For a long time, ‘auteur theory’ has been the leading method of approaching film criticism. However, what exactly is it, and is it really the best mentality to have?
After France was liberated from German occupation during World War II, the ban on American films was lifted. In From Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, Peter Wollen notes that “when they reappeared after the Liberation they came with a force – and an emotional impact”. Countless films came flooding into the country all at once and the fledgling group of critics, notably those working for the popular film criticism magazine Cahiers du Cinema, started to rediscover many works that had been otherwise completely dismissed and forgotten. In their concentrated viewing of these rediscovered films, they began to notice thematic and stylistic patterns throughout the collected works of particular directors. This led them to separate these directors from the rest, labelling them as ‘auteurs’.
Many of these critics, including a young François Truffaut, were frustrated by the state cinema was in at the time. Since the introduction of sound cinema, they felt filmmakers had gotten lazy, treating films more like literature instead of exploiting the full potential of cinema. They viewed it as the ‘age of the screenwriter’. In his landmark essay, A Certain Tendency in the French Cinema, Truffaut comments that “[w]hen they hand in their scenario, the film is done; the metteur-en-scène, in their eyes, is the gentleman who adds the pictures to it and it’s true, alas!” Critics claimed the ability to differentiate between the films made by a metteur-en-scène and the films made a director, whom they deemed a ‘true auteur’.
What exactly is an auteur? Wollen notes, “[t]he auteur theory grew up rather haphazardly; it was never elaborated in programmatic terms, in a manifesto or collective statement.” Auteur theory’s lack of a clear, precise definition led to many misunderstandings and reinterpretations. However, in its most basic form, an auteur is the single, controlling, creative voice behind a film. In Auteurism and After, John Hess says “there existed the belief that the cinema could be a personal art through which one expressed one's point of view just as the novelist or painter did through his chosen medium.” Auteurs, who were mostly directors, are supposedly like great painters and their films are the result of their intimate and personal relationship with their art. If their ‘personality’ was not apparent in the films they made, a filmmaker tended to be considered as merely a metteur-en-scène, despite the very real possibility that they may well have been incredibly skilled and talented filmmakers in their own right.
In his article La Politique des Auteurs Bazin presents us with the following artificial equation. He suggests that “auteur + subject = work”. However, to him, some critics would seem to prefer more banal scenarios in the films they watch, just so that the ‘expression of the auteur’s soul’ has more room to take centre stage. For these critics, the only equation that really matters is auteur = work. They are effectively reducing the importance of the ‘subject’ to zero and instead, they are placing all significance onto the auteur, disregarding everything else completely.
Auteur theory was popularised by Andrew Sarris in his essay Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962. By the time the period known as New Hollywood Cinema came around, which C. Paul Sellors identifies as “[r]oughly encompassing the years 1967-1980” in his book Film Authorship, auteur theory was in common practice. However, while predominant, it was not accepted universally. Pauline Kael says in Circles and Squares, “a critic with a single theory is like a gardener who uses a lawn mower on everything that grows.” When relying solely on ideas within auteur theory, the focus may well be too narrow to see the bigger picture, missing the contributions of those not considered auteurs. Using the theory as a blanket tool means treating it as a mindless formula, instead of forming a nuanced argument. Sellors summarises Kael’s criticism as, “auteur theory is a recipe for avoiding robust criticism.” Always applying auteur theory to the study of a film is lazy, however the lack of a full understanding is potentially harmful.
Enter Hal Ashby. Director Hal Ashby’s career was seen to deviate from how New Hollywood’s prestigious auteurs worked. Despite the risk of interference, Ashby revelled in a very close working collaboration with enormous Hollywood studios. In his book, Authoring Hal Ashby, Aaron Hunter points out that “he never made a film that did not have some sort of major studio support, at least on the level of distribution.” Ashby was a great believer in collaboration; in working together as a team to make a film bearing the marks of all of its contributors. According to Hunter, Ashby said, “[t]he great thing about film is, it really is communal. It is the communal art.” Collaboration was at the forefront of his filmmaking and he viewed it as integral to how he made films. in Being Hal Ashby Nick Dawson notes that Ashby “never had his Best Editing Oscar for In the Heat of the Night engraved with his name, feeling everyone involved in the film had actually won it” and perhaps this is a testament to how dearly he held his collaborative approach.
