you want me to listen to you here?" H e
indicates the confessional.
"I never confess."
"Nevertheless, you must have confessed yesterday,
since you took communion this morning?"
"I didn't take communion."
He looks at her, very surprised.
"Pardon me, I gave you communion."
Chantal tun1s rapidly toward~ the pri-Dieu she had
occupied that morning.
"Come see. ..
The cure follows her. Chantal indicates the n1issal
she had left there.
"Look in this book, Sir. Me, I no longer, perhaps,
have the right to touch it."
The cure, very intrigued, opens the book and dis-
covers, between two pages, the host that Chantal had
spit out. His face is stupified and confused.
" I spit out the host," says Chantal.
"I see," says the cure, with a neutral voice.
"You've never seen anything like that, right?" says
Chantal, harsh almost triumphant.
"No, never," says the cure, very calmly.
"Do you know what must be done?"
The cure closes his eyes for a brief instant. He is
thinking or praying, he says, "It is very simple to repair,
Miss. But it's very horrible to commit."
He heads for the altar, carrying the open book.
Chantal follows him.
"No, it's not horrible. What is horrible is to receive
the host in a state of sin."
"'You were, then, in a state of sin?"
"Less than the others, but then - it"s all the san1e
to them."
"Do not judge."
"I do not judge, I conde111n ... says Chantal \vith
violence.
"Silence in front of the body of Christ!··
He kneels before tht' altar. takes the host fron1 the
book and swallows it.
111 the 111iddle of the hook, the cur.:- and an obtuSl'
,1theist na111c"d Ars,·ne ,ire oppo~c•d in .1 discussion on
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Faith. This discussion ends with this line by Arsene.
" When one is dead, everything is dead." In the adapta-
tion, this discussion takes place on the very tomb of
the cure, between Arsene and another cure, and
terminates the film. This line, "When one is dead, every-
thing is dead," carries, perhaps the only one retained
by the public. Bernanos did not say, for conclusion,
"When one is dead, everyt.hing is dead," but "What
does it inaner, all is grace."
" Invention without betrayal," you say - it seen1s to
me that it's a question here of little enough invention
for a great deal of betrayal. One or two more details.
Aurenche and Bost were unable to n1ake The Diary
Of A Country Priest because Bernanos was alive.
Bresson declared that were Bernanos alive he would
have taken more liberties. Thus, Aurenche and Bost
are annoyed because someone is alive, but Bresson is
annoyed because he is dead.
Unmask
From a sin1ple reading of that extract, there stand~
out:
1. A constant and deliberate care to be 11,ifaitlif,1/ to
the spirit as well as the letter;
2. A very 111arked taste for profanation and
blasphemy.
This unfaithfulness to the spirit also degrades Le Diablc
Au Corps - a love story that becomes an anti-
rnilitaristic, anti-bourgeois film, LA Symphonie Pa.storale
- a love story about an amorous pastor - turns Gide
into a Beatrix Beck, Un Rccteur a /'Ue de Sein whose
title is swapped for the equivocal one of Dieu A Besoi11
Des Hom111es in which the islanders are shown like the
fan1ous "cretins'' in Bu11uel' s I.And Without Bread.
As for the taste for blasphen1y. it is constantly n1ani-
fested in a 1nore or less insidious 111anner, depending
on the subject, the n1crte11r-c11-.<n\11c nay, even the star.
I recall front n1e1nory the conlc.·ssional scene from
l),,11<(', Marthe's funeral i11 Le l)i,1/,/c, the profaned
hosts in that adaptation of Di,iry (scene carries over
to Dic11 ."I &:soi11 Des H,1111111c.<). the ,vhole scenario and
tht' character playl·d by Fcrn.111dt·I in L 'Auberge RouJe,
the sct:11ario iu 1,,1,, of jfu.,· l11tcrdits (joking in the
Cellll'tl'ry).
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema
Thus, everything indicates that Aurenche and Bost
are the authors of frankly anti-clerical films, but, since
films about the cloth are fashionable, our authors have
allowed themselves to fall in with that style. But as it
suits then1 - they think - not to betray their convic-
tions, the theme of profanation and blasphemy,
dialogues with double meanings, tum up here and
there to prove to the guys that they know the art of
"cheating the producer,'' all the while giving him
satisfaction, as well as that of cheating the "great
public,'' which is equally satisfied.
This process well deserves the name of "alibi-ism";
it is excusable and its use is necessary during a tin1e
when one n1ust ceaselessly feign stupidity in order to
work intelligently, but if it's all in the game to "cheat
the producer," isn't it a bit scandalous to re-write Gide,
Bemanos and Radiguet?
In truth, Aurenche and Bost work like all the scenar-
ists in the world, like pre-war Spaak and Nataruon.
To their way of thinking, every story includes char-
acters A, B, C, and D. In the interior of that equation,
everything is organized in function of criteria known to
them alone. The sun rises and sets like clockwork, char-
acters disappear, others are invented, the script deviates
little by little from the original and becomes a whole,
formless but brilliant: a new film, step by step n1akes its
solemn entrance into the "Tradition of Quality."
So Be It, They Will Tell Me . . .
They will tell me, "Let us admit that Aurenche and Bost
are unfaithful, but do you also deny the existence of
their talent ... ?" Talent, to be sure, is not a function of
fidelity, but I consider an adaptation of value only
when written by a man of the cinema. Aurenche and
Bost are essentially literary men and I reproach them
here for being contemptuous of the cinema by under-
estin1ating it. They behave, vis-a-vis the scenario, as if
they thought to reeducate a delinquent by finding hin1
a job; they always believe they've " done the n1axin1u111"
for it by embellishing it with subtleties. out of that
science of nuances that n1ake up the slender n1erit of
modem novels. It is, moreover. only the smallest
caprice on the part of the exegetists of our art that they
believe to honor the cine1na by using literary jargon.
(Haven't Sartre and Camus been talked about for
Pagliero's work, and phenon1enolof.'Y f<>r Allcgret's?)
Digitized by Google
13
The truth is, Aurenche and Bost have made the
works they adapt insipid, for equivalence is always with
us, whether in the form of treason or timidity. Here
is a brief exan1ple: in Le Diable Au Corps, as Radiguet
wrote it, Fran,;:ois n1eets Marthe on a train platform
with Marthe jumping fron1 the train while it is still
moving; in the filn1, they meet in the school which
has been transfom1ed into a hospital. What is the point
of this equivalence? It's a decoy for the anti-militarist
elements added to the work, in concert with Claude
Autant-Lara.
Well, it is evident that Radiguet's idea was one of
n1ise-en-scr11e, whereas the scene invented by Aurenche
and Bost is literary. One could, believe me, multiply
these exarnples infinitely.
One of These Days ...
Secrets are only kept for a time, formulas are divulged,
new scientific knowledge is the object of communica-
tions to the Academy of Sciences and since, if we will
believe Aurenche and Bost, adaptation is an exact
science, one of these days they really could apprise us
in the name of what criterion, by virtue of what
systen1, by what 111ysterious and internal geon1etry of
the work, they abridge, add, multiply. devise and
"rectify" these masterpieces.
Now that this idea is uttered, the idea that these
equivalences are only timid astuteness to the end of
getting around the difficulty, of resolving on the
soundtrack problems that concern the image, plunder-
ing in order to no longer obtain anything on the
screen but scholarly framing, cornplicated lighting-
effects, "polished" photography, the whole keeping the
"Tradition of Quality" quite alive - it is tin1e to corne
to an examination of the ensen1ble of these films
adapted, with dialogue, by Aurenche and Bost, and to
research the pennanent nature of certain themes that
will explain, without justifying, the constant unfaitl1ful-
11ess of two scenarists to works taken by them as
"pretext" and "occasion."
In a two line resume, here is the wav, scenarios
treated by Aurenche and Bost appear:
La Syn1pl1011ie Pastorale: He is a pastor, he is n1arried.
He loves and has no right to.
Le Diable Au Corps: They n1ake thl' gestures of love
and have no right to.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
14 Fra~ois Truffaut
Dieu A Besoi11 Des Hommes: He officiates, gives
benedictions, gives extreme unction and has no
right to.
Jeux Interdits: They bury the dead and have no
right to.
Le Ble En Herbe: They love each other and have
no right to.
You will say to me that the book also tells the
same story, which I do not deny. Only, I notice that
Gide also wrote La Porte Etroite, Radiguet La Bal Du
Comte d'Orgel, Colette La Vagabonde and that each
one of these novels did not tempt Delannoy or
Autant-Lara.
Let us notice also that these scenarios, about which
I don't believe it useful to speak here, fit into the sense
of my thesis: Au-Dela Des Grilles, Le Chateau De Verre,
L'Auberge Rouge . ...
One sees how competent the pron1oters of the
"Tradition of Quality" are in choosing only subjects
that favor the misunderstandings on which the whole
systen1 rests.
Under the cover of literature - and, of course, of
quality - they give the public its habitual dose of sn1ut,
non-confomlity and facile audacity.
The Influence of Aurenche and
Bost is Immense ...
The writers who have come to do film dialogue
have observed the same imperatives; Anouilh, between
the dialogues for Degourdis de la 11c and Un Caprice
De Caroline Cherie, introduced into more an1birious
films his universe with its affection of the bizarre
with a background of nordic n1ists transposed to
Brittany (Pattes Bla,uhes) . Another writer. Jean Ferry.
1nade sacrifices for fashion; he too, and the dialogue
for Manon could just as well have been signed by
Aurenche and Bost: "He believed n1e a virgin and, in
private life, he is a professor of psychology'" Nothing
better to hope for from the young scenarists. They
sin1ply work their shift, taking good care not to break
any taboos.
Jacques Sigurd, one of the last to con1e to •·scenario
and dialogue," tearncd up ,vith Y vcs Allegret. Together,
they bequeathed the French cinen1a ~orne of its black-
est n1asterpiccc:s: Dcd<:c [)'A1111frs, Al1111r_f.!c.<, ( l11<' Si Jolie
f>c1i1c f>/<1.1!<'. L,·s :\.fir,rdc., N ' ( )111 Lic11 Q11 '1111c r,,is, LIi
Digitized by Google
Jeune Fol/e. Jacques Sigurd very quickly assimilated the
recipe; he must be endowed with an adnlirable spirit
of synthesis, for his scena.rios oscillate ingeniously
between Aurenche and Bost, Prevert and Clouzot, the
whole lightly modernized. Religion is never involved,
but blasphemy always makes its tinlid entrance thanks
to several daughters of Mary or several good sisters
who make their way across the field of vision at the
moment when their presence would be least expected
(Maneges, Une Si Jolie Petite Plage).
The cruelty by which they aspire to "rouse the
trembling of the bourgeois" finds its place in well-
expressed lines like: " he was old, he could drop dead"
(Mane~es) . In llne Si Jolie Petite Pla~e. Jane Marken
envies Berck's prosperity because of the tubercular
cases found there: Their family comes to see them and that
makes busi11css good! (One dreams of the prayer of the
rector of Sein Island).
Roland Laudenbach, who would seem to be more
endowed than most of his colleagues, has collaborated
on films that are most typical of that spirit: La !i,finute
Dr Vcrite, Le Bon Dicu Sans Confession, La Maison D11
Silc11ce.
Robert Scipion is a talented n1an of letters. He
has only written one book; a book of pastiches.
Singular badges: the daily frequenting of the Saint-
Germain-des-Pres cafes, the fiiendship of Marcel
Pagliero who is called the Sartre of the cinema, prob-
ably because his films resen1ble the articles in "Temps
Modemes." Here are several lines fron1 Amants De
Brasmort, a populist film in which sailors are "heroes."
like the dockers were in Un Homme Marrhe Dans La
Ville:
"The wives of fiiends are made to sleep with.''
"You do what agrees with you; as for that, you· d
rnount anybody, you n1ight well say."
In one single reel of the filn1, towards the end, you
can hear in less than ten n1inutes such words as: pros-
titute, 11,J,,,rc, slut and bitcl1i11css. ls this realis1n?
Prevert is to be Regretted ...
(~onsidering the uniiormity and equal filthiness of
today·s sc,·narios, one: takes to regretting Prevert's
scenarios. He bc:lieved in the ()evil. thus in God,
and it: tor the rnost part. his charactc.-rs were by his
\Vhi111 alone char~ed v,irh all rhe sins in creation, there
'
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
- - ·- ----
 A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema
was always a couple, the new Adam and Eve, who
could end the fihn, so that the story could begin
.
again.
Psychological Realism, Neither Real
Nor Psychological ...
There are scarcely n1ore than seven or eight scenarists
working regularly for the French cinema. Each one of
these scenarists has but one story to tell, and, since
each only aspires to the success of the "two greats," it
is not exaggerating to say that the hundred-odd French
films made each year tell the san1e story: it's always a
question of a victim, generally a cuckold. (The cuckold
would be the only sy1npathetic character in the film
if he weren't always infinitely grotesque: Blier-Vilbert,
etc....) The knavery of his kin and the hatred among
the members of his family lead the "hero" to his
doom; the injustice of life, and for local color, the
wickedness of the world (the cures, the concierges,
the neighbors, the passers-by, the rich, the poor, the
soldiers, etc ....)
For distraction, during the long winter nights, look
for titles of French films that do not fit into this
frainework and, while you're at it, find an1ong these
films those in which this line or its equivalent does
not figure, spoken by the most abject couple in
the film: "It's always they that have the money (or the
luck, or love, or happiness). It's too unjust, in
the end."
This school which aspires to realism destroys it at
the moment of finally grabbing it, so careful is the
school to lock these beings in a closed world, barri-
caded by formulas, plays on words, nuxims, instead of
letting us see them for ourselves. with our own eyes.
The artist cannot always don1inate his work. He must
be, sometimes, God and, sometimes, his creature. You
know that modem play in which the principal char-
acter, nom1ally constituted when the curtain rises on
hin1, finds hin1self crippled at the c.-nd of the play, the
loss of each of his n1e1nbers punctuating the changes
of acts. Curious epoch when the least flash-in-the-pan
performer uses Kafkaesque words to qualify his don1es-
tic avatars. This fonn of cinerna conies straight front
modem literature - half-Kafka, half Bovary!
A film is no longer n1ade in France that the authors
do not believe they are re-making M adan1e Bovary.
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15
For the first time in French literature, an author
adopted a distant, exterior attitude in relation to his
subject, the subject becoming like an insect under the
entomologist's n1icroscope. But if, when starting this
enterprise, Flaubert could have said, "I will roll then1
all in the same mud - and be right" (which today's
authors would voluntarily make their exergue), he
could declare afterwards "I am Madame Bovary" and
I doubt that the san1e authors could take up that line
and be sincere!
Mise-en-Scene, Metteur-en-Scene, Texts
The object of these notes is limited to an examination
of a certain fom1 of cinema, from the point of view
of the scenarios and scenarists only. But it is appropri-
ate, I think, to make it clear that the metteurs-en-scenc
are and wish to be responsible for the scenarios and
dialogues they illustrate.
Scenarists' .films, I wrote above, and certainly it isn't
Aurenche and Bost who will contradict me. When
they hand in their scenario, the film is done; the
metteur-en-scene, in their eyes, is the gentlen1an who
adds the pictures to it and it's true, alas! I spoke of the
mania for adding funerals everywhere. And, for all that,
death is always juggled away. Let us remember Nana's
admirable death, or that of Enrma Bovary, presented
by Renoir; in La Pastorale, death is only a make-up
job and an exercise for the camera ntan: con1pare the
close-ups of Michele Morgan in La Pastorale,
Dontinique Blanchar in LR Secret De Mayerling and
Madeleine Sologne in L' Eternel Ret()ur: it's the sarne
face! Everything happens a_fter death.
Let us cite, lastly, that declaration by Delannoy that
we dedicate, with perfidy, to the French scenarists:
"When it happens that authors of talent, whether in
the spirit of gain or out of weakness, one day let
then1selves go to "write for the cinen1a,'' they do it
with the feeling of lowering themselves. They deliver
themselves rather to a curious ternptation towards
n1ediocrity, so careful are they to not co111promise their
talent and certain that, to write for the cinen1a, o ne
n1ust n1ake oneself understood by the lowliest. (" L,1
Synrp/,()nie Pastorale ou L' An1our Du Metier." revie,v
Verger, Noven1ber 1947).
I ntust, without further ado, denounce a sophis111
that \Viii not fail to be thro\vn at 111e in the guise of
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
16 Francois Truffaut
argu1nent: "This dialogue is spoken by abject people
and it is in order to better point out their nastiness
that we give then1 this hard language. It is our way of
being moralists."
To which I answer: it is inexact to say that these
lines are spoken by the most abject characters. To be
sure, in the films of "psychological realisn1" there are
nothing but vile beings, but so inordinate is the
authors' desire to be superior to their characters that
those who, perchance, are not infi1111ous are, at best,
infinitely grotesque.
Well, as for these abject characters, who deliver
these abject lines - I know a handful of n1en in France
who would be INCAPABLE of conceiving then1,
several cineastes whose world-view is at least as valu-
able as that of Aurenche and Bost, Sigurd andJeanson.
I mean Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau,
Jacques Becker, Abel Gance, Max Ophuls,Jacques Tati,
Roger Leenhardt; these are, nevertheless, French cine-
astes and it happens - curious coincidence - that they
are a11te11rs who often write their dialogue and son1e
of then1 themselves invent the stories they direct.
They Will Still Say To Me .. .
"Dut ,vhy." they will say to n1e, "why couldn't one
have the san1e ad1niration for all those cineastes who
strive to work in the boson1 of this 'Tradition of
Quality' that you 1nake sport of so lightly? Why not
adn1ire Yves Allegret as n1uch as Becker, Jean l)elan-
noy as n1uch as Bresson, Claude Autant- Lara as n1u ch
as Renoir?" ("T astt' is n1ade of a thousand distastt'S"
- Paul Valery).
Well - I do not believt' in the peaceful co-
existence of the "Tradition of Quality" and an "<111tr11r's
'
Clnt'llla.
..
Basically. Yves Allcgret and Delannoy arc only c1ri-
catures of Clouzot. of Bresson.
It is not the desirt' to cn:att· :i scandal that leads 111e
to depreciate a rine111a so praised t·lst·\vhere. I rest con-
vinced that the exagg<'r.1t,dly prolcn1gt·d t·xiscen.:t· of
psyc/10/0,l!ical rcalis111 is the c1 use of tht· lack of public
con1prehensio11 ,,·hen faced ,vith such ne,v ,vorks as I.A·
c:c1rr,,sse JJ'( )r r7711' c;,,ldo, (.\,,1r/1J, C:11sq11r V"iir. not to
111ention L •s D,111,rs [)11 [3.,is De B,,11/1\l!II<' .ind ( )rp/11:r.
Long . liv(• auda,it,·. , to bt· sure. still it nn,~t b,·
revealed as it is. In tcnns o f this ye.t r, 1l/3J. if I had
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to draw up a balance-sheet of the French cine1na's
audacities, there would be no place in it for either the
vonuting in Les Orgueilleux (The Proud And The Beauti-
ful) or Claude Laydu's refusal to be sprinkled with
holy water in Le Bon Die11 Sans Cotifession or tht'
homost'xual relationships of the characters in Le Sala ire
De LA Pe11r (11,e Wa.~es Of Fear), but rather the gait oj-
H11/ot, the maid's soliloquies in LA R11e De L'Estrapad,·.
the mise-en-sch,e of LA Carrosse D'Or, the direction of
the actors in A1adame de (The Earrings Of Madame De).
and also Abel Gance's studies in Polyvision. You will
have understood that these audacities are those of n,en
o_f tlw cinema and no longer of scenarists, directors and
litterateurs.
For exarnple, I take it as significant that the
n1ost brilliant scenarists and mette11rs-en-scene of tht"
" Tradition of Quality" have 111et with failure when
they approach comedy: Ferry-Clouzot Mituett,• Et
Sa Mere, Sigurd-Boyer Tous Les Chemi11s i\-lenent .,t
Ron,e, Scipion- Pagliero LA Rose Route, Laudenbach-
Delannoy LA R,111te Napoleon. Auranche-Bost- Autant-
Lara L 'A11bel)?e Ro11.~e or, if you like, O<c11pt'-toi
d'An,clie.
Whoever has tried, one day, to write a scenario
,vouldn't be able to deny that con1edy is by far the
111ost difficult genre, the one that dernands the n1ost
\vork, the n1ost talent, also the n1ost hu111ility.
All Bourgeois . . .
The dontinant trait of psychological realisn1 is its anti-
bourgeois will. But what are Aurenche and Bost.
Sigurd,Jeanson, Autant-Lara. Allc:gret, if not bourgeois.
and what are the fifty thousand nt"\V readers, who do
not fail to st'e each filn1 front a novel, if not
bourgt"ois?
l-l,'11,11 thc11 is 1/,r 1',1/11c ,,( an a11ti-/,m1~1/l'<'is dnen,a n1adl'
/,y the b,,,,~l!l't>is _li>r the /1,111~1?<'<>is? Workers, you kno,v
very well, do not appreciatt' this tonn of cine1na at all
even "'' ht·n it ain1s at rl·lating to thern. They refust"d
to reco~nize then1st'lves in the dockers of Un Homnu·
'
;\1,irrl,r Dans [.,<1 I ·;11c. or in the sailors of Les Ama11ts
De l3rc1.-,11,irt. Pt'rhap~ it is 11t·t:t·ssary to send the chil-
drt'n out on the st,1invay landing in order to n1ake
love, but tht·ir parents don't like to ht·ar it said, abovt"
,111 ,It the cint·111a. t·ven ,vith "bent·volence." If the
puhlir likt·s to 111ix ,~,ith lo"· con1pany under the alibi
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema
of literature, it also likes to do it under the alibi of
society. It is instructive to consider the progranuning
of filn1s in Paris, by neighborhoods. One conies to
realize that the public-at-large perhaps prefers little
naive foreign fihns that show it n1en "as they should
be" and not in the way that Aurenche and Bost believe
thern to be.
Like Giving Oneself a Good Address ...
It is always good to conclude, that gives everyone
pleasure. It is rernarkable that the "great" 111ettc11rs-1·11-
scc11e and the "great" scenarists have, for a long tirne,
all n1ade rninor filn1s, and the talent they have put into
then1 hasn't been sufficient to enable one to distin-
guish then1 fro111 others (those who don 't put in
talent). It is also rernarkable that they all carne to
"Quality" at the sarne tin1e, as if they were giving
thernselves a good address. And then, a producer -
even a director - earns rnore rnoney n1aking Le Ble
E11 Hcrbt· than by n1aking Lt• Plo,nbier Amo11re11x. The
"courageous" filnrs are revealed to be very profitable.
The proof: son1eone like Ralph Habib abruptly
renounces derni- pornography, n1akes Les Compax11es
De La N11it and refers to Cayatte. W ell, what's keeping
the Andre Tabets, Co,npaneer, the Jean Guittons, the
Pierre Verys, the Jean Lavirons, the Ciampis, the
Grangiers, fron1 rnaking, fro,n one day to the next,
intellectual filn1s, frorn adapting rnasterpieces (there
are still a fe"; left) and. of course, adding funerals, here,
there and everywhere?
Well, on that day we will be in the "Tradition of
Quality" up to the neck and the French cinerna.
Notes
(Whl"n transbtt.·d in C11Mcr.( du Ci11e·mt1 in f:'11.i:li.< /1 no . I. thc.·rc.·
,vc.-re no indic:1tlons of where.· in rhc tc:xt tht'sl' note.·~ should he.·
placed.)
1 La Symplu,11it- Ptist,1rul,·. Char;.1nt.·ri. addt.'d tht.' film: 1-'it.'UC.
tt)
Jacques' tiancec: Caster-•n. Pictce's father. Ch.1ra,· ter.1 omittt'd: tht'
l'a.<tor', thre,· childr<·n. In the tilm, no mention is ,node of what
happens 10 Jacqu,·s atier Gcnrudc\ d,·.11h. In tlw book. J.i<'<Jllt'S
entrrs an order.
Oper:ition Symplw11i,· /'c1$tM,1lr: J. (;iJc..· hitnsd f writc.·s Jn
ad•pt~tion of his book; h . This ad.,pt.111011 ,,j ud"c,I ··untilnl.lbk";
c. Jc.·an Aurc.•nchc and Jc.-.111 1.Jdannoy. in tun,. \Vritt.' .10 .tdapt;,-
Digitized by Google
17
\Vith rivalry arnong "psychological rcalisn1," ''violence,•·
"strictness," "an1biguity," will no longer be anything
but one vast funeral that will be able to leave the
studio in Billancourt and enter the cen1etery directly
- it seerns to have been placed next door expressly. in
order to get n1ore quickly fron1 tile producer to the
grave-digger.
Only, by dint of repeating to the public that it
identified with the "heroes'' of the filnis, it ,night well
end by beliec-ving it, and on the day that it understand~
that this fine big cuckold whose misadventures it is
solicited to syrnpathize with (a little) and to laugh at
(a lot), is not, as had been thought, a cousin or neigh-
bor down the hall but ITSELF, that abject farnily ITS
fa,nily, that scoffed-at religion ITS religion - well, on
that day it rnay show it~elf to be uni,>Tateful to a
cinerna that ,viii have labored so hard to show it lite
as one sees it on the fourth floor in Saint- Gennan-
des Pres.
To be sure, I n1ust recognize it, a great dee-al of
en1otion and taking-sidec-s arec- the controlling factors
in the deliberately pessimistic exarnination I have
undertaken of a certain tendency of the French
cinen1a. I am assured that this famous "school of psy-
chological realisrn" had to exist in order that, in tun1.
11,e Diary Qf a Co1111try Priest, La Carrosse D'()r,
Orpheus, Ca.<que D'Or, 1Wr. Hu/or's Holiday ,night
exist.
But our authors who wanted to educate the public
should understand that perhaps they have strayed frorn
the prin1ary paths in order to becorne involved with
the n1ore subtle paths of psychology; they have passed
on to that sixth grade so dear to J o uhandeau, but it
isn't necessary to repeat a grade indefinitely!
tion: d. (;it.fl- n: ti.1~l.'~ at: e. Pierre Uost's t.· ntry on thi..• .:.n.·11c.·
1.:onl'i liatc~ t.·vc:ryont'.
U· Oi,r/JI,· Au (:M7,s. ( )n the: radio, in tht.· cour.-c of ,1 progr.1111
hy Andr,• l'.irin,,ud d,•votnl ro R .1.li"'a·r. Cbud,· Ama111-Lira
dt'dareJ in sulv,t.tnft.•, ·• 1t 11111 /,-d m,· 1t1 m.rl..·r ., Jifo, ,1111 cf L · / )idM,·
Au C,,rps u•,u tlull I ~""' it c1s , u, Jllli-11111r mwd.·•
( )11 tht.• ~:1111c.· pr<>!,.'T,1111. Fr.1nco1~ Pouleni:. .1 &1c:n<l of
RJdi!(U,·t\. scud ht' had found nothin~ of the book on ,t'cin"
the film .
] To tht.· pruposc:d prodlh't.•r of ]71t' Di11ry (?{.·I C'mmtry i->n·,.,., who
w:t'i a.)to m,ht.·J lO s;c:t.· tht." rh.1r:.tc.:h."r of I )nrtor I >dhc:ndt.· di.-..,p . .
pt.·.tr III tht.· ;1d.1pt:nio11. Jt·Jn Aurend1t.' (who h.1d ~,~nt.·d lhc.:
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
18 Fran~ois Truffaut
s.:ript) answered, "Prrl,aps, i11 1<11 yt'ars, ,1 Hftrdrin will br ablr M
rr1ai11 a charactrr u,/,o dies midu,ay tlrrouglr th, film but, ,is for me, I
do11'tfrrl capablt ofit." Three yeus btrr, Robert Bresson retained
Doctor Oelbende and allowed him 10 die in the middle of the
film.
-I Aurenche and Bost never said they were "faithful." This was the
cnucs.
5 La 8/c E11 H~. There was an adaptation of Colette's novel •s
e3rly as 1946. Claude Autant- Lara accused Roger Leenhudt of
having plagiarized Colene's Lr Bir En Hrrbt with his Lts
Drnritrrs VQ{a11us. The arbitration of Maurice Garcon went
ag;ainst Claude Aut3nt-Lua. With Aurenche and Bost the
intrigue imagined by Colette was enriched by a new chuacter.
that of Dick, a lesbian who lived with the "White Lady." This
character was supprcs...:d, severa.l weeks before the film was shot,
by Madune Ghislaine Auboin, who "reviewed" the adaptation
with Cbude Autant- Lar.i.
6 The chancrers of Aurenche and Bost speak, al will. in nu.xiins.
Severa.I examples: La Symp/1011i, PastoraIr: "Ah! It would be be11er
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if children like that were never born." "Not everyone ha< the
luck 10 be blind." "A cripple is someone who prct<·nds to be
like everyone else."
Lt Diahlc A11 Corps (a soldier has lost • leg) : "He is perhap<
the bst of the wounded." "That nultes a fine le~ for hnn ...
}tu-< lmrrdits: Fr.in{-ois: "What does this mean - 'to put th<
cart before the horse?'" Berthe: "Oh. it's what we 're doing: ·
(They are making love.) Fran{ois: "I didn't know that', wh,t 1t
was called."
7 Jean Aurcnche W3S on the crew of Lts Dames D11 &,;, D<
Boulog11t, but he had ro leave Bre<.,on becau.sc of inco1npatibtlirv
of inspiration.
8 An extract fi-0111 the dialo1,'lle Aurenche and Bost " ' rote for
Jrannr D'A,r was published in La Rrimt D11 C.'it1h11a. #~.
page 9.
9 In fact, "psychological reali<m" was created para.lie! to "poetic
realism," which had the tandem Spaak-Feyder. It really ,viii bt-
necc.-sury, one day. to start an uJti1natc quarrd with Fevdcr.
before he h:i., dropped definitively into oblivion.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
-- ---
 2
De la Politique des Auteurs
Andre Bazin

Andre Bazin was one of the founding editors of Cahiers du Cinema along with Jacques
Doniol-Valcroze and Lo Duca. He was an influential voice in French film culture and a major
film theorist, approaching realism from the perspective of style in relation to space and time
rather than in mimetic terms. As such, he became a champion of Italian neorealism. After his
death in 1958, a four-volume collection of his writings was published entitled Qu'est-ce que
le cinema? (What is Cinema?). Two of these volumes were translated Into English and have
been required reading in film studies courses since their publication more than 30 years ago.
In this essay, originally published in 1957 when he was editor of Cahlers, Bazin addressed
"la politique des auteurs", the auteurist polemic, of his "young firebrands." Bringing his typical
acumen to weigh the pros and coos of auteurism, Bazin seeks to rein in the excessive claims
of his junior colleagues by pointing out that individuals transcend society, but society is also
internalized within each of us, so that any auteurist analysis must necessarily take into account
relevant social forces and technical circumstances. As well, Bazin cautions against ignoring
the context of genre and studio production ('1he genius of the system") in considering Holly-
wood directors as auteurs.

G()t'the? Sl,ak,·speart·? Evaythi11l tllt'y p11t their 11a111,· ro is
supposed to be J!t>Od, a11d people rack their brai11.< t<> ji11d beauty
i11 the silli,•st li11le thi11.~ tht'y bu,i~led. All ,grt·at tale11ts, likt'
c;.,ethi·, Sl,akesp,·arc, &etl1<>V<'n, ,\ .fid1l'ia11lelo, rrcau·d 11,,1 m,ly
beautiful works, but thi1i~s 1/1,11 u~·re less than m,·di,>cri·. quite
.<imply auf,11.
(f,, /st,,y. Diary 1895- 99J
I realize 111y task is fraught with diflicultics. (:ahicrs du
Cine,na is thought to practise the p,,/itique des a111c11rs.
This opinion ,nay perhaps not be justified by the
entire output of articles, but it has been tn1c of
the 1najority, especially for the last two years. It would
be useless and hypocritical to point to a few scraps of
t"vidence to the contrary, and clain1 that our magazine
is a hannless collection of wishywashy reviews.
Nevertheless, our readers n1ust have noticed that
this critical standpoint - whether i1nplicit or explicit
- has not been adopted with equal enthusiasm by all
the regular contributors to Cal1iers, and that there
111ight exist serious differences in our admiration, or
rather in the degree of our adn1iration. And yet the
truth is that the 111ost enthusiastic among us nearl y
ahvays win the day. Eric Rohn1er put his finger on
the reason in his reply to a reader in Cahiers 63: v,1hen

Andre Lllt in. ··0t- I,, ,,,,titi1JII< Jn dlllnm." rr. JJ7- 55 frou 1 Pl·h:r (;r:1h.11u (,·\I.; . 1111· .\ 'c•rr ll 'J 1"(' (l.oudon: lffl: Nl'\\' YorJ.. : l>v uhll·tfay, 19<l-X). ·("· J(J(,i,t lly P(,:l \·r
(;r.aham. Rt"printed by p..·ntti\~ion of UFI l'ubluhin~.

Original from
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20 Andre Bazin
opinions ditfcr on an in1portant fihn, v..e generally
prefer to let the person who likes it 111ost write about
it. 1 It follows that the strictest adhen:nts of the plllitiqur
des a111e11rs get the best of it in the end. for, rightly or
,vrongly, thcy ahvays see in their favourite directors
the 111anifestation of the san1e specific qualities. So it
is that Hitchcock, Renoir, Rossellini, Lang, Ha,vks,
or Nicholas Ray, to judge fron1 the pages of Caliicr.<,
appear as alrnost infallible directors who could nt·ver
111Jke a bad filn1.
I ,vould like to avoid a 111isundcrstanding fron1 the
~tart. I beg to differ with those of 111y colleagues \\·ho
arc the n1ost finnly convinced that the p,1/i1iq11e des
,11,rcurs is ,veil founded, but this in no ,vay con1pro-
111ises the general policy of the 111agazine. Whatt·ver
our differences of opinion about tihns or din.•ctors.
our conunon likes and dislikes are nu1nerous enough
and strong enough to bind us together; and although
I do not see the role of the aurcur in the cinen1a in
the san1e way as Franc;ois T ruffaut or Eric l~oh111er
tor exantple, it does not stop n1e believing to J rt·rt.1i11
cxtent in the concept of the auteur and very often
sharing their opinions. although not ahvays their pas-
sionate loves. I f.111 in with the111 1nore relurtantly in
the case of their hostile reactions; often thcv, art· verv,
harsh ,vith tiln1s I find defensible - and I do so prt·-
ciselv, because I find that the \\'ork transct·nds tht·
director (they dispute this pheno111enon, ,vhirh tht·y
consider to bt· a critical contradiction). In otht'r ,vords.
ahnost our only difference conct·rns tht· n·lationship
het,veen the \\'Ork and its creator. I have never bet·n
~orry that one of 111y colleagues has stut·k up l<lr ~uch
.ind such director. although . I h.1ve not ahv.1,·s .
. agrt·ed
;1bout the qualities of tht· til111 undt·r t·x.unin.Hil,n.
Finally. I ,vould like to add th.it .1lthough it ,et·111~ to
111t' that tht' p,,/iriquc de.< ,1utcur.< ha~ led it~ supporters
to 111ake a 1111111ht·r of 111i,cakt·,. its tot.ii rt·,ults h;1vt·
bt·t·n te rtilt' l'll<>Uµh to ju~tit'\' then1 in thl' 1:1re of their
rritirs. It i, very rart· th.n tht· ;1r~u111e11t, dr.1\\·11 upon
to att.1ck the111 do not 111akt· 111e ru,h to tht·ir
defenrt·.
Sn it i, \\'ithin tht'St' li111its, \\'hit·h. if ynu likt· ..,re
th(l~t: of a 1:11nily qu.irrt·l. th.tt I \\'ould likt· to t.1ck k
\\·h.1t sec111, to 111t· to rt·prt''<'llt not ~o 111urh ;1 cnt1c1l
111i~tr.111sl.1tin11 :I', .1 rritir.11 ·1:d~t· nuance of 111t·.111i11!.:·-
•
My point of dt·p,1rturt· i, ;in ,1rtit·k hy 111y fr1t·11d J c.111
l)o111archi 011 Vi11re11tt· Minnl'lli', Lu.,,,1;,,. /.//;•,·· \\'hirh
tl'l1' th,· ,tory of V,111 (;1,gh. ~Ii, pr.,i,t· " .,, ,·en · intl'lli-
Digitized by Google
gent and sober, but it struck n1c that such an articlt·
should not have been published in a review , 1vhich.
only one n1onth previously, had allowed Eric Roh111t'r
to de1nolish John Huston. 3 The relentless harshness or'
the latter, and the indulgent adnurarion of the tonncr.
can only be explained by the fact that Minnelli is Ont'
of Don1archi's favourites and that Huston is not J
c;al,ii•rs auteur. This partiality is a good thing. up to
a certain point, as it leads us to stick up for a tihn that
illustrates certain facets of Anterican culture just J~
n1uch as the personal talent of Vincente Minnclli . I
could get l)on1arrhi caught up in a rontradiction. by
pointing out to hin1 that he ought to have sacritict·d
Minnelli in favour of Renoir. since it \\'as the shootill!!
'
of Lust Ji,r L/fr that forced the director of Frc11d1 C,111,,111
to give up his o,vn projt•ct on V:111 (;ogh. Can D01n.1r-
rhi clai111 that a I ;,,, (;,'.~/, by Renoir ,vould not h,1,·<.'
brought n1ore prt'stige to the p,,/i1iq1w des au/curs than
a tihn by Minnelli' What ,vas net·ded ,vas a painter·~
son, and ,vhat we got was a director of fihned ballets'
Uut whatever the c;1st'. this exarnple is only .1
prt·tt'Xt. Many a ti111e I have felt uneasy at the subtlety
of .111 argurnent. v,hich ,vas con1pl<'tcly unable: to ca111-
outl.1gt· the na'ivett' of tht· assu111ptio11 \\'hereby. for
t'Xa111ple. tht' intentions and tht· roht'rt·nct' of a delib-
t-ratt· and \\·ell thou!,!'.ht out fihn art· rt·ad into son1t·
'
link ·1r tt·ature.
And of course .1~ ~non as vou . ~tate th;Jt the tihn-
111akt·r .ind his filn1s are one. there can be no 1ni11or
tih11s. :is the \\·orst of tht·111 \\·ill ahva\'S, .
be in tht· i111agt'
of thl'ir creator. Uut lt·t ·, set' "·hat tht· facts of thl·
111.tttcr ,trt·. In ordt·r Hl do so. \\'t' 111ust go right batk
to tht· bt•1..,,inning
. ..
( )f ,oursc. the ,,,,/iri,J111· des ,1urcur.< is tht· applic.1tio11
to tht· ci11t·111a of .1 notion th.It is ,,·illt·ly atTt'ptt·d in
tht· individual .ire,. Fr.lll(ois Trutin1t likt·s to quott·
(;ir.1 udo11x·s rt'111.1rk: 'Tht·rc ,1rt· 110 ,,·orks. thert· .Ir<'
onh· ,111rrur.< - .1 pole111i,·.1I s.11ly \\'hich st·e111s to 111<'
of li111itt·d ~i~nitic.111,·t·. l 'ht· nppositl' ~taten1ent could
j ust .1, \\'l'll bt· ,et .is .111 ex.1111 qut·stion. Tht· t,vo 1<1r-
11111l.1t·. like tht· 111.1:--inis of La R.ocht·loucaulJ .ind
( :h.1111fr1rt. "·ould ,i111ply rt·,·t·i~t· tht·ir proportion of
truth .111d error. A, ti,r Eric R.oh111er. he stJtt'S (<ll
r.11h,-r ·'"<Tt~l th.11 in .trt it i, the ,1111rurs. and not th<'
\\·ork,. th.it rt·111.1111: .ind tht· l'rogr.1n1111~ of tihn
"''·1t·t1t·, "·11uld 't't•111 tn "'l'P<>rt this critical truth.
But ollt' should note th.11 R.oh111er's arh'<llllt'llt dot·~
not ~n 11,-.,rly .,, t:,r .1, (;ir.1udoux\ .1phorisn1. tc.ir. if
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 De la Politique des Auteurs
Figure 2. 1 Lust for ~(r (M(;M, 1'151,), by Viuc.,-utc Mmndl,,
John I louscrnan
a111e11rs rcn1ain. it is not necessarily becausl' of thei,r
production as a "vhole. There is no lack of exan1ples
co prove that the contrary 1.s true. Maybe Voltaire·s
nan1e is n1ore in1portant than hi~ bibliography. but
no\v chat he has been put in per-pecrive it is not so
111uch his Oic1i<,1111nirl' pltil(>5ophiquc that counts nowa-
days as his Voltairean \vit. a certain sr11h• of chinking
and ,vririug. But today ,vhcre arc \Vt' to find the
principle and the exan1ple? In h1s abundant and atro-
cious v,rri tingS
•·
for the rhearn:? Or in chi: slin1 volu111r:
of short 5tories? And \\1hat about Beaun,archai~? Are
we to go looking in La Alc'rl' co11pt1ble?
In any case. the authors of that period were appar-
ently cben1selves a,vare of the relat1v1ty of their ,vo rth.
since they ,villingly diso,vncd their ,vorks, and so111l'-
tin1es did not 111ind even being the ~ubjl'Ct of
la.111poons ,vhose quality they cook ,1s a con1ph111enc.
For then,. aln1ost the only thing chat n1anered \\·a~
the ,vork icsclf. ,vhetl1er their o,vn or another·s. and
Digitized by Google
21
dirrnor of filmed b,1llc1>.' Produc,·d b)•
0
"'J
il ,vas onJy at the end of the cightel'nth ct.'ntury, ,virh
Beaun1arch:11~ in fact. that the concept of the a 11u•11r
finally crystallized legally. \Vith his royalties, duties
and responsibilities. Of course I an1 111aking allo,v-
ances for historical and social co11ci11gcncies: political
and 111oral censorship has 111ade a11on y111iry ~0111t'tin11.:s
inevitable and always excusable. Uut surely the ano-
nyntity of the \Vritings of the Fre11cl1 R.c:~isla11ce i11
no way le~~ened the dignjcy or respon~ibiliry of the
\\rnter. It \,VJS only in the 1tinett•enth centu ry that
copying or pla~arisn1 reall y began ro be con~ider•·d
a professional breJch that djsqualified ics perpetrator.
The san1c is true of painting. Although no\v.1days
any o ld ~plash of paun can be val urd according to its
111e.:asur.·n1l'IH~ a11d the celebrity of the si~1aturc, die
obJl'Ctive quality or che work ic~df \V3~ fonnt·rly h.·ld
in 111uch h1~hcr .. cscec111. Proof of llus 1, co be found
111 the d1fticulry there 1s 111 aurhenncating a lot of old
p1crure~. What e111c:rged fron1 a studio 111ight s1111ply
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
22 Andre Bazin
be the work of a pupil, and we are now unable to
prov1• anything one way or the other. If one goes back
even further, one has to cake into consideration the
anonymous works that have con1e down co us as
the produces not of an artist, but of an art, not of a
,nan, but of a society.
I can see ho,v I will be rebutted. We should not
objectify our ignorance or let it crystallize into a
reality. All these ,vorks of art, the Venus de Milo as
well as the Negro mask, did in fact have an auteur,
and the whole of n1odem historical science is tending
to fill in the gaps and give nan1es to these works of
art. But did one really have to \.Vait for such erudite
addenda before being able to ad,nire and enjoy then1?
Biographical criticisn1 is but one of n1any possible
critical din1ensions - people are still arguing about the
identity of Shakespeare or Moliere.
But that's just the point! People are arguing. So
their identity is not a n1atter of con1plete indifference.
The evolution of Western art towards greater person-
alization should definitely be considered as a step
forward, as a refine1nent of culture, but only as long
as this individualization ren1ains only a final perfec-
tion and does not claim to dc:fine culture. At this
point, we should rernen1ber that irrefutable conunon-
place we learnt at school: the individual transcends
society, but society is also and abovc:- all 11tithi11 hin1.
So therc:- can be no definitive criticis111 of genius or
talent which does not first take into consideration the
social detenninism, the historical co1nbination of cir-
cun1stances. and the technical background which co a
large extent detern1ine it. That is why the anony1nity
of a ,vork of art is a handicap that in1pinges only very
slightly on our understanding of it. In any case. 1nuch
depends on the particular branch of art in question,
the style adopted. and the sociological context. Negro
art does not suffer by rernaining anonyn1ous - al though
o f course it is unfortunatc:- that \Vt' kno\v so little
ahout the societies that gave birth to it.
Uut 77rc Af1111 11111, K11n1 • T,,,, .\luc/r. /:'11r,>J>i1 51. and
B(~~cr TI,,111 L//i' art· conte,nporJry \Vith the paintin~
of Picasso. Matis~e. and Sin¢er1 1)oes it t"t,lkl\v that
one should set' in thc:-1n the san1<.' de!-,>Tl'<"
, o f individu -
alization ) I for ont· do not think ~o.
If you w ill excuse yet another cnn1111o npl.H·t·. tht·
ci nen1a is an art \Vhi,h is both popubr and indu~tri.1I.
Tht·~t· conditions, ,vhich ;ire nt·ct·ssary to it~ t·xistt·nt·t·.
111 no ,vay con~titute :i collection of hindr.111ct·~ - no
Digitized by Google
n1ore than in architecture - they rather represent a
b'Toup of positive and nc:-gative circun1stances ,vhich
have to be reckoned with. And this is especially true
of the A1nerican ci nen1a, which the theoreticians of
the politiq11e des a11te11rs adn1.ire so much. What n1ak~
Hollywood so much better than anything else in the
world is not only the quality of certain directors. but
also the vitality and, in a certain sense, the ex:cellence
of a tradition. Hollywood's superiority is only inci-
dentally technical; it lies much 1nore in what one
111ight call the American cinematic genius. something
which should be analysed, then defined, by a socio-
logical approach to its production. The An1erican
cinen1a has been able, in an extraordinarily competent
\vay, co show An1erican society just as it wanted to sc:-.:
itself; but not at all passively, as a si1nple act of satisfJc-
tion and escape, but dynaniically, i.e. by partiripating
with the n1eans at its disposal in the building of this
society. What is so adn1irable in the An1eri can cinenu
is that it cannot help being spontaneous. Although the
fruit of free enterprise and capitalisn1 - and harbour-
ing their active or still only virtual defects - it is in a
wav, the truest and rnost realistic cinen1a of all because
it does not shrink fron 1 depicting even the contradic-
tions of that society. D0111archi hi111self. who has
de111onstrated the point very clearly in a penetrating
and well- docun1entc:-d analysis. 4 exen1pts 111e fron1
developing this argun1ent.
But it follows that every director is swept along by
this powerful surge; naturally his artistic course has to
bc:- plotted acrording to the currents - it is not as ii
he \Vere sailing as his tancy took hin1 on the cahn
\vaters of a lake.
In fact it is not even trut' of thc:- n1ost individual
artistic disciplines that genius is fret' and always self.
dependent. And what is genius anyway if not a certain
cornbination of unqu.·stion,1bly personal talents. a giit
fron 1 the t:1iries..ind a n10111ent in history? Genius i~
an H -bn111b. Th t' ti~sion of uraniurn triggers otf the
fusio n of hyd rogt·n pulp. But a sun cannot be born
fron1 the disintl'!-,>Tation of an individual alone unless
'
this disintt·gracion has repercu~sions on the art thJt
surrounds it . Wht·n ct· the par,1dox of Ri,nbaud's Iii<'.
His pnt·ti r ti.ash in tht· pan suddenly died out and a
R.in1haud the adventurt·r hecarne n1ore and 111ore
dist.Hit likt· a st.ir. ~till glo\\·ing hut heading to,varru
t·xtinction. l'rob.1hly H.i111h.111d did not change at JII.
Then.- " ·.is sin1ply nothing lcti: to ii.-ed the flan1es that
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 De la Politique des Auteurs
had reduced the whole of literature to ashes. Generally,
the rhythm of this con1bustion in the cycles of great
art is usually greater than the lifespan of a man. Liter-
ature's step is measured in centuries. It will be said that
genius foreshadows that which comes after it. This is
true, but only dialectically. For one could also say that
every age has the geniuses it needs in order to define,
repudiate and transcend itself. Consequently, Voltaire
,vas a horrible playwright when he thought he was
Racine's successor and a story-teller of genius when
he n1ade the parable a vehicle for the ideas which were
going to shatter the eighteenth century.
And even without having to use as examples the
utter failures which had their causes almost entirely in
the sociology of art, creative psychology alone could
easily account for a lot of patchiness even in the best
authors. Notre-Dame-de-Paris is pretty slight compared
with LA Ugende des siecles, Salammbo does not come
up to Madame Bovary, or Corydon to Le Journal des
Jaux-monnaye11rs. There is no point in quibbling about
these examples, there will always be others to suit
everyone's taste. Surely one can accept the perma-
nence of talent without confusing it with some kind
of artistic infallibility or i.mmunity against making
mistakes, which could only be divine attributes. But
God, as Sartre has already pointed out, is not an artist!
Were one to attribute to creative man, in the face of
all psychological probability, an unflagging richness
of inspiration, one would have to admit that this
inspiration always comes up against a whole complex
of particular circumstances which make the result,
in the cinema, a thousand times more chancy than in
painting or in literature.
Inversely, there is no reason why there should not
exist - and sometimes there do - flashes in the pan
in the work of otherwise mediocre film-makers.
Results of a fortunate combination of circumstances
in which there is a precarious moment of balance
between talent and milieu, these fleeting brilliancies
do not prove all that much about personal creative
qualities; they are not, however, intrinsically inferior
to others - and probably would not seem so if the
critics had not begun by reading the signature at
the bottom of the painting.
Well, what is true of literature is even truer of
the cinema, to the extent that this art, the last to
come on to the scene, accelerates and multiplies the
evolutionary factors that are common to all the others.
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23
In fifty years the cinema, which started with the
crudest forms of spectacle (primitive but not inferior),
has had to cover the same ground as the play or the
novel and is often on the san1e level as they are. Within
this san1e period, its technical developn1ent has
been of a kind that cannot compare with that of any
traditional art within a comparable period (except
perhaps architecture, another industrial art). Under
such conditions, it is hardly surprising that the genius
will burn himself out ten tirnes as fast, and that a
director who suffers no loss of ability may cease to be
swept along by the wave. This was the case with Stro-
heim, Abel Gance and Orson Welles. We are now
beginning to see things in enough perspective to
notice a curious phenomenon: a filrn-maker can,
within his own lifetime, be refloated by the following
wave. This is true of Abel Gance or Stroheim, whose
modernity is all the more apparent nowadays. I an1
fully aware that this only goes to prove their quality
of auteur, but their eclipse still cannot be entirely
explained away by the contradictions of capitalism or
the stupidity of producers. If one keeps a sense of
proportion, one sees that the same thing has happened
to n1en of genius in the cinema as would have hap-
pened to a 120-year-old Racine writing Racinian
plays in the middle of the eighteenth century. Would
his tragedies have been better than Voltaire's? The
answer is by no means clear-cut; but I bet they would
not have been.
One can justifiably point to Chaplin, Renoir or
Clair. But each of them was endowed with further
gifts that have little to do with genius and which were
precisely the ones that enabled them to adapt them-
selves to the predicament of film production. Of
course, the case of Chaplin was unique since, as both
auteur and producer, he has been able to be both the
cinema and its evolution.
It follows, then, according to the n1ost basic laws
of the psychology of creation, that. as the objective
factors of genius are much more likely to modify
themselves in the cinema than in any other art, a
rapid maladjustment between the filrn-maker and
the cinenu can occur, and this can abruptly affect the
quality of his films as a result. Of course I admire
Cof!fide11tial Report, and I can see the sarne qualities in
it as I see in Citize11 Ka11e. But Citizen Kane opened
up a new era of American cinema, and Co1!fide111ial
Rt'p,>rt is a film of only secondary in1portance.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
24 Andre Bazin
Figu re 2.2 Oc,·p focu, cmc111.1tof.""phy by Cr.·i;iz Toland
•11d co-wn1tc11 by (_)r;on \Vdk·•
But let's pause a n1on1ent o n this assrrtion - it ,nay.
I feel, allo\v us to get to the hl·art of the 111actc: r. I
think that noc only ,vould thr supportl'r.. of che poli-
rique des a111e11rs refuse to agree that Cot!/ide111i,1/ Reporr
is an inferior fi.1111 to Ciri: r11 Ka11e:5 they ,vould be
,,.,ore eager to clai n, the contrary, and I can ,veU see
ho" ' they wo uld go abo ut it. As C,,1ifidc111ial Reporr is
Welles·s sixth fi ln1. one can assun1e that a certain
anrouut of progress has already been u1ade. Not o nly
d id the Welles of 1953 have n1ore experience of
hi1nself and of his arc than in 1941 , but ho"vevcr great
,vas the freedon1 he ,vas able to obtain in HollY"vood
Citi.zc11 Ka11r can not help re111aining LO a certain t'Xtcn t
an It.KO product. T he filn, ,vould never have seen the
light of day ,vitho ut the co-operation of son1e superb
technici,111s and tht·ir just as adn,irable technical appa-
ratus. Gregg Toland, to 111entio n o nly o ne. ,vas n1ore
than a little tl'Spo nsiblc: for the fina l rrsu lt. O n the
other hand. C111!fidr111inl Rl'p<1r1 is con1pletely the "'' ork
of Welles. Until re can be proved co the concrary. it
Digitized by Google
111 C111 : ,·11 ,-:.,.,.. (RK(). 194 1). Produced. d iren,·d,
\Viii be considered n pnon a superio r fihn because
it is n1orc pt·r..onal and because WeUes·s personality
can o nly have n1an1rcd as he gre,v oldt' r.
As far as this quesrion is concerned, I can only agree
"vith 1ny young fi rebrands \,·hen they state that age as
such cannot di,ninish the talent of a fi ln1-111aker, and
rr.1ct violently to tl1at cridcal prejudice ,vhich consists
in ahvays fi nding th t' ,vorks of a young or n1arurt'
filn1-111aker superior co the fLlr11s of ,111 o ld utan. It has
been ~aid that 1V/011sic11r I ·e,do11x ,vas not up to 771e G,,/d
Ruslr: people have cnticized -n,e Ri11cr and Ca rrosse d"or.
saying they n1 iss the· good old days of La R~clc du Jru.
Eric R oh111er has found an excellent ans\ver to th is:
'The history of art oflcr.. 110 exan1ple, as far as I kno,v.
of an authenric gc:nius \Vho ha~ µo ne thro ugh a period
of Lrue dcdine at tht· end of his caret:r; this should
encoura~e u rather to dctl'Cr. he ne.1th what seenlS to
bt· clu111sy or bald, the traces of that desire for sin1plic-
iry thac charactcn1cs tht· ·'l,iq n1anner" of pai nter.; such
a, Trti,111. Rl·111br,111dt. Matisse• or .Bonnard, con1posers
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 De la Politique des Auteurs
such as Beethoven and Stravinsky . . .' (Cahiers 8,
•Renoir An1ericain '). What kind of absurd discrin1ina-
tion has decided that filn1-n1akers alone are victirns of
a senility that other artists are protected from? There
do renuin the exceptional cases of dotage, but they are
n1uch rarer than is son1etimes supposed. When
l3audelaire \Vas paralysed and unable to utter anything
other than his ' ere non1', was he any less Baudelai rean?
Robert Mallet tells us how Valery Larbaud, Joyce's
translator into French, struggling against paralysis after
twenty years of i1nn1obility and silence, had n1anaged
to build up for hirnself a vocabulary of twenty sirnple
words. With these, he was still able to bring out son1e
extraordinarily shrewd literary judginents. In fact, the
few exceptions one could n1ention only go to prove
the rule. A great talent ,natures but does not b'TOW old.
There is no reason why this law of artistic psychology
should not also be valid for the cinerna. Criticisnt that
is based implicitly on the hypothesis of senility cannot
hold water. It is rather the opposite postulate that
ought to be stated: we should say that when we think
we can discern a decline it is our own critical sense
that is at fault, since an impoverishment of inspiration
is a very unlikely phenon1enon. Frorn this point of
view, the bias of the politique des auteurs is very fruitful,
and I will stick up for thern against the naivete, the
foolishness even, of the prejudices they are fighting.
But, always remernbering this, one has nevertheless
to accept that cenain indisputable 'greats' have suffered
an eclipse or a Jos.~ of their powers. I think what I
have already said in this article may point to the reason
for this. The drama does not reside in the growing old
of men but in that of the cinen1a: those who do not
know how to grow old with it will be ovenaken by
its evolution. This is why it has been possible for there
to have been a series of failures leading to complete
catastrophe without it being necessary to suppose that
the genius of yesterday has become an in1becile. ()nee
again, it is simply a question of the appearance of a
clash between the subjective inspiration of the creator
and the objective situation of the cinema, and this is
what the politique des autcurs refuses to sec. To it~ sup-
porters Co'!/idential R«-port is a more in1portant filnt
than Citizen Kane because they justifiably sec 111ore of
()rson Welles in it. In other words, all they want to
retain in the equation auteur plus subject = 11~1rk is the
auteur, while the subject is reduced ·to zero. Sornc of
then1 will pretend to 1-,rrant ,nc that, all things hcin~
Digitized by Google
25
equal as far as the a11te11r is concen1 ed, a good subject
is naturally better than a bad one, but the more out-
spoken and foolhardy among them will admit that it
very rnuch looks as if they prefer sn1all 'B' filn1s, wht're
the banality of the scenario lt'aves n1ore roorn for the
personal contribution of the author.
Of courst' I will be challengt'd on the very conct'pt
of a11te11r. I achnit that the equation I just used was
artificial, just as ,nuch so, in fact, as the distinction ont'
learnt at school between fonn and content. To benefit
fi-0111 the politique des aute11rs one first has to be worthy
of it, and as it happens this school of criticisrn clairns
to distinguish between true auteurs and directors, even
talented ones: Nicholas Ray is an a11teur, Hu,ton is
supposed to be only a director; Bresson and Rossellini
are a11teurs, Clernent is only a great director, and so
on. So this conception of the author is not compatible
with the auteur/subject distinction, because it is of
greater intportance to find out if a director is worthy
of entering the select group of auteurs than it is to
judge how well he has used his ntaterial. To a certain
extent at least, the a11te11r is a subject to himself; what-
ever the scenario, he always telh the same story, or, in
case the word 'story' is confusing, let's say he has the
san1e attitude and passes the saine n1oral judgments on
the action and on the characters. Jacques Rivette has
said that an auteur is someone who speaks in the first
person. It's a good definition; let's adopt it.
The politiq11e des auteurs consists, in short, of choos-
ing the personal factor in artistic creation as a standard
of reference, and then assunung that it continues and
even progresses front one filn1 to the next. It is rec-
ogttized that there do exist certain intportant films of
quality that escape this test, but these will systenuti-
cally be considered inferior to those in which the
personal stamp of the auteur, however run-of-tht"-111ill
the sct"nario, can be perceivt"d even n1inutely.
It is far front being my intt°ntion to dt'ny
the positive attitude and methodological qualitil's
of this bias. First of all, it ha., the great merit of treat-
ing the cinen1a as an adult art and of reacting against
the irnprt:ssionistic relativisnt that still reigt1s over the
majority of fihn reviews. I adnut that the explicit or
adnuttcd pretension of a critic to reconsider the pro -
duction of a filn1-1naker with every new fihn in thc
light of his judgrnent has sornething presurnptuous
about it that rt'calls Ubu. I ant also quite willing co
ad111it that if one is hu,nan one cannot h(')p doing
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
26 Andre Bazin
this, and, short of giving up the whole idea of actually
criticizing, one n1ight as well take as a starting point
the feelings. pleasant or unpleasant. one feels person-
ally when in contact with a fihn. Okay. but only on
condition that these first impressions are kept in their
proper place. We have to take them into consideration,
but we should not use then1 as a basis. In other words,
every critical act should consist of referring the fihn
in question to a scale of values. but this reference is
not n1erely a n1atter of intelligence; the sureness of
one's judgment arises also, or perhaps even first of all
(in the chronological sense of the word), fi-0111 a
general impression experienced during a film . I fet.>l
there are two synunetrical heresies. which are (a)
objectively applying to a filn1 a critical all-purpose
yardstick, and (b) considering it sufficient sin1ply to
state one's pleasure or disgust. The first denies the role
of taste, the second presupposes the superiority of the:
critic's taste over that of the author. Coldness ... or
prcsurnption!
What I like about the polirique des a11tc11rs is that it
rt·acts against the in1pressionist approach ,vhile retain-
ing the best of it. In fact the scale of values it proposes
is not ideological. Its starting-point is an appreciation
largely con1posed of taste and sensibility: it has to
discen1 the contribution of the artist as such, quite
apart from the qualities of the subject or the tech-
nique: i.e. the n1a11 behind the style. But once one has
111ade this distinction, this kind of criticisn1 is doon1ed
to beg the question, for it assun1es at the start of its
analysis that the tihn is autornatically good as it has
bc:en n1ade by an auteur. And so the yardstil'.k applic:d
to the tihn is the aesthetic portrait of the fih11- n1aker
dc:duced fi-0111 his previous filn1s. This is all right so
long as there has been no n1is1ake about pro11101i11g
this filn1-n1aker to the status of ,111tt'11r. For it is objt.>c-
tively speaking safi.·r to trust in the: genius of thl' arti~t
than in one's o,vn critical intt·llij!;enct.>. And this is
,vhen: the: politiq,w des a11t1'11rs foils in lint· ,vith the
svste111 of ' criticis111 hv bcaun··: in otht·r ,vords. \\'hen
• , , >
one is dt·aling ,,·ith a gt·nius. it is ahv,1ys a good
n1t·thod to presuppose that a ~uppost'd ,veakness in a
,vork of art i~ nvthin~ '
other than a beautv, tl1Jt 0111:
h.i- not yt·t n1anagt·d to understand. Uut as I havt·
,ho\\·n. this n1t·th<,d had its li111it.1tions cvt·n in tr;1di-
tionallv i11divid1ulistic arts sut"h .is litt·rJturt·. and .1II
th, n1ort· so in tht· rint·111a ,vht·re tht· sociolo~ir.tl•
.ind
h istoric.ii cross-currt·nts art.> countll'ss. Uv. .!-,ri,·in~
'
,uch
Digitized by Google
in1portance to 'B' fihns, the politiq11e des a11te11rs recog-
nizes and confirms this dependence a contrario.
Another point is that as the criteria of the politique
des a11te11rs are very difficult to fonnulate the whole
thing becon1es highly hazardous. It is significant that
our finest writers on Ca/riers have been practising it
for three or four years no,v and have yet to produce:
the n1ain corpus of its theory. Nor is one particular!\'
likely to forget how Rivette suggested we should
ad111ire Hawks: 'The evidence on the screen is proof
of H awks's genius: you only have to watch Alo11krr
B11si11ess to know that it is a brilliant film . So111e people
refuse to ad1nit this, however; they refuse to be satis-
fied by proof. There can't be any other reason why
they don't recognize it ... ·~ You can see the danger: an
aesthetic personality cult.
Dut that is not the n1ain point. at least to the extl'nt
that the J1<>litiq11c d1·s a11tc11rs is practised by people of
tastt.> who know how to watch their step. It is it,
neg-Jtive side that seen1s the most serious to n1e. It is
unfom1nate to praise a filn1 that in no way dt'scn·t~
it, but the dangers are less tar-reaching than when a
worth,vhile filn1 is rejected because its director has
rnade nothing good up to that point. I an1 not denying
that the chan1pions of the J'"litiq11c des aute11rs discovt'r
or encourage a budding talt.>nt when they g,·t tht'
chance. But they do systen1atically look do,vn on
anything in a filn1 that conies fron1 a conm1on fund
and which can sometin1es be entirely admirable. just
as it can be uttt·rly dett'stable. Thus. a certain kind ot
popular An1erican culture lies at the basis of Minnelli's
Lust _ r;,, Ll_fi·. but another n1ore spontaneous kind of
culturt' is also the principlt' of An1erican comedy, th<'
Westen1. and the gan~tt'r filn1. And its influence here
is hent.>ticial, for it is this that gives these cinematic
'
genres thc:ir vigour and richnt·ss. resulting as they do
fro111 au artistic evolution thJt has always been in
\\·011derfully dost' hJnno ny \\·ith its public. And so
one can rl'ad a revie,v in C,1/ricrs of a Westen1 by
Anthony Mann (a nd (;od kno,,·s I like Anthonv
M.1nn\ Wt·stt·n1s!) - as ifit \\·ert· not above all a Western.
i.e. a ,vholt' collection of convt·ntions in the script.
the at·ting. and the: direction. I know very well that
in .1 lihn 111agazinl' ont· 111:1y bl' pennittcd to skip such
nn1nd,111e det.1il<.: but tht·v should at least be in1plied.
\\'hl're.1, ,vhat in f;1ct happl'ns i, that their existenct' is
glo,,t·d o,·t·r r;1tht· r ,hl·t·pi,hly. as though they ,vere .1
r.1tht·r ridit·ulou~ 11t·rt·s~itv. that it ,,·ould be incon'-'TU-
'
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 De la Politique des Auteurs
Figure 2.3 How,,rd H,,wl.,, .lfo,,11,·y 811.,mrss (Tw~nuc1h Century fo,-. 1\/5::!). Authorship
g,·nius. Produced by Sol C. S1cgd
ous to 111ention. In any ca e. the y ,vill look dow n on ,
o r treat co nd.-sct:ndin gly. any Westt·n1 by a direct<lr
,-vho is nor yet appro ved, eve n if it is as round and
s111ooth as an egg. W cU, -.vhat is S111xcro11d1 if not an
ultra-classical W estern in ,vhich the art of Ford con-
sists si111ply of raising characters and situations to an
absolute degree of p(·rti.•crio n:ij and ,vhile ~itting on
the Censorship Con1n1ittee I have seen s0111<' ad1ni-
rable Westerns, n1ore or less a11onyi11ous and off the
beaten crack , but displaying a ,vo nderful k.i1 o"vledge of
the conven tions of the genre and respecting the style
fro111 beginning to end .
Paradoxically, the supporters of the politiq11r di•s
n111e11rs adn1ire the An1erican ci11e111a, where the rl:'srri c-
tions of production are heavier than anywhere else. II
is also true th at it is the country where the grea test
technical possibilities are offered to the director. Uut
the one docs not ca ncel out th e other. I do ho,vcver
admit that freedo1n is greater in Holl ywood th an it i~
said to b e, as long as one k.n o,vs how to detect its
Digitized by Google
27
l, ,df-cv1dcnc
n1anifestarions. and I \.Vili go so far as to say that th e
traditio n of gt·nres is a base of operations for creative
freedon1 . The A1nerican cine,na is a classical art, but
,vhy not then adnun: in it ,vhat is 1nost ad1nirablc:,
i.e. not onJy the talent of this o r that fi ln1- n1aker,
but the ge nius of the systeu1, the richness of its ever-
vigorous tradition, and its ft'rrility ,vhen it conies into
contact with ne\.V elc111ents - as has been proved. if
proof th ere need be, in such fil1ns as A u .411,erir,111 i11
Paris, Tl,e Seve11 Year /rd, and B11s Stop. True, Logan is
lucky enough to be co nsidered an 11111e11r, o r at least .i
budding n11te11r. But then v.·hen Picnic o r 811s Stop get
good revie,vs the praise docs 11ot go to ,vhat S<'erus
to n1e to be the t'Sse ntial point. i.e. th e social truth,
,vhich of course is no t offe red as a goal that suffices
in ir~elf but is integrated into a style o f cinen1.1tic
narratio n j ust as pre- ,va r An1 erica ,vas integrated in ro
An1erica n con1edy.
To conclu de: th e poli1iq11c des a111e11rs see,ns to n1e
to hold and d.-fend an css<,ntial criti cal truth that the
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
28
cinerna needs 111ore than the other arts, precisely
because an act of true anistic creation is more uncer-
tain and vulnerable in the cinema than elsewhere. But
its exclusive practice leads to another danger: the
negation of the film to the benefit of praise of its
,1uteur. I have tried to show why mediocre auteur5 can,
by accident, 1nake admirable films, and how, con-
versely, a genius can fall victim to an equally accidental
sterility. I feel that this useful and fruitful approach,
Erir Rohmt·r. 'us Ltttcurs dn c,J,im ct b politique des
auteurs ·. Ca/tirn 63, October 1956, pp. 54-8.
~ J,·an Domarchi. ' Monsicur Vinccnt', C,,him 68, February 1957.
pp. 44-(,.
1 Eric R ohmer. •t.e~on d'un cchcc: i propos de Moby Dit1,·.
C.rliirrs 67, January 1957, pp. 23--8.
4 JeJn Domarchi, 'Le, Fer dans la pbic', 0,1,im 63, ()c'tobcr 195<,,
pp. 18-:!8.
5 Cf Eric Rohmcr, ' Une Fable du XXe ,iecle' (on Confid,ntial
R <"t11•rt). Cal,im 6 1,July 1956, pp. 37-40; cf. Cahirrs' 'All-Time
ll,·<t Film$'. m Appcndix 1 in Jim Hillier (ed.), Ca/1irn du
Digitized by Google
Andre Bazin
quite apan fro1n its pole111ical value, should be co111-
plemented by other approaches to the cinen1atic
phenomenon which will restore to a film its quality
as a work of an. This does not mean one has to den\"•
the role of the auteur, but sin1ply give hi1n back the
preposition without which the noun auteur ren1ains
but a halting concept. A11teur, yes, but what <?f?
Translated by Peter Grahan1
Notes
Ci,itma: 7nr 1950s - Nro-R<"alism. H,,1/y,,_,,,d. l\."t11• 11 ;,..,. ( London:
Roudedgc. 1985).
6 Jacques Rivette, 'Genie de HowJrd HJwkf. C.rliirr.< 2.\. ~1.v
1953, pp. 16-23.
7 Cf. Andre Bazin, 'lkautc' d'un west,·n,· (on M•nn', 77,r .lf,111
.from lAramit), Cahim 55, January l<JSr.. pp . .\.\ -{,.
II Cf. Andre Bazin, 'Evolution du Wc-,;tcm·. Cal,i,·n 54, Chn<llnJ>
1955. pp. 22-<,, translated 35 'Evolution of the W c-s1,·n1· in AnJrc
llazin, What is Cin,ma? Vol. 2. n·printed in Bill Ni,hols (eJ.).
M,w irs and Mt1l1od$ (Berkdey: Univer.sity of Calitc,n1i, p,.,,,.
1976--115).
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 3
Films, Directors and Critics
Ian Cameron

Ian Cameron was the founding editor of Movie, the brash British film journal that brought
auteurism to England begiMing in 1962. Cameron also co-authored several books on the
cinema, including Dames, The Heavies, and Antonioni with Robin Wood. In this piece, pub-
lished in Movies second issue, Cameron provides a spirited defense of auteurism and
articulates clearly the critical assumptions underlying the magazine. He considers the question
of the intentional fallacy in the context of auteur criticism, and in relation to Hollywood dis-
tinguishes Movies embrace of auteurism from the established views of Sight and Sound.

H1,y docs 1l1t· mm,·r.i J:<' up '"'"'~ &·c.i11s1· /11· 's wa1d1i11.~
,1,,. .<ky.
This question and ans,ver, printed in an interview
,vith Vincente Minnelli front the first M,,11ic, have
t'XCited more contment than anything else in the
111agazine. Dt'rek H ill in 77,c Fi11a11cial Tin,es found
tht'lll so absurd that he used the,n to disntiss the
whole of l'vfovic as an expensive joke. I suspect that
there were a nu1nber of causes behind Mr. Hill's ,nirth:
the idea of asking such questions on n1inute detail to
a director would have see,ned pointless to hint, par-
ticularly when the answer was so simple that he
probably took it at once to explode the grandiose
theories which the foolish young critics were doubt-
less hatching about the director's intentions and to
stan1p hint as an1bitionless or simple.
H ad we found Minnelli's ansv.ers stupid, we would
obviously not have printed then1 in Mc>Pie. And if they
were in flat contradiction to our theorit's about his
,vork, we would certainly havt' hesitated to ust' then1
,vithout con1ment. Where ,ve differ fro1n Mr. Hill,
then, is in our attitude to directors. Apparently our
assu,nptions are still sufficiently strange to need expla-
nation. In ainung to fill that need here. l do not want
to say anything particularly new or to provide a
defence of our views. Our only defence is that our
approach see,ns to work when actually applied to
filnlS. Before starting to recapitulate our assun1ptions,
though, l would like to say a little n1ore about the
Minnelli business.
In 77,e Four Horse111e11 of rite Apocalypse, the shot in
question occurs just after the death of Lee J. Cobb.
Shattered by the discovery that one of his grandsons is
a Nazi, he has rushed out into the garden, haunted by
the destn1ctive vision of the Four Horse,nen. As he
collapses to the ground and dies of a heart attack.
another grandson (Glenn Ford) rushes out to hi111,
kneels down on the ground and cradles the body in his
anns. As he looks up at the sky, sobbing, and secs the
vision of the horse,nen, the can1era cranes up and
n1oves in. Our question and its answer n1ay look a little
less rudin1entary if one bothers to think of otht'r
reasons why the can1era n1ight have craned up. Thus: (I )
E111otional: tht' ca rner:1111oves up to leave hin1 co,vering

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 ..
30
Figure 3. 1 M1~c:-c.·11 ->rl'uc: in Vmccnh. . Minndh"s ·11,r J:c,,,, /-for$1'm«·n <!/ rite• .~f•t1-i1lyptr (MCN\. I '-f62). i>roJuu.·d
by Julian Blaustem
bt·fon: the v1sio n. (2) Sy111bolic: the can1era looks do,vn
on hi111 in judginent because he fet'L~ hi111self (o r the
d irector feels hi111) rt•spo nsible in so111e ,vay for tht• o ld
1nan's death. (3) As a ,vay o f linking the sho t to its suc-
ccs~or, ,vhich , ho ,vs the Ho ~ en1en in the \ ky. (➔) A,
orchestracio n. taking up the bravura of th t' can1era
1noven1ents w hich havl' prt·cedl'd ir. That Minnl'lli
cranes up sin1ply because of the n1oven1ent o f h is acto r
is indicative o f his ,vholt.- n1ethod (Jnd confinns \Vhac
\\,a, said else,vhe re in rl1t' 111ab,:izine). The ca111era 111ovcs
so that ,ve can see Ford's face JS clt>,1rly :1s possible. T he
re.1son is neirhcr inevitable nor foolish.
T he n1ott ve for inrerv1e,vi ng di rectors ac aU 1s to
sec ho,v far their ideas of their a1111s square ,vith the
cri cics' ratio nalisations fron1 the fi l111s. Wht> n tht> d1rt>c-
ror disagrees ,vith the critics this doe, no t n1ea11 that
the cri cics are ,vrong. fo r, afrer ,111. the val ue of :1 fi ln1
depends on the fib11 icsell~ Jnd no t o n the direcco r·s
intt·n tions. ,vhich n1ay not be ;ippare nt fro 111 rhe
finished \\/Ork .
Digitized by Google
-
•
Ian Cameron
For ta lking about one sn1all sectio n o f a fi ln1 in
great detail, ,vhe;:ther in an intervie~• o r in an arncle.
,ve h:ivc been ,1ccuscd o f fascinatio n ,vith technical
1ro111•<1 i/lcs at the t>xpe nse of n1eaning. T he alternative
,vhich \ VC find clsc\Vhl·rc is J .~i'St11/r approach ,vhich
trie~ to prese;-nt an ovr:rall picture o f the filn1 ,vi tho ut
going into " unnecessary" detail. and usuall y results in
giving alrnost no i111prt·ssion o f ,vhat the fil n1 ,,·as
JCtualiy like fo r the spectator.
The fil111 critic's ra,v 111ateri als - apart front hi~ ov,n
intelligence - arc his o bservations in the cinen1a: ,vhat
he set·s, hears and feels. By building up o ur thcst•s
about fiJn1s &0111 these obsen•ations. ,ve are going
through the sanll" proces~l'S JS the ,1 udic11ct· al tho ugh,
o f cou rse. o ur rt'JCtio ns are conscious \Vhereas those
111duct'cl in the cint'tna. particularly at the first vit·\\•ing
o f a fi hn. tend co be reached unconsciously. We believe
that our 1nethod is likely co product" cricici,111 ,vhich
i, closer. no t j u~t to obj ectivt' dt'sc ripcion of the filn1
it.~t"lf but to the spectator's t'xperie nce of the fiJn1.
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Films, Directors and Critics
The assun1ption which underlies all the writing in
i\-fovie is that the director is the author of a film, the
person who gives it any distinctive quality it n1ay have.
There are quite large exceptions, with which I shall
deal later. On the whole we accept this cinen1a of
directors, although without going to the fanhest-out
extremes of la politiq11c des auteu~ which n1akes it dif-
ficult to think of a bad director making a good filn1
and almost impossible to think of a good director
n1aking a bad one. One's aesthetic must be sufficiently
flexible to cope with the fact that Joseph Pevney,
having n1ade dozens of stinkers, can suddenly corne
up with an admirable western in The Pl11ndere~, or
that Minnelli, after years of doing wonders often with
unprornising 111aterial, could produce anything as flat-
footed as 77,e &/ls Are Ringing.
Everyone accepts the cinen1a of directors for
France. Italy, Japan, India, Argentina, Sweden and
Poland - everywhere, in fact, that the An is easily
identifiable. Critics will talk happily about a liergtnan
ftln1. or a Mizoguchi tiJ,n, or even a Carol Reed film.
It is only over A111erican 111ovies that the trouble starts.
and reviews are likely to end with a desultory "George
Cukor directed efficiently." The reasons are easy
enough to find. Hollywood pictures are not so much
custon1-built as n1anufactured. The responsibility for
the1n is shared, and the final quality is no more the
fault of the director than of such parties as
the producer, the set designer, the cameran1an or the
hairdresser. Only by a happy accident can anything
good escape from this industrial cotnplex. The good
American filrn comes to be regarded as the cinen1atic
equivalent of a 1nutant.
Now there are qualities superirnposed on n1ost big
studio fiJnlS (these days there are very few of then1
indeed) that depend not on the director but on the
studio: the look of colour fil111s is particularly prone
to this son of control. An extre111e exa111ple is Fox
films in the late fonies and early fifties which are
alruost in1mediately identifiable by their photography
and music, particularly if these are by the leading
exponents - photographers Joseph la Shelle and Joe
MacDonald and co111posers Leigh Harline and David
Raksin. However, these qualities are rather peripheral.
and one comn1on accusation of this son, that Gn:gg
Toland effectively directed the filn1s he photographed
so remarkably, has been disposed of by Andrew Sarris
in Film C11lt11re: "Subtract Gregg '. Toland fron1 Welles
Digitized by Google
31
and you still have a 111ountain; subtract Toland fron1
Wyler and you have a 111olehill."
The closer one looks at Hollywood ftlnts, the less
they seem to be accidents. There is a correlation
between the quality of the filnts and the nan1es of their
directors. When one notices that such 1nasterpieces as
Scarface, Bri11gi11g Up Baby and Gentlemen Prefer Blo11des
were all directed by the san1e man, one begin~ to
wonder whether the merits of these otherwise dis-
si1nilar films nught not be explained by this man's
talent. On a slightly closer look, one finds that he was
also responsible for such generally admired movies as
T1ve11tierlr Ce11t11ry, Sergea11t York, Red River and Mo11key
Busi11ess, not to n1ention Rio Bravo, a fihn which gained
little attention on its release and is now accepted as a
n1asterpiece, even by Sig/rt and Sound, which greeted
its appearance with a singular lack of enthusias111.
Hawks is just beginning to be accepted in Britain
and the US. Raoul Walsh, on the other hand, is
vinually unknown. Yet if one looks at Walsh's films
(or son1e of them - he has made 200 since he staned
directing in 1913), one can identify the san1e talent
and highly syn1pathetic personality behind a British
cheapie of 1937, ]11mp for Glory, a 1945 racecourse
111ovie. Salty O'Ro11rke, and more recent works like
Blackbeard tire Pirate (1952), Tire La1vless Breed (1952),
Battle Cry (1955), Esther and rl,e King (1960) and
Mari11cs, Let's Co (1961 ). The similarity of these n1ovies
111ade in three different countries over a period of 25
years by a director whose name does not spell prestige.
who will thus not have an exceptional degree of
freedo111, should leave no doubt that, provided he has
any talent, it is the director, rather than anyone else,
who detennines what finally appears on the screen.
Pan of the neglect of A.inerican directors comes
fron1 the sin1ple fact that it is easier to accept foreign
films as An: a status word to indicate that the filn1 is
wonh the critic's serious attention. In foreign lan-
guage 111ovies. one of the biggest obstacles has been
linuted: the dialogue. Even if they are bad. subtitles
provide a shock-absorber between the dialogue and
the audience. Everyone knows that laughable subtitles
do not necessarily indicate defects in the original
language. But two lines of ill-written dialogue in an
An1erican picture will put the critics on their guard.
Aln1ost invariably it is dutf dialogue that alienates
thern. not unconvincing n1otivation. or false 111ovc·-
n1t·nts of actor.; or pointless c1n1era\vork. A recent
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
32 Ian Cameron
victin1 is 11,e Four Hc>rst·111et1, which did have rather
n1ore than a couple of bad lines.
When a S(glrt a11d Sound critic does n1anage to
work up son1c enthusiasm for an An1erican fihn, it is
usually self-linuting: "very good ... of its kind." So
,ve are treated to dinuy ren1en1bered sections of John
Russell Taylor's childhood erotic fantasies about Maria
Montez and Veronica Lake as a picture of the Forties.
R..evie,vs of American filn1s tend to link the111 together
in re111arkably ill-assorted pairs. One would be a111azed
at the current review of 111c i\1an ITTu, Slrot Uberty
l,a/ance and Guns in tire Ajien1oc>11 (both "so consciously
old-fashioned and nostalgic that, appearing in 1962,
they seem aln1ost esoteric'') if one had not already
been treated to such unlikely joint reviews as Exodus
plus 11,e Guns of Navar(>ne and Psydl(> plus 11,e Apar1-
111e111. If the ,vriter.; of these pieces wen~ literary critics,
,vhich, barring a certain illiteracy, they very nearly are.
one in1agines that they would happily revie,v Tender
Is tire Nig/11, i\4iss L>nelilrcarts and A-fa11lra1ta11 Tra11~/i·r
together entirely in tenns of American 111al-de-siede in
the twenties. Any other qualities would be written off
in a well- chosen sentence: "Mr. Dos Passos's narrative
technique of intertwining a nu111ber of aln1ost uncon-
nected stories does not n1ake for easy con1prehension."
S(i:lrt a11d Sou11d has j ust produced the n1ost accurate
piece of unconscious self-criticisn1 in its n1ost recent
and 111ost desperate atten1pt to be hip: a colun111 in
,vhich the glad hand of John Russell Taylor is hidden
behind the 11a111e of Arkadin. "Why," he opens brightly,
"don't we take horror fihns n1ore seriously? Well, not
seriously seriously ... "
The worst sufferer fro111 restricted ad111iration has
bt'en Hitchcock. Psyd1<> ,vas passed over as one big
laugh. As a joke it could not possibly be anything
elst'. Psyclrc>'s joke-content is very large. but that
doesn't n1ean it is only joke. Exan1ple: tht' sct'ne of
Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins getting Jt'lJUaintt·d
is both an ingeniously extended d,111ble 1·11tn1drc on
stuffing bird~ and a very real and touching picture of
t,vo people, isolated fron1 others by their actions.
voluntary or other\vise, trying to talk to each other.
The great weakness of la p,,liri,111c de; ,1111r11r.< is its
rigidity: its adherents tl"nd to bt·, as they say. totally
conunitted to a cine111a ofdirectors. Tht·rt· art', ho,vt·vt·r.
4uitc a ft·w filn1s ,vhosl' authors ,ire not tht·ir directors.
The various filn1 versions of Paddv, ( :havt't-:.kv's
. . ,vorks
arc: all pri1narily Chayt•fsky 111ovie, rath t·r th:111 [.>elbert
Digitized by Google
Mann, or John Cron1well or even Richard Brooks
111ovies. Given a weak director the effective author of
a filn1 can be its photographer (Lucien Ballard, Al
Cap<>ne), composer (Jeron1e Moross, 111e Bi}! Country),
producer (Arthur Freed, Uj!lrt in tire Piazza) or star
Uohn Wayne, 111e Co111a11clreros). None of those fihns
was 111ore than n1oderately good. Occasionally, though,
son1ething really ren1arkable can con1e fi-0111 an effi-
cient director with n1agnificent collaborators. Such a
fihn was Michael Curtiz's Casabla11ca, which contained
Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergtnan. Paul Henreid,
Claude Rains, Sidney Greenstreet, Conrad Veidt, Peter
Lorre and Marcel Dalio, and was son1ehow nlissed
fron1 John Russell Taylor's knee-high panoran1a of
the forties. More recently we have had 111c Si11s <!f
Radie/ Cade, which, although directed by the excellent
(;ordon Douglas. was above all an Angie Dickinson
n1ovie. being entirely shaped by her personality and
deriving all its power, ,vhich ,vas considerable, fi-0111
her perfonnance.
Many filn1s have also an iconographical intcrt·st.
,vhich is son1ething quite apart fro111 any aesthetic
n1erits they 111ay have. This interest co111es fron1 their
relationship either to conditions external to their
rnaking (things as diverst' as the discovery of the H
bo1nb or current trends in auton1obile design, which
inffuenced the design of the subn1arine in I 'c>y~i:r r,,
tire B01ton1 <!f 1/,e Sea) or to other filn1s. Joseph
Newn1an ·s Spi11 i!f .i Coi11 (TI1r c; eol")le R,~fi Story) is
fascinating bt'cause of its sin1ilarity to other period
gangster n1ovit's: the sequences are built in the s.une
,vay towards a cli1nax of slaughter - only in this case
the burst of gunfire is replaced by equally staccato
laughter. for insta nct'. as Al Capone (played by N eville
Urand. "'' ho ,vas (:apone in Karlson 's 77,e Sraifare i\.f,,b)
tells Gt'orgie (llay Danton. whost' pt'rfonnance is an
extension of his previous Lt.:r,:s Dia111011d in Boetticher's
tihn) ho,v n1uch he liked his perfonnanct· as Capone
in Srarf:1.-c, the cli111atic sct'ne of ,vhich has been
reconstn1cted for us. This sort of kick is also available
t·vcn n1ore lavishly in Vinc,·nte Minnelli's an1azing
nt',v ·r,,,,, U·1Tks /11 .--111,,1/,cr ·1,,1,,11, "''hen: f:1ded n1ovie
star Kirk l) ouQlas ... sits in a vie,vin-' e-, tht·atre watching
.. a
tihn he has previously 111ade ,vich the director for
\vhoni he is no,v ,vorkin~ in the dubbing roon1.
T he tihn is 71,r B,11/ ,11,d the I3e,11uifid. , vhich Minnelli
111,1tk· tt'n yl·,1rs a!-\o ,vith I )ouµb, ..1s ,veil ,1s the san1e
\\Titer. prndurtT .111d ro111posrr ((:hark s Schnee, J ohn
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Films, Directors and Critics
Housen1an and David Raksin). In another Joseph
Newn1an n1ovie, 77,e Big Ba11kn1/I (An10/d Rothstein,
King of tile Roaring Taventies), it is assumed that the
audience has seen the earlier rnovies which found it
neces.~ary to explain how bootlegging and protection
worked. 77ae B~ Ba11kro/l (in spite of 26 missing
111inutes in the British version one of the very best of
its kind) builds on the knowledge it assun1es to tell
the story of An1old Rothstein, who turned the
rnechanics of corruption to his own ends.
A few filn1s are interesting for a related reason: the
picture of their audience which they provide. The bt."St
c::xan1ple is Deln1er Daves, who n1akes movies for ste-
nographer.; and provides then1 with just what they
wish to see. His pictures may be trivial, dishonest;
i111n1oral - Daves· anovies have every fault in the book
except bad production values - but they do provide
a picture of the girl Daves is ain1ing his fihns at (very
successfully, it seerns). However irritating one may
find Suzanne Pleshette in Lovers Must Learn (Rome
Adventure). one has to adanit that her perfonnance
is brilliantly pitched at just the right level of l,'Ush.
While one can appreciate filn1s for their icono-
graphical significance or as a critique of their audience,
any rnerit they n1ay have still cornes fro111 the director.
rnuch rnore than fron1 any other source. Although
finally our belief in the cinen1a of directors can only
be justified though continuous application of our
ideas in i\101,ie, I want to conclude this anicle with an
extended exan1ple of the part played by the director,
based on three filn1s, nvo of theau well-liked, rnon:
or less, British offerings. J. Lee Thoanpson 's 77,e G1111s
,~( l\lavaro11e and David Lean's Bri~(!e <'" tire Ri,,cr K11•<1i,
the third a n1uch less respected An1c.-rican filn1, f)on
Sic.-gcl's Hell Is _(or Herc>t'S.
All three contain the sin1ple rnoral that war is futile
and degrading; all three use one of the basic war tilrn
stories: the strategic action of considerable importancc.-
,vhich devolves on a very few n1en. J\lavar1>t1e sets out
with the obvious intention of telling a rattling good
yam about the way our chaps heroically battled against
aln1ost irnpossible obstacles to knock out the Jerry
guns. Even this it aln1ost fails to do by disastrously
overplaying its suspense potential in a lenh'thy sequenct.•
of spurious thrills as the tean1 crawl up a crun1bling
cardboard cliff so early in the ,novit· that everyone
,viii need to survive to justify their •billing on the
credits. However. its ,vorst sin is stopping otr at k·ast
Digitized by Google
33
nvice in the course of the narrative for dialogue rncdi-
tations on the nastiness of war, which the audience is
rneant to accept and which would in thernselves be
perfectly syn1pathetic, if slightly superfluous, in a filn1
that refused to present war as enjoyable. But here their
effect is con1pletely vitiated by the rest of the action,
and in context they seen1 almost hypocritical . I have
a feeling that the failure is not inherent in the script
but comes fro,n the lack of any firm control in the
direction. Even the one moment which could hardly
help having some force, the shooting of Gia Scala as
a collaborator, in the film has none. Here adn1ittedly
the script does side-step by letting Irene Papas, who
is Greek and only a secondary character, forestall Peck
and Niven in shooting her, when they are both more
directly affected by the responsibility for her death.
But even allowing for this, the lack of conviction is
total.
Hell Is for Heroes is based on a story by Roben
Pirosh which could easily have been tun1ed into the
son of plug for the gallantry of the Ainerican fighting
n1an which Willian1 W elln1an rnade 13 years ago fron1
a Pirosh story in Battle,~ro1111d (recently re-released
,vith Anthony Mann's ren1arkable ex-3D western 77,c
i\laked Spur). I an1 not concerned here with the central
theme in the fihn which is en1bodied in the Steve
McQueen character, the psychopath ,vho n1akes an
ideal soldier but goes to pieces outside the field of
con1bat. Two sequences arc.- particularly relevant to any
purpose here as they could easily have degenerated to
the.- sa,ne level as K111ai and Navaro11e. In the first, three
soldiers set out at night on a ananoeuvre to trick the
c.-nc.-rny into thinking that they are sending out large.-
patrols and therefore have the front well-n1anned. Tht·
idea is to take en1pty an1n1unition tins out into no-
rnan 's land, fill thern with stones and rattle them by
rcn1ote control fron1 their position by n1eans of lengths
of telephone wire. The noise of these would be picked
up by the enen1y's ground rnicrophones and all hell
,vould be let loose to 1,>-reet the ghost patrol. Siegel
does not tell us what they are doing until their n1ission
is ahnost cornpleted. We take the episode seriously.
,vhich is right because it is serious and no lc.-ss danger-
ous than a real patrol. If he had sho~vn us beforehand
exactly what they were doing. the.- episode would have
been invt'stt·d for us in the safetv, of our cineana scats
with a feeling of fun, of fooling the c.-nen1y. NcvtT
onct' in tl1t' tilan do \Vt' gt·t this fet·ling.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
34
Figure 3.2 Scev, McQuecn in Don S1q;d's Hr/I Is Jnr I fr,,,..s (i>.1~an1ounc. 1962). Produ ced by Henry
01.mkc
The last sequence for once does sun1 up the \vho le
filin by its picture of the contribution au individua.l
ca n 111ake to the action. In serious trouble after leading
an abortive attack on chc crucial pillbox. ,vhich has
resulted in the death of his t"\,vo cornpanions. M cQuee n
takes it upon hi111self to put the pillbox out of actio n.
H e n1anages by a sui cidal charge to get close enough
to lob a satchel charge into the n1outh of the box.
~
Inevitably he is shot. Seeing the charge thro\vn ou t of
the pillbox. he staggers for\vard. grabs it and rolls into
the rnouth of the box ,vith it :is 1c explodes. A Aan1c-
thro v.,er is played on the n1outh of the pillbox to n1ake
sure it rs ou t of action. The last shot of the filn1 is a
long.;hot of :1 general advance begi nning along the
section of the front around the pillbox. The advance
is obviously going to be very costly. The ca,nera zoon1~
into the 111outh of the pillbox and the end title is
supcri111poscd. The zoo111 111 fron, the general vre,v co
the dt·tail en1phasises the sn1allne,s of the g.iin fron1
M cQuecn ·, death. (.)ne pillbox h,1s been put out of
action, and as the advance continu~·, cha t pillbo x ceases
Digitized by Google
Ian Cameron
ro have any significan ce. It is left behind a dead. aln1ost
abstract object. Unlike N<1vart•11e, there is no conflict
benveen th e intended content and the fom1 \vhich
expresses rt.
Contr.ist with tht· last shot of He// /.1 _fi1r Hfroe.1 the
end of Bri~11e Oil r/11: Rir,c•r Kll,ai. Jarnes l)onald stands
surveyi ng the wreckage after the destruction of the
bridge. •· Madness. n1adness." he says. and the can1era
soars back a\vay fro,n hi111 in a 11100d of ttiun1ph
,vhich i~ taken up by the 111arcial n1usic on the
soundtrack. In the co ntradiction between tht• senci-
111ents expres~ed by the dialogue and the 111ean.ing
contained in the rreatn1ent. critics have noticed only
the fon11er. Bril(I/<' Oil rl,e Riv<·r Ku,ai's anti-v..-ar content
is ,videly accepted to be i111peccable. Bur Hr// /.1 .for
Heroes, ,vhere the idea, art' ,·.xprt·s,.:d by tht• ,vhole
fom1 of the fihn., can pass nearly unnoticed and eve n
be described a, eq uivocal in 1t~ atntude to ,var.
The lack of perception ,vhich result~ in this sort of
fuzzy thinking is the best argun1ent for a detailed
cnnc1~1n.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 4

Notes on the Auteur Theory

•
1n 1962
A11drew Sarris

Writing for New York's Village Voice, a counter-cultural newspaper with a national profile,
Andrew Sarris attained national prominence reviewing films from an auteurist perspective. He
was the first and most eloquent of auteurists in the US, beginning in his earty days writing
for Jonas Mekas' Film Culture, a small journal devoted primarily to experimental and avant-
garde cinema that began publication in 1955. Sarris' groundbreaking book, The American
Cinema, published in 1968, was the first attempt to offer a systematic map of important direc-
tors throughout the history of Hollywood. This essay, which originally appeared in Film Culture,
introduced auteurism to North American readers and was the first attempt to give au1eurism
a theoretical framework ("Henceforth, I will abbreviate la politique des auteurs as the auteur
theory to avoid confusion"). Sarris' proposed theoretical framework has been the subject of
much comment and attack, particularly from Pauline Kael.

I call 1/11·,,- sk.-1d1c.< Slwd,>11!1!"'1'/", p,irtl)' I•)' 1/1c d,·.,(~11<1ti,>11 1,,
r,·111i11d y,>11 <1/ 1>11Cf 1h<11 thry ,lt-rir•c•.J;,,,,1 tire- d,irka sidr ,f li(c-,
p,urly /11..-,111.H". like• ,,1/1.-r .</1,1d,,11:i:r,1p/1s, th,·i• ,,,,, 11,>I dirc,tly
Pi.<i/,/c•. JV/11•11 I 111kr ,, .</1,11/,,11:i:rap/1 i11 my lta111/. it 111,1k,·.<11,>
;,,,,,,cssfo11 OIi nu·. c111d gi11,•J ,,,,. lltl dt'clf (tllltTJ>fit111 t!f ;,. ()11/y
11•l1t·11 I h,,/d it "I' ,>pp,>.<itc 1/,,- "'""· mu/ '"'"' /,,,,1,: 11,>t dircYtly
at it, b111 <II th,11 11•/1ir/1 appc,,rs ,,,, the w,11/, .un I a/,/,- 1,, sec· ir.
Sc, 11/sc> with 1/1<· pia11rc I wi.<lt 1,, _,1,,,,,. Ital', <111 i11w11rd pia11rc
1/1at does ""' b,·cc>111e J1t'rtcp1ihlc 11111il I si·,· it 1/1r,111xh th,· ext,·r•
11al. 111is rx1,·n1t1/ is p,·1/1111,s 11,,1 q11i1,· 1111,,/,1n,si1•r, />111, 11,>t 11,11i/
I J.,,,k 1hro11)!ft it, do I disrcwrr 1/1,11 i1111cr pia11r,• 1/1,11 I d,•.<irt· I<>
shc>11• yc>11, and i1111cr pia uri- /c>c> ddice11.-ly du111 •11 1,>be· ,111t11•<1rclly
1•isi/>lt•, ll~ll'fll tlS it ;, ~r ,,,,. 1.-11da,·s1 ,,,,,,,ds ,f ,,,.. .<,111/.
Sorl'll Kit'rkcga,ird. in /-;itlwrl ()r
An exhibitor onCl' askcd 111e if an old til111 I had rec-
onunended ,vas really good or good only according to
.
,4,,ndn•w S.1m,. ""Nott.·~ on th1..· Aut,,:ur T lwory m l 1U1..:?.." rr- 1--~ frn111 him, ,.,,,,,,,.,. ! 1)
of the.· .1uthor.
the <1111t·11r theory. I appreciate the distinction. Likl' th e
alche1nists of old, a11tc11r critics are notorious tor ration -
alizing leaden clinkers into golden nuggets. Their
judginents are seldo111 vindicated, because fe,v specta-
tors are conditioned to perceive in individual works
the organic unity of a director's career. On a given
evening, a fihn by John Ford n1ust take its chances as
if it were a fil.tn by Henry King. A.in I i111plying th.it
the weakest Ford is superior to the strongest King?
Yes! This kind of unqualified aflim1ation seen1s to
reduce the a11te11r theory to a gan1e of aesthetic soli-
taire with all the cards turned f.1ce up. Uy a11tc11r rules,
the Fords will co111e up aces as invariably as the Kin~,s
,viii con1e up deuces. Presun1ably. we can all go hou!l'
as soon as the directorial si{,'Tlature is flashed on the
screen. To those who linger. 11,c G1111fi.(!lrtcr (King
1950) 111ay appear ,vorchier than f/rs/1 (Ford 1932).
(\\/ imn 1•u1,?: J1J1>_\) , <l' • 1'"•l h~ :\ndn,:\\ s.,m<., ll 1,.•pnnt1..•d hy r l·nm,.\11 111

Original from
Digitized by Google UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
36 Andrew Sarris
(And how deeply one n1ust burrow to undennine
Ford!) No n1atter. The auteur theory is unyielding. 11:
by definition, Ford is invariably superior to King, any
evidence to the contrary is n1erely an optical illusion.
Now ,vhat could be sillier than this inflexible attitude?
Let us abandon the absurdities of the auteur theory so
that we n1ay return to the chaos of con1111on sense.
My labored perfonnance as devil's advocate not-
withstanding, I intend to praise the auteur theory, not
to bury it. At the very least, I would like to grant the
conden1ned system a hearing before its execution.
The trial has dragged on for years, I know, and everyone
is now bored by the abstract reasoning involved. I have
little in the way of new evidence or new arg11n1ents, but
I would like to change son1e of 111y previous testin1ony.
What follows is. consequently, less a manifesto than a
credo, a son1e,vhat disorganized credo, to be sure,
expressed in fomiless notes rather than in fonnal brief
I. Aimez-Vous Brahms?
Goethe? Shakespeare? Everything signed ,vith their
narnes is considered good. and one ,vracks one's brains
to find beauty in their stupidities and failures, thus dis-
torting the general taste. All these great talent\, the
Goethes, the Shakespeares, the Beethovens, the Michel-
angdos, created, side by side with their n1astcrpicccs,
,vorks not 111ercly rnediocre. but quite sirnply fright1i1l.
Leo Tolstoy. ]c>un,a/, 1895-9
The preceding quotation prefaces the late Andre
Bazin's fan1ous critique of "la politique des auteurs,"
v,hich appeared in the Cahiers du Ci11e111a of April,
1957. Because no cornparably lucid staten1ent oppos-
ing the politique has appeared since that tin1e, I ,vould
like to discuss so111e of Bazin's argurnents ,vith reft·r-
ence to the current situation. (I except, of course.
Richard Roud's penetrating article " T he French Line."
which dealt 1nainly v.•ith the post-1\/c>uvd/c ~ ·,•.!!""
situation ,vhen the politiquc had dcgeneratt"d into
McMahonisn1.)
As Tolstoy's ohst"rvation indic.1trs. /,1 pcJlitiq11c des
c111tnirs ante-dates the cint'rna. For centu rie~. tht·
Elizabethan p()/itiq11c h.1s decrt·t·d tht· readini:: of evt·ry
Shakespearean play bcfort" .tny t"ncou1ltt'r ,vith thl'
Jonsonian rept·rtory. At sorne point ht·t,vcen "/1111<111 ,,(
.41/11·11.i ;111d l ',,/J'1>111', this proct·durt" is patently unfair
to Jonson ·s rt·putation . Uut not rt•,tlh·. ()n tile ntost
Digitized by Google
supt"rficial level of artistic reputations, the autt•ur theory
is merely a figure of speech. If the n1an in the street
could not invoke Shakespeare's nan1e as an identifiable
cultural reference, he would probably have less contact
with all things artistic. T he Shakespearean scholar, by
contrast, will ahvays be driven to explore the sur-
rounding terrain, with the result that all the Elizabethan
dran1atists gain 111ore rather than less recognition
through the pre-en1inence of one of their nun1ber.
Therefore, on balance, the P"litiquc, as a figure of
speech, does 1nore good than hann.
Occasionally, s01ne iconoclast will atten1pt to den1-
onstrate the fallacy of this figure of speech. We will be
solen1nly infom1ed that 7711: Gambler was a potboiler
for Dostoyevsky in the n1ost literal sense of the word.
In Jacques Rivette's Paris N()IIS Appartie11t, Jean-Claude
Brialy asks Betty Schneider if she ,vould still adnure
Pericles if it were not signed by Shakespeare. Zealous
111usicologists have played Welli11gt()11's Victory so often
as an exan1ple of inferior Beethoven that I have grov.'n
fond of the piece, atrocious as it is. The trouble with
such iconoclasm is that it presupposes an encyclopedic
awareness of the a111e11r in question. If one is fanuliar
with every Beethoven composition, Welli11gto11's Victory,
in itself. will hardly tip the scale toward Mozart, Bach,
or Schubert. Yet that is the issue raised by the a11te11r
theory. If not Beethoven, who? And why? Let us say
that the politique for co111posers wen t Mozart, Beethoven,
Bach, and Schubert. Each composer would represent
a task force of compositions. arrayed by type and
quality with the 1nighty battleships and aircraft carries
flanked by flotillas of cn1isers. destroyers, and n1ine
sweepers. Wh<"n the Mozart task force collides with
the Beethoven task force , syrnphonies roar against syrn-
phonies, quartets n1aneuver against quartets, and it is
sirnply no contest with the op<"ras. As a single force.
Ucethoven's nine sy1nphonies, outgun any nine of
Mozart· s forty-one syn1phonies, both sets of quartets
art' n1ost on a par with Schubert's. but ·n,(' 1\,fagic Fl11tc,
11,c l\,Jr1rri,1,1!C of F(!!ar11, and D,,,, (;i<,l'a1111i will blow
poor Fidc/i,, out of the v.•ater. Then, of course, there is
Uach with an entir<"ly different drploy111ent of con1-
po~ition and instruntentation. The Haydn and Handel
cultists art" 111oort·d in their ink·ts rt·ady to join the fray.
and tit<" ntodt· n1s ,vith their nuclt·.1r noisl's are still
1nobilizing tht·ir forct·s.
.
It can be argut"d thJt any. t·:xact r.tnking '
of artists
is arbitr.iry and pointlt'~S. Arbitr,1ry up to a point,
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962
perhaps, but pointless, no. Even Bazin concedes the
polemical value of the politique. M any fihn critics
would rather not conmut thc111sclves to specific rank-
ings ostensibly because every film should be judged
on its own n1erits. In n1any instances, this reticence
rnasks the critic's condescension to the 111edium.
Because it has not been fimtly established that the
cinen1a is an art at all, it requires cultural audacity to
establish a pantheon for film directors. Without such
audacity, I see little point in being a filn1 critic. Anyway,
is it possible to honor a work of an without honoring
the artist involved? I think not. Of course, any idiot
can erect a pantheon out of hearsay and gossip. Without
specifying any work, the Saganesque seducer will ask
quite cynically, "Airnez-vous Brahrns?" The fuct that
Brahn1s is included in the pantheon of high-brow
pickups docs not invalidate the industrious criticisrn
that justifies the con1poser as a figure of speech.
Unfortunately, so111e critics have e1nbraced the
auteur theory as a short-cut to film scholarship. With
a "you-see-it-or-you-don't" attitude toward the reader,
the particularly lazy auteur critic can save hin1self the
drudgery of com111unication and explanation. Indeed,
at their worst, auteur critiques are less rneaningful than
the straight-forward plot reviews that pass for criticisn1
in America. Without the necessary research and analy-
sis, the auteur theory can degenerate into the kind of
snobbish racket that is associated with the n1erchandis-
ing of paintings.
It was largely against the inadequate theoretical
formulation of la politique des autcurs that Bazin was
reacting in his friendly critique. (Henceforth, I will
abbreviate la politique des auteurs as the auteur theory
to avoid confusion.) Bazin introduces his argu1nents
within the context of a fa,nily quarrel over the edito-
rial policies of Cahiers. He fears that, by assigning
reviews to adnurers of given directors, notably Alfred
Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, Fritz
Lang, Howard Hawks, and Nicholas Ray, every work,
,najor and n1inor, of these exalted figures is made to
radiate the sa111e beauties of style and 111eaning. Spe-
cifically, Bazin notes a distortion when the kindly
indulgence accorded the in1perfcct work of a Minnelli
is coldly withheld from the in1perfect work of Huston.
The inherent bias of the auteur theory 1nagnifies the
gap between the two fihns.
I would make two points here. Firsr. Bazin 's great-
ness as a critic, (and I bt·lievt' stron gly that he ,vas the
Digitized by Google
37
greatest filn1 critic who ever lived) rested in his dis-
interested conception of the cinema as a universal
entity. It follows that he would react against a theory
that cultivated what he felt were inaccurate judginents
for the sake of dra111atic paradoxes. He was. if any-
thing, generous to a fault, seeking in every film so111e
vestige of the cinematic art. That he would seek
justice for Huston vis-a-vis Minnelli on even the
secondary levels of creation indicates the scrupulous-
ness of his critical personality.
However, n1y second point would seem to contra-
dict 1ny first. Bazin was wrong in this instance, insofar
as any critic can be said to be wrong in retrospect.
We are dealing here with Minnelli in his L,ist for Lifr
period and Huston in his Moby Dick period. Both
ftln1s can be considered failures on ahnost any level.
The miscasting alone is disastrous. The snarling force
of Kirk Douglas as the tom1ented Van Gogh, the
brutish insensibility of Anthony Quinn as Gauguin,
and the nervously scraping tension between these two
absurdly lin1ited actors, deface Minnelli's n1eticulously
objective decor, itself inappropriate for the n1ood of
its subject. The director's presentation of the paintings
then1selves is singularly unperceptive in the repeated
failure to n1aintain the proper optical distance fron1
canvases that arouse the spectator less by their derailed
draughtsn1anship than by the shock of a ~estalt whole-
ness. As for A1oby Dick, Gregory Peck's Ahab deliberates
long enough to let all the den1ons flee the Pequod,
taking Melville's Lear-like fantasies with then1.
Huston's epic technique with its casually shifting
carnera viewpoint then drifts on an intellectually
becaln1ed sea toward a fitting rendezvous with a
rubber whale. These two fihns are neither the best nor
the worst of their tin1e. The qut.-stion is: Which deserves
the harder review? And there 's the rub. At the tin1e,
Huston's stock in Arnerica was higher than Minnelli 's.
Most critics expected Huston to do "big" things, and,
if they thought about it at all, expected Minnelli to
stick to "sn1all" things like musicals. Although neither
filn1 was a critical failure, audiences stayed away in
large enough nu111bers to 111ake the cultural respecta-
bility of the projects suspect. On the whole. Lust j,,r
L[fe was rnore successful with the audiences it did
reach than was Moby Dick.
In retrospect, J\,f,,by Dick repres<"tltS the turning
do,vnward of Huston as a director to bl' taken seri-
ously. Dy contrast. L11.,t J,,r L!fi· is sin1ply an isolatt"d
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

38 Andrew Sarris
Figure 4.1 Gregory Pec k » Alub 111
d,r,·ctl'd br John H u<tnn
episode in the err:itic career of an interesting stylist.
The exact size of Mianelli's talent rnay inspire con-
troversy. but he dot·~ represent son1ething in the
cine111a today. Huston is virtually a forgotten 111an
wi th a fe,v actors' classics behind hin1 surviving as the
ruins of a once-pro1nising career. Both Eric Roh111er,
,vho denigrated Huston in 1957. a11J Jean D0111archi.
v.•ho was kind to Minnelli that sa111e year, son1ehow
~aw the furure 111ore clearlv• 011 a.11 ,1111c11r levt'I than did
Bazin. A.s Santayana has re111arked: "It is a great
advantage for a syste111 of philosophy to be substan-
tially rrue." If the a11re11r crirics of the 1950s had not
scored so 111a11y coups of cL,irvoyance, the a11re11r
Digitized by Google
.::.
111,,/,y 01,I: (Worner Llro,. l'J5f,). Produced Jnd
theory ,vould not be ,vorth discussing in the 1960s. I
111ust add chat. at the ti111e, I ,vould have agreed ,vith
Bazin on this and every other objection to the 11111t·1,r
theory, but sub~equent history. that history about
,vhich Bazin ,vas ahvays so 111ystical, has substantially
confin11ed rnost of the principles of the a111e11r theory.
Iro11icaJly. 111ost of the original supporters of the a111e11r
theory have no,v abandoned ic. So1ne have discovered
tnore useful poliriq11es as directors and \VOuld-be direc-
tors. Others have succumbed to a European-oriented
pragn1atis111 ,vhere intention is no,v 1nore nearly equal
to talent in critical relevance. Luc Moullet's belated
discovery that Sa1nuel Fuller ,va~. 111 fact. fifty years
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962
old, signaled a reorientation of Calriers away fron1 the
American cinen1a. (The handwriting was already on
the wall when Truffaut remarked recently that,
,vhereas he and his colleagues had .. discovered"
a111r11n, his successors have .. invented" then1.)
Bazin then explores the i111plications of Giraudoux's
epigram: "There are no ,vorks; there are only authors."
T ruffaut has seized upon this paradox as the battle
cry of la politique des a11teurs. Bazin casually denton-
strates how the contrary can be argued with equal
probability of truth or error. He subsequently dredges
up the equivalents of Wel/in~t<1n's Vict<1ry for Voltain:,
Beauntarchais, Flaubert, and Gide to docun1ent his
point. Bazin then yields sonte ground to Rohmer's
argu111ent that the history of art does not confinn the
decline with age of authentic geniuses like Titian,
Ren1brandt, Beethoven, or nearer to us, Bonnard,
Matis.se, and Stravinsky. Bazin agrel'S with R ohnter
that it is inconsistent to attribute senility only to aging
film directors while, at the sante time, honoring the
gnarled austerity ofRen1brandt's later style. This is one
of the crucial propositions of the a11te11r theory, because
it refutes the popular theory of decline for aging
giants like Renoir and Chaplin and asserts. instead,
that, as a director grows older, he is likely to becorne
n1ore profoundly personal than ntost audiences and
critics can appreciate. However, Bazin inunediately
retrieves his lost ground by arguing that, whereas the
senility of directors is no longer at issue, the evolution
of an art fonn is. Where directors fail and fall is in
the realm not of psychology but of history. If a direc-
tor fails to keep pace with the developn1ent of his
rnedium, his work will becon1e obsolescent. What
seenis like senility is, in reality. a dishannony ber.veen
the subjective inspiration of the director and the
objective evolution of the n1ediu1n. By n1aking this
distinction between the subjective capability of an
auteur and the objective value of a work in fihn history,
Bazin reinforces the popular irnpression that the
Griffith of Birt/, <?fa Nation is superior to the Griffith
of Abraham Uncoln in the perspective of tirning, ,vhich
sirnilarly distinguishes the Eisenstein of Potl'l11kin front
the Eisenstein of Ivan tire Terril,/c, the Jlenoir of Lr
Grande Illusion fron1 tht· R.enoir of J>irnir i11 1/11· c;r,1s.<,
and the Welles of Citi.:nr K,111c front the Wt·Ilcs of ;\Jr.
Arkadin.
I have embroidered Uazin 's actual l'xarnplcs for the
sake of greater contact ,vith the A111t'rican scene. 1n
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39
fact, Bazin irnplicitly denies a decline in the later
works of Chaplin and Renoir and never n1entions
Griffith. He suggests circuitously that Hawks's S<a,fare
is clearly superior to Hawks 's Gcntlenren Prefer Blondes,
although the a11te11r critics would argue the contrary.
Bazin is particularly critical of Rivette 's circular rea-
soning on Monkey B11siness as the proof of Hawks's
genius. "One sees the danger," Bazin ,varns, "which is
an aesthetic cult of personality."
Bazin's taste, it should be noted, was tar more dis-
crin1inating than that of Arnerican historians. Filn1s
Bazin cites as unquestionable classics are still quite
debauble here in America. After all, Citizen Kane was
originally panned by Jan1es Agee, Richard Griffith,
and Bosley Crowther, and S<a,f,ue has never been
regarded as one of the landrnarks of the American
cinema by native critics. I would say that the Arneri-
can publi,· has been ahead of its critics on both Kane
and S<a,face. Thus, to argue against the a111c11r theory
in Arnerica is to assun1e that we have anvone , of
Bazin 's sensibility and dedication to provide an alter-
native, and we sin1ply don't.
Bazin, finally, concentrates on the An1erican cinerna,
\vhich invariably serves as the decisive battleground of
the auteur theory, whether over fvl<'nkey B11si11css or
Party Girl. Unlike ntost "serious" An1erican critics.
Bazin likes Hollywood filn1s, but not solely because
of the talent of this or that director. For Bazin, the
distinctively A111erican contedy, western, and gangster
genres have their own n1ystiques apart fron1 the per-
sonalities of the directors concerned. H ow can one
review an Anthony Mann western, Bazin asks, as if it
were not an expression of the genre's conventions.
Not that Bazin dislikes Anthony Mann's westerns. He
is ntore concerned \vith otherwise adrnirable westen1s
that the a11rc11r theory rejects because their din.•ctors
happen to be unfashionable. Again, Bazin's critical
generosity conies to the fore against the neg;11ive
aspects of the <111tc11r theory.
Sorne of Bazin's argurnent~ tend to overlap each
other as if to counter rc.-butuls trorn any direction. Hl'
arw.res.
•
in tum, that the cinerna is less individualistic
an art than painting or literature, that HollY'vood is
lt·ss individualistic than other cinernas. and that, l'Vcn
so, the ,111tc11r theory never really applies any\vhere. In
upholding historical deten11inis1n, Uazin goes so f.ir as
to spl'(·ubite that, if Racine had lived in Voltairl''s
century. it is unlikely that Racinl·'s tragedit's \vould
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
40 Andrew Sarris
have been any 111ore inspired than Voltaire's. Presun1-
ably, the Age of Reason would have stifled Racine's
neoclassical impulses. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Bazin 's
hypothesis can hardly be argued to a verifiable conclu-
sion, but I suspect so111e,vhat greater reciprocity
between an artist and his zei~l!eist than Bazin would
allow. He n1entions, ,nore than once and in other
contexts, capitalisn1's influence on the cinen1a. Without
denying this influence, I still find it i1npossible to
attribute X directors and Y filn1s to any particular
systen1 or culture. Why should the Italian cinen1a be
superior to the Gem1an cine,na after one war, wh en
the reverse ,vas true after the previous one? As for
artists confomung to the spirit of their age. that spirit
is often expressed in contradictions, 'w·hether between
Stravinsky and Sibelius, Fielding and Richardson,
Picasso and Matisse, Chateaubriand and Stendhal.
Even if the artist dot-s not spring fron1 the idealized
head of Zeus, free of the embryonic stains of history.
history itself is profoundly affected by his arrival. If
,ve cannot in1agine Griffith ·s Oct1,ber or Eisenstein's
Bini, ,if a l\iati,111 because we find it difficult to trans-
pose one artist's unifying conceptions of Lee and
Lincoln to the other's dialectical conceptions of Lenin
and Kerensky, we are, nevertheless. compelled to rec-
ognize other differences in the personalities of these
r,vo pioneers beyond their respective cultural co111-
plexes. It is with these latter differences that the 1111tc11r
theory is 111ost deeply concerned. If directors and
other artists canno t be wrenched fron1 their historical
enviro11111ents, aesthetics is reduced to a subordin ate
branch of etl1nobrraphy.
I have not dont· full justice to the subtlety of
U;1zin ·s reasoning and to the rivilized skepti,is1n with
,vhich he propounds his 0\\'11 argu1nents as slight
probabilities rather than absolute certaintie~. c:ontent-
porary opponents of the ,111tc11r tlK·ory 111.,y li:el that
Uazin hin1self is suspt·ct as a n1t·111ber of the c;,,J,it·rs
fa111ily. Afi:er all, Uaz in dot's express qualified approval
of the a111,•1,r theory as a relatively objecti vt· 111ethod
of t·valuating fihns apart fro111 the subjectivt· perils of
in1pn:ssionistic Jnd idt·ological criticisn1. Bl'tter to
.,nalyze the director's pt·rsonality tha11 the critir's nerve
ccntt'rs or politics. Nevertheless, Uaz i11 n1akes hi~ ~tand
cll'ar hv. concluding: . "This is not to den\'. tht· rolt· of
tht· author. but to rt·~tort· to hi1n the prt·po~ition
,vithout \\·hi,:h tht· noun is onl\' ,1 li111p conct·p1.
'Author.' undouhtt·dly. but of \\·h,11;·•
Digitized by Google
Bazin's syntactical flourish raises an interesting
problern in English usage. The French preposition "de"
serves rnany functions. but an1ong others, those of
possession and authorship. In English. the preposition
"by" once created a scandal in the An1erican fi.ln1
industry when Otto Prenunger had the ten1erity to
advertise 111e A1a11 Witlt the Golden Ami as a film "bv,
Otto Prenunger." Novelist Nelson Algren and The
Screenwriters· Guild raised such an outcry that
the offending preposition was deleted. Even the noun
·•author" (which I cun ningly n1ask as "auteur") has a
literary connotation in English. In general conversa-
tion, an "author" is invariably taken to be a writer.
Since "by" is a preposition of authorship and not of
o,vnership like the an1biguous "de," the fact that
Prenunger both produced and directed The J\,fan with
the G,,/dc11 Ami did not entitle hin1 in America to
the preposition "by." No one would have objected
to the possessive fonn: "Otto Pre111inger's The Man
rvitl, tl1c G<llde11 Ami." But. evt'n in this case, a novelist
of sufficient reputation is usually honored with the
possessive designation. Now, this is hardly the case in
France. where 11,e Red and the Black is advertised as
"un filn1 de Claude Autant- LarJ." In An1erica, "directed
by" is all the director can clai111, when he is not also
a ,veil-known producer like Alfred Hitchcock or Cecil
U. de Mille.
Since n1ost An1erican fihn critics are oriented
to,vard literature or joun1alis1n, rather than toward
future filn1- n1aking, 1nost Arnerican fihn criticisrn is
directed to,vard the script instead of toward the screen.
The ,vriter- hero in S1111st·t &,11/('11ard cornplains that
people don't realize that son1eone "writes a picture;
they think the actors n1ake it up as they go along." It
,vould never occur to this ,vritt·r or n1ost of his col-
leagues th.11 people art· even less a,vare of tht· director· s
function .
<.)f course. the n1uch-abust' d 1na11 in the street has
a good t·xcuse not to be J\\'are of the 1111tc11r theory
<'Vt'll as ;1 ti~1re of spet·ch. Even on the so-called
d.bsit· levt·l. ht· i~ not enrou raged to ;1sk "Ai111ez- vous
(;ritlith?" or '"Airnez- vous Eist·nstein?" Instead. it is
,vhich c;rittith o r 'A·hir h Eis,·nstt·in? As tor less
acdainied dirt·ctors. he is luc·ky t(> tind their nan1es in
the l<)urth par.1~,r.1ph of the typir.1I rt·vicvv. I doubt
th.it nHi~t An1eric.1n tilrn ,riti(~ re.1lh·, believe that an
indith-rt'ntly din·rtt·d tihn i~ ro111p.1rahle to an indit:
ti.·rt>nth· \,·ritten hook . Ho,vt·vt-r. th,·re is little point in
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962 41

TtlE
MAN
Will-I N
Ttt

Produced and directed by Otto Preminger

F~K
S IM'rM
El.5ANOR..
PAAAER-

~~AK.

THE M AN WITH THE COLDEN ARM

Figure 4.2 S•ul B»~ de<igncd the advemsing fo r 77,r Af,m ,.,;,1, 1hr C:old,·11 .4,m (Unitc•d
Artist, . 1')55). Produ<t'U .md dirc·ctt'd by Otto Prc·111111gc•r

,vailing at the Philistines on this issue, particularly
,vhen s01ne progress is being n1ade in telling o ne
director tron1 another, at least when the filn1 con1es
&01n abroad. The Fellini, Dergn1an, Kurosa v,a, and
Antonioni pron1otio ns ha ve helped push 1nore direc-
tors up to the first paragraph of a review, even ahead
of the plot synopsis. So, we n1ustn ' t co1nplain.
W here I wish to redi rect the argun1ent is tov.rard
the relative position of the A111 erican cinc1na as
opposed to the foreign cine n1 a. Sorn e critics have
advised 111e that the a11re1ir th eory onl y applies to a
srnall nu111ber of artists \\' ho rnakc personal filn1s. not
to the run -of- the- m ill H oll)'\.vood director who takes
whatevc:r assignrnen t is available. Like n1ost An1 ericans
,vho take filn1s st:riously. 1 ha ve ahvays felt a cultural
inferiority cornplex about H o U)'\.vood. Just a fe ,v year;
ago, I ,vould have thought it unthink,1blc to speak
in the san1e breath of a "cornn1ercial" director like
Hitchcock and a "pure·· director like Bresson . Even
today, S(i:lu a,111 So1111d uses different type sizes for
tlresson and Hitchcoc k fiJ111s. After years of tom1red
revaluation, I ain no ,v prepared to stake n1y critic;tl

Original from
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42 Andrew Sarris
reputation, such as it is, on the proposition that Alfred
Hitchcock is anistically superior to Robert Bresson
by every criterion of excellence and, further, that, ' merely a polemical weapon for a given time and a
film for filn1, director for director, the American
cinema has been consistently superior to that of the
rest of the world from 1915 through 1962. Conse-
quently, I now regard the auteur theory primarily as
a critical device for recording the history of the
American cinema, the only cinema in the world
worth exploring in depth beneath the frosting of a
few great directors at the top.
These propositions remain to be proven and, I
hope, debated. The proof will be difficult because
direction in the cinen1a is a nebulous force in literary
terms. In addition to its own jargon, the director's craft
often pulls in the related jargon of music, painting,
sculpture, dance, literature, theatre, architecture, all in
a generally futile attempt to describe the indescribable.
What is it the old jazz man says of his art? If you
gotta ask what it is, it ain't?. Well, the cinen1a is like
that. Criticism can only attempt an approxin1ation, a
reasonable preponderance of accuracy over inaccuracy.
1 know the exceptions to the auteur theory as well as
anyone. I can feel the human attraction of an audi-
ence going one way when I an1 going the other.
The temptations of cynicism, common sense, and
facile culture-mongering are always very strong, but,
somehow, I feel that the auteur theory is the only hope
for extending the appreciation of personal qualities in
the cinema. By grouping and evaluating fihns accord-
ing to directors, the critic can rescue individual
achievements from an unjustifiable anonymiry. If
medieval architects and Amcan sculptors are anony-
mous today, it is not because they deserved to be.
When Ingmar Bergrnan bemoans the alienation of the
modem artist from the collective spirit that rebuilt
the cathedral at Chartres, he is only dran1atizing his
own individualiry for an age that has rewarded hi111
handsomely for the travail of his alienation. There is
no justification for penalizing Hollywood directors for
the sake of collective mythology. So, invective aside.
"Ain1ez-vous Cukor?"
II. What Is the Auteur Theory?
As far as I kno,v, there is no definition of the a111c11r
the ory in the English language. th.H is. by Jny A111eri-
Digitized by Google
can or British cnuc. Truffaut has recently gone to
great pains to emphasize that the auteur theory was
given place, and I am willing to take him at his word.
But, lest I be accused of nusappropriating a theory no
one wants anymore, I will give the Cahiers critics full
credit for the original formulation of an idea that
reshaped my thinking on the cinema. First of all, how
does the auteur theory differ from a straightforward
theory of directors. Ian Can1eron's article " Films,
Directors, and Critics," in Movie of September, 1962,
nukes an interesting coniment on the issue: "The
assumption that underlies all the writing in Movie is
that the director is the author of a filin, the person
who gives it any distinctive qualiry. There are quite
large exceptions, with which I shall deal later." So far,
so good, at least for the auteur theory, which even
allows for exceptions. However, Cameron continues:
"On the whole, w e accept the cinema of di.rectors,
although without going to the farthest-out extremes
of la politique des auteurs, which n1akes it difficult to
think of a bad director n1aking a good film and almost
impossible to think of a good director making a bad
one." We are back to Bazin again, although Cameron
naturally uses different exan1ples. That three otherwise
divergent critics like Bazin, Roud, and Cameron
make essentially the same point about the auteur
theory suggests a common fear of its abuses. I believe
there is a nusunderstanding here about what the aute11r
theory actually clai1ns, particularly since the theory
itself is so vague at the present time.
First of all, the auteur theory, at least as I under-
stand it and now intend to express it, claims neither
the gift of prophecy nor the option of extracinematic
perception. Directors, even auteurs, do not always run
true to form, and the critic can never assume that a
bad director will always n1ake a bad film. No, not
always, but almost always, and that is the point. What
is a bad director, but a director who has made many
bad fihns? What is the problen1 then? Simply this:
T he badness of director is not necessarily considered
the badness of a filn1. IfJoseph Pevney directed Garbo,
Cherkassov, Oliver, Bl·lrnondo. and Harriet Anders-
son in 171(· Cherry ()rdu,rd, the resulting spectacle
,night not be entirely devoid of n1erit Vl,;th so many
subsidiary ,1111c11rs to rover up for Joe. In fact. with this
cast and this literary property. a Lu111et n1ight be safer
than a Welles. Thl' rcalitic~ of c.1sting apply to direc-
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962
tors as well as to actors, but the auteur theory would
demand the gamble with Welles, if he were willing.
Marlon Brando has shown us that a film can be
made without a director. Indeed, One-Eyed Jacks is
1nore entertaining than n1any films with directors. A
director-conscious critic would find it difficult to say
anything good or bad about direction that is non-
existent. One can talk here about photography, editing,
acting, but not direction. The filn1 even has personality,
but, like The Longest Day and Mutiny 011 tire Bounty, it
is a cipher directorially. Obviously, the aute11r theory
cannot possibly cover every vagrant charm of the
cinema. Nevertheless, the first prenuse of the aute11r
theory is the technical con1petence of a director as a
criterion of value. A badly directed or an undirected
filn1 has no importance in a critical scale of values,
but one can make interesting conversation about the
subject, the script, the acting, the color, the photog-
raphy, the editing, the music, the costu111es, the decor,
and so forth. That is the nature of the 111edium. You
always get n1ore for your n1oney than mere art. Now,
by the auteur theory, if a director has no technical
competence, no elen1entary flair for the cine111a, he is
automatically cast out from the pantheon of directors.
A great director has to be at least a good director. This
is true in any art. What constitutes directorial talent is
1nore difficult to define abstractly. There is less dis-
agreen1ent, however, on this first level of the a11te11r
theory than there will be later.
The second pre111ise of the auteur theory is the
distinguishable personality of the director as a crite-
rion of value. Over a group of films, a director n1ust
exhibit certain recurring characteristics of style, which
serve as his signature. The way a filn1 looks and n1oves
should have son1e relationship to the way a director
thinks and feels. This is an area where American direc-
tors are generally superior to foreign directors. Because
so much of the An1erican cinema is cornmissioned, a
director is forced to express his personality through
the visual treatn1ent of rnaterial rather than through
the literary content of the ntaterial. A Cukor, who
works with all sorts of projects, has a 1nore developed
abstract style than a Berginan, who is free to develop
his own scripts. Not that Berginan lacks personality.
but his work has declined with the depletion of his
ideas largely because his technique never equaled his
sensibility. Joseph L. Mankie\vicz and Billy Wilder are
other exan1ples of writer-dire,tors without adequate
Digitized by Google
43
technical n1astery. By contrast, Douglas Sirk and Otto
Prenunger have moved up the scale because their
ntiscellaneous projects reveal a stylistic consistency.
The third and ultimate premise of the auteur theory
is concen1ed with interior n1eaning, the ultimate glory
of the cinema as an art. Interior meaning is extrapo-
lated from the tension between a director's personality
and his material. This conception of interior meaning
con1es close to what Astruc defines as mise en scene,
but not quite. It is not quite the version of the world
a director projects nor quite his attitude toward life.
It is ambiguous. in any literary sense, because part of
it is imbedded in the stuff of the cinema and cannot
be rendered in noncinen1atic tenns. Truffaut has called
it the temperature of the director on the set, and that
is a close approxin1ation of its professional aspect. Oare
I come out and say what I think it to be is an elan
of the soul?
Lest I seem unduly mystical, let me hasten to add
that all I mean by "soul" is that intangible difference
between one personality and another, all other things
being equal. Someti1nes, this difference is expressed by
no more than a heat's hesitation in the rhyth111 of a
fihn. In one sequence of Lo Rcglc du Jeu, Renoir
gallops up the stairs, turns to his right with a lurching
movement, stops in hop-like uncertainty when his
nan1e is called by a coquettish n1aid, and, then, with
n1arvelous postrefiex continuity. resumes his bearishly
shan1blingjourney to the heroine's boudoir. !fl could
describe the n1usical grace note of that n1omentary
suspension, and I can't, I 111ight be able to provide a
rnore precise definition of the a"te11r theory. As it is,
all I can do is point at the specific beauties of interior
111eaning on the screen and, later. catalogue the
n1oments of recognition.
The three prenuses of the auteur theory may be
visualized as three concentric circles: the outer circle
as technique; the middle circle, personal style; and the
inner circle, interior n1eaning. The corresponding roles
of the director rnay be designated as those of a techni-
,:ian, a stylist, and an auteur. There is no prescribed
course by which a director passes through the three
circles. Godard once re1narked that Visconti had
evolved fron1 a 1ne1tc11r en scene to an a11te11r, whert·as
R ossellini had evolved fro111 an a11tc11r to a 111e1tc11r 1°11
sci11e. Fron1 opposite directions, they en1erged \vith
cornparable status. Minnelli began and ren1ained in the
second circle as a stylist: Bunuel "vas an 1111tc11r even
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
44
befo re he had assernbled the technique of the first
circle. Technique is sin1pl y the ability to put a filn1
together with son1e clarity and coherence . No"vadays,
it is possiblt· co beco111e a director \Vithouc kno ,ving
too much abo ut the techni cal side. even the crucial
functions of pho tograph y and editing. An expert pro -
ductio n cre,v could probably cover up fo r a chin1panzee
in the direc to r's chair. How do you tell the genui ne
d irecto r fro n1 che quasichin1panzee? After a gi ve n
nun1ber of filn1s. a parren1 is established.
In fact, the a111e11r theory itself is a pattern theory
in constant flux. I ,vould never endorse a Ptolen1aic
co nstellatio n of din:ctors in a fLxcd o rbit. At the
n10111enc, n, y list o f n111c11rs runs s01nething like this
thro ugh th e first ~venty: Ophuls. R enoi r. M izoguchi.
Hitchcock, C haplin, Fo rd. W elles. Dreyer, R ossellini.
Mun1au, Gri fri th. Scen1berg, Eisenstein. vo n Stro hein1,
Bu1iuel. Bresson. H a\vks, Lang, Flaherty, Vigo. This
list is son1e,vhac w eighted tO\Va rd senio ri ty and estah-
li.~hed reputati ons. In tin1e, so111e of these 1111te11rs , vill
Figure 4.3 //,~/, .-;,..,,,, (\V.,ntcr Un l\, 1'141 ) n·v-,.,1, ., "t ruu.11 linl ·· " ' R .,o ul \\ ·.,l,1,\ udw1 f,l111\. l'roch,cc,I by
M .,rk I-kl I1111-:,·r
•
Digitized by Google
Andrew Sarris
rise, s01ne \\rill fall. and s0111e \Vill be displa ced either
by new directors or redi.scovered an cients. Again,
the exact order is less in1ponant th an the specific
definitions of these and as n1any as two hundred
o ther po tential n11re11rs. I wo uld hardly expect any
ocher critic in the world fully to endorse th is List,
t'Spt'cially o n fu ith. O nly afit'r thousands of filn1s have
been revaluated. will an y personal pantheon have a
reasonably objecti ve validity. The task of validating
the a11te11r theory is an eno m1ous one, and the end
,vill never be in sight. Meatl\vhile, the n11re11r habit
of collecting randon1 fihns in directorial bundles
,vill serve posterity \Vitb at k·ast a tr.:ntaave
classificatio n.
Altho ugh the nure11r theory en1phas izes che body o f
a direc to r•~ \VOrk rather d1an isolated n1asterpieces, it
is expected of great directors tha t they n1ake grea t
fil111s every so o ftt'n. The only possible exct·ption to
this rule I ca n think of is Abt"! Cance, ,vhose 1,rreamess
is largely a functio n o f his aspiration . Even ,vith C ance.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962
L1 Ro11e is as close to being a great filn1 as any single
work of Flaherty's. Not that single works n1atter that
n1uch. As Renoir has observed, a director spend~ his
life on variations of the san1e fihn.
Two recent filn1s - &ffaffio ' 70 and 11,e ScPCII
Capital Si11s - unwittingly reinforced the a11te11r theory
by confimung the relative standing of the rnany direc-
tor.; involved. If I had not seen either filn1, I would
have anticipated that the order of n1erit in &ccaccio
'70 would be Visconti, Fellini, and De Sica, and in 11,e
Seven Capital Si11s Godard, Chabrol, Demy, Vadin1, De
Droca, Molinaro. (Dho1nn1e, Ionesco's stage director
and an unknown quantity in advance, tun1c.>d out to
be the wor.;t of the lot.) There nught be.> so111e aq:,ru-
rnent about the relative badness of De.> Broca and
Molinaro, but, otherwise, the director.; ran true to
ionn by aln1ost any objective criterion of value.
However, the 111ain point here is that even in these
frothy, ultraconunercial servings of entertairunent, the
contribution of each director had less in conunon
stylistically with the work of other directors on the
project than with his O\Vll previous \\'Ork.
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45
Son1etimes, a great deal of con1 111ust be husked to
yield a few kernels of internal meaning. I recently saw
Evi·ry Night at Eight, one of the many n1addeningly
routine filn1S Raoul Walsh has directed in his long
career. This 1935 effort featured George Raft, Alice
Faye, Frances Langford, and Patsy Kelly in one of
those farniliar plot~ about radio shows of the period.
The fihn keeps rnoving along in the pleasantly unpre-
tentious rnanner one would expect of Walsh until one
incongruously intense scene with George Raft thrash-
ing about in his sleep, revealing his inner fear.; in
n1u111bling drearn- talk. The girl he loves conies into
the roorn in tht: n1idst of his unconscious avowals of
feeling and listens syrnpathetically. This unusual scene
\vas later an1plitied in H(!!h Sierra with Hun1phrey
Bogart and Ida Lupino. The point is that one of the
screen's n1ost virile director.; en1ployed an essentially
fen1inine narrative device to drarnatize the cn1otional
vulnerability of his heroes. If I had not been aware of
Walsh in £,,cry N((/ht at E(11ht, the cnrcial link to H(11l1
Sierra would have passed unnoticed. Such are the joys
of the a11rc11r thc:-orv.
,
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 5
Circles and Squares
Pauline Kael

As the film critic for New Yorlcer magazine from 1967 to 1991, where she had virtually free
rein, Pauline Kael became perhaps the most influential US film critic of the time. Her reviews
were said to be able to make or break a film's chances of success at the box-office. She
responded to Sarris' auteurism with a savage attack on his claims to have established an
auteur theory, and thus began a celebrated war of words between the two critics for years.
Kael's antipathy to auteurism is perhaps best seen in her book The Citizen Kane Book (1971 ),
which includes the shooting script for Orson Welles' classic film and a lengthy analysis,
"Raising Cain." in which Kael argues against Welles as its primary auteur by demonstrating
through a combination of historical research and textual analysis the contributions of others
such as co-screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz and cinematographer Gregg Toland. In this
essay, which appeared originally in the journal Film Quarterly in 1963, her critique of Sarris'
auteur theory was at once the most reasoned and the most accessible of the many that
appeared in print.

Joys and Sarris
... th<" first prernise of the a11tr11r th<"ory is chc tc:chnical
c.:0111petenct' of a director as a criterion of value .. . The:
, ccond pn·n1ist· of the a111,·11, theory is the distinguishJblc:
personality of the director as a criterion of value . . .. The
third and ultirnate prernisc of the a11tr11, du·ory is con-
cerned ,vith interior n1eaning, the ulti111ate glory of the:
<0i ne111;1 as an art. Interior 111caning is t'Xtr,1polatcd frorn
the tension bt·tween a director's p<'rs<) nalit:y and hi,
rnatt'rial. . . .
So111eti111t'< a !,.'TC;ll deal of con1 11n1st be huskt·d 10
vidd
. .
a ft·,v kt"n1ds of internal 111t'.111ing. 1 r<"rcnclv. sa,v
/:1•rry ,'\·i~ht cJ/ T:i~/11. one of tht· 111.111 y 111addeningly
routint' tihns R.aoul Walsh h;1s dir,·nt·d in h is lo ng
•
c.irt·t·r. Thi, I '>J5 t·tl,,rt ti:.11ured (;eo rg,·
•
'°'·•ti. Alice
F:1vc. Fran,·,·, Lan!,...ford .111d l'acsy Kdl y in oil<" of 1hn,,·
fa111ili;1r plots .1hout r;1dio show< of the p,·riod. Th,· tihn
keeps ,novi ni;: .1lnng in the plc.h:1ncl y 1111prt·1,·ntin11,
nunner one ,vould exp<'CI of Walsh until one irKOll!,.'TU -
ously intcnst· s,·('nc with ( ;t•orgc Ran thrashing about in
his sleep. revealing his innt·r l~ars in n1urnbling drea111
tJlk. Thc girl ht· lov.-s conics inco tht· roo111 in the 1nidst
of his uncons,ious avo,v.1ls o( frding. and listens syrn -
pathetirally. T his unusual sc,·nc ,vas lat<·r an1plitied in
H(~/1 Sierra ,vith Hurnphrt·v Uogart and Ida Lupino. Th<·
poi,u is thac ont· of cit<· s, rt·t·n ·, 111os1 virik dircctors
e111ployed an t''-t·111ially fi:111ininc 11arr.1tive dcvi, t• to
dr.1niatiZ<' ch c t·111ocion al vuln <·rability of his heroes. If I
h.1d not becn a,v.irt' of W Jl, h in /:1•,·ry ,\i(~/11 ,11 E(~ht.
!ht' , n, ri al link to /-/ (~/, Si.-,,,, ,vould havt· p,1ss<·d unno-
tict·,t. Such .ire th t' joy, of che ,1111<·11, th,·o~·-
Andr<'W Sarri<. " Noce, on tht· Auct·ur T h,·ory in
1•11,2:· l'i/111 C:11/111,,·. \Vinter 19(,2- )
Pt'rhaps .1 little 111ort· corn ,hould bt' husked; perhaps.
li) r t· xa111ple. ,v,· r.111 husk .nvay the \\·ord "inten1al"
(is "intern.ii 111,·anin~ .. any ditli:rcnt ti-0111 "111eani11g••;).

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Circles and Squares
We might ask why the link is ..crucial"? ls it because
the device was "incongruously intense" in Every Night
at Eight and so den1onstrated a try for so1nething
deeper on Walsh's part? But if his merit is his "pleas-
antly unpretentious 1nanner" (which is to say, I suppose,
tllat, recognizing the limitations of the script, he wasn't
trying to do n1uch) then the incongruous device was
probably a n1isconceived atte1npt that disturbed the
manner - like a bad playwright interrupting a comedy
scene because he cannot resist the opportuniry to
tug at your hearcstrings. We might also ask why this
narrative device is "essentially feminine": is it more
feminine than masculine to be asleep, or to talk in
one's sleep, or to reveal feelings? Or, possibly,
does Sarris regard the device as feminine because the
listening woman becomes a sympathetic figure and
emotional understanding is, in this "virile" context,
assumed to be essentially feminine? Perhaps only if
one accepts the narrow notions of viriliry so comn1on
in our action films can this sequence be seen as
"essentially feminine," and it is amusing that a critic
can both support tllese cliches of tile male world and
be so happy when they are violated.
This is how we 1night quibble with a different kind
of critic but we would never get anywhere with Sarris
if we rried to examine what he is saying sentence by
sentence.
So let us ask, what is the 1neaning of the passage?
Sarris has noticed that in High Sierra (not a very good
movie) Raoul Walsh repeated an uninteresting and
obvious device that he had earlier used in a worse
movie. And for son1e inexplicable reason, Sarris con-
cludes that he would not have had this joy of discovery
witllout the auteur theory.
But in every art fom1, critics traditionally notice and
point out the way the artists borrow fron1 tllen1Selves
(as well as from others) and how the same devices,
techniques, and themes reappear in their work. This is
obvious in listening to music, seeing plays, reading
novels, watching actors; we take it for granted that this
is how we perceive the development or the decline of
an artist (and it may be necessary to point out to auteur
critics that repetition without developn1ent is decline).
When you see Hitchcock's Saboteur there is no doubt
tllat he drew heavily and clun1sily fro1n 77,e J 9 Steps.
and when you see Norri, by NorthUJfst you can see that
he is once again toying with the ingredients of The 39
Steps - and apparently having a good ti111e with then1.
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47
Would Sarris not notice tile repetition in the Walsh
filn1S without the auteur theory? Or shall we take the
n1ore cynical view that without son1e commitn1ent to
Walsh as an auteur, he probably wouldn't be spending
his rime looking at these n1ovies?
If we may be permitted a literary analogy, we can
visualize Sarris researching in the archives of the Sat-
urday Eve11i11g Post, tracing the developn1ent of Clarence
Budington Kelland, who, by the application of some-
thing like the auteur theory. would emerge as a n1uch
more important writer than Dostoyevsky; for in
Kelland's case Sarris's three circles, the three premises
of tile auteur theory, have been consistently congruent.
Kelland is technically con1petent (even "pleasantly
unpretentious"), no writer has a more "distinguishable
personaliry," and if "interior meaning" is what can be
extrapolated front, say, Hatari ! or Advise and Consent or
What Ever Happened to BabyJane? then surely Kelland's
stories with their atten1pt~ to force a bit of character
and humor into the familiar plot outlines are loaded
with it. Poor nusguided Dostoyevsky, too full of what
he has to say to bother with "technical con1petence,"
tackling i1nportant themes in each work (surely the
worst crime in the auteur book) and with his almost
incredible uniry of personaliry and material leaving
you nothing to extrapolate from, he'll never make it.
If the editors of Movie ranked authors the way they do
directors, Dostoyevsky would probably be in that
almost untouchable category of the "ambitious."
It should be pointed out that Sarris's defense of the
auteiir theory is based not only on aesthetics but on a
rather odd pragmatic statement: "Thus to argue against
the auteur theory in Anierica is to assurne that we have
anyone ofBazin's sensibiliry and dedication to provide
an alternative. and we simply don' t." Which I take
to mean that the auteur theory is necessary in the
absence of a critic who wouldn' t need it. This is a
new approach to aesthetics, and I hope Sarris's humil-
iry does not camouflage his double-edged argument.
If his aesthetics is based on expediency, then it may
be expedient to point out that it takes extraordinary
intelligence and discrimination and taste to u.te any
theory in the arts, and that without those qualities. a
theory becomes a rigid formula (which is indeed what
is happening among auteur critics). The greatness of
critics like Bazin in France and Agee in An1erica 111ay
have son1ething to do with their using their full rangt'
of intelligence and intuition. rather than relying on
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
48 Pauline Kael

Figure 5.1 '" lrnerio r 111,•,11,ing" in 1171111 Ei.•r Hapf'<'lll'tl tt• I.lab)' Jam•? (\V.1n1cr Uros/
$cve11 Art.<, IlJ6~)- l'rodurcd and direc ted by R.obcrt Aldric h

fom1ulas. Criticisn1 is an art. not a science, and a critic
\vho follO\VS rules \\,j]I fuil in one of his 111ost i111por-
tant functions: perceiving \\•hat is original and
i111portanc in 111•111 \Vork and ht·lping ochers to St'C.
The Outer Circle
.. . the firsr prcn1i~c of the aulcu r theory i~ tht' u·chnical
cornpcte.nc,• of a directo r as a crucnon of value.
This sct·n1s less the prcnuse o f a theory than a con1-
111011pbcl· of judg111t'nt, as Sarris hi111sclf indil·Jtl'S
\Vhen he paraphrases it a~ ... A great director has to be
:it least a good director." But this con1111011placc,
though it so1111ds reasonable and basic, is a shaky
prcrnisc: sotnl' ti111es the greatest artists in a 111ediu111
bypass o r violate the sin,ple technical competence that
is ~o necessary for hacks. For exan1ple. it is doubtful
if Anto nioni could handle a routine directorial assign-
n1cnt of th l! type at which John Stnigcs is so proficient
(F:.1rnpC' _(r1>111 F,,r, Bn111,1 o r Bad Dn)' nt 13/nrk R()(k) , bu1
surely An ton1oni"s L'Av1•c11111rn is the -.vork of a great
director. And rh e greatness o t" a director like Cocteau
h.1, no thing to do \,,th 111cre technical con1pctence:
his 1:,,rcatnl'SS is in b..-ing abk· to .1ch icvc l1is O\vn

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Circles and Squares
personal expression and style. And just as there were
writers like Melville or Dreiser who triu1nphed over
various kinds of technical inco1npetence, and who
,vere, as artists, incontparably greater than the facile
technicians of their day, a new 1,rreat filnt director ntay
appear whose very greatness is in his struggling toward
grandeur or in n1assive accuntulation of detail.
An artist who is not a good technician can indeed
create new standards, because standards of technical
contpetence are based on cornparisons ,vith work
already done.
Just as new work in other arts is often attacked
because it violates the accepted standards and thus
see1ns crude and ugly and incoherent, great new
directors are very likely to be condentned precisely
on the grounds that they're not even good directors,
that they don't know their "business." Which, in sontc:
cases, is true, but does it ntatter when that "business"
has little to do \\,jth what they want to express in
filntS? It may even be a hindrance, leading them to
banal slickness, instead of discovery of their own
rnethods. For so1nc, at least, Cocteau ntay be right:
"The only technique worth having is the technique
you invent for yourself." The director n1ust be judged
on the basis of what he produces - his filn1s - and if
he can 1nake great films without knowing the standard
rnethods. without the usual crafts1nanship of the "good
director," then that is the way he works. I would
amend Sarris's pren1ise to, "In works of a lesser rank,
technical competence can help to redeern the weak-
nesses of tlte n1aterial." In fact it seen1s to be precisely
this category that the a11te1,r critics are n1ost interested
in - the routine n1aterial that a good crafrs1nan can
111ake into a fast and enjoyable movie. What, ho,vever,
ntakes the auteur critics so incontprehensible is not
tlteir preference for works of this category (in this they
merely follow the lead of children who also prefer
simple action filn1S and westerns and horror filntS to
works that make demands on their understanding) but
their truly astonishing inability to exercise taste and
judgn1ent ivithin their area of preference. Moviegoing
kids are, I think, 111uch 111ore reliable guides to this
kind of movie than the a11te11r critics: every kid I've
talked to knows that Henry Hathaway's Nort/, to Al,1skt1
was a surprisingly funny, entertaining movie and
Hatari ! (classified as a "masterpiece" by half the Ct1l1i£·rs
Conseil des Dix, Peter Bogdanovich. and others) was
a terrible bore.
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49
The Middle Circle
... thl' sc,cond pren1isc, of the autl'ur th<·ory is the dis-
tinguishable pc~onality of the dirl'Ctor as a criterion of
value,.
Up to this point there has really been no theory, .ind
now, when Sarris begins to work on his foundation ,
the entire edifice of civilized standards of taste:
collapses while he's tacking down his floorboards.
Traditionally, in any art, the personalities of all those
involved in a production have been a factor in judg-
ntent, but that the distin,1111is/1ability of personality
should in itself be a criterion of value co,npletely
confuses 11om1al judgn1ent. The sn1ell of a skunk is
n1ore distinguishable than the perfu,ne of a rose; does
that tnake it better? Hitchcock's personality is cer-
tainly ntore distinguishable in Dial !vi _(or !vfurdcr, Rear
Wi11do1v, Vert(!/o, than Carol Reed's in Tire Stars Look
D0111t1, Odd Ma11 0111, Tire Fallen Idol, TI,e TI,ird 1\111111,
An 011tcast '!,( the Islands, if for no other reason than
because Hitchcock repeats ,vhile Reed tackJes ne,v
subject n1atter. But how does this distinguishable per-
sonality function as a criterion for judging the works'
We recognize the hands of Cante and Prevert in Le
]011r se Uve, but that is not what n1akes it a beautiful
fihn; we can just as easily recognize their hands in
Q11ai des Bn1n1es - which is not such a good filnt. W c
can recognize that Le Plaisir and TI,c Earrings ,,(
A1,11lar11c de ... are both the work of Ophuls, but Lc
J>laisir is not a great fihn, and lvladanre dt' .. . is.
Often the works in which we are most awart' of
the personality of the director are his worst fihns -
when he falls back on the devices he has already dont'
to death. When a fa1nous director ,nakes a good
n1ovie, we look at the n1ovie, we don't think about
the director's personality; when he ntakcs a stinker
Wt' notice his fanuliar touches because th ere's not
rnuch else to watch. When Prerninger 111akes an
expert, entertaining whodunit like /.A11ri1, we don "t
look for his personality (it has become part of the
texture of the fihn); when he ntakes an atrocity like
l·t'l,irlp<>ol, there's plenty of ti111c to look tor his "per-
sonality" - if that's your idea of a good tin1t'.
It could even be argued. I think, that Hitchcock's
unifom1ity. his rnastery of tricks, and his clt'ven1ess
at getting audit·nces to respond according to his
calculations - the feedback he ,..-ants and gt•ts front
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
50 Pauline Kaai
the1n - reveal not so n1uch a personal style as a per-
sonal theory of audience psychology, that his n1ethods
and approach are not those of an artist but a presti-
digitator. The auteur critics respond just as Hitchcock
expects the gullible to respond. This is not so surpris-
ing - often the works auteur critics call masterpieces
are ones that seem to reveal the contempt of the
director for the audience.
It's hard to believe that Sarris seriously atten1pts to
apply "the distinguishable personality of the director as
a criterion of value" because when this premise
becon1es troubleson1e, he just tries to brazen his way
out of difficulties. For example, now that John Hus-
ton's work has gone flat 1 Sarris casually dismisses hin1
with: "Huston is virtually a forgotten man with a few
actors' classics behind him ... " If TI1e Maltese Falcon,
perhaps the most high-style thriller ever made in
America, a film Huston both wrote and directed, is not
a director's film, what is? And if the distinguishable
personality of the director is a criterion of value. then
how can Sarris disnuss the Huston who comes through
so unmistakably in The Treasure qf Sierra Madre, The
African Queen, or Beat the Devil, or even in a muddled
Huston film like Key I.Argo? If these are actors' movies,
then what on earth is a director's n1ovie?
lsn 't the auteur theory a hindrance to clear judg-
ment ofHuston's movies and ofhis career? Disregarding
the theory, we see son1e fine film achieve1nents and
we perceive a remarkably distinctive directorial talent;
we also see intervals of weak, half-hearted assignments
like Across the Pacijir and In This Our Life. Then, after
A,1oulin Rouge, except for the blessing of Beat the Devil,
we see a career that splutters out in an1bitious failures
like Moby Dick and confused projects like TI1e Roots
qf Heave11 and TI1e Mi~/its, and strictly comn1ercial
projects like Heave11 Knows, Mr Alliso11. And this kind
of career seen1s n1ore characteristic of film history,
especially in the United States, than the ripening
development and final n1astery envisaged by the auteur
theory - a theory that makes it aln1ost de rigeur to
regard H itchcock's An1erican filn1s as superior to his
early English filn1s. Is Huston' s career so different, say.
frorn Fritz Lang's? How is it that Huston's early good
- ahnost great - work, must be rejected along with
his n1ediocre recent work, but Fritz Lang. being sanc-
tified as an auteur, has his bad recent \vork pr.1iscd
along with his good? Ernploying n1ore usual norrns.
if you respect the Fritz Lang ,vho n1,1de ;\J and )·i,u
Digitized by Google
O,tly Live Ot1Ce, if you enjoy the excesses of style and
the magnificent absurdities of a filn1 like Metropolis,
then it is only good sense to reject the ugly stupidity
of ]011n1ey to the Lost City. It is an insult to an artist
to praise his bad work along with his good; it indicates
that you are incapable of judging either.
A few years ago, a friend who reviewed Jean
Renoir's University of California production of his
play Carola hailed it as "a work of genius." When I
asked n1y friend how he could so describe this very
unfortunate play, he said, "Why, of course, it's a work
of genius. Renoir's a genius, so anything he does is
a work of genius." This could almost be a capsule
version of the auteur theory (just substitute Hatari! for
Carola) and in this reductio ad absurdum, viewing a
work is superfluous, as the judgment is a priori. It's
like buying clothes by the label: this is Dior, so it's
good. (This is not so far fron1 the way the a11te11r
critics work, either.)
Sarris doesn't even play his own gan1e with any
decent attention to the rules: it is as absurd to praise
Lang's recent bad work as to dismiss Huston's early
good work; surely it would be more consistent if he
also tried to make a case for Huston's bad picrures?
That would be n1ore consistent than devising a
category called "actors' classics" to explain his good
pictures away. If 77,e Maltese Falcon and 11,e Treasure q(
Sierra 1\1/adre are actors' classics, then what makes
Hawks's To Have a11d Have Not and 11,e Big Sleep
(which were obviously tailored to the personalities of
Bogart and Bacall) the work of an auteur?
Sarris believes that what makes an auteur is "an elan
of the soul." (This critical language is barbarous. Where
else should elan corne from? It's like saying "a diges-
tion of the ston1ach." A fihn critic need not be a
theoretician, but it is necessary that he know how to
use words. This nught, indeed, be a first premise for a
theory.) Those who have this elan presumably have it
forever and their films reveal the "organic unity" of
the directors' careers; and those who don't have it -
well, they can only rnake "actors' classics." It's ironic
that a critic trying to establish sin1plc "objective" rules
as a guide for critics who he thinks aren't gifted
enough to use taste and intelligence, ends up - where,
actually, he beg;111 - with a theory bJsed on rnystical
insight. This 111ight really 111akt· den1ands on the auteur
critics if tht·y did 1101 si111ply take the easy way out
.
bv, ,1rbitrdrv, derisions of ,vho's got .. it" and ,vho hasn't.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Circles and Squares
Their decisions are not n1erely not based on their
theory; their decisions are beyond criticis,n. It's like a
woman's telling us that she feels a certain dress does
something for her: her feeling has about as much to
do with critical judgn1ent as the a11te11r critics' feeling
that Minnelli has "it," but Huston never had "it."
Even if a girl had plenty of"it," she wasn't expected
to keep it forever. But this "elan" is not supposed to
be affected by the vicissitudes of fortune, the industrial
conditions of n1oviemaking, the tunnoil of a country,
or the health of a <lirector. Indeed, Sarris says, "If
<lirectors and other artists cannot be wrenched fron1
their historical environn1ents, aesthetics is reduced to
a subordinate branch of ethnography." May I suggest
that if, in order to judge movies, the auteur critics n1ust
wrench the directors from their historical environ-
ments (which is, to put it nuldly, impossible) so that
they can concentrate on the detection of that "elan,"
they are reducing aesthetics to a forn1 of idiocy. Elan
as the permanent attribute Sarris posits can only be
explained in terms of a cult of personality. May I
suggest that a n1ore n1eaningful description of elan is
what a man feels when he is working at the height
of his powers - and what we respond to in works of
art with the excited cry of"This time, he's really done
it" or "This shows what he could do when he got the
chance" or " He's found his style" or " I never realized
he had it in him to do anything so good," a response
to his joy in creativity.
Sarris experiences "joy" when he recognizes a
pathetic little link between two Raoul Walsh pictures
(he never does explain whether the discovery makes
him think the pictures are any better) but he wants
to see artists in a pristine state - their essences, perhaps?
- separated from all the life that has fonned them and
to which they try to give expression.
The Inner Circle
The third and ultimate premise of the auteur theory is
concerned with interior 111eaning, the ultin1ate glory of
the cinema as an art. Interior 111eaning is extrapolated
from the tension between a director·s per..onality and his
n1aterial.
This is a ren1arkable fonnulation : it is the opposite of
what we have always taken for granted in the arts, that
Digitized by Google
51
the artist expresses hi,nself in the unity of forn1 and
content. What Sarris believes to be "the ultin1ate glory
of the cinen1a as an art" is what has generally been
considered the frustrations of a ,nan working against
the given n1aterial. Fantastic as this fonnulation is, it
does something that the first two premises didn't do:
it clarifies the interests of the auteur critics. If we have
been puzzled because the auteur critics seemed so
deeply involved, even dedicated, in becoming con-
noisseurs of trash, now we can see by this theoretical
formulation that trash is indeed their chosen province
of filn1.
Their ideal auteur is the man who signs a long-tenu
contract, directs any script that's handed to him, and
expresses hin1self by shoving bits of style up the cre-
vasses of the plots. If his "style" is in conflict with the
story line or subject matter, so n1uch the better - more
chance for tension. Now we can see why there has
been so much use of the tern1 "personality" in this
aesthetics (the tern1 which seen1s so inadequate when
discussing the art of Griffith or Renoir or Mumau or
Dreyer) - a routine, co1nn1ercial n1ovie can sure use
a little "personality."
Now that we have reached the inner circle (the
bull's eye turns out to be an empty socket) we can
see why the shoddiest filnts are often praised the n1ost.
Subject matter is irrelevant (so long as it isn' t treated
sensitively - which is bad) and will quickly be dis-
posed of by auteur critics who know that the sn1art
director isn't responsible for that anyway; they'll get
on to the important subject - his mise-en-scene: The
director who fights to do something he cares about
is a square. Now we can at least begin to understand
why there was such conten1pt toward Huston for
what was, in its way, a rather extraordinary effort - the
Moby Dick that failed; why Movie considers Roger
Corman a better director than Fred Zinnemann and
ranks Joseph Losey next to God, why Bogdanovich,
Mekas, and Sarris give their highest critical ratings to
Wl1at Ever Happtned to Baby Jane? (mighty big cre-
vasses there). If Carol Reed had made only n1ovies
like The Man BetWfen - in which he obviously worked
to try to make something out of a ragbag of worn- out
bits of material - he might be considered "brilliant..
too. (But this is doubtful: although even the worst
Reed is superior to Aldrich's Baby Jane, Reed would
probably be detected, and rejected. as a n1an interested
in substance rather than sensationalisn1.)
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52 Pauline Kael
Figure 5.2 lni;mar Bt<rg111an's "lb,tran" techmque 111 ·17.,. Sc,•.-,11/, S.-11/ (~v<·n,l f1hnmdu>1n. 11>57). l'roduc<·<l
by Allan Ekelund
I an1 angry, but an1 I unjust? Here's Sarris:
A C ukor ,vho ,vorks ,vith all sortS of projl'Cts has a 111ore
developed abstract <tyi<' t han a Bcrgni.111 ,vho i• free 10
develop lus o ,vn script~. No t that li<'rgnun lacks persou-
aliry. but his ,vork has declined wi th the dcpletion of
hi• ideas largely because hi, technique n<•vcr <'quah:d his
,ensib,liry. J oseph L. Ma11 k1 c,v1cz and llilly Wilder arc
other cxa111pks of \\Titer- dirl.'ctors \\'ithout adeqnatl'
tl'cluucal 111.1stcry. tly contra<t. Dougla, Sirk and ()tto
Prcniinger have n1oved up the scale b<·cau<e t hl' ir 111i<ccl-
lancous proJcCts n:vcal a scyl1st1,: cons,stcncy.
Ho,v neat it all is - Bcrgn1a11 ·s ",vork has declined
,vith the depletion of hjs ide,1s largely because his
technique ncv<'r equaled his ~ensibility." 13ut \\·hat on
earth does that 1nean? Ho\\· did Sarris perceive
13ergn1a11 ·s sensibility t·xcepc ch rough his tech11it1ue?
1, Sarris saying "''hat he seen1s to be saying. chat if
13erginan had developt·d n1ore ··ct·chniquc. ·· his work
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\.Vouldn "t be dependent on his ideas? I'm afraid this is
\Vhat he 111eans. and that when he refers ro C ukor's
"tnore developed ab~tract style" he n1eans by "abstract"
so111ething unrelated to ideas. a technique no t depen-
dent on the content of the fihns. This is curiously
renunisccnc of a vie,v con1111on enough in the busi-~
ness world, that it's better not to get too invo lved. too
personally interested in business proble1ns. o r they take
over your life; and besides. you don't function as \vell
,vhen you've lo\t you r objectivity. But th is is the
oppvsiu· of ho,v .111 an ise " ·orks. His technique. his St)'le,
is de tcnnined by his range of involven1ents, and his
preference for certain chen1es. Cukors style is no n1o re
t1/i.<rr,1rr(!) than 13crgn1a11·s: Cukor has a ran ge of subject
inaner chat he can hJndJe and ,vhen he gees a good
script ,vithin his range Oikt· Titt• P/1ila1/clp/Jia Story or
Pat ,1111/ ,\ 1!,kc) he doe~ a good job; but he is at an
i111111ense ,,rristir dis,,dvant..i~c, co111pJred ,virh Oergn1an.
becau~e h•· is dependent on the ide.1s of so n1any (and
often b.1d) scriptwriters and on n1att'ri,1l ,vhich is
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 Circles and Squares
often alien to his talents. It's an1using (.ind/or dcpn:-ss-
ing) to see the way auteur critics tend to downgrade
\Vriter-directors - \vho are in the best position to use
the fihn n1ediu111 for personal expression.
Sarris does so,ne pretty fast sh uffiing \Vith Huston
:ind Bergman; \vhy dot'~n 't he just con1e out and
adrnit that writer-directors are disqualified by his third
pre111ise? They can't arrive at that "interior ,neaning.
the ultirnate glory of the cinerna" because a \.\'riter-
director has no tension between his personality and
his 111aterial. so there's nothing for the 11111e11r critit· to
extrapolate front.
What is all this nonsense about extrapola ti ng "intt'-
rior" 111eaning frorn the tension bet\veen a dirt'ctor's
personality and his rnaterial' A con1petent co,11111<:rcial
director generally does the best he can with what he·~
got to work with. Where is the "tension"? And if you
can locate son1e, \,\•hat kind of n1eaning could you
draw out of it except that the director's having a bad
tin1e with lousy ,naterial or n1aterial he doesn't likt·?
l)r n1aybe he 's trying to speed up the da,nned produc-
tion so he can do so,nething else that he has sontt'
l1t1pes for? Are these critics honestly (and futilely)
looking for "interior rneanings" or is tl1is just son1e
fonn of intellectual diddling that helps to sustain their
pride while they're viewing silly rnovies? Where is the
tension in Howard Hawks's fihns? When he has good
n1aterial, he's capable of better than good direction, as
he demonstrates in fihns like Ttl'<'11lic1/r Cc11t11ry, Bri11t•
i11.'1 l lp Baby, His Girl Friday; and in T<> Have a11d Have
i\!ot and TI1e Big Sleep he den1onstrates that with help
fro1n the actors, he can jazz up ridiculous scripts. But
\vhat "interior ,neaning·• can be extrapolated front an
enjoyable, hannless, piece of kitsch like 011/y A11,11<'ls
Have Wings; what can the auteur critics see in it beyond
the sex and gla,nor and fantasies of the high-school
boys· universe - exactly what the n1ass audience liked
it for? And when Hawks's rnaterial and/ or cast is dull
and when his heart isn't in the production - when by
the a11te11r theory he should show his ''personaliry ...
the result is something soggy like Tiu· Bit Sky.
George Cukor's ntodest staten1ent. "Give 111e a
good script and I'll be a hundred tin1es better as a
director"2 provides son1e notion of ho\\• a director
1nay experience the problen1 of the given n1aterial.
What can Cukor do with a script like 7711• (J111p111,111
Report but try to kid it, to dress it up a bit, to sho\v
off the talents of Jant' Fonda and (:laire Uloorn and
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53
Glynis Johns, and to give the total production a little
flair and crafts111anship. At best. he can 1nake an enter-
taining had n1ovie. A director \Vith son1ething like
rn:1gical pfts c.i11 1nake a silk purse out of a so\v ·s t'ar.
Hut if he has it in hi,n to do ,nore in life: than n1akt·
silk purst·s. the triu111ph is ,ninor - evt·n if tht' purse
is lined \Vith gold. Only by the use of the ,1111c11r
tht>ory dot's this little victory beco1ne "ulti,nate glory ...
For sontt' unt·xplained reason those traveling in 11111c11r
cin:k·s believe that 1naking that purse out of a SO\\' 's
ear is an infinitely g reater acro111plishn1ent than
n1aking a solid carrying cast· out of a good piece: of
leather (Js, for exan1ple. a Zinne111ann docs \vith Fn,111
Here "' Etcr11ity or 111c 1V1111 's SI<'')').
I suppose \VC should be happy for Sirk and Prt'-
1ninger elevated up the glory "scale," but I suspect that
the "styli.~tic consistency" of say, Pre111inger, could bt·
a n1atter of his li111itati<,11s, and that the only \vay you
could tell he n1ade son1e of his n1ovies was that he
used the sante players so often (Linda Daniell. Jeannt·
C:ran1, Gene Tierney, l)ana Andrews, et al., gave his
,novies the Pre,ninger look). But the argun1ent is
ludicrous an yway. because if Prerninger sho\.\'S stylistic
consistency with subject ,natter as varied as C,1r111c11
Jo11cs. A11ato111y of a ;\111rder, and Ad11is<' a11d Co11se111,
then by any rational standards he should be attacked
rather than elevated. I don't think these filn1s art·
stylistically consistent, nor do I think Prc,ninger is a
great director - for the very sin1ple reason that his
filn1s are consistently superficial and facile. (Advisf a,u/
Co11sc11t, an a111c11r "n1asterpiece" - Ian Ca,neron, Paul
Mayenberg, and Mark Shivas of A1<>vie and Jean
Douchet of (,'a/tiers du Ci11b11a rate it first on their ten
best lists of 1962 and Sarris gives it his top rating -
seenis not so 1nuch Pre111inger-directed as other-directed.
That is to say. it seents calculated to provide \Vhat as
111any different &'!'oups as possible \Vant to S('e: thert··s
so111ething for the liberals, sornething for the conser-
vatives, son1ething for the ho,nosexuals, son1ething
for the fan1ily.) An editorial in J\,fo11ie states: " In order
to enjoy Pre,ninger's fihns the spectator 111ust apply
an unprejudiced intelligence; he is constantly requirt·d
to rxan1ine the quality not only of the character<
decisions but also of his O\vn reactions," and "He
presupposes an intelligence active enough to alknv the
spectator to 1nakt" connections. cornparisons and judg-
tnents." May I suggt'st that this spectator \vould have
better thin~,s to do than tht· editors of A/,,,,fr \Vho put
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54 Pauline Kael
out Prenunger issues? They n1ay have, of course, the
joys of discovering links between Centennial Summer,
Forever An1ber, That LAdy in Ermine, and 11,e 11,irteent/r
Letter, but I refuse to believe in these ever-so-
intellectual protestations. The auteur critics aren't a
. .
very <onv111c,11g group.
I assun1e that Sarris's theory is not based on his
prenuses (the necessary causal relationships are absent}.
but rather that the prenuses were devised in a clumsy
attempt to prop up the "theory.·· (It's a good thing he
stopped at three: a few more circles and we'd really
be in hell. which nught tum out to be the last refine-
ment of film tastes - Abbott and Costello co111edies,
perhaps?) These critics work en1barrassingly hard
trying to give some semblance of intellectual respect-
ability to a preoccupation with 1nindless, repetitious
commercial products - the kind of action movies that
the restless, rootless n1en who wander on Forty-
Notes
And, by the way. the turning po inc came. I think, not with
i\tohy Dirk. >< Sarris indicates, but much earlier, with !\1011/i11
R,,ug,. This may not be so apparent to auteur critics concerned
prinurily with style and individual touch~. because what was
shocking about Mouli11 R1>1\~r was that the content was S<enti-
menw 1nush. But critics who accept even the worse of Minnelli
probably wouldn't have been bothered by the fact that ,Wouliu
Roug, was soft in the center. it had so rnany fancy touches ac
the cdg.-s.
'.! In another 5enst\ it is perhaps inunodcst. I would say. give Cukor
Digitized by Google
Second Street and in the Tenderloin of all our big
cities have always preferred just because they could
respond to them without thought. These n1ovies soak
up your titne. I would suggest that they don't serve a
very different function for Sarris or Bogdanovich or
the young n1en of Movie - even though they devise
elaborate theories to justify soaking up their time. An
educated n1an must have to work pretty hard to set
his intellectual horizons at the level of J Was a Male
War Bride (which, incidentally, wasn't even a good
commercial movie).
"Interior n1eaning" seen1s to be what those in the
know know. It's a mystique - and a nustake. The auteur
critics never tell us by what divining rods they have dis-
covered the elan of a Minnelli or a Nicholas Ray or a
Leo McCarey. They' re not critics; they're inside dope-
sters. There must be another circle that Sarris forgot
to get to - the one where the secrets are kept . . ..
a clever script with light. witty dialogue. and he will know what
co do with it. But I wouldn '1 expect n1ore than glo"y entertain-
ment. (It see,ns almost too obvious to men1ion it, but can Sarri,
really disct"rn the "distinguishable personality" of George Cukor
and hi, "•bstract" style in films like BhoU'a11i ju,ution, us Girls,
11ir :1<1rtss, A LJ_[,, ,!f Hrr o,,.,, 11u· Modrl and t/i, 1\1arriagt Brokrr,
J;dward, My Son, A I.Yonra11 's F.ur, Romto andJulitt, A Douhlt U(,·?
I wish I could put hint 10 the test. I can only susptct tlut nuny
a111(111 critics would have a hard time seeing those teUtal<· traC<:i
of the beloved in their work<.)
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 6
The Auteur Theory
Peter Wollen

A British film critic, filmmaker, and teacher, Peter Wollen's films include Penthesilea (1974),
Riddles of the Sphinx (19n) and Crystal Gazing (1982), all co-directed with feminist film theo-
rist Laura Mulvey. Wollen's most important critical work was the book Signs and Meaning in
the Cinema, first published in 1969 and revised in 1972. The book's three parts were devoted
to analyses of Eisenstein and montage theory, semiology, and the auteur theory, from which
this reading is excerpted. Here Wollen offers his influential comparison between Howard
Hawks and John Ford in the process of combining the insights of both auteurism and struc-
turalism. In his reading of Hawks' movies Wollen offers a model of how auteurism allows one
to read individual films by an auteur in relation to the auteur's entire oeuvre.

