Andrew Sarris and The American Cinema

Yet, anyone who loves the cinema must be moved by Daughter of Dr. Jekyll, a film with a scenario so atrocious that it takes forty minutes to establish that the daughter of Dr. Jekyll is indeed the daughter of Dr. Jekyll. (p. 143)

Andrew Sarris's book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 is among the most influential and popular books within cinema studies and among cinephiles the world over. It is often said to be the birth place of the "auteur theory" (allegedly taking the critical writings in France, especially in Cahiers du Cinéma, and condensing their ideas into a theory), and it has been a central part in many people's cinematic lives; being used as a guide book to American cinema and what to look for in that rich cinematic history. It is also a book that has been criticised or ridiculed by film scholars who find the idea of authors and auteurs misguided, or romantic, or ideologically suspicious. Feminists have also criticised it for its lack of women filmmakers.

But like many books and articles of such influence, it has also taken on a life of its own, an almost mythical position, and, like Laura Mulvey once said about her own article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema": "it has acquired a balloon-like, free-floating quality." Both its friends and foes often seem to not necessarily pay that much attention to what Sarris is actually saying. They are talking about their ideas of the book, rather than the actual book. I have written before about how off-putting it can be when people base their judgement about films and directors entirely upon what Sarris has said about them, or what they think Sarris has said about them. He is one of those people whose followers do not always do him justice.

But while it is wrong to dismiss The American Cinema as some kind of romantic love song to towering geniuses (Sarris is appropriately aware of the constraints of filmmaking and its collaboratory nature), the book has its flaws and weaknesses. It is also a book of infectious enthusiasm and passion, and there are many wonderful sentences and insightful observations in each part of the book.

***

Films are not made by single individuals alone, they are made by a group of collaborators. But these collaborators do not all have the same impact on the film, and most are only concerned with a specific aspect of the film. It is usually only the director, whether or not she has a screenwriting credit, who has all aspect of the film as her responsibility. This is not a theory but a known, empirical fact about how films are made, and those who have written about films, at least from the 1910s, have as a rule taken this position. The great British critic Dilys Powell mused about the national, industrial and cooperative aspects of cinema in an article in 1946, and then asked the rhetorical question: “How can one man leave the mark of his personality and his talent on this hugger-mugger?” which she answered with “But he does.” This is the same question and answer Sarris gives, and he is also trying to provide an explanation as to how.

Raoul Walsh and Ernst Lubitsch

His definition of what he means by "auteur theory" is this: "The auteur critic is obsessed with the wholeness of art and the artist. He looks at a film as a whole, a director as a whole. The parts, however entertaining individually, most cohere meaningfully. This meaningful coherence is more likely when the director dominates the proceedings with skill and purpose." (p. 30) He then discusses various constraints, including studios and producers, and says "The strong director imposes his own personality on a film; a weak director allows the personalities of others to run rampant. But a movie is a movie, and if by chance Robert Z. Leonard should reign over a respectable production like Pride and Prejudice [1940], its merits are found elsewhere than in the director's personality, let us say in Jane Austen, Aldous Huxley, Laurence Olivier, Greer Garson, and a certain tradition of gentility at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer." (p. 31)

I think it is unfortunate that he used the expression "auteur theory" in the book because there is no such thing, at least not as it is commonly understood. The idea that a director usually is the creative force behind a film is not a theory, any more than it would be a theory to say that Frida Kahlo or Hilma af Klint are the creative individuals behind their respective paintings, or that Anne Tyler is the author of Breathing Lessons. As there is no "painter theory" or "author theory," there is no "auteur theory." He does correct himself at one point by saying "the auteur theory is not so much a theory as an attitude" (p. 30) and on another page he says that it is "merely a system of tentative priorities" (p. 34) yet he continues to say "auteur theory."

Sometimes those who criticise him, or "auteur theory," will mention an important scriptwriter or cinematographer or editor and use their names as an argument for why Sarris is wrong. But he is not denying their presence or importance. Those who criticise him for romantic ideas about artistic geniuses should pause to consider that of all the directors he writes about in the book, few of them are said to be great, and even fewer geniuses. "Not all directors are auteurs. Indeed, most directors are virtually anonymous. Nor are all auteurs necessarily directors." (p. 37) He uses The Americanization of Emily (1964) as an example of a film in which the writer, Paddy Chayefsky, is more important than the director Arthur Hiller. Some of those who criticise Sarris claim that he ignores the production circumstances of filmmaking but he does not do that either, it is rather the opposite. It is precisely the modes of production, that others claim invalidate his arguments, that are the basis of his argument. He writes "The auteur theory derives its rationale from the fact that the cinema could not be a completely personal art under even the best of conditions. The purity of personal expression is a myth of the textbooks." (p. 32) and a little later: "To look at a film as the expression of a director's vision is not to credit the director with total creativity. All directors, and not just in Hollywood, are imprisoned by the conditions of their craft and their culture." (p. 36) Neither does he ignore filmmakers' weaknesses or how consistencies can be liabilities: "All that is meaningful is not necessarily successful. John Ford's sentimentality in The Informer [1935] is consistent with the personality he expresses throughout his career, but the film suffers from the sentimentality just the same." p. 35 He also mentions Hitchcock's Marnie (1964) and Hawks's Red Line 7000 (1965) as two other films that are clearly personal and consistent yet have, to him, obvious weaknesses.

Marnie

Almost all of what he has to say about auteurs and directors are widely accepted ideas and beliefs, and many of those who have criticise him probably feel the same way, unless they are of the belief that human agency and personal vision could never possibly appear in filmmaking. What he wants to do with the book is not to idealise directors or ignore the production circumstances. His main concern is to bring forward the riches of Hollywood cinema and say "Look, here are films and filmmakers as great as any from Europe or the rest of the world!" and the book is a polemic against a certain kind of criticism that sees American cinema as only mainstream trash, with a few serious-minded films. He makes an important distinction: everybody is a potential auteur, or is potentially great, and it is only after you have researched, investigated and analysed their work that you will be able to tell. "Welles is not superior to Zinnemann 'of course,' but only after an intensive analysis of all their respective films." (p. 32) That he himself is at times unable to live up to this ideal of "intensive analysis" is another matter.

