Film Culture (January 1958)

RUDOLF ARNHEIM: WHO The identity of the true author of a film concerns the legislator and judge, for it is their professional duty to determine who is responsible for the content of a film, who has the right to decide what a film shall be like and what shall be done with it, and also who shall profit, and to what extent, from the money it earns. At the same time, the question arouses the passion of filmmakers and film theorists alike: the answer that is given to it clearly defines a person’s attitude towards film production and film art. Specifically the controversy boils down to two points. First; is the scriptwriter or the director to be considered the real author? Second, is a film, and indeed a work of art, the conception of only one individual, or can it — and perhaps, should it — spring from the cooperation of a group of workers? A clear decision in the case of scriptwriter vs. director might be of considerable practical importance. When, for instance, a director feels free to revamp a_ script completely, he assumes that the director is the sole responsible author of a film. Objections to such a procedure on the part of the writer may be based on the contention that the director is a mere executor of this work of art, which had its true birth on a writing desk. The latter view carries little weight today. It derives from the theater, where the director will put on the stage a work created by the playwright as the true author. A good stage director will help the work, a bad one will harm it, but in no case has the director anything essential or indispensable to add to the written play. To apply the same notion to the new technique of the film is wrong not only in a relative but also in an absolute sense. It is more than a matter of giving too little importance to the director: this view ignores basic differences between the theater and the film. The theatrical play is a work of art produced by a writer in one medium, namely, the literary word, and made visible and audible secondarily by means of two other media. The performance — if it has been competently directed — will modify, but not essentially change, the work of the writer. A film, on the other hand, is conceived from the outset in the visual medium (plus that of sound, in the case of the sound film) and can either be produced directly, without the aid of a script, in the studio or described first in words on paper, just as all other things of this world can be described on paper. This more recent conception implies an exaltation of the director, and since attitudes tend to sway from one extreme to the other, the director was proclaimed dictator. He alone was said to be the author of the film. He alone was truly able to give cinematographic shape to the subject matter. The scriptwriter — unknown to the public, underpaid by his employer, and manhandled by the director — found that even the theoreticians of film art treated him as a negligible quantity. From the very beginnings of motion pictures there are RUDOLF ARNHEIM IS A MEMBER OF THE PSYCHOLOGY FACULTY AT SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE. HE IS ALSO THE AUTHOR OF “ART AND VISUAL PERCEPTION: A PSYCHOLOGY OF THE CREATIVE EYE” AND “FILM AS ART” (WHICH HAS JUST COME OUT IN A’ NEW PAPER-BOUND EDITION). THIS ARTICLE, PUBLISHED HERE FOR THE FIRST TIME, WAS WRITTEN' IN THE THIRTIES FOR THE UNREALIZED “ENCICLOPEDIA DEL CINEMA.” IS THE AUTHOR OF A FILM? examples of the type of film that is a mere staging of something thought up and written down beforehand; and there are also examples of the opposite, the film derived spontaneously and without written preparation from what happens to be available in front of the camera. The first type is found most clearly in sound films, even in those of the early Nineteen Hundreds when opera arias were sung into the horn of a recording machine and then synchronized with appropriate pantomime. The more elaborate sound film of today resembles its lowly predecessor in that it is based on pre-existent sound, that is, written dialogue, which is performed on the sound stage by actors under the coaching of the director. In such cases, the writer’s claim to authorship is well-founded — but then, are we dealing with a true film? At the other extreme we find in the pioneer days the reporter-cinematographer, who takes pictures of whatever interesting things he can capture with his camera and afterwards assembles his material suitably, without ever having relied on a_ script. He is the grandfather of our newsreel producers and documentarists. There may be a script for such a documentary film, but it is essentially a working schedule. Often the theme and shape of the film will derive from the material that has been shot. Significantly enough, the term “director” hardly fits the documentarist if we think of a director as someone who uses actors to translate a script into pictures. But even the narrative film cannot put up with a limited, theatrical conception of its maker. An illustration from the early years is afforded by Mack Sennett, who would gather his actors in front of the camera in order to think up for them and with them the cheerful “gags” that were the substance of his films. This procedure, which leaves room for a good deal of improvisation, is found also in the later masters of film comedy, notably Chaplin and Keaton, who invented plot and action for the characters they embodied. Today the tendency to draw the content of the film from the available performance material survives in the practice of planning a film for a particular actor or actress. The short dialogue films of Karl Valentin and Lisl Karlstadt, the Bavarian comedy team, derived from conversations between the two actors, which are reported to have usually started with the words: “Well, I am going to play a man and you play a woman!” Pantomime and documentary films are prime examples of genuine film since they stem from the means of representation rather than merely transmit the content of a script. These authors are not writers; they are “organizers” — to use a characteristic term of the Russian filmmakers — of the material collected by and for the camera. The conception of authorship that is implied here gains weight as the artistic use of the camera and of montage increases the difference between what was acted out in front of the camera and what finally appears on the screen. The more definitely film shapes up as a distinct and integrated art form, the more tempting it is to suggest that the scriptwriter is nothing but a furnisher of raw material. Discussions of this problem have often been misled by the understandable assumption that two different jobs, distinguished by the names of “scriptwriter” and “director,” must stand for two different occupations; since the director is in charge of making the picture, the writer’s task must be purely literary. Actually, there is no