The politiq11e des aute11rs - the auteur theory. as Andrew
Sarris calls it - was developed by the loosely knit
group of critics who wrote for Cahiers du Cinema and
made it the leading filn1 magazine in the world. It
sprang from the conviction that the American cinema
was worth studying in depth, that masterpieces were
n1ade not only by a sn1all upper crust of directors, the
cultured gilt on the conunercial gingerbread, but by
a whole range of authors, whose work had previously
been dismissed and consigned to oblivion. There were
special conditions in Paris which made this conviction
possible. Firstly, there was the fact that American filnis
were banned from France under the Vichy govern-
ment and the German Occupation. Consequently,
when they reappeared after the Liberation they carne
with a force - and an emotional impact - which was
necessarily missing in the Anglo-Saxon countries
themselves. And, secondly, there was a thriving cine-
club moven1ent, due in part to the close connections
there had always been in France between the cinen1a
and the intelligentsia: witness the example of Jean
Cocteau or Andre Malraux. Connected with this cine-
club movement was the magnificent Paris Cinematheque.
the work of H enri Langlois, a great a111eur, as Jean- Luc
Godard described him. The policy of the Cinematheque
was to show the maximum number of films, to plough
back the production of the past in order to produce
the culture in which the cinema of the future could
thrive. It gave French cinephiles an unmatched percep-
tion of the historical dimensions of H ollywood and
the careers of individual directors.
The a11teur theory grew up rather haphazardly; it was
never elaborated in programmatic tem1s, in a rnanifesto
or collective staternent. As a result, it could be inter-
preted and applied on rather broad lines; different
critics developed somewhat different n1ethods within
a loose frarnework of comrnon attitudes. This looseness
and diffi1seness of the theory has allowed flagrant n1is-
understandings to take root, particularly among critics
in Britain and the U nited States. Ignorance has bt>en

Peter Wollen. ~'Tht- Autl"ur Tht'ory .. (t"xo·q,t) . pp. 74- 10 5 from .~'l!'t! .md ,\ /c-,w11~.: m ,1,,, <..:;,,,,,,,,,. Jrd ~·«l {Bl(lo m111~P11 : Jmh.111.1 Umvt.•f'(1ty Prt.·,,. 197'.!). <"
1%9. 1972 by PC"tcr W ollc.•n, U,xprintcd by pcnni.,<.ion o f BFI Puhl1d 1111~.

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56 Peter Wollen
con1pounded by a vein of hostility to foreign ideas and
a taste for travesrv, and caricature. Ho,vever, the fiuitful-
n<:ss of the aurcur approach has been such that it has
n1ade headway even on the rnost unfavourable terrain.
For instance, a recent straw poll of British critics, con-
ducted in conjunction with a Don Siegel Retrospective
at thee- National Filn1 Theatre, revealed that, an1ong
Arnerican directors rnost adnun:d, a group consisting
of Budd Boetticher, Sarnuel Fuller and Howard Ha,vks
ran i111n1ediately behind Ford, Hitchcock and Welles,
,vho topped the poll. but ahead of Dilly Wilder, Josef
Von Sten1berg and Preston Sturges.
Of course, sorne individual directors has always bet·n
recognised as outstanding: Charles Chaplin. John Ford.
<.)rson Welles. The autc,ir theory does not lin1it itself to
acclainu ng the director as the 111ain author of a filrn. It
irnplies an operation of deciphenuent; it reveals authors
,vhere none had been seen before. For years, the 111odel
of an author in the cine111a was that of the European
director, with open artistic aspirations and full control
over his filn1s. This rnodel still lingers on; it lies behind
the existential distinction bet\\'een art filrns and popular
tilrns. Directors ,vho built their reputations in Europe
,vere dis111issed after they crossed the Atlantic, rt"duced
to anony1nity. An1erican Hitchcock was contrasted
unfavourably with English Hitchcock, An1erican
ltenoir with French Renoir, An1erican Fritz Lang ,vith
Gt"nnan Fritz Lang. The auteur theory has It"d to the
n:valuation of the St'Cond, Hollywood careers of these
and other European directors; without it, n1asterpit·ct·~
such as Srarlcr Srrccr or 1'crti)/<' would never have been
perceivt"d. Conversely. the au/cur theory has been sct·p-
tical wht'n offered an A111erican director ,vhose salvation
has been exile to Europe. It is difficult no,v to argue
that Bn,rc F,,rcc has ever been excelled by Jules l)assin
or that Joseph Lost·y· s rt'rent ,vork is 111arkedly superior
to, say, 11,c Prorvlcr.
In ti111e, o,ving to the diffuseness of the original
theory, t\VO rnain schools of a111c11r critics t,'Te,v up:
tho~e ,vho insistt'd on revealing a core of 111t·.111int,~.
oi tht·111,1tic 1notifs. and those ,vho stressed styk· and
111isc £'II scl11c. Thert' is an in1portant distinction ht·rt:.
,vhich I sh.ill rt·turn to later. The ,vork of thl' ,1111c11r
ha, a st·n1,111tic din1t·11sio11. it is not purely ion11al; the
,vork of the 1111'1/nir 1·11 .,.-hie. 011 the other h.111d. does
IH)t go bt·yond the rt·:1hn of pt·rfi1r111a11ce, of tr.111spo~-
i11g into the special co111plex of ci11t·111atic codes and
rhannt·ls a pre-ex1,1111µ t,·xt: :1 scen.1rio. a hnok or a
Digitized by Google
play. A~ Wt' shall see. the 111eaning of the fihns of an
a1111·11r is constructed a posteriori; the rnea1Ling - se111an-
tic. rather than stylistic or expressive - of the fihns of
a 1ne11eur c11 sch,e exists a priori. In concrete cases, of
course, this distinction is not always clear-cut. There
is controversy over whether sorne directors should be
seen as a11te11rs or 111ct11'.11rs e11 sci:11c. For example, though
it is possible to n1ake intuitive ascriptions, there have
been no really persuasive accounts as yet of Raoul
Walsh or Willia111 Wyler as a111eurs, to take two very
different directors. Opinions n1ight differ about Don
Siegel or George Cukor. Because of the difficulty of
fixing the distinction in these concrete cases, it has
often becon1e blurred; indeed, some French critics
have tended to value the met1e11r e11 scene above the
a111c11r. MacMahonisrn sprang up. with its cult ofWalsh.
Lang, Losey and Prerninger, its fascination with vio-
lenct" and its notorious text: 'Charlton Heston is an
axiorn of the cinerna. · What Andre Bazin called 'aes-
thetic cults of personality' began to be fom1ed. Minor
directors were acclai111ed before they had, in any real
sense. been identified and defined.
Yet the autc11r theory has survived despite all the
hallucinating critical extravah>anzas which it has
fathered. It has survived because it is indispensablt'.
Geoffrey Nowell-S1nith has sununed up the a11/£'11r
theory as it is nonnally prt•sented today:
( )nc: c:ssc:nti.11 corollary oi the: theory as it has bc:t·n
dt·vdoped is tht· dist'ov.:ry that th,· dt·linin~ ,haractc:ris-
tic, of an author's ,vork are 1101 nc:ct'ssarily those ,vhich
art· rnost rl'adily appar,·111 . Th,· purpose: of ,·ritit'isrn thus
hecornc:s to unrovc:r bd1inJ th,· sup,·rticial contrasts of
suhjt·n and tr,-.11,nt·nt a h.1rd ,·ore oi ba,ir and oticn
Tl'conditc: tnotits. The: p:tttent 1,,rn1,·d by th,·<c: 1notils ... is
wh.11 ~iv,·, :tll :iuthnr\ \\'Ork it, p.,rt k u)Jr ,tnKturc. both
dt·linin~ it int,·n1Jlly Jt1d di,tin~ui<hitt): one: bt)dy of
\\'urk frorn .111<1th,·r.
It i~ this 'strucnrral .1pproach ·. a, No,vell-S111ith rails
it, ,vhi.:h is indispt·nsabll' for the critic
Tht: test cast· fiir tht' 1111rc11r theory is provided by
tht· \vork of Ho,vard H.1,vks. Why Ha"·ks. r.ither than,
s.1y. Frank Uorz.1gt· or King Vidor' Firstly, Hawks is
a director ,vho h.1s \\·orkl'd for years ,vithin the
Holly"·ood sy~tt·111. Hrs tirst tilr11, R,,ad 1,1 (;for)', was
111ade in 192(1. Yet throughout hi~ Ion~ c,1ret·r he has
onlv. onre rect·iv,·d .~ent·r;rl <.:ritic1l a.:rlain1. for his
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 The Auteur Theory
wartin1e tiln1, St·~i:ca111 ) ·,,rk, which closer inspection
reveals to be eccentric and atypical of the n1ain <017111s
of Hawks's filrns. Secondly, Hawks has worked in
aln1ost every genre. He has rnade ,vestcn1s (Ri() Bra,,()),
!-,r.111gsters (Scaifaa·), war filn1s (Air Force), thrillers ('n,c
B(I! Sh-cp), science fiction (77,e 771i11.!! _f,0111 An,11/,cr
~Vorld) , n1usicals (Ge11tle111e11 Prij'er B/011des), cornedies
(Rri111?il1,I! up Ba/,y), even a Biblical epic (LA11d •?l tl,c
P/,araoliJ). Yet all of these filn1s (except perhaps L111d
'!f the Pliara,,lis, which he hj1115elf was not happy about)
exhibit the san1e the111atic preoccupations, the san1e
recurring 111otif\ and incidcnt5. the san1e visual style
and ten1po. In the s,1111e way that l~oland U.1rthes
constnrcted a specit•s of/,,,,.,., ra<i11ia1111s, the critic can
ronstnrct a /u11111> h1111•/.:.,ia1111.<, the protagonist of
Ha\vksian values in the proble111atic Ha,vksian ,vorld.
H awks at·hit·ved this by rl·ducing the gl'llres to r,vo
basic types: the adventure dr:1111a and the crazy coniedy.
These two types exprt·ss inverse views of tht· ,vorld,
the positive and negative poles of the Ha,vksian vision.
Ha,vks ~tands oppO\l'd, on thl· ont· hand. to J ohn Ford
Jnd. on the other hand, to Uudd lloetticht·r. All thesl'
directors are conl'enit·d ,vith the problt·n1 of heroisrn.
For the hl·ro, as an individual, dt'ath is an absolutl'
li1nit which cannot be transrenck·d: it renders the life
,vhich prl·ceded it 1neaningk·ss. absurd. How tht·n r.111
there be any 111cani1,gti1l individual action during life?
Ho,v ran individu.11 artion have any value - ht> hl·roic
- if it cannot have transct·ndc:nt value. hl·c.1ust· of the
absolutely devaluin g li111it of death? John Ford finds
the ans1,1,l·r to this qul'stion by placing and situating
the individual ,vithin soril'tv . .ind ,vithin history. . l l,11,1ri 1 blood is l'Xrhangl·d by tra11sfi1sio11) and t·xpn.-·s~
specifically ,vithin A111eric.111 history. Ford finds tr.1n-
~cendt'nt valul'S in the hi~toric vocation of Antt·rica as
.
a nation. to bring rivilisation to a sav.Jgt' '
land. the
gardt·n to the ,1·ildl'n1css. At the s,une ti1ne. Ford also
secs these value~ tht·111,t'lvl's .1~ prohlt-111:uic: hl' bc!,.rins
to qut·stion the 111ovt·111t·nt of A1neric1n history it~l'lf
Uot'tticher. on thl· contr.1r:y. insists o n a r.1dical indi-
vidualis111. 'I a1n not i11tl'rl'stt·d in n1aking •
tihn~ abnut
111.,~~ ti:l'lill!-."'- I an1 for tht' individual.· Ht· looks for
'
v.1lues in the encou11tl'r ,vith dt·:1th itsl·lf: the u11(k·rlv-
ing 111etaphor is .1hvays th;u of thl' bull- tightl'r in the
arena. The hl·ro l'ntcrs ,1 group of co1np,111ion,. but
there is no pos~ibility of group solidaritv. Uoettirhl'r's
hero arts by di5solv ing group\ .ind colll'ctivitit·~ of .111y
kind into their constit uc11t individual,. ~o th,ll ht· co n-
fronts t·ach pt·rson t:.1ce- to- facl': the tiln1s develop. in
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57
Andrc,v Sarris's "·ords, into 'floating poker 1,,r.1n1es,
,vhere every character takes tun1s at bluffing about his
hand until the final showdown'. Hawks, unlike Boet-
ticher, St'eks transcendent values beyond the individual.
in solidaritv• with others. But, unlike Ford. he does not
!-,rive his heroes any historical di1nension, any dl'stiny
111 tune.
For Ha,vks the highest hun1an en1otion is thl'
c.11naraderic of the exclusive, sclf- sufiicicnt. all-n1ak·
group. H:1,vks 's herot·s are cattle111en, 111arlin- fishennen.
raring-drivers. pilots, big-gan1e hunters, habituated
to dangt·r and living apart front soriet:y, actually cut
otT fro111 it physically by densl' forest. ~e,1, snow or
dl'scrt. Thl'ir aerodron1cs art' fog- •
bound; the radio
has crar kl'd up; tht· next n1ail-coarh or packet-boat
does not k·avc: tor l \\'t•ck . The airr group strictly
prl'~t'rve~ its exclusivity. It is ncct·ssary to pass a tt·st of
ability and courag<' to ,vin ad111ittance. The group's
only inten1:1l tensions ro111c \\'hen <Hl<' 111t·1nbt:r kts
the others do,vn (the dn111k dl'puty in /{it> Br.11,,,. till'
panicky pilot in ()11/y rl11gcls H,1vc l•i'i11,l!S) and 1nust
rl'dl't'lll hin1sl'lfhy SOllll' act of l'XCeptional bravt·ry. or
occ 1sion:1llv. ,vh,·n too 1nuch 'individualisn1 · thrl'.ltt:ns
to disn1pt thl' closl'-knit l'irclt' (the riv,1lry bt·t\\'l't·n
drivl'rs in R ed Li11c 7000. tht· tight,·r pilot a111011g till'
ho1nht'r crt'\\' in Air r:,,rrc). Tht· group\ Sl·C uritv i~
the first t·o,nn1:1nd1nl·nt: ·you •get a stunt tl'.1n1 in
,1rrobatics in the air - if one of the111 is no •good. then
tht·v'rc: all in trouble. If sonieone losl's his nerve t·:1tch -
ini.:
•
:111i1nal~. then the ,~·holl' hunch can he in trouhk·. ·
Thl' )..'l'Oup n1cn1hcrs arl' hound to~l· thl'r by rituals (in
tl1l·n1sclves univorally in co1n1111n1al \i ng-,on!-,~ - l 'hl'rl'
is :1 t;1111ou~ exa111pk· of this in Ri,, Hr,11 1,>. In /),111·11
P,11n1/ the r:1111:1radt·rie of the pilots strl·tcht>s e, ·l·11
across thl' c11e1ny lint·,: a captured (;l•rn1:111 :ire is
i111111t·d i.1tely drafted into the !,.'l'Oup Jnd join, in till'
sini,:-~ong:
. ' in / l,11,1ri 1 huntl:rs of difflTt'nt nationalit,·.
and in ditli:-rt·nt pl.1r,·s join together in a ,ong over :111
intl'rcorn radio s,·stt'111.
.
Ha\\·k~·s ht·rot·s prilk· then1selves on tht·ir proti.·s-
sion.1li\111. Thev. ask: 'Ho,v 'good is he;. Ht· \I hl·tter bl·
good. · They t·xpt·rt 110 praist· t<.ir doing thl'ir job \\'l'll.
lndl'l:d, nonl' is gi ve n except: 'The boy~ did all right.'
When thev. die. thcv. lt•,1vt· bt·hind tht·111 onlv. the
1110~1 lllt':tgrl' pt·rsonal belongings. pt·rh:1ps .1 h.111dti1I
of 111t·dals. H.nvk, hinist·lf has su111n1l·d up this lk·sobtt·
:111J b.irrt·n vit·\v of lit<.·:
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
58 Peter Wollen
Figure 6. I Group ca111.1r:idcnc and 1hc problem of h,·rc,"111 111 0 11/y :111.~1•/s 1-1,we 11 711.fs (Cohuubca. 1939).
Produced and du-c~1..-d by Howard Hawk;
It's jusr a caln1 acceptance of a fuct. In 011/y A11cl'ls H,1111·
M-'it\~S. after Joe dies. Cary Grant says: 'He just ,vasn ·r
good e nough.' Well. that's th<· only thing that keep<
people going. Thcy JIISt have to say: 'Joe ,vasn ·, good
enough, and 1'111 bt>rter than JO<', so I go ahead and do
it.' And they find 0111 they're 1101 any better than Joe. but
then it's 100 late. you sec.
In Ford filnis. death is celebrated by funeral services.
an i111pron1ptu prayer, a fe\v staves of 'Shall we gather
at the river?' - it is inserted into an ongoing systen1
of ritual institu tion_;, J_lo11g ,vith the ,.vedding, the
dance, the parade. Bur for H,l\vks it is enough th at
the routine of the group's life goes on, a routine
,vhose only relieving features are 'danger' (ll11111ri.~ and
'fi.1n'. Danger gives existence pungency: 'Every ti1ne
yo u get real action, then you have d:.1nger. And the
questJon. "Are you living or no t living?" i~ probably
the biggest dran1a ,vc have.• This nihilisn,. in ,vhich
~~
'living' n1eans no n1 ore than being in danger of los111g
Digitized by Google
your life - a dangl~r entered into quire gr;ituirously - is
augn1ented by the H awksia n concept of havin g 'fi.111'.
The ,vord 'fun· crops up constantly in Ha\vks's intcr-
vi e\\'S and scripts. Ir rnasks his despair.
When one of Ha,vks's elite is asked, usually by a
,von1:in. ,vhy he risks his life. he r<.>plies: 'No reason I
can think ofniakcs any sense. I guess \vc'rejust crazy.'
Or Feathers. sardonically. to Colorado in Rio Brar,o:
·You haven't even die excuse I have. We're all fools.'
By 'crazy· H a\vks docs not n1ca.11 psychopathic:
none of his characte~ are like Turkey in Peckinpah's
1711: Deatlly c:,n11pa11io11s or Billy die Kid i.n Penn's 11,e
Lc:ft•Ha111frrl C 1111. Nor is there the sense of the absur-
dity of life which ,ve ~on1eri1nes find in 8ot.'tticher's
fi ln1s: de.1th. as ,ve have seen , is for Ha.,,vks si n,ply a
roua ne occurrence. nor a ,I/Tclttsq11eric. as in 77,e Tall ·r
(' Prerry ~0011 that ,veil 's going to be chock-a-block')
or 77,c Rise a11rl F11/I ,?f U',1/S Oi11111011tl. For H awks
·crazine,s· in1phl'S ditlen.'nce. a sense of apartness &0111
the o rdinary. everyday, $OCial world. At the sanie tinie.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 The Auteur Theory
Hawks sees the ordinary world as being 'crazy' in a
n1uch more fundamental sense, because devoid of any
meaning or values. 'I mean crazy reactions - I don't
think they're crazy, I think they' re nonnal - but
according to bad habits we've fallen into they seen1ed
crazy.' Which is the nonnal, which the abnormal?
Hawks recognises, inchoately, that to most people his
heroes, far from en1bodying rational values, are only a
dwindling band of eccentrics. Hawks's 'kind of rnen'
have no place in the world.
The Hawksian heroes, who exclude others &0111
their own elite group, are thernselves excluded fron1
society, exiled to the African bush or to the Arctic.
Outsiders, other people in general, are perceived by
the group as an undifferentiated crowd. Their role is
co gape at the deeds of the heroes whom, at the same
tin1e, they hate. The crowd asse111bles to watch the
showdown in Rio Bravo, to see the cars spin off
the track in TI,e Crowd Roars. The gulf between the
outsider and the heroes transcends enn1ities among
the elite: witness Daw,i Patrol or Nelse in El Dorado.
Most dehumanised of all is the crowd in La11d of the
Pharaohs, employed in building the Pyramids. Origi-
nally the filn1 was to have been about Chinese
labourers building a 'rnagnificent airfield' for the
An1erican army. but the victory of the Chinese Revo-
lution forced Hawks to change his plans. ('Then I
thought of the building of the Pyranuds; I thought
it was the sarne kind of story.') But the presence of
the crowd, of external society, is a constant covert
threat to the Hawksian elite, who retaliate by having
'fun'. In the crazy comedies ordinary citizens are
turned into conuc butts, larnpooned and tonnented:
the most obvious target is the insurance sales111an in
His Girl Friday. Often Hawks's revenge becon1es grirn
and macabre. In Se'}?ea11t York it is 'fun• to shoot
Gennans 'like turkeys·; in Air Forc1• it is 'fun' to blow
up the Japanese fleet. In Rio Bra110 the geligniting of
the bad n1en 'was very funny'. It is at these n1oments
that the elite turns against the world outside and takes
the opportunity to be brutal and destructive.
Besides the covert pressure of the crowd outside,
there is also an overt force which threatens: wo111an.
Man is woman's 'prey'. Won1en are ad111itted to the
male group only after n1uch disquiet and a long ritual
courtship. phased round the offering, lighting and
exchange of cigarettes. during which they prove
then1selvC's worthy of entry. Often they perfonn 111inor
Digitized by Google
59
feats of valour. Even then though they are never
really fi.111 n1en1bers. A typical dialogue sun1s up their
positron:
~Vim,m,: You love hi 111. don 't you ?
:\1<111 (crnbarr:isscd): Yl~ ... I 1:,>ul'S-' so ....
M1<1111a11: Ho,v can I love hin1 like vou?
'
,\l<111: Just stkk around.
The undercurrent of hornosexuality in Hawks's fihns
is never crystallised, though in TI,e Big Sky, for
exan1ple, it runs very close to the surface. And he
hin1self described A Girl i11 Every Port as 'really a love
story between two n1en'. For Hawks 111en are equals,
within the group at least, whereas there is a clear
identification between women and the anin1al world,
most explicit in Bri11gi11g Up Baby, Ge11tleme11 Pr~fer
Blondes and Hatari! Man must strive to n1aintain his
n1astery. It is also worth noting that, in Hawks's adven-
ture dramas and even in many of his con1edies, there
is no n1arried life. Often the heroes were n1arried or
at least intimately con1nutted, to a woman at son1e
tin1e in the distant past but have suffered an unspeci-
fied trauma, with the result that they have been
suspicious of won1en ever since. Their attitude is 'Once
bitten, twice shy.' This is in contrast to the filn1s of
Ford, which aln1ost always include domestic scenes.
W oman is not a threat to Ford's heroes; she tails into
her allotted social place as wife and n1other, bringing
up the children , cooking, sewing, a life of service,
drudgery and subordination. She is repaid for this by
being sentin1entalised. Doetticher, on the other hand.
has no obvious place for won1en at all; they are pha11-
to111s, who provoke action, are pretexts for n1ale n1odes
of conduct, but have no authentic significance in
then1selves. 'In herself, the won1an has not the slightest
importance.'
Hawks sees the all-111ale conununity as an ultin1ate;
obviously it is very retrograde. His Spartan heroes arc.
in fact, cruelly stunted. Hawks would be a lesser dirt·c-
tor if he was unaffected by this, if his adventure dra111as
\Vere the sun1 total of his work. His real clain1 as an
author lies in the presence, together with the dran1as.
of their inverse. the: crazy con1edies. They are the:
agonised exposure of the underlying tensions of
the heroic drarnas. Thl·re are l'.vo principal thc:nll'S,
zones of tension. The first is the thcrne of r..:gression:
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
60 Peter Wollen
of rl'!:-,'TC:ssion to childhood. infantilis,n, as in .\/,111/.:cy
H11si11c.<-<. or r<·gn:ssion to savagc:ry: \Vitni:ss thi: rc:pt:att:d
Sl'<'lll' of the: adult about to bc: scalpl'd by paintl·d
c h ildrt'n, in ;\./,,11/.:cy H11si11css and in 7711' R,111.<<>111 ,,( Red
( :J,icJ:
. With brilliant insight. . . R.obin W ood h.1s sho\Vll
1111\\' Scc111;,cc should bt· catl·gorisc:d an1ong the: c(11nc-
dic, ratht'r than tht' dra111a~: (:a111ontc: is pt:r,i:ivt:d as
s.1v.1gc. child-likt'. subhun1 ;111. Tht· S<'l'OIHI prinrip.,1
ron1l'dv rhc:n1c: is that o f '<'X-rt'vt."rsal and rolc:-rever-.1L
'
I II;,; :-1 .\f,,f<' 11 ·,1, Uridc is tht· n1<)St <'Xtrt·n1<· t'X:tn1pk·.
M.,n\· o f Ha\vks 's ron1<·di<'S .1rt' cl'ntri:d round do111i -
11l'<'rin!-( \\'Ollll'll ;1nd tin1id. pli;1bll' llll'11: Hri,~~i11.i: I 'p
H,,,.r and .\l,111 's F,11•, 111rirc -"I'•'"· for l'X,11npk. Thl'rl' arl'
<lltcn sc't'll<'' of 111.1le S<'xual hu111iliatinn. such .1s th<.'
tn>llSt'l'S hl·ing pulk·d otr thl· hapk·,s pri\·,,tl' l'Yl' in
( ;n11/n11c11 l'r,:J;., H/,,11dc.,. In thc s:Ulll' tihn. th<· ()h·111pir
T l',1111 of ,1thk·tl'' .trl' n·d11rl·d to p.1,si\'l' oh_jl·rt, in .111
l'Xtr.,nrdinarv. -f.lllt' H.u,,ell ,onL: .. nu1nhl·r: hii.:- . .g.1111e
h111111nµ i, l.11np,>c>n<·d. likl· tishing in .\f,,,, ·s r,,,.,,,,,.,,,.
s,,,,rr: th,· thl'llll' nf int:11nili,n1 rrops up .1g.1in: ··rhe
rl11ld \\'as tht: 111ost 111.tturl' olll' on hoard th,· ,hip ..111d
I think hl· \\·,1s a lot of ti.111.'
Wht·re:1s thl' dr:1111.1, sho\\' the 111:1,1,·rv of n1.111 O\'<'r
n.1turl'. OVl'r ,,·on1an. O\'l'r chc: ani111.1I ;111d childish:
cht: rollll'dics ,ho,v hi, hun1ili.11ion. hi, rl'µrl·" ion.
' l'h,· h,·rol'S hl-ro111,· \·irti111,: ,ol'il·tv. . i1ht,·.1<l ot' bc i11g . clu, t<'rl'd, hut i11 til111, \\·hi,·h .ll tir-t ~il!ht
,·,clud<·d .ind <k,p1,ed. hre.1ks in ,,·ith 1rrupti<lllS of
1111,11,trou, 1:1rl'l'. It could \\TII bc argucd •
d1.11 l·l.1 \\·I.., ·,
nutlo<>k. th,· .tlt<·n1.1ti\'l' \\·orld ,,·hil·h hl· <'<llt,trul'l\ in
th<' cint·111:1. thl' I Ll\vksi.111 ht·t,·rocos111. i, not on,·
1111hul·d \\'i th part1rular intt:lk·ctu,11 suhtkty o r ,ophi,-
tir.1tion. This does 1101 dl'tr.1ct fro111 its f<11'l·e . 1-Ll\\·ks
tir-t attr.1rtl·d attl'l1tio11 hl'l·:111,c he \\·,is n·g.1nk·d •
11.i'iveh· a, .111 .tt't1011 director. L.H,T. th,· 1h,·n1.1tit-
l·o11t,·nt \\·h1l·h I h.1v,· outlin,·d \\·,i,; d,·1,·,·tcd :ind
r,·\·,-.1kd. lll'vnnd
. th<· qvk111,·,
. . "'111.1tltl'111,·, \\'l'fl' ti.iund
t<l ,·:-.:i,t: thl· tilnis \,.,.,,. :111chorl·d in an ob_1,·,·ti\·,•
, tr.1tun1 of Jll<'.1t1i11~.., pl,·r,·111.1tic ,cr.1tu111. :,s th<· I ).1111,h
linguist 1-ljl·lni,;ll·\· \,·ould put it. Thu, thc ,t\·li,t i<
expr,·"iv,·11l·,, of 1-l.t\\·ks', tih11s ,,..,, sh0\\'11 to hl· nt>t
purl'lv co11ti11~ent, hut !-,'Tou11<ll'd in ,i~nifir.111,·,·.
Son1l·thi11~ •
tiirther lll'l·ds to bl· ,.,id .1hou1 1h,· th,·1>-
rcticJI b.isi, nf th,· kind 01· s,·h c1n.11 il' ,·:-.:p1hit11>n ,,f
1-l.l\,·ks\ \\·ork \,·hich I h.1\·,· outlin,·,I. ·rhc ·,tru,·tur.11
·'l'J'l'<>,1<·h' \\'hi,·h underli,·, it. th,· d,·tin1t1<1n of., ,orl·
<lf repl',lt ed 1notil~. h.1, ,•\·al l'n t .,tiinitie, \\·itl, 111,·tho,h
\\'hi<-h h,l\'<' hl'cn d l'\'<• lnp<·d fi.>r th,· '111dv nt' ti, lk lore
.111d 111vthc,
. logv. . . 111 chc ,,·,wk nf ( )lrik .111d 0 1h,·r,. it
Digitized by Google
\\'JS noted that Ill dit1crc:nt folk- talcs tht· san1c n1otils
rl'appl'arl·d tillll' and tinl<' again. It b<·c·an1l' possiblt' to
build up a k·:-.:il'o n of chest' 111otils. Evt"ntually Propp
sho\\·t'd ho,v ., ,vholt' l·,.·clt' of R.u,sian fairv-talt', .
could be .111ah·,ed . intci v,1riations of ,1 v<·rv, li1nitt'd set
of basic 111otif; (or 111ovcs. as hl' calk·d thc:111). Undt'rly -
in~ the difli.·r,·nt. individual tales \\',IS .111 arc hi- talc:. of
'
\\·hich th<·y \Vl'rl' all variants. ( )11,· in1portant point
needs to bl· 1n.1d,· .1bout this tvpe of structural analysis.
Then· is ., dang,·r ..1, L~·vi-Str;lU'- h.,s pointed out. th.It
by si n,ply noting and n1.1ppi11g rl'S<'nthl:111ces. all thl·
texts \\·hich :tr<· studied (\\·hcthl'r R.u ssi.1n fairv- tak·s
o r Ant<·rican 1110\·ic:,) ,,·ill he n·dul·l·d to one:. ab,trJCt
and i111poverished. Tht·rt' 111ust he .1 111on1l'1lt of svn-
thl·,is .is \\·di .,s .1 n10111e11t of .111.1ly,is: otht·r,,·ise. thl'
n1ethod is fon11alist . r.lther than truh· ,trurturJlist.
Structur,1li,t criti,·is111 c annot n·st .tt thl· p,-reeption of
rc•s,·111bl.1nrl'' or rep,·titions (r,·dund.1ncil's. in 1:1rt). hut
1nus1 .11,o co111pr<'h,·1 Hi .1 ,y,tc111 of ditli.·r,·nces .ind
<>ppc1S1t icH1,. In th is \\·ay. tt'Xh r.111 hl· , cud i,·d not only
in cheir univl'r-.,lit\'. (,vh.ll thev. .,II ha,·,· in con1 nH>nl.
.
but .,ho in thl·ir si ngularirv. (,,·h,11 di1l;.•r,·11tiatc·s th,·ut
ti-0111 e.1rh oth,·r). This 111,·.1n, nf rnur,l· th.11 the: tl'St
of ., ,trul'tu r.,I anah·,i, . lil'S 1101 in tht· orthodox
c.111011 of a dircrtor·, \\'Ork. \\·h,·r<' l'l''<' lllbl.111r<'S arl'
•
111.1,· ,ec:111
t'<" <'t'l II fl l' It I,.,.
111 1he tiltns of Hn,,·.ird I l.1\,·k, .1 ,\',te111.11ir St'ric~
of nppchll i(lll' l',111 hl· ~l't'll \'l'ry ll <',11' th<· ,urt:ll·t'. in
cht' c ontrast h,·t \,·,·e11 the .1d\·,·11111rc· ,lr.1111.1, and thl'
r r.17,· ron t<'dil·,. If ,v,· t.1 ke thl· ,1<h·<·11ture Jr.1111:1, alonl'
it \\·ould 'l'l'III that Ha\\·k,\ \\·ork b tla.-cid. lacking •
i11
,h·11.1111is111:
. it i, 0111\', \\·h,·n \\·,· <·ons id,·r the c.:r,1z,.·
ro11tl'<hl·, that it hl·co111l', rich. h,·~ins to ti:nll<' llt:
.ilo11g,1dc t'\'t•n· dr.1111.Hic hcro \\'l' .1n· ,l\\·:1r,· of ,l
ph.111te1111. ,triJ'pl·d of 1na'ler\'. hu111 ili.1tl·d. it1Vl'l'tt'd.
With othcr din·rtnr- . thc ,\·,1,·111 of oppositio11s i,
111uch 111orl' l·e1111pkx: i11,t,·.1d of thl'l'l' h<'III!! t,\·o bro.id
str.ll.1 of til111s th,·r,· ,lrt· .1 \\·holl' scril·, of shi tiinl! , v.1ria-
t1,>n,. In th,·, ,· r.1,l·,. \\T tll'<'d to :111:1h·sl· . tht' rok·s of
the prnt.1;,:oni,ts thl·1n,l·h·l·s. r.,th<·r than ,in1ply thl'
\\'Orl,h Ill \\'hii'l1 th ey O)'l'f.lll' . ·rhe prot:t!!Ollists of
t:11ry- t.1k, or 111\·th,. as 1.,: , ·i- Str.1us, h.1s pointl·d out.
r .111 hc di,sc>h·l'd into hundk, of d itl,·r<·11ti.1I ele111l'nts.
p.1ir, nt' t'l'l''"ll<''· l ' hu, th,· d1 tii:n·11.-l' bl't \\'l'<'ll the
prince· .11,d chl' ~oos,•- ~irl c.1n h,· rcdur,·d to t\\·o
,1111111<>111K p.11r,: <'ll<' 11.Hur.11. 111.1k , ·l·r,us fi.·111,1lc, .ind
th,· oth,·r ,·ultur.11. hi~h ,·,·rsu, In\\·. We c.111 procl'ed
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 The Auteur Theory
\Vith tht' san1t' kind of operation in thl' study of tihns.
though. as \Vt' shall ~t"l'. \\'l' \hall tind thl·n1 n1orl'
co111plc:x than fairv-talt's.
It is instn1crivt·, for l'Xa111plc. 10 considl·r thrc:l' tiln1,
ofJohn Ford and con1p.irl' d1l·ir hc·rol's: Wyatt Earp in
.\ly D,1r/i11,i: (,'/c111c111i11c, Ethan E(hv.1rds in ·rllf Sr11rd1ff.<
Jnd Ton1 l>oniphon in 7·1,c .\f,111 11 7,,, Sl,,,1 Lilwrty
I ·,,t,111,c. Thl·y all .1c1 \\·ithin rill' recog11i,.1hll· Ford
\\·orld. govl·rnl'd hv a St't of oppositions. hut rl1c:ir /,,,;
\Vithin th.a \vorld an· vc:ry ditlc.·rl'nl. Thl' rl'll'vant p.1irs
of oppositl'S ovl·rlap: diflerl'nt pairs Jrt· l<)rt·groundt·d
in ditlc.-rt'lll n1ovit', . Thl' n10,c rl'k-v.1111 .trl' •~.1nil·n
,·c:r..us \\·ildc:nll'SS, ploughsharl· vc:rsus s.1brc:. Sl'ttk·r
,·ersus no111.1d. Europt'.ln versus Indian, f ivili,l·d v,·rsus
,.,va~l', •
hook ,·cr..11, •~1111. 111:trril·d Vl'r,11, un111a1Til·d.
£ .1st ,·l·r,us W c,1. ·r hc,t· antino111ics c.,n ofil·n hl' broken
do,vn tiirrlll'r. Tht· E.1,1. ti,r inst.11H·t·. c.1n hl· (lt·tinl'd
eitht·r .1, Uoston t•r W.1,hi11µ:to n and. in "/111· l,1.,1
l-l11rr,1/1. ll1hton it,t'lt' is brokl·n do\\·11 into thl· .111tipn-
dt·s of lnsh 11n1111,.:r.1nts ,·c1-sus l'lv111outh t:lub.
thc: n1st·h·t·s b und lt-, of ,urh di tlc.·rl·11tial l·kn 1t·11ts .1s
c:c:lr1l· ,·l-r,11, Anµ: lo -S.1xon. poor ver,u, rich. ( :.11holir
Vl'r,u, Prott',t.1nt. I >t·111<,cr.11 vcr,us ll..epublir.111 ..ind ,o
011. Ar tir,r sight. it 111igh1 St'l:111 tha t rill' oppositions
li,tt·d Jhovt' o,·t·rl.1p to the t'Xtt·nt th.11 tht·\· bt·<"on1t·
pr:1ctit·,tlly sy111u1y111ou,. but thi, is by 111, 111t•,111s till'
ct,t' . As ,\·t· sh.ill ,t·t·. p.1n nf the dc:,·c:lopn1t·nt of rord \
r.trl·c:r h.1, ht·,·11 tht· ,hiti li-0111 an idt·ntil\· . bl'l\\.l'l'll
civilised ,·t·r,u, s,l\·,1µc .111d Europt·.1n ,·t-rsu, l11di.1n to
tht·ir sc:p.1r,1tin11 :111d tin.ii n·,·t·rs.1I. ,o th.it in ( ,'l11-rc1111c
.·1 1111111111 it i, tht' Europt·.111s \\·ho arl' s.l\·,t~l'. thl' victi111s
\\'ho Jrl' hc:rot',.
T hl· 1nastl-r .1nrino111v . in Ford\ til111, is th.II bt·t\\.l'l'n
tht'. \Vildt'rnt·ss and thl' 'g.1rdt·n. As Ht·nn·. N.1sh S111i1h
has dc:111on,1r.1tt'd, in hi, 111.1gi,rt-ri.1I hook I 'irt:i11 /.,111d.
cltt· contrast bt'l\\'t't'II cl1l· in1.1~t·•
of A111l'rica .1, ,1 dt·,ert
and J~ a •~.1nk·11 i, Olll' ,\·hich ha, dn111111.1t,·d A111,·rir.111
thoul{ht •
and litt-r,Hurt'. rl'C11rri11g• in r,n11Hk" no,·cb.
tr;1rt~. politit'.tl 'l'<'<'t'ht·, .111d 111.1,_:.1l.i11t' ,tori,·,. 111 Ford's
tiltns it is cryst.,lh,t'd in .1 11u111ht·r of stnkinµ: in1.1µ:,·,.
771(' .\l,111 111,,, _._,,,,, Lib,-rrr I ;,1,,,,,.,., 1,,r lllSt.lllt't'. con-
tains thl' in1.1gl' of till' r;1ct11, ro,l'. ,vhtt·h t·11r.1p,ul:11t·,
thc: antinon1v h,·t,vt·cn desert .ind g.1rd,·11 \\·hich pcr-
\'adl's th,· ,vhok· ti l,n. ( \,111p.1r,· "·ith this tl1,· 1:1111<a1,
5l'cn,· in .\ly l),11·/i,11! (,'/,·111t·111111t·. •1lit·r W\',ltt F.trp h.i-
gone to thl· harhc:r (\\·ho ci\·ili,,·, tire:' u11k,·111p1). "·h,-rt·
the: st·ent of ho11t·y,u,k lt· 1s t\\·1,·t· rt·111.ukt·d upon : .111
aniticial pt'rfi1111l'. cult ur.11 r.nh,·r th.111 11.1111r.1l. ·rhi,
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61
11101lll'llt 111arks tht' turning-point in Wyatt E.1rp's tran-
sition ti-0111 \\·andl·ring . co\,·hov, , non1adic, savagl', ... hcnt
on pl'rson,11 rl'Vt'ngl·, unn1arrit'.d, to 111;1rric:d n1an.
sc: ttkd. rivili,ed, tht· shc:ritr ,\·ho .1d111inistc:rs tht· la,v.
E.1rp. in .\/y D,1di11.1! (.:/c111,-111i11c. is structurally the
n1<,st ,irnplc: of till' thrc:t' prot.1gonists I hav,· n1c:n-
tionl·d: hi, progrl's, is an 11nco111plir.1tl'd passage ti-0111
naturt' to ru lturt'. ti-0111 th,· \vildt·n1,·s, k·ti in thc: p.1,t
to thl' gardt'11 antir1p.1tt'd in till' ti1turt·. Ethan Ethvards.
in 71,r Sr,11·.-lwrs. i, 1111,rt· cn n1pk·x. Hc: 11111,r bc: dctinc:d
not in tt·nns of p.1,t ,·t·rsus ti1ture or \\'ildc:n1e" vt·rsus
gardl'n co111poundl'd in hi11Jst•IC hut in rt·l.trion to t,\·o
otlll'r prot.1gonists: Scar, the Indian rhic:C and rill·
l:1111ily of ho111t·,1t·.1dt'rs. E1h:1n Ed\vards, unlikl· Earp.
rt·111ains ,1 11<1n1ad throu~hout •
thl' ti hn. At tht· st.1rt. ht·
ridl's in fron1 thl' dt',c:rt to l'IHt·r thl' 101.:-housl:;•
.1t thl'
t'lld. "·ith pl-rtc.·rt ,y111111,·try. Ill· k·.1\·t·s till' hou,c: ag.1i11
to rl'turn to thl' dt·st·rt. to \',1~r.n1c\·. 111 1n.1nv rt•,;pe,·ts.
he i, ,i111il:tr to St'.tr; ht· i, .1 \\·.1n,k·rcr. a ,av.11.:t·. •
uui-idl'
the l.i\\·: ht· sc.1lps his t'll<:'111\'. But. lik t· the: ho111cstt·.1d-
t·r,. of rour, l·. ht' i, .1 Europt·;111. thl· llH>rtal l<ll' of cl1l·
lndi.111. Thus Ed,v.ird, is an1 biguous; the ant i110111ic:s
i1n·.1d,· th,· pl·r,011.1lity of th e: protagoni,r hi111 ,;,·lt'. The·
opp<l,1tio11, tt'.lr Ld\vards in t\\·o ; hc: is a tr.1~it· hl'ro.
I ·I i, t'on1p.111io11, M.1r1i11 1'.1\\·ll'~-. ho,vt·vt·r. i, ,1h!t· to
rt',<lh'l' thl' duality: tc,r hi111. till' pt·ri1,d <lt' no111.1lli,n1
i, only .111 <'pi,odt'. ,\·hirh h.i- 111c·.111i11µ .1, chl' r,·,11tu-
tio11 of till' fa111ih·. . ,1 nt'l.l'"·'n·. lin k hl't\\·t·l'II his o ld
ho111,· .ind hi, Ill'\\' ho111t·.
E1h;111 Ed"·.1rt1,·s " ·.111,lt-rin~ •
i,. likt· th.11 of 111.111,·
other Ford prot.1goni,r,..1 qut·,c. a Sl',1rrh. A 11u111b,·r
of rord tih11, .art· built round cl1l' tht·111t· nf tht· qut·,c
fi>r till' l'nuni~t·d L.111d. an A111t·ric1n l'l'•<'llar t111t·11t ot'
the Bihlir .11 exodus. the: jourlll'Y through tht· dt·,tTt to
rill' l.111ll of 111il k .ind honl.'y. tht' Nt'\\" _lt'ru,.1lt·n1. ·rhis
tl1cn1l' is built <lll the co111hi11.11io11 ,,f tht' t\\·o p.1ir-:
\,·ild,·n1,·" ,·,-r,u, •gardc:n .111d 111u11,1d ,·l·r1u, , t·ttk·r:
thl' ti1-st )',llr prt'Ct'dt·, tht' St'COlld in tin1t·. ·r111". Ill
11 ·,,,:,•11111,1.,r,.,-, tht· Mon11011, (·ros, tht' dc,t'rt in ,t·.1rrh
of tht·ir futurt' ho1nl·: in //,>11• ( ;n•nr 11 ;,, .\Ir I ;,//,')' .111d
·11,.- l1!f;,,,,,..,, thl' proc.1go11ist, \\-.111t to r ros, thl' Atl.1n-
1ir to a ti11urt· ho111c: in thc: Unitl·d Statt·,. But. during
Ford's c.irt·t·r. tht· situation ofho111t· is l'l'\'l'rst'd in ti1nt·.
l11 ( ,'/1,')'r1111r .·l11111r1111 till· l11d1.111, journ,·y in st·.1 r,·h nf
tht' honlt' th1.·,· Ollt't' had ill tht' p.1st: in ·rtu· ()11ir1
.\/,111. cht· A111<:ric 111 Sl'.111 ' J'hor11t1111 rt'turns 11.1 hi,
a11rt·,tr.1I ho111,· in lrt·l.111d. Eth.111 E1h\'ard,\ joun1t·y is
.1 kind of p.1roch · of this tl1l'lllt': hi, ohjt·ct i, not
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
62 Peter Wollen

.. .
<)
> ) )
)

)
)

)
) )
> >•
~
• • •••
.. • • • • • • •
•
..
.......... ......
•• ~

••
' ..
• t •••

••• <t I

~ • I

Figure 6.2 W yatt Earp (H enry Fond~) pr<>!',r<'<'<·, fi-0 111 naru«• to culrurc 111 John l·ord's
Aly D.ir/111.~ Cl,·111,111111.- (Twentieth Ccnn,ry Fox. I94f>). Produced by Samuel C. En!(d

co ustru ccivl'; to found a hon1e, bur dcstrucLivt'. co find
and scalp Scar. Neverrhele~s. rhe \veighr of rhe fil111
ren1ains orientated co the fururc: Scar has bumt'd
dov,n the home of the se ttlt·rs, but it is replaced and
\Ve are confident chat the hontt'steader's ,v1fe. Mrs
Jorgensen . i~ right \vhen she s.,ys: 'S0111t· day thi~ coun-
try's going co be a fine place to live.' The \\•ildt'nt t'SS
,vill. in the end. bl' tun1t'd into ,I gardt'll.
11,e .Vl,111 I V1rc> S/rt11 Liberty ll n/1111rc hJ~ n1any ~in1i-
lariries ,vith 77,f S£·t1rd11·rs. We nLly uott' tlut't': the
,vildemess beco n1 es a ga rden - this is 111ade quite
explicit. for Senator S toddart has ,vrung front
W asl1ington the fund~ 1tt'cc~sary to build a dan1 v.rh,ch
will irrigate the desert and bring real ro~es, not cactus
rest's: T o,n I)o111phon shoo~ Liberty Valance as Ethan
Ed,vard~ ~calped Scar; a log- ho111e is burned to the
brround. But the ditTerences an: equally clear: the log-
ho n1e is bunted alter the death of Liherty Valance; it
is dt' troyed by l)o niph on h11nsel t: it is his O\Vll ho111e.
Tht· bun,in~ •
n1arks tht• rl':tlisacio11 th.,t he ,viii never
enter the Promised Land. that ro hin1 it n1eans nothing:
that he ha~ doon1ed hint~l·lf to bt' a crcarure of the
past. insignificant in the ,vo rld of the future . By shoot-
ing L1bt·rry Va1Jnce he has dr:stroycd the only ,vorld

Google Original from

Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
. -
 The Auteur Theory
in which he hi,nself can exist, the world of the gun
rather than the book; it is as though Ethan Edwards
had perceived that by scalping Scar, he was in reality
conm1itting suicide. It n1ight be n1entioned too that,
in 1711• ,l\.fa11 Wlro Sh1>t Uberty Valance, the won1an who
loves Doniphon n1arries Senator Stoddart. Doniphon
,vhen he destroys his log-house (his last words before
doing so are 'Hon1e, sweet honte!') also destroys the
possibility of rnarriage.
The then1es of 171c ,\fa11 ~J,110 Sh1>t Libt'rty i-~1fo11cc
can be expressed in another way. llansont Stoddart
represents rational-legal authority. T on1 Doniphon
represents charis,natic authority. Doniphon abandons
his charisn1a and cedes it, under ,vhat an1ount to false
pretences, to Stoddart. In this way charisntatic and
rational-legal authority arc: co1nhint'd in the person
of Stoddart and stability thus assured. In 171f Sc,1rd1crs
this transfer does not take place; the two kinds of
authority re,nain separated. In AJy Dar/i11,f? Clt·111c11ti11e
they are con1bined narurally in Wyatt Earp, without
any tr:1nsfer being necessary. In 111any of Ford's late
fihn.s - 771c Quiel Ala11, C/1eye1111t· Aut1111111, D011()11a11 's
Rc~f - the accent is placed on traditional authority.
The island of Ailakao,va, in D()11ova11 's Reef, a kind of
Valhalla for the hon1eles.s heroes of 111e ,\1a11 H-1,1, Sl,,,1
Liberty Vala11cc, is actually a rnonarchy, though corn-
plete with the Boston girl, wooden church and saloon,
n1ade fantiliar by My Darli11g C/c,nc11ti11e. In fact, the
character of Chihuahua, Doc Holliday's girl in ,\ ,fy
Darling Cle1ne11ti11c, is split into two: Miss Lafleur and
Lelani, the native princess. One represt'nts the saloon
entertainer, the other the non-A,nerican in opposition
to the respectable Bostonians, A111elia Sarah l)edhan1
and Clementine Carter. In a broad senst', this is a
part of a general n1ove111ent which can be detected
in Ford's work to equate the Irish, Indians and
Polynesians as traditional comn1unities, set in the past,
counterposed to the ,narch forvvard to the A,nerican
future, as it has turned out in reality, but assi,nilating
the values of the A111erican future as it "'as onct·
drt'a111ed.
It would be possible, I have no doubt, to elaborate
on Ford's career, as defined by pairs of contrasts and
si,nilariries, in very great detail. though - as ahvays
with film criticis111 - the i111possibility of quotation is
a severe handicap. My o,vn vie,v is that Ford's \'I/Ork
is ,nuch richer than that of Ha,vks and that this is
revealed by a structural analysis: it is the richness of
Digitized by Google
63
the shifting relations bet,veen antinonties in Ford's
work that ntakes hint a great artist, beyond being
si111ply an undoubted auteur. Mort'over, the a111c11r
theory enables us to revt"al a whole co111plex of
,neaning in filnts such as D"11011a11 's Re~{. which a
recent fihnography sun1s up as just 'a couple of Navy
111en who have retired to a South Sea island 110,v
spt'nd n1ost of their rin1e raising hell'. Sin1ilarly, it
tl1ro,vs a co111pletely new light on a fihn like Wit(!!-'
<!( [;',1.l!les. which rt'volvcs, like 171e Searcl,ers, round the
vagrancy versus hon1e antino,ny, with the differenct·
that ,vht"n the hero docs co1ne honte, after flying
round the world, he trips over a child's toy, falls do,vn
the stairs and is co111pletely paralyst>d so that he cannot
nH>ve at all, not even his toes. This is tht' ntacabre
rcduahi ad absurdu,n of the settled.
Perhaps it " 'ould be true to say that it is the lesser
,1111curs "·ho can be defined, as Nowell-S,nith put it.
by a core of basic 111otif~ which re111ain constant.
,vithout variation. The great directors 111ust be detint'd
in tenns of shifting relations, in their singularity as
,veil as their unifonnity, R,.enoir once ren1arked that a
director spends his whole life n1aking one fihn; this
fihn, which it is the task of the critic to construct.
consists not only of the typical features of its variants,
'-''hich are 111ert'ly its redundancies, but of the principle
of variation which goven1s it, that is its esoteric struc-
ture, which can only n1anifest itself or 'seep to the
surface', in Levi-Strauss's phrase, 'through the repeti-
tion process'. Thus Renoi r's 'fihn · is in reality a 'kind
of pennutation group, the t\vo variants placed at the
far ends being in a synunetrical, though inverted, rt'la-
tionship to each other'. In practice. ,ve will not find
perfect sy111n1etry, though as we have seen, in tht' case
of Ford, so111e antino111ies are co,npletely reversed.
Instead, there will be a kind of torsion within the
pt'nnutation group, within the n1atrix, a kind of
exploration of certain possibilities, in which s0111e
antino111ies are foregroundt'd, discarded or t·vcn
inverted, ,vhereas others re111ain stable and constant.
The in1portant thing to stress, ho,vever, is that it is
only the analysis of the ,vhole <()rpus which pennits
tht' n1on1ent of synthesis v..-ht'n the critit· retunts to
the individual fihn.
(.)f courst", the dirt·ctor does not have fi1II control
over his ,vork; this explains why tht' a11tc11r theory
involvt'S a kind of deciphen11t'11t. decryptnten t. A great
111a11y ft'aturt's of tihns analyst'd have to be dis111issed
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
64 Peter Wollen
as indecipherable because of·noise' fron1 the producer,
the ca111eran1an or even the actors. This concept of
'noise' needs funher elaboration. It is often said that
a tiln1 is the result of a 111ultiplicity of factors. the stun
total of a nu111ber of different contributions. The con-
tribution of the director - the 'directorial factor', as it
were~ - is only one of these, though perhaps the one
v.•hich carries the tnost weight. I do not need to
ernphasise that this vie,v is quite the contrary of the
<111tc11r theory and has nothing in conunon ,vith it at
all. What the 11111c11r theory does is to take a group of
tihns - the ,vork of one director - and analyse their
structure. Everything irrelevant to this. everythini,t
non-pertinent. is considered logically secondary, con-
tingent, to be discanit.·d. Of course. it is possible to
approach fil111s by studying son1e other featu re; by an
et1ort of critical ascesis ,ve could see tihns, as Von
Stt·rnberg son11~ti111e~ urged. as abstract light-sho,v or
as histrionic fc.1sts. Snt11l·ti111cs thesl' separate tl'Xt~ -
those of the Clllll'ran1an or the actors - n1av !()rel·
thc111selvl'S into pro111in,·11ce so that the til111 bt·co111l·s
a11 indecipherable palin1psl'St. This dol'' not 111e.111, of
course. that it ct·a,cs to l·xist or to s,vay u, or pk·.is,
us or intrigue us; it si111ply 111e.1ns that it is inaccessible
co criticisn1. Wt' can n1erl·lv record our n1on1e1Harv,
a11d subjectivl' in1prl·S~ions.
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Myths. as Levi-Strauss has pointed out. exist
independently of style, the syntax of the sentence or
111usical sound, euphony or cacophony. The n1yth
functions 'on an especially high level where meaning
succeeds practically in "taking off" from the linguistic
ground on which it keeps rolling'. J\,f11tatis n1111a11dis,
the san1e is true of the auteur filn1. ' When a n1vthical,
sc hen1a is transtnitted front one population to another.
and there exist diflerences of language, social organisa-
tion or way of life which n1ake the tnyth difficult to
co111n1unicate, it begins to becon1e in1poverished .ind
confused.· The san1e kind of i111poverishn1ent and con-
fusion takes place in the filn1 studio, where difficulties
o f conununication abound. But none the less the tilrn
can usually be discen1ed. even if it was a quickil' n1ade
in a fortnight ,vithout the .1ctor.. or the cre\\'S that tht'
director ,night have liked, \\'ith ,111 intn1sive producer
,ind even, perhaps. a ct·nsnr"s scissors cutting a,vay \·ital
st·guenct's. It is as though a tilrn is a 111usical cornposi-
tion ratht·r than a 1nusic1l perfi)nnance, although,
\,·h,rl·a, a 111usic.1I (On1position exists ,1 J'ri<,ri (lik, a
scenario). an 11111c11r tiln1 is constructt'd ,, p,•stcri,,ri.
ln1af,>ine the situation if the critic had to construct a
111usiral co111position fron1 a nun1be r of fra1-,1111entar\'.
distortt'd ver~ions of it. .1II \\'ith i111provised pa,sages or
p.1~s,1p:e~ 11,i,~i11g. j .. -1
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 7
Direction and Authorship
V.F. Perki11s

V.F. Perkins was one of the group of young critics to contribute to the British magazine Movie,
which introduced auteurism to English readers. Perkins led off the very first issue of Movie in
June 1962 with a polemical call, ·on behalf of the editorial board," for a more personal cinema
instead of the British equivalent of the "'Tradition of Quality: His book Film as Film: Under-
standing and Judging Movies, first published in 1972, coalesced the discerning auteurist
aesthetic that was characteristic of his writing for Movie: it opens with the stated aim of pre-
senting "criteria for our judgements of movies" and "is written in the belief that film criticism
becomes rational" when it presents clear evidence and reflects on its own methodology. In
this reading, excerpted from his chapter on authorship, Perkins was one of the first to explore
some of the assumptions of auteurism by considering several aspects of the production
context in which directors work as well as the inevitably collaborative nature of the filmmaking
process.

I· . -1 ll(>t,thlt' virti111s ,ts (;t•org,· (:ukor\ .-1 St,,r Is JJ,,r11.

Tht' •grl'.ltt'r the i11vc·,c111t·11t in .1 111ovil'. thl' •grl'.1tl'r
bt·t:nntt' the prc·s,urc·s to ,ivoid any ti.inn (>f ri,k. and
tht· 111orc• likl'I\" the dirl'rtor hl'ro111c•, to 1:ill virti111 to
ext·rutivt· p.111it·. i111ri!,:t1<' or inc·tlir r,·n ry. Bonk, h.t\'t'
bet'll \vrittl'll .1bo11t thl' ,·h.H>, in \\·hirh (;/,'<'!'•"''•' \\·.1,
crl',ltl'd. ~ rh.1os \vhirh rl',uhl'd. not ,n 111t1<·h fro111
s0111e ,vt·ll-publirizl'd di,pl.1\·, of te111pcr,1111,·11t .ind
ill- ht·.tlth . .1, front a lack of ,·o,,rdi11.1tio11 bt'l\\'c'l'II.
and 111.111aµl'1tlt'lll \\·ithin. tht· \·,1riou, tk1'.1rt111t·11ts of
the '.!11th- ( :,•11tu rv- Fox orµ.111 i,.1tin11. ( )11,· ·s ,urpn,t·
\\'hl'n (:l<'•'l'•'lr,1 tin.illy t' lllt'f,.!t'd \\·.1, not 1h.1t lhl' til111
\va, in 111.111v . \Vav, . 1111,.n,,1:1rton· . .111d inroln-r,·111. ' J'h,·
.
;1111.1zi11g th1111.~
'
\\'," d1.1t d 1c·r,· \,·.,, .1,·tu.illY. ., 1110\·ic to
~ho \v, and th.tt ,n 11111,·h of it ''"·" i111t·ll1µl'11t. \\'itty .111d
f(l'll llinel y µla11 1nr<>1IS. -rite rule' th.ll Jll.ll l.1),(l"fl,11 fl'l't
frt·,·zt· .1, bud!.!t't'
•
.1srt·11d h," cl.1 i111c·d ,11<'11 oth,-r
lur hino Vi,conti's ·11,<' L,·,,,,,1n/. John Ford's (:!1<')'<'1111<'
.·1 1111111111. S.1111 l't",·ki11p.1h\ .\/,1;,,, l)1111dct'. .111d Nichola,
}~.I\"\
. 1'111~
. ,,(
. 1'111{!.'.
.
' ('hrs J.1q c111 ,,-r\·l' ;1, .111 t'x.1111pk of \\'h.n. 011,·
hop<',. i, th,· \\'Orst 1h.11 111.1,· ht· i11tl1rtc·d on ,1 picture
,111d it, ,·rc.ttors. A111011i.: thl' i11s.111icies ,vhirh it sull~'rt'd
'
\\·,·rt·: tht· inst·rtio11 ot .1 llt'\V rhar.rrtt-r i11to tht· script
st'\'t-r.11 \\'t'l'k, .11i,·r tilrnin,: h.1d hl'gun: the l.1t,•r l'ii111i-
11.111011 nf th.rt rh.1r.1ctl'r. i11 the cutti11!.!. ' .
IO!.!<'lhtT \\·id1
.1 J..,,\· ,,·q11,·11<·,· into \\'hi, h he h.1d hc,·n i11 tn>durt·d:
.
rl'-rl'cord1111.: of tht· ,<n111d-1r.1ck so .h 10 t'h.111!.!t' . the
dr.11",.!lll' .111d hri11,;: it, , k·h\·<T\" 11110 line \\·i th M-(;- M·,
,·<,11 t'l'f't ot''tht' tr.1ditio11.d rl'ligious qui,·tn,·ss of( :hri,t';
rt·11,nr, hip in r,·l.1tio11 to d tl' rh.1r.1rtcr ofS.1lo111t· \\·hicl1
rt\hbl'd hl'r .tr tinns of r t>hl'rl'nt 111oti\·.ttio11 . 1'i11_\! ,:(
1'i•(~·' · ,.1id l,.1y. ·\,·.1, in 111y opi111<111 .1tn1r iou,h· t'dit,·,I.

\ ' f Pt·, ~Ill'. ··1h t1', I IP J)', . 111, 1 t' I' Ii. - s,. If, •II J I .: .. 1 .,. I ii,u
:\1111 I• .,, l ur .. h ' ' \ l ' 'J •I '

l•i:~1. ( V t·. l'\·, k11,,. J•t7 ~ lt...·p1 1111nl I\\ p(·ruu--11,n ,,1 l',·11;--·11111 H,,nl., I t,I

Digitized by Google Original from

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
66
figure 7.1 Vince111e Minndli", Ki•(~ ~{ Kin.~.• (M GM . I9<, I); A vini,n of ,·x,·cutivc intt·rfi:rcncc. Prt>duct'd by
Samuel Bron>1on
This has noching to do \\"1th the technicians. only -.vith
those \vho do not kno\v chat '"There is no fonnula for
success, but then: i.i a fonnula for failure and that is to
cry co plea~e everybody." ·•
Probably the din:c.:tor·s bitterest subjection is not
to the taste of his public nor to the occasional inepti-
tudes of his en1ployers, bur co the industrial sy~ren1,
tht: n1echanisn1 of n1ovie finance, production and
distributi on .
In 1959. Robert Aldrich found hi1nself obliged to
sta re fi ln1ing 77,c A11.ery I-fills ,vith a ' loo~,:. ,vandi:ring'
script because the srudio·s con111tin11cnrs did not leave
tin1i: for the necessary overhaul. 'You get locked into
these situation s." said Aldrich. 'and it's diffi cult to kno,v
-.vhat to do abo ut thc11t. ·~
The defi:cts of the ~ysten1, the 11ecessiry for 11 ~y~ten1
and the unavoid,ble expense of n1ovie production put
the diri:ct·or at a gre.11 dis.1dv,1ntage v.,hen co1nparcd
,virh, s:iy. the novelist. He is connnuall}' 111aki11g irre-
versible decisions. pa.ss111g pou1ts of 110 return, \Vhich
Digitized by Google
V.F. Perkins
the writer doc~ not encounter unti l his ,vork has been
corrected. revi ed. polished and sent co the printer.
The: dirt·ctor cannot .1ba11do11 a ,vork ,vht·n it is failing
to fulfil hi~ expectations: even his lease sacisfoctory
,vork has ro go 011 display. He is not allo\ved the
privilege of failure. I-le cannot go back co revise his
,vork and eliminate faults of structure. characrerizacion
or style. He cannot allo,v his 11100d to dictate his
hours of ,vork: he has to niece a schedule \vhich is
perfectly i11diA~re11t to depression. sickness or creativt·
exhaustion. hnaginacion. perception and intelligence
are not t>nough; he n1ust also be a diplon1at. able as
occasion dc111ands to persuade. reconcile, donunate,
scare and inspire his co-,vorkers. Wi: shall never kno\v
ho\v 111any fiL11s h,1ve turned out badly no t through
any fault in thei r conception bur through personal
inco111p,1nb1lirie \vith111 the: production tea,n; or
through the net·d to rush the \vork in order to n1eet
a co n1111in11ent; or through financial troubles necessi-
tating drasti c changt·~ in production plans; o r through
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Direction and Authorship
sin1plc: bad luck with locations, the weather, ill-health,
censorship and so on.
As long as we concentrate on the: director's working
conditions and measure thc:m against son1e ideal
notion of how and why good work is created, so long
will it seen1 impossible for good work to emerge fron1
the 'con1mercial machine·. Thus Rocha reflected on
the alleged in1beciliry of the An1erican cinen1a (not of
specific American filn1S).
Perhaps it was in1possible to produce. let alonr conc..-ivc
any work of rt:al aesthetic value when surrounded by the
Hollywood at111ospherc of dollars and opportunisn1.
where culture and sincerity seen1 to be unkno,vn
qualities . ... Sinct•rity of purpose and surroundings bring
out good work. Transfer the painter fron1 his di,ordered
studio into a luxurious apartrnent with evc.-ry nt·,v-
fangled contrivanct· to hand and he is at a loss.-'
This nostalgia for a garret- and-absinthe systen1 of pro-
duction n1akes rightc:ous, perhaps envious, indignation
a substitute for judgen1ent or understanding. Ulti-
1nately it frees the critic fron1 the bother of st·eing or
thinking about the foredoon1ed failures.
A knowledge of the fihn industry's n1echanics and
structure helps us to understand many things. It explains
why many pronusing projects re111ain unrealized, why
directors are often ernployed on subjects in which thc:-y
have litde interest. why they must often ,vork in col-
laboration with people for ,vhose talents they have
little respect. In brief, it explains why direction is an
activiry surrounded by con1pro1nist' and frustration.
' I've been rnaking filn1s for thirty yt"ars, said
Mizoguchi.
..
If I look bat·k on all I've dont· in that tirne I st·e nothin~
but a series of co1npror11ist·s with the capitalist.~. who111
v.•c nowadays call producers. in order to 111akc a fihn iu
v.•hich I could take pleasure. My only real de$ire ha$ bet·n
to be able to 111ake a fihn Jccording 10 ,ny o,vn taste.
But I havt oii:en been fonTd to accept a job kno,ving
in advance that it couldn't otft·r tht· least chanc(· of
<ucce,s and ,vould 111,'an nothing for 111e but an absolute
'
failure.'
Yet Mizoguchi's best tih11s display a continuity of style
in which the highly individual con1pound of sensual-
iry, elegance, bitten1ess and vigour is very n1arked.
Through a series of assign111c:nts, he was ·able to creatl'
a consistent world, a plact" of brief pleasures and
Digitized by Google
67
enduring sadness where 1110111ents of tendernt'ss and
repose break the action ,vith a suddenness that is itself
close to violence.
'Tht' systen1' can account for sorne of the director's
failures and frustrations. But it does not help us to
understand or appreciate his success. The accepted
in1age of 'Hollywood', graveyard of artistic integrity
and creative an1birion, is the product of son1e notable
n1artyrdonLs: Von Strohein1, Sternberg, Eisenstein,
W elles .... But it does not take account of the large
nun1ber of directors who functioned superbly within
the con1111ercial framework when it was at its n1ost
restricting: Ford, Vidor, Hitchcock. Prenunger. Hawks.
Boetticher, Fuller ...
I have offert"d a frightening picture of what 111ay
happen to fi.ln1s and directors through their involve-
1nent with a huge con1n1ercial enterprise. But th is
needs to be balanced by a recognition that the con1-
n1t"rcial systen1 can. often does, ,vork in the director's
favour. If he has the good fortune to want to n1ake
pictures on subjects and in sryles which the n1ass public
\vanes to see, the dirc:ctor need never be a,vare of
restriction or co1npron1ise. Minnelli 111ade most of his
pictures for M-G-M, by reputation the n1ost repressive
of tht' big cornpanit's and the one 111ost insistent on its
own 'studio style'. His Tlfl<' Weeks i11 A11othcr Tou111 suf-
fc:red, as we have sc:cn, at the con1pany's hands; but
thirry pictures ,vere produced in fruitful collaboration
to offset that one disaster. Not all the rnovies were suc-
Ct'sstul, of course, but the list includes such fine pictures
as ,'vleet Mc i11 St L111is, l_ l11der t/re Cfo<k, 11,c Pir<1tc, A11
.-'1111erica11 i11 l'aris, Lust jar LJ_fc, Dcs(1111i11x W,,1111111, C(~i.
S0111c Ca,ne Ru1111i1~11 and 771c C<>urts/,ip of Eddi<•'s Father.
About his working conditions Minnt'lli said:
Nt·.irly ahvays I have tht· opportunity of ,vorking " ·ith
the ,vritt·r rnore or les< frorn the beginning. In cases
,vhl·rt: the srript has not bl·cn cornpletcd. I !);<'lll'T:JUy
\\'ork ,vith tht· writer ti.)r :it kast tive or six ,vet·ks. In
<0111c cases I haven't had that tirne tor ~vin~ dircnions:
' '
in that <',1st· it's bt·t·n done ;1s wt· go ,1long. The directo r
usu,1lly \\'orks \\'ith th,· \\'ricer in prt•parin~ tht' script. I
l(,und it that ,v.,y in :1U ,,1,t·s.. .. Cutting has n,·ver h.:,·n
a prohlcn1 because l'\'e ah\'ays ,vorkcd on it in h.1n11ony
,vith tht· produrt'r and t ht· studio. Tht·re ,ire ,·on1pro-
1nisc,. of course. but l'\'l' .1lw.1ys been quit<' sJtisfit'd ,vith
the ,utting in the ,·nd. ·r,..,,
It ·,·.-k.< \\'a< just ,111 arbi1r.1ry
cunin~ "•hjch ,v,1s ,·0 111pk1dy \\'Ton~. Th.H h,1ppt·ns to
t'V<'rvone. I tind.'
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
68
Any systt'n1 clain1s its o,vn victin1s. The cinen1a \
industria.l setup pron1ott:s <.:t'rt,1in sorts of subjt:ct and
trt·atrnent at the expt'nst' of others; it involvt's a wastt'
of 1nuch that is potentially valuable. Judged by tht·ir
fruits, other systt·n1s are not notict·ably better. John
Huston said: ·Son1e of tht' ,vorst picturt·s J' vt' 111ade.
r vt: 111adt: sinct· r v e had co111plett· frt·t·do1n.''' Cre:11ivc
fret·do111 does not guaran tt'e. nor dot·s industrial pro-
duction n1le out, a •good re,uh. In the cinen1a ,vc• art•
involvt·d ,vith a produ..:t. not .1 syste1n of produt·tion.
W l' can reach a judge111t·nt ,vithout kno"·ing ho"' a
tilin ,vas n1adt:.
The n1ovit·s offer a constant chal!t·nge of con n ois-
St'urship. The t'rt·dit~ supp li ed at thc· bt'!Qlllling of a
picture .ire notoriously unrt·li.1blt'. Evt·n ,vht·n they art'
.it·c urate thc·y suggc·st a clt·arer dl'nurcation of rc·~pon-
sibilitv .
. than t·xists a111011g 111ost tih11- 111,1kt·rs during
111oq produc tions. They 111.1y lead u, to credit thl'
\\Titt· r ,vith di.1logut· or a..:tion i111provised by tht'
dirc·ctor or the pt'rti)r111t·rs. (~onvc•r,t·ly. tht·v 111ay result
in our .11tributi11g •
to tht· dirt·ctor visu.il efit'l'b devi sed
b,· the de\ig11t·r. photo!,•Tapht· r or rolour ronsuh:1111.
Unlt·s, one ha\ \\·acrhc·d the plJ1111i11g and 111aking of
.1 pit·ture. it is i111p(>s,ibk to k110\\· prec ist·ly "·ho ro n-
tributed t·ach idt·a or etli.·rt to the fini shed n1ovic•. Wt·
t·annot. fi)r t·x,1111plt·. tt'll to \\·h.11 t'Xtt·nt tht· editing
\\",IS foreset·n bv the dirt·rtor Jurin!,( tihning. super-
.
vi,t·d bv. hi111 in tht· r utting roon1s. or !t·ti to the
ingt·nuity of thl' 111:111 11,1111ed .1, editor.
(. )nh·, external intiir111ation ,all tdl us \\"hl'thc•r. .111d
ti,r "·hat n.-ason. the ,ubjl·rt of .1 til111 \\·;1, cho,t'II by
the 111t·11 ,vho 111adc• it: \\"ht·thl'r tht· tinished product
rcprt·,c·nts \\ h,1t the,· u•,111tt'd 10 dl> or \\·l1.1t they \\"tTt'
0
allo\\·t·d (pt·rhaps obligt·d) to do . I11tt·111i,H1s and
rre.1t ive proct·sse, are invisi hlt·. At hcst \\"<' gu,·s~ thc111
or .1rt" givt·n ,·xtenial. oftl'n su,pt·ct. inti)nn,111011 .1hnut
thc111. Wt· t·an1HH do ,vh.11 Erneq Lindgrc·n .1sks us to
do in f<>nnin!-( our j11dgc·111c11ts: "Look to the opcr.1-
tio11s of the 111i11d " ·hich pn:redc ronsc inus (Tt'.1tio11 .-
- bt·c111,t' there i, 110 , inglc· 111i11d to \\·h i,·h \\"t•
r.111 IO(l k.
Lindgren gi,·t·, ,1' .111 c•x.1111plt· <>f tot.11 cr,·.1ti,·t·
t'<>lltrol the dirt·t·tor Vittl>ri,> de· Si,-.1 .111d hi, t\\·o fil11h
lli,")',·k ·1"/,in·rs .111d ( .-,,,/,,·r,,, I). Both fil111, ",·rt· \\Ti1tt·11
b\· ( :c,.1n· Z .1,·.1tti11i ..1 '< L'n.1ri,t \\·hn ,· xvrtl'd ,·u11,ider-
0
.1hlt· intlU('lll"t' O\"tT tht· pn,t- \\";Jf lt.tli.111 ri11,·11t.1. ·rht·y
.1rc , t-rt.1i11h· tht· ht·,t dl' Si,·.1 h.1, di rc·,tcd. Uut tht·,·
.1rt· 11,,r \\·h.tt l.11 1di.:n·11
•
d t·111.11 1d , ot' tht· tine, t ti l111 ..111
Digitized by Google
V.F. Perkins
expn.-s,ion of the l'xperience and v1s1on of a singlt'
111an'.' As n1uch of tht'ir i111pa<"t conies fro1n the situ-
ations dt·vised by the ,vriter and fro111 the constru<.:tion
of their script, JS fro1n the director's realization o f
their scenarios. At the very least Zavattini 111ust be:
granted his shart· in the responsibility for tht'se pic-
tures. The fact that Lindgren can illustrate his arb'Un1ent
in favour of undivided authorship \Vith nvo tihns
,vho,e authorship 11•,1.< dividt·d is sutlicient co undt'r-
111ine his tht·on·.
W c ran su,tain the bl'lief that a good tiln1 i,
nect·ssarily an t'xprt·,sion of one 111:111 ·s vision, .1 ro111-
11H111ication ti-0111 the director to his audience, only if
\\"l' t',111 d<:'lllOJlqrate a diffc:rt'IICl' in kind ,111d t•flc·ct
bc·t\\"t'l'll the· persona l til111 .111d thl' fot·tory 1110,·ie. The
·st.1111p of one prt·do111i11.11i11g creative n1i11d' 111ust be•
. visibly di,tinrt ti-0111 tht· sta1np of ~t·,·t"r,11 coll.1bor.1ti11g
,rl'ativc 111i11ds. Provi,lt·d th.1t .1 fihn ha, its 0\\"11 unity.
it St·c·111, uni111portant \\·ht·thc·r tht' unity \\·,1s t'\·olvt·d
through cooperation and co111pro111isc· \\"ithin tht' pr(>-
duction te.1111 or ron,t·ivt·d I"· Ollt' 111:111 .111d i111po,cd
011 hi, t·ollahorators.
If tht' relationships t·st.1hli,ht·d in a tihn are ,i~1iti-
ca11t. it 111,1kt', 110 diti1.·rt·11t·t· to tht· spc·rtator ho"· tht'y
c;1111e. or ,\·ere• brought about. or to \\·h.1t t'Xtt'nt their
sii.:nifit',111,·,·
•
,v.1s i11tendc:d. A n1t),·it· ha~ .1 111c•.111ing •
ti1r
the· ,pt·rt.1tor "·hen he is ahk to interprc•t its p.1ttt·n1
of artio11, :ind i111.tgL'S. l'ro,·idc·d 1h.11 its rel.1tio1l.\hips
.ire· coht're11tly sh.1 pt·d. tht· til111 c·111bndit·s - and c.111
he sho \\·11 to e111hodv - a co11siste11t 111e.111i11g \\·hich
111.1y or 111.1y not h.1vt· hc·t·11 sought. or ~i11rt'rt"ly lt.'lt.
b,· thc· dirertor.
J.1cq11,·s ·1'cn1na·ur·s J'/1r· :,:;i:/11 ,:( 1/,r Dn11<•11 i, a
,triking illustr.11io11 of thi\. It pre,t·nts .1 ~tory of th t·
or,·u lt. dr.l\Vll fron 1 M . 1~ . _Ja111es·s ·,-,,,. ( :,1.<ti11.i: ,:( the
Ru11c.-. in \\·hich :1 111odc-r11 st·1t·111i,t i, gr,1du.1lh·. .
persu.1 tlt·d th.11 hi, lift· i, end.111gert·d hv the dt·111011ic
po\\·l'r, or' a hl.ick 111.1git'i.111. 1 ·hc· ti h11 c111ploy, J
" ·h,,lt· .1r,t·11.1l of dt·,·kt·, - ,hnrk c·llt·t·ts. grott·squt·
con1edv. . c.1111,·r.1 .111d cutting .
. tri.-ks. a111bii.:uitic, o f
rh.1r.1rttT ,111d i111.1µt·. l'.1rt1c11 l.1rly t·k·,·c·r i, it, c·xploit.1-
tinn <>f the ,pect.1tur\ i11.1hi htv to di,ti11µ11i,h ht·t\\"t'en
truth .111d l°o11vi11ri11i.: '
li,·s: \\"t' .in· t·o1ni1111.11lv
. ;J\\·ar<:'
th.It "1111t· ot" tht· ,·h.ir.1rtt-r, " ·itl1111 thl' til111 storv. 111av.
ht· ·.1c1i11i.:· but \\·e h.1,·e 110 lllL',111' of t·ontinning or
' '
rt:it'rtinµ tht· ,11,pic1(>11. "l'ht· tihn \ dt·,·1t·t·, art· JU,titic·d
in rc l.11iun to ic- etlt·rt. <>r purpost·. SJl!l°t' the,· h:1vt· .1
r<>11'hlt'lll 1,·11clt·11c·y. Tht·v i11,·o h·t· the· 'J't't"tator in tht·
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHJ.GAN \
 Direction and Authorship 69

Figure 7 .2 l ht· und1.·111m1111~ of rJuoi a..lttv 111 J.tt·qut•, I o un1L'ur\ ;\ '11,!l,1 ~{ 11,,- IJ,·111tm
(Lolu1uhu 'uhn.· f-1111 1 Pruc.Ju d h.H1~. PJ.57) . l'ro<luc..t•d b~ l·r.111l Uc.•\'h

proces, undc:rgone br d1c hero. steady undt·rntining
of rational ~C<'pticis1n .111d final reduction to .1 ~tare:
oi paruc in ,vhich tl1c: rc:.1l1ry ot occult po,vc•r i~
rc:cog11ized.
-
We cnn rranslace che 111ea11ing of rhe 1110,-ie in t\vo
•
wJys, on the ba,is of tt\ fon11 a11d on the ba.\is of our
experience. In so for a~ it ~uccced, 111 terrori7ing th<·
spectator the n)ovic JCC\ J> J de111011,cratio11. If the fi l111
had been unable to call on rc,ervc, <)( sup<·r-titit1us
belief 111 the po\vcr; of darkness ir ,vould ha ve bt·en
unable to co11vi11ce Jud ,o to ,cart· us. To enter into
the experience of the: fil111 •~ to ~h.ire. ho,vcvcr tt·111-
Even if v.-e \Vatch Tourncur\ 111c1v1e \Vith co111plete
c:111orional dct.1c h111t·11t it rcn1.1in,. in it~ dr.1111.1tic
srrucrurc•. an assertion of rhc i11adequ.1cy of rational
,cc:pticis1n. We 111ay challt·ngt· this argu111t'111. Thc·re is
no denying th:1r it is cont.1111t·d (d1ar i~ con~i~tenrly
provokcJ) by tht· picture. l3ut " 'e can11ot k110,v fro111
,ee111g the til111 ho,,• 1:1r it, ·111c".1gt· · ,,·.I\
1ncc:r1ded or
ho,v far it \\',1, Jrt Jccidcnt,ll by-product of Olher
intt·ntit) ns. 11 111.ty bl' l11Jt :,;~!!Ill<!( rl,c Dc1111•11 ,vas 111ade
by 111cn ,vho gcnu111c•ly bclievt· 111 the pO\Vt"r t)fS.1tJn-
1, 111. It 111.1,· .
. h.t vc• been dl",1g11ed u1 .1g11ostic
'
te,t rhe hypothc~i, that ,ve all. ~c·crctly :ind 1rrano11.1lly.
fa,hion to

poranly or playfully. us a,,1.1111pt1011,. harbour such a belief (.)r it 111ay have bt·e11 creJted

Digitized by Google Orig in al from

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
70 V.F. Perkins
simply to provide its audience with ninety 111inutes of
enjoyable terror, and its metaphysical content used,
without sincerity, as a n1eans to this end.
We n1ay regard the last as the n1ost likely explana-
tion. But likelihood is a long way fro,n certainty. The
question of intended meaning, of sincerity, is left open
by the film. Its effective meaning is all that we can be
sure o( And it is all that we need to know. If as con-
noisseurs we wished to place the picture in the context
of Tourneur's work and beliefs it would be important
to find out how far Nitht of tire Demon en1bodies a
sincere attitude to the occult. But so long as we are
concerned, as critics, with the n1eaning and quality
of this particular movie such infom1ation rernains
irrelevant.
The fact that n1ovie production is a collaborative
enterprise makes the cinen1a accident-prone. The
interaction between the various personalities and
talents engaged in making a filrn cannot be foreseen .
Tbe composition of a filrn unit, like that of a jazz
group, detem1ines the personality of the end
product.
This is not a n1atter sirnply of ' correct' casting
an1ong the various artists and technicians who rnake
a definable contribution co a n1ovie. Two talented
designers n1ay produce decors of equal excellence,
equally appropriate to the job in hand, yet quite dis-
tinct in the sorts of e111phasis and suggestion which
they evoke. Selecting the production cean1 is like a
chen1ical or culinary experiment. The separate i:le-
n1encs/ingredients are known but their in1pact upon
each other is a subject for hopeful speculation rather
than certainty.
Out of the confusion of ternpe-rarnencs. arnbitions
and tali:nts, good things often, and extraordinary thinbrs
s0111etin1es. come. The n1eal has frequently provi:d
n1ore satisfying than the recipe \vould suggest or tht"
chef could expect. So111e notable exan1ples: Pi/loll' T.1/k,
F<1rbiddc11 Planet, Gypsy. TI,r :\·fa11d111rian c;,111didatc.
l\i,,r,/, to Alask,1. TI1e111!, H,n,sc ~( M1 i1x. Fort'(l!II /11tri_l/11c.
TI11' ~Vo11dcif,1/ Co1111try, Sivt·ct Sn1ell ~f S11ra·s.<. It v:ould
be hard to establish that any of thc:sc shcnvs us ·.111
artist \Vorking at the height of his po\vers·. etc. For
the n1ost part, the various functions are perfonned
with intelligence rather than inspiration. These pic-
tures are ck·verly written, etlcctively .ictcd .111d skilfully
tiln1ed. But ,vith the possible cxi.:eptions of ,'\i,,rth I<>
,'llask,1 and f-',,rr(l!II /11tri_1!11t· (,vhich .ire perh:1ps 1nainly
Digitized by Google
John Wayne and Robert Mitchu1n n1ovies) their indi-
viduality does not seem to derive fron1 one contribution
rather than another.
It is not possible for me to trace the precise ' ffavour'
of these filnis in other work by the same writers or
directors or actors. Their personalities seen1 the result
of particular con1binations of talents. Films are 'acci-
dental' to the extent chat they evolve unpredictably
under the in1pact of different, often opposed, person-
alities. They are also in1personal in so far as their styles
and n1eanings are not derived from one nun's concep-
tions. Individual creative responsibility and artistic
control are limited wherever filn1-n1aking is a group
activity: that is, aln1ost always. In expressing and
exploring group concerns rather than the private
interests of a solitary artist, popular filn1s tap one
source of coherence that is independent of 'artistic'
self-expression.
There are others, notably the story itsel( If the
director is successful in his atten1pt to examine subject
through story, the1ne through action, then significance
beco111es so deeply ernbedded in the movie that it
seen1s a by-product of the narrative. Conversely, the
intention to n1ake a staten1ent becon1es unnliscakeable
when the n1essage is detached fron1 the dynanuc of
the n1ovie, tacked on to its structure rather than built
into it. In John Schlesinger's Darlin.~. for example, there
is a scene where the heroine wanders into the library
of a posh gan1ing club. There- she reads aloud John of
Gaunt's speech in praise of England fron1 Richard II.
We kno,v chat the scene is intended to work as ironic
con1111ent sin1ply because it has no ocher function in
the filn1. It does not advance the plot. It tells us
nothing about the characters. The speech could as v,ell
have been read by a passing charlady as by the n1ovie's
heroine: the effect would have been much the same.
We notice the n1eaning because the scene gives us
nothing else to notice. Conversely, by following the
logic of a story. setting out to solve its problen1s and
realize its possibilities, n1aking it credible and effective.
the director ,nay not create a n1eaning; but he n1ay
alkl\v it to e111erge. It see111s probable that such good
n1ovies as TI1e111!, P,111ic i11 the Year aro, Ho11se <!f H·.-a x
and "/7,e Scaif,1«· Atf,,b were tiln1s of this sort.
Tht· opening sequence of Don Sharp's otherwise
uninteresting Kis.i '!f tlr<' i "a111pir,· provide-s a very strik-
ing exan1plc: of the ,v,iy in ,vhit·h a strong situation
can genc:rate n1canin~ of its o,vn. We are \Vatching
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Direction and Authorship
the last 1110111ents of a burial service. A sn1all group is
gathered in respectful mourning around an open
grave. The priest intones the ritual of conimittal with
n1echanical fervour. Isolated at son1e distance fron1
the n1un1bling n1oun1ers, a shabby figure drunkenly
observes the scene. As the priest finishes his recital the
n1an approaches the scandalized group. pushes his ,vay
through to the graveside, clain1s the gravedigger's
spade and, we suppose, the right to be first in casting
earth upon the coffin. Instead, he drives the shaft of
the spade through the coffin-lid. Fron1 inside the box
there conies a screan1. and the blood of a 'living·
person gathers round the break in the wood. A van1pire
has been extenn.inated.
The feebleness of ,vhat tollo,vs suggests that this
sequence was devised as nothing n1ore than a suitably
shocking hors-d'oeuvre to yet another saga of the
undead. But. efficiently fihned, the st·enc is so don1i-
nated by its basic concept that it becon1es son1ething
altogether n1ore provocative: consecration versus exor-
cisn1, a conflict of rituals holy and unholy. the Christian
one recognized, co,nplacent and con1forting. the other
furtive, de1nonic, violent but effective. The flatness of
the filn1ing itself adds to the effect by putting both
rites on the sa111e level. We can accept both as neces-
sary or disn1iss both as superstitious, but they are so
linked that we cannot endorse one while rejecting the
other. The significance of the scene is contained in
the tension it poses between 'faith· and 'superstition·.
All the spectator needs is an adequate grounding in
van1pire lore. Without that the sequence would not
1nake sense. It would seem that the coffin had con-
tained a live body and that the scream had co1ne front
one of the onlookers. Filn1 reviewers have n1ade us
fant.iliar with the notion that a director can transcend
the limitations of a genre; here, as quite often in the
movies, we see genre transcending the lin1itations of
the director.
This can happen ""·henever the genre contains
within its own evolving 'rules· tht' possibility of coher-
ent meaning. One exa111ple. notable in both nun1ber
and quality, ,vas the series of Westen1 and adventure
fibns produced in the fifties where the shifting settings
of a joun1ey paralleled the 1noral and psychological
development of the characters: Rt'd Rivt'r, TI,e B{I/ Sk)'.
River of No Re111n1, 11,c ~/nca,i Quce,i, Thi' Far C1>1n1try.
The Naked Sp11r, U'.1/t'lld <!f tire L >st. and 1nany ,non:.
Sirnilarly, any credible gan!:,~ter tihn. fron1 S(,irf;,rc and
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71
Pub/it E,ien,y to P,1y "' Die and LJ,idcnvorld LI.S.A ..
touches on questions of political philosophy. When it
shows the 111echanics of gang rule the gangster 1novie
is dealing with the concept of Law, and with the
n:lationship berween power and fear. A convincing
reconstruction den1ands a coherent attitude to n1otives
and pressures. Then1e and n1eaning are, 111 a sense.
ready-1nade.
But a director can also exploit consciously the
an1biguities of his n1ediun1 and the possibilities of his
genre. Thus ,vc are unable to tell fron1 the fihn itself
whether the variations on a political the1ne which
en1erge front Samuel Fuller's l111den1't1r/d LJ.S.A. are a
by- product of the story or the reason for which the
story was created. The n1oral pattern in River o_( 1,,,
R1•1un1 secn1s too fully developed to have been acci -
dental; yet Prerninger talks of the fibn as an assignn1ent
undertaken for strictly contractual reasons. In Pren1-
inger's fihn. and in Fullt'r's, effect and 111eaning are
quite clear. The source alone is at issue and that can
be traced n1ainly by referen ce to their other works.
A~tain. Tiu: Serva,it is a 1novie ,vith a rhyth111, style and
texture of its own. Anyone who had read TI,e Birthday
Party or Tir<· Caretaker ,vould recognize it as the work
of Harold Pinter. Equally. those fan1iliar with ·n,c
Crimirral or Tit11e Witl,0111 Pity would soon detect the
hand of Joseph Losey. The signatures of both writt·r
and director are quite evident. In various contexts it
n1ay be convenient to treat TI,e Scrva111 as a Pinter filn1
directed by Losey, or as a Losey picture written by
Pinter. But neither the writing nor the direction is
sub1nerged or absorbed in the 111anner required by the
'solitary man• theories of filn1. TI,e Serva,rt is domi -
nated by the tension berween rwo creative nunds, two
styles. rwo personalities and t\vo attitudes. But it is
L>scy's version of the Pinter script; and if we are con-
cen1ed with fihn as filn1 it is the realization that 1nust
clai1n our interest and judge1nent.
Any clainis n1ade for direction are of course clain1s
about its possibilities, not rules governing its exercise.
However \Vide or narrow the theoretical lin1its that
,ve place on the director's function, the actual extent
to which his authority is established within those
lin1its n1ust vary \vith each director's ability and
involven1ent.
The director n1av• be little n1ore than an adviser or
a catalyst. Certainly it is one of his n1ost i111portant
jobs to stand in the place of the future spectator. to
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
72 V.F. Perkins
t'n1body in hi1ns,:Jf the absent audi,:nce and so to
inspire actors and technicians that they give the clear-
est and n1ost convincing realization of ,:ach chara,:tcr
and event. His task as the audience's representative is
largely a critical one; but his criticisn1 has to be con-
stn1ctive. He n1ust decide on our behalf "vhat \Ve n,:,:d
to se,: and how and when ,v,: ne,:d to see it. He is
required not only to say when a particular point is
o bscur,: or overstat,:d but also to suggest ho\v it n1ay
be 111ade n1orc: ck•arly. n1ore subtly or n1or,: eflertively.
His advisory function already begins to be a crl'a-
t1vc one.
His othl'r 111ost vit.11 rt'sponsibiliry is that of co-
ordination. l)irc:ctors arc.> net'dt'd pr<·cis,·ly bt:causc
til111-111aking involve:~ so 111any and such vari,:d kinds
of creative decision. If .1 rnovie is to have evl'n the
n1ost t'lt"n1ent,1ry fr1nn of unity - th.n is. one in "vhich
thl' various t·len1ents at least do not jar - it is t'S~enti.11
that a,·cors, desigi1,·rs and ccchni,:ians \VOrk coherl•ntly
to\\·ards an agrl'l'd
•
end. The rnost obvious 111ethod of
:u:hi,·ving this result is to put Ollt' 1nan in charge
' '
of tht' ,·ntirl' opt'ration. Tht> dirl"Ctor is th,·r,· to t'nsurt'
th.it the dl'tails of perfi>n11ance and recording arc-
r,•bt<:'d to the total design. It is through his control
over dt>tail that thl' director rnay bc·(·on1e chi.·fly
re~ponsihlt· ti)r the <:tl,:ct and quality of ch,· con1pl,·ted
.
ll10\'ll'.
His t:1sk of org.1nizatio11 is. in part. a ,natter of
t,·rhnique and .:r.11ts111.111ship. As irHt'f'}>r,·t<:r of the·
srn·l'n\,·riter's \\'Ork ht' is en1ployed to <'nsurL' th.It
th e :Ktors r.:·spect the dy11an1ics of th<:" sl'l'll:trio in tht·
rhythrns ,111d tcn1po \vith \vhich th,•\' pl.1y ,·a.:h ,r<:'lll'.
Throu)!h his su pervision of thL' canlL'ra tl'.11n h<' 1111rst
a(·hit·ve a suttil·i,·nt v.1rit"ty in tl1<· irn.1g,·s to int,·r,·st
th,· spcct,ttor\ l'\"l'. At thl' ,.1111e ti111,· ht· h.1s to , ecurl'
i1n.1g,•-;
•
th:it tht' C:"ditor \\· ill hL' .,bit· to .1sst·111hk· into
flo"ving and roh<:'rl'nt ,equt'nre. A, .1 cratisn1.111 he
11n1,t kc,·p a b.1l.111ce that .t\·oids both 111onotony .111d
d i,i I Jtt•~rati on.
Herl' ,l)!,tin. th<· \\'Ork of the in1,·rpreti11)! crati,1n.1n
,h.1dt·S o tr \'Cry quick h· into tht· \\'Ork of th,· lTl',ltOI'.
There can he no rle.1r disti11<·1ion b,·t\\·e,·n ,upervi,ing
th,· c.1111,·r.1111.111 and crt'.tting '
tht· i1n:11i,·,.
. <>r b,·t,v ,·cn
ad\·1,ing th,· artors and n1ouldi11µ th,· p,·rfon11.1nct·s.
But unle,, \\'c ,·01hid,·r .1<·ting .ind photoµr.1phy to b,·
tht· \vhok proC<'" ot tih11 -n1.1king. tht· dirl't·tor i, ,till
.1 long \\',IY frorn the tot.ii .1uthor,hip ch.it is otten
d.1i111t·d fc>r hin1.
Digitized by Google
It is clear that, in outline at IC:"ast, the shape of a
picture is controlled by the construction of its script.
()ver this the director n1ay have no influence at all.
Certainly. the word 'direction· in1plies no such control.
Dy the tirne the work of direction begins, plot and
dialogue are already established; n1ore or less detailed
decisions have been taken on character, casting. 1noti-
vation and St'tting. The shape of the filn1 has alrt>ady
been sketched and, with that, son1e part of its 1neaning
has been detennined.
Son1l' producers insist that the dirl'ctor's \vork
should begin and <:'nd on the studio fl oor; that he
should havl' no influt>nce over desi~1. cutting, n1usic
or any other process that is ind<:"pendent of the shoot-
ing. More usually. a dirt'ctor "vould expe,·t to work in
close contact with the ,vrit<:'r, to have .1 voict' in the
c.1sti11g. to ht° allo\vt'd dialogut· changt·s at his o\vn
discr<·tion. and to g-uidt· che \vork of the <:"ditor and
'
th<· con1p<>S<'r. Tht' 111ost powerful directors art' virtu-
ally th<:"ir O\Vll srrt'l'll\vriters; it is pure fr,nnality
(plus union de1nJrca tio n) that prevl'nts. for <:'x,unplt·.
Hitrhco,·k. Prt>1ning,·r .ind Ha\vks fro111 rt'reivin~
rredit .1s co-authors ot tht>ir ~crl'enplays. A 1nore .iccu-
r:it<:' .1rrangt'n1ent
•
\Voti!d oti,,11 be th,· French <lilt'
\vher,·by tl1l' dirertor sharl'~ the S('t'nario (redit :ind
the \\ ritt'r is n,un•:d st·p.1rately as author of the di;1 -
0
Jogu,·.
•
J)ir<:"ction's 111ost sig11itira
•
nt til'lds of control art'
al~o tho,e \\'hich 1n.1kt· up the sin.1llest area ot rt>spon-
sibilit\'. th.it .1 dirc,·tor c.111 h<: 'L,oiv,·n: ,It the:" vcrv. l<:ast
dir,·rtion detl'n11inl's hcl\v .1 fihn i, pt•rf'i1nnl'd and
ho\\' it i, r,·cor<k·d .
(.\111crol O\'t•r p,-rtor111anc<:" i~ control over \vh.it
h.1ppt·11' i11 th<· tihn. This control is clearly incon1plete.
It is l'.\ l'rr i,,·d \vithin th,· li111 its in1pos,·d by the
srt·nario .ind the caq. The sren.1rio diet.lit'' a ct·rtain
n1i11i11n1111 of :irtion (••-s,·nti.11 to th,· plot 1nc·rh.1nis111.
1' hL· dirt·rt<>r\ tir,t task is to n1.1ke that action convinc-
in~. i111,·re,t i11g .111d e!lt·cti\·l'. If th,· plot dt'rnands th at
h,-ro .111d h,·roi11,· 111,·,·t .It ,1 p.trty. there.' is nothin~
dirt·ction c.111 do :1hnut th.11. ho\v,·vt·r 1nuch L,'Teat,·r
•
th,· stg111ti,·.111c,·
. .
th.it 1ni,rht b,· dcn\'ed fro1n having .
.
then, 111e,·1 in :111 ,·lev.11or ,,r .11 .1 g.1th,·ring . of the local
p.11'l'11t-t,·.1chl'r .1,sori.1tio11. l' he d1r,·rtor ,vorks \\·ithin
thl' pr<'"Tihed S1tu.11io11. But ;,:i\'t'll th.II ht' \\'orks \\'ith
e11th1hi.1>111 . .111d of course t.1lent. the \\':IY that h,·
\\'ork, i~ 11<'<'<' '-'·•rily pcrso11al.
It i, .1 r ,Hn1no11pl.1<·t· th.11 ,·.1ch ot us h.1s hi, o\\'11
i111.1g,· t>t" ,1 "·,·11t· dt·,crib,·d in a 11<>v,·I: in otht'r \\·ords
'
Original from
UNIVERSITY-OF MICHIGAN I
oq
 Direction and Authorship
that ...ve each direct the scene ditlcrently in our ,ninds.
How much rnore n1ust this apply when the director
has to con1plete the vague images of the ntind. the
sketched action of a scenario, and to produce the
concrete, detailed action of a film irnage. Even when
the director hirnself thinks that he is n1erely 'doing
the script', his choices of gesture, rhythm and en1phasis
will reflect his own experience, syrnpathics and
convictions.
In order to rnake a scene convincing for us. the
director has first to convince hin1self But what, within
the given context, is convincing? Whether the char-
acters move or stand still. look at or away fron1 one
another, are close together or widely spaced, speak
confidently or with hesitation - these and a host of
other detailed decisions are required at every 1110,nent.
These sorts of detail are to a very srnall extent con-
trolled by the writing. They are pan of the business
of direction and, in sun1, they are largely responsible
for the spectator's attitude to the characters and their
actions and so for the n1ood and effect of the scene.
The director begins to be the author of the fihn front
the moment when he finds l,is way to rnake the details
significant as well as credible.
Of course, it is open to the writer to state, in son1e
d etail, how he wants the scene played; and the director
n1ay well believe that his writer knows best. Sin1ilarly.
the actors may arrive at their own way of playing it,
leaving the director simply to accept or reject their
decisions.
At the san1e tirne it is irnportant to recognize that
the director controls the film as much by what he
allows as by what he invents. He has to decide whether
to accept the suggestions and de,nands of his col-
leagues. That decision is itself positive and creative.
The resulting action 'belongs' to the director as rnuch
as do the details that he hirnself suggests. Pren1inger,
by reputation the n1ost autocratic of directors,
has said:
I nt:vcr ,vant to have· an actor led that he is diree·tcd... . If
there arc t\VO possibilitic·s ;1nd the one that the· .ic-tor
suggests is, in n1y opinion. a littk- k·,s effective· than the
one I could suggest. I k·t hin1 Jo it his ,vay berausc I
feel I wiU get son1..-thing in ,·xchangc·. It conics l'asier;
it's more right for hin1. evt:n if it n>ulJ be· in1proved. It's
like a suit which you've ,von1 for a long ·tin1c it's llH>rc
con1fortablc. it tits bett,· r than a nc"' suit.''
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73
With actors. as ...vith scripts, the director is given
1naterial which can be used and organized but not
transforn1ed at will. The star perfonners influence
what the audience expects and therefore how it reacts.
The fantiliar styles and personalities of such skilled
perfonners as Grant, Mitchum, Wayne, Hepburn and
Newman necessarily contribute to the total style of
any filn1 in which they appear.
The director who is also a producer can allow for
this fact when casting his picture. An1ong Hitchcock
n1ovies distinctions of tone, style and nteaning can be
drawn between those starring Cary Grant and those
with James Stewan in the lead. Hitchcock profits fro1n
the different sorts of impact that the r...vo personalities
n1ake. Another director, Leo MacCarey, ren1arked that
any film with Cary Grant tends to tum towards
co111edy because the actor auto111atically seeks out the
hun1our in a dran1atic situation. Hitchcock recognizes
this in casting Grant for films (To Catch a 11,ief, Nort/1
by Nortl11vest) whose tones are predontinantly light and
in which Grant's presence acts as our guarantee that
all wiU tum out well. At the sarne tirne, he centres his
n1eaning on the moral weakness of the hero's disen-
gaged attitude. In the Stewan fihns (Rope, Rear Wind,1111,
l/ert,~o) the tone is much darker, reflecting the disturb-
ing an1biguities of the central personality. Stewan ·s
ben1used detachn1ent is seen as a mask which thinly
disguises a deep and dangerous involven1ent.
Hitchcock is able to absorb the strong personalities
of Grant and Stewan into the textures and rneanin~..;
of his n1ovics. But Hitchcock has the advantage of
control over casting: Vert(111> would have been a very
different fihn if its obsessed hero had been played by
Cary Grant. W here the director joins the production
after its casting is con1plete, the personalities of
the actors becon1e pan of the given 111aterial, like the
script, which cannot be altered. A Wayne movie is a
Wayne 1novie. How good a picture it is will depend
largely upon the extent to which the 'BigJohn' image
can be made to coexist with, or intensify, the signifi-
cance of the action.
Here again, the director's job is to exploit and
organize in1aginatively as often as it is to invent. I do
not know of a Jan1es Stewan performance ,.vhich is
less than accon1plished. But the best Stewan pictures
are those in which the direction has n1anaged to
intewate the tensions of his (~creen) personality.
to rnakl.' thl'nl contributt' to the total patten1: the
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
74 V.F. Perkins
Hitchcock pictures, Mann's The Far Country, Ford's
Two Rode Together and Preminger's Anatomy ofa Murder
are some of the most notable examples.
Tackling the same problen1 from the opposite angle,
we can observe the continuity of response that a
forceful director can achieve with distinctive person-
alities in a series of different pictures. Nicholas Ray,
for example, has drawn unexpected perfom1ances
from actors whose names have usually suggested
toughness and self-sufficiency. Under Ray's direction,
Bogart (In a Lonely Place), Mitchum (The Lusty Men),
Cagney (Run for Cover) and Heston (55 Days at Peking)
revealed surprising dimensions of uncertainty, ten-
derness and vulnerability. In these respects Cagney's
performance in Run for Cover was more consistent
with Mitchum's in The Lusty Men, and with Ray's
work generally, than with the established Cagney
image. That is not to say that he ceased to be
recognizable as James Cagney. The matter is one of
emphasis, not of transformation. The personalities
of the real stars are con1plex enough to reward exami-
nation from many viewpoints. We should expect
different directors to explore and stress different quali-
ties in the same actor. The task for both director and
star is to find an effective way of matching the familiar
personality of the actor with the special den1ands of
the role.
The director is the only 1nember of the production
team who can see (whose job it is to see) the whole
film rather than particular aspects, the interrelationship
of the pans rather than the parts as separate tasks. As
Max Ophuls expressed it: ' There are as 1nany creators
to a filn1 as there are people who work on it. My job
as director consists of making out of this choir of
people a creator of films. ' 10 The director takes charge
at the point where the components of the filn1 have
been assembled and they await their organization into
synthesis. From this point those components are going
willy-nilly to enter into relationship. Their interaction
can be mutually enriching, controlled and coherent.
Since it will exist, it is best that it exist to positive
effect. Correlation occurs within the image, berween
images, and across the filn1's con1plete ti1ne-span.
Change 1nust take place. But organized, significant
change is developn1ent. Actors, designers, writers,
photographers contribute n1ajor components of this
development; the directo r is best placed to desi~n the
developn1ent itself. Being in chargt' of relationships. of
Digitized by Google
synthesis, he is in charge of what makes a filrn
a .film.
Direction can determine which objects and actions
are to be seen as foreground and which as back-
ground. By controlling the balance berween the
elements, by creating a coherence of en1phasis, it can
control the priorities of significance and so shape the
movie's theme. The more closely it is adjusted.
the more intimately personal the balance is likely to
become. Density of interrelationship berween parts is
both the source of contained significance and the
touchstone of style. Style and meaning are twin
products of synthesis; they do not result from a simple
accun1ulation of independent staten1ents by actors and
technicians.
A film may assemble a number of such 'statements'
and they may well be interesting in themselves. To this
extent it can usefully be seen as a group work. But if
the filJn's form embodies a viewpoint. explored in
depth and with complexity, it is almost certain to be
the director's. He is in control throughout the period
in which virtually all the significant relationships are
defined. He has possession of the means through
which all other contributions acquire meaning withi11
the filn1.
The director's authority is a n1atter not of total
creation but of sufficient control. The inadequacies of
an actor. an editor or a composer 1nay inflict more or
less brutal damage on work which ought to have
yielded a fine picture. Or. skilled cutters and musicians
can do much to make bad work less noticeably bad.
But they cannot put on to filin the close correspon-
dence berween character and design. gesture and
image, movement and motive, which a director has
failed to create.
That is part of the reason for resisting the claim
that the screen-writer is normally the major source of
n1eaning and quality in good n1ovies. So far from
creating a finished work, he offers an outline open to
an infinite variety of treatments. It n1ay be so ran1-
bling, inconsistent and self-contradictory as to defy
reden1ption. However rich its possibilities may seem,
it cannot determine the significance or excellence of
the realization. There is no such thing as the n1ovie
v.•hich 'simply filn1s the script'. Too much is added in
the transfer fron1 paper to celluloid. If all that is added
yield5 little of extra significance or con1plexity, why
1nake or \Vatch the 111ovie:>
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHlGAN \
 Direction and Authorship
The case is overstated if we fail to consider the
possibility of the screenplay's being so tightly con-
structed and coherently designed towards particular
ends that the director needs only to achieve and coor-
dinate the prescribed effects in order to let the writer's
meanings come through. Here the writer's creative
authority could hardly be denied. But there is no
reason to wish to deny it. If we observe the frequency
with which precision of style and complexity of
meaning are chiefly attributable to the director, we do
not thereby claim that direction must always and
everywhere be the sole source of any meaning we find
in a film and any pleasure it gives us.
Nor do we deny that a lively interaction betwec:n
members of the film-making team may create a con1-
posite personality for the movie. I have na111ed son1e
films which attain a rewarding level of quality and
significance without betraying a dominant 'signature'.
The fluke masterpiece - where the various contribu-
tions fall into an intricate reciprocity of meaning
without the director's causing them to do so - must
remain a possibility. But I do not know of such a film.
The 'team- n1ovies' which I cited still seem very
worthwhile, yet they fall rather short of the best the
cinema has offered. The argument is circular, since I
Notes
N icholas Ray, /1,lovie. no. 9, May 1963 p. 23.
2 Robert Aldrich. Movir. no. 8. April 1963 p. 10.
3 Paul Rotha, Th, Film "fill Nou• (London: Vision Press. 1'149),
p. 78.
4 Kenji Mizoguchi, Cal,iers du Cinrn,a, vol. 20, no. I 16. Fcbnra,y
196 1, p. 15.
~ Minndli. !•.-fovir, no. 10. June 1963 pp. 23-1.
Digitized by Google
75
recognized then1 as team products by their common
deficiency: a looseness of organization, of relationship
between parts, that resulted in a provocative com-
bination of ingredients rather than an indissoluble
synthesis.
The n1ost telling argu111ent for a critical belief in
the 'director's cinen1a' is that it has provided the richest
base for useful analyses of the styles and meanings of
particular filn1s. Yet on theoretical grounds alone, when
a movie offers a complex and meaningful interrelation
of event, image, idea and feeling, it surely n1akes sense
to think the most likely source a gifted director's full
involvement with his materials. At this level ofinvolve-
n1ent decisions which critics may analyse in relation
to total style and n1eaning may be taken by the direc-
tor sin1ply because they ' feel right' - they .fit.
The connoisseurship implicit in a view of the
director as author does not demand that we see a great
director's failures as master-pieces, although it may
make then1 n1ore interesting than a feebler artist's suc-
cesses. By seeing the connections between a director's
films we can become more sensitive to the pattern
within each of them. 'Director's cinema' offers us n1ost
clues to the understanding which must precede
judgen1ent.
6 John Huston, quoted in James Goode, 77re Story ~( 11rr Alis/its,
(Bobbs-Merrill, New York, 1963). p. 46.
7 Ernest Lindgren. 77,r Arr of tlrr Film (London: Allen and
Unwin. 1963). p. 202.
8 Ibid .. p. 192.
9 Pren1inger. ,\1ovir, no. 4. November I 962. p. 20.
IO Max Ophuls. Calrirts du Ci11ema_, no. 81. March 1958, p. 4.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 8
Ideas of Authorship
Edward Buscon1be

Edward Buscombe has taught at a number of universities and served as general editor in the
Publishing Department of the British Film Institute. His wor1< has focused largely on the
western genre, with important monographs on John Ford's Stagecoach and The Searchers
and Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven as well as editing the authoritative BF/ Companion to the
Western. In this essay, first published in 1973 in Screen, a journal that was more concerned
with ideology and theory than Movie, Buscombe connects earlier auteurism with the more
recent developments of •auteur-structuralism." Critiquing Cahiers and Andrew Sarris and build-
ing on Peter Wollen's distinction between Howard Hawks and "Howard Hawks." he contrasts
auteurism's Romantic conception of the artist as an isolated, unified individual at odds with
society with structuralism's concern with repeated structural patterns that reveal cultural values
and beliefs.

Tht· 1111tc11r thc:ory ,vas nc:vc:r, in itsc:I( a tht·ory of the
cint·111a, though its originators did not clain1 that it
,,·.1s. The: writers of c:.,/rit•rs d11 C'i11b11<1 always spoke
of · la p<>litiq11e d1·s a111e11rs". The: translation of this into
'the 1111tc11r theory' appt·ars to be the responsibility of
Andn.· w Sarris. In an essav. entitled "Notes on the:
Auteur Thc:ory in 1<J6:!" he ren1arked, 'Henceforth.
I ,~·ill abbreviate "la p,,Ji1iq11c des 1111/1'11rs .. as the 11111c11r
theory to avoid confusion." 1 Confusion ,vas exactly
,vhat followt•d when tht" ne,vly christened "tht·ory' was
rt·gardcd by rnany of its supporters and opponents
.1likt' as a total explanation of the cinerna.
Not only ,v,1s tht· original p,1/i1iq11c of (:c1hicr.< so111c:-
"·h.1t lt'ss than a theory; it ,vas itself only loosel y based
upon a thi:ort·tical appro.1ch to the cinc:n1a ,vhich ,v.1s
nt·,·c:r to bt· 111adc ii.illy explicit. The p,,/i1iq11c, as the:
choice of tt·r111 indicates. ,v.1s polc:n1ical in intent and
,,·a, n1t-.111t to dc:fint· an .lttitudc: to tht· t·int·n1a .u1d ;1
course of action. In the pursuit of this course c:,1/,icrs
did inevitably reveal s0111e of the theory on -..vhich the
politiq11r ,vas basc:d; but usually this appc:ared incidc:n-
tally. and at ti111cs incoherently.
()nc: thing is clear, ho,vc:vt"r. Fron1 the beginning
C<1/,icrs. and its predecessor La Rc1111c du Ci11r11111. \\'t're
c<Hn111itted to the line that the cinen1a ,vas an art of
pc:r-onal t'Xprt·ssion. (In the second issue of La Rn,11,·
an article: appeared entitled: 'La cni-ation doit etre
l'ouvrage d ' un st"ul"). At the pt"riod (the late l<J40s)
it ,vas inc:vitable that part of the: project of a ne,v fihn
111agazint· \vould be to raist· the: cultural status of the
cinerna. The ,vay to do this, it st·t·rned. was to advance
tht· rlai111 of the cincrna to bt· an art fonn like paint-
ing or pot·try. offering the: individual the freedorn of
pt·rsonal c::--prt·~~ion. Tht> 1nain difli:renct' at that tin1e
bct\\"l't"n ( :,1/,icrs and othc:r tihn 111agazint·s was that
'
( ,',,/1icr.~ did not ft•cl th.11 oppnrtunitit•s of this kind

1,1·.,.ird Ht1,, ,,mh,·. "ldt·.1, ,,t :\111!i,,r,lnp:· 1'1' - ; s :; tr1•1n , ,(,.,, J--l, 11, • \ , ·\ , 1t11nm 1•1- ' • •· 1•;- ' h, h,l\\ ,1hl lh""'ml•,· H.,-rm1h·,I l•,· pt·n111,,11m c,I thl·
""""' .111d ., , , ., II.

Digitized by Google Original from

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
I
 Ideas of Authorship 77

Figure 8.1 John Hu<ton·s ·n,, Rrd Bi•~l'" ,?f C,""'!~•· (MGM . 1951): An rx•mple of adaptJcion rather than
creative tn11slcJn11.1tion. Produced by Gottfrcid Reinhardt

,vere to be found exclusively in the Europc:an ·art'
cine111a. R-ight fron1 the very earliest issues there are
discussions of Holly,vood directors such as W tdles,
Ford and Lang. Cahicrs \Vas concerned to raise not
only the status of the cinc1n.1 in general, but of
An1erican cinen1a in particular, by elevating its direc-
tors ro the: ran ks of the artistli.
The pvfiriq11e in the sense of a line that ,vill bl· rigor-
ously pursued and provocatively expres~ed. really dates
fro1n :tJl article in issue no. 31 by Fran~ois Tn1tT.1u t
entitled 'Une certaine tendance du cinen1a fran~ais'.
Truft1ut attacks \vhat he calls the tradition of qu,1lity
in the French cinen1a. by v,rhich he 111eans the filn1s of
directors such as Oelannoy. All egret and Aucanr-L:ua.
and espt'cially the adaptations by Aun:nchc and Dose of
well-kno\vn novels. They are att.1cked for being literary,
not trul y cine111atic. and are also found guiJty of 'psy-
chological realisn1'. Truffaut define~ a tn1e fil111 111uc1tr
as one who brings son1eching genuinel y per;onal co his
subject instead of nu: rcly producing a tasteful, accurate
but lifeless rendering of the original 111are.rial. Exan1ples
of true a,11e11rs art· Brcsson and Renoir. lnsccad of
rnerely transferring son1eone else's ,vork faithfully and
self-eff.,ringly. the 11111c11r transfom\S the rnaterial inco
an t·xprcssion of his O\Vn personality.
So succes~ful ,vas Truflaut's call co am\S, and so
n1any were the ,111te11rs subsequently discovered. that in
all the later articles in C11/1icrs in \vhich the 'poli1iq11c·
was explicitly discussed. a gre:1t deal of space had to
be devotcd to dissociating the joun1aJ fro111 the
exces~es con1n1itted in irs 11a111e. (Sec, for exan1ple,
issues nos 63, 70, 126, 172). Trut'Tuut had referred o nly
to French directors. but Cahirrs began to give 111ore
and 1nore space to th<: AJ11crican ci11e1na. III its special
issue nos 150-1 on the A.111crican cine111a no fe\ver
than 120 ci11r11Sres (i.e. ai11<·11rs) were idenrified.
Yer even by this late date ( I 96-t) the questions of
what an 11111r11r is and ,vhy che cine111a should be dis-
cussed largely in tenns of individual artistS an: ones
that are o nly ans,vered by in1plication. C lear articula-
tions of a theory behind the practicc: are rare .ind
sketchy. Out a revi,·\v by Andre 13azin of 1/,r Red
B11~11r i!f' Co11rn,i[c (no. 27. pp. 49C) 1-,rivl'S a clue. Ba21n
distinguishes bct\vcen Hitchcock, ;i tn1e 1111tc11r. and

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
78 Edward Buscombe

Huston, who is only a 111ette11r e11 scene, who has 'no When this is con1pared with a staten1ent front early
truly personal style'. Huston n1erely adapts, though Romantic literary theory, it is easy enough to see the
often very skilfully, the material given hi111, instead of derivation of this distinction.
transfonning it into son1ething genuinely his own. A
sin1ilar point is n1ade by Jacques Rivette in a later issue An Original may be said to be of ,,i:~crablt· nature: it risc:s
(no. I 26), in the course of a discussion on criticis111. sponuneously from the viul root of genius: it ~o,vs. it
Rivette declares that Minnelli is not a true aute11r, is not n1ade: hniutions are often a sort of mar11ifJcr11ri-.
n1erely a talented director at the 111ercy of his script. "'rought up by those mec/1a11in. an and lah,111r. out of
pre-existent 1naterials not their own.''
With a bad script he 1nakes a bad and uninteresting
filn1. Fritz Lang, on the other hand, can son1ehow
It's not surprising, therefore, to find the auteur critics
transfonn even indifferent n1aterial into something
draw others of their assumptions &0111 Ron1antic
personal to hin1 (and this, Rivette assumes, 111akes it
theorists. For example, Coleridge n1akes a distinction
interesting).
between two kinds of literature which n1akes use of
Such discussions, however, do not advance n1uch
the n1etaphor of organic unity contained in the above
beyond Truffaut's original position, though they serve
passage: 'The plays of Beaun1ont and Fletcher are
to confirm Cahiers' stance on the issue of personal
n1ere aggregations without unity; in the Shakespearean
expression. Some attempt to modify this was made by
dran1a there is a vitality which grows and evolves itself
Eric Rohrner. Rejecting the lunatic fringe who took
fro1n within - a keynote which guides and controls
the issue of personality to extren1es, Rohn1er writes,
the ham1onies throughout. ' 7 This notion of the unity
'Le filn1 est pour lui [the auteur) une architecture dont
produced by the personality of the auteur is central to
!es pierres ne sont pas - ne doivent pas etre - filles de
the Caliiers' position; but it is n1ade even more explicit
sa propre chair.'2 The con1parison with architecture,
by their American apologist. Andrew Sarris: 'The
another industrial art, would seem to lead in a different
c111te111 critic is obsessed with the wholeness of art and
direction fron1 comparisons with literature, the best
the artist. He looks at a filn1 as a whole, a director as
known of which is, of course, Alexandre Astruc's
a whole. The parts, however entertaining individually.
article 'The Birth of a New Avant Garde: LA Ca111era-
111ust cohere n1eaningfully .'" The work of a mctteur rn
Stylo' ..1 But it was Astruc's article which was to prove
.ffcne will never be n1ore than the sum of its parts, and
n1ore influential over the critics of Caliiers. The 1nore
probably less. The araeur's personality, on the other
ro111antic conception of the director as the 'only beget-
hand, endows his work with organic unity. The belief
ter' of a film was the one that dominated the journal.
that all directors n1ust be either a11te11rs or n1ette11rs 1·11
One expression of this which seen1S particularly
scene led inevitably to a kind of apartheid, according
indebted to Romantic artistic theory is that of Rivette
to which. as Rivette savs. , the failures of the a11te11rs
in issue no. 126: 'Un cineaste, qui a fair dans le passe
,vill be n1ore interesting than the successl"s of the rest.
de tres grands filn1s, peut faire des erreurs, 1nais !es
Another fom1ulatio11 of what is essentially the san1e
erreurs qu'il fera ont toutes chances, a priori, 4 d'etre
distinction occurs in Cal,i<·rs no. 172:
plus passionantes que les reussires d'un confection-
neur. ,s What seems to lie behind such a staternent is
l'c:tre douc: du n1oindrc talt·nt t'SthC:·tique. si sa pt•rsonalite
the notion of the ·divine spark' which separates off the 'cd.11e' d;ins l'ot'uvn·. l't'1nportera sur lc tcchnicien le
artist from ordinary mortals, which divides the genius plus avisc. Nous dC:·couvrons qu'il n'y pas de rc-gks.
front the joumeyn1an. All the articles by Truffaut, L'in1ui1ion, la scnsibilite, trion1phent de toutes theories.''
Bazin and Rivette fro1n which I have quoted share
this belief in the absolute distinction bet,vcen 1111/C'ur Whether this zeal to divide directors into the company
and mette11r e11 sce11e, between cineastc and · co1!fccti,11111c11r. of the elect on the right and a co1npany of the
and characterise it in tem1s of the differl"ncc bet,vel"n dan1nl"d on the !t·fr o,ves anything to the Catholic
the aureur's ability to n1ake a fihn truly his own. i.e. inriuence in (,'.1/,icrs is hard to say at this distance;
a kind of ori1-,rinal, and the 1111·1t1·11r en sd·u,_.s inability but ,vhat ran be identified. yet again. is the presence
to disguise thl" fact that the origin of his fih11 lit·s of R.on1antic artistic theory in the opposition of
~on1e,vhen.· else. intuition and n1les. ,,:nsihility ;111d theory.

Orig in al from
Digitized by Google UNIVERSITY- OF MICHIGAN \
 Ideas of Authorship
This tendency in Ca/ricrs to 1uake a toten1 of the
personality of the aute11T went to such extremes that
every now and again the editors felt the need to
redress the balance. Andre Bazin, writing in issue no.
70, introduces a different perspective:
The evolution of Western an towards greater personali-
sation should definitely be considered as a step forward,
but only so long as this individualisation ren1ains only a
final perfection and does not dain1 to dt:Ji11t culrure.
At this point, ,ve should remember that irrefutable con1-
1nonplace we learnt at school: the individual transcends
society. but society is also and above all within hint. So
there can be no definitive criticisn1 of genius or talent
which docs not first take into consideration the social
determinism, the historical con1bination of circumstances.
and the technical background which to a lJrge extent
determines it.'"
Bazin, as Rohn1er had done before, takes up the
analogy of architecture:
If you will excuse yet another conunonplace, the cinl·n1a
is an an which is both popular and industrial. These
conditions, which are necessary to its existence, in no
way constitute a collection of hindrances - no n1ore than
in architecture - they rather represent a group of positive
and negative circun1stances which have to be reckoned
with. 11
To be fair, Ca/riers never entirely forgot these con1-
n1onplaces, and quite frequently ran articles on the
organisation of the film industry, on film genres (such
as Bazin's own 'The Evolution of the Western' in
December 1955) and on the technology of the cinema.
The developn1ent of · la politiquc des au1r11rs' into a
cult of personality gathers strength with the en1ergence
of Andrew Sarris, for it is Sarris who pushes to extren1es
arguments which in Ca/riers were often only i1nplicit.
Sarris, for example, rejects Bazin's atten1pt to
con1bine the auteur approach with an acknowledge-
n1ent of the forces conditioning the individual anist.
Arguing strongly against any kind of historical deter-
n1inis1n, Sarris states:
Even if the anist docs not spring fro111 th<' idcalisl·J hl·:id
of Zeus, free of the e1nbryon ic stain, of hi,tory, history
itself is profoundly Jffe<'tc:d bv his .1rrival. If \\'l' cannot
in1agine Griffith's ()at>/1.-r or Eisl·nstt'in °< lJirrl, ,f ,1 .\·,,,;,.,,
because we find it ditli cult to 1r,111sp0Sl' On<· .1rtist's uni~·-
Digitized by Google
79
ing conceptions of Lee and Lincoln to the oth<:r's
dialectical conceptions of Lenin and Kerensky. we are
nevcnhelcss compelled to recogni~e other differences in
the personalities of these r.vo pioneers beyond their
respective cultural cornplexes. It is with these latter dif-
fi:rt'nces that the ault'11r theory is n1ost deeply concerned.
If directors and other anists cannot be ,vrenched fron1
their historical environn1ents, aesthetics is reduced to a
subordinate branch of ethnography. 11
(Pauline Kael is for once correct to write of this:
'And when is Sarris going to discover that aesthetics
is indeed a branch of ethnography; what does he think
it is - a sphere of its own, separate frorn the study of
. environment.
.
n1an an d h 1s ,,13
But h er own confusion
re-emerges later in the same essay when she ren1arks,
'Criticisn1 is an art, not a science .. .' 14 Is ethnography,
then, not a science?)
If Sarris is not saying that genius is independent of
time and place, then he comes dangerously close to
it. The critic's task as he sees it is to scan the cinerna
for signs of 'personality', and having found them to
mine the film so as to bring as n1uch as possible of it
to the surface. It is not his job to explain how it got
there. He is canny enough to remain aware that his
position is partly determined by the need to rnaintain
a polemic, both against those who are contemptuous
of the American cinema and against the crudities of
'n1ass n1edia critics'. ('A11teur criticisn1 is a reaction
against sociological criticisn1 that enthroned the ,vltat
against the ho1v.' 1) But this awareness does not save
him from being driven further and further into an
untenable position. That position is reached, l think.
when he writes in his essay of 1962: 'The second
premise of the a111cur theory is the distinguishable
personality of the director as a criterion of value. Over
a group of filn1s a dir1:cto r n1ust exhibit certain
recurring characteristics of style which serve as his
signature.' 16 Here, surely, is a fatal Raw in Sarris's argu~
n1ent, and the sleight of hand he uses to cover it
cannot disguise its vulnerability. He is atten1pting to
n1ake the a11te11r theory perform two functions at the:
san1e titne. On the one hand, it is a method of classi-
fication. Sarris talks elsewhere about the value of the
theory as a way of ordering filrn history. or a tool for
producing a 111ap of the cinema, and no one could
deny that in this sense the theory has, whatevt·r its
fault~. been extre,nely productive, as a n1ap should bt·.
in opening up unexplored territory. But at the san1c
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
80 Edward Buscombe
cinte Sarris also requires chc:- chc:-ory co ace as a ntt>ans
of 111easuring value. Filnts, he is saying, beco111e valu-
;tble in so far as chey reveal directorial personaliry. He
therefore does precisely what Bazin said should not
be done: he uses individualiry as a test of cultural
value. It's worth noting that Sarris is not consistent in
practising what he preaches. for several directors whose
\vork undoubtedly exhibits a high degree of personal-
iry do not rank very far up the league tables of 11,c
A ,nerican Ci11e111a. Kazan, Wilder, Dassin, even Brian
Forbes, all produce filn1s easily recognizable as 'theirs'
which are not rated by Sarris.
As one n1eans, an1ong others. of classifying fihns.
the auteur theory has proved its usefulness. But to
assert that personaliry is tire criterion of value seents
altogether n1ore open to question. The assun1ption
char individualiry and originaliry are valuable in thent-
selves is, as Bazin points out in 'La Politique des
Auteurs', derived front Rontantic artistic theory. Sarris
goes further; 'the a11te11r theory values the personality
of the director precisely because of the barriers to
its expression.' 17 In C11lt11n: and Society R.ayn1ond
Willian1s describes the ,vay in which aesthetic theory
cante in the Ro111antic period co see the artist as
essentially opposed to sociery. achieving person.ii
expression in the face of a hostile environment and
valuing it all the ntore for this.'" Sarris is directly in
this tradition.
Sarris. like Calril'rs before hint. then uses this crite-
rion of value as a n1eans of raising the status of
A111erican cine111a. He ad1nits that in HollY'vood there
are pressures which might work against individual
expression. But so there are else,vherc:-:
All directors. and not just in Hollywood. an, intprison,·d
bv, the conditions of rh.:ir craft and th.:ir cultur.:. Th,·
n.:ason forci1,'ll dir,·ctors Jn· J!rnoM invariably ~v,·n ,non:
.:r.:dit for cn.-ativity is that th.- local critic is n,·ver 3\\'ar,·
of all the: inth,.-nr,·s opc:ratin~ in a tor,·ign c:nviron,n,·nt.
The late llob,·rt Warsho,v treated Carl l)rcy..-r a, a ~oli-
t.iry artist and L,·o McC.1n·y .l\ .1 so.-i.il ag,·nt, bur ,v,·
kno\\' no"· that there ,ven· cultural intiu,·1Kt'S in I )t'nn1ark
op,·raung on Drt•y,·r. Day ,f Ii 'r,11/, i< sup,· rior by ,1ny
stand,trd to :\I)' S,m J,,/,11, hut I )n·y<'r is nor th.H 111u,·h
frc·cr ,lit artist than Mct:arey. l)rc'}'<'r's duins an· nwrdv
It·" visiblt' frorn our v.u1tag,· point across rh,· Atl.1nri,·. '''
T.1kt'n at face value this is un,·x..-..-prionahlt'; of cour-,·
no director has total freedon1. and tlt,·r,· i< no reason
Digitized by Google
,, pri<>ri ,vhy An1erican cint:n1a should not bt: as good
as any other. And in fact, says Sarris, it is bercer:
Aftt·r y ...ars of tortured revaluation, I a111 110\\' prep.in:d
to stake 111y critical reputation, such as it is. on tht
proposition that Alfred Hitchcock is artistically sup,· nor
to Robert Bresson by every criterion of excellence, and
further that, filrn for fihn, the Antt'rican cinc:nia has b.:en
consistently superior to that of the rest of the ,vorld front
19 I 5 through I 962. C:onsequcntly. I now regard rh,·
a1111•11r theory prirnarily as a critical device for recording
the history of the Anterican cinerna, the only cincnia in
thl' \\'Orld ,vorth ..-xploring in depth b,·n,·ath thl' frosting
of a fr,v great dire,·tors on top.~-
Again, this in itst'lf is fair enough; the problt:nt is chat.
having obtained our easy assent to the proposition that
all fibn- 111akers art' subject to conditions, ht' appears.
by a sleight of hand, to procet"d on the assuntption
that therefort' conditions are unintportant. An1eric;1
can produce fihn artists in just the sante way as Europe.
bur ntore of thent, and of a hight'r standard. Filnt
history is for Sarris the history of a11te11rs. The acknowl -
t:dgentenr of ·conditions· tunis out co be 1nere lip
servict'. And it is nor, I think, difficult to see why: if
pt·rsonaliry is the criterion of value, and can bt'
achit'ved in the face of 'conditions', then it is not the
critic's job to be tnuch concented with the111.
One obvious objection to eniploying individuality
as a tt'st of value is that a dirt'ctor could well be highly
individual, but a bad dirc:-cror. In the first t'dition of
S(I/IIS a11d Afca11i11.~ i11 the Ci11e111a Peter Wollen does noc
s,·ent wholly to avoid this trap. In tht" c hapter on the
t111tr11r tht:orv
, ht' v.•rict:s:
Mv o,vn vit'\\' is rlut Ford', ,vork i< 111uch richer~' th.111
that of Ha,vk< ;ind that this is re v,•;1lt"d by a structural
anJly,is: it is the richness of the shifring rdations bt't\VC:t'n
antinontics in Ford's " 'ork th.tr 111akes hin1 a great ~rti<t.
beyond b,·ing , i111pl y l l l undoubted .i11r1·11r. Moreover. thl'
n111r11r rh,·ory en:tbks us to n·v,·;11 a whole:' co1npll'x oi
111eaning in tihn, such as D,,11,,,.,111 '.< Re,:{. ,vhi,·h a rc:c,·nt
tih11o~r:1phv sun1< up as just ·a couple of Na vy rnen ,vho
ha,·,· r,·tir,·d to a South S,·.1 isl.1nJ no,v sp.:nd ntost of
their ti,nc: ral\1nit hdl. ' ' '
Thl're is no doubt th.tt tilnts such as D,,11t>va11 's R,•,:J:
11 'iui:s ,>( E,,~lcs and t'sp,·,·i,1lly '/7,r S1111 Shi11es Bri,i:/11
(alntost indl'cipherahle co thos,· unacquainted \\'ith
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN \
 Ideas of Authorship
Ford's work) do n:veal a great deal of ,neaning when
seen in the context of Ford's work as a whole. But
does this make then1 'good' filn1s as well as interesting
ones? The question is worth asking, because it seen1s
to be just this srnuggling in of one thing under the
guise of another that is most responsible for the repu-
tation in sorne quarters of the auteur theory as n1erely
the secret password of an exclusive and fanatical sect.
Possibly people such a.~ Pauline Kael, who are
roused to fury by Sarris's version of the auteur theory,
should sirnply be lefi to stew in their own juice. And
perhaps those who won't accept that Win<~s of Eagles
is a good fihn have a very narrow concept of what is
good and are unreasonable in dernanding that all films
should have fonnal perfection, should be 'intelligent',
'adult', etc. But the auteur theory becornes n1ore
tenable if in fact it is not required to carry in its
bag!,>age the burden of being an evaluative criterion.
And Wollen, in the third edition of his book, durnps
it along with 1nuch elst'. :!.l
At this point, it is ncces,-.ary to say S<)t11<•rhing about the
a11ttur theory since this has often been seen as a "·ay of
introducing the idea of the creative personality into th<'
Holl}"vood cinema. Indeed. it is true that n1any protago-
nists of the a111e11r theory do argue this ,vay. Ho,vcver.
I do not hold this vicv,• and I think it is in1ponant to
detach the m1te11r theory fron1 any suspicion that it sirnply
represents a 'cult of personality' or ,potheosis of the:
director. T o nty ,nind the 11utr11r theory actually reprc·sents
a radical break with the idea of an ·an' cinl'rna, not the
transplant of traditional ideas about an into HollY"vooJ.
The ·an' cinen1a is rooted in the idea of creativity and
the filn1 as the expression of an individual vision. What
the a111e11r theory ar~es is that any fihn, certainly a
Hollywood filn1, is a nct,vork of ditli-n:nt statcn1ents,
crossing and co11tradic·ting each other, dJboratc:d into a
final 'coherent' vl'rsion. Like a drearn, the fihn the spe,·ta-
tor sees is, so to spcak, the 'filnt fa~ade'. the end product
of 'secondary revision·, ,vhich hides and rnasks th<·
process which rernains laccnt in thc fihn 's 'unconscious·;
by a process of ron1parison with othcr tihns. it is po,,ibk
to decipher, not a cohc·n:nt ntc·ssagc· or ,vorld-vicw. but
a strUcture which undcrli<'S the fihn Jnd shap<·, it. givc'S
it a rcrtain pattcnt of c·nl'rgy c,th<·xis. It is this stnrccure
which auc,•1,r analysis di,cng;1g,·s Iron, the filn1.
The strUcture is a«oc·iatc'd ,vith a single Jire,·tor..111
•
individual. not becJuse he h:1s play,·d chc· rok of .1n1sc.
t'xpressing hintsdf ,ir his o,vn vision in the tiln,. but
bcrause it is through the l<)rcc• of hi, prc·,irrupations th.H
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81
an unconscious. unintended n,caning can be decoded
in th<' fihn, usually to the surprise of th<' individual
concerned.... It is wrong, in the nan1e of a denial of the
traditional idea of crcativc subjectivity, to deny any status
to individuals at all. But Fuller or Ha,vks or Hitchcock.
the directors, arc quite separate fron1 'Fuller' or 'HJ,vks·
or 'Hitchcock', the structures nan1ed after the111, Jnd
should not be rnethodologically ,·onfu~t·d.! •
Wollen does not clain1 that this is a total theory of
the cine111a:
theory cannot si111ply bt· applit>d indiscri111inatdy.
A111,·11r
Nor does an a111e11r analysis exhaust ,vhat can be said
about any single filn1. It dot'S no rnore than provide one
,vay of decoding a filnt, by specifying ,vhat its 111echanirs
arc at one level. There arl' othl'r kinds of code that could
be proposed, and whether they arc of any value or not
,vill have to be settled by rct,.:rerKe co the cext, to chc
tihns in qucstio11. ~1
There is n1uch in this pos1t1on that is attractive. It
satisfii:s our sense: that on the: one hand the An1erican
cinema is the richest field for study, and on the other
hand that the n1ore one knows about its habitual
n1ethods of working the less it becon1es possible to
conceive of Hollywood as populated by autonon1ous
gt'niuses. And certainly a priori evidence suggests that
tht' then1es of transferred guilt in Hitchcock, of hon1c,
and the desert/ garden antithesis in Ford, for exarnph:.
arc ahnost entirely unconscious, rnaking it inappropri-
ate to speak, as so n1uch auteur criticis111 does, about
a director's world- view (and especially about the rnoral
worth of that world-view). And the avoidance of the
problen1 of evaluation is surely justified until we have
an adequate description of what Wl' should evaluat<·.
Structural analysis of a11te11rs has produced in1por-
tant results, not least in Wollen' s own book. Yet thl'rc
arc surely problen1s in using techniques which were
developed for the analysis of fonns of conununication~
v,1hich are entirely unconscious such as drean1s. n1yths
and language itself. For what is the exact relation
between the structure called 'Hitch cock· and the
filn1 director called Hitchcock, who actually n1akc's
dec isions about the story, the acting, the sets. the:
can1era placing? It is possible to reveal structure's in
Hitchcock's .,...ork \vhich are bv, no n1eans entiri:lv.
uncon scious. suc h as the use: of c ertain c.unerJ angles
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
82 Edward Buscombe
Figurr 8.2 Th,·m,.,; of subJc,·uv,ry .uul ~ 11lt 111fon11
dircct<"d by Alfred Hnchco ck
to involve and in1plicate the audience in the action.
Hitchcock ren,arks about 77,"
Jtllrc11~l/ J\1/ 1111:
The \vho le approach is subjective. Fo r instance. they've
<lipped o n a pair of h.,ndcuifs to lin k hi ,n to anoth..-r
pri•o ncr. D uring rhc j oun1ey bet\veen the sta rion hou~e
and the pri,nn. rh cn, arc different 111cn guarding hi111. hur
since he\ ashan1ed. he ke.-ps l11s head d o\vn. stann g at
hi , <hoes. <o ,vc n,·vcr <how the guards?'
T his kind of thing occurs in aln1ost all H itchcoc k ·s
filn1s. and so could be said to identify hin1 a< an 11111r11r
in the cradinonal st·nsc. Dut it also cot111t•cr:, to his
obses<ional and no doubt largely un co nscious (nil he
read about it) concern with guilt and voyeunsn1,
\Vhich have been re vealed in srrucrural analysis.
Earlier versions of the 1111re11r theory n1adt'. the
assu1nption that because there \Vas 111eaning in a ,vork
son1eone n1u <t have deliberate ly put if thert·. and that
so n1eone n1ust bt'. tht· 1111rc11r. W ollen riglnl y rcsi>ts lhat.
But thi~ doe~n 't n1 l'an th.it one c,111 o nly ta lk about
un co nscious structures (ad n11ttedly Wollen doe~ say 1t
is ,vrong to den y any ~tatu~ to indi vid uals at all, but
Digitized by Google
·n,, II ·,,,1te ,\/,m (Warner llro,. 195ft). Produced and
is there not so111ethi11g a little disingen uo us in this
concession ?) . The conscious ,vill and talent of the
artist (fo r ,vant of a bt·ttcr , vord) 111ay still be allo,ved
so nic part, surely. Bue of course, chat conscious ,,rill
and t,ilr.:nt .i.re also in runt the product of those forces
rh:ic act upon the artist. and it 1s here that traditiona l
a111eur theory 111ost seriously breaks do\vn. As Sain
Rohdie savs:
.
•·IJ11t'11r.< arc out of tinic. Th,· 1h-,orv. ,vhich 1nakes th.-111
<a,rt·d 1nake, no inroad on vul1<-1r hi<tory. ha.< no con-
cept-< fo r the social or the coll.-ctivc. or the n.1tio11al.
The prin,ary act of 1111rr11r cnnc1sn1 1s one of di<Soc1a-
tinn - the 0111r11r o ut of ti 111t· .ind h1s1ory and soci,·ty ~
also fr-,cd fro1n any produenvc: proce,s. be ii' in Los
An~,·lc~ or Pari,_!'
Thi: tc<l of a theory i!i ,vhed1(· r it produces ne,v
k1ic1,,·lt·dgt· . The 1111re11r th eory produced n1uch. but of
,1 very parti.11 kind , and 1nuch it left toc;1lly unkno,vn .
Wh:11 i, needed no,v i, a tht·ory of the cinen,a that
loc.1tt's directors in a total situ,1tio11. rather than one
\Vhirh .1s< un1rs that th ei r developn1e nt has only an
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN .,
 Ideas of Authorship 83

inten1al dynarnic. This n1eans that we should jettison
such loaded tenns as 'organic', which inevitably suggest
that a director's work derives its i1npetus from within.
All such tenns reveal often unformulated and always
unwarranted assumptions about the cinen1a; a film is
not a living creature, but a product brought into exis-
tence by the operation of a con1plex of forces upon
a body of matter. Unfortunately, criticis1n which deals
with only one aspect of the artistic object is easier
to practise than that which seeks to encompass the
totality. Three approaches seem possible, and each of
them n1ust inevitably squeeze out the aute11r from his
position of pron1inence, and transfonn the notion of
hi1n which remains. First, there is the examination
of the effects of the cinen1a on society (research
into the sociology of mass media, and so on). Second
is the effect of society on the cinema; in other words,
the operation of ideology, econon1ics, technology, etc.
Lastly, and this is in a sense only a sub-section of the
preceding category, the effects of filnis on other filnis;
this would especially involve questions of genre, which
only n1eans that some filnis have a very close relation
to other filn1s. But all films are affected by the previ-
ous history of the cinema. This is only one more thing
that traditional a11teur theory could not cope with. It
identified the code of the a11teur; but was silent on
those codes intrinsic to the cinen1a, as well as to those
originating out~ide it.

Notes

I Film Cu/tom·. no. 27 (Winter 1<)fi:!- 3); rc,prinred in l'nspraii•rs 10 Andre Bazin, 'La l'oliriquc de; Autcurs' , trans. in 77,r 1\ir111 ll'ao•,·.
,,,, tlu· Study of Film. ed. John Stuart Katz, Boston, Little, Urown. p. 142.
1971 (p. 129). Sarris later conc..-ded. 'Ultimately, the au11·11r 11 Ibid.
theory is not so much a theory as an attitude. a table of value, 12 Sarris. in Katz, op. cit .. pp. 132-J.
that convens film history into directorial bio1,>r.1phy.' ·n,, Amrri- 13 Pauline K.ld. 'Cirdrs and Squ•re;: J oys and Sarris, in Katz. op.
<•11 Ci11rma, New York. Dutton, 1968, p. 30. cit .. p . 154.
..,
- 'For the auteur, the film is a piece of arch ittcturc, whose brick.<
are nor - must not be - the children of his own body.' Caloii·rs
14
15
Ibid .. p. 142.
Sarris. Amtrira11 Ci11.-ma, p. 36.
Ju Cinema. no. 63. October 1956, p. 55. 16 Sarris. in Katz. op. cit .• p. 137.
3 Alexandr..- Astruc, 'The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: "La 17 Sarris, Amrrir<111 Ci11ema, p. 31.
Camrra-Sty/o" ', reprinted in 77or i'\'n,, ~Vao,r, ed. Peter G raham. HI Sec Williatru, op. cit., pp. 4!l-64 and f'<B Sim.
London, Sc<eker & Warburg, 1968. 19 Sarris. Amtrira11 Ci11rma, p. J<,,
It's hard to sec how this can be so a priori in any case; only :!fl Sarris in futz, op. cit., p. 134.
according to the balance of probabilities. 21 Possibly by 'richer' WoUen does not imply 'has b'n·ater aes-
5 · A ri11r<Utr who has made great filn~, in the past nuy make thetic value'; but if that is the case his tenninology i; • little
ntistakes, but his ntistakes will h•ve every ,·hanc<' of being, a confu.<ing.
priori. more impressive than th(' succ~si:s of a "'m.anufa.ctun-r'". 2:! Peter W ollen, S(~11s a,od M1·ani1\~ i11 thr Ci11r1t1a, 3rd edn. London.
Cahiers, no. 126, p. 17. The same ide• L< to be found in Sarris. S..-ckcr & Warburg. 1972. p. 102.
in 77,, Amrri,a11 Ci11rma, p. 17: 'the wo"t film of• f,'TC•t director 2., The virtual obs~ion with aesthetic - even mor•I - evaluation
nuy be more, int..-r<"ning than the best filni of a fair to ntiddling which has characterised so much Uritish critidsm undoubtedly
director.· gave the """"' tl1cory murh of its appeal. (It's hard to •~rib,·
Quoted in Raymond W illfanu, Cu/tom· a11d S,~'irty I 78(~ l'J50. moral value to. say . the studio ;ysreni.)
Hannondsworth, Penguin, l<lf>l. p. 54. :!4 Ibid .. pp. 167- 1!.
7 S. T. Colerid1,,e, LrN11trs and ut>t,·s ,,,, Shakcsp,•,,rc aud ,,thrr E11.~lislo 25 Ibid .. p. 168.
p<><ts (1818), London, Dent, 1951. :!6 Fran,ois Truffaut, Hitdm>rk, London. Pa11thcr etl11 1<l(>'·I,
8 Sarris, Amtrira11 Ci111•1t1a, p..,o. p. 296.
9 Cal,irrs, no. 172, Novcniber 1965, p . 3 : ·• man endowed with :!7 Sam Rohdic, 'Education and Critici<rn' , 5'ru11, vol. 12, 110. l,
the le.ut aesthetic talent. if hi; personality "shines out" in the p. 10.
work. wilJ be more 'iucct.··sst\Jl than the: dt.·vt.>rc~t rc,·hnician.
We dL<cover that there art• no n,le<. Intuition and ;ensibiliry
triumph over :ill theories.'

Orig in al from
Digitized by Google UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
•
 9
Ideology, Genre, Auteur
Robin Wood

Robin Wood Is one of the most influential film critics in English. An early proponent of classic
auteurism in such volumes as Ingmar Bergman and Howard Hawks, his Hitchcock's Films
(first published in 1965) combined close textual analysis with incisive prose and demonstrated
auteurism as a viable critical methodology. Profoundly affected by feminist and ideological
criticism and theory in the 1970s, Wood later re-examined his earlier work on Hitchcock and
Hawks while tackling new questions of gender and ideology rather than focusing on universal
human values. Wood's view of Hawks has remained fundamentally unchanged 30 years later,
Hawks for him continuing to be regarded as a great communal director concemed with fun-
damental human issues of self-respect, emotional maturity, and personal relationships; by
contrast, Wood has revised or revisited his cri1ical views of Hitchcock's films in several revi•
sions, the most recent of which was published in 2002, wherein he takes into account other
developments in film studies, most notably feminism. In this essay, Wood's project is similar
in that he is seeking a satisfying synthesis of critical methodologies. Here he considers the
place of the auteur in relation to genre and ideology through a comparison of Frank Capra's
It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Alfred Hitchcock's Shadows of a Doubt (1943) in terms of
how each director's personal vision negotiates the inevitable presence of dominant ideology
in Hollywood cinema.

'T71<· tnul, Iii'.< "''' i11 ''"I' drl',1111

111,111y. b111 ;,,
- Arabian Nights (Pier Paolo Pa~olini, 1')7-1)
Each tht:ory of fihn so far has insistt"d on its own
particular polarization. M ontage theory enthront"s
editing as the essential creativt' act at the expense of
other aspects of fihn; Bazin's realist theory. seeking to
right the balance, 1nerely substitutl'S it~ o,vn in1balanre,
do,vngrading n1ontage and artifice: the rt'volutionary
thl· ory centered in Britain in Screen (but today very
\\'idespread) reject~ - or at any r.1te seeks to "decon-
stn1ct'' - rl·alist art in favor oi the ~o-r;1lled open tl'Xt.
Auteur tht'ory, in its heyd.1y, concentrated attention
exclusively on tht' fingerprints, th1:111atic or stylistic, of
the individual artist; recent attempts to discuss the
co111plete "filrnic text" have tendt"d to throw out ideas
of personal authorship altogether. Each theory has.
given its underlying position, its o,vn validity - th e
validity being dependent upon and restricted by
the position. Each can offer insights into different areas
of cinen1a and different aspt'cts of a single fil1n.
I have suggested clse,vhert' 1 the desirability tor
critics - ,vhose ai1n should ,1hvavs be to see the work
a , vholly as pos~ihl<', a~ it is - to be able to dra,v on
the disrO\'l'ries and particular pcrct·ptions of eJch

lltibm \\!o,,d. ··1 itl·,,lo!--'Y, C l'11n·. Auh'ur,'' pp. I. 16 . 1N lrP111 him(.\ ,,,.,,,,.,,, J.\, 1h 1. I r.J.u)U,1J) - h :~n1.11"\ 1•>77;. •· 1•1--7 by T hl· f ilm Son,:ty llfl.mfolu Ct·mt·r.
All llf-!hh H''l'f\' t'tl. R ,:pnult•,l l•y r -,:m11,,1011 1\ f dtt· 1 ,1111 ....... ,, H,'IV ,,1 I 111,dl U ( : l 'llh'f.

