The Auteurist’s Tears

The Auteurist'sTears Robert Philip Kolker. A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. 395 + xii pp. Richard Maltby. Harmless Entertainment: Hol{l'wood and the ldeologv of Consensus. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1983. 417 pp. Thomas Allen Nelson. Kubrick: Jn.11dea Film Artist'.~Maze. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1982. 268pp. WIiham Rothman. Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982.371pp. Bart Testa That field of critical inquiry into the cinema that bears the name "the auteur theory" is supposed to have been thoroughly uprooted and thrown away, its space in film scholarship seeded with salt, by French theorists and their British followers in the interval between "May '68'' and the rise of the critical discourse that lately calls itself post-modernist. 1 Of course, we are told, the··auteur theory" was nothing of the sort; it was just an unfortunate name chosen in 1962by the American film critic Andrew Sarris in order to make the idea clearer to his readers and slapped on the original La politique des auteurs that had served as the "critical policy" of Cahiers du cinema in the period between Francois Truffaufs not-quite-a-manifesto in 1954 and the rise of the French New Wave about five years later. We are also told that Sarris scraped the authenticity off of the French original, its combative posture, when he translated Cahiers' polemical thrust as a "theory." Well, Sarris did more, and he did less, than all that when he wrote his "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962"for FilmCulture, and that doing endures, as three of these four book under review attest. 2 What he did that was less was to fail to provide his "theory" with even the semblance of a meta-critical apparatus. His ideas of concentric circles, still memorized by students taking introductory Film Studies courses, defined only three areas in which the critic might look-competence, style and significance-and these criteria are not even as sophisticated as those that might evolve in a highschool English Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 17, Number 4, Winter 1986,525-538 526 Bart Testa textbook. It was, in other words, much less than theory. What Sarris did that was more, however, was to suggest that the auteur theory might do service as a sort of film-historiography bushel-basket in which to carry bunches of film into the classroom or to a publisher until such a time arrived when some other, more sophisticated, sorting device might be designed. Out of this very modest goal, Sarris made the auteur theory a home in critical biography, the favorite genre of English-speaking literary historiancritics , and he made himself the Wolfflin of formal analysis of the cinema. This was not terribly difficult to do, of course, because, while lapolitique des auteurs was never a theory, it was backed by a quite brilliant historiography that Cahiers turned into a polemic. It was the historiography of Andre Bazin, augmented and amended by the intense scholarship of Jean Mitry, that effectively freed Cahiers, for a time, from seriously attending to meta-critical considerations. So Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard took up the causes of Eisensteinian montage and the classical style of editing, respectively (which was really no more than Mitry was doing), and Bazin turned his attention to running down Hollywood montage (and he was never more primly evocative) in what might very well be the first shot analysis to appear in an important film essay since Eisenstein's discussion of his own Alexander Nevsky and "Dickens, Griffith and the FilmToday," it seems (but isn't) a generation before.3 In 1957,Bazin himself criticized the politique ,4 and much has been made of this-even by Sarris himself, for example. Bazin's dispute was over a matter of evaluation, however, not method: it was about the place a director should hold in film history, not about how film history should be analyzed. What Bazin fretted about was the preeminence of a Hitchcock or a Hawks among those auteurs celebrated at Cahiers in the same breath (Godard's, Truffaufs) as Rossellini and Renoir. For...