Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film
Cinema poses its own problems. Commercial filmmaking, which accounts for most of the films—European and
world as well as American—shown in cinemas and
reviewed in print, as well as most of the material made
for television, is justifiably seen as a collaborative activity,
involving the skills and talents of many different film
workers. At the same time, that mode of film production
is hierarchical as well as collaborative: not all the collaborators count in the same way. In the sense that many
commercial film productions will include a ‘‘dominant
personality’’ influencing the shape and look of a film
more than others, the idea of the film auteur or author
is not necessarily very controversial. Although claims have
been made for the importance of producers, screenwriters, and stars, either in general or in relation to
particular films, the director—usually with the final
say over the detailed realization of scenes (and hence
over the way they will look and sound on screen) and
often with crucial say over editing and other postproduction processes, and even over scripting—has usually been credited with having the dominant role in
most cases. This dominance seems implied by the
nature and place of the director’s credit on the film
itself, though dominance may not equate with
authorship.
Although the numbers and processes involved can
vary greatly within commercial film production, filmmaking can also be organized in quite different ways. In
experimental or avant garde filmmaking, for example, the
term ‘‘filmmaker’’ is often preferred to ‘‘director,’’ simply
because the filmmaker does often make the film rather
than play the particular role of director in a complex
collaborative hierarchy. Filmmakers like Stan Brakhage
or Michael Snow, for example, generally shot, edited—
and sometimes distributed—their films. In such cases
questions about authorship must be very different
from those for commercial production—and perhaps
should figure in the same way they might in the fine
arts. Some radical filmmaking groups, such as the
Dziga Vertov Group of the late 1960s and early 1970s,
have purposefully rejected the hierarchical nature of
most commercial production and claimed collective
authorship.
Despite the controversial nature of claims about film
authorship in the 1950s, authorship or something
approximating to it had been very widely accepted for
many years. No one seriously disputed that the films of
D. W. Griffith (1875–1948) were ‘‘authored’’ by him,
or that it was justified to use the possessive form
‘‘D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation’’ for that 1915
film, or at the very least that Griffith was the ‘‘dominant
personality’’ influencing the film’s final form. This was
even more the case with non-US films, like those by
the German directors Fritz Lang (1890–1976),
F. W. Murnau (1888–1931), and G. W. Pabst (1885–
1967); Soviet films by Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948),
Vsevolod Pudovkin (1893–1953), Aleksandr Dovzhenko
(1894–1956), and Dziga Vertov (1896–1954) (despite
the supposedly more cooperative and egalitarian Soviet
approach to art production); and films by, for example,
Abel Gance (1889–1981), Jean Epstein (1897–1953),
Luis Bun˜uel (1900–1983), Victor Sjo¨stro¨m (1879–
1960), and Carl Dreyer (1889–1968).