Digitized by Google Original from

UNIVERSIU OF MICHIGAN ...,
•
 Ideology, Genre, Auteur
theory, each position, without conunitting the1nselves
exclusively to any one. The ideal will not be easy
to attain, and even the atten1pt raises all kinds of
problenis, the chief of which is the validity of evalua-
tive criteria that are not supponed by a panicular
syste1n. For what, then, do they receive suppon? No
critic, obviously, can be free from a structure of values,
nor can he or she afford to withdra,v fron1 the strug-
glt·s and tensions of living to sorne position of
"aesthetic" conten1plation. Every critic who is wonh
reading has been, on the contrary, very much caught
up in the effon to define values beyond purely aes-
thetic ones (if indeed such things exist). Yet to "live
historically" need not entail com1n.itrnent to a systl.'111
or a cause; rather, it can involve being alive to the
opposing pulls, the tensions. of one's world.
The past two decades have seen a nun1ber of
advances in tem1s of the opening up of critical possi-
bilities, of areas of relevance, especially with reE,,ard to
Hollywood: the elaboration of auteur theory in its
various rnanifestations; the interest in genre; the intt'r-
est in ideology. I want here tentatively to explore son1e
of the ways in which these disparate approaches to
Hollywood n1ovies n1ight interpenetrate, producing
the kind of synthetic criticisn1 I have suggested n1ight
no,v be practicable.
In order to create a context within which to discuss
It's a Wo11deif,1/ Li_fe (Frank Capra, 1946) and Shad,1111
,fa Do11b1 (Alfred Hitchcock, I 943), I want to atten1pt
(at risk of obviousness) a definition of what we n1ean
by American capitalist ideology - or, more specifically,
the values and assun1ptions so insistently en1bodied in
and reinforced by the classical H ollywood cinerna. The
following list of components is not intended to be
exhaustive or profound, but simply to n1ake conscious,
prior to a discussion of the filn1s. concepts with ,vhich
we are all perfectly fan1iliar:
I. Capitalisrn, the right of o,vnership. private cntcr-
prise, personal initi.,tive: thc settling of the land.
2. The work ethic: the notion that "honest toil" is
in itself and for itself n1orallv, adn1irable, this and
con cept 1 both validating and reinforcing each
other. The n1oral excellence of work is also
bound up with the necl.'s,ary subjugation or sub-
lirnation of the libido: "thi: I ) evil fi11ds ,,·ork for
idle hands." The rt·lation~hip is bt·autili.1lly t·pito-
Digitized by Google
85
111ized 111 the zoo-cleant'r's song in Cat Pc,>plc
(Jacqut·s T oun1eur, 1942):
Nothing d sc· 10 do.
Nothing dsc.- 10 do.
I strayc•d. ,vc·nt a-(ourting
'ca u~" I'd nothing d sc to do.
3. Maniagt' (legalizt'd ht'terosexual n1onogan1y) and
fan1ily - it once the funher validation of con-
cepts I and 2 {the hornestead is b uilt for tl1t'
v.·01nan, whose function is to en1body civilized
values and guarantee their continuanct" through
her children) and an t'Xtension of the ownership
principle to personal relationships (" My houst\
11,y wife. 11,y children") 111 a n1ale- donunatt:-d
society.
4a. Nature as agrarianisrn; tl1t' virgin land as
c;arden of Edt:-n. A concept into which, in tht:-
,vestt'm, concept 3 te nds to beco1ne curiously
assirnilatt:-d (ideology's function being to " natural-
ize" cultural assun1ptions): e.g., the treatn1ent of
the fa1nily in Dn1111s Alc>11g 1/1e M()/,a11 1k (John
Ford, 1939).
4b. Nature as tht' wilderness. the Indians, on whose
subjugation civilization is built; hence by exten-
sion the libido, of which in n1any westcn1s the
Indians St'en1 an extension or en1bodin1ent. as in
1111· Searcher.< (Ford, 1956).
5. Progress, technology, the city ("New York, New
York, it's a wonderful tov;n ").
6. Succt·ss and wealth - a value of ,vhich Holly-
wood ideology is also deeply asha1ned, so that.
,vhile hundreds of fihns play on its aUure. vt'ry
ft:-w can allow thernsclves openly to extol it. Thus
its ideological "shadow" is produced.
7. The R osebud syndron1e. Money isn't everything:
1noney corrupts; the poor are happier. A very
convt'nient assun1ption for capitalist ideology: tht'
rnore oppressed you are, the happier you arc. as
exen1plified by the singing "darkies" of ,.-1 D,,y ,11
1/11· Races (San1 Wood, 1937).
8. An1erica as the land wht·re everyone is or can be
happy: ht'nce the land whert' all problt'rns arc solv-
able within the existing systen1 (,vhich n1.1y nt·cd
,1 bit of rcfom1 ht' rc and there but no r11dic,1/
changt'). Subversi Vt' systt·n1s are assi111ilatt·d
,vhc·rt·vcr possiblt• 10 ~t·n•e the don1inant idl.'olo!-'Y·
Andre"' Britton. in a charactcristil·allv hrilliJ11t
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
86 Robin Wood
article on Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), argues
that there even Freudian psychoanalysis becon1es
an instrument of ideological repression. 2 Above all,
this assun1ption gives us that n1ost striking and
persistent of all classical Hollywood phenon1ena,
the happy ending: often a 111ere "emergency exit"
(Sirk's phrase)J for the spectator, a barely plausible
pretense that the problems the film has raised are
now resolved. Hilda Crane (Philip Dunne, 1956)
offers a suitably blatant example among the
hundreds possible.
Out of this list logically e1nerge two ideal figures:
9. The ideal male: the virile adventurer, the potent,
untrammelled man of action.
10. The ideal fe1nale: wife and n1other, perfect con1-
panion, the endlessly dependable n1ainstay of
hearth and hon1e.
Since these con1bine into an ideal couple of quite stag-
gering incompatibility, each has his or her shadow:
11. The settled husband/father, dependable but
dull.
12. The erotic won1an (adventuress, gambling lady.
saloon "entertainer"), fascinating but dangerous,
liable to betray the hero or tum into a black
panther.
The n1ost striking fact about this list is that it presents
an ideology that, far fron1 being n1onolithic, is
i11/iercntly riddled with hopeless contradictions and
unresolvable tensions. The work that has been done
so far on genre has tended to take the various genres
as "given" and discrete, defining them in tem1s of
n1otifs, iconography, conventions, and thernes. What
we need to ask, if genre theory is ever to be produc-
tive, is less ivhar than why. We are so used to the genres
that the peculiarity of the phenornenon itself has been
too little noted. The idea I wish to put forward is that
the developrnent of the genres is rooted in the sort
of ideological contradictions 1ny list of concepts sug-
gests. One in1pulse 1nay be the atte1npt to deny such
contradiction by elirninating one of the oppost'd
tem1s. or at least by a process of sin1plification.
Robert Warsho\>J's serninal essays on the gangster
hero and the westenu:r (still fn1itfully suggestive.
despite the obvious objection that he took too little
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into account) might be adduced here. The opposition
of gangster filn1 and western is only one of n1any
possibilities. All the genres can be profitably examined
in ten11S of ideological oppositions, forming a
complex interlocking pattern: sniaJl-town family
con1edy/sophisticated city comedy; city comedy/film
noir; film noir/smaJl-town comedy, and so on. It is
probable that a genre is ideologically "pure" (i.e., safe)
only in its simplest, most archetypal, most aesthetically
deprived and intellectuaJly contemptible form - such
as the Hopalong Cassidy filnlS or Andy Hardy
con1edies.
The Hopalong Cassidy films (in which Indians.
always a potentiaJly disruptive force in ideological as
well as drarnatic temlS, are, in general, significantly
absent), for example, seem to depend on two strategies
for their perfect ideological security: the strict division
of characters into good and evil, with no "grays"; and
Hoppy's sexlessness (he never becon1es emotionaJly
entangled). Hence the possibility of evading aJl the
wandering/settling tensions on which aestheticaJly
interesting westerns are generally structured. (An
intriguing alternative: the ideal American fanilly of
Roy Rogers/Dale Evans/Trigger.) Shane (George
Stevens, 1953) is especially interesting in this connec-
tion. A deliberate attempt to create an "archetypal"'
western, it also represents an effort to resolve the
n1ajor ideological tensions harn1oniously.
One of the greatest obstacles to any fruitful theory
of genre has been the tendency to treat the genres as
discrete. An ideological approach rnight suggest why
they can't be, however hard they may appear to try: at
best, they represent different strategies for dealing with
the same ideological tensions. For example, the sn1all-
town movie with a contemporary setting should never
be divorced fron1 its historical correlative, the western.
In the classical Hollywood cinema n1otifs cross repeat-
edly fron1 genre to genre, as can be 1nade clear by a
few exan1ples. The hon1e/\vandering opposition that
Peter Wollen rightly sees as central to Ford~ is not
central only to Ford or even to the westen1; it struc-
tures a remarkably large number of Axnerican filnis
covering all genres, fron1 0111 vf tl,c Past (Toumeur,
1947) to 77,rrc's N,, B11si11ess Like Sliow B11siness (Walter
Lang, 1954), The explicit co1nparison of women to
cats connects scre\vball con1edy (Bringing Up Baby.
Howard Hav,ks, 1938) . horror fihn (Cat People,
Tourneur, 1942). n1elodr.una (R,1111p11gr, Phil Karlson.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Ideology, Genre, Auteur
19<>3), and psychological thriller (;\/.in,it', Hitchcock.
19(,-t). Another exan1ple brinb~ us to this essay's spe-
cific topic: notice the ,vay in which the potent rnale
adventurer, when he enters the fan1ily circle. i111n1edi-
ately displaces his "shadow," the settled husband/ father,
in both 771<' Sc,rrt/1crs and Shado1v of" D<>11bt.
Before we atten1pt to apply these idea~ to specific
filnts, hov;cver, one ntore point needs to bt· especially
<..'n1phasized: the presence of ideological tensions in a
rnovie. though it ,nay give it an intert•st beyond
Hopalong Cassidy, is not in itself a reliable t·valuJtive
criterion. It scents probable that artistic value has
ahvays bet'n dependt'nt on tht' presence - so,nev.·here,
at sorne stage - of an individual anist. whatever the
function of an in the panicular society and even ,vhcn
(as with the Chanres cathedral) one no longer kn o,vs
,vho the individual anist~ were. It is only through the
n1edium of the individual that ideological tensions
corne into panicular focus, hence becorne of aesthetic
as ,veil as sociological interest. It can pt·rhaps be argued
that works are of especial interest when the defined
panicularities oi an auteur interact ,vith specific ideo-
logical tensions and when the fihn is led fro1n rnore
than one generic source.
The san1e basic ideological tensions operate in both
It's a ~Vondeif,1/ L/fc and Sliad<>111 <?( a D<>11/1t. They
furnish funher rerninders that the ho,ne/,vandering
antinomy is by no n1eans the exclusive preserve of
the western. Bedford Falls and Santa Rosa can be seen
as the frontier town seventy or so years on: they
en1body the dcvelopn1ent of the civilization ,vhose
establishrnent was celebrated around the san1e tirne by
Ford in My Darlin,ll Cle1nr11tinr (I 946). With this rela -
tionship to the western in the background (but in
Capra's film made succinctly explicit), the centra]
tension in both films can be described in tenns of
genre: the disturbing influx or filn1 noir into the
world of small-town don1estic con1edy. (It is a tension
clearly present in C:lcme11ti11e as well: the opposition
between the daytin1e and nighttin1e Ton1bstones.)
The strong contrast presented by the t,vo fihns
t estifies to the decisive effect of the intervention of a
clearly defined anistic personality in an ideological-
generic stn1cture. Uoth filnts have as a central
ideological project the reatlinnation of fa1nily and
srnall-town values that the action has callt•d into qut~-
cion. In Capra's filn1 thi~ reatlinnation is n1agnitict·ntly
convincing (but with lull ack11<>,vl,..dgn1t·nt of the
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87
suppressions on ,vhich it depends and, consequently,
of its prt·cariousness); in Hitchcock's it is cornpletely
hollow. The very different en1otional effects of the
tihns - the satisfying catharsis and entotional fullness
oi Capra's, the "bitter taste" (on \Vhich so n1any have
conuncnted) of Hitchcock ·s - are very deeply roott'd
not only in our response to two opposed directorial
pt·rsonalities but in our o,vn ideological structuring.
( )ne oi tht· n1ain ideological and the111atic tensions
oi ft·., a u:,,,,dcifid L!fi' is beautifully encapsulated in
the sct'nt· in ,vhich George Bailey Qan1es Stewan) and
Mary (I)onna !'teed) srnash ,vindo,vs in a derelict
house as a prcfi1cc to ntaking wishes. George's wish is
.
to get thl" ntoncv, to leave Bedford Falls. which he
St't'S as hurndrunt and constricting, and travel about
the world: Mary's ,vish (not expressed in words, but
in its subsequent fulfillrnent - continuing her belief
that ,vishes don't con1e true if you speak the111) is that
she and George will 111arry, settle down, and raise a
fontilv, in the sarne derelict house, a ruined sht."11 that
1narriagt."- and- fa111ily restores to life.
This tension is developed through the extt'nded
sequence in which Gt."orge is ntanipulated into n1ar-
rying Mary. His brother's retun1 horne with a wife
and a new job traps George into staying in Bedford
Falls to take over the farnily business. With the ho,ne-
corning celebrations continuing inside the house in
the background, George sits disconsolately on the
front porch; we hear an off-screen train whistle, to
which he reacts. His n1other (the indispensable Beulah
Bondi) cornes out and begins "suggesting" that he visit
Mary: he appears to go off in her direction, physically
pointed that way by his n1other, then reappears and
walks away past the mother - in the opposite
direction.
This leads hint, with perfect ideological/ generic
logic, to Violet (Gloria Grahante). The Violet/Mary
opposition is an archetypally clear rendering of that
central H ollywood female opposition that crosse~
all generic boundaries - as with Sus.1n (Katharine
Hepbunt) and Alice (Virginia Walker) in Bri11,Rill 0
(/
t fp Baby, Irena (Sin1one Sinton) and Alice (Jane
Randolph) in Car Pc<>plc, Chihuahua (Linda Daniell)
and Clernentinc (Cathy l)owns) in 1\,fy D,1rli11,(! Ck111-
c111i11c, l)ebby ((;)oria Graharnc) and Katie (Joct'lyn
Drando) in 77,c B(I! Heat (Fritz Lan~. 1953). But Violet
(in front of an a111used audienct·) rt-jects his poetic
invitation to ;1 barefoot rantble over the hill~ in the
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
88
rnoonlight; the good-time gal offers no rnore solution
to the hero's wanderlust than the wife-mother figure.
So back to Mary, whom he brings to the window
by beating a stick aggressively against the fence of the
neat. enclosed front garden - a beautifully precise
expression of his a1nbivalent state of mind: desire to
attract Mary's attention warring with bitter resent-
111ent of his growing entrapment in dontesticity. Mary
is expecting him; his ntother has phoned her, knowing
that George would end up at her house. T\vo ideologi-
cal prentises combine here: the notion that the "good"
mother always knows, precisely and with absolute cer-
titude, the workings of her son's mind; and the notion
that the fentale principle is central to the continuity
of civilization, that the "weaker sex" is cornpensated
with a sacred rightness.
Indoors, Mary shows George a canoon she has
drawn of George, in cowboy denints, lassoing the
n1oon. The ntoment is rich in contradictory connota-
tions. It explicitly evokes the western and the figure
of the adventurer-hero to which George aspires.
Earlier, it was for Mary that George wanted to "lasso
the moon," the adventurer's exploits motivated by a
desire to n1ake happy the wontan who will finally
entrap hin1 in domesticity. Front Mary's point of view,
the picture is at once affectionate (acknov,ledging the
hero's aspirations). mocking (reducing the111 to carica-
ture), and possessive (reducing George to an irnagc she
creates and holds \vithin her hands).
The rnost ovenly presented of the filn1 ·s structural
oppositions is that between the two faces of capitalisnt.
benign and n1alignant. On the one hand, there are the
Baileys (father and son) and their building and loan
company, its business practice based on a sense of
hurnan needs and a belief in hun1an goodness; on the
other. there is Potter (Lionel Barry111ore). described
explicitly as a spider, rnotivated by greed, egotis111, and
n1iserliness, with no faith in hun1an nature. Potter
belongs to a very deeply rooted tradition. He derives
n1ost obviously fron1 Dickens's Scrooge (the filn1 is set
at Christmas) - a Scrooge disturbingly unrepentant
and irredeernable - but his n1ore distant antecedents
an: in the ogres of fairy tales.
The opposition gives us not only two attitudes
to 111oney and propeny but t\VO father iniagcs (Bailey.
Sr., and Potter). each of who111 givl'S his nan1t· to the
land (Bailey Park, in s111all-town Bedfr,rd F.11ls, and
Pottcrsville, the tcl\vn ·s dark alt..-rnati vl·). Most interl·st-
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Robin Wood
ingly, the two figures (representing Arnerican choices.
American tendencies) find their vivid ideological
extensions in Hollywood genres: the happy, sunny
world of small-town con1edy (Bedford Falls is seen
rnostly in the daytime) and the world of film noir, the
dark underside of Hollywood ideology.
Pottersville - the vision of the town as it would
have been if George had never existed, shown hin1 by
his guardian angel (Henry Travers) - is just as "real"
as (or no ntore stylized than) Bedford Falls. The
iconography of small-town comedy is exchanged.
unmistakably. for that of film noir. with police sirens.
shooting in the streets, darkness, vicious dives, alcohol-
isnt, burlesque shows. strip clubs, and the glitter and
shadows of noir lighting. George's ntother, entbittered
and malevolent, runs a seedy boarding-house; the
good-rime gal/wife-mother opposition, translated into
noir tenns. becornes an opposition of prostitute and
repressed spinster-librarian. The towns emerge as
equally valid intages of America - validated by their
generic fantiliarity.
Beside Shadorv (!( a Doubt, It's a Wondeiful Lf(c
n1anages a convincing and moving affirmation of the
values (and value) of bourgeois family life. Yet what is
revealed, when disaster releases George·s suppressed
tensions, is the intensity of his resentntent of th e
family and desire to destroy it - and with it, in sig-
nificant relationship, his work (his culminating action
is furiously to ovenhrow the drawing board with his
plans for 111ore sn1all-town houses). The film recog-
nizes explicitly that behind every Bedford Falls lurks
a Pottersville, and implicitly that within every Geor~
Bailey lurks an Ethan Edwards of 77,e Searchers. Potter.
ten1pting George, is given the devil's insights into his
suppressed desires. His ren1ark, "You once called n1e a
warped, frustrated old n1an - now you're a warped.
frustrated yc1u1~11 n1an," is an1ply supponed by the evi-
dence the filn1 supplies. What is finally striking about
the film's affin11ation is the extre111e precariousness of
its basis; and Potter survives without remorse, his
crin1e unexposed and unpunished. It may well be
Capra's n1asterpiece. but it is n1ore than that. like all
the b>:reatest An1erican tihns - ft·d by a complex generic
tradition and. beyond that, by the fears and aspirations
of a \vhole culture - it at oncl' transcends its director
and v.·ould be inconceivable \Vithout hint.
Slr,1d11 11• <?fa l),,11/11 has al\vays been arnong the n1ost
popular of Hitchcock ·s n1iddk·- period tihns. \Vith
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Ideology, Genre, Auteur
Figure 9. 1 /r 's a 11·011d,·if11/ Lif t (R_KO. 1\146) affim,s the values ofbouri;eois fonuly life. Produced and dir,·ctcd
hy Frank Capra
critics and public alike, but it has been perceived in
very different, aJn1osc dian1etrically opposed ways. On
its appearance it was greeted by British criti cs as
th e fiJ1n n1arking H itchcock 's coining to tem1S with
America; his British fi hn s were praised for their hun1or
and "social criticis111 •· as much as for their suspe11Se,
and the early A1nerican filn1S, notably R ebecra (1940)
and Suspicion ( I 94 I). see1ned Ii ke atten1pts artificialJy
co reconstruct England in H oll)",vood. In Shatloiv of a
Doubt H itchcock (\vith the aid of Thornton Wilder
and SalJy Benson) at last brought to An1erican 1niddJe-
c lass society the shrewd, satirical, affectionate gaze
previously besto\ved on the British. A lacer generation
of French critics (notably Rohmer and Chabrol in
th ei r H itchcock book) praised the fihn for very dif-
ferent reasons, establishing its strict fom1alisn1
(Truffaut's "un filn1 fonde sur le chiffre 2") and seeing
it as one of the keys to a consistent Catholic interpre-
cation of Hitchcock. a rigorous working out of the,nes
of original sin, the loss of innocence, the fallen world,
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89
the exchange (or interchangeability) of guile.; The
French noted the funuly con1edy beloved of British
critics. if at all, as a n1ildly annoying distraction.
Thar both these vie,vs correspond to irnportant
elen1ent~ in the filn1 and throw light on certain aspects
ofit is beyond doubt; both, however, now appear false
and partial, dependent upon the abstracting of ele-
1nents fron1 the w hole. If the fiJ1n is, in a sense,
co111pletcly do1ninated by 1-litchcock (nothing in it
is un1narked by his artistic personaliry). a con1plete
reading would need to see the s1nall-town-fanuly ele-
ments and the Catho lic cle1nent~ as threads weaving
thro ugh a con1plex fabric in ,vhjch, again. ideological
and generic deten11inancs are crucial.
~
T he kind of "synthetic" analysis I have suggested
(going beyond an interest in the individual auteur)
reveals It's a Wo11d11if11/ Life as a far more potentiall y
subversive film than has been generally recognized,
but it\ subversive elen1ents are. in the end, succcs,~-
fulJy contained. In Shado111 of a Doubt the Hollywood
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
90
ideology I have sketched is shauered beyond convinc-
ing recuperation. One can, however, trace through the
fihn its auentpts to impose itself and render things
"safe." What is in jeopardy is above all the family -
but, given the fantily's central ideological significance,
once that is in jeopardy. everything is. The sntall town
(still rooted in the agrarian dream, in ideals of the
virgin land as a garden of innocence) and the united
happy fantily are regarded as the real sound hean of
Anterican civilization; the ideological project is to
acknowledge the existence of sickness and evil but
preserve the farnily front their contamination.
A nuntber of strategies can be discerned here: the
atternpt to insist on a separation of Uncle Charlie
from Santa R osa; his death at the end of the filrn as
the definitive purging of evil; the production of the
young detective (the healthy, wholesome, srnall-town
rnale) as a 1narriage panner for Young Charlie so that
the farnily ,nay be perpetuated; above all, the attribu-
tion of Uncle Charlie's sexual pathology to a childhood
accident a~ a nteans of exonerating the fantily of the
charge of producing a rnonster, a possibility the
Anterican popular cinenta, with the contemporary
ovenuming of traditional values, can now envisage -
e.g.• It's Alive (Larry Cohen, 1974).
The farnous opening, with its parallel introductions
of Uncle Charlie and Young Charlie, insists on the city
and the srnall town as opposed, sickness and evil being
of the city. As with Bedford Falls/Pottersville, the filrn
dra\vs lavishly on the iconography of usually discrete
genres. Six shots (with all ntoventent and direction -
the bridges, the panning, the editing - consistently
rightward) leading up to the first interior of Uncle
Charlie's roorn give us urban technology, \Vreckage
both huntan (the down-and-outs) and ntaterial (the
dumped cars by the sign "No Dumping Allo,,vcd"),
children playing in the street, the nurnber 13 on the
lodging-house door. Six shots (ntovernent and direc-
tion consistently left) leading to the first interior of
Young Charlie's roorn give us sunny streets ,vith no
street garncs (Santa J~osa evidently has parks). an
orderly town ,vith a sn1iling. paternal polit·t·111:u1 pre-
siding ovl'r traflic a11d pedestrians.
In Catholic tenn~. this is tht· falle11 ,vorld against a
v.·orld of appare11t prt·laps,1rian innocenct·: but it is just
as valid to i11tcrprct the irnages. ;1s i11 It'., ,1 ll-',,11dcryi,i
Li/<'. in tt·nns of the t,vo fact·s of Anterican r;ipitalis1n.
U11rle C:harlie has 111ont·y (thl' fruits of his cri111e~ .ind
his ,ibt·rrant st'xuality) li1tt-rcd in disorder ovtT t:1blc
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Robin Wood
and floor; the Santa Rosa policen1an has behind hint
the Bank of America. The detailed paralleling of unrle
and niece can of course be read as contparison as
much as contrast, and the opposition that of two sides
of the sante coin. The point is clearest in that crucial.
profoundly disturbing scene where film noir erupts
into Santa Rosa itself: the visit to the Tit Two bar.
where Young Charlie is confronted with her alter ego
Louise the waitress, her fonner classntate. The scene
equally invites Catholic and Marxist cornntentaries; its
force arises front the revelation of the fallen world/
capitalist-corruption-and-deprivation at the hean of
the Anterican sntall town. The close juxtaposition of
genres has implications that reach throughout the
whole generic structure of the classical Hollywood
cinema.
The subversion of ideology within the film is
everywhere traceable to Hitchcock's presence, to
the skepticisnt and nihilisn1 that lurk just behind the
jocular facade of his public irnage. His Catholicism is
in reality the lingering on in his work of the darker
aspects of Catholic ntythology: hell without heaven.
The traces are clear enough. Young Charlie wants a
"ntiracle"; she thinks of her uncle as "the one who
can save us" (and her n1other immediately asks, "What
do you ntean, save us?"); when she finds his telegram,
in the very act of sending hers, her reaction is an
ecstatic "He heard 1ne, he heard me!" Hitchcock cuts
at once to a low-angle shot of Uncle Charlie's train
rushing toward Santa Rosa. underlining the effect
,vith an orninous crashing chord on the sound track.
Uncle Charlie is one of the supre1ne ernbodintents
oi the key Hitchcock figure: ambiguously devil and
lost soul. When he reaches Santa Rosa, the in1age is
blackened by its srnoke. Front his first appearance,
c:harlie is associated consistently with a cigar (its
phallic connotations evident front the out,et, in the
sct'ne v.·ith the landlady) and repeatedly shown with
a wreath of srnoke curling around his head (no one
else in the filrn sn1okes except Joe. the displaced father,
,vho has a paten1al pipe. usually unlit). Several inci-
dent~ (the escape frorn the polict·n1en at the beginning.
the garage door sla111n1ed as by remote control) invest
hi111 ,vith a qua~i-supt·niatural power. Rather than
rt'strict the tihn to a c:.11holic n·ading, it scents logical
to connect these ,narks ,vith others; the thread of
~uperstition that n,n~ through the tihn (the number
1.1; the hat on tht· bt·d: "Sing at table and you 'U marry
a cr,1zv, hu~hand"; th<' irrational drc:ad of the utterance,
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 Ideology, Genre, Auteur
Figure 9.2 Alfred Hi"hcoc,k ·• S /111,/,,111 ~{.i 0,,.,/,1 (Univcl"l;II. 1943) «·,•c•I• the oppression of dominant idco lui.,y.
Produced by J,ck H. Sk,rb,IJ
h o wever innocent. o f che forbidden \Vords '"Merry
Widow"') and che telepathy n1otif {the celegran1s. the
rune "'jumping fro1n head to head "') - the \vhole
Hitchcockian ~e nse of life at the n1 ercy of terrible.
unpredictable forces that have to be kept down.
The Hjtchcockian dread o f repres.~ed forces is char-
acteristically accompa1ued by a sense of the eo1ptioess
o f the surf.ice \vorld that represses th en1, and th is
c rucially affect~ th e presentation of che A,nerica n
s1nall- to1,v n fanuly in Shadow ef a Doubt. The \Vam1th
and cogeth en1css, the 111utual re~onsiveness and affec-
tion that Capra so beautifully creates in the Bailey
fanulies, senio r and junior. o f It ·s a J;VCl11dc,ji,I Lifi.· are
here al1nost entirel y la cking - and this despite the fact,
in itself of great ideological interest, tha t the treatn1ent
of th e fan1ily in Shadm11 ef a 0011/11 ha~ generally been
perceived (even, o ne guesses, by 1-Litchcock hinl.'>elf)
as affectionate.
T he n1ost strikin g characceri$tic of the Spencers is
the sepa.rateness o f each 111en1ber; the recurring point
_ ..
_.._
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91
of the celebrated overlapping dialogue is that no o ne
ever listens to what anyone else is sayi ng. Each is
locked in a separate fan tasy \vorld: E1nn1y in the past,
Joe in crin1e, Ann e in books that are read appa rently
less for pleasure than as a n1ea11s of a1na~ing kno\vl-
cdge ~rich ,vhich she has lirtle e111otio11al contact
{though she also believes that everything she reads is
'"true"') . Thl" parents arc trapped in a perry 1naterialisn1
(both respond co You ng Charlie's dissatisfaction with
the assun1ption that she' s talking about n1011ey) and
reliance o n '" honest toil" as the means of using up
energies. In Shadow of a Doubt the ideological in1age
of the srnall- to\vn happy fan1ily beco1nes the flin1siest
facade. Thac so 1nany are nonc::thc::less deceived by it
testifies only to the strength of the ideolo!:(Y - one of
\vhose functions is of course ro inh ibi t the irnagining
of radical alternatives.
I havt· argued else\vhere that the key to Hitchcock"s
fi.l111S i~ less su~pensc:- than sexuality (o r. alren1atively.
thJt his "suspen,e•· al\vays ca rries :i sexual chargt· in
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
92
ways so1neti1nes obvious, so1netin1es esoteric); and that
sexual relationships in his work are inevitably based
on power, the obsession with power and dread of
in1potence being as central to his method as to his
the1natic. In Shadow of a Doubt it is above all sexuality
that cracks apart the family facade. As far as the Hays
Code pennitted, a double incest theme runs through
the film: Uncle Charlie and Emmy, Uncle Charlie and
Young Charlie. Necessarily, this is expressed through
i1nages and n1otifs, never becoming verbally explicit;
certain of the images depend on a suppressed verbal
play for their significance.
For the reunion of brother and sister, Hitchcock
gives us an in1age (Emmy poised left ofscreen, arrested
in n1id-1noven1ent, Charlie right, under trees and sun-
shine) that iconographically evokes the reunion of
lovers (Charlie wants to see En1n1y again as she was
,vhen she was "the prettiest girl on the block"). And
En1n1y's breakdown, in front of her embarrassed friends
and neighbors, at the news of Charlie's imminent
departure is eloquent. As for uncle and niece, they are
introduced sy1nrnetrically lying on beds, Uncle Charlie
fondling his phallic cigar, Young Charlie, prone, hands
behind head. When Uncle Charlie gets off the train
he is bent over a stick, pretending to be ill; as soon as
he sees Young Charlie, he " comes erect," flourishing
the stick. One of his first actions on taking over her
bedroom is to pluck a rose for his buttonhole ("deflow-
ering"). More obviously, there is the business with the
ring, which, as a symbolic token of engagen1ent, not
only links Charlie sexually with her uncle, but also
links her, through its previous ownership, to his suc-
cession of n1erry widows. The filn1 shows sexual
pathology at the heart of the An1erican family, the
necessary product of its repressions and sublin1ations.
As for the "accident" - that old critical stun1bling
block - it pn.-sent~ no problem at all, provided one is
1 R obin Wood. "'()Id Wine. New lloult·s: Stn1,t11r:ili~111 or
Humanism >·· Film Comment 12, no. 6 (Novembcr- D<·ccmbcr
1976): 2:?- 5.
2 Andrew llritton. "I fic.-hcock·, S1•·/11"'1111d: Text Jlld Cnunter-
Text."" Ci11r-A.-ri1>11! no ..1/ 4 ();inuary 1'181,): 7~- !U.
3 Sec Sirk "" Sirk. <·dit<·d by Jon Halliday (London : S,·ckcr &
W,rhuri:/ llriti<h f'ilm Institute. 1971).
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Robin Wood
ready to acknowledge the validity of a psychoanalyti-
cal reading of n1ovies. Indeed, it provides a rather
beautiful exa1nple of the way in which ideology, in
seeking to impose itself, succeeds n1erely in confim1-
ing its own subversion. The "accident" (Charlie was
"riding a bicycle" for the first tin1e, which resulted in
a "collision") can be read as an elen1entary Freudian
metaphor for the trauma of pren1ature sexual awaken-
ing (after which Charlie was "never the san1e again").
The smothering sexual/possessive devotion of a dot-
ing older sister may be felt to provide a clue to the
sexual motivation behind the n1erry- widow 1nurders;
Charlie isn' t interested in money. Indeed, En1my is
connected to the n1erry widows by an associative
chain in which important links are her own practical
widowhood (her ineffectual husband is largely
ignored), her ladies' club, and its leading light, Mrs.
Potter, Uncle Charlie's potential next-in-line.
A fuller analysis would need to dwell on the limita-
tions of Hitchcock's vision, nearer the nihilistic than
the tragic; on his inability to conceive of repressed
energies as other than evil and the surface world that
represses then1 as other than shallow and unfi.1lfilling.
This explains why there can be no heaven corre-
sponding to Hitchcock ·s hell, for every vision of
heaven that is not n1erely negative is rooted in a
concept of the liberation of the instincts, the resur-
rection of the body, which Hitchcock 1nust al,vays
deny. But my final stress is less on the evaluation of J
particular fi.ln1 or director than on the implications for
a criticism of the Hollywood cinen1a of the notions
of interaction and n1ultiple detemunacy I have been
en1ploying. Its roots in the Hollywood genres, and in
the very ideological structure it so disturbingly sub-
verts, make Shado1l1 ofa Doubt so much more suggestive
and significant a work than Hitchcock the bourgeois
entertainer could ever have guessed.
Notes
4 Peter Wo lkn, S(\?US anti Atr,mi,~i! in tlrr C'inrma. xi. cJn.
(llloon1111i;ion and lon,fon : lnd1JnJ Univ,·rs1ty Pres.,, 1972).
pp. '14- 1II I.
:, S,·,· En, Rohm,·r .md Cl.iudc Chabr,,I. Jfird,c.><k: ·1111· hr.11
,:.,,ty•F.111, Films. tr.tm,Lltl'<l hy Stanlc.:y I lodunan (Nl·w York:
Un!(ar. I')7'1). p. 7~.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

llraudy. L,·o ,nd Oidt«cin. Morris (e,h.). Crr,11 Fi/111 Vir,w,>r.< : .1
Criri.-,1/ ,·l,11/1<•1,i~y. New York: ()xforJ Univ.·r..it)· Pre"· I '178.
C.uneron. Ian (,·d.). ;\/,,,.ir R,·adrr. New York and Washini.,ion:
Prae11:,•r/Lor1do11: November Bo,lks. 1972.
C~ountldon, l'ic.·rre!. with Pil"rrt' Sauval,t\,', .-imrri<,m Dircr1c,r.<, :? vols.
New York: MrGraw-Hill. l'ltU.
(;rah:un, Peter (ed.). '/1,r ,-..;,.,,, 11:11,·. London: Scck,·r &: WJrburi:,
I96~.
H ess. John. "LJ l'olitiqu,· des Auteur,;," J11111p C:111. no. I (May-J,me
197.J), pp. l'>-22. and no. 2 (July-Aul,!ust 197-1) . pp. 21l- 2.
Hillier. Jim (,·d.). C,1/1i,·rs ,/11 Ci11,'ma: ·17,.. 19.50s: f',.'n••R<'<1li.<111,
H,,1/yu,,,,I. i'Jrw 11 ',u•f. C:.imbridi;,·. MA: H:irvard Uni\'er.;iry Pre<.<.
1985.
• lillier. Jun (ed.). C,r/,irrs ,fo Ci11h11a: ·17,.. I '160,: '°"""'
11 ;,,.,, ,,·,,,,
c;m•mtt, Rtt'l'd/11,rti,~e //(tllyu't)(td. Camhr1dgc-' MA: Harvard
Univer.<ity Pr<-<s. I'/>!(>.
Kad. Paulin,·. '/1,r (.'iri:1•11 K<111t' ll.>,•k. New York: Little 13rown.
197 1.
Digitized by Google
Further Reading
Ki1>,-,;.Jim. I fori:m,s 11 , ., ,. 131oornington/London: Sed,er & Warburi:.
1'169. Revised edn .. London: British Film Institute. 2tKH.
Lapsey. Robert and Westlake. Mich,d. l'ilm 711<•ory: ,111 l111ri•,l11ai,,11.
Manche5ter, UK: Manch,c<ter University Pres,, 1988.
S.1rri~. Andn·w. 77Jt• ,-t men·rtm Ci11n1111. DittYMrs and Dirt•lli,tn.\, 1929-
1'168. New York: Dutton, I'll,!!. Reprinted Chicagc,: University
of Chicogo Pre,.,, . I 'J85.
SJrri<. Andrew (ed.). /111,•n,i,•ws wiri, 1-'ilm Virrac>rs. New York: 13obbs-
Merrill, 1967.
Starn. Rolx-rt. Fi/111 '/1u•,>ry: .111 l111rc•d11aim1. Nnv York .111d ()xford:
131ackwcll. 2<KMI.
Wood, R obin. Hiul,1,,•k'; Fi/111.<. London: A. Zwemmer/ New York:
A.S. Uam"', 1~>65.
Wood, R obin. Hvw,ud H,,,,.ks. Loudon: Secker & Worbur~l 13ritish
Film ln,titutc. Rcvi"·d cdn .. Detroit: W.iync Stat<· Univer<ity
l'r<'<.<, 21Mlh.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Digitized by G~(_g_le
Original from
. 1,INIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN _, ...- _.
........
 Part II
The Contexts of Authorship

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Digitized by Google Original from
UNIVERSITY O~MICHIGAN
 10
The Death of the Author
Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes was a major figure in ideological analysis and deconstruction. His publications
include Writing Degree Zero (1953), S/Z (19TT), and Image-Music-Text (19TT). His early book
Mythologies, first published in France in 1957 but not translated and published in English until
1972, was a pioneering work in the field of cultural studies, offering brief semiological analyses
of selected artifacts and events of popular culture. S/Z, a detailed discussion of a novella by
French writer Honore de Balzac, presents a model of semiological analysis, introducing a
system of cultural "codes" that work to produce textual meaning. Although he seldom wrote
about cinema, Barthes' broad semiological approach to cultural texts ranging from the tradi-
tional arts to popular rituals and advertising as systems of signs was highly influential in film
studies because it offered the possibility of a more objective, scientific analysis of films. In
this piece on "The Death of the Author," first published in 1968 and translated for inclusion in
Image-Music-Text, Barthes argues that a work of art contains no fixed meaning but is rather
a field of potential meanings that may be taken up by readers, thus dethroning the auteur of
any privileged status in interpretation.

In his story Sa"asine llalzac, describing a c;1strato dis-
guised as a wo111an, writes the following scntencl·:
'111is 1vas 1von1a11 l,ersl'!f. 111itl, /,er s11ddc11 fears, l11"r i"atio11al
111/,i111s, /,er i11sti11rtivc tVOrries, her in1p<'l11011s boldness, l1t'r
_f11ssi11gs, a11d /,er delicious se11sibility.' Who is spc:aking
thus? Is it the: hero of the story bent on ren1aining
if,"llOrant of the castrato hidden beneath the \vo111an?
Is it Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal
experience with a philosophy of Won1an? Is it Balzac
the author professing 'literary' ideas on fe111ininity? Is
it universal wisdo1n? Ron1antic psychology? We shall
never know, for the good reason that \Vriting is the
destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.
Writing is that neutral. cornpositc.-, oblique space
\vhere our subject slips a\vay, the negative wht>re all
identity is lost, starting with the vt.>ry idt."ntity of the
body writing.
No doubt it has always been that ,vay. As soon as
a fact is na"ated no longer with a view to acting
directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say,
finally outside of any function other than that of the
very practice of the sy111bol itself, this disconnection
occurs, the voice loses it~ origin, the author entt·rs
into his o"vn death, writing begins. The scnst:' of this
pht:'no111enon, however, has varied; in ethnographic
socit:'ties the responsibility tor a narrative is nevt:'r
assun1ed by a person but by a n1ediator, shan1an or
rebtor whost:' 'perfonnancc • - the n1astery of the nar-
rative code - n1ay possibly be ad111ired but nevc.-r his
'genius'. The author is a n1odcn1 figure, a product of

H.ol.mJ Uanhc.-'i, "T hl· l h·.irh ,,f rhl· Autlu,r. " Jlf' 141 H fro m lm,,.i:,•:.\/mri t ' fr.\l. L'tl. .uhl tr.Ill'•. S1q,hL·11 Ht•.uh (Nt.·w Y,,rk: H 1ll .md W .m~. 1977). On~_.,,11.-lly puh-
h<1hc.·J m Frcnrh {1'Jt,l'tJ Cnpyn~ht 1' I" 77 hy Sh.'J'ht·n fl c.·Jth, lt,4,.•pn1111.·d hy p a m1v•h"lU o t I hll .mt! \V.111~. ,1 dl\ ' IMOn of F.1rr.u. ~tr:u,, :mJ (;1mux. l l (' ,111.._I
Eduiom Ju Sc-uil.

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
98 Roland Barthes
our society insofar as, e1nerging fron1 the Middle Ages
with English ernpiricisn1, French rationalism and the
personal faith of the Refom1ation, it discovered
the prestige of the individual, of, as it is rnore nobly
put, the 'hun1an person'. It is thus logical that in
literature it should be this positivism, the epitorne
and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has
attached the greatest in1portance to the 'person' of the
author. The author still reigns in histories of literature,
bioi,rraphies of writers, interviews, n1agazines, as in the
very consciousness of n1en of letters anxious to unite
their person and their work through diaries and
n1en1oirs. The i1nage of literature to be found in ordi-
nary culture is tyrannically centred on the author,
his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criti-
cisrn still consists for the n1ost part in saying that
Baudelaire's work is the failure of Baudelaire the n1an,
Van Gogh's his 111adness, Tchaikovsky's his vice. The
explanation of a work is ahvays sought in the n1an or
,von1an who produced it. as if it were always in the
end, through the n1ore or less transparent allegory of
the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author
'confiding' in us.
Though the sway of the Author ren1ains powerful
(the new criticism has often done no n1ore than con-
solidate it), it goes without saying that certain writers
have long since atten1pted to loosen it. In France,
Mallam1e was doubtless the first to see and to foresee
in its full extent the necessity to substitute language
itself for the person who until then had been sup-
posed to be its owner. For hirn, for us too, it is
language which speaks, not the author; to write is.
through a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be
confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist
novelist), to reach that point where only language acts,
'perfon11s', and not '111e'. Mallanne's entire poetics
consists in suppressing the author in the interests of
writing (,vhich is, as will be seen, to restore the place
of the reader). Valery, encun1bered by a psychology of
the Ego, considerably diluted Mallanne's theory but.
his taste for classicisrn leading hirn to tun1 to the
k·ssons of rhetoric, he never stopped calling into ques-
tion and deriding the Author; he stressed the linguistic
and. as it were, 'hazardous' nature of his activity, and
throughout his prose ,vorks he n1ilitated in favour of
the essentially verbal condition of literature. in the fal·<:'
of ,vhich all recourse to the ,vriter's interiority St'l'lned
to hin1 pure superstition. Proust hi111sel( despite the
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apparently psychological character of what are called
his analyses, was visibly concerned with the task of
inexorably blurring, by an extreme subtilization, the
relation between the writer and his characters; by
making of the narrator not he who has seen and felt
nor even he who is writing, but he who is J11>i11}! t<l
rvrite (the young rnan in the novel - but, in fact, hov,·
old is he and who is he? - wants to write but cannot;
the novel ends when writing at last becornes possible).
Proust gave n1odem writing its epic. By a radical
reversal, instead of putting his life into his novel, as is
so often n1aintained, he made of his very life a work
for which his own book was the n1odel; so that it is
clear to us that Charlus does not in1itate Montesquiou
but that Montesquiou - in his anecdotal, historical
reality - is no n1ore than a secondary fr.1gn1ent, derived
fi-0111 Chari us. Lastly, to go no further than this prehis-
tory of1nodemity, Surrealisrn, though unable to accord
language a supreme place (language being system and
the aim of the 1nove1nent being, rornantically, a direct
subversion of codes - itself rnoreover illusory: a code
cannot be destroyed, only 'played off), contributed to
the desacrilization of the irnage of the Author by
ceaselessly recornn1ending the abrupt disappoinm1ent
of expectations of n1eaning (the famous surrealist
'jolt'), by entrusting the hand with the task of writing
as quickly us possible what the head itself is unaware
of (autornatic ,vriting), by accepting the principle and
the experience of several people writing together.
Leaving aside literature itself (such distinctions really
becorning invalid), linguistics has recently provided the
destnrction of the Author with a valuable analytical
tool by showing that the ,vhole of the enunciation is
an e1npty process. functioning perfectly without there
being any need for it to be filled with the person of
the interlocutors. Linguistically. the author is never
rnore than the instance writing, just as I is nothing
other than the instance saying /: language knows a
'subject' , not a 'person·, and this subject, en1pty outside
of the very enunciation \vhich defines it, suffices to
rnake language 'hold together'. suffices, that is to say,
to exhaust it.
The ren1oval of the Author (one could talk here
,vith Brecht of ,1 veritable 'distancing', the Author
din1inishing like a figurine at the far end of the liter-
ary st,1g,·) is not nu:rely :111 historical fact or an act oi
\Vriting: it utterly transfonns the 1uoden1 text (or -
,vhich is the saint' thing - the t<'Xt is henceforth n1ade
'
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UNIVERSITY OF MIO:JIGAN
 The Death of the Author
and read in such a way that at all its levels the author
is absent). The ten1porality is different. The Author,
when believed in, is always conceived of as the past
of his own book: book and author stand auton1atically
on a single line divided into a bef(lre and an after. The
Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say
that he exists before it. thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in
the san1e relation of antecedence to his work as a
father to his child. In con1plete contrast. the moden1
scriptor is born sin1ultaneously with the text, is in no
\vay equipped with a being preceding or exceeding
the writing, is not the subject \vith the book as pre-
dicate; there is no other tirne than that of the
enunciation and every text is eternally written /r1•rt·
1111d 110w. The fact is (or. it follows) that writing can no
longer designate an operation of recording, notation,
representation, 'depiction' (as the Classics would say);
rather, it designates exactly \vhat linguists. referring to
Oxford philosophy, call a perfonnative, a rare verbal
fonn (exclusively given in the first person and in the
present tense) in which the enunciation has no other
content (contains no other proposition) than the act
by which it is uttered - son1ething like the / declare·
of kings or the / sing of very ancient poets. Having
buried the Author, the rnoden1 scriptor can thus no
longer believe, as according to the pathetic view of
his predecessors, that this hand is too slow for his
thought or passion and that consequently. n1aking a
law of necessity, he n1ust en1phasize this delay and
indefinitely 'polish' his forn1 . For hin1, on the contrary,
the hand, cut off fron1 any voice, borne by a pure
gesture of inscription (and not of expression). traces a
field without origin - or which, at least, has no other
origin than language itself. language which ceaselessly
calls into question all origins.
We know now that a text is not a line of words
releasing a single 'theological' n1eaning (the 'rnessage'
of the Author-God) but a n1ulti-dimensional space in
which a variety of writings. none of thern original,
blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations
drawn from the innun1erable centres of culture. Similar
to Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, at
once sublin1e and cornic and \Vhose profound ridicu-
lousness indicates precisely the truth of \Vriting, the
writer can only iniitate a gesture that is always ante-
rior, never original. His only power is to rnix \Vritings,
to counter the ones with the others. in such a \vav, as
never to rest on any one of the111. f>id he •Nish to
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99
express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner
'thing' he thinks to 'translate' is itself only a ready-
formed dictionary, its words only explainable through
other words, and so on indefinitely; son1ething expe-
rienced in exen1plary fashion by the young Thon1as
de Quincey, he who was so good at Greek that in
order to translate absolutely n1odern ideas and images
into that dead language. he had, so Baudelaire tells us
(in Paradis Art!ficiels). 'created for hin1Self an unfailing
dictionary, vastly n1ore extensive and con1plex than
those resulting from the ordinary patience of purely
literary thernes'.
Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer
bears within hin1 passions, hun1ours, feelings, irnpres-
sions, but rather this inunense dictionarv, fron1 which
he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never
does rnore than inutate the book, and the book itself
is only a tissue of signs, an irnitation that is lost,
infinitely deferred.
Once the Author is removed, the clairn to decipher
a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author
is to in1pose a lirnit on that text. to furnish it with a
final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception
suits criticisrn very well, the latter then allotting itself
the i,nponant task of discovering the Author (or its
hypostases: society, history. psyche, liberty) beneath the
\Vork: when the Author has been found, the text is
'explained' - victory to the critic. Hence there is no
surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the
Author has also been that of the Critic, nor again in
the fact that criticism (be it new) is today under-
rnined along with the Author. In the n1ultiplicity of
\.\•riting, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deci-
phered; the structure can be followed, 'run' (like the
thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level.
but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is
to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly
posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out
a systen1atic exen1ption of n1eaning. In precisely this
way literature (it would be better fron1 now on to say
111ritin,(!), by refusing to assign a 'secret', an ultirnate
rneaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liber-
ates what rnay be called an anti-theological activity. an
activity that is tn1ly revolutionary since to refuse to
fix n1eaning is. in the end, to refuse God and his
hypostases - reason. science, law.
Let us co111e back to the Ualzac sentence. No one.
no 'person·. says it: its source. its voice. is not the true
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
100
place of the writing, which is reading. Another - very
precise - exan1ple will help to 111ake this clear: recent
research (J.-P. Ven1ant') has de111onstrated the consti-
tutively an1biguous nature of Greek tragedy, its texts
being woven fron1 words with double n1eanings that
each character understands unilaterally (this perpetual
nusu nderstanding is exactly the 'tragic'); there is,
however, son1eone who underst.-inds each word in its
duplicity and who, in addition, hears the very deafness
of the characters speaking in front of hin1 - this
so1neone being precisely the reader (or here, the lis-
tener). Thus is revealed the total existence of writing:
a text is made of 111ultiple writings, drawn fron1 111any
cultures and entering into n1utual relations of dialo-
!,>ue, parody, contestarion, but there is one place where
this 111ultiplicity is focused and that place is the reader,
not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the:-
space on which all the quotations that 1nake up a
I !Cf )<an-Pierre V<·nunt (with P1<rr<· Vid,1-N.,qu,·tl. ,\l)'tlw rr
IT,~\!i-dit· ('II cn·n · 1111ti,·1111t', PJri~ 1972, c~
r- pp. 19- 40, 9t)- IJI.I
Digitized by Google
Roland Barthes
vvriting are inscribed without any of then! being lost;
a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.
Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the
reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is
si1nply that someone who holds together in a single
field all the traces by which the written text is consti-
tuted. Which is why it is derisory to conde1nn the
new writing in the name of a hun1anis1n hypocriti-
cally turned cha1npion of the reader's rights. Classic
criticis1n has never paid any attention to the reader;
for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We
are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no
longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of
good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside.
ignores, sn1others, or destroys; we know that to give
\Vriting its future, it is necessary to overthrow the
n1yth: the birth of the reader n1ust be at the cost of
the:- death of the Author.
Note
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 11

The English Cine-Structuralists

Charles W. Eckert

Charles W. Eckert taught in the English Department at Indiana University, where his research
was on Shakespeare and film and Hollywood cinema of the 1930s. His published work
includes the collection Focus on Shakespearean Films, and articles on the ideology of stars
such as Shirley Temple ("a kind of artifact thrown up by a unique concatenation of social and
economic forces") and Bette Davis in the Warner Bros. gangster film Marked Woman (1937).
In this essay, which originally appeared in the New York-based magazine Film Comment in
1973, as the author himseH explains in a followup essay, he was looking at the work of a
group of English critics "faulting some of them for what I considered an improper and unpro-
ductive application of the structural method of Levi-Strauss to the study of directors." Eckert's
critique, in which he considers how auteur-structuralism seems to slide from a descriptive
method to an evaluative toot, elicited attacks in tum from others, including Geoffrey Nowell-
Smith, who acknowledged the distortions of Levi-Strauss for the purposes of film analysis.

In the late 1960s, just when the politiq11c ties a11tc11rs see111 in order before discussing the future of the
began to look shopworn and foxed at the edges, a 111ethod they have developed. But before assessing it,
group of English critics gave it a hard inspection. we must define the major forms of criticisn1 which are
stripped it to its franu.-work, and refurbished it with a today called structuralist and with which their work
bright new critical n1aterial called structuralisn1. In its is easily confused. Although structural insights have
new habit, and viewed &0111 a distance, auteuris111 always underpinned conceptual thinking in philoso-
ntight pass as the creation of Claude Levi-Strauss, or phy and the sciences (Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, Jung),
Roland Barthes, or Christian Metz - or even such un- their wide n1odern vogue derives from the structural
structuralists as Freud and Jung - though certainly it linguists. The basic insights of de Saussure. Jacobson.
bears little rese1nblance to Truffaut and Sarris. But seen and others have been rarnified into three forn1s of
close up it quickly proves to have few distinctive fea- structural criticisn1 of special interest to filrn critics:
tures, to pertain, in fact, to all its fathers - or to none the study of linguistic structures in narrative, 1nainly
of them - like a ragan1uffin pron1iscuously conceived by Todorov and Bart hes; the sentiological study of the
in the streets and dropped on the nearest doorstep. 'language· of cinen1a by Metz, Pasolini, Eco and others
The English critics in question are Geoffrl"y (really an atte1npt to detennine how cinerna signifies
Nowell-Sn1ith, Peter Wollen, Jin1 Kitses, Alan Lovt"II, and whether it can be analyzed like a language); and
and Ben Brewster. An assessn1ent of their ,vork ,vould Levi-Strauss 's study of the underlyin~ structures of

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tion. R,·printC"d by pl.'nm~~ion of 1h-.· F,1111 \.t1l·h:1y nf l.1111,:oln Ct·m..,·r.

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
102 Charles W. Eckert
thought and of the codes en1ployed in the dialectical
systems which operate in n1ythic thought.
The last form of structural study most closely
approximates that used by the English critics, and is the
one I shall concentrate upon. The study of narrative
structure in fihn en1ploying purely linguistic analogues
does not look promising; in fact, Barthes has said as
111uch and, more importantly, has professed to find little
that is intellectually interesting in the cine1na (certainly
a co111ment on his n1ethod rather than the cinerna).
Metz, the most thorough of the sen1iologists, seen1s
satisfied that the study of filn1 as a language is limited
in scope and in the applicability of the insights it
achieves. But we have not as yet seen any thorou~h
atten1pt to apply Levi-Strauss's study of mythic thought
and codes to fihn. I ernphasize the ,vord thorough
because Levi- Strauss's name and his rnethod are fre-
quently alluded to by the English auteur-structuralists.
Perhaps the best way to elaborate these con1plex
rnatters is, first, to assess the work of this group of
critics and to co,npare their methods ,yjth those for-
mulated by Levi-Strauss, and then to define both the
achievements and the pronuse of auteur-structuralis,n,
and of structuralism in general. Fron1 this point on,
any reference I n1ake to structuralisrn should be con-
sidered a reference to Levi-Strauss's n1ethod. (For
those interested in the recent Cal,ier.s disparagernent
of structural study as opposed to a Marxist-ideological
analysis I have appended a brief note. 1) The first
influential work - indeed, the generative locus for the
auteur-structuralist criticisn1 we are considering - was
Geoffrey No,vell-Smith 's L11<l1it10 Vi.sco11ti (1967). This
work influenced Peter Wollen, whose Sig11.s and J\,fea11i1~((
in the Cinema (1969) in tun1 gave rise to a series of
articles concerned with stn1cturalisn1 in Screen. Nowell-
Srnith 1noved from the assertions that authorship is a
necessary dimension fo r the study o f films, and that
'the defining characteristics of an author's work are
not those that are most readily apparent,' to his rnain
thesis: 'the purpose of criticism becon1es therefore to
uncover behind the superficial contrasts of subject and
treatn1ent a structural hard core of basic and often
recondite rnotifs. ' 2 The principal drawbacks to this
approach, he found, were a radical narrowing of the
field of inquiry, the 'possibiliry of an author·s ,vork
changing over tin1e and of the stnictures being vari-
able and not constant·, and the.- teniptation to ncglt·ct
the n1yriad aspc.-cts of a fihn 's production and aestht·tic
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effect that a study of rnotifs does not in1pinge upon.
In Visconti's filn1s Nowell-Snuth did not find a 'sing!.:
and comprehensive structure,' largely because Visconti
has developed with the years and has adopted many
styles of filnunaking.
As a structuralist approach this is tentative and
qualified indeed. And Nowell-Smith's entire study of
Visconti brings under analysis many aspects of pro-
duction, history, and stylistic influence that have no
bearing upon structure, yet are considered indispens-
able for understanding the films. Yet the dominant
irnpression one receives fron1 this thoughtful, indepen-
dent analysis is that structured themes are indeed at
the hean of Visconti's enterprise and Nowell- South's
critical interest. In the later discussion of Levi-Strauss
I will atternpt to position and to assess Nowell-Smith's
method. For the 111on1ent let us consider Peter
Wollen' s use of his conceptions.
Sig11s and 1\llea11i11J{ in the Cinema n1ust be, after Fi/111
Fomr and 14'/iat i.s Ci11ema?, the n1ost widely read work
on filtn theory among present-day filnl students. Its
faults are n1any, but they have proven to be seminal
faults. spawrung as rnany ideas and thoughtful reac-
tions as the Bazin-Eisenstein controversies. The
centrality of this work ,nakes its views on auteur-
structuralisn1 especially in1portant. Wollen begins v.,ith
quotations front Nov;ell-Sn1ith 's study, then chooses
the films of Howard Hawks as a test case for the
'structural approach.' He first dichotomizes Hawks's
filn1s into two categories: the adventure drama and
the crazy comedy (he here follows Robin Wood, who
also has structuralist affinities). These types 'express
inverse views of the world. the positive and negative
poles of the Hawksian vision. ' 3 An awareness of
'differences and oppositions,' he continues, must be
cultivated along with the awareness of 'resen1blances
and repetitions' usually found in then1atic or motif-
seeking criticisrn. He then cites n1ain sets of antinomies
in Hawks's work and notes how they break down into
lesser sets - any of which n1ay overlap or be 'fore-
grounded in different 111ovies. ·
But W ollen·s rnost intensive criticisn1 is saved for
John Ford. in whose work he finds the 'master antin-
0111y' of ,vilden1ess and garden {the tenns are derived
by Wollen front Hl·nry Nash Srnith's 11,e Virgin Land).
The entire analysis of Ford re,1ches its principal con-
clusion in this st;1tt·n1ent: ·ford's work is 1nuch richer
than th.It of Hawks and .. . this is revealed by a struc-
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 The English Cine-Structuralists
tural analysis; it is the richnt>ss of the shifting relations
between antino1nies in Ford's work that 1nakcs hin1
a great artist, beyond being simply an undoubted
auteur.• This statement captures the essence of
Wollen 's species of structuralisn1, just as the search for
a 'hard core of basic and often recondite n1otifs' detint>s
Nowell-S1nith 's.
Both of thest> definitions wt>re ham1onious with
the intentions of a work appearing in the sa1ne year
as Wollen's - Ji1n Kitses's Horizons West. Kitses began,
' But I should make clear what I mean by auteur
theory. In n1y view the term describes a basic princi-
ple and a n1ethod: the idea of personal authorship in
the cinema and - of key in1portance - the concomi-
tant responsibility to honour all of a director's works
by a systematic examination in order to trace charac-
teristic then1es, structures and fonnal qualities.·• Kitses
also draws upon Smith's 77,e Vi~i11 l.And for the insight
that the in1age of the West has a dialectical fom1: 'Thus
central to the form we have a philosophical dialectic,
an an1biguous cluster of meanings and attitudes that
provide the traditional then1atic structure of the genre.'
l{jcses provides a chart listing the principal antinomies,
and notes that polar tern1s may be transposed in the
course of an auteur's developn1ent. His study of indi-
vidual auteurs is very subtle, yet, as I will show later,
not as close in spirit to Levi-Strauss as Wollen's.
The works of Nowell-Smith. Wollen and Kitses, all
produced in the late Sixties, might have represented a
mere eddy in the current of auteur criticism had dieir
methods and their cause not been taken up by other
English critics. In the March/ April 1969 issue of
Screen Alan Lovell published a strongly dissenting criti-
cisn1 of the work of Robin Wood, finding it deficient
in analytic method and concerned with gaining assent
rather than giving proof as it n1easured films and
directors against an established syste111 of beliefs
and values. As an antidote, Lovell proposed an auteur-
structuralist method strongly resen1bling those already
discussed: ' any director creates his filn1s on the basis
of a central structure and ... all of his fihns can be
seen as variations or develop1nents of it. ' 5 To illustrate
his method he analyzed a patten1 found in Arthur
Penn's work consisting of a polarity between social
groups and heroes, and a f.1ther-figure who mediates
between the two (both the groups and heroes arc
prone to violence; the fathers 111ediate· the violent
can1ps much as the Prince does in Rlll11ct> t111d ]11/ict).
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103
Lovell's article began a chain- reaction of response
including an attack on Lovell's structuralisn1 by Robin
Wood, a reply by Lovell, an independent defense of
Wood by John C. Murray, and a well- infom1cd discus-
sion of the structural contributions of Barthcs. M etz
and others by Ben Brewster.b
Although 1nuch of the discussion is contentious,
,vhen one pares avvay the ad ho111inen1 forensics and
the quite pointless debates over the 'value' of totally
divergent critical n1ethods. one finds both the inten-
tions and the linutations of auteur-structuralist
criticis1n clarified. Both Wood and Murray note that
Kitses, Wollen, and Lovell are 111aking judgments of
the worth of directors on such bases as the clarity
of the antinonlic structures or the con1plexity of their
interrelations (Wollen on Ford; Lovell on Penn).
Structuralisn1, Wood and Murray contend. is not used
as a mere analytic tool, but as a measure of a director's
1naturity or artistic stature. And they find its discover-
ies - the pairs of opposites, the patten1s of interchange
- banal, of no great significance. mere critical jargon
that cannot help us distinguish between a great filn1
and a highly polarized and structured cartoon by
Tex Avery or Chuck Jones (Murray).
There is so much oversin1plification, obtuseness.
and downright unfain1ess running through the whole
debate that one 1nust resist the ten1ptation to leap in.
But what one principally feels is the need for a re-
truing of tenns, for a fresh look at the notion of
structuralisn1, and at the suitability of a structural study
of a director's body of work - or of filnis in general.
W e n1ust begin with the writings of the doyen of
structuralism, Claude Levi- Strauss. There are two
indispensable essays, both of then1 atten1pts to formu-
late and delinut the uses of structuralis1n. 'The
Structural Study of Myth' (1958). 7 and the 'Overture'
to 111e Raw a11d the Cooked (1964).ij The essays are so
broad-ranging, especially the latter. that we would do
best to define our interests before aproaching then1.
We rnight express these interests as a series of qut>s-
tions directly bearing upon fihn: Has a tru ly
Levi-Straussian study of a director been n1ade? In
what would it consist? Should structural study be
lin1ited to directors, or has it pron1ise for gcnn.·s of
tihn, tht• output of individual studios. or rnore special-
ized aspects of tihns such as visuals and sound tracks?
(.)r is fihn too syncretic and co111plex an art fonn to
yit"ld anythin~ of value to such an approach?
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
104 Charles W. Eckert
We should begin with a definition of Levi-Strauss's
object (1nyth) and the analytic method he devised to
coniprehend it. Levi-Strauss's object is relatively si1nple
and unifom1: a body of myth (usually shon narratives)
collected by ethnographers and anthropologists in a
given region of the world. It is imniaterial whether
one has all the available versions of a 1nyth or is able
to assess the ' reliability' of one's sources: n1yths are
intenninable and have no definitive or 'ur' fom1. All
versions of a given n1yth constitute the 1nyth; and one
can begin the task of analysis with any of the versions.
The n1yths are analyzed sequentially, each 'gross unit'
of the analysis consisting of a tenn and a relation
\vhich are one half of an antino1nic pair: Oedipus kills
his father - the Sphinx's death gives life to Thebes. A
given tem1 1nay enter into n1any relations; the sun, for
instance, n1ay figure in the first relation in the pairs.
It gives light - darkens; bun1s - freezes; causes growth
- causes death. Or it 111ay be an1bivalent and represent
both relations: causes drought - gives new life. Its
value at any n101nent in a 111yth n1ust, therefore, be
deten1tined through careful assessn1ent of its function
in (usually) a nun1ber of polarized relations. It is the
next analytic step, however, that is n1ost unique in
Levi-Strauss's n1ethod: 'The true constituent units of
a n1yth are not the isolated relations but bundles o_f sue/,
relations, and it is onlv, as bundles that these relations
ca n be put to use and conibined so as to produce a
n1eaning. "1 Levi- Strauss's brilliance resides in his ability
to discern central 'bundles' of relations in n1yths and
to suggest why they are 111eaningful - a task that
requires 111ore intelligence and discenunent than ana-
lytic rigor. One cannot, without extended quotation
fron1 Levi-Strauss's work, show how the analysis pro-
ceeds. I can only refer the reader to specific passages
and to conunentaries on the n1ethod by interpreters. 1"
The entire task is additionally con1plicated by the
possibilities for pennutation among the relations one
is analyzing: 'two opposite tenns with no inten11ediary
.1hvays tend to be replaced by t\VO equivalent tenns
\vhich adn1it of a third one as n1ediator; then one of
the polar tenns and the n1edi.1ror beco111es replaced
by a new triad. and so on.' 11 These 'transfi.innations·
of the 111yth usually t'Xpress the sarne opposition(s) by
,vorking through a variety of si1nilarly structurt>d tax-
ono1nies - in prin1itivt' societies, taxonornies of plants.
.1nin1als. ~tones, heavenlv, bodies ..ind so forth . Thl'
oppo~ition sun- rnoon 111ay c.1rry the san1e n1c,111ing .1~
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the opposition eagle-bear, even though the tem1s are
drawn &0111 separate taxonomies.
Again and again, Levi-Strauss emphasizes the
imponance of polarized thought ('myth works from an
awareness of oppositions to their progressive media-
tion') and the dynamic,.fluctuatin~ nature of this thought.
Polarization is basic to all processes of thought and
language, as a form of clarification and ordering of
the world about us; dynamism reflects both the
ongoing process of thought and - this is n1ost crucial
- the essential nature of n1yth: an obsessive repetitive
conceptualizing of a dilenm1a or contradiction, the
meaning of which is hidden from the narrator who
rather con1pulsively tells and retells versions of
the n1yth.
Structural study consists, then, in breaking down
n1any versions of a myth into significant ele1nents,
arranging these in the polarized patterns natural to
n1yth, and noting clusters of relations. One discovers
the core of the n1yth only upon an examination of all
of the individual analyses. What the 1nyth is 'about'
usually proves to be something quite different from its
surface 1neaning. If its content were not hidden fron1
the narrators, they would have no reason to obses-
sively reshape it, retell it, and accord it such significance
in their lives. Once a myth has been penetrated and
understood, it dies; it no longer functions as an expres-
sion of a dilemma or contradiction. The nonliving
111ythologies of the world are fossilized dynamic
thought which has been discarded because it was
resolved, outgrown, or made irrelevant by events or
cultural evolution. The analyst begins his task on the
san1e footing with the creator of myth - in a condi-
tion of ignorance. If he is assiduous he can read the
riddle at the center of the n1yth and see how all of
its versions are related.
This is all general and abstruse and can only be
clarified through specific applications to film. I will
take up the n1ost provocative of Levi- Strauss's insights
in the E!eneral order of their in1ponance and breadth
of applil·ation. We will then be in a position to asst."SS
the achieve111ents of currl'nt auteur-structural studies
and to suggest further uses that 111ight be n1ade of the
structural appro;1ch.
Ul·fiirc tilrns can he eq uatt•d \vith n1yths they 1nust
fultil one ti111da1nt·ntal condition: they 1nust originate
in .1 co11111u1nity posse~~t·d of a ·co1n1non conception
of tht· ,,·orld. · (.lnly in such a co1111nunity can the sort
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 The English Cine-Structuralists
of dialectical systern typical of rnyth be coherent.
Given this criterion, myth may be 'any manifestation
of the mental or social activities of the comn1unities
under consideration.' 12 Let us measure film against this
prin1ary criterion. Film history is usually written a.~ an
analvsis
•
of cornmunal blocks of art, defined as national
schools or styles (Gennan expressionism, Italian neo-
realism), as international n1oven1ents (Surrealisn1, the
New Wave) or as studio-centered styles (Biograph,
Ufa, Warner Brothers). Such tidy bins always do vio-
lence to the dynamic, creative interplay of art history,
but they are probably no less arbitrary than the 'con1-
munities· that Levi-Strauss defines for study. And they
do reflect the fact that frlms are generally produced as
conrmunal efforts. Hollywood at its zenith resen1bled
a con1plex social structure not unlike the family-clan-
village structures that Levi-Strauss works with. Within
the larger con1munity called Hollywood there existed
the distinctive cultures of Warners, MGM, Paramount,
Republic, and others, and within these, units n1ade up
of given production tean1s or devoted to creating
certain genres of fihn (topical, con1edy, epic, serial).
Whether Warner Brothers or Ufa or the Russian
experin1entalists \Vere possessed of 'a comrnon con-
ception of the world' is a n1atter for research and
study, not for arbitrary pronouncernent. But if one
can draw upon the kind of intuitive judgment built
up from seeing filn1s, this criterion seerns likely to be
1net. One would have to allow for the syncretic forces
that affect all con1n1unities in the n1odem world (Lang
travels to Hollywood, Kubrick to England), but the
gestalt ambiance of a comn1unity is more frequently
reflected in films than not. Before leaving this topic
it is worth underlining Levi-Strauss's statement that a
myth may be 'any manifestation' of the social or
tnental activities of a conununity. By this token, the
publicity and life-style of a film comn1unity (say Hol-
lywood in the Twenties) w ould qualify as versions of
its myth or myths.
A second major criterion chat filn1S would have to
answer in order to qualify as bona fide n1yths is that
they must arise out of a •dialectical systern of contrasts
and correlations' that is logical, consistent, and dernon-
strably typical of the co1nn1unity under study. Such
systen1s in the myths Levi-Strauss analyzt·s are usually
zoologic.il, botanical, or 111ade up of tangible qualities
(the raw and the cooked). Levi-Strauss·s n1ajor contri-
bution to n1yth may be the insight that abstract ideas
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105
can be conveyed through the n1anipulation of such
·empirical categories.' Modent societies no longer
e111ploy taxonotnic schen1es made up of plants and
animals, but we do ernploy comparable schemes of
n1any sorts. Filn1s are especially rich in schen1es con-
structed of physical objects (clothing, parts of the body.
furnishings, topography) or of qualities (beauty-
ugliness, darkness- light). These systen1s function in
myths as codes: one must discover, frequently through
interview or research , the tneaning or significance
accorded a land tortoise by a prirnitive con1n1unity
before one can 'read' a myth in which it appears;
similarly one n1ust discover the significance accorded
a monocle in Hollywood in the late Twenties or a
black shirt in the early Thirties to ' read' the appropri-
ate character traits of Von Stroheim or Tim M cCoy.
Certairrly frlrns, with their almost con1pulsive and
fetishistic attach1nent to physical objects, reveal many
codified schernes upon even casual analysis. And such
schen1es can, with discemrnent, be found in lighting,
can1era, editing, and acting styles, as well as musical
scores (the codification of 111usic begins early with the
Kinotheks).
Whether these codes are part of a careful, logical
system can only be established through research. M y
own preliminary attempts at analysis suggest that they
are - but that they are affected by n1any ,nore contin-
gencies than appear in Levi-Strauss's n1yths. With myths
one must contend with the abilities of narrators, lapses
of mernory, all sons of disruptive cultural forces
(although Levi-Straus.~ virtually negates all of these by
treating individual myths as 'found objects'); whereas
with films one n1ust consider physical as well as artistic
and cultural forces - that is, accidents that affect the
achievement of the screen in1age (casting, change of
script, censorship, loss of a shot, and so forth) and
of the conceptual schemes of the writer and/or direc-
tor. Perhaps these problen1s are no more inhibiting for
structuralisn1 than for any form of filrn criticism; but
we cannot treat films as found objects, because we
know too much about how they are made.
The study of codes central to periods of fihn.
studios. genres, even individual directors could also
illu,ninate the logical systenis of directors who react
against traditional codified systems or work subvt-"r-
sively \Vithin then1 (Truffaut, Godard, Bunuel, Sirk). 1
a,n not in1plying son1ething as sin1ple as a study of
ho\v Holl)"vood thug.; \Vear hats in order to footnote
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
106 Charles W. Eckert

Figure t I. I The Hollywood unagc of dte hir..-d killer in Franrois Truffi1u·, Tirrc s11r Ir r11111i,rr (Shoot 1/11·
Pumo f'lny,·r) (Cocmor. 19(,0). Produced by Pierre IJramtbt•ri,:~r

the in1age of the hired killers in S/1001 the Piano Pla)ler
(\ve don "t need analysis of \vhat is already an implicit
analysis). but rJther a study that \vould help us co1n-
prehend the a111biguous tensions Tn1ffaut maintains
bet\veen traditional and novt·I itnages, l'(CStures, or
,nusical effects - those detai ls of the filn, ,vhich n1ay
lead us to the central n1yth chat Tn.11Tauc expresses. If
the n1eanit1g of a a1yth is hidden &0111 ics creator,
Truffiiut·~ ftln1 is neither an hon,age to nor a sati re on
Holly\vood (eve n if - or especially if - theSl' dcfu1i-
tions ~acisfy Tn1ffaut). The n1yth it e1nbodies will be
d1Scovered through analysis of the 'bundle o f relations'
that constitute the entire fihn, and con1parisot1 \Vith
analyses of other French Ne\v Wa ve ftl,ns.
Before leaving the subject of the codes that
constin1te the 'dialectical syste1n of contra~ts and
correlations' in fiJnu, we sho uld note one in1portant
distinction bet\Veen filn1S and the narratives that Levi-
Strauss analyzes. To put the distinction aphoristically:
anyone in a conm1unicy can cell a n1yth, but only
MGM can n1ake a n1ovie. The codes found in ftln1s
are closely linked to the creative processes behind the
fun,: they are narrative, visual, and aural codes of grear
variety originating ofte n in individual 1ninds, often
evolved as part o f a sn1dio or production team style,
or even derived fron1 the larger conm1unicy that sur-
rounds che ftli1u11akers (docu1nenrary, locale shooting.
expose). Even ,vhen evolved v,rithin a filin conu11u11ity,
they are relared to the codes of the larger conm1unicy
of fwngocrs - or else audiences ,vould ftnd the ftlins
inco111prehen~ible. The n1ost accessible film codes, I
wo uld suggesc. are those mrrit1sic: it, the script. in the
visuals, and in the n1usic, especially ,vhen it is through -
c:o n1posed or choroughly cut co the filn1 (as were the
best Kiuothek scores for silent fil111s). Filrns see1n to
111eet the cri teria di~cusscd ~o far. although the analysc's
task is undeniably con1plex.
The next requiren1e11t, that the n1 eaning of a n1yth
be hidden fro1n its narrator, ~ee1n~ less proble1narical.
Perhaps no llthcr niaJor art fon11 is ~o characteristically

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UNIVERSITY OF MIO:!.IGAN
 The English Cine-Structuralists
opaque to its creators and consu1ners as is the cinen1a.
The dominant metaphor for the film experience fron1
Melies to Fellini has been a 'drea1n,' and like drean1s,
films perform magical psychic functions. They are
also endlessly repetitive and con1pulsively consumed
('they're showing four Clint Eastwoods at the Drive-
In'). This dreanuike repetitiveness points unerringly to
their mythic character. In Levi-Strauss's tern1s, a myth
is the embodiment of a dilemn1a or contradiction; and
its repetitiveness, which grows out of its con1pulsive
nature, functions to make its structure apparent. Or to
n1ake the sa1ne point in applied terms, the hero who
is central to the detective action fihn is an embodied
dilemma: if this dilemma were resolved by fihnmakers
and viewers the hero would cease to attract the111.
That is, I believe, an extremely sen1inal insight. It can
be applied to individual character types, to entire plots,
to genres of film, to series or 'runs' (Andy Hardy,
motorcycle fi.lrns) and so forth. The dioscuric union
of filminakers and their audience produces a strange
Janus of art - myths n1ade by mythmakers that are
only certified as true or untrue after they have been
created. Perhaps the best index to authentically n1ythic
films, then, is the yearly box-office ratings.
Two more of Levi-Strauss's stipulations deserve
brief consideration. The first is that every myth is only
a li1nited application of the pattern that en1erges as
the analysis of a body of rnyths proceeds. This means,
quite simply, that many films must be analyzed before
a valid structure can be discerned. Presumably, one
must analyze a substantial quantity of De Mille epics
of Republic Westen1s before substantive discoveries
will be made. Or if one is focusing upon a given
studio or era, one would have to consider fihns of
many genres.
The second stipulation brings us to the end of this
discussion and can serve as a bridge back to the
subject of auteur-structuralism. It is that figures in
myths have 1neanings only in relation to other figures.
They cannot be assigned set meanings, as is typically
done in an archetypal or Freudian analysis, nor should
they be expected to 111aintain the same meaning in so
dynainic a thought-forn1 as myth. Again we can illus-
trate the argu111ent better than we can paraphrase it.
Jane Darwell is Jung's archetype of the ' Good Mother'
as certainly as Joan Collins is an 'Evil Anin1a.' The
Jungian systern also allows for n1ixed archetypes. but
one way or another the n1eaning tends to gl't fixed.
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107
For a structuralist.Jane Darwell's 'n1eaning' in, say, Tirr
Grapes of Wrath would be expressed as a series of rela-
tions - to other characters, to ideas if she functions
allegorically, or expressed in tern1S of contrasting
camera treatments, musical leit motifs, or mimetic
styles. The search is not for what she resembles or for
what she sy111bolizes. but rather for the meaning of
the n1yth in which she is one figure entering into
many relations.
The issue of how figures are to be interpreted takes
us to the heart of the whole enterprise I have char-
acterized as auteur-structuralisn1. Each of the authors
mentioned earlier employs a unique critical method,
although each is nominally a structuralist. Which of
them most closely approxiinates the 1nethod elabo-
rated by Levi-Strauss? Nowell-Sntith makes a careful
analysis of relationships in individual ftln1S, and is
especially attentive to the shifting nature of these
relationships and to dialectical progressions. But his
initial premise is that Visconti developed too n1uch as
an artist to make a comparative study of his films
possible. He prefers to 'consider the filrn singly,
attempting in the analysis of each to bring out its
relationship, hidden or oven, to the rest of Visconti's
work.' The absence of a thoroughly comparative
method not only qualifies his structuralism, it raises
the profound issue of whether or not the body of
filn1s produced by an individual director over a period
of years can qualify as a 'set' of n1yths. Let us return
to this question at the end of the discussion.
Kitses does analyze the canon of a director's works
as a single body of myth, but his individual figures are
defined in archetypal and iconic tem1S; their meanings
are traditional rather than dependent upon relation-
ships within each film. Only his emphasis upon the
dynainic interaction of the figures and their tendency
to forn1 antinontic pairs resembles Levi-Strauss's
analysis. Lovell's n1ethod is extremely close to Kitses.
employing a mixture of archetypal and structural
insights.
Of all the critics, Peter Wollen shows the closest
fan1iliarity with Levi-Strauss's writings. His analysis of
Hawks and Ford, though only intended to be explor-
atory and suggestive, is less artuned to archetypes,
is thoroughly directed at 'bundles of relations' and is
founded on the prentise that 'it is only the analysis of
the whole corp11s which pennits the n1oment of syn-
tht'sis when the critic returns to the individual fihn'.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 •

108 Charles W. Eckert

Figure 11.2 Jule Oarwdl O.) a. Ma J o,d with I lcnry Fond, , ud Ru,sdl Suup<ou i11 J ohn Furd's 77rr Grap,;
,?f I Vr,u/, (Twe ntieth C entury-Fox. 1940). Produced b)• Uarryl F. Zanuck ,nd Nunn.1Uy Joh11~on

le ,vould seem. chen. chac there are r,vo bftes
11oircs roan1i11g the dornain of the current auteur-
scru cturalists: the questions of ho-.v figures are to be
interpreted. and of the degree co which an auceur's
\Vo rks possess the san1e unity co a co1l1111unal body of
n1yth. The laying of the first beast ,vas Levi-Straus~·
pri.inary cask i.J1 'The Stnictural Study of Myth':
' If there is a n1eaning to be found in n1ycho logy. it
cannoc reside in the isolated elen1ent~ ,vhich enter
into the co111position of a rn yth, but only in the ,vay
those: elen1encs are cornbined.· So rnu ch. it appear;,
for lather-figures, traditio nal icon ~. and Henry Nash
S,nith •~ wilderness and ga rden. The acceptance of
such set 111eani11gs 111ay not o nly blind us co i111portanc
shifts of relatio nship, i1 n1,1y also con1n1ic us to the
~urfare rneaning of the 111ych - to che narrator's
r:nionalized account of ,vhat his story is abou t. or
the critic·~ overlay of fossrlized n1yth upon a living
s1ructure. Of course, tradition.ii n1c,1ni11~ n1,1y \VC U
en1erge fron1 che process of analysis: but the poinr is
tha t they ""ill be dis<o11cred rather than established a
pnon.
The questio n of the degree of unity in an aute ur·s
,vork is less easily resolved, although f\\lO rcRections
con1e 10 rnind: R enoir's opinion that a director spends
his life n1aking , one fwn: and Elizabeth SeweU's con-
tention that every artist creates the n1yth by ,vhich he
is ro be interpreted. Doth buttress the 1nain pre,nise
that is i111plicit in the auteur theory: that a director's
body of ,vork possesses uni ty. The alternative notion.
that an artist evolves through di.sparate stages of
thought and technique, is a 111o re nineteenth-century
conceptio n, artuned to the belief in purposive l'volu-
tion. The 111odcrn study of 111yth has artacked or
,nilfrated agains
, .
t cvoluaonarv sche111es and has substi-
tuu:d synchronic studies of 111otif5, types. and fonns.
T he reaction ha~ undoubtedly bt·en exrrente. We n1us1
use judg111cnt in dec1d111g to ,vhat degree a dirt'ctor

Original from
Digitized by Google UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGA~N- ~ •
 The English Cine-Structuralists
conlorn1s to Rc:noir's definition and invites a n1vthic
, fonns - and all but supplanted them. And it can1e to
analysis; and we 111ust anticipate that an apparent evo-
lution in style and theme n1ay only ma.sk what is
recurrent in a body of work.
The structuralist n1ethod, considered in all of it~
potential applications. will probably be productive in
proportion to the discretion and intelligence with
which it is applied. Its pron1ise, however, is undeni-
able: the cinen1a, after sensationalist and arty
beginnings, took over the conununal rnyth-rnaking
functions of a variety of dran1atic, literary and oral
Notes
S(r,-n, h.is fl~l'ently puhlished .1 tr.lnsl.Hion of <..":,l,ia ~· very
irnportant colll~rti\'l" :m.1ly~illi of Ford\ \ 'm"~\! Air l..iur,•fn. In tht.•
incroc.hu.·cory rern:uk~ <~·"l,h·,~· ( turJcteriZt"S stn1<."u1ral ;111aly~is J.S
chi..· 'dissl·c·tion of an ob_1c:a c:mu.:eivt.·d ()f :1s ., t.·loSt"<l structun:.
th,· c~t.1lo1,.'11ing of progr,·~<ivdy "nailer aud mor< "\li~creet"'
unit".' ignoring d1t:ir use h}' tihn1naker and 'rh,: Jyn:unic of the
inscription· (San·u, I J. no. J . p. 6) . Thi, rdkcts ,·arly arritu,ks
of Althu~Sl'T, C dl1if'rs · principal llll*ntor. tow:ird :tll t()nn:; of
intellerrual effort ,·onr,·iv,·d withi11 bourgeo1> idn,logies whirh
~how little: or no ronsriousnc.:ss of rhdr own prl'IHi'i.C:S and
restri<"tions, Llut in his 1'168 «<av. "Lenin Jnd Philosophy."
Althu\Ser acknowledged th•t philosophy in th,· fotun· h•s a
tn1e object - ·pure thought." aud th,·n added: 'what d"· is
Li·v1-Str.1us, up to tod.1y, on hi, own aJ111i-sion. ,nd by ,1ppe.ll
co Engds' authority? Ht', coo. i~ ~tudyin~ chl• law~. ll·C u~ s.1y
dw stn1cn1rl'S of tlhll~{!/u' (L·uiu ,md Pl,il,,.\11pl,y i1ml ()tho 1;::sj1y., .
tr>n<. Lien B«wst<r. London . New Left Books. lf/71. p. 5'1). I
interpret this as • v,Jidation of Lcvi-StrJu~ss obj,·cti ves and his
111ethod: a M.,rxist rc,ding of myth 111tt,t Jlso co111prd1end th<
stn1t:rures that th~ mind c.:r~ah,''i. :111d 1mpO'i.t") upon all .trt: ic
will ~i111ply \t't' 1nott.' and dillt"rc.·nt st rur tun:s (,l·t· Althu~!,.c:r's
re:iding of the temporal <tn,crure~ of U,·rrolazzi and Urefht in
l',>r j\,f,ir:,;).
2 (;coffrey Nowdl- S111ith. /;1c/1i11,> I i,c,>1ui ( l<J<,7). New York,
0
Doubleday. l<JM!. p. 11>.
J Pt•tt.·r WoUt·n. .,\ ·~ens ,uul .\lr~miu,I! in the· Ci,,rn1t1. lndi~\n,1
University Pn·« . 1'11,'I. p . KI.
Digitized by Google
109
serve as a vehicle for rnore private n1ythologies like
those of Cocteau, Bunuel, and Bergn1an. What is
1nore problen1atical is the pursuing of studies that
depend upon long-tenn access to or possession of
large nun1bers of filn1s. My own experience is that
only third, fourth and fifth viewings of filnlS bring the
intintate familiarity required for structural analysis. But
for those vvho can surn1ount this obstacle, there
rernains n1uch to be done beyond what current
auteur-stn1cturalisn1 has suggested.
-I
Jim Kit$<>, l-foric,,11.< 11,·,r (l'J<,<l). l11,lianJ University l'n·<,,
1970. p. 7.
5 Alan Lovell. 'Robi11 Wood - ,1 dis«·11ti11g view." Sarr11. Ill,
'
110. 2. Morrh/April 196'1. pp. -17-8.
6 Robin Wood. ' Ghostly paradigm and 1-1.C.F.: an an,wcr to Abn
Lovell,' Saa11. IU. no. J. M.1y/Jun< 19(,<J, pp. 35-17: Alon
Lov,:11. 'Th-: conunon puouit ot' true.· judgc.·1nc11t,· Sat'n1. 11.
no. -1/ 5. Aui:usti Sq>t,·mb,r. 1970, pp. 76-XK:John C. Murr.1y,
'Rohin Woo<l .111d the stn1ctur.tl critics.' Sn-au 12. n c,l . .,.
Su111111er 1971. pp. 101- 111: Ue11 Urew<t<r. 'Srr11nur.1li~m in
film criticism." St n·,·11. 12. no. 1. Spring. 1971. pp. -1'1-5K.
7 "The stn,ctural study of myth". in Sm1<1111al .-!111/1r111,,•l.i~y. rra11s.
C:birt· j;Kobso11 and llrook Sch(lepf ( 1958). N,·w York.
Doubled.1y. 1•1<,.l
8 '()vl"rtllrl' ' to "/7,t R.m· dlltl ,,,,. c.,..,lu,I. trans. John and Don:c.•n
Weightnun ( 1'1<>-1). New York. H <tfl't'r Jnd Row. 1'170.
pp. 1-32.
9 'Strunur.11 <tudy." p. 207.
IO S,·, Lcvi- Str.uas·, J11alysi, of the {)ed1pu, and 'Zuni ,·111er-
~l•nc.· l'0 n1yths in 'Scruc.· tural ~tudy, · ,lnd his ,utich: 'Le Tri:tn¢l'
culinain.:.' l.'Arr. no. 26. Aix-en-Provc..·ncc.·. 1965. pp. l'J-~ 1>.
Tht.• hlth.·r St."r\'c.·s .1~ ~m introduction to tht.· ,maly~i, t.•mpk>~Td
throu!(hout th,· three p11bli,h,·d ,·oh11nes of Aly1/,.,J,i~iq11r~. Th,·
best i111,·rpretatiu11 is that of Edmund le•rh. Cl,mrll' Lil'i-
S1r,m,($, New York. Viking Pre.~ \. J<>iO.
11 'S true.·tura I St\ltIy.· · p. r,
__ I .
12 '()verturc." p. K.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 12
Alternatives to Auteurs
Graham Petrie

A Canadian scholar of European cinema, Graham Petrie's numerous publications includes

one of the first books on Truffaut, The Cinema of Frafl9(}is Truffaut, published in 1970, and
Hollywood Destinies, about the careers of several European film directors after coming to
Hollywood. In this article, which originally appeared in the Spring, 1973 issue of Film Quarterly,
Petrie questioned auteurism's neglect of production realities and contexts and began to ask
logical questions about the question of control of a film production. Petrie also raises questions
about the potential distortions of film history when it is based on a series of auteurs, in opposi-
tion to Sarris, who had claimed that auteur1sm was a way of conceptually organizing the history
of cinema. Petrie concludes by offering his own variation of the pantheon, in which only a few
filmmakers who had virtually complete control of their films emerge as auteurs, although other
categories are more inclusive of those in other roles (actors, producers, cinematographers,
scriptwriters) than the pantheon of Sarris and other auteurists.

''l\/o one t'Vt'r r,•,11/y has _fi11al cut. 1·1,r11 ll'hr,r yo11 'rt' the pro- ests that are an integral pan of any ,najor n1ovie
d11crr. S<lmd,,,dy e/sr always Oll'rt.<tl1t· pirt11rt', a11d tlu•r,•'s a/11•ay.< project. "Personal vision" n1ade it unnecessary to pay
11/ll'ay.< somr,mr r,•,1dy t" take it away _from yo11 and str,'11' it ,nuch attention to such n1inor n1atters as: Who insti-
11p. " gated the project, and for what niotives? Who actually
John Huston' \vrote the script, and how n1uch of it survived? Who
cast the fihn, and for what reasons? Who edited the
GEIST : / d,,11 't k11,>11• if Y"" /1<11•1· ,/i11al r111 ...
SCHAFFNER: / J,,11 '1. I do11 '1 thi11k <111yh,,dy in tlu· l.!.S. ,!f
final product, and under whose directives? All these
/I ., wh,, make.< 11 _fi/111 ,f<>r " lll<!i<Jr di.<tri/11110,, has ..fi11al r111.' could gratefully be swept aside, and attention concen-
trated on what was really of significance: the discovery
of recurring then1es, characters, and situations in fihn
The ,111/cr,r theory was essentially an atten1pt to by-pass after fihn of one's chosen hero.
the issue of who, ulti,nately, has control over a filn1 - The contempt for fact displayed by aute11rists at
an issue that Huston and Schaffi1er disclose with bn1tal their peak son1eti1ues achieved breathtaking propor-
frankness. By distilling so111ething called "personal tions. T in1e and again they v.•ould confess ingenuously
vision" fro,n a filin, and n1arketing this as the "essl!nce" that they hadn't the faintest idea whether Hawks or
of its success, it \Vas hoped to evade all the sordid and Ford or Fuller or Aldrich had really u,a111ed to n1ake a
tedious details of pov.-er conflicts and financial inter- panicular tiln1. had contributt'd anything to the script

<.:r:1lum l'c.·tnc.·. " Ahc.·m.Ul\'C.'l to At1lt'11r\ ... rr• 17- .\ ;i frtm l him <..)11.1111•J1)' 111, l h ) . :\ 1~pn11>,:_ l'Ji.\). •· 1 l1fi;\. Rc.·pm1h.•tl hy r c.•r 11u ,,h) tl () f Tht.· Copyri~ht C l«:aum't'
( ·1..·11h.'r, o n bdulf of film (}u,atn lr.

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIG8N
 Alternatives to Auteurs
or casung. or had even directed several of the key
sequences. All this, they confided was of little in1por-
t.1nce when set against their O\vn intuition that the
tiln1 obvi<i11sly bore the director"s personal stan1p &0111
beb-inning to end. This habit of arguing frorn precon-
ceptions has so thoroughly penneated conten1porary
tiln1 criticisrn that a recent article on "Welles's Use of
Sound" can use the raihvay station scene in ·n,e
J\-ta.l!-
11!/i<ent A1nbcrso11s as one of its key illustrations without
n1enrioning - or even showing awareness of - the tact
that this scene was not directed by Welles hin1self:'
After this kind of thing it is sornething of a relil'f
to read Garson Kan in 's n1alicious conunents on the
Wan1er Brothers assen1blv, line and to discover that
Michael Curtiz (a recent candidate for hagiography)
"sornetirnes st.1rted shooting a script without reading
it" and that "frequently a director at Wan1er's ,vouldn 't
even see his assernbled stuff."' To a hard-core a11te11ris1.
of course, this would rnerely provide further confinna-
tion of his belief that a director's personal vision can
son1ehow transcend otherwise insurmountable obsta-
~Jes, but the recent n1assive accumulation of evidence
of this kind rnust surely give the rest of us pause.
As books on can1erarnen and scriptwriters begin to
pour off the presses, and interviews with them begin
co fill the pages of the 1nagazines,; it beco1nes evident
that some radical rethinking ,vill have to be done, and
that n1ost of the lazy and comfortable assun1ptions
that have becorne habitual even to many who would
indignantly deny that they were aute11ris1s will have to
b e abandoned. It is no longer going to be enough
to assume that the director's contribution is auton1ati-
cally of n1ajor significance; equally, it will be necessary
to avoid the dangers of replacing one culture hero
by another and launching into "The Can1erarnan as
Superstar" and solernn studies of the per.-onal vision
of Sol Polito or Jan1es Wong H owe.
There are two directions that this reassessrnent
n-iight fruitfully take. One could be a thorough con-
sideration of the cinen1a as a cooperative art and of
the ways in which it thereby differs fron1 fiction,
poetry, painting, and even music and dran1a. (The two
last require collaborators before they can fully exist
and they can be performed badly or ,veil. but Kit\{!
Lear is still a great play and Beethoven's Ninth a grt·at
symphony despite all the inadequate or horrendous
incarnations they have achieved: one is dissatisfied
with a particular interpretation and not with the orig-
Digitized by Google
- --
111
inal ,vork itself. One has only one version of a tilrn
to judge. ho,vever, and it is tlrat which becon1es either
bad or good.)" And a second n1ight be a serious
atternpt to analyze the status of the director in Europe
(and perhaps A1nerica in the silent period and the last
tivl.' years) as opposed to the Hollywood of 1927-
1967 - the heyday of the big studios and producers.
It is ironic that, at the verv, n1on1ent ,vhen a111c11r
critics have begun to get over their obsession \Vith
thernes and are making daring forays into the territory
of visual style, the whole question of the responsibility
for the ,vay a fihn "looks" should be thro,vn into
doubt by carneran1en who tell us that X "kne\v
nothing about lighting" or Y "left all the lighting to
n1e." But this in tum 1nay produce unexpected bene-
fits, for it forces critics, perhaps for the first tirne, to
ask what it is that constitutes a "visual style." To ,vhat
extent is it the arrangernent of the lights and the
choice of lenses, filters, and 1,r.iuzes (aln1ost invariably
the prerogative of the director of photography), and
to what extent is it franting and con1position, the use
of a static or n1oving camera, the type of location and
setting, the establishn1ent of a particular color schen1e,
the choice of costumes and rnake-up, and the creation
of a basic editing rhythrn (all of which ttray be the
responsibility of the director)? The complexities of this
type of approach are evident when one considers that
it is perfectly possible that in a given film the balance
of light and shadow, the visual effect of the close-ups,
and the n1oven1ent of the can1era n1ay be totally the
work of the director of photography; the pattern,
order, and type of shot 111ay have been laid down in
the script; the costun1es and sets may have been chosen
by the studio; and the editor and producer n1ay create
the final shape of the filrn between then1 without even
consulting the director. In these circun1stances what
sense does it make to talk confidently of so-and-so's
"visual stvle"
, and how can we ever be sure that we
are attributing credit where it really belongs? Yet these
are questions that have to be answered if we are ever
to go beyond the bland assuniption that "everything"
(or at least "everything that ,natter.-") in a tiln1 can be
crt·dited to its director.
It is also worthy of note that, onct· the young
French critics ,vho had inaub•urated and pole111icizt·d
the a11t1•11r theory actually can1e to the stage of n1aking
tiln1s of their o,vn, their enthusiasn1 tor their earlier
ideas began rapidly to fade. Tn1tf.1ut has recently been
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
112 Graham Petrie
expressing much n1ore interest in the nature of a film's
script than its direction. while Roh,ner has abandoned
the whole process of film criticism con1pletely. It is
possible that their own experience of the complexities
of getting a film into production has led them to see
ho\v over-sin1plified their previous assumptions had
been - at a tin1e when, paradoxically, their own filnlS
have given the tem1 "personal cinen1a" a coherent and
justifiable n1eaning. The theory can then be seen as a
kind of wish-fulfillment, a convincing of themselves
that it was possible for them to n1ake fihns, their own
filnlS and on their own terms; once they had suc-
ceeded in doing this, the theory had served its purpose
and could be left behind. The staunchest defenders of
auteurism now are probably to be found in America,
where it serves to bolster the self- respect and boost
the egos of American directors, as well as providing a
convenient way of organizing a film course or getting
a book into print. Its connections \vith the realities
of filn1-mak.ing, ho\vever, remain as tenuous as they
ever \Vere.
The flaw in the auteur theory is not so n1uch its
assun1ption that the director's role is of primary
i111ponance as its naive and often arrogant corollary
that it is 011/y the director who n1atters and that even
the n1ost 1ninor work by auteur X is auton1atically
n1ore interesting than the best filn1 of non-auteur Y.
What good does it do Kazan's reputation, for instance,
to insist on including in a retrospective of his filn1s
the unwatchable Sea '!f Crass, a work that Kazan
hi,nself has disowned as a purely con1missioned piece.
and that the prograan notes to the showing at the BFI
glunuy adn1itted is worthless? And why continue
to inflict on Fritz Lang "credit·• for Der Tixer 11011
Esch11apurI Das lndisclre Crabn,al and bewail the "slaugh-
ter" perfonned on them by English and An1erican
distributors. when Lang spent n1ost of his ti111e on the
set lan1enting the depths to which he had sunk in
being obliged to n1ake these filn1s. and concen1ed
hirnself chiefly with adjusting the folds of Valery
Inkijinoffs costu,ne and saying that what he rc,11/y
,vanted to do was to film Camus?' One of the 1111(e11r-
ist's rnain defenses is that his 111ethods allo\v hin1 to
rescue neglectt'd filn1s - but there are son1e fihns that
probably deserve to remain neglected.
Uy tocusing attention so exchrsivt"ly on a liniited
nu,nbt' r of figures the a11te11ris1 also n,ns the opposite
risk of OVt'rlooking en1inently ,vortl1,vhile fihns that
Digitized by Google
cannot conveniently be slotted into any of his
favorable categories. Fibns like Dark Viaory and Nou,,
Voyager are left in lin1bo because Ed,nund Goulding
and Irving Rapper are not considered worthy of aute11r
status; yet both films are still thoroughly watchable and
transcend magnificently the stupidity of their plots. It
is not, however, through the "personal vision" or "per-
sonal style" of the director that the films achieve this.
and it would be irnpossible to take five minutes at
random from either Dark Vi<tory or Now, Voyager and
attribute then1 with any confidence to either Gould-
ing or Rapper on the basis of visual style or thematic
n1aterial alone. In most respects the two filn1s are
interchangeable: they are the product of a particular
genre and a particular studio, and in theme, structure,
moral tone, sets, costun1es. lighting, and ca,nera style
they meet the requiren1ents laid down by these rather
than expressing anything deeply felt on the pan of
director or can1eran1an.
The fibns, however, are not totally anonymous:
they are studio products, put together by crafts1nen
who were also minor artists, but what gives then1 their
lasting quality is the artistry of Bette Davis, who
wielded 111uch more power at Warner's at that tin1e
than 111ost directors (and even read her scripts right
through before comn1itting herself to filn1ing the111) .
She is not in any sense the "author" or " creator'' of
these films, she did not write or photograph or direct
them, but in a very real sense they were conceived for
and around her, and she probably had as decisive an
effect on their shaping as any of her collaborators.
They are her films, and when people go to see then1
today it is Bette Davis they go to see the1n for.
The situation becon1es n1ore co111plex if we try to
apply a sinular approach to a film that is almost
universally considered to "belong" to its director:
Ni111,1d1ka. Certainly this film is full of Lubitsch
''touches": it displays the elegance, the wit, the cyni-
cisrn, the total lack of respect for conventional moral
susceptibilities that we associate with his work (and
which even pre-a1111·11n·s1 critics of the thirties had
rnanaged to isolate and identify). In moral tone and
social n1ilieu, in characters and situations, it forms part
of a world that Lubitsch had been creating as recog-
nizably his own for the previous 15 years. And yer,
fro111 today's standpoint, tht> filn1 belongs as much to
C,;1rbo as it does to Lubitsch. It fonns an integral stage
o f her o,,·n career - a carcc•r that displays a degree of
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
_....
 Alternatives to Auteurs
rontinuicy and art1suc roherencc co111parable to that
of n1ost Hollywood directors. It V.'as a tihn that Garbo
\vanted, and needed, to make at least as n1uch as
Lubitsch clid: it gave her a chance to display a ne~ected
facet of her talent and to show her potential as a
con1edienne. She had n1ore say in the choice of tech-
nirians than Lubitsch and insisted, as usual. that Willia1n
Daniels act a.~ director of photography. The fihn was
n1ade by Garbo's M GM rather than Lubitsch's Para-
n1ount, and though the differences be~veen Paran1ount
glan1or (in tl'm1s of sets. costun1es. and lighting) and
MGM gla1nor n1ay be slight. there is no doubt that
they exist. And although Lubitsch supl·rvised and con-
tributed to the script, it is certainly possible to see
Uilly Wilder and Charles Brackett's \Vriting as having
as 1nuch connection \vith Wilder's later 011c, 'Jj,,.,, 'J1ircc
and S()n1c Like it H()t as with Lubitsrh ·s earlier tihns.
An understanding of the ba~ir intl·rserting ti.irl'l'S
that \vent together to 111ake up filn1s like ;Yi11,11d1k,1
and .'Vo11•, I'')'•!\.'"' can only help to enrich our apprecia-
tion of the tiln1s. and is surely preti:rahle to distorting
:'\'i11,,1d1ka bv. trvin~
. ' to ~ee it as "all.. Lubitsch. or
neglecting i\ ',iw, I ,,y,\l,'l'r becaust' there is n,, convenient
category in ,vhirh to slot Irving Rapper. lndet'd \Ve
111ight begin to develop a degree of sophistication that
allo\vs us to enjoy a fihn for so1nething ,non.· than the
.. personal vision .. of its director - for its photography.
its costurnes, its 111usic and even (like the hurnble and
1nuch-despised fans of Holly\vood's past) t'i,r its stars.
Tht're is no net·d. of course, to neglect or tk·i,..,.;ide
the director and it is worth re1nen1bering that n1any
European and even A1nerican dirt·ctors had been
identified (and ,vritten about) as artists with son1e-
thing personal to convey 1nany decades before the
a11te11r theory appeared. A partial list of these figurt·s
\vould include: Eisenstein, (;riffith, Hitchcock. Mun1au.
Pudovkin, C haplin. Von Strohei111, Ford. Lubitsch,
Capra, Mamoulian, and Preston Sturgt·s. The ,1111c11r
theory had the effect of shaking up and often revers-
ing conventional ev:lluations, and its n1ost lasting
contribution has probably been the discovt·ry and
rehabilitation of the nt·~lt·cted
'
ti~1rl'S
'
of thl' fi.,nnerlv,
despised "action" gt·nres. togetht·r \Vith the An1t·rican
tiln1s of Lang and llt·noir: yt·t here too it should be
pointed out that Manny F.1rber has bt·en praising thl'
"n1asculine" values of Walsh. Fuller, and Sil'~el l<>r
-
1nany years and l<)r rt·:1son\ that h,ive little to do \vith
a111c11ris111. What v.·e can ust·lt11ly do 110\v. 1s to start
Digitized by Google
113
sorting out and re-t'xarn1n111g son1e of the a111c11ri;1
preconceptions that have becon1t· petrified into n1ean-
ingless dogrna.
(;ranted that the cine111a can be a "personal art,"
ho\v do \Ve set about defining this? It is certainly
possible to identify recurring tht'n1es, characters, and
situations that reappear throughout the work of n1any
directors, but to rely on these alone. as a111e11rists tend
to do, is to coun disaster. The continuity 1nay be the
result of \vorking ,vithin a certain genrt', or tor a
particular studio, or in habitual collaboration \vith
a favorite scriptwritt'r or actor. just as n1uch as it n1ay
spring frorn a del·ply tclt need of the d irector's tc111-
pcra111ent (and t·vcn here the recurrence of a particular
tl11.'1ne 1nav• indicatl' a shallO\V or obsessive vision
rather than a fruitful one). To try to isolate a "personal
style .. based on visual qualitil'\ is t'ven n1ort' dangerous:
tl1erl' are not n1ore than a handltil of An1t'rican dirt·c-
tors to \vho111 one can safely attribute a distinctive
visual (or aural. or editing) style that pt·rsists no 111:ittt·r
\Vith "·hon1 they are collaborating or for \Vhon1 they
are n1aking tht' tihn. M y O\Vll list ,vould include
(;ritlith, Wt·lles. Keaton. (~haplin. Von Stt·n1berg (in
the fil111s \\'ith l)ictrich), Ford (in the Westt·rns at
least), Nit·holas Ray (for tht· t·onsistently biz.1rrl'
qualitv of his i111.1g<'s). and Kubrick .
E\·en if tl1l'Sl' ditlicultit·s h.lvt· ht·en overco111t·, and
"'<' have sucl·t·l·ded in a1-,rrt·eing on so111ething - in
the1ne. ch:1rartl'rs, visual co,npo~ition. editing, settin~-s.
use of 1nusic. or \vhat have vou •
- that sets ont· dire,tor
apart fro111 his fl·llo,vs and can reliably be traced as
persisting in at k·ast a significant nun1ber of his tilrns,
there are other problerns to be taken into account. l)o
\\' e insi~t on pursuing this personal factor into tht·
deept·st retTs~es of the hack and co111111i~sioned work
that the director ,nay have been forced to chun1 out.
or do we st·ttlt· on so111e kind of dividing line that
1narks otr \\'Ork that is \vorth considering fron1
that v.-hich is not? Ho\v do \Ve cope with actors.
can1era111en. co1nposers. set dcsi1-,'11ers, and script\vriters
\vho 1nay also have evolved a "pt·rsonal style" over a
Sl'rie~ of tiln1s (bt·aring in mind that here too we havt·
ditl1culties in establishing degrees of freedorn and of
choice. ,nany r.1111era1nt'11 having conf~·s~t'd that thl·y
,hangt·d tht·ir lighting style .1ct·ording to the studio
thcv \vorkt·d ti,r: \\'hik the precarious and ofren
.
hu1nilia1i11g ~tatu~ of tht> \\·ritt·r in Hollv\\'OOd
, needs
littll' lt1rthcr doc11111cntation)?
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114 Graham Petrie
All these questions lead ultimately back to the issue
of control raised in the quotes from Huston and
Schaffner. One can take the auteurist position that
" personality" is son1e kind of mystic quality that exists
in a vacuu,n, and can be examined in total isolation
from such ,nundane factors as whether the director
had anything very n1uch to do with initiating, writing,
casting, photographing, scoring, designing, producing,
or editing the filn1 for which we are giving hin1 sole
credit. It is at least consistent with this standpoint that
those few H ollywood figures of the thirties and forties
who did n,anage to secure something of this kind of
conttol, being able to choose, write or produce their
own projects - men like Stevens, Wyler, Huston,
Capra, Sturges. and Mamoulian - have been stead-
fastly belittled by a11tc11rists and insulted for displaying
no "personality." Or one can try to work towards a
viewpoint based on son1e kind of knowledge of who
actually did what in a particular film, and why; and
only then begin to apply criteria of artistic evaluation.
As far as the status of the director as an artist is con-
cerned, a useful starting point (though it would have
to be used with modesty and flexibility) might be this
quotation fron1 Eisenstein:
Unity n1akes any fom1 of creative cooperation possible
- not only between a director and an actor, but bet\veen
a director and a con1poser and, panicularly between a
ca1neraman and a director. This applies prin1arily to the
cine111a, where all these proble111s acquire panicular sig-
nificance and acuteness. Coopl·rarion exists in l"vcry
collective ,vhere there is unity of style.
When, then, is a "conflict" justified? When can the
director behave like a "tyrant"? First, ,vhen a 1ne1nber of
the collective does not fully perceive the itnponance of
stylistic requirements. Useless to cry dictatorship; it is the
director ,vho is responsible for the organic unity of style
of the filrn. That is h is function. and in this ~ense ht· is
a unifier."
It ,nay very well be true, as Andre,v Sarris has argued.
that English-language critics and audiences have over-
e~tirnated the freedon1 of the European director and
that he has often had to put up with restrictions at
least as confining as those of his Atnerican counter-
part. The fact ren1ai11s, ho,vever, that Holly,vood
benveen the con1ing of sound and the end of the
fifties had no exact equivalent any,vhcre C:"lse in
the world. FilnL~ ,vere sha pt·d to suit the talents .111d
Digitized by Google
the tastes of the producers and the stars, or to fit the
requirements of an established film ~enre, or to exploit
a n1ood or a then1e that was fashionable (or thought
to be fashionable) at that time; they were rarely made
because a director desperately wanted to n1ake then1.
Once filn1ing began, the director had to adapt hin1self
to the whi,ns of his producer, the accepted "look" and
,noral tone of his studio, the requirements of a script
that, in n1ost cases, so,neone else had written, the
limitations in1posed by the talents or the screen in1age
of his actors, a tightly organized budget and produc-
tion schedule, and the knowledge that, once he \\'as
finished, the filn1 would be taken a,vay and edited by
someone else, often in accordance with in1peratives
that had nothing whatever to do with what he ntay
have been trying to express. All this is fa1niliar enough,
but it bears repeating in the light of sorne of the n1ore
starry-eyed versions of the Hollywood director that
we have been given in the past few years. The
European director encountered so111e or all of the
san1e linutations, but rarely in so n1assive and uncon1-
promising a fom1, and there has always been a greater
opportunity in Europe for the director to i11a11~11ra1e
his own ftln1 and not n1erely do the best he can ,vith
material allotted to hin1.
In the groupings which follow, therefore, I have
placed together figures fron1 the An1erican, European.
and Oriental filn1-n1aking traditions, not on the basis
of sorne elusive and idiosyncratically applied " person-
ality," but according to the degree of creative freedon1
they can reasonably be assumed to have enjoyed
during the most i1nportant periods of their careers. A
reformulation of this kind nught provide a valuable
antidote to the alinost n1aniacal " Pantheon-building"
that has do,ninated ,nuch of the discussion of tiln1
during the last decade (in Cahiers du Ci11ema and J\-lot•ir
as ,nuch as by Andrew Sarris). M y ain1 is to restore
son1e sense of practicality to an activity that has
becon1e increasingly divorced fron1 reality, and my
groupi ngs arc not intended to in1ply value judgn1ents
as between one: category and its fellow. The fact that
one n1a11 had 1nore creative freedom than another
does not auton1atically n1ake hin1 a better artist (and
111,111v, filn1-n1akers have \vasted or abused the freedon1
f.'Tantt·d to then1); but a kno\vledge of the degree and
type ot frc<:'don1 <:'njoycd ,viii allow us to replare
fantasy by con1111011 SCIISl' ,vhen talking about
their , vork.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Alternatives to Auteurs
The lisnngs also n1ake no pretense at being ex-
haustive and are intended si1nply co suggest the
co nsideratio ns that sho uld be taken into account and
to oiler a fe\v r.:-presentative nan1 es o f each type.
Creators
Those who. in all or n1osr of their cornplered filn1s.
, vere able ro do all or rnosr of the follov,ing: ,vrire.
choose. or collaborate closely on the script; have a
decisive voice in rhe choice of .ictor.. and technicians;
direct: produce. or ,vork clo~dy \Vith a syn1parhetic
producer: edit or supervise the editing of the version
that , vas relca~ed for public vie,vi ng.
Strictly spea k1n~. onl y c:h11pli11 truly belong-; in this
c.ite~ory: he is rhe onl y figure in rhe history o f the
ci ne 111a to have been able ro n1ake 11/1 hi.s learure-
- .
length , vorks exactlv as he , va nred ro n1ake rhe1n and
Figure 12. 1 Ch,1rl1<· Ch.1pl111 (wnh t•,uku,· C.thkl.ir.t) wr.,tc. J>ro,hu.cd, directed. ,cor,·J and <1.1rrcd 111 ,l/m/er11
7i m, s (Umt,·d Arn,tS. 193(1)
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115
to relea~e them l.vithout interference o r alteration to
the finished product.
Ho ,vever. ~0111e o chers co111e clO>t· to this level:
Eiscflstei11: 1f \Ve leavt' as ide filn1s like Que f/iv11
1\ltxirt1! and Bc:I,;,, Jl. le1ido111, that ,vere ne ver co1n-
pleted, Eisenstein wa~ given total artistic fi-eedon1 111
the preparing and shootin g of all his fihns. Only Oao/Jl'r
\\·as altt'rt:d after co111pletion. and evt:n Ivan 1/,c- T ern"/,ft,,
Part II was tinally releast'd t'xactly as he had 111ade it.
Gri[Ji1I,: fron1 about 19 14 to 1925 had co111plcrc
artistic and usually financial contro l of his ,vork.
,vriting hi~ o, vn ~cripcs and editing the fil111s hin1~elf.
Any as~1:ssn1ent o f his ,vo rk. ho,vever. should take into
account lus collaboraLi on ,vith Dilly Bitzer, Lillian
G ish. and othe~. and ~hould note tht: dl·clint: of his
ca reer a frer 1925.
Keatiln: enjoyed a frecdo111 sinti.lar to that of C haplin
benveen 1920 and 1928. 77,r Cm11er11111a11 and Spit<'
1\ l11rri,il/l' after that period are still rtcognizably. and
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
116
beautifully, Keaton, despite the pressures that were to
destroy his career soon afterwards.
Von Stcn,be~: seems to have posses.~ed a good deal
of freedom even before the collaboration with
Dietrich. For her, he wrote, designed, and ofi:en pho-
tographed the films, and was left in peace by Paramount
to do so, as long as box-office receipts held up.
Llbitsch: was his own producer at Paran1ount for
most of his career in sound fil1ns and was able to
control scripts and casting to a very large extent.
Capra: enjoyed almost total freedom at Columbia
during the thirties, his work being both financially
and artistically profitable.
Hitc/rc'1£k: both in Britain in the thirties and in
Hollywood afi:er that obtained a position of respect
and authoriry. Son1e of his early Hollywood work is
largely routine, but over his career as a whole he has
generally made only the filn1s he wanted to 1nake, and
on his own tern1s.. He is far from being a one-man
show, however, and his writers, cameran1en (especially
Robert Burks), con1posers (Bernard Herrn1ann), and
actors (James Stewart, Grace Kelly, etc.) deserve a
good deal of credit for the success of his films.
Bcrgma11: since 1950 has exerted total control over
all his fihns. But he works ,vith collaborators of genius:
Gunnar Fischer, Sven Nykvist, Max von Sydow, Eva
Dahlbeck, Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullrnan, etc.
Felli11i: since 11,e Hl/,ite S/reik has niade filn1s on
his own tern1s, to the extent that his nan1e is now
routinely attached to their titles.
Tn,jfa11t: all his filn1s have been his own projects,
scripted or co-scripted by hin1self. Only 11,e 11,fississippi
Mermaid has suffered fron1 exten1al interference, and
there only in the version shown in North Atnerica.
Kubrick: the 111ost totally independent of major
conten1porary An1erican film- makers. But he "volun-
tarily" cut 2001 and has just done the san1e on A
Cfock,wrk Ora11,1zc. The scale of his projects requires a
good deal of assistance on the level of special effects,
but, on the other hand, script and photography art·
often handled by Kubrick hin1self. uncredited.
Misfits, Rebels, Unfortunates,
and Professionals
Thost· ,vho had this kind o f control oftt·n enou(:h
it to 1nake senst· to talk about .<!l111c ,rt lc,1;1 of their tilrns
Digitized by Google
Graham Petrie
as displaying artistic coherence and continuity. At sig-
nificant stages of their career, however, they did work
that was purely routine and to which it is probably
unnecessary to devote n1uch attention (whereas with
the first group aln1ost every filn1 is one which the
director chose to n1ake and all should therefore be taken
into account when evaluating his achieven1ent). Or. in
some cases, several key fihns have been so niutilated
before release that critics spend more time lamenting
the "lost" film than studying what remains.
Von Stroheim: the archetypal representative of this
group.
Welles: had con1plete control over Citizen Ka11e. But
to what extent in 11,e Magnificent Ambersons and To11c/r
(!( Evil are we seeing the film that Welles intended us
to see?
Ford: the tliorough professional, who n1akes tliree
films he has little interest in, in order to ntake the fourth
that he really cares about. Son1e 25% of his work, then,
was 1nade with a large degree of creative freedont. But
which is that 25%? Ford, for one, won't tell us, and his
British adntirers think that it was Scve11 Women.
B111111el: since Viridia11a ( 1961) has obtained thC'
freedon1 that he possessed only sporadically in Mexico
in the fifties.
LAng: the Gern1an filn1s were made by a nun with
a pretty free hand (though he was heavily indebted to
the scripts of Thea von Harbou). The Anterican filnts
\\'ere n1ostly assign1nent~. though he did a good job
on n1any of them.
Renoir: a few beautiful, uniquely personal ftln1s. and
rr1any that suffered front the detnands and conipro-
mises effected by studios. /l.1ada111c .&n,ary, Toni, Ele11J
et /cs H<lmn,es and LA Re.i:le d11 Jeu (until its restoration
in 1965) were antong those that suffered from cuts by
producers and distributors. Most of the films of the
t\,•enties and sonte in the thirties were done purely
on co1nn1L~SIOl1.
L.1s1·y: his career has been a n1nning battle ,vith
producers and distributors. Only the fihns with Pinter
perhaps en1erge as "pure."
T>i1d<'11ki11: had sonll'thing oi the freedon1 oi
Eisenstein in the t,ventil's and up to D1·serter (1933).
His ,vork afrer that ~ervl's the R. ussi.in state 1nore than
hi111~t·lf.
K11rt>.<,111•<1: 17,c Sc,,c11 S,111111r,1i and 11,c Idiot ,vere
•
tor butchered by his studio. <.)thers ,vere only lightly
111a~,.1cred. A fr·"· have ~urvivt·d intact.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
.
 Alternatives to Auteurs
Chabrol: a period of total self-indulgence in the late
fifties and early sixties (originally financed from his
own funds) was followed by the routine thrillers of
the mid-sixties. The films since Les Biches have been
very much a tean1 effort, with Stephane Audran,
Michel Bouquet, Paul Gegauff, and Jean Rabier con-
tributing perhaps as much as Chabrol himself
!v1a1111: the Westen1s of the fifties (and El Cid) fonn
a coherent group of films on which Mann suffered
little outside interference or pressure and worked wim
sy1npametic producers and scriptwriters.
Scene-Stealers and Harmonizers
This is not lintited solely to directors and includes any
111ajor collaborator on a filn1 whose influence seen1s
to have been decisive in creating its quality or lasting
i1npact. It could be the star round who111 the script
was written and for whom the technicians were
chosen; the scriptwriter whose work was so power-
fullv• visualized that it needed little alteration in the
filming; the director of photography who created
in1ages that transcended a banal script and poor acting;
a creative or do1nineering producer in whose hands
the director was little n1ore than a puppet; or an
erratic or routine director who rose to the challenge
of particularly congenial n1aterial or circumstances.
This category includes several figures n1entioned
already as collaborators in the first category. It also
overlaps with the second, to the extent that these
people rarely had total artistic control over their
films and that their influence is evident only in a
proportion of the films on which they worked. There
is value, however, in studying aspects of their careers
as a whole and in trying to establish patterns of
conttnu1ty.
Among filn1 stars, for example, Greta Gar/,o and
Bette Davis were, at the peak of their careers, ahnost
invariably the factor around which discussion of a filn1
would start. Director, can1era111an, and supporting
actors were chosen to suit the111, and they possessed
powers of veto or noncooperation which ensured that
any debate was usually settled to their satisfaction .
Each developed a consistent artistic personality on the
screen, around which the script. sets, and lighting ,vcre
shaped: there is a tine line to be drawn bet,veen this
and mere type-casting. of which (;Jrbo \VJS 111ore
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117
nearly me v1ct1m than Davis. Jan1es Stewart n1ight
con1e into this category too, so rnany filnlS of quality
- fron1 Mr S111itl, Gees to Washington, through Vertigo
and The ,l\llan from LAran1ie to The Man H/110 Shot
Li/,crty Valance - having centered round his varied
personae as the slow-burning, passive, aln1ost victimized
spectator who finally rouses hin1Self to action.
Val Lewton is perhaps the classic exa1nple of a
producer whose fi.hns display a ho111ogeneity of
then1e and annosphere, no niatter who happened to
direct then1.
Boris Ka11fma11, Cre,~ Tola11d, and Rao11I Co11tard arc
ca1nerarnen whose work is recognizable no 1natter
which director they are filming for. Nonnally they
have worked with n1en of great distinction, but we
will have to learn to talk of me visual style of Godard
a11d Coutard, of Vigo and Kaufinan, of Wyler a11d
Toland.
Scriptwriters would include D11dley Nichols (taking
into account his collaboration with Ford in particular),
Jacques Prevert (who imposes his own patten1s on
Renoir as well as on Came) and T11ea von Harbou and
Carl !vlayer. whose impact on Gennan Expressionist
filn1 is all-pervasive.
There are many directors who were identified with
a particular kind of filn1 and could be tn1sted to carry
that through efficiently, but have displayed little notice-
able talent outside their chosen area. Son1e of these
would be: James Whale (horror filn1S), Vittorio de Sica
(neo-realism), Raoul Wais/, (gangster and war), Micl,ael
Curtiz (n1elodran1a and costun1e dramas), Roxer Corma11
(horror) and Budd Boetticher (Western). All these
enjoyed a considerable degree of freedom in making
filn1s of this type (partly because so rnany of them
,vere low-budget) and all are quite heavily dependent
on the quality of their collaborators.~
It would be possible to continue. inventing other cat-
egories and drawing 1nore and 1nore refined and
tenuous distinctions, but I prefer to stop here. I an1
concerned simply with suggesting that there are other
ways of thinking about the personal factor in fih11 -
n1aking than those propagated by a11tc11rism and the
con1n1on assun1ption that one n1ust start ,vith
the director ,vhen trying to detennine the quality or
value of any particular filn1. In 111any cases, of course.
the director is the decisive influence - in one or t,vo
o r a brroup of tihns. or, 111ore rarely. OVl' r his entire
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
118 Graham Petrie
carc:<'r - but this is far front b<'ing ahvays, or even
nonnally, the case:, at lc:ast as far as Hollywood is
concerned; and too niuch injustice and distortion has
bc:c:n perfomied in recent film criticism for the sake:
of providing a neat and tidy solution to the extreniely
con1plex question of artistic freedon1 and creauv1ty in
Notes
,\·,.,., }·,,,k ·n11w; (Sund:w. lk<"~ml;,,·r IO. 1'171).
Fi/111 C,•nmrnll. n)I. 8. uo. J (S1..·pt<..·1nh4.: r-()l·tc.,hl·r 1972). p . .\6.
.\ l'hylli, C,., l,ll:irh . .. l)r.,011 \VdJ._.,, U,,. of So und ... ·1:,kc• <>111·, v<>I.
J. no. I, (1'172) . p. 11.
4 Sfr/,r dud St111ml. vol. 41. no . .'\ ( Sumn1L·r JlJ7 2). p. 1.'\h. K.,nm
.,1:-u d.1i111~ th.n. c,, thl· hc~t of hit. knowll·dµ.t.·. 111• Hollywood
dircrtt..>r of thb pt.·rlud. (tht.· I.tu: thirt1t>s :11u.l t:arly fi,n1c..·~) h.h.l
tht.· ri~ht t<.l tin.,I l ' U t.
'
5 Spn.·:iJm~. 111 Jn mtL·n·,t111g rt.·vcNal o ( tht' u~u.11 trc:od, W t:,t-
E.,,t .1rrc,,;( tht' Acbnul·: :1.l't' Ci11h11,, 72. 110. lflX tOr (ll1l' of tl1l·
r.1rc:· f-rl·nrh .1nidl·~ on ( it1l'lll,HO!,,.rr,1phc.-r'i .
(, .
Thi~ is crt1t' l"\'t'U of., rl·m.ikl·, \\:hid1 - unh.•,,; ic w.\, oril!i11.1Uv.
Digitized by Google
the n1ovies. Good and evc:n great filn1s have been
produced in ci rcu1nstances where directional control
has been negligible, or where other contributors have
played an equally significant role; a n1ajor concen1 of
fihn criticisn1 should now be to discover ho,v Jnd
,vhy this should be so.
t.tkt..·n frn111 J :.t,,~l· pl.1y - h llt'Vl·r r.\·11oly the:" :-:un'-· m.1t1..·n.1I
nH:rdy pt·rt(1r1t1l·d in .1 Jili~·rc:n t 111a1mt"r. \Vhil·h .,ho .h.'\'ornu,
fin tht.· t:,n th.u .1 ~,:npt th.u w.,, llt'\·cr 111.1dc.: into ., tihn - l'\'t:n
Ont'" hv. Ebt'll'~tt'in - 11:1, :1 curi,1:.1t,·. r:ith,:r dun :111 .nt1,rn
V,tllll',
7 ··souvl·nirs c.k V:ill'r\' luki,ii11off (II).'' c,,u:m,r 7:!. 110. 1(,~.
pp. 112-.\ .
~ .,·lHc·..: •f ,1 1-'ilm Dm•,·fln (I )()\'ctr. Nt·w York. )\)7( 1t_ p. I IJ.
9 I .un not intl·ndm~ to ,h~ht thl",e mt·n hy c 1llm~ ,Htl'ntinn t f~
thl·ir limit.uiou,. lkr~ n.111 would proh.1bly nukl· ;1 111n, t,t'
difl•,,: tin!,! .1 ~ 1t,:'itt.'nL Thl· poim j,; th.H hl· h.,~ not tnni - or hn·n
t(lrt'l•J - co do ,o.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 13
Women's Cinema as
Counter-Cinema
Claire Johnston

Claire Johnston was an important ear1y voice in British feminist film criticism. She is the editor
of Notes on Women's Cinema (1973) and The Worlc of Dorothy Arzner - Towards a Feminist
Cinema (1975) for the British Film Institute. Johnston was one of the first critics to challenge
the almost exclusively masculine orientation of orthodox auteurism. In this essay, which origi-
nally appeared in Notes on Women's Cinema, she rejects "sociologicar analysis of film and
its false issues of realism for the representation of women, and instead approaches tile depic-
tions of women in the male-dominated world of movies as signs of masculinist ideology. From
this perspective she reconsiders the by-then standard comparison of Ford and Hawks, as well
as opening up auteurism to the consideration of women directors such as Ida Lupino, Dorothy
Arzner, and Agnes Varda.

Myths of Women in the Cinema Panofsky's detection of the prinuuve stereotyping

... tl1t·rr ari>,<t', id,•11t!fi,1bJ.· /,y ;t,111dard 11J'p•·,m111r,·, /11·/uwi1>11r
,111d a1trib111t'.<, the ll'cll-,,.111e111bat"d typ<'.' ,f the ~ ·,,mp ,111d
tire Stra(~lrt Girl (pal1<1p.< tire 111<1st r,>111•i11ri11.~ modcn, rq11i1•t1-
ln11s <!f thr n1t•dic1•al pcrs,mi/imtio11.< ,f tl1t· Vires ,md Virtm·s),
the Family ,\ ,fat1 c111d the I 'il/c1i11, t/11• lt11ter mt1rked by a b/11.-k
111011stachr a11d 11•c1lki11J .<tirk. N<1rt11n1al .<<C11t'.< u~·rc pri111cd
,,,, bh1r "' .~rcr11 _film. A r/1cckt·n·d Mblr-doth 1t1t·a111, 1>11ff
.f,,, all, a 'p<><>r b11t ho11,·st' milieu: a /111ppy 111,,rri,1_~<'. _.,,,m
1,1 be c11da11.~ercd hy the s/1t1dll11•.< _r,.,,,, tire pt1.<t .<y111b<1/isnl
by tl,c y<>u11.~ 11,ifi-·., p,111ri11.~ ,f the 1,,,..,~(,1.<t <•!/Tn· _(,,, her
l,11sba11d: 1/,,· _firs, ki.,., "'"-' i111•t1ri,1bly ,11111,11111Ct'd /,y 1he l,1d1• 's
.~r11tly plc1yi11.~ wit/, ha 11,1r111,·r's 11aktit' 111111 ,,.,,s
i111•11ri,1l,ly
t1ff<1tnpanied by her kirki11~ ,,,,, 11,i1h her /r/i .J;,,,1. ·17,,.
ro11d11<1 ef thr d,,ir,,aa.< 11•11.< 1•rrd,-1,.n11i11,·d ,1ff,•rdi1i~l1•-
(£111,i11 J>.1111'.lsky i11 "Sr)'l1· ,11ul ,\kdi11111 ;,, thr
,\·foti<>11 />irt11r,•,<, " 19.1-1 ,1111/ i11 "Film: .--111 .-lut/1<1/,~~)', ..
D. -1~1/1,,,1. rd., :,·,.w \
·,,,k. I 959)
,vhich characterised the early cinema could prove
useful for discerning the way myths of won1en have
operated in the cinen1a: why the in1age of man un-
derwent rapid differentiation, while the primitive
stereotyping of women remained with son1e modifi-
cations. Much writing on the stereotyping of won1en
in the cine111a takes as its starting point a monolithic
view of the n1edia as repressive and n1anipulative: in
this ,vay, Hollywood has been viewed as a drean1
factory producing an oppressive cultural product. This
over-politicised view bears little relation to the ideas
on art expressed either by Marx or Lenin, who both
pointed to there being no direct connection betvvcen
the development of art and the rnaterial basis of
society. The idea of the intentionality of art which
this view irnplies is extren1ely n1isleading and retro-
gr.idl·, and short-circuits the possibility of a critique

Cbin· Johnston ... ~,.011wn\ ( :111<.•m .1 ,1,; Cc,1tr1tl·r ~c ·ml·111,1.·· (h,1u S,11, ., ,,,,
I;, l'J7.\ .

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
120 Claire Johnston
,vhich could prove ust'.ful for developing a strategy
for won1en 's cinen1a. If we accept that the developing
of fe,nale stereotypes was not a conscious strategy of
the Holly\vood dream ,nachine, what are we left
with? Panofsky locates the origins of iconography and
stereotype in the cine111a in tenns of practical neces-
sity; he suggests that in the early cine111a the audience
had 111uch difficulty deciphering ,vhat appeared on the
screen. Fixed iconoi:,>Taphy, then, was introduced to aid
understanding and provide the audience \Vith basic
facts with which to co,nprehend the narrative. Ico-
nography as a specific kind of sign or cluster of signs
based on certain conventions ,vithin the Hollv,-vood ,
gt·nrcs has been partly responsible for the stereotyping
of ,vonien ,vithin the conunercial cine1na in general,
but the fact that there is a fi1r greater differentiation
of n1en 's roles than of \von1en 's roles in the history of
the cine111a relate~ to sexist ideology itself, and the
b.1sic opposition \vhich places n1an inside history.
and \vonian as ahistoric and eten1al. As the cinenia
developed, the stereotyping of 111an \Vas increasingly
interpreted .is contravening the realisation of the
notion of '<:haracter'; in the case of wo111an, this V.'JS
not the case; the do1ninant ideology presented her as
eternal and unchanging. except tor n1odifications in
tenns of fashion etc. In general the n1yths goven1ing
tht· cinen1a are no ditl~rent fron1 those governing
other cultural products: they relate to a standard value
syste111 intonning all cultural systen1s in a given society.
Myth ust·s icons, but the icon is its \veakest point.
Furthennon:, it is possible to use icons (i.e. conven-
tional configurations) in the face of and against the
n1ythology usually associated with then1. In his n1ag-
isterial work on n1yth (i\,Jythologics, Jonathan C:ape.
London 1971 ). the critic R oland Barthes exanlines
ho\v n1yth. as the si1,,11itier of an ideology, operates. by
analysing a v.-·hole range of iten1s: a national dish. a
soriety \vedding, a photogTaph fro111 P,1ris li,f,11d1. I11
his book he analyses ho\v a sign can be etnpticd of
its originJI denotative n1eaning and a ne,,· co1111ot;1tive
nit·aning superin1posed on it. What was a ro1nplete
sign. consisting of a sii,•nitier plus a signified, beco1nes
111erely tht' signifier of a llt'\V signitit·d. \vhich subtly
usurps the place of the original denot.1tion. In this
,v:iy. the nt·,,· connotation is 111israken f<)r the natur.11.
ol:,vious and t·vident denotation: this is \Vhat 111akes it
the signifier of the• idt'ology of the soc1t·tv in '"hich
it is used.
Digitized by Google
Myth then, as a form of speech or discourse, rep-
resents the 111ajor 111eans in which won1en have been
used in the cinen1a: 111yth trans,nits and transfonns the
ideology of sexis111 and renders it invisible - when it
is 111ade visible it evaporates - and therefore natural.
This process puts the question of the stereotyping of
won1en in a some\vhat different light. In the first
place, such a view o( the way cinen1a operates chal-
lenges the notion that the conunercial cinen1a is n1ore
111anipulative of the i111age of won1an than the art
cinen1a. It could be argued that precisely because of
the iconography of Hollywood, the systen1 offers
sonie resistance to the unconscious workings of tnyth.
St·xist ideology is no less present in the European Jrt
ci11e111a because stereotyping appears less obvious: it i~
in the nature of rr1yth to drain the sign (the in1age oi
,vo111an / the function of ,von1an in the narrative) of it~
n1t·.1ning and superi111pose another \vhich thus appe;1rs
natural: in fact, a strong argun1ent could be 111ade for
the art fthn inviting a gre.ner invasion fron1 111yth. This
point a~sun1es ronsiderable i111portance v.•hen consid-
ering the en1erging ,von1en 's cinen1a. The conventional
vit'v.• about wornt'n working in Holly\vood (Arzner.
Weber, Lupino etc.) is that they had little opportunity
ti)r real expression \Vithin the don1in,1nt St'Xist idt·ol-
O!-.'\'; thev \Vert· token \Votnen and little 1nore. In fi1rt.
' ' '
because iconography otlt'rs in sonic: \V,tys .l gre.ltt'r
resistance to the realist rharat·teris.1tions, the 111vthir•
qualities of ct'rtain stt'reotypt·s beco1ne tar n1ore ea~ilv
detachable and can be used a, .1 short- h,1 nd for rt•f;.•r-
ring to an ideological tradition in order to providt· a
critiyue of it. It is possiblt· to dist·ngag<' the icons fn)nl
the 111yth and thus bring .1bout rt·vt·rbcrations \vithin
the sexist ideology in \vhich tht' tihn is 1nade. Dorothv
Arzner certainly n1adc u~t· of such techniques and the
work of Nelly Kaplan is particularly i111portant in this
respect. As a Europt·an director she understands the
dangt·rs of niyth invading the sis'11 in the art fibn. and
dt·liberatel y n1akes use of Hollywood iconography to
counter.ict this. The u~t· of crazy coniedy by sonie
,von1t·n directors (t·.g. Stephanie R.othn1an) also derivt·s
fron1 this insi~ht.
'
In rejecting a sociological ,111alysis of \\·onian in
the ci ne1na \\'e rejt·ct any vie'\\' in tenns of realisn1.
for this \vould involvt· .111 acceptance of the apparent
n.1tur.1l dt·notation of the sign and \Vould involve a
dt·ni.11 o( tht· n•,1lity of 111yth in operation. Within a
st·xist itk·olns'\· ,111d a 1n.1le- don1inated cinen1a, \von1an
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema
Figure 13. 1 M.irl,·nc D1ctnch \ nusculJnc dothmg m Jo,,·f von St,·mbcrg's ,1/om,r,, (P.iramount. 1')30). l'ro-
duccd by H,·<·tor Tun,hull
is presented :is v.rhat she represents for n1:1n. Laura
Mul vey in her n1ost usefu l essay on the pop anise
Allen J ones (' Yo u Don't Kn o,v What Yo u 're Doing
Do Yo u , Mr. J ones?', Laura Mulvey in Sp11rt· R ib.
Febn1ary 1973) poi nts out that ,von1 an as ,von1an is
to tally absent in Jo nes' ,vork. The fetishistic in1abre
po rtrayed relates onl y to n1ale n:1rci~~isn1: wo111an
represents not herself. but by a process of displace-
me nt, the n1ale phallus. It is probably true ro ~ay th:ir
despite the enom1o us e111pha~is placed o n ,vo 1nan as
spectacle in the ci ne n1a, won1a11 as won1an is largel y
abse nt. A sociological analysis based on the en1pi ri cal
srudy of recurring roles and n1oti(~ ,votild lead to a
critique in tem1s of a11 enu111eraL-io n of the notion of
ca.reer/ ho n1e/1notherhood / sexuali ty, an exami natio n
o f won1en as the ce nt ra l figur.:s in the narrative, etc.
If \ve v-ie,v the i111age of ,vornan as ~ign , vi thin the
sexist ideology. \\'e sec d1at the portra ya l o f ,vonian
is n1erely one iten1 subject co the la,v of- vcri~i111ili-
tude, a lav, which d irectoN ,vorked ,vith or reacted
.. , Digitized by Google
•
121
against. The la,v of verisintiJitude (that ,vh ich deter-
n1ines the in1pression of realis111) in th e cinen1a is
precisely responsible for the repression of the in1age
o f , von1a.n as won1a.n and th<.' celebration o f her
.
non exLStence.
This point becon1<.'s clearer ,vhen ,ve look at a filn1
whi ch n:volvi:s aro und a won1an entirely and the idea
of the fen1ale sta.r. In their analysis of Sternberg's
Mororro , th<.' critics o f C11l1iers du Ci11e11111 delineate the
systen1 ,vhi ch is in operatio n: in o rder that the n1an
ren1ai n '\Vithin the centre of di e uni verst· in a tl'Xt
, vhich focuses o n the in1age of ,vo1nan, the auteur is
forced to repress the idea of ,vo111an as a social and
sexual being (her O then1c~~) and to deny the opposi-
tion 111an/ v,,on1an altogether. The won,an as sign .
then. bcco111es the pscudo-ccttlrt· o f th e fiJ111jc dis-
course. The real opposition posed by the sign is
n1ale/ non - n1ale, ,vhich Sternberg establishes by hjs
use of n1 a~culin e clothing en\'cloping the in1age of
Dietri ch. T hi~ 111asquerade indicate~ the abse nce
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
122 Claire Johnston
of 111an, an absence which is simultaneously negated
and recuperated by man. The image of the won1an
becon1es n1erely the trace of the exclusion and repres-
sion of Won1an. All fetishism, as Freud has observed,
is a phallic replacen1ent, a projection of male narcis-
sistic fantasy. The star system as a whole depended on
the fetishization of won1an. Much of the work done
on the star syste1n concentrates on the star as the focus
for false and alienating dreams. This en1pirical approach
is essentially concerned with the effects of the star
systen1 and audience reaction. What the fetishisation
of the star does indicate is the collective fantasy of
phallocentris1n. This is particularly interesting when
we look at the persona of Mae West. Many women
have read into her parody of the star syste111 and her
verbal aggression an atten1pt at the subversion of n1ale
donunation in the cinema. If we look 1nore closely
there are 1nany traces of phallic replacement in her
persona which suggest quite the opposite. The voice
itself is strongly n1asculine, suggesting the absence of
the male, and establishes a male/non-n1ale dichotomy.
The characteristic phallic dress possesses elen1ents of
the fetish . The fen1ale ele111ent which is introduced,
the ntother image, expresses male oedipal fantasy. In
other words, at the unconscious level, the persona of
Mae West is entirely consistent with sexist ideology;
it in no way subvens existing myths, but reinforces
them.
In their first editorial, the editors of Wo111e11 a11d
Film attack the notion of auteur theory, describing it
as 'an oppressive theory n1aking the director a super-
star as if film-making were a one-man show.' This is
to n1iss the point. Quite clearly, so1ne developn1ents
of the auteur theory have led to a tendency to deify
the personaliry of the (male) director, and Andre,v
Sarris (the rnajor target for attack in the editorial) is
one of the ,vorst offenders in this respect. His deroga-
tory treatment of wornen directors in 11,e American
Ci11e111a gives a clear indication of his sexism. Nevt'r-
theless, the development of the auteur theory n1arked
an in1ponant intervt"ntion in fihn criticisn1: its polt'111-
ics challenged the entrenched vit"w of Hollywood as
n1onolithic, and stripped of its nonnative aspt'cts the
classification of filn1s by dirt"ctor has proved an
t"Xtrentt'.ly productive ,vay of ordering our t'xperiencl,
of th:: cine111a. In de1nonstr,1ting that Holly,vood ,vas
at ll·ast as intt'rt·sting ,ts tl1t' art cinen1a. it 111arked an
i111portant ~tep fonvard . The test of any tltt"OI)' should
Digitized by Google
be the degree to which it produces new knowledge:
the auteur theory has certainly achieved this. Further
elaborations of the auteur theory (cf Peter Wollen,
S~m and Meanings i11 the Ci11e111a, Secker & Warburg,
Cine1na One Series, London 1972) have stressed the
use of the theory to delineate the unconscious struc-
ture of the film. As Peter Wollen says, 'the structure is
as.~ociated with a single director, an individual, not
because he has played the role of artist, expressing
hin1self or his vision in the film, but it is through the
force of his preoccupations that an unconscious, unin-
tended n1eaning can be decoded in the filn1, usually
to the surprise of the individual concerned.' In this
way Wollen disengages both from the notion of cre-
ativity which donunates the notion of 'art', and fro,11
the idea of intentionality.
In briefly exan1ining the myths of woman which
underlie the work of two Hollywood directors, Ford
and Hawks, making use of findin~ and insights
derived from auteur analysis, it is possible to see that
the in1age of woman assun1es very different n1eanings
within the different texts of each author's work. An
analysis in tern1s of the presence or absence of
'positive' heroine figures within the sarne directors'
oeuvre would produce a very different view. What Peter
Wollen refers to as the 'force of the author's preoc-
cupations' (including the obsessions about women) is
generated by the psychoanalytic history of the author.
This organised network of obsessions is outside the
scope of the author's choice.
Hawks' fihns celebrate the solidarity and validiry of
the exclusive all-n1ale group, dedicated to the life
of action and adventure, and a rigid professional ethic.
When wornen intrude into their world. they represent
a threat to the very existenl·e of the group. However,
wo1nen appear to possess 'positive' qualities in Hawks'
filn1s: they are often c:tret'r \VOnten and show sigrts of
independence and agf,'Tession in the face of the male.
particularly in his crazy con1edies. Robin Wood has
pointt"d out quite corrertly that the crazy con1edies
portray an invertl·d ver.;ion of Hawks' universe. The
n1alc is ofrcn hun1iliated or depicted as infantile or
regrcsst"d. Surh tihns as Bri,~l!ill,'! l !p Baby. His Girl
Frid,,y and ( ;c11tlc1111·11 Pn:fi·r Bh>11d,·.< co1nbine, as Robin
Wood has said, 'farce and horror'; they are 'disturbing·.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema
Figure 13.2 Cary Gr,111 and Rosolind Russdl
l'roduc,•d Jnd direned by Howard Hawk,
For Ha,vks, there is only the 1J1ale and the non- 111ale:
in order to be accepted in to the 111ale universe. the
wo1nan rnust be<o111c a 111a11; alternatively she beco111es
,von1an-as- phaUus (Marilyn Mon roe in Ce111/e111e11
Prefer Blo11des). ' fhis disturbing quality in Ha,vks' filJ11s
relates directly to the presence of wornan; she is a
rraun1atic presence which must be negated. Ford 's is a
very different universe, in which ,von1en play a pivotal
role: it is around th eir presence mat the tensions
between che desire for che ,vandering existence and
the desire for scttlen1ent/thc idea of the wilden1ess
and the idea of the garden revolve. For Ford won1an
represents tht' home. and ,vith it the possibility of
culture: she beco1nes a cipher onto which Ford pro-
jects his profoundly a1nbivalent attin1de to the conce pts
of civilisation and psycholo!:;,>ical ',vholeness'.
While the depiction of ,von1en in Ha,vks involve~
a direct confrontation ,vith the proble1J1atic (trau-
matic) presence of Won1an. a confrontation ,vhich
results i11 his need to repress her, Ford's use of won1an
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123
,IS rhc .. ,r:mrnar,c prc<,·nn··· 111 His Crrl Fn,lay (Columbia. 1940).
as a syn1bol for civilisation considerably con1plicates
the ,vhole question of the repression of wo111an in his
,vork and leaves rooo1 for 1nore progressive elen1ents
to e111crge (e.g. St·11e11 l,V.1111e11 and Cheye1111t· A 1111111111).
Towards a Counter-Cinema
There is no such thing as unn1 anipulated ,vnnng,
fil11 1ing or broadcasting.
The qut"stion is thert'fo re not ,vhether the ntcdja :i.rc
n1.1nipula1cd. but ,vho 111anipulate~ 1he111. A revolurionary
plan sbould not require die 1nanipulators to disappear;
o n the contr.1ry, it 111us1 n1ake everyone a n1anipula1or
(Hans Magnus En2<.'nsbcrgcr in "Constirucnts o f J
Theory of Media ,.. iVcw Le_fi Rrvicw. no . 64).
Enzensberger suggesrs the 111ajor contradiction operat-
ing in th e 1nedia 1s mat bec,veen their present
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
124 Claire Johnston
constitution and their revolutionary potential. Quite
clc:arly, a strategic use of the n1edia, and fihn in par-
ticular, is essential for disse1ninating our ideas. At the
n1on1ent the possibility of feedback is low, though
the potential already exists. In the light of such possi-
bilities, it is particularly i1nportant to analyse what the
nature of cinen1a is and '\vhat strategic use can be
n1ade of it in all its fonns: the political filn1/the con1-
111ercial entertainn1ent fihn. Polenucs for women's
creativity are fine as long as we realize they are polen1-
ics. The notion of won1en's creativity per sc is as liinited
as the notion of n1en's creativity. It is basically an
idealist conception which elevates the idea of the
'artist' (involving the pirfall of elitis111), and under-
111ines any vie\V of art as a n1aterial thing \vithin a
cultural context which fonns it and is formed by it.
All filn1s or works of art are products: products of an
ex1sung systen1 of econon1ic relations, in the final
analysis. This applies equally to experin1ental filn1s.
political fihns and cornn1ercial entertainn1ent cine111a.
Fihn is also an ideolof,rical product - the product of
bourgeois ideology. The idea that art is universal and
thus potentially androgynous is basically an idealist
notion: art can only be defined as a discourse within
a particular conjuncture - for the purpose of won1en 's
cinen1a, the bourgeois, sexist ideology of n1ale do1ni -
11ated capitalisrn. It is irnportant to point out that the
\vorkings of ideology do not involve a process of
c.leception/intentionality. For Marx, ideology is a
reality, it is not a lie. Such a 111isapprehension can prove
extren1ely nusleading; there is no \Vay in \vhich we
can elin1inate ideology as if by an effort of will. This
is extren1ely in1portant \,;hen it conies to discussing
\von1en ·s cinen1a. The tools and techniques of cine1na
thcn1selves, as part of reality. are an t'xpression of tht'
prevailing ideology: they are not neutral, as 111any
' rt' volutionary· filn1-n1akers appear to believe. It is
ide,1list n1ystification to believe that 'tn1th· can be
captured by the ca1nera or that the conditions o f a
fihn's production (e.g. a fihn n1adt' collectively by
\vo111en) can ,i_f' itself reflect the conditions of its pro-
duction. This is 1nere utopianis1n: new 111eaning has
to /,c 111a111!f;1a11rcd \vithin the text of the tihn. Thl'
c.unera wa~ developed in order to accur,itely repro-
duct· rc,1lity and safeguard the bourgeois notion of
real is111 v,hich \Vas being replaced in painting. An
t·len1ent of sexi~n1 governing the technical dt·velop-
rnent of the ran1era c:1n also bt· discerned. In fot·t. thl'
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lightweight can1era was developed as early as the
1930s in Nazi Gern1any for propaganda purposes; the
reason why it was not until the t 950s that it assun1ed
conm1on usage remains obscure.
Much of the emerging won1en's cinenu has taken
its aesthetics from television and cine,na verite tech-
niques (e.g. 171ree Uves, Wo1net1 Ta/kin.I!); Shirley Clarke ·s
Portrait ofJason has been cited as an important influ-
ence. These filn1s largely depict images of women
talking to camera about their experiences, with little
or no intervention by the film n1aker. Kate Millett
sun1s up the approach in 17,ree Uvcs by saying, 'I did
not want to analyse any more, but to express and filn1
is a very powerful way to express oneself·
Clearly, if we accept that cine1na involves the pro-
duction of signs, the idea of non-intervention is pure
n1ystification. The sign is al\vays a product. What the
can1era in fact grasps is the 'natural' \vorld of the don1i-
nant ideology. Won1en's cinema cannot afford such
idealis1n; the 'tn1th' of our oppn:ssion cannot be · cap-
tured' on celluloid with the 'innocence' of the can1era:
it has to be constructed/n1anufactured. New 111eanin!-."'
'
have to be creatt'd by disn1pting the fabric of the in.tie
bourgeois cinen1a within the text of the fil,n. As
Peter Wollen points out, 'realiry is always adaptive·.
Eisenstein's n1ethod is instructive here. In his use of
fragn1entation as a revolutionary strategy, a concept is
generated by the clash of two specific in1ages. so thJt
it serves as an abstract concept in the filn1ic discourse.
This idea of fragn1entation as an analytical tool is quite
different fron1 the use of frag111entation suggested bv
Barbara M artineau in her essay. She sees fragn1entation
as the juxtaposition of disparate elen1ents (cf U,,,, 's
L>vc) to bring about en1otional reverberations. but
these reverberations do not provide a 1111:ans of undt'r-
standing within then1. In the context of \von1en ·s
cine1na such a strategy \Vould be totally recuperable by
the do111inant ideolO!-,')': indeed. in that it depends on
e111otionality and 1nystery, it invites the invasion of
ideology. The ultin1ate loh>ic of this rnethod is auto-
n1atic writing devt·loped by the surrealists. Ro1nanticisn1
\viii not provide us \vith tht· nt'ct'ssary tools to con-
stn1 ct a \vo1nen ·s ci11e111a: our objectification cannot be
overrorne sin1ply by ex.unining it artistically. It can
011ly bt· d1.11l e11gt·d by dt'vC:"loping the means to inter-
rog.ut·
•
the ,nail'. bourgt·ois
•
ri11C:"111a. Furthern1ore. a
desire fo r changt· can onl y co111C:" about by drawing on
font,1~y. Tht· dan~t·r of developing a cinen1a of non-
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema
intervention is that it pron1otes a passive subjectivity
at the expense of analysis. Any revolutionary strategy
1nust challenge the depiction of reality; it is not enough
to discuss the oppression of wo,nen within the text of
the film; the language of the cinema/the depiction of
reality must also be interrogated, so that a break
between ideology and text is effected. In this respect,
it is instructive to look at films n1ade by won1en within
the Hollywood systen1 which atternpted by fonnal
,neans to bring about a dislocation bet,veen sexist
ideology and the text of the fihn; such insights could
provide useful guidelines for the e,nerging wo111en ·s
cinen1a to draw on.
DcJn>thy ilr:11cr ,111d Ida L11pi11,1
Dorothy Arzner and Lois Weber ,vere virtually the
only won1en ,11orking in Hollywood during the 1920s
and 1930s who rnanaged to build up a consistent body
of work in the cinen1a: unfortunately, very little is
known of their ,vork, as yet. An analysis of one of
Dorothv, Arzner's later filn1s, Da11ce, Girl, Da11ce, n1ade
in I 940 gives so,ne idea of her approach to won1en's
cinen1a within the sexist ideology of Hollywood.
A conventional vaudeville story. Da11ce, Girl, Dance
centres on the lives of a troupe of dancing girls down
on their luck. The main characters, Bubbles and Judy,
are representative of the pri,nitive iconographic depic-
tion of 1,vomen - van1p and straight-girl - described
by Panof~ky. (Working frorn this crude stereotyping,
Arzner succeeds in generating within the text of the
film, an internal criticisrn of it.I Bubbles n1anages to
land a job, and Judy becon1es the stooge in her act,
perfonning ballet for the a111use111ent of the all-n1ale
audience. Arzner's critique centres round the notion of
1,von1an as spectacle. as perforn1er within the n1ale
universe. The central figures appear in a parody fonn
of the perfonnance, representing opposing poles of
the n1yths of fernininity - sexuality vs. grace & inno-
cence. The central contradiction articulating thl'ir
existence as perforn1crs for the pleasurt' of nren is Ont·
with which rnost 1,11on1en would identify: [the contra-
diction between the desire to please and self-exprt'ssionj.
Bubbles needs to please the n1ale, ,vhile Judy sec:ks
self-expression as a ballt't dancer. As the tihn pr<lgressc:s,
a one-way process of the perfonnance is firn1ly t'Stab-
lished, involving tht· hurniliation ofJudy as the stoogt·.
Towards tht· end of tht' til111 Arznc'r brings about her
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125
tour de force. cracking open the entire fabric of
the filn1 and exposing tht' workings of ideology in the
construction of the stereotype of woman. Judy, in a tit
of anger, turns on her audience and tells them ho1v she
sees the111. This retun1 of scrutiny in what within the
filn1 is assun1ed as a one-way process constitutes a
direct assault on the audience within the filn1 and the
audience of the fihn, and has the effect of directly
challenging the entire notion of won1an as spectacle.
Ida Lupino's approach to wornt'n's cine111a is sorne-
what different. As an independent producer and
director working in Holl)'\vood in the 1950s, Lupino
chose to work largely within the melodrama, a genre
,vhich, 111orc than any other, has presented a less reified
view of wo111en, and as Sirk's work indicates, is adapt-
able for expressing rather than ernbodying the idea of
the oppression of won1en. An analysis of Not Wa111ed,
Lupino's first feature fihn gives son1e idea of the dis-
turbing arnbiguity of her fihns and their relationship to
the sexist ideolob'Y· Unlike Arzner, Lupino is not con-
ccn1ed \Vith ernploying purely forn1al rneans to obtain
her objective; in fact, it is doubtful whether she oper-
ates at a conscious level at all in subverting the sexist
ideology. The film tells the story of a young girl, Sally
Kelton, and is told front her subjectivt: viewpoint and
filtered through her i111agination. She has an illegiti-
n1ate child which is eventually adopted; unable to
con1e to tern1s with losing the child, she snatches ont'
fron1 a pran1 and ends up in the hands of the authori-
ties. Finally. she finds a substitute for the child in tl1t'
person of a crippled young rnan, ,vho, through a
proct'ss of syn1bolic castration - in which he is forced
to chase her until he can no longer stand, whereupon
she takt'S hi,n up in her arn1s as he perfonns child-like
gt'sturt's, - provides the 'happy t'nding'. Though
Lupino 's filrns in no way explicitly attack or expose
the ,vorkings of sexist ideology, reverberations ,vithin
the narr.1tive, produced by the convt'rgence of t,110
irreconcilable strands - Hollywood rnyths of won1an r•s
the fen1ale perspective - cause a serit'S of distortions
\vithin the very stn1cture of tht' narrativt': the rnark of
disablt'111ent puts the fihn under the sign of diseast' and
frustration . An exarnple of this process is, for instance,
tl1t' invt'rted 'happy ending' of tht' filn1.
The intention behind pointing to the interest of
Holl)'\vood directors like I)orothy Arzner and ld.1
Lupino is twofold. In the first place it is a pole111ic.1I
atte111pt to restore the intc:rest of Holl vv,ood fron1
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
126 Claire Johnston
attacks chat have been n1ade on ic. Secondlv, , an analvsis
, tive ,vork is obviously a 111ajor step fonvard; as a
of the workings of n1yth and che possibilities of sub-
verting it in the Hollywood systen1 could prove of use
in detem1ining a strategy for the subversion of ideol-
01:-,,y in general.
Perhaps something should be said about the Euro-
pean art filn1 ; undoubtedly, it is 111ore open to the
invasion of n1yth than the Holly-.vood fihn . This point
beco111es quite clear when we scrutinise the work of
lliefenstahl, Con1paneez, T rintignant, Varda and others.
The filrns of Agnes Varda are a particularly good
t'xan1ple of an ot'1111rc \\'hich celebrates bourgeois n1yths
of ,vo111en, :ind with it the apparent innoct"nce of
tht' sign. Lt Bi.1n/1eur in particular, ahnost invites a
llarthesian analysis! Varda· s portrayal of fen1ale fantasy
constitutes one of tht" nearest approxi1nations to the
facile day-drean1s perpetuated by advertising that
probably exist~ in the cinen1a. Her tihns appear totally
innocent to tht" workings of 111yth; indeed, it is the
purpost" of n1yth to fabricate an in1pression of inno-
cence, in ,vhich all becomes 'natural': Varda 's concern
tor nature is a direct expression of this retreat fron1
history: history is transn1uted into nature, involving
the elin1ination of all questions, because all appears
'natural'. Tht"re is no doubt that Varda's ,vork is reac-
tionary: in her rejection of culture and her placerlll'llt
of ,von1en outside history her filn,s n1ark a retrograde
. . .
seep 111 won1an s c111en1a.
Conclusion
What kind of stratt.'gy, then, is appropriatt.' at this
particular point in tin1t.'? The developn1ent of callee-
Digitized by Google
n1eans of acquiring and sharing skills it constitutes
a formidable challt.'nge to n1alt.' privill'gt.' in the tiln1
industry: as an expression of sisterhood. it suggest, a
viable altemativt.' to the riipd hierarchical structures of
111ale-dominated cinen1a and offers real opportunities
for a dialogue about the nature of won1en 's cinen1a
within it. At this point in ti111t", a strategy should be
developed which e111braces both tht.' notion of tihns
as a political tool and fihn as entertainn1t.'nt. For too
long these have been regarded as rwo opposing poles
,vith little co111n1on ground. In order to counter our
objectification in the cinen1a, our collective fanta~il's
111ust be releast.'d: wo111en ·s cine1na n1ust ernbody the
working through of dt.'Sirt.': such an objective den1.1nds
the use of the entt.'rtainn1t.'llt tiln1. Ideas derived
frorn the entertainn1ent fihn. tht.'n, should infonn the
political fil111, and political ideas should intonn
the entertainn1ent cinen1a: a t,vo-way process. Finally.
a repressive 111oralistic assertion that wo111en •s cinen1a
is t·ollective tihn-n1aking is n1isleading and unneces-
sary: \Vt" should seek to operate at all levels: ,vithin the
111ale-don1inated ci11t"n1a and outside it. This essay has
atte111pted to den1onstrate the in terest of ,von1t.'n's
fil111s 111ade within the systen1. Voluntarisn1 and utopia-
nis111 n1ust be avoided if any revolutionary strategy is
to t"111erge. A collective filrn <?f itsc/f cannot reflect the
conditions of its production. What collective n1ethods
do provide is the real possibility of exanu ning ho,,,
cint"n1a ,vorks and hov.r we can bt"st interrogate and
de111ystify the workings of ideology: it will be ti-0111
these insights that a genuint"ly rt.'volutionary conct.'p-
tion of counter-cinen1a for the ,von1en's struggle
,viii co111e.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 14
Refocusing Authorship in
Women's Filmmaking
Angela Martin

Angela Martin's essay "Refocusing Authorship in Women's Filmmaking" appeared originally in

an anthology of feminist film criticism published in 2003 entitled Women Filmmakers: Refocus-
ing. Martin's contribution to the collection examines the masculine biases of classic auteurism,
arguing that the position of women directors in the industry is necessarily different from that
of men. Auteurism's traditional masculine paradigms restrict women filmmakers to being con-
sidered as auteurs In particular ways. Attempting to move beyond the trap of gender binarism,
Martin calls for feminist authorship to be defined by a distinctive style that does not necessarily
rely on the locatable presence of a female voice.

This chapter has t,vo points of dt'parture. The first is Many n1ore recent filn1s are often available only
n1y teaching of fihn theory and practice; the second during brief cinerna runs, and only a few of these
is the availability ofwon1en's fihns - specifically within find their way onto video; even fewer will be
the education context but also within the wider widely available on video.
context of distribution and exhibition. It seen1s to nit' 2. This loss of important filn1s by won1en reflects
that we arc experiencing two nt'w kinds of omission and is reflected in the discipline of film studies,
of won1en fil111n1akers: ,vhich tends to ignore or omit won1en's filins -
not consciously, but because the theory that
1. In addition to the 111any lost filn1s by wo111en fro111 infon11s the discipline is still largely only con-
the earliest period of the cinerna, we have also lost cerned with n1ale filn1111akers. This applies to filn1
a disturbing number frorn the l 970s. For exan1ple. history, genre studies, authorship, narrative, furn
w h en I was putting a festival progran1 strand language, and so on. Furthermore, while fen1inist
together on pioneer wornen docurnentary filn1- fihn theory has, rightly, had a great impact on filrn
makers. 1 I could not get hold of the prints of film~ theory in general. its attention. too. has tended to
by the London Wornen's Filrn Group 2 or of Heiny focus on the work of n1ale filnunakers. As a
Srour's 77,e Hour,,{ Liberatio11 (Lebanon 1974). The teacher and as a filrn worker, I find this extren1elv,
filmmakers thernselves were not entirely aware \vorrying and would suggest that we need to look
that their fihns ,vere no longer in distribution. 1 at filrn theory in general from this point of vie\v.

An~d.1 M.1nin. ·· itl·tC,n Mn~ Autho l°'lup 111 \\1 (, nh:11 \ ( · 11h :t11,1. .. pp . .? 1>- .'i frf1111 jJt.4li...·h11c..· l.1.·v1t111. Judith 1'1 ..·" h . :rnd V,11..-rk H..toul (t·(h.). II ~1111r11 J,'i lm111,1J.·o1,, .
Rt_t« ww,\! (V;mc..·ouvl'T: Umn.•f'\ify o ( Bnmh C vhunln:, Prt·\,. :!:UIIJ ). ,c,' ;!Ult_\ lw U nin·roty t,f Hnti<,h Columlu.,1 l'rl"""· All n~hr~ n,·:,.l,."r.',.'<i lw the.• publi~ht·r
Rtprimcd by rcnm,qo11 of UBC Pr,.·,:,..