He also criticises those who look at films only from the perspective of plot and story, and disregard the visual element. As a director will be explicitly concerned with the look of the film, its visual elements, even when somebody else wrote the script, it is only natural that directors are especially important to Sarris. There is nothing romantic or ideologically suspect about that, and there is nothing there that is revolutionary or remarkable, and no particular reason for anybody to get upset or provoked by it. Yet upset and provoked people were, and the kind of critics and scholars he was criticising are still prevalent today.

***

That was the first part of the book, the historical and theoretical groundwork. The next part, the largest part, are the brief entries about individual filmmakers. There is great writing in this section of the book, but here I will focus on what I think are its flaws, and the key weakness of the book: Sarris's judgements, ranking and his system of 11 different categories. The weakness is that they are often difficult to understand, and at times contradictory.

These are the categories:

Pantheon directors
The far side of paradise
Expressive esoterica
Fringe benefits
Less than meets the eye
Lightly likable
Strained seriousness
Oddities, one-shots, and newcomers
Subjects for further research
Make way for the clowns!
Miscellany

The first thing to note is that Fringe benefits consists of directors who are not Americans and have not made films in the United States, except one, René Clair. So why are they in this book? I have never understood it. If he felt compelled to add some European filmmakers he should at least have explained why, and why these 11 randomly chosen ones. It is a mystery. It is also a mystery why Clair is in this section. Jean Renoir and Max Ophüls has not made more American films than Clair, but both are included in Pantheon directors and not Fringe benefits. This seems arbitrary. Not that Clair should also be included in the pantheon, but if they can be included among American directors then Clair should be able to as well, in a suitable category; maybe Lightly likable.

The problem with the other categories, except Make way for the clowns!, is that it is rarely clear or obvious why a particular filmmaker is in one category and not in another. At times it feels like there has been an editorial oversight; as if Sarris had put the director in a different category but somebody got the categories and entries mixed up. Judging by what Sarris writes about Victor Fleming, why is he in Miscellany and not Lightly likable? Why are Jack Garfein and Leslie Stevens in Miscellany and not Oddities, one-shots, and newcomers? Some in the category Subjects for further research, like Rex Ingram, Sarris seems to not know much about and therefore they belong there, but he has as much to say about Henry King as he has about many others in other categories, so why is King there and not in Lightly likable or Miscellany? Although the category of Miscellany feels especially muddled, as most of the directors within it might as well have been included in other categories. In Pantheon directors, there is nothing in his entries about Flaherty, Lang and Renoir that explains why they are in that category and not in The far side of paradise or Expressive esoterica. On Chaplin, Ford, Griffith, Hawks, Hitchcock, Keaton, Lubitsch, Murnau, Ophüls, von Sternberg, and Welles he is better at emphasising what he thinks makes them special and great, and why they are in the pantheon.

On the other hand, his entry on George Cukor in The far side of paradise suggests that Cukor, rather than Lang or Renoir, belongs in the pantheon, whereas Anthony Mann might as well have been placed in Expressive esoterica as in The far side of paradise where he now is. (Personally, I think Mann belongs in the pantheon.) And what is George Stevens doing in The far side of paradise? It would have been more understandable, based on what Sarris has to say, if Stevens was to be found in Strained seriousness. Allan Dwan should clearly not be in Expressive esoterica but in Subjects for further research. And what exactly is the difference between Less than meets the eye and Strained seriousness, and why are there so many English directors in either category? Carol Reed and David Lean are in Less than meets the eye, yet Reed had made only two films that can be said to be American, and David Lean had not made any (although some had international funding), and neither had Jack Clayton, Bryan Forbes (except King Rat (1965)), Karel Reisz or John Schlesinger (all four in Strained seriousness). As with Fringe benefits, I do not understand why they are in the book at all. Sarris does mentions this in the preface, saying that "the doctrine of directorial continuity within the cultural marketplace of the English language takes precedence over ethnographic considerations" (p. 16), but I still do not understand why. Would he have included, say, Ernst Lubitsch, Howard Hawks, and George Cukor in a book called The British Cinema?

It is also peculiar that Richard Fleischer, John Sturges, and Robert Wise are in Strained seriousness. Neither of them, it seems to me, whatever their strengths and weaknesses, might be accused of "the mortal sin of pretentiousness. Their ambitious projects tend to inflate rather than expand." (p.189) which is how Sarris defined that category. He has not explained in what sense this is applicable on Fleischer, Sturges or Wise. An individual film here and there of either director maybe, but not their careers as a whole, which is what Sarris claims to be interested in.

I could give more examples, but I have mentioned too many directors already and I think I have made my point. In short, I find the disposition of the book confusing, and the logic and reason for the various categories, and the directors placed in them, to be lacking. Why have the categories at all, when it seems as if Sarris himself cannot really keep them apart? "One reason is to establish a system of priorities for the film student. Another is the absence of the most elementary academic tradition in cinema. /.../ The rankings, categories, and lists establish first of all the existence of my subject and then my attitude toward it." (p. 27) he says, but he sets a poor precedent for students by his bewildering system.