However, this willingness and openness to collaboration, may have had unfortunate side effects on the academic and critical appreciation of the films he directed. Ashby’s love for collaboration and his belief in its merits, unfortunately led to him essentially being labelled as a ‘director for hire’ and not someone with a personal filmmaking voice of their own. Hunter says that many critics marked him down as merely “a passive director who benefitted from the talent of the people around him”.
Despite being the director, Ashby’s films were seldom viewed as the works of an
auteur, or at the very least, Ashby was never considered the auteur of his films. Hunter says many would argue that Ashby’s influence on his films was “too subtle, too fleeting, or even too scattered.” Since at first glance Ashby had no obvious and consistent sense of personal style throughout his body of work, it seems only fair to agree with the critics of his time and declare that Hal Ashby was not an auteur. Although uncommon, it is not unheard of for someone other than director to be considered a film’s author. Sellors gives Rocky (1976) as an example of this, as while it was directed by John G. Avildsen, Sylvester Stallone is very much seen as the predominant personal voice on display.
Perhaps an interesting angle to examine Ashby’s collaborative approach to filmmaking is to look at a time when it did not necessarily completely work; in this instance, his directing efforts on Shampoo. The film was produced by, co-written by and starred Warren Beatty. However, Hunter notes that “[i]n some sense, Beatty saw Shampoo… as a practice run for his future as a director.” Descriptions of the Shampoo shoot sound like it would be any director’s worst nightmare. Ashby’s producer was encroaching on his territory and limiting his directorial power, but he could not do anything about it because his producer was also his lead actor. Ashby was pushed to the background on his own film. Hunter says “the story of Shampoo became that Ashby did not really direct the film, but that he… would acquiesce to the wishes of… Beattie.” This is reminiscent of how Sarris dismisses John Huston’s classic films like The Maltese Falcon19 (1941) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) as “actors’ classics”, considering them to have no real value. In the same way, Ashby was dismissed as a talentless hack who only managed to make the films he did by being raised up by the talented cast and crew he surrounded himself with. Despite the quality of many of the films Ashby directed, he was regularly dismissed in favour of other filmmakers who fell more in line with the usual conception of auteurist filmmaking.
However, Ashby never claimed to be an auteur. He did not want to be one and in fact he went so far as to outright reject the label of auteur consistently throughout his career. He insisted that it did not apply to him and his collaborative filmmaking process. Hunter says that Ashby “seems not to have believed in the concept as a practical framework for understanding filmmaking, at least within the context of the Hollywood system” Despite this, or perhaps as a consequence of this, his directorial efforts were very rarely viewed as anything worthy of study. It was as though simply based on the fact he rejected the idea that he was an auteur, his films were not worth anything; as if his approach to filmmaking had somehow affected the quality of his output. Bazin says “[i]t is recognized that there do exist certain important films of quality that escape this test, but these will systematically be considered inferior to those with the personal stamp of the auteur”. Throughout Hollywood’s history, the work of non-auteurs has been consistently downplayed or ignored in favour of films made by directors that were deemed auteurs. Why is this? There is, of course, nothing necessarily inferior about a non-auteurist film. In fact, critics may well appreciate them a great deal more if they viewed these films unobstructed by any pre-judgement they might have made based on the film’s director. Conversely, they may well begin to see the cracks forming in films that they previously praised once they take their ‘auteurist geniuses’ down off their untouchable pedestals. However, as it stands even today, many critics seem to continue studying cinema from an auteur-centric point of view. It is as if some critics think, as Bazin criticises, "when one is dealing with a genius, it is always a good method to presuppose that a supposed weakness in a work of art is nothing other than a beauty that one has not yet managed to understand.” His fellow critics assumed there was artistic merit in films simply because they were made by auteurs they considered ‘great’. They were reading far too deeply into terrible films that didn’t deserve the critical attention which they were receiving. Maybe without the use of their rose-tinted auteurist glasses the truth behind those “perceived weaknesses” would become apparent; that, most of the time, it is simply just bad filmmaking.