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
128 Angela Martin
But I \Vish here to address the issue onlv, in nvo
related ways: by looking at the notion of author-
ship and by suggesting a different angle on
,vomen's filrrunaking.
Authorship is the n1ain aspect of fihn theory that
directly affects women filn1makers; however, for his-
torical reasons, it actually contributes to the on1ission
of won1en 's filn1s fron1 circulation and fron1 film
theory. l want to argue, therefore, that unless we talk
about won1en's fihns in a different way, we will not
be able to address that on1ission. And although I am
not going to talk here about Kathryn Bigelow, her
work as a won1an filnm1aker makes the need for this
argu111ent very clear; so l will start and end with refer-
ences to her.
I originally intended to produce a paper on
Bigelow's work and the possibility of talking about a
gendered authorship, with particular reference to her
filn1 Point Break, but I found the proposal of "author-
ship" increasingly problen1atic. At the sa111e time,
excellent publications have appeared in English on the
work of Agnes Varda, Diane Kurys. Marguerite Duras.
and Dorothy Arzner; 4 and Christina Lane has pub-
lished an in1portant article on Bigelow.5 All these texts
po int to the uneasy relationship between theoretical
notions of authorship and won1en's filnunakin g:
I ,viii not d.1in1 that Arzncr ·s liln1s art" unqualiticd suc-
ct'sses fro111 beginning to end: I arn far too suspicious of
such a "gre-at genius" thcory of authorship.''
Within the spcciti<· context of French cint'nt,1 and Frt·nch
culture ... the: concept of thc: <111tc11r. if ostt'n~ibly ungen-
dcrc.-d. n:111ains resolutely 1nasc ulinc: .7
It is .. . hard 10 dc:nv. to Varda 's ,vork that ratht·r over-used
title of d11c111n d',111tc11r."
Ho,vever, as Carrie Tarr points out: ''fen1in ist cri tic~
:111d historians h.1vt· argued the political necessity fc.)r
dt·lending fcn1ale authorship as a useful and neces~ary
cat<'~ory. "" Othenvise the theory of authorship con-
tinue~ its tendency to,vards a "leab'1.le table" of ·•great
geni us" (read 1nale}, and: "fen1all'- authored tihns n1ay
he n1ore open to represt·n tati ons of ,von1t·n re\vorked
tn fen1inist o r ,vo111an- identitied ends. " 1"
At tht" san1l' tin1e. Sl'Veral ,von1en filn11n.1 kers (Kurys
.ind ( :oline St·rreau an1ongst the111)" dn not idl·ntify
Digitized by Google
themselves or their work with a fen1inist (or even
specifically fe1nale) project; on the other hand, the
theory of authorship has become so1nething of a
tangled web, and I want now to look briefly at a fe,v
of the signposts along the way of fihn theory and of
filrn studies as I pursue my argun1ent that "auteurisn1,"
as we call it in English has nothing to do with \vo1nen 's
filn1n1aking. 12
The original suggestion that the filnll1laker should
be an auteur was a matter of policy, not of theory: it
,vas about the desire for a cinen1a of self-expression,
a generational revolt on the part of the young Cahiers
d11 ci11e,11a critics, who were demanding a break '"';th
the persistently traditional n1ainstream French cinen1a,
\Vhich they saw as heavy, entrenched, and tied to the
\VOrdiness of the theatre- inspired script. They spoke
abou t auteurs because they desperately wanted to cla,v
the creative centre away fron1 the writers of these
scripts. Everything, they said, should be geared towards.
shaped, and even produced by the "true brilliance"';
of the director. the fihn auteur's "self-expression"" of
"pri1nary en1otion."' 15 In his atternpt "to n1ake a per-
sonal work," 10 the auteur transfonns, "as if by magic.
a screenplay written by son1eone else. " 17 And they sa,v
the epitorne of the politiq11c in the work of a nurnber
of hitherto little thought of conm1ercial Holl)"vood
directors. One exan1ple illustrates the gender-bound
nature of their enthusiasm. In his announcen1ent of
the arrival of "the age of the 11111c11rs," Jacques Rivette
nan1es four fihnn1akers: Nicholas [lay, Richard Brooks,
Anthony Mann, and Robert Aldrich, ,vho, if one
accepted nothing else about then1, he wrote, share the
comn1on trait of youth. But of the virtues of youth
that they share, violence is the prin1ary one:
not that <'3"'• bnrtalitv• ,vh ich cons1i1u1t·d tht· suC'cl'ss o f
a l)n1ytryk o r a l3l'nc:dek, but a virile: anger, which conic:<
fi-0111 tht· hi::1rt. and lks kss in the sn:n,1rio or the cht)k<.'
of event<, than in tht' tonl' of the: narrative and the very
1c:,·h11 iqu,· of thl' 111i1r "" s,·.'11,·. Violc:rKt' is ncvt·r an ,·nJ.
but J n1t'.111s of app ro.1d1 .. . 10 drill an op<·ning: in short,
to Opl'n tht· short<''! rout<'<. And the frc:quc.-nt r..-sort 10
a tt·chni,111t· whid1 is di<n)ntinuous. halting, ,vhich
r<'ltl\t'< tht· c,>11,·,·nnon, nf cutting and continu ity. is ,1
fr,nn of that '\up,-ri\lr n1.1d11<'"" ,vhid1 (:octl'au speaks
.1buu1. bc>rn 0111 ,,f till' n<·cd t,,r .111 i111n1l'dia1e.· expression
,vl11d1 :K,·nunts fur .ind ih.1r<·, in th<' pri111ary c:111otions
,,t the ,1111c·11r . . • try ini,: 10 111:1k,· J p<'r<on.11 " 'Ork ... In
, hort. vi.,knr,· i, tht· <'Xt<·n1al ,i~• nf n1p1ure. 1"
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Refocusing Authorship in Women's Filmmaking
Actually. this n1ale- centredness notwithstanding, the
dentands of the Cahiers critics were understandable
\Vithin their own historical and political context -
being part of the first new post-Second World War
generation, implicated in the French colonial war
against the Algerian struggle for independence, and
disillusioned by the state. the Church, and bourgeois
culture. But virility is, by definition, n1asculine, ,~
which is easily attached to notions of violence, anger.
and "the need for an inunediate expression"; and the
,\!011velle v·~{l11e's call for a personal self-expression is
Vl'ry different from the later feminist call for the per-
sonal to be political rather than ego-centric.
The inevitable n1ale- centredness of the politiquf ,/rs
a111c1irs was compounded by Andrew Sarris's theory
that the source of value was the director. At the san1e
ti1ne, the British filn1 joun1al ,\,fovic published "The
talent histogran1" in its first issue in June 1962,.!t' cat-
egorizing directors according to "Great, Brilliant, Very
Talented, Talented, Con1pe1ent or A,nbitious, and The
J~ est." Two women appear in it, in the last two catego-
ries - Shirley Clarke was in the longest {Antt'rican)
"(:on1petent or An1bitious'' colu,nn, while Murit'I
Box \Vas one of "The (aln1ost as n1any British] !~est. " 11
Victor Perkins sununarized the theory and critical
practice of au1eurisn1 as looking for "the achievement
within the single fihn of values like econon1y, unity,
t'loquence, subtlety, depth and vi,{lo11r (on the one hand;
and on the other] recurrent the,nes in a director's
fihns considered as a series ... then1es. viewpoints and
,nethods of sufficient personal significance to carry
over from fihn to fihn" (e,nphasis nunc). 22
We have now ,noved on a long way front this
position. but it is apparently still alive and well. Just a
cursory keyword con1puter reference check produced
a dozen or so journal article~ between 1981 and 19')J
that defend the E,'Teatness of. for exan1ple, Fassbinder.
Kazan, John Ford (revisited). Jacques Doillon, Louis
Malle, Sirk, and the Marx Brothers but not a single
won1an filnunaker. However. if ,ve a11en1p1ed to apply
the theory to wo1nen filn1n1akt'rs. as ( :laire Johnston
understandably suggested in I 97 .,.! ' ,ve could then
have applied it only 10 the v.·ork of Arzn.:r or Lupino
because only those filn1111akers had produced a body
of work within a single produrrion context. 13igclo,v
\vould be one.- of the fr•,v currL' lll \VOllH:'n fil111111akers
who would be t>li~ihlt·. if one \vanteci to 111ake
the clai111.
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129
Later, as auteur analysis, the theory looked to tli1·
tt·xt as the source of a 111eaning of which the fihn-
111ak.:r hin1self rnay not have bl·cn a,vare. This
involves
tra,ing J stnll'tUrl' (not a 111cssagc) within the ,vo rk,
,vhkh can 1/11·11 p,,;r } 1rt11m be assign<"d to an individual,
tht· dirt·ctor ... IHo,vt·ver, I there can be no doubt that
the presence of a strurture in the tl'Xt can often Ix·
,onnccted with rhl· presence of a director on tht· S('t,
but thl' situation in the cint"n1a. \Vhere th<" director's
prin1;uy task is olil'n ont· of co- ordination and rationali-
sation. is very diffcrt"nt ti-on1 that in the other arts.
,vhcrc then· is a nn1ch rnorc direct rdationship bctwt·cn
artist and work. It is in this sense that it is possible
to spcak of a filn1 11111r11r as an 1111<"11.<<i.•111 <atJ/ysr. ~• (1ny
c1nphasis)
The problen1 here, as tar as won1en tilnunakers are
concerned, is that they are not unconscious indus11y·
hacks or jobbing directors, churning out one filn1
after another within recognizable con1111ercial cine,na
genres. Most won1en filrrunakers we would be inter-
ested in are thinking filnunakers, usually ,vorking
within an independent cine111a framework. and many
have been to film school, even if, like Chantal
Akerman, they didn't stay very long. Kathryn Bigelow,
for exa,nple, attended classes with Milos Forman and
Peter Wollen. an1ong others. She was, therefore.
engaged in dialogue about filn1 theory almost as soon
as she picked up a can1era. It see111s reasonable 10
assun1e, therefore, that when she approaches the
rnaking of a filn1, she does so with knowledge of
the issuc:s of rc:presentation, ideology. fihn history, and
aesthetics. In other words, she - like Wollen hin1sclf
- is a very conscious tihnn1aker.
Between the publication of ,\,f,1pie's "Talent His10-
gra1n" and Wollen's distancing the filnunakc:r's person
front his function, lloland Barthes published "The
l)eath of the Author" (1968), which n1ade it clear that
n1eaning was produced by tlie render. "As soon as ,1 fact
is "''"'11ed ... the voice loses it~ origins. the author
l'nters into his o,vn death . . . a text 's unity lit"S 1101 in
its ori"-,in but in its dt>stination. Yet this destination
'
cannot any longer be personal: the reader ... is si1nply
that s,>111c,>11c who holds together in a single field all
the trat·es bv . \vhi.;h the: ,vritten text is consti-
luted . .. [and[ thl· birth of the readl'r nn1s1 be at tht·
co~t of tht' death of the Author ... ~,
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
130 Angela Martin
One cannot clai111 a filnunaker as auteur if,
effectively, the author is dead. Of course, the debate
about authorship - in its proper, unabridged context
- has developed into extren1ely important work on
language, signification, and enunciation. But the work
of women filmn1akers remains of marginal interest
to it; 26 and it seen1s to me that the tide of Audre
Lorde's text, TI,e Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle
t/ic Master's House, has a useful resonance here, as
does a recent con1n1ent I understood Gennaine Greer
to be rnaking.!7 - that the way poetry is lauded is
actually as n1ale display and, therefore, there is no
point in arguing that any won1an poet could be
better than Shakespeare because. clearly, she is
unlikely to be engaging in that kind of poetry. By
the sa111e token, the kind of poetry ,vo111en do write
is not accounted for in the " league tables" of
poet-nan1es.
Both filn1 theory and film studies have. thank
goodness, acknowledged the work of fe111inist fihn
theorists; however, largely for the reasons already out-
lined, they only pay lip service to the presence and
contribution of wo1nen filmmakers - with the possi-
ble exception of those filnunakers who are, as Dudley
Andrew puts it, "serious and progressive critics then1-
selves," like Duras, Mulvey with Wollen, and Huillet
,vith Straub. 18 Looking at what film studies uses as
course literature, this is abundantly clear. I'll give just
a couple of recent exan1ples. In his overview of
authorship in the irnportant Ox_ford Guide 1,1 Fil111
Studies, 29 Stephen Crofts outlines ten ,nodes. The
"author as gendered" n1ode is the shortest section,
despite the fact that it begins: "The n1ost influential
theoretical discourse affecting fihn theory in the last
two decades, fe1ninisn1 has necessarily in1pinged [sic)
on Authorship." ·"'
Arzner alone is 111entioned here, and only briefly.
<.)therwise, the Oxford G11id1· effectively n1entions
fi:111ale directors only in its chapters dealing Y.' ith
··ochen1ess" - fen1inisn1 and fihn; gay, lesbian, and
queer cine111a; the avant-garde; and 11011-An1erican
cine111as. Chant.ii Akennan is the only \\'0111an din:ctor
to be given one of the "special n1ention" boxes. In
TI,e ()x.f;,rd Hi.<t,,ry ,,( I V,,r/d C..'i11c111c1 there appears to
bl' no 111t'ntion ,vhatever of Lois W ebt•r (nor is there
any n1ention of her in Tho1npson and Uonhvt·ll's f-i/111
f-/i.<tory) and only pas~i ng n1e11tio11 of Alice ( ;uy Blacht·
(,vithin tht· contt·xts of GJurnont, hc.:r hushand, and
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Louis Feuillade, whom she taught). Yet these i1nportant
texts form part of the 1naterial that informs n1uch of
the practice of furn studies.
Unfortunately, though for very good reasons,
fe1ninist film dieory has also paid most attention to
n1ale-directed n1ainstrea1n cine1na, often widi a vie,\'
to at least understanding, if not "dismantling[,] the
master's house," and to those avant-garde won1en fihn-
makers n1entioned by Dudlt'y Andrew, who can be
said to be working within the same theoretical frame-
work; mat is, on questions of "the gaze," representations
of the body, desire, subjectivity, and so on. For the
n1ost part, this work takes place within (or near)
the acaden1y. Meanwhile, women have been working
in n1ore and n1ore sections of the industry, no longer
just in theory-based (or campaign) ftlmmaking. The
associations representing women in production art'
now n1ore industry-based and, rightly and inevitably,
are about wo111en being recognized by, and getting on
in, the industry. As a result, while we used to talk in
tenns of whether there was a feminist aesdietic or a
wo1nan's voice that informed won1en's filmmaking.
such questions are now less productive, and, though
necessary and very important at the tirne, diey have,
in son1e ways, become as !inuring as the auteur theory.
It is not surprising that several women filnunakers
,vho becante known as ft'ature directors were reluctant
to be tied by such a right fran1ework. Consequently.
from the n1id-1980s or so there was a divergence of
intt'rests. Kathryn Bigelow. for exan1ple, has, on tht'
whole. been on the industry side of the divide, and
she has not attracted the volume of theory-infonnt'd
articles that Sally Potter or Jane Can1pion have (though.
adn1ittedly, this is changing): 11 Within authorship
theory, what fe1ninist filn1 criticisn1/theory has done
is talk about.fi·111alt· or_{cn1i11ist authorship. Interestingly.
hov.cver, Kathryn Bigelow's work see1115 to n1e to raise
considerabk~ problenlS for this approach, largely 1Kca11s,·
of her n1ainstrea111 position. But I believe die problt>111
is ,vider than this and that it t'n1anates from die ques-
tion of dt·finition.
Strictly spt·aking, thc.:re arc: tY.'O definitions of the
,vord "authorship": one ronct·n1s the (legal) owner-
ship of an idc:.1 or its 111ode of expression. the other
concc:rns the: act ,111d tht' occupation of writing. But
fc:rnalt· or ti:111inist authorship tc:nds to be sought in
" ·hat c.1n hl' idt·ntitiably linked to the filn1n1akt'r (as
\\
0
0ll1:tn):
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Refocusing Authorship in Women's Filmmaking 131

Figure 14. I Kate Win<l,·t1 ,ind Hat\'ey K,·itel embody the dyn:11111c~ of gendt'r pobtic,
in J.111c Campion', / Joly Smok,· (M1r:un.1x, I<J<J'J). Produced by Jan C hapman

• a filrn 's autobiographical reference
• a fiJnu11aker·s actual presence in the filn1
• die evidence of a fe1nale voice ,vithin the narrative
(however located):'1
Out none o f thl'sc, J S factors in a filn,. guarantces
authorship. And if a ,von,an filn1111aker's film does
not produce evidence of a fen1ale voice, this does
not preclude her fron, being the filn1 ·s autho r (in
either of the strict senses). Bigelo,v's fi lrn.s, fi>r exa111plc:-.
do not show easy evidence of her prese nce or even of
a clea r female o r fe111jnist voice. Ho ,v to t:1lk about her
fiJnlS, then , fro111 a fenu1ust authorslup poi nt o f view?
Bigelo,v·s ftln1s arc produced witl1in Ho lly\vood's
111ainsrrean1 filn1 i11d11srry context, with a cre,v. This, of
course, is one of the argu111ents against the theory
o f"author-nan1e ·• authorship, and her ,vo rk confo unds
this argu111ent. Obviously she ,,.,orks \\ri th other people
on her filn1.s. but she appea.rs to have 1nanaged to , vork
with and for e111pathetic people (and I don "t n1 ean in
a cosy sense). AJd1ough Poi111 Break was no t, to begin
,vich, a pe rsonally initiated project. she ~vas the direc-
tor the producers kept returning to when the)' ,vere
se tting up the fi.ln1 's productio n. She herse lf asked for
Jan1es Ca111cro11 to be brought onto di e project. Editor
Ho ,vard S111ith had already ,vorked ,vith her on °t'11r

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

132 Angela Martin
Figure 14.2 Repressed homocrotoci\111 in th,· ,ction fi lm: Kathryn 81gdow·, P.•i111 Brmk (fwcnti,·th C,·ntury
Fox. 1'l'J I). l'.-odun·d by J.1111c< C:.1111~ro11
Dark. Bigelow says she rev,1rote tht> script, originally
,vritten by Pt:ter IUiff (\vho scriptt:d Patriot Ca11,rs).
Also, having been a painter before becon1ing a fil111-
rnaker, she knO\VS. sooner than she knov;s anything
elst· abouc the shoot, ho,v she ,vants J fila1 to look.
l)on Peten11an. the DO P on Poi11r Break, is quire cat-
egorical when he says that the look his tea1u produced
\V:\S the look Bigelo,v wanted. She also ,vorks \Vith
~
storyboards, \vhich she has said \.vas particularly in1por-
1ant because several second units \Vt:rl· involvt>d in the
shooting of Poi11I Break and it ,vas essential for cheir
differen t iniages to cohere ,vich the rest of tht: 111,itt:-
rial. It ,vould see111 ridiculous. therefore. co suggest
that she did not have considerable aesthetic and con-
ceptual control of the fil111. I ,vould certain)}' .1rgue
for a reading of the filrn that is infon11ed by fen1111is111,
but this does no t see111 to fit the dcii11ition of fe rnak·
or fen1inisc authorship sunirnari zed above.
Much n1o re helpful, it secnl5 co n1c, is the sen)C of
a fihn being produced in a context of dialo1-,Y1.1c ,virhin
,vhich the filn1n1aker. the conrexc, and rhc reader/
spectator aU p.irticip.1te and fro111 ,vhicb they all
produce 111ean1n~ char ,viii ac lea<t ovcrbp if not ac ru-
Digitized by Google
•
aUy agree. We need co find a ,vay of recognizing this
kind of conceptual and aesthetic ,vork around tbl'
production of a fthn . We particularly need to do this
for ,vo1nen filn1n1akers, and ,ve need to do it for
exactly thl· s,Ulll' rcJso1l!> as ,ve need to clain1 ,von1en
filn1111akers a< autt:urs or to define and defend notion~
of fen1a]e authorship. One ust:ful ,vay fon-vard \VOuld
be to take the concept Agnes V.1rc\a uses for her ,vork:
d11crri111rc" (which translates, rather less happily. as
"fihnic ,vriting''):
A ,vcll-,vritten fil111 i, also ,vcll-fihnl'd. the actors an·
,veil cho,cn. s(1 .1re the lot·anons. The cuttin~.
, the 111ove-
n1ent, the points-ot:.vic,v, th,· rhythrn of tiln1ing .1nd
edinng hJVl' bl'en felt .111d considered 111 the ,v.1y a ,,Titer
choost·< the dcpth Jnd 111t·:i11111µ of sentt·nct·<. the typc of
,vord,. nun1ber of Jdvl'rb,. p.1rattT:iph,. a-.idl',. chapt<'fli
,vhich advanc-c the <tory o r hre.1k irs Ro,v. e re. In ,vriung
1t\ r.1llcd ,tylc. In thl' cu1e 111J. style i.< <i11ccri111rr."
<l·c this as a starting point r.1thcr than as a.n t>nding
point bt·causlc" que~non< of ~ryle are also problen1aoc.
1-lo,vt·ver, .,~,1st.arcing poinL. it ,vo uld allo,v us to avoid
h3ving to go rhrough 3nd be ntarginalizcd by the
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Refocusing Authorship in Women's Filmmaking
argu1nents about the authorship theory, or having to
find the filnunaker or her fen1ale voice in the text in
order to give it authorial credence. It also allows us
to n1ove away fro,n the legal defu1ition of "author-
ship" and towards the definition dealing with the
practice of writing, which n1ay or n1ay not e1nerge
fro111 a single person but, in tem1s of fil111 production,
Notes
Shdlidd lnccniation:11 Docunwncary Fe«iv.,I (Eni-:land) 1995.
The LWF(; W.t'.' .tl'tivt.· hl·twt.·cn 1972. ,uuJ 1977, .md Jll1011!-,...,t
chc tihns produred by nwmb,·r. of ch,· !-,'TOup (whi, h inch,d,·d
C lain· Johnston) \\'l"rt" th(.· Vl'ry ntoving 11 ~'"'"'' cf rl,r Rlwodd1,
(197:!): J tic.uur,·-lcni;th .. pohuc:11 burk,4uc:· ·11,r A111,1:i1i~
Eq11,1/ Po1y S/,.,w (197-1): and th,· c.unpciii.:n donmi,·111.,ry wnh
linional d,·mcnt,. 11111>.<r C/u,i,r.' (197<,).
J ~ the right< on shon ~ and docmHt"JH~lrit.·s r,\lllt' co tht' .:nd
of their tcnn. Metro {fom1crly T he ()ther Ci 11c111J ITC)CI)
s.1dly but 11t.·CcllisJrily movt"d aw.1y front thij an.•.1, not rc1t.:wing
. but. r.uhcr, (Ollft'lltr.ttin~. on t<.·,1turc tilm di!'litnhu-
the' riJ.~ln~
11011. For 111:iterial 011 th,· <x.:dk·nt work of T ()C. s,·,· Sylvia
Hjrvtv. . in ..The ()thcr Cinema: A H istorv., 19711-77 ." Sa,·<'11
:?6. f, (Nov,·mb,·ri D,·ccmb<r 1'185): ~t >-57: and s,,..,.,,
'27. :?
(M.irch/ April l'JK6): HO-l/(,.
4- AJi"iOU Smith ..--1.~urs Vi11d;1 (M:uu:he~tt.·r: lv1:tnfht.·litt~r Umvt.·I"ity
Pr<ss. ll/'IK) : Ccirrie T.,rr. /)i,11,r 1.:ury, (1"1andw<ter: M.mrh,·,ter
Umver,;iry Pre><. I'19'>): Judith M ., yn,·. /)ir,·t1rd /,y /),,,.,rl,y
.-1,.:ua (Bloo1ni11i,.rton .ind l111.iiJ11apoli"i: lnd1;111a U 1livt.·Niry
Pre~)I.. 199..J); L4.-':ilie Hill. ;\t.,~~ufn'tf OurcJ:-: Apll(,1/r,11u l)r:iirc$
{London: Routk·di;,·, 1IJ<IJ).
:, Chrhtina Lani.·, ··.-:rnm ·17,•• J.. wd,•.\'5 to H•i111 Hn·i,I.:: Kathryn
Bi~dow', T r,1jt.·\.·tory ln Al·tiun."' Cim•mc1 .Jm,m,11 37. 4 ( l'J9H):
51.H!I .
6 Mayne. Di,urnl J,y l.)(,,,,rhr Ar.:ncr. I.
7 T.ur. Di,111l' 1'11,ys. .3.
H Snuth . ."':1.~mis I ".mid. 17.
9 T.,rr. DiJ11c i.:11ry.,. -I.
1,1 Ibid .. 5.
11 S«· Brigitt,· R ollet'< hook. C,,/i11,· S,·m·1111 (M.111dwst,·r/
Nt.·w York: Mandlt.'!>tt.· r Univt.>~iry Pre~, ; Sr. M.1ni11 ·s Prt.·!>li,
1998).
I '2 AJ, ,·xcdlcnt reader Oil the subj,·rt is John C.1ui.:hic ·, ·17,,.,,nr.<
,f.'1111/wr-;/11p (London: R KI'1 llFI. I'IHI) .
1 J Eric Rohmer (M.,unc,· Sd,,·n·r)... Renoir Ameril':iin. ·· C:,1/1i,·r.<
•"' (."i11hnt1. l't O:inu.1~· 1952): .\.~40, l'Str.trh.·d .uul rr.m!\l.1tt.·d
in Cau~hir. ·nu·tlrin ,!f .~utltN!fo/,, JX-9. My quot.HIOII' twrt..•
~II come from ,·xtr.,n, ,hosen hy J "hn c:.,u!!h k ( 1•1i; 1) to
rt.•prt:-!>l'nt rht.· C,,/,i,·r:- po,.iuon (.Jlthuut,:h obv1ou:-ly not with tht..·
, I.un 1 .nn now i;ivini; 1h,·1u).
14 Pit·rr~ K.J"il, "l)l,,. n.>ntiturl'" pour tHl µ:\_·11,l.1n11t.·,'' <:,,1110.' du
Citrhm, 2 (J.t11t1.lr)' l'J5' I): 40. '-'xtr.1l'tL·d ..md tr.m,l.1tl·d in
C.1u~hie. 'J1u·c•rit·., ,f Aurh11r.,l11r. JX.
Digitized by Google
133
,vill certainly be organized around the director. It also
,.
allows us to talk about wo111en auteur filnunakers·,
and to n1ake a different historical link - a link n1ade
through filn1n1akers like Lois Weber, Gem1ainc Dulac,
Arzner, and 111any others who would never be seen as
auteurs but who, like a nu111ber of n1ale directors, are
fi ln1111akers ,vho produced eloquent filn1ic ,vriting.
15 J.h.·qut.·-:- R.iv,·nt.·, ''Notes \Ur uot.· rl'volutio11.·· C,,hh·r., ,lu Ciut:111.1
(s.pc-cial l"iSUt· on Atnt"nc.111 t.·int.·111.1), 54 (Christrn ,1, 1955): 12-
:? t. t'Xtr:ll' tt.•d :.\lid tr:Ulsl.ttt.·d in ( ::iu~hic. '/1,cMi,·~ ,f .·l uth1,r.<hip,
-1 1-2.
II, Ibid.
17 Fereydoun Hon·yda, "I.., reponse d,· Nid,ol:is R ;iy:· C,1/110.< ,/11
Ci11t'111o1 107 {MJy I')hO): -11-(,, extr:ined and transl.ucd in
c~1u~hie, '{1,r,,rit·)' ,f :t111ht,Nl1ip. 4:?-1.
IK Rivl'ttt·. "Nott.·s sur unc.- rt·volution." 41,
19 T ht.." dh:tionary ddinition of .. \·irik" h,: rdating to . o r hJvin~.
tht.· dlJractt"ri~tics of .111 adult 111ale: 1uontt, fOrceful. v1~orous.
It surfan·d in the tifrecnth ,·cntury :md 1s probJbly b.1>ed on
.1 ,oinbination of tht.." L.1ti 11 word~ "vir." 111t.•Jning n1an. ~md
"'vis," rnt.·a.ning scrt.•n~,ih.
20 The.· ro11n:·n1 of rht.· hi\lOl-,'T.1111 wa~ :Jl'tu,tlly to show "Uritish
l'inerua·s Jack of what \Vl' would rons1dcr as tall·nt."
'.! I Shirley Cbrk,· had n·,-.-utly made .'I St.iry Tim,· ( I 91,0) Jnd had
pos,ibly not long bl'lort· compkccd ·11... C,,111..-ai,,11 ( I '!6 I):
Murid Uox h:1d ft"('t.'Htly ntldl· .,,,.,, Yc•rm.~ hl Lwr and ·n,r Pip<'r \
T1111,· {hoch 1<Jl,f J).
:?2 V.F. Perkins . .. him Authorship: The Prcnutur< lluriJI. .. Ci11,·
. ~,•,;,,,, 2 I / :?'.! { I '><Jo). Edw.ird llu«·ombc t:1lk, about .. th,·
notron o f tht: "divine <ripark.' whifh SL'p;lrJtt.''" off the anist fro1u
ordin:uy 1non:1l~. whkh divilkli tht.· ~cniu~ fro111 tht.· jountt.·y-
nrnn ." Thi"' idl·a "l"t.•nu, p;1n1n1l.1rly indt"htl·d to R o111antil·
.1ni!'litic tht'or;·. Sn· "ldt·a"' of Author;hip." 111 Caut(hk. ·nu·c,rfrs
•!f :lt11lwrsl,ip. :?4; SC \.' ab,o Michd Foucault, ,.Wh;tt I~ an
Author? .. in Lr,~~11◄1,1.:t·, (.\,1111ta-.\frm,>r)', J>r,raiic• (()xl(.lrd; lhH~,I
1.11.tckwdl. 1'177). l :?1-JK..111,I in S,·ri·,·11 20. 1(1'>7'1): 1.\- 2'!:
ori~i1ully puhlisl1t..·d in Bulletin de J,, .'\Nib,~ 1-'1,111(,1ist• d,· l'ltilc•icl•
p/rir h.>. •\ ( )'169): 7.\-10-1 . Jonct St.111-:cr wvcs, usdi,I (lc:mini,t)
l'riti4Lh.' of tlu,; "Ro111anul'.' :nnt.·ur1!>m •· in "Tht· Poliurs of Film
C..::mnn:-.." in :\111//iplt· I ·,,;c,·., ;,, Fnuiuist Film Criril'l.'illl, (•tL n.
C.,r,on . L. I >ittm,ir..md J. R . Wd,<"h (Minnc>pol": Unk,·r,11y
o f Mi11th;'""iOt,1 Pn_ ' ""· )l)tJ4). 197- :?0o .
:?J Cbir\.' Juh11~to11. "Wo1nt·n\ Cllll"lll:l :l~ Counter Ci1u·111:1," in
;\ ·1,tr.• ,111 11 i,,11u·11 'f. Cim·m11 (Loudon: Sot:it:'tY f( ,r Ed11f.ltio11 1n
Film .md Tdev1>ion. 1'17.\), 21,- 7 .
24 l't.·tt.·r Wolkn. · ·co11dt11il()l1 ," 111 s,:t:m- 1md .\fraui,~c Ill thl'
Cim·m,,, 2nd t"dn. (Loudt)n; Martin Sl't'kt.·r Jnd W.1rhur~.
1'17'2). lht!. S,·e .1ho Fo11c 1uh . .. Wlut I, .111 Author''·
'.!5 Rol.111d Ll:inh ...s... Tlw !),•.,th of ch,· Author .. /111,i~•·-,\ fo; ir- ·1;.x,
{Lm,d"n : 1\mc:,n.,. l'li7 IJ '!f,XI). '.!O.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
134 Angela Martin

:'?<, <)nl· r.m wow.fer ho"· far the tt'.Xt~ 111<.·nnonc.•d t"arlkr (i.t"., forthcomin!( ,olln·tion on Ui~dow. ntitnl by Deborah Jcr111y11
thO'-l.' 011 Arz n«:r. Bi~dow.
•
Kurvs.
•
Sl.'rrc.: ..m . .u1d Vard.1) will Jnd S,· •n R,·dmond.
unpmgc upon tiw :1µc:nd.1 of the.• wider c.h:h:m,· ,1bout J2 Extri:mdy imponant in thb contc:xt ls KJjJ Silvt.•nn.m \~ -,1,c
aurhor<hip. .--lcc1w:/;( .\lfrwr: ·n,,· Ft'mal,: I ~lifl' Ill P:i)'(lti•1utlll)'itS ,md Cmcm,,
27 <)n ,1 UUC R.,dio di<fUS<ion pro1-,r,1111. M .1rd1 l'J<J'I . (JJloominµ-ron ,ind ludi:ul.lpoli<.: l11diJ11J Univl·~iry Prl'''·
.:?H Dudlev An<ln·w. C,,,,,q,1., ;,, Fi/111 '/111·,,ry (t1,li>rd: ()xti,rd Um- l'IHKJ . ,s;pe,·ially the chapter ,·ntitled "Thl' F,·111:1I,· Auth<lnal
v,·r..ity Press. I 'IH4). l .:?t.. Voice... Illlt'rl',tinwy. le,lie Hill'< l:>ook Oil ()urJ< d,w, Jltll
2') John Hill and P.1111d.1 ( :hun:h ( :ibson. <.·d, .. 1111· ( J.~·/~1,,I ( :uidf' prohll·rnarizc: the: notion of authorship, a.nd in hi:- .,.-)1Jpta
1,1 1:ilm Stu.fir; ((.)xtl1rd / Nc.·,,· York : <)xtOrit UJU\'c.•r.irv Pre,-.. e11titl,•d "l111.,~e, of Authorship ... h,· goes n!(ht mto t.1lk111~
I 9'JH) . ahout Dur.1,;, \ ,vork in tc.· nns ot: tOr t,.'XJrnplc:. .1urhon.1l
,\ I ) 11:>,d .. .\.211 . pcn.ona Jnd pl·rfr,n11;uiv1ty. ~111thori.1l c.·011n11enul'\· Jnd ,;,d f-
.\I s.._•t.·, tl>r t'x.unplc.·, Coll<.·cn Kc.•.mc.· . "'D1n.·rrur .,~ 'Adr,:nalinc.· nu11111l·nt.uv. . .111d ;nuhoritv. '
junki,•."· in .11,·,,., 1011 (19'17) : 22- 7: l.1ura R.1s,·Jn>li. "Sr,·,·1 in ].\ St·c· S111ith, .·J.\!ui.~ I ~rrda. IJ- 15.
the C.iz,·: ()n l'()V .m<l rhe l>i,,.,ur..,· of Vi,wn in K.nhryn J-1 Varda. "V,trlb p:n Al!ltl·,,'' C'i,l,i,·r., ,fr, C,uim,, ( t C.)9-1): 1-1, tr.111,w
Ui~dow\ Cin,·ma ... Sai'n1 .\8, J (Autumn I9\/7): 2.t:!- 46; L.mc . lated in Alio:;c.)n Stuith . .-l_1,.•11i·~ I ·,m/i1. 1-L
.. From '/7u· L111do., t() r,,,.,11 Hrtdk" : Yvonnl.' T.1!.kt.·r. ·•ui~~c:r .15 A" (;111,:ttt.· Vi111.·c.·ndt.·:1u inc.hcuc..·d in Hill Jnd Churrh G1b,011 .
Th:111 Liti::· S\~/11 ,md S.•1111d \J. :i (J\,1:iy 19\/11): 12- 1:i: :mtl the <hi,rd c;11idr. 444.

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 15
The Men with
the Movie Cameras
Richard Koszarski

Richard Koszarski teaches film history in the Department of English at Rutgers University in
New Jersey and is the editor-in-chief of Film History: An International Journal. His books include
Fort Lee, The Film Town, Von: The Ute and Films of Erich von Stroh6im, An Evening's Enter-
tainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture and The Man You Loved to Hate: Erich von
Stroh6im and Hollywood. This article on the Importance of cinematographers in expressing the
look and the vision of a film originally appeared in the New York magazine Film Comment in
1972. Noting the historical marginalization of the cameraman in favor of the director In early
Hollywood cinema, Koszarski discusses the eclectic internationalized nature of the Hollywood
style of cinematography generally as a context for understanding the distinctive work of specific
cinematographers individually and sometimes in their relationship with individual directors.

When applying the spotlight theory of filn1 history,
attention is directed front one "golden age" to another.
flitting back and forth across Europe, back and forth
across the Atlantic, following the cinen1atic 111use as it
settles first with one national cinen1a and then another.
This theory is quite serviceable in the writing of
cursory filn1 histories, but always raises the problen1
of specifically delineating each national cinen1a to
which the author seek.~ to attribute greatness. Those
who apply this technique n1ost strictly tend to choose
n1ovements that are easy to talk about in tenns con1-
n1only en1ployed in literary analysis. It is a strong
thematic quality which unites the Soviet, Gennan. or
post-war Italian schools for these writers, and any
utilization of editing. design or can1er.1,vork is shuffied
uncomfortably to a far con1er and discussed as ancil-
lary technique. This is only to be expectt·d. ~ven the
state of film historiral study ;1nd the predilections of
R1chnd Kou;1~k1. "Th,: r--.•k n ,,11h rlh· M11v1\· C.111h:r.l' ... ,,j,. _17 .•<J frt11H him (.'.11111,,,·,,1
~Hon. H.c:pnntcd by p\·nrn,;,11111 o r' th,· F1hn !\,,, l\' h ' ,,( I 11,<,,Jn ( ·,:nt,•r.
1nany filn1 historians. Occasionally the n1ore daring
a1nong then1 will try to relate the ''style" of a particu-
lar ,novement to the "content" of that movement, but
seldo1n will you find any admission that the style is
the n1oven1ent, and the way a story is told is the story.
Our conditioned vocabularies resist defining a move-
n1ent in tem1S ofjuxtaposition or special relationships,
and consequently, the only film moven1ents that get
generally discussed as 111oven1ents are those who have
a strong and unifying thematic core susceptible to
analysis in literary fashion .
When filtn criticis111 gre~• into a 1nore artist-
centered fonnat, it was still these then1atic values that
do1ninated the conversation. Directors, even such
obvious visual stylists as Ophuls or Dreyer, ,vere dis-
cusscd pri111arily in tenns of the story content of their
work, certainly a strange approach for criticisn1 of
this 111ost 1nodcn1 of art lonns. Recently che grip
X, IHI. ! (~Huum·r J•J':"~). 1• J-J72' h~ r:1lu1 CPmnlnH l't1Ml'h111t,! Corp,•·

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
136 Richard Koszarski
of director-as-auteur criticis111 has loosened, and fleet-
ing spotlight~ of attention have been directed to other
panicipants in the filnunaking process. Last year Fi/111
Co111111e11t devoted a whole issue to the work of the
screenwriter, cenainly a fresh approach in the welter
of director-centered criticisn1 that has appeared in the
past decade, but predictably devoted to a type of fihn-
1naker intirnately bound up with story and narrative
elements, and thus susceptible to the standard fonns
of literary/the1natic analysis e1nployed previously.
Written criticisn1 necessarily tend~ towards what
can be verbalized n1ost satisfactorilv, •
and so filn1 criti-
cis1n has always centered on those ele1nents of this
variegated an fonn which are n1ost n1anageable in
literary tenns. But the fonn dcn1ands critics t'quipped
to discuss it not only in the tem1s of written literature,
but with a critical vocabulary conscious of develop-
rnents in post-war n1usic and an as well, prepared to
discuss the n1ovi11,R pict11r1· in tenns of tht' questions
raised by these related disciplinl.>s. Only tht'n can wt'
successfully appreciate the work of those whose cre-
ative contribution is involved most directly with the
n1ore plastic and rhythmic elements of the 1nediun1.
those who lend fonn and 111oven1ent to the structure
of the n1oving i1nage. At this state in filn1 history a
n1onograph on Margaret Booth would be n1ost
welcon1e. Or on the other hand, a study of those \vho
put the irnages on the filn1 in the first place. It is
sirnply preposterous that there is not a se11te11ce on the
an of Lt'e Gannes or Gregg Toland, not any proper
critical evaluation. What were these n1en doing? It is
a very hopeful sign that the American Fihn Institute
has been spending n1ore attention lately in cornpiling
oral histories of cine1natographers. and that several
books have appeared recently with sin1ilar infonna-
tion. But these are only tools for scholars and critics,
,vith little value as end~ in thernst'lvc:s.
The san1e 1night be said for the tihnographics li ~tc,·d
here: they are only staning points in analysis. Tht'y do.
ho,,·cvt'r, represt·nt nt'w n1aterial not prc:viously col-
lectt"d and absolutely crucial to any understanding of
the work of the tihn artists involved. Evt'll 111ore
in1portantly, tht'y illun1inate still another "golden
.l~t'."
. .
,vhich unlike that of (;ennanv. or Italv or (;rt•;1t
Britain ,v:is not one detined so r.1~ily by its contt·nt
.1s by its ~tylt· - the Holly\vond !);Olden age. the cla~sic
p<'riod o f the An1t·rican studios, front l 'J 15 up to the
Fiftit·~. In looking over thest· til111ogr.1phit·s it bt·co111c~
',·., r that hcrt' ,va~ the kt·v, unih·ing
. . t·ll'111ent of tht·
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Hollywood style. a visual halhnark which effectively
evaded the attentions of most previous historians.
The process of absorption, synthesis and change is
,vhat 111arks H ollywood photo1,rraphy throughout, the
idea of building on earlier rnodels, foreign 1nodels,
con1en1porary n1odels, taking everything of quality in
sight and purring it to use for their o,vn panicular
ends. This eclecticisn1 was developed into an
unn1istakeably fluid and dynan1ic style by H ollywood
can1er.11nen over the four or five decades of Holly-
wood's ascendance, and its roots n1ay be traced back
to the very beginnings of An1erican production .
When G . W. Bitzer began work at Biograph in 1898
the n1otion picture had just left the laboratories of its
inventors. Luntiere, Dickson - Friese-Greene if vou ,
insist - had de1nonstrated just before the tun1 of the
century the success of tht'ir n1echanical contrivances
in catching and reduplicating action in n1ovement. But
after perfecting the device they left its developn1ent
to other hands, and the n1otion picture passed fron1
inventors and n1echanics fascinated by the problen1 of
1nove1nent to businessn1en and artists enthralled by th<'
fact of n1oven1ent itself. To Melies and Porter. to Sn1ith
and Selig and Lubin and dozens of other vague figures
of this transitional period, the fate of this latest Victo-
rian 111arvel was entrusted. The n1anner of their success
is still son1ething that await\ the proper Gordon
Hendricks treatn1ent, but one factor which unified all
of their \vork was an intense personal contact ,vith
all the clen1t'nts of the filn1n1aking process.
This was the scene into which Bitzer wandered in
1898. A fihn was generally conceived, shot, developed
and printed by one n1an - a not infelicitous situation
for 50- or I ()()-toot productions. This is the way Bitzer
hi1nself learned filnunaking. and his early work pre-
St'rved on Library of Congress paper print~ casts an
intt•rt•sting light on the nature of his collaboration ,vith
Gritlith years later. But of all these ti.1nctions, by far
the chief,vas photoi,,rraphy. "Making a n1oving picture"
n1cant turning the crank; thinking up a story, handling
the actors and cutting the n1aterial together ,vas just
iring on tht• r.1kt·. Soon a pri1nitive division of labor
,vas introduct·d lt)r the n1ore co111plicatcd productions.
.1 nd spt·ri:1lizt·d fih11 "dirt·t· tors" like Wallace
Mr(:u1d1t·on ht•gan •
to restrict tht·111selves to workini:•
..
solt·h·. ,vith tht· ~torit·s .ind act,.in. of the increasinglv
t·on1plic1tt·d 11.1rrativc tihns. Uut tht' 1nechanical ponion
nf tht· n1arh i11e .1rt \\·,1~ ll'ti to the can1eran1en, and
\vhen the 1i111t· r,1111t· this is \,·h.11 Bitzer and 111Jn,·
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 The Men with the Movie Cameras 137

Figure 15.l. Uill)• U1tzcr prov,d«l dot' bnvura canwr~work 111 81tr/, ,f ,, l\·1wo11 (Epoch
Films. 19 I ~) Produc,·d .111d d1«·rtt·d by I) . W . C.: nflith

others chose to spt'cialize in. The responsibility of this
position was such that \Vhcn Grifftth arrived in 1908
he found his ca1neramen were often slo,v to irnple-
111ent the suggestions Jnd i111proven1ents he thought of
for his films. Tht'y reasoned that if anything went
,vrong ,vith the filn1. if a.n in1age failed to register, it
,vas the can1eran1an and not the director who ,vas in
trouble. The camera was still the \vhole sho,v.
But the gro,vth of the 1nodcrn ci11e111a restructured
all of this again. The Holly\vood 5tudio tradition
gre"v up around the id<·a of divisio n of labor. of
deparonentalization, of a spccialiq for ev.ery :isp<'Ct
of the production - Literary, sce1tic. photographic. or
,vhatever. Screcn,vritcrs dt'cidcd ,vhat HoU y,~·ood
fib11s had to say, and directors ho,v it " ·ouJd be said.
But putting the in1agc on filn1 - "rnaking the 1noving
picture'' - ,vas sti ll the;- responsibility of the ca111cra-
n1a11. And in the pre-,var yea£1, this ,vas no 111t:an
accornplishrnent. Lethargic: e111ulsions. sputtering or
non-existent lighting. crotchety ca111era 111echanis1ns
and supcr-slo,v lens<·~ n1adc great can1cra111e11 out of
anyone ,vho could ucceed in gening .i clearly focused
i.n1agc on the filu1 - yet those troubleso111c days ,vcrt'
certainly a fn1irful training ground. By 1915 111echani-
cJ1 difficulties had bet'll S\Vt'pt a,vay and expression in
cem1s of light \\1as n1.1de possible on a 111ajor scale.
Three fi l111s of that year, fortunately aU extant 111 Jinc
quality prints, offer good exan1ples: De Mille\ T7w

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
138 Richard Koszarski
Cheat, shot by Alvin Wyckoff; Dwan's David Hamm, shot
by Hal Rosson; and Griffith's TI1e Birth (!{ a Nation, shot
by Billy Bitzer. In these three filn1s one can see already
formed the basis of the whole tradition of American
cinen1atography: Wyckofl's use of shadows for psycho-
logical effect, of superb figure molding, of intricately
accomplished trick work, points to the whole ron1antic-
expressionist tradition of Lee Gam1es, John Seitz and
Bert Glennon. Rosson's warm and documentary-like
examination of the countryside (con1plete with preco-
cious deep focus and tracking moven1ents) prefigures
the deceptively uncon1plicated sryles of George Sch-
neidennan or William Clothier. And Bitzer's bravura
camerawork, which can enco1npass intin1ate human
drama and grandscale panorama in the same shot (as in
Shem1an's n1arch to the sea), has been carried on by
such 1nen as Leon Shan1roy and Robert Surtees.
Over the intervening years the continuiry of this
visual sryle was fostered by a number of methods
which enabled younger cameran1en to work under
n1ore experienced veterans in a direct way, either as
operators, second can1eran1en, or assistants. Thus, an
infonnal "school" of one particular visual style can be
traced in a reasonably clear n1anner (son1ething which
can't be done with directors, for exan1ple, whose
assistants were usually busy rounding up extras). Many
cameramen were under contract to studios for years,
and such cross-pollination no doubt resulted in one
particular sryle heavily inffuencing a wide variety of
younger assistants who were also under contract at the
time. One can discuss an En1est Palmer or Arthur
Miller or Leon Shan1ory style at Fox, for exan1ple,
,vhich would exist outside of any particular trend in
studio production. Of course. when such a studio style
,vas definitely promoted. it was the cameran1an who
carried it along. Warner Brothers filn1s of the Thirties
are probably visualized more clearly in terms of Sol
Polito, Tony Gaudio and Barney McGill, than through
Welln1an, LeRoy or even Curtiz. Paramount's glossiest
period was the result of Victor Milner and Lee Gam1es
as 1nuch as Lubitsch, Sternberg or Man1oulian. Willia111
Daniels, Oliver Marsh and Harry Stradling Sr. went a
long way toward producing the MGM look. And Joe
Walker was Colu,nbia all by himself.
()nee such a studio style had been fixed it see1ned
to pervade the rafters of the studio itself. (;eorgt·
Folsey 111oved fron1 Paran1ount (Appla11st', The S111ili11.I!
Lie111t·11,111t) to Metro (;\,feet A-le i11 St. L,uis, ·nu· U-1,it<'
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Cliffe of Dover} but his sryle didn't move with hin,.
Only those can1eran1en with the strongest personal
sryles were able to cross studio boundaries with impu-
niry and in1print their own vision on everything. Hal
Rosson could 1nake a Metro Fle1ning (Red Dust} look
like a Paran1ount Sternberg (TI1e Docks of 1\Jeu, York),
and Bert Glennon, Joe August or Gregg Toland could
do the san1e thing.
Just as n1any of the great can1eramen were associ-
ated n1ost strongly with individual studios, another
group was so linked to individual directors that their
,vork together created a fusion of personal styles
sinrilar to some of the studio/ cameraman associations.
Bitzer and Griffith are the chief exa1nples, but John
Seitz and Rex Ingram (and later Billy Wilder), Karl
Brown and Jan1es Cruze. and ltobert Burks and Alfred
Hitchcock are also notable pairings and, when these
associations broke up. the effect on the visual sryle of
both partners was often quite noticeable (Hitchcock·s
work after Burks' death, for example).
But Hollywood's visual style was not a purely inbred
tradition. As ,vith everything else, the studios could
appropriate a pictorial sryle fron1 overseas and make it
their own. In the late Twenties and early Thirties a
"Gt'rman look" was highly cultivated, but there was no
n1istaking Fies/, and tire De11il or Svengali as anything but
pure Hollywood. no n1atter how hard they tried. The
finest Hollywood can1eran1en always added to tht'
techniques they adopted from overseas, and to see this
most clearly look at Sunrise agai1tst the contex"t of
Murnau·s earlier filn1s. The Gem1an ca1nera111en had
retained their primary interest in engineering; creative
photography ,vas concen1ed with the designing of
tracking and dollying equipn1ent. But Struss and
Rosher quickly adapted to the n1oving sryle called for
by Murnau and con1bined with this their own back-
grounds in portrait photography. The visual differenct'
between Sunrise and TI1c !Ast LAugh can be seen in the
figure n1olding on the faces of George O'Brien a11d
Janet Gaynor, a lighting sophistication undrean1ed ofin
Gemiany at the tin1e, but well grounded in An1erica11
ca1nerawork throughout the Twenties. Karl Freund and
the otht'r Gennan can1eran1en who successfully ,vorked
in An1erica quickly adapted the1nselves to these ne\\·
con1plt'xities of shading. and we can trace this change
by ,v;1tchi11g their earliest A1nerican work.
The post-World War II period brought the inffu-
ence of the docurnentarists .111d Italian neo-realists. but
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 The Men with the Movie Cameras 139

Figure 15.2 Ch.irk·~ ll o,her and K.u l Stni,, contnbuted th,· cxpr<·,"m u.st c111e11 1.uoi-rJph)' tor F. \V. Munuu\
Smm,c- (l--'1x him Corp .. 1'127). l'nkhi.ed by \V11li,m r o x

hen: again it ,vas digcstcd and ntadt• pJ rt of the evolv-
ing tradition. Look at Jan1es Wong H o,ve·s TIii' R,,sc
Ta1100. ,vh.ich echoes th e gn n1 tcxrure of M agnani's
' '
Ita lian filnis - an antazin~ ' hvbrid.
. but stil l a n1ost
polished piece of Ho ll)'\Vood craft.~n1ansh1p under-
neath. And ,vhen the studios ,verc11 ·c borro,ving
stylistic couches fron1 over;t"as th ey ,vere often bor-
ro,ving tht: can1cran1c.:11 then1selves: Freund. M ate.
Planer and oth ers ca,nc over and brought part of the
European traditio n ,vith then,. Karl Freund n1ade
1\ •l11rdrrs in 1/,c R11e t\,f,,~fl'"' a sequ el co Ca/~~1,ri and TIii'
Golc111. One ca n see l) rcyer's ,vall-eyt'd lighting effects
behind R..ita H ,1y,vorch in Rudolph Mate's photo-
graphy of G ilda. A~ for Franz l'laner. hi~ ,vork ,vich
Ophuls 011 bo th side, of the Atlannc 1s refiecced in
th e elegance of such dive~e ,vork a~ Holiday and
Brea~/asr ar T/fJ;111y 's. T he hsc could go on and on.
In the RO\.V of the~t· inftut·nce,. a~ ,veil .1s their
ab~orpri on into tht' ge neral fohric of Holly" ·ood ~tyle
f.. ,I one not o uly sees the gro,vth oi the 1ndiv1dual
3rtist. but th e historical context ch:it pron1pted ccrtai11
devt'lopn1enc~ and h1~ re,1ctio n5 and concriburio ns to
tl1en1. I- .. I T .1ken together these fo mt the fabric of
Ho ll y,vood·~ visual style ,virl1 alJ th e individual strands
sho,vi ng through . C:0111b111ed \vith the v.,ork of direc-
tors. \Vritt·r... dt·signcr1 and o thel'. ther fo n11 a picture
of clas5ic Holly,vood as the Florence of th e West.
bringing cogcthcr cre,1tive idea, and crearivt· t..1lent,
front all ove r the ,vorld, then blendin g the:nt into a
ne,v and dynanuc ~yn thesis.
This foblt·d 111ixture held so lo ng as there: ,vas a
fi-an1 e\.vork to support 1t all. Whe n that dropped out
it 111ea11c 111o rc than the coll,1psc of the studio 1nechod
of filn1n1ak1ng. Without chis ~m1 cture to ~upporc
l:{fO\\'tb and change, Antt·rican cine111atography run1ed
fron1 inspired t'clccricisn1 co frag111ented in ~p iration.
It ca111e: full circle a~d111 to the days of Billy Uitze r.
as tod.1y's pionccr1 roa1n the , treecs ~vith portable
equ ipn1t·nt and Ange n1eux len~e~, starting th eir o\\·n
traditio n~.

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 16
Notes on a Screenwriter's
Theory, 1973
Richard Corliss

At one time the editor of New Yortc's Film Comment magazine in the 1970s, Richard Cor1iss
is a longtime writer for Time magazine who focuses primarily on movies. His wortc has
appeared in such publications as the New Yorlc Times, Film Quarterly, National Review and
the Village Voice. Cor11ss has helped draw attention to the role of the screenwriter rather than
the director in the making of films. This reading, the introductory chapter to Cor11ss's book
Talldng Pictures: Screenwriters in the American Cinema, 1927- 1973 (1974), was, as its title
implies, inspired by Sarris' 1968 book on Hollywood directors and explicitly acknowledged by
the author as his primary influence. Yet Cor1iss suggests that Sarris has distorted film history
by his exclusive focus on directors, and observes that an auteurism truly concerned with visual
style would be more concerned with the images directors created in relation to the words in
the scripts that screenwriters wrote. Cor1iss moves on to offer a screenwriter's pantheon and
to discuss the writing of a number of Hollywood screenwriters in relation to the different direc-
tors with whom they wortced.

of social torces - whether capitalist, conununist, or

1 . Thesis: The Director as Auteur
I ,vas driving by Otto Pren1inger\ house: last night - or
is it "a hou,c: by Otto Prentinger"?
- Uurt K<·nn ...dv 197 1
It's a full decade 110\\' since Andre,v Sarris published,
in Fil,n Culture magazine. his ~vo-part An1ericaniza-
tion of the politiq11e des autc11rs. At the tin1e it could
be taken as a thoughtful and provocative challenge to
that near-1nonopoly in serious English-language fihn
cnt1c1sn1, the Social Dialectic. Refrt•shingly. Sarris
exan1 ined fihns as the creations of artists rather th;111
fascist - and, in doing so, he helped liberate the scru-
pulous study of American tihn fron1 the nun1bing
strictures of solemnity. We could finally admit without
sh:une that the best Hollywood n1ovies succeeded not
..
only as delightful entertainn1ents but as art works
rivaling those front the culture capitals of Europe.
Sarris wasn't the first An1erican to argue that "the
director is the author of a filn1." Hollywood itself had
accepted this policy in the silent days, when directors
received billing just belo"l.v their stars; TI1e Rise t)( 1/,e
.'1111cn·ci111 Fi/111 and ·11,e U11eli1'SI Art devote long chap-
tt·rs to the careers of Holly,vood 111c1teurs-e11-sce11e; even
Dosley C ro,vther. back in 1940. seconded WilliJn1

ll 1d 1,1rd C,lrl1", "No 11.· , \_•n :1 Slr'-:'-·n wnh:r\ T fh'l•ty. l 1 •7J.'' l'P· ~v11 :nvi u fr,n11 1:,IL·,,,.~ P111111n : ·" , ,.·,iw rita , 111 t/i,· .•lmn ,.. m <'.'111011,1, /9_.,""- 19 ":.I (W<~xh tt,d,.
N Y: l h ·f rloPk PH~~. 1•,; ~·, . .l '. Jl) / ~ hy ll 1, h.,nl ( ' 1,,1,..... R ,·1•m11c.:d lw r1.·1 ll ll\\ l(.• U t.H I h,· l lv1:rk•t.•l Pr..·" ·

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Notes on a Screenwriter's Theory, 1973
Wyler's assertion that "the final responsibility for a
picture's quality rests solely and completely upon the
shoulders of the man who directed it." But it was
Sarris 's call to am1s that started the auteur revolution.
First the specialized journals. then the n1ass- n1arket
niagazines. then 11,e Neu, York Tin,es, Cue, and TV
Guide began crediting directors not only with author-
ship but with ownership: "Arthur Hiller's Love Story."
By the .in1e the trend had reached Hollywood, it had
becorne sornething of a joke. Thus Play It Again, Sam
- starring Woody Allen, screenplay by W oody Allen,
from a play by Woody Allen - is heralded in the screen
credits as "A Herbert Ross Filn1."
Sarris's version of the politiq11e was extraordinarily
helpful in calling attention to neglected A1nerican
directors in a fistful of infra dig genres, but it ,nay
have done more harm than good in citing the director
as the sole author of his film. What could have begun
a systematic expansion of American film history - by
calling attention to anonymous screenwriters, cinema-
tographers, art directors, and, yes, even actors - bogged
down in an endless coronation of the director as
benevolent despot, in his enshrinement as solitary
artist, with his collaborating craftsmen functioning
rnerely as paint, canvas, bowl of fruit, and patron.
By establishing the director as the Creator of a
Work of Art, the auteurists were falling into the san1e
critical traps that had snared the no-less-well-meaning
Social Realisn1 crowd some thirty years earlier. The
notion persists that a work of art is the product of
one man ,vorking alone to carve a personal vision out
of the marble of his sensibility. Ideally, perhaps, but not
invariably- and, in Hollywood, not even generally. Yet
this notion, very ron1antic and very American, is the
basis upon which rnost recent film histories stand. It
is so basic that it is taken for granted: in the standard
book-length studies of Sternberg and Stevens.
Hitchcock and Hawks. the critics• auteur bias is a
given that needn't be proven.
A number of critical labels have to be spindled and
mutilated before we can begin to appreciate the col-
laborative complexity of American cinen1a 111ore fully.
An vs. entmainment: a rather precious distinction by
now, since any supren1ely entertaining n1ovie should
reveal deeper (or at least broader) levels upon further
viewings. and since any work of art cannot help but
entertain, if only in the vit",vcr's dclight in discovcring
it. S,1/itary 11n 11s. n111i,,r,1tc drt: Tht' f:1ct that C:hartrcs. or
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141
Charade, was the work of a nun1ber of individuals con-
tributing their unique talents 10 a corporate enterprise
doesn't necessarily n1ake either work less "artistic"
than. say, Van Gogh's "Wildflowers" or Snow's Wave-
/en~//,. It just 111akes it n1ore difficult for the critic 10
assign sole authorship, which is 111ore a critical conve-
nience than a value judgment - or should be. anyway.
11,e creative artist vs. t/,e interpretive artist: Both Stanley
Donen and Michael Snow are, shall we say, artists; but
Snow is a creative artist and Donen an interpretive
artist. Snow is ahnost literally a filn1 maker, collaborat-
ing with his film strips and his Movieola in an intin1ate.
incestuous way that has very little to do with the way
Donen collaborates with his scriptwriter, actors, and
technicians. The traditional view was that the solitary.
creative artist produced Art, while the corporate,
interpretive craftsn1an produced Entertainment. It
would seen1 that the auteur theory, which one might
have assu111ed would de111olish this old canard, is actu-
ally reinforcing it. If Donen is worthy of sustained
critical study (and I believe he is), so are, say, Arthur
Freed, Gene Kelly, Betty Con1den and Adolph Green,
Richard Avedon, George Abbott, Cary Grant, Peter
Stone, Christopher Challis, and all the other talented
n1en and won1en whose careers intersected Donen ·s
at mutually felicitous points.
Cinen1a is not the only medium in which author-
ship is bestowed upon the director (or, for that matter,
the art director - as witness John Sin1on's recent criti-
cal study, lngn,ar Bergman Directs. which the title page
describes, in a type size equal to Mr. Sin1on's credit.
as "a creation of Halcyon Enterprises"!). Determining
authorship in the theater can be a complicated busi-
ness. ls Harold Pinter the "author" of Old Times? Most
assuredly. And yet the difference bet,veen the London
and New York productions of the play a111ounted to
more than a subtle shift in tone, or even in effect; it
was a difft'rence in n11·aning. As played by Colin Blakely
(London), the Deeley character was the audience's
very vulnerable identity figure; as played by R obert
Sha,v (New York), he was a self-deceiving boor. As
played by Vivien M erchant (London), the Anna char-
acter was 111enacing, predatory; as played by Rosen1ary
Harris (Ne,v York), she was helpful. syrnpathetic. Sarne
author. sa111e director, san1t' pauses - but different casts
and, ahnost. two different plays.
It's probably fair 10 consider Toni O'Horgan the
pritne rnovt·r (\vht·ther as creator or defiler) of his later
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142
theatrical extravaganzas. because he shapes. packages,
controls his productions as co111pletely as, say. Ken
R.. ussell controls his fihns. In a less 1nannerist vein, the
llroad,vay career of Elia Kazan - whose collaborations
,vith Tennessee Willia111s, Anhur Miller, and S. N.
l3ehnnan. an1ong others, ,vere both intense and endur-
ing - could be profitably studied for Kazan's personal
approach to the1nes and styles. Dut could he exercise
"directorial authority" as powerfully on Broad,vay as
in Holl)'\vood? In one case at least. yes: at his insis-
tence. W illian1s wrote an entirely ne,v third act for c:,u
"" a H<>f Tin R1>,>( To be sure (and to be la1nented).
one ca1111,,1 study Kazan's theater ,vork, because his
productions died on closing night, ,vhilc his play-
,vrights' scripts livt- on in book tonn. One reason ti.,r
directorial supren1acy in the cincrna 1nay be that,
there. the reverse is true: screenplays are rarely pub-
lished (and barely consultl·d even then), ,vhilc the
filn1s 1nadc:: fron1 thcn1 arc available at the flick of a
TV channel selector.
Willian1 Wyler ,vas absolutl·ly right to hold the
director responsible tor "a pi,curc·s quality" - just :is
a conductor is responsible for the:: co1npOsl·r's sy111-
phony. or a contractor for the architect's plans. l3ut he
111ust also be responsibl<: ro sornething: the Sl·n:enplay.
With it, he can do one of thrc::e thin~: n1in it. shoot
it, or inlpHlVt' it. r.. -1- Realizing a screenplay is the
director's job; transcending it is his glory. Dl·spite the
Writers Guild's in1111en1orial 1,'Tipes, directing is a fine
art. not a lead- pipe cinch (.is too 1na11y screcn,vriters
have proved ,vhen they tried to direct a picture). It\
no roincidi:nce that n1ost of the filin~ sclcctl·d ti.,r
praise in this book [Corliss 1974] ,verc: din.:,tl·d by
Hollyv.·ood's tinl'St auteurs - 110 n1ort' a roincidl·11re
than that thi:sc:: sa111c tihns ,vere scripted by Holly-
,vood's finest authors.
Andre,v Sarris has said that the directors he prctic·rs
,ire those.' ,vith an u11cons,ious - ,vho. presurnably.
speak fro111 the· ~oul. and not fro1n the srcnario. I think
that this statellll'llt also suggests ,vhy Sarti~ prefl·rs a
dirertor's cine111a to a ,vriter's. ()nl' restraint on the
pol·tic tcndencil'S of a screen,vritl'r-oriented critic, as
oppo~cd to those of an .1uteurist, is that tht· sc·rc·en-
,,.,riter 111c1kcs ,,·ords and situations ocrur, ,vhik· the
director ,1//c,11,s actions to occur. Thu~. the process of
crl';1ti11g ;l ~,re<:nplay is 111o re ti.,nnal. kss niysti l·,11 tha11
the in1age. ,vhich is created by the director. photoi::r,1-
pher. dtsignl·r. and actors. This inexact ness of the visual
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Richard Corliss
pro,ess gives the auteurist an opponunity to inft'r
rean1s and realtns of 1netaphysical nuan,e. Typev.•ritcr
keys seen1 t<> spring to the paper with grandiose gen-
eralizations: "a ,vorld of . .. , " "the cinen1a of ..... And
since the director allowed these filnuc epiphanies to
take place, ,vho's to say he didn't 111<1ke then1 happen?
This is the notion of the anise as inspired dervish
- literally "in-spired." The Muse breathes the spirit
into a director. and hi: exhales this inspiration. tilling
the sound stage ,vith a 111agic that affect~ cast and c-re"·
;n1d result~ in a privileged n101nent. To the great direc-
tors, n1aking their greatest fihns, this fanta~y n1ay apply.
One gets the tceling that John Ford cri:atively con-
trolled t'very 111on1ent of T11e Sc,1rd1ers. frorn tirst
opening door to last clo~ing door. But the greatlll'SS
of even so controlled a til111 as Psych" is panly due to
Anthony Perkins's perfonnance. ,vhich at kast
extended. and probably transcended. Hitchcock\
understanding of Nonnan l3atcs's character.
Th<: dire,tor is right in the n1iddle of thin~~- At th<:
very li:ast, he's on thl' sound stage while the cinenu-
to~>rapher is ligl1ting the set that the an director has
designed and, later. while the actors are speaking the
lines that the screen,vriti:r wrote. At bi:st. he Stl'ers all
tht·se f:1rtors (~tory. a,tON, ,an1era) in the right din•.-.
1it>11, to the extent that n1a11y filn1s are indeed don1inatt·d
by his personality - though not, perhaps, in the ,vay
the auteurists 111ea11. The phrase "directorial personJl-
ity" 1nay n1.1ke niort- si:nst' if it's taken quite litcrallv.
Anyone Y.' ho's seen Stanley Oonen or Sain Peckinpah
or Ho,~·ard H.1wks or Radlev Metzger in action kno,,·s
that the etli:-ctive dirc::ctor is usually a n1an ,vith a
strong. persuasive personality. He has to co1nbine tht·
talent~ of s.ilesn1.in (to get a job in the first placl·).
tough guy (to n1akl· the technicians respond to hi~
ro1n1na11ds). ,ind hl·st fril·nd (to coax a good pertt,r-
1na11ce out of a volatile actress). Whl·ther ht· directs
,,·ith a riding crop (Scrohein1). an icy scare (Stembt'rg) .
or son1e light\\'l'ight h.1nttr (Cukor). his personality is
often crucial to the succ<:~s of a fihn. The in1pona11ct·
of a dirt'ctor's pl'Nonal - or evl·n visual - style is not
.it questiQn here. onlv thl' assu111ption that he ..:reate~
a style out of thin air inste.id of adapting it to tht'
equ.1lly i111portant stvk·s of the story and perfonnrrs.
lndt'cd. if .Hlll'Ur criticis1n had lived up to its early
l·bini 10 br truly co1H·crnt·d ,,.,ith visual style. there
,vould bl· no lll'l•d for anv ~ysteniatic slighting oi
thl· scr<:l·n,vritcr. (;iven a ce rtain tl'Xt. or pretext, the
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Notes on a Screenwriter's Theory, 1973
Figu.r e 16. 1. Howard H•wk< chrc,ti ng Humphrey Uo1,,;in •nd Lau ren Uacall on lhc <el uf Tiir B(e Slfl'JI
(W,,nlcr Oro,. 1946). Produced by Howard H.,wki
directo r could be said to ,veave the ,vriter's design
into a p ersonal, visual subtext through the use of
ca111era placen1ent and n1oven1ent, lighting, cutting,
di rection of actors. etc. Such a poliriq11c ,vould go far
toward elucidating the ,vork of superior 111c11e11rs-
e11-src11e o n the order of Cu kor. Oonen, Michael
Curriz. M jtchell Leisen, and Don Siegel. Dut visual
style is n oc the autt·urisc's n1ajor interest. Auteur
criticism is essentially then1e criticisn1; and then1cs - as
expressed through plot. characterization. and dialogue
- belong pri1narily to the writer.
2. Antithesis: The Screenwriter as Auteur
In rny o pinion, the \\•ritcr i hould have the first and b<t
,vord in filtnn1aking, tht' only bt'tct'r altcmattvt' bdng the
,vritcr-dirertor, bu t ,vith tht' sire~• 0 11 the fir.1t ,vord.
- Orson WcUcs, 1950
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143
The cry "d1crd1ez /'a11te11r'' ca n lead un,vary fi ln1 schol-
ars astray when the auteur happens to be the author
- or r:uher, ,vhen the script is the basis of a fil111 's
success. As often as not, when a fine fLln1 is signed by
a n'l.iddk·-rung director. the filn1 's clistinctive qualities
can be traced to the screenwriter. There ·s no need to
rescue MitcheU Leisen, Garson Kauin. Sa111 W ood, and
Willi:11n D. l~usseU from the under,vorld of neglected
directors sin1ply becaust' each , vas fortunate enough
to direct a con1cdy ,vritte11, in his best period, by
N om 1an Krasna (H flnds A cross the "fable, Badie/or .'vfotl,er,
77,r D evil aud i\1iss jo11es, and D ear Rut/, , respectivel y).
The direction of these filn1S is usually adroit and sensi-
tive, and the presen ce of channing con1edie11nes
enhance~ the111 even further; but the dclightfi1Uy don1 -
inanc personality behind the screen is undoubtedly
Kr:isua ·s.
Kra.~na 's "mistaken-identity" theme, v,hich he
rnil ked for n1ore than trurry years, is .is un111iswkabl e
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144
Figure 16.2. Applc-p1<·-m-1hc-f.,cc A111encanJ m H<1il i/1(• c:,,11,111rri1i~ /-/rm (Paramount, 19-1-4), Produced,
wnttt..· n . .111d d1rcct,.'d by Pn:~tcu1 Sturgt~
as an Eric R.o hn1l'r plot - but hl''s hardly the o nl y
Hollywood screen,vnter \Vlth then1at1c or tonal
ob~essions. Den Hecht's pl·nny-ante cy11icisn1, Pre~ton
Sturges·~ apple-pie-in-chc·-foce A111ericana. Frank
Tashlin's breast fixation. Peter Srone·s sc hizophrenia.
Georgl' Axelrod's in1potent Svl"ngalis, Howard Koch's
lid,esrc>d letters, Borden Chast' ·s ,.vagon trains of W estt'm
Civilization, Abral1 a111 Po lonsky\ cco nontic deter-
n1inisn1, Billy Wilder's crea tive con n1en, S.imson
R aphaelson 's aristocratic bo11~(!roisic, Garson Kan in and
Ruth Gordon ·s eccentric n1Jrriagcs. Dudley Nichols·
insrant reden1prion. J o~eph L. Mankie\vicz·~ endk-ss
arcicularion, D,1lron Tru1nbo 's gilt-edged propag-.inda,
R.obert Jliskin's dc1nogogic populisn1, Sidney Buch-
n1an's den1ocratic republicanisn1, Jul es FurthJuan ·s
noble adventurers, C harles Ll·dcrer's sassy 1nisanthropy.
l~ing Lardner. Jr.'s brassy rnisogyny. Terry Southen1 ·s
practical joking. Erich Segal's ivy-covc:n:d senti111en-
cality. Juh_,~ Fc:iffcr's cartoon 111oraliry pby~. !)avid
Nt',v111an and llobert IJenton "s likabll' lo~er<- . . . look
at tht: filins of thl',c scriccn,vriters half as closely a~ an
Digitized by Google -
Richard Corliss
au teurist ,vould l'xan1int: the ,vork of Otto Prl·n1ingt:r
or R.obert Mullig:in. and chances are you ·u find your-
self sta ring at s0111t' do111inant then1e or stylt' or plot
or n1ood - so111e srrong peNonal trait of fil111 author-
ship. Aftt-r all, ftln1 is (as Andre,v Sarris has obst:rvt:d)
l'SSl'lltially a dran1acic llll'CUun1; and the screen,vrirers
are the 111edi un1·s dran1atisrs.
It's clear that s01nc 1nethod of classification and
evaluation is nercssary. both to identify and to assess
the contributio n of tl1at overpaid but unsuJ1g tr1111s
kno\.vn as the screcn,vrirer. But that is :i ga.me rhat
conceal~ even rnore pitfalls than does the Sarris Hit
Parade of Oirl'ctors. Once the auteur schol.u- accep~
the n1yth of th e 01nnipotent director - that non-
existent Ha,vks or SteVl'llS ,vho wtires, produces.
photographs, act~ in, and l'dits every filin he rnakes -
his •gan1e is ,von. Indeed, even the scancht>st adherent
of the P"li1iq11c dt"s collabor<1tc111"S can be fairly sure that
the director of record is che n1an who hollered
"Action!'" and "Cut! " - though his in1porta11ce 111
controllin~ ,vhat ,vent on bet\ve.:n those t\VO con1-
Original from
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 Notes on a Screenwriter's Theory, 1973
1nands 111ay be disputed. But the size of a screenwriter's
contribution to any given filn1 is often 111ore difficult
to ascertain.
A writer may be given screen credit for work he
didn't do (as with Sidney Buchn1an on Holiday), or be
denied credit for work he did do (as with Sidney
Buchman on 1i1e Auful Trnth). The latter case is far
111ore co1nn1on than the fonner. Garson Kanin co-
,vrote The More the Jvlerrier, but his name didn't appear
on-screen because he had already been inducted into
the wartin1e Anny. Ben Hecht toiled for seven days
rewriting the first nine reels of Gone With the Wind,
but David 0. Selznick wanted Sidney Howard's nan1e
to appear alone on the screenplay. Michael Wilson
,vrote the screenplay for Friendly Persuasion and c<>-
scripted 1i1e Brid}!e 011 the R iver K111ai and 1A111rencc •!f
Arabia, but the Hollywood blacklist kept his nan1e off
all three fihns, and the writing Oscar for K,vai was
a,varded to Pierre Boulle, who had nothing at all to
do ,vith the film adapted fron1 his novel.
The An1erican Screen Writers Guild has a ridicu-
lous rule that disallows screenplay credit to any director
who has not contributed at least fifty per cent of the
dialogue - ridiculous if only because it pem1its auteur
critics to infer that their favorite directors consistently
contributed, say, forty-nine percent. (When the Guild
discovered that Bad C()1npa11y, a script by the writing
tean1 of Benton and N ewn1an, was going to be
directed by Benton, it routinely scheduled an arbitra-
tion hearing to detem1ine whether director Benton
was stealing a credit on poor writer N ew111an's script!)
In Europe, the auteurists tell us, things are ,nore
enlightened: there, the director receives screen play
credit whether he wrote anything or not. C ertainly
Berginan, Fellini, Antonioni, Chabrol, Trulfaut (all
wri ters before they were directors) work either as sole
authors or as collaborators - and not just as editors -
on their screenplays. But reliable sources indicate that
10111 Va Bien, the new " Godard" filn1, was \Vritten
solely by Jean-Pierre Gorin; and Luis Bunuel has
adnutted in print that he contribut<:d not one \vord
of dialogue to Jean- Claude Carriere's script for Le
Clianne Discret de la Ba11~1!£"0isie, although Du1iuel is
listed ahead of Carriere as an au thor of the scret·nplay.
Joseph Losey, who never takes scrc:-t·nplay credit. says
he works as closclv, with the screen,,-ritt·r as he does
,vith the cinen1atographt'r, editor, and actors - should
he share oflicial crt·dit ,vith these collaborators as ,vt·ll?
Digitized by Google
145
Losey needn't worry: auteur cnt1cs would have hin1
share credit with nob()dy.
In the Golden Age of Hollywood, things were a
bit different. A director would be given a script and
instructed to start shooting Monday; so much for
shaping a personal vision through creative rewriting.
But what about the screenwriter who specializes in
adaptations' Who's the auteur then? It's true that,
in the case of a Donald C)gden Stewart, the problen1
is n1ore subtle. Few screenwriters can boast a more
i111pressive list of credits than Ste\Vart's. As with George
c:ukor, the director for whon1 he produced his finest
scripts, Stewart's "filmoE,,,-aphy is his most eloquent
defense." Both Stewart and Cukor, however, had the
good luck to be assigned adaptations of some of
the wittiest and 111ost actable theater pieces of their
ti111e - Holiday, 11,c W on,en (for which Stewart received
no screen credit), 1i1c Plrilade/pl,ia St()ry, and Edu,ard,
t\1y Son - and Stewart's transferrals of these \\'Orks
fron1 stage to screen adhered closely to both the spirit
and the letter of the originals.
Stewart's achieven1ent should not be dis111issed;
1nany screenwriters failed at the delicate craft he n1as-
tered. But, as \Vith directors, one can distinguish several
layers of scr eenwriting authorship: the indifferent
work of a n1ediocre writer, whether it's an original
script or an adaptation (which we 1nay call procrus-
tean); the gem-polishing of a gifted adapter like
Stewart (protean); and the creation of a superior origi-
nal script, like H em1an J. Mankiewicz's Citizen Kt1n1·
or Abraham Polonsky's Bady and S()11/ (pron1ethean).
When faced with the career of a Stewart, the critic
who has discarded •the convenience of the auteur
theory n1ust con1pare Stewart's adaptations with the
source works, in hopes of detecting such changes as
plot co111pression or expansion, bowdlerization, addi-
tion or deletion of dialogue, and dilfert'nces in the111e
and tone. At 'NOrst, this research will exhaust and dis-
courage the critic; at best, it \viii convinct' hint that
tht' creation of a Hollywood 1novie involves a con1plex
\Vt·ave of talents, properties, and personalities.
When a screenwri ter, like Preston Sturges or
C;t•orge Axelrod, has a distinctive authorial tone. his
contributions to fil111s with n1ultiple script credits can
usu:illy be discen1ed. 13ut the halln1ark of rnany tine
scret·n,vriters is versatility. not consistency. Subject
n1attt.>r dictates style. Givt•n the C~ht·shire Cat nature
of tht·~t' \\'rite1'<\, ho,v are ,ve to kno,v ,,·hich part of
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
146 Richard Corliss
the Casablanca script is the work of the sophisticated
but self-effacing Howard Koch, and which part was
written by Julius and Philip Epstein? Well, recent
archaeological studies have indicated that the Epsteins
began to re\vork the plot of an unproduced play,
Everybody Co,nes to Rick's (\vhich has, in sketch fonn.
n1ost of the filn1's characters, including a Negro nan1ed
San1 who is told to "Play it, San1," and plays "As Tin1e
Goes By"), but then were called to the War: and that
Koch developed these contributions into the final ,
full-blooded screenplay.
We don't have many of these memoirs, though -
screenwriters being a notoriously underinterviewed
breed (ever read one with Hennan Mankiewicz?) -
and since n1ost Hollywood egos are approxin1ately the
size of the Graf Zeppelin, the accounts of screen-
\Vriters n1ay be taken with the sa,ne pillar of salt we
keep handy for directors' interviews and actors' auto-
biographies. Nevertheless, a screenwriter's work should
and can be judged by analyzing his entire career, as is
done with a director. If a writer has been associated
with a nun1ber of favorite films, if he has received sole
writing credit on son1e of these filn1S, and if we can
decipher a con1n1on style in films with different direc-
tors and actors, an authorial personality begins to
appear. The high polish and understated irony of
Koch's other work - from his script for the M ercury
Theatre War of tlie Worlds, through his ten- year tenure
at Wan1ers, to his late-forties scripts for Letter .from 1111
(.Jrrk11011111 i-Voman and No Sad So11~s _for !vie - and his
fulfillntent of our three conditions, give credence to
this account of the writing of Casablanca. In fact, 1no~t
of the best Holly\vood screen,vriters were sole authors
of a substantial nun1ber of scripts.
The paucity of critical and historical literature
111akes all screenwriters ''Subject~ for Further Research."
The cavalier gy-oup headings on the following lists are
n1eant only to emphasize the tentative nature of the
classification (as opposed to the groupings of screen-
,vriters in the body of this book, ,vhich atten1pts to
categorize ,vi th out polen1icizing). As n1ore tiln1s are
sec.-11 frorn the writers' point of view. na1nes \\•ill be
shuffied fro111 one list to another. Ultintatcly. each of
then1. and rnany n1ore, should have an artistic identity
cle:1r enough to n1ake such capricious classification
unnect·ssary. Until that enlightened tirne conies to
pass. ,ve rnust 1nake do \\'ith an Acropolis of Srrt·en-
,vriters son1ething •
like.' this one - ,vhich considers
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only the ,vriters who are evaluated in !Corliss's Talki11;:
Pia11res: Scree1111mters in tire An1erica11 Ci11c111a, 1927-
1973 (Overlook Press, 1974)).
Parr/1c11011. Borden Chase, Betty Co1nden and Adolph
Green, Ben Hecht, Nunnally J ohnson. Garson
Kanin (and Ruth Gordon), H oward Koch, Frank
S. Nugent, Sa111son Raphaelson, Preston Sturgt's.
Billy Wilder.
Ercc/1t/1cion. George Axelrod, Sidney Buchn1an, Jules
Feiffer, Nonnan Krasna, Ernest Lehn1an, Hennan
J. Mankiewicz, David Newn1an and R ohen
Benton, Abrahan1 Polonsky. Casey Robinson , Pt'tt'r
Stone.
Pr()l'y/aca. Charles Brackett. Dehner l)aves, Jules
Furthn1an, Buck Henry, Rjng Lardner. Jr .. Charlt·s
Lederer, Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Robert Riskin.
Morrie Ryskind, Frank Tashlin.
Outside tlie ~Valls. Ed,vinJustus Mayer. l)udley Nichols.
Erich Segal, Terry Southern, Dalton Tnunbo.
All of these screenwriters - even those infidels n1ut-
tering curses oul~ide our Acropolis waJls - deserve
1nonographs or books devoted to their Holl}'\\'Ood
careers. If the critical winds reverse then1selves, and if
publishers' generosity to unsalable fihn books contin-
ues, dawn 1nay yet break over a bookshelf stocked
with such titles as 77,r Ci11en1a of Samson Raplrar/s,111
and 77,e Collected Letters of Hc•rvard K,,cli. It seen1ed
to n1e of primary i1nportance, however, to provide J
general but detailed introduction to as n1any screen-
writers as possible. [... ) Within the bounds of available
filrns and the limitations of n1y own prejudices, I have
tried to select representative works of each writer's
career, and representative writers fron1 the several
ge.nres, periods, and styles of the Hollywood talkie. My
ain1 has been to avoid facile gener.ilizations by con-
fronting specific fihns. thus not 111erely pinpointing a
,vriter's then1es but discovering how he related his
preoccupations to the job at hand.
In the 111ain, the screenwriters who appear in this
book !Corliss. I 974) are those.' who, by adapting their
conspicuous talents to the Byzantine de,nands of the
trade. developed the n1ost successful screenwriting
tl'chniques. Succt·ss usually bt·gat po,ver. and po,ver
beg.It authority. By authority is 1neant the right
co cornplete your o ,vn script ,vithout being forced to
surrender it to the nt'xt fi:llow on the asse111bly line,
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 Notes on a Screenwriter's Theory, 1973
the right to consult with any actor or director \vho
\vants changes. and the right to fight for your filn1
through the taffy pull of front-office politics. pressure
!,'Toups. and publicists. If directors have been pn·-
en1inent in Hollywood since long before the arrival
of the auteur theory. it is probably because, an1ong all
of Tinseltown's en1ployees. they \Vere the o nt·s with
the n1ost power.
3. Synthesis: The Multiple Auteur
Thl're ,vas thl' erJ of the actor. ,vhcn a filn1 ,vas its star.
.ind ,ve had Mary Pickford, l)ouglJs Fairbanks. Grc:ta
GJrbo. Then ,ve had the era of thl' din·ctor, and the
tilrns of King Vidor, Sternberg, Fcydt·r and (~lair. A ne,v
era is beginning: that of the author. Alier all, it's thl'
Juthor who 1nakes a tihn.
- J<'an llcnoir. 19]9
l)espite their O\Vll kvetching about functional i1npo-
tence in the 1novien1aking process, and despite tht'
crin1inal negligence of a new breed of critics. screen-
,vriters have done so rnuch in n1aking a filrn
entertaining, moving, even ennobling. But such has
been the factory nature of the Hollywood movie that
writers can still do 011/y so much. A screenwriter is, as
often as not, the 111iddlenian between thl" author of
the original propeny and the director - and the 111an
who gets his hands on the flypaper last is the one
whose fingerprints will show up first. The writers·
n1oven1ent in the thirties and forties, inextricably
Digitized by Google
147
bound up with inter-Guild hostilities and jealousies as
it was. drew its lirnited power by sucking as ntuch
blood as possible frorn the me11cur-e11-scene as the
L)irectors Guild would allow. The effect of the auteur
theory was to steal back whatever authority (and
authorship) the writers had usurped: at best, it was
proposed, the writer writes a script but the director
111akes the filrn. The two crafts were seen as riding on
opposite sides of a seesaw, with the weight of con-
ten1porary critical opinion deciding ,vhich group ,vas
to be left stranded in the air.
Perhaps a synthesis of these prt>su1nably antithetical
functions is in order. The filn1s that receive the highest
praise in this book (Corliss, I 974] are those whosc:-
writers and directors - in creative association with thc:-
actors and technicians - worked together toward a col-
laborative vision. You could call Cirize11 Ka11e either
the cuhnination of Hennan Mankiewicz's drearns or
the beginning of Orson Welles· 11ightn1ares. but it
would be silly to ignore either ntan's contribution.
Who is the auteur of 1\Ji11otchka: Ernst Lubitsch, or thc:-
Charles Brackett- Billy Wildt>r- Walter Reisch team, or
Greta Garbo? Obviously. all of then1. I've tried in this
book !Corliss. 1974) to 111ake a case for the screenwriter
without libeling either the director or the actor. Once
the contribution of all these crafts - individually and
collectively - have been accepted and exan1ined, studies
of other vital filn1 collaborators could begin and be
rneshed into a giant niatrix of coordinate talents. One
ultimate result of this process of synthesis should be to
open the critical shutter a few rnore stops upon that
strange and glorious hybrid: the artistic-entertaining.
solitary-corporate, creative-interpretive talking picture.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 17
Who Makes the Movies?
Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal is an important American writer and political commentator. His books include the
novel Myra Breckinridge (1968) and the plays Visit to a Small Planet (1957) and The Best
Man (1960), all of which were adapted as films. Vidal also is an actor and screenwriter, includ-
ing scripts for Joseph L. Mankiewicz's adaptation of Tennessee Williams' play Suddenly, Last
Summer and William Wyler's remake of Lew Wallace's 1880 bestselling novel, Ben-Hur: A
Tale of the Christ. In this piece about authorship in the movies, originally published in the
New Yorlc Review in 1976, Vidal offers an important contribution to the debate about who is
responsible for what in a film by providing an articulate insider's ability to reflect upon his
personal experience in the making of one major and in many ways typical Hollywood produc-
tion. Vidal's observation that screenwriter Paddy Chayevsky was an auteur whose "pencil"
was the director is a brilliantly provocative recasting of the director-oriented notion of "le
camera-stylo."

Forty-nine years ago last October Al Jolson not only
filled with hideous song the sound track of a filn1
called 77,e ]a:.:z Sin~er. he also spoke. With the words
"You ain't heard nothin' yet" (surely the most n1en-
acing line in the history of world drama), the age of
the screen director can1e to an end and the age
of the screenwriter began.
Until 1927, the director was king turning out by
the nule his "n1olds of light" (Andre Bazin's nice
phrase). But once the 1novies talked, the director as
creator becan1e secondary to the writer. Even no,v,
except for an occasional director-writer like lng111ar
Uergn1an, 1 the director tends to be the one inter-
changeable (if not entirely expendable) elen1ent in the
111aking of a fihn. After all, there are thousands of
rnovi,'. technicians who can do what a director is sup-
posed to do because, in fact. collt'ctively (and so111eti111t·s
individually) they actually do do his ,vo rk behind the
Gc..'fl' V hbl. "\ \/ho MJ~t'' lhl· .~v\iwiv,~" pp. _\.; (> fru m S ,w )',,,{·
.,uth••r.
can1era and in the cutter's roon1. On the other hand,
there is no film without a written script.
In the Fifties when I can1e to MGM as a contract
writer and took my place at the Writers' Table in the
con1111issary, the Wise Hack used to tell us newco111ers.
"The director is the brother-in-law." Appart-ntly the
a1nbitious n1an beca1ne a producer (that's where
the power was). The talented man became a writer
(that's where the creation was). The pretty 1nan beca1ne
a star.
Even before Jolson spoke. the director had begun
to give ,vay to the producer. Director Lewis Milestone
sa,v the writing on the scret'n as early as 1923 when
"baby producer" Irving Thalberg fired the legendary
director Erich von Strohei111 fron1 his filn1 l\.1erry G,,
R,,1111d. "That," ,vrote Milestone son1berly in /\'eu•
Tli<"cllcr ,111d Fi/111 (March 19J7). •·,vas the beginning of
tht' stonn and tht' end of tht· rt'ign of the director.... "
-
~ ITll'W N Jt, ,,,J.: . 11'\,' c,\c,"ll)~a ~~- l'Ji t. ). l: jC)i'h b, Cnl'l' \ 'ul.tl. ll,:pri1111.·<i 1'v rwruu,;(1('11 o f the

Digitized by Google Original from

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Who Makes the Movies?
Even as late as 1950 the star Dick Powell assured the
film cutter Robert Parrish that "anybody can direct a
rnovie, even I could do it. I'd rather not because it
would take too n1uch tin1e. I can make 111ore n1oney
acting, selling real estate and playing the market. " 2
That was pretty n1uch the way the director was viewed
in the Thirties and Forties, the so-called classic age of
the talking n1ovie.
Although the essential creator of the classic
Hollywood filn1 was the writer, the actual 1naster of
the film was the producer, as Scott Fitzgerald recog-
nized when he took as protagonist for his last novel
Irving Thalberg. Although Thalberg himself was a
lousy movie n1aker, he was the head of production at
MGM; and in those days MGM was a kind of Vatican
\Vhere the chief of production was Pope, holding in
his fists the golden keys of Schenck. The staff produc-
ers were the College of Cardinals. The n1ovie stars
were holy and valuable objects to be bought, bor-
ro,ved, stolen. Like icons, they were moved from
sound stage to sound stage, studio to studio, film to
filn1, bringing in their wake good fortune and gold.
With certain exceptions (Alfred Hitchcock, for
one), the directors were, at worst, brothers-in-law; at
best, bright technicians. All in all, they were a cheery,
unpretentious lot, and if anyone had told them that
they were auteurs du cinema, few could have coped
with the concept, 111uch less the French. They were
technicians; proud conm1ercialites, happy to serve
what was optinustically known as The Industry.
This state of affairs lasted until television replaced
the n1ovies as An1erica's principal dispenser of n1ass
entertainment. Overnight the producers lost control
of what wa, left of The Industry and, unexpectedly,
the icons took charge. Apparently, during all those
years when we thought the icons nothing n1ore than
beautifully painted irnages of all our dreams and lusts.
they had been not only alive but secretly greedy for
power and gold.
"The lunatics are running the asylum," n1oaned the
Wise Hack at the Writers' Table, but soldiered on.
Meanwhile, the icons started to produce, direct, even
write. For a tirne. they were able to ignore the f.1ct
that with television on the rise, no 1novie star could
outdraw the "$64.000 Question." During this transi-
tional decade, the director was still the brother-in- la\v.
But instead of marrying hirnself off to a producer, he
shacked up, as Jinuny Carter ,vould say. ,vith an icon.
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149
For a time each icon had Ii.is or her favorite director
and The Industry was soon on the rocks.
Then out of France can1e the dreadful news: all
those brothers-in-law of the classic era were really
autono111ous and original artists. Apparently each had
his own style that impressed itself on every frame of
any fihn he ,vorked on. Proof? Since the director was
the same person frorn filn1 to fihn, each in1age of his
oeuvre must then be stamped with his authorship. The
argun1ent was circular but no less overwheln1ing in its
in1plications. Much quoted was Giraudoux's solen1n
inanity: "There are no works, there are only auteurs."
The often wise Andre Bazin eventually ridiculed
this notion in LA Politique des Auteurs, but the damage
was done in the pages of the n1agazine he founded,
Ca/iiers du cinema, The fact that, regardless of director,
every Warner Brothers filn1 during the classic age had
a dark look owing to the Brothers' passion for saving
n1oney in electricity and set-dressing cut no ice with
ambitious critics on the prowl for high art in a field
once thought entirely low.
In 1948, Bazin 's disciple Alexandre Astruc wrote the
challenging" LA Camera-stylo." This ,nanifesto advanced
the notion that the director is - or should be - the true
and solitary creator of a movie, "penning'' his film on
celluloid. Astruc thought that camera-stylo could
tack.le any subject, any genre .... I will even go so far
as to say that contemporary ideas and philosophies of life
are such that only the cinenu can do justice to then1.
Maurice Nadeau wrote in an article in the newspaper
Combat: "If Descartes lived today, he \vould write novels."
With all due respect to Nadeau. a Desc:artes of today
,vould already have shut hirnsdf up in his bt'droon1 with
a 16 n1n1 camt'ra and so1ne filn1, and \vould be writing
his philosophy on fihn: for his Discours de la ,\;f,'1/,.,dl'
would today be of such a kind that only the nnt·nia
could express it satisfactorily:'
With all due respect to Astruc, the cinen1a has rnany
channing possibilities but it cannot convey con1plex
ideas through words or even, paradoxically, dialogue in
the Socratic sense. Le Ge11011 de Claire is about as close
as we shall ever con1e to dialectic in a fihn and though
Rohn1er's ,vork has its delights, the ghost of Descartes
is not very apt to abandon the n1arshali ng of word, on
a page for the flickering shado,vs of talking heads. In
any case, the l)escartes of Astruc's period did not rnakt>
a tihn; he ,vrott' tht· novt·l Lr 1\ ',111scc.
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
150
But the would-be can1era- writers are not interested
in philosophy or history or literature. They want only
to acquire for the cinerna the prestige of ancient fonns
without having first to crack, as it ,vere, the code.
"Let's face it," writes Astruc:
bct,vecn the pure cinerna of the 1920s and fihnt'd theater.
there is plenty of roon1 for a different and individual
kind of tiln1-n1alung.
This of course in1plies that the scriptwritc:r direct, his
o,vn scripts: or rather. chat the script,vritcr ceases 10 c:xist.
tor in this Jund of filn1-n1aking the distinction bel\vccn
author and director loses :ill n1eaning. Direction is no
longer a n1eans of illustrating or presenting a scene, but
a 1n1e act of ,vriting.
It is curious that despite Astruc's fierce will to elin1i-
nate the scriptwriter (and perhaps literature itself), he
is forced to use tenns fron1 the art forn1 he would
like to supersede. For him the filrn director uses a pen
,vith which he 1111itcs in order to beco111e - highest
praise - an a11tll<lr.
As the French theories 1nade their way across the
Atlantic. be111used brothers-in-law found then1selvcs
being courted by odd-looking French youths with
tape recorders. Details of long-forgotten W estems were
recalled and explicated. Every halting word from the
a11teur's lips was taken down and reverently examined.
The despised brothers-in-law of the Thirties ,vere no,v
Artists. With new-found confidence, directors started
inking n1ajor pact\ to n1eg superstar thesps whom the
rneggers could control as hyphenates: that is, as direc-
tor- producers or even as writer-director-producers.
Although the icons continued to be worshipped and
over-paid, the truly big deals ,vere now 111ade by direc-
tors. To them. also, went the glory. For all practical
purposes the producer has either vanished fro111 the
scene (the "package" is now put together by a talent
I!) agency) or 1nerged with the director. Meanwhile,
the screenwriter continues to be the prirne creator of
the talking fil111, and though he is generally paid very
,veil and his nan1e is listed right after that of the direc-
tor in the n1ovie reviews of Tin•<·. he is entirely in the
shadow of the director just as the director ,vas once
in the shadow of the producer and the star.
What do directors actually do' What do srreen-
,vriters do? This is difficult to explain to those " 'ho
have never been involved in the rnaking of a tilrn.
It is particularly difficult whl·n French thcoretk·ians
Digitized by Google
Gore Vidal
add to the confusion by devising false hypotheses
(studio director as auteur in the Thirties) on which to
build irrelevant and misleading theories. Actually. if
Astruc and Bazin had wanted to be truly perverse
(and ahnost accurate), they would have declared that
the cameratnan is the auteur of any fihn. They could
then have ranked Jan1es Wong Howe with Dante.
Braque, and Gandhi. Can1era1nen do tend to ha\·e
styles in a way that the best writers do but n1ost direc-
tors don't - style as opposed to preoccupation. Gregg
Toland·s can1era w ork is a vivid fact fron1 film to fih11.
linking Citi;:cn Kane to Wyler's The Best Years •~f Our
Lives in a way that one cannot link Citizen Kane to,
say, Welles's Co,!fid<•ntial RrpC1rt. Cenainly the can1era-
1nan is usually n1ore in1portant than the director in
the day-to-day n1aking of a film as opposed to the
preparing of a fihn. Once the filn1 is shot the editor
beco1nes the principal interpreter of the writer's
. .
1nvennon.
Since there are few reliable accounts of the nukin~ •
of any of the classic talking 1novies, Pauline Kael's
book on the making of Citizen Kane is a valuable
docurnent. 4 In considerable detail she establishes the
primacy in that enterprise of the screenwriter Hern1an
Mankiewicz. The story of how Orson Welles sa,v to
it that Mankiewicz became. officially, the noncreator
of his o,vn filn1 is grimly fascinating and highly typical
of the way so n1any director- hustlers acquire for
the1nselves the writer's creation. Few directors in this
era possess the n1odesty of Kurosawa, who said,
recently, "With a very good script, even a second-class
director n1ay n1ake a first-class filtn. But with a bad
scnpt even a first- class director cannot n1ake a
really first-class filn1." The badness of so 1nany of
Orson Welles's post-Mankiewicz films ought to be
. .
1nstructrve.
A useful if necessarily superficial look at the \\'ay
n1ovies were written in the classic era can be found
in the pages of s,,,ne Time i11 tire S11n. The author, Mr
Torn Dardis, exa1nines the n1ovie careers of five cele-
brated writers who took jobs as movie-writers. They
are Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, William Faulkner,
Nathanael West, and Ja1nes Agee.
Mr Oardis's approach to his writers and to the
,novics is that of a deeply serious and highly con-
Cl'rnrd lowbro,v, a type no,v heavily tenured in
Anrerican Acade1nl'. H e ,vrites of "literate" dialogue,
" rnassive" biO!,'Taphies. Ma¢stcrially. he- misquote~
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Who Makes the Movies?
H enry Jan1es on the subject of gold. More seri-
ously, lie 111isq11otes Joa11 Cra11ford. She did not say to
Fitzgerald, "Work hard, Mr. Fitzgerald, work hard!"
\vhen he was preparing a film for her. She said "Write
hard... . " There are many sn1all inaccuracies that set
on edge the film buff's teeth. For instance, Mr Dardis
thinks that the hotel on Sunset Boulevard known,
gorgeously, as The Garden of Allah is "now demol-
ished and reduced to the status of a large parking
lot. .. . " Well, it is not a parking lot. Hollywood has its
o\vn peculiar reverence for the past. The Garden of
Allah was replaced by a bank that subtly suggests in
glass and n1etal the n1ock-Saracen f.1,;ade of the hotel
that once housed Scott Fitzgerald. Mr Dardis also
thinks that the hotel , vas "demolished" during World
War 11. I stayed there in the late Fifties, right next
door to fun- loving, bibulous Errol Flynn.
Errors and starry- eyed vulgarity to one side. Mr
Dardis has done a good deal of interesting research on
how filn1s were \Vritten and n1ade in those days. For
one thing, he catches the a1nbivalence felt by the
writers who had descended (but only temporarily)
&0111 literature's Pan1assus to the swampy marketplace
of the n1ovies. There was a tendency to play Lucifer.
One was thought to have sold out. "Better to reign
in hell than to serve in heaven," was 1nore than once
quoted - well, paraphrased - at the Writers' Table.
We knew we smelled of sulphur. Needless to say, n1ost
of the tin1e it ,vas a lot of fun if the booze didn't
get you.
For the Pamassian writer the n1ovies were not just
a means of making easy n1oney; even under the worst
conditions, movies were genuinely interesting to write.
Mr Dardis is at his best when he shows his writers
taking seriously their various "assignn1ents." The
instinct to do good work is hard to eradicate.
Faulkner was the luckiest (and the n1ost cynical) of
Mr Dardis's five. For one thing, he usualJy worked
with Howard Hawks. a director who might actually
qualify as an a111e11r. Hawks was hin1self a writer and
he had a strong sense of how to manipulate those
cliches that he could handle best. Together Faulkner
and Hawks created a pair of satisfying movies. To Ha,,e
a11d Have Nor and The B(!! Sleep. But ,vho did what?
Apparently there is not enough re1naining evidence
(at least available to Mr Dardis) to sort out authorship.
Also. Faulkner's public line \Vas pretty n1uch: l'n1 just
a hired hand who docs \vhat he's told.
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151
Nunnally Johnson (as quoted by Mr Dardis) found
H awks's professional relationship with Faulkner n1ys-
terious. "It n1ay be that he simply wanted his nan1e
attached to Faulkner's. Or since Hawks liked to write
it was easy to do it with Faulkner, for Bill didn't care
n1uch one way or the other.... " We shall probably
never know just how 111uch Bill cared about any of
the scripts he worked on ,vith Hawks. Yet it is inter-
esting to note that Johnson takes it entirely tor granted
that the director wants - and n1ust get - all credit for
a film.
Proble1n for the director: how to get a script
\\'ithout it~ author? Partial solution: of all writers, the
one who does not n1ind anonynlity is the one most
apt to appeal to an ambitious director. When the
studio producer was king, he used to n1inin1ize
the writer's role by assigning a dozen writers to a
script. No director today has the resources of the
old studies. But, he can hire a writer who doesn't
" care n1uch one way or the other." He can also put
his na1ne on the screen as co-author (standard proce-
dure in Italy and France). Even the noble Jean Renoir
played this game when he ca1ne to direct Tlie Soutli-
en1er. Faulkner not only wrote the script. he liked
the project. The picture's star Zachary Scott has said
that the script was entirely Faulkner's. But then other
hands were engaged and "the whole problem," accord-
ing to Mr Dardis, "of who did what was neatly solved
by Renoir's giving himself sole credit for the screen-
play - the best way possible for an a11te11r director to
label his films."
Unlike Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald <:ared deeply
about movies; he wanted to make a success of n1ovie
writing and, all in all, if Mr Dardis is to be believed
(and for what it n1ay be worth, his account of
Fitzgerald's tin1e in the sun tallies with what one used
to hear), he had a far better and more healthy tirne
of it in Hollywood than is generally suspected.
Of a 1nethodical nature. Fitzgerald ran a lot of
tihns at the studio. (Unlike Faulkner, who affected to
rt·spond only to Mickey Mouse and Pathe N ews).
Fitzgerald n1ade notes. He also did what an ambitious
writer must do if he wants to write the sort of n1ovie
he hi1nself might want to see: he n1ade friends ~vith
the producers. Rather censoriously, Mr Dardis notes
Fitzgerald's ''t·lcarly stated intention to work with fihn
producers rather than with fihn directors, here down-
graded to the rank of'colbborators. ·Actually.Fitzgerald
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
152 Gore Vidal
seen1s to have had no use whatsoever for directors a.~
such." But neither did anyone else.
During n1uch of this tin1e Howard Hawks, say, \vas
a low-budget director known for the neatness and
efficiency of his work. Not until the French beatified
him twenty years later did he appear to anyone as an
original artist instead of just another hired technician.
It is true that Hawks was allowed to work with writers
but then he was at Warner Brothers, a frontier outpost
facing upon barbarous Burbank. At MGM, the holy
capital. writers and directors did not get n1uch chance
to work together. It was the producer who worked
with the writer, and Scott Fitzgerald was an MGM
writer. Even as late as n1y own years at M G M (1956-
1958), the final script was the writer's creation (under
the producer's supervision). The writer even pre-
e1npted the director's n1ost i1nportant function by
describing each catnera shot: Long, Medium, Close,
and the director was expected faithfully to follow the
. ' s score.
\Vnter
One of the most successful directors at MGM
during this period was George Cukor. ln an essay on
"The Director" (1938), Cukor reveals the gan1e as it
used to be played. "In n1ost cases," he writes, "the
director n1akes his appearance very early in the life
story of a motion picture." I arn sure that this was often
the case with Cukor but the fact that he thinks it nec -
essary to n1ention "early" participation is significant.
There an: 1in1es ,vhen the ,vhok i<lc'1 f<)r a filn1 ,nay
conic.' fro111 [the dircetorl. but in a n1orl' usual case he
111akes his entry ,vhen he is sun1111ont·d by a producer
.ind it is SUgi{tStcd that hc ~hould be du: dirt·ctor of a
proposed story.'
Not only \vas chis the niost usual \Vay but, vt'ry ofi:en.
the director left the producer's presence with the fin -
ished script under his arn1. Cukor does describt' his
own experienct' working ,vith writers but Cukor \..-as
so1nething of a star at tht' studio. Most directors were
"sununoned" by the producer and told wh,1t to do. It
is curious, incidentally, ho,v entirc:-ly the idc:-a of the
,vorking produt·c:-r has vanished. He is no longer renH:1n-
bcred except as the butt of fan1iliar storit's: frab•i.le artist
trl·atc:-d cn1c:-lly by insC'nsitive cig.1r-s111oking producer
- or Fitzgcr.1ld sav.,ged yc:-t again hy Joe M.111kic,vic2.
C)f Mr l)ardis 's tivt' \..-ricers. Junes Agee is. to s:1y
tht· least. the lighte~t in litt'rary \veight. l3ut he ,va~ a
Digitized by Google
passionate filrn-goer and critic. He was a child of the
movies just as Huxley was a child of Meredith and
Peacock. Given a different te1nperament, luck, birth-
date, Agee nught have been the first Atnerican cinen1a
auteur: a writer who wrote screenplays in such a way
that, like the score of a symphony, they nec:-ded nothing
111ore than a conductor's interpretation ... an interpre-
tation he could have provided hin1self and perhaps
would have provided if he had lived.
Agee's screenplays were remarkably detailed. "All
the shots," writes Mr Dardis. "were set down \\"ith
extreme:- precision in a way that no other screenwritc:-r
had ever set things down before . ... " This is exagger-
ated. Most screenwriters of the classic period wrote
highly detailed scripts in order to direct the director
but, certainly, the exan1ples Mr Dardis gives of Agee\
screenplays show then1 to be ren1arkably visual. Most
of us hear stories. He saw them, too. But I an1 not so
sure that what he:- saw was the reflection of a living
reality in his head. As with n1any of today's young
directors Agee's n1en1ory ,vas crowded with men1ories
not of life but of old fihus. For Agee, rain falling ,vas
not a n1emory of April at Exeter but a scene recalled
fron1 Eisenstein. This is particularly noticeable in the
adaptation Agee 111ade of Stephen Crane's TI1e B111<'
Hotel. which, Mr Dardis tells us, no "filn1 director has
yet taken on, although it has been televised twice, c:-ach
tin1e with a different director and cast and with the
Agee script cut to the bone, being used only as a
guidepost to the story." This is nonsc:-nse. In 1954, CDS
hired n1e to adapt TI,c Blue Heird. I worked dirc:-ctly
front Stephen C:rane and did not kno,v that Jan1es
Agee had ever adapted it until I read Some Ti111c i11
t/rc S1111.
At tl1t' n1ention of any director's na111e, the Wise
Hack at the Writc:-rs' T .1ble would bark out a percent-
age, reprc:-senting ho\v 111uch, in his estitnate, a given
dirt'etor ,vould subtract fi-0111 the:- potential I 00 percent
of the script he ,vas directing. The thought that a
director n1ight add son1ething worthwhile never
cros~t'd the good gr,1y Hack 's 111ind. Certainly he
would have:- found hilarious !)avid Thon1Son 's .4 Bfo-
.1!,ap/rical Dic1i,111,1ry <!( Fi/111, \,·host· haphazard pagt'S are
studied ,vith tributt·s to dirt·ctors.
Mr "fho1nson has his O\Vll pk·asantly eccentric pan-
thl·on in ,vhich ,vritt-rs tigurt· hardly at all. A colunm
is devoted to the di111 Micheline Presle but the:- fint·st
of all ~tTct·n,vritt·rs. Jacqlll'S l>rl'Vl'rt, is i!,'l!Ored. There
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Who Makes the Movies?
Figure 17.l MGM'~ rt·rnake of IJ,,11-Hur. direct,·d by \Villfam Wyler (1'.159). wa.< the product ofs.·vcral colbbo-
rators. Produced by Sam Zin1bah,r anJ Wilham \Vylcr
is a long silly tribute to Arthur Penn; yet there is no
biography of Pen n's conten1porary at NBC tel evision,
Paddy C hayefsky. \vhose filt11S in the Fifties and early
Sixties \vere fa r more interesting than anything Penn
has done. Possibly Chayefsky ,vas excluded because
not only did he write his own filnis, he would the n
h ire a director rather the ,vay one would en1ploy a
pJun1ber - o r a ca1nt'ratnan. For a tin1e, C hayefsky
,vas the only America n 11111e1,r, and his pencil ,vas the
director. Certainly C hayef,;ky's ea rl y career in filn1s
perfectly disproves Nicho las R ay's dictun1 (approv-
ingl y quoted by Mr Thon1son): "If it ,vere all in th e
script, ,vhy make the fiJ111'" If it is not a.II in the script,
there is no film to n1ake.
Twenty years aKo at the Writers' Table ,,.,e all agreed
with the Wise Hack that Willian1 W yler subtracted 110
111ore than 10 percent fron1 a sc ript. Sonic of the n1osr
attractive and sensible of Bazin's pages arc devoted to
Wyler's work in the Forties. On the o th er hand, Mr
Thonison does not like hin1 at all (bt'caust' Wyler lacks
those redundant fa ult~ that create the illusion of a
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153
Style?). Yet ,vhatever was in a script, W yler rendered
faithfully: \vhen he v.,as given a bad script, he ,vould
n1akc no1 only a bad 111ovie, but the scri pt's particular
kind of badness ,vou ld be revealed in a ,vay that co uld
altogether too easily boon1t'rang 0 11 the too skillful
directo r. But when the script ,vas good (of its kind. of
its ki11d!), Tlte Leuer. say, or '17,e Liule F,,xes, there 1.vas
no bcr1cr in terpreter.
At M G M. I worked exclusively ,vi th the producer
San1 Zi111balist. H e was a re111arkably good and decent
rnan in a business where such qualities are rare. H e
was also a producer of th e old fashioned sort. This
111eant that the script was prepared for hin1 a11d ,vith
hin1. O nce the script ,vas ready, the director was sun1-
111oned; he , votild then have the chance to say, yes.
he ,vould direct tl1e scri pt or. no. he ,vouldn 't. Fe,v
changes ,vere made in the script aner the director ,vas
assigned. IJut this ,vas 11ot to be tl1c case in Zi111balist·s
last fi ln1.
For several years M GM had bt'en planning a
re111ake of Be11-H11r. the studio's 1nost successful silent
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
154 Gore Vidal
film. A Contract Writer wrote a script; it was dis-
carded. Then Zi111balist offered 111e the job. I said no,
and went on suspension. During the next year or two
S.N. Behrman and Maxwell Anderson, an1ong others,
added many yards of portentous dialogue to a script
which kept growing and changing. The result was not
happy. By 1958 MGM was going bust. Suddenly the
renuke of Bet1-Hur seen1ed like a last chance to re1:,r.iin
the mass audience lost to television. Zi1nbalist again
asked me if I would take on the job. I said that if the
studio released me from the remainder of my contract,
I would go to Ron1e for two or three months and
rewrite the script. The studio agreed. Meanwhile.
Wyler had been signed to direct.
On a chilly March day Wyler, Zi1nbalist, and I took
an overnight flight from New York. On the plane
Wyler read for the first ti1ne the latest of the n1any
scripts. As we drove together into Ron1e fom1 the
airport, Wyler looked gray and rather fiightened. " This
is awful," he said, indicating the huge script that I had
placed between us on the back seat. " I know," I said.
"What are we going to do?"
Wyler groaned: "These Romans.... Do you
know anything about the1n?" I said, yes, I had done
n1y reading. Wyler stared at 1ne. "Well," he said.
"when a Ron1an sits down and relaxes, what does he
unbuckle?"
That spring I rewrote n1ore than half the script
(and Wyler studied every "Ron1an" fihn ever n1ade).
When I was finished with a scene, I would give it
to Zimbalist. We would go over it. Then the scene
would be passed on to Wyler. Nom1ally, Wyler is
slow and deliberately indecisive; but first- century
Jerusalen1 had been built at enom1ous expense; the
first day of shooting was approaching; the studio was
nervous. As a result, I did not often hear Wyler's
fan1ous cry, as he would hand you back your script,
"If I kne\v \vhat was wrong with it, I'd fix it
n1vsel("
•
The plot of Bc11-H11r is, basically, absurd and any
attempt to make sense of it would destroy the story's
awful integrity. But for a filrn to be watchable the
characters 1nust n1ake so1ne kind of psychological
sense. We \Vere stuck with the following: the Je\v
Ben-Hur and the Ron1an M essala \Vere friends in
childhood. Then they \Vere separated. Nl) Y.' the adult
Mess;1la returns to Jerusalen1; 111et·t~ Ben-Hur; asks hi111
to help \Vith the Ro1nanization of Judea. Uen- Hur
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refuses; there is a quarrel; they part and vengeance is
sworn. This one scene is the sole n1otor that must
propel a very long story until Jesus Christ suddenly
and pointlessly drifts onto the scene, automaticaJly
untying sotne of the cruder knots in the plot, Wyler
and I agreed that a single political quarrel would not
tum into a lifelong vendetta.
I thought of a solution, which I delivered into
Wyler's good ear. "As boys they were lovers. Now
Messala wants to continue the affair. Ben- Hur rejects
him. Messala is furious. Chagrin d'a111011r, the classic
motivation for n1urder."
Wyler looked at me as if I had gone mad. "But
we can't do that! l 1nean this is Ben-Hur! Mv•
God.... "
"We won' t really do it. We just suggest it. I'll write
the scenes so that they will 1nake sense to those '\vho
are tuned in. Those who aren't will still feel that
Messala's rage is somehow en1otionally logical.''
I don't think Wyler particularly liked my solution
but he agreed that "anything is better than what we've
got. So let's try it."
I broke the original scene into two parts. Charlton
Heston (Ben-Hur) and Stephen Boyd (Messala) read
the1n for us in Zin1balist's office. Wyler knew his
actors. H e warned 1ne: "Don't ever tell Chuck what
it's all about, or he'll fall apart.'' I suspect that Heston
does not know to this day what luridness we n1anaged
to contrive around him. But Boyd knew: every time
he looked at Ben-Hur it was like a starving man
getting a glin1pse of dinner through a pane of glass.
And so, among the thundering hooves and cliches of
the last (to date) Beu-Hur, there is something odd and
authentic in one unstated relationship.
As agreed, I left in early sununer and Christopher
Fry wrote the rest of the script. Before the picture
ended, Zin1balist died of a heart attack. Later, when it
can1e tin1e to credit the writers of the film, Wyler
proposed that Fry be given screen credit. Then Fry
insisted that I be given credit with him since l had
'\vritten the first half of the picture. Wyler was in a
quandary. Only Zi,nbalist (and Fry and n1yself - two
interested parties) knew who had written what, and
Zin1balist was dead. The n1atter was given to the
Screenwriters (;uild for arbitration and they, mysteri-
ously, av,arded the credit to the Contract Writer
\vhost' script was st·parated fron1 ours by at least rwo
other discarded scripts. The tihn was released in 1959
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Who Makes the Movies?
(not 1959-1960 as rny edition of TI,e Fil,ngoer's Con1-
panio11 by Leslie Halliwell states) and saved MGM
from financial collapse.
I have recorded in son1e detail this unimponant
business to show the near-impossibility of detemun-
ing how a movie is actually created. Had &11-Hur
been taken seriously by. let us say, those French critics
who admire johnny Guitar, then Wyler would have
been credited with the unusually subtle relationship
between Ben-Hur and Messala. No credit would ever
have gone to n1e because n1y name was not on the
screen, nor would credit have gone to the official
scriptwriter because, according to the auteur theory,
every aspect of a film is the creation of the director.
The twenry-year interregnum when the producer
was supren1e is now a memory. The ascendancy of the
movie stars was brie( The directors have now regained
their original prirnacy; and Milestone's storm is only
an echo. Today the n1arquees of n1ovie houses feature
the names of directors and journalists ("A 1vork of art,"
J. Crist); the other collaborators are in fine print.
This situation nught be n1ore acceptable if the filn1
directors had becon1e true auteurs. But most of then1
are funher than ever away from an - not to mention
life. The majority are si1nply technicians. A few have
co1ne from the theater; many began as editors, cam-
eramen, makers of television series, and onunously, of
television commercials. In principle, there is nothing
wrong with a profound understanding of the technical
means by which an image is impressed upon celluloid.
But n1ovies are not j ust rnolds of light any more than
a novel is just inked-over paper. A rnovie is a response
to reality in a certain way and that way must first be
found by a writer. Unfonunately. no conternporary
film director can bear to be thought a mere inter-
preter. He must be sole creator. As a result, he is n1ore
often than not a plagiarist, telling stories that are
not his.
Over the years a nun1ber of writers have becorne
directors, but except for such rare figures as Cocteau
and Bergn1an, the writers who have gone in for
directing were generally not much better at writing
than they proved to be at directing. Even in co111-
mercial terms, for every Joe M ank.ie\virz or Preston
Sturges there are a dozen Xs and Ys, not to mention
the depressing Z .
Today's filnlS are n1ore than ever artifacts of light.
Cars chase one another 111indlessly along irrelevant
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155
freeways. Violence seen1s rooted in a notion about
\vhat ought to happen next on the screen to help the
images move rather than in any human situation ante-
rior to those images. In fact, the human situation has
been eliminated not through any intentional philo-
sophic design but because those who have spent too
n1uch ti1ne with cameras and machines seldom have
much apprehension of that living world without
whose presence there is no an.
I suspect that the time has now come to take
Astruc seriously ... after first rearranging his thesis.
Astruc's camera-stylo requires that "the script writer
ceases to exist.... The filrnn1aker/ author writes with
his can1era as a writer writes with his pen." Good.
But let us elin1inate not the screenwriter but that
technician-hunter - the director (a.k.a. auteur d11
cinema). Not until he has been replaced by those who
can use a pen to write frorn life for the screen is there
going to be n1uch of anything wonh seeing. Nor does
it take a genius of a writer to achieve great effects
in filn1 . Con1pared to the works of his nineteenth-
century mentors, the writing of lngn1ar Bergnian is
second-rate. But when he writes straight through the
page and onto the screen it.~elf his talent is trans-
formed and the result is often first-rate. (As was very
often the work of Rene Clair.)
As a poet, Jacques Preven is not in the same liter-
ary class as Valtery, but Preven's Les Enfants du paradis
and Lun1iere d'he are extraordinary achievements.
They were also disdained by the French theoreticians
of the Forties \vho knew perfectly welJ that the direc-
tors Came and Gremillon were inferior to their
scriptwriter; but since the Theory requires that only
a director can create a film, any film that is plainly
a writer's work cannot be true cinema. This attitude
has given rise to sorne highly cornic critical n1usings.
Recently a movie critic could not figure out why
there had been such a dramatic change in the quality
of the work of the director Joseph Losey after he
n1oved to England. Was it a difference in the culture?
the light? the water? Or could it - and the critic fal-
tered - could it be that perhaps Losey's filn1s changed
when he . .. when he - oh, dear - got H arold Pinter
to write screenplays for hin1? The critic pron1ptly
disnussed the notion. Mr Thon1son prints no biogra-
phy of Pinter in his Diaionary.
I have never n1uch liked the fihns of Pier Paolo
Pasolini but r find 111ost interesting the case \vith which
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 I

156 Gore Vidal

Figure 17.2 Lr, E1!f'<11111 i/11 r,11,1du ( l'J~S): A til111 where the d1rccior (/\,1.ircc l C,rnc)
wa, de,1rly 1111,: rior 10 the wn1cr U•cqucs l'ric,·cn). l'rodur eJ by K.1y111011J Uordcric .111<1
Fn:d (.)rain

he tun1ed co filrn afte r son1e r.venry years as poet and the ,vorld , ,vhile the cine1na is a ,vorld that organizes
~

novelist. He could not have been a filn1maker in
A111erica bec:au~e the cost:5 arc too high ; also, the
tech nician-hustlers are in total charge. But in Italy.
during the Fifties, it ,va~ possible for an actual a111r11r to
u, c for a pen the ca1J1era (having first hiniself cou tpo~ed
rather than colen the narracivt' to be iLlu,n inated).
Since, the talking n1ovit· is clost·,t in fonn to the
novel ("the novel is a narrative that organize~ itst•lf in
itself into a narrative•· - J ea n Mitry), it strikes 1ne chat
the rising literary generation nt.ight th.ink of the
niovic5 as, peculiarly, their k111d of novel, to be created
by then, in collaboration ,vith techni cians but .vithout
the interference of The Director. that hustler-plagiarist
who ha~ for ~venry year; do111inated and exploited
and (occ.,~ionally) enhanced :in .irt fonn still in search
of its rruc author..

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Who Makes the Movies? 157

Notes

Ques1ions I a111 ad,·iscd to anticipa1c : What about suc:h tn1c
,mrrurs ,Ju a,u;,,Jd :&\ Tn1tfaut? Wc:U. )11/1'$ «·t Jim w.is a novel by
H,·11ri - Picrre Ruc:ht'. Did Tn,tl:iut Jd.tpt the «·rccnpby him,df?
Nu. he work,·d w1cl1 Je,111 (;ruault. Did Bu,iud <'r<'Jlt' JJ,,.
f;'xtf'nnimrtru.~ .-lt~~d? Nu, it wa~ "su~t.·.;;t~d" by an unpuhli,;,hc.' d
pby by Jose: Bcr~:uuin. Did Bunud uk,· it from 1hcn·' No. he
had a.< co-Juthor Lui, Akori,.1, Su it ~o,·s.
2 Rnbcrt Parrish. Gr,111,i11g { ;I' i11 H,,lfyu,,,,d (Harcourt Bral'c
Jov;111<w1,h, 1976).
3 A,tnK's c:s..~,y i,- rt·prinu:d in Pl·t,:r Gralu1n. t·d., 'Il,r ;,:,·u• UJ,-"
(I )oublcdJS·. 1'161:1).
4 ·111<• Ciri~r11 Kaur n.,,k (Atla111k Monthly Pn·ss, 1'171).
:-, Cukor·~ e:·..:,J)' is rc:printni in RidurJ Ko,;:zanki. L"d .. Htil/ywc•t•d
Diri·rh•r.< I <JI -1- I 940 (()xford U11ivc"ity Pn~<. 1976).

Orig in al from
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 18
Script/Performance/Text:
Performance Theory and
Auteur Theory
Peter Lehman

Peter Lehman is Director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program at Arizona State Univer-
sity. He has published widely in film studies and is the author or co-author of many books
including Authorship and Narrative in the Cinema, Thinking About Movies and the edited
collection The Searchers: Essays and Reflections on John Ford's Classic Westem. With
Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body Lehman contributed
significantly to the understanding of cinema's representation of masculinity. Here, comparing
the differences between scripts, screenplays, and performances, Lehman theorizes the nature
of performance in the making of films and the relation of such performance to the work of the
director and auteurism.

It is not uncom111on in newspapers or n1agazines to
find the dran1a critic contributing an occasional filn1
review or, in fact, serving simultaneously as reviewer
for both of those arts. Much more attention has been
paid to studying the relationship between literature
and filn1 than between theater and film. This is unfor-
tunate for several reasons. Many unstated assumptions
\vhich don1inate a great deal of American fihu
criticis1n derive from unexamined feelings about
the connection between theater and fihn, hence the
rnoonlighting drama critics. We speak, for exan1plc,
about actors' perfonnances and dramatic events in the
two fom1s in ahnost exactly the sa1ue \vay. Moreover,
the failure to critically txamine these notions obscures
the larger question as to ho\v filrn relates to perfonn-
ing arts in gtneral.
We generally agree, for exan1ple, that theater and
n1usic are performing arts. And we generally agree on
what that n1eans. If a n1usic critic goes to hear Leonard
Ben1stein conducting the New York Philharmonic in
a "perfonnance" of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
ht/she feels secure in knowing who is responsible for
what. What Beethoven did and what Bernstein is
doing are taken to be known entities. Praise and blame
are easily distributed. If the critic hates the perfor-
rnance, he/she doesn't confuse that with hating the
,vork created by Beethoven. In other words. a clear
notion exists of what constitutes the aesthetic text and
\vhat constitutes a perfonnance of the text. We kno\v
ho\v to attribute critical praise and blame for author-
ship of the text as \Veil as for performance of the text.
We could not do one \vithout the other. Unfortu-

P,.•1t·r L1.·hm.111 , "S,·npc/ 1'1.· rth nn:mft.· / T<.· xc Pe rfonn.l n( ,: T h(·ory .,nd A11tn1r T lw•'')' ... pp. 11'7 Joh lnm1 h im R t·,u/1·, .\ tNvrtll\\1.·,r<.· 01 Umvt:n.1ty). ~·· 1'>7X h~
P<·tt·r l.d 1111.111, R t:pnntcd by iwmu,,1011 o f rh'-· .mthor

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Performance Theory and Auteur Theory
nately. in fihn ,ve have not yet learned how to do
these things.
A good deal of the problen1 surrounding film in
relation to perfonnance theory derives from the
history of the tenninology en1ployed. The word
"script" was originally used in connection with stage
plays. Actors were given scripts, they n1en1orized lines,
and under the supervision of a director. a performance
was staged. Nor does the con1111on tenn "screenplay"
instead of "script" in1ply anything different. It merely
suggests a play written for the screen as opposed to a
play written for the stage. William Froug, a screen-
writer hinuelf, in attacking the auteur theory, speaks
abou t the filnunaking process in the same language
he would use to speak about a play:
Due the history of An1erican filn1s is dra~tically opposed
to the auteur concept. The director ,vas often brought
to the production long after the conceptual work had
been done. His job was to interpret the work of the
writer, just as the actor's job ,vas to interpret the role:.
the character, that tht· ,vriter had conceived.'
Sirnilarly. Richard Corliss remarks that a filn1 director
is "Jes.~ a composer than a conductor," that is, the direc-
tor is less a creator of a work than an interpreter of
sorne previous creation. 2 How n1uch sense does it
make to speak of a film director "interpreting" a writ-
er's script as a stage director "interprets" a play script
or a musical conductor "interprets" a con1poser's score?
A decisive difference exists between a film director and
a theater director or a musical conductor.
Only the most undisciplined, polen1ical critical
nulieu could allow tenns like these to be bantered
about without further investigation. Just such a clirnate
has prevailed in the auteur debates. Of all the partici-
pants, Peter Wollen raises the question tnost directly.
H e concludes that there are two types of directors:
son1e who n1erely interpret a pre-existent text and
transpose it into cinen1atic codes and others who
overlap that level of manifest performance with a
newly created text in the ,naking of the filrn. 3 This
distinction shows son1e of the confusion of the Corliss
and Froug remarks but also points the way toward~ a
solution to the proble111: a consideration of pcrfor-
n1ance theory.
At the end of his disc ussion of the issue. W ollen
rernarks. "We need to develop 111uch further a theory
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159
of perfom1ance ... "' Surprisingly, that staten1ent is
unqualified in the later edition of Wollen's book
which appeared in 1972. Nelson Goodn1an had already
contributed a much more highly developed theory of
perfom1ance in his 1968 book, Lang11ages of Arr.
Goodn1an's work helps clarify some of the issues.
Taking up the subject of authenticity and fakery in
art, Goodman investigates the difference between
autographic and allographic art:
Let us speak of a ,vork of art as autographic ii and
only if the distinction between original and forgery of
it is significant; or better, if and only if even the most
exact duplication of it docs not thereby count as
genuine ... Thus painting is autographic, n1usic non-
autographic, or allographic.'
Goodrnan then observes:
One notable difference bet\veen painting and n1usic is
that the co111poser's work is done when he has written
the score, even though the perfom1ances are the end-
products, while the painter has to finish the picturt·
(Good,nan, pp. 113-14).
This line of inquiry leads Goodn1an to the conclusion
that "an art seenis to be allographic just insofar as it
is amenable to notation" (Goodn1an, p. 121).
Only autographic works of art involve forgeries,
and a forgery is, in effect, a false claim to a certain
history of production. How and by whom the object
was produced is crucial. Allographic arts, on the other
hand, are e1nancipated fron1 the history of production
as a test of authenticity. This requires a suitable nota-
tional system. That notational systen1 n1ust include
"All the constitutive properties of the work in quc:s-
tion" (Goodman, p. 122). In a score of Beethoven's
Fifth Sy,nphony, for example, there can be no rele-
vant question about the history of production of the
particular score a n1usician looks at. It means nothing
to argue who made that score o r fron1 what other
"copy" of the score it was copied. The n1an Beethoven
and the personal history involved in writing the syrn-
phony has nothing to do with what other person or
n1achine copies do,vn the score, how they do it. and
,vhen they do it. All that n1atters is that they do it
accurately, \Vithout n1aking "spelling rnistakes" - here
n1eaning, for exan1ple, copying a wrong note. Accu-
racy and fidelity to the characters in the notational
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
160 Peter Lehman
systen1 count for everything; who (lleethoven hin1self
or a school child), how (pen or pencil), and when
( 1900 or I 950) count for nothing.
Not surprisingly, Goodman uses music as an
example of an art existing in a nearly pure notational
systen1. The on.ly issue is con1pliance with the accurate
score. The perforn1ers have to do exactly what is
notated. The only proble1n arises concen1ing verbal
language \vritten in scores (e.g.. allegro):
Thus the verbal language of ten1pos is not notational.
The te1npo words cannot be integral parts of a scorc
insofar a., the score serves the function of identifying a
work front pcrfonnancc to perfom1ance. No departure
fro,n the indicated tentpo disqualifies a perfom1ance as
an instancc - ho,vever ,vretched - of the ,vork defined
by the score. For the ternpo spc:cifications cannot be
.1ccounted integral parts of the defining score. but are
rathcr auxiliary dirc.-ctions whose obscrvancc or nonob-
servance affects the quality of a pertorn1ancc but not the
identity of the work. ((;oodrnan. p. 185)
However n1uch we rnight disagree with, for exan1ple,
Leonard Bernstein's nonobservance of a te1nporaJ
verbal direction in a perforn1ance of Beethoven·s Fifth
Symphony, we nevertheless acknowledge the identity
of the work in question.'' Were he to play wrong notes
or alter the n1etronon1ic specifications of ten1po. we
,vould no longer call it a perforn1ance of Beethoven ·s
Fifth Symphony. It is i1nportant to bear in n1ind that
so,ne features of a perfonnance n1ay vary considerably
fro,n perforn1ance to perforn1ance. Even in 111usic not
all features are part of a notational syste111, though all
the constitutive properties of the work are in a nota-
tional systen1.
What distinguishes a notational syscen1 fro,n ocher
languages is a con1plicated n1atter. The two n1ajor
characteristics of scores in notat1onal syste,ns are that
they separate perforn1ances that belong to the ,vork
frorn those that do not and that, given a notational
systen1, scores can be detennined fro,n a perfonnancl'.
In a notational systen1 nothing is a sample of n1ore
than one co,nplianre class. This is not the case in
discursive language. At best, a good definition deter-
111int·s ,vhat objects confonn to it, but the dt·finition
is not dccennined by each of its inst.1nces. This double
n1oven1ent is t'SSt'ntial in notational sy~tt'111s. If I hear
.1 note in a 1nusical perfonn;ince and a111 fon1ili~r v,ith
tl1t' notational systen1, I can 111ark do,vn the note only
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one way. Everyone fan1iliar with the syste111 ,vould
111ark it down the san1e way. The sounded note is a
cornpliance only of that notational character. If, on the
other hand, son1eone points to their car I can. using
discursive language, place it in the class "car," "Volk-
s\vagen," "n1eta.l objects," "objects on wheels," "white
objects," etc., etc. It belongs to all those classes and
n1any 111ore. There is no uniquely determining double
n1ovement. Perhaps all of this is best sumn1ed up by
Goodn1an's observation that, "The criteria that dis-
tinguish notational syste1ns fron1 other languages are
in tern1s of interrelationships an1ong complianct·
classes ... •· (Goodn1an, p. 200).
Discursive language. for a final exan1ple. cannot
detennine the constitutive properties of a painting. A
description of a certain color of blue and how and
where it is applit>d to the canvas cannot be uniquely
detennined - no ,natter ho,v n1any qualifying tenns
,ve use. Likewise. given a painting W1th blue in it, no
one can precisely and uniquely encode that blue in
discursive language. ln1agine a hundred people \11ith
full knowledge of a discursive language describing the
exact san1e painting. Now con1pare this with people
fully acquainted with a notational system working
from a perforn1ance co a score.
In this fran1ework. a sketch which an amst ,nay do
bl·tore he/she n1akes a painting is not a score. rather
it is an autographic work. The sketch and the painting
are two different works; the painting is in no ~•ay an
instance of a compliance with the sketch. The consti-
tutive properties of the painting are not notated in the
sketch. This does not i111ply that a painter could not
use a sketch ,vhilc: painting a picture.
This brings us to scripts which, in the case of tihns.
like sketches can be used in the creat1on of an art
work whose constitutive properties they do not notate:
"A script, unlike a sket<·h. is a character in a notational
schc:n1e and in a lan1-,'llage. but unlike a score. is not
in a notational syste111" (Good1nan, p. I 99). "Script"
here includes the work of plaY\vrights and st·reen-
" 'riters. In literary ,vorks, Goodn1an goes on co
observe that an actual utterance is in no way 1nore
an inst.1nce of the \\'ork than the written inscription
of the text. l~eading a novl·l aloud is not a
'
ro1npli;1nre- class perfon11.1nce. R.:1ther than having
a con1pli.111re-class. a litt·rary \\'ork is the text .
Good111an ·~ r~·,11arks ,1bout drJ111a and his later ~ole
rl'ft'rt'nce to fil111 Jrt' of particul.tr irnportance here:
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 Perfonnance Theory and Auteur Theory
Figure 18. 1 N.11,lit• W<>Od . John Way11,•, JntlJdfrcy Hunte r in Jo hn Ford\ '/l,r S.·11rrl1t•rs (W.1 n1cr Dro,. 1956).
Produced by C. V. Whitney
In the dran1a . as in n1us1c. thi: ,vo rk is a co1np(jancc-class
o f pcrfom1ancc. Th .. ccxt o f the pby. ho,vcvcr. i< a co111-
pos11c: of score and scnpc. The;: t11J.loguc is in a virtually
no tatio nal ~ystc1n. ,vith utterances as its con1pliants. This
part of the text i, a <con.': and perfon11ance< con1plirit
,vi th it co11 <tir11rc the ,vork. (Goodn1an , pp. 2 ll1-- l l)
Stage direction< and descriptions of <cenery. e tc., are
featurc:s ,vh ic h arc no t part of the no tatio nal sysre111.
They arc supplen1enca ry instru ctions a nd in no ,vay
constitute the , vork. It is fo r this rea,on that Goodn1an
can 111akc tht· all-i111po rta nt ob5e rva rio n ,vhi c h re turns
u s. o nce again , to the subject of fi ln1:
The script for a si.lcnt ftl111 is n,·ithcr the cini;-n1adc " 'Ork
nor a score for n but. though 11sl'd 111 produ cing the filn1.
is o then,•i<e as loo<dy rcbtcd to the ,vork a< is a verbal
description of .i pain ring to the pa1n1111g it~df. (Gootlnrnn,
p. 2 11 . lt:ihcs nu nc)
The co rollary to this. o f course, is that in ,1 sound filn1
only the spo ken dialogue is in a no ta tion.ti syste111, cha t
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161
i~ the sole releva nt differen ce bet\veen a silent film
and a sound ftl111 as relates to the script.
·rhe dialogue in a fi ln1 script is in a notational
sc he1nc. but that is no t sufficie nt to qualify it as an
aesthetic text. T he dialogut· in a play sc ript. on the
ocher hand, is a to taliry unto itself. speaks of \.vhat is
fun,bn1cntaUy at issue and creates the dicgcsis and
decor. It is, in sho rt, what M etz calls a " continuo us
ve rbal tissue." 7 This is, of cou~e. ,vhat e nabl es us co
read .ind acsch c ticaUy evaluate a Shakespeare play
, vithout seeing it perfon11cd. This is also what acco unts
for us being able to .1ttribute creatio n of the aesthetic
\VOrk to Shak espea re -.vhen we are ,vatching a
perfonnance.
This is no t to suggest. as perhaps so111e have done.
thac there is son1e clea r divisio n be tween t\VO kin ds
o f lnnguage. thea trica l o n the one hand. cinen1atic on
the other. What I a111 spcakjng of he re is no t kinds of
dialogu e but rather. the ~tatus of dia logue in the aes-
theti c " 'ork. An exan1ple frnn1 J o hn Ford's 77,r S1'11rr/1crs
sho ul d cla rify this c n 1cial point.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
162 Peter Lehman
To,vards the t:nd of tht: filn1, Ethan Ed,vards, instead
of killing Dt:bbie, sweeps her up into his am1s and
says, "Let's go hon1e, Debbie." Like any profihnic
t·vent, it could be photographed in any nurnber of
ways and then edited into an infinite nun1ber of shot
sequt:nces as relate to the shots which con1e before
and after it. In tenns of any verbal patterns within the
line (or in relationship to any others in the filn1), it is
quite unexceptional. No doubt, banal to n1any. Fur-
thennore, considered solely as a narrative event which
any nu,nber of directors could handle in any nun1ber
of ways, the action see1ns ludicrously senti111ental.
Indeed, to ,nany it may appear that after five years of
trying to find Debbie and kill her, the Hollywood
happy ending wins out and Ethan lovingly takes her
ho111e.
When viewed as part of the cinentatic text, however.
it beco111es part of an aesthetic text, full of rich and
co,nplex connections. Briefly, the previous shot is
from within a cave. This refers forn1ally to earlier shots
from within a cave and, in fact, an entire scene set in
a cave. It also refers to a whole series of doorway and
teepee shots which structure the fihn . The shot where
Ethan actually picks up Debbie includes a gesture of
lifting her above his head, recalling a sintilar mo,nent
which transpired between them five years earlier in
front of a fireplace in the Edwards's hon1e. None of
these con1plex associations are in1plicit in the pro-
fihnic event nor in the dialogue. Yet, exactly what the
shots "say" and tht:ir aesthetic value result precisely
from these ele111ents. Considered abstractly within the
tihn's narrative or 111erely on the dialogue level (or as
a scripted event before filn1ing) , the 111on1ent collapst's
into nt'ar n1eaninglessness. Evt'n if the con1positional
features were described in discursive language (an his-
torical study of Ford's work with varying scriptwriters
and his scriptwriters' work with other directors
indicates that even the general con1positional ideas
characterize his work, not theirs), the delicate work of
actual creation ren1ains to be done. Even if we are to
bt·lit·Vt' Alfrt•d Hitchcock's extraordinarv, clain1s that he
knows exactly ,vhat his fihns will look like beti.)re ht:
bt·gins shooting, the fact re,nains that only he can
n1ake the111 look that way, which is \.\'hy he has to
put up with the a\vful tediu111 of 111:1king rnovies.
Furtht·nnore, it ,vould be a seriQus rnistakc to vit',v
such cornpositional features as thost· in ·111<' Sr,1rd1rrs
t·x:11nple as ,vindo ,v dressi ng: thl'y activt·ly shape and
Digitized by Google
stn1cture the n1on1t:nt, give it con1plex textual refer-
ences, as well as n1eaning and aesthetic worth.
The way in which Urnberto Eco discusses the
relationship between a verbal description and a paint-
ing is instructive when applied to the relationship
bet,veen a script and a filn1 text:
Suppose thJt one had to t'Xpress till' follov,,ing (,ontent)
situation: Solornon n1et'ts the Queen of Sheba. ej<·h
leading a procession of ladies and gcnden1en dr,:ss,:d in
Renaissance style. and bathed in a pure and still n1on1ing
light that givt-,; bodies the air of rnysterious statues. etc.
etc. Everyone \vould recognize in this 'verbal' d.iscours<·
soniething vaguely sirnilar to a ,veil-known pi<·torial
"text" by Piero ddla Francesca: but the verbal exl'rcssion
dot's not 'interpret' the pictorial one. At n1ost. the fonner
suggt'sts the latter only because the latter has alrl.'ad\'
bct·n expressed and recorded by our culturl'. And e\'<"n
in this <'JS<' only certain of the verbal expressions n·for
to recognizable rontent units (Solon1on. to rncet. Queen
of Sheba. etc.). \Vhile 111any others by no rneans convt·y
th<' sort of content that one ,night re<'t"ive when looking
at the painting (it goes without saying that even such .111
expression as (the ~ign vehide) /Solon1on/ represents a
rather in1predse interpreunt of the corresponding irnage
painted by Piero). When the painter begins \vork. the
content (in its nebula-like strut·turc) is neither codt·d nor
divided into precise unil<. It has to be inv<·nted .. . The
si!!n producer has a fairly dear idea of 11J/ra1 he ,vould
lik<· to 'say' but ht· dot·s not kno,v ''""' to say it: and ht·
ra1111ot knO\\' 1,,,u• to do so until he has dist·overed
praisdy 11•/,,11 to say."
Even given the existence of a fihn script, the 111ost \\'e
can say is that the director 111ay have a fairly clear idea
of ,vhat he/she would like to say. It is exactly in the
area of discovery of ho,v and thus what to "say" that
the creative process ,vorks. The verbal discourse oi
tht' script cannot of course codt· these units of the
aesthetic text.
Murray Krieger. discussing poetry. conies to ,1
re111arkably si111ilar conclusion:
The poet hq,:in< "·ith :1 V3!-,'11e i111pulsl·..1 V3b'11l" so111e-
thi11g he ,vants to ,:iy: but this sornething need have litdc
rdation h> ,vh.ll hi~ " 'ork ,viii fi11.11ly say ... Ht· r annot
s:i y precisdy ,vlut it is. or dse his poen1 \vould already
bt· v,rittl·n .. . As thl· pot·t cn·.11cs. ht· discover., \vhat it is
ht· is rrl·:1ti11g ... But ht• ,nay prt•li.·r to believe that the
poe111 i, rnerdy jlJ ernbodirnent o f \'ihat scents to hin1
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 Performance Theory and Auteur Theory
10 have been a thoroughly lucid original idea. To the
extent that he is an anist he will be - happily - n1is1aken;
and if he penists in this belief. it will r<·niain tor the
critic 10 sho\v hini \vhat he has really done.·•
In order to understand what it is that the filn1maker
''really does," it is necessary to distinguish between the
profilmic event and the film text. The camera is com-
monly viewed as a window upon the events presented
in the fi.lrn, a device that simply records a pre-existent
occurrence. The rationale behind the placement of the
camera in relation to the in1age recorded and the
cutting from one shot to the next is generally assun1ed
to be determined by the dramatic i111peratives inher-
ent in the event.
This assumption about the integrity of the pro-
filmic event reduces the viewer to a spectator of the
dramatic performance. Whereas a great deal of recent
scholarship has excellently den1011strated how this
aspect of Hollywood fil111s operates, it would be a
serious mistake to reduce the entire perception of the
filmic text to this level. 10 A good director establishes
an aesthetic text in which ,nany elen1ents other than
profilmic performance determine the work itself The
profilmic event is not equivalent to the text, a viewer
is not equivalent to a spectator, and a stage director is
not equivalent to a fihn director. 11
Peter Wollen 's crucial distinction between two
types of directors, mette11rs en scene and auteurs, cannot
stand up for several reasons. The 111eaning of a film of
a metteur en scene cannot exist a priori since the meaning
of the work cannot be abstracted from the context of
that work without altering it and since no aesthetic
text exists before the mette11r en scene. makes his/her
filrn; the filn1 must be something other than a " transla-
tion" of that meaning into cinen1atic codes. As l have
den1011strated in the first part of this paper, it is insup-
portable to view any director as being in "co111n1and
of a performance of a pre-existing text. .. ,! A sy111-
phony orchestra conductor and a stage director have
that opportunity, a fihn director doesn't. In art fomis
where someone ,nay be seen as being in conunand of
a performance, there has to be a notational syste111
capable of notating the constitutive elements of tht:
work. No such systen1 exists in the cine1na.
All films are autO(.,'l':lphic, and thus in a sense all
directors are a11re11rs. This brings up the St'Cond st·rious
proble,n with the 111ettl'11r c11 scene l,11111·11r distinction: it
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163
reveals a confusion of hierarchic levels. If a carc::ful
look at perfonnance theory shows that the meaning
of a film cannot exist a priori, a careful look at single
fiJn1s and their relationship to larger groupings shows
that the latter cannot determine the n1eaning of the
former. The organization of a fihn is different than the
organization of a career.
Leonard Meyer introduces the useful term
"hierarchic level" to discuss such differing planes of
organization, not only in art but also in science and
history. Modes of analysis in all these areas contain
various hierarchic levc::ls:
It is, as we have seen, a serious nlisuke to assunie that
1he principles or "la,vs" governing the organization of
one hierarchic level are necessarily the same as those of
sonic other level. As a rule. the forces creating structure
and organization do not ren1ain the san1e - are not
unifonn from one level to another ... There is no logical
staircase running fron1 the physics of I O:?J< cni. to the
physics of I 0.,. light years ... Si1nilarly in the theory and
analysis of music it is doubtful that the several ditfcrcnt
hierarchic levds arc governed by the san1e syntactical Jnd
granunatical principles of organization. 13
The conct:pt of jun1ping front one level to another
involves, in the auteur theory, the leap from the indi-
vidual film to the career overview. Meyer further
elaborates about these types of organizational levels:
The \Vorld - including the \Vorld of 1nusic - is not,
ho,v.-vcr. in this sense hon1ogcnous; and it is not so
pn:.:isely because hierarchic differentiation and anicula -
tion are non-uniforni. Just as th<' forces governing the
\vay in \vhich cheniicals unite to fonn rnolccules an:
different fron1 the forcc:5 involved in the organization of
n1olecules into n:lls, so the \vays in which tones cornbine
10 fonn niotivcs are different froni the wavs , in \vhich
n1otivcs are organized to create larger. niore co1nplex
rnusical event.,."
The auteurists have:: never propt:rly apprt:ciatcd this
concept. If looking at John Ford's career proves inter-
esting. it is not because it locates the n1eaning of, say,
T1,c Searchers. A consideration of this point may lead
to son1e conclusions about perfonnance theory and
,111tn1r theory.
A sketch can be used in rreating a painting and a
script can bt> used in creating a tihu. In both cases tht:
Orig in al from
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164 Peter Lehman
antecedent stagt: docs not notate the constitutive
properties of the ,vork. In ntany ways the script of a
filn1 can be st:en as analogous to a verbal description
that precedes a poem. Thus, it is not useless, but the
author of it cannot be credited with the authorship
of the work. The rnajor portion of the creative process
i~ yet to take plact'.
It is precisely ,vithin this zone of creativity between
gent'ral description and realization, bt"twecn gt"nt'ral
idea of ,vhat to say and discovery of ho,v, and thus
precisely what, to say, that the authorship of the tt"xt
takt's place. Tht' text is neither created before filntinp;
nor reconstituted after an entire cart."er. This got."s a
long way to,vard explaining what lt:d to the f.1lst" dis-
tinction between 111ettc•1,rs cu sce11c and ,111te11rs and also
to,vard explaining apparent discrepancies ,vithin the
,vork of a singlt" director.
l)itlerent directors work dilft."rt·ntly ,vithin that all-
i,nportant creativt' zone. and in fact the santt' director
ntay y.•ork ditfert."11tly ti-0111 filnt to filn1." Son1e dirt"c-
tors ,nay never be able to conceive of anything other
than viewing the cantt:ra as a recording dt·vice rult'd
over by tht' pcrforntanct• lt"vel of action taking placcc•
\\'ithin the profilntic event. Thus, entire Holly,vood
tiln1s are constructed alrnost solely on principk·s of
cutting on action - rt'action - and dialo!:-,rtlt'. This situ-
ation ,vould bt" vt·ry sintilar to that of tht· pot·t ,vhosc
tin.11 pot."nt in fact is just like his/ht·r Ori!:-,>inal idt·a;
nt·ither is rnuch of an artist. At the other cxtrt'111e are
dirt'. (tors \'vho frt·qut·ntly (though St·ldon, ahv.,ys) use
tht· profiln1ic event as a starting point fi.1r crt•;itivc
activity, thus redut·ing the in1porta11cc:' of protilrnic
perfonnancc in the co111plt:ted fihn tt·xt. What \Ve
rt'ally have is a co11tinuunt , not a 111agical distinction.
And for this rt·Json, the grt:ats are not ahv.1ys that
great; they sontcti1nc~ fail at the crc;itive t·tli.)rt. And
the lesst·r directors son1etin1t:-s surpas~ the111selvt·s.
If John Ford's ( ;;de,,,, <?( Sr,,1/i111d )",1rd seen1s unt·x-
reptional by any ~t.1ndards. it n1ert·ly indicires th.11. tor
,vhatl'Vt'r reason. Ford was unable to ,vork tTt'ativl'ly
on th:u occasion . As in all tht' art~. the n1ovt'n1ent fron1
gener,11 conct·ption to prcci~e di~rovery is never
guarantet'd. ,\ f,'.~,1111/,,, is rnany respt·cts h.1~ gt·ner.11
conreptual lc;itures ren1arkably si111ilar to those fc1und
in Ford's bt·st post-War ,vork: ,1 cros~-l·ultur.il ~ituatio n.
;1 str.1nge renHJte envir()nn1cnt. and a jounlt'\" into an
e\·en re111otcr :irc.1. Yet, the tihn ran 't bt·gin to t·o111p.1rc:'
to Ford's bt·st ,,·ork fro111 th.u period. Even n1ort'
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puzzling perhaps than Cidco11 ,if S.·,11Ja11d Yard where
the ntaterial seerns conceptually far rentoved ti-0111
Ford's usual interests, Mo.J!ambo sho,vs a creative failure
of a sirnilar kind.
At tintes, of course. interference on the set or post-
production manipulation of the text account for a
failure. And at tirnes. in the niidst of threatening
circurnstanct:s, directors still succeed in creating an
interesting aesthetic text. A111e11rs, I have suggested.
don't exist ntai:,>ically as a group. and there is no reason
to expect that any director alY.'ays succl·eds in the
creative zone. even ,vhen there is no production
intcrfcrt•ncc.
If we place A·f1\{!Dt11bt1 in a career context, it 111ay
beconte very intt·resting. But this tells us so,nething
about tht: hierarchic construct of John Ford's caret'r.
and nothing about .l\-1,'.l!<llllb(). We have not discovered
so1nething hidden in J\:ltiea111b,1 bent:ath a n1,111it~·st
level ofperfonnance. We have rnade it part of another
construct ,vith different principles of organization. In
all filrns by all directors the level of perfonnance is
located within the profihnic event. the lt·vel of
aesthetic arhit"ven1ent {lto,vcvt'r clichcd or banal) is
located at the level of the constructed filrn text, and
tht: levd of ;1uteurisn1 is located at the: hierarchic
grouping of 111any fihns. The thrc:"e lt·vels art· scparace
and distinl·t.
A final ,vord ,nay bt· in order conren\ing the at·s-
thctic i1nplications of the notion of the tilrnic text
1-.>iven here. As the theoretical thn,st of the argun1ent
and the brief exa111ple fron1 TI1t Sl.',1rd1crs should indi-
cate, ,vhat distinguishes the good front the bad dt·pe111.is
prin,arily upon co111plex .ind structured use of con1-
positional features. organization of screen space, sound.
carnera n1ovl·n1ent, t:tc. As is well knoY.'ll by 110\\·, Petc:'r
Wollen discussed and evaluatc.>d t·ntirc:' directors' careers
\vithout attending to tht·~e aspects of the constructt'd
tiln1 tt·xt. So111t· of his :1rticles llt'Ver cite a single shot
front a ~pl'r1tir tiln, yt·t alont' rt·late it to anything t>lst'
in tht· ti 1111. "· But auteuris1n is not alont: in having•
bccn plagut·d hv this problen1.
<.)11 tht· 111ost b.1~ic levt>l. ,,·hat a tilrn is about
rannot t·ven be disrusst•d \Vithout first attending to
co111position.1l ti.·.11urt·s of the:' projt·cted tilntic text.
M .111y criti cs rush to di~t·uss i1nportant sounding sub-
jt·l·ts (signitic1111 tht·n1t·s. intl'resting characters. etc.) as
if tht·y exi~t sl'p:1r.1tt' frorn the:' projel·ted filnt. as if in
son1e un~tatl'd \\':1y. thl' ti Int text is 111t·rt:ly a record ot
Original from
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 Performance Theory and Auteur Theory
a pertonnance of those things. Thus a critic 1night
assc:rt that 77,e Searc/,ers is a racist tiln1. Approached in
this way. to discuss con1positional featurc:s and pattenis
of off-scrt'en spact' sounds n1crrly fonnal. Tht' point
beconies: If the filn1 is racist, why bother to discuss
how petty or con1plex that racisn1 is? l)oesn 't this
dt"tract from the racisn1?
The: very posing of such questions, of course,
already assun1t's that the fihn is a recording of a per-
fon11ance. that it is little n1ore than windo\v dressing,
be it a pretty \Vindow \\·e look thro ugh or an ugly
one. If in f.1ct a fihn is racist, the only way that 1/1,,r
racis111 can be: discusst:d is by speaking about the aes-
tht:tic text. For just this rt:ason, so niany discussions
of such topics as won1t:n "in filrn" or blacks "in fihn,"
ho\Vt'Vt'r well intentiont:d, are so liniitt:d. Thl·y don' t
place a particular wo1nan or a particular black in a
particular tilrn. Tht:y i111n1ediately grab the i111age of
the perfonner out of it, assun1ing that thl· in1age
speaks for itself and that to \\'Orry about any possiblt:
spatial ft:atun:s. fc1r l'Xan1ple, is lllt'rt·ly to digress into
a t<1nnalis111 that 111oves away fro111 tht' i111portant
point. In fact, the:- so- called fon11alisn1 is the irnportant
point. The topi(s could frequently be bettt'r t'ntitlt'd
along such lint·s as ''Blacks Out of Fihn."
Aestht'tic tt:xts do not ernbody son1ethi11g vJhich
alrt'ady t'xists, tl1t'y do not say sonll'thing ,,·e already
Notes
l Willi.u11 Frouµ . 11u· .'\acnm'Tita / ,.111b ,II tlu· S,H1·uun·r,·r
(N,•w York: Ddt:1. 1'17~). p. ix.
2 Ridurd Corli,,. ·nu· H,1 /lyu•t\jld .'¼·1n'llll'n·,o~· (N1.· w York: Avon
Uooks, l'1711) . p. Ill.
·' Pt.·tt.tr Wollc.:u. s,,\ 11.\ dm/ .\/c,min,t! m ,l,c ( ,'mt'ltl,1 {Bloo111i11!,!hlll:
1 Fit'th Symphony cm ht.·c:mnt· "Thr<.'l' UlmJ. Min:" ((;nod111.1n.
huh;uu Um\'.,;r,uy Pn.·:-.,. 1')72). p . 7~ .Hh.l pp. 112- 1J .
-I Wollen. p. 11.\.
:, Nd5,on (;nodm.11t. L.r,~1.•11,~..:n cf Art (llh.l1.111.1po li,: Bnhh,.
M,·mll. I'll>ll). p. 11.l.
<, A l11~hly q11.1l1tit:d po,1tio11 i, t.1kl·11 011 tl11, pomt m \~h llum
Luhr :uul l'l·h.·r Lc.:hnun..'1111/"''·"'"./1 ""'' ;,·,,,,,,,,,'f' 111 rh1· C:111t·n1i1
(N,·w Y nrk : ( ;_I'. l'utn.un'< Snn,. I '177). pp ..\I - ~. William Luhr
folt stron~ly that c;ood111.in''\ point ,hould h<.· ntvdific.',i to
inc.:ludl· µl·11cr:,I ulil•y,111t:l' with tlb<.·u~1,·<.· dirc.·l·tio n~: d,l·r<.· 1.;.
lc.·l~\\',lY hut not lmudt..·,, lt..·t..·way. I .l~l'n: wuh (;ood1u.111·,
pos1uon .,~ ,t.1kd h<.·rc.·. If thl' d1,,·ur-1\·<.· d1n:"·ttl)n.;. md11,:.ttc.·
~1ow111~ dowu .111d Lc.·on.m.t u..•r11,(<.'lll ,pn ·d, up. \\'1,' 111.lY
ht"ar :1 \\' H't(hc,:d pc.·rtt,rin.111<t: hut rh1.' w, ,rk bl'lll~ pl·rt(,nnc.·d
i~ ~till mt.1.,;t . Nt.·n·rthclc.·,,. thb .,n·.1 lh:1,·,t, ll1r1ht.·r ,n,·,·,11~.UHHl.
As 1t now ,t,lllth. pi.lym!! 011t· wn,11~ m,tt: d1,qu.1li ltl'' tht·
Digitized by Google
165
know. they do not translate so1nethi11g which can be
said a hundred different ways. They are, rather. st'lf-
focusing texts \vhere ho,v so1nething is said uniquely
becon1es part of ,vhat i~ said. 17 Nor does this fact
sever aesthetic texts front life:- and ban thern into the
cliched never-neve r land of art for art's sake; nor
doi:s it trivializt' politics and social contexts. On the
contrary, by insisting on the parti(ular qualitii:s o f
the aesthl·tic text and \vhat it sJys and it alone says.
this approach then returns to us precist'ly what
needs to be politically understood or placed within
the social context. The irony \Ve have to understand
is that by insisting that aesthetic tc:-xts are in son1e
,.,·av• autonornous, ,ve do not divorce the1n fro111
life, but rather, rnakc:- tht'n1 111ore valuable. Aesthetic
tl' xts teU us thinb>s which other kind~ of texts cannot
tell us, and critics have to attend to those thin!-,>s.
'
If litt"rary critics have leamt'd to slo,..,· do,vn \vhat
Jonathan (:ullt'r calls "the unsee111ly n1sh fron1 word
to ,vorld," fihu critics have to lt"am to slow do\vn
the rush front tilt' screen to the world.'" T his doesn't
111ake the world or fihn any less in1porta11t; it sirnply
does then1 both justice:-. In order to achieve this justict",
\\' l' havt" to pay 1nuch n1ore attention to the projecte::d
fihn tt"xt and to precisely undt"rstand tht' place of the
script and the profiln1ic perl<)m1anct' \Vithin such
a text.
work whik tht" n1ost '\y,tl·rnau( .111d outra~t.·ou, .1hu~t..· of
di,;L'llf"l\'t.' d1r<.·ctiu11s '-tot.•( 11ot thrc:ttcn tht.· work', intt.~~'Titv
' ..
( ;o,.'dm;m lum~d( .1(knowlcJgcs thii poiru with thl· w.lrninµ
th.It throu~h a ,c.•rit•, of <\in~k n<Hl' rh:mµl·~ Uc.·c.·tho\'c.'ll ',;
1'· I K7).
7 C:hn,u.,n ," 1l·t.t, "()11 Jt',lll Mttry\ L'J;\th,'·trquc .,, />~p/1i,/1!\!1t' du
c·;,,.~,,,... \'Of. II," tr.111(. hy l)i.111;1 lv1.1t1.1,, .......,,.,.,,, ,·ol. 14. till\.
I i ~ (Spnni:i Sunuuer 1'17.\). I'· 52.
X Umhl'no E,:o ..·I ·11,c,t,')' ,f SnnicHir:,: {Uloomin~ton: Indian.,
Univl·r,ity Prl•~;;. 197(,). p. ISX .
9 rv1urr.1y Kri<.-~t'r. ·nw .,·,·w
.-1r,1'c~\!1Sh' .,~., l'.•i·1rr (Mmnt.·;'l pola;;:
Tlw U111 ,·l·~1ty o f Mi1111t.·suta Pre.·,~. ltJ5<,). p. f.9 ,
1(1 St.'l' Chn,u.m rvh·t,, "Thl· lrn:1~'ln,1ry S1!-,'l1iti<.·r." S(r,•tu. vol. 16,
110. 2 (Sunnntr l'l7;i): D:rnid l>.l\·,1n ... The Tutor-Cod,· ol
Cl.""'·'' C111<·111 .,... h/111 (}u,m,·rlr. \'ol. XVIII. no. I (1'.111 1'>7-1):
.md N1d1ol.1' Un•wnt.·. "The.· Spn·uror m tht.· T t·xt." him
CJ1Mnc·,lr. \'OI. XXIX. Jl (l. 2 (\Vmtt.·r PJ75-<,).
I I Thi, pn11u .1l•our d1l~ i,htli·rl.'lh'l' bl·t,\T<.'ll thl· ~Pl't.'t.nor ;md dtt·
VJt.'Wl'r h.1, l't.Tlt wdl dl·,·d(,pnl rt.·n·ndy hy H.ohl•rt Elwr.\'<.' 111,
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
166 Peter Lehman
·•sper1a1or-Viewer," 1,J'idr A11gl,·. vol. 2. no. 2 (1978) pp. 4-9.
T he point I wish 10 stress here is that the viewer can be a
conscious ev:tluator taking into account nuny more thing,;
than a spectator of a drJJ11atic event - ev,·n if tl1e camera
placement implicates him/her as a <pec1a1or of the evenc.
12 Wollen.p.11 2.
13 Leonard Meyer. Mu,ic. ·17., Ans a11d JJ,.., (Chicago: The Uni-
versity of Chicago Press. 1967). p. 258.
1-1 Meyer. p. 258.
I5 le should be added that it need not be che credited direclor
or even a single person who is responsible for the work in the
creation of the aescheric text. Circumstances vary from proj.-ct
10 project. The point here is merely to indicate where the
creation of a..-s1hetic value takes place. 1101 necessarily who doc,s
Digitized by Google
it. Whoever is r<-sponsiblc for the creation of the aestheuc text,
ii cannot be someone whose work is cornpkted in a <Ul:(C
antecedent 10 that text's cr..-ation.
16 See for example. the articles Peter Wollen WTote for Th( ,, ·, .,.
LL.fr Review under the pen name of Lee Ru$.sell. T he articles
appear betwttn January-February 1964 and March- April 19(,6
in Nos. 23. 24, 26, 29, 32. 35, and 36.
17 For discussion of this approach to the nature of aesthetic tcxL<.
sec Eco, pp. 270-1 : Meyer, pp. 210-17; and RonunJalcobson.
·'Linguistics and Poetics,"' in The Strurturalists Jr,,m ,War.,· ,,, U,,;.
Stra111s ed. by Richard and Fernande DeGcorgc (Garden City:
Anchor Books, 1972), pp. 93-6.
I 8 Jonathan Culler, Stru(turalist P~tics (Ithaca: ComeU Univer.;ity
Pr,...,, 1975). p. 130.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 19
Studio Authorship, Corporate Art
Jerome Christensen

As Andre Bazin had famously put It In discussing auteurism in relation to the Hollywood studio
system, "Auteur yes, but what of?" Although Bazin praised "the genius• of the studio system
for Its ability to support the work of directors with a vital genre system, considerably more
critical work has been done on genres than on studios. In this essay, Jerry Christensen, chair
of the Department of English at the University of California at Irvine, continues his examination
of the role of the studio in the context of authorship that he explored in an analysis of King
Vidor's film adaptation of Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead (1949) originally published in
Velvet Light Trap in 2006. Christensen there argues that the individualist capitalism espoused
by the movie's narrative accords with the business philosophy of Its producing studio, Warner
Bros., which thus might be considered the author of the film as much as Its director or writer.
In this essay Christensen considers more broadly the question of studio authorship in relation
to concepts of corporations and Hollywood cinema, challenging the auteurist model of
American film history from yet another perspective.

In its 1932 profile of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,
Fortune departs front analysis of the studio's history,
structure, and personality to herald the advent of
corporate art:
MGM is neither one 111an nor a collection of n1t·n. It is
a corpor.ition. Whenever a ,notion picture beco1ncs a
,vork of art it is unquestionably due to n1en. But the
moving pictures have been bo rn and bred not of rncn
but of corporations. Corporations have set up the easels,
bought the pigrnents. arranged the vic,vs. and hired the
potential artist,. Until the artists en1erge. at least. the
corpor.irion is bigger than the sum of its part,. Sornehow.
although our poets have not yet defined it for u.s, a
corpor.irion lives a life and finds a fate outsidl' the lives
and fates of its hun1a11 constituent,.'
In other words, the condition for the en1ergence of
cinenutic works of art is not individual genius, not
technology, not even money, but the corporate orga-
nization of the studio. Fortune does not pro1nise that
Hollywood n1orion pictures will transport like art or
that they will endure like art, but, it affim1s, if any do
they will count as examples of corporate art.
Fortu,re's corporate art thesis has attracted fe,v
adherents in fihn studies. Richard Maltby's generaliza-
tion in 1998 still holds true: "There has . . . been a
fairly clear division between a practice of textual anal-
ysis that has either avoided historical contextualization
or engaged in it only nuni1nally, and econonuc filrn
history that has largely avoided confronting the movies
as fonnal objects... ~ The predorninant theoretical
approach to An1crican filn1 history descends fro111

J("rOml." C hri~tcnsen. " StuJi1., Authu"hip." A.tl.1ptl·d fro m ..S, m,tio Autht.,l'\h1p, W.1mc:r Uro, ,Uh.I 11,r l·i111,11,m1l1e•,1d... pp. 17- .! I fro m "11,< I 'rl1Yt IJ.i:ht Tr,,p 57 (Spnn~
2006). V 2lN J7 by J4.•ro ml· ( :1tn,11.:1Ul'IL U1.1.·d hy p l~n111\\1011 of tht· :1u1h()r.

