Cahiers Catch-All Thread: From Auteur to Z

[zedz]

That's more like theory determining taste, which...seems like a bad idea. Most auteurism today takes a 'theory divorced from taste' stance, where auteurism is considered true without that making auteurist films or filmmakers intrinsically better. I always thought Sarris and co.'s big mistake was taking a quasi-Leavisite position, where auteurism wasn't simply descriptive but a badge of honour signaling the real tradition of high art in film.

Exactly: just because a director is distinctive doesn't mean they're any good! (I can smell a Baz Luhrmann film a mile away, and I'll be heading in the opposite direction.)

[Michael Kerpan]

I thought the earliest version of "auteurism" explicitly recognized that an "auteur" could actually be distinctively bad, while a non-auteur might turn out (reasonably) consistently good movies. (But I am not sure which of the gang articulated this).

[domino harvey]

Well, not for Truffaut

To benefit from the politique des auteurs one first has to be worthy of it, and as it happens this school of criticism claims to distinguish between true auteurs and metteurs-en-scene, even talented ones […] it is of greater importance to find out if a director is worthy of entering the select group of auteurs than it is to judge how well he or she has used the material at hand.

[black&huge]

can we rename this thread: "yippie cahiers, motherthreader!"?

[rrenault]

There's a current use of "auteur" that I've seen used in several extras and commentaries in recent years that seems dead wrong to me: it's the sense that "auteur" cinema is equivalent with highly controlled arthouse cinema, with some directors dismissed as "not auteurs" because they didn't write their own scripts, or made commercial projects they didn't choose themselves, or didn't work within consistent genres in a consistent style - or all of the above. Which is surely the antithesis of auteurism as originally conceived, which was all about recognizing the signature of directors who operated within exactly those kind of constraints. Nobody ever had to argue that a writer / director / star like Chaplin was an auteur, because it was self-evident.

Precisely. Funnily enough, these days “film d’auteur” in everyday language in French essentially means “art film”.

« Un cinema d’art et d’essai » is an « arthouse » basically, and I suppose you could say ‘film d’art’ to describe an ‘art film’, but ‘film d’auteur’ seems to be a much more common phrase among French film buffs, although the term probably encompasses both arthouse directors like Haneke, Sciamma, and Ceylan on the one hand and more mainstream ‘auteur directors’ like Tarantino and PTA on the other.

That said, I’m not sure why I should feel the need to put auteur director in quotes if so many other people in the world are willing to use the term earnestly. The concept of auteurism has morphed by itself over time, which I think was partly domino’s point above. We don’t necessarily need to stage an intellectual battle anymore to prove that Hawks was a great artist. That struggle has been won.

I’m not gonna raise a ruckus when my real life friends earnestly use terms like “world cinema” or “auteur cinema”, and I imagine most people on this forum wouldn’t even if we can intellectually dissect why such terms might be problematic.

[rrenault]

can we rename this thread: "yippie cahiers, motherthreader!"?

Works for me.

[diamonds]

To me, he seems to be implying the reverse of your formulation, something like: "My taste in cinema finds me gravitating toward certain films/directors due to elements I perceive in their direction. That makes me an auteurist." He writes in the article that he has given up on the idea of "a pure and objective standard for auteurism," that it has no identifiable unique tenets, which would seem to contradict the idea that he believes in auteurism as a school to which one subscribes.

Could be, although I suppose, in truth, it's a chicken and egg scenario.

Don't get me wrong. I think Sallitt genuinely likes the directors he claims to actively like but with people in general there can be a tendency to not allow oneself to like certain things without rational justification, and said rational justifications tend to often rely on already extant critical frameworks, such as, for instance, Sarris' critical paradigm as outlined in The American Cinema. I guess what I'm saying is Sallitt seems like the sort of person who won't allow himself to just go "Man, Last Year at Marienbad (or Tree of Life or any other highly opaque film) was such a weird crazy film. I can't make heads or tails of it, but it was interesting and I definitely felt something. I'll have to revisit and mull it over I guess". I feel the whole "I didn't understand it, but I liked it and found it interesting nonetheless" phenomenon is a healthy part of aesthetic appreciation in general that I feel a lot of film critics actively resist.

