structured by a patriarchal ideology. On every front, theory replaced the study of the author with the study of the sign systems through which author and ideology were represented. In contrast to traditional Marxism, the author became a kind of epiphenomenon or ideological construction, and the human subject seemed to have no individual agency. Two celebrated French essays strongly influenced this tendency: in “What Is an Author?” Michel Foucault deconstructed the authorial “function,” showing its relationship to early Christian exegesis, to the rationalist episteme of bourgeois society, and to legal or property rights; and in “From Work to Text,” Roland Barthes contrasted the authorized work of art—which, he suggested, was little more than a reified commodity—with the open-ended process of textuality, which seemed to belong to the reader, or to nobody in particular.
Where film study was concerned, the names of theorists became more important than the names of directors, although the new writing favored a wide range of filmmakers who could be interpreted in modernist and avant-garde terms: Soviet radicals (Eisenstein and Vertov), pre-Hollywood pioneers (Porter and the photographers who worked before Griffith), certain Japanese directors (Ozu and Oshima), and a group of contemporaries who practiced “countercinema” (Godard, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, and Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey). The auteurist canon didn’t disappear from the advanced film journals, but it was treated differently. The new editorial collective at Cahiers du cinéma undertook a political and Lacanian analysis of John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), most of the French essays on cinema and psychoanalysis were centered on Hitchcock, and even Comolli and Narboni said a good word about Jerry Lewis’s The Bellboy (1960). Several of the original British auteurists, including Wollen and Wood, who were associated with the New Left, made increasing use of poststructuralist theory but chose to write about pictures by Welles or Hitchcock. In the pages of Screen and elsewhere, cutting-edge theoretical papers were often devoted to films by Hawks, Walsh, Sirk, and Ophüls. These papers didn’t try to establish particular individuals as artists; in most cases they were designed to reveal that the classic Hollywood auteurs were ideological partners in an illusionistic system that needed to be dismantled. They nevertheless had the indirect effect of keeping artistic reputations and auteurist tastes alive.
The Vietnam era gave way to the Reagan-Thatcher years, Hollywood learned to profit from blockbusters, the media were increasingly consolidated and globalized, and social protest fragmented. The succeeding generation of academic writers on film became skeptical of authoritarian or top-down models of communication (in part because Barthes had already pointed to the importance of the reader), and the theoretical conjunction of Saussurean linguistics, Althusserian Marxism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis was gradually replaced by another paradigm, associated with such figures as Antonio Gramsci, Michel de Certeau, Pierre Bourdieu, and the British and Australian exponents of cultural studies. The critical emphasis shifted from the avant-garde to the popular and from the ideological effects of cinematic narrative to the techniques of “resistance” or “poaching” employed by audiences. As a result, we began to hear more about reception than production, and more about Jean-Luc Picard than about Jean-Luc Godard.
Today, after more than two decades of film theory, academic writing tends to oscillate between large-scale arguments about the Hollywood “apparatus” and studies of genres or audiences. The critical study of authors is no longer a central activity. A great deal of contemporary historiography continues to treat the author in the manner of Foucault, as little more than a discursive function, and this tendency is reinforced by a long tradition of cultural theory, ranging from radicals like Walter Benjamin to conservatives like Daniel Bell, who argue that technology and the mass media systematically undermine the bourgeois values of originality, autonomy, and aestheticism upon which the idea of authorship depends. Each new technical development since the beginning of the century has helped to confirm this theory. In the age of the computer, the media are able to generate “hypertexts,” apparently authorless words, sounds, and images manipulated by the reader/viewer according to structural conventions and a repertoire of older styles. A great many postmodern artists have adopted this strategy; like bricoleurs or samplers, they make new texts out of borrowed or retro motifs, becoming ironic about their originality.
And yet, as anyone can see from the latest movies, individual style hasn’t gone away and the star director is as visible as ever. Timothy Corrigan has argued that such figures are especially important to the contemporary marketplace because they serve as a “commercial strategy for organizing audience reception . . . bound to distribution and marketing aims that identify and address the potential cult status of an auteur” (103). I agree, although Corrigan seems to me to understate the fact that directors are also artists, and to overstate the difference between the past and the present. Orson Welles was a vastly more important artist than Michael Bay, but he was just as deeply involved in vulgar show business, and the marketing of his early pictures depended heavily on RKO’s ballyhoo about his “genius.” In their own day, Cecil B. DeMille and Frank Capra were publicized no less than Steven Spielberg and James Cameron. What makes the contemporary situation relatively new is the split between Hollywood and an audience of people who read reviews and make discriminations on the basis of directorial names like David Lynch, Sally Potter, and Atom Egoyan. In 1997, Cahiers du cinéma speculated on the question, “What happened to the politique des auteurs?” The journal’s answer: nothing. As proof of an ongoing auteuromorphisme (defined as a persistent desire to make the film resemble the body of its creator), the journal offered interviews with five directors—Pedro Almodóvar, Takeshi Kitano, Alain Resnais, Robert Guédiguian, and Abbas Kiarostami—whose work had just opened in Paris (Baecque, 22–25).
The academic deemphasis on authors is out of key with this situation, although it offers an important counterweight to the overwhelming emphasis on stars, celebrities, and biographies in the mainstream market. In universities, nothing should prevent author criticism from contributing to our understanding of media history and sociology. French auteurism as a historical movement may be dead (its greatest influence lasted roughly two decades), but so are the tedious debates about the death of the author. The residual “auteur theory” in its various manifestations still affects our view of film history, and it still has lessons to teach us—among them, the three I list below:
1 The author is just as real (or as illusory and fetishized) as the money and the mechanical apparatus behind the cinema. The classic auteurs such as Hitchcock and Hawks imposed a style upon their films, as do contemporary directors, and any “materialistic” criticism needs to take this fact into account. It’s true that authors are “written by” a series of historical, social, and cultural determinants, and that no author creates a film ex nihilo; but the author doesn’t become less real simply because she’s socially constructed or because she uses the common language and tradition. Critics need to understand the phenomenon of the author dialectically, with an awareness of the complicated, dynamic relationship between movie history, institutions, and artists, and with an appreciation of the aesthetic choices made by individual agents in particular circumstances.
2 The study of authors is useful because it sometimes enables us to differentiate films more precisely. One can make valid generalizations about Hollywood studios and genres, but every western and every film noir is not the same. As Robin Wood has pointed out, the name “Hitchcock” points to a different nexus of ideological and psychological concerns from the name “Capra.” These two individuals were themselves situated differently in history, and a study of their careers can produce a fine-grained understanding of both film style and the general culture. Echoing a statement by F. R. Leavis, Wood argues that it is “only through the medium of the individual that ideological tensions come into particular focus” (Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, 292).
3 Contrary to what Foucault suggests in his famous essay on the idea of the author, it can be very important for us to know who is speaking. A good deal is at stake, for example, when we view Citizen Kane as an RKO production rather than as a product of Orson Welles’s career; one way of looking at the film makes it seem like a Hollywood classic and the other emphasizes its critical or subversive edge. Of course we can derive a political interpretation from purely internal evidence, avoiding the question of the source altogether.