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
168 Jerome Christensen
))avid Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristen
Tho,npson's land111ark 1987 book 17,e Classical
H<>llyu,ood Ci11e111a, ,vhich comprehends Hollywood
tihns as industrial con1n1odities. According to 17,e
Classical Holly111()od Ci11e111a, by the nud-1920s feature
filnunaking had evolved fro111 the individualistic enter-
prise of the early silent era into an industrial syste1n
organized on quasi-Fordist principles of n1ass produc-
tion. Supervised by an inelastic hierarchy of ,nanagers,
propelled by a rhythm of technological innovation and
standardization, characterized by a coherent set of
"ideological signifying practices," and driven to 111axi-
111ize profit, the n1otion picture industry produced,
distributed, and exhibited n1arginally differentiated
conunodities for n1ass consun1ption. 3 17,e C/assic,11 H()l-
ly111<1od Cinema does co111bine extraordinary attention
to fi.hn form with its equally in1pressive analysis of the
industrial systen1. Those perspectives, ho,vever, work
together because "group style" finally 111atters insofar
as it contributes to the construction of a classical nar-
rative. which, in the last instance, has as its function
n1aking a profit. 4 Whatever the distinctions between
the n1ode of production in Detroit and Hollywood, it
,vas the n1ode of production that mattered. Respon-
sive to the 111arket and changing practices, Hollywood
product ,nay have been elegantly varied, but individ-
ual filn1s had no more n1eaning than the stylish tailfin
on a Chevrolet or the newest hue of a Frigidaire.
Because n1eaning is incidental to the n1ode of
production, questions of authorship are just not rele-
vant. Fonn follows function. not intention. What an
o,vner. 111anager, or worker want~ to do or thinks he
or she is doing has little bearing on what is finally
done. In defending 77,e Classical H()l/yu~>od Ci11e11111's
functionalis111, Dirk Eitzen seconds the view that in
HollY'vood "there is a clear discrepancy bet,veen the
111otivations for innovation and the actual causes of
change. It was the consequences of inventions that
detennined their 'success,· and consequences. though
they ,vere deliberately sought, could very rarely be:
fully anticipated ..., Thus although there ,vere con1pet-
ing innovations by Holly,vood practitioners. it ,vas the
svsten1.
, not the individual inventors or even thei r
111an;1gers, , vhich detennined their success: "The inno-
vations that ,von out ,vere always those that fit bl~St
into the established 'n1odes· of practicl' and produr-
ti nn" (p. 77). For the functionalist any supposed n101ivt·,
, vhether individual or corpor,tte, is a second.1ry etlert
Digitized by Google
of the dyna1nisn1 of an industrial systen1 that is fun-
dan1entally a technology for efficient self-reproduction
through profit- n1axin1ization.
As applied by followers of 17,e Classical Holly,,,,,,,d
Ci11e111a, the functionalist n1odel nonnalizes the
con1plex and peculiar business of n1aking ,notion
pictures by an1algamating the Hollywood studios into
an industry. "a group of finns producing products
that are close substitutes for each other...,, Those finns
111ay con1pete strenuously; or, as in the fi.ln1 industry.
they ,night collectively agree to restrain competition
in order to 111aintain a certain level of prices and
restrict entry into the industry. Unlike a corporation.
an industry is not a person. which is to say that
almough it 111ay be incidentally personified (as
"Hollywood" regularly is in the pages of 17,e Cl,issiral
H<>lly111c>()d C..'i11r111a) and assigned "wants" or "needs." an
industry can actually "want" or "decide" only when
finns with shared interests formally establish an asso-
ciation or council, appoint representatives. agree on
objectives. collaborate on policies, and hire spokesnten.
Joun1alists at Variety in the 1930s could leant ,vhat
the n1otion picture industry "thought" by consulting
individuals charged to speak on its behalf. such as
Will Hays, or by surveying an aggregate. such as the
studio heads or the n1embers of the Academy of
the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. They could
learn nothing about what the industry wanted, needed,
or planned by watching 111otion pictures. An industry
perspective does have the considerable benefit of
isolating the conunon deno111inators that permit
cooperation on techrucal standards, establishment of
conventions of representation, recognition of spheres
of influence, and the tr"'.iffic of personnel among tht•
~tudios. But looking at Hollywood as a generic indus-
try has the considerable disadvantage of erasing thee-
strategies of individual studios, each of which -
oligopolis tic agreen1ents not,vithstanding - had a
distinctive corporate intention that infonned thc:-
n1eanings its fihns co1nn1unicated to their various
audie11<:es. The phrase "MGM \\'anted" or "Wanter
Uro5. decided" is not shorthand for an aggregate of
individu,11 opinions; it is the apt recognition of a cor-
porate "person·· capable of strate!-,>ic intentions and
1.1rtic.1l 111ant'UVl'TS, a pl'rson ,vho has an achjeved
social reality and is the bearer of constitutional rights.
Wht·n Jobon ~.111g, W ,lnll'r Uros. perfonned. When the
Lion roar-. MGM ~pea ks.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Studio Authorship, Corporate Art
When corporate theory is invoked in the landn1ark
n1ulti-volume History of the America11 Ci11en1a, it involves
a repudiation of the agency of persons - individuals
and corporations - in favor of systen1ic inexorability.
f)onald Crafton speaks for the consensus when he
asserts, "Syn1ptomatic of the newer academic treat-
1nent of sound is the rejection of history told as the
exploits of business geniuses or of individual stars, like
Jolson. We now see these n1overs and shakers as cogs
in the larger system. " 7 In the volu1ne devoted to the
Hollywood of the 1930s, Tino Balio identifies two
phases in the understanding of the motion picture
industry as a corporate enterprise: out1noded accounts
of Holl}'\vood as under the virtual control of the Wall
Street financiers who owned the studios, and "revi-
sionist" accounts that "rest more or less on conte1nporary
critiques of finance capitalisn1 that focus on corporate
hegen1ony. Robert Sklar," Balio says, "sununarized the
ne,v thinking when he said that it is not so in1portant
'\vho owns the movie companies but who rnanages
the1n.'" Like Bordwell, Staiger, and Thon1pson, Balio
cites as his authority on the "new thinking" Alfred I).
Chandler's 1-"isible Ha11d, which
d<·tin..-d the rnodcrn busin<'SS ..-ntcrpris<· as having c,vo
sp..-cific charact..-ri<tics: "It contains rnany distinct opcr,11-
ing unit.< and is 111anag<·d by a hierarchy of salaricd
executives." Motion-picture finns took on the first ,·har-
act..-ristic during the teens and the twenties ,vht•n they
integrated both horizontaUy and vcrticaUy. As they ~'Tew
in size, these firms bi:cante n1anag..-rial. which is to say.
they rationalized and organiz..-d operations into Jutono-
nH>us depart111ents <';1d1 head,·d by a proti:<sion.11
tnanag..-r."
The thinking is neither 11c,v nor revisionist. W t·ll before
Balio consecrated Visiblt• Ha11d as the foundation on
which contemporary histories of Hollywood should
build, Martin J. Sklar had argued that Chandler's tht'sis
that the increast>d efficiency of operation naturally
selected large scale, ¼'t:11-coordinated corporations for
donunance of tht' econo1ny echoes the apologies rnade
on behalf of the corporate syste1n in the early years of
the century by "pro-corporate partisans," who detendt>d
the social dislocation attendant on the rapid tran5ition
to a new. highly or~niz.:d syst.:n1 of industrial pro-
duction and market control as ..sin1ply a -n1atter of
su b1nission to 'objective· la,vs of t>cono111ic evolution ....,
Digitized by Google
169
In that light, the filrn historians ,vho uncritically take
Chandler for gospel do not reprt>sent the rt>ality of tht'
corporate revolution; rather, they reproduce highly
interested corporate self-represt'ntations. The under-
standable desire of these scholars to legiti1nate
Hollywood historiography has led then1 to subscribe
unwisely to the approach that has predon1inated in
business history an1ong those scholars con1n1itted to
explain how what is had to be.
The work of a new gt>neration of institutional
historians has restored contingency to the account of
the corporate revolution. William G. Roy has distilled
the temlS of the "1najor undt>rlying debate" an1ong
conten1porary historians and theorists of the 111oden1
corporation: those who insist that " the econon1y
operates according to an econonuc logic bast'd on
efficiency" are opposed by those who are convinced
that it "operates according to a social logic based on
institutional arrangen1ents, including po\',er." 10 Roy's
own case histories of the tissue of decisions n1ade by
financiers, entrepreneurs, stockbrokt>rs, and legislators
at the tun1 of the twentieth century st>ek to explain
why, for t'xan1ple, Ja,nes Duke's An1erican Tobacco
Con1pany and not the National Tobacco Works rost·
to don1inanct' in the cigarette industry. Tht> efficiency
of the business organization was rarely dt>cisive in such
contests. The success of particular corporations in spe-
cific industries ,vas contingent on both the 1nix and
1nastery of the actors (entrepreneurs, financiers. legis-
lators. judges) involved and the 1naterial and political
opportunitit's availablt> for exploitation. Dy conunit-
ting to the efficiency thesis, ib>T1oring both corpora tt·
intentions and the realization of thost' intentions in
articulate artifacts, overvaluing tt'chnological dett·nni-
nation. and undervaluing the studios· stratt'gic exercise
of behavioral. structural, and sy1nbolic power. fi111c -
tionalist filn1 scholars typically construct a history of
unintended but preordaint'd consequt>nces and tell a
story that could have gone no other way. To get tht'
story right. we need to learn how corporate enter-
prist's detennined what they wanted. to reconstn1ct
,vhat corporate actors did to get what tht>y needed in
order to acquire ,vhat they wanted. and to pay close
attt'ntion to tht' " 'ay in which corporate rt>presenta-
tions helped achieve corporate objt>ctives.
For anyone interested in ,vhat n1otion pi<:ture~
n1t'an - ,vhat ar~u1uents
'
thev, 1nakt'. ,vhat artions
they pcrfon11 - it is as in1portant to kno,v that J1,c
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
170 Jerome Christensen

Figure 19. t M,·rvyn LeRoy·, Gld DiJ!.~r,s ~{ /9JJ: A dcfiniuvc Warnc·r Bros film ,vnh mu~1cal scqurncc,
tlircctcd by llusby llcrkdcy. Produced by Robcn \Vard and J•.:k L. W amcr

Cold D(e.eers ef 1933 (1933) is a W arner Bros. liln1 as
it is that Mervyn LeRoy and Busby Berkeley directed
it. What ,vas distinctive about Berkeley's choreography
was adequately imitated in MGM 's Da11ri11}! Lady.
,vhich \,VJS rushed into production in the sun1111er of
1933 to capitalize on the popularity of W arn ers· 4211d
Street and v.rhich. under David 0. Selznick's supervi-
sion, did its best to 111i1nic Berkeley's spectacular dance
nu1nbers. Yet the co n1n1itn1ent to studio identity trumps
copycatting for dollars. It ,vould have never occu rred
to MGM (a nd therefore to Selznick) to n1ount a
n1usical that features the comn1utative;- chorus rather
than an inirnitable star. In Cold D((!l/crs the leading
characters - Po ll y (l:tu by Keeler). ,vho son1eti111es
impersonates Carol; Carol Uoan Blondell). , vho so111e-
ti111t·s in1pcrsonales Polly: Trixie (Alin e M ac Mahon),
and the aptly narned Fa y Fortune (Ginger Rogers) -
e111erge fro111 the chorus :is a group still bound by
friendship and rivalry. In D,11ui11}/ Liuly, J:utie Uado,v, a
burlesque dancer avid for ··art,·· gets her start o n Hro ad-
v,ay as a 111en1ber of th e cho rus, but that's n1erely a plo t
point on tlte royal road of Janie ·s destiny: there is n o
evidence chat ~he kno \VS anyone else's n an1e o r could
be n1istake11 for any o f the o cher dancers. And ,,·hen
J anie en1erges as fearured perfonner, she d oes it alone
and is justified by a star quality that has nothing co do
,vith her singing or d:111ci.ng ability and everything to
do ,vith the fact chat she is played by Joan Crawford.
M G M sho"ved li ttle respect fo r directors: when Berke-
ley ,..,enc to Metro he lost his style and when LeRoy
signed on for more n1011ey than any ocher director in
the history of the studio he lose all the dynarnisn1 that
the raggedy. fast- paced envi ro 1u11ent of W arner.; had
su pplied hi1n. M G M did not ,vorry abo ut directors.
but it did worry abou t st.us. It faces do,vn the tlrreat
of sta r insu rgency in Si11.~i11 1 i11 r/,e Rai11 ( 1952) where
one sr., r \Vho .1spircs to diet.ace co the studio is destroyed
(J nd all star.; both in tl1e filn1 and o n the lot w:imed)

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Studio Authorship, Corporate Art 171

Figure 19.2 Edward G . l~obm,on 111 Mervyn Ldloy·~ I..,11/r Ca1•st1r (W,1n1<·r Uro~/ F1nt N•tion,I. 1931 ): A fil111
that MGM never could have 111>dc. Produced bv, Mal U. Wallt.s and IJarrvl . F. Zanuck

by the den1onstration 011 ihe scree11 of how the studio
can exploit it~ fon11idable apparatus to synthesize the
intra- and extra-dicgctic a.nd 111akc a ne,v star right
b efore the eyes of the audience i11 the fiJn1 and the
audience efthe filn1. That J\ torouo (1930) was niade by
P ar.unount 111ay appear to be a fact of less significa nce
than that J osef Von Sternberg directed and that Marlene
Dietrich and Gary Cooper starred in the filin - buL it
seen1s that way only because 1\1oro«o u1as tr1adc by Par-
a1nount. As a late r Paran1ount 1no lio11 picture, S1111.H't
Boulevard ( 1950), "vould argue, in Holly,vood o nly at
Para1nount ,vere the directors and their stars 111ore
important than the sLudio - a hierarchy chat ,vas Para-
mount's brand identity.
To put the case 111ore stringcntly, nun1crous
H ollywood filins could only have been rnadc by the
studios that released then1. It is inco nceivable that
M GM could have 111adc Uuh• Cncsar (193 1) even if
L.H. M ayer had both Edward G. Robinson and Mervyn
LeRoy under contract. ·n,c
Gold D(l!,,V,frs of I 933 ( I 933)
and 801111ie a11d Clyde ( 1967) arc definitive Wan1er Bros.
pictures. Cecil B. de Mille's Tr11 Cc>111111a11d111e11L~ (Para-
111ount, 1956) is about a sac red ccxt in thcJudco-Christian
tradition; it is a sacred text in the Para111ount canon of
brandlore, the set of filins that ponder the co nception,
founding, consolidation. and tr.1nsfom1ation of the
Paran1ount brand. ,vhich includes TI,e C/1c11t ('I 916).
TI,r Covrred I-V11_Ro11 ( 1925), 77,c VirJ!i11i1111 ( 1929), Lo11e
ti1e To11((!ht ( 1932). Christ111<1s in July (1940). R,,ad to
Utopia (1946), and S1111srt B011/ev11rd ( 1950). 11 If, to
entertain an i111possibiliry, The Pl1ilt1delpl,ia Story (M GM,
1940) had been 111ade. scene by scene. shot by shot, star
by sta r. by Warners rather th.in M GM, the filn1 would
n1ea n son1ething entirely different rron1 v,hat it does.
becausc TI,e Pl1iladclf'l1ia Story as \Ve have it is sa turated
v,ith Mecro 's corporate intention to justify the v,ays of
Louis B. M ayer. sn1dio head. to Ni ck Schenck, the boss
ofLoc\v·s Inc. Like ·n,cJ11.::.:: Si11,!/cr ( 1928). Gabriel 011t'r
tire vl '/111e H,111sr (M G M , 1933). 8111/rts or Ballou
(Warner.., I ')3-1), Boys Tm1111 (MGM. 1938). Pi11oahio

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
172 Jerome Christensen
(Disney, 1940), 1\,frs !vli11iver (MGM, 1942), Tivelve
O'Clock High (Fox, 1949), 771e Fo11ntai11head (Wan1ers,
1949), Singin' in the Rain (MGM, 1952), Psycho
(Shantley, 1960), jaivs (UniversaJ, 1975), Invasion of the
Body S11atchers (UA, 1978), &tman (Warners, 1989),
Yo11've Get !vlail (Warners, 1998), and Minority Report
(Drean1works, 2002), The Philadelphia Story is a strong
instance of studio authorship.
T o show that certain films are in accord with
docu1nented or inferred studio interests would be
insufficient evidence to validate the thesis of studio
authorship, for that test would ultimately appeal to
the judgn1ent of the n1arket. To make the case that
H ollywood motion pictures mean and that the studio
makes that n1eaning in order to define its interests and
to shape its future depends on the persuasiveness of
the prior claim that a corporation can intend. And that
depends on what one means by intention. To begin
to specify the character of corporate intention, it will
be useful to lay out an argument advanced by Noel
Carroll on behalf of a theory of interpretation that he
calls "n1oderated actuaJ intentionalism." Carroll ini-
tially developed his theory in opposition to Beardsley
and Wimsatt's postwar staten1ent of "the intentionaJ
fallacy," which Carroll broadly renders as the view
that "the realm of art and literature ... is or should be
sufficiently different from other domains of hun1an
intercourse so that the difference n1andates a different
fonn of interpretation, one in which authorial intent
is irrelevant. " 1! In his subsequent elaboration of the
theory Carroll p resupposes agreen1ent that texts, which
he also calls "artworks," can only be understood as
n1eaningful and, therefore, subject to interpretation if
they have been intended by an author. Carroll's pre-
supposition enfolds my argun1ent to a point: no
interpretation without 1neaning; no meaning ,vithout
intention; no intention without an author. Carroll
does not approve of all intentionalists, however. He
repudiates "the n1ost extre1ne fonn" of intentionalisrn,
v,1hich, he says, "n1aintains that the n1eaning of an
artwork is fully deten11ined by the actual intentions of
tht· artist (or artists) who created it" - a vie,v that leads
to ,vhat he refers to as '"Hun1pty- l)un1pty- isn1': thc.>
idea that an author could n1ake a work 1nean anything
sirnply because he wills it so." In the nan1e of n1 odera-
tion and the service of conunon ~ense. Carroll insi~ts
that an author's staternent of intention 11111st be sup-
ported by the langua~e o f the tt·xt.
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Carroll's chief objective, however, is to contest
adherents of "hypotheticaJ intentionalisn1," who clain1
that "the correct interpretation or meaning of an
artwork is constrained not by the actual intentions of
authors (co1npatible with what they wrote), but by the
best hypotheses available about what they intended."
The hypothetical intentionalist, Carroll reports, goes
so far as to reject the actual writer as a privileged
informant in favor of information that would have
been publicly available to an ideal reader of the text.
Jerrold Levinson, Carroll's chief adversary, explains that
hypothetical intentionalisn1:
acknowledges the special interests and attendant con-
straints of the practice or activity ofliterary conununicarion.
according to which works - provided they are inter-
preted with maximal attention to relevant author-specific
context . . . are ultimately more important than, and dis-
tinct from, the individuals who author them and those
individual's inner lives; works of literature thus retain. in
the la.~t analysis, a certain autonomy from the n1ental
processes of their creators during composition at least as
far as resultant meaning is concerned. It is this small but
crucial dirnension of distinctness between agent's meaning
and work's n1eaning . .. which is obliterated by acrual
inte11tionalisn1 but safe-guarded by the hypothetic .ii
variety (Carroll, 2001: 201-2).
Carroll denies that there is a distinction between the
literary work and ordinary comn1unication. For Carroll
there is no author who is not (or was not) a conver-
sationalist, that is, sorneone who could personally
explain the n1ean.ing of his artwork. Therefore, we
ought to seek out the intention of an author with the
satne interpretive skills that we "deploy constantly in
our everyday co111merce" by asking the author what
he intended or consulting docun1ents in which he says
what he intended to 1nean. Carroll accuses hypotheti-
cal intentionalism of being "parasitic on the aints of
actual intention." Hypotheses about intentions are
never in truth hypotheses about some "author-
construction, the postulated author," he argues; they
are always hypotheses about the author's actual inten-
tions. Levinson assc:-rts that "the core of utterance
n1t:aning can be conceivc:-d of analytically as our b~t
appropriately infrlr111ed projection of an author's
intended 111c,1ni11g frorn our positions as intended
interprt·ters .. ,, ' C::1rroll asks, ' ',vhy should we stick 'w;th
tht· rl'S11lts of the hypothetical intentionalist's inter-
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Studio Authorship, Corporate Art
pretation when a true account of an author's actual
intention is available?'' "Appropriately informed"
should always n1ean best informed; and best infonned
means that we should not project an author's intended
meaning from our position; we should learn the
,neaning that the author intended fron1 his or her
position. The hypothetical intentionalist has no justi-
fication for substituting a "warrantable assertion" for
" the truth" when the truth is available by consulting
"things like notebooks" that enable the interpreter "to
identify the relevant authorial intention correctly''
(Carroll, 200 I : 202-4).
Despite its serious flaws as a defense of "moderated
actual intentionalisn1," Carroll's strict constructionist
critique of the hypothesists is serviceable just so far as
it applies to literary and other ordinary texts that do have
an actual individual author, someone with whon1 wi:
could in1agine conversing. Hollywood motion pictures
do not. Any clain1ant of that status can be effectively
contested; at the end of the day, the distributive justici:
of the credit roll is the only authority that n1atters."
Consequently, most interpretivi: di:bates within film
studies, whether or not they are explicitly informed by
intentionalist con1mitn1ents, have to do with a "theo-
retical i:ntity" called an "author-construction." Positions
on the authorship of studio fihns tend to cluster anti-
thetically: at one pole are auteurist accounts which
stipulate that some actual individual's contribution,
whether director, screenwriter, or producer, qualifies
her to be credited as auteur despite her lin1ited partici-
pation and control; at the other extreme are rnaterialist
accounts that render so,ne n1ode or n1eans of produc-
tion, son1e apparatus. or set of industrial conditions as
the functional equivalent of the author. There is.
howevi:r, a third, more con1prehi:nsive alten1ativi:: a
person who is not actual but who, by warrantable asser-
tion, nonetheless qualifies for the status of the intending
author: the corporate studio itself.
By "the corporate studio itself," I include those
Hollywood production con1panies that were incorpo-
rated (such as Sarnuel Goldwyn, Inc. and MGM until
the end of the 1930s). those that were the production
subsidiaries of larger corporations which includt·d
distribution and exhibition co111panics (Twentieth
Century-Fox Filn1 Corporation. RKO Radio Pictures,
Inc .. Paramount Pictures, Inc.), the one: that straddled
that distinction (Warner Dros.). and production co111-
panies that shared thl· structure. practice~. and objl·cti ves
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173
of the 111ajor studios (Universal Picturi:s, Selznick
International, United Artists after t 950). Organiza-
tional conunitn1ent to the "concept of the corporation"
as "a social institution organizing human efforts to
a con1mon end" is decisive in detennining studio
authorship, not strict adherence to any particular orga-
1
nizational forn1. '
By "corporate studio itself' I also intend to exclude
the agents of the corporation, its 1nanagers, at least as
an ideal type. Managers n1ay be en1ployees of the cor-
poration, but they work on behalf of capital.'" Managers
q11a managers do not think and decidi:; they coordinate
activities and make operational choices regarding the
allocation of resources which respond to n1arket dic-
tates and are calculated in tem1s of their contribution
to the control of production cost. 17 The 1nanagerial
ideal is frictionless functionality. Managers make the
chans that represent the abstract, two-din1ensional,
technically n1eaningless world in which they iinagine
that they efficiently con1municate. The ideal corporate
comn1unication flowing from upper 1nanagen1ent
down the check-listed ranks does not have the status
of a text (literary or ordinary) in Carroll's tenns; it more
closely approxi111ates the status of his idealized author's
notebook: a privileged, transparent, opi:rational state-
ment that requires acceptance not construal. 18 Unlike
co1nn1unications between individuals or between
authors and readers, the norn1ative inter-office memo
does not mean what the author intends it to n1ean; it
means exactly what it says. To inquire of bosses what
they n1eant here and here and here is to challenge their
ability to n1ake their intentions clear and. therefore, to
perfonn their job effectively. The subordinate manager
who is interested in keeping his own job and has no
designs of toppling his superior does not interpret a
rnemo frorn his boss, but acts on it.
Now it is not necessary to believe in the truth of
that account of corporate communication. It is only
necessary to acknowledge that rnanagers as n1anagers
perforn1 as though it is true - just as book reviewers.
in Carroll's account, act as though it is true that
authors' staten1ents in conversation or notebooks are
transparent accounts of their intentions in order that
they 1nay do their job of trans1nitting those intentions
to their readers as n1eaning itself 1'1 Most book revie,vs
appear in newspapers for good reason; their appc.-al
to an author's stated vic.-,vs is what we ordinarily
l·all jour11alis111. not c: riticis111: it involvc:s reporting. not
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
174 Jerome Christensen
interpreting. Insofar as Carroll's '"1noderated actual
intentionalisn1," like the n1anagerial flow chart or the
con1pliandy self-editing reviewer, is reflexively respon-
sive to the operational authority of a detected fact, it
is not a theory of interpretation at all.
Hypothetical intentionalism is not parasitic on
actual intentionalisn1 any ,nore than corporations are
parasitic on actual hun1ans. To state the studio author-
ship thesis in its full extension: no interpretation
without n1eaning, no n1ea1ung without intention, no
intention without an author, no aut/ror u,itho11t a person,
and no person 1vith greater right to or capacity .for a11t/rorship
t/ra11 a corporate pers,1n. Unlike the conversational n1odel,
which requires the interpreter to acquire her n1ean-
ings fron1 what hu,nans say about texts, the studio
authorship thesis funds a theory of how persons n1ake
texts as well as how persons should interpret then1.
Hypothetical intentionalism is not parasitic on
actual intentionalis,n because, unlike the conversa-
tional n1odel, it is a theory of how tc.-xts are nude as
well as how they should be interpreted. A version of
hypothetical intentionalis1n has a place in the history
of organizational theory. Chester I. Barnard urged that
the authority to n1ake executive decisions. that is,
dc.-cisions not ordained by the price n1echanisn1,
attaches to that not so ideal type of manager within
an organization who effectively constructs hin1self as
the ideal reader of the organization by interpreting its
actions in light of a comn1on purpose, not in order
to report on that discovery but in order to render
his orders as the appropriate 111eans to execute that
purpose. Ban1ard's executive dictates rnernos to
ernployees in order to con1111unicate his wishes; but
he has authority over his subordinates insofar as he
persuasively refers his wishes to a co111111011 purpose.
Success or failure is determined by the recipient of
that order, who rnust decide whether or not to accept
its authority by rnaking a similar interpretive n1ove:
determining whether the order actually hannonizes
with the co111mon purpose of the organization.
Although Ban1ard ackno\vledges that there is a "zone
of indifference, .. where orders are 111erely processed,
his 111odel of vertical communication \11,"ithin an orga-
nization requires of a leader the rhetorical skill to
negotiate the boundary benveen indifference and
interest, a skill that n1ust be applied in the ti.ill con-
s.:iousness that every order rt·ceived by a subordinatl'
Digitized by Google
is, in principle, the occasion for a crisis of authority,
the decision to obey or defy, to stay or leave_:,, Put
less abstractly, in terms of the n1anager in a b11sinl'ss
organization, as Peter F. Drucker does. persuasion
becomes n1arketing, or, if you prefer, rhetoric becon1es
poesis. That is, in light of the general purpose of the
business enterprise, as Drucker conceives it, the par-
ticular task of persuading subordinates to acknowledge
executive authority so that they will obey is n1ost
effectively in1agined as the creation of a custon1er who
wants to buy what the executive has to sell. Ji
Though published in 1938, Barnard's T11e F1111ctio11s
of tire £-.:ecutivc achieved its greatest influence during
the postwar era. when, largely due to the An1erica11
experienc.e during World War 2, the big corporation
ernerged as son1ething n1ore than a special exa1nple
of the theory of organizational behavior. The title of
Drucker's 1946 Co11cept of the Corpt1ratio11 echoes
Barnard's both to suggest a continuity and to indicate
the shift that he will execute from the study of or~r.i-
nizational behavior to analysis of the corporation as
"a social institution organizing hun1an efforts to a
con1n1on end." The difference that the concept of the
corporation n1ade can be clearly seen in i1nportant
studies published by Phillip Selznick (1957) and
Kenneth R. Andrews (1971), which respond to t\l.·o
weaknesses of Barnard's approach: I) its inattention to
the condition of institutionality - that is, what 111akes
orgaruzations hang together despite the fonnal possi-
bility for dissidence and disobedience; 2) a vagueness
about the status and role of what Barnard calls
·· con1n1on purpose·· in ditferent kinds of organizations.
especially corporations.
Selznick supplernented Ban1ard's account of orga-
nizational behavior with an influential definition of
tht' social character of institutions: "In what is perhaps
its 111ost significant n1eaning, ' to institutionalize."' he
wrote, "is to infuse with value beyond the technical
require111ents of the task at hand ... Whenever indi-
viduals becon1e attached to an organization or a ,vay
of doing things as persons rather than as technicians,
the result is a prizing of the device for its own sake.••::
Selznick ·s version of "attachn1ent" recalls the psycho-
logical explanation of organizational identification
proposed by Thunnan An1old in 11,e Folklore of c:api•
t,1/is111 '.:!O yt>ars before. There An1old had argued that
··\vhl'n n1c11 are eng:it-:ed in any continuous coopera-
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Studio Authorship, Corporate Art
tive activity, they develop organizations which acquire
habits, disciplines, and morale; these give the organiza-
tions unity and cause then1 to develop son1ething
" 'hich it is convenient to describe as personality or
character. " 1·1 That develop111ent is no n1ere phase, for
"once the personality of an organization is fixed, it is
as difficult to change as the habits of an individual"
(Arnold, 1937: 352). And, as An1old argues, the per-
sonality of the individual is at stake in the fonnation
of the personality of the organization, for "organiza-
tions which are personified in the n1ind of tht." public
have the effect of making their members uncon-
sciously submerge their own personalities and adopt
the personality of the organization while they are
acting as a part of it" (Arnold. 1937: 353).
The difference betwt."en An1old' s psychological and
Selznick's philosophical explanation is substantial.
St."lznick's Kantian phrasing effaces Arnold's implica-
tions of social and individual neurosis by describing a
process that involves a change of perspective an1ong
tt."chnicians who becon1t." pt"rsons by treating the
device of the corporation as if it wert." a person and
not just a n1echanisn1 for 111aking products. profit,
and pt"rsons. No n1ore than Arnold does Selznick
rt."srrict his account of the change in the organiz.1tion
to the kind of organization called a corporation,
although neither n1an would likely have been able to
frame his particular account of attachn1ent without
the precedent of the naturalization of the device of
corporate personhood which occurred in the courts
and the legislatures and then in the popular n1ind
during the first two decades of the nventieth century.
as the corporate form, once a n1echanis1n for accu-
n1ulating capital, becan1e a pt"rson valued for its o,vn
sake. J-1 The corporation ,vas not only a person but a
person of privilege, endowed with the capacity to
n1ake new figures, whether internally through "the
conversion of the specialized technician needed in the
day to day conduct of business into the 1.veU-educated
personality capablt." of judginent who is needed ti.,r
policy n1aking decisions (Dn1ckcr. C(>11rrp1: 14) .. or
externally by tun1ing loyal citizens into loyal custon1-
ers. 111L>se figures are not vahu:d for their own sake
but as personifications (e.g.. the "organization n1an,"
"the suit,·• "the Pepsi generation") of the corporation
whose econon1ic perfonnancc and social pron1inence
they enable. For Drucker the "unconscious" ,plays no
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175
part in either conversion. The process is clarified and
given son1e historical context if we replace "techni-
cian" with "actor" and "well-educated personality"
(1.vith the emphasis on perso11ali1y) with "star" and
si1nply change "loyal custo1ner" into "fan." Like the
Wizard of Oz, the Hollywood studio is a person with
the capacity to personify - and the process works no
n1atter how n1uch anyone endeavors to den1ystify it,
no n1atter who bares the device: in 77w Wizard o.f Oz
it is the skeptical Toto 1.vho pulls back the curtain to
expose the fraud; in Si11gin' in t/1e Rain it is the head
of the studio who gives the nod and pitches in to
yank the ropes, draw back the curtain, and display the
star-construction. Corporate theory carne of age in
the postwar era when it discovered in the business
enterprise as such the conceptual reach, marketing
acun1en, and organizational tools that had constituted
the culturally transfonnative prowess of the Holly-
v.•ood studio since the 191 Os.
In the preface to the second edition of 1\1a11a,(!i11.~
_[c>r Results (1986), Drucker credited his 1964 book
1.vith being the "first to address itself to what is no,v
called 'business strategy.' " 2' By 1971 , however, Kenneth
R. Andrews could say that "business strategy," which
defines the "choices of product or service and n1arket
of an individual business" had beco1ne distinguished
front "corporate strategy,'' which applies to "the whole
enterprise." Working with that distinction, Andrews
revises Barnard's notion of the "conunon purpose" in
light of the objectives of strategic n1anagen1ent in the
conten1porary corporation. As Andrews defines it,
"corporate strategy is the patten1 of decisions in a
co1npany that detern1ines and reveals its objectives.
purposes, or goals, and defines the range of business
the con1pany is to pursue. the kind of econon1ic and
hu1nan organization it is or intends to be and the
nature of the economic and non-econo1nic contribu-
tion it intends to n1ake to its shareholders, en1ploycc:s.
custon1ers. and conununities. " 2~ Intention here ernerges
as a 1nanager deduces front "decisions observed, ,vhat
the patten1 is and ,vhat the company's goals and
poliries are" (Andrews, 1987: 18). Corporate stratt'!,'Y
cannot be referred to any e1npirical individual such
as, say, the ,vriter of a 1nission staternent ("What
exactly did you n1ean by saying our ntission ,vas
'the general ,vc:lfare'' ") or the innovator of a product
line ("l)oes this n1t·a11 that all our shorts hav<: to bl·
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
176 Jerome Christensen
baggy?") or the CEO ("What was the real reason we
n1erged with AOL, Mr. Levin?"). Because the "essence
of the definition of strategy ... is pattern . ... it is
the unity, coherence, and internal consistency of a
company's strategic decisions that pos1t1on the
con1pany in its environrnent and give the firn1 its
identity, its po\ver to n1obilize its strength, and
its likelihood of success in the marketplace" (Andrews,
1987: 15). Corporate en1ployees becon1e effective
executives insofar as they are able to discern a pattern
and, discounting the professed intentions of the actual
agent of any particular decision, n1ake a decision con-
sistent with the operant intention.
Andrews' corporate executive is an actor who inter-
prets a set of decisions as establishing the character of
the organization, which he in1personates in order to
1nake a decision that will acco1nplish corporate objec-
tives and do so as if the corporation, not he, were the
author of that strategy. hnpersonation is the norm for
successful perfonnance in the corporation as, Barry
King argues, it is in the theater and rnotion pictures:
Th<· actor·s intention to portray a spccific charact<·r in
a specific ,vay nlly secn1 at first sight. and the case of a
leading actor is olten so represented, to correspond to
authorship conceived as the: creative prindple of the
fixed, dc:lin1ited text. But the proct·ss of character repre-
s<·ntation through i111persona1ion entails that the actor
should strive 10 obliterate his or h.:r sc:nse of identity in
order 10 b<·con1e a signifier for the intentionality inscribed
in charactcr. Such oblitt:ration returns the project of
intentionality to the level of the narrative it~elf ,vhich is
usually "authored" reductivdy in tcnns of the dir(·t·tor's
or play,vright's "vision, .. rather than as a n1c:aning cn1er-
gent front a collcrtive act of represt·ntation. The fi,11
partit'ipation of the actor in the narrative as d1arac1cr
thcreby tit·pcnds upon tht' supprc:ssion of the: litt·rary
.:onc<·ption of tht' author. 1~
If ,ve substitute "corporation" tor ·'character" and
"stratee,,y'' for "narrative," \Ve ar<· on finn ground
n1aking our conversion. It's \Vhen \Ve get to the reduc-
tion that thinf..'S get sticky. There is no question that
such reduction occurs in all kinds of corporations:
Ken Lay bt·co111es the n1an with the vision for Enron,
c;erald Levin for Ti1ne-Wan1er. Both 111t· 11 ,vere gifred
actors ,vho had seized the opportunity to irnpersonatt·
r orpor;1re i11tc:-11tion; both cultivatt'd a n7>11t,lli<'11 fr>r
,·ision that reduced the111 to perso11ific.1tio11s of tht·
Digitized by Google
company they led: the CEO as star. Eventually that
status as personification becan1e an alibi for each man
when the strategy pursued by his company ended in
disaster.
The ten1plate for that corporate device was the
career of Irving Thalberg, whose pre-entinence at
MGM was owed both to the unparalleled success of
the n1otion pictures the studio produced under his
supervision and to his decision not to take credit tor
any of the motion pictures that he produced. That
willed anonyntity was read by Fortune (as it had already
been read by Hollywood) as Thalberg's preternaturally
effective in1personation of the corporate intention in
his work as vice-president of production even as he
raised MGM to pre-e1ninence by attributing author-
ship to the studio. Of course, Fort11ne's project \Vas to
pull the veil aside and bare the device by which
Thalberg lost hin1self in the part of the studio: but as
always at MGM, baring the device does not n1ean
demystification, for although Thalberg is pressed into
service as the personification of the studio that is the
personification of Hollywood, in certifying Thalberg as
the genius he has been called, Fort1111r renders hin1 as
the personification of the essential n1ystification that
Hollywood, that corporate an, is and, not incidentally,
the n1agazine n1akes Thalberg the first star executive in
Hollywood and, arguably, in corporate An1erica. Fort1111t'
nc-ver exactly called Thalberg a "star" - it took F. Scott
Fitzgerald to do that - but the star-n1aking machinery
that would be applied to Alfred P. Sloan of General
Motors,Joseph P. Kennedy of the US Maritin1e Con1-
111ission, and Benito Mussolini of Italy was fabricated
in its first profile of a Hollywood studio.
Neither the corporation nor the executive, M ( ;M
or Thalberg, is the actual author of the n1otion pic-
tures that played in Loev/s thc-aters. TI1er1• is 11,1 actual
c111t/1or. And because there is none, the corporate inten-
tion cannot possibly be recovered from notebooks or
n1inutes. In objecting to the "fictional" aspect of the
in1plied author in Levinson 's n1odel, Carroll co1n-
plains. "It is ditlicult to st·e how this theoret1cal
constn1ct could really explain the features of a text,
si nct· this theoretical constn1ct could not have causallv .
inth1enced the text in any \\'ay·· (Carroll, 200 1: 206).
Yet that dot·s not n1akt· st·nse for corporations. What-
evt·r ont·' s point of vit'\\" on the ,nerits of or li1nit.~ to
corporate pen.onhood. no Oil<' has seriously doubted
th.it the tht·oretir.11 construct called the c-orpor.lte
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Studio Authorship, Corporate Art
person has causally influenced ,vork of all kinds. At a
rnore local level, consider a scene in which a ,vriter,
balked in the course of con1position, asks herself,
",vhat does all this n1ean?" She 1nay look through her
notes and drafts but not to search out a note that says,
" I intend this." She is trying to discern a pattt'rn in
the decisions that she has n1ade during the process of
cornposition. The "I" that is the subject of her ques-
tion can only be hypothesized: and if the hypothc~is
cau\ally influences the 111aking of the artwork, it is
bc·cause the ,vriter has been able successfully to i111per-
sonate the shaping intention of the ,vork.
Let's look at an actual person , R . S. Crane - a
theorist front the postvvar era of rorporate hegl·n1ony
and an adversary of Beardsley and Wi111satt on the
intl'l1tionalis1n front. c:rane begins one of his essays
,vith a short reflection on the process of his o,,•n
u,riting. which, despite a111ple preparation, does not
proceed with ease unless he is dir<.>cted by a "~yntlll·-
sizing idea." (:rane's account of ho,.,. this ,vorks is
•
,,·orth quotation:
As a conct·ption n1y idt'a 111ay b,· ti~ht or loost'. co111plcx
or sirnple: I call it a shaping cause lt>r the Vl·ry good
rc:ason that. once sud1 a prinripl,· has con1,· to 111,· for a
particular essay. it g,·nt'ratcs cons,·qucnce, and prohk111s
in the dt•tailt·d \\'Orkin~ out of rny ,uhj,·ct ,vhid1 I
c1nnot ,vdl ,:sc1pt' ,o long .is I Tt'n1:1in con1111ittcd to
"'riting th<' ,·ssay .1s I s,•,: it ought to be "'ritt,·n. It l'x,·rt<,
that is, a kind of in1pcn.on:1l and obj,·,tivc• p,l\vt·r. whirh
is at onct: cornpulsiv,· jnd suggt'sti vc:. ov,·r everything I
attetnpt to do. until in tla· end I ,·0111,: out ,vith a corn-
position which, ii ,ny t'Xl·cution h,is bl'<'ll Jtkquate. is
quite distinct. a, an ord,:red \vhol..-. front :inything I
rny,df con1pletdy inc..-ndl·d or for,·saw ,vh,·n I hl'f::tll to
write. so that atienv.1rds I ,on1,·tin1t'S ,vnn<kr. even ,vh,:n
I applaud. ho,v I n,uld ever have conll· to s.1y ,vhat I
hJvc said.:•
We ca n certainly see the li11ea111ents. if not the visa~e.
of hypothetical intt·ntio11alis111 in this bit of sc·lt:.
illun1ination. It does so111,· violence to Cr.inc to
translate his 1953 account of a person ·s con1111itnK·nt
to an "in1personal and objc•ctivc- po,ver" to a gt·ncral-
ization about the corporate· studio. but it is the right
violence to do. For Cr.int· 's "concl'ption" of an i111per-
so nal, gen..-rative principle• or '\h.1ping r.1u~c" is "·hat
Dn1ck..-r had in n1ind \\'ht·n. in 194(,. ht· an1u111riated
pax corporate Arnerica by pro,noting the "conrt'pt of
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177
the corporation" as "tht' dynan1ic ele111cnt'' of
An1erican socit'ty, the "sy1nbol through which the
facts arc organized in a social pattern." Druckt'r ntight
havt' anticipated that thoughtful people in the 1950s
,vould have ''intuitions" like Crane's in a socit'ty whose
"represt'ntative institution" is the corporation, ",vhirh
s,:ts the sta11d.1rd ti.)r tht' ,vay of lite and the 111odl· of
living of our citizen~: \\' hirh lt'ads, 111olds and dirt'rts;
,vhich dett'nnines our perspt·ctive on our own society"
(Drucker, Co11a·pt: 6- 8). C:rane departs fron1 the n1odel
of studio authorship by relying on a hit or 111iss intu-
ition caused by an i111pt'rsonal po,ver. The in1personal
person of the corporation is so organized that concep-
tions and decisions ran bt' routint>ly gt·neratl·<l by
n1anagc•ri.1l tl·chnique.!'' When intuition hits it causes
Cr;utc to conunit hin1st·lf to an inescapable cornpul-
sion. but 111aking 111ovir:s cannot wait on intuition. The•
n1otion picture studio is so organized that to 111ake
111ovit's tihnrnakers nnrst i111pt>rsonate a studio intt·n-
tion oftt'n unarticulated bv, anv, l'Xt·cutive at tht· studio
and then (ht're it goes the theater ont' better) ,,er .1s
if thl·y are lost in the part. Tht' ,notion picture studio
is so organized that it ren1ains tl1t' represcntativt·
corporation in a society wht'n." the corporation is the
reprcSl'ntativt' institution. fi,r in puNuing its o,vn indi-
vidual objectiv..-s the Holly,vood studio equips its
custo111t·rs as no otht·r busint'ss dot:s ,vith tht· tools to
thrive if not in an actual corporation then in a ~ociety
that inescapably labors under the concept of tht·
corporat1011 .
Th ... tasks that tullo,v fro,11 the studio authorship
tht·sis are threefold: (I) to discern the patten1 of studio
productions that dt'tinc· its idl·ntity. represent its objl'(-
tives, and that endt·avor to achieve thos(' objel·tivc·\;
(::?) to account tor ho"· tht· corpor.1te intention ,vas
realizl·d in individual n1otion pictures ,vithin the•
orga11iz;1tional hierarchy: and (3) to contribute to
tht· de bat<.> regarding "T he Nevv Holly\\'Ood." espe-
cially regarding the ,·fli:rts of changes in the
entl·rtain111c111 industry ~incl' the breakup of tht" stud io
sys1e111 in the I 'J50s and J ')C,lls on the social character.
the systt·111 of rt·prt'st·ntation, and the stratt'gic aspira-
tions of Hollv\\'Ol>d studios."' We should look at
111ovi,:s, study the con1panic•s th at rnade then1, and ask
\,·hl·tht'r thl· ronCl'pt of till· studio dt'Vt'loped in the·
classical ,·ra and "tht· concept o f the corporation"
fi,r11111l.11ed by l)rucker and others in thl· po~t,v.ir er.1
ar,· still co111patiblt· and. if so. ,vhl·tht'r tlll'Y art· still
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
178 Jerome Christensen
pertinent in the globalized digital econon1y of the
twenty-first century. A useful hypothesis might be that
insofar as corporations increasingly understand their
objectives in tem1s of a n1arketing paradign1 and as
Notes
h >r11mr (6 IJccember l'-13.2); in 77,r .-im,·ri,,111 l'ilm />1J11stry.
ed. Tino 13alio (Madison: Univer..ity of Wisconsin Press. 197h).
p. 263.
Richard Maltby. "'Nobody Knows Everything': Post-Ch.sical
Historiographies and ConsoLid.ted Ente"J.inmcnt," in Steve
Neale and Murray S,nith (eds.), 0,11rrmporary Hollyu'<'Cd
(.';,,,,.,a (London: Routledge. 199H). pp. 25-6.
J David 13ordweU. Janet S1.1.iger, and Kristin Thon1pson, ·n,c
Cla,<siCdl Hollyu""'d Ci11rma: Film Stylr ,111d Afodr o( Pr,,d,uti,,,, to
1960 (New York: Columbia Univer,ity Pres,. 1985).
Elizabeth Cowie, "Storytelling: Cl3.<.<ical Hollywood Cineni;1
and Classfral Narrative," C,>111t111por,1ry Hollywood Ci>1ema,
p. 180.
Dirk Ei12,·n, "Evolution. Functionalism. and th,· Smdy of
the An1erican Cinema," l'rl11ct /..i.~111 Trap, no. ~8 (Fall 19'11 ).
p. 76.
h M .E. Porter. Com~titi,,.. Strat~~y (New York: Free Pr~. 19t!O).
p. 5. Quoted in An1old Windeler. "Project Networks Jnd
Changing Industry Practices - CoUabor:itive Content Produc•
lion in the Germ.tn Tdevision Industry," 0,;~,1>1i::atfo>1 Stmli.-s
(November 2001). n.p.
7 Donald Cr.ifton, Thr. Talkie: .1mcrira>1 Ci>1rma', Tm11.<iti<>>1 10
So1111d, /926-19.l/ ; Vol. 4 of Hist,>ry ,?f° 1111· .1mrri<a11 c;,.,,.,.,
(Berkdey: Univer,ity of Califonilil Press. 1997), p . 5.
8 Tino Balio. 77..- Grand Drs[~11: Hollywood a.< a Alo,lrm B11si11,·ss
I::111rrprisr, 19.l()- / 9J9: vol. 5 of His1<1ry ~( tire .imrritau Ci11.-m,,
(l.lcrkeley: University of California P«·s,. 19</J), pp. 25-f>.
'I Martin J. Sklar, 11,c Corporatr Rrc,>>1.<trn<1io11 ~( .1111rrira>1 C,,,,ital-
ism, 189~19l6 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univcr,ity Press.
1988). p . 12.
1ll William Roy. ,<;.,ri,i/i:i11.e C.il'ital: Thr Ri.<r ,f 1111· i.A,xt· ludu.,1ri11I
c(l'7)()rcJli('11 ;,, Amen"ra (PritH.'t•ton NJ: Prill(t'[On Uuive~iry
l'n'£s. I 9'-17), p . 6. See Jl<o Ch,rles Perrow, ()1)!<1>1i:i>1.~ i lmrri<,1:
IV,altl,. P.,11,rr. ,md 1hr Or,:~;,,, of Corpor,>1r Ca11ira/i.,111 (Princeton:
Princeton Univ,rsity Pr..-ss. 2002).
1I S,•e J.red Gardner, "Cov,·rcd Wagons Jnd I >ecalo1--i1cs:
I'aramoun1·, Myths of ( )n1,~n,," \'air }<.>ltmal ,f Criticism 1.1. no.
2 (Fall 20rKJ}, pp. Jhl - 8'): Paul Graingc. '"Branding Hollywood:
Studio Logos and the AeMhctic, of M,mory Jnd Hype." Sa...-11
45. no.4 (Winter 211114). rP- '.154-{iO.
12 Nod Carroll. ·· A". ln1,·111ion. .111d C:onvcrs.11ion." &·y,,11d 0
,•k;tl,rtiis: /~1il,,;,,plri<,1I L:,,,,ys (C.unbridge: Cambridge Univcr-
,ity Pre«. :!(Hll}. pp. 157-K. Tellingly. C.1rroll gel< "Th,·
lnh:ntional faU;H.:y·· wrong. A hl·rter. chou~h still inJdrqu.1h.'.
,1J1,,me111 of the purpoS<· of the ,•<s.1y would he 1ha1 ··chc rc.ihu
o f poetry •~ or ~houkl hl· \q..,rrt'~:Ul·d &nrn pl·rson.tl l'Xpre,..:1011
,o th:u tht· pol.'111 ran bl· 0hj l·t:uvl'ly l."V:tlu:ttt.·d."
Digitized by Google
long as that n1arketing paradigin depends on a trallic
in identities (which n1ake persons who becon1e acton
by becon1ing custon1ers), the concept of the studio
will remain vital to the success of corporate art.
IJ J<rrold Lt·vinson. 77,r Pl,·Jsurt·s ,f .~e.<tlirtus: /'11ilos,•phiral r.ssar.•
(Ithaca: Con1ell Univer..ity Press. 191/h), p. 178.
1-1 Carroll invokes as evidence for his ,rgument J momrm , i the
end of the ntotion pinure S1,111d By A,f, ( 1986). where II i1
difficult 10 trU whether a co111pu1rr ha.\ been tumcd off , ,·ci-
dentaUy or delibcu1dy. Starkly diliercnt interpretations of the
conclusion follow fro111 each option. Carroll suspcn< that
··,nost viewer, would be loath 10 conunend the prodn.-e" ot'
SM11d Hy ,\-fr ii it tun1ed out they just dido 't know whJt 1hcv
were doing. But if we discovered, perhaps by ask mg thc111, that
they did rnake the rdr,·aiu scenr with the cxorcisn1 interpret•·
1ion in 111ind, the modest 3ctual intentionalist would he
hJppy .. : · (Carroll, 2001 : 210). Carroll do..-. not clan!)· who
the "producers of Stand By Afr"' are. those who Jre !,~ven
<crt·en credit •s producer... according to HoUy"•ood t'(Hl\"<"11·
tion, or tho«· who actually had a hand in the Jrtistic production
of the filtn. And if he would prrfrr the latter, would hr be
happy with a few producer.;, say, the director ,nd nraybr the
scrernwritcr, or might hr not fed compelled to poU all th,·
producers. of the film: the ._<sistanl dir<ctor rt-,;ponsthlc for
monitoring activity on the set or aU prop 111011 who nugh1 h,ve
hJd occasion 10 touch the computer? If there is prohkm
<nough in identifying 1hr actual producer.; of the fihn. deciding
on a protocol to adjudicate different dainu for responsibility
would be scriou.,Jy complic,trd. Would the producers be asked
in a group or separately' Could we really expect any producer
10 conf.,.s 10 an accident? Would unani1nous agreen,em b,·
neress.u y or only Jgtec111cn1 by • majority? Carroll's exampk
ac1uilly shows 1hJ1 whatever onr thinks of the merit uf moder•
,ic actual in1cn11011alis111 as 3n intcrprcriv< protocol tor n,)vd~
Jnd poen». it .:anno1 be applied to morion pictures \\ith any-
thing J.pproathin~ the cunfiJenct· hi~ th,:ory requin·-s.
15 l'et<r F. l>nKker. C,,,,,.,,,,, ,f tlw C,,.,,Natie11 (New York: John
Oay. 1<J-lh), p. 12.
I Ii Janet St.ug,·r appro,·ingly quote·, this definition of monJJ{<"
proposed by Antony Cutler. Uarry Hindcss. Paul Hir.a1. and
Ath.1r Hu,,._;,un: ··m:inag'-·~ an.• l.'Conontic agents entployc-d ro
,·x,·rci<c the ,·.,pacity of direction of bdrnlf of a capital"· l»cl.
c·111.<;ir11I H,,1/yw,,,,tf C i,rrm,1. p. <>J. Tht> ddinltion i~ not.1hlt· li.,r
0
ii, , 11hstitu1ion o f ··capit.11" for ",cork holders.··
17 Tl1t· hl·st "-tudio n·prc~e;•nt.ltion (or c.1ricJture) of the idt"al ()'PC
of the 111odl·n1 nu11.:i.~t·r is the l..· h.1ral'tl.'r of Lor,·n Shlw (Frc:-drfr
N1 .irdi). th,· lw.ui -n>untmf: l'v1.,d1i.wdli who is the co1np1rolkr
o t' tlw Tn·dw.,y Corpc.n,tt1011 in M(;M·~ l;xr,1,,i1·f Smu
(1 '1:i-1).
1X A V ll'W of tht· 1n"·mor.mdum in cht.· br~e-~ralt.· businl.'~\ l)r~.t-
11ii.ttion prop(hitd hy JoAnrtl' Y.1tc.·s. "Thl.· E1nefl(encc- of rhr
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Studio Authorship, Corporate Art
Mcn10 .is a Managl·ri.il Genre." .\l"'"'.(!(tnetll C,,mmunicaticm
Quarterly 2 (May I98'J). pp. 4K5 - 5 I0. John Guillory di<cuss~.,
Yates's th~is in the context of moden1ity'1 suspicion of the
n1otive of per.m:ision in "The Memo and Modernity." in
Critical It,q11iry 31 (Autumn 2<K)4). pp. 11-1-22.
19 for an ac<·ount based on intensive fieldwork of the way infor-
mation Actually moves up and down the corporate hierarchy
,nd the w,y authority is personalized in corporate burc,ucra-
cie,, S<'e Robert Jackal!. At.>ral ,w,,~,·s: 71,.. 11i>rlJ ,!f C,,'I"'"''"
A·fo11a,~ers (New York: ()xford University Press. 198K), pp.
17-10
Chester I. Bamard. Th,· F,moit"rs <i the E.,·,·N1ri1•r ( 1938; rpt ..
CJn1bridge: Harv,ird University Pr<s1. I ')68). pp . 165-84. For
J later, influcnti:il ex,:101in.1tion of the r<.·a.,ons son1c- employee~
(and customers) stJy ,nd sorne go. sec Albert 0 . Hirschnun,
exit. Vi>i<t, a11d L,,y,,lry: R,·s1>,m,r.< r,, Dali11t i11 Fin11s, (~~m•i~a-
timrs, and St,trr, (C.1mbridgc. MA: Harvard University Pn·ss.
1970).
21 Pcter F. Un1cker. 11,r />racria· ,f Afm1,1g,m,·11r (l'J54 ; rpt .. New
York: H,rpcr Business. l 'J'J3), p ..,7.
., ., Quoted in Henry Mintzberg and Jame, llrian Quinn, ·11,.,
Strot~ey f>rocrs$: Co11ctpts , C,,111tx1,, C,r.<<$ (Englewood Clitfs. NJ:
Prentice H•ll. I 'J'J I). p. 39.
23 Thurman Arnold, ·n., 1-'olkt.m· ,f Capit11li.<m (New Haven: Yale
University Pre«. 1937). p. 35!J.
See Roland Marchand\ fonnidabl,· C r,·,11i11.c r/11· C,,,,,,,,.,r S,.,,I:
11,e Risr '!,{ P11blic Rrlarimu and Corpt1r11tt· lma,(!ery ill Amcrfom
Businr55 (Berkeley: Universiry of Califon1ia Pres,. l9'J8). The
leb>al literature on corporate pcr.onhood is imn1ense. and a
review of its development is beyond the scope of this chapter.
A good. brief sunuuary of the theories of corporate person -
hood appears in the note "Constitutional R ights of the
Corporate Per.;on," Y11lt Law ,<;,/,."'I ]"umal 91, no. S (July.
1982). pp. 1641- 511, which divid~ the donlinant theories into
thn·c categories: (I) the fiction theory. which rakes the position
that the corporation "cxi<Ls as a person only bccauSt" it is rec•
ognized by the law. and it is b'l',tnt<·d swnding in the court only
because 1t has been brought into hdng by the st.ire"; (2) the
con tr.ct theory. whirh regard, the corporation "as a produn
of contractual •greement"; and (.') realism. which L<sert< that
"the law docs not create its own subjects ... ; rather. ir is forced
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179
ro reroi;nize the extra-legal existen,e of r<·rtain ' persons' -
some narur.1I. others not" (pp. lf,45-'!). This paper shares th,·
t,vin foci rhar the not\." sugg,e1ts: "tint, tht" notion that a cor-
porJtion. like aU con1plex or!(,lnizations. should be understood
not as an object, but as a set of role relations. and. second. the
observation that in any particular relation. the eorpor.trion,
unlike a natural person, must be represented by an agent"
(p . 1652). It should be added that a.s a matter of practice that
view can only be mainttined in full recognition that the other
theories. especially rcalisn1, have long held ,nd continue 10
hold sway in the courts. business literature. and the public
. . .
1nuginauon.
25 Peter R . Drucker. A,fat1<(~it1gfor R,·s11lts (1964: rpt .. New York:
Harper and Row, 1986). vii.
26 Kenneth R . Andrews, 71,,. Cmucpt of C"'I"'""" Stmr,;ey ( I 1171;
3rd edn .. Hon1ewood IL: l=·in, 1987), p. 13.
27 Barry King. "Articufating Swrdom," S.:r,:e,c 26. no. 5 (Septern-
ber-Octobcr. 1985), p. 31.
2ll R .S. Crane. "Towards a More Adequate Criticism of Poetic
Structure," in '11,t Lin)lll~'!('S ~{ Crititi.cm ,mcl tit,· Srrucrur,· ;f
/>oflry (Toronto: Toronto University Press. l 953). pp. 141-2.
29 With space. the illustr-•tion drawn fro,n Cr-me could be co111-
plemented by a more self-consdous cxa,nplc of corporate
theory from 1953: Dow ling Productions' renurhblc Donavan ·s
Brain. Thar picture radically depans fron1 its source, Robert
Siodn1ak's novel, .u,d earlier adaptations to explore with
unprecedented incisivenes.s the then1atics of the corporate
cak~over, represe nted .u 2 scientist's ability to con1munic1tc
w ith and be direct,·d by the brain of a rapacious corporate
executive, which ha, been extracted fron1 the dying man's
body. Dtmovan 's Brai11 anticipates less the polyvalent l11vasio11 ,!f
1111· 8,,,/y S11atcltrn. directed by Don Siccgd in 1956 for Walter
Wanger Productions than the aggre<sivdy anti-corporate alle-
gory of Th, lnva.sio11 ~{ tht &dy Snarrlirn of 1978, directed by
Philip Kaufman in spite of United Artists and ir, parent, the
Transan1etica Corporation.
JO For examples, sec the nurnerous superb c~1ys on the New
Hollywood collected in Steve Neale and Mu=y Smith (<·ds.).
Contrmpor,,ry Hollywood Ci11tma (London: Routledge, 1991!)
and Jon Lewis (ed.), 7111· ,Vnc• Amrrira11 Ci11r,na (Durham: Duke
University Pr~s. l<J'JH).
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 20

The Producer as Auteur

Matthew Bernstein

Matthew Bernstein is Chair of the Department of Film Studies at Emory University in Atlanta,
GA. A film historian, he has approached Hollywood history from a number of critical perspec-
tives, including genre, authorship, studio, censorship, race, reception, and ideology. Bernstein's
book Walter Wanger, Hollywood Professional is a significant study of a producer and the
producer-function within Hollywood, and an important corrective to the general view of produc-
ers merely as crass money-men. In this essay, Bernstein considers the role of the producer
in both the classic studio system and In contemporary Hollywood and discusses
the collaborative authorship of a number of important producers.
.>'

•
'.
i.
.' ' (~an a fihn producer be an auteur? On its face, the
... question seen1s preposterous. After all, a central axio111
I,
_,,. of the auteur "theory" in its original fonn was that
great directors n1ade great fihns by overcon1ing
the Hollywood classical studio syste111 's in1personal
n1achinery of filn1n1aking for the n1asses. Andrew Sarris
fan1ously wrote that "the auteur theory values the per-
sonality of a director precisely because of the barriers
to its expression" and that the auteur ",vould not be
,vorth bothering with if he ,vere not capable now and
then of a sublinury of expression ahnost 1niraculously
extracted front his 111oney-oriented enviro11111ent. " 1
If any one individual could be said to e111body that
i1npersonality, those barriers, that 111oney- oriented
environ111ent, it was the fihn producer. If any one
per-on could be arrused of insisting that a tihn 's story-
line. characterization. and plot devclop1nent be
i-:cneric.:. it ,vas the producer. If anyone de111.111ded that
principal photO!,,>Taphy be ron1plett'd on ti111e and
under budgt·t, ' no 111atter how t·xhilaratini.:
. or .~raciou~
tht' long take rould be. it \\'as tht· product·r. If a studio
dt·11ied the dirt·ctor the ri~ht •
of final cut. it \\'as the
producer ,vho ,vre~tled the: tihn out of the dirt·rtor·s
hands.
On this view, the produt,er represented the eco-
no111ic, profit-seeking basis of the studio syste111. its
funda111ental rationale. Screenwriter exttaordinaire
Ben Hecht re1narked late in his career that "The pro-
ducer is sort of a bank guard. He's there to protet't
the bankroll. His objective is to see iliat nothing is
put on the screen that people are going to dislike. Thi~
n1eans practically 99 per cent of literature. thinkin~.
probinb'S of all problc:1ns. "~ To quote T 0111 Wilkinson's
charactl'r of Hugh Fcnny111an in S/rakespearr i,i Ull'f.
the producer is "the 1noney." The producer could not
possibly have any artistry or vision to express. Produc-
ers are 111ana~ers. supervisors: they are all about the
botto111 linl'.
(:errainly. J cur-ory look at Holly"vood historv
supports this vie,v. The fihn producer arose \\'hen
A111t·rican til111111akini..: 111.,dt· the transition fron1 short
'
tihns to 111ore expensive Jnd elaborate features. Fol-
lo,vini..: tht· 111odel of T ho1n.1s ln<·e in the 111id-teens.
'
studio producer; <k· vi~t·d ,1 sy~t<'lll to k<·cp track of a

Orig in al from
Digitized by Google UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 The Producer as Auteur
fihn's progress - in tenns of schedule and budget -
during production. The filnt producer in the studio
era ,vas a ntiddle n1anager, an adntinistrator.' By the
l 920s, Holly,vood was full of stories in which studio
executives or producers took fihns front directors
before the filn1S were complete. Irving Thalberg
wabbed Erich von Stroheint's filnts at Universal
•·
(Foo/isl, Wives, 1922, and A--lerry-Go-Ro11nd, 1923), and
at MGM (Gret•d, 1924), and cut thern down drantati-
cally. MGM destroyed Buster Keaton's career when he
rnoved there frorn his own independent company
during the transition to sound by intposing strict
screenwriting policies and procedures on a gag-basc:d
artist. David 0. Selznick fired George Cukor after a
lt>\V weeks of shooting began on Gone 1vi1/r tlrl' 14'i11d
( 1939), and replaced hint with Victor Flenting.
Selznick peppered Alfred Hitchcock with so rnany
production ntentos in the early 1940s that Hitchcock
quipped 20 years later that he was still reading one of
them. The RKO powers that be rnangled Orson
Welles's TI,e A1aR11{/it-e11t An1berso11s ( 1942) and
Hollywood in general, destroyed his career.~ Darryl F.
Zanuck, the head of production at Twentieth Century
Fox, told master director Jean Renoir that his work
so far on S1van1p Water (1941) had "too ntuch back-
ground," too many dolly shots, too n1any carnera
angles and too much irnprovising on the set; Zanuck
concluded, "I am behind you and I am going to see
you through on the picture - but, by the same token.
I expect you to play ball rny way.,,;
Whether it was playing ball or (as Orson Welles had
it) playing with a train set, the producer had the final
s.iy. Joel Siegel, writing the n1ost in-depth study of the
n1aking of RKO producer Val Lewton's horror filrns
eleven years after Sarris's "Notes on the Auteur Theory
111 1962," expresses this point of view perfectly:
Alrhough son1t·thing of an o,·t·r-<in1plitication ... tht• art
,vent out of H ollywood ,vht·n produc,·r. bq~an to appea r.
The produ(:cr, in charge of the.' filn1·s t'(onornirs and
logistics. ,vas usually J n1ont·y-111an, pure and sirnple. an
overset·r oi the ,1rti,1< who took his orders fron1 the
bankers. .. . It is gt'nt·r.1ll y non<t·n,i,·al 10 spt'.lk of produc-
t·rs JS crt·Jtors ,vht·n. in all but a fi.·,v c 1st·,. tht·y \\'t'rt·
the cneniies of creation.'"
Sarris wrolt' that "ldt·ally tht' strongt'St personality
should be the dirt"t"tor. and it is ,vht·n tht· dir.,.rtor
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181
dorninates tht· filrn that the cinen1a cornes closest to
reflecting the personality of a single artist. " 7 The:
problent was that producers were the strongest per-
sonalities on any project and their energies wt're
directc:d to the botton1 line.
Frorn this perspective, the only producer-auteurs
who could possibly exist were the screenwriters and
directors who added the producer's hat to their port-
folio, such as Frank Capra, Willia1n Wyler, and (;eorge
Stevens in the n1id-1940s; Alfred Hitchcock in the latt'
1940s after his contract with David O. Selznick
expired; and Billy Wilder in the 1950s. Or the pro-
ducer-auteur rnay take the fonn of an actor with a
producing con1pany; while this phenon1enon began in
the 1940s as a dodge for punishing incon1e tax rates.
it also gave rnany actors great freedorn after being
under studio contracts for seven years and longer
(Jarnes Cagney, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, and
111any rnore). Whatever their past careers, such creative
talents beca1ne their own producers precisely to over-
corne the obstaclc:s to personal expression which
producers represented as representatives of the studio
systen1. However, the existence of these screenwriter-
director-star-producers. and their fine work, sidesteps
the question of whether a producer could be an
auteur.
The answer to the question is "ran:ly.'' An individ-
ual producer on certain fihns could be an auteur,
because he (and it was usually a he) provided a strong
personal vision that infom1ed the filn1's conception,
scripting, direction and editing. It is fair to say that
the classic n1onster film KinR Ko11R (1933), so central
to An1erican twentieth-century popular culture and
the public·s in1ab>inary, was producer and co-director
Merian C. Cooper's brainchild. Cooper had sorne-
thing of a lifelong obsession with gorillas and was a
war veteran and world traveler. He had previously
co-directed with En1est Schoedsack a nun1ber of
featurt· docun1entaries inspired by Nano,,k <?f tlrr 1\/,,r,I,
(1922), including Gra.ts (1925) and C/ra11.11 (1927). He
had bet·n an associate producer and executive assistant
to !)avid (). Selznick at RK() before he becarne head
of production after Selznick left for MGM. Whilt·
C:oopc:r developed the idc:a fi1r Kin.I/ K<111.'< bt:'fi>rc
assurning that post. his authority enablc:d hint to tollov.:
through on the project. After supervising the script,
( :ooper collaboratt·d on tht• direction again with
Schoc,hack to ere.Ht' this autobiographicJI t.1lt· of a
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
182 Matthew Bernstein
rnovie director who seeks adventure (as Cooper
had) in re1note parts of the world (as Cooper and
Schoedsack had) in the form of capturing a giant ape.
As Cooper's case shows, production executives func-
tioned on occasion as auteurs, and at tin1es made
extremely personal works. Certainly, there is a strong
connection between the Cooper-Schoedsack docu-
mentaries, Ki11,e Kong and their other exotic adventure
ftln1s, such as 77,e Most Dangerous Game (1932).g In
the strictest sense, this barely makes Cooper an auteur
at all - since one major principle of the auteur theory
as Andrew Sarris expressed it was the abiliry of the
critic to discern a skill, a personal sryle and a core of
interior meaning in a body of work. Moreover,
Cooper the producer- co-director of Ki11g Kong could
also be classified as another multi-hyphenate producer.
Being a studio head enabled Cooper to ensure that
the film was rnade, but does not account for the pos-
sible connections among the films he co-directed.
David 0. Selznick, Cooper's predecessor at RKO, is
most fan1ous for his independent productions, espe-
cially the blockbuster Gone with the Wind. Selznick
chose to work as an independent so he could lavish
his attention on each filn1 he produced, son1ething not
possible at the nujor studios, which in the 1930s
cranked out n1any, many filn1s each year. As an inde-
pendent, Selznick was con1pletely in charge of the
films he produced. "Selznick's idea of collaboration,''
Rudy Behinler has stated, "was to hire first-rate talent,
extract certain attributes fron1 that talent, and n1old
then1 to suit his vision. " 9
Selznick believed in supervising every detail of
production or substituting his own writing and visu-
alization ideas for those of the directors he hired. On
Gone with tl,e Wind, he launched an infan1ous talent
search for the actress to play Scarlett O'Hara, a bril-
liant publiciry stunt. He centrally contributed to the
many, ,nany script drafts for the filn1 secured from
different writers, rewriting their efforts as he saw fit.
He fired George Cukor and hired Victor Flerning
weeks into shooting. He closely supervised the editing
and post-production of the filn1. He was intirnately
involved in planning the frln1's marketing via distribu-
tor MGM and even had directions for projectionists
for the filn1 ·s showing. Selznick went so far as to
crystallize a new rype of creative Hollywood techni-
cian, the Production Designer. to account for Willian1
Carneron Menzies· contributions to the look of the
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Civil War epic. w Certainly, Selznick struggled ...,;ch
ocher directors on certain projects (most notably and
productively Alfred Hitchcock on Rebecca, 1940),
and he has been accused of n1eddling in director's
work (and in fact being a frustrated screenwriter-
director). Still, Gone with the Wind was the ftln1 he
wanted to create. We can find continuities in the the-
matics of Selznick's films - what Thonus Schatz calls
a fondness for "sentin1ental dran1as with forceful hero-
ines, relatively heavy themes, and lavish production
values," which Selznick shared with director George
Cukor, as seen in such fibns as A Bill of Divorcement
(1932), liVhat Price Hollywood? (1932). and Uttle Women
(I 933). 11 But since Selznick so constantly adapted
works of literature, he nught be con1parable to the
tradition of qualiry directors whorn Truffaut denounced
in his original fom1ulation of la pclitique des a11te11rs. In
addition, in spite ofbeing an early champion of Tech-
nicolor, Selznick did not have an appreciably distinctive
visual sryle, apart fron1 his frln1s' high production
values, evident again in D11el in the Sun (1946), another
Technicolor epic Selznick fussed over. His films reserve
nujor srylistic flourishes for n1oments of great drama.
such as the celebrated crane shot rising on the war-
wounded lying in downtown Atlanta. Moreover, while
n1ost historians have been content to claim Gone 11,ir/1
the Wind as Selznick's creation, Michael Sragow's
forthconung biography of Victor Flenung, who shoe
the n1ajoriry of the footage of the nearly four-hour
filn1, n1akes the case for Flerning's important contribu-
tions to the film in terms of sensibiliry and visual
sryle.
Merlan C. Cooper and David 0. Selznick demon-
strate how close a producer could come to being
considered an auteur for single projects within the
classical studio systern, whether en1ployed by a n1ajor
studio or running his own production con1pany. Val
Lewton, a protege of Selznick's, provides the best
exarnple of the producer as auteur within the terms
of the original auteur theory. Lewton's low-budget
horror series for RKO in the first half of the 1940s
- including Cat Pe,>ple (1942), I Walked witli a Zombie
and The Leopard A1a11 (both 1943), The Curse of the
Cat People (1944), 11,r Body Snatc.lier (1945), and
Bcd/11111 (1946) - were realized with three different
directors (Mark Robson, Jal"ques Toumer, and Robert
Wise) and n1ultiple screen\vriters. Lewton famously
,vas n:stricced to budgets of S 150,000, and he had co
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 The Producer as -Auteur
Figure 20.1 Cat Proplt ( 1942). directed by Jacques Toun1~11r. was one of producer-outcur Val L~,vton·s low-
budget horror filni< made for R KO
work ,vith filnt titles that st udio heads had n1arket-
tested , regardless of th e filn1's ~torylinc. By all accounts,
Lewton had an unusual amount of freedorn to n1ake
the first film. Cat People, according to his t.'\Ste, in part
because his unit was to tun1 out such low-budget
genr e filn1s that uo 111cn1ber of the RKO studio brass
would pay much attention to his producrions. 12 That
fil.rn's success only affinned Le\vton's right to auton-
omy within the studio.
Le,vton , ,vho had written several novels before
entering the filn1 industry, often created original story-
lines and was heavily involved in script revisions. In
fact, he usually drafted the final shooting script. Lew-
ton's staff have recounted ho,v Lewton rewro te scripts
but used a pseudonyn1 to avoid the appearance of a
conflict of interest (that he ,vould rewrite others' work
to gain that credit 011ly. rather than in the i11terests of
creating the best possible filn1) . When forced to take
a c redit late during his sojourn at IU<.O. he used a
favorite 110111 de plun1e, Carlos Keith. In face, Le\vton
referred to himself as a .. ,vritcr-producer." Lewton
biographer and criti c Joel Siegel v.1rites: "It ,vould be
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183
grossly unfair to conclude tl1at Le,vton 's ,vriters did
not n1ake in1portant contributio ns to his fihns. but a
look at tlle subsequent credits of those \Vriters will
show that none ever n1anaged to match the quality of
the work he did for Lewton. " 13
But insofar as auteu r-ship relics on a discenuble
pattern of meaning and style, Lewton's fi!n,s fit the
bill. Critically, the Lewton horror fil111s have been
praised for what Siegel describes as "their attention to
detail. their unusually literate screenplays, their skilful.
suggestive use of shadow and sound. " 14 The Le,vton
ftln,s represented an innovative fon11 of horror that
relied less on on-screen n1onsters such as U niversal's
Franke nstein and Dracula and n1ore on evoking the
psycho logical fears of the characters, who ,vere in tum
111ore roundly conceived than typical horror victi1ns
like the stereotypical little girl \Vho befriends the
n1011ster in Fra11kc11stei11 ( I 93 1). At their best.
the Lewton horro r fiJ1t1S created a sense of dread that
was heightened no t only by character developn1ent
but also by low-key lighting and off-screen threats
signaled only by sound effects, such as tb e footsteps at
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184 Matthew Bernstein
night as Alice (Jane Randolph) \valks through Central
Park in Cat People.
The sa,ne could be said for Walt Disney, who led
a struggling independent production company front
the 1920s through the 1950s. Disney himself stopped
actively anin1aring filn1s after 1928's Steamboat Willie,
but as the head of his own sn1all con1pany, he was
closely involved in creative decisions on his filnlS, and
closely supervised the work on ftln1 storylines
,tnd character designs. Clearly, the classic Disney films
had extraordinary techniques, a discernible and clear
visual style, and a core of interior n1eanings that
re111ain associated with the con1pany to this day.
Cooper, Selznick, Lewton, and Disney ,nay have
been exceptional a111ong studio producers, but their
exa111ples dt·n1011strate that son1e 111ajor studio pro-
ducers under certain conditions could be seen as
auteurs in the studio era - in Lewton and Disney's
case in1posing a world view and a distinctivt' stylt'
across a series of filn1s con1parable to that of Howard
Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, or John Ford. But such
producers \1/t're t'XCt't"dingly rart' in classical era
Hollv,vood.
, Carringer's study also told us a great deal about the
Rethinking the Producer as Auteur
Another \vay of thinking about the question of
whether or not product'rs can be auteurs is to refran1 e
the question. In the 1980s. several Hollywood histo-
rians cornplicated Sarris's conception of the auteur as
an artistic visionary \vho produces art in a comntt'rcial
sy~tt'm. In son1e \vays, this could be.- con1pared to tht'
111ovt' frorn auteurisn1 in its original highly ron1antic
fonnulation to auteur-structuralisn1, a ,neans of dect'n-
tering the individual artist in critical and historical
thinking. 15 Robert Carringer concluded front his
cornprehensive study 77,e i\4aking <!f "Citizen K,1111' ''
that collaboration better defines Holly\vood artistry
than auteur-ship. As Carringer writes in tht' preface
to his book, ".13y <,>llall!1ra1i,,c pr<1<css I ,nean the sharing
of the creativt" functions by tht' director \\'ith others.
A collaborator. in the n1ost gt'neral St'nse of tht' tenu.
is anyont' \1/ho rnakes a distinguishable contribution
to a tibn .. . " 1'· Havinp; surveyed Welles's pre-K,1111·,
unrealized project Hc,1r1 •)/ l),1rk11css and his suct·eedini-:
tihn '/1,c ;\f,~i:11ificc,11 An1bers,111s. c:amni-:er \VJS rt·ady
to dra\v ~onte additional t·onclusions. Wht·rt· ()rson
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W elles had con1n1ented to Carringer that "Collabora-
tors rnake contributions, but only a director can n1ake
a ftlm. H e is the one elen1ent in the formula that
cannot be sacrificed," Carringer added a "corollary .. in
his volun1e's very last sentences:
The quality of a fihn is partly a 111ea.,ure of the quality
of its coUaborativc talents. On Citizt'11 Ka11r. W dlt'~ wJs
lortunate to have collaborators ideally suited to hi,
tc:111pera1nent and ,vorking 111c:thods and capablt' of
perfom1ing at his level of arnbition. Front th<' evidence
of Hrt1rl <?f Darkness and 7711· A.f,\~11//iff11/ Ambcr;,111; and
the rt-st ofWelks's career. I ant ,villing to go further: had
it not L,..,en tor rhis partil"ubr co111bin.1tion, ,v,• 111ight not
hJve Ci1i::c11 1',1111" at all .,.
Tht' notion of collaboration provides a ditferent ,vay
of thinking about the producer's role in Holly,vood.
While the work of Cooper, Selznick. and Lewton
re111ains undin1inished, the concept of collaboration
enables us to think about the ways producers contrib-
ute to filn1111aking in less traditionally creative tenns.
systentatic nature of classic era studio production via
the author's exploration of ho,.., RKO's art depar1-
n1t'nt worked, and how scripts were custornarilv
dc•veloped at the studio. (Carringer duly noted early
in this volu111e that "it should be stated unequivocally
for the historical record that without Schaefer's gan1bli:
and co ntinued tn1st in his own instincts on W t'lles,
Citi::1•11 Ka11e would never have been possible.") '" Yet
Citi::1'11 Ka11e \\'as hardly the typical til1n for illustrating
tht' ,vorkings of the classic t·ra studio systen1, partiru-
larly since Wellt's was ~vt·n considerable creative
freedorn at the studio. J anet Staiger's study of the
division of labor in Holly,vood provides a n1ore
far-reaching look at how. on a re1:,•1.1lar basis, producers,
st.1rs, directors, screenwriters. and all technici.ins
\vorked in H ollY'vood's ht'yday, fron1 1917 to 1960.'"'
She and other scholars have helped us understand
what p roducers actually do. ,vhich n1ight also help us
think about hov, producc•rs could be constru ctive
frirces in the 111aking of a tiltn.
Most notably. Tho111as Schatz built upon Staigt'r's
.
stu<lv. of Hollv,,,ootfs divi\iOn of labor to accord clas-
siral era studio production ext·cutives and producers a
creativitv, that ,vas unthinkablt' in Sarris ·s fonnularion.
Exan1111ing the \\·orkin)..>S of M(;M, Universal. Wan1er
' '
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-UNIVERSITY
.. OF MICHIGAN ... .,..
 The Producer as Auteur
Bros., and David 0. Selznick, Schatz calls these n1en
"the n1ost misunderstood and undervalued figures in
A111erican film history.":?<' While Carringer focused on
collaboration in the strictly creative aspects of Citi::c11
Kane, Schatz's influential argun1ent is that Hollywood's
studio era flourished when a balance of forces (co111-
111ercial and artistic) and skills (those of the above and
below the line talents) were put to work on particular
film projects in a system that balanced co111peting
pressures. Responding to Carringer's notion of "col-
laboration," Schatz wrote that: "studio filn11naking was
less a process of collaboration than of negotiation and
struggle - occasionally approaching anned conflict," a
systen1 that worked beautifully when no one force or
pressure overpowered another. 21 In deploying their
authority at the studio, production executives and pro-
ducer.. could ensure that the systen1 worked, helping
screenwriters, directors. and stars realize their tnost
powerful and popular screen creations. In this vie,v,
the producer could of course interfere with an auteur's
work. but actually functioned to facilitate it.
Like Carringer, Schatz argues that auteur theory is
,vrong to emphasize particular individuals in the crt'-
ation of outstanding fihns: "isolating the product'r or
anyone else as artist or visionary gets us no,vhere."
Instead, Schatz argues.
Thc quality and artistry of all these: fihns \Vl'rl' thl·
product not si1nply of individual hurnan expn:ssion. but
of a 1nelding of institutional forrt's. In each case the
"style" of a writer, director. star - or evc:n a cine111atog-
rapher, art director. or costun1e desigtll'r - fused with thl'
studio's production opt'rations and 111anagen1ent struc-
ture. its resources and talent pool. its narrative traditions
and 111arke1 strategy. And ulti1natdy any individual's styk
,v.1s no n1orl' th.111 an inflection on an l'Stablishcd studio
stv1t:
, .11
While traditional auteurists dis111iss Schatz's fom1ula-
tion. it is undeniably ust·ful in any eflort to undt'rstand
who producers ,vere and what they did. The studio
production head~. often holding the title Vice Prt·si-
dent in charge of production, included the likes of
Irving Thalberg through 1932 at M(;M, and Darryl F.
Zanuck at Wan1er Uros. through 1933. then at T,ven-
tieth Century Fox fron1 1935 until the n1id- l 950s.
These n1en were solely responsible for the ,;ornpany ·s
entire film1naking slate - choosing propertil· s. cast~.
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185
talents, and technicians ,vithin the budget handed
the111 by the New York office. Zanuck entered the
filn1 industry as a gag ,nan and then screenwriter for
Wan1er Bros.' Ri11 Tiu Ti11 111ovies in the 1920s. As
he rose through the ranks, he becan1e closely involved
in all aspects of the filnunaking process at Wanter
Bros. in the early 1930s, helping that studio fom1ulate
its house style of fast-paced, urban, low-budget
realisn1, as evidenced in such fihns as / am a Fu,~irivc
_{ri,111 a Cl,ai11 Ga11.J!, TI,e P11blic E111•111y. and U11/e C,1cs,ir
(all 1931 ). as \\.·ell as the early Busby Berkeley n1usi-
cals. His succt"ssor, Hal Wallis. likewise provided key
supervision to the studio's n1ajor filn1s, such as 11,c
Advr11111rcs ef Robi11 Hood (1938). Wallis famously con-
tributed Huntphrey Bogart's final line to Claude
Rains in Casabla11c<1 (1942), "Louis, I think this is the
beginning of a beautiful friendship," helping to sl'al
the closure on a fihn \vhose ending had been in doubt
during production.
Zanuck's involventl'nt in supervising filn1n1aking at
T\'.entieth Century Fox ,11as as close a.\ a studio exec-
utive could cotnl' to auteur status without actually
doing so. He held extensive script conferences. often
dictating changes in plot and characterization and
inserting possible dialogue which he felt would n1ake
the film n1ore effective. H e insisted on quick-n1oving
action, and if need be, he would personally recut the
fihns. In fact, screenwriter-producer Nunnally Johnson
once:' called Zanuck "the greatest editor of movies, the
greatl'st editor of scripts" in Hollywood, and praised
his absolute insistence on getting a script set first .~'
Zanuck's personal involven1ent ensured that the studio
lollowed production policy that distinguished it
from the other filn1n1aking con1panies: a progran1 of
unabashed An1ericana, creating historical co111edies,
1nusicals and dran1as tinged with nostalgia - c,·,,,11·y
ls/1111d ( 1943). Alcxauder's Ra)ltimc Ba11d, and /11 ()Id
(:!1ica~o (both 1938). While Zanuck had n1ade a 1najor
contribution to the creation of Warner Bros.' early
I 930s gritty style and hard-hitting social proble1n and
gangster filn1s. at his own studio Zanuck only occa-
sionally ventured into controversial or topical filn1s
,vhich he nurtured while a production executive at
Warner Bros. in the early 1')30s - and these only
during and after World War 2 ,vith such fihns as
lt'i/s,111 (1944), Cc111/cn1n1's .-I.J!rt'c111c11r (I 947), Pi11ky
(194'>). and 1, :,, l-t't1y ()111 (1950). Much as Irving
Thalherg is celebratt·d for establishing MGM's high
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
186 Matthew Bernstein
gloss, high quality production values fro1n the 1920s
through the early 1930s, we can say that Zanuck"s
creativity informed an entire studio's output. Zanuck
fans can debate \Vith director John Ford"s admirers
how 1nuch Ford's Fox films owe to Zanuck, but
Zanuck is one of the few creative production execu-
tives in Hollywood's classical era about whom one
could even ask such a question. 14 Still, no one would
clai111 that Zanuck was an auteur.
In the 1930s, production executives (Zanuck to a
lintited extent) delegated authority to unit producers
,vho reported to and took advice fron1 the n1ajor
executive producer, if one still functioned centrally.
This ensured that a particular film could synthesize a
studio star, a favored genre, and a directorial sensibility
under the aegis of a studio's house style. At MGM,
college- educated Al Lewin (spoofed in the Jan1es
C:agney studio satire Boy Meets Girl (Wanter Bros.,
1938) supervised the high-class stage adaptations
(so1netin1es of Noel Coward plays, and starring Alfred
Lunt and Lynn Fontaine). Harry Rapf specialized in
Joan Crawford melodran1as. Eddie Mannix ,vas adept
at producing action fihns or filn1s set in exotic locales,
such as Trader H<Jm (1931) or Red D11st (1932). Hunt
Stron1berg supervised the 17,e T11i11 Man series. Greta
Garbo preferred working with director Clarence
Brown and cinen1atographer Willian1 Daniels, as well
as screenwriter and friend Salka Viertel; after Thalberg
retun1ed to MGM to work as a producer rather than
a production executive, she denianded that he produce
all her fihns. 25
It is these producers-associate producers-supervisors
who are the typical villains in Sarris's and Siegel's
classic auteurist scenario. They could carry directives
fron1 the production head to the screenwriting con-
ference or the set, and were n1ost likely, in the I 930s
and 1940s, to interfere with a project.
Yet producers could also 1nake i1nportant contribu-
tions to a filn1's realization. Walter Wanger was in the
late 1930s a prestigious, sen1i-independent producer
prone to letting filn1n1akers develop their projects
their ,vay. He produced Ford's S1agect1a<l1 (1939), but
he openly ad1nitted that all he did was provide financ-
ing and a distribution deal, and that the filn1 ,vas a
John Ford Production.z,, Yet, fifteen yc.>ars later. while
,vorking at low budget Allied Artists in the 1950s ati:t· r
serving a short prison term. W anger insisted on rl'al-
istit' detail in the depiction of prison conditions and
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routine during script develop1nent on Ri<Jt irr Cell
Bl,,ck 11 (1954). The film, which Don Siegel directed
in a con1pelling, straightforward, postwar realistic style.
1narked an innovation in the prison film genre on
n1any counts - the lack of a ro1nantic interest, a 1nulti-
faceted presentation of the issues and concerns which
inmates and prison adn1inistrators contended \\-ith,
and the absence of a happy ending. Wanger's involve-
ment here, and in the later J Wa111 t<J l.Jvc! (1958). were
atypical of his usual filmnuking 1nethods. Indeed, the
decision to spend the last forty n1inutes of I U1a,11 11,
l.Jve! watching the preparations for Barbara Grahan1's
(Susan Hayward) execution in the gas chan1ber -
without question the most powerful part of the fim1
and the core of its anti-capital punish1nent statement
- was 1nade by the director Robert Wise while doing
research on the fihn. So was the decision to use
Johnny Mandel's jazz 1nusic for the filn1's score. Neither
,vere part of Wanger's original conception, but he
encouraged Wise to pursue these ideas. Still, the
impact of Wanger's contributions to these two 1950s
filn1s is undeniable. Wise himself would later charac-
terize the fihn as Wanger's "baby. " 27 On a n1ore costly
scale. Wanger had fought to produce a big budget
version of Cleopatra for years. Yet when Joseph L.
Mankiewicz took over the troubled production of
Cleopatra in early 1961, Wanger was perfectly happy
to have Mankiewicz create "an entirely new, n1odern.
psychiatrically rooted concept of the filn1. " 1" Perhaps
at that point, he had no choice.
As such examples illustrate, understanding the
division of labor in Hollywood helps to clarify why
producers were - with the rarest of exceptions - not
auteurs in Hollywood's classical studio era. Whether
they were studio producers at the n1ajor studios or
worked within their own "independent production"
co1npanies, Hollywood's approach to filmmaking n1ili-
tated against it. The producer as auteur was clearly Jn
exception.
The Producer as Auteur Today
Beginning in the late I 960s. Hollywood recogitized
the value of the auteur as a 111arketing brand. While
the studios 111aintained tht' sa1ne division of labor as
in the classical period, the director, whose creativity
,vas constantly suppn:ssed, ,vas no\V given considerable
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 The Producer as Auteur 187

Figure 20.2 W,ltcr Wani:<·r wuh .:i1wrna101,-'Tlphcr Ru«dl Harlan on loc,1non at S,1_11 Qucnun during produc-
uon of Don S,q:cl', Riot III C,·11 Blo<k 11 (All,ed Aru,t<. 1'154). Produced by Walt,·r \V•1114,·r. Photo coun<''Y
\V,scons,n Center for Fil,n and Theater R <~•·•n·h

creative freedo1n as the classical era studio sy te1n
cn11nbled.
N o \v the auteur as such was dcfu1ed not by over-
con,ing barriers to personal expres~ion, but by the
naru rc of chat exprcs~ion - a sin1ation char obtains
even today. For exa111ple, the Coen Brothers· sense
of postrnodern irony, Martin Scorst•se•~ exploration of
desperate n1asculinity and violl'ncc, Wes A11derso11·s
insight inco the childlike i11nocence of beleaguered
111ale protago nists, and Chri~tophcr G ucsr·s in1provi~ed
rnoc kurnentaries - all are readily sold to fil111goers
and understood co be che creations of the di rector
o r directo r-producer 1ean1s. Directors arc no longer
under the heel of the producer. The directo r, in the
strictest sense, no longer needs a producer to n1ake
filn1s, though there arc ca,l's in ,vliich J dirl'Ctor n1.ight
have beneficed fron1 a producer's restraining hand (as
w ith Michael Cimino 's 1980 H1,a11r11 's Cat('). In fact.
today, the auteur director - such as Steven Sp1elbt·rg.
Clint East,vood. Martin Scorsese, and Warre n Beany
- often serves as his or her O\Vl1 producer o r
co-producer.
Indeed. the n1osc pro1ninent H oU~vood producers
,vork.ing today, ,vith rare exceptions, are p.trcnercd -
and collaborate - \Vith 1T1ajor d.irectors whose ,vork
they facilitate. Brian Graze r produces fi lrns apart fi-on1
director l"lon Ho ,vard, but his 111ost 111cn1orable and
successful films so fa r. such as Apollo I J ( 1995) and II
&·1111tif11/ ,\ li11d (20()1 ). ,vere directed by Ho,vard. T 0111
Cruise produces h.is fi.lrn!I ,vith PauJ.1 Wagner: and they
have just recencly agreed to n1n a fon1 1rr major
co1npa11 y. UA- MGM. Jan1l's Schan1us produces filn1s
for Jnd ,vith Ang Lee. Unlike Grazer or Wagner,
Scha,nus often scripts Ang Lee's fi ln1s, as in the case
of Tht· l<r Ston11 ( 1997) and Cr<u1d1i11.I! Ti,e,·r. Hiddc11
Dr11.ito11 (2000). This 111akes Schan1us a creative
produccr-~crccn,vriter, but it does not 111ake hin1 an
au teur.

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
188 Matthew Bernstein
The best known An1erican film producer today
\vho is not partnered with a n1ajor director or star is
Jerry Bruckheimer. One keynote of his output has
been the action-packed buddy/rival filn1s, from Beverly
Hills Cop (1984) through Top Gun (1986), Armageddo11
(1998) to Bad &ys (2001). Industry observers have
noted his diversification into historical dramas such
as Pearl Harbor (2001) and comic adventures such as
the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise since 2003 (not
to mention the television series CS/). Bruckhei1ner
has been celebrated for defending his own decisions
against studio objections, such as the casting ofJohnny
Depp in the first Pirates fihn . He is known for hiring
stylish directors such as Tony Scott and Michael
Bay to nuke his films visually arresting. Even if we
acknowledge that he is the most successful producer
working today, Jerry Bruckheirner cannot be consid-
ered an auteur in any sense of the word. But like the
Notes
I Andrew Sarris. "'Toward A Theory of Film History." in "11,r
Am.-,i(a,, Ciurma: Dire,1011 a"d Dirtaio111, / 929-1968 (New
York: E. P. Dutton City, 1968), pp. 31. 37.
2 lien He,:ht Interview. Columbia University Oral History
l'roj«·t, Popular Art.< Collection. lludcr Library. New York:
E. P. Dutton City, quoted in Matthew Ucm,tein, I.Ya/1,·r
~Vim~rr. Hollywood lnJr,w11d,111 (1994; rpt., M inneapulis:
University of Minnesota l'n-ss. 2000). p. 394.
., Sec Janet Staiger's discu.«ion in David Bordwell. Janet Staiger
and Kristin Thornpson. "1111· Cl,~<1icdl Hollyu.,<>d Ci11rma: J-'ilm
Srylr awl Afodr ,f l'r<•d1lflio11. / 917- 1960 (New York: Columbia
University l'n-ss, 1985). pp. HS-95, 3:?0-37.
4 Andrew Sarris poi111,·d out that D . W. Griflith, von Stroheim.
Bu,tcr Keaton. Josef von Stenibcrg, and Wdks were ill
vinims of the studio systent (p . 21).
5 Z Jnu,·k\ memo to Jean R<·noir •ppcars in Rntly lkhlm,·r. <'d . .
,\,frmo from D,,rryl I'. Z.mu, k : Tirr Go/,/,11 Yrars at Tu,·mirtl,
C,·11111,)' /',,.- (N,·w York: Grove Press. 1'19.,). pp. 51. 54.
6 Joel E. Siegel. Val u11•1,•11: ·17,, R,·ality o( Trm•r (New York:
Viking Pn,s,. 1973). pp. 2 1- 3.
. ,,,
7 Sarr1>. p. - ~-
X Sn: Mark Cotra Vaz. LJ1.,i11.~ L),u~\!t·rciusly: '11,r Atll't'tll11tr$ ,f
Al,·n.in C. C'c1c11x·,. Crruwr t!{ " Ki11.l.! K,mJ( ' (Nt·w York: Vill.1rd.
~(~J5). for .111 arrount of C<>op,•r's ca1<·cr.
9 Uchlrut.·r. p. xv.
Ill St.·c.· D.1vid Abn Vc.•rtn."l'S, Sd:nitl:'.( I 'i,fou: (;,mf ll'ffh 1/1(' u:;,,d
,m,I /·foll)'H'1>(,,/ Fil11un,,t•it1,1! (Au~tin: Univt.·~iry of ·rc.•xas (>re:-., .
J<J9i) , t(,r ,1 ,11~t.1111cJ d1s..:u".;ion of St.·lznirk '), 1nultit:h·.,·tcd
work on tht.· tilm .
11 1"hom.1, Srh.uz, ·n,,. (;cuiu.• •ftlu· .'\y.H,'111.' H,,l/ywo,1d 1.:;1,,,,,,,,Lo;,~~
i11 11,,· S111di,1 /:r,r ( l'IKK: rpr. , N<·w York: I knry Hoh. l'l'H,l ,
Digitized by Google
most accomplished of his predecessors in the classic:il
era, he, and other producers, can help to facilitate the
contemporary auteurs' work. Perhaps the n1ost fruitful
way to think about producers and their relation to
creative work is as a brand na1ne, n1uch as today\
auteur-directors are marketed to the n1oviegoing
public. The Bruckheimer brand denotes the action
filn1 or action-packed adventure, typically featuring
two heroes who work together or compete against
each other. This generalization holds even as Bruck-
heimer now produces other kinds of fi.ln1s. The
producer as brand narne - rather than the creative
artist who generates an admirable body of filn1s -
could apply equal.ly as well to the outstanding classical
studio era producers like Selznick or Goldwyn, Disney
or Wanger. This places producers at son1e remove
from the kind of artistic creativity the auteur concept
was n1eant to identify. But that is as it should be.
p. 130. For additional accounts <>fSclznirk \ <">r<"<"r. S<"<" ll<"hlma.
Venr.-e<, and David Thomson. S/111u.,1a11: 11,r 1-!fi- ,?f D,w,d <J.
Sd;:11ick (New Yori<: Knopf. l l/ 112).
12 See Paul Kerr, .. Out of What Past' Notes on the B Fihn Noir:·
in Paul Kerr, ed., Th,· Hollyu'IJ<>d Film /ndu;rry (London: 13FI,
l'lkft), pp. 220-44. A thorou~h arcount of Lewton's ,reanv.-
working mt:thodlii and contribution to his t'ilnu .ippt·Jn. in
Siegel.
IJ Sicgd. pp. 2.4.
1~ Siegd. p. 23.
15 I am refrrring of cour<c 10 the work of l'et,·r Wollt>n Jnd th<
inrroduction of 2utcur-stnu:rur.ilis1n in his S('lnS and .\fe,m11{~-~
in 1/ir Ci11rma (Bloomi111-,-ron: Indiana University l'n-,~. I•17J).
and the various d~vdopn1cnts Jue.I retinctnent:s 111 tht' :auteur
theory sinn· then .
16 R oh,·n Carringcr, ·17., 1H.iki11.~ ,f --Ciri :c11 1':,1111·.. (U,·rkd<·,·:
Univ,•rsil)' of C:olifi>miJ 1'1<·«. 1<185; « ·vised <"dn .. l '1'16). p. x.
17 Carrin~<·r. p. 1J4.
I K C:imngcr, p . •l
19 St't' Staigl·r's di!>i.·ussion ot' dtl' v.1rious ntodt·s of proJuL' tion 111
H ully wnnd 111 11w Cl,um· H,,1/yu,>oJ C:i11.-m.i. pp. 115-<JS.
32U-J7.
20 Tho1na..-.. Sdurz. ·17,,, ( rl·11ius ,?f 11,,· Sysr,·m. p. 8.
21 Sdi,ti. p. 12.
2:! Sdl,IIZ, p. " ·
2.\ Nun,lly Johnson. CulurnbiJ Uni,•crsity l)ral Hi,tory Projcn :
c..1uott~d 111 Ul·n1sh.·111. It ~1l1t·r u ·du,c('r, f/cll/)'ln:1t•J /11,frprml,·ut.
p. YH,.
2-t ThL· t'.1SL' fr,r Z .mLKk :H, .nttl'llr production t'Xl'l'lltivt~ l'i nude:·
in (;l·or~c..· Cu,r1.•11's 1i1•,•m ,'"1I, <.'nttury'f. Ft'.\'.' l),1nyl P . Z.mu(k
.1111/ ,,,,. C:11/111,,· o( lf,•lly11,-•d iN<·W York: U,si,: Book.<. ( \/IJ,).
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UNI\/ERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 The Producer as Auteur 189

For • ,ampling of Zanuck', corr<·sponJ<·n, e. >«' Uehlmer's anJ I l-1 '11111 '" u ..,.! ,,.,. Uen1St<·in. pp. 2111 - .\01. 317-J<I. lnter-
t.·Jitl·J ~dt..•ction in .\J,,m,l f,,.,,, l),J")'I f-'. Zcuufc"k. Thc:r<.· is ..1lso t:Stingly. Sarris. pp. 311-1. su~e>1cJ that producer,; were more
J\,\d Gussow·, I>.•11·1 S,,y \',•s t :111il I Fi11i.1/, ·1;,11.,;,,_
~: A Bi,>;1!r,1pl1y likdy to inte rfere with a storyline rh:m a visual <rylc. so thJI
,f {),1rryl I-'. i',,11111rk ( 1971 ; rpt. N <w York: Pod,et Uooks. st:n·l·n,vrite~ wt·n· "mon..- victin1ized .. dun din·cton;., but the.·
1983). produn·r< w,·n· 1he bJd !;\\IVS. Uut thi< was also. or pcrh:ips
25 Schatz. pp. 159- 75. 1>rimarih•. a function of the producer's role in S<:rip1
21, ()n Wanger and .\1,,~r,,,,u/1, see Bcni<tdn. pp. 1-11,-~o. dcvdopment.
27 For n1or~ on W.1n~cr's cm1tribuuon~ to Ric1t in C'r'il 8/1,.·J..· I I 2ll W Jngcr quo1,·tl in Uen1stein . p. 359.

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 21
Authorship, Design,
and Execution
Bruce Kawin

Bruce Kawin taught literature and film in the Department of English at the University of Colo-
rado at Boulder. The author of Telling It Again and Again: Repetition in Literature and Film,
Faulkner and Film and Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film, his work has
focused on considering the differences of narration in the two forms. This discussion of auteur-
ism is from the section of Kawin's book How Movies Work (1987) entitled "The Film Artist and
the Movie Business." The section is comprised of chapters devoted to the different phases of
the production process, beginning with a chapter addressing questions of authorship, from
which this reading is taken. Kawin echoes earlier authors who have argued that auteurism
neglects the collaborative nature of the filmmaking process, but in addition to discussing
important examples of collaboration in cinema Kawin introduces the Idea of collaboration as
a system of human interaction.

Applauding the Conductor There art· at lelst three art1snc enttttes involved
here: the co1nposer, the conductor, and the orchestra.
In tihn tenns the contposer is often the writer, the
l111agine that you are at ;t concert perfonnance of conductor is often the director. and the orchestra is a
Mozart's Fortieth Syntphony. T he last 111oven1ent has vast array of professionals. fron1 actors to lab techni-
just ended, and the audience is applauding the con- cians. The parallel to the concert hall is the sound
ductor. Not only did the conductor not \vrite the stage or location \Vhere the n1ovie is shot and the
ntusic. he o r she has not even played an instrument. theater \vhere it is exhibited. Behind both operations
Yet it is the conductor whose interpretation of the is a sophisticated financial network that ntust ren1ain
,naterial is being praised. Next the conductor shakes solvent if further concerts or filn1s are to be presented.
hands \vith the concertn1aster, and another round of As a link between the producers and the paying audi-
applause ensues. Although the concertn1aster's violin ence, advertisers ha ve let the public know when and
\vas not featured in an extensive solo, th is violinist where the:- perfon11ancc will take place, and they havc:-
is a represe::ntative of the entire orchestra, and no,v <'lltphasized thOS<' artists \vhose creative accon1plish-
the audience is re\varding th<·n1 for having played 1nents arc:- \\Tll kno\vn and ,vhosc:- pc:-r.;onal style:-~ are
\Vl·ll. likelv. to attral't ;111 enthusiastic cro\vd.

Hnu:c.· K;1w1n, '?rntfh)r-lur. n c:.;1~11 .md E:-.1.·turnm:· N' · ~''1 ·'"' H1 11' .\J,,1·u • 11 :,,-J_. I rht· l1111q:1'1l\' \\fC.,hr~,rm.1 Pr ..·,, ,.,.,~>- Cc., pyn!,!hf \" J\r.J1 bv Thc-
fhllll 1

ll q.:..·m, ,,t' T lw Um\'c.•~tty or <.:.,ht~•m 1.1 lt.l·rnnrn l h~ pc.·m11l,.11m t1f T lw C, 1p~ n~ln C l,·.1r:mu.· ( \ ·11 1,·r. nu 1,1.·lult' o r ·1 ht.· l h un.·r-.11y o f C .1lifom1:1 l'n~c..

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Authorship, Design, and Execution
Mozart's Fortieth Sy111phony existed as a co111plete
textual entity when Mozart finished co111posing it.
Any perfomtance of that co1nposition is itself an artis-
tic event with its own unity and integrity, yet it is still
a performance of an auto1101nous text. In a ftl111 the
situation is 111arkedly different, because the perfor-
n1ance is the text.
Dashiell Hamrnett wrote 11,e ;\,[alt<"se Falco11, and
the novel is still available in its original fom1 for
anyone who chooses to read it. It becante the basis of
three filnts: Roy Del Ruth's 11,e />vfa/tesc Falco11 (1931),
Williant Dieterle's Sata11 i'vfet a Lidy (1936), and John
Huston's 111e Maltese Falc,,11 (1941). All four of these
arc autonontous texts. distinct works of art. In the
Huston version, Sant Spade is inseparable from the
\Vay Hu111phrey Bogart incan1ated and enacted hin1.
even if we can sort out the differences between Spade
and Bogart when we step back fron1 the film. Huston
\Vrote the screenplay and directed the n1ovic. so that
the final product becante his as much as H antn1ett' s.
Y ct Huston did not "play an instrun1ent."
The resolution to this quandary is to realize that
the instrument that a conductor plays is, in fact, the
orchestra. The orchestra 111en1bers depend on the con-
ductor to keep tin1e and to let thent know when and
\Vith what emphasis to play. The conductor organizes
the perfonnance, and it is therefore up to her or hint
how the composition will be realized. As the designer
of an independent work, the director n1ay have clairns
to authorship - but such clain1s are not at all auto-
111atic, and film authorship is rarely sole.
The Auteur Theory
Sole authorship is a ntatter of conceiving, designing,
executing, and owning a work. Harnrnett planned 71,c
,\,faltese Falcon, wrote it, and had the sole right to sell
it to a publisher. In the n1ajority of filnts, design, real-
iz.ition. and ownership are necessarily split a,nong
ntany people and con1panies. and "authorship ..
becomes problen1atic.
Recall the 111on1ent when Queen Christina ren1oves
her crown. The physical 111ove111ent was executed by
Greta Garbo. The position of the ca111era, \Vith its
background view of a crown that cannot be re111oved,
vvas chosen by the director, I,ouben Man1ou)ian, and
by the cine111ato1-,=pher, Williarn Daniels. The action
Digitized by Google
191
\Vas designed in the first place by a tea111 of screen-
\vriters, based loosely on a historical event. The editor
juxtaposed that shot with others that would enhanCl'
its intpact. And the director, of course, coached Garbo
on how to act the scene. But could Manioulian have
told Garbo every nuance of that gesture? Who took
off that crown? Who should get credit for the brilliant,
slow tenderness of (;arbo 's ntotions and the exquisite
co111plexity of her face , in that light, at that n10111ent'
Who is the author of the total effect, of this scene. of
this rnovie?
In this exa111ple there is no sole author. But there
n1ay have been a conductor - an anist with ultintatt·
responsibility for approving the work of others - and
it n1ay well have been Mantoulian. The director is
usually involved - or at least has a say - in all the
rnajor creative decisions fron1 develop111ent through
post-production, notably script approval. casting, pro-
duction and costunte design, the details of perfonnance.
and editing. That puts hint or her in a position to
unify the project and coach the tean1. But in the
absence of reliable inforntation about who did what
while a picture was being rnade, there is little or no
justification for assuming that the director has, in f.1ct.
perfonned this unifying function , let alone originated
the thentes. tropes, and gestures that have proved n1ost
distinctive and valuable in the finished work. It is dif-
ficult to 111ake sense of the whole body of cinerna. or
even of any individual n1ovie, until so111e critical
111ethod, infornted by a careful understanding of real
filnm1aking practices. 111akes it possible to give credit
where credit is due. Critical interpretations, especially
of creative intentions and decisions, can be n1ore reli-
able and sophisticated ,vhen one knows who thl'
author is; otherwise, intentions are ascribed to a gen-
eralized vacuurn.
First proposed by Fran~ois Truflaut in the I 9SOs
and further developed by Andrew Sarris in the 1960~.
the auteur theory set out to provide just such a critical
tool. It begins by acknowledging (or perhaps si,nply
gives lip service to the idea) that filnt is a collaborativt·
art, then goes on to argue that when a fihn reveals a
the111atic and stylistic coherence, that coherence can
usually be attributed to the guiding vision of a single
artist who \Vas expressing his or her personal convic-
tions and tastes. In order to have such power. the artist
1nust alrnost invariably havt· been the director. though
it is even better if the dirl'Ctor has also \Vritten the
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 -

192 Bruce Kawin

I,
I/,;, I I
•

Figure 21. I Grera Garbo w~ring her crown in R.oub..n M:miouhan's Q11er11 Cl,ris1i1111
(MGM, 1933). Produced by \V,Jcer Wanger

screenplay. To distinguish this artist &0111 a sole auth or.
he or she is referred to as an "auteur"' (French for
"author, .. but used in English to connote this n1ore
ambiguous position of conrrol).
The problen1 with the auteur theory is t hat it n1ay
allow the critic to ignore creative collaboration and
leap straight to the di rector. The special merit of the
auteur theory is that it is rnpa/1/e of ack110\~1ledging the
collaborative structure of the cinen1atic enterprise ,111d
the evidence of patten1s of coherence that have the
integrity of authorship. These n1ay be stylistic patterns.
characteristic approaches to recu rring subject 111atter,
or attitudes and strategies that have developed in the
cour.;e of a career. H itchcock's \VOrk. for exa,nple, is
characterized by recurring content - notably the
probleniaric rel,1rions bet\vccn guilt and innocence -
and a visual style that no one has been able to in1itate
\Vith authority. This observation does not u11ply that
an artist always says the sarne thing in the san1e \Vay;
rather. it allO\VS for dcvelopn1en t and maturation

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 Authorship, Design, and Execution
,vithin a stn1ctun: ,vhose consistency is that of the
artist.
In the role of director, then, which touches nearly
every aspect of the filmn1ak.ing process and 1nay let
an artist dotninate a work without actually taking
center stage, the auteurists found a site for these pat-
terns of coherence. It is quite plain to the111 that
Renoir fihns are Renoir filtns, that von Steinberg
filn1s could not have been n1ade by Lu1net, and that
Welles was the auteur of Citizen Ka11e. This n1akes it
sin1ple to talk about a 111ovie as a direct expression of
one person's creati ve intentions. But auteurisn1 has
often been applied carelessly. It is by no n1eans true
that every fihn has an auteur. There are auteurs who
are not directors, and directors who are not auteurs.
Many auteurists have not taken the trouble to check
these n1atters out, nor have they even bci,'1.ln to applaud
the concenn1aster.
Auteuris111 has had critical i111plications that arc
far-reaching and son1etimes off-target. It appears, for
one thing, to havt: been the on.ly acade1nic debate ever
to affect the filn1 industry. In its later critical n1anifes-
tations it has becon1e a cult of personal style, so that
a director is considered interesting - or an author at
all - only when he or she has exhibited a consistt:nt
sryle and a n1atrix of recurring interests. Directors in
whose work such pattt:n1s cannot be discerned have
often been dis1nissed bv' critics as "hacks." Tht: industrv,
itst'lf has becon1e "dirt'ctor-conscious," while n1any
non- directors have beco1ne auti-auteurists. Under the
influence of auteurisn1, n1any fledgling fihn artist~ have
gathered that directing is the only in1ponant job and
that they have to make their rnark. But there is n1ort:
to good directing than self-expression, and there are
distinctly crt:ative aspects to other filn1 jobs. The public
view now appears to be sin1ply that filn1s are n1ade
and signed by directors.
Critically. the conventional test of an auteur is that
a pattern en1crges when all of his or her pictures arc
viewed together or are considt!rt:d in relation to each
other. But the real value of autcurisn1 - onCl" it is
extended beyond directors and a\ it 111ay be critically
applied to a singlt' picture - is that it oflt·rs a reason-
able explanation fi)r a fact about cinc1na: th;H an often
personal coherenct: c,111 en1erg:l· fi-0111 a collaborJtive
project.
Even when a tihn does have an auteur - a Berg1nan
-
o r a Hitchcock. frir exa111ple - till' critical nH.' thodol-
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193
ogy is son1etin1es applied irresponsibly. Many auteurists
want to find a single author and let it go at that.
Although tht:y n1ay understand that actress Bibi
Andersson and cine1natographer Sven Nykvist are
independent bt:ings. they prefer to analyze every i111age
and instant of P1·rso11a as if it proceeded directly fron1
lngrnar Bergrnan's consciousness. Bergman hinJSelf has
always been generous in acknowledging the contribu -
tions of the group he ha.s worked with and ,vould
never endorse such a critical position.
Collaborative Decision-Making
Not every filn1 has a single director, let alone a singlt_..
guiding consciousness. Doth Sun.Icy Donen and Gene
Kelly directed Si11~i11' in tire Rain, and Arthur Fret'd
produced it. Director Vittorio de Sica and writer Cesare
Zavattini were lifelong collaborators, fron1 Sl111£'s/1i11e
(1946) and The Birydr Thit_f through A Brief Vacati!111
( 1973). Resnais directed Marienbad, Alain Robbt·-
Grillet wrote it, and tht: two n1en disagreed about what
happens in the story. The finished filn1 reflects this
authorial a111bivalence and presents the lovers as having
n1et before (llesnais's interpretation) and as never
having 111et before (Robbe-Grillet's interpretation).
This doublt:ness is responsible for 1nuch of 1Warie11/,ad's
characteristic tone and style, and it would not be ade-
quate to identify it si111ply as Resnais's 111ovie. It has as
111any significant connections with Robbe-Grillet's
novels as it has with llesnais's other 111ovies.
A.It hough one can identify 111ost of Spielberg's
111ovies as his, the Indiana Jones filrns are clearly the
result of his collaboration with Lucas. As their pro-
ducer, Lucas is tht' auteur of the Star Wars serit:s,
and his control of those pictures was so personal and
exacting that TIre E111pirc Strike.< &1ck ( 1980)
and R£"t11n1 1~( tire Jc·di ( 1983), which he did not direct.
are nearly indistinguishable fro111 Star l-i1ars. which he
did direct. Yct the Indiana Jont:s filn1s art' not the san1e
as the St,ir l·Far.< fihns. and Raiders in particular share~
111any i111portant characteristics with both Spielberg's
J ,111•.< (1975) and Lucas·s A111ericc111 (;ra_tfiti (1973). ()nee
you kno,v the pictures, all of tht:se distinctions arc
obvious, yet a conventional auteurist would approach
R,,idcr., a~ a Spielberg fil111 and n1ight dis111iss Jedi fro111
Sl'rious consideration if it did not bear tht: sta111p of
llichard Marquand\ directorial pt'rsonality. h is only
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
194
Figure 2 1.2 Prrso11a (Svcn,k Filmi11dustri, 1966), a personal film written, pro<luc,·d. , nd d irected b)' l11g111ar
B,·ri;m.m 1h21 noncthdcss reveal, the comTibuuons of the actrc-,c, (llibi Andcr<,on and Liv Ul11 11a11) and cincn1a-
tObT.1Phcr (Sv,·n N )'kv11t)
recentl y that "vriters. producers. and actors have begun
to be considered possible autcurs. even though it
sho uld long have been obvious that there is such a
th ing as a Horton Foote filn1, a Walt Disney filn1. and
a Marx Brothers fil1n. But even to settle o n such site~
of coherence can be to sidestep the realities of devel-
op111ent and produ ction.
Lee us take up son1e exa1nples of creative collabora-
tion. both fruitful and unfom1nace. In 1943 di rector
H enry H athaway ,vas develo ping a story idea about
the Unknown Soldier. He kept evaluating suggestio ns
fron1 his colleagues and rejecting then,. Finally one
, vriccr said, in si rnplc exasperation, "You ·u nt·ver b<'
satisfied until the Unkno\.vn Soldier is J esus C hrist! "
H atha,vay replied, " Hey, that's a good ide,t!" This
,vas the key j uxt:iposition for which Hacha,vay had
unkno,vingly been searchin g. and his colleague's quip
precipitated the insight. 1-lacha,vay and ,vriccr Willian1
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Bruce Kawin
Bacher t hen dre,v up a ne\v sto ry idea, and Willian1
Faulkner ,vas assigned co develop ic into a treatrnent
(an extended story outline fro111 ,vhich a screenplay
can be fi1rther developed) . Faulkner wam1ed up to
the idea and tun1t'd in a 51 - page trcam1ent, hue me
picn1re (to have been entitled t,ll/10?) was never n1ade.
Faulkner ,vent o n to expand the idea into a novel
called A Ft1ble ( 195-t), and he gJve credi t co H ama,vay
and B:icher on the dedi cation page.
Eugene Lo urie worked as the art director on Jean
R.enoir's Gra11d lllusio11 (1937). When he and Renoir
w,·re scouting locati ons for that filn1, d1ey decided to
use chc 111o u11tai11 castle of Haut- Koenigsburg. which
had been built by Kaiser Wilheln1. Lourie, according
to h is o~vn account in A 1111'ria111 Fili11 (J an. / Fcb. I 985),
"noticed a sn1all po t of geran iun1s on the windo,vsill
of th e janJtor's lodhring. I ,vas in1pressed by this linle
speck of color amid the gray sco ne surro undings. I
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IJNWERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Authorship, Design, and Execution 195

Figure 21..l The ger:11u 11111 111ct.1phor in Grtmd //111sio11 ( 1936) w:,;, the result of collaboratton between d irecto r
J,·an Rcnoir ,1nd art director Eug,·nc Louri~. Produced by Alben 1'111kov1tch Jnd Fr.ink Rollmer

asked jt'an if he ,vould no t object to n1y placi ng a
ge ranj um in Scrohein,•~ roon1. 'By al l means. put ir
there,· he said, ' I could use it.· T h is lirrle Ao,vcr becan1e
a h ighly poetic syn1bol. Strohei1n 's cutting this Ao ,ver
became the en1o tional final couch during the sce ne
showing the death of the Fresnay character.'' It is clear
&0111 chis exa111ple chat the arc directo r did 110 c gee the
en tire idea, did not anticipate ho,v Ilenoir would
ulti111ately use the geraruun1 in Gra11d ll/11sio11. but it is
also clear chat there ,vo uld have been no gera niun, in
the filn1 had Lourie not noticed o ne o n loca tion and
inn1ired that it s0111ehow belonged in the design of
tht· pic ture. Alth ough Rt'no ir justifiably rook credit as
th e principal author of Grand Jl/usio11. he also referred
co Lou rie as hi~ "accon,plice.''
Sometirnes, ho ,vcver, too 111any cook.s can in fact
sp o il the broth. H itch cock's S11spicio11 ( 1941) "vas based
on a b rill iant n1 ystery novel by Francis lies. B({ore 1/,1·
Fact. The novel is about a ,von1an ,vho ruscovers that
she has married a 111urderer. Wben sbe realizes that he
intends co kill her, too. she lets hirn do it. The scene
in v, hich the husband, J ohnn y, brings his , vife a glass
of poisoned ntllk and realizes that she kno,vs what he
is doing. yet acqu iesces co her dcrnand - ,;Give it 111e,
J ohnn y" - is dt·eply affecting. In ,vhat seemed co be
perfect casring decisio ns, Cary Grant and Joan
Fo ntaine ,vere signed to play the leads. But then the
f~K() sn1di o heam decided that no sta r of Grant's
irnpo rcan ce could be cast in the role of a 111urderer. It
becarne necessary to devise an incredible ending in
,vhich the ,vife is revealed as ha ving nusu nderscood
her husband 's good intentions. This happil y-cver-aftc·r
resolution is a classic exantpl e of " th e H o lly,vood
tre:it111en r." and the equivocal cen11s in ,vhich it n1ore-
or-less succeeds have nothi ng to do ,vit11 the novel.
To see ho,v input fron1 various sources ca n affect
a finished product , even one o f classic status. consider
the production history of 7 7ie C11bi11e1 of Dr Ct1l(i!11ri

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
196 Bruce Kawin
(a story vividly recounted by Siegfried Kracauer in his
study Fron, Cal((!ari I!> Hitler). The writers. Carl Mayer
and Hans Janowitz, developed a story about an insane
doctor (Caligari) who forces a somnan1bulist (Cesare)
to conm1it a series of n1urders. When the doctor is
eventually exposed by the vigilant hero and conm1it-
ted to his own asylu111, what Janowitz and Mayer
hoped to show was that insane authority can be chal-
lenged and even overthrown, that its insanity can be
revealed. They saw Caligari - whon1 each of the1n
drew fron1 a particularly threatening figure in his own
past - as a sy1nbol of the crinunally deranged, nulita-
ristic, authoritarian systen1 and Cesare as a youth
tun1ed into a killing ,nachine. like a conscripted
soldier.
Producer Erich Pon1n1er bought the script and
detennined to n1ake, if not an avant-garde feature,
then at least an arty n1ovie capable of attracting inter-
national attention. He hired Fritz Lang to direct.
Lang suggested that fran1ing sequences be added:
one, at the start of the filn1, to establish that the story
(rhat is, Jano\virz and Mayer's script) is being narrated
by the central character (Franz or Francis), and one,
at the end of the filn1, to reveal that Francis is insane.
In the script and in the body of the 111ovie, Francis is
a friend of one of Cesare's victims and is the one who
tracks Caligari to his lair, but in the closing scenes he
is shown to be an in111ate of the asylun1 run by the
benevolent and insightful doctor whon1. in his delu-
sio n, he calls Caligari. Perhaps Lang conceived this
purely as a dran1aric twist, and perhaps Pommer appre-
ciated its shov; business value. bur the fact is that their
adding the closing fra1ne drastically altered the n1eaning
of the story and sent the writers into a rage. What the
revised version preached was subn1ission and self-
doubr. Dortor Calib,ari kno\vs what is good for you .
Lang did not, ho\vever, direct rhe picture; ht• was
reassigned to Spiders (1919). Ponnner hired R.obt:rt
Wiene, who did direct it. Wiene agreed ,virh Lang
about the value of the fran1ing sequences and the
revers.ii of the story's original intc::ntions. So 110\V it
,vas set: rather than a fihn of rebellion. c:ali(!,iri
•
\vas to
he a filn1 of repression, of the ti_.ar and the denial (a nd.
in fact, the rcsrripti11J) of rebellion.
It \\'as t·itht:r Pon1n1er or Janov,itz \vho first con-
ceived of (:af(l!•"i as a fil111 \Vith stylized, paintl'd st·ts.
J.1no,vitz suggt:stt·d that the lk·siµnl'r bt· Alfred Kubin.
hut the ac tual choice of dcsiµncr \Vas n1ade by Wicne,
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and he chose Hennann Wann. It was Wann ,vho
,vrote that "Fihns must be drawings brought to lite,"
and he and Walter Rohrig and Walter Rei1nann, all of
who111 were Expressionist artists, created the sets and
the costu1nes. Without Porruner's approval, however,
there is no ,vay that Caligari would have becon1e an
Expressionist filn1, and it n1akes relatively linle differ-
ence whether Janowitz or Wiene suggested it to him.
Under Ponuner's guidance, or as a result of the en1erg-
ing lob,ic of the revisions, the Expressionist style
becan1e proble1natic in the san1e terms as the fran1ing
sequences, and Caligan· became neither a fihn of rebel-
lion nor a filn1 of repression but a paradox and a
"drean1 play." As it stands. it n1ight well be con1pared
to a drean1 "vhose tem1s and whose repressed, eruptive
1neanings have been changed and distorted.
Expressionist distortion was not inconsistent ,,,ith
the meaning and dran1atic project of the ori1,.,i11al
script, and Janowitz clearly had no objection to it. In
the context of the script alone, the Expressionist dis-
tortions ,vould have portrayed and critiqued the state
of the culture. or of the Gennan "soul" if you will.
shortly after World War I. They would have enhanced
the dran,atization of the n1adness of the world that
n1ust answer to insane tyranny.
But with the fran1ing sequences added, of course.
all these distortions signify is that Francis is crazy. That
i111plies that the world is fine. The action of the closing
fra1ne irnplies that it is not the authority figure bur
the insightful postron1antic rebel who is psychologi-
cally disturbed. So far, then, the official n1essage of
Calij/ari is ahnost exactly the opposite of what the
,vriters intended it to be, as the result of suggestions
111ade by Lang and Wiene and approved by Pomn1t'r.
Creative distortion has become delusion.
Then Wiene rnade a mistake - or perhaps, in this
context, a Freudian slip. He failed to instruct the
designers to restore 11or111al sets, n1akeup, and costun1cs
tor the closing fran1e. (The opening frarne is relatively
neutral.) If the world \\'hen it is not being narrated
by Francis looks n1uch the san1e as when it is, then
all of the Expre~sionisr distortions cannot sin1ply be
,vritten otr as expressions of the narrator's n1adness.
The Expressio11i~n1 of the final scenes leaks over fro111
rhe n1ain srory. erupts out of ir, and is ultin1ately both
suhvt·rsive and paradoxical. A hint of what nught be
called tht· \Vriter's perspt'crive survives, then, and not
onlv the closing fran1e hut .1l~o the entire fihn appt·Jrs
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 Authorship, Design, and Execution
divided against itself Thanks to all of these internal
contradictions (the in1possible closing landscape;
the different interpretations of the story held by the
writers, Lang and Wiene, and Pon1n1er; the praise of
confonnity and submission and the in1pulse to revolt
etc.), Cal(~ari actually d()es portray the a1nbivalence of
Gennany between the wars, tom between the desire
to discover and subntit to an authoritarian father
figure and the in1pulse to revolt; it says both things at
once. CaliJ!ari also plays out perfectly the often con-
tradictory n1essage systents of drean1ing, and that is
one of the reasons, a1nong many, that it becan1e the
paradigm of the horror fihn rather than a unique
political n1elodran1a.
None of its 1nakers foresaw ho\v CaliJ!ari would
cum out, and at the very least, it had several authors.
The true, or ur-CaliJ!ari was conceived by Janowicz
and Mayer. Wiene directed the fihn (often very poorly).
selected Wann and approved tht" tenns of the design,
and is usually crt"dited as the filn1 ·s auteur. But if
anyone had overall creative approval at every stage of
production, it was Po1nmer, the producer. And the
addition of the fran1ing sequences, which was as
in1portant a developn1ent as the decision to use
Expressionist sets, was Lang's idea. We are not even
speaking here of the definitive, brilliant contributions
1nade by the actors who played Caligari (Werner
Krauss) and Cesare (Conrad Veidt), who were case. as
it happens, by Ponuner.
Although it 1nay seern r-.1ther tangled, the produc-
tion history of CaliJ!ari is just as representative as the
story of the geraniun1 in Gra11d /1/usi()n. Well after the
\vriter surrenders the script, people are always getting
bright ideas, and son1eti1nes the ideas actually enhance
\vhat the writer has envisioned. Even a Renoir needs
help, and even a script as coherent as that for Cal(~ari
n1ay be worked over by 1nany people who "in1prove"
it to the point of incoherence. As con1plcx as it is to
establish how a collaborative venture 1nay be E,ruided,
and to what ends, it is a worthwhile critical effort.
And to be con1prehensive. that c.-fTort n1ust take into
account the business context within \vhich feature
filn1s are made.
Most of the artS, at son1e point, couch the \vorld
of com1nerce. If you \Vant co \vrite a novel for your
own amusen1ent and satisf.1ction. that is up to you.
13ut if you want so111eone to publish it, you \viii have:
to deal \Vith busine~~ people :111d listen to rnany sug-
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197
gestions for in1proving the work or n1aking it n1ore
1narketable. In the case of a feature fihn, where you
will have to convince son1eone to put up at least a
n1illion dollars before you can even begin to shoot
the picture, the business con1ponent is extre1nely
significant.
This is a n1atter of aesthetics as well as of sheer
power. In the first place, the ideas contributed by
agents, story editors, producers, and marketing special-
ists can tum out to be valuable. In the second place,
the filn1maker is answerable to an unpleasant reality:
fihnn1aking is one of the only arts that an accon1-
plished artist can be kicked out of Without the trust
of the ~tudios and banks, the artist n1ay simply not be
allowed to work. That is what happened to Griffith,
Strohein1, and Welles: they were denied the expensive
tools they needed to realize their designs. Even a solo
filnm1aker like Brakhage n1ust scrape together the
money to rnake his filn1s, To ignore this practical
context is to introduce the danger of reading a rnovie
in conrplctely aesthetic tenns and losing sight of the
cornplexities of design and execution - of reading
S11spicio11, for exan1ple, as if Hitchcock had had his
O\Vn reasons for changing the story, or Cal(11ari as
Wiene 's n1asterpiece.
Collaboration as a System
Many people n1ake creative decisions in the course of
a filnunaking project, and several people - at various
levels of authority - approve or reject the1n. The
student and the critic n1ust, then, resolve two appar-
ently contradictory facts: (1) that film1naking is a
collaboration, and (2) that son1e filn1s do reveal the
workings of a particular stylistic imagination, one th.it
tends to recur in other fihns rnadc by the sa111e
artist(s).
The auteurists have resolved these contradictions
by arguing that the director i111poses his or her vision
on the entire crew, bucks tht' systen1, and heroically
conveys a personal staternent through the oppressive
1nechanis1n of a dense industry. That 1night be thought
of as the n1odel of the conductor and the orchcstra.
except that the conductor is also being given credit for
the equivalent of writing and playing the n1usic. Thc:rt·
is soniething plainly \vrong about giving a dirt·ctor
crcdit for the insights and the stn11.:tural in1a1,rinatio11 of
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198 Bruce Kawin
a writer, especially if the director has worked fron1 a
con1pleted script. And even if one views the essence of
ci nema as lying in the treatment and the n1ounring
of the n1aterial - the discourse rather than the story -
all that is done by still other professionals who have
their own special interests and skills.
Nevertheless, it is si,nply true that there are styles
associated ,vith certain individual filn1n1akers. There is
a "Hitchcock can1era" whether or not the cinen1atog-
rapher was Robert Burks. There is a "Toland camera"
whether the director was Ford, Wyler, or Welles.
There are worlds that can accurately be described as
Chaplin's or Keaton 's or Lloyd's.
A partial explanation is that a director (and by the
sarne token, a producer) is often given his or her choice
of projects. Out of the many available scripts in devel-
opment at a studio, or St'nt to the director by agents,
the one that the director picks - probably because he
or she finds it interesting - is often the one that gets
produced. A recognized director also selects his or
her rnajor collaborators, knowing their previous work.
Part of the "Huston" flavor of a John Huston fihn can
be explained by Huston's having selected only those
properties that struck hin1 as "his kind of 111aterial,'"
whereas the ones he rejected ,night wait around to be
picked up by other fihnn1akers who were interested in
other things. By the san1e logic, the look of the in1age
can be read as the one that he hired that particular
cinen1atographer to achieve. In these tern1s, one can
discover Huston's personal tastes- and business acumen
- by studying and cornparing the properties he agreed
or fought to direct. All that is easier if you also kno"v
,vhich ones he did not \vant or agree to direct. but it
is still possible to find evidt'nce of the connecting
thread of Huston through "his" fihns.
But are they his fihns? Let n1e propose that they
are "Huston" fihns. The nan1e is in quotes to suggest
that they do have a recognizable and developing style,
that that style is reliably associated with all of the fihns
directed by Huston, and that all of then1 \Vere pro-
duced as collaborations. Like Ma111oulian in tht'
" cro,vn ·• exa1nple, Huston could not have dictated
every sit,•nificant aspect of all these filrns. If n1y argu-
rnent is correct, solution to this paradox rt'sts in the
intuitive dynanucs of collaboration.
Cinen1atographer Robby Muller has said that he
and director Wi111 Wenders rarely discussed ho,v a
scent' should be shot but otic·n Sl'<:nlt'd to share tl1t'
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same ideas. One explanation is that Wenders chose
Muller as his ca,neraman because he liked the ,vav.
Muller had worked on other projects. But that would
not explain the nature of the understanding benveen
then1, nor the differences in Muller's work for other
directors.
Over and over, in the course of researching this
book. I encountered cine,natographers who said that
although they had their own sense of style and craft.
they studied the director and any of his or her previous
fihns in order to discover the director's characteristic
approach and to "give the director what he wants.'' I
heard the san1e thing filn1 editors. sound n1ixers, research
librarians. assistant directors, and actors. The director is
acknowledged as the person who is in a position to
have a finger in every pie, at least up to the first edited
version of the picn1re. But it is the position, not r..-ally
the person. that is at so crucial a place in the fihnrnak-
ing systern. The director has the opportunity to live up
to that position.
It is not that the director issues instructions to
everybody in sight and they then carry thern out;
rather, every creative n1en1ber of the filnm1aking tt'ant
cornes to sliarr a vision of how the fihn ought to be.
a vision that they n1ay well identify with the desires
of the director. They each do their part, and the parts
are coherent because thev, were each fashioned in
relation to an ideal of the whole. The rays con1e to a
point of focus, and whether that point is a shared
construct of "what the director wants" or the director
as a person. it is most crucially the ideal toward which
the filn1111akt'rs are working and, with luck, the shape
of the finished product.
What the group of artists does, in other words. i~
to agree to work together in a certain style and toward
a particular goal. When they are working with Huston.
that goal is a "Huston" fihn. They associate this sty!<'
with "giving the director what he wants," but that
does not n1ean that the director has or even could
have told then1 all how to do that. What it does n1..-an
is that style in a collaborative enterprise is not just
the result but often the 1·11idenrc of a group effort. The
n1ore coherent the style. the better 111ust have been
the working understanding arnong the mernbers
of the tearn.
There are still cases ,vhere stylistic coherence
reAects the cornprehensive and specific instructions of
a si ngle person. There are others in which the group
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Authorship, Design, and Execution
ideal has bccn stin1ulated not by the director but by
the inherent logic of the script, the story to be told
- or by the studio, ,vhich wants to put out a certain
kind of product. But in general, and in the majority
of cases, the rich coherence of a n1ovie can be ascribed
to the shared vision of its n1akers.
If that redefined auteur n1cthod leaves us t:xarnin-
ing the politics of Capra. the conflict of guilt and
dc:.-sire in Hitchcock, or the social vision of Ford, there
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199
,viii be no proble111 - as long as ,ve do not forget that
none of those individuals can be given absolute credit
for and tide to the filnt~ they guided to co111pletion.
Directors, too, arc parts of the systen1, and if they
generate an abstraction that proves to inspire and unify
the activities of their n1any collaborators, that is an
intri1-,11.1ing explanation of how the parts of the cinc-
n1atic syste111 - people, arts, and shots - 111ight be
drawn together into a coht·rcnt ,vhole.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

BordwcU, David . "The An Ci nema as a Mode of Film Prat'.tiCr."
Film Critiri.,m -1. no. I (Fall 1979). pp. 51>-6-1.
Uordwdl, David. Staiger, J•net, 2nd Thompson. Kristin. ·11., Cf,.,.
sical H,,1/ywood Ci11rm.i: Film Stylr ,md Afodr ,!f Pr11,l11afo11 to I 960.
New York: Columbia University Pr~s/ London: Routledge 1:1:
Kc~n Paul, 1985.
Urown. Nick (ed.) . Col,i,r,, d11 Ci11b11a: ·n,c 1970.,. C;unbridge. MA:
Harvard University Press. 199().
CJughie.John (ed.). A11tlwr$/1ip i11 the Ci11r111,i: ,~ R,·,111,·r. London and
Uoston: Routledge & Kci;an Paul. 1118 I.
Cook. Pam, King. Nod. ,nd Miller. Toby. "Authorship." in Pam
Cook and Micke Bemink (eds.). 77,r Ci11rm• &,,k. ~nd edn.
London: British Fil.in lnsti111tc. 1999. pp. 2:15- .\19.
Crolts. Stephen. "Authonhip and Hollywood." in John Hill ,nd
Parnda Church Gibson (cd,.). A111eri,·n11 (,'i111•n1,1 ,111d Holly,"•od:
<:riti<,rl .~ppr,Mrl,r.<. New York: Oxford Univcr.ity Press, 20!K).
pp. 310-2-1.
Fishc:r, Lucy. SJ,01 / (.\,,mrash,,1: f"ilm Traditicm a11J II ·,,mr11 's Cintn1c1.
Prinrt~ton: i>riru:eton Univt·Nity Press. l9X9.
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Further Reading
fouc,uh. Michel. "Wh,t is .111 Author'" in Donald F. Bouchard
(ed .). L..m.~11•gr. C,>11111,·r-.\·frm,,ry. l'roaia. tran.<. Oonald F. Bourh,rd
and Sherry Simon. Ithaca. NY : Conidl Univt'rsiry Pn·ss. l'Ji7.
pp. 118-38.
McCarthy. Todd, and Charle, (<-ds.) . Ki11gs qf the Bs: II orki11g 11,;111111
1/11· Hollyu,~•d Sysr,·m. New York: E.1'. Ounon. 1<>75.
Saxton. Christine. "The Cultural Vokt· as Collective Voict'... Cu"''""
J,•11mal 2t.. 11(1. I (Fall J'l!!t.). pp. 19- JO.
S,·hJtZ. Thom3'. ·n,.- c;,.,,;,,s ,f ,,,.. Sy.<1c•1ti: H~lly11.-•d Film111aki11.c ;,,
1/,r S111,lio f:'r,1. New York: Pantheon. 1'IHR.
Sodety for Edu(·ation in film and Tde,-i<ion. S,7fl'II Rr•,lcr I.
London: Society for Educ2tion in Fihn and Tdevisron, 19i7.
Tasker. Yvonne (ed.). i'!fty C,>11tc111Jx>rory filn1111,1ka$. London and
New York: Rontkdge. 211112.
Wood. Robin. Hl•/lyu ..·,(1,f /mm I'ifrucJm ,,, Rea.t:•'"'""' &·rtmcl. Nt"\\'
York: Columbr,, Univt•r.itv Pre«. 2CJ<l.\.
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 Part Ill
Close Readings

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 22
Hitchcock's Imagery and Art
Maurice Y acowar

A Canadian film critic and former Dean of Fine Arts at the University of Calgary and the Emily
Carr School of Art in Vancouver, Yacowar's books include A Method in Madness: The Comic
Art of Mel Brooks, Loser Take All: The Comic Art of Woody Allen, and Tennessee Williams
and Film. The essay here Is taken from another of Yacowar's auteurist studies, Hitchcock's
British Films (1977), devoted to an analysis of the films made by Alfred Hitchcock in his native
Britain before moving to Hollywood at the invitation of David 0. Selznick. Like Claude Chabrol
and Eric Aohmer's book on Hitchcock, the first book of auteur criticism 20 years ear1ier,
Yacowar looks at each film in chronological order; but where Chabrol and Aohmer emphasize
a spiritual reading, Yacowar is more concerned with the social and psychological dimensions
of Hitchcock's work. Here, in his book's conclusion, Yacowar offers a persuasive auteurist
analysis of Hitchcock's personal vision as he connects the themes and stylistic elements of
the director's British films to his more well-known American movies.

Of the twenty-three feature filins that Hitchcock
directed in his first fifteen years, none is without son1e
interest and son1e lively personal character. Hitchcock
was Hitchcock frorn the outset - perceptive, progres-
sive, playful, in his n1ischievous n1achinations against
the simple securities of his audience, yet profound in
the implications of his ironic stance. The early filn1s
show the same then1atic concerns for which his later
work is known, and the sa,ne expertise.
As in his later work, Hitchcock often parallelled
characters of ostensible innocence and guilt, to
dramatize the thin line that separates ,nan fron1 his
pretensions to purity. Thus we have Patsy Brand con-
trasted to Jill Cheyne in The Pleasure Garden, the
romantic policen1an contrasted to The Lodger, and
the two men of The Manxman. In Easy Virtue, Rici,
and Strange, 11,e Skin Caine. and Ja111aica /1111 , figures of
sin1ple innocence are inadvertently seduced into cri1n-
inal con1plicity. These foreshadow the drama of Bruno
and Guy in Stran~ers on a Train .
Often the Hitchcock innocent is drawn into evil
by boredom, which functions as the image of moral
lassitude. Thus we have the passionless marriages of
·n,e Pleasure Garden, 17,e Manxman, and Sabotage; the
pren1ature marriages in 11,e Ring, Easy Virtue, and The
Skin Game; and the boredom which pron1pts the girl
to flirt with the artist in Blackmail. Hitchcock realizes
how dull morality is and how exciting sin is. His
delight is to n1ake his n1oral points through exciting
fictions. reminding his audiences of the difficulties and
pain of the rnoral life - albeit in his delightful way.
These n1arriages foreshadow the cold, antiromantic
situations that are developed in NotC1rio11s, 1\JC1rth by
N,>rth111Cst, and "fopaz.

Mlurit:c Y;1rowar. ·'Hitc:h.:nd,\ lm.t~t.·ry .md An." pp. 25h·•·h9 fr,,m l litfltf,vFs Hnr,., lt Film,• ( H .u1id1.·n,
. CT: Ardu.lll Uo,1L:, IShut.·~tnn~ Prt.'lll, 1977_). ;1. ' , l'i77 hy
M.mn(c Y:1co,1,·ar. llcpnutt:"d hy p,:mul,10ll f1f tht' ~uthor.

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204 Maurice Yacowar
Because innocence and b'llilt are so radically inter-
t\\'ined, a Hitchcock hero never enjoys a si,nple success,
The innocent will die along with the guilty: the native
girl in 77,c Pleasure Gardc•11, the pirate in Ri<h a11d
Srrange, Stevie Verloc in Sal,orage, as later the children
and Annie will in 77,e Birds, and Marion Crane will
•!/ic·r she has resolved to surrender to police in Psyc/10.
For 111an's laws fail in the allocation of justice.
In R,1pe, Jan asks playfully of a friend's description
of her: "Did he do n1e justice?" Rupert replies sharply:
"l)o you deserve justice?" Fron1 the lovers of 77,r
Pleasure Garde11 through the murders of Fa»rily Pfor,
Hitchcock's heroes are of at best a dappled virtue, and
his villains of civilized elegance. Indeed, his villains are
often extremely syn1pathetic people, as Verloc is. o r
Fane of J\,f11rder! Even the nasty Levet in 771t' Pleasure
c-;11rdc11 is allowed a death of chamting civility.
Hitchcock's justice is tricky, poetic rather than
legal. For his ,vorld is full of uncertainty. Sl,adoiv C?f a
D,111/,1 n1ay seem to have a happy ending, but the killer
is eulogized by the sn1all town, and an innocent n1an
,vas fed to an airplane propeller by nlistake. Sin1ilarly
in Bla<k111ail, the 1nurderers go free while a s1nall-ti111e
blackn1ailer is killed in their stead. Even the happy
endings, then, refuse the confidence of a secure order.
No si1nple justice, no sin1ple psychology, can be sus-
t:iined in Hitchcock's world of quicksand insecurity.
So aln1ost all Hitchcock's filn1s end on an uncertain
in1age, fron1 the new lovers in 771e Pleasure Garde11 to
the n1ass of abiding doon1 at the end of 77,e Birds.
And in Frenzy, Blaney establishes his innocence by
perfonning the crin1e for which he ,vas wrongly st·n-
tenced; no ,natter that the ,vornan he attacks in l~usk 's
hed is already dead.
Hitchcock often ust·s the X -i111age to express his
Sl'nse of 111an as a con1plex of innocence and evil. Thus
in 77u· Pleasure Garden we found the two ,von1en
li>nning an X to suggest their equivalence in their
lover's ,nind; the husband n1oves to kill his wife in
order to con1plete the X. in response to his 111urdered
rnistress ·s irnagincd den1ands. In Blt1<k11111il a sin1ilar
l'diting co111pll'tl'S an X betwl'en the corpse's hand and
thl' policen1an 's, ,vhere the plot develops the illegality
of the police·s activitit•s and the crirninal parodies
justict·. The X in1agcry is developl'd n1ost ti1lly. of
course. in Srra11gcrs ,,,, 11 Tr,1i11.
Pl'rhaps Hitchcock prt·sents t\vo ditlerent cont·cpts
ofn1.,n·, 111,1kc·up. First, opposite tcndt·ncit·, n,.,y unite
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to fom1 a single, con1posite whole, as the ladies do in
17,e Pleasure Garden and as the strangers on a train do.
Here thl' X would represent the unity of opposite
n1otions and values in hurnan nature. Sinularly, in /
Co,!fess an X variant, the cross. unites Father Logan
and killer Keller in a crin1inal sacrament that costs
them Alina (the soul in its earthly existence) . But in
the second i111age of hun1an nature, opposite wholl'~
are paralleled. Charlie and Uncle Charlie in Sl,ad,,"'
C?f a D011bt are parallel opposites, albeit \\'1th such
sin1ilarities as name, selfishness, vanity, and telepathic
connection. They are not a unity. The good Charlie
111ay have son1e fla\VS and the evil Uncle Charlie son1l'
elegant pretense to justice in his effect, but the char-
at·ters are clearly separable and they diverge by the
i111pulse of their respective ,vills. So too in Psych,,.
Nonnan Hates pretends to be an X with his n1othcr,
but she is innocent, n1isrepresented even after she \Vas
murdered by her spoiled, jealous son. Norman and his
n1other are antitheses who only intersect in Nom1an 's
n1alevolent rationalizing. The bantering and bickering
lovers in Hitchcock's ron1ances (Cliampag11c, /I.fr a11d
J\.1rs S1nirl1) and in his thrillers (77,e 39 Sreps. Sa/11)/c11r
and on through A,farnie) are spiritl'd strokes ,vho dis-
cover then1selves to be fulfilled as Xs.
The other quintessential Hitchcock in1age is the
staircase. Again the early fihns show a111ple use of thi~
device for which his later work is known. Whether
upwards or down, Hitchcock's stairs take his characters
and his audience to the f~ars, dangers, and rewards of
self-discovery. The n1ost con1n1on suircase shot is
down,vard through a seen1ing spiral, which leav~ the
in1prc:ssion of stairs within stairs. One finds this shot
fron1 77,c Lo~11c·r through i/c·rr(110. As an en1ble111 it
recalls Peer c;ynt's onion, concentric layerings around
a void, \\'ith the addition of the danger that height
ahvavs •
1nea11s in Hitchcock.
The occasional round stairt·ase, as in 77,e Plec1s11rr
c:,rrde11 and '11,c Sc•<rct A,l/1'111, also suggests a plunge
through layers of ont·'s self. There are even threl' stair-
cast·s in ~Falr~l's .1;,,,11 I 'i1•1111t1: The ricketv, ladder do,\·n
\vhich Schani's rival carries thl' heroine in the opening
fire· sct·nt·; its parJJlel, thl' l.1dder the girl climbs at the
end to savi: Schani fro,n the duel and to reclai,n hirn
ron1antically: and thl' palatial staircase down which the
Count rolls his valt·t in a piano rift. an irnage of their
ditli.·rt·nct· in privilt·gt' and station . In ]11110 a11d tire
P,1y.-,,,.f.: tht· stairs provide:' a sin~e straight and dark
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Hitchcock's Imagery and Art
Figure 22. l The 111dividuar s pnvate life is sh~rtc.-red in Alfred Hitchcock·• ·n,r Lady Vm1isl1t.1
1931!). Produced by Edw.ird Ubck
descent frorn the fa1nil y \van11th to the cold public
funeral and to their dispossessioL1.
In S/1ado111 of a D011bt Charlie's ho111e has t'.VO paral-
lel staircases. the cl.:an public front and the dangero us,
steep. private back, the latter \vhjch Uncle C harles
uses to escape and to threaten C harlie. The t\vo-staired
house ,vorks as an image of the hun1an psyche and as
an in1age of a societal ideal, both of \Vhich project a
front that is n1ore attractive and safer 1.han their hidden
natu res.
Stairs con1pel movc1111c"nt and ,vith it, fear, as in
Constance's ascent to Murchison ·s office in Spellbo1111d,
and Bates's in Ps)'cl,o. The ca111era (the 111aker) has a
liberty over space and stajrs that the character has not.
Hence the open. expressionistic stai rcase in 77,e Lo~(!er
and the brittle onlc' in No. 17. Hitchcock's stairs i111age
both 1nan's co n1pos1tion and th e rigors and fears of
his rise o r plunge to av,rarenes5, The dan ger that
a.l ways lurks around the stairs is the anxiety that
undercuts aU confidence (in rhe Hitchcock vi.sion). all
sense of st·cure footi ng, :ind that provides bo th rhe
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205
(Gau,110 111 British.
central 01ctaphor and title fo r Douru/,il/ and for VcrtiJ?o.
The source of the latter ,vas a novel titled Be1111te11
T11,o De11fl1s, but •·vertigo" conveys Hitchcock 's pri111ary
i11terest: otan's unce rtainty iu stepping bet'.veen c,vo
mom ents of living.
Hitchcock's art is based on tl1e drJtnatic appeal of
the insecure. In the first place. his characters are typi-
cally sec ure people ,vhose footing is swept out front
under then1. Thus Patsy loses her independence: in T11e
Ph'asure C ard1•11 and the hero loses hjs \vhol e world in
D011111/,i/l. Sanders loses his station in 7711• Ri11g and the
fishen11a11 his bliss. friend, and ,vife in ·n,e J\,/a11x111a11.
Love provides o nl y a £1lse sense of sec urity in 77,r
Pleasure Carden, T11c Fan,wr's 1,V!fe. 77,e AJa11x111a11. and
(.'/,an1pa.i/11C. ,vhere the reconciled lovers begin co
quarrel anew over their 1narriage arra ngen1en ts. And in
t\l,· 1111d ,\,Jr; S11ii1J, a 01arriage sudde nly ceases co exist.
N o r is there security in the social co ntract. The pro-
ct·sscs ofjustice go .i,vry i.11 cas)' r ·ir111c, Bl11tk111ail,J1111C1
a11d 1/,e Payrork. 1\/11rder! And in rhe thriller series
front 'r71t· .\./,111 r 1//10 K11e111 'Too /IJ11r/1 through T71f L1d)'
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
206 Maurice Yacowar
l/anishes the individual's private life is shattered by the
social processes that are supposedly functioning to
protect hin1. Hence Hitchcock's frequent twist where
the hero is threatened by the police as n1uch as by
the enen1y: The Lodger, Blackmail, The 39 Steps, North
by Nortlnvest, Psycho, Frenzy. Virtue and Hitchcock's
justice are endangered by the merely hun1an law. Joe in
T11e Lodger eventually subordinates his romantic interest
to his public duty. But not until Frenzy will we have a
Hitchcock police,nan whose arrival at the truth is based
1
upon his sense of the criminal potential within himself
For the others, the police are sheep (The 39 Steps) or
careless shots (Strangers on a Train) . In The Trouble with
Harry, the springy villagers have but a single fear -
discovery by the sheriffs deputy, a cold Puritan named
Calvin whose resurrections are confined to antique
autos.
Hitchcock usually presents his theme of man's
limited freedom in society as a conflict between love
and duty. The tension is between love and friendship
(a personal duty) in Downhill, T11e Manxman, and The
Farmer's Wife. In the policen1an drama the hero must
choose between what his job requires and what his
heart (and the lady) deserve: 77,e Lodger, Blackmail,
Young and Innocent, Sabotage, Stage Fright, T11e Paradine
(:ase. The spy thrillers adjust the love versus duty
debate to the tensions of the cold war, where the hero
must choose between his personal love and his inter-
national duty: Foreign Co"cspondc11t, Notorious, North by
Northwest, Tom Curtain, Topaz. Another form of this
debate is the conflict between privacy and public
involven1ent. Although the fullest presentation of this
the,ne is in Rear Window, it is fully developed in both
versions of 17,e Man Hl/10 Kncu, Too Much, The Secret
A,11e11t, Sabota.l!e, and The Lody Vanishes. Possibly its
earliest staten1ent. however. is in the scene of the
switchboard operator in Easy Virt11e.
But if love and citizenship are two areas in which
Hitchcock affiicts his characters with insecurity, the
111ost dramatic is the family relationship. Richard
Roud relates the n1otif of parental tyranny to the
espionage plots:
Even his do,nc:stit- dran1as involve a kind of cspionJge in
the sense that his characters, having discovt'rcd frightt·n-
ing realities buried beneath the surface. arc ohliged to
1un1 spy thcrnsclvc:s in order to di<rovt·r the wholt' truth.
l)ften it has son1cthing to do ,vith thl' pJst, the past th.It
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conics back to r onfound the present, to compron1isc the
future. 2
Thus we find so n1any tyrannical parents in Hitch-
cock's work, as we have noted in our discussion of
Downhill. Cruel fathers spring readily to ,nind: Dou~,-
hill, Champagne, The Manxman, Waltzc'.S from Vienn,1.
Then there are the treacherous father surrogates in
Sabotage, 11,e I.Ady Vanishes, and Jan,aica 11111 (particu-
larly after Hitchcock's revision of the villain in the
latter). Even where the parent figures are not oppres-
sive or negative, the parent must be abandoned at least
temporarily, as in Young and Innocent. The fa1nily is
presented as a fragile, son1etin1es false and always vul-
nerable, unit in all Hitchcock's thrillers of the late
thirties. In Psycho we have a pervasive feeling of paren-
tal oppression, by Marion Crane's n1other, San1's father.
and the happiness-buying Texas daddy; but in the
n1ain thrust of the filn1, it is the sick son that projects
his guilt and inhibitions upon his parental i1nage. The
parent is blamed for the child's violent weakness.
In this respect one of the key Hitchcock's filn1s
is his con1edy, T11e Trouble 1vitl1 Harry. A little boy dis-
covers a man dead in the forest; it's his stepfather.
unknown to the boy. The dead Harry Warp ham10-
nizes the entire cornmunity as each n1ember assun1es
guilt for his death and they all con1bine to conceal
him. In one shot the corpse is so arranged that his
feet and legs seen1 to cornplete the body of the little
boy Uerry Mather), whom we see from the waist up.
Later we see the Captain (Edn1und Gwenn) dozing in
his rocker; we see all but the Captain's feet, but on
the wall behind hi111 we see the shadows of the
corpse's feet. These two shots prove Roud's point. The
dead complete and shape the living, but the living can
n1ake their own use of the dead.
Thus we have the fatal "haunting" of Levet in 77u·
Pleasure Garden, the heroine's haunting by her past in
Easy Virt11e and in Blackmail. and the conununity's
haunting by the past in Juno and tire Paycock and 77,e
Skin Game. The individual can succurnb to the pres-
sure of his past - or blan1e it for his own weakness.
Dut the haunting can work as a regeneration. as it
does in 77,e Trouble 11ri1/, Harry. In The Farmer's ii1!/e,
too, the dead wife's 111essage provides a new lease on
life for her husband, as the lovers' exile will in 7711'
J\,1a11x111a11. As Iloger Thornhill ernerges chastened and
solidified by his false death in 1\Jorth by Nortl111'fst.
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 Hitchcock's Imagery and Art
R.ichard Hannay assu1nes a responsibility frorn the
death of the strange ,vontan at the start of 77,e J 9
Steps; so do Ashenden and his lady front Caypor's
death in Secret Age11t. Even in Waltzes _from Vie1111a,
Schani descends through the hell of the pastry cook,
abandoned suitor, duelling rake, and disowned son, to
enterge an Orphic hero. Hitchcock's hero can prove
hirnself by surviving the tribulations that befall hint
(or that he claints to inherit).
Even rnore than the insecurity of his characters,
though. Hitchcock exploits the insecurity of his audi-
ence. Hence his penchant for subjective shooting
angles. His early filnts abound with atten1pts to depict
the character's mind through what he sees. Hence, too,
Hitchcock's penchant for expressionistic devices. The
can1era and printing tricks of 77,e L,dger, the halluci-
nations of 77,e Plcas11r1· Garden, D011111/rill, and 77,e Ring,
the swoop in Yo1111g and lt111()(e11t, all serve as nonreal-
istic rhetoric to dran1atize the character's state of rnind.
Hitchcock used intages of the concrete to express the
reality of the irnagination. As Toni Ryall points out,
"the openings front 77,e L,dger (1926), The Ma11xma11
( 1928), and Blackmail (1929) could be docuntentaries
of the ne,vspaper industry, the fishing industry and
the police force respectively."3 So too Hitchcock's
delirium sequences docun1ent the hot currents of the
character's mind. Durgnat's distinction between Hitch-
cock's "piercing realism" and his "vibrant irrealisnt" is
a merely fom1al distinction. for Hitchcock's basic
interest has always been in how our perceptions
reshape our world. His realisnt constantly shades off
into the expressionistic imagery and extravagant tech-
nical devices by which he conveys the realism of the
en1otional state. So his aquariun1 explosion of Picca-
dilly Circus in Sal,otage ranks with the best documentary
poetics of Vertov.
Hitchcock continually violates his viewer's expl'C-
tations. Thus we have the ron1antic deflations in 17,e
Pleasure Garden, Champag11e. and the su rprise of Drew's
innocence in 77,e Lo<{~er. Where the genre requires a
fight, Hitchcock will provide a comic fight, as in
Downhill, No. I 7, 1,1,'altzeJ _fron, Vie111111. and 77,e Lady
Vanishes, for there is no room in Hitchcock's world of
vertiginous insecurities for the conventional fight,
which rnakes its protagonists appear efficient.
And from time to tirne Hitchcock allows his con1ic
spirit, the vision of an anarch ic principle at the heart
of the universe, to run free. So ,vc gt't tht' chaotic
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207
cortsequences of the courtships in 77,e Fanner's i-V!fi·,
the fi1ntbling villains of 77,e Ma11 Hll,o K11ei11 Too M11c/,,
and old Den in No. 17. Of course, these con1edies of
chaos are only lighter versions of Hitchcock's essential
vision that ,nan's civilization is underpinned by chaos.
as we have it in 11,e Pleas11re Gardet1, Downhill, Tiu·
J\•la11x1nan, Cha111pa.1!11e, Ri</, and Stra,~(!r, J\.1urder!, 77,r
3 9 Steps, and Sabota,ge. In his later work, Marion Crane
111ust die because she is played by the star, Janet Leigh.
For Hitchcock·s filrns are a relentless assault upon tht'
viewer's security, as well as his n1oral assurnptions.
The English filn1s also prove that fron1 the outset
Hitchcock's technical innovations were close to the
then1atic center of the work. The experimental devices
of 11,e Lodger and Blackn,ail served those film's basic
then1es. the preoccupation of the fonner with the
nusleading power of the perception, and of the latter
with the obscurities and difficulties of cornntunica-
tion. Then, too, the scenes with off-camera orchestras
in ]11110 and Murder! were the pivotal points in tht'
psychological development of the narratives. This
observation serves as well when we approach
Hitchcock's later work.
For example, his massive orchestration of birds for
11,e Birds, a staggering technical challenge, is an asser-
tion of the power of the huntan enterprise in the face
of the filn1's assault upon man's pre-Copernican arro-
gance. The technical challenge in Ufeboat is analogous
to its political thente, the fatal isolation of the Allies
and their need for a selfless unity. The continuous
shooting of Rope, which Hitchcock calls his "aban-
donrnent of pure cinema" 4 because it eschewed his
nomtal dependence upon drantatic editing, grows out
of both the title intage - sontething continuous that
will tie one up - and the n1ain then1e of the filn1 - the
continuity of word into deed; a nturderous huntan
reality is spun out of a musing that was considered
safely theoretical. The restricted isolation of the ca111era
in Rear Wi11do1v relates to that filnt's central concern:
the distinction between respecting one's brother's
privacy and meeting his needs for a keeper. What
Durgnat calls Hitchcock's "calntly hem1etic aesthetic
satisfaction"' ntight be better considered as his pas-
sionate synthesis of idea, irony. and technique. In his
ac hievernent of the e111otional idea and the intellectual
in1age he rneets the aim of that other great film editor.
Eisenstein. By so brilliantly uniting idea. in1agt',
and en1otion, Hitchcock has con1e to n1ake our
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208 Maurice Yacowar
Figure 22.2 77r, ,1/a,r 111,~ K11,w -,;.., A/urlr (G.nnnom Bntish. I'IJ~): Tlw vdlJrn (Pct<·r Lo rr,·)
hcan o f 1hc um vt·rw. Produced by M,chacl l.lJkon
nighanarcs for us ,vith a clarity and thn1st no other
fihn n1aker has con1111anded.
Hitchcock·s ironic dc:tachn1l· nt also explains chose
n1on1encs in l11s wo rk ,vhere ,ve ~ee the sean1s of his
crafi. ,vhere his technical ,vo rk n1a y ~ee1n to be rough.
One lesson ,vhich thl· Urirish filrns should teach us is
that Hitchcock ahvays kn o,vs ,vhar he is doing. His
plot~ are carefully crafted. For l'Xan1ple, he has Drexler
rehearse the orche era of Strauss Sr. so that chcir sur-
prise perfon11ance of Schani's new ,valrz ,viii not sccn1
i111plausiblc. And ,vherc 1-lirchcock"s cechnica.l ,vork
seen1s shoddy ,vhat ,ve really have is not a crafrsn1an
nodding bur an artist extending his resources. Where
Hirchcock·s craft seen1s loose, ,vc usually fiud his tech-
nique ~ub~erving hi ~ conrrnc. his hrrr:il re;ili~n1 shading
oir into vibra nt 111etaphor.
To put it another ,vay. it is safe co assu111e chat ,vhac
sce111~ to be a Hitchcock error 1s likt'ly o ur failure to
,vurk out ,vhat he •> doing. In TI,r L,11/y I n11ishrs. fo r
insc..1nce. the palpably false opening shor and the unreal
proportions of che departing trai n are typical of ho\\'
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• -
a, th,· aua,--h1c
Hitchcock extends his rcJhsn1 inco e>..1Jressiorusn1
only to be charged \\,;th poor technique. This liberty
can1e fi-0111 the Gen11ar1 ci11cn1a. Thus Fritz Ling
insercs a jamng interlude of fa lse scenery into a key
mo111ent of Ra11rlw l\'C11orio11s.
Willian, Jo hnson describes Hitchcock's "failure·· in
1'vl11n1ir:
Ir so happcn< that rh ere are certain dt:part1ne nts 111 ,vhich
Hitchco,·k has J patently blind eye. These inc lud,· the
phony backdrops Lhat grate like TV conuncrcials (<-spc-
c:1ally 111 colo r). the bit< of r.tpid n1ontage chat do not
quite fit tog,·ther . .ind the n vo-,hots that are h,·ld so long
th:u they ahno,t '" "fy."
The f.ilse b.1ckdrops in 1\111n1ir arc a concise i1113ge of
che heroine·s pred1ca1ncnt: she lives in dislocation frorn
her <urro undings and fron1 he r o,vn past. The false
back~rou n<ls prov1dt· a phyMcal expression of the dis-
j unction 1n her 111ind. Thus che tirsc fu lse back projection
~cc nc i< her fir;t ,cc11c aboard Florio, \vhen she rs
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Hitchcock's Imagery and Art
Figure 22.3 Srn1ct11n: " th~111<' 111 Alfred Hitchcock\ />Jyr/11• (l'ar.,mount. l '><,1t). Produced by Hnchco,·k .md
Al111.1 Rcv,llc
enjoying an artificial respite fi-0111 her alit·nation. A klud,
rhetorical swell in 1ht> 1nu~ic cohert>s with the rhetoric
of the false background. The second is the scc nc at her
mother's hon1e, ,vherc rhe ships' dock is flat and fahe
behind t he 1ene111ent. The painted sh ips 100111 larger
than life and paler. in1agi11g the phanto1n sailor unac-
knowledged fron1 her past. The fulse register of both
backgrounds rnovc the shots fron1 st·tt1ng 10 active
~yn1bol. A false front stands behind tht' Rutland build-
ing, a building stripped of its back, or, a fon:'ground
unsupported by an integrati:d backing. as Mamie is.
M ark varies this 111otifby giving Mamie a $42.000 ring
instead of a fa111.i.ly heirloon1; he wanes her to "have
so,nech.ing that neve r belonged ro anyone- before. .. The
line jocularly refers co her rh,.:fi:~. poignantl y recalls her
chil dhood, ,vithou1 a bed of her o,vn, and provides
anoth er instance of a11 object ,virhouc a paq, a fore-
ground without a11 intcbrratcd background:
Sin,ilarly in Ti•nr C11rtai11 rhe palpable falseness of
the i;,ra rden pad, up ,vhich Ne,vn,an leads Andre\v~
Digitized by Google
209
(Hud leads M ary Poppins) undercuts the noble pre-
tense of the hero •~ an,bitious venture. And \vhat
Sa111ucls find~ co be the " contcndess virtuosity" of
1'\lorth b)' 1\.'or1/1111esl i~ the heart of rhe film: the filn1's
central the111e/ eflecr i~ char total dislocation which the
co n1placent hero and the typ ically inj udicious cinen1a
audience share. As che tide cells us, di e fi.1111 delibrr-
arely pursuc·s a f.1111asticaJ course.
Ir is si.n1.ilarly ,vro11g ro consider Hitchcock a crafcs-
11,an first and only seco ndarily. accidentally, as it \Vere.
an artist. Fro111 his first feature on. eve11 through
that period of self-conscious "respectable'' adaptation.
Hitchcock's filn ts had s01ncchi11g to say, s01neci111t·s au
obviou~ 1nc~~age (Easy l·'ir111e, L!fcboar) but n1ore often
an integr.i ted 1he111e (Plt•asuri· Cardc11, D011111/ril/). Only
because for111 is co ntent cJn H itchcock s.iy " I aut
intere~red not ~o 111uch in the storii:s I tell as in the
111cans of celling d1c111 ...., Scn1cture is thc111e in Psy</11,,
i 'crf(l!c>, T/rc Tr<111ble 111i1J, Harr)', but also as early as ·11,c
Plcas11rr G11rdc11. D,,11,11/rill. and 77,r Ri11.I(.
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
210 Maurice Yacowar
The early films are also notable for their ambitious
conception. Though working in an unacknowledged
medium, Hitchcock showed himself a serious artist
even then. For Hitchcock, popular filnt is art. His art
is the manipulation of the audience's entotions and
fantasy through a variety of felt dangers and thrills, to
send his viewers out at the end, cahn of nund, all
smugness spent, ready to brave the hairline ntoralities
of real life. ln his early filnts Hitchcock also dealt with
the responsibilities of the artist. The dance-floor meat
markets of 11,e Pleas11rc Garde11, Do1vnhill, and Cham-
pagne, and the squared circle of 11,e Ri11g, are fairly
tawdry arenas of hun1an enterprise. But even in those
settings it is possible for an individual to achieve art.
to fulfill his own creative and expressive intpulses and
to establish a community with an audience.
The laughing clown in Blackmail provides the
neatest statement H itchcock makes about art. Coher-
ent with the fertility of silent montage, the portrait
gains new n1eaning front each juxtaposition, each
context, yet it maintains the sa,ne detached, ironic
stance regardless o f its changing set. When all about
are noisy, loud, an1biguous, Hitchcock's mute jester
remains silent. Yet the portrait is eloquent in its accusa-
tory stare, its lively eye, its sha,neless traditional garb.
Beyond the inflections of that painting in the story
itself, Hitchcock devotes hi,nself to a career of critical
irony that will be independent of changes in ntode
and in medium. The jester retains his acrid indepen-
dence even when stored in the vaults of the ntost
conventional (the police station; the comntercial bas-
tions of light, diversionary cine111a).
Front Murder! we can infer why Hitchcock was
never to stray into the esoterica of Berginan, late
Godard, or even the Penn of Mickey 011c. For M11rder!
is the dra,na of an artist who takes his artistic skills
and interests into the prosaic business of real life. In
A111rder! sonte fulfill the111selves through art (the theater
tolk), sonte conceal themselves in their art (the trans-
vestite trapeze artist), but the noblest and n1ost gifted
turn their art to the service of hu111anity (Sir John),
to the discovery of truth and self-knowledge and the
saving of lives - fron1 prison and front bort'don1. Tht'
W est End artist-aristocrat brin1:,,s his style and ~ensitiv-
ity to tht' service of tht' hurlv- burly world.
For Hitc.:hc.:ock lift' is a ,natter of drav.:inµ art and
n:,1lity tOgl•ther. In SI,((!<" f-ri,(!/11. Eve Gill conJl·~ fron1
a st'paratt'd fa111ily. a rt'alistic but theatrical lather and
Digitized by Google
a whintsical but prosaic ntother. Eve's salvation lies
in ordinary Snuth, a policeman who plays the piano.
and in her own abilities at acting and setting scenes.
The clues point to the guilt of the Marlene Dietrich
figure, but as her song warns us, she is too lazy to
be either crinunal or n1oral. The real villain is the
Richard Todd character. He is unable to distinguish
pretense (art) from reality, so he kills for Dietrich and
is ulti111ately prepared to kill Eve to prove his own
insanity. As befits his unharntonized dichotomy, he is
chopped in half by the safety curtain on the theater
stage.
For Hitchcock, art is to come fron1 life ( i-fla/tzc.<
f,0111 Vie11na) . But often life entulates art, as in the filn1
parodies in Sabotaj/c, Saboteur and Nortli by Northu,rst.
An at its best will cultivate, free, and invigorate the
huntan spirit, both the entotion and the will, as
the cartoon does for Sylvia in Sabotaj/e. So1netintes art
will deliver a narrow truth, as Mr Mentory does. or
deliver one from bondage, as the child is freed by song
and by shot in the rwo versions of 11,e Man H'ho K11111•
Too A,f,uli. But its deeper function is to free the ento-
tions. So Hitchcock often sets up a theatrical situation
to expedite a character's physical escape: The Pleasure
Garde11, Do11111/iill, 11,e Ri11g. the fashion show in 77,e
Lod~er, the auction in 11,e Ski11 Game, Roger
Thornhill's auction in North by Northwest, the ballet in
Tom Curtain. In Vertij/O even more fully than in Murder!
and Staj/e Frij/lit, Hitchcock explores the corollary
danger: losing one's self in the act of performance.
Hence the penultin1ate in1age in Psycho: Norn1an Bates
dissolves into the skull; the hidden reality overwhelms
the muted, visible reality; the role overtak~ the self.
But like the Todd figure in Staj/e Fright, Nomtan Bates
lost the sense of where life and art were to be distin-
guished. Upon this distinction and interplay Hitchcock
thrives for fifty years of splendid film n1aking.
Hitchcock's genius lic:s in his synth~is ofnund, eye.
and heart in the dynarnic fi.ln1 experience. S0111e
critics prefer the craft of the American period over
the English, or the profundity of the later American
tihns ovc.-r the earlier diversions. Willia111 Pechter
prefers Hitchcock•s detailed realism of the Engli~h
thrillers, and bl·n1oans hi~ loss of contact with his
.1udic:11Cl' in the A111t'ric.111 period. But even in 1931
c:.A. Ll:icunl' \v.is to con1plain of Hitchcock's lack of
"the -.vann hun1.111itv. of a dirt·ctor like Griffith'. and
··Pabst's psycholo~cal insight":
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Hitchcock's Imagery and Art
His figurt·s arc photographir n,cords of synthetit· men,
not n1en of flcsh-and- blood translated into the n1ediun1
of the 111otion picture ... The fault ,vith Hitchrock ·s
unrealiry lit>s in the fact that he has been essentially a
dirc,·tor of realistic fihns: his subjects havl' been in1in1a1c.
d,·tailcd and individual. H t· has d,·alt ,11i1h 011t· n1an , not
.I
\\'It l lllCll . . . '"
Pcchter harkens back to the golden age of the thrillers
and Lejeune cavils before thern, but both find
Hitchcock naturalistically unsatisfying. Nor could
anyone accuse the golden thrillers of realis111!
Surely the realisn1 of H itchcock ranges fron1 tht·
physical settings of TI1e Lodg1•r to the in1aginative inner
,vorlds of Do11111/,il/ and 771c Ri11,1!, and bet\veen thosl'
Notes
S<. C' l.d.111d P1.'>J.h,rtlt', "Tht· l>rt~.:tiv1.• in fr('II~)-'." }t•unMI (!{
4
f>,,,,.,/,11 /-'i/111. Winter. I'17.•. pp. 47- ;;•1.
Rid,ard Roud. ··111 Uroad D.,ylight." Fi/111 (),111111c111. Juh'-
Au1,"1st. 197-1. p. 3/,.
Torn Ryall. "l>urgn.1t on Hitd,cork." S,-Y<',·11. Summer. 1•11;,
p . 123.
Hitchcock told Leslie l't'rkoff: ··t would like 10 make
docunu:ntary tiltns. hl·r.1ust· hc.·r'-' rou hJve state.-.. of ,Kuon or
n1nvt·t1tl'nt which ( .tn t',B,ily be tn ..·:th..·d by photognphy Jud
cutting. llut a cat.u:lysn, m :111y filrn . for c.•x:unpll·. i~ akjn to
documentary matc:rial. It begins with the ,·amerJ and go,·s
dire,·tly to thl' c utting room." Thi.< is in '"The Censor and
Sydnt'y Street." ll'orl,I Film 1\'c•ws. March , l9J8, p. -1. Hitdwock
her.- yeanis for the fantastkol opportunities provid,·d by
do<." umcnt.try! Hl' t'Xploitc.·d thc.·111 tnost ohvi<..1w,ly in the.·
plot ... Jinr and srninp of R,d, 1md S tr1mJf, ,tnd in the opening
SCC"llt"S of C'ltcrmp,~t:,,c. R/11{km11il. '/1,r ,\·fou.nmm. 77t<' l I·mu.c
Af,m. ere.
P,•1cr Bogdanovich. ·17". (; i11r11ia ,f ,•l //;,.,1 flitd11·c>(k ( New York:
Museum of Moden, Art Film Library. 196.\), p. 2!!.
Raymond Durgnat. '/111· Stm11.~,· C,1.<c· ,f .-1/Jr,·d Hit,·/,.·c>tk
(C.,mbridgc. MA: MIT Prt·ss . l'J74).
6 William John,on. "Al,m,ir." Fi/111 Q11,irr<'rly. XVIII. ,, pp.
311-42.
Digitized by Google
211
poles throughout his later career. Always he is a pol't
and always he is engaged ,vith the rnoral and percep-
tual nature of n1an. T he early filn1s are full of en1orionally
charged scenes, it is true: the praying scene, the fevered
kiss, the final killing, in 77,e Pleasure Garden; or tl1e
private reconciliation of old Strauss in Waltzes _{rt1111
l"ie1111a. But there is a well of feeling in Lydia's scenes
"vith the coffee cups in TI1e Birds too. T he fihns of
Alfred H itchcock are rich enough, varied enough, yet
of a spiritual piece, to rnake their total enjoyment pref:.
erable to any arbitrary choice of preferences. O ne can
watch Hitchcock's British fi.lrn s in order to co,ne to a
better understanding of the An1erican ones. But also
because they are so good in then1selves. so 111oving. so
thoughtful and so n1uch fun .
7 D.1vid Thorn,on provide.~ a rnorc gL·n,:rJI iutc.-rprt.•(ation of
rhc device in .\tc,,,i,· .\f,111. London : S,· ck,·r :111d Warbur!\, I 971.
p. 72.
X Ch.1rlt·'\ Thornas S;unuc.·l'i, "Hitrhcoc.·k." in l:ur,murrrin..: Dirra<,,s
(N,·w York: Capricont/ Puoum, I')72), p. 301.
()f cou~e. Hitchcork i< fanious for the painst•king attention
h,· giv..s his work b,·fore going on the ,et. Sec the following
artidt"$ frorn Amt·nr,m Cim·mt11<tgr11J'l,r, a~ c.~vidcnce: Hikb
Ubck. "Th,· Pho<Of.>raphy is hnport.int to Hitchcock: I
C,>11/(',;," l>eremher. 1952. pp. 524-5. 54(.-7. 549: l'rcderi<-k
Foster. "Hitrhcock Didn't Want it Arty," Fehn1.1.ry. 1957. pp.
!!4- ;, 112- 14: Chark-s Loring. ''filmmg 7;,n, C11rt,1i11 by
Refiect,·d Light." ()ctobcr. 1966. pp. 681>-3. 711(.-7: H,·rh
Lightni>n, "Hitchco~k Talks About Lights. C:11nera. Action. "
M,iy. 1967. pp. J32- 5, 350-1.
Hitrhcock·, f:unou, preplanning and subsequent appear.rnrc
of casuaJrw~~ about rhe ;1t:tuJJ shooting nlJy havt.· contributc.·d
to the ready di><Llin for lus 1echnic,I "sloppin,·Ss<." It certainly
Jlienated Andre Uazin ($C<' his "Hitdicock vs. Hitrhnirk." in
(.'t1/Jfrr$ ,/u C:i,u·m« ;,, L::t1.l!lisl1. 110. 2. pp. 51 - 60) .
9 lhzin . ibid .. p . 55.
111 William l'echtt·r. T11,·111y:f.>111 Tim,·s " Sr(l>11d (N,·w York.
1')71) pp. 175- 94. C.A. L,:jcune. Ci11r111a (London. 1931).
pp. I 1- 12.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 23
John Ford's Young Mr Lincoln
Editors of Cal1iers du Ci11e111a

This essay has been considered a critical milestone since it was first published in Cahiers du
Cinema (no. 223) in 1970. By the end of the 1960s Cahiers had become a more politically
oriented magazine than before. In a previous issue published in 1969, two members of the
new editorial board, Jean Comolli and Jean-Louis Nart>oni, sought to categorize Hollywood
films in tenns of their relation to ideology. Although their approach helped shape the discus-
sion of directors such as Douglas Sirk, their categories minimized the importance of the
director in film analysis. Comolli and Nart>oni's category "(e)." films that reveal an ideological
tension that threaten to crack apart their coherence, have attracted the most critical attention.
In this essay, excerpted here, Cahiet's editors offer an exhaustively detailed analysis of Young
Mr Lincoln (1939) by favorite auteur John Ford wherein the director becomes merely one code
at play In a series of others, including political, industrial, ideological, and historical forces,
that detennine the film's meaning. Some of the detailed scene-by-scene textual discussion
has been deleted here for reasons of length.