I only just saw the added paragraph, but I'm having a bit of trouble comprehending it. I'm not sure I understand the references to Marienbad and Tree of Life, both of which are works of noted auteurs and films Sallitt thinks highly of. Mainly I'm confused as to what you're basing the bolded impression off of. Has he said or indicated that he resists or flat out rejects works he doesn't initially comprehend? I can think of at least one example off the top of my head where he said almost exactly what you imagine him being unwilling to say: of Angela Schanelec's I Was at Home, But… (which one could say is a "highly opaque film"), he wrote:

I still couldn't make head or tails of the structure after 2 viewings, but it was so beautiful that I had to value it.

The impression I've gleaned from Sallitt's writing is that of a highly individual/idiosyncratic approach to engaging films, not at all one which heavily "relies on already extant critical frameworks."

Here's another quote from Sallitt pertinent to the subject of auteurism (which echoes Mr Sausage's point on the previous page):

One of the things I don't like about this word [auteur] is that it implies an a priori rather than an a posteriori approach to director studies.

In my view, we're supposed to set our cinema sensors on "find anything that's good" and then try to organize that information after the fact. If it organizes well into a director-quality correlation, then we're auteurists.

But I think it's backwards to start from director consistency and deduce quality. Of course, few or none of us would do that explicitly - but, on a connotative level, that's what emerges from using the word "auteur" in a complimentary context.

And here's another problem I have with the word, a more personal problem. I don't like the idea of throwing a film back into the water just because the entire film, or the filmmaker's entire body of work, doesn't measure up. Is Henry Hathaway or Richard Fleischer (to take two examples that have been bandied about for years) an auteur? Certainly these guys don't have the kind of consistency that we dream of in a director. But sometimes they glow with real artistry. I hate to say anything dismissive about such valued filmmakers.

Sarris seemed to feel differently on this last point, and that's his privilege.

[Michael Kerpan]

I got to serve as a sort of pseudo-benshi for Dan Sallitt when he visited our house -- showing him (among other things) some unsubbed Naruse and excerpts from Somai's Moving. I never found him to put theory before actually experiencing what he was watching.

[rrenault]

I wasn’t necessarily suggesting Sallitt dislikes films like Last Year at Marienbad and Tree of Life.

I just meant to say that sometimes film critics have a tendency to not just allow a work of art to wash over them without trying to understand it. In short, you don’t have to *get* a film to like it. And Sallitt, kind of by his own admission, won’t allow himself to like any film he doesn’t first *get*. Yes, I know it’s a critic’s job to rationally dissect and interpret a film to determine why it’s good or not, but critics at times struggle with the fact certain works don’t always easily lend themselves to rational (Cartesian) analysis, and I guess I just felt Marienbad and Tree of Life were textbook examples of those types of films.

For the record, I admire Sallitt, and he seems like a nice guy on a personal level. I guess we probably would just have different ideas of what feeling/experiencing a film first before analyzing it entails.

And it could be I misunderstood some of Sallitt’s quotes, as well.

One last thing: I’m probably a somewhat “dispassionate” viewer by nature, by which I mean I don’t have a problem acknowledging something is great/accomplished/important even if I don’t necessarily “like” or “love” it. That doesn’t there aren’t films that have emotionally and/or viscerally moved me on the first viewing. Of course there are. But I do tend to approach things from the standpoint of “This is an important film which I should probably watch and be familiar with in order to have well-rounded film education (whether it’s Battle of Algiers, or Sansho Dayu or what-have-you)”. My impression is a lot of cinephiles don’t necessarily approach things that way…and that’s fine. There’s a place for both types of engagement with art.

Granted, it’s rare that I actively dislike a (pre-90s) canonical film, but there are exceptions such as Gilliam’s Brazil. I guess in a sense I give the canon the benefit of the doubt first in an effort to be educated about film and then just let my personal taste naturally develop as an offshoot of that. Granted, there are tons of critically acclaimed films from recent times I flat out hated like The Substance, and I don’t much like Lanthimos or Glazer(Zone of Interest notwithstanding).

Anyhow, I didn’t intend this to be a drawn out discussion on Sallitt. I just meant to use him as an example of someone who I would perceive as a dyed-in-the-wool auteurist who’s part of the “Sarris school”, as opposed to someone like Durgnat who’s very much not a part of that tradition. But maybe I was just misperceiving him (Sallitt that it is).

