Late work and last films

In Adventures in the Screen Trade, William Goldman argues that after Psycho (1960) Hitchcock lost his creative touch and began making bad film and that this was due to the lavish praise he had received during the 1950s, particularly by French critics, which had gone to his head. I do not buy this as all. It is true that his films in the late 1960s are not as good as before, but he had been highly praised already in the 1930s and should be used to it, and his two films after Psycho, The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964) are not the films of a director in decline. Whatever happened after Marnie is related to other things; personal issues, changes within the film industry, changing tastes and so on. And he did get back on his creative feet with Frenzy (1972). Besides, Hitchcock made only two films between Marnie and Frenzy: Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969), and they have their merits. They are not worse than some of his earlier films, like Stage Fright (1950).

This is about a topic that interests me a lot, that of late films, or a "late phase", in a filmmaker's career. These films are often dismissed or unacknowledged and in general it is earlier works that are the focus of peoples' and critics' attention. Sometimes, as with Satyajit Ray, it is only the very first films that are talked about at any length. I remember a discussion I once had with a student about Billy Wilder being a filmmaker who (the student claimed) lost it completely in his later stage, and the student is not alone in this belief. But Wilder in the late 1960s/early 1970s is to me as good and interesting as he was in the 1940s, there is no decline there.

The first thing to wonder about is at what stage in a career it becomes appropriate to talk about a late phase. When does it begin? How should it be measured? Obviously the career itself must be of some length, spanning a couple of decades at best. And what is meant by it? There has to be a distinct change in the films for there to be a point of talking about a late phase. With Hitchcock it seems possible to see Psycho as the beginning of such a late phase. With Howard Hawks I would like to suggest Rio Bravo (1959) as the first film of his late, and glorious, phase. It was made after a longer pause, and it and his later films are looser, more meandering and even less concerned with plot than before. While thematically consistent with his films of the 1930s and 1940s, they have a different tone, mood and pace.

What about John Ford? Is there a late phase beginning with Sergeant Rutledge (1960) maybe? When he, as is sometimes suggested, began make films that deliberately questions assumptions and ideas from earlier days. (Although he had already done that too, in the late 1940s for example.) Does Vincente Minnelli's late phase begin with The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962)? David Lean's late phase, when he ventured abroad and made long epics, began with Bridge of the River Kwai (1957); a phase which, with the exception of Lawrence of Arabia (1962), is also often disparaged. Michael Powell's late phase began after the thrashing Peeping Tom (1960) got by British critics. After The Queen's Guard (1961) he did some TV-work, two fine films in Australia and an adaptation of Béla Bartók's opera Bluebeard's Castle.

Some filmmakers move around and this might make it easier to distinguish phases. Luis Buñuel's late phase might be said to begin when he began making films in France, with The Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), or perhaps better to push it forward to 1967 and Belle de Jour. Jean Renoir, who also did a version of The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946), could be said to having inaugurated his late phase when he left the US, first for The River (1951) in India, and then his last films in France. Max Ophüls is another filmmaker who moved around, and could be said to have three phases, first a European, then in the 1940s an American and then in the 1950s a French phase, although in his case the last phase is too similar to the earlier ones for it to be meaningful to talk about it as a distinct "late phase". This is also his most celebrated phase; much like Yasujiro Ozu, the later films are the ones most people talk about. Buñuel is a similar case. They are exceptions to an otherwise strong rule.

Vittorio De Sica and Ophüls on the set of The Earrings of Madame de... (1953).

But is there any value of talking about a late phase? Or argue about when it might have begun? I think there is, if you are interested in film as art, and in the artists who make them. The conventional response is to focus on the earlier work, or some alleged golden age, and then ignore or belittle the later work, but often only because the later films are in one way or another (or more ways) different from the earlier ones. Sometimes this can be put down to an inability among critics and people at large to appreciate change and development, and often it comes from an unwillingness to look beyond the usual classics and established "masterpieces". Another reason might be that a late phase is often not in tune with the prevailing styles and themes of the younger contemporary filmmakers' work, and is therefore not considered hip and trendy and consequently dismissed as old and conservative. This is often unfair though and leads to dismissals on shallow grounds. But these aspects are still interesting to discuss. To follow a filmmaker's long and winding career can be very rewarding, and lead to insights about not just personal developments and creativity but also to discussions about how filmmakers navigate changing societal and industrial contexts and circumstances, and also to discussions about how we evaluate films. Another aspect is to consider how artists deals with ageing and mortality, including their own, in their later years. Many filmmakers have done this, from Hawks to Ozu, and some not yet mentioned here such as Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa.

