Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film
For many writers on film for whom auteurism had been
in many ways liberating, these post-structural theoretical
debates were a step too far. One of the main results has
been that, having been central to debates about the
nature and function of film criticism and film studies
for twenty-five years or more, since the 1980s questions
about authorship in film have not generated the same
frenzied critical debate they did between the 1950s and
the 1970s. To a large extent, this is because—the problems of high theory aside—auteurism has been widely
recognized as one of the most useful critical approaches
available, and writers on film, while happy to modify
what might have been initially naı ¨ve ideas about authorship in film, have refused to give up the concept. This is
not to say that critical and theoretical writing has reverted
to the simpler and hence more problematic positions of
the 1950s and 1960s: the critiques of those positions have
been taken on board and have been adapted and modified.
More recently, Robert Stam argues that ‘‘auteur studies
now tend to see a director’s work not as the expression of
individual genius but rather as the site of encounter of a
biography, an intertext, an institutional context, and a
historical moment.’’ (Stam & Miller, 2000, p. 6).
The radical changes in film studies brought about by
auteurism’s insistence on exact attention to just what was
occurring in the film brought in its train a number of very important later developments in film criticism and
film theory. Indeed, as well as, from the mid-1960s, a
steady flow of sophisticated and influential auteur studies—notably Robin Wood’s monographs on Hitchcock
and Hawks—the discipline of film studies itself can be
seen to have emerged out of these first debates in English
about authorship in cinema and the further debates and
questions they raised.
Bazin’s objections to some of the ways the politique
des auteurs was practiced by his Cahiers colleagues arose
in part from his insistence on the contexts in which
Hollywood films were made. These objections were recognized, if not paid much attention to, by early Movie
writers and Sarris’s writing. One of these contexts—of
more interest to Bazin than to most of his Cahiers colleagues—was genre. Hollywood cinema was, in many
ways, primarily a generic cinema; Bazin himself was
particularly interested in the western. Whatever might
be said about the authorial signatures of Hawks, Ford,
or Mann, the fact remained that they made—among
other genre types—westerns. How did the longestablished but constantly evolving conventions of the
genre interact with authorial personality? What did the
genre provide for the auteur, and what different authorial
emphases or inflections might the auteur bring to the
genre—or, put more simply, how were westerns by
Hawks, Ford, and Mann both different and the same?
Building on the previous critical theoretical work on
genre, which was very sparse, these were the questions
posed by Jim Kitses’s book Horizons West (1970), a study
of the western genre and of the work of Ford, Mann,
Boetticher, and Peckinpah within it. Colin McArthur’s
Underworld U.S.A. (1972) aimed to do something very
similar for the gangster-crime genre. These were important stages in the growth of genre study, soon able to
break away from any dependence on auteurs for its justification. Debates about authorship also raised the question, as discussed above, of whether anyone might stake a
greater claim to authorship than the director. This question also had some fruitful results: although no one was
very convinced by Pauline Kael’s attempt in The Citizen
Kane Book (1974) to argue that the writer Herman
Mankiewicz (1897–1953) was the real author of Citizen
Kane, Richard Corliss’s Talking Pictures (1975) was a
useful reminder of the often crucial role of screenwriters
in the Hollywood system and in the work of individual
directors.
For Bazin, genre was part of the ‘‘genius of the
system,’’ but the system was also a mode of production.
Sarris could assert that the studio system imposed potentially beneficial constraints on its directors and Movie
could recognize that a film like Casablanca (1942) represented a coming together of various talents and conventions, but there was relatively little thought about or
research into the intricacies of how films actually got
made within the studio system—and after. Given the
new interest in the possibilities for authorship within that
system, this then became an area for urgent further
research, stimulating a remarkable amount of work on
the way the industry functioned, and functions. Major
books like Thomas Schatz’s The Genius of the System:
Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (1988) and
David Thomson’s The Whole Equation: A History of
Hollywood (2005) are testimony to both the new research
field that opened up and the more ‘‘holistic’’ perspectives
on Hollywood production.
As mentioned, debates about authorship also served
to focus attention on the ways in which directors made
choices in the process of direction in relation to meaningmaking. This suggested that the specificity of the
medium—what made film different from other
media—resided in mise-en-sce `ne. Sarris argued that the
art of cinema was ‘‘not so much what as how’’ (Sarris,
1968, p. 31), and this Movie-Sarris emphasis began a
process of focusing on questions about the specificity of
cinema—or at least the specificity of narrative, illusionist
cinema. V. F. Perkins’s book Film as Film (1972), which
is strongly authorial in its assumptions, looks at the ways
in which meaning is constructed in such cinema, in a
chapter titled ‘‘ ‘How’ Is ‘What.’ ’’
One thing this focus on direction, or mise-en-sce `ne,
did not really do was pay much attention to the various
conventions and ‘‘rules’’ about shooting and editing.
However much an auteur might ‘‘invent’’ (as Hoveyda
put it) via the mise-en-sce `ne, this invention also took place
in the context of a long and developing history of textual
conventions. This was an area that had interested Bazin
since the 1940s (as in, for example, his essay on ‘‘The
Evolution of the Language of Cinema’’) and which was
no doubt part of the ‘‘genius of the system,’’ but the
auteur debates, as they focused on mise-en-sce `ne, also
foregrounded the need for a systematic examination of
the various conventional constituents of the ‘‘classical’’
style of film narration. Not quite coincidentally, JeanLuc Godard’s nouvelle vague films of the 1960s were also
engaging in a systematic deconstruction of these narrative
and continuity conventions. Later critical and theoretical
work like David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin
Thompson’s book, The Classical Hollywood Cinema,
(1985) and Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film
(1985) grew out of these imperatives.