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1 introduction William Wyler liked to quip, “i could hardly call myself an auteur—although i’m one of the few american directors who can pronounce the word correctly.” While he invariably said this in jest, the slight of being denied auteur status clearly rankled. Wyler saw his friends John Ford, Frank Capra , George Stevens, billy Wilder, and John Huston celebrated by film scholars and historians as artists whose work exhibited distinctive styles and explored complex themes, while his was dismissed as mere craftsmanship, not worthy of extended scholarly attention. Nonetheless, Wyler was celebrated early in his career by andré bazin , the father of la politique des auteurs, which defined directors as the primary auteurs of motion pictures—authors who “wrote with the camera .” believing that cinema and photography, unlike the traditional arts, are inherently realistic, bazin maintained that film could probe for a deeper psychological complexity and that no other art form could examine life’s ambiguities as effectively. He championed those directors who manipulated the medium the least, allowing all of life’s mysteries and intricacies to remain intact on the screen. in two articles published in La Revue du Cinema (1948), bazin expresses admiration for Wyler’s ability to extend and enhance film’s predilection for realism, linking him with the italian neorealists in his reverence for reality. according to bazin, by utilizing depth-of-field cinematography, which brings all the planes of the image—foreground, background, and middle ground—into sharp focus and enables the director to cover a scene in a single take without resorting to editing, Wyler provides a vast array of information that allows spectators to formulate their own interpretations of what they see. Furthermore, bazin finds the democratic equivalent of the spirit of the american spectator not only in Wyler’s technique but also in the films’ characters. He compares Wyler’s mise-en-scène to the literary styles of andré Gide and roger Martin du Gard, which he categorizes as 2 William Wyler neutral and transparent, without any literary shadings or flourishes coming between the reader and the story. bazin’s enthusiasm was matched in an article published the same year by roger Leenhardt, who argues that after 1940 the tradition of classical Hollywood cinema—represented most purely by the films of John Ford— was replaced by a new tendency, heralded by Wyler, that prioritized “scene over image, decoupage over montage, story over drama, equilibrium over pace, character over symbol, modulation over effect.”1 For Leenhardt, as for bazin, this aesthetic shift was heralded by similar stylistic changes in the novel. When bazin was preparing a collection of his essays for publication in book form in 1958, he revised his opinion of Wyler in a postscript, tempering his original enthusiasm because he felt that Wyler’s films of the 1950s had not lived up to his earlier work. He maintained, however, that it was still possible to prefer the unique style of Wyler to the more spectacular cinema of Ford. even in his early essays, however, bazin may have inadvertently laid the groundwork for Wyler’s future detractors. in discussing Wyler’s body of work, bazin notes that each film is different—that the form of The Best Years of Our Lives, for example, bears little resemblance to that of The Letter. Thereafter, because the auteurists felt that a director’s worth was measured in consistent visual styles and personal preoccupations and themes, Wyler was dismissed because of his fondness for adapting the work of others and for tailoring his visual style to the needs of the screenplay. Unlike a John Ford or a rené Clair, Wyler did not pursue a set of abiding themes that he revisited or expanded on, and this apparent lack of focus was anathema to the orthodox auteurists, who never forgave Wyler for the diversity of his films. andrew Sarris, the father of american auteurism, even utilized bazin (mistakenly calling him a “French director”) in his attack on Wyler by citing the title of bazin’s second article, “The Style without a Style,” as a derogatory description. Writing that Wyler’s career is “a cipher as far as personal direction is concerned,” Sarris banished him to the purgatorial realm of “less than meets the eye” in his ranking of american directors.2 Since Sarris’s The American Cinema was published, others in that category —including Wyler’s close friends John Huston and billy Wilder—have seen their achievements reevaluated, while Wyler’s reputation has remained...

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