Auteurism, Hollywood, and Zach Snyder

[paranoid-knight2008]

So after spending the hours since leaving the theater soaking every bit of whiplash I got from watching it and the amazing amount of craziness the online world is taking it (I can't remember the last time a mainstream Hollywood blockbuster divided people so... viciously). I just want to say that I really liked it. A masterpiece? Certainly not. A truly great film? Not a chance. Is it even remotely great in any respect? Nope. Not really. But I respect the hell out of it and respect Zack Snyder as well. While Sucker Punch has its flaws (to an extent, in all honesty) it is still an auteuristic achievement. Without really dripping into too much praise, I just have to say that, from a directorial standpoint, this is a strong entry into the director's filmography. I've read many mentioning how empty and heartless the film is... I think that comes from the fact that its not really a character piece to begin with - this is all Snyder. (However, Jena Malone excels at giving a seriously strong dramatic performance in an underwritten part.)

This is pure cliche-filled melodrama story laced with a hyper-artistic style (one Snyder has claimed as his own with this and his previous efforts) in which the audience expecting sexualized young women fighting in video game environments of explosions, zombies, dragons and the such ultimately get what they want. But the cold and distant approach to such material is what gives Sucker Punch a disturbingly calculated kick. Not trying to say it reaches such heights as Kubrick in that department, but Snyder definitely achieves it to an extent here, repeating the same mood and feeling he did with Watchmen: Director's Cut (so far, his best film). Every action scene in which the audience gains what they were promised in advertisements is a mirrored image of something that is less sexualized in a cinema voyeur sense and more sexualized in a demented and almost allegorical to sex trafficking way. Snyder will have thirteen year old boys coming to the film getting their rocks off only to piece together on further thought that every image is replacing scenes of extreme sexual abuse.

There's a lot here to marvel at. The layers Snyder likes to put together for his vision is quite amazing. He does it all through mirrored imaging. A sequence in which two characters discuss their plans in front of a mirror (think a ballet company or a showgirl dressroom) as the camera pans from the mirrored image to the face-forward way the girls are really sitting. It doesn't surprise that much that the lead character will ultimately, in the same scene, write up their "escape plan" on the backside of a chalkboard featuring they're sex slave-like routines.

Marvelously put together at a rampant pace, starting with the over-the-top hysterics of an over-dramatic opening mood piece set to a cover of "Sweet Dreams" is chill-inducingly good. The entire rest of the soundtrack is filled with classic songs being covered in a Goth-like schoolgirl depresso sound, and while none of them really come close to being better than the original tracks, they fit perfectly here in creating both a perfect aural palette for the atmosphere and the theme. Remaking, recreating... reflecting.

It's not a masterpiece, but it's getting bashing, and as you all know, if I respond to a bashed film, I come to its defenses. Here I am again, probably gonna get more slams thrown my way, but... Sucker Punch is a very good movie, fantastically directed and has got me siding with Snyder as an auteur. I actually can't wait to see the director's cut when it comes to DVD - all of Snyder's films grow in richness when those cuts are watched, and I expect this one to be no exception.

[mfunk9786]

Sorry - as soon as you said you respect Zack Snyder, I stopped reading. But I'm glad you liked the film!

[paranoid-knight2008]

Haha. Trust me, I can see why someone would hate him and his style (personally, I really disliked the dreadful 300)... but I can't help but feel he's one of the few mainstream Hollywood auteurs out there. :-"

[domino harvey]

He's definitely an auteur, no argument there. But so were a lot of lousy directors! I will admit to having a mild "It cannot really be as awful as it looks" interest in this, but once I heard it was essentially an extended rape fantasy, I can't say I'm in any rush to discover for myself

[rs98762001]

It makes me ill that somehow Zack the Hack has people defending him as an auteur. Just because there's a ton of visual trickery involved doesn't mean there's any kind of vision. Watchmen was astonishingly awful, especially considering the brilliance of the source material. The famous "good/original" quote attributed to Samuel Johnson sums up Snyder perfectly.