U11co/11 i.< 11t>t tire 11r,,d11a ,,(l"'l'"l,tr ,..,,,,/11tit>11: r/,,. J,a11,r/ g,11nr 0

Mr Li11c"/11: A1111::rican tihn by John Ford. Scripr:

,f 1111ivasal .<11/Jr,i~r. \~11,,,.,111 ,f 1/,,. .~n·t1t /ris1,,ric11/ t,ul·s 1/1,11
11111.< t br ad,i,·,,,cl, lro1.< r,1i.<1•d /rim It> 1/rr t<>p. /rim. oJ ph-b1·i,111,
11 .<t·l(-111,11/r 111,111 1111<> rose Jr<>m /,t'ing 11 .<tone br,•akcr 1<> J,,·i11.\!
1/11· S,·11t1tc>r _li•r llli111>i.,. 11 111,111 lo1cki11.~ i1111·/lat11al /,ril/i,111«·,
wit/11,111 ""Y gr,·,1111r.<.<,?f dwmctcr, ll'it/r 111> cX<<'J>timi.1/ ,,11/11,·.
ba.iusr ht· is au ,wfr11.~r. ll'<'ll-mc1111i11.'! 1111111.
( l'rifdrid, r.11.~1•/s mu/ l..:11rl ,\ lar;,.·. I>i,· Pr.-s~. 12- I0 - I 8 61)
.-ft tlrlt' p(lJ·,,, ;,, ,,,,, i11t«•n it•111, Air Femi
1 t,1/kin.t: uh,,ut ,1
ll'ilS
cur .<cq11,•11.-r .from \"oung Mr Lincoln: i111c/ /11· d,-Hrilwd
Li11w/11 ,u " s/1,1/1/>)' J\~1,rc, ricli1(~ i111,, ,.,,,,,, ,,,, a 11111/,-, .<h>p-
pin.t? 1,1 .\!,l.O:f ,Jt ., tht·dtrf ,_,,,.~tt'r. '11,i.< J>l'''' ,1p,:, • /,f s,,id,
•wisl1i11.t! /,f l,c1,I ,·um~t!l, 111011cy t(} :\er H,uul,•t '. R,·,,ditt_\! tll't'r
the t'dirnf ,,,·rsic111 t!f 1/,c i11u·n•i,·11, it w,,s ,,,tt. ,f thf jt·11 1l1i1~t.:.<
F,,rd t1skccl me r,, d1,11(~r; /1,· .,,,id /r(' did11 't 11111d, li/.:c 'r/11·
idr11 ,,( c,,llit(~ ,\.fr Li11n>/11 " I''''" ''I""'.
(l'rrr, H,!~c/,111,,,.id1. John Ford. S1111fii, 1 ·;_,,.,. L>ttd,,11,
I')(, i)
hl1tur,, o t , :,,,,,n, .1.. C:111,·m,1. ",l11h11 h,nl \. ) ,110•~ .\/, /.i u11•/11" l, l ·, .. ~, r
R \·rnnt(·d 1-w pnllll~\l('ll l , f ( ;,,,,.,.,, ,,,, ( ,-,, ........ .
'1- ()1111.11
Lainar Trotti. Photography: Bt>rt Glennon. .\lusic:
Alfred New111an. Art direaor: Richard Day, Mark Lee
Kirk. Set dec,1ratio11s: Thornas Little. Editor: Walter
Thornpson. C,,srume: Royt>r. Sound assista111: Robert
Parrish. Cast: Ht>nry Forda (Abrahan1 Lincoln), Alil·l'
Brady (Abigail Clay). Arleen Wheelan (Hannah Clay).
Marjorie Weaver (Mary Todd), Eddie Collins (Efe
Tunrer), Pauline Moore (Ann Rutledge), Ward Bond
(J. Pahner Cass). R.ichard Crornwcll (Matt Clay).
l)onald Meek (John Feldt>r), Judith Dickens ((:.irrie
Sul·), Eddit" Quillan (Adan1 Clay). Spencer Charters
1
(Judge Herbert A. Bell), Milbun1 Stone (Stepht>n A.
1)ougl.1s). Cliff Clark (Sheritf Billinbrs), Robert Lo,very
(juror). Charles Tannen (Ninian Edwards). Francis
Ford (Sa111 Uoone). Frt'd Kohler, Jr. (Scrub White),
K.1y Lin.1kcr (Mrs Ed,v.1nh). Russel Si111pson
n , fn mt (:,1/11,·r. ,/11 ,:.,,,:,,,,, ,!_'!\ ( )IJ':"CI~ H.l·rm1h·d Ill,.,... ,. I.\. no.-' 41'•!7.?) . .... 111 70

Digitized by Google Original from

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 John Ford's Young Mr Lincoln
(Woolridge), Charles Halton (Hawthorne), Clarence
Wilson (Dr Mason), Edwin Maxwell (John T . Stuart).
Robert Hu1nans (Mr Clay), Jack Kelly (Matt Clay
boy), Dickie Jones (Adan1 Clay boy), Harry Tyler
(barber), Louis Mason (clerk), Jack Pennick (Big
Buck), Steven Randall (juror), Paul Bums, Frank
Orth, George Chandler, Dave M orris, Dorothy
Vaughan, Virginia Brissac, Elizabeth Jones. Prod11cer:
Kenneth Macgowan. £yecutive producer: Darryl F.
Zanuck. Production: Cosmopolitan/Twentieth Century
Fox, 1939. Distribution: A'isociated Cinen1as. Length:
IOI 11111.
1.
This text inaugurates a series of studies the need for
which was indicated in the editorial of issue No. 218.
We must now specify the objects and 1nethod of this
work, and the origin of its necessity which has hith-
erto been n1erely affim1ed.
1. Object: a certain nun1ber of 'classic' filn1s,
,vhich today are readable (and therefore, anticipating
our definition of method we will designate this work
as one of reading) insofar as we can distinguish the
historicity of their inscription: 1 the relation of these
filnlS to the codes (social, cultural ...) for which they
are a site of intersection, and to other filn1s. the111selves
held in an intertextual space; therefore, the relation of
these films to the ideology which they convey, a par-
ticular 'phase' which they represent, and to the events
(present, past, historical, n1ythical, fictional) which they
aimed to represent.
For convenience we will retain the tenn ' classic'
(though obviously in the course of these studies we
will have to examine, and perhaps even challenge it,
in order finally to construct its theory). The tern, is
convenient in that it roughly designates a cinen1a
,vhich has been described as based on analogical
representation and linear narrative ('transparence' and
'presence') and is therefore apparently con1pletely held
within the 'system' which subtends and unifies these
concepts. It has obviously been possible to considt'r
the Hollywood cinen1a as a 1nodel of such · classicis111 ·
insofar as its reception has been totally dictated by this
system - and limited to a kind of non- reading of the
filn1s assured by tht'ir apparent non-,vritin ~.. ,vhich
was seen as the vt·ry esst·nre of their 111astery.
Digitized by Google
213
2. Our work will therefore be a readi11}l in the
sense of a resca1111i11)l of these films. That is, to define
it negatively first: (a) it will not be (yet another) co1n-
n1entary. The function of the commentary is to distill
an ideally constituted sense presented as the object's
ultin1ate meaning (,vhich however remains elusive
indefinitely, given the infinite possibilities of talking
about fihn): a wandering and prolific pseudo-reading
which misses the reality of the inscription, and sub-
stitutes for it a discourse consisting of a sin1ple
ideological delineation of what appear(s) to be the
n1ain statement(s) of the filn1 at a given mon1ent.
(b) Nor will it be a new interpretation, i.e. the
translation of what is supposed to be already in the
filn1 into a critical systen1 (meta-language) where
the interpreter has the kind of absolute knowledge of
the exegetist blind to the (historical) ideological deter-
nlination of his practice and his object-pretext, when
he is not a henneneute a la Viridiana slotting things
into a pre-ordained stn1cture.
(c) Nor will this be a dissection of an object
conceived of as a closed structure, the cataloguing of
progressively s111aller and more 'discrete' units: in other
words, an inventory of the elen1ents which ignores
their predestination for the fihn n1aker's writing
project and, having added a portion of intelligibility
to the initial object, claims to deconstruct, then recon-
struct that object, without taking any account of the
dyna1nic of the inscription. Not, therefore, a n1echa-
nistic structural reading.
(d) Nor finally will it be a den1ystification in the
sense ,vhere it is enough to re-locate the fihn with.in
its historical detemlinations. 'reveal' its assumptions,
declare its problematic and its aesthetic prejudices
and criticise it'> staten1ent in the name of a 1nechani-
cally applied 1naterialist knowledge, in order to see it
collapse and feel no more needs to be said. This
amounts to throwing the baby out with the bathwater
without getting wet. To be 1nore precise, it would
be disposing of the fihn in a n1oralist way, ,vith
an argu1nent which separates the ·good' ti-0111 th e
"bad'. and evading any effective reading of it. (An
effective reading can only be such by returning on
its o,vn deciphering operation and by integrating
its functioning into the text it produces, which is
so1nething quite different fro1n brandishing a 111ethod
- t'Ven if it is 1narxist- leninist - and lea ving •
it
Jt that.)
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
214 Editors of Cahiers du Cinema
It is worth recalling that the exten1al and n1echa-
nistic application of possibly even rigorously
constructed concepts has always tried to pass for the
exercise of a theoretical practice: and - though this
has long been established - that an artistic product
cannot be linked to its socio-historical context accord-
ing to a linear, expressive, direct causality (unless one
falls into a reductionist historical detenninisn1), but
that it has a co111plex, mediated and decentrcd relation-
ship with this context, which has to be rigorously
specified (v.rhich is why it is simplistic to discard
'classic' Hollywood cinen1a on the pretext that since
it is part of the capitalist syste1n it can only reflect it).
Walter Benjan1in has insisted strongly on the necessity
to consider literary work (but similarly any art product)
not as a reflection of the relations of production, but
as having a place 1vithi11 these relations (obviously he
,vas talking of progressive works, past, present, and to
come: but a n1aterialist reading of art products which
appear to lack any intentional critical din1ension con-
cerning capitalist relations of production must do the
sa1ne thing. We will return later at greater length to
this basic notion of 'the author as producer'). In this
respect we 1nust once again quote Macherey's theses
on literary production (in particular those concerning
the Leninist corrections to Trotsky and Plekhanov·s
simplistic positions on Tolstoy) and Badiou's concern-
ing the autonon1y of the aesthetic process and the
complex relation historical truth/ideologies/author (as
place and not as ' internalisation ')/work.
And that, given this, denouncing ideological assun1p-
tions and ideological production, and designating then1
as falsification and error, has never sufficed to ensure
that those who operated the critique then1selves pro-
duced truth. Nor what's 1nore has it sufficed to bring
out the tn1th about the very thin1:,,s they are opposing.
It is therefore absurd to den1and that a filn1 account tor
v.•hat it doesn't say about the positions and the knowl-
edge which forn1 the basis fron1 which it is being
questioned; and it is too easy (but of what use?) to
· deconstruct' it in the nan1e of this san1e knowledge (in
this case. the science of historical 1naterialis1n ,vhich
has to be practised as an active n1ethod and not used
as a guarantee). Lest we be accused of dishonesty, let us
111ake it clear that the points 111ade in paragraph (d)
refer to the 111ost extre111e positions within Ci11rtl1iq11c.
3. At this point ,ve seen1 to have con1e up against
a contradiction: we are not content to den1and that a
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film justify itself vis a vis its context, and at the san1e
ti111e we refuse to look for 'depth', to go from the
'literal n1eaning' to so1ne 'secret meaning'; we are not
content with ,vhar it says (what it intends to say). This
is only an apparent contradiction. What will be
atten1pted here through a re-scansion of these filn1s in
a process of active reading, is to n1ake them say what
they have to say within what they leave unsaid, to
rc.-veal their constituent lacks; these are neither faults
in the work (since these filn1S, as Jc.-an-Pierre Oudart
has clearly de1nonstrated - see the preceding issue -
are the work of extren1ely skilJed filn1 nukers) nor a
deception on the part of the author (for why should
he practise deception?); they are structuring abse11a•s.
always displaced - an overdetennination which is the
only possible basis fron1 which these discourses could
be realised, the unsaid included in the said and neces-
sary to its constitution. In short, to use Althusser·s
expression - 'the internal shadows of exclusion'.
The filn1s we will be studying do not need filling
out, they do not detnand a teleological reading. nor
do we require them to account for their exten1c1/
shadows (except purely and sin1ply to disnliss them);
all that is involved is traversing their statement to
locate what sets it in place, to double their writing
with an active reading to reveal what is already there.
but silent (cf the notion of palimpsest in Barthes and
Daney). to n1ake then1 say not only ' what this says.
but what it doesn't say because it doesn't want to say
it' (J. A. Miller, and we ,vould add: what, while intend-
ing to leave unsaid, it is nevertheless obliged to say).
4. What is the use of such a work? We "'ould
be obliged if the reader didn't envisage this as a
'Hollywood revisited'. Anyone so tempted is advi$t'd
to give up the reading with the very next paragraph.
To the rest we say: that the.- stn1cturing absences men-
tioned above and the establishn1ent of an ersatz which
this dictates have some connection with the sexual
other sce11c, and that 'other scene' which is politics; that
the double repression - politics and eroticisn1 - which
our reading will bring out (a reprc.-ssion ,vhich cannot
be indicated once and for all and left at that but rather
has to be written into the constantly renewed prol·ess
of its repression) allows the answer to be deduced; and
this is an answer whose very question would not have
been possible ,vithout the t,vo discourses of overde-
tenuination. the Marxist and the Freudian. This is ,vhy
,ve ,viii not choose fihns for their value as 'external
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 John Ford's Young Mr Uncoln
masterpieces' but rather because the negatory force of
their writing provides enough scope for a reading -
because they can be re-written.
2. Hollywood in 1938-9
One of the consequences of the 1929 economic
crisis was that the major banking groups (Morgan,
Rockefeller, DuPont, Hearst, General Motors, etc.)
strengrhened their grip on the Hollywood firms
which were having proble,ns (weakened by the talkies'
'new patents war').
As early as 1935. the five Major Companies
(Paramount, Warner, MGM, Fox, RKO) and the three
Minor (Universal, Colun1bia, United Anists) were
totally controlled by bankers and financiers, often
directly linked to one con1pany or another. Big Busi-
ness's grip on Hollywood had already translated itself
(aside from economic management and the ideologi-
cal orientation of the American Cinema) into the
regrouping of the eight companies in the MPPA
(Motion Pictures Producers Association) and the cre-
ation of a central system of self-censorship (the Hays
code - the American bank is known to be puritanical:
the major shareholder of the Metropolitan in New
York, Morgan, exercised a real censorship on its
programmes).
It was precisely in 1935 that, under the aegis of the
Chase National Bank, William Fox's Fox (founded in
1914) merged with Darryl F. Zanuck's 20th Century
Productions, to fom1 20th Century Fox, where Zanuck
became vice-president and took control.
During the sa,ne period, and mainly in 1937-38
the American cinemas suffered from a very serious
drop in box-office receipts (this is first attributed to
the consequences of the recession, then. with the situ-
ation getting worse, to lack of regeneration of
Hollywood's stock of stars); the bank's boards, very
worried, ordered a maxi,nun1 reduction in costs of prod1u-
tion. This national marketing crisis (in a field in which
Hollywood films previously covered their entire costs,
foreign sales being n1ainJy a source of profits) was
n1ade even worse by the reduced income fron1 foreign
sales; this was due to tht> political situation in Europe.
the gradual closure of the Gerrnan and Italian 1narkets
to American films, and the currency blockad~· sec up
by thest' two countries.
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215
3. The USA in 1938-9
In 1932, in the middle of the economic cns1s, the
Democrat Roosevelt became President, succeeding
the Republican Hoover whose policies, both eco-
nomic (favourable to the trusts, deffationist) and social
(leaving local groups and charitable organisations to
deal with unemployment: cf Mr Deeds Goes to Tow11,
Capra) had been incapable of avoiding the crisis and
also of suppressing its effects. Roosevelt's policies
were the opposite; federal intervention in the whole
country's economic and social life. States as private
powers (New Deal); establishn1ent of federal interven-
tion and public works agencies, impinging on the
rights and areas previously reserved to State legislature
and private companies; a controlled economy, social
budget etc.): so ,nany measures which encountered
violent opposition from the Republicans and Big
Business. In 1935 they succeeded: the Supreme Coun
declares Roosevelt's federal economic intervention
agencies to be unconstitutional (because they interfere
with the rights of the States). But Roosevelt's second
victory in 1936 smashed these n1anoeuvres, and the
Supreme Coun, threatened with refom1, ended up by
recognising the New Deal's social policies and (among
others) the right to unionise.
At the level of the structures of An1erican society,
the crisis and its ren1edies have caused the strengthen-
ing of the federal State and increased its control over
the individual States and the Trust's policies: by its
'conditional subsidies', its nationwide economic pro-
grammes, its social regulations, the federal government
took control of vast areas which had previously
depended only on the authority of the States and on
the interests of free enterprise. In 1937, 'the dualist'
interpretation of the 10th amendn1ent of the Consti-
tution - which forbade any federal intervention in the
economic and social policies of the States (their private
domain) - was abrogated by the Supreme Coun fron1
its judgments. This strengthening of federal power at
all levels had the effect of ir1creasi11~ r/ie Preside111's
pmver.
But, as early as 1937. a new econon1ic crisis
l'n1erged: econo1nic activity dropped by 37% co111-
pared to I 929, the nun1ber of une,nployed was agJin
ovt>r 10 n1illion in 1938, and despite the reffoating of
111ajor public works, stayed at 9 nlillion in 1939 (cf
11,e C rapes<>( l·Vrath). The \\'ar (anns industries beco111-
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
216 Editors of Cahiers du Cinema
ing pn.·don1inant in the eco110111y) was to ht'lp end
the new crisis by allowing full en1ployn1ent ...
Federal centralisn1, isolationism. econontic reor-
ganisation (including HollY"vood). strengthening of
the De1nocrat-Republican opposition, new threats of
intt.>n1al and intt.>n1ational crisis. crisis and rt>strictions
in Holly"vood itself; such is tht.> fairly gloo1ny context
of the Y1>111~~ i\·lr Li11ci>/11 ( 1939) undertaking.
It is no doubt ditlicult, but necessary to attt·ntpt to
esti111ate the total and rt·spective in1portance of tht·st·
factors to the project and the ideological '111e~sagt' · oi
tht· filn1. In Hollywood. n1ore th.in any~·here else the
cinenta is not 'innocent·. Creditor of the capitalist
systent, subject to its constraints. its crise.s. its contra-
dictions, the A111erican cine111a. the 111ain instru111t.>11t
of the idt.>ological super-stn1rture. is heavily deter-
n1ined at every level of its existence. As a product oi
tht• capitalist systt·nt and of its ideology. its rolt" is in
turn to reproduct· the one and tht•n~by to help the
~urvival of the other. Each fihn , however, is inserted
into this circuit acrording to its specificity, and there
has been no analysis if one is content to say that
eat·h Holly,vood tihn continns and spreads the
ideology of An1erican capitalisn1: it is the precise
articulations (rarely the sa111e front one fihn to the
next) of the tihn and oi the: ideoloi,,,y ,vhich 111ust be
studied (sec I).
4. Fox and Zanuck
20th Century Fox (which produced Y,>111~i: ,\ ·I r Li11cc>/11).
bt·cause of its links with Big Business, also supports
the Republican Party. Front its inception the R epub-
lic.in Party has been the party of the '(;reat Fa1nilies·.
Associatl'd with (and an instrun1ent of) industrial
develop111ent, it rapidly beca111e the 'party of Big Busi-
ness' and follo,vs its social and eco no1nic din:ctives:
protectionis111 to assist industry, anti-unionist struggle.
111oral reaction and racis111 (directed against inunigrants
,ind Blacks - ,,·hon1 the party had fleetingly cha1npi-
oned in Lincoln's ti111e: but it is conunon kno,vledgt·
'
that this ,vas due once again to econon1ic reasons and
to pressures front religious groups. group~ ,vhich tifry
years later ,vere to lead a ca111paign ag.1inst t'verything
that is ·unan1erican ·.
In po\\·er froni I ')28 to I 1)32 ,vith Hoover as
president. tltl' R.epublican Party is tin.111(ed b\' sonll·
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of Hollywood's n1asters (Rockefeller, Dupont dt"
Ncn1ours, General Motors, etc.). At th e elections in
1928 87'¾, of the people listed in iv1,o's i-t-1,,, i11
An,erica supported Hoover. He has put the under-
writers of Capital at key posts in the adntinistration:
the Secretary to the Trc:asury is none other than
Mellon. the richest 111an in the world (take an ex.1111ple
of his policies: he brings do,vn the inco,ne tax ceiling
fron1 65'¼, in I 919 to 5(r¼, in I 921. and 26'};, in
I 929).
Forced bv• Roosevelt to 111ake a 11u111bcr of conces-
sions, A111erican Big Business goes to ,var agains1
the New Deal as soon as the inunediate effects oi the
depression decrease (for exa111ple, the privatt' electric-
ity co111panies withdra,v tht·ir advertising - ,vhich,
in the USA is equivalent to a dt>ath sentence - front
the ne,vspapers ,vhich support Roosl·velt .u,d his
Tennessee Valley Authority) and they do everything
in their power to ,vin the 1940 elc:crion.
All this allov,is us to assu111e that in 1938-9. Fox.
111anaged by the (also) R.epublican Zanuck. partici-
pated in its o,vn " 'ay in the Republican oficnsivt· b,·
producing a tiln1 on the legend.iry character Lincoln.
()f all the Ilepublican Presidents. he is not only 1ht·
111ost lan1ous. but on the ,vhole the only one capablt'
of attr;1cting 111ass support. bec.iuse of his hun1blc
orii:-,ins. his si1nplicity, his righteousness. his historical
role. and the le!:(endary aspects of his career and his
death.
This choice is. no doubt, all th e lt·ss fortuitous on
thl' part of Fox (,vhich - through Zanuck and th e
contracted product'r Kenneth Macgowan - is as usual
rl'sponsible for taking the initiative in the project, and
not Ford) that during the preceding season. the Den,-
ocrat Shenvood's play · Abe Lincoln in Illinois· had
been a great sut·ce,s on Uroadway. With very likely
the sin1ult.1neous concern to anticipate the adaptations
planned in Hollywood of Sherwood's play (John
( :ron1,vell's fihn with Ray111ond Massc:y ca111e out the
sanll· year and, unlike Ford's. ,vas very successful), and
to rt·verse the in1pact of the play and of Lincoln's n1vth
in favou r oi the I,epublicans. Zanuck inunediately put
Y,,1111.~ ,'\.Jr Li11c1>/11 into production - it would, ho,vever.
be ~vron!:( to l'xagp;er.lte the tihn 's political detern1in-
is1n ,vhit'h c:1nnot. under .iny circun1stances. be seen.
in contr.ist. tor exa111pk·. to Zanuck's personal produc-
tions. 'f/11· c:;,.,,pc.< ,,f l·Fr,11/,, or li :ils,111, as pro111oting the
co n1pany's linl·.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 John Ford's Young Mr Lincoln
---
Figur• 23.1 Fordian Americana with W,11 R og,·r~ 111J111(~r />nr11 (Fox F,lrn. l'IJ4). Produc,·d h)' Sol \Vurtzd
Producer Kenneth Macgowan's past is that of a
f.1111ous theatre n1 an. Along \Vith R obert Ed1nond
Jon es and Eugene O'NeiU. he has been n1anager of
th e Provincetown Playhouse; they had had a consider-
able influence o n An1eri can theatre. A friend of Ford"s,
whon1 he n1et at R.KO during the period of the 11,e
l11{onner. he 111oved over to Fox in 1935 (there he
pro duced Four 1\llc11 a11d a Prayer among o thers) and
b eca me the 111an responsible for h iqorical biographies
which co nstitute the cort' o f the co111pan y' s
productions.
Yo1111N 1'vlr Li11ro/11 is far fro ,n being one of Fox's
n1ost i111porta11t productions in 1939. but this fi.l.111 \ VJS
shot in particularl y favourab le conditions; it is one of
the few cases in which the o riginal undertaking was
lea.~t distorted, at least at the production stage: of thirty
filins produced by Macgo\.va n in th e eigh t years he
spent at Fox ( 1935-43) lh1s is oue of the 0 11.ly nvo
whj ch ,vere \Vritten by onl y one script\vriter (La1nar
Trotti) (the o tht' r bt·ing The Rc11,r11 of Fra11k J ,11111"s.
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217
written by S. M . H elln1an). Ano th er thing to remark
on: these t\vo scri pts w ere \vritten in close collabo ra-
tion with th e directors, wh o were, th erefore, involved
at a very ea rl y stage instead o f being chosc-n at the
last 111jnute, ,15 is the custo111, even at Fox (the 'directors
studio'). Ford even says of th e script: ' W e \Vrote it
together' (~rith L. T rotti). a rare if not exceptional
staten1ent contlng fro1n hi111.
La111ar Trotti had already written two con1edics
on o ld An1erica for Ford (of the species known as
•An1ericana'). J11~~e J>rfrs1 and Stea111boa1 Round the
&·nd. before specialising in historical fi ln1s \vith Fox
(s uch as Dn1111s A /011}? the /i,l()/1a1vk. directed by Ford
afier Yo1111g 1\,/r U,uo/11) .
T he back~o und to a ,vhole section of th e scrip t
is the obsession ,vi ch lyn chj11g and legality ,vhich is
so srrong in the thirties· ci ne111a. because of thr increase
in expcditivr: j usti ce Oy nching), thr: consequences of
gangsccris111. the rebirth of terrorist orga nizations su ch
as tht' KKK (cf Lang's Fury, M ervyn LcR.oy•~ Tltt·)'
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
218 Editors of Cahiers du Cinema
Won't Forget, Archie Mayo's Black Legion). Trotti, a
southerner (he was born in Atlanta and had been
a crime reporter before editing a local Hearst paper),
combined one of Lincoln's most famous anecdotes
with a memory from his youth. 'When Trotti was a
reporter in Georgia he had covered the trial of two
young men accused of murder at which their mother,
the only witness, would not tell which son had com-
n1itted the crime. Both were hanged' (Robert G.
Dickson, 'Kenneth Macgowan' in Films in Review,
October I 963). In Lincoln's story, a witness stated
having seen, in the moonlight, an acquaintance of
Lincoln's (Duff Armstrong) participate in a murder.
Using an aln1anac as evidence, Lincoln argued that the
night was too dark for the witness to have seen any-
thing and thus obtained Armstrong's acquittal with
this plea.
5. Ford and Lincoln
Ford had already spent the greater part of his career
with Fox: he n1ade thirty-eight movies between 1920
and 1935! Since Zanuck's take-over, he had nude
four n1ovies in two years, the first in 1936, The Pris-
oner of Shark Island ('I haven't killed Lincoln'). Thus
it was to one of the company's older and more trust-
worthy directors that the project was entrusted. The
sarne year, again with Zanuck, Ford shot Drums Along
the Moha1vk (whose ideological orientation is glaringly
obvious: the struggle of the pioneers, side by side with
Washington and the Whigs against the English in
alliance with the Indians) and in 1940 11,e Grapes of
1¥rath which paints a very gloomy portrait of the
An1erica of 1938-39. Despite the fact that he calls
hin1self a-political \Ve know that Ford in any case
greatly adn1ires Lincoln as a historical figure and as a
person: Ford, too, clai111s hun1ble peasant origins - but
this closeness with Lincoln as a nian is, however,
n1oderated by the fact that Ford is also, if not pri111ar-
ily, Irish and Catholic.
In 1924 already, in 11,e Iri,11 Horse, Lincoln appears
as favouring the construction of the intercontinental
railway (industry and unification); at the beginning of
11,c Prisoner of Shark Isla11d we see Lincoln requesting
'Dixie' fron1 an o rchestra after the Civil War (this is
the tune which he 'already' plays in )'(11111.~ Afr U11ra/11):
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syn1bolically, the emphasis is put on Lincoln's unifying.
nonvindictive side and his deep southern sympathies
by means of the hymn of the Confederation; in
Sergeant Rutledge (1960) he is evoked by the Blacks as
their Saviour; the anti-slavery aspect; in How the West
Was Won (1962) the strategist is presented; finally in
Cheyenne Autumn (1964), a cornered politician tum~
to a portrait of Lincoln, presented as the model for
the resolution of any crisis.
Each of these films thus concentrates on a particu-
lar aspect either of Lincoln's synthetic personality or
of his co1nplex historical role; he thus appears to be
a sort of universal referent which can be activated in
all situations. As long as Lincoln appears in Ford's
fiction as a myth, a figure of reference, a syrnbol of
America, his intervention is natural, apparently in
con1plete hannony with Ford's morality and ideology;
the situation is different in a film like Young A-fr LJncol11
where he becomes the protagonist of the fiction. W e
will see that he can only be inscribed as a Fordian
character at the expense of a number of distortions
and reciprocal assaults (by hirn on the course of fiction
and by fiction on his historical truth).
6. Ideological Undertaking
What is the subject of Young Mr Lincoln? Ostensibly
and textually it is 'Lincoln's youth' (on the classic
cultural model - 'Apprenticeship and Travels') . In fact
- through the expedient of a simple chronicle of
events presented (through the presence and actualisa-
tion effect specific to classic cinenia) as if they Wt"re
taking place for the first tin1e under our eyes, it is the
refom,ulation of the historical figure of Lincoln on the
level of the n1yth and the eternal.
This ideological project n1ay appear to be clear and
si1nple - of the edifying and apologetic type. Of
course, if one considers its statements alone, extracting
it as a separable ideoh,~i<al statement disconnected from
the complex network of deternunations through
which it is realized and inscribed - through which it
possibly even criticises itst"lf - then it is easy to operate
an illusory deconstruction of the fihn through J
reading of the demystificatory type (see 1). Our work,
on the contrary, will consist in activating this network
in its co111plexity, wh('rt" philosophical assu1nptions
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UNIVERSITY OF-Ml"(HIGAM - -~-
 John Ford 's Young Mr Lincoln
(idealisn1, theologis111), political detenninations (repub-
licanisn1, capitalis111) and the relatively auto1101nous
aesthetic process (characters, cinen1atic si~11!fiers, narra-
tive mode) specific to Ford's writing, intervene
simultaneously. If our work, which will necessarily be
held to the linear sequentiality of the discourse, should
isolate the orders of detem1ination interlocking in the
fihn. it will always be in the perspective of their rela-
tions: it therefore den1ands a recurrent reading, on all
leveh.
7. Methodology
r,,1111~ 1\:/r Li11co/11, like the vast majority of Hollywood
fihns, follows linear and chronological narrative, in
which events appear to follow each other according
to a cenain 'natural' sequence and logic. Thus two
options were open to us: either, in discussing each of
the detennining moments, to sin1ultaneously refer to
all the scenes involved; or to present each scene in it~
fictional chronological 1,rt/1·r and discuss the different
detennining moments, emphasising in each case ,vhat
we believe to be the 111ain deten11inant (the key sig-
nification), and indicating the secondary detem1inants,
,vhich n1ay in tum becon1e the 1nain determinant in
other scenes. The first method thus sets up the film
as the object of a reading (a text) and then supposedly
takes up the totality of its overdetennination networks
simultaneously, witlio11t taking acco1u11 o_f tl,e repressive
operatio11 which, in each scene. determines the realisa-
tion of a key signification; while the second n1ethod
based itself on the key s(11n[/uation o_f eacl, sce11e, in order
to understand the scriptural operation (overdetenni-
narion and repression) which has set it up.
The first method has the drawback of turning the
filn1 into a text which is readable a priori; the second
has the advantage of n1aking the reading itself panici-
pate in the .fi/,11 's process of beco,ni11_l!-a-tcxt, and of
authorising such a reading only by what authorises it
in each successive moment of the fihn. We have there-
fore chosen the latter n1ethod. The fact that the course
of our reading will be modelled on the 'cutting' of
the film into sequences is absolutely intentional,
but the work will involve breaking down the closures
of the individual scenes by setting then1 in action ,vith
each other and i11 each other.
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219
8. The Poem
After the credits (and in the san1e graphic style: i.e.
engr.ived in 111arble) there is a poe111 ,vhich consists
of a nutnber of questions which 'if she were to co1ne
back on eanh •. Lincoln's n1other ,vould ask, concen1-
i11g the destiny of her son.
(a) Let us sin1ply observe for the n101nent that the
figure of the n1other is inscribed fron1 the stan, and
that it is an absent Mother, already dead, a syn1bolic
figure who will only later 1nake her full i1npact.
(b) The enun1eration of questions on the other
hand progranunes the developn1ent of the filn1 by
designating Lincoln•s problernatic as being that of a
choice: the interrog.itive fonn of this poern, like a
n1atrix, generates the binary systen1 (the necessity to
choose betwren two careers, two pies, two plaintiffs.
two defrndants, etc.) according to which the fiction
is organised f... J.
(c) In fact, the main function of the poe111, ,vhich
pretends that the questions posed therein haven't yet
been answered (,vhereas they are only the si1nulatio11
of questions since they presume the spectator's knowl-
edge of Lincoln's l,istorical character). is to set up the
dualist nature of filn1 and to initiate the process of a
double reading. By inviting the spectator to ask
hin1self 'questions• to which he already has the
answers, the poem induces hi1n to look at history -
son1ething which, for hi111, has already happened - as
if it were 'still to happen'. Similarly by on the one
hand playing on a fictional structure of the 'chronicle·
type ('natural' juxtaposition and succession of events,
as if they were not dictated by any detenninis111 or
directed towards a necessary end), and on the other
hand by contriving, in the scenes where a crucial
choice must be n1ade by the character, a margin of
feig11ed i11decisive11e_ss (as if the gan1e had not already
been played, Lincoln had not entered history. and as
if he was taking every one of his decisions on the
spot, in the present), the film thus effect.~ a 11a111ralis,1-
1io11 of the Lincolnian myth (which already exists as
such in the 111ind of the spectator).
The retroactive action of the spectator's lu10,vl-
edge of the n1yth on the chronicle of events, and
the naturalist re,vriting of the n1yth in the divisions
of this chronicle thus irnpose a reading in the future
perfect. 'What is realised in 111y story is not the past
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
220 Editors of Cahiers du Cinema
definite of v.,hat once was since it is no rnore, nor
the perfect of what has been in what I arn, but the
future perfect of what I will have been for what I arn
in the process of becon1ing' (Lacan).
A classic ideolOJ!i<al operation n1anifests itself here,
nonnally, through questions asked after the event
,vhose answer, which has already been given, is the
very condition for the existence of the question.
9. The Electoral Speech
First scene. A politician dressed in townclothes (John
T . Stuart, later to becorne Lincoln's associate in Spring-
field) addrt'Sses a few fanners. He denounces the
conupt politicians who are in power and Andrew
Jackson, President of the USA; he then introduces the
local candidate whon1 he is sponsoring: young Lincoln.
The first shot, in which we see Lincoln, shows hin1
sitting on a barrel leaning backwards, in shirtsleeves,
\\'t·aring heavy boots (one recognises the classic casual-
ness of Ford's hero, who has returned and/or is above
everything). In the next shot, addressing the audience
of farn1ers, Lincoln in a friendly tone (but not without
a hint of nervousness) declares: 'My politics art' short
and sweet like your ladit's' dances; I an1 in f.1vour of
a National Dank and for everybody's participation in
\vealth.' His first words are 'You all know who I ani,
plain Abrahan1 Lincoln' - this is n1eant not only for
the spt'ctators in the filn1, \vho are any,vay absent &0111
the screen, but also to involve the spt'ctato r of th e
n1ovie, brought into the cinernatic space: thus this
treatrnent in the future perfect is i111111ediately con-
finned (see 8).
This prograrnn1e is that of the Whig party, at that
tin1e in opposition. It is in essence the prograr11n1e or
nascent Arnerican capitalisrn: protectionisrn to favour
national industrial production, National Hank to
favour the circulation of capital in ~11 the states. The
tirst point traditionally has a place in the pro!:!ranune
of the l,epublic;111 Party (it is thus ea~ily rtTogni,able
to the spect:itor of 1')39): the second c .ills to n1ind a
point in history: -.vhile in po\vCr befi.ire 1830, the:
Whi!-,"- had crt•att·d a National Uank (hc:lping. indus-
trial dt·vc:loprnc:11t in the North) ,vhose po,vc:rs Jackson,
,vho succt"t"dt·d thern. atten1ptt·d to \V1;";1kt•n: the
dt'ti.·nct· of thi~ hank \Vas th us ont· of the: dc:1n.1nds of
the: Whi!,rs, \vho later bc:carnl' llt·puhlic.111,.
Digitized by Google
(a) The specifically political notations which intro-
duce the film, have the obvious function of presenting
Lincoln as the candidate (that is, in the future perfect.
the President, the champion) of the Republicans.
(b) But the scorn which is im,nediately sho\vn
to,vards the 'conupt politicians' and the strength in the
constrast of Lincoln's progranm1e which is sin1ple as
'a dance'. have the effect of introducing hi111 (and
the Republicans in his wake) as the opposition and the
remedy to such 'politics•. Furthenuore we will see later
that it is not only his opponents· politics which are
•corrupt'. but all politics, condemned in the nan1e of
ntorality (the figure of Lincoln will be conrrasted, v.,ith
that of his opponent l)ouglas, with that of the prosecu-
tor, as the defc:nder of Justice versus the politicians.
the:- Uncon1pron1ising versus the manipulators) .
This disparagen1ent of politics carries and confinns
the idealist project of the film (see 4 and 6): rnoral
virtues are worth n1ore than political guile, the Spirit
rnore than the Word (cf 4, 6, 8). (Likewise, politics
appears again, later. as the object of discussion an1ong
dnrnks - quarrel between J.P. Cass and his acolyte - or
of socialite conversation: carriage scene bt't\veen Mary
Todd and Douglas).
But what is rnost significant here is that the points
of the electoral progra11Une are the 011/y i11di<ati,,11s oi
a p,,sitil'r rrlati,>11 bet,vet'n Lincoln and politics. all
othc:rs being nc:gativc: (separating Lincoln &0111 the
n1,1ss of 'politicians').
(c) We 111ay be surprised that a fihu on Lincoln \
youth could thus ernpty out the truly political din1t·n-
sion frorn the career of the future President. This
n1assivc on1ission is too useful to the filn1's ideologicJI
purpost> to be fortuitous. By playing once again on
the: spt·ctator's knowledge of Lincoln's political and
historical role it is possible to establish the idc:a that
these \\'ert' founded on and validated by a Mor.ility
superior to all politics (.u1d could thus be neglectt"d
in favour of tht·ir c:ause) and that Lincoln ah,·ays
dra\vs his prl·stige and his strt'ngth front an intin1.1te
rt·lationship \Vith La,v. lron1 a (natural and/or divine:)
knowll'd!,!t' of (;ood and Evil. Lincoln starts \Vith poli-
ti cs but soon risc:s to thl· rno ral level. divine right.
v,hi ch lilr an idt•alist di~course - originates and valo-
risl·s all politics. Indc:l·d. the first scene of the fihn
already sho-.vs Lint·oln as a political candidate without
providing any infc.inn:1tion either on what n1ay hJvt'
brou!,:ht hirn to this stagt·: .-,,11a·,1/n11"11t •!( ,1r(~i11s (both
Original from
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 John Ford's Young Mr Lincoln
his personal - f.an1ily - origins and those of his politi-
cal knowledge, however basic: that is 'his education')
which establishes the n1ythical nature of the character;
or on the results of this electoral campaign (we know
that he \vas defeated, and that the Republicans' failure
resulted in the shelving of the National Bank, an1ong
other things): as if they were in fact of no itnportance
in the light or the already evident significance of f.1te
and the 111yth. Lincoln's character makes all politics
appear trivial.
But this very repression of politics, on which the
ideological undertaking of the filn1 is based, is itself a
direa result of political assun1ptions (the eten1al false
idealist debate between n1orality and politics: Des-
cartes versus Machiavelli) and at the level of its
reception by the spectator, this repression is not
,vithout consequences of an equally political nature.
We know that the ideology of An1erican Capit1lis111
(and the Republican Party which traditionally repre-
sents it) is to assert its divine right, to conceptualise
it in terms of pennanence, naturalisn1 and even biology
(cf Benjan1in Franklin's fa1nous fom1ula: 'Re111en1ber
that n1oney has genital potency and fecundity') and
to extol it as a universal Good and Power. The enter-
prise consisting of the conceahnent of politics (of
social relations in An1erica, of Lincoln's career) under
the idealist n1ask of Morality has the effect of regilding
the cause of Capital with the gold of n1yth, by 1nani-
testing the ' spirituality' in which A1nerican Capitalis111
believes it finds its origins and sees its eten1al justifica-
tion. The seeds of Lincoln's future were already sown
in his youth - the future of America (its eten1al
values) is already written into Lincoln's n1oral virtues.
,vhich include the Republican Party and Capitalisn1.
(d) Finally, with the total suppression of Lincoln's
political din1ension. his 1nain historico-political char-
acteristic disappears fron1 the scene of the filn1: i.e. his
stn1ggle against the Slaver States. Indeed, neither in
the initial political sequence. nor in the rest of the
fihn is this do111inant characteristic of his history, of
his legend even, indit"ated, whereas it is n1ainly to it
that Lincoln owes his being inscribed into A111erican
history mon,• than any other President (l{.epublican or
otherwise).
Strangely enough, only one allusion is 111ade to
slavery (this exception has the value of a signal) :
Lincoln explains to the defendants' fa111ily that he had
to leave his native state since '\vith all tht· slavt·s corning
Digitized by Google
221
in, white folks just had a hard tin1e n1aking a living'.
The fact that this con1ment en1phasises the econon1ic
aspects of the problen1 at the expense of its moral and
hun1anitarian aspects would appear to contradict the
points outlined above (primacy of n1orality over poli-
tics) if Lincoln had not spoken these words in a scene
[... ) where he puts hirnself in the i111aginary role of
the son of the poor fanner family. He recalls his ov.'n
origins as a poor white who, like everyone else, suf-
fered fro111 unen1ploy111ent. The accent is thus put on
the econonuc proble111, i.e. the problem of the whites,
not the blacks.
The not-said here, this exclusion fron1 the scene of
the fihn of Lincoln's n1ost notable political dimension,
can also not be fortuitous (the 'omission' would be
enonnous!), it too n1ust have political sign!fica11ce.
On the one hand, it was indeed necessary to present
Lincoln as the unifier, the harmoniser, and not the
divider of An1erica (this is ,vhy he likes playing 'Dixie':
he is a Southerner). On the other hand, we know that
the Republican Party, abolitionist by economic oppor-
tunisn1, after the Civil War rapidly reappeared as niore
or less racist and segregationist. (Already, Lincoln was
in favour of a progressive e111ancipation of the blacks.
which would only slowly give them equal rights with
the whites). He never concealed the restrictions he
asked for concen1ing the integration of blacks. Con-
sidering the political in1pact that the filn1 could havC:'
in the context described above (see 3, 4) it ,vould
have been in bad taste on both these accounts to insist
on Lincoln's liberating role.
This feature is thus silenced, excluded fron1 the
hero's youth, as if it had not appeared until later, when
all the legendary figure's othC:'r features are given by
the fiJn1 as present frorn the outset and are given value
by this predestination.
The shelving of this dirnension (the Civil War)
which is directly responsible for the Lincolnian Legend
thus allows a political use of th is legend and at the
sa111e ti111e by l'astrating Lincoln of his historico-
politic:11 dirnension, reinforces the idealisation of the
111yth.
Uut the exclusion of this doniinant sign fron1
Lincoln's politics is also possible because all 1/,c ,Jtlwrs
are rapidly pushed out (except for the brief positive
and negative notations nientioned above which in
any case are in play as i11dirators - of the general reprt·~-
sion of politit·s - and of stan1ping of the Republit"an
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
222 Editors of Cahiers du Cinema
cause by the st>al of the Myth) and because this fact
plact>s the fihu inunediately on the purely ideological
plane (Lincoln "s a-historical di111ension. his syn1bolic
value).
Thus what P"!icas tlze politic.ii 111ra11i1\(! of the filrn
is not a directly political discourse: it is a 111oralisi11,I!
disc()11rse. History, almost totally reduced to the ti111e
scale of the n1yth with neither past nor fi.rture can
thus at best only survive in the fihn in the form of a
spe.-i/ic repetiti()11: on the teleological n1odel of history
as a continuous and linear develop111ent of a pre-
t>xisting Sl'l'd, of the future contained in the past
(anticipation, predestination). Everything is there, all
the features and characters of the historical scene are
in their place (Mary Todd who will becon1e Lincoln's
wife, Douglas whon1 he will beat at the presidential
elections, etc, right up to Lincoln's death: in a scene
,,..hich Fox cut, before the filn1 was first released. one
could see Lincoln stop in front of a theatre presenting
Hantlet and facing one of the (Booth tan1ily) troupe
of actors - his future n1urderer), the problernatic of
deciding [... ) and of unifying is already posed ... The
only rnissing thing is the rnain historical feature,
this being the one on \,vhich the rnyth was tirst
constructed.
But such reprt>ssion is possible (acceptable by the
spectator) only inasn1uch as the fihn plays on what is
already k11011111 about Lincoln treating it as if it were a
fi1<.:tor of 11011-rcco.1111iti,,11 and at the lirnit, a not-kno,vn
(at least, sornething that nobody v.•ants to kno,,.. an y
rnore, which for having been known is all the n1ort'
easily forgotten): it is the already constituted force of
tht' myth which allows not only its reproduction, but
also its reorientation. It is the universal knowledge of
Lincoln's fate ,vhich allows, while restating it, tht>
0111ission of parts of it. For the proble111 here is not
to build a ,nyth, but to negotiate it~ realisation and
even 111ore to rid it of its historical roots in order
to liberate its universal and eternal n11:aning. ' Told'.
Lincoln's youth is in fact rc11'1itte11 by ,vhat has to filter
through the Lincolnian n1yth. The fihn e~tablisht's not
only Lincoln's total predestination (tt·leolo!!ic.11 axis)
but also that ,,11/y t/rat t,> ll'l1id1 /rl' /1,1s bcc11 s/r,n111 t<l t,,.
prl'dc,tincd descrvt·s inunortality (tl1t·ok>i-,rical axis). A
double operation of addition and subtraction at the
end of which the historic.11 axis. havin!! bt·t·n abolisht'd
.ind ,nythifitd. retu rns ck·.1n~ed of .111 i111puritit·s and
Digitized by Google
thus recuperable to the service not just of Morality
but of the rnorJliry re- asserted by capitalist ideolo~·.
Morality not only rejects politics and surpassc:s history.
it also re,vrites then1.
10. The Book
Lincoln ·s electoral speech seen1s to open up a ticrion:
electoral can1paign, elections ... A problern is pre-
sented. which we have the right to expect to sce
solved, but which in fact will not be solved. To use
the Barthesian fom1ula, we have the c.-len1ents of a
hermeneutic chain: enign1a (will he or won't he bt'
elected?) and non-resolution. This chain is abandoned
by the use of an abrupt fictional displacement: the
arrival of the fanuly of fam1ers. Lincoln is called a,vay
to help the111. This farnily comprises the father. the
n1other and two ~·elve year old boys. They ,vant to
buy so1ne rnaterial fi-0111 Lincoln thus infonning us of
his occupation: he is a shopkeeper. But the fan1ily has
no money: Lincoln offers the111 credit. and confronted
by the n1other's e1nbarass1nent, argues that he hin1self
has acquired his shop on credit. The situation is
resolved by the use of barter: the fan1ily owns a barrt."I
full of old books (left behind by the grandfather).
Delighted at the rnere mention of a book (legendary
thirst for reading) Lincoln respectfully takes one out
of the barrel: as !f by c/1.i,rce, it is Blackstone ·s 'Co1n-
n1entaries'. He dusts the book, opens it. reads. real ist·s
that it is about Law (he says: 'La"•') and is delighted
that the book is in good condition (the La,v is
indestructible).
(a) It's a .fa111ily I- .. I of pioneers who are p,zssi11.I!
t/11,>11)!/, that gives Lincoln the opportunity of coining
in contact ,,..ith Lavv: en1phasis on the luck-predestina-
tion connection as well as on the fact that ev"" ,,,;,1,,,,,,
k11,,,,,;,,_1! it it is the hurnble who transn1it La,v (rt'li-
i-,,iously kept by the fanuly as a legacy frorn the
ancestor). <. )n the other hand we have here a classic
Fordian fictional ft·ature (apart fron1 the fanuly as a
displaced ct·ntrc): 111ceting and exchange between t,,·o
!!fOUp~ ,vhose paths need not have crossed (a ne,v
fictional st·quence is bon1 &0111 this very n1eering: it
is first prc~cnted as a suspension and simple digressive
delay of tht' n1.1in narrativt· axis. later it constirutes
itst·lf as bt•ing ct·ntr.11. until another sequ ent·e arises.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 John Ford's Young Mr Uncoln
functioning in the san1e n1ode, Ford's total fiction
existing finally only as an articulation of successive
digressions).
(b) Lincoln makes a brief but precise speech in
praise of credit: ' I give you credit' - 'I don't like credit'
(says the farmer-won1an incarnating the digniry of the
poor) - 'I n1yself bought n1y shop on credit': when
one is aware of the role played by the extension of
credit in the 1929 crisis, this kind of publiciry slogan
uttered by an American hero (who later, with ever
increasing en1phasis will be the Righteous man) tends
to appear as a fonn of exorcism: without credit, the
development of capital is impossible; in a period of
recession (1 935-40) when unemployment is high and
wages have gone down, the n1aintenance of the level
of consumption is the only thing which allows indus-
try to carry on,
(c) The fact that Law is acquired by barter intro-
duces a circuit of debt and repay1nents which is to
run through the fihn (see 23).
(d) The principle function of this sequence is to
introduce a nun1ber of constituent elen1ents of the
sy111bolic scene from which the filn1 is to proceed, by
varyin_!! and activating it (in this sense it is the true
expository scene of the fiction, the first scene becon1-
ing pretextual and possibly even extra-textual): The
Book and the Law, the Fa1nily and the Son, exchange
and debt, predestination ... This setting up of the fic-
tional matrix means puttin~ aside the first sequence
(political speech): a simple digression, first believed to
be temporary, but then seen to be in fact the first
step in the operation of the repression of politics by
rnoraliry which will continue through the whole fihn
(see 9).
I. . -I
24. Work of the Film
With the fiction reaching saturation point here, ,vhat
culn1inates in the final sequence is nothing other than
the effects of meaning, re-scanned by our reading
through the filn1 as a whole, taken to their extrernc.
That is: the unexpected results (\vhich are also con-
trary in relation to the ideological project) produced
by the inscription - rather than flat illustration - of
this project within a cinen1atic texture and its trt"at-
Digitized by Google
223
ment by a writing which, in order to carry through
the project successfully, maximising its value and only
that (it's obvious that Ford takes practically no distance
in relation to the figure and the ideology of Lincoln)
is led to: such distortions (the setting up of a systen1
of deception); such omissions (all those scenes, neces-
sary in the logic of the crin1e thriller but whose
presence could have lessened the miraculous din1en-
sion of Lincoln's omnipotence: the confrontation with
the accused, the least one could expect of a lawyer);
such accentuations (the dramatisation of the final
scenes); such scriptural violence (be it for the repres-
sion of violence - the lynching, the trial); such a
systemisation of detennination and election (through-
out a film which at the sa111e tin1e wants to play on
a certain suspense and free choice without which the
fiction could neither develop nor capture interest); in
short to such a 1vork that today sin1ply delimiting its
operation and the series of 1neans it puts into action
allows us to see the price at which such a film could
be n1ade, the effort and detours demanded to carry
the project through.
And which Jean- Pierre Oudart in the following con-
clusion, the point of departure of our study, cannot
but repeat.
25. Violence and Law
I. A discourse on the Law produced in a society
which can onJy represent it as the staten1ent and
practice of a n1oralist prohibition of all violence,
Ford's filn1 could onJy reassert all the idealist repre-
sentations which have been given it. Thus it is not
very difficult to extract from it an ideological state-
n1ent which see111S to valorise in all innocence tht'
ascetic rigour of its agent, 1naking it into the unalter-
able value ,vhich circulates throughout the filn1 fron1
scene to scene; it is also easy to observe that this
cliche, presented as such in the filn1 and systematically
accentuated, is not there 1nerely to ensure the accept-
ability of the Fordian inscription. Without this
cliche which provides the fiction \Vith a kind of n1et-
onynuc continuiry (the san1e constantly re-assertt'd
figure) - whose necessiry is n1oreover overdetermined.
it's function being n1ore than simply setting up a
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 -
•

224 Editors of Cahiers du Cinema

Figurte 23.2 rhc lawyer ,nd liuurc prc<idtnt (Henry Fonda) defonds the fanuly and the Liw 111 John Fo rd's
} '01111.~ ,~Ir L,t1rol11 (fwcnucrh Ccnrury Fox. I '139). Produrcd by l)arryl F. Z•nu,k

char.icter \\1hose 'idealisn1' can n1ost conveniently be
signified by the exten1al signs of the very puritan
sense of election - the fiJ111 ,vould appear, in fact dol'S
appear in spite of it, to be a text of disquieting unin-
telligibiJicy; through itS co nstant disconnections, it
places us in a forced position for the reading and in
fact its con1prehen~io11 de111ands:
( I)That one first take no account of this at once
insistent and fixed staten1ent;
(2) That one listens carefully to ,,.,hat is stated in
the succession o f so obviously 'Fordian · scenes
,vhich support this staten1 ent. and in the rr.:b -
tions bet,veen the figures, all n1ore or less part of
th t: Fo rdian fiction, ,vhich con~tinrte the~e
scenes:
(3) That one trie,; to detennine how all th ese are
involvl·d; i.e. to di~cover ,vhat the oper.itio n by
,vhich Fo rd inscribes this character into his
not traverse it like a foreign body. but finds
through this inscription into h is fiction a desig-
nated place as representative of his La,,.,; for the
fihn n1aker pron1otes the character to the role to
,vhich his (legendary) historical referent destines
hin1 only at the price of his subjection to the
(Fordian) fi ctio nal logic. This detem1ined his
entry there in advance in ofar as his role ,,·as
already written and his place already set o ur in
Fo rd 's fiction. Tht: \\' Ork of Ford's ecriture only
beco 111e apparent in this ftJ,n tl1rough the
prob len1 involved in producing the character in
this ro le, in th at he took a place ,vhich \\'JS
already occ upied.
11. It is the characct·r o f the 111o tl1er tl1at incar-
nates the idealised figure of Ideal Law in Ford"s fiction.
M o reover. it is often, as in )'0111~ !vlr Li11ro/11, die
,vidowed n1o tl1er. guardian of the deceased father"s la,v.
~

fiction consi~t~ o f, in~of:1r as, de~pite appearance~. It is for her that the 111en (the regi n1ent) sacrifice the
it is no t supt> ri1T1post"d o n Ford"s ·,,·orld .. dot's cau~e of their dt·~ire. :ind under her presidency tl1at

Original from
Digitized by Google UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 John Ford's Young Mr Lincoln
the Fordian celebration takes place; this in fact consists
in a simulacrun1 of sexual relations fron1 which all
etfective desire is banned. But it is in the constantly
renewed relationship of this group ,vith another (the
Indians). in the dualism of Ford's universe that the
inscription of the structural i1nperative of Law which
dictates the defennent of desire and in1poses exchange
and alliance is realised. in violence. guided by the
n1ediating action of the hero (often a bastard) ,vho is
placed at its intersection.
Ill. In Y,,1111.e Mr U11caln one of the results of
usi ng a single character for both roles is that he ,viii
have both their functions , which will inevitably create.\
by their interference and their inco1npatibility (insofar
as one secures the: taboo on the violence of dc:sire.
the otht:r is agent of it~ inscription). disturbances,
a..:tions ,vhich oppose the order of Ford's world. and
it is re1narkable that each con1ical effect ahvays sho,vs
then1 up (there is no fihn in which laughter is so
precisely a sign of a constant disorder of the universe).
The con1pression of their functions ,viii in fact be:
usc:d only on the one level of the castration of the
c haracter (signific:d at the ideological level by its
puritan cliche. and at the san1c: tin1e ,vritten, in the
unconscious of the text, as the effect of the fictional
logic on the structural determination of the character)
and of his castrating action. in a fiction ruled by Ideal
Law alone since the dualisn1 of Ford's world is aban-
doned in favour of the n1ass-individual opposition. (In
fact the political conflict intervenes only as a second-
ary detennination of the fiction and literally only act~
backstage). In fact, we see that:
(I). The character's calling originates in his renounc-
ing the pleasures of love; it is strc:ngthencd
because he resists its attraction: Lincoln becon1es
so well integrated in the: fiction and so vigilant
against the violences and plots which take place
there only because he refuses to give in to the
advances constantly n1ade to hin1 by -.von1en.
affected by a chann which is due only to the
prestige of his castration.
(2). This extren1e postpone1nent of the hero's desi re
soon becon1es rneaningful sinCl' it pennies hi111
to becon1e the restorer of Ideal La,v, whose order
has been perturbed by a crin1c \vhil'h the Mother
has not been able co prevent but "vhich _she ,viii
atten1pt to stifle.
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225
This sho,vs that:
(I). The puritan cliche ,vhich Ford en1phasises has
the very precise: function of pron1oting the char-
acter to his role as mediator. insofar as che
pleasure which he rejects allows hin1 to thwart
any atte111pt at sexual and political corruption; it
thus sin1ultaneously guarantees the credibility of
the figure of Lincoln and the position of the
character as the figure of Ideal Law in Ford's
fiction. At the obvious price of installing hin1
,vithin a castration. whose con1ical aspects Ford
uses sufiicientlv• to indicate how indifferent he is
to producing an edifying figure. and ho,v 111uch
111ore attentive he is to the disturbing results of
ics presence in the fiction: for exan1ple in the
dance scene in which his character perturbs the
hannony. ,vhere the agent of La,v behaves likl' a
kill-joy. thus 111aking visible what the hannony
of the Fordian celebration would conceal.
(2). The fact that the character literally takes the:
place of the Mother, i.e. takes on sin1ultaneously
her ideal position and her function (since he
assun1es responsibility for her children, and
pron1ises to feed then1 well in the new hon1e
-.vhich the prison becon1es) gives rise to a curious
transfonnation of the figure, as this repetition of
roles is effected under the sign of a secret which
the M other n1ust (believes she does) keep to try
to prevent any violence - even. inconceivably.
that of the Ideal Law which she incarnates -
against her children; and by thus incubating the
cri1ne she projc:cts her role into a quasi erotic
(ahnost Hitchcockian) din1ension never pre-
sented as such by Ford, since usually the fiction
protects her fi-0111 any relationship with the cri111e
(s ince it is part of her function to be ignorant
of violence). This is co1nically reintroduced in
the final scene of the trial, when the real proof
(an ahnanac on a sheet of which should have
bct·n ,vritten the letter of love which Lincoln
,vas planning to write for her. only to lull her
attention and extract confessions fron1 her) is
pullc:d out of Lincoln's hat: it was necessary for
the re- establish111ent of La~• that by the end of
the trial a sii:,"l1ifier (the proof of th e: crin1c) be
produced ,vhose very occulcation renders it
erotic; and that it n1ust nec..-ssarily be produced
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
226 Editors of Cahiers du Cinema
by the figure of Law to fit into the fictional logic
since it is fron1 this ideal Law that originated the
cancellation of the criminal act in the fiction,
the statement of the taboo on violence (on plea-
sure), the position of the Mother as the figure of
forbidden violence (pleasure), the possession
of the phallus by this figure (as a signifier of this
pleasure) and the production of the proof of the
crime as if it were a phallic signifier obviously
proceeding from the san1e statement. In such
fictions this usually n1eans, either that the weapon,
the trace of the cri,ne, acts like a letter which
Law must decipher, since its very proscription
has written it, or that the confession be produced
by the crin1inal as a return of the repressed in
an erotic form . The two results are here con1-
pressed, Law producing the proof of the cri111e
(the writing which reveals the murderer) as if it
were a phallic object which Ford's con1edy pres-
ents like the rabbit pulled out of the conjuror's
hat; the improbable leviry with which Ford
brings the trial to its close really can only be
read as a masking effect which conceals to the
end the 'human' context, thus allowing the logic
of the inscription to produce this gag as its ulti-
n1ate effect, a final consequence of Lincoln ·s
re- enactment of the Mother's role. a fantastic
return of the mask.
IV. The fact that the overdetennination of this
inscription of the Lincoln figure, as agent of the Law,
in Ford's fiction by all the idealised representations
of Law and its effects produced by the bourgeoisie.
tar from having been erased by Ford, has been declared
by his writing and e1nphasised by his con1edy,
shows what a strange ideological balancing act the
filn1-n1aker has insisted on perforn1ing, and \vhat
strange scriptural incongn1ities he has insisted on
exploiting; to the extent that by the fictional con-
straints he gave hirnself, by giving up the usual
bisection of his fiction and the so1netin1es tn1ly epic
inscription of Law thereby articulated (which recalls
Eistenstein in 77,r Gc11cral U11c) he could only produce
the Law as a pure prohibition of violence, whose
result is only a pern1anent indictn1ent of the castrating
effects of its discourse. Indeed to what is the action
of his character reduced if not hitting his opponents
at their \Veakest point - ,veaknes~es ,vhich Ford ahvays
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perversely presents as being capable of provoking a
deadly laughter? So that the sole but extreme violence
of the filn1 consists of verbal repression of violence
which, in certain scenes (the unsuccessful lynching) is
indicated as really being a death sentence. a mortal
interdict which has no equivalent except maybe in
Lang and which shows the distance Ford, or rather his
writing, keeps between himself and the idealist propo-
sitions which he uses.
V. For, with a kind of absolute indifference to the
reception given to his srylistic effects, the film-maker
ends by practising stubbornly a scriptural perversion
which is in1plied by the fact that, paradoxically, in a
film ,neant to be the Apology of the Word. the last
word is always given to the iconic signifier, entrusted
by Ford with the production of the detennining
effect~ of meaning. And as in this filin what is to be
signified is always either the (erotic. social, ideological)
separation of the hero relative to his surroundings, or
the irruneasurable distance between him and his
actions, or the absence of any conm1on denominator
between the results he obtains and the n1eans he uses.
and those obtained by his opponents (insofar as he
holds the privilege of the castrating speech), Ford
succeeds, by the econon1y of means which he uses to
that effect - his sryle forbidding him the use of etTec~
of i1nplicit valorisation of the character which he
could have drawn front an 'interiorised' writing - in
sin1ultaneously producing the san1e signifier in
cornpletely different statement~: (for exainple in the
n1oonlight scene, where the moonlight on the river
indicates at the san1e tin1e the atte,npted seduction,
the past idyll. and the hero's ' idealist' vocation); or even
in renewing the sa1ne effect of meaning in totally dif-
ferent contexts (the san1e spatial disconnections of the
character used in the dance scene and the murder
scene) . So that the intention of always n1aking sense.
of closing the door to any in1plicit effect of nteaning,
of constantly re- asserting these same meanings, in fJi:t
results - since to produce then1 the filn1-n1aker al,vays
actualises the san1e signifiers, sets up the sa,ne srylistic
effects - in constantly undennining them, turning
them into parodies of thentselves. (With Ford parody
ahvays proceeds front a denunciation of the writing
by its o\vn efrccts.) The tihn's ideological project thus
finds itst·lf led astray by the -w·orst 111eans it could have
bt•en f?iven to rt·alise itself (Ford's sryle, the infle~;ble
logic oi his fiction) 111ainly to the benefit of a properlv
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 John Ford's Young Mr Lincoln 227

scriptural projection (obtained not by the valorisacion
afi:cr the event of previously constituted effect~ of
111eaning. but proceeding directly fron1 the inscription,
produced anew and resolved in each scene, of the
character in Ford's fiction) of the etfeccs of the rcpn:s-
sion of violence: a violence: \vhose repression, written
thus turns into exorcisn1, and gives to its signifiers, in
the murder and the lynching scenes, a fantastic t:on-
trast which contributes considerably to the subversion
of the deceptively cahn surface of the text.

Note

J. This us..1µc of ins(ript1011 (l'iusaiptitJJ1) n.·f\.·ni ro ,vork dn111.· by mined '1,·xt · (/"/1i;1,,irt· 1,·x111cl/1·) within whirh tl1cy arc produ,,·d;
J.1<:quc..-s I)l~rrid;l 011 tht· l'Unn:pt of t~t,illlff in ·n,('(1"C' ,ffll$C'mMr .i n.·.Hiin~ of the ind1viJu:1l tt.·xt thcn..· forc- require~ 1..·x.u11 inin~

(Colknion T d Qud. 196>1) wl11d1 will be t:lkt'n up in ., ti1ture both ii' dynamic rd.11ionship with thi~ ~t'ner.il 1,·x1 and tht'
,~,tu.· of Satnr. (.',1l1il'fi point ht·n.· is th:lt all individual h:xts
0

rd.11ionship b,·twc,·n the i:<11er;1I 1,·xt and ~pedti, hi~tork:11

;trt.· part of .md inscribl· d1l·111sdn.·s into Olll' hi,..tnrit:ally dctt'r- t."\.'l'll~.

Original from
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 24
Towards an Analysis of
the Sirkian System
Paul Willen1en

Despite being dismissed as sentimental trash by Pauline Kael, Douglas Sirk's films have
been long embraced by critics and filmmakers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and
Todd Haynes, who have admired Sirk's ability to work within the studio system making
commercially successful movies that are at once characteristic entertainments of their era and
devastating social critiques. British critic Paul Willemen, who has published books on Indian
cinema and Israeli director Amos Gitai and co-edited Questions of Third Cinema
and other volumes on film and cultural studies, was involved in several of the auteurist
studies produced by the Edinburgh Film Festival, including those devoted to Douglas Sirk
and Frank Tashlin. In this essay Willemen discusses the formal elements of Sirk's style,
particularly as they relate to irony and a Brechtian notion of distanciation, and how these sty-
listic choices allow Sirk to make his complex melodramas during a conservative era in the
United States.

Sinct· the S<r<'fll issut' of Sun1n1cr I 971, a great deal enerb'Y answering questions and helping c.:nt1cs Jnd
has been ,vritten on Sirk's work: the interview book students in tht' arduous but rewarding usk they had set
Sirk 1•11 Sirk' by J on Halliday was published and a the111selves: to try and understand how a Sirk tihn
book of essays cornpiled by the Edinburgh Filn1 Festi- v,orks.
val and edited by Jon Halliday and Laura Mulvey. As Jon Halliday points out in D1•11,11/as Sirk (p. 60).
0011.f!/<1.< Sirk,J ,vas published recently. In addition, tht· Sirk has been praised either for his stylistic qualitit'S
n1agazin.: AJ,,11,~11ra111 devoted a special issue to the or else for being a niaster of the weepie. With th..-
n1clodra111a ,vith special t'lllphasis on Sirk 's work and exct'ption of the t,vo anicles by Halliday and J - l
f>,,sir/f revi.:wcd the Screen issue. adding ne\v niatt·rial. Bourgt·t. the essays in D,11~11/as Sirk reflect these n,·o
so111e of which was translated into English and includt'd apparcntlv irret·o ncilable approaches. Sirk is eith..-r
in the Edinburgh book. In conjunction ,vith the book, praist'd for n1aking extraordinary fihns in spite of th..-
the Edinburgh Filn1 Festival n1ounted an extensive exigt·nries of the \\'t·epi..- as a genre, or else it is chc
retrospective of Sirk ·s ,vork "vhic.:h ,vas ~ubsequently \Vt't'p it'-gt·nrc itst·lf ,vhich is validated, and Sirk is
taken over en-bloc by tht' N ational Filtn The;1tn.·. brought fonvard as its 111ost ac.:con1plished practitiont·r.
I >ougl.1s Sirk hin1st'lf spt·nt a hrreat de.ii of tin1e and Indt·ed it is tht·se gt'nuinc contradictions ,vi thin the

1',1ul \\-'1l1t·111t·11 . ..., ,m .,rd, .m ,-\11,1!~,1" of tht· ~ 1111.111 ~y,rnu." pp l.~S .\.i l'u•111 ',r, ,·n I.\. 1w . 4 •\\'mta 1•,;~ 1''7.\) <' 1~r;,2 hy P:ml \\:' 1llt•1m·11 . R '-·pnntt~f \H
p t·m11,,11111 .,,t' rht· .1u1th >r .md ,,;.,,.t 11.

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 Towards an Analysis of the Sirkian System
\vork of Douglas Sirk which to son1e extent invite
both approaches.
In order to understand this contradiction and to
assess the function of such contradictions in the Sirkian
system, one must again tum to Sirk's theatrical experi-
ence in Gennany in the twenties. In 1929 Sirk staged
Brecht's Thrcepe11ny Opera with inunense success, As
left-wing intellectuals in the Gennan theatrical world,
both artists reacted against expressionisn1, although it
is quite clear that both were equally influenced by the
1nove1nent. Brecht's early plays bear witness to this, as
do son1e of Sirk's Hollywood ftln15; 11,e Tamis/red
,-1,i_i:l"ls in particular. In fact, Sirk n1akes a direct allu-
sion to expressionist ideas in the phantasn1agoria
speech in Captain Ul/rifoot. Although it is not clear
whether Brecht approved of Sirk's production of the
111rccpe11ny Opera (Sirk on Sirk, p. 23), during his
career in Hollywood Sirk 1nade frequent use of tech-
niques Brecht had pioneered in the play and achieved
very sint.ilar results. In his study Lect11re De Brer/rtJ
Uen1ard Don describes Brecht's pre-epic technique as
that of the 'boo111erang i111age'. Brecht prt•sented the
theatre public \vith the i111age of life that it wanted
to see on the stage, but in order to denounce the
unreality of such an in1age, to denounce its ideologi-
cal character (p. 189). Brecht hi111self explained that
the 111r1·epe1111y Opera attacks bourgeois conceptions
not only by choosing then1 as a content, by the 111ere
fact of presenting thern on the stage, but also by the
n1anner of presentation itself. The play shows a w,1y
of life \Vhich the spectator wishes to see portrayed in
the theatre. At the san1e tin1e, however, he is forced
to confront aspects of this life with which he would
rather not be confronted: he not only sees his wishes
fulfilled, but he sees then1 criticised and is thus forced
to perceive hin1self as object. rather than subject.
Bernard Don continut·s:
Tht> pictur,·sque robb,·rs of the "/11rcc{'r11111• ()['<""' ar,· not
bandits: they an· robbers only :IS th,· bourg,·oisit' dre;uns
the111. In the lin;1l ,111Jlvsis w,· r,-.1liz,·d that they an· in
fact 111en1bcrs of the bourg,ois1,·. ()r. 111or,· pr,·,·i~dy, it
is through the disgu is,· of th,· robbe rs that th,· ,p,·rt.1tors
,viii co111e to r,·rognis,· th,·n1S<·h·,·, JS hcing h,,urg,·o is. A
subtly engincen·d Sl't of di,pl:K,·111,·nts Jnd discontinui-
ties facilitates ql<'h a sdf-r<T<1g11ition. In this ,vay Bre,ht
has atte1npt,·d to s.1bot.1~,· th,· notion of tl1,· thc,1trc ,,s a
111irror (for our fa11t.1sic<) ... . Brcd1t put , on tlH· st.lg<'
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229
,vhat see111.~ to be the i111age of the kind of exotic society
that the spectator want, to see. In fact what the spectator
discovers in the very unre~lity of such an in1age, is
himself. The n1irror of the stage does not reflect the:
world of the audicnce any n1ore. but the ideological
disguises of the audience itsdf. Suddenly, at that point.
the 111irror refers us back to our o,vn reality. It bounct·s
the in1ages of the spectacle back to us - lik,· a
boo111erang. (pp. 190- 1)
Sirk's fihns operate in a si111ilar \vay. It has been shown
how Sirk takes distance front the spectacle he presents.
but that there is no distance between the audience
and the filn1 (D011glas Sirk. p. 23). In fact, Sirk n1erci-
lessly in1plicates the audience by the use of techniques
deliberately designed to involve the spectator emo-
tionally (Sirk 011 Sirk, p. 70). In contradistinction to
social-con1111ent-n1elodran1as such as A Tree Gro1vs /11
Brookly11 , Gt'11tle1nan 's A,i[rC('1nent (both by Elia Kazan).
Peyton Placr (by Mark Robson), No D011111 Pay111e111
(by Manin Ritt) etc., Sirk 's fihns shon circuit the
so-called channel of con1111unication between director
and audience. Instead of inscribing the director's per-
sonal view or n1essage into the fihn and thus by
extension denying that any 'personal' statement n1ust
to a very large extent be dictated by both the society
and the industry within which the director works.
Sirk inscribes his distance from the spectacle into the
filn1. In this way, the diegesis ceases to appear trans-
parent: it beco111es the point beyond which tho:
spectator cannot go. It is this sense of an absence
behind the diegesis, so to speak, which Fred Ca,nper
(D011~/as Sirk, p. 79tf) quite 111istakenly describes as a
t\vo-dintensionality within Sirk's filn1.~.
Sirk's fihns could be described as the opposite of
a distorting 111irror: the world the audience wants to
see (an exotic ,vorld of crin1e. wealth, corruption.
passion. etc.) is a distorted projection of the audienc,: ·s
O\.vn f.1ntasies to \Vhich Sirk applies a correcting
device. n1irroring these very distortions. This con-
j unction ol~ or rather contradiction bet\veen
distantiation and in1plication. betwe,:n fascination and
its critique, allows Sirk to then1atise' a great 111any
contradictions inherent in the society in which he
\1/0rked and the \VOrld he depicted. It equally 1:-,rivt·s
us the 111cans to read Sirk ·s O\Vll contradictory po~i-
tion ,vithin that society and vis-a- vis that \vorld.
Jon Halliday has indicated (D,,11,1!/ct.< Sirk. p. 59/l')
and has b.:cn supported o n this point by Sirk hi111st·lf
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

230
Figure 24 .1 ll 'r/11,11 ,,,, 1/rt 1,l"im/ (Univer<al -lntcmational, 195(,}: Dough$ Sirk"s mdodr.1111,s
of a tlutonu1g nurror. Produced by Alben Zug,-snuth
( irk 011 Sirk, p. 89) lhat lhe society depicted in 1T1ost
of the fiJms is characterised by a s111ugi1ess and con1-
placency 111:isking decay and disintegration fro111
within, just beneath the surface. Sirk also indjcates his
O\vn conrradictory position \Vith in the society in
which he found himself (Sirk 011 irk, p . 86). H e \Vas
atternpting to 111ake critique of ,1 society ,vhich:
(a) provided hjn1 \Vith the 111oney and the tools to
make his filnu, but (b) ,vould not be offended to the
extent that it ,vould withdraw its support in the forn1
of box-office receipts. These prin1ary contradictions
generated further. secondary contradictions in Sirk's
,vork:
I. Although the filins were products of, for and
about Eisenho,ver- An1erica. they ,vere 111isu nder-
srood at that ti111e. Sirk explained this in tern1s of
the An1erican audience ·s fo.ilure to recognise irony
( irk (lll Sirk, p . 73) and the lack of a genuine filn1
Digitized by Google
I -
Paul W illemen
,r~ the oppusitc
culture based on a theory of aesthetics (Sirk 011
Sirk, p. 72).
2. No,v that these filnu are beginning to be
understood, even in English-speaking countries.
An1erican society has undergone a process of social
change and now produces quite different filn1S.
This change contributes to sonic extent to the con-
ten1porary criac·s tendency to ntisread Sirk's fi.ln1S:
criti cs tend to judge Sirk's presentation of
Ei enho,ver-An1eric:1 b)' rhe sr:indards of conte111-
porary critiques of ideology. thus co1nnlirting the
111i~take of neglecting the tn1e relevance and
n1caning of the filins at the tin1e they \vcre pro-
duced. One of the n1ajor contributions of Jon
H alliday·s ,vriting on Sirk is precisely that he situ-
ates Sirk ·s fi l111s in their o,vn historical context, a
fact the critic has to grasp before he can co nunent
o n the relevance ofSirk's ftln1s in our o,vn histori-
cal conte:--"T. Within the ftln,s thenuelves. these
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Towards an Analysis of the Sirkian System
externally determined contradictions are ntlrrored
in a wide variety of ways, often differing from fihn
to film:
• Displacements and discontinuities in plot con-
struction: 'The supporting part in the picture
is your hidden leading man' (Sirk on Sirk, p.
98). Examples of this can be found in Sign of
the Pal{an, Written 011 the Wind, 1111,nder on the
Hill, etc. A creative use of discontinuity can be
seen in Sirk's comments on his happy-endings:
' It makes the crowd happy. To the few it
makes the aporia more transparent' (Sirk 011
Sirk, p. 132).
• Contradictions in characterisation: '(Taza is)
a syn1bolic in-between n1an: he is an
Indian, but there has seeped into the character
this elen1ent of civilisation' (Sirk on Sirk, p. 82).
Also Kyle Hadley's invitation to Lucy (in
Written 011 the Wind) to come and ' n1eet an
entirely different character' which manifests
itself only when he's 'up in the blue' but is
present in the background throughout the filn1.
In fact, all Sirk's best films contain such
split-characters.
• Ironic use of camera-positioning and framing:
in The Tan,ished Anl{els, the identification with
the solid character, Durke Devlin, is under-
mined by the camera which shoots hin1 in low
angles, so that he appears to hover over the
Shumanns as a bird of prey. As we 'see'
through Devlin's eyes, this is a classic example
of the ca,nera-style achieving a boomerang-
image. In All that Heave11 Allows, such irony is
achieved in the first scenes within the close-
knit Scott fa,nily by frantlng Cary Scott in
such a way that she always rernains separated
fron1 her two children. In this context, Tin1
Hunter's conunents on Summer Storm (Do•~~las
Sirk. pp. 31 sq) and Mike Prokosh 's essay on
Imitation of Ufe (Do11glas Sirk, pp. 89ff) abound
with exarnples of such inner contradictions.
• Formal negations of ideological notions inher-
ent in the script: Magn!fia:111 Obsessiorr contains
n1any such ele,nents of parody: the 'true source
of spiritual life• is co,npared to electricity sup-
plying the current for a non-de~cript sort of
table-la,np; the can1cra 111ove1nent revealing
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231
the god-like purveyor of worldly wisdon1
benignly nodding to Bob Merrick when the
latter is about to perform a tricky operation.
Other examples of such elements of parody
and of the ironic use of cliche are given in the
essay Distarrtiation and Douglas Sirk (Douglas
Sirk, pp. 23ff).
• Irony in the function of camera-movement:
Sirk's can1era, as a rule, remains at some dis-
tance from the actors. The space in the diegesis,
although rigorously circumscribed, is vast and
solidly established. Long-shots and mid-shots
predontlnate. The camera, however, is almost
continuously in motion. This mobility of the
camera is designed to implicate the viewer on
an en1otional level (Sirk on Sirk, p. 43), while
the distance from the characters suggests
detachment.
This last type of contradiction, that between n1obility
(i.e. insecurity, emotional involvement) and distance
(i.e. detachment, solidly establishing a locus for the
diegesis) refers to a dialectic which is perhaps the n1ost
dynantlc aspect of the Sirkian system, because it
underpins the very notion of the Sirkian spectacle:
people put then1selves on show in order to protect
thenuelves. Mirrors are nearly always there, in the
background, to remind them of the fact that they
live in a world where privacy is virtually non-existent.
The characters are aware of being under scrutiny, so
their best protection is to try and take command of
the situation by determining their own appearance.
if necessary even by deliberately putting on an act.
However, the persona developed in this way functions
as a trap: it is the persona, the pretence which comes
to donunate, causing conflicts against which there
is no further defence. Thus the persona in fact is
shown to reveal them in a far more naked and vulner-
able way. At the san1e tin1e, the audience is presented
with what it would like to see - such as people suf-
fering the extten1es of anxiety, titillating sexual i,nage
- while the criticis,n of such voyeurisn1 is inscribed
in the filn1 itself. We are not just looking into a world
which is unaware of our watchful presence (the
n1irrors atnongst other things convey this lack of
privacy within the fihn). nor are the characters in
the diegcsis tnere puppets in the hands of the
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
232 Paul Willemen
( ;reat- Manipulator-llehind- The- S.:enes. We \Vatch
then1, they are a,vart" of being ,vatcht"d and perfonn
.1ccordingly, attt"tnpting to protect tht'n1st'lvt"s by con-
trolling what tht'y allo,v us - and their fellov; characters
- to set". The effect is that the audit'nct' sees nothing
n1ore than the distortions and constraints ,vhich it
l<)rct·d upon the spt'ctaclt" in the first place. In other
\VOrds. tht" audience· s ideology is unn1asked and is
111ade to rebound back upon itself. A,vareness of its
o,vn reality is forced upon it, against its wisht's. This
dialt"ctic also find~ its representation within the fihn :
although the characters are aware of being undt"r scru-
tiny (a fonn of surveillance 111anift'sted as prl·ssurt's to
conlonn to standards of behaviour in1posed on the111
by their t'nviro11111ent), they refuse to recognist' tht'
111irror-in1agt' of tht'nlst'lves, or bettt'r still. they rt'fust'
to look into the n1irror. This is a111ply illustrated by
(;arv, Scott's fear of the TV- set in All that Heaven
,•l//i,11,, . Blindness can be another such refusal to st't',
as in A,f,1.1!11!ficc11t O/,sc.<.<it>11. Helen Phillips has lost
her sense of security (security bt"ing a husband whose
lite depended on the in1111ediate availability of a resus-
cit;1tor!) and refust's to set' the n1an ,vho wants to
rt'store that security. A Sirk filn1 sets out to do for
the audience what the TV -set does for Cary Scott or
surgery for Helen Phillips. This dialectic bt'tween
self:.protection and exhibitionis111, sensationalis111 and
puritanisn1 is particularly relevant for the whole of the
Hollywood cine1na, even today (see Charles Darr·s
analysis of San1 Peckinpah's rape-scene in Stra11• D,~l!S,
in Srrcc11. vol 13 n 2, 1972).
()nly no,v, after Jon Halliday's intervil'\v book
and the prelin1inary explorations published in the
Edinburgh Filn1 Festival's book of essays. has
the ground been cleared for a n1ore accurate and
co111prehensive study of the \Vork of I)ouglas Sirk.
Such a study would have to exan1ine in son1e detail
this extren1ely co1nplex ,veb of contradictions. the
intt·raction of ,vhich fon11s the Sirkian svsten1. ,
130th the vie,vs of Sirk as a Marxist critic of
Ebenho.,ver-A1nerica or of Sirk as the greatt'st expo-
nent of the bourgeois ,vel•pie dre equally n1isi-.ruidt"d.
In fa ct , Sirk's position in the history of the An1eri can
c1nl'll1J closl·ly paralk·ls Tolstoy's position in the
Digitized by Google
history of Soviet literature. Lenin considerc:d Tolstoy
to be a unique and extre111ely valuable artist becJuse
he dran1atised and presented the contradictions ,vithin
Russian society at the tun1 of the century. a tin1e
when Tsaris111 ,vasn't strong enough to prevent a revo-
lution \\ hile the revolution did not yet have enough
0
strength to defeat Tsarisn1. Sirk perfonnt'd a si111ilar
function in the An1erican cinen1a in the fifties: hl·
depicted a society which appeared to be strong and
healthy, but which in fact was exhausted and ton1
apart by collective neuroses.
In this context, it beco111es possible to understand
and explain the enon11ous success of n1any of Sirk's
best fihns at the tin1e of their release. and the sub-
sequent neglect and/ or rejt'ction of his ,vork by the
'intelligentsia for n1any yt'ars. The reason tor this is
analogous to the reason why Brecht's 11irecpcu11y ()l'cr,1
,vas. and still is, such a huge public success. As llcn1ard
[)ort points out. the technique of the boo111erJng-
in1age carrit's ,vith it son1e on1inous pitfalls. Either tht"
sophistic;1tion of the proCl'SS is ignored. thus allo,,·ing
the bourgeois audience to operate a recovery-111anoeu-
vre: the audienct' indeed recognises its O\vn inta!:(t' .1s
bourgeois, but enhanced with the exotic prestige of
robbers (or com1pt n1illionaires. actresses or stunt
fliers) . Or alternatively. if the audience is n1ore kno\\·l-
edgeable about al'Sthetic processes, they have to rejt'ct
such a representation. as their ideology dot's not allo,,·
the1n to recognise then1selves in that rnirror-in1Jge.
Hence the rejection or wilful 1nisreading (by tun1ing
it into ca1np) of Sirk 's tiln1s by tl1t' revie,vt·rs and
n ostal gia-frt·a ks.
In spite of these pitfalls, the fact re1nains that. taking
into account the historical and econon1ic context
,vithin ,vhich he ,vorked, Sirk developed tht' n1ost
relined and co111plex possible syste111 to convey his
critique under the circun1stances. Even if they did not
allow hi111 to n1akt· this critique as explicit as he n1igh1
have wanted to (t'X<.:t'pt perhaps in fihns sul·h a~
~Fri11c11 ,,11 rl1t· li 'i11d and 7711· 1i1n1islred ,-'l,i<1c/s). the
Sirki,tn s,·ste111 at le.1st 111anitcsted and tht'111atised the
t·ontradil'tions \\·ithin that society in a ,vay \,·hich,
throughout A111erica11 tihn history. has pl·rhaps onl\'
bet'n equ.tllt·d by Ernst Lubitsch.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Towards an Analysis of the Sirl<ian System 233

Notes

Jon HJ11id.1y. Sir/.: ,111 Sirk. Cm,·111.1 ( )nr S,·ri,·<. S,·,:krr & Warhurg, ➔ This tt..·nn is usc.·d in thl" S-l·1ue of tran,;fOnnin~ tht" c:011ditio11,
London I 'Ii I. ot' produ,:tion into J thc..·nu.· throu~h a pron:-c;~ o f intt'n1a1is...nion .
J on H.11lid.1y .md l.:iur., lvl uh-,·y (n kJ, /),,,,~/,._, Sirk. E.!mhu ri:h A111c:rk.ln ..-~1pic.,hs1n (Jl1 h(.· intl·n1.1li~c..-d into a rhl'.'mc.· by a \)''-
Fi lm l',·,uv.11. Edmllur..:h•
I 117 ~- tt.·m.tti..: n:t\1,,il rn UM,', or ~ ,ht:n1.1uvc.•ly by ;1 !'oy'.'h.'111.ttic: U!'oc.' ot'.
.\ U,·nurd Dnrt, 1.,-,.r,,r,• V.· flrrd11, Ed< du Sruil. P.tri<. c.·xtrt•tndy c.·xpc.·11s1\T t.·Jrnt·r:t 1110\'l'l1H.'llt'i. lilh:h .t, c.:r.Hlt.•- d1ocs or
I <J<,11. rr.lc:k.i11~-<.l1ot'i.

Original from
Digitized by Google UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 25
My Name is Joseph H. Lewis
Paul Kerr

This article, which appeared in the journal Screen In 1983, looks at the question of authorship
in the case of a Hollywood director whose career for the most part consisted of B genre films.
Apart from a few cult favorites, notably the films noir Gun Crazy (aka Deadly is the Female,
1949) and The Big Combo (1955), Lewis' films are mostly efficient fonnula movies that have
attracted virtually no critical attention. He had no defining relationship with a specific studio
or genre, and Kerr is less interested in identifying the personal vision of Lewis as an auteur
than in examining how a director who had to work within not only the studio system but also
the meager means of B film production managed to use those very constraints to distinguish
his films from other similar movies. If there is no consistent core of thematic and stylistic motifs
In Lewis' films, it is because their textual qualities were detennined by the changing economic
conditions of B film production.

Despite the recent publication of John Caughie 's relation bet,veen authors and contexts. Understand-
excellent anthology, Theories of Aurhorship, 1 auteuris111 ably dubious of the liberal extensions of auteurisrn
has been co nspicuously absent front the agenda of to embrace non-directorial personnel and siniilarly
S<reen 2 in particular and filn1 studies in general of late. sceptical about the contextualising work done on
But auteuris1n refuses to go away. It crops up in Hollywood genres and Hollywood as industry:'
Festival retrospectives, in the programming of reper- Caughie admits that his book
tory cinemas, as the organising principle behind
cinen1a seasons on television, in edu cational syllabuses
and an1ong the assumptions of articles in S<rccn itself. has very li ttle to say on the plare of the author ,vithin
Indeed there ren1ains, as C aughie argues, a reluctant institutions (indu.,trial. cultural, acaden1ic), or on the ,,·ay
sense in which while it is assun1ed that authorship in which the autho r is constructed by and for co1nn1ercc.
(in both its traditional hun1anist 'exception to the Panly this n:A,·cts a dissatisfaction with most of ,vhat has
been written. ,vhil'h has tc:nded to renuin \.vithin the
Hollywood rule' and its post-structuralist 'subject's
romantic concc:pt of the artist, with its concentrati,)n on
construction of and by a reading' guises) is an inade-
questions of artistic fr,·c:do111 and industrial interferc:nce.
quate critical concept, it is difficult - if not altogether and "'ith its continual dt"<irt' to identify the true author
irnpossible - to entirely dispense with it. Caughie ·s out of the contpkx of cn·ative personnel. At the san1e
anthology itself collects much of the best writing on ti,ne. qul·,tions of the author's relation to institutional
the relation between texts and authors but is quick to and co111111en·ial cont,·xts arc: increJsingly bt"ing recog-
acknov.-lcdgt' the relative absl·nce of ,vork on the niz,·d as rru r ial .. .'

P.ml Kc;•IT. "My N ,llflt" 1\Jo,t·ph •1. Lt•w 1c.," pp . .. ~. ,,7 lrn,u Su u u .!of, fW\ , .. s iJuly f lt°h'lhn ) 'Hn ). 'f, ' l'18J by P.1ul Kt·n . R,·pnnlt'll hy rcMlU\'\l(\11 c., fth<'
,111hnr ,mJ .'\.t'lnrr.

Digitized by Google UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Original from
 My Name is Joseph H. Lewis
This article atte1npts to sketch out - if not yet to fill
in - son1e of the gaps discussed by Caughie concen1-
ing the place of the author within those institutions.
The title of this piece has both a playful and a
pole1nical purpose. Playful because it 111arries the tide of
Joseph H. Lewis' first n1ajor success, My N,11ne is Julia
Ross, with an echo of the first clause of John Ford's
fa,nous staten1ent 'My nan1e is John Ford. l make West-
en1s.' Unlike Ford, Lewis - in spite or perhaps because
of the cult status of son1e few of his fihns - is not fa,niliar
enough to assun1e such an easy equivalence with a
directorial oeuvre, let alone to conjure up a conven-
tional genre, nor can his nan1e even be relied upon to
guarantee recognition among readers of specialist jour-
nals like Screen. And this, to risk repeating 111yself, is
i111portant. There is no obvious genre that Lewis can
clain1 to have n1ade his own - as Ford could n1odestly
associate himself with the Western, Lewis began and
ended his career with W esten1s, but in between was a
decade or 1nore in which he n1ade none at all and it is
that decade, in which he essayed the n1usical, the
comedy, the war filn1 and the cri111e thriller. with which
I am prin1arily concerned here. and in which Lewis
n1ade his nan1e as a director. Indeed, ifit can be said that
Lewis made any categorisable and consistent type of
tihn at all in those years then the critical consensus can
suggest only two coherent candidates for such continu-
ity. First, that they are all 'Lewis" filn1s. a formulation
\vhich simply elides the problen1 by transforming the
auteur canon itself into a virtual genre; and second. that
they are all 'B' films destined for the botto,n half of
Hollywood's double bills.
There is, however, a third and rather n1ore con-
tentious case to be n1ade for Lewis: indeed, a nu,nber
of critics have already argued that the bulk of his
1945-55 output falls into the category now known as
film 11oir. This ,nay, of course. be no n1ore than a
symptom of the very real difficulty auteurists have
experienced atten1pting to define and describe these
filnls . Nevertheless, their eccentricities, their exces-
siveness, their expressiveness as texts of and for their
time, con1bined with their centrality in, their repre-
sentativeness of a particular professional strategy at a
specific moment and mode of the An1erican cine,na ·s.
and indeed tile An1erican fihn industry·s. developn1ent
is what interest n1e now.
This article grew out of a paper I presented . at the
1980 Edinburgh Fihn Ft·stival which includt·d a prt·tty
Digitized by Google
235
con1prehensive retrospective of Lewis' tihns. That ret-
ropective itself says a great deal about Lewis' standing
in 1980 though the conclusions reached by the various
contributors to the event all share the conviction that
Lewis is and was something of an unsuitable case for
the Edinburgh treatn1ent. It is also significant that the
Edinburgh Retrospective, unlike n1any of its predeces-
sors, did not transfer to the National Fihn Theatre in
London or inspire a tie- in publication. On the other
hand, this article itself is a part of the expanding Lewis
bibliography. T he draft presented in Edinburgh '\Vas
itself derived fron1 an earlier article published in Scrcc11
Ed11catio11 5 and this case study of Lewis, however sche-
1natic. presents an opportunity for an1ending the more
obvious weaknesses and filling in son1e of the n1ore
gaping 01nissions of that previous piece. What it does
not atten1pt is textual analysis - not because this is
not considered crucial in relocating authors in institu-
tions, but because there are several very useful exan1ples
of such analyses already available.''
What follo\vS can be divided into three relatively
distinct parts: first, a claim for the surprisingly con-
tinuous result\ of, but historically and institutionally
extremely diverse reasons for, expending energy in
fani iliarising exhibitors, audiences and critics with
Lewis' nan1e; second, a sketch of the landn1arks in the
industrial terrain in which Lewis operated and a dis-
cussion of the ways in which 'he' achieved son1e of
the 'effects' for which he has since been celebrated;
and third, a survey of the history of atten1pts to con-
struct Lewis as an author within the critical and
acaden1ic institutions.
In 1942 the United States goven1ment reached a
te111porary settle111ent with the 111ajor studios in the
so-ca!Jed Paran1ount Case and, for the 'big five' verti-
cally integrated n1ajors at least, the twin practices of
block booking and blind selling were either effectively
curtailed or banned outright. 7 For the first tin1e all
their products had to be sold to exhibitors individually
and this included 'B' filn1s which were even, occasion-
ally. now subject to press previews and trade shows.
Relatively rapidly B fihns were encouraged to becon1e
incn~asingly con1petitive, con1pulsorily and con1-
pulsively different, distinctive. What had previously,
perhaps, been a rather static aesthetic and occupational
hierarchy between Bs and As became suddenly 1nore
flexible. No longer could a con1pany like Colu111bia
guarantee outlets for its fihn~ in blocks - it had to sell
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
236 Paul Kerr
them singly and it could consequently no longer rely
on its own 'trade name' to attract exhibitors or assure
quality. Rather paradoxically perhaps, one of the
avenues this opened up an1ong the 'an1bitious Bs'
involved the contravention of current fom1ulas and
standard stylistic practices (too often referred to as the
Classic Hollywood style), as indulgence in excess,
individuality, idiosyncrasy, virtuosity as if for its own
sake. Within these differences, however, residues of
Hollywood's cinematic standardisation remained. First,
of course, the constraints within which such 'experi-
1nents' took place were real and right; secondly,
the conventions against which such reactions were
c:xpressed remained relatively comn1on an1ong a large
numbc:r of different filn1-makers wishing to 'n1ake a
name for themselves'; and thirdly, in order for a direc-
tor like Lewis to differentiate his work from that of his
contemporaries he would be obliged to standardise his
own style wherever possible, for purposes of recogni-
tion - and reward.
Today, the naming of such directors as Fuller,
Karlson, Mann, Ray, Siodmak, Toumeur, Ulmer and
so on continues for rather different reasons. At the level
of British distribution and exhibition there remains a
need to 'authorise' Hollywood directorial retrospective
repertory screenings as Art in order to attract art-cinema
audiences otherwise antipathetic to An1erican cine111a;
filn1 critics, meanwhile, require authors to 'credit' for
the filn1s they review in colun1ns still dominated by the
methods of literary criticisn1. And at a n1ore acaden1ic
level, the fashion for film noir in particular and for
Hollywood's post-war years in general which has
characterised the 1970s and early '80s can be understood
as nostalgia for a certain style, specifically a style which
contravened not only the supposed 'standard practices'
of the tin1e but also the theoretical accounts of n1ore
generalised Hollywood practices articulated in Screen
and else\vhere. More cynically. it adds another 'indi-
vidual' nan1e to the 'traditional' pantheon of teachable
' talents·. Finally, the presence of television. historically.
has not only had an ar!,,'llable effect on the developrnent
o(fi/m n,,ir but also - it is often alleged - con1plied readily
and in an ahnost parodic n1anner with son1e at least of
thl" rules of that realis111 \vhich .fi/111 noir has been hailed
as having broken.
Atte111pting to locate thl" author. Le,vis. in the
plact' and ti111e of Holly,vood in the late l()rties and
,·.trly fifties is tar frorn si1nple. In 1974 Edv,,ard 13us-
Digitized by Google
combe, writing an article for another of Edinburgh's
Hollywood director retrospectives - this time on
Raoul Walsh - sought, by sketching out the 'house
style' of Warner Brothers, where Walsh worked con-
tinuously for some years, and relating it. albeit
tentatively, to that studio's industrial structure, to 'call
into question the sin1ple notion of Walsh as an auteur
who dictated the style and contents of his pictures."
Instead, Buscombe argued that
working for a studio ,vith as distinctive a policy and style
as Wamers imposed a nun1ber of constraints on any
director. Yet these constraints should not be thought of
as n1erely nc:gative in their operation. Working for the
studio n1eant sirnply that the possibilities for good work
lay in certain directions rather than in others.'
In atternpring to adapt Buscon1be's approach to a
specific period in the cinen1atic career of Joseph H.
Lewis, a number of problenlS rapidly appear. First of
all, Lewis - unlike Walsh (or, for that matter, Ford) -
was never exclusively involved with a single studio for
more than four or five consecutive years. From the
first film he directed, in 1937 to the last, in 1958.
Lewis worked at Grand National ( 1937), then Uni-
versal (1937-8), then Colu1nbia (1940), then Monogran1
(1940-1), then PRC (1941), then Universal again
(1942), back to PRC (1944), then PKO (1945),
Columbia again (1945-9), then for the King Brother.;
(distributed by United Artists, 1950). then MGM
(1950), then for United States Pictures (distributed by
Warner Brothers, 1951), then back to MGM (1952-5).
then for Security-Theodora Productions (distributed
by Allied Artists, 1955), then for Scott-Brown (distri-
buting through Colun1bia, 1955-6), and finally two
fihns for Collier Young Associates and Seltzer Filn1S
(both of which were distributed by United Artists.
1957-8). Whether this aln1ost incessant n1obility is
n1ore characteristic of the Ds than of n1ore prestigious
productions or whether it is more specific to Le\viS is
difficult to determine. The nu1nber of con1panies that
Lewis worked for, however. together with the tlft
that tht> peak period of his career coincides with the
dt·cline (and divorce) of the vertically integrated studio
systern (as the presence.' of so 1nany independents
to\vards the end of the Lewis list bears out) suggests
that a director/ studio study is inappropriate here. Fur-
thern1ort·. as an unprt·stii:,>ious dir<.'ctor Le,vis' care er is
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 My Name is Joseph H. Lewis
relatively undocun1ented. In order to overco1ne some
at least of these problen1s I restrict n1y attention here
to an industrially defined (sub- )enre, the B _fil111 ,roir.
an area in which, it has been argued, a large propor-
tion of Lewis' 1945-55 output can con1fortably be
situated; this focus allows n1e to draw in son1e detail
on my S<rce11 Educatio11 article.
There I associated the develop1nent of the B _fi/111
uoir with what I called 'a negotiated resistance to the
realist aesthetic on the one hand and an acco1n-
1nodation to restricted expenditure on the other', 111 a
formula which should becon1e clearer in the following
paragraphs. Very sche1natically. the argun1ent boils
down to the conviction that _fil,n noir, far fron1 being
reducible to a specific socio-political atmosphere, aes-
thetic ancestry or a set of e1nigre authorial signatures,
actually related to the particular conditions of its pro-
duction, distribution and exhibition. Indeed, I suggested
that film 11oir combined an econonlically detemuned
·tow budget' mode ,vith an ideologically detemlined
'anti-realist' mode. What I did not discuss in that
article. and what I would like to briefly draw attention
to here, are what AJthusserians would describe as the
political determinants of the genre.
Very briefly. I would suggest that the B _film 11oir is
an ambitious B, a B bidding for critical and/or con1-
n1ercial prestige. The Supreme Court rulings against
blind selling and block booking encouraged and indeed
obliged the B co1npanies (and the B units within the
n1ajors, though perhaps here the pressures were son1e-
what diluted and delayed) to inject an ele1nent of
expressive individuality into their products. At the san1c
tin1c the shift to independent production (partly accel-
erated by tax incentives) and the rise of the Directors
Guild professionalised the directors, reaflinning the
rhetoric of individuation. creativity and differentiation.
The Directors Guild. founded in 1936. succeeded in
drawing up an agreement with the studios in 1939
recognising the creative function of the director, ensur-
ing salary nlinimums and safeguarding contracts.
Low key lighting - a characteristic as con1n1on to
.film noir as it was rare in other conten1porary gec>nres and
alrnost entirely absent fro1n the thrillers of the previous
decade - functioned si111ultaneously to conceal the
meagre production values of the B Jiln1 ,,,,;, while itself
constituting a striking style. This propensity a,vay fron,
realist denotation toward ·expressionist' connotation
,vas also a consequence of (and could rash in o n) the
Digitized by Google
237
constraints of the Production Code. Furthen11ore, the
'hybrid' quality of the .fil,n 11oir was perhaps, at least in
part, attributable to increasing studio insecurities about
1narketing their B product (covering all their generic
options, as it were, in each and every tihn). The experi-
ence of directors like Lewis in con1panies as different as
MGM and PRC and genres as distinct as spy filn1s.
horror fihns. musical westen1s, screwball co,nedies and
war fihns - experiences denied n1any conten1porary
directors who worked only at the prestige end of the
industry - may also have contributed to the curiously
cross-generic quality of the B.film 11oir. Sinlilarly. if low
key lighting styles, for exan1ple, were more econo,nic
than their high key alternatives they were also dran1ati-
cally and distinctively different from them, fron1 the A
filnlS that tended to e1nploy them and fro1n the ne,v
technologies ofTechnicolor. television and deep focus.
all of which necessitated high key.
By the end of the l 950s the studio system, the
double bill, black and white cinen1atography, the Pro-
duction Code, the very status of cinema as the most
popular - and profitable - art were all being eroded.
In their place, a shift ,vas already taking place to inde-
pendent production, to single feature progranunes.
colour cinen1atography. wide and s1nall screens and an
audience classification syste1n. The period of this tran-
sition, the period in which the equation between black
and white on the one hand and realis,n on the other
was at its n1ost fragile is that of the B .film noir, the
period in which Joseph H . Lewis n1ade his name.
Between 1945 and I 955 Lewis directed twelve
filn1s; of these. one is a light con1edy. one is a swash-
buckler and another a (noirish) ,var filn1 . The other
nine are 17,r Falcon in Sa11 Francisco (1945), A,Jy Na1111·
is Julia Ross (1945), S() Dark the N(<,!ht (1946), Tl,e
l l11derco11er ,\.1a11 (1949). G1111 Crazy (1950). A LAd)'
Witlzout Passp()rt (1950), Desperate Searclz ( I 952), Cry
<){ the H1111tcd (1953) and 17,e B(~ Combo (1955) . T he
latter was his last black and ,vhite filn1 and his last _ti/111
1111ir. Lewis' career in cinen1a continued with fiiur
Technicolor W esterns; he then turned to television
,vhere he continued to direct episodes of W esten1
sec>ries into the 19<,0s.
Before looking in any detail at the production of
any of Lewis' B _fil111s 11t>irs (all of ,vhich had n1nni11g
tin,es under 90 n1inutcs and aln1ost all of which ,vere
111.1dec> on the convt·ntionally derisory schedule~ and
budgets of the sct·ond tcaturt·). it is ,vorth 111aki11g J
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

238
Figure 25.1 "/1,e Big Comm• (Allied Artists, I955) was J oseph H . Lewis· lost film in black and whit~ and l11;,
1:ist fi /111 110,r. Produn•d by S1dn~y Ham,on
few o bservations about his earlier career. Le\vis had
\\·orked as a di rector fo r ah11ost ten years by chis tin1e
at the sn1aller B co1npaiues aJld in the B ututs of the
' little three· n1ajors. Conseq uently he \Vas already
identified (as 1nany B directors \Vere) with specific
series of second features. in Le\vis' cast' the Bo b
Baker/ Fuzzy Knight singing W esten1s and the Bo,very
Bov~ , fihns. 7111' Falcon i11 Sa11 Fr,111rist1, \Vas also oue of
a series of RKO Falcon fi lms but Le,vis' en1ploy111enr
there see111s co have been 0 11 a stri ctly one-off con-
tract. Perhaps th e ever- Auid adinirristratio n at RKO
n1eanc th at for a directo r to exercise any consistent or
coherent 'crt·ativicy' th ere s/he needt·d ,t strong pro-
du ce r/ produ ction unit belund wluch co shelter (viz.
Val Le\vto n). Fron, RKO Lewi~ turned to Colun1bia
,vhert: he was co 111ake the fihn that was to bring h.itn
critical and even con1n1ercial success for the first tin1e.
At Columbia. the production unit structure seen1s to
have exercised considerably less int portance than at
RKO; at Columbia. the crucial facto r seen,s to have
heen the favo ur of Harry Cohn.
Digitized by Google
I -
Paul Kerr
Le\vis worked at Colun1bia fron1 1945-9, his n1ost
prolonged period \Vith any co rnpan y. His first filn1
there \Vas tvly l\Ja111e is Julia Ross, a project he cla.itus
to have chosen fo r hirnself and for which he ,\·as
allocated a twelve-day shooting schedule and a 125,000
dollar budget -1.it11its ,vhich Lems apparently exceeded
by four or five days and 50,000 do llars respectively. 11
H aving gone considerably over both budge t and
schedule without severe repri111and Levvis eve n
111:inaged to sec ure a sneak previev.r for tl1e finished
filu1 (whi ch ran only 65 11m1utes) - an apparently
aln1ost unprecedented event fo r a 8 ftlnt but presu111-
abl y a pan of Colu111bia's new ·ambitious B' strategy.
According co Lewis the ftltn grossed fou r o r five
rnillio n dollars: certainl y Le,vis' future \vith Colun1bia
was £,'llaraJltt'ed and positi vc revie"vs by cl1e likes of
J an1es Agee together ,vich a N e"v York C ritics A ,vard
ca nnot ha ve dan1aged the filn1's chances.
The little three co1npa1ues (Colun1bia, U1uversal and
United Anises - so-called co distinguish the1n fron1 the
cl1eatre- o \, 1nin g big five: Para111ount. T ,venticth
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 My Name is Joseph H. Lewis
Century Fox, MGM, Warner Brothers and RKO) had
refused to sign the 1940 Consent Decree elin1inating
blind selling and block booking an1ong the n1ajors.
Compliance with the Decree obliged the 111ajors to
introduce trade shows for all their fihns and to opt for
a 111aximum of five fihns per sales package. With their
theatre chains regularly hungry for new product the
majors understandably opted for the continuation of the
n1ass production systen1 which they had already oper-
ated for more than a decade. The ntinors, on the other
hand, decided to slin1 down, producing fewer, better
filn1s. The little three's refusal to endorse the Decree did
not prevent the other majors from transforming the
industry. Paramount, RKO and Fox reduced their
selling blocks to five; MGM went to blocks of ten,
Wamers and UA used unit sales while Columbia and
Universal stayed with full season blocks. But the Big
Five's transformed strategy inevitably influenced even
the least flexible cornpanies: selling by studio brand
name became increasingly untenable, even for compa-
nies like Columbia which still sold fihns in large blocks;
and B competition and consequent differentiation
intensified. Thus, Colun1bia's ambitious risk with My
Name is Julia Ross was reprised elsewhere, especially in
the Bfilm 11oir. At Universal, Siodn1ak's TI1e Killers began
as a B; at Fox Preminger's Laura had sirnilar low-budget
oribrins and was destined for the botton1 half of the bill;
and at W amer Brothers Huston's The Maltese Falco11 was
also allegedly conceived and cast as a second feature.
Lewis describes in Posit/( how Columbia could not
str etch to a budget for extras onj11/ia Ross (each of whom
would have cost fifteen dollars a day) but forced him to
create an 'English' atn1osphere th rough in1aginative
assen1bly of stock footage, studio streets and sets, fog.
fountains and back projection. James Agee, in the
."vation, wrote 'The film is well planned, rnostly ,veil
played, well directed and in a sornewhat boornhappy
way, well photographed- all around, a likeable, unpre-
tentious, generally successful atternpt to tum good trash
into decently artful entertainrnent.' 11
At the success of )11/ia Rc>ss c:0Iu1nbia encouraged
Le,vis to direct another 'crin1e n1elodra111a· (a phrast'
that recurs throughout the trade press rt·vie,vs of
Lewis' .films noirs, as Wl'll as those of other directors).
Based on an inexpcnsivt' Rt·adcrs' D(J!cst story. tht·
script of So Dark rhc :v,:~hr neccssit.ttt'd t,vt·ncy days
shooting and a French town st·t hut Le,vis' B ~udget
- probably no n1ore than for J11lia R<>ss - could not
111eet the twenty dollars a day that Fox de111a ndt·d in
Digitized by Google
239
rent for theirs. Lewis has described in some detail how
he and his art director and sketch artist walked round
the Colun1bia back lot looking for a possible, passable
location:
W c walked around that back loc whi,·h \Vas over in che
vallc:y, I'll bet you six tin1es, and I kept con1ing back co
one spot. C)nc spot. And that one spot - there was a
town - they had nude a war film and they bombed the
hell ouc of it, and half a church vvas lcfi. And the build-
ings Wl"re just den1olished. And I was inspired by that
steeple, that church steeple. And \VC walked around into
a fidd ... Now this is just a field - no sets. nothing -
and way in che background is that steeple. And I loo ked
at the art director and I said 'if you took a bulldozer
and you n1ade a \Vinding road here, and a dirt road chat
led past that steeple; and you took a thatched roof in
the foreground. just a roof and a side of a building, and
over here further back in perspective so you have ic. you
know, one in the foreground, one in rhe background,
co cover up all the burned-out buildings and everything.
and you had another Rat there, and do\vn this sliding
nud I saw a litde donkey cart or son1e French villager
can1e or an auco111obile came, would I give the in1pres-
sion of a French village?' And the art director leapt for
joy, and by the tin1e I had finished. the sketch artist had
drawn a French village for me with two flats in the
foreb,round and out of a field we n1adc a dirt road.
That's the French village... .
When the girl is found dead, the little French guy
ron1es running up to her mother and there's a long
dialogue scene \vhere he tells her n1other the girl is dead
and she screan1s and cries and all that. And I got on th,·
sec and I rehearsed ic and I said oh. no. no. no. irnpo,-
sible. How can I supply dialogue to n1eet chis kind of
situation? And so, I threw out all thi: dialogue ... I put
the carnera outside of the house and \vay in che back-
i,-ound was a big window that \Vas cut up into about
sixteen different linle panes and there you sa\v the
n1ocher busy polishing son1e silverware: or son1cthing.
And through the scene as taken front outside che fanu-
house. in n1ns this little Frenchn1a11. but in cxtrc.·n1,· long
, hot. and he runs through the house.• and he dis.1pp,·:1rs
bdund J ,val) and rhc.·n reveals hinLsdf in fro nt oi 1his
,vindo,v. Thcy'rc c,vo tiny tif_'llrc.'S . .. in an c.·xtren1t·
long shot and you can't hear. He's talking of ,ours,·. but
you r.111 '1 hear it. W,··rc shooting ic. you kno\v. ,vichouc
sound. And the onlv. noise. shaucring . nois,,. thac vou
.
h,·.1r ,vhen she drops chat <ilver planer or ,vhac,·v,·r it
,v:1s ..1nd that's ,111 you ,,.,· .... 1.,
The point of rt·printing these anecdotes here is not
to salutt' tht> 'irnagination' of the dirt>ctor and h is
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
240 Paul Kerr
production tea1n but rather to ackno,vledge the
con1plex ways in \vhich the n1uch commented-on
· Dressonian · spareness of Le,vis· settings and yet the
fluid 'Ophulsian' manner of his shooting style both
originate precisely in the industrial constraints under
,vhich the fihn ,vas n1ade. Once again Cohn and the
Colun1bia hierarchy \Vere happy with the result and,
by ,vay of pron1otion, ·,niscast' Lewis to direct the
n1usical sequences in the far n1ore prestigious and
hugely successful Larry Parks vehicle 77,<' ],,/son St,>')'.
T his " 'as follo,ved by t\vo further, equally uncha rac-
tl·ristic projects: a ~econd Parks vehicle, 11,c S11~1rds111a11.
and an unsuccessful Cary Grant style con1edy about
a 111an reincarnated as a horse, Tiu· Rct11n1 (!( Octo/1cr.
Finally. Le,vis ,vas allowed to retun1 to the path he
had begun to carve out ,vith Julia Ross, and directed
his third crin1e n1elodran1a fi,r Colurnbia. 77u· Undcr-
<'<'1.,cr i\l,111 . Ht:re again. in spite of the fihn 's 13 st.nu~.
Le,vi~ ,vas allowed unusual licence. including the
luxury of a three can1er;1 set-up (quite a t·onventional
A fihn technique but, bec.1use of its expense, aln1ost
unhl·ard of an1ong Bs), and even rehearsal tin1e for an
in1provisatory dialogue scene. (Once again, censorship
pressures prevented a straightfonvard, denotative nar-
rative of the Capone caSl' on ,vhich the script ,v.1s
based: instead. Capone's identity behind the 'big fellov/
could only be connot('d by careful rl·creation of
Capone ·s fan1iliar hat.) Ti111c n1agazinc conun('nted
'Director Joseph H. Le,vis has turned out a neat little
job. It is ntore entertaining than 1nost of the b ettt'r-
advertist'd n1ovies it ,viii get paired ,vith on double
fl·ature bills . . . It just goes to show that thought ful
dirt'ction ,111d handso n1e cantera ,vork c111 lift a 111cdi-
ocre n1ovie a long ,vay abovt' its hun1ble origins.'"
In respect of rny general ren1arks about the indus-
tri,11 in1peratives of .fi/111 11,,;, it is perhaps pertinent
here to n1ention that it \\'as in 1945, Lewis· first
year at Colu111bia. that that con1pany ,vas finally
ton11ally charged ,vith conspiracy to infringe the
Anti-Tn1st l:l\vs; indec::d. the very s:1111t· issue of the
,\f,,ti,111 Pia11rc Hcr,1/d (Noven1ber 17. 1945) ,vhich
rl·vil·,ved Julia R,>.<.( also carried an article .1bout tht·
An1i-Tn1st ~uit and the probable o utcon1e and conse-
quences of the then irnn1inent derision on block
booking. Sirn.ilarly. tht• san1e issut' of tht· i\lPl-i
(Septl·n1ber 4. 194(,) in ,vhich So D,1rk rlu· ,\ '(i:/11 ,v.1s
revil·,ved includt·d ne,v~ of ( :olu111bi,i 's response to
tlH>St' charges and that decision. It is .1lso ,vorth noting
Digitized by Google
that it ,vas in 1945 that Colun1bia first en1ployed
Technicolor as ,veil as the cheaper Cinecolor process.
In I 949, following the Anti-Tntst case conclusion.
,vhich finally outla,ved the fi!Jn industry·s vertical
integration and instructed the n1ajors to divest
then1selves of their theatrical holdings, (';olun1biJ
decided to discontinue the last of its B series (includ-
ing crin1e thriller series like Boston Blackie and (;rime
J),,ct<,r) and concentrate its efforts on the an1bitious 13
and n1odest A end of the industrv; , the san1e vt·ar
. it
" 'as the first of the 111ajors to launch its o,vn television
subsidiary, Screen Genis. Much could be said about
the detennining role of Colurnbia studios as a struc-
turing 'author' of Lc'A·is' fihns there in the early
I 940s; sinJ.ilarly. it is clearly worth considering the
contribution of con tract ca111eran1an Dun1ett Gutli.·y
,vho ,vas cineniatographer on ]11/ia Ross, S,, Dt1rk 1/w
1\\i:ht and 77,c ( l11dera1P<'. r /\·Ian . Suffice it to say ht're.
though. that such considerations cannot displace Le\\·is
entirely frorn the tilr11s that carry his credit as
director.
Le,vis follo,vl·d l f11dcrco1,cr Af,111 by leavin)?:
c:olu111bia (for unknown reasons) and working for the
King llrothers. an independent and slightly suspe,t
production outfit distributing through United Artists.
According to Lewis. the King Brothers were extren1ely
gl·nerous and non- interfering and his budget Jnd
schedule ,vcre consequently increased fro,n their
( '; olun1bia levels. The King Brothers had apparently
n1,1dc th eir n1oney installing slot n1achines and ,vere
anxious to legiti111ace chen1selves by going Hollywood.
Based on MacKinlay Kantor's Sat11rd,1y Evrni11_1! P,,st
story, c;,,,, c:razy cost about 450,000 dollars and took
30 days to shoot. even en1ploying a new portable
sound svsten1
, for the fan1ous two n1ile location track-
ing shot. Conten1porary critics and filn1-n1akcrs
apparently besieged Le,vis ,vith queries about the
rnysterious n1ultiple back projection technique the
sequence seen1ed to havt· den1anded: they could not
bl·licvl· ch,1t it \v,1s actuallv shot fro1n the back of a
'
car driven do,,..n a street on location in a single take:.
But Le,vis had learned to experin1ent "'-ith exception-
ally Ion!?: takt·s and unconventional location trat·king
shots 111uch t'arlier in his career. with. for exan1ple.
the cclcbratt'd tl'll 111inutt\ ~ingle-take coun roo1n
Sl'qucnce in 11,c Silc11t I Vit11css and the polo pon,·-
111ountl·d carnc:ran1an in 77,c Spy Ri,\I! (1938). United
Artists. \Vho had arr:ingl'd co di stribute c;,11, (.:r,1:r,
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 My Name is Joseph H. Lewis 241

Fi gure 25.2 l'ei:.,')' Cu nun,ns ., nd John l)all .~, the o utlaw couple ,n Le"~' c;,,,, C:r<1::)'
(Kmit Oro,/ U11nrd Arn<t<, l \14lJ). l'rodun' d b)· Fr,11k KJll)t J lld M.,unce King

offered the King Brother. a sun1 of n1oney to take
the latter's na111cs off the filrn but they refused. Perhaps
as a result of - or in retriburion for - this conflict
UA we re reluctant to pu<h the fi ln1 and it \vas even-
tually launchl·d !'\vice, o nce under an aJccn1arive
title. D eadly Is till' Fc111c1/e. UA had been nan,ed, along
,vith the rest of the 111aj ors, in the 1948 Anri- Trusr
pur.uit of qua li ty 8 s or ,vhac ,vere considered hargain
ba)cnu.:nt As.
Fron1 the Kin g Brothers. Le,vis ,vent to the Clther
end of the prestige <pectrun,. MG M. to direct a filtn
entitled rl Lad)' 111itli<l11t P,usp,1rt. On chis occasion,
instead of being expected co create an ann ospheri<' <cc
o ut of vircuallv nothing - as ,ll Colu1nbia - Lc:,vis \ \!JS
• <

decision and, despite its o,v11 lack 11f theatres. had tQ
adapt to n1eet the needs of a changi ng n,arket. An
adtni nistr.1tive reshuffle in I 'J50 had led to a ne,v
regin1e and a ne,v di,rnbunon <tr;itegy: under Krin1
and Benjanun the nc,v policy involvl·d the active
able co l'Xploic MGM ·s extensive bac.:ldoc and e:-.-iscing
sc:ts fron1 previous feature<. T he nrnin borderco~vn <et
in ll Lady 11•i1/111111 Pt1.l$J111rt, in fact. is a revised Vl'rs1011
of the Ve rona Squarl' <et on MC.M's lo r 2, ,vh1ch
h.1d bl:en built for R,,11w,, 1111tl )11/ict i11 1936. A L,1dy

Digitized by Google Orig in al from

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
242 Paul Kerr
,vithout Passport ,vas one of the first of MGM's
quasi-docu1nentary crin1e cycle of second features,
fictionalising the Cri,ne Docs Not Pay forn1at (a 1935-
48 MGM series) but expanding the two-reeler length.
(Lewis con1plains in Posit!{ that the presence of
Hedy Lan1arr in the cast unnecessarily g)an1ourised
the project.) In 1948, the year of the Anti-Trust deci-
sion, Dore Schary had been appointed as head of
MGM's B productions and immediately set about
supervising the transformation of the studio's formu-
laic series, serials and spin-off properties into fewer,
better Bs, Bs which would simultaneously 'express' and
'exploit' topical issues like, in this case, the plight of
illegal irnmigrants. Lewis left MGM after A Lady
1vit/1011t Passport and 111ade a war fibn for Warner
Brothers, Retreat, Hell! but returned in 1952 to n1ake
Desperate Search and Cry of the Hunted (1953). It was
not until 1955, however, towards the end of the fi/111
noir period, that Lewis was to direct his last and rnost
fully blown work in the genre. 77,e B(r? Co111bo was
distributed by Allied Artists and that con1pany's presi-
dent at that tin1e, Steve Broidy, has described the
'nervous A' (as an1bitious Bs and 1nodest As were
son1etin1es known) as an in1portant strategy in
Monogran1's 'prernt>ditated attempt to upgrade our
status in the industry', an attempt to achieve 'a per-
centage deal. as opposed to the flat rental' 15 fee for
the second features and the new co-features it was
providing for exhibition:
()ne of the big things that kept us fro111 111aking :is 111uch
progress as we deserved 10 n,ake. at a tirne ,vhen ,ve
,vere n,aking a fairly good run of product, was the fact
that the exhibitor. in those days. bought pictures based
on the precedent he had paid for product .. . That's ,vhat
I.:d to the creation of Allied Ani~ts. It ,vas the ~an1e
.-0111pany. san1c personnel, sa,ne ev<'.l)'thing. but ,ve
created a totally difii:renl i111agc by calling it Alli,·d
• lh
A rtlSIS.
Thus, in 1.953. Monogran, changed its narne. ()nly
one of Lt>wis' filrns ,vas ever distributed by the
co,npany but as an exan1ple of the new strategy it is
as good as any other - a gangster fihn for 'adults', full
of 'sock. shock and bn,tality' (Hollyrwod Rcp<•rtrr.
February 10, 1955). 'gri1n, sordid, sexy and candid ...
likt'ly to satisfy 111ost adults ... but in no sense a tihn
for children' (A-fori,111 Picture H,,r,1/d, Febn1ary 19. 1955).
l)cscrihing the torture scene, 1,·a,icty was ratht>r It>~~
Digitized by Google
generous, conunenting that 'The n1oronic fringt> of
sadists will enjoy this and all the little kiddies will be
sick to their ston1achs' (February 16, 1955). 77,e Bit
C,imbo is undoubtedly the blackest of Lewis• .films 11oirs;
tht> cine111atographer was John Alton and, in Cal,iers
du Ci11cma, the revie,ver restricted his con1111t>nt~
entirely to Alton's contribution. But it is, in fact, a very
understated film - Robert Mundy. for instanct'.
has ren1arked on the subjectively shot and recorded
1nachine-gun sequence and the sexuality of the Jean
Wallace character, both of which pushed at the Pro-
duction Code but, by virtue of their very subtlety,
escaped the censor's scissors. 17
At the tin1e, however, (as well as ever since) n1ost
critics focused on a con1parison between Lewis' B(!!
Con,bo and Lang's 1953 fil111 77,e Big Heat, generally
asserting the former's indebtedness and alleged inferi-
ority to the latter. (A sin1ilar con1parison has haunted
aln1ost every article about G1111 Crazy, which is tradi-
tionally 111easured up against Ray's 77,ey Uvc by ,"-'(f!III.
Lang's You 011/y Uve Once and Penn's Bc1111ie a11d
Clyde.) Essentially, Lewis is accused of plagiaris111 at
the level of both plot, style and even title, but the
accusation is extren1ely uninforn1ed. Firstly because
the An1erican fihn industry and the An1erican cinen1a
both depended - as did genre cinema in general and
.filn, ,wir in particular - on repetitions, conventions and
fan1iliar formulas. Thus the plot of The Big Co111b<'
(1955), scripted by Phillip Yordan, was indeed based
to son1e extent at least on the success of The Big Heat.
And The Big Heat (1953) was scripted by Sydney
Bot>hn1, produced by Columbia and starred Glenn
Ford. Four years earlier, in I 949, Columbia had pro-
duced another filn1 with a very sirnilar plot-line, al~o
scripted by Sydney Boeh111 and also starring Glenn
Ford. The film was called Underc,n,er A,fa11 and it ,vas
directed by Joseph H . Lewis.
The point of this anecdote is not to prove Le.,,vis
sornehow rnore original than Lang, but simply to
illustrate how self-perpetuatingly the hierarchies of
value within fihn culture (and all its institutions) func-
tion. l l11dcrcot1cr A,fan was a B filn1, for all its ambitions.
It ,vas well enough rt>ct>ived and did reasonably enough
at the box office but Lewis, unlike Lang, was never a
nan1e to put up in lights; ht> \\'as not a Gen11,1n
~n1igre, veteran of UFA expressionisn1. but a cont.Jct
director, verteran of PllC. Most in1portantly. he ,v.1s
a 13 not an A dirl'Ctor. ( :onsequendy, (.ludcrc,,~•cr A-fa11
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 My Name is Joseph H. Lewis
\Vas not sold \vith tht' san1t' sort of energy or expt'cta-
tions as accompanied TI,e Bi~ H1·at. It received lt·ss
prt'ss covt'rage. fewer prints were struck, its theatrical
run was brief. All these factors put severe constraints
on the possibilities for retrospectives and re-viewings
(and, thus, for rt'jigging the pantht'on). In Britain and
An1erica - though this is perhaps less true of France
- tht' criteria t'rnployed for the selection and preserva-
tion of filrns in the National Archives and equivalent
bodies bore (and still bears) a direct relation to their
re$pective critical and/or conunercial success. If a filrn
is considered to be critically prestigious enough it will
be acquired and preserved , budgetary constraints pt'r-
rnitting; if, on the other hand, the filn1 is a big
box-office success and/or a big budget production
then it is likely that arnong the large nurnber of prints
produced one will eventually find its way into the
archives. often via donation. But a filn1 like Under«•vcr
:Vfa11 and, by extension, not only all of Lewis· work
but B filrns in general, fits neither of these categorit·s;
it ren1ains forever outside the self-perpetuating systcn1
of profitability and prestige which is so scrupulously
guarded and guaranteed by the allocation of produc-
tion finance and facilities, by Acaderny Awards, and so
on. In the event, the print of £J11dercover i\1a11 destined
for Edinburgh almost fell apart under the strain of
proJeCOOn.
Which brings me to th e role of the cultural, aca-
demic and critical institutions in the history of
atternpted 'authorisations' of Lewis. Tim Pulleine, in
the /i,fo111/rly Fi/111 B11/leti11, 1" has usefully traced son1e
of the English language perspt'ctives on Lewis and
\vhile what follows is certainly no n1ore contprehen-
sive than Pulleine 's account it does cover a longer
period and a wider art'a. Paul Willen1en, in his
Edinburgh article on Le\vis, 1• relates the apparent
retrospective interest in Le\vis to what he describes as
' the phenon1enon of cinephilia• which he associatt's
with the 'residues of surrealisn1 in post-war French
culture·.!1> Richard Thornpson. in his piect· in (:i11e111a.
sees G1111 Craz y as a precursor of the 11011vdlr 11a_1111e
and elsewhere the filn1 has bct·n estirnated as an influ-
t'nce on Godard in general and .-1 Bout de So,!fJle in
particular. 21 Avoiding such problc:n1atic but provoca-
tive notions. hovvever. Willc:n1c:n is undoubtedly ri~ht
to point to the French and specifically tht' surrt'alists
a.s being (an1ong) the first St·rious critics to a..:knov.rl-
edge Lewis. Ado Kyrou 's L · S11rri-,1/is1111· "" C i11h1111
Digitized by Google
243
( 1953) describes G 1111 C razy as 'an adn1irable filrn.
\Vhich alone of all cinerna clearly n1arks the road
v,hich leads front l'an1our fou to la revolte folle' .: 2
Two years later, the publication of Borde and
C haurneton's Pa11orar,1a d11 Film Noir A111ericai11 (1955),
the first booklength study of the genre, also salu ted
that film as deserving 'a place by itself' as 'a nearly
unclassifiable \Vork ... a kind of Goldc:n Age: of
Antt'rican filn1 noir .. .' .:,
In the United States it scc111s that Andrew Sarris
was one of the first to takt' Lewis seriously (perhaps
through the critic's connections with the An1erican
Ca/1iers); in his book. American C inema, Sarris slots
Le\vis into a st'ction entitled 'expressive esoterica·
alongsidt' the likes of Budd Boetticher, Phil Karlson,
Don Siegel, Robert Siod1nak. Jacques Toun1eur and
Edward G. Ulmer. Sarris saluted Lewis' 'son1bt'r per-
sonality ... revealed consistently through a con1plex
visual style' but today Lewis rernains one of the only
directors so relegated to have resisted pro111otion. 1• In
1962 Sarris had issued a challenge in the page$ of Fi/111
C11/t11re, warning Lewis' adrnirers that 'in this direction
lies n1adness ' 15 - a warning that the writer was to
withdraw the following year, but which has son1eho\v
stayed alive through the tern1s of appraisal Lewis'
critics have employed ever since, fro,n Sarris' 'expres-
sive esoterica' to Willen1en's 'cinephilia'. In 1971 , the
An1erican n1agazine Ci11ema (then edited by Paul
Schrader) devoted eleven pages to Lewis, con1prising
thrt'e articles, an interview:!<• and a filn1ography. If
Lewis proved less than forthcoming about his 'person-
ality' there is some rnaterial about the production of
a nun1ber of his fil111s. More intertliting. however,
are the articles on Lewis by Schrader hin1self, by
Thon1pson and by Robert Mundy. Schrader regards
G1111 Crazy as quite sintply 'one of the best Arnerican
fihns ever made' 27 but is unable to offer any explana-
tion for the alleged excellence of the film. in tht' light
of what he clearly considers the relative 111ediocrity of
n1ost of the rest of Lewis' work; indeed, he found his
cnthusiasrn for the quality of the director dt'Crt'asing
in direct proportion to the quantity of his filrns
vit'wt'd. Prt'dictably, Schrader compares TI1e B('< Co111bo
nt·gatively to Lang's TI,e B(i: Heat and adds that LeYliS·
o nly other strong filn1, U11dera,ver 1\1a11, pales bc:sidc:
Mann ·s T A-1c11. Mundy is 111ore gt'nerous. though his
conclusion that 'Lewis' v,,ork presents a problt'nt of
cl,1ssitication . . . To look at his \vo rk in ~enrt's is
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
244 Paul Kerr
of little ... use·~• is ultin1ately unhelpful. Richard
Thon1pson's rather longer consideration is less cau-
tious, arguing that, the early work apan,
Lewis found his 111etier, if not his personal vision, in the
new popularity of the fil111 noir. Fron1 ]11/ia Ross on, all his
successful filn1., \Vere either outright fihns noirs (G1111
Crazy. ( J11der«wrr l\ila11, 8(~ C,>111bo, I.Ady wit/1()11/ Passport)
or contained rnaudit dernent, (Drsptratt· S,·ard,, So Dark
tire l\J,;~ht, Cry ,f tire H1111ted, A 1.Awle.<S Stre,·t, Halliday
Bra11d, 1error in a "/exaJ 1011111). Upon these filnu - of
varying quality. but none without interest - Lewis' repu-
tation rests. Though it seems diff"rcult to clain1 for Lewis a
consi.stendy black vision, his visual style contained several
ele,nents conducive to the genre: a taste for Bazinian
depth of focus; and for its temporal l\vin the long take: for
can1era 1noven1cnt (rdativity) rather than alternating static
cuts (isolated specificity): for cinen1atographers ,vith dra-
1na1ic. concrete styles. often harshly black and white: for
naturalistic location shooting, or failing that. for 111odestly
scaled back-lot work stressin~ characterh:nvironnu:nt
interfaces rather than explicit spe,·tade ..!'I
Lewis didn't rate an entry in the 1972 l111er,1atio11al
Encyclopaedia of Film but in 1974 Ton1 Flinn's anicle
'The Big Heat and The Big Con1bo • appeared in
Velvet Ug/rt Trap's special issue on the 1950s, and was
entirely devoted to a textual and 'political' con1pari-
son between the two oft- compared filrns:"' The sa,ne
year, the first lengthy appreciation of Lewis, retaining
Sarris' 'insanity clause' appeared, 'Joseph H. Lewis:
Tourist in the Asylun1 •:" In 1975 a second intervie,v
with Lewis, this time by another American critic.
Gerald Peary, appeared in the French n1agazine
Positif. 12 as if to outdo C ine111a, Positif provided sev-
enteen pages for several critics to consider Lewis but
once again, the interview elicited little n1ore than the
fe,v already fanuliar anecdotes, sorne additional pro-
duction details. while the anicles reprised the assenions
about Le,vis' alleged affinity for .fi/111 ll()ir.
In 1980 Le,vis' status for 'cinephiliars· rose ti1nher
still. The BFl's ,\-10111/r/y Fi/111 Bulll'ti11 ran retrospective
reviews of T11c Falc<ln in San Fra11cisco, C1111 Cra~y. ,,t
urdy 11,jt/r,1111 Pa.1sp1,rt, T11at Ga11t vf Aline, {.!11derc1>111•r
i\-11111, Tire 8(11 c:o,11bo, 11,c Hal/id,,)' Braud, Rctrc,11, Hcl/1.
.111d Tcrr<>r in a ·rcx11s 11>11111 and devoted its b,1ck cover
to Tin1 Pulk·inl' 's t·~s;1y• on thl· diret·tor. 1•1 These etli,ns
cornprised part of tht· preparations for the Edinbur~h
Fihn Festival R.etrospet'tivc.' f<)r ,vhich the first dr;1ft of
th is article ,vas ,vrittl'n and to ,vhil'h Paul Willen1en.
Paul T Jylor and Richard ('.01nhs al~o con tributed."
Digitized by Google
Unlike previous retrospectives at Edinburgh. however,
there was no tie-in publication fron1 either the Festiv.iJ
itself, the BFI or Screen. Nor was the retrospective taken
up later in London at the National Film Theatre -
though a small season was n1ounted at a repenory
cinen1a, Riverside S tudios, son1e weeks before the fes-
tival:'' More irnponant in the British pron1otion of
Lewis in the early eighties were the reviews run in the
London listings 111agazine, Time 0,11. The magazine
then exercised a virtual n1onopoly on the audiences of
the more adventurous repenory/independent exhibi-
tors in the capital and the revie,vs duly alened large
(new?) audiences to the filn1S. The two films that
received caption reviews were, perhaps predictably.
Gun Craz y and Tire Big Combo, though, rather less
conventionally. it was The Bi~ Combo which first
attracted exhibitor and consequently reviewer attention
in this case. It's wonh printing the two reviews in full :
Everything you ahvJys lovt·d about A111,·riran 'fihn noir'
in one sensational 111ovie: Joseph Le,vis' 1111· B(~ (;,,,,,~~
(Electric, frorn Sunday). Police lieutenant Con1cl Wildt·
Sl'arches neurotirally for evidence to pin on n1obster
R.ichard Conte - because he nurses a pathetic crush on
his victim's rnoll Jean Wallace. Along the way. through
the night and fog, he clutches at fragmentary clues (a
nan1e, a photo). goes to bed ,vith a stripper and lovinl?ly
helps her on with her shoes. and suffers torture - by
hearing aid. St·nt to get hin1 arc two thugs (Let· Vin
C:leef and Earl Hollirnan). \vho share not only guns but
Jlso beds; their rdationship provides the rnovie ,vith 1t1
n1ost tcndt·r 111on1ent. The pace is brutal, the ton<' is
harsh, the dialo1,'l1l' is cnrel. Aln1ost certainly the !-'TCatt·st
1110\' ie ever ntadc. as heady as an1yl nitrate and ,ls co111-
pulsive a.< sta111pi11~ on insects. (Tony Rayns)·"·
Front it< op<·ning 1110111c.-nt~. it's clear that Gun (:m~y
(lnd<'P<'1tdc111~: Electrir) is a B-picture classic. Din·cted
hy Jost·ph H. Le,vis - \\'hose later noir thriller. '111,· B(e
<:,,111/,,,. ,v:i> al~o rt'<'<·ntly redi~rovt·red by the Elcl'tric -
it ti.-atur<'S :111 a111 iablc but gi1n-<·r:tzy hero ,vho ab,u1do11,
Ho111c10,... 11 USA 10 dope ,vrth the (lady) sharpshooter
fro111 a 1r.1vdling nrru,. L><·cp in rnutual obst'ssion. tht·v
n111 out of 111<H1t·y. patit·nt·<·, and tin1e: then t:1k<· to
arllt<·d robbt'I)' ,111d the roJd that leads (incvit.1bly) 10
d<·,tth. l'l.,tly l'·'"io11.11c, 11<'\'t•r \',1111pish, Pt·~ Cununins
turns in a <t.tggt·ring perlorn1ann.- ,vhirh threart·n,. ,in-
gkh.11,ded. 10 O\'<·rthnn\' tht· cultural and sexual
C<'rt.1i111i,·s nf rniddlt' Arn<·ri c111 lift·. Ev<."n, at tht· verv
end. this b,t ronuntic coupk· refust· to p.1y the price ot
th<·ir rdwllion: huntt·d d<nvn in a 111isty. t·l'hoing S\\':unp.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 My Name is Joseph H. Lewis
ch,·ir tom11:nced faces exprL-s.~ only pain and fear, never
a cr~cc of guilt or regret. Contpulsive genre cinen1a.
,11earing its low budget and Freudian motifs with alrnosc
equal disdain; it sin1ply knocks spots off senile in1it;i1ions
like &nnie a11d (:lyde. (Chris Auty)-''
Also in I 980 the An1erican Telluride Fihn Festival
111ounted an impressive _fi/r,1 11oir retrospective, which
featured the attendance of Lewis hi1nself, who ,vas
interviewed at length by Paul Schrader.
Paul Wille111en 's paper for Edinburgh is the latest
piece on Lewis I have been able to trace - though I
should repeat that n1y aim here is not an exhaustive
bibliography but rather a schen1atic scrutiny of that
bibliography as pan of the case study of attentpted
'authorisations'. And Willemen's article neatly opens
up (and yet rather pere111ptorily also sin1ultaneously
closes off) that debate, noting that
Many avowed auteurist, in Franc,·. the US and Britain
have attempted to clain1 hint as an author. All have
failed. Not because it would be impossible to construct
a thematic coherence covering a substantial proportion
of his work. but because the films appear to resist such
efforts, locating their pleasure elsewhere. on a n1ore
disturbing though fascinating level:'"
But is it indeed possible to construct such a coht"rence?
Mundy proposes son1e pott'ntial significance in the
recurrence of swamp scenes, the predilection for long
takes, tracking shots and depth of focus, and a thentatic
concern for memory and its loss. -''' Thon1pson under-
lines Lewis' liaison with fi/1,r 11oir and funher notes that
'Lewis seen1S instinctively to cast his filn1s in the fonn
of hunter-hunted chases' but concludes that 'no con-
sistent style of n1ise-en-scene is apparent, no Lewis
look or Lewis POV or Lt'v,is conceptual slant that ran
be spotted front filn1 to film.''" Meisel reiterates tht'
hunter-hunted n1otif and adds another recurrent ite111
of Lewisiana in 'the inst'parability of individual iden-
tiry fro1n social action'. He notes an irreconcilable
collision between 'the noir detem1inisn1 of his style'
and 'his brief for f:unily ties as the root of n1oral
responsibility'. Meisel got's on to unpack this asst·nion
a little, describing how Le,vis· apparent penchant lclr
'characters (who) express then1selves exclusively
through their actions· rnakt's for v.·hat he calls •~ood
visceral cine111a ·." The fonner e111pha~is, on fa_111ily
ties, is repeated by Pulleint'; tht' lattt·r is rt'pri~,·d in
Ton1 Mih1t''s rt·111arks o n God.1rd's (lt·hts to L,·,vis.':
Digitized by Google
245
More generally, ho,vever, all tht' cnucs surveyed
st:e111 to agree: that Lewis· fihns are ofi:en stronger in
pans than as wholes, as is Lev.is' oe11vre itself; that the
B .film noir provides a useful way into understanding
Lewis, if only so as to distinguish his films that fall
outside its paran1eters; that his stylistic 'signature·,
however difficult to detennine, did preempt sonte of
the attributed innovations of the nouvelle vague and yet
at the sante tin1e functioned as a syrnpton1 of and a
valediction for a ceruin son of .Atnerican cinema.
Finally, there seen1s to be a critical consensus that
Lewis was unwilling and/or unable to 'irnpose' his
personality on his filn1S, but that
Picking through Lc,vis' diverse filn1ography. 11 1s quite
..-asy to find evidence of a director with a strong pt"rson-
ality - and just as n1uch evidence of one who never
really found a subject. Lewis n1ight almost en1body the
kind of caricatured figure that an auteurist critic would
hold up as the epito1ne of the cult of the director: sty-
listic authority operating in a vacuu111. '-'
Lewis clearly poses a problem for auteurisrn - as for
genre criticisn1 - acknowledged by almost all who
have written seriously about his work (with the pos-
sible exception of Paul Willemen). But such problems
do little to deter the desperate search of anachronistic
auteurists, the cry of the hunters. Trying to identify
a coherent, consistent ' thernatic core' in the Lewis
oe11vre, of course, begs the too rarely raised question
of just what constitutes such an oeuvre, such a core.
This anicle has attempted to argue that neither are
static but rather that both are conjunctural and are
continuously being reconstructed. Nevenheless, it is
interesting to note that the film which 'n1ade Lev.•is·
name·, in the industry, at least, My Na,ne is Julia Ross,
should have n1ade the n1en1orisation of a name, an
identity. so central to its plot and, indeed, its title.
Apparently Lewis chose this project for hin1self - in
fact it seen1s to have been the first occasion on which
he was able to select a script rather than si111ply being
hirnself selected to direct one. And Lewis hi111self
changed the title frorn the script's Woma11 i11 Red. So
D<1rk the /\:(t;1ht retains the identity/ 111e111ory the1natic
(and ,vas al~o a project selected by Lewis hi1nselt) .
Whill· it n1av• be dubious at bc>st to 111ake 1nuch n1ore
of this than ironic coincidence, it is \vonh adding that
Sl'Vt'ral of Lt·,vis' tihn~ carry thi s idc.1. fron1 the under-
COVl'r idrntitit·s of the detectives in .·I Lu/y ,,,;,/"'"'
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
246 Paul Kerr
Passport and U11dercover !l-fa11 to the uncovered identi-
ties of the 111ysterious Alicia in TI1e Big Combo and
the fleeing Bart nan1ed by the press in Gun Crazy.
More intriguingly, perhaps, two n1ore fihns express the
urgency of nan1es and nanling in their very rides, A
I.Ady without Passport and TI1e Halliday Bra11d.
It's ten1pting to reject Wille1nen 's ren1arks about
Lewis' filn1S - 'the scripts are unchallenging, the acting
stereotyped and haphazard, the ideologies unfailingly
reactionary' - as no n1ore than in1passioned polenlic
against auteurist excesses. But the films are worth
defending against such charges; not because of any
disservice such re1narks n1ay do to Lewis or his fihns
but because of their disservice to fihn history and filrn
studies. Certainly several of the scripts as well as the
actors Lewis Yo'orked with were in1perfect; equally
certainly, however, the scripts for My Names is Julia
Ross, A I.Ady without Passport, TI1e U11dercover /itfan, Gu11
Crazy, TI1e Big Combo and The Halliday Bra11d were
actually excellent as were many of the performances
in Lewis' filn1s and, as a number of critics have sug-
gested, it was Lewis who failed to n1atch them. More
seriously. Willen1en's allegation that Lewis' films
en1braced unfailingly reactionary ideologies, its• impact
as polen1ic apart, risks returning film studies to the
prestigious theatrical values of pre-auteurist days, long
before the publication of Con1olli and Narboni's
influential essay, 'Cinema/ldeology/Criticis1n' . ◄• Of all
Lewis' work in the period, only Retreat, Hell! seen1s
to have had an indisputably propagandist project; and
in Hollywood, as elsewhere, it is essential to be wary
of intentions. Labelling the entire Lewis oeuvre as reac-
tionary seen1s at best in1pulsive and at worst critically
reactionary it~elf Indeed. Willemen could be accused
of echoing the Korean War utterance (of General
Sn1ith) which gave Lewis' filn1 its nan1e: 'Retreat, Hell!
We're just attacking in a different direction.' The
· different direction• in which Willemen is in danger
of advancing filn1 theory is toward Adorno and (High)
Cultural pessimisn1 and away from the kind of
acknowledge111ent of the fihns' historical context, their
institutional place that this article has been urging as
a nece~sary precondition of any analysis - let alone
evaluation - of cinc111a, fron1 levels of \\'riting or
acting to ideology.
For Wille111en, ho\vever. the prcsl'nt status and
historical locus of Lt·,vis' \.vork is sin1ply to be
regretted:
Digitized by Google
When cincphilia disappears. Lewis' films will cease to
have any function. their specificity will vani~h a.long
with the spectator's inability to acknowledge a desire for
cinema, the asoC'ia.l. politically irresponsible joy of
. .,
Iook. 1ng.
It is hard to take this kind of con1bination of cultural
pessi1nis111 and radical puritanisrn seriously as polenlic.
let alone as prophecy. But if Lewis' fibns have had a
'political' role in the last mree decades, then that has
been their function as hiccups, indigestible exceptions
to theories about the general applicabiliry of ceruin
propositions about Hollywood as industry and as
cinen1a, about genre, about the classic realist text,
about authorship itself. about the impossibility of
attributing essential 'ideologies· to texts outside
of their institutional site and historical moment;
about specifically the history of Hollywood's n1odes
of production and their relation to n1odes of
representation/signification. That n1ode of production
actively prohibited and delimited the possibilities of
individual authorship. But the n101nent and specific
site of such productions as Lewis' between 1945 and
1960 also in1portantly coincides with another political
detenninant on Hollywood, that of the HUAC hear-
ings and the consequent blacklist. The blacklist 1nade
all too literal the cliche about the authorless anonyn1-
ity of the average Hollywood fibn. After the first
HUAC hearing (in I 947) and particularly after the
first trials (in I 951) a nun1ber of film-nukers were
forced to work anony111ously either for the Bs or for
the new independents. Victor Navasky's Nami11.f! •1,:J111es,
a study of the blacklist era, connnents:
Independent filnunakcrs . . . were by definition ,ulla!,!O-
nistk to studio values. So1nc wert· independents becauS<'
they were incapable of functioning other than on the
111argin (and on the cheap). And it seents fitting that one
of these, the King brothers. should have nude it a
rq,,'lllar practice to en1ploy blacklisted personnel under
pseudonyn1s - not as a protest against repression but as
a calculated risk. a shrt·,vd econon1y. getting top t.iknt
for n1inin1al n1on<'V. It was the King brothers ,vho hired
l)alton T run1bo .'"
Tnunbo's first script for the Kings was apparently Gun
(,'r,1zy. Lc...,·is adntits that the MacKinlay Kantor script
\vas far too long; he does not, however, adnlit th,1t
the crt·diting of Millard K.aufinan as co-screenwriter
\Vas sin1ply a 'front' for the 'unen1ployable', black-
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 My Name is Joseph H. Lewis
listt:d Trun1bo.'7 Lewis had collaborated with people
on the liberal left at Colu111bia in the late forties. In
1958 he \Vas to be associated even n1ore strongly with
blacklistees. The script for his last filn1, Te"or in "
Texas Toulfl, is attributed on the filnts credits to Ben
L Perry. Lewis notes in his interview with Bogdanov-
ich that Ned Young. a blacklisted ~•riter who also
appears in the film, contributed to the script uncred-
ited. So. according to Navasky, did another e1ninent
blacklistee, John Howard Lawson. 4" In this light, the
film's gunfight between (HUAC friendly witness)
Sterling Hayden and (the blacklisted) Young takes o n
new charges.
To paraphrase Busconibe's fonnulation about
Wal,h and Warners, it has been the an1bition of this
piece to call into question the predictable - if prob-
lc1natic - pron1otion of Lewis to the auteur pantheon;
to recognise that working in an industrially dt:fined
sub-genre with as distinctive a strategy and style as the
B .fil,n noir in1posed a nun1ber of constraints on 'cre-
ativity' but to insist that such constraints should not
bec· seen as 1nerely negative in their operation. Working
in the area of the B film noir n1eant sin1ply that the
opponunities for conunercial and critical success lay
in cenain (industrial, generic) directions rather than in
others. Sheila Johnston, in an article on the production
context of the New Gennan Cinenta, has argued
Not just that so,ne highly individualistic W est Gcrnian
films in the sixties and seventies sccrn to invite an
autl'urist reading. but that the: conditions for an Autor
Notes
1 John Caughi< (<·d.) "17irl'rirs ,f Aurlwrship, London. llriti,h Film
ln.s1i1u1e and Roud<·d~< & Kc"an Paul. 1'>t! I. See al<o Stephen
Jenkins (ed.) Frit::: L m.~: ·11,.- /111~~•· ,md 1/11· I,,,k. London. British
Filn1 Institute. I981 . Jenkin~ conl"t:ivc.~:-. of · L:mg · nt·ithc.·r hio-
b,raphically nor struc.· tur:ally. ~inlt' tht· fiJnnc.•r J.'i~u,nc.·s :, ro1n:uuic
Artist behind e,·ery a.<p,·rt of "hi, work, while the laner 'implies
that such a stn1ctun..· exist'§. .as so111ethinµ to be: i,.,rr.,spc:d. · ln~tc:ad,
J<·nkin, odd«s~c, "L.111~· ,, a ·,p:1re wh<·rc a niultiplicicy of dis-
course..~ inten.c<.:t, an Ull'\t.,blt:. sh1fi1nµ nmfiguranon of disrour,;t.•s
producc..·d hy the: intt·raction of a 'ipc.·t'1fic ~roup of tiln,~ ( Lm~·~
ftltnogr;1phy) with p.1rtin1br. hi<1nric11ly and ,on.11lv lor.1t.1blt·
,v,1y, of rt.·,u.iio~l vitwin~ chn,;c,; tilm~·. p. 7.
2 Sec, hOYlt.'Vl·r, Stt.'Vl' N l·.1k\ ,lrtr<'k- · Autho n. .111d (;l•nrl•:,. · in
Srre1·11 vol. 2.1 no. 2. pp. K4- <J .
3 Cauglue. op. cit.. p. 14.
4 Ibid .. p. 2.
Digitized by Google
247
cine,na were deliberately cultivated (in conjunction ,vith
certain industrial. political and cultural devdopnients)
rather than accidentally propitious.'"
Were Johnston's observations about Gennan art
cine1na extended to Hollywood, they would go sonte
way to n1eeting Caughie's suggested relation of 'the
author . . . to institutional and conunercial contexts•.
Indeed, I would like to suggest, by way of a conclu-
sion, that the late forties and early fifties in Hollywood,
particularly in the cotnpetitive realn1 of the an1bitious
8/nervous A picture, provided similarly decisive
developntents. developn1ents which at least panially
encouraged the authorial halltnarking and, indeed, the
directorial 'expressiveness' of people like Lewis.
Countless critics have ren1arked on the richness of.fi/111
noir, the nu111ber of fant.iliar and unfanliliar filtn-
makers who excelled thentselves in the genre. Perhaps
that genre, though never named as such at the tin1e.
\.vas an accidentally propitious arena in which the
process of 'authorisation' could be played out and
institutionally inscribed. In the 1970s and '80s, on the
other hand, film noir in general and the B film noir in
panicular have indeed been deliberately recultivated
around a nu1nber of nantes - nan1es like Karlson,
Fuller, Siodn1ak, Mann, Tourneur and Uln1er. Among
them that of Joseph H . Lewis has functioned to liter-
ally re-authorise and consequently categorise a nun1ber
of B _films noirs in this period just as, in the '40s and
'50s, that subgenre it~elf could be said to have helped
to authorise Le\.vis.
5 Paul Kt·rr, '()ut ()f Whot l'Ast; Not,·, o n the I.l Filrn Noir.
Sa,·1·11 l::d11r,11i<•11 no,. J2 / J.1. Autumn/ Winter I 97')/ XO. pp.
-1~>5.
6 A ninnbl·r of ,uch tt:xtu.11 analyses arc rcfrrrcd to in the: tOot•
note,; 10 chis .>rtide. S<e bdow.
7 See Janet Stai~er·s overview of the shift 10 independent pro-
dunion S<Tcc11. vol. 24 nos. -1-5.
ll Edward llusrmnb,·. 'Walsh and Warner Brothers' in Phil
Hor,!y (,·J .) R,,,.,1 l1'.1/5/,_ Edinbur~h film l'esuv.tl, 1'17-1. S,•e
also Ste\"<' J<·nkin, artick "Edg.u (; . Ulm<·r and PRC: A
I ktour down Po,·,·rty Row·. in ;\l,,111/1/y l'i/111 13111/niu July
l'>K2. vol. -I'> no . 5K2. 1>. I 52.
'J BuM:1.,111be op. ,:i1.. p. Ml. Th.it ~ut'h "fono;.tr.111n,· .111d 'd in.·c~
uou,· could hl· nllh.·h 111o n· tllJn ~imply o;.tyli,ti1..' i, fl'ntr.11 to
Bu.;~ombe;•·, .1r~ume;•11t. Wlull· Ll.·wi,' (Jrc:..·r ,tt Cohunbi,1 b too
.
hril'I' tu ht·ndit 6-mn thl· kind nt .;tudio/ dirt·t·tor ,tudv ..h.-votl·tl
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
248 Paul Kerr

to Wal~h and Wan1r:~. it l~ ,vorth notin~ th.i t dscwhcrc.· Quotl'd by Thornpson. op. nt .. p . 46.
Uusromb.- hls pubh,h.-d .111 ankk on C,,lurnbiJ itsdf. 'Notl'S Quotl'd by Thompson. ibid.
on C.:olmubi.1 Pirturc:s Corpor.ttu.)11 192(,~ 1·, Sa,·r11. Autun1n Andre."'-'' Sims. TI,r : lmfnr,m Ci11t"ma. N tw York. l >unon.
1975. vol. 16 no. 3. pp. <,S- !C!. In this Jnid,· Uu«:ornb,· l'lhli. pp. I .'2-3.
addr,·s,cd th,· qu.-stion of Colurnbi:i', <tudio styl<' and politir.,I Andn·w Sarri~. 'The Hi~h Fnnil's R cvi,itcc.l·. Fi/111 Cu/111,r no.
.1flili.1tions. J\kin~ whc:thc.•r o r not th;u ro,np.,ny\ rd:u ive 24. Sprin~ l'J<,2. p. <,<, .
indt"pl'nth.·nt:c fron1 Wall Strc.·c.·t tin.u1ee frcc:d ib til111 • n1Jkc.·n The intc.·rYit.·w n1akc.."\ a useful comp.an,on with Uo._:d:1110\' llh'1,
roluir.1Jly. Uu!-contbc:\ (Onc..'lusion is nq~~ui,·c.·. but ht' dot's prt..·viou.,ly publi.~ht'd 'inll·rvi~w ht>ok:-.·. 1:n·1: L.mg in .~mfn1J.
point out thJt p«·n,dy 11.11( of thl' Holly\\·,,.,d Tl'n w,·r.· Mo,·1r Pap\.·rb,Kk.,, Studio V1,r,l. l'Jt,7 .u1J j,,lm F, ,.t. f...1(Wll'
1

t·rnployc.·d .lt Cohnuh1.1 111 thL· PJ.\ik. A111011i,: rite.· r:u.hc.:al~/ l';iperh.ick,. Studio Vi,1.,. I 'Jf,X.
hl.,d:.-lii:tt..·c.·s th.u Lewi, workc.•d with .n the.· studu., w1.·n· Lury '27 Sl'hradt·r in c·;,,,.,,,.,. op. t'it.. p. -t1.
P.trks (who ~tarn·d m '/111· Jc,/$,111 Ste''}' ,tnd ·11,c -~"°''r,lsm,m). 2X Mundy III Ci11r111,1. ,hid .. p. 45.
Sydnc.·y Burhnt:an (who w :11; :111 unrn.·dth.·d ,:nntnbutor to rht· T homp,on in Ci11r111a. ibid .. p. 4<,.
,<'.ript of ·11,., }<•/;.>11 S1<•ry). Rob,·n Ro«,·n (who produ,·,·c.l .lo .·n,,· H,.i: H,·lu Jlh.l ~17,f n,:~ ( .'c1111b.1 - Ro~ttl' Cop\ &: Mmk•
l ·udrri',wrr .\l,m) :md Nt·dr11.:k Young {who :1ppt·.1r1.:d in "/711· Co:11,·d (;,rl, in 'J'/1<· I .-/,•.-1 l~~lu T,,,,, no. 11. pp. 1.1-X.
.'\,n1rdsm,m .111t.l who worknl with l.t.·wi" 011 .me.! off throuµhn ut ., I Myron Mdsd. ·Ju,q,h H . L,·w": Toun<t in th,· A,ylum .. 111
hi< ,·ar.·,-r •lil'r thcv h.,d both kti Columbi.1). Ch:irlc, Fl\'1111 and Todd MrC•nhy (<-c.l,.). /\111.~, ,,/ 1111· B.,. op.
111 K,·rr. op. dt .. p. 45. cit.
1 I Tht.'"l.' and otht.·r tiµ:urct,; in this .inidc.· dt·rivt.· fro111 Pt'tt·r ~\2 H•~irf op. nr. . pp. JCJ-~5 .
Uo~d.,novil'h 's intt·rvit.·w with Lc.:wi!I i11 ( .'im·mt1 F.,II 197 1. .1.\ l'ulkin,·. vp . ,·i1.
'
vol. 7 no. I. JrH.I fro111 (;1..•r.1ld Pl·Jry\,, 1ntfrVll'W 111 i't.•Jit{l ~'-I P.1ul Willc..·111t..•u·,; .u1d R.11..·lurd Co1nhs' t"ontribuuon"' Wt·rt·
July/ Au~ust 1'175. no<. 17 1-2. T h,·y hJv,· 1101 hl','11 vcriti,·d pr1111c..·d in th(.· l9HII 1:,liu/tu~~J, 1:;1,,. Ff.,ri1•,1/ bnh,: hu rc.·. P.llll
a~.tu l'il tht· t.·stt.·11:,.1vt· l.t·w1, 111:1tt·rial hdd by thc.: Ch1r.1~0 T.1ylor h.1~ wnttt.·n ()JI Lt.·w t, in Tim,· ()ut. l\,hy ~- K. 19SO, r -
l11.;titutc.· of An . 5 1 Jnd p. 53.
12 (Juott.·d 111 1)011~ i\-1r(]dl.i1ul. 77,t (;,l/d,·u .·l.~1· ,?f Ii .\l,w11·,;;. J?; S\.-c: P.u1I T.1ylor's r\.·111.1rk,. op, t"11.
Un11.111 z.1 B,,. ,k,. I97X. p. 141>. .\(, 'Jim.- I )111. l'vt.1rd1 2- K. l'li '!. p. 4.\ .
IJ Lt..·w1,; mrt.--rvic.·,,·c..·d by Bn~d.11u.>virh. op, ..-it .. p. -IX. -'' ·nmc' ()m. Sc..·pCt·111bt.·r 21 - 27. 1'>7tJ. p. 4l),

1-l ()1101,·J in l\,1t·C ldl.111d . op. ,·i1.. p. lli<, . ,\~ W1lk111t.·11 in Fr,uuru'c•rk. op, dt.. p. -i<J .
I 5 1111,·rvi,·w with Bro1<ly III Ch.ulc~ Flynn and Todd lvkC.,rthy .\9 (.'i,u•uM. op. ,:it.
(nl<.) /\i11~.• ,f ,/11· I!, . [ . I'. 1>1111011. 1975 . p. ~71. 40 u,..1.
H, Ibid .. p. 27 2. 4I 1\,1'·1,d. op. n1.
17 Sc.·c.· Rohe"n fv1 undv·-.. lmtu lt·d ,lftlt' k• i,i ( .'1111·m,1 F.1H Jt)i l. \'ol . -12 rv11h1t.·. op. nt.
7 no. I. -'J R1d urt.f Comb,· rt..·vit'\'-' of l ·udn " 1n ,\1,m :tppt.-.1rt..· J in .\l\•t11hlr
1

) X run Pulk11w, ·u11dt·rf o\·,:r I )Jfl t·ror or: Tlw N .1111c.· 1, JP"'t'J'h
0
him Hull,·1i11. op. nc .. p. 3X,
11. Lt'\\'j. . · i11 .\J.•111hlr J,,/111 Hullc•fm tvbrch 11n•u1. vol. ➔7 l h). "'"' Rt·rn11tl'd Ill S.r,·c-11 H.,·,1,la I. ,1:Ff. London. 1977. I ,till rc.·fl· r-
5S-I. p. ,.o. nnl,!
. ht·n· lo C:umo1h .tnd N.trbo111·$: noton,,u~ c.'.\tc~on· . . ·t··.
llJ P.u1I W 1lk 11u:n\ , p:1pcr i, n·pnnh:d. with .t nc.·w .ttl1.•rword. -IS \1/ill(.'111t.'11, Fr,nnt·111i,rJ.:. op. cit.. p. SO.
undt·r till' l1t.·:,dmµ · Etlinhurµh - Dt:h.,tc.· ·, / :,,uucu"t•r/..· 110 . i'J. -1(-, V1t·1or S. NJ\',l!->ky..,·,,,,,,,,_~ .\",m1e·s., Pt.·ng:uin. ltJXI. p . 15':i.
pp. 4!l- ~11. ➔7 ' (;Ju, . .twrum~ - Unr;1n·li 11µ thl· Em!,,.'111:1 uf Mo..-1c.· Aurhc.H,lup'
211 lh,d .. I'· 4'1. hy fvt ,dud Sr.1µow. F,l,n ( ;,,,,,,,w,,, ~-1.,rdl . Arni 1'JSJ , \'tll. J1t
2 1 R ich.in.I Tho1np,011 \ tmtllll'd .u t idl· o n Ll·w,.. .,ppv .nnl 111 -,
l hl. -• J'· 'I .
{,'mf m,, E,11 I 1J7 I. vol. 7 no, I . ,,·uh :trth.'lc..• . , \-iy ..,_d1r.hkr .md -'~ N.l\',1,ky op. l' it.. p . .\4:i .
l\t11111tty an,I .m mfl•n·1c..·w hy Pc.·tt·r Bt1~d.111tl\"l l h (tlp. fH .) . -'') Shl·1l.1Jo hu . . hlll. 'The.· Amhor ,l'o Puhi..- ln"tllutinn' . •,,n 11 1.,/tt.
T n,n M1l11t..· h.1'."' .tho rdi.·1Tc.·d 10 .m :i llc.·~l·d i11Hut..·11t' c.• 0 11 ( ;t1d.1rd ,.1111111 IHh. .\21.\.\ Autumn ' Wmrt.·r Jt)7CJ/ XU, p. hX.
in hi"' rc.·\'ic..·w of ( ;,,,, <.'ri1.:y i11 ,\/(111tl1ly Film Bultrttu l\.1.1rd1
l'JHO, ,·ol. 4i no. 55..t. p. S7.