Sometimes it is in their late phase that filmmakers really burrow deep, get personal and sometimes reach for the sublime. I think Fred Zinnemann began to blossom in his late phase, which began with The Nun's Story (1959).

***

Related to this, and particularly poignant to me, is a filmmaker's very last film, and even the very last image of them. I am not talking about the solution to the story but the very last thing we see, the final image. Here are five last images that have always struck me as being particularly suitable or poignant, from the last films of Buñuel, Lean, Hitchcock, Minnelli and Ozu.

Buñuel's That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) ends with a sudden and unexplained explosion, a fabulous end to an explosive and surreal style of filmmaking. Lean's A Passage to India (1984) ends with Judy Davis's main character turning away from a window, on which it is raining. A temperamental person trapped in a damp English apartment which is too small for her outreaching personality. Hitchcock's Family Plot (1976) ends with the main character, played by Barbara Harris, looking directly into the camera and wink to us, as if it has all been one big joke and Hitch wants to let us know. Minnelli's last film, the flawed but marvellous A Matter of Time (1976), ends with a freeze frame of the face of his daughter Liza Minnelli, who plays the lead. But most moving of all is the last shot of Ozu's last film An Autumn Afternoon (1962). Chishu Ryu who had played the male lead in Ozu's films ever since the 1930s, sits alone in a small room, now old and tired, looking away from the camera and us, faced with his own loneliness and approaching death. It is the end scene to end all end scenes.

--------------------------------------------------
The meaning of a last image might change, or deepen, depending on whether you know if the filmmaker knew that this was the last film they would make. That is a topic worthy of a book...

And speaking about books, Goldman says a lot of dumb things in his book, but I shall have to come back to that another day.

Billy Wilder - a reassessment

Billy Wilder, writer, director and producer, has been a major part of my life in film, from my late teens. The Apartment (1960) is one of my most treasured films, and has always been included in the top ten, however else that list might have twisted and turned. I have seen almost all of his films many times, and now I have done yet another retrospective. And this time I also, finally, watched the two American films he directed that, for one reason or another, I had never seen before: The Emperor Waltz (1948) and The Spirit of St. Louis (1957).

Up until this session I had had the idea that there were two phases to Wilder's career. One harsh and haunted, when he was co-writing with Charles Brackett, and one more mellow and romantic, and that the second phase coincided with his partnership with I.A.L. Diamond. I now think this is a mistake. His most romantic film, Sabrina (1954), came several years before he and Diamond become a duo. A Foreign Affair (1948), which is both mellow and romantic, came during his Brackett phase, between two of his darkest and most tragic, The Lost Weekend (1945) and Sunset Boulevard (1950). One reason why The Apartment is my favourite is perhaps because the bitter and the sweet are most perfectly blended there. (Which reminds me of Wilder once quoting Samuel Goldwyn in an award speech, "You got to take the bitter with the sour.")

Gloria Swanson and Cecil B. DeMille in Sunset Boulevard.

In my earlier days I was a bigger fan of Wilder than I am today. There are more films that are flawed than there should be and where the blame cannot be put elsewhere, such as studio interference, but on Wilder. For example, the only good thing about Witness for the Prosecution (1957) is Charles Laughton's performance, otherwise it is a staid and unimaginative work. The first half of One, Two, Three (1961) is surprisingly dull and obvious, although the second half is on the other hand thrilling and relentless. Irma la Douce (1963) has fine moments but it looks awkward, colourwise, and the plot is too contrived. And neither of these films breathe. Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) is often unpleasant and feels forced, slightly desperate, and the casting does not feel right. The Seven Year Itch (1955) feels more theatrical than I imagine the actual play it is based on might have felt. And most of Wilder's films have the problem that too many scenes feel written rather than directed, there is a lack of fluency and ease in the visual storytelling, or things feel a bit too neat, and we are told things, things are spelled out to us, that might have been shown instead, and thus become more elegant, and even more moving. I cannot give an exact example now, I would have had to take down notes while watching, but I get this feeling often.