While there can be real merit in an examination of a filmmaker’s career as a whole in order to more fully understand each work they produce, this effort is fruitless if the works themselves are pushed to the background of your attention. Sellors says that “[n]o longer is the film the main object of the critic’s attention, but the auteur that conceived and created the film.” Surely any study of filmmakers themselves is simply a means to an end. Should the end goal of auteurist study not be to achieve a fuller understanding of each individual film? Bazin questions this issue, saying “[t]his does not mean one has to deny the role of the auteur, but simply give him back the preposition without which the noun auteur remains but a halting concept. Auteur, yes, but what of?” Auteur theory can be of great interest and help to a critic, but there is no point in it if it causes you to be led astray, forcing you to lose sight of the one thing that truly matters; the films.
However, even in cases of complete anonymity, art outside of cinema is not necessarily just ignored. Bazin comments on the writings of the French Resistance, observing that their anonymity “in no way lessened the dignity or responsibility of the writer.” In dealing with anonymous art, it is impossible to analyse the artist and the repetition of themes throughout their collective works. Does this mean that their art is somehow lessened? Surely the art itself remains unchanged by the anonymity of its artist. Applying these ideas to cinema, perhaps Bazin is correct when he says, “the work transcends the director”. A purely anonymously made film would still be significant despite its lack of an auteur credit, because the work itself will always be more significant than its artist. After all, an artist without art is no longer an artist, but art without an artist is still art. A film could still be critiqued and appreciated, without any knowledge of who its auteur is. In many ways, the filmmaker’s identity is a luxury and doesn’t really matter in the long run.
With this in mind, is Hal Ashby’s body of directing work worth reconsidering? Sure, he may not have been the ‘great auteur’ many New Hollywood critics desperately clung to, but in no way that does that mean that he, and his many collaborators, lacked talent and skill. Dawson notes that despite his contributions to Shampoo being downplayed by critics, “Beatty says that Ashby's direction was the reason his performance in the film was so good, and his admiration for Ashby is clear”. If a film is well made, what does it matter who made it? Filmmakers who do not fall into the great canon of auteurs can, and do, still make fantastic films and, thankfully, it seems that writings such as Hunter’s Authoring Hal Ashby are finally giving Ashby and his fellow rejectors of the auteur label the re-evaluation that they perhaps always deserved.
Although Ashby was a talented filmmaker in his own right, he publicly kept his collaborations at the very forefront of his filmmaking process. Hess claims that these rigid followers of auteur theory “slight, if not reject, the valuable contributions of scriptwriters, cameramen, and actors and actresses” and this was not how Ashby liked to run his operation. In fact, the traditional auteurist idea that a film is the personal expression of the one true artist at its core was perhaps the direct antithesis to how Ashby liked to run things. Ashby relied on the talent of those around him in order to elevate his films into something beyond what solely one person could possibly make. He may not have been the auteur behind any of his films. However, that is not to say he wasn’t an auteur behind them. Hunter says that “While each Ashby film is authored in part by Ashby, each is also a film authored by his closest collaborators.” If film is by its very nature such an intensely collaborative medium, then perhaps it is only logical for a film to have more than one creative and expressive author involved in its production. Sellors refers to this model of filmmaking as ‘collective authorship’. While the director is obviously crucial in the making of a film, at the end of the day he is only one cog in a massive machine. The director is not necessarily the be all and end all when it comes to recognising who authored any given film. Cinematographers, writers, producers, actors, editors etc. inevitably have at least some degree of authorial input, however great or small, and their input should not just be completely dismissed for the sake of romanticised ideas of auteur geniuses.