[knives]

You know being an auteur doesn't mean that he is good right?

[Mr Sausage]

This reminds me of the Michael Bay/auteur arguments that used to crop up on this board every once and a while. While it is true that auteur used to signify a special achievement, that position has long stopped being defensible. It's a plain fact that you can author something terrible.

Tho' I think there's no reason this thread should've been made--I doubt it'll get a discussion out of this forum--I applaud paranoid knight for putting in the effort, especially on this forum, which can bare its teeth pretty easily. Not everyone's so willing to put themselves in the thankless position of defending a Zack Snyder movie in intelligent terms.

[jojo]

Zack Snyder is one of these modern age directors who can be described as both a geek and a jock. Does that make him an "auteur"? I dunno. If he is, he sure is annoying (like a geek) and uninteresting (like a jock) though.

[matrixschmatrix]

Haha. Trust me, I can see why someone would hate him and his style (personally, I really disliked the dreadful 300)... but I can't help but feel he's one of the few mainstream Hollywood auteurs out there. :-"

I don't actually think that's true- just off the top of my head, Michael Bay, Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro, James Cameron, Tim Burton, Christopher Nolan, Sam Raimi (if he still counts as mainstream), even Roland Emmerich- I think auteurism is de rigueur among a lot of the big moneymakers, whether through the recruiting small, independent directors for giant Hollywood productions strategy (Nolan, Raimi, even Jackson way back when) or through the "if the same crap keeps making money we want people who keep making the same crap" strategy that keeps Michael Bay in business.

That said, I have no idea of why Snyder keeps getting work, since he's lost money like three times running now.

[Gregory]

So here's a polemic:
When it comes to high-budget/CGI filmmaking from "name" directors, one person's "auteur" is another (marketing or PR) person's "branding." When dozens of people are creatively involved in shaping the visual look of a film, it's still important that it fit the template of what people expect from "a Zach Snyder [or whoever] film." In the days of the old studio system, mainstream moviegoers seldom even thought of films having a director (Hitchcock being an exception) but in recent decades the major studios (and their "indie" divisions, too) have figured out that it's valuable to get people to care about who directed a picture and how a given film will fit into their oeuvre, even if the sense of such auteurist connections between a director's works remains at a superficial level. One can make a case that Snyder and Bay are auteurs, but can anyone really imagine film critics over a span of decades critically interrogating these careers and finding much in them?
These quasi-auteurist "connections" are less the result of individual vision and more a function of the need to carve out a niche in an assembly-line of safe investments for marketing (and to disguise the fact that people are watching derivative "products" that are more carefully crafted than ever before to be reliably safe investments). If you can say "from the director of 300... or whatever, it helps consumers of movies who are inundated with advertising to place all the images they're seeing in a trailer, prompting them to make connections between this film and others they've seen, on the basis of style, emphasis. But that doesn't mean the filmmaker is producing something the least bit personal, or remarkable in any way, beyond some superficial similarities.
I can't see everything that's coming out in theaters, and I watch relatively little recent Hollywood, so I rely on film critics to help me sort out some of these recent auteurs and would-be auteurs. But no film critic I take seriously has much to say about all this big-budget CGI "product," and I suspect the reason is not necessarily that the films are crass or reprehensible; it's because they're ultimately not all that interesting in terms of filmmaking vision. But of course differences of taste and opinion will likely mean lots of people will vehemently disagree with what I'm saying here.

[knives]

Well it can be safely said that the reason those critics you respect have had nothing meaningful to say about the recent slew of blockbusters is because those films don't interest them, not because there is nothing to say. Actually your whole spiel suggests that directors like Bay and Snyder fit the more classic definition of an auteur by performing a distinctive style or voice despite studio interference. Sadly these are the Hitchcock's of our day. Yes the studios do use that as a marketing ploy, but that doesn't reduce the personality of their work. Anyways if the creators of the auteur theory couldn't even properly designate who was and wasn't how can we?

