many of these developments, praised Hollywood’s “underground,” male-action genre movies and attacked the middlebrow or “quality” tradition in America (meanwhile persuading us that Howard Hawks, one of the most successful producer-directors of the previous two decades, was an underground artist). The most influential American exponent of auteurism, however, was Andrew Sarris, whose columns for The Village Voice and writings on directors in The American Cinema (1968) helped to establish what have become canonical works of classic Hollywood. Sarris’s book is filled with sharp but productive contradictions—a mixture of populism and elitism, of appeals to individual expression and vigorous praise for Hollywood. In his case, as in that of Godard, I’m reminded of a passage in Oscar Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist” (1891), in which the wise aesthete Gilbert tells his friend Ernest that critical impressionism is a form of art. Gilbert confesses that the Mona Lisa never makes him contemplate Leonardo; on the contrary, he can never look at the painting without thinking of Walter Pater, who wrote a famous essay about it. For my part, I can never see A Time to Love and a Time to Die without thinking of Godard, and I can never see The Searchers without thinking of Sarris. Like the best critics, these two were not only what Wilde would call artists but also what Walter Benjamin would call producers. Writers on film, whether auteurists or not, can hardly expect to do more.
THE DEATH (AND SURVIVAL) OF THE AUTHOR
Auteurism profoundly affected Hollywood’s view of its own past and in the process enhanced the reputation of directors like Hawks and Hitchcock, who were making their late films at the height of the movement. It influenced the spread of college film societies, inspired a generation to write about film, and contributed to the growth of film studies as an academic discipline. In the Anglo-American world especially, academic film study proliferated in literature departments rather than in drama or art history departments. Literary specialists found auteurism compatible not only because it emphasized authors but also because it offered a provisional canon and a program for research into a vast, largely unexplored area of twentieth-century narrative; in addition, it required a scholarly effort to see everything, not for the purpose of cataloging or building an archive, but for the purpose of informed value judgments. To British auteurists such as Robin Wood, this project had something in common with the severely evaluative, somewhat antimodernist literary criticism practiced by F. R. Leavis and his followers at Scrutiny in the 1930s and ‘40s. Wood’s early writings also have something in common with the American literary critic Lionel Trilling’s espousal of “moral realism”; thus Wood began his famous book on Hitchcock with a chapter entitled “Why We Should Take Hitchcock Seriously” and went on to stress the “complex moral implications” of certain Hitchcock films (4). In more qualified fashion, the first edition of Peter Wollen’s Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969) concluded with the suggestion that film study might join forces with the dominant form of literary education: “Hitchcock is at least as important an artist as, say, Scott Fitzgerald, much more important than many other modern American novelists who have found their way on to the university curriculum. I do not think time is wasted in writing about these novelists, all things being equal, and I do not think it would be wasted if hundreds of post-graduates were writing research theses on Jean Renoir, Max Ophuls or John Ford” (160–61).
These arguments owed something to the culture-and-society debates of the previous century, but they also realigned or decentered the academic canon and encouraged a certain curiosity about how canons are formed in the first place. For that reason and others, auteurism as a movement began to self-destruct. Ultimately it fell victim to internal contradictions, to the splintering of its original French advocates into different filmmaking careers, to the professionalism of academia, and to theoretical challenges from both the right and the left.
The first of the theoretical challenges, barely noticed at the time, was already inherent in the literary methodology that some of the American auteurists had adopted. The very idea of modern poetics in the Anglo-Saxon world derives from an “objective” formalism of a type best exemplified by T. S. Eliot, who argued in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) that “honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.” In the literary sphere, Eliot and the New Critics mounted a devastating attack on a dusty, genteel, academic historicism, in which the names of great writers figured prominently. In the process, they warned against the “intentional fallacy” and advocated trusting the tale, not the teller. New Criticism also had democratic effects: it called attention to the way language constructs the world, and, in the words of Jonathan Culler, it enabled “the meanest student who lacked the scholarly information of his betters” to make “valid comments on the language and structure of the text” (3–4). And even though New Criticism gradually died out, all subsequent developments in textual analysis—including structuralism, poststructuralism, and contemporary narratology—have resembled the New Critics in being formalist or “objective.” The overwhelming majority of introductory classes on media “language” taught in universities are still based on methods of formal analysis not completely unlike the New Critical analysis of poetry; as a result, they’re less concerned with who makes films than with how films are made and with how they generate meanings and artistic effects.
But even though the main current of instruction and analytic criticism tends to leave the question of the author to one side, the major achievements in modem poetics, as represented by such diverse figures as Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, Roland Barthes, and Émile Benveniste, are derived from close analysis of the Western canon. There would appear to be an unstated link between formalism, aestheticism, and the tendency to favor certain artists or kinds of texts. We should recall that, for all its apparent objectivity of method, the New Criticism advanced implicit ideological agendas, creating both a canon of modernist authors and a kind of priesthood of interpretation. It achieved such ends despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that it bracketed the important issue of historical authors and readers, leaving them outside the field of study, as unexamined entities who were extraneous to the understanding of self-sufficient works of art. Auteurism was different, not only because it validated Hollywood, but also because it openly fostered a cult of authorship and an impulse toward historical research.
Auteurism faced much greater challenges from inside film culture, which was deeply affected by the radical politics of the Vietnam years and by new forms of modernist cinema, largely centered in Paris. The late 1960s and ‘70s were a period when the Langlois Affair led to student riots and a general strike, when the Situationists made collage films, when Godard joined the Dziga Vertov collective, and when the radicalized elements of the French film industry began to express dissatisfaction with any system that designated directors as “bosses of meaning.” (For a useful survey of the period, see Sylvia Harvey.) At roughly the same time, Third Cinema developed in Latin America and in nations that had recently escaped colonization, which led to a militantly political filmmaking that, although it was indebted in certain ways to the Italian neorealists and the French New Wave, defined itself in opposition to both Hollywood entertainment and personalized European art.
Meanwhile, French antihumanist “theory” (a term that had barely existed in the Anglo-American world) began to change the priorities for academic film criticism. Outside France, the change became apparent in the British journal Screen, which published Cohn MacCabe’s writings on Brecht, Stephen Heath’s two-part analysis of Touch of Evil, Laura Mulvey’s study of “visual pleasure,” and many other seminal essays. Screen theory as a whole was indebted to the program outlined in “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” a 1968 Cahiers du cinéma manifesto by Pierre Narboni and Jean-Louis Comolli, which marked the turn away from auteurism. Like Narboni and Comolli, Screen was suspicious of Hollywood entertainment and tended to subsume individual practices under generalized formal categories, to which it attributed ideological effects; it closely examined the ways a hypostasized “subject” was positioned by narrative conventions and the technical apparatus, and it repeatedly argued on behalf of a modernist or avant-garde cinema that was both politically activist and critically self-reflexive. Theory in this period was Marxist (via Louis Althusser), but just as disdainful of social realism as the auteurists had been. It was Freudian (via Jacques Lacan), but not at all interested in the neuroses of individual artists; instead, it argued
