An Argument Against Auterism

by Julie Cohen
Emerson College

There is no argument that I, Julie Cohen, have written what you are now reading. If you want to argue this fact, look at the top of the page. Now don’t you feel dumb?

In cinema, the idea of authorship is a little harder to pin down. If you look at movie credits, you would see the names of everyone from the coffee boy to the extra who managed to get her elbow in a few frames. Even among the big credits: producer, executive producer, line producer, director, creator, writer, none clearly states a single person, or “author”, responsible for the film’s content. The problem is that feature filmmaking is arguably the most complicated and hardest to coordinate of all of the arts. It directly uses the media of photography, sound design, and in many cases music and visual affects. It also has artistic features of its own including: structuring motion picture shots, editing the shots with one another, and juxtaposing the image to the sound. With all of these elements at work, how can one person grasp, let alone create an entire feature film? The answer is that most of the time one person does not. It takes many people to create a good film, and yet the common belief is that only one is the true artist.

The auteur theory was coined by a Francois Truffaut article in Cahiers du Cinema in 1954. To some critics the idea of the auteur becomes more important than the film itself. The quality of the film is judged by the skill of the filmmaker in displaying his personal world-view. In Cahiers du Cinema, Truffaut wrote “I believe tomorrow’s films will be even more personal than a novel, as individual and autobiographical as a confession or a journal…Tomorrow’s films will look like those who filmed them.” Shortly thereafter, the first American film school generation, directors such as Martin Scorsese and Brain DePalma, were fulfilling Truffaut’s dreams. The 1970s brought along Coppola, Altman, Speilberg and a slew of other directors who would also latch onto the trend. Of course, there would still be opponents to the theory. Pauline Kael argued that the starting point for interpretation of some films might be the director, but for other films it is not. She said, “Since universality is implied in any theory, the auteur theory does not make sense.” It is easy to see where Pauline is coming from. I suspect (or at least genuinely hope) that a movie like Glitter is not the work of an auteur director. It obviously did not have just the intentions of the director at heart (have you seen that poster?).

Even if people are to agree that the auteur theory is not always the right approach when critiquing a movie, many filmmakers still regard it as the tried and true way to effectively make a film. But is this so? The studio system, which made it so the crew was subservient to the studios and the stars, produced many great films. In this manner, it seems as if the auteur theory has taken over. My experiences at film school has shown me student directors who: rip apart scripts, shoot with less and less coverage, and do not workshop their ideas. This is in contrast to screenwriting and songwriting students who are always bouncing ideas off one another. When did it become standard to workshop a script, but not storyboards?

Herein lies the downside of the on-set auteur. There is an emphasis of command and competition over collaboration. Film is a unique art form because it is so multifaceted. Many people are required just to get sound and image on the screen. It seems like a denial of the medium to make all of the other departments (sound, cinematography, art direction, etc) slave not only to the director’s vision, but also to the director himself. When each person holds a very different job, most carrying their inherent creative aspects, why not let these people contribute their creativity? Allowing those specialized people, who may understand or care about their aspect of the film better than the director, to contribute, can mean a multi-layered film.

In music, a similar phenomenon occurs. Often one person writes and performs his own music, like a guitar playing singer/songwriter. This can be very good, but when people with many different instruments can come together to play in a orchestra or even a band, a whole new depth is created to the music. Even more amazing is when the people in these bands make their music together, as many do. When this is done in the spontaneous form of improvising together, as is done in many jazz and jam bands, the music has the potential to diverge in beautiful and totally unexpected directions. In film’s pre-production, the work-shopping of ideas between the director, writer, cinematographer, editor, and producer, can be a lot like a band creating a song. As long as everyone involved in the project is working towards a similar vision, their ideas should be able to add depth and dimension to the piece.

Within the spectrum of suggestions there will be anomalies, but a group of solid filmmakers should spot them quickly. And even in this ideal situation someone, usually the director, will need to moderate the ideas to make sure they are relevant and applicable. Nonetheless, when the director is the end all, be all for the film, the film misses out on many artistic possibilities. Common sense tells us that ten people’s best ideas will usually be better than ten ideas from one person.

On set, the circumstances often require a rethinking of some parts of the predetermined script, shots, etc. The result can be a beautiful improvisation like in a jazz band. Time and again, however, I feel that I am on sets where the direc-tor, even if he does not know about an aspect of the film, feels that he needs to have an opinion. He is after all, the director. This kind of logic leads to hasty decisions, which are often second-guessed by other crewmembers behind the back of the director. The affect can be tail spinning, as an unsure director tries to hold onto artistic control by making more bad decisions, instead of coming to terms with the idea that he may not know everything.

Alexandre Astruc stated, “The filmmaker-author writes with his camera as a writer writes with his pen.” As glamorous as that sounds, the truth is that the filmmaker-author does not hold the camera. And sometimes the filmmaker-author does not know anything about the camera.

But whether one considers the director the overall authority of the film, the creative vision for the film, or the coordinator of ideas; it cannot be denied that film is a collaborative effort. In judging films this is the only thing we can say about authorship with 100% confidence. Within this effort, I have found that much of the joy of making films is the synthesis of ideas, before, during, and after production. Film is a medium that contains aspects as varied as the arts themselves, and any way in which we understand authorship should respect this quality.