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2. The Director Plays Director
- University of Minnesota Press
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The image is from 1957, taken on the set of The Seventh Seal. Director Ingmar Bergman, not quite thirty years old, is deeply engaged in a conversation with Death—that is, actor Bengt Ekerot, in whiteface and cloaked in black. Bergman has already received adulation at Cannes for Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), and soon he will be championed as an auteur, an art-cinema author, one of the elect, in the pages of Cahiers du cinéma by a worshipful Jean-Luc Godard.1 The director and actor on the set of The Seventh Seal sit as if unaware of the camera , but Bergman, like Ekerot, is in costume: he wears his favored beret, a kind of self-dramatizing (self-ironizing?) little nod to the culture that acknowledges his status as artist(e). Such photographs offer support to the burgeoning auteurist movement; as testimony, the Bibliothèque du cinéma in Paris houses a significant collection of tournage images— that is, photographs devoted to chronicling the making of films. Tournage documents can focus on various aspects of film: acting, camerawork , construction of sets, and so on, but frequently the director is the star actor. And after the proclamation of the politique des auteurs at the end of the 1950s, auteurist-centered documentaries begin to play a role in establishing the primacy of the image of the art-cinema director. In the examples discussed in the last chapter, auteurist filmmakers play with the line between off-screen and on-screen worlds through the insertion of their own bodies into the narrative frame as actors within that narrative. In yet other instances, when auteurs not only appear as actors in the narrative, but either create or participate as a director figure in a documentary, mockumentary, or fictional narrative that revolves around the making of a film, the relationship between the director’s “real-life” persona and the character within the narrative becomes even more charged, and layers of reality and representation are confused. 69 2 THE DIRECTOR PLAYS DIRECTOR The “Making of” Documentary When a self-conscious art-cinema movement emerged in the late 1950s, the director became the central subject of the “making of” documentary , and it is at that point that the posture of “being an auteur” can be assumed overtly and recognizably. And once the auteurist role assumes shape as a performative mode, we see instances of the film author’s self-construction and self-deconstruction, sometimes within the same film. The “making of” films undergird the institution of auteurism by highlighting and dramatizing the role of the film’s director, in fact staging the auteur as a role, which begs the question: Who is the auteur if not a role? In the discussion above of auteurs as actors, I brought to light the problems and questions and meaning surrounding selfhood that are introduced by the director’s physical appearance as a fictional character in one of his own films; in the analysis of “making of” films, the position of the auteur’s self-creating role within the institution of auteurist cinema comes to the fore. The “making of” films are, in these cases, as much about the “making of” the auteur as they are about the making of a film, with “making” in this context meaning both to forge a persona and to ensure a reputation, as in “the making of a man.” And ‘making,’ when the focus is on an auteur figure, emphasizes the primacy of agency.2 This is, however, more complex an issue than a simple fortification of the claim that the auteur is an artist or that any single individual is in fact an auteur. The “making of” films about auteurs most often include a dialogic structure, in which the director of the “making of” film, usually a younger or less prominent director, interviews and views the auteur at work. The ensuing dialogue carries more than a hint of discipleship ; the younger director (or a group of unnamed aspiring directors or film connoisseurs) wants to get at the heart of what makes this cinematic genius tick (in the “making of” films, the auteur is implicitly designated a cinematic genius either by the documentarian or himself or both). But in introducing the idea of an outside view, a split occurs within the auteur himself. Not only do the documentarian and the film audience have him in their sights, but he observes himself in the act of making a film, comments on his own...