Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film
Apart from Griffith, US cinema certainly was looked at
rather differently than European cinema—especially after
the entrenchment of the studio system and the coming of
sound. (Cinemas other than the US and European barely
registered with US and European critics and audiences at
this time.) Hollywood cinema came to be seen as more
industrialized, more factorylike and commercial, than
production in Europe, and therefore less likely—perhaps,
unlikely—to produce more personal or individual films.
Even so, in the 1920s some American filmmakers managed to establish authorial identity. In some cases, like
that of Erich von Stroheim (1885–1957), this standing
drew on a variety of elements, such as his foreign background and his status as a star actor as well as a director,
but authorial recognition of Stroheim owed much to his
clashes with the system and not being allowed to make
and release films like Greed (1924) in the form that he
wished. Stroheim projected the image of the artist struggling to make art and achieve his personal vision against
the impersonality of the system. Some other, less controversial, directors, however, also managed to establish
some kind of personal identity with industry peers, critics
and, to some extent, audiences without too many obvious
or outright clashes with the system—Ernst Lubitsch
(1892–1947), Frank Capra (1897–1991), Josef von
Sternberg (1894–1969), John Ford (1894–1973) to a
certain extent, and perhaps Preston Sturges (1898–
1959). Some of these were special cases in other ways—
Sternberg’s long association with star Marlene Dietrich,
for example—and some were their own producers as
well, especially from the late 1930s onward.
At the time of Citizen Kane (1941), Orson Welles
(1915–1985) represented a clear break with past practices
in terms of the freedom and status he was accorded,
though his later image and notoriety drew on some of
the same sources as Stroheim’s. Much more clearly, here
was the director—though in this case also the performer—as artist. No one could seriously doubt—despite
later attempts to prove otherwise—that Welles was the
author of Citizen Kane. The soon rapidly changing
landscape of Hollywood production after the
Paramount decision of the US Supreme Court in 1948,
and the divorcement decrees obliging the studios to
divest themselves of their exhibition outlets that followed,
also encouraged what Cahiers Jacques Rivette (b. 1928)
would call the more ‘‘egocentric conception of the director’’ of the postwar era, initiated by Welles (Hillier,
1985, p. 95).