But that is not to belittle the writing, which is frequently very good, of course. That includes such things as structure, pacing and dialogue. There are also several recurring things he does which I like, such as have a word or a line of dialogue used several times in the same film, but with slight alterations, so that they accumulate meaning each time they are used, and either becomes more funny or becomes more poignant. A person might often repeat something he or she has heard before, making the words sound as if they were theirs, only we know that they do not really mean them, they were at a loss of what to say and therefore just repeated what first came to mind. The wide-ranging uses of pocket mirrors is another thing I like, and especially so in The Apartment.

"It makes me look the way I feel."

The frequent self-referencing (like Hawks, Wilder sometimes have his characters, or props, refer back to earlier films he has made or other films with the same actors), and aligning his fictional characters to real persons, like with Dino, played by Dean Martin in Kiss Me Stupid, or Sunset Boulevard, are two other things I like.

But what is less noticed perhaps, and a correction to my complaint of the "writtenness" of his films, is the rich texture of his interiors. The apartments in his films, whether Dietrichson's in Double Indemnity (1944), Don Birnam's in The Lost Weekend, C.C. Baxter's in The Apartment, Harry Hinkle's in The Fortune Cookie (1966), Irma's in Irma la Douce, Spooner's in Kiss Me, Stupid feel real, they breathe (unlike some of the films), you can almost smell them, and after having watched the films you might be able to do a drawing of their apartments. Norma Desmond's house in Sunset Boulevard is a bigger example. The opening sequence in Kiss Me, Stupid, with Dean Martin in Las Vegas, looks spectacular. (But unfortunately when the film comes to Climax, Nevada, it looks cheap and unconvincing, outside of Spooner's apartment.) 

***

After Germany had been defeated in 1945 and the concentration camps liberated, Wilder was assigned to supervise footage from the camps, which led to the documentary Death Mills (Die Todesmühlen). This was obviously a horrendous experience (and he lost family members, including his mother, in the camps). When he came back to the US he did not want to make another dark and depressing film like his previous ones but instead do a colourful fantasy with songs, and set in the Vienna of the past, during the Austro-Hungarian Empire in which Wilder was born, long before Nazism descended upon it. That film would be The Emperor Waltz. It is an unusual film in Wilder's oeuvre, and it is rarely talked about or seen. But it is not a bad film. It has many good jokes and fine scenes, and some scenes have a special poignancy. There is even a scene where a veterinarian takes three newborn puppies and attempt to kill them by drowning because they are not pure poodles but mongrels. They are saved in the nick of time, but it is a peculiar scene to have in such a film, a moment of sheer horror and a suggestion of what kind of film Wilder might have made had he not tried to suppress it. It would take a few years before he went really dark again, especially with Ace in the Hole (1951) and Stalag 17 (1953).

In the barrack in Stalag 17

Another interesting thing about The Emperor Waltz is the way it looks. It is set in the Austrian alps but shot in Jasper National Park in Canada. The landscape is fine as it is, quite spectacular, but Wilder was unhappy, and so particular about the look of the film, that he demanded new pine trees to be planted, an island built in a middle of a lake, a country road painted and thousands of flowers too. His eagerness to improve on nature and the mounting costs (the film went way over budget) led Herman J. Mankiewicz to quip "It only goes to show you what God could do if he had the money." It was Wilder's first film in colour, something he otherwise disliked, and is not necessarily good at using. But here it works, perhaps because it rhymes well with the film as a whole. But it would not be until The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) that a colour film of his would look good again, and there the colours are very different from The Emperor Waltz. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is one of the visually most satisfying of Wilder's films, shot by Christopher Challis.

Bing Crosby and Joan Fontaine on Wilder's man-made island.