[matrixschmatrix]

I actually have read a fair number of serious critical essays about the work of both Bay and Snyder- using them to discuss what attracts an audience at a given time, where their styles originate, who picked up from them, etc. Certainly, both men have at least as many issues they habitually work out on screen- even in the context of a studio film they had no hand in scripting, which is arguably the most rigorous test of auteurism- as any Hitchcock or De Palma.

It's ludicrous to argue that their work isn't personal because it isn't good- that just means that the personalities in question aren't very interesting. I truly believe that Michael Bay is out there doing exactly what he wants to do, and what he wants to do is spend ungodly money making childish fantasies. Zack Snyder wants to make pornographic use of slow motion. Robert Rodriguez (whom I like) wants to make things blow up with his kids. How are any of those things impersonal?

edit: I agree, though, that the popularity of auteuristic directors from the studio end is largely a way for them to make risky projects into known quantities- to the degree that they'll throw someone like Nolan a project like Inception to keep him doing Batman movies. Inception made money, but it would certainly never have happened if Nolan wasn't a bankable name (who could also draw bankable actors).

[Gregory]

...the reason those critics you respect have had nothing meaningful to say about the recent slew of blockbusters is because those films don't interest them, not because there is nothing to say.

I don't quite see the distinction here.

Yes the studios do use that as a marketing ploy, but that doesn't reduce the personality of their work.

I'm not saying that per se reduces it, but my point is that this type of branding is being mistaken for auteurism. The filmmakers I have in mind know how to use technology to create the type of film that's expected of them, they've probably internalized this, and they have their own little stylistic signatures and flourishes -- and that's where the auteurist "fingerprints" come from. That doesn't make it personal in any meaningful sense of the word. Again, it's undeniably subjective, but I personally don't find any real substance to this stuff in most cases.

Anyways if the creators of the auteur theory couldn't even properly designate who was and wasn't how can we?

Well, critics have debated the meaning and significance of the auteur for a long time now; it's not just a matter of what critics thought back in the 1950s, and there's probably little hope that I can try to continue that debate here.

I actually have read a fair number of serious critical essays about the work of both Bay and Snyder- using them to discuss what attracts an audience at a given time, where their styles originate, who picked up from them, etc.

I haven't read the stuff you refer to, so perhaps there's more to it than I think. But discussions of reception and influence alone would not generally convince me of the merit's of a body of work's substance for critical interrogation.

It's ludicrous to argue that their work isn't personal because it isn't good- that just means that the personalities in question aren't very interesting.

I don't believe I said that at all; if my argument gave that impression, then I failed to make myself understood.

I truly believe that Michael Bay is out there doing exactly what he wants to do, and what he wants to do is spend ungodly money making childish fantasies. Zack Snyder wants to make pornographic use of slow motion. Robert Rodriguez (whom I like) wants to make things blow up with his kids. How are any of those things impersonal?

I can't prove a negative: that they're not personal. I'm simply unconvinced that they are personal, or that there's any artistic substance to most big-budget Hollywood productions of recent decades. But my purpose was not to call out recent Hollywood but to argue that the auteur things works completely differently than it did within classical Hollywood. Pretty much everything is different now compared to then, and marketing/branding are unbelievably more elaborate and sophisticated now.
I'll admit I'm pretty unfamiliar with R. Rodriguez; there may indeed be something there (only the 1990s stuff looks at all appealing to me, and I haven't caught up with it yet).

[John Cope]

Tho' I think there's no reason this thread should've been made--I doubt it'll get a discussion out of this forum--I applaud paranoid knight for putting in the effort, especially on this forum, which can bare its teeth pretty easily. Not everyone's so willing to put themselves in the thankless position of defending a Zack Snyder movie in intelligent terms.