***

It is possible that the problem is not in the categories but in Sarris's writing. Maybe it is obvious to him why this director is in that category, and vice-versa, but he has not been able to explain this to the reader. Most entries are too short anyway to be of much help. The short entry on William Dieterle is almost offensive in its unthinking dismissal. William Wyler is barely discussed at all, despite being a formidable director of remarkable talents. It is clear Sarris does not think Wyler has much talent at all, but you will have to do a lot better work in explaining why than he does. Henry Hathaway (in Lightly likable) gets about as much space as Wyler, but Sarris goes into more depth. I do not agree with what he says, as I think Hathaway is one of the best, but unlike the entry for Wyler, I get what he is saying about Hathaway. Another I do not understand is the entry about Carol Reed. He begins by stating that the "decline of Carol Reed since Outcast of the Islands [1951] is too obvious to be belabored." (p. 163) but then he goes on to say that Reed's films before 1952 are bad as well, so does he mean that Reed declined from being a bad director to being a terrible director? He says that "Reed steadily lost control of his medium as his feigned objectivity disintegrated into imperviousness," (p. 164) I do not know what this means, but I have never associated Reed with being particularly objective. And Reed's decline is not at all obvious. The Man Between (1953) and Our Man in Havana (1959) are as good as his earlier films, and both A Kid for Two Farthings (1955) and Trapeze (1956) are fine films. I also like The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) but that is admittedly a lesser film, even though it is an improvement on Reed's previous The Running Man (1963).

After mentioning some of Henry King's films that he finds better than average, he says they are "not quite forceful enough to compensate for the endless footage of studio-commissioned slop which King could never convert into anything personal" (p. 234). Compare this to what Sarris said about Ford: "Critics of the thirties always joked about the way that the Hollywood system compelled Ford to make three Wee Willie Winkie for every Informer. The joke, then as now, was on the critics." (p. 45) What is the difference between Sarris's view on King, and these alleged critics of the thirties' views on Ford? I think he makes the same mistake that those critics made.

***

It is a curious thing, but judging by the book his tastes are surprisingly narrow. I like both Phil Karlson and Joseph L. Mankiewicz, both Sam Fuller and William Wyler, but Sarris seems more binary. It is either one or the other. But the problems with the book is not that I often disagree with him, but that it too often is not much to agree or disagree with, as he is confusing and vague. This is probably inevitable for a book of this kind, but it also has the feeling of having been written and published in too great a haste. More time might also have given him the chance to include some noticeable omissions, such as Edward Dmytryk, John Farrow, Anatole Litvak, and the great George Sherman.

One might also ask why the subtitle of the book is Directors and Directions 1929-1968. Since many directors discussed in the book, such as Ingram, Griffith, Murnau, and Victor Sjöström, made almost all of their films before 1929, it would make more sense for the subtitle to be Directors and Directions 1915-1968.

***

I have been reading The American Cinema for maybe two decades. It is an important book for me, as it is for many others. "If you received The American Cinema at the right moment in your life, and many people including myself did, it came with the force of a divination, a cinematic Great Awakening. I suppose that makes Andrew Sarris, its author, the Jonathan Edwards of film criticism." is how Kent Jones put it in an article from 2005. It came to me later in life, and it was not a great awakening, but I treasure it, despite the issues I have raised in this article.

One of my favourite sentences in the book comes from his entry about Fred Zinnemann. "In cinema, as in all art, only those who risk the ridiculous have a real shot at the sublime." (p. 169) I do not agree with much of what he has to say about Zinnemann, as I would put Zinnemann in the pantheon if I was using Sarris's categories. But I do like that phrase, and I understand what he means, and how it relates to Zinnemann. Zinnemann's last film Five Days One Summer (1982), which unfortunately is not particularly liked by anyone, is a film in which I think he did risk the ridiculous, and reached the sublime. I am thinking in particular of the last half of the film, in which the mountains of Switzerland take on a life of their own. I am told that Sarris liked it when it came out, but I have not been able to locate any writings by him on it. I would be interested to know what he had to say.

Five Days One Summer

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The quotes from Powell, Mulvey, and Jones are from:

Powell, Dilys, Dilys Powell Film Reader (1991), p. 37

Mulvey, Laura, Visual and Other Pleasures (1989), introduction

Jones, Kent, "Hail the Conquering Hero: Andrew Sarris" in Film Comment, May-June 2005

Link to a recent piece on Henry Hathaway: https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2018/06/summing-up-hathaway.html

Link to my argument for why Anthony Mann should be considered one of the best filmmakers of all time: https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2018/01/anthony-mann.html

Fellini and/or Lean

In my early twenties my favourite filmmaker was David Lean, and I felt bad about this at times because Lean was not someone you were supposed to like. The critics and writers whom I treasured all seemed to dislike him. At the same time, I did not like Fellini's films. I felt bad about this too, because it seemed he was somebody I should like, if I knew what was good for me. At one point, I mentioned this to my brother, how I could clearly see how Fellini's films were personal expressions of his unique individuality but I did not like them whereas I loved all of Lean's films yet did not see the same unique individuality, and in my understanding of the art of cinema, it was the Fellini's one should love. My brother had no understanding of this problem, and asked whether Lean's films were not as personal as Fellini's. I said yes and he replied. "Well, then." Indeed. Well, then.

Doctor Zhivago (David Lean 1965)

It is probably still the case that Lean is my favourite filmmaker, but Fellini has grown on me, even though there are not many of his films I consider great. This however is not the point, but the point is that it is so easy to be influenced by the views of others. Thinking now about my struggles concerning Lean vs. Fellini, I feel almost ashamed and sympathise with my brother's dismissal of my concerns. And yet, I cannot completely shake free of such thoughts. Not about Lean and Fellini but in other circumstances. I did not like either Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino 2019) or Little Women (Greta Gerwig 2019) all that much, and this puzzled me because they had got such overwhelmingly great reviews by many critics I like and trust. Maybe I had not really understood their greatness? I watched Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood again, a few weeks later, but felt the same thing. There are many things I dislike, especially how many scenes are too emphatic and on the nose, and how it is structured, and how it is weird that Tarantino seems to dismiss and make fun of the films Rick Dalton makes, even though Tarantino loves such films, including 1970s Italian genre cinema. With Little Women it was mainly the awful, unbearable music score by Alexandre Desplat that ruined the film for me. I was also put off by the acting style, which felt incoherent and, as with Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, too emphatic. Both films felt over-directed. But I have not read any thoughtful negative criticism of either film, and this makes me feel, still, that I am missing something. (I added the word "thoughtful" because I have of course read negative criticism of them both, but written from a position of either wilful ignorance or arrogance.)

