Film Culture (Winter 1962/3)

than most audiences and critics can appreciate. However, Bazin immediately retrieves his lost ground by arguing that whereas the senility of directors is no longer at issue, the evolution of an art-form is. Where directors fail and fall is in the realm not of psychology but of history. If a director fails to keep pace with the development of his medium, his work will become obsolescent. What seems like senility is in reality a disharmony between the subjective inspiration of the director and the objective evolution of the medium. By making this distinction between the subjective capability of an auteur and the objective value of a work in film history, Bazin reinforces the popular impression that the Griffith of Birth of a Nation is superior to the Griffith of Abraham Lincoln in the perspective of timing which similarly distinguishes the Eisenstein of Potemkin from the Eisenstein of Ivan the Terrible, the Renoir of La Grande Illusion from the Renoir of Picnic in the Grass and the Welles of Citizen Kane from the Welles of Arkadin. I have embroidered Bazin’s actual examples for the sake of greater contact with the American scene. In fact, Bazin implicitly denies a decline in the later works of Chaplin and Renoir, and never mentions Griffith. He suggests circuitously that Hawks’ Scarface is clearly superior to Hawks’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes although the auteur critics would argue the contrary. Bazin is particularly critical of Rivette’s circular reasoning on Monkey Business as the proof of Hawks’ genius. “One sees the danger,” Bazin warns, “which is an aesthetic cult of personality.” Bazin’s taste, it should be noted, was far more discriminating than that of American film historians. Films Bazin cites as unquestionable classics are still quite debatable here in America. After all, Citizen Kane was originally panned by James Agee, Richard Griffith and Bosley Crowther, and Scarface has never been regarded as one of the landmarks of the American cinema by native critics. I would say that the American public has been ahead of its critics on both Kane and Scarface. Thus to argue against the auteur theory in America is to assume that we have anyone of Bazin’s sensibility and dedication to provide an alternative, and we simply don’t. Bazin finally concentrates on the American cinema which invariably serves as the decisive battleground of the auteur theory whether over Monkey Business or Party Girl. Unlike most “serious” American critics, Bazin likes Holly 4 FILM CULTURE wood films, but not solely because of the talent of this or that director. For Bazin, the distinctively American comedy, western and gangster genres have their own mystiques apart from the personalities of the directors concerned. How can one review an Anthony Mann western, Bazin asks, as if it were not an expression of the genre’s conventions. Not that Bazin dislikes Anthony Mann’s westerns. He is more concerned with otherwise admirable westerns which the auteur theory rejects because their directors happen to be unfashionable. Again, Bazin’s critical generosity comes to the fore against the negative aspects of the auteur theory. Some of Bazin’s arguments tend to overlap each other as if to counter rebuttals from any direction. He argues in turn that the cinema is less individualistic an art than painting or literature, that Hollywood is less individualistic than other cinemas, and that even so, the auteur theory never really applies anywhere. In upholding historical determinism, Bazin goes so far as to speculate that if Racine had lived in Voltaire’s century, it is unlikely that Racine’s tragedies would have been any more inspired than Voltaire’s. Presumably the Age of Reason would have stifled Racine’s Neoclassical impulses. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Bazin’s hypothesis can hardly be argued to a verifiable conclusion, but I suspect somewhat greater reciprocity between an artist and his Zeitgeist than Bazin would allow. He mentions more than once, and in other contexts, capitalism’s influence on the cinema. Without denying this influence, I still find it impossible to attribute X directors and Y films to any particular system or culture. Why should the Italian cinema be superior to the German cinema after one war when the reverse was true after the previous one? As for artists conforming to the spirit of their age, that spirit is often expressed in contradictions whether of Stravinsky and Sibelius, Fielding and Richardson, Picasso and Matisse, Chateaubriand and Stendhal. Even if the artist does not spring from the idealized head of Zeus, free of the embryonic stains of history, history itself is profoundly affected by his arrival. If we cannot imagine Griffith’s October or Eisenstein’s Birth of a Nation because we find it difficult to transpose one artist’s unifying conceptions of Lee and Lincoln to the other’s dialectical conceptions of Lenin and Kerensky, we are nevertheless compelled to recognize other differences in the personalities of these two pioneers beyond their re