Oh, I'll take that opening, sir. I am after all, as some here know, more than willing to go to bat for much otherwise determined to be indefensible (and for that matter willing to criticize much determined to be virtually unassailable--i.e. the stupefyingly overrated Certified Copy, about which more elsewhere).

Anyway, I still have not had the opportunity to see this yet but FB friend Matthew David Wilder (who I would wager knows as much about movies as just about anyone here) has and describes it as the Celine and Julie Go Boating of action blockbusters. The rest of his response is too good not to re-post, especially given the prevalent attitude here:

SUCKER is a Rivettean movie about performance that exists on more parallel but maybe simultaneous levels than INCEPTION. It's closer to something like INLAND EMPIRE. Its main subjects are how the mind deals with trauma--...does it make war, art, love, porn, or just cash? The other subject is that corny 80s trope, the Male Gaze, which gets a workout here like no other movie I can think of. Snyder extends Quentin's DEATHPROOF gag of cutting away from the hot striptease/lapdance into a movie-length trope: whenever the heroine is forced to perform, like Suelynn Gay in NASHVILLE, we beam into a parallel, IMAX-y, tentpole, action-whiz-bang universe as a form of sublimation.

For my own part, I have, as I stated earlier, been looking foward to this for quite awhile based on the trailers. I'm attracted to the conflagration of what appears to be an unhinged, even vaguely psychotic, wallowing in excessive overabundnace and ADHD sensory stimuli combined with Snyder's relentless drive to iconicize everything in sight (his sense of the self-made and sustained mythic). Whether he fully comprehends the implications of that, along with what I gather are some rather heavy handed politics applied equally so, almost doesn't matter. If it works a picture like this reflects back something of its audience's own derangement of the senses and becomes, if not a full bodied critique, than a kind of transformative element in the mix, an exercise in restructuring existing parameters and reconceiving the assumptions of the body politic itself, especially as regards the possibilities and meanings available to form and function. The very fact that the dam has burst creating a level playing field for all manner of inhabitants of generally differentiated pop landscapes (whatever is most immediately available to the psyche) should tell us something about what is really important here, i.e. the nurturing of endless stimulation as an end to itself, made justifiable under the banner of a superficially rendered ode to indivdual empowerment. It may very well all be seen to be the elevating of the trite but this critique is inadequate in the face of the idea that this is the whole world for someone, a lived reality participated in to whatever degree prevailing society makes possible. What may have been qualitatively trite at one cultural moment becomes, by default, something else as it takes on the burden of multiple roles.

I'm also very interested in the coping device aspect Wilder mentions above and that has been little discussed it seems. When I saw the trailer I thought immediately of the way that stuff is implemented in Bharadwaj's Closet Land. Here it would seem to get an ill fitting pop makeover but the very gauche nature of that move has its own implications and suggestions and not simply about Snyder but rather a culture disinterested in making fine tuned distinctions of what merits socially acceptable couth or "appropriate" treatment. There's also the intriguing idea (always intrguing to me) of the possibilities of meaning for the fantasy experience itself beyond the obvious strategies involved which may have motivated it. And to what degree is any given fantasy/creative vision delimited or self-restricted by that source inspiration?

As far as predicting what sorts of films should or likely will be discussed here--well, I guess I chafe a bit from that assumption of merit. I realize such things here and elsewhere are ultimately subjective determinations enforced by consensus, but given that a film like Inception (which I found numbing and deadening) is discussed for pages on end one could hope that a similar willingness to consider the values in alternative pop styles and forms is also possible.

Hopefully ace theorist Steven Shaviro will weigh in on this one as well given his predisposition toward hyperkinetic or bombastic cinema of heightened affect (Black Swan, the films of Neveldine/Taylor) and his recent aggressive populist shift.

Oh, and as to Michael Bay, the Transformers films are exactly what he should be doing and I don't mean that as criticism.