I do not think I will be persuaded; my feelings are what they are and I trust my judgement, but I still want to know more about reasons of others. I always do. It might be that they for example agree with me on some of my criticism, but either do not mind or thinks it is part of the strength of the film. It can sometimes be that two people agree about a certain aspect of a film, like the acting being over the top, but for one it is part of what is good about the film whereas the other cannot stand it.

***

To get back to being swayed, or deeply influenced by others. Something I find annoying, or sometimes disturbing, is when people seemingly base their own judgement of films or filmmakers on what their favourite critics think. I have for example experienced this many times with fervent readers of Andrew Sarris. When I have mentioned a certain film or filmmaker, they have responded by saying variations of "Well, Andrew Sarris did not like him." as if this meant that the case was closed and I had been proven wrong. They did not speak out of personal experience of said filmmaker, they based their beliefs on Sarris. This often happens with film scholars too. I say something or ask someone what they believe, and they reply by quoting maybe Bazin or Deleuze or Mulvey or Gunning or Bordwell, or, heaven forbid, Althusser, as if this was the final word or the truth of the matter. "We now know, thanks to Barthes and Foucault..." No, we do not know, other than what they believed, and I did not ask what they thought, I asked what you thought.

There is a certain kind of filmmaker, the likes of Fred Zinnemann, Carol Reed, William Wyler and George Stevens, whom a lot of people diminish and dismiss. They are said to be among the makers of "white elephant art", as Manny Farber phrased it; boring, self-righteous and unimaginative. They are among those of whom people might say "Well, Sarris did not like him." Neither did David Thomson. Those today who do not like them will often also invoke that alleged purveyor of middle-brow taste, Bosley Crowther at The New York Times, because if he liked their films, this, in a case of reverse engineering, proves that they are not any good. My point here is not to do with the merits of these filmmakers, although I happen to love three of those four mentioned here (the one I do not love is Stevens, although I am not denying his intelligence, imagination and personal style). My point is that it is from a personal investigation into the work itself that you should base your preferences and form your opinions, not based on what others think. You may like or dislike Zinnemann or Buñuel, or Lean or Fellini, as much as you wish, but if it is not coming from arguments from the films, but from what others have said about them, you are doing them a disfavour.

Besides, critics change their minds, and they often have more complex views to begin with than they are given credit for. The most embarrassing people are those who have neither engaged with the films in question nor with the critic they are using as alleged proof of their own sound opinions. I often wonder how they deal with filmmakers who are not in Sarris's book The American Cinema, like Edward Dmytryk. How will they know if he is good or not when Sarris has not written about him?

Tom misunderstanding Trilling on Austen when talking to Audrey

Metropolitan (Whit Stillman 1990)

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George Stevens, while he is today often bunched together with Wyler and Zinnemann, was not included in the categories "Less than meets the eye" or "Strained seriousness" in Sarris's book. Stevens was instead in "The far side of paradise", the prestigious category where you also find Samuel Fuller, Raoul Walsh, Nicholas Ray, Vincente Minnelli and King Vidor, and others. That might surprise some, considering Stevens's reputation today.

Among the films Farber calls "white termite art" in his essay "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" is Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player (1960). This makes no sense to me, not even on the terms he provides.

Mise en scène

The world is filled with film terms that are vague, ambiguous and over-used and mise en scène is most certainly such a term. Since it is a vague term, and is used differently in different contexts, it will never be definitively defined, and certainly not by me. Of course many have written about it, including some of the sharpest critics writing now such as Glenn Kenny and Adrian Martin. Kenny, when writing about Horizons West (Budd Boetticher 1952) in this post, focuses on the "clarity and momentum and the necessary information placed in the correct space with little sense of fuss or strain. Which could, in a sense, be mise-en-scene." Martin has written a whole new book on the subject, Mise en Scène and Film Style (2014). He there highlights the fact that mise en scène means different things to different people in different countries at different times, and he distinguishes between two aspects.

"There is mise en scène as the global history - still to be fully, comprehensible written - of how film-makers made their films, what structures and effects of style they created in their work; this could be called a history of forms in cinema. Then there is mise en scène as the history (again, global) of what critics, theorists and commentators have said, written and thought in their quest to define and use tools to understand the films they see, study, analyse and transmit to others." (Martin 2014: xviii)

The term comes from the theatre and it is not obvious that it should be something to argue about since it would seem to refer to whatever is within the frame (including the angle of the frame), and nothing else. So the actors, lighting, set, décor, depth of field and so on. But since it is a theatre term there is friction when applied to the cinema. Two obvious things is that 1) you have editing in films but not in the theatre and 2) in the theatre the stage is fixed and space is restricted whereas in film space is limitless, and the camera can move. When what is in the frame is constantly changing, the camera moving from one location to another, what becomes of mise en scène? When a film is shot outdoors is it still relevant to use the term? Is it Manhattan which is the mise en scène in the opening sequence of Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979)? Some argue that it is. In The Film Experience: An Introduction, Patricia White and Timothy Corrigan talks about the desert in Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean 1962) as mise en scène. They also argue that "architecture of a town might be described as a public mise-en-scène" (2012: 64), but now we are getting to the point where everything is mise en scène...

In Film Art: An Introduction, Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell provide four elements of mise en scène, setting, costumes and make-up, lighting and staging, and among their many examples they use a scene from Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) as an example, a lightning storm over the prairie. Likewise, in "Afterword: the Auteur Theory Revisited" (to be found in later editions of The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968), Andrew Sarris defines mise en scène as "all the means available to a director to express his attitude towards his subject. This takes in cutting, camera movement, pacing, the direction of players and their placement in the decor, the angle and distance of the camera, an even the content of a shot". But I find all this unsatisfying, and too broad. If mise en scène is simply what is seen in a film, what distinguish it from cinematography? Jacques Rivette had another answer. “Here's a good definition of mise en scène - it's what's lacking in the films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz.” (Incidentally, I think Laura Mulvey claimed that melodrama was “the genre of mise en scène”.)