The Spirit of St. Louis, about Charles Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic, is not bad either, although it is compromised, and parts of it were shot, or re-shot, by John Sturges. But it has a fine structure and individual scenes can sometimes be quite impressive. It was not a successful film either, it flopped, but it was a film Wilder had been eager to do, and he and Lindbergh were friends of sorts, despite Lindbergh's Nazi leanings during the war. Their relationship might have made for a more interesting film. 

***

Of Wilder's films there is one that towers over all the rest of them, and that is, as mentioned, The Apartment: it is where everything comes together at their finest; casting, writing, direction and sentiment. Stalag 17 is the one that comes second. After them there are a number of really good ones, primarily Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, Love in the Afternoon (1957), The Fortune Cookie, Avanti! (1972) and Fedora (1978). Films about hypocrisy, sleaze, venality, hustling, filmmaking, business, role-playing and sex, and ever so often genuine sweetness. (Like the scene with the rose in the fridge in Love in the Afternoon.) So that is plenty of fine films, and for the weaker ones, well, nobody's perfect.

The temporary morgue in Avanti! One of Wilder's finest scenes.

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.

---------------------------------------------------
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.

The first modern film

In Laura Mulvey's book Death 24x a Second there is a chapter about Rossellini's Journey to Italy (1953). She writes: "In Journey to Italy, out of a minimal plot line and two bewildered Hollywood stars, Rossellini managed to create, in the opinions of many critics, the first modern film." She is right in saying that many others have called this "the first modern film" and the reasons for this are, it seems, the film's improvisations, meandering narrative and how it pauses and gives the audience time and space to reflect on what is happening on the screen.

As readers of this blog are no doubt aware there are few things I am more allergic to than claims about something being "the first". These claims are usually about concrete things, such as a particular stylistic achievement, a narrative convention or a technical breakthrough, and since they are concrete it is easy to point at a film and say that "there it is". This claim about Journey to Italy, or any other film, being "the first modern film" is much more abstract and therefore trickier to argue about. But it is also all the more reason why it is an almost meaningless statement. Why is it that this particular form of filmmaking is "modern"? Why for example are not experimental films made in the 1920s, such as Entr'acte (1924), modern? Why should Journey to Italy be deemed modern but not Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. (1924) or Jean Vigo's films, including L'Atalante (1934)? Sometimes these films from the 20s are called "modernistic" instead, rather than "modern", which I think is cheating, but even if we were to go along with that argument then why is for example Stromboli (1950) or Umberto D. (1952) not modern but Voyage to Italy is? Besides, many 1930s films by for example Jean Renoir and Kenji Mizoguchi have the same approach to narrative and characters as these post-war films so could be called modern according to this definition. But they are not experimental in the way as some of those films from the 1920s and should consequently not be called modernistic. And what is to be done about Howard Hawks? His often blatant disregard for story and narrative, and the way the films are based on improvisation, makes them equally modern. Just think of The Big Sleep (1946).

Hawks's films also constantly refer back to other films, and make fun of genres and actors. They are also self-referential. Yet many, including Jean-Luc Godard, have argued that the generation who emerged in the 1950s (Godard's generation) were the first filmmakers who were conscious of the medium's past and made films that were reflections of earlier films, and that this is an important aspect of "modern" cinema. I am not sure there is any truth to this claim. Many filmmakers of the earliest generations have said that they learned how to make films by watching other films, and watching filmmakers at work, They did perhaps not go to film schools or cinematheques, but they learned by way of apprenticeship and by going to the cinema. Is it not condescending to earlier filmmakers to say that they were not aware of their own history, unlike the alleged enlightenment of later generations? It would be more accurate to suggest that this awareness is as old as cinema itself. When Chic Johnson finds a sled named Rosebud in Hellzapoppin' (1941) and says "I thought they burnt that.", it is very much a sign of awareness and reflexivity. Filmmakers have always made films that are consciously built on earlier films, and are reflecting upon film history, either repeatedly like Billy Wilder, or occasionally, like Hasse Ekman.  And let's not forget that Hollywood has always been fascinated by films about itself, exemplified for example by Show People (1928), Sullivan's Travels (1940) and Singin' in the Rain (1952), to name three beginning with S.