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 26
Authorship as a Commodity:
The Art Cinema and
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari
Michael Budd

In this essay Michael Budd, a professor of film studies at Florida Atlantic University in Boca
Raton, examines the complex authorship of the classic German Expressionist film, The
Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920). It builds on discussions by David Bordwell and Steve Neale of
art cinema as an institution, with a distinct infrastructure (specialized cinemas, festivals, jour-
nals) and stylistic conventions, a central one of which is its foregrounding of the author's
presence through stylistic traits that disrupt the norm of standard narrative cinema. In Bord-
well's account, art cinema is "a distinct mode of film practice" featuring looser narrative
structure, ambiguity, and noticeable stylistic gestures that function like authorial signatures.
Art cinema addresses the viewer as a knowledgeable spectator who will recognize the char-
acteristic stylistic touches of directors from their other films. In the case of The Cabinet of Dr
Caligari, not only is its production history unclear and fraught with changes involving director
Robert Wiene, producer Erich Pommer, and screenwriters Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, but
Budd's analysis of the film contextualizes its marketability within the context of art cinema,
where authorship has legal status and concrete economic exchange value.

A Footnote to Film History
Dy the early 1940s, the principal niakers of ·n,f c.:,1bi11cr
q1· Dr c:aligari ( 1919), like 111any other Gen11an writers
and artists, had fled Hitler's reginie. l)irector Robert
Wient' had died in France in 1938 ati:er having clainu:d
ownership of the tiln1 and having sold the rights to
Rex Filn1s of Paris in 1934. Carl Mayer had eniigratcd
to London where he wrote scripts until his death in
1944. HansJano,vitz, the C zt·c h pol·t ,vho co-authored
the screenplay with Mayer, was living in Nev,: Jersl·y.
Erich Ponuner, who produced the fihn while head of
Decla-Bioscop and later becan1e head of production at
UFA, Germany's largest studio, ,vas with Mayflo,ver
Productions in England and later with the Producers
Corporation of An1erica in Hollywood.
In 1944 Jano\vitz and Ponuner, through their
la,vyt'rs, began elaborate negotiations over the leg.1)
rights to the fan1ous filn1, which each of tht'nl wanted
to re1nakt' in HollY"'Ood. 1 Thest' legal 111aneuveri11~.
,vhich appare11tly never reached tht' courtroon1, ,,,ere

Mtduc.·1 Uudd. ··Aurlmr-lup ;I\., (\•umh•\lih·: Thl· Art C111n11., .,od ·17,t' (.'.,l,wt'I ,,, I>, C:.rh..:_:.m :· pp. 1~- 1', from 11 'i,/,· .·!,~.,:/,· t,, m,. I (1 9X4). c.· PJ>U h~ /\.1i..: h.h·I
UuJd. Rq,nnh:d by pl·m11,,1un ot' dH.- Jurhor.

Orig in al from
Digitized by Google UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
250 Michael Budd
co1nplicated not only by multiple clain1s on the fihn,
but also by the problen1 of silent versus sound rights
and the in1position ofNazi law in Gerntany, which was
not recognized in the United States. English language
versions of the original fihn were being held by the
Custodian of Alien Property. At one point in January
1945, Janowitz, who already had written an extensive
treatntent for a ren1ake, was offered a n1inimum guar-
antee of S16,000 against 5% royalties for his rights to
the original plus a script to be written by hint for a
production to be directed by Fritz Lang.2 Later, when
the satisfaction of all claims to the original seemed
intpossible, Janowicz wrote a script for a sequel, entitled
Cal(~ari 11, and offered his property, both Cal(~ari 1 and
11, to a Hollywood producer for $30,000:' None of
these negotiations resulted in the production of a fihn,
although the preliminary clearing of legal rights prob-
ably contributed to the use of the ride (and little else)
in a 1962 production by 20th Century Fox.
The Art Cinema
If all this talk of Hollywood ren1akes and legal rights
sounds a bit bizarre in its relation to dtat hoary classic
shown in filn1 history courses and dutifully extolled
in textbooks, then the reader has begun to grasp the
argument to be n1ade in this paper. For 11,c Cabinet
•!f Dr Caligari is an early exantple of art cinenta. a
111ode of cinen1atic discourse which differentiates itself
in lin1ited n1odemist directions from the dominant
111ode of classical narrative, but which nevertheless is
produced and consun1ed largely within the comn1odity
relations of advanced capitalist societies. As delineated
by D avid Bordwell and Steve Neale with somewhat
ditferent entphases. the art cinerna is not just a type
of filnt, but a set of institutions. an alten1ative appara-
tus within the co1111nercial cinen1a: cultural patronage.
"enlightened" producers or state subsidies for produc-
tion. festivals and prizes, art theaters, publicity. revie\vS.
criticisn1 and "theory" in books and n1agazines for
consu1nption: lntplicated also is the sntall acaden1it·
industry of coui;es and textbooks in filrn. which ofi:en
functions to n."cruit ne\v consun1ers and help dirt·ct
rt·ruperative reading strategies. Central to tht·se reading
strate•t-,>it·s is tht· discourst· of authorship, \,·hich secs the
art cinen1a 's characteristic partial or int,·n11ittt·nt lore-
t-,'Tounding of ~tyle in rel.1tion to n.1rr.1tive - its lin1itt·d
Digitized by Google
deviation frorn the nom1 - as n1otivated by the per-
sonal vision of its author, usually the director. This
was particularly true during the period of art cinen1a·s
institutional consolidation in the fifties and sixties,
when European and Japanese national cinen1as carved
out a niche in the Anterican market with auteurs Jikt'
Fellini, Antonioni, Berginan, Truffaut, Resnais.
Kurosawa, et al., pron1oted by art theate-rs, state subsi-
dies, international festivals and "serious" criricisn1
oriented toward an aesthetics of personal exprc.-ssion.
The heterogeneity of an cinema, dte force even of its
lin1ited moden1ist transgressions, is contained in a co-
optation distinctive to advanced capitalisnt: "the na1ne
of the author can function as a 'brand nan1e, • a n1eans
of labeling and selling a fihn. " 5 There is no document
of individualism which is not at the sa1ne tirne a
document of confonnity.
The beginnings of the art cinen1a go back at least
to the late teens, to the consolidation of the hege-
n1ony. in both econon1ic and signifying practices. of
the do1ninant classical narrative discourse in relation
to which the art cine1na differentiated its product. A
full exa1nination of dte history of art cinen1a is beyond
the scope of this essay, but we can gain certain insights
into its operation by exa,nining two specific processes:
first, how Tire Cabi11et of Dr Cali~ari acquired the
exchange value which was the subject of negotiations
in our historical footnote, and second, the contribu-
tion of both legal authorship as private prope-ny and
the actual relations of production an1ong emplO}'t'ei
and bosses to the generation of that exchange value.
Moreover, since Cal(~ari as art cinema exists on the
fringt's of the conunercial cinema, it n1ay help define
the lintit~ and boundaries of the- latter ntode, and in
particular. to argue and explore rather than to assert
the process so often identified with con1mercial
cinema - con1modification. The concept of the con1-
111odiry fonn offers a way of understanding the ,vhole
production/ronsuntption proct'ss and a n1eans oi
den1ystifying the rt·lation bet,veen dominant and
oppositional n1odt's.
The Commodity
()bje·ct< of utility be·.:01ne ,onunodities only bcc"ausc
the·y :Ire· the· produns of th,· bbour of privJtc individual,
,vho work in,kpcndcntly of l'JCh other... .
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Authorship as a Commodity 251

Figure 26. 1 Robert Wien,··, '{7,r ( :,,b111c•1 ,,( Dr C:<1/(c,m (Deeb-Film. 19:?0): An early example of authorship
undcr.tood w11hm the Ro111>nuc c:itc.,;ory of ,\rt c111cm.1 . Produced by En ch Po mn'lcr

It i< o nly by b{·ing exchanged that the product.< o f
bbo ur acquir..- J socia lly u11ifo n11 obj,·("tiviry as val ues,
, vhich is d1srinc1 fro,11 their <ensuously varied obj ecuv1ry
as articlcs of utility. T hi< d1vi<ion of the product of
labo ur into a us,·ful thing and a thing po,s,·<<111g ,·ahll'
ap pears 111 practi .:c on ly ,vhl'n l'xchangc h:is already
acquired a sufficient ,·x11:11s100 and in1portance to allo,v
u <cful thing< to be produn:d for 1he purpo<e of be ing
exchanged. so that the ir ch,aractcr .1s valucs ha< already
t o be cakcn into con<idcranon dunng production.•
T he historical proces~ described in this last sentence
b y M.arx is a r,·ci procal one: the gro \ving ianport:ince
of exchange value in re lation to use value gradually
tr:1nsfom1s the latter so that the hu1nan needs satisfied
by the product are increasingly defiucd by the n1arke1.
by the exchan ~e value o f the co1nn1odity. The perva-
sive inRuence o f exch:ingc value o n use value ,vid1in
th e consuD1ption-don1inated phase of advanced
capitalism applies to both consumt•rs and prod uce~;
advertising :u1d publicity help define use value for
consun1crs. ,vhilc a different kind of ratio nalizatio n
scgrnents the ..creati ve concnbutio ns" of producers
into categories based on n1arketability. As the co1n-
rnodity-fonn becon1cs increasingly don,inanr. even
..artists" ,vho ,vork closely togethe r in 111aking a tihn,
,vho seen, to be collabo rating in a ,vork of genuine
cultural innovation, end up ,-vich separate ("cougcaled "
is Marx ·s ,vord) contributions as " private individuals
,vho ,vork independentl y o f each o ther."
In art cinen1a, the privacy of one of those individu -
als is fetishized, and an in,aginary unity. th e " persona.I
vision ," is proj,·cted onto rhc social process o f produc-
tion and con5 urnption. Partly thro ugh the qualitie5
give n to the fil111 in p roductio n. and partly through
the readi ng strategic~ pro111oced by i11ternational ftln1
culture, ,vh ich generall y accept authorship uncriocally.
art cincrua 111ystifics its o,vn div ision o f labor, separat-
ing (alienating) n1anual labor fro111 intellectual labor
and J$~ign ing exchange val ue to th e latter. Oitfereno-
aring its p roduct largely by referen ce to a un.iqu c aud

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
252 Michael Budd
private artistic personality which supposedly 1notivates
its difference fro,n the dontinant n1ode, art cinen1a
denies the social din1ension in art's huntan uses and
in its own production, thus helping transfonn those
uses and that artistic personality into exchangeable
con1n1odities.
Perhaps the n1ost trenchant analysis of conunodifi-
cation in the film industry. in both production and
consun1ption, is contained in Bertolt Brecht's long
essay, "The Threepenny Opera Trial, A Sociological
Experi111ent. " 7 In 1929 Brecht and Kurt Weill signed
a contract with Nero- Filn1 for a fihn version of their
very popular 111reepe1111y Opera. The contract specified
that they controlled the scenario and n1usic; when
Brecht's outline was rejected by Nero- Fil111, they
sued.~ The trial, in October 1930, attracted rnu ch of
Berlin's literary elite and high society. Brecht argued
that "he was in no way defending his copyright, his
literary property, but ... 1/,e pr()perty of tlrt' spectator....,
Brecht lost and the filn1 was sc ripted by B~la Balazs
and directed by Pabst in I 931.
In his conunentary on the 111rcepe1111y Opera trial,
Brecht develops Marx's argtnnent about the gro\ving
hegen1ony of exchange value into an analysis of how.
in the capitalist fihn industry, all relations of production
are do,ninated by the 1narketplace: the filn1's character
as con1n1odity n1ust be taken into account during pro-
duction, so the den1and for an abstract equivalence of
isolated elen1ents of the work (setting, plot, happy
ending. characters, tide, author's na111e and author's
reputation are so1ne of Brecht's exan1ples) conies
increasingly to shape the production process itst:lf.
"A tihn 111ust be tht· \\'Ork of a ('Olkl'tivc.·· This concep-
tion is prOb'Tt·,sivc.... In contrast to an individu,11. a
rollertivc cannot \\'Ork without a tixt·d point of dir<·c-
tion, and t:vening conferences are no such tixt·d point.
Had the (ollectivc son1t· dt·terrnined pt·dagogical dt·,ign.
it could i111n1edi.11dy build .1n organic body. It is the
l'SSl'll('<' of rJpitalisrn ... th.11 everything "ont·-of-a-kind"
.111d "cx<·eptional" cin only con1e ti1rth froni an indi-
vidual. ,vhik coUcrtivl'S can only bring t,,nh 111l'diocre
dirue-J-dOll'II \\'Ork~. What h.ivl' ,,·t· •~ot 1<1r a nillt'l"tlVl'
these days in tihn> The collective puts itsdf tog,·th<'r froni
the finan(it·r. tht' saksn1.1n (the puhli,·-rdations 111a11). th,·
din·ctor. th<· techni,i.1ns. and th<· ,vrit<·rs. A dire,tnr i<
n<'tTssary be<·auS<' the tinarKil'r \\'ill h.lVl' nothing to do
,vith Art: the <alt·s111an. hc:c;1 u<t· the dire,·tor rnust b,·
n,m1ptcd: tl1t' ted111ki.1ns not bt'(';lU~t· the: app:iratus 1s
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con1plicated (it is unbelievably prirnitive). but bccaus<·
the director has not the n1ost printitive notion of techni-
cal things; and the writers, finally, because the audienct>
itself is too lazy to leant to write. Who wouldn "t ,vi,h
right off that his individual pan in the production would
be unrecognizable? At no n101ncn1 during the work on
the 17rrcepc1111y filn1 did the panies involved, inl·luding
those carrying out the lawsuit, have coinciding interpre-
tations of the subject n1atter, the intent of the filn1 . it<
audience, it< apparatus. etc. The fact of the matter is that
a collective can only produce works ,vhich can build
collertives out of the "audience."
... In order for an art ,vork. ,vhich according to bour-
gcois ideology is the expression oi one individual. t<>
reach the rnarket it n1ust be subntitted to a completely
detcnnined operation. which deaves it up into it< pJrt.<:
the parts enter thc rnarketplace in particular ways.... The
Juthor's work can be broken up. in that its subJ<'l't
111atter can be invested with another fom1 or it.< fonn
invested with another , , , subject niatter. Funher, " ,jth
rl"spect to fonn. it is possible for the linguistic tonn and
the scenic tonn to appear ,vithout the other. The plot
of the subject ,natter can be played out by other chJr-
acters: these characters can be placed in another plot.
and so on. This disrnantling of thl' art ,vork appears to
folio\\' the la,vs of the n1arkl'tplace in the san1e ,vJy as
autornobiles. which have becon1e non-utilitarian, ,\'hir h
one can no longer drive. and which one no\\• di"t•,·ts
into their tiny idiosyncr.1sics (type of ,netal. k.11ht·r
upholstery. ht'adlights. etc.) and then buys. Wt' arc:
Sl'eing the unavoidable and tht"refore to-be-sanctioned
decay of the individualistic art work. It can no longt·r
attain the rnarketplace as a unity: the stn:ssful narure
of its contradiction-tilled unity niust soon shatter it into
pieces.... For all that. the work thus constiruted appears
as a unity on the rnark<·tplace. '"
Caligari as Art Cinema as Commodity
Art cinen1a, tht>n, according to this line of reasoning.
n1ust dilferentiate its product by producing a distinc -
tive comn1odity fetish - a particularly prestigious.
cultu red and individualistic one, we n1ight even say.
(:errainly this is present front the fifi:ies on, with the
con tinuity and t'COnon1ic stability of art cine1na con-
structed around t\VO discourses of international fil111
culture: tirst, authorship. and second, the "adult" and
l'xplirit "rt·prest>ntation ofsexuality. " 11Yet before World
War II and the proliferation of state subsidies to
national art ci11t·111as. the ,node had only the n1ost
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Authorship as a Commodity
intennittent and uneven existence. Its exhibition cen -
tered around the cine-clubs in Paris which began to
appear in the early Twenties. Those clubs served as the
basis for an avant-garde film moven1ent; the London
Filn1 Society and The Film Society at the New Gallery
Cinen1a on Regent Street; and the Filn1 Associates,
The Film Guild and other ''little Cinemas" in N ew
York. 12 But production depended either on short-
lived moven1ents at the fringes of the comn1ercial
industry, like Gem1an Expressionism, or fell entirely
outside the industry itself, as with such fully n1odernist
,vorks as Un Chien A11dalo11 and E11tr'Acte. 1-'
Clearly, the art cine,na had its beginnings in the
first alternative, even radical institutions to challenge
the hege,nony of the donunant n1ode. In part this must
be because the ro1nanric discourse of authorship, which
removes a text fron1 it, econon1ic and social context
and places it in an ideal realn1 of personal t'Xpression,
rt'1nains within the subculture of co~11L1sce11ti until tht'
rulturt' industry takt's it up as a n1arketing strategy.
There is little evidence that Cal(l!ari was read or pro-
n1oted as an author's filn1 at least until Siegfried
Kracauer adoptt'd the screenwriters' reading in his
book, Fron, Caligari to Hitler - and even then its osten-
sible author was not its director. Caligari's exhibition
spans the possibilities of the art cine1na in the pre-
World War II period: it played initially in large
con1n1errial theaters. in Berlin, Paris, London and Ne,v
York, then apparently became a kind of early standard
for the cine-clubs and filn1 societies in the san1e cities. 14
Yet in both these situations, critical discourse seen1s to
have centered around the fihn 's techniques: in the
rine-clubs these wert' extolled as revolutionary o r
attacked as derivative and theatrical. while the publicity
apparatus of the culture industry could only flail away
ineffectively about the filn1's novelty.
Cal(l!ari did not succeed as a conunodity even
though its origins were hidden, its context con11nodi-
fied, even the text itself altered. 15 The point is not just
that a cultural product can be con1n1odified in one
ronjucture and not in another, but also that the history
of Cali~ari as a text 111arks an early point in the devel-
opment of art cinen1a, when deviation fro111 the nor111
as novelty is seen as the only pron1otable reading
strategy. and C,1/(1!11ri's novelty is inadequately consun1-
able. The filn1 's Expressionist St·ttillh'S, costu111cs and
acting can be attributed to tht: expn:ssive subjec.-tivity
of a chararter 11•i1/,i11 tht• tiln1, but not vet
, to an author;
Digitized by Google
253
it is still too weird to produce that in1aginary unity
off the assen1bly line to which Brecht refers. Interest-
ingly, ads in the New York trade papers in 1921 for
Cal(l!ari stressing its novelty are juxtaposed with ads
for D .W . Griffitll's Drean, Street selling a rudin1entary
version of authorship - dignified portraits of Griffith,
lists of earlier fihns "under his personal direction,.,
biographical information. 1~ One would have thought
that the transgressions of Cal~f!ari would require the
recuperations of an authorial reading much more than
those of Drean, Street. On the other hand, advertising
characteristically tries to produce difference exactly
where there is none. since a real difference between
products, an authentic choice presented to the buyer,
111inin1izes its influence. Perhaps the culture industry
has its own forces and relations of production. and
only a Marxist theory of uneven developrnent will
help here.
Caligari's status both as art cinerna and as con1-
n1odity centers around the place of Expressionisn1
within it, exactly because that place is a carefully
li111ited one which can function , in certain conjunc-
tures. as the separable and exchangeable part of a
co1nn1odity. I have argued elsewhere that this filn1 is
profoundly contradictory in its forn1, "grafting a visual
style fron1 [modernist) painting and theatrical set
design onto a conventional narrative fom1, ignoring
the 1noden1ist experiments in Expressionist literature.
poetry, and drama. " 17 In other words. precisely tht:
quality which n1ade the fihn avant-garde also n1ade it
accessible to the com111odity culture; precisely the
aspect which ,nade the fihn unique becan1e that
which linked the detail of the work to the systen1 of
the culture industry as a whole. To explain this con-
tradiction it n1ust be traced, following Brecht.
backwards fron1 consumption to produrtion, to under-
stand the product which presented itself to Janowitz
and Ponuner in I 944 as exchange value. For Brecht
it was not so ,nuch the division of labor \Vhich con1-
n1odified but the lack of collective ain1, of genuine
'
collaboration.
Here one can see ho.,.., the double function of
C,'af(11ari's li111ited Expressionisn1 originated in the diver-
gen t ain1s of its 1nakers. For the en1ployees. the designers
Wann Rohrig and Rein1ann, the ai1n \Vas to uni!)·
setting and narrative, while for the producer. Ponunt·r.
the ain1 was to differentiate his product - just enough
but not too 111urh - in order to open ne,v intt·n1,1tion:1I
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
254
rnarkeL~.'" (Of course the designers probably had n1er-
cantile interests as well, and Pornrner ,vas not ,vithout
artistic sensitivities - on both sides, contradictions
,vithin contradictions.) During his negotiations ,vith
Janowicz in 1944, Ponuncr argued in a letter to his
la,vyer that the "value" of the original Cal(l!ari , vas
not so n1uch in ch,· basic3( (sic) story but in rhe n·volu-
rionary ,v.1y rhe picture: ,vas produced . ... It was tht·
sui;:i::e~tions of the nvo art directors. Herlth and Rohrig
(si,·) ,vho propO$ed th,· style and rreaunent ,vhid1 then
111Jde tht• fi h11 \\'Orld fa111ous. All th,·sl' values Jre posi-
tively vestl'd in UFA 's si lc 11t rights.... ,.,
Drecht believed that conunoditication \\'JS 111:iking
individual authors and unified ,vorks of art anachro-
n1st1c, but Pon1n1er's argurne::nt syn1ptornatically
r<'Vt·aled the beginnings of a use:: which the conuner-
cial fihn industries found for authors ..!<• Because
exchange value ,vas as stake, Po111n1t'r ,vanted to
e::levate the art directors fron1 tht" status of t:"111ployces
paid by ,vages to that of authors with i1n1naterial
rights. Authorship as creativity (use:) is recogniz<·d
o nly in tenns of authorship as property (exchange):
Lt'ttcr ti-0111 Fowler L,·K~ to J uliu< 8 . Salter. M :iy X, I'J4h. Tlus
:ind ochr:r pnvatc w:orn:spundl'1tc:1.· rq;.trding (.'iil~i:i1d citl'c.l bl'low
.1r,· hdd in the D,•utsrh,· Km,·m,,tlll'k. W,·st U,·rlin. J\,ly tl1.1nks
to till' <t.,ff of th,· Ki11,·m.11hek. e,p,·,·1Jlt)" Mr. Gero Gandert.
2 Tdq;rJ111 from H.m~ J:mowitz. New Yo rk. to Paul Roth,.
Lo11do11. J.111. 19. l'145.
-' l e tter from Julius U. S.,lter to Ern,·st M ,ur.,y, Au!:. .\I . I '145.
4 ll.wid Bordwdl. .. Th,· Art Ci11c1lla :i< ., Mod,· o f f ilm l'r.u·-
tin: ... l't/111 <:ri11.-i<111 4. no. I (F.,11 197'1) . 51,-1,4: St,·v,· N,·.,I,·.
.. Art Cinc.·ruJ .ts ln,titutton, " S,n·,·n ::?2. no. I (1')81) . l l-."\'-1,
~ Ne;ile. p. Jfi.
<, K.1rl M:irx. C.ipit,11. vol. I, tr. U,·n Fowkes (N,·w Yo rk :
Vint:ii:,· Uonks. I '177). 1(,5. I(16.
7 U('nolt U n•fht, ''l)l'r l)n:·i!-,.7ft) sf hcnprozc.·:i-~. E111 Snzit1lo!,d,(lH::-
Expl·n11wnr:· 111 Sd1rfji1·11 Zur U1a,J111r uml Km,.-., I 1'J20- 19.\2
(Suhrk.unp Vcrl.1!:, l'lf>i}. 14.'-2.14. Al<o 111 B,sru,lt Ur,·du.
Ct'J,111u11tltf lf 'c•rkt' iu 20 H.mdfu, vol. IX (Fr.1nkfi.1rt-111-M,1in.
1'11,7). 1.l'l-'.!O'I. Tran,!Jc,· d into Frendt in U,·rtolt U«•cht. Sur
/,· c;,,.,,,,., (!'.iris: L" Archc. I<J7o). 148-2~2. A v.,JuJt-k c,,111-
111e111.trv in En11h<h is Ucn llrcw,t,·r . .. ll,.·rht ,nd T h,· Him
. '
lndu!\r~-" ,1t1d "l) 1~nlfi\1f1n, " S ( r'ff" I(,. no. 4 (\Vmtt:r PJ/:,.: f,).
lf,- .l.l.
8 lk·rtolt l3r..·..- ht. "Co11n ·ti v..· Prl'H~1u.u ion ( Ednor,: NtHt·~) ."
-~" '<'ti I 5. no. 2. 1Su11u1wr I '>7 ➔). ➔ 7.
Digitized by Google
Michael Budd
an author, then. is s0111eone ,vho can by his or hc:r
work directly produce exchange value.!' A prit·t' can
be put on that quality ,vhich differentiates Ca/(1!,,ri
frorn those filn1s rnade only for a price.
The conunodity fonn , then, is not just an a~pt·r1
of the work itself but a social relation of isolation.
divergent interests. even mutual antagonisn1 for n1os1
of the hun1ans who produce and consun1e. In the: cJse
of Cali)!ari, the ,var of all against all which starts at
the beginning of the production process is not revealed
until decades later, ,vhen the tilr11's use value has been
dt'fined across the ne,v space of an eniergent ,ut
cinen1a, betwc:en the con1111odity and the avant- gJrde.
Dut the conunodification of an cinen1a is ahvay,
uneven and incon1plete: if consu111;1bility is b;1sed on
a tension, largely invisible to viewers, bct\veen scan-
d;1rdizacion and novelrv/! , th en this tension is out ot
baJance in the art cinen1a before W orld War II . pre-
venting the sn1ooth rationalization of audience nt't'd~
and industrial practict's. Brecht began his essay on tht'
111rccpc1111y ()pcra trial with the ad111onition. "In ron-
tradictions lit' our hopes!" In the contradictions oi
r.,,l(l!<lri and the art r inen1a li t' their use values ti.,r a
genuinely critical theory.
Notes
9 Lottt" Ei,11t·r. ·· Appl 1t<lix: Tht· I >rt.·i~'To,c:hl 1H.>pt'r L:a,v"'uat ... m
0 0
"l1H· 11,umtfd ·"·rt'n,. tr. R ogt"r
'
Cn•.ives (lkrkdcv: . Un1,·..·n1tY .
ot C.1litiir111.1 Pre". 1•17.l) . .\44-5 .
IO Ur1.:•(ht. ·•l>e-r Dn·iµro:-d1c:npro1t·~"-" 185- 6. 195-h. ) •ti .
Tr>n<l.111011 hv R id1.1rd (;.trreu.
11 Bordwdl. 5i : N,·:ilc . .lo--~.
12 St:tndi,h I>. L.1wd,·r. ·11,.. C11/,i.,1 Ci11,•111,1 (N,·w York: N,·w
York Unl\'<'r<iry l'n ·•~- I')7 5). IX4--5.
1.l N,·.,le. J.\.
14 i'v1idtld Uudd. •· ·11,.- c.,/,i11rt ,,(. Dr <:,1/i~,1ri: . Conditton~ , ,(
ll,·,eptinn." c:;,,,;. -r,,,,15 .l. no. 4 (Wimer 1981 ). 41 --<J.
15 Budd. p:i«i111 .
lt1 Jl\ l'i11.i: />frturr U ~,, /d .ind .\J,,1im, Pr'rturr ,,·..ws. v;1rious i,sut·s m
1
Apnl .uni i'v1.,y. 1•1:!t.
17 lludtl. 4X .
It( (;eor~,· A. Hu:tl'O. ·11,.- s,,,•j,,/,;~)' ,f l-'i/111 .4n (Ne w York: llJ<I("
Llnnk,. I'1(,5) . .lS-1,.
19 L,·ner from Erid1 l'on1111,·r to P.tul Kohner. Aug. 3 . I <>44.
20 Un·w,tc,:r. 2~- J.
'.! I '>u,· Cl.,yton and Jon.nh:m Curlini:. "'( )n Author,h1p."' ,-;.•,rrn
2t1. " " · I (\prin~ 1'17'11. 48.
.,, J ,HH:t Sta iµi:r ... ~1.1~, l'rodun:d Pho topl.Jy5,: Ero110 1nk and S1µ-
nit\m~ Pr.1rrirt", in tht• Fil"\t Yt•.u.. ;. of HoHywood," it:idt" .-111.~lr
4. no..l (1 '.JXo). ll/- 24 .
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 27
The Place of Women in
the Cinema of Raoul Walsh
Pam Cook and Claire Johnston

Along with Claire Johnston, whose work is represented earlier in this collection, Pam Cook
was a pioneering voice in British feminist film criticism in the 19705. Cook is the co-editor of
The Cinema Book, a comprehensive overview of film theory, criticism, and history, among
other volumes, and she has served as associate editor for Sight and Sound magazine. In this
essay on Hollywood director Raoul Walsh, the authors examine the work of a Hollywood
stalwart director whose career spanned the studio era with over 100 films to his credit. Choos-
ing an auteur whom Sarris includes in his accomplished second rank ("The Far Side of
Paradise") and whom he describes as a "virile" director whose masculine characters periodi-
cally succumb to "feminine" emotion, Cook and Johnston offer an analysis of some of his films
in terms of how they treat women characters. More interested in "Raoul Walsh" than in Raoul
Walsh, they trace the trajectory of women in his films as objects of exchange in a masculine
discourse. If Walsh, in these terms, is an auteur, it is less because he expresses a personal
vision in his films than that an ideologically determined meaning (in this case, the inevitable
contradictions of a patriarchal capitalist social order) can be found in them.

Presentation ously involves the rt'jel' tion of the vast bulk of

The following analysis of the place of ,vo1nen in son1e
of Raoul Walsh's filn1s relies on concepts borrov>'ed
fro111 the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose \\'ork
constitutes a radical re- reading of Freud. The basis
of that reading is the insight that Freud thought
his theory of the unconscious in tenns of a concep-
tual apparatus which ht' forged in the f.1ce o f
pre-Saussurian linguistics. anticipating the discoveries
of n1odern linguistics. Lacan therefore proceeds to a
re-reading of Freud's theory in the light of concepts
produced by and for ~tructural linguistics. This obvi-
post-Freudian psychoanalysis. Noy.• that it has becon1e
clear that Freud conct>ived the unconscious as being
structured like a language, any deciphennent of the
discourse of the unconscious rnust abandon all the
unfortunately widespread rnisconceptions rei,r.irding
the reading - i.e .. selection - of "syn1pto111s" and of
the kind of sexual "syrnbolisn1" propagated by Jung.
J. l..1<'311 di~tin!{llishes the Sy,u/,,,/;,. fro111
the lt11<(~i11<11')' .1nJ
th,· Rrc1/. Th,· lnu!!inary rel,1tionship "'ith the oth,·r
Ol'l' ll ~ in a dual situation ,vhid1 is pri1n,1rily n.1rr i,sistic
A!,l!(T<''siv,·ness and id,·ntiliration ,vith the in1,1ge of the

P.un C onk .md Cl.u rl· J11l111,t. •11. " 1lh· l'l.h·c.· f,f \\.'11n 1i.·n 111 the C 111n 1u of ll.u ,ul \\',1l~h." rr •1.\-1 11"1 fwm Pini 11.,rdy {i.·d.) . 1<..,,,11I 11 ;,1,1, fbhnl•ur:,!h,
E.dmhurt,:h Film h·c.t 1\'AI. l'J7-IJ. 1' l 'Ji -1 hy 11.un ( :,,uJ.. .md ( ' l.1 irc.· J1•hn,hHl, H.c.· pnntt,·tl tw pc.·n111" 1vn of P.un t :c,nk.

Digitized by Google Original from

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
256 Pam Cook and Claire Johnston
other predorninate at this stage. The Symbolir element is
one that intervenes to break up an ln1aginary relation-
ship from which there is no way out. The child n1eets
the "third clen1ent" upon birth: he enters a world ordered
by a culture. law, and language. and is enveloped in that
Syn1bolic order. Finally, lacan distinguishes the 01/,er, the
locus fron1 which the code en1anates, frorn the In1aginary
otlrcr. (M. Mannoni, TI,e Child, /,is '/l/111•s.1' a11d tire 01/,crs.
London, 1970, p. 23n.)
The Other, as the locus of the Law (e.g., the law of
the prohibition of incest), as the Word (i.e., the signi-
fier as unit of the code) is the "Nan1e-of-the-Father"
around which the Syn1bolic order is constructed. The
child, or indeed, any human being, as a subject of
desire is constituted front the place of the Other: his
"I" is a signifier in someone else's discourse and he
has to find out how and \vhere "I" fits into the social
universe he discovers.
It has often been argued that there are a nurnber
of filn1s directed by Raoul Walsh which appear to
present women as strong and independent characters.
The authors of the following essay take issue with this
type of reading and atten1pt to den1onstrate that
won1en (e.g., Man1ie Stover) in fact function as a sig-
nifier in a circuit of exchange where the values
exchanged have been fixed by /in a patriarchal culture.
Although Levi-Strauss pointed out that real wo111en,
as producers of signs. could never be reduced to the
status of n1ere tokens of exchange, i.e., to 111ere signs,
the authors argue that, in filn1s, the use of images of
\V0111en and the way their "I" is constituted in Walshian
texts play a subtle gan1e of duplicity: in the tradition
of classic cinerna and nineteenth-century realism, the
characters are presented as "autonon1ous individuals";
but the construction of the discourse contradicts this
convention by reducing these "real" \von1en to in1ages
and tokens functioning in a circuit of signs the values
of which have been detern1ined by and for 111en. In
this way, the authors are atten1pting to help lay the
foundations of a fen1inist fihn criticisn1 as \veil as
producing an analysis of a nun1ber of fil111s din:cted
hv Walsh.
Uetwcen 1956 and 1957 R.,10111 W.1l~h n1,1de threl'
tiln1s which Cl'lltre around the social, cultural and
sexual definition of ,vo111en. At tirst sight, the ro le of
C
,vonwn ,vithin th.:se filrns appt"ars a "positive" one:
they display .1 great independence of spirit, and con-
trast sharply " 'ith the apparl·nt "v/eakncss" of the 111.1le
Digitized by Google
protagonists. The first fihn in this cycle depicts a
woman occupying the central function in the narra-
tive; the Jane Russell vehicle, 111e Revolt of Nlan,ie
Stover, tells the story of a bar-room hostess's attempts
to buck the system and acquire wealth and social
status within patriarchy. The King and Fo11r Queens,
111ade the same year, depicts five wo111en who hide
out in a buntt-out ghost town to guard hidden gold.
Band o_f Angels, made the following year, tells the story
of a Southern heiress who suddenly finds herself sold
into slavery at the tirne of the An1erican Civil War.
Walsh prefigured the problematic of the independent
won1an before this period, 1nost notably in a series of
films he n1ade in the 1940s, so111e of which starred
the actress Ida Lupino, who later became one oi
the few won1en fih11-111akers to work in Hollywood:
11,ey Drive by N(!Jht, Higlr Sierra and 77,e A1an I L,11c.
However, undoubtedly the n1ost useful filnlS for pro-
viding a reference point for this cycle are J\.lanpt,w,·r
(1941) and 11,e B011,ery (1933); in these fi.hns, Walsh
celebrates the ethic of the all-n1ale group, and outlines
the role which won1en are designated to play within
it. Walsh depicts the male hero as being trapped and
pinned down by son1e hidden event in his past. In
order to becon1e the Subject of Desire he n1ust test
the Law through transgression. To gain self-knowledge
and to give meaning to memories of the past, he is
in1pelled towards the pri1nal scene and to the accep-
tance of a symbolic castration, For the n1ale hero the
fe111ale protagonist becon1es an agent within the text
of the tilrn whereby his hidden secret can be brought
to light, for it is in \Von1an that his "lack" is located.
She represents at one and the sarne time the distant
1ne111ory of maternal plenitude and the fetishized
object of his phantasy of castration - a phallic replace-
n1ent and thus a threat. In Ma11pot1'<'r Walsh depicts an
all-n1ale universe verging on infantilis111 - the can1a-
raderie of the tire-fighters fron1 the "Ministry of
Po,ver and Light". Sexual rt'lationships and fen1alt:
Sl'Xuality are repressed within the filn1, and Marlene
I )ietrich is depicted as only having an existence within
the discourse of 1nen: she is "spoken", she does not
spl·ak. As an object of exchange between 111en. a sign
oscill.iting betv;et'n thl' i111ages of prostitute and
111other- ti1,'l.1re, she represents the 111eans by \Vhich
rnen exprl·ss tht"ir relationships \Vith each other, the
111eans through \\'hich tht'y co1ne to understand
thcn1sl·lvt·s and each othl·r. 77,c B,111't'ry presents a
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Women in the Cinema of Raoul Walsh 257

Figure 27. I Marl,·nc l)1ctnch m i\/<111/"'"''' (W;in1cr Uros. 1941): R aoul W J lsh 's film,
explore rh<· probk•m o f 1h~ ind,·pcndc111 wo man Produt<·d by 1-1:,1 13. Wallis

sinular aU-1nale society, this tin1e based totally on
inten1al all-1nale rivalry; v.ri thin th is highly ritualised
systen1 the ,vo111e11 ("the skins"') assun1c the function
of symbols of this ri valry. Whatever the "positive"
attributes assigned to th e111 through ch.ir.1cterisat io n,
wonian as sign rt:111ai11s a function , a token o f exchange
in this patriarchal order. Paul Wille111e n in his article
on Pursued dt·scribes th e role o f the fc11 1ale protagonist
Theresa Wrigh t/ Tho rley as th e ·'specular in1age" of
th e 1nale protagonist R obe rt M irchu111/Jeb: she is th e
place ,vhere he deposits his ,vo rds in a dc~irc to
" kno,v" hin1self thro ugh her.
In her boo k Psyc/1oa11al)1sis aud J:e111i11is111 Juliet
Mitchell, cicing Levi- Strau~s. characteri zes a (yste111
,vhere won,en are objects for exchange as essentially
a co1nn1unications systen1.
T he ac.:1 of t·xchangc holds <ociery together: th,·
J
rules of k1n~hip ~ike rho(e of language to ,vhich they
are nc:1r-:11lit'cl) art' the soctt'ty. Wharevt·r the: nature of
the ~ncicty - pa1riard1al. 111atrilin ea l. patrilincal. t'tc. - it
is al \VJ )'' 111c:11 ,vho t•xchan gc ,von1cn. Won1cn thus
bcconlt' the equ1valenr of a sign ,vh1Ch is being
co111111unicatt:d.

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
258 Pam Cook and Claire Johnston
In Walsh's oeuvre, ,vo111an is not only a sign in a
systen1 of t>xchange, but an t>ntpty sign. (The 1najor
exception in this respect is Mamie Stover, who seeks
to transfomt her status as object for exchange precisely
by con1pounding a highly aniculated, fetishized image
for herself.) The ntale protagonist's castration fears, his
search for self-knowledge all converge on woman: it
is in her that he is finally faced with the recognition
of"lack". Woman is therefore the locus of ernptiness:
she is a sign which is defined negatively: son1ething
that is missing which must be located so that the
narcissistic ain1 of the n1ale protagonist can be achieved.
The narrative structure of Band of Angels is panicularly
interesting in the light of this model. The first half of
the story is concerned with events in Manty/Yvonne
de Carlo's life which reduce her front the position of
a lady to that of a slave to be auctioned in the slave
n1arket. Almost exactly half way through the story - at
the "centre" of the fihn - Clark Gable appears and
takes possession of her: front that nton1ent the unfold-
ing of his "dark secret" takes precedence. It becomes
clear that Manty/Yvonne de Carlo's story was nterely
a device to bring into play the background (the slave
trade, crumbling Southen1 capitalism) against which
the " real" drama is to take place. Manty/Yvonne de
Carlo is created in Clark Gable's i1nagt>: half black and
half white. she signifit's the lost secret which ntust be
found in order to resolve the relationship betwt'en
Clark Gable and Sidney Poitit'r - the "naturalisation"
of the slave tradt'.
One of the ntost intt'resting aspects of this n1is<·-c11-
sci'11e of exchange in which wontan as sign is located
is tl1t' ,vay Walsh relates it directly and explicitly to the
circulation of n1oney within the text of the fihn. Marx
states that under capitalisnt the exchange value of con1-
1nodities is their inherent n1onetary property and that
in tum money achieves a social existence quite apan
front all con1ntoditit's and their natural ntodt' of exis-
tence. The circulation of rnoney and its abstraction as
a sign in a syste1n of exchange serves as a n1irror in1age
fr>r ,vornan as sign in a syste1n of exchange. However.
in Walsh's universe, ,110111c:n do not have :1cces~ to the
circulation of n1oney: Man1it' Stovt>r's attt·n1pt to gain
JCt't'SS to it takt·s plact· ;1t a tin1t' of national t·n1ergt·ncy,
the bo1nbing of Pearl Harbor. ,vhen all tht· 1nen ,lrt•
J,vay tighting - it is dt·scribt·d as '' tht'ft ... As .1 systt·1n.
the circulation of n1ont·y enibodit·s ph,1llic p<l\ver and
, he right of possession; it is a systt·n1 hy ,~·hich ,von1en
Digitized by Google
are controlled. In Band of Angels Manty/Yvonne de
Carlo is reduced to a chattt>l and exchanged for n1oney
on the slave 111arket; she is exchanged for mont'y
because of her father's "dark secrt>t" and bt>cause of
his debt. In TI1e Kin.11 and Four Queens the women guard
the gold but they cannot gain access to it directly.
Its phallic powt>r lies hidden in tht> grave of a dead
husband, surrounded by sterility and devastation. Clark
Gable gains access to it by assening his right of pos-
session by n1eans of tossing a gold coin in the air and
shooting a bullet through the n1iddle ofit, a trick which
the abst>nt rnales of the fan1ily all knew: the nurk of
the right of possession. The ticket system in The Revoir
of A-famie Stover takes the analogy between money and
wo111t'n ont' stage funher: 111t'n buy tickt>ts at "Tht>
Bungalow" and at the san1e tin1e they buy an intage
of wontan. It is the syntbolic exprt>ssion of the right
mt>n have to control wonten within tht>ir in1aginary
system. This link between 111oney and phallic po,ver
assuntt'S its n1ost striking intagt' in Walsh's oeuvrt' when
Jane Russell/Marnie, having accuntulated considerable
savings as a bar hostess in Pearl H arbor, declares her
love for Richard Egan/Ji111nty by asking him if she can
place these savings in his safety deposi t box at the bank:
"tl1t>re's nothing closer bt>tween friends than money".
Rt>cognising the significance of such a proposition, ht'
refuses.
11,e Revt>II •?f ,\,fan,ic St,,ver is tht> only ont' of tht>se
fihns in which the fe1nale protagonist represt>nts the
central organising principle of the tt'Xt. As tht> adven-
turt>ss par e:xcclle11ce sht> is intpellt>d to test and transgrt>ss
the Law in the santc way that all Walsh's heroes do: she
would st'ern to function at first sight in a sin1ilar way
to her ntale counterpan, the adven turer, within dtt>
narrative structure. But as the fihn revt>als, her relation-
ship to the La,v is radically ditft>rt'nt. Ht>r drive is not
to test and transgress the Law as a n1eans towards
understanding a hidden secret within her past. but to
tra nS!:,'Tt'SS tht: fonns of representation governing the
classic cine111a itself, which intprison her forever within
an i,nage. As tht' credits of tht' filnt appt>ar on the
screc:n, Jane Russell looks into the can1era with deti-
:1nct'. before tun1ing ht>r back on A1nerica and ,valking
otr to a nt'\V lift> in Pt>arl Harbor. This look, itst>lt a
tr.n1S)'.'Tl'ssion of ont' of the classic rules of cinematog-
raphy (i.e .. "don't look into the l·antera") st>rves as a
rt·lt·rt>nce point tor \.vhat is to ti.1llow. Asst>ning herst>li
as the subjt·ct r:1ther than the object of dt>sire, this look
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Women in the Cinema of Raoul Walsh
Figur.- 27.2 J ,111cRu"cll (r .) wi1h Agnes Moorhead in R ,1oul WJl,h', TI1e· R,-,.,1,
Cc11llH) Fox. 1'15(,). l'ruJuocd b)' 1311,ld)' Adkr
into rhc ca1nera represents a reaching our beyond the
diegetic space of the filn1 and the 111yths of representa-
tion \vhich entrap her. The central contradiction of her
~ituation is char she can only acce111pt to Jsserc herself
as subjec t through the exploitation of a fetishised
image of wo111an to be exc hanged within the circula-
tion of n1oney; her independence and her desire for
social and econo1nic status aUlunge on this obJectifica-
rion. The fonns of representation genera ted by the
c lassic cinen1a - the 111yths of wo111an ,1s pin- up, van1p,
.. M ississippi C inderella" - are the only n1eans by which
she can achieve the objective of beco1ning the subject
rather than the object of desin:. The futility of this
enterprise is highlighted at the end of the filn1 \vhen
she retun1s once ,nor.: to An1erica in a sirnilar sequence
of shoes; this cin1e she no longer looks cowards the
ca mera, but ren1ain~ trapped within the dicgeric ~pace
\Vhich the fiJ.111 has alJottcd to h er.
The film opens ,vith a lo ng- shoe of a neon-ht ciry
at night. Red letters appc:ir on the screen tellin g us
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259
,!f .\ fomit St,w,·r (Tw,·n11t•1h
the ri111e and place: SAN FRANCISCO 1941 . The
Revolt of ,,J11111ir Stc>11cr was 111ade in 1956 - the story
is rherefort' set ,vithin the living 111en1ory/history of
the spectator. This title i.s the first indication that the
fwn will reactivate the 111e1uory of an anxiogeflic sin1-
acion: the crau111aric r11on1enr of the arrack on Pearl
Harbor a11d the entry of the Uniu:d Scates into tht·
Second World War. Simultaneously, on the sound band,
sle:izy ni ght-club 111usic swells up (clip-joint~, preda-
tory prostitution, fen1alc sexuality exchanged for
111oney ac a tin1e \Vhen the country, its n1ale popula-
rion and its financial resources are about to be put at
risk). A polic.: car (one of the cnany represe ntations
of tht' Lav.r in the fi lm). its si ren ,vailing insiste ntly
over th e rnusic (a further indication of i111n1inent
danger) drives fast onto a dock-side where a ship is
waiting. As it dra\VS up aloni;tSide the ship. a fen1al c
figur<· carrying J coat and a s1nall suitcase gl'ts out of
the car and appears to run, back to look at the city
fron1 ,vhich she has obviously been expelled in a
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
260 Pam Cook and Claire Johnston
hurry. Jane llussell then looks straight into the can1era
(see above).
Up to this point the text has been 111ultiply
coded to signify danger/threat. The threat is closely
associated with sexuality - besides the music, the red
letters on the screen indicate red for danger and red
for sex. Paul Wille111en has pointed out that the "look"
in P11rs11cd is a threatening object: the Cal,iers d11
Ci11b11a analysis of Yo1111i A·fr Unro/11 also delineates
Henry Fonda/Lincoln's "castrating stare" as having the
san1e threatening significance. Besides this threatening
"look," Jane Russell has other dangerous connotations:
qualities of a~'Tession, of preying on the 111ale to attain
her own ends. Her "look" - repeated n1any ti1nes
during the filn1, directed towards n1en, and explicitly
described at one point as "con1e hither" - doubly
n1arks her as signifier of threat. In the absence of the
n1ale, the fen1ale ,night "take his place": at the 1non1ent
ofJane Russell's "look" at the camera, the spectator is
directly confronted with the in1age of that threat. The
fact that this irnage has been expelled fron1 a previous
situation is also i1nportant: Jane Russell actually rep-
resents the repudiated idea: she is that idea. Thus the
threat is si111ultaneously recognised and recuperated:
the female cannot "take the place" of the 111alt·; she
can only be "in his place" - his n1irror in1age - the
"you" which is the "I" in another place.
This 1non1ent of dual fascination between the spec-
tator and Jane Russell is broken by the intervention
of a third organising principle representing the narra-
tive, as the titles in red letters "Jane Russell Richard
Egan" appear over the fernale figure. The title has the
effect of inm1ediately distancing the spectator: it
rcn1inds hi111 of the sy1nbolic role of the narrative
by locating Jane Russell as an irnaginary figure. In
psychoanalytic tenns the concept "irnaginary" is n1orc
con1plex than the word would i111n1ediately seen1 to
in1ply. It is a concept central to the Lacanian fonnula-
tion of the "n1irror stage" in which the "other" is
apprehended as the ··other which is 111e". i.e., 111y
n1irror itnage. In the in1aginary relationshjp the other
is seen in tenns of resen1blance to oneself. As an
in1aginary fi!:,•ure in the text of the fihn Jane Russell's
"n1asculine•· attributes are en1phasi~ed: square ja,v,
broad shoulders. narrow hips. s,vinging. alinost s,vash-
buckJing vvalk - .. phallic" attributl'S ,vhich are echol·d
and re-echoed in the text; for exa111plt·. in her :1g1,-'TCS-
sive )Jnguage - she tells a ,volf- \'.-l1istling soldier to
Digitized by Google
"go n1end your rifle, soldier"; when Richard Egan/
Jinuny fights Michael Pate/Atkins at the Country
Club she shouts "give hin1 one for n1e, Jimmy". The
girls at "The Bungalow" hail her as "Abe Lincoln
Stover". Jane Russell/ Man1ie is the in1aginary cou111cr-
part of the absent spectator and the absent subject of
the text: the 1nirror i1nage they have n1utually con-
structed and in whon1 both i,nages converge and
overlap.
Again, borrowing fron1 Lacan, the function of the
"Sy111bolic" is to intervene in the imaginary situation
and to integrate the subject into the Syn1bolic Order
(v,hich is ultin1ately the Law, the Narne of the Father).
The narrative of 11,e Revolt o_{ 1\,fa111ic Stover, in that it
presents a particular n1odel of the world historically.
culturally and ideologically overdetenn.ined. could be
said to perfonn a syn1bolic function for the absent
spectator. The anxiety-generating displacement Jane
Russell/Man1ie appears to threaten the narrative at
certain points. For exarnple. after having pronused to
n1arry Richard Egan/Ji111n1y, give up her job at "The
Bungalow" and becon1e "exclusively his", and having
taken his ring in a sy1nbolic exchange \\'hich is " aln1ost
like the real thing" and "makes it legal", Jane Russell/
Man1ie leaves her n1an at the anny ca111p and retun1s
to "The Bungalow" to resign. However, she is per-
suaded by Agnes Moorhead/ Bertha Parch1nan to
continue working there, now that Michael Pate/ Atkins
has gone (been expelled), for a bigger share of the
profits and 111ore power. Richard Egan/Jinuuy is absent.
so he won ·t know. His absence is in1portant: it recalls
another sequence earlier in the narrative which shov,s
in a quick succession of shots Richard Egan/Jinuny
and the army away at war while Jane Russell/Man1 ie
is at the sarne mon1ent buying up all the available
property on the island, beconung "Sto-Ma1ne Company
Incorporated" with Uncle Sam as her biggest tenanr.
Jane Russell / Marnie n1akes her biggest strides in the
absence of 111en: she threatens to take over the po,ver
of t·xchange. By pron1jsing to 111arry and give it all up.
she is reintegrated into an order ,vhere she no longer
~ '
represents that threat. Richard Egan/Jinm1y can be
seen as the representative of the absent spectator and
ab,t·nt subject of the discourse in this structure: they
are n1utual ronstructo~ of the text - he is a ,vriter
,vho is cons1antly trying to write Jane Russell/Ma111ie's
story tor her. When J ane Russell/ Manne goes back to
\\'Ork at ..The Bung,1kl\v ·· she in etfect nef_rates his
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Women in the Cinema of Raoul Walsh
in1age of her in favour of an in1age which suggests
destruction and purging - "Flan1ing Marnie" - and
becornes again a threatening displace111ent, reproduced
and enlarged 7 foot high. When Richard Egan/Jinm1y
is confronted with this threatening in1age at the anny
camp, when a soldier shows hint a photograph of her,
a bo1nb drops and he is wounded. In the face of this
renewed threat he retun1s to "The Bungalow" and in
his final speech to Jane Russell/ Manlie repudiates her
as his i1naginary counterpan; the narcissistic fascination
with her is ended; he realises he can no longer control
her in1age.
The syrnbolic level of the narrative in 1naintaining
its order in the face of a threat is reassened in the
final sequence where the police1nan at the dockside
re-echoes Richard Egan/Jinuny's words of rejection:
.. Nothing's changed: Mamie. You aren't welcon1e
here". Jane Russell/Man1ie replies that she is going
hon1e to Leesburg. Mississippi (this is what I,ichard
Egan/Jirnmy was always telling her she 1nust do).
When the policen1an ren1arks that she does not seen1
to have done too well, she replies: " If I told you I had
made a fonune and given it all away, would you
believe n1e?" When he says "No", she replies " I
thought so". This exchange contains a final assenion
that the protagonist cannot write her own story: she
is a signifier, an object of exchange in a play of desire
between the absent subject and object of the dis-
course. She ren1ains "spoken": she does not speak. The
final rhetorical question seals her defeat.
On the plane of the in1age. the syrnbolic order is
rnaintained by an incessant production, within the
text, of in1ages for and of Jane Russell/ Ma111ie front
which she is unable to escape. and with wllich she
co1nplies through a misc-c11-.ffh1c of exchange. In order
to beco111e the subject of desire. she is cornpelled to
be the object of desire, and the in1ages she "chooses"
rcn1ain locked within the n1yths of rC'presentation gov-
erned by patriarchy. This 111isc-e11-srhw of exchange is
initiated by her expulsion by the police at the dock-
side - the in1age of predatory whore is t·stablished.
T his in1age is elaborated during the next scene \vhen
the ship's ste\vard tells T,ichard Egan /Jinuny about her
reputation as st·xual predator ("she ain't no lady'').
Marnie intem1pts the conversation. and realising that
Richard Egan/J i1111ny JS a script\vriter in Hollywood
is interested in her. sh<: suggests he should ,vrite and
buy her story - the hard- luck story of a ''Mississippi
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261
Cinderella". Growing en1otional involven1ent with
hin1 leads her to reject the idea of being "written" in
favour of "writing" her own story, and to seek out
an in1age n1ore consistent with the wealthy "hilltop"
nulieu of which Richard Egan/Jinuny is pan, epito-
nused by Jin1rny's girlfiiend ("Miss H illtop"). Jane
Russell/ Marnie asks R..ichard Egan/Jin1my to " dress
her up and teach her how to behave"; he refuses. Their
relationship front then on is characterised as one of
transgression: they "dance without tickets'' at the
country club, a,vay front the "four don 'ts" of "The
Bungalow". For her intage as a perfom1er and hostess
at " The Bungalow" Jane Russell/Ma1nie has dyed her
hair red and has assu1ned the na111e of "Flanling
Man1ie" ("Manlie's not beer or whisky, she's chan1-
pagne only"). T he in1age of "Fla111ing Man1ie" is at
one and the same time an assenion and a negation of
fen1aJe sexuality; sexually arousing ("Fellas who try to
resist should hire a psychiatrist" intones the song) but
at the sa1ne time the locus of sexual taboo ("Keep the
eyes on the hand~" she says in another nun1ber - they
tell the story). It is at "The Bungalow" that the ticket
systent fom1alises this 111isr-en-scene of exchange: ,nen
literally buy an i111age for a predetermined period of
time. (It is this concept of exchange of images which
Jane Russell/Marnie finally discards when she throws
the ticket a,vay as she leaves the boat at the end
of the filn1.) lleduced once again to the image of
con1nton prostitute when they go dancing at the
country club and having decided to stay at "The
Bungalow" in spite ofl,ichard Egan/Jin1nty, she finally
:1ssun1es the iconography of the pin-up, with the
"con1e hither" look: an intage en1ptied of all personal-
ity or individuality; an in1age based on the effects of
pure gesture. This irnage was prefigured in an extra-
ordinary sequence at the beach when Jane Russt·ll/
Ma,nie ju1nps up from the sand where she has been
sitting with Richard Egan/Jin1nty in order to take a
s,vin1. As she does so, she tun1s back to look at hin1
and her i1nage bccon1es frozen into the vacant grin
of a bathing suit advcniscn1cnt. T alking about n1011ey.
Jane Russell/Mantie describes herself at one point as
a "havt' not"; this recurrent i,nbrication of in1agcs. the
telling of story \1:ithin a story which the filn1 gener:ttes
through a 111is<'-l't1-sch1c of t'xchange, serves to rt·prt·ss
the idea of fen1ale sexuality and to encase Jane Ru sst•II /
Ma,nie within the sv111bolic
, order, the Law of tht·
Father.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
262 Pam Cook and Claire Johnston
Walsh criticis111 to date has been don1inated by the
notion of "personality"; like the An1erican adventurer
p<1r rxcelle11ce he so often depicts, Walsh, as one of
the oldest pioneers. has con1e to be regarded as of the
essence of what is called "classic" Hollywood cinen1a
- a cinema characterised traditionally by its linearity,
its transparency: in short, the effect of " non-writing".
Andre\v Sarris has even gone so far as to say of hin1:
.. only the n1ost virile director can effectively project
a fentinine vulnerability in his characters". This
notion of authorship has been criticised by Stephen
Heath in the follo\ving tenns: "the function of the
author (the effect of the idt:-a of authorship) is a fi1nc-
tion of unity; the use of the notion of the author
involves the organisation of the filn1 ... and in so
doing. it avoids - this is indeed its function - the
thinking of tht:' articulation of the fihn text in relation
to ideology." A vie\v of Walsh as the originating
consciousness of the Walsh oeuvre is, therefore. an
ideological concept. To attribute such qualities as
"virility" to Walsh is to foreclose the recognition of
Walsh as subject within ideolo1:,,y. This fentinist reading
o f the Walsh oeuvre rejects any approach which would
atten1pt to delineate the role of wo1nen in tern1s of
the influence of ideology or sociology, as such an
approach is n1erely a strategy to supplen1ent auteur
analysis. We havt:' atten1pted to provide a reading of
the Walsh oeuvre \Vhich takes as its starting point
Walsh as a subject \Vithin ideology and, ultimately. the
laws of tht:- hun1an order. What concerns us specifically
is the delineation of the ideology of patriarchy - by
\vhich we n1ean the Law of the Father - \Vithin the
text of the filn1. As Levi-Strauss has indicated:
"The e1nergence of syn1bolic thought n1ust have
required that won1t:-n, likt:- works. should be things
that were exchanged." The tasks l<lr fe1ninist criticis1n
Digitized by Google
must therefore consist of a process of de-naturalisation:
a questioning of the unity of the text; of seeing it as
a contradictory interplay of different codes; of tracing
its "structuring absences" and its relationship to the
universal problem of sy1nbolic castration. It is in
this sense that a feminist strategy for the cinen1a must
be understood. Onlv, when such work has been done
can a foundation for a fe111inist counter-cine1na be
established. Wo111an as signifier of won1an under patri-
archy is totally absent in rnost i1nage-producin~
systen1s, but particularly in Hollywood where in1age-
n1aking and the fetishistic position of the spectator an:
highly developed. This is indeed why a study oi
"woman" within the Hollywood systen1 is of great
interest. A study of \von1an within Walsh ·s oeuvre. in
particular, reveals "wo111an" as the locus of a dile111n1J
tor the patriarchal hun1an o rder, as a locus of contrJ-
dictions. Cal,iers d11 Ci11c111a in an editorial described
such texts in the following tern1s: "an internal criti-
cisn1 is taking place which cracks the filrn apart at the
sea1ns. If one reads the film obliquely, looking tor
sy1npton1s, if one looks beyond its apparent coherence
one can see that it is riddled with cracks; it is splitting
under an internal tension which is sin1ply not there
in an ideologically innocuous film. The ideology thus
beco111es subordinate to the text. It no longer has an
independent existence; it is presented by the filrn. ··
The function of "wornan" in W alsh as the locus of
"lack". as an en1pty sign to be filled. the absent ct:-ntre
of a phallocentric urtiverse n1arks the first step to~'ards
the de-naturalisation of woman in the Hollvwood ,
cint·n1a. In a frenzied i111brication of in1ages (77,r
Revolt of J\,famic Stov1•r) the Phallus is restored; but in
this distanciation the first notes of the "swan-song of
the immortal nature of patriarchal culture" (cf. Juliet
Mitchell) can be heard.
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 28
Female Authorship Reconsidered
(The Case of Dorothy Arzner)
Judith Mayne

An American feminist critic, Judith Mayne teaches in the Department of French and Italian at
Ohio State University in Columbus. Mayne is the author of several books including Cinema
and Spectatorship, Framed: Lesbians, Feminists and Media Culture, as well as studies of
Dorothy Arzner and French director Claire Denis. This essay, taken from her book The Woman
at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women's Cinema (1990), begins by considering how the ques-
tion of female authorship has been understood in film studies, and then proceeds to consider
the films of Dorothy Arzner, one of the very few women directors to work in Hollywood during
the studio era. Mayne explores the possibility of female authorship in the case of Arzner, who
has been a favorite filmmaker for feminist critics. While she does not claim that Arzner Is an
auteur in the strict sense of a consistent and identifiable style, Mayne argues that her films
nevertheless are consistently concerned with the limitations of and challenges to patriarchal
definitions of femininity.

[. . -1 In conten1porary fentinist literary criticism, inqui-

In this chapter, I will exantine how fi:n1ale authorship ries into the nature of fe1nale authorship have been
has been theorized in fenunist filn1 studies, and I will shaped by responses to two son1ewhat obvious assump-
focus in particular on the example of Dorothy Arzner, tions: first, that no matter how tenuous, fractured, or
one of the fev, \Vomen to have been successful as a co1nplicated, there is a connection between the writ-
director in Hollywood in a career that spanned fro1n er's gender, her personhood, and her texts; and second,
the late t 920s to the early 1940s. Arzner was one of that there exists a female tradition in literature, whether
the early "rediscoveries" of fenunist filn1 theory, and defined in tem1s of n1odels of mutual influence, shared
she and her work ren1ain to this day the n1ost i1npor- the1nes, or conunon distances from the donunant
tant case study of fen1ale authorship in the cinen1a. culture. A wide range of critical practice is held within
While the n1ost significant work on Arzner's career these assu1nptions. But insofar as a self-evident cat-
was done in fen1inist film studies of the early to ntid- egory of wornanhood may be in1plicit in the fernale
1970s, I will suggest that i1nportant din1ensions of her author defined as the source of a text and as a 1nornent
status as a fen1ale author havt' yet to be explored. in a fernalc-specific tradition, these seen1ingly obvious
Juduh fi-.by1w. " ft'1n,,h- !\u1h11r),,lup 1l ...•l'flfl\Hk11.·d (fhl· C ,l\l· of l>t,rorhy Ar-11h:r):· rr, >W- 1115. I Jn- 15 frtllU di. 5 of 'Hu· ll 'c11111m iH tl,r Kqlh1/r: fm,1111,111
.i11d U cJmt"n '.< C111(mJ (Ul<lonun~htll .111d l11di,11upoli,: lndi.u u U 111\'t.:l"\lt)' Pr"·~,. 1' 1'111). f..'1 l'JIJO ~)' Juduh Mayo'-'· Rt'pnmed hy pl•n ni \\lOll of d1"· .mthor :mtl

I ndi:uu Um,•<'~Uy Prt·\\,

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
264
assuntptions evoke \Vhat has beco1ne in conte1nporary
theory a dreaded epithet: essentialisnt.
A decade or so ago, a friend of nune rentarked
sarcastically upon the prevalence of "oedipus detec-
tors" at a Modent Language Association 1neeting, that
is, critics eager to sniff out any remnants of oedipal
scenarios in work that was ostensibly "progressive,"
"feminist," or "postoedipal." Contentporary feminist
criticis1n - and fenunist filnt studies in panicular - is
n1arked by a sintilar presence of" essentialist detectors."
For virtually any ntention of "real women" (especially
insofar as authors are concerned) tends to inspire a
by-now-fanuliar recitation of the "dangers" of essen-
tialisn1 - an affirmation of the difference between 1nen
and women as given, and an attendant belief in the
positive value of female identity which, repressed by
patriarchy, will be given its true voice by fentinisrn.
While there is obviously ntuch to be said about the
risks of essentialis111, the contentporary practice of
essentialis1n detection has avoided the cornplex rela-
tionship between "wontan" and "won1en," usually by
bracketing the category of "wonten" altogether.
Even though discussions of the works of wornen
ti1nunakers have been central to the developntent of
ft."1ninist filnt studies, theoretical discussions of fen1aJe
authorship in the cinerna have been surprisingly sparse.
While virtually all fcn1inist critics would agree that
the works of Gennaine Dulac, Maya Deren, and
Dorothy Arzner (to na1ne the ntost frequently invoked
"historical figures") are in1portant, there has bet"n
considerable reluctance to use any of then1 as privi-
leged exa1nplcs to theorize female authorship in the
cinen1a, unless. that is, such theorizing affinns the
difficulty of women's relationship to the cinen1atic
apparatus. This reluctance reflects the current associa-
tion of "theory" with "antiessentialisn1." In the reahn
of fen1inist literary theory and criticis1n, however, anti-
c:ssentialisnt has not had quite the sa1ne widespread
effects of negation. In the works of critics such as
Margaret Hontans and Nancy K. Miller, tor instance.
ft:rnale authorship is analyzed not in temts of si1nplc:
categories of agency and authority. but rather in tenns
of con1plex textual and cultural processes which dra-
111;1tizl' and foreground wont en's relationships to
language, plot, and the institutions ot literature. 1 My
point is not that teutinist filn1 critics have the provc:r-
hial "1nuch to le.1 r11 .. front fe1ninist literary, critics.. but
rather that the paradig111 of lc111alc: authorship in
Digitized by Google
Judith Mayne
literature 1nay provide a useful point of departure
to examine the status of fe1nale authorship in the
c11ten1a.
For such a point of departure. I tunt to two anec-
dotes, one "literary" and one "theoretical," both of
\Vhich stage an encounter between wonten's writing
and the cine111a in sitnilar ways. My first anecdote. the
more "literary" one, concents two contentporary
novels by women concerned with the vicissitudes oi
fentale writing. In both novels, cinema becomes a
persuasive n1etaphor for the difficult and son1etimes
irnpenetrable obstacles that confront the won1an
v.. riter. Doris Lessing's novel 11,e Golden Notebo,,k
explores the relations between fentale identity and
artistic production, and a fomtulation of that relation
is represented through the cine1na. Wontan is the
vie\ver, n1an the projectionist. and the whole vie\ving
process a fonn of control and don1ination. Writer
Anna Wulf describes her vision of events front her
O\Vn past as filnts shown to her by an invisible n1alt.>
projectionist. The fihns represent what Anna calls tht.>
"burden of recreating order out of the chaos that 1ny
life has becon1e." Yet Anna is horrifit.>d by this vision
of cinentatic order:
They were all. so I sa,v no,v. conventionally. ,vcll-111adc
fihns, as if tht·y had bt'cn done in a studio: then I ,.l\\'
the titles: tht•se fihns, whid1 \vt·re everything I hJtcd
111ost, had been directed hy n1e. The projcctioni,t kept
running these filn1s very fast. and then pausing on the
credits. and I could hear his jeering laugh at Direct!'./ by
. Then he ,vould run another fe,v scenes. ev,•rv
il1111a H:11/f ,
sn:nc glossy ,vith untruth. false and stupid. 1
Lessing's cinen1atic n1etaphor is infomted by a rda-
tionship betwet.>n viewer and i1nage, and bet\,·een
projectionist and screen. that is profoundly patriarchal
in the sense that separation. hierarchy, and power are
here synonyn1ous with sexual division. The conven-
tionality and gloss of untruth of the filnts are con1plicit
with Anna Wulfs alienation front her nante that
appears on then1. If, for Lessing, the conditions of filn1
vie,ving suggest patriarchal do1nination, then the n1ost
inunediate temts of that 1netaphor are the sintultane-
ous evocation and dc:nial of fen1ale authorship. Cinen1a
en1bodies distance fron1 the self - or at least, distanCl'
fro111 the _1i•111<1h· self. a distance produced by the
1nockcry of lcn1alt· .1uthorship in the titk-s of the fihn.
As evoked in 77,c ( ;<,ldc11 ;'\;tJtcbt>,>k \vithin the context
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Female Authorship Reconsidered
of the fen1ale narrator's relationship to language and
to experience, cinerna functions as a particularly
and peculiarly negative inflection of the fen1ale autho-
rial signature.
ln her novel 11,e Quest for Christa T., Christa Wolf
evokes the cinen1a as a fonn of illusory prt'st'nce. as a
fantasy control of the past. The fe111ale narrator of 11,e
Quest _for Christa T. describes her search for Christa. as
\vell as for the very possibility of 111en1ory: "I even
narne her nan1e, and now 1'111 quite certain of her. But
all the tin1e I know that it·s a filn1 of shadows being •
nrn off the reel, a filrn that was onct' projt'cted in tht'
real light of cities, landscapes. living roon1s. " -1 Filtn n1ay
create in1ages of tht' past, but the in1ages are contained
by a reificd rnernory. The cine1na thus suggests a past
that has been categorized. hierarchized, and neatly
tucked away: like lessing's Anna Wulf. the narrator
of T7rr Quest <!f Christ,1 T. searches for the connections
between fen1alc identity and language. While less
t'xplicit in its patriarchal configuration. Wolfs 1neta-
phor nonethek·ss posits cincn1a as resistant to the
process of actiVl' St'arching gent'rally. and fen1;1le self-
t'Xpression specifically. Thl· fen1ale narrator in 77,c
Q11cst j<lr Christcr T . is engai::l·d. in Wolfs ,vords, in
a search tor "the Sl'Cret of the third person. ,vho is
thl•re without being tangible and ,vho, '-''hen circu111-
stances favor her. can bring do'-''11 n1ore rt·ality upon
herself than the first pl·rson: I.·· As in 11,r G,,/dn1
;'\:,,rebook, cine1na obstructs the ,vriting •
of ti:·111ak·
self-representation. thus t~111bodyi11g ,vhat Wolf ralh
"the difficulty of saying 'l.' ..,
If we are to take Lessing's and Wolfs n1etaphoric
representations of the cine111a at their word, then the
difficulty of saying "I" for the ,vo111an filnunaker is for
!,,'Teater than for the ,vo111an writer. Fc,ninist interroga-
tions of the cine1na have supported Lessing's and
Wolfs metaphors, for the narrative and visual staging
of cinen1atic desire rel ies, as n1ost theoretical accounts
,vould have it, on the 1nassive disavo,val of sexual dif-
ference and the subsequent ali!,,'11111e11t of cincn1atic
representation with n1,1lt·-i.:entered srenarios. To bt·
sure. one could argue - ,vith n1ore than a touch of
defensiveness - that surh n1etaphoric renderin!,,~ of the
cinerna suggest the strategic irnportancc· of the \vorks
of won1en filr11111akl'I'\. For if the cine111,1 is sy111pton1 -
atic of alienation (Ll:ssing) and reilication (Wolf). then
the: attempts hy ,vo111en directors to redefine. appro-
priate. or othl'nvisl' rcinve11t till' rine111a arl' crucial
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265
den1011strations that the boundaries of that supre111ely
patriarchal fom1 are 1nore penneable, n1ore open to
fc:minist and fen1ale influence. than these film-inspired
111et.iphors would suggest. At the sa111e time. it could
be argued that the works of wo111en filnunakers offer
reformulations of cinernatic identification and desire.
reformulations that posit cinen1atic 111etaphors quite
different fron1 those in the passages fron1 Lessing and
W olf cited above. ln other ,vords, the "difficulty of
saying 'l'" does not necessarily n1ean that fen1ale
authorship is irnpossible in the cinen1a. but rather that
it functions differently than in literature.
lfles.~ing's and Wolfs fom1ulations reflect the spirit
of 1nuch feminist writing about filn1, suggesting that
the cinen1a is peculiarly and forcefully resistant to the
fe1nale creator. yet another obstacle to the theorizing
of te111ale authorship in the cine111a en1erges when the
literary con1parison is pursued in another direction.
My second, n1ore properly "theoretical" anecdote of
the relationship between fen1ale authorship in its liter-
ary and cine,natic fonns is drawn fron1 the introduction
to Rc1,i.<i<l11, a collection of essays on fen1inist filn1
thl·ory and criticis111. The editors of the volun1e notl·
that fe1ninist filn1 critics have "reason to be envious··
of thosc fe1ninist critics working in literature \vho
",vere able to tun1 to a con1paratively substantial
canon of ,vorks by won1en writers." Unlike literature,
the cinen1a has no such evidence of a fen1ale-authored
ri11e1na to " ' hich fe111inist critics n1ight logically turn
to begin to elaborate the con1ponents of won1en 's
cine111a or of a ferninist filn1 aesthetic. "For where in
the classic cine111a," the editors ask, "do ,ve encounter
anything like an ·autonon1ous tradition.' with 'distin(-
tivt' features' and 'lines of influence'? And if. ,vith
so111e difficult. ,ve can conceive of Lois Weber and
Dorothy Arzn er as the J ane Austen and George Eliot
of Hollywood , to ,vhon1 do they trace their o,vn
influence?"''
While fen1inist literary critics have their o,vn dis-
ai:->Teen1ents about the validity of the concept of ;1
"fe111ale tradition" (autono,nous or not) or a fen1ak·
"canon" (substantial or not), it is true that fen1inist
til111 criti cs si111ply do not have the body of evidence
to suggest ho,v and in ""hat ,vays fernale-authort·d
ci11e111a would be substantially different fro111 cine111a
dirt'rted and creatt·d by ,nen. The absenct' of this
bodv• of evidence not,vi thstanding. •
ho,vever. it see111s
to 111e that the reluctance of n1any fe111inisc critics to
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
266 Judith Mayne
speak, as fenunist literary critics do, of a "fe,nale tradi-
tion'' in cinen1a had to do with a number of other
factors, ranging fron1 theoretical fran1eworks in which
any discussions of "personhood" are suspect, to the
peculiar status of authorship in the cinema. Particu-
larly insofar as the classical Hollywood cinema is
concerned, the conventional equation of authorship
,vith the role of the fibn director can repress or negate
the significant ways in which female signatures do
appear on fibn. For instance, consideration of the role
of the often- forgotten, often- fen1ale screenwriter
111ight suggest ,nore of a female in1print on the film
text; and the role of the actress does not always
conform to co,nmon feminist wisdon1 about the con-
trolling n1ale gaze located in the persona of the male
7
director - witness Bette Davis as a case in point.
The reluctance to speak of a "fen1ale tradition" has
perhaps been n1ost influenced, however, by the fear of
essentialis1n - the fear, that is, that any discussion of
"fen1ale texts" presumes the uniqueness and autonon1y
of female representation, thus validating rather than
challenging the dualisn1 of patriarchal hierarchy.
However, the act of discarding the concept of female
authorship and of an attendant fen1ale tradition in the
cine,n a as necessarily co111pronused by essentialist defi-
nitions of woman can be equally dualistic, in assunung
that the only models of connection and influence
are unquestionably essentialist ones. Sometimes it is
assumed that any discussion of authorship is a throw-
back to the era of biographical criticisn1, to the text
as transparent and simple reflection of the author's life.
While the linutations of such an approach are obvious.
purely textual 1nodels of cinen1atic representation have
their own lin1itations insofar as the narrative strategies
of n1any conten1porary won1en 's fihns are concerned,
for these strategies frequently involve an inscription of
authorship in literal terms, with the director herself a
perforn1er in her film.
Any discussion of fen1ale authorship in the cinen1a
n1ust take into account the curious history of defin i-
tions of cinen1atic authorship in general." It was not
really until the 1950s that ''auteurisn1" became a
fixture of fihn theory and criticisrn. The French tenn
did not connott" then, as French tenns have in thl'
past two decades of fihu studies, a particularly complex
entity. For a11te11ris,n refers to the view that the filrn
director is the single force responsible for the final
fihn. and that throughout the fihus of a given <111/(' '"
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a body of themes and preoccupations will be discern-
ible.~ The obviousness of these claims is con1plicated,
rather, by the fact that the object of inquiry for
auteurist critics was primarily the Hollywood cinen1a.
To speak of a "Hitchcock" or a "John Ford" or a
"Nicholas Ray" fihn as opposed to an "MGM" or
a "John Wayne" fihn was, if not a necessarily radical
enterprise, then at least a historically significant one.
in that a shift was n1arked in the very ways in which
one speaks of fil111. For the corporate industrial 1nodt'l
of filn1 production was being challenged by a liberJl
hun1anist one, and '"Hitchcock" does not carry quite
the same capitalist, industrial, or corporate baggage as
"MGM."
Despite the opposition between the industry and
the creative individual fron1 which auteurisn1 emerges,
however, the tern1s do not differ all that n1uch in their
patriarchal connotations; "MGM" and "Hitchcock"'
,nay be patriarchal in different ways, but they share a
co1nn1on ground. The cinen1atic a11te11r was identifit'd
as a transcendental figure resistant to the leveling
forces of the Hollywood industry; to use Roland
Banhes's words, the aute11r theory in cinen1a reinstated
the "formidable paternity" of the individual creator
threatened by the institutions of n1ass culture of ,vhich
the cinenu is a paradign1atic and even privileged
exan1ple. io Thus it does not require too n1uch i111agi-
nation to see Alexandre Astruc's fa1nous equation of
the can1era with a writer's pen, in his phrase "camero-
stylo," as inforn1ed by the san1e kind of n1etaphorical
equivalence between pen and penis that has defined
both the Western literary tradition (symptoniatically)
and fenunist literary history (critically). 11 The phallic
denonunator can be read several ways, most obviously
as a denial of the possibility of any fe,nale agency.
Conversely, it can be argued that the privileging of
fe111ale authorship risks appropriating, for won1en, an
extrernely patriarchal notion of cinenutic creation. At
stake, then, is whether the adjective Jenrale in fen1ale
authorship inflects the noun authorship in a way sig-
nificant enough to challenge or displace its patriarchal
and proprietary in1plications.
Whether authorship constitutes a patriarchal
and/ or phallocentric notion in its own right raises the
specter of the "Franco-An1erican Disconnection" (to
use D0111na Stanton's phrase) that has been the source
of n1uch critical debate. or confusion, depending upon
your po int o f vie,v, in contc111porary fenunist theory. ,:
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Female Authorship Reconsidered
The pos1uon usually described as ''A111erican" - and
therefore en1pirical and historical - would clain1
fe1nale authorship as basic to the goals of a fen1inist
appropriation of (cinen1atic) culture, and the position
described as "French" - theoretical and deconstructive
- would find " authorship" and "appropriation" equally
con1plicitous in their mimicry of patriarchal defini-
tions of self, expression, and representation. 13 Although
it is a commonly held assun1ption that conten1porary
film studies, especially as they developed in England,
are virtually synonymous with "French theory," the
fate of auteurism, particularly in relationship to femi-
nist filn1 theory, has not followed such an easily charted
or one-directional path. In a fa1nous 1973 essay, for
example, Claire Johnston argued against the disn1issal
of the a111eur theory. While acknowledging that "so1ne
developments of the a11/e11r theory have led to a ten-
dency to deify the personaliry of the (male) director,"
Johnston argues nonetheless for the in1portance of
auteurisn1 for feminism. She notes that "the develop-
ment of the a11te11r theory n1arked an important
intervention in film criticisn1: its polemics challenged
the entrenched view of Hollywood as monolithic, and
stripped of its nonnative aspects the classification of
films by director has proved an extren1ely productive
way of ordering our experience of the cinema." 14
Johnston's argun1ent recalls Peter Wollen's writings
on auteur theory, where the cinematic a111eur is defined
less as a creative individual and rnore as a figure whose
irnprint on a film is n1easured by the repetition of sets
of oppositions and the network of preoccupations,
including unconscious ones. i ; Her analysis needs to
be seen in the context of a certain n1on1ent in feminist
criticistn, when notions of "good roles" for women
(and therefore " positive" versus "negative" images) had
much critical currency. Johnston n1rns that critical
currency on its head in a comparison of Howard
Hawks and John Ford. She argues that the apparently
more "positive" and "liberated" heroines of Hawks' s
films are pure functions of 1nale desire. For John Ford.
women function in n1ore an1bivalent ways. Whereas
in Hawks's films "von1an is "a traun1atic presence
which must be negated.'' in Ford's filn1s won1an
"becomes a cipher onto which Ford projects his pro-
foundly an1bivalent attitude to the concepts of
civilisation and psychological ' wholeness.' " 11' Defined
as a narrative and visual svsten1
,
associated with a 'given
director, Johnston's auteurisn1 allov.•s tor .1 kind of
Digitized by Google
267
analysis which goes beyond the categories of
"good" and "bad" (i111ages of roles) and into the far
n1ore productive critical territory of symptom and
contradiction.
While Johnston's analysis see111s to stress equally the
importance of auteurism and of "symptomatic read-
ings," her work is read today far n1ore in the context
of the latter. As with Peter Wollen's work on author-
ship, one senses that perhaps the auteurist part is a
backdrop upon which more significant critical and
theoretical assu1nptions are projected - those of struc-
turalisn1 and senuotics in the case of Wollen, and
those of Althusserian-based critical readings in the case
of Johnston. The kind of analysis for which Johnston
argues - analysis of the position of "woman" within
the narrative and visual structures of the cinema - has
by and large been pursued without much direct con-
sideration of the a11te11r theory, or for a111e11rs. 17 Despite
the in1portance of auteuris111 in staking out what
Johnston would call progressive claims for film criti-
cism, the analysis of the kinds of structures to which
Johnston alludes in the filn1s of Hawks or Ford has
been pursued within the framework of textual and
ideological analyses of that ubiquitous entiry, the clas-
sical Hollywood cinema, rather than within the scope
of authorship.
By and large, the preferred n1ode of textual analysis,
given its particular attention to unconscious resonances
within narrative and visual structures, has had little
roon1 for an exploration of auteurism. One notable
exception is Raymond Bellour's analyses of Hitch-
cock's role as "enunciator" in his filn1s, which
nonetheless define authorship in expliciry literal and
narrow textual terms - i.e., the fact that Hitchcock's
fan1ous cameo appearances in his films occur at crucial
moments of the exposition and/or resolution of
cinernatic desire. 1~ More frequently in conten1po-
rary filn1 studies, one speaks of a " Hawks" film or a
"Ford" film in the same way one would speak of
a "horror" fihn or a " film noir" - as a convenient cat-
egorization of filn1S with sinular preoccupations and
si1nilar srylistic and narrative features. Such a de111ysti-
fication of authorship nught well be n1ore progressive
than Johnston's defense of authorship. Conversely,
authorship itself n1ay have assun1ed a sy1npton1atic
status, in "vhich case it has not been de1nystified so
n1uch as concealed within and displaced onto otht'r
roncen1s, evoking a process si111ilar to what Nancy K.
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
268 Judith Mayne
Miller has obseived in the field of literary studies,
where the concept of authorship has been not so much
revised as it has been repressed "in favor of the (ne\',r)
rnonolith of anonymous textuality. " 19
In film theory and criticisn1 of the last decade,
auteuris1n is rarely invoked, and when it is, it is n1ore
as a curiosity, as a historical development surely influ-
ential, but even n1ore surely surpassed. In this context,
Kaja Silverman has suggested that a curious slippage
occurs in feminist discussions of the avant-garde works
of women filnmukers, for the concept of authorship
- largely bracketed in textual analysis - reappears, but
in an extratextual way.
The author often en1ergcs ... as a largely untheorized
category, placed definitively '"out\ide" the text, and
assun1ed to be the punctual source of its sounds and
in1ages. A certain nostalgia for an unproblematic agency
permeates much of the writing to which I refer. There
is no sense in which the feminist author, like her phallic
counterpart, rnight be constructed in and through dis-
course - that she might be inseparable fron1 the desire
that circulates within her texts, investing itself not only
in their forn1al articulation. but in recurring dicgctic
eIClllClltS ••~·
Silvern1an recon1n1ends a theorization of fen1ale
authorship that would account for a diversity of
authorial inscriptions, ranging from thernatic preoc-
cupations, to the designation of a character or group
of characters as a stand-in for the author, to the
various enunciative strategies (sonoric as well as visual)
whereby the film autrur's presence is marked (whether
explicitly or irnplicitly), to the "fantasn1atic scene" that
structures an author's work. 21
The concept of fernale authorship in the cinen1a
,nay well have a currency sinular to categories of
gt·nre or of style. But can fen1ale authorship be so
easily assinulated to the existing taxonomy of the
cinerna? Present categories of authorship are undoubt-
t·dly rnuch n1ore useful in analyzing the configurations
of "won1an" on screen than in corning to tenns ,vith
the ,vays in which won1en directors inflect cinen1atic
practice in new and challenging Vl'ays. The analysis
of fc.·111alc:. authorship in the cinen1a raises sorne,vhat
difft"rent questions than does the analysis of 111alc
authorship, not only for the obvious reason that
\VOIIK'l1 have not had the saint' relationship to the
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institutions of the cinerna as n1en have, but also because
the articulation of fenule authorship threatens to
upset the erasure of "women" which is central to the
articulation of "won1an" in the cinen1a. Virtually all
fenunist critics who argue in defense of fenule author-
ship as a useful and necessary category assume the
political necessity for doing so. Hence, Kaja Silvennan
urges that the gendered positions of libidinal desire
within the text be read "in relation to the biological
gender of the biographical author, since it is clearly
not the same thing, socially or politically, for a won1an
to speak with a fen1ale voice as it is for a n1an to
do so, and vice versa. " 22 The notion of fenule author-
ship is not simply a useful political strategy; it is
crucial to the reinvention of the cinema that has been
undertaken by won1en filn1n1akers and fenunist
spectators.
One of the most productive ironies of fenunist
theory 1nay be that, if "won1an" and "women" do 1101
coincide (to borrow Teresa de Lauretis's formulation),
they also connect in tenuous and often complex ways.
It is customary in much fenunist film theory to read
"subject" to "object" as "male" is to " fernale ." But a
rnore productive exploration of fen1ale authorship
insofar as "woman" and "wornen" are concerned n1ay
result when subject-object relationships are considered
within and an1ong wornen. Visions of "won1an" that
appear on screen n1ay be largely the projections of
patriarchal fantasic:.s, and the "women" who nuke filn1s
and who see then1 may have problen1atic relations at
best with those visions. While it is ten1pting to use de
Lauretis's distinction as an opposition between tradi-
tional cinematic representations of "won1an" and those
" won1en ' ' filn1n1akers who challenge and reinvent
thern, the gap, the noncoincidence. is better defined
by exploring the tensions within both "woman" and
2
"'wo111en. " ·'
One such strategy has been directed toward the
"reading against the grain" of traditional cinen1atic
representations of won1en, dernonstrating how they
can be read in ways that contradict or otherwist
proble111atize their function ,vithin n1ale-centered dis-
course .14 Surprisingly little con1parable attention has
been paid, ho\'Jever, to the ti.rnction and position of
tht \V01nan director. (~t·ntral to a theorizing of fenule
authorship in the cinerna is an expanded definition of
ttxuality attentive to the cornplex net'w·ork of inter-
St·rtions, distances, and rt>sistances of "won1an" to
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Female Authorship Reconsidered
",vo1nen." The challenge of fe1nale author.ihip in the
cinema for fen1inist theory is in the demonstration of
l101v the divisions, overlaps, and distances between
"won1an" and "wo1nen.. connect with the contradic-
tory status of cinerna as the en1bodin1ent of both
on1nipotent control and individual fantasy.
The feminist rediscovery of Dorothy Arzner in the
1970s remains the n1ost important atten1pt to theorize
fernale author.ihip in the cinen1a. Arzner may not be
fenunist film theory's answer to George Eliot, but her
career as a won1an director in Hollywood with a sig-
nificant body of work (and in whose work - true to
the n1ost rudin1entary definitions of film authorship
- a number of preoccupations reappear) has posed
issues n1ost central to a feminist theory of fen1ale
cinematic authorship. As one of the very sn1all handful
of women directors who were successful in Holly-
wood, particularly during the studio years. Arzner has
served a.~ an important exan1ple of a won1an director
working within the Hollywood syste1n who managed,
in however limited ways, to n1ake filn1s that disturb
the conventions of Hollywood narrative.
The significance of this argun1ent, advanced pri-
rnarily by Claire Johnston and Pan1 Cook, in which
Arzner is defined as a director "critical" of the H ol-
lywood cine1na, needs to be seen in the context of
the development of the notion of the film a11te11r.
Arzner was very definitely 11ot one of the directors for
whom auteurist claims were n1adc in the heyday of
auteurist criticisrn. For despite the core then1es and
preoccupations visible across her work, Arzner does
not satisfy any of the specific requiren1ents of cine-
n1atic authorship as they were advanced on either side
of the Atlantic - there is little of the flourish of mise-
en-scene that auteurists attributed to other directors,
for instance, and the preoccupations visible from filn1
to fibn that rnight identify a particular signature do
not reflect the life- and- death, civilization-versus-the-
wildemess struggles that tended to define the rangt>
of more "properly" auteurist themes.~;
Given the extent to ,vhich fen1inist analysis of the
cinema has relied on the distinction be~•een don1i-
nant and alternative filn1. the clai111s that can be n1ade
for an alten1ative vision that exists ,vithin and along-
side the don1inant cinen1a will be cn1cial in gauging
the specific ways in ,vhich wo111en directors engage
,vith "women's cine1na" as dividt.>d be1'vet.>n represt.>n-
tations that perpt.>tuate patriarchal definitions of
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269
fern.ininity. and repn:sentations that challenge then1
and offer other n1odes of identification and pleasure.
One can read in responses to Arzner's work reflections
of larger assun1ptions concerning the H ollywood
cinema. At one extreme is Andrew Britton 's assess-
1nent of Arzner, in his study of Katharine Hepbun1,
as the a11te11r of Christopher StrOll,l! (1933), the film in
which Hepburn appears as an aviatrix who falls
in love with an older, n1arried man.
That Cliristoplier StrOll,l! functions as a "critique of
the effect of patriarchal heterosexual relations on rela-
tions between women" suggests that the classical
cinema lends itself quite readily to heterogeneity and
conflicting ideological allegiances, whether the
"critique" is the effect of the wo1nan director or
the fen1ale star.2~ At the opposite extre1ne, Jacquelyn
Suter's analysis of Christopher Stro11g evolves front the
assumption that whatever "female discourse" there is
in the filn1 is subsun1ed and neutralized by the patri-
archal discourse on n1onogan1y. 27 lfthe classical cinen1a
described by Britton seen1s re111arkably open to effects
of subver.;ion and criticism, the classical cinema
described by Suter is just as re111arkably closed to any
n1eanings but patriarchal ones, and one is left to
assume that female author.ihip is either a simple affir-
111ation of agency, or virtually an in1possibility as tar
as Hollywood cinema is concerned.
In contrast. Claire Johnston's analyses of Arzner are
rerniniscent of Roland Barthes's description of Balzac
as representative of a "linuted plurality" within classical
discourse. 28 For Johnston suggests that the strategics
of her fihns open up li111ited criticisnts of the Holly-
wood cinen1a. Johnston's clain1s for female authorship
in Arzner's filnis rely on notions of defamil.iarization
and dislocation, and more precisely on the assumption
popularized within filn1 studies, primarily by Jean-
Louis Con1olli and Jean Narboni, that there exist~
within the classical Hollywood cinema a category of
films in which realist conventions are criticized fi-0111
within, generating a kind of internal critique. Clai111s
for this "progressive" text have been n1ade fron1 a
variety of vantage points, virtually all of the111 con-
cerned with ideological value - with, that is. the
po~\ibility of a H ollywood film that critiques the very
values that are ostensibly pron1oted, fro111 the litc:ral
dark underside of bourgeois ideology "exposed'" in
Y,,,,,,,~ A•fr Li11co/11 to the in1possibility of fan1ilial ties
for won1en in .\-fildrcd Picrcc. 1'' For Johnston, le111alt.>
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
270 Judith Mayne
desire is the auteurist preoccupation that generates a
critique of patriarchal idt!'ology in Arzner's filn1s.
Initially.Johnston's analysis of Arzner appears to rely
on a definition of the classical cinen1a that allows for
1nore heterogeneity and n1ore aniculation of contra-
diction than is the case in those analyses that posit a
rigid distinction between the classical cine1na and its
alternatives. However, Arzner's filn1s can be identified
as "progressivt!'" only in relationship to a nonn that
allows for no divergences from purely classical filn1-
n1aking. More problematical within the present
context, there is nothing in this kind of analysis to
suggest what these marks of dislocation and critique
have to do with distinctly female authorship. Many
"woman's fiilns" are n1otivated by the representation
of female desire, and fen1inist critics have shown how
these films n1ight also be read as driven by such an
internal - if often unconscious - critique:~' It is not
clear, in other words, to what extent the fact of fen1ale
authorship gives a particular or distinct inflection to
the representation of female desire.
The "political" reasons for insisting on the rele-
vance of the author's gender are not adequate in and
of then1selves, for they can easily harden into an ideal-
ized abstraction, and the name "Dorothy Arzner"
\vould thus become just one n1ore signature to add to
the pantheon of (male) directors who critique the
conventions of Hollywood cinen1a from within. While
the in1portance of Arzner's signature in extratextual
terms is undeniable, stressing that importance should
not be a substitute for an examination of the textual
ramifications of female authorship. Yet Johnston's
approach to those textual ran1ifications in Arzner's
work seems ton1 between fen1ale authorship under-
stood ("politically") a.s agency and self-representation,
on the one hand, and as a negative inflection of the
nonns of classical cinema, on the other:11 This an1biva-
lence - which could be read in tern1S of the conflicting
clain1s of the so-called An1erican and French positions
- is not particularly productive, for the agency thus
affirmed dissolves into negation and the in1possibility
of a fen1aJe position, evokingJulia Kristeva's extremely
lin1ited hypothesis that "\vo1nen 's practice can only be
negative, in opposition to that which exists. to say that
'this is not it' and 'it is not vet.'
, "-'~
Noting that structural coherence in Arzner's filn1s
con11.>s fron1 the discourse of the \.vo111an , Johnston
rt·lies o n the notion of defa1niliariz.1rion. derived fron1
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the Russian fom1alists' prien, ostranenie, the "device of
making strange," to assess the effects of the won1an·s
discourse on patriarchal ,neaning: "the work of the
won1an's discourse renders the narrative strange, sub-
verting and dislocating it at the level of meaning... _1-'
Johnston discusses in this context what has becon1e
the single most fan1ous scene fron1 any of Arzner's
films, when Judy (Maureen O'Hara), who has played
ballet stooge to the vaudeville performer Bubbles
(Lucille Ball) in Da,ue, Girl, Dance (1940), confronts
her audience and tells the,n how she sees them . This
is, Johnston argues, the only real break between domi-
nant discourse and the discourse of the woman in
Arzner's work, and it is a break that is quickly recu-
perated within the film, for the audience applauds
Judy, and she and Bubbles are quickly dispatched to
center stage, where they engage in a catfight, to the
delight of the audience. The n1oment in Dance, Girl.
Dance when Judy faces her audience is a privileged
,noment in fenlinist fiiln theory and criticisn1, fore-
grounding as it does the sexual hierarchy of the gaze,
with fe,nale agency defined as the return of the look.
thus "citing" the objectification of wonian. 34
The celebrity accorded this particular scene in
Arzner's filn1 needs to be evaluated in the context of
feminist film theory in the 1nid-1970s. Confronted
with the persuasive psychoanalytically based theoreti-
cal n1odel according to which wo,nen either did not
or could not exist on screen, the discovery of Arznl"r.
and especially of Judy's "return of the gaze," offered
some glimmer of historical hope as to the possibility
of a fen1ale intervention in the cinema. To be sure. the
scope of the intervention is li111ited. for as Johnston
herself stresses, Judy's radical act is quickly recuperated
within the filn1 when the audience gets up to cheer
her on, and she and Bubbles begin to fight on stage.
But the need to revise Johnston ·s rnodel of authorship
is n1ost apparent in this reading of recuperation, for it
is infonned by the assun1ption that such a "break" can
be only a brief eruption, and can occur in classicll
cinema only if it is then inm1ediately contained within
the laws of n1a.le spectatorial desire.
()nly one kind of look (Judy's return of the look
to her audience) and one kind of spectacle (where
n1en are the agents of the look and won1en its objects)
have received attention in Dance, Girl, Dance. In otl1er
\vords. the disruptive force of fen1ale desire central to
Arzner's \Vork exists prin1arily within the symn1erry
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Female Authorship Reconsidered 271

Figure 28. I /\ double site of frnialc obj ccrific•tion and bonding: Bubbles (ltu:illc Ball) and J udy (Maureen
0 "1--!Jra) in Dorothy A.-,ncr, Dmm•, Girl, Da,,t,· (RKO. 1940). Produced by Erich Pommer and H:irry E.
Edin!,'tOn

of masculinity and femininiry_J; Ho\vever. I \VOuld
suggest that fen1alc authorship acquires its n1ost sig-
nificant contours in Arzner·s work thro ugh relations
berween and an1ong women . The fen1ale gaze is
defined early ou in the filn1 as central to the aspira-
tions of won,en as th ey are shaped within a con101unity
of won1e n. Mada,ne;- 13asilova, thl' olde;-r , vornan who
is in charge of the dancing trou pe of which J udy and
Bubbles are a part, 1s seen gazing thro ugh the rai ls of
a stain.vay as Judy practi ces her ballet . and the gaze of
J u dy herself is isolatt'd as she looks longingly at a
rehearsal of the ballet co1npany which she v.iishes to
join. Even Judy's fo1nous scolding of the audience is
identified priJ11arily as a co1nn1u1licacio n. not bet\veen
a fen1ale perfonner and a 111alc aud ie nce (che audience
is not, in any case, cxclusivt"ly n1ale) but bct\vcen the
performer and the fen1ale mecnber of the audience
(secretary to Steven Adan1s, the rn:in \Vho ,viii eve ntu-
ally becou1e Judy's love interest) \vho stands up to
applaud her:"' And the carfight that en1pts bet\veen
Judy and Bubbles on stage is less a recuperative n1ove
- i.e., transfon11ing the potential threat of Judy's con-
frontation in to an even n1orc tantalizing spectacle
- than the clainung by the t\VO ,von1en of th e stage
as an exte nsion of thei r conflicted friendship, rather
than as the alienated site of perfom1ance.
To be sure. the n1cn - pron1oters as \VelJ as
onlookers - eagerly consun1e the spectacle ofJudy and
13ubbles in a carfight. But I see this response less as a
sign of pure recuperati o n by the n1alc-centercd systen1
of looks and spectacles. and n1ore as the dran1atization
of the tension ber,veen pcrfom1ance and self-
expression \vh ich the fi!J11 atten1pts co resolve. Although
J o hnsron is n1ore concerned with cJ1e devices that give
Arzner's fihns ..structural coherence." it i~ ten1pring to
co nclude fro n1 hL' r analysis that Judy functions as a
111etaph oric renderiJ1g of the won1an fiJJ1unaker herself,
thus establishing son1eth ing of a ho n10l01,,y bet\veen
Arzn er's position vis-a-vis rhe classical Ho U}'\vood
ci nen1a and Judy's posirion on stage. 17 The stage is. in

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272 Judith Mayne
other words, both the site of the objectification of the
fen1ale body and the site for the theatricalizing of
fe,nale friendship . This "both/and" - the stage (and, by
n1etaphoric implication, the cinema itself) is an arena
sin1ultaneously of patriarchal exploitation and of fe,nale
self-representation - stand~ in contrast to the rnore
lirnited view of Arzner's filn1s in Johnston's work,
where rnore of a "neither/nor" logic is operative -
neither patriarchal discourse nor the " discourse of the
won1an" allO\VS women a vantage point fron1 which
to speak, represent, or in1aginc thernselves.
Reading Arzner's films in temts of the "both/and"
suggests an irony n1ore far-reaching than that described
by Johnston. Johnston's reading of Arzner is sugges-
tive of Shoshana Feln1an's definition of irony as
"'dragging authority as such into a scene which it
cannot 1naster. of which it is not aware and which,
for that very reason, is the scene of its own self-
destruction ... ••.1>1 The irony in Dance, Girl, Da,uc.
ho\\'ever, does not just dernonstrate how the patriar-
chal discourse of the cinen1a excludes won1en. but
rather ho\v the cinerna functions in two radically dit:.
fc:,rent ,vays. both of ,vhich are "true," as it were. and
totally inco111patible. I a111 borrowing here: fro111 Donna
Hara,vay's definition of irony: "Irony is about contra-
dictions that do not resolve into larger ,vholes. cvl.'n
dialectically. about the tension of holding inco111patible
thin~ togetht·r because both or all are ncct·ssary and
true."''' This insistence on t,vo equally co,npelling
and incon1patible truths constitutes a fonn of irony
tar 1nort· ron1plex than Johnston·s analysi~ of
detarniliarization.
Johnston ·s notion of Arzner"s irony a~su111<:s a patri-
archal fonu of representa tion ,vhich rnay have its gaps
and its weak links, but ,vhich ren1ains dorninant in
every sense of the word. For Johnston, Arzncr's irony
can be only the irony of negativity. of puncturing
holes in patriarchal assu111ptions. Such a vie,v of irony
h.1s Jes~ to do. I ,vould ar~ue. •
,vith the li111itatio11~ of
Arzner's cart·er (e.~.. as a ,von1;1n director working
' '
,vithin the inevitable li,nitations of tht' Hollv"·ood . J udy's attractions to 111e11 arc shaped by substin,tions
syste111) than ,vith tl1t' li111itatio11s of tl1t' tihu thl'ory
fro111 \\·hich it !-.'TO\VS . If tht' ci11e111a is understood as
•
a 011e-din1t·11sio11al systern of 111all' subjtcts and ti:rnale
object,. then it i~ not ditlicult to understand ho\\· the
irony in Arzner·s til111s i~ lirnitt'd. or at le,1~t \\'llltld he
ri·,1d ,1' li111itl'd. While rii.:id
•
hit'rarchit·s of st·xual dit:.
ti:rt·nct· art' indl'ed char.1ctl'ristic of do111i11:111t cint'111a,
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they are not absolute, and Arzner's fil111s represt'nt
other kinds of cinen1atic pleasure and desire.
An assessn1ent of Arzner's in1portance within the
framework of female authorship needs to account not
only for how Arzner problematizes the pleasures of
the cinen1atic institution as we understand it - e.g.. in
tem1s of the voyeurisn1 and fetishis111 reenacted
through the power of the 111ale gaze and the objecti-
fication of the fen1ale body - but also for ho\v. in ht'r
filn1s, those pleasures are identified in \vays that arc
not reducible to the theoretical cliches of the on1nipo-
tcnce of the n1ale gaze. The irony of Da11cc, Girl, D,111cr
ernerges fron1 the conflicting de,nands of perfonuance
and self-expression, which are linked in their tun1 to
heterosexual ron1ance and fe111ale friendship. Fe111Jk
friendship acquires a resistant function in the " ' ay that
it exerts a pressure aE,"Jinst the supposed "natural"' la\\'S
of heterosexual ron1ance. l~elations between \\'On1en
and conununities of wo111en have a privilt'ged status
in Arzner's filn1s. To be sure, Arzner's fihns otfer plots
- particularly insofar as rc:solutions arc conct'nlt'd -
that are con1patible with tht' ro111antic t>xpectJtions
of the classical Hollywood cinen1a; conununities ot
\VOl!lt'n n1ay be central, but boy still rneets girl.
C:Iairt' Johnston clain1s that the conclusion of Danff.
c,;;r1, D,111cc. where Judy is e111braced by Stevt·n Adan1s.
destined for a fusion of professional 111t·ntori11g and
ron1anct', is rnarked by Judy's defeat. This strikes 111t·
111ort· as ,vishful fcrninist thinking than as a convincin!!
reading of the filn1 ·s ronclusion, which ",vorks" ,11,·ithin
tht· conventions of Hollywood ron1ance. NotingJud\'·,
tinal conuncnt as she is in Steven's anus - "when I
think ho\v sin1ple thinh".I could have bec:11, I just ha,·e
to laugh" - Johnston says that "this irony n1arks her
dc:ti.:at and final enb'llltiuent, but at the ,;.1n1e ti,ne it
is tht· final ,nark of subversion of the discourse of the.'
n1ak· ... ,., If the " discourse of the n1alc" is subvc.-rted in
l),111cc, (;;,/, D,111«·, it has less to do \vith the resolution
of tht· tihn and 111ort· to do with the procc,\ of
hett·rosexual initiation \\'hich the tihn has traced.
ti,r ,vo111t·11 and fi:111ak· rivalrv, - Steven Ada111$ is .1
proti:~sional 111entor to substitute for Basilova. and
Ji111111it· Harris is an i11t:111tilt' ,nan who is desirJble
111.1i11lv bcc1use 13uhhlc, \\·,111ts hint too." Thcreforc,
the heterose)(ual r<l111antT provides the conclusion of
the tilrn. but onlv :.1lil'r it h.1s becn n1ediated bv rela-
tionship~ bet,vt· en \\'0111c11.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Female Authorship Reconsidered
A controversial area in fen1inist theory and criti-
cism has been the connection between lesbianisn1 and
feniale friendship in those fictional worlds which, like
Arzner's, take conm1unities of women as their inspira-
tion. Barbara Sntith's suggestion that the relationship
between Nel and Sula in Toni Morrison's novel Sula
can be read in lesbian temJS has been provocative to
say the least, particularly given Toni Morrison's own
assertion that "there is no homosexualiry in S11la ..., i
But the case of Arzner is sotnewhat different. What is
known about Arzner irnplies that she herself was a
lesbian."·1 But this assertion raises as n1any questions as
it presumably arJSwers, con cerning both the responsi-
biliry of a critic vis-a-vis an individual who was
presun1ably in the closet, and th e con1pulsion to define
lesbianism as sornething in need of proo(" Bonnie
Zin1n1erman has suggested that "if a text lends itself
to a lesbian reading, then no an1ount of biographical
'proof ought to be necessary to establish it as a lesbian
text. " 45 The point is weU taken, but in Arzner's case
another "text" mediates the relationship between
director, her films, and their reception. For Arzner's
films are virtually no longer read independently of her
persona - an issue to which I will retun1 rno,nentarily.
Nonetheless, if relationships between and a,nong
won1en account for n1uch n1ore narrative and visual
11101nentun1 than do the relations between n1en
and women in Arzner's work, then one begins to
wonder about the perspective that infom1s these
preoccupations.
For all of the attention that has been given to
Arzner's work, one striking aspect of her persona -
and of her films - has been largely ignored. Although
the photographs of Arzner that have accon1panied
fentinist analyses of her work depict a \Von1an who
favored a look and a style connoting lesbian identity,
discussions of her work always stop short of any
recognition that sexual identity n1ight have sontething
to do with how her fihns function, particularly con-
cerning the "discourse of the wornan" and fen1ale
communities, or that the contours of fen1ale author-
ship in her filn1s rnight be defined in lesbian tenns.
This marginalization is all the n1ore notable, given
how visible Arzner has been as an i111age in fe,ninist
film theory. With the possible exception of Maya
Deren, Arzner is n1ore frequently represented visually
than any other \VOn1an director central to conten1po-
rary fen1ini st discussions of tiln1. And unlike Deren,
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273
\Vho appeared extensively in her own filn1s, Arzner
does not have the reputation of being a particularly
self-pron1oting, visible, or "out" (in several senses of
the tenn) won1an director.
Sarah Halprin has suggested that the reason for
this omission is, in part, the suspicion of any kind of
biographical infonnation in analysis of female
authorship:
rnost discussions of Dorothy Arzner's filn1s, especiaUy
those by the English school, carefully avoid any n1ention
of Arzner's appearance in relation to sonic of the irnages
in her filn1s. Lengthy analyses of Da11ce, Girl, Da11a·
ignore the fact that while the "n1ain" characters, Judy
and Bubblt-s, are recurrently placed as i1nn1ature within
the context of the fiJn1. there are t'.vo "1ninor" characters
who both dress and look rcnurkably similar to Arzner
herself (i.e.. tailored, "mannish," in the rnanner of
Radclyffe Hall and other fan1ous lesbians of the tin1e)
and are placed as nuture, single, independent won1en
,vho are crucial to the career of young Judy and who
arc clearly seen as oppressed by social stereoryping, of
,vhich they are conten1ptuous. Such a reading provides
a whole new way of relating to the fihn and to other
Arzner films, encouraging a discussion of lesbian stereo-
types, relations between lesbians and heterosexual won1en
as presented in various filnu and as perceived by any
specific conten1porary audience."'
Indeed, one of the 1nost critical aspects of Arzner's
work is the way in which heterosexuality is assun1ed
equivocally, without necessarily violating many of the
conventions of the Hollywood fihn.
In his book on gay sexuality and filn1, Vito Russo
quotes another Hollywood director on Arzner: "an
obviously lesbian director like Dorothy Arzner got
away with her lifestyle because she was officially
closeted and because 'it ,nade her one of the boys. "'H
An interview with Arzner by Karyn Kay and Gerald
Peary gives some evidence of her status as "one of
the boys," at least insofar as identification is concerned,
for in discussing both Christopher Strong and C.:ra(i:'s
Wife, Arzner insists that her syrnpathies lie with the
111ale characters:s However, one has only to look at
the photographs of Arzner that have accon1panied
essays about her work in recent years to see that
this is not a director so easily assin1ilated to the boys•
club of Hollywood. Arzner preferred ,nasculine attirt·.
in the 111anner. as Halprin says, of Radclyflc Hall.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 •

274 Judith Mayne

Figure 28.2 Studio portrait of Dorothy Ann~r

T,vo do111inant tropes shape the photo~nphic nuse-
en-scene of the Arzner persona. She is portrayed
against the backdrop of the large-~cak· apparatus of
tht' H oUY'voocl cint'1na. or she is shown ,vith other
,vorncn. usually actresses. n1ost of ,vho1n are rnosr
t'111phatica Uy ··ft'1nini11t':· creating a striking co ntrast
indeed.
f. . .l
The photographs of Arzner are intc rl·~ting no t only
in the bio~ph1cal ten11s suggested by Sarah Halprin.
but also in textual tcnns. For one of the n1o~t distinc-
tive ,vays in ,vluch Anner's auchonal pre~ence is f..-lt
Lil her filn1s is in the en1phasis placed on conu11u11iti.-s
of ,vornen. to be sure. bur also in the e rotic chal)(e
'
identified within tho~t' con1111unities. If hete rosexual
initiation is central co Arzncr's filn1s. it is precisely
in its fi1nction as rite of passage (rather than natural
destiny) that a 111,trginal prt'Sence is felt - :111 auchori,tl
presl·nce that is lesbian. as ,veil as fernale. Consider, for
instance, C/,rinophrr S1rcu1,f!. Katharint' H epbu rn first
appears in che fil111 as a prizc-v.rinning objt"Ct in a
~cavenger hunt, for ~he ca n clain1 that she is over
t\Vl'ntv-
, one .rnd h as never had a love affair. Christo-
pher Strong. the 111an ,vrth "" horn she will evenruaUy

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Female Authorship Reconsidered
beco111e involved, is the n1ale version of this prize-
\vinning object, for he has been n1arried for n1ore
than five years and has always been faithful to his wife.
As Cynthia Darrington, Hepburn dresses in decidedly
unfentinine clothing and walks with a swagger that is
masculine, or athletic, depending upon your point of
view. Hepburn's jodhpurs and boots n1ay well be, as
Beverie Houston puts it, "that upper-class costun1e for
a won1an performing n1en 's activities ...,., But this is
also clothing that strongly denotes lesbian identity. and
which (to stress again Sarah Halprin's point) is evoca-
tive of the way Arzner herself, and other lesbians of
the tin1c, dressed.
Cynthia's "virginity" becon1es a euphen1istic catch-
all for a variety of n1argins in which she is situated,
both as a won1an devoted to her career and as a
\von1an without a sexual identity. The filtn traces tht"
acquisition of ht"terosexual identity, with son1e pecu-
liar representations of fen1ininity along the way,
including Hepburn dressc.>d as a n1oth. I a111 not arguing
that Cltristopher Stroll)/, like the drea1n which says one
thing but ostc.>nsibly "rc.>ally" n1eans its n1irror opposite,
can be decoded as a coherent "lesbian fihn, .. or that
the real subject of the fihn is the tension between gay
and straight identities. The critical attitude toward
heterosexuality takes the fonn of inflections, of bits
and pieces of tone and gesture and e1nphasis, as a result
of which the conventions of heterosexual behavior
beco1ne loosened up, shaken free of son1e of their
identifications with the patriarchal status quo.
Most i1nportant, perhaps, the acquisition of hetero-
sexuality beco111es the downfall of Cynthia Darrington.
Suter has described C/,rist,1phcr Stn,11,11 in terms of how
the fenunine discourse. represented by the various
female characters in the filn1, is sub1nerged by pa-
triarchal discourse, the central tenn of which is
n1onogamy. The proof oflen.-d for such a clai111 is. as
is often the case in textual analysis, convincing on one
level but quite tc:ntative on another, for it is a proof
which begins fron1 and ends v.'ith the assun1ption
of a patriarchal n1astcr code. Even the: "fen1ini11e
discourse:" describc:d by Suter is nothing but a pale
reflection of that n1aster t·odt·. \v ith non1nonoga1ny its
111ost radical expression. The: possibility that ·'fe1nininc
discourse" in (Jrrisr,,phl'r Srr,,11g n1 ight exct"cd hetero-
sexual boundaries is not takt"n into account.'" As
should be obvious by no\v. I a,n arguing that 1t 1s
Digitized by Google
275
precisely in its ironic inflection of heterosexual nonus,
\vhether by the nlirroring gesture that suggests a
reflection of Arzner herself or by the definition of the
fen1ale conununity as resistant to, rather than cont-
plicitous with, heterosexual relations, that Atzner's
signature is written on her filn1s.
These two con1ponents central to fen1ale author-
ship in Arzner's work - fen1ale conununities and the
ntirroring of Arzner herself - are not identical. The
one, stressing the irnportance of fen1ale conununities
and friend~hip an1ong won1en, 111ay function as a pres-
sure exerted against the rituals of heterosexual
initiation, but is not necessarily opposed to then1. This
foregrounding of relationships a111ong won1en disturbs
the fit between ten1ale friendship and heterosexual
ro111ance, but the fit is still there, the con1patibility
\vith the conventions of the classical HollY\vood
cine1na is still possible. The representation of lesbian
codes, as in the n1irroring of Arzner's - and other
lesbians' - dress, constitutes the second strategy, which
is n1ore n1arginal and not integrated into narrative
flow. These two authorial inscriptions - the emphasis
on fen1ale con1111u1lities, the citing of n1arginal lesbian
gestures - are not situated on a "continuun1," that
n1odel of continuity fro111 fen1ale friendship to explicit
lesbianis1n so favored in n1uch contemporary lesbian-
fe1ninist writing.51 Rather, these two strategies exist
in tension with each other, constituting yet another
level of irony in Arzner's work. Fen1ale co1nn1unities
are con1patible with the classical Hollywood narrative;
the lesbian gesture occupies no such position of co111-
patibility, it does not 1nesh easily with narrat ive
continuity in Arzner's filn1.
Thus, in Da11cr, Girl, Da11cc, Arzner accentuates not
o nly the won1an's desire as en1bodied in Judy and her
relationships with other wo1nen, but also secondary
fe111ale figures who never really becon1e central, but
\vho do not evaporate into the n1argins, either - such
as the secretary (who leads the applause during Judy 's
"retun1 of the gaze" nun1ber) and Basilova (the danct·
tt'acher and director of the troupe). That these figures
do not si1nply "disappear" suggests even n1orc strongly
their impossible relationship to the Hollywood plot,
a relationship th.11 is possible insofar as Judy is con-
ct·n1ed. In Cra(~ 's H-'ifc. hov.'ever, there is n1ore of
an innnediatt' relationship between 1narginality and
ien1ale con1111unicies. although in this c.1st·, tl1t'
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
276 Judith Mayne
marginality has less of a lesbian inflection, both dress-
and gesturewise. Julia Lesage has noted that in Craig's
~V!fe, Arzner rereads George Kelley's play, the source
of the filn1, so that the secondary wornen characters
are treated rnuch 111ore fully than in the play. 52
Craig's W!fe - preoccupied with heterosexual den1ise
rather than initiation - shows us a woman so obses-
sively concen1ed with her house that nothing else is of
interest to her. Harriet Craig (Rosalind Russell) n1arried
as "a way towards emancipation .... I rnarried to be
independent." If n1arriage is a business contract, then
Harriet Craig's capital is her house. Indeed, Harriet's
sense of econon1y is pursued with a vengeance. And
the men in the film are the victirns, explicit or not, of
her obsession. It is Harriet's husband who rnarried for
love, not money. and in a subplot of the filrn, a friend
of Walter Craig is so obsessed by his wife's unfaithful-
ness that he kills her and then hin1self.
At the conclusion of the filn1, virtually everyone
has cleared out of Harriet's house. Her niece has left
,vith her fiance, her servants have either quit or been
fired, and Walter has finally packed up and left in
disgust. Harriet seerns pathetically neurotic and alone.
The widow next door (Billie Burke) brings Harriet
son1e roses. In Kelley's play, Harriet has becon1e a
1nirror irnage of her neighbor, for both are portrayed
as won1en alone, to be pitied. But in Arzner's fihn, the
neighbor represents Harriet's one last chance for con-
nection with another hun1an being. Thus the figure
who in Kelley's play is a pale echo of Harriet, becon1es
in the fihn the suggestion of another identity and of
the possibility of a fernale co1nn1unity. The resolution
of Arzner·s Cra(~'s W!fc has little to do with the loss
of a husband, and rnore to do with situating H arriet
Craig's fantasy come horribly true alongside the pos-
sibility of connection with another won1an. And while
Billie Durke is hardly evocative of lesbianisn1 (as
Dasilova is in Dance, Girl, Dance) , she and Rosalind
Russell n1ake for a play of contrast~ visually sin1ilar to
those visible in photographs of Arzner \vith 1nore
"fe1ninine" won1en. "·'
To be sure. Arzner's authorship \.'Xtends to :in ironic
pl'~pective on patriarchal institutions in general. and
in this \ense her tihns do not require or as\Ullll' a
lesbian audience. as if this \vas or is Likely to happl'n
,vithin the institutions of the Hollywood cinl·n1a. At
the ~an1e tintl' that th e irony of Arznl·r's tihns .1ppl·;il\
to ,1 ,vidl· range of fc111:1k· exp,·riencl·~. .ind is thus
Digitized by Google
readable across a wide spectrun1, ranging fron1 lesbian
to heterosexual and fron1 fen1ale to feminist, the 111arks
of fernale authorship in her work do not constitute a
universal category of fernale authorship in the cinema.
The fen1ale signature in Arzner·s work is nurked
by that irony of equally con1pelling and incon1parible
discourses to which I have referred, and the lesbian
inflection articulates the division between fen1ale
conununities which do function within a heterosexual
universe, and the eruptions of lesbian marginality
which do not. This lesbian irony taps differing and
con1peting views of lesbianis,n within conternporary
fen1inist and lesbian theory. Lesbianism has been
defined as the rnost intense fonn of female and fen1i-
nist bonding, on the one hand; and as distinctly
opposed to heterosexuality (whether practiced by
women or n1en), on the other. In Arzner' s o,vn rin1e.
these co,npeting definitions were read as the conflict
between a desexualized nineteenth-century ideal of
rornantic friendship an1011g wornen, and the "mannish
lesbian" (exernplified by R adclytfe Hall), defined by
herself and her critics as a sexual being. "4 Arzner's
continued "visibility" suggests not only that the tension
is far front being resolved, but also that debates about
lesbian identity infom1, even (and especially!) in
unconscious ways. the thinking of fenlinists who do
not identify as lesbians.
I see, then, several points to draw &0111 the exan1ple
of Dorothy Arzner as far as fe111ale authorship in the
ci11e111a is co11cen1ed. The preoccupations with fernall'
co111n1u11ities and heterosexual initiation are visible and
readable only if ,ve are attentive to how the cinen1a.
traditionally and historically, has offered pleasures other
than those that have rel·eived the most sustained criti-
cal and theoretical attention in recent years. Female
authorship finds an inadequate rnetaphor in the female
gaze as it returns the ostensibly central and overriding
force of the 111ale gaze. Other fom1s of the fe1nale gaze
- such as the exchange of looks between and an1ong
\\'0111en - open up other possibilities for cinen1atir
n1e.1ning and plt.>asure and identification. In addition.
a lcn1ale si!{ltature can take other fonns besides the
gaze - costu1ne .ind gesture, and the strategies oi
reading "n1ar-gin.1lity" in tht· case of Arzner. Textually.
the nHist pervasivt' sign offi:1nale authorship in Arzner's
tiln1 i~ irony, and thJt irony is n1ost appropriately
dt'scriht·d a, the confrontation between two equally
con1p,·lling. and incon1patible discourses. 1- .. ]
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Female Authorship Reconsidered
Notes
I See M:ugaret Hmnans. &·ari11.~ th<' 11 ·,,ril: L111,e11,(~'<' a11J 1-;,mal,·
Expt·n·,.,uc in tVim·rr,·uth-<..~t'lll14,Y H",m,cu '> ~Vrititt\! (Chic,lgo:
Univ,·rsity of Chicago Prt·ss, 19!!1,); and Nan,·y K. Miller,
.'i11hject to Cl1a11.~e: Rr,1Ji11.e 1-',·miuist ll'rirm.~ (New York:
Columbi3 University l're~,. 1988). 14
2 Doris Lc.-s,ing. '1111· G,,ldr11 ,'V,,rrb.wk (19<,2: rpt. New York:
Sirnon and Schuster. 1973). p . 619.
3 Chrisu Wolf. 'l1rc· Q11cs1 J•r Cl,ri;ra T. (1968; English trans. 15
Christopher Middleton, New York: Odta, I 970). p. 4. 16
4 In her c.-sSJy on the relation between fcrninism and Christa
Wolfs work. Myra Love analyz.-s the status offihn ;15 an inll!(e
.. usC'd to evok1... the comu.~..::tions .1n1ong do1nination. n1anipub-
1ion and experiential impoverishment." See "Christa Wolf and 17
f'eminism," Nrw G,·mrau Critiq11<' 16 (Winter 197'1). 36.
~ Wolf. TI,r Quest for Christ" r., p. 170.
6 Mary Ann Doane. Patricia Mellen,·arnp. and Linda Willia,ns.
"Fentinist Fil111 Critici,111: An Introduction," in Doane.
Mellencamp, and Williams, t'ds., Rn•i,i,,11: I':ssays i,r F1•mi11ist 18
Film Criti<i,m (Frederick, Md.: The A,nerican Fihn ln.ni1u1e/
U niversity Publications of America, 19!l4), p . 7. The e,liton 19
are «-sponding to a ddinition of feminist literary critici,111
by Elizabeth Abel. a, the e"plor.ation of "distinctiv,· feature,
of ti,m:lle texts" and "lines of inRuence ,·onnccting won1en in
a fertile and partially autonontou, tr.idition." Abd 's ,onunents 20
arc drawn from ''Editor's Introduction," Critiral /11q11iry ti. no.
2 (Winter l'J>IJ), 173.
7 M;ina Lal'lace argues for Uette Davis's signitir.1n,e a, a crcativ,· 21
tOrce in her own right. Sc:c "Producing Jnd Con~mnin~ 22
tht· Won1,1n 's Fihn: Discur.;ivc: Stn1~e in /\'t,u•, l 'oya._~•·r," in 2.\
Christine Gledhill. ed.. Homt' /_; H 111·rc· 1/11· H,·,1rt I.<: S 111Jfr.<
iu J\·frloJram.i a11d thr H 'e1111<1rr '; Fi/111 (London: Uritish Fihn
lnuitute. l'Jll7). pp. 1.\ll- 1,<,.
R An t•xcdk~nt <urvey of thl" ntost ,i~nificant tc:Xt5 on durrnatir
authorship is John Caughie. ,·,l.. ·n11·,>ric's ,f.1111/wr;/,il' (London: 2.J
Routl.·dg,· and Kcgan Paul. l 'llll).
'I A usditl surv,·y anti Jn:1lysis of the ditl,:rcnc 111,·aning, that have
bel"n .ut.u:hl·d to the tenn Jut,·un·, ,,, ran bt" fOunJ in Pch:·r 25
WolJrn. .~(eus ,rnd i\tr,m;u,I.! iu 1hr C'im·m" (llloorn.ington:
lndiJna Univ,·rsicy Pr,·«. 19(,l/), d 1ap1,·r 2.
IO Roi.and Banhes. '/lrr /l/r,r,<rm• <>{ 1/11· ·1;•xt (New York: I Jill and
Wang. 197SJ. tr.ms. Rid,ard Miller, p. 27 .
11 Alrxandrc As1n1c "Th,· llinh of a New Avant-(;arde : Lr 2(,
tJmh.1•.> l)'h>," in 1'1..·tc..·r Gr:1lum. t.·d., '/11,· 1\ f,-w U~wr (London:
Secker and W:irhur!(, l9C.K). pp. 17- 2.\. Sus:111 (;uhar and 27
SJ1H.it.:i Gilbt'n ht·!,;i11 d1l·ir :u1.1lysi-, of ,vomen wri te~ with a
query into tht.· c:qmv.1h:11rt• hl·t\Vl"l'II p<.·11 ,lnJ p l~111s: ~l'l' '/7tc· 28
:\l,1d1w111i111 i11 tlu· •.-lttit (Nl'W J-t.1vl·11: Y.1ll.' U111vl.'rsity Prl·s~.
I 'J79). p. 3. 2lJ
12 Sec 0011111.1 St,1111011. "L.1ni:11,1i:e .rnd R ,·volution: T he Fra11,o-
An1c:ric.:a.n I >isfnttnl'l'tiou:· in ~kstl·r Ei!ll'l1Stl·in and AJi<.T
Jard111e. c,h.. '/7rr ,.-,,,,,,.. ,,{ D,fiirc·rr,.- ( I 'Jl!ll; rpr. New
Brunswick. NJ: R 111i:,·rs U111\·crsi1y l'r,·~,. l'l>l:\). pp. 7.\-
117.
I J For p,1nkul.,r)y lurid l' Xpt.hition, of thl''l' two po,ition, . a)
,vdl J~ tht.· problt.·111~ ill \'Oln:d 111 ddinin~ tht..· r") "tlOUS .\S
Digitized by Google
277
opposing in rhe first pl.ice, see Pcgi-,')' KJmuf. " R,cpladng
F,·111inis1 Critkism," and N .ut<:y Miller, "The Text', Heroine:
A Feminist Critic and Her Fictions." Diarriti<, 12. nu. 2
(Surruner 19112). 42-53.
Claire Johnston. "Women's Cinema •• Cou111cr-cinn11a."
in Claire Johnston. ed .• ,,•01,·s <>rr ll 'omr rr's Cirrrma (1973; rpt.
London: Uritish Filtn Institute, 1975), p. 26.
Se..- Wollen, S(~m a11d ,lfrarriu.~ irr 1/,r Ci11r111a, chapter 2.
John,1011. "Women's Cinema :is Count,·r-cin.-m,.'' p. 27. A
comparison bern·een HJwks and Ford ._, ,mtt11rs is •lso central
in Wollen's disn1ssion of Juteurism (S(e,u ,md ,\frm,irrs ;,, tire
Cirrfmn, chapter 2) .
One noubl•· exception is T .utia Modleski's study of women
and frn1:lle spe,utorship in th,· films of Alfred Hitch,ock,
although it is in no woy a conventional "auteurist" srudy. Ser
'/1,r IV0111r11 H-'/1t• K11ru• '/i,,, ,',,fut/, (New York: Methuen,
1911!1).
See Ray111ond UeUour, "Hitch,·o,·k the Enunciator," r,mrrra
ob.<c11ra, no. 2 (Fall 1977). (>6-91.
Nan,·y K. Millt'r. "Changing the Subje,·t: Authorship. Wntin!(.
and the Reader," in Ter<~ de Lauretis. ed .. Fl'mirrist St11dic"sl
Critical S111dirs (llloom inb>'lon: Indiana University Pres,. l'18C.).
p. 10-1.
Kaj;1 Silvcnnan. ·17,.. .·l,,>11s1i.- ;\(i"or: '/1,r F(mal,· I 'oiCC' i11 P.<y·
r/1tl111Jolyii., iJuJ Cint·m11 (Bloo111inbrto11: Indiana Univc-nity Prl--s~.
I 'Ill!!), p. 209.
Ibid. , pp. 212- 17.
Ibid., p. 217.
Thi, is sug!(.-sted by de Laurccis h,·rself: "the ditli,renccs among
wontrn may be bener understootl a, differerte,·• within
wo1nrn. " S,·e "F,·mmi,1 Studies/ C ritic.ii Studies: 1,sucs. T,·m1s.
and Contl' Xt~:· in de Laurc:ti~. Ft·mi11ist S111dicJ I C'rititdl Studit·.<:,
p. 14.
KajJ Silven11a11 n ·fi.' I"\'. to such .1 pron:-ss a~ the "rl.'-Juthoring"
o( a tr~ldition:tl tl'Xt in tt·rnini~r tcnns,. St'l' '/11t A(cm.Hfr ;\fi"clr,
p . 21 1.
For .111 msightful discu« ion of the idcolob')' of auteuri.,1 criucs
in Franc,·. see John Hess. " L.1 Politiquc de, autrurs: Pan ()ne:
World View as Aesthetk." .Jurnp Cut, no. I (1974), l'J-22:
Jnd "La i'oli1i4ue d,-, 1111,·urs: Part Two: Tntffaut's M:mi-
festo," .Jump <:111, 11<>. 2 (1974), 21 1-~.
Andrew Uritton. Katlwrirrr H,•11/11,m: ·11,r ·n,inil'.< a11d 1\(t<'f
(Ncwci<tle upon Tyne: Tyn,·sid,· Cinema. l'lll4). p. 74.
J;1.cqudy11 Suter. "f1..~rninint.· Disc.:ount· in C/1rin,,pher Smm,i::·
C,11111·,., ()/,_".'"''· no. 3-4 (Sunun,·r I'l7'1), 1.\S-5ll.
R.ol:md U.,nh,-.. Sl 7. (New York : Hill and Wang. l'174).
tr.ins. Ridllrd Miller. p. Ii.
Sc:t" the t'ditors of C'i,1,irr.' du tinl ma\ t·0Ucctiv1..· h.'Xt. ''John
l'ord'> \ ',,1111.~ .\Ir U11.-,>l11." Srrrrrr 1.\ (Au1111n11 l'J72). S- 44 : on
,\lildrrd l'irrtr, s.·e Joyce Nel,on, ",\lildrnl f'itr(c' Rccorr,id-
,·rcd ." Film Rc,11lrr, no. 2 ( 1977). t,~-711; l':un Conk, "lluplrnry
in .\lildr,·,I /li,·r,c·.'' in E. Ann K.aplan. 1..·c.i.. It ·t111h'U iu 1-'ilm ,\ ·l,;,
(l.onJon: Briti<h Film l11<1i1u1t·, 197ll). pp. C,!1-K2: Jtnet
w.,lkt•r. ''F1..•n1ini)r,,t (~ritiral 1,r.Ktic1..·: ft'IIIJlc.· l)1..:c.-ou~c.· i1,
,\lil,ln-d />i,·n·,·." Film R,·,ulrr, no. 5 ( l'IH2). 1<>4-72; Jud11h
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
278 Judith Mayne
Mayne. Pri,,arr /\,·,,.,,,/,, H1bli< ri/111s (Athens: University of
G,·orgi• Press, 1988). pp. 142-54; and Linda Williams.
"'F,·minist Fihn Theory: h·lild,rd Pirr<, and the Second World
War." in lJeidre Pribram . ed .. Female S1~·aators: l.o.•ki11~ "'
Film a1td Trkvisi,111 (London and New York: Ve,..o. 19118).
pp. 12- 30.
.10 ()ne of th,· best exa1nples of this kind of ,naly,i, is Lea J•cobs.
.. N,,,,., l'oy,i~•·r: Son1e Problems of Enuncia_tion and Sexual Dif-
ference," Camera O/,sr11ra, no. 7 (1981), 89-109.
JI I am not arguing here. as Janet 13ergstron1 ha_, done in her
criticism of Johnston. 1h,1 1he problen1 is the ukirnate ren,-
per,bility of aU fonns of difference by 1he appua1us oi 1he
HollywO-Od cinema. Referring specifically 10 the work of
S1cphen Hea1h , and n1orc generally 10 1,·xtual analyses by
crick, such as R aymond Udlour and Thierry Kun12d, Berg-
strom criticizes Johnston ·s proto-fcrninist t.:binu for clement~
which, she says. fie quite readily into cb.<si,· •l narrative cinema.
Ucr~".ltrom speak.< of 1he "'secrnin~y unlimi1cd capacity for
d:is.1ii,,tl narrative film to crcatc g.,1p~. fis~urcs. n1ptun.·s. gt'nc:r-
ai,•d most of all by iL< diffteulcy in contain in~ sc,mal ditfercncc.
only to rccov,·r 1hen1 ultirnately and 10 efface 1he memory, or
at kast the paths. of this heterogeneity. It is jusl thi, n1pn1rin~
:ictivity thJt is said 10 be charlcteristic of the classical text, and
which. morco,·cr. is 1hought 10 be th,· condition of• large pan
of its pleasur<·... While I would •~,,..,,, with Ber~trom that
John!lton 111akl·s some-what cxtravJg.lnt daint, for dcrnl~nb
which may well be incorporated into the ov,·raU narr.1tive
.md visual n1on1c11tum of the individual tilm. the view of the
HuUywood cinema put fonh by thO'e criti,·, to whose work
she points approvingly is no les, monolithic in the Jnicula1io11
of o,·dipal ,cenario, Jnd mJle hcu·rosc·xual desire . And 1,c,•dless
to say, if heterog,·neity is dfa.-,•d. then there is no ro,1111 in
wh ich to speak of female author<hip. S,·,· jJnet Uerir.-tro111.
"Rl~reading the W(uk <.1f Claire John~ton." f.ruu·rc1 tlb.<rura, no.
.'-4 (1979), '27.
32 "lnt,·rview - 1'174: JuliJ Krist;v,1 •nd l'<yd1analr•,· et
politiqu,· ... tTJll<. Cbire l',1j,Kzkowsk:i, 111 I (. no. 5-(, ( I 'IX 1),
I t,<,,
.1.\ Cl.11re John,1011 . "Dorothy Arz1l('r: Criucal Str;itcµi,., ... in
C laire John~ton. l'd .. '/1u· IVi,,k ~f r>.m,thy Ar: w·r: ' /(lll',lfds d
h ·,11i11iS1 Ci111·111,1 (London: llritish Film Institute. 1975). p. "·
J4 Luc:y fi~c:her reads D,ma·. (;i,/, D,mtc· in ten1t, of this ··rc:~i~-
t.Jnfl' to t~·ti~h1~ni." St'e Sl,m 1(_:,,,mtash1,1 (Pnn(c..·ton: Pnnct·t<Hl
Un,v,•,..ity Pres,. I' '8'1), pp. 14!\- 54.
JS K.Hyn K.1y and Gerald P,·,,rv\ re:1dini; oi the tihn. how,·,·,-r.
l(H.· u ~c !I- nmc h 111o n· t-c.·ntrnlJy on ,von1c.~n ·4i tih.· nd~hip" :-m d
the.· ritc.·4i of iniri.ition . Sc.·c.· "Dororhy Arznrr·"- ();ma·. <;;,J,
/),wff•:· in Karyn K.1y and (;c..•rald Pc.•,1ry. l·d, .. 11.nm·u r111,I ti,,·
Cit1<'11td: ."1 Cnti,·11/ .1111/,.,/,')/)' (N,·w York: Dutton. l'li7).
pp. '-1-~5 .
U.1rh.1r.1 Koc.•ni~ (~u:1n .-.tn.·,sc.·, th\' rd.1ti1Jnship hetwc.~c.·11 Judy
;md the.- ,t.·l·rt"rary i11 ht·r rc.·.1din!,: of the sn:nc:. Sc.·c.· JI ·,,mf 11 J)irt·r-
~,·t,r·
wr.,: ·11,c' Er1r<"~l!nr,·•· i.!f't1 Cim·11111 (Nc.·w York .111d Wc.·,rpon,
CT: l'r.1q:,·r. l'lt!X). 1'· 25.
l3.1rb.1r.1 QttJrt (ibid.) $UK_L!..:,t~ .1 cnnnc.•rrion hl'tw1.·. 1.•11 Ar11H.· r·,
,:.i rn:r .111tl thc.· show-bu~i1H:~, ,vorltl tkpic:tc.·tt m J),mff , <;,,J,
Digitized by Google
Dam,·: "Arzner i., clearly ambivalent about the viul, ~b111orous
vulgarity of Bubble~. the Lucille Bill showgirl - hut the:: ;con,
for HollywO-Od implicit in the film, and for 1he n,·«1 to be J
flesh peddler to survive there. is doubtless something Arzn,·r
he=lf fell in no snull pan, in this next to last of her tiln».
close to her retiren1en1."
38 Shoshana Fchnan, "To Open the Question,'' \ 'ale f-rr11d1 St11dirs,
ll0. 55- 56 ()980), 8.
.'9 Donna Haraway... A Manifesto for Cyborg:.: Scil'nc,•. T echnol-
"~'Y· and Socialist Feminism in the I<JKlls ... S,1ci,1/i.<t Rfl•i,11•, no.
I!() (1985). 65.
40 Johnnon, "Oorothy Ar211cr: Critical Srr~tcg:ies." p . 7 .
41 Th.- relationships of desire betwl'en won1en in Arzncr\ tilm,
art' developed al len~h in my book- length study of Arzncr
(l)iratrd lty V,.,Ml1y .-l,~11r,. Bloomini,on: Indiana Uni,·crs,ty
Pres< 1994). For an analysis of the secondar)' roles men pbv
in Arzncrs films. sec MdissJ Sul' Kon. " 'Spectacular Spinde,,-
nes<' : The Men in Dorothy Arzncr, Films,"' inJJn,·t Todd. ed ..
,\fe11 by H ,1111en, I 1-i,m,·11 011d Litrr•t11~• (New Serie<). vol. :? (I 9N2).
pp. 189- :?05.
42 UJrbar,\ S1nith ...T OWJTd a Ul:t.ck ft"rninist Crittl"i~,n ... c·,,,,,/ith1,u,
no. 2 (()nob,·r 1977). :?5-14; lntervi,·w wuh Toni /l,1orn,on
in Claudia T:11e. ,·d. , Bf.rd, JVi1111,·11 1-1 'ritrr.< ,rt 11 ',,rk (N,·w York:
Continuum. 198.1). p. 118.
4.' See, ti>r example, Vito Russo. ·1111• Cd/11/,,id C/,,sn: H,,,,.,,.
ffx 11ality ;,, thr Al,wir.< (N,·w York: Harp,·r and Row . l'IX I).
p. so.
44 Sh:1ron <YUrien addn·<s,·s thc<c questions in her stud,· oi
Will, Catll<'r. Norin~ 1h,t the dl'linition of "lt"ibi.1ni<m'' Jnd
''lesbian writer" has bt•rn i111pon~uu in ~cent fi.·111inist l·nu ~
dsrn, tYl3rit'n s.;1y~. '"For 1,tooJ rt'.1son. ~t"nital "'t' XuJil t>Xpl"ril.'nce
with wo1nt'11 h~a hc.·c.·n the lc.·:1.st- uscd ,ritc:rion. 1\5. )C\'frJJ
rntic$ have.· ob.sc.·rvc.:d . to Jdopt "ud1 a ddinition n·qmn.-s
the unc:inhi ng of ' proof we do not think ncrcss.1ry III dcrin-
ing: writL•r; :i~ hl·tc..·ro'iexual - proof. n1oreovc.~r. rh.1t is u~u;;illy
un.iv-ailablt' .. .. " Sc.·e l1 i'flt, c·,,,1,rr: ·n,,- Em,·~i,~~ I ~wr
(N,·w York and ()xford: l\,ford University Pres,. 19!17).
p. 1'27.
45 Bo nni,· Zin11n,·n11.1n. "Wh.11 Has N,·,·,·r lleen: An ()ver.·1<·w
of Le~bian Feminbt Critidlitn,'' Ffmr'Hi.<r SrmNr5 7. 110. J { F.1ll
l'JXI}. 457 .
4(, S.u-:,h Halprin. "Writin~ in th,· M ,,r~,in, (Review of E. Ann
K~tp1.1n. 11 (lmeu ,md Film: lJ.,1l1 Si,lt·s (f tl,r C'i11m·r.1) ... Jump Cw.
110. ;!'I (l'IX4) ..1:?.
.J7 Rll!i-'\O, JJu, C,·llull1id C:Jc,sfl. p. Sri.
4X K.1r.·n K.l\· ,llld Ger.1ld Peary. "1111,·r.·icw with Dorothy Arztl<'r."
in Johnston. '/1,r 11 ',,r.(o <!i l>,,,,,,1,y .·lr~•wr, pp. 25-<,.
41.J Bl'Vl·rk Hou~to11 , "Mi:.."iu~ in Al·tion: Note.·, on Dc.uothy
Arzn,·r,'' 11 ·i,/r .·lu~/c (,. no .., (I 'IH4). '27.
so sl't" Stttl•r, .. Fl·n1inhh,' l)i,;,n)\IN<.' in c:J,rist1lrhn Sm,,~i:."
51 Thl· phr;,:..l' "h:·,hi:m nmti numn" l'Oml--.. fro1n Adnt·mw Rkh.
"C:t11t1 JHll,o~· Hc.·rt..·ro.;l'Xll,lliry :ind Lc.·!l.bi:Ul Exi,tt'lll't', .. s,:~m ; ,
110. 4 (S11111111,·r l 'IXO). h ,11-c.tl,
51 Julia Ll''·'!;,!<.', "Tht· I iq.:t·111011il· FcmJk F:111u,;y in .-In
( ·,m1tJrri,•cl II i111,.111 .uu.l C r,,~{$ l1 'fk." Film Rrt1Ja. no. 5 ( l9S2) .
1)1. In K.,~·n K,,y .tnd (;rr.1ld l\•,lfy·~ intt: rvil'\\', An-nt.·r stJ.Ct"\
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Female Authorship Reconsidered 279

that Kt'lley was ani."Y at the clungt-s in e1nphasis that were
1nade.
53 Mdhs.i Sue Kon also discu~sc, Arzner's re.,ding of the Kelley
play. noting 1ha1 the "shift from pby 10 tiln1 t"hangn Harriet
fron1 villain to vktim." St•e her dist"us,ion of tht• filn1 in
.. ·spenan,IJr Spinele<sne.s."' pp. l'J<,-~IXI.
54 Sec Esther N~w1on. "The Mvthic
. Mannish Lesbian: Radclvfle
.
Hall and the New Won1an," S(~11s 9, no. 4 (S11n1n1er 1984).
557-75. See also Lillian Fadennan. S11'71assi11,~ r/r, Low ~{ Jvtr11:
R,,manti.c Frir,ulship aud Lot1t• brtwrrn J-i-(1mr11 .f;,,,,., thr Rruaisillna·
,,, r/1<· />,,,,.,,, (New York: Willian, Morrow •nd Co .. l'IH I). esp .
parts II and 111.

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 29
Man's Favorite Sport?:
The Action Films of
Kathryn Bigelow
Barry Keith Grant

A professor of film studies at Brock University in Ontario, Canada, Bany Keith Grant has
published widely in the area of popular cinema and film genre. His books include Film Genre
Reader, The Dread of Difference: Gender and tfle Horror Film, John Ford's Stagecoach,
Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology, and Voyages of Discovery: The Cinema of
Frederick Wiseman. in which he considers film authorship in the context of documentary
filmmaking practices. In this essay, originally published in Yvonne Tasker's 2004 anthology on
Action and Adventure Cinema, Grant brings a feminist perspective to an analysis of the action
films of Kathryn Bigelow within their various generic traditions. He shows how Bigelow's work
questions the values and assumptions of masculinity. particularly the central importance of
violence, that typically provide pleasure in such genre films even as it offers those very
pleasures.

Introduction also \vork within the various genres that fall within
the category of action cinen1a - cop filn1s, buddy and
With only a fc~\V features to her credit - 7711' L,,.c/css road n1ovies, westen1s and horror films - to que1irion
(I 983, co-directed with Money Montgoniery), l\'f,lr their traditional and shared ideological assu1npttons
Dark (1987), Blue St,•rl (1990), Pt>i111 Break (1991), about gender and violence.
and StranJJe Days (1995) 1 - writer/ director Kathryn So111e critics have hesitated to call Bigelo,v Jn
Bigelow succeeded in establishing herself as the only auteur because of her personal and professional a.~so-
fen1ale filn1n1aker specializing in action filn1s who, at ciation ,vith Jan1es Can1eron, the creator of such
least to this point, can claini the status of auteur. rnuscular action 1110\;es as Tcn11i11a1or (1984) and Ter-
Bigelow's filn1s eniploy, in the \vords of Anna Powell, 111i11,111>r 2: ]u,~(/1111·111 Del)' (1991) who also produced
'stunning and expressionistic visuals. rapid narrative P,,i111 Break and wrote and produced Stra11,(/c Days.
pacing. thrilling and visceral scenes of eroticized vio- (:ertainly her biolo!-,rical status as a won1an has enter..-d
lence and physit·al artion', 1 providing all the expected into the discourse surrounding Bigelow, with critics
pleasures of action til111s. Yet at the sanie tinll' they and rt·vit·v.,ers often referrin1,: not only to her gendt·r

U.trl'\ Kl·llh (;uni, ••f1..t.m\ l~t\onh,· "iptm ?· T lw :\n1011 Fihm ,,t' K.11 hr\11 B1~1.·hm ," pp. \ 7 f - S4 li-0111 Y\tUlll t.' r.a,L.c.·r (c.·~t.). .-ia11,11 J11d .·ld1·('tlfurr c:iue,n,, (t,,ndtm
.md Nt.·\\' Y~.\rl . R ou,lt·d~..-. .:!• "1-1 1. .... 211c1~ h~ u.,rr, Kc.·uh (;r,mt. H.q•mttc.·,.I 1, v p ..·nm\\h•II l,ftht.· .1111hur.