If mise en scène is to be used I feel it should be used to refer to something more specific; something deliberately, artificially created, staged, for the purpose of the shooting of a scene, to return the term to its theatrical roots. But I would also include sound and colour grading as being part of it. What is required is unity, coherence and spatial awareness (space being integrated in the scene, with the actors and their movements). Some seem to connect it especially with "classical cinema", and some conflate it with long takes and elaborate camera movements, but I see no reason to do that. Editing can be a part of it when it is done within the context of the specific scene, such as from a medium shot to a close-up, or from a high angle shot to a low angle shot. But a tracking shot through a real city street would not count as mise en scène whereas this shot from Henry Hathaway's Niagara (1953) would.

But outdoor tracking shots are not excluded wholesale of course. In Weekend (1967), Jean-Luc Godard does a very long tracking shot alongside a country road which is filled with cars, people, animals and various activities and set-pieces, staged by Godard for the film, and that might very well be regarded as a striking example of mise en scène. Instead of forcing the term into the straitjacket of a definition, I will leave it somewhat open, but I still want it to refer to something specific, the coherent, spatially aware scene I mentioned above. Its occurrences are all around us, in films, in video games, in art installations, in paintings. Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas, from 1656, is an excellent example.

In films the term is for me especially connected to F.W. Murnau, Henry King and Douglas Sirk, because their mise en scène is frequently so striking, meticulous, sometimes overwhelming, and complete (or integrated), it is where they put the most emphasise and tenderly cared for. But this is more of a personal hang-up; there is no objective reason for emphasising those three and not, say, David Lean, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Akira Kurosawa, Wong Kar-Wai, or Carol Reed, among many others. Unlike Rivette in his comment quoted above, for me mise en scène is not related to quality, it is a neutral element of a film, and it might be good or bad. Whereas somebody like V.F. Perkins prefers unity and coherence and compare it unfavourably to fragmentation and disparity, I do not favour one over the other. It is not a contest but different ways of filmmaking, and to each his own.

Chinese Roulette (Fassbinder 1976)

The scene below, from Michael Bay's second Transformers film, Revenge of the Fallen (2009), is a favourite of mine, especially the part when all the marbles (tiny transformers) fall down the ventilation shaft and then come together to form a much bigger transformer, a large copy of all the small individual ones. It is both ingenious and beautiful, in its idea as well as in its execution. But Bay pays almost no attention to space here, or the surroundings, so this is not what I would characterise as great mise en scène. Or is it perhaps after all in line with my own view of mise en scène, narrow and vague as it is? But it does not matter for in any event the sequence is excellent.




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For those who want to read more about Adrian Martin's thoughts on mise en scène but have neither the time nor the money to invest in his book, try this piece. In his book he also suggests that should we want "a decent English translation for mise en scène, staging is not bad". (2014: 15) Yet he seems to think that there is a lot more to it than that.

Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman 1975)

Thinking about directors

Four years ago I wrote a blog post called On Authorship - or Auteurship but I was never completely satisfied with it, and as my thoughts on the subject has evolved since then I have now written a new piece, which incorporates parts of the old piece. It is primarily aimed at students:

When the first films were made at the end of the 19th-, beginning of the 20th century it was no secret who made them. The brothers Lumière for example, or Georges Méliès. As cinema evolved and developed the director became more and more important and by the 1910s some directors were global phenomenon such as D.W. Griffith, Thomas Ince, Fred Niblo, Cecil B. DeMille and Victor Sjöström, and it has been like that ever since. In the 1920s Ernst Lubitsch had become such a superstar that he was invited to the White House and had songs written about him. He was celebrated and influential in the US, Europe and East Asia. This background is important for this discussion since it shows that the history of directors and the history of cinema run parallel with each other. It is not an accident that the director has almost always been singled out as the most important person on the set. But they of course do not work in isolation.

The idea of the director as auteur, as the creative force behind the film, has often been criticised, even ridiculed. Pauline Kael was one who was skeptical. In the 1970s and 1980s it was customary to dismiss the director, any author, for ideological reasons. Some well-known examples of such views are Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Stephen Heath. But these efforts were never all that satisfying or successful. Films are made by living, breathing individuals with ideas, beliefs and dreams and although these individuals work with restrictions (financial, cultural, political, personal) they still impact the films that they make, and the books that they write. No film is completely unique, but no film is completely like another film either, and the differences matter. Any work of art, such as a film, is the result of the combining forces of an artist's personal agency and the context in which the artist works, just as Foucault's writings are the combination of his own beliefs and the context in which he was working. He is firmly embedded in a French post-war academic culture. So looking at the auteur/artist/author must not mean neglecting context or social circumstances; in good auteur criticism/scholarship discussing the relationship between the author and her context is key. But since one person's engagement with her surroundings and context is different from that of another person, the art works will be different too. Anthony Mann's films are easily distinguished from Budd Boetticher's, just as Picasso is different from Braque. A work of art is an expression of the particular artist's engagement with the particular context in which she finds herself, and that is true for painters, writers and directors alike, if they have that interest. Emphasising the author can also be a progressive, political act. Bringing forward women filmmakers and filmmakers from minorities and non-Western regions is an important part of auteur studies.

The extraordinary ending of Ride Lonesome (Boetticher 1959)

Some think that "auteur" is synonymous with "a good director", with particularly talented directors and "art cinema", but that is not satisfactory. It is the consistencies of the director's body of work, not the quality of it, that matters here. Auteurism is not about giving medals and awards, it is empiric work. Being called an auteur is sometimes seen as a badge of honour, a club for the elite, but that is not a good way of going about it. The way that deep focus has been seen as the exclusive style of certain filmmakers (Jean Renoir, Orson Welles and William Wyler) rather than accurately seen as a common tool used by many filmmakers, good or bad, all throughout film history, is a good example of how ideas of auteurs as exceptional can lead to wrong and ahistorical assumptions. (See my earlier post on deep focus.)

