white, middle-class),” and we forsake the chance of “developing alternative and different notions of subjectivity” (213). There is no good reason why everyone needs to follow the example of Barthes and Foucault, who, as European male intellectuals, were deeply invested in the attempt to kill off “papa.” Less powerful individuals or groups need authors to help shape their identities. Thus in a recent book on Italian director Elvira Notari, Giuliana Bruno poses a rhetorical question: “Can or should we consider as dead an author, such as the female author, who is yet to be fully established in the public sphere and theorized?” (234; see also Flitterman-Lewis).
In many cases the study of authors is a conservative activity, bound up with the perpetuation of traditions and the manufacture of commodities. But in certain contexts it can serve as an attack on convention and a form of resistance. The best of the early auteurist criticism had something of this last quality. It was romantic, but it challenged received wisdom; it was ironic, but it never used irony as a defense against popular pleasure; it was subjective, but it implicitly demonstrated that the personal is political. We can build on what it accomplished without sacrificing theoretical insights or cultural critique. The canon of Hollywood, largely established by the original French auteurists, has yet to be explored, expanded, and challenged. We have plenty of biographies on major directors, but surprisingly few good books of criticism on their films. The vast area of post-1980s cinema and made-for-TV movies is largely uncharted territory. We need discussions of such things by people who work outside the studio marketing departments. The result might be to restore to film criticism the sense of iconoclasm and aesthetic sensitivity it had in the days of the politique des auteurs.
The Reign of Adaptation
My title alludes to a relatively little-known essay by André Bazin, “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest,” written in 1948 but not translated into English until 1998, when it appeared in Bert Cardullo’s useful anthology Bazin at Work. I especially recommend this essay to readers who think of Bazin almost exclusively as an eloquent proponent of a certain kind of humanist realism in the cinema. Without denying the importance of Bazin’s writings on the phenomenology of the photographic image and the realistic uses of the camera, we need to remember that an entire volume of the French edition of his posthumously collected criticism, published in four volumes under the title What Is Cinema?, was devoted to the relationship between film and other media. The essay on adaptation is one of his most intriguing statements on behalf of what he called “impure cinema,” and it enables us to see him in a new light, as a writer who has something to contribute to what academics today call cultural studies.
I shall return to Bazin, but first I want to comment on some of the reasons why his essay may have been neglected and why the very subject of adaptation has until fairly recently constituted one of the most jejune areas of scholarly writing about the cinema. One of the major reasons, as Robert B. Ray has pointed out, is institutional: a great many film programs in the academy are attached to literature departments, where the theme of adaptation is often used as a way of teaching celebrated literature by another means (Ray, “The Field of ‘Literature and Film,’” 44–47). Thus we immediately think of Mrs Dalloway (1998) or even of the more freely derivative Orlando (1993) as adaptations, but not of The Set Up (1949, based on a narrative poem), Batman (1989, based on a comic book), His Girl Friday (1940, based on a play), Mission Impossible (1996, based on a TV series), or Twelve Monkeys (1995, based on an art film). Even within the realm of the novelistic, the range of things usually discussed under the rubric of adaptation is quite narrow. Twentieth Century Fox’s 1940 production of The Grapes of Wrath is nearly always seen in relation to John Steinbeck, but the same studio’s 1944 production of Laura is rarely viewed as an adaptation of Vera Caspary (even though the film’s main title reads “Laura, by Vera Caspary”)—probably because Caspary’s protofeminist thriller has long been out of print and has seldom been taught by English teachers.
Unfortunately, most discussions of novelistic adaptation in film can be summarized by a New Yorker cartoon that Alfred Hitchcock once described to François Truffaut: two goats are eating a pile of film cans and one goat says to the other, “Personally, I liked the book better.” Even when writing on the topic isn’t directly concerned with a given film’s artistic adequacy or fidelity to a beloved source, it tends to be narrow in range and constitutive of a series of binary oppositions that poststructuralist theory has presumably taught us to reject: literature versus cinema, high culture versus mass culture, original versus copy. Such oppositions are the products of what was once the submerged common sense of the average English department, which was composed of a mixture of Kantian aesthetics and Arnoldian ideas about society.
When I use the term “Arnoldian,” I’m referring chiefly to Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869), which argues that culture is synonymous with great works of art and that the inherited cultural tradition of the Judeo-Christian world, embodied in “the best that has been thought and said,” can have a civilizing influence, transcending class tensions and leading to a more humane society. The study of English literature in American universities owes its very existence to this argument, which was more subtly elaborated by such later figures as T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis; and, until recent years, English professors have been especially suspicious of mass-produced narratives from Hollywood, which seem to threaten or debase the values of both “organic” popular culture and literary culture. When I use the term “Kantian,” I’m speaking of a slightly older, more complex mode of idealist philosophy that emerged toward the end of the eighteenth century in Europe, and that we commonly associate not only with Immanuel Kant but also with Georg Hegel, Johann von Schiller, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and continuing throughout the period of high literary modernism, all art in the European world was theorized under what might be roughly described as a Kantian set of assumptions; that is, both the making and the appreciation of art were conceived as specialized, autonomous, and transcendent activities having chiefly to do with media-specific form (see Eagleton, 17–53). A locus classicus of such theorizing (perhaps even a parody of it) is the fifth chapter of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914), in which Stephen Dedalus tells us that art differs from pornography because it does not elicit desire, from propaganda because it does not teach or move to political action, and from market goods because it has no entertainment value or practical utility. The proper effect of art, Dedalus says, is the “luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure,” which can be achieved only through the contemplation of formal matters.
Never mind that Joyce’s own novel problematizes such ideas, and that his next novel, Ulysses, pushes aestheticism beyond its sustainable limits; some variation of aesthetic formalism rightly underpins every modern discipline that claims to be dealing with art. Consider, for example, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s excellent college textbook Film Art, which has long been used in introductory film study courses throughout the United States. Bordwell and Thompson are quite different from the literary dandies and philosophical idealists of the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries; their approach is practical and undogmatic, grounded in empirical evidence from an exceptionally wide range of films, and their chief theoretical influences are contemporary narratology and the Russian formalists. Even so, they devote themselves to teaching us how to recognize cinema-specific codes and how to appreciate part-whole relationships within individual movies.
I, too, am something of an aesthete, and I strongly believe that no proper criticism of art can ignore questions of form. I was also an English major, and I don’t think we can dismiss Matthew Arnold or that we should stop reading Great Books and seeing films based on them. It’s nevertheless important to understand that both Arnold’s defense of high culture and the aesthetic movement of the late nineteenth century are historically situated ideologies, generated largely in response to industrial capitalism and mechanical reproduction. Their culminating or extreme instance, and in one sense their crisis, was the period immediately before and after World War II, when New Criticism was in the ascendency in American universities and modernist intellectuals, including otherwise quite different theorists Theodor Adorno and Clement Greenberg, enunciated an idea of “authentic” art in defense against the culture industries. Greenberg’s famous essay