In general history modernity is often said to have appeared with the renaissance in 14th century Italy. In art history modernism is traditionally said to appear at the beginning of the 20th century, such as Picasso's cubist paintings (following Paul Cézanne, Wassily Kandinsky and others, going back to the second half of the 19th century). In literature there was T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and the others in the 1920s (also with forerunners of course such as Proust, Kafka, Lawrence, Conrad), simultaneous with popular modernist film movements.  But definitions of modernity, what is "modern" and what is "modernism", are never clear, and cannot be. If we are talking of storytelling then "modern", as in something that is not linear, sometimes fragmented, and that lacks a clear closure, is almost as old as "classical" storytelling. Perhaps even older.

In many ways cinema and modernity go hand in hand, and are intimately connected, right from the start. But I do not think that there is a film which can be called "the first modern film" and nothing is gained by trying to find one. These arguments often make me think of children who argue about who's father is the tallest ("my film is more modern than yours"). And now I, too, have indulged in this.

---------------------------
Perhaps it can also be argued that a poem like Eliot's The Waste Land is post-modern, just as well as modern, which one might perhaps say about The Big Sleep as well.

Screenplays and screenwriters

I've written short stories, poems, a theatre play and I've been working on film scripts, not least together with Lisa James Larsson, so I know that scripts are important and meaningful. But I'm still sceptical about the primacy often given to the script. It is sometimes said, not least by writers, that it is impossible to make a good film without a good script, but I'd like to challenge that. For one thing how do you compare, say, the script and the casting? The quality of the acting has nothing to do with the script and theatre actors have been known to move the audience to tears just by reading from the phone book. (For what it is worth I have publicly read bus timetables as poetry.)

A more interesting question though is what constitutes a good script. Is it enough that it has a witty dialogue or does it have to have rich and complex characters and a multi-layered story to be considered a good script? And what is the script? On many films some of the great scenes, and great lines of dialogue, were improvised on the set. Should that be retroactively considered part of the script?

But even if we could agree upon a definition of a good script, are they still essential to make a good film? To take a specific example we can look at Hitchcock's version of The 39 Steps (1935). The script by Charles Bennett, which is based on the novel by John Buchan (from which it is rather different), can easily be regarded as nothing more than sketches of various set-pieces and there's not much plausibility, nuance or complexity. But I think it is a great film, and so do a lot of other people, as it is sometimes voted as among the best British films ever made. To me it is a great film because it is amusing and inventive and much of this comes from the actors, the editing and the visual style. How much of that is in the script? 

A modern example could be The Tree of Life (2011). It has admittedly confused and bored many, and they may find that what the film lacks is a good script. But those that do like it, perhaps even think it is great, isn't that primarily for the way Malick visually expresses ideas, age-old ideas, more than the actual words and the story (which would be the script)? I don't know.

This is not meant to belittle the work of the writers, it is merely to point out that a film is different from the script, and it is not possible to single out one thing as being generally the most important part. To quote Nicholas Ray: "But it was never all in the script. If it were, why make the movie?". Sometimes it is the script that is most important, sometimes it is not. And it should also be said that many great scripts have been damaged or destroyed by bad direction and/or bad acting. I think that Mike Leigh and Sam Mendes are two directors who almost always manhandles their scripts, even though in Leigh's case he writes the scripts as well. The King's Speech (2010) is another example when I feel inappropriate direction (by Tom Hooper) diminishes a script (by David Seidler), as I explained here. 

With those words as an introduction, I'd like to add a translated, and slightly amended, version of a blog post I wrote a few years ago in Swedish about scriptwriters (the Swedish original is here http://film-forum.blogspot.com/2005/07/manus-och-manusfrfattare.html):

Sometimes you hear disgruntled scriptwriters, and critics, blame French film critics in the 1950s for starting the trend of claiming the director as a film's true creator, leading to a disrespectful approach to writers and to directors getting uppity. But blaming the French for this is not really fair. To take one example: when Billy Wilder came to the US in the 1930s he quickly established himself as a sought-after scriptwriter, working  with Charles Brackett, but he became frustrated by how the directors changed and, to his eyes, made his script worse. He was perhaps particularly upset with Mitchell Leisen. So Wilder began directing his own scripts, to get more control over the process. (It could be argued though that his greatest strengths are as writer rather than director.)