Another assumption is that there is an "auteur theory". There is not, and never has been. Even Andrew Sarris, who did unfortunately use that phrase, said almost simultaneously that it was not a theory. “[u]ltimately the auteur theory is not so much a theory as an attitude.” he wrote in The American Cinema: Directors and Directions (1968). It should preferably be regarded as an approach, one among many, of looking at films where a given film is discussed in the context of the film's director's other films. What are Hou Hsiao-hsien's trademarks, how does he view the world, and how has his style and his themes evolved through his career? How does Three Times (2005) compare to Café Lumière (2003) and Millennium Mambo (2001), and are they different from A City of Sadness (1989), and if different, how? These are questions that auteurism are concerned with, and they are the same questions that critics and scholars asked themselves in the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s as well, about Fritz Lang or John Ford and many others. And before there was cinema, these questions were asked about writers and painters. For some it may seem uninteresting or unnecessary, but that does not make it wrong or romantic. Barthes himself wrote loving tributes to several auteurs, not least Michelangelo Antonioni.

 Café Lumière (Hou Hsiao-hsien 2003)

One of the most persistent arguments against auteurs is that cinema is a collaborative art form. Although that is true it is not the final word, a case-by-case approach is needed here. There are editors and cinematographers and composers and actors who are very important and can have a profound influence on a film, but they all do just their part. The directors are (in most cases) the only ones involved in the whole process and the director is also usually the one to whom the others answer. They usually write the scripts and if they have not written the original script they almost always rewrite it, officially or unofficially. The director is also the only one who is concerned with both the look and the sound of the film, with camera angles, editing, decor, colour, effects and so on. And, of course, the only one who directs the actors. There are exceptions. Some producers, such as David O. Selznick, have been intimately involved with all aspects of many of the films they have been producing, and some writers, like Carl Mayer in Weimar Germany, take on responsibilities that are usually the director's. Some films can have two or more auteurs of distinction. For example The Social Network (2010) has two, director David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin, and it does not feel like they are really compatible. Midnight (1939) should be approached both as an important part of Billy Wilder's oeuvre (he wrote it together with Charles Brackett) and of Mitchell Leisen's oeuvre, who directed it. Another point worth making is that whether a director has a contract with a studio or not does not matter within auteur studies. Ingmar Bergman (who worked for SF most of his life) is not less of an auteur than somebody using their own digital camera and their own money. Making very personal films, like Bergman or John Ford or Andrei Tarkovsky, is more a question of integrity, ambition and judgement than whether you have a contract or not. Even in pre-1960s Hollywood many filmmakers had contracts that gave them comprehensive creative control, none more so than Lubitsch when he came to Hollywood in the early 1920s. (It is often said that Orson Welles was given unprecedented creative control when he made Citizen Kane (1941) but that is not the case. Creative control yes, but not in a unique way.) Ultimately, arguments against auteurs are best answered by pointing at the films. If there are strong links between the films of a particular filmmaker, and if those films are different from those by other filmmakers, then that is what matters.

Directors are often called auteurs as if the words were synonymous, but they are not. All directors are not auteurs, whether someone is is revealed through studying the films. But most well-known filmmakers, regardless if they are contemporary or from earlier days, are auteurs after all, be they from Iran, Brazil or working in Hollywood. Yet just calling somebody an auteur is not enough, further elaborations are needed. There are different kinds of auteurs. For example, one approach I have been developing is to distinguish between external and internal auteurs. An external auteur is somebody who just makes the films, with thematic and stylistic consistencies, but without having any personal presence in them. An internal auteur is somebody who not only makes the films but appears in them as well, and/or makes explicit autobiographical films, in short somebody whose personal presence is experienced directly. Charlie Chaplin, Hasse Ekman, Chantal Akerman, Ingmar Bergman, Clint Eastwood, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alfred Hitchcock, Francois Truffaut are some obvious examples.

Hasse Ekman in The Banquet (1948), which he also wrote, directed and co-produced.

Howard Hawks might also be considered an internal auteur, and in many ways an excellent example of the whole concept of auteurs. In all his films certain recurring characters, scenes, lines of dialogue, stylistic ideas, ethical discussion, ideas about life and love and gender, are to be found (and his voice). They are easy to recognise. He also was a freelancer, and often his own producer. But just because Hawks is an auteur does not mean that he alone has contributed to his films. There were indisputable contributions from writers such as Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman, Ben Hecht, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway; cinematographers like Joseph Walker and Russell Harlan; actors like Walter Brennan, Lauren Bacall, Cary Grant, John Wayne, among others, and his wife (for a few years) Nancy Keith, aka "Slim". But the strongest input, and the special particularity that separates a film by Hawks from all other films made, comes from Hawks himself. Not least since he frequently got the inspiration for the films from his personal experiences and his life. Any film by Hawks is to some extent about him, he is embodied in them.

Auteur studies is empirical work and it requires a lot of effort to figure out who is responsible for what in a given film. Only after seeing most, if not all, of a director's films is it possible to tell whether he or she was an auteur, and in addition seeing films made by other contemporary directors, and other films written by the writers this director worked with, and other films shot by the cinematographers this director worked with, and so on and so forth. There are also useful questions to help in the research, such as:

How does the director use music?
Are there particular recurring characters?
Are there visual motifs that figure throughout the director's oeuvre?
Does the director have a special view of space, or use space in a specific way?
Can any specific views on questions about death and love be found?
Are there certain words or expressions that return in different films?
If a director is working for a particular studio (like Paramount or UFA or Toho or SF), how does the style of his films compare to the films of that studio in general.

