The Unbalanced Auteur and the Undervalued Actress
By Christopher Batty
"You have to take the auteur theory seriously if you give
it the proper definition and perspective."
–writer/director Lawrence Kasdan, in an interview segment of Saturday
Night at the Movies
"I'm one of the few people who can pronounce the word 'auteur,'
and I think it's bullshit."
–director John Frankenheimer, in the same interview segment
The auteur theory is now half a century old, and seems solidly established as the most influential paradigm for interpreting motion pictures. The theory posits that the director exerts the dominant artistic influence upon a film, at least in regards to any film considered great. So, for instance, no one would argue that the director of Happy Gilmore (1996) wielded more influence than star Adam Sandler, but since Happy Gilmore is not a good movie to begin with, it doesn't matter. Whereas with an acknowledged classic like Citizen Kane (1941), the director's primacy is manifest.
David Denby analyzed the ongoing debate between pro-auteurist Andrew Sarris and anti-auteurist Pauline Kael in his critical anthology Awake in the Dark. Published in 1977, his commentary needs little revision today:
If one judges by ultimate influence (leaving aside the question of who is right), it appears that Sarris won the battle. The reorganization of film studies at universities, the flood of books on directors, the revival of many obscure American films in directors' retrospectives� all of this attests to the progress of the auteur theory in the world outside film magazines. (139)
And yet, despite its evident triumph, the auteur theory continues to arouse fierce opposition. A more sensible attitude, in my opinion, is the one adopted by Erwin Panofsky in "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures":
It might be said that a film, called into being by a co-operative effort in which all contributions have the same degree of permanence, is the nearest modern equivalent of a medieval cathedral; the role of the producer corresponding, more or less, to that of the bishop or archbishop; that of the director to that of the architect in chief; that of the scenario writers to that of the scholastic advisers establishing the iconographical program; and that of the actors, cameramen, cutters, sound men, make-up men and the divers technicians to that of those whose work provided the physical entity of the finished product, from the sculptors, glass painters, bronze casters, carpenters and skilled masons down to the quarry men and woodsmen. (294)
Who is more accurate about the relationship of filmmakers to finished
product, Panofsky or auteurist Andr� Bazin? Consider the following excerpt
from Bazin's "Theatre and Cinema":
The human being is all-important in the theater. The drama on the screen
can exist without actors. A banging door, a leaf in the wind, waves beating
on the shore can heighten the dramatic effect. Some film masterpieces
use man only as an accessory, like an extra, or in counterpoint to nature
which is the true leading character. (181)
But isn't all this equally true of literature? Throughout history, there have been brilliant imaginative writings that "exist without actors" (i.e. without characters). Except for a few anomalies like Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, however, none of these pieces were narrative fictions. There have always been great films, such as Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and Chris Marker's La Jet�e (1963), that do not depend upon great acting, but these movies more closely resemble lyric poems than novels or short stories (hence the dream-like imagery, akin to figurative language, and the brief running times). The vast majority of feature films are stories about human beings interacting, and they absolutely do demand powerful performances if they are to survive alongside the best novels of yesteryear. Who would still be reading Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Notes from the Underground, or Anna Karenina today if the protagonists were crushing bores? It's the actor who is primarily responsible for bringing a character to life onscreen.
When Titian painted the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V's portrait, he did it so well, with such mastery of highlights and shading, that the delighted monarch wanted Titian to be his sole portraitist ever after. Titian looked at Charles' homely face and unearthed the dignity and strength lurking within those nondescript features. Titian's greatness did not stem from his chosen subjects but rather from the idiosyncratic clarity of his vision. The actor's equivalent of the individual brushstroke is the split-second choice of gesture, inflection, expression, action, reaction. The agglomeration of perfectly executed minutiae is the representation. Such is the only difference between Titian's version of Charles V and some forgotten court portraitist's version of Charles V.
One might expect reviewers to realize this. But on the contrary, as scholar Ray Carney points out, most critics today are implicitly either auteurists or formalists. "Formalism," explains Carney,
is basically an extension and updating of sixties auteurism� only this time the critic, instead of limiting himself to discovering Hitchcock' s, Welles', or Ford's stylistic "signature," sets himself a much larger and more ambitious task: comprehensively describing the stylistic earmarks of whole bodies of work–the thriller genre, the thirties studio picture, the art film, the continuity editing system, etc. (paragraph 15)
The result, once again, is that acting, the lifeblood of most narrative films, is given short shrift:
It is clear why the old auteurism did this since it focused on the director-auteur at the expense of every other creative contributor to the meaning of a film, but the neglect of the actor as an originator and controller of meaning continues under the regime of the formalists insofar as the streaming particularity and fugitiveness of great acting, grounded as it is in concrete events and moment-by-moment adjustments of relationship, is clearly impossible to reduce to an abstract system of signification. (paragraph 21)
The woeful legacy of this misapplication of auteurist and formalist principles can be seen in P.T. Anderson's overrated film Magnolia (1999). Nearly every sequence of the three-hour picture is introduced with a lengthy, gimmicky, needlessly virtuoso tracking shot. An absurdist plague of frogs showers down on the characters simply so Anderson can end his movie with a bang: flashy, razzle-dazzle visuals being the sine qua non for any young director hoping to wow the critics nowadays. Since Anderson's camera is a perpetual motion machine, almost all of the dozen or so principal players are forced to go over-the-top, shouting at the top of their lungs or collapsing into hysterical fits of sobbing. Julianne Moore in particular is shrill and grating, which is odd considering her beautifully understated work elsewhere.
In Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), for example, Moore plays essentially the same role as in Magnolia, an attractive young woman unhappily married to an old man. But Moore imbues Yelena with a fluid complexity of response. In an intimate scene with Wallace Shawn as Vanya in which he reveals his fear that he has "squandered [his] past on nonsense," Moore shifts her emotional emphasis almost from sentence to sentence, one minute looking at Shawn with blatant sympathy, the next minute inquiring with an air of baffled intensity, "You speak to me of love? How am I to deal with that?" When the lovestruck Vanya cuddles up to her, she at first asks him if he's drunk, and laughs nervously when he says he may well be, but when he crushes her into his needy embrace and kisses her fiercely, she recoils and tells him he disgusts her. The entire film, directed by Louis Malle, is filled with the mysterious motives (or lack of motive) of real people, because Malle respects Chekhov's material and refuses to call attention to himself with his shots and angles. His camera serves the actors, not the other way around.
If Vanya on 42nd Street is an instance of cinema shaping itself around a piece of classic literature, Chekhov's contemporary Henry James provides a possible example of the reverse: a literary classic perhaps written as a reaction-formation to the invention of cinema. Consider the following communication between Maggie Verver and her father Adam in The Golden Bowl:
Just as he had been sitting he looked at her an instant longer; then he slowly rose, while his hands stole into his pockets, and stood there before her. "Of course, my dear, you go on at my expense: it has never been my idea," he smiled, "that you should work for your living. I wouldn't have liked to see it." With which, for a little again, they remained face to face. "Say therefore I have had the feelings of a father. How have they made me a victim?"
"Because I sacrifice you."
"But to what in the world?"At this it hung before her that she should have had as never yet her opportunity to say, and it held her for a minute as in a vice, her impression of him now, with his strained smile, which touched her to deepest depths, sounding her in his secret unrest. This was the moment, in the whole process of their mutual vigilance, in which it decidedly most hung by a hair that their thin wall might be pierced by the lightest wrong touch. It shook between them, this transparency, with their very breath; it was an exquisite tissue, but stretched on a frame, and would give way the next instant if either so much as breathed too hard� (477)
This exchange has the intimate feel of a motion picture sequence, cutting back and forth between pregnant close-ups of father and daughter. I think Henry James grew impatient with the innate drawbacks of the novel as a form: its limited ability to capture the evanescent symmetries and quicksilver nuances of human interaction. James strains language to its limits in an attempt to recreate the flux and flow of consciousness, to beat the movies at their own game.
Is it a coincidence that James' rococo "late" style developed around the turn of the century? The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl are literary contemporaries of the earliest motion pictures. Perhaps the very existence of the cinema clued James in to the fact that no novel yet written had done justice to the fine copiousness of our daily, hourly, minutely, secondly existence. Ingmar Bergman claimed that with his masterpiece Persona (1966) he "touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover." (paragraph 5) But Maggie and Adam Verver, with their telepathic sensibilities and wordless empathy, are the literary predecessors of Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson in Persona.
And yet, precisely because he is so rich in nuance, precisely because he comes so close to refuting Bergman, James was and must remain a cult author. What James bestows with one hand, he takes away with the other. By investigating every linguistic flourish, every facial tick, every involuntary gesture so exhaustively, James risks exhausting his reader. The action of The Golden Bowl unfolds at a snail's pace. We're presented with an incredible wealth of descriptive detail, but our pleasure in reading James is marred by swollen, suffocating patches of tedium.
Ingmar Bergman was basically correct: the cinema alone can do justice to certain kinds of wordless intimacy. Masterful novelists like Henry James can conjure these truths, but at the high cost of trying the reader's patience with a surfeit of words. Bergman is free of James' Catch-22, but nothing is got for nothing, and the conundrum of the narrative filmmaker is his reliance upon superb performers to realize his vision. For without great acting, the director is not a cinematic Titian. He's just one more workhorse in the emperor's court.
Copyright Christopher Batty, 2003
Works Cited
Battle, Murray and Shuman, Risa, prods. Interviews: Saturday
Night at the Movies. A Production of TV Ontario. (Date of broadcast:
Jan.11, 2003).
Bazin, Andr�. "Theatre and Cinema." In Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader, edited by Timothy Corrigan, pp.176-196. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999.
Bergman, Ingmar. Quoted on Persona/Ingmar Bergman tribute page
of the Wings of Desire website. (1998). 23 paragraphs. Accessed
4 January 2003.
< http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Venue/3825/persona.html
>
Carney, Ray. Excerpts from "Cassavetes and the Critics: The Road
Not Taken." In Academic Fads and Fashions: The Road Not
Taken. (1999-2000). 31 paragraphs. Accessed 4 January 2003.
<http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/acad/crit.htm>
Denby, David, ed. Awake in the Dark: An Anthology of American Film Criticism, 1915 to the Present. New York: Random House, 1977.
James, Henry. The Golden Bowl. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1963. First published 1905.
Panofsky, Erwin. "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures." In Film And/As Literature, edited by John Harrington, pp. 283-294. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977.
