Film Culture (Winter 1962/3)

NOTES ON THE AUTEUR THEORY IN 1962 by Andrew Sarris CALL these sketches Shadowgraphs, partly by the designation to remind you at once that they derive from the darker side of life, partly because like other shadowgraphs they are not directly visible. When I take a shadowgraph in my hand, it makes no impression on me, and gives me no clear conception of it. Only when I hold it up opposite the wall, and now look not directly at it, but at that which appears on the wall, am I able to see it. So also with the picture which I wish to show here, an inward picture which does not become perceptible until I see it through the external. This external is perhaps quite unobtrusive but not until I look through it, do I discover that inner picture which I desire to show you an inner picture too delicately drawn to be outwardly visible, woven as it is of the tenderest moods of the soul. Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or An exhibitor once asked me if an old film I had recommended was really good or good only according to the auteur theory. I appreciate the distinction. Like the alchemists of old, auteur critics are notorious for rationalizing leaden clinkers into golden nuggets. Their judgments are seldom vindicated because few spectators are conditioned to perceive in individual works the organic unity of a director’s career. On a given evening, a film by John Ford must take its chances as if it were a film by Henry King. Am I implying that the weakest Ford is superior to the strongest King? Yes! This kind of unqualified affirmation seems to reduce the auteur theory to a game of aesthetic solitaire with all the cards turned face up. By auteur rules, the Fords will come up aces as invariably as the Kings will come up deuces. Presumably we can all go home as soon as the directorial signature is flashed on the screen. To those who linger, The Gunfighter (King 1950) may appear worthier than Flesh (Ford 1932). (And how deeply one must burrow to undermine Ford!) No matter. The auteur theory is unyielding. If, by definition, Ford is invariably superior to King, any evidence to the contrary is merely an optical illusion. Now what could be sillier than this inflexible attitude? Let us abandon the absurdities of the auteur theory so that we may return to the chaos of common sense. My labored performance as devil’s advocate notwithstanding, I intend to praise the auteur theory, not to bury it. At the very least, I would like to grant the condemned system a hearing before its execution. The trial has dragged on for years, I know, and everyone is now bored by the abstract reasoning involved. I have little in the way of new evidence or new arguments, but I would like to change some of my previous testimony. What follows is consequently less a manifesto than a credo, a somewhat disorganized credo, to be sure, expressed in formless notes rather than in formal brief. I, AIMEZ-VOUS BRAHMS? “Goethe? Shakespeare? Everything signed with their names is considered good, and one wracks one’s brains to find beauty in their stupidities and failures, thus distorting the general taste. All these great talents, the Goethes, the Shakespeares, the Beethovens, the Michelangelos, created, side by side with their masterpieces, works not merely mediocre, but quite simply frightful.” Tolstoy, Journal, 1895-1899 The preceding quotation prefaces the late Andre Bazin’s famous critique of la politique des auteurs which appeared in the Cahiers du Cinema of April 1957. Because no comparably lucid statement opposing the politique has appeared since that time, I would like to discuss some of Bazin’s arguments with reference to the current situation. (I except, of course, Richard Roud’s penetrating article, The French Line, which dealt mainly with the post-nouvelle vague situation when the politique had degenerated into McMahonism. ) As Tolstoy’s observation indicates, la politique des auteurs antedates the cinema. For centuries, the Elizabethan politique has decreed the reading of every Shakespearean play before any encounter with the Jonsonian repertory. At some point between Timon of Athens and Volpone, this procedure is patently unfair to Jonson’s reputation. But not really. On the most superficial level of artistic reputations, the auteur theory is merely a figure of speech. If the man in the street could not invoke Shakespeare’s name as an identifiable FILM CULTURE 1