[knives]

...the reason those critics you respect have had nothing meaningful to say about the recent slew of blockbusters is because those films don't interest them, not because there is nothing to say.

I don't quite see the distinction here.

The distinction is solely in interest. I have no interest in even watching a Snyder film let alone the needed mental work in writing a quality paper. That said it wouldn't be more difficult to write some theoretical or auteurist blah blah for him if i wanted to. As Matrix points out several people have written interesting essays on a number of these directors. While it's not about his whole career this article does a good job of writing something about Snyder for example. So there is interesting critical thought that can be applied to these films if someone wants to. It's just that no one seems to want to.

Yes the studios do use that as a marketing ploy, but that doesn't reduce the personality of their work.

I'm not saying that per se reduces it, but my point is that this type of branding is being mistaken for auteurism. The filmmakers I have in mind know how to use technology to create the type of film that's expected of them, they've probably internalized this, and they have their own little stylistic signatures and flourishes -- and that's where the auteurist "fingerprints" come from. That doesn't make it personal in any meaningful sense of the word. Again, it's undeniably subjective, but I personally don't find any real substance to this stuff in most cases.

That suggests these fingerprints weren't there before they became a brand. Snyder's first two films, made before he became a brand, have the slo-motion, conservatism, and a number of other traits that are now a part of the brand. Just because someone makes a certain type of film or is working under certain pretensions doesn't make their work any less by their authority. Snyder and Bay are just as much auteurs as Spielberg and Lucus who are just as much auteurs as Truffaut and Roeg are. The arguments you appear to be making could have just as easily been applied to Hitchcock or Lubitsch.

[Gregory]

That said it wouldn't be more difficult to write some theoretical or auteurist blah blah for him if i wanted to.

I know there are always devils advocates and those ready and willing to get on the soapbox for the most reviled films and to be gadflies (e.g. against the "prevalent attitude here," whatever that is.) as some of the critics I most respect have done. But would somebody's "theoretical or auteurist blah blah" really hold up? I'm not convinced.

...several people have written interesting essays on a number of these directors. While it's not about his whole career this article does a good job of writing something about Snyder for example. So there is interesting critical thought that can be applied to these films if someone wants to. It's just that no one seems to want to.

I see this piece as a review rather than a piece of film criticism. That may sound snobbish to some, but I think there's a useful distinction to be made between reviews of a film (such as the insightful one you link to) and actual film criticism, that engages brings film theory to bear in some way on the work in question and places it in a much broader context than a mere critique.

I'm not saying that [marketing] per se reduces [personal content], but my point is that this type of branding is being mistaken for auteurism. The filmmakers I have in mind know how to use technology to create the type of film that's expected of them, they've probably internalized this, and they have their own little stylistic signatures and flourishes -- and that's where the auteurist "fingerprints" come from. That doesn't make it personal in any meaningful sense of the word. Again, it's undeniably subjective, but I personally don't find any real substance to this stuff in most cases.

That suggests these fingerprints weren't there before they became a brand. Snyder's first two films, made before he became a brand, have the slo-motion, conservatism, and a number of other traits that are now a part of the brand. Just because someone makes a certain type of film or is working under certain pretensions doesn't make their work any less by their authority. Snyder and Bay are just as much auteurs as Spielberg and Lucus who are just as much auteurs as Truffaut and Roeg are. The arguments you appear to be making could have just as easily been applied to Hitchcock or Lubitsch.

Based on this, I don't think we'll find much common ground. I take a pretty dim view of Lucas and the Hollywood of the '80s on and would have a hard time placing them in the same arena as Hitchcock, for example. To me, as I've been arguing, auteur status involves something like substance that stands up to critical interrogation. I know this is not the view everyone takes around here, as I've often seen it taken as a given that Bay, Ron Howard, etc. etc. are auteurs.

