Authorship Notes

Jean-Luc Godard, Band of Outsiders (1964)

–       What is the difference between an actual author and an implied author?

• (structuralists considered the auteur as a “critical construct”, implied author helps meaning construction, aesthetic significance determined by unconscious forces particularly by the audience)
• implied author: style emerges across a body of work
• implied author: author as a construct via interpretation of their work
• actual author: person with a crucial role in the filmmaking process

–       According to the French film theorists from Cahiers du Cinema, what is an auteur? An author?

• (mark of an original, creative, wrote their own screenplays, personal stamp)
• able to recognize a film as a particular director’s work
• director has control over the final cut
• Consider how involved the director is an various aspects of the filmmaking process
• How collaborative is the process? Is the team working to realize the director’s creative and unique vision?
• Livingston “only counts as a film’s author someone for whom the film is a direct and personal vehicle of expression” (50)

Francois Truffaut, The 400 Blows (1959)

–       What are some of the main limitations of the auteur theory?

• “repressive principle of interpretation” – formulaic,
• the collaborative aspects of a film (technicians, screenwriters, cinematographers, actors etc)
• Gaut counts anyone as an author who “plays an aesthetically significant role in its production” (50)
• Some director’s aren’t technically competent which adds to their style
• Expression of personality isn’t always a necessary criteria for a film to be good
• A consistent style and expression ends up creating a sense of uniformity and unoriginality
• Interior meaning is illusory (according to Kael p.54)

–       Dictionary Definition: “the person who originates or gives existence to anything” (45)

Claude Chabrol, Les Cousins (1959)

–       What makes a particular film or body of work ‘valuable’ or ‘good’?

• Shapes the way we think
• Potential to “re-structure culture” (51)
• Challenges codes
• “Overthrows established ways of reading or looking” (51)
• Sarris’ “interior meaning”

–       Utterance

• Author makes an intentional utterance that operates as a form of expression and mode of communication via the filmic text
• Emphasis on action and intention
• An utterance can have multiple authors

–       Can we construct a film author?

• Livingston: pragmatic conception of the author as a person who constructs an utterance (cinematic utterance) – control over the final cut & implementing a creative plan. Acknowledges it’s a collaborative effort but all those working on the film were attempting to make the director’s film and help make the director’s creative vision a reality
• Livingston: distinction between creative contributor and an author
• A director has to rely on collaborators in order to decide how they carry out their tasks – too many types of variation eg. acting
• Nehamas: transcendental conception of the author as a construct generated through literary interpretation
• Did the director write the script? Involved in casting? Influenced the actors? Supervised editing and sound-mixing? Worked closely with the cinematographer? How involved were they in the selection of props, location, make-up choices etc? Did they choose elements that they didn’t create themselves, such as music?
• Gaut: distinguishes between theater (as literary) and film (as audio-visual recording art) – play is authored by the screenwriter, in contrast, a film’s actors contribute to the aesthetic of a film therefore making them collaborators that have a claim to authorship
• Gaut: anyone who plays an aesthetically important role in a film’s production – film interpretation is guided by signs that may or may not be signs of a single author
• Sarris: saw auteur as a way of elevating the American film director to artist & promote the field of film studies within the institution
• Sarris: considered the auteur American director as a creative visionary working against the oppressive Hollywood studio system & says its up to the critic to recognize whether a director has been successful with their struggle against the system – this becomes apparent through an analysis of their body of work (53)
• Sarris: technical competence, personality, creation – personality emerges not in the “subject matter of this films, but in his treatment of the material” [interior meaning – purely cinematic] (53)
• Sarris: study a body of work – stylistic continuity – narrative devices, outlook and sensibility (54)
• Kael: opposed to Sarris. Some directorial brilliance can come about via the “absence of technical competence”. Personality could result in a ‘bad film’ (the reuse of devices that characterize a director’s style may not always be effective) (54).
• Kael: continuity across a body of work – authorship ends up celebrating the “mastery of a set of ‘tricks’ for manipulating the audience” rather than “artistic originality” (54)

Kael: “violates ethics of criticism” – defending a poor work by a great director and ignoring a great work by an unknown director – can become about the cult of personality (55)

Eric Rohmer, The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1963)

–       Why do you think the concept of the sole author is so dominant in the film industry?

–       Andrew Sarris brought the auteur theory to American film criticism. His three main criteria are as follows:

• Technical competence
• Signs of the director’s personality
• Creation of “interior meaning” (53)
  • Purely cinematic
  • Have to analyze a body of work to locate “interior meaning”

   

Jean-Luc Godard, Breathless (1960)