Maybe Fred Camper would have been a better example, since he pretty much, as a matter of course, hates “arthouse films”, although he likes Bela Tarr interestingly.

I suppose I brought up Last Year at Marienbad, since Sarris is often portrayed as the “anti snob snob scold who didn’t like arthouse films”, even though that’s obviously not true as he did in fact praise plenty of so-called arthouse films, but Marienbad does seem like exactly the kind of arthouse film Sarris would have been stereotyped as disliking even if if he may have in fact admired it.

[knives]

I thought the earliest version of "auteurism" explicitly recognized that an "auteur" could actually be distinctively bad, while a non-auteur might turn out (reasonably) consistently good movies. (But I am not sure which of the gang articulated this).

Could it have been Bazin? I believe he’s the one who cited Curtiz as an example of the great journeyman.

[rrenault]

David Ehrenstein once called Ridley Scott the Michael Curtiz of his generation.

[Mr Sausage]

Ridley Scott? The man with the highly personal style?

[Michael Kerpan]

knives -- For some reason I think it may have been Godard. What I recall is that the person acknowledged that it was possible (in theory at least) for a director to both be bad AND an auteur.

[beamish14]

knives -- For some reason I think it may have been Godard. What I recall is that the person acknowledged that it was possible (in theory at least) for a director to both be bad AND an auteur.

Peter Greenaway admires him. Scott is a brilliant art director

[Red Screamer]

Ridley Scott? The man with the highly personal style?

If Ridley Scott has a highly personal style, then what does Robert Bresson have?

I think part of the confusion here has to do with what directors do and what counts as "their" style. In Truffaut's terms, Scott and Eggers would both fall in the "metteurs en scène" category. They have a strong brand, but a lot of that comes from producer-level decisions (like art direction, historical research/adaptation, genre), while when it comes to the nuts and bolts of direction (découpage, blocking, work with actors, rhythm, tone) they are pretty variable and impersonal, or even unaccomplished and careless. There aren't many clearer cases of "everyone is in a different movie" acting than House of Gucci, for example, while Nosferatu squanders its labored-over art design and camera movements in muddled and monotonous direction that can't make the people, ambiance, or situations come alive. In this line of thought, even a successful work of a metteur en scène is essentially the sum of its parts, which is why a (Sarrisite) auteurist likely won't understand what people like so much about Alien, with Dave Kehr praising its technical elements, while speaking with utter contempt of Scott's direction. This idea of "direction" does not include overseeing the creation of the film's art design, sets, and cinematography, though that was surely part of his actual job. When "auteur" is used as an exclusive term like this, it also implies that these filmmakers create a distinct artistic universe that's more than the sum of its parts, not only in terms of style, but in terms of a singular philosophical outlook, with its own logic, borders, and moral center. This is why we can talk of Lubitsch's universe or Hitchcock's universe -- even the idea of Welles' universe clearly encompasses both F for Fake and The Lady from Shanghai -- but not Curtiz's or Mamoulian's (though he's a director with both an identifiable brand and visual presence). Hence why Sarris' pantheon does not include auteurist favorites who were more inconsistent or had a light touch.

That being said, I don't find being exclusive with the classification very helpful, and the terms of the auteur (author) / metteur en scène (theater director) distinction are just borrowed from other media with existing critical hierarchies, which filmmaking largely lacked back in the 1950s -- you go to see a Pinter play staged by any theater director and at the end of the day, it stays a Pinter play. I agree with Sallitt that "auteurist" is most useful now for referring to a cinephilia whose primary interest is in a director's style -- people who will complain about Scorsese's overreliance on close-ups in Killers of the Flower Moon long before they talk about how good/bad/believable Leo is -- but given the baggage and confusion that come with the term (in just this post I needed to specficy the different versions of Truffaut/Sarris/Sallitt, and that's just the beginning!), so I don't often use it.

[MichaelB]

In this line of thought, even a successful work of a metteur en scène is essentially the sum of its parts, which is why a (Sarrisite) auteurist likely won't understand what people like so much about Alien, with Dave Kehr praising its technical elements, while speaking with utter contempt of Scott's direction. This idea of "direction" does not include overseeing the creation of the film's art design, sets, and cinematography, though that was surely part of his actual job.