[knives]

Auteur very literally just means author. There isn't a quality statement in that. I hate Spielberg, but there are a number of consistent ideas and styles that are carried over all of his films. The qualification you're arguing is too subjective to be taken seriously. for example by your definition AW is not an auteur to me because films like Tropical Malady don't stand up to critical interrogation. That stance takes away the authoring purpose of auteur theory and simply treats it as an identifier that separates 'quality' cinema from bad. If some one were to find Hitchcock as not succeeding under interrogation would he no longer be an auteur?

[paranoid-knight2008]

... describes it as the Celine and Julie Go Boating of action blockbusters. The rest of his response is too good not to re-post, especially given the prevalent attitude here:

SUCKER is a Rivettean movie about performance that exists on more parallel but maybe simultaneous levels than INCEPTION. It's closer to something like INLAND EMPIRE. Its main subjects are how the mind deals with trauma--...does it make war, art, love, porn, or just cash? The other subject is that corny 80s trope, the Male Gaze, which gets a workout here like no other movie I can think of. Snyder extends Quentin's DEATHPROOF gag of cutting away from the hot striptease/lapdance into a movie-length trope: whenever the heroine is forced to perform, like Suelynn Gay in NASHVILLE, we beam into a parallel, IMAX-y, tentpole, action-whiz-bang universe as a form of sublimation.

For my own part, I have, as I stated earlier, been looking foward to this for quite awhile based on the trailers. I'm attracted to the conflagration of what appears to be an unhinged, even vaguely psychotic, wallowing in excessive overabundnace and ADHD sensory stimuli combined with Snyder's relentless drive to iconicize everything in sight (his sense of the self-made and sustained mythic). Whether he fully comprehends the implications of that, along with what I gather are some rather heavy handed politics applied equally so, almost doesn't matter. If it works a picture like this reflects back something of its audience's own derangement of the senses and becomes, if not a full bodied critique, than a kind of transformative element in the mix, an exercise in restructuring existing parameters and reconceiving the assumptions of the body politic itself, especially as regards the possibilities and meanings available to form and function. The very fact that the dam has burst creating a level playing field for all manner of inhabitants of generally differentiated pop landscapes (whatever is most immediately available to the psyche) should tell us something about what is really important here, i.e. the nurturing of endless stimulation as an end to itself, made justifiable under the banner of a superficially rendered ode to indivdual empowerment. It may very well all be seen to be the elevating of the trite but this critique is inadequate in the face of the idea that this is the whole world for someone, a lived reality participated in to whatever degree prevailing society makes possible. What may have been qualitatively trite at one cultural moment becomes, by default, something else as it takes on the burden of multiple roles.

I'm also very interested in the coping device aspect Wilder mentions above and that has been little discussed it seems.

I swear that I seriously took this same response to the film. It really covers performance art and using the brain as a defense mechanism in some very refreshing ways. I was surprised how depressing the movie overall was.

[Gregory]

Auteur very literally just means author. There isn't a quality statement in that. I hate Spielberg, but there are a number of consistent ideas and styles that are carried over all of his films. The qualification you're arguing is too subjective to be taken seriously. for example by your definition AW is not an auteur to me because films like Tropical Malady don't stand up to critical interrogation. That stance takes away the authoring purpose of auteur theory and simply treats it as an identifier that separates 'quality' cinema from bad. If some one were to find Hitchcock as not succeeding under interrogation would he no longer be an auteur?

Authorship isn't nearly as straightforward with film as it is with other media, such as the written word, thus the long debate as to its significance in the former. I recognize that I probably have a higher standard than others for "auteurship" and so once someone meets that criterion by distinguishing her/himself with a significant statement in a string of genuinely interesting Hollywood films, within a system that doesn't necessarily value that, I think that quality is a a by-product of it, but agreed not necessarily a criterion for being an auteur per se.
And I think there has been serious critical work (not just movie reviews) around Tropical Malady and AW, whether or not one recognizes it. So has Hitcocock's work, so that's a moot point. If the same happened with more Hollywood films, I might be just a bit more persuaded regarding all this, aside from my own proclivities. If I were immortal, I could see everything and provide my own view of all this, but the more significant perspective I think will always be tied to the most interesting ares of critical inquiry, not necessarily anyone's personal assessment, such as my own.

