These arguments owed something to the culture-and-society debates of the previous century, but they also realigned or decentered the academic canon and encouraged a certain curiosity about how canons are formed in the first place. For that reason and others, auteurism as a movement began to self-destruct. Ultimately it fell victim to internal contradictions, to the splintering of its original French advocates into different filmmaking careers, to the professionalism of academia, and to theoretical challenges from both the right and the left.
The first of the theoretical challenges, barely noticed at the time, was already inherent in the literary methodology that some of the American auteurists had adopted. The very idea of modern poetics in the Anglo-Saxon world derives from an “objective” formalism of a type best exemplified by T. S. Eliot, who argued in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) that “honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.” In the literary sphere, Eliot and the New Critics mounted a devastating attack on a dusty, genteel, academic historicism, in which the names of great writers figured prominently. In the process, they warned against the “intentional fallacy” and advocated trusting the tale, not the teller. New Criticism also had democratic effects: it called attention to the way language constructs the world, and, in the words of Jonathan Culler, it enabled “the meanest student who lacked the scholarly information of his betters” to make “valid comments on the language and structure of the text” (3–4). And even though New Criticism gradually died out, all subsequent developments in textual analysis—including structuralism, poststructuralism, and contemporary narratology—have resembled the New Critics in being formalist or “objective.” The overwhelming majority of introductory classes on media “language” taught in universities are still based on methods of formal analysis not completely unlike the New Critical analysis of poetry; as a result, they’re less concerned with who makes films than with how films are made and with how they generate meanings and artistic effects.
But even though the main current of instruction and analytic criticism tends to leave the question of the author to one side, the major achievements in modem poetics, as represented by such diverse figures as Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, Roland Barthes, and Émile Benveniste, are derived from close analysis of the Western canon. There would appear to be an unstated link between formalism, aestheticism, and the tendency to favor certain artists or kinds of texts. We should recall that, for all its apparent objectivity of method, the New Criticism advanced implicit ideological agendas, creating both a canon of modernist authors and a kind of priesthood of interpretation. It achieved such ends despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that it bracketed the important issue of historical authors and readers, leaving them outside the field of study, as unexamined entities who were extraneous to the understanding of self-sufficient works of art. Auteurism was different, not only because it validated Hollywood, but also because it openly fostered a cult of authorship and an impulse toward historical research.
Auteurism faced much greater challenges from inside film culture, which was deeply affected by the radical politics of the Vietnam years and by new forms of modernist cinema, largely centered in Paris. The late 1960s and ‘70s were a period when the Langlois Affair led to student riots and a general strike, when the Situationists made collage films, when Godard joined the Dziga Vertov collective, and when the radicalized elements of the French film industry began to express dissatisfaction with any system that designated directors as “bosses of meaning.” (For a useful survey of the period, see Sylvia Harvey.) At roughly the same time, Third Cinema developed in Latin America and in nations that had recently escaped colonization, which led to a militantly political filmmaking that, although it was indebted in certain ways to the Italian neorealists and the French New Wave, defined itself in opposition to both Hollywood entertainment and personalized European art.
Meanwhile, French antihumanist “theory” (a term that had barely existed in the Anglo-American world) began to change the priorities for academic film criticism. Outside France, the change became apparent in the British journal Screen, which published Cohn MacCabe’s writings on Brecht, Stephen Heath’s two-part analysis of Touch of Evil, Laura Mulvey’s study of “visual pleasure,” and many other seminal essays. Screen theory as a whole was indebted to the program outlined in “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” a 1968 Cahiers du cinéma manifesto by Pierre Narboni and Jean-Louis Comolli, which marked the turn away from auteurism. Like Narboni and Comolli, Screen was suspicious of Hollywood entertainment and tended to subsume individual practices under generalized formal categories, to which it attributed ideological effects; it closely examined the ways a hypostasized “subject” was positioned by narrative conventions and the technical apparatus, and it repeatedly argued on behalf of a modernist or avant-garde cinema that was both politically activist and critically self-reflexive. Theory in this period was Marxist (via Louis Althusser), but just as disdainful of social realism as the auteurists had been. It was Freudian (via Jacques Lacan), but not at all interested in the neuroses of individual artists; instead, it argued that the dominant tradition of cinematic language (described by Christian Metz as an “imaginary signifier”) was structured by a patriarchal ideology. On every front, theory replaced the study of the author with the study of the sign systems through which author and ideology were represented. In contrast to traditional Marxism, the author became a kind of epiphenomenon or ideological construction, and the human subject seemed to have no individual agency. Two celebrated French essays strongly influenced this tendency: in “What Is an Author?” Michel Foucault deconstructed the authorial “function,” showing its relationship to early Christian exegesis, to the rationalist episteme of bourgeois society, and to legal or property rights; and in “From Work to Text,” Roland Barthes contrasted the authorized work of art—which, he suggested, was little more than a reified commodity—with the open-ended process of textuality, which seemed to belong to the reader, or to nobody in particular.
Where film study was concerned, the names of theorists became more important than the names of directors, although the new writing favored a wide range of filmmakers who could be interpreted in modernist and avant-garde terms: Soviet radicals (Eisenstein and Vertov), pre-Hollywood pioneers (Porter and the photographers who worked before Griffith), certain Japanese directors (Ozu and Oshima), and a group of contemporaries who practiced “countercinema” (Godard, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, and Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey). The auteurist canon didn’t disappear from the advanced film journals, but it was treated differently. The new editorial collective at Cahiers du cinéma undertook a political and Lacanian analysis of John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), most of the French essays on cinema and psychoanalysis were centered on Hitchcock, and even Comolli and Narboni said a good word about Jerry Lewis’s The Bellboy (1960). Several of the original British auteurists, including Wollen and Wood, who were associated with the New Left, made increasing use of poststructuralist theory but chose to write about pictures by Welles or Hitchcock. In the pages of Screen and elsewhere, cutting-edge theoretical papers were often devoted to films by Hawks, Walsh, Sirk, and Ophüls. These papers didn’t try to establish particular individuals as artists; in most cases they were designed to reveal that the classic Hollywood auteurs were ideological partners in an illusionistic system that needed to be dismantled. They nevertheless had the indirect effect of keeping artistic reputations and auteurist tastes alive.
The Vietnam era gave way to the Reagan-Thatcher years, Hollywood learned to profit from blockbusters, the media were increasingly consolidated and globalized, and social protest fragmented. The succeeding generation of academic writers on film became skeptical of authoritarian or top-down models of communication (in part because Barthes had already pointed to the importance of the reader), and the theoretical conjunction of Saussurean linguistics, Althusserian Marxism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis was gradually replaced by another paradigm, associated with such figures as Antonio Gramsci, Michel de Certeau, Pierre Bourdieu, and the British and Australian exponents of cultural studies. The critical emphasis shifted from the avant-garde to the popular and from the ideological effects of cinematic narrative to the techniques of “resistance” or “poaching” employed by audiences. As a result, we began to hear more about reception than production, and more about Jean-Luc Picard than about Jean-Luc Godard.
Today, after more than two decades of film