Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film
Given the debates and arguments about authorship in
cinema, and given the changing cultural context, it was
inevitable that auteurism would be put under pressure
and evolve. Peter Wollen, influenced like Movie and
Sarris in his tastes by those of the Cahiers’s critics, wrote
in the early 1960s in New Left Review and developed his
ideas in the 1969 and 1972 editions of his book Signs and
Meaning in the Cinema. He introduced a new emphasis,
so-called ‘‘auteur structuralism’’ or ‘‘cine-structuralism.’’
Claude Le´vi-Strauss’s structural anthropology looked for
patterns of ‘‘structuring oppositions,’’ or antinomies,
both within and between texts, and the cine-structuralist,
as Wollen put it, looked not only for ‘‘resemblances or
repetitions,’’ but also for ‘‘a system of differences and
oppositions.’’ These needed to be teased out of what
might appear very different kinds of films—Ford’s or
Hawks’s westerns as well as their comedies, for example.
In a further shift, Wollen put the auteur directors’ names
in inverted commas—‘‘Hitchcock,’’ ‘‘Ford,’’ ‘‘Hawks’’—
to distinguish the real people and creative personalities
Hitchcock, Ford, and Hawks from the structures or
retrospective critical constructs—the auteur codes—
named after them.
The auteur thus became something more like an
unconscious catalyst for elements and influences beyond
his or her conscious control. In the politically and theoretically highly charged post-1968 cultural atmosphere in
France, Cahiers itself was changing rapidly, and this stage
of the development of auteur theory generated the collective essay by the editors of Cahiers, ‘‘John Ford’s Young
Mr Lincoln’’ in the August 1970 issue of Cahiers. This
essay considers the film symptomatically in terms of its
repressions and contradictions, in which the auteur/director John Ford cannot be taken unproblematically as a
unifying, intentional source. From Wollen’s inverted
commas and the auteur as ‘‘unconscious catalyst’’ and
Cahiers’s problematizing of authorial inscription, it is not
far to post-structuralism’s virtual disappearance or ‘‘death
of the author,’’ as Roland Barthes’s 1968 essay put it. For
Barthes, the author becomes a by-product of writing, and
emphasis on the author is replaced by emphasis on the
text’s destination, the reader.