Film is a collective artform, that is inevitable. But the director has, pretty much since the beginning of cinema, been given the most elevated position, by ad men and critics alike. Usually out of convenience, or because you are of the opinion that the director really is the true auteur of the film. But it is not only convenient but often also proper to highlight the director. Obviously so if the director is also the scriptwriter and/or the producer, as the above mentioned Wilder, alone or with Charles Brackett or I.A.L. Diamond. But sometimes a film can have five, six screenwriters while hardly ever has it got more than one director. Sergio Leone's films for example usually have a staggering number of screenwriters but that doesn't make them any less Leone's films, perhaps the opposite.

When I wrote about Ernest Lehman [I'll perhaps published a translated version of that article soon] I said that North by Northwest (1959) feels very Hitchcock-esque, you might even say that it is a copy of The 39 Steps, just 30 minutes longer without anything new added. Before he wrote it, and during the writing process, Lehman watched most of Hitchcock's best films to be able to capture the right Hitchcock mood, and before Lehman wrote it Hitchcock gave him specific ideas of what he wanted, such as the sequence with the crop dusting plane. As Dan Auiler put it once: "It is Hitchcock's sequence - but it is his sequence as realized by Lehman and Huebner [the storyboard illustrator]."

But having said all that, when talking about films it is only proper to consider the scriptwriters, if for no other reason than respect. When people criticise Hollywood they usual say that directors are being controlled and hampered and that the producers and studios call all the shots, but that has always been ahistorical, and the reality was always more nuanced and complex. Andrew Sarris for one has argued that it was actually the writers that suffered the most in the studio system, not the directors. Thelma and Louise (1991) is directed by Ridley Scott, but it is Callie Khouri's script, and she work long and hard on it, not only when writing but during the shooting of the film as well. It is therefore most unfair that Scott got all the praise and glory, whereas Khouri was forgotten almost instantly. That might partly be because of gender discrimination, Scott being a man and Khouri a woman, but even male scriptwriters are diminished or forgotten. Bend of the River (1952) is a typical Anthony Mann film, and Red River (1948) a typical Howard Hawks, and the respective filmmaker's themes and styles are easy to see, and keeps the film apart. But they have the same writer, Borden Chase, and the two films share many things such as structure, character development and even lines of dialogue. Some of Mann's other films were written by Philip Yordan and it is therefore worthwhile to compare those to Bend of the River and also to other films Yordan has written but that have not been directed by Mann, for a deeper understanding of the complex authorial situation, without there being any need to question those films as being the very essence of Mann's art. Or take Hideo Oguni and Shinobu Hashimoto, how important were they for the films of Akira Kurosawa? Or Kogo Noda's scripts for Yasujiro Ozu's films?

A more modern example is the writing team of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. They've been writing together since the 1970s, and have both a theme and a style, without getting much attention. The feel of the films, and the quality of them, changes depending upon who directed them, but you can still feel the Ganz/Mandel touch. Some good examples are Splash (1984), Parenthood (1989) and Multiplicity (1996) and a few others.

Some screenwriters become famous. Garson Kanin in the 1950s for example and Charlie Kaufman is a modern example, as is Aaron Sorkin. But more of them deserve a place in the sun. (A quick test, Theodore Dreiser wrote the novel A Place in the Sun (1951) is based on, a film George Stevens directed, but who wrote the script?)

-------------------------------------------
Mitchell Leisen directed three scripts from the writing team Billy Wilder/Charles Brackett: Midnight (1939), Arise My Love (1940) and Hold Back the Dawn (1941). They're great, as are many others of Mitchell's films, written by less known writers.

Babaloo is surely the coolest name in show business. Unfortunately not his birth name but a name borrowed from Philip Roth's novel Portnoy's Complaint. Incidentally, the only film Ernest Lehman directed, in 1972, was based on that novel.

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.