[knives]

And I think there has been serious critical work (not just movie reviews) around Tropical Malady and AW, whether or not one recognizes it. So has Hitcocock's work, so that's a moot point. If the same happened with more Hollywood films, I might be just a bit more persuaded regarding all this, aside from my own proclivities. If there were "world enough and time," to quote Marvell, I could see everything and provide my own view of all this, but the more significant perspective I think will always be tied to the most interesting ares of critical inquiry, not necessarily anyone's personal assessment, such as my own.

I simply don't understand what you mean by how this affects being an auteur. What you seem to be suggesting is that someone can't author a film until someone else has written about how they authored it which doesn't make any sense to me. Hitchcock wasn't seriously written about until late into his career. Does that mean he didn't hold any authorship until than. You seem to be making too many arbitrary distinctions with your view on authorship.
I agree that in film the distinction is sometimes impossible to met out. For example I find that Charlie Kaufman has more claim to Adaptation than Spike Jonze does. In fact until Where the Wild Things are I'm not sure if he had the rights to that claim. There are still serious essays written about his work though and to say because of that he has more right over authorship than Bay who actually does rewrite the scripts handed to him due to that artifact is simply arbitrary.

[Mr Sausage]

I simply don't understand what you mean by how this affects being an auteur. What you seem to be suggesting is that someone can't author a film until someone else has written about how they authored it which doesn't make any sense to me. Hitchcock wasn't seriously written about until late into his career. Does that mean he didn't hold any authorship until than. You seem to be making too many arbitrary distinctions with your view on authorship.

Gregory's point seems like a blatant argument from authority to me. It also doesn't make much sense when you remember that a lot of the directors who ended up informing the auteur theory (Hawks, Welles, Ford, ect.) made the bulk of their work before the theory was even invented. So is he claiming that the theory created the very thing it sought to describe? That a personal stamp could not have existed before there was a theory to account for it? If so, the whole idea of film authorship is rendered incoherent.

[zedz]

This is an interesting topic, and I'm on the knives edge of the argument, in that I view the status of 'auteur' as a neutral one in terms of signifying quality. There are plenty of capital-A auteurs whose work I find to be generally inconsequential and thematically uninteresting (e.g. Fellini) or just plain bad (discovering Jodorowsky was a critical turning point for me in this regard), but you can't argue that their work is not distinctive and personal, that they don't have a stylistically coherent and individual signature.

Just as you can have good and bad writers, painters, playwrights and so forth, whether or not a filmmaker has his or her own distinctive, consistent and analysable style doesn't automatically confer great artistic status.

One of the biggest frustrations I have with some aspects of auteur theory is that the identification of an auteur - i.e. the documenting of a certain artistic signature - is too often seen as the destination rather than the starting point for critical engagement, and once a filmmaker is so anointed they can do no wrong and distinctions between the values of their individual works, or between their works and those of other, less fortunate 'mere directors,' are rendered meaningless.

I can't recall the exact formulation or exemplars, but this attitude was obnoxiously put by Truffaut at one point in terms like: "the worst film by [approved auteur] X is of course better than the best film by [mere director] Y." Some really penetrating critical thinking there, Francois.

[Kirkinson]

I think we're reading some things into Gregory's statements that aren't quite there. Overall, I don't see him making any strong statements about auteurism necessarily being connected with quality, only that he is unconvinced there is anything truly personal in the works of some of these directors, which is fair enough. When he says that

auteur status involves something like substance that stands up to critical interrogation

I only see that as meaning that the stamp of an "auteur" must be based on something more substantial than stylistic flourishes, something around which you could actually build a body of criticism. And he's careful to say that it may not be impossible to do this with directors like Zach Snyder or Michael Bay, only that he's not convinced it is possible. What this "something" is that could form such a critical basis is definitely very subjective, but I don't think Gregory is saying that it isn't.

