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Chapter 1 The Genius of Genre and the Ingenuity of Women Jane M. Gaines Every reference to the cinema director as author carries the weight of several centuries of literary and art historical criticism. This very weight makes it difficult to argue against authorship in motion-picture industry history. Nevertheless, it is my contention that authorship has been taken up too uncritically. One cannot hope to completely discredit the authorial approach, but the critical ascendance of the author has been successfully challenged in a number of ways, for example, for its eclipse of the audience’s contributions to meaning. In this essay, however, I begin by picking up a thread from my earlier argument about the work of silent cinema director-producer, Alice Guy Blaché, namely that auteur criticism gives short shrift not only to the audience but to other texts as sources of meaning. Here “other texts” references genre, the repetition with difference of popular forms. The author, I maintained, blocked the most important insights of the critically convulsive 1970s, most significantly, the poststructuralist assertion that we are constituted through language (Gaines 2002, 98). As Stephen Heath put it, “the author is constituted at the expense of language” (1973, 88; my emphasis). Approaches to cinema-as-language and to genre converged and later diverged in the 1970s. Film genre theory was one of the first critical heirs of the more systematic approach to culture promised by semiotics and structuralism. Initially, the rule-governed operation of the linguistic sign system was analogized with the iconic sign system and refined into genre theory’s understanding of rules or conventions in the relatively stable western and gangster genres. Cinema-as-language shared with genre criticism an understanding of cultural conventionality: culture as a readable system. However, with the stress on “representation” as ideological symptom, cinema-as-language became ascendant and genre was subsumed. Here Heath’s reference to the tension between “author” and “language” recalls Raymond Williams’s three-tiered understanding of consciousness: To be a writer in English is to be already socially specified . . . at one level to an emphasis on socially inherited forms, in the generic sense; at another level to i-xii_1-262_Gled.indd 15 12/13/11 11:17 AM 16 Jane M. Gaines an emphasis on socially inherited and still active notions and conventions; at a final level to an emphasis on a continuing process in which not only the forms but the contents of consciousness are socially produced. (Williams 1977, 193) Here Williams challenges the individual creator as himself the source of cultural forms produced by his singular consciousness. Thus individual autonomy, so esteemed in notions of “the author,” is negated. It is this co-implication of authorship and genre that I want to revisit. Hence my title, which questions the location of genius, wants to force an earlier issue for feminists into the foreground. To be specific, when a woman director is said to “author” a melodrama, does she “transcend” the form in the way that the male auteur was said to have “transcended” industrially produced genre? One might assume that feminist film theory, new in the 1970s, would have taken up this question. Although feminist film theory was immediately interested in director Dorothy Arzner, her work was not considered in exactly auteurist terms, for feminist interest in film theory barely overlapped with early 1970s auteurism, anticipating, rather, later poststructuralist approaches. It is, then, a poststructuralist auteurism we find in Claire Johnston’s well known analysis of the ending of Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance (1940): “Towards the end of the film Arzner brings about her tour de force, cracking open the entire fabric of the film and exposing the workings of ideology in the construction of the stereotype of woman” (1973, 29). In 1973, this move was an exciting possibility for a nascent feminist film criticism. However, it was not a totally new approach but rather a variation on post-1968 French theoretical developments, echoing Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narbonis’ 1971 theorization of the “category E” film, that exemplary popular work that was able to turn itself inside out so that it critiqued its own ideological scheme (see Klinger 1986). In retrospect, one wonders if the methodology of ideological critique, originally developed for popular genre films, was not in this moment gradually and imperceptibly moved into auteur criticism, where it remains today. We will return to the easy analogy between the author and the text that made such a move possible. We find...

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