In the case of Alien, absolutely—it was Scott's own meticulously drafted storyboards that persuaded 20th Century-Fox to double the budget. For all the talent of its individual contributors (not least on the design side), there's no doubt at all who was in overall charge.

(On the cinematography front, Derek Vanlint was essentially a commercials DOP who clearly preferred working in that environment, because his feature filmography is sparse in the extreme—I assume he got the Alien gig because he'd worked extensively with Scott on numerous commercials.)

[rrenault]

I do find it weird/interesting that Sarris’ polemic was so often rightly centered around the idea we should be able to derive just as much aesthetic enjoyment from seemingly commercial fare like Psycho or 7 Women as we do from capital A art films like Persona and L’Avventura but that for “Sarrisites” it’s treated as borderline sinful to enjoy a movie for simply managing to be a “Great Movie”. A film like Alien is a perfect example.

There’s kind of a contradiction in “Learn to find the art in *commercial cinema*, but it’s bad to simply enjoy great movies *as Great Movies*”.

But I often suspect a lot of auteurists are intellectually interested in “film” but just don’t seem to actually like movies all that much…if that makes sense. Ideally, a cinephile should be both. Kael’s problem is she was the latter without being the former whereas a Dave Kehr or Fred Camper can often feel like the former without being the latter.

But another issue is auteurism (if by that term we mean Sarris and mid-century Cahiers-influenced thinking on film) has never really updated its critical vocabulary. By that I mean they seem to live in an alternate reality in which there are still Budd Boettichers and Nicholas Rays hiding in the shadows and toiling way in obscurity “in the industry” when the reality is film culture and the film industry are far different today than they were in 1959. Granted, “vulgar auteurism” is all about trying to unearth modern-day Boettichers.

[Mr Sausage]

Ridley Scott? The man with the highly personal style?

If Ridley Scott has a highly personal style, then what does Robert Bresson have?

I think part of the confusion here has to do with what directors do and what counts as "their" style. In Truffaut's terms, Scott and Eggers would both fall in the "metteurs en scène" category. They have a strong brand, but a lot of that comes from producer-level decisions (like art direction, historical research/adaptation, genre), while when it comes to the nuts and bolts of direction (découpage, blocking, work with actors, rhythm, tone) they are pretty variable and impersonal, or even unaccomplished and careless. There aren't many clearer cases of "everyone is in a different movie" acting than House of Gucci, for example, while Nosferatu squanders its labored-over art design and camera movements in muddled and monotonous direction that can't make the people, ambiance, or situations come alive. In this line of thought, even a successful work of a metteur en scène is essentially the sum of its parts, which is why a (Sarrisite) auteurist likely won't understand what people like so much about Alien, with Dave Kehr praising its technical elements, while speaking with utter contempt of Scott's direction. This idea of "direction" does not include overseeing the creation of the film's art design, sets, and cinematography, though that was surely part of his actual job. When "auteur" is used as an exclusive term like this, it also implies that these filmmakers create a distinct artistic universe that's more than the sum of its parts, not only in terms of style, but in terms of a singular philosophical outlook, with its own logic, borders, and moral center. This is why we can talk of Lubitsch's universe or Hitchcock's universe -- even the idea of Welles' universe clearly encompasses both F for Fake and The Lady from Shanghai -- but not Curtiz's or Mamoulian's (though he's a director with both an identifiable brand and visual presence). Hence why Sarris' pantheon does not include auteurist favorites who were more inconsistent or had a light touch.

As MichaelB said, Scott's background in art and design made him an essential contributor to the look and feel of his films. And both he and his brother Tony created identifiable styles that were influential--indeed you can still see remnants of them today in stylists like David Fincher and Michael Bay. I can't speak for the quality of his career as a whole, especially these last decades where he seems to work just to work, but his films up to Blade Runner seem plainly to me the work of a stylist with specific vision. Comparing that to Michael Curtiz is daft.

As for Eggers, the same is true. The fact that the "producer-level decisions" are consistent across his films and mark them out as his work is, actually, classic evidence of auteurism. He is as good an example as you can get these days of someone creating as it were their own universe, one that's period specific, tied with the erotic and the transgressive, and blurring the distinctions between nightmares, fantasies, and reality. I'm sorry you didn't like Nosferatu, but that's scant reason to claim he isn't or wouldn't have been considered an auteur, despite the ample evidence to the contrary.