The films in themselves are not enough either but interviews, biographies, on-set reporting and history overviews are also essential tools for getting to the bottom of the issue. But most important is still looking at the films.

Chocolat (Claire Denis 1988)

But it is not only hard work. Watching the films of a particular director, seeing how his or her films belong to each other, how they seem to be engaged in conversations with each other, to notice how Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings (Hawks 1939) is intimately connected to his Hatari! (1962), how Nicole Holofcener's Lovely & Amazing (2001) and Enough Said (2013) are dealing with similar people with similar problems yet with different emphasises and solutions, is, ultimately, the joy of auteurism, besides its scholarly usefulness.

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A related posts about cinematographers.

2014-03-12. I always forget to include references. Here are some articles/essays:
Pauline Kael: Circles and Squares
Roland Barthes: The Death of the Author
Roland Barthes: Cher Antonioni
Michel Foucault: What is an Author?
As a bonus, a contemporary, nuanced text by James Naremore: Authorship,, Auteurism, and Cultural Politics.

William Wyler

In an article in Theatre Arts from 1947, Hermine Rich Isaacs complains about the fact that since William Wyler's films "flourish neither the mark of an insistent personality, nor the aura of experiment, nor the cachet of conscious striving after artistic effect" he is being undeservedly neglected by archives and museums. Isaacs makes the claim though that Wyler is a true master, and just because he is not obviously artistic he should not be treated with this lack of interest (or lack of respect). Isaacs complaint is somewhat compromised by the fact that Wyler was perhaps the most celebrated filmmaker in the US at that time, but at the same time she has a point because with the exception of André Bazin, Wyler has been treated a bit off-handedly by the most influential of critics and scholars. In the post-war consensus he is sometimes seen as the opposite of the true glory of Hollywood and seen as boring, safe, dispassionate and audience-conscious as opposed to the likes of Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk and Vincente Minnelli. Andrew Sarris placed Wyler in the category Less Than Meets the Eye and it is noticeable that when people today talk about Bazin's writings they mention that he wrote about Orson Welles, Jean Renoir and the neorealist filmmakers. Less often is it said that Bazin idolised Wyler (and Anthony Mann), probably because Wyler feels less cool and cutting edge. Bazin's fullest exploration of Wyler comes in the essay "William Wyler: or the Jansenist of Directing", reprinted in Bazin at Work, and Bazin's enthusiasm is not surprising since the astonishing body of work of Wyler is enough to humble must critics. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) is perhaps the most treasured but at least from 1936 he hardly ever failed, and even though the films were more uneven after the mid-50s there was still enough great scenes, great images and above all great acting to make up for any flaws that the later films might have had.

I have been reading interviews with Wyler and they have been very interesting. He talks a lot about auteurs, and he argues that somebody like Preston Sturges can rightfully be called one, but he says about himself that "I could hardly call myself an auteur - although I'm one of the few American directors who can pronounce the word correctly." At another point he says that he is not a composer but more of a conductor. What he means is that the films he makes have been written by others, such as Lillian Hellman, or Robert Sherwood, or Emily Brontë. But at the same time he also says, and others have said as much, that he only made the films he wanted to make, films he felt strongly about, that he was very much involved from pre-production to post-production, that he wanted final cut (and usually got it), that he always worked on the scripts (telling the writer what to take out and what to add) and that he added things in the films that was from his own life. In addition, after the Second World War he created his own independent production company, together with George Stevens and Frank Capra, called Liberty Films. So even if he did not want to call himself an auteur he still wanted, and had, the power to go his own way (with the exception of strict censorship rules). Isaacs interviewed Wyler and when asked what makes for a good film Wyler answers "A story, a passion and a craft." That is apparent in his films and although Oscar nominations and winnings are not necessarily a sign of greatness, Wyler was actually nominated for an Oscar for best direction 12 times (a third of all his feature films), and won three times, and three times he was nominated for the Grand Prix/Palme d'or in Cannes, and he won once.

Even though Wyler began as a maker of short westerns, as he came into his own in the mid-30s he was not a genre filmmaker. Primarily he was a witness to family disintegration and punishing social structures and conventions. Visually there are many striking things about Wyler's films, such as the use of deep focus and elaborate compositions, the excellent use of mirrors and staircases. When it comes to do interior compositions Wyler are among the very best, and mirrors are often at the centre of his compositions, like Bergman and Fassbinder. The films are often harsh and uncomfortable, there are a lot of cruelty in them, again like Bergman and Fassbinder. Not cruelty from Wyler towards the characters but cruelty between the characters. Fathers are cruel to their daughters, sons to their fathers, wives to their husbands, and so on, and it rarely ends well. Sometimes in death and despair, sometimes in sadness and regret, and often they are open-ended. Not even a romantic comedy like Roman Holiday (1953) ends in happiness, but in loneliness. Wyler had a deep understanding of suffering it would seem, and of seeing it. He is not the kind of filmmaker who would leave his characters unattended, he sees them all, and shares their pain. Watching Austin Sloper ridiculing and punishing his daughter Catherine in The Heiress is about as painful as it gets in cinema.

Quintessential Wyler, a staircase and a mirror. The Heiress.

And then there are the actors. Ralph Richardson and Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress (1949), Walter Huston in Dodsworth (1936), John Barrymore in Counsellor-at-Law (1933), Laurence Olivier, Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins, Herbert Marshall, Bette Davis in several films. He once said that actors hated him on set but loved him at the award ceremonies, because his punishing direction methods led to remarkable performances. He had a theory that in order to get at the truth of a character the actors have to go beyond acting. The method for getting there was to do retake after retake, to wear down the actors until the acting disappeared and the truth would be revealed, the essence of the character. The actors should not play, they should be. (This is why he was called "90-take Willie" and why he frequently went over budget and over time.) His style of shooting could also be difficult, not least his habit of instead of cross-cutting between actors he would keep them in the same shot, but one with the back against the camera. That meant that one of the two actors had only his/her voice and neck to act with, and could not use the face.