The idea of a film as a pure expression of the auteur’s view of life makes the assumption that the film is solely the uninfluenced work of the auteur. However, this generally isn’t true. Bazin selects several films and compares them to paintings of the same time period. He asks of them, “Does it follow that one should see in them the same degree of individualization? I for one do not think so.” Cinema has always been a collaborative artform. It is a dance of many departments coming together in order to make one joint end product. It is a far cry from a solitary artist dabbing a bit of paint onto a canvas. The sole auteur is the driving influence of a film, but to assume they are the only influence is absurd. To use the example Bazin himself gave, Citizen Kane is considered the auteurist work of Orson Welles, but it would be a mistake to downplay cinematographer Greg Toland’s significant influence on the film.
Ashby’s collaborative approach seems to have gotten in the way of New Hollywood critics fully appreciating his films, but was this approach really all that unique to Ashby? Every film is made with a certain degree of collaboration. The exception to this rule is films that are genuinely made by one person and one person only, for example Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight, however this is very rare outside of amateur filmmaking. On a Hollywood film, there may well be hundreds of people involved, all invested in their own departmental aspects of the film. Making films of any kind of scale requires collaboration; avoiding it is entirely impossible. Perhaps a re-evaluation of Ashby’s films, while a step in the right direction, is not really what is required to make true advances in how we think about cinema. Rather what may be needed is a re-evaluation of how filmmaking is actually approached in general. Hunter says, “it is time to explore how New Hollywood – like all eras of Hollywood history – comprises the films of multiple authors, working collaboratively to create movies in which all their individual visions can be detected”. ‘Collective authorship’ is much more present in cinema than auteur critics would seem to suggest or understand. In fact, ‘collective authorship’ might be the predominant and almost universal approach to filmmaking right throughout the history of Hollywood cinema.
Auteur theory is certainly not without its positives. However, it can sometimes just be too dangerous when it leads to the dismissal of films made by filmmakers like Hal Ashby, simply on the basis that they are not auteurs. Perhaps Ashby’s collaborative approach to filmmaking is less the result of his passivity as a director and moreso the result of practices far more commonplace in Hollywood than most auteur critics would like to admit. Collaboration is crucial in filmmaking, so perhaps this ‘collective authorship’ that comes about as a result of collaboration, is not simply practiced in the work of lesser filmmakers. Perhaps 'collective authorship’ is in fact a practice widespread throughout the history of Hollywood cinema.
Bibliography
Bazin, André, ‘La Politique des Auteurs’ in Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader, ed. by Barry Keith Grant (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008) pp. 19-28
Dawson, Nick, Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel (Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 2009)
Hess, John, ‘Auteurism and After: A Reply to Graham Petrie’ in Film Quarterly, Volume 27.2 (1973) pp. 28-37
Hunter, Aaron, Authoring Hal Ashby: The Myth of the New Hollywood Auteur (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016)
Kael, Pauline, ‘Circles and Squares’ in Film Quarterly, Volume 16.3 (1963): pp. 12-26
Sarris, Andrew, ‘Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962’ in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1999) pp.515-518
Sellors, C. Paul, Film Authorship: Auteurs and Other Myths (Wiltshire: Wallflower Press, 2010)
Thompson, Kristin and David Bordwell, ‘Art Cinema and the Idea of Authorship’ in Film History: An Introduction, (New York, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2003) pp. 415-438
Truffaut, François, ‘A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema’ in Film Theory, ed. by Philip Simpson, Andrew Utterson and Karen Shepherdson (London: Routledge, 2004) pp.7-20
Wollen, Peter, ‘From Signs and Meaning in the Cinema: The Auteur Theory’ in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1999) pp.519-531
Other:
In the Heat of the Night, dir. Norman Jewison (United Artists: 1967) [On DVD]
Maltese Falcon, The, dir. John Huston (Warner Bros.: 1941) [On DVD]
Mothlight, dir. Stan Brakhage (1963)
Rocky, dir. John G. Avildsen (United Artists: 1976) [On DVD]
Shampoo, dir. Hal Ashby (Columbia Pictures: 1975) [On DVD]
Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The, dir. John Huston (Warner Bros.: 1948) [On DVD]
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