[rrenault]

I think part of the problem is a lot of critics, including some knowledgeable “highbrow” ones like Kehr know very little about and/or don’t appreciate the hard practical realities of film production.

(Many) People often don’t realize how arduous and stressful an undertaking even a 10-minute short film is regardless of whether or not it displays the visual expressiveness of someone like Dreyer.

I think this goes a long way in explaining why a film critic’s list of favorites will often look quite different from a director’s. They don’t always value the same things and/or the things that seem easy in the eyes of a critic who never spends time on a film set aren’t easy at all.

[MichaelB]

As for Eggers, the same is true. The fact that the "producer-level decisions" are consistent across his films and mark them out as his work is, actually, classic evidence of auteurism. He is as good an example as you can get these days of someone creating as it were their own universe, one that's period specific, tied with the erotic and the transgressive, and blurring the distinctions between nightmares, fantasies, and reality. I'm sorry you didn't like Nosferatu, but that's scant reason to claim he isn't or wouldn't have been considered an auteur, despite the ample evidence to the contrary.

For me, Nosferatu is certainly Eggers' least interesting film (the material's just too familiar), but I'd be able to guess who made it in a matter of seconds. As you say, he's been stylistically and thematically consistent right from the start.

I think this goes a long way in explaining why a film critic’s list of favorites will often look quite different from a director’s. They don’t always value the same things and/or the things that seem easy in the eyes of a critic who never spends time on a film set aren’t easy at all.

Quite a few filmmakers have told me that critics' assumptions sometimes make them laugh out loud, as they invariably betray their ignorance of the filmmaking process (or the process of making that specific film). The fact is, it's a collaborative medium, and they have pretty much no idea who contributed what at any given moment, so they just lazily attribute it to the director, a practice that particularly drives screenwriters up the wall.

I've just spent a fascinating month writing hundreds of entries for the upcoming Comprehensive Dictionary of Cinema, unsurprisingly specialising in things in my own particular wheelhouse—I suspect this may be the first such book to have separate entries for Czech, Czechoslovak and Slovak New Waves! But they also asked me to fact-check entries in the other sections, which was quite a humbling (and hugely educational) experience as it really rammed home how much I didn't know about what actually went on on a film set on a day-to-day basis.

[rrenault]

As for Eggers, the same is true. The fact that the "producer-level decisions" are consistent across his films and mark them out as his work is, actually, classic evidence of auteurism. He is as good an example as you can get these days of someone creating as it were their own universe, one that's period specific, tied with the erotic and the transgressive, and blurring the distinctions between nightmares, fantasies, and reality. I'm sorry you didn't like Nosferatu, but that's scant reason to claim he isn't or wouldn't have been considered an auteur, despite the ample evidence to the contrary.

For me, Nosferatu is certainly Eggers' least interesting film (the material's just too familiar), but I'd be able to guess who made it in a matter of seconds. As you say, he's been stylistically and thematically consistent right from the start.

I think this goes a long way in explaining why a film critic’s list of favorites will often look quite different from a director’s. They don’t always value the same things and/or the things that seem easy in the eyes of a critic who never spends time on a film set aren’t easy at all.

Quite a few filmmakers have told me that critics' assumptions sometimes make them laugh out loud, as they invariably betray their ignorance of the filmmaking process (or the process of making that specific film). The fact is, it's a collaborative medium, and they have pretty much no idea who contributed what at any given moment, so they just lazily attribute it to the director, a practice that particularly drives screenwriters up the wall.

I've just spent a fascinating month writing hundreds of entries for the upcoming Comprehensive Dictionary of Cinema, unsurprisingly specialising in things in my own particular wheelhouse—I suspect this may be the first such book to have separate entries for Czech, Czechoslovak and Slovak New Waves! But they also asked me to fact-check entries in the other sections, which was quite a humbling (and hugely educational) experience as it really rammed home how much I didn't know about what actually went on on a film set on a day-to-day basis.

Critics often take “camera stylo” a little too much to heart. See Richard Brody who essentially thinks calling a film a collaborative medium is tantamount to philistinism.

[MichaelB]

Critics often take “camera stylo” a little too much to heart. See Richard Brody who essentially thinks calling a film a collaborative medium is tantamount to philistinism.

So does that mean that describing things accurately makes one a philistine?

