AUTHORSHIP AND FILM CRITICISM IN BRITAIN AND THE US IN THE 1960s – Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

The tastes of both Movie in Britain and Andrew Sarris in
the US were clearly influenced by those of Cahiers, and
they shared similar ideas and emphases. The British
magazine Movie, whose main editors and contributors
included Ian Cameron, V. F. Perkins, Mark Shivas,
Paul Mayersberg, and Robin Wood, opened its first issue
(May 1962) with an assessment of American and British
cinema in the form of rankings, signaling Hawks and
Hitchcock as ‘‘great,’’ with Joseph Losey (1909–1984),
Mann, Minnelli, Otto Preminger (1906–1986), Ray,
Douglas Sirk (1897–1987), and Welles among the ‘‘brilliant.’’ Andrew Sarris in his ‘‘Notes on the Auteur Theory
in 1962’’ (Sarris in Mast and Cohen, 1979, pp. 650–
665)—later reprinted and expanded in his book, The
American Cinema (1968)—included Hawks, Hitchcock,
Ford, and Welles in his ‘‘pantheon,’’ with Losey, Mann,
Minnelli, Preminger, and Sirk just below them. As in
Cahiers, both the Movie critics and Sarris aimed to be
provocative, to stir things up—though more in the arena
of critical attitudes than in filmmaking itself. In this they
certainly succeeded. In Britain, under the impact of the
French nouvelle vague, Sight and Sound in its Autumn
1960 issue tried to address the critical ‘‘excesses’’ of
Cahiers, while editor Penelope Houston (‘‘the critical
question’’) joined battle with the critics on Oxford
Opinion (shortly to found Movie), arguing that ‘‘cinema
is about the human situation, not about ‘spatial relationships’ ’’ (Houston, 1960, p. 163) and that criticism
should be concerned primarily with a film’s ‘‘ideas.’’ In
the United States, Sarris’s ‘‘auteur theory’’ provoked a
fierce attack by critic Pauline Kael, arguing that artistic
signature did not imply anything about the value of the
art itself, and that Hollywood directors were inevitably
working with material of low artistic value (Kael in Mast
and Cohen, 1979, pp. 666–679).
But the differences between Movie and Sarris were
important, too. Movie committed itself—in a way which
Cahiers had not—to the detailed analysis of films. The
conventional view has been that the Movie writers combined Cahiers’s tastes with the British tradition of close
literary textual analysis associated with F. R. Leavis and
others. Certainly, Movie-associated writing is rich in close
attention to textual detail, which is largely absent in the
more philosophical and abstract writing in Cahiers
(although the lengthy interviews in Cahiers with directors
demonstrated its writers’ interest—as critics and future
filmmakers—in detailed decisions about mise-en-sce `ne),
but of the original Movie group, only Robin Wood was
familiar with this literary tradition. From their earliest
writing in the student magazines Oxford Opinion
and Granta, the Movie critics, like the Cahiers critics
before them, were always as interested in non–Englishlanguage—primarily European—cinema (Renoir, Roberto
Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and, not least, the
French nouvelle vague) as they were in English-language
cinema.
Sarris’s object of study was American cinema, and
one of his prime goals was to argue for the superiority of
American cinema over others. Both Movie and Sarris,
however—like Cahiers—aimed to change perceptions
of and attitudes to American popular cinema. Most
established critics and reviewers—used to weighing the
thematic content of respected directors like Fred
Zinnemann (1907–1997), George Stevens (1904–1975)
or William Wyler—found it hard or even impossible to
consider B westerns and thrillers by directors such as
Budd Boetticher (1916–2001) or Samuel Fuller—e.g.,
The Tall T (1957) or Pickup on South Street (1953)—as
both examples of the art of cinema and vehicles for the
articulation of an authorial worldview. As Sarris noted,
‘‘Truffaut’s greatest heresy . . . was not in his ennobling
direction as a form of creation, but in his ascribing
authorship to Hollywood directors hitherto tagged with
the deadly epithet of commercialism’’ (Sarris, 1968,
p. 28). Though Sarris translated the politique des auteurs
into the auteur ‘‘theory,’’ there was little more, if any,
theory in Sarris’s version than there was in Cahiers; Sarris
himself concedes that ‘‘the auteur theory is not so much a
theory as an attitude, a table of values that converts film
history into directorial autobiography . . . a system of
tentative priorities’’ (Sarris, 1968, pp. 30, 34).
Although Sarris saw the critic’s job as illuminating—
and implicitly evaluating—‘‘the personality of the
director’’—also necessarily an evaluative task—this did
not mean that directors should be credited with total
creativity and control. For Sarris, all directors, whether
from Europe or Hollywood, are shaped and constrained
by the conditions in which they work and the culture that
has formed them. ‘‘The auteur theory values the personality of a director precisely because of the barriers to its
expression’’ (Sarris, 1968, p. 31). Sarris conceded studio
domination of Hollywood cinema but argued that producers were more likely to tamper with scripts than with
visual style; further, genre filmmaking was likely to provide more freedom from studio interference for
filmmakers.
Theoretically, both Movie and Sarris recognized that
authorship might on occasion be ascribed to someone
other than the director. In the second issue of Movie, Ian Cameron argued that it was the director who was responsible for what appears on the screen, but he also argued
that a dominant personality other than the director could
be the ‘‘author’’ of a film, that, for example, the ‘‘effective
author’’ of the film versions of Paddy Chayefsky’s (1923–
1981) works was primarily Chayefsky rather than the
credited directors, and the person responsible might on
occasions be the photographer or composer or producer
or star. Cameron cites The Sins of Rachel Cade (1961),
which ‘‘although directed by the excellent Gordon
Douglas, was above all an Angie Dickinson movie, being
entirely shaped by her personality and deriving all its
power, which was considerable, from her performance’’
(Cameron, 1972, pp. 13–14). In practice, though, little
of the work done by Movie or Sarris implied an authorial
dominant presence other than the director.
In important respects—and this was a clear implication in Astruc’s conception of the ‘‘came´ra stylo’’—the
arguments for authorship in cinema at this time represented a triumph for a rather traditional Romantic view
of the author as artist. This was a somewhat paradoxical
position to take in relation to an art form that was
popular and made in industrial and collaborative conditions—though the film author was seen as able to transcend those conditions. Given the dominance of
modernism in the other arts, and particularly developments in literature and literary criticism that rejected
Romantic forms and Romantic views of the artist, the
establishment of the idea of authorship in this period
could be seen as a retrogressive step. Yet at the same time,
auteurism offered a critical method to replace the
then-dominant largely thematic or sociological critical
approaches with more specifically cinematic concerns, as
well as opening up for serious consideration many filmmakers and categories of film barely taken seriously
before. Auteurism shifted the focus of film criticism away
from the more or less explicit thematic subject matter
that was the concern of most other critical approaches,
and toward the personality of the auteur and the consistency of the auteur director’s style and themes. These
were not immediately or easily accessible, and required
the analysis of individual works in relation to a body of
work: the critic’s task became to discover and define the
auteur and the ways in which the auteur had worked with
the given material. ‘‘Film criticism became a process of
discovery, a process which . . . forced a more precise
attention to what was actually happening within the film
than had been customary for a traditional criticism which
tended to be satisfied with the surfaces of popular film’’
(Caughie, 1981, pp. 11–12).

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