What you seem to be suggesting is that someone can't author a film until someone else has written about how they authored it which doesn't make any sense to me.

It's not that criticism validates authorship, only that claims of authorship need to be based on something that can be critically analyzed over a whole body of work. His comments about this not happening with many of these Hollywood directors are only relevant insofar as he is acknowledging that the type of criticism he's looking for may simply not yet exist (as opposed to being incapable of existing) and he doesn't have enough interest in these films to examine them in that context himself. And it's not just a question of the criticism being written or not written, as the substance of the criticism is important, too. Someone could write a very focused, detailed and even fascinating critical analysis of Zach Snyder's work that was still unconvincing.

Now, regarding branding: I think Gregory is right to a large extent, but I would like to suggest, without knowing whether he would agree, that branding and auteurism need not be exclusive of each other. Hitchcock was most certainly an auteur, but I think it would be silly to suggest that he wasn't also a brand, what with the TV show, all the books he lent his name and image to, the records like "Music to Be Murdered By" and "Ghost Stories for Young People," and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, which is still publishing. But the fact that he was a brand name doesn't make any of his films worse. I also don't think the presence of recognizable elements of a filmmaker's brand in work made before they became a brand makes the argument less persuasive. This is certainly the case with Hitchcock. I would count Tim Burton as another auteur who has become a brand (he's not handcrafting all those toys they sell at Hot Topic, after all) even though elements of that brand go back to his earliest works. This doesn't mean he suddenly ceased to be an auteur, even if I think he's descending into a crass, superficial imitation of himself. The point is, one can be both an auteur and a brand, but one can also be either a brand or an auteur without being both.

I'm not here to defend Gregory's particular views of this or that director. I'm sure I don't agree with all of them. But I do think what he's saying about marketing and advertising, and the way directors' names are used as a brand identity, is very important and mostly true, regardless of whether the filmmaker in question is an "auteur," and should not be brushed aside.

I can't recall the exact formulation or exemplars, but this attitude was obnoxiously put by Truffaut at one point in terms like: "the worst film by [approved auteur] X is of course better than the best film by [mere director] Y." Some really penetrating critical thinking there, Francois.

In his most famous essay on the subject, X = Jean Renoir and Y = Jean Delannoy, but he also made the same comparison between Howard Hawks and John Huston, which I find pretty indefensible. All this leads me to ask whether the word "auteur" is being applied so casually now that it has lost any particular meaning. I'm not gung-ho about the value judgment inherent in its original conception myself, and if we're at the point where "auteur very literally just means author," and it's not necessarily referring to that specific line of criticism, why not just use the word author?

[knives]

He was talking about Huston and Hitchcock which makes it even more absurd to me. I don't find Truffaut much of a critic compared with his peers though. I agree that the fact that a work has an overriding controller should be taken as a given. That author isn't always the director such as in my Kaufman example or in Gone with the Wind, but that doesn't mean a film, a work of art, is authorless. There are interesting things to talk about in regards to authorship as it extends through a career, but arguing who has the right to being an author is a waste.

[Kirkinson]

He probably made similar comparisons over the years, but it was the Hawks/Huston one that stuck with me the most, since there are at least four Huston films I find more interesting than the best Hawks I've seen, and I don't consider that a blight on Hawks.

When I was twenty, I argued with Andre Bazin for comparing films to mayonnaise--they either emulsified or did not. "Don't you see," I protested, "that all Hawks's films are good, and all Huston's are bad?" I later modified this harsh formula when I had become a working critic: "The worst Hawks film is more interesting than Huston's best." This will be remembered as "la politique des auteurs" (the auteur theory); it was started by Cahiers du Cinema and is forgotten in France, but still discussed in American periodicals.

And message boards, evidently!