I know that we're supposed to be living in a post-truth world, but this is an angle that I wasn't anticipating.

[Michael Kerpan]

I am pretty sure that Dave Kehr does indeed enjoy movies that tickle his fancy, regardless of auteurist concerns. Looking back at his capsule reviews shows he could savor disparate movies like Life of Brian, Dr. No and The Great Escape. I followed his career dating back to his college era reviews pre-dating his Chicago Reader gig, and never felt he did not truly love movies. Although we overlapped briefly at University of Chicago (and in Chicago for a long while), I never got to meet him until well after I arrived in Boston (when he was showing off some early Raoul Walsh films). (Disclaimer: early on some of his reviews infuriated me -- but I always read them and found them more useful overall then any others I encountered).

[diamonds]

I do find it weird/interesting that Sarris’ polemic was so often rightly centered around the idea we should be able to derive just as much aesthetic enjoyment from seemingly commercial fare like Psycho or 7 Women as we do from capital A art films like Persona and L’Avventura but that for “Sarrisites” it’s treated as borderline sinful to enjoy a movie for simply managing to be a “Great Movie”. A film like Alien is a perfect example.

There’s kind of a contradiction in “Learn to find the art in *commercial cinema*, but it’s bad to simply enjoy great movies *as Great Movies*”.

Or they simply have different ideas about what constitutes a "great movie." You're discussing a matter of taste, while again trying to subtly assert that a non-auteurist's taste is somehow more "pure" than an auteurist's. I myself have never found Alien to be a great film, and my antipathy toward it predated any knowledge I had of "auteurism" as a concept. I also find the use of "borderline sinful" here questionable; can you cite some examples from their criticism in which they posit that it is "bad to simply enjoy" a film not endorsed by "autuerism"? I associate that kind of scolding more with the Kael school than with the so-called Sarrisites.

But I often suspect a lot of auteurists are intellectually interested in “film” but just don’t seem to actually like movies all that much…if that makes sense. Ideally, a cinephile should be both. Kael’s problem is she was the latter without being the former whereas a Dave Kehr or Fred Camper can often feel like the former without being the latter.

Many of your posts in this discussion involve sweeping assumptions about a diverse group of practitioners that inevitably trivialize them or paint them as being disingenuous in some way. I find the notion that "a lot of auteurists don't actually like movies all that much" frankly hard to take, with Kehr as a particularly perplexing example given the sheer number of films he wrote about and championed over the course of his career.

Another example I'd take issue with:

I think Rivette was the one most committed his entire life to the dogmatic strain of auteurism.

The same Rivette who, per Jonathan Rosenbaum, "was the only member of the Cahiers team to refuse to allow his criticism to be reprinted—mainly, he said, because he no longer agreed with much of it"? It seems to me that Rivette, far from adhering to dogma, was almost unique in how far he went in revising his initial opinions on film direction. Quoted in the same article:

I detest the formulation ‘a film by.’ A film is always [by] at least fifteen people.…Mise-en-scène is a rapport with the actors, and the communal work is set with the first shot. What’s important for me in a film is that it be alive, that it be imbued with presence, which is basically the same thing. And that this presence, inscribed within the film, possesses a form of magic….It’s a collective work, but one wherein there’s a secret, too.

If you'd like, I can try to pull up some more quotes from him in interviews over the years that dispute the idea that he was a lifelong dogmatist.

I think part of the problem is a lot of critics, including some knowledgeable “highbrow” ones like Kehr know very little about and/or don’t appreciate the hard practical realities of film production.

Believe it or not, this problem has been raised from within the auteurist camp. (A more general note: here Jones distinguishes between "Sarris the epigrammatically inclined critic" and "Sarris the polemical campaigner." While it's true Sarris's categories have eclipsed his writing as the basis of his reputation—for which he certainly possesses a measure of blame—it's good to remember that at his best he was a very sharp critic.)

I hope I'm not coming across as unfairly harping on you. But I do think my concerns with some of the things you've written are legitimate.

[MichaelB]

I myself have never found Alien to be a great film, and my antipathy toward it predated any knowledge I had of "auteurism" as a concept.

Whereas I've always thought that it was a superb film—an opinion reinforced when I watched it again circa 2021; I thought it stood up incredibly well—and my positive attitude towards it also predated any knowledge that I had of "auteurism" as a concept.