Film Culture (Winter 1962/3)

spective cultural complexes. It is with these latter differences that the auteur theory is most deeply concerned. If directors and other artists cannot be wrenched from their historical environments, aesthetics is reduced to a subordinate branch of ethnography. I have not done full justice to the subtlety of Bazin’s reasoning and to the civilized skepticism with which he propounds his own arguments as slight probabilities rather than absolute certainties. Contemporary opponents of the auteur theory may feel that Bazin himself is suspect as a member of the Cahiers family. After all, Bazin does express qualified approval of the auteur theory as a relatively objective method of evaluating films apart from the subjective perils of impressionistic and ideological criticism. Better to analyze the director’s personality than the critic’s nerve centers or politics. Nevertheless, Bazin makes his stand clear by concluding: “This is not to deny the role of the author, but to restore to him the preposition without which the noun is only a limp concept. “Author,’ undoubtedly, but of what?” Bazin’s syntactical flourish raises an interesting problem in English usage. The French preposition “de” serves many functions, but among others, those of possession and authorship. In English, the preposition “by” once created a scandal in the American film industry when Otto Preminger had the temerity to advertise The Man With the Golden Arm as a film “by Otto Preminger.” Novelist Nelson Algren and the Screenwriter’s Guild raised such an outcry that the offending preposition was deleted. Even the noun “author” (which I cunningly mask as “auteur’’) has a literary connotation in English. In general conversation, an “author” is invariably taken to be a writer. Since “by” is a preposition of authorship and not of ownership like the ambiguous “de,” the fact that Preminger both produced and directed The Man With the Golden Arm did not entitle him in America to the preposition “by.” No one would have objected to the possessive form: “Otto Preminger’s The Man With the Golden Arm.” But even in this case, a novelist of sufficient reputation is usually honored with the possessive designation. Now this is hardly the case in France where The Red and the Black is advertised as “un film de Claude Autant-Lara.” In America, “directed by” is all the director can claim when he is not also a well-known producer like Alfred Hitchcock or Cecil B. De Mille. Since most American film critics are oriented toward literature or journalism rather than toward future film-making, most American film criticism is directed toward the script instead of toward the screen. The writer-hero in Sunset Boulevard complains that people don’t realize that someone “writes a picture; they think the actors make it up as they go along.” It would never occur to this writer or to most of his colleagues that people are even less aware of the director’s function. Of course, the much-abused man in the street has a good excuse not to be aware of the auteur theory even as a figure of speech. Even on the so-called classic level, he is not encouraged to ask aimez-vous Griffith or aimez-vous Eisenstein? Instead, it is which Griffith and which Eisenstein? As for less acclaimed directors, he is lucky to find their names in the fourth paragraph of the typical review. I doubt that most American film critics really believe that an indifferently directed film is comparable to an indifferently written book. However, there is little point in wailing at the Philistines on this issue, particularly when some progress is being made in telling one directo1 from another, at least when the film comes from abroad. The Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa and Antonioni promotions have helped push more directors up to the first paragraph of a review even ahead of the plot synopsis. So we mustn’t complain. Where I wish to redirect the argument is toward the relative position of the American cinema as opposed to the Foreign cinema. Some critics have advised me that the auteur theory only applies to a small number of artists who make personal films, not to the run-of-the-mill Hollywood director who takes whatever assignment is available. Like most Americans who take films seriously, I have always felt a cultural inferiority complex about Hollywood. Just a few years ago, I would have thought it unthinkable to speak in the same breath of a “commercial” director like Hitchcock and a “pure” director like Bresson. Even today, Sight and Sound uses different typesizes for Bresson and Hitchcock films. After years of tortured revaluation, I am now prepared to stake my critical reputation, such as it is, on the proposition that Alfred Hitchcock is artistically superior to Robert Bresson by every criterion of excellence, and further, that, film for film, director for director, the American cinema has been consistently superior to that of the rest of the world from 1915 through 1962. Consequently, I FILM CULTURE 5