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 The Action Films of Kathryn Bigelow
but also to her physical attractiveness - hardly the kind
of discourse that generally surrounds 111ale directors:'
Yet close analysis of her fihns reveal a remarkable
consistency of style and theme that, as with n1ost
canonical 111ale auteurs, \Yorks in relation to the
paran1eters of genre.
The action fihn is perfectly suited to Bigelo\v·s
then1es. The representation of violence is of course
central to the genre, and as Steve Neale notes, the
ideology of n1asculinity which it traditionally has
worked so hard to inscribe centers on 'notions and
attitudes to do with aggression, po\ver, and control':
Bigelo\v's first fi1111. the short Set-Up (1978), which
sho\vs two men fighting in an alley while on the
so undtrack two theorists interpret the violence, is
in a sense a paradigin for her features to follo\v.
All explore the nature of n1asculinity and its relation
to violence, especially within the context of spectator-
ship, largely by playing on the look of the viewer
as conditioned by the generic expectations and
conventions of traditional action filn1s. The 'false'
bt"ginnings of both Blue Sted and 1'Jcar Dark, which
arc tests of perception for Bigelow's protagonists as
\veil as for the viewer. are only the n1ost obvious
instances of the in1portance of looking and the look
in her filrns.
Critics have duly noted the then1atic and stylistic
in1portance of vision in Bigelow's fihns - her ' cine111a
is essentially a discourse on vision', writes one5 - a
then1e that likely has its roots in her days as a filn1s
studies student at Columbia University in New York
Ciry, at a time when the influence of fe111inist !:,>'3Ze
theory was at its height. Much as Sirk and Fassbinder
had approached the genre of 111elodran1a or 'the
won1an·s fihn', providing their pleasures while critiqu-
ing the ideology that underpinned the1n ('bending',
in Sirk's phrase), so Bigelow works within the action
filn1. H er music video for the pop band Ne\v Order's
·Touched by the Hand of God is indicative of her
approach: just as in the video she incongruously tiln 1s
the new wave band with the iconography of costun1e
and the conventions of perfon11ance associated with
heavy n1etal, thus foregrounding and questioning their
111asculine coding. so Bigt'lcl\v·s tihns n1obilizt' a range
of the genres traditionally regarded as 'n1alt•' precist·ly
to interrogate that terrn spe:-citic.1lly. as \\'t·II ,1s the
politics and pleasures of gendered representations in
genre fihns n1ort' gt·ner.1lly. (;avin S1nith is thu~ .,bso-
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281
lutely correct in describing her work as ·,netacine,na
of the first ran k•. 1•
Men with Guns
While action in tiln1 has been popular ever si nce the
Lun1ieres· train entered the Ciotat Station, the action
fi.hn as a reC06'11izable genre for the definition and
display of n1ale power and pro\vess was clearly estab-
lished with the rousing swashbucklers of Douglas
Fairbanks (TI1e M,1rk of z,""• 1920; TI,c Black Piri,11•,
I 922) and Errol Flynn (Captai11 Blood, 1935; TI,r
Advc11t11rcs o_f Robi11 Hood, 1940). The depth of
the genre's rnasculine perspective is painfully clear in
a n1ovie like Tn1e Ues (1994, written and directed,
ironically, by Bigelow's fonner husband, Jan1t's
Can1eron). At one point in the narrative Ja1nie Lee
Curtis is forced to succun1b to the hun1iliating process
of visual objectification in a scene that exceeds any
narrative require1nent (thinking she n1ust do so to save
her husband's life. she is n1ade to enter a hotel roon1
and strip for the pleasure of an unknown ,nale specta-
tor sitting in the shadows). The apparent joke is on
her, since she does not realize {but we do) that the
1nysterious n1an is in f.1ct her husband, whon1 she does
not know is a spy. The husband is played by Arnold
Schwarzenegger - ·an anthropon1orphised phallus, a
phallus with 1nuscles', in the apt words of Barbara
Creed' - the actor who n1ore than any other en1-
bodies the action film in the 1980s and I 990s and
who, in this scene, explicitly functions as the ego ideal
of the n1ale viewer.
It is stating the obvious to say that successful
action stars often rely on anato111y rather than acting.
Male action stars such as Schwarzenegger. Sylvestt'r
Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Danune, Steven Seagal.
Chuck Norris, and Bn1ce Willis offer impres.~ively
111uscular bodies for visual display and as the site of
ordeals they 111ust undergo in order to triumph at
narrative's t>nd. Critics such as Yvonne Tasker and
Susan Jeffords have discussed the conten1porary action
til111·s exaggerated n1:1sculinity as an expression of
patriarchal idt'olni-,•y. the reassertion of n1ale power and
privilegt· during and after the Reai,,an adn1inistration
and in an t·ra of eroding hegt'n1ony." It is no accident
that tht· hyperbolically 111asculine action fihn gained
popul.irity roughly ,It tht• s.1111<' tin1c that other gt·nrt·s.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
282 Barry Keith Grant
traditionally regarded as 'n1ale', were beginning to be
opened up to revisionist readings.
Into the 1980s, genres and genre rnovies ren1ained
aln1ost exclusively the cultural property of a ,vhite
n1ale consciousness. the centre &0111 ,vhich and
difference regarding race, gender. and sexuality ,vas
defined and n1arginalized. In all the action genres, it
,,vas white n1en who had to get the job done, whether
driving the cattle, solving the crirne, capturing the
spies. or defeating the aliens. Movies such as H1estu,ard
the J,V1>1nen (1951). in which a wagon train of ,von1en
successfully n1ake the cross-country trek to Califon1ia.
,vere only the exceptions that proved the rule. In
every type of action filn1, won1en and visible 111inori-
ties assun1ed subsidiary and stereotyped roles, serving
as hindrances. helpers, or rewards for the white 111ale 's
doing, With the ghettoized exceptions of n1usicals and
111elodra1nas - at one tin1e referred to in the industrv,
as 'wo111en's fihns' - 111ost genre movies addressed an
assu1ned viewer who was. like aln1ost all of the fihn-
n1akers who 111ade then1, white, n1ale, and heterosexual.
But by the next decade 111any conte111porary genre
1novies sought to grapple with and redress the in1pli-
cations of traditional generic representations of race
and gender, often deliberately acknowledging and
!-,tiving voice to those previously n1arginalized by
n1ainsrrean1 cint:"n1a, including won1en, blacks and
t, ;1 ,vs.
0 finding a place for won1en in the action filn1 specifi-
The fihn that 111ore than any other provided the
in1petus for this nt:",v generic transfonnation ,vas.
undoubtedly, 11,elma a11d u,uise. One of the most
popular movies in North Arnerica in 1991, TI1d111,1
a11d LJ111isc is a generic hybrid of the westen1, the buddy
fihn. and the road 111ovie - three of those genres tradi-
tionally regarded as n1ale - and the outla,v couple
111ovie. the protagonists of ,vhich had always rornanti-
cally involved heterosexual couples. 111cln1a a11d
L,,uisc reversed H ollvwood's
, conventional definition of
won1an 's place as the don1estic sphere and rein1agined
the buddy 111ovie as fen1ale adventure. The acts of rebel-
lion on the pan of tht· two wornen, like blo,ving up the
tanker truck of a driver ,vho 111akes obscent:" gestures at
them. conic to seern nothing less than irna1:,rinative acts
of retribution tor all v.·on1en. transcending their pt·r-
sonal plight. As Peter Churno observes, ·,vhat Bonnie
and Clyde do !<)r Depression evils, Thehna ,ind Louise
do for the evil of sexual violence . . , ,,,
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In the tilrn's controversial ending, Thehna Jnd
Louise drive over the edge of the Grand Canyon
rather than capitulate to the police. The last irnage is
a freeze fran1e of the car in n1idair, just beyond the
apogee of its arching flight. followed by a fade to
,vhite. This ending is, of course, a direct reference
to one of the most fan1ous of buddv, n1ovies, B111.-I,
c:assidy and the S1111da11ce Kid ( I 969), and it sparked
considerable dt:"bate regarding 11,cln,a a11d L>ui,c\
political value. Did it signify suicidal defeatisn1 or
triun1phant transcendence? This debate in itself ,vas
si1,'llificant for, as Rebecca Bell-Metereau noted:
Critics did 1101 concl·m tht·111sdvcs ,vith the outt·o,nc of
811tr/1 Ca;;idr a11d 1h,· S1111dn11CC' Kid lorl E"·'>' Rider.
hccausc a 111ale dl·ath in the condusion is sacritirtJI.
sy111bolk, and Christ-like, A fe,nalc dt·ath at thc <'nd
of the story rardy rt•ct•ivi:s sur h a heroic interpr<'t..llion.
frc)ln fi:n1ini~t!-i or no11fr·n1inists. '"
The contentious but popular reception of Thcl,na a11d
L iuisc's ending suggests ho,v novel the tiln1 ,vas Jt
the tin1e.
Regardless of how one reads the filn1 ·s ending. tht·
fact that it was the subject of such heated debate sug-
g<.-sts both the con1plexities of gendered representations
in popular cinen1a generally and the difficulty of
cally. Many recent genre filnL~ are content rnerely to
borrow 111c/111a and L.•11ise's gender 'ginunick', si111ply
plugging others into roles traditionally reserved for
,vhite n1en. But in reversing conventional representa-
tions, they are prone to fall into the rrap of repeating
the sarne objectionable values. The question of,vhether
fe111ale action heroes such as Sigourney Weaver's
Ripley in .'1/ir11 (1979) and it~ sequels or Lindi
Ha,nilton's Sarah Connor in ·remri11ator 2: J11d_i:n1c111
Day are progressive representations of women or
n1erely contain then1 within a n1asculine sensibility has
been a n1atter of considerable debate. It is just here
that Bigelow's tilt11s constitute a site of generic inter-
vention, for ,vhile they often reverse generic
expectation (the fernale cop in Blue Steel, for exarnple.
or the black ternale bodyguard and fe1ninized n1ak
prot.1gonist in S1ra,1.f!c l),r)'J), they also en1ploy a variety
ot ,cyli,tic 111e,111~ to question the gendered values that
anin1ate action til111 genres,
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
.. -
 The Action Films of Kathryn Bigelow 283

Figure 29. 1 Kathryn B,~dow', J7,r L,,i,·/,·s, (Atl.inuc F,hn, / l'tone,·r Rd,··""'!;• 1'li!:?) dt<pby< 1h,· bik,·"' in
Ur<·chuan tableau. l'rodu,·<d by A. K,rm.,n Ho ""' Gr.,lion Nunes

Toe Children of Eisenhower and Coca-Cola
11,r Lo1lt'less. Higelow's first feature fihn. ren1ains ht'r
'
most avant-g.irde or experin1ental. Set in the l 950s.
the fu111 is a generic a111alpn1 of n1ainsrrean1 biker
111ovies of the period, particularly 77,e 1,Vi/d 011c ( I 954),
.ind the celebration of gay iconography in Kenneth
Anger's expcrin1ental filni Srorpio Risi11,~ ( 1963). As
such. 171l' Loveless ntight 1nore accur:itely be described
as an anti-action film because of its stylized coniposi-
rions and deliberately slo,v pace - e~pecially curious
(-,riven the kinetic potential of a 111ov1e about guys on
n1otorcyclt's. The 111ain charactt'r. Vance (Willeni
Dafoe), accuratl·ly describes the fiLn ·s style ,vhen he
tells the other bikers: "We're;- going 110,vhere ... fast.'
The n1inirnal plot involves a group of bikl·rs (.1U
rnen. with the notable exception of the bleach-blonde
Debbie Sportstt'r) ,vho convt·rge on a s111all Southen1
tovm on tlil'ir way to thl' drai; race~ at Dayto na,
waiting ,vhile one of thern does sonic necessary repairs
to his 11·1o torcych:. Their pre~enct' rJt,1 lyzes the 10,vns-
pt'ople. ,vho respond to theru l'ither ,v1th tk·sire or
fear, tl1l'Se extrt•nte and polar reactions conting togetl1er
in a violent clirnax fearuring a shoor-out in a road ide
b:ir and the suicide of a local girl. Tht' bikers firnction
like d1t' ,nonstrous other of the horror fihn (in fact.
there are a nun1ber of correspondences between the111
and the van1pirc clan in die later J\Jcar Dark). a graphic
represenwaon of the return of the repressed. And like
the 111ore syn1pathetic 111onstc~ of sonie progre~sive
horror fun rs, they arc less evil than n1ert'ly different
in che;-ir bohen1ia11 ltfescyle.
77,r Lovrlt'ss ,vorks to,vard its violent cli1nax not so
n1uch as a necessary dr:in1atic resolution, but 111orc
becau~e. like;- Michel and Patricia in Jean- Luc Godard's
A bout de so,!fllt- ( I 959), thl' characters are trapped
,vithin the constraints of genre. A tragic outco111e
sec1ns inevitable, a given, che kind of ending ,ve cxpt'ct
,vhcn fret'-spiriccd bikt'r1 co11fro nt rednecks 111 1r1ovics
like E,uy Rider ( 1969). But the specific fon11 this
viok·n t clirnax takl·~ in 77,r Ln 1ch-ss, tun1ing in on the
co,vn and niaking the ro,vnspcoplc the vic-rin1s, rs
.1 111orc.· ~ubtlc politiral critique. Appropriately. T/11·
un 1t·h-ss co1tt,111b 111.1ny rcfl'[l'llCl'S to Godard's ,vo rk -

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 284 Barry Keith Grant
, n1ost obviously in the shot~ of Vance driving in the
open convenible with Telena (Marin Kanter), the local
jailbait. The sense of buoyant freedom as they drive,
the way Kanter turns her head away fron1 the ca1nera,
and her shon, boyish haircut, all deliberately echo Jean
Seberg in A bo141 de soulfic. The Loveless's bold colour
palette, use of deliberately choreographed tracking
shots (a central elen1ent of what Brian Henderson calls
Godard's 'non-bourgeois can1era style'), 11 and vivid
deployment of consu1ner iconography (the brilliant red
Coke 1nachine in the filling station) all invoke Godard's
distinctive style of political ftlmmaking.
The actors are often filn1ed doing nothing, even
being cornpletely n1otionless, in Brechtian tableaux.
Vance tellingly says in the opening scene, when the
won1an with the flat tyre asks hint what he does for
a living, ' not a whole lot'. These shots are frequently
held longer than the tin1e required for narrative com-
prehension, encouraging us to exantine their studied
con1position. As a result, the characters - male and
fernale - becon1e objects of aesthetic conten1plation
for the spectator. The in1ages are often composed so
that the actors are decentred in the frame, en1phasizing
the iconographical in1pon of gesture (sn1oking a ciga-
rette, drinking a Coke) or costume (motorcycle jacket,
boots). In the roadside diner - Bigelow's equivalent to
the Parisian cafe for Godard - when they wonder
where one of their group is, Debbie comn1ents that
he n1ust be outside 'fine-tuning his sideburns'. The
tiln1's first in1age is of Vance laconically co1nbing his
hair before heading out on the highway. Bigelow thus
subvens the traditionally n1asculine gaze of the camera,
fetishizing, as in Anger's n1ore experi1nental work, the
accoutre1nents of the biker subculture. The languorous
shots of the bikers ultin1ately reveal then1 as poised,
posed, performing, so that any sense of a monolithic
or essential n1asculinity is called into question. This
~ubversion is literalized in the cli1nax, and the violence
precipitated. \vhen Telena' s abusive and belligerent
father discovers one of the bikers wearing ,vonu.-n 's
under~annents beneath his leather in , significantly. the
bar's 1ne11 ·s roon1.
Terror in a Texas Town
Bi~l'lo\v·s ~econd fe.1ture. !\•r,ir D,1rk. is a <>cnl·ric
. "
h\·brid of the ,vestern and thl' van1pirl' tiltn in the
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venerable tradition of such unassunting genre fare as
C11rse o_f the U11dead (1959), Billy tl,c Kid vs Dracufo
(1965) and Jesse James lvfects Fra11ke11stei11 's Daugl,tcr
(1966), but with considerably n1ore serious ambitions.
As Christina Lane points out, both genres 'have tradi-
tionally been used to work through ambivalent feelin~
toward nature and civilization, and both usuallv, tell
stories in which threatening natural forces are purged
for the sake of society'. 12 Both genres are structured
by binary oppositions that at root reflect the ongoing
tension between individual desire and social responsi-
bility - civilization and its discontents, in Freud's tenns
- in the western, as a topographical 1napping onto the
frontier and in the horror film, as a psycho-social
projection _,., Near Dark mixes elen1ents of both genres,
revealing their common conventional gendered
assumptions.
A nudwestern farm boy, Caleb (Adrian Pasdar).
seen1ingly falls in love at first sight with an attractive
fen1ale vampire named Mae (Jenny Wright) after a
romantic evening together. Mae bites Caleb, who
tun1s almost in1n1ediately into a vampire and is
snatched away by the vampire clan, a terrible fa111ily
re,niniscent of those in horror 111ovies like TI,e Texas
Cl,ainsaw Massacre (1974) or TI1e Hills Havr E)1cs
(1977) or westerns like My Darling Clementi11e (1946)
or Wagon Alaster ( 1950). But Caleb, like the classic
western hero, refuses to kill except in self-defence.
allowing Mae to do it instead and then drinking her
blood. In a final showdown at high nudnight on nuin
street, Caleb, now cured by a blood transfusion per-
formed by his father, destroys the vampire clan, literally
earning his spurs.
In the denouement, Caleb adn1inisters the san1e
cure to Mae, who in the fibn's final shot can now st<'p
into the sunlit pron1ise of don1esticity. the plart'
typically reserved for wo,nen in the western - see.
tor exarnple, H(11h Noon (1952) or Shane (I 953) - and
a gaping absence in Caleb's family, given the unex-
plained absence of a ,nother. (This absence. unn1entioned
by the characters, is addressed by the filn1 in the scene
of the three f.1n1ily 1nembers having dinner, th e
founh chair at the tablt.' noticeably e111pty.) This endin~
recalJs that of nun1rrous horror fihns, panicularly Tod
Urowning"s l)r,1,11/a (1931). ~·hich concludes ,vith the
ro111antir rouplt.> ascending a long flight of stairs in
thl' van1pirc 's dark crypt to the security of sunny day-
light .111d church bl'lls on thl' soundtrack.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 The Action Films of Kathryn Bigelow
i\Jt·ar Dark's narrative closure thus seen1s emphati-
cally to restore patriarchal gender politics, as do both
the classic horror fihn, when the ,nonster is destroyed
and civilization n1ade safe, and the western, when the
bad ,nen or Indians are defeated and the frontier
ta1ned for settler families . But given the rest of the
fihn. this ending rings hollo\v, like the apparently
happy ending of Sirk's All that Heaven Allou,s (1955)
in which the heroine, seeking to define herself as a
desiring su bject, can be reunited with her lover only
\Vhen she is sununarily forced into the position of
nurturer after he is seriously injured while hunting.
In both cases the apparent happy ending fulfils generic
convention but lacks thenutic conviction.
Bigelow suggests that the happy ending of ,'Vear
Dark is intended to be read as si,nilarly perfunctory
and ironic, given the sexual meaninb~ of van1piris111
both within generic tradition and in Near Dark spe-
cifically. The sexual basis of the va111pires' allure is
shown when, during a typical night of feeding, we see
Severen (Bill Paxton) use his chann as a hitchhiker to
attract two wo,nen who pick hin1 up in their truck
hoping for a good tin1e. The attractive Mae, a seen1-
ingly archetypical bluejean baby, arouses such strong
desire in Caleb that it threatens to destroy his tradi-
tional fan1ily by luring hint away from ho111e and the
daytin1e world. Funher, this desire threatens to erupt
and destroy bourgeois stability at any 111on1ent, as we
see when Mae cornes back, a literal retun1 of the
repressed, after Caleb is cured of his vampirisn1.
Unhesitatingly, Caleb rushes to hug Mae, noticec>ably
exposing his neck to her as they en1brace. Like the
popular song, the fihn asks, 'How are you gonna keep
'en1 down on the fam1 after they've seen Paree?' - a
question that directly ackno\vledges the necessity of
repression for n1aintaining traditional social values.
Like Bohe,nian Paris, Mae represents the siren song
of desire, so in the course of the narrative she 111ust
be literally defanged and thrust into the glaring sun-
light of nonnalcy. Now saved by her n1an, no longer
feminized, she will likely take her place in that en1pty
chair, adopting the kind of maternal role (.~aleb had
tried to in1pose on her when they were van1pires and
he fed fro,n her blood like a helpless. hunt-'TY infant
suck.Jing at its n1other's breast.
The fihn consistently contrast~ Caleb's nonnal,
good fan1ily \Vith the undc:id, evil fan1ily of the van1-
pircs. The va,npirt·s are capable of terrible violence, as
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285
\Ve see several tin1es in the filn1 and especially in its
men1orable set piece, their decimation of a roadhouse
and its occupants. This violence is tinged with eroti-
cis111 throughout, and it intoxicates even as it repels, a
perfect exprt'ssion of Susan Sontag's description of
the appeal of monster n1ovies as 'the aesthetics
of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found
in wreaking havoc, n1aking a n1ess' .14 During the
n1assacre, Caleb, like the spectator, watches mesn1er-
ized, even finding hin1Self panicipating against his will
when he sends a tough-looking biker flying through
the air \Vith one punch ('Did I do that?' he asks with
be1nusen1ent). Christopher Sharrett con1plains that the
vampire clan is 'wholly repugnant and destructive', so
that, in contrast to the kinds of horror filn1s Robin
Wood calls progressive, there is no syn1pathy generated
toward them." He views the van1pires as unproblen1-
atically other, but I would suggest that Near Dark does
indeed proble111atize the relation of the nom1al and
n1onstrous once we accept the seductive and violent
pleasures the fihn offers. Their inherent appeal is
underscored by the fact that the n1onstrous patriarch
Jesse (Lance Henrickson) is associated with An1erican
history (he clairns to have fought for the Confeder-
acy), and that the clan travel across n1iddle An1erica,
the centre of what poet Allen Ginsberg called tht'
'hean of the Vortex' out of which An1erican violence
e1nanates."' Despite the fibn's apparent rigid contrast
between the daytin1e ,vorld of the farin fa1nily and
the night-tin1e world of the van1pire clan, \Ve are
in1plicatcd in tht' latter, all of us near dark.
Sleeping with the Enemy
Blue Stl'd is a stylish police thriller that exploits to the
fullest the action filn1's conventional association of
the gun with the phallus, exploring the representation
of the gun as a toten1 of masculine po\ver. Fron1 the
opening credit sequence in which the can1era pene-
trates tht' interior of a Snlith and Wesson handgun,
Blue Steel (according to one critic, the tenn is
An1erican slang tor an erection) 17 explores the genre's
iconographical fetishization of the pistol. Uy n1aking
possession and control of the gun a contest between
a police1l',>1na11 and a 111ale crin1inal. the filn1 fore-
grounds the n1etaphorical and gendered irnplirations
of one of the prin1ary icons of tht.> action 11h11.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
286 Barry Keith Grant
The plot involves a rookie fen1alc: cop, Megan
Tun1er (Jarnie Lee Cunis), \vhose gender troubles all
the rnen in the filn1 once she dons her unifonn.
Intervening in a supermarket robbery, Turner shoots
and kills the hold-up ,nan, while one of the cowering
bystanders in the store, Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver),
secretly pockets the thiefs handgun. As the filn1
pro1:,rresses. Eugene becon1es increasingly psychotic,
obsessed with the in1age of Tun1er wielding her
\veapon and usurping phallic po\ver. In the final
violent confrontation, Turner rnanages to kill the
seen1ingly unstoppable Eugene.
Some have read the fihn as e111powering for won1en.
Megan is like the hero of a rape revenge filn1, an
exarnple of Carol Clover's 'final girl'. In this sense. the
casting of Curtis, protagonist of the prototypical slasher
filn1 Hal/01vec11 (1978). is particularly resonant. 1" After
all, it is Megan who defeats Eugene in battle, not her
superior, the suitably nan1ed Detective Nick Mann
(Clancy Brown), who is 'disarn1ed' when Megan
handcuffs hin1 to their car door during her penulti-
n1ate confrontation with Eugene. Nevertheless, B111<·
Stl'el suggests that the triurnph of Megan and the
fernininity she represents can only be lirnited because
of the entrenched power of patriarchy since the filn1
contextualizes the rnale \Vorld of Eugene as a rnon-
strous extension of nonnative n1asculinity.
En1ploying a standard motif of the horror tihn,
Eugene is doubled \Vith Megan's abusive father (Philip
Bosco). ernphasizing a continuity between apparently
n1asculine nonns and the horribly psychotic. Also, like
Patrick Baternan in Brett Easton Ellis·s controversial
novel Atnerican Psyclio (199 I), published the year after
the release of the filn1, Eugene is a stockbroker, his
position of econonlic privilege apparently allowing
hirn the power to co1111nit horrible cri111inal acts,
including n1urder, \vith impunity. Both \VOrks link
their central rnale character's craziness to capitalisrn,
cornpetition, 1nasculine identity, and violence. Eugene
hears voices in his head and so expresses a desire for
quietude - an understandable ,vish given his profes-
sion: on two occasions we see hi111 screan1ing and
,vildly gesticulating in a se:1 of cornrnodity traders.
all n1ale, on the floor of the stock exchange. (It is in
this san1e sp:1ce that Eugene first fantasizes shooting
tht· gun he has picked up at the supt·nnarket.}
When Mann asks M egan \vhy sht· bccan1e a cop. ~ht'
.1111biguously replit's, 'Hin1 ·. \,·hich. as Taskt·r notes. 111ay
Digitized by Google
refer to her abusive father specific:11ly or 1nore gener-
ally to 'the 1nan', to n1en, to the n1any potential
Eugenes. 1'1
The fil111 employs other conventions of the horror
fihn. particularly the werewolf film. Eugene is hirsute.
\Vith a dark beard, and associated with the night; at
one point we see him digging for his gun like an
ani111al under the full n1oon in New York's Central
Park (Eugene's last nan1e, remember, is 'Hunt'). These
associations of rnasculinity with violence and anin1al-
ity appear throughout Bigelow's filrns: hothead biker
Davis (llobert Gordon) in 77,e Loveless literally barks
at his friends and yelps wildly as he fires his gun in
the violent clin1ax in the bar, while in Near Dark,
\Vhen Caleb thinks he has killed Severen by running
over hirn with a diesel truck, another icon of phallic
power, he sin1ilarly ho\vls with satisfaction.
Violence is associated with n1ale ani111ality in
Bigelow's ftlnJS because violence is seen as an inher-
ently rnasculine quality. B/11e Steel den1onstrates this
idea visually, in its painterly irnages con1bined \\•ith
careful foley work that en1phasize the physical and
sensual qualities of the gun. Frequently the tihn
ernphasizes the texture and tactility of guns - the ,vay
hands caressingly grip then1, how they slide across a
table or are provocatively unbuttoned from a holster
- as welJ as the sounds they n1ake. Viewers are seduced,
within the context of the action filn1, by the power
of the phalJus, like the 111en in the filrn in their 111ore
extren1e ways.
Megan's desire to bt· a cop thus beco111es a desire
to enter into the phallic don1ain, literalized in her
struggle with Eugene over possession of the gun. H er
unifonn is a sign of transgression as Megan encroaches
on a traditionally n1ale world, an idea rnade clear at
the beginning of the fihn in the n1ontage of Megan
suiting up for graduation. Individual shots fetishize
parts of her uniform rerniniscent of the shots of the
bikers' costun1es in 11,c Loveless. The character's gender
is initially indeten1linate. but then, as she buttons her
shirt, we gli111pse her lace bra underneath. Viewers are
likely taken aback for a mornent, 'disarn1ed' like the
several 111en in tht' filn1 \vhen they see her in uniforn1
the first tirne or lean1 \vhat her job is. Megan's wearing
of a traditionally 111ale uniforn1 also suggests the extent
to which. ap,1rt frorn the 111asculine propensity toward
violenre. ~ender is a constn1cted perfonnance. dept'n-
dc:111 upon the st>rniotics of style for n1eaning .
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 The Action Films of Kathryn Bigelow 287

Figure 29.2 l11 Uii;dow', B/11r Srrrl (MG M. 1\1'>0), Mcg•n Turner (J•nue Lee Cunis) ancmpL< to enter the
plulhc domain . l1roduccd by LJwrcnce K.1sanoff

Imitation of Life The filn1 ·s plot concerns a band of bank robbers

If ·n,e Loveless deconstntcts the acrion. Poi111 Break is
a thoroughly successful reconstn1 ctio n. As the story
unfolds, vic,vers are treated to son1c terrifi c action
sequences. the 1nost 111en1orable of ,vhich is an
extended chase. effectively photographed throu gh
alleys. ho uses. and bac kyards ,vith a n1odified Steadi-
ca tn that adt·ptly places us squarely ,v ithin th e action.
(Iligelo.v ,vould use the sau1e strategy n1ore tren-
c hantl y in the opening of S1ran,11e Day.1.) A con1binati on
of buddy and caper n1ovie, it nevl·rtheless has th e
sa n1e objective of subverting che pov,er of n1asculinist
ge neric 1nyth by challengi ng o ur sense of the conven-
tio ns o f ' realisn, · charac teristic o f classic H o llv,vood
, ous) social criticis111 with its band of presidential b:ink
c inen1a. In Sirki an fashion, Bigelow treats th e acti on
excessively in PCli111 Break. pu~hing the 1r1acho n1ysti-
cisn1 into overblown spectacle. As Tyler (Lori Petty)
- the lone won1an in the ti ln1 's hypermasculine world
of skydiving. surfi ng, and bankrobbing - disgustedly
opines at o ne point , vhile the tnen are busy bonding
on a beac h, 'There's too 111uch tl'Stostcrone .here
,vho co nu ni t hl'ists because thl'y are devoted surfr: rs
,vho need to n1aintain their cash flo,v as they travel
around the world in search of the perfect .vave. T h e
gang is known as the Ex-Presidents because they ,vear
111asks of fon11er US presidents .vhile con1111irting their
robberies. The case is being invcsti!:,rated by a pair of
Fl31 age nts. seasoned Angelo Pappas (Gary Husey) and
hotshot rookie Jo hnny Utah (Keanu Reevt·s). Under-
cover, Utah infiltrates the gang and experiences a
conflict benveen his duty as agent of the la\V and th e
~pirirual bond he has developed with the ga ng's le;1dl·r
Do dhi (Patri ck Swayze).
The fih11 , it is true, offers son1 e di rect (a nd hun1o r-
robbers - particularly when 'Nixo n· jun1ps up on a
co unter to dt'clare ' I an1 no t a crook! ' and ,vhen
Hodhi. wearing his R eagan 111ask. waves a gas pun1p
in the air and 1!:,'llites a filling station into a fla111ing
fireball.!•' But for the 1nost part Poi111 Break is rnore
sly in its ~ubversion of the 111asculin e n1yths of action
cine111a. frequently n:111inding us that it is only a
n1ovie. a generic construction . T he n1ale characters ,ire

Original from
Digitized by Google UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
288 Barry Keith Grant
clc:arly types rather than rounded individuals. Keanu
Reeves' typically flat perforn1ance style ironically
\Vorks well here, emphasizing Johnny Utah's lack of
psychological depth. His nan1e is itself something of
a n1ythic an1algam, at once evoking the American West
and the western, as well as legendary athleticisn1 in
the n1asculine world of football (Utah was a college
football star; his na.me recalls that of both Johnny
Unitas and Joe Montana, two legendary quarter-
backs), and the fact that he is a fictional character
in the tradition of Johnny Guitar ( 1954) and Johnny
Hc111dso111e ( I 989). 21
If action n1ovies exhibit a masculine hon1osocial
hysteria mapped onto the excessive display of the male
body, 21 then Point Break is a paracligrnatic action movie.
The n1ale characters are on constant display, even to
the point that the gang are identified by the tan lines
on their buttocks when they 'n1oon' for the security
ca111eras at one of the banks they rob. The fihn en1pha-
sizes Swayze's body and long blonde tresses, and pushes
its representation of the surfer gang's n1acho co1nra-
derie to the point of parody. This excessive treatment
co1nes to a head, as it were, in the clima.x when Utah
jumps out of an airplane without a parachute in a
determined atte111pt to catch Bodhi, who had jumped
n1on1ents before with the last one. The sequence of
Utah's windy free-fall toward 13odhi and clasping
of hin1 in n1idair becon1es a hysterical visualization of
the repressed hon1oerotic subtext of the buddy
n1ovie. The two 1nen en1brace as they grapple, their
windswept faces together in intin1ate close-up as they
tusslt!' for either the gun or the pullcord ('Pull it, pull
it.' Bodhi cries). And as -..ve see in the subjcctivt!' zoom
shot of the ground rapidly coining nearer, for both
n1en it is an experience in which the earth has 111oved.
The sequence.-' ends with then1 rolling on the ground,
the parachutt!' flapping gec>ntly to the ground 111 post-
coital cahn.
Back to the Future
Srr,111.~c Days is set just slightly in the future of thl."
fihu's rele;isc. in Los Angeles on the d.1y before Nl."\V
Yc.1r's Eve, 1999. Lenny (Ralph Fiennes), a black
111arket dealer in 'clips·, an outla\\·ed !()nu of total
cine1n;1 produced by a ne,v tl."chnology th;it c;ips
Digitized by Google
directly into the cerebral cortex for both recording
and playback, must learn to abandon the sin1ulated
n1en1ories of his fom1er girlfriend Quliette Lewis).
however realistic, and en1brace a new life in the real
world with Mace (Angela Bassett). Through this nu:ta-
cinematic 1netaphor, violent action and eroticisn1 are
critiqued as voyeuristic, sadistic, and decidedly mascu-
line. It is not surprising that Bigelow has called Stra11.11c
Days her most personal fihn. !J
The film begins by positioning us as viewers of
one of tllese clips, altllough it is only in retrospect that
we realize tllis, since no exposition precedes it. On
the soundtrack we hear someone say 'Boot it', and the
image seems to forn1 as pixels, but the n1eaning of this
is unclear. Once the clip boots, there is no apparent
difference, such as a fran1e within a fra1ne or disparity
in in1age resolution, to n1ark these in1ages as a fihu
within the fihn rather than as irnages within the world
of the filn1. For all intents and purposes, what we are
seeing is the fihn - and by extension, any action fihn.
We are thrust inunediately into the vit!'wing dynamic.
our identification fully mobilized, despite the fact that
as yet we do not know who ·we' are. Like clip users
\vithin the world of the tiln1, we are fooled bv• tht'
reality status of the sequence.
As in Pc•int Break, we are inunersed in the action.
a part of it, featuring Bigelow's tour-de-force ust' of
the subjectivt!' can1era. In what seerns like one lengthy.
technically breathtaking shot (there are actually a
couple of disguised cuts) on a par with the opening
shot of Welles's To11cl, of Evil (1958) or Altn1an's TI1c
Player ( I 992), the viewer is put into the perspectivt' of
one of the participants. 'We' drive up to an Asian res-
taurant with a group of robbers, sitting in tile back
seat; conmut robbery, intirnidating staff and patrons in
the process; frantically flee fron1 the arriving police
in a confusing shootout; attempt to escape across a
series of rooftops, police in hot pursuit; and finally.
plunge to 'our· death in the street below when we fail
to n1ake the leap fro1n one rooftop to another. In this
opening sequence we know only that we are 1nah:, as
indicated by the dialogue. and by tile hands we see
fron1 · our' physical point of view, a la LAdy in rite Like
(194(1). But the individual 111a11 here is in fact irrell·-
vant - ,ve are. the fihn inunediately suggests. 1nasculi11iry
irsc!f The apparl'llt long takt' n1aintains a consistent
point of vie\\' and thus heightens our sc:nse of pres-
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 The Action Films of Kathryn Bigelow
ence throughout the action, the appeal of which is
rnarked as racist and sexist since the victin1s of our
abuse are 'fucking chinks' and 'bitches', as our invisible
surrogate calls the,n.
This astonishing opening sequence exposes the
subjective can1era conunon to such genres as action
and slasher n1ovies as nothing less than a tool of naked
1nale aggression. Many of the violent action sequences
that follow in Stran.~c Days involve the victin1ization
o f won1en with the SQUIT) apparatus. in the infa-
111ous 1nanner of Mark Lewis (Karl Bohn1) in Michael
Powell's Prepi11~ Ton, (1960). It is no coincidence that
(with the exception of Mace's one reluctant SQUII)
trip for Lenny's sake) the only users we see in the filn1
are rnale. (The extent to \vhich wo111en are involved
in the production or consu1nption of SQUID clips
111ay be read as an indication of their n1oral corrup-
tion, as in the case of Faith.) Thus the subsequent
scenes of violent action in the fihn cannot be viewed
\Vith the samt' kind of 'innocent' plt"asure we n1ay
have brought to the opening sequence, for \Ve have
been n1adt' aware of the gendered dyna1nics involved
in such pleasure.
But strangely - or perhaps not strangely, sinct' this
is, after all, a Holly\vood movie - Stra11.1!c Days builds
to a cli1nax that denies what has con1e previously, that
seen1s to recuperate its own ideological critique. In
the clin1ax. Lenny, along with his friend, a fen1ale
bodyguard (Angela Bassett). try to give to the police
con1n1issioner a clip that has recorded the tn1th about
the killing of a popular n1ilitant black rock star by
two racist white cops. The two policen1en confront
the won1an during the wild celebration on the eve
of the n1illenniu111 and begin to assault her with
their nightsticks. The scene obviously invokes the inf.1-
1nous tape of the Rodney King beating, which also
occurred in Los Angeles; but in the 1novie, unlike the
real world, the crowd of onlookers responds by actively
banding together to fight this act of racial oppression.
Finally, the honest whitt' n1ale co111n1issioner. bran-
dishing the evidt•nce in his raised hand. parts the
suddenly con1pliant cro\vd like the archetypal patri-
arch Moses parting the lled Sea and calls for the arrest
of the two rogue cops. Pcl\ver, ultin1ately. is retained
in the Qiteral) hands of the \vhite tnall.'. \vho nCl\V
supersedes tht' once-c.1pabk• and indcpt·ndt·nt black
won1an.
Digitized by Google
289
Conclusion
Robin Wood has angrily disrnissed Stra11:~e D,iys as
'a tease and a cheat' because of the en1phatic way it
con1pron1ises its ow11 prt>rnises.!< But this rt>sponse
111ay be sorne\vhat ungenerous, for it is no 1nore an
ideological cheat than the n1ajority of n1ainstrea111
A111erican n1ovies are. Perhaps it seerns n1ore disap-
pointing because of ho\v radical its initial pre1nise is.
Wood n1ore accurately rnight have called Stra11,1ir Days.
in his o'l.vn tenns, 'an incoherent text'. Such texts,
for Wood. are fractured or fragxnentary, but have a
'consciously n1otivated incoherence (that] becon1cs
a structuring principle, resulting in works that revt>al
themselves as perfectly coherent once one has n1as-
tered their rules· .1s Bigelow herself has described
Stran.11e Days as 'at war with itself.26 From this per-
spective, the filn1 's ideological contradictions speak
quite eloquently of the tensions inherent in the situa-
tion of a won1an rnaking action rnovies about the
traditionally n1ale genre of action rnovies. Indeed, this
position seen1s as fraught with difficulties as Megan
Turner seeking phallic power in the rnale world of
the police force, only with the penetrating, affective
power of the motion picture camera instead of a gun.
Strange Days does collapse at the end - an ending.
significantly, that Bigelow stretches out for ahnost
twenty n1inutes rather than elides - but this collapse
st>rves to ernphasize the lin1ited place and power of
women in mainstrean1 cinerna, whether in front of the
c:unera or behind it.
In a sense, Bigelow's ernbrace of the action genre's
pleasures while sin1ultaneously critiquing then1 den1-
onstrates a n1astery of the rnaster's own language.
Although excess is n1ore often associated \Vith
111elodrama and the n1usical, it is certainly an in1por-
tant quality of the action filn1 as well. The exces.~ in
Bigelow's action filn1s serves as self-reflexive con1-
n1entary on the genre and the n1asculine culture it
celebratt's, 1nuch as the excess in Douglas Sirk 's 111elo-
dra1nas co1nn1ented on the ideology of the genre in
which he was working and the cultural contexts of
Eisenhower Anterica. Although Sirk \Vas working
\vithin tht' constraints of the studio systern while
Bigelow has 111ade ht>r fihns in the postclassical context
of the ne\V Holly\vood, the analogy is apt, for both
dirt>ctors t>xist \Vithin thl' contexts of popular cinen1a,
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
290 Barry Keith Grant
,vhich is so thoroughly structured at every level by
generic principles.
In the introduction to their pioneering anthology,
Screr11i11J/ the .l'vfalc, Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark
note that:
tihn tht·ory has for the: 111ost part contidc:ndy equated
tht' 111asculinity of the 111alc subjc:ct ,vit h activity. voyt·11r-
isn1. sadisn1. fc:tishis111, and story. and the fi: rnininity of
the: fe111ale subject ,vith passi vity, t'xhibitionisrn. 111aso-
d1isn1. 11arcissisn1. and spc:ctacle. In this scht·n1.: of
ho111ologous differenct·s the po,ver. stability. and ,vho l<'-
ll<'SS of ,nasculine subje:-ctiviry at tht· c:xpc:n., e of ii:111ininity
seern all too axiornatit· .ind thus, unive~al and
uncontcstable. 1'
Notes
·11,.. It ,·,g/11 ,:( It ;,,,., (20! H•). a mdodram.1 fearunni: S,·,111 P,·nn
.ind Eliz:tbl'th Hurky wt·.1vi11g to~l·th,.-r t,vo n.1rr:1nvc'\ J
century .1pJrt, h:i~ n."f l'ivl·<l r:1ther lirnirl·d rdl".\St" . Le.· Studio
C:•nal+. the French coinr;1nv dut rrodun·d 1h,· film , h•s not
)'et relc:1scd it on video. KI 9: 111e· I Vid,,,.,,,,,k,·r (::?002). .1 Cold
W:1r thrillc-r, h.1s Bigduw rctun1i11g to thl· 111.,~culint' tcrr.1i11 ot"
thl· :tl'tion µ.c.·ruc .ts it is ofrl'II t.·mphJtk.llly dcpic:tc.·d in suh111~1 -
rinc.· film~.
' Anna Powdl. ' Ulood on the Bo rders - ,,.;,.,,, D,11k and 8/u.-
Sr,·cf. Sa,·,·11 • .\5 : :!. Sun1111,·r 199 -l. r - 1Jf>.
J Chr1litinJ Luu: <li~cus1-t>s !iOmc.· of thc.·'.1-e romnu:nts in Fcmi11ii t
H,,//yw,,(),/: ,.-,,,,,, Ht,m in 1-'l.rmt'.( 1t, A,;,,, lir,·.rk. l >t·troit: W .1yi11..·
Stat,· Umv,·rsiry Pr<·~,. 2000. rp. 10.\--l.
-l Ste ,·,· N,-.,k ' M,1sn1liniry as Spcnade·. Sa,·.-11. 2-l: h.
Nov,·mbcr/ D,·ccmbcr 1'JX.\. p. 5.
:, L,ura R:o<l':oroli 'Steel in the (;;1zc: ()11 l'()V .111d the ))i,,·ours,·
of Vi<ion in Kathryn Uii;elow·, Ci nema' . .s.-,....,,, Jl!: 3. Autumn
l'J'Ji. p. 2.\2.
(, 'Mu111t.·ntum ,tnc.l Dn1gn: Kathryn lli~dow ltHc.·1'·ic.·wt'c.f hy
(;Jvin Smith'. l'i/111 <:,,,,,,,,,.,,,..
ll : 5. Scp1e111lwr! ()nobcr 1995.
r- -i1-,
7 Uarb:lr:l C reed ' From H,·r< to Modernity: Ft·rnini,111 >111.l l'o<t-
lllt><k·nu,111 .. S,r,'('11, 2ll: 2. S pnni; 1•Jl!7. r - (,5 .
X Y,·onnt' T.1~kt:r Spfft,1ful,1r Btl1/ir5: c.;,.,,dn. c;,·,m· ,wd tfo· ..-lai,111
Ci,11·m11, L(lndon ~md Nt.~\\' Yo rk: Rou dl'lll,:l', l 1 J9J: su~.111
Jt:tlCndc. H,,rdl,,,Jir.<: H11ll)1u,,,,c/ .\fo.<1·11li11i1y ;,, 11,,· Rt·11.1:1.111 J_;·,,,.
Nt.·w Unmc;,. .·ifk. NJ: Rutµl'n Unin.·TT>ity Pn·!-.,, I'194.
<J l't'tt'r N . Cl1111110 11. · At th,· Generic C rossroad, with '/11d111,1
,111,.I L..tiur_i,... l'Ml S,rrirr. L\: 2. Wintc:r/ S prin~ !')94 , p. .5 .
IO Rc:.·hl·cc., Bdl ... Mct,·n·.m H,1 1/yu,,,,d ."iudn~~Y">'· 2nd t.·diuon.
Nl·w York: Colmnb1.1 U11ivcr,1ty Prt.•,.;. 11 >9]. p. 2-lH.
11 Hri,m Ht:ndl·~on "To,v:1rc.h :1 Non - B1.>urµc:n1, C .m1t.·r.1 Styk',
,.-a,,, ()u,,rtal)'. 24: 2 , Wi rm..·r 1''70- 1. pp. ~- 14.
12 L:ml' F,·mim::1 H<,llruvc•d. p. I I 0.
Digitized by Google
Kathryn Bigelow uses the action fil111 to address fun-
dan1ental issues of genre, gender and spectatorship, and
to negotiate a place for won1en both in front of and
bl•hind the camera within traditionally rnasculine dis-
courses. While n1any recent action n1ovies have tended
to reinscribe traditional patriarchal values.~8 Bigelo,.,,·s
work includes a n:n1arkable series of films that have
resisted the genre's conservative thn1st. Like the ne,v
genre filn1s of the I 970s that John Cawelti described
as 'setlting) the ele1nents of a conventional popular
genre in an altered con text, thereby n1aking us per-
ceive these traditional fom1s and irnages in a ll t'\V
,vay•.~•1 Bigelow's action fihns are generic intervention~
that invite and encourage speculation about the nature
of popular cinen1a.
13 Sc:t.·. fi.u t·:<.unpl~. Jim Kit..,t.''.\ /11in·~,1,rJ lt'c·.-.,. L(lnc.tc., u: Urui,h
fihn In~ri tut1.·. I'Jh9 / Dloo1nin!!(on: lndi.u1a Unh·c.•f'iity Pn·~, .
1'170. rh.ipter 1: :md R obin Wood 'An lntro,tucuon u, 1hr
Arn,•rican Horror Film' in Robin W ood ,nd Ru·h:ird LipJ'<'
(t·t.ls) A m,·ri<du 1'\'1):lum,11r : J;.,.,,1yJ ,m t/Jr H,1r1()1 ,.-u,,,. Toromo:
Fc<llv:il or' F,·,11val<. I 'J7'J. csp,·ci:tlly pp. 8- 11.
14 su~;m S011,.1~ 'Tht.· lin.i~in:1tit)l1 of Di~a~(l•r'. in A_\'dlll.•' I fo1n7m·•
Mtfou ·'"'' ()tlu·r 1;~·., ,J)'S. Nc?\\' Y nrk: l>l'lu. I 96(,. r- 2 1.'.
15 Chrisrophc.·r Sharrl'tl 'The Horror Fihn in Ni:oc<1nst'n.'Jt1\·<'
C uhur<··, in B.1rry K,·ith Gr.u11 (,·d.) 77,r Dr,-,,./ ,:( l)1f/nrt1a :
Gt'mkr ,1111I thr H ,1n1lt Film, Aulitin: Univc.•n;.ity o f Tt>XA) Pr,-s,.
JtJl){1, pp. ::!5tJ-<,1. For Robin Wood\ diMinnion hl·t\\·c..·c.·n 'pro~
.grl·~,1,·t.·· .111d 'rt'accio11,1n··. horror tilntli. ,t.·c· Wood ' h1tn.>liul'UOn
ro thl· Amcrir.u1 Horror Film·.
Allt.·n Gin~ht·r~ 'Wichit:1 Vnrte:·x Sutra'. Pf,m,·r :\',,,"f. S.m
Fr.rnl'i~ro: City Light<, I<JMl.
17 l'owdl · Ulootl on the Uordrrs ·. p. I .JS.
Il! l'owcll ' Blo od on the Uord,·n;·. p. 1-17. Sec .1l,o C,ro) Clo n·r
,\In,, 11C•mn, muf ( .'h.,im',m'S': ( ;rmk, ;,, 1/,r ,\ fodrnr H<1m1r Film.
Prmn·,01,. NJ: l1ri1Kc.·to11 U1n, ·l•r.;ity 11nt"~· 1992.
I<J T:a~kc.~ r Spro,,w/111 /i,,,/irJ, p. 1-47.
20 K.tthlt·l·n Murphy dl''il'riht.·~ tht· Sl't"11c.· a\ 'ber.;erker CJ1npJ1~'1l
l l'OII0!,.'1',tphy pronu~nl!,! hone.I lime~ ..1 n~t.•r in t"Vc:ry unk'.
· uJ.1,·k A rt.,. Pi/111 C:,1111111,·111. JI : 5. S,·pt,·mb,·r! ()rrt,ber 1'l'>S.
p. S.\.
21 lntt.·n.•.;ti11 !!IY, Rl"t.'\'l'' would 1.ltl"r ,t.1r in ;HI (',·en n1orl' dpl rt)k
.u _J,1/u,11)1 .\1111·n111mr ( I <>95) .
S<'t' Cynthia J. Fud» 'Th,· Uudtly Poliric·. in Steven C,,h,n
,md 111.1 R. Jt' H.ltk (t.·t.h) S,·, ..n,i,t~ 1/,t· A.J.,lr: E.'<plorin,Jl ;\/,m.11/im-
ll l'' ;,, I l\ 1llrw,1, 1 d C 111('m,1 . L,.l1u.lnn .1nd Nt·w York: RuutkJµ.:.
l'l'J.l, pp. 1'1-l- 2111.
·tv1onwntmn .md I >t-,1µ11·. p. -4X.
llnhin Wond 'T ht· Spt·rtn,·\ Emt·r~c.· 111 D.1yli~ht" . <..:rnc-.i ,ti,,11.
-l.\. 19'17. 1'· 7.
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
. -.
 The Action Films of Kathryn Bigelow 291

~5 R ohiu Wood H,,llyu'f.•t,d .J;l,,,, I 'it't,1im1 1t, Rr,~~•"'· Nl'W Yo rk: the Family in the Co11tempor,1ry Action-Thriller'. }<•1m,a/ ,f
Cohnnbi., U niv,·r<ity Pr,•,s, I 'IHI>. p. 41,. l'<>p11/,11 Film ,md 'Jilt·1•1;i,,11. 27: I. Sprin1t 1999, pp. 2-11.
2,, "Mo1nt:nuun and Dl.·,1µ:11', p. 49. ~'J John C ,\w.,.·hi ·<..J,iu1m111.,, and G,:nl·ri( TrnnstOnn.uion in
27 Cohan and Hnk .Yrffniu.\! tlw i\ lalt·. p. 2. lll'CL'nt A111l.·ric m F1h11,· in 13arry Kl·ith G rant (t.·d.) FUm (:nm·
1X K~r,· n Sd1neider ' With Violen<'< if N,·c...,,ary: Re.1nicubtin1t R r•1frr II. Au,tin: Unive"ity of T c Xll P«·ss. I'!<JS. p. J<I I.

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 30
Authorship and
New Queer Cinema:
The Case of Todd Haynes
Michael DeAngelis

Michael DeAngelis, an associate professor of cinema and cultural studies at DePaul

University's School for New Leaming in Chicago. is the author of Gay Fandom and Crossover
Stardom: James Dean. Mel Gibson, and Keanu Reeves. This essay appeared originally in the
anthology New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader, published in 2004, and is here expanded
to include discussion of Far From Heaven (2002), which appeared subsequent to its writing
and which has been Haynes' biggest commercial success to date. DeAngelis identifies Haynes'
style as expressing a uniquely queer perspective in focusing on ambiguities and fantasies in
his films that serve to destabilize normative definitions of sexuality and other aspects of
socially constructed identity.

In her se111inal 1992 article. ll. Ruby Rich describes
the shared characteristics of the evolving " New Queer
Cine111a" in tem1s of a " H onto Ponto" style involving
" appropriation and pastiche, irony, as well as a rework-
ing of history with social constructionisn1 very nn1ch
in ntind." and an associated break front the identitv•
politics of an earlier era. 1 lly the time of a follow- up
piece in 2000. ho,vever. Rich reflects upon the decade-
old New Queer Cinenta as a product of a specific
historical and no,v lost 111on1ent - a cinenta that has
since devolved in to "just another niche ntarket, anotht·r
product line pitched at one particular type of discen1 -
i11g consun1er. " 2 As Rich intin1ates. the directions of
New Queer Cincn1a are shaped by the ways in ,vhich
a ~ubculture constructs and i111agines its o,vn history
- relations of past, prt·sent, and future certainly, but
also, and n1ore specifically. relations of re1ne-1nberi11g
and forgetting. Many gay and lesbian filnunakers in
the early 1990s confronted historical dynamics by
atte-1npting to "rework" the111; disconnected 6-0111 their
cine111atic antecedents as well as fonnarive social and
political ntove111ents. recent films which qualify as
N ew Queer Cinerna appear to disavow historical rela-
tions altogether. Certainly, Ne,v Queer C ine111a h.1,
changed partly becaust:', fron1 the perception of n1ain-
strea111, popular filrn industries. things "queer" have
att.1i11ed a renewed popularity and qualified public
acceptance. If the "product line" to which Rich rc:-fcrs
ro111priscs those fihns identified as "quec:-r'' solely on
tht:' basi\ of the111cs and char.1cterizations, the "nicht'

M 1, h.td I l c.•f~\ll~t•h,... Author.. h1p :111d N n,· Q111.•c.•r ( •llll'III.I'. The.· ( ··" "' ,,t I udd I l.1y111.·,." H.n·1,1.·tl n·r-.1011 (1f ..T ht· ( :lu r.h tt'n«KI. o( Nt·w <lut"C'T f -ilmnul..m~
( ,N ' ~tud~ - I odd H .l\·nn." 1'1'· -i.:!- '.' l fo:un ,\.·t1dwlc.· A.m ,n h.'d l. ,'\·1·11• (}m·u ( :m,·11,,1 · .·1 C:m11 ,1I N.,•.,,I,·, {Nc.·,, Htuu-:,, 1, k . NJ: R ut~·" Umvt·r"'iry Pn."'" · ~I IHJJ.

t 2t •o➔ by 1\·fo.:lud I >t-A 11~1,: h,. l h.t·,J 0~ pt·nu1"1011 ,,f tfw .111tlu,r

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Digitized by Google UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
. .,, -.
 Authorship and New Queer Cinema
n1arket" is certainly prominent and well established
through the subgenre of queer con1ing-of-age and
"coming out" narratives. Alongside these n1ore con-
ventional narratives the experi,nents of filmn1akers
such as Gregg Araki continue to maintain a closer
relation to the n1ore dynan1ic "PoMo" style that
originally inspired Rich to classify New Queer
(.~inen1a as a n1oven1ent in the first place.
And then there's Todd Haynes, the director who
becarne notorious even before the New Queer Cine111a
was ever labeled as such, with his now-suppressed
version of the Karen Carpenter story enacted by
Barbie dolls (Superstar, 1987), and the subsequent
National Endown1ent for the Hun1anities funding
controversy surrounding his first full-length feature,
Poiso11, in 1990. At first glance, Haynes n1ight appear
to be firmly grounded in the PoMo/social construc-
tionist tradition, with a body of filn1s that renounces
the realist aesthetic \Vhile highlighting pastiche, irony.
and the blending of seerningly discordant genres, as
\Veil as his open rej ection of the notion of an "essential
1:,r.iy sensibility. " 3 Especially (though not exclusively) in
some of his post-Poiso11 fihns, however, H aynes has
developed narrative strategies that steer New Queer
Cinema towards a version of social constructionisn1
that strives to express son1ething integral to a uniquely
queer perspective on hurnan experience. In a 1993
interview with Justin Wyatt, Haynes explains that:
I havt• a lot of frustration with the insistence on content
when people an.· talking about hon1osexuality. People
dctine gay cin<.-n1a soldy by content: if there arc gay
character.; in it, it's a gay fihn. It fit.\ into the gay sensibil-
ity, we got it, it's gay. It's such a failure of the in1agination,
kt alone the abiliry to look beyond content. I think that·.~
rt'ally sin1plistic. ~1eterosexuality to 111e is a structure as
n1uch as it is a content. It i~ an irnpost·d structure th.It
goes along with the patriarchal. dorninant structure that
constrains and defines society. If hon10sl·xuality is the
opposite or the countl'r-Sl'Xual at:tivity to that. thl·n ,vhat
kind of a structurt· ,vould i1 bt·''
What would it be? V cht'nH!ntly rt'j erting any notion
of essence in identity. Haynes' discoveries in the
exploration of this question co1npris<.- his unique
contributions to the Ne\v Qut'er Cinen1a. Using a
variety of cine111atir fonns. Haynes "queers" het-
erosexual. n1ainstn:a111 narrative cine,na by n1a)-i11g
whatever n1ight be fa111i liar or non11al about it strange,
Digitized by Google
293
and in the process hypothesizing alten1atives that
disrupt its integrity and ideological cohesiveness. He
accornplishes this by arranging an intricate juxtaposi-
tion and dialectic of "realities" and restructuring the
spatial and temporal relations that order then1. What
en1erges from this dialectic is the irnagination of ne\v
rin1es and spaces that exist apart fron1, and in opposi-
tion to, dominant, patriarchal culture.
The resonances of Haynes' dialectic extend,
however, far beyond this ideological intervention, ulti-
n1ately engaging in a dynan1ic historical confrontation
that extends Rich's origi nal prescription for an
oppositional Nev, Queer Cine1na. This confrontation
situates gay culture within a set of historical relations
that includes the social, personal, and psychological,
and that also emphasizes gay culture's political respon-
sibilities of remen1bering its own past, as well as the
as.~ociated implications of forgetting and disavowing.
The vehicle of this dialectic "imagining" is fantasy, and
Haynes engages his central protagonists in fantasy sce-
narios that succeed in both n1on1entarily stabilizing
tin1e and ultirnately re-ordering relationships between
past, present, and future. The result of Haynes' use of
fantasy and his interrogation of history is a politically
engaged version of New Queer Cinema whose power
and 1nomentun1 sten1 fron1 relationships of identifica-
tion and desire, the dynamics of which in1plicate
protagonists and viewers alike. Through a close exanu-
nation of fom1al and representational niatters affecting
the historical relationship between past and present
"realities" in three ftlnis steeped in network.~ of history
and heavily invested in the workings of fantasy - the
short video narrative Dottie Gets Spanked (1993) and
t\vo of his features, Velvet Goldmi11e (! 998) and Far
Fron, Heave11 (2002) - I will illununate the workings
of Haynes' queer aesthetic as well as the sexual and
political confrontations that it enables.
Although it is anything but didactic, the 27-nunutc
Dottie Gets Spa11ked could readily serve as a textbook
illustration of the workings of identification in
Freudian psychoanalysis; indeed, the first of its t,vo
fantasy sequences is conspicuously interrupted ,vith
the intertitle "A Child Is Being Beaten" referencing
the case study of the sarne nan1e that Freud hirnself
used to describe identification within the fantasv,
network.' The fihn begins by revealing the daily, sub-
urb:1n. early 1960s life of eight-year-old Stevie (Evan
13onifant) as sharply divided bet,veen two realities. The
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
294 Michael DeAngelis
first to be introduced is his close relationship with
Dottie Frank (Julie Halston), the protagonist of a Lucy
Sl,orv-likc sitcom who inspires Stevie to produce
vibrant artistic sketches as he sits silent and transfixed
before the television screen; as a contest winner later
in the film. Stevie earns the honor of visiting the set
of the show. n1eeting the actress who inspires hin1, and
,vitnessing the rehearsal of an episode. The second
reality con1prises Stevie·s not-so-inspiring, wholly iso-
lated, routinized, extra-Dottie existence. n1ade bearable
only by a doting mother (Harriet Harris) who inter-
venes when her husband (Robert Pall), glued to the
TV screen watching a football ga1ne, rudely disn1isses
Stevie's fandom. Stevie's life outside the ho,ne extends
tht' don1estic tensions, as he yearns to participate in
his fen1ale schooln1ates' heated conversations about
Dottie, instead ean1ing only their ridicule since, like
Stevie's father, they find his devotion to the screen star
a pursuit unsuitable for a male ("My sister says you're
a fen1inine," a younger girl jeers).
This second daily reality positions Stevie as a rather
helpless subject, at the n1ercy of divisive gender poli-
tics that n1onitor his identity within and outside the
hon1e. H is relationship w ith the Dottie character ini-
tially seen1s to provide n1on1entary release from social
restrictions, as well as a creative outlet in which to
interpret experience on his own ten11s, especially
through the illustrated narrative that Stevie prepares as
a gift for Dottie in anticipation of their n1eeting. Soon
enough, however, his drawings belie this "escapist"
fi.1nction when the TV taping that Stevie witnesses
begins to replay the gender relations that surround the
young boy in his t'veryday lift': as punishn1ent for a
lie told to her husband (Adan1 Arkin), Dottie is forced
to endure a carefully staged, brutal spanking which
Stt'vie struggles furiously to recapture in a vivid color
dra,ving.
The inseparability Qf the t\vo realitit·s is driven
hon1e by Stevie's two drean1-night111an:s. both of
\vhich center upon beating and the exercise of powt•r.
In \VJking life, Stevit' n1aintains tht' role of observer
and acted-upon subject at hotne and ,vith Dottie
Frank, but the polyn1orphously perverse nighu11:irt·~
co111pt·l the boy to 1nove a1nong a nu111ber of positions
in relationships of identification. In the first dn:.1111,
Stevie initially assun1es the role of a n1thlcss king \\·ho
hu111iliate~ Dottie in the sa111e \vavs
, that her husband
doc~ on the TV sho,v. Tht· scene then shiti:s to a 111ale
Digitized by Google
adult beating a n1ale child who appears to be Stevie
(the lighting conditions and camera distance obscure
the child's identity). The beaten child is transfonned
into a young girl who exists in Stevie's daily reality as
a schoolmate who ignores him, and who undergot'S
frequent spankings at her father's hand. With this
transformation, Stevit' switches to the role of observer.
cheering on her beating as he looks on sn1iling.
Occurring after Stevie's visit to the Dottie set, the
second nightn1are finds King Stevie hintself punished
for the 111urder of a wo111an. and senten ced to be
beaten by "the strongest n1an in the kingdon1"; ,vith
a forceful hand raised to inflict the punishrnent. the
aggressor's face becon1es a mustachioed Dottie's. As
the final bt'ating is carried out, the scene juxtaposes
all of the positions and participants from the fin.t
nightn1are. to \vhich confusion is added the beating
of another son by his father - a beating that Stevie
and tht" schoolgirls witnessed earlier that day in the
playground. With tit!.' frenzy of this accelerated and
out-of-control spanking. a startled Stevie soon awakens
in a panic, n1eticulously folds up his latest draYling of
L)ottie, st'cures the artwork in Reynolds Wrap. and
buries it under a rock in his backyard.
l)o Stevit''s fantasies constin1te an un const·io us
atten1pt to liberate himself fron1 oppressive social
restrictions, or are they instead a syn1ptorn of son1c::-
thing inherently "wrong" with the young boy?
Psychoanalytic frameworks provide a useful starting
point here. While Freud asserts that drean1s and f.1n-
tasies constitute a desire for the fulfilln1ent of a ,vish.
Elizabeth Cowie explains that rt"presentation in fantasy
is altert'd and transforn1ed by deft'nsive mechanisrns."
Freud's essay "A Child Is Being Beaten" concen1s a
fantasy of the:: child's atten1pt to St"duce his 0\Vn lather.
and the child's 111ove111ent a111ong various positions of
identification is less an act of liberation than a rt'sult
of repressive processt's that guard the child fro,n bring-
ing the v,ish to the surface.
This fantasy is also a primal f.111tasy, an investigation
requiring a 111oven1ent back,vard in time to help the
boy in his ~earch tor answers about his own origin as
a subject in the world. According to Freudian logic,
Stevie's nighunare f.1nt.1sit's constitute an investigation
of tht· p,1st - in this rase, a psychic past - that infonns
the ,vav, he lives each n10111cnt of his life in the
present. Thinking about the protagonist's conflict as an
(ultin1ately. and perhaps necessarily, failed) atten1pt to
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
. -
 Authorship and New Queer Cinema
ncgotiate the boundaries between "then" and "no\\'"
brings us closer to an understanding of Haynes' nar-
rative strategies in the structuring of queer sexual
desire. Working fron1 concepts originally theorized by
Laplanche and Pontalis. c:owie explains that fantasy
"involves . .. not the achievcn1ent of desired objects,
but the arranging of, a setting out of, desire; a veritable
111isc-e11-;ri11e of desire." 7 Stevie's own story comprises
a series of settings and scenes, front those staged on
the set of a television sho\v, to those played out in his
uneasy drearns. His burial of the product of his en10-
tions and fantasies once and for all dernonstrates a
rJther na'ive belief that these scenes could ever ren1ain
s!!parate in the first place, and an equally na'ive (as it
could only be, for a young hoy) conviction that the
scc:-nes could be ordered such that fantasies would evcr
beco1ne thc exclusive realn1 of the "past." The uneasy
juxtaposition of past and present enactcd by both
Stcvi!!'s story and the fihn itself conunents upon the
inescapabiliry of desire (the inevitable return of the
repressed) and the inability to do anything else but to
continue to repn.-ss it, in a culture that ofiers its sub-
jects no other options. Considering how fantasy is
kept alive throughout ntost of Dottie Gets Spanked, the
final burial quite self-consciously plays like a conclu-
~ion in1posed upon the narrative by the dentands of
the nonnative version of sexuality circulated at the
tirne the story takes place. Or is it Stevie who gets
the last laugh. his forrnal burial of the artwork only a
n1eans of keeping desin.- "safc" for sorne unrevealed
future 11101nent?
A "gay" filnt less in its overt rt!presentation of
hontost.>xuality than in \\'hat its narrativt> both activc:-ly
and self-consciously represses, Dollie Gets Spanked
speaks of a dt>sirt' that is not, or not yt>t, acct>ssiblt.> to
its central protagonist. It articulatt's a structure of
repression in1posed upon its subject bt>caust' of his
own youth and the constraints of a society that
dentands that deviant youngstt!rs grow out of their bad
habits and assintilate with ht.>terost>xual norntalcy.
Whether or not Stt>vit> \viii achieve this dt"Sired result
is never rt>vealed. but for journalist Arthur Stuart
(Christian liale). the ct.>ntral protagonist of (./c/1 1e1
Gold111i11e, the ntatter of assi111ilation is self-adn1ittt.>dly
a given as the narrative bt'gins in prcsent-day Jt)84
New York. After his superiors at tht.> Herald conunis-
sion Arthur to investigatc \vhat happt·ned to _Brian
Sladt.> (Jonathan Rhys- Meyers). a 1970s glan1 rockt.'r
Digitized by Google
295
who faked his O\Vn assassination in a failed publicity
ploy, Arthur rt>flects in voiceover narrative that "sud-
denly I \vas being paid to ren1t.>111ber all tht.> things that
111ont>y, futurt', and tht.> serious lift> ntade so certain I'd
forget." J,cfvet G<lld111i11c continut.>s and responds to
Stt.>vie's final act in Dottie Gets Spa11ked, extending
Haynes' qut>t'r vt>rsion of everyday life by articulating
tht.> ultirnate t!ficct~ of any atternpt at "burying the
past" of fantasy and dt>sirt>. As a narrative rnuch 111ore
overtly concented \Vith the \VOrkin1,,s of both tht'
personal/ psychic and social/political history, i ,.t'f,,,.,
G<lld,11i11c also situates tht.> past as a field of resistanct'
that induces an inevitable confrontation with prt.>St.>nt
rt.>alities, providing an opportunity for Haynes to
"qut>cr" tht.> prest.>nt by rt>constituting the notion of
"rt.>ality" itself through rnultiple juxtapositions of his-
tories rt>rnen1bered, forgottt'n, and represst>d.
Tht.> filnt announct.>s its ternporal confrontation of
repression in thc first words of its voiceover narrativt>.
juxtapost.>d against a visual field of twinkling stars:
"Histories. like ancit.>nt n1ins, are the fictions of
t.>n1pires, while everything forgottt'n hangs in dark
drearns of the past, ever threatening to retun1." Initiat-
ing a historical trace spanning ovt'r 130 years, the
artifact that survivt.>s the ruins of tintt' is a jewt.>l pinned
to the blanket of the newborn and abandoned Oscar
Wilde, who is discovt>red on the doorstep of a fan1ily
in the 1850s on a dark, Dublin street. Over the course
of the narrative, tht.> jt.>wel is recovered front a guttt.>r
in the 1950s by tht' soon-to-be giant rockt.>r Jack Fairy
(()sheen Jont>s) after he is bt.>aten by schooln1att's,
stolt.>n by Brian Slade 20 years latt.>r after the n1en ·s
Nt.>\V Year's Evt> sexual encounter, and offered to
Brian's lover Kurt Wilde (E,van McGregor) as a gift.
before it is ultirnately coughed up fron1 Arthur Stuart's
throat during his final rnt'eting with Kurt in a tavt.>n1.
at which tin1e Kurt reveals the legend of the jt!wt.>l's
origin. Against the progression of this historical nar-
rativt' of the survival of a form of st.>xual rebellion and
resistance are countt>rpost>d activt' processes of dis-
avowal. forgetting, and "burial," by both invt'stigativt·
subject and object. The reasons ntotivating the ft>ignc:-d ,
onstagt.> assassination of Brian (and his adoptt>d onstagt>
pt:rsona, Maxwell Denton) are nt.>ver explained, though
tht.> narrativt' does suggest connections between tht.>
act and lirian and Kurt's recent brt>akup. It also offt>rs
an indirect cornparison to the fate of Dorian (;ray
(quott.>d and rt>ft>rt>nccd in the first part of the tiln1).
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

296 Michael DeAngelis
Figure 30. 1 Arthur Stu,rt (Chn<tian Ualc) :md glain rock friends in Todd Haync,s l'rl,w C,,/,l111i11r (M1ran1ax.
199!!). Produced by Chnstinc V.tchon . Photo courtesy Photof,-.1
,vho elected an aging self- portrait over an aging body;
in Ve/11e1 Co/d,11i11e, however. che ''deceased " rock scar
hi1nself ages into the portrait of the n1ore farnous yet
less gla111orous persona of another n1usical perfon11er,
Ton1my Stone, ,vho has effectively disguised the iden-
tity and sexual an1b iguity of his fon11er i11can1 ation as
Brian/ M axweU until Arthur discovers the secret.
While Haynes doe~ not a..•;sign clear n1otives ~nd
caust' / eflect relationships in hun1an expt'rienct',
Arthur's o , vn conflict ,vith the past is 1no re fully
elaborated than Brian 's, because of the narrative's
invest1nenc in Arthur as the filn1 's pri111ary perspec-
tive and central protagonist." The invcscigarion of
another's disappear.ince st·ts the stage for Arthur's self-
cxanu nation, initially occurring no t out of his i1u1ate
desirc to kno,v. but ~pecifically because he has been
professionall y conu1ussioned to do so. Arthur is the
ideal vehicle for che type of re1ne1nbering that chi~
search requires: even befo rt' ht' is given his press
ass1gnn1ent - and before the narrative has iruated the
I 9711s a~ .. the past" - the filn1 reveals scene~ o( his
tee nage days as a gl.1111 fJn , running through the streets
or M anchester ,vich his friends. one or , vho111 acc1-
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•
dencally bu111ps into Jack Fairy (played as an adult by
M icko W esm1oreland). Arthu r is also .. present" at the
concert \vhcrc Brian is "assassinated ," and an eyewit -
ness co a later interaction ber,veen Brian's by-d1en
ex-,vife M andy (Toni Colette) and Kurt Wilde after
a " Death o f Glitter" concert.
Unlike Brian. -.vho has sumn1arily excluded his
19 70s' glam- rocker inca rnation. Arthur acknowledges
the source of his conflict ber,veen past and present,
and bet\veen ren1e1nberi11g and forgetting. quite early
in the fil111 . After receiving his investigative charge, he
ad1nics in voiceover that " clearly, there was son1etbing.
son1eching fron1 che past , spooking n1e back. I didn 't
realize at the tin1 e that it ,vas you." Instead of provid-
ing any sort of explanatio n, ho,vever. his admission secs
forth a deeper ce111poral paradox. Although the narra-
tive never specifically idenciftes the "you,.. Arthur
appear; to be referring co Kurt W ilde. foreshado ,ving
the intcrviev; ,vi th Kurt in the tavern at the end of
the tiln1 - a 111eering •
intercut ,vi th scenes of the t,vo
111e11 before . durin!?, and after a sexual encounter on
a roofi.op in the " past., of the I 970s. The voiceovcr of
the early scene is thu~ presented at a double ren1ove
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Authorship and New Queer Cinema
ti-on1 the incident(s) to which it refers, from the per-
spective of the most recent version of Arthur, reflecting
back to the start of his journalistic search, to incidents
occurring some ten years earlier.
The voiceover also establishes a plot trajectory
that is both rnotivated and undennined by repressive
processes. According to Haynes, the film "had to be
about a lost tin1e frorn the start, about something
repressed - and great fears had risen up around what-
ever this was, which had changed completely and
buried it. That's why for Arthur it's an ambivalent
search back."~ His ambivalence clearly does not stem
from any perfect or idealized present n1oment in
Arthur's life that mernorit>s of the past might disrupt:
the search engages hin1 in a subjectively rendered re-
vision of experience in space and tirne, such that the
fan1iliar present is rendered queer and strange. Arthur's
version of the 1984 New York that he inhabit.~ is
rather gruesorne, sterile, and alienating: sunless exteri-
ors: cold. dark and colorless spaces stripped of
ornament: crowds of workers with blank and worn-
out expressions; 1nuffied voices over loudspeakers
announcing the cliched platform of an unseen Presi-
dent Reynolds, who urges citizens to join the
"Comrnittee to Prosper." Arthur is depicted in work
settings where he re111ains apart from his co-workers:
rnore often, he is entirely alone, the narrative provid-
ing neither an indication of social ties or connections,
nor any do,nestic spact"s or situations that art> not
related to his work.
In sharp contrast. the spaces of Arthur's rnemories
of the 1970s in the strt"ets and clubs of Manchester
are inm1ersed in light, color, ambient n1oven1ent, and
the crisp and seductive sounds of glarn rock n1usic.
signaling the sexual awakenings of a past that is n1ore
real to him than the prest"nt. The pleasant n1en1ories
are, however, those confined to Arthur's life outside of
the don1estic sphere, within which he is depicted as
alienated fron1 his parent.~ on the rare occasions ,vhen
they happen to inhabit the san11: space. At horne.
Arthur finds respite only ,vhen he retires to his roon1
filled with posters of rock stars. pen1sing album covers
and n1usic n1agazines with the san1e devoted attention
that Stevie invt"st~ in l)ottie. In fact. the si1nilarities
be~veen the ··tans" of the ~o fil111s are n1ost pron1i-
.
nent when the 111alt·s inhabit the onlv tentativelv . to bury his desirt·s - the f..'lntasies of l-'d11ct (;old111i11i:
private spaces of their respc:-ctive bedroorns. As St_t·vie
draws his IJtt·st sketch of the span king he witnes,ed
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297
on the TV set, his father enters the roorn unan-
nounced, insisting that an embarrassed Stevie show
him the portrait. Arthur's confrontation with his
parents is more traun1aric: as the teenager masturbates
over a newspaper picture of Brian and Kurt kissing,
both of his parents barge into his room, his father
decrying the boy's actions as disgraceful while Arthur
retreats in shame from their view.
The colors, sounds, and rhythms of the glan1 rock
scene that Arthur later embraces (at first through his
fandon1 and subsequently by sexual encounters with
two rock perfonners) are thus chronologically situated
between two n1ore uninviting realities - the bleakness
of the joun1alist's life in the present, and the men1ories
of his equally constraining upbringing decades earlier.
Accordingly, for Arthur, the glam scene signals a n1ost
uneasy intersection of tin1e trajectories, initiating both
a willing n1oven1ent forward and a reluctant 111ove-
n1ent backward. If the planned death ofDrian/Maxwell
becornes the irnpetus for investigating what appears to
be the 111uch more gradual and less conspicuous death
of Arthur's past life, the identity of the "you" that
spooks Arthur back is not only Kurt Wilde, but also
a "self' that den1ands to be reclaimed - a self once
but no longer elated by its own identifications and
desires. No wonder, then, that Arthur is so bitter when
his ulti111ate revelation of Brian's new "Tonuny Stone''
incan1ation is aln1ost stifled by what appears to be an
elaborate political hush ntaneuver, and a pren1ature
curtailn1ent of his con1missioned investigation; his
conviction to "out" Brian as Ton1n1v, has becorne the
result of a rigorous struggle with his own dernons.
If the glam rock past is the setting upon which
repressive operations converge in the story of ~'e/11c1
G()/dn1i11e, the workings of identification and desire in
fantasy effect a parallel convergence in the space of
queer desire, at the level of the fihn 's structure. Through
the contrast between the visual splendor of the glan1
rock scenes and the starkness of both present and
childhood realities. the fihn appears to offer no
"present" at all except for its imn1ersion in the con-
tinuous present of fantasy. While Stevie's nightn1are
fantasies in Dottie (;cts Sp,J11kcd ulti1nately signal a
111ost frightl'ning relinquishing of control of his O\Vll
repressive." operations - as \Veil as his own co111pulsion
are stn1ctured as scenes of a 111uch 111ore carefully
o rchestrated and idealizt·d desire. rendered so that it
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
298 Michael DeAngelis
can be remembered as perfect, unchangeable, and
insusceptible to the work.ings of time.
As Dottie Gets Spanked illustrates, fantasy scenarios
carry and rework the residues of daily realities that the
fantasy subject has experienced, and the stagings and
scenes of any individual fantasy clearly require a
subject who imagines and who orchestrates. Part of
the queer pleasure that Velvet Goldmine offers is in the
plethora of fantasy perspectives that the film inter-
mingles in scenes of identification and desire. As does
its structural model Citizen Kane (1941), Velvet
Goldmine "hands off'' its narration to other characters
as the film progresses: both Brian's first agent, Cecil
(Michael Feast), and Mandy Slade assume the role of
central storyteller at different points in the film. Unlike
its predecessor, however, the investigator in Haynes'
fiJ.m is also a witness to several of the scenes narrated
by these other storytellers (even, at some points,
encountering the narrators themselves), resulting in an
instability and fluidity in the act of remembering, even
though the extended flashback to the 1970s is ren-
dered chronologically. In the same way that this
investigative journalist motivates the progression of the
narrative from the time that his present-day character
is introduced, Arthur Stuart also functions as the
orchestrator of fantasy - what induces pleasure in the
film emerges from his own memories of past events
that situate him as an emerging queer subject steeped
in his own identifications and desires, even when these
memories are triggered by the narration of others.
Arthur's function within the narrative and fantasy of
the film paraJlels the " lesson" from Oscar Wilde that
Arthur's schoolteacher directly addresses to Arthur in
an early scene:
There were tirnes when it appeared to Dorian Gray that
the whole of history was merely a record of his own life
- not as he had lived it in acts and circumstance, but as
his in1agination had created it for hin1, as it had been in
his brain. and in his passions. He felt that he· d known
them all. those strange, terrible figures that had passed
along the stage of life. and made sin so n1arvclous and
evil. so full of subtlety. It seen1ed that in sorne n1ystcrious
way. their lives had been his own.
Echoing and reiterating the responsibilities of resusci-
tating history that B. Ruby Ilich identifies as integral
to the vitality of a Ne,v Queer Cinema, the " lesson"
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that Arthur is about to learn through his investigation
is that the history of an era that the journalist is com-
missioned to investigate objectively is also his own
history, and one which cannot be relegated to the past
- precisely the lesson that Stevie is denied the oppor-
tunity to learn in Dottie Gets Spanked. The fact that
fantasy provides the vehicle by which the past is made
"real" to the investigative subject helps us to come to
tem1S with the ways in which the fantasy scene - real
and imagined - becomes the only setting of reality
for Arthur.
"The genealogy of desire is always a history of the
subject's identifications," Leo Bersani proposes, and the
untroubled move from identification to desire is inher-
ent in the fantasy scenarios that Arthur constructs and
orchestrates, evidencing his self-constitution as a queer
subject in these very "real" scenes of his own historical
past. 10 This movement is apparent in Arthur's mastur-
bation scene, part of an elaborately orchestrated
segment that begins with press photographers captur-
ing a k.iss between Brian and Kurt - a k.iss then
reproduced in the pages of a newspaper that Arthur
peruses in his bedroom. Brian and Kurt's onstage per-
formance of Brian Eno's "Baby's on Fire" provides the
musical orchestration, as extreme closeups of Anhur
are intercut with shots of the two stage perfom1ers
enacting a slow, graceful, and baJletic seduction scene
- one which eventuaJly finds Brian on his knees.
licking the strings of Kurt's electric guitar in erotic
frenzy. As tongue touches wire, the scene shifts to
Arthur turning the newspaper pages to witness a
photo of the encounter. The music bridges to a third
scene, of an orgy tak.ing place after the night's perfor-
mance, as Kurt and Brian reciprocate beckoning
glances before they surreptitiously retreat to a private
room. Before Arthur can bring himself to a clinux,
the fantasy scenario is disrupted, and the music is
softened as his parents barge into the room. "Stand
up!" the father exclaims, but as the terrified and
ashamed Arthur rises to view his image in a mirror.
the scene shifts to Brian himself standing up in the
orgy roon1, moving away to meet Kun. This vivid
reme1nbering of the in1aginations of fantasy is at the
same time both firntly grounded in space and ti1ne (a
specific room, a specific n1on1ent in Arthur's past). and
entirely liberated frorn spatial or temporal groundings:
the three separate spaces intercut in the sequence
build upon and cxtcnd one another, with Brian con-
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Authorship and New Queer Cinema
tinuing n1oven1ents initiated by Arthur, and the "real"
space of both the kiss and the musical fellatio magi-
cally transported via print n1cdia to the fantasy space
that Arthur in1agines at hon1e. The musical continuity
that unites the three spaces also effects a sense of
simultaneous action and "continuous present," empha-
sized by the slow pace of action and moven1ent in
each of the spaces. 11
Herc and elsewhere, however, the fantasies of the
film - whether con1prising past men1ories or wholly
in1agined scenes - are enacted as "settings" for the
playing out of desire rather than scenes in which
desire itself yields to climax or ultin1ate fulfillment .
The cn1phasis upon settings adds to the feeling that
fantasy suspends ti1ne in the film. From the frozen
inuges of Brian constructed for media circulation, to
the stagings of n1usical numbers with either real or
implied audiences, to the n1ore private stagings of
sexual attractions now lost or past, the film presents
desire as an intersection of knowing glances. An
immanent possibility of queer desire is always in the
process of being fulfilled. "Con1e closer," a voice on a
rooftop beckons, "Don't be frightened." As Arthur
ultimately yields to the signals sent by Kurt, this nun
"who ended n1y life . .. in waves," the scene plays out
as a ballet of gradually approaching bodies, a hand
caressing the flesh of another, all magically lit by a
shooting star and spaceship above, as the can1era slowly
retreats from the connected couple, a snowy shower
of stars obscuring them &0111 view.
The erotic charge of these hypnotically orches-
trated scenarios appears to have been lost on several
of the film's critics. "Haynes doesn't want to show us
the dirty parts. that ecstasy, excess. and eroticism have
no place in his portrayals of gay sexuality.' " Christo-
pher Kelly suggests. adding that "the emotions and
experiences (the filn1J relates are hardly ones that
connect to real gay people. " 11 Craig Seligman argues
that in the second half of the film the love scenes
aren't charged. and the characters arc underdeveloped:
"The sex feels like a gay artist's statement: obligatory
and earnest." 13 Such criticisms, however, arise fron1 the
presumption that eroticism is limited to those art-
works that engage a realist aesthetic - a presumption
that Todd Haynes' reliance upon fantasy networks
challenges at every juncture. just as extensively in his
intricate reworking of melodrama in Far From Heaven.
'
Indeed. if one contint's oneself to n1attcrs of erotic
Digitized by Google
299
representation and thernatic en1phasis. it n1ight initially
see1n i1nplausible to describe Far From Heaven as a
"queer" filn1 at all, given that its dicgetic perspective
is that of a white, heterosexual woman. and its repre-
sentational treatn1ent of hon1osexuality is limited to a
few sequences, none of which is particularly sexually
graphic. As is the case with Dottie Gets Spanked and
Velvet Gcldmine, however, Far From Heaven "queers" by
rendering the fan1iliar uncomfortable and strange.
through intricate and subversive cine1natic processes
of historical disjuncture.
If the look of Far From Heaven harbors familiar and
recognizable groundings, it is because its reference
points are situated in the Technicolor-saturated cine-
matic past of Douglas Sirk's social and do1nestic
melodra1nas of the 1950s - a past already heavily
mediated and stylized, and one which signals to
contc,nporary audiences a pronounced spatial and
temporal distance. It is the look of a genre that was
even in its heyday continually at odds with the con-
ventions of the realist aesthetic and considered critically
suspect for that very reason, even while it enjoyed
heightened popularity with mainstream American
audiences of the 1950s. However extensively Haynes
borrows from Sirk, Haynes' intent in Far From Heaven
is not a literal re-creation of the Sirkean world of his
film's most obvious reference point, All That Heaven
Allows (1955), but instead a positioning of these two
seemingly similar past worlds in an intricate historical
dynamic, one in which the temporal remove effected
by the ftln1 's genre and style facilitates a critical dis-
tance by which to assess past and present. Sirk's film
focuses primarily upon class inequities ensuing from
the growing attraction of wealthy widow Cary Scott
(Jane Wyman) to her gardener Ron Kirby (Rock
Hudson), whose Walden-inspired naturalist values are
at odds with the country-club conventions and studied
affiuence of Cary's close circle of"friends" who, along
with the widow's two over- indulged teenage children,
harshly judge her decision to abandon their world
for Ron's as selfish and misguided. Haynes' update of
Sirk's ,nelodranu certainly docs to a great extent
retain and recreate the fom1al and stylistic attributes
of its referent, including the panora,nic crane shots of
the sleepy New England town that open both narra-
tives, and his use of saturated color motifs and
accentuating n1usical crescendos throughout the filn1
oftt'n outdo Sirk·s. Still. whatever might secn1 familiar
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
300 Michael DeAngelis

Figure 30.2 In Ft1r Fn,111 H,avcn (Focus Features. 21l02) Haynes update$ Douglas Sark 's mdodranw ro addrffi
i~suc~ of r.ice and sexuality. Produc,·d by Jody P:atton •nd Christine Vachon

through this extendc:d rake on the generic, 111elodra-
n1atic past through All 'TT1ar Hcave11 Allor.vs is strategically
disn1pted by changes and substitutions which result in
a quite diffc:ren t set of social and political conflicts in
Haynes· "version'' of the story: rather than wido"ved,
Cathy Whit1ker Qulianne Moore) is here married to
successful sales execu tive Fra11k (De1u1is Quaid). \Vho
is struggling "vith the "problem·• of his hon1osexual
tendencies: and the gardener in Haynes' fiJ11 1, Ra yn,ond
D eagan (Demus H aysbert). is Africa11-An1erican.
In addition to integrating the class issues o f All Tl,at
H1·avc11 Alloivs with n1atters of sexuality and race, the
result of these substitutions is a narrative that retains
the visual. fom1.1l, and stylistic sen,blance of an
"authentic" Sirkean nic:-lodran1a ,vhile conspicuously
deviating from Sirk's 1nodel in terms of then1e, and
perhaps n1orc significantly. of representation. If cl1e
paradox of this displacen1ent renders the furn suscep-
tib le to criticism o n the basis of a seenting disloyalty
to ics cinen1atic antecedents. its infi.1sion of undeniable
historically authentic realities of racial and sexual
stereotyping and oppressio n into a narrativt· set in th e
affluent suburbs of An1erica in the late 1950s looks
and see111s far fetched only to the extent iliat the
representation of these issues so111etin1es registers as
not "belonging" here generically. 14 Certainly, one need
look only as far as Sirk's slightly later film /1ni1a1ion of
Lift ( 1959) to verify cl1at 111elodrama - and perhaps
especially Sirkean 111elodran1a - is well equipped to
dra111atize historically pertinent issues of racial injus-
tice effectively, but H aynes pushes the linlits of generic
representational " accuracy" by taking o n the greater
white, heteronom1ative enterprise in positioning his
opcn-n1indcd and deeply en1pathetic heroine between
African-American heterosi:xual and \vhi te hornosex-
ual o bjects of affection.
Through such positioning. Haynes enables his nar-
rative to ex"J)lore and extend structures of repression
which already figured prontinently in Dortir Grrs
S1,a11ked and Velvet Goldn1i11e. In fact. the stylistic codes
that he uses to represent hon1osex·uaticy in Fnr From
Hea11e11 al ready configure such representation as a
spatio- te111poral iJ11possibilicy, as son1ething iliat must
inevitably be ccnSllrt:d as a condition of its represent-

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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Authorship and New Queer Cinema
ability. The sequence in which Frank's homosexual
tendencies are first revealed offers a cogent example.
After wimessing two men furtively and silently signal-
ing one another to meet in a movie theater balcony,
Frank follows a homosexual couple out of the theater
at a safe distance through the dark streets of down-
town Hanford, his focus so intent that he fails to
acknowledge the beggar asking for his n1oney or the
feniale prostitute soliciting his affection. Largely
obscured and visible only as a deep-blue lit, shadow-
casting silliouette tracking the two n1en as they
proceed into a barren alley, canted angles signal the
protagonist's almost unknowing surrender to "deviant"
desire. The can1era then tracks Frank from the front
as he emerges into the dark, green-lit space of a male
ho1nosexual lounge, startled by an older man at the
door who asks him for identification. The sequence
concludes with Frank drinking a scotch at the bar as
he becomes trapped within an intricate network of
glances - some unreturned, others very cautiously
acknowledged and reciprocated - until the scene ends
in a fade-out as one of the men moves towards Frank's
position at the bar. The strictures of the Production
Code Administration would certainly have guaranteed
that an approved film of the late 1950s would find no
place - except on the cutting room floor - for such
representations a.~ those included in this sequence, so
that the inclusion of such a scene in Haynes' twenty-
first-century narrative references an implausible
narrative past while simultaneously serving as a strik-
ing and historically accurate renunder of a very real
and convincingly portrayed representation of"deviant"
sexuality from the perspectives of that same past his-
torical n1oment. The sequence's narrative strategy is
further accentuated by its canted angles, obscure light-
ing schemes. and perhaps especially its ultin1ate fade
to black, highlighting a "forbidden-ness" consonant
with donunant 1950s perspectives on homosexuality,
even as it also posits the anachronistn of such perspec-
tives from the seenungly n1ore enlightened position of
the contemporary viewer. is
This representation/repression dynamic plays out
in the larger narrative scheme of Far From Heaven as
an extended conflict - and also a conflation - of then
and now, one which always interrogates the co1nfort-
ing notion of the present as a ti1ne that no longc:r
accommodates such outdated reprc:ssive tendenci~',S as
Digitized by Google
301
those represented here. The struggle also manifests
itself in spatial terms through the interplay of seeing
and being seen, and ultimately of conspicuity and
obscurity, delimiting the very narrow range of acts and
discourses authorized at this historical n1on1ent as part
of "normal" social relations. Accordingly, the "queer-
ing" enterprise of Far From Heaven relics just as
extensively upon the hyper-representation of hetero-
sexuality as the (un)representability of homosexuality.
In contrast with the diegetic field spreading across
1nuch of Hollywood cine1na in the 1950s, which
managed to sustain heterosexual identity hegemoni-
cally as a default by obscuring the representation of
alternative identities as a n1atter of policy, the presence
of homosexual representation in Far From Heaven
enables a contesting of heterononnative relations
by drawing attention to heterosexuality as a social
construct.
Haynes en1phasizes the conspicuity of this con-
structedness through the act of isolating the
heterosexual "moment" and thereby sub1nitting it to
critical scrutiny. The morning after the Whitakers•
plans to attend a social function are interrupted by
Frank's arrest on a charge of public "loitering," the
couple exchange a dispassionate kiss as Frank prepares
to leave the house for work. At the very brief instant
of this kiss they are illununated, and wholly startled,
by a blinding flash bulb and the loud click of a camera
shutter. A team fron1 the Hartford W eekly Gazette has
already set the stage for an in-depth interview with
Cathy, she and her husband having earned the title of
"Mr and Mrs Magnatech," the name of the technol-
ogy corporation where Frank works, and their image
is reproduced in product and corporation advertise-
n1ent sketches captured in gilded fran1es on the walls
of their living room (one reads, "Mr and Mrs
Magna.tech choose nothing but the best for their
hon1e"). Here and elsewhere, Far From Heaven empha-
sizes through role playing the strain of sustaining the
in1age of this ideal relationship between men and
won1en that American culture posited as both desir-
able and without imaginable alternative - a strain
which Cathy soon begins to note when these sa1ne
society pages begin to describe her as "a wo111an as
devoted to her family as she is kind to negroes," a
description that elicits nervous giggles a,nong her
\von1an friends . That such hyper-visibility is rendered
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
302 Michael DeAngelis
appropriate only when it highlights the socially nor-
nutive is clarified in the art exhibit sequence, which
finds Cathy and the gardener Raymond so deeply
engaged in conversation about the redemptive possi-
bilities of abstract expressionism that they remain
oblivious to the shocked stares of the high society
patrons in the gallery - oblivious, that is, until the
giggles become audible. It is this same visibility that
ultinutely results in Raymond and Cathy's undoing
when they are spotted together by a gossip outside a
restaurant in the "WTong" part of Hanford.
Highlighting the insidious ways in which accept-
able social relationships are constructed hegemonically
in the world of this film. the hyper-visibility of unat-
tainable heterosexual norms is ofien contrasted with
the normative and highly conspicuous invisibility of
the "other." At the upscale cocktail party that Cathy
has planned for the Whitakers' home, afier one of the
guests mentions a contemporaneous act of social resis-
tance in the Civil Rights Movement, another guest
assures his listeners that such incidents could never
happen in Hartford because "there are no negroes in
Hartford," as the camera cuts to an African-American
waiter holding a tray of appetizers. Such nomutive
social mechanisms are shown to be so efficient that
even those individuals who are marginalized by them
eventually succumb to their logic. After Raymond's
daughter is attacked by prejudiced white teenage boys
and his own African-American community begins to
judge him for his attraction to Cathy Whitaker, he
decides that he must no longer sustain his relationship
with her. More insidiously and disturbingly, Frank
finds opponunity at least momentarily to remove
himself from his status of "other" by chastising Cathy
for her relationship with Raymond on the basis of
the humiliation that Frank has just endured from
Magnatech colleagues. who learned about Cathy's
alleged transgression earlier that day.
Beyond this intricate network of repression,
however, lies an unyielding attentiveness to the possi-
bility of a set of human relations that are no longer
assessed on the basis of how strictly they conform to
stated or implicit norn1s, and in Far From Heave11 this
possibility is advanced. momentarily and hypotheti-
cally, by the fantasy of this i111possible relationship
between an African-A1nerican rnan v,ho is all too
accusto111ed to his social function as conspicuous
absence, and a ,vhite ,von1an brave enough to experi-
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ment with "what it feels like to be the only one in a
roon1 - colored or whatever." That this fantasy niay
not be sustained under such repressive social condi-
tions is certainly central to its function in the realn1
of n1elodrama, a realm in which the resonances of the
"if only" ultimately throw into relief the presumptions
of the realist aesthetic. Just as Brian Slade loses himself
in the n1asquerade ofTonuny Stone, and Stevie buries
his final sketch of Dottie in the ground of his back-
yard, the fantasy of transcendence in Far From Heave11
ultin1ately yields to the realities of separations and
divisions, yet this ultimate yielding never renders the
fantasy less than remarkably powerful in the possibili-
ties that it articulates.
Attesting to this possibility is the fact that Frank
does eventually find a way beyond the social structures
that he has found to be oppressive - or, at least, the
film lets its audience imagine such a path as the final
shots of Frank show him with the man who seduced
hin1 at the Miami resort. That this ultimate homo-
sexual "togetherness" still feels quite tentative and
precarious in the world of Far From Heaven attests
once more to the filmmaker's resistance of easy solu-
tions which he perceives to be just as complex now
as they were in the late 1950s. And the fact that
Haynes' films are not overtly graphic in their repre-
sentation of homosexual acts, and that he alwavs •
frames such representations in the context of repres-
sive operations that struggle to disrupt heteronom1ative
human relations, does not make him any less integral
a contributor to this cinenu's vitality; in fact, he has
demonstrated a keen ability to move beyond such
nutters as gay sexual representation and content,
enabling Haynes to hypothesize the structure of queer
desire more dynantically. Haynes' method fuses sexual-
ity and politics, through the articulation of fantasy
scenarios that arrange confrontations between past and
present at the levels of the personal, sexual, and social.
In the process, he politicizes the hunian tendency to
forget, as well as the inability of the sexual subject to
release himself fron1 the history of his own identifica-
tions and dt.-sire-s. The lessons he offers are vital not
only to individual queer subjects struggling to engage
the dynarnics of their own sexual histories, but also to
the history of a New Queer Cinenia that, as B. Ruby
Rich has intimated. has lost touch with its historical
antecedents in a troubleso1ne case of short-tem1
rnernory.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Authorship and New Queer Cinema
Notes
1 B. Ruby Rich, "New Queer Cinenu," Sig/11 and Sound, 2.
no. 5 (September 1992), p. 32.
'.? B. Ruby Rich, "Queer and Pr=nt Danger", Sight and Sound
10. no. 3 (March 2000). p. 24.
J Justin Wyatt, "Cine,natic/Sexu" Transgr.-ssion: An Interview
with Todd Haynes," Film Quarttrly 46, no. 3 (Spring 1993).
p. 7.
4 Wyatt, "Cinernatic/Scxu" Transgression", p. 8.
5 Sigmund Freud, "A Child Is Being Beaten: A Contribution to
the Study of the Origins of the Perversions," in The Comp/er,
Psychofogica/ Worlu of Sigmund Frrud, trans. James Strachey
(London: The Hogarth Press. 1955), vol. 17. For a discussion
of the definition of identification and its rebtion to object
choice, see Sigmund Freud, "Group Psychology and the
An"ysis of the Ego," in Tht Cc,mplttt Psycholc,gical Works of
Sigmund Frrud, trans. Jan1es Strachey (London: The Hogarth
Press, 1955). vol. 18, p. 106.
6 See the chapter "Fantasia" in Elizabeth Cowie, Rtprrstntit1g tht
Woman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1997).
pp. 123-65.
7 Cowie. Rrprrsrnting thr Woman, p. 133.
8 In an insightful discussion of causality in Haynes's film Safe
(1995). Roddey Reid suggests that "the ftlm queers and goes
against the grain of what could be called 'a politics of episte-
1nology and visibility,"' in that the ftlm resists any clear
expbnation of the origin, of its cen~ protagonist's environ-
mentally related illness. Sec "UnSafc at Any Distance: Todd
Haynes• Visu" Culture of He"th and Risk," Film Quart,rly 51,
no. 3 (Spring 1998). pp. 32-44.
Digitized by Google
303
9 Nick James, "American Voyeur," S(flll at1d Sound 8, no. 9
(September 1991!), p. I!.
10 Leo Bersaru, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press. 1995), p. 63.
11 In "Fantasia," Elizabeth Cowie explains, "The pleasure [in
fantasy! is in how to bring about the consummation. is in the
happening and continuing to happen: is how it will co,ne
about, and not in the moment of having happtt1ed, when it will
fall back into loss, the past" (emphasis in the origin"). See
Rrprrsrntin.~ thr Woman, p. 133.
12 Christopher Kelly. " The Unbearable Lighme-ss of Gay Movies,"
Film Comment 35, no. 2 (March-April 1999). p. 20.
13 Craig Seligman, "AU That Glitters," Artforwm lnttma1io11al 37.
no. 2 (October 1998). p. 104.
14 This temponl disjunct between representation" systems leads
James Harvey to describe Far From Hravm's strategy as a "con-
descension towards the past." leaving the audience with the
feeling that "you're seeing a movie in quotes." See "Made in
Heaven: How is it that Todd Haynes's Wannest Film is Inspired
by Douglas Sin:'s Coldest?," Film Commtnl 29. no. 2 (Much-
April 2003), pp. 52- 5.
15 Mary Ann Doane describes the tempo'" scheme of the film
as "doubly accessible. as a naive yet excCS$ive discount" about
a particular historical moment suffused with tensions drawn
from the present, and as an extended quotation of All That
Htaw11 Allows" (p. 5). See "Pathos and Pathology: The Cinema
of Todd Haynes," ramrra obscura 57, no. 19 (2004), pp. 1- 21.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 31
Twoness and the Film Style
of Oscar Micheaux
J. Ronald Green

A professor in the Department of History of Art at Ohio State University in Columbus, Green
is the author of two books on pioneering black American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, With a
Crooked Stick: The Films of Oscar Michesux and Straight Lick: The Cinema of Oscar M/cheaux.
In this reading, originally Chapter 3 of Straight Lick (2000), Green opens up auteurism to a
consideration of race by using black author W.E.B. Dubois' idea of "twoness" as a central
feature of the African-American experience to illuminate the stylistic tensions within Micheaux's
films and in relation to the hegemonic model of Hollywood cinema. Green shows how these
tensions are central to Micheaux's representations of black American life, and questions
assumptions based on judging black films against Hollywood paradigms.

The i111plied nc1ncsis of African-A1nerican uplift has
;ihvays been racis111. One of the force fields through
which Oscar Micheaux. who wrote, produced, and
directed more than 40 tiln1s fron1 the 1920s through
tht' 1940s, had to nt'gotiate a path to,vard his goal of
111iddle-class status \\'.ts that characterized by the polar-
ized extren1es of Afric,111-nl'ss and A1nerican-nt•ss.
W .E.8. DuBois presented the no,v-fon1iliar, paradig-
n1atit· notion of "t"vone,s" in th(· tir..t ft',v pagt'S of
11,c S,111/s '!f Blark F()/k:
It i< J pt·t·u li.ir sensation. this doublt-- consciousne<,. this
st·nse of ahvays look in~ at one's , oul by the tape of a
\\'orld tlu1 looks on in an111sed contt·1npt and pity. ( )ne
t'Vt-r li:d, his nvont·<s. - .in A1nt·rican. a Nt·~ro; r,vo souls.
r,vo thoughts . 1,vo unreconrik·d <rriv in!--,;; rwo ,varrin~
itlt·als in ont· dark bodv. . "·hose doggt·d
1
'
<trt"llh'th
' .
alont·
k<·t·ps it fro111 bt·in~ torn asun<kr.
African- An1erica ns. that is. individually have f.1ced the
sin1ultaneous possibilities of t\VO identities \vhose relJ-
tions to each other are bipolar and strained, creating J
dilenuna that each African- An1erican individual 1nu~t
so1nehow resolve. The hon1s of tht' dilenuna are to b<'
filunJ. ont'. in the do1ninant ,vhite culture that cannot
bt· ignored and that has itself tended to detnand and
at the san1e ti1ne to reject the assin1ilation of p<'oplt'
of color; and. t,vo, in the ethnic black culture of the
African-A1nerican conunu ni ty. The concept ofc,von<''>S
has recognizt"d a resistance by blacks to their assi1nilJ-
tion by \\·hite culture, a ,viii to retain a black ethnic
identity. Where:1s assi n1ilation see111ed nect'ssary l<.)r
survival bv, blacks in An1erica, it also threatened black
sclf-t·stct·n1 and tht' intt'l!ritv
' , of their African idt'ntity.,
T hon1as ( :ripps h.1s identitied ;1 debilitating dilen1111.1
to r A tiican-A n1trit·an tihn th.it h<· has associated \\'ith

.I H. ' , n .1ld ( ;r..·1.·n. "T\\ 1111,·,, .Ul\t d h · h im SId t• ,,f n ,1.:.tr r,.. 1idh· ,u., .. ' Ch.1r tn \ tr11t 11 ' " .u;.,-hl h ,d.: ·11t,· l. Ul1,' lll,I nf n, . .lf M h'lw.mx ( U)1,)01lU11!,.'10 1l .llhi
I cu1tl1,11: lnd1.11u U 111 n'f'IIV Pr1,•,, . .:!1 10 ••} 1 ~•11 11 ) hy .J. ltou,11,1 (;rn·n R c·r1111t1:d hy pa11u,, 1011 11J da- .mlhm .,ml 1111l1h~lwr,

Orig in al from
Digitized by Google UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Twoness and the Film Style of Oscar Micheaux
OuBois's concept of twoness. Cripps's book Slow Fade
to Blatk was the ground-breaking work on the history
of race n1ovies, early filn1s n1ade by blacks for black
audiences. 1 Cripps's 111onun1ental effort, under difficult
research conditions, to locate and interpret the prin1ary
and secondary source n1aterials of black cinen1a -
alongside the prior pioneering effons by Donald Bogle
and L)aniel J . Leab·' - adumbrates an ethnic cine111a
that was previously invisible. Cripps's thesis is founded
on the historical 111yth of the Arnerican 111elting pot
and the phe110111enon of assi1nilation, addressing black
cinen1a as a problen1 of non-assin1ilation.
Cripps has proposed that the future of black cine1na,
and of black criticis111 and spectatorship, lies properly
,vith assimilation and thus Hollywood. Though he
atten1pts in Slo111 Fade to Black to find works of artistic
value created by the "black underground" outside H ol-
ly,vood, which included Micheaux and the Colored
Players, Cripps nevertheless concludes that no black
producer was sufficiently capitalized to produce good
filn1s (Cripps revised this opinion in his next book,
Black Film as Genre). Cripps also concludes that H olly-
,.,,ood was sufficiently capitalized to co-opt any
successful idea produced by black producers of race
n1ovies - hence, the double n1eaning of Cripps's title,
"slow fade to black" - the slow fade-0111 of the i11depe11-
dc11t black producer (the "blackout" of blackness) and
the slow fade- i11 of the H11//y1vt1od black producer (the
slo,vness of the e1nergence of assirnilated blackness).
The S/0111 Fade thesis, however, undervalues the loss
represented by the fade-out of the independent race
111ovie, blaming that loss on the inadequacies of inde-
pendent filn1s. Slo1v Fade also overvalues the gain, both
realized and potential, in the African-American fade-
in to 1nainstrean1 filn1.
After posing the dilen1ma of twoness, and after
considerable detailed criticisn1 of particular fihns and
filmrnakers, including Micheaux, Cripps indeed ends
his study by celebrating refonns in Hollywood as the
best hope for black cinen1a. Of the written agreement
reached by "delegates of the National Association for
the Advancen1ent of Colored People and the heads of
st'veral Hollywood studios" ,vho "n1et and codified
so1ne social changt'$ and procedures" in 1942, Cripps
says: "The studios agreed to abandon pejorative racial
roles, to place N egroes in positions JS extras they
could reasonably be expected to occupy in society, and
to begin the sl◊"-' task of integrating blacks into the
Digitized by Google
305
ranks of studio technicians."' Cripps capped the initial
staternent of his thesis by observing that "the 1942
agreen1ent accon1plished far 111ore than allowing a fe,v
blacks to appear in roles that were not overtly racist.
It changed the ,vhole tune and nature of Hollywood's
response to the Afro- Arnerican's role in film and, by
extension, in Arnerican life as well ... ~ The optinlisrn of
this denoue111ent seenis inappropriate, however, since
the agreen1ent of 1942 addressed only the problen1 of
assin1ilation; only, that is, one horn of the dilen1ma.
The assin1ilation of blacks might have been expected
to ethnicize Hollywood to son1e extent, but there was
little historical evidence on Hollywood screens - in
relation to black or any other ethnic groups - that the
expectation was realized. The recent successes of black
cinerna on Hollywood screens are the result of Spike
Lee's successful assault on Hollywood as an i11depe11de11t
- he forced his way in by n1aking n1oney on the
outside first. Any success derived fron1 the agreen1ent
of 1942 to integrate blacks into the Hollywood culture
industry would appear to be a gain prin1arily for
assi111ilation, for one side of the twoness dilemma but
not for the other. While it is the case today that n1ore
positive black characters appear on An1erican film and
television screens, their African-An1erican characteris-
tics are very often either virtually erased (Bill Cosby)
or caricatured (Eddie Murphy). And when African-
American characteristics are delivered in a fully
rounded fashion, as in Fra11k's Place (1987), Charles
Burnett's To Sleep 1vitl, A11~er (1990), and Julie Dash's
Da11~hters of tire D11st (1991), they are often poorly
handled by the industry. Still, Cripps is certainly right
in emphasizing that Hollywood should be held
responsible for its extren1e and peculiar nusrepresenta-
tion of blacks. Nevertheless, even though the efforts
of DuBois and the NAACP that resulted in the 1942
agreen1ents were necessary and laudable, they were
not and are not sufficient. In response to an earlier
published version of this chapter, Cripps has pointed
to facts and figures that are signs of progress in black
representation in Hollywood;Jesse Rhines has recently
argued, however. that sin1ilar facts and figures repre-
sent a society still rafked by fundamental racial.
gender, and class injustices and irnbalances, thus indi-
cating a continuing need for independent film.~
The predictable effects of the 1942 agreements arc
analogous to the effects of the I 94 7 decision to sign
Jackie Robinson to the roster of the Brooklyn Dodgers
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
306 J. Ronald Green
that opened n1ajor league baseball to the assin1ilation
of black players. As Nelson George points out in 77,e
Death of Rhythm & Blues, that was "a major event in
the integration of America" and "now lies at the hean
of this nation's popular culture." He also points out.
however, that:
Unfortunately. not too many people cared that it n1eant
the end of Negro baseball and the dernise of a "naturally
integrated" black institution. Ask an older black ntan
about it and you'll be told sagely, ··That is the price you
have to pay for entry into the garne. l ook at the nu111ber
of black players ,vho dontinate Major League Baseball,
r11aking n1illions and beconting role: rnodds for tltl"
nation." Yet if, following the advice of Bob Woodward
and Carl Bl·nistein's Ocep Throat. ,ve follo,v the n1oney .
,ve sec that this trade-off. whilt:. on the surface great for
blacks. \\'as 111 reality an econontic steal fi,r bast'ball"s
u,vncrs.
George was drawing on the analob'Y of black baseball
to suppon his thesis that black n1usic had been co-
opted by the white owners of larger institutions, but
the same analogy applies even n1ore faithfully to the
co-optation of black filn1 talent by the 1942 agree-
111cnts betv.•een the NAACP and Hollywood film
con1panies. Hollywood, like baseball, had been lobbied
hard by blacks to open up, whereas black musicians
did not have to lobby the 111usic industry to have their
talents co-opted (and they were co-opted in a 111ore
underhanded way). As George 1nakes clear, the son
of institutional co-optation that unifies the three his-
torical exan1ples of this triple analogy has consequenc1:s
in t,vo related din1ensions - representational in1agina-
tion and econon1ic class:
Since llobinson ·s debut. blacks havl· dont· th<: san1c thin~
in Major Ll·agut· Baseball that tht·y havt· done in popular
n1usic entertain. 111akc l.1rge salaries. and g<"nerate nH1nt·y
for busint·sst·s that tunnel pn:cious little of it back into
bl.Kk conHnunitil'S. Tht·y fi:ed the drt·an1 111.1chine th.it
tells black youths th.11 entertaining - on .1 stagL' ,>r a hall
tidd !or a ,novi.: scrcl·nl - i, tht· ,urt·st " ·:iy to k·.1p r,KiJI
h.1rrier,. Llut ,vithout Jl·,t·s, to p,.i,ver. hl.Kks lost n1orl·
than tl1<:y gained t-co110111ir;1lly front intq~r.11ing M;1jor
lt·a!,'1.1<: Uasl·baU."
Perhaps Micheaux ·s greatest contribution. the one th.It
all critics have rt.'roguized.
•
is his estahlisluu ent ,111d
sucrt·ssful operation of a bbck tilru institution over an
Digitized by Google
extended period, a going concern analogous to pre-
integration black baseball. And no matter what one
thinks of Micheaux's actual filnis, what is not debat-
able is that they could not have been made any other
way - cenainly not through any arrangements approx-
in1ating the NAACP-studio agreen1ents of 1942.
Micheaux's institutional accon1plishn1ent - his ability
to tum out film after film addressing directly the
needs of an all-black audience - has not been repli-
cated since, though it is n1ore than half a century after
the 1942 agreements. K
A Knowledge Worth Having
The issue of twoness is in1ponant for understanding
Micheaux, race n1ovies, and Cripps's thesis about
then1. As DuBois noted, rwoness is not an enviable
state and the value of the knowledge of twoness in
no way just/fies the color line. The knowledge. however,
111ay still be valuable and its probable value justiti c:s
not only the study of Micheaax but the place of race
n1ovies in any canon that clai1ns to represent An1eri-
can cinen1a, or a cinen1a of An1erican society. bell
hooks cnakes a related point in discussing whiteness
in the black imagination, and Carol Clover n1akes an
analogous point about gender ambiguity in spectators
of n1oden1 horror fibns.~ A canon of such a cinen1a
would need to include representation of the dialectical
aspt:cts of An1erican hcgen1ony, including not only
Hollywood's role in that hegen1ony but the effect of
Hollywood hegen1ony on African-An1erican identicy.
Robert Stant considers this son of rwoness or \Vhat
ht' calls "relational vision" as an advantageous aspect
of a Bakhtinian approach to ethnic studies:
A Hakhtinian appro,1ch thinks ..fro,n the n1aq:in.,. ·· seeing
Native Atnl.'ricans. African Antericans and Hispanics. frn
t·x.1n1plc. not as intc:rt~t !,'Toups to be added on to a
prec:xisting plur:1lisn1. but rather a., being at the vt•ry con·
of tht· A111erican t·xperil.'ncc fr,)111 the beginning, carh
ofl,·ring ;111 ir1L·.1luahlc: .. dialob,iral angle" on the nationJI
expt·rie1Kt' .... A l.lakhtinian approach recognizt•s "" ,·pi.<•
tf111c,/,~\!i(,1/ c1d11c1111.~\!f (}ti rl,c part ,f t/1().,;t• whtl art· "l'l'''·sscd
,111,I 1/,rnJi.,,· /,ir11lr11r,1/. Tht, opprl'SS('d, hl'C;IUSt' they dr<.'
obligL·d hy cirru1n,1:111Ct'' .,nd the in1per.triVL'S of ~urvival
to kn,),v both th,· do111inan1 and the ntarginal culture.
ar,· idea/Ir 111,ir,·d to dt•rons1n1c1 tht• n1ystilications of thr
dornirunt group le111phasis addcdj . '"
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Twoness and the Film Style of Oscar Micheaux
Cripps has, in Slow Fade to Black, resolved the dilemn1a
of twoness solely by reference to Hollywood, thus
opting for assimilation. There is no evidence so far,
however, that Hollywood can handle controversial dif-
ferences of identity as significant as the color line,
economic class, patriarchal sexism, or sexual taboo.
Robin Wood's and Carol Clover's studies of sexuality
and gender an1biguity and repression in the horror
film nught see,n to suggest that Hollywood can
and does deal in a healthy way with difference and
denial; but, in fact, their theses ultin1ately reveal that
Hollywood's treatn1ents of gender "bending" leave the
prevailing gender relations intact, and that indepen-
dent, inexpensive, non-Hollywood fihns treat repressed
n1aterial n1ore directly. 11 Hollywood has certainly not
taken the lead in broaching, much less celebrating.
significant differences in society. That sort of leader-
ship in cinema n1ust con1e fron1 undercapitalized and
unassin1ilated independent and alternative cinen1as
such as race movies, documentary, and the avant garde.
C:ripps's answer to the dilemma - to rum away fron1
"underground" films - see,ns, therefore, inadequate. 11
If Cripps could, in S/01v Fade to Black (and again in
;\•faking M,n,ieJ Black), write off independent race
n1ovies by saying that black-produced cinema acqui-
esced in segregation, placed white cupidity off lin1its
as a then1e, rehashed the stereotypes for which
Hollywood had been blan1ed, set black against black,
and irnitated white movies, it is because he has accepted
the rhetoric and aesthetics of assin1ilation in Holly-
,vood. 1.1 The tem1 "aesthetic" refers to the standards
of beauty or sensual pleasure displayed or implied by
the discourse as evidenced in its style in relation to its
rhetoric. For exan1ple, if the "good guys" are virtually
ah,vays white and tall and are photographed fron1
below so that they look even taller and n1ore do1ni-
nant, and if they are also associated \\,jth "beautiful"
photography, then the association of these choices of
style with the rhetoric of "goodness" of the good guys
implies a standard of beauty that is associated positively
not only with tallness (and don1inance), but also with
whiteness itself. "Beauty" and whiteness, by ahvays
appearing together, in1ply each other. Stylistic choices
in the production of films are n1ade, consciously or
unconsciously, in the context of such n1utually inflect-
ing rhetorical and aesthetic fields; those fields n1ay be
complex or sin1ple, but they are always operative. All
of Cripps's specific criticisn1s of independent race
Digitized by Google
307
movies (listed above) are answerable. For exan1ple, it
is not fair to say that black-produced cinen1a "acqui-
esced" in segregation when the necessity to avoid
topics of integration was imposed by white censorship,
and when black audiences were the1nselves divided on
the benefits of integration - one could be "for" sepa-
ration without being "acquiescent" to segregation.
Race n1ovies did not "place white cupidity off-li1nits";
white cupidity was placed off-linuts by white boards
of censorship. Micheaux fought such censor boards for
years and still n1anaged to treat white oppression both
directly and indirectly in films such as Withi11 Our
Cates (I 920), Sy,11bol <?f tire (}11cc>nq11ercd (1920), 771r
Girl j,c>,11 Chicago (I 932), Birthright (I 938), and others.
So,ne race n1ovies n1ay have "rehashed" Hollywood
stereotypes of blacks, but son1e did not; and son1e race
1novies, such as Micheaux's, developed a cotuplex
critique of those stereotypes. If race n1ovies sometimes
"set black agJinst black," then those movies reflected
the reality of all-black- cast narratives as well as the
realities of the larger black comn1unity, which like any
com1nunity was unanin1ous on virtually no is_\ue. If
son1e race 111ovies "in1itated white movies," they did
so only to a greater or lesser degree. White movies
were the only n1ovies that existed; to the extent that
there was a cornmunity standard of cinema it was a
white standard. Even those filn1n1akers working against
that standard had to work with a legacy that was both
unavoidable and basically - because historically -
,vhite, To reject on the basis of white in1itation all
non-Hollywood cine,nas that used or referred to son1e
aspects of the H ollywood contributions to film style
would be to ignore the issue of hegemony and to
misunderstand son1e basic processes of culture such as
those discussed by Harold Bloom in 77,e A11xic1y •!f
b1fi11e11ce. 14
Twoness and Style
No existing Micheaux film looks n1uch like a ,vell-
111ade Hollywood film, and Cripps's initial intolerance
in Slo1v Fade to Black of the deviation in Micheaux's
films fron1 Hollywood style still in the I 970s, 1980s.
and even 1990s represents a generally negative or
uncertain attitude about M icheaux's accon1plishment.
Cripps has described the pervasive, typical mistakes
in Micheaux's style, and has sho,vn that Micheaux's
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
308 J. Ronald Green
Figure 31.1 White oppression L, Jddresscd u,
ducctcd by OscJr M1ch~aux
production company was aware of then1 b ut unable
to correct then1 bt:cause of the prohibitivt: expenst: of
hight:r shooting ratios. rt:ta kes, n1aster shots, and pro-
fessional t:diting. The apparatus of C ripps's own critical
assessmt:nt , however, ignores the contradi,tion inl1er-
ent in t\voness. At the beginning of his discussion of
Micheaux, Cripps has described the central dilt:nm1a
for Micheaux (and black-produced race n1 ovies) as the
"te1nptation co make 1nirror irnages of white n1ovics
[in which easel ... success itself nught be a false
god for N egroes." 15 Throughout che discussions on
Micheaux, Cripps uses the tcm1 "nurror in1ages" to
signify this dilen11na.
One Horn of a Dilemma
The no-win. 1nirror-i1nage dilerru11a in race 1novies
and in M icheaux ·s work remains unresolved in C ripps's
treat111e11t. Instead of holdi.ng up this dil<"nuna as a
stru ctural conrr:idiction (black succes~ ac imitating
white n10V1cs co111prises failure; success equals failure)
Digitized by Google
11 71/1111 Our G,urs (M1cheaux Film Corp .. 1'>20}. produc,·d and
that illu1ni11ates the struggles of black fil nunakers and
critics, C ripps has alte rnated in bis loyalties to v,ar d
each pole of the dilern111a. It remains difficult to
discuss Mjcht:atuc o r the phe1101neno n of race n1ovit>S
at all until sometlung is said about the possible cine-
1natic o utcomes of the dilc1nn1a of t\vo ness.
C ripps's critical stan ce urges assinillation ratht:r
than confrontation of the dilemn1a of black produc-
tion, a dilcnu11a in which a.ssi nulatio n ,vas half d1e
problt:111. H e regrets the lost opportunity for successful
black movie n1aking in H ollywood without positing
what that success utight 111t'.31'1 and ho w it n1ight
accoo1modate the dilenuna of t\voness previously
introduced . Furthem1orc, in his argument C ripps cas-
tigated criticisnts of M atthews and Ottley in tht: black
press that see n1 now ro have suggested rhe most
responsible approach to the dilcn1rna:
Roi l)tdcy. a major figu re an1ong black n e,vspaperrncn,
called forth even lc:<s precise obj<"ctions and scrded for a
rhctoric:,l broad r:Kial boostcris111:
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
- -
 Twoness and the Film Style of Oscar Micheaux
77,.. Green Pas1urcs will!,) no doubt, receive n1agnifi-
cent and glowing accounts in the Negro press .. . and
unhappily so for the Negro public .... Negro newspapers
on the whole have a false sense of values.... They seen1
to work front the pren1ise that anytime a Negro appears
in a play or picture which the ,vhites have produced it
shouJd be applauded regardless of its n1erits.... This
departtnent goes on record as feeling that Oscar
Micheaux, ,vith his inferior equipn1cn1. ,vould have pro-
duced a better picture. 1•
Ottley (here) and Matthews (elsewhere) insisted that
no matter what the technical and stylistic problenlS,
the only future for the production of black culture
was through black people, and the only future for
black filnts was through black filn1makers. What here-
tofore had been seen as technical problents and
mistakes in the production values of race movies
might then be seen instead as elen1ents of style and
texture, as for example the "rough" carving is now
understood in the sculpture of Elijah Pierce, or the
rough acting, dubbing, and general directing of n1any
of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's filn1s is understood as
integral to their artistic success:
No doubt (Fassbinder) wa~ temperamentally incapable of
working in any other way than he did, but thi~ is to say
that he was incapable of nuking anything but flawed
filn1s .... The advantage of setting a furious pace was that
no-one could get bored. and everyone was under tension,
especially the actors. The disadvantage was that there
would be a good deal of botching in every phase of
n1aking the fihn, from scripting 10 post-synchronising. 17
The criteria for "successes" and for failures would then
have to be derived from a culture of twoness - fro1n
the culture of the maker (whether rural or urban,
working- or middle-class, gay or straight), not front
the apartheid and assi1nilationist Hollywood industry.
Judging the Films
It is not necessary to assume that the conventions of
Hollywood cinema constitute the only valid basis for
narrative cinema. What would a "good" black cinen1a
look like, then, if it did not i1nitate classical white
cinema? Actually, though scholars such as Pearl Bowsc::r.
Mark Reid, bell hooks. Ed Guerrero, Jessie Rhines,
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309
and Clyde Taylor have provided answers to this ques-
tion, it should not be n ecessary to delineate qualities
of good black cine1na; students of world cinema are
fan1iliar ,vith n1any styles of narrative cinen1a other
than those of the classic Hollywood film. Many of
those fihns have successfully reached supportive audi-
ences, both n1ass and non-mass audiences such as
those who responded to Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet
Stllt'rtback 's Baadasssss Son~ ( 197 1). Sillt'rtback n1ade
n1oney as a black-produced independent film, but the
111ove1nent it spawned, called "blaxploitation," con-
sisted prin1arily of HollY'vood-produced filn1s. Such
co-optation suggests that the problen1 for black inde-
pendent producers lies not with their filnts or their
audiences, but lies in the machinery of distribution
and exhibition, an issue that Roy Annes en1phasizes
in his book on Third World cinen1a. 1w Black indepen-
dent filn1makers can and do 1nake movies in all sorts
of ways, just as black musicians, n1inisters, painters,
sculptors, and writers have created different kinds of
in1provisational music, oral jeremiad. visual art, and
narratives, all of which could be understood by their
own audiences and which were later celebrated by
Euro-centric audiences as well. The contribution of
these fomts to art, pleasure, and understanding has
often been the greater for their ethnic authenticity
and has come to be seen as diminished by any forced
concessions to classicism.
Since Micheaux did not necessarily assun1e
Hollywood standards, his fi!nts n1ay be based on
assumed or invented syntagmatics unknown in the
film industry. White cinen1a is important to Micheaux's
work, both positively and negatively, but it is not
determinant. Micheaux's style and production values
were appropriate to his circuntstances and can be
considered artistically limiting only in the way that
the super-refined style and the high production values
of Gone with the Wind ( 1939) are artistically limiting
in their own way.
The Issue of Assimilation
Micheaux's treatn1ent of racial or ethnic is.~ues has
received as 111uch disapprobation as his stylistic artistry.
When Cripps concluded that "race movies tended to
acquiesce in segregation, place white cupidity off-
lin1its as a then1e. rehash n1any stereotypt:<s .... St't
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
310 J. Ronald Green
black against black, and i1nitate white 111ovies, •· 1~ he
characterized these attributes as failures, at least in
Micheaux's filn1s. As bell hooks has pointed out,
however, Micheaux·s films i11te"ogated those issues.
an1ong n1any others."'' Holl)"vood movies themselves
certainJy could not have been relied on to deal with
those issues or n1ost of the other issues Micheaux
explored; it is equally i1nprobable that Hollywood's
content and style could ever reflect such sensitivity to
twoness and contradiction as do Micheaux's content
and style.
According to Neal Gabler"s thesis in ,111 En1pir1· <?(
TI1rir Otvu, Holl)"Vood was constructed aln1ost entirely
by i1nn1igrant~ who wanted desperately to assin1ilate
to the characteristics of the founding groups of Europe
and New England. Hollywood created an en1pire of
illusion that would do just that - tun1 in1n1igrants into
the i1nage of the power elite. the "New England-Wall
Street-Middle W est n1oney" - An1erican through the
ideals and aesthetics of Holl)"Vood movies. 11 The fact
that inunigrant Jews created the "White Anglo-Saxon
Protestant" cinen1a par excelle11ce n1ay see1n to contra-
dict any thesis about the in1ponance of ethnically
produced cinemas. It proves, however, very little in
itself. It suggests the tendency of a group in power -
such as white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in An1erica
- to be in1itated and flattered; it suggests me power
of such a do1ninant group to attract services fro1n
arnbitious sub-do1ninan t groups - such as i111rnigrant
Je,vs; and it exen1plifies a solid basis for the fears of
t hose critics who point out that even African-An1eri-
can cine111a often seeks to look white. Nevertheless,
the construction of an assimilationist Holl)"Vood style
by in1n1igrant Jews disproves nothing about the value
of cultural diversity and the need to encourage it.
Assimilation has had a strong econo111ic intpl·tus.
o,ving to the radical fragn1entation of the An1erican
labo r and consun1er rnarkets during the developrnent
of rnass production. The- f.1ctori es and urban centers
\Vl're attracting nc-,v ethnic groups all the tin1e, includ-
in~•
southern blacks ,vho were in the 111idst of their
' -
~C.ltl'St nugration nortl1,vard. l).W . Gritlith and
M icheaux ,vere getting into filn1111akinµ; at about
this tirne (c. 1908-18). H oll)"vood. itself Sl'eking a
dl·pc:ndable n1ass n1arket tor its filn1s, began trying ro
,1ssi1nilate the ne,v urban divl·rsity. In ordl•r to l·over
over the (sub~tantive) near-irnpossibility of such a job.
Holly,vood developed a (fonnal) style of gloss. illu-
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sionis1n, and closure that gave the appearance of a
con1n1on system of values for all Americans, an appear-
ance of uniry that undoubtedly played a part in
fomung a broad exclusionisrn intolerant of difference
and twoness.
Micheaux's sryle is son1etin1es better understood as
a retaining of earlier fihn traits fron1 before the advent
of glossy illusion ism than as a failed in1itation of white
assin1ilationist n1ovies. His style is n1ore closely related
to the glossing of a text (such as African-An1erican
life) than the glossing <>ver of a rough surface (such as
value differences an1ong whites). A non-assin1ilati ve
sryle that glosses a living struggle with twoness - a
nvoness that, as DuBois said, threatens the dark body
with "bein11: torn asunder" - can itself. as a style, bl·
expected to reflect the turn1oil of that struggle.
The Case of The Girl from Chicago
TI,c Girl .fr<,111 Cl,i<a_(!<> (1932) serves well as an exa111plc
of Micheaux·s non-assinulative "crooked-stick" style
partly because it is not one of his better films fron1
the point of view of conventional Hollywood styk·.
Since it is an extre,ne case. any din1inishmcnt of
disdain for it. or any overlooked values that can be
clain1ed for it, rnight strengthen the case for Micheaux "s
overall accomplishn1ent. In TI,r Girl _from Chi<,(\!<'.
Mary Austin is a middle-aged southern black ,von1an
,vho n1ns a boarding house in the sn1all t0\\'11 of
Uatesburg, Mississippi (ren1iniscent of the Patesvillt·
of The C,,1!i11rr Wo111a11, 1899, by one of Micheaux·s
favorite black writers. Charles Chesnutt). and \vishes
to send her sister north to seek her fortune as a sin~er: •
Austin's boJrding- house savin1:-,rs are all set aside tor
that purpose. When N o nna Shepard. the fen1ale lead
in the fihn. arrives in to,vn to take up her position as
a ne,v tt·achl·r, she stays at Austin· s boarding ho11Sl'.
T he boarding house is the setting for 111ost of tl1l'
action in the first half of the fihn, since it also ten1-
porarily houses the n1ale lead, Alonzo White. ,vho
eventually c.1pt11rc:~ the villain there. thereby saving
Nonna.
The tir.;t five 111inutt·s of the filn1 are co,npost·d of
sonic 311 short- .111d n1<·diu111-lcngth shots - averaging
about 1( I S<-conds each ,vith one take of about <,11
seconds - of disturbing <"Olltt·nt (peonage and poten-
tial rap<') Jnd of disturbing styll· (flagrantly discontinuous
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Twoness and the Film Style of Oscar Micheaux
Figure 31.2 77,r Girl from CMr<1.~•• (Miehe aux Film Corp., 1932) as an cx.uuplc of M1che,ux \ "crooked stick""
style. l'ro,luccd by Oscar M,r hcaux
1nacching. expression1st1c shooring, so1ne awk,vard
blocking and acti11g and son1e practically con1ic, bur
also illusion-shattering audio glitches). Then there
occurs a "sequenCl' shot" (a n entire sequence of"shocs"
in a single take, ,vith no edit~ - a ''long take") of over
three nunutes in "vhich Mary Austin, in n1ediun1 shot,
stand~ beside her sister \Vho. seated in the foreground ~
at the piano. perfon11s an entire song. The transition
to this shot (the lo ng take) is accented by a strong
piano tone that is struck a fraction of a beat after the
cut that begins th e long take. Thus. the viewer springs,
via syncopation. into this sequence-shot scene out of
a previous scene that has been peculiarly and distu rb-
ingl y fragn,ented by c-diting. Mary Austin's sistc-r then
sings "Blue Lagoon" in an i1npres~ive. bur in1perfect,
light- operatic vo ice. Partly because- the recording
quality is poor, the vo ice sccn1S to break up occasion-
ally, and the hun1ble. upright piano so und~ tinny. The
w eak, sing.le-point lighting and the hard, live acoustics
see1T1 consistent \Vith the lo"v production values a11d
discontinuines in editin g and ,vith the an1ateurish.
decla111:1tory style of ac ting of the previous scene .. The
effect produced is bound ro be excn1ciat1ng or inap-
Digitized by Google
311
propriately con1ic ro anyone used only to H ollywood
production qualities.
Yet for a vie,ver syn1parhetic co the econon,ic
status of the characters (characters for w hom the
viewer is 1neant to care, and for \vhon1 there is no
narrative reason not to care) this shoe sequence appears
realistic an d is appealing. There is both hope a11d
pathos in the desires of t he two sisters. emotio11S that
arc: articulated in the "grain·• of the uncrai11ed but
beautiful voice. and in the "grain of the apparan,s"
ch rough which that vo ice is presented. T he "grain·• of
Micheaux's style is walogous in son,e ,vays to the
grain of Panzera's voice, and the polished and perfect
style of Hollywood is analogous to Fischer-Oieskau 's
voice, as characterized in R.oland Barthes' fa1nous
essay, "The Grain of the Voice. " 21
There is integrity in the unity of ri111e. place,
and action that secs this song apart as a viE,'llerte for
spcci;1] appreciatio n and as a stylistic have n fro,n th e
surrounding "confusion." The title ("Blue Lagoon")
and theme of the ~ong reinfo rce rhe stylisti c effect
o f haven. The hopes and fears in this scene are stylisti-
cally represented in the contrasts: che confusion of
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
312 J. Ronald Green
the previous editing versus the unity of the long take;
the roughness of the audio recording and of the
untrained voice versus the smoothness of the vocal
talent and the self-confidence of the singer. These
stylistic representations, whether conscious or not, are
appropnate.
Even though there is pathos as well as hope, the
scene is not pathetic. Pathos does not dominate, since
Micheaux's audience would have been aware that
sonic black singers n1uch like Mary Austin's sister (as
,veil as writers, dancers, musicians, and con1posers)
,vere "n1aking it" in Chicago and Harlem at the tin1e.
Jazz, blues, jazz dance, and the Harle1n Renaissance
,vere conunon knowledge in 1932. In the second half
of The Girl fro111 Cliica,(!o, n1ost of the primary and
secondary characters, in fact, move to Harlen1. The
line "Honie to Harlen1!" uttered by Alonzo in celebra-
tion of the n1ove fro1n Batesburg to Harlen1 is a
reference to the fan1ous novel of that title by one of
the leading lights of the Harle111 renaissance, Claude
McKay. Many of those who succeeded during the
renaissance period were not "New Negroes" or
eastern-educated "dickty"-style ("high-toned") anists,
and many of those who were at least panly dickty
were also loyal to their humble origins in the South,
as was Zora Neale Hurston, for exan1ple. Mary
Austin's sister's song of the blue lagoon is more dickty,
cenain.ly, than Bessie Smith's or Billie Holiday's songs,
but not more dickty than some of Marion Anderson's
or Ethel Waters'; and the very successes of people like
Smith, Holiday, Anderson, and Waters would have lent
credibility to the Austin fa1nily's hopes. Micheaux's
scene represents the hopes and fears of the n1igration
realistically, which Hollywood had never done.
There are several possible objections to this scene.
It is possible to object that the sister's voice is not a
good one, that it breaks in places - but so did the
voices of Louis Annstrong and Bob Dylan, although
their styles were n1ore ironic. Armstrong and Dylan
were not always ironic. but to the extent that they
,11ere, it was pan of what made then1 great. Mary
Austin's sister. however, is not n1eant to represent
greatness - she represents hope and pathos, and she
n1ay tun1. out to be unfonunate enough to learn
irony too.
It is possible 10 object that the shot is too dark.
Uut the darkness of the shooting in TI1e Girl .frc,111
(]1frc1g,, Sl·rves its aesthetic purpo~e in representini-: an
Digitized by Google
interior scene in a depression-er-a, lower-midd.le-class
house of An1erican Victorian or southern gothic
oribiins, a house that would typically be dark, con1-
partn1entalized in small rooms, and run down. Its
lighting loosely resen1bles the lighting in cenain paint-
ings by Micheaux's contemporaries, Tho,nas Han
Benton, Grant Wood, Edward Hopper, and Charles
Burchfield. For Micheaux to have lit this scene strongly
and fron1 the classical three points would have given
an inappropriately glossy effect. Had Micheaux had
the money to shoot "correctly," the scene 111ight have
changed stylistically front realistically oppressive to
reassuring, n1ediocre, conventional realisn1. In avoiding
such conventionality, Micheaux's work is a significant
but overlooked precursor to Italian neo-realis111, which
changed the course of film style in the late 1940s.
It is possible to object that Micheaux's shot is
grainy. Yet shots in cine-n1a verite- and direct cinen1a.
sen1i-docun1entary, neo-realisn1, new wave, and under-
ground styles are often grainy. A.II those styles are
accepted (though they were not originally) as niature,
purposeful and effective. They becan1e accepted stylis-
tically as appropriate to the circuntstances of their
production and to their representational systerns, ont·e
those systen1S were understood. The grain in Micheaux ·s
shot reflects lower-n1idd.le- class tawdriness and n1at-
erial thinness, approximating the econonlic status of
the (diegetic) boarding house and of the (real-Iii~)
filn1's producer. Micheaux's interiors are rcnuniscent
of the Farm Security Adn1i1listration (FSA) photo-
graphs of the southern poor (those of tenant fam1ers,
for example, by photographers Walker Evans and
Russell Lee). The content represented in Micheaux is
lower nliddle class instead of "din" poor - Mary
Austin's boarding house is plain and run down, but
not diny and falling apan like the FSA tenant fann
houses. The style of Micheaux's shots is closer to the
production style and aesthetics of his subjects than
Evans's and Lee's style is to the style and aesthetics of
their subjects, and thus Micheaux's subjects arc less set
otI e111bossed, or foregrounded by the style of their
repreSl'ntation. Micheaux 's dark, grainy shots look like
thl' faded, halftone newspaper and magazine an that
decorates the sharecroppers' houses in Evans' and Lee's
photographs. Ev;111s and Lee reproduced those share-
croppers· interiors, but they represented those often
111essy, poveny-stricken interiors through the artists·
styles of photography, which \\'ere often elegant and
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 Twoness and the Film Style of Oscar Micheaux
well-produced. Micheaux as a producer, however, \Vas
n1uch closer to the econon1ic status and the n1essy style
of his lower-class subjects, or to the respectable (rather
than refined) values of his n1iddle-class ideals, than
Evans and Agee \Vere to the status and styles of their
subjects.
It is possible to object that the piano in this
sequence shot is tinny and out of tune and is pre-
sented as such without irony, thus beconung ludicrous
- yet the piano in one of Benny Caner's jazz groups,
"Benny Caner and His Swing Quintet," is tinny and
out of tune and is not used ironically. The instrun1ents
in Caner's "Waltzing the Blues" and "Jingle Bells"
sound, in relation to earlier jazz, like the "original
instrun1ents" n1oven1ent of Gustav Leonhardt and
Nikolaus Hamoncoun in classical rnusic today. A
review of one of the n1ajor recording projects of the
original-instrun1ents 1noven1ent points to son1e criti-
cisrn of that 111ove111ent that is rerniniscent of the
criticisrn of race rnusic and race 111ovies' a111ateunsn1
and inexpensive production values:
even sy111pathetic scholars t'ould find the Leonhardt-
Han1oncourt approach disconn:rting. what ,vith its
clipped non-legato articulations. its rhythn1ic alterations
and dislocations, its easily satirized dynarni<' bulgt-s. its
bn1squdy punctuated recitatives. its flippant ten1pos.
not to n1cntion the tiny fon·c<, the w een and sickly-
<ounding boy sopr.1no soloists. above aU the recakitrant.
so1netin1es ill-tun,·d "original instru1ncnts. "
Sorne \\'Crtc do,vnright indii.'Tlant at the Jos.< of tradi-
tional scak· and ,vt·ight. Th<' venerable n1usicolo1-,j<1 PJul
Henry Lani;: blasted the "frail pcrfornunccs ,vith inaJc-
quattc cns,·,nbks."
In defense of the original- instrun1ents n1oven1ent. the
~an1e rev1c,v savs:
,
Mr. Han1oncourt's stylc has takt·n on attributtcs that
"pc:rtorn1a11,·c prJrtic,•" alone could nevt•r havt· vouch -
safrd. They can only hav,· co111t' fi-0111 those "conttc111ptihlt·"
Lutheran tt·xt~ .ind their 1111acco11111H1d.11ing pokn1ic. His
incn·Jsingly hort.Hory Jnd unbea11titi1l \\".lY of pt·rti,r111-
ing Bach rt',1d1t'd ;1 p,·.1k .1bout half\vay throup;h th,·
stcrics. anJ the 111t,·rv,·ni11~ dtccadt· has don,· nothin~ to
• •
ksscn its p<l\\'t'r to slHKk - or di<p;ust. If you «·<'k cont.1ct
,vith the t·s, t·nti;1I Clad1 at ti1II hidtcous strt·n~th , Mr.
•
l-lan1011co11rt 's p<'rt,,nnancl', rl'111ai11 the only . place
,,
to go ...
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313
Analogously, if you seek contact with the essential
African Ainerica at full "hideous" (unwhitewashed)
strrngth, Benny Caner's style of jazz and Micheaux's
style of race n1ovies are "the only place to go."
There is no doubt about Benny Caner's ability to
produce more polished n1usic. since he has spent
111uch of his career writing n1usic and arrange111ents
for very srnooth orchestras, Holly,vood filn1s, and
rnainstrearn television progra111s and con1mercials. His
choice of tinny original instrun1ents for son1e of his
recording sessions was consciously judged by him to
be aesthetically legiti111ate and it resulted in son1e of
his most engaging work. Micheaux's perfom1ers and
instrun1ents were also legitin1ate, in spite of the fact
that Micheaux's choices n1ay have been less intention-
ally aesthetic because they were n1ore severely bound
by economic and cultural constraints. In that sense, his
filn1s are con1parable in style to the painting and
sculpture of the great "outsider" or "self-taught" artists
of his era, such as Grandtna Moses ( 1860--1961 ),
William Edn1undson (c. 1870-1951 ), Horace Pippin
(1888-1946), Elijah Pierce (1892-1984), Willian1
Hawkins (1895-1990), Sister Genrude Morgan
( 1900-80), Nellie Mae Rowe (1900-82), and numer-
ous others.!• The question of whether Micheaux had
the talent of a Benny Caner or an Elijah Pierce
re1nains open, but is not relevant to this point of stylt·.
The evaluation of Micheaux's acco111plishn1ent has
hardly begun, and fundan1ental valuative criteria
rcn1ain obscure.
After Mary Austin's sister's song ends, the sequence
shot continues with Austin congratulating her sistt'r
on the perfection of her perfom1ance and larnenting
the lack of financial resources that prevt'nt Mary frorn
sending her sister to Chicago to pursue a caret'r.
Austin strikes her open hand with her fist and says,
" If I only had a few more boarders, I could soon send
you." Mary Austin's references to her own lack of
financial resources can be understood to express the
anguish of any "producer" or n1anager of talent - such
as Mary Austin is in relation to her sister, or such as
Michcaux hin1self is as a film producer. Micheaux ·s
production values and style in this shot can be read
as part of a reprt'sentation of the desire for financial
nit·ans: that is. Micheaux has prest'nted Mary Austin
as h,1ving a production problern sinlilar to his own.
and thus tht· production values and style of the filn1
bt·cornc tht'rnsclvt's a contributing then1e in the
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
314 J. Ronald Green
narrative. The question of Micheaux's rough style
becon1es itself a the1ne treated by the film, as does the
struggle with twoness, inherent in the style of all race
111ovies, but absent fron1 the style of the Hollywood
filn1s produced for black audiences.
The the1nes of production financing and represen-
tations of the struggle with twoness in this film n1ight
be pursued along avenues such as the following:
(1) There are several ntore set-piece singing sequences
in the filn1, two of thent in the boarding house in
the first half of the film. th e others in nightclubs in
Harlen1 in the second half. Each such sequence set
in the boarding house is presented in a style different
front the preceding one. Those three sequences
111ight be understood as a progression in which the
stylistic changes and the narrative meanings constitute
a developn1ent of underlying thentes of the struggle
,vith twoness and with uplift. In these three sequences,
the style becomes progressively more upscale but
also n1ore fraginented. The intercurting becon1es very
confusing, the rnatching of the eyeline vectors of
glances becomes cornplex and unorthodox.
(2) The direct glance is used with poignancy at
several points of the narrative. When Alonzo and
Nonna declare their feelings for each other and con-
spire to keep their relationship secret, they look at the
can1era. When they discuss Liza Hatfield's lover of
the second half of the fihn , the nun1bers-racket
111agnate, Gon1ez. during the 'rupture' in Liza's song
(this scene is discussed below), they refer to hint as
furtive. While en1phasizing the term "furtive," they
speak directly to the carnera. These direct glances n1ay
be seen as a representation of direct speech, of integ-
rity and good faith, through a sin1ple. pseudo-theatrical
address to the audience. They can also be seen as part
of a style that is less illusionistic and glossy than that
of Hollywood, that does not stitch the in1plied viewer
into the narrative through "furtive" continuity editing.
Even if these glances toward the camera or "audience•·
are unconscious or unwilled by the filn1maker, even
if they are "n1istakes," they have a consistency of
pattern that constitutes a breach of illusionisnt, an
i111provisation that tend to advance Micheaux's the111es
and represent his enunciative directness. They repre-
Sl'nt an attitudl' toward n1aking fihn and an address
t<nvard filn1 audiences that is fundan1entally differen t
fro111 the classical. :in :ittitude that is not so 111uch anti-
illu~ioni~tic as a-illusioniqic.
Digitized by Google
(3) The whole production, so to speak, rnoves to
Harlen1 in the n1iddle of the 1novie. This might be
considered a serious flaw in the film. because the dis-
placernent to the North seenis to hack the narrative
in two, and the Harlem story becomes a seemingly
gratuitous second beginning for all the characters.
Some story lines are tied off completely, while others
are taken up again later. The extreme and messy break
is not gratuitous. however, but is integral in ways
related to both the theme of twoness and the thente
of production financing. John Russell Taylor argues in
a si111ilar way in defense of the unity of Satyajit Ray 's
filn1, Aparajito (111e U11va11quished, 1957), whose title.
interestingly enough, recalls Micheaux's first novel.
171e Co11q11est, and whose narrated struggles resen1ble
those of Micheaux's characters and his "crooked-
. k" Styl e:
StlC
Ev<·n 111any sy111pathe1i, cntKs fed that j.--tp,1mjir.•I is
brokc:n-backed and lacking in unity ... and that :It b<'<t
it 111akcs formal senSl' only as a hinge bet\veen the r-.vo
flanking filn1s !of the Apu trilogy). I cannot 31:,'T<'l' ,vith
this ... What gives unity to it, despite its appan:11t brrak i11
tire middle, when Apu and his n1other return 6-0111 13enares
to the country ... is the continuing theme of Apu's rcl.1-
tions with Sarbojaya, and the tug between education .ind
ne,v experience on one lund and traditional ,vays of lite
on the otl1..-r. i ; (cn1phasis added)
In the case of The c;;,/ j;,,,,, C/1ica,i:,1 the break in the
111iddle represents the great ntibrration itself, which
broke apart black fantilies and societies forever. That
n1igration continued during the Depression (,vhen
11,e Girl from Chica,~o was 111ade) when thousands of
a111bitious African Antericans ntoved from the agrar-
ian, rural, poorly capitalized South to the industrial.
urban, well-capitalized N orth. Like Ray's rural people.
Micheaux's southerners went to northern cities to get
jobs. In the tern1s of the claims of this study about
Micheaux's discourse on production values. such
n1igrations can be sct·n as related to production. The
job- set•king ,,·.1s literally an act of personal and house-
hold financing; and the seeking of fortunes by artists
and entrepreneurs ,vere searches for production oppor-
tunities and corporate financing. Mary Austin and her
sister. as ,veil as Alonzo and Norn1a, are an1ong the
characters in 171£· (;;rt frt1111 C/ricago who go north to
"retinance·· their personal and productive lives.
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Twoness and the Film Style of Oscar Micheaux
(4) There an: several production numbers in the
second half of the filn1, the most in1portant of which
features the girl from Chicago herself, Liza Hatfield,
.is the lead chanteuse of a jazz band. Liza Hatfield
represents the "wrong" approach to the twoness
problem and to production values and style, in con1-
parison with the "right" approach represented by the
earlier, n1ore an1ateurish "production nun1ber" in
the boarding house (discussed above). Narrative anti-
cipation builds around Liza's production nun1ber as
the film's n1ale lead, Alonzo White, in conversation
'I.Vith Nom1a, calls Liza exotic and strange, partly
because Liza is reputed to be returning from a suc-
cessful career in Paris and is of unknown
African-An1erican origin. Liza's production number is
ten1porally interrupted by a cutaway from the lead-in
rnusic to another long discussion of her by Alonzo
and Nonna at their nightclub table. The cutaway is
the kind of tirne-extending, non-continuity edit found
in the na'ive style of early fihns such as Edwin S.
Porter's TI,c Li_(e ,~( a11 Am1'.rica11 Fircn1a11 (1903) and in
St·rgei Eisenstt:in 's (non-na·ive) avant-garde style of tht:
I 920s. When Alonzo's and Nom1a·s discussion ends
and we retun1 to the production number, the n1usic
continues fron1 tht: san1e point we left it, tht: timeline
of the production nun1ber having bt:en suspended.
The scene then continues frorn there as a long take
without furtht:r interruption. The song, "Love is a
Rhapsody," is intended to be seductive and polished.
Although the production nurnber recalls Mary Austin's
sister's perfom1ance in son1e ways - it is a long take
of a fernale vocal perfom1ance - Liza's nurnber is
carefully distinguished frorn Mary's sister's. Since Liza
turns out to be the central, and eponyn1ous, problen1
in the filn1, her relation to explicitly high production
valut:s - those of Paris and of the Radiun1 Club \vhere
she sings in Harlern. higher production values by far
than thost: of the good characters in the boarding
houst: - sugge~ts a dctinite attitudt: toward the issues
Notes
W .E. ll . I )ulloi,. -,111· S,,,,f, ,:( Hlc1ck l'c•fk. in ·nirr<' :\it;~'•' Cf,1;5ic5
(N,·w York : Avon. l'Jh5). pp. 2 14-15.
2 Tho111.1> Cripp<. Sf,,,,, /'.1d,· 1,, Hf,,.-k (N~w York: ( lxford
U111v,·r,,1ry Pre,,. 1'>77).
J Do11.1ld Uo!,!k·. ' / ~tu,,\·, ( ;,¾,u J , .\/11/,111,,c'.~. ,\l,unmir.< (,-, H1uk.'.{Nt·w
York : Vik.inµ, Jt»7J): D.1mt..•I J. lc.·.1b. J,',,,,,, S,uulw /(I s,,,,..,.\p,11fr:
Digitized by Google
315
of production financing for African Americans strug-
gling with twoness and uplift. The glossier production
number, though it is enjoyed by the protagonist,
Alonzo, and is n1eant for the enjoyn1ent of Micheaux 's
fihn audience, is nevertheless located explicitly in a
realm of villainy, furtiveness, and seduction.
Conclusion
Micheaux surely did not intend all the rougher aspects
of his style explicitly in the ways suggested above, but
his style is nonetheless appropriate to and worthy of
his situation and his thernes and issues. That in itself
indicates that his accomplishment ,nay have been
greater than has been recognized. Micheaux's style has
served important then1es, such as the financing of
African-American culture, and has provided a cornplex
but worthy approach to the dilenuna of twoness.
Micheaux has represented the hope for, but also thr
dangers of, assimilation. He has cornpared the hopes
of one an1a1e11r singer and the accomplishments of one
profcssio11al singer, and has incorporated ideas about the
production and stylistic values of each. The relatively
high financing and stylistic values are associated with
Liza Hatfield, a virtual prostitute; the lower production
values are associated with the hopes of a character
with undeveloped talent, but with personal integrity.
Micheaux associated his own underdeveloped style
and personal integrity with both these n1odes, as a
hope, and a fear. He 111ight have liked to have been
able to assirnilate hirnself into "high" aspects of the
An1erican culture, but he represented such assin1ilation
as dangerous, as well as attractive, for African An1eri-
cans. The idea of a da11,1!ero11s attractio11 is a dilen1n1a. It
is but one reflection of the struggle with twoness in
Ati-ican- Arnerican uplift, a struggle ernbodied in a
style "whose dogged strength alone keeps it fro111
21
being ton1 asunder. " '
·nu· 81,,rL· [;'.\ 'Jlfn't'IJ<t' ;,, A·fo1fo11 J>itturt·s (Boston : Houµht(HI
Mifllin. 1975).
4 Cropp<. Sf,,,,. huli-, p . .1.
5 Cripp<. Sf,.,,, hid,-, p . 7.
I, C ripp,. "()sc,1r Mir h,·.m,c Tlw Story C ontinues: · in l)i,1w.1r;1.
Hf,,.-k .-t111.-ri1,111 Ci11r111,,. pp. 74-5: J,·ss,· Ali,:ernon Rhin,·,. Hf,,,l:
Original from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
316 J . Ronald Green
Fi/111/11·1,itr A·/1111,y (New Bnmswick. NJ: 1996). pp. K3. 86.
•nd p,ssi111.
7 Nelson George. ·n., ~at/1 ~{ Rlrythm £;- Ul,u·s (New York:
l'Jntheon. 19!!8). pp. 57, 58.
K A, this m.anuscript w.s nearing completion. Robc,rt L. John,on.
the chaim1a11 and founder of Black Entertainment Television
announced a plan "'to start a venture to make low-bud~"-·t
tiln1s .,,;th black sun. financed and producc,d by Afucan-
Arnerican, and aimed lari....-ly at the black urban muket" (see
Geraldine F•brik.1nt. "'BET to Establish a Filn1 Un.it Aimed at
llbrk Urban Market,"" The New Yori< "limrs. July 10,
1998).
9 bdl hooks. "'Repr<~tations of Whitcnl.'S-, m the Black
lnugin.rion." in her 8/..,k I.,..,ks; Carol J. Cluver. ,\11·11.
IVi,111,·11, a11d ClwitHJu~: Cn,drr i11 tltt Af,,drnr Ho""' Film
(Princeton, NJ : Princeton Univcnity P«·ss. I 992).
Io Robert Sum. ""lhkhtin. Polyphony. and Ethni,·I Racial
Rcpr=·mation," in Lester D. Frirdnun (c<l.). U11sprak,1blr
/m~rs: /;t/mfrity a111/ tlor Amm,a11 Ci11rma (Urbana: Univcniry
of lllinoi, Pre«. 1')91). pp. 25~~1.
11 Clovt.~r. ( ,'h,1i11.<,1w$: Robin Wood. H,,lfyu,,c,,I fu1,n 1'irtnam 1,1
Rra_~,111 (New York : Columbia Univ,•r<rry Pre"· I '>Kl>).
1.2 Thi, ar!-,"llllH"nt i, addressed to Slou• Fudr. Cripp, n·vised hi,
""·,sn1cnt of indepc:ndent film in his en<uing book. B/,>tk l'ilm
,,; G,·11ri·. which «·cognizcs spedal valu,-s in some of those
··t:,,k·d"' underground blark films. Cripp<. how,·vcr, substan-
tially rt·tun1s to th..- argument of S/,,,,. l'adt in his 1nost rec..-nt
hook. A1aki,i~ Afovirs Bliuk. Sec J. Ron,ld Gn·en. '"The
Rcemcrg,·ncc of ~c.u M icheaux: A Ti1nrline and Uibl.io-
gnphir Essay:· in Pearl Bowsc:r. Jan,· ( ;aines. and Charles
Musser (t·ds.). <Js,ar ,Wi<hta11x and Hi1 Cird,·: tlfri,an-Amman
l'i/11111111ki1i~ <1ml Raft Cintma of tht Si/nil l;ra (UloominK[on,
IN: lndi•n• University P« -ss. 2001). pp. 211 - 27. for further
discns<ion of Black Him a.< c;,.,,.._
1.l The tenn "'rhctoric .. n,fers to the tendency of don1inant di,-
cour..c, (such a< Hollywood"s) or opposition.ti disc:ou""' (,urh
JS uce ,novies in relJtion to Hollywood) to construct argu-
Digitized by Google
men ts. either direcdy or indirrcdy. For cxa111plc. if the ··good
guy,·· in Holly...,·ood movies are vinu..Uy alway, wh11e •nd the
'"bad b'Uys"' include whites but also people of color, then the
rhetoric of the discoune of Hollywood movie, c,n b,· ,ccn "
'"pro- white.·• In distinguishing rhetoric from "'nan,r•I r.n·· or
"'n·aliry,"' it is assumed that in realiry not all people of ,·olor
are "bad"' and that son1r people of color are ··b•ood, .. so the
choice not to indud..- those .spec13 of reality in a dis.·ouf'S<"
ber on,cs rh..-torical. whether intentionally so or 1101. If. in
Holly...,•ood cinen1a. the trair... of "'rightne,,· or ··compctcncc··
arc n-servcd ovt'rwhdtningly for nule char•rt,·rs while the
tnirs of bring wrong or incompetent (or merely suppomv,·)
art• «·served for won1cn, then the rhetoric of the disc:ounc of
Hollywood n1ovics can be dee111ed '"patriarchal...
14 H•rold Uloom. '/111· tlu.irirty ,,[ l1!/111e11,c (New York: ()xford
Universiry Pre~,. 1973).
15 Cripps. S/,,,,, Fadr. p. 172.
16 Cripps. Slow F..Jr. pp. 260- 1.
17 Ronald Haynian. l'asshi11df1: l'ilm 11,faktr (New Yori.:: Simon and
Schuster, I <JK-1). p. 138.
Ill R oy Anncs. '/7,ir,/ ll'orld l'ilm .\f,1/.:i11.~ and tire II rst (Ucrkeky:
Uni,·~~it)· of Califon1ia l't<'SS, 1'>>17).
1\I C ripps. Slow l'adr. p. 6.
2(1 bell hooks. "'Mi,· hcaux: Celebrating Bbck.n,-s, •., B/,>tk Arnm<Jn
l.iterarurt l'omm .25, no. 2 (Sumn1er 1991), pp. 351-{~).
21 Neal Gabler. 1111 c mpin· ef 77,eir Own: How tlrr Jru~ l11vr11trd
Hollywood (N,·w York: Crown Publi<h<'n. 1988). p. S.
,, In Roland Barthcs. lm~-1,fusi<• Trxt, c,d. and tr:uu. Stc,phcn
Heath (New York: Hill and Wang. 1977).
23 Richard Taruskin. "'Facing Up. Fin.ally. To Bach's I.lark Vision.""
Nru1 Yon.- 'fimrs. Jan. 27. 1991. pp. H25, H28."
24 See Muse-um of American Follr. An. ~if- TauJlhl tlnists o( t/tr
20,I, Cnin,ry: An llmmca,r Anthology (San Fr.u1ci,;co: Chro,ud,·
Book.<. 19'18).
25 John Russdl Taylor, in Richard R oud (ed .). (:iMmu: ii Crili•
,al Dilrio,1ary (New Yorl: Viking, 19811). vol. 2. p. 817.
26 l>uUois. Souls. p. 215.
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 32
Spike's Joint
S. Craig Watkins

S. Craig Watkins teaches in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of

Texas at Austin. His publications include the book Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture and
the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement. This reading is excerpted from the chapter on Spike
Lee in his book Representing Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (1980).
With the Success of Do the Right Thing (1989) and several subsequent films, Lee has been
instrumental in opening up the film industry to greater participation by people of color. Here
watkins explores how Lee's films seek to regain control of the representation of African-
Americans in popular cinema. Not unlike Green's approach to Micheaux in the previous
reading, Watkins locates Lee's authorial style in its differences from the hegemonic, white
style of classic Hollywood cinema.

Stylizing the Cinematic Apparatus aesthetic organization of classical fihn. Moreover, as I

discuss below, the more expressive fonns of authorship
Check thl' technique. create a very different film-viewing experience for
Eric B a11d Rakim' spectators.
The classical Hollywood cinenia is the n1ost influ-
ential model of filnmiaking practice in the world. This
Spike Lee· s varying approaches to lilinn1ak.ing and the panicular mode defines the characteristics and aes-
techniques that he e111ploys are especially stylized. thetic codes that nomu.lize the an of filmmaking in
Like n1ost filnm1akers, Lee struggles to create a signa- An1erican cinenia. In truth, the narrative structure.
ture style that differentiates his fihns front others. In camera work, and editing in the cinen1a have adhered
the course of his conm1ercial fihnmaking career, he to essentially the same rules throughout the history of
has incorporated an array of filnunaking repenoires, n1oden1 An1erican filnunaking. The classical n1odel
demonstrating in the process a tendency to resist rigid refers to a patten1 of representational nonns that have
adoption of the classical fonns of popular fihn produc- evolved over time. shifting now and then in relation
tion and narration. Lee ·s stylization of the apparatus to technological, organizational, and social changes but
constitutes a fom1 of authorial expressivity. This dis- nevenheless retaining n1any of its core features. 1
tinctive approach to directing cinema occasionally In a rather infom1ative essay, Peter Wollen outlines
intrudes upon the filnunak.ing process by interrupting, the central characteristics of classical cine111a and what
1
violating, and subvening son1e of the nonns and con- he posits as its antithesis, countercine1na: The values
ventional n1odes of representation that don1inate the and techniques of the latter, according to Wollen.

S. C:r.11J,: \1.;',atl: im ... Sp1lt.··,. Jm111 .. it..:·xn:rpt), rr, 15'J-i,l, froiu r h. ~ of Rff"''·'""'"~I? Hip H1•p C:ultw,· ,md thr f'r,1,/uitii>11 t,f 0/JtJ.: <:i11rm,1 (Ch1t·.1go .mtt L.t..:,r1don: U111-
n·l'try of Ch11:.1t,:,.> Prt•~,. l 1NK). i: 1998 tw S. C:r.u~ 'IJ/ ,ukm'-. Rt•pri11rc:"<l by pt•nni ..,1t)n of tht' ;iuthor :md Tht' U111,·t·r'\1t\' of C:h1c.,f:O Ph.'""·

Original from
Digitized by Google UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
318 S. Craig Watkins
Figure 32. 1 Spike Lcc.-·s Alalro/m X (Wamccr Bros. 1992): Sdf-consc1ous auth or..h,p w1th111 convc,ntional
narr:iovc fonn. Produc..-d by Marvm W o rth and Sp,kt> Lee
o ppose the o rthodo:\)' of the fon11er. A close exa,nina-
tion o f Lee·s filnunaking sryle suggescs that he
srra tegicall y incorpo rates son1e of the elern ents defined
by Wollen as part o f the countercinen1a filn1making
practi ce. What are s0111e of che ways in "vhich Lee
n·sists che nonns and values chat typicall y govern the
production of the classical paradig111? First, it is in1por-
tant co note. however, that, li ke 1nost fihnn1akers ,vho
n1akc fr·ature- length filn1s for theatrical distribution,
Lee fun ctions ,nostly 1vi1/,i11 the nom1s that regulate
the production of popular fihn . For in~tance. his por-
tra yal of M alco hn X adhered to 111a11y of the basic
rules an d conventions that structure che H o ll)"vood
biographical picture. But it is equally in1portant to
nott: that the filnu11akt'r has also co111bi11cd expe ri -
mt'nta l and nonconventional rnechods of cinernatic
authorship in so111e o f his ,nose 111en1orable ,vo rk.
The classical cinen1a paradigrn privileges the notion
of tra n~pa rcncy over foregro unding. Wh ereas the logic
of transparency atten1pts co o b~c ure the conscrucced-
ne<s of the ficti onal , vorld represenred on-screen.
foregrounding. conver;ely, atte111pt, to 111.ake the con-
struction of th e fih11 wo rld 111ore explici t. M o~t 111ovies
produced by the H oll y,vood nia chin e are gov,.-rned
Digitized by Google
THELONIOUS
DINAH WASHI ~
ONE 'WEEK ONL
by the notion of realisn1. a transparent approach to
fihnn1aki11g. Discussing the realis111 sryle in A111erican
po pular filn1 culture, tiJn1 scholar Louis Gi:i nnetti
\\'ntes: " [Wle rarely no tice the style in a realistic
1novie; the artist tends co be self-effacing. Such filn1-
n1aker< are n1 o re concerned with 111l,at's being sho,vi1
rather than ho\v it is n1anipulated. The ca,nera is used
co nservatively. It's essentially a recording n1echanisn1
that reproducl·~ the surfa ce of tangible objects ,vith as
little conunentary as possi ble . . .. The realistic cinenu
specialize~ in art that co ncea.l~ art." 4
To be sure. Lee's cinema tic politics ha ve never
invested fi nnJy 111 the notion that he \\•as presenting
spectators a no nparti ~an. objective vie\v of the ,vorld.
In face. his intenti ons have bct·n. in part. co stake out
a particul:tr set of cbirns on the nan,re o f race rebrions.
and tht· po~c- industrial experiences of blacks especially.
and 111anipulace th e ccchnology of filo1 production to
arti culate thost· clai1115, Part of carving o ut chis ~pace
h,1s also n1 t·anc dt' vclo ping a style of filnunaking thac
has been a~ striking and in1agi narive as his goal of both
pining and 111aintai11ing access to tht' resources of the
111~or culrure industne~. Lee ·s politicization of popuJar
fil111 enterta in111ent, then. h:is been especially strategic
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Spike's Joint
and intentionaUy provocative. In 111any of his filn1s, for
example, he has ofien refused to con1ply with the idea
of transparency, preferring instead to practise a n1ethod
of filn1making that foregrounds his own authorial pres-
ence and distinctively 1narks his filmmaking signature.
Giannetti discusses this 111anner of filn1making as for-
n1alis1n and writes: "The formalist cinema is largely a
director's cinema: Authorial intrusions are con1n1on.
There is a high degree of 111anipulation in the narrative
111aterials, and the visual presentation is stylized. The
story is exploited as vehicle for the filn1maker's per-
sonal obsessions.... This style of cinen1a deals with
ideas - political. religious, philosophical. ... Its texture
is densely symbolic. " 5
On the one side, the features of realisn1 are less
noticeable; the filnunaker strives to disguise the con-
structedness of the story-world presented on screen.
On the other, the director strives to unveil the trans-
parency of filn1111aking. Still, the idea of realisn1
do111inates the production of popular filn1 and televi-
sion. Considering that classical cinen1a is at best
n1oderately self-conscious, Lee's approach to filmmak-
ing is detemunedly self-conscious, often acknowledging
his srylized use of the cinernatic apparatus. While son1e
view Lee's filnunaking techniques as gratuitous or self-
scrving, they nevertheless represent a fonn of authorial
action, a fonn of agency that contests the intensely
regulated fom1s of cine1natic authorship that custon1-
arily obscure the fact that aU fomts of n1edia are a
socially constructed, n1anipulative view of the world.
Take, for example, Lee's use of characters directly
addressing the spectator - a consistent narrative 1notif
throughout his early work. This rype of address is
seldon1 used in classical cinema, mainly because it
interrupts the flow of filtn events that take place on-
screen. In addition, full frontality in cinema ruptures
traditional story- space boundaries that generally posi-
tion the spectator n1ore fully as a voyeur. In the case
of classical cinen1a. characters only address other char-
acters i11 the filn1. In Do the Ri~llf 111i11g, Lee ju1np-cuts
to a sequence that fean,res the character direct-address
device. In the sequence, the carnera cuts to five dif-
ferent characters who utter racial epitaphs. The
sequence is both a playful and serious experin1ental
technique that disorients the non11al fihn-viewing
process: ju1np cuts are deliberately abrupt editing tran-
sitions that disrupt the continuiry of narrative t.irne
and space. Direct character address also establishes a
Digitized by Google
319
n1ore personalized experience of fihn viewership by
repositioning the spectator as a more active participant
in the fibn-viewing process. As a result of this tech-
nique, characters speak directly to spectators.
Furthermore, the narrative structure that defines
n1uch of Lee· s filmography is antithetical to the nonns
of classical cinen1a. The do1ninant narrative structure
usually constructs a single story- plot that contains,
according to Wollen, "a unitary homogenous world."
In this system, the organization of narrative adheres to
a basic fom1ula : the introduction of a ham1onious
setting; the insertion of a conflict that disrupts the
equilibriu1n; the cli1nactic clash, which generally
places the protagonist in sorne sort of contest; and
finally, the restoration of a ham1onious world. The
narrative structure in the rypical Spike Lee Joint,
however, privileges n1ultiple story-plots over the
single-story-plot fom1ula. In other \vords, the filn1-
n1aker generaUy deploys the film-within-a-filn1 device.
which fractures the prin1ary story-plot. Consequently,
his filn1 narratives tend to develop acute fissures. So
i1tstead of constructing a single homogenous world.
Lee opts for creating a filn1ic world in which a
polyphony of issues, conflicts, and enign1as seen1 to
proliferate unabashedly.
Perhaps Lee's n1ost decisive break from the classical
style of fibnmaking is the 111anner in which his fihn
narratives tend to close. Because the classical paradign1
generally privileges the notion of a single story-plot,
the prin1acy of this style lends itself to easy resolution
and narrative closure. Discussing narrative closure in
classical cinen1a, Bordwell \vrites:
IW]e c.·an see it as the crowning of 1hc structure. the
loi,.>ical conclusion of the: string of events. tht' final effc.•ct
of the initial cause·. This vic:w has son1e validity. not only
in the light of tight constructions that we: frequently
l.'111:ounter in Hollywood filn1s but also given the pre-
cepts of Hollywood screenwriting. Rulebooks tird.-ssly
be111oan the pressures for a happy ending and cn1phasize
the: need for a logical ,vrap-up... . Thus an extrinsic
nonn. the need to resolve the plot in a way that providc.·s
"poc.,tic justice," becon1es a stn1ctural constant.''
The happy-ending clichc is arguably the n1ost donu-
nant narrative n1otif in Hollywood fihn. Indeed, ont"
of the 111ost taken-for-granted belief systents in
Holl}'\vood is the notion that. in order for a fihn to
be a box-ofl1ce success. the narrative n1ust be con1pact,
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
320
Figure 32.2 Do rlir R(~/11 ·n,i11,e(Umversal. 19119): lnd1v1dual action< cannot <olve complex social issues. Wn<ten.
pruduced. and dirt•ctcd by Spik.- Lee
sunple, and easily resolved. Moreover, industry insiders
strongly believe in n,akjng uplifring, ··feel-good"
n1ovies, w hich generally translates into a neat resolu-
tion of narrative conflict. But the tendency to resolve
co nflict reaffirms do1ninant ideological values like
individualisn1 and patriarchy and further suggests that
heroic. often male. deeds are the solution to social
problen1s. 7
Yet narrative closure in the Spike Lee Joint is
intentionally resi~ted. Rather than asserting a ham10-
nized world at the end of his filins, Lee repeatedly
subverts this industry rule by choosi ng to end n1any
of his fihn narratives on th<:: curvature of several
question n1arks. This strategy leav<:: the fihn/ text
open- ended and subj ect to n1ultiple interpretatio ns. At
the sarne tin1e, though, this strategy can also generate
discon,fort for fiJn1goers accustomed to narrative
closure. T ake. for exan1ple, the follo v.•ing conclusion of
a test screening survey fro111 Lee's second feature fwn,
S<l,ool Da~e; "1.TJhe n1ajoriry of audience 111en1bers felr
negatively about the endi11g. finding it confusing.
too abrupt and unresolved. Si1nilarly, some audie nce
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S. Craig Watkins
111embers (both blacks and whites) con1plained that
the story and the 1nessage were confusing.'"8 The
results of the survey suggest tha t \vhen n1oviegoers are
exposed to open- ended filn1 narratives, it violates their
perception of \vhat co nstitutes coherence and clarity,
thus n1aking the filn1-viewing experience unpleasant
. .
111 so1ne 11,stances.
An excellent exan1ple of tl1is open-ended structure
is, of course, the intensely debated Do the R(11h1 11,int,
The fih11 ends abn1ptly and declines to resolve the
n1ultiple enigruas that 01otivace conflict and accion in
the story-plot. I11 fuct. one of the n1ain charges leveled
against the filn1 was that Lee raised n1any issues regard-
ing the volatility of racisn1 but fuiled co propose any
sol utions. T his critique is, of course, inspired by a set
of spectatorial non11s accusto111ed to narrative resolu-
tion. The conclusion of Do 1/,e R~/11 T11i11J1 does in fact
leave the spectator po ndering several questions - for
example: What happens co Sal and his pizzeria? D id
M ookie "'do the ri gh t thing" by initiating the d estruc-
cion of the pizzeria? Did Rahee1n 's death justify
burning and looting Sal"s property? Is blac k rage
Orig in al from
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
 Spike's Joint
against white property a legiti111ate expression of
political resistance? Whose political philosophy was
right, Martin Luther King Jr.'s or Malcoln1 X's? Para-
phrasing Wollen, it can cenainly be said that - with
its endless counterposition of characters, conflicts, and
issues - Do tire Right 17,in~ can best be understood as
an arena, a meeting place in which different discourses
encounter each other and struggle for supren1acy. The
filrn. according to conventional vvisdom, is unfinished
and therefore open to a seemingly inexhaustible
nu1nber of different spins and interpretations. But to
the extent that narrative apenure intentionally invites
the production of meaning. it also encourages dia-
logue. Spectators are forced to create their own
ending(s) and therefore ponder the many questions
the filrn deliberately refuses to answer. finally, narra-
tive apenure correctly suggests that con1plex social
issues are stnut11ral and not personal; hence, heroic act~
by individuals cannot resolve then1. It n1akes the
crucial point that happy endings only exist in
the in1aginary fantasyscapes of Holl}'\vood.
Lee's recombination ofboth conventional and n1ore
expressive fonns of cinen1atic authorship is indicative
of ,vhat son1e filrn scholars argue is the en1ergence of
a '"New H olly,vood.'' The New Hollywood rests, in
p;1n, upon technological innovations that facilitate a
1nore definitive break fron1 the do1ninant conventions
and approaches to narrative in the cinema by creating
new possibilities in the areas of sound nuxing. can1era
n1ove111ent, and photography. for exan1ple. The NeY.'
Hollywood is greatly influenced by the European
art cine111a, which typically en1ploys. according to
Bordwell, Staiger, and Thon1pson, ·•a looser. n1ore
tenuous linkage of events than ,ve find in the classical
9
tiln1. " The art cine111a generally creates n1ultidin1en-
sional characters rather than one-din1ensional characters
,vhose traits tend to be overwheln1ingly "good" or
"bad." Funher, Bordwell, Staiger, and Tho1npson n1ain-
tJin that, ,vhereas characters in the classical cinen1a
have clearly defined traits and cha racteristics (i.e.,
heroes and villains). characters in the art cinen1a lack
clear definition and objectives. This new style in
Holl}'\vood is generally associated ,vith a generation of
tilrn school p;raduatt'S ,vho h.1ve t·njoyed tren1endous
success in the con1111ercial arena en1ploying n1ore
expressive lc)nns of cint·111atir authorship - Martin
Scorsese. Francis Ford (:oppola. and R.obert Aluuan,
~ Ju
to na1ne a le"·.
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321
Rather than supplant the classical style, an cinen1a
has been assin1ilated into the dontinant paradigin.
While panicipants in the New Hollywood can be
described as stylists, they tend to work within the
paradign1atic structure of the classical n1odel. Bordwell.
Staiger, and Thon1pson ren1ind us that, despite the
achievements of the new stylists, the classical prenuse
of time and space ren1ains powerfully in force, with
only subtle alterations. Moreover, the emergence of
celebrity directors reinvigorates theatrical filn1-going,
which, in tum, strengthens the popular n1ovie industry
and, ironically. the classical paradign1. Lee's stylization
of the apparatus, then, appears to be pan of a broader,
albeit subtle, trend in the commercial fi.l111111aking
industry. The filmmaker's own carefully crafted in1age
as an icon of black popular culture, in fact, stin1ulated
interest in other black An1erican-directed films that
are n1ore committed to the don1inant conventions of
filin production. So despite Lee's neo-black nationalist
i111age, the stylistic choices that n1ark his unconven-
tional fih11111aking techniques are rooted in the trends
and values of European an cinen1a. 11 Lee's approach
to conunercial fihnn1aking is as much a by-product of
the genre hybridization of the classical, art, and exploi-
tation styles of filnunaking as it is a decisive shift in
the logic of black cultural production or any panicular
fonn of black resistance.
Lee·s breakthrough succt·ss was n1ade possible by
several interrelated factors. First, the production, dis-
tribution, and consun1ption of popular media products
have changed drarnatically during the latter decades of
the twentieth century. Technology not only accelerates
the production and distribution of products; improve-
n1ents in technology also make access to communications
n1edia resources slightly n1ore de111ocratic than in pre-
vious periods. Thus, new players have been able to
occupy sn1all niches in the industrial in1age-111aking
landscape. And while new con1munication technolo-
gies and the infonnation econon1y do not threaten
the hegen1ony of capitalis111 or the global spread of
corporate influt·nce. they have, albeit inadvertently.
created spact• for the 111obilization of ney.• cultural
practices and n1oven1ents that creatively contest social
and political don1ination.
In n1any ways, the renewal of black filnunaking ~vas
111ade possible by the innovations and i,rrowing popu-
larity of the hip hop 111oven1ent. Hip hop redefined
the presence and vit;ility of black yo uth culture in the
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
322 S. Craig Watkins
popular cultural landscape. More in1portant, it forged
new territories and spaces for African An1ericans to
assert greater control over the shaping and reshaping
of the popular culture scene. Consequently, young
African American filmmakers who have harnessed
the creative energy and spirit of hip hop to their
own cinematic imaginations have gained limited
access to the corridors and resources of commercial
cinema. Spike Lee, to be sure, has responded in an
innovative fashion to the changing cultural lands-
cape. He understood that, in order to become a
fonnidable player on the field of popular culture, it
was necessary to align himself with some of the more
popular movements and sensibilities of the youth
scene. Lee's strategic use of hip hop culture certainly
enlivened his filmnuking career. But while he has
been careful to incorporate some of the expressive
elements of hip hop, he has not limited his cultural
politics to the sensibilities of the youth movement.
Notes
1 This quote is from a popubr rap album produced and pcr-
formNI by Eric B and Rnim (1989).
2 Bordwell, 0., Su.iger, J. and Thompson, K. (1985, Tht Classic
Hollywood Cintma: Film Stylt and lt,fodt of Production to 1960,
New York: Columbia University Press) , cX2111inc the evolu-
tion and transformations of the classical style of Hollywood
filmmalcing. The cbs.sical Hollywood cinema has become
the dominant model throughout the entire filnunalting
world.
3 For a description of countcrcincma, sec Wollen, P. (1986)
"Godard and Counter-Cinerm: Vtnt d'E.st,'" in P. Rosen (ed.),
Na"arivt, App<1ratws, ldtoi,,gy: A Film Thtory Rtadtr, New York:
Columbia University Press, pp. 120-9.
4 Gunnetti, L. (1990) U11dtnta11di11.~ Movi,s, Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, p. 3.
5 Ibid., p. 6.
6 Bordwell, D. (1986) '"Clas.,ical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational
Principles and Procedures," in P. Rosen (ed.). Na"ativt, Appa•
ratus, ldtol<JKy: A Film Th,~ry Rtadtr, New York: Columbia
Univenity Press, p. 21.
7 For a discussion of how !devision in particular h,s employed
this technique with a high dcb'TCC of frequerKy, sc,· Gitlin. T.
(1'18~) "Prime-Time ldcoloizy: T he Hct1:cmonic Process in
Tdevision Entertainment." in H . Ncwn,mb (ed.). 1i·lrvisio11:
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The filmmaker, as I have discussed above, has politi-
cized the sphere of popular film production in ways
that also move beyond the priorities and preoccupa-
tions of hip hop.
Finally, because Lee was responding to rather
than creating changes in the popular culture landscape
that facilitated his arrival on the cultural stage, his
imprint on the production of black cinema, while
obviously important, must not be viewed as dominant.
In reality, the scope of black cinema broadened far
beyond its most distinguished icon in ways that not
even he could contain, direct, or anticipate. By the
early 1990s, the most dominant characteristics of
black commercial cinema were not associated with the
neo-black nationalist racial politics and expressive
techniques that defined the typical Spike Lee Joint but
rather with the popular rhythms of gangsta rap and
the proliferation of ghetto imagery in American
culture.
Tht Critical View. 3rd edn., New York: O,cford Un.iversiry l'rcss.
pp. 426-54.
8 Lee, S. (1988) Uplift tht RMt: Tht Comtruction of School Daze.
New York: Simon & Schuster, p. I 78.
9 For a more complete rreatment of how the newly introduccJ
filmnulr.ing technologies and techniques have been incorpo-
rated into the classical Hollywood cinerm. sec the final two
chapters in Bordwell ct al. (1985, pp. 36s-85).
10 For • discussion of their respective contributions 10 filrn. ~<,
for exan1plc: Lourdeax, L. (I 990) Italian and Irish Fil,nmakers in
Amtrica: Furd, Capra, Coppola, and Scones,, Philadelphia: Temple
Univenity Press; Key=, H. (1991) Robnt Altman's Amtrica,
New York: Oxford University Press. 1991; Stem, L. (l<J95) TJrc
Scones, Connection, Bloonungton: Indiana University Press: •nd
Lewis, J. (1995) 1-J'lrom G<>d Wishts to Dtstroy: Frantis C<>ppt>la
,md tht New Hol/yw,,.,d. Durhan,, NC: Duke University Pn-s.,.
11 For a discussion of Lee's neo-black nationalist politics see
Dyson, M.E. (199.1) R~/ltaing BIMlt: Aftican Amrrican C 11ltural
Criticism, Minneapolis: University of MinnN<>ta Press. Else-
where Todd Boyd (1997, Am 1 Bl«k Enough for You?: Popular
C11/t11rr from rht 'Ho,>d and &yond, Bloomington. Indiana Uni-
v,·,-ity Pn:~s). argues that Lee's politin are grounded in • new
bl,ck aes1he1i, that is inflected hy bou~ois sensibilities and
intention~.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Bowser. PeJrl. O s,,rr Alid11•1111x ,111J Hi, Cirdr: .ffe<a11-Amrri<a11 Film-
maki11,(! ,111J Rau Cinema ,?{ tlir Si/rm era. Bloomington and
London: lndi,na Univt"rsity PrcS<, 2001.
Donalson. Melvin. Bla<k Dirrttors in H<>llyu'<'<>d. A,utin: University of
T cxas Prc.'Ss, 2003.
Doty. Al<"xander. Flami11g t/11· Cl,issi<s: (J11reri11.~ tfo· Fi/,., Ca111111.
London and New York: Routledge. 21)()0.
Dyer. R ichard. Hraw11ly 8.rdi,·s: Film StaN a11d So<irty. London:
M,cinillan Educ,tion, 1987.
Ga~!(hcr, Tag. Joh11 1-,>rd: Thr ,\ta11 and His 1-'ilrtrs. Berkeley ,nd
London: Univer:1ity of Ca.lifomia l'rt',s. I 986.
Gerstner. D,vid A. and Staiger, Janet (eds.). A11tho,sl1ip a11d Film. New
York and London: Routledge. 2()(13.
(jrant. Barry Keith . Voyage, ~l l)i.<a>very: '1hr Ci11ema ~f J'rrdrrid,:
~I 'iscma11. Urban• and Chicago: University of Illinois Pr<"S.<, I 992.
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Further Reading
Halliday. John (ed.). Sirk 011 Sirk: Co11vrrs111fo11, with )011 Halliday.
London : Faber and Faber. 1997,
Johnston, Claire. 11,e Work ~f Dorothy Ar:11er: Tou•11rd a Prmi11ist
Ci11tma. London: British Filn1 lrutitute, 1972.
Klinger. Barbara. Mrlodrama and 11,ftani,i,g: History. C11/tu,r a11d the
rilms of Do11.~las Sirk. Uloornington and London: Indiana Univer-
sity Prc.'Ss, 1994.
Modlcsk.i. T anu. Th, Womrn Wlro K11tu• T"" M11tli: Hitrlrco<k a11d
Ftminist Film "lhtory. N<"w York: Methu<"n. 1988.
Rothman, William. Hitdr<o<k: 17rr /1,lurdrrous Gaze. Cambridge, MA
and London: Harvard University Press, 1982.
w~xman, Virginia Wright (ed.) . Film a11d Auth,,rship. New
Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgt'rs University Prt'ss, 21)(13.
W ood. Robin. Hitchcock 's Film.< RrvisitC'ti. New York: Columbia
Univcr:1ity Pr<"Ss. I98'1.
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