Here are a few favourite parts from his rich oeuvre:

First there is the character Birdie in The Little Foxes (1941), played by Patricia Collinge. She is a sad older woman, treated with contempt by those around her, if they even notice her. It is a heartbreaking character, and performance, and the key here is that Wyler sees her. She is often visible in shots, even if she plays no part, and goes unnoticed by the other characters. It is as if Wyler is the only one aware of the fact that she is there, and her loneliness and fragility is underscored not by focusing in her, but rather by not doing so. She is there, and she suffers, and that is enough. Wyler is good at that, seeing and capturing the emotional state of his characters, and being concerned about them.

Birdie in The Little Foxes.

The next example is related, and it is from the beginning of Mrs Miniver (1942). The station master is waiting for Mrs Miniver to step of the train, and when she does he says that he wants to show her a new rose he has created. She hesitates but then follows him. She looks at it, and smells it, and when she smells it we see a reflection of the station master in a round mirror. He captures his breath. It is as if he cannot believe his courage and luck, of having approached her, and then having her smell his rose. It is a tiny little thing, but it makes the scene almost disproportionally moving. And of course, we did not have a close-up of him; we were looking at her, smelling the rose. The mirror reflection is behind her.

In the same film, Mrs Miniver and her daughter-in-law Carol (played by Teresa Wright) are out driving when a German fighter plane attacks. Carol is hit, and they take cover in a house. Carol lies down on the floor while Mrs Miniver goes for help. There, in a long take with the camera far away from her body, Carol dies, quiet and alone on a wooden floor. There is no music, just the sound of her sobbing, until it stops. It is such a sad death scene because it is understated and she is all alone on the hard, cold floor.

The next example is from Roman Holiday with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. When they first meet she is drunk, he is not, and he takes her to his small apartment. She spends the night there, in separate rooms. The next morning she wakes up and has forgotten where she is and how she got there. It is so good, because they are so natural and relaxed. The teasing, the rapport, the combination of amusement and tenderness makes the scene feel wonderfully alive and enchanting. Peck is often rather stiff, or gruff, but not here. And Hepburn is at her best, breezing through the scene.

The last example is the ending of The Children's Hour (1961). The film has some of Wyler's most impressive deep focus compositions and some excellent acting, with several really intense scenes, but it is not one of his best. The last ten minutes though are fantastic. Karen (Audrey Hepburn) is talking a walk and then, sensing something is wrong, turns and runs back to the home that she shares with Martha (Shirley MacLaine). The scene is first lyrical, relaxed and leisurely. But when she runs back it is a series of jump cuts of her face. When she comes back she finds Martha dead, having committed suicide. The cause of this is the malicious gossip in the small town about the two women, and the rumours that they are lesbians. (At least Martha is a lesbian whereas Karen's sexuality is more ambiguous.) The next scene is the funeral, which is short. Karen does not speak to anyone, she does not even look at them. She stands tall, and her contempt is in her body language. Her one-time boyfriend is there too, but she does not acknowledge him. She walks away from the funeral service, still without looking at anybody, just straight ahead. She will have no part of them, or their world. There is no heterosexual reunion between her and the man, instead she walks away alone under some trees, and then she looks up towards the tree tops and the sky. And then she smiles. It is as if she has come to terms with herself, and that she is now one with Martha.

The Children's Hour

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2014-06-13, I added some photos and corrected some grammatical errors.

Andrew Sarris

The library in Farsta, the suburb of Stockholm where I grow up, did not have many film books. A dodgy one in Swedish and Truffaut's interviews with Hitchcock was all there was. So I had to educate myself, as a (very young) cineaste. One day in a second hand book store in downtown Stockholm I found a well-read copy of Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, heavily annotated by an unknown former owner. I bought it on the spot, and I have yet to put it down.

When I found it I had already developed my own tastes in cinema, and I noticed that several of my favourite filmmakers were in his categories "Less Than Meets the Eye" and "Strained Seriousness". I was particularly confused as to why David Lean and Billy Wilder were less than met the eye. He did not like Fred Zinnemann either. But it did not matter, the point is that I did not use Sarris to tell me what was good and what was not, I already knew that. I used him as a way to sharpen my own views, to engage with his thoughts and to agree or disagree, whatever the case might be. I also read him for the luxury of being in the present of somebody who took film seriously, passionately and intelligently, and who also knew how to write seriously, passionately and intelligently. So even if he did not influence my opinions, he helped me become the historian and scholar that I am today. The first dissertation I wrote as a film student was a study of the films of David Lean (an awful piece, even though it has some good ideas). My Master dissertation was a study of the films of Howard Hawks (a piece that I actually can read without much embarrassment). My thesis, which I just sent of to be printed and bound, is a study of the films of Hasse Ekman. I did not quote Sarris in the first, but he does figure in the other two. Of course.

He is frequently misunderstood by his critics, not least by Pauline Kael. He did not disregard other contributors such as screen writers, neither did he disregard the context. His views on cinema were suitably complex and evolving (he later changed his mind about Wilder for example, and moved him up to the top of the pedestal), and about "auteur theory" he said that it was "not so much a theory as an attitude". I never really understood why it was even called a theory, unless for polemical reasons. And polemical he was.

When I heard the news I tweeted one of my favourite quotes from him:

"In cinema, as in all art, only those who risks the ridiculous have a real shot at the sublime."

Another favourite is:

"Anyone who loves the cinema must be moved by Daughter of Dr Jekyll, a film with a scenario so atrocious that it takes forty minutes to establish that the daughter of Dr Jekyll is indeed the daughter of Dr Jekyll."

He once said "People think I'm dead, but I've only moved to Los Angeles, which pretty much amounts to the same thing." Alas, now he really is dead, and the world of film criticism is the poorer for it. We all are poorer for it.

On Authorship - or Auteurship

As of 2014-03-07, this post has been rewritten and reposted. You can find the new one, titled Thinking about directors, here.