Visual images have long been capable of provoking fascination and anxiety because of their power to shape beliefs and mass opinion: the Old Testament God forbade graven images, Protestant iconoclasts denounced the elaborate paintings and statuary in Catholic churches, and Marx and Engels compared bourgeois ideology to an upside-down picture at the back of a camera obscura. In the twentieth century, the “magic” of movies created both a sense of wonder and concomitant fears that dark forces are influencing the ignorant, complacent masses. Literacy rates actually rose during the first great age of cinema, at the moment when reformers and censors were condemning the medium’s evils; but another concern emerged because moving imagery was increasingly controlled by big business and government. Among intellectuals, this issue became especially evident during the U.S. economic boom of the 1950s, when I was still a child and when television began to displace the already powerful forces of classic Hollywood. Much of what was produced in those years by movies, radio, television, and Henry Luce’s slick magazines filled with photography was created by a factory system whose product was designed to appeal to as many social classes or class fractions as possible. Capital intensive and organized by complex divisions of labor, it was rationalized as entertainment and/or instruction rather than as art; by its nature, it tended to devalue originality and individuality, and it was usually supervised by committees and boards of executives.
The high modernists and the avant-garde constituted an aesthetic modernity in conflict with these developments. Of course, high modernism and the avant-garde sometimes blended with what Miriam Hansen has called “vernacular modernism”: see Busby Berkeley’s “Lullaby of Broadway” number in Gold Diggers of 1935, which is a breathtaking fusion of modern art, show-biz glamour, and pure cinema. There was nevertheless an inevitable tension between the movie industry and individual modern artists, nicely expressed by Orson Welles: “I love the movies, but don’t get me wrong. I hate Hollywood.”
I believe that the United States has by far the richest film history in the world, but from the end of World War II until the 1970s the most significant artistic movements in cinema—Italian neorealism, the French New Wave, the German New Cinema, the Brazilian cinema of poverty, the Los Angeles school of black filmmakers, and the various “third world” cinemas—were developed more or less in reaction against dominant forms of U.S. mass culture. Despite the familiar argument that postmodernism has ended the tension between high and low or resistant pop, this tension remains. Andy Warhol may have become a fashion celebrity, but his films were never commercial rivals of Hollywood, and his art shared with the old avant-garde a use of mechanical reproduction to shock and unsettle the values of established museums. Late-twentieth-century novelists such as Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, and Roberto Bolaño will never be adapted into movies, at least not in ways that closely resemble their fiction.
For these reasons, there’s a paradox in my writing, which originates in a longstanding and deep love of both classic Hollywood and high modernism. Exciting movies continue to appear today, sometimes even as blockbusters, but in my view and that of many others, the most consistently good mainstream cinematic entertainment produced in the United States is found in long-form or series cable TV. The contemporary marketplace is fragmented, under the control of corporations yet more niche oriented, less “massified” than it once was. Hollywood’s money-making hits have bloated budgets, saturation booking, and inescapable ad campaigns aimed at a young, mostly male demographic; and Hollywood’s Academy Award contenders, aimed at an older audience and scheduled for December release, are seldom of great consequence. Nevertheless, in the year and a half in which I was completing this book, I saw a number of fine English-language pictures, among them Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color, Terence Davies’s The Deep Blue Sea, Richard Linklater’s Bernie and Before Midnight, Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell, and Robert Zemeckis’s Flight. The pictures I saw from other parts of the world were even better: Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s The Kid with a Bike, Kléber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring Sounds, Miguel Gomes’s Tabu, Jafar Panahi’s This Is Not a Film, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, and Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse. I would conclude from this exactly what could have been said at several points in the history of the art form: A certain kind of cinema is dead. Long live cinema.
PART I
Issues
Authorship, Auteurism, and Cultural Politics
The periods of human history prepare their prospective representatives; they seek them out, shape them, bring them to light, and through them make themselves known.
ERICH AUERBACH, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature
Motion pictures and television are often described as collaborative media, but their modes of production are nearly always hierarchical, involving a mixture of industrialized, theatrical, and artisanal practices that give some people authority over others. Depending upon the circumstances under which particular films are made, anyone who functions in a creative job might, at least potentially, be viewed as an author. We obviously don’t need to know who the author or authors were in order to enjoy a movie, but the term could be applied with more or less justification and qualification to certain writers (Anita Loos, Raymond Chandler), photographers (John Alton, Gordon Willis), composers (Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann), choreographers (Busby Berkeley, Michael Kidd), stars (the Marx Brothers, Bette Davis), and producers (David Selznick, Darryl Zanuck). For the most part, however, film authorship is associated with directors. Names such as D. W. Griffith and F. W. Murnau have been fundamental to the establishment of movies as “respectable” art, and some histories of film are organized around them, just as literary history is organized around the names of poets or novelists. As a result, “Sergei Eisenstein,” “Robert Flaherty,” and “Alfred Hitchcock” have come to signify not only persons but also traditions, theories, and genres.
Despite the term “auteur theory,” the practice of writing about movie directors has never been a true theory; it simply assumes the importance of directors and takes the form of practical criticism that can be done well or badly. But the discourse on the director-as-author has always been problematic, in part because of the industrial basis of the medium, but also because film directors began to be called “auteurs” in the 1950s and ‘60s, at the moment when the rise of theory in the academy was about to make authorship in general an embattled concept. During those years, the French politique des auteurs, or “policy” of canonizing favored directors, served as background for debates surrounding authorship in cinema. To make sense of the debates, we first need to make a distinction between writing about movie directors as authors—a practice as old as the feature film—and the more historically situated phenomenon called “auteurism.”
AUTEURISM
As its suffix implies, auteurism was a kind of aesthetic ideology or movement. Like other movements in art history, it was generated by what Raymond Williams terms a “cultural formation”—a loose confederation of critics and artists (in this case made up almost entirely of white males) who had roughly similar objectives and who developed a body of polemical writing to justify their opinions. Such formations are especially important to modernity. As Williams notes, they’re typically centered in a metropolis, at points of “transition and intersection” within a complex social history; and the individuals who both compose and are composed by them always have a “range of diverse positions, interests and influences, some of which are resolved . . . , others of which remain as internal differences” (Culture, 85–86). Formations also tend to be ephemeral, spinning off into individual careers or breakaway movements but disseminating their ideas widely, leaving more or less permanent traces on the general culture.
Auteurism fits the profile of a modern cultural formation almost perfectly. It originated in Paris during the 1950s, at a moment when enthusiasm for American cinema was being voiced by several groups, including the left critics at Positif and the right critics at the “MacMahonist” Présence du cinéma. The most influential collective in those years, and the one most identified with auteurism, was at Cahiers du cinéma, but this group was more heterogeneous than it seemed; several members were Catholic, and their politics ranged from conservative to socialist. To some